There may be no such thing as a completely perfect novel. Yet few achieve greatness despite missing perfection quite like this one. What makes A Handful Of Dust a classic are the same things that catch readers like me short on a first read. It’s the grittiness that grabs you.
Take a set of cold, seemingly unknowable characters. A radical tone shift from comedy to drama. A dire third act with an O. Henry twist out of nowhere. An abrupt finale that can’t be anything but anticlimactic.
If I was a book publisher in the 1930s with this manuscript in my hands, I would have sent Evelyn Waugh back for a rewrite, probably grumbling at him on his way out. Thus the world might have missed out on one of the century’s greatest literary works.
Fortunately we didn’t, and so this misshaped masterpiece took flight.
This is the first Waugh novel informed by his commitment to Catholicism, a realization true happiness was unattainable in the material world. This sensibility is fused with the sharp sarcasm Waugh had been leveling on his own upper-class London set in Decline And Fall and Vile Bodies, but amped up by a more visceral savagery.
Tony Last is a man in love. He has a wife, Brenda, and a son, John Andrew, but what he loves most is his country estate, Hetton. The way Waugh describes it, it’s hard to see the attraction: no bathrooms, drafty bedrooms, and leaky roofing. “But there was not a glazed brick or encaustic tile that was not dear to Tony’s heart,” Waugh writes.
 |
| A former abbey remodeled as a family estate in the 1860s, Hetton is a treasure to behold but a bear to live in and maintain. Above is a similar real-life estate, Tyntesfield near Bristol, England. "The time would come, perhaps in John Andrew's day, when opinion would reinstate Hetton to its proper place," Tony believes. Photo by Bob Fowler from https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/bath-bristol/tyntesfield |
Brenda meanwhile is visited by a young man named Beaver who lives with his ruthlessly opportunistic mother and does no work. He hangs around clubs waiting for others to pick up his tab. Implausibly and insuperably, they commence an affair.
Brenda is under no illusions; she just likes the action: “He’s second rate and a snob and, I should think, as cold as a fish, but I happen to have a fancy for him, that’s all…besides I’m not sure he’s altogether awful.”
For Brenda’s friends, the affair provides something new to gossip over and keep from Tony. Waugh crafts an environment where such dealings are common to the point of banality. “You know, you’re causing a great deal of trouble,” Brenda’s sister Marjorie confides. “You’ve taken London’s only spare man.”
For the first half of the novel, Waugh reintroduces familiar themes from earlier books. Here again are the jaded party set and the ruthless exploiters of same. Beaver’s mother is a flagrant example of the latter, an interior decorator who sees her son’s adultery as entry point to transforming Hetton into a chromium-plated, money-pit monstrosity.
 |
| A 1930s party in full swing. Tony and Brenda start the novel pretty happy, but his distaste for the social whirl sets them at odds after a while. "I'm not making a thing about it," she pouts. "I just thought it might be fun to eat someone else's food for a bit." Image from https://www.londonworld.com/whats-on/new-years-eve-london-1930s-photos-4926758 |
In the novel’s opening, Mrs. Beaver delightedly reports on the aftermath of a fatal fire in an apartment she has plans for a pricey fix-up:
“The fire never properly reached the bedrooms I am afraid. Still they are bound to need doing up, everything black with smoke and drenched in water and luckily they had that old-fashioned sort of extinguisher that ruins everything.”
Waugh could keep going like this forever, but this time he shuts it down with a sudden onslaught of tragedy that pulls the novel away from Decline And Fall territory into something closer in spirit to Thomas Hardy’s Jude The Obscure. Yet black humor and cold wit still remain in force, accentuating the darker shadows of the plot and bestowing on Tony a kind of sympathetic gravitas.
He’s still a stick, but in his ordeal he develops something Waugh plays with for the first time: a rooting interest. Waugh being Waugh, though, he can’t help but constantly worsen Tony’s situation.
 |
| Hosting an annual fox hunt is part of the attraction of Hetton for Tony: "The Hetton meet was popular, it lay in their best country and the prospect of stirrup cups had drawn many leathery old ladies from the neighbouring packs," Waugh writes. Image from https://www.petersfieldpost.co.uk/news/nostalgia/peeps-into-the-past-the-boxing-day-hunt-a-festive-tradition-or-echo-of-a-cruel-past-751670 |
At one point, Brenda attempts to mitigate her planned abandonment of her husband by fixing him up with one of Waugh’s most delicious horrorshow characters, the faux-exotic Princess Abdul Akbar. Alas, even if he was more prone to straying than proves the case, the Princess wears a heavy scent Tony can’t abide. Only John Andrew takes to her.
Meanwhile, Brenda throws herself more deeply into Beaver, to the point where his mother makes a Hetton redesign a condition of their togetherness. Brenda is not presented as a deep character, but rather shallow and easily bored. Her friends wonder what she can be thinking even as they support her dalliance.
Marjorie discusses it with a mutual friend:
“Oh, Jock, how d’you think it’ll end?”
“She’ll get bored with Beaver soon enough.”
“The
trouble is that he doesn’t care for her in the least. If he did, it would soon
be over… What an ass she is being.”
“I should say she was managing it unusually well, if you asked me.”
 |
| Kristin Scott Thomas as Brenda and Rupert Graves as Beaver in a 1988 movie adaptation of the novel. "A Handful Of Dust has more cruelty in it than a dozen violent Hollywood thrillers, and it is all expressed quietly, almost politely," wrote Roger Ebert in a positive review. Image from https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/a-handful-of-dust-1988 |
The inspiration for Tony’s loss of Brenda is commonly attributed to Waugh’s divorce from his first wife, Evelyn Gardner, a. k. a. “She-Evelyn.” An affair ended that relationship, too, yet it’s hard to blame her. He-Evelyn was an inattentive husband by his own account (see his travel book Labels) and after a while of attempted co-habitation, She-Evelyn figured her husband was probably gay anyway.
In A Handful Of Dust it’s a far different situation. Drawing his newfound Catholic sensibility, Waugh develops Tony’s plight as a critique of the amoral, post-Christian world he found then-modern England to be. Sin and cupidity are not pursued from lust or greed but rather sheer boredom, diversions to distract from lives lived without purpose.
A phrase which feels like a mantra rolls across the book: Everybody agreed that it was nobody’s fault.
Not religious himself until his post-divorce conversion, Waugh saw the dominant Anglicanism as a façade for a practical atheism, which had been the case for him. In A Handful Of Dust, the one representative of any faith is a former missionary who dusts off old sermons apparently indifferent to the fact his audience aren’t colonists in the British Raj.
 |
| "Let us remember our Gracious Queen Empress in whose services we are here and pray that she may long be spared to send us at her bidding to do our duty at the uttermost parts of the earth," Rev. Tendril instructs his flock. The village parishioners may be confused; but they recognize happily another service is ending. Image from https://livingchurch.org/covenant/thinking-about-mission-the-anglican-way/ |
In the last third of the novel, another major shift occurs. Tony leaves England for what appears to be an ill-conceived effort at forgetting his troubles with an expedition to either Brazil or Dutch Guiana in the company of Dr. Messinger, a man he only just met who prides himself on his closeness to the native population:
“I became blood-brother with a Pie-wie – interesting ceremony. They buried me up to the neck in mud and all the women of the tribe spat on my head. Then we ate a toad and a snake and a beetle and after that I was a blood-brother…”
A tragicomedy of errors ensues, as tragic as everything that came before, yet oddly satisfying in the way it wraps up Tony’s journey and provides him with escape from a world he realizes never cared about him. It’s a bleak story, yet Waugh throughout suggests the fault lays not in the stars but in the misplaced values of its protagonists.
 |
| Evelyn Waugh, circa 1937. A Handful Of Dust continued his run of successful novels, while warning readers he wasn't writing just for laughs anymore. "A whole Gothic world had come to grief...there was now no armour, glittering in the forest glades, no embroidered feet on the greensward, the cream and dappled unicorns had fled..." Image from https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw142815/Evelyn-Waugh |
The sourness of the narrative throughout can put off readers. Even those prepared for sudden death narrated lightly from their exposure to other Waugh novels will find themselves tested here. I think this is where the Catholic perspective rears up. Tony experiences a kind of purgatory, revisited by ghosts from his past, that calls to mind all the misplaced alliances and affections of his past:
He was going away because it seemed to be the conduct expected of a husband in his circumstances, because the associations of Hetton were for the time poisoned for him, because he wanted to live for a few months away from people who would know him or Brenda, in places where there was no expectation of meeting her or Beaver or Reggie St. Cloud at every corner he frequented…
In Catholicism, the goal of life isn’t survival, but something after. Reading Handful Of Dust with this in mind helps steel one for how the book goes down. Yet like his later The Loved One and Love Among The Ruins, it’s the absence of God and religion one notices more.
 |
| Alec Guinness as Mr. Todd lays down the law for Tony Last (James Wilby), just beginning to sense a trap, in the 1988 movie. "There is medicine for everything in the forest, to make you well and to make you ill." Image from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095274/mediaviewer/rm3701024256/ |
Yet Satan does show up in a fashion near the book’s end. Tony’s ordeal culminates in meeting Mr. Todd, a sly figure whose boundless thirst for Dickens proves more than our hero can handle.
“You know very well that I can’t get away without your help.”
“In that case you must humour an old man. Read me another chapter.”
This portion of the novel is based more on Waugh’s real experiences than the divorce from his wife. As retailed in his travel book Ninety-Two Days, Waugh did journey through Guyana and Brazil just before beginning A Handful Of Dust. His impressions of deep forests and annoying insects are recorded in the earlier book much the way they are described in the novel, as is a constant state of exhaustion.
The
catawampus construction of A Handful Of Dust clashes hard against
Waugh’s usually smooth, dry style. Its objective seems more to shock and
provoke than to be enjoyed. The true test of its greatness lies not in a first
read but its immediate aftermath. What seems splenic in its sudden plot twists
and tonal adjustments comes across as surgical in retrospect, of literature mirroring
the day-to-day sting of life in a way that Waugh, however brilliant his writing
remained, never would achieve again.
No comments:
Post a Comment