This Amazon customer review (search for the reviewer name “seth@lancenet.or.jp”), if you can wade through his pathetic mock Appalachian dialect, suggests that repressed homosexuality is an underlying theme of this book. I’ve heard it from others, but wonder if that was really intended by the author. (Or was Waugh himself gay, and that aspect of the story naturally came up?). Of course, there are three obviously homosexual characters in the story…Sebastian, Anthony, and Kurt (the German deserter who lives with Sebastian in Morocco). Yet, the main character of the story is the narrator Charles Ryder, who as far as I can tell is straight.
What do you all think’s going on here? I try not to evaluate novels set in distant times and locales by the standards of the culture that surrounds me now. Sure, Sebastian and Charles walking arm-in-arm to “see the ivy” might raise red flags now, but was that the case 75 years ago when the story was set? Or 50 years ago (I suppose), when the story was written? I prefer to think of the earlier part of the story as being nothing more than a paean to the beauty and innocence of youth, especially as personified by Sebastian, which was shortly to deteriorate into the ruin that was personified by Sebastian in the second half of the book. For my part, I’m fascinated by this transformation Sebastian, who is witty and urbane as an Oxford freshman and seems to delight in all the expensive pleasures that his class position affords him. The desperate alcoholic of the second half hardly seems to be the same person. I think it’s this transformation that is the real heart of the story, not issues of sexuality.
According to Selina Hastings, one of Evelyn Waugh’s biographers:
There are two main themes in Brideshead Revisited: the first, that of the working out of a divine plan in the restoration and creation of faith, encompassing the second, the infatuation of Charles Ryder for an entire noble family, the Flytes…Charles’s intense emotional friendship with Sebastian Flyte is firmly grounded in Evelyn’s love affair with Alastair Graham - in the manuscript, Alastair’s name inadvertently appears from time to time instead of Sebastian’s…In appearance and temperament Sebastian owes something also to Hugh Lygon, another weak, charming, not overly bright young man to whom Evelyn was much attached.
There seems little doubt that Waugh was infatuated with Graham. In Waugh’s last year at university he avoided his old friends and haunts and spent all his time with that young man.
Whether this relationship was consummated is open to doubt. It is a moot point as to whether Waugh was gay, but he did have at least five children, although this neither confirms nor denies the proposition.
You can read what you like into the reasons for Sebastian’s descent into alcoholism. At one point in the book, Sebastian confesses his fear that his family will ‘take over’ Charles and so he will be lost to Sebastian as a friend. In many senses this is what comes to pass, and when it happens, Sebastian has had enough of his family and disappears to Morocco, although he is careful to collect the allowance sent to him by his family.
In my opinion, Charles is no great loss as a friend anyway. He’s more interested in the house!
I would agree with Nostradamus’ evaluation of Charles. I think more than repressed homosexuality the book is about isolation. Feeling isolated from family, friends, and fellow students in Sebastian’s case. His fears that his family will steal Charles away from him… and yet at the same time Sebastian really never ATTEMPTS to keep Charles. A life being lived like a self fulfilling prophesy.
Its been a VERY long time since I read this book, like 180 or 81, so I may be off the mark. But that is the feeling that has stuck with me for 20 years.