[Barnard is an English writer and educator. In the following essay, he analyzes Waugh's satirical attack on superficiality and illusion in The Loved One.]

One of the most haunting images one retains of Evelyn Waugh's life, a life rich in incongruities and contrasts, is the author's own account of how, during his brief and abortive visit to Hollywood in 1947, he was driven daily (in the car that was supposed to take him to the studio) to the cemetery called Forest Lawn, and how he spent hour after fascinated hour exploring the mysteries of the place. He had exhausted the possibilities of Hollywood in days, but the appeal of Forest Lawn seemed inexhaustible. This preference is mirrored in The Loved One, both in the career of Dennis Barlow, and in the structure of the novel itself; after a few pages devoted to the great dream factory, the novel takes wing for Whispering Glades and the Happier Hunting Ground, and remains there.

What was the appeal of Forest Lawn to Waugh? Of course to some extent the appeal was that of an incubating story. Waugh himself was very conscious of how limited his experience had been since his marriage, and he welcomed both the war and the hallucinatory experiences that gave him Pinfold precisely on the ground that one should be grateful for experience that was potential fiction. He himself, in the Preface to the Collected Edition reprint of the novel draws the parallel between himself and Barlow, and the simple explanation of the fascination is that, like him, Waugh came away with a chunk of experience which was to be turned (in Waugh's case) into a novel rather than a poem. But the interesting question is: Why this experience? Why, of all places in the States, did Waugh's imagination feed so ravenously on Forest Lawn? And, since Dennis Barlow's search for his 'chunk of experience' is presented, like Tony Last's, in terms of a quest, what is the quest for?

The relationship between the two major objects of satire in the novel is clear-cut. Hollywood and Whispering Glades deal with illusion, with throwing a mist of unreality over the unpalatable. Life's dream factory is complemented and completed by Death's dream factory. Just as Baby Aaronson can be transformed by the artists of the studio into Juanita del Pablo and then (as fashions change) into Kathleen Fitzbourke, so can the bulging indigo face of Sir Francis Hinsley be transformed by the artists of the mortuary into the dignified mask that will greet his mourning Waiting Ones. True in the first case the star's singing of The Wearing of the Green may have a flamenco ring, and in the second the peaceful image may appear to Barlow even more horrible than the strangulated reality. But these are extreme cases: on the whole the dream machine works its magic, and blurs the distinction between reality and illusion.

And in blurring that distinction it contributes to the dismal process of standardisation which is Waugh's second prong in his satirical attack. Mr Medici may not (like Baby Aaronson) lose his name, but it has to be pronounced Medissy ("'how you said kinda sounds like a wop and Mr Medici is a fine young man with a very, very fine and wonderful record…'"). The truth about Mr Medici's origins is lost, and the illusion is produced of him as the standard product. This illusion is almost universal, since it must be within the reach of all to become the standard product. Air hostesses lose everything that makes them individual women, and become American Womanhood. Kaiser's peaches lose their stones and become fruity cotton wool. Waugh is perhaps the last of a long line of writers for whom America was the great revolutionary leveller (the position now occupied, in some American eyes, by the countries of Northern Europe).

An account of the novel along these lines is convincing enough, and true to the text—a neat and simple pattern, appropriate for such a tiny satiric gem of a novel. And yet it leaves one dissatisfied. This is not because (as has often been objected) Waugh's lines of attack were well-worn: the effectiveness of satire does not depend on the originality of the satirist's viewpoint. Yet, the more one reads the novel, the more complex it seems, or—to be more precise—the more one senses lurking layers of meaning below the mordant hilarity of the surface. This feeling, that there is something enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos—something complex which is never allowed entirely to become explicit, is reinforced by the Conradian opening to the novel.

If The Loved One were simply the hard, bright satire on American illusion and American standardisation which it is easily taken for, it is difficult to account for the deliberate mystification of this opening. We are—apparently—in some Far Eastern Outpost of Empire, with mystery and menace lurking in the jungle around the British Presence. What one would underline about this opening is not the suggestion of savagery lurking behind sophistication (which has been a constant theme of Waugh from the beginning of his career), but precisely the mystery, the disorientation the gambit produces. The reader takes some time to get his bearings, and in fact he is never allowed to be too sure that he has got them. He may feel he has resolved the mystery when the scene is revealed as Hollywood. The British are parody Empire-builders, parodying the public-school code of games, keeping up appearances, and drumming out the rotter who does not play by the rules. The Americans are the natives, whose bizarre customs are observed rather as Marlow observes the signs of savage life along the banks of the Congo—strange, terrifying, fascinating, and above all other.

Yet as soon as this pattern is established in our minds, the kaleidoscope is given another shake, and we are back in uncertainty: Sir Francis is dismissed—more, he is de-personed. The studio not only does not employ him, it does not know him, and seems not ever to have known him. He has no identity; he has no history. A new pattern then emerges: the Americans are all-powerful rulers, God-like as Kurtz; the British are the shabby hangers on at their despotic court, barnacles posing as pillars. The new pattern is a suitable mirror of the British in the twilight of their day as Empire-builders.

Building on this beginning, Waugh makes sure that as soon as the reader thinks he has a firm foothold on the satiric viewpoint of the author, he finds himself on a slippery slope. We are in 'that zone of insecurity in the mind where none but the artist dare trespass', and when he has mentioned that zone, Waugh goes on: 'the tribes were mustering. Dennis, the frontiersman, could read the signs'. Dennis, then, is our guide; his quest, and Waugh's, and ours, is into the heart of the American emptiness. But the mystification and ambiguity of the opening warns us to beware of clear-cut simplifications, simplifications such as the American Innocence and European Experience platitude which Dennis himself mentions: the American experience is judged, and found wanting, that is certain, but the point of view from which this judgment is made is far less obvious. Only the total experience of the novel can reveal the deeper shades of meaning behind the simplistic pattern of the surface, and in talking of them we enter 'zones of insecurity' with a vengeance, for Waugh has made nothing explicit.

In his well-known and much quoted article in Life which was a prelude to The Loved One, Waugh described the creator of forest Lawn as 'the first man to offer eternal salvation at an inclusive charge as part of his undertaking service' [Life, September 29, 1947]. In The Loved One itself, the Happier Hunting Ground certainly seems to conform to this description: it offers a heaven for pets to wag their tails (or go through other appropriate motions) in. And Whispering Glades is described frequently in terms of a Church, with Mr Joyboy as its High Priest: "'Mr Joyboy's kinda holy'". But the Whispering Glades of the novel comes no closer than this to a guarantee of eternal salvation. Indeed, one could well claim that some of the more self-confidently exclusive varieties of Protestantism come nearer than Wilbur Kenworthy to offering such a guarantee. Actually, all that seems an offer here (to Caucasians only) is a kind of life-less life, a trouble-free, wait, an unstimulating dream. All THE DREAMER foresees for the Loved One as they await, inurned, immured or insarcophagused, their reunion with their Waiting Ones, is a 'Happy Resting Place', no further description vouchsafed. This could be a result of a desire to avoid sectarian controversy, but it seems more like a failure of the imagination. After a flavourless life, all that can be imagined is a flavourless eternity. THE DREAMER, after all, is a product of the society whose principal characteristics Waugh has seized on as standardisation and witless dreams: as a consequence he is hard put to promise as a Way of Death anything but its equivalent—sterilised, prettified, and monotonous. In fact it is not merely paradoxical to say that the principal characteristic of Wilbur Kenworthy's conception of the after-life as its lifelessness. It is as if, for the inhabitants of this hygienic Eden, the imagination has been so anethetised that it can prefigure as a reward for enduring this life only the gift of lack of life (in peaceful and artistic surroundings). Kenworthy offers not salvation, but drugged rest—the eternal Kaiser's peach.

The points Waugh is making through the burial rituals of Southern California are, then, both social and religious: pressing on from the satire on the monotony of classless, stressless, uniform America, he traces the Americans' obsession with smooth surfaces to its ultimate, death, and finds there the same falsification, the same trivialisation. But by glossing over pain, they have lost the sharp taste of delight; and by denying the existence of evil, and misery, and loss, they have rendered meaningless not only the age-old sanction of hell in the hereafter, but the age-old inducement of Heaven. Eternity has been so emptied of significance that one can no longer hope for or even imagine it. And yet, beneath the glossy surface, through the anæthetised response, a new pain asserts itself—the pain of emptiness, of sameness, of routine. It is this pain that Mrs Joyboy protests against, that Aimée dumbly senses. It is this pain that is the Grail of Dennis's quest.

The characters in the novel and their progress (or lack of it) to self-knowledge and an awareness of the nullity around them are chosen to illustrate a spectrum from complacency to desperation. They certainly do not divide themselves up by nationality. Sir Ambrose Abercrombie is self-sufficiently at home in it, and so—until he is savagely brought up against the ruthless underbelly of the Dream world—is Sir Francis Hinley. On the other hand, not all Americans can accept it so complacently, for they sense (without always putting it into words, which would imply disloyalty, might even be unethical) the cracks in the pretty painted face. The girl at Whispering Glades whom Dennis sees as 'the standard product' and forgets the moment she leaves the room may think she finds life tolerable, for she is of an age to do so. But when Mr Joyboy goes home, it is to his Mom. Without finding this character in the least endearing, one warms to her, because she is alive, and she protests: Life is not good, life is not sweet, she seems to say; I am not good, I am not sweet—nor will I be until I lie under the mortician's fingers. I am a nasty, cantankerous old woman, and I'll make sure you know it, if only to tear down some of the rosy veils from your dream world.

But the main character who comes gradually to see through to the reality behind the surface of American life is, of course, Aimée Thanatogenos, and it is in fact Mrs Joyboy who is one of the elements in the novel that persuade her that life cannot be standardised to anybody's satisfaction. Other things that are of weight are Dennis's 'unethical' behaviour, the failure of her Guru Brahmin (a figure drawn from Nathanael West, but sadly prophetic of the 'sixties), and the forceful murmurs of her own ancestral gods. It is these last that most engage Waugh.

The dining car attendant who replied to Waugh's 'I am a foreigner' with 'In this country we are all foreigners' deserves a place in any account of The Loved One's genesis quite as prominent as that of the lady from another nation of immigrants, Australia, who first directed his steps to that place of 'sheer exquisite beauty', Forest Lawn. For the straw that Waugh clutches at in this novel is the links all Americans must have with older, more diverse, and (apparently above all) decadent cultures. Just as conservative people who talk of 'levelling down' nurture in their hearts the confident hope that new inequalities will immediately arise to nullify the levelling, so Waugh believes that the standardised emptiness of American life ignores the rich diversity of American origins, and cherishes the hope that, in some cases at least, the old gods will fight back, and win. Seen from this point of view, Aimée's death is a triumph—of her 'decadence', her 'absurdity', and the 'shady businesses (fencing and pimping)' of her ancestors, qualities and attributes which in turn link her to Greece's Gods and Greece's ancient greatness. Her end is no more a 'tragedy' (as the subtitle of the novel has it) than the ending of Vile Bodies is a 'Happy Ending'. It is a glorious reassertion of ancient values, a communion with greatness, a rejection of mediocrity.

It is, above all, a victory of the spirit over the heart. We are told of Aimée that her heart 'was a small inexpensive organ of local manufacture', but that her spirit 'had to be sought afar … in the mountain air of the dawn, in the eagle-haunted passes of Hellas'. This denigration of the heart is not surprising, in view of the would-be classicism of Waugh's earlier fiction, and in view of the immediate inspiration for the novel: he was in the Hollywood of the 'forties, when romantic and Victorian stereotypes had been debased to absurdity. It was a world which devalued the very word heart by its usages: 'heart-warming', 'heart throb', 'heart-broken'. It is also worth noting that Waugh's objection to the proposed film treatment of Brideshead Revisited, the purpose of his visit, was that it was treated as a simple love-story, with the spiritual and theological implications ignored (surely he can not have been surprised?). In this book, then, he shows a distinct preference for the man 'of sensibility rather than of sentiment'—and this description is probably explanation enough of Barlow's failure to prosper in Hollywood.

Dennis Barlow, in fact, is the least loved of Waugh's (mostly unlovable) central figures. Carens says that 'his cynicism and his incapacity for feeling mark him as another hollow man' and Sykes calls him 'loathsome'. This dislike of Dennis no doubt springs mainly from the last pages of the novel, from his cool reception of the news of Aimée's suicide ("'Of course I never thought her wholly sane, did you?'"), and his self-interested organisation of her final combustion. But of course the point about Dennis is precisely his refusal to participate in Joyboy's gutless wailings ("'She was my honeybaby'"), which are the emotional small change of an impoverished imagination. We are told specifically, as Carens should have noted, that Dennis 'went out alone into the pets' cemetery with his own thoughts, which were not a thing to be shared with Mr Joyboy'. Dennis is not incapable of emotion, but he can control it with classical finesse, and use it. He poaches the romantic poets for his wooing, and he even has recourse to the decadents of the nineties for his own pleasure—but when he does he uses them as a 'branded drug', guaranteed to 'yield the sensation he craved'. He is in touch with the world of emotions, but in the most practical possible way. Life, and the war, have left him without illusions or ideals: he is cool, aloof, Augustine in spirit.

He has, in fact, to a frightening degree, the detachment of the artist. 'Here at the quiet limit of the world', one of the lines he repeats like a monk's text, hints at the contracting out, the withdrawal he finds necessary to his art. Ironically, this withdrawal links him to America: just as he forgets the mortuary attendant as soon as she has left the room so 'standard' is she, so Aimée complains that "'When I turn away I can't even remember what you look like'". He is so detached as hardly to be a complete person. Whispering Glades momentarily upsets that necessary aloofness, for it presents itself as the ultimate embodiment of his American experience. It excites him intolerably, because he knows '[t]here was something in Whispering Glades that was necessary to him, that only he could find'. Later we are told:

He had abandoned the poem he was writing, long ago it seemed, in the days of Frank Hinsley. That was not what the Muse wanted. There was a very long, complicated, and important message she was trying to convey to him. It was about Whispering Glades, but it was not, except quite indirectly, about Aimée. Sooner or later the Muse would have to be placated. She came first.

But if Aimée is not the Grail of Dennis's quest, it is she who provides the final ray of light that illuminates his goal. With her death Dennis's discovery is made, the excitement is over, he can settle down to the moulding of his spiritual discoveries into satisfying aethetic shape. He is enriched in spirit by his experiences, and enriched, too, by the loss of his heart:

On the last evening in Los Angeles Dennis knew he was a favourite of Fortune. Others, better men than he, had foundered here and perished. The strand was littered with their bones. He was leaving it not only unravished but enriched. He was adding his bit to the wreckage, something that had long irked him, his young heart, and was carrying back instead the artist's load, a great, shapeless chunk of experience; bearing it home to his ancient and comfortless shore; to work on it hard and long, for God knew how long. For that moment of vision a lifetime is often too short.

Aimée's death, then, has provided the illumination which is the end of Dennis Barlow's quest: she has shown the saving madness, the redeeming horror, behind the bland surface of American life. His literary transformation of that illumination must be what Waugh's book is too: a hymn to pain; a celebration of unpredictability; a justification of disaster. His message is not a comfortable one, and to bring it to literary fruition he needs the rigour of the Saint and the Artist—never companionable figures. Dennis has to be tough to accept the message, tougher still to wrest it into artistic shape. But the Whispering Glades have whispered him a message—about the desirability of pain, the necessity of diversity, and chaos, and madness, and despair. And, against all odds, he has survived, and will pass the message on.