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The Loved One is by no means the subtle and cold-blooded rage at the perversion of death and love which some subtle and raging people suppose it to be. It is Evelyn Waugh caught between laughter and vomiting. The story of the patriotic pretensions and fussy snobbishness of the British film colony is grade A Waugh. Less artful is the travelogue of the intricate inanities of Whispering Glades, from the voice of a nightingale piped through the grounds and mortuary buildings to the Lake Isle of Innisfree, complete with nine rows of beans and beeless beehives with electric buzzers (burial plots $1,000). Most amusing is the love of Mr. Joyboy, the senior mortician, and Miss Aimée Thanatogenos, his assistant, uttered in an American idiom which Author Waugh has not entirely mastered. Their passion, unrolling between the refrigerators and the crematory, is alternately hot & cold. They play games of hearts & flowers with the corpses. When the lovers tiffed, the corpses looked "woebegone and reproachful." When love ran smoothly, they "grinned with triumph."
The failure of this funerary passion, the intrusion of an Englishman named Dennis, who works in a neighboring cat & dog cemetery, the Happier Hunting Ground, and Miss Thanatogenos' love-death, are the burden of The Loved One.
In the end Mr. Joyboy, afraid that Miss Thanatogenos' suicide will endanger his job at Whispering Glades, pays Dennis $1,000 to cremate her at the dog & cat cemetery. While she is volatilizing, Dennis "entered the office and made a note in the book kept there for that purpose. Tomorrow and on every anniversary as long as the Happier Hunting Ground existed, a postcard would go to Mr. Joyboy: Your little Aimée is wagging her tail in heaven tonight, thinking of you."
Perverse Innocence. In 1928, Evelyn (pronounced Evil in) Arthur St. John Waugh (rhymes with raw) leaped, like a literary commando, out of nowhere and, establishing a beachhead in that dismal waste land which Poet T. S. Eliot had charted six years before, began to commit merry mayhem on the comic muse.
Somewhat against its better judgment, Chapman & Hall, the London publishing house of which Evelyn's father was head, had brought out his first slim, satiric novel, Decline and Fall. It was a lighthearted little tale of moral turpitude about a young Oxonian named Paul Pennyfeather, who became a teacher without qualifications in one of fiction's most fascinating schools for backward children. He was on the point of marrying Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde, the mother of one of his pupils, when he was thrown into jail. It had come to the notice of the vigilant police that Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde's enormous wealth and social prestige rested wholly upon her very efficient management of a profitable white-slave trade. Since it was necessary to arrest somebody, the police, like the Oxford authorities, saw that Paul was their man.
As the effortless sprint of Waugh's prose discovered a new region of perverse innocence unshadowed by any moral concepts whatever, it was clear that a new master of English satire had emerged.