Worse, Waugh's intense dislike of America drives away the necessary qualities of wit - indirection and understatement. He has so little respect for his subject he doesn't hold himself to a very high standard and ends up making misogynistic comments about American culture that are downright stupid (e.g., "American mothers, Dennis reflected, presumably knew their daughters apart, as the Chinese were said subtly to distinguish one from another of their seemingly uniform race, but to the European eye the Mortuary Hostess was one with all her sisters of the air-liners and reception-desks…. She was the standard product" (53-4)).

Waugh spent six weeks in the U.S.; he doesn't know his subject well enough to hate it accurately or distinctively. (What Mrs. Joyboy says about finding cheaper and better lettuce in Vermont than in Los Angeles, and having "a coloured girl" there who "came in regular," will puzzle anyone who has spent five minutes in that state (115).) The Loved One can't begin to compete with Philip Wylie's execratory blasts in Generation of Vipers, an insider's catalogue of the worthlessness of the various American estates in the early 1940s. While you can tell that The Loved One is intended as caustic drollery, it has the feel of Nathanael West (as noted by Edmund Wilson (304) and Waugh's biographer (Stannard 208)). The Loved One is Waugh's "Burning of Los Angeles," fueled by just enough hellfire to make the arson recognizably his handiwork.

FILM

Almost twenty years after Waugh's junket to Hollywood, the same studio that saw Brideshead Revisited "purely as a love story" without "theological implication" (Diaries 673) was ready for The Loved One, the religious points of which are just part of a choppy attack on American "sterility." The Loved One is coarse enough that it doesn't matter that the moviemakers, inevitably, get it wrong, and make it even coarser. It's the least conventionally unified and yet in some ways the most entertaining of the movies made from Waugh's books.

The American producers did hire an English director, Tony Richardson, and commissioned a script by Christopher Isherwood. The decision was then made, however, to update the story, and the topical satire, to the 1960s. So the American writer Terry Southern, hot off his collaboration on Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, was hired to hipsterize the material. According to Southern's "journal" of the film's production, his script included such things as a one-shot scene in which Sir Ambrose Abercrombie, the book's humorless defender of the respectability of the English colony in Hollywood, appears in drag at a gay leather bar. (Robert Morley refused to shoot the scene, proof to Richardson that he was behaving like "a boorish prima donna" (195)).

This is enough to indicate that Southern's writing has the juvenile impertinence of an undergraduate revue, and though one commentator noted the "imprint of an unadult mind" on Waugh's book (Ward 83), it's puerile in a very different way from the movie that resulted. (Southern's Journal includes a "transcript" of a prank phone call he made to a pet cemetery asking how much a funeral would cost for an 11-foot python that died swallowing a pig.)