The Columbia History of the British Novel

follow. Adam Fenwick-Symes, the «hero» of Vile Bodies, is so lacking in character that the narrator introduces him with throwaway carelessness: 'There was nothing particularly remarkable about his appearance. He looked exactly as young men like him do look.' Adam warrants no further physical description anywhere in the narrative. When we first meet him, he is returning from Paris. He had gone abroad to write his autobiography, a presumptuous project for someone so personally indistinct and still in his twenties. Arriving in England, he passes through customs where an alert inspector spots his manuscript and his copy of Dante's Purgatorio. No slouch, the inspector informs Adam that he 'knows dirt when I sees it, or I shouldn't be where I am today.' A moment later, with all the force of British authority behind him, this moral guardian strips Adam of his personal and cultural past-his autobiography and his Dante-leaving him to drift aimlessly through London society, a featureless nonentity, submitting to a series of improvised roles-hack author, gossip columnist, vacuum salesman, impromptu pimp, and, finally, a soldier lost in the uncharted landscape of 'the biggest battlefield in the history of the world.' In this, Waugh's most experimental novel, his characters have no past, no future, no interior lives; their presence registers as little more than a hapless flickering against 'an unusual series of events.'

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With the exception of his openly apologetic works involving his commitment to Roman Catholicism- Brideshead Revisited, Helena, and parts of the Sword of Honour trilogy-Waugh liked to devise paperthin characters running amok in apparently aimless plots. These twodimensional figures tend to fall into the two classes mentioned before: one traditional, the other modern. There are the well-meaning but dull citizens and the anarchic but engaging rogues. They often seem to belong different species. Captain Grimes and Paul Pennyfeather of Decline and Fall, for instance, work and socialize together but seem to belong to mutually exclusive moral universes. Grimes is the incorrigible rascal who flouts morals and manners so cheerfully that no one would seriously want to bring him to account. He may be a bisexual bigamist who leaves schoolmastering in Wales for pimping in South America, but these faults cannot be seriously held against a man who so genially confesses, 'I can stand most sorts of misfortune, old boy, but I can't stand repression.' Grimes goes his way 'careless of consequence,' slipping society's restraining nets with an ease that is as astonishing as it is comical. He is an untamable life force, disruptive of good manners, but quite beyond moral censure. Paul, on the other hand, lives his life as a divinity student with exemplary moderation (he smokes three ounces of tobacco a week and drinks a pint and a half of beer a day), keeps up with current affairs (he attends meetings at the League of Nations Union where he finds discussions of Polish plebiscites fascinating), and takes an interest in his nation's cultural past (he reads nightly installments of The Forsyte Saga). For his troubles he is sent down from Oxford, imprisoned for crimes he didn't commit, and, finally, forced to assume a false identity to escape his legal complications. There is no justice in Waugh's world, and that, of course, is the point. In Waugh's vision, modern society is bereft of any moral consensus and, as a consequence, human beings have been reduced to bogus shadows of themselves.

It is in A Handful of Dust, considered by many critics to be his best work, that Waugh makes his most trenchant criticisms of this bogus world. Tony Last is a variation on Waugh's standard protagonist: decent, educated, and almost criminally passive. As his name implies, Tony is the last of his line. Although he doesn't know it, he's the doomed gentleman in an age of crass opportunists. This ignorance defends him at first. Unlike others 'all over England,' he doesn't awaken each morning 'queasy and despondent.' Instead, a typical waking -882- hour finds him in bed 'happily planning the renovation of his ceiling.' This ceiling, however, gives Tony away. It's another product of nineteenth-century nostalgia: a sham Tudor ceiling made to look coffered by means of molded slats. The house he prizes, we discover, was built in the eighteenth century and then given a spurious Gothic façade in 1864 amid the Victorian enthusiasm for things medieval. It's a fake and, however unwittingly, so is Tony Last.

Tony has the show of tradition and the style of the aristocrat, but concerning his origins he has little understanding and less curiosity. He seems to take them for granted. He performs the outward duties of the Christian gentleman, but he does so with no better motive than a genteel and sentimental nostalgia. He attends chapel on Sundays, sitting in his family's pew furnished with its own fireplace. Under the guise of tending his fire, Tony's grandfather had once rattled the hearth's grating with his poker whenever he disapproved of something in the parson's sermon; Tony, however, no longer troubles himself to keep a fire going, much less to raise theological objections. He sits uncomplainingly through the senile Reverend Tendril's sermons. These are homilies that have not been revised since he wrote them while serving with Queen Victoria's imperial army in India. His Christmas sermon is a particular favorite with his congregation. As they sit shivering in their pews, he commiserates with them, but he mistakes the nature of their discomfort. 'How difficult it is for us… to realize that this is indeed Christmas,' he ruefully observes. 'Instead of the glowing log fire and windows tight shuttered against the drifting snow, we have only the harsh glare of the alien sun… Instead of the placid ox and ass of Bethlehem… we have for companions the ravening tiger and the exotic camel, the furtive jackal and the ponderous elephant.' The joke speaks for itself, but it also has further meaning. Tendril may be senile, but his sermons have an unwitting application. Tony Last is under the alien sun of the twentieth century, and the beasts of modernity are ravening all round him. His wife has taken up with the London fast set and has embarked on a pointless affair in the city while plotting to modernize Tony's beloved estate in the country. But Tony is too innocent to recognize her treachery. He is one of Waugh's decent, well-meaning bores, too complacent to maintain his guard against the barbarians at his gate. As one of Waugh's favorite metaphors would have it, he has 'deserted his post' and, given the opportunity, 'the jungle [is] creeping back to its old strongholds.'

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The sham of Tony's life is thoroughly exposed by Mrs. Rattery, his friend's current mistress. Before she arrives at his ancestral home, Tony had imagined her as 'chorus girl, in silk shorts and brassiere, popping out an immense beribboned Easter Egg with a cry of 'Whoopee, boys. ' Instead she descends on Tony's estate in her own plane, emerging from the cockpit 'tall and erect, almost austere in helmet and overalls,' her greetings 'deft and impersonal.' Far from being the wanton of Tony's imaginings, Mrs. Rattery turns out to be one of Waugh's supremely modern women. She lives in the world without visible antecedents, 'totally denationalized, rich without property or possessions… changing her hotel on an average, once every three weeks,' periodically 'liable to bouts of morphine.' Rootless and bored, she is the ultimate twentieth-century transient.

Like Margot Metroland in Decline and fall, Julia Stitch in Scoop, and Virginia Crouchback in The Sword of Honor, Mrs. Rattery is one of Waugh's goddesses of modernity; her spirit presides over A Handful of Dust in much the same way these others reign in their respective narratives. She is what George Orwell called streamlined, a person who has dispatched the nostalgic accessories of the past and abandoned the needless bother of an interior life as if they were so much excess baggage. Asked her opinion of the Last estate, she replies that she never notices houses one way or the other. Houses, ancestral houses at least, establish a link from one generation to the next, but Mrs. Rattery simply does not value the continuity they represent. She is supremely indifferent to the conventional concerns people have for their past and future. Mrs. Rattery's existence is radically present tense. As such she is ideally suited for survival in the contemporary urban scene. Waugh gives her what seems to be his grudging admiration. She displays undeniable integrity. Having accepted the terms of modernity, she acts on them without shame or apology.

Mrs. Rattery's appearance in the novel is brief but pivotal. She brings the modern world to Hetton and with it the death of Tony's Victorian dream. During her visit, his son dies and his marriage unravels. It's not that she is responsible for these events or that she dislikes Tony. In fact, she is the only one who bothers to offer him any comfort during his ordeal. But in the design of the novel, her presence simply explodes Tony's self-indulgent idyll.

Like Waugh's other innocents, Tony must suffer for his dereliction. He meets his punishment in Brazil. Having belatedly awakened to his -884- wife's betrayal, he embarks on a mad quest to find a lost civilization in the Amazonian jungles. Instead, he discovers that the modern savagery at home is only mirrored by the primitive savagery abroad. Succumbing to fever in the tropic clime, Tony wanders deliriously into the compound of a half- breed illiterate named Mr. Todd who has an unlikely passion for Dickens. He's so obsessed with Victorian sentiment that he makes a practice of having Dickens read to him aloud whenever he can get his hands on someone able to read. Soon Tony becomes his captive, reading and rereading the complete works while Mr. Todd ruminates on their significance. 'Do you believe in God?' he asks one day. Tony replies, 'I suppose so; I've never really thought about it much.' Mr. Todd's rejoinder is withering: 'Dickens did.'

In Waugh's view, Tony, the would-be Victorian gentleman, has missed the point of his cultural allegiance altogether. He has supported tradition for traditions sake, taking it as an end rather than a means. But tradition's real purpose, Waugh suggests, should be to provide structures through which the individual can become aware of