Flytes of fancy Evelyn Waugh might not have liked the film but he did like the book Our associate editor likes both
Baumann, Paul
NOTEBOOK Paul Baumann FLYTES OF FANCY 'Brideshead' all over again Santa was very good to me this year. I certainly didn't deserve it. Somehow-perhaps it was my incessant whining-she managed to...
...I'm obsessed...
...And a death-bed reconciliation to boot...
...Have I mellowed, or merely gone soft in the head...
...Waugh's romance with the doomed Flyte family was egregiously sentimental, the celebration of the landed aristocracy risible, the sex scenes ludicrous, the theology medieval by way of the Catholic Truth Guild...
...Probably both...
...Among my favorite scenes are Cordelia's disquisition on Sebastian's unsuspected holiness...
...It wasn't until five or six years ago that I managed to sit through even one episode...
...Despite Waugh's absurd pretensions and prejudices, Brideshead's redemptive sense of life's longings and love's possibilities is wonderfully all of a piece...
...Somehow-perhaps it was my incessant whining-she managed to get her more cinematic-minded elves to cobble together exactly what I had asked for...
...I thought Ryder's melancholy unearned, the burnished settings preposterous, the homosexual infatuation and the foppishness irritating, Anthony Blanche's stutter maddening, and Sebastian's Teddy bear as inexcusable as his alcoholism...
...Santa assured me that she had, through various subterfuges, purchased this extravagant indulgence at a considerable discount...
...Inevitably, the movie suffers from many of the same excesses...
...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...
...As he noted, the novel somehow triumphs over its showy snobbery and idiosyncratic piety...
...I found myself absorbed-absorbed utterly by Waugh's brilliant evocation of the potency of memory and longing -"for we possess nothing certainly except the past," as Waugh's narrator Charles Ryder confesses...
...In between, I reread the novel (I had first read it fifteen years ago...
...The English journalist Christopher Hitchens has referred to the novel as Brideshead Regurgitated...
...That's the most boring movie ever made...
...Noooo, not again," beseeches my eleven-year-old son...
...It is a novel altogether readable and magical...
...Eight months later I watched all ten hours again...
...everything they think important is different from other people...
...Perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols," Ryder speculates, "a hill of many invisible crests...
...I suspect it has to do with theological battle fatigue, exacerbated by my own accidie...
...A dozen...
...And now...
...Jeremy Irons, Laurence Olivier, Diana Quick, Claire Bloom, and Anthony Andrews seem nearly perfect to me now, but when I first saw Brideshead on PBS in the early 1980s, I couldn't watch it...
...I suppose I was longing for something that both mirrored my increasing fecklessness and yet tempered it...
...There lying under the tree, along with the keys to my new Maserati, were all six video-cassettes of the now antique ten-hour BBC miniseries, Brideshead Revisited...
...A sham and a snobbish sham," was the judgment of many critics, Burgess conceded...
...Price was no object...
...Grappling with my addiction, I found some comfort in learning that Anthony Burgess was similarly afflicted...
...Symptoms of this obsession began to appear about a year-and-a-half ago...
...Yet Burgess confessed to having read Brideshead at least a dozen times...
...Presently I'm reading the novel for a third time, and making my way through Waugh's letters...
...On impulse I borrowed the first cassette of Brideshead from the library...
...I needed to be reminded of something-something transcending (literally and literarily) the next clash over a papal pronouncement, the last irksome liturgy, the course of church politics generally...
...Sebastian's earlier off-handed confession of faith-"they've [Catholics] got an entirely different outlook on life...
...Still-in my best Sebastian Flyte manner-I can't help myself...
...doors that open as in a dream to reveal only a further stretch of carpet and another door...
...In a weak moment-and I seem to be having more and more of them-I would have paid nearly anything...
...Whenever my children see me eyeing a Brideshead cassette, much moaning and gnashing of teeth can be heard...
...Any novel that can make that remarkable intimation believable is worth reading a few times...
...This is one of those disturbing novels in which the faults do not matter," Burgess professed...
...I did not interrogate her about the details...
...In any event, John Mortimer's (of Rumpole fame) screenplay is remarkably faithful to the novel...
...Father Mowbry's hilarious attempts to catechize the ambitious Rex Mottram...
...He has a point...
...Though he selected Brideshead as one of the best novels of the last fifty years, he readily acknowledged its glaring flaws...
...and of course the epic domestic battle over ministering extreme unction to Lord Marchmain...
Vol. 123 • January 1996 • No. 2
