I am not the only person stolen from in literary and entertainment circles. I am told that I am in good company.
Brideshead Revisited, Miramax/BBC films (2008), Directed by Julian Jarrold; written by Andrew Davies and Jeremy Brock, based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh; director of photography (Bravo!), Jess Hall; with Mathew Goode (Charles Ryder); Ben Whishaw (Sebastian Flyte); Haley Atwell (Julia Flyte); Emma Thompson (Lady Marchmain); Michael Gambon (Lord Marchmain); Ed Stoppard (Bridey Flyte); Felicity Jones (Cordelia Flyte); Greta Scacchi (Cara); James Bradshaw (Mr. Samgrass) and Jonathan Cake (Rex Mortram).
An Oscar nomination for Emma Thompson is richly deserved. I wonder whether Ed Stoppard is related to Tom Stoppard? Tom Stoppard is overdue for a Nobel prize, or so he claims.
Et in Arcadia Ego.
Reviews of this film have been tepid and mostly non-comprehending. This movie is not "tedious, confused and banal." (A.O. Scott)
The sensibility captured in the literary masterpiece that inspires the movie is seen on-screen along with the ethos of the world recalled in its pages that is now very distant from all of us.
Estrangement from Waugh's world and values may even be true of the finest artists in the land that gave birth to this controversial novelist.
We have all become "Hooper" or, if we are "successful," perhaps, we are "Rex Mortram."
Waugh would not be surprised. He predicted such a "catastrophe" in this very work. Mr. Hooper may well become the next Prime Minister in the UK. Horrors.
Maybe the "decline and fall" of Waugh's world is for the best. It may be that I am not the sort of person to whom Waugh would have spoken in a social situation. But then neither are the people reviewing this film for the New Yorker magazine or The New York Times nor the current British Prime Minister come to think of it. Nevertheless, it should sadden all of us that something so beautiful and fragile has gone out of existence.
What is that fragile and beautiful thing that has vanished?
Waugh would say: "Christendom."
An entire civilization was dying before Waugh's eyes as he was writing this novel in the late thirties and early forties. It seemed that Britain had lost the war. The Holocaust was consuming the lives of millions of Jews and others. This "death" of a culture is symbolized by the snuffing out of a candle at the very end of the film (it should be at the beginning of the movie).
The image of arriving and lingering darkness should open and close this film as death introduces and draws a curtain on our erotic narratives in life.
Arnold Toynbee suggested that the two World Wars of the twentieth century are really one prolonged military struggle resulting in European Civilization's leisurely suicide.
The almost unbearable sadness and aching sense of loss found in the story is nearly abandoned in a movie that seems to forget what it is really about. One scene in particular is an almost successful attempt by the director to destroy his own movie. This story is not about social climbing or snobbery.
By way of comparison readers may wish to examine F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Towards the end of that beautiful book the protagonist revisits the crumbling mansion where Gatsby's parties filled the Long Island night with music and light. The parties are symbolic of an entire civilization. The demise of Gatsby's world is indicated by an obscenity scrawled along the marble steps to his mansion. That obscene insult is the world in which we must live today.
Charles Ryder is a young man "going up" to Oxford to read history. He is an artist in embryo, who discovers that "to know and love another human being is the beginning of all wisdom." He will encounter Sebastian Flyte, an aristocratic young man, who is doomed by Catholic guilt resulting not so much from his proclivity for same-sex love -- which was not exactly unknown or unheard of at elite English public schools or in the priesthood for that matter -- but at the "sin" (What is that?) of hatred and rage felt for a loving and "saintly" mother, perfectly played by Emma Thompson, who embodies controlled righteousness and piety, but nevertheless seems to kill everything that she touches.
St. Sebastian's wounds are associated with his physical and non-physical sufferings. Worsened by the well-intentioned ministrations of Irene these sufferings lead to the saint's eventual death. St. Sebastian lived during the third century of the Christian era and was a victim of the Diocletian persecution. Nursed back to health by Irene after being pierced by arrows he was eventually crushed at the orders of the reigning Roman emperor. St. Sebastian haunts the imagination of many great artists as a gay icon. St. Sebastian is symbolic of many kinds of suffering for the post-AIDS generation of American gay men. ("Images and Death.")
Oscar Wilde alludes to St. Sebastian after his imprisonment by assuming the name "Sebastian Melmoth" drawn from Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer mixed with references to the suffering saint drawn from a dog-eared copy of The Lives of the Saints that Wilde carried with him to Paris.
Wilde was received into the Church on his death-bed and was given the Last Rites.
George Santayana, who provides one inspiration for "Anthony Blanche" (reciting T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" on a punt in the river), also makes use of this figure of Saint Sebastian pierced by arrows in his sonnets. ("George Santayana and the Mysteries of Quantum Physics.")
Michel Foucault makes veiled references to this Catholic saint in his late writings on "The History of Sexuality."
Gore Vidal's script improves on a Tennessee Williams' play to explore many themes borrowed from Waugh in Suddenly Last Summer.
"Sebastian" Horsley's recent memoir adds to the pile of books invoking this icon.
Pain is barely dulled by Sebastian Flyte's alcohol use. Sebatstian's pain is produced by what -- he believes -- is the loss of God's love (something which is impossible) as a result of irremovable guilt. This is the mortal stain.
Saints are marvelous and admirable persons, it seems, who (in the form of Lady Marchmain) may be unbearable and far from pleasant company.
Even saints are guilty, we are told, for they must share in human fallibility. One of the most cultured men I ever knew -- a man I loved -- once said to me in discussing this novel:
"I would much prefer to be sent to hell than to heaven. The company will be much more fun, the food will be better. Most of the great artists will be there. The sex will be absolutely steamy."
No, we did not have sex. Yes, I have many gay friends. My entire sexual history will be placed on DVD for examination by the press, if necessary.
This was the self-conscious opinion of a man who was "post-Christian" (his term) and highly civilized as well as moral. We spoke of Milton's Lucifer in connection with Waugh's novel.
I will be only too happy to discuss my sexual life, if I have to, but I will not refer to other persons whose privacy I always respect.
The novel and movie will be interpreted by middlebrow reviewers, like the person writing for the Times, in terms of themes from the "class struggle" (Waugh would have vomited), or "gay liberation" (he would have vomited twice).
Only the middle classes needed liberation from such things. The criminal or marginal classes (persons like me?) and aristocrats (Toni Morrison, Gore Vidal, my friend from long ago and always) are free of such suburban conventions.
The novel is not a comedy nor does it contain a "hidden comedy." Brideshead is a great tragedy with comic relief, like Hamlet (also evoked by Sebastian), and a philosophical allegory.
Brideshead is actually a morality tale. ("Is there a gay marriage right?")
Charles learns at Oxford -- "that death and suffering linger as shadows even in the Spring of life."
A skull kept by students at Oxford and by Dr. Faustus, as conjured by Christopher Marlowe (who attended an obscure prep school called "Cambridge"), bore the slogan: "Et in arcadia ego." This is also the title of one of Waugh's chapters. The phrase means "even in the garden of life, [youth] there am I [death]."
These very Catholic reminders of mortality and of our fallen condition will strike people as morbid today.
They were aimed at the instruction of young people expected to die before age fifty. Until the twentieth century life-spans were circumscribed by fatal diseases and infections now mostly controlled by antibiotics and other treatments.
Mr. Ryder's infatuation with Sebastian (profane?) -- who explicitly suggests the sufferings of St. Sebastian, as I say, the saint is seen in a background painting by Titian -- is his embrace of beauty, civilization (dimly seen by this young actor playing Sebastian), and Ryder's first appreciation of tragedy.
Jealousy is not what separates Charles and Sebastian. The writer and director got that wrong.
Ben Wishaw is outstanding as "John Keats" in Jane Campion's touching film, "Firelight." Amy Cornish is amazing in what I take to be her film debut as "Fawny Brawne." Sadly, Mr. Wishaw is a little lost in this difficult role.
Where do they find these superb young actors in Britain? Must be something in the rain. Americans are not to be left behind: "Joelle Carter," is a dazzling young American actor who promises great things for the future. (I hope I spelled Ms. Carter's name correctly.)
What separates these young men is the young Flyte's sense of his impending doom and of Charles as a resident (if a reluctant one) in the world of normality and adulthood that is just coming into being for both of them, but which only one of them may enter.
Julia (Hayley Atwell) is, of course, Sebastian in female form. "He was the forerunner ..." Charles says. Julia is one side of the single personality that Charles loves. Sebastian is the other side of this same personality. Half of this one person dies; the other half endures, bearing our condition on the cross of life, in order to remain a person.
Waugh made it very clear on more than one occasion that Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" and other works were important references in terms of appreciating Brideshead Revisited.
Celia is Rex Mortram in female form. ("God is Texting Me!")
Charles knows, as did T.S. Eliot, that the modern world belongs to such people -- to Celia and Rex who shall inherit the earth. As a matter of fact, they have.
Charles rightly fears that much worse than Rex and Celia is to come in his country. Horror might have been defined by Evelyn Waugh as "Elvis Presley." Mr. Waugh could not have imagined "The Spice Girls." Personally, I like the Spice Girls. "Girl Power!"
Symbolism reigns in the chess game where a black knight moves against a white queen. Eliot's "Wasteland" contains an apt section entitled: "A Game of Chess."
The deaths that punctuate this great tragedy serve as symbols for the catastrophe engulfing Western mores and manners. Civilization is dying. We no longer miss civilization for we have "Beauty and the Geek" and "I-Phones."
Brideshead Revisited was completed and published in 1945. The subject of this novel, according to its author is "the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters." See Daniel Mendelsohn's elegant and very familiar review-essay "Evelyn Waugh Revisited," in The New York Review of Books, October 9, 2008, at p. 18. (My essay appeared first, but is not credited in Mr. Mendelsohn's strikingly similar article that reproduces my text word-for-word no doubt "accidentally.")
That's "elitism!" Persons wearing a nose ring shout this slogan at us. We are (whatever!) "snobs" for admiring this masterpiece.
Yes, Brideshead is certainly an "elite" work of art. Waugh celebrates a meritocratic form of elitism that is also democratic because it is concerned with the struggle by each of us to avoid collapsing into tempting forms of barbarism, violence, greed, pointless carnality, cruelty and power-worship.
We must be good, despite our flawed human natures -- or we must struggle to be good -- even if we are unlikely to succeed, perfectly, and it is more fun to be evil. ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")
I recently attended a Catholic mass -- something I have not done in many years -- noticing the astonishing number of messages in symbolic form as well as archetypal discourse surrounding me associated with the art objects in the church where the mass was celebrated.
Even a humble church in a working class neighborhood in New York, literally, is an encyclopedia of theological communications if persons bother to read the various "texts" on display for them. Fewer people today than ever before are equipped to do that "reading" by their so-called "educations." ("Nihilists in Disneyworld.")
The true snobbishness today comes from below in society.
Snobbery now is a so-called "anti-elitism" that rages at spiritual aristocracy in the interest of the monetary kind. The strange poverty of the rich (produced by greed) must be set beside the spiritual wealth of the poor (produced by suffering).
One of these forms of poverty or wealth must be chosen. Julia chooses the wealth of the poor as she does war work; Charles is left to decide the issue in her absence; the viewer/reader is invited to consider the matter in the silence of his or her conscience.
Silence and privacy are priceless commodities also taken from most of us these days.
Wallowing in shit is the pleasant task assigned to us in this postmodernist reality where we find ourselves unhappily placed by something called "history."
Our contemporary tragedy of forced immersion in imbecility in the form of chats with half-wits as a matter of enduring our lot in life is best demonstrated by our politicians and lawyers in New Jersey speaking to us of the "issues" in society and how they expect to "resolve" them.
"I am for all the people," they say, with a belch and loud farts. ("Menendez Charged With Selling His Office.")
Let us be honest about human bodily functions. Why be elitists? ("Is Humanism Still Possible?" and "Menendez Consorts With Underage Prostitutes.")
"My theme is memory."
"I regard writing not as [the] investigation of character, but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed. I have no technical psychological interest. It is drama, speech, and events that interest me."
Waugh said this to an interviewer late in his life then spoke of his love of words. The music of language is so powerful in his books that it is impossible not to believe what Waugh says. The reader's delight in mood and tempo conjured by words linked with great sensitivity and a powerful sense of the visual (like Charles Ryder Waugh is a painter!) justifies the reading of any of Waugh's writings.
The cinematographer and director of Brideshead Revisited understand this haunting quality of the texts conveying with color, light, pace and alternating distances from the lead actors Waugh's elegant prose. A great musical score would have helped to communicate the elegiac mood of the film.
The relationship with Venice is part of the texture of this work. Venice and Italy play a key role in the English imagination. It must be all that warmth and sunshine. Opportunities for happy fornication among sun-bathing natives -- who are curiously lacking in the sense of guilt since Catholicism was never a terrible secret in Italy -- explain many of the choices in the arrangements of persons and furniture meant to suggest a "relationship" with great Venetian canvases. Again: Ponchielli to Puccini would have added to the memory of the experience of this movie. ("'The English Patient': A Movie Review.")
Novel and film are morality plays, as I said, but they are also explorations of the collective subconscious in a Judeo-Christian civilization. They are not tributes to lost youth and happiness at carefree school moments that are beyond the comprehension of most people today. They are -- like the masterpieces of Marcel Proust -- the restoration of what is lost through capturing recollections on the page, in film, canvas, or stone. The artist seeks to defeat time by way of his or her genius.
Waugh succeeds in this effort as did Shakespeare by fulfilling a promise to his lover(s) in the Sonnets to make him/her immortal in deathless verse. ("Shakespeare's Black Prince.")
Lord Marchmain's death, for example, arrives with the power of speech in the novel. Words describe history and England, also civilization and family, as what endures for those few persons in every generation who care to make them live. Hence, the sign of the cross -- substitute your favorite symbol -- that returns us to ourselves, to God, home, history and family:
"Better tomorrow. We live long in our family and marry late. Seventy-three is no age. Aunt Julia, my father's aunt, lived to be eighty-eight, born and died here, never married, saw the fire on beacon hill for the battle of Trafalgar, always called it 'the New House'; that was the name they had for it in the nursery and in the fields when unlettered men had long memories. You can see where the old house stood near the village church; they call the field 'Castle Hill,' Horlick's field where the ground's uneven and half of it is waste, nettle and brier in hollows too deep for ploughing. They dug to the foundations to carry the stone for the new house; the house that was a century old when Aunt Julia was born. Those were our roots in the waste hollows of Castle Hill, in the brier and nettle; among the tombs in the old church and the chantry where no clerk sings."
Michael Gambon was deprived of these delicious words. Gambon did much with little text in his death scene. Crafty and experienced English actors are worth the cost of any film or play.
Emma Thompson's restrained performance (the obvious association with Anthony Hopkins as a forlorn butler in another, lesser film, will be left for others to explore) is a masterpiece of contained bewilderment and pain at the modern world and the persons produced by it whom Lady Marchmain no longer understands. This woman is also pierced by arrows.
I alluded to America's Catholic aristocrat Fitzgerald and his doomed Gatsby, and here is the passage that I recall:
"I spent my Saturday nights in New York because those gleaming, dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still hear the music and the laughter faint and incessant from his garden and the cars going up and down his drive. One night I did hear a material car there and saw its lights stop at his front steps. But I didn't investigate. Probably it was some final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn't know the party was over."
Fitzgerald's text becomes an elegy for a party that is indeed ended:
"On the last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer, I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once more. On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly on the stone. Then I wandered down to the beach and sprawled on the sand."
Ms. Thompson has placed on screen her bravest performance yet. See the film again and just look at her. English women are so beautiful and genuine, Greta Scacchi (Australia or New Zealand by way of Cambridge?) has inhabited my dreams for years. Ms. Scacchi is now joined by the haunting Ms. Atwell in a Louise Brooks haircut.
Ms. Thompson's performance is like one of those great old Dutch Masters. She offers us a study of light and form comparable to a Jan Vermeer that is executed to perfection. Lady Marchmain's emotion "inward breaks" as she is forced to witness the gradual destruction of a son's and daughter's lives after a flawlessly "moral" upbringing has prepared them for a vanished society and civilization.
Please do not think of mentioning Gone With the Wind in the same breath with this book. Truman Capote said of Margaret Mitchell's glorified bodice ripper: "It is such a terrible novel that it wasn't gone fast enough for me."
Lady Marchmain's Catholic faith has made a lifetime of unavoidable demands. Their non-recognition by Mr. Ryder's cheerful anarchism and atheism mystifies and saddens her. Lady Marchmain has become laughable and irrelevant like her faith and civilization. She cannot come to terms with the world which makes this true. This is tragedy indeed. Tragedy for her and (much more) for the world that was being born, whether this great cost is worth paying must be left for others to debate. What must not be doubted is the reality of that cost. Look around you.
Interviews with ancient residents -- many were the last aristocrats of dying families -- in the Paris, "Ritz Hotel" featured an encounter with a bizarre dowager. This lady spoke about eleven languages and was the last Countess in a Spanish family, I believe, who admitted the necessity for socialism and apologized for her archaic self. She lived with a massive boa constrictor together with her paintings and books, of course, hoping that this one place would be left to nineteenth century persons like herself. She called her pet snake "Noah-the-Boa" and commented that the snake was an "anarchist." This fascinating lady is no longer possible in the world in which we live.
A world that contains professional wrestlers and Republican Congresspersons from Idaho arrested for molesting a child does not approve of cultured persons who are called "elitists" because they enjoy Mozart's Operas. ("A Night at the Opera.")
I leave it for you to decide whether we have made progress.
Cordelia is neglected in this production. The association with Shakespeare's Lear is strengthened by her character. Cordelia provides redemption with the return to what is indestructible (for Waugh) in Cristendom: Love. Charity. Compassion.
Sebastian is taken up as a beggar by monks even as Lord Marchmain is received into the Church and God's grace, during a slow death.
We return to Christian civilization and to God "with a twitch upon the thread." (G.K. Chesterton)
Before you laugh please remember that these "roots" are also the foundations of our American civilization and culture. These roots are within all of us. They are not the farce that you have been taught to despise by the Nation magazine and "Looney Tunes" cartoons which have come to replace Shakespeare, Titian, Beethoven and high mass at St. Peter's Church, or services at New York's centuries old Synagogues, and now Mosques or Ashrams.
Not all religious persons are fools or subject to ridicule because you majored in something called "Women's Studies." ("The Scarlet Letter and the #Me Too Moment.")
What are we asked to "remember" in this mythic narrative? Youth? Beauty? A world that had meaning? God? Western civilization? The British Empire? All of the above. Look to Plato and Augustine, then Schopenhauer and Freud on "recollection." (No, not all of these things are necessarily admirable which is irrelevant to the importance of recollection.)
"The human soul enjoys these rare, classic periods, but, apart from them, we are seldom single or unique; we keep company in this world with a hoard of abstractions and reflections and counterfits of ourselves -- the sensual man, the economic man, the man of reason, the beast, the machine and the sleep-walker, and heaven knows what besides, all in our own image" -- not the image of God -- "indistinguishable from ourselves to the outward eye. We get borne along, out of sight in the press, unresisting, till we get the chance to drop behind unnoticed, or to dodge down a single street, pause, breathe freely and take our bearings, or to push ahead, out-distance our shadows, lead them a dance, so that when at length they catch up with us, they look at one another askance, knowing we have a secret we shall never share."
What the children are saying.
The hostility to this movie in the American media is puzzling. Everyone can see that the film is beautiful, even unforgettable, different certainly from what we normally get in the Summer blockbuster season.
Brideshead is potentially a great -- if flawed -- movie that offends contemporary values and sensibilities.
A.O. Scott used Brideshead as an excuse to excoriate religion or to compare the present film, unfavorably, with the Granada television series from the eighties.
Emma Thompson is better than Claire Bloom as Lady Marchmain (and Ms. Bloom is a fine actress).
Michael Gambon is as good as Laurence Olivier with fewer lines and opportunities to dazzle us.
Why do these beautiful Flytes fall in love with Charles Ryder as played very intelligently by Mathew Goode?
Charles Ryder is the poet and chronicler, whose "painting" of this world is the novel we read and film we see.
English Catholicism appropriates the celebration of the artist associated with Romanticism. The artist is the "experiencing nature" (Henry James) providing the light of the candle that is always in danger of being extinguished:
"... the lineaments of the romantic image were most decisively executed in the nineteenth century. The artist is then one surrounded by invisible powers, which by an act of rapt attention may be transformed into a permanent image or symbol. The poet is one set apart, the conscience and unacknowledged law-maker of human society who as a consequence of his solitariness [and wandering?] is doomed to be misinterpreted and mistreated; he does not endure the world but re-creates it in the act of imagination, and must place his own sensibility at the heart of this enterprise because there is no other sure foundation of knowledge. The romantic poet is a lamp rather than a mirror, to use a celebrated antithesis, the source of illumination within his or her own breast. If this entails the re-creation of the self as well as of the world, then the divine afflatus of the bard may also be a mode of private transformation. A human being may be transfigured by god-like powers of the imagination. 'A Man's life of any worth is a continual allegory,' Keats wrote, 'Shakespeare led a life of Allegory; his works are the comments on it.' ..." (Peter Ackroyd)
What some people dislike about this movie is unapologetic Christianity.
Catholicism is presented as something other than a source of evil in the form of child molestation and intolerance.
Some people thought, foolishly, that Waugh was denigrating the Catholic faith rather than dramatizing some of its most painful lessons concerning the inevitability of suffering and evil in every human life.
Why is Catholicism so hated today?
My friend (who was an atheist) is in heaven now if anyone deserves to be there.
Please understand that these are metaphors. Any good priest will tell you that much. In fact, the wisdom of this film and the masterpiece of a novel on which it is based is best captured in a late poem by Oscar Wilde, a poem written in a Parisian slum as Wilde lay dying that is signed: "Sebastian Melmoth":
Come down, O Christ, and help me! reach my hand,
For I am drowning in a stormier sea
Than Simon on thy lake of Galilee:
The wine of life is spilt upon the sand,
My heart is as some famine-murdered land
Whence all good things have perished utterly
And well I know my soul in hell must lie
If I this night before God's throne should stand.
'He sleeps perchance, or rideth to the chase,
Like Baal, when his prophets howled that name
From morn to noon on Carmel's smitten height.'
Nay, peace, I shall behold, before the night,
The feet of brass, the robe more white than flame,
The wounded hands, the weary human face.
