1: Introduction

EVELYN WAUGH STUDIES Vol. 42, No. 2 Autumn 2011 Art Criticism and Brideshead Revisited Elyse Graham 1.) Evelyn Waugh’s first literary vocation was not novelist but art critic. Upon deciding at the age of twenty-three to follow the family tradition of a life in letters, he prepared as his first work for independent publication a short pamphlet on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which his friend Alastair Graham commissioned for his private press in 1926. Waugh followed up two years later with a book-length biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1928). The choice of subjects was natural, for Waugh’s ambitions had been in the visual arts: a prolific illustrator of undergraduate magazines, he had been famous among his college friends as a talented draftsman rather than a budding poet.[1] His first published work of any kind emerged from an adolescence steeped in visits to galleries and readings on modern artists: a short essay, “In Defence of Cubism,” appeared in the journal Drawing and Design when he was fourteen years old. As the title hints, the essay expresses infatuation with the Formalist school of criticism led by Roger Fry—loyalties that Waugh would abandon by the time he began work on the Pre-Raphaelites. Eventually, Waugh allowed his painterly identity to slip behind the persona of the writer.[2] He continued writing art criticism under other guises. When Waugh revived college memories decades later, his great semi-autobiographical novel Brideshead Revisited (1945) represented a return to his origins in the visual arts. This novel acquired early fame as the portrait of an era, but its period atmosphere relies on detailed evocation of visual culture. In Brideshead, references to the avant-garde tradition from the Pre-Raphaelites to the Post-Impressionists abound: characters summon the art world in their gestures and dress, in the critical judgments they pass back and forth in conversation, in the murals and sculptures and decorated screens with which they illuminate their surroundings. The protagonist is himself a painter, and he navigates the business and politics of his profession. It is surprising that so few critics have given sustained attention to Brideshead as an art novel—a work of extended aesthetic self-reflection in the genre of Zola, Wilde, and Joyce, and close to favorite poets of Waugh’s, such as Browning, Morris, and Rossetti. Only a few studies have attended to the prominent role the novel accords the visual arts;[3] only one that I know of, a 1987 piece in the Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, notes the novel’s specific focus on the art of the Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic schools.[4] While the author of the 1987 essay, William Going, usefully supplements our understanding of visual themes in Brideshead, he takes the novel’s abundant references to the Pre-Raphaelites to represent an uncritical endorsement of their aesthetic. A satisfactory reading of the novel, however, depends on seeing how far the truth is from this claim. Waugh writes as an ironist: the role of visual culture in Brideshead is not to exalt a pantheon or to provide mere detail, but rather to present, through wry examination of ascendant factions in art, a critique of the spurious bases of a supposed golden age. Critics have long noted the novel’s skeptical attitudes toward the pagan Arcadia in early scenes, but Waugh profoundly binds Brideshead to visual education, weaving the discourse of art criticism into settings and character studies. Pre-Raphaelitism, Aestheticism, Decadence, and Formalism become, in Brideshead, the gaudy lines of a manuscript illumination inked in by a skeptical hand: aesthetic terms define the foibles and vanities of an age, lend poignant perspective to the twilight of a ruling class, and, in a move that symbolically restores Waugh to the role of art critic, lay the grounds for a competing theory of art. 2.) When Charles Ryder arrives as a freshman at Oxford, his first object is to deck out his rooms in a crowded anthology of Aesthetic and Formalist design. From the perspective of his older self, he laments that he did not fill his rooms with high-quality, old-fashioned work but rather leaped at the thrilling and modern: On my first afternoon I proudly hung a reproduction of Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” over the fire and set up a screen, painted by Roger Fry with a Provençal landscape…. I displayed also a poster by McKnight Kauffer and Rhyme Sheets from the Poetry Bookshop, and, most painful to recall, a porcelain figure of Polly Peachum which stood between black tapers on the chimney-piece. My books were meagre and commonplace—Roger Fry’s Vision and Design; the Medici Press edition of A Shropshire Lad; Eminent Victorians; some volumes of Georgian Poetry; Sinister Street; and South Wind….[5] The older Charles finds his youthful taste disagreeable, but his earlier self has, relative to the period, nearly perfect pitch. His rooms broadcast many defining expressions of the Formalist and late Aesthetic movements: McKnight Kauffer, the poster designer who splashed cubism, futurism, and vorticism across the London Underground; the Poetry Bookshop, which enlisted Aesthetic paragons such as Burne-Jones to decorate pages of modern verse; and Van Gogh, who today seems well outside mere decorations, but whose early detractors complained that he reduced the world to filigree and mere form, treating skies and landscapes as “a decorator might a wall-paper.”[6] (Polly Peachum, a cupcake from The Threepenny Opera, provides the comic deflating note.) The books present a small canon of the contemporary avant-garde in literature, with emphasis on Roger Fry’s Bloomsbury. The college setting frames a story of education, but this careful set piece initiates a pedagogical arc that emphasizes aesthetic discourse, creating a gap between the reader’s enthusiastic appraisal of celebrated works and the mature perspective from which they seem inadequate and even embarrassing. As one might expect in an atmosphere where stylization is at a premium, Charles admits that his friends, “a small circle of college intellectuals, who maintained a middle course of culture between the flamboyant ‘aesthetes’ and the proletarian scholars,” fit as neatly as a pattern into the decorative scheme (27). They observe habits of gesture, dress, and speech familiar from the postures of Whistler and Wilde. Artistic topics dominate their conversation; indeed, at least one besides Charles, the ponderous Collins, goes on to a career in the arts. (The series of books that he writes on Byzantine art follows convention as well, for the Aesthetes often playfully identified themselves with Byzantine portraiture--gilded, angular, and otherworldly.) The most explicitly Wildean character is Anthony Blanche, whose effete mannerisms and flamboyant style are too well-known to need much rehearsal. As with Sebastian Flyte, whose habit of speaking in extremes (“I must have pillar-box red pajamas,” “I’ve absolutely got to drink champagne to- night!”) recalls parodies of Aesthetic hyperbole (“too utterly, utterly delightful!”), Anthony’s speech reflects Waugh’s attentiveness to Wildean phrasing and irony. “Where are the pictures?” he demands at Charles’s show: “Let me explain them to you” (269). Even better is his complaint about having to read a dull book “because everyone was bound to talk about it, and it’s so banal saying you have not read the book of the moment, if you haven’t” (48). The logic is boilerplate Wilde, implying that the thing to do is to read the book and pretend you haven’t. Nor does Charles himself escape allusive reference. Although Charles is not a great artist but rather an inspired draftsman, a sort of lower Ingres or Andrea del Sarto,[7] his career shares several sly connections with that key figure in Aesthetic and Wavian experience, Dante Rossetti. Recalling the Pre-Raphaelites’ mural in the Oxford Debating Hall, Julia mentions that Charles “went to Oxford to paint the picture they didn’t like” (278). Probably in reference to the lushly ethereal women on Rossetti’s canvases, Charles’s mistress, Lady Julia Flyte, is a dark beauty like Elizabeth Siddal. “She is one thing only, Renaissance tragedy,” Anthony Blanche declares: “A face of flawless Florentine Quattrocento beauty” (54). Reinforcing this connection, Charles later compares Julia’s face with the Aesthetic critic Walter Pater’s famous evocation of La Gioconda: Time had wrought another change, too; not for her the sly, complacent smile of La Gioconda; the years had been more than “the sound of lyres and flutes,” and had saddened her. She seemed to say, “Look at me. I have done my share. I am beautiful. It is something quite out of the ordinary, this beauty of mine. I am made for delight. But what do I get out of it? Where is my reward?” (239) Like Pater’s Mona Lisa, who bears only a notional resemblance to the woman Leonardo painted, Julia reflects her era more than her Renaissance prototype. She too seems charged with bearing an overburdened erotic and mystical symbolism of the ripening and collapse of civilizations. It is symbolically appropriate, if unsettling, that her fiancé, Rex Mottram, pays her tribute with a gift that readers (although not the characters) recognize as an allusion to the famous Decadent novel Au Rebours: “a small tortoise with Julia’s initials set in diamond in the living shell” (164). Yet Charles’s words also show how he understands Julia better than her suitor does. If she wears the outward features of Pater’s goddess, her response to what Pater called “the thoughts and experience of the world” is far different from pagan mirth. Pater gave his muse the indulgent smile of Leonardo’s Saint Anne; Waugh, foreshadowing the contrast between old dispensation and new, gives his the Christian sorrow of Saint Mary at the Pieta.

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