Physics Behind the Rhododendrons
Spinors, found only in quantum mechanics and the fiction of Evelyn Waugh. Review of Vile Bodies, the ultimate modernist novel, or anti-modernist, or, er... supramodernist? Read to find out!
Review of Volume 2 of The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh: Vile Bodies published by Oxford University Press. Originally published in The Evelyn Waugh Society, issue 53.1. In the pantheon of physics novels, there is only Anna Karenina (special relativity), Blood Meridian (quantum mechanics), and Vile Bodies (quantum mechanics).
‘Are your books meant to be satirical?’ No. Satire is a matter of period. It flourishes in a stable society and presupposes homogenous moral standards—the early Roman Empire [Martial] and 18th Century Europe [Swift]. It is aimed at inconsistency and hypocrisy. It exposes polite cruelty and folly by exaggerating them. It seeks to produce shame. All this has no place in the Century of the Common Man where vice no longer pays lip service to virtue. The artist’s only service to the disintegrated society of today is to create little independent systems of order of his own. I foresee in the dark age opening that the scribes may play the same part of the monks after the first barbarian victories. They were not satirists. Evelyn Waugh, “Fan-Fare,” Life. April 8th, 1946 [Martial and Swift mine; if not yours]
I was taking a few weeks’ indulgence in answering the question we Wavians love to be posed (unless your name isn’t Nick), “Nick, which Waugh should I start with?” when by chance the very man who introduced me to Evelyn Waugh asked if I would review the towering Oxford University Press edition of Vile Bodies—the very Waugh with which I started. Serendipity of this sort has a tendency, in Waugh’s novels if not in his life, to morph into the cruelest of mistresses before too long. After all, it was halfway through writing Vile Bodies that Evelyn Waugh divorced Evelyn Waugh. (Waugh’s first wife, Evelyn née Gardner, left Waugh for John Heygate—and she was not the first Evelyn in the relationship to have affections for another man.) Not only that, but the deep psychical gout of the 1929 divorce nearly led Evelyn to take his own life—or, to put it another way, Evelyn Waugh nearly divorced Evelyn Waugh—which might have left Vile Bodies gapingly unfinished at Chapter Six with columnist Simon Balcairn’s own suicide, one of the dark peaks of the novel’s famous cruelty.1
I wavered at the assignment and was dealt, naturally enough, an increasingly Wavian hand: the review was initially assigned elsewhere and would I take over the job pronto, and to boot (or Boot), I would not be given a copy of the text I was reviewing by my editor. Well. With the cards of coincidence stacked against me, yet with my last quantum review of Cormac McCarthy making for, I hope, awe-inspiring reading, I set out boldly to see if Vile Bodies still glints in the dark age of our 21st Century, and if the editors of The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh had dipped any of it in amber. After all, if these were the Wavian fates at play (another way of saying original sin), then I didn’t really have a choice now, did I? And I may as well prepare for the worst.
Oxford’s Coat of Arms and anti-Lit. Theory Undergarments
Published with Waugh’s grandson Alexander Waugh at the editorial helm and the emblazon of revolutionizing Wavianism at the mast, The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh is a critical study of the entire published and unpublished Wavian corpus, from his graphic art to all the parerga and paralipomena a Wavian (and those at home with ancient Greek—yes, there are lemmas, too) could dream of. With only 15% of Waugh’s letters previously published, Alexander Waugh himself oversaw the intercalating of 10,000 new missives into Waugh’s complete, unabridged diary, comprising over twelve volumes of the forty-three-volume collection. These personal writings are also freely quoted throughout the collection’s various critical essays, Volume Two of which is constituted by Vile Bodies and undoubtedly iridesced by the new biographicals.
Forty years in the making, the task and the finished edition are not only Herculaen in scope but colossally outstrip the scale and scholarly comprehensiveness afforded any other British prosaist in Waugh’s day or before—certainly hence. The Thetises of this edition, Alexander Waugh, Martin Stannard and the late David Bradshaw, dip each volume by the same heel into the Styx (and might even get the Achilles wet too in the case of Vile Bodies): declaration of Editorial Principles, extensive Chronology, multi-sectioned Introductions, and twin Appendices of Contextual Notes and Manuscript Development and Textual Variants—no volume goes denuded of this coat of arms which, in some cases, runs to nearly half or more of the volumes’ anointed page counts.
While never quite reaching Vladimir Nabokov Eugene Onegin territory for any single volume, the preliminaries are enjoyably exhaustive with the Chronology itself running to twelve pages. One is likely to consider entries of the genus: “June 10th, 1912, [Waugh, age 8] begins new diary about his appendicitis;” silly, perhaps, except that this diary is to be included in the as yet unreleased Volume Forty-Two. We then find Waugh’s inaugural abandoned novel coming at age sixteen, right on schedule for a future novelist. And, yes, for those who have always wondered on what exact date Waugh visited “Pixton Park, Dulverton, Somerset, home of the Herbert family, Earls of Carnarvon, for the first time,” rejoice, for the debate is at last put to bed: it occurred December 8th, 1934 (your humble reviewer’s birthday).
This is all well and good, but before I got to the masterpiece beneath the blazonry, or its last preliminary undergarment knit by Martin Stannard, I wanted to know: Are the editors of sound minds? Turns out there’s a pretty simple test, passed early: one of the critical study’s greatest gifts to the reader, if not to the terse complexity of Vile Bodies, is its ideological aversion to ideology. Just about the closest we come to the much-abused term “theory” or its insidious corymb in the entire edition is the constituted promise in the Editorial Principles to avoid anything that could “date” the text, “e.g. updated figures for sums of money, or editorial critical interpretation of thematic issues” [emphasis added]. A refreshing diptych indeed! A clearheadedness of how inane and instantaneously superfluous “lit. theory” (a depraved term which should never go without the escort of quotation marks) renders a discussion of literature might have prevented the Freudian blemishes of Richard Jacobs’ otherwise deserving 1996 father-obsessed introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Vile Bodies — which the obviously sane Martin Stannard’s introduction here affirmatively supplants as the novel’s definitive essay.2
Vile Bodies is complex enough, with several leitmotifs linked in invisible, ultraviolet spectrums beneath the novel’s apparent surface entropy. It hardly needs “lit. theory” with its more answers than questions principle to obscure our shot at clarity, and the editors should be applauded for their disconsideration of contemporary clichés. (Though, let us pause to catch our breath. Perhaps an equivalence between pecuniary inflation and “lit. theory” is overstating it a bit—I suppose a comprehensive understanding of Vile Bodies would not have been hurt by figures updated in the present, i.e. Adam Symes’ search for his missing thousand pounds. How much would that sum be today? And in US dollars? A missed opportunity, to be sure….)
With Alexander Waugh dedicating the edition in part to the “ever-living memory of the author and his work” (a goal achieved), the pure mass of the Complete Evelyn Waugh is a much deserved historical jockeying for posterity, putting Waugh and Wavianism in a camp beyond that of Greeneanism, Wodehousianism, Huxleyanism, Powellianism et al., and making, dare I say it, Waugh’s nearest scholastic confrère Joyce—themselves hillocks on Mount Shakespeare. Its other dedicatee? “[T]he future of English prose,” for which purpose Stannard’s scholarly adornments of Vile Bodies may prove the most consequential in the whole forty-three volume set, laying the novel bare as a singular quantum phenomenon in all of literature, not just modernism.
Wavian Arachaeology
It is a rare thing to witness a writer shift artistic epochs in real time—it usually takes place over the course of several novels, not between two halves of a book. But Vile Bodies is a piece of literary impact rock on the scale of the Yucatan extinction event, reorienting the dominant fauna and genera of Waugh’s works, including the second half of the novel itself. One watches Waugh begin the first half a modernist if not a bright young adherent of its artistic practices and their rude powers to offend and subvert the regnant—that is, he begins in a self-described mood of “gaiety.” This tenor is picked up on easily enough with characters like Fanny Throbbing and her seasick, innuendo-laden duologue with Kitty Blackwater (“Oh, Fanny.” “Oh… Oh… Oh.”), depictions of lesbianism (which critics of Waugh’s non-erotic sex scenes might want to revisit; Chastity is pinched in Chapter Six, be quick about it), hidden plays on the then-new term “queer” aimed at delighting gay friends, and, cut from the famously once-missing, now recovered autographed manuscript (containing substantial, mysteriously ignored corrections, all of which are tabulated in Appendix B), a journalist telling a joke in the novel’s opening embarkation “in which an old lady calls the police about an elephant apparently stuffing carrots up its behind.”
In a famous admission already apparent to readers of his debut Decline and Fall (1928), Waugh’s personal cosmogony at the outset of Vile Bodies was as close to atheistic “as it was possible to be.” And it would appear from Stannard’s excellent work that he was still writing in the “pragmatic” momentum of his Decline and Fall-era epistle to his agent, too: “It would be nice if we could persuade them [the Daily Express] that I personify the English youth movement [Bright Young People].” Waugh’s “satirical shot,” as Stannard puts it, was of a “scattered range.” Yet, in Vile Bodies’ second half—after the meteorite of his wife’s defection strikes Chapter Six, melting the manuscript content in such a way that guesswork at post-defection edits can only ever be as certain as “probable”—Waugh turns organically against modernism’s “illusion of permanence” and its Bright Young People, who came to embody the tenuous morals of his disloyal wife. This would lead to, if not hasten, his 1930 Catholic conversion, and sharpen the satirical sights not just of Vile Bodies’ latter half but the rest of Waugh’s career. After all, as Waugh self-consciously admitted thirty-six years later, “The reader may, perhaps, notice the transition from gaiety to bitterness.” Thus, the two Wavian epochs—Bright Young Holocene and Churchward, Ho! Anthropocene—are fused into one work.
Evidence from the Stannard Standard
Besides “lit. theory,” nothing irks more than undue attention paid to artist over art. But the compositional history of Vile Bodies is of undeniable importance, nowhere more thoroughly explored than here in Stannard’s consequential introduction. We can thank him for both settling some of its famous bibliographical controversies and constellating his findings with remarkable gems. The root beds of the sixty-eight-page introduction, replete with a perfectly blent “History of the Text” (including the famous, eternal mis-transcriptions of typist Lily Anne) and “Text in History” (analysis of the novel’s critical reception, socio-political contexts, and artistic influences and influencees) abound with footnotes both pleasurably picayune and too-Waugh-to-be-true.
As an example of the former, Waugh’s claim to have written three-thousand words a day of Vile Bodies is checked—it’s more likely to be twenty-five hundred. As for the latter sort, let’s just say they show the umbra of Gilbert Pinfold dogging Waugh well before the high noon of his career. Finally pulled together from his nervous breakdown and a persecution mania in which he dined at restaurants convinced of guests gossiping about his divorce, he holed up at the riparian Royal George Inn to finish Vile Bodies. Evelyn Gardner and Heygate, fleeing their half of the divorce scandal in London and unaware of Waugh’s whereabouts, happened to canoe down to the George one evening. “Shocked by the news that EW was staying there, they escaped by a window or side entrance to their boat beneath the sea wall one night while EW was inside the pub.” Not boat, canoe. Waugh would never know just how Pinfoldian this episode in his life truly was. “Anything more likely to have driven him mad,” Stannard observes, “is difficult to imagine.”
And yet, there are still those who argue such Vile Bodies-era episodes in Waugh’s personal life are irrelevant to understanding the novel. Stannard fixes this delusion by establishing the most approximate state of the novel at the time of Waugh’s divorce, and conclusively correcting the ancient presumption that Vile Bodies was already mostly complete at the time of Evelyn’s defection from Evelyn. Far from it.
The story is this: Evelyn, an almost certainly repressed homosexual (let us ignore the uneasy shifts in certain seats), marries a woman named Evelyn. The two (known as Hevelyn and Shevelyn to friends) bear the appearance, at least in the famous A Bride and Bridegroom in Duplicate photograph, of disconcerted twins. Shevelyn falls in love with unremembered novelist John Heygate (the inspiration for Ginger Littlejohn who marries Adam’s fiancée Nina out from under him). Hevelyn suffers a six-week breakdown, attempts a fortnight of reconciliation with Shevelyn, and becomes frenetic: he talks of giving up writing for painting; threatens to emigrate to Canada (Canada); makes a suicide pact with Heygate’s ex-lover Eleanor Watts behind the rhododendrons at her family’s countryseat; visits Alistair Graham—one half of the personal cache for Brideshead Revisited’s homosexualism—en route to the motor races in Belfast (providing the condemning symbol of modernism in the novel’s second half, and riding the whole way there in a “fury that the car would not go faster”); and finally lands at the Royal George Inn in Appledore to revise Chapter Six and finish the novel off, at which point the cuckolding couple then being skewered by Waugh’s pen escape his notice by side window and canoe! Or, from the bibliographical-eye’s view:
It seems likely, however, that Chapters 1–5 were typed as he was writing, that having posted Chapter 5, he continued with Chapter 6 until his wife’s devastating letter arrived [announcing her defection], and that he then took his six-week break, after which, and before beginning Chapter 7, he went back over the whole of the untyped Chapter 6, adding darker touches to smooth the transition.
And transition he does. After writing his last gossip column, Waugh has Simon Balcairn puts his head in a gas oven. This fictional suicide as opposed to the real one Waugh was contemplating announces the novel is now playing by different rules. The leitmotif of “sickness ceases to be an amusing commentary on hangovers and becomes the existential horror of the tilting aeroplane from which the view of humanity is that of a writhing, indistinguishable mass in which the individual is rendered anonymous, swept up and destroyed in a secular world.” The artistic doublespeak between Adam and Nina manages to drop all (or most) of its irony in one of their last post-coital duologues to express an exasperation not present in the novel’s first half (with the “darker touch” of Nina now bought from Adam by new husband Ginger):
‘Nina, do you ever feel that things simply can’t go on much longer?’
‘What d’you mean by things—us or everything?’
‘Everything.’
…
Later he said: ‘I’d give anything in the world for something different.’
‘Different from me or different from everything?’
‘Different from everything… only I’ve got nothing… what’s the good of talking?’
‘Oh, Adam, my dearest…’
‘Yes?’
‘Nothing.’
The novel’s title, too, once a flippant, oblique allusion to Phillippians and The Book of Common Prayer through the first half, twists into a grim, shame-inducing statement on “that succession and repetition of massed humanity,” symbolized by Agatha Runcible’s famous hospital-bed dream after her car crash at the motor races (recall Waugh’s fury that his own car could not “go faster” en route to Belfast’s races):
‘D’you know, all that time when I was dotty I had the most awful dreams. I thought we were all driving round and round in a motor race and none of us could stop, and there was an enormous audience composed entirely of gossip writers and gate-crashers and Archie Schwert and people like that, all shouting to us at once to go faster, and car after car kept crashing until I was left all alone driving and driving—and then I used to crash and wake up.
This is said before the previously “charmingly reckless” Miles Malpractice applies malpractice to the car-crash recovering Agatha, bringing into the hospital room the novel’s never long interrupted drunken party—the strain of which kills her. By the final chapter, “Happy Ending,” the plot (if there is much of one) comes to no conclusion—the leitmotifs do. Shame and cruelty reach the end of their exponential lifespan. Waugh charted these twin muses from dark peak to dark peak while his personal life arc’d in tandem, until it led him to the novel’s concluding post-defection Everest: the prediction of World War II—which is only declared because the easily confusable Prime Minister misunderstands that Parliament is already planning war and does not want to be kept out of the loop. But these examples have all been spelled out before. Their new iridescence comes from Stannard’s definitive bibliographical proofs linking their developments to the rupture in Waugh’s personal life, allowing us to see with a new precision just what the nature of Vile Bodies’ rare and enduring glint is.
I’ll be at my point soon. We plainly get in the second half the emergence of purposeful symbols organically unknowable to Waugh before his Yucatan, artistic coincidences and anti-serendipities like Miles Malpractice’s malpractice; Adam’s purchasing of the defecting Nina from Ginger for the exact amount of the Shepherd’s Hotel bill he’s been ducking the whole novel (he then buys her back for the Christmas season in a brutal public insult to Shevelyn). Put into motion at the seasick embarkation of the novel’s opening with Waugh’s marriage yet intact, the momentum of original sin and the Book of Job carry the leitmotifs into an ultraviolet spectrum with, one suspects, organic resolutions invisible even to Waugh—resolutions that would not have been possible without the parallel “sharp disturbance” in Waugh’s personal life that inspired them.
It is here that the novel’s genius—and rarity—lies: in its perfect ironies and expertly cruel knots that could not, one feels, have resolved organically in any other way than the way they did: Adam in the desolation of the natural world (“Damn difficult country to find one’s way about in. No landmarks…” says the Drunken Major, flamethrower in hand on “the biggest battlefield in the history of the world”), sitting in a mud-sunken limousine beside the Major as he makes love to Chastity—the money the Major owes him, once an elusive fortune, now worthless in the wartime economy.
This, in parallel to Evelyn’s divorcing Evelyn, are both Wavian faits accomplis. How could it have been any different for Waugh or Vile Bodies—the title alone taking on a meaning it did not possess when it was chosen? As only the greatest works of art do, Vile Bodies forces one into a legitimate teetering: is art created, or discovered? Or, if Plato puts you ill at ease, consider the wickedest resolution of all: for Vile Bodies as a work of art, Waugh’s personal tragedy was pure serendipity. It would not be the masterpiece it is without the events that put Waugh, for a spell, behind the rhododendrons.
Waugh’s Spinor
One test of a writer’s posthumous worth is how the tertiary folds around them—that is, how language takes care of them when they are gone. Besides the dual adjective/patronymic Wavian (preeminent in all of literature—making, again, Joyce and Joycean Waugh’s closest confrère), simple Wavian explication has the tendency to reach the state of maxim: “No two batches of paper may be folded identically,” declares Stannard. It is by this method that he differentiates Vile Bodies’ compositional waves from the early, gentler foolscap’d and cuckolded days to the luxurious monogrammed sheets of the novel’s apocalyptic squall, the original finis of which reads, “The end thank God. EW.” Ew indeed—Waugh would hardly ever be able to reread his masterpiece again. But we can. And upon my own rereading, and in full respect to the tertiary through which I have been shifting, I might now drop a new descriptor into Wavianism.
Nabokov famously established Anna Karenina as a rare example of Special Relativity in literature, with coterminous sections happening within the same timeline but at speeds that conflict in a linear Newtonian perception. That’s one way of saying expect a lot out of the following image. Vile Bodies is the first and only example in literature of a spinor. A spinor is a genus of charged, subatomic particle that, when it rotates in a full circle, changes its charge to its opposite. If at the start it is positive, a full 360 degrees later it is negative. It is as if you stood before a looking glass (perhaps one of the kinds absent from Miss Runcible’s room at the car race), spun around in a circle and came to rest with a different face—or a rosary dangling ’round the neck. Yes, there were once two Evelyn Waughs—one an atheistic satirist, one a Catholic literary missionary—and they’re both fossilized in Vile Bodies.
Godel’s Girdle
But just as Balcairn left his last column a masterpiece of libel and creative license, I too feel carried away by a potentially dicey muse, and may as well offer up another descriptor while I’m at it. In documenting the reception of the novel by its few dissenting critics, long in the tooth, Stannard gives the following assessment: “Vile Bodies was dangerous in the scattered range of its satirical shot, and stylistically experimental. Few of this old guard understood how he had suddenly introduced a new facet of literary modernism” [emphasis added]. This new facet is Godelian in nature.
According to Kurt Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, a logically consistent system will produce true statements that cannot be proved by the logical system or axioms of the system itself. There is an innate incompleteness in systems that attempt absolute definitions and complete encapsulations, and an ineradicable propensity for systems to legitimately transcend their own strictures in ways that the logically-sound system itself can yet have no purchase on. Another way of saying this is that it is impossible to define or encapsulate anything completely—at some point every system feigning finality will produce its own inexplicable transcendence.
The spinorial nature of Vile Bodies allows the novel to not simply transcend modernism, but Godel into an anti-modernist modernist, or supramodernist, novel, one of the rarest states of literature in which it finds itself, to my knowledge, alone. Thus, the Godelian Vile Bodies contains the spirit and viciousness of the modernist, atheistic Decline and Fall and the anti-modernist yearning for a Catholic Brideshead. I am not unaware that this may be the succinct missing piece for those Wavians always on the re/post-modernizing make with Brideshead Revisited. Godel’s Theorem is a remarkably simple way of explaining how modernism produced a Catholic conversion in no way consistent with modernism, and might save us all any more stupendous exertions in this pursuit. I pass on the good news. But, alas, didn’t I once frown on introducing “theory” to Waugh?
Finis
An atheist through the first six chapters, Waugh ends on a sprint towards the sacristy, declaring to his brother before his divorce was finalized, the novel finished, or Father Martin D’Arcy was even a twinkle in his eye, “the trouble about the world today is that there’s not enough religion in it. There’s nothing to stop young people doing whatever they feel like doing at the moment.” Though his Catholic conversion would come but a year later, Vile Bodies finds him converting in real time (putting, for instance, the only direct critical elucidation of Bright Young Modernists in the mouth of the novel’s Jesuit, Father Rothschild, before Waugh himself had ever met one).3
Not, however, that a Wavian decline and fall can be dated by his conversion—Waugh hadn’t even written Black Mischief yet (whose pages every Wavian should be urged to hide from the humorless, hemilinguist bloc of post-post-modern students currently overpopulating college campuses, until such a time when the coast is again clear). Nor does original sin all of a sudden appear on the scene—it simply begins defracting through a changed, no longer strictly secular prism, a prism that dulls within its spectrum simple “shame,” as Waugh later reflected on the purposes of satire, in order to introduce the new colors of his “little independent systems of order.” Though Vile Bodies offers no system of order, it is the first time in Waugh’s corpus we find the bedrock of his proceeding Anthropocene bent on systems of order or the search thereto. This prism was glass-blown in and by Vile Bodies, and its 360-degree spinorial procession may be scientifically categorized by the artistic transition cited in my epigraph, mapping shame’s evolution to antidote:
Satire is a matter of period. It flourishes in a stable society and presupposes homogenous moral standards… It is aimed at inconsistency and hypocrisy. It exposes polite cruelty and folly by exaggerating them. It seeks to produce shame. All this has no place in the Century of the Common Man where vice no longer pays lip service to virtue. The artist’s only service to the disintegrated society of today is to create little independent systems of order of his own.
Searching early on for this passage, the binding of my A Little Order broke open at its exact page, the credo violet-lit by my ancient underlines. Serendipity? Prepared, as I had been, for the worst, I even paused at Chapter Six to see if my own relationship would fall apart. (It did not, though I’m not sure this helped.)
I am still paused, too—quite languorously I might add—on that question posed to me by a friend, some months ago at this stage: “Nick, which Waugh should I start with?” For initiation into Waugh is a delicate matter. He was a Catholic idolizable by atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry. He was a brief Mussolini supporter crucial to the satirical development of progressives like Gore Vidal4 and Joseph Heller (Adam’s purchase of Nina from Ginger is pure Catch-22, with Ginger asking Adam to stop butting into his affair with her: “I mean, you were more or less engaged to her yourself, weren’t you, at one time? Well, what would you have thought if I’d come butting in? You must look at it like that, from my point of you, too, mustn’t you, I mean?” Adam: “Well, I think that’s rather what did happen”).5
Is the novice ready for Black Mischief off the jump? (I’ll stand anyone a drink who is.) Are the irony and original sin of Decline and Fall graspable in a world that believes in such things as “post-irony?” Is the spinorial Vile Bodies too advanced for the beginner? Can Brideshead lift our prospect a “hair’s breadth” off the ground without the alpine trail of A Handful of Dust and Scoop leading them to its clime? Is this piece’s editor, my former professor who initiated me into Waugh long ago in a red barn-classroom in a Vermont hamlet—is he, in refusing to give me a copy of the text I was to review, still teaching me something about our dashing curmudgeon, his riddlesome trajectory? I now take my leave to answer these questions. Some of them are quite personal, thank you.
The doomed Job of Vile Bodies Adam Fenwick-Symes takes over Balcairn’s popular Chatterbox column after it’s killed him—Balcairn’s editress: “‘I suppose you don’t know of anyone who’d care to take on the job? They’d have to be a pretty good mutt, if they would.’” Adam: “‘I’d do it myself…’”
One of the pieces of evidence Jacobs rests his case of Adam’s “treasure hunt” being a “search for a father” on is that Evelyn née Gardner’s uncle—her father dead—was a treasure-hunter who discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb. If that doesn’t close the book.
Though Freudianism may make him prone to “detecting” such “phenomena,” Richard Jacobs makes note of another odd prescience in his 1996 Vile Bodies introduction: Waugh has Adam begin the novel returning from Paris, where Waugh would eventually flee so as not to linger after his divorce.
Who, despite making a universal précis in his literary criticism out of Vile Bodies’ opening insinuation of every novelist beginning a career with a memoir, later never had a kind word to say for him.
Though, according to Martin Stannard’s excellent compositional history of Vile Bodies here in Volume Two of The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh, the exact content of Chapter Six at the time of Waugh’s divorce and suicidal period is not definitive—Balcairn’s suicide may have been a later edit.