Brideshead revisited

In the six months between December 1943 and June 1944 the novel Brideshead Revisited was written in England. In those same months I existed in utero on the other side of the Atlantic in Canada. When Evelyn Waugh, the author of this novel, wrote his preface to the revised edition in 1959, and Fr. Ronald Knox published his biography of Waugh in that same year---I was 15 and had just joined the Baha’i Faith. I have remained a Baha’i all my life.

Waugh converted to Roman Catholicism in his late 20s and remained a Catholic although, as Martin Stannard the author of a two-volume biography of Waugh noted, “he struggled against the dryness of his soul”1 in the end, a common enough experience for believers of all Faiths and non-believers of all philosophies alike. Stannard saw Waugh as “the greatest novelist of his generation.”2-Ron Price with thanks to 1Martin Stannard, "Evelyn Arthur St John Waugh (1903–66),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, 2007; and 2Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years 1903-1939, and Evelyn Waugh: The Later Years 1939-1966, 1987 and 1992, resp., W.W. Norton & Co., NY., V.2, p.492.

Without Christianity you saw
civilization doomed or, as you
put it in your conversion: “it is
like stepping out of a Looking-
Glass world, where everything
Is an absurd caricature, into the
real world God made…..and then
begins the delicious process of….
exploring it limitlessly.”1….This is
perhaps the most succinct and
sufficient description of the process
of conversion ever written for man.

Waugh's own conversion from the "absurd
caricature" of ultra-modernity to the "real
world" of Catholic orthodoxy was greeted
with astonishment by the literary world &
caused a sensation in the media. Do those
who have watched Brideshead in these last
30 years know any of this?....I did not until
today &, wanting to know something about
how this television series came into existence
in these last thirty years: ‘81-’11…..I learned
a thing or two from a little research/reading.

1“Today we can see it on all sides as the active negation of all that Western culture has stood for. Civilization - and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organization of Europe - has not in itself the power of survival. It came into being through Christianity and, without, it has no significance or power to command allegiance. The loss of faith in Christianity and the consequential lack of confidence in moral and social standards have become embodied in the ideal of a materialistic, mechanized state. It is no longer possible to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it rests."

Waugh concluded this press statement on his conversion by saying that he saw Catholicism as the "most complete and vital form" of Christianity. The article from which the above is taken was written by Joseph Pearce and it appeared in Lay Witness a publication of Catholic United for the Faith, Inc., an international lay apostolate founded in 1968.

Ron Price
14 July 2011

I apologize for cavilling about something that obviously means a lot to you, but this is the "Personal Poetry" forum and people peruse these posts in search of a variety of what might be considered poetry. We do have other forums where this would fit more appropriately.

This was very interesting and informative... but is it a poem? I think it would be well received in the "general literature" forum.

Belated Thanks For Your Responses, everyadventure and PrinceMyshkin. You both make good points, arguable ones, but fair. I won't get into a lance and parry defence of my posting. I don't get to this site very often, certainly not as often as I'd like. Perhaps others will have other views on my post.

The clash of differing opinions is often the source of the spark of truth. As long as the clash has a degree of civility I am always happy to entertain the thoughts. I am certainly happy to entertain your courteous and just responses---for which, as I say above, I thank you.-Ron Price, Tasmania:coolgleamA:

I read "Brideshead" recently, belatedly, was struck by the richness of Waugh's language but equally by the failure to create credible characters. Sebastian is surely one of the lynch-pins of the novel and, top me, utterly undeserving of the reverence shown him. He is described as "beautiful," "holy," but in terms of demonstrated behaviour is a petulant, self-destructive drunk.

Whatever sympathy I might have felt for "Ryder" went down the toilet when he twice referred to a minor character as a "Jew boy." At which point all his vaunted spiritual aristocracy was exposed as upper-English class elitism.

In general I think Ryder displays a kind of spiritual vulgarity and as for the divine intervention in human affairs, one of these - if not the pre-eminent - manifestations is when the dying Lord Marchmain, having rejected the attendance of the priest, subsequently raises a feeble hand and makes the sign of thr cross. Divine intervention, or an ullistration of the Jesuit saying "Give me a child until he is seven years old and and I will give you the man"?

If Evelyn Waugh is right when he says that "nobody wants to read other people's reflections on life and religion, but the routines of their day, properly recorded are always interesting," then my books have little hope to ever see the light of day. Perhaps, following Waugh or a writer like Thomas Mann, I should really make my diary with all its confessionalism the focus of this and future writing. As my work has come to see the light of day at sites like the Baha'i Academics Resource Library, bahai-library.org website(and several 1000 other sites) in August 2003 and the website: bahaindex.com in November 2003 and the Baha’i World Centre Library, among several other sites like lulu.com and eBookMall where hard cover and electronic copies can be purchased, I tend to think that there is little hope that it will find a wide appeal, a high degree of popularity. Such is life! At the very least writing this work has offered, like knitting, a therapeutic relaxation for me, but for others well....who knows?
--------------------------
CHAOS AND THE VOID

The desperation to believe

In the final chapter of his magisterial biography of Oscar Wilde, Richard Ellmann(1918-1987), American literary critic, recounts the last moments of Wilde’s life, and his being received into the Church. The story of T.S. Eliot’s(1888-1965) unexpected conversion to Anglicanism is a long and well-documented one. Eliot’s early poetry, certainly up to The Waste Land, betrayed an allegiance to art, not religion. But with the poems Journey of the Magi, Salutation, and the sequence Ash-Wednesday, it was clear that the direction of Eliot’s poetry was changing. Peter Ackroyd(1949- ), the English biographer, novelist and critic, writes that Eliot, like so many modernists, was “aware of what he called the void in all human affairs: the disorder, meaninglessness and futility which he found in his own experience. Human affairs were, at their heart, inexplicable intellectually; his scepticism taught him that they could only be understood or endured by means of a larger faith.” –Nebula, Vol. 2, No. 3, September 2005.

Evelyn Waugh’s(1903-1966) conversion from what he called the “absurd caricature” of modernity to the “real world” of Catholicism was, Joseph Pearce(1961- ), Professor of Literature at Ave Maria University, writes, “greeted with astonishment by the literary world. It caused a sensation in the media. Given the controversy surrounding his decision, Waugh succinctly explained the reasons for his conversion in his essay, “Converted to Rome: Why It Has Happened to Me.” The modern world faced a choice between Christianity and Chaos.

Reminiscent of the French poet and essayist Charles Baudelaire’s(1821-1867) formulation of modernity, for Waugh one had to choose between the eternal and the immutable or the transient, fleeting, and contingent. Like Eliot, Auden, and Wilde, Waugh chose the eternal and the immutable found in Christianity. In the final passages of Brideshead Revisited(1945), a novel of redemption, we see what can be read as the narrator’s second conversion; and at the same time, we see Waugh subtly renouncing the idea that art will lead us to paradise.

In his youth the Anglo-American poet, W.H. Auden(1907-1973), was interested in Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxism, interests that waned with age. According to a web page sponsored by The Academy of American Poets, while Auden never entirely abandoned these early interests, Christianity and especially Protestant theology had become a primary preoccupation by the 1940s. The best book length study of literary figures who converted to or were influenced by Christianity is by Joseph Pearce, Literary Converts: Spiritual Inspiration in an Age of Unbelief, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1999.

Can some fortuitous conjunction
of circumstances make it possible
to bend the conditions of human
life into conformity with a set of
prevailing human desires? Such
hopes are merely illusory, & they
entirely miss the nature & meaning
of the great turning point we have
passed through during what is this
climacteric of history since, say, the
1840s, 1850s, the entire 20th century,
and into this third millennium. Great,
how very great…is the magnitude of
the ruin, the catalogue of horrors-----
unknown in the darkest of past ages.1

1 The Universal House of Justice, Century of Light, Foreword, and p.1, Baha’i World Centre, Haifa, Israel, 2001.

Ron Price
31 May 2012