The Loved One

The Memorial Park

Waugh visited California in 1947 to discuss the adaptation of Brideshead Revisited for Hollywood — a project that came to nothing — and returned with the material for his sharpest satirical novella. What he found in California was, in his view, a culture that had systematized the evasion of death to a degree that only Americans could achieve: Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, where the dead were referred to as “loved ones,” the headstones as “memorial tablets,” and the process of dying as something to be passed through with the minimum possible acknowledgement that anything ending was happening.

The Loved One takes place in the fictional Whispering Glades, Mann’s direct portrait of Forest Lawn, and in the studios of the Hollywood British community — a collection of English writers, actors, and directors who have come to California to make money and stay long enough to lose whatever it was that brought them. Dennis Barlow, a young British poet with genuine but stalled talent, works at a pet cemetery, which exists at a satirically significant relationship to Whispering Glades: the same aesthetics, the same vocabulary, the same systematic denial, applied to the deaths of animals rather than people.

Dennis attends the funeral of a British colleague at Whispering Glades and meets Aimée Thanatogenos, a cosmetician employed to make the dead presentable for their memorial ceremonies. His courtship of Aimée, conducted largely through the poetry of others delivered as his own, constitutes the novella’s romantic plot; the satire of Whispering Glades itself constitutes its satirical argument.

Death Without Death

The argument is straightforward but the execution is devastating. Whispering Glades is dedicated to the proposition that death can be processed, administered, and aestheticized until it no longer feels like what it is. The staff are trained to speak a language from which any acknowledgement of mortality has been removed. The facilities — the non-denominational chapel, the Hall of Poets with its reproductions, the carefully maintained lawns and gardens — are designed to produce in the bereaved a sense that their loss is occurring in a context of beauty, comfort, and institutional competence. Nothing about this is intended as comfort for grief; it is designed to prevent grief from being recognized as what it is.

Waugh’s novella was published in 1948, and its satire of the American funeral industry became the direct inspiration for Jessica Mitford’s 1963 investigative classic The American Way of Death. But where Mitford wrote journalism, Waugh wrote fiction, and the difference is that fiction can do what journalism cannot: show the comedy and the horror simultaneously, without reducing either to the other.

The novella’s ending — Aimée’s death and the disposal of her body by Dennis through the cremation facilities of his pet cemetery — is Waugh at his blackest, entirely composed, refusing all sentimentality while ironically delivering the ultimate satirical punch: that the systematic denial of death produces its own deaths, and that the system processes these too.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — Waugh’s most concentrated satirical achievement — a novella about American death-denial that remains, seven decades later, entirely accurate.

The Hollywood British

The expatriate British community in Hollywood that Waugh portrays in The Loved One is one of his sharpest sociological observations. These are people who came to California to make money from the film industry and stayed long enough to acquire the particular pathology of the comfortable exile: no longer quite English, certainly not American, maintaining the forms of their class and culture in a context that has made those forms absurd. Sir Francis Hinsley, who employs Dennis Barlow and whose suicide opens the novel’s action, is the type precisely rendered — a man who came to Hollywood with a reputation and stayed until the reputation became useless, his English credentials converting, over time, into a kind of novelty value that the studios eventually ceased to need.

Dennis Barlow is younger and less defeated than his elders, but Waugh presents his talent as genuinely stalled — he is capable of better than he does, and he knows it, and the knowledge does not produce any particular urgency. His decision to work at the Happier Hunting Ground, the pet cemetery that mirrors Whispering Glades in every aesthetic detail, is less a moral choice than a default: it pays, it is available, and it requires nothing of him that he is unable to provide. That the cemetery’s practices are indistinguishable from those of its human counterpart is Waugh’s satirical point made structural.

Aimée Thanatogenos

The figure of Aimée — whose name means “beloved” in French and whose surname means “born of death” in Greek — is Waugh’s most concentrated symbolic creation: a young woman who has been entirely formed by the aesthetics of Whispering Glades, who genuinely believes in the beauty and dignity it manufactures, and who is destroyed when the two men who want her — Dennis, who uses her sentiment; Mr Joyboy, the head embalmer, who shares it — force her to choose between forms of manipulation she cannot distinguish. Her consultation of the Guru Brahmin, an agony-column columnist who is not a guru and barely a journalist, for guidance on her romantic dilemma is one of the novel’s funniest and most devastating passages: the manufactured wisdom of the mass market dispensing advice on a situation the mass market has helped create.

The Satirical Target

Waugh was clear that his target in The Loved One was not death itself or even the American relationship to death as a universal human experience, but something more specific: the mid-twentieth century American commercial processing of death into a consumer product, with the same logic of comfort, aesthetics, and institutional reassurance that applied to the selling of any other commodity. The memorial park as a marketing concept — the “loved one” as a vocabulary designed to prevent any acknowledgement that what is being sold is the disposal of a corpse — represented, for Waugh, the most complete available example of a culture’s refusal to acknowledge reality when acknowledging it would be bad for business.

Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death (1963), which drew directly on Waugh’s novella, made the same argument in journalism. Waugh made it first, in fiction, and with more economy.