An Unseen Hook and Invisible Line

Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited is not just a brilliant novel, it is a brilliant Christian novel written in the mid-20^th century when that Christianity thing was supposed to be passé.

The story is of Charles Ryder’s interactions with the Flyte family, denizens of an ancient English manor dubbed Brideshead. He enters the Flyte orbit via his college chum, Sebastian, for whom he has a vaguely homosexual attraction. Sebastian’s parents (now separated) and his siblings (Brideshead, Julia, and Cordelia) make up quite the menagerie. The defining trait of each character is the relationship to the Roman Catholic Church. Over the first two-thirds of the book, we watch these characters become developed as a Catalogue of Failed Saints.

Charles, on the other hand, has no religious background. The discussions about religion among the characters are masterfully done; they capture the nature of that sort of discussion perfectly—ships passing in the night. “You know all this is very puzzling to me” is how Charles summarizes it. And this about Brideshead, “I knew that this disagreement was not a matter of words only, but expressed a deep and impassable division between us; neither had any understanding of the other, nor ever could.”

But, the explicit discussions about religion are not the heart of the book. The story follows Charles in his quest for an object of love, from Sebastian to Celia (whom he marries) and onto Julia. In a moment of shocking self-awareness toward the end of the novel, Charles explains this to Julia.

“It’s frightening,” Julia once said, “to think how completely you have forgotten Sebastian.”
“He was the forerunner.”
“That’s what you said in the storm. I’ve thought since, perhaps I am only a forerunner too.”
“Perhaps,” I thought […], “perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.”
I had not forgotten Sebastian. He was with me daily in Julia; or rather it was Julia I had known in in him, in those distant Arcadian days.
“That’s cold comfort for a girl,” she said when I tried to explain. “How do I know I shan’t suddenly turn out to be somebody else? It’s an easy way to chuck.”

Right there the whole structure of the novel is revealed. All these longings after failed people and ideals are all pointing to something greater; Charles loves Sebastian and Julia and maybe at some point even his wife, Celia, but none of them are really the object of his love—he just doesn’t realize yet that he loves something more. Those other loves are a hints and symbols of something more. 

Waugh is a master of the small but telling detail. Throughout, there is a detail here or there that feels like it just gave a vision of an entire world. A couple of examples:

1. In the first chapter, Charles is at college, and one of his acquaintances (friends?), Anthony Blanche, stands on a balcony with a megaphone reading The Waste Land to the people below. I don’t know of anything which more perfectly captures the effect of that poem in the 1920s. The scene embodies an era and a type of person in that era…you now know exactly the type of person Anthony is…and simultaneously, you know the type of poem Eliot just published. And the part Waugh chose to have Anthony read is perfect: Tiresias on the wall.

(When I taught a Western Civilization course and we got to Eliot, I always mentioned this scene. The guy in the know reading Eliot from the balcony to the masses below. One year, a half dozen or so students showed up at my office and stood in the hallway, reciting The Waste Land. Sometimes Mount Holyoke students have a real sense of humor.)

Eliot hovers over this novel, from this moment on. Eliot’s Four Quartets came out around the time Waugh was writing this novel. Waste Land to Four Quartets is Charles’ journey.

2. About two-thirds of the way through the novel, Charles returns from a long journey in which he was completely cut off from civilization. His return is when we discover that he was married in the space between the last chapter and this one. Not only that, he has kids, one of which was born while he was away. Charles shows a truly shocking indifference to his children; he shows zero interest in seeing them or even hearing about them. It is easy to conclude that Charles is a cad.

But, then the telling details start getting dropped into the narrative in offhand ways. In a conversation between Charles and Celia, she tells him that things will be like before he left, and he asks if she means right before he left or shortly before that. Celia is silent. It’s never explicitly stated, but when reading that I assumed Charles had an affair. Turns out I was right about the affair, but wrong about the person: it is Celia. We later find out that Celia, has been unfaithful in a casual remark in a conversation between Charles and Julia.

The realization that Celia was unfaithful generates another realization of something which is left totally unstated at any point in the novel. We know that Charles’ daughter, Caroline, is born while Charles is away. The realization: she is not his child. The timeline is perfect—Charles finds out Celia is pregnant, he knows he is not the father, he heads off to South America and cuts himself off from all contact with civilization. That also explains an awkward moment when Celia says that Caroline is named after Charles—that would indeed be rather awkward that Celia is pretending to the outside world that this is Charles’ daughter when Charles knows it is not. Then it hit me; why assume that the older child is Charles’ son? Maybe Charles has no children. No wonder he is totally indifferent to them and has no real desire to even see them.

None of this is actually stated in the novel. That is what I found so fascinating. It’s like all the clues are there, but there is no grand reveal. What we think about Charles is hugely affected by whether or not these are his kids. Only an author who is sure of himself would leave something like this buried in a novel. (It is like a small version of Nabokov’s Pale Fire—now that was artistry—the entire plot can only be pieced together by connecting the endnotes (which are a part of the book, not something added later.))

The whole novel is like that. You only realize it at the end, but Charles spends the whole book looking for an object of love that will bring him satisfaction. Sebastian, Celia, Julia…all of them just keep pointing him onwards. At the end, again in masterful understatement, we find out that Charles has converted. He visits the old chapel at Brideshead and discovers a small lamp burning before the altar. And there he explains to the reader that something none of them thought about at the time, some small red flame, that flame the old knights saw from their tomb, burns again for others. That flickering flame is what this novel is. It is only when some flickering light allows Charles to see through “fierce little human tragedy in which I played,” that he comes to “accept the supernatural as the real.” If the novel had been more overt about the conversion, it would have lost this point, it would have lost that sense of inevitability that hovers over the whole story. The novel is arguing that conversion is not due to some loud event; it comes from a still small voice softly calling.

What makes the novel so brilliant is that high percentage of readers almost certainly will miss the larger narrative of the irresistible pull of grace. The novel reads nicely as a tale of the decline of the English aristocracy too. But Waugh, in another bit of misdirection, explains what he is doing in this novel. Cordelia says to Charles, “I wonder if you remember the story mummy read us the evening Sebastian first got drunk—I mean the bad evening. ‘Father Brown’ said something like ‘I caught him’ [the thief] ‘with an unseen hook and invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.’” Waugh is not just explaining the hook that has been planted in Charles; the whole novel is designed to plant a hook in the reader. It’s an unseen hook and an invisible thread.

Wander to the ends of the earth, Waugh says, it doesn’t matter…because the hook is set.

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Nabakov, Vladimir, Pale Fire, “Your Mind is an Arrant Thief”
Greene, Graham A Burnt-Out Case “Faith of the Unchurched”