Lost and Found: a review of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited.
From Monday, 5 March to Wednesday, 4 April, I read Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1945 [portions of the novel were previously published in abbreviated form in Town and Country]; 351 pps.); this is the original version, not the revised edition published in 1959, owing to Waugh's subsequent embarrassed distaste for the novel. The copy that I have includes a three-paged insert containing Christopher Morley's review of Brideshead Revisited, reprinted from the December 1945 Book-of-the-Month Club news, that was designed "to be pasted, if desired, to the flyleaf of the book." The jacket illustration is by Lester M. Peterson; if you remove the jacket, you will see a rather fraught, symbolic illustration engraved on the front cover.
Brideshead Revisited is Waugh's much-celebrated look at the passage of time and the operation of divine Grace, as defined by the Catholic Church, through the eyes of the architectual painter Charles Ryder (a captain in the British Army, during what would be called the Second World War), as he interacts with various members of an aristocratic Catholic family on its uppers, the Flytes. Ryder's reminiscences of his time with the Flytes are framed by his present-day (either 1943 or 1944, though most likely 1943; however, opinions are divided) activities, helping conduct seemingly pointless -- certainly all sense of urgency is lacking -- training exercises in England; the unit he's attached to has just relocated to the Flytes' former seat, Brideshead, in Wiltshire. The Flytes are already well into the process of dissolution and dispersal when Ryder meets them in 1923: the younger son Sebastian is, like Charles, a student at Oxford, although he is far more frivolous and eccentric (he carries a teddy bear -- the "t" is capitalized here; the bear is named Aloysius -- with him everywhere, to the amusement of his peers) than Ryder; the father, Alexander (Lord Marchmain; he is a marquess), lives in Venice with his mistress, Cara, a former dancer; the mother, Teresa (her title is Marchioness of Marchmain), is a devout Catholic (Alex converted to marry her, but tacitly renounced all religious practice, if not belief, when he left her) who refuses to grant her husband a divorce and who desperately tries to hold her family together; the elder daughter, Julia, is very much of the "Bright Young Things" set (which Waugh's 1930 novel Vile Bodies satirized), and is a fleeting presence in the first part of the book; the younger daughter, Cordelia, is wise beyond her years, though naïve about certain matters; and the elder son, nicknamed "Brideshead" or, less respectfully, "Bridey," after the Flyte family home (his Christian name is never divulged), is an absurdly somber, ineffectual figure -- his half-hearted plans to enter the seminary, the military, or Parliament come to naught -- whose great passion in life is eventually revealed to be the collection and categorization of matchbooks. (Truly, he is a man made for the Internet Age.)
The first part of the novel (titled "Et in Arcadia Ego," what Christopher Morley derided as "the most worn and ancient of tags" in his otherwise glowing review of Brideshead Revisited) is much taken with Ryder's and Sebastian's careers at Oxford in the mid-1920s; much of the references dropped here will be at least a little mysterious, if not downright esoteric, to the modern reader (Compton Mackenzie's lengthy bildungsroman set at Oxford, Sinister Street [p. 27], Michael Arlen's The Green Hat and David "Bunny" Garnett's Lady Into Fox [p. 60], to name three -- the last of which sounds like a peculiarly English variation on Kafka's The Metamorphosis), but they're deployed with an adeptness that mostly allows them to blend into a background white noise unless the reader has an especial interest in trivia. (I confess to not having heard of charcoal biscuits before reading Brideshead Revisited.)
The most consistently interesting character -- and, unfortunately, one who doesn't appear nearly often enough -- is Anthony Blanche (who was apparently based on an acquaintance of Waugh's, the poet-cum-journalist Brian Howard), an openly homosexual foreign student at Oxford who is far more louche, dissipated, cynical, and unintellectual than either Sebastian or Ryder (Ryder observes: "..his vices flourished less in the pursuit of pleasure than in the wish to shock"; p. 46); he is also a remarkably incisive observer of the passing scene, for all of his affected mannerisms (for example, his stutter). Blanche has a nearly Wildean knack for turning a phrase, if not dropping an actual bon mot: speaking of a platonic crush on a debutante, Blanche says, "'I was besotted with her, crawling with love like lice'" (p. 52; this nearly anticipates William S. Burroughs's "love love love in slop buckets"); discussing Sebastian, he says:
"'Tell me, candidly, have you ever heard Sebastian say anything you have remembered for five minutes? You know, when I hear him talk, I am reminded of that in some ways nauseating picture of "Bubbles." Conversation, as I know it, is like juggling; up go the balls and the balloons and the plates, up and over, in and out, spinning and leaping, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them. But when dear Sebastian speaks it is like a little sphere of soapsuds drifting off the end of an old clay pipe, anywhere, full of rainbow light for a second and then -- phut! -- vanished, with nothing left at all, nothing.'"
-- pps. 56-7
The lofty, edifying purpose of Brideshead Revisited isn't exactly obscured: as early as the end of Chapter Two, Book I, what at first seems a straightforward narrative of Ryder's Sunday walk to Sebastian's rooms concludes with a superficially flip sentence full of foreshadowing and symbolism: "So through a world of piety I made my way to Sebastian" (p. 60). A little bit later, in Chapter Four, Ryder expounds upon Sebastian's Catholicism, and his own lack of faith, at some length:
"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 which some people professed and others did not; at 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 intransigeant historical claims; nor, had they done so, would I have been much interested."
-- pps. 85-6
Ryder has plenty of religious discussions with the Flytes, even Sebastian, as in the following exchange; Sebastian speaks first:
"'So you see we're a mixed family religiously. Brideshead and Cordelia are both fervent Catholics; he's miserable, she's bird-happy; Julia and I are half-heathen; I am happy, I rather think Julia isn't; Mummy is popularly believed to be a saint and Papa is excommunicated -- and I wouldn't know which of them was happy. Anyway, however you look at it, happiness doesn't seem to have much to do with it, and that's all I want....I wish I liked Catholics more.'
"'They seem just like other people.'
"'My dear Charles, that's exactly what they're not -- particularly in this country, where they're so few. It's not just that they're a clique -- as a matter of fact, they're at least four cliques all blackguarding each other half the time -- but they've got an entirely different outlook on life; everything they think important is different from other people.'"
-- p. 89
By the second part of the novel, titled "A Twitch Upon the Thread" and set in the 1930s, most of the frivolity of the Oxford years has been burned away, replaced by a superficially effervescent (in the case of Ryder) or biting (in the case of Julia) account of parallel marriages in the upper crust of English society; a fairly detailed narrative of how Ryder and Julia find momentary happiness with each other; and a rather ham-fisted settling of scores among the Flytes and Ryder by the Catholic faith. Sometimes you find the Mother Church; and sometimes the Mother Church finds you.
This was my first exposure to Waugh's writing; it belatedly occurs to me that perhaps Brideshead Revisited was not the best introduction to Waugh that one could have wished for. Far from the mordant and misanthropic satire that he is most lauded for, Brideshead is, at essence, both an apologia for Catholicism and a conversion narrative; everything else here is merely bait for Waugh's hook. If Brideshead wasn't as unreadable as Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory (1940), its conclusion is just as unbelievable and forced as that of Greene's polemic. The word "Brideshead" itself has more than one meaning: the fact that it, like the surname of the heroine of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Sue Bridehead, is evocative of "maidenhead," suggests that "Brideshead" also implies innocence, if not actual virginity; Ryder's reminscences are certainly reflections on a time when he was more spiritually innocent (or naïve), and of how he came to gradually lose this quality. For all that "Brideshead Revisited" is a fitting title for this novel, "Lost and Found" is even more apropos; however, "Brideshead Revisited" does have a greater degree of subtlety than "Lost and Found" does: one suspects that the sales and acclaim that the book enjoyed my not have been as great under the latter title.
It's telling that Christopher Morley's review elides over the spiritual concerns of the novel, concentrating rather on the Oxford years (it's not surprising that Morley let pass unremarked the openly homosexual Anthony Blanche, or the at minimum homoerotic friendship of Ryder and Sebastian, which Lord Marchmain's mistress Cara notes with approval as being typical of English and German youths, saying that she thinks that these types of friendships "'are very good if they do not go on too long'" [p. 101]); it's also revealing that such fellow novelists as Henry Green and Edmund Wilson were dismayed at the denouement, signalled as early as the conclusion of Book I, after Lady Marchmain's funeral, when Cordelia quotes a line from G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown detective story, "The Queer Feet" (the quote supplies the title of Book II): Waugh admitted to his agent A.D. Peters, and his friend, the priest, theologian and writer Ronald Knox (who also wrote detective stories, primarily ones featuring Miles Bredon) that "The whole thing is steeped in theology." Paul Elmen noted in his article "Brideshead Revisited: A Twitch Upon the Thread" for the Christian Century, that Waugh's novel "is a story of some fishes lost in a great sea until they are finally hauled to safety by a jerk of the pole in the hands of the Fisher King"; he also pointed out that Waugh patterned Lord Marchmain's deathbed reconciliation with Mother Church after a similar such instance in his own life: Waugh brought a priest to the deathbed of his friend Hubert Duggan, despite the opposition of some of Duggan's family. Duggan died an early death from tuberculosis, although Elmen calls it "dissipation."
Joan Acocella, in her review essay of Alexander Waugh's (he is Evelyn's grandson) family biography Fathers and Sons for the 2 July 2007 issue of The New Yorker, notes that Evelyn's uncle Alec
"..claimed that [Evelyn's father] Arthur was also responsible for the tone of Evelyn’s novels. Evelyn, Alec insists, was a warm, gentle man who made himself seem cold for fear of being like his father. It is not for nothing, Alec says, that Evelyn’s most sentimental book, 'Brideshead Revisited' (1945), was written the year after Arthur’s death: 'The warning example was now removed.' Also removed was the danger of pleasing his father, by seeming tenderhearted."
The notion that Evelyn Waugh, who even from early in his career had a reputation for being "a racist, anti-Semitic, misogynist reactionary," and who, in his later years, as Anthony Lane noted in his essay reviewing The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh and David Wykes's biography Evelyn Waugh: A Literary Life for the 4 October 1999 issue of The New Yorker, "claimed to prefer his books to his children ('A child is easily replaced')" and described his six children as "'feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless,'" was really "a warm, gentle man who made himself seem cold for fear of being like his father" is mind-boggling, not to say utterly incredible. (Lane shrewdly observes, "All in all, the privilege of reading Waugh is rivalled only by the relief of never having had to encounter such a rare, irascible beast in person; the privilege is all the more acute because, with age, his fiction starts to shimmer with self-consciousness-a quickened Falstaffian shame, far beyond the reach of your average club bore-about the monstrous figure that he knows he must cut.") While at first blush Waugh may seem to be a risibly inappropriate advocate for the divine grace and eternal peace that Catholicism may bestow, upon further consideration of the long and checkered -- not to say sanguine -- history of Mother Church, he is fitting, indeed, perfect, for the office; which is precisely why Brideshead Revisited leaves me cold, for all the admirable qualities of Waugh's prose. (I couldn't help but compare it to another much-celebrated novel of an aristocratic family winging its way into the dustbin of history even as war looms and bumptious, uncouth and uncultured members of the lower orders throw elbows about in their attempt to scramble to a higher perch in society: Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard. For all my reservations about The Leopard, I found it a much more congenial novel of the type than Brideshead Revisited; Lampedusa also shows the Catholic Church in a better light than Waugh does, given that it sends clerics to winnow out the spurious relics from the Salina family shrine at the end of the novel.)
I still want to read Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy (consisting of Men At Arms [1952], Officers and Gentlemen [1955], and Unconditional Surrender [1961; published as The End of the Battle in the U.S.]), which I first learned of from Paul Fussell's excellent Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (1989); but I'll probably wait awhile to clear the aftertaste of Brideshead from my mind. (I must confess that the prologue of Brideshead had me happily anticipating the Sword of Honour books.) I also want to begin Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time in the near future, the first volumes of which cover many of the same years and scenes as the first book of Brideshead (indeed, Powell fictionalized many of the same people that Waugh did, such as the aforementioned Hubert Duggan); but, again, a bit of distance between finishing Brideshead and beginning Dance is a desideratum.
Brideshead Revisited is Waugh's much-celebrated look at the passage of time and the operation of divine Grace, as defined by the Catholic Church, through the eyes of the architectual painter Charles Ryder (a captain in the British Army, during what would be called the Second World War), as he interacts with various members of an aristocratic Catholic family on its uppers, the Flytes. Ryder's reminiscences of his time with the Flytes are framed by his present-day (either 1943 or 1944, though most likely 1943; however, opinions are divided) activities, helping conduct seemingly pointless -- certainly all sense of urgency is lacking -- training exercises in England; the unit he's attached to has just relocated to the Flytes' former seat, Brideshead, in Wiltshire. The Flytes are already well into the process of dissolution and dispersal when Ryder meets them in 1923: the younger son Sebastian is, like Charles, a student at Oxford, although he is far more frivolous and eccentric (he carries a teddy bear -- the "t" is capitalized here; the bear is named Aloysius -- with him everywhere, to the amusement of his peers) than Ryder; the father, Alexander (Lord Marchmain; he is a marquess), lives in Venice with his mistress, Cara, a former dancer; the mother, Teresa (her title is Marchioness of Marchmain), is a devout Catholic (Alex converted to marry her, but tacitly renounced all religious practice, if not belief, when he left her) who refuses to grant her husband a divorce and who desperately tries to hold her family together; the elder daughter, Julia, is very much of the "Bright Young Things" set (which Waugh's 1930 novel Vile Bodies satirized), and is a fleeting presence in the first part of the book; the younger daughter, Cordelia, is wise beyond her years, though naïve about certain matters; and the elder son, nicknamed "Brideshead" or, less respectfully, "Bridey," after the Flyte family home (his Christian name is never divulged), is an absurdly somber, ineffectual figure -- his half-hearted plans to enter the seminary, the military, or Parliament come to naught -- whose great passion in life is eventually revealed to be the collection and categorization of matchbooks. (Truly, he is a man made for the Internet Age.)
The first part of the novel (titled "Et in Arcadia Ego," what Christopher Morley derided as "the most worn and ancient of tags" in his otherwise glowing review of Brideshead Revisited) is much taken with Ryder's and Sebastian's careers at Oxford in the mid-1920s; much of the references dropped here will be at least a little mysterious, if not downright esoteric, to the modern reader (Compton Mackenzie's lengthy bildungsroman set at Oxford, Sinister Street [p. 27], Michael Arlen's The Green Hat and David "Bunny" Garnett's Lady Into Fox [p. 60], to name three -- the last of which sounds like a peculiarly English variation on Kafka's The Metamorphosis), but they're deployed with an adeptness that mostly allows them to blend into a background white noise unless the reader has an especial interest in trivia. (I confess to not having heard of charcoal biscuits before reading Brideshead Revisited.)
The most consistently interesting character -- and, unfortunately, one who doesn't appear nearly often enough -- is Anthony Blanche (who was apparently based on an acquaintance of Waugh's, the poet-cum-journalist Brian Howard), an openly homosexual foreign student at Oxford who is far more louche, dissipated, cynical, and unintellectual than either Sebastian or Ryder (Ryder observes: "..his vices flourished less in the pursuit of pleasure than in the wish to shock"; p. 46); he is also a remarkably incisive observer of the passing scene, for all of his affected mannerisms (for example, his stutter). Blanche has a nearly Wildean knack for turning a phrase, if not dropping an actual bon mot: speaking of a platonic crush on a debutante, Blanche says, "'I was besotted with her, crawling with love like lice'" (p. 52; this nearly anticipates William S. Burroughs's "love love love in slop buckets"); discussing Sebastian, he says:
"'Tell me, candidly, have you ever heard Sebastian say anything you have remembered for five minutes? You know, when I hear him talk, I am reminded of that in some ways nauseating picture of "Bubbles." Conversation, as I know it, is like juggling; up go the balls and the balloons and the plates, up and over, in and out, spinning and leaping, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them. But when dear Sebastian speaks it is like a little sphere of soapsuds drifting off the end of an old clay pipe, anywhere, full of rainbow light for a second and then -- phut! -- vanished, with nothing left at all, nothing.'"
-- pps. 56-7
The lofty, edifying purpose of Brideshead Revisited isn't exactly obscured: as early as the end of Chapter Two, Book I, what at first seems a straightforward narrative of Ryder's Sunday walk to Sebastian's rooms concludes with a superficially flip sentence full of foreshadowing and symbolism: "So through a world of piety I made my way to Sebastian" (p. 60). A little bit later, in Chapter Four, Ryder expounds upon Sebastian's Catholicism, and his own lack of faith, at some length:
"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 which some people professed and others did not; at 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 intransigeant historical claims; nor, had they done so, would I have been much interested."
-- pps. 85-6
Ryder has plenty of religious discussions with the Flytes, even Sebastian, as in the following exchange; Sebastian speaks first:
"'So you see we're a mixed family religiously. Brideshead and Cordelia are both fervent Catholics; he's miserable, she's bird-happy; Julia and I are half-heathen; I am happy, I rather think Julia isn't; Mummy is popularly believed to be a saint and Papa is excommunicated -- and I wouldn't know which of them was happy. Anyway, however you look at it, happiness doesn't seem to have much to do with it, and that's all I want....I wish I liked Catholics more.'
"'They seem just like other people.'
"'My dear Charles, that's exactly what they're not -- particularly in this country, where they're so few. It's not just that they're a clique -- as a matter of fact, they're at least four cliques all blackguarding each other half the time -- but they've got an entirely different outlook on life; everything they think important is different from other people.'"
-- p. 89
By the second part of the novel, titled "A Twitch Upon the Thread" and set in the 1930s, most of the frivolity of the Oxford years has been burned away, replaced by a superficially effervescent (in the case of Ryder) or biting (in the case of Julia) account of parallel marriages in the upper crust of English society; a fairly detailed narrative of how Ryder and Julia find momentary happiness with each other; and a rather ham-fisted settling of scores among the Flytes and Ryder by the Catholic faith. Sometimes you find the Mother Church; and sometimes the Mother Church finds you.
This was my first exposure to Waugh's writing; it belatedly occurs to me that perhaps Brideshead Revisited was not the best introduction to Waugh that one could have wished for. Far from the mordant and misanthropic satire that he is most lauded for, Brideshead is, at essence, both an apologia for Catholicism and a conversion narrative; everything else here is merely bait for Waugh's hook. If Brideshead wasn't as unreadable as Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory (1940), its conclusion is just as unbelievable and forced as that of Greene's polemic. The word "Brideshead" itself has more than one meaning: the fact that it, like the surname of the heroine of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Sue Bridehead, is evocative of "maidenhead," suggests that "Brideshead" also implies innocence, if not actual virginity; Ryder's reminscences are certainly reflections on a time when he was more spiritually innocent (or naïve), and of how he came to gradually lose this quality. For all that "Brideshead Revisited" is a fitting title for this novel, "Lost and Found" is even more apropos; however, "Brideshead Revisited" does have a greater degree of subtlety than "Lost and Found" does: one suspects that the sales and acclaim that the book enjoyed my not have been as great under the latter title.
It's telling that Christopher Morley's review elides over the spiritual concerns of the novel, concentrating rather on the Oxford years (it's not surprising that Morley let pass unremarked the openly homosexual Anthony Blanche, or the at minimum homoerotic friendship of Ryder and Sebastian, which Lord Marchmain's mistress Cara notes with approval as being typical of English and German youths, saying that she thinks that these types of friendships "'are very good if they do not go on too long'" [p. 101]); it's also revealing that such fellow novelists as Henry Green and Edmund Wilson were dismayed at the denouement, signalled as early as the conclusion of Book I, after Lady Marchmain's funeral, when Cordelia quotes a line from G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown detective story, "The Queer Feet" (the quote supplies the title of Book II): Waugh admitted to his agent A.D. Peters, and his friend, the priest, theologian and writer Ronald Knox (who also wrote detective stories, primarily ones featuring Miles Bredon) that "The whole thing is steeped in theology." Paul Elmen noted in his article "Brideshead Revisited: A Twitch Upon the Thread" for the Christian Century, that Waugh's novel "is a story of some fishes lost in a great sea until they are finally hauled to safety by a jerk of the pole in the hands of the Fisher King"; he also pointed out that Waugh patterned Lord Marchmain's deathbed reconciliation with Mother Church after a similar such instance in his own life: Waugh brought a priest to the deathbed of his friend Hubert Duggan, despite the opposition of some of Duggan's family. Duggan died an early death from tuberculosis, although Elmen calls it "dissipation."
Joan Acocella, in her review essay of Alexander Waugh's (he is Evelyn's grandson) family biography Fathers and Sons for the 2 July 2007 issue of The New Yorker, notes that Evelyn's uncle Alec
"..claimed that [Evelyn's father] Arthur was also responsible for the tone of Evelyn’s novels. Evelyn, Alec insists, was a warm, gentle man who made himself seem cold for fear of being like his father. It is not for nothing, Alec says, that Evelyn’s most sentimental book, 'Brideshead Revisited' (1945), was written the year after Arthur’s death: 'The warning example was now removed.' Also removed was the danger of pleasing his father, by seeming tenderhearted."
The notion that Evelyn Waugh, who even from early in his career had a reputation for being "a racist, anti-Semitic, misogynist reactionary," and who, in his later years, as Anthony Lane noted in his essay reviewing The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh and David Wykes's biography Evelyn Waugh: A Literary Life for the 4 October 1999 issue of The New Yorker, "claimed to prefer his books to his children ('A child is easily replaced')" and described his six children as "'feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless,'" was really "a warm, gentle man who made himself seem cold for fear of being like his father" is mind-boggling, not to say utterly incredible. (Lane shrewdly observes, "All in all, the privilege of reading Waugh is rivalled only by the relief of never having had to encounter such a rare, irascible beast in person; the privilege is all the more acute because, with age, his fiction starts to shimmer with self-consciousness-a quickened Falstaffian shame, far beyond the reach of your average club bore-about the monstrous figure that he knows he must cut.") While at first blush Waugh may seem to be a risibly inappropriate advocate for the divine grace and eternal peace that Catholicism may bestow, upon further consideration of the long and checkered -- not to say sanguine -- history of Mother Church, he is fitting, indeed, perfect, for the office; which is precisely why Brideshead Revisited leaves me cold, for all the admirable qualities of Waugh's prose. (I couldn't help but compare it to another much-celebrated novel of an aristocratic family winging its way into the dustbin of history even as war looms and bumptious, uncouth and uncultured members of the lower orders throw elbows about in their attempt to scramble to a higher perch in society: Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard. For all my reservations about The Leopard, I found it a much more congenial novel of the type than Brideshead Revisited; Lampedusa also shows the Catholic Church in a better light than Waugh does, given that it sends clerics to winnow out the spurious relics from the Salina family shrine at the end of the novel.)
I still want to read Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy (consisting of Men At Arms [1952], Officers and Gentlemen [1955], and Unconditional Surrender [1961; published as The End of the Battle in the U.S.]), which I first learned of from Paul Fussell's excellent Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (1989); but I'll probably wait awhile to clear the aftertaste of Brideshead from my mind. (I must confess that the prologue of Brideshead had me happily anticipating the Sword of Honour books.) I also want to begin Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time in the near future, the first volumes of which cover many of the same years and scenes as the first book of Brideshead (indeed, Powell fictionalized many of the same people that Waugh did, such as the aforementioned Hubert Duggan); but, again, a bit of distance between finishing Brideshead and beginning Dance is a desideratum.