Something So Different

[brideshead-castle]

Something So Different by Kathryn S. Easter

The literary gamut usually runs from the sublime to the ridiculous, but Evelyn Waugh developed in quite the reverse direction: from the ridiculous to the sublime. Between his first novel and his last, Waugh clearly went through a profound paradigm shift easily detected in his themes. The startling change recalls Monty Python’s stock transitional phrase, “and now for something completely different.” Waugh’s view of the world was completely different by the time he wrote his masterpiece, Brideshead Revisited, for a singular reason: he had become a Roman Catholic.

[…]

Fast-forward sixteen years past publication of Decline and Fall. Waugh has converted, having become a devout Roman Catholic. His magnum opus is written, and it radiates with Waugh’s religious convictions. Whereas he had prefaced Decline and Fall with the warning that it was “meant to be funny,” this time he stated boldly, “Brideshead Revisited is not meant to be funny.” He added that there are passages of buffoonery, but “the general theme is at once romantic and eschatological” (Stannard 236).

[…]

After publication of Brideshead Revisited in America, a Mr. McClose wrote to Waugh: “Your Brideshead Revisited is a strange way to show that Catholicism is an answer to anything. Seems more like the kiss of Death to me” (Stannard 260). By the novel’s end, the lovers are forced apart by a sense of sin; the house is deserted; the family is scattered; the only child that is born is dead. Mr. McClose is right, Catholicism is a kiss of Death—one absolutely necessary for salvation; it is death to worldliness, selfishness, carnal baseness. Death in this case is not tragic as the world understands tragedy, but comedic as Christianity understands comedy. This commedia of Dante “enters drama with the miracle-play cycles, where such tragedies as the Fall and the Crucifixion are episodes of a dramatic scheme in which the divine comedy has the last word,” Frye explains, and that last word is of course Resurrection: “The sense of tragedy as a prelude to comedy is hardly separable from anything explicitly Christian” (84). Brideshead is not only Christian; it is also explicitly Catholic.
The distinction between Christianity and Roman Catholicism is important, mostly because many Protestant sects lack a developed theology regarding “death of self”—especially as it involves pain and suffering. Catholics know that their religion is extremely difficult (impossible, in fact, without the help of God’s grace), and this difficulty becomes the theme of Brideshead Revisited.

Throughout Brideshead Revisited, the difference of Catholicism is not as funny as it is profound; this profundity exasperates Charles, the “poor agnostic,” as Cordelia calls him. When he and the family discuss Sebastian’s downward spiral into alcoholism, Bridey says, “I believe God prefers drunkards to a lot of respectable people.” Charles cries out, “For God’s sake, […] why bring God into everything?” (BR 145). Later, Bridey makes a similar comment: “There’s nothing wrong with being a physical wreck, you know.” He also mentions a “moral obligation,” and in frustration, Charles tells Bridey that he manages to “reduce what seem quite sensible propositions to stark nonsense” (BR 164). But Bridey is quite right in terms of Catholic piety. Drunkards and physical wrecks are more acutely aware of their weakness and dependence on God than are those who go from one shallow comfort to the next.
Cordelia supports Bridey’s offhand remarks when Charles asks her, “How will it end?” She responds, “I’ve seen others like [Sebastian], and I believe they are very near and dear to God” (BR 308). She goes on to describe his daily struggles; Charles says, “I suppose he doesn’t suffer?” “Oh yes, I think he does,” Cordelia replies. “One can have no idea what the suffering may be, to be maimed as he is—no dignity, no power of will. No one is ever holy without suffering” (BR 309). This is one of the great paradoxes of Christianity: suffering leads to holiness, holiness to eternal happiness.
Eternal happiness, not earthly happiness, is a key point in Brideshead Revisited. The Marchmain family experiences this theological crux in different ways, as Sebastian explains to Charles:

“So you see we’re a mixed family religiously. Brideshead and Cordelia are both fervent Catholics; he’s miserable, she’s bird-happy; Julia and I are half-heathen; I am happy, I rather think Julia isn’t; Mummy is popularly believed to be a saint and Papa is excommunicated—and I wouldn’t know which of them was happy. Anyway, however you look at it, happiness doesn’t seem to have much to do with it, and that’s all I want.… I wish I liked Catholics more” (BR 89).

As his drinking increases, Sebastian joins the unhappy. His mother notices that when Sebastian is drunk, there is “nothing happy about him” (BR 136). Charles becomes increasingly distraught at the sorry situation. He tells Bridey, “without your religion Sebastian would have the chance to be a happy and a healthy man.” Bridey nonchalantly replies, “It’s arguable” (BR 145). Bridey’s matter-of-fact Catholicism is endlessly frustrating. Bridey knows that health and happiness are unnecessary for holiness, which is why he is content to be “miserable,” as Sebastian observes.
Charles shares more of his thoughts about the Flytes’ Catholicism when he speaks about Julia, Sebastian’s “half-heathen” counterpart. Wherever she turns, “her religion [stands] as a barrier between herself and her natural goal” (BR 181). The goal that Charles speaks of is carnal, unholy—adultery followed by divorce. As a Catholic, Julia is called not to a “natural goal” but to a supernatural one, which requires death to her passions, her desires, her self.
Charles explains Julia’s troublesome situation: “If she apostasized now, having been brought up in the Church, she would go to hell, while the Protestant girls of her acquaintance, schooled in happy ignorance, could marry eldest sons, [and] live at peace with their world” (BR 181-2). “Happy ignorance” may seem like a better way to spend one’s life, but it is not the Catholic way. Because she has been brought up a Roman Catholic, Julia is not ignorant of the necessity of suffering, and she has a tremendous responsibility for the well-being of her own soul.
The greatest saints of the Church knew that they must suffer for the love of God and embraced their trials wholeheartedly. They were even given the grace to transform their suffering into happiness. The two half-heathen Marchmain children and their excommunicated father resist this lofty idea in Brideshead Revisited. Charles tells Lady Marchmain that Sebastian is “ashamed of being unhappy.” He has become just like his father: unhappy, ashamed, running away. Lady Marchmain concludes, “It’s too pitiful” (BR 136-7). The attitude of the matriarch drives her son and her husband away. Her pity is also God’s; it is God’s mercy. Cordelia explains: “I sometimes think that when people wanted to hate God they hated Mummy. […] she was saintly but she wasn’t a saint. No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can’t really hate God either. When they want to hate Him and His saints they have to find something like themselves and pretend it’s God and hate that” (BR 221).
Lady Marchmain is perhaps the most complicated character in the entire book. A reader once asked Waugh, “Are you or are you not on Lady Marchmain’s side? I couldn’t make out.” He responded, “No, I am not on her side, but God is, who suffers fools gladly” (Beaty 161). She gives the Church to her family, though she also drives most of them away. Destructive as her behavior may be, it is not sinful. Lady Marchmain is as compulsive as her son, maimed like Sebastian, but less holy. Sebastian is loveable; bound to the stake of his suffering—of his compulsions—he becomes saintly, like the martyr after whom he is named. Lady Marchmain suffers too (in fact, Sebastian even relates her to an oleograph of the Seven Dolours), but she is not a saint, not loveable, not even adequately loving towards anyone other than God. She is, however, ultimately more fruitful than her son, for she is the primary vehicle of Catholicism in the novel. “The book,” wrote Waugh, “is about God,” and Lady Marchmain acts as His instrument despite her great and perhaps insuperable difficulty seeing His Son in His creatures (Myers 76).
Lady Marchmain has somehow allowed the world to be too much with her—fallen secularity has infiltrated her sacred abode, and scandal after scandal (beginning with Lord Marchmain’s adultery and ending with Julia’s) has scarred the family’s honor. She is nearly incapable of loving the un-Christ-like—she does not adhere to the Lord’s words in Scripture, “And if you love them that love you, what thanks are to you? For sinners also love those that love them” (Luke 6:32). Furthermore, she, her middle children, and her estranged husband do not transcend their self-loathing to lead truly pious lives. The latter three cannot love Lady Marchmain, since she acts as a constant reminder of the way they ought to be living, in spite of their disordered attachments to the world. Julia, Sebastian, and Lord Marchmain flee from their painfully difficult Catholic duty into shallow pleasures. While these orphans run amuck, the agnostic outside the fold is drawn in. Charles falls in love with the Marchmain family. He is enchanted by Sebastian, enamored with Julia, charmed by Lady Marchmain, and moved by the experience of being at their home: “I […] believed myself very near heaven, during those languid days at Brideshead” (BR 79). Charles says of Sebastian, “He was the forerunner,” and Julia replies: “That’s what you said in the storm. I’ve thought since: perhaps I am only a forerunner, too.” Charles reflects that

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. (BR 303)

Because man is made in the image of God, love of any person is a forerunner of the ultimate love of God. Such is the drama of life—perseverance day in and day out through disappointment and sadness—all stemming from separation from the Creator.
It is a tragicomic war in Lord Marchmain’s soul as he lies quietly dying. Charles looks at this man in bed—slowly breathing, slowly fading—and the poor agnostic fights against the imposition of the Last Rites. In great distress, he asks Julia, “Can’t they even let him die in peace?” Julia responds, “They mean something so different by ‘peace’” (BR 324). Something entirely different, indeed: finite war with self on earth before infinite peace with God in Heaven. Lord Marchmain must smite his stubborn pride and give in to Christ’s mercy. Charles imagines that “All over the world people were on their knees before innumerable crosses, and here the drama was being played again by two men—by one man, rather, and he nearer death than life; the universal drama in which there is only one actor” (BR 338).
Brideshead Revisited is a lush tapestry of drama; it is comedy and tragedy splendidly juxtaposed. Many readers who did not like this book did not recognize this juxtaposition. When observed with spirit and supernatural awareness, religion automatically blends the comic and the tragic. Any religious view will see absurdities, paradoxes, and simple humor adjacent to the most serious truths. When Julia rants in pain at the realization that she is “living in sin,” Charles says to her, “It’s like the setting of a comedy.” Julia is startled by Charles’s choice of the word “comedy.” He answers, “Drama. Tragedy. Farce. What you will. This is the reconciliation scene” (BR 291). How perfectly right he is; Julia is finally being reconciled with herself, her faith, her God. She has died in the same way that Paul Pennyfeather died in Decline and Fall, and like him, Julia is on the brink of resurrection.
After watching her father’s surrender to the love of Christ at his death, Julia knows that she cannot go on living in sin with Charles; instead, she must follow her father’s example. At first, Charles is hurt and angry; he says to his lover, “I hope your heart may break” (BR 341). In the story’s epilogue, Charles is a different man altogether, a Roman Catholic. No longer is he sad and grim, poor and thwarted. He prays before the tabernacle in the house that was his heaven and is at long last “cheerful” (BR 351). He has accomplished what the saints have all accomplished: happiness through suffering. This is the work of the Divine Purpose which drives Waugh’s novel. As God’s Providence led a poor agnostic to supernatural reality through his love for a Catholic family, so too it may be God’s Providence that has led countless readers to the same supernatural reality through their love for this profoundly Catholic story.