A Handful of Dust Study Guide

Evelyn Waugh was born in 1903, the second son in a family whose ancestry drew from throughout the British Isles as well as France. Evelyn’s father Arthur, a publisher and literary critic of note, always favored his older son Alec, and their tight relationship habitually left the young Evelyn feeling shunned. In his schoolboy years Evelyn was something of a bully, and this instinct toward cruelty would stay with him throughout his adult life and frequently color his writings. Waugh attended Oxford, where he behaved rambunctiously, experimented with homosexuality, and developed a drinking problem that would follow him his whole life. He came close but ultimately failed to earn a degree. After college, he chose to become a writer and sparked a sensation with his first few novels: these mercilessly satirized the chic scene in interwar London to which he himself belonged, popularly referred to as the “bright young things.” Following a disastrous first marriage and growing dissatisfaction with what he saw as a debased modern world, Waugh converted to Catholicism in 1930. Catholic themes, and the clash of tradition and modernity, would remain central to most of his work thereafter—much to the disappointment of some fans of his earlier satires. In the 1930s, he visited far-flung regions as a travel writer. He chose to fight in WWII when the time came, subsequently writing a trilogy of novels about the war. He continued to write, sometimes to great acclaim, until his death in 1966. However, his later years were marked by premature health issues and alcoholic decline, along with increasing bitterness towards the modern world. Today, his reputation stands firm as one of the 20th century’s greatest English novelists and prose stylists.

A Handful of Dust drew heavily on Waugh’s recent personal experiences at the time of its writing. Waugh married his first wife, also named Evelyn (Gardner), in 1928, but the marriage lasted only a year before she declared that she loved John Heygate, her and Waugh’s mutual friend. While finalizing their divorce, Waugh was also preparing to be received into the Roman Catholic Church, which he did in 1930. Flailing in the humiliating collapse of his marriage and subsequent disappointing sexual affairs, Waugh fled his problems on a journey to South America, where he intended to arrive at the remote Amazonian city of Manaus. This ultimately proved impossible, and he spent much time in boredom and discomfort in the jungle with little to read. During this time, he met an eccentric elderly man named Christie, who told Waugh of his biblical visions. Christie ultimately became the model for Mr. Todd, and the entire experience, together with the marital breakdown and humiliation that preceded it, became the close autobiographical model for A Handful of Dust, which Waugh wrote between Morocco and England upon his return. Thus the seemingly incongruous, even unbelievable, third act of the novel in fact had its roots directly in Waugh’s recent activities. The implicit critique of a wayward and debased secular society that the novel offers reflects Waugh’s embrace of Catholicism, a pointed move in a country with centuries of Catholic-Protestant tensions.

Waugh’s first two novels, Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, were scathing and uproarious satires of the interwar London social circle he ran in. A Handful of Dust is often considered Waugh’s crucial transitionary book, since it retains the merciless and often funny depictions of contemporary London socialites that he had become known for, but humor is not as much of a priority. Instead, a deeper critique of modern civilization—reflecting his conversion to Catholicism—enters the novel, a critique that would come to dominate his later work more and more. Highlights of this more serious later period include Brideshead Revisited, often called one of the best novels of the century, and the Sword of Honour trilogy, derived from his time fighting in WWII. Waugh’s clique that he satirized in A Handful of Dust were known as the “Bright Young Things,” and among their ranks were other noted novelists including Henry Green, author of similarly autobiographical novels like Party Going, and crime novelist Dorothy Sayers, whose popular works included Murder Must Advertise. Waugh’s title and epigraph for this novel were taken from T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, which similarly reflected on the crisis of faith and meaning in modernity and is often considered the century’s most significant poem. The Amazonian misadventure in A Handful of Dust alludes to Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, which similarly follows a harrowing journey up a jungle river and confrontation with madness. Conrad was also a significant influence on Eliot, so Waugh’s evocation of them both was intended to place himself in a recent literary tradition.