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David Bittner contests my argument, which appears in the Evelyn Waugh Newsletter (Winter, 1989, pp. 7-8), that Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited was homosexual.
To begin, I completely agree with Mr. Bittner with respect to the video version of the novel making the relationship of Sebastian and Charles Ryder overtly homosexual and thus violating the reticence of Waugh on the subject. My interpretation of Sebastian, however, was made initially thirty years ago, when I first read Brideshead Revisited. The video then was far in thefuture. I was also not influenced by the "gay liberation" movement and I doubt if I had heard of the phrase then. Subsequent re-readings of the book have reinforced my first impression.
Mr. Bittner claims that Lady Marchmain "is nobody's fool" and that if Sebastian was homosexual "she would know it." The complex Lady Marchmain seems to me to fit a dictionary definition of fool as "a person of little or no judgment." She was certainly obtuse about Sebastian's alcoholism. Also, how would she know what Sebastian was doing at Eton and Oxford? Mr. Bittner is right when he notes that Ryder's cousin Jasper did not like homosexuals, but living in digs, Jasper could not know everything that went on in the university (although I admit that he tried hard to).
On the subject of the cigarette that Ryder lit and then gave to Julia, igniting "a thin bat's squeak of sexuality," I interpret this to reflect the fundamentally heterosexual part of his nature. I would add that on page 76, where this is described, Ryder previously mused that Julia was "especially female as I...