The Pitfalls of Charm

Brideshead Revisited. By Evelyn Waugh.

Last year, my wife and I drove to visit friends who had just moved to a town called Clarkston, northwest of Detroit. On our way, we drove through the town’s center, which Monica promptly described as a “charm attack.” I’m sure you know what that means: shaded streets, faithfully restored Victorian and Georgian homes, perfect landscaping, boutiques, cute little flags, and, of course, coffeeshops. Yes, it was all very charming — yet I wouldn’t want to live there. If I were to live in a small town, I would prefer the village where I grew up, in the panhandle of Florida. It too has shaded streets and restored homes — but no charm at all. The corner store where I used to buy RC Colas is abandoned and slowly collapsing, there’s too much traffic, and most of the landscaping doesn’t go beyond keeping the grass cut.

To restore my hometown with a veneer of charm certainly would make it more aesthetically pleasing, but that would bring with it charm’s usual companion: environmental sensitivity. I’m not talking about awareness of climate change and melting icecaps (though such awareness would be included). What I mean is sensitivity to one’s physical surroundings and a concomitant need to have a sense of control over one’s surroundings. The house would have to be perfectly painted, the lawn manicured; shoes would need to be removed upon entrance; and, in most cases, there would be dogs, not children (dogs are easier to train). Sadly, as we track further this sort of environmental sensitivity, we find pro-abortion rhetoric on the bumper of the Prius and gay-pride banners floating from the picturesque front porch — both beliefs arising, ultimately, from the desire for control. But control also comes with its own inevitable companion: isolation.

Therefore, though charm is, well, charming, it makes me uneasy. At the same time, though, I remonstrate with myself: Edmund, charm is closely associated with beauty, and Beauty is one of the metaphysical Trinity, up there with Truth and Goodness. But is charm really the offspring of beauty? Or is it a diabolical counterfeit? Again, I ponder this possibility because charm quite relentlessly associates itself with said environmental sensitivity — the desire to have the things of life in their proper place, the desire not to be disturbed, to guard one’s isolation. (By the way, have you ever noticed that most Black Lives Matter signs are in black-less neighborhoods?) We can try to hack out these matters on our own. Or we can go where they have been thoroughly explored — in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945).

The matter of aesthetics — charm being one if its subcategories — is consistently in the background of Brideshead. In the early part of the narrative, the reader learns of Charles Ryder’s refusal to quit his impractically situated ground-floor rooms, principally because there were “gillyflowers growing below the windows which on summer evenings filled them with fragrance.” The novel also details the room’s decorations, including a “reproduction of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers” and “a screen, painted by Roger Fry with a Provencal landscape.” After a “beautiful” friend, Sebastian Flyte, comes into his life, we learn how Charles’s tastes graduate beyond the trendy (which, around 1922, van Gogh and Fry were). To illustrate, when Charles returns from a trip with Sebastian to the Oxford Botanic Garden, in his rooms he “detected a jejune air that had not irked [him] before.” He promptly turns the Fry painting against the wall, then later stores it in a custodial closet. Again through Sebastian, Charles is introduced to Brideshead Castle and its many artistic forms. When Sebastian unfolds the shutters opening on the great hall, “the mellow afternoon sun flooded in, over the bare floor, the vast twin fireplaces of sculptured marble, the coved ceiling frescoed with classic deities and heroes, the gilt mirrors and scagliola pilasters…. It was a glimpse only, such as might be had from the top of an omnibus into a lighted ballroom.”

The Sebastian conduit into the aesthetic world carries on throughout the novel. He is Charles’s connection to the aesthete Anthony Blanche, to Sebastian’s beautiful sister Julia, and, ultimately, to Charles’s career as an architectural painter. That we are to understand Sebastian in this role, as the one who influences Charles in the aesthetic life, is clear through Sebastian’s contrast with Charles’s cousin Jasper, who tries to adopt a fatherly role with Charles by offering “judicious advice” and establishing “the rules of conduct which [Charles] should follow.” With Sebastian, though, it’s altogether different — wine and strawberries “on a sheep-cropped knoll under a clump of elms.” Even more strongly, during his first extended stay at Brideshead Castle, at Sebastian’s behest he carries out a drawing of the veranda fountain, an experience that brings a “whole new system of nerves alive within [him].”

However, as Charles — always influenced by Sebastian — enters more deeply into the aesthetic world, the novel’s references to and instances of charm run side by side. The most charming of all is, of course, Sebastian himself, with his good looks, his seeming innocence, his teddy bear, his love of nature, and his inconsequential conversation. “Those that have charm,” Anthony comments, “don’t really need brains.” It seems Anthony is rather sensitive to the matter of Sebastian’s charm, for, during his dinner with Charles, he comments on it at least nine times. Sebastian himself is not unaware of the power of charm, which he acknowledges not in himself but in his family. He tells Charles, “I’m not going to have you get mixed up with my family. They’re so madly charming. All my life they’ve been taking things away from me. If they once got hold of you with their charm, they’d make you their friend, not mine, and I won’t let them.”

Sebastian’s foreboding, of course, proves correct, as we watch Charles drawn into the confidence of Lady Marchmain and, ultimately, into the bed of Julia. His connection to Sebastian, actually, is rather short-lived; within two years of the forging of their friendship, Sebastian slips away to northern Africa and into the depths of his alcoholism. At that point, Charles’s connection with the rest of the family is strong enough to merit Julia’s asking him to find Sebastian and bring him home to be by his mother’s deathbed. Although Charles succeeds in finding Sebastian, his old friend will not come home. His self-isolation has been made complete.

To the midpoint of the novel, then, the pattern is this: Through his connection with Sebastian and the Flyte family — in all he sees in Sebastian, in Julia, in Brideshead Castle and Marchmain House — Charles is drawn to the aesthetic life to the point of dropping out of Oxford to attend art school in Paris. As the second part of the novel begins, he has won some fame and fortune as the author/artist of Ryder’s Country Seats, Ryder’s English Homes, and Ryder’s Village and Provincial Architecture. At the exhibition of the paintings for his new volume, Ryder’s Latin America, his wife, Celia, exclaims for all to hear, “You see, Charles lives for one thing — Beauty.” The viewers of his new works agree, lauding the paintings as “virile” and “passionate.” However, as the exhibit is about to close, in walks Anthony, who, after a silent tour of the exhibit rooms — disturbed by only a few heavy sighs — whispers to Charles, “My dear, let us not expose your little imposture before these good people.” Charles’s new works, Anthony summarizes, are not beautiful but “terrible tripe.”

What happened, then, to the beauty promised in Charles’s friendship with Sebastian and all his Sebastian-related experiences? Despite these experiences and influences, Charles fails to achieve the beautiful, to become an artist — a failure that might have been anticipated by Sebastian’s own disintegration and self-isolation within the clouds of alcoholism.

As a matter of fact, wherever we find a member of the Flyte family, we find, if not alcoholism, then some other form of isolation. Lord Marchmain has separated himself from the family to live in self-imposed exile with his mistress in Venice. Lady Marchmain inhabits a world of private confidences and “little talks,” a world imaged by her study, which, with its lowered ceiling, is so stylistically different that it “seemed to be in another house.” Sebastian’s older brother occupies an intellectual realm separated from social consciousness, as seen in his aloof comment to Julia about her “living in sin.” Julia isolates herself from her family and from the Church in her marriage to Rex Mottram; and later, when she begins her affair with Charles, the two are in solitude on a storm-tossed ship (reminiscent of the solitude Sebastian and Charles once enjoyed at Brideshead Castle). Interestingly, Brideshead Castle itself is first described as situated in a “secret landscape” with hills “guarding and hiding it.”

In almost all cases (Cordelia, Sebastian’s youngest sister, perhaps being the exception), isolation accompanies the Flytes’ charm. This being so, it’s no surprise Brideshead Revisited is not a happy book. The beautiful, charming Sebastian is last seen in an infirmary in Tunis, slowly dying of alcoholism. Lady Marchmain dies somewhat prematurely, unresolved in her tortured relationship with her family. In most of his dying process, Lord Marchmain fights against the encroaching darkness, naïvely affirming that he will be “better tomorrow.” Marchmain House is torn down to make way for a block of flats. The war comes. Brideshead Castle is commandeered by the army, and the Italian fountain is filled with cigarette butts. Charles, apparently, abandons his search for beauty, given that the third in his sequence of loves, after Sebastian and Julia, is the army, in which he ascends to the rank of captain.

At this point, the traditional reading of Brideshead interrupts to say, no, it’s not all failure. At the novel’s close, Charles does indeed have his moment of affirmation, as he finds the tabernacle light again ablaze in the chapel of Brideshead Castle — “the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs…that flame burns again for other soldiers….” And so, from the man who once vowed to live only according to his senses, and who vigorously protested inviting a priest to Lord Marchmain’s deathbed, there are indications of a conversion, as Captain Ryder skips off to deliver more orders about setting up new company headquarters.

But what, exactly, is the source of this conversion? Waugh said the book is about grace, and there is indeed a chapter titled “A Twitch Upon the Thread.” Apparently, then, we are to read the novel in this light: Charles’s exposure to the aesthetic life, via the Flyte family, opens him to the life of grace and, ultimately, to conversion.

In an article in The Darling Axe (Nov. 2024), Michelle Barker says the novel “didn’t make sense until I embraced Waugh’s intentions.” However, in the introduction to the 1945 edition of Brideshead, Allesandro Piperno refuses to accept any real resolution in the novel. The only resolution, he argues, is that there is no resolution — religious conversions, like the dressings of cultures come and gone, are shallow. “This Brideshead Revisited demonstrates better than anything else how artificial [Waugh’s] devotion is,” he argues.

Barker’s position about Brideshead, then, seems to be something along the lines of I can’t find what the thread is, so it must be grace — a position I have heard from many other readers of the novel. As for Piperno, the simple conclusion is that there is no thread. The novel itself doesn’t help much, because at the beginning of the second part, the older Charles states, “My theme is memory.” It is? Since when? Just because you’re remembering all this, Captain Ryder, doesn’t mean memory is your theme, only your narrative device. And if memory is your theme, what happened to the aesthetics motif and the isolation motif? It is tempting to sympathize with Piperno, who claims that in Waugh’s attempt to write a conversion story, “it is entirely evident that he missed the mark.” Charm is a siren, drawing us into isolation and destruction. The search for beauty ends in an army barracks, bordered by an insane asylum; the present is empty, the only good resting in a glossed memory. As for the single concluding paragraph of affirmation, how does it possibly stack against hundreds of pages of failure?

Indeed, Waugh himself was somewhat apologetic about the novel in his preface to the 1959 edition, writing, “The book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language which now, with a full stomach, I find distasteful.” However, it’s clear to me that the work’s intention — even if not Waugh’s! — is that this is precisely the point. The novel is a condemnation of charm and the isolation toward which it tends. The common reader, though, is reluctant to reach this conclusion because we like the young Sebastian and his teddy bear, and we’d all love to book Brideshead Castle on Airbnb for a week or so. Yet I remind the reader that Sebastian is basically dead midway through the novel. As for Charles, he becomes a gluttonous creep (remember his dinner with Rex Mottram in Paris) who breeds children he refuses to visit.

So, what are we missing? We’re missing the un-charming, the kind of person we always miss. We’re missing the heart of the work, its cor. We’re missing Cordelia.

Symptomatically, Charles, throughout the greater course of 20 years, likewise misses Cordelia, in that he consistently underestimates her. In physical form, the novel plays out the relationship between Charles and Cordelia, starting when she slips in behind him to watch him paint a series of portraits of Marchmain House before its demolition. He is so absorbed (isolated) in his art that initially he doesn’t notice she has entered and then forgets she is there after she speaks. He continues to paint until the sunlight fades; only then, after he has put away his brushes, does he acknowledge the girl who would never have “the promise of Julia’s Quattrocento loveliness.”

Because he himself is tired and hungry, Charles invites Cordelia to dinner. During this dinner, at the structural center of the novel, there follows a sequence of revelations provided by Cordelia — occasions in which she manifests a human vision far more perceptive than Charles’s aesthetic. Most indicative of the novel’s intent is when she describes the closing of the chapel at Brideshead Castle. At that moment, just as she had been while watching Charles paint, she was in the shadows, observing. She tells Charles how the priest “blew out the lamp in the sanctuary and left the tabernacle open and empty, as though from now on it was always to be Good Friday.” At that point, she quietly but keenly remarks, “Suddenly there wasn’t any chapel there any more, just an oddly decorated room.” In other words, according to Cordelia’s perception, only the charm of the chapel remained — “angels in printed cotton smocks, rambler-roses, flower-spangled meadows, frisking lambs.” Cordelia’s vision consistently cuts through the gloss, so that she nimbly identifies Charles as a “poor agnostic,” and his affair with Julia as “thwarted passion.” Later in the novel, after Sebastian’s external beauty has faded and as he lies in a hospital bed, an emaciated form with thinning hair and scraggly beard, she pinpoints his real beauty: holiness. “Oh, yes, Charles, that’s what you’ve got to understand about Sebastian.”

Here we find a theme, reminiscent of what we discover under the rubble in Canticle for Leibowitz (about which I wrote in “The Burden of History & the Promise of Divine Life,” April 2025). The theme is best grasped when we understand the nature of that to which the theme is put in contrast, which in the case of Brideshead is charm. Charm is an immediately appealing surface — witty, pointless sayings; stuffed animals; cherubs in smocks; a smart-looking hunting jacket. It is everything about England with which Waugh was disgusted in 1945, the year of Brideshead’s composition, as he recovered from a parachuting accident. The novel clearly posits charm as the enemy, that which distracts human vision from its final perception of underlying reality. There are definitely Genesis vibrations here, reminiscent of when Eve turned her focus from God to the apple, which she perceived as a “delight to the eyes.” As in Genesis, charm leads to existential isolation — blame, frustration, murder, and, ultimately, the fragmentation of language. The isolation in Brideshead already has been noted. Again, it is witnessed most clearly in Charles, who isolates himself from his family and fails in his love for Sebastian.

However, all we’ve done so far is identify the negation. What is the affirmation? To find it, we must follow the thread. Plain Cordelia looks beyond the surface, condemning Charles and Julia’s romance as thwarted passion, while affirming Sebastian’s dissolution as holiness; she sees that without the Eucharist, Brideshead chapel is merely an oddly decorated room. And while she speaks of the Eucharist, she herself is eucharistic in her plainness and her daily constancy. This, then, is the point at which we understand that, indeed, Ryder’s theme is memory. While he begins in memory, then steps back from memory to deeper memory, ultimately what is re-membered is the Eucharist, the still presence underneath time’s revolutions, the reality that re-members Christ’s presence into each moment of history. As Charles himself puts it, “That flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones.”

Today’s mode of charm, while having the same nature as mid-20th-century charm, is different in its manifestation. It is not verbal witticism, decoration, or virile paintings; it is the quickly moving, colorful surface of the screen, now bolted to the table at restaurants, in the center of gas pumps, on every wall of the local bar, and most aggressively always held in our palms in the form of our smartphones. Yet we still have the same flame — as long as we remember it.

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