EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER and STUDIES Volume 28, Number 1 Spring, 1994
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
·,- .:-;.;.::,._ EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER AND STUDIES Volume 28, Number 1 Spring, 1994 BROTHERS, WAR, AND SUCCESSION IN BRIDESHEAD REVISITED and SWORD OF HONOUR By John Howard Wilson (Dakota Wesleyan University) Brideshead Revisited is obviously a turning point in the fiction of Evelyn Waugh. Waugh used many of his old characters-Oxford undergraduates, Bright Young People, aristocrats-but he rendered them in a richer, more complicated style. Waugh also added new themes, such as memory and religion, enabling his characters to begin to believe in their own significance. Though in many ways the culmination of the first half, Brideshead was also preparation for the second half of Waugh's career. As he wrote Brides head, Waugh developed themes and characters he would be able to use again in later fiction. One such character is the brother killed in the First World War. In Brideshead, we read that "lady Marchmain was engaged in making a memorial book ... about her brother, Ned, the eldest of three legendary heroes all killed between Mons and Paschendaele" (1 09). It is a small detail, but Waugh comes back to it several times. In an interview with Charles Ryder, lady Marchmain says her brothers "were three splendid men; Ned was the best of them. He was the last to be killed, and when the telegram came, as I knew it would come, I thought: 'Now it's my son's turn to do what Ned can never do now.' I was alone then. He was just going to Eton.lfyou read Ned's book you'll understand" (137). lady Marchmain was alone because her husband had left her. As Charles's cousin Jasper says, lord March main "went off to France with his Yeomanry and just never came back. It was as if he'd been killed" (41). Waugh is emphasizing the great cost of the war, not only in terms of those killed, but also in terms of how the survivors changed. lord March main has lost interest in the forms of marriage, lordship, and fatherhood. His reaction to the war is a blow to the family, perhaps even greater than his death would have been. The children not only lose their father; they also gain an example of indifference to conventional obligation. lady Marchmain is worried that her son may take after his father. She has two sons, but she isn't talking about Bridey in her interview with Charles. If Ned, the last brother, was killed at Paschendaele, the year would have been 1917, the year Charles and Sebastian would have entered public school. It's not clear what lady Marchmain expects Sebastian to do in Ned's place, but she has some preconception about his future, and she uses the example of her brother to evaluate her son. Charles reads the book, and he begins to understand. lady March main was the first of three girls; "after the birth of the third daughter there had been pilgrimages and pious benefactions in request for a son, for theirs was a wide property and an ancient name; male heirs had come late and, when they came, in a profusion which at the time seemed to promise continuity to the line which, in the tragic event, ended abruptly with them.'' The First World War has finished a male line of succession that had survived hardship for centuries: "from Elizabeth's reign till Victoria's they lived sequestered lives among their tenantry and kinsmen, sending their sons to school abroad; often marrying there-inter-marrying, if not, with a score of families like themselves, debarred from all preferment; and learning, in those lost generations, lessons which could still be read in the lives of the last three men of the house.'' The years of endurance seem to have come to nothing. Even "in all the full flood of academic and athletic success, of popularity and the promise of great rewards ahead," lady Marchmain's brothers had been "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 fort he travelling salesman, with his polygonal pince-nez, his fat wet hand-shake, his grinning dentures. I wondered, as the train carried me farther and farther from lady Marchmain, whether perhaps there was not on her, too, the same blaze, marking her and hers for destruction by other ways than war'' (139). The First World War amounts to a conspiracy to get rid of the aristocracy, an act of dispossession that allows the modern world to come into being. That world is, like the travelling salesman, weak, ugly, and insecure, in every way opposed to the aristocracy's strength, beauty, and confidence. This passage has been quoted as an example of Waugh's adulation of the nobility, his bias against the bourgeoisie, but actually it is Ryder's reflection, and we know that narrator and author are not identical. Viewed from another angle, the passage seems intended to stress the danger to Lady March main and her family. At this point in the novel, they are clearly doomed, and the shadow seems to fall most squarely on Sebastian, Uncle Ned's heir apparent. "Uncle Ned is the test, you know" (141 ), Sebastian says to Charles, and test he is, in more ways than one. Lady March main uses Ned to test Charles, trying to see whether or not he will help her to reform Sebastian. For Sebastian, Ned is also a test, a standard he is supposed to emulate, though -2- actually another torment driving Sebastian into alcoholic exile. Sebastian follows his father rather than his uncle, running away from family and responsibility. He runs away from Mr. Samgrass, who has acquired influence in the family by editing Ned's book. Sebastian runs away from Charles, too, eventually assuming responsibility for Kurt in Morocco. Left alone, without much of a family to flee from, Charles goesto Paris. He returns to England for the General Strike, having been "too young to fight in the war," trying to show "the dead chaps we can fight too" (205). The Strike proves uneventful, and Charles's attempt to assume responsibility becomes a parody of Uncle Ned's. Later Charles escapes his wife and children by going to South America, only to return, ready to take responsibility for Julia and Brideshead. Again his desires lead only to illusions. Charles nevertheless joins the army at the beginning of the Second World War, but by then another noble family seems to have reached the end of the line, Bridey's wife past childbearing, Julia divorced, Sebastian dead or dying, Cordelia still unmarried. Though several characters in Brides head choose between flight and responsibility, the end of the novel suggests that flight at most delays one's inevitable collision with responsibility. Each character is caught, as Father Brown says, "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" (220). This twitch is nothing less than God's grace, what Charles seems to sense in the novel's final scene: "Something quite remote from anything the builders intended has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time ...."The chapel has been reopened, and Charles sees that the lamp there "could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians ... " (351 ). Grace redeems tragedy, giving it purpose and meaning, but tragedy is also necessary in order to appreciate grace. Though they are quite minor characters, Lady March main's brothers are a few of the tragedians, and by the end of the novel, Charles can see in their deaths something other than senseless waste. Waugh is not explicit on this point, but it takes faith, hope, and charity to give up one's life for others, as the brothers have done. Charles has just begun to acquire these virtues, and though he has been denied the brothers' opportunity for self-sacrifice, perhaps he can see himself as having been spared until he could learn to believe. Short lives need not be meaningless if others can derive meaning from them. The brothers are also part of history, the unfolding of the divine plan and the process that makes the present possible. In'· historical terms, characterization of the brothers seems cluttered. The aristocracy might see them as garlanded victims, since sacrifice claims only a few of the very best, propitiating some deity that should then leave the others alone. If the brothers were sacrificed, their deaths should have made the modern world safe for the rest of their social class. This reading fails to jibe with other terms applied to the brothers. The middle and working classes might see them as aborigines, people who had long controlled land now being coveted by newcomers. Other classes might even see the brothers as vermin, pests to be gotten rid of. In either case, the commons would hardly be willing to accept a sacrifice intended to preserve the privileges of other aristocrats. Waugh may have meant that the Catholic aristocracy was being singled out for extermination, but then it is hard to see why a partly religious issue should be represented solely in terms of class, as it is in Brideshead. Waugh seems to have over-written this short passage, his fiction's first step toward acceptance of the First World War.