BRIDESHEAD REVISITED AND THE PERILS OF CREAMY ENGLISH CHARM

We’ve all been on the receiving end of the sweet oppression of charm but is it, as described in Brideshead Revisited, a ‘killer’?

Evelyn Waugh claimed that his novel Brideshead Revisited was intended to show ‘the operation of divine grace in the affairs of a particular group of people’ but it can also be read as a dissection and repudiation of that most dangerously beguiling of English attributes: charm. 

The book was a long established classic by the time the TV series adaptation came out in 1981. This was not long after the straightened 70’s-- that time of three day weeks, blackouts, rampant inflation and ‘winters of discontent’ -- and it felt like a breath of fresh air and part of the zeitgeist of upward mobility and the nation’s yearning for a little luxury and elegance. The series had wonderful production values, career defining performances and a languorous, magisterial pace that perfectly captured the book’s loving evocation of an era.

Its charms even reached the playgrounds of Yorkshire mining town schools where the show was a great favourite of many of the boys in my year who could quote verbatim large stretches of dialogue.

Part of the attraction might have lain in the way the younger characters’ seemed to be having so much fun (at least in the early episodes) and, though ostensibly at university, appeared to do little or no actual work—instead dining on Lobster Thermidor and drinking fine champagne while reciting TS Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’ from elegant balconies. Another part of the attraction might have been that this was a powerful rite de passage story and we were all in the grip of rite de passages of our own.

The story describes the long-running and ultimately tragic relationship Charles Ryder has with the aristocratic Flyte family.

Charles is the lonely, only child of a stiff Edwardian family and desperately needy for love, excitement and ‘that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden.”

That door is opened by Sebastian, the wayward scion of the Flyte family, who quickly becomes Charles’s aesthetic instructor, showing him some of the most beautiful sights the world has to offer, from the canals of Venice, to the Flyte family’s spectacular country estate, to the 14 different varieties of rare Ivy only to be found in the Oxford botanical gardens.

Charles is provided with both an education in aesthetics and the inspiration to pursue a career in art that eventually leads to him becoming a much feted painter of British stately homes.

But Charles artistic sensibilities eventually become numbed by elegant houses and an ambitious wife who cynically monetizes his career. Seeking to revive his palette he embarks on a grand working tour of the tropics of South America. This seems to succeed and when the resulting paintings are exhibited in London the critics find them an exciting departure from his previous work.

The only person who begs to differ is Charles’s outrageously camp friend from his Oxford days, Anthony Blanche, who describes the exhibition as ‘a very naughty and successful practical joke—like Sebastian dressing up in false whiskers. Charm again, my dear—simple, creamy English charm’. Later they have a drink in a ‘pansy bar’ and Anthony goes further, saying: 

‘Charm is the great British blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you’.

Of course Charles responds – in the TV show at least-- with charm.

Years previously Anthony had taken Charles out to dinner to expressly warn him about charm and the Flyte family— claiming they would blight his creativity and critical faculties and we are first hand witnesses to this prophecy playing out.

Soon after the exhibition Charles divorces his wife and falls in with Sebastian’s sister Julia. The two intend to marry-- meaning Charles will come into possession of the family seat he admires so much-- until Julia decides to devote herself to her Catholic faith and throws him over.

Charles is left forlorn, ennui-stricken and middle-aged – a Captain in the British Army with only a cruel war in Europe to look forward to. The book is framed by his return to Brideshead where his unit is briefly stationed, and where he narrates the story of how the Flyte’s— and their charm— undid him.

But what exactly is wrong with charm? We all like to be charmed, don’t we? We would all like to be thought of as capable of charm. So what was Waugh getting at?

If the novel is about the perils of charm then we must start with the book itself which is enormously seductive: from the portrait of Sebastian’s profligate, indulgent upper-class Oxford milieu to Lord Flyte’s vast Venetian palazzo one is inexorably drawn in.

The book shows eras ending: aristocracy giving way to a more level society, the classical giving way to modernism and abstraction, a Gilded Age drifting into fascism and war. Here the past is a foreign place where they do things differently and invariably better.

But by the novels end the feeling one is left with is yearning: yearning for one’s youth, yearning for bygone eras, yearning for lost love, and yearning for that which can never be recaptured. Sebastian, especially, is trapped in the past but all the characters—apart from Anthony Blanche who is the modernistic foil to all this-- are in thrall to it.

And when we are yearning for the past we are in denial of the present; in one way or another it is betrayed or demoted. And how can anything of genuine vitality be created in an environment like that?  

So I think this is the crux of the novel: the charm of the past can beguile us into denying the present. And if this is true, then charm can be used as a tool—a buffer— to prevent us connecting with reality; thus Sebastian constantly puts charm in between himself and any real intimacy and love in his life. He uses it as a way to protect himself from reality and in this way it is intertwined with his religious sensibility—also his alcoholism. All can be great buffers between oneself and the outside world.

I’ve been on the receiving end of ‘creamy English charm’ many times and it is almost impossible to resist. And afterwards one is often left, like Charles, feeling forlorn, used, tainted and conned.

I do think it is a tool that can be used in an extremely self-seeking and manipulative way (we only have to look at our current Prime Minister to see that) but it’s worth remembering that the person using it— and their lack of genuine love, intimacy and personal connection— might be the real victim.