–Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the New York Times Book Review has posted this notice in its “Read Like the Wind” column. It is written by Book Review editor Joumana Khatib:
The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy, by Evelyn Waugh
You probably know Waugh for his novel “Brideshead Revisited,” or if you’re journalism-adjacent you’ve probably read “Scoop,” or if you really have excellent taste you might cherish “Vile Bodies” as much as I do.
“The Loved One” isn’t as well known, but this novella is quintessentially Waugh: outrageously funny, a satire that arrives like a javelin hurled from left field. It is also very, very weird.
The story follows a community of fairly ineffectual British expats in Los Angeles, and centers on a love triangle involving a funeral home aesthetician, her mortician boss and a rival embalmer–of animals.
I’m as skittish as the next maladjusted mortal about death, corpses, embalming fluids, coffins. And yet! I was howling on every other page. The premise is utterly absurd, sure, and Waugh packs a lot in: a lovelorn man caller Mr. Joyboy, a pair of newspaper reporters writing a pseudonymous advice column, a mad-cap cover-up. (The 1965 film version–which, however improbably, features Liberace–deserves a mention in the DSM.)
But it’s the dialogue that sends the story into the extreme. Take this, as a sample:
“An open casket is all right for dogs and cats,” the animal embalmer (who is also a hack poet) explains to his love interest; but parrots “look absurd with the head on a pillow…Who asked you to the funeral anyway? Were you acquainted with the late parrot?”
God, I’m laughing just retyping that.
READ IF YOU LIKE: Spy magazine, estate sales, “Fawlty Towers.” [or, she might have added, “Monty Python” in which a “late parrot” also prominently figured.]
AVAILABLE FROM: A good library or used-book store, or online at Project Gutenberg Canada (where the book is in the public domain).
–Craig Brown writing in the Daily Mail notes that P G Wodehouse died on Valentine’s Day 50 years ago. He goes on to offer the following:
…One of his greatest champions, Evelyn Waugh, argued in 1961 that ‘Mr Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. ‘He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.’
Waugh also said Wodehouse was a master of his craft because he could produce ‘on average three uniquely brilliant and entirely original similes to the page’. And it is these wonderful similes, so exact yet so ludicrous, that ensure his comedy will never stale.
Brown concludes with a list of 15 of his own favorite P G Wodehouse similes. Here are two of the best from Brown’s list:
- Unlike the male codfish which, suddenly finding itself the parent of three million five hundred thousand little codfish, cheerfully resolves to love them all, the British aristocracy is apt to look with a somewhat jaundiced eye on its younger sons.
- The shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French.Â
The entire article and remainder of the similes can be read at this link.
–Mark McGinness also notes the Wodehousian connection to Valentine’s Day. He writes in The Spectator:
Pelham Grenville (PG â or Plum) Wodehouse breathed his last on Valentineâs Day fifty years ago. As Evelyn Waugh saw it, Wodehouse inhabited a world as timeless as A Midsummer Nightâs Dream and Alice in Wonderland. Wodehouse himself said it was as though he was forever in his last year at school. It was, Waugh said, âas if the Fall of Man had never happenedâ….
He reserved his wit and conversation for the page. When an uncharacteristically starry-eyed Waugh met Wodehouse for the first time, he was disappointed to find their exchanges did not get beyond the inequities of income tax. And when Plum was invited to join the Round Table gang at the Algonquin hotel in New York, he complained, âAll those three-hour lunches. When did these slackers ever get any work done?â…
The full article is posted in this week’s Spectator.
–The Daily Telegraph has an article by Jake Kerridge about US novelist Robert Plunket whose 1983 satirical novel My Search for Warren Harding is being reprinted in the UK as a Penguin Modern Classic. Here’s an excerpt:
…Having moved to Sarasota, Florida, and found that trailer park life suited him, Plunket spent many years working for Sarasota Magazine as a gossip columnist â âMr Chatterboxâ, a sobriquet he borrowed from the gossip writer in Vile Bodies by his hero Evelyn Waugh â and became a leading figure in local society. âI was cultivated by the local politicians because they all wanted to see their names in print. And of course every third-rate celebrity with something to sell ended up in Sarasota so I interviewed them all â Pia Zadora, Eva Gabor.â
He covered George W Bushâs trip to Sarasota in September 2001, and witnessed the then-president being told about the Twin Towers attacks while reading to the children at an elementary school. âI can remember his face the moment he figured out what it meant. And then there was just chaos.â And naturally he was on the spot when Paul Reubens, aka the wholesome kidsâ comedian Pee-wee Herman, was arrested for indecent exposure at a Sarasota adult cinema: âIt was owned by a friend of mine, in fact I helped him programme all the movies.â…
–The Daily Telegraph has also published this letter from a reader relating to a story about Ofsted’s school rating system:
SIR–As a retired teacher of 35 years’ experience, may I recommend to Ofsted the classification of schools described in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall?
“‘We class schools, you see, into four grades: Leading School, First-rate school, Good School, and School. Frankly,” said Mr Levy, ‘School is pretty bad.'”
What more need be said?
Max Sawyer
Stamford, Lincolnshire
–Finally, the Hudson Review has posted a long essay by Brooke Allen in which she discusses several notable contributions to literary scholarship that have appeared in the 75+ years of its existence. This one is of particular interest to our readers:
…William H. Pritchard is one of the best literary critics of his time, and it is The Hudson Reviewâs good fortune that more than 170 of his articles have graced the pages of the magazine over the course of nearly five decades. In âTotal Waughâ (1993), his review of Martin Stannardâs two-volume biography of the novelist Evelyn Waugh, Pritchard was among the first to be bold enough to suggest that Waugh, a humorous writer not taken too seriously by the literary establishment of his own day (he was ignored by high cultural institutions of the time like Leavisâ Scrutiny and Eliotâs Criterion), might just turn out to have been the best English novelist of the twentieth century. Thirty years later this opinion has become quite widespread. In his treatment of Waugh, and of Stannard, an exemplary biographer, Pritchard brings into play his characteristically elegant prose and his clear humanistic values. âThe premiere English novelist of [the twentieth] century?â he asks. âI canât think of any, including D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, who is more repaying.â I canât either.
The entire essay entitled “Classic Articles Revisited” can be read here.