‘Pardon me. Aren’t you the friend of the strangulated Loved One in the Orchid Room? My memory’s very bad for live faces.’
(Miss Aimée Thanatogenos in The Loved One, page 70)

In Hollywood with Dennis Barlow

We are in the British expat community in Hollywood, California. Dennis Barlow is 28 (p.33). He was a budding poet back in Britain but was lured to Hollywood on the promise of extending his literary potential and making a lot of money. However, he didn’t like the life of a lackey to the Megalopolitan film studio. ‘He repined, despaired, fled,’ and got a (poorly paid) job at a pet cemetery (The Happier Hunting Ground) run by fast-talking, business-minded Mr Schultz, working alongside brisk Miss Poski. Here, grateful Americans pay to have their pet cats, dogs, parrots, goats and many other species embalmed, stuffed, buried or cremated. They like Dennis because:

‘They find me reverent. It is my combination of melancholy with the English accent. Several of our clientele have commented favourably upon it.’

Sir Francis Hinsley

Since he moved to Hollywood, Dennis has lived with Sir Francis Hinsley. A generation earlier Sir Francis had been the only Brit with a knighthood in Hollywood, ‘the doyen of English society, chief script-writer in Megalopolitan Pictures* and President of the Cricket Club.’ Twenty-plus years later his career has not prospered. He now works in the lowly studio press department and the swimming pool which used to flash with the shining limbs of lovely young starlets is now ‘cracked and over-grown with weed’ (an entirely coincidental but slightly eerie overlap with the dominant image from J.G. Ballard’s short stories).

(* Mention of Megalopolitan Pictures will remind anyone who’s read Waugh’s short stories that this is the name of the fictional film company mentioned in the 1932 short story lampooning the British film industry, ‘Excursion in Reality’. Even in relatively small details like this, Waugh reused names and characters which, cumulatively, go to create the strong sense of a parallel comic universe. If the shabby world of seedy sin and sweaty guilt portrayed by Graham Greene came to be called Greeneland, surely Waugh’s use of recurring comic names and characters throughout his oeuvre helped to create WaughWorld.)

‘Juanita del Pablo’

Hinsley’s most recent triumph is the PR creation of a new star, ‘Juanita del Pablo.’ That isn’t her real name, her real name is Baby Aaronson. She was spotted by a director for her eyes, and handed over to Hinsley to mould. So he changed her name, got her plastic surgery to make her look more Hispanic and got her flamenco lessons. Unfortunately, a few movies into her career and the League of Decency has cracked down on immoral films i.e. ones which include passionate Hispanic babes. Now Irish women are all the rage, so Hinsley’s getting ‘Juanita’s hair dyed auburn, they’ve pulled out all her teeth and given her dentures to help her learn Irish brogue. Hinsley is sitting on the verandah of his rundown bungalow with Dennis trying to decide on a suitably Irish name for his remodelled creation.

Sir Ambrose Abercrombie

Thus the narrative opens when Sir Francis and Dennis are enjoying a sundowner at the end of another arid scorching California day. Another venerable Brit pops by. This is Sir Ambrose Abercrombie, who ‘used to bounce about the lots in his famous series of fatiguing roles, acrobatic, heroic, historic, and come almost nightly to Sir Francis for refreshment’. His career has continued to thrive and he is now very much President of the Cricket Club and acknowledged head of the English expat community. He very very much disapproves of Dennis taking a job at the pet cemetery. Lets the side down, very bad form.

Sir Francis is fired by his studio…

The plot, such as it is, kicks in when, a few week later, Sir Francis makes a presentation to the assembled board of the studio, reading out his press release for Juanita’s new Irish backstory and profile. It goes down badly and, as soon as he’s left the room, the execs agree to hand the project over to someone else. For a few more days Francis works from home with the studio secretary. Then one day she fails to turn up. He makes a few calls to the studio, finds himself put off and batted around various secretaries, then finally pops into the studio, to discover his office has been given to someone else (with thumping satire, named ‘Lorenzo Medici’), his name removed from the door, his stuff chucked in a skip, and that he has been fired, without anyone having the guts or decency to tell him.

… and hangs himself

Dennis comes home late from work to discover Sir Francis has hanged himself on the stairs. He has to cut him down and call the cops. It is Sir Francis’s death which triggers the main content of the book, which is Dennis’s visit to the largest cemetery and morticians in Los Angeles, the famed Whispering Glades.

Whispering Glades Memorial Park

There is some attempt at fictionalisation but the long passage which dominates the first half of this short book reads almost like a piece of magazine journalism, as Dennis is given a guided tour of the cemetery by a series of immaculately presented, polite and efficient young women, who talk him (and the reader) through every possible variety of service and product which the cemetery offers, for example: is the body to be embalmed, buried or cremated? In fact, in the words of the soft-spoken and sensitive guide:

‘Normal disposal is by inhumement, entombment, inurnment or immurement, but many people just lately prefer insarcophagusment. That is very individual. The casket is placed inside a sealed sarcophagus, marble or bronze, and rests permanently above ground in a niche in the mausoleum, with or without a personal stained-glass window above. That, of course, is for those with whom price is not a primary consideration.’ (p.37)

Is there to be a funeral service, in which case which denomination, Protestant, nonconformist, Catholic, Jewish or other? Will the body be displayed for mourners, in which case full body lying on a sofa, or in a casket, casket half closed, casket only revealing the face? What should the body be wearing, formal attire or did he or she have favourite clothes? Holding symbolic objects, for example a favourite toy, if it’s a child, or a flower to symbolise peace? In which part of the cemetery should the body be buried, in a family plot or Pilgrims’ Rest, in Lovers’ Nest or on the beautiful Lake Isle or, if a writer, in Poets’ Corner?

Throughout the presentation the winsome young lady uses the phrase The Loved One rather than the deceased, the body, the corpse – ‘The Loved One’ and the repetition of this phrase begins to give it a noumenal, rather unreal charge.

We learn that Whispering Glades was founded by a Wilbur Kenworthy who had a dream of presenting the dead to their mourners as happy and at peace, and so is reverently referred to by his employees as The Dreamer. (By the way, just as the deceased is referred to as The Loved One, so the the mourners, relatives and so on of the deceased are uniformly referred to as The Waiting Ones.)

This is all very entertaining (although note the way, that as with so much Waugh, it is also deeply factual; as I the smooth sales patter of the cemetery’s sales woman went on and on it began to make me think about my own funeral arrangements i.e. I don’t have any, and whether I ought to make some).

Identikit American young women

But at one point in the tour the saleswoman hands over to a cosmetician and something happens: Dennis is smitten by her. Part of the reason reads, nowadays, as pretty controversial. It is because she is different, different from the identikit appearance of so many many young American women which Dennis (and Waugh) note, lament and satirise – and he goes on to describe the way post-war America was covered by identikit lookalike stewardesses and hostesses and waitresses and so on. Of the saleswoman who’s brought him this far, he writes:

She left the room and Dennis at once forgot everything about her. He had seen her before everywhere. American mothers, Dennis reflected, presumably knew their daughters apart, as the Chinese were said subtly to distinguish one from another of their seemingly uniform race, but to the European eye the Mortuary Hostess was one with all her sisters of the air-liners and the reception-desks, one with Miss Poski at the Happier Hunting Ground. She was the standard product. A man could leave such a girl in a delicatessen shop in New York, fly three thousand miles and find her again in the cigar stall at San Francisco, just as he would find his favourite comic strip in the local paper; and she would croon the same words to him in moments of endearment and express the same views and preferences in moments of social discourse. She was convenient… (p.45)

Obviously, young #metoo feminists might read this as an objectifying, degrading description, typical male condescension etc, and there is obviously something to this. But you could turn it right around and say that Waugh had noticed, and was satirising, precisely the ‘honey I’m home’ identikit model of American womanhood which feminists of the 1960s protested against and are still protesting against. Later on, Waugh repeats the same sort of idea i.e. the way American women in particular were slaves to American consumerism and advertising.

[She] spoke the tongue of Los Angeles; the sparse furniture of her mind—the objects which barked the intruder’s shins—had been acquired at the local High School and University; she presented herself to the world dressed and scented in obedience to the advertisements; brain and body were scarcely distinguishable from the standard product. (p.105)

Miss Aimée Thanatogenos, cosmetician

Anyway, the cosmetician that the standard-model guide and hostess hands Dennis over to is not a ‘standard product’, she is more rare and refined and individual, less plastered in just the right make-up. Waugh gives her Greek parentage and the comic name Aimée Thanatogenos and Dennis falls in love with her. The only snag is that Aimée Thanatogenos adores the most senior figure at Whispering Glades, the head embalmer, the fabulously named Mr Joyboy. What a great name. A truly great piece of comic invention.

Mr Joyboy, chief embalmer

Mr Joyboy is not handsome or attractive but he is a master at his trade.

Mr Joyboy was not a handsome man by the standards of motion-picture studios. He was tall but unathletic. There was lack of shape in his head and body, a lack of colour; he had scant eyebrows and invisible eyelashes; the eyes behind his pince-nez were pinkish-grey; his hair, though neat and scented, was sparse; his hands were fleshy; his best feature was perhaps his teeth and they though white and regular seemed rather too large for him; he was a trifle flat-footed and more than a trifle paunchy. But these physical defects were nugatory when set against his moral earnestness and the compelling charm of his softly resonant voice.

Mr Joyboy can make any corpse, no matter how mangled, appear beautiful and serene for its resting in state. Not only that but when he arrived at Whispering Glades he brought new manners and decorousness to the operation. Under the previous head cosmetician the trolleymen referred to corpses and stiffs and even the ‘dead meat’. Under Mr Joyboy all such disrespect was scrupulously banned. He not only is a master cosmetician, he enforces respect and courtesy wherever he goes. And so that is why Miss Aimée Thanatogenos adores him.

Now, the plot is padded out with various events, for example Sir Ambrose takes charge of the funeral arrangements and commissions Dennis to research materials for Sir Ambrose’s eulogy and to write a poem in honour of the deceased, so there is quite a lot of bother about Dennis going through the dead man’s books and looking for inspiration.

(By the way, I was expecting to get a description of Sir Francis’s funeral, complete with comic caricatures of Hollywood types, but Waugh resists the temptation and the funeral is barely even mentioned, glossed over in order to get on with the plot.)

Encounter on the Isle of Rest

But the real core of the story is the way Dennis, a genuinely sensitive soul, becomes fascinated by the setup at the Whispering Glades and obsessed by Aimée Thanatogenos. Their interaction is crystallised when he finds himself wandering into the Glades and taking the ferry to the Isle of Rest, there to lie down amid the sound of the bees (a recording emitted from loudspeakers hidden in the mock bee hives) and bumps into Aimée Thanatogenos who has come there for her lunch break. They chat, he finds out more about her, he starts sending her poems.

Dennis’s purloined poems

Admittedly, in a nice comic touch, they’re not poems written by him but cherry-picked from anthologies of English verse although, in another comic touch, Dennis quickly discovers that most of the well-known English poems are unsuitable for plain and simple wooing:

Nearly all were too casual, too despondent, too ceremonious, or too exacting; they scolded, they pleaded, they extolled. Dennis required salesmanship; he sought to present Aimée with an irresistible picture not so much of her own merits or even of his, as of the enormous gratification he was offering. The films did it; the crooners did it; but not, it seemed, the English poets. (p.84)

Miss Thanatogenos consults the Guru Brahmin

Anyway, poor Miss Thanatogenos finds herself torn between dawning feelings for her ardent if sometimes incomprehensible English suitor and her adoration of the older expert in her field, with the result, that in a further comic/satirical strand, she writes a series of querulous letters to a well-known Los Angeles agony aunt:

Once, in days of family piety, it bore the title Aunt Lydia’s Post Bag; now it was The Wisdom of the Guru Brahmin, adorned with the photograph of a bearded and almost naked sage. (p.80)

With predictable inevitability, we are told that the daily column and sensitive replies of this woman agony aunt are, in fact, churned out by two overworked, harrassed, middle-aged hacks.

The Guru Brahmin was two gloomy men and a bright young secretary. One gloomy man wrote the column, the other, a Mr Slump, dealt with the letters which required private answers. (p.93)

Promotion and dinner with Mr Joyboy

Her situation becomes further complicated when Mr Joyboy makes a move on her, to her surprise, dismay and bewilderment. First of all he gives her the frabjous news that the owner of Whispering Glades has decided it is high time it had its first woman embalmer and that Mr Joyboy has recommended her, Miss Thanatogenos, for the role (p.86).

But she is even more thrilled when he modestly and chastely asks if she would do him the honour of dining with him this evening to celebrate. Miss Thanatogenos excitedly accepts, dashing off yet another note to the two disgruntled hacks who go by the name of Guru Brahmin and are beginning to get fed up of her continual requests for advice about her love life.

In the event, the dinner clarifies a lot of things because, eminent in his field and wonderfully competent though he may be, Mr Joyboy is, at the end of the day, just an embalmer in a morticians, not that well paid, and so lives in a very average seedy house in an estate far out on the edge of town with his mother who keeps a crapulous parrot (Sambo) and whines and criticises throughout their shabby meal (tinned noodle soup, a bowl of salad with tinned crab compounded in it, ice-cream and coffee, p.91). Mr Joyboy compounds his crassness by not driving her home but turning her out and telling her a street car back into town runs from the corner. Oh what disappointment!

Miss Thanatogenos becomes engaged to Dennis

As you might imagine, this bitter disappointment makes Miss Aimée Thanatogenos reconsider Dennis as a prospect. At the same time we see Dennis asking the owner of Happier Hunting Grounds for a raise. When Mr Schultz roughly turns him down, Dennis buttonholes the minister performing the funeral of their latest customer (a much-loved Alsatian) how you get into the minister racket and how well it pays. Not very well at all, replies the mournful minister (p.97).

Later that day, Miss Aimée Thanatogenos leads Dennis to one of the many fake chapels and churches scattered around the vast grounds of Whispering Glades, this one a fake Scottish kirk near which is situated a solid granite bench with a heart-shaped hole cut out and a snatch of love poetry. Miss Aimée Thanatogenos makes Dennis solemnly repeat the verse and then they kiss through the big heart-shaped hole. They regard themselves as engaged.

Mr Joyboy sulks

Alas, from that day onwards Mr Joyboy, who had always had a kind world for Miss Aimée Thanatogenos and always gave the corpses she was to paint and finalise an extra special smile, becomes distant and sulky. The corpses no longer have the same smiles. He is himself disappointed, and jealous.

But one day Miss Aimée Thanatogenos makes a special effort to be nice to Mr Joyboy who responds by telling her his mother has experienced a bitter tragedy, her old parrot has passed away and she is inconsolable. Mr Joyboy has gone to the trouble of arranging a funeral for the parrot at the Happier Hunting Ground pet cemetery and invites Miss Aimée Thanatogenos to join them.

Oops. That’s where Dennis works. And once or twice during their engagement, Miss Aimée Thanatogenos has casually let slip that she disapproves of the Happier Hunting Ground and the way it applies to mere animals the ceremony and respect which should be reserved for humans. Although she was introduced to us as an exception to the identikit young American woman, Miss Aimée Thanatogenos is portrayed as every bit as inflexibly moral and high-minded as her devout women ancestors and zealous feminist descendants.

Moreover, Miss Aimée Thanatogenos shows Mr Joyboy a poem Dennis has ‘written’ for her and he is impressed and promises to show it to a writer he knows, to see if it can be published. Oops. We know all of them are simply copied from The Oxford Book of English Verse.

We are now only 20 pages from the end so I expected the narrative to lead up to the comic scene when Miss Aimée Thanatogenos attends the funeral of Mrs Joyboy’s parrot and is shocked to discover that her fiancé works at the despised pet cemetery, has lied to her and might even, with his numerous questions about Whispering Glades, have been just pumping her for commercial tricks and technique all along. Except I was wrong. Like the funeral scene I was expecting, the Big Reveal scene is omitted, and glossed over in a sentence, announcing that Miss Aimée Thanatogenos is so shocked that, in the words of the raddled old hacks who write the Brahmin Guru column, ‘she marries the other guy’.

The engagement of Dennis and Aimée had never been announced in any paper and needed no public denial. The engagement of Mr Joyboy and Aimée had a column-and-a-half in the Morticians Journal and a photograph in The Casket, while the house-journal, Whispers from the Glades, devoted nearly an entire issue to the romance. A date was fixed for the wedding at the University Church. Mr Joyboy had been reared a Baptist and the minister who buried the Baptist dead gladly offered his services. The wardrobe-mistress found a white slumber-robe for the bride. Dr Kenworthy intimated his intention of being there in person. The corpses who came to Aimée for her ministrations now grinned with triumph. (p.106)

This is genius not only because it’s funny, but because of the crispness of the prose. There is no fat. Each comic aspect of the situation is briskly and lucidly described.

Encounter at the nutburger bar

Dennis doesn’t even realise he’s been dumped till he follows Miss Aimée Thanatogenos to a nutburger bar and asks why she hasn’t been returning his calls. She explains a) he lied about the poems b) he lied about working at Happier Hunting Grounds c) he’s an awful person and d) Mrs Joyboy’s dead parrot looked awful in its tiny casket with its head lying on a pillow.

Once he’s grasped the situation, Dennis replies with a barrage of arguments and self justification, none of which sticks till he almost at random mentions the silly vow they took at the Scottish Kirk. To his surprise, this hits home and Miss Aimée Thanatogenos is quelled. In her American dimness, she thinks this is a real, enduring vow and is suddenly struck silent as Dennis drives her home and pulls up outside her flat.

Mr Joyboy fails to offer comfort

Dennis drives off and Miss Aimée Thanatogenos phones her new fiancé, Mr Joyboy, for comfort and reassurance. But she can barely hear him for the tremendous racket in the background. Mr Joyboy’s mother has bought a new parrot and is breaking him in. Miss Aimée Thanatogenos pleads for his time, pleads to see him, but Joyboy persists in saying that at a time like this his mother needs him. It is a new parrot.

Mr Slump counsels suicide

Thoroughly disillusioned, Miss Aimée Thanatogenos next phones the news paper which publishes the Brahmin Guru. It’s the evening so the receptionist tells him the column is written by several gentlemen, she can probably reach Mr Slump at Mooney’s Saloon, so she gets the number and calls him there. The bartender takes the call and hands over the phone. Now as bad luck would have it, Mr Slump, who has been drinking more and more and turning up later and later for work, has been fired just that very day. When Miss Aimée Thanatogenos begins blathering about her love life down the phone he lays the receiver on the counter, takes a drink, orders another drink, and chats to his neighbour till the tinny little voice has quite finished. Picks up the receiver to hear Miss Aimée Thanatogenos pitifully asking what she should do. Take a lift, Mr Slump tells her, to the top of your building then throw yourself off, then hangs up.

Miss Aimée Thanatogenos commits suicide

Miss Aimée Thanatogenos takes some sleeping pills and sleeps till dawn. She wakes, dresses and walks the short distance to Whispering Glades, goes in the staff entrance, sits by the lawn watching them change colour as dawn comes up. Then enters the building, goes to the main workroom, finds a big bottle of poison and injects herself with it. It is cyanide. She dies.

Mr Joyboy comes blubbing

Next morning Mr Joyboy arrives at the Happier Hunting Ground to break the news to Dennis. Dennis had hardened his heart against Miss Aimée Thanatogenos so is not that upset. Joyboy blames him – Dennis brushes aside his accusations – Joyboy wants Dennis to help him dispose of the body before the owner of Whispering Glades finds it. Might be difficult to explain away. Dennis says he’ll think about it and sends him away.

Sir Ambrose makes Dennis an offer

Far funnier is the surprise news that Dennis has quit the Happier Hunting Ground. Without too much effort he has managed to qualify as a non-denominational priest or minister, and has sent round to the British expat community a card announcing the services of ‘Squadron Leader the Rev. Dennis Barlow’.

This brings Sir Ambrose briskly to his door to tell him that working at a pet cemetery was one thing but this, deer boy, this is quite another. It simply won’t do. In the current fraught political situation, it reflects very badly on the old country. Slowly they fence and negotiate and it emerges that the Cricket Club have had a whip-round to pay for Dennis’s ticket home – and that Dennis was expecting precisely this to happen. In fact Sir Ambriose has arrived with a cheque made out to Dennis for travelling expenses which he suavely pockets.

Playing Mr Joyboy

The story ends with Dennis transformed from the sensitive poet obsessed with Whispering Glades and Miss Aimée Thanatogenos and metamorphosed into the confident practical joker / scammer Basil Seal. For when Mr Joyboy returns, still upset and panicking about what to do, Dennis has worked out a very smooth plan.

Problem one, how to dispose of the body? Well, after hours Mr Joyboy must bring Miss Aimée Thanatogenos’s body to the Happier Hunting Ground. As their senior employee, Dennis has free use of the crematorium and they’re often cremating pets who don’t require ceremonies or funerals at all times of day or night. So the staff will leave and he will incinerate Miss Aimée Thanatogenos safely and securely.

Problem two, how to explain Miss Aimée Thanatogenos’s mystery disappearance? Well, everyone knows she had a thing with Dennis and Dennis has abruptly returned to England so all her few acquaintance and workmates need to know is that she’s run off to England with him. Eloped. Unethical but romantic.

Problem three, money. Dennis smoothly extorts $1,000 from Mr Joyboy for performing this service, and tells him to cash Sir Ambrose’s cheque while he’s at the bank.

Cremating Miss Aimée Thanatogenos

And so it is that Dennis drives the Happier Hunting Ground van over to Whispering Glades after dinner and he and Mr Joyboy furtively manhandle a coffin into it. Then he drives them back to the Happier Hunting Ground, they carry the heavy coffin up to the furnace, push it in, turn on the gas and ignite the flames. It will take an hour and a half, and then pulverising the skull, the pelvis and bigger bones, scraping it all into an urn and burying it somewhere. Mr Joyboy departs in disgust.

In a final twist of the satirical knife, Dennis conscientiously makes an entry in the Happier Hunting Ground Book of Remembrance, entering Mr Joyboy as the customer and Aimée as the name of his beloved pet. This means that tomorrow and on every anniversary as long as the Happier Hunting Ground exists a postcard will be sent to Mr Joyboy with the message: Your little Aimée is wagging her tail in heaven tonight, thinking of you.

Unlike so many Englishmen who came hopefully to southern California and failed and broke their hearts and lost all their money, Dennis is leaving triumphant and enriched. What’s more, he will be taking with him back to Blighty a priceless chunk of Experience, of Life, which the artist in him will be able to labour over long and hard. What more could a man ask of life?

Credit

The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh was published by Chapman and Hall in 1948. All references are to the 1971 Penguin paperback edition.

Related link

• The Loved One online

Evelyn Waugh reviews

• Decline and Fall (1928)
• Vile Bodies (1930)
• Remote People (1931)
• Black Mischief (1932)
• Ninety-Two Days (1934)
• A Handful of Dust (1934)
• Waugh in Abyssinia (1936)
• Scoop (1938)
• Work Suspended (1942)
• Put Out More Flags (1942)
• Brideshead Revisited (1945)
• Scott-King’s Modern Europe (1947)
• The Loved One (1948)
• Men at Arms (1952)
• Love Among the Ruins (1953)
• What is Waugh satirising in ‘Love Among The Ruins’?
• Officers and Gentlemen (1955)
• The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957)
• Unconditional Surrender (1961)
• The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh
• Evelyn Waugh: A Biography by Selina Hastings (1994)