The War and Brideshead Revisited: “I Do Not Want Any More Experiences”
[…]
Wine is the symbol and sacrament of the world’s good things, of which Rex Mottram is ignorant and of which Ryder is unfairly deprived by the war. Even Waugh later had reservations about Brides-bead’s epicurean lust, writing to Graham Greene, for example, in 1950: “Talking of re-reading, I re-read Brideshead and was appalled. I can find many excuses—that it was the product Consule Bracken of spam, Nissen huts, black-out—but it wont do for peacetime.” And later he told an interviewer:
It is very much a child of its time. Had it not been written when it was, at a very bad time in the war when there was nothing to eat, it would have been a different book. The fact that it is rich in evocative description—in gluttonous writing—is a direct result of the privations and austerity of the times.
The diaries give a slightly less harrowing impression of Waugh’s privations; certainly as he wrote Bridesbead he was seldom without wine, once having some of his private stock of claret fetched from Piers Court; noting later, during Lent, that he “drank a great deal of good wine which is getting scarcer daily but still procurable by those who take the trouble”; treating his old Oxford friends John Sutro and Harold Acton to “a fine dinner—gulls’ eggs, consomme, partridge, haddock on toast, Perrier Jouet ‘28, nearly a bottle a head, liqueur brandy, Partaga cigars—an unusual feast for these times”; another time drinking “champagne at