The Loved One is a great satire on British expatriates, the American film industry, our extravagant burial practices for humans and animals, and the mad romantic fantasies about death that people engage in when they lose track of the realities of the Four Last Things (Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell). I was led back to read The Loved One this time by coming across a good essay on P.G. Wodehouse, by the otherwise-loathed-by-me Christopher Hitchens. In Hitchens' essay I learned that Wodehouse had a stint writing for the films in Hollywood before he wrote the Jeeves and Wooster books, and that Wodehouse started the Cricket Club there in 1933 or thereabouts. Hitchens wrote that Waugh was indebted to that Cricket Club started by Wodehouse for the extremely funny first chapter of The Loved One.
The story of what brought Waugh to Hollywood in 1947 is a funny one too. He pretended to negotiate with MGM about a film adaptation of his book Brideshead Revisited to get a free trip for himself and his second wife, Laura, while being paid $2000 a week during the negotiations. The studio refused to see the novel as anything other than a romance, and he was not going to let them film it since they dismissed the religious elements that were so important in the book. Its actual title is: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder. MGM was not interested in the Sacred. Waugh was actually ashamed the novel was so well regarded in America, since Americans missed the point about everything he thought was valuable about the novel.
While Waugh was in Hollywood, he was given tours of Forest Lawn Cemetery by the founders, got ahold of a book about techniques of embalming, and he relished the prospect of writing a novella about it all. A Waugh biographer wrote, "As Waugh felt that the eschatological or apocalyptic implications he had intended in Brideshead Revisited had escaped many American readers, he was determined to highlight eschatological aspects of American society in The Loved One." Eschatological, to save you the trouble of looking it up, as I had to do, means having to do with the ultimate destiny of humanity.
And oh how sublimely Aimée Thanatogenos, the main female character, misses the real point of human destiny and just about anything else. Named after evangelist Aimée Semple McPherson, her first name is French for "loved one" while her last name is Greek for "born of death." Her end is both a little sad and very funny. Come to think of it, I once chanced across online an essay a student wrote about Aimée's vaporous musings about death, and to my amusement, the essayist took them seriously! That was sad and very funny too.
After I posted this on Facebook, Jonathan McDonald, the editor I work with on the Dappled Things Deep Down Things blog, pointed me to a interesting post of his about the above-mentioned vaporous musings, which gives more credence to her thought process than I have done here by a writer whose opinion I respect: The Attic Epiphany of Aimée Thanatogenos.
Image: This is the same book cover that was on the copy I read when I was a 15 year old high school sophomore in 1960, and it is also the cover of the copy I read recently at the Internet Archive. The first time I read it, I was in a long-term care hospital recovering from spine surgery, and this is one of the two or three books my high school English teacher sent me every week for the many months I was there. Miss Marjorie E. Frye was a creative writer manquée and was encouraging me to be a writer, and the plan— I think it was a good one and would recommend it to would-be writers—was for me to learn how by reading lots of books by many great writers.
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