THE LOVED ONE (164 pp.)— Evelyn Waugh—Little, Brown ($2.50).
"Of course, parts of Brideshead are wicked, really wicked. But does one have the feeling that Evelyn Waugh himself is wicked enough?"
In a dingy Manhattan bar, some members of the Waugh cult were measuring out their lives with swizzle sticks. They had been badly shaken by Brideshead Revisited (TIME, Jan. 7, 1946). Unlike Waugh's earlier novels, its irony had not been outrageously funny, and the typical Waugh mood, bright, pardlike and impermeable, had been clouded by a sweat of nostalgic and religious dither. Worse still, Brideshead was the first of Waugh's novels to become a U.S. bestseller. His fans had reluctantly winked at the fact that he is a conservative and a Roman Catholic convert. But popular? No literary cult can tolerate popularity in its prey. The boys were preparing to dump Evelyn.
"I know what you mean, Eustace—is Evelyn depraved enough so that, as an artist, he can make the spiritual leap from malice to malignance?"
"After all, if he is ever to mature as a satirist, he must stop tickling the public's toes, and start cutting its throats."
"Instead of simply festering, as in Brideshead, like an old, old staphylococcus, my dear, in a duodenal ulcer."
"I am afraid poor Evelyn has begun to take the problem of evil seriously."
"How very tiresome."
Last week Novelist Waugh was tickling toes and cutting throats again. The Loved One, his first novel published in the U.S. since Brideshead, was in the eager hands of U.S. readers, most of whom did not know whether to gasp, hoot or holler at the uncomfortable feeling that they had been smudged with soot from a crematory. The title was Waugh's creamy trade name for a corpse. A tale of love and suicide among the morticians of a cemetery that physically resembles Hollywood's fabulous Forest Lawn (TIME, Aug. 24, 1942), The Loved One was either Novelist Waugh's most funereal horse laugh or a retch of glacial rage at two of America's most cherished deceits—its effort to prettify death and to vulgarize love, and hence escape the impact of both. Intellectuals were bitterly divided over Waugh's intention. But the book, which was richly laced with the fun of embalming fluid, might well become a bestseller.
The Book. Last year Metro-Goldwyn Mayer offered Waugh $150,000 for the film rights to Brideshead. It was a situation worthy of a Waugh novel. It is explained, according to Waugh, by the fact that none of the top studio brass had ever read the book. When Waugh demanded "full Molotov veto rights" over the script, the deal fell through.
Waugh's Hollywood trip was not wasted. He was fascinated by the ritual for disguising death which is big business in Southern California. Waugh spent every day that he could get away prying into the fatuous, sumptuous necropolis of Forest Lawn. The result was The Loved One.
It was first published in Horizon. Editor Cyril Connolly devoted the entire February issue of the highbrow British literary monthly to Waugh's short novel. This smart devotion paid off. Horizon for February was sold out in a week.