Inspiring Older Readers
posted on 24 Jul 2022
Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
I have often thought that the early novels of Evelyn Waugh can sometimes seem almost as brittle and fatuous as the milieus they lampoon. And of course I have also had to revise that hasty opinion several times over. Decline and Fall, for example, which I had particularly in mind, has become one of my favourite Waugh novels.
But in the case of Waugh’s second novel, Vile Bodies, I think at least some of what I said does hold true.
Vile Bodies excoriates the bright young things of the 1920s and their search for hedonistic thrills, amusement and pleasure. It must surely be amongst Waugh’s bitterest, most acid satires, and is at times extremely dark – for instance, I had forgotten that it has the world again descending into chaos and conflict almost a decade before the Second World War actually happened. It is surely significant that Waugh abandoned the title he originally had in mind – Bright Young Things – as too clichéd, replacing it with the much more forceful and misanthropic ‘vile bodies’. “All that succession and repetition of massed humanity… Those vile bodies…” the narrator says.
Aspiring but talentless writer Adam Fenwick-Symes has almost completed a novel. If it sells well he might just earn enough to enable him to marry his girlfriend, Nina Blount. Unfortunately, as Adam is returning from Paris the only copy of his manuscript is impounded and destroyed by a Dover customs officer. This launches him on a sequence of hare-brained money-making schemes and endless on-again, off-again marriage plans. At the same time that Adam is being stripped of his manuscript, another member of his set, the Honourable Agatha Runcible, is being strip-searched by customs officers. “Too, too shaming,” she declares before hurrying away to sell her story to the newspapers.
Meanwhile, at Lottie Crump’s seedy private hotel-cum-drinking club the increasingly stupid Adam gives what money he does have – against tremendous odds he has managed to charm £1,000 out of Nina’s father – to a drunken major who offers to place a bet for him on a horse that simply can’t lose… Needless to say, the major disappears, the horse doesn’t run and Adam spends the rest of the novel trying to get his money back from the drunken major.
Some commentators have likened Vile Bodies to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (Letterpress review), another Twenties novel which uses similar material. But the differences couldn’t be greater. Scott Fitzgerald’s depiction of empty hedonism resulted in a beautifully written novel of great formal elegance and immense and enduring emotional depth. By comparison, Vile Bodies rarely seems more than a sequence of frenetic, farcical vignettes that quickly become fatiguing to read. Everyone in it is dreadful and shallow, stupid to the point of cretinism (that’s sort of the point) and there is no character development to speak of. Waugh seems satisfied in lashing his cast of drunken pleasure-seekers onwards to ever more self-destructive escapades. It seems that Scott Fitzgerald set out to create beauty from ugliness and succeeded magnificently, while Waugh set out to ensure that ugliness remained as ugly and as stupid as possible.
I think I will always find Vile Bodies a difficult novel to engage with and doubt that it will ever become a favourite of mine, but even this cursory re-examination is making me think about it in fresh ways. For instance, Rebecca West apparently said that its characters were shuffled and spread out like a deck of cards and it’s true, they are flat and one-dimensional, moved around in whatever order Waugh finds conducive to events. But their emptiness and lack of character (in both senses) is not accidental. They have, according the academic Naomi Milthorpe, been stripped of interior life the more effectively to emphasise their speech – and it is certainly true that Waugh gives a wonderful rendition of the brittle, self-regarding verbal mannerisms of the smart set that is both stylistically innovative and funny.
And so yet again I find myself reflecting on a Waugh novel I profess to dislike and finding that there is more, much more to it than immediately meets the eye. What an infuriating man Waugh is.
The copy shown has marvellous 1970s artwork by Peter Benchley of the design ‘supergroup’ Bentley/Farrell/Burnett. For a few years their blend of late-psychedelia and art deco was immensely influential. You can read more about their work here and here.
Alun Severn
July 2022
Evelyn Waugh elsewhere on Letterpress:
A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
Put Out More Flags by Evelyn Waugh – two reviews: here and here
Rereading Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy: Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, Unconditional Surrender
Rereading Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall