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Sometimes the consequence is painful. There is the book whose title was taken from a line in T. S. Eliot's Waste Land: "I will show you fear in a handful of dust." A Handful of Dust tells about a dull Englishman whose dedicated obsession is to retrieve from the waste of time and progress the hideous country house which is his real love. His wife betrays him with a cheap social hanger-on who is not even physically attractive. His son & heir is killed. To save his sanity, the man betrayed by life & death goes abroad. In South America he falls into the clutches of a maniac recluse living in an inaccessible tract of the Amazon jungle. The mad outcast keeps the lover of the manorial past in a serfdom more awful than death—reading aloud the complete works of the laureate of industrial England, Charles Dickens.
Readers have complained that A Handful of Dust is not as gay as Waugh's earlier novels. It is, in fact, the terrifying crater of the abyss in which Waugh exists. Waugh is a conservative. In his case, this implies an intense sensitivity to the beauty of past forms, an organic response to the moral order that produced them. Waugh is a lover of tradition and hierarchy. In a world which denies hierarchy in the name of equality and tradition in the name of progress, Waugh is a lonely and an angry man. The modern world revolts him. He can see little in civilization that compensates for the chaos of the modern mind or the debasement of modern life.
Peristaltic Revulsion. In one degree or another, much of his work is an expression of loathing—a peristaltic revulsion of the soul. Waugh grasps at all outward forms—rank, ceremonies, cuisine, evocations of the architecture of once lovely and stately houses—to arrest the effortless slide of the old world into the muck of modernity. Brideshead is such an evocation.
The Flytes of Brideshead were a doomed family. They were Catholics in an alien community. The Flytes' Catholicism could not save them from a doom enjoined by the interaction of their characters on one another and the modern world. But it could save them from dissolution in their doom. That was the real meaning of Brideshead Revisited—that Catholicism was the one force that could still give order and unity to fragmented lives.
Waugh himself now regards Brideshead as a failure, a task beyond his powers. But readers were perhaps more right than the critics. The book has an elegiac beauty, like a bell tolling in a solitary church, where no one comes.
The Man. "Evelyn," Editor Cyril Connolly was once heard to sigh, "has been cruel, really very cruel to me." Evelyn and Cyril were not speaking at the time. For Evelyn Waugh's well-honed tongue is as celebrated as his snobbishness, social climbing and personal courage. Says an equally cruel contemporary: "One can find Evelyn's biography in the dedications of his books, each displaying a further step in his social progress." His first book, Rossetti; His Life and Works, was dedicated to Evelyn Gardner (fourth daughter of the first & last Baron Burghclere, and later Mrs. Evelyn Waugh No. 1). The Loved One is dedicated to Nancy Mitford, sister of the late Unity Mitford.