The excellent 1981 adaptation of Brideshead Revisited
was re-run on my local TV recently. Watching it again, I remembered
how, at the time of the original screening, the letters columns of
a number of publications were filled with argument as to whether
Charles and Sebastian had had a homosexual relationship.
It was a pity this argument engaged so many people’s attention
apparently to the extent of excluding consideration of some of the
important themes the book and the film dealt with. Perhaps it is
time to re-consider at least some of the other things it is
actually about.
From the religious point of view, the themes it dealt with
included one that few writers in modern times have tackled — the
fact that Salvation is offered to all and by Divine Grace the rich
may be saved as well as the poor. The Marchmains, an ancient
Catholic family, have inherited enormous wealth, the great estates
and palatial building of Brideshead (played in the series — it can
be counted a character — by Castle Howard) and sonorous titles,
while Charles Ryder, the narrator, who attaches himself to the
family, first as Sebastian’s friend and later as Julia’s lover,
seems to be at least upper middle-class. His father has a large
house in London and makes him an allowance.
However, apart from the fact that they do not have the spiritual
blessing of poverty, the characters tend to be a convincing and
realistic mixture of good and bad. They have been dealt some bad
cards: apart from the spiritual dangers of inherited wealth and
luxury, Sebastian is a weak-willed, rather stupid alcoholic,
without dignity or courage. His elder brother Brideshead is
insensitive to the point of grotesquerie, his sister Julia is
infatuated by the politician Rex Mottram’s power, their mother is
spiritually devouring, their father, Lord Marchmain, is an
enigmatic, spiritually bleak and withered old man, a lapsed
Catholic, spending most of his time in a pointless social round in
Venice. The young sister Cordelia, who grows into a plain, pious
spinster, seems the only unreservedly good and fulfilled person
among them. Cara, Lord Marchmain’s mistress, comes across as kind
and wise, and genuinely loves Lord Marchmain, but is also living in
a form of high-class prostitution. Charles Ryder himself is, as a
painter, a sort of fashionable fraud. He behaves vindictively
toward his wife, though she had been at least supportive of his
career, and, it appears, abandons his children.
Most of them appear to be spiritually in a bad way. Yet by and
large, through what the author Evelyn Waugh called Divine Grace,
they come to some sort of terms with life, and with God. Even
Sebastian, who ends up an assistant porter in a monastery in North
Africa, unfit for either the monastic order or the world, finds a
way of living. Cordelia, when she sees him and how he has ended up,
says she believes such people are very near and dear to God. The
others, one way or another, become reconciled to their situations.
They also become morally and spiritually aware — as befits beings
who have been promised everlasting life.
Even Charles Ryder finds purpose and some earthly as well as
spiritual happiness at last, though he has lost his family and also
lost Julia for whom he left them, and squandered his talent. When
we last see Ryder he is an infantry Captain in World War II, and a
Catholic convert, though it is Julia’s return to Catholicism that
has made it impossible for them to marry (and cost him the palace
and fortune of Brideshead as well).
He has returned with the Army to Brideshead where he has spent
so much of his life, including an idyllic, Arcadian part of his
youth, and which it looked at one time as if he would, with Julia,
inherit, to find it occupied by soldiers, battered and made
squalid, its beautiful rooms bordered up, its ornate statues
chipped and broken. His youth is gone beyond recall. He will soon
be going into battle with the allied invasion of Europe. He has
become disillusioned with the Army. But the old Chapel, long
closed, has been re-opened by Julia, and, as the billeting officer
he is relieving tells him, a surprising number of the soldiers use
it. As he meditates on this, he finds an unexpected, and, we fell,
deep and lasting happiness. He had been moved to think, surveying
the dilapidated palace and the squalor that had replaced its former
splendor: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” But with his final
reflection comes the knowledge that it is not so. The light in the
chapel has been re-lit.
Rick Warren wrote recently in A Purpose-Driven
Life:
Many Christians misinterpret Jesus’ promise of the
“abundant life” to mean perfect health, a comfortable lifestyle,
constant happiness, full realization of your dreams, and instant
relief from problems through faith and prayer. In a word, they
expect the Christian life to be easy. They expect heaven on earth.
This self-absorbed perspective treats God as a genie who simply
exists to serve you in your selfish pursuit of personal
fulfillment. But God is not your servant, and if you fall for the
idea that life is supposed to be easy, either you will become
severely disillusioned or you will live in denial of reality.
One message of
Brideshead Revisited is that the rules
Christianity imposes on a believer can be hard: they do not
guarantee earthly happiness or the satisfaction of earthly desires
(C. S. Lewis said that trying to lead the Christian life by the
rules can “be more like the dentist’s drill or the front line” than
like a bed of roses). But they show one how to get through life and
in the long run offer something a great deal better.
Brideshead
Revisited is a work with a serious theological message, and,
beyond all the complex sexual linkages and comedy about teddy bears
and so forth it deserves to be treated as such.
