Guestblog: Stearns on Brideshead as Depressing

Perhaps Brideshead is depressing in some sense, but could we ever forgive Waugh if he wrote a cheery ending? Imagine Charles carrying Julia off to live happily ever after at Brideshead Castle. That would be truly chilling. That would be worse than depressing; it would turn your stomach.

The opening line of an essay I wrote for a tutorial when I studied in England reads: ‘If one reads just the skeleton of events in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, the novel is a record of dissatisfaction, loss, and emptiness.’ And this is true, I suppose, but four years later I realize that this sentence needs one more caveat, something like this: ‘and if one is not taking into consideration the state and health of the soul.’

I think my favorite quotation from the text is relevant here:

perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving–stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.

So many of the characters are ‘straining though and beyond the other,’ which is part of what gives Brideshead its melancholy and hollow edge. But what’s so redeeming is that everyone we care about ultimately finds what he or she strained through the others for: Sebastian finds his monastery, Lord Marchmain makes his sign of the cross, Julia lands in Palestine with God’s goodness (to which she has set up no rival good), Charles prays his ‘ancient, newly-learned form of words.’

And even Brideshead Castle itself—Charles thinks ‘Quomodo sedet sola civitas’ and then corrects himself. Yes, Hooper and the war have devastated so much of Brideshead, but the beaten copper lamp is relit because of the havoc of war and the refugee priest—the ‘blitzed R.C. padre.’ And so the twitch upon the thread extends to all the corners of the story.

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