Paying Attention To The Sky

 

I watched the BBC dramatization from the 1980s the other day and then read the novel. If you haven’t read it or are unfamiliar with the story: Brideshead Revisited is the story of Charles Ryder’s college affair with the young lord, Sebastian Flyte at Oxford.  Despite the difference in class and economic circumstances, Charles becomes almost a member of the family, Catholic peers of the realm, meeting Lord Marchmain on a trip to Italy  with Sebastian and Lady Marchmain (Sebastian’s mother and father are divorced) and 20 years later has an affair with Sebastian’s younger sister, Julia. This all happens in the period between the two World Wars before England’s landed gentry had declined.

More than a novel of manners and social class, Brideshead also shows the Catholicism of the Flyte family through the eyes of the pagan Charles Ryder and the struggles that the four children (Bridey, Sebastian, Julia and Cordelia) have living in harmony with their faith. It ultimately is the story of Ryder’s conversion to faith on the eve of the Normandy landings.

Reading selections follow.

Youth
The languor of Youth — how unique and quintessential it is?  How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous  affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes.  Youth — all save this — come and go with us through life; again and again in riper years we experience, under a new stimulus, what we thought had been finally left behind, the authentic impulse to action, the renewal of power and its con­centration on a new object; again and again a new truth is revealed to us in whose light all our previous knowledge must be rearranged These things are a part of life itself, but languor — the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding, the sun standing still in the heavens and the earth throbbing to our own pulse — that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it. Perhaps in the mansions of Limbo the heroes enjoy some such compensation for their loss of the Beatific Vision, perhaps the Beatific Vision itself has some remote kinship with this lowly experience, I, at any rate, believed myself very near heaven, during those languid days at Brideshead.

Sebastian’s Faith
Sebastian’s faith was an enigma to me at that time, but not one which I felt particularly concerned to solve. I had no religion. I was taken to church weekly as a child, and at school attended chapel daily, but, as though in compensation, from the time I went to my public school I was excused church in the holidays. The view implicit in my education was that the basic narrative of Christianity had long been exposed as a myth, and that opinion was now divided as to whether its ethical teaching was of present value, a division in which the main weight went against it; religion was a hobby with some people professed and other did not; at the best it was slightly ornamental, at the worst it was the province of “complexes” and “inhibitions” — catchwords of the decade — and of the intolerance, hypocrisy, and sheer stupidity attributed to it for centuries. No one had ever suggested to me that these quaint observances expressed a coherent philosophic system and intransigent historical claims; nor had they done so, would I have been much interested.

Often, almost daily, since I had known Sebastian, some chance word in his conversation had reminded me that he was a Catholic, but I took it as a foible, like his Teddy-bear. We never discussed the matter until on the second Sunday at Brideshead, when Father Phipps had left us and we sat in the colonnade with the papers, he surprised me by saying: “Oh dear, it’s very difficult being a Catholic.”

“Does it make much difference to you?”

“Of course. All the time.”

“Well, I can’t say I’ve noticed it. Are you struggling against temptation? You don’t seem much more virtuous than me.”

“I’m very, very much wickeder,” said Sebastian indignantly.

“Well then?”

“Who was it used to pray, ‘Oh God, make me good, but not yet’?”

“I don’t know…You, I should think.”

“Why, yes, I do, every day. But it isn’t that.” He turned back to the pages of the News of the World and said, “Another naughty scout-master.”

“I suppose they try and make you believe an awful lot of nonsense?”

“Is it nonsense? I wish it were. It sometimes sounds terribly sensible to me.”

“But, my dear Sebastian, you can’t seriously believe it all.”

“Can’t I?”

“I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings and ox and the ass.”

“Oh yes, I believe that It’s a lovely idea”

“But you can’t believe things because they’re a lovely idea”

“But I do! That’s how I believe.”

“And in prayers? You think you can kneel down in front of a statue and say a few words, not even out loud, just in your mind, and change the weather, or that some saints are more influential than others, and you must get hold of the right one to help you on the right problem?”

“Oh yes. Don’t you remember last term when I took Aloysius and left him behind I didn’t know where? I prayed like mad to St. Anthony of Padua that morning, and immediately after lunch there was Mr. Nichols at Canterbury Gate with Aloysius in his arms, saying I’d left him in his cab.”

“Well,” I said, “if you can believe all that and you don’t want to be good, where’s the difficulty about your religion?”

“If you can’t see, you can’t.”

“Well, where?”

“Oh, don’t be a bore, Charles I want to read about a woman in Hull who’s been using an instrument.”

“You started the subject. I was just getting interested.”

“I’ll never mention it again…

Like A Piece Of Ivory In A Chinese Puzzle
“D’you know, Bridey, if I ever felt for a moment like becoming a Catholic, I should only have to talk to you for five minutes to be cured. You manage to reduce what seem quite sensible propositions to stark nonsense.”

“It’s odd you should say that. I’ve heard it before from other people. It’s one of the many reasons why I don’t think I should make a good priest. It’s something in the way my mind works I suppose. I have to turn a thing round and round, like a piece of ivory in a Chinese puzzle, until — click! — it fits into place — but by that time it’s upside down to everyone else. But it’s the same bit of ivory, you know.”

Leaving Brideshead
I was unmoved; there was no part of me remotely touched by her distress. It was as I had often imagined being expelled from school. I almost expected to hear her say: “I have already written to inform your unhappy father:’ But as I drove away and turned back in the car to take what promised to be my last view of the house, I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world.

“I shall never go back,” I said to myself.

A door had shut, the low door in the wall I had sought and found in Oxford; open it now and I should find no enchanted garden.

I had come to the surface, into the light of common day and the fresh sea-air, after long captivity in the sunless coral palaces and waving forests of the ocean bed.

I had left behind me — what? Youth? Adolescence? Romance? The conjuring stuff of these things, “the Young Magician’s Compendium,” that neat cabinet where the ebony wand had its place beside the delusive [vocab: Tending to delude; Having the nature of a delusion; false] billiard balls, the penny that folded double and the feather flowers that could be drawn into a hollow candle.

“I have left behind illusion,” I said to myself. “Henceforth I live in a world of three dimensions — with the aid of my five senses.”

I have since learned that there is no such world; but then, as the car turned out of sight of the house, I thought it took no finding, but lay all about me at the end of the avenue.

My Theme Is Memory
My  theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.

These memories, which are my life — for we possess nothing certainly except the past — were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark’s, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder or pecking broken biscuit from between my lips; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that morning.

These memories are the memorials and pledges of the vital hours of a lifetime. These hours of afflatus in the human spirit, the springs of art, are, in their mystery, akin to the epochs of history, when a race which for centuries has lived content, unknown, behind its own frontiers, digging, eating, sleeping, begetting, doing what was requisite for survival and nothing else, will, for a generation or two, stupefy the world, commit all manner of crimes, perhaps, follow the wildest chimeras, go down in the end in agony, but leave behind a record of new heights scaled and new rewards won for all mankind, the vision fades, the soul sickens, and the routine of survival starts again.

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 counterfeits 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, 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 side street, pause, breathe freely and take our bearings, or to push ahead, outdistance 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.

For nearly ten years I was thus borne along a road outwardly full of change and incident, but never during that time, except sometimes in my painting — and that at longer and longer intervals — did I come alive as I had been during the time of my friendship with Sebastian. I took it to be youth, not life that I was losing. My work upheld me, for I had chosen to do what I could do well, did better daily, and liked doing; incidentally it was something which no one else at that time was attempting to do. I became an architectural painter. I have always loved building, holding it to be not only the highest achievement of man but one in which, at the moment of consummation, things were most clearly taken out of his hands and perfected, without his intention, by other means, and I regarded men as something much less than the buildings they made and inhabited, as mere lodgers and short-term sub-lessees of small importance in the long, fruitful life of their homes.

Julia Speaks About Sin
Following her brother Bridey cruelly telling her she couldn’t meet with his fiancé because she was “living in sin” with Charles, Julia collapses in tears and has a long speech with Charles.
“‘Living in sin’; not just doing wrong, as I did when I went to America; doing wrong, knowing it is wrong, stopping doing it, forgetting. That’s not what they mean. That’s not Bridey’s pennyworth. He means just what it says in black and white.

“Living in sin, with sin, by sin, for sin, every hour, every day, year in, year out. Waking up with sin in the morning, seeing the curtains drawn on sin, bathing it, dressing it, clipping diamonds to it, feeding it, showing it round, giving it a good time, putting it to sleep at night with a tablet of Dial if it’s fretful.

“Always the same, like an idiot child carefully nursed, guarded from the world. ‘Poor Julia,’ they say, ‘she can’t go out. She’s got to take care of her little sin. A pity it ever lived,’ they say, ‘but it’s so strong. Children like that always are. Julia’s so good to her little, mad sin.’”

An hour ago, I thought, under the sunset, she sat turning her ring in the water and counting the days of happiness; now under the first stars and the last grey whisper of day, all this mysterious tumult of sorrow! What had happened to us in the Painted Parlor? What shadow had fallen in the candlelight? Two rough sentences and a trite phrase. She was beside herself; her voice, now muffled in my breast, now clear and anguished, came to me in single words and broken sentences, which may be strung together thus: “Past and future; the years when I was trying to be a good wife, in the cigar smoke, while time crept on and the counters clicked on the backgammon board, and the man who was ‘dummy’ at the men’s table filled the glasses; when I was trying to bear his child, torn in pieces by something already dead; putting him away, forgetting him, finding you, the past two years with you, all the future with you, all the future with or without you, war coming, world ending — sin.

“A word from so long ago, from Nanny Hawkins stitching by the hearth and the nightlight burning before the Sacred Heart. Cordelia and me with the catechism, in Mummy’s room, before luncheon on Sundays. Mummy carrying my sin with her to church, bowed under it and the black lace veil, in the chapel; slipping out with it in London before the fires were lit; taking it with her through the empty streets, where the milkman’s ponies stood with their forefeet on the pavement; Mummy dying with my sin eating at her, more cruelly than her own deadly illness.

“Mummy dying with it; Christ dying with it, nailed hand and foot; hanging over the bed in the night-nursery; hanging year after year in the dark little study at Farm Street with the shining oilcloth; hanging in the dark church where only the old char-woman raises the dust and .one candle burns; hanging at noon, high among the crowds and the soldiers; no comfort except a sponge of vinegar and the kind words of a thief; hanging for ever; never the cool sepulchre and the grave clothes spread on the stone slab, never the oil and spices in the dark cave; always the midday sun and the dice clicking for the seamless coat.

“Never the shelter of the cave or of the castle walls. Outcast in the desolate spaces where the hyenas roam at night and the rubbish heaps smoke in the daylight. No way back; the gates barred; all the saints and angels posted along the walls. Nothing but bare stone and dust and the smoldering dumps. Thrown away, scrapped, rotting down; the old man with lupus and the forked stick who limps out at nightfall to turn the rubbish, hoping for something to put in his sack, something marketable, turns away with disgust.

“Nameless and dead, like the baby they wrapped up and took away before I had seen her.”

Between her tears she talked herself into silence. I could do nothing; I was adrift in a strange sea; my hands on the metal spun threads of her tunic were cold and stiff, my eyes dry; I was as far from her in spirit, as she clung to me in the darkness, as when years ago I had lit her cigarette on the way from the station; as far as when she was out of mind, in the dry, empty years at the Old Rectory and in the jungle.

Tears spring from speech; presently in the silence her weeping stopped. She sat up, away from me, took my handkerchief, shivered, rose to her feet.

“Well,” she said, in a voice much like normal. “Bridey is one for bombshells, isn’t he?”

I followed her into the house and to her room; she sat at her looking-glass. “Considering that I’ve just recovered from a fit of hysteria,” she said, “I don’t call that at all bad.” Her eyes seemed unnaturally large and bright, her cheeks pale with two spots of high color, where, as a girl, she used to put a dab of rouge. “Most hysterical women look as if they had a bad cold. You’d better change your shirt before going down; it’s all tears and lipstick.”

“Are we going down?”

“Of course, we mustn’t leave poor Bridey on his engagement night.”

When I came back to her she said: “I’m sorry for that appalling scene, Charles. I can’t explain.”

Cordelia Tells Her Story About Sebastian to Charles
Charles learns about his college lover, Sebastian from his Cordelia (little sister to Julia and Sebastian) who is being looked after at a monastery near Carthage.

The superior simply said, “I did not think there was anything I could do to help him except pray.” He was a very holy old man and recognized it in others.”

“Holiness?”

“Oh yes, Charles, that’s what you’ve got to understand about Sebastian.

——————

“Have you told Julia this about Sebastian?”

“The substance of it; not quite as I told you. She never loved him, you know, as we do.”

“Do?’ The word reproached me; there was no past tense in Cordelia’s verb “to love:’

“Poor Sebastian!” I said. “It’s too pitiful. How will it end?”

“I think I can tell you exactly, Charles. I’ve seen others like him, and I believe they are very near and dear to God. He’ll live on, half in, half out of the community, a familiar figure pottering round with his broom and his’ bunch of keys. He’ll be a great favorite with the old fathers, something of a joke to the novices. Everyone will know about his drinking; he’ll disappear for two or three days every month or so, and they’ll all nod and smile and say in theft various accents, ‘Old Sebastian’s on the spree again,’ and then he’ll come back disheveled and shamefaced and be more devout for a day or two in the chapel. He’ll probably have little hiding places about the garden where he keeps a bottle and takes a swig now and then on the sly. They’ll bring him forward to act as guide, whenever they have an English-speaking visitor; and he will be completely charming, so that before they go they’ll ask about him and perhaps be given a hint that he has high connections at home. If he lives long enough, generations of missionaries in all kinds of remote places will think of him as a queer old character who was somehow part of the Hope of their student days, and remember him in their masses. He’ll develop little eccentricities of devotion, intense personal cults of his own; he’ll be found in the chapel at odd times and missed when he’s expected. Then one morning, after one of his drinking bouts, he’ll be picked up at the gate dying, and show by a mere flicker of the eyelid that he is conscious when they give him the last sacraments. It’s not such a bad way of getting through one’s life.”

I thought of the joyful youth with the Teddy-bear under the flowering chestnuts. “It’s not what one would have foretold,” I said. “I suppose he doesn’t suffer?”

“Oh, yes, I think he does. One can have no idea what the suffering may be, to be maimed as he is — no dignity, no power of will. No one is ever holy without suffering. It’s taken that form with him…I’ve seen so much suffering in the last few years; there’s so much coming for everybody soon. It’s the spring of love… And then in condescension to my paganism, she added; “He’s in a very beautiful place, you know, by the sea — white cloisters, a bell tower, rows of green vegetables, and a monk watering them when the sun is low?’

I laughed. “You knew I wouldn’t understand?”

“You and Julia…” she said. And then, as we moved on towards the house, “When you met me last night did you think, ‘Poor Cordelia, such an engaging child, grown up a plain and pious spinster, full of good works’? Did you think ‘thwarted’?”

It was no time for prevarication. “Yes,” I said, “I did; I don’t now, so much.”

“It’s funny,” she said, “that’s exactly the word I thought of for you and Julia. When we were up in the nursery with Nanny. ‘Thwarted passion,’ I thought.”

She spoke with that gentle, infinitesimal inflection of mockery which descended to her from her mother, but later that evening the words came back to me poignantly.

Julia wore the embroidered Chinese robe which she often used when we were dining alone at Brideshead; it was a robe whose weight and stiff folds stressed her repose; her neck rose exquisitely from the plain gold circle at her throat; her hands lay still among the dragons in her lap. It was thus that I had rejoiced to see her nights without number, and that night, watching her as she sat between the firelight and the shaded lamp, unable to look away for love of her beauty, I suddenly thought, When else have I seen her like this? Why am I reminded of another moment of vision? And it came back to me that this was how she had sat in the liner, before the storm; this was how she had looked; and I realized that she had regained what I thought she had lost for ever, the magical sadness which had drawn me to her, the thwarted look that had seemed to say, “Surely I was made for some other purpose than this?”

That night I woke in the darkness and lay awake turning over in my mind the conversation with Cordelia. How I had said, “You knew I would not understand?” How often, it seemed to me, I was brought up short, like a horse in full stride suddenly refusing an obstacle, backing from the spurs, too shy even to put his nose at it and look at the thing.

And another image came to me, of an arctic hut and a trapper alone with his furs and oil lamp and log fire; the remains of supper on the table, a few books, skis in the corner; everything dry and neat and warm inside, and outside the last blizzard of winter raging and the snow piling up against the door. Quite silently a great weight forming against the timber; the bolt straining in its socket; minute by minute in the darkness outside the white heap sealing the door, until quite soon, when the wind dropped and the sun came out on the ice slopes and the thaw set in, a block would move, slide and tumble, high above, gather way, gather weight, till the whole hillside seemed to be falling, and the little lighted place would crash open and splinter and disappear, rolling with the avalanche into the ravine.

Lord Marchmain Receives the Last Sacraments
The priest took the little silver box from his pocket and spoke again in Latin, touching the dying man with an oily wad; he finished what he had to do, put away the box and gave the final blessing. Suddenly Lord Marchmain moved his hand to his forehead; I thought he had felt the touch of the chrism and was wiping it away. “O God,” I prayed, “don’t let him do that.” But there was no need for fear; the hand moved slowly down his breast, then to his shoulder, and Lord Marchmain made the sign of the cross. Then I knew that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came to me back from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom.

Parting With Julia
While she was still upstairs Brideshead and Cordeia arrived from London; when at last we met alone it was by stealth, like young lovers.

Julia said: “Here in the shadow, in the corner of the stair — a minute to say good-bye.”

“So long to say so little.”

“You knew?”

“Since this morning; since before this morning; all this year.”

“I didn’t know till today. Oh, my dear, if you could only understand. Then I could bear to part, or bear it better. I should say my heart was breaking, if I believed in broken hearts. I can’t marry you, Charles; I can’t be with you ever again.”

“I know.”

“How can you know?”

“What will you do?”

“Just go on — alone. How can I tell what I shall do? You know the whole of me. You know I’m not one for a life of mourning. I’ve always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can’t shut myself out from His mercy. That is what it would mean; starting a life with you, without Him. One can only hope to see one step ahead. But I saw to-day there was one thing forgivable — like things in the schoolroom, so bad they are unpunishable, that only Mummy could deal with — the bad thing I was on the point of doing, that I’m not quite bad enough to do; to set up a rival good to God’s. Why should I be allowed to understand that, and not you, Charles? It may be because of Mummy, Nanny, Cordelia, Sebastian — perhaps Bridey and Mrs. Muspratt — keeping my name in their prayers; or it may be a private bargain between me and God, that if I give up this one thing I want so much, however bad I am, He won’t quite despair of me in the end.

“Now we shall both be alone, and I shall have no way of making you understand.”

“I don’t want to make it easier for you,” I said; “I hope your heart may break; but I do understand.”

The avalanche was down, the hillside swept bare behind it; the last echoes died on the white slopes; the new mound glittered and lay still in the silent valley.

Final Scene Charles Ryder
“Rightyoh. I say, did you say you knew this place before?”

“Yes very well. It belongs to friends of mine,” and as I said the words they sounded as odd in my ears as Sebastian’s had done, when, instead of saying, “It is my home;” he said, “It is where my family live.”

“It doesn’t seem to make any sense — one family in a place this size. What’s the use of it?”

“Well, I suppose Brigade are finding it useful.”

“But that’s not what it was built for, is it?”

“No,” I said, “not what it was built for. Perhaps that’s one of the pleasures of building, like having a son, wondering how he’ll grow up. I don’t know; I never built anything, and I forfeited the right to watch thy son grow up. I’m homeless, childless, middle-aged, loveless, Hooper.” He looked to see if I was being funny, decided that I was, and laughed. “Now go back to camp, keep out of the C.O.’s way, if he’s back from his recce, and don’t let on to anyone that we’ve made a nonsense of the morning?’

“Okey, Ryder?’

There was one part of the house I had not yet visited, and I went there now. The chapel showed no ill-effects of its long neglect; the art-nouveau paint was as fresh and bright, as ever; the art-nouveau lamp burned once more before the altar. I said a prayer, an ancient newly learned form of words, and left, turning towards the camp; and as I walked back, and the cook-house bugle sounded ahead of me, 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.

And yet, I thought, stepping out more briskly towards the camp, where the bugles after a pause had taken up the second call and were sounding Pick-em-up, Pick-em-up, hot potatoes — and yet that is not the last word; it is not even an apt word; it is a dead word from ten years back.

Something quite remote from anything the builders intended has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time: a small red flame — 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.