The Penguin Project

A Handful of Dust

Happy New Year! I’m back and we’re kicking off with a cracker of the tortured upper class genre. Evelyn Waugh was the master of tragic toffs and Handful of Dust is considered the transitional book between the lighter satires of his early career and the later Catholic-guilt-heavy works that he became known for post war.

Written in 1934, Dust’s hero, Tony Last, is your classic English country squire: he’s got the massive ancestral home, he’s got the trophy wife, he’s got the small, mildly irritating son who will one day inherit the lot but what he hasn’t got is a jot of self awareness or the street smarts to understand that his bored wife, Brenda, is embarking on sexual shananigans every time she’s in London in order to fend off the sort of ennui that only the well to do seem able to muster.

Only in the upper echelons of the British class system can it be perfectly acceptable for a woman to be running round town with her boyfriend, the epically named John Beaver, amidst a society that doesn’t just not frown on these things but actively goes out of its way to try and find Tony a squeeze on the side to even things up. This doesn’t work, so in a practice run for Brideshead, Waugh delves into the terrible consquences that must surely follow when a woman has an extra marital affair and her husband doesn’t. In short, the child must die and awkward divorce proceedings must then ensue.

But Waugh then throws in a curveball and has Tony, in what I can only presume is a posh mid life crisis, decide that he wants to go on an expedition to find a lost city in the Amazon rainforest rather than finalise his divorce. This, of course, goes catastrophically wrong, Tony is overcome with malaria, his travel companion is swept over a waterfall and killed whilst trying to fetch help and our beleaguered hero ends up in the sort of sticky end that seems, well, we’ll get to that. Suffice to say, it’s a little on the nose. It’s a book about the decay of the upper class and the emergence of the upper middle class, who are, according to Waugh, shallow upstarts who lack values. It’s a great book even if the end drove me half mad.

Evelyn Waugh was the son of the managing director of a publishing house and after the usual stint at a minor public school and Oxford, he taught in a handful of prep schools before settling into his life as a serious writer. He published short stories, worked as a reporter and turned his hand to a short biography of Rossetti before achieving fame in 1928 with his first comic novel Decline and Fall. His first marriage went south when his wife declared she was in love with his best friend (you can see where he got his inspiration) and this coincided with him converting to Catholicism, a move that became a huge own goal when it meant he was unable to marry a woman called Teresa Jungman, a rather intoxicating socialite.

To get over the inconvenience of not being able to marry again (The Catholic church considered him to be still married to his first wife) he set off on an adventure to South America but it was here, finding himself stuck in Boa Vista with no boats available to take him on, that he wrote a short story “The Man Who Liked Dickens” about a lost explorer who is held captive and forced to read Dickens if he wants to eat. It’s the exact same fate as meets Tony Last which made me wonder if Waugh simply got bored at the end of writing Handful of Dust and self cribbed to give himself an ending. Please see my previous statement about the end of the book driving me spare.

Interestingly, the book was serialised in Harpers Bazaar pre publication and because the Mr Dickens short story has already been published, Waugh wrote an alternative ending in which the entire trip to Amazon was replaced with Brenda, now suitably chastened, who comes crawling back asking for a reconciliation. Tony agrees but secretly keeps on her dreaded London Affair Flat for his own nefarious purposes. Now that would have made for a better book and, I think, if he’d kept it, would put Handful of Dust alongside The End of the Affair by Graham Greene as one of the greatest bust up novels of all time.

Evelyn Waugh was, by all accounts, a bit of a shit when he was a boy and famously bullied the renowned photographer Cecil Beaton, who never forgot it. Whilst at Sherborne school, his elder brother Alec was expelled after the discovery of homosexual toings and froings. His brother then wrote a novel, The Loom of Youth, which alluded to homosexual relationships and it caused such public offence that Evelyn was sent to Lancing College instead. It infuriated him. Despite the set back, he won a scholarship to read History at Hertford College, Oxford, where he took up pipe smoking and writing film reviews for Isis magazine. It was here that he came into the orbit of two Etonians, Harold Acton and Brian Howard who sucked him into an artistic, gay social whirl he found intoxicating. (Hello, Brideshead) He went on to have three homosexual relationships. He would leave Oxford without his degree. This is clearly what happens when you go gay. Remember that.

In 1939 he was commissioned into the Marines but proved to be an unpopular officer so quickly lost his command and became the battalion’s Intelligence Officer instead. He saw action in 1940 in Operation Menace which was an attempt to overthrow the Vichy Government. It failed. He was then involved in an unsuccessful attempt to liberate Bardia on the Libyan coast and was sent to assist in the evacuation of Crete which also proved a shambles. He was dispatched back to Britain and in 1942, he was transferred into the Royal Horse Guards where he could cause no further fuss. Bored, he applied for parachute training, jumped and broke his leg, was sent to Windsor to recuperate and whilst laid up, he wrote Brideshead Revisited. It was a huge success.

By the early 1950’s his writing was falling out of fashion and he became gripped with paranoia, believing he’d been demonically possessed. He wasn’t. It was bromide poisoning. Despite getting better, Waugh detested the modern world and refused to use a telephone or drive even insisting on using an old ink dip pen to write. He was offered a CBE in 1960 but he turned it down because he wanted a Knighthood. He died of a heart attack aged 62. He was called “the nastiest tempered man in Europe”

The book was adapted for film in 1988 starring James Wilby as Tony and Kristen Scott Thomas as Brenda (perfect casting) with Rupert Graves as the social climbing John Beaver. An earlier adaptation, in 1960, had been considered with David Niven and Judy Garland in the leading roles but was abandoned for reasons unknown.