A Handful of Dust by Auden - Essay Example

A Handful of Dust A Handful of Dust was written in the background of London of the 1930s, a decade that W.H. Auden called the “low, dishonest decade.” The story revolves round the marital betrayal of Tony Last by his wife Brenda Last. Against this backdrop Waugh satirizes the modern metropolitan culture where conversation takes place of telephones, where the people are gradually getting detached from physical connections with others and where mechanical improvisations have assumed a front seat in their lives. Waugh belonged to the upper middle class and later associated with the aristocracy and he was satirical of small service flats and Economics evening classes. The world that he portrayed in his novels was a world of chaos, a place where nobody accepted responsibility and nobody took the blame; a world beyond an individual’s comprehension or understanding. The novel was made into a film by Charles Turridge, featuring James Wilby as Tony Last and Kristin Scott Thomas as his adulterous wife Brenda Last. Opening with a bleak scene of a deserted camp somewhere in South America and a hallucinating hero, this film moves in a flashback style. In a satirical style, interspersed with elements of fun, Waugh takes us to a journey through the life of Tony Last and his horrible fate. Throughout the book Waugh is like a detached narrator. In the end where Tony is lost and delirious in a jungle in South America and then finds himself a captive in the hands of a certain Mr. Todd in a primitive village, we realize that the chaos in which he now finds himself is not much different from the chaos that existed in his former life. Introduction Early Life Hailed by many as one of the leading satiric novelists of his times, Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh, was born on 28th October, 1903, in the affluent suburb of Hampstead in London, to Arthur Waugh and Catherine (Raban) Waugh. They belonged to the upper middle class and was comfortably well off.1 Evelyn’s father, Arthur was the critic, editor and author of several books, and was a very influential person by virtue of his position as the chairman of Chapman and Hall, a publishing firm in London.2 Arthur had an elder brother named Alec. Though both his father as well as his brother had attended the prestigious Sherborne public school, Arthur was refused entry there since his brother Alec had been thrown out of the institution during his final year on allegations of homosexuality. Alec was quite adamant and even published a novel, The Loom of Youth, which alluded to the controversial topic of homosexuality among students. This was considered as detrimental to the reputation of Sherborne and the school consequently refused to grant admission to Arthur. Thus he was compelled to attend Lancing College in Sussex. This institution had a strong High Church Anglican leaning and ranked lower in social prestige than Sherborne. Its strong leanings towards the church could have contributed towards Evelyn’s abiding interest in religion. Evelyn’s years at Lancing were not particularly happy. He was very conscious of his status and the fact that he was forced to attend a school of lesser prestige was bad enough. The situation worsened further, when, to his disappointment he discovered that the behavior of even upper-class students who he expected to be sophisticated, was in fact unscrupulous and savage. He was often bullied by his classmates. Later, Evelyn would record these experiences that he had had at school in the novels that he would write. From Sherborne, Evelyn went to Hertford College in Oxford to study history. He concentrated more on writing and on artwork most of the time and consequently his studies were neglected. He gradually became more and more involved in an active social life with people like Brian Howard, David Talbot Rice and Harold Acton, and others from the upper strata of society. Though not exactly proven, it was claimed that he involved in some homosexual activities during his days in college. Evelyn’s negligence in studies earned him a third class degree and he was prohibited from occupying a residency in his college for the extra term that was required of him. Disgusted, he left Oxford in 1924 without bothering to take his degree. He then studied at Heatherley’s Art School in London and had a brief stint working as a schoolmaster at Arnold House in North Wales. Thereafter, he almost totally devoted himself to writing. Later Years Evelyn Waugh’s first book Rossetti appeared in 1928 and it clearly spoke of his vast admiration for the Pre-Raphaelites. That same year, Waugh wrote Decline and Fall which established his fame as a writer. Based loosely on his experiences as a teacher at Arnold House, his protagonist, Paul Pennyfeather is caught in the entangling web of London society life but in the end he manages to escape to a saner and stable life which is happier than the life he had hitherto known. With this book, he establishes his style, flippant and irreverent, in the tradition of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw.3 Next came Vile Bodies, published in 1930. Evelyn Waugh described this book as "a welter of sex and snobbery.” In this book he caricatured the world of the Bright Young People. Vile Bodies gained almost instant success. The year 1930 is significant because it was the year that Waugh converted to Catholicism. He remained a devout Catholic for the rest of his life. In 1932 he published Black Mischief. The coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie in Abyssinia was responsible for inspiring Waugh to write this book. Then came A Handful of Dust, which narrated an embittered story of adultery. Waugh himself regarded this book as a excellent piece of work. His own marriage with Evelyn Florence Margaret Winifred Gardner had fallen apart and Gardner’s own infidelity provided the background for Waugh’s book. Evelyn later married Laura Herbert and they enjoyed a stable and happy relationship. Waugh fathered seven children, one of who died in infancy. Scoop, published in 1937, was based in Ishmaeliah, a fictitious country in Africa. In this book, the author mocks foreign correspondents. Waugh traveled widely in Europe between 1928 and 1937. During the 1930s, he became a well known figure in the aristocratic and fashionable circles and he gathered his materials for his fiction from his friends, acquaintances and people he met there. It was also during this period that he formed and development a flamboyant vision of aristocracy. He joined a military mission to Yugoslavia in 1944 but was severely injured in a plane accident. Disenchanted with war he took leave, which was duly sanctioned, to write Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder. Though gaining instant and popular success, it was also criticised for glorifying the upper class. Most of his time after this was spent in Combe Florey in Somerset where he flaunted Edwardian suits. One of his major works is the trilogy, Sword of Honour. In 1947, Evelyn Waugh visited Hollywood as a guest of MGM to discuss the possibility of making a film version of Brideshead Revisited. Waughs health began to decline. His addiction to alcohol and sleeping potions, combined with smoking and a sedentary life, weakened his health. The productivity of this once prolific writer also declined. His addictions gave him frequent bouts of hallucinations and his detective novels The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold were based on these hallucinations. The biography of Ronald A. Knox was published in 1959. The first volume of his unfinished autobiography, A Little Learning, appeared in 1964. Evelyn Waugh died on 10th April, 1966, in Combe Florey. A Handful of Dust A Handful of Dust, published in 1934, is undoubtedly one of Evelyn’s best works and is listed in Time Magazines 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. It is also included in the Modern Library List of Best 20th-Century Novels. Originally titled A Handful of Ashes, the name was changed to A Handful of Dust following a dispute with his American publishers. The title has been taken from The Waste Land, a poem written by T.S. Eliot: 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. Considered by Waugh himself as an excellent piece of work, A Handful of Dust is a satire aimed towards the business and commercial class, the aristocracy and the institutions and establishments of the period including the Church itself. The story is set in the England of the 1930s, and focuses on the lives of Tony and Brenda Last and the breakdown of their marriage. Tony Last is an aristocrat, profoundly attached to Hetton Abbey (a hideous piece of Victorian Gothic architecture) and a feudal past which he considers ideal. His attachment to his feudal setting is so complete that he is blind to the changes that are taking place outside his world and blind his wife’s (Brenda) boredom to the stately rhythms of country life in the estate. While Tony plays his role as the lord of the manor in earnest, Brenda sets up a life for herself in a London flat where she pursues her affair with John Beaver, an idler and social climber. The first half of the novel tries to anatomise the lifestyles of the rich and the shameless. There are endless parties and country house weekends. The people there are hypocrites who act polite in public and behave horridly in private. Sex is only a means to relieve boredom: “It had been an autumn of very sparse and meagre romance; only the most obvious people had parted or come together, and Brenda was filling a want long felt by those whose simple, vicarious pleasure it was to discuss the subject in bed over the telephone.”4 (Aca.lwstore.biz, 2008) The indifference of Tony towards his wife’s growing boredom and Brenda’s infidelity and selfishness give their relationship a sort of equilibrium and they maintain a show of conjugal life. This sham is broken with the death of their only son and the tragedy forces the truth to come out. Brenda asks for a divorce and Tony agrees to go through a sham of creating the appropriate grounds, basically that of infidelity on his part, so that the divorce will not create any unpleasant situations. However, Brenda and her family prove to be very greedy and insist on a monetary settlement of so large a sum that it will require Tony to sell his beloved estate. He refuses to file for a divorce and leaves on an expedition to Brazil. There Tony’s expedition companion dies and he himself falls ill. Sick and delirious he finds himself at the mercy of a jungle only slightly more savage than the one he has left behind in England. He is held hostage by a Mr. Todd in a tribal village who forces him to read the works of Charles Dickens to him for the rest of his life. Brenda’s relationship with John Beaver has soured over time and shortly after everybody assumes that Tony is dead, she married Jock Grant-Menzies, a mutual friend. Hetton passes over to Tony’s distant relative, Richard Last, who raises a silver-fox farm there. “For all its biting wit, A Handful of Dust paints a bleak picture of the English upper classes, reaching beyond satire toward a very modern sense of despair. In Waughs world, culture, breeding, and the trappings of civilization only provide more subtle means of destruction.”5 Evelyn Waugh dexterously mingled farce with tragedy and used Few writers have walked the line between farce and tragedy as nimbly as used “the conventions of the comic novel” to chip away at the disintegrating class system in England. In A Handful of Dust, he expertly uses a bleak satirical style to expose the decadence that exists in the world of the aristocracy and the feeling of ennui that was engulfing England between the wars. In Black Mischief, implicitly Waugh says to his readers: "You liberals, colonialists, and decent agnostic pragmatists--you laugh at my jokes, and are excited like me by wealth, sex, barbarity, and power--but can you face the implications, for society and for yourselves, of identifying with Basil Seal and recognizing him as Everyman? If you cannot, then perhaps I have resources you lack. However, I leave it to you to find out what they are." A Handful of Dust, also makes the same points by using starkly opposite means. Like Black Mischief, here too he mingles the world of the primitive with the upper class civilized English society but in exactly opposite proportions. Tony like Basil is the connecting link between the two worlds but unlike Basil, Tony is honourable, naïve and innocent. He is the creature of circumstances not the maker.6 Charles Turridges screen adaptation of the novel, opens with the remains of an abandoned camp somewhere in South America and a main characters hallucination. The film moves in flashback after that. Scenes are dexterously handled to bring live to us the tragedy and greed and utter chaos that follows. The relationship of Brenda and Tony initially follows a symmetry pattern. When their only son who Tony adores dies, this symmetry of superficial happiness is rudely broken. But Tony has always lived in and believed in pattern. So in this time of grief, Mrs. Rattery offers a pattern. She tries to help Tony by sharing a game of bezique or piquet. Tony who knows only Animal Snap, something that his son used to play does not know piquet or bezique. But Mrs. Rattery intent on offering condolence suggest that they play Animal Snap surprising the servants with their "bow wow" and "coop-coop-coop" that can be heard coming from the library. The ludicrous is masterfully intertwined with the serious here. Mr. Waugh’s comedy of manners offers no comfortable catharsis. The alternative to this archaic structure is not a new order, but a chaos as old as humanity. The cardinal sin in the upper classes is to "go on about things" with unconscionable persistence. Like Metroland in Decline and Fall, Tony lives in his make believe world of order and coherence. Metroland’s eyes fall on precisely the things he wants to see: the works that will establish his place in the world by recording order and precedence and convince him that he is the centre of a coherent and manageable world. However, he is cowed into retreat by Trumpington’s tall hat and cigar that is smouldering in the hall. He would rather be surrounded by illusions than confront his wife’s infidelity. So when Trumpington departs, Metroland approaches his wife disarmed, his cigar, the symbol of masculinity, burning out among the ruined mementoes of a past order. We can recall a similar scene in A Handful of Dust. Tony too tries to maintain an air of gentlemanliness. In order to expedite the divorce that his wife wants he agrees to escort a prostitute to a seaside resort and oblige the waiting detective there so that he can gather ‘incriminating’ evidence of his ‘infidelity.’ Whatever remained of Tony’s sense of proprieties is shattered. His overprotected sensibility is offended but worse than that he is forced to realise that this woman who can trade her body for money is far more genuinely concerned about her child than Tony’s wife ever was about theirs. She knows that Tony’s intentions are directed at the appearance of vice and not the act, and so she brings her daughter with her to the resort. To the frustration of the detective this lends an air of respectability to the act. In Waugh’s inverted world, the respectable only provokes dismay. In contrast to the prostitute, Tony’s wife Brenda, had taken all efforts to keep their son at a distance so that he would not prove to be a hindrance to her adulterous adventures. She was even relieved that it was their son John, and not her lover who died. Raised in a world where proprieties and virtues are honoured, Tony is forced to respect the prostitute. There is a lot of cinematic element in this scene. “It is as though Tony were watching a film that failed to distinguish between the background and the foreground. ..every sensation is as important and as unimportant as any other. The resulting experience resembles a nightmare in which Tony becomes a passive centre encompassed by shrieking chaos.”7 In the world that Evelyn Waugh created the traditional mind is shaken by events that do not resemble their expectations or match their sensibilities. Therefore, though Paul Pennyfeather is able to handle the idea of drunkenness, he is unable to face the drunkard. Therefore, we have Mrs. Rattery, supremely austere, and unruffled, trying to establish pattern and symmetry in this time of chaos. Under her card playing fingers, order grows out of chaos though only intermittently between shuffling. That only symbolises and stresses the substantial order that existed once. Waugh, the dandyish narrator of the story, records without being involved. He is fascinated but not involved. He is delighted by the outrages and excesses but maintains his distance. Neither does he censor, nor does he approve. He is sophisticated in his tolerance and never goes beyond expressing mild wonder. So, when Margot Beste-Chetwynde in Decline and Fall razes her sixteenth century home, Waugh brightly announces “surprising creation of ferro concrete and aluminium.” But the Bright Young People in Vile Bodies turn into “a litter of pigs…popping all together out of someone’s electric brougham.” Waugh approached his fictions with a strong predilection of a radical montage. His scenes are spliced together and connected with associated rather than linear logic. A good example of this is provided in Black Mischief. He also turned to film when he wanted to express the discontinuity and unreality in the modern world. Without conviction of any ultimate purpose of existence the self and experience becomes arbitrary and fragmented. Life simply unreels as a series of discrete sensations placed side by side like individual frames in a film, their continuity being mechanically maneuvered from outside. Colonel Blount and Lottie Crump, Lord Cooper, Sir James Macrae, and Rex Mottram all succeed because they have come to terms with the world as it is. They forget what they are doing from one moment to the next. The Loved One also emphasizes this point by contrasting two Englishmen who have gone to Hollywood to make their respective fortunes. One fails while the other succeeds. The key to their difference in fate lies in the ways they view their past and their present and their different personalities. Sir Francis Hinsley, who failed, failed because he is given to reminiscing. He often “strayed back a quarter of a century and more to foggy London streets lately set free from all eternity from fear of the Zeppelin; to Harold Monroe reading aloud at the Poetry Bookshop; Blunden’s latest in the London Mercury;…tea with Gosse in Hanover Terrace.”8 Sir Abercrombie, who had an adventurous past lived existentially. He proudly announces that “I’ve always had two principles all my life in motion pictures: never do before the camera what you would not do at home and never do at home what you would not do before the camera.”9 Ambrose is able to discard all senses of individual continuity and historical perspective in order to become a functional part of the present moment. Waugh associated the themes of his novels and the narrative to what he considered to be the leveling or egalitarian tendencies of the twentieth century. The reasons for this were also closely allied: one was economy and the other aesthetics. Like both James Joyce and Virginia Woolfe, Evelyn Waugh was also attracted to the aesthetic possibilities of the film form. At the same time he was also aware that the production expenses would be too high to enable the film to reach its full potential. He was acutely conscious that despite their limitless technical resources, filmmakers had only been able to offer rudimentary and primitive entertainment till then. In his 1947 essay, “Why Hollywood is a Term of Disparagement” he remarked: “A film costs about $2,000,000. It must please 20,000,000 people. The film industry has accepted the great fallacy of the century of the Common Man…that a thing can have no value for anyone which is not valued by all. The economics of this desperate situation illustrate the steps by which the Common Man is consolidating his victory.”10 (McCartney, p. 130) He does not make this pejorative remark to flaunt his snobbery. According to him, the Common Man did not exist. His own experiences taught him that film producers did not have any other concern than profit. Waugh himself used the film as a metaphor for his centuries leveling tendencies.11 Another fascination of Waugh’s was primitivism. His interest in primitivism lay in his belief that modern technology actually unwittingly promoted “reversion to a barbarous sensibility”. We must remember that Waugh started his career at a time when the literary mind’s sense of decorum was shocked by films. With its superior ability to recreate the visible world even as it suspends logical co-ordination of time and space, a film offers a paradoxical aesthetic that frustrates and confounds civilized expectations. Though intensely realistic, it floats on the shifting currents of dream consciousness.12 Therefore mundane things can gain an enormous significance while essential elements of life may get lost. In A Handful of Dust he dexterously juxtaposes the primitive with the modern to show how our values sham and sense of proprieties can be. Masterfully satirical, the novel A Handful of Dust examines the themes of contemporary amorality and the death of spiritual values. Crushingly realistic, A Handful of Dust, became a great movie. Charles Sturridge, had also directed Brideshead Revisited earlier, another novel written by Waugh. He understood the underlying satire very well and could successfully direct the actors to deliver the performance that was required of them to produce the right effect. The performance of the actors has been rated as superb though the film has been rated as emotionally drenching. Kristin Scott Thomas did great justice to the role of Brenda Last, and the character seemed to come live through her performance. The delivery of her speeches, her voice modulation, and her body language, all gave the exact dimensions to the character she resembled in the movie. Tony Last was played by James Wilby. A seasoned actor, he won several awards for acting. It is difficult to imagine another actor in the role of Tony Last, a character that James Wilby played superbly. Together the actors orchestrated their performance to produce a great movie representation of a crushingly realistic theme. Though set in the 1930’s the film still has relevance in our times. We owe this enduring quality of the film to the great performances of the actors. Conclusion The title of the novel, A Handful of Dust, has been taken from Eliot’s famous poem: The Waste Land. It is expected therefore that there would be certain common features in them. In The Waste Land, Eliot uses imagery to talk about the decay of ancient fertility myths into such degenerate forms as telling fortunes with Tarot cards. Similarly, we find the fortune-teller in A Handful of Dust reading the soles of her clients’ feet to tell them their fortunes. The Waste Land looks behind the medieval Arthurian story-cycle to the Celtic rituals from which it derives. In A Handful of Dust we get a degraded modern version of the same: Tony may be King Arthur, Brenda with her illicit affair and her infidelity may be compared with Guinevere, and John Beaver may be compared to Lancelot. Tony is like the knight searching relentlessly for the Holy Grail, looking in vain for the mythical city of El Dorado and finding nothing but his own special hell of chaos on earth. Mingling satire with humour, A Handful of Dust has a wide rage of ironic implication and is even exceptionally funny at times. The vicar repeating sermons he had written while in India produce a hilarious effect. But it also has a cruel bearing on Tony’s appalling fate that is to follow at the end of the novel. Tony’s attempt at adultery will Milly and her insufferable daughter are no less funny. These seemingly funny incidents are connected to Tony’s horrible fate. Sick and lost in a jungle in South America, among a primitive tribe, Tony is unable to distinguish between the London he has lived in and the jungle and his dream city. He wakes up from his delusion to find himself captive in the hands of Mr. Todd, his dreams, his perceptions and beliefs, his aristocracy, his life, reduced to a handful of dust. And all the nuances in the novel and its underlying crushing satire, and deep realism have been brought alive to us through the superb performances of the actors who brought the characters and their times and their conflicts alive on the screen. References 1. ‘Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966)’. Books and Writers. 2008. Retrieved from: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/ewaugh.htm on January 23, 2009 2. ‘Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh Biography’. Book Rags. 2005-2006. Retrieved from: http://www.bookrags.com/biography/evelyn-arthur-st-john-waugh/ on January 23, 2009 3. ‘A Handful of Dust’. Amazon.com. 1996-2009. Retrieved from: http://www.amazon.com/Handful-Dust-Evelyn-Waugh/dp/0316926051 on January 23, 2009 4. ‘Evelyn Waugh: A Handful of Dust (1934). Vanderbilt University. 2009. Retrieved from: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/english/English151W-03/handful.htm on January 23, 2009 5. McCartney, George. Evelyn Waugh and the Modernist Tradition. Piscataway: Transaction Publishers. 2004. 6. ‘Modern Classics Bridehead Revisited Centennial Edition: Evelyn Waugh Penguin Classic’. Aca. Lwstore.biz. 2008. Retrieved from: http://aca.lwstore.biz/g/Waugh,%20Evelyn/Books/931978/931966/ on January 23, 2009 7. Waugh, Evelyn. Loved One. Topeka: Sageburg Education Resources. 1977. Read More