Vile Bodies (Penguin Modern Classics)

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The difference is that somewhere along the road, we stopped satirizing these people and took to glorifying them instead. Case in point: the person who wrote the 2000s version of this story - pretty young things with too much money, too few brains and too strong a sex drive - had it serialized in print and brought to life on TV, now known and idolized by millions as Gossip Girl.

It was in January 1929, that the eighteen-year-old became Diana Guinness when she married Bryan, glass-jawed heir to the brewing fortune.Just to repeat the situation, this time in Diana's words: 'He stayed with us at the rue de Poitiers and so did Nancy. Bryan was writing a book; Evelyn and Nancy were writing too. While I sat in bed in the mornings reading, everyone wrote.' Diana and Evelyn were obviously sharing a joke then, in the middle of the Evelyns' attempted reconciliation, which lasted until a few days after the Bruno Hoax opening. Heavily influenced by the cinema and by the disjointed style of T. S. Eliot, Vile Bodies is Waugh's most ostentatiously "modern" novel. [4] Fragments of dialogue and rapid scene changes are held together by the dry, almost perversely unflappable narrator. [5]

Diana: "Praying. Don't be absurd. Evelyn simply doesn't pray. And even if he did no-one would mention it." I will always be a Decline and Fall man, though I'm impressed by the attempt made in Vile Bodies to transform experience (failure in marriage) into art ( 'Good-bye... I'm sorry, Adam. ') Even the names are so obvious that instead of completing the characters' portraits, become the characters: a heavily smoking priest is called Bishop Philpotts, a silly but valiant lesbian is called Agatha Runcible, calling a journalist – even a homosexual one – Malpractice isn’t enough if his first name is not Miles and what better name for a prime minister other than Outrageous?Don't worry, its an easy premise to grasp - here, let me explain... we bright young things are an erudite group of social laaah-de-dahs who favour a bohemian life style. We like the finer things in life and indulge our love of drinking, dancing and outlandish behaviour much to the joy of the press who like to follow us around documenting our frivolous and moderately hedonistic acts. We're also frightfully upper class and a tiny bit prone to navel gazing but some of us are quite arty. We can also be a little bit flaky and a wee bit emotionally sterile. Sometimes we talk a bit like the cast of Dawson's Creek would if they were transposed to 1920's London. If you'd like to put us in a modern context, we're like the cast of The Hills but we've got culture, money and talent on our side. Does that answer your question?" I just finished reading the gorgeous 1930 novel, Vile Bodies by the old genius of a boy, Evelyn Waugh. It's been suggested in the Waugh literature that the character Agatha Runcible, is in part a portrait of the Bright Young Thing, Elizabeth Ponsonby. There is probably something in this, but in chapter ten, Evelyn is surely thinking of She-Evelyn, the woman who has just deserted him, notwithstanding that she is already well and truly embedded in the book as Nina. At one stage in their relationship, Evelyn stubbed a cigarette out on Olivia's arm, to show her just how much her rejection meant to him. Maybe that's why the stabbed dressmaker's dummy came to mind while scribbling away in the Royal George. Chapter thirteen presents the third and final visit to Colonel Blount. The newly wed couple, Nina and Ginger, are to spend Christmas with her father. Only Ginger has been called up to his regiment, and so it's fair-haired Adam that's presented to Colonel Blount as 'Ginger'. Together they enjoy a surreal Christmas that ends with the local vicar informing the household that War has been declared. I wonder if Adam's Christmas card to Nina's father was anything like the Christmas card that Evelyn sent out a month or two after writing this scene.

Evelyn Waugh, considered by many to be the greatest satirical novelist of his day, died on 10 April 1966 at the age of 62.Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies, Penguin Books 1996 edition (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics Series), 272 pgs. Adam goes off to see Colonel Blount again. A cheap historical film is being shot at the house. Blount deliberately misunderstands Adam again, and thereby avoids giving him any money. Adam is fired from his job on the paper. This terrific (although long and somewhat stuffy) essay argues for Vile Bodies as a parody of a traditional romance novel. The traditional plot involves a young man in love but deemed unworthy of the woman, often for economic or social reasons; he acquires a fortune or suddenly discovers he's actually the son of a baron or something and the plot ends in marriage. (You know, like a Shakespeare comedy or Tom Jones.) Here, Adam is constantly in pursuit of that fortune - represented by the drunk Major - but like the Jarndyce settlement in Bleak House, when it finally arrives it's completely devalued, and the book ends in one final display of pointless extravagance as the world ends.

However, I prefer to take from Evelyn's Christmas card of 1929 the sentiments that nearly everyone can write (and be a successful artist). In summary: there is joy and profit in creative art. Gossip columns provide an income source for writers, including for Adam. They also offer the general public a glimpse into upper class debauchery and they keep socialites relevant and interesting. The problem, however, is that the only way to keep readers hooked is to constantly ratchet up the level of scandal and outrage, while at the same time not alienating oneself from the people featured in these articles. Adam and others eventually take to simply manufacturing tabloid stories and even making up people. Today we read a lot about ‘fake news,’ but that’s exactly what we see in Vile Bodies as well. The tabloid journal quoted frequently in the novel is aptly entitled The Daily Excess and the gossip column’s writer is known by the pseudonym Mr. Chatterbox. It’s a revolving door position at the paper — the man behind the pseudonym changes several times in the novel as writers fail, in succession, to provide the right amount of moral outrage to readers, while keeping access to the people and parties that provide all the salacious content. Nancy: "Praying. Don't be absurd. Evelyn simply doesn't pray. And even if he did no-one would mention it." Evelyn Waugh's father Arthur was a noted editor and publisher. His only sibling Alec also became a writer of note. In fact, his book “The Loom of Youth” (1917) a novel about his old boarding school Sherborne caused Evelyn to be expelled from there and placed at Lancing College. He said of his time there, “…the whole of English education when I was brought up was to produce prose writers; it was all we were taught, really.” He went on to Hertford College, Oxford, where he read History. When asked if he took up any sports there he quipped, “I drank for Hertford.” Well, not quite. I walk away from the manuscript to another part of the Brotherton LIbrary where they have computers. I've been given a temporary code so that I can get onto the net if I want to. And so I google The Royal George, Appledore. This is what it looks like today:Waugh was at a turning point in his personal life when he wrote this book. His wife — also called Evelyn but referred to by their friends as “She-Evelyn” so as to avoid confusion — had decided to divorce him as he was writing Vile Bodies. Knowing that, it’s hard not to see something of Waugh’s misery and the conduct of his ex-wife in the life and behaviour of Adam and Nina. And there’s another thing too: in Vile Bodies, Nina suggests that her sexual relationship with Adam was dull. In real life, She-Evelyn once commented about Waugh: “All this fuss about sleeping together . . . I’d sooner go to my dentist any day.”