A Knife in the Jocular Vein

THE LOVED ONE (164 pp.)-- Evelyn Waugh--Little, Brown ($2.50).

"Of course, parts of Brideshead are wicked, really wicked. But does one have the feeling that Evelyn Waugh himself is wicked enough?"

In a dingy Manhattan bar, some members of the Waugh cult were measuring out their lives with swizzle sticks. They had been badly shaken by Brideshead Revisited (TIME, Jan. 7, 1946). Unlike Waugh's earlier novels, its irony had not been outrageously funny, and the typical Waugh mood, bright, pardlike and impermeable, had been clouded by a sweat of nostalgic and religious dither. Worse still, Brideshead was the first of Waugh's novels to become a U.S. bestseller. His fans had reluctantly winked at the fact that he is a conservative and a Roman Catholic convert. But popular? No literary cult can tolerate popularity in its prey. The boys were preparing to dump Evelyn.

"I know what you mean, Eustace--is Evelyn depraved enough so that, as an artist, he can make the spiritual leap from malice to malignance?"

"After all, if he is ever to mature as a satirist, he must stop tickling the public's toes, and start cutting its throats."

"Instead of simply festering, as in Brideshead, like an old, old staphylococcus, my dear, in a duodenal ulcer."

"I am afraid poor Evelyn has begun to take the problem of evil seriously."

"How very tiresome."

Last week Novelist Waugh was tickling toes and cutting throats again. The Loved One, his first novel published in the U.S. since Brideshead, was in the eager hands of U.S. readers, most of whom did not know whether to gasp, hoot or holler at the uncomfortable feeling that they had been smudged with soot from a crematory. The title was Waugh's creamy trade name for a corpse. A tale of love and suicide among the morticians of a cemetery that physically resembles Hollywood's fabulous Forest Lawn (TIME, Aug. 24, 1942), The Loved One was either Novelist Waugh's most funereal horse laugh or a retch of glacial rage at two of America's most cherished deceits--its effort to prettify death and to vulgarize love, and hence escape the impact of both. Intellectuals were bitterly divided over Waugh's intention. But the book, which was richly laced with the fun of embalming fluid, might well become a bestseller.

The Book. Last year Metro-Goldwyn Mayer offered Waugh $150,000 for the film rights to Brideshead. It was a situation worthy of a Waugh novel. It is explained, according to Waugh, by the fact that none of the top studio brass had ever read the book. When Waugh demanded "full Molotov veto rights" over the script, the deal fell through.

Waugh's Hollywood trip was not wasted. He was fascinated by the ritual for disguising death which is big business in Southern California. Waugh spent every day that he could get away prying into the fatuous, sumptuous necropolis of Forest Lawn. The result was The Loved One.

It was first published in Horizon. Editor Cyril Connolly devoted the entire February issue of the highbrow British literary monthly to Waugh's short novel. This smart devotion paid off. Horizon for February was sold out in a week.

The Loved One is by no means the subtle and cold-blooded rage at the perversion of death and love which some subtle and raging people suppose it to be. It is Evelyn Waugh caught between laughter and vomiting. The story of the patriotic pretensions and fussy snobbishness of the British film colony is grade A Waugh. Less artful is the travelogue of the intricate inanities of Whispering Glades, from the voice of a nightingale piped through the grounds and mortuary buildings to the Lake Isle of Innisfree, complete with nine rows of beans and beeless beehives with electric buzzers (burial plots $1,000). Most amusing is the love of Mr. Joyboy, the senior mortician, and Miss Aimee Thanatogenos, his assistant, uttered in an American idiom which Author Waugh has not entirely mastered. Their passion, unrolling between the refrigerators and the crematory, is alternately hot & cold. They play games of hearts & flowers with the corpses. When the lovers tiffed, the corpses looked "woebegone and reproachful." When love ran smoothly, they "grinned with triumph."

The failure of this funerary passion, the intrusion of an Englishman named Dennis, who works in a neighboring cat & dog cemetery, the Happier Hunting Ground, and Miss Thanatogenos' love-death, are the burden of The Loved One.

In the end Mr. Joyboy, afraid that Miss Thanatogenos' suicide will endanger his job at Whispering Glades, pays Dennis $1,000 to cremate her at the dog & cat cemetery. While she is volatilizing, Dennis "entered the office and made a note in the book kept there for that purpose. Tomorrow and on every anniversary as long as the Happier Hunting Ground existed, a postcard would go to Mr. Joyboy: Your little Aimee is wagging her tail in heaven tonight, thinking of you."

Perverse Innocence. In 1928, Evelyn (pronounced Evil in) Arthur St. John Waugh (rhymes with raw) leaped, like a literary commando, out of nowhere and, establishing a beachhead in that dismal waste land which Poet T. S. Eliot had charted six years before, began to commit merry mayhem on the comic muse.

Somewhat against its better judgment, Chapman & Hall, the London publishing house of which Evelyn's father was head, had brought out his first slim, satiric novel, Decline and Fall. It was a lighthearted little tale of moral turpitude about a young Oxonian named Paul Pennyfeather, who became a teacher without qualifications in one of fiction's most fascinating schools for backward children. He was on the point of marrying Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde, the mother of one of his pupils, when he was thrown into jail. It had come to the notice of the vigilant police that Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde's enormous wealth and social prestige rested wholly upon her very efficient management of a profitable white-slave trade. Since it was necessary to arrest somebody, the police, like the Oxford authorities, saw that Paul was their man.

As the effortless sprint of Waugh's prose discovered a new region of perverse innocence unshadowed by any moral concepts whatever, it was clear that a new master of English satire had emerged.

The perfectly manipulated anarchy of Decline and Fall, at once playful and lethal, was peopled with a rout of sinister caricatures tagged with unforgettable names (Waugh is probably the most inspired creator of synthetic surnames since Charles Dickens). There were Lady Circumference and her numskull son, little Lord Tangent; Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde (later Lady Margot Metroland) and her son, Peter Pastmaster; Sir Alastair Digby-Vaine-Trumpington and Viola Chasm. This glittering, blandly selfish, pretentiously stupid upper-class riffraff was to romp through most of Waugh's later books, sharing their futile power for pointless and appalling mischief with such later creations as raffish, rascally Basil Seal, motorbiking Father Rothschild (a member of a younger branch of the banking family, who had become a Jesuit priest), and the American evangelist, Mrs. Melrose Ape. With her cotton-winged angels (Chastity, Divine Discontent, et al.), Mrs. Ape wowed high society by singing her inspirational hymn: There ain't no flies on the Lamb of God.

Bright Young Books. The bright books followed one another like delayed bursts of sinister laughter. "Spotty, a little flat, not quite so good," some readers said. But they were still the funniest books of their kind being written, and Evelyn Waugh was Britain's No. 1 satirical novelist.

Vile Bodies orchestrated the gay dance of death of Mayfair's Bright Young Things between the wars. Readers were somewhat taken aback by the ferocity of the ending: the unheroic hero stands in the total blackness of the next war's no-man's-land, waiting to toss his Huxdane-Halley bacterial bomb and infect the enemy with leprosy. Black Mischief was a grim guffaw at the efforts of an Oxford-trained black emperor to apply the notions of liberalism, progress, international uplift and birth control to a country as barbaric as Ethiopia. Scoop, the most rollicking of Waugh's novels, reported the lunacies of Communist and fascist revolts in another African state whose savagery and ignorance were excelled only by the savagery and ignorance of the great British press organization marshaled to cover it.

Put Out More Flags, written in six weeks while Waugh was cooped up on a troopship during World War II, described Basil Seal's war effort, in the course of which he profitably blackmailed his sister's respectable neighbors by billeting on them three evacuee children so monstrous as to be almost lifelike.

Sealskin in the Bathtub. The world has never been notably sane, but it exists under the convention that it is--just as in certain families there is an agreement not to notice that a "peculiar" aunt wears three hats to the breakfast table and a sealskin coat in the bathtub. Waugh's world simply ignores that convention. Lunacy is its norm, evil is without guilt, pain without pathos, and tragedy is comedy. Yet, in lucid intervals, the real world and Waugh's world are seen in part to be one. The degree to which they are so measures Evelyn Waugh's ironic vision of mankind.

Sometimes the consequence is painful. There is the book whose title was taken from a line in T. S. Eliot's Waste Land: "I will show you fear in a handful of dust." A Handful of Dust tells about a dull Englishman whose dedicated obsession is to retrieve from the waste of time and progress the hideous country house which is his real love. His wife betrays him with a cheap social hanger-on who is not even physically attractive. His son & heir is killed. To save his sanity, the man betrayed by life & death goes abroad. In South America he falls into the clutches of a maniac recluse living in an inaccessible tract of the Amazon jungle. The mad outcast keeps the lover of the manorial past in a serfdom more awful than death--reading aloud the complete works of the laureate of industrial England, Charles Dickens.

Readers have complained that A Handful of Dust is not as gay as Waugh's earlier novels. It is, in fact, the terrifying crater of the abyss in which Waugh exists. Waugh is a conservative. In his case, this implies an intense sensitivity to the beauty of past forms, an organic response to the moral order that produced them. Waugh is a lover of tradition and hierarchy. In a world which denies hierarchy in the name of equality and tradition in the name of progress, Waugh is a lonely and an angry man. The modern world revolts him. He can see little in civilization that compensates for the chaos of the modern mind or the debasement of modern life.

Peristaltic Revulsion. In one degree or another, much of his work is an expression of loathing--a peristaltic revulsion of the soul. Waugh grasps at all outward forms--rank, ceremonies, cuisine, evocations of the architecture of once lovely and stately houses--to arrest the effortless slide of the old world into the muck of modernity. Brideshead is such an evocation.

The Flytes of Brideshead were a doomed family. They were Catholics in an alien community. The Flytes' Catholicism could not save them from a doom enjoined by the interaction of their characters on one another and the modern world. But it could save them from dissolution in their doom. That was the real meaning of Brideshead Revisited--that Catholicism was the one force that could still give order and unity to fragmented lives.

Waugh himself now regards Brideshead as a failure, a task beyond his powers. But readers were perhaps more right than the critics. The book has an elegiac beauty, like a bell tolling in a solitary church, where no one comes.

The Man. "Evelyn," Editor Cyril Connolly was once heard to sigh, "has been cruel, really very cruel to me." Evelyn and Cyril were not speaking at the time. For Evelyn Waugh's well-honed tongue is as celebrated as his snobbishness, social climbing and personal courage. Says an equally cruel contemporary: "One can find Evelyn's biography in the dedications of his books, each displaying a further step in his social progress." His first book, Rossetti; His Life and Works, was dedicated to Evelyn Gardner (fourth daughter of the first & last Baron Burghclere, and later Mrs. Evelyn Waugh No. 1). The Loved One is dedicated to Nancy Mitford, sister of the late Unity Mitford.

Evelyn Waugh was born in 1903, allegedly near London. ("It's a great secret where I was born," Waugh said, when asked by TIME's London bureau, and hung up.) His father, a journalist turned successful book publisher, was a man of solidly middle-class taste, who reared Evelyn and his elder brother Alec (The Loom of Youth, Going Their Own Ways) in the solidly middle-class London suburb of Finchley.

At Oxford, Waugh's flight from the bourgeoisie was furthered. Evelyn became one of a mauve circle of which glittery, willowy Harold Acton was the titular Tiresias. Says Acton, who is supposed to have modeled for one of the more exotic characters in Brideshead, in his Memoirs of an Aesthete (recently published in England): "An almost inseparable boon companion at Oxford was a little faun called Evelyn Waugh. Though others assure me that he has changed past recognition, I still see him as a prancing faun, thinly disguised by conventional apparel. His wide-apart eyes, always ready to be startled under raised eyebrows, the curved, sensual lips, the hyacinthine locks of hair . . ."

In this shrilly articulate circle, Evelyn is said to have sat usually mute, but terrifyingly observant. Other contemporaries recall a more vigorous Waugh--a young sport who, like Father Rothschild, rode a motorcycle and, like Sir Alastair Digby-Vaine-Trumpington, drank a good deal and was sometimes noisy in public places. He was conspicuously bohemian and agnostic and enjoyed baiting Roman Catholics, for his wit already possessed a fine cutting edge.

After two years of undistinguished scholarship but steady social progress, Evelyn was sent down without his degree. Like Paul Pennyfeather, Evelyn went to teach in a school for backward boys.

Then he spent a brief, unhappy term working for Lord Beaverbrook's Daily Express--a career terminated by a typically Waughlike misunderstanding. One day Editor Beverley Baxter saw Evelyn lolling in a chair in the reporters' room, and asked him his name. "Waw," was the answer that reached Baxter's ears, and, thinking that the young man was making a rude noise, the editor fired him.

Waugh was already writing Decline and Fall, and he capped that literary success by a solid social advance: he married Evelyn Gardner. Later they were divorced.

Those were the days when Waugh was being one of the Bright Young Things later satirized in Vile Bodies. But Evelyn was constantly widening his connections with the country gentry. He took up fox hunting and began to give examples of a personal courage about which he is quite bland but which amazes his friends. They still wince at the thought of the dauntless little pink-coated figure dashing at fences and ditches that would unnerve more experienced horsemen.

Today the evolution of Waugh the conservative English gentleman is almost complete. His attachments to the old families and the peerage are close. With them and with Catholic intellectuals, rather than among his literary contemporaries, he finds his friends.

Waugh's second wife is amiable, gracious Laura Herbert, daughter of the late Lieut. Colonel the Honorable Aubrey Nigel Henry Molyneux Herbert, second son of the Earl of Carnarvon. With her and their five children, Waugh lives at Piers Court, a spacious grey stone, 18th Century house crowning a hill in Gloucestershire. There, more than three hours from Mayfair, Waugh leads a comfortable, orderly, reflective life. An impeccable butler in striped trousers brings sherry and serves meals. The bright, airy rooms of the house are furnished with beautiful (and valuable) period pieces. There Waugh is at one with himself and the England he loves.

Waugh's Catholicism is an organic part of this oneness. In 1930 he was converted (by Father Martin D'Arcy, Britain's more literate Monsignor Sheen). Catholicism has given Waugh the unifying influence and the spiritualizing force whose workings are evident in Brideshead. It has also given him something which is also clearly necessary to his nature--the chance to feel superior in partibus infidelium.

During the war, Piers Court was for rent. The advertisement read: "Low rent to civilized tenant." For Waugh, then 38, set out to defend his ideal England. As a commando officer he took part in one of the raids on Bardia, in Libya, and made a reputation for daring. With Randolph Churchill and a group of British observers, he parachuted into Yugoslavia and came out with the original theory that gaudy Tito is a woman.

Noblesse oblige is not part of Waugh's concept of the conservative gentleman. The stories of his venomous rejoinders are legion. To a superior officer who suggested that Evelyn give up drinking after Waugh had spilled wine in the officer's lap, Waugh replied: "I do not propose to interrupt the habit of a lifetime merely to suit your temporary convenience."

Evelyn Waugh has great talents--and he is well aware of them. But he notably lacks one quality. Its absence contributes to the perfection and brilliance of his satire, but it also sets a definite limit on his greatness as man and artist. That quality is compassion.

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