A Stillborn Son of Brideshead

Charles Ryder's Schooldays is lost and found in England

It began last fall as routine business for A.D. Peters, the London literary agency that represented Evelyn Waugh and now handles publication rights for the novelist's estate. Says Managing Director Michael Sissons: "We had called up the Waugh files, going back to shortly after his death to look for evidence, while trying to renegotiate some of the paperback royalty rates." Suddenly the familiar rustle of contracts became the startling flutter of serendipity. "Out of the 1970 file," says Sissons, "dropped a typescript of Chapter I of Charles Ryder's Schooldays."

Charles Ryder, the nostalgic hero of Brideshead Revisited? The young man whom millions of Britons and Americans know as Jeremy Irons, the lanky star of the TV series based on the novel? Up to a point, as readers of the Times Literary Supplement are discovering this week.

In its expanded March 5 issue, TLS carries the previously unpublished 12,500 words that Waugh intended as the opening to a Brideshead sequel. The book, begun in 1945, the same year that Brideshead appeared, was to have been a flashback to Charles Ryder's life before he went up to Oxford and met Sebastian Flyte. But the one chapter, titled "Ryder by Gas-Light," is all he wrote. Sissons believes that the author decided to abandon the project after discussions with Peters, the late founder of the agency and one of Waugh's close friends.

It was the right decision. Waugh, one of the great prose craftsmen of the 20th century, must have realized that his 14-year-old Charles was a faint carbon copy of his public school self. Ryder attends "Spierpoint" just after World War I; Waugh went to Lancing at the same time. Details and dialogue are loosely transplanted from the author's diaries. Like Waugh, young Ryder exhibits a monkish passion for drawing and illuminated texts. Unlike the grave, sentimental narrator of Brideshead, Charles the teen-ager can sound as curmudgeonly as his middle-aged maker: "I think the invention of movable type was a disaster, sir. It destroyed calligraphy." There is a dearth of incident, and most of the schoolboy repartee reads like a twit's guide to the jargon of the better classes.

But the chapter's conclusion has the weight and shape of Waugh, the critic of modernism and the Age of the Common Man: "He was aware of a new voice in his inner counsels... a voice, as it were, from a more civilized age as from the chimney corner in mid-Victorian times there used to break sometimes the sardonic laughter of grandmama, relic of Regency, a clear, outrageous, entirely self-assured disturber among the high and muddled thought of her whiskered descendants."

There is no doubt that the work is authentic. The original 20-page, handwritten manuscript is stored at the University of Texas' Humanities Research Center at Austin, the main repository of Waugh's papers since 1967. U.T. Research Librarian Ellen Dunlap notes that the unbound folio of Schooldays bears the novelist's signature and the date Oct. 13, 1945. It is reasonable to assume that Waugh, flushed with Brideshead"s critical and popular success, decided to give a primed public more about Charles Ryder. Chapter 1 bears one piece of sad news: his mother was killed by German shellfire in the Balkans while on some unspecified patriotic mission. His father is already the cold fish of Brideshead. Says he, after refusing to attend his wife's memorial service: "She had no business to go off to Serbia like that. Do you think it my duty to marry again?"

One question remains: How did a 1945 manuscript by a major writer get lost in a welter of financial records? Sissons can think of only one reason: "Peters must have been clearing out his desk, found the typescript and just dropped it in the 1970 file."

That Charles Ryder's Schooldays fell out in time for the Brideshead renaissance is a coincidence wrapped in a contract inside an irony. The author's son Auberon acknowledges that the work is not worth "splashing around." Yet, he adds, "that's why we let the TLS have it." The journal then promotes this bottom-drawer curiosity as a "scoop," which is the title of Evelyn Waugh's classic satire on the press.

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