Goodbye to Brideshead

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Goodbye to Brideshead. The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder is a novel by the English writer Evelyn Waugh , written in 1944 and published in 1945 . From the perspective of the first-person narrator Charles Ryder, he describes the collapse of the wealthy, Catholic aristocratic family Flyte of Marchmain in England in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1960 Waugh published a revised version "with many small additions and some extensive cuts".

Time magazine ranks the novel among the top 100 English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005. The novel was filmed as a TV series from 1979 to 1981 and for the cinema in 2008 .

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During the Second World War , Captain Charles Ryder and his troops were quartered on a noble residence: Brideshead Castle, which he knew from the interwar period. Charles Ryder remembers the Flyte family, with whose son Sebastian he befriended in Oxford in 1922 and whose older sister Julia he had a love affair with. The novel tells the story of this family from the perspective of Charles Ryder.

Charles Ryder, an unloved son from a middle-class family and an agnostic , left Oxford prematurely without a degree and became an architectural painter. Sometimes up close, sometimes from a distance, he takes part in the life of the Flyte family and witnesses various forms of misfortune: his father Alexander, Marquess of Marchmain and Earl of Brideshead, has been separated from a lover in Venice since the end of the First World War from his wife, who is an avowed Catholic. Lord Sebastian, the younger son of the Marquess and his wife Teresa, Lady Marchmain, turns into an alcoholic. The reasons for this remain unclear: is it the mother's neglect or some kind of negative contact with her? The older sister, Lady Julia, takes refuge in marriage with the Parvenu Rex Mottram, then in love affairs and later in increasing self-reproaches. The older son Bridey (his real first name is never mentioned), with the courtesy title of Earl of Brideshead, cultivated his wooden character until he became a professional matchbox collector. The youngest daughter, Lady Cordelia, a deeply religious Catholic, is involved in the Spanish Civil War after a failed religious appointment as a nurse .

The friendship between Sebastian and Charles, hardly concealed as homoerotic, gradually fades the more Charles becomes part of the society at Castle Brideshead, by which Sebastian feels controlled and restricted. Both lost sight of each other in the mid-1920s. Ten years later, Charles Ryder happened to meet Sebastian's sister Julia again on a steamer from New York to Great Britain. They enter into a relationship with one another and divorce their respective spouses.

With the exception of Sebastian and the late Lady Marchmain, all of the characters in the novel meet at Lord Marchmain's deathbed, who returned to Great Britain before the outbreak of World War II. The old lord is converted back to the Catholic faith shortly before his death. Julia also returns to the bosom of the Catholic Church and leaves Charles, whom she does not want to marry because, according to Catholic marriage law , he is considered married despite his divorce. Sebastion had already found support in the role of the cloister porter. At the end of the framework story, Charles says a prayer in the palace chapel - an ancient, newly-learned form of words  - which seems to indicate that he has found faith.

Narrative

The language is interwoven with irony, wit and poetic metaphors. At the same time, Waugh uses colloquial formulations that contrast the tragedy of the main characters with the distant perspective of the observer. The ironic distance is already heralded in the untimely dissolute subtitle of the novel.

The action takes place in changing locations - in Oxford, London, Venice, Paris and Morocco, on Brideshead Castle, a steamer - which enables Waugh to present the world he has drawn in an interesting and new way. From the late re-encounter between Charles Ryder and Brideshead, the painting of a whole epoch emerges, the time between the world wars.

interpretation

After a minor injury sustained in December 1943, Waugh asked for a few months of official leave in the spring of 1944 and justified his request with the hope that the book he intended to write would "offer a greater number of readers harmless reading pleasure and relaxation in the current war" . In fact, the work is written "easy to drink" and contains numerous snappy, casual dialogues.

A major theme of the book is Catholicism , seen through the eyes of the agnostic Charles Ryder. In a “Warning from the Author” (1945), which is missing in the 1959 revision, the author - a conservative eccentric who converted to Catholicism in 1930 - wrote that the book was “nothing less than an attempt at the work of divine destiny To trace [or grace] in a pagan world, in the life stories of an English Catholic family that is itself half paganized ”. The American film production company Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer informed Waugh that the novel was about "what is theologically called 'the working of grace ', that is, about the undeserved and one-sided act of love through which God constantly calls souls to himself" ( deals with what is theologically termed 'the operation of Grace', that is to say, the unmerited and unilateral act of love by which God continually calls souls to Himself) . In a letter to Lady Mary Lygon, Waugh said: “I believe that everyone is open to divine grace at some point in their life. Of course this is always ready, but human life is planned in such a way that there is usually a certain point in time for it - sometimes [...] only on the deathbed - when all resistance is extinguished and grace can pour in ” (I believe that everyone in his (or her) life has the moment when he is open to Divine Grace. It's there, of course, for the asking all the time, but human lives are so planned that usually there's a particular time - sometimes […] on his deathbed - when all resistance is down and grace can come flooding in).

Faith and the eternal dilemma between guilt and atonement play an important role: Almost all actions of a person are determined by it, even if it increases one's own unhappiness. Ultimately, however, everyone finds their way back to God, albeit through suffering: The third and last part of the main story is entitled " A Twitch on the Leash" (A Twitch upon the Thread) and is a quote from Gilbert Keith Chesterton's crime novels with the main character of Father Brown . In one of these stories it is said that Brown caught the thief on an invisible hook and an invisible leash and that he could always get him back with a pinch.

In his epilogue, the first-person narrator sums up his report as “ the fierce little human tragedy ”. Indeed, this “effect of divine destiny in a pagan world” is an ironic twist on the part of the author, because what is actually meant are the negative consequences of the (attempted) turning away from Catholicism: Bridey finds fulfillment as a collector of matchboxes and marries a no longer young widow who marries him primarily for reasons of financial security; Julia is incapable of a full marriage; Sebastian ends up drinking and atone as the porter of a Moroccan monastery; and the old marquess, Alexander, returns to Catholicism only because he fears death. The counter-image to this is offered by the deeply religious and at the same time cheerful and lovable Cordelia, who expresses the positive aspects of religious life.

Another theme of the novel is the decline of the English aristocracy, the end of an era and a world. The guiding metaphor for this is the image of the hut of an arctic hunter, which the narrator describes several times at the end of the novel, which is crushed by a glacier. However, the author later distanced himself from this point of view: In the foreword to the revised version from 1959, Waugh wrote that in 1944 it was not foreseeable that the aristocracy would recover after the war and that a real country house boom would arise - at the time he thought man, the old mansions were doomed (it seemed then that the ancestral seats which were our chief national artistic achievement were doomed do decay and spoliation like the monasteries in the sixteenth century) . That is why at the time he wrote the novel he “ piled it on”: Much of this book is a “eulogy that has been preached in an open coffin” (much of this book therefore is a panegyric preached over an empty coffin) . However, he could no longer rewrite the novel so far without not completely destroying it. It is therefore offered "to a younger generation of readers, more than a reminder of the Second World War than one of the twenties and thirties, in which the story supposedly takes place" (it is offered to a younger generation of readers as a souvenir of the Second World War rather than of the twenties or of the thirties, with which it ostensible deals) .

The novel is strongly autobiographical. This is supported by biographical parallels and the story Charles Ryder's Schooldays found in Waugh's estate - published in Germany under the title Charles Ryder's Days before Brideshead  - in which the author processed his own experiences from his school days.

Film adaptations

Waugh's novel became particularly popular when it was made into a television split, filmed on Castle Howard and first broadcast on British television in 1981. In Brideshead Revisited were Jeremy Irons as Charles Ryder, Anthony Andrews as Sebastian Flyte, Diana Quick as Julia Flyte to see in the lead roles. The production by the two British directors Michael Lindsay-Hogg and Charles Sturridge - starring prominent supporting actors such as John Gielgud , Laurence Olivier , Stéphane Audran and Claire Bloom - became an international success with critics and audiences in 1982 and was awarded seven BAFTA TV awards , including Best Dramatic TV Series. Anthony Andrews received the BAFTA Award and an Emmy for Best Actor, Laurence Olivier the BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actor for the role of Lord Marchmain. A year later, two Golden Globe Awards followed in the categories of Best Miniseries and Anthony Andrews as Best Actor .

A theatrical version of David Yates' material , in which Paul Bettany was supposed to play Charles Ryder, Jude Law Sebastian Flyte and Oscar winner Jennifer Connelly Julia Flyte, failed in 2005 due to financial problems. In 2007 another attempt was made to adapt the novel for the big screen. Julian Jarrold , who is mainly experienced as a television director, was commissioned with the production , while the young British actors Matthew Goode , Ben Whishaw and Hayley Atwell were entrusted with the roles of Charles Ryder, Sebastian Flyte and Julia Flyte. The remake of Brideshead Revisited premiered on July 25, 2008 in New York City .

expenditure

  • English: Brideshead Revisited. The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder. Chapman and Hall, London 1945.
  • English revision: Brideshead Revisited. The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder. Chapman and Hall, London 1960.
  • English: Goodbye to Brideshead. The sacred and profane memories of Captain Charles Ryder. A novel. German by Franz Fein. Amstutz & Herdeg, Zurich 1947.
  • English: Goodbye to Brideshead. The sacred and profane memories of Captain Charles Ryder. Novel. German by Hans Bütow . Claassen & Goverts, Hamburg 1948.
  • German new translation: Reunion with Brideshead. The sacred and profane memories of Captain Charles Ryder. Novel. German by Pociao . With an afterword by Daniel Kampa. Diogenes-Verlag, Zurich 2013.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b According to the foreword in the revision written in 1959 and published in 1960.
  2. ^ Spiegel Online : "Legend without Passion" , November 20, 2008
  3. ↑ According to the preface in the first edition from 1945.
  4. ^ Message from Evelyn Waugh to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer dated February 18, 1847, quoted in Giles Foden: Waugh versus Hollywood, in: The Guardian of 22 & May 2004, pp. & 34.
  5. ↑ Mark Amory (Ed.): The Letters of Evelyn Waugh . Ticknor & Fields, New Haven 1980, p. 520.
  6. ^ Francesca Coppa: "A Twitch Upon the Thread": Revisiting Brideshead Revisited. In: Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives. Edited by L. Gallagher. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2006. ( Book II is incorrect, it is Book III .)
  7. ^ Afterword by Daniel Kampa to the German edition (2013), p. 507.
  8. ↑ Start dates for Brideshead Reunion in the Internet Movie Database, accessed April 30, 2011.
  9. ^ AO Scott: Bright Young Things in Love and Pain , in: The New York Times, July 25, 2008, accessed April 30, 2011.