The Loved Ones - an ode to/from Evelyn Waugh

Last week I picked up an erratically highlighted version of The Loved Ones by Evelyn Waugh. Touted as "a dark and savage satire on the Anglo-American cultural divide" I read it more as a misguided love story surrounded by death. 

British Dennis Barlow is an uncouth pet mortician while his love interest Aimee Thanatogenos (her name roughly translates to “beloved of the race of death”) is Waugh's imagined "typical American woman": feeble in intellect, indecisive, sentimental, perpetually immature. But at least she works in a super classy cemetery and is also being courted by the head mortician, an artist in his own right. 

Funny but somewhat surreal, the book was lent an additional layer by the streaks of orange my anonymous highlighter provided...including some words and phrases on the cover and on the copyright page! In an effort to provide meaning perhaps I will transcribe them here. I know that you'll never read it to the bottom but beware spoilers.

Read into them as you will: 

nourishing taproot of tradition
1948
they don't expect you to listen.

It's the secret of social ease in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard."

fatuously called the "right" side of sixty
he now aspired to the honours of age.

one gets in a groove and loses touch.

Beverly Hills.

Bel Air.

doyen
colleen.

gloaming
monacles
The time was apt for
toddling.

five-to-two
We can't all be at the top pf the tree
ate at drug-stores.

I always think how much better not to have anything to atone for, eh?

The head-lamps of the waiting car spread a brilliant fan of light
Hollywood Boulevard.

prune and polish
a young man of genius,
Hollywood is my life.

The studios keep us going with a pump. We are still just capable of a few crude reactions--nothing more. If we ever got disconnected from our bottle, we should simply crumble.

Once or twice when I was in liquor.

Whispering Glades Memorial Park,
hatted and freshly painted.

sombre good taste
carbolic,
these were the branded drug,
as a monk will repeat a simple pregnant text, over and over again in prayer.
Presently the telephone rang.

207 Via Dolorosa, Bel Air.

incineration?"

"The best will be good enough."

niche in our columbarium
Grade A service
Happier Hunting Grounds

Artists are by nature versatile and precise; they only repine when involved with the monotonous and the makeshift.

buzz-bombs
umbrageous
others had their pets emabalmed
she-bear
It is forbidden by California law to scatter human remains from an aeroplane
snakes-and-ladders
house-match
equanimity
leaden effort
moke
maybe you feel kind of allergic to the assignment?"

has been,"
footled
right here right now."

urbanity
Britisher
How say
wop
blunt Nordic terms
pudgily
fishmongering
cordwaining
englishry.

tocsin.

yeoman
false and fruity tones
we all suffer for the folly of one.

In a world of competition people are taken at their face value. Everything depends on reputation-- 'face' as they say out East. Lose that and you lose everything.

Times without number
necropolis
news-sheets
patois
Golden Gates.

They were vast, the largest in the world,
gabled,
pigeon-cote.

Whispering Glades,
Mortuary Hostess.

Before Need Arrangements.

inhumement, entombment, inurnment
immurement,
insarcophagusment.

The casket is placed inside a sealed sarcophagus, marble or bronze, and rests permanently above ground in a niche in the mausoleum.

The Park is zoned. Each zone has its own name and appropriate Work of Art. Zones of course vary in price and within the zones the prices vary according tot heir proximity to the Works of Art.

starting
mottled
cornice.

They fixed that stiff,"
"so he looked like it was his wedding day. The boys up there surely know their job. Why if he'd sat on an atom bomb, they'd make him look presentable."

slipping on her professional manner again as though it were a pair of glasses,
Waiting Ones
leave-taking
Something dark is best to set off the flowers."

sacristy chest
apotheosis
Slumber-Room
leave-taking
chaise-longue
pince-nez.

half-exposure in the casket,
chaise-longue?"

The leave-taking is a very very great source of consolation. Often the Waiting Ones last saw their Loved Ones on a bed of pain surrounded by all the gruesome concomitants of the sick room or the hospital. Here they see them as they knew them in buoyant life, transfigured with peace and happiness.

a last beautiful memory on the mind."

I am a foriegner. I have no intention of dying here."

morbid reflexions.

death is not a private tragedy of your own but the general lot of man.

Hamlet
'Know that death is common; all that live must die.'

the Chinese were said subtly to distinguish one from another of their seemingly uniform race,
Mortuary Hostess
croon
livery
crimson grease;
photographs
They are the greatest help in re-creating personality.

"Braces.

suspenders."

leave-taking
'Burn him up cheap.
Folks pretend to love their pets,
sortie
redolent
embalming rooms
inclined china slabs,
pressure pumps,
deep gutters
heavy smell of formaldehyde.

cosmetic rooms with their smell of shampoo and hot hair and acetone and lavender.

paunchy.

nugatory
He had only to be seen with a corpse to be respected.

voice assumed a peculiar tone when she spoke to him.

carotid suture
Radiant Childhood smile."

Waiting One
Loved Ones
swirling and gurgling of taps in the embalming rooms,
rubbery cheeks
Within two hours the main task was complete.

but the oeuvre was designed for the amber glow of the Slumber Room
blue stipple work around the eyelids
"A tendency to open in the inside corner?"

I worked a little cream under the lid and then firmed it with No. 6."

When I send a Loved One into you, I feel as though I were speaking to you through him."

Had they been mother and child I should have taken both,
There is something in individual technique -- not everyone would notice it perhaps; but if I saw a pair that had been embalmed by different hands I should know at once and I should feel that the child did not properly belong to its mother; as though they had been estranged in death.

outfitters
raised the arms and set the hands together, not in a form of prayer, but folded one on the other in resignations. He raised the head, adjusted the pillow and twisted the neck so that a three-quarter face was exposed to view.

leave-taking in the Slumber Room.

ante-room
hot-house
cornice.

cumulus
catalfalque.

as ageless as a tortoise and as inhuman;
holm-oaks
Whispering Glades held him in thrall.

sat in purdah, hidden from curious glances.

langurous,
lychgate
guichet.

abstracted
miasma
unregarded
coxswain
Animals are a headache in cemeteries.

Annual.

they appreciate the privacy, too, same as cats."

bosky
wattle
haricots
simple bronze plaques; flush with the turf. bore the most august names in the commercial life of Los Angeles.


peace cane dropping slow,
fruiterer.

verisimilitude.

pickled in formaldehyde
painted like a whore,
Shrimp-pink incorruptible,
irrefragable
a treatment needing special Soul;
Do you think anything can be a great art which is so impermanent?

Once you start changing a name, you see, there's no reason to stop. One always hears one that sounds better.

between psychology and art and Chinese, you had the mortuary in view?"

blue rinse and set,
the Dreamer
I was just glad to serve people that couldn't talk.

I'm just a handmaid to the morticians
carillon
laid his card along the teeth and gums.

grim line of endurance,
We know cases who have only experienced real love after several years of marriage and the arrival of Junior.

a stamped and addressed
he is British and therefore in many ways quite Un-American.

he is cynical at things which should be Sacred.

barbary goat
columbarium."

sing an orison
bran-tub
They have proved themselves in the lowlier tasks to be worthy of the higher.

the Dreamer
embalmers' room
swish and hiss of the taps,
oilcloth curtains
dabbed herself under the arms with a preparation designed to seal the sweatglands,
first freshness
The truth is that morticians, however eminent, are no paid like film stars.

The mothers of great men often disconcert their son's admirers.

pince-nez
positively insulting clothes.

tartarean
You would say, would you not, that a non-sectarian clergy-man was the social equivalent of an embalmer?"

belfry
tartan
dalliance
rough-hewn
BRUCE.

CANTY
skirl
hogmanay,
maun
crapulous.

missive
spoke the tongue of Los Angeles;
eagle-haunted passes
An umbilical cord of cafe and fruit shops,
ministrations
swilling out corpses.

on the horns of a dilemma
Whispering Glades the most wonderful thing outside heaven.

'half in love with easeful death'
you're the nautch
spasmodic
the instruments and chemicals which are the staples of feminine well-being,
barbituates
the staple of feminine repose.

It came at length brusquely, perfunctorily, without salutation or caress. There was no delicious influx, touching, shifting, lifting, setting free and afloat the grounded mind.

the empty streets flamed with light.

The East lightened. In all the diurnal revolution these first fresh hours alone are untainted by men.

the slopes became a dancing surface of light,
mortuary
incuriously
sheeted dead.

Aimee's death Dennis
rival in love, Mr. Joyboy.

these are wild words."

nutburger?

"Cyanide. Self-administered."

abandoned weeping.

Panegyrics
collecting-van.

allow me an old man's privilege
Even among the best you find a few rotters.

No one in Southern California, as you know, ever inquires what goes beyond the mountains.

penury.

Whispering Glades was ideally equipped for the smooth movement of bodies.

man-handled their load to the crematorium.
apposite,
madcap,
stylists
filmdom
American ethos...
mass-mind of America,
the compulsion to 'package everything, even love and death...