CHAPTER - 2

MAN REDUCED TO A HANDFUL OF DUST

Evelyn Waugh has described his travel books as a

"record of certain journeys, chosen for no better reason than

that I needed noney at the tine of their conpletion" (7).

This nay have been true of his journeys to Ethiopia in 1930 and

in 1935,or of yet another journey to Africa nuch later in 1959,

but the same cannot be said of his journey to British Guiana and

parts of Brazil in the winter of 1932. Actually, there is no evidence in Waugh's diaries or letters to explain why he decided

to visit South America rather than any other place. Christopher

Sykes, Waugh's friend and biographer, has noted that "an acute critic of 's work has suggested... a religious reason" (Sykes 182) — that Waugh wanted to see how Christianity had grown in remote places-- theological and ecclesiastical matters having been his interests since childhood, as is evident

from a reading of his autobiography. Michael Davie, the editor of

Waugh's diaries, suggests, on the other hand, that the journey

"contains a hint of penance," and adds that "Waugh in the South

American jungle inflicted discomfort and tedium upon himself in a way that was not normally part of his character" (Diaries 354).

Davie has based his deduction on a diary entry of 4 December

1932, written while Waugh was en route to Georgetown, the capital of British Guiana. It is a brief three - word entry — "Heart of

lead" (Diaries 356) — which speaks of his state of mind at that time. The "heart of lead" was obviously because of certain developments affecting his personal life. During the months

31 preceding his South American trip, Waugh had been leading some

kind o-f a fast life. He was also "in the awkward position of

being involved in two affairs of the heart” (Sykes 182). One of

them concerned Lady Diana Cooper, a married woman and an actress.

The other, "his most impassioned attachment" (Diaries 354), was

his involvement with Teresa (Baby) Jungman. Waugh would have

liked to marry her, but since both he and Teresa were Catholics,

they could not marry as he had divorced his wife and the marriage

had not yet been annulled. His escape to South America,

therefore, could have been an attempt to avoid certain embarrassing situations.

Yet another possibility has been hinted. Brazil, at

that point of time, was in the news because of the return of an

English expedition to that country. The expedition's mission had been to search for an explorer, Colonel P.H. Fawcett, who had disappeared in 1925 "while searching for an Inca city rumored to exist in the heart of Cthe Brazilian state of] Mato Grosso."^

Fawcett "was thought by some to have been made a prisoner of the 2 Indians." Peter Fleming (brother of , the creator of

■' ), a well-known writer-explorer who was to publish the account of this expedition later in his Brazilian /^dv&i\,ture

tl933), had accompanied the e>:peditian as a epecial correspondent of The Ti/n&s. Tho expedition had failed in its mission but it had been the subject of talk for quite some time. All this and the

* A.S.G. Edwards," A Source for Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust,” Mod&rn Fiction Studies 22 (1976) : 24 3.

^ Frederick J. Stopp, Eu&Lyn Waugh : Portrait of an Artist (London ; Chapman and Hall, 1958) 136.

32 fact that South America was a "territory relatively untouched by

the crowd of smart young men in the market for travel

1iterature, might have stimulated the wanderer in Waugh.

Moreover, he had not undertaken any journey for more than two years after his return from Africa, and very likely "he felt a new stirring of wanderlust" (Sykes 182).

Evelyn Waugh apparently meant this trip to be more in the nature of an expedition than a simple journey. This was evident from the elaborate arrangements he made in preparation for the journey. He bought a kit to meet the requirements of an expedition, and sought the advice of men with South American experience, one of them being Peter Fleming who advised him about the kind of equipment he needed for journey through forests.

Waugh,eventua11y , left England for Georgetown on 2

December 1932 and reached his destination on 22 December. The period from 3 January 1933, when he started from Georgetown on his expedition, to 5 April 1933, when he left for home, makes up the ninety-two days' that he later adopted as the title of the travel book which contains the account of this journey.

The expedition proper set off on 15 January 1933 from a place called Kurupukari, a district headquarter on the borders of

British Guiana and Brazil. Waugh's destination was Boa Vista, a frontier town situated some forty miles within Brazil. Boa Vista, which in Portuguese means lovely view', had been described to

^ Martin Stannard, Evelyn W a u ^ h : Th& Early Y&cLrs (London : JM Dent, 1986) 307.

33 him as ‘‘an important Brazilian town... a place of peculiar

glamour-— dissipated and violent; a place where revolutions were

plotted and political assassinations committed" (WGG 210). When,

after an arduous journey, Waugh finally reached Boa Vista, he

found it, to his utter shock, "a run-down hopeless wreck of a

place" (Sykes 186). His original plan was to go by river to

Manaos, the most important town in the Brazilian state of

Amazonas, but as there was no prospect of a boat for weeks, he decided to return to Georgetown via a different route. So, like

Peter Fleming's expedition, Waugh's journey, too, had its share of disappointment.

However, the journey was not a total wash-out. It provided him with enough material to write a travel book,

Nin&ty-Two Days, which was published in the spring of 1934, and also inspired the writing of a novel, A Handful of Dust, published in the same year. The writing of this novel has an interesting story to tell. Actually, Waugh had no plans this time, as he had at the start of his journey to Ethiopia earlier, of making use of his travel experiences to write a novel. It was his chance meeting with one Mr Christie, a religious man of highly eccentric nature, which served as a stimulant, first , to the writing of a short story, and then the novel, A HandfuL of

Dus t.

The account of Waugh's meeting with Mr Christie, a half-caste rancher, whom he met during his journey to Boa Vista, is rather sketchy in the diary, but it gets exhaustive treatment in the travel book, Nin&ty-Two Days, selections from which were

34 later incorporated in Wh&n the' Going was Good. Waugh had been

told that Christie was "very old and very religious'" (WGG 217).

Waugh found him reclining in a hammock, sipping cold water. He

had "a long white moustache and a white woolly head" (WGG 218).

When Waugh greeted him, "he smiled in a dreamy absent-minded

manner and said, I was expecting you. I was warned in a vision

of your approach" (WGG 218). He further told Waugh that he could

always know the character of any visitor by the visions he had of

them. Waugh could not resist asking how he had seen him. “ As a

sweetly- tuned harmonium,' said Mr Christie politely" (WGG 218).

At supper time Christie spoke about many more of his fantastic

visions, about God, the end of the world, and the assembly of the

elect in heaven.

Waugh left Christie's ranch the next morning but could

not leave behind the memory of Mr Christie, whose eccentricity

had greatly fascinated him. As it was, Waugh himself possessed

some streaks of madness which were to blow up in 1954 when his mind almost gave way. He was advised a change of climate and went on a journey to Ceylon. During the course of the voyage he suffered from hallucinations. He returned home and had himself

treated. Later, he incorporated his strange experiences in his highly autobiographical novel, Th& Ordeal o/ Gilbert Fin/old

(1957), which forms part of the present study. Suffice it to say here that, for some strange reasons, eccentricity and insanity held a peculiar fascination for him.

The encounter with Mr Christie aroused the artist in

Waugh. He visualized the immense comic possibilities a fictional

35 treatment of the subject could af-ford. He soon thought of a plot for a short story and completed it in two days. It had the title

"The Man Who Liked Dickens," The story, when it was published

later, had a resounding success in England and the United States.

Sykes considers it “worthy of Maupassant or Somerset Maugham at their best" (Sykes 189). The story's plot revolves around a man trapped in a jungle, ending his days reading Dickens aloud to a lunatic who had made him his captive. Incidentally, the choice of

Dickens's name in the title of the story was not haphazard.

Waugh, a great admirer of Dickens, had been reading some of his works during the journey^as is evident from his diary entries of

27 February and 4 March 1933. Interestingly, Waugh's daughter,

Margaret, has mentioned how, much later, Waugh used to read

"aloud to us a great deal, mostly Dickens'" (Sykes 597).

It is the above story which later became the basis for the novel A Handful of Dxtst (1934). In an article entitled "Fan-

Fare," published in Lif& (8 April 1946), Waugh described how the novel came to be written about. It is worth recording what Waugh has said about the genesis of A Handful of Dust, for it neatly sums up what the novel is really about. This is how Waugh has put

It :

I had written a short story 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 and reflecting how easily he could hold me prisoner. Then, after the short story was written and published, the idea kept working in my mind. I wanted to discover how the prisoner got there, and eventually the thing grew into a study of other sorts of savage at home and the civilized man's helpless plight among them. (Essays 303).

36 The story (of A Handfxil of Dust) that Waugh finally

constructed went like this. Tony Last, a scion of the landed

gentry, lives in Hetton Abbey, a Gothic country- house, with his

young wife, Brenda, and six-year old son, John Andrew. Tony is

deeply attached to the house and loves country-1ife, but Brenda

considers the house hideous and old-fashioned as it is devoid of

modern comforts. She is more at home in London with its gay

parties and affairs'. She herself gets involved in one, with

John Beaver, whose mother is some sort of interior decorator.

Under the pretence of taking a course in Economics, Brenda

persuades Tony to buy her a flat in London. She also wants

Beaver's mother to renovate Hetton Abbey. The death of John

Andrew in an accident severs whatever little link Brenda has with

Tony and the house. She asks for a divorce, hoping to get married

to Beaver. Tony cooperates initially, even going to the extent of supplying evidence of his' infidelity. But when Brenda asks for a higher alimony, as Beaver is not prepared to marry her unless she is properly provided for, Tony puts his foot down. To raise that much money he would have to sell Hetton. He refuses to grant her divorce and, instead, goes on an expedition to Brazil. During the course of his explorations there he reaches the ranch of one

Mr Todd. Todd virtually turns him into a prisoner and makes him read Dickens aloud to him for the rest of his life. Hetton is inherited by Tony's cousin and Brenda marries a friend of Tony.

The short story "The Man Who Liked Dickens" was incorporated in its entirety in the novel, forming the sixth chapter. The novel was completed in early 1934 and was serialized in Warper’s Bazaar with the title "A Flat in London." Waugh's

37 American publishers asked him to supply an alternative ending to

the serial , as the short story, "The Man Who Liked DickenSj," had

already been published in most American magazines only a "few

months back. Waugh supplied the alternative ending, and it was

later included in the collection of his short stones, entitled

Mr Lov&day's Little Outing and Other Sad Stories (1936), It

carried the title By Special Request'. This ending replaced the

last three chapters of the novel, thus omitting the entire

Brazilian episode. Tony Last is described going on a long cruise

after his marriage breaks down. The voyage is not described. When

he returns, Brenda is waiting at the docks to receive him. She

informs him, as they are on their way home, that Beaver has deserted her for another woman. Tony "falls asleep and the crisis with Brenda is avoided." Later, he decides to keep the London

flat "under an assumed name so that he may have an affair of his ..5 own .

A Handful of Dust is, thus, the outcome of some kind of a chain reaction triggered off by Waugh's strange encounter with

Mr Christie during the course of his Brazilian journey-

Naturally, when he wrote about Tony's voyage to Brazil and his journey through the jungles, he drew quite substantially upon his own experiences. For example, compare these two pieces, the first from Waugh's travel book and the second from the novel :

^ Richard Wasson, “A Handful of Dust : Critique of Vic torianism," Modern Fiction Studies 7 (1961-62) : 336.

^ W a s s o n : 3 3 7 .

3 8 I did gaze rather wistfully as each of the islands in turn disappeared behind us. The first was Antigua... and it remains the most vivid — steep little hills covered in bush, a fringe of palm along the beach... a shabby little town... (WGG 188).

They reached the first of the islands; a green belt of palm trees with wooded hills rising beyond them and a small town heaped up along the shores of a bay (AHD 165)

There are some other similar details both in the travel book and the novel. There is the same confusion about the course of the rivers — "tiny cascading brooks, confusing in an unmapped country because they seemed always to be flowing in the direction one did not expect" (WGG 190); " W e are now in the Amazon system of rivers.... [ Dr Messinger, Tony's companion, tells him ] You see, the water is running south.' But almost immediately they crossed a stream flowing in the opposite direction" (AHD 180). Dr

Messinger himself is largely modelled after one Dr Roth who Waugh had met in Georgetown. When Dr Roth came to know that Waugh was keen to undertake a journey to the interior, he expressed his willingness to take him "to the only place where unsophisticated

Indians are still to be found" (Diaries 361). Dr Messinger also promises Tony that he would take him to "the city" (AHD 159).

Waugh was, however, strongly advised against taking Roth as a guide as he was described to be an irresponsible person.

In the course of his visit to Zanzibar in 1930-31,

Waugh had met "a young lady who was on her way to be married"

(WGG 161). She makes her appearance in A Handf-ul of Dust in the form of Th^r^se de Vitr^, an eighteen-year old girl who Tony meets during his voyage, "coming home to be married" (AHD 163).

39 Th^r^se, incidentally, "was lightly based on Teresa Jungman."*^

Waugh often referred to her as Th^r^se. Waugh has also recorded

having met a "pretty Indian girl named Rosa" (Diaries 365). She was later immortalized under her own name in the novel.

r h ~ r - 7 C i g other details include the mention of howler monkeys, tree frogs, a Red Indian tribe named Macushi, the vicious Cabouri fly, and farine— a food preparation of the Indians. There is also a mention of vampire bats. In the travel book a bat is reported as having attacked a pony (WGG 201), and in the novel it is described as having nipped Dr Messinger’s toe (AHD 171). Poor visibility, "by reason of the sand-paper trees.... [which] often hid a house from view" (WGG 217) is noted in the travel book. In the novel, Tony and Dr Messinger come into sight of an Indian village "quite suddenly emerging from the bush"

Todd are almost identical. Mr Todd, of course, is entirely drawn from Mr Christie. When Waugh came to describe Tony's delirious fever^ he probably had in mind the peculiar fever that he found people suffering from in Boa Vista.

It is also to be noted that while writing the story

"The Man Who Liked Dickens" (which constitutes the sixth chapter of A Hand/xtl of Dust) Waugh did not confine himself to his travel experiences only. He borrowed quite a few details from Peter

Fleming's Brazilian Adx>e‘TXtvir&, already referred to earlier.

^ Jacqueline McDonnell, Ev&lyn Vfaxigh. (London : Macmillan, 1988) 156.

40 Waugh had reviewed this book for the Sp&ctator in August 1933, a

month before his own story was published. There are "striking

correspondences”^ between Fleming's book and Waugh's story. It is

pointed out that Waugh drew quite substantially from Fleming's

experiences while describing Tony's journey through Brazilian

jungles. Some of these are things like the quest for a lost city,

ill-equipped and inexperienced expedition leaders, difficulties

of language when dealing with the natives, problems in engaging a

guide, confusion about directions due to lack of adequate maps,

and desertion by guides through fear of hostile or cannibalistic

tribes. The details of Tony's encounter with "a half-caste

prospector" (AHD 241) at the time he was being held in captivity

by Hr Todd, have also been re-worked from Fleming's book. It is

also possible that the idea of Tony being made a captive for life

may have come to Waugh's mind on reading about the possibility of

Colonel Fawcett having been made a prisoner by the Indians, as

referred to earlier in the text. Yet another detail that Waugh

borrowed is about Dr Messinger being solicited by native women

for iodine, which they used as a cosmetic.

There is a strong element of autobiography also that

finds its way into the novel. The tragedy that befalls Tony Last,

as far as the break-down of his marriage is concerned, is not, in

some ways, different from Waugh's own. Waugh, too, like Tony, had

put a lot of trust in his first wife and was sadly deceived. It

is quite natural, therefore, that "his pain and disgust at such

^ A.S.G. Edwards : 243.

41 in"fidelity spills over -from his experience into the novel" (CH

23). It is also suggested that the portrait of Brenda Last,

Tony's wife, bears a close resemblance to Waugh's first wife— in

appearance as well as in behaviour. Paradoxica11y enough, John

Heygate, the man for whom Waugh's wife left him, was more like

Tony "in terms of background and persona 1ity. Incidentally,

that marriage also broke down later, affirming, as one might put

it, Waugh's thesis in the novel. Tony's futile ship-board romance

with Th^r^se de Vitr^, a young Catholic girl, during his voyage,

was probably inspired by Waugh's own unsuccessful attachment with

Baby Jungman, who also was a Catholic.

When the novel was to be published in book-form (as

noted earlier, it was first serialized in Harper's Bazaar with

the title "A Flat in London"), Waugh first chose the title A

Handful of Ashes.' Some dispute with his American publishers led

him to think of another title, namely. Fourth Decade', as the

hero of the novel was a little over thirty (Sykes 196). Finally,

he settled for A Handful of Dust', a phrase taken from the

four-line quotation from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land which he

used as an epigraph for the novel. The lines are ;

... 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.

8 John Bayley, "The Art of Self Assertion," Times Literary Supplement 5 Oct. 1984 : 1111,

42 It nay be added that the post-script of a letter‘d that Waugh wrote to his literary agent, A.D. Peters, "deoonstrates the eventual title had been in Waugh's »ind throughout the later „io stage.

Christopher Sykes, who was not happy with the title, felt that the quotation Eight have been used to give the book "a certain extra selling value' (Sykes 196). But, it has been rightly pointed out that "the poea's 'rhythnical gruBbling' about the desecration of high culture had lodged in Waugh's mind since

Harold Acton [Waugh's friend at Oxford] had chanted it through a negaphone fron Meadow Building [in Oxford] in 1924. Waugh, in his autobiography, has acknowledged his debt to Harold Acton to have introduced hi», anong other things, to T.S. Eliot and Th&

Wast& Land.^^ Whether the title is appropriate for the novel or not Bight be debatable, but the aptness of having a quotation froHTj The Wast& Land as an epigraph for the novel can hardly be questioned, as the novel can truly be said to embody in prose form the sense of utter desolation and despair that is conjured up in Th& Wast& Land. Like many others of his generation Waugh seemed “to have shared the disillusionment and disgust to which

The Waste Land gave quintessential expression.''*^ The bleak world

^ Martin Stannard, Ewlyn Waugh : The Early Years 363.

Stannard 364.

Stannard 456.

Evelyn Waugh, A Little Learning The First Volxune of an Autobiography (London : Chapman and Hall, 1964) 197. James F. Carens, The Satiric Art of E\>elyn Wa-ugh 13.

43 of Eliot's poem is not very unlike Waugh's own world. In all

aspects of nan's life Waugh, like Eliot, noticed futility and

sterility — whether it was the institution of marriage, family

life, relations between men and women, or man's spiritual life.

There was no coherence and no order, and one really and truly

lived in a waste land, described in Eliot's poem as a place where

"the dead tree gives no shelter," where “we live in rat's alley,"

and where there is plenty of "fear in a handful of dust." As has

rightly been pointed out, in this novel Waugh's "wonderfully

fertile comic imagination... satiric tone, and his feeling for

the macabre" have fused together to give us "an unforgettable

picture of a brilliant, but sick society whose decadence he

emphasizes not only by choosing both his title and motto from The

Land but also echoing Proust in two of his chapter

titles. "**

The reference to Proust in the quotation given above

needs some elaboration. The titles of the two chapters referred

to are : 'Du C6t^ De Ches Beaver' and Du C6t^ De Chez Todd,'

which are the first and the sixth chapters respectively of A

Handfxil of Dust. The titles serve as an ironic allusion to Marcel

Proust's celebrated work A la R&cherch& (R&m&mbrance oj Things

Past). Though "Waugh always claimed that he had not read Proust until late in life... there is some evidence tosuggest that he had dipped into A la R&ch&rch& as a young man" (CH. 262 n.). It is also mentioned that "several volumes of Proust, annotated by

Waugh" (CH. 263 n.) were part of Waugh's personal library. (This

James W. Nichols, "Romantic and Realistic : The Tone of Evelyn Waugh's Early Novels," College English 24 (1862) : 53.

44 library is now kept in the Evelyn Waugh Archive, Humanities

Research Centre, University of Texas, at Austin.) Attention has

also been drawn to the -fact that there are passages in

Brid&sh&ad Revisite'd, too, "that seem to paraphrase Remje’mbranc&

of Things Past" (CH 260). One passage, in particular, that

strongly echoes Proust is the opening of Book Three of Brid&shead

R&visit&d where Waugh talks of memory' being his theme.

A Handful of Dust, apparently, starts as a conventional

story about upper class country-life, but soon diverges into

something entirely different. As noted earlier, Waugh had stated

how his encounter in the Brazilian jungle with a 'savage,' in the

form of Mr Christie, had made him ruminate over the awesome

possibilities that such a meeting could lead to and how "the

thing grew into a study of other sorts of savage at home and the

civilized man's helpless plight among them." He had already

provided in his earlier novels, including Black Mischief, some

glimpses of these "other sorts of savage" and their 'savagery'.

In a sense, the equation in this novel is just opposite to what we have in Black Mischief, though the end-product is more or less

the same in both the novels. In Black Mischief, the main theatre of action is Africa, the homeland of the black, with the focus on

the conduct and behaviour of the black. In A Handful of Chist, on

the other hand, it is the white man's country which takes the central stage with the white playing the lead roles. And whereas

the white play a somewhat secondary role in Black Mischief ^ the

black, or the natives, do so in A Handful of Dust, with the ultimate point of interest in both the novels being the same, namely, "man's helpless plight."

45 Waugh's encounter with Mr Christie was, in a way, not a

very unusual occurrence. One does come across people who are

slightly eccentric or mentally deranged. Ulaugh, however, viewed

it differently and transformed it into an extraordinary situation

that became symbolic of the jungle' that man's life can turn

into. Mr Todd, Mr Christie's counterpart in the novel, is a

savage, a man of the jungle, and the laws he enforces are jungle

laws. Once a person gets trapped in such a world, there is no escape, except by way of death. Significantly, Mr Todd's name has an ominous ring about it as 'Tod' in German means death'. The possibilities of a man finding himself trapped in a Tony-like situation were enormous in a world which, as Waugh generally visualized it, was largely ruled by 'savages' like Mr Todd, on

the one hand, and Mrs Beaver and Polly Cockpurse, on the other.

A satirist, as Carens puts it, "must know some 'good' if he is to expose and ridicule man's imperfections."*^ The

good' that Waugh is concerned with in A Hand/ul of Dust were certain social values which he considered essential for a civilized living. Most of these values, by present-day standards, might probably be termed as conservative; but they have their relevance so far as well-bred social virtues are concerned. Some of these are : sanctity of the institution of marriage, admiration for the genuine aristocracy of the past and observance of the proper religious tradition. Waugh strongly believed in these and these very beliefs were partly responsible for his

Th& Satiric Art of Ex>&lyn Waugh xiii.

46 conversion to Roman Catholicism. As early as 1929, Waugh had spoken about the necessity of "the imposition by rigid discipline... of the standards of civilization."**’ Having once belonged to the care-free bohemian world of the Bright Young

Things and seen its hollowness, it was natural that he should have longed for the stability of the old order. Stately homes, in particular, like Hetton Abbey in A Handful of Dust, were seen by

Waugh "not only a creation of aesthetic value, but the symbol of an aesthetically satisfying way of life."*^ These houses stood for orderliness and "integrated and purposeful existence."*® No wonder, then, that Tony Last is not prepared to part with his mansion, though he is willing to do anything else to please

Brenda.

Alvin B. Kernan, a prominent Waugh critic,has drawn attention to a passage in one of Waugh's later novels, Helena

(1950), which, according to him, very aptly sums up what Waugh had to say about the perennial struggle going on in the human world between the forces of civilization and barbarism. The passage refers to the description of the Roman Wall which separated Gaul from Germany and formed the outermost defence of the city of Rome. Explaining the meaning of the wall to his wife,

Helena, Emperor Constantine describes it as ;

Evelyn Wau^h : A Little Order : A Selection from His Journalism, ed. Donat Gallagher (London : Eyre Methuen, 1977) 12.

Eric Link later, "Evelyn Waugh," The Art of Adventure (London : Macmillan, 1947) 55.

Linklater 56.

"The Wall and the Jungle ; The Early Novels of Evelyn Waugh," Yale Review 53 (1963) ; 199.

47 "a single great girdle round the civilized world; inside peace, decency, the law, the altars of the Gods, industry, the arts, order; outside wild beasts and savages, forest and swamp, bloody mumbo-jumbo, men like wolf-packs; and along the wall the armed might of the Empire, sleepless, holding the line."

The passage vividly presents the contrast that Waugh

often focussed on in his novels - the contrast between chaos and order; animals and social man; jungle and city. We have it in A

Hand/nl o/ Dxxst, too. Hetton Abbey, on the one hand, and Mayfair

London as well as the Brazilian jungle on the other, represent

the two forces. The tragedy of modern life is that, as Kernan

puts it, " the walls have already been broached and the jungle

powers are at work within the city.’’^* Mrs Beaver, a

representative of the 'savages', invades Hetton Abbey, at the

head of a demolition squad, and is all set to literally rip off

the Gothic grandeur of the place. She has already done it in the case of many other houses, converting them into flats. " I shall

have to look about for another suitable house to split up,'" (AHD

53) she says and Hetton Abbey becomes her next target. She plans

to start off with the morning room, covering its walls with white chromium plating. One of the party, though, would even like to

"blow the whole thing sky-high'" (AHD 79). Waugh, it may be pointed out, loved old houses, with their mid-Victorian features.

We read in his autobiography, when he describes the house built by his grandfather and later inhabited by his three maiden-aunts

(a house where Waugh loved to spend his holidays and also loved the peculiar smell that it contained within its walls), about his

Evelyn Waugh, Ucl9 na (1950; Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1963) 3 9 .

"The Wall and the Jungle" : 199.

48 expression of deep regret when "the interior oi the house grew younger" with "the twentieth century... seeping in."^^

A hapless, helpless Tony, finding the walls of his citadel crumbling, goes in search for another heaven. His search for the lost city in the Brazilian jungle assumes, thus, a

symbolic significance. In his naivety, he thinks that what he

failed to have in the so-called 'civilized' world might be there

in the land of the savages. The city, however, proves elusive. He escapes from the savages of London only to be caught up in a real

jungle among real savage, and, though ironically enough he

"finds the order for which he has so diligently searched," each day at Mr Todd's ranch following the same routine, it is "order

justice. Like Boa Vista, the Brazilian town which had « been described to Waugh as "a city of inexpressible grandeur, of palaces and opera houses, boulevards, and fountains..." (WGG

2 1 0 ), and which had in reality turned out to be a "rundown hopeless wreck of a place" (Sykes 196), Tony's search also ends in utter disappointment. There is not only no city,but there is no further escape, too.

A Handfxil of Dust can be viewed as Waugh's first serious novel in the sense that, as Peter Green has so aptly put it, "it advances from purely two-dimensiona1 satire to the exploration of character and motive in depth... Not that his

A Little Learning 53. Pamela R. Johnson, "Tony Last's Search for Order and Justice in A Handf-ul of Dust,” E-u&l^^n Waxigh N&u>s I e 11 e-r 18.1 (1984) :7.

"Du C6 t6 de Chez Waugh," Review of English Lit&rat-ur& 2.2 (1961) ; 89.

49 earlier novels lacked seriousness or purpose. De‘Clin& and Fall,

Vil& Bodi&s, and Black Mischi&f, Waugh's -first three novels,

followed a definite pattern. They all aimed at depicting the

cxhaotic movements of modern life. However, quite often the

situations presented in these novels were highly comic,

especially in the first two novels, almost bordering on farce,

and the characters were dealt with rather superficia1ly. A

Handfxil of Dust, on the contrary, presents a perfect mixture of

the comic and the serious, with situations that are life-like,

and characters with whom we can easily identify ourselves.

One such character is Tony Last, the hero of the novel, who contributes quite a lot towards the novel's strong appeal.

Though in certain respects he is no different from Waugh's

earlier heroes— like Paul Pennyfeather in D&cline and Fall and

Seth in Black Mischi&f, both prototypes of the hero as the victim

— yet he possesses certain distinguishing traits which set him apart. Referring to A Handfxil of Dust, Waugh is reported to have

told one of his friends, "that he was finding the book 'very difficult to write because for the first time I am trying to deal with normal people instead of eccentricsFor the first time, indeed, in a novel of Waugh we are face to face with a character with whom we can sympathise, despite all his weaknesses. And he has quite a few of them. He trusts his wife far too much. He is blind to the realities of life and is unable to cope with them, and "is betrayed as much by the nature of his illusions as by his

25 Qtd. in Jacqueline McDonnell 72,

50 He is so naive that he cannot see what his wife is up to, though he claims to "know Brenda so well" (AHD 109). He lives in a make-believe world, not really having grown up, as his attachment with things of his childhood days clearly proves (AHD

15-16). And he clings to things which have become outdated. He is actually so taken up with the past that he lets the present go past him.

In short, he is too soft and too simple. No wonder,

Waugh is "at his cruel best"^^ with such people. Of course, people like Tony are bound to suffer. The world is made such that the innocent are always at the receiving end while the crafty often get away with things. Yet, the very weaknesses of Tony make him like a real human being (for, don't we all have all sorts of weaknesses in us?). Waugh's earlier heroes fail to evoke any sympathy as their characters appear so very insubstantial, vague, even grotesque and unreal. The only instance where one felt a little touched by the predicament of a central character, in

Waugh's earlier novels, occurs in Bloch Mischi&f where Waugh describes Seth's solitary figure battering, in fading twilight, at the granite archway of the Anglican cathedral which he had ordered to be pulled down so as to enable him to rebuild the city

(BM 184). It is, indeed, a pathetic picture of a man pursuing a task with all the zeal associated with people who are wedded to a cause. One cannot but feel sorry for the singular naivety of a

2^ Walter Allen, Tradition and Dr&am. : Tfx& English, and Am&rican Nov&l from the T\»&nties to Our Ou>n Time (London : Phoenix , 1964) 211 . 27 Frank Kermode, "Mr Waugh's Cities," Encounter Nov. 1960: 6 8 .

5 1 man lost in a world of unrealizable dreams— going single -

handed against the current of the world at large. Surely, they

are heading for disaster because of the very scheme of things and would be made to suffer; but one does feel a twitch in one's

heart when they do so. It is precisely this quality, of a character touching one's heart, which made Sir Angus Wilson place

A Handf-ul of Dust "above all Waugh's others as a work of art" (CH

485). Waugh himself considered it his favourite till he wrote

Brid&shead Re-oisit&d (1945).

A Handful of Dust, like Black Mischief, shows, thus, how a gifted writer can convert his personal experiences to a great advantage in his fiction; how he can, in fact, build up a whole novel on the basis of just one single incident, as we find with this novel. Actually, it can be suggested here that Waugh's journey to Brazil, or even his meeting a person like Mr Christie, was somewhat immaterial to the writing of a novel such as A

Handful of Dust because, as things stood in his life, he was sure to come out with a novel like this, sooner or later. Waugh's unfortunate first marriage had made a heavy dent on his sensibilities. He could never have been able to shake its bitter memory off, however hard he might have tried. It was bound to get itself translated, in some form or the other, into his fiction.

Stating that Waugh's writings struck him "as an essential part of him," Harold Acton, a close friend of Waugh, suggested that a great deal of what we find in Waugh's works was sharpened by the failure of his first marriage, and further added that "A Handful of Dust was written in his blood.The Brazilian adventure, his

28 More Memoirs of an Aesthete (London : Methuen, 1970) 318.

52 encounter with Mr Christie, to be precise, merely served as a catalyst. The deathly trap in the wilds of Brazil, which enmeshes

Tony Last, with the likes of Mr Christie on the prowl, was deftly transformed by Waugh into a metaphor that symbolized the jung1 e-nature of man's world with predators like Mrs Beaver and her son (classic reincarnations of Mrs Heep and Uriah Heep in

Charles Dickens's David CoppG^r/ield) feeding on the simple and the innocent. This observation about John Beaver and his mother vis-a-vis Uriah Heep and his mother further reinforces the

Dickens factor in the novel. Attention has already been drawn to the fact that Waugh had been reading Dickens during the course of the Brazilian journey, and that Dickens was one of Waugh's favourite novelists.

The publication of A Mandfxxl of Dust really consolidated Evelyn Waugh's reputation. The first reviews of the novel clearly hinted that here was a mature work. Though

Oldmeadow, who had given such a damning review to Black Mischief, was again up to some mischief. Writing in the Catholic weekly

Tabl&t, he disapproved of the book's having been recommended by the Book Society. Admitting that the book had "some witty pages," he spoke of the "brutal finale," which, in his opinion, was

"sedulously and diabolically cruel" (CH 152). Every other critic, however, had nothing but praise for the book. Calvert Alexander, in his book Th& Catholic Literary Rex>i'oal (1935), described the novel as "the most powerful satire since Brave Nexj^ World."

Margaret Morris and D.J. Dooley, EdS., Evelyn Waxigh Reference Guide (Boston : G.H. Hall, 1984) 12.

53 William Plower, reviewing the book for of 14

September 1934, commended the novel as "it catches exactly certain of the rhythms of contemporary life" (CH 154). Peter

Quennel 1 , in the N&w Stat&smjan of 14 September 1934, refuted

□Idmeadow's charges and added that "a more moral book,.. has seldom come my way" (CH 156).

The novel also earned praise, a few years later, from critics like Rose Macaulay and Edmund Wilson. The former, writing in the December 1946 issue of the //orizon,described A Handful of

Cnist as a social novel that "deals with real life." She considered the last section of the book as "a brilliant and terrifying tour de force," and observed that the novel "seems to reach the climax of Mr Waugh's view of life as the meaningless jiggery of barbarous nit-wits" (CH 158). Edmund Wilson referred to the novel as Waugh's "masterpiece", and spoke of how the

■fear' referred to in T.S. Eliot's line is all pervasive and that

Waugh "manages to convey from beginning to end... the impression of a terror, of a feeling that the bottom is just about to drop out of things. Bernard Bergonzi, writing in the July-August

1964 issue of Black Friarsjdescribed the book as "the first of

[Waugh’s] essays in 'serious' fiction," pointing "forward to such ambitious later novels as Brideshead and.... the Sword of Honour trilogy" (CH 159). Frank Kermode thought that it was "one of the most distinguished novels of the century."^* Walter Allen echoes the sentiment when he describes it as "one of the best novels of

"Never Apologize, Never Explain : The Art of Evelyn Waugh," Classics and Commercials (London : W. H. Allen, 1951) 142-143.

Encounter Nov. 1960 : 66.

54 our time."^^ And, oi course, we have the old faithful,

Christopher Sykes, who thinks that "there are only five or six

novels of the century which can seriously challenge it" (Sykes

2 0 0 ). Incidentally, a film version of the book was released in

1988. The film, which featured the celebrated British actor, Sir

Alec Guinness, in the role of Mr Todd, had quite a successful 33 run .

Tradition and Dr&am 210. 33 Edwin J. Blesch, Jr., "(W)awe- Inspiring : Waugh's A Handf-ul of Dust on Screen," Evelyn Waugh. N&wsL&tt&r 22.2 (1988) : 3-6.

55