Mad World (51 page)

Lord Marchmain’s Palace of Sin

‘He daren’t show his great purple face anywhere. He is the last, historic, authentic case of someone being hounded out of society.’

(Anthony Blanche on Lord Marchmain,
in the original manuscript of
Brideshead
)

To those in the know, such as Chips Channon, Lord Marchmain in his crumbling palazzo on the Grand Canal in Venice was unmistakably Beauchamp.

Charles is interested in the effect of Lord Marchmain’s disgrace on the rest of the family:

‘It must have upset you all when your father went away.’

‘All but Cordelia. She was too young.
^*
It upset
me
at the time. Mummy tried to explain it to the three eldest so that we wouldn’t hate papa … I was his favourite. I should be staying with him now, if it wasn’t for this foot. I’m the only one who goes. Why don’t you come too? You’d like him.’

This passage is one of the novel’s few concessions to Lady Marchmain. It raises the possibility that one of the Lygon children may have told Evelyn about that moving letter their mother wrote to them. What he certainly did know was that Hugh was the child who spent most time with his father in the years of exile. In
Brideshead
, Sebastian is the family member most loyal to his father, the one who goes out to Venice with papers for signature.

As with Hugh, Sebastian’s devotion and loyalty to his errant father is unquestionable. He tells Charles that ‘papa is a social leper’, that he lives in a ‘palace of sin’, and that the family has been tainted by sexual scandal, but this only adds to his glamour and mystery. Waugh admired Hugh Lygon’s beauty, his loyalty, his courage and his gift for friendship. He also admired his way of dealing with his father’s disgrace. It was Hugh who talked his father out of committing suicide. It was Hugh who travelled the globe to be with his father. Evelyn also saw how his vulnerable friend
drank to escape his mother, his fear of failure, and, given what had happened to his father, his own homosexuality. At Oxford, at Madresfield and in the isolation of the Arctic, he had witnessed at first hand Hugh’s great attraction and great despair.

The depiction in
Brideshead
of Lord Marchmain, whom Charles first meets in his ‘palace of sin’ in Venice, is drawn from Waugh’s own first meeting with Lord Beauchamp in Rome: ‘I was full of curiosity to meet Lord Marchmain. When I did so I was first struck by his normality, which, as I saw more of him, I found to be studied. It was as though he were conscious of a Byronic aura, which he considered to be in bad taste and was at pains to suppress.’ The notion of his studied ‘normality’ takes on additional resonance when one recalls the context in which Waugh used the word, with probing quotation marks, in his review of Compton Mackenzie’s
Thin Ice
.

Lord Marchmain is described as having ‘a noble face … slightly weary, slightly sardonic, slightly voluptuous. He seemed to be in the prime of life; it was odd to think that he was only a few years younger than my father.’ Anthony Blanche is more cutting in his description, but again it is an accurate and, to those who knew him, slightly uncomfortable description of Boom: ‘a little fleshy, perhaps, but
very
handsome, a magnifico, a voluptuary, Byronic, bored, infectiously slothful, not at all the sort of man you would expect to see easily put down’.

Both Marchmain and Beauchamp are men of high culture with a keen interest in porphyry. Marchmain is described as ‘following the sun’, just as Beauchamp followed the sun by wintering in Australia and then returning to Italy and France for the summer months. Lord Marchmain advises Charles to ‘stick to the churches’ in order to avoid the searing Venetian heat, as Evelyn had loved the cool of the churches in Venice and visited churches in Rome with Lord Beauchamp.

The ‘murky background’ of the Flytes resonates with that of the Lygons. In
Brideshead
Lord Marchmain’s status as social pariah is masterfully executed. He stays away from dining at the Luna restaurant, as it is ‘filling up with English now’. Charles and Sebastian are taken to Florian’s for coffee, where Lord Marchmain is snubbed by a party of English people, who are making for a table close to them and move away when they see who it is, suddenly talking with their heads close together. They are a Catholic man and woman that Lord Marchmain used to know when he
was in politics. Just before this, Lord Marchmain is talking about how undignified the English are ‘when they attempt to express moral disapproval’. He plays tennis with the professional coach, not with friends (Beauchamp was a keen tennis player). Lord Marchmain is also a Liberal, on the left of his party: ‘I am all the Socialists would have me be, and a great stumbling block to my own party. Well, my elder son will change all that.’ The latter allusion is to Bridey’s defection to the Tories: when the Liberal Party split over participation in Ramsay MacDonald’s National Government, Elmley joined the breakaway National Liberal grouping which later merged with the Conservative Party. Like Lord Beauchamp, Lord Marchmain despises his pious estranged wife, blaming her for his ostracism. And the references to footmen are striking. The syphilitic Kurt is described as a ‘footman’ from a popular film. Given all these connections, Chips Channon’s knowing diary entry is hardly surprising.

Chapel and Fountain

What a place to live in!

(Charles Ryder, on first seeing Brideshead Castle)

Lady Dorothy Lygon said that there was no resemblance between the landscape and architecture of the fictional Brideshead Castle and the real Madresfield Court, with the exception of the chapel. This is not so. Although Evelyn’s most direct portrayal of the physical characteristics of the house was in
A Handful of Dust
, many elements of Brideshead are shaped by Madresfield.

The surrounding landscape, the tiny village with post office and pub, the river, the sense of ‘a sequestered place, enclosed and embraced, in a single winding valley’, the house nestling out of sight, ‘couched among the lime trees like a hind in the bracken’: each loving detail offers an exact description of Madresfield. The ‘blue remembered hills’, as A. E. Housman called the Malverns, provide protection for Madresfield, just as with Brideshead, ‘round it, guarding and hiding it, stood the soft hills’. The estate’s woods of beech and oak, its avenues of lime and poplars, its wide green parklands, are all borrowed from Madresfield. On the other hand, Brideshead is not a moated house like Hetton Abbey. Nor is it red brick, nor
Victorian Gothic. There is always an element of distortion and a fusion of different models in Waugh’s fictional recreation of people and places.

Coote observed that Brideshead is ‘an epitome of stone of the Palladian style [Evelyn] loved so much. It is grey-gold, with a distinctive dome. This is the main feature derived from Castle Howard, with its famous central dome by Sir John Vanbrugh, a highly unusual feature for a private dwelling. From the dome stretch out the fountain, the lakes, the temple and the obelisk, all reminiscent of Castle Howard and giving some justification to the use of that location in both the television and movie adaptations of the novel.

Evelyn’s Hollywood memo cites the vital importance of two architectural features: the chapel and the fountain. ‘I suggest that before I leave Hollywood,’ he wrote, ‘I should be allowed to see preliminary sketches of these two features drawn under my supervision.’ The fountain represents the worldly magnificence and grace of the family which captivates Charles and the chapel symbolises his redemption.

The fountain was not in fact based upon Castle Howard’s Atlas Fountain, as is often supposed. It was, in Evelyn’s own words, ‘brought from Italy and I see it as a combination of three famous works of Bernini at Rome … the Trevi and Piazza fountains and the elephant bearing the obelisk in the Piazza Minerva, which the Romans fondly call ‘‘the little pig’’ ’. The Brideshead fountain is ‘an oval basin with an island of formal rocks at its centre; on the rocks grew, in stone, formal tropical vegetation and wild English fern in its natural fronds; through them ran a dozen streams that counterfeited springs, and round them sported fantastic tropical animals, camels and camelopards and an ebullient lion all vomiting water; on the rocks, to the height of the pediment, stood an Egyptian obelisk of red sandstone’. Waugh has in a sense brought back to Mad the fountains that he visited in Rome with Boom.

The circumstances of the commissioning of the Arts and Crafts chapel, Boom’s wedding present from his wife, are reversed in the novel: it is Lord Marchmain’s present to his religious wife. The Brideshead chapel, as Coote admitted, was based precisely on the Madresfield chapel, with its Arts and Crafts decoration and the huge life-size frescoes of the earl and his wife and their children frolicking as angels. Even the firebuckets are in the Beauchamp colours of maroon and cream.

Evelyn, in common with his hero, professed admiration for homes that
passed down the generations in the same family. Mad had done this since the eleventh century. In
Brideshead
Charles says: ‘More even than the work of great architects, I loved buildings that grew silently with the centuries, catching and keeping the best of each generation.’

But with the modern age – the Great War, the introduction of death duties, then another war – the buildings were decaying. The Flytes’ London home is Marchmain House, which they call ‘Marchers’, just as Halkyn House is called ‘Halkers’ by the Lygon family. ‘It’s sad about Marchers, isn’t it,’ says Cordelia near the end of the novel; ‘Do you know they’re going to build a block of flats and that Rex wanted to take what he called a ‘‘penthouse’’ at the top?’ In reality, Mona had tried to convert Halkers into flats, though she had been turned down by – the old nemesis – the Westminster estate, who owned the freehold. It was sold instead to the Syrian Arab Embassy. It’s now the home of the Ghana High Commission.

Lord Marchmain leaves his crumbling palazzo on the Grand Canal to die at his home in England. Knowing that, in the normal course of things, Brideshead would be inherited by Lord Brideshead and Beryl, he plans to leave the great house instead to Julia and Charles. According to Lygon family tradition, Lord Beauchamp did not want his eldest son to inherit Madresfield. He wanted to leave it to Hugh.

Conversion

It was, of course, all about the deathbed. I was present at almost exactly that scene.

(Evelyn Waugh to Ronald Knox)

Many of Evelyn’s friends and critics were appalled by the deathbed conversion of Lord Marchmain. But for Evelyn himself, this scene was the whole point of the book. To those who complained that it was unrealistic, Evelyn replied that it was a piece of reportage. He had been present at the very scene – a moment of profound spiritual significance for him. This is one of the masterstrokes of his art of composite creation: he imagines Boom on his deathbed undergoing a conversion experience like that of Maimie’s old boyfriend, Hubert Duggan.

Charles Ryder’s spiritual epiphany occurs in this scene. The operation of divine grace upon him comes at Lord Marchmain’s death, when he prays for a sign and the dying man makes the sign of the cross. The epilogue sees him kneeling at the altar of the Brideshead chapel, praying ‘an ancient, newly-learned form of words’.

For most of the novel, Charles appears to be a non-believer, though there are clues that this is a novel narrated by a convert. The Flytes’ faith is an enigma to Charles, ‘and not one which I felt particularly concerned to solve’. But Charles is also shown fighting God, mocking Catholicism as ‘mumbo jumbo’ and ‘an awful lot of nonsense’. Sebastian replies: ‘Is it nonsense? I wish it were. It sometimes sounds terribly sensible to me.’

Early in the novel there is a strong clue in the lines: ‘I have come to accept claims which then, in 1923, I never troubled to examine, and to accept the supernatural as the real.’ In the end, Charles submits to God’s grace as quietly as Evelyn, who wrote in
The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold
: ‘Conversion suggests an event more sudden and emotional than his calm acceptance of the propositions of his faith.’

When Charles says that Catholics seem just like other people, he is rebuked by Sebastian: ‘My dear Charles, that’s exactly what they’re not … they’ve got an entirely different outlook on life; everything they think is important is different from other people.’ Charles’s prayer for a miracle at Lord Marchmain’s dying scene is a prayer for Julia. But when the miracle occurs, it is his own soul that is saved. In Evelyn’s memo to Hollywood he says that the importance of the relationship between Charles and Julia is for each ‘to bring the other to the Church’. Julia must renounce Charles in part to atone for her sins. She explains that if she gives up the thing she most loves, then God won’t despair of her. Julia’s bargain is very similar to Helen’s in Graham Greene’s
The End of the Affair
. She makes a plea with God to save Bendrick’s life and if God spares him she will renounce him. This sort of plea makes sense to a Catholic, but not to anyone else. Charles himself makes this perfectly clear: ‘I do understand.’

The Anglican Nancy Mitford was confused about the theology and Julia’s renunciation of Charles: ‘Now I believe in God and I talk to him a very great deal and often tell him jokes … he also likes people to be happy and people who love each other to live together – so long as nobody’s else’s life is upset (and then he’s not so sure).’ Evelyn patiently
explained: ‘It must be nonsense to say people never give up sleeping together for ‘‘abstract’’ principles. Anyway why ‘‘abstract’’? Is the crown of England or the love of God abstract? Of course with Julia Flyte the fact that the war was coming and she saw her life coming to an end anyhow, made a difference.’ In the memo, he goes further: ‘I regard it as essential that after having led a life of sin Julia should not be immediately rewarded with conventional happiness. She has a great debt to pay and we are left with her paying it.’ In other words, there will be no Hollywood ending for Charles and Julia.