Addis Ababa
Escaping my cramped, clammy hotel room in Djibouti just wasn’t possible one evening. I sorely wanted to – this Horn of Africa coastal port is an intriguing place to wander as a journalist – and no one was stopping me. No one, that is, except the cast of the 1980s Brideshead Revisited television series.
A few weeks earlier at my base in Ethiopia, a parcel from a friend arrived including a USB stick with an eclectic selection of films and television programmes. Previously I’d only known Granada Television’s Brideshead Revisited through stills and short clips. But having opened the first file on my laptop I became mesmerised, so much so that the USB stick accompanied me for an assignment in neighbouring Djibouti. So I watched the last tumultuous episode while encased in the city’s African quarter, a muezzin exclaiming from a nearby mosque.
Such surroundings for viewing a most English classic weren’t as incongruous as one might think. Brideshead’s author, Evelyn Waugh, visited Djibouti in 1930 to catch the train westward to report on the coronation of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie as a special correspondent for the Times. While modern Djibouti, with its swirling Arabic, Somali, French and Ethiopian influences, seizes my imagination, back then Waugh was far from impressed at its “intolerable desolation”, declaring it a “country of dust and boulders, utterly devoid of any sign of life”.
As demonstrated above, and in much of his travel writing, Waugh could use words to memorably acerbic effect. But at the same time, and despite his much-reported capacity for stinging rudeness and misanthropy, he could also unleash the most hauntingly beautiful writing. Hence my Brideshead crush.
For though the sublime acting of Jeremy Irons as Charles Ryder and Anthony Andrews as Sebastian Marchmain must be acknowledged, a large reason they entrance is because of the words they speak – many of them Waugh’s own. This is coupled with Waugh’s gripping analysis of “the poetry, the Alice-in-Wonderland side, of religion”.
Like many a distracted soul during his twenties and early thirties, I let my Catholicism slide to the borders of existence. I have spent the past three years in Ethiopia, surrounded by devout Ethiopian Orthodox and Muslims. This has either urged or forced me – I’m not sure which – to re-evaluate what Catholicism is for me.
I was in such a state of mind when I encountered Brideshead as a novel and then the television series within a few months of each other. Waugh’s mysterious and ambiguous treatment of Catholicism struck home. Because if Catholicism, and all religion, isn’t mysterious and ambiguous, then I’m not sure what is.
Brideshead tells the story of Charles Ryder’s infatuation with the Marchmains, the aristocratic Catholic family of his best friend Sebastian, and how he gradually comes to recognise his spiritual and social distance from them. Watching Charles, I saw myself grappling with the perceived absurdities, which were pointedly illustrated after he had listened to Sebastian’s elder brother, Bridey, discuss Catholicism:
“D’you know, Bridey, if I ever felt for a moment like becoming a Catholic, I should only have to talk to you for five minutes to be cured. You manage to reduce what seem quite sensible propositions to stark nonsense.”
As Charles increasingly rails against this apparent nonsense, he finds himself at odds with the love of his life, Sebastian’s sister, Julia, who won’t renounce her faith, even if that means destroying their relationship.
“The worse I am, the more I need God,” Julia says after telling Charles she can’t marry him. “I can’t shut myself out from His mercy. That is what it would mean; starting a life with you, without Him … I’m not quite bad enough to do [it]; to set up a rival good to God’s.”
As with that line, and many others in Brideshead, I’m not exactly sure what it means. But perhaps that’s Waugh’s point, taking us back to that Alice-in-Wonderland quality, which is enough to hold even the increasingly dissolute Sebastian’s attention. During a summer break from their partying at Oxford University, when Charles questions whether Sebastian’s Catholicism makes much difference to him, Sebastian replies: “Of course. All the time.”
Ryder pursues his point: “I suppose they try and make you believe an awful lot of nonsense.”
Sebastian’s wonderfully elliptical reply: “Is it nonsense? I wish it were. It sometimes sounds terribly sensible to me.”
In Djibouti, not far from Rue d’Ethiopie and its neon-lit doorways beckoning drunken soldiers, is the city’s Catholic cathedral. Near the entrance to its crypt – the preferred spot for Mass to escape Djibouti’s broiling heat – is a grotto to the Virgin Mary. Standing in front of it the night after finishing Brideshead, a breeze placating the hot darkness, I continued to share Ryder’s bafflement but also occasional insight:
Then I knew that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom.
James Jeffrey is a freelance journalist based in Addis Ababa, from where he covers Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa for various international media. He tweets at @jamesinaddis
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