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Life & Letters

Wednesday, 15th October 2008

Allan Massies dips into Brideshead Revisited

Having just read something about the new film of Brideshead Revisited, I picked up the novel, opened it at random, and then, some two hours later, a good part of my working evening was gone. I suppose it is now Waugh’s most popular novel — his Pride and Prejudice as it were — but, when first published, ‘it lost me’, he wrote in the introduction to the revised 1960 edition, ‘such esteem as I once enjoyed among my contemporaries and’ — perhaps worse? — ‘led me into an unfamiliar world of fan-mail and press photographers’.

His confidence had been high when at work on the novel. He called it his ‘magnum opus’ and, if this was partly in jest or self-mockery, it nevertheless seems clear that he believed it to be the best book he had yet written. The later revision, which toned down some of the more lush passages and rhetorical flourishes, testifies to the uncertainty its reception had provoked. I suspect however that many who have read the novel more than once couldn’t say with much assurance which version they had read on each occasion.

No doubt the new film will again lead to articles in which the presumed originals of Waugh’s characters are identified. There may be fewer now than when the Granada version was shown on television, if only because the passage of time means that the originals are themselves mostly forgotten, while the characters on whom they are supposedly based retain their vitality. Who, apart from scholars of political history, now knows anything about Brendan Bracken (model, in part anyway, for Rex Mottram)? Who cares which of Waugh’s Oxford friends gave rise to Sebastian Flyte, Anthony Blanche and the Wykehamist Collins, never (I think) granted a Christian name? They are all dead, while the novel, gloriously, lives.

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E. Babcock

October 16th, 2008 10:09pm

I'd say Brideshead is one of those "good, bad books" you hear about. I reread it not long ago, and though it's tone is embarassing, there are scenes and characters who are unforgettable---for instance the spectacle of Sebastian's downfall,j or his mother's unfortunate handling of her son's rebellion. The best Waugh was written before he fled to Catholicism in horror at the emptiness of life as portrayed in Vile Bodies and A Handful of Dust.

Michael Buhagiar

October 20th, 2008 4:59am

Brideshead Revisited is in the Journey of the Hero genre, along with Ulysses, The Magic Mountain, Star Wars, Titanic, The Lion King &c &c &c, hence its power. One could develop this theme at length e.g. Sebastian is the Hero, Oxford the Ordinary World, Brideshead the Special World &c. Questions of class are irrelevant - the upper class can foster heroes too. The stage version was on in Sydney recently - its power remains undiminished. A truly great novel.

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