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Evelyn Waugh Newsletter EVELYN WAUGH NEWSLETTER Volume 23 Number 2 Autumn 1989 A HANDFUL OF DUST ON FILM: THE MISSING IMPLICATIONS By D. J. Dooley (University of Toronto) Edwin J. Blesch, Jr. provided an interesting and informative account of the film version of one of Waugh's most successful novels (EWN, Autumn 1988). His article contains such useful information as the fact that Carlton Towers, the Yorkshire home of the 17th Duke of Norfolk, became Tony Last's beloved Hetton Abbey, with very little change, and that the old railway station at Windsor, still used by the Queen, provided the setting for Brenda Last to see her dim lover, John Beaver, off for London. Blesch especially emphasizes the attention to detail in the novel, not only in the period furnishings but in the visual connections made ingeniously between one setting and another and one episode and another. In his opinion, Derek Granger (writer and literary consultant) and Charles Sturridge (director), the same combination which was responsible fort he television version of Brides head, have done it again; the film is a brilliant and faithful adaptation of the novel. "Some Waugh fans may cavil with questions of emphasis and interpretation," he writes, "but most, I think, will find it inspired filmmaking."' It is possible, I think, to consider it an inspired and highly successful film, but still to cavil at the interpretation. Briefly, nearly the whole of Brideshead was caught in the television series, but aspects of A Handful of Dust which ought to be there by implication or as felt absences are not there at all. This is particularly true of the religious dimension. The novel was written a little more than three years after Waugh's conversion, which took place in 1930. He once said that "The Protestant attitude seems often to be, 'I am good; therefore I go to church,' while the Catholic's is 'I am very far from good; therefore I go to church.' " 2 He himself was apparently very far from good at the time he was writing A Handful of Dust; writing from Fez in Morocco to Lady Mary and Lady Dorothy Lygon in January of 1934, he told of making friends with a taxi driver who took him to the red-light district: "It was very gay and there were little Arab girls of fifteen and sixteen for ten francs each and a cup of mint tea. So I bought one but I didn't enjoy her very much because she had a skin like sandpaper and a huge stomach which didn't show until she took off her clothes and then it was too late.'' In a later letter to Lady Mary, he said, " ... I go most evenings and take my coffee in a brothel where I have formed an attachment to a young lady called Fatima.'''. In the first letter, he also said, "When I have finished this novel I think I will go to Jerusalem for a pilgrimage to become holy." However scarlet his sins were, however great the contradiction between his principles and his practice, there is no doubt about the central importance of religion in his thought. In an article entitled "Converted to Rome: why it has happened to me," which appeared in the Daily Express in October 20, 1930, he ridiculed three popular errors regarding conversion to Catholicism-"The Jesuits have got hold of him,'' "He is captivated by the ritual,'' and "He wants to have his mind made up for him"-and explained the deeper reason as he understood it. "It seems to me," he wrote, "that in the present phase of European history the essential issue is no longer between Catholicism, on one side, and Protestantism, on the other, but between Christianity and Chaos." He regarded Europe's loss of faith as the active negation of all that western culture had stood for: Civilization-and by this I do not mean talking cinemas and tinned food, nor even surgery and hygienic houses, but the whole moral and artistic organization of Europe-has not in itself the power of survival. It came into being through Christianity, and without it has no significance or power to command allegiance. The loss of faith in Christianity and the consequential lack of confidence in moral and social standards have become embodied in the ideal of a materialistic, mechanized state, already existent in Russia and rapidly spreading south and west. It is no longer possible, as it was in the time of Gibbon, to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it rests. 4 Of course T. S. Eliot's Waste Land, from which Waugh took the title of A Handful of Dust, deals with a related theme: it shows modern man as living a lonely, neurotic, and empty life because ofthe lack of a common core of values in society and the absence of any faith which might produce regeneration. He possesses only "a heap of broken images"-fragments from, reminders of, past cultures in which beliefs and values were really alive and men themselves, in consequence, fully alive as well. Reviewing Henry Green's novel Living in 1930, Waugh detected in it "much the same technical -2- apparatus at work as in many of Mr. T. S. Eliot's poems." Reviewing David Jones' In Parenthesis in 1939, he wrote, "There are whole passages which, out of context, one might take for extracts from The Waste Land. "5 He knew the poem well then; in fact his own use of it in A Handful of Dust goes well beyond his choice of title. For example, Mme. Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, "With a wicked pack of cards," has her counterpart in Mrs. Rattery, who plays patience by herself and animal snap with Tony Last. The death by water in the poem has its parallel in Dr. Messenger's death by drowning, the fire and hallucinations in the poem in the fever and hallucinations of Tony. The dry bones of Ezekiel, of great importance in two sections of the poem-"The Burial of the Dead" and "What the Thunder Said"­ are found in the novel too; Brenda's brother Reggie comes home from Tunisia "where he was occupied in desecrating some tombs." As a result of his archaeological depredations, his house in London is indeed full of broken images-"fragmentary amphoras, corroded bronze axe-heads, little splinters of bone and charred stick, a Graeco-Roman head in marble .... "But perhaps the clearest example in the novel of Eliot's "withered stumps of time" is the jumble of objects, many of them misapplied because their significance is not understood, in Princess Jenny Abdul Akbar's room: "swords meant to adorn the state robes of a Moorish caid were swung from the picture rail; mats made for prayer were strewn on the divan; the carpet on the floor had been made in Bokhara as a wail covering ... "and so on for a long paragraph.' In the poem London is an "unreal City"; in the novel it is a jungle, a counterpart of the jungle in Brazil-a correspondence not sufficiently established in the film. The initial scene in both novel and film brings out the predatory nature of Mrs. Beaver, rejoicing at news of a fire which may bring her an interior decorating commission if she can beat out the competition. Helton is a sanctuary, a clearing in the jungle; a line near the end of Eliot's poem-"Shalll at least set my lands in order?"-explains what Tony Last attempts to do-to preserve the traditions of Helton, bogus though some of them are, and to preserve a way of life which finds room for generosity and responsibility. As Frederick Stepp puts it, Tony is the Innocent who, by sheer selflessness and dedication to a principle, becomes the instrument of a moral judgment: The principle is Helton and all that for which it stood: the integrity of marriage, responsibility towards the tenantry, the village, the Church, the house and its contents, poor relatives and next-of-kin, something which one can love unreservedly with that trust which comes of an undisturbed belief in its stability. The remoteness of this principle is expressed by the preposterous nature of its embodiment Hetton Abbey, pure English nineteenth-century Gothic .. The very quality of childish illusion, of immaturity, in the ideal, is a judgement on the grown­ up, matured savagery of others.' In the long run, Tony cannot keep out the London savages; Helton is invaded, and Mrs. Beaver threatens to cover the walls with chromium plating. The primitive Indians in Brazil, when they decamp, take nothing that is not theirs; they have their principles, they know their limits. In contrast, the London savages take all they can get; Brenda, under their influence, demands a large amount of alimony from Tony (with which to buy Beaver), even though she realizes that it will force him to sell his beloved Helton. Much of this is lost when the novel is translated into film; in fact, by leaving out one important character in the novel, the film ignores the effects of spiritual ignorance in the modern world. The marvellous sermons of Mr. Tendril, first delivered in the far reaches oft he Empire during the reign of Queen Victoria, illuminate this theme in the novel in a number of ways. As his name indicates, he himself makes only a slight impact upon an almost completely secularized society. Though the villagers enjoy his sermons, though he is considered the best preacher for miles around, "Few of the things said in church seemed to have any particular reference to themselves." Tony's regular attendance at church is merely a formal ritual with no religious meaning; during the service his thoughts drift from subject to subject: "Occasionally some arresting phrase in the liturgy would recall him to his surroundings, but for the most part that morning he occupied himself with the question of bathrooms and lavatories ...
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