A Handful of Dust (1934)

The Title:
The title is a reference to a line from the poem The Waste Land (1922), by T. S. Eliot: 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. Waugh originally titled the novel A Handful of Ashes , but, after a dispute with his American publishers, he chose the quotation from The Waste land. Certain features of The Waste Land will reappear: Thus _The Waste Land_ represents the decay of ancient fertility myths into such degenerate forms as telling fortunes with Tarot cards; the fortune-teller in A Handful of Dust reads the soles of her clients feet. The Waste Land looks behind the medieval Arthurian story-cycle to the Celtic rituals from which it derives. A Handful of Dust gives us a degraded modern version of the same material: Tony is King Arthur, Brenda Guinevere, and Beaver her lover, Lancelot. (The rooms in Hetton are named after the characters in Tennyson's heavily Victorian version of the same story). And just as Eliot's poem contrasts the "Unreal City" of London with the great cities of legend--Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna: all "fallen," all finally unreal--so Waugh's novel ends with Tony, like a knight searching from the Holy Grail, vainly seeking his mythical city and finding nothing but his own special hell on earth.

Summary in a nutshell:
Evelyn Waugh's "A Handful of Dust" published in 1934 is a story about one character's decision to have an affair and the effects this decision has on the other characters within the story. Waugh opens the novel describing the relationship between Tony and Brenda Last. They have been married for eight years. They have a son named John Andrew Last and they all live on a wealthy London estate located in Hetton. Waugh interrupts this ideal image when she inserts John Beaver into the storyline. He is a friend of Tony's and spends much time with his wife gossiping about the social scene. But it is Brenda who is first attracted to John and initiates an affair with him. She lies to her husband about her whereabouts and activities in London, giving Tony the impression that she is taking classes. Tragedy befalls the family when the son dies; his death motivates Brenda to ask for a divorce and marital compensation. Because Tony finds Brenda's demands to be unreasonable, he leaves town. Waugh shifts the setting from a wealthy estate to an unknown territory, signifying the character's mental and emotional state. In this context, Waugh introduces another character who is an old illiterate man; the man nurses Tony back to health and subsequently imprisons him. By the end of "A Handful of Dust," Tony spends the rest of his life trapped, Brenda remarries to an old friend of Tony's, and Beaver moves to New York.

Plot Overview:
It is set in the 1930s. The novel contains many of the qualities typical of Waughs satirical novels. He usually establishments.

satirizes

the upper classes (gentry) and the

When the novel opens, Tony Last's life seems perfect. He is married to Brenda; has a son, John Andrew, and a neo-Gothic country house called Hetton; and loves all three. Life at Hetton Abbey is sufficiently content for most of the London set to envy the Lasts; Tony Last is devoted to the family seat, a large country estate which is very grand - and expensive to run. He is considered "madly feudal" by his wife, Brenda, a lovely, obviously shallow socialite. The couple sweet-talk each other, while their only child, little John Andrew, is taught to ride - and swear - by the colourful Ben, a former farm worker. The story focuses on the breakdown of the marriage of Tony and Lady Brenda Last. The aristocratic Tony is the proud owner of a Victorian gothic country

house,

Hetton Abbey. He is very preoccupied with its maintenance.

Brenda, married seven years, is bored and pokes fun at Tony's pomposity and belief in the old social order. The arrival of an unexpected weekend guest changes their lives. The guest is John Beaver, a self-interested and impoverished social climber, the hopelessly idle son of a mother who runs a frenetic decor business. Mrs Beaver is the universal provider of everything from cushion covers to entire flats. She indulges her boy, while he takes whatever he can get through random invitations secured due to his usefulness as a single man on the dinner-party circuit. Beaver's arrival at Hetton causes Tony to leave Brenda to play hostess. Frustrated and annoyed by his boring and old-fashioned ways and yearning for the urban excitement, Lady Brenda, becomes infatuated with a young socialite called John Beaver. Soon afterwards, they begin to have an affair. At the time of Beaver's visit to Hetton, Brenda remarks to Tony: "He's quite like us in some ways." To which Tony immediately retorts: "He's not like me." And he is not. Tony is an old-school product of the upper classes. Waugh is not unsympathetic to Tony and chronicles his increasing bewilderment as Brenda withdraws further away, even refusing to speak to him when he travels to London to visit her. Soon she announces to Tony that she should enrol in an economics course, in order to help him. She spends an increasingly large amount of time in a flat she has rented in London, and during one of her absences her son is killed in a riding accident. A family friend, Bruce Scott-Menzies???, brings her the news. Momentarily she thinks he is referring to Beaver, and when she realizes that he means John Andrew she says "Thank God" and bursts into tears. It is a chilling moment. The death of their son, John Andrew, while riding in in a hunting accident is the climax of the book. On being told of John's death, Brenda at first thinks her lover has been killed, and appears relieved that her son is the victim.

After the boys funeral, Brenda decides to leave Tony and the family home at Hetton and they agree on a divorce:

Brenda seeks a divorce from Tony and first in order to avoid any scandal for his wife, Tony agrees to go through the sham (farsa) of creating appropriate grounds for divorce (a disastrous trip to Brighton, on which he and his supposed mistress are accompanied by her little girl), however, their agreement on the divorce falls apart when Brendas brother reveals that Brendas family (at Beavers urging) will insist on a monetary settlement so large as to require Tony to sell Hetton and at the end Tony refuses to grant her the divorce, not necessarily because he does not want to let go of his wife but he is more concern with the high cost of alimony (pension alimenticia) and the possibility of losing his beloved Hetton.
Tony departs for an extended trip to Brazil (Latin America) and goes up to Amazon with a casual and absurd acquaintance, Dr. Messinger, who is an explorer . They join in the search of a mythical lost city. He has a futile shipboard romance with a young Catholic girl, and the expedition goes fatally wrong.While there, Tony gets sick and Messinger drowns. Tony finds himself helpless and becomes very ill. He wanders, delirious and experiencing bizarre hallucinations to the point of dying until he stumbles into an isolated tribal village. Once there, he is nursed back to health by a certain Mr. Todd, who has lived in the jungle for many years. Todd is somewhat a mad recluse as a result of having been away from civilization for a long time, living in the jungle for nearly 60 years.

When tony recovers, Mr. Todd holds him captive and forces him to become his companion and insists that he must spend the rest of his life reading aloud the works of Charles Dickens to him.
Having been reported as dead in England, Brendas relation with John Beaver has fallen apart after it became apparent that she would not become a rich divorce. Brenda marries their old friend Jock Grant-Menzies (Bruce Scott-Menzies???), now an M.P. Hetton Abbey is relinquished (cedida) to Richard Last, Tony's cousin.

Additional Notes:
The Mr. Todd sequence was originally published in the United States as a short story before the work of the novel began. Consequently an American serialization of A Handful of Dust has a different ending, in which Tony returns to London, is reunited with Brenda, and cynically takes over her flat in London in order to prosecute his own infidelities. 1. Waugh used as the final chapter for the novel a slightly adapted version of a pre-existing short story called "The Man Who Liked Dickens".

Waugh wrote of the novel's development: "I had just written a short story ["The Man Who Liked Dickens"] about a man trapped in the jungle, ending his days reading Dickens aloud. The idea came quite naturally from the experience of visiting a lonely settler of that kind (he actually met the original Mr. Todd in 1933) and reflecting how easily he could hold me prisoner [...] eventually the thing grew into a study of other sorts of savages at home and the civilized man's helpless plight among them." The novelist Henry Yorke felt the English version too "fantastic . . . . The first part is . . . a real picture of people one has met and may at any moment meet again." Waugh's scheme, however, was to show "Gothic man in the hands of savages--first Mrs Beaver [John's mother] etc. then the real ones." Even when Tony's happy cousins inherit Hetton, the vixens on their silver-fox farm keep having their brushes bitten off; barbarism can never really be kept at bay. Waugh's strength as a novelist is that, precisely as a sophisticated inhabitant of the city of man, he was prepared to face all the consequences of its being, in the end, an illusion. 2. Interestingly, there's a later version of this novel with an alternative happy ending. This American version is certainly more urbane, but its effect is cynically to restore, not subvert, civilization. When the novel was serialized in the American magazine Harper's Bazaar, Waugh had to supply a new ending because the short story, which had been published in the US earlier, could not for copyright reasons appear in the magazine. In the alternative ending, included as an appendix in some editions of the book, Tony returns from an uneventful visit to Brazil and to his relationship after reconciling with a repentant and penitent Brenda. He finds that Hetton has been entirely redecorated in his absence. Tony quietly plots to deceive her as she deceived him. To do so, he plans to use the flat, remodeled by Mrs Beaver, which his wife had used for her own affair with John Beaver. Indeed the ending is less disturbing, particularly taking into account that Tony was the innocent partner. On the other hand, he retains the HOUSE, which in the original version, according to the English laws of inheritance, in the absence of a male inheritor due to his sons death, had passed over to a distant male cousin. In the new version the farce loses its edge, yet all irony is not lost. QUESTION FROM OUR ADDENDA:

Write on the poetic justice of this ending in the light of the relationship between old and modern houses and past and present in Waughs fiction.
POETIC JUSTICE: The morally reassuring allocation of happy and unhappy fates to the virtuous and the vicious characters respectively, usually at the end of a narrative or dramatic work.

INTERESTING DETAILS:
In _Black Mischief_, implicitly Waugh says to his readers: "You liberals, colonialists, and decent agnostic pragmatists--you laugh at my jokes, and are

excited like me by wealth, sex, barbarity, and power--but can you face the implications, for society and for yourselves, of identifying with Basil Seal and recognizing him as Everyman? If you cannot, then perhaps I have resources you lack. However, I leave it to you to find out what they are." Waugh's next novel, _A Handful of Dust_, makes essentially the same points by exactly opposite means. It too mingles an English upper-class world with that of a primitive people, but in proportions that reverse those of _ Black Mischief_. Like, Basil, its hero Tony Last, is the only character to unite the two worlds ; but unlike Basil he is naive, honorable, and innocent, the creature, not the maker, of circumstance. Yet he is a universal figure, too, in his fashion. What sort of world is it, the reader asks, in which such decency can end up as wretchedly as Tony does? And the answer, of course, is, the same sort of world as that in which a man like Basil Seal can flourish a world comprehensively in need of redemption. Clearly this story of marital betrayal bears closely on Waugh's personal experience. Putting it on public record, however indirectly, was a new instance of his willingness to outface the public. It is remarkable for its generosity toward Brenda. The moment when she discovers that Beaver is alive and John Andrew is dead is handled with great delicacy. Once she has made her terrible remark, she weeps helplessly, pressing her forehead against the gilt back of a hard little empire chair. Her behavior is clearly compulsive. Later she is for a time impoverished and demoralized, but her real punishment has been to see her situation for what it is from the beginning. Nor is this handled with any vindictiveness (desire of revenge). In all his later writings (with one exception in Brideshead Revisited) he remained uncensoriously compassionate in his attitude to faithless women. For a humiliated cuckold (cornudo), the stance was a fundamentally honorable one.

IRONY, SATIRE AND ABSURDITIES:

This sustained body of literary allusion gives A Handful of Dust greater range of ironic implication than Waugh was ever again to attempt. It is in parts exceptionally funny. The vicar of Tony's church had originally written his sermons while serving in India, and he mindlessly repeats them each Sunday at Hetton to hilarious effect; but his wordy fatuities about the unity of the servants of a far-flung empire have a cruel bearing on the appalling isolation that is Tony's ultimate fate. At least as funny are the absurdities of Tony's supposedly

adulterous weekend. Tony sets out in the company of Milly and her horrid child to provide evidence of infidelity to a pair of detectives working for divorce lawyers, more is to follow in a satire which becomes a black morality play.
The final section is brilliantly edited. The text cuts between Tony's sufferings in the jungle and the loneliness of Brenda in London (or alternatively between Bruce ScottMenzies asking fatuous questions in the Commons about Japanese pork pies and the explorers' Indian guides gorging themselves on pig meat after a hunt). Finally, in a phantasmagoric fever-dream Tony blends the worlds of London, the jungle, and his dream city (a fantastically elaborated Hetton)

only to wake in the hands of Mr. Todd, and to the knowledge he has gained "in the forest where time is different. There is no City" (ch. 6).