Evelyn Waugh's Decadent Redemption

A new essay in Liberties

I have written a long essay about Brideshead Revisted for the marvellous Celeste Marcus at Liberties, called “Evelyn Waugh's Decadent Redemption”. It’s about loving the whole novel—the Catholicism and the Oxford scenes, the religion and the beautiful hedonism—and thus appreciating Waugh’s grand design.

The critics’ antipathy echoes today. Even some Brideshead lovers fail to recognize the novel’s careful construction which crescendos in Charles’ religious awakening. The second half is not a disjointed disappointment: it is the realization of Waugh’s artistry. Who else wrote, or could have written, with such charm, such elegance, a novel intended to proselytize for a religion that had been abandoned by the country in which the book was written and takes place? Brideshead is an earnest ode to faith decked out in sumptuous, glittering, beauty and withering wit. No wonder the literati hissed. Waugh showed them their own world — their own youth, glamour, and hedonism — and used it to call them to a religion their ancestors had overturned in a revolution four hundred years earlier.

I discuss the history of how the novel was written, what the critics have made of it, how the structure of the novel points to Waugh’s purpose, and I defend Waugh’s wonderful prose against the dreary accusations that it is “purple”.

To understand the morality of Brideshead, one must first understand its style. There is a long tradition of calling the prose purple. As Macolm Bradbury said in 1964 (in a splendid little book about Waugh’s work), “Most critics agree that he piled it on rather.” Rose Macauly called it an “adolescent surrender to glamour.” Recently in the LRB, Seamus Perry called Waugh’s prose “splendid schmaltz.” But Waugh is never purple in the gaudy manner of, say, Laurence Durrell. He writes in the purple not of amethyst and lilac, not the plush, insistent purple of fizzy wigs and velvet cushions, but the great grand purple of crown jewels and Bishop’s robes. His style is not an indulgent deviation from the canonical norm of the good hearty plain style. (Had it been the purple of modernism, the semi-colons of Orlando, for instance, fewer would disapprove.) No: Waugh’s is a High purple.

Waugh had strict beliefs about prose style. Writers, he stipulated, ought to know grammar thoroughly, understand word derivations, and use dictionaries and reference books like Fowler’s Modern English Usage.

Brideshead is quite different from Waugh’s earlier novels (one reason the critics were befuddled, no doubt. It marks an signifiant moment in his career and stands as one of the great accomplishments of the twentieth century English novel. It also makes explicit a deeper moral shift that lies just under all Waugh’s humour. As I say,

Brideshead was a return to beauty, which by now, for Waugh, meant a return to God and the one true church.

I have an abiding love of Waugh and this novel especially. This is one of the essays I have most enjoyed writing. It benefitted a lot from Celeste’s editing. Be sure to read the whole thing.