BOOKSHELVES

I dreamed I went to stay for a few days in a hotel and installed in my room the bricks and planks that for many years I used as bookshelves, complete with an array of books to feed my habit and defend me against all-comers. This, perhaps, because for the last few weeks of revolving 'flu I have read a considerable number of books, mostly early Penguins, by Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh and Vita Sackville West, the latter the earliest and least worthy, Penguin number 16. When I left the hotel I took the books but forgot the bricks and planks and then had to make elaborate arrangements to retrieve them. As when I first came to Ireland I brought my bricks and planks with me, thinking it would be easier to have bookshelves ready to install, and as it turned out, southern Ireland was not rich in clay and so rather short of bricks, especially bricks of character, so my foresight was justified.

I often turn to early and mid-twentieth century novels, all of them variously cracking and reinforcing upper class codes of behaviour, especially when I'm ill. Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh knew each other well; they were of a kind, he far more caustic than she, and broader, more able for savagery, and, eventually, depth. After Decline and Fall, A Handful of Dust and Vile Bodies, all short, derisive books, and still in bed with a violent headache, in need of larger narrative in order to find these past months of my own life, I read Brideshead Revisited, and, once past the Oxford posing and spending and drinking, and beyond, or inside, the tv adaptation I loved in the eighties, or was it nineties, found myself fully involved, to my surprise, in the ghastly turmoil of Catholicism.

Evelyn Waugh is strangely serious when he is. I read Brideshead during the worst of my third 'flu, the whole book in not much more than twenty-four hours, and felt almost as convinced of the grave hold of Catholicism on people's lives as the narrator, Charles Ryder, aka Jeremy Irons. Uncomprehending but acknowledging. Ireland has not made me think about Catholicism in the same way. It's too much part of the fabric, along with the music and the language and myriad daily habits; whereas Evelyn Waugh's involvement with English Catholicism represented a dive out of the meaningless into the mystery and the sadness.

Brideshead Revisited, Again

Slightly more sleep, slightly more sun, in fact hot beneath the westerly breeze, when it wasn't raining, then sometimes a clear blue day with rushing clouds; then a shower. A lush day to finish Brideshead Revisited. Revisited. I was saying to Mickos the other Saturday that I reread books all the time. He was incredulous. He had just handed back a thriller he had borrowed, its task completed. The idea you'd want to go again to feel the pace or rush on towards a savoury end you already knew, this was a passing conundrum. Like the beleaguered river we looked onto.

Recently I watched the Brideshead film, which does not touch the TV series but sends me back to the book  extra-receptive and keen. The wind in the aspen this afternoon now at the same remove as that ripe and distanced english catholicism, straight out of religious paintings, all drama and despair and scant decorum that propels Brideshead along. Not much to do with the irish version I have absorbed all these years. Both of them fictional.

Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh

The chance encounters that give rise to reading: watching a film of Brideshead Revisited followed by a sneezy cold in unseasonal weather lead me to re-read the novel over two days, a 1954 Penguin shedding an aromatic buff-coloured dust as I turned the pages, the book's fragility echoing mine as I lay on the sofa half under a blanket in what we still, after more than twenty years, call the new room.

Several of my Evelyn Waugh books are very old. I liked him best in my twenties and thirties when his taut mannerism suited my need for high aesthetic mixed with social savagery. The religious preoccupation got on my nerves but I managed to overlook it. Now, after more than forty years in a country whose Catholicism is everywhere and nowhere, I am no less irritated but a little more interested in how the English version managed to be so consumed in its trappings and its rules, much as it would have been several hundred years ago.

Every satirist hides an emotional maelstrom. Evelyn Waugh is not a likeable writer, but occasionally you feel for him, as, near the end of the book, he cooks up an extended arctic image of a hut in the last blizzard of winter.

Quite silently a great weight forming against the timber; the bolt straining in its socket; minute by minute in the darkness outside the white heap sealing the door, until quite soon when the wind dropped and the sun came out on the ice slopes and the thaw set in a block would move, slide and tumble, high above, gather way, gather weight, till the whole hillside seemed to be falling, and the little lighted place would crash open and splinter and disappear, rolling with the avalanche into the ravine.

In an author's note economically placed on the verso page, beneath the publishing history, he absents himself and those he knows from his book. Which is a sure way of planting them firmly on his pages.

I am not I; thou art not he or she; they are not they.  E.W.