Jonathan Keates has reviewed the OUP’s new Collected Works edition of Waugh’s 1948 novel The Loved One. This appears in the current edition of the Times Literary Supplement (16 August 2024). The article is entitled: “Slumber Room, then Paradise: Evelyn Waugh’s pitiless vision of a Los Angeles cemetery.” Here are some excerpts:
When The Loved One first appeared, in a single issue of Cyril Connolly’s Horizon magazine early in 1948, there was a distinct feeling of relief among many readers at its author’s return to form. Brideshead Revisited, the book’s predecessor, had been greeted with critical respect, and its sales were gratifying enough, yet the prospect of an accomplished and original satirist earnestly weighing the values of Britain’s Catholic aristocracy against their dreaded antithesis in “the world of Hooper” had furrowed quite a few brows. Time magazine, for example, found “the typical Waugh mood, bright, pardlike and impermeable, clouded by a sweat of nostalgic and religious dither”. With his new novel, Waugh’s admirers, claimed the Daily Telegraph, “who feared that he had lost his powers to be shocking may from all accounts take heart”.
Exactly how Waugh aimed to shock with The Loved One is not so obvious. The novel can be viewed on one level as a morsel of anthropology, fascinating us with the otherness of American manners, speech habits and preoccupations. There is a continuous sense of the challenge issued to our credulity by the writer himself, lured to Hollywood in 1947 by a potential contract for a screen version of Brideshead. While this project headed swiftly nowhere, Waugh trained his gaze on the Forest Lawn cemetery, its mortuary techniques and funeral practices, all part, as he saw it, of Hollywood’s unending struggle to fend off the more prosaic and pitiless actualities involved in the business of dying. Whereas the Old World saw interment and memorials as inherently admonitory, a moral injunction to the living, for the New “the body does not decay. It lives on, more chic than ever before; the soul goes straight from the Slumber Room to Paradise, where it enjoys an endless infancy”.
Talk of “the Slumber Room” forms part of a specialist vocabulary in whose acquisition Waugh clearly revelled. “I am entirely obsessed by Forest Lawn”, he told his agent. “I go there three or four times a week, am on easy terms with the chief embalmer. It is the only thing in California that is not a copy of something else.” …
In a wide-ranging introduction to this new edition Adrian Poole presents The Loved One as a work of greater substance than is often acknowledged. Dramatizing a clash of moral priorities, American vs European, while giving vent to its author’s spleen amid the cynical barbarism of the postwar world, the book shocked several early reviewers by its lack of anything like compassion. For Waugh the act of becoming a Catholic, it seemed, did not guarantee any renewed impulse of Christian charity. Desmond McCarthy was surely right in identifying “a misanthropic tinge more reminiscent of Swift” and seeing the story’s dimension of macabre farce as simply a carapace for its inherently tragic vision of life.
Nothing better emphasizes this aspect than Waugh’s treatment of his antihero, Dennis Barlow. Superficially another of the satirist’s Candide-like innocents, cast adrift amid predatory sophisticates, an avatar of Paul Pennyfeather, Adam Symes or William Boot, he is in fact a heartless, calculating opportunist whose insolent lying trashes the marriage prospects of Aimee Thanatogenos, the mortician Mr Joyboy’s prize pupil, driving her to suicide. The plot here offers a skilful variant on one of Saki’s most acrid short stories, “The Jesting of Arlington Stringham”, in which the jaundiced wife of a dim MP, puzzled by his suddenly acquired reputation as a wit, takes an overdose on discovering he has acquired a mistress with a turn for tart epigrams.
In this newest edition, The Loved One forms part of Oxford University Press’s Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, receiving in the process a treatment reminiscent of the Arden Shakespeare. There is an exhaustive survey of manuscript development and textual variants, while sections on reception history and the novel’s broader contemporary resonances are included, as is the original set of illustrations by Stuart Boyle. In case we should still think of the whole achievement as mere mischief-making born of boredom and frustration, the last of the editor’s contextual notes reminds us of Evelyn Waugh’s own statement, made in 1946: “I have come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as normality. That is what makes story-telling such an absorbing task, the attempt to reduce to order the anarchic raw materials of life. The artist’s only service to the disintegrated society of today is to create little independent systems of order of his own”. [Additional excerpts from the text of the article were added: 17 August 2024.]
