Why does Brideshead Revisited have such a strong hold on our imagination? Evelyn Waugh’s beautiful dialogue plays its part, argues Christopher Hitchens, but the chief source of the novel’s power is its summoning of innocence lost on the fields of Flanders. Never mind that the new film version is a travesty: go back to the book


As I drove away from a California screening of the new film version of Brideshead Revisited, I was amused to overhear the comments of my companions from the back seat. “I thought the one who played Jeremy Irons was a bit thin …” “I liked the Anthony Andrews character better … ” It is more than a quarter of a century since the late William F Buckley introduced the Granada TV series to the American viewers of the Public Broadcasting System, and the residual effect is one of what Harold Isaacs once called “scratches on the mind”: a very durable if sometimes vague cultural impression. (My son was born in 1984 and as I was carrying a teddy bear home, and happening that day to be wearing a white linen suit, I was astonished by the number of passers-by in Washington DC who shouted “Hi Sebastian!” at me as I tooled along.)


The directors Charles Sturridge and Michael Lindsay-Hogg achieved their 1981 success by gorgeous photography, of course, and also by generally inspired casting. The locations, plainly, required little or no embellishment. And the music was suitably … well, evocative. But most of all, they were faithful to Evelyn Waugh’s beautiful dialogue and cadence, both in set-piece scenes and in sequences of languorous voice-over in Oxford and Venice and - perhaps decisively - in the opening passage, where the melancholic Captain Charles Ryder hears the almost healing word “Brideshead” spoken again: “a name that was so familiar to me, a conjuror’s name of such magic power, that, at its ancient sound, the phantoms of those haunted late years began to take flight”.


Graham Greene once wrote that, in his own memory, that same inaugural passage had seemed very long and elaborate, and that he was surprised on rereading it to find how brief it was. He intended this as a compliment. I, too, find that Brideshead is oddly capacious and elastic, disclosing new depths and perspectives with each reading. Why does this novel have such a tenacious hold on the imagination, even of people who have never been to England or never visited a country house?


Well, to answer that first and easiest question, it is entirely possible to feel nostalgia for homelands, and for periods, which one has never experienced oneself. This applies to imagined times and places as well as to real ones: Waugh uses the phrase “secret garden” and also - alluding to the Oxford of Lewis Carroll - to an “enclosed and enchanted garden” reachable by a “low door in the wall”. The yearning for a lost or different upbringing is fairly universal, and one of Brideshead’s keys is precisely the one that unlocks the gate to it:


Now, that summer term with Sebastian, it seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence.


This sentence, incidentally, puts the quietus on the ridiculous word “platonic” that for some peculiar reason still crops up in discussion of the story. Waugh’s unambiguous mention of “the catalogue of grave sins” also reminds us of his stated purpose in writing the book, which was “nothing less than an attempt to trace the workings of the divine purpose in a pagan world”. And this is the story’s second source of fascination: the struggle between the sacred and the profane. Critics have differed sharply here. Monsignor Ronald Knox was so much affected by Julia’s monologue on sin that he proposed to quote it to the clergy of Westminster Cathedral on their “Day of Recollection”, while George Orwell, who was reviewing Brideshead on his own deathbed, thought that the passing of Lord Marchmain and other kitschy scenes demonstrated the impossibility of being simultaneously grown-up and a Roman Catholic. It can’t be said that Waugh is merely propagandistically or proselytisingly Catholic in the novel: Sebastian is a doomed and sometimes vicious alcoholic, his elder brother, the devout Bridey, is an honest but ineffectual crank, his little sister Cordelia a sweet little frump who goes off to work for General Franco, and their mother a sort of ultra-glamorous witch, while all the priests are represented as either silly or simple. And as for Julia: the whore/Madonna complex might have been invented for her. Nonetheless, it can’t be doubted that Waugh was trying to do honour to English Catholicism and, as he later came to realise, was inadvertently engaged in commemorating the passing of its traditionalist wing. (He died as the full horror of the Second Vatican Council, with its abolition of the Latin or “Tridentine” mass, was becoming fully apparent to him. The recent rise of Josef Ratzinger might have struck him as another of the operations of divine grace.)


Fatally perhaps for his own cause, he thus identified the esoteric “elitism” of his religion with the “snobbery” that attached to the Marchmain lineage and its lovely country home. (Sebastian Flyte describes the English Catholics as a series of “cliques”, while Lord Marchmain freely allows that he himself is a caricature of “all that the socialists would have me be”.) At least Waugh was unapologetic about this, saying that “the novelist deals with the experiences which excite his imagination”, and adding that “class consciousness, particularly in England, has been so much inflamed nowadays that to mention a nobleman is like mentioning a prostitute 60 years ago. The new prudes say: ‘No doubt such people do exist but we would rather not hear about them.’ I reserve the right to deal with the kind of people I know best.” This to me appears more than reasonable: it would be absurd and vulgar to indict Marcel Proust or Anthony Powell or PG Wodehouse for their emphasis on the upper crust. The test is not characters so much as characterisation. One of Waugh’s best minor figures is anything but aristocratic: the hapless clerk Hooper could have been invented by Charles Dickens or Arnold Bennett in a spare moment. Ryder plays a word-game with his name, changing the fashionable word “Youth” in modern discourse to the word “Hooper” and thus coming up with “Hooper Rallies”, “Hooper Hostels” and suchlike. Fair enough. But then try this, from Charles’s first lunch with Sebastian:


He was magically beautiful, with that epicene quality which in extreme youth sings aloud for love and withers at the first cold wind.


Or this, during the stolen summer holiday that leaves the naughty boys with Brideshead Castle all to themselves:


The languor of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth - all save this - come and go with us through life …


In this rather sickly passage the word is even capitalised, but I doubt that Waugh wanted us, while the golden lads were splashing and romping, to substitute the word “Hooper” for it. So, if you must seek a conviction for “elitism”, look to the language and not to the sociology.


Look to the language, also, if you want to guess at meanings that may be only semi-conscious in the writer’s own mind: when Waugh tells us that “the sweet scent of the tobacco merged with the sweet summer scents around us and the fumes of the sweet, golden wine seemed to lift us a finger’s breadth above the turf”, does he intend the slightly saccharine repetition or is he unaware that he is being a little too … rich?


It comes as a shock to discover that Waugh nearly called Charles Ryder by the surname of Fenwick, and almost gave Cordelia the first name Bridget. (Such is the power of a great novel to make us feel that we own it almost as private property, as it were, and must resent any intrusion on our intimacy with it.) But evidently he gave some care and reflection to nomenclature. In one of his literary essays on sacred subjects, Father Robert Barron proposes that because “St Paul told the Corinthians that Christ is the Head of His Body the Church and, shifting the metaphor, that Jesus is the Bridegroom and the Church the Bride”, it follows that Waugh fuses these two Pauline images of Head and Bride to create the gracious mansion that lies at the core of the story. This may be plausible (the two images are widely separated in the Bible) but I feel on surer ground in proposing my profane counterpart to Barron’s sacred one. In the very name of Sebastian Flyte there is either a very great ingenuity or a very strong subliminal element. Recall the way in which Anthony Blanche says to him, with obvious flirtatiousness: “My dear, I should like to stick you full of barbed arrows like a p-p-pin-cushion”. Here the reference to the martyrdom of St Sebastian is obvious enough, and then it might occur to you - as it only did to me after several rereadings - that the word “flight” also happens to be the collective noun for a shower of arrows.


Pressing home with this analogy, one hits upon what may be the chief source of Brideshead’s potency. Even if only in distant and muffled tones, with the actual tragic action taking place off-stage

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