So much of what made Evelyn Waugh great, including the decade he blossomed in and the smart set he dished so ruthlessly about, is on display in this, his second novel, a triumph of form over substance.
No doubt Waugh intended it just so.
In many important ways, Vile Bodies marks a turning point in the author’s career. He already had his signature voice worked out. Here he aims for scope and bite, casting a wide net on the social antics of the jaded aristocratic scions dubbed the “Bright Young Things.” These were people he knew and loved best. And they loved him back, even more after he pilloried them in print with this mordant, often acid book.
Adam Fenwick-Symes is a struggling young novelist attempting the feat of courting a rich girl without an penny to his name. After a harrowing Channel crossing, Adam’s manuscript is seized and burnt by Customs. His book agent demands back a hefty advance he already spent.
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| "There were about a dozen people left at the party; that hard kernel of gaiety that never breaks..." By the time Waugh wrote this, the "party" he knew and wrote of, that of the roaring 1920s was breaking up. Vile Bodies projects forward to an era of war and unrest. Image from https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/142492.Vile_Bodies |
He still has Nina, on and off, though their sex life is hardly inspiring:
“Anyway, you’ve had some fun out of it, haven’t you... or haven’t you?”
“Haven’t you?”
“My dear, I never hated anything so much in my life... still, as long as you enjoyed it that’s something.”
Waugh’s first novel, Decline And Fall, gave you a sympathetic, put-upon protagonist. Here, Adam, Nina, and their companions are a shallow and insensitive lot. Their adventures have a deliberate impermanence about them, a sense of dancing in the raindrops before the deluge. Waugh pours in a bevy of secondary characters whose empty chatter reveals the hollowness at the core of upper-class London life.
We meet a scheming evangelist, a shadowy Jesuit, a Prime Minister with a scandalous passion for Asian women, a myriad of upper-class twits who live to dress up and be seen, and quite a number of ne’er-do-wells.
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| Aimee Semple McPherson, a famous American Pentecostal evangelist, was the model for Waugh's Mrs. Ape, who combines fiery faith with an eye for money: "'Salvation doesn't do them the same good if they think it's free' was her favourite axiom," Waugh writes. Image from https://www.thoughtco.com/aimee-semple-mcpherson-3529977 |
The most emblematic character of Vile Bodies is tragic, vapid party girl Agatha Runcible, who can’t be bothered to put down her drink and ciggie even when her life is on the line. Her knowledge of current affairs is abysmal; she can’t even recognize the Prime Minister when she finds herself sitting at his family’s breakfast table:
She had heard someone say something about an Independent Labour Party, and was furious that she had not been asked.
Sometimes the speakers are unknown to us, the context of their words unclear. Their chatter forms its own kind of absurdist character:
“Oh, to be young again, Kitty. When I think, my dear, of all the trouble and exertion which we had to go through to be even moderately bad…”
“…She seems to know you.”
“Yes, I’ve known her all my life. As a matter of fact, she’s my mother.”
“My dear, how too shaming...”
When he takes up the guise of newspaper gossip writer "Mr. Chatterbox," Adam finds himself for a time a London sensation, his prose exciting the public in a way his novels never would. "With sultanesque caprice Adam would tell his readers about inaccessible eating-houses...he drove them to dance in temperance hotels in Bloomsbury."
Image from https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/142492.Vile_Bodies
“…Poor Judge What’s-his name is in a terrible state about it. I said to him it’s not so much the price of the chandelier, I said. What money can make money can mend, I said, and that’s the truth, isn’t it, dear? But what I mind, I said, is having a death in the house and all the fuss. It doesn’t do anyone any good having people killing themselves in a house like Flossie did.”
Tragedy is a regular visitor in the pages of Vile Bodies, often as a punchline. Governments collapse and young women are corrupted and lords commit suicide because they can’t get invited to the right parties. This sort of thing happens frequently in Waugh books, though not with the same rapidity: The ever-changing parade of notable victims put their harsh demises in an almost cheery kind of perspective.
The plot is a weakness, perhaps by design but a weakness still. There is no single overarching story; Adam and Nina’s interactions are central but occur sporadically. For a long chapter and change we watch as Adam becomes a gossip writer, achieving success by making up the people he writes about. Then it is over and done, and we move on to other business. It is a rinse-and-spin narrative.
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| An English mansion of classical Palladian design. In Vile Bodies, one such home is "Doubting Hall," the residence of Nina's father Colonel Blount. A cab driver pronounces it "Doubting 'All," which drives home the pun. Punny names are scattered throughout the book. Image from https://www.mansionglobal.com/articles/a-neo-palladian-mansion-in-surrey-hits-the-market-for-27m-63810 |
Waugh aims to be diverting, and this he is, but at some expense to what impression the book leaves on readers. I would submit it is not deep.
The biggest character of Vile Bodies is London itself. Waugh centers most of the action around the city. Long sections of the book form a kind of comic travelogue of places to be among the smart set:
They lunched Chez Espinosa, the second most expensive restaurant in London; it was full of oilcloth and Lalique glass, and the sort of people who like that sort of thing went there continually and said how awful it was.
Charles
Dickens seemed to be an early model for Waugh’s novel-writing. In Decline
And Fall, Paul Pennyfeather taught at a dodgy boarding school not unlike
the one in Nicholas Nickleby. This time, the Dickens influence is visible
in the methodical manner in which Waugh lavishes descriptions with colorful,
often whimsical details:
There was a cabinet containing the relics of Nina’s various collecting fevers – some butterflies and a beetle or two, some fossils and some birds’ eggs and a few postage stamps. There were some bookcases of superbly unreadable books, a gun, a butterfly net, an alpenstock in the corner. There were catalogues of agricultural machines and acetylene plants, lawn mowers, “sports requisites.”
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| The dining room of Evelyn Waugh's London flat where he lived while writing Vile Bodies. Above the mantel is a portrait of his then-wife, Evelyn Gardner Waugh, whose affair was echoed in the fates of main characters Nina and Adam. Image from https://www.evelynwaugh.org.uk/styled-82/index.html, a fantastic repository of knowledge for all things Waugh. |
Nina is not a very committed type of person. Over the course of the novel, we see her flip boyfriends like flash cards. Her stodgy relic of a father proves quite balmy and forgetful, with countless visitors at his palatial estate whose identities he can’t remember. “It’s the thin edge of the wedge asking people down for the week-end,” he mutters.
Waugh throws a lot of activity at the reader, a motor race, a dodgy film production, a major who keeps borrowing money. Throughout a fragile joviality hangs over the show, Waugh’s focus being on the pauses after the laughter, “when the momentary illusion of well-being and exhilaration gives place to melancholy, indigestion and moral decay.”
The title of the book is referenced in the middle of one of Waugh’s long catalogs, explicating the dreary ennui of having too much:
…Russian parties, Circus parties… parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris – all that succession and repetition of massed humanity...Those vile bodies...
Waugh was undergoing two life-transforming events during the course of writing Vile Bodies. One was his divorce from Evelyn Gardner, a. k. a. “she-Evelyn,” after she dumped him for another man. The relationship between Adam and Nina is an utterly cynical affair; him selling her at one point to settle a boarding-house bill; her dropping him for his drippy rival Ginger the moment Adam suffers any reversal of fortune.
At one point Nina says: “Do be amusing, Adam. I can’t bear you when you’re not amusing.”
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| In 2003, comedian and longtime Waughophile Stephen Fry directed Bright Young Things, his adaptation of Vile Bodies. Concerned more with the persecution of homosexual characters and class divisions than was the source novel, it is a weak comedy with some fun period detail. Image from https://thebookdrifter.com/2013/11/12/of-vile-bodies-and-bright-young-things/ |
The other, much bigger change in Waugh’s life was his conversion to Catholicism, which would transform his writing and objectives in time. That it isn’t so large a subject in Vile Bodies, apart from the vaguely sinister Jesuit, Father Rothschild, is because Waugh only just came to the religion after having been a mostly atheistic youth.
There is a marked moral dimension to Vile Bodies, though it is not elevated from Decline And Fall. Here again, good-for-nothing types conspire to cause the ruins of trusting friends. We hear the evangelist, Mrs. Ape, do some preaching, though it is understood she always has her hand out and uses the youth of her pretty disciples to attract rich men. One of them is even recruited into prostitution by Lady Metroland, the aristocratic pimpress who waylaid Paul back in Decline And Fall.
It is left to Father Rothschild to offer some spiritual perspective on the confused way these Bright Young Things live their lives:
“My private schoolmaster used to say, ‘If a thing’s worth doing at all, it’s worth doing well.’ My Church has taught that in different words for several centuries. But these young people have got hold of another end of the stick, for all we know it may be the right one. They say, ‘If the thing’s not worth doing well, it’s not worth doing at all.’ It makes everything very difficult for them.”
A first edition dust jacket of Vile Bodies, its image a reference to a climactic motor race observed by the principal characters. Waugh makes clear many of the spectators are on hand to see any fatal car accidents; they will not be disappointed.
Image from https://www.jonkers.co.uk/rare-book/12037/vile-bodies/evelyn-waugh
Vile Bodies has much of what keeps Evelyn Waugh so enjoyable so many years on: Whip-smart dialogue, characters hoisted on their own petards, brutal plot twists, and a sense of cosmic, comic disengagement. As a main character, seedy Adam is reminiscent of Basil Seal, Waugh’s later caddish hero, but without any of Seal’s clever wit or dynamism.
Waugh wrote for the gut punch throughout his career, and Vile Bodies is a very good book putting that across. I think that Waugh did gain deeper emotional resonances and thematic clarity as a more openly Catholic novelist later on; his best novels were still to come.
Vile
Bodies
merely doubles down on Waugh the social satirist, with no quarter given. No
small thing, given how mercilessly funny he could be.
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