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"That Charles Ryder was converted to the Roman Catholic Church at the end of Brideshead Revisited is accepted by all Waugh scholars," John W. Osborne begins his "Hints of Charles Ryder's Conversion in Brideshead Revisited. " I suppose that makes me not a Waugh scholar; though I think I can honestly affirm that I am not a hasty or careless reader of the work. Another Waugh scholartells methat Ryder's conversion is "one of the most widely accepted points in the book." I was astonished when I was told this. I long ago lost count of.the number of times I have read the novel since it was first published more than forty years ago, but never once in those readings did this interpretation occur to me.
The onus is surely on those who advance that interpretation to produce the evidence in the text for it. The three "hints" Mr. Osborne cites seem to me to provide no such evidence. First, Hooper, after informing Ryder that "there's a sort of R. C. church attached" to the "great barrack of aplace. . . very ornate," says, "More in your line than mine." Mr. Osborne thinks "The last sentence can only mean that Hooper knows of Ryder's Roman Catholicism." Suppose that Ryder's battalion had been stationed, as it might well have been, in the vicinity of a "great house" which had an Anglican chapel attached- there are many more of them in England than Roman Catholic private chapels; for instance, the ornate Baroque chapel of Chatsworth, built by the staunchly Protestant Dukes of Devonshire (readers of Waugh's letters will recall his denunciation of John F. Kennedy's sister for marrying the heir to the dukedom). Would Ryder, a known "highbrow," a connoisseur of architecture who had published several books on the subject, not have been expected to display an interest in it? And would the "relentlessly philistine" Hooper, as Mr. Osborne rightly calls him, not have made exactly the same remark to him, "More in your line than mine"? Is a relentless philistine, uninterested in Ryder's aesthetic concerns, likely to evince more interest in his theological ones?
Another "hint" is that Ryder comments that Father Phipps "looked at me with the expression I have seen since in the religious, of...