Dreaming of Waugh

I had a dream where I was cast to play Sebastian in the newest adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, mostly, I think, because in the logic of dreams my high school role as Henry V was actually the role of Sebastian. My friend Hannah and I and others were driven to Castle Howard (which at this point is more or less synonymous with Brideshead in we fans’ collective imagination for having portrayed the Flyte home twice). Hannah and I waited on a warm-up bench that was spring-loaded to throw us toward a foam wall when it was our turn to go on stage (this was designed to get us pumped up). Fast forward, and we were on a bus with a cute and spry Anthony Andrews, who was sullenly submitting to the appointment of his successor, the exceedingly twinky Ben Whishaw. There was some concern that the lake at Castle Howard was too big, so I helpfully suggested they could use CG to dry part of it up. I have no idea how I came by this expertise about any lakes that may or may not exist on those grounds.

I suppose Sebastian is the character we readers are supposed most to want to be: the dissolute aristocrat whose people have been noble since before the Reformation, freed by antinomianism from middle class drudgeries like having a career, an education, or an interest economic justice. But I always imagined myself as Anthony Blanche, with the negligently eccentric, deposed ancien-régime mother who led him around the world on fabulously expensive whims while she gambled, drank, and had liaisons with heads of state. He seemed to be Waugh’s favorite, too, because he was the only character who spoke lucidly (if floridly) about what Charles was getting himself into.

A while back, I was hoping that my simultaneous reading of Brideshead and watching of Star Trek Voyager would hatch a chimera of space-faring aristocrats drinking their way across the galaxy in the 24th century. (Douglas Adams would have been proud.) Instead, 40s and a few minutes of Seinfeld before bed commingled with my preoccupation with the English aristocracy to make these reflections what they were.