Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder is a novel by the English writer Evelyn Waugh, first published in 1945. It follows, from the 1920s to the early 1940s, the life and romances of Charles Ryder, especially his friendship with the Flytes, a family of wealthy English Catholics who live in a palatial mansion, Brideshead Castle. Ryder has relationships with two of the Flytes: Lord Sebastian and Lady Julia. The novel explores themes including Catholicism and nostalgia for the age of English aristocracy. A well-received television adaptation of the novel was produced in an 11-part miniseries by Granada Television in 1981. In 2008, it was adapted as a film.
Plot The novel is divided into three parts, framed by a prologue and epilogue.
Prologue The prologue takes place during the final years of the Second World War. Charles Ryder and his battalion are sent to a country estate called Brideshead, which prompts his recollections of the rest of the story.
Et In Arcadia Ego
In 1923, protagonist and narrator Charles Ryder, an undergraduate reading history at a college very similar to Hertford College, Oxford, is befriended by Lord Sebastian Flyte, the younger son of the Marquess of Marchmain and an undergraduate at Christ Church. Both Charles and Sebastian had matriculated at Oxford in the autumn of 1922, Charles doing so shortly before his 19th birthday. The following year, Sebastian introduces Charles to his eccentric friends, including the haughty aesthete and homosexual Anthony Blanche. Sebastian also takes Charles to his family's palatial country house, Brideshead Castle, in Wiltshire, where Charles later meets the rest of Sebastian's family, including his sister, Lady Julia.
During the long summer holiday, Charles returns home to London, where he lives with his widowed father, Edward Ryder. Charles is called back to Brideshead after Sebastian incurs a minor injury, and Sebastian and Charles spend the remainder of the holiday together.
Sebastian's family is Catholic, which influences the Flytes' lives as well as the content of their conversations, all of which surprises Charles, who had always believed Christianity was "without substance or merit". Lord Marchmain had converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism to marry his wife, but he later abandoned both his marriage and his new religion, and moved to Venice. Left alone, Lady Marchmain focuses even more on her faith, which is also enthusiastically espoused by her elder son, the Earl of Brideshead ("Bridey"), and by her younger daughter, Lady Cordelia.
Brideshead Deserted
The Flyte family becomes aware of Sebastian's heavy drinking, and attempts to stop him are detrimental. Lady Marchmain falls out with Charles and he leaves Brideshead for what he thinks is the last time.
Julia marries the rich but unsophisticated Canadian-born businessman and politician Rex Mottram. This marriage causes great sorrow to her mother because Rex, though initially planning to convert to Catholicism, turns out to be a divorcé with an ex-wife living in Canada. He and Julia subsequently marry without fanfare in the Savoy Chapel, an Anglican church where marriage between divorcés with one or more prior living spouses is permissible.
Sebastian descends into alcoholism, drifting away from the family over a two-year period. He flees to Morocco, where his drinking ruins his health. He eventually finds some solace as an under-porter and object of charity at a Catholic monastery in Tunisia. Sebastian's drifting leads to Charles's own estrangement from the Flytes.
Julia asks Charles to go and find Sebastian because Lady Marchmain (Sebastian's mother) is ill. Charles finds Sebastian in the monastery in Morocco. Sebastian is too ill to return to England, so Charles returns to London to see Brideshead and sort out Sebastian's financial affairs.
Charles is commissioned by Brideshead to paint images of Marchmain House in London before its demolition. The paintings are very successful. Charles talks to Cordelia while he paints and discovers more about the Flyte family.
A Twitch Upon the Thread Charles finds success as an architectural painter and visits Latin America to portray the buildings there. Charles marries and fathers two children, but he becomes cold towards his wife, Celia, and she is unfaithful to him. Julia separates from Rex Mottram and Charles eventually forms a relationship with her.
Charles and Julia plan to divorce their respective spouses so they can marry each other.
Cordelia returns from ministering to the wounded in the Spanish Civil War with disturbing news about Sebastian's nomadic existence and steady decline over the past few years. She predicts he will die soon in the Tunisian monastery.
On the eve of the Second World War, the ageing Lord Marchmain, terminally ill, returns to Brideshead to die in his ancestral home. Appalled by the marriage of his elder son Brideshead to a middle-class widow past childbearing age, he names Julia heir to the estate, which prospectively offers Charles marital ownership of the house. However, Lord Marchmain's return to the faith on his deathbed changes the situation: Julia decides she cannot enter a sinful marriage with Charles, who has also been moved by Lord Marchmain's acceptance of the Last Rites.
Epilogue The plot concludes in the early spring of 1943 (or possibly 1944 – the date is disputed). Charles is "homeless, childless, middle-aged and loveless". He has become an army officer and finds himself unexpectedly billeted at Brideshead, which has been taken into military use. He finds the house damaged by the army, but the private chapel, closed after Lady Marchmain's death in 1926, has been reopened for the soldiers' use. It occurs to him that the efforts of the builders – and, by extension, God's efforts – were not in vain, although their purposes may have appeared, for a time, to have been frustrated.
Motifs Catholicism Catholicism is a significant theme of the book. Evelyn Waugh was a convert to Catholicism and Brideshead depicts the Catholic faith in a secular literary form. Waugh wrote to his literary agent A. D. Peters:I hope the last conversation with Cordelia gives the theological clue. The whole thing is steeped in theology, but I begin to agree that the theologians won't recognize it.
The book brings the reader, through the narration of the initially agnostic Charles Ryder, in contact with the severely flawed but deeply Catholic Flyte family. The Catholic themes of divine grace and reconciliation are pervasive in the book. Most of the major characters undergo a conversion in some way or another. Lord Marchmain, a convert from Anglicanism to Catholicism, who lived as an adulterer, is reconciled with the Church on his deathbed. Julia, who entered a marriage with Rex Mottram that is invalid in the eyes of the Catholic Church, is involved in an extramarital affair with Charles. Julia realizes that marrying Charles will separate her forever from her faith and decides to leave him, in spite of her great attachment to him. Sebastian, the charming and flamboyant alcoholic, ends up in service to a monastery while struggling against his alcoholism.
Most significant is Charles's apparent conversion, which is expressed subtly at the end of the book, set more than 20 years after his first meeting Sebastian. Charles kneels down in front of the tabernacle of the Brideshead chapel and says a prayer, "an ancient, newly learned form of words" – implying recent instruction in the catechism. Waugh speaks of his belief in grace in a letter to Lady Mary Lygon:I believe that everyone in his (or her) life has the moment when he is open to Divine Grace. It's there, of course, for the asking all the time, but human lives are so planned that usually there's a particular time – sometimes, like Hubert, on his deathbed – when all resistance is down and grace can come flooding in.Amory, Mark (ed), The Letters of Evelyn Waugh. Ticknor & Fields, 1980. p. 520.
Waugh quotes from a short story by G. K. Chesterton to illustrate the nature of grace. Cordelia, in conversation with Charles Ryder, quotes a passage from the Father Brown detective story "The Queer Feet":I caught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.Chesterton, G. K., The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, story "The Queer Feet", Ignatius Press, 2005: p. 84.
This quotation provides the foundation for Waugh's Catholic treatment of the interplay of free will and grace in the moment of conversion.
The same themes were criticised by Waugh's contemporaries. Novelist Henry Green wrote to Waugh:The end was not for me. As you can imagine my heart was in my mouth all through the deathbed scene, hoping against hope that the old man would not give way, that is, take the course he eventually did.
Edmund Wilson, who had praised Waugh as the hope of the English novel, wrote:The last scenesThat is, Lord Marchmain's death scene, and the subsequent tearful separation of Ryder and Julia. are extravagantly absurd, with an absurdity that would be worthy of Waugh at his best if it were not – painful to say – meant quite seriously.
Nostalgia for an age of English nobility The Flyte family may be taken to symbolise the English nobility. One reads in the book that Brideshead has "the atmosphere of a better age", and (referring to the deaths of Lady Marchmain's brothers in the Great War) "these men must die to make a world for Hooper ... so that things might be safe for the travelling salesman, with his polygonal pince-nez, his fat, wet handshake, his grinning dentures".
According to Martin Amis, the book "squarely identifies egalitarianism as its foe and proceeds to rubbish it accordingly".*
Charles and Sebastian's relationship
The question of whether the relationship between Charles and Sebastian is homosexual or platonic has been debated, particularly in an extended exchange between David Bittner and John Osborne in the Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies from 1987 to 1991.Highdon, David Leon. "Gay Sebastian and Cheerful Charles: Homoeroticism in Waugh's Brideshead Revisited". ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature. (2) 5:4, October 1994. In 1994 Paul Buccio argued that the relationship was in the Victorian tradition of "intimate male friendships", which includes "Pip and Herbert Pocket [from Charles Dickens' Great Expectations], ... Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, Ratty and Mole (The Wind in the Willows)",Buccio, Paul M. "At the Heart of Tom Brown's Schooldays: Thomas Arnold and Christian Friendship" Modern Language Studies. Vol. 25, No. 4 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 57–74. and Tennyson and Arthur Henry Hallam (In Memoriam). David Higdon argued that "[I]t is impossible to regard Sebastian as other than gay; [and] Charles is so homoerotic he must at least be cheerful"; and that the attempt of some critics to downplay the homoerotic dimension of Brideshead is part of "a much larger and more important sexual war being fought as entrenched heterosexuality strives to maintain its hegemony over important twentieth century works". In 2008 Christopher Hitchens derided "the ridiculous word 'platonic' that for some peculiar reason still crops up in discussion of the story".Hitchens, Christopher. "'It's all on account of the war'". The Guardian. 26 September 2008.