GEORGE WATSON
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in his notes: "Waugh's loyalty is to a form of society no longer viable,
of which he must be aware ." Of course Waugh is aware of it. That is
the tragedy at the heart of his book. More than that, and far worse
than that, he was aware that he could not have had it for himself
even if it did still exist. It is difficult here to shut out of one's mind the
well-known pictures of Waugh in his last years , in one or another of
the modest country houses he bought for himself, forever trying to
look like a country gentleman and forever (as a friend once re–
marked) looking like a bookie. That is the comic side of his social
tragedy. But his point runs sharper and deeper. As the novel amply
shows, those who want can't have and-what only makes it worse–
those who have don't want. Lord Sebastian, who has the magnificent
baroque pile of Brideshead as his home , detests it-"It's where my
family live," as he says distantly-and drinks himself to death. His
undergraduate friend Charles Ryder, whom he introduces into the
enchanted worlds of the great English house and of Venice ("I
drowned in honey, stingless") , would give all he ever had , and far
more , to live in such high ceremonial heavens, and is forever shut
out.
It
is impossible here not to remember about Waugh what
everyone knows : that as a boy he longed to go to Eton, and did not;
that his first (and aristocratic) wife left him after a year, and for an
Etonian; that his own sojourns in a great Elizabethan house in
Worcestershire as a young man , the guest of a friend, let him glimpse
at a world of moats, battlements and rolling parkland from which in
spirit he never recovered . "The smiling meadows of Worcestershire
and the noble line of the Malvern hills that I love so dearly," he
wrote from the tropic swamplands of British Guiana in January 1933
to Lady Dorothy Lygon, one of the family, missing a home that
could never be his . He missed it all his life long.
It
is easy to dismiss all this as snobbery: easy too, no doubt, to
say that Waugh's head had been turned . But then anyone with a
head at all ought to let it be turned once or twice, and falling in love
with great houses and ancient traditions sounds like a fairly innocent
sort of infatuation. Waugh often returns in his fiction to that lost
Eden, which in an England that was once the world's first industrial
nation is always pastoral. When the lovers awaken in the country
under mistletoe on Christmas morning in
Vile Bodies
they hear
church-bells ringing across the snow:
Later they put some crumbs of their bread and butter on the
windowsill , and a robin redbreast came to eat them. The whole
day was like that.
