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Brideshead Revisited RevisitedHow to watch Evelyn Waugh.

By Troy Patterson
Posted Friday, July 25, 2008, at 3:08 PM ET
Brideshead Revisited

Evelyn Waugh is the greatest comic novelist of the last 100 years, and if you somehow dispute this fact, there is simply nothing to be done for you but a period of house arrest. One or another reputable online bookseller will deliver Waugh's fiction to the doorway of your awful little warren, and you can begin your re-education at the beginning, with the debut novel Decline and Fall, wherein hero Paul Pennyfeather, cast out of Oxford for the indecent behavior of running around without any pants on, assumes a teaching job (for which he lacks all qualifications) at a school in Wales (a country disparaged in the rude, cruel, achingly hilarious terms that anticipate the author's shabby treatment of Africa). You will go onward through the dark satire, brilliant viciousness, and unmatchable dialogue of Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, and, especially, A Handful of Dust, with its stunning climactic swerve from light social comedy to perfect desolation. If you haven't been converted by the opening chapters of Scoop—about a writer, incompetent even as a nature columnist, covering a war for a paper called the Daily Beast—then there is no hope for you, and you should just stay home forever.

But do not, when attempting any course of reading aimed at appreciating Waugh's wit, give undue attention to Brideshead Revisited, a misfit of a book, much loved, and often loved in the wrong way, as the vomitous stupidity of Miramax's new film adaptation attests. There's a comic novel in there, but it is not, as the common expression goes, struggling to get out. It's lodged there quite contentedly; the book's acid portraits of dull dons and rich oafs are enmeshed with its affectingly tender peeks at lost youth and also with its eagerly overwrought splendor and its sincerely bogus religiosity. This was the seventh novel Waugh published—the eighth he attempted—a grasp at grandeur written in a mere four months, during a leave from the British army in early 1944. "Waugh wrote Brideshead with great speed, unfamiliar excitement, and a deep conviction of its excellence," Martin Amis once remarked. "Lasting schlock, the really good bad book, cannot be written otherwise."

All apologies to Wuthering Heights, but Brideshead Revisited has a claim as literature's finest schlock. It sees narrator Charles Ryder reflecting, with a compound of sharp rue and magniloquent longing, on his past. In his youth, there was a powerful love for beautiful and doomed aristocrat Sebastian Flyte and a failed attempt to rescue Sebastian from alcoholism; in early middle age, a thwarted romance with Sebastian's sister, Julia, and a continuing passion for the Flyte family's huge and gorgeous country house. At 39, Ryder—and, with him, the credulous reader—is convinced that the world of the Flytes has expired and, with it, an essential part of the soul of England.

The rear cover of my copy finds a reviewer from the '40s calling Brideshead "Waugh's most deeply felt novel," prompting the belief that Waugh ought to keep his feelings to himself if he's going to insist on writing passages like this one, which expands a point of sunlit truth into a large gaseous orb:

The languor of Youth—how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrevocably, lost! .... [L]anguor—the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding, the sun standing still in the heavens and the earth throbbing to our own pulse—that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it. Perhaps in the mansions of Limbo the heroes enjoy some such compensation for their loss of the Beatific Vision; perhaps the Beatific Vision itself has some remote kinship with this lowly experience; I, at any rate, believed myself very near heaven, during those languid days at Brideshead.

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Troy Patterson is Slate's television critic.
Still from the 1982 Brideshead Revisited copyright Granada TV. All rights reserved.
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Notes from the Fray Editor

There was some argument as to that title of "greatest comic novelist": nominations from the Fray included P.G.Wodehouse, Thomas Berger, E.F.Benson, Peter DeVries, Kingsley Amis, John Barth and Terry Pratchett. Kerstin recommended reading the letters between Waugh and the writer Nancy Mitford—recommendation strongly endorsed by the Fray Editor.

Comments from the Fray

I admit I've never really gotten this book. How on earth can a family of frivolous, affected aristocrats be seen by anyone as the acme of civilization? As a glossy soap opera all this solemn, unintentionally campy hokum perhaps works. But as a seriously intended statement of what British society has supposedly lost, it's just laughable.

--florentine

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Patterson writes:

At 39, Ryder—and, with him, the credulous reader—is convinced that the world of the Flytes has expired and, with it, an essential part of the soul of England.

The reason this can not possibly be true is that the Flytes are Catholics, making them outcasts among England's elites. Rex Mottram did not understand this either. I don't disagree with Patterson's overall view that the novel contains elements of "schlock"… and I continue to shake my head at the ending, which is unearned. But the novel also remains complex in ways that defy breezy summaries and summary dismissals.

--michael1960

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