As predicted, I stalled along the long open road of Henry Adams’s History of the US, but, as reading in bed is still my Ambien, I was lucky to stumble again upon the novels of Evelyn Waugh. The one everyone knows is Brideshead Revisited, which was made into a movie as well as a lauded miniseries starring Jeremy Irons. Maybe these are great, I don’t know: Waugh, however, wrote at least a half dozen novels that are way better than Brideshead. The “half dozen” I have in mind are his first two, Decline and Fall (1928) and Vile Bodies (1930), which were followed in 1932 by his best book, A Handful of Dust, and then, years later, by the long Sword of Honor trilogy, wherein Waugh’s World War II experience is turned to fiction in which one can luxuriate for months of bedtimes. There are many others–he was prolific–but I’d say these six are his “indispensable works.”
For most of his adult life Waugh was a right-wing Catholic who would have thought the demise of the Latin Mass a sign of Western Civ’s collapse–and therefore somewhat of a strange bedfellow for me. I can’t now remember whether I knew this about him when I first laughed aloud in bed while reading Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies. Doesn’t matter. He was a gifted humorist and satirist. Imagine if Hemingway’s attitude toward his rootless hedonists had been one of urbane disdain. Waugh performs from on high the labor of a vivisectionist. If someone were to complain that the books are cartoons, my recourse would be to confess that I guess I love cartoons. Then, fresh off a honeymoon delayed by a lack of funds, Waugh’s wife leaves him for another man, he takes Catholicism as his new bride, and the comic elements of the first two novels, though still present, serve a deeper purpose in A Handful of Dust.
The novel divides nicely into two parts. The first is set in London and Hetton, a fictional town about a half-day’s train ride away. Tony Last lives at Hetton with his wife and young son. His wife, Lady Brenda, starts spending a lot of time in London, and eventually takes a flat there because, she explains, she’s signed up for an extension course in economics. Personal development, and all that. Actually, of course, she’s having an affair with a fellow, John Beaver, who’s sufficiently ridiculous to have fit right into Vile Bodies. The scenes of Beaver prosecuting his feckless routines, which include spending a fair amount of time sponging drinks at his men’s club, are continuous with the two earlier novels. He’s thirtyish and still dependent upon his mother, who is also a piece of work–she’s the one who rents the flat to Brenda. Comedy arises from the reader’s suspicion, and then knowledge, of Brenda’s infidelity long before Tony suspects a thing. He never really suspects a thing. Their son dies in an accident at Hetton while Brenda is pursuing her pleasures in London. Tony stays behind to make arrangements while a friend travels to London to tell Brenda and bring her back to Hetton. With great skill, Waugh manages to describe a kind of suspended time in which Tony, devastated by loss, is watching a clock and calculating when Brenda will get the news. If he’d been worldly enough to know what she’s been up to, he might have hoped that they’d be brought back together by their common pain, but the boy’s death removes her last connection to her husband and she finally has to write him a note:
You must have realized for some time that things were going wrong.
I am in love with John Beaver and I want to have a divorce and marry him. If John Andrew had not died things might not have happened like this. I can’t tell. As it is, I simply can’t begin over again. Please do not mind too much. I suppose we shan’t be allowed to meet while the case is on but I hope afterwards we shall be great friends. Anyway I shall always look on you as one whatever you think of me.
Best love from
Brenda
“Please do not mind too much.” “I hope afterwards we shall be great friends.” One feels that in the characterization of the self-seeking, vacuous Brenda there are ten million daggers aimed at Waugh’s ex, and in that case, English literature benefited from his private troubles. The way in which the comedy settles into tragedy, but lives on enough to mix an element of the farcical into the woe, is something new in Waugh.
In the second half, Tony goes on a journey to South America. His old life, wife and son, is gone, and he needs, as is said, to “find himself.” (Waugh is contemptuous of all the peppy talk self-transcenders pep themselves up with.) This general situation always makes me think of the scene in Dances with Wolves where Kevin Costner says something along the lines of never really having known who he was until he came to live with the Indians, thereby inspiring the critic Pauline Kael to comment, “Dances with Wolves is a kid’s daydream of being an Indian. Costner has feathers in his hair and feathers in his head.” Waugh expands somewhat upon Kael’s acerbity. The wasteland of London’s “civilized” people is, in A Handful of Dust, implicitly contrasted to the uncivilized one in the Amazonian interior, where the locals, when Tony and his guide attempt to communicate with them, seem interested only in whether they have a good supply of cigarettes. “You have cigarettes?” Later, another faltering inquiry, and then, “You have cigarettes?” I said the contrast is “implicit” but this isn’t always true. Tony’s troubles in the jungle are sometimes interrupted by descriptions of what’s currently going on back in London. Early in the book, a man in Beaver’s men’s club, a Minister of Parliament, asks the bartender whether he knows anything about pigs:
“No, why?”
“Only that they keep writing to me about them from my constituency.”
A bit of chit chat that advances Waugh’s general theme of decadence and waste, since the MP, who evidently represents a rural district, is seeking information from a bartender at his men’s club about topics of vital interest to his constituents. Maybe he would want to study up a little himself, perhaps from a more reliable source, such as, say, a hog farmer in his district? But Waugh isn’t done with the matter. One of the “interruptions” to Tony’s Amazonian debacle goes like this:
Ten o’clock on the river Waurupang was question time at Westminster. For a long time now Jock had had a question which his constituents wanted him to ask. It came up that afternoon.
“I should like to ask the Minister of Agriculture whether in view of the dumping in this country of Japanese pork pies, the right honourable member is prepared to consider a modification of the eight and a half score basic pig from two and a half inches of thickness around the belly as originally specified, to two inches.”
Replying for the Minister, the under-secretary said: “The matter is receiving the closest attention. As the honourable member is no doubt aware the question of the importation of pork pies is a matter for the Board of Trade, not for the Board of Agriculture. With regard to the specifications of the basic pig, I must remind the honourable member that, as he is doubtless aware, the eight and a half score pig is modelled on the requirements of the bacon curers and has no direct relation to pig meat for sales in pies. That is being dealt with by a separate committee who have not yet made their report.”
“Would the honourable member consider an increase of the specified maximum of fatness on the shoulders?”
“I must have notice of that question.”
Jock left the House that afternoon with the comfortable feeling that he had at last done something tangible in the interests of his constituents.
Tony Last dies in South America, away from such scenes never returns from South America, where, near the novel’s conclusion, he’s subjected to absurdities that transcend question time at Westminster. The author’s newly minted Catholic faith is not overt in A Handful of Dust, but it isn’t hard to imagine that he might be the kind who’d seek solace in elaborate liturgies chanted in a dead language. He appears to have little hope for this world, or the people in it. There must be some relief, somewhere.
