Loved One, The

The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy (1948) is a satirical novel by the English novelist Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) and is regarded by many critics as one of the best fictional works of the past century. The novel's unabashedly comic treatment of the subject of death and funeral customs was widely accepted by a postwar audience and paved the way for even more adventurous treatments of these themes in literature. The Loved One inspired critical examinations of the funeral industry and southern California's famous Forest Lawn Memorial Park in particular. The novel was also a progenitor of the “black humor” of the 1960s, evident in the 1965 film version of the novel.

Background and Summary

During a 1947 visit to California, Waugh made several visits to Glendale's Forest Lawn cemetery, which made an indelible impression. Once back in England, he immediately began work on a satirical novel based on American funeral customs. The novella's principal character is the young English poet Dennis Barlow, a typically bemused and passive Waugh anti-hero. Barlow is lodging in Los Angeles with the elderly expatriate screenwriter Sir Francis Hinsley. After being fired by the studio, Sir Francis commits suicide, leaving Dennis to deal with his remains. He visits the fabled Whispering Glades cemetery and meets the lovely cosmetician Aimée Thanatogenos (her first name comes from the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson—a resident of Forest Lawn—and her surname means “born of death” in Greek), who introduces him to the various services that the mortuary can provide his “loved one.”

Dennis becomes infatuated with Aimée, who seems more “decadent” and therefore more interesting than common American girls. Aimée and Dennis meet in a corner of Whispering Glades, where the girl tells him about how she became a cosmetician and about her love for transforming corpses. His rival is the expert embalmer Mr. Joyboy, known for his ability to put peaceful smiles on faces stiffened by rigor mortis. Dennis, meanwhile, toils away at the ovens of a pet cemetery, the Happier Hunting Ground, where he disposes of animal corpses while writing poetry. Joyboy offers Aimée a chance to become the first female embalmer at the cemetery and takes her home to meet his mother.

Aimée is torn between her admiration for Joyboy's professional skills and her love for Dennis's poetic nature and writes to a newspaper “advice-to-the-lovelorn” columnist, who is in reality the cigar-chewing Mr. Slump. Barlow pitches woo, but the romance comes to a sudden end when Aimée accompanies Mr. Joyboy to his mother's parrot's funeral and finds Dennis at the pet cemetery. She immediately decides to become engaged to the embalmer, and she and Dennis have a final meeting in which he expresses his cynicism about the funeral trade. Mr. Joyboy, on the other hand, proves to be more attached to his mother and her bird than his fiancée, leaving her in a state of agitation. After the advice columnist advises her to take a leap, she decides instead to return to Whispering Glades and commit suicide by taking cyanide and injecting herself with the embalming needle. Worried by the possible damage to his reputation arising from her death, Joyboy agrees to turn Aimée's corpse over for disposal in the animal crematorium, while Dennis cynically accepts hush money from both Joyboy and the expatriates, who pay him to take the next plane back to England.

...