Evelyn Waugh, like Charles Ryder [the narrator of Brideshead Revisited], is an architectural painter who sees, with anger, horror, and a kind of fascination, the destruction of old homes, the decay of institutions, the death of meaningful values. But Waugh refuses to create a merely sentimental picture of the achievements of the past at the moment of extinction; he insists, rather, upon recording in scrupulous detail the actual process of demolition. In Waugh's satiric vision, seeming trivial events—the breaking up of a manor house, the redecoration of an old room with chromium plating, a drunken brawl in an Oxford courtyard—are symbols of a massive, irreversible, and terrifying victory of barbarism and the powers of darkness over civilization and light. Waugh's early novels, especially Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), and A Handful of Dust (1934) are chronicles of that awful triumph. (p. 4)

The wholesale demolition of the value structures of the past and the creation in their place of a vile and absurd habitation is the central theme of Waugh's early novels. However, this theme does not always manifest itself in terms of a destroyed manor house. Man, in his fear and anxiety over the loss of values, unconsciously seeks dehumanization, but he may become a sort of animal as well as a machine…. [In Waugh's novels the] savage coexists perfectly with the streamlined man…. Against the technological skill of the machine and the voracity of the savage, culture, refinement, and tradition have little defense. The jungle is always threatening to overrun the city, the work crews are always tearing down a country estate, and hordes of howling aristocrats and gate-crashers are always sullying the sacred preserves of order and decency. (pp. 6-7)

Paul Pennyfeather, the young man so rudely thrust into the world [in Decline and Fall], is singularly unsuited for its trials, for Paul is a shadow-man, completely passive, completely innocent. One of Waugh's favorite satiric devices is suddenly to catapult a totally naïve individual into a grotesque and uncontrollable world, for, with this technique, he can expose both the corruption of society and the hopelessness of naïve goodness and simple-minded humanism. Since the essence of Waugh's criticism of Paul Pennyfeather's innocence is that it is too simple to cope with the complexities of the world, one cannot expect complex character delineation, and indeed Paul's flatness is very carefully and successfully pursued. "Paul Pennyfeather would never have made a hero," Waugh blandly observes in the middle of the novel, "and the only interest about him arises from the unusual series of events of which his shadow was witness."… (p. 8)

[The] laying of absurd religious doubt by equally absurd religious conviction, is the sort of hilarious and gruesome irony Waugh delights in…. [Gratuitous cruelty is] a quality of Waugh's work which many readers have found disturbing. The grotesque, the unreasonable, and the cruel are always asserting themselves in the satirist's world…. The amputation of Lord Tangent's gangrenous foot and his death, reported in widely separated and totally undramatic asides, are the source of great amusement in Decline and Fall. The deliberate accumulation of cruel details creates the atmosphere of [the novel's] world…. (p. 10)

[There is, however] a vital principle which has remained completely untouched by the change. This principle manifests itself in "the primitive promptings of humanity," epitomized by Captain Grimes…. Grimes is a powerful life-force existing outside the pale of conventional morality, and, audacious, elusive, outrageous, free, he represents the spirit of Decline and Fall. The growth of Waugh's pessimism is reflected in his treatment of Grimes spiritual heirs. Father Rothschild, S.J., in Vile Bodies and Krikor Youkoumian in Black Mischief are far less sympathetic, until, with Mrs. Beaver, in A Handful of Dust, the vital principle has become triumphant opportunism and moral blankness. (p. 11)

Decline and Fall was characterized by its wild audacity, but Vile Bodies is a comedy haunted by an inexplicable sadness…. One of the curious qualities of Vile Bodies is the reader's inability to discriminate between guilt and innocence. In Decline and Fall Paul Pennyfeather was clearly an innocent suddenly thrown into a corrupt world, but the distinction is blurred in Vile Bodies. Adam sells his fiancée … and is an adulterer, but at the same time he exhibits an extraordinary naïveté and innocence, for he is conscious of breaking no moral norms.

Vile Bodies is an experimental novel. There is practically no plot and no continuity of narrative. The scenes shift wildly from the stormy English Channel to a party given for Mrs. Melrose Ape, the noted evangelist; from the intrigues of Father Rothschild, S.J., and the Prime Minister Walter Outrage to the small talk of two middle-class ladies on a train; from the drawing room of a huge mansion to the grease pit at the auto races. With this technique of disconnected and seemingly irrelevant scenes, Waugh is attempting to portray a world that is chaotic and out of joint. Readers have complained, with some justification, that the technique is all too successful, that the novel is disjointed and slights the affairs of Adam Fenwick-Symes and Nina Blount; but Vile Bodies is not a love story. Adam and Nina are significant only as representatives of the sickness of an entire generation, and their thwarted attempt to marry is meaningful and interesting only as a symbol of the frustrated search for values of all the Bright Young People. (pp. 12-14)

The fate of the old order with its decency, culture, and stability is represented by the fate of Anchorage House, the last survivor of the noble town houses of London…. A party at Anchorage House, "anchored" in custom and tradition, is juxtaposed with an orgy held by the Bright Young People in a dirigible, and the loss of the firm ground of the past is painfully obvious. (pp. 14-15)

Black Mischief is not a witty travelogue or, as some readers have felt, a vicious, racist attack on the African Negro. Rather, it treats precisely the themes of the earlier works—the shabbiness of Western culture, the decline and fall of institutions, the savagery underlying society.

Black Mischief chronicles the attempted modernization of a black nation by Seth, "Emperor of Azania, Chief of Chiefs of Sakuyu, Lord of Wanda and Tyrant of the Seas, Bachelor of the Arts of Oxford University."… As his title indicates, Seth's character is a paradoxical blend of savagery and civilization, the cannibal feast and the drawing room. He is unpredictable, cruel, naïve, insanely optimistic, lonely, terrified…. Seth's modernity … is not a meaningless label or a thin veneer of culture concealing the dominating violence of his black soul, for the meaning of Black Mischief is not the impossibility of civilizing the Negro. That the ideal of Progress in which Seth so fervently believes turns out to be a shabby concatenation of inane conventions is a condemnation far more of the cultivated Westerner than of the African. Seth serves the artistic purpose of a Paul Pennyfeather: he is a naïve outsider who, in his contact with an alien society, is the means of satirizing that society. (pp. 16-17)

The abortive attempt to modernize Azania is not a statement of the African nation's inability to share in the glories of civilization but a sly and satiric examination of modernity itself. The struggle which Seth envisages as a mortal combat between barbarism and Progress is a miserable sham, for Western culture itself is no longer meaningful. Those Western ideas which might have given Seth's project real significance have been abandoned…. The inspiring motto "Through Sterility to Culture" is the banner not merely of the participants in the birth-control pageant but of the entire European civilization. Western culture is sterile, totally isolated from the realities of human life and incapable of making man's existence more pleasant.

Waugh uses Africa as a lens which renders grotesque and revealing images of English institutions and social classes. The Bright Young People and their silly parents, scheming politicians and unscrupulous soldiers of fortune, crude peers and nouveau riche socialites are all represented in the Azanian court. (pp. 18-19)

As Decline and Fall was signalized by its comic audacity and Vile Bodies by its comic sadness, Black Mischief is characterized by its comic cruelty. Recurring references, quite hilarious in their context, to starving children, executed men, and mutilated bodies constantly remind the reader that as Seth's blind infatuation with Western culture grows, the savagery underlying the calm surface of the superimposed civilization becomes increasingly agitated until it explodes…. (p. 20)

Waugh's delight in architectural images does not diminish in Black Mischief. The tough old Anglican Cathedral …, that impractical and "shocking ugly building," is marked for demolition by Seth and the Ministry of Modernization to make way for the Place Marie Stopes. But the Cathedral, despite its many years of disuse, has a remarkable solidity…. The attempt to replace the worship of God with the worship of Progress is even more obvious in the site of the Ministry of Modernization, which occupies what had formerly been the old Empress' oratory.

Seth's palace compound, like the concept of progress it embodies, is a haphazard conglomeration of strange structures, refuse, and, occasionally, the flyblown carcase of a donkey or camel. Modernity and barbarism are linked in the grand work-projects of leveling and draining which are pursued without any success by gangs of prisoners chained neck to neck. (pp. 20-1)

The sense of desolation and decay is best conveyed, however, by another structure—a wrecked automobile, lying in the middle of the Avenue of Progress, its tires devoured by white ants, its motor removed by pilfering, its rusting body reinforced by rags, tin, mud, and grass and used as a home by a native family. The rotting car appears throughout Black Mischief as an impediment which Seth tries in vain to remove, and, at the end of the novel, when the British and French hold Azania as a joint protectorate, it is still blocking traffic, unmoved by the entire force of the League of Nations.

Seth's deposition and murder seems to be the laying of the ghost of madness and instability. The protectorate, with its pukka sahibs, police stations, snobbery, European clubs, polished brass, and Gilbert and Sullivan, promises to be a grand step forward in the onward March of Progress, but, like the reign of Seth, it is a ridiculous sham…. The history of Azania, like the dance of the witch doctors and the life of the Bright Young People, is a savage, futile, comic circle.

In A Handful of Dust Waugh returns to England to tell a seemingly simple story of the failure of a marriage…. What might have been a rather dull "bedroom farce," however, is transformed by Waugh into a terrifying and bitter examination of humanism and modern society, which is the culmination of his art. (pp. 21-2)

By the accumulation of a great many seemingly irrelevant details, Waugh evokes a whole world, a philosophy, and a way of life as well as an architecture and a landscape. Hetton [Tony's country home] is a lovely, sentimental, idealized world of the past and of childhood, at once silly and charming, hopelessly naïve and endearing. Far in the past Hetton had been an abbey, but, as religion receded, it became "one of the notable houses of the country" …, and, finally, in the nineteenth century, at the height of the Gothic revival, this structure was totally demolished and the present house was built as a monument to Victorian aesthetics. If the true significance and beauty of Hetton had been destroyed in 1864 or earlier when it ceased to shelter pious monks, at least the glazed brick and encaustic tile of the present structure have a character and sentimental worth completely lacking in the cold, oversize boxes being constructed in London. In the twentieth century, however, the huge building, with battlements and towers, a huge clock with maddeningly loud chimes, lancet windows of armorial stained glass, pitch-pine minstrels' gallery, Gothic bedrooms, moldy tapestries, and a fireplace resembling a thirteenth-century tomb, is rather impractical, mildly uncomfortable, and completely unfashionable.

Like the house itself, Hetton's proprietor, Tony Last, is a simple-minded creature of the past who has never quite grown up…. (pp. 23-4)

The infidelity and the disintegration of the marriage are not analyzed in terms of the characters' deep, personal drives or romantic love or even blind lust. Brenda cherishes no illusions about her chosen lover…. There are no soul-searchings, no tortured moments of guilt, no remorseful thoughts of home and family. Brenda's choice of John Beaver is completely thoughtless and completely appropriate, for they inhabit a world and share a set of values about which Tony Last, content at Hetton, can know nothing.

The complete absence of any emotional life in the characters of Waugh's satires has irritated certain critics…. But one must not ask Evelyn Waugh or any satirist for a deep psychological examination of his characters, for this would be inimical to the satire itself. Satire, like comedy, is bound to be directed at the nonpersonal and mechanistic, for it sees man as an automaton, swept up in the mad conventions of society…. Satiric detachment can only be maintained when characters are soulless actors in a social drama, when the author treats his creations not as individuals with private lives but as symbols of societal forces. Any single character taken out of this context and forced to stand naked before the critic will naturally seem flat and unreal, but this individual emptiness is not a symptom of … Waugh's "brilliant faking." Rather it is the result of an attempt to portray characters who have lost their inner beings, their complexity, their moral and intellectual independence. The satirist's careful and quite conscious shrinking of his characters' personalities does not mean, however, that satire must deal with trivialities, for, seen in his proper ambient, Tony Last transcends a shallow characterization of a sap and becomes the complex symbol of a dying value system at once hopelessly naïve and deeply sympathetic, unable to cope with society and yet the last spark of human decency in a vile world.

Waugh's brilliance and the source of his bitter pessimism is his remarkable ability to sustain an ironic double vision, to laugh uproariously at his posing, lying, stupid, carnal, vicious, and unhappy characters at the same time that he is leading them on to damnation through those very qualities. The plot of A Handful of Dust is very much that of a typical bedroom farce—the stupid country squire with the beautiful wife is cuckolded by a young man from the city—and Waugh does not hesitate to employ all the stock devices of such comedy. The husband, now called "old boy" by his friends, is the only person in the world who does not know of his wife's affair. The clever wife treats her husband outrageously and then makes him feel guilty for being such a suspicious old fool. Assignations are kept right under the husband's nose, to the delight of all informed onlookers. Old maids and matronly ladies get immense vicarious pleasure from the affair, which they treat as a marvelous fairy story of an imprisoned princess rescued by a shining hero. But the unrestrained laughter with which the reader is conditioned to greet such situations is never wholly fulfilled, for the reader is aware of the double vision, of the bitterly ironic and unforgiving theme underlying the surface gaiety and flamboyance. (pp. 24-6)

Waugh's world is one in which the worst possible events implicit in any situation can and do happen, a world where the savagery underlying a seemingly innocent remark is always fully realized…. A Handful of Dust is a novel filled with improbable events and grotesque characters, but nothing ever happens for which the reader is not thoroughly prepared by Waugh. Even the fantastic ending in the jungles of Brazil is foreshadowed in the Vicar's Christmas sermon, and, though the reader may never consciously make the connection, the logic of the finale has been established. If we characterize Waugh's first three novels as comic audacity, comic sadness, and comic cruelty respectively, A Handful of Dust may be understood as comic bitterness, the comedy of rigidity and misunderstanding, the bitterness of betrayed ideals and fallen dreams. (p. 28)

In his reaction to [his] child's death, Tony reveals the terrible price he has paid for his simple-minded humanism, for he has lost the ability to assert his identity even in the moment of greatest suffering. In complete abnegation, Tony worries about everyone's feelings but his own…. Tony, ignorant [and] self-deceived,… is pitiable …, but he is certainly not a tragic or even a wholly sympathetic figure. By constantly denying his own feelings, he has gradually reduced himself to a cipher. The fantasy world into which he had retreated to avoid the mechanical, dehumanized society has, ironically, robbed him of his humanity. (pp. 28-9)

[The] total disintegration [of Tony's life] recalls the mad banquet of Trimalchio in the Satyricon and the "universal Darkness" in the Dunciad; it is the vision of hell which has tormented every great satirist and which underlies all of Waugh's early work. (p. 30)

Tony's distant ancestors might have sought a hardheaded, human solution to the problems of unidealized existence, but the family line has gone sour and Tony is heir to the rottenness, imbecility, and sham of his nineteenth-century forebears who tore down a noble house to build a pretentious and fraudulent structure in its place. Faced with the realities of human viciousness and supported by nothing but his useless humanism, Tony can only retreat into infantile fantasies…. The repeated juxtaposition of a scene in Brazil and a similar scene in London makes devastatingly clear Waugh's point that the foul, inhuman jungle in which Tony wanders feverishly is London transfigured. At the heart of darkness, the intricate and elaborate screen of lies with which modern man comforts himself is torn away, and the horror and savagery of society is laid bare. Here, in a world where the distinction between reality and nightmare has broken down, the inhabitants are avaricious, moronic, superstitious, insolent cannibals; reason can no longer control passion; nature is cruel and treacherous; exposed flesh is prey to the bloodsucking thirst of vampire bats and malarial mosquitoes.

Fever-ridden and raving, Tony at last grasps the whole of his life as a grotesque hallucination. In a remarkable and brilliant passage, all of the characters in the novel, ugly and distorted, dance around the sick man in a mad, fiendish circle. Rising from his hammock, Tony begins to plunge wildly through the jungle…. (p. 31)

[He reaches] a transfigured Hetton, but it is stripped of all the sentimental drivel. Instead of ceilings groined and painted in diapers of red and gold and supported by shafts of polished granite with carved capitals, there are palm thatch roofs and breast-high walls of mud and wattle; instead of a society of vicious sophisticates presided over by a cruel and unfaithful wife, there is a community of savages ruled by a cunning lunatic…. Tony Last, literally imprisoned now in a literal wasteland, has nothing left of his dream but a heap of broken images. The fulfillment of Tony's humanism, his selfless devotion, his abnegation is an endless self-sacrifice enforced by a madman in the midst of a jungle. There is no City. Mrs. Beaver has covered it with chromium plating and converted it into flats. (p. 32)

[Like Nina Blount in Vile Bodies, Waugh] regards what was once "a precious stone set in the silver sea" and is obsessed with an overwhelming sense of loss. His laughter at the masses of dirty, moronic, corrupt, and fornicating beings beneath him cannot conceal his bitter rage. For the glory, the beauty, the dignity, and the grace of England have been destroyed, and Waugh, like Nina, sees only straggling red suburb, nauseating filth, and appalling decay. (p. 33)

Stephen Jay Greenblatt, in his Three Modern Satirists: Waugh, Orwell, and Huxley (copyright © 1965 by Yale University), Yale University Press, 1965.