A Handful of Dust—Evelyn Waugh
A highly cultivated waste land
Tony and Brenda Last, both in their mid thirties, live in Hetton, an old family mansion some distance from London. Tony loves the house and land—he’s even named all the bedrooms after Arthurian figures—and would prefer spending all his time enjoying the country life. Brenda, who sleeps in Guinevere, takes no interest in such matters, and, predictably, becomes romantically entangled with a younger man. She takes a flat in London and begins spending more and more time there. Predictably, the marriage breaks up. But now, things start to get weird. Because Tony doesn’t want to leave Brenda destitute, he agrees to let her divorce him. Apparently, the only suitable grounds for a woman to get a divorce is infidelity, so he and the lawyers for both sides agree to stage an infidelity. The lawyers set him up with a young woman from a seedy bar, arrange for them to stay a few days in Brighton, along with a couple of detectives who will gather photographic “evidence.” Everyone agrees that Brenda will get her divorce and an annual income of 500 pounds. But she gets greedy after the evidence has been gathered and demands alimony of 2,000 pounds annually. Since that would force Tony to sell off his beloved Hetton, he refuses to agree. He threatens to divorce her and give her nothing, but decides to take a cruise instead, delaying any conclusive action. While trying to decide where to travel, he meets an adventurer, and decides to strike off into the largely unexplored wilds of the Amazon in search of a nameless, mythical city. Things quickly go from bad to worse, and he ends up in what Waugh might have thought of as a lower ring of Hell: trapped in a remote village where he must read aloud the novels of Charles Dickens for the rest of his life.
Written in 1934, and set at roughly that time, A Handful of Dust satirizes the British Empire at its height, just prior to WWII. We never lose sight of the fact that Brits thought of themselves as rightful rulers of an Empire. I have trouble separating the satire from the author’s own conservative view.
I don’t know how to describe this novel. William Boyd calls it “Madame Bovary rewritten by Noël Coward.” To me, as an outsider, the satire seems to consist, not in exaggerating uniquely English quirkiness, but in displaying without comment the inherent depravity of the aristocracy and of everyone caught in its orbit. The epigraph, a quote from T.S. Eliot that supplies the book’s title, points to the seriousness of Waugh’s purpose:
“… I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
THE WASTE LAND
Beneath the funny dialogue, descriptions, personalities, situations, and much else, we can’t keep overlooking the dark storyline, the flawed characters, the heartless society, the unjust laws, and the cosmic cruelty of the universe in which Waugh sets his tale. Their only son, John Andrew, provides much comic entertainment, for example, with that annoying habit of all children: repeating the things he’s overheard, but at the wrong times and places. Waugh won’t let us simply enjoy these moments without foreshadowing John Andrew’s doom. The child named his favorite horse, Thunderclap, after another horse that had killed two riders and “had staked itself in the guts, hunting, and had to be shot.” Another comic figure, Mr. Tendril, the elderly vicar, had served in India and reused the sermons he had formerly delivered at the garrison chapel. He had not updated these sermons to reflect his new circumstances. So for his Christmas sermon, he said,
How difficult it is for us […] to realize that this is indeed Christmas. Instead of the glowing log fire and windows tight shuttered against the drifting snow, we have only the harsh glare of an alien sun; instead of the happy circle of loved faces, of home and family, we have the uncomprehending stares of the subjugated, though no doubt grateful, heathen.
But the congregation had heard these lines year after year, so they had become “an integral part of their Christmas festivities.” Anachronistic, yes, and thus funny, but perfectly apt, since Waugh, just one page earlier, had described the family party at Hetton as including “two families of impoverished Lasts, humble and uncomplaining victims of primogeniture, to whom Hetton meant as much as it did to Tony.”
But at the core of this novel lives a soul-crushing betrayal, from which Tony cannot recover. Waugh does not chronicle this betrayal in a balanced way, with both characters having their fair share of virtues and vices. No, Brenda, cheats on her trusting and totally faithful husband, without hesitation or remorse. We cannot forgive her because she has no redeeming qualities. A comedy would end with some sort of justice. But the law has given Tony up for dead, and the estate passes on to the next brother in line, who graciously hosts a party for various relatives, including “a family of impoverished Lasts who had not profited from Tony’s disappearance.” I can’t help but think of Tony’s fate as far more cruel than any author could decently arrange for such an innocent victim, as humorous as he tries to make it sound.
Great literature enlarges our horizons, revealing vistas of the human condition, the depths of human baseness, and the heights of human nobility. This novel does achieve that goal, even though I did not enjoy this particular corner of the human condition, nor did I accept the complete guilt of Brenda and complete innocence of Tony. We often find the stock figure of the cuckolded husband in literature, but usually as a mere foil for the antics of the wife or her lover, a necessary component of ribald jokes. Tony’s portrayal, however, strikes me as too raw. No amount of social satire can disguise this as anything other than Waugh’s chronicle of his own personal Inferno, following his annulment a few years before. I suspect that Waugh identified too closely with Tony to make of him anything other than a guileless King Arthur at the hands of a soulless Guinevere. When Tony reads Brenda’s letter requesting a divorce, it comes as a total surprise to him, although half of their society knows well enough and has been complicit in not enlightening him. “[I]t was several days before Tony fully realized what it meant. He had got into the habit of loving and trusting Brenda.”
Next up: A Passage to India, by E. M. Forster, another novel set against a backdrop of the British Empire.
Amazon links to works mentioned in this post.
A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
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