The Loved One is a short satire with very sharp teeth. It is hilarious in that dry, mordant vein the British mine so well. I'm confident you'll enjoy
The Loved One if you like sparkling prose, dark comedy, and a writer who wants to tip over every sacred cow he can find.
Evelyn Waugh was one of the most successful and influential comic writers between the World Wars. His sensibility is British, but his books trot the globe, and he has a large, clear grasp of human nature (and all that's ridiculous in us). Waugh's a good storyteller, a great crafter of language, and he has a very fresh and inventive wit. Waugh's characters are often caricatures, as he stretches their foibles for comic effect. Brideshead Revisited was adapted for TV in the '80s, was very popular, and sparked a Waugh revival. But Brideshead is unusual Waugh. It has humor, but it also has heart and heft: it's much more three-dimensional than his popular early satires.
The Loved One is less substantial than Brideshead Revisited, but succeeds splendidly in its aims. It's a zippy 160 pages, crackling with energy and stabbing with its punchlines. When it came out in 1948 it was shocking, as Waugh warns us on page 1:
A WARNING
This is a purely fanciful tale, a little nightmare produced by the unaccustomed high living of a brief visit to Hollywood. . . . As I have said, this is a nightmare and in parts, perhaps, somewhat gruesome. The squeamish should return their copies to the library or the bookstore unread.
The Loved One flips two fingers at social niceties, and chortles at cozy sentiments and brutal tragedies. You won't find it gruesome, as the horror flicks and newscasts of the last 60 years have jaded all of us, even our children. The salient question is, whether
The Loved One is too heartless. There are very few likable characters, and our hero, Dennis Barlow, is rotten. If you can accept that, he's also engaging, enterprising, sometimes frank and sincere, and daringly witty.
Waugh shaped a lovely plot, rich with comic potential. Dennis Barlow fought in WWI, was wounded and hospitalized, then wrote a book of war poems which was highly praised by critics. He has a literary reputation. He's been working as a scriptwriter at Megalopolitan Pictures. As The Loved One opens, Barlow's just been fired.
Barlow is on the edge of the British ex-pat community in Hollywood, which gives Waugh many contrasts to explore: British vs. American, Art vs. Commerce, Authenticity vs. Image, and Class vs. Impropriety or Coarseness to start with. The Brits stick together, look after their own, and keep up appearances. But Barlow doesn't care a fig for any of that.
The main action of the book is built around two cemeteries. The first is Whispering Glades, which is the snobby, pretentious cemetery all of Hollywood and LA royalty want plots in. They copy the brightest lilies of European Art, gild and amplify them, and think they've done world culture a great favor. Everything about Whispering Glades is a little ridiculous, while convinced of its own excellence. For example, they take Yeats's widely loved Lake Isle of Innisfree, and build an island that incorporates every phrase of Yeats's poem.
Barlow aspires to get a job at Whispering Glades, and falls in love with a mortuary cosmetician who works there. He has to hide from her that he now works at The Happier Hunting Ground - a pet cemetery, which dreams of being as "classy" as Whispering Glades. The Happier Hunting Ground's owner likes Barlow because, compared to the rest of the staff there, he lends the place a little dignity.
In the excerpt below, Barlow is visiting Whispering Glades for the first time. A Mortuary Hostess has been showing him the cemetery's splendors, and is now trying to interest him in their Before Need Provision Arrangement:
"The benefits of the plan are twofold" — she was speaking by the book now with a vengeance — "financial and psychological. You, Mr. Barlow, are now approaching your optimum earning phase. You are no doubt making provision of many kinds for your future — investments, insurance policies and so forth. You plan to spend your declining days in security but have you considered what burdens you may not be piling up for those you leave behind? Last month, Mr. Barlow, a husband and wife were here consulting us about Before Need Provision. They were prominent citizens in the prime of life with two daughters just budding into womanhood. They heard all particulars, they were impressed and said they would return in a few days to complete arrangements. Only next day those two passed on, Mr. Barlow, in an automobile accident, and instead of them there came two distraught orphans to ask what arrangements their parents had made. We were obliged to inform them that no arrangements had been made. In the hour of their greatest need those children were left comfortless. How different it would have been had we been able to say to them: 'Welcome to all the Happiness of Whispering Glades.' "
"Yes, but you know I haven't any children. Besides I am a foreigner. I have no intention of dying here."
"Mr. Barlow, you are afraid of death."
"No, I assure you."
"It is a natural instinct, Mr. Barlow, to shrink from the unknown. But if you discuss it openly and frankly you remove morbid reflexions. That is one of the things the psycho-analysts have taught us. Bring your dark fears into the light of the common day of the common man, Mr. Barlow. Realize that death is not a private tragedy of your own but the general lot of man. As Hamlet so beautifully writes: 'Know that death is common; all that live must die.' Perhaps you think it morbid and even dangerous to give thought to this subject, Mr. Barlow, the contrary has been proved by scientific investigation. Many people let their vital energy lag prematurely and their earning capacity diminish simply through fear of death. By removing that fear they actually increase their expectation of life. Choose now, at leisure and in health, the form of final preparation you require, pay for it while you are best able to do so, shed all anxiety. Pass the buck, Mr. Barlow; Whispering Glades can take it."
The Pros and Cons of Evelyn Waugh
I particularly enjoy Waugh's satires because his prose and wit are clear and sharp, and he appeals to the wicked side of my sense of humor. The Loved One is rich material for him to sink his teeth into: all those contrasts, every form of pretension, and the Disneyfication of great art.
I was surprised at how well his jokes carry across more than half a century, since he does poke fun at fashions and paints local and contemporary backdrops throughout his story. However, as with Austen, the central focus of Waugh's humor is human morality and feelings. The difference between him and Austen is, it's hard to tell if Waugh believes in the morality or really cares about the feelings. It's not exactly a shallowness: he does comprehend the human heart, there is some real insight here. But he wears cold armor, and he keeps his own heart well-hidden. He's not at all like Dickens, who obviously loves many of his characters, and pours warmth into the best and worst of them.
The aspect of The Loved One that won't carry so well to most modern readers is, Waugh riffs a lot on the poems and art that readers in the '40s were familiar with. You should know that Lake Isle of Innisfree was the Mull Of Kintyre of its time: ubiquitous, lovely, laughed at, way too popular to be hip. You should recognize famous lines from Shakespeare, Tennyson, Burns - and what those names convey.
Evelyn Waugh wrote many books, and several kinds of them: collections of short stories, travel books, biographies, a trilogy looking at WWII and all it destroyed, and a book about a descent into mental illness. Those last four books contained a lot of his own experiences. But Waugh was most successful with and famous for his satires of the bright young things of British Society between the Wars. The Loved One has a similar tone, and it's a page-turner and a quick read. His highest rated satires are, in approximate order of reputation, Vile Bodies, A Handful of Dust, Scoop and Decline and Fall. I found Brideshead Revisited his most satisfying as a novel, though it has a lot less laughs. I'm glad I read Brideshead Revisited, because it made Waugh easier to like, more sympathetically humane. If you read about the man, he comes across as easy to dislike:
In the course of his lifetime, Evelyn Waugh made enemies and offended many people; writer James Lees-Milne said that Waugh ″was the nastiest-tempered man in England″. Waugh's son, Auberon, said that the force of his father's personality was such that, despite his lack of height, ″generals and chancellors of the exchequer, six-foot-six and exuding self-importance from every pore, quail[ed] in front of him.″
In the biographic Mad World (2009), Paula Byrne said that the common view of Evelyn Waugh as a "snobbish misanthrope" is a caricature; and asks: "Why would a man, who was so unpleasant, be so beloved by such a wide circle of friends?"
Waugh was loyal to his close friends. He seems to have had few principles, but they were solid. He was also a terrible snob, and there is some racism and anti-semitism in his writing. He was an extreme egoist, pampering himself and scorning most others. I get the sense that there was some deep love in him, but not enough to spread around much. Waugh mostly had a good life and good fortune, but he had tragedies too, and his own issues (like that brush with madness). I think he had a lot of understanding, and some deep caring (he ended up a devout Catholic - a safe place to pour his heart, where human frailties couldn't disappoint him), but he was easily hurt and therefore armored himself tightly.
Waugh cherished language, and shaped it with thought and care. Here are a few glimpses from his Paris Review Interview:
Perhaps what was most striking about Mr. Waugh's conversation was his command of language: his spoken sentences were as graceful, precise, and rounded as his written sentences. He never faltered, nor once gave the impression of searching for a word. . . .
WAUGH
[A little restlessly] But look, I think that your questions are dealing too much with the creation of character and not enough with the technique of writing. I regard writing not as investigation of character, but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed. I have no technical psychological interest. It is drama, speech, and events that interest me.
INTERVIEWER
Does this mean that you continually refine and experiment?
WAUGH
Experiment? God forbid! Look at the results of experiment in the case of a writer like Joyce. He started off writing very well, then you can watch him going mad with vanity. He ends up a lunatic. . . .
INTERVIEWER
Can you say something about the direct influences on your style? Were any of the nineteenth-century writers an influence on you? Samuel Butler, for example?
WAUGH
They were the basis of my education, and as such of course I was affected by reading them. P. G. Wodehouse affected my style directly. Then there was a little book by E. M. Forster called Pharos and Pharillon—sketches of the history of Alexandria. I think that Hemingway made real discoveries about the use of language in his first novel, The Sun Also Rises. I admired the way he made drunk people talk.
INTERVIEWER
What about Ronald Firbank?
WAUGH
I enjoyed him very much when I was young. I can't read him now.
INTERVIEWER
Why?
WAUGH
I think there would be something wrong with an elderly man who could enjoy Firbank.
INTERVIEWER
Whom do you read for pleasure?
WAUGH
Anthony Powell. Ronald Knox, both for pleasure and moral edification. Erle Stanley Gardner.
INTERVIEWER
And Raymond Chandler!
WAUGH
No. I'm bored by all those slugs of whiskey. I don't care for all the violence either.
INTERVIEWER
But isn't there a lot of violence in Gardner?
WAUGH
Not of the extraneous lubricious sort you find in other American crime writers.
INTERVIEWER
What do you think of other American writers, of Scott Fitzgerald or William Faulkner, for example?
WAUGH
I enjoyed the first part of Tender Is the Night. I find Faulkner intolerably bad.
After reading this, I wonder if there was too much bitterness and envy in Waugh, which shrunk his gaze, like a shard of goblin mirror. (I suspect a sliver of this in Hemingway too, with all his urge to knock others down, and macho over-compensation for his insecurities.) What jars with me, in the quotes I highlighted, is how Waugh is knocking down three of the greatest prose stylists of his day: Joyce, Chandler and Faulkner. Very different writers, each of them pushing the boundaries of the sentence and paragraph and novel.
Waugh has a deep, strong grasp of English, and can see just what works and what doesn't in a phrase or a story. He has his own tastes, and I can't second-guess those. But a top writer who's keeping abreast of fashion (as shown by the subjects and details in his books), a lover of English who cherishes what brilliant inventive prose can do, should be diving into Ulysses, and The Sound and the Fury, and The Big Sleep. They are three of the most groundbreaking novels of Waugh's lifetime, full of epiphanies of wonder and tricks well worth stealing. I can't for the life of me see how Waugh could condescend to all three of those writers, unless the scales of his clear and knowledgable judgment had a finger or two of envy weighing them down.
