Vile Bodies (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Masked spectators, savage spectators, Victorian spectators, spectators who have been made to dress as someone else, almost naked spectators in St John's Wood, spectators in flats and studios, houses and ships and hotels and nightclubs, in wind-mills and swimming-baths, spectators at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, spectators at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull spectators in London and comic spectators in Scotland and disgusting spectators in Paris - all that succession and repetition of massed humanity... Those vile bodies... The antics of the Bright Young Things might be comically exaggerated, but they are set in a credible world of London and the home counties – of Mayfair, Shepherd’s Market, Fitzrovia, and Manchester Races. But a war which had not taken place is a different fictional – and moral – universe altogether. Well, not quite. I walk away from the manuscript to another part of the Brotherton LIbrary where they have computers. I've been given a temporary code so that I can get onto the net if I want to. And so I google The Royal George, Appledore. This is what it looks like today: Again, Diana kept the note. No doubt it will be in volume 32 of The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh when it comes out. That's the volume of Personal Writings, edited by Alexander Waugh and Alan Bell, covering the years 1930-1935. Evelyn told Diana that he wrote two long letters and tore them up. All he was trying to say was that he must have seemed unfriendly lately and for that he was sorry. In the surviving note he asks her to understand that it's only because he's puzzled and ill at ease with himself. He assures her that much later everything will be fine.

The final sentence of his paragraphs on artists' studios mentions that he came across a prettily decorated edition of the poems of Mr Humbert Wolfe. This would be the book, published by Chapman and Hall in 1923, for which Evelyn himself designed the dust-wrapper when he was a student at Oxford. What a self-referential travel book he was writing! The original title Bright Young Things, which Waugh changed because he thought the phrase had become too clichéd, was used in Stephen Fry's 2003 film adaptation. The eventual title appears in a comment made by the novel's narrator in reference to the characters' party-driven lifestyle: "All that succession and repetition of massed humanity... Those vile bodies...". [1] [2] What happens? Ultimately, what happens is that Evelyn Waugh designs a striking cover for his own book, though the image below is the related frontispiece . Vile Bodies is the second novel by Evelyn Waugh, published in 1930. It satirises the bright young things, the rich young people partying in London after World War I, and the press which fed on their doings.Hastings, Selina (1994). Evelyn Waugh: A Biography. London: Sinclair-Stevenson. ISBN 1-85619-223-7. OCLC 34721492. In 1936, Anthony Powell wrote a novel called Agents and Patients . Two of the main characters are the Maltravers, and this is known to be a portrait of She-Evelyn and John Heygate. Moreover, it's a portrait of their relationship when, married, they lived together in the Canonbury Square flat that had once been the home of the Evelyns. I go into this in more detail in Evelyn! Rhapsody for an Obsessive Love . Suffice to say here, that directions given in the novel take one to the Heygates' home in Canonbury Square, and Anthony Powell admits the connection in his autobiography, To keep the Ball Rolling . In the novel, Sarah Maltravers (She-Evelyn, once removed) is described as a motoring correspondent for Mode . When she is asked by another character whether she is interested in cars, she admits that she goes down on her knees to them. John Heygate's son, Richard, has told me that She-Evelyn had a penchant for motor mechanics, so the sexual undertones of that last Powell sentence are probably no accident. I am afraid that this will never be of the smallest value but I thought that, as it is your book, you might be amused to have it (as a very much belated Christmas present). Orwell’s further comments about not being able to be Catholic and grown up chime with Cyril Connolly idea of

Gossip columns provide an income source for writers, including for Adam. They also offer the general public a glimpse into upper class debauchery and they keep socialites relevant and interesting. The problem, however, is that the only way to keep readers hooked is to constantly ratchet up the level of scandal and outrage, while at the same time not alienating oneself from the people featured in these articles. Adam and others eventually take to simply manufacturing tabloid stories and even making up people. Today we read a lot about ‘fake news,’ but that’s exactly what we see in Vile Bodies as well. The tabloid journal quoted frequently in the novel is aptly entitled The Daily Excess and the gossip column’s writer is known by the pseudonym Mr. Chatterbox. It’s a revolving door position at the paper — the man behind the pseudonym changes several times in the novel as writers fail, in succession, to provide the right amount of moral outrage to readers, while keeping access to the people and parties that provide all the salacious content. On Saturday, Evelyn went to Pool Place from Folkestone where he’d been with Bryan. Nancy and Diana arrived later. ‘Diana and I quarrelled at luncheon. We bathed. Diana and I quarrelled at dinner and after dinner. Next day I decided to leave. Quarrelled with Diana again and left.'

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There are no photographs of pregnant Diana. There are very few photos at all of this phase of her life. Perhaps this picture from 1935 hints at her mythical attractiveness to Evelyn. This terrific (although long and somewhat stuffy) essay argues for Vile Bodies as a parody of a traditional romance novel. The traditional plot involves a young man in love but deemed unworthy of the woman, often for economic or social reasons; he acquires a fortune or suddenly discovers he's actually the son of a baron or something and the plot ends in marriage. (You know, like a Shakespeare comedy or Tom Jones.) Here, Adam is constantly in pursuit of that fortune - represented by the drunk Major - but like the Jarndyce settlement in Bleak House, when it finally arrives it's completely devalued, and the book ends in one final display of pointless extravagance as the world ends. Vile Bodies is full of such memorable scenes: a customs officer who finds a book on Economics subversive and Purgatorio objectionable, a judge who has a prostitute swinging on a chandelier in a hotel room and sees that police cover her accidental death, a journalist who commits suicide after being banned from high society, a charlatan drunken major who becomes general when war is declared, and so on, and so forth.

Apparently many of these characters were thinly-veiled portraits of Waugh's actual acquaintances, and it was a big thing to rush out and get his books and try to figure out who was who. And when some of the satires got a little too pointed, Waugh got invited to fewer parties. (Somewhat like the Chatterbox series of incidents.) Carla Meyer of the San Francisco Chronicle called the film a "witty, energetic adaptation" but thought "Fry, so deft with lighthearted moments, seems uncomfortable with Waugh's moralizing, and more serious scenes fall flat". She added, " Bright Young Things is like a party girl on her fourth martini. What had been fun and frothy turns irretrievably maudlin". [10] It's been suggested in the Waugh literature that the character Agatha Runcible, is in part a portrait of the Bright Young Thing, Elizabeth Ponsonby. There is probably something in this, but in chapter ten, Evelyn is surely thinking of She-Evelyn, the woman who has just deserted him, notwithstanding that she is already well and truly embedded in the book as Nina.Once the Eveyns had split, Evelyn was homeless. Only he wasn't exactly that, not with the number and quality of the homes that Diana had the keys to. The map below shows the London town house, the castle near Dublin, the flat in Paris and the 'ugly little' house on the south coast of Sussex. Of course what Diana means by 'ugly little house' gets one's juices flowing, does it not?. The one below too, I think. The woman (actually, it's not a woman) in the image is so strong, so cool, so in control, so - in embittered He-Evelyn's view - asking to be brought crashing down to earth. The race is off and there goes Evelyn's party's car on the right in the picture below, number 38 cum 13. There are two curious features in the conclusion of the novel. The first is the fact that all the farcical goings-on of the plot are brought to an abrupt stop by the declaration of war. For a book published in 1930, the reader is forced to wonder ‘What war is that?’ The text does does not refer to the war of 1914-18, and the Second World War was still a decade away. It turns out to be an imaginary war, which does not sit easily with the essentially realistic mise en scene of the remainder of the novel. Evelyn Waugh's acidly funny and experimental satire shows a new generation emerging in the years after the First World War, revealing the darkness and vulnerability beneath the glittering surface of the high life. Read more Look Inside Details