LOST CITY

In a Preface to the 1962 edition of Black Mischief (first published 1932) author Evelyn Waugh puts his satire into historical context: "Black Mischief was written after a winter spent in East and Central Africa...Thirty years ago it seemed an anachronism that any part of Africa should be independent of European administration. History has not followed what then seemed its natural course." 

The imagined island of Sakuyu, renamed the Empire of Azania by his His Imperial Majesty Seth, is situated off the eastern coast of Africa. Its native regime is incompetent, corrupt, with delusions of grandeur. Latching on to this 'failed state' are a number of non-Africans singularly ill-equipped to hold responsible positions in any government worth the name.

Of the main expatriate character, Englishman Basil Seal, it was said by his mother Lady Celia, "it isn't even as though he was the kind of man who would do in Kenya". The official representative, "His Britannic Majesty's minister Sir Samson Courtenay" is also described in dismissive terms ― "almost from the outset of his career it became apparent that he would disappoint expectations".

More generally, "the unofficial British population of Debra Dowe [the island's capital] was small and rather shady". Typical is Mr Jagger the building contractor tasked with demolishing the Anglican cathedral. He is "a stocky, good-hearted little Britisher who after a succession of quite honourable bankruptcies in Cape Town, Mombasa, Dar-es-Salaam and Aden, had found his way to Debra Dowe where he had remained ever since".

Other outsiders to wash up on the listless shores of Azania include a devious Indian civil servant and a Portuguese trader whose venality knows no bounds. When Basil the failed parliamentarian arrives to assume the title "High Commissioner and Comptroller, Ministry of Modernisation", it is between coups. The Indian personal secretary to the emperor is dismissed, well, shot really, and the Portuguese entrepreneur becomes Financial Secretary to the new "department of everything".

Emperor Seth is kept in power by the boozy good offices of General Connolly, an Irishman who commands "the infantry; hard bare feet rythmically kicking up the dust, threadbare uniforms, caps at all angles...Lee Enfield rifle with fixed bayonets slung on their shoulders...pockets bulging with loot".

Black Mischief is an unashamed put-down of African nationalist aspirations. But it is also critical of the type of rejects from civilisation who are attracted to colonial outposts. To the author's credit, his fiction is based on actual experience, albeit short-term and through jaundiced eyes.

As a journalist and travel writer Waugh visited Africa in 1930-31 (British East Africa, Belgian Congo) and South America in 1932-33 (British Guyana, Brasil). From these trips he wrote two travel accounts (Remote People, 1931, Ninety-two Days, 1934) and two novels (Black Mischief, 1932, A Handful of Dust, 1934). He also reported on the Abyssinian emperor's coronation in 1930 and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia from Somalia in 1935-36, resulting in the non-fiction Waugh in Abyssinia (1936) and the novel Scoop (1938).

A Handful of Dust is a most notable for its latter third. The earlier part of the novel portrays an upper-class society in London that is shallow, treacherous and without meaning. This leads the central character Lord (Tony) Last to luncheon at the Greville Club, where he meets the explorer Dr Messenger. Tony is exhausted and confused by the secret betrayals of his wife and their 'friends', as well as the recent death of his young son John, and the impending loss of his much loved ancestral home Hetton Abbey. He is therefore susceptible to the Messenger's current obsession, a quest for the lost City of the Amazon.

     "I am going away shortly", said Dr Messenger, "to Brazil. At least it may be be Brazil or Dutch Guyana. One cannot tell. The frontier has never been demarcated...

      You see, there has been a continuous tradition about the City since the first explorers of the sixteenth century, It had been variously allocated, sometimes down in the Matte Grosso, sometimes on the upper Orinico in what is now Venezuela. I myself used to think it lay somewhere on the Uraricuera. I was out there last year and it was then that I established contact with the Pie-wie Indians; no white man had ever visited them and got out alive. And it was from the Pie-wies that I learned where to look. None of them had ever visited the City of course, but they knew about it...

      Well he told me that the City lies between the headwaters of the Courantyne and Takutu. There's a vast tract of unexplored country there. I've often thought of visiting...

      I more or less know how the City got there. It was the result of a migration from Peru at the beginning of the fifteenth century, when the Incas were at the height of their power. It is mentioned in all the early Spanish documents as a popular legend. One of the younger princes rebelled and led his people off into the forest. Most of the tribes had a tradition in one form or another of a strange race passing through their territory...

     Every tribe has a different word for it. The Pie-wies call it the 'Shining' or 'Glittering', the Arekuna the 'Many-Watered', the Pattamoras the 'Bright-Feathered, the Warau, oddly enough, use the same word for it that they use for a kind of aromatic jam they make. Of course, one can't tell how a civilisation may have developed or degenerated in five hundred years of isolation."

Before Tony left the Greville that day, he had arranged to join Dr Messenger in his expedition. Like an enthusiastic reader of Boys Own Magazine, he reached out for the mythical City. A fortnight later he was aboard ship, bound for the mouth of Dumerera in Guyana. Ahead lay a fortnight by boat up river, another fortnight trekking to its source, then crossing the ranges before descent by canoe into the Amazon Basin. 

But Tony had no practical grasp of what the expedition would really involve. "His mind was occupied with the City, the Shining, the Many-Watered, the Bright-Feathered, the Aromatic Jam. He had a clear picture of it in his mind. It was Gothic in character...a transfigured Hetton...a coral citadel...a tapestry landscape...this radiant sanctuary."

Tony's ideal of "a transfigured Hetton", an imaginary reproduction of England in the jungle, is as unrealistic as Emperor Seth's ordering-in of European 'modernity' from his collection of illustrated catalogues in Black Mischief. It ends badly in both stories. The Azanian chiefs honoured the reign of Seth by eating his corpse in a highly seasoned stew. The English lord is presumed dead in London, but is actually condemned to an endless reading out loud from Dickens' books to an insane Mr Todd (his illiterate rescuer/captor) in the Brazilian wilderness.

Waugh believed that exporting Western values would result in little lasting change. It was not just that he thought the colonised incapable of absorbing more than a superficial layer of 'civilisation'. He had a major problem with the quality of the 'donors' too.  

The frontis-piece to A Handful of Dust is an extract from TS Eliot's poem The Wasteland.

          I will show you something different from either

          Your shadow at morning striding behind you

           Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

            I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Literary critic Edward Lobb links this quotation to Tony Last's revelation in "the radical disorder of the jungle...Finally, feverish and out of his mind, Tony seems to realise that all human societies are corrupt;

      'I will tell you what I have learned in the forest, where time is different. There is no City.'"

Eliot's waste land is about desolation (mental) and fragments (physical). Civilisation and culture are reduced to "a heap of broken images" or "withered stumps of time". People give lip-service to ancient founding traditions but act without any sense of genuine reverence. They have lost faith in the immutable, preferring to judge matters as fundamental as sex and law according to self-interest or convenience. So,

           London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down.

Lobb also notes significant textual reference in A Handful of Dust to Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness. 

     "The surface parallels are obvious enough: a dangerous river journey, an encounter with a sinister, possibly mad European who tyrannizes over the natives, and a revelation...In Conrad, the heart of darkness ― Kurtz's 'horror' ― is the black hole at the centre of the universe, the recognition that all values are human constructions, that good and evil are mere words, that there is no standard by which to say that Kurtz's acts were atrocities."

Conrad's "vision of nothingness" is an important insight for interpreting Waugh's book. Narrator Marlow explains "stepping into the abyss" without the surety of sincere belief. 

     "Force of habit, fear of public opinion, and mere obliviousness keeps most people in line. For those who see the artificiality and ultimate impotence of such restraints, however, there are only two possibilities: Kurtz's nihilism [skulls atop the fence posts] or complicity in a conscious lie like the one Marlow tells to Kurtz's 'Intended' [He was thinking of you to the end]."

There is a connecting thematic thread between Conrad, Eliot, and Waugh. Despair at the emptiness, the falseness, indeed, the pettiness, of modern developed societies is completely at odds with their supposed superiority over the rest of the world. At Home, these writers are sure, there is the same void ("heart of darkness") that colonisers seek to dispel elsewhere.

Lest it be thought that this is over-interpreting the novels, or even inventing meaning where there is none, some commentary from the The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists (2009) may help. In his article on Evelyn Waugh, critic Anthony Lane summarises the author and his stories in a couple of pithy phrases:

     "Unlike...other travel-writers of his generation...Waugh, by his own admission, went abroad with a set of prejudices and came back with them intact..."

     "The lure of elsewhere, throughout the novels, is balanced with the horror of home...urban civilisation is no less rabid and raw than the supposedly primitive conditions under which less developed cultures are said to toil."

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Evelyn Waugh, 1932, Black Mischief, Chapman & Hall, London, <fadedpage.com/showbook.

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Evelyn Waugh, 1934, A Handful of Dust, <fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20190606>

Edward Lobb, 2004, 'Waugh Among the Modernists: Allusion and theme in A Handful of Dust', Connotations, vol 13, nos 1-2, pp 130-144

Anthony Lane, 'Evelyn Waugh', in Adrian Poole (ed), 2009, The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists, pp 407-422