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I have several Waugh novels sitting on my shelf due to my sudden infatuation with his writing in late 2008. Just those two books made me start boasting that Waugh was one of my favorite authors. After over a year of neglect, I decided it was time to visit Waugh again and read what some consider his best work, A Handful of Dust (1934). I remembered immediately why I fell for Waugh in the first place.
The title comes from one of my favorite poems (and one I’ve hated too), The Waste Land 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.
I devoted a chapter of my masters thesis on that nasty poem; I can tell you an awful lot about it and its allusions, though I still don’t understand it all and could not explain it. I think we can all agree, though, that it is centered around a dying civilization, or, perhaps better, a decaying civilization — civilization already being dead. Its imagery, both of the city and of sex, and set pieces of conversation between lonely souls feel so sad, so dry — I think it’s beautiful. Leavened with quite a lot more humor, Waugh is taking on the same theme in A Handful of Dust. His isolated characters represent a civilization in decline.
In the novel’s first few pages we meet a young Mr. John Beaver. Beaver is relatively poor and quite lazy and selfish, though to an extent the reader might find him charming as he tells his mother he has accepted an invitation to visit Hetton Abbey, the proud inheritance of Tony Last. Tony, incidentally, did not intend his invitation to be taken literally; it was merely an act of courtesy during a night drinking at the club. Beaver probably knows this, but he is ever the social climber.
While Beaver is travelling to Hetton Abbey, we arrive there first to meet Tony and his wife Brenda. This is Tony Last at his most confident and Brenda Last at her most docile as they discuss their plans. Brenda is bored of Hetton Abbey. Tony cannot comprehend. Tony winces when he realizes that Beaver has taken the invitation seriously and decides to put him in the most uncomfortable room in the house, the room called Sir Galahad.
At this point in the novel, perhaps we can hardly blame Beaver and Brenda for commencing an affair. They flirted slightly during the weekend, and before Beaver left Brenda had already planned to go to London to see him the next weekend. Here is a nice little snippet on their behavior just after Brenda’s sister Marjorie leaves them alone this first weekend together:
They were awkward when Marjorie left, for in the week that they had been apart, each had, in thought, grown more intimate with the other than any actual occurrence warranted.
Their affair suddenly increases everyone’s interest in Beaver; he was below their notice before. That’s not to say anyone really likes him now. Perhaps Brenda herself expresses why best:
Brenda had come into Marjorie’s room and they were having breakfast in bed. Marjorie was more than ever like an elder sister that morning. ‘But really, Brenda, he’s such a dreary young man.’
‘I know it all. He’s second rate and a snob and, I should think, as cold as a fish, but I happen to have a fancy for him, that’s all . . . besides I’m not sure he’s altogetherawful . . . he’s got that odious mother whom he adores . . . and he’s always been very poor. I don’t think he’s had a fair deal. I heard all about it last night. He got engage once but they couldn’t get married because of money and since then he’s never had a proper affair with anyone decent . . . he’s got to be taught a whole lot of things. That’s part of his attraction.’
As you can see, there is quite a bit of comedy involved, even when the subject is so sad when we stop to think about it. It is quite some time before Tony finds out about the affair. And the plot itself has a few twists and turns, some tragic, many comic, before he finally agrees to a divorce. And this was, for me, one of the best parts of the novel. Under British law of the time, a divorce was not easily executed. Furthermore, if Mrs. Last is found to be the cause of the severance, the court would grant her next to nothing. It is privately arranged that Mr. Last will be the cause. To this end, Tony seeks a partner in his fraud, some woman who will understand the delicacies of falsifying an affair:
But when he came to discuss the question later with Jock, it did not seem so easy. ‘It’s not a thing one can ask every girl to do,’ he said, ‘whichever way you put it. If you say it is merely a legal form it is rather insulting, and if you suggest going the whole hog it’s rather fresh — suddenly, I mean, if you’ve never paid any particular attention to her before and don’t propose to carry on with it afterwards . . . Of course there’s always old Sybil.’
Old Sybil — that ominous figure in The Waste Land. The book is still just rolling along, but much of the comedy will be absent from what remains. Which brings me to a fascinating tidbit about the novel. Waugh’s first ending takes off as Tony leave England to pursue a hidden country in Brazil, and one could feel the book is almost split in halves that don’t quite balance. I found it fascinating, particularly given the inspiration for the title. This ending was actually written first as a short story called “The Man Who Loved Dickens.” Yes — it takes place in Brazil. Waugh said that he wanted to write the story that preceded “The Man Who Loved Dickens”; hence, A Handful of Dust in its original form.
However, also included in my version, and I hope in most versions, is the alternate ending the American press demanded to give the book more balance. The ending is much shorter, very different, and much more conventional than the original. That it is shorter, different, and conventional is not to suggest it isn’t satisfying. I’m sure there are many who prefer it to the original. I’m not sure where I stand in preference, but I’m glad to have them both. Both endings were for me fantastic expansions on the first part of the novel. One is long and exotic and counterbalanced against the first half of the book; the other is short and bitter tasting, but in a satisfying way.
Here, because I couldn’t find any other place to put it in my review, but because I really just love the dialogue, is another bit of the comedy. It also showcases a bit of Hemingway’s influence on Waugh’s style of dialogue, though thankfully Waugh didn’t give up his British humor.
‘But all the same, making every allowance for your feelings, I do think that you are behaving rather vindictively in the matter.’
‘I’m doing exactly what Brenda wanted.’
‘My dear fellow, she doesn’t know what she wants. I saw this chap Beaver yesterday. I didn’t like him at all. Do you?’
‘I hardly know him.’
‘Well, I can assure you I didn’t like him. Now you’re just throwing Brenda into his arms. That’s what it amounts to, as I see it, and I call it vindictive. Of course at the moment Brenda’s got the idea that she’s in love with him. But it won’t last. It couldn’t with a chap like Beaver. She’ll want to come back in a year, just you see. Allan says the same.’
‘I’ve told Allan. I don’t want her back.’
‘Well, that’s vindictive.’
‘No, I just couldn’t feel the same about her again.’
‘Well, why feel the same? One has to change as one gets older. Why, ten years ago I couldn’t be interested in anything later than the Sumerian age and I assure you that now I find even the Christian era full of significance.’
I only recently read Brideshead Revisited, my first encounter with Evelyn Waugh’s work. That book displayed an impressive amount of range. While it was focused on the upper upper English class, there were many aspects to the novel - youth, war, sexuality, marriage, religion, alcoholism – that all flowed naturally from one narrative. Despite that range, however, I was not expecting what I found in The Loved One (1948). Not only does the setting shift from upper-class Britain to a sort of no class America/Hollywood setting, but the tone is completely different. This cover, which I thought was just some cover designer’s abstract interpretation but which is actually quite literal, should give some clue:
To get right to it, this is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, and one of the best. (I’ve said such things a lot this year. I can only thank fellow bloggers and commenters who give me good suggestions constantly.) From the first page I was drawn into Waugh’s darkly humorous prose and subject matter. There we meet Dennis Barlow and his uncle Sir Francis Hinsley, two Englishmen who have resorted to live in Southern California, “the counterparts of numberless fellow countrymen exiled in the barbarous regions of the world.” Hinsley works in the movie industry where he has recently run into some trouble with one of his stars:
‘He had most of her nose cut off and sent her to Mexico for six weeks to learn Flamenco singing. Then he handed her over to me. I named her. I made her an anti-fascist refugee. I said she hated men because of her treatment by Franco’s Moors. that was a new angle then. It caught on. And she was really quite good in her way, you know – with a truly horrifying natural scowl. Her legs were never photogenique but we kept her in long skirts and used an understudy for the lower half in scenes of violence. I was proud of her and she was good for another ten years’ work at least.
‘And now there’s been a change of policy at the top. We are only making healthy films this year to please the League of Decency. So poor Jaunita has to start at the beginning again as an Irish colleen. They’ve bleached her hair and dyed it vermilion. I told them colleens were dark but the technicolor men insisted. She’s working ten hours a day learning the brogue and to make it harder for the poor girl they’ve pulled all her teeth out. She never had to smile before and her own set was good enough for a snarl. Now she’ll have to laugh roguishly all the same. That means dentures.’
Though Waugh presents his characters as people who take their ridiculous jobs seriously, we know that Waugh’s portrayal of this society is dead serious – and dead on. Just like this actress is used and abused to create a new entity from the surface out, much in this novel deals with the veneers people place over themselves. These veneers ultimately serve to destroy them. Neither Dennis nor Hinsley are doing particularly well in America. They don’t like the culture; indeed, Barlow in particular is very cynical about America (“A man could leave such a girl in a delicatessen shop in New York, fly three thousand miles and find her again he cigar stall at San Francisco, just as he would find his favourite comic strip in the local paper; and she would croon the same words to him in moments of endearment and express the same views and preferences in moments of social discourse.”).
Still, though they pretend they are outside of the society, they cannot rise above it. Barlow, a failed poet, now works at The Happier Hunting Ground, a pet mortuary and one of my favorite literary creations (or is it for real?):
‘Our Grade A service includes several unique features. At the moment of committal, a white dove, symbolizing the deceased’s soul, is liberated over the crematorium.’
‘Yes,’ said Mr Heinkel, ‘I reckon Mrs Heinkel would appreciate the dove.’
‘And every anniversary a card of remembrance is mailed without further charge. It reads: Your little Arthur is thinking of you in heaven today and wagging his tail.’
‘That’s a very beautiful thought, Mr Barlow.’
I can’t resist including a bit more of Waugh’s hilarious prose about the pet mortuary:
Not all his customers were as open-handed and tractable as the Heinkels. Some bogged at a ten-dollar burial, others had their pets embalmed and then went East and forgot them; one, after filling half the ice-box for over a week with a dead she-bear, changed her mind and called in the taxidermist. These were the dark days, to be set against the ritualistic, almost orgiastic cremation of a non-sectarian chimpanzee and the burial of a canary over whose tiny grave a squad of Marine buglers had sounded Taps.
It isn’t long before Hinsley loses his job and commits suicide. Barlow finds him hanging in the apartment and must now go about arranging for his funeral. This takes him to the Happier Hunting Ground’s aspiration: Whispering Pines. Here The Dreamer has founded a virtual fairytale necropolis. It is to here that the elite of Californian society bring their Loved Ones for a final ceremony and for a final resting place. The workers roam around reverently preparing Loved Ones for – well . . . for a show. One gets the feeling that Whispering Pines is the equivalent of a quickly raised gated community. Everything has the look of something else that’s really nice: “Then there is Lovers’ Nest, zoned about a very, very beautiful marble replica of Rodin’s famous statue, the Kiss.” And here is one of my favorites in a sort of Poet’s Corner based on Yeats’s “Lake Isle of Innisfree”: “[N]ine rows of hapricots (which by a system of judicious transplantation were kept in perpetual scarlet flower)”; “He looked into the hives and saw in the depths of each a tiny red eye which told that the sound-apparatus was working in good order”; “Peace came dropping rather more quickly.”
While preparing for Hinsley’s finale, Barlow meets Aimée Thanatogenos, a new but rising cosmetologist. Proud of her work, Aimée attempts to show Barlow the importance of what Whispering Pines is, though she admits it’s frustrating to have art that decomposes so quickly. An interest, nevertheless, sparks between the two. To complicate matters, Mr. Joyboy, the head cosmetologist – indeed a god among the workers of Whispering Pines – is pining for Aimée too:
‘But Mr Joyboy, you’ve given him the Radiant Childhood Smile.’
‘Yes, don’t you like it?’
‘Oh, I like it, of course, but his Waiting One did not ask for it.’
‘Miss Thanatogenos, for you the Loved Ones just naturally smile.’
‘Oh, Mr Joyboy.’
‘It’s true, Miss Thanatogenos. It seems I am just powerless to prevent it. When I am working for you there’s something inside me says “He’s on his way to Miss Thanatogenos” and my fingers just seem to take control. Haven’ you noticed it?’
Aimée confounds herself trying to choose between the cynical, ungodly Barlow, though attracted to him, and the godly, artistic Mr. Joyboy. Whose Loved One will she become?
As I hope you can see, this novel entertained me to no end. I still get excited reading these pulled quotes (by the way, sorry for the large amount of quotes in this review; there were many many more I wanted to include, so don’t worry that I’ve pulled all the best ones). The humor, however, is not the only thing this novel has going for it. This novel, which takes apart a society based on veneer and superfluity, itself has a serious and genuinely tragic narrative underneath its humorour cover. It’s subtitle is “An Anglo-American Tragedy,” and while that is a satirical title, it is also quite literal. Underneath it all, the novel deals with exactly what these people can’t: loneliness, cynicism, aura, and death. And Waugh’s prose isn’t entirely sardonic:
There was silence still. Dennis had made an impression far beyond his expectation.
‘Here you are,’ he said at length, stopping at Aimée’s apartment house. This was not the moment he realized for soft advances. ‘Jump out.’
Aimée said nothing and for a moment did not move. Then in a whisper she said: ‘You could release me.’
‘Ah, but I won’t.’
‘Not when you know I’ve quite forgotten you?’
‘But you haven’t.’
‘Yes. When I turn away I can’t even remember what you look like. When you are not there I don’t think of you at all.’
My reading Brideshead Revisited (1945) was not inspired by any viewing of the 2008 film adaptation. Let’s just make that clear. And now that I’ve read the book and watched the trailer to the 2008 film adaptation, I’m certain I’ll never watch it. It looks atrocious and like the makers took some characters and made their own story about them. I’m really not a fan of most film adaptations (there are, of course, many exceptions), especially these days when producers and directors seem to be grasping at – here it is again – a beautiful, showy style rather than a nice meeting of form and substance. I bought this book because I liked the cover. I read it in preparation for a nice long viewing (11 hours) of the apparently superb ITV adaption of 1981 - I have it already, so it’s just a matter of finding that time.
At the beginning of the book, Charles Ryder is a disillusioned, apathetic soldier in World War II. I was quickly drawn into the story and into the writing during at this very early point in the novel. Waugh’s writing, I found, was superb – complex without being burdensome, beautiful without being pretentious. And I could just imagine Jeremy Irons reading this sentence:
Here my last love died. There was nothing remarkable in the manner of its death. One day, not long beofre this last day in camp, as I lay awake before reveille, in the Nissen hut, gazing into the complete blackness, amid the deep breathing and muttering of the four other occupants, turning over in my mind what I had to do that day – had I put in the names of two corporals for the weapon-training course? Should I again have the largest number of men overstaying their leave in the batch due back that day? Could I trust Hooper to take the candidates class out map-reading? - as I lay in that dark hour, I was aghast to realize that something within me, long sickening, had quietly died, and felt as a husband might feel, who, in the fourth year of his marriage, suddenly knew that he had no longer any desire, tenderness, or esteem, for a once-beloved wife; no pleasure in her company, no wish to please, no curiosity about anything she might ever do or say or think; no hope of setting things right, no self-reproach for the disaster.
The company of soldiers Captain Ryder is traveling with ends up at Brideshead, a place, we are to find out, where Ryder’s conflicted and complex past most played out. At any rate, it represents a great deal, and Ryder lapses into the book-length reminiscence. Brideshead is divided into two books. The first one, for the most part, introduces Ryders complex and touching relationship with Sebastian Flyte, a fellow Oxford student. Sebastian is an incredibly wealthy young man who still carries around a teddy bear and adores his nanny. Ryder finds Sebastian and his lifestyle incredibly attractive, and like a lover he despairs when they are apart and finds himself jealous when Sebastian travels without inviting him to come along.
Waugh does a great job developing their relationship. Though I didn’t feel it was ambiguous, there are grounds to believe that their relationship was deeply platonic but not sexual. In not getting explicit, Waugh makes their relationship all the more realistic, somehow. By not going into detail, Ryder’s narration tells a lot about his relationship with Sebastian. To me it didn’t feel like Ryder’s restraint meant he was ashamed – he doesn’t hide the fact that he deeply loved Sebastian, and this love probably was sexual;
Now, that summer term with Sebastian, it seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never know, a happy childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts and liquers and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence.
Rather, his restraint seemed to suggest that he didn’t want to confine his love in language, that he doesn’t want to explain his love to others, that to do so would taint his love. The subtitle of the book is, after all, “The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder.”
This relationship, though seminal and perhaps the beating heart of the story, is not the whole story or even the focus. First, they begin to grow up. The langourness of youth passes on, and the novelty and freshness wears off. Through the years, Sebastian drifts away. His religion and his family create such a conflict within him that alcohol and prodigality seem to be the only real escape.
The book moves into a discussion on religion, particularly Catholicism, which Ryder thinks has Sebastian and his family stifled. Lady Marchmain, Sebastian’s mother, is deeply religious.
Religion predominated in the house; not only in its practices – the daily mass and rosary, morning and evening in the chapel – but in all its intercourse. “We must make a Catholic of Charles,” Lady Marchmain said, and we had many little talks together during my visits when she delicately steered the subject into a holy quarter.
As the story progresses, it becomes clear that Ryder’s main antogonist is Catholicism. We get a sense that though Sebastian has the pretense of being irreligious, he believes enough of what he’s been taught to be stifled with guilt. That is the case with the whole family. And the last half of the book develops Ryder’s relationships with those other members, particularly Sebastian’s sister Julia.
One thing that really strengthens this book, besides the subtle writing, is Waugh’s ability to draw and maintain strong motifs: painting and building being one of my favorites. Ryder is an architectural painter, but Waugh manages to use this to achieve a great effect when he pronounces some of the book’s largest themes and conclusions.
Now, for me, it’s on to the 1981 adaptation. And here’s one observation after watching the first hour and a half, which comprises of the first 100 pages of this 350-page book. How did they turn the last 250 pages into ten hours of film? I’m anxious to find out!
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