Waugh on the Warpath

Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One is not one of his ‘big name’ books. It doesn’t rank with, say, Scoop, Vile Bodies or Brideshead Revisited in the reading consciousness. I came across it only by dint of having a father who had read everything, usually as soon as it came out, and who had a first edition of the Penguin on his shelf. ‘If you like Decline and Fall,’ he would say, ‘you should read The Loved One,’ but for some reason I never did. Not until the other day, when it successfully got me through two dismal coach journeys. That is what Waugh specializes in, of course: a book to read which is like eating a long-drawn-out tea at Fortnum’s, but one you can leave and return to at your leisure – not that leaving it is all that easy.

These days America-bashing is the preserve of the Left, but of course it wasn’t always so. In 1948, when Waugh wrote The Loved One, as many of England’s upper classes (among whose ranks Waugh liked to place himself ) detested their American cousins as did socialist intellectuals. For instance, one of the things Waugh disliked about Americans was their not dressing for dinner; another, the tendency of such people as taxi drivers and lift attendants to ask him questions about himself when, in any civilized society, the conversational boot would naturally have been on the other foot. The Loved One is a controlled, deadly accurate venting of this latest manifestation of Waugh’s misanthropy and spleen, the emotions with which he is most at home as a writer. Modern consumerism may not have been an exclusively American phenomenon by 1948, but the US was certainly well ahead, and he was naturally inclined to despise Americans for it. Nor was that the only aspect that raised his hackles, if the depiction of its citizens here is anything to go by. The bogus politeness, the rigid conventionality, the inbred conviction of America’s superiority to every other nation on earth – these are also a target for his barbs. Waugh’s contempt for the country he first visited in 1947 (a visit which proved the catalyst for this book) is signalled as early as page one. Two Englishmen – Sir Francis Hinsley and the actor Sir Ambrose Abercrombie – sit on a veranda drinking whisky and soda. The heat has been intense all day and now the wind ‘shook the rusty fingers of palm leaf and swelled the dry sounds of summer, the frog voices, the grating cicadas, and the ever-present pulse of music from the neighbouring native huts’. Where are we? Presumably some farflung corner of the old empire – Malaya, perhaps, or Africa – where the two men are ‘staying on’. We have returned to the backdrop of Scoop and Black Mischief. But no, this is Hollywood, the native huts are condos, and the music is coming not from gourds and bongo drums but from wirelesses and gramophones. In this hilarious Martian touch, Waugh has set up his stall. Hollywood – America – he implies, is as uncivilized as any colonial backwater. The Englishmen, though scarcely Jamesian but themselves pretty appalling, with their old-school-tie, quasi-colonial values, nonetheless represent an older, more civilized world, Hollywood a new, brash, brutal one where a screenwriter (as happens to Sir Francis) can arrive at his office one morning to find his secretary has been reallocated and the name on the door changed, without his being informed of his dismissal. The vicious hilarity of the first page is sustained throughout with brio, and explains why, when it came out, the book was widely viewed as a return to form after the meanderings of Brideshead and the Sword of Honour trilogy, with their uncharacteristic nostalgia and seriousness of tone. If, among major English novelists writing after the war, Graham Greene was the first to perceive, and decry, the scope of America’s imperialist agenda, then Waugh, in The Loved One, can fairly lay claim to have done the same for its ruthless consumerism, its seemingly endemic naïveté, sentimentality and deadly (literally, on some occasions) earnestness. The latter characteristic is akin to the Germans’ proverbial lack of a sense of humour, and Waugh shows it no mercy. The female protagonist, Aimée Thanatogenos, is adored by two men, her boss Mr Joyboy, senior mortician at Whispering Glades crematorium, and Dennis Barlow, a flippant young English poet and failed Hollywood screenwriter, who now works at a pet cemetery. Dennis is in the habit of sending Aimée love poems out of Palgrave which he passes off as his own. This wheeze does the trick for a while, though even in her air-filled head a note of suspicion sounds when one of Dennis’s tributes compares her to a summer’s day. As a serious American girl, this jape, once discovered, unhinges her. She writes to an agony column that Dennis, though more attractive than her boss, has troubling traits: ‘For one thing he is English, and therefore in many ways quite un-American. I do not mean just his accent, and the way he eats, but he is cynical at things which should be sacred.’ By the latter she means such bogus features of Whispering Glades as an ‘apiary’ where there are no bees but only loudspeakers that reproduce the sounds of the hive, and a replica, in concrete and steel, of a medieval English church. The pursuit of consumerism to its logical, and grim, conclusion is pilloried with the mixture of amusement and scorn that characterize Waugh on top form. In the grounds of Whispering Glades stands the family vault of Kaiser, the stoneless peach magnate, whose appalling product recurs through the novel like the eyes of Dr T. J. Eckleburg in The Great Gatsby. About the star system, Waugh is equally on target. Sir Francis bitterly recalls his heyday, when he was once asked to rebrand an American Jewish starlet: ‘I remember the day she arrived. Poor Leo bought her for her eyes. She was called Baby Aaronson then . . . I named her [Juanita del Pablo] . . . I made her an anti-fascist refugee. I said she hated men because of her treatment by Franco’s Moors.’ The grisly sentimentality of the mock church and apiary are mirrored in the language of Whispering Glades – especially, obviously, with regard to death. A poster in the grounds of the crematorium reads: ‘Welcome to all the happiness of Whispering Glades’; the room where the corpses are laid out is dubbed ‘the slumber room’; and of course the book’s title is another syrupy euphemism designed to take the sting out of death. The inability to confront death head on betokens an immaturity to be expected of a relatively young country – the paradox of acute neurosis in a nation that places a pathological emphasis on normalcy. This sanitization of death reaches its grotesque comic apogee in the broad grins that Mr Joyboy implants on the faces of his corpses, the pipes he sticks in their mouths. Waugh’s ear, like his eye, is unerring. Another poster in the grounds of Whispering Glades reads: ‘This perfect replica of an old English manor . . . like all the buildings of Whispering Glades, is constructed throughout of Grade A steel and concrete.’ The native idioms are reproduced with pinpoint accuracy, from the nigh subnormal sincerity of Aimée to the hard-boiled cynicism of Mr Slump, the agony columnist. His response to Aimée’s last, desperate phone call is pure Chandler:

‘Well, sister, what is it?’ ‘You heard what I said?’ ‘Sure. I heard fine.’ ‘Well – what am I to do?’ ‘Do? I’ll tell you what to do. Find a nice window and jump out. That’s what you can do.’

If the mock church and mansion symbolize a lack of culture and tradition that add up to barbarity, Dennis Barlow’s flippancy, his irrepressible amusement in the face of life’s ghastliness, are racial traits that mark him out as different from, and superior to, the humourless Joyboy and Aimée. The ability to laugh at oneself, at life, at death, denote maturity, humanity, civilization. Here, Waugh is perhaps prescient, as it is the mark of a top-class satirist that he or she may detect a trend without even being aware of doing so. A serious point is being made beneath the comic surface. He has put his finger on an endemic problem, which ultimately proves fatal when Aimée, caught between the repulsively American Joyboy and the disturbingly British Barlow, commits suicide by injecting herself with cyanide in the embalming room. Her failure to get the joke has actually killed her. At the start of the twenty-first century we can extend this: if America had a better sense of humour, maybe fewer of her citizens would get shot in schools and shopping malls. By the last page, as Aimée’s corpse burns under Dennis’s dispassionate supervision in the crematorium of the pet cemetery, the reader has the sense of just having wallowed deliciously in a bath of bile. This (with the exception of Scoop, which is in a class, and mode, of its own) is what Waugh does best, as when he leaves his protagonists stranded in no man’s land at the end of Vile Bodies, or Tony Last in the jungle, reading Dickens to his illiterate captor Mr Todd, in A Handful of Dust. The Loved One invites us (in an utterly un-American way) to embrace and enjoy darkness, and Waugh’s achievement is that we do so, not merely without a qualm, but with positive pleasure.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 46 © Ranjit Bolt 2015