The Loved One – Evelyn Waugh, 1948 ★★★½

Death Be Not Cheap

A novel easy to enjoy but hard to love, The Loved One demonstrates how able a novelist Evelyn Waugh was when he didn’t give a hoot about any of the characters in his book.

It may well be the bleakest satire Waugh ever crafted, plunging his readers into an utterly alien and forlorn land known as California. There celebrity reigns supreme, death is the ultimate arbiter of social status, and empty chatter replaces serious conversation. This is a point in its favor, our English protagonist Dennis Barlow is told:

“They are a very decent, generous lot of people out here and they don’t expect you to listen. Always remember that, dear boy. It’s the secret of social ease in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard.”

Barlow, a failed poet, takes work as front man for a Los Angeles pet cemetery, Happier Hunting Grounds. He discovers Whispering Glades, an ultra-posh cemetery for Hollywood’s elite, while making arrangements for a departed friend. Noticing the business model for disposing of dead humans is even more lucrative than for dead pets, he opportunistically romances a woman who beautifies the corpses’s faces.

Waugh found much to dislike about the Hollywood funeral industry, from its emphasis on lush beauty to its non-sectarian appropriation of religion. Dennis is told: “The Dreamer does not approve of wreaths or crosses. We just arrange the flowers in their own natural beauty.”
Image of Hollywood Forever Cemetery and Funeral Home from https://promisezonearts.org/portfolio_page/hollywood-forever-cemetery-and-funeral-home/

Too uninspired to come up with his own love poems, he recycles the likes of Shelley and Shakespeare in wooing her, knowing she is too uncultured to pick up on this deceit.

Like everyone else in the novel, Barlow is a soulless cad:

“An American man would despise himself for living on his wife.”

“Yes, but you see I’m European. We have none of these prejudices in the older civilizations.”

Written between two of his most warmly human and deeply Catholic novels, The Loved One is neither of those. Rather, it is a callback to Waugh’s roots as a biting social critic. Here again he broadly lampoons cultural mores with a cast of one-dimensional caricatures who are designed to make their rude points and then disappear.

Fine for what it is, but not my favorite Waugh novel. He worked better with a scalpel than he did with a sledgehammer.

Whispering Glades's profusion of unseemly ornament attracts Dennis's notice in the novel, "a host of bronze and Carrara statuary, allegorical, infantile or erotic." Above, Waugh relaxes with friends a few years after The Loved One's publication.
Image from https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-3063095/Sex-Evelyn-Id-dentist-fancied-ladies-man-Waughs-wife-thought-hopeless-bed.html

The novel opens quite well, setting up California from the perspective of English expatriates Barlow and his much older living companion, Sir Francis Hinsley. Like Barlow, Hinsley was once a writer of great promise who now works as a publicist for Megalopolitan Pictures, content to craft fake personas for wanna-be starlets.

The pair discuss literature with jaded, boozy ennui and a faint shiver: “Kierkegaard, Kafka, Connolly, Compton Burnet, Sartre, ‘Scottie’ Wilson,” Hinsley asks. “Who are they? What do they want?”

There is a wonderful sense of comic disengagement, the idea of Hollywood as some Somerset Maugham outpost in deepest Africa. This is magnified by a visitor, Sir Ambrose Abercrombie, the self-appointed doyen of Hollywood’s British colony, who has learned of Barlow’s new job working at a pet cemetery. He is not amused:

“You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs – except in England, of course. That’s understood out here, thanks to the example we’ve set. There are jobs that an Englishman just doesn’t take.”

Leon Gordon, an English playwright who relocated to Hollywood, was Waugh's reason for visiting Los Angeles in 1947. Gordon wanted to produce an adaptation of Brideshead Revisited. Waugh's unsuccessful negotiations with him and other relocated countrymen may have influenced his treatment of the British contingent in The Loved One.
Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Gordon_(playwright)

The Tinseltown focus is something we lose quickly – along with Hinsley – as the novel shifts into the plot for which it is best known, a full-blown satire of the American funeral industry as well as commercialism and capitalism in general, aspects of American life Waugh disliked.

Waugh gets pegged as a conservative for his religious views and his general disdain for progressivism. In fact, his politics were not easily defined from a 21^st century or even a 20^th century perspective. Consistent with his Catholicism was an abhorrence for materialism, and he was hardly alone in finding American life very materialist. He also didn’t like Americans, considering them loud and too full of themselves, without much in the way of culture to draw upon.

This comes through in every character we meet in The Loved One, apart from the English ex-pats. At the center of this thesis is Aimée Thanatogenos, introduced as “sole Eve in a bustling hygienic Eden” and easily fooled by Barlow’s pretending the great verse of others is his own invention inspired by his love for her.

Aimée is America in all its godless innocence, worshipful only of the cause she serves, Whispering Glades, which mimics the language of piety to make money off of death. Aimée was named after the real-life evangelist Aimée Semple McPherson (a famous charlatan of the cloth) by a dipsomaniacal mother who kept renaming her but then forgetting what the new name was.

“Once you start changing a name, you see, there’s no reason ever to stop,” Aimée explains. “One always hears one that sounds better.”

Hollywood went all out in 1965 to celebrate Waugh's takedown of their community, with a film adaptation directed by Tony Richardson. Members of its cast are seen above at Forest Lawn Cemetery.
Image from https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0059410/mediaviewer/rm3603198464

Barlow clearly doesn’t care about Aimée herself; he just is looking for another easy ride after losing Hinsley to suicide. Hinsley’s death is in fact what brought Barlow into Whispering Glades and Aimée’s presence, Abercrombie insisting on a state funeral for Hinsley being that he was once one of Hollywood’s first British successes:

“This is an occasion when we’ve all got to show the flag. We may have to put our hands in our pockets…but it will be money well spent if it puts the British colony right in the eyes of the industry.”

Waugh spent considerable time researching The Loved One in California, even visiting Forest Lawn Cemetery, the obvious model for Whispering Glades. Ironically, the book is dedicated to his friend Nancy Mitford, whose sister Jessica would later write another famous takedown of the same industry, The American Way Of Death.

Waugh’s dislike for the funeral business is pungent, eloquent and extends even to the artificiality of embalmment itself, as when Barlow first sees Hinsley’s corpse laid out for public presentation:

The body looked altogether smaller than life-size now that it was, as it were, stripped of the thick pelt of mobility and intelligence. And the face which inclined its blind eyes toward him – the face was entirely horrible; as ageless as a tortoise and as inhuman; a painted and smirking obscene travesty by comparison with which the devil-mask Dennis had found in the noose was a festive adornment, a thing an uncle might don at a Christmas party.

Party time at Whispering Glades, in a scene from the 1965 movie. The film takes many liberties from the book, as its script was co-written by Dr. Strangelove scribe Terry Southern with a "nothing's-sacred" aesthetic Waugh would have abhorred.
Image from https://skydancingblog.com/2012/11/18/the-loved-ones/the-loved-one-1965/

Dennis himself is a cipher in the novel, a conscious choice of Waugh’s perhaps, but a distancing one. His relationship with Sir Francis has a vague suggestion of homosexuality about it – Sir Ambrose says it was the exposure of his living arrangements that caused Sir Francis’s falling out with Megalopolitan Pictures, but without elaboration. Later Dennis does enjoy a sexual relationship with Aimée, who worries in turn about Dennis’s lack of ethics.

I think he’s just to be taken as a rank opportunist, of no individual worth and thus at home with the other car wrecks inhabiting California.

Waugh makes the British characters no less venial, especially Dennis but taking in bluff Sir Ambrose as well. (Sir Francis registers the only hint of real pathos, when he learns of his firing at Megalo by walking into his office and finding it inhabited by his replacement.)

On the American side, no one may be more memorable than Mr. Joyboy, star mortician at Whispering Glades with eyes for Aimée. He flirts with her by making sure the corpses he handles greet her with a smile.

“When I send a Loved One [Whispering Glade code for a body] to you, Miss Thanatogenos, I feel as though I were speaking to you through him,” Joyboy says. “Do you ever feel that at all yourself?”

Competing with Joyboy for our attentions is Joyboy’s mother, who lords over her son with “small angry eyes, frizzy hair, pince-nez on a very thick nose, a shapeless body and positively insulting clothes.”

My first copy of The Loved One, with this Charles Addams cartoon, may have misled me into expecting something lighter and more charming than the book itself offers. There is no pet cemetery in the novel, for one thing, with or without TV antennae.
Image from https://www.yesterdaysmuse.com/pages/books/2320967/evelyn-waugh/the-loved-one-an-anglo-american-tragedy-laurel-5080

The book is fun in this way, if broadly so. After the glories of Brideshead Revisited, it is a step back for Waugh, away from the emotional investment of A Handful Of Dust, back to the more facile ridicule of Vile Bodies. The Loved One is well-loved, even having its own cult movie adaptation, but I find it overrated and underbaked, with a tacked-on subplot about an advice columnist that comes off to me as uninspired borrowing of Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts.

Waugh was Catholic by choice, not by birth, his conversion being a matter of rejecting the atheism he found all around him. The Loved One may work best when read from that perspective, a reverse image of all Waugh held dear, presenting life as a gaping, godless maw of doom where even death ultimately is another commodity. However much a figure of her author’s contempt, Aimée’s final moments in the novel are haunting in her personification of misplaced values:

As she grew up the only language she knew expressed fewer and fewer of her ripening needs; the facts which littered her memory grew less substantial; the figure she saw in the looking-glass seemed less recognizably herself.