Aloysius won’t speak to me until he sees I am forgiven, so please come to luncheon today.” As Charles Ryder observes upon first seeing Sebastian at Oxford: “He was the most conspicuous man of his year by reason of his beauty, which was arresting, and his eccentricities of behaviour, which seemed to know no bounds.”įor a book published in Britain in 1945, the romantic relationship between Charles and Sebastian is described in non-sensational, even “normalizing” terms. In one of his first notes to Charles, inviting him for lunch, Lord Sebastian writes, after having been drunk the night before and vomiting out of Charles’ dorm room window: “I am very contrite.

Lord Sebastian even acquired a brush with stiff bristles, with the teddy bear’s name engraved on it, in order to “threaten him with a spanking when he was sulky.” Whether the teddy bear took those threats seriously was another matter. He walks around Oxford carrying a teddy bear named Aloysius who, we are told, is prone to acting out and has an attitude. In the first part of the book, Sebastian is portrayed as flamboyant, careless, lively and eccentric. His parents are separated and his mother, Lady Marchmain, a lonely, frustrated and tragic figure who tries mostly in vain to pass on her staunch Roman Catholicism to her children, is a suffocating presence for the young Sebastian. Lord Sebastian also comes from a broken family.

Charles’ mother had died and his father is socially awkward and highly introverted, taking only marginal interest in his son. Although they are from different social classes (Charles is from the upper middle class, while Sebastian is aristocracy), they share one thing in common: both come from unhappy, dysfunctional families. What is so paradoxical about all we know of Waugh’s Catholic faith and the treatment of Catholicism in Brideshead Revisited is that the book is at times quite irreverent and at its heart is a romantic relationship between two young men: the narrator, Charles Ryder, and Lord Sebastian Flyte.Ĭharles and Sebastian are undergraduate students in the early 1920’s when they meet at Oxford University. 451 pgs.īritish novelist Evelyn Waugh was what one might call a traditional Catholic and Catholicism is central to his 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder. Waugh was outright despondent following the liturgical transformations of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and felt as though he was losing the church and faith that he embraced after his conversion in 1930.

Brideshead revisited charles ryder