[Fitts was an American poet, critic, and translator. In the following review, he calls Waugh's novel Vile Bodies a "failure," noting that the use of satire is heavy-handed and derivative.]

[Vile Bodies] is the kind of book that assures you, in a desperate sort of way, that it is funny. It is modeled, pretty consciously, upon the early Aldous Huxley—the Huxley, that is to say, of Crome Yellow and, more noticeably, Antic Hay; not the sad Huxley of the moment, whose touch has become so oppressive since he borrowed Mr. Wells's ouija board and achieved intimacy with God. Mr. Waugh, too, has heard the thunder on the usual Sinai: Vile Bodies has predicatory implications, the same hangover tone that spoiled Point Counter Point, but Mr. Waugh has little of Huxley's wit and none of his substance. While it was possible to forgive the latter's taking himself so seriously by reflecting that after all he had created something to be serious about, it is difficult to excuse Mr. Waugh for wrenching good slapstick into tragicomedy.

As satire the book is no less a failure. First of all, Mr. Waugh displays none of the élan that distinguishes the true satirist from the caricaturist. For all its brilliance the writing lacks vitality. The invention is tired, and effects are too often got by recourse to the devices of slapstick exaggeration. Again, the satire is self-conscious satire, which destroys itself. What made Crome Yellow so effective, for example, was its utter lack of apparent purpose. One never felt that Huxley was deliberately meaning anything; least of all was one conscious of him as the imminent critic of his characters. One is constantly aware, however, of the presence of Mr. Waugh: usually he is felt only in casual turns of expression, the occasional laying on of effect upon conscious effect; but sometimes he descends to the whimsical footnote, and at least once to the bombastic apostrophe: "O Bright Young People!" Successful satire must be impersonal (the "I" of Gulliver is dissociate from Swift) and either entirely improbable (Gulliver again, and Alice), qua history, or entirely probable (Crome Yellow, Antic Hay). Vile Bodies is none of these.

If Mr. Waugh had not tried to do so much, if he had been content to amuse, without attempting to devastate, if he had been content to laugh, without essaying a prophetic sneer at the same time; his book would be diverting in a cockeyed sort of way. It is acceptable comic knowledge that men and women drink to be drunk and sometimes sleep together; that female evangelists are often hypocrites and society editors occasionally unreliable; that movie directors are not invariably sincere artists; that many clergymen are smug, many wives adulteresses, many statesmen lechers, and many dowagers boors. And it is always pleasing to know that what used to be called the "lost generation," before it went humanist, is still energetically losing itself. It is a pity that Mr. Waugh felt that more than these ingredients was needed. Because of its weight of satiric and tragic exaggeration, Vile Bodies neither amuses nor instructs. It is not of the type of true stories, but of True Stories.