Evelyn Waugh's view of England in A Handful of Dust
By juxtaposing the pastoral words of Hetton and
later the Brazilian jungle against the counterfeit world of London, Evelyn
Waugh exposes the degenerating values and encroaching corruption of
contemporary English society. A failing
marriage and collapsing Gothic home become symbols of a value system threated
with extinction by a mechanical, dehumanized society in A Handful of Dust (1934).
Waugh’s tragic story is secondary to the way in which is is presented
and farce, fantasy and caricature are the means of exposing the follies, evils
and instabilities of human nature to present the author’s ideas about the
condition of England.
Evelyn Waugh treats his characters less as
individuals than as symbols of societal forces.
Tony Last, like his house, represents values that are both impractical
and outdated. Hetton is the symbol of
all that modern life lacks and is a source of ‘constant delight and exultation’
([p.15] for Tony, who is rooted in the idealized world of childhood and the
past and displays no curiosity or desire to grow and change. He continues to sleep in his childhood
bedroom where he had been put ‘so he would be in calling distance from his
parents, inseparable in Guinevere; for until late in his life, he was subject
to nightmare’ [p.15]. As well as
suggesting his immaturity, this observation also reveals a fundamental fear of
the reality of things. It also
anticipates the nightmare ending of the novel.
Unlike his parents, Tony and his wife keep separate
bedrooms, with Brenda sleeping in a room named after an unfaithful woman and in
which she had ‘insisted on a modern bed’ [p.16], which implies a modern
attitude and anticipates what is, in Waugh’s eyes, her typically modern sexual
infidelity. Brenda devises strange diets
to alleviate the boredom of mealtimes at Hetton, and soon confesses to Beaver
than she detests the house.
To Tony, this pastoral idyll stands for the
important values of life: order, stability, decency and continuity with the
past. Such values have no meaning for
Brenda, as becomes clear when she embarks on an affair with Beaver without
thought or care. Brenda is misplaced in
the simple, old-fashioned world of Hetton, whose way of life and values she
betrays in her role as a modern Guinevere.
She clearly belongs to the antithetical world of Beaver and his
opportunistic mother, among the savage and morally blank society of
London. The collapse of Tony and
Brenda’s marriage merely provides the framework for Waugh’s satiric vision of
the degenerating condition of England – the victory of modern barbarism over
humanism and the civilized values of the past.
Waugh takes the title for his novel from T. S.
Eliot’s harrowing poem The Waste Land,
and he portrays a similarly bleak view of modern society with its spiritual or
moral barrenness. Cynicism, ennui and
dullness are seen by Waugh as the corrosive forces of society, and the first
summation of Brenda provided by Mrs Beaver includes the prediction that, after
five or six years of marriage ‘it was time she began to be bored’ [p.9]. Brenda’s choice of a man about whom she
harbours no romantic illusions for her adventure, and her extreme, if casual,
cruelty to Tony, is testimony to her lack of taste, principles and
feelings. London society is similarly
devoid of values as attitudes towards Brenda’s affair reveal. In that Waste Land, nothing is sacred, least
of all the institution of marriage, so that no one feels any sympathy for the
humiliated husband who is typically the only person in ignorance of the affair,
and dismissively referred to as ‘the old boy’ by all Brenda’s friends.
Brenda’s affair is not merely condoned, but warmly
welcomed as ‘filling a want long felt’ and offering ‘vicarious pleasure’ [p.57]
to the bored masses. Appropriate to his
name, Tony Last, despite his obvious weaknesses and illusions, manifests the
last traces of human decency in this corrupt and savage world.
A frequent device employed by Waugh is to trace the
decline of noble country houses to show how traditional values are being
destroyed and replaced by the savage mechanism of modern society. Tony Last’s house, at one time an abbey and later
‘one of the most notable houses of the country’ [p.14], was torn down by Tony’s
Victorian ancestors and rebuilt in sham Gothic style. For its present owner, it possesses enormous
sentimental value and still manages to preserve a certain quaint
character. It may stand as a monument to
Victorian bad taste, but this is mild in comparison to the atrocious taste of
Brenda and Mrs Beaver, at whose hands it suffers the indignity of an assault
with chromium plating and sheepskin.
At the end of the novel, the house suffers ultimate
defeat by being turned into a farm for the breeding of the savage and voracious
silver-fox. Houses, therefore, cannot be
impervious to the onslaught of barbarism and even begin to share the qualities
of the attacker. Mrs Beaver’s
utilitarian conversions with their ‘transatlantic refinements’ [p.42] are
devoid of sentimental value, but not quite of character, as suggested by
Brenda’s description of her London flat, with its raw smells, odd noises,
hostile plumbing that causes the hot tap to gush air and the cold to
perpetually drip brown water, and unyielding cupboards and curtains. Indeed, the London flat possesses all the
hostile and savage qualities that Waugh attributes to modern society, whose
arch-representative is Mrs Beaver.
If Tony Last has remained rooted in the habits of
the past, so too have religious values and practices. Comedy and satire are cleverly combined by
Waugh in the absurd sermons which the Reverend Tendril habitually delivers to
his uncomplaining congregation. ‘The
simple, mildly ceremonious order’ [p.30] of Tony’s Sunday morning ritual
provides an important sense of continuity with the past and affords him great pleasure
as he dons his customary dark suit and stiff collar to sit in his
great-grandfather’s pitch-pine pew in the village church, and enjoy, in common
with the rest of the congregation, the vicars hopelessly inappropriate sermons.
Composed years earlier for an entirely different set
of circumstances and people, these sermons lack an particular reference to the
lives of anyone present, but the vicar has never considered it necessary to
adapt or update his homilies and nor is there a single dissentient voice among
the present flock. Religious practice is
therefore reduced to a comfortable habit, a mildly entertaining ritual that is
devoid of any real significance, except to the satirist. The benighted vicar’s traditional Christmas
message therefore becomes pregnant with symbolic truths, rendered all the more
comic by being mechanical in delivery and completely unconsciously apposite:
‘How
difficult it is for us,’ he began, blandly surveying his congregation, who
coughed into their mufflers and chafed their chilblains under there woollen
gloves, ‘to realise that this is indeed Christmas. Instead of the glowing log fire and windows
tight shuttered against the drifting snow, we have only the harsh glare of an
alien sun; instead of the happy circle of loved faces, of home and family, we
have the uncomprehending stare of the subjugated, though no doubt grateful
heathen. Instead of the placid ox and
ass of Bethlehem,’ said the vicar, slightly losing the thread of his comparisons,
‘we have for companions the ravening tiger and the exotic camel, the furtive
jackal and the ponderous elephant…’ [p.60].
Waugh has allowed the Reverend Tendril to
inadvertently summarise the condition of England, as he intends it to be
viewed. Tony Last is, indeed, isolated
and blind in his jungle of illusions, surrounded by heathen predators in human
form, who are all motivated by avarice.
Mrs Beaver is the ‘ravening tiger’, Jenny Abdul Akbar the ‘exotic
camel’, and John Beaver the ‘furtive jackal’, and against such predators, the
naïve Tony must be as defenceless as he ultimately becomes in the real jungle
of Brazil.
In this Godless world, Waugh posits no solutions but
merely catalogues instances of man’s inhumanity. The march of ‘progress’ is inexorable and
viciously destructive, so Tony Last’s simple humanism and faith in traditional
values must be systematically annihilated.
With John Andrew’s untimely death, the last fragile link between Tony
and Brenda has been irreversibly severed.
Without this tragedy, the marriage might have limped on because of
Tony’s naïve illusions about perpetuating the line through primogeniture, and
Brenda’s deceptive role as fond mother, superficially keeping up
appearances. Brenda’s selfish
priorities, however, are almost unspeakably evident in her reaction to the news
of her son’s death.
The character of Brenda has become so thoroughly
assimilated with the perversion of values associated with contemporary society
as to render it hollow and meaningless.
Because of his ‘habit of loving and trusting Brenda’ [p.129], and his
belief in outdated conventions, tony is prepared to suffer the indignity of a
farcical, compromising weekend in Brighton with a prostitute and her dreadful
child to provide Brenda with the grounds for her petition for divorce. As Tony’s lawyer gloomily informs him:
‘divorce is a serious matter’ [p.137] – the trouble is that no one realizes
this nowadays, because marriage, like religion, has lost its integral value and
become a meaningless, and therefore disposable convention. The ensuing divorce proceedings and Brenda’s
avaricious demands, which meet with the approbation of her family and friends,
verify this.
In the jungle, to which Tony is conducted by Dr
Messinger – a modern-day Hermes – the distinction between nightmare and reality
is blurred. Nature itself is viciously
parasitical and the inhabitants are ignorant, greedy and superstitious, thus
disproving the pastoral concept of primitive societies being uncorrupt. Waugh’s brilliant device of juxtaposing
scenes in Brazil with similar scenes in London lays naked his central message:
that civilization is merely a façade to conceal the ugly and savage nature of
modern society. London is nothing more
than a treacherous, inhuman jungle in which the more barbaric one is, the better
the chance of survival. In the
penultimate chapter, with its ironic, Proustian title, the two worlds are
combined. The aptly-named Mr Todd is a
cunning lunatic playing the simultaneous role of civilized host and despotic
jailer. Even in the heart of the
Brazilian jungle, there is no escape from the rottenness inherent in human
nature.
Evelyn Waugh filters his presentation of the wider
society through the microscope of domestic life, seeing the family as a
microcosm of society and the disintegration of the family unit as
representative of the condition of society as a whole. His message is that through self-serving
individualism, societal values have been perverted. Modern man, in succumbing to the selfish
demands of his ego, puts the good of society in second place and this manifests
in widespread disharmony and discontent.
Waugh takes this premise to its extreme consequences in order to
validate his projection of the jaundiced condition of England, which he sees as
the inevitable result of such corruption of values.
(Page numbers cited relate to the Penguin Edition of A Handful of Dust)
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