Waugh goes beyond mere foreshadowing to spell the situation out. His neglect and abandonment of them all is both funny and shocking. He is shown as being unable to make a family of his own: his wife is deliriously awful, but he is also the most terrible husband and father (to Caroline and John-John, strangely pre-figuring John F Kennedy’s real-life family 15 years later). His pictures of Marchmain House give him an entrée to society and lead to a career. And Sebastian and his sister Julia are only ever fleetingly together in Charles’s presence – this is one of the ways that the 2008 film, whatever its merits as entertainment, is a travesty of the book: Charles, Julia and Sebastian are shown having good times together as a joyous group, rather like the triangle in the film Cabaret – unimaginable in the Waugh version.Įven during the period when he doesn’t see any of the Flytes, Charles is still tied to them. Sebastian takes Charles to meet his nanny, not his mother. Brideshead is “where my family live”, says Sebastian, prompting Charles to reflect: “I felt, momentarily, an ominous chill at the words he used – not, ‘that is my house’, but ‘it’s where my family live’.”
The sadness is that Sebastian wants to grab on to Charles in order to get away, while Charles wants to belong.
“That summer term with Sebastian,” he says, “it seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood.”
If they once got hold of you with their charm, they’d make you their friend not mine, and I won’t let them.Ĭharles has no idea of family life – he lost his mother in an absurd Waugh manner during the first world war, and while his father is occasionally kind he is vague and not very paternal. All my life they’ve been taking things away from me. I’m not going to have you get mixed up with my family.
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