BOOK: Evelyn Waugh, "Vile Bodies"

The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. Volume 2: Vile Bodies. Ed. by Martin Stannard. Oxford University Press, 2017. 9780199683451. cv + 313 pp. [A scan of the 1960 printing is available on archive.org.]

Vile Bodies is probably the only book by Waugh that I knew anything definite about before I started reading the present OUP series of Waugh's collected works; I saw a movie based on it, Bright Young Things, some years ago, and liked it a lot. So I looked forward to reading the novel, and fortunately I wasn't disappointed. Not only did I enjoy the novel, but the present edition has a generous amount of explanatory notes and a long introduction by the editor with a wealth of interesting background information. How much more pleasant literature would be if every novel in the world were available in such a form!

It turns out that this was Waugh's second novel; the first, Decline and Fall, was published two years earlier. Waugh denies that Vile Bodies is a sequel to his previous book (p. cv), but the fact is that some of the characters from it appear again here in Vile Bodies, and I felt on more than one occasion that it would have been better if I had read Decline and Fall first. (Fortunately, the editor's notes at the end of the volume include relevant information from Decline and Fall where suitable.) But in my defense, and to my surprise, Decline and Fall hasn't been published in the OUP collected works of Waugh yet. I'm not saying that they should be publishing them in strict chronological order, but on the other hand I also don't see why they had to go for what appears to be a completely random order either.

I suppose it's inevitable that every society, except the most desperately poor or the most rigidly communistic, should have an upper class of idle rich people; and moreover that some of these idle rich people will be young; and if you have a sufficient number of them living in sufficiently close proximity, they will form a ‘set’ and live carefree lives of non-stop drinking and partying. (And there's nothing wrong with that; if there's one thing I despise more than a rich person who indulges in debauchery, it's a rich person who keeps on living a sober and boring life.) ‘Bright Young People’ (or ‘Bright Young Things’, but Waugh always uses ‘People’; see also p. lxxi on the difference between the two terms) is what this segment of society was called in the context of 1920s England. I was not surprised to find that the wikipedia has a list of them, but I was surprised at the length of that list; you can't help getting the impression that anyone who was more or less young in England at that time, and who eventually ended up being important enough to merit a wikipedia page, was at least distantly associated with this group.

[Incidentally, while I don't think that rich young people need any particular excuse or reason to devote their lives to aimless non-stop partying, it would appear that the ones in 1920s Britain did have a particular extra excuse. The younger generation at the time consisted of people who had spent their time in the shadow of the WW1 and its propaganda, but had been just a little too young to be actually called up before the war was over. As a result, they felt bereft of a sense of purpose or of a way to prove themselves; hence to them, everything was “bogus”, from the war and the high ideals in whose name it had supposedly been fought, to the post-war world that it had helped bring about; and they had nowhere to turn except into blind hedonism (p. lxii–lxiii).]

Waugh's first wife was one of the BYPs (incidentally, her name was also Evelyn, so that their friends took to referring to them jokingly as Hevelyn and Shevelyn :), p. xxix), and therefore Waugh himself was at least a peripheral part of this world when he started working on this novel (p. xlvii). The first half or so of the novel is a satirical but basically affectionate portrait of the BYPs and their world; it is not the view of an outsider mocking something he hates, but an insider smiling wryly but indulgently at something he is fond of. But when he had written about half of the novel, Waugh's wife abandoned him for another man, and his whole outlook changed and became more sober and more conservative (p. xxxix); it was also then that he got religion — having hitherto been “as near an atheist as it was possible to be” (p. lii), he now became a devout catholic and stuck to it for the rest of his life. (I was really surprised to read about this conversion of his; I can sort of imagine that one may be raised a catholic, or switch from protestantism to catholicism; but why on earth would an atheist convert to catholicism?! I can only shake my head in disappointment and disbelief.)

Thus in the second half of the novel, the tone becomes more sombre, and conveys the impression that the BYPs' lifestyle of carefree fun is a blind alley, that it can have no future; and indeed by the end of the novel the world of the BYPs is well and truly over, and most of the protagonists that we couldn't help but grow fond of earlier in the book are gone. Now, of course Waugh may have had a point, and their lifestyle may indeed have been doomed; and yet I liked the first half of the novel better, and wished that he could have found a way to end it on a more cheerful note. I suppose he must have felt gloomy after his wife left him, and some of that gloom rubbed off on me towards the end of the book. You can't blame a writer for doing that to you, and yet I wished he hadn't done it. [Incindentally, one reviewer quoted in the introduction went so far as to say the book “seems to be based on complete despair. [. . .] I find his discouragement infectious. Nor can I find anything particularly tragic in the fates of such futile people. Which only goes to show how completely one generation is a mystery to another.” (P. lxxiv.) I think he is right that they are futile and their fates not particularly tragic; but framing it in terms of generations is surely an exaggeration. The BYPs were only a tiny part of their generation, after all, and if they had an oversized presence in the popular awareness it is only because of their wealth, social connections, proximity to writers and artists and the like.]

Moreover, it seems to me that Waugh is being perhaps a little *too* pessimistic here. Sure, the BYP culture of 1920s England had no future — if nothing else, for the simple reason that those particular people obviously weren't going to stay young for very long; and moreover, even the idle rich were surely not going to be completely unaffected by such things as economic depression, war, rationing, and austerity, not to mention the overall long-term decline of the British aristocracy, the class to which it seems most BYPs belonged. And yet, of course, as we know now, and as Waugh must surely have surmised even in 1930 — surely it was obvious that new generations of idle rich would arise in due time, duly spend their decade or two partying and doing drugs, and then yield their place to their successors. Only the outer forms would change — the clothes, the music, the slang, the drugs. (Actually, we know that Waugh was aware of this, because in this very novel he has two aging ladies, the gloriously obscenely named Kitty and Fanny, who are basically relics of the previous generation's equivalent of the BYPs. They had been party girls in the ‘gay nineties’, now they are looking on slightly confused and trying to understand what the young people are up to.) So, in short, there's no reason to be particularly glum on the Bright Young People. They will continue to exist, in one form or another, until we either all get roasted by global warming or we attain communism (alas, I suspect the former is likely to happen sooner). Meanwhile, Waugh has given us a charming and incisive portrait of one particular iteration of this phenomenon.

Interesting things from the introduction

The editor's introduction to this volume is long and full of interesting things previously unknown to me. For example, I didn't know that Waugh was also a promising painter early in his career, and was even planning to have an exhibition at one point (p. xxix).

Waugh's father was a director at Chapman and Hall, the company that published Waugh's novels (p. xxix). Incidentally, Alec Waugh's (Evelyn Waugh's brother) travel book The Coloured Countries was published on the same day as Vile Bodies (p. liv). One reviewer even mistakenly described the two Waughs as “brother and sister” :))) (p. lxxvii).

Waugh's previous novel had been moderately successful, but Vile Bodies was a best-seller; his income rose to “ten times the national average wage, and more than double his father's salary” (p.lvii); but Alec's book sold even better (p. lxxii). In 1932 Vile Bodies was also adapted for the stage, by a playwright named H. Dennis Bradley (pp. lxxxix, lxxxviii).

In a letter to a friend, Waugh wrote self-deprecatingly of Vile Bodies: “I am sure you will disapprove of it. It is a welter of sex and snobbery written simply in the hope of selling some copies.” (P. xxxii.)

It seems that the typist hired to turn Waugh's manuscript into a typescript made a large number of minor changes to the text, perhaps because of struggling with Waugh's difficult handwriting, but partly also because his spelling was quirky and he expected the typist to standardise it; and many of these changes made it into the printed version of the novel (pp. xliii–xlv).

The character of Lord Monomark in the novel is based on a real person, the Canadian-born newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook. Waugh originally meant to call the character ‘Lord Ottercove” but was persuaded to change the name for fear it would be considered too close to the real one and hence libellous (p. xlv). Several other characters in the book were also based on real people (p. lx); Waugh even felt the need to insert a disclaimer that all the characters are imaginary (p. cv). [In the manuscript version, the disclaimer ends with a joke: “Bright Young People and others kindly note that all characters are wholly imaginary (you get far too much publicity already whoever you are)”; pp. xlv, 189.]

The title of the novel is a biblical reference (p. lii): “we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ: who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body” (Philippians 3:21).

Interesting: the first recorded use of ‘queer’ as a derogatory word for gay men was in a letter from the Marquess of Queensbery to Lord Alfred Douglas in 1894 (p. liii, n. 93).

Waugh's political views could be summarized as “instinctively a conservative anarchist” (p. lxiv) to whom “all politicians were equally ridiculous” (p. lxv). This is in a way a charming and seductive view, until you remember that it favours only the rich people, as they don't need to rely so much on the state to help them and protect them.

A funny bit of BYP hijinks in which Waugh was involved: they staged a fake exhibition of avant-garde scuplture by a fictional artist named Bruno Hatte, “with Tom Mitford (Nancy's brother), heavily disguised and mumbling from a wheelchair in incoherent German, imitating Herr Hatte. Waugh wrote the catalogue notes” (p. lxvii, n. 125).

An interesting example of ‘make love’ used in its older sense, in Waugh's diary: “Elizabeth Ponsonby made vigorous love to me which I am sorry now I did not accept. She has furry arms.” (P. lxix.)

A reviewer jokingly described Vile Bodies as “another regionalist novel about [. . .] youthful members of a small village called Mayfair [. . .] [It] is local in place; it is also local in time” (p. lxxiv; Mayfair being a rich part of London where much of the novel takes place).

An interesting quote from a review by Waugh, of a novel by another writer, but which seems applicable to Waugh's Vile Bodies as well: “There are practically no descriptive passages except purely technical ones. The character, narrative and atmosphere are all built up and implicit in the dialogue, which is written in a vivid slang, with numerous recurring phrases running through as a refrain.” (P. lxxxii.)

The story

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The book starts with a neat way of introducing several of the principal characters: we meet them as passengers on a ship crossing the English Channel. There's Mrs. Ape, an American evangelist, with her “angels” (a girls' choir); there's Miles and Agatha, two Bright Young People (Agatha is the most airheaded character in the book and the most resolute exponent of BYP slang); there's Adam, probably the closest thing this book has to a protagonist. He's a young writer just finishing his first book; but alas, upon landing in Britain, stupid customs officials destroy his manuscript. (“Particularly against books the Home Secretary is. If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.” :)) Pp. 11–12.) Unable to honor the terms of his contract with his publisher, he now has to agree to a ludicrously unfavourable new deal; his career prospects look none too bright. He lives in a “hotel” which is really more like a boarding house and which is populated by a rather bizarre assortment of relics, including a deposed king of Ruritania and a retired (and now slightly senile) American judge.

Adam has a girlfriend, Nina, whom he is hoping to marry but the fact that he is, frankly, quite penniless currently prevents this. At one point he wins a thousand pounds from a bet (a huge sum), but then he promptly gives the money to some drunken Major whom he has never seen before, but who promised to put the whole sum on a horse (an insanely risky bet) on Adam's behalf. What are we supposed to make of this ridiculous move? Either Adam is the most irresponsible character ever to grace the pages of a novel (in which case I find it difficult to have any sympathy for him, and I don't think that's what the author intended), or — more likely in my opinion — we aren't meant to take anything here seriously; the characters and the social world they inhabit are surreal, and the author is just having a bit of fun and is inviting us to have a bit of fun along with him.

There's a funny chapter in which a number of BYP characters hold a savage-themed fancy-dress party. At the end a few of them are looking for somewhere to go to continue partying, and a Miss Brown, who is desperately keen to become part of the in crowd, invites them over to her house. After some time there, most of them eventually leave, except for Agatha, who spends the night there. In the morning it turns out that Miss Brown is the Prime Minister's daughter, the house is at 10 Downing Street, and the morning editions of the tabloids have already printed rumours of Agatha's affair with the Prime Minister :)))

At Nina's suggestion, Adam goes to visit her father to ask him for money until his literary career takes off again. Colonel Blount turns out to be a rather dotty old man living in a large but dilapidated country house with a tiny staff of servants — frankly, I wonder if he is really all that rich himself. To Adam's delight, the Colonel gives him a cheque for a thousand pounds; Adam and Nina spend a wonderful evening together, planning to get married the next day — but next day she points out that the cheque is a joke and is signed “Charlie Chaplin”. She had seen this at once but didn't have the heart to tell Adam as he was so happy.

Incidentally, this phenomenon of people with an upper-class background but not much money seems to be pretty common in this book, as indeed it was in real life. Apart from Col. Blount, Adam himself is an example of it, being the son of a professor (p. 56; or, in a manuscript, an admiral: p. 246). We also see two impecunious peers making a living as gossip columnists (p. 30); one of these is a friend of Adam's, Lord Balcairn, but his position is slowly becoming untenable: people no longer invite him to parties because they don't like the gossip he prints about them. He tries to sneak into a party in disguise, but is discovered and kicked out. As a final fuck-you gesture to the world that has so cruelly exiled him, he sends a completely fake gossip column filled with the most grotesquely outrageous lies to his newspaper, then commits suicide (pp. 68–9).

I for one felt sorry for him, and thought his end tragic and his final gesture of defiance a commendable one. There should be limits to downward mobility; a system of pensions for peers that had fallen on hard times or something like that — then he wouldn't have had to rely on writing a gossip column to make a living. (Come to think of it, couldn't he have got a decent amount of money just by showing up in the House of Lords every day?) But Waugh doesn't seem to want us to feel sorry for Balcairn; he presents his death light-heartedly and moves on with a positively unseemly haste.

Adam takes over Balcairn's former job as a gossip columnist, but cannot write about most of the people Balcairn used to write about, because those are all suing the newspaper for libel. Thus Adam resorts to writing about increasingly insignificant third-rate celebrities, and eventually about completely fictional people; and nobody seems to be any the wiser for it.

Thanks to the income from his new job, Adam is now again in a position to marry Nina. He goes to visit her father to discuss this, but finds him too senile for the discussion to get anywhere. Moreover, the situation at Col. Blount's estate is rather chaotic: he has rented it out for the shooting of a historical film, in which he himself will appear as an extra. In Adam's absence, Miles and Nina write his gossip column for him; but they unwittingly mention all the things that Adam's boss had declared off-limits, as a result of which Adam gets fired, Miles gets his job, and Adam's marriage to Nina is called off yet again.

You can't help noticing that every time Adam's marriage prospects pick up, the author very deliberately ruins them immediately afterwards. I'm sure it is a very clever literary technique, the author is showing us the futility of his characters' lives etc. etc. or some nonsense like that, but in actual fact I just found it annoying. Nobody has bad luck *all the time* like that.

Miles, by the way, is rather flamboyantly homosexual and his current boyfriend is a race-car driver. So, in the next chapter, Miles, Adam, Agatha and another friend attend a race where this driver is about to compete. After a series of mishaps, a rather drunk Agatha ends up behind the wheel as a backup driver and suffers a bad crash. Her injuries turn out to be more serious than they seemed at first; she is put into a nursing home, and there's a bizarre scene when her friends visit her and promptly throw a party right in her hospital room.

Meanwhile Adam has a few more encounters with the drunken Major, who tells him that the horse on which he had bet Adam's £1000 had in fact won, and that he now has £35000 waiting for Adam — but he is not sure if he recognizes Adam as the man who gave him those initial £1000. (How frustrating! Is this another example of the futility of Adam's life? Is the author being a very clever modernist by subjecting Adam, and by extension us, to this? And is it wrong for me to be extremely annoyed with him for it?)

Nina by now has given up hope that Adam will ever make any money, so she decides to marry another man, Ginger, who is perhaps a little square but at least he has money and some sort of career in the army. Adam has yet another close miss with the drunken Major, who perhaps isn't “bogus” after all — but by then it is too late: Nina and Ginger are already married (p. 135).

Events turn quickly, and rather dramatically, towards the end of the book. Within a few weeks, Agatha dies of her injuries, Miles had to flee the country (over his homosexuality), some sort of war is looming, and Ginger is called up to his regiment; hence Adam arranges to accompany Nina on a visit to her father over Christmas, with Adam pretending to be Ginger, whom nearly nobody knows anyway. Col. Blount has invested most of his money into the historical film they had been shooting at his place, and now shows the film with great pride and joy. The festivities, however, are interrupted by news that war has been declared.

The book ends with a “Happy Ending” section which, to nobody's surprise, is not actually very happy. Adam wanders across a desolate battlefield, and whom does he encounter but the drunken Major, except that the latter has been promoted to General by now. He has Adam's £35000, but the sum is now worthless due to implausibly rampant inflation. And in the General's car there's Chastity, formerly one of Mrs. Ape's “angels” but now a well-worn prostitute.

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Miscellaneous

A funny line from p. 32, which perfectly summarizes both Agatha's character and the craze for themed costume parties (cf. also p. lxviii) at the time: “She had heard some one say something about an Indepenent Labour Party, and was furious that she had not been asked.” :))

Nina apparently did not enjoy her night with Adam: “All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day.” (P. 58.)

Agatha refers to Miss Mouse's relatives as “the Mice” (p. 128) :)

I was intrigued by the sudden outbreak of war towards the end of the novel; I wonder what to make of it. When I saw it in the film, I naturally assumed it to be the WW2; only while reading the novel did I realize that of course it was written in 1930, so it was only a hypothetical future war as imagined by Waugh. Indeed the descriptions of the battlefield here reflect this: the author must have taken what he remembered from WW1 and turned it up to 11, with absurdly inhumane weapons such as “a liquid fire projector” and a “Huxdane-Halley bomb (for the dissemination of leprosy germs)” (p. 152). Frankly, the way he has war erupt within weeks with no real prior warning is implausible, especially since otherwise he gives you the impression that the story is set at the time it was written rather than in the future. Obviously, people had been saying ever since the end of WW1 that some new world war would erupt sooner or later, but still, such things don't really happen so suddenly out of the blue like that. The international situation wasn't yet so tense in 1930, and even though the looming economic crisis made things look less than promising (“[t]he Wall Street Crash had occurred as EW was completing the book”, p. 181), it would still take years for things to deteriorate enough.

Interesting things from the manuscript

On the subject of interesting things from the critical apparatus, probably the best one is the elephant joke told by a character in the manuscript of chapter 1, but not included in the final version of the text: “ ‘There was an elephant escaped from a circus, see, and went into the garden of a very short sighted old lady. The old lady looked out of the window and saw it eating her carrots. She went to the telephone. “Oh inspector,” she says, “come at once. There's an enormous animal in my garden rooting up all my carrots with its tail.” — “Good gracious,” says the inspector, “what's he doing with them?” — “I hardly know how to tell you,” says the old girl! That's good eh?’ ” (P. 196.) The editor calls it “a long and awful joke” (p. xlv), but it made me laugh :)))

By the way, occasionally the appendix not only includes textual variants from later editions, but even from later printings of the first edition — see the mentions of the 5th impression on p. 208, and of the 9th on p. 202. I was very impressed that they took the trouble to compare different printings too, not just different editions.

In the manuscript, Mrs. Ape says: “There are two great evils in the world today—Communism and Constipation and there's only one way to fight them” (p. 198); in the final version, this became: “There's only one great evil in the world to-day. Despair.” (P. 8.)

A lost detail from the manuscript: the man from whom Adam initially won his £1000 was killed in a traffic accident shortly afterwards (p. 217).

The manuscript contains two mentions of “Lady Oxford”, i.e. Margot Asquith, the widow of the former prime minister, once in a list of guests in a fashionable restaurant (p. 244), and once as a possible target of Balcairn's gossip column (p. 245).

In the scene where Balcairn is attending a party in disguise and some of the guests start suspecting him to be foreign spy of some sort (p. 63), one of them actually gets a revolver ready in the manuscript (p. 251). Perhaps Waugh thought this would make the whole thing a little too serious for what was still supposed to be a lighthearted part of the book?

On the subject of the likely upcoming war, Father Rothschild makes a high-blown geopolitical speech in the manuscript (p. 270), which was dropped from the final version: “There are still two nations who can speak without shame of ‘Conquest’. One is an ancient race whose roads transgress the earth and lead the footsteps of centuries to a heap of broken marble; the other is a new & wicked race. And there is a savage Northern race whose existence is itself a Conquest. And the whole inarticulate east as a single flame.”

The slang of the Bright Young People

The BYPs in this book have a peculiar slang, which I was happy to find annoying, as is normal with any slang of which one is not oneself a speaker. At least some of this slang is apparently real slang that was used at the time and is also recorded in the work of other writers (p. lxxxiii). Agatha is the most hardcore user of this sort of slang in this book, but other BYP characters use it more or less often as well. Here are instances I've noticed (with page and line numbers in parentheses):

• Anything they like is “divine” (33.124, 33.126, 33.131, 34.178, 35.190, 35.193, 36.247, 51.514, 52.566, 53.620, 101.386, 112.393, 130.174, 145.281, 149.450). The instance from 35.193 is particularly good; Miss Brown is asked about the party she had attended the night before: “ ‘It was just too divine,’ said the youngest Miss Brown. / ‘It was what, Jane?’ / ‘I mean it was lovely, Mama.’ ” :)))

• Anything they dislike is “bogus” (15.156, 37.267, 82.35, 83.84, 112.389, 118.632, 124.4, 128.91, 159:15.156). The editor's introduction mentions “bogus” as “a key period word” (p. lxiii).

• If not bogus, things they dislike are “(too) shaming” (12.57, 15.151, 19.330, 31.34, 113.417, 114.460).

• “enterprising” (31.53, 68.559–60) means ‘daring, risqué’ (pictures, dress etc.).

• They are very fond of combining an adjective with -making: “shy-making” (36.235, 56.114), “sick-making” (4.145, 15.152), “drunk-making” (83.83), “ill-making” (101.389), “better-making” (107.158), “rich-making” (118.625), “blind-making” (127.40), “sad-making” (127.63).

• They like to double the tag question: the first time it is used as normally, to ask for confirmation of the previous statement, but the second time it is used as a sincere expression of uncertainty. “ ‘Anyway, we aren't engaged any more, are we—or are we?’ ” (33.112) “ ‘All this is really much more embarrassing for me, isn't it, don't you think . . . or don't you?’ ” (36.225–6) “ ‘It really would serve him right if we complained and he lost his job, don't you think so, Sir James . . . or . . . don't you?’ ” (37.264–5) “ ‘Anyway, you've had some fun out of it, haven't you . . . or haven't you?’ ” (53.610) “ ‘Let's go to the tent and have another drink—don't you think, or don't you?” ” (114.463–4)

• The following is not on the subject of BYP slang but still a language-related curiosity: in the speech of a few characters, we find would contracted into 'ld instead of the usual 'd, resulting in “we'ld” and “you'ld” (there's Col. Blount on p. 141, his neighbour the Rector on p. 146, and Isaacs the movie director on p. 97). Judging by some googling, the 'ld forms, though they may be quite gone now, did actually see some use in the first half of the 20th century and earlier (more in Britain than in America, though). But in that case I wonder why here in Vile Bodies these three characters use 'ld while everyone else uses 'd. If it was just the Colonel and the Rector, who are neighbours, you might think it's a regionalism; but Isaacs the movie director is an outsider to that area.

ToRead:

• D. J. Taylor: The Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation, 1918–1940 (2007). Mentioned here on p. lix, n. 103 and elsewhere.
• Ronald Firbank: Sorrow in Sunlight (1924). Apparently it was published in the U.S. as Prancing Nigger :::)))) It is mentioned here on p. lxxviii as the inspiration for the customs scene in the first chapter of Vile Bodies. Firbank was “[t]he first major influence on his [= Waugh's] fiction” (p. lxxxi).
• Or, better yet, there is a collected edition of Firbank's works, The Complete Ronald Firbank (Duckworth, 1961).
• Norman Douglas: South Wind (1917). Mentioned here on p. lxxxv; Waugh described it as “the only great satirical novel of his generation”. I heard of Douglas before, but only as a travel writer: in the late 1990s, a publisher called Picador, which mostly published paperbacks, also brought out a handsome series of hardcover reprints of old travel books called the Picador Travel Classics; I have about three of them, including Douglas's Old Calabria.
• Michael Arlen: The Green Hat (1924). “In the mid-1920s Arlen was the prince of ‘Mayfair’ novelists, and Waugh was colonizing his literary territory.” (P. lxxxv.) We have already encountered Arlen's book on the pages of this blog before, because its protagonist was inspired by Idina Sackville.
• Michael Arlen: These Charming People (1923). A collection of short stories, mentioned here on p. 162.
• Beverley Nichols: Crazy Pavements (1927). Mentioned here on p. lxxxv as a novel which “bears striking similarities to Vile Bodies”.
• Aldous Huxley: Crome Yellow (1921) and Antic Hay (1923). His first two novels; they impressed Waugh (p. lxxxv). Like, I suppose, most people, I only know of Huxley as the author of Brave New World, so I was interested to see that he actually wrote about a dozen novels.
• Noting that Vile Bodies “emerged after a decade of ‘flapper’ texts about the lives of newly liberated young women” (p. lxxxviii), the editor's introduction proceeds to list a number of them:
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald: This Side of Paradise (1920), Flappers and Philosophers (1920), The Great Gatsby (1925);
  • Gertrude Atherton: Black Oxen (1923);
  • Warner Fabian (= Samuel Hopkins Adams): Flaming Youth (1923);
  • Beatrice Burton: The Flapper Wife: The Story of a Jazz Bride (1925);
  • Anita Loos: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925);
  • Samuel Merwin: Anabel at Sea (1926–27);
• Anthony Hope: The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), The Heart of Princess Osra (1896), Rupert of Hentzau (1898). Novels set in the fictional country of Ruritania, mentioned here on p. 160 (Waugh introduced an ex-king of Ruritania as a minor side character here in Vile Bodies; according to the note here, P. G. Wodehouse had done the same in some of his work).
• William Gerhardi: Pretty Creatures (1927). A book of short stories mentioned here on p. 165; Gerhardie's “writing influenced EW's”.
• Patrick Balfour: Society Racket: A Critical Survey of Modern Social Life (1933). Mentioned here in the notes on p. 169.