Finally, almost at the end of the article, Waugh describes the memento mori of the European tradition of funerary sculpture - "the corpse half decayed with marble worms writhing in the marble adipocere" - in such a way that he seems to be speaking of his own artistic project: "These macabre achievements were done with a simple moral purpose - to remind a highly civilized people that beauty was skin deep and pomp was mortal"(Essays 336-7).
This felicitous phrase is a late save for a sophisticated yet mulish and rancid article, the most presumptuous kind of travel writing. When the Forest Lawn article became The Loved One, however, the insights got lost in a cruder form of expostulation - for the first and only time in Waugh's longer fiction the satire is mostly topical. Thus, it falls within literary scholar Leon Guilhamet's category of "demonstrative satire," which "encompasses direct attack in the present tense against individuals or specific groups," is "the most vituperative of satiric expressions," and takes "quite naturally the shape of demonstrative rhetoric" (27).
BOOK
In other words, The Loved One is a travel-writer's withering editorial fitted out with a narrative, which leads to another peculiarity. Although the protagonist Dennis Barlow is a rogue on the order of the Basil Seal of Waugh's Black Mischief and Put Out More Flags, and although Waugh contemporaneously wrote in a letter of the "ineradicable caddishness" of all his heroes (Stannard 200), by comparison to the Southern Californian scene and populace Dennis ends up with a hero's pull.
Dennis is a 28-year-old English poet whose screenwriting contract with Megalopolitan Pictures has lapsed and who takes a job at the Happier Hunting Grounds, a pet cemetery, where his bosses like him because his melancholy and his accent give him a "reverent" air. The Happier Hunting Grounds patterns itself after Whispering Glades (itself modeled on Forest Lawn), where Dennis goes to arrange the funeral of Sir Francis Hinsley, an English artist who kills himself when his studio contract is not renewed. (Sir Francis had said to Dennis over drinks, "I am your memento mori. I am in deep thrall to the Dragon King. Hollywood is my life" (14).)
Dennis, "a young man of sensibility rather than of sentiment" (37), is himself "held… in thrall" (79) by the mystique of Whispering Glades and is particularly drawn to Aimée Thanatogenos, an apprentice cosmetician there. Aimée must decide between mother-loving Mr. Joyboy, Senior Mortician at Whispering Glades, and Dennis, who passes off classic English poetry as original compositions and plans to be ordained as a non-sectarian minister in order to impress her (but who must hide his job at the Happier Hunting Grounds from her). Aimée confides her romantic confusions to the Guru Brahmin, a newspaper advice columnist, who, eventually, tells her to jump off a building; instead she kills herself with a lethal injection in Mr. Joyboy's work-room. A desperate Mr. Joyboy asks Dennis to help him dispose of the corpse at the Happier Hunting Grounds; Dennis bargains for Mr. Joyboy's savings and returns to England, "carrying back… a great, shapeless chunk of experience, the artist's load" (163).
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