Glimpses of Unworthy Life and Unworthy Deaths

Dr. Robert Hickson 26 July 2015Saint Anne

The Cleansing Pathos of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One (1948): Glimpses of Unworthy Life and Unworthy Deaths

--Epigraphs--

“A Warning—This is a purely fanciful tale, a little nightmare produced by the unaccustomed high living of a brief visit to Hollywood [in early 1947]. Readers whose pleasure in fiction derives from identifying the characters and scenes with real people and real places will be disappointed. If in the vast variety of life in America there is anyone at all like any of the characters I have invented, I can only remind that person that we never met, and I assure him or her that, had we done so, I would not have attempted to portray a living individual in a book where all the incidents are entirely imaginary. As I have said, this is a nightmare and in parts, perhaps, somewhat gruesome. The squeamish should return their copies to the library or the bookstore unread.” (Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1948)—my emphasis added. These somewhat ironical words come from the author's own un-paginated introductory note and suspect warning. His poignant book is dedicated, moreover, to his close friend, Nancy Mitford.)

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“'Miss [Juanita] del Pablo has been a particular protégée of mine [i.e., of the Englishman and movie script-writer, Sir Francis Hinsley] from the first [in Hollywood]. I remember the day she arrived. Poor Leo bought her for her eyes. She was called Baby Aaronson then—splendid eyes and a fine head of black hair. So Leo made her Spanish. He had most of her nose cut off and sent her to Mexico for six weeks to learn flamenco singing. Then he handed her over to me. I named her. I made her an anti-Fascist refugee. I said she hated men because of her torment by Franco's Moors [in the Spanish Civil War]. That was a new angle then. It caught on. And she was really good in her way, you know—with a truly horrifying natural scowl. Her legs were never photogénique but we kept her in long skirts and used an understudy for the lower half in scenes of violence. I was proud of her and she was good for another ten years' work at least. And now there's been a change of policy at the top. We are only making healthy films this year [in Hollywood] to please the Catholic League of Decency. So poor Juanita has to start at the beginning again as an Irish colleen.'....Sir Francis was charged with the metamorphosis. How lightly, ten years before, he had brought her into existence—the dynamite-bearing Maenad of the Bilbao water-front!...He read it [his newly proposed metamorphosis] aloud in conference...; there were also present the Megalopolitan Directors of Law, Publicity, Personality and International Relations. In all his career in Hollywood Sir Francis had never been in a single assembly with so many luminaries of the Grand Sanhedrin of the Corporation. They turned down his story without debate....When the door closed behind him, the great men [of the Sanhedrin]

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looked at one another and shook their heads. 'Just another has-been,' said the Director of Personality. ” (The Loved One, pp. 7-8, 25-26—my emphasis added)

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“In a thousand years or so [circa 2947], when the first archaeologists from beyond the date-line unload their boat on the sands of southern California, they will find much the same scene as confronted the Franciscan missionaries....Its history will pass from memory to legend until,..., as we have supposed, the archaeologists prick up their ears at the cryptic references in the texts of the twentieth century to a cult which once flourished on this forgotten strand; [the cult] of the idol Oscar—sexless image of infertility—of the great Star Goddesses who were once noisily worshipped there in a Holy Wood. [Moreover,] Without the testimony of tombs the science of archaeology could barely exist, and it will be a commonplace among the scholars of 2947 that the great cultural decline of the twentieth century was first evident in the graveyard....

“What will the archaeologists of 2947 make of all this and of the countless other rarities of the place? What webs of conjecture will be spun by the professors of comparative religion? We know with what confidence they define the intimate beliefs of remote ages. They flourished in the nineteenth century. Then G.K. Chesterton, in a masterly book, sadly neglected in Europe but honoured in the U.S.A.—The Everlasting Man [1925]—gently exposed their fatuity. But they will flourish again, for it is a brand of scholarship well suited to dreamy natures who are not troubled by the itch of precise thought. What will the professors of the future make of Forest Lawn [i.e., the elaborate Los Angeles Cemetery and Memorial Park, which in The Loved One is called “Whispering Glades”]? What do we make of it ourselves? Here is the thing, under our noses, a first-class anthropological puzzle of our own period and neighborhood. What does it mean?....

“Dr. Eaton [the founder of Forest Lawn] has set up his Credo at the entrance. 'I believe in a Happy Eternal Life,' he says. 'I believe those of us left behind should be glad in the certain belief that those gone before have entered into that happier Life.' This theme is repeated on Coleus Terrace: 'Be happy because they for whom you mourn are happy—far happier than ever before.' And again in Vesperland: '...Happy because Forrest Lawn has eradicated the old customs of Death and depicts Life not Death.'

“The implication of these texts is clear. Forest Lawn has consciously turned its back on 'the old customs of death,' the grim traditional alternatives of Heaven and Hell, and promises immediate eternal happiness to all its inmates....Dr. Eaton is the first man to offer eternal salvation at an inclusive charge as part of his undertaking service.

“There is a vital theological point on which Dr. Eaton gives no ex cathedra definition. Does burial in Forest Lawn itself sanctify, or is sanctity the necessary qualification for admission? Discrimination is exercised....Suicides,...who, 'in the old customs of death' would lie at the crossroads, impaled, [now] come [into

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Forest Lawn, as well as into “Whispering Glades”] in considerable numbers and, often, particularly in cases of hanging, present peculiar problems to the [cosmetic] embalmer.

“Embalming is so widely practiced in California [as of early 1947] that many believe it to be a legal obligation....We are very far here from the traditional conception of an adult soul naked at the judgment seat and a body turned to corruption....These [traditional conceptions and symbolic presentations, even, for sure, 'in the [graying] marble adipocere' (336)]...were done with a moral purpose—to remind a highly civilized people that beauty was skin deep and pomp was mortal. In those realistic times Hell waited for the wicked and a long purgation for all but the saints, but Heaven, if at last attained, was a place of perfect knowledge. In Forest Lawn, as the builder claims, these old values are reversed. The body does not decay; it lives on, more chic in death than ever before...; the soul goes straight from the Slumber Room to Paradise, where it enjoys an endless infancy....That, I think, is the message [of Forest Lawn and its soothing inversions and reversals].” (Evelyn Waugh, “Half in Love with Easeful Death: An Examination of Californian Burial Customs,” in The Essays and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh (Edited by Donat Gallagher) (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1984), pp. 331, 334-335, 335-337—my emphasis added.)

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“One participates in a work of art when one studies it with reverence and understanding.” (Evelyn Waugh, The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh—edited by Michael Davie (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1976), pp. 788-789—Waugh's “Easter 1964” Diary Entry—For Waugh, this insight also applies, and more importantly so, to one's “Participation” in the Mass. Funeral Rites, too!)

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While recently re-reading—after almost forty-five years—Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, his

piercing 1948 novel set in the United States—in Southern California, in and around Los Angeles and

Hollywood—I gratefully came to realize for the first time the deep and purifying pathos artfully

expressed in that often disturbing, but carefully nuanced, text—especially when one also becomes

gradually aware of what is missing. For, there are certain sacred elements that are not there amidst the

poignant suicides and the human cremations and the self-deluded evasions of Death. Despite Waugh's

unmistakably Catholic perspective and allusions, we are only implicitly led to consider altogether the

Four Last Things.

That is to say, there is a certain “presence of absence”—in G.K. Chesterton's profound

paradoxical words—such as the absence of a traditional Catholic Requiem Mass and the absence of a

traditional Catholic burial, with the reverent interment of a body, as distinct from the remains of a

deliberate cremation. Part of Waugh's literary art is to draw us to consider what is intimately missing

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and why.

If we hold to a certain Criterion of our Catholic Faith—to include a reflection on the Four Last

Things—we come to notice what is not there in variously presented and purported friendships, in the

proffered and partly reciprocated human affections, in the religious reverence expressed by “the Guru

Brahmin” and “the Hindu Love Song,” in the Guru's romantic and spiritual guidance, and in the facing

of death with its likely consequences. We also notice the absence of living children in the story. But,

this all seems to be in accordance with Evelyn Waugh's artistic design and his implied moral purpose.

For, there is, unmistakably, “a terrible absence” present in Hollywood and in the elaborate

Mortuaries and Cemeteries that are shown to us gradually, and sometimes suddenly. And we now see

some of this same nonchalance, indifference, and spiritual presumption seeping into parts of the

Catholic Church today—especially the Modernist-Occupied Parts of the Church—almost seventy years

later. Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One may therefore help us to gain—or regain—fresh and fortifying

perspectives and understanding of these inescapable matters of moment to man. We may also even

come to realize that an earlier part of the currently permeating “Drug Culture” was to be seen in 1947-

1948 in California by those who were languidly, even slothfully, “half in love with easeful death.”1

If the reader would first again read and closely consider the four sequenced Epigraphs presented

above, he would find a worthy framing for this essay, thereby also better enabling us to savor Evelyn

Waugh's own nuanced presentations of conversation in their special, indeed unique, settings. It is my

purpose to show us how Waugh has deftly presented the loneliness and the yearnings of that society, the

insecurity and the insufficiency of the Hollywood studio-business and its frigid inhuman

manipulations, all of which trenchantly test the human heart and one's own fundamental hope.

Because Waugh originally subtitled his book “An Anglo-American Tragedy,” we should not forget

the denotation of “tragedy” amidst his sustained satire and effective ironies. A tragedy presupposes a

certain objective moral order in the universe, while also reminding us that a man may unknowingly set

in motion fearsome and fateful affairs whose fuller consequences he does not foresee and cannot finally

control. Moreover, when a tragical moral agent receives a glimpse of what may all too destructively

come to transpire, he does not have enough time to correct the missteps. One has a sense of

constriction, often of desperation, as time is running out. Hence the pity and the fear in his audience,

1 Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1948), p. 96. Quoting a poem, John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” Stanza 6, Dennis Barlow, the hero of the novel, later speaks these poignant words in person to Aimée Thanatogenos, the young woman whom he comes to love, and then to lose.

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and the effectiveness of the tragic catharsis.

There can be no tragedy in “an aleatory or in an absurd universe”—that is, in a “random

universe.” There must be some recognizable moral order and moral standard—a sort of Law or

“Manufacturer's Instructions”—which may be more or less freely transgressed, thereby producing a

“pollution” or a “guilty impurity” in need of expiation, an expiation which often requires a sacrifice, as

well as the candid and courageous acknowledgement of dishonorable shame. One's own death or

destruction is often involved—and the disproportion of the punishment pierces the human heart—

certainly the heart of an attentive (and partly knowledgeable) onlooker.

Moreover, since mendacity as well as hypocrisy is also vividly present—and is often permeating

— in a true tragedy (as distinct from a mere “misfortune”), we must at least consider the meaning of a

“lie” and the primary social consequence of the lie. A lie, at root, is “a deliberate falsehood”; and the

main “social effect” of a lie is that it breaks trust. And, intimate trust, once broken, is so hard to repair.

Even if trust is gradually restored, it is often too late—even when there is mercy present and also “a

true and deep forgiveness from the heart.” Such are some of the essential elements and qualities of

tragedy, and we must suppose that Evelyn Waugh would want us to retain that disciplined knowledge,

even amidst his own purported “little nightmare,” which is also sometimes a shocking and “gruesome

satire,” as he has warned us.

There are three distinct, but interrelated, groups that Evelyn Waugh presents and investigates in

the novel: (1.) the English colony (both the long-resident and the temporary expatriates) to be found in

and around Los Angeles (and Hollywood); (2.) the Hollywood Movie-Studio Set (screenwriters,

actresses, and senior executives, as well as the technicians and bureaucrats); (3.) The Mortician Culture

and the Arts of their trade, both in “the Pets' Cemetery” and in the Larger Cemetery (on the pattern of

Forest Lawn Park) which is purportedly for sympathetic human beings, as well as plutocrats. In this

essay, therefore, we shall also now try, where possible, to approach these thematic matters in this same

sequence, while attempting to show how Waugh himself deftly interweaves these three groups of

associates (English expatriates or exiles, the Hollywood Film Network, and the Morticians and

Cosmetic Embalmers), and especially a few of the more distinctive kinds of characters among them all.

Moreover, if one has belatedly read his later 1964 Preface to the final 1965 edition of The Loved

One—one year before he himself was so suddenly to die on Sunday, 10 April 1966—the reader will be

prepared to grasp the first paragraph of the novel. For, Waugh did not take well to the heat and semi-

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aridity of the Los Angeles region, nor to “the sprawling, nondescript ugliness of Los Angeles” itself as

he experienced it in the first few months of 1947. Echoes of this memory and vivid perception are in

the novel's first paragraph:

All day the heat had been barely supportable but at evening a breeze arose in the West, blowing from the heart of the setting sun and from the ocean, which lay unseen, unheard behind the scrubby foothills. It shook the rusty fringes of palm-leaf and swelled the dry sounds of summer, the frog-voices, the grating cicadas, and the ever present pulse of music from the neighboring native huts.

In that kindly light the stained and blistered paint of the bungalow [cf. “the neighboring native huts”] and the plot of weeds [once a swimming pool] between the veranda and the dry water-hole lost their extreme shabbiness, and the two Englishmen [the elderly screenwriter Sir Francis Hinsley; and the novel's young hero and poet, Dennis Barlow], each in his rocking chair, each with his whisky and soda and his outdated magazine, the counterparts of numberless fellow-countrymen exiled in the barbarous regions of the world, shared in the brief illusory rehabilitation. (3-4—my emphasis added)2

Much is compactly conveyed in these first two paragraphs, but only implicitly, though resonantly

and memorably. When one re-reads them after reading the entire novel, one will understand my

intended meaning better, I think—even by the tones of Waugh's chosen diction: e.g., the “barely

supportable” heat; “scrubby foothills” which blocked both the sight and sound of the ocean waves; “the

dry sounds of summer”; “frog-voices”;“ grating cicadas”; “the ever present pulse of [“native”] music,”

“native huts”; the “kindly light” in the breeze “at evening”; “the stained and blistering paint”; the

“shabbiness”; “exiled in the barbarous regions”; a “brief illusory rehabilitation.”

The first two chapters of Waugh's The Loved One convey the enervating and corrupting, moral

and physical atmosphere which prepares us for the fuller pathos of the tale, and already adds to it, by

way of a sudden suicide.

But first we must see how Waugh deftly conveys the pretentiousness and imposture of one of the

leaders of the exiled British colony in and around Los Angeles, Ambrose Abercrombie, whom we shall

also see more fully exposed at the very end of the novel, as he tries to keep up the “good appearances.”

Speaking to young Dennis Barlow, who temporarily dwelt with him, Sir Francis Hinsley said:

“Ambrose Abercrombie will be here shortly”....“I don't know why. He left a message he would come”....Sir Francis Hinsley's momentary animation left

2 Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1948—the first edition), pp. 3-4—my emphasis added. Henceforth, all references to be to this edition, and placed above, in parentheses, in the main body of this essay.

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him....His was a weak, sensitive, intelligent face, blurred somewhat by soft living and long boredom....“I never was good at anything new [to include those of “Hopkins once” (4)—the difficult innovative poetry of Jesuit Father Gerard Manly Hopkins].”....“My best subjects [as a writer himself] were 'The English Parson in English Prose' or 'Cavalry Actions with the Poets'—that kind of thing. People seemed to like them once. Then they lost interest. I did too. I was always the most fatigable of hacks. I needed a change [i.e., to go away from England and I chose to travel to southern California and reside there, in order to work in Hollywood]. I've never regretted coming away. The climate suits me. 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 [and an “easeful death”?] in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard.” (4-5—my emphasis added; italics in the original)

Such is the presentation of superficiality and banality and boredom already, and then Ambrose

Abercrombie arrives and says:

“Evening, Frank. Evening, Barlow....It's been another scorcher, eh? Mind if I take a pew?....” Sir Ambrose wore dark grey flannels, an Eton Rambler tie, an I Zingari [the “Gypsies” Amateur Cricket Club] ribbon in his boater hat. This was his invariable dress on sunny days; whenever the weather allowed it he wore a deer-stalker cap and an Inverness cape. He was still on what Lady Abercrombie fatuously called the “right” side of sixty but after many years of painfully trying to look youthful, he now aspired to the honours of age. It was his latest quite vain wish that people should say of him: “Grand old boy.” (5-6—my emphasis added)

Through Abercrombie's further words we first come to see his fuller perfunctory character, and it

is not pretty:

“Been meaning to look you up for a long time. Trouble about a place like this one's so darn busy, one gets in a groove and loses touch. Doesn't do to lose touch. We limeys have to stick together. You shouldn't hide yourself away, Frank, you old hermit.”

“I remember a time when you [Ambrose] lived not so far away.”[said Sir Francis Hinsley.]

“Did I? 'Pon my soul I believe you're right. That takes one back a bit. It was before I went to Beverly Hills [a swanky place, too!]. Now, as you know, we're in Bel Air. But to tell the truth I'm getting a bit restless there. I've got a bit of land on Pacific Palisades [nearer the coastline of the Pacific Ocean]. Just waiting for building costs to drop. Where was it I used to live? Just across the street, wasn't it?”

Just across the street, twenty years ago or more ago [circa 1925-1927], when this [now] neglected district was the centre of fashion, Sir Francis, in prime middle-

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age, was then the only knight in Hollywood, the doyen of English society, chief script-writer of Megalopolitan Pictures and President of the Cricket Club. Then the young, or youngish, Ambrose Abercrombie used to bounce about the lots [at the movie studios] in his famous series of fatiguing roles, acrobatic, heroic historic, and come almost nightly to Sir Francis for refreshment. English titles abounded now in Hollywood, several of them authentic, and Sir Ambrose had been known to speak slightingly of Sir Francis as a “Lloyd George creation.” The [swift] seven league boots of failure had carried the old and the ageing man far apart. Sir Francis had descended [from “chief script-writer”] to the Publicity Department and now held rank, one of a dozen, as vice-President of the Cricket Club. His swimming pool [at his residence and veranda] which had once flashed like an aquarium with the limbs of long-departed beauties [i.e., feminine movie-stars] was empty now and cracked and overgrown with weed.

Yet there was a chivalric bond between the two [Sir Francis and Ambrose].

“How are things at Megalo [i.e., “Megalopolitan Pictures”]?” asked Sir Ambrose.

“Greatly disturbed. We are having trouble with Juanita del Pablo.”

“Luscious, languid and lustful?”

“Those are not the correct epithets. She is—or was—'surly, lustrous, and sadistic.' I [Sir Francis] should know because I composed the phrase myself. It was a 'smash-hit,' as they say, and set a new note in personal publicity.”....

Sir Ambrose, in accordance with local custom, had refrained from listening....Sir Ambrose had a more adventurous past but he lived existentially. He thought of himself as he was at that moment, brooded fondly on each several excellence and rejoiced. (6-7, 8, 10—my emphasis added)

The compassionate and loyal deep-heartedness of Sir Ambrose Abercrombie is a touching thing,

is it not? So chivalric. What a man! With a touch of irony, the novel's own narrator notices this, too!

Near the end of the novel—after Sir Francis had committed suicide by hanging himself, and after

another desolate character, a young cosmetic mortician, had also taken her own life—the poet Dennis

Barlow was trying to help out another man who was in trouble, Mr. Joyboy, the fiancé of the suicide.

Earlier, while still working at a pets' cemetery, Barlow had decided to take up theological studies and

then to become a religious minister, both because of a special vocation he felt, which seemed genuine,

and also because of his understandable desire to increase his own status in the community. But

chivalric Ambrose Abercrombie found out about this, and came to visit Barlow with a few proposals.

In Waugh's narrator's words, young Denis, at one point,

Went out alone into the pets' cemetery [where he still worked after having left the Hollywood studio] with his own thoughts which were not a thing to be shared

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with Mr. Joyboy [in his grief]. Thus musing he was disturbed by a once familiar visitor. It was a chilly day and Sir Ambrose Abercrombie wore tweeds, cape and deer-stalker cap, the costume in which he had portrayed many travesties of English rural life. He carried a shepherd's crook.

“Ah, Barlow,” he said, “still hard at it?”

“One of our easier mornings [at the pets' cemetery]. I hope it was not a bereavement which brought you here.”....

He [Ambrose] paused and gazed curiously about him at the modest monuments [to the various pets]. “Attractive place you've got here. Sorry to see you're moving.”

“You received one of my cards?”

“Yes, got it here. Thought at first it must be someone playing rather a poor kind of joke. It's genuine, is it?”

From the depths of his plaid he produced a card and handed it to Dennis. It read:

'Squadron Leader [in the British Forces in World War II, in the Air Transportation Command, but as a Non-Aviator] the Rev. Dennis Barlow begs to announce that he is shortly starting business at 1154 Arbuckle Avenue, Los Angeles. All non-sectarian services expeditiously conducted at competitive prices. Funerals a specialty. Panegyrics in prose or poetry. Confessions heard in strict confidence.”

“Yes, quite genuine,” said Dennis.

“Ah, I was afraid it might be.”

Another pause. Dennis said: “The cards were sent out by an agency, you know. I didn't suppose you would be particularly interested.”

“But I am particularly interested. Is there somewhere where we could go and talk?”

Wondering whether Sir Ambrose was to be his first penitent, Dennis led him indoors....At length, Sir Ambrose said: “It won't do, Barlow. You must allow me an old man's privilege of speaking frankly. It won't do. After all you're an Englishman. They're a splendid bunch of fellows out here, but you know how it is. Even among the best you find a few rotters. You know the international situation as well as I do. There are always a few politicians and journalists simply waiting for the chance to take a knock at the Old Country. A thing like this is playing into their hands. I didn't like it when you started work here [at the pets' cemetery]. Told you so frankly at the time. But at least this is a more or less private concern. But religion's quite another matter. I expect you're thinking of some pleasant country rectory at home. Religion's not like that here. Take it from me, I know the place.”

“It's odd that you should say that, Sir Ambrose. One of my chief aims is to raise my status.”

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“Then chuck it, my dear boy before it's too late.” Sir Ambrose spoke at length of the industrial crisis in England, the need for young men and dollars, the uphill work of the film community in keeping the flag flying. “Go home, my dear boy. That is your proper place.”

“As a matter of fact,” said Dennis, “things have rather changed with me [especially after the death of his beloved young Aimée by suicide, and] since that [religious] announcement was made. The Call I heard has grown fainter....But there are certain practical difficulties. I have invested all my small savings in my [California] theological studies.”

“I expected something of the kind. That is where the Cricket Club comes in. I hope the time will never come when we are not ready to help a fellow countryman in difficulties. (155-158—my emphasis added)

Ambrose then discloses his proposal, as well as his own strategic anticipation:

“We had a committee meeting last night [at the Cricket Club] and your name was mentioned. There was complete agreement. To put it in a nutshell, my boy, we will send you home.”

“First class?”

“Tourist. I'm told it's jolly comfortable. How about it?”

“No drawing room in the train?”

“No drawing room in the train.”

“Well,” said Dennis, “I suppose that as a clergyman I should have had to practice certain austerities.”

“Spoken like a man,” said Sir Ambrose. We signed it last night.” (158-159—my emphasis added)

By way of such interchanges of speech, Evelyn Waugh conveys many facets of moral character

and fakery. And we thereby learn to be more attentive to his narrator's nuanced ironies.

At the very beginning of the novel—after Ambrose Abercrombie had himself departed in the night

by automobile from his odd and snooping visit to Sir Francis and Dennis Barlow (the poet)—Sir

Francis, while imparting his generous and good counsel, first alertly said to Barlow:

“He's heard something. That was what brought him here....If exclusion from British society can be counted as martyrdom, be prepared for the palm and the halo. You have not been to your place of business today? [i.e., at the pets' cemetery, where Barlow now worked, shortly after his contract at Megalo studio had ran out “three weeks ago”(10)]....It is one of the numberless compensations of my exile that I never need read unpublished verses....Take them away, dear boy, prune and polish [your set of poems] at your leisure....I should [now] not

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understand them and I might [even] be led to question the value of a sacrifice which I now applaud [i.e., your leaving the drudgery and bondage at Megalo studio in Hollywood, and not renewing your contract there]. You are a young man of genius, the hope of English poetry. I have heard it said and I devoutly believe it. I have served the cause of art enough by conniving at your escape from a bondage to which I myself have been long happily reconciled....

I am your memento mori [remember death, be mindful of death!]....That's what all of us are [a “dribbling” dog], you know, out here. The studios keep us going with a [blood] pump [an artificial one, as with that blood-injected Russian “dog's head”]. We are still just capable of a few crude reactions—nothing more. If we were ever disconnected from our bottle, we should simply crumble. I like to think that it was the example of myself before your eyes day after day for more than a year that inspired your heroic resolution to set up in an independent trade. You have had an example and perhaps now and then precept. I may have counselled you in so many words to leave the studio [in Hollywood] while you still could....And my advice, I think, was to return to Europe. I never suggested anything so violently macabre, so Elizabethan, as the work you chose [as a pets' mortician at “Happier Hunting Grounds, the “Pets' Cemetery” in Los Angeles, very nearby the artificial Hollywood paradise and Memorial Park of “Whispering Glades” where Sir Francis will soon himself be so incongruously buried].” (13-15—my emphasis added)

Soon, however, we shall see Sir Francis himself to be involuntarily excluded as an expendable,

and cast off as a superfluous man. For, he is now being explicitly considered by the Hollywood

“Moguls”—by “the Megalopolitan Directors” themselves (25), as “just another has-been.” (26) The

way he was then treated is full of pathos, and Evelyn Waugh, with great art, knows how to convey it.

After his fateful meeting and conference with the Megalo Directors at Megalopolitan Studios,

Sir Francis remained at home and for several days his secretary came out daily to take dictation....Then there came a day when his secretary failed to arrive. He telephoned to the studio. The call was switched from one administrative office to another until eventually a voice said: “Yes, Sir Francis, that is quite in order. Miss Mavrocordato [his secretary] has been transferred to the Catering Department.

“Well, I must have somebody.”

“I'm not sure we have anyone available right now, Sir Francis.”

“I see. Well, it is very inconvenient but I'll have to come down and finish the work I am doing in the studio. Will you have a car sent for me?”

“I'll put you through to Mr. Van Gluck.”

Again the call went to and fro like a shuttlecock until finally a voice said: “Transportation Captain. No, Sir Francis, I'm sorry, we don't have a studio

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automobile here right now.”

Already feeling the mantle of Lear about his shoulders [cf. an allusion to King Lear's piercing phrase about the acts of his seemingly ingrate children: “Monster Ingratitude!”] Sir Francis took a taxi to the studio. (26-27—my emphasis added)

It gets worse. And, like the weather outside, what happens then is “barely supportable” (3)—

especially “the false and fruity tones” (34) that Sir Ambrose simpered out “on the day following Sir

Francis Hinsley's unexpected death” (32).

Before “Megalo” had finally “sacked poor Frank” (35), Sir Francis had pathetically arrived at the

impersonal studio by taxi, still “feeling the mantle of Lear about his shoulders” (27):

He nodded to the girl at the desk with something less than his usual urbanity.

“Good morning, Sir Francis,” she said. “Can I help you?”

“No, thank you.”

“There isn't anyone in particular you were looking for?”

“No one.”

The elevator girl looked inquiringly at him. “Going up?”

“Third floor, of course.”

He walked down the familiar featureless corridor, opened the familiar door and stopped abruptly. A stranger sat at his desk.

“I'm so sorry,” said Sir Francis. “Stupid of me. Never done that before.” He backed out and shut the door. Then he studied it. It was his number. He had made no mistake. But in the slot which had borne his name for twelve years—ever since he came [in his descent] to this department from the script-writers'—there was now a card typewritten with the name “Lorenzo Medici.” He opened the door again. “I say,” he said. “There must be some mistake.”

“Maybe there is too,” said Mr. Medici, cheerfully. “Everything seems kinda screwy around here. I've spent half the morning clearing junk out of this room. Piles of stuff, just like someone had been living here—bottles of medicine, books, photographs, kids' games. Seems it belonged to some old Britisher who's just kicked off.”

“I am that Britisher and I have not kicked off.”

“Mighty glad to hear it. Hope there wasn't anything you valued in the junk. Maybe it's still around somewhere.”

“I must go and see Otto Baumbein.”

“He screwy too but I don't figure he'll know anything about the junk. I just pushed

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it out in the passage [into the “featureless corridor”]. Maybe some janitor...”

Sir Francis went down the passage to the office of the assistant director. “Mr. Baumbein is in conference right now. Shall I have him call you?”

“I'll wait.”

He sat in the outer office where two typists enjoyed long, intimately amorous telephone conversations. At last Mr. Baumbein came out. “Why, Frank,” he said. “Mighty nice of you to look us up. I appreciate that. I do really. Come often, Frank.”

“I wanted to talk to you, Otto.”

“Well, I'm rather busy right now, Frank. How say I give you a ring next week sometime.”

“I've just found Mr. Medici in my office.”

“Why, yes, Frank. Only he says 'Medissi,' like that; how you said it kinda sounds like a wop and Mr. Medici is a very fine young man with a very, very fine and wonderful record, Frank, who I'd be proud to have you meet.”

“Then where do I work?”

“Well, see here, that's a thing I want very much to talk to you about but I haven't the time right now, have I, dear?”

“No, Mr. Baumbein,” said one of the secretaries. “You certainly haven't the time.”

“You see. I just haven't the time. I know what, dear, try fix it now for Sir Francis to see Mr. Erikson. I know Mr. Erikson would greatly appreciate it.”

So Sir Francis saw Mr. Erikson, Mr. Baumbein's immediate superior, and from him learned in blunt Nordic terms what he had in the last hour darkly surmised; that his long service [“just on twenty-five years” (31)] with Megalopolitan Pictures, Inc. had come to an end.”....Sir Francis left Mr. Erikson and made his way out of the great hive.... “Did you find who [sic] you were looking for?” [the secretary asked] as he made his way out into the sunshine. (27-32—my emphasis added)

Inhuman. So impersonal and congealed. And soon Sir Francis was to die.

We soon hear from one of the English “expatriates” at the Cricket Club that “Young Barlow had

found him.” (32) After Ambrose Abercrombie belatedly arrived and gave his own perfunctory

interpretation of events, and of Sir Francis himself, Waugh ends his chapter deftly, as follows:

As he [Sir Ambrose of “the false and fruity tones” (34)] spoke the sun sank below the bushy western hillside. The sky was bright but a deep shadow crept over the tough and ragged grass of the cricket field, bringing with it a sharp chill.” (36—my emphasis added)

13

Such a thing can good literature compactly do.

And then Waugh –perhaps recalling his own recent shocks of maturity as a Commando Officer in

World War II—begins his next chapter with an important depiction of Dennis Barlow:

Dennis was a young man of sensibility rather than of sentiment. He had lived his twenty-eight years at arm's length from violence, but he came of a generation which enjoys a vicarious intimacy with death. Never, it so happened, had he seen a human corpse until that morning when, returning tired from night duty [at the pets' cemetery, “the Happier Hunting Ground” (38)], he found his host [Sir Francis] strung to the rafters. The spectacle had been rude and momentarily unnerving; perhaps it had left a scar somewhere out of sight in his subconscious mind. But his reason accepted the event as part of the established order. Others in gentler ages had had their lives changed by such a revelation; to Dennis it was the kind of thing [deliberate suicides] to be expected in the world he knew and, as he drove to Whispering Glades [“that great necropolis” (38), and specifically in order to make funeral arrangements for Sir Francis, his generous friend] his conscious mind was pleasantly exhilarated and full of curiosity. (37-38—my emphasis added)

For, as Waugh had revealed at the beginning of the previous chapter,

Dennis Barlow was happy in his work [at the neighboring Happier Hunting Ground]. Artists are by nature versatile and precise; they only repine when involved with the monotonous and the makeshift. Dennis had observed this during the recent war; a poetic friend of his in the Grenadiers was enthusiastic to the end, while he himself [Dennis] fretted almost to death as a wingless [non-flying] officer in Transportation Command. He had been dealing with Air Priorities at an Italian port when his first, his only book came out. Dennis was offered the post of personal assistant to an Air Marshal. He sulkily declined, remained in “Priorities” and was presented in his absence with half a dozen literary prizes. On his discharge he came to Hollywood to help write a life on [the poet] Shelley for the films.

There in the Megalopolitan studios he found reproduced, and enhanced by the nervous agitation endemic to the place, all of the gross futility of [military] service life. He repined, despaired, and fled.

And now he was content [at the Happier Hunting Ground]; adept in a worthy trade [as a pet-mortician], giving satisfaction to Mr. Schultz [the owner], keeping Miss Poski guessing. For the first time he knew what it was to “explore an avenue [for a story]”; his way was narrow but it was dignified and umbrageous and it led to limitless distances. (22-23—my emphasis added)

And now he would move on, even with some rare elation, to see and to explore Whispering

Glades, which will provide him with some new adventures—hence risks—and one irreparable personal

loss. However, Dennis Barlow would first have to face and learn to defend himself against the language

14

and mind-sapping vapidity of the uniformly reassuring Mortuary Hostesses. There would also come

into his life “Corpse Beauticians” and Mortuary Cosmeticians and a Master of the Embalmer's Art, Mr.

Joyboy, and that one special and distinctive Female Embalmer, Miss Aimée Thanatogenos, whom

Dennis comes to love.

An attentive reader will come to learn many things just by savoring the almost uniformly

enervating, therapeutic and evasively euphemistic language soothingly used by the Whispering Glades

Professional (with only an occasional lapse into crudeness). Mostly importantly, one will thereby come

to see and better understand their artificial (and evasive) ways of dealing with human death. More

poignantly and personally, Dennis will be himself faced with another shock: the death of the beloved

herself by suicide—and the suicide would be by an injection, and injection of “cyanide, self-

administered” (150). Weary, conflicted, increasingly languid, desperate, Aimée was, it would seem

“almost half in love with easeful death.”3

But, compared with the other hostesses and beauticians and embalmers, Aimée has a distinctive

character and a poignantly yearning, romantic heart not at all cynical, despite the privations of her life

during childhood. She is especially touched by poetry and its inimitable ways of expressing the deep

trials and yearning aspirations of the lonely human heart.

Preparing us to meet her in the novel, and to come to know her better, Waugh's narrator conveys

the more “uniform” or “standard product” of female hostesses and secretaries which were to be so

ubiquitously experienced in those years in the United States, not only in California.

For example, one hostess says soothingly to Dennis Barlow during his visit to Whispering Glades

in order to plan the obsequies for Sir Francis: “I'll leave our brochure with you. And now I must hand

you over to the cosmetician.”4 (53) To which the Narrator responds, conveying Barlow's own private

3 See also, in this poignant connection with a purportedly “easeful death,” the haunting Epigraph of James Burnham's profound book, Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism (New York: The John Jay Company, 1964). Although Burnham does not give the explicit source for his stirring Epigraph, it is to be found in full in Edmund Spenser's lengthy 16th-century poem, Fairie Queen (Book I: Canto IX, Stanzas 38 and 40). Because the 16th-century Renaissance English is somewhat difficult to understand for those not accustomed to its syntax and diction, I shall here give only a few of the lines from these two stanzas: “Is [it] then uniust [unjust] to each his due to give?/ Or [to] let him die, that loatheth living breath?/Or [to] let him die at ease, that liveth here uneath [i.e., with difficulty]?/....Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas,/ Ease after war, death after life does greatly please.” (I:Canto IX: Stanzas 38, 40—excerpts, with my emphases added). Such may have been Aimée's illusion or temptation. And a temptation wouldn't be a temptation if it weren't attractive! The alluring sophistries of Despair. So meretricious again!

4 Waugh had introduced us to this young lady earlier, and, even then, the narrator was to add a revealing shock: “Denis passed through and opening the door marked Enquiries [at Whispering Glades] found himself in a raftered banqueting hall. The 'Hindu Love-song” was here also, gently [and easefully] discoursed from the dark panelling. A young lady rose from a group of her fellows to welcome him, one of that new race of exquisite, amiable, efficient young ladies whom

15

thoughts:

She left the room and Dennis at once forgot everything about her. He had seen her before everywhere. American mothers, Dennis reflected, presumably knew their daughters apart, as the Chinese were said subtly to distinguish one from another of their seemingly uniform race, but to this European eye the Mortuary Hostess was one with all her sisters of the air-liners and the reception desks , one with Miss Poski at the Happier Hunting Ground [the Pets' Cemetery]. She was the standard product. A man could leave such a girl in a delicatessen shop in New York, fly three thousand miles and find again in the cigar store in San Francisco, just as he would find his favorite comic strip in the local paper; and she would croon the same words to him in moments of endearment and express the same views and preferences in moments of social discourse. She was convenient; but Dennis came of an earlier civilization with sharper needs. He sought the intangible, the veiled face in the fog, the silhouette at the lighted doorway, the secret graces of a body which hid itself under formal velvet. He did not covet the spoils of the rich continent, the sprawling limbs of the swimming-pool, the wide-open painted eyes and mouths under the arc-lamps. But the girl who now entered [Aimée Thanatogenos, the Cosmetician] was unique. Not indefinably; the appropriate distinguishing epithet leapt to Dennis' mind the moment he saw her: sole Eve in a bustling hygienic Eden, this girl was a decadent. (53-54—my emphasis added)

We may soon come to see that this vulnerable and tempted young woman was, in a limited way,

an analogue to Eve, but, despite her suffering and its pathos, she was not like Maria, Mater Gratiae.

Here is how Waugh presents Dennis Barlow's first meeting with Aimée:

She wore the white livery of her calling; she entered the room, sat at the table and poised her fountain pen with the same professional assurance as her predecessor's, but she was what Dennis had vainly sought during a lonely year of exile [in Hollywood].

He hair was dark and straight, her brows wide, he skin transparent and untarnished by the sun. Her lips were artificially tinctured, no doubt, but not coated like her sisters' and clogged in all their delicate pores with crimson grease; they seemed to promise instead an unmeasured range of sensual discourse. Her full-face was oval, her profile pure and classical and light. Her eyes greenish and remote, with a rich glint of lunacy.

Dennis held his breath. When the girl spoke it was briskly and prosaically.

he had met everywhere in the United States. She wore a white smock and over her sharply supported left breast was embroidered the words Mortuary Hostess....'You are sure that they will be able to make him [i.e., Sir Francis] presentable [after his terrible way of dying , by suicide, suspended and very distorted]?' [asked Dennis]. 'We had a Loved One last month who was found drowned. He had been in the sea a month and they only identified him by his wrist-watch. They fixed up that stiff,' said the hostess disconcertingly lapsing from the high diction she had hitherto employed, 'so he looked like it was his wedding day. The boys up there [ the cosmeticians and embalmers] surely know their job. Why if he sat on an atom bomb, they'd make him presentable.''' (41-42, 47—my emphasis added)

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“What did your Loved One pass on from?”

“He hanged himself.”

“Was his face much disfigured?”

“Hideously.”

“That is quite usual. Mr. Joyboy [himself raised as a Baptist, is yet unmarried and also still living with his mother alone] will probably take him [Sir Francis] in hand personally. It is a question of touch, you see, massaging the blood from the congested areas. Mr. Joyboy has very wonderful hands.....This cosmetician, however, [then] seemed to draw another thickness of veil between herself and her interlocutor [Dennis]” (54-55, 57—my emphasis added)

Later, after the prepared-for obsequies for Sir Francis Hinsley, Dennis unexpectedly met Aimée on

“Lake Island”—a remote and restful place within the large Park of Whispering Glades—as he was

composing a poem:

Dennis sat up and saw the girl from the mortuary....“Oh,” she said, “pardon me. Aren't you the friend of the strangulated Loved One in the Orchid Room? My memory's very bad for live faces. You did startle me. I didn't expect to find anyone here?”

“Have I taken your place?”

“Not really....But it's usually deserted at this time so I've taken to come here after work and I suppose I began to think of it as mine. I'll go some other place.”

“Certainly not. I'll go. I only came here to write a poem.”

“A poem.”

He had said something. Until then she had treated him with that impersonal insensitive friendliness in that land of waifs and strays. Now her eyes widened. “Did you say a poem?”

“Yes, I am a poet, you see.”

“Why, but I think that's wonderful. I've never seen a live poet before.” (87-88—my emphasis added; italics in the original)

Being obviously touched by her modesty and guilelessness and pure sense of wonder, Dennis—

after she again says “I think it's a very, very wonderful thing to be a poet” (88)—warmly responded:

“But you have a very poetic occupation here.”

He spoke lightly, teasing, but she answered with great gravity. “Yes, I know. I know I have really. Only sometimes at the end of the day when I'm tired I feel as if it was all rather ephemeral....[M]y work is burned sometimes within a few hours [in the crematorium]. At the best it's put in the mausoleum, and even there it

17

deteriorates, you know. I've seen painting there not ten years old that's completely lost tonality. Do you think anything can be great art which is so impermanent?”

“You should regard it as being like acting or singing or playing an instrument.”

“Yes, I do. But nowadays they can make a permanent record of them, too, can't they?”

“Is that what you brood about when you come here alone?”

“Only lately. At first I used just to lie and think how lucky I was to be here.”

“Don't you think that any more?”

“Yes, of course, I do really. Every morning and all day when I am at work. It's just in the evenings that something comes over me [as with Sir Francis]. A lot of artists are like that. I expect poets are, too, sometimes, aren't they?”

“I wish you'd tell me about your work,” said Dennis.

“But you've seen it yesterday.”

“I mean about yourself and your work. What made you take it up? Where did you learn? Were you interested in that sort of thing as a child? I'd really be awfully interested to know. (88-90—my emphasis added)

In order to convey more of the innocence and pathos of Aimée's own account, I shall now attempt

to make a judicious selection from her trusting open-hearted words to Dennis, who was an

understanding and sensitive poet himself, and still then with “his young heart” (163):

“I've always been Artistic,” she said. “I took Art at College as my second subject one semester. I'd have taken it as first subject only Dad lost his money in religion so I had to learn a trade.”

“He lost money in religion?”

“Yes, the Four Square Gospel [a movement of Evangelical-Revivalist Christianity that emphatically and extensively used the Media—also around Los Angeles, too]. That's why I'm called Aimée, after Aimée McPherson [d. 1944—the Evangelist]. Dad wanted to change my name after he lost the money. I wanted to change it too but is rather stuck....Once you start changing a name [as in Hollywood?], you see, there's no reason ever to stop. One always hears one that sounds better. Besides you see poor Mother was an alcoholic....”

“What else did you take in College?”

“Just Psychology and Chinese. I didn't get on so well with Chinese. But, of course, these were secondary subjects, too; for Cultural background.”

“Yes, and what was your main subject?”

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“Beauticraft.”

“Oh.”....

“Only, of course, we went into history and theory too. I wrote my thesis on 'Hairstyling in the Orient.' That was why I took Chinese. I thought it would help, but it didn't. But I got my diploma with special mention for Psychology and Art.”.

….[After the unexpected invitation to help an old Colonel Komstock's restoration in the mortuary at Whispering Glades:] “Well, I didn't know quite what to think. I'd never seen a dead person before because Dad left Mom before he died, if he is dead, and Mother went East to look for him when I left College and [she] died there. And I had never been inside Whispering Glades as after we lost our money mother took to New Thought and wouldn't have it that there is such as thing as death.”....

“It's only in the last year that I've come really to love the work [as a mortuary cosmetician at Whispering Glades]. Before that I was just glad to serve people who couldn't talk. Then I began to realize what a work of consolation it was . It's a wonderful thing to start every day knowing that you are going to bring back joy into one aching heart. Of course mine is only a tiny part of it. I'm just a handmaid to the morticians but I have the satisfaction of showing the final result and seeing the reactions [to my attempt to give consolation]. I saw it with you yesterday. You're British and sort of unexpressive but I knew just what you were feeling.”

“Sir Francis was transfigured certainly.”

“It was when Mr. Joyboy came he sort of made me realize what an institution Whispering Glades really is. Mr. Joyboy is kinda holy. From the day he came the whole tone of the mortuary became greatly elevated. I shall never forget how one morning Mr. Joyboy said to one of the younger morticians: 'Mr. Parks, I must ask you to remember you are not at the Happier Hunting Ground [the Pets' Cemetery nearby, where Dennis Barlow was employed]....I don't suppose you'd ever heard of that. It's a dreadful place here where they bury animals.”

“Not poetic?”

“I was never there myself but I've heard about it. They try to do everything the same as us. It seems kinda blasphemous.”

“And what do you think about when you come here alone [to this “Lake Island”] in the evenings?”

“Just Death and Art,” said Aimée Thanatogenos simply.

“Half in love with easeful death.”

“What was that you said?”

“I was quoting from a poem.

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'For many a time

I have been half in love with easeful death.

Call'd him [Death] soft names and many a mused rhyme,

To take into the air my quiet breath;

Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

To cease upon the midnight with no pain...'”

“....You like it?” [said Dennis] “Why it's beautiful. It's just what I've thought so often and haven't been able to express. 'to make it rich to die' and 'to cease upon the midnight with no pain.' That's exactly what Whispering Glades exists for isn't it?” (90-96—my emphasis added; italics (“with no pain”) in the original)

And thus will Aimée die. But our sympathy for her will not—nor the piercing pathos.

Dennis himself more and more grew to fall in love with her—and so did Mr. Joyboy, in a certain

sense. Aimée then had her own aching and conflicted heart, and so she pathetically sought advive from

“the Guru Brahmin,” for

There was a spiritual director, an oracle in these parts who daily filled a famous column in one of the local newspapers. Once, in the days of family piety, it bore the title “Aunt Lydia's Post Bag”; now it was “The Wisdom of the Guru Brahmin,” adorned with the photograph of a bearded and almost naked sage. To this exotic source resorted all who were in doubt or distress. (100—my emphasis added)

So, too, Aimée—and a later piece of “Guru Brahmin's” abrupt advice led to—indeed unknowingly

precipitated—her painless death by injection.

We later find out that “the Guru Brahmin's” real name is “Mr. Slump, but he doesn't work here

after tomorrow” (100), as Aimée was informed on the telephone. However, she was also told:

“You could try Mooney's Saloon. That's where the editorials mostly go evenings.”

“And his real name is Slump?”

“That's what he tells me, sister.”

Mr. Slump had that day been discharged from his paper. Everyone in the office had long expected the event except Mr. Slump himself, who had taken the story of his betrayal to several unsympathetic drinking places. (100—my emphasis)

Mr. Slump was another one of the seeming Expendables—like Sir Francis.

When, in her desperation about her future marriage (either with Dennis or with Mr. Joyboy), and

20

after just speaking with the indifferent Mr. Joyboy himself by phone, Aimée reached Mr. Slump by

phone at Mooney's Saloon, she told him her predicament and finally said to him: “Well...what am I to

do?” And Slump then abruptly answered:

“Do! I'll tell you what to do. Just take the elevator to the top floor. Find a nice window and jump out. That's what you can do.” There was a little sobbing gasp and then a quiet “Thank you.” (147)

Back at her little apartment-home nearby Whispering Glades, Aimée tried to face her sorrow and

deep discouragement:

Among the instruments and chemicals which are the staples of feminine well-being, lay the brown tube of barbituates which is the staple of feminine repose. Aimée swallowed her dose, lay down and awaited sleep. It came at length brusquely, perfunctorily, without salutation or caress. There was no delicious influx, touching, shifting, lifting, setting free and afloat the grounded [if not yet shipwrecked] mind. At 9:40 P.M. She was awake and distraught, with a painful dry sense of contraction and tension about the temples...; suddenly it was 5:25 A.M.....

She met no one during the brief walk from her apartment to Whispering Glades. The Golden Gates were locked from midnight to morning, but there was a side-door always open for the use of the night-staff. Aimée entered....Her mind was quite free from anxiety. Somehow, somewhere in the blank black hours she had found counsel; she had communed perhaps with the spirits of her ancestor, the impious and haunted race who had deserted the altars of the old gods, had taken ship and wandered, driven by what pursuing Furies through what mean streets and among what barbarous tongues! Her Father had frequented the Four Square Gospel Temple [where they purportedly “spoke in tongues”]; her Mother drank. Attic voices [epic and tragic?] prompted Aimée to a higher destiny [hence sacrifice? As with Iphigenia in Aulis, in Boeotia?]; voices...which spoke to her more sweetly [but deceitfully!] of the still Boeotian water-front [and the becalmed Attic fleet of Agamemnon impatiently wanting to sail to Troy and to the Trojan War], the armed men all silent in the windless morning, the fleet motionless at anchor, and Agamemnon turning away his eyes [from the prophetic priest Calchas and then from his daughter, Iphigenia, whom he was then to sacrifice, in order, putatively, to placate the offended gods]; [and the voice also] spoke of Alcestis and proud Antigone [the pure and pious, tragic Greek heroines].

The East lightened....these first fresh hours alone are untainted by man. The lie abed in that region [in southern California]. In exaltation Aimée watched the countless statues glimmer, whiten and take shape while the lawns changed from silver grey to green. She was touched by warmth....

Aimée walked swiftly down the gravelled drive to the mortuary entrance....She took the elevator to the top story where everything was silent and empty save for the sheeted dead. She knew what she wanted and where to find them; a wide-

21

mouthed blue bottle and a hypodermic syringe. She indited no letter of farewell or apology. She was far removed from social custom and human obligations [much less obligations and gratitude to God]. The protagonists Dennis and Mr. Joyboy were quite forgotten. The matter was between herself and the deity [sic] she served.

It was quite without design that she chose Mr. Joyboy's work-room for the injection. (148-150—my emphasis added)

That same Mr. Joyboy to whom she was then engaged to marry, had recently let her down and

showed his unmistakable indifference, as well as his flippancy and superficiality—and shabbiness. In

her isolation of soul and confusion and need for human warmth and compassion, she had called him at

home, where he lived with his cranky mother and her parrot, Sambo, who had just recently died:

She turned to the telephone and dialled Mr. Joyboy [after Dennis had brought her home and left].

“Please come over, I'm so worried.”

From the ear-piece came a babel, human and inhuman, and in the midst of it a still small voice saying, “Speak up, honey-baby. I can't quite get you.”

“I'm so miserable.”

“It isn't just easy listening to you, honey-baby. Mom's got a new bird and she's trying to make him talk. Maybe we better leave whatever it is and talk about it tomorrow.”

Please, dear, come right over now, couldn't you?”

“Why, honey-baby, I couldn't leave Mom the very evening her new bird arrived, could I? How would she feel? It's a big evening for mom, honey-baby. I have to be here with her.”

“It's about our marriage.”

“Yes, honey-baby, I kinda guessed it was. Plenty of little problems come up. They all look easier in the morning. Take a good sleep, honey-baby.”

“I must see you.”

“Now, honey-baby, I'm going to be firm with you. Just you do what Poppa says this minute or Poppa will be real mad at you.”

She rang off and once more resorted to grand opera; she was swept up and stupefied in the gust of sound. It was too much. (144-145—my emphasis added)

When a momentary silence return, Aimée then made her fateful telephone call to “the Guru

Brahmin.”(146)

On the morning of Aimée's death, Dennis' “rival in love, Mr. Joyboy” (151) arrived at the Happier

hunting Ground to speak with Dennis. Mr. Joyboy was now panicked. He was also condemnatory and

aggressive with Dennis and said it was all his fault. Dennis replied: “This is no time for recrimination,

22

Joyboy. Let me merely point out that you are the man publicly engaged to her....Of course I never

thought her wholly sane, did you?” (153—my emphasis added) Later in the day, Dennis spoke with

him again, after he had calmed down a little:

Some hours later the mortician [Mr. Joyboy] returned.

“You have regained command of yourself? Sit down an listen attentively. You have two problems, Joyboy, and let me emphasize that they are yours. I am in no way implicated. I resign all rights in the girl. You are in possession of the corpse of your fiancée and your career is threatened. You are a well-know man in your profession and you would never live down the scandal. You have then two problems—to dispose of the body and to explain the disappearance. You have come to me for help and it so happens that in both of these things I and only I can help you.

“I have here at my disposal [at the Happier Hunting Ground] an excellent crematorium....All we have to do is collect our Loved One, if you will forgive the expression, and bring her here. Tonight after working hours will be the time.

“Secondly, to explain the disappearance. Miss Thanatogenos had few acquaintances and no relatives [not even a brother or a sister]. She disappears on the eve of her wedding. It is known that I once favoured her with my attentions. What could be more plausible than that her natural good taste should have triumphed at the last moment and she should have eloped with her earlier lover? All that is necessary is for me to disappear at the same time. No one in Southern California, as you know, ever inquires what goes on beyond the mountains. She and I perhaps may incur momentary condemnation as unethical. There the matter will end.

“For some time I have felt oppressed by the unpoetic air of Los Angeles. I have work to do and this is not the place to do it. It was only our young friend who kept me here—she and penury.”....On his last evening in Los Angeles Dennis knew that he was singularly privileged. The strand was littered with bones and wreckage. He was adding his bit; something that long irked [vexed and wearied] him, his young heart. He was carrying back instead a great, shapeless chunk of experience [especially about those “half in love with easeful death”—thus also sloth and spiritual death], the artist's load; bearing it home [to England] to his ancient and comfortless shore to work on it [that “load,” that “shapeless chunk of experience”] hard and long, for God knew how long [for almost 20 years perhaps —1947-1966]—it was the moment of vision for which a lifetime is often too short. (159-161, 163-164—my emphasis added)

Hilaire Belloc also new of those nourishing moments of memory and those moments of vision

“for which a lifetime is often too short”—but these moments are sometimes also, sub Gratia Divina, a

gracious Foretaste, a Praegustatum. Even sometimes of Beatitude. Thus from the tears of sorrow to the

tears of joy.

23

In his final edition of The Loved One in 1965,5 Waugh added a few evocative and morally

modest changes to the same, penultimate paragraph of the original 1948 edition as was just fully quoted

on the previous page above. He now more poignantly said: “On this last evening in Los Angeles Denis

knew he was a favorite of Fortune. Others, better men than he, had foundered here and perished.

The strand was littered with their bones. He was leaving it not only unravished but enriched. He

was adding his bit to the wreckage; something that had long irked him, his young heart....”

CODA

What Evelyn Waugh had perceived in Southern California in early 1947, and gradually came to

understand more fully, we now get more glimpses of in the laxer culture of the Catholic Church, also

about Death and the purportedly more “easeful” attainment of Beatitude now.

Therefore, I wish to convey two personal experiences that reminded me of Evelyn Waugh's The

Loved One, a novel which I first read in 1970 and read only once—until very recently (early July 2015)

when I understood it much more and more maturely. One of the shocking experiences occurred in

August of 1988, and the other only a few years ago (2012 or 2013) at a nearby Catholic College.

The Catholic mother of a Catholic woman I knew died late in the summer of 1988, but the

woman's father, in addition to telling her that sad fact, unexpectedly stipulated to her that he wanted

only her and her four siblings to come to her mother's obsequies—and not any of the spouses of those

five children, nor any of their own children, of any size.

In deep grief, the daughter departed alone to go to her mother's wake and funeral and burial. After

a week, she returned and I happened to see her and to speak with her. She looked very solemn, even

somewhat morose.

“How was the Funeral Mass?” was one of the first questions I asked her. For I knew that her

family attended the Novus Ordo Liturgies, in which there is no longer a traditional Requiem Mass, but

only a Mass of the Resurrection, as it is called. Thus, I was concerned, during that time of loss and

grief, that the New Mass was reverently done, and with no embarrassing innovations. Even more

shockingly and suddenly, the daughter said, with downcast eyes: “There was no Funeral Mass.” “Why

was there no Mass?” “Because there was no Corpus. My mother was cremated.”

5 Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy (Boston: Little, Brown and Company—Back Bay Books, Paperback, 2012-- “The text of this edition follows...an edition of 1965,which was the last to be overseen by the author.”), p. 146—my emphasis added.

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In 1988, such a thing—“a Catholic cremation”—was still a grave shock—and especially when it

was permitted, and even now promoted, in a morally and liturgically conservative upper-middle-class

family—as was the case with her family, apparently.

I never found out the fuller reasons for this cremation, and I hesitated to ask such a personal

question. But, the shock has remained. And I wondered what that daughter (and mother of many

children) told her own children in light of their Catholic Faith.

If we move forward a quarter of a century to 2013, there came another analogous shock and

dislocation. For, at a nearby rather conservative Catholic College a Memorial Mass was held for a

former employee of the College who had been a career Naval Officer and who was a very important

addition to that College after his retirement from the Navy. (I had known this man personally, and I

only knew him as a professed and faithful Catholic; and thus I attended this Memorial Mass, which was

conducted very soon after he had died.)

In the nave of the College chapel, near the sanctuary rail, there was a small table, on top of which

a small urn was placed which contained his ashes, the result of his deliberate and explicit wishes to be

cremated, according to his own sons, who emphatically assured me of this. Moreover, they said, he did

not choose to be buried beside their mother, his wife, who had predeceased him, but, rather, he wanted

his own solitary ashes to be cast upon the waves by a naval vessel—hence probably one going to sea

out of Norfolk, Virginia or nearby.

What would Evelyn Waugh have said about all of this?

In his 1965 Sword of Honour War Trilogy, Evelyn Waugh presents a Traditional Requiem Mass

and the burial of a father. It is the Mass said for Guy Crouchback's own father:

When he [Guy Crouchback, who is the genuine hero of the Trilogy] returned to the Transit Camp, he found a telegram from his sister, Angela, announcing that his father had died suddenly and peacefully....

The village was there [at the church] in force; many neighbors....and the headmaster of Our Lady of Victory. The nuns' choir was in the organ loft. The priests, other than the three who officiated, lined the walls of the chancel. Uncle Peregrine [his father's brother] had seen that everyone was in the proper place.

Box-Bender [Guy's brother-in-law, and the non-Catholic husband of Guy's sister Angela] kept his eyes on Angela and Guy, anxious to avoid any liturgical solecism. He genuflected with them, sat, then, like them, knelt, sat again, and stood as the three priests vested in black emerged from the sacristy, knelt again but missed signing himself with the cross. He was no bigot. He had been to Mass

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before. He wanted to do whatever was required of him. Across the aisle the Lord Lieutenant [of the county] was equally undrilled, equally well disposed.

Silence at first; the Confiteor was inaudible even in the front pew....Then the nuns sang the Kyrie. Guy followed the familiar rite with his thoughts full of his father.

“In memoria aeterna erit justus: ab auditione mala non timebit.” The first phrase was apt. His father had been a “just man”; not particularly judicious, not at all judicial, but “just” in the full sense of the psalmist.... Did it [the “auditio mala”] mean simply that the ears of the dead were closed to the discords of life? Did it mean they were immune to malicious gossip? Few people, Guy thought, had ever spoken ill of his father. Perhaps it meant “bad news.” His father had suffered as much as most men—more perhaps—from bad news of one kind or other; never fearfully. “Not long for purgatory,” his confessor had said of Mr. Crouchback. As the nuns sang the Dies Irae with all its ancient deprecations of divine wrath, Guy knew that his father was joining his voice with theirs:

Ingemisco, tamquam reus:Culpa rubet vultus meusSupplicanti parce, Deus;

That would be his prayer, who saw, and had always seen, quite clearly the difference in kind between the goodness of the most innocent of humans and the blinding, ineffable goodness of God. “Quantitative judgements don't apply,” his father had written [in his personal letter to his son, Guy]. As a reasoning man Mr. Crouchback had known that he was honourable, charitable and faithful; a man by all the formularies of his faith should be confident of his salvation; as a man of prayer he saw himself as totally unworthy of divine notice. To Guy, his father was the best man, the only entirely good man, he had ever known.

Of all the people in the crowded church, Guy wondered how many came as an act of courtesy, how many were there to pray that a perpetual light should shine upon Mr. Crouchback? “Well,” he reflected, “'The Grace of God is in Courtesy' [cf. Hilaire Belloc's poem]; in [non-Catholic] Arthur Box-Bender glancing sidelong to be sure he did the right thing, just as in the prelate who was holding his candle in the chancel, representing the bishop....'Quantitative judgments don't apply.'”

The temptation of Guy, which he resisted as best he could, was to brood over his own bereavement and deplore the countless occasions of his life when he failed his father. There would be ample time in the years to come for these selfish considerations. Now, praesente cadavere [in the presence of the corpse], he was merely one of the guard who were escorting his father to judgement and to heaven.

The altar was censed. The celebrant sang: “...Tuis enim fidelibus, Domine, via mutatur, non tollitur...” “Changed not ended” reflected Guy. It was a huge transition for the old man who had walked with Felix [his beloved dog] along the cliffs [of the sea] at Matchet—a huge transition, even, for the man who had knelt so rapt in prayer after his daily Communion—to the “everlasting mansion prepared for him in heaven.”

The celebrant turned the page of his Missal from the Preface to the Canon. In

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the hush that followed the sacring bell Guy thanked God for his father and then his thought strayed to his own death, that had been so near in the crossing from Crete [to Egypt in World War II], that might now be near in the mission proposed for him by the nondescript colonel....Guy's prayers were directed to, rather than for, his father. [For, Guy's father “was worrying now perhaps [for his son, Guy, and for his his son's spiritual apathy, acedia] in that mysterious transit camp—Purgatory—which he must pass on his way to rest and light”]....Perhaps his father was at that moment clearing the way for him. “Show me what to do and help me to do it,” he [Guy] prayed.

Arthur Box-Bender had been to Mass before. After the last Gospel,...the priest left the altar....The Absolution was sung, then priest and deacon walked around the catafalque, first sprinkling it with holy water, then censing it . The black cope [of the priest] brushed against Box-Bender's almost black suit. A drop of [holy] water landed on his cheek. He did not like to wipe it off.

The pall was removed, the coffin borne down the aisle [the nave] . Angela, Uncle Peregrine, and Guy fell in behind it and led the mourners out....The nuns sang the Antiphon and then filed away from the gallery to their convent. The procession moved down the street from the new church to the old, in silence broken only by the tread of the horse, the creaking of harness, and the turning of the wheels of the farm cart which bore the coffin; the factor walked at the old mare's head leading her.

It was a still [Autumn] day; the trees were dropping their leaves in ones and twos...Guy thought for a moment...and, by contrast, remembered boisterous November days when he and his mother [now long deceased] had tried to catch leaves in the avenue...in his wholly happy childhood. Only his father had remained to watch the transformation of that merry little boy into the lonely captain of Halberdiers who [now] followed the coffin.

On the cobbled pavements the villagers whose work had kept them from church, turned to see the cart roll past. There was not room for many to stand in the little burying ground.

The nuns had lined the edges of the grave with moss and evergreen leaves and chrysanthemums, giving it a faint suggestion of Christmas decoration. The undertaker's men deftly lowered the coffin; holy water, incense, the few prayers, the silent Paternoster, the Benedictus; holy water again; the De profundis. Guy, Angela, and Uncle Peregrine came forward, took the sprinkler in turn and added their aspersions. Then it was ended. (Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honour (London: Chapman & Hall, 1965)—A Final Version of the Three Novels: Men at Arms (1952); Officers and Gentlemen (1955); and Unconditional Surrender (1961), pp. 594, 600-605—my emphasis added)

In his two-page 1964 Preface (pp. 9-10) of this final 1965 Edition of Sword of Honour, Evelyn

Waugh added some other poignancies—as he had also done in his final 1964 Preface to The Loved

One; An Anglo-American Tragedy (1948). In his 1964 Preface to his Sword of Honour, written less that

two years before he was suddenly to die at 62 years of age on Easter Sunday in 1966, he wrote:

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On reading this book [again] I realized that I had done something quite outside my original intention. I had written an obituary of the Roman Catholic Church in England as it had existed for many centuries. All the rites and most of the opinions here described are already obsolete....It never occurred to me, writing Sword of Honour that the Church was susceptible to change. I was wrong and I have seen a superficial revolution in what then seemed permanent. Despite the [Catholic] faith of many of the characters, Sword of Honour was not specifically a religious book. Recent developments [even before the end of Vaticanum II in 1965] have made it, in fact, a document of Catholic usage [customs and culture] of my youth. (Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honour (1965), pp. 9-10—my emphases)

One of the last entries in Evelyn Waugh's Diaries will also draw us into some pathos, as did his

artful writing and revelation of reality in The Loved One. But the pathos presented is now concerning

the Catholic Church—not the life and death of Aimée Thanatogenos, nor the meretricious and often

perfidious life of Hollywood, nor the mortuary services at Whispering Glades or the Happier Hunting

Ground.

When we consider now Evelyn Waugh's poignant and deep-hearted Diary entry for “Easter 1965,”

only a year before his death on Easter Sunday 1966, we may also better come to understand how he

likely would have looked upon “Catholic Cremations” and the absence of a solemn “Requiem Mass”

and the “Dies Irae,” with its more adequate non-presumptuous consideration of the Last Four Things.

For, Waugh knew the grave and subtle dangers of laxity and spiritual presumption (a sin against hope)

and the deadliness of sinful sloth (“tristitia de bono spirituali”), one of the least regarded of the Seven

Deadly Sins. Especially in old age when, perhaps, one is also “half in love with an easeful death.”

Evelyn Waugh's “Easter 1965” Entry in his Diary said the following:

A year in which the process of transforming the liturgy has followed a planned course. [One year before, on Easter 1964, Waugh had also farsightedly written: “'Participate'—the cant word—does not mean a row [noisy disturbance] as the Germans [the Rhine Group] suppose. One participates in a work of art when one studies it with reverence and understanding.” (p. 789)] Protests avail nothing. A minority of cranks, for and against the innovations, mind enormously. I don't think the main congregation cares a hoot. More than the aesthetic changes which rob the Church of poetry, mystery and dignity, there are suggested changes in Faith and morals which alarm me. A kind of anti-clericalism is abroad which seeks to reduce the priest's unique sacramental position [“in persona Christi,” “in loco Christi”]. The Mass is written of [now] as a “social meal” in which “the people of God” perform the consecration. Pray God I will never apostatize but I can only now go to church as an act of duty and obedience—just as a sentry at Buck House [Buckingham Palace] is posted with no possibility of his being employed to defend the sovereign's life. Cardinal Heenan [of Westminster] has been double-

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faced in the matter. I had dinner with him à deux in which he expressed complete sympathy with the conservatives and, as I understood him, promised resistance to the innovations which he is now pressing forward. How does he suppose the cause of participation is furthered by the prohibition of kneeling at the Incarnatus in the Creed? [i.e., “Incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria Virgine et Homo factus est.”] The Catholic Press has made no opposition. I shall not live to see things righted. (Evelyn Waugh, The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh, p. 789—my italics)

Such intimate sorrow did he know, as well as the perils of “acedia.” Requiescat in pace aeterna.

--Finis--

© 2015 Robert Hickson

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