Just in case we hadn’t got it, Waugh resorts to telling not showing, in a manner that is over-obvious and over-larded. Time and again in the novel, these inconsistencies and dissonances are revealing. And what they reveal, I would argue, is that A Handful of Dust is not the harmonious whole, the masterwork, that critics have claimed it to be. Inside the structure of omniscience and Victorian apostrophe, a leaner, more oblique, more modern novel is struggling to coexist. Pages of rapid cross-cutting and terse dialogue consort unhappily with ponderous explication, authorial asides and forced humour (A Handful of Dust is the least funny of all Waugh’s novels: look at the interminable ten pages of Tony and Jock’s drunken spree). What is in fact a dark and acerbic exposé of contemporary decadence and ennui is overweighted at the end by the battened-on symbolism of a previously written short story.
I see other inconsistencies that point to further warring intentions. Take the portrait of Brenda, for example. At the beginning of the novel she seems sweet: loving and tolerant of Tony — yet she takes to adultery effortlessly and without a qualm: indeed she’s rather good at it. Scenes are then presented to show Brenda in the worst possible light as someone utterly without feeling and casually cruel. The famous exchange when she learns that “John” has died and instantly thinks it is John Beaver, rather than John Andrew her son, is perhaps the best example (though I’ve always felt the scene sells itself short — no one really refers to Beaver as “John,” so when she says “John” the reader will automatically think of the boy. The joke requires a double take (you have to remind yourself of Beaver’s Christian name) and in that split second the shock effect rather loses its potency). More to the point are her lying telephone calls to Tony when Beaver is in bed with her: there is nothing in Brenda as she is first presented to us to hint that she is capable of such icily calm duplicity — this is the behaviour of a serial adulteress. Some other process is going on here, I would argue, in her changing portrayal. Similarly, critics who contend that Tony is meant to be seen as a buffoon and that his love of his big, ugly, Victorian Gothic house is risible are not reading the book closely. Waugh — whose own tastes were maverick and the opposite of à la mode — lovingly celebrates Het-ton and Tony’s love for the house. The precision of the writing about the architecture does not remotely hint at mockery — on the contrary, every word speaks of relish and approval. If Tony’s taste is meant to be absurd then what of Mrs Beaver’s ghastly interiors? Surely Hetton is meant to represent values, however out of fashion, that are fundamentally sound and worthwhile and deliberately set in opposition to the shoddy trendiness of Mrs Beaver. What these discordancies illustrate is the effects of attempting to shape A Handful of Dust into something it isn’t. My contention is that, at root, A Handful of Dust was written to be Waugh’s own exploration of betrayal and marital humiliation and that it is, in its special way, a form of revenge against the damage inflicted on his psyche by Evelyn Gardner. Brenda’s casual adultery and the disasters it sets in train are meant to be condemned in the most stern and merciless terms. Waugh gives her no escape route: her lover is a waster and a sponger, a hopeless remittance man. Her betrayed husband, by contrast, is sincere, decent and loving. Furthermore — and this is the killer blow — Brenda has so lost her sense of value that she cares more about her boyfriend than she does about her son. It is an unyieldingly cruel and vicious portrait of a worthless woman.
One more piece of evidence: towards the end of the novel when Tony is sailing to South America he has a shipboard romance with a young girl called Thérèse. In the previously quoted letter to Henry Green, Waugh admits, “I think the sentimental episode with Thérèse is probably a mistake.” He was right: it’s a mistake because we think that it is positioned there so that Tony will find some romantic reward for his sufferings — and the romance is painted with real tenderness — but it turns out that, as soon as Thérèse finds out Tony is married (i.e. not divorced) she loses all interest in him. Yet another insincere woman dissembling to try and catch a husband. Martin Stannard, in his biography, points out that Thérèse was originally named Bernadette but the name was changed in the manuscript. Prior to writing the novel Waugh had proposed to Teresa Jungman, had been rejected and was severely heartsore (he dedicated the Dutch edition of A Handful of Dust to her). Circumstantial evidence? Yes, perhaps, but the more it mounts the harder it becomes not to read A Handful of Dust as Waugh’s individual cry of pain.
The novel is full of hate and scorn, not just for Brenda, but also for the society in which she moves. The smart world of metropolitan London is portrayed by Waugh as utterly dissolute, genuine venom lurking beneath the ostensible social satire. The only woman in that world who escapes total censure, interestingly enough, is the morphine addict Mrs Rattery — who is of real and coolly efficient support to Tony in the hours after John Andrew’s death. Mrs Rattery, morphineuse and aviatrix, can retreat from the social whirl through her drugs, her self-absorption (her endless games of patience) or — physically — by taking to the air in her flying machine. There is something enviably godlike about her impassivity and emotional distance from the rest of the characters in the novel.
The social world of the novel — of night clubs and house parties, soirées and silly fads — is the world that Waugh himself occupied and was intimate with. It is depicted with a cold and unsparing eye and I would suggest that this explains the title Waugh eventually chose (he was going to call the book A Handful of Ashes). “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” is about the emptiness at the heart of this section of society. Eliot’s poem, to put it very simply, seems notionally about seeking some form of restoration (rain, rebirth, regrowth), redemption (some Grail substitute) or salvation (some spiritual peace) in a world turned waste land. But looked at from a slightly different angle (again trying to ignore the poem’s reputation and critical baggage acquired over the years) it can be argued that in fact The Waste Land is all about sex — seedy, unsatisfactory, loveless, dangerous, destructive sex. It abounds in references to sex, is steeped in it, almost obsessively so. The context of the four lines Waugh cites as his epigraph (and usually authors do not choose epigraphs lightly) comes just before the introduction of the “hyacinth girl.” Would one think of Brenda Last? “… your hair wet…/I was neither/living nor dead, and I knew nothing/looking into the heart of light, the silence.” Brenda, with her “fair underwater look” (not a bad description of Evelyn Gardner, either) … Circumstantial evidence, admittedly, but the file is growing.
Waugh wrote the first two-thirds of this novel at great speed, fresh from his rejection by Teresa Jungman (his one great love after Evelyn Gardner) and his regular testimony to the Roman Catholic authorities about the sham and frivolity of his first marriage. That bitterness and resentment found its place in the bleak story of Brenda Last’s betrayal of her husband and the curse they suffered of their child’s awful death. And then Waugh stopped, unable to think how to conclude the book, knowing only that he wanted Tony to come to “a sad end.” In the event he took over, almost wholesale, an earlier short story and hitched it on to his incomplete novel. Fiddling around here and there with themes and images, chapter headings and symbols, he endeavoured to give the book some coherence. But in fact the most integral conclusion to the book was the one he had already written to complete the American serialization. It is a very short final section, some seven or eight pages, and is meant to come after Tony and Brenda have agreed to a divorce. It picks up the story after Tony has returned from an uneventful tourist trip in the Caribbean and is met at Southampton docks by Brenda. The couple are reconciled, after a fashion (Beaver, tiring of Brenda, has tried and failed to seduce Mrs Rattery, and has gone abroad), and Tony, it appears, has forgiven her — or decided to ignore — her aberration. Months later they go up to town (Brenda is now pregnant). Tony goes to see Mrs Beaver about Brenda’s flat and makes a deal to keep it on (Brenda knows nothing). The implication is that Tony will be coming up to town more frequently himself and will need the flat to entertain girlfriends. In the final lines of the chapter Tony lies to Brenda: