Paganism in Brideshead Revisited and Sheldon Vanauken's A Severe Mercy

P​AGANISM​ ​IN​ ​B​RIDESHEAD​ R​EVISITED​ ​AND​ S​HELDON​ V​ANAUKEN​’​S​ ​A S​EVERE​ M​ERCY By Justin Keena Brideshead Revisited, ​according to Evelyn Waugh’s “Warning” on the dust jacket of the 1945 first UK edition, is “an attempt ​to trace the workings of divine purpose in a pagan world, in the lives of an English Catholic family, half-paganized themselves, in the world of 1923-1939” (qtd. in Davis 13, Heath 163). Its setting, particularly Oxford, is pagan; its main family of characters is “half-paganized;” and its main themes include, as the subtitle declares, not only the “Sacred” but also the “Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder.” While the novel has typically attracted attention for its Catholicism and the conversions of its characters, whether positive and more respectful (e.g., the studies of Gordon Leah, RoseMary Johnson, and Laura White) or negative and more hostile (e.g., the contemporary reviews of Frank Kermode, Rose Macaulay, and Donat O’Donnell, qtd. in Stannard 279-87, 253-55, and 255-63, respectively), I propose to examine and elucidate the nature of 1 its paganism. The way in which I will do so is as follows. After analyzing the few instances of the word “pagan,” “heathen,” and “profane” in the novel, I will trace the concept of paganism as it appears in other passages but without the appearance of those words, finding it to be an essential and pervasive theme. Then, in order to clarify the particular quality of ​Brideshead’s ​paganism, I will contrast it with that of another conversion narrative about “the workings of divine purpose in a pagan world,” also partially set in Oxford and at points directly inspired by ​Brideshead, ​Sheldon Vanauken’s autobiography ​A Severe Mercy. One of the few scholars to address the novel’s paganism is Simon Whitechapel. However, his comments on how ivy symbolizes Sebastian’s “hedonistic paganism” and on various “references to the occult” in the Marchmain family (1) are far from a systematic treatment of the meaning of paganism in the novel as a whole, as I attempt here. But perhaps this lack of attention to the paganism in ​Brideshead ​is not too surprising. Without a focus on the religious themes of the novel, the contrast between Catholicism and paganism disappears from critical view. And as RoseMary Johnson has pointed out, critics of ​Brideshead ​since 1970 have tended either to ignore or sideline its religious dimension. She cites Dean Baldwin, William J. Cook, Dustin Faulstick, David Leon Higdon, and David Rothstein as examples of this trend (162-63). 1 1 Despite the importance of the pagan element in ​Brideshead Revisited, ​the word itself appears only three times in the novel. Its first two uses are, moreover, incidental to this study insofar as they act as little more than opposites for “Christian.” When Lady Marchmain recalls her privileged childhood to Charles, she says: “The poor have always been the favourites of God and His saints, but I believe that it is one of the special achievements of Grace to sanctify the whole of life, riches 2 included. Wealth in pagan Rome was necessarily something cruel; it’s not anymore” (126-27). Here “pagan Rome” means only pre- or non-Christian Rome. A more puzzling, but fundamentally similar iteration of this meaning of “pagan” comes later in Book I, when Father Mowbray communicates his exasperation about the progress of Rex Mottram’s religious instruction: “Lady Marchmain, he doesn’t correspond to any degree of paganism known to the missionaries” (193). The core of the word’s meaning here is, as in the prior instance, “non-Christian,” but its particular connotations remain as elusive as the sincerity of Rex’s Catholic faith. What precisely are the degrees of paganism that Father Mowbray is thinking about, and how many are there? Which missionaries and indigenous peoples does he have in mind? What time period is he referring to, if any? A much more substantial, definable, and thematically significant use of the word “pagan” comes toward the end of the novel in Book II, Chapter 4. After Cordelia projects Sebastian’s future life to Charles, he muses to himself: “I thought of the joyful youth with the Teddy-bear under the flowering chestnuts. ‘It’s not what one would have foretold,’ I said, ‘I suppose he doesn’t suffer?’” (309) To which Cordelia replies: “Oh, yes, I think he does. One can have no idea what the suffering may be, to be maimed as he is—no dignity, no power of will. No one is ever holy without suffering. It’s taken that Quotations from ​Brideshead, ​with the exception of an excerpt from the 1959 Preface below, are from the original, pre-1959 revised text, with pagination from the 1999 edition published by Little, Brown, and Company. 2 2 form with him….I’ve seen so much suffering in the last few years; there’s so much coming for everybody soon. It’s the spring of love…” And then in condescension to my paganism, she added: “He’s in a very beautiful place, you know, by the sea—white cloisters, a bell tower, rows of green vegetables, and a monk watering them when the sun is low.” (309) This passage provides the key to the pagan element in the whole novel. As such, we may first of all notice its difference from the other two uses of “pagan.” In this passage, the word does not simply, or even primarily, mean “non-Christian” as it does in those instances, though that opposition is still present in a less prominent way. “Paganism” here means something positive, not merely negative. It means something more like “the worldview which celebrates beauty, sensuality, and earthly pleasures—and which also, as a result, happens to reject Christian revelation and its austere, constraining lifestyle.” Consider the context in which the word appears. Cordelia has just been discussing holiness and suffering, emphasizing the difficulty of Sebastian’s life amid the monks, about to lose herself in meditation on the Catholic-Christian ascetic ideal. But she realizes just in time that, in the process, she will lose the interest of Charles, to whom the lifestyle of religious asceticism is, to say the least, quite foreign. When she “condescends” to take into consideration his “paganism” and reverts to a totally different, albeit compatible description of Sebastian’s life, Charles’ paganism appears as the opposite of her religious, ascetic ideal which, in this case, also happens to be Catholic-Christian. Paganism is here presented as, primarily, the opposite of religious asceticism, and secondarily as the opposite of the religion to which Cordelia belongs. In any case, it means much more than “non-Christian,” unlike the first two uses of the word. “Paganism” as it is used here implies a whole lifestyle, a whole worldview, the kind of mindset to which a “beautiful place…by the sea,” vibrant “white cloisters” and “green vegetables,” a 3 picturesque monk gardening in the evening, and the striking architecture of “a bell tower” would strongly appeal—much more strongly, certainly, than a description of a life of suffering, self-denial, and religious devotion. Cordelia has, in other words, selected those elements of Sebastian’s present experience that she knows are most compatible with Charles’ ideal of paganism: beauty, color, scenery, architecture, and food. She is an astute psychologist. She is aware that the Sebastian Charles used to know must still be associated in Charles’s mind with pagan things in that sense, not with pain, holiness, and religious asceticism: “I thought,” Charles narrates, “of the joyful youth with the Teddy-bear under the flowering chestnuts.” His thought, in short, is entrenched in paganism. This image of the younger Sebastian, which highlights his youthful vigor and earthly happiness (“joyful youth”), his idiosyncratic childhood innocence (“with the Teddy-bear”), and the natural scenery associated with him (“under the flowering chestnuts”), makes an appeal to Charles’ mind that Cordelia’s initial picture of a religious ascetic, with its sternness, self-denial, and otherworldliness, simply could not have done. I have claimed that this instance of the word “pagan” is the key to the pagan element in the whole novel. But before explaining how it unlocks the consistent emphasis on sensual description that saturates almost the entire work (so much so that Waugh himself, considering it excessive upon revision, attempted to edit some of it out in the 1959 edition of ​Brideshead​), I must first complete my word study by discussing the instances of the two words most closely related to “pagan,” namely “heathen” and “profane.” There are three instances of the former, but only one of the latter. The three uses of “heathen,” unlike the three uses of “pagan,” are remarkably unified in context and meaning: they are all used in conversation to indicate the degree to which certain central characters are imbued with the pagan ideal as sketched above. The earliest use of “heathen” occurs when, 4 during Charles’ first extended stay at Brideshead, Sebastian finally opens up about his family, their religion, and its relation (or lack thereof) to their individual happiness: So you see we’re a mixed family religiously. Brideshead and Cordelia are both fervent Catholics; he’s miserable, she’s bird-happy; Julia and I are half-heathen; I am happy, I rather think Julia isn’t; Mummy is popularly believed to be a saint and Papa is excommunicated—and I wouldn’t know which of them was happy. Anyway, however you look at it, happiness doesn’t seem to have much to do with it, and that’s all I want. (89) In the same conversation, Sebastian continues to explore the distance between the Catholic worldview and his own. According to him, Catholics have “an entirely different outlook on life; everything they think important is different from other people. They try and hide it as much as they can, but it comes out all the time. It’s quite natural, really, that they should. But you see it’s difficult for semi-heathens like Julia and me” (89-90). The third and final use of the word comes toward the end of the novel in a conversation between Cordelia and Charles about Sebastian. Cordelia recalls how she “wanted him to come home with me, but he wouldn’t. He’s got a beard now, and he’s very religious.” To which Charles replies: “That I won’t believe, not even if I see it. He always was a little heathen” (302). All three passages, then, claim that Sebastian, in his essence, is at least “a little,” but perhaps as much as “half heathen.” In context, this means that Sebastian (and Julia) are motivated by the heathen or pagan ideal rather than the Catholic and ascetic one. That the pagan worldview is in question, and not simply the fact of being non-Christian or non-Catholic, is evident by how Sebastian contrasts the Catholics’ “entirely different ​outlook​ ​on life​” with the outlook of others, including himself. Considering these three uses of “semi-heathen” in conjunction with Charles’ full-blooded paganism in Book II, Chapter 4 (or Book III, Chapter 4 in the revised edition), we may now take 5 inventory of the characters most closely associated with the words “heathen” and “pagan” in the 3 novel. The heathen and pagan ​dramatis personae, ​as revealed by the language of these passages, ​are as follows: one full pagan in mind and body, Charles Ryder; two semi-pagans in temperament and lifestyle, Sebastian and Julia; and one pagan-by-practice (if not also by belief), Lord Marchmain. This four-item catalogue may be brief, but it is not insignificant. On the contrary, it reveals the narrative structure of the novel. The narrative progression of ​Brideshead Revisited​ is from Charles alone to his “romantic friendship” with Sebastian to his affair with Julia to his presence in the gathering of the family around Lord Marchmain at his deathbed. In other words, the novel moves from pure paganism (Charles alone) to half paganism (of Sebastian’s type) to half paganism (of another type, namely Julia’s) to an encounter with what is beyond the pagan, what overcomes the pagan, as manifested in the holiness of a Catholic-Christian death (i.e., that of Lord Marchmain). The plot, in other words, is a gradual transformation, or at least a gradual tempering, of Charles’ paganism by divine grace. ​Paganism​ ​is therefore essential to the structure of the novel. The pagan ideal is built into the very foundation of ​Brideshead;​ and, given the teleology of the plot, so is its tension with the Catholic-Christian ascetic ideal. The simultaneous presence and tension between these worldviews in the novel is, moreover, foreshadowed by the only instance of “profane” in ​Brideshead, ​namely in the subtitle, “The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder.” Just as the “Sacred” and the “Profane” are both present in the subtitle (emphasized by the conjunction “and”), yet there exists also a tension between them (given that they are antonyms), so are they both present, yet at variance with one another in the structure of the novel’s plot and in the development of Charles’ character. Foreshadowing Charles’ paganism or heathenism as it does, the There are certainly other pagan characters in the novel who are not directly associated with the words “pagan” or “heathen”—most notably, Anthony Blanche. 3 6 use of “Profane” in the subtitle seems to encompass what is meant by both “pagan” and “heathen” in the main text. If the pagan element in ​Brideshead Revisited ​is fundamental to its narrative structure and protagonist’s development, we would expect to see it appear frequently in the text. It is my further contention that the paganism of the novel is most apparent in its frequent and characteristically sensual descriptions of persons, places, architecture, scenery, food, drink, smells, and sounds. Having realized what appeals to the heathen mind by what Cordelia selects to emphasize for Charles “in condescension to [his] paganism”—that is, ​inter alia, ​beauty, color, scenery, architecture, and food—it is not difficult to amass example after example along the same lines. The very opening paragraph of Book I, Chapter 1, for instance, sets a precedent for the whole novel by describing a day on which “the ditches were white with fool’s-parsley and meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer” and “when leaf and flower and bird and sun-lit stone and shadow seem all to proclaim the glory of God” (21). When Oxford is introduced in the next paragraph, equal emphasis is placed on the beauty of the weather and the vitality of the flora, to which is added the exquisite architecture, the ringing bell music, and the quietly joyous atmosphere of the place. Ryder recalls how 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 soft vapours of a thousand years of learning. It was this cloistral hush which gave our laughter its resonance, and carried it still, joyously, over the intervening clamour. (21) Joy, earthly joy in laughter, plants, weather, seasons, and the music of bells—all this makes up the furniture of Charles’ idyllic pagan world. For at this point in the novel we are still, as the title of Book 7 I puts it, “in Arcadia.” But there is more to be said about the Arcadian paganism of the opening page. We also see hundreds of women coming to the city at the end of term, “sight-seeing and pleasure-seeking, drinking claret cup, eating cucumber sandwiches,” thus adding taste and touch (if the texture of the food and drink qualifies) to the emphasis on sight, hearing, and smell already present in the earlier descriptions, rounding out the tour of the senses in the opening lines. Waugh has made Charles write his autobiography as a pagan, with pronounced emphasis on the voluptuous and the epicurean: and that is why descriptions of exotic smells and tastes, gorgeous appearance and sensual atmosphere, abound in the rest of the novel. 4 Brideshead Revisited​ is particularly saturated with drink and glutted with food, so much so that the reader may, on occasion, be tempted to think that the sheer amount (and detail) of liquor drunk and meals eaten distracts from the story and characters. Even Sebastian’s destructive drinking habit, which is necessary to the story, can become tiresome to read about. On the other hand, Charles himself tends to think (and as it is his autobiography, it is his thoughts that are central) that the pleasures of the palate are extraordinarily important—more important, at times, than other people. At one point Charles, meeting with Rex, does his best to pay attention to the culinary delights of their meeting to the exclusion of their communication. “We had by no means reached the cognac,” he relates, “but here we were on the subject of himself. In twenty minutes I should have been ready for all he had to tell. I closed my mind as best I could and gave myself to the food before me, but sentences came breaking in on my happiness, recalling me to the harsh, acquisitive world which Rex inhabited” (175-76). Ryder’s brand of paganism, as indicated by his frank enjoyment of the fine food and drink, finds its fulfillment in the sensual and the bodily, the luxurious and the pleasant, whatever appeals to the refined palate of the connoisseur and the refined senses of the aesthete. 4 See Dean Baldwin’s study of this particular theme in the novel. 8 At other points in the novel, the visual setting of a meal conveys just as much epicurean opulence as the meal itself. When Lord Marchmain returns to Brideshead to die, his decline is gradual but steady. Nevertheless, on one particular evening at dinner-time, Lord Marchmain was in good spirits; the room had a Hogarthian aspect, with the dinner-table set for the four of us by the grotesque, chinoiserie chimney-piece, and the old man propped among his pillows, sipping champagne, tasting, praising, and failing to eat the succession of dishes which had been prepared for his homecoming. Wilcox had brought out for the occasion the gold plate, which I had not before seen in use; that and the gilt mirrors and the lacquer and the drapery of the great bed and Julia’s mandarin coat gave the scene an air of pantomime, of Aladdin’s cave. (318-19) The meal itself is grand, with “champagne” and a “succession of dishes”; but it is also surrounded by the opulent (the “gold plate,” “gilt mirrors,” and “the lacquer and drapery of the great bed”) and the exotic (the “chinoiserie chimney piece,” “Julia’s mandarin coat,” and the aspect “of Aladdin’s cave”). Collecting more than a few of the many other lush and sensual descriptions in the novel would be tedious—or rather, given the subject matter, intoxicating. It would, perhaps, create a literary experience akin to that of Charles and Sebastian in the well-known wine-tasting scene, sampling bottle after bottle of exquisite vintages as they attempt to describe the delicacy of each flavor with “wilder and more exotic” similes (84). But if the amount of drinking would not, when recalled in rapid succession, eventually turn our stomachs, perhaps the amount of smells would. At one point, early in his friendship with Sebastian, Charles describes a scene in which they ate strawberries, drank wine, and smoked cigars outside, leisurely watching the smoke curl upwards, “and the sweet scent of the tobacco merged with the sweet summer scents around us and the fumes of the sweet, golden 9 wine seemed to lift us a finger’s breadth above the turn and hold us suspended” (24). Three sweet smells, reinforced by a triple repetition of the word “sweet,” each mingling and filling the olfactory sense, is enough to fumigate any scene. Or if not the smells, then the food would eventually nauseate; there is so much of it that even the people are described in culinary terms. Charles, as he himself relates, had known Anthony Blanche by reputation before their paths crossed, “and now meeting him, under the spell of Sebastian, I found myself enjoying him voraciously, like the fine piece of cookery he was” (33). Nausea was, at any rate, Waugh’s own reaction to all the sensual descriptions when he set out to revise the novel. He explains the major historical and autobiographical reason for the sensuality of the book in his 1959 Preface as follows. During World War II, It was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster—the period of soya beans and Basic English—and in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language, which now with a full stomach I find distasteful. I have modified the grosser passages but have not obliterated them because they are an essential part of the book. (1) They are indeed essential, as we have seen, given how they concretize and reveal Charles’ pagan worldview, thereby justifying to the novel’s readers on an experiential level why he would be so attracted to the various members of a half-paganized aristocratic family. Ultimately, these “grosser passages” explain the basic motion of the storyline from one partially-pagan member of the family to the next, from Sebastian to Julia to Lord Marchmain. It is clear, then, how the paganism of ​Brideshead Revisited ​is central to its narrative and how it manifests itself in the text. However, the novel’s specific brand of paganism can still be further clarified. By contrasting the paganism of ​Brideshead ​with that of Sheldon Vanauken’s ​A Severe Mercy, ​its 10 particular nature will become more evident. ​A Severe Mercy ​itself invites comparison with ​Brideshead ​on 5 this and numerous other points: in its Prologue, “Glenmerle Revisited,” in which the author returns to his childhood home and reminisces with palpable nostalgia about his past; in its exhilarating and romantic description of Oxford, a critical setting in the story; in its autobiographical nature and multiple conversion narratives; in its focus on a woman whose heart, like that of Julia, was first turned to her lover, and then to her God; and in its 1980 Afterword, which describes a certain year following the events of ​A Severe Mercy ​as a series of “nudges towards God—or perhaps twitches on 6 the tether,” alluding to Book II of ​Brideshead, ​“A Twitch Upon the Thread” (235). A more detailed analysis of these comparisons is beyond the scope of this essay. My main concern is the fact that paganism of fundamentally different sorts is as central to ​A Severe Mercy ​as it is to ​Brideshead Revisited. The same basic plot is present in both, namely the gradual tempering of the author’s paganism through his relationships with others, as orchestrated by divine grace. Such a progression is programmatically declared in both works by their subtitles, as we have already seen in the case of Brideshead​. The subtitle of Vanauken’s book is “C.S. Lewis and a pagan love invaded by Christ, as told by one of the lovers.” We thus have the same three elements in Vanauken and in Waugh: autobiography (“as told by one of the lovers”/“Memories of Captain Charles Ryder”), paganism (“a pagan love”/“Profane”), and Christianity (“invaded by Christ”/“Sacred”). But the paganism in ​A Severe Mercy ​is of a different order than that of ​Brideshead. ​It is more noble, more refined, and less epicurean. Vanauken and his wife Davy worshipped beauty, especially Will Vaus seems to have been the first to recognize this connection in his biography of Vanauken (228). Beyond the parallels and allusions to ​Brideshead ​in ​A Severe Mercy​, it is also directly revealed in Vanauken’s later autobiography, ​Under the Mercy,​ how important the novel​ ​was to him. He states that, though he had not yet become a Catholic during his Oxford years, “Both Newman’s ​Apologia ​and ​Brideshead Revisited (​ which one read at Oxford) haunted my mind” (221). But “after reading ​Brideshead Revisited—​the almost terrible faith of Lord Marchmain’s family, despite their sins, as contrasted with the decent unbelief of Anglican Charles—I was already on the road to Rome” (218-9). Vanauken also greatly enjoyed the Jeremy Irons miniseries adaptation, which he recommended at least twice: once to a dying agnostic friend (​Under the Mercy ​253-54) and once to his future biographer (Vaus 225). 5 6 11 as manifested in nature and poetry, and love (particularly their own), whereas Charles Ryder worshipped bodily pleasure, especially the delights of fine food and drink, and the aestheticism of painting and architecture. In Chapter 2 of ​A Severe Mercy,​ “The Shining Barrier (the Pagan Love),” Vanauken characterizes his and Davy’s paganism as follows: If we were caught up in love, we were no less caught up in beauty, the mystery of beauty. Essentially we were pagan, but it was a high paganism. We worshipped the spirits of earth and sky; we adored the mysteries of beauty and love. Early spring became full spring. The orchard was a sea of white blossoms where we drifted enraptured in starlight and sunlight. Sometimes we walked in the rain, and we pressed our faces into masses of damp cool lilacs. I picked little posies of lily-of-the-valley to pin on her blouse. However often it has happened to other lovers, it was to us the greatest glory we had ever known. (31) While Ryder’s and Vanauken’s interests may overlap insofar as both paid close attention to nature and appreciated a beautiful atmosphere, their basic attitudes as pagans were fundamentally different. Vanauken’s “high paganism” was animated by (1) a reverence and an intensity of respect for beauty in all its forms, particularly in nature and poetry, as well as (2) a worship of romantic love. Both of these factors are simply absent from Ryder’s relatively “low” paganism, however much he enjoyed, in a less reverential and devoted way, beauty and romance. Moreover, while Ryder was content to ignore religion until the Marchmain family brought it to his attention, Vanauken’s paganism was (3) vaguely theistic from the start. All three distinctively “high” elements of Vanauken’s paganism are present in his description of his and Davy’s theological position as pagans: Davy and I called ourselves agnostics, but [3] we were really theists. A creator seemed necessary, a creator with an immense intelligence embracing order. Apart from reason, the 12 one quality that we attributed to this creative power was [1] awareness of beauty. …Beauty was somehow at the very centre of meaning. For us, [2] love was [1] an aspect of beauty, though [3] that might not be true of the power, which perhaps cared nothing for man. We might acknowledge a creating power, but our religion, if it could be called that, was really an adoring of [2] love and [1] beauty. It was the domain of Aphrodite, and, as I have said, we were really pagans. Many an ancient philosopher and, even more, many a Hellenic poet would have approved, or at least sympathised with, our dedication to [2] love and [1] beauty, our trust in reason, and our goal of the good life. (60) Sheldon Vanauken’s paganism was therefore one of the head (given its “trust in reason” and rational basis for worship of “a creating power”) and heart (given its “dedication to love and beauty”), while Charles Ryder’s was, for the most part, one of the stomach. Literally and figuratively, Ryder’s paganism is lower. This is not to say that Ryder could not appreciate beauty, nor is it to say that Vanauken’s paganism was not sensual. But it is to say that, while Vanauken was a worshiper of Aphrodite and, I would add, Apollo, Ryder was rather a devotee of Dionysus. Vanauken was a poet and a lover, whereas Ryder was an epicurean and an aesthete. Both were pagans, but each in their own way. 13 Works Cited Baldwin, Dean. “Gluttony? 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