The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Evelyn Waugh · a novel in seven chapters · Chapman and Hall, London, 1934 · scored on the book text of 1934 with its English ending, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
The comic society novel turned to tragedy without a change of manner: dialogue, report and telephone talk carrying a death, an adultery and a ruin
Mythos
The waste land in Eliot’s sense and its maimed king; a grail quest for a lost City that ends in captivity; a house built as a faith; the cuckold, the abandoned knight and the lost heir
Phase
London and the English country in the early 1930s, then the forest of Brazil; written in 1933 and 1934 after Waugh’s own journey through British Guiana into Brazil
Presentation
Fiction; seven chapters in the third person, almost wholly external, built in a mirrored design: two chapters named in Proust’s manner for two houses, three called English Gothic
Register
Deadpan, exact and quick; party chatter and flat report held unchanged through grief, and ending in terror
Scale
One marriage, one house and one man’s ruin, with a society, a law of divorce, a church and an empire behind them, in the length of a short novel
Governing Proposition
Tony Last loves his Gothic house, Hetton, as if it were a cathedral, and keeps the forms of a squire’s life, church included, when their meaning has gone. His wife Brenda drifts into an affair with John Beaver, a dull and needy young man about London; their son is killed in the hunting field; the marriage ends in a divorce staged by procedure; and Tony, looking for a lost City, finds himself held in the forest by Mr Todd, reading Dickens aloud without end. The wager of the novel is that the clipped, external manner of the comic society novel can carry a tragedy without softening it, and that a world in which feeling has become socially impossible needs no villain: cruelty there requires only inattention.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The novel opens in London, among the people who will undo its hero, and its first chapter is named in Proust’s manner for a house that is not his: “Du Côté de Chez Beaver”. John Beaver is a young man about town, dull and needy, with a mother who is a businesswoman. Nothing in the chapter is wicked. It is chatter, arrangements and telephone talk, the manner of Waugh’s first three novels, Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930) and Black Mischief (1932); this is his fourth, published by Chapman and Hall in 1934.
Tony Last lives in the country, at Hetton, a Gothic house built in 1864 which he loves as if it were a cathedral. Its bedrooms are named from Malory. He goes to church as a squire’s office, likes his breakfast tray and his routine, and talks of a lost City. His wife Brenda is charming, and the book shows her drift toward Beaver almost wholly from outside: in telephone calls, in gossip, in arrangements.
The narration will not say what anyone feels, and that refusal is the book’s instrument. These people cannot or will not say it; the form will not say it for them; and what an interior novel would make a sad story about a bad wife becomes, told from outside, a judgment on a whole manner of living. The cost is that Brenda’s interior, where the darkest truth lies, stays closed.
Movement II
Three chapters bear this title, and the house changes under it: from home, to illusion, to an inheritance that passes to cousins. Hetton is Tony’s faith. He keeps its upkeep and its forms as other men keep a creed, and the book lets the reader see, before he does, that the forms are already empty.
The church of the village gives the same truth in comic form. The vicar preaches sermons written for an Indian garrison, unchanged, to an English congregation, and Tony attends them as part of the office of his place. Religion is present as its absence, and the Gothic of the house stands in for it: a faith in architecture.
Above the house the book sets its title. The epigraph comes from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922): “I will show you fear in a handful of dust”. Hetton is a waste land in Eliot’s sense, and Tony its king, keeping a court whose meaning has gone.
Movement III
The death of the child is deferred until the reader has been lulled. Tony and Brenda’s son, John Andrew, is killed in the hunting field, and the book reports it as its people report everything, in the wrong words spoken in the right voice. When Brenda is told that John is dead, her relief that the John who died is her son and not John Beaver turns the novel.
That evening Tony, who can grieve in no form the house allows, plays animal snap with Mrs Rattery, a guest in the house. It is one of the book’s few heights, and it is cold: a man holding to a children’s game because the forms of his world have no place for what has happened to him.
The scene is placed exactly at the hinge. Before it the novel is a comedy of manners with a shadow in it; after it the same manner carries a ruin. That is the book’s swerve: the farcical technique used, unaltered, for a tragedy.
Movement IV
The marriage ends in divorce, and the law of the day requires evidence of adultery. Tony supplies it by a staged weekend at a Brighton hotel with a woman called Milly, who brings her child, Winnie. The set piece is comic, and it is load-bearing: here Tony’s decency is made to perform its own humiliation.
It is also where he first refuses. Brenda’s family ask for alimony on a scale that would force the sale of Hetton, and Tony declines it. The decent man, having given up his wife and his son, will not give up his house; the faith in forms is the one thing left in him that resists.
He leaves England instead. Divorce as procedure, property and inheritance, class and its money: the orders the book holds bear here on one man’s ruin, and none of them is pressed by a villain. Cruelty in this world needs no malice, only inattention.
Movement V
Tony goes in search of the City, which he imagines as a Gothic city of turrets, and the book follows him by liner and into the Brazilian forest. The chapters of the expedition are cross-cut with London, where Brenda slides into poverty and Beaver leaves for America. In his fever Tony sees the City as Hetton transfigured: the whole Gothic dream shown to be a hallucination.
The sixth chapter is named for a second house, Mr Todd’s, set against Beaver’s in Proust’s manner. Mr Todd keeps a guest by the forms of hospitality, as Hetton kept Tony, and he cannot read; he keeps Tony to read Dickens aloud to him, without end. The grail quest ends not in the grail but in captivity to a text. The ending comes from Waugh’s story “The Man Who Liked Dickens” (1933), and the seam shows a little in the forest’s transitions; the American serial’s other ending, in which Tony comes home, is not the work.
In England Tony’s death is reported and his memorial unveiled, and the last chapter, English Gothic once more, closes at Hetton in a page, with the house passed to the cousins. A man held in a house by a habit of reading: the ending repeats the beginning in the forest, and it is one of the great dreadful closures of the English novel.
Act III · The Twelve
Ask what could be removed, and little can. The staged divorce at Brighton, Tony’s weekend with Milly and her child Winnie to give the evidence of adultery the law then needed, looks like a comic set piece and is load-bearing: there his decency is made to perform its own humiliation, and there he first refuses Brenda’s family, declining the alimony that would force the sale of Hetton. The death of the child is placed exactly at the hinge. The forest chapters, often called a break, are compelled by Hetton: Tony seeks the City because his Gothic house has failed him. The interleaving of London scenes into the expedition is the one place a reader might ask whether the alternation is needed; it is, for it keeps Brenda’s slide into poverty and Beaver’s departure for America in the same frame as Tony’s fever.
Score: 8.5 / 10
What the book brings into the open can be stated and holds: a society in which feeling has been made socially impossible, and the moral catastrophe this permits without anyone raising a voice. No one is a villain in manner. Brenda is charming, Beaver merely dull and needy, his mother a businesswoman. Cruelty in this world needs no malice, only inattention; and the man of faithful habit, who goes to church as a squire’s office and loves a house built in 1864 as if it were a cathedral, has no defence, because his faith is in forms already empty. The vicar’s sermons, written for an Indian garrison and preached unchanged in an English village, give the religious version in one comic device. The axis stands on the line of the gate and no higher because the disclosure is made almost wholly from outside: Brenda’s interior, where the darkest truth lives, is closed by design, and the design costs some depth.
Score: 8.5 / 10
One of the three lowest of the twelve. Waugh’s method refuses elevation, and the axis is indifferent to the reason. The book rises in a cold register, and more than once. On the evening of the child’s death Tony, unable to grieve in any form the house allows, plays animal snap with Mrs Rattery, a guest in the house. In the forest his fever shows him the City as Hetton transfigured, the whole Gothic dream seen as a hallucination. And the last scene with Mr Todd reaches true terror: a man sentenced to read Dickens aloud forever to a captor who cannot read, while in England his death is reported and his memorial unveiled. It is one of the great dreadful closures of the English novel. What holds the axis here is frequency: for long stretches the book is brilliant social comedy, flat by intention.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Myth is built here more than readers of a society novel expect. The Arthurian design is structural: Hetton’s bedrooms are named from Malory; Tony is the king of a waste land in Eliot’s sense, and the title binds the book to Eliot’s poem; his journey is a grail quest for a lost City he imagines as a Gothic city of turrets. The quest ends not in the grail but in captivity to a text, Dickens read aloud as the endless rite of an imprisoned priest. The cuckold, the abandoned knight and the lost heir are each particular: Tony is never generalised, and remains a man who likes his breakfast tray and his routine. What holds the axis a tenth below the gate is that the frame is partly a satire on itself. The myth bears weight as irony, and the book declines to let it carry tragic weight in its own right.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is the comic society novel, Waugh’s own first three books, Firbank, and the manner of Wodehouse made sinister, together with the novel of the broken marriage. The turn is to use the farcical technique, unaltered, for a tragedy: the same deadpan, the same telephone conversations and party chatter, now carrying a child’s death, an adultery and a ruined man. Inside Waugh the swerve is real and its stake was real. He risked losing the readers of Vile Bodies by denying them the comic release, and he grafted onto the society novel a forest ending taken from a short story, a structural risk still argued over. Beyond Waugh the departure is smaller: the impersonal, ironic, dialogue-led novel was available from Firbank and from Hemingway, and the Eliotic frame was the decade’s common property. A turn of real cost inside a known mode.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The highest of the four axes of form and argument. Change the form and what the book knows goes. The knowledge is that these people cannot or will not say what they feel; the form is a narration that will not say it for them. Brenda’s affair is shown almost wholly in telephone talk, gossip and arrangements, and the death is reported by people saying the wrong thing in the right voice. Put the same story into an interior novel and it becomes a sad story about a bad wife; told from outside, it becomes a judgment on a whole manner of living. The chapter titles carry knowledge too: English Gothic three times, as the house goes from home to illusion to the cousins’ inheritance, and two houses of ruin set against each other in Proust’s manner, Beaver’s and Todd’s. The ending repeats Hetton in the forest: a man held in a house by a habit of reading.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The evidence of return is real. Ninety years of criticism have argued the same few questions without settling them: whether the Brazilian ending is earned; whether the book is a Catholic novel by absence; how far Brenda is condemned; whether Tony’s Gothic faith is a parody of belief or its residue. Those questions recur because the book will not close them. Formally it rewards rereading: the planted details, the bedroom names, Tony’s habits, the early talk of the City, pay out on return. What holds the axis at 8.0 is the book’s compactness and the lucidity of its surfaces. Its depths are of irony rather than of inexhaustible meaning, and a second or third reading confirms more than it discovers.
Score: 8.0 / 10
One of the three lowest of the twelve. The field is the English novel of the 1930s. The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation of what the comic novel could hold: the clipped, external, party-and-telephone manner shown able to carry tragedy without softening, and satire shown able to end in horror. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the book is the hinge of Waugh’s own career, between the farces and the gravity of Brideshead Revisited (1945) and the Sword of Honour trilogy (1952 to 1961), which returns to the cuckolded decent man in Guy Crouchback; it stands behind the dry, ironic, dialogue-led English novel of manners after the war, where Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time shares its world and method, and Muriel Spark’s cold comic fatalism is often traced to it, how far being argued. What holds the axis there is that the wider field was not redirected by this book alone: Waugh’s reach is that of his whole manner, and this novel is not the source of a mode.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The highest of the twelve. Ninety-two years since publication are weighed as ninety-two years. The text is whole and stable; its one textual question, the ending Waugh wrote for an American magazine serial, is settled by the book’s published form. Its presence has been continuous: in print since 1934, widely taught in courses on the modern English novel, translated into the main European languages, filmed by Charles Sturridge in 1988, and named by many critics as Waugh’s finest. The charge against a surface fixed to its moment applies in part. The slang, the divorce law that required staged evidence and the chromium flat are of 1934; but the book takes its period as its subject and has outlived it. Its presence is not the widest: it is read less than Brideshead. Fame is presence, not proof, and is counted for no more than a tenth.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Waugh’s English is among the most exact of the century, and here it is at full command: dialogue that characterises in two lines, a single flat sentence of report timed after pages of chatter, a comic cadence held through grief. The structure is as finely made as the prose. The child’s death is deferred until the reader has been lulled; Tony’s expedition is cross-cut with London; the City is planted early and returns in the fever; and the last chapter closes the book at Hetton, on the inheritance and the memorial, in a page. Command of the medium is what the axis weighs, not ambition of means. The one charge is that the transitions in the forest chapters, and the ending taken from a story, show some seam to a close reader.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the London society comedy of the first chapter and the forest captivity of the sixth. They obey one law, mostly, and the book takes care that they should. Mr Todd is a host who keeps a guest by the forms of hospitality, as Hetton kept Tony; the forest is Tony’s Gothic delusion made literal, and his fever sees the City as Hetton, making the link inside the book itself; the narration keeps one impassive register throughout. The range is wide, London flat, country house, Brighton hotel, Atlantic liner and Amazonian forest, and the law holds across most of it. What holds the axis at 8.3 is the forest chapters’ lean toward the adventure story and toward allegory, and a change of world abrupt enough that a long line of readers has felt the book break in two. The book answers that objection more than half way, not wholly.
Score: 8.3 / 10
One of the three lowest of the twelve. The orders held are several, and integrated rather than listed, for each bears on Tony’s ruin. The marriage and the family, in the child’s life and death. Property and inheritance, in Hetton, its upkeep and its passing to cousins. Class and society, in the London set, its money and its idleness. Law, in divorce as procedure. Religion, present as its absence: the vicar, Tony’s churchgoing as habit, the Gothic as a faith in architecture. Empire and the world beyond England, in the forest, the expedition and the sermons for India. What holds the axis there is that consciousness is held from outside, labour hardly enters, and the state and history are present only through their manners: a short novel holding much, not a book of the largest scope.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.0, then The Made at 8.9 and The Living Form at 8.6. Ninety-two years whole, in print and taught; an English among the most exact of the century, with dialogue that characterises in two lines and a structure as finely timed as the prose; and a form that is the knowledge, a narration that will not say what its people cannot, so that a story of a bad marriage becomes a judgment on a whole manner of living.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime, Pressure on Tradition and The Encompassed, each at 7.8. The book rises in a cold register, the animal snap, the fever, Mr Todd, but rarely, its long stretches flat by intention; its reach is that of Waugh’s whole manner rather than of this novel; and it holds many orders from outside, with consciousness closed, labour hardly present and the state and history seen only through their manners. Next above them, The Swerve and The Bottomless Well at 8.0: a turn of real cost inside a known mode, and depths of irony that a second reading confirms more than it discovers.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Made at 8.9, The Living Form at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.0 clears the bar of 8.5 and The Unconcealment meets it on the line at 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4 falls a tenth short, its myth built and load-bearing but held as irony rather than tragedy; The Swerve at 8.0 falls five tenths short, a turn of real cost made inside the known mode of the comic society novel; and Pressure on Tradition at 7.8 falls seven tenths short, its reach that of Waugh’s manner and not of a mode this book began. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below The Sublime and Pressure on Tradition at 7.8, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. The aggregate stands below 9.0 in any case, and the novel is placed in the Canonical tier on its standing.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, first published by Chapman and Hall, London, in 1934. It is scored as the novel in the text Waugh published in book form, in seven chapters, with its English ending, in which Tony Last is kept by Mr Todd in the Brazilian forest. The alternative ending written for the American magazine serial, published later as “By Special Request”, in which Tony comes home, is context and not the work. The book was written in 1933 and 1934, after Waugh’s journey through British Guiana and into Brazil in 1932 and 1933, which he wrote up as Ninety-Two Days (1934); its last chapters absorb his story “The Man Who Liked Dickens” (1933). No text of the novel was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. The plot, the cast and the mirrored design of the chapters are known closely; the wording of the prose is not. English is quoted only where the words are certain: the epigraph from Eliot’s The Waste Land, and the titles of the first and sixth chapters; Brenda’s words on hearing of the death are given in substance only, and everything else is paraphrased. Matters that could not be verified, among them the American publisher and date, the word count, the exact titles of the middle chapters, the names of particular bedrooms, the details of Mrs Rattery’s arrival, Mrs Beaver’s plans for Hetton, the trade the cousins take up at the house, the share of dialogue in the text and Waugh’s later account of the book’s subject, are not given.