Orphans of the storm - 'Englishness' and spiritual sobriety in Brideshead Revisited
A plattered ‘Englishness’, and the characteristics therein, form the meat of many current discussions. Extractive podcasters and bivouacked columnists hoarsen their throats and drain their pens trying to wrench this ‘Englishness’ from their minds. Apart from the semantic fundamentalists who’d say that ‘Englishness’ is tacked on to those born in or otherwise registered to the 80,000 square miles just west of Calais, markers have been drawn up. The English archetype which finds its buttered and brill-creamed apotheosis in yours truly, is as follows. It enjoys as its four corners; a beaming urbanity, an uncritical love of all that has been which is indivisible from a colonially imperious past, an angling towards bibbidi-bobbidi phrases and euphemisms allowing for the release of sexual valves couched in broadcastable language and - the oldest of these corners - an imperviousness to the bothersome hurdles and troughs suffered by others. Of course, we’re mistaking ‘Englishness’ here for private education, hoity-toity received pronunciation and the artifice of Etonian effortless success.
Bunk bed psychodrama, gigglesome jokes from a Christmas cracker and an unfathomable disregard for financial, domestic and even clinical impedimenta are the English writer’s handbrake. If everything else fails to tickle their fancy (if plots and commentary will not do) then a rumour of jiggery-pokery or a nob-mad nun are sure to reshake the sheets. P.G Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh are the mowers of the twentieth century’s English lawn whose books have been interpreted as aligning most reliably with the above practices. Now that Brideshead Revisited has been rubbed from my TBR, I’m finding in Waugh as I did in Wodehouse that the chastised overreliance on phallic schadenfreude and surnamed hyphenation only goes one third of the way to analyse and, heaven forfend, enjoying these crumpet-munchers and their antics.
Any chump looking for the light-hearted hand-on-stomach humour needn’t think that Brideshead has had such chewy crumbs hoovered out. In the opening lines of a novel-long reminiscence, the protagonist Charles Ryder summarises an Oxford twenty years prior, as the rubble of World War One is swept and people’s responsibilities are flung into hedgerows. “It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance,” Waugh writes “and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamour. Here, discordantly, in Eight Week, came a rabble of womankind, some hundreds strong, sight-seeing and pleasure-seeking, drinking claret up, eating cucumber sandwiches; pushed in punts about the river, herded in droves to the college barges…” Only a certain amount of critical tact prevents that quotation being tripled in length. First our inner ear appreciates the undulations that the long-forgotten subordinate clause so perfectly provides. The additives “discordantly” and “some hundreds strong” dunk the speed and preparedness from the sentence. We’re whooshed and shoved between the borders of a nation’s hippocampus as Charles Ryder’s foremost recollections gild the first chapters.
Add the toffish insincerity and red-faced fist-banging of Ryder’s cicerone of substances Sebastian Flyte, and the novel’s opening is complete. “Sebastian’s life was governed by such imperatives. ‘I must have pillar-box pyjamas’, ‘I have to stay in bed until the sun works round to the windows’, ‘I’ve absolutely got to drink champagne tonight!’” Waugh lets the italics impugn Sebastian, allowing us to hear this moneyed layabout prioritising the trivial whilst the henges of material importance - bank account health and school deadlines - gather a neglected mould. Sebastian doesn’t necessitate the affection that other inebriates have done. He’s too prickly and poxed, without the redeeming qualities of Wildian pith. There may indeed be fewer characters with sticky names like ‘Tom Thimble-Donk’ and ‘Rita Fompville-Asterbury’ (it’s harder than it looks folks) and there may not be sighted too many cistern sobriquets and fireside frippery, but Waugh provokes a guffaw and a tut from those of us wishing to outsource our bawdiness.
The rocking, capacious lists continue throughout. When Charles outgrows the awful subservience to alcohol that floors dear feckless Sebastian, he absconds from Oxford University and hacks his way through the New World’s cackling forest fronds. “I sought inspiration among gutted palaces and cloisters embowered in weed, derelict churches where the vampire-bats hung in the dome like dry seed-pods and only the ants were ceaselessly astir tunnelling in the rich stalls; cities where no road led, and mausoleums where a single, agued family of Indians sheltered from the rains.” We need goggles for all the pirouetting sparks of invention. All the time us tertiary lessers have been pootling about, constructing ordinary sentences with ordinary words, Evelyn Waugh grips our flabby unnursed buttocks as we remember that “gutted”, “embowered”, “astir” and “agued” are all serviceable little lozenges that work just as well as any modern, blunted equivalent. They have an archaic pzazz conferred on them by their scarcity. Waugh not only stuns and scares with his agility, he involves us more permanently into the reading process. Any coasting observer of Brideshead Revisited is led back to closer reading with these busy, bustling scrums.
For all his shoe-shining adjectival trickery, he has a good bash at and clearly retains a liking for drawn out, sinuous appeals to universality. Inside this postprandial humourist, there is a tenable pompous philosopher trying to breathe too. Years after Sebastian Flyte has fluttered off into bottle-swigging oblivion, trapped together aboard a storm-swayed boat as all fellow sailors chunder in their suites, Charles and Seb’s sister Julia waddle into each other’s arms. Discussing the ease with which he can appreciate the company of his future fiance’, Waugh has Charles think - “It was dead contrary to the common experience of such encounters, when time is found to have built its own defensive lines, camouflaged vulnerable points, and laid a field of mines across all but a few well-trodden paths, so that, more often than not, we can only signal to one another from either side of the tangle of wire. Here she and I, who were never friends before, met on terms of long and unbroken intimacy.” Off shoots the listener to their own privatised mirroring of this mutual loveliness. By virtue of a passage that could be worked inconspicuously into the dough of Austen, Eliot or Tolstoy, Waugh wins our misty-eyed nod, just pages after tightening our cheeks with idle chatter.
I was surprised to read on Waugh’s wikipedia page that he’d executed a full, hand-wringing, heaven-sighting conversion to Catholicism. A loss of Anglicanism and a repentance for a thrusting hedonism at university drew him back into the Almighty’s arms in 1930. Yet this book, which was published fifteen years afterwards, seems to glorify (and propel into the realms of polemical grace) a studied, irreverent atheism. Scene after scene and session after session sees Charles Ryder appealed to. His agnosticism and his clenched opprobrium of many religious solecisms are connotative of a readied sceptic or an aggressive anti-theist. Too often for a theologian’s satisfaction does Waugh have a Catholic turn up their nose at Ryder’s spiritual sobriety. The believers bobbing up and down in Brideshead leaven their distaste at the dinner table and look to disturb, via a priest, the peaceful remnants of Lord Marchmain’s life. This mismatch is the reason for Julia and Charles’ tragic late split. We even hear Charles’ bald summation put with such ebullience. “‘It’s such a lot of witchcraft and hypocrisy’” Ryder bellows, as the religious look around with a frozen, and uncharacteristic, incredulity. Why does Waugh place such irrefutably excellent critiques of a faith to which he was an adherent into the mouth of his finest novelistic sprog? God knows…
Whether we are entitled to dislike Charles the bible-burner and Charles the iron-clad rationalist as a result of Waugh’s careful constructions is not obvious on first reading. I fully expected to be met with a more common theological evolution. I thought Waugh would have been the initially tractable youth placing his palms together in complicity rather than true belief, who then came to light upon and later roast the manifold intellectual blindspots of the most popular monotheism. Regardless of this, I’m happy to have another jobbing English wordsmith who can, in the magic of one page, produce two watery eyes of opposite emotional origin. Let us laugh and cry at these “orphans of the storm.”