Memories of a Golden Past

By Gerald Clarke

A lavish British series mirrors Evelyn Waugh, faults and all

BRIDESHEAD REVISITED PBS, beginning Jan. 18, 8 p.m., E.S.T. It is an odd book by one of the century's oddest writers, and even he had serious reservations about it. "I reread Brideshead and was appalled," he wrote Graham Greene in 1950, five years after publication. But Brideshead Revisited, overwritten and underplotted, is and probably will remain Evelyn Waugh's best-known and most popular novel, a lush, sentimental tribute to Catholicism and to the period between the wars that Waugh regarded as the last gorgeous days of the British aristocracy. Now, in this lavish and beautiful eleven-part series from Britain's Granada Television, U.S. viewers will be able to see why a book so often derided is yet so often loved.

Probably never before, in fact, has a novel been so faithfully adapted. John Mortimer's script preserves big chunks of Waugh's narrative prose in addition to his dialogue. "We went for the book whole," says Producer Derek Granger. "We were true to its faults as well as its virtues, but the faults--the over luxuriance, for instance--are also rather appealing. Waugh wrote it during a very bleak period of World War II, and he looked back to his days in Oxford as golden, halcyon." The most expensive TV production ever to come from Britain (about $9.9 million), Brideshead Revisited has a cast that includes John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Claire Bloom, Mona Washbourne, Jeremy Irons, Anthony Andrews and Diana Quick. Not to mention, of course, that wonderful baroque pile called Castle Howard, which may indeed be the very louse the author saw in his mind when he described the fictional Brideshead, first glimpsed on a cloudless day in June, "prone in the sunlight, gray and gold amid a screen of boskage."

The young man who does the glimpsing is Brideshead's narrator, Charles Ryder (Irons), who finds his army unit bivouacked by coincidence on the grounds he knows so well. He had been introduced to the house years earlier by one of its inhabitants, Sebastian Flyte (Andrews), an Oxford classmate renowned for "his beauty, which was arresting, and his eccentricities of behaviour, which seemed to know no bounds." In the flashbacks arising from Ryder's bittersweet memories, Sebastian gives long, champagne-inspired lunches in his rooms and, in an extravagant undergraduate fantasy, carries with him everywhere a large Teddy bear named Aloysius. Charles and Sebastian form a strong attachment and probably--although the relationship is kept behind its own screen of boskage in both the book and the series--become lovers.

Ryder soon falls in love with the entire Flyte family and becomes for a time almost an adopted son. His own widowed father (Gielgud) is comically austere in his affections; when his son returns to their London home after 15 months, he looks up in unhappy surprise and says, "Oh, dear." The Flytes, by contrast, are warm and charming. Their only fault, in Charles' conventional Anglican eyes, is their obsession with their exotic, un-English Catholic religion.

Propelled by piety, Lady Marchmam (Bloom) tries to mold everyone into goodness. Therein lies much of the family tragedy. Lord Marchmain (Olivier), his love turned to hatred, has gone into self-imposed exile in Venice; Sebastian becomes a doomed and hopeless alcoholic. "Poor Mummy," he says, when he later learns of her death. "She was a true femme fatale. She killed with a touch." Sebastian's beautiful sister Julia (Quick) meantime marries a crass politician, and Charles, who has become a painter, enters into an unhappy marriage of his own. Ten years later, the two of them meet again on an ocean liner, and Charles loves the sister as he did the brother--on-camera this time. Summing up 12 1/2 hours, Bloom jokingly remarks, "Boy meets boy. Boy loses boy. Boy finds girl. Girl dumps boy. Boy goes off alone."

At the beginning, Charles' enchantment with Sebastian and the Marchmains' way of life is infectious, and the first several hours of Brideshead are a glorious feast--even better, no doubt, than those served up in Sebastian's rooms at Christ Church college. The acting is scrupulous. Gielgud's scenes with Irons in the Ryder dining room in London are small comic masterpieces of timing and nuance. Olivier's grand scenes come at the end, when Lord Marchmain comes home to die at Brideshead.

The trouble, for which Waugh is really responsible, comes after Sebastian takes up a drunkard's residence in the remoteness of North Africa. When he leaves--for the last several hours, he is never seen--he takes with him the story's focal point and vitality. Like many narrators, Charles is a reactor, someone who responds to people more interesting than himself. When he is forced to stand in the spotlight, he does not know what to do, and therefore does nothing.

"I think Charles might have had a little more glamour," Waugh's friend Nancy Mitford delicately complained to him when he sent her an advance copy of the book. Mitford saw the point of making the narrator "dim," but asked, "Would Julia and her brother and her sister all be in love with him if he was?" Irons asked himself the same question when he was assigned the role. "Is this character going to bore the audience terribly?" he wondered. "He certainly bores the pants off me."

One solution considered during the shooting was to depart from Waugh and bring Sebastian back into the story. Charles Sturridge, who succeeded Michael Lindsay-Hogg as director and is responsible for most of what appears on screen, did bring Sebastian back in a test scene that showed him in North Africa in the '30s, but the scene was discarded in editing. Still, the production's fidelity to Waugh is something viewers can respect. Several hours of brilliance are worth a couple of tedium. Once hooked, it is doubtful that many people will give up on the series. That, in any event, was the experience in Britain, where the last episode ran Dec. 22. Though it never won top ratings, the program did score a solid hit with the well-off and educated viewers prized by advertisers, and there was something of a Brideshead cult. Restaurants and theater owners complained of lack of business on Brideshead Tuesdays, and Anglophiles as far away as Peking begged for TV cassettes. Costume parties were built around the show, and pretty Sebastian look-alikes were spotted accompanying Teddy bears into smart discos.

How would Waugh, who died in 1966, have liked it? Very much, if the opinion of his son Auberon, who is also a writer, is any indication. "It's the best bit of television I've ever seen," he says. "It is tremendously enjoyable, incredibly true to the novel." Evelyn Waugh never had much affection for Americans or for television, however, and he probably would have had no more than a harrumph of derision for the newest U.S. edition of the book, which bills itself as a "companion to the PBS television series ." By Gerald Clarke. Reported by Jef McAllister/London

With reporting by Jef McAllister

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