Reading Brideshead Revisited in MP

Dears,

I apologize for the delay in posting. Every few days here in MP I catch a new ticket stub or flower or city map in the nostalgic sieve that is my now-bulging notebook; I feel like my thoughts and readings in response to your lovely letters/posts have been similarly accumulating in a unattractive jumble. For one, true to your prophecy, Jules, via A Portrait of a Lady's Isabel Archer, I had indeed been struggling to read anything since my first quiet days in Montpellier--though various books have made some delightfully picturesque props for a many afternoons passed at local sidewalk cafes and parks! As beautiful and mind-soaking as Proust was in Paris, by week two in Montpellier, I found myself caught up instead in various currents: one pulling me away from Swann's Way-- and along the way, regular internet access-- another floating me an inscribed copy of Brideshead Revisited (1945) from a close (and perhaps now former) friend-- followed swiftly by a volume of selected poems by Auden courtesy of a cool Swedish girl in my French class.

Because I find the sentimental impulses borne of a pressing sense of both personal history and borrowed time (Auden goes back to Gothenburg not long after I leave the South of France) are quite sympathetic to one another, if not really the same at heart, I've been toggling back and forth between the two: savoring Waugh in long stretches on the train, at the beach, in patchy shade the local botanical garden, peppered judiciously by a poem or two of Auden's while waiting for friends to arrive or classes to begin. I finished Brideshead Revisited two nights ago; I wanted to weep and didn't.

From the first pages of Waugh's 1959 preface, one can't help but encounter the questions that Jerry and Jules both raised (albeit differently) about the relation between history and fiction, the things that happen and the stylized work of the telling, the big, bad passing world and its tiny players. In the fifteen years that followed the writing of Brideshead Revisited, Waugh sees the end of the war, the pristine preservation of British aristocracy-- or at least its relics, and duly repositions the novel as "a souvenir of the Second War rather than of the twenties or of the thirties, with which it ostensibly deals" (x). A wounded soldier's 1944 drive to "pile it on, rather, with passionate sincerity," amounts then to the wry novelist's 1959 "panegyric preached over an empty coffin." And to this reader in 2009, both accounts seem to vibrate steadily and powerfully throughout: the sincere, swelling notes of outcry against the changes wrought by time, by retreating youth, by circumstances seemingly beyond any one control balanced by the constant and weary rhythms of resignation to things being the way that things are, were, and might very well turn out to be...

So I'm getting slap-happy with the metaphors here. Besides just liking metaphors (and this glass of wine that's accompanying them), I think I have a hard time describing otherwise this weirdly old and raw sentiment of mourning and accepting loss and life. But I think maybe Waugh might do it better. Charles Ryder watches his best friend, the enchanting, odd, child-like Sebastian Flyte (who endears himself to Charles and the reader alike for the entire first half of the book) confirm his adult life of misery and alcoholism: the Flytes enjoy a last moment of (false) peace, a brief section break, and the words, "a blow, expected, repeated, falling on a bruise, with no smart or shock of surprise, only a dull and sickening pain and the doubt whether another like it could be borne-- that was how it felt, sitting opposite Sebastian at dinner that night..." (156). Extreme sensation bounded by the trained expectation of routine, an inflection of doubt regarding future sustainability hemmed in by the bleak assurance of the retrospective voice. Repeated in reckoning with his second love, Julia. Bleak, bleak... an over-tender heart feels battered like that first bruise, too weary to even muster what are usually easy tears. Thus ends the ostensible novel. But actually no. Thank God for epilogues?

Instead, Charles interrupts his own dour train of thought: "Something quite remote from anything the builders intended has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time; a small red flame-- a beaten copper lamp of deplorable design relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones..." (326). Distant, absent, revisited, absent, revisited, distant, revisited... Overlaying the two prominent lines of passionate resistance and resignation in Charles' history, a third-- some kind of slippage, unseen, unexpected, yet as enduring as the continuation and tragedy of human history: faith, or something like it.

I've been thinking-- or at least feeling-- a lot about the concurrence of these three tensions these days. Not the least of which as I join a number of wedding parties, turn another year older, make plans for the coming fall, say goodbye to a dear relationship, remember the uncanny number of recently lost loved ones, and do this all while vaguely or painfully grappling to get a handle myself on my sense of that third line-- past, present, or future.

Oh yeah. I was originally planning on writing about how fantastically brilliant some of these dialogues in this novel are-- I mean really. The novel largely comprises dialogue, and Waugh (or perhaps Waugh through the admittedly self-editing Charles) is quite (often hilariously) good at filling out characters and their relationships with the flick of a wrist and a few lines sparse exchange. Especially as I devote most of my energy this summer to speaking my idiotic French with new friends and acquaintances, questions of what one might perceive in another through conversational exchange have definitely been on my mind... But anyway, I have to go back to struggling through French in the morning, so I think it might be best to stop here for now.

I hope you all are living and reading well!

Much love,
Irene