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. I was pleased to find it. 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. 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 from Tony and Brenda Fast to their country home called Hetton Abbey. During the weekend, Tony mostly disappears. Brenda entertains John and though she admits she finds him pathetic, takes pride in her skill of being hostess. Tony and Brenda have an eight-year old son, John Andrew, who is being taught to ride by a stablehand named Ben. 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 salty language from the stableman, Ben. 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. Waugh’s light satire of the English upper class reminded me of P. G. Wodehouse.

Then it gets a little more complicated. John Beaver goes home after his weekend and Brenda goes into town to visit her sister, Marjorie. Brenda is invited to a party and she asks John Beaver to take her. The evening ends up becoming a date, Brenda pays for dinner, and they start a romance. Brenda decides to take a flat in town, a flat Mrs. Beaver renovates for her. She takes up a class in Economics clearly 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 all day. There follows a long and comic episode of Tony and Jock getting increasingly drunk, regularly calling Brenda at her 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 Brenda 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. By the lax moral standards of her friends, no one disapproves; they’re 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 but John Andrew, the eight year-old, 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 under the supervision of Ben, the stableman, to take his horse up to watch as far as the first covert. But the hunt goes off in another direction preventing John Andrew from seeing very much so he begs to go further. But Jock, heeding Tony’s instructions insists Ben take the boy back home. John Andrew whines, “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 comic story takes a turn. John Andrew riding back home is killed. An undisciplined horse, startled by a motorbus, 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 scene is told entirely without emotion, which keeps the tragedy fresh without becoming maudlin. The death of a child, even a fictional one, is shocking and sad, and the tenor of the novel up to this point gave no indication it was coming. I’m glad I didn’t know (sorry for the spoiler). I went to bed at that point wondering what would happen next. It’s been quite awhile since I’ve been so intrigued by a story.

But what happens next disappointed me and lowered my overall assessment of the book when I picked it up the next day. I imagined Brenda’s remorse, confession of her affair and an attempt to reconcile with Tony. I imagined the second half of the novel would have something profound to say about the serious consequences of the casual immorality of the first half. Instead, when Jock delivers the news, Brenda, who had been worrying about her lover John Beaver all day because he was away traveling to France thinks at first it’s he who has died, not her son. 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 asks for a divorce.

Chapter four follows the divorce proceedings. Divorce at that time in England required 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 arrange it. Tony finds a willing girl, Milly, who he met earlier at the Old Hundredth. They make plans to spend a weekend together at the shore in clear sight of a couple of private detectives hired for the purpose of gathering the needed evidence. So we’e back in the land of farce again. But the friendly separation agreement with Brenda goes wrong. She demands more money than they had initially agreed, so much that Tony would be unable to keep Hetton, which he loves. So Tony backs out of the 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 the pleasure trip he planned, Tony meets a man at one of his clubs, Dr. Messinger organizing an expedition to a lost city in British Guiana, and Tony rather quixotically, decides to sign on. Perhaps his son’s death and wife’s betrayal clouds his reason. The novel now leaves all of English society behind and becomes an adventure story. The voyage across the Atlantic is fine. Tony is unaffected by seasickness. He flirts with a nice girl. The expedition, though, is a disaster. Dr. Messinger is a fool and the trek is insufficiently planned. They take a boat up the river. The native guides will only take them so far. The Englishmen go on alone. But Tony comes down with a fever and the situation grows desperate. Eventually Dr. Messinger leaves Tony, delirious, hoping to bring back help but he is swept over a waterfall and killed, likely leaving Tony for dead. Meanwhile, the expedition narrative is occasionally interrupted by small scenes back in London where John Beaver and Brenda’s affair falls apart as John realizes that Brenda is unlikely to get any money after the divorce.

The final two chapters are short. Tony appears alive in the next chapter, the sixth, stumbling into a small encampment inhabited by a man named Mr. Todd. Mr. Todd is friendly. He nurses Tony back to health with local remedies. He can’t read, but he 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 to find his way out of the jungle and back to London, it becomes clear that Mr. Todd means to keep Tony permanently. The tone of the novel changes once more now from adventure to horror. 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. 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 the focus seemed to become clear the novel shifted and it became about something else.

An unusually large amount of the text is dialogue, done very well, which moves the story along very quickly. It’s witty. The satire of the quirky details of a certain class of English club and country life reminded of Nabokov. 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 for Tony in the jungle is based on a short story that Waugh had published earlier called, “The Man Who Liked Dickens” based on an idea he had when he had his own South American adventure. The break up of Tony and Brenda’s marriage is also 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. Eventually, Waugh had his marriage annulled and did re-marry, to a third woman. During the emotional turmoil of the marriage break-up and the love affair, he had his South American adventure.

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 and Brenda appear to reconcile and Brenda agrees to give up the flat in town, but Tony deceives her, keeping the flat for himself, implying that he intends to use it for affairs of his own.