A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh

This is another book I picked up in the free book exchange bin at the coffee house near the church. Lucky me. I’ve never read any Evelyn Waugh. I know Brideshead Revisted from the 1981 television series, though I saw it several years after it came out. And I vaguely remember seeing the 1965 movie, The Loved One, based on Waugh’s 1948 novel. This novel is Waugh’s fourth, originally published in 1934.

The novel begins in a light-hearted mode. The first character introduced is John Beaver, a nothing of a young man who lives with his mother. Mrs. Beaver has a business doing interior design. John sits by the phone hoping to be invited to dinner parties, which he often is, not because he’s popular, but because he’s always reliable when a single man is required to fill out a party.

John has managed to get a half-hearted invitation to the country home of Tony and Brenda Fast called Hetton Abbey. During the weekend Tony mostly disappears. Brenda entertains John and though she finds him pathetic takes pride in her skill of being hostess. Tony and Brenda’s have an eight-year old son, John Andrew who is learning to ride. Hetton Place is described as an old house, inherited from Tony’s father, and redone in the 1860s. There aren’t enough bathrooms, and renovations must be postponed until the death taxes are paid off.

At this point, I wondered what this book was about. The focus shifted rather quickly from John Beaver to Tony and Brenda. There’s some humorous description of life at Hetton Abbey. Tony and Brenda are on a funny diet of alternating starch and protein. John Andrew learns some adult language from the stableman, Ben, who is teaching him to ride. Tony goes to church where the vicar recycles sermons that he originally wrote years ago when he was stationed in India, leaving in all the references to the tropical weather and being far from home. Clearly Waugh is being funny at the expense of the upper class.

Then it gets a little more complicated. John Beaver goes home after his weekend and Brenda goes into town to visit her sister, Marjorie. Benda is invited to a party and she asks John Beaver to take her. It ends up becoming a date, Brenda pays for dinner, and they start a romance. Brenda decides to take a flat in town, which Mrs. Beaver renovates for her. She takes up a class in Economics obviously as a cover for spending time in town with John Beaver and neglecting Tony and her son out at Hetton.

That’s chapter two. Chapter three finds Tony having drinks with his friend Jock Grant-Menzies at their club in London. Tony has come up to town to surprise Brenda, but she’s been out. There follows a long and comic scene of Tony and Jock getting increasingly drunk, regularly calling Brenda at flat and threatening to go over to see her, which she discourages. They leave the club and go to a dance hall called the Old Hundredth where they are companioned by a couple of working girls named Milly and Babs. They annoy Benda all night with drunken phone calls. After the night is over Brenda uses the incident to her advantage making Tony feel guilty and hinting he’s got a drinking problem.

Meanwhile, her affair with John Beaver has become common knowledge. Her friends are uncritical, amused actually. Brenda attempts to set Tony up with a girl of his own so he won’t be bored all alone. She arranges it so another girl in the building where she has her flat goes down to Hetton Abbey for a visit while Brenda is “delayed” in London. Tony is uninterested by John Andrew is smitten with the girl. Later Jock also comes down to Hetton Abbey accompanied by a woman he’s romancing named, Mrs. Rattery, an aviatrix who flies in. This bit reminded me of George Bernard Shaw’s Misalliance, which Jim and I recently saw at A Noise Within.

The week is an exciting one for John Andrew because there’s going to be a hunt in the village and John Andrew is going to be allowed to take his horse up to watch as far as the first covert. John is left in charge of Ben, the stableman. But the hunt go off in another direction and John Andrew is able to see very little so he begs to go further. But Jock, heeding Tony’s instructions insists Ben take the boy back home, which he does. John complains, “But there mayn’t be another day. The world may come to an end. Please, Ben. Please, Mr. Menzies” (p. 125).

On page 126 (I read a hardback edition reissued in 2012), just short of the midway point of the novel there’s this line: “Then this happened…” and suddenly the lightly comic story takes a turn. John Andrew riding back home is killed by a horse, startled by a motorbus, who knocks John to the ground and then kicks him. The aftermath is quiet, and grave. Tony is told quickly. Jock is dispatched to go up to town and tell Brenda while Mrs. Rattery stays behind to keep Tony company. The death of a child, even a fictional one, is shocking and sad, and the tenor of the novel to this point gives no indication it’s coming. I’m glad I didn’t know (sorry for the spoiler). I went to bed at that point and wondered all next day what would happen next until I could pick the book up again. It’s been quite awhile since I’ve been so intrigued by a story.

But what happens next is even stranger. I imagined that Brenda would feel remorse and guilt for her affair and the death would cause her to reconcile, or at least to attempt to reconcile to Tony. Instead, when Jock gets a hold of her and tells her the news, Brenda, who had been worrying about John Beaver all day traveling to France thinks at first it’s her lover, not her son, who has died. When Jock corrects her she stammers, “John… John Andrew… I… Oh thank God…” (p. 143). It’s the coldest possible reaction. After the funeral, Brenda sends a letter to Tony saying she’s in love with John Beaver and asking for a divorce.

Chapter four follows the divorce proceedings. This was novel to me. Divorce at that time in England requires cause. “It was thought convenient that Brenda should appear as the plaintiff” (p. 156) meaning that Tony would have to pretend to commit adultery so Brenda would have grounds to sue. Apparently it’s a common enough situation that Tony’s lawyers help him out. Tony finds a willing girl, Milly who he met earlier at the Old Hundredth. They make arrangements to spend a weekend together at the shore in clear sight of a couple of private detectives hired for the purpose. But the friendly arrangement goes wrong. Brenda demands more money than they had initially agreed, so much that Tony would not be able to keep Hetton, which he loves. So Tony decides to back out of the whole deal. To clear his head and get away from everyone he knows he decides to sail to the Caribbean and see how he and Brenda feel when he comes back in six months or so.

Chapter five is the trip. Instead of a pleasure trip, Tony meets a man at one of his clubs, Dr. Messinger planning an expedition in British Guiana to a lost city, and Tony rather quickly, and foolishly, decides to sign on. Blame his mental state post son’s death and wife’s betrayal. The novel takes another strange twist and now leaves all of English society behind and becomes an adventure story. The voyage over is fine. Tony is unaffected by seasickness. He flirts with a nice girl. The expedition, though, is a disaster. dr. Messinger is rather a fool. They take a boat up the river. The native guides will only take them so far and abandon Tony and Dr. Messinger. They go on alone, searching for the next tribe. But Tony comes down with a fever and the situation grows desperate. Eventually Dr. Messinger leaves Tony, delirious, hoping to find the tribe on his own and bring back help but he is swept over a waterfall and killed. Meanwhile there are some occasional small scenes back in London where John Beaver and Brenda’s affair is falling apart as John realizes that Brenda is unlikely to get any money after the divorce.

The final two chapters are short. Tony appears in the next chapter, the sixth, stumbling into a small encampment inhabited by a man named Mr. Todd. The tone of the novel changes again now from adventure to horror. Mr. Todd is friendly. He nurses Tony back to health with local remedies. He speaks English but can’t read, but owns a collection of the complete works of Dickens and loves to be read to. Tony obliges. But when Tony begins to be anxious to have the natives build him a canoe and find his way out of the jungle and back to London, it becomes clear that Mr. Todd has no intention of letting Tony leave. Tony attempts an escape but is easily thwarted. He’s doomed.

The final chapter is a few pages of postscript. Back in England, Tony has been declared dead. Hetton Abbey has been settled on Tony’s younger brother and his family. Brenda has married Jock.

The novel is sometimes named as one of the best English language novels of the twentieth century. It is good. I’m glad I read it. It’s also one of the strangest novels I’ve read. From comic satire, very light and inconsequential, we move through the death of a young boy, and then a South American jungle adventure that ends with horror. The novel begins with John Beaver and his mother, but shifts away from them to Brenda’s affair, and then shifts again to focus on Tony. I wondered early on what the novel was about, and then whenever it seemed to become clear the novel shifted and it became about something else.

Much of the writing is dialogue, done very well, which moves the story along very quickly. It’s witty. I was reminded of Nabokov in the early chapters when it’s satirizing the quirky details of a certain class of English club and country life. John Beaver is supposed to be dull. He’s mother is comic. Brenda becomes highly unlikable the more we know about her. I felt sorry for Tony. He doesn’t deserve his fate.

Apparently the ending is based on a short story that Waugh had published earlier called, “The Man Who Liked Dickens”. The rest of the novel, too, both the South American adventure and the break up of the marriage are fictionalized from Waugh’s own life. Waugh had married a woman in 1928, also named Evelyn (their friends called them He-Evelyn and She-Evelyn) but the marriage went bad nearly immediately as she began an affair. Waugh then fell in love with another girl but was unable to consummate the affair due to his Catholic faith which forbid divorce. Waugh was able eventually to have the marriage annulled and did re-marry, though to yet another woman. During the emotional turmoil of the marriage break-up and the love affair, he had a South American adventure of his own, including meeting a strange man in the jungle named Mr. Christie who became the basis for the short story.

Because the short story had already been published when the novel came out, Waugh used an alternate ending for the original English edition that has Tony return from South America. He meets Brenda, who has not married Jock, and of course they still have Hetton Abbey. The seem to reconcile and Brenda agrees to give up the flat in town, but Tony deceives her, keeping the flat, implying that he intends to use it for his own affairs. it still bites, but not as badly as endlessly reading Dickens in the Amazon.