Editing Corpses in Evelyn Waugh’s Hollywood

Abstract

The origins of Evelyn Waugh's novel The Loved One (1948) are well known. Having traveled (reluctantly) to Hollywood in February 1947 to discuss film version of his novel Brideshead Revisited with studio executives at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, found himself simultaneously disgusted and fascinated with American film industry as well as nearby Forest Lawn Memorial Park, cemetery that, with its gaudy memorials and piped-in music, struck him as more like an amusement park than hallowed ground. subsequently published two articles, one (Why Hollywood is Term of Disparagement) an excoriating critique of Hollywood studio system, other ('Half in Love with Easeful Death': An Examination of Californian Burial Customs) mock-anthropological profile of Forest Lawn. He fictionalized both subjects in The Loved One, his blackly comic Hollywood novel about an undertaking business called Whispering Glades and neighboring crematorium for pets known as Happier Hunting Ground. Death and Hollywood film industry constitute twin poles of Waughs novel and are related to each other in ways that I'd like to consider here at greater length than has yet been done. Critics of novel have typically considered one of these two aspects at time or else have only passingly theorized relationship between them. In his reading of The Loved One, Frederick L. Beaty suggests that Waugh obliquely indicates what he believes to be essential similarity between mortuary dream and products of filmdom, and acknowledges that American industry shares a close philosophical connection with Hollywood of moviemakers, which is also portrayed as dream factory where mere shadows of reality are passed off as genuine article (172). Beaty stops here, however, and never returns to pursue further relationship between cinematic and mortuary. Similarly, Christopher Ames has placed The Loved One within tradition of British novels about Hollywood and death, arguing that Hollywood has figured as cultural dumping ground (409) for works of British high culture such as Shakespearean drama. (1) Walter Wells has argued more surprisingly that The Loved One is, at bottom, not concerned with Hollywood at all, nor is it really concerned with funeral business. According to Wells, the studios and cemetery took direct assaults in [Waugh's] earlier articles. The novel has broader target The Loved One explicitly makes Hollywood metaphor for fate of western civilization in mid-twentieth century (181-82). Other readings of novel such as Naomi Milthorpe's similarly discuss novel's thematization of in terms of general attack on post-war American culture, where the perfectability of dead body has removed fact of death (211) from view. It's that notion of removal from view that I would like to pick up on here in thinking about relationship between Hollywood and corpse. Although Waugh's attacks on American culture in The Loved One extend beyond parameters of Hollywood, which is treated as locus of nearly everything about American culture that found objectionable, Hollywood and cemetery nevertheless serve as specific, carefully chosen objects of attention in The Loved One and should not be treated as arbitrary or convenient metaphors. They are twin targets of Waugh's trenchant statement about bodies that postwar American culture idealizes (those of Hollywood star) and bodies it most wants to disavow (those of corpse), and about ways in which those bodies are fashioned, (re) constructed, exhibited, and visually consumed. The ideological meaning of Hollywood cinema remains inextricably bound up in and mirrored by burial rites of nearby Forest Lawn/Whispering Glades. And it is into this so-called necropolis that stranger comes--someone who looks at both American cinema and cemetery in all wrong ways. …