…to Brideshead Revisited.
Quomodo sedet sola civitas… How doth the city sit solitary
“…the priest came in - I was there alone. I don’t think he saw me - and took out the altar stone and put it in his bag; then he burned the wads of wool with the holy oil on them and threw the ash outside; he emptied the holy-water stoop and blew out the lamp in the sanctuary, and left the tabernacle open, and empty, as though from now on it was always to be Good Friday. I suppose none of this makes any sense to you, Charles, poor agnostic. I stayed there ‘til he was gone, and then, suddenly, there wasn’t any chapel there any more, just an oddly decorated room. I can’t tell you what it felt like. You’ve never been to Tenebrae, I suppose?’
‘Never.’
…”I thought: 'The builders did not know the uses to which their work would descend; they made a new house with the stones of the old castle; year by year, generation after generation, they enriched and extended it; year by year the great harvest of timber in the park grew to ripeness; until, in sudden frost, came the age of Hooper; the place was desolate and the work all brought to nothing; Quomodo sedet sola civitas. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity’…”
"My theme, says the narrator in Evelyn Waugh's book, this most carefully written and deeply felt novel, "is memory, that winged host." And, with that, the bright devastating satirist of England moved from one world to another. From the lunacy of a burlesqued Mayfair, to a world in which people credibly think and feel. For Mr. Waugh was very definitely an artist, with something like a genius for precision and clarity not surpassed by any novelists writing in English at that time.
It tells an absorbing story in imaginative terms. By indirection, it summarizes and comments upon a time and a society. It has an almost romantic sense of wonder, together with the provocative, personal point of view of a writer who saw life realistically. And, the moralist remained. For Mr. Waugh was, of course, a moralist after his fashion, and always would be; when you look even slightly beneath the hilarity of those Mayfair studies, you see that he is performing the satirist's ancient function: he is excoriating the morals and standards of a society. Needless to say, he was too much the artist-and too astute as an entertainer- ever to be didactic; but inevitably it is there, in the satirist's way with absurdity, including the absurdity of empty tradition; the moralist's hatred of injustice and his unspoken belief in the values of intelligence and simple decency.
“Quia fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te.” (Our hearts are restless ‘till they find rest in Thee.)
4 comments:
I'll never forget the closing lines,
"...a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design, relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones. I quickened my pace and reached the hut which served us for our ante-room. 'You're looking unusually cheerful to-day,' said the second-in-command."
Perfect.
Waugh really made an impression on me when I was young. I read Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies in my early 20s and loved the writing. Still have the old paperbacks somewhere, and wonder how I would respond to his writing from this perspective in time...
Wonderful and lyrical use of words as I recall. I was also into Nabokov at about the same time, perhaps for some of the same reasons, though completely different sensibilities...
"Brideshead" ...
..."a name that was so familiar to me, a conjuror's name of such magic power, that, at its ancient sound, the phantoms of those haunted late years began to take flight".
Graham Greene once wrote that, in his own memory, that same inaugural passage had seemed very long and elaborate, and that he was surprised on rereading it to find how brief it was. He intended this as a compliment. I, too, find that Brideshead is oddly capacious and elastic, disclosing new depths and perspectives with each reading. Why does this novel have such a tenacious hold on the imagination, even of people who have never been to England or never visited a country house? I belief it is entirely possible to feel nostalgia for homelands, and for periods, which one has never experienced oneself. This applies to imagined times and places as well as to real ones: Waugh uses the phrase "secret garden" and also - alluding to the Oxford of Lewis Carroll - to an "enclosed and enchanted garden" reachable by a "low door in the wall". The yearning for a lost or different life is fairly universal, and Brideshead is one of the keys that unlocks the gate to it.
Thank you, interesting observations. Will meditate about this ;-)
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