Books, Arts & Manners: Beyond Brideshead

The brilliant English television production of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, recently reshown in America, has no doubt confirmed in the public mind the impression that this most popular of the novels by the great English master of satiric comedy was also his most significant work of fiction. But in fact it isn’t, having been considerably superseded by his comparatively unknown masterwork, Sword of Honor (1965), the recension of the trilogy that was published at intervals during the previous decade under the separate titles Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955), and Unconditional Surrender (1961). Although Waugh’s publisher in this country (Little, Brown) has curiously chosen to reprint what is known as the War Trilogy in these separate versions, it is the one-volume edition of Sword of Honor that is the most powerful representation of Waugh’s masterpiece and the one he wanted to present to the public.

There are probably very sound and at the same time subtle reasons why the superb dramatization, in Brideshead, of a noble English Roman Catholic family in dissolution should once again engage the contemporary sensibility. Only some four decades ago, American Catholic criticism was emboldened to suggest that Brideshead Revisited was our Roman Catholic epic in the modern triumphalism of a Church that few could have known was even then at the end of the pre-conciliar age. This was an understandable and yet seriously flawed reading of Waugh’s nevertheless great novel. Brideshead Revisited is still highly readable today precisely because, rather than a self-fulfilling example of triumphalism, it was actually a prophetic account of such a thorough disintegration of the social order as would al most simultaneously result in a similar decline of the spiritual order. The world of Subaltern Hooper was about to take over—and it did. Perhaps Waugh died from knowledge of this, as the novelist Graham Greene suggested shortly after the death of his friend in 1966.

TM

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Thomas P. McDonnell

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The brilliant English television production of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, recently reshown in America, has no doubt confirmed in the public mind the impression that this most popular of the novels by the great English master of satiric comedy was also his most significant work of fiction. But in fact it isn’t, having been considerably superseded by his comparatively unknown masterwork, Sword of Honor (1965), the recension of the trilogy that was published at intervals during the previous decade under the separate titles Men at Arms (1952), Officers and Gentlemen (1955), and Unconditional Surrender (1961). Although Waugh’s publisher in this country (Little, Brown) has curiously chosen to reprint what is known as the War Trilogy in these separate versions, it is the one-volume edition of Sword of Honor that is the most powerful representation of Waugh’s masterpiece and the one he wanted to present to the public.

There are probably very sound and at the same time subtle reasons why the superb dramatization, in Brideshead, of a noble English Roman Catholic family in dissolution should once again engage the contemporary sensibility. Only some four decades ago, American Catholic criticism was emboldened to suggest that Brideshead Revisited was our Roman Catholic epic in the modern triumphalism of a Church that few could have known was even then at the end of the pre-conciliar age. This was an understandable and yet seriously flawed reading of Waugh’s nevertheless great novel. Brideshead Revisited is still highly readable today precisely because, rather than a self-fulfilling example of triumphalism, it was actually a prophetic account of such a thorough disintegration of the social order as would al most simultaneously result in a similar decline of the spiritual order. The world of Subaltern Hooper was about to take over—and it did. Perhaps Waugh died from knowledge of this, as the novelist Graham Greene suggested shortly after the death of his friend in 1966.