This only leads to a further objection: it's one thing to suggest that Anglicans have put themselves out of the way of salvation, as Waugh does in A Handful of Dust, a jeremiadic claim with a basis in the rejection of the true church, in Waugh's view, by the Church of England. By contrast, saying that Americans are damned makes no sense because "American," as depicted here in Los Angeles circa 1947, doesn't represent a spiritual tradition. And if you specify American low-church Protestants like Aimée, as this last passage about her suggests, you're not describing The Loved One as Waugh wrote it, what with all the nonsense about deodorants and mouthwash and public schools, etc.
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.
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