Vile Bodies

“I should never have mentioned it, but whenever I see Agatha Runcible I can’t help thinking… girls seem to know so much nowadays. We had to learn everything for ourselves, didn’t we, Fanny, and it took so long.”

The 1920s were a critical time in freeing gender and sexuality from tradition. In the conservative landscape of Waugh’s novel, however, such liberation only leads to confusion and unhappiness.

“‘Every Molassine dog cake wags a tail,’ Mr. Outrage read, and the train repeated over and over again, ‘Right Honorable gent Right Honorable gent Right Honorable gent Right Honorable gent Right Honorable gent…’” 

In this passage, the disgraced Prime Minister observes a repeated advertisement for dog biscuits from the window of a moving train. The memorable imagery of modern life bridges the chasm between high and low culture, making the world surreal, difficult to navigate, and more like the frame-by-frame effects of cinema than like a novel.

“For it was one of his most exacting duties to ‘ginger up’ the more reticent of the manuscripts submitted and ‘tone down’ the more ‘outspoken’ until he had reduced them all to the acceptable moral standard of his day.” 

While border agents simply burn manuscripts on sight, editors adulterate them with arbitrary adjustments toward the center. Like the many partygoers whom the novel depicts as a mass rather than as highly delineated individuals, here Waugh shows how a similar effect is produced in literary products.

“It’s a very straightforward arrangement really. Doesn’t leave room for any of the disputes which embitter the relation of author to publisher.”

The poverty described in Vile Bodies is of the genteel and “shabby” sort. Many of the people described in the book are English earls and dukes reduced to working for wages in a diminishing marketplace. Here, Adam’s publisher explains the ruinous conditions of his future publication with a disingenuous euphemism.

“‘Oh, I say, Nina, there’s one thing—I don’t think I shall be able to marry you after all.’

‘Oh, Adam, you are a bore. Why not?’” 

The on-again, off-again nature of Nina and Adam’s proposed marriage undercuts the institution of marriage. For reasons that go unexplained, Nina later exclaims that she’s surprised that Adam is fair-haired, hinting that their early courtship has occurred entirely over the phone.

“And now when I come to England always there is a different Prime Minister and no one knows which is which.”

To the deposed royal in Lottie’s hotel parlor, democracy and anarchy appear to be the same thing. He complains sullenly that a member of the democratic government stole his gold pen, while missing the massive changes happening to the world outside the door.

“She had heard someone say something about an Independent Labour Party, and was furious that she had not been asked.”

This joke underscores that most young people in Vile Bodies are not significantly more well-informed than their parents. If there is a generation gap among this upper-class set, it is dwarfed by the forces of democratization that have diminished the standing of young and old equally.

“There were about a dozen people left at the party; that hard kernel of gaiety that never breaks. It was about three o’clock.”

Parties carry significant meaning in Waugh’s novel, providing a whirlwind of sensory immersion. There is also a core of nihilism to this “hard kernel” of partygoers, a desire to burn quickly and fade away.

“It was Armistice Day, and they were selling artificial poppies in the streets. As he reached the station it struck eleven and for two minutes all over the country everyone was quiet and serious.” 

The global confrontation of World War One just a decade before is now an event of artificially minimized solemnity in which no one has learned anything meaningful. The pace of life in modern England, with its minute-by-minute sensations, means that the world could stumble blindly into another conflagration at any minute.

“All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I’d sooner go to my dentist any day.”

The reader could mistake all the partying in Vile Bodies for a movement away from social responsibility and into the sensual pleasures of libertinism. The opposite is true. Sex gives no pleasure to Nina, and only anxiety to Adam, both of whom anesthetize themselves to the constant shock of modernity.

“So the last Earl of Balcairn went, as they say, to his fathers (who had fallen in many lands and for many causes, as the eccentricities of British Foreign Policy and their own wandering natures had directed them; at Acre and Agincourt and Killiecrankie, in Egypt and America).”

Earl Simon Balcairn comes from a noble lineage going back to the battle of Agincourt. The last of his line, he dies in an undistinguished London flat, having failed to secure an invitation to a party for his Mr. Chatterbox column. His undignified end illustrates the deterioration of the English nobility.

“Even Provna, who was notoriously indifferent to conventional beauty, described her as ‘justifying the century.’”a

Adam seems to understand the nature of the Mr. Chatterbox column better than his predecessors. His fictional accounts of the upper classes are far better than the real thing could ever be, creating a loop of fictional gossip in which fake tastemakers comment upon the beauty of other fakes.

“Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else […]—all that succession and repetition of massed humanity… Those vile bodies…”

Parties with different themes cannot mask their sameness, nor the sameness of the impulse that propels guests from one party to another. Waugh suggests that this impulse to gather without purpose or cause generates a form of contempt unique to modern life.

“I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence. I think all the divorces show that.” 

This observation, spoken by a Victorian elder about a young person, is a mass of contradictions. Young people supposedly fetishize the permanence of things like marriage but without understanding the traditions that undergird them. According to this speaker, the result is a wave of divorces.

“Miss Runcible wore trousers and Miles touched up his eyelashes in the dining room of the hotel where they stopped for luncheon. So they were asked to leave.”

Waugh’s brother was accused of being attracted to men and punished for “homosexuality” at a time when it was illegal but tolerated in some social circles. Here, Waugh points out that the twenties represented a brazen moment in popular fashion and attitude, a moment when the presentation of nonnormative genders and sexual orientations became more open and daring. At the same time, he illustrates the institutionalized prejudice that ejected people who would today be called LGBTQ from businesses and from supposedly respectable society.

“These are in perpetual flux; a vortex of combining and disintegrating units; like the confluence of traffic at some spot where many roads meet, streams of mechanisms come together, mingle and separate again.”

Here, Waugh explores the difference between commercially sold automobiles and the sort used by professional racers. The former represents a staid product; the latter is constantly being built from the ground up for performance, exchanging parts at such a rate that it is never the same car in any two instances. In this sense, it is like the British government, with its constantly cycling through Prime Ministers.

“The effects of their drinks had now entered on that secondary stage, vividly described in temperance handbooks, when the momentary illusion of well-being and exhilaration gives way to melancholy, indigestion and moral decay.” 

Alcohol is an undercurrent throughout the book, influencing the behaviors of characters and forming the physical concentration of their personal regrets. Indeed, most of the characters make their daylight decisions under the influence of a hangover.

“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 at us at once to go faster, and car after car kept crashing until I was left all alone driving and driving—” 

Here, the sensitive Agatha Runcible attempts to describe her ongoing, debilitating delirium by referring to her recurring dream. This dream connects the ever-fluctuating state of the race car to the similarly fluctuating state of English society. The result is chaos.

“If only you were as rich as Ginger, Adam, or only as half as rich. Or if you had any money at all.”

It never occurs to any of the characters in Waugh’s novel that they should apply to work at regular hours for regular pay. They understand that such rigors are for people without active command of the economy; from their perspective, having to contribute labor power towards the enrichment of anybody else’s leisure would be a failure on par with death.

“‘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?’” 

Adam’s passivity about the world takes a dark turn in the last half of the book. Still borne aloft by circumstances he can’t control, Adam protests in favor of another world, one he cannot even begin to imagine or articulate.

“Nina looked down and saw inclined at an odd angle a horizon of straggling red suburb; arterial roads dotted with little cars; factories, some of them working, others empty and decaying; a disused canal; some distant hills sown with bungalows; wireless masts and overhead power cables; men and women were indiscernible except as tiny spots; they were marrying and shopping and making money and having children.” 

In this scene, Nina’s perspective from an airplane contrasts with Ginger’s struggle to remember the lines from Shakespeare’s Henry V in which the young king rallies his troops to battle by describing England as “this sceptered isle, this earth of majesty” (255). Nina, looking at the tacky landscape below, feels nothing for her home in this moment but nausea.

“‘Regular parties they used to have when the Colonel and Mr. Eric were boys. Theatricals and all the house turned topsy-turvy, and every gentleman with his own valet.’

‘Ah,’ said Mrs. Florin.

‘Times is changed,’ said Florin, picking a tooth.”

The interlude at Christmas underscores the relative sanity of life under the traditions and rules of the older generation, when each gentleman had “his own valet.” Blount’s servants remember this as a good time even though it was they who performed the service.

“As he came nearer Adam saw that he was leveling towards him a liquid-fire projector. Adam tightened his fingers about his Huxdane-Halley bomb (for the dissemination of leprosy germs), and in this posture of mutual suspicion they met.” 

Drawing on the horrible implements of war used in World War One, Waugh projects even worse weapons into the war to come. Just as the motorcar is constantly being perfected in a vortex of moving parts, so does weaponry keep pace with modernity.