First person singular

The young Evelyn Waugh, it’s said, once declared in a newspaper article that the writing of novels in the first person was a contemptible practice. One would like to think he gave his reasons, but, according to Somerset Maugham, ‘he threw out the statement with just the same take-it-or-leave-it casualness as Euclid used when he made his celebrated observation about parallel straight lines.’ Subsequently Waugh would write his most popular novel, Brideshead Revisited, in that despicable first person. It would have been a poorer novel if he hadn’t shown the glamorous Flyte family through the eyes of his narrator, dazzled (if also dull) Charles Ryder. Few readers, I suppose, care much about Ryder’s own story, even though it is integral to Waugh’s theme — ‘the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters’. Yet it is Ryder’s tone of voice, or rather the modulations of that tone, now nostalgic, now enraptured, now weary, now bitter, finally reconciled, that give the novel its peculiar, and for so many of us irresistible, flavour.