That, as Waugh wrote elsewhere, ‘German bombs have made but a negligible addition to the sum of our own destructiveness is a familiar refrain in his later work.’As in Woolf s Between the Acts, and counter to the official strain of anti-conservative and socially reformist rhetoric of the wartime administration, the war here becomes a fight for the preservation of a sanitised past.
Of course, Waugh identified rural England with the aristocracy, with the country estate and its privileged way of life, in a way that Woolf struggled to avoid. Infamously, the problem with Brideshead Revisited is that the narrator’s veneration of the feudal order is to be taken at face value; Waugh said as much when he retrospectively called the novel a ‘panegyric’ over the aristocracy’s ‘empty coffin’. Anticipating a debate that would become very familiar in the years after the war - that more will mean worse - Viscount Esher wrote an article for Horizon in 1942 that prefigured the novel’s elegiac mood:
The first effect of a transference of wealth is a levelling down, and not as the optimists hoped, a levelling up. If there is to be only one class on the railways, it is the first-class that disappears, and everybody goes third. As the minimum standard of life for the poor has been raised by the social services, the burden of taxation from which to create those services has lowered the standard of life for the rich. Under this process the ultimate and perfect expression of English aristocratic culture, the country-house life, has declined, and must disappear.
It would be a stretch to suggest that, since Waugh had likely read this article (as a reader of and regular correspondent to Horizon) Viscount Esher’s railway analog}’ is being rendered quite literally when the narrator and Lord Sebastian Flyte travel third-class to Venice on the money intended for Sebastian’s first-class journey. The principle is certainly the same one, even if, in an almost predictable Second World War irony, it is Viscount Esher, the aristocrat, who finally concedes that the ‘levelling down is going to be worthwhile - not an argument Waugh was ever likely to advance.
That said, Brideshead Revisited makes it hard to ignore the self-hating qualities of Waugh’s nostalgia, coded as a ruinous straightness of sexual and artistic ambition on the narrator’s part. Not only does the middle-class protagonist contribute to the wrecking of the dynastic and aristocratic dream when he tries to get inside it by marrying Sebastian’s sister, but he is simultaneously there as an artist cashing in on the loss by memorialising it. What emerge from this are the inconsistent politics of the self-deluded and the mediocre art of the conservative in retreat from modernity:
The financial slump of the period, which left many painters without employment, served to enhance my success, which was, indeed, itself a symptom of the decline. When the water-holes were dry people sought to drink at the mirage. After my first exhibition I was called to all parts of the country to make portraits of houses that were soon to be deserted or debased; indeed, my arrival seemed often to be only a few paces ahead of the auctioneers, a presage of doom. I published three splendid folios - Ryder s Country Seats, Ryder’s English Homes, and Ryder’s Village and Provincial Architecture, which each sold its thousand copies at five guineas apiece.
So the would-be modernist artist ends up producing coffee-table books that might be ungenerously described as the visual equivalent of Waugh’s own novel, a lucrative and parasitic art predicated on the snobberies of not just the house owners (whose loss was presumably real enough in human terms), but those of a voyeuristic public. In a misfiring metaphor of stunningly appropriate bathos, Ryder likens his first visit to Brideshead Castle to ‘a glimpse only, such as might be had from the top of an omnibus into a lighted ballroom*, and the aristocratic Sebastian Flyte has no compunction about reminding Charles of his tourist status, and responds to his friend’s desire to see more of the glories of Brideshead Castle with the put-down that *On Queen Alexandra’s Day it’s all open for a shilling’ (BR, 38).
Their common friend James Lees-Milne tells an anecdote in his memoir of Henry Green which points unflatteringly to the Brideshead demographic - himself an architectural conservator and an arch-snob, Lees-Milne was well placed to recognise social pretensions when he saw them:
I saw Caught in Heywood Hill’s bookshop where Nancy Mitford was then working. She was amazed that I did not realize Henry Green was really Henry Yorke (indeed, it was a difficult thing to grasp). At a luncheon party Nancy remarked in her languid Mitford voice that if only Henry had spelt the title Court and written about royalty and the aristocracy instead of firemen the novel would, in those days of austerity when everyone pounced upon books recalling glamour and glitter, have sold like hot cakes.
The modernist survivor Anthony Blanche gets to point out what an artistically worthless activity this aspirational fluff really is: ‘the shade of the cedar tree, the cucumber sandwich, the silver cream-jug, the English girl dressed in whatever English girls do wear for tennis … your art, my dear - is a dean’s daughter in flowered muslin (BR, 272). Ryder’s (and Waugh’s) efforts at tragic grandeur are rendered ridiculous, literally parochial, a middlebrow commercialism in the style of their contemporary John Betjeman, rather than the high tragedy to which the book’s refrain of ‘quomodo sedet sola civitas’ aspires (BRt220, 237, 351). ‘I cannot understand this keen zest to be well-bred’, Blanche tells Ryder, ‘English snobbery is more macabre to me even than English morals’ (BR, 271). If there’s anything to redeem this book from what the heritage industry turned it into, and even what Waugh surely intended it to be, it’s the layer of self-criticism provided by this blast from the cosmopolitan modernist past: ‘part Gallic, part Yankee, part, perhaps, Jew; wholly exotic’. As if the novel were rebelling against itself, this character turns up periodically in both of Waugh’s wartime novels to point out that class-bound and chauvinistic insularity isn’t going to be enough.