Introduction
C.S. Lewis and Evelyn Waugh are two of the most loved authors in the Christian imagination. They shared the twentieth century, and they both studied at Oxford. Even though Waugh left college shortly before the final examinations, the two writers did overlap during the academic year 1922-1923.
For Waugh, Oxford was the university city that he used for source material, not least for Brideshead Revisited’s “Arcadia.” For Lewis, Oxford was also an Arcadia of sorts: the idyllic place where he met Tolkien and founded with him and their friends “The Inklings,” but also the home of the university where he launched an outstanding academic career.
Nothing is known about any physical (“in person”) interaction between these Two Towers—if indeed there was any. Instead, this article will explore one instance of attention by one of them (Lewis) for the work of the other one (Waugh). It will also point out, in the first place, a little-known fact: that before that instance occurred, Lewis had already read Waugh.
Jack’s first shot at Evelyn
In 1951, Christian Hardie—who, together with her husband Colin (like C.S. Lewis, a Fellow at Magdalen College), was one of Lewis’s best friends in Oxford—offered Lewis help to catch up with “the contemporary scene.” Hardie suggested that Lewis read Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory and Brideshead Revisited, because these books were “currently read and admired.” Lewis professed in conversation with Hardie that he had never read anything by Waugh. But in fact, he had…
Several years before that conversation, Lewis had indeed reviewed (and therefore, we are allowed to presume, read) Evelyn Waugh’s first book, Rossetti: His Life and Works, published in 1928. The book review came out that same year in the Oxford Magazine. The review was unsigned—a common practice in those days and, in some contexts, even now—, but years later Walter Hooper—Lewis’s biographer and literary executor—included the piece in his volumes collecting Lewis’s essays and reviews.
Why did Lewis not mention this review to Christian Hardie but instead remarked “that he had read no book by Evelyn Waugh?” Nobody knows, and seeing that 31 years had elapsed since the time of the (unsigned) book review of an unremarkable first by a then unknown author, the best guess is that Lewis simply forgot. Still, that long forgotten review may perhaps be relevant when we try to fathom Lewis’s reaction to Brideshead Revisited.
The 1928 book review is short but, given Lewis’s extremely negative reaction to Brideshead, it seems rather significant and therefore worthy of succinct dissection. Lewis opens his informed opinion by stating that “Mr Evelyn Waugh is a courageous writer” and wraps it up by writing that “We look forward with interest to Mr Waugh’s next book.” In between there he expresses “confidence in the author’s good sense and insight;” the rest is mostly praise for the author of Rossetti: His Life and Works. Not entirely unstinted: Rosetti “is an interesting, if not perfectly successful, book.”
So how should we understand Lewis’s view that Brideshead Revisited is… “odious and deplorable.”
When C.S. Lewis visited Brideshead
The 1951 conversation between C.S. Lewis and Mrs. Christian Hardie resulted in her lending Lewis a copy of Brideshead Revisited. The result of his reading Waugh’s novel was a collection of three letters from Lewis to Hardie. As Ben Reinhardt pointed out, these letters were for many years “buried […] in the more than 3,000 pages of [Lewis’s] collected correspondence,” which makes his critique of Brideshead “especially easy to miss.” The letters acquired more visibility in 1991, when Mrs. Hardie published them together in The Chesterton Review, in an article titled “Three Letters from C.S. Lewis.” Later, Walter Hooper included the same letters in his own volume of the collected letters of Lewis. The combination of these two publications lent added visibility to Lewis’s critique of Brideshead.
In the first letter, Lewis confessed to Hardie that “half way through [Brideshead Revisited], not having yet met a single scene or character that thoroughly engaged my interest, I nearly gave up.” He did not. And even if the praise announced in the review of the Rossetti book recurs—“Waugh is a writer, certainly. Many descriptions, phrases, and long-tailed similes pleased me”—the overall dislike of this novel, that had almost led Lewis to quit reading it, prevails: he does not like the book “as a novel.” This first letter includes some reasons in support of this opinion, but since they were absorbed by the more substantial ones spelled out in the next letters, I will not heed those here.
In the second letter, dated five days after the first one, Lewis seems to react to Hardie’s response to his first letter—but her letter we do not get to read, as it has not been published. He opines that “a novel, or any work of art, is primarily a thing, an object, enjoyed for its colour, proportions, atmosphere, its flavour […] but never, never […] as a personal acquaintance with the author.” I could not agree more with this view, though, as we shall see, Lewis’s clearcut opinion on this will make a shocker—somewhat of a contradiction—of what he will ultimately decree about Brideshead Revisited.
The third letter is dated around a year later. By then, Lewis had also read Greene’s The Power and the Glory, a book he compares favorably to Brideshead Revisited: “there is no common measure between it and Waugh.” In this letter, Lewis elaborates further on an idea anticipated in the second letter: that “the supposedly good end of the old rake”—Lord Marchmain’s deathbed conversion—is unsuccessfully portrayed and turns the whole novel unsuccessful too. Lewis considers that happening to be the “twitch upon the thread.” I will focus next on that “twitch” and question his interpretation of that key element of Waugh’s book. But before we move on, we should reference two additional letters, with different addressees, that were only made public in 2007, when Hooper collected and published the volumes containing all the letters.
In the same year 1952 as the third letter to Hardie, Lewis also wrote a letter to Phyllis Sandeman, in which he calls Brideshead Revisited an “odious work.” The context of this startling remark is a comparison of Waugh’s book—which at one point deals with Christmas—with one that Sandeman had written, offering an account of a Christmas during her own childhood. Later, in 1956, Lewis told his fellow writer, Idrisyn Oliver Evans, that “the modern ‘serious fiction’—E. Waugh and all that—seems to me […] deplorable.” The context of this equally pungent remark is Lewis’s mentioning in the first place his “growing sick of modern science-fiction,” a negative sentiment he then extends to modern fiction in general (including Waugh). It seems clear from the context that in using the harsh term “deplorable” Lewis is conveying an ethical or moral judgment.
Which twitch upon what thread?
C.S. Lewis was of course entitled, like anyone else, to dislike any and every book, including my favorite novel, Brideshead Revisited. But what matters is whether the reason he chose to offer for his dislike makes sense from an aesthetic point of view. Surely Lewis would not object to this “internal” analysis of his own judgment, because he shared the view, as we know, that “a novel, or any work of art, is primarily a thing, an object, enjoyed for its colour, proportions, atmosphere, its flavour.”
It seems to me that the main reason for Lewis’s dislike is his thinking that the main conversion scene represented in the novel was not well done. That scene, to repeat, is the conversion of Lord Marchmain on his deathbed, which Lewis takes to be the “twitch upon the thread”—G.K. Chesterton’s metaphor, used by Waugh and then, scathingly, by Lewis. Because the other conversions in Brideshead Revisited seem to follow from this first one, one could validly expect more from Lord Marchmain’s deathbed scene:
When the old man crosses himself, we are shown (and can only be shown) only the physical gesture.
Lewis suggests that this is not enough to prove the old man’s conversion. Instead, the gesture is compatible too with “momentary sentiment” and “semi-conscious revival of a gesture learned in childhood.” As things stand we readers “are left to put in all the important part for ourselves.” Lewis concludes that, given the way the scene is crafted by Waugh, it is rather debatable whether Lord Marchmain did actually convert, which would leave the rest of the conversions in the novel hanging from thin air. I, instead, find it regrettable that Lewis could not see that the ambiguity in the scene—perhaps Lord Marchmain did convert out of fear—effectively opens up the gratuity of grace, that makes the faith so rich. Lord Marchmain produces only the slightest move to open the doors for grace; and Christ, in his mercy, through his Church and the sacrament of last rites, seizes the opportunity and extends him sanctifying grace.
In any event, what is truly debatable is that the set of conversions that follow upon Lord Marchmain’s—and therefore the whole novel—hang only from such a “deathbed twitch.” As recently posted in substack, “Charles, Sebastian, Julia, we learn, are all caught in the manner described by Father Brown. The action of the novel is concerned with the way this tangle of invisible lines is formed and how, believing themselves to be struggling against God, the characters in fact conspire with Him to undo the knot.” The action of the novel, the post rightly indicates, is partly unrelated to the deathbed conversion scene.
Instead, there are many prior indicators of crisis in the religious faith of different characters, especially crises in the faiths of Julia (Lord Marchmain’s daughter) and of Charles (the protagonist of Brideshead and Julia’s lover)—which announce what happens in the end. Lord Marchmains’ making the sign of the cross in his deathbed is a “twitch upon the thread” only if one understands the twitch in context.
Before the book gets to Lord Marchmain’s final act, Waugh puts the flow that leads to the several conversions thus:
[…] another image came to me, of an arctic hut and a trapper alone with his furs and oil lamp and log fire; everything dry and ship-shape and warm inside, and outside the last blizzard of winter raging and the snow piling up against the door. Quite silently a great weight forming against the timber; the bolt straining in its socket; minute by minute in the darkness outside the white heap sealing the door, until quite soon when the wind dropped and the sun came out on the ice slopes and the thaw set in a block would move, slide, and tumble, high above, gather weight, till the whole hillside seemed to be falling, and the little lighted place would open and splinter and disappear, rolling with the avalanche into the ravine.
This beautiful observation by the main character in the book—Charles, the last one to convert—is preceded by a few dramatic episodes—the alluded to “prior indicators”—, especially, but not only, confrontations between him and Julia. If there was a “twitch upon the thread,” its operation was possible only in the aftermath of those episodes, considered together with the impact they produced in the souls of the characters in the novel.
So even if one were to agree with Lewis that Lord Marchmain’s deathbed scene was not well made—a point on which my opinion is irrelevant—, the truth is that Brideshead Revisited as a conversion story would still remain unassailable, as the several conversions in the book are otherwise sufficiently explained, to the extent that one can explain a conversion in writing—a limited extent, as Lewis willingly concedes in one of his letters.
Finally, one need not assume that Waugh’s novel is only a conversion story. There is much beauty in it that goes well beyond the conversion of any of the characters. True, Waugh famously said in the Preface to the revised 1959 edition of Brideshead that its “theme [is] the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters.” This indication by the author of the novel was absent from the original 1945 edition (the one Lewis read in 1951), which had no formal Preface. Nevertheless, I do not think that the author’s indication binds the reader who wants to understand and appreciate the book as “a thing, an object, enjoyed for its colour, proportions, atmosphere, its flavour.” Because one should “never, never [be distracted by] […] a personal acquaintance with the author,” one should also not necessarily be guided by the author’s understanding of his own work: to the extent that that understanding does not flow from the piece of art itself it may be relevant to the historian but not to the aesthete—the one who enjoys the thing. Those (including Lewis) who read Brideshead Revisited between 1945 and 1959, when it lacked a Preface, should have been able to appreciate it for what it was worth—and so too those who choose to read it today omitting the Preface. If a novel needs a Preface for it to be appreciated that novel has, I think, a problem—a problem that, about this I will give my opinion, Brideshead Revisited does not suffer.
Conclusion
Anyone is entitled to interpret Brideshead Revisited as a conversion story (with or without the assistance of Evelyn Waugh’s 1959 Preface). This was the case with Lewis, who thought the book was a conversion story even before there was a Preface so stating it.
Someone could even argue that Waugh’s decision to add a Preface might be proof of Lewis’s point of view: because the conversion was not clear in the first place, the author had to add an explanatory afterword—an ex post facto Preface. But as I tried to explain in this paper, Waugh’s “twitch upon the thread” should be understood in the broader context of the novel. Leaving aside the issue of the Preface, Lewis’s circumscribing his focus to the deathbed scene seems to have curtailed his understanding and appreciation of the book.
Santi Legarre is a professor of law at Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina and longtime friend of the Rover.