Brideshead Unvisited

 In a Church Life Journal article from 2021 (brought to my attention today because it was reposted on their Facebook page), Joseph Tulloch offers this confounding example of literary analysis:

There is a passage from Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh’s otherwise superb 1945 novel, that has always bothered me. The protagonist, Charles, at this point in the narrative an agnostic, asks Lady Marchmain, the devoutly Catholic head of the wealthy, aristocratic Flyte family, about Jesus’s saying that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God. Her response is astonishing:

“But of course,” she said, “it’s very unexpected for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, but the gospel is simply a catalogue of unexpected things. It’s not to be expected that an ox and an ass should worship at the same crib. Animals are always doing the oddest things in the lives of the saints. It’s all part of the poetry, the Alice-in-Wonderland side, of religion.”

I was puzzled, when I first encountered this reflection, by Lady Marchmain’s attempt to explain away Jesus’s teaching on poverty. Surely, I thought, it could not be Christian for the Flytes, or anyone else, to hoard wealth while their neighbors starved. I was struck, too, by the thought that, given the overall context of the novel, an ode to the vanished splendor of the English aristocracy of the 1920s, as well as his own well-known conservative views, this seemed to be Waugh’s own position—and, to judge by their behavior, that of countless other Christians.

It is clear to me, looking back, that my initial reaction to this passage was justified—Waugh’s position is both morally indefensible and thoroughly un-Catholic. The Church has, throughout the centuries, consistently held that anyone with money must go to extreme lengths to help those without.

This ancient moral teaching is especially interesting because it has come to be accepted by a growing number of modern, secular ethicists inspired by the controversial Australian philosopher Peter Singer, whose views on many other issues—most notably the permissibility of infanticide—could not be further from those of the Church.

Doubtless others will engage with Tulloch's presentation of Peter Singer's charitable imperatives, but I stuck right here in the opening paragraphs with this misreading of Brideshead Revisited. Lady Marchmain here is expressing Lady Marchmain's thoughts. By her own lights, she is cleverly engaging in an irrefutable paradox, but here at least Tulloch is right: she is trying to "explain away Jesus's teaching on poverty." 

But Waugh as author doesn't present Lady Marchmain as a moral paragon. She is, despite her personal piety, a flawed, destructive character who uses her charm and wealth to manipulate others. Socially, she is very successful at this; in the more intimate setting of family and home, she alienates her family precisely because she's terrified to give them the freedom to sin. At this point in the novel, she's turned her considerable charm on Charles Ryder, in an attempt to win his soul for the Church and enlist him to keep Sebastian, her alcoholic son and Charles's best friend, under surveillance. Her argument here is disingenuous, Waugh's subtle criticism of the grip Chestertonian paradox has on the Catholic imagination. (If he were writing today, he'd skewer the current infatuation with Flannery O'Connor's Southern-gothic grace.)

The strangeness of this analysis of Brideshead Revisited, as well as the question of how it got past the editors at the Notre-Dame sponsored Church Life Journal, reminds me of Bishop Barron's use of the chapel in Brideshead Revisited to bolster his favorite theme of Beauty as Evangelization. 

In his masterpiece Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh implicitly lays out a program of evangelization that has particular relevance to our time.  “Brideshead” refers, of course, to a great manor house owned by a fabulously wealthy Catholic family in the England of the 1920’s.  In the complex semiotic schema of Waugh’s novel, the mansion functions as a symbol of the Catholic Church, which St. Paul had referred to as the “bride of Christ.”  To Brideshead comes, at the invitation of his friend Sebastian, Charles Ryder, an Oxford student, devotee of the fine arts and casual agnostic.  Charles is overwhelmed by the sheer majesty of Brideshead’s architecture and the sumptuousness of its artistic program, which includes magnificent painting and sculpture, as well as a fountain of Bernini-like delicacy, and a chapel which was a riot of baroque decoration.  Living within the walls of the manse, Charles mused, was to receive an entire artistic education.  The beauty of the place would entrance Charles for the rest of his life, drawing him back again and again. 

This article, recently rerun at Word on Fire, was first published in 2013, and I wrote about it then, the gist of which was this is a bizarre reading of Waugh's novel. (Then-Father Barron may have been remembering the otherwise faithful BBC series, in which the chapel as well as the house is a "riot of baroque decoration".)  In Waugh's text, the chapel has been ruthlessly renovated as a wedding present from Lord to Lady Marchmain (a foreshadowing of their disastrous marriage) and redone in the most tacky contemporary style, Arts and Crafts, hopelessly dated by the 1920s. The house may be "an entire artistic education", but to Charles Ryder's trained eye, it is hideous. Here is his initial impression:

The whole interior had been gutted, elaborately refurnished and redecorated in the arts-and-crafts style of the last decade of the nineteenth century. Angels in printed cotton smocks, rambler-roses, flower-spangled meadows, frisking lambs, texts in Celtic script, saints in armour, covered the wallls in an intricate pattern of clear, bright colours. There was a triptych of pale oak, carved so as to give it the peculiar property of seeming to have been moulded in Plasticine. The sanctuary lamp and all the metal furniture were of bronze, hand-beaten to the patina of a pock-marked skin; the altar steps had a carpet of grass-green, strewn with white and gold daisies.

'Golly,' I said.

Throughout the novel, the chapel is a symbol of how the falsity of poor art can stand between an aesthetic soul and God.

"You're an artist, Ryder (says Brideshead), what do you think of it aesthetically?"

"I think it's beautiful," said Cordelia with tears in her eyes.

"But is it Good Art?

"Well, I don't know what you mean," I said warily. "I think it's a remarkable example of its period. Probably in eighty years it will be greatly admired."

"But surely it can't be good twenty years ago and good in eighty years and not be good now?"

"Well, it may be good now. All I mean is that I don't happen to like it much."

The aesthetic glamor of the house can't stem the moral decay of the family, and the aesthetic atrocity of the chapel still holds Truth, if unmediated by Goodness or Beauty. But Charles does learn to see God despite ugliness: at the end of the book he kneels in the chapel, a broken and bereaved convert, before "a beaten copper lamp of deplorable design".

No novel is immune from criticism, and any book of quality ought to be able to handle literary criticism. But Brideshead is The Catholic Novel, and it deserves a higher quality analysis than this, especially from those who would speak for and to the Catholic intelligensia.