Distinguishing Greatness

Back to Brideshead Revisited, for it is important not to leave that book behind before celebrating a few more aspects of its differentiating greatness. I mentioned structure in yesterday's blog, and I should have been more clear, I should have said: Isn't it extraordinary how Waugh is able to shift his camera's lens from character to character, giving us all we need to know about each one, precisely when we need to know it? Waugh unveils relationships, and this trumps any adherence to strict chronology. It is by shuffling his time deck that he gains much of his power, so that by the time we begin Book II and we are told, "My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time," we already fully understand that we are not just reading a masterfully assembled story. We are being steeped in something much deeper.

That's one thing. But there is also, of course, the peeling away that Waugh does, his sui generis descriptions of people, his way of showing the magnitude and mystery of time passing. Take this passage, about his heroine, Julia, whom Waugh's narrator knew as a 20 year old, and whom he rediscovers several years later:

She was not yet thirty, but was approaching the zenith of her loveliness, all her rich promise abundantly fulfilled. She had lost that fashionable, spiderly look; the head that I used to think Quattrocento, which had sat a little oddly on her, was now part of herself and not at all Florentine—not connected in any way with painting or the arts or with anything except herself, was her own essence, and could only be known in her and by her authority and in the love I was soon to have for her.

One last thing, just for today: Waugh's mastery of nuance. Not just the nuance of telling one story overtly while suggesting another (the told story of one aborted love affair, the never quite told story of a suppressed one). But Waugh's ability to pin a concept to the wall. Here he is on charm:

"... Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you."

Brideshead Revisited is a classic, as my niece Claire would say. An electrification, on so many levels. An instruction.