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Wykes believes that, of the novel's three central characters, only Tony is representative of his real-life equivalent—Waugh in his pre-Catholic irreligious state. South American journey In 1932 Waugh embarked on an extended voyage to South America. The novel's critical standing grew steadily in the years following its publication.

In the same month it was issued in New York by , who were initially unenthusiastic about the book and, according to Waugh's agent, made little promotional effort on its behalf. Evelyn Waugh: The Critical Heritage. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books.



For the 1988 film based on the novel, see. For the New Zealand band, see. A Handful of Dust is a novel by the British writer. First published in 1934, it is often grouped with the author's early, satirical comic novels for which he became famous in the pre- years. Commentators have, however, drawn attention to its serious undertones, and have regarded it as a transitional work pointing towards Waugh's postwar fiction. Waugh incorporated several autobiographical elements into the plot, including his own recent desertion by his wife. In 1933—34 he travelled into the South American interior, and a number of incidents from the voyage are incorporated into the novel. The book's initial critical reception was modest, but it was popular with the public and has never been out of print. In the years since publication the book's reputation has grown; it is generally considered one of Waugh's best works, and has more than once figured on unofficial lists of the 20th century's best novels. Waugh had converted to in 1930, after which his satirical, secular writings drew hostility from some Catholic quarters. He did not introduce overtly religious themes into A Handful of Dust, but later explained that he intended the book to demonstrate the futility of humanist, as distinct from religious, especially Catholic, values. The book has been dramatised for radio, stage and screen. Tony Last is a country gentleman, living with his wife Brenda and his eight-year-old son John Andrew in his ancestral home, Hetton Abbey. Entirely content with country life, he is seemingly unaware of Brenda's increasing boredom and dissatisfaction, and of his son's developing waywardness. Brenda meets John Beaver and, despite acknowledging his dullness and insignificance, she begins an affair with him. Brenda starts spending her weeks in London, and persuades Tony to finance a small , which she rents from John's mother, Mrs Beaver, an unscrupulous property developer. Although the Brenda—Beaver liaison is well known to their London friends, Tony remains uxorious and oblivious; attempts by Brenda and her friends to set him up with a mistress are absurdly unsuccessful. Brenda is in London when John Andrew is killed in a riding accident. After the funeral, she tells Tony that she wants a divorce so that she can marry Beaver. On learning the extent of her deception Tony is shattered, but agrees to protect Brenda's social reputation by allowing , and to provide her with £500 a year. After spending an awkward but chaste weekend in with a prostitute contriving divorce evidence, Tony learns from Brenda's brother that, encouraged by Beaver, Brenda is now demanding £2,000 a year—a sum that would require Tony to sell Hetton. Tony's illusions are shattered. However, the prostitute brought her child with her who can establish that Tony did not commit adultery and the blackmail fails. Tony withdraws from the divorce negotiations, and announces that he intends to travel for six months. On his return, he says, Brenda may have her divorce, but without any financial settlement. With no prospect of Tony's money, Beaver loses interest in Brenda, who is left adrift and in poverty. Meanwhile, Tony has met an explorer, Dr. Messinger, and joins him on an expedition in search of a supposed lost city in the. On the outward journey, Tony engages in a shipboard romance with Thérèse de Vitré, a young girl whose causes her to shun him when he tells her he has a wife. In Brazil, Messinger proves an incompetent organiser; he cannot control the native guides, who abandon him and Tony in the depths of the jungle. Tony falls ill, and Messinger leaves in their only canoe to find help, but is swept over a waterfall and killed. Tony wanders in delirium until he is rescued by Mr. Todd, an expatriate Englishman who rules over a small native tribe in a remote clearing in the jungle. Todd nurses Tony back to health. Although illiterate, Todd owns copies of the complete works of , and asks Tony to read to him. However, when Tony's health recovers and he asks to be helped on his way, the old man repeatedly demurs. The readings continue, but the atmosphere becomes increasingly menacing as Tony realises he is being held against his will. When a search party finally reaches the settlement, Todd arranges that Tony be drugged and kept hidden; he tells the party that Tony has died, and gives them his watch to take home. When Tony awakes he learns that his hopes of rescue are gone, and that he is condemned to read Dickens to his captor indefinitely. Back in England, Tony's death is accepted; Hetton passes to his cousins, who erect a memorial to his memory, while Brenda marries Tony's friend Jock Grant-Menzies. Evelyn Waugh photographed circa 1940 , born in 1903, was the younger son of , the managing director of the London publishing firm of. After attending and , Waugh taught for three years in a series of private preparatory schools before beginning his career as a writer. He worked briefly as a reporter, and wrote a short biography of the pre-Raphaelite painter before achieving success in 1928 with the publication of his comic novel,. By the end of 1932 Waugh had written two further novels, and , and two travel books. His professional successes coincided with private upheavals; in June 1928 he married Evelyn Gardner, but just over a year later the marriage ended when she declared her love for the couple's mutual friend. Reconciliation proved impossible, and Waugh filed for divorce in September 1929. At the same time, Waugh was undergoing instruction which led to his reception, in September 1930, into the. Waugh's adherence to Catholic teaching on divorce caused him frustration while awaiting the possible annulment of his marriage. He had fallen in love with Teresa Jungman, a lively socialite whose Catholicism precluded any intimacy in their relationship since in the eyes of the Church Waugh remained married. Waugh's conversion did not greatly affect the acerbic and sharply satirical tone of his fiction—his principal characters were frequently amoral and their activities sometimes shocking. Waugh made no public rebuttal of these charges; an open letter to was prepared, but on the advice of Waugh's friends was not sent. South American journey In 1932 Waugh embarked on an extended voyage to South America. His decision to absent himself may have been a reaction to his increasingly complicated emotional life; while his passion for Teresa Jungman remained unrequited, he was involved in various unsatisfactory casual sexual liaisons, and was himself being pursued by the much older. The choice of South America was probably influenced by , the literary editor of. Fleming had recently returned from an expedition to Brazil seeking traces of who, in 1925, had disappeared in Brazil while searching for a fabled lost city. Having seen Black Mischief launched to mixed but generally favourable critical comment Oldmeadow's intervention was not immediate , Waugh sailed from on 2 December 1932. He arrived in on 23 December, and after some days of indecision opted to accompany the district commissioner for , on a journey into the interior. He hoped that he might reach , a large city deep within the Brazilian jungle, but transport proved unreliable, and he got no further than the border town of. He told Waugh that he had seen the entire gathering of the saints in heaven—surprisingly few, he said—but could not count them because they were incorporeal. Apart from using different names and some minor details this story is the same as the episode that Waugh later used as the climax to A Handful of Dust: an elderly settler modelled in manner, speech and appearance on Christie , rescues and holds captive a lost explorer and requires him to read aloud the novels of Dickens, in perpetuity. The story was published in 1933, in America in , and in Britain in. Then, after the short story was written and published, the idea kept working in my mind. In October—November he wrote his account of the South American journey, which he called Ninety-two Days. He then went to in Morocco, to begin the novel in warmth and solitude. By 10 February he had reached the half-way point—45,000 words—but was uncertain how the story should proceed, and returned to England at the end of February with most of the second half unwritten. He finished the book at the Easton Court Hotel at , in , a regular retreat that he used when completing writing projects. Waugh's agent sold the pre-publication serialisation rights to the American monthly magazine. In this, the whole Brazilian adventure was replaced by a brief coda, in which Tony returns from a luxury cruise to be greeted by a chastened Brenda asking to be reconciled. Tony agrees, but, unknown to her, he decides to keep her London flat for his own purposes. In March 1933 Waugh wrote to Peters from Chagford to say that he intended to call the novel A Handful of Ashes. This title was disliked by Harpers; an alternative, Fourth Decade, was also considered and rejected. Wykes believes that, of the novel's three central characters, only Tony is representative of his real-life equivalent—Waugh in his pre-Catholic irreligious state. There is general agreement among commentators that other characters are drawn from life: Mr Todd is clearly based on the eccentric but rather less sinister Mr Christie; Dr Messinger, the incompetent explorer, reflects W. Roth, the curator of the museum whom Waugh considered accompanying into the jungle, only to be dissuaded by reports of Roth's irresponsibility and disregard of danger. Thérèse announces her destiny to marry a rich Catholic, and, in an echo of Jungman, recoils from Tony when she discovers that he still has a wife. Satire flourishes in a stable society and presupposes homogeneous standards... It is aimed at inconsistency and hypocrisy. It exposes polite cruelty and folly by exaggerating them. It seeks to produce shame. All this has no place in the Century of the Common Man where vice no longer pays lip service to virtue. Critics and commentators have generally acknowledged that A Handful of Dust stands apart from Waugh's other prewar fiction. A later critic, John Cunningham, recognises that stylistically, the book is in a different category from Waugh's other 1930s novels, both more ambitious and more ambiguous. In his introduction to the 1997 Penguin edition, Robert Murray Davis suggests that in part, the book reflected Waugh's reconsideration of his position as a Catholic writer, in the light of the recent Oldmeadow furore over Black Mischief. He may have developed a more serious tone to pre-empt further criticism from that quarter, although Stannard maintains that Waugh's beginnings as a serious writer date back to 1929, when he was completing Vile Bodies. Religion and humanism Cunningham sees A Handful of Dust as a forerunner of Waugh's later, avowedly Catholic novels. In keeping with Waugh's dismissive attitude to the , Anglicanism is shown as a farce Mr Tendril the vicar's sermons , or a nullity Tony's admission that he had never really thought much about God. He believed that the essential 20th century conflict was between Christianity and Chaos, and chose to present a chaotic world to demonstrate that civilisation did not have in itself the power to survive. Todd is the symbol of humanist, irreligious power. English Gothic Ettington Park, in Warwickshire, a mid-nineteenth century remodelling of a much earlier house, as was the fictional Hetton. According to Stannard, Waugh tended to judge a civilisation by its art, and especially by its architecture, and is a major leitmotif of the novel. Publication history A Handful of Dust first appeared in Harper's Bazaar, as a serial in five instalments during the summer of 1934, using the alternative, non-Brazilian ending. The complete novel was first published in book form in London, on 4 September 1934, by Chapman and Hall. It was an immediate success with the British public, and within four weeks had reached its fifth impression. In the same month it was issued in New York by , who were initially unenthusiastic about the book and, according to Waugh's agent, made little promotional effort on its behalf. It has since been published in the United States by among others 1959 ; 1977 ; and 2001. Since its first publication the book has remained in print, and has been reproduced in many editions and foreign languages. It was first published as a paperback in 1951, by , who have reissued it regularly. In 1945 Bernard Grasset published a translation in French, after which the book was published in most European languages, and also in Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Arabic. Critical reception The initial critical response to the book, while largely complimentary in tone, was nevertheless muted and sparse. This relative paucity of attention, Stannard surmises, might have been a consequence of the earlier serialisation, which meant that the essence of the story was well known before the book appeared. The review mixed literary criticism with moral sermonising, to which Waugh felt bound to object publicly. Many of Waugh's friends and admirers gave the book unstinting praise, among them , , and. Among those less enthusiastic were the novelist , who found the characters lightweight and uninvolving, and the devoutly Catholic Katharine Asquith who thought the writing was brilliant but the subject-matter deeply depressing. The novel's critical standing grew steadily in the years following its publication. In 1942 the American critic chose it as the best English novel in 100 years, a verdict largely endorsed some years later by Frank Kermode. On 8 April 1968 broadcast A Handful of Dust as a radio play, in an adaptation by Denis Constanduros produced by Brian Miller. A new radio adaptation, with Jonathan Cullen and in the main roles, was broadcast as a two-part serial in May 1996. In November 1982 an ensemble cast performed the work as a stage play, directed by Mike Alfreds, at the. A , directed by , was released in 1988, with as Tony, as Brenda, as Mrs Beaver and as Mr Todd. She believes that although Waugh may have begun the story in Boa Vista, it unlikely that a story of this length and complexity could be completed in two days and notes that story incorporates events that occurred after Waugh left Boa Vista. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Retrieved 12 November 2014. Novel: A Forum on Fiction. Life International: Chicago : 53—60. Archived from on 4 November 2014. Journal of Modern Literature University of Indiana. University of Adelaide ebook. Archived from PDF on 3 August 2016. Retrieved 18 July 2016. Maud and Other Poems. Christian Classics Ethereal library. Retrieved 16 September 2015. Novel: A Forum on Fiction. The Sewanee Review Johns Hopkins University. Retrieved 28 July 2016. Retrieved 18 July 2016. Retrieved 18 July 2016. Retrieved 18 July 2016. Retrieved 21 November 2014. Retrieved 21 November 2014. Retrieved 23 November 2014. Retrieved 23 November 2014. Genome Radio Times 1923—2009. Retrieved 23 November 2014. Retrieved 29 November 2014. Retrieved 29 November 2014. The Letters of Evelyn Waugh. The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Waugh : A Handful of Dust. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books. Evelyn Waugh: A biography. Cyril Connolly: A Life. Evelyn Waugh: The Complete Short Stories Introduction. Evelyn Waugh, Volume I: The Early Years 1903—1939. Evelyn Waugh: The Critical Heritage. Evelyn Waugh: A biography. A Handful of Dust. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books. Evelyn Waugh: A Literary Life.

When a search party finally reaches the settlement, Todd arranges that Tony be drugged and kept hidden; he tells the party that Tony has died, and gives them his watch to take home. His decision to absent himself may have been a reaction to his increasingly prime emotional life; while his passion for Teresa Jungman remained unrequited, he was involved in various unsatisfactory casual sexual liaisons, and was himself being pursued by the much older. Archived from PDF on 3 August 2016. The choice of South America was probably influenced bythe u editor of. Waugh's agent sold the pre-publication serialisation rights to the American monthly magazine. The readings continue, but the atmosphere becomes increasingly menacing as Tony realises he is being held against his will.