After years of hearing about it, I finally got around to reading the most famous work of the great British writer Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited. I wish I hadn’t waited. (For those who like to listen to books, an audio version is superbly performed by Jeremy Irons.)
The novel tells the story of the romances, tragedies, and transformations of Charles Ryder. His family life is not exactly ideal. His mother has died, and “my father greeted me with his usual air of mild regret.” Charles heads to Oxford to become a first-year college student. There he meets the witty, sophisticated, and eccentric Lord Sebastian Flyte, an English aristocrat. Sebastian invites Charles to visit where his family lives. It’s called Brideshead, and the place makes Downton Abbey look like a Motel 6. At Brideshead, Charles meets other members of the Flyte family, including Sebastian’s sister Lady Julia. The Flytes are as fabulously wealthy as they are fundamentally dysfunctional. The exquisite beauty of their home does not save anyone in the family from superlative suffering. The aristocrats endure addiction, adultery, and alienation.
But the story at root is about love: the love of a mother for an alcoholic son and wayward husband, the love of spouses grown glacial, and the love of eros fraught with difficulties. When Charles falls in love, he falls hard. He is more than smitten when he looks at his beloved:
This was the creature, neither child nor woman, that drove me through the dusk that summer evening, untroubled by love, taken aback by the power of her own beauty, hesitating on the steps of life; one who had suddenly found herself armed, unawares; the heroine of a fairy story turning over in her hands the magic ring; she had only to stroke it with her fingertips, and whisper the charmed word, for the earth to open at her feet and belch forth her Titanic servant, the fawning monster who would bring her whatever she asked, but bring it, perhaps, in unwelcome shape.
Unfortunately, falling in love sometimes leads to falling out of love, since both are states of emotion rather than commitments of the will. Charles says, “I was aghast to realize that something within me, long sickening, had quietly died, and felt as a husband might feel, who, in the fourth year of his marriage, suddenly knew that he had no longer any desire, or tenderness, or esteem, for a once-beloved wife; no pleasure in her company, no wish to please, no curiosity about anything she might ever do or say or think; no hope of setting things right, no self-reproach for the disaster. I knew it all, the whole drab compass of marital disillusion.” He replaces appreciation for his wife with a laser focus on whatever is not right, not lovely, and not honorable:
“When the waterholes were dry, people sought to drink at the mirage.”
I caught the false notes in her voice and learned to listen for them apprehensively; I recognized the blank, resentful stare of incomprehension in her eyes, and the selfish, hard set of the corners of her mouth. I learned her, as one must learn a woman one has kept house with, day in, day out, for three and a half years; I learned her slatternly ways, the routine and mechanism of her charm, her jealousy and self-seeking, and her nervous trick with the fingers when she was lying. She was stripped of all enchantment now and I knew her for an uncongenial stranger to whom I had bound myself indissolubly in a moment of folly.
Charles, and not just Charles, must choose to live out an answer. Is marriage a matter of folly or faith? Or is it a bit of both?
In his loves, Charles feels a sense of unsatisfied longing, “All our loves are merely hints and symbols; a hill of many invisible crests; doors that open as in a dream to reveal only a further stretch of carpet and another door; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.” This deep longing is shared by Sebastian and Julia, indeed by all the extended and blended family Flyte. Yet they often work at tragic cross purposes with each other, seeking the love and grace they need but not finding it where they seek it, “When the waterholes were dry, people sought to drink at the mirage.”
These marital and familial conflicts come to a surprising conclusion at the culmination of the novel. More than one character is caught 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.” I won’t spoil the ending. But have Kleenex handy.