by
Evelyn Waugh

Preface

This was a totally unplanned novel. I had the facility at the age of 25 to sit down at my table, set a few characters on the move, write 3000 words a day, and note with surprise what happened. The composition of Vile Bodies was interrupted by a sharp disturbance in my private life and was finished in a very different mood from that in which it was begun. The reader may, perhaps, notice the transition from gaiety to bitterness.

It was the first of my books to be a popular success. Decline and Fall had been well reviewed but its sales in its first year were small, fewer than 3000 copies if I remember rightly. Vile Bodies caught the public fancy for extraneous reasons. ‘The Bright Young People’ with whom it deals, and of whom I was a member rather on the fringe than in the centre, were one of the newspaper topics of the time. They were totally unlike the various, publicized groups of modern youth, being mostly of good family and education and sharp intelligence, but they were equally anarchic and short-lived. The jargon most of us spoke came new to the novel reader and so captivated one prominent dramatic critic that for weeks he introduced into articles week after week: ‘“Too sick-making”, as Mr Waugh would say.’

There was also a pretty accurate description of Mrs Rosa Lewis and her Cavendish Hotel, just on the brink of their decline but still famous. I think I can claim that this was the first English novel in which dialogue on the telephone plays a large part. For reasons of novelty the many gross faults were overlooked. There were not many comic writers at that time and I filled a gap. I began under the brief influence of Ronald Firbank but struck out for myself. It is not a book I enjoy re-reading but there are one or two funny scenes which redeem it from banality. I like Colonel Blount, though he is a figure from conventional farce. He was brilliantly played by Athol Stewart in a very poor dramatic version. I may add that at the time I invented ‘Father Rothschild’ I had never met a Jesuit.

E. W.

Combe Florey 1964

‘Well in our country,’ said Alice, still panting a little, ‘you’d generally get to somewhere else — if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.’

‘A slow sort of country!’ said the Queen. ‘Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!’

‘If I wasn’t real,’ Alice said — half laughing through her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous — ‘I shouldn’t be able to cry.’

‘I hope you don’t suppose those are real tears?’ Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt.

— Alice Through the Looking Glass

Chapter One

It was clearly going to be a bad crossing.

With Asiatic resignation Father Rothschild S.J. put down his suitcase in the corner of the bar and went on deck. (It was a small suitcase of imitation crocodile hide. The initials stamped on it in Gothic characters were not Father Rothschild’s, for he had borrowed it that morning from the valet-de-chambre of his hotel. It contained some rudimentary underclothes, six important new books in six languages, a false beard and a school atlas and gazetteer heavily annotated.) Standing on the deck Father Rothschild leant his elbows on the rail, rested his chin in his hands and surveyed the procession of passengers coming up the gangway, each face eloquent of polite misgiving.

Very few of them were unknown to the Jesuit, for it was his happy knack to remember everything that could possibly be learned about every one who could possibly be of any importance. His tongue protruded very slightly and, had they not all been so concerned with luggage and the weather, some one might have observed in him a peculiar resemblance to those plaster reproductions of the gargoyles of Notre Dame which may be seen in the shop windows of artists’ colourmen tinted the colour of ‘Old Ivory’, peering intently from among stencil outfits and plasticine and tubes of water-colour paint. High above his head swung Mrs Melrose Ape’s travel-worn Packard car, bearing the dust of three continents, against the darkening sky, and up the companion-way at the head of her angels strode Mrs Melrose Ape, the woman evangelist.

‘Faith.’

‘Here, Mrs Ape.’

‘Charity.’

‘Here, Mrs Ape.’

‘Fortitude.’

‘Here, Mrs Ape.’

‘Chastity…. Where is Chastity?’

‘Chastity didn’t feel well, Mrs Ape. She went below.’

‘That girl’s more trouble than she’s worth. Whenever there’s any packing to be done, Chastity doesn’t feel well. Are all the rest here — Humility, Prudence, Divine Discontent, Mercy, Justice and Creative Endeavour?’

‘Creative Endeavour lost her wings, Mrs Ape. She got talking to a gentleman in the train…. Oh, there she is.’

‘Got ’em?’ asked Mrs Ape.

Too breathless to speak, Creative Endeavour nodded. (Each of the angels carried her wings in a little black box like a violin case.)

‘Right,’ said Mrs Ape, ‘and just you hold on to ’em tight and not so much talking to gentlemen in trains. You’re angels, not a panto, see?’

The angels crowded together disconsolately. It was awful when Mrs Ape was like this. My, how they would pinch Chastity and Creative Endeavour when they got them alone in their nightshirts. It was bad enough their going to be so sick without that they had Mrs Ape pitching into them too.

Seeing their discomfort, Mrs Ape softened and smiled. She was nothing if not ‘magnetic’.

‘Well, girls,’ she said, ‘I must be getting along. They say it’s going to be rough, but don’t you believe it. If you have peace in your hearts your stomach will look after itself, and remember if you do feel queer — sing. There’s nothing like it.’

‘Good-bye, Mrs Ape, and thank you,’ said the angels; they bobbed prettily, turned about and trooped aft to the second-class part of the ship. Mrs Ape watched them benignly, then, squaring her shoulders and looking (except that she had really no beard to speak of) every inch a sailor, strode resolutely forrard to the first-class bar.

Other prominent people were embarking, all very unhappy about the weather; to avert the terrors of sea-sickness they had indulged in every kind of civilized witchcraft, but they were lacking in faith.

Miss Runcible was there, and Miles Malpractice, and all the Younger Set. They had spent a jolly morning strapping each other’s tummies with sticking plaster (how Miss Runcible had wriggled).

The Right Honourable Walter Outrage, M.P., last week’s Prime Minister, was there. Before breakfast that morning (which had suffered in consequence) Mr Outrage had taken twice the maximum dose of a patent preparation of chloral, and losing heart later had finished the bottle in the train. He moved in an uneasy trance, closely escorted by the most public-looking detective sergeants. These men had been with Mr Outrage in Paris, and what they did not know about his goings on was not worth knowing, at least from a novelist’s point of view. (When they spoke about him to each other they called him ‘the Right Honourable Rape’, but that was more by way of being a pun about his name than a criticism of the conduct of his love affairs, in which, if the truth were known, he displayed a notable diffidence and the liability to panic.)

Lady Throbbing and Mrs Blackwater, those twin sisters whose portrait by Millais auctioned recently at Christie’s made a record in rock-bottom prices, were sitting on one of the teak benches eating apples and drinking what Lady Throbbing, with late Victorian chic, called ‘a bottle of pop’, and Mrs Blackwater, more exotically, called ‘champagne’, pronouncing it as though it were French.

‘Surely, Kitty, that is Mr Outrage, last week’s Prime Minister.’

‘Nonsense, Fanny, where?’

‘Just in front of the two men with bowler hats, next to the clergyman.’

‘It is certainly like his photographs. How strange he looks.’

‘Just like poor Throbbing… all that last year.’

‘… And none of us even suspected… until they found the bottles under the board in his dressing-room… and we all used to think it was drink…’

‘I don’t think one finds quite the same class as Prime Minister nowadays, do you think?’

‘They say that only one person has any influence with Mr Outrage

‘At the Japanese Embassy…’

‘Of course, dear, not so loud. But tell me, Fanny, seriously, do you think really and truly Mr Outrage has IT?’

‘He has a very nice figure for a man of his age.’

‘Yes, but his age, and the bull-like type is so often disappointing. Another glass? You will be grateful for it when the ship begins to move.’

‘I quite thought we were moving.’

‘How absurd you are, Fanny, and yet I can’t help laughing.’

So arm in arm and shaken by little giggles the two tipsy old ladies went down to their cabin.

Of the other passengers, some had filled their ears with cotton wool, others wore smoked glasses, while several ate dry captain’s biscuits from paper bags, as Red Indians are said to eat snake’s flesh to make them cunning. Mrs Hoop repeated feverishly over and over again a formula she had learned from a yogi in New York City. A few ‘good sailors’, whose luggage bore the labels of many voyages, strode aggressively about smoking small, foul pipes and trying to get up a four of bridge.

Two minutes before the advertised time of departure, while the first admonitory whistling and shouting was going on, a young man came on board carrying his bag. There was nothing particularly remarkable about his appearance. He looked exactly as young men like him do look; he was carrying his own bag, which was disagreeably heavy, because he had no money left in francs and very little left in anything else. He had been two months in Paris writing a book and was coming home because, in the course of his correspondence, he had got engaged to be married. His name was Adam Fenwick-Symes.

Father Rothschild smiled at him in a kindly manner.