Vile Bodies, by Evelyn Waugh

c1930, this edition from Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company, 1999

I have wanted to read this book for a long time, ever since I read A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh in a post-WWI lit class I took for my Master's. I loved reading A Handful of Dust, which was cleverly funny and kept a smile on my face throughout, even though it is definitely a dark comedy. For instance, there is a whole section of the book called "Hard Cheese on Tony," and I was so tickled by that title that I smiled through the whole section. I distinctly remember another member of the class being surprised when I asked the instructor if all of Waugh's books were this "funny," because she did not think the book was funny at all.

Well, fast-forward to two weeks ago when I finally checked out Vile Bodies at the library. I don't know if I wasn't in the right mood, or what, but this book, of which the New York Times claimed, "It might shock you, but it will make you laugh," did not do either for me. In the bio on Waugh inside the cover, an article from Time is quoted: "In fifteen novels of cunning construction and lapidary eloquence, Evelyn Waugh developed a wickedly hilarious yet fundamentally religious assault on a century that, in his opinion, had ripped up the nourishing taproot of tradition and let wither all the dear things of the world." It's pretty clear what Waugh is assaulting in this book - the young aristocrats in 1930s London who have nothing more to show for their existence than a nightly succession of drinking parties and meaningless conversation. The plot follows a group of wealthy, non-working twentysomethings from party to party. Two members of the crowd actually write their own gossip columns for different newspapers recounting the nightly exploits of this much-watched group of losers. It reminded me of young Hollywood "starlets" and how there is a constant watch on who is wearing what and who is dating whom. While the Younger Generation parties, the older crowd has a fancy dinner party where, "the topic of the Younger Generation spread through the company like a yawn. Royalty remarked on their absence and those happy mothers who had even one docile daughter in tow swelled with pride and commiseration. 'I'm told they're having another of their parties,' said Mrs. Mouse, 'in an aeroplane this time.' 'In an aeroplane? How very extraordinary.' 'Of course, I never hear a word from Mary, but her maid told my maid...'" (By the way, this is Mary's mother speaking, and Mary, unknown to her mother, is having a fling with the Maharajah of Pukkapore which is all the talk at this aeroplane party.)

I love to identify where titles come from, and here is the source of the title for this book: (Adam, the main character, is at a party with his girlfriend, Nina, and says,) "'Oh, Nina, what a lot of parties.' (...Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St. John's Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris -- all that succession and repetition of massed humanity...Those vile bodies...)." As you can see, Evelyn Waugh can clearly write.

So what is my problem with this book? I know exactly what it is...as I was reading the book I felt completely and utterly that none of the characters was real. That was the thought I kept having - there is no depth or human urgency to their lives, no emotion or feeling in their relationships, no conscience nor consciousness in their decisions. Like Adam thinks, they are nothing more than vile bodies. As I've gone back through the book, though, looking for quotes for this blog, I've seen that that is a theme of the novel, and now I'm dying to write a paper on it (this is where my neurotic English major kicks in!). So here's how I would lay out my paper: I would start with the quote Waugh uses to begin the novel, from Alice Through the Looking Glass: "'Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else -- if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing.' 'A very slow sort of country!' said the Queen. 'Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!' .... 'If I wasn't real," Alice said -- half laughing through her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous -- I shouldn't be able to cry.' 'I hope you don't suppose those are real tears?' Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt." Okay, you can already see the theme introduced here, with Alice's claim of being real and Tweedledum's accusation that she may not be. Then throughout the book many of the characters go by multiple names or identities, making it hard to decipher which is their "true"identity, which is real. Also, many of the characters in the book are confused about other characters' identities. For instance, There is an ex-Prime Minister who moves with this young crowd, and there is a constant discussion going on about whether he is still the Prime Minister or not. Also, Adam goes several times to visit Nina's father to talk to him about marrying Nina, and every time he goes there is great confusion about who Adam is and Nina's father always operates under the assumption that Adam is somebody other than who he really is. Ultimately, Nina and Adam go to stay with her father over the Christmas holiday, and the entire time Nina's father thinks that Adam is her husband, which he isn't.

Oh, now I'm dying to write a paper about this, and now I'm falling in love with the book! I could be an English student my whole life. If I wrote a paper now, who would read it?