Gallows Humor
One of my favorite stories about Evelyn Waugh finds him at a swank Parisian dinner party. After rudely belittling a helpless French intellectual with his characteristic boorishness, the host asked Evelyn how he could be so mean and still call himself a Catholic. “You have no idea,” Waugh answered, “how much nastier I would be if I was not Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.”
Apparently supernatural aid did not intercede during the composition of Waugh’s The Loved One. Waugh described it as a “little nightmare” about Hollywood, inspired by the author’s brief tenure in America’s West Coast wasteland. When directed at such a ripe target, Waugh’s cruelty morphs into a poison-tipped arrow: fast, sharp, and lethal.
Dennis Barlow, British expatriate and would-be poet, works at the “Happy Hunting Grounds,” a slightly disreputable pet cemetery (assuming there’s such a thing as a reputable pet cemetery). His accent and courtly manner help facilitate funeral arrangements for the deceased pets of the rich and famous. He doesn’t do much writing—the California desert has dried up the well of inspiration—apart from the occasional “anniversary card of remembrance” for a departed animal:
Your little Arthur is thinking of you in heaven today and wagging his tail.
“How about the goat’s card? We can’t very well say he’s wagging his tail in heaven. Goats don’t wag their tails.”
“They do when they go to the can.”
“Yes, but it wouldn’t look right on the greeting card. They don’t purr like cats. They don’t sing an orison like birds.”
“I suppose they just remember.”
Dennis wrote: Your Billy is remembering you in heaven tonight.
Meanwhile, Dennis also woos Aimee, a cosmetician at a funeral home for actual people (where the deceased are always referred to as “The Loved One”) by passing off poems from The Oxford Book of English Verse as his own—“at first he had tried writing poems for her himself, but she showed a preference for the earlier masters.”
Dennis’ rival for Aimee’s affections is Mr. Joyboy, the expert embalmer at “The Whispering Glades” where Aimee works, and also a mama’s boy. The scene where Mr. Joyboy takes Aimee home to meet his mother is a minor masterpiece of grisly characterization, the kind of scene that wouldn’t seem out of place in a horror film if it wasn’t so grotesquely funny. Waugh takes Puckish delight in the foolishness of mortals. His characters in The Loved One are like art deco caricatures—sketches in thin elegant outlines, devoid of color or dimension, floating on style. Little they say or do conform to any reality outside Waugh’s wicked imagination. He holds his characters in high contempt.
For example, when Aimee discovers Dennis has courted her under false pretenses, Waugh coolly observes “her heart was broken perhaps, but it was a small inexpensive organ of local manufacture.” Waugh once wrote of the gloriously silly British writer, P.G. Wodehouse, that “Mr. Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale.” Unlike the prelapsarian “Eden” Wodehouse’s innocent characters inhabit, Waugh’s own comedy “has no relish of salvation in’t”—his caustic, unsparing wit eviscerates the damned souls who inhabit a fallen world. It’s funny, but not necessarily fun. You’ll find yourself laughing more out of discomfort than anything.
Like the offended host at the dinner party, you might also wonder how Waugh can be so mean. But you’ll also take a secret delight in his meanness. After all, how cruel can you be when skewering a place where the vulgar rich desperately care about what they look like even after they’re dead?
Addendum: It came as no surprise to me to learn that the 1965 film adaptation of The Loved One was written by Terry Southern, Kubrick’s co-writer of the classic black comedy, Dr. Strangelove. Waugh’s book is bleak black comedy cut from the same cloth. I haven’t seen the movie yet, but it features a stellar cast: Jonathan Winters, John Gielgud, James Coburn, and—wait for it—Liberace!
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