Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Evelyn Waugh (2) (Introduction to A Handful of Dust)

Madame Bovary rewritten by Noël Coward. Is this too harsh — or too glib — a redaction of A Handful of Dust, considered by many readers to be Evelyn Waugh’s finest novel? My one-sentence summary is not intended to be facetious but arose from a thought-experiment I imposed on myself. I tried to imagine what it must have been like to read the novel when it was first published (in 1934), to imagine what the experience must have been to read Waugh without the mighty baggage of the posthumous reputation. The problem is that we know too much about Evelyn Waugh — the biographies, the journals, the letters and the memoirs flesh him out in a manner rare amongst twentieth-century British writers. Virginia Woolf runs him close, Philip Larkin is coming up on the rails, but it is unusual to have so much information so comparatively soon on a writer who died only a generation ago. This weight of public judgement and analysis (and self-analysis) makes it hard to return to the novels as an innocent and unknowing reader: the bloated Catholic apologist, the misanthropic, check-suited Tory squire, stands at your shoulder and hindsight’s 20/20 vision provides answers that are both too swift and too pat. Hence the attempt at a thought-experiment and hence the reference to Noël Coward and Madame Bovary. And in this spirit it seems to me that above all else A Handful of Dust—this complex, fraught, tension-riven novel — is essentially, pre-eminently, two things: namely, it is a society novel (which is not the same as a novel about society) and a novel about adultery. I had forgotten how Tatlery the book is: how it was so plainly written for a small elite of London and County readers who would pick up the many smart references and the in-jokes. It is bright and brittle and knowing in its depiction of that milieu and written with an insider’s ease and familiarity. This tone of voice seems a little mannered and tiresome today (as indeed does Noël Coward’s) but it was designed at the time to play to a well-heeled and well-connected gallery.

It is also a brutally cold and clear-eyed look at a wife’s betrayal of a loving husband. Brenda Last, like Emma Bovary, is a provincial lady married to a stuffy and somewhat dull, prematurely aged man (“a bore,” as Cyril Connolly dubbed Tony Last). John Beaver is a metropolitan version of the clerk who takes his pleasure selfishly and lovelessly. From here the comparisons begin to grow a little strained. Flaubert may have said “Madame Bovary c’est moi” but Waugh would never have made that claim about Brenda. A Handful of Dust is a portrait of adultery seen from the side of the blameless cuckold — there can be few more ruthless and unredeeming literary portrayals of a woman than Waugh’s of Brenda Last. As the affair between Brenda and Beaver continues and the lies become more and more brazen (and therefore condemnable) one begins to question the veracity of the earlier portrayal of the Lasts’ marriage: how could Tony Last (a good man, though set in his ways) have ever married anyone as vapid, heartless and lacking in human warmth as the Brenda who takes up with Beaver? I would argue that the portrait of Brenda is inconsistent and dislocated (wife and adulteress seem different people) because it is not her character that particularly interests the author but the nature of what she has done to her marriage. The betrayal is everything and Waugh is unsparing in the way he wrings every final humiliation from it.

This is not all that surprising given the circumstances in which A Handful of Dust was begun. Waugh travelled to Fez, in Morocco, to write the book in January 1934. The preceding months had seen him much preoccupied with an unhappy love affair with Teresa Jungman (Waugh had proposed marriage, she had turned him down — Waugh was distraught and miserable) and with the continuing consequences of his own divorce from his first wife Evelyn Gardner, a complicated process which involved appearing at an Ecclesiastical Court to testify to the flawed and insincere nature of his marriage in an effort to have the religious authorities declare the union null and void, Evelyn Gardner (she-Evelyn) had had an affair with John Heygate in the first year of her marriage to Waugh. The publicity and grim procedures surrounding the eventual divorce (announcements in The Times, for example; meeting the lover in a lawyer’s office so he could be formally identified as corespondent) and the acute embarrassment (and his own perceived shame and ridicule) that Waugh suffered within his circle of friends had a monumental and lasting effect on his life and personality. It is no wonder that adultery, betrayal and heartlessness so dominate the pages of the novel he began to write.

Waugh wrote fast: he finished A Handful of Dust in four months, dispatching sections to the typist as he completed them. But he was having trouble with the ending (there is a very useful account of the composition of the novel in volume I of Martin Stannard’s fine biography). Before starting A Handful of Dust, Waugh had just written a travel book (in a month), an account of his recent travels in the hinterland of British Guiana, published under the title Ninety-Two Days. It was a job of work and was not a book he held in much esteem. However, the trip had given him the material for a short story, “The Man Who Liked Dickens.” In the novel, Tony Last, having discovered Brenda’s adultery, also leaves Britain to travel into the jungles of British Guiana and his famous fate — compelled to read Dickens for the rest of his life to the baleful settler-cum-gaoler Mr Todd — is essentially Waugh’s short story “The Man Who Liked Dickens” stapled on to the end of his unfinished novel about adultery. Henry Green wrote to Waugh when the book came out and said, “I feel the end is so fantastic that it throws the rest out of proportion. Aren’t you mixing two things together? It seemed manufactured and not real.” This is one novelist’s intuition analysing a fellow novelist’s work with great and embarrassing acuity. Waugh defended himself stoutly: “wishing to bring Tony to a sad end I made it an elaborate and improbable one.” Adding that it was a “conceit in the Webster manner.” This is disingenuous: I would argue that Waugh needed an ending and realized that he had already written something that would do. He was an assiduous recycler and re-user of his own experiences and other writings and A Handful of Dust is evidence of his economy — both Ninety-Two Days and “The Man Who Liked Dickens” were press-ganged into solving the problem of his novel’s conclusion.

There is nothing wrong with this — most novelists have occasion to do something similar from time to time, though perhaps they do it more covertly than Waugh. But I think the history of the novel’s composition and the evidence of its frankly cobbled-together ending undermine claims for the book’s thematic consistency and its structural cohesion. A Handful of Dust is characterized by several such tensions: not merely in its structure, but also in its tone of voice, its characterization, comedy — the novel is full of uneasiness. The key to Waugh’s objective in finding the right ending to the story lies in his phrase “wishing to bring Tony to a sad end” rather than any huffing and puffing about Websterian conceits. Waugh wanted to bring Tony to a sad end because this was the nature of his comic genius — it is pitiless and ruthless, and this is what makes it both modern and enduring. Tony, that most wronged of decent men, is served up with his own particular circle of hell through no fault of his own. Brenda, in contrast, one of the most empty and unpleasant women one can imagine, is rewarded with marriage to Jock Grant-Menzies, MP, one of Tony’s rich friends. This was the way the world worked for Waugh (and it certainly must have seemed so as he wrote the novel in 1934) — in his best work he always refused to allow his art to provide any form of easy consolation. At the end of Labels, the travel book he wrote in the immediate fallout of his own broken marriage, and in the full knowledge of the nature of his wife’s betrayal, he wrote: “Fortune is the least capricious of deities, and arranges things on the just and rigid system that no one shall be very happy for very long.” This is very bitter, but it also happens to be very true, in the main. It was a world-view that underpinned Waugh’s work and, I believe, was one that continually fought against his newly acquired Catholic faith. It provokes an unhappy tension in his work that begins to emerge in the novels after A Handful of Dust (with the notable exception of Scoop, his real masterpiece, in my opinion). The new seriousness that critics began to see in his work — in Brideshead Revisited and in The Sword of Honour trilogy, for example — is Waugh’s attempt to use his religious faith to combat or obscure this instinctive view he possessed of the human condition. He saw life as anarchic, indifferent and absurd. Waugh, to put it crudely, could not, or did not, want to write in this spirit any longer (which is fundamentally Godless) but it was one that came all too naturally to him. In A Handful of Dust we see its apotheosis.

Waugh wrote very fast and he always had financial reimbursement for his writing very close to the forefront of his mind. This is not to say he wasn’t an artist — he definitely was, as were Balzac and Dickens, two other speed-merchants — but he was not an artist in the sense that, say, Flaubert, Joyce and Nabokov were. One fact about A Handful of Dust makes this very clear: before the book was published in Britain it had been serialized in five parts in the American magazine Harper’s Bazaar. Because “The Man Who Liked Dickens” had been published separately as a short story in America, Waugh found himself in copyright difficulties (this conflict also testifies tellingly to the virtually unchanged, bolted-on aspect of the Mr Todd conclusion). Consequently, he wrote a new ending for the serialized version of the novel. In the light of this evidence I find it very hard to accept that there is some schematic master-plan for A Handful of Dust and that its various components were always designed to harmonize and complement each other. This is what Henry Green sensed — one craftsman looking at another craftsman’s work — and his complaint is wholly justified. Waugh’s response is a little desperate: if the book is so intricately stitched together, then just how easy can it be to write an entirely new ending for it? However, the serialization ending is very interesting in itself and it inadvertently says as much about the novel’s underlying intentions, I would claim, as the published book version does. We will return to it later.

Waugh was one of the most confessedly autobiographical of writers. All his novels — with the exception of Helena, perhaps — are rooted in his own experiences, even the most exuberant and grotesque comedies. The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold and The Sword of Honour trilogy are particularly good examples of this tendency, but the life/art nexus is strongly present in all his novels. Novelists of this sort do not necessarily possess the fingernail-paring artistic objectivity of a Joyce or Nabokov. Themes and leitmotifs, images and metaphors tend to emerge more unconsciously with this category of writer. That Waugh wrote so quickly also testifies to something subconscious and instinctive in his art rather than highly planned and artistically organized. True, there are repeated themes in A Handful of Dust that appear to run coherently through it — lists of objects that define a character, images of beasts and animals, for example; the idea of the celestial city, of Gothic fantasy and romance — but such synthesis is not the overriding impression the novel conveys, I would claim. On the contrary, A Handful of Dust, structurally speaking, is highly variable, not to say disorganized, and the machinery of the novel — its nuts and bolts, its pulleys and levers — suggests, when analysed, something altogether more inchoate and thrown together.

Take the question of point of view, for example. The narrative voice is omniscient: namely, the author is at liberty to enter any character’s mind and tell us, the readers, what he or she is thinking. Godlike, the author can flit here and there, and present the novel’s world in all its objectivity or subjectivity as he pleases. As the twentieth century moved on, omniscient narration became less and less favoured, or else was used with deliberate knowingness. It was the most popular narrative method of the great Victorian novelists and, surprisingly, A Handful of Dust sounds at times very Victorian in its use of omniscience. Waugh does not hesitate to employ what we might call the Dickensian apostrophe: a moment in the text when all suspension of disbelief is cast aside and the novelist addresses the reader in his own voice. For a book regarded as bleakly modern it is in places creakingly antique. Waugh favours the use of the bracketed aside quite frequently. For example, early in the novel after Tony and Brenda have breakfast there is a two-line parenthesis: “(These scenes of domestic playfulness had been more or less continuous in Tony and Brenda’s life for seven years.)” Whose voice is this, thus distinguished from the surrounding expository prose? It is Waugh, himself, filling in a bit of background, ignoring the modernist injunction, “show not tell.” And Waugh does a lot of “telling” in this novel, often clumsily, which is surprising given that the novel’s strongest technical virtuosity is otherwise its economy and spareness. A Handful of Dust is at its most accomplished and convincing when Waugh does the opposite of apostrophize and tells us virtually nothing: when what is implicit in the few words used detonates so much more effectively than any amount of elaborate explanation. I find Waugh’s manifest awkwardness with the omniscient voice perplexing — seeing it as evidence (with the aid of hindsight operating, I admit) of something hurried rather than fully or carefully considered. The opening of chapter three, “Hard Cheese on Tony,” almost reads like a parody of Dickens: “It is not uncommon at Brat’s Club, between nine and ten in the evening, to find men in white ties and tail coats sitting by themselves and eating, in evident low spirits, large and extravagant dinners.” The tone is avuncular, the overview authorial, the tense is present — and then it shifts back to the past tense for the arrival of Jock Grant-Menzies: “It was in this mood and for this reason that, one evening towards the middle of February, Jock Grant-Menzies arrived at the club.” This would not seem out of place in Trollope.

By dramatic contrast you then find passages as elliptical as this conversation between Tony and Brenda after Brenda has seen Beaver in London:

“Barnardo case?”

Brenda nodded. “Down and out,” she said, “sunk right under.” She sat nursing her bread and milk, stirring it listlessly. Every bit of her felt good for nothing.

“Good day?”

She nodded. “Saw Marjorie and her filthy dog. Bought some things. Lunched at Daisy’s new joint. Bone-setter. That’s all.”

“You know I wish you’d give up these day trips to London. They’re far too much for you.”

“Me? Oh, I’m all right. Wish I was dead, that’s all… and please, please, darling Tony, don’t say anything about bed, because I can’t move.”

Underneath these commonplace exchanges lurks the ticking time bomb: Brenda hasn’t mentioned Beaver. She hasn’t exactly lied, true, but we, the readers, will be hugely aware of the omission. It’s at this moment that we know for the first time she will have an affair with Beaver and will betray Tony. It is what is not said, what is left out, that makes these few lines function so effectively. But such skilful reticence isn’t consistent in the novel: implicitness and explicitness coexist, often uneasily. This is not a sign of a writer exercising total mastery over his material.

Such signs are legion, however, in the passages leading up to the death of Tony and Brenda’s child John Andrew in a hunting accident. Before the fateful hunt Waugh uses a device that can only be called cinematic: a series of short scenes juxtaposed, sometimes no more than a few lines of dialogue, a method that, in a film, would be known as cross-cutting, or even, at its most rapid, montage. Again, it is the absence of interlinking passages that is conspicuous. Often the speakers of lines aren’t identified, neither is their location. Waugh was an avid cinema-goer and he doubtless realized that here was a method of moving narration along without the need for pages of expository prose. And such descriptive passages as there are demonstrate the old adage of “less is more” to near perfection:

She hit him and the horse collected himself and bolted up the road into the village, but before he went one of his heels struck out and sent John into the ditch, where he lay bent double, perfectly still.

Everyone agreed that it was nobody’s fault.

Terse, heavily monosyllabic, the words do their job with perfect thriftiness — and then the overused phrase “bent double” seems, at first, slack or lazy, until you realize, as you visualize exactly what the words describe, that there is no more expressive way of conveying the fact that John Andrew is actually dead. A little boy bent double in a ditch.

Sustained passages of brilliance like this can function as an ideal model of how to maintain narrative power. The pages that lead up to the death of John Andrew are a tour de force. But then you come across a section, such as the following, when Tony learns that Brenda is going to sue for heavy alimony.

He hung up the receiver and went back to the smoking room. His mind had suddenly become clearer on many points that had puzzled him. A whole Gothic world had come to grief… there was now no armour glittering through the forest glades, no embroidered feet on the green sward; the cream and dappled unicorns had fled …

Just in case we hadn’t got it, Waugh resorts to telling not showing, in a manner that is over-obvious and over-larded. Time and again in the novel, these inconsistencies and dissonances are revealing. And what they reveal, I would argue, is that A Handful of Dust is not the harmonious whole, the masterwork, that critics have claimed it to be. Inside the structure of omniscience and Victorian apostrophe, a leaner, more oblique, more modern novel is struggling to coexist. Pages of rapid cross-cutting and terse dialogue consort unhappily with ponderous explication, authorial asides and forced humour (A Handful of Dust is the least funny of all Waugh’s novels: look at the interminable ten pages of Tony and Jock’s drunken spree). What is in fact a dark and acerbic exposé of contemporary decadence and ennui is overweighted at the end by the battened-on symbolism of a previously written short story.

I see other inconsistencies that point to further warring intentions. Take the portrait of Brenda, for example. At the beginning of the novel she seems sweet: loving and tolerant of Tony — yet she takes to adultery effortlessly and without a qualm: indeed she’s rather good at it. Scenes are then presented to show Brenda in the worst possible light as someone utterly without feeling and casually cruel. The famous exchange when she learns that “John” has died and instantly thinks it is John Beaver, rather than John Andrew her son, is perhaps the best example (though I’ve always felt the scene sells itself short — no one really refers to Beaver as “John,” so when she says “John” the reader will automatically think of the boy. The joke requires a double take (you have to remind yourself of Beaver’s Christian name) and in that split second the shock effect rather loses its potency). More to the point are her lying telephone calls to Tony when Beaver is in bed with her: there is nothing in Brenda as she is first presented to us to hint that she is capable of such icily calm duplicity — this is the behaviour of a serial adulteress. Some other process is going on here, I would argue, in her changing portrayal. Similarly, critics who contend that Tony is meant to be seen as a buffoon and that his love of his big, ugly, Victorian Gothic house is risible are not reading the book closely. Waugh — whose own tastes were maverick and the opposite of à la mode — lovingly celebrates Het-ton and Tony’s love for the house. The precision of the writing about the architecture does not remotely hint at mockery — on the contrary, every word speaks of relish and approval. If Tony’s taste is meant to be absurd then what of Mrs Beaver’s ghastly interiors? Surely Hetton is meant to represent values, however out of fashion, that are fundamentally sound and worthwhile and deliberately set in opposition to the shoddy trendiness of Mrs Beaver. What these discordancies illustrate is the effects of attempting to shape A Handful of Dust into something it isn’t. My contention is that, at root, A Handful of Dust was written to be Waugh’s own exploration of betrayal and marital humiliation and that it is, in its special way, a form of revenge against the damage inflicted on his psyche by Evelyn Gardner. Brenda’s casual adultery and the disasters it sets in train are meant to be condemned in the most stern and merciless terms. Waugh gives her no escape route: her lover is a waster and a sponger, a hopeless remittance man. Her betrayed husband, by contrast, is sincere, decent and loving. Furthermore — and this is the killer blow — Brenda has so lost her sense of value that she cares more about her boyfriend than she does about her son. It is an unyieldingly cruel and vicious portrait of a worthless woman.

One more piece of evidence: towards the end of the novel when Tony is sailing to South America he has a shipboard romance with a young girl called Thérèse. In the previously quoted letter to Henry Green, Waugh admits, “I think the sentimental episode with Thérèse is probably a mistake.” He was right: it’s a mistake because we think that it is positioned there so that Tony will find some romantic reward for his sufferings — and the romance is painted with real tenderness — but it turns out that, as soon as Thérèse finds out Tony is married (i.e. not divorced) she loses all interest in him. Yet another insincere woman dissembling to try and catch a husband. Martin Stannard, in his biography, points out that Thérèse was originally named Bernadette but the name was changed in the manuscript. Prior to writing the novel Waugh had proposed to Teresa Jungman, had been rejected and was severely heartsore (he dedicated the Dutch edition of A Handful of Dust to her). Circumstantial evidence? Yes, perhaps, but the more it mounts the harder it becomes not to read A Handful of Dust as Waugh’s individual cry of pain.

The novel is full of hate and scorn, not just for Brenda, but also for the society in which she moves. The smart world of metropolitan London is portrayed by Waugh as utterly dissolute, genuine venom lurking beneath the ostensible social satire. The only woman in that world who escapes total censure, interestingly enough, is the morphine addict Mrs Rattery — who is of real and coolly efficient support to Tony in the hours after John Andrew’s death. Mrs Rattery, morphineuse and aviatrix, can retreat from the social whirl through her drugs, her self-absorption (her endless games of patience) or — physically — by taking to the air in her flying machine. There is something enviably godlike about her impassivity and emotional distance from the rest of the characters in the novel.

The social world of the novel — of night clubs and house parties, soirées and silly fads — is the world that Waugh himself occupied and was intimate with. It is depicted with a cold and unsparing eye and I would suggest that this explains the title Waugh eventually chose (he was going to call the book A Handful of Ashes). “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” is about the emptiness at the heart of this section of society. Eliot’s poem, to put it very simply, seems notionally about seeking some form of restoration (rain, rebirth, regrowth), redemption (some Grail substitute) or salvation (some spiritual peace) in a world turned waste land. But looked at from a slightly different angle (again trying to ignore the poem’s reputation and critical baggage acquired over the years) it can be argued that in fact The Waste Land is all about sex — seedy, unsatisfactory, loveless, dangerous, destructive sex. It abounds in references to sex, is steeped in it, almost obsessively so. The context of the four lines Waugh cites as his epigraph (and usually authors do not choose epigraphs lightly) comes just before the introduction of the “hyacinth girl.” Would one think of Brenda Last? “… your hair wet…/I was neither/living nor dead, and I knew nothing/looking into the heart of light, the silence.” Brenda, with her “fair underwater look” (not a bad description of Evelyn Gardner, either) … Circumstantial evidence, admittedly, but the file is growing.

Waugh wrote the first two-thirds of this novel at great speed, fresh from his rejection by Teresa Jungman (his one great love after Evelyn Gardner) and his regular testimony to the Roman Catholic authorities about the sham and frivolity of his first marriage. That bitterness and resentment found its place in the bleak story of Brenda Last’s betrayal of her husband and the curse they suffered of their child’s awful death. And then Waugh stopped, unable to think how to conclude the book, knowing only that he wanted Tony to come to “a sad end.” In the event he took over, almost wholesale, an earlier short story and hitched it on to his incomplete novel. Fiddling around here and there with themes and images, chapter headings and symbols, he endeavoured to give the book some coherence. But in fact the most integral conclusion to the book was the one he had already written to complete the American serialization. It is a very short final section, some seven or eight pages, and is meant to come after Tony and Brenda have agreed to a divorce. It picks up the story after Tony has returned from an uneventful tourist trip in the Caribbean and is met at Southampton docks by Brenda. The couple are reconciled, after a fashion (Beaver, tiring of Brenda, has tried and failed to seduce Mrs Rattery, and has gone abroad), and Tony, it appears, has forgiven her — or decided to ignore — her aberration. Months later they go up to town (Brenda is now pregnant). Tony goes to see Mrs Beaver about Brenda’s flat and makes a deal to keep it on (Brenda knows nothing). The implication is that Tony will be coming up to town more frequently himself and will need the flat to entertain girlfriends. In the final lines of the chapter Tony lies to Brenda:

“Did you get rid of the flat?” she asked.

“Yes, that’s all settled.”

It’s not exactly a lie but the reader knows (as the reader knew earlier when Brenda committed her sin of omission) that Tony is going to find the flat very useful indeed. The last line reads: “And the train sped through the darkness towards Hetton.”

The changes of emphasis are hugely significant: in the novel Tony’s fate is as a helpless victim; Mr Todd’s torture a symbol of the malign indifference of the universe. In the magazine version he is instead actively responsible for his own unpleasant transformation. Given the bitterness and contempt that inform the novel this alternative ending seems to me to be truer to the novel’s potent undercurrents than the short story Waugh recycled to finish off his sombre, disturbing tale of adultery, betrayal and the death of hope. Waugh republished the ending in 1963 as an appendix to the uniform edition of A Handful of Dust, describing it as a “curiosity.” We have to take it that he wanted it preserved. So why didn’t he use the ending that was specifically written for his novel? Perhaps because it would have seemed too brutally, too unsparingly cynical. Tony Last has become like everyone else in A Handful of Dust—corrupt, selfish, venal and heartless. He still has Hetton — he still has Brenda (with another child on the way) — but he now speeds through darkness to reach his home.

2003