Vile Bodies Evelyn Waugh LINKS VILE GINGER April 24, 2014. I wonder if anyone has ever been so pleased to be in a library. I'm so excited I can't sit down on my seat. Which doesn't bode well for actually reading anything. What I have in front of me, resting on triangles of foam, fresh out of its protective case, is the leather-bound manuscript of Vile Bodies. It's the only manuscript of an Evelyn Waugh novel not to have been bought for a pittance from his widow by a robber called Harry Ransom (only joking, America) and taken to Austin in Texas. Where am I again? I'm in the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds. What have I got in front of me? Well, let's turn to the beginning of chapter two and see: "Have you anything to declare?" "Wings." "That's all right then." And back to the front endpapers. Oh, what a butterfly it seems! It's been bound by Sangorski and Sutcliffe. Evelyn usually got Maltby's of Oxford to do the binding of his diaries for him.

But as he presented this manuscript to one of the richest couples in the country, it may have been luxuriously rebound at some point. Let me turn over a few pages... The bookplate of Bryan Guinness...Evelyn's crashing racing car picture, at the bottom of which he's written to Bryan and Diana: 'This is the cover. Do you like it? I do.' Actually, I've missed out a page. Overleaf from the bookplate, again on the recto, is a note written by Evelyn to Bryan and Diana, saying that the book will never be of the smallest value but he thought it should go to them as it is their book (Vile Bodies is dedicated to them). That note is dated January 4, 1930. Evelyn had a busy back end of 1929. After his day at the motor races in Belfast he went to stay with Bryan and Diana at one of their country houses, Knockmaroon, near Dublin. From there Waugh made his way to a quiet pub in Devon where he wrote the second half of Vile Bodies before returning to spend Christmas with the Guinnesses, this time in Paris.

I guess it was while finishing off the manuscript in Devon that he deleted the upbeat and playful preface which had read: 'Bright young people and far too much publicity already whoever you are).' The page with the note to Bryan and Diana also contains another note, written in shaky handwriting, saying that the manuscript was given to Jonathan Guinness on his 30th birthday in 1960. If I remember rightly the manuscript was sold at Christie's in 1985, when it was bought for about £60,000. (Had the 54-year old Jonathan Guinness fallen on hard times?) In 1990 the manuscript was bought by Fay and Geoffrey Eliot and in 2002 it was gifted to the Brotherton Library in Leeds. Ensuring the British public have access to this cultural gem; allowing me to be standing here now, my mind awash with adrenalin, my hands dry and disinfected: April 24, 2014. The first part of the manuscript is made up of 68 pages.

Those pages mostly concern the futile attempts of Adam, a penniless writer, to get some money together so that he can marry NIna, a bright young social butterfly. I flick through these pages, taking the odd photo for future use, but basically I'm starting my study at the halfway point of the manuscript. Waugh writes 'END OF BOOK I' across page 68, the last line of which is 'Shucks Margot,' he said. 'You know better than to get on a high horse with me.' The 'he' is the press baron, Lord Monomark, though in the manuscript his name is given as Lord Ottercove. No doubt, Waugh decided on reflection, this was a little close to the real-life Lord Beaverbrook for comfort. The second half of the manuscript - 66 more pages - begins with the line: 'Then Adam became Mr Chatterbox'. That is, Adam gets a job on the gossip column of The Daily Excess, Lord Monomark's paper. Nothing to do with The Daily Express, Lord Beaverbrook's title. No, nothing to do with that rag! I have a Penguin copy of Vile Bodies with me for reference.

I note that the above lines I've quoted are at the end of Chapter six and the beginning of chapter seven. The first six chapters were written at the Abingdon Arms, Beckley, Oxfordshire, when Evelyn thought he was happily married, if poor. The chapters from seven onwards were written at the Royal George, Appledore, Devon, when he was trying to cope with the fact of his marriage's collapse. In chapter seven, Waugh introduces Adam's rival in love. Adam and Nina are at the horse races in Manchester, watching Indian Runner canter home unexpectedly in first place, when Adam spots in the crowd the drunk Major (who had promised to put £1,000 on Indian Runner on Adam's behalf, money that Adam had won on the toss of a coin). Adam tries to track him down, in vain, and when he returns to Nina, she is talking to a young man with a curly red moustache. 'This is Mr Broughton,' she said. 'He and I used to play together when we were children. He's just come back from Kenya.' The character has had to be 'brought on' by Waugh, so perhaps that was the reasoning behind the name.

Though Richard Jacobs, in the notes to the Penguin I have in front of me, suggests that it's a 'not very sly hint at sexual excitability'. In any case, Waugh was obviously not happy with the name, as he immediately deleted the line, and had another go at introducing Adam's rival. Here is a close-up of the relevant paragraph. I'll transcribe and/or paraphrase below: The young man says he is fed up with the horse racing, Adam says he is fed up too, and the three return to London together in the newcomer's racing car. Over dinner Nina explains to Adam '...that the young man used to play with her as a child, and that he had been growing coffee in Kenya for the last five years.' This is not deleted in the manuscript (as you can see in lines 5 and 6 of the above reproduction) but by the time it got into print, Evelyn had changed the young man's background to 'doing something military in Ceylon' for five years. Then Waugh tells us that the young man's name was Eddy Saxon. Now John Heygate, Waugh's rival in real-life, was perhaps perceived by Evelyn to be more of a Saxon than himself.

Waugh in A Little Learning, points to two Scotsmen, one Welshman and one Irishman among his eight great-great-grandfathers. But he deletes Saxon and inserts the name Littlejohn (see line 6), a name which he sticks with for the rest of the book. Well, no, the young man is most commonly referred to by his nickname, 'Ginger'. In chapter eight, Adam, Nina and Ginger go to a party together. Or rather they go to parties together. First, on a captive dirigible in the suburbs of London. Then to St Christopher's Social Club near Leicester Square, where they can't get a drink. Then to the flat of an old friend of Ginger's, where they drink whisky sitting on a bed while Ginger's old pal is sick next door. Ginger sums up this part of the proceedings with 'There's nowhere like London really, you know.' In chapter nine (I read the second half of Vile Bodies while travelling to Leeds this morning, so this stuff is all at the top of my mind, I'm not reliant on peering at the manuscript) Adam goes to see Nina's father for the second time.

Colonel Blount is busy playing a bit part in a film that is being made on his property, a scene which draws heavily on Waugh's experience of making The Scarlet Woman at his own father's house. Adam fails to extract any money from the crafty old man. When he returns to London, it's to the realisation that he has lost his job. This is thanks to Nina, who had written and filed Adam's column that day, mentioning the fictitious fashion for green bowler hats that Lord Monomark had specifically asked not to be mentioned again. Chapter ten is the one where Adam goes to the motor races with three chums. Because of the big race, rooms to rent in the unnamed town are hard to come by. No luck at the Imperial Hotel. At the Station Hotel they are told that they might get rooms at the Royal George. At the Royal George, the landlady does her best to fit them in. This involves ejecting Mr Titchcock from his bed onto the floor. In fact, Adam gets Mr Titchcock's room. In it there is a dressmaker's dummy, which reminds Adam of one that used to be in his family home that he had stabbed with a chisel.

Now this is strange stuff, especially when it's recalled that it's a pub called The Royal George where Waugh is writing the second half of the book. Is 'Mr Titchcock' another cheap jibe at 'Little' John Heygate? Or is the Titchcock suggestive of low sexual self-esteem on Waugh's own part? After all, it's Evelyn that has been found somehow wanting in the love department by She-Evelyn, is it not? When shortly after She-Evelyn's desertion, Eleanor Watts told him to try and put it all out of his mind, Waugh replied 'I can't, I can't'. And when telling Harold Acton about his 'cuckolding', Acton wrote back asking 'are you so very male in your sense of possession...?'. In Mr Titchcock's bedroom of the Royal George, Waugh describes the female bust as being chopped off short, at neck, waist and elbows. Then Adam brings to mind the stabbing of his own dressmaker's dummy, 'Jemima', with a chisel, scattering stuffing over the nursery floor. As a reader, one wonders what it has got to do with a day at the motor races.

However, it has everything to do with Waugh's despair at She-Evelyn's treatment of him. And yet those words towards the beginning of chapter ten - the violence against a symbol of womanhood, the insulting of himself and/or a sexual rival - could almost go unnoticed, so different is the key in which this passage is written compared to the tightly controlled, butterfly-winged majority. In The Letters of Evelyn Waugh there is a single one written from The Royal George, Appledore. It's to fellow novelist Henry Yorke and tells him that Waugh came to this pub to make a final effort at finishing his novel. He reports that it's been very difficult and that it all seems to shrivel up and rot from the inside. Waugh says that he is relying on a sort of cumulative futility for any effect it may have. He ends by suggesting that as soon as he has enough pages covered to call it a book he shall join Bryan and Diana in Paris. Certainly, Waugh gets the most out of his day at the motor races in Belfast. It's the longest chapter in the book, yet essentially it's a set-piece, a stepping away from the love triangle that the book is on the point of becoming.

Chapter eleven is the very short one, where, on the phone, Nina tells Adam she is engaged to be married to Ginger. In the manuscript, Waugh gets it onto a single page - it's over a double page of my Penguin Classic - by setting the end of the dialogue into the right side of the page. But initially the end of the call was written on the back of a page, as reproduced below. In this deleted section, Waugh seems to have lost track of who is speaking. The last line 'Goodbye, Nina,' has to be changed to 'Goodbye, I'm sorry, Adam.' As for the deletion itself... It's not the vertical blue margin in the above image. It's a single stroke of the pen that starts up at the top right corner, where the page number is ringed, and ends up there after an elaborate zig-zag through the words written. Presumably the same hand that waylaid the dressmaker's dummy with a chisel has dealt with this dialogue - the aftermath of the revelation that Nina was going to marry Ginger - with the sharp nib of a fountain pen.

Chapter twelve is where Adam visits Agatha Runcible at the nursing home following her crash while at the wheel of a racing car. The visit turns into a party to which Nina turns up. Adam persuades her to spend the night with him, but the sleeping together doesn't work out and so Nina goes home in the middle of the night. However, Ginger, unable to contact NIna and realising who she was with, turns up to berate Adam the next morning. Adam persuades GInger to buy Nina from him for the price of the hotel bill that he has run up. Next thing, Adam phones Nina, thinking he may be able to buy her back with money he still hopes to get from the drunk major, only to be told that Nina and Ginger have just got married. Chapter thirteen presents the third and final visit to Colonel Blount. The newly wed couple, Nina and Ginger, are to spend Christmas with her father. Only Ginger has been called up to his regiment, and so it's fair-haired Adam that's presented to Colonel Blount as 'Ginger'. Together they enjoy a surreal Christmas that ends with the local vicar informing the household that War has been declared.

I wonder if Adam's Christmas card to Nina's father was anything like the Christmas card that Evelyn sent out a month or two after writing this scene. Almost any line in the collage can be related back to Vile Bodies in one way or another (or is that just a fancy of mine?). Note 'Vicar calls police', and 'alcoholic excess' and 'Bile Beans' (an ideal snack for vile bodies?) and 'Women with venom of a serpent'. Note too the sad little word in the top left corner... Reproduced with the forbearance, I hope, of the copyright holder. However, I prefer to take from Evelyn's Christmas card of 1929 the sentiments that nearly everyone can write (and be a successful artist). In summary: there is joy and profit in creative art. In the last chapter of Vile Bodies, called 'Happy Ending', we learn from a letter from Nina to Adam, being read on the front line of the biggest battlefield in the history of the world, that Nina and Ginger are together again. Nina is pregnant with Adam's child, but that's fine, she says, because GInger thinks he's the father.

If all this would seem to represent wishful thinking on the author's part (there was a little to-ing and fro-ing of She-Evelyn between Evelyn Waugh and John Heygate in the summer of 1929, but not as much as might be implied by the closing chapters of Vile Bodies) at least the book has the realism to end on a down note. On the battlefield, Adam ends up in the back seat of a Daimler beside a man and a woman who are making love. Not Ginger and Nina, rather the drunk major (who is now a general) and Chastity (who, thanks to Margot Metroland, has become a prostitute and has been passed from soldiers training at Salisbury Plain, to Canadians, to an American doctor, to soldiers serving in the East). Throughout the second half of the manuscript of Vile Bodies there are few changes in the manuscript itself or between manuscript and printed book. Evelyn has been bashing it out without going over it much. However, in the last page or so he does go back into the manuscript to tell the reader what Chastity's name was when she was with various parties.

Evelyn Gardner's name was She-Evelyn when she was with Evelyn. What was it when she was with John? Could it have been 'Bunny', the name that Chastity earned on Salisbury Plain? With Chastity fingering the medals on the general's uniform, the story ends: 'And presently, like a circling typhoon, the sounds of battle began to return.' That's how the manuscript ends. And that's how the printed book ends. Having told Henry Yorke that he would stop writing as soon as he had enough pages to call it a book, he wasn't going to devote a great deal of time editing a typescript. Evelyn was going to spend Christmas with Bryan and Diana in Paris. He had somehow produced the book he'd promised his publisher and he was moving on. He was checking out of the Royal George. Well, not quite. I walk away from the manuscript to another part of the Brotherton LIbrary where they have computers. I've been given a temporary code so that I can get onto the net if I want to. And so I google The Royal George, Appledore.

This is what it looks like today: In Vile Bodies, Adam wakes in his room to find rain beating on his windows. He looks out on a canal from which rise islands of scrap iron and bottles and a pram. Well, here he's looking out on where the River Torridge meets the River Taw. That's Lundy Island, in the middle distance, where Evelyn had been on holiday, in the spring of 1925, with the Plunket Greenes. Happy memories? No, not particularly, that's where Olivia Plunket Greene (second from left in the picture below) would have nothing to do with him, physically. Waugh's diary of the holiday records, several times, his regret that he is not able to cure himself of his love for Olivia. Why is Evelyn sitting down while everyone else is standing in the photo below? Perhaps because the Plunket Greene was a tall family. David (holding the dog) was six-foot-nine, so why would Evelyn, at five-foot-six, want to be measured against him? So Evelyn sat down on the ground. Smooth move, Titch.

At one stage in their relationship, Evelyn stubbed a cigarette out on Olivia's arm, to show her just how much her rejection meant to him. Maybe that's why the stabbed dressmaker's dummy came to mind while scribbling away in the Royal George. That's Terence Greenidge, smoking, second from right. Evelyn's close friend from Oxford who directed Evelyn in The Scarlet Woman. Yes, it's a significant photograph this. I can't help wondering why - when it was used in Evelyn's autobiography, A Little Learning - the two end figures were cropped off. Because that's Richard Plunket Greene and his wife Liza, very good friends of Evelyn from Aston Clinton days, with Richard being the 'reserve driver' at the Belfast TT, the event that inspired such a long chapter in Vile Bodies. I expect the cropping was the publisher's doing and not Evelyn's, the picture being made more into a portrait shape so that it could nearly fill a page. But it's something that points towards Evelyn's future rather than his past that I want to flag here. The map below shows that just along from the Royal George (marked with a red cocktail glass) is another pub called The Beaver Inn (marked with a knife and fork).

The pubs were both so called back in 1929. Perhaps Evelyn did indeed drink at the Royal George and eat at the Beaver Inn. Or vice versa. In any case, whenever Waugh took a stroll along the front in a westerly direction, the pub name, Beaver Inn, would be in sight. The name 'John Heygate', always at the back of his mind, and the pub sign, 'Beaver Inn', suddenly in front of his eyes. And on the way back from his stroll, Evelyn, still thinking about whether his manipulation of Nina and Ginger was the most he could get out of the She-Evelyn/John Heygate business, saw this: Day after day of his writing routine: Heygate-Beaver. Or Hate Beaver for short. The association probably didn't reach Waugh's conscious mind then. He was happy with the names 'Ginger' and 'Littlejohn' for John Heygate, and he wouldn't have wanted to change his manuscript. But, just a few years later when it came to sitting down and writing A Handful of Dust, the love rival, referred to by Waugh to friends as 'the basement boy', is given his ultimate name: John Beaver.

In other words, when in Fez in January, 1934, he thinks: 'John Heygate', his mind comes up with 'John Beaver'. Actually, though I haven't seen the manuscript of A Handful of Dust myself, Robert Murray Davis has discussed it in Evelyn Waugh, Writer. The first chapter of Waugh's novel, called 'Du Cote de Chez Beaver' in print, was called 'Beaver's Way' at an early stage in the writing. A reference to Proust, but also a reference to Appledore? Davis tells us that Waugh systematically changed 'John' to 'Beaver' in the opening pages, speculating that this was to distance the reader from the character. Either that or because he'd realised how appropriate the name was. Yes, it has to be emphasised that the name - Beaver - is perfect. Not only is there the juxtaposition of words during the painful writing of Vile Bodies, as just described, but the word 'Beaver' had been used in Britain as a slang reference for a woman's pudenda since 1927. And from that date there is a limerick that demonstrates such basic use.

Perhaps Evelyn Waugh even knew it. In which case, I can see Waugh, his day's work at the Royal George done, sitting down in the Beaver Inn for a nightcap, singing to himself: 'There was a young lady named Eva Who went to the ball as a diva, But a change in the lights, Showed a tear in her tights, And a low fellow present yelled "Beaver!"' Yes, Evelyn singing to himself - and the next day, pen in hand, singing to posterity - in a bid to keep his spirits up. Notes 1) Thanks to The Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, for generously allowing access to the manuscript of Vile Bodies and for permitting me to take photographs of it. 2) Evelyn Waugh, Writer by Robert Murray Davis, is a valuable study of the manuscripts at the Harry Ransom Centre, University of Texas. It was published in 1981 when Vile Bodies was still in private hands. Hence the chapters go straight from Decline and Fall to Black Mischief, missing out Waugh's second novel.

In his concluding chapter, Davis comments that: 'In manuscript Waugh tended to skip endings, whether of scenes, chapters, or whole books, and again and again, in looking over what he had written, he took the opportunity to augment.' This is not the case with Vile Bodies. Waugh seems to have meant what he said in his letter to Henry Greene from the Royal George. So as soon as he had enough pages covered to call it a book, he called it a day. From what I've observed (in a single afternoon's perusal of the ms), as far as the second half of the book is concerned, what Waugh wrote in inspired haste at the Royal George, is what was printed by Chapman and Hall when they published the book in February, 1930. Certainly, the last three pages of manuscript passed into print with only a few insignificant deletions. 3) The second line of the 1927 limerick actually reads: ''Who went to the ball as Godiva". But Godiva scans so badly with Eva that I've substituted my own line. Apologies to purists.

4) At the end of the Vile Bodies ms, Waugh wrote: 'THE END THANK GOD,' as he did at the end of his first book, Rossetti. He wrote simply 'THE END' on the last page of Decline and Fall which he enjoyed writing (after all it was composed in joyful personal circumstances). I will always be a Decline and Fall man, though I'm impressed by the attempt made in Vile Bodies to transform experience (failure in marriage) into art ('Good-bye... I'm sorry, Adam.') The End thank Evelyn. DMcL. Vile Bodies | novel by Waugh | Britannica.com novel by Waugh Ulysses Vile Bodies, satiric novel by Evelyn Waugh , published in 1930. Set in England between the wars, the novel examines the frenetic but empty lives of the Bright Young Things, young people who indulge in constant party-going, heavy drinking, and promiscuous sex. At the novel’s end, the realities of the world intrude, with Adam Fenwick-Symes, the protagonist, serving on a battlefield at the onset of another world war.

Learn More in these related articles: 1 Reference found in Britannica Articles Assorted Reference place in English literature (in English literature: The 1930s ) External Links Corrections? Updates? Help us improve this article! Contact our editors with your feedback. MEDIA FOR: You have successfully emailed this. Error when sending the email. Try again later. Edit Mode Submit Tips For Editing We welcome suggested improvements to any of our articles. You can make it easier for us to review and, hopefully, publish your contribution by keeping a few points in mind. Encyclopædia Britannica articles are written in a neutral objective tone for a general audience. You may find it helpful to search within the site to see how similar or related subjects are covered. Any text you add should be original, not copied from other sources. At the bottom of the article, feel free to list any sources that support your changes, so that we can fully understand their context. (Internet URLs are the best.) Your contribution may be further edited by our staff, and its publication is subject to our final approval. Unfortunately, our editorial approach may not be able to accommodate all contributions. Submit Thank You for Your Contribution!

Our editors will review what you've submitted, and if it meets our criteria, we'll add it to the article. Please note that our editors may make some formatting changes or correct spelling or grammatical errors, and may also contact you if any clarifications are needed. Uh Oh There was a problem with your submission. Please try again later. Close Date Published: April 26, 2016 URL: Access Date: January 05, 2017 Share The Eclectic Reader: Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies Sunday, November 21, 2010 Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies Vile Bodies (1930) is Evelyn Waugh’s second published novel. This dark comedy satirizes the “Bright Young Things,” or the young upper class partying set of the nineteen twenties. Like Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby , the theme of Vile Bodies is the spiritual bankruptcy and emptiness of the hedonistic lifestyle of party going and materialism.

The title is based upon a verse from Saint Paul’s epistle to the Phillipians which is a part of the burial service in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.*** The plot of Vile Bodies involves the struggle of Adam Fenwick Symes, who like Paul Pennyfeather in Decline and Fall , is a hapless victim of circumstances. Adam is engaged to marry Nina Blount. Although Nina is deeply in love with Adam, she refuses to marry him unless he is wealthy enough to maintain a certain standard of living. Adam spends the length of the book trying to make enough money to be able to marry Nina. First, Adam, who is an aspiring writer, has the manuscript of his book confiscated by British customs as pornography when he returns to England from the continent. Since Adam had already been paid an advance by a publisher for the book, he is now deeply in debt. Then Adam manages to win a thousand pounds from gambling, but gives the money to a drunk retired army Major to bet on a horse. Nina then sends Adam to ask her father, Colonel Blount, to give him enough money to let them be married.

Evelyn Waugh The character of Colonel Blount foreshadows Waugh’s later creation of Charles Ryder’s eccentric father in Brideshead Revisited . Nina’s father is an eccentric who sponges off of the local Anglican priest and pays a film company to make a movie about the life of John Wesley on his estate. The name of the Blount estate, Doubting Hall, is symbolic of the lack of faith in the post- World War I world. Colonel Blount pretends at first that he thinks that Adam is a vacuum cleaner salesman. Adam is ecstatic when Colonel Blount gives him a check for a thousand pounds. Adam’s euphoria is short lived when he discovers that Colonel Blount has signed the check “Charlie Chaplin.” In order to make money, Adam takes a job as a gossip columnist, “Mr. Chatterbox,” after the suicide of the former writer. (Which, I must add, has to be one of the funniest suicides in the history of English literature). In order to fill his column, Adam begins making up things about imaginary people and inventing fashion fads.

When Adam says that the latest thing is black suede shoes worn with a tuxedo, fashionable men among “the Bright Young Things” all run out and get black suede shoes. Adam is finally fired from his job when he tries to start a fad of bottle green bowler hats. At the same time as she is breaking her engagement with him, Nina begins sleeping with Adam. Eventually, Nina becomes engaged to Ginger Littlejohn, a wealthy childhood friend. Nina is not in love with Ginger but is marrying him solely for his money, so she continues to sleep with Adam. After being confronted by Ginger, Adam sells Nina to Ginger for the price of his hotel bill which he cannot pay. In this novel, Waugh predicts the coming of the Second World War. When political tensions in Europe increase, Ginger is called up to his regiment and Nina takes Adam home for Christmas and introduces him as her rich husband, Captain Littlejohn. So pretending to be Ginger, Adam spends the holidays taking Ginger’s place in Nina’s bed. Although the servants and the Rector are suspicious, the Colonel apparently doesn’t know the difference. The novel ends with Adam lost on “the world’s biggest battlefield,” where he finally finds the drunk Major, who is now a General.

The Major writes Adam a check for thirty four thousand pounds, which, after inflation, will now buy him “a couple of drinks and a newspaper.” Nina writes Adam that although she is pregnant with Adam’s baby, she is happily married to Ginger who is convinced that the baby is his. All through the novel, Adam attends one fashionable party after another: “Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St. John’s Wood, parties in flats and houses and shops and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming baths . . . all that succession and repetition of mass humanity - Those vile bodies.” According to Humphrey Carpenter’s book The Brideshead Generation , Waugh was writing Vile Bodies as his first marriage to Evelyn Gardner (“she Evelyn”) was breaking up. According to Carpenter, sexual dysfunction contributed to the break up. After Adam and Nina’s first night together, Nina remarks, “All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I’d sooner go to my dentist any day.” Vile Bodies is filled with eccentric characters. There is Mr.

Outrage, the Prime Minister, who is baffled about the conversations at cabinet meetings which he doesn’t understand. The government of his predecessor is brought down when the Prime Minister’s daughter, one of the “Bright Young Things,” brings a group of her friends home and the press reports that wild parties have been going on at Number Ten Downing Street. There is Mrs. Melrose Ape, the American evangelist ( a thinly veiled Amy Semple McPherson), who has a choir of young women dressed as angels and named after the virtues. Unfortunately, Chastity is the most promiscuous of the bunch and eventually winds up becoming a prostitute. (At the end of the novel, the drunk Major, who is now a General, is making love to Chastity in the back of his staff car in the middle of a battle). There is the homosexual Miles Malpractice and the lesbian Lady Agatha Runcible who dies in a mental hospital after taking over for a disabled race car driver and wrecking the car (aptly numbered car number 13).

Adam’s hotel is full of eccentric characters including a European king who lost his throne after the World War, an American Federal Court Judge who has a drunk prostitute die in his room when she falls from swinging on the chandelier, and the Major who takes Adam’s money. The hotel owner, Lottie Crump, is based upon Rosa Lewis who owned the Cavendish hotel in London and had, during the Edwardian era, provided discreet accommodations for the male aristocracy and their extra-marital female and homosexual companions. The character of the Jesuit Priest, Father Rothschild, who opines that the young people are desperately in search of permanent values, exists in the novel as a kind of Greek chorus. (Shortly after the publication of this novel, Waugh converted to Catholicism). Vile Bodies contains one joke and outrageous situation after another. Although the particular scenes and situations are contrived, over blown, and ridiculous, the over arching theme of the spiritual bankruptcy of hedonism and materialism presents serious food for thought for our own age.

The youthful Evelyn Waugh ***“Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed: we therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ; who shall change our vile body, that it may be like unto his glorious body, according to the mighty working, whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.” Posted by Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh Truman Capote, in his last literary project, decided to stitch together a novel out of bits of gossip. He never completed the work, which he called Answered Prayers , although some chapters were published in Esquire and later collected into a book after his death. Yet Capote talked and boasted about it incessantly, extracting a string of cash advances from his publisher along the way with unanswered promises about its forthcoming completion. How fitting that the great literary novel of gossip turned out, itself, to be mostly a matter of literary gossip. But those seeking a witty and polished gossip novel don't need to settle for the scraps from Capote's society roundtable.

Back in 1930, the young Evelyn Waugh published Vile Bodies, a follow-up to his successful debut Decline and Fall (1928), offering readers (and posterity) an incisive satire of British society at the midpoint between the two World Wars. Here gossip serves as the centerpiece for one of the finest comic novels of the era. Evelyn Waugh was in his mid-20s when he wrote Vile Bodies, but he had already seen enough of the foibles of the ruling class to provide ammunition for a lifetime of storytelling. Although he hailed from a solidly middle class family, Waugh associated at Oxford with a circle known as the Hypocrites' Club, centered around Etonians Harold Acton and Brian Howard—a group that gained notoriety as a magnet for the debauched, dissipated and disputatious. After Oxford, Waugh continued to hobnob with the rich and fatuous, courting and marrying Evelyn Gardner, the daughter of Lord and Lady Burghclere—the newlyweds became known among friends as He-Evelyn and She-Evelyn—and battling with his disapproving in-laws.

(Lady Burghclere’s investigations had led her to learn, to her horror, that Waugh was known to "live off vodka and absinthe and went about with disreputable people.") The marriage lasted only 15 months, ending when Waugh found that his wife had taken a lover, novelist John Heygate (later Sir John Heygate). Waugh, for his part, had to work for a living like the rest of the bourgeoisie, but was dismissed as schoolmaster, when he got drunk and tried to seduce the new school matron. At the close of this tumultuous period, Waugh turned to writing and converted to Catholicism. Such were the building-blocks of Vile Bodies. And if Christian virtue plays a modest role in the novel—a Jesuit priest and an American lady evangelist have bit parts in the story, but seem every bit as worldly as the other characters—the shallow and tawdry preamble to Waugh's conversion is given center stage. The "Bright Young People" who populate Vile Bodies drink too much, party too late, sleep too little, and borrow today what they can't pay back tomorrow.

Around the same time this novel was written, Hemingway had popularized the idea of a "lost generation" (the phrase borrowed from Gertrude Stein) of bohemian and alienated writers, mostly American ex-pats living in Paris. But Waugh shows in these pages that London possessed a "lost generation" that could match up with the Paris contingent drink-for-drink and affair-for-affair. But a few characters in Vile Bodies find a way to make a decent living off of indecency—mainly as gossip columnists for the London press. The public has an insatiable appetite for tawdry tidbits and insulting innuendos, and Fleet Street does its best to accommodate their curiosity. But the job of tattle-teller has its drawbacks, and before the mid-point of the novel one of the gossip writers, the Earl of Balcairn commits suicide in dismay over his exclusion from a fashionable party. In a final act of revenge, before placing his head inside the gas oven and breathing in the fumes, he files one last news article filled with imagined confessions of transgressions by society leaders.

…the Countess of Throbbing rose to confess her sins, and in a voice broken with emotion disclosed the hitherto unverified details of the parentage of the present Earl….The Archbishop of Canterbury, who up to now had remained unmoved by the general emotion, then testified that at Eton in the 'eighties he and Sir James Brown….. A suicide seems not quite cricket for a comic novel, but Waugh never found death incompatible with humor—two decades later he even wrote a very funny book about the funeral business, The Loved One (1948). Certainly in Vile Bodies, Waugh makes every effort to live up to the cynicism of his book's title, delivering both vileness and the bodies in ample measure. The Earl is not the only "Bright Young Person" to meet an untimely end in this novel. Waugh exhibits an almost Dantesque desire to mete out punish- ments to his characters, and this may be the most telling sign that the novel’s author had recently embraced the Church of Rome.

There is no Inferno here, but one could easily imagine Waugh creating different levels of his own British ruling class version of hell, assigning special spots to dipsomaniacs and fornicators, scroungers and snitches, hypocrites and whingers. Soon another gossip columnist steps in to relate the colorful transgressions of the ignoble nobility for public consumption. Adam Fenwick Symes mixes with high society but is always low on cash, and a career as a journalist could help him out of his pecuniary embarrassment. He first gains a wide following by writing tell-all accounts of lunatics and eccentrics among the most prominent families in the land. There is an amusing story of how, when lunching with the then Dean of Westminster, Lord —— startled his host by proclaiming that so far from being of divine ordinance, the Ten Commandments were, in point of fact, composed by himself and delivered by him to Moses on Sinai…. Lady ——, whose imitations of animal sounds are so life-like, that she can seldom be persuaded to converse in any other way….. Etc. etc. Adam soon learns that it is easier to make up gossip rather than track it down.

He begins populating his columns with phony fashion trends—touting, for example, the stylishness of green bowler hats and black suede shoes—and imaginary exploits by unreal people. But he proves to be too clever for his own good, and is fired after one too many made-up stories. Waugh is often admired for his dark humor, but rarely is recognized for the structural innovations of his novels. Yet Vile Bodies is as daring in its construction as in its titillating tales. As Truman Capote later learned, any novel built around gossip tends to fall apart into bits and pieces. Waugh does not fight against this tendency, but uses it to his own advantage. From the very start of Vile Bodies, Waugh employs a kaleidoscopic technique in which the perspective and personages constantly change. More than twenty characters are introduced in the first 15 pages, and although many of them are soon abandoned in the course of this peripatetic novel, Waugh comes up with others to take their place.

See Also: A few story lines recur throughout the novel—notably Adam's on-and-off-again engagement with Nina Blount, and his attempt to track down an intoxicated major who owes him a large sum of money—but these are more running jokes than developed plots. Waugh really has little to fall back on here except his own wit, inventiveness and sprightly dialogue. No high-flown ambitions or dramatic conflicts are allowed to intrude on the festivities. Well, not until the end, when Waugh dishes up a new World War for his grand finale. But Vile Bodies never lags, despite the emptiness at its center. Waugh, like an inspired prattler at the bar, can draw humor out of the passing anecdote, and always seems to have another to tell when the last one is finished. In our current day, the comedy of manners has fallen on hard times. Some may suggest that it's hard to laugh at manners when there aren't any manners. That’s not entirely fair. Certainly codes of correctness have emerged to take the place of what we once called etiquette.

These attitudes, supplemented by our egalitarian ideals, may have gradually led us to lose our eye for the quirks of different social classes and the unintended humor entrenched in the rituals and observances of everyday life. But the British have been masters of this kind of comic invention at least since the time of Shakespeare, if not back in the days of Chaucer. And its golden age came in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, with Oscar Wilde, P.G. Wodehouse, Noel Coward and (the youngest of this group) Evelyn Waugh. But I wouldn't say that Vile Bodies is out-of-date. Rather its comedy may seem all the fresher since it embodies a type of humorous attitude that readers today will rarely encounter among their own generation. Or put differently, we are still a lost generation, just a little less able to laugh at ourselves. Give Evelyn Waugh some credit: this book shows you how it might still be done. Perhaps we should learn from the example. Ted Gioia writes on literature, music and popular culture.

His most recent book is Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies as Opposed to Stephen Fry’s Bright Young Things: Doubting All | Blogcritics Home / Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies as Opposed to Stephen Fry’s Bright Young Things: Doubting All Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies as Opposed to Stephen Fry’s Bright Young Things: Doubting All Posted by: Alan Dale September 1, 2004 in Uncategorized Leave a comment Please Share... 0 0 Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh is an epic satire of English high society after the Great War written with the brittle wit, insinuating intimacy, and skittering attention span of a gossip column. The protagonist Adam Fenwick-Symes, a posh but broke young writer, does, in fact, end up penning a tell-all newspaper column after his unpublished manuscript is confiscated at customs on his return from the continent and burned. (The officer also takes his copy of Purgatorio, which “doesn’t look right.” It isn’t: based on what follows, Inferno would have been more appropriate.) Typically of both himself and all the people in his set, what Adam feels is more on the order of inconvenience than outrage.

For one thing, he’s already spent the advance from his publisher. Having no money or income further means he can’t afford to marry his girl Nina. The fate of their engagement goes up and down with Adam’s financial prospects, and in the world Waugh depicts there’s no other basis for marriage, certainly nothing like common morality or religious adherence. Which turns out to have its convenient side, after all: Adam and Nina don’t let the inadvisability of their marrying each other keep them from sleeping together, even after she’s married to someone else. (Nina brings Adam home for Christmas and presents him as her husband to her addled father, and to the servants who know better.) Nobody in the vast array of characters Adam and Nina come across socially and professionally would do any different. Adultery is common morality to them. Vile Bodies imagines no alternative in the present for its amoral creatures (who live down to such names as Miles Malpractice, Father Rothschild S.J., and the Duchess of Stayle) and only a worse future, when they’ll lack the will to get serious about the (unspecified) international conflict they’ll be engaged in.

(We last see Adam, having lost his platoon on “the biggest battlefield in the history of the world,” a scene of “unrelieved desolation,” still playing footsie with Nina by mail and trying to get his money from a drunken major who earlier placed a bet on a winning horse for him.) When Adam first visits Nina’s father (to hit him up for £1,000 so they can marry), he asks the taxi driver to take him to Doubting, the father’s house. The taxi driver refers to it as Doubting Hall, which he pronounces Doubting ‘All, the pun at the center of the book’s vortex. From Waugh’s point of view, “doubting all” is the characters’ universal problem. (Vile Bodies came out in 1930, the year Waugh converted to Catholicism .) The glittering world of the book is a world without answers in which it’s considered vulgarly “impudent” even to formulate the questions. But despite the prophet’s disapproval underlying the book, you can see why it would be sensationally and enduringly popular.

It presents the same warning as a medieval ship of fools –“Repent Before It’s Too Late!”–but with enticing, exquisitely kaleidoscopic, jazz-age dazzle. (Plus it has the good commercial sense not to get too specific about those unformulated questions.) What keeps the book spinning and refracting light is the way Waugh maintains a mature distance from the characters’ gaddings-about while describing them in an up-to-the-minute idiom they themselves could appreciate. The book is giddy yet effortlessly accomplished, as if the author had performed an autopsy with a pearl-handled letter opener, without getting up from his chair or even putting down his cocktail. Waugh, who published the book when he was 26, comes across as the most enviably, fantastically deft young-old man, the ultramodern precocious fogey (infinitely better company than T.S. Eliot). Vile Bodies is perhaps the least cumbersome, the most “deliciously” entertaining epic in literature. Its qualities are so unusual for epic that it applies some pressure to the definition of the genre.

Epic is the romance of the group, and in its classic literary form, in Virgil’s Aeneid, it serves as a glorification and justification of the group’s destiny. Their destiny is ordained by the heavens and their military prowess in establishing a realm on earth reflects this higher sanction. Milton’s Paradise Lost puts more emphasis on the spiritual than the earthly element but likewise has a martial vigor and grandiloquence. The question, then, is whether Vile Bodies is too slight for epic. We expect a certain monumentalism of the genre, but epic has to mean something besides a production of sufficient scale (walled cities, sea-darkening fleets, massed armies, transport to heaven and hell, etc.). Isn’t scope perhaps more important, that is, the ambition of the author to achieve an encompassing vision of the significance of the group’s destiny? This factor gives Fiddler on the Roof (1971) more epic dimension than Lawrence of Arabia (1962), for all its chivalric sweep, and it’s precisely what Waugh sneaks in on you while you’re cackling over his clueless debauchees.

Another problem with epic is that in modern democratic countries artists tend not to be possessed of epic certainty. It turns out that such certainty, however, isn’t essential. Instead, the artist’s vision can be an expression of his doubt as to the group’s destiny. Thus, Vile Bodies is an epic treatment of the English elite in which their presumption of eminence has a grandly hollow resonance. Which is to say that Vile Bodies is an ironic epic–it pointedly places an epic structure on a foundation incapable of supporting it. The focal moment in this respect comes when Nina and Ginger, the rich husband she doesn’t love, are flying to Monte Carlo for their honeymoon and Ginger asks if she knows a bit of poetry that he only half-remembers and misquotes and has no idea is John of Gaunt’s tribute to England in Shakespeare’s Richard II. (Ginger’s version begins, “This scepter’d isle, this earth of majesty, this something or other Eden.”) Ginger gestures toward the English epic ethos by following up with, “Well, I mean to say, don’t you feel somehow, up in the air like this and looking down and seeing everything underneath.

I mean, don’t you have a sort of feeling rather like that, if you see what I mean?” Ginger, like Waugh, is looking down on the island but in his mouth the most movingly nationalistic verse in English letters becomes burlesque, exposing Ginger and his kind and sapping the sentiment as he gives halting voice it. To finish off any pretensions to national ascendancy Waugh ends his book by plunking down on that outsized battlefield a warrior-protagonist too emblematically depleted to accomplish anything on it. Americans, who have become the most self-questioning of all triumphant peoples, have grown familiar since the 1970s with ironic epic in our movies. For instance, Francis Ford Coppola’s first two Godfather movies (1972, 1974) show the establishment of a Sicilian-American dynasty on new shores, as if in continuation of the Aeneid. The characters at the center of the action where the heroes would be in the ancient poem, however, are brutal criminals.

The baptism sequence at the end of the first picture, in which the crown “prince” Michael stands godfather to his nephew while his henchmen murder his rivals with paramilitary precision, manifests not the sanction of the gods but the empty formality of Michael’s religious commitment. It certainly isn’t sin-cleansing blood that’s flowing. Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975) is perhaps the closest thing to Waugh’s Vile Bodies in movies: both wickedly satirize enclosed societies in a way that radiates beyond them. Set in the country music industry, Nashville is a casually structured pageant of the comings and goings, the ups and downs, the ambitions, ruminations, and dalliances, of 26 characters–“royalty,” courtiers, suppliants, all of them more or less ridiculous or compromised–who converge at a concert in support of a self-appointed savior of a presidential candidate. On Sunday morning we get a cross-section of the church services they attend, with apparent sincerity, but their lives are caught up in a kitsch mixture of art, religion, and politics that seems to satisfy no one deeply.

Nashville ends with an assassination at the city’s replica of the Parthenon and the final shot is a pan up to the empty sky, putting in place epic monumentalism and undermining it at the same time. (Nashville is much closer to Vile Bodies than Altman’s Gosford Park (2001), a satiric murder mystery that “achieves” an almost Soviet degree of humorlessness about British class relations.) This does not mean, unfortunately, that filming Vile Bodies is a sure thing. The actor Stephen Fry (A Handful of Dust (1988), Peter’s Friends (1992), Wilde (1997), Gosford Park (2001)) has made his directorial debut with an adaptation of it and the kindest thing I can say is that the new title Bright Young Things, a phrase drawn from the book, is better than the original. Vile Bodies suits a collection of Jonathan Swift’s poems (e.g., “The Lady’s Dressing Room” which makes you gag til you laugh); Waugh’s disgust just isn’t that carnal. (After sleeping with Adam Nina says, “All this fuss about sleeping together.

For physical pleasure I’d sooner go to my dentist any day.”) Adam’s volume of Purgatorio has been dropped, but the movie opens at an Inferno-themed party, hinting at a spiritual-visionary quality that, alas, it otherwise misses entirely. Beneath its chic surface the non-stop partying in Vile Bodies is supposed to be as ghastly as in Poe’s Masque of the Red Death, but Fry’s handling of the breathless opening bash is too explicit. If any director does have the touch to get a memorable laugh from a flapper saying how bored she is while flapping, it isn’t Fry. From the start everything that’s understated in Waugh becomes overstated in the movie, which you could forgive if it helped people who haven’t read the book get the jokes. But that’s just the start of the movie’s problems. The culmination of them is that Fry either doesn’t understand the total irony of Waugh’s view in Vile Bodies or deliberately chose to violate it in order to make the movie more palatably movieish.

The movie turns Adam, Waugh’s cipher of a writer-protagonist, a juvenile so trivial the association with the fall of man and original sin seems (purposely) overblown, into a romantic hero. This changes the genre of the movie from an all-out epic satire into an ironic romance with a heroic turnaround on Adam’s part. Late in the book Adam sighs, “Oh, Nina, what a lot of parties,” and then in parenthesis the narrator describes the variety of parties these shiny insects have been swarming to for years on end, leading up to the incomplete phrase, “Those vile bodies.” In the movie the parenthesis is given as a speech to Adam, suggesting he’s become fed up and is gaining insight that the Adam of the book is incapable of. (And also suggesting an identity of Adam with Waugh that in the book could function in only the most self-accusatory way.) In order to sustain Adam’s maturation, the script hacks off the subsequent episode in which he takes the married Nina to Doubting Hall for Christmas, leaving behind a (rubber) check for Ginger in repayment of the amount for which Adam had previously sold his interest in Nina to him.

Adam, Doubting, Christmas–does this sound like an expendable episode in a Catholic author’s work? Instead the movie changes the book’s era from the “near future” to the historical late ’30s and adds a coda in which Nina works in a war-production factory and Adam, having got the money from the major, gives it to Ginger and moves in with Nina to live contentedly broke. You’d think a gay English director with a literary bent would be familiar enough with Auden to know that the atmosphere of the ’20s and ’30s aren’t interchangeable, but what’s really dispiriting is the way the movie turns blitzed-out London into a re-education camp for Adam and Nina. The movie doesn’t trust us to enjoy Waugh’s vision and be improved by it, so it keeps senselessly propounding Waugh’s disgust with the high-society revels outright. The taxi driver, for instance, doesn’t say “Doubting ‘All” but he does complain to Adam that an experience like the Great War would be good for the young people nowadays.

Though he’s meant to be a crank (the movie couldn’t be explicitly pro-war, of course), that’s exactly how the script has rewritten the ending. And while the American lady evangelist Mrs. Melrose Ape is still presented as a grotesque charlatan (lighted from below Stockard Channing in a gaudy purple suit looks like Little Richard), the opening of her speech, “Just you look at yourselves,” which in the book brings on such searching self-examination as “Darling, is my nose awful?”, now leads to a tirade that reflects the movie’s own attitude toward the superficially beau monde. The most explicit condemnation comes, peculiarly, from a race car driver Miles Malpractice is going with, who hollers something like, “What’s wrong with you people?!” The movie doesn’t make clear his source of moral authority and then drops him from the picture. In the scene in the book the driver “heartlessly” shows more concern about his car than about Agatha Runcible, who’s driven off in it and disappeared.

(Why have we been given this speech, which, in the characters’ parlance, is truly “bogus,” and not the slapstick involving Agatha’s smoking in the pits?) But the most staggering switch-up comes in the handling of the homosexual Miles. The movie’s Miles, a snotty, ferret-faced drug addict, is flagrant in a way he isn’t in the book, and yet when he has to leave the country because of his homosexuality Fry stops everything for a tearful scene clearly meant to elicit our sympathy. It makes no sense: the movie has, if anything, made Miles even more representative of his hellish circle, undercutting any reason for us to care especially what happens to him. (In the book Miles’s fate is summed up in two unemphatically informative lines between Adam and Nina.) This ill-fitting Wilde remnant is an obvious piece of self-serving special pleading on the part of the openly gay Fry, and it grinds the story’s gears to filings. The huge cast of characters in the book whirl by in a blur and register like an infinite string of zeroes with no positive integer at their head. Waugh shows no affection for any of them, no investment in any individual’s fate.

There’s every reason to sympathize with actual victims of oppressive sexuality laws, but these aren’t real people. They’re not even realistically drawn characters. They’re appealing because they’re so totally, amusingly, flatly irredeemable. The book is not for simps who think a work should give you a reason to care about, root for, or like the characters. This is related to the fact that it’s not a novel in any sense except the least meaningful (as a work of prose fiction of a certain length). It’s prose satire and so thoroughgoingly satiric it scarcely contains what could be a called a satiric norm, i.e., a standard, explicit or implicit, by reference to which the targets of the satire could ameliorate their behavior. We can infer a norm by negative implication but that’s very different from having anything invested in the characters’ fates. By contrast, in Nashville Altman respects his central figure Barbara Jean as an artist in the midst of all the empty activity, and the Godfather movies are tragic by virtue of making clear to us what Michael might have been if he hadn’t got involved in the family operations.

Both movies have a more palpable, passionate sense of this world as fallen, of experience as a decidedly mixed proposition, than Vile Bodies. Waugh’s tone in the book is perfectly, glacially consistent. Fry’s movie varies the tone, fumblingly, and comes to seem like a bad adaptation of Anthony Powell rather than a bad adaptation of Waugh. Powell is a greater writer than Waugh but this doesn’t rate as a feat. Bright Young Things is the sort of movie that makes critics say it’s as relevant now as it was when published. On the one hand, irony, the literary genre that measures the distance between the ideal and the real, is always “relevant,” given man’s moral imperfectibility. On the other hand, Vile Bodies wasn’t especially predictive of the English “near future.” No one can say the English didn’t pull their socks up and defend the better cause in World War II. Not only that, the soldiers would have been a decade or so junior to Waugh, which is something no satirist expects, that the younger generation will have strengths and virtues his own lacks.

Fry has asked for this kind of comment by eliciting contemporary concern over tabloid news and paparazzi and commercial violations of privacy. This kind of banality is nearly the reverse of Waugh’s suavity and misplaced to boot, since the problem to Waugh is not that the characters are caught out by the press but that they’re doing what they’re doing in the first place. But as an aesthetic matter it’s worse that when the movie makes Waugh’s naughty figurines redeemable they cease to be interesting. This is nearly inevitable because the script hasn’t changed the story enough to support its romantic warping of a plot originally carpentered as satire. All told, Bright Young Things is one of the most depressing obliterations of a literary source that comes to mind, much worse than the recent Wings of the Dove (1997) and Nicholas Nickleby (2002). It harks back to a fundamentally compromised Hollywood studio production like Madame Bovary (1949), a movie that similarly fails to appreciate, or even perceive, its source author’s ironic outlook. I’m a slow reader and I tore through Waugh’s 321-page book at cheetah speed.

If you add travel time, dinner, and the now-endless advertisements and previews before the 106-minute movie, you could stay home, read the whole book, and still get to bed earlier. The pleasures supplied by the comic acting of Jim Broadbent, Fenella Woolgar, Imelda Staunton, and Peter O’Toole are considerable but too incidental to rate a recommendation. There’s no reason to see the movie. A footnote about fallen behavior: lest anyone think that Waugh wrote from a morally unattainable height, look for the bananas in this review of a memoir by his son Auberon. You can find this review and a lot besides at The Kitchen Cabinet . The Post-War Elite The Post-War Elite VILE BODIES By Evelyn Waugh. he various perturbed elders who made such vociferous outcry when the younger generation started to make public--via numerous novels--its gay-hearted private lives, will give thanks, surely--after reading this series of episodes--that they were not born in England. For in England, they will discover, there was a younger generation that really was a younger generation. At least if Mr. Evelyn Waugh can be believed!

As in his widely-applauded "Decline and Fall," so now in "Vile Bodies" he has set down the antics of a group of youngsters so madly and unmorally irresponsible that beside them Scott Fitzgerald's most defiant characters are staid and conservative. The book, so the publishers inform us, is satire. It seems, rather, a dizzy nightmare. One of those weird nighttime dream productions in which everything gives the impression of being fiercely logical, until--to your disillusion--you start to tell about it. The author prefaces it with two quotations from "Alice in Wonderland," and it has at least this in common with Mr. Lewis Carroll's immortal fairy tale: everything in it is very nearly utterly impossible; everything in it seems absolutely true.

Its principal theme is the love story of Adam Fenwick-Synes, a young author, and of Nina Blount, strange daughter of the British aristocracy, who at every momentous or unmomentous crisis is placed hors-de-combat by "an awful pain." Throughout the book they become engaged, dis-engaged, re-engaged, and at the end definitely and finally unengaged, as Adam over and over almost acquires--only to find at the last minute that he has lost--the money on which they were to get married. It is around the vicissitudes of this pair that the book's other characters group themselves. They make a strange assemblage. Mr. Outrage, "last week's Prime Minister"; Mrs. Melrose Ape, a woman evangelist with her travelling troupe of "angels"; Miles Malpractice "who touched up his eyelashes in the dining room of the hotel where they stopped for luncheon"; the Hon. Agatha Runcible who "wore trousers"; Lord Belcair who wrote a Mr. Chatterbox column for the Daily Excess and had the decency to commit suicide. All of them the cream of the post-war elite.

And these very weird persons are woven into a series of incidents as fantastic as could possibly be imagined by the whim of a novelist. To relate these incidents would but be to spoil the reader's encounter with them. The book could be called needlessly nasty, decadent, superficial, and arrogantly, even offensively sophisticated. It is not even brilliantly original, for Mr. Waugh is decidedly indebted to Norman Douglas, Michael Arlen and Aldous Huxley. Yet it certainly is funny and that, surely, is enough to say for it. The larger part of modern satire makes you smile, and smile only faintly. "Vile Bodies" may shock you, but it will make you laugh. Vile Bodies : Evelyn Waugh : 9780141182872 Add to basket Add to wishlist Description Evelyn Waugh's acidly funny and formally daring satire, Vile Bodies reveals the darkness and vulnerability that lurks beneath the glittering surface of the high life. This Penguin Modern Classics edition is edited with an introduction and notes by Richard Jacobs. In the years following the First World War a new generation emerges, wistful and vulnerable beneath the glitter.

The Bright Young Things of twenties' Mayfair, with their paradoxical mix of innocence and sophistication, exercise their inventive minds and vile bodies in every kind of capricious escapade - whether promiscuity, dancing, cocktail parties or sports cars. In a quest for treasure, a favourite party occupation, a vivid assortment of characters, among them the struggling writer Adam Fenwick-Symes and the glamorous, aristocratic Nina Blount, hunt fast and furiously for ever greater sensations and the fulfilment of unconscious desires. If you enjoyed Vile Bodies, you might like Waugh's A Handful of Dust, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'The high point of the experimental, original Waugh' Malcolm Bradbury, Sunday Times 'This brilliantly funny, anxious and resonant novel ...the difficult edgy guide to the turn of the decade' Richard Jacobs 'It's Britain's Great Gatsby' Stephen Fry, director of Vile Bodies film adaptation Bright Young Things show more Product details 128 x 194 x 20mm | 199.58g Publication date 9780141182872

Question: Who wrote the novel Vile Bodies?
Answer: Evelyn Waugh