English Drunks, Both Fictional and Not

Photo by Viktor Forgacs on Unsplash

I linked to The Guardian’s obituary of Wilfrid Sheed (1940–2011) yesterday. Sheed’s first book was A Middle Class Education (1960), which was apparently semi-autobiographical, much like Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.

The Guardian notes that there’s a lot of drinking in Middle Class:

Owing more to Kingsley Amis than to Evelyn Waugh, A Middle Class Education proclaimed that Oxford undergraduates drank beer and chased girls as enthusiastically as their redbrick counterparts.

I like the reference to Amis, whose anthology of three short drinking books (Everyday Drinking) is a mainstay in my drinking library, but I’m not sure I understand the reference to Waugh. There was a helluva lot of drinking in Brideshead Revisited, too, and it was alcoholism that did in — and arguably saved — the book’s tragic hero, Sebastian Flyte.

I’ve long maintained that Sebastian, had an acute sense of holiness, which created an intense desire for joy — a supernatural trait — and he wrongly tried to capture it with drink. After Sebastian had destroyed his sense of holiness through debauchery, calls from the divine didn’t stop coming to him.

This becomes clear in Waugh’s final words about Sebastian. Sebastian’s drinking worsened until he ended up living with a shiftless German named Kurt, a pitiful…