Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust is such a curious novel. At once acerbic social satire and vicious family melodrama, it examines the question of social propriety among the upper echelons of the moneyed classes and yet loses steam in the last third of the novel. For the most part, however, it beautifully illustrates the ultimate cruelties and snide savagery that humans are all too capable of.
‘That’s always the trouble with people when they start walking out. They either think no one knows, or everybody. The truth is that a few people like Polly and Sybil make a point of finding out about everyone’s private life; the rest of us just aren’t interested.’
Waugh begins the novel by introducing us to John Beaver, a hideous young man of little social standing – he’s always being called up at the last moment to fill in empty seats at dinner parties, he’s something of a joke within the moneyed social circle he moves in. Waugh moves on and introduces the Lasts, Lady Brenda and her husband Tony and their precocious child John Andrew, living in the Gothic surrounds of Tony’s familial estate Hetton. Their lifestyle seems to be largely idyllic, they don’t want for anything and Brenda and Tony’s relationship appears to be healthy and thriving, if a little fallen to routine. Into this idyll the unexpected arrival of Beaver has a profound effect on Lady Brenda, whose fascination with him leads her to London and eventually, embarking on a scandalous affair with the younger man. Scandalous not because of the age difference, or because she is already married – these sorts of frivolous affairs are quite common amongst the married set – but because of the disparity between their social positions. Brenda’s desire leads her to taking up a flat in London, apart from Tony, her son and Hetton.
It had been an autumn of very sparse and meagre romance; only the most obvious people had parted or come together, and Brenda was filling a want long felt by those whose simple, vicarious pleasure it was to discuss the subject in bed over the telephone. For them her circumstances shed peculiar glamour; for five years she had been a legendary, almost ghostly name, the imprisoned princess of a fairy story, and now that she had emerged there was more enchantment in the occurrence than in the mere change of habit of any other circumspect wife. Her very choice of partner gave the affair an appropriate touch of fantasy; Beaver, the joke figure they had all known and despised, suddenly caught up to her among the luminous clouds of deity.
Waugh’s writing is careful not to lay the blame on either side of the marriage. Showing the moroseness of both John Andrew and Tony left behind in Hetton, not aware of why Brenda is so taken with London all of a sudden, shifts our sympathies from her boredom and listlessness to their loss. After the tragic death of John Andrew, Brenda feels compelled (or freed) to tell Tony the truth about Beaver and London and that she wants a divorce. Because of her social status and to maintain social propriety – despite the fact that everyone already knew about the affair – Tony’s lawyers go to great lengths to create marital disruptions on his side to allow the divorce to move smoothly. A clandestine weekend with a woman from a club is more comic that it should be given the circumstances. Once the divorce proceedings are underway, suddenly Brenda and company are talking about Tony’s mortifying actions that lead to the necessary divorce, which is a confusing about face. I suppose maintaining the reputation of her good name is more important that anything even close to resembling the truth.
‘I hear Brenda disgraced herself,’ he said.
‘Goodness,’ said Brenda. ‘People do think that young men are easily come by.’
Whereas the social comedy is largely written in sparkling dialogue, but when Tony ventures to avoid all divorce proceedings and familial manipulations by taking an exotic trip overseas the tone significantly changes. Rather than relying on conversations to drive the narrative forward, it takes on a very different, more reflective and descriptive tone once Tony is abroad. Here the novel lost me a bit. Tony’s travels may have been interesting in their own right, but to become so involved in the inner workings of the social circles of the Lasts and then to be torn right out of it had a somewhat jarring effect. Perhaps this is to suggest Tony’s equal removal from society through no real fault of his own?
After such effective portrayal of the petty worries of the London elite, the ending is rather unsatisfying and bleak. Tony is lost in Brazil, captive to an old man who forces him to read Dickens to him every night; Brenda has remarried, not to Beaver, but to another of Tony’s close friends, and Hetton has passed into the hands of Tony’s relatives. Reflecting on it, I suppose that in A Handful of Dust Waugh was trying to show that all humans are capable of great savagery – whether it is discussed discreetly among friends in beautifully decorated drawing rooms or in the remote jungles and clay huts of the tropics.
I picked up Aldous Huxley’s classic Brave New World with knowledge of its dystopian themes, but with no real awareness of its story; vague recollections of soma and babies being created mechanically, but nothing really beyond that. It’s amazing how in a culture in which we are continually spoiled or assumed to have a certain level of knowledge about canonical texts, somehow, basic information about Brave New World had passed me by. Set in the distant future, civilized society has taken technology and the methods of mechanical reproduction to every aspect of human life – the physical birthing process and concept of mothers are abhorred in favour of chemically differentiated humans assigned to castes according to tasks that need to be performed within society, work is performed in exchange for the perfect drug soma, promiscuity and carnality are encouraged, and above all the collective social order is more important than the individual. Within this system, Bernard Marx finds himself feeling “different” but it isn’t until he returns from a savage reservation with the naturally birthed son of Bernard’s Director that the social order can be examined from an outsiders perspective.
‘But people never are alone now,’ said Mustapha Mond. ‘We make them hate solitude; and we arrange their lives so that it’s almost impossible for them ever to have it.’
Bernard Marx is such a complex character, he is for the most part of the novel the sole voice of protest but he is too afraid to really express it, surrounded as he is by others who have been successfully conditioned to passively accept everything on offer. When John revolts against the impassive acceptance of his mothers death and refusal to see his grief, Bernard just stands back unable to join him. In his heart, and in his thoughts he knows that the methods of distraction are against everything he wants to stand for, but because he is both critical and part of society he just cannot separate himself entirely because it is all he knows. I didn’t wholly understand the point Huxley was driving toward until John (the Savage) meets with the Controller, Mustapha Mond, and Mond discusses the basis of the civilized world to the alienated and confused John. It wasn’t until this point when all everything started fitting together for me, and became truly horrifying – and started to mirror aspects of our own culture as well. The cult of positivity, the fear of solitude, the use of entertainment to dull people. Here’s a graphic which lends the comparison to today a stark relevance, and compares the future as envisioned by Huxley to that of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
‘But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.’
‘In fact,’ said Mustapha Mond, ‘you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.’
‘All right, then,’ said the Savage defiantly, ‘I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.’
‘Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.’
There was a long silence.
‘I claim them all,’ said the Savage at last.
Mustapha Mond shrugged his shoulders. ‘You’re welcome,’ he said.
I’m still stunned and taken aback by how powerful the final chapters of Huxley’s novel are. Reeling, I suppose one would say. I think my experience of Brave New World is going benefit immensely from multiple rereads, there was so much going on that didn’t become clear to me until the end. I feel completely unable to articulate how deeply it has shaken me. I wonder whether this paralyzing inability to write about Brave New World stems from the power and continuing relevance of its message or from the novels prestigious reputation. It’s the same feeling I had when I was reading The Heart is a Lonely Hunter for the first time (yes, I can really tie Carson McCullers into any and every book discussion I have.), the feeling of “yes. Yes. Yes! Someone else gets it.” I’m sure it’s just a matter of synchronicity, simply discovering it at the right time.
(A brief note: I do talk about some details which are essential to the plot, so be aware. This is your official spoiler warning.)
Before beginning to read All the King’s Men, I was under the impression – one of those pesky groundless preconceived notions that so often prove to be wildly incorrect – that it would be a very dry, heavily political novel. Had I done a little research beforehand, I would have discovered that Robert Penn Warren not only won the Pulitzer Prize for this novel, but also for his poetry, making him the only person to win the Pulitzer for fiction and poetry. (He was also a Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for the Library of Congress.) Enough about the author, basically I approached All the King’s Men with a misconception about the content and style, and was surprised, even pleased, to find that I was completely wrong.
Jack Burden, a wisecracking journalist, narrates the tale of and his role in the political career of Willie Stark, an idealistic and determined lawyer turned politician, in the early 1930s in the American South. Stark enters his political career primarily because of the corruption of others – an underhanded affair with a local schoolhouse goes fatally wrong which puts him in favour of the voters, he is the pawn in a political game to try and split the vote of another candidate running for Governor. It is this latter event, and the revelation of his role as a pawn, “a sap”, from his assistant/mistress Sadie Burke that sets in motion Stark’s attitude toward politics. Afterward, Stark is not afraid to use the same corrupt, morally questionable techniques in order to succeed. Eventually, he turns to use these on Jack Burden, his press man, who has close familial connections to influential people in the state. Interestingly, Warren presents these events non-chronologically, as Burden reflects back on their relationship together. It is a bit confusing at first, especially because the chapters are so long and it is easy to get lost in the temporal shifts. However, it is a clever stylistic technique, and comes to echo the theme of time, responsibility and retrospective reassessments of the past.
“Yeah,” I said, “I heard the speech. But they don’t give a damn about that. Hell, make ‘em cry, make ‘em laugh, make ‘em think you’re their weak erring pal, or make ‘em think you’re God Almighty. Or make ‘em mad. Even mad at you. Just stir ‘em up, it doesn’t matter how or why, and they’ll love you and come back for more. Pinch ‘em in the soft place. They aren’t alive, most of ‘em, and haven’t been alive in twenty years. Hell, their wives have lost their teeth and their shape, and likker won’t set on their stomachs, and they don’t believe in God, so it’s up to you to give ‘em something to stir ‘em up and make ‘em feel alive again. Just for half an hour. That’s what they come for. Tell ‘em anything. But for Sweet Jesus’ sake, don’t try to improve their minds.”
It is Willie Stark’s insistence that Burden scrounge around for any dirt on Judge Irwin, a prominent father figure of Jack’s youth and an ally to Stark’s political rival MacMurfee, that the story really springs from. Burden revisits his childhood and adolescence, the people and family members that populated those years and uncovers a hell of a lot more than he ever intended. While it is somewhat questionable, I thought, of Stark to encourage Burden to look into Judge Irwin’s past to find any misdeeds, Burden takes on the role with aplomb. A former student of history, Jack has a keen awareness of the importance of the past, but no real attachment to his own. Burden discovers an incident of bribery and suicide which implicates not only Judge Irwin, but Governor Stanton, the father of Burden’s close friends Anne and Adam Stanton. Unsurprisingly, Stark uses these connections and the knowledge of the event to use Adam and Anne for his own ends as well, making Adam Stanton the head of a new medical centre and taking Anne Stanton, the object of Jack’s affection, for his mistress. To Willie, everything and everyone is a potential political tool.
Feeling betrayed and rejected after finding out about Willie and Anne, Jack heads West, taking a road trip of self discovery, coming out of it with the theory that no one is responsible for anything, instead there is an uncontrollable, involuntary current which guides everything. This seems to be just another way for Burden to diminish his participation when things turn out badly. Burden confronts Judge Irwin about his involvement in the bribery/suicide case, leading to Irwin shooting himself later that night. Jack’s mother reveals that Judge Irwin was Jack’s biological father. Despite the violence that occurs as a result of his actions, Burden takes or seems to show little responsibility toward his part in it, assuaging any guilt by lying about their conversation.
I dismissed the question finally. Perhaps the only answer, I thought then, was that by the time we understand the pattern we are in, the definition we are making for ourselves, it is too late to break out of the box. We can only live in terms of the definition, like the prisoner in the cage in which he cannot lie or stand or sit, hung up in justice to be viewed by the populace. Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selfness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made? At least that was the way I argued the case back then.
The novel ends in a display of bloodshed, Adam discovers the truth about Willie and Anne disrupting his staunchly held belief in the triumph of good and honesty over all else, and shoots Willie; Willie’s over protective driver Sugar Boy shoots Adam. As Jack tries to uncover who set in motion the carnage he comes to accept his responsibility, in part, for what happened. While he shows some awareness of how his actions influenced the actions of others, there still doesn’t seem to be any retribution or repentance for this. He ends with everything he ever wanted, money, the girl, the time to write his monograph on a distant family member and so on. At first, this ending didn’t really have much effect on me, but the night I finished it I woke up during the night and found myself thinking about it, incredibly incensed about how things transpired. Thinking further, it probably just reflects deeper on a comment Willie makes in the novel about how all good is built upon the foundation of corruption.
All the King’s Men is a powerful novel, definitely not the dry political tome I was expecting. Instead it examines the moral responsibility we should take for our actions and the implications and importance of time and hindsight in a detailed and vivid language.
Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell
Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road examines the harsh poverty in the daily life of the Lester family. Jeeter Lester is a failed sharecropper whose family are starving and all but two of his seventeen children have abandoned him. Jeeter’s sister, a widowed preacher, arrives and lures his son Dude into marriage.
Jeeter Lester is such a curious character. He is driven by a faith in nature, a faith in God, despite numerous setbacks which he solely accredits to the work of God; but it is a misguided religious faith, almost an excuse for not taking responsibility for his own livelihood. Then there is the faith of preacher Sister Bessie, whose religious devotion does not seem to be any more active that Jeeter’s. Her motivation for marrying Dude is unclear, the marriage doesn’t seem to benefit her – and this is a tale devoid of all love, marriage is a business transaction.
Pearl would not talk. She would not say a word, no matter how persuasive Lov tried to be, nor how angry he was; she even hid from Lov when he came home from the coal chute, and when he found her, she slipped away from his grasp and ran off into the broom-sedge out of sight. Sometimes she would even stay in the broom-sedge all night, remaining out there until Lov went to work the next morning.
Pearl had never talked, for that matter. Not because she could not, but simply because she did not want to.
There is always the undercurrent of suggested violence, especially against women. Lov and his child bride Pearl Lester, all of 12 years old and refuses to speak to or sleep in the same room as him. The position of women in Tobacco Road is perplexing. They are wives who fail, according to their husbands, their duties both around the home and sexually. Ellie May and Sister Bessie are physically deformed: Ellie May with her reparable harelip (which Jeeter keeps talking about how he will take her to get it fixed, but after eighteen years still hasn’t managed to provide for her), Sister Bessie with her absent nose – just two black holes in her face. The male characters continually point out these physical attributes, often claiming that it prevents them from being able to find a man. This continual degradation of the female characters made me feel uncomfortable.
The novel sometimes appears to be repetitive – characters repeat the same action or speak the same words over and over. At first I thought it was lazy writing, reducing the characters to mere simpletons with very little internal, emotional processes; but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed that this repetition worked to keep them within the vicious cycle of poverty. Jeeter talks about how all he needs is a mule and cotton seed – at least once each chapter – but he just doesn’t have the motivation or means to actually do it. Talking about it, knowing the way out, but being unable to translate that into action keeps the Lester family in their state. Jeeter prides himself on maintaining tradition, without realizing that it comes at the expense of progress.
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio tells of the townfolk of Winesburg, their eccentricities, their frustrations and their desires. All of them share their stories and interact with George Willard, a young reporter for the local newspaper, who acts as a sort of guiding beacon in their lives. Each of the chapters introduces a new character, linked with the others only by their friendship with George Willard, their hometown and their inherent and desperate loneliness; in this way it reminded me of Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Willard acts as a symbol of hope for the possibility of escape from the stifling conditions of Winesburg which have crippled, it seems, a large majority of the townsfolk.
Rather than a sprawling narrative tracing entire lives, instead Anderson chooses the moments in life that make them simultaneously unique and alike: a young mother who neglected her own dreams listens to her son express his own desire for adventure and escape, a minister watches the bare shoulders of a woman from the window of his study, a woman is abandoned by her young lover. There seems to be a distinct schism between who these people are now and who they were in the past, and they attempt to understand what happened to them in the in-between time. Yes, it is the loss of a type of innocence, but it is not quite as explicit or simple as that. It is more than the gap between childhood and adulthood, more of a certain level of consciousness – an awareness and frustration of the limits of experience.
“There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backwards view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood. The boy is walking through the street of his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. Ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life. From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy. […] With all his heart he wants to come close to some other human, touch someone with his hands, be touched by the hand of another. If he prefers that the other be a woman, that is because he believes that a woman will be gentle, that she will understand. He wants, most of all, understanding.”
Denying the idea of an idyllic pastoral small-town America, Anderson creates Winesburg as a microcosmic textured map of the complexity of human desperation. These inarticulate, lonely characters have lives and moments that are heartbreakingly real, their secret thoughts and wishes are artfully expressed through Anderson’s haunting prose, giving voice, and hope, to the voiceless.
(Winesburg, Ohio is also available online to read through Project Gutenberg.)
As I Lay Dying: Successive episodes in the death and burial of Addie Bundren are recounted by various members of the family circle, principally as they are carting their mother’s coffin to Jefferson, Mississippi, in order to bury her among her people. As the desires and fears and rivalries of the family are revealed in the vernacular speech of the South, the author builds up an impression as epic as the Old Testament, as earthy and comic as Chaucer, as American as Huckleberry Finn.
I’m almost considering launching yet another tirade on how my Australian high school education and limited experience of studying Literature at a tertiary level never introduced me to Faulkner. I don’t know why I place such emphasis on discovering these authors within an educational setting, maybe because it seems like that is where most people tend to come across them? Then I think that I probably would not have understood these authors when I was younger, and that I am discovering them now because I am at a level where I can appreciate and enjoy them without it feeling like laborious study.
So, William Faulkner. I’ve spent a while researching Southern – mainly Southern Gothic – literature, and everything I’ve read of the genre has completely floored me. Faulkner was the huge looming giant of the genre, intimidating me with his stature and supposed difficulty.
I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time. (Addie)
William Faulkner
The death and subsequent burial rites of Addie Bundren are told through the voices of her children and husband, and local townsfolk, in a stream of consciousness style. It is richly layered and complex, it approaches issues of death and of the fragility of human identity. While the stream of consciousness narrative, shifting between fifteen different characters does take time to adjust to, it is also liberating – so much of the story is left to the imagination, so much is left unsaid and the reader has to interpret. It is challenging but in a satisfying way. The characters, at the beginning, seem to be indistinguishable from one another but gradually, through nuances of speech and thought patterns, they become clearer. They all deal with their grief over Addie Bundren’s death in their own way, no matter how far from usual conceptions of grief they may be. Their actions speak of their character more than their thoughts or speech does – I’m thinking mainly of Jewel here, who isn’t really given much of a voice, and his actions are read through the other characters. While Darl is the most eloquent of the family, some of his internal monologues are just breathtakingly gorgeous. The division between the inner thoughts and the conversations between the family establishes up how secretive and set apart all the characters are.
My mother is a fish. (Vardaman)
Most striking, and I’ve been thinking about it for days since, is Addie’s chapter told from her point of view after her death. (I think Faulkner says a lot about her position in the family by only allowing her voice to be heard beyond the grave.) She speaks of motherhood and childrearing in a completely unexpected non-romanticized way. It’s confronting in that it still seems to be largely believed that motherhood and the desire for children is a trait inherent in women. Addie speaks of how she hates her children, how motherhood is just a word and doesn’t mean a thing to her, it is just something she does.
He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn’t need a word for that any more than for pride or fear. (Addie)
An intense novel, thematically and stylistically, but the images of these characters have stuck with me for days. Their struggles, their secrets. I’m really looking forward to reading more Faulkner.
