Supplementary: Brideshead Revisited (2) – on the description of marital and extra-marital sex

There are some interesting descriptions of sex in Brideshead. Waugh avoids any explicit reference to gay sex, but he is slightly more comfortable with marital affairs, taking a quick peek into the bedroom. When Charles returns from his two-year long trip to South America, his reaction to meeting his wife could not be more off-hand if he tried. “There was also a daughter now, she remarked” (218) – noted in the same tone as if she had had the spare bedroom redecorated. When they are at last alone, the scene is described thus:
“She talked in this way while she undressed, with an effort to appear at ease,; then she sat at the dressing table, ran a comb through her hair, and with her bare back towards me, looking at herself in the glass, said “Shall I put my face to bed?”
It was a familiar phrase, one that I did not like; she meant, should she remove her make-up, cover herself with grease, and put her hair in a net.
“No” I said, “not at once”.
Then she knew what was wanted. She had neat, hygienic ways for that too, but there were both relief and triumph in her smile of welcome; later we parted and lay in our twin beds a yard or two distant, smoking”.
Waugh packs a huge amount of information in this brief scene of clinical, hygienic marital sex. When his wife offers herself – obliquely, but quite clearly – to her returning husband after two years apart, she can’t even look at him. She seems to disgust him somewhat – “cover herself with grease”- and his acceptance of her offer is equally half hearted – “not at once”. her relief and triumph derives from his acceptance of her offer. It is later implied that she has been unfaithful in his absence, and that he is aware of this – her relief derives from a mistaken belief that her infidelity has gone unreported, or is forgiven. This is a marriage where little needs to be said – later, when Charles decides to go to see Julia, his mistress, rather than his newly arrived daughter, signalling effectively the end of the marriage, all she says is “I wish it hadn’t got to happen quite this way” (256)

Sex with his mistress on the other hand is more tempestuous, with the storm raging on the Atlantic acting as a usual metaphor:
“As we made our halting, laborious way forward…we were alternately jostled together, then strained, nearly sundered, arms and fingers interlocked as I held the rail and Julia clung to me, thrust together again, drawn apart, then in a plunge deeper than the rest, I found myself flung across her, pressing her against the rail, warding myself off her with the arms that held her prisoner on either side” (248)
This plunging and swooping goes on for some time. When the actual, non-metaphorical sex happens a little later, the language Waugh uses is quite extraordinary:
“Julia led me below. It was no time of the sweets of luxury; they would come, in their season, with the swallow and the lime flowers. Now in the rough water there was a formality to be observed, no more. It was as though a deed of conveyance of her narrow loins had been drawn and sealed. I was making my first entry as the freeholder of a property I would enjoy and develop at leisure”. (248)
So not only is this first sexual exchange portrayed in legalistic, commercial terms, but more precisely as a transaction relating to property. Julia eventually inherits Brideshead House, and if they had married Charles would have shared in this inheritance. (Incidentally I wonder if the reference to the “swallow” an accidental punning reference to oral sex? If that’s not too far for you, then this surely is: the mention of lime flowers could be an oblique reference to the fact that lime trees are hermaphroditic, with both male and female parts, suggesting Charles’s tastes are not solely confined to women, as by now we are almost certainly aware.

Portraying sex in novels in the first half of the twentieth century was a challenge – writers were pushing at the boundaries of what public taste and censors would allow, and of course sometimes – Lady Chatterley, Ulysses, The Well of Loneliness, etc – crossing the line. Waugh seems to me to be ambivalent in his references to heterosexual sex – it is treated almost as a necessary evil, but is far from comfortable compared to his treatment of the relationships between men.

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, 1946

Why do I write this blog? Thinking about it there are four principal reasons, with one bonus justification.

1. To keep a record of what I read. Simple as that – just to look back and see what I have read over 12-24 months is interesting, as my appetite for classic fiction wanes and is replaced by recent history, for example.

2.    To keep a note of what happens in the novels I read. I appreciate that probably sounds a bit daft at first, but if you think about it, how many times have you picked up a book and wondered whether you had read it or not? Writing down what happens helps fixed the main events of a story in my memory. Of course, re-reading books and rediscovering them can be great fun, but I find it frustrating not being able to remember what happens in a book even though I know I have read it.

3.    To make me a careful reader. This follows on very much from the above – if I know I am going to have to write something about a novel, I will read it more carefully than otherwise. I will even make marginal notes and highlight sections if I am being really conscientious. When I do this of course it means I am more likely to remember the detail of the book, but writing it down reinforces this.

4.    To have something interesting and original to say about the novel/book.

(The bonus reason is that I occasionally use this blog to write about something other than my reading. It’s harmless, and gives me somewhere to work out my thoughts, or maybe just show off a bit, even if just to myself.)

So when I finished Evelyn Waugh’s 1946 novel “Brideshead Revisited” and found I didn’t really have anything new or insightful to say about the novel, I was disappointed. Looking back on the list above however, I realised there are nevertheless plenty of reasons to blog about the novel, even if it won’t be as amusing or clever as I would have hoped – it still ticks three of the four boxes.

“Brideshead Revisited” is narrated by Charles Ryder, an upper middle class officer who is billeted in the grounds of an English country house at an indeterminate point in the second world war. He is startled to realise he knows the house well, having visited as a guest many times. The body of the novel is a series of reminiscences starting with Charles’s time at Oxford in the early 20’s, when he meets Sebastian Flyte, the younger son of the Brideshead family. The fact he is a younger son, and therefore unlikely to inherit the family title or house, is significant – he dedicates himself to a life of excess, ending as an alcoholic wreck. The surname Flyte is also telling – Sebastian is quintessentially flighty, a decadent aesthete interested in only what pleases him. The bond between Ryder and Flyte is strong and instantaneous, and their lives run in parallel until Sebastian’s alcoholism finally pulls them apart.

The sexual nature of their friendship is fairly explicit – bearing in mind that gay relationships were illegal in the UK before 1968, and only decriminalised in very specific circumstances thereafter. They have an openly gay friend – Antoine Blanche – who is accepted by them without judgment or any hint of censure. Waugh is as clear as possible on this point, dropping multiple hints. To give one example, Charles’s cousin, Jasper, visits him early on during his time at Oxford, and warns him “Beware of the Anglo-Catholics – they’re all sodomites” (28). The Flyte’s are one of England’s leading aristocratic Catholic families.

They grow apart, and Charles becomes an artist. He eventually marries, although his relationship with his wife is distant, and he has no interest in his children. He goes on an expedition into the South American jungle, and is away for two years – when he meets his wife after this absence their lack of affectionate is palpable. On the stormy Atlantic crossing home he begins an affair with Sebastian’s sister, Julia, but she ultimately rejects him in favour of her Catholic faith. In a book-ending chapter back at Brideshead, Ryder reveals he too has embraced Catholicism.

This is a complex novel with many themes. The loss of Edwardian England, preserved in part in Brideshead and Oxford, but torn apart by the devastation of the Great War. Waugh’s 1959 introduction to the novel talks about it being about the imminent loss of the great English country house, but that seems a minor theme to a 21^st century reader. Catholicism, the Second World War, love, homosexuality – it makes it seem a worthy novel, and eventually it is, but the early scenes in Oxford in particular are extraordinarily evocative:

“Oxford, in those days, was still a city of aquatint. In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman’s day; her autumnal mists, her grey springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days – such as that day – when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth. It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamour.”