Waugh's allusions to outside sources and concepts are explicit in this novel, serving the function of illuminating and giving dimension to surface aspects of the text . They are English Gothic, Proust, Dickens, Arthurian Romance, and Browning .
It hardly needs saying that, say, a church built in the classical style will have a streamlined purity which appeals to some universal aesthetic standard, and that the personal imprint of its sculptors and builders is submerged beneath this appeal to the intellect, whereas the Gothic church is an imposing presence appealing to the emotions, and its superstructure is arbitrarily festooned with assorted gargoyles and obscure motifs--the idiosyncratic imprint of the church's individual but nameless sculptors . This individual imprint was already a peculiarly English motif--witness the babooneries festooning the margins of illuminated church manuscripts from the Middle Ages onwards . English Gothic, then, is not just an architectural style : it is a frame of mind .
In the period of the Gothic Revival, '' England was the first country to break the unity of interior and exterior and wrap buildings up in clothes not made for them, but for buildings of other ages and purpose...in England there existed a disposition in favour of narrative, and the thatched Old English cottages as against the Italianate villas tell a story by their very costumes . Their effect is evocative, not strictly aesthetic .'' (N.Pevsner,The Englishness of English Art,48-50) As to evocative architecture, Vanbrugh wrote that certain buildings are valued highly by us because '' they move more lively and pleasing Reflections...On the persons who have Inhabited them, On the remarkable things which have been transacted in them'' (Pevsner,ibid) .
The problem here, as A Handful of Dust underlines, is that the legacy from old to new generation may be embarrassing, horrific, or simply irrelevant to the new owner : Beaver's dresser is submerged in his father's bric-a-brac, with not a hint that they are of use or welcome ; there is an embarrassing generation gap in function and mood at Bratt's ; Hetton is the weighty Last legacy, beloved by Tony, hated by Brenda ; Todd is legatee of his father's taste for Dickens . In this world, where curios change to unwanted bric-a-brac in a generation, the entrepreneurial Mrs Beaver is in her element . Town or country houses are passe ; town flats are 'in', so she supplies them and furnishes them from her garish cornucopia of yesterday's treasures . Beaver himself is like a flat on the social market waiting for a buyer, and he will not settle with Brenda unless the price, the settlement, is right .
There are numerous other examples of English neo-Gothic frame of mind, either of individualist, idiosyncratic, and barely understood whim of the moment, or of a person fitting up another according to his notion of the other's tastes :
(1) John Andrew's naming of Thunderclap : I don't know what it means,
but I didn't mean it(21) ;
(2) Brenda's choice of Beaver, although he is not the fashionable, or expected,
type for a beau : It's very odd that I should(59) ;
(3) Brenda and Polly trying to fit Tony up with the exotic--but, for Tony, distasteful--
Jenny(84) ;
(4) Tony arranging some tasteful adultery for Jock at Hetton(95) .
Against the current of change, whim and moment stand Hetton and Tony . But he only seems to stand for continuity . With him, it is simply a case of convergence of his personal tastes with his ancestral legacy, as it is for Teddy at the conclusion, and as it is for Todd, whose taste for Dickens coincides with his father's legacy . But, out of love for Hetton, Tony deceives himself into the role of link-man in the genealogical chain, and firms out this role by the purposeful routine of Lord of the Manor. As to Hetton itself, he knows it is neo-Gothic, but the ascription to the rooms of names from Arthurian Romance gives the internal layout of the manor an organic structure, rooted in medievalism, maintained and nurtured by the present incumbent .
The presence of an almost living Arthurian legend is not without relevance to the plot . At the knighting of Lancelot, Arthur forgets to grind on Lancelot's sword, and this is done by Guinevere, thus establishing a bond of feudal loyalty between them, which is soon deepened by physical attraction : at Hetton, Tony is a less than enthusiastic host to Beaver ; Brenda repairs the breach, a bond is established, bringing an affair in its train . Similarly, Lancelot and Guinevere become lovers on the night when Arthur sleeps with the enchantress, Camille : Beaver and Brenda indulge in a tryst while Tony is at the Old Hundredth, dallying, through a drunken haze, with the hostess, Babs .
Tony is cast as the deceived Arthur, Brenda as the alternately true and false Guinevere, and it is apposite to the Waugh story-line . Steeped in his stolid pursuance of maintaining Hetton, Tony is sleepily unaware of The Affair, and is only shocked out of his torpor by the death of young John . The direct genealogical line is cut away, but definitively so when Brenda eschews the sham, asks for a divorce, and takes up permanent residence in London . Hard Cheese (from Anglo-Saxon 'ceosan',to choose) on Tony, indeed ! For Tony chose Brenda and chose to stick with Hetton . Both are false : chimeras of a medievalism that he wills onto them, chimeras because extrinsic to their neo-Gothic natures . That Tony does think in these terms can be seen on p.151, when he is shocked into the realisation that Brenda would have Hetton sold out of the Last heritage to finance her marriage to Beaver : A whole Gothic world...armour...embroidered feet...unicorns... The present --Hetton or Brenda--is only the past, the Gothic past, in modern clothes .
Until the climactic pivotal point of John Andrew's death, Waugh is notable by his absence . The narrative is spartan, stripped clean of 'intervening' epithets whereby Waugh may incline . Also, there is a lack of descriptive passages as primary setting for his characters . Where descriptive passages do occur, they are delineated through a particular character's eyes : Tony's consideration, from below, of the Hetton ceilings and interior ; Tony's vision of Brenda dappled with the variegated stained-glass colours ; Mrs Beaver's assessment of the Hetton morning-room . Another example of Waugh's 'absence' is where he abruptly cuts across space and time from one situational conversation to another, with no ancillary fleshing-out of setting . This authorial detachment coincides with the period of Tony's deception, of his self-absorption in Hetton, when time is mere hand-maiden to Tony's wilful sense of continuity .
After the pivotal point, Waugh is immediately an immanent presence : Jock could never know in such detail the provenance of Jenny's furnishings(114) ; Brenda is once again (122) dappled with colour from the windows, but this time there is no subjective observer ; or, again, at Brighton, Waugh intrudes in metaphor about Milly--a legionary ordered for active service...(137) . Waugh's involvement coincides with Tony's awakening from his torpor and deception to an active, positive involvement and interaction with, and interest in, the world and the people who cross his path . In this second half, the keynote is 'All change' : new club, new places--Brighton, Barbados, Brazil--and a whole new set of characters--the St Clouds, detectives, the on-ship jogger, Messinger, Therese, the indians, and Todd--all in the main relayed by Waugh, though sometimes subjectively, through the sole surviving character from the first half, Tony .
This abrupt change in narrative style can be ascribed to what becomes manifest in Tony in the latter half of the novel : 'Tout ca change, tout c'est la meme chose' . Messinger evinces Tony's English Gothic convergence with mythic Gothic transposed into the mythic Eldorado in the jungle, built by Peruvian emigrants in the middle ages(163) . Therese, although hedged around by socio-religious motives for marriage within an exclusive set (in the manner of English aristocracy), indulges a whimful dalliance with an outsider (in the manner of Brenda with Beaver), and is another Guinevere, false in spirit to her prospective, eventual husband . The new, alert, inquisitive Tony has the chance to discern from the outside these identical patterns . But no more than he could at Hetton relate the Arthurian legend to his then current marital position, can he here relate current exemplars to his past marital position . For Hetton, and his obsession there with some residual Gothic continuity into the present, is here translated into a medieval city in the jungle . The very real Hetton and his Gothic dream were irrevocably sullied by contact with London, the wilfully ascribed continuity broken off by death and by his 'nearest and dearest'. But now Messinger has provided him with a clean canvas on which to paint a reported city which has survived in continuity from medieval times, unsullied by civilisation . He duly bedecks the mythic city with cornice and battlement, and we find ourselves with the same Tony of old, applying his English Gothic individualistic taste to a re-born Hetton in the jungle, and justifying his choice by identifying with continuity . After the climactic pivotal point, why need Waugh continue in authorial detachment ? Present or past, through whichever viewpoint, in whichever setting, Tony retains the same obsessional will to self-absorption and self-deception in a dream .
By the same token, the Proustian chapter-headings are there to suggest the possibility in the novel of a dual standpoint in the fashion of A la recherche du temps perdu . But there is no need for this peculiar Proustian narrative mode here, for Tony is so steeped in the endeavour to recover time from the Middle Ages to the present, i.e. anterior to his lifetime, that it eclipses any possible endeavour to recover time within his life-time and experience therein . For example, there is the flurry of reminiscences (155-6) of times of boyhood and youth : a sequence of events anterior to Hetton, irrelevant, unilluminating, and evoked not in the manner of Proust by some arbitrary, instant mnemonic, but simply by virtue of Tony having an excess of free time on the cruise . The sole instance of Proustian mnemonic (177) again recalls for Tony events anterior to Hetton . Clearly, Tony has not the presence of mind to assess his adult life from Hetton onwards . The Proustian double-time mode cannot serve the living dead, so Waugh mockingly--with Tony the butt--reduces it to time-zone differences whereby the old and new worlds collide abruptly, in time .
Tony's bouts of hallucination are a fitting stepping-stone to chez Todd , for both evince the past English scene dressed out in present jungle clothes : Green line rats to Dickens wrapped in palm leaf and raw hide . At first sight, Todd seems the ideal soul-partner for Tony : each has the good fortune of a legacy which coincides with his English Gothic tastes . But Todd is the more realistic of the two : with an equal devotion to his legacy as Tony to Hetton, Todd allows two hours a day to it to Tony's twenty-four . He actively ensures the cyclical continuity of Dickens, and his appreciation of it, at the point of a gun or by circumstantial coercion, whereas Tony attempted to ensure the linear continuity of Hetton by passively enacting the time-honoured role of Manorial Lord . Todd's pleasure in Dickens is insecurely sustained by a line of narrators whom Fate arbitrarily presents to him within his lifetime, whereas Tony's pleasure in Hetton is, he thinks, securely sustained by a genealogical line before and after his lifetime, but which Fate cuts away from him .
This concluding episode in the jungle is awash with irony, all at Tony's expense . Dickens's works were pictorially illustrated, but since Todd is illiterate, Tony must verbally illustrate them . Todd is interested in the motivation of fictional English characters, communicated by Tony, who never sounded the depths of motivation in real-life English people . Dickens spent a good deal of his life rendering public narrations of his works, which are pure neo-Gothic, spiked with literary babooneries, and we find Tony, with a penchant for Gothic Arthurian, having to spend the rest of his life giving private narrations of neo-Gothic to one with neo-Gothic tastes and temperament . Some of the Dickens novels are already a handful of dust, and time will pass the same sentence on Bleak House and its dust-heap, and on the other survivors . Waugh gives Tony a life sentence for his obsessional relation of Hetton to a mythical past [another handful of dust] in the constant, coerced presence of one who actively relates his obsession within a realisable, pragmatic present .
Meanwhile, back at Hetton, neo-Gothic is gathering apace, the Princes Risborough Lasts have moved in, the new labour-saving devices are in place, the manorial staffing and living arrangements are reordered to suit this junior line's individual taste and inclination . Tony's handful of dust, his individual style, has been swept clean or away, his memory confined to a plain monolith of local stone . It is only proper : when he was living in Hetton, Tony was the living dead, and Hetton the commemorative tomb-stone above him . Now that he is dead, living away from Hetton, a commemorative monolith stands on the grounds of Hetton, a silent Chorus facing onto what is now Tony's cenotaph, Hetton Abbey .
The impermanence of the senior Last line is the same as that of Browning's Last Duchess . It attaches to Tony and Brenda Last both, and yet, if Tony had been less obsessional, more alert and pragmatic in the now, one could well imagine Tony still the incumbent Last here and now at Hetton, saying somewhat ruefully, but at least comprehendingly :
' as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody's gift'
As it turned out, the senior Lasts are not even on the wall, and Tony is reduced to an adamantine concluding aside :
'Notice Anthony, though,
Taming the Amazon, thought a rarity,
Which the estate workmen cut in local stone for me !'
