Review: A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh

 A Handful of Dust

by

Evelyn Waugh

Published 1934

Classics Club Review #3/50

Me? Oh, I liked it.

I suppose I can manage a bit more than that! I really don't know what to say, though, except that if this book surprised me I wasn't surprised. This is Waugh.

At the risk of revealing just how late I am with my review (the answer is 'very'), this book took me three days, which is to its credit as it is quite certainly equal to my preceding spin read in terms of fullness and quality, and while The Portrait of a Lady is not without its pleasures, in terms of enjoyment this novel exceeds it. The adeptness with which Waugh writes captures conversation, personality, setting, and atmosphere so well it is a beauty to observe. It is also perfect for slipping from a fairly normal comedic tragedy to a completely insane comedic tragedy. And the characters are all so perfectly awful, each in their own way, except for the rather sad figure of Tony. That may sound a strange thing to like in a book, but for this book in particular it is quite good.

In keeping with the established Waughian paracosm (if I'm using that correctly) mention is made of Lady Metroland, which may tell you something - but believe me not all - of the circles this book moves in.

A Handful of Dust follows the dissolution of the marriage and lives of Tony and Brenda Last, following the introduction into their at first small world of John Beaver. Neglect, unhappiness, indulgent unhappiness, and unhappy indulgence are numbly rampant, especially in the more populated society into which Brenda enters to 'escape' from vapid Hetton. That sounds very simple, but that's not taking in how the story is told and what actually goes on. The nonchalant madness is not continuously on the scale of Decline and Fall, but boy does it get up there!

Besides satire, misery, and mayhem there is the remarkable beauty of Waugh's writing. This paragraph is short, but so evocative, and so pristinely worded, that one forgets for a moment what sort of a story one is in. 

    Outside, it was soft English weather; mist in the hollows and pale sunshine on the hills; the coverts had ceased dripping, for there were no leaves to hold the recent rain, but the undergrowth was wet, dark in the shadows, iridescent where the sun caught it; the lanes were soggy and there was water running in the ditches.

Chapter Two, "English Gothic"

There are moments of sudden, ordinary quiet within a person's life, far from the madding crowd as it were, which bring into one's soul something of their solace. One can be walking through a day and for no apparent reason suddenly remark the hitherto unnoticed calm surrounding one. Brenda always saw this calm and was bored by it; but I do not think she understood the beauty. Tony didn't understand it either, but he had some sense of it, at least a sense of place within it. While the beautiful countryside is not, as is proved by more than one event in the novel, always in union with safety, it does afford opportunity for contentment. Tony, in the beginning, is quite content, and Brenda somewhat so. But to be content is not enough for her, or for many others in the story; indeed, it is a question people argue over even now and has been so for quite some time: is contentment an acceptable form of happiness? C. S. Lewis somewhat addresses this in The Screwtape Letters and other works when he discusses love & marriage, and what it means to be 'in love' in the context of an entire life spent together. It is not giddy and dramatic as it would've been at the beginning of the love/relationship. Just so, everyday happiness is not ecstasy; it is contentment. But it is that drama, that constant thrill of (non-Lewis) joy which Brenda desires and seeks out. The book is, in one theme, a play of modern life, and a show of the modern take on what life should be.

Hetton provides room for contentment. It is a sort of blank sheet of paper, on which happiness or depression may be writ depending on the way in which it is approached. It is, up to a certain point in the novel, a place of silence - the sort of silence, almost, which Thomas Hood wrote of in his poem so conveniently titled "Silence". But London, in a dark sense, also finds its feature here; London, which was Brenda's refuge.

There is a silence where hath been no sound,

There is a silence where no sound may be,

In the cold grave - under the deep deep sea,

Or in wide desert where no life is found,

Which hath been mute, and must sleep profound;

No voice is hush'd - no life treads silently,

But clouds and cloudy shadows wander free.

That never spoke, over the idle ground:

But in the green ruins, in the desolate walls

Of antique places, where Man hath been,

Though the dun fox, or wild hyaena, calls,

And owls, that flit continually between,

Shriek to the echo, and the low winds moan, -

There the true Silence is, self-conscious and alone.

Of course, the title of the novel is from "The Waste Land" by T. S. Eliot, and the quote is handily included in the book:

. . . 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.

(Possibly coming some day if I ever read it: a  review of "The Waste Land", the which until said future possibilities have been realized when, as specified, I have read it, I reserve comment on.)

If you wish to know more about A Handful of Dust you ought to read it, which is probably the laziest thing ever said in a review, but for all that it still stands. A Handful of Dust is desolate, hilarious, and truly Waugh!

* * * * * *

The green line vampire bats are in love with John Beaver, for the time is different and there is no bathing.

(If you know, you know.)