Brideshead Revisited

And a look at Saltburn (better late than never).

I recently finished re-reading Brideshead Revisited (1945)–a book which for most of my young adult life I considered the best I have ever read. While studying abroad in England in 2009, I sought a book that embodied old-world indulgences and open-eyed youth that might justify any loneliness I might have been feeling at the time. This British romance set in the early and mid 20th century by Evelyn Waugh fit the bill.

Charles Ryder, narrator and keeper of memories both sacred and profane, begins the story with a prologue. He is a captain in the army, helping to shuffle troops across rural England during the Second World War in preparation for a nameless overseas deployment. Sardonic and middle-aged, he is afflicted with the long-suffering of a straight man caught up in an eddy of idiots and bullies (a hapless clerk-made-lieutenant named Hooper dogs Charles’ movements). Although maybe a bit shabby and quietly sad, I remember feeling reassured by Charles’ normality: powerless in the thrall of the behind-the-lines drudgery and the titanic demand of the war, he moves with the slow energy of one who has been there before. His acuity is sharp, prying back the mundane to show the colorful layers in the world around him: among weedy ditches, cookhouses, feckless youth, and irate COs. This beginning is strange and slow and some might argue superfluous–I think it does wonders to set your pulse to the right beat for the rest.

Charles’ routine stumbles suddenly when, on a rain-soaked day, he’s asked to scout a location for a new camp for his battalion. The name of a nearby house is dropped:

“He told me and, on the instant, it was as though someone had switched off the wireless, and in a voice that had been bawling in my ears, incessantly, fatuously, for days beyond number, had been suddenly cut short; an immense silence followed, empty at first, but gradually, as my outraged sense regained authority, full of a multitude of sweet and natural and long-forgotten sounds–for he had spoken a name that was so familiar to me, a conjuror’s name of such ancient power, that, at its mere sound, the phantoms of those haunted late years began to take flight.” (p. 15).

What awesome relief! What space is opened! A magic switch is flipped and happy chemicals snap and churn through the khaki uniform at the mention of “Brideshead.” Charles goes back to retell what he remembers.

He begins with memories of his youth–arriving at Oxford in 1920 to study art. Charles’ introduction to the very aristocratic, very charming, and very Catholic Marchmains–owners of Brideshead castle–begins with the youngest son, Sebastian Flyte, who drunkenly vomits into his rooms through an open window. The ensuing love affair between the two (one of sodden, shipwrecked mariners) grants Charles a golden luxury. The Marchmains eventually adopt him into their fold, trusting his steadiness and quiet honesty. Charles believes he has found belonging. What he ends with is more complicated.

I’ll admit it was likely the blithe juncture I was living in at the time, but what I remember of reading Brideshead Revisited were these happy moments. Imbibing strawberries and white wine (a Château Peyraguey) on shaded, sheep-cropped grass; passing a lit cigarette from mouth to mouth while driving through the dark; leaning back in a chair after a kingly dinner and listening to your enemy describe the hungry gossip about you at home. The story progresses fantastically to a love affair–at the very height of its slow burn–born on an ocean liner in the midst of a great storm. Upon its decks–empty, askance, and ensnared in towering waves in the middle of the Atlantic–Waugh creates (in my opinion) one of the most classically sexy scenes in modern literature. All of these scenes, posh though they may sometimes be, are incredibly fun to read.

That's what I remember from my first reading. How does it hold up now? Pretty well, I gotta say. Although age–with its inevitable busyness–may have dimmed the book’s invincibility. I think that’s ok, even good. I actually found great, honest founts of tragedy and dysfunction–big sections that I know I read but chose not to remember–that made it more rewarding the second time around.

For example, Sebastian becomes a terrible alcoholic pretty early on. His descent is brutal and the response is completely bungled by his family, a failure quintessentially old-school and upper-class. Lady Marchmain’s schemes to hide the whisky and set her son straight are comically heavy-handed. At one point she assigns a shady devotee and self-described Catholic scholar, Mr. Samgrass, to chaperone Sebastian across southeastern Europe and the Middle East, hoping that a tour of Classical ruins would fix her son’s rampant drinking (no surprise, it’s a disaster). Lady Marchmain’s handling of Sebastian’s crisis also felt sadly familiar. Throughout his other work, Waugh is deft at weaving subtle comedy with subtle tragedy, lovingly skewering the upper-class. But in Brideshead he paints a darker picture of wealth, of people choosing to believe in something to make a problem go away–a poor performance of placation for an audience that barely fills more than a drawing room.

What the Marchmains do actually believe in though is their religion. I found Brideshead to be much more a story of spiritual searching than my prior reading. Charles is an artist and an agnostic–a believer in warm-blooded history and the chemical impacts of time that create and morph beautiful things. The Marchmains’ Catholicism, already a bit of an anathema in English high society, fascinates and charms him at first. It reminds him of arcane tradition and ritual that give big churches and small towns their color and character. But when decisions of power and individual freedom are eventually laid upon the great table, he’s shocked at their blind reliance on their faith. Each of the Marchmains–mother, estranged father, and four children–harbor a distinct brokenness that bedevils them. As far as the children go, one could easily say it’s the parents' fault–their divorce, their chilly distance from their children, their debilitating wealth. Though later in the book–when war is about to be declared and Hitler is heard screaming over the airwaves –the family’s flaws become superfluous in the face of their ardent love and trust in their faith. Catholicism, with its stubborn and baffling rules, gives them meaning–making them believe so much in the shoestring that it pulls them up like a hearty rope. And then Charles begins to feel a damp chill.

And then there’s Charles. Although his charm remained somewhat intact, he acquired other traits of weaker men on a second reading. His quiet confidence betrays itself as controlling and occasionally childish. When Sebastian refuses to discuss his family, Charles grows petulant–insisting on hearing the rest of the story, completing a fairy tale he’s been enjoying. He is snide and dismissive to Sebastian’s sister, Julia, as she muses over her family’s piousness. His loyalty and warmth seem not to extend much beyond the Marchmains–his cheerful (although unfaithful) wife Cecilia and his faceless children later in life are indifferent additions to his reflections. Even his politics run slightly askew: in one scene which I totally forgot in my first reading, Charles returns to England from Paris where he was studying art to help put down the 1926 General Strike. As a paramilitant with a billy club, he believes it's his patriotic duty (and perhaps jealousy of missed action in the First World War) to put the British working class back in their place.

Like Christopher Tietjens from Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, Charles is a conservative, a man of high-culture with a faith in English nobility. But his definitions of truth appear slightly more modern than Tietjens’, finding emotional–and it should finally be said, nostalgic–strength in old and beautiful things, rather than strictly in duty and patriarchy. For Charles, Brideshead castle is that physical manifestation of human majesty and the Marchmains represent its spiritual denizens. For Tietjens, it’s the more intangible “parade.” It’s all the same in the end. Both characters and their authors know this aesthetic, well-bred realm is doomed. In Charles’ case, it may also be a mirage. He hints at it back in the prologue, after hearing the name Brideshead again, there appears a sudden lack of structure that feels endangering.

In a review in The Guardian of the fairly awful 2008 film version, Christopher Hitchens reflects back on the book (his writing is better than his politics). He references an early scene, one pleasurably hazy for Charles, where the flamboyant aesthete Anthony Blanche begins reciting at a drunken garden party of sorts:

“[He] seizes a megaphone and through it declaims a death-filled stanza from the poem of all poems that summarises the discontent and alienation of those too young for the war: “The Waste Land.” ‘Grasp that,’ as Sebastian's tipsy and lachrymose host says at the first unpropitious meeting with Charles, ‘and you have the root of the matter.’ For what is the special aesthetic symbol of - to give it its proper name - ‘the great war’? It is, surely, the martyrdom of young men. Or the “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, as the title of one imperishable poem has it…It may or may not be a coincidence that the greatest poets of this boy-carnage were passionate homosexuals such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, just as it may be accidental that Walt Whitman's “Leaves of Grass” was written by a man who risked everything to nurse bleeding and pierced young soldiers, or that Yukio Mishima's gay classic Confessions of a Mask tells us that for him the revelation of his own nature came when he first saw a painting of St Sebastian feathered and penetrated with arrows…”

To me, Brideshead never felt like a “picking up the pieces” novel of that gut-shattered decade after the First World War. But Hitchens might be getting at something. A skilled reader might part the bacchanalian fronds and reveal a youthful angst and hollowed-out masculinity in the wake of missing The First World War. Hitchens’ emphasis on gay love wrapped in Catholic iconography (St. Sebastian peppered with arrows) is a useful nod to Waugh’s thinking–a longing for a pure, male bond, forged by religious sacrifice on the last field of battle (like Shakespeare’s St. Crispian’s Day “Band of Brothers” in Henry V). Because the battle was missed, the young men, in their frustration, descend into perceived sexual excess, drunkenness, and soft aestheticism.

The irony being that when the Second World War rolls around–giving brave, privileged idiots like Charles another chance to die for their idea of country–it brings nothing but pen-pushers and bureaucratic destruction to the old world and a waste of the remaining old guard. He muses at one point:

“...men who were, in all the full flood of academic and athletic success, of popularity and the promise of great rewards ahead, seen somehow as set apart from their fellows, garlanded victims, devoted to the sacrifice. These men must die to make a world for Hooper; they were the aborigines, vermin by right of law, to be shot off at leisure so that things might be safe for the traveling salesmen, with his polygonal pince-nez, his fat wet handshake, his grinning dentures.”

Damning for Charles. Raised eyebrows and grimaces for you and I? One could be forgiven for thinking him a snob (and racist) and the book a practice in snobbery. His analogy to aborigines as old, English nobility being sacrificed for doughy, middle-class cogs like Hooper is rich. Martin Amis said of Brideshead Revisited that it “squarely identifies egalitarianism as its foe and proceeds to rubbish it accordingly.”

I don’t entirely disagree. The elitist playground argument is a strong one. But you might be able to read through that to see a natural, stinging pain in Charles’ thoughts. His artistic purpose has been snuffed, his youth has died hard, and he begins and ends alone. I think Waugh created a character who suffers from generational faults, some of which may have taught him something. The result is a reluctant pragmatist, a student of history who understands nothing lasts forever (he just doesn’t have to like it). Despite his class credentials and being clearly learned, he doesn’t come off as stuck-up, and more merely as a creature of many. Charles’ superiority rather comes from a place more relatable–a disdain for time-wasting, vapid performance, cheap thrills, and blunt instruments. I argue, an everyman.

Waugh, apparently a difficult person to be around normally, was feeling particularly grouchy when he wrote Brideshead in 1943-1944. His father had just died, he had missed the Allied invasion of Sicily (he had eagerly joined up at the start of the Second World War), and he was basically bedridden after an awkward landing during his parachute training fractured his fibula. But what came out on paper had depth, empathy, and sensory joy. Sure it was indulgent, but maybe indulgent is what he needed at the time. Hitchens believed he had been getting at a more universal theme:

“Once you connect the epicene and homosexual elements to the aftermath of national catastrophe, and the ephemerality of all human and social relations, it becomes easy to see who is really, in Waugh's mind, the boss. It is death, and the skull beneath the skin. And not only people expire, but concepts…so love dies, and naturally innocence dies, but sin clings tenaciously to life.”

It’s a compelling argument, but it may have gone over my head even in the second reading. Considering it though, death and tenaciously clinging sin does click into other interesting spots in English literature. One of its greatest heroes, the guilt-ridden Sir Lancelot, knows this only too well. After destroying King Arthur’s marriage and the Round Table, Lancelot laments not making it in time to prevent Arthur’s death at the Battle of Camlann, intoning dolefully in Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485): “...we came too late, and that shall repent me while I live, but against death may no man rebel.” As penance, Lancelot discards his armor and title, becoming a hermit monk and eventually wasting away in obscurity. It’s a fate not unlike Sebastian’s–a man once described by Charles as “magically beautiful, with that epicene quality which in extreme youth sings aloud for love,” who ends a wraith-like drunk in a Moroccan monastery. Skin and concepts indeed. Woof.

However you slice it, I think Brideshead Revisited has some meat to it. Charles’ approachable narrative, the spiritual soul-searching between the wars, and nostalgia for youth redeems the book from what some might consider rightly-deserved obscurity.

I also recently watched Saltburn (2023). I’m not here to review films, but Emerald Fennel’s widely popular and “beautifully wicked” tale that many claimed emulated Brideshead’s story and vibe needed to be watched. I’ll say straight up that I enjoyed it. The cast, particularly Barry Keoghan and Rosamund Pike, carried the film to its rightful place as a funny, stylish, and goofily gross favorite. Spoilers beware.

Being protective of my long-time favorite book, I also wanted to watch to check if Fennel was trying to make a point with Saltburn—and if there was one if it was unkind or complementary or neither. I watched with a notepad (“nerd alert” said my wife) and saw the bigger pieces of Waugh’s work knit in with a masterful subtlety. Oliver Quick is a good Charles: nondescript, slightly guarded, smart but relatable, and initially surrounded by bullies and idiots. Michael Gavey, an insane mathy outcast who plagues Oliver’s early days at Oxford, gives him advice similar to what Charles’ goody goody cousin Jasper recommends–stay away from the Felixes and Sebastians (advice in both worlds duly ignored). And Felix is a decent Sebastian. Although he doesn’t seem quite as afflicted by familial neglect, he does have Sebastian’s angelic charm and languorousness that’s so seductive. The physical elements are pretty close too. Saltburn’s rooms, like Brideshead’s, are all rambling, and painstakingly decorated in certain styles and colors. Rooftop sunbathing, big fountains, and long drives (there is even a cheeky mention of a teddy bear, re Sebastian’s famous Aloysius) check more boxes. And watching the rampant smoking, drinking, partying (mixed in with the late 2000s music) was as fun as reading it. In one quick moment, as if trying to head-off any barreling statements claiming Saltburn is stealing from Brideshead, Fennell inserts a line that Evelyn Waugh was apparently at one point obsessed with the house–a stealthy wink that worked to solidify the story as its own.

I thought the departures in plot and characterization (at least in the first half) from Brideshead were actually what made the movie so good. The big one being the more obvious power struggles that were mostly absent in the book. Oliver and Farleigh Start’s rivalry got me rooting for each of them like gladiators. Jacob Elordi’s (Felix) staggering tallness seems to emphasize the challenges of gaining admission to the Catton realm, with Oliver looking like a mountaineer with arms too short to reach. Saltburn was at its absolute best when Felix unwittingly blows Oliver’s cover by driving him to see his mother–discovering he also has a father–and that Oliver’s circumstances are far from the broken-home squalor he previously described.

And then, alas, the movie suddenly loses its bottom. This tight, funny, satire–garnished with some great ewww factor moments–chickens out and gives the audience a cheap and hackneyed finale. It almost felt like Emerald Fennel (an aristocrat herself) got lazy and decided to dispatch the Cattons in quick succession–shifting her audience’s synapses from intellectual fun with a few bodily fluids, to a base blood-letting. The camera is suddenly possessed by A24 and looks obliquely to the sky from the perspective of Felix’s winged corpse, as the Catton family sob and blubber in the corners. A stately dining room inexplicably becomes blood red when the curtains are drawn. The characters’ personalities degenerate into the stupidly wide-eyed participants of a horror movie that muscled its way in without ceremony. Then dicks out and play the music.

Several reviewers thought this doomed Saltburn in the end. “There are, in effect, two movies at work in ‘Saltburn’--the one that Fennel puts onto the screen and the one that it implies–and the implied movie is better,” says Richard Brody in The New Yorker. “The heavily drawn-out ending feels uncertain… composed of a broadly guessable twist which relies on there being an absence of anyone in or out of authority showing a normal level of curiosity,” said The Guardian. I see where they are getting at–I think it would have been a better movie with a more thought out ending. Parasite (2019), another class conscious thriller, is a good example of where this worked. It’s twice the movie of Saltburn because it earns its violent payoff–it puts in the work. Like Saltburn, Parasite had wit and it balanced the authentic and the absurd–but it also brokered with the audience’s intellect and told a more complicated story. It kept the characters fully alive until they weren’t.

What does this have to do with Brideshead Revisited? Not much, in my opinion. Which is why I think Saltburn is still a great movie. Who cares if the bottom fell out? It entertained completely.

Alissa Wilkinson of the New York Times, however, DOES think Saltburn has a point to make (explained in an annoyingly titled review: “The Point of ‘Saltburn’ Isn’t What You Think It Is”). The crux of her argument is that Brideshead Revisited’s popularity is equatable to Oliver’s depraved lust for possession of aristocratic nostalgia. “It’s not a movie about class. It’s a movie about foolishness — [Oliver’s], and ours,” she suggests, claiming the movie is actually a brilliant play by Fennel, a big joke that’s on “us.” Wilkinson quotes Fennel as saying “Saltburn’ is ‘a satire about our fixation with films like this,” referring to the genre of what Wilkinson calls “great house” tales. And who tells those great house tales?

“Whereas Charles Ryder, the Oliver character in “Brideshead,” is attracted to the beauty, history and transcendence of the great house and the broken family that inhabits it, and finds there some grander eternal consequence, Oliver is working from a more base instinct: the acquisitive need to have what he feels he’s been denied in his own family’s boring, moral, middle-class existence…[Oliver’s] just the inversion of a more innocent literary prototype, one whom readers and viewers see as their own emissary into the glamorous world of the great house. This is a movie, in essence, about these kinds of movies.”

If that was the point, to put a thumb in the eye of “great house” stories, to we that read and watch them, to satirize a world already-oversaturated with satire—then Fennel wasted it. Sure, the opportunity was there–Waugh’s crowning novel, written almost 75 years ago, has enough elitist baggage and soppy lines to make a go at a good lampooning. But instead we got a public-execution fit for a slavering, simple audience used to gory revenge flicks. It’s clear Wilkinson hasn’t read much more of Brideshead Revisited than the SparkNotes and a review or two elsewhere. To truly skewer the great house genre through a vessel of Evelyn Waugh, a satiric genius in many of his other works, you need to do a bit more homework (“You come at the King, you best not miss”).

Thanks everyone for reading and sticking with Backpocket Reviews to Issue 50. Happy New Year!