Evelyn Waugh and Brideshead Revisited

Brideshead Revisited (1944) is considered by many to be Evelyn Waugh’s (1903-1966) greatest work. The deeply passionate novel tells the story of Charles Ryder and his relationship with troubled Sebastian Flyte and his family, the Marchmains. Charles has suffered through an emotionally deprived early life and hungers for the intimacy that Sebastian offers.

Waugh’s story is autobiographical, drawn from his days at Oxford, friendships as a young man, and relationship with a cold, seemingly unloving father. By reading Brideshead and accounts of Waugh’s childhood and early adulthood, it is easy to feel the link between the author and his character. But not because of reportage—Waugh, perhaps unconsciously, channeled his pain and emotional hunger into a story filled with great emotion and beauty.

The relationship between Charles and his father is a small

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but significant part of Brideshead. There are few details of Charles’ childhood, but we know his mother died when he was young. His aunt came to live with Charles and his father, but Mr. Ryder had her leave. “I got her out in the end,” he crows to his son—who senses that his father would like to do the same to him (Brideshead, pp. 67-68). This dialogue shows a father who is enraged and hostile toward his son.

When Charles arrives home during a break from school, his father doesn’t greet him until hours later, at dinner. After a conversation in which Charles’ father talks at him rather than with him, his father begins to read at the table, ignoring his son. The rest of Charles’ stay follows a similar pattern. They have little contact each day until dinner, which Charles calls a battlefield. He uses words like “malice,” “menace,” and “strife” to describe their interactions. When they pass in the hallway or on the stairs, Charles says of his father, “He would look at me vacantly and say, ‘Ah-ha’ or ‘Very warm,’ or ‘Splendid, splendid,’” much as he might speak to an acquaintance (Brideshead, pp. 62-66). Waugh’s grandson Alexander, who wrote Fathers and Sons (2004), a biography of five generations of Waughs, notes, “Like all fictional Evelyn Waugh fathers to this date, Mr. Ryder is distant, unhelpful, one might say uncaring, even a little malicious towards his son” (Fathers, p. 283).

Sebastian is a salve for Charles’ wounds. With him, Charles finds love, warmth, appreciation, a connection. He is drawn into Sebastian’s life of partying, road trips, fine food, and wine. Charles finds something he never had before: “That summer term with Sebastian, it seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence” (Brideshead, p. 45).

Charles is eventually embraced by Sebastian’s family. He becomes privy to their darkest secrets. He is recruited by Sebastian’s manipulative mother to try to “fix” her troubled, alcoholic son. Charles feels needed, wanted—unlike the young Evelyn Waugh.

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In Waugh’s autobiography, A Little Learning (1964), the few details he gives about his relationship with his father show that it was marked by anger and distance. “For my first seven years, my father was a figure of minor importance and interest…I think he paid a visit to the nursery every evening and often made brief efforts to entertain, but I never particularly welcomed him.” He calls his mother and nanny “the sole objects of love” until prep school. He ate his breakfast and dinner in the nursery “so as to be out of my father’s way” (Learning, pp. 33, 43).

We have witnesses and reporters, including Alexander Waugh in Fathers and Sons (2004), to provide a fuller picture of Evelyn Waugh’s childhood and his relationship with his father. From them, we can understand the pain that inspired Brideshead and other writings as well as the need for intimacy that drew Charles Ryder to the Marchmains. Alexander Waugh’s family history begins with Evelyn’s grandfather, Alexander, known as the Brute because of his harsh treatment of his children, including Arthur Waugh, Evelyn’s father. Alexander goes into great detail about the mistreatment of Arthur—and Arthur’s mistreatment of his son Evelyn.

Evelyn was a disappointment from birth to his parents, who wanted a girl after their first son, Alec, was born. His mother gave Evelyn an effeminate name and dressed him in girl’s clothes (Fathers, p. 74). His father favored his older son. Alexander writes: “Arthur did little to disguise his preference for Alec. When Evelyn asked for a bicycle in April 1914…Arthur went off and bought a bigger and better one for Alec, and gave Evelyn a small box of theatrical facepaint instead.” Alec “always got the best presents. Everything Evelyn was given came to him ‘shop-soiled and secondhand’ and he knew it” (Fathers, pp. 78-79).

The favoritism helped mold Evelyn’s acerbic wit—which in turn helped him to become a great writer. But that wit also fueled an animosity between father and son not unlike that between Charles Ryder and his father. Alexander writes, “Arthur knew that Evelyn was different, unlovable perhaps, not the sweet daughter he had always wanted, but a distant and brilliant boy. He did not like Evelyn’s manner; he detested his sharp tongue, his cynical wit and satirical humor” (Fathers, p. 153).

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When Evelyn was 17, Arthur, a literary critic and publisher, published a second collection of his critical work and grudgingly dedicated it to Evelyn. The first collection had been dedicated to Alec. Evelyn’s dedication was “a million miles from the heartfelt gush of his brother’s dedication four years earlier,” Alexander writes (Fathers, p. 156).

Evelyn revealed his bitterness in a 1936 short story, “Winner Takes All,” in which a wealthy mother favors her older son and sabotages her younger son, Tom, at every turn. Tom was a disappointment; the mother had wanted a girl (Evelyn Waugh, The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh, 1998, pp. 175-191).

But while Charles Ryder’s father is cold and appears unloving, Waugh also portrayed him as something of an eccentric. Why the more sympathetic father in Brideshead than the mother in “Winner Takes All”? Alexander, who describes the portrait as “semi-affectionate,” provides some clues. As a child, Evelyn yearned for his father’s approval. But his brother, Alec, being more capable simply because he was older, impressed their father, Arthur. Evelyn tried to keep up but couldn’t. “It may be true that in his first ten years he saw his father as a decrepit old bore, ‘a figure of minor importance and interest,’ but it is also the case that he tried hard to win his approval,” Alexander writes (Fathers, p. 83). Later, as a young man, “despite the embarrassment and ennui that Evelyn sometimes felt in his father’s company, he was not past wishing to please him.” Alexander describes how Evelyn applied to “a less illustrious” college, hoping to save his father money (Fathers, pp. 158-159).

In Brideshead, Charles’ happiness with Sebastian is increased when he is welcomed into his friend’s family. According to Alexander, Evelyn railed at readers’ attempts to identify the models for his characters (Alexander Waugh, “Genius Loci,” Literary Review, August 2009). But it is widely believed that Evelyn got his inspiration for the Marchmains from the Lygon family, who he spent time with during his 20s. Their home, Madresfield, was the basis for the fictional estate Brideshead. “Fun and fantasy reigned, although always with an undertow of sorrow” at Madresfield, writes Paula Byrne in Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead (2011), a book about Waugh and the Lygons

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(Byrne, p. 161). As readers of Brideshead know, Sebastian and his family were anguished people.

Suffering contributed to Evelyn Waugh’s creativity, but creativity did not cure. Waugh showed the same disdain for his children that he felt from his father and that Charles Ryder felt from his.

Evelyn’s son (and Alexander’s father) Auberon Waugh wrote an autobiography with a telling title, Will This Do? (1998). He describes his father, Evelyn, as cold, exasperated, and bored with his children. “There could be no mistaking the relief of his children when he was absent, the great brooding presence was removed” (p. 44). Auberon’s version of his childhood was corroborated in letters his father, Evelyn, wrote to friends. One of them read, “My news are the great news that all my children have at last disappeared to their various places of education…I now dislike them all equally” (Fathers, p. 299).

Auberon’s book reveals how angry he was with his father, but also shows that he understood what was behind his father’s behavior. In 1955, Evelyn had what appeared to be a psychotic episode. His son writes, “What he never came to terms with was any suggestion that his habitual melancholia might have been a form of clinical depression” (Will This Do?, p. 54).

Auberon was a successful writer, best known for his satirical diaries in the British magazine Private Eye. Like his father, Evelyn, he channeled pain and anger into creativity. But he appears to have been a very different father from Evelyn. After Auberon’s death, his son Alexander wrote, “Our relationship was never perfect, but it was probably better than many” (Fathers, p. 17).

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