Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh - To Be "Vile" Is To Go Through Life Without Passion

Evelyn Waughs second novel, Vile Bodies is his tribute to Londons smart set. It introduces us to society as it used to be but that now is gone forever, and probably for good.

To Be "Vile" Is To Go Through Life Without Passion
After the success of DECLINE AND FALL (1926), Evelyn Waugh followed one year later with VILE BODIES, which, while containing a few of the same characters, was not a sequel. However, in the world of Waugh, life in post World War I England was one in which the middle and upper class could no longer rely on the same eternal set of Edwardian rules that promised a continuation of a comfortable post Victorian mode of life. Once the shooting had stopped, Waugh saw that his generation was not made of the same stern stuff as his fathers'. He increasingly came to see his peers as frivolous and irrelevant. In VILE BODIES, he excoriates an entire generation, labelling them as chatty Prufrocks, who see the waste around them but choose to wallow in it without making much of an effort to get out. In short, Waugh saw them as passionless automatons who assumed a sense of life only when they vicariously become someone else.

Adam Fenwick-Symes is a typical Waugh hero: young, seemingly bright enough to be one of the Bright Young People, and unable to generate much passion about anything except feeling power about directing the lives of others. Adam is in love with Nina Blount. He has high hopes of marrying her, but he unexpectedly discovers that the Dover authorities have burned the manuscript for his auto-biography,leaving him destitute. Each time that he is on the verge of raising enough money for a wedding, events dissipate his funds, almost as if the Fates were determined to block their connubial bliss. Nowhere does Adam doggedly plan a wedding regardless. Instead the majority of the novel is a series of sad links in a chain of dispassionate reactions to disaster. One wonders what drives Adam and Nina even to continue to make plans for a probably non-existent future. And that is what I see as precisely the point of the book. Waugh saw the post war generation as lacking the passion and gumption of their Victorian forebears.

VILE BODIES is a witty and bitingly satirical poke at an emotional wasteland that was led by those who saw themelves as Bright and Fearless. Bright they may have been, but their fearlessness lay in a sort of saving stupidity. Had these Bright Young Things had the passion that Waugh sought, then their "vileness" might have altered for the better, strengthening them for a true test of character that lay only a decade ahead.

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