This is not all that surprising given the circumstances in which A Handful of Dust was begun. Waugh travelled to Fez, in Morocco, to write the book in January 1934. The preceding months had seen him much preoccupied with an unhappy love affair with Teresa Jungman (Waugh had proposed marriage, she had turned him down — Waugh was distraught and miserable) and with the continuing consequences of his own divorce from his first wife Evelyn Gardner, a complicated process which involved appearing at an Ecclesiastical Court to testify to the flawed and insincere nature of his marriage in an effort to have the religious authorities declare the union null and void, Evelyn Gardner (she-Evelyn) had had an affair with John Heygate in the first year of her marriage to Waugh. The publicity and grim procedures surrounding the eventual divorce (announcements in The Times, for example; meeting the lover in a lawyer’s office so he could be formally identified as corespondent) and the acute embarrassment (and his own perceived shame and ridicule) that Waugh suffered within his circle of friends had a monumental and lasting effect on his life and personality. It is no wonder that adultery, betrayal and heartlessness so dominate the pages of the novel he began to write.
Waugh wrote fast: he finished A Handful of Dust in four months, dispatching sections to the typist as he completed them. But he was having trouble with the ending (there is a very useful account of the composition of the novel in volume I of Martin Stannard’s fine biography). Before starting A Handful of Dust, Waugh had just written a travel book (in a month), an account of his recent travels in the hinterland of British Guiana, published under the title Ninety-Two Days. It was a job of work and was not a book he held in much esteem. However, the trip had given him the material for a short story, “The Man Who Liked Dickens.” In the novel, Tony Last, having discovered Brenda’s adultery, also leaves Britain to travel into the jungles of British Guiana and his famous fate — compelled to read Dickens for the rest of his life to the baleful settler-cum-gaoler Mr Todd — is essentially Waugh’s short story “The Man Who Liked Dickens” stapled on to the end of his unfinished novel about adultery. Henry Green wrote to Waugh when the book came out and said, “I feel the end is so fantastic that it throws the rest out of proportion. Aren’t you mixing two things together? It seemed manufactured and not real.” This is one novelist’s intuition analysing a fellow novelist’s work with great and embarrassing acuity. Waugh defended himself stoutly: “wishing to bring Tony to a sad end I made it an elaborate and improbable one.” Adding that it was a “conceit in the Webster manner.” This is disingenuous: I would argue that Waugh needed an ending and realized that he had already written something that would do. He was an assiduous recycler and re-user of his own experiences and other writings and A Handful of Dust is evidence of his economy — both Ninety-Two Days and “The Man Who Liked Dickens” were press-ganged into solving the problem of his novel’s conclusion.
There is nothing wrong with this — most novelists have occasion to do something similar from time to time, though perhaps they do it more covertly than Waugh. But I think the history of the novel’s composition and the evidence of its frankly cobbled-together ending undermine claims for the book’s thematic consistency and its structural cohesion. A Handful of Dust is characterized by several such tensions: not merely in its structure, but also in its tone of voice, its characterization, comedy — the novel is full of uneasiness. The key to Waugh’s objective in finding the right ending to the story lies in his phrase “wishing to bring Tony to a sad end” rather than any huffing and puffing about Websterian conceits. Waugh wanted to bring Tony to a sad end because this was the nature of his comic genius — it is pitiless and ruthless, and this is what makes it both modern and enduring. Tony, that most wronged of decent men, is served up with his own particular circle of hell through no fault of his own. Brenda, in contrast, one of the most empty and unpleasant women one can imagine, is rewarded with marriage to Jock Grant-Menzies, MP, one of Tony’s rich friends. This was the way the world worked for Waugh (and it certainly must have seemed so as he wrote the novel in 1934) — in his best work he always refused to allow his art to provide any form of easy consolation. At the end of Labels, the travel book he wrote in the immediate fallout of his own broken marriage, and in the full knowledge of the nature of his wife’s betrayal, he wrote: “Fortune is the least capricious of deities, and arranges things on the just and rigid system that no one shall be very happy for very long.” This is very bitter, but it also happens to be very true, in the main. It was a world-view that underpinned Waugh’s work and, I believe, was one that continually fought against his newly acquired Catholic faith. It provokes an unhappy tension in his work that begins to emerge in the novels after A Handful of Dust (with the notable exception of Scoop, his real masterpiece, in my opinion). The new seriousness that critics began to see in his work — in Brideshead Revisited and in The Sword of Honour trilogy, for example — is Waugh’s attempt to use his religious faith to combat or obscure this instinctive view he possessed of the human condition. He saw life as anarchic, indifferent and absurd. Waugh, to put it crudely, could not, or did not, want to write in this spirit any longer (which is fundamentally Godless) but it was one that came all too naturally to him. In A Handful of Dust we see its apotheosis.
Waugh wrote very fast and he always had financial reimbursement for his writing very close to the forefront of his mind. This is not to say he wasn’t an artist — he definitely was, as were Balzac and Dickens, two other speed-merchants — but he was not an artist in the sense that, say, Flaubert, Joyce and Nabokov were. One fact about A Handful of Dust makes this very clear: before the book was published in Britain it had been serialized in five parts in the American magazine Harper’s Bazaar. Because “The Man Who Liked Dickens” had been published separately as a short story in America, Waugh found himself in copyright difficulties (this conflict also testifies tellingly to the virtually unchanged, bolted-on aspect of the Mr Todd conclusion). Consequently, he wrote a new ending for the serialized version of the novel. In the light of this evidence I find it very hard to accept that there is some schematic master-plan for A Handful of Dust and that its various components were always designed to harmonize and complement each other. This is what Henry Green sensed — one craftsman looking at another craftsman’s work — and his complaint is wholly justified. Waugh’s response is a little desperate: if the book is so intricately stitched together, then just how easy can it be to write an entirely new ending for it? However, the serialization ending is very interesting in itself and it inadvertently says as much about the novel’s underlying intentions, I would claim, as the published book version does. We will return to it later.