Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh [0]
EVELYN WAUGH
THE SACRED AND PROFANE MEMORIES
OF CAPTAIN CHARLES RYDER
Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
Penguin Books, 625 Madison Avenue, New York,
New York 10022, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Australia Ltd,
Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 2801 John Street,
Markham, Ontario, Canada L3R IB4
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road,
Auckland 10, New Zealand
First published by Chapman & Hall 1945
Published in Penguin Books 1951
Reprinted 1952, 1954, 1957, 1959
Revised edition first published by Chapman & Hall 1960
Published in Penguin Books 1962
Reprinted 1964, 1967, 1968, 1970, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1976, 1977,1978, 1979, 1980 (twice), 1981
Copyright © 1945 by Evelyn Waugh
All rights reserved
Made and printed in Great Britain
by Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press) Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk
Set in Monophoto Baskerville
Except in the United States of America,this book is sold subject to the conditionthat it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise,be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulatedwithout the publisher's prior consent in any form ofbinding or cover other than that in which it ispublished and without a similar conditionincluding this condition being imposedon the subsequent purchaser.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
I am not I: thou art not he or she:
they are not they
E.W.
CONTENTS
Preface
Prologue: BRIDESHEAD REVISITED
Book One: ET IN ARCADIA EGO
Chapter One: I meet Sebastian Flyte—and Anthony Blanche—I visit Brideshead for the first time
Chapter Two: My cousin Jasper's Grand Remonstrance—a warning against charm—Sunday morning in Oxford
Chapter Three: My father at home—Lady Julia Flyte
Chapter Four: Sebastian at home—Lord Marchmain abroad
Chapter Five: Autumn in Oxford—dinner with Rex Mottram and supper with Boy Mulcaster—Mr Samgrass—Lady Marchmain at home—Sebastian contra mundum
Book Two: BRIDESHEAD DESERTED
Chapter One: Samgrass revealed—I take leave of Brideshead—Rex revealed
Chapter Two: Julia and Rex
Chapter Three: Mulcaster and I in defence of our country—Sebastian abroad—I take leave of Marchmain House
Book Three: A TWITCH UPON THE THREAD
Chapter One: Orphans of the Storm
Chapter Two: Private view—Rex Mottram at home
Chapter Three: The fountain
Chapter Four: Sebastian contra mundum
Chapter Five: Lord Marchmain at home—death in the Chinese drawing-room—the purpose revealed
Epilogue: BRIDESHEAD REVISITED
To LAURA
PREFACE
THIS novel, which is here re-issued with many small additions and some substantial cuts, lost me such esteem as I once enjoyed among my contemporaries and led me into an unfamiliar world of fan-mail and press photographers. Its theme—the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters—was perhaps presumptuously large, but I make no apology for it. I am less happy about its form, whose more glaring defects may be blamed on the circumstances in which it was written.
In December 1943 I had the good fortune when parachuting to incur a minor injury which afforded me a rest from military service. This was extended by a sympathetic commanding officer, who let me remain unemployed until June 1944 when the book was finished. I wrote with a zest that was quite strange to me and also with impatience to get back to the war. 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.
I have been in two minds as to the treatment of Julia's outburst about mortal sin and Lord Marchmain's dying soliloquy. These passages were never of course, intended to report words actually spoken. They belong to a different way of writing from, say, the early scenes between Charles and his father. I would not now introduce them into a novel which elsewhere aims at verisimilitude. But I have retained them here in something near their original form because, like the Burgundy (misprinted in many editions) and the moonlight they were essentially of the mood of writing; also because many readers liked them, though that is not a consideration of first importance.