Taking the Mickey Bliss out of a Loved One

Coffin shop, Warsaw, Poland. Photo: FastilyClone [CC BY 3.0] via Wikimedia.

The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I am on a journey to read all of Evelyn Waugh's work and The Loved One is regarded as one of his best. Reviewing the book for the New York Times on 23rd June 1948, Orville Prescott wrote that:

Mr Waugh has never written more brilliantly.

I was surprised that an American reviewer found the work so witty because it is a critique of all the worst of Hollywood's excess. (Apparently, it was written after Waugh had been in Hollywood, trying to adapt his most famous work, Brideshead Revisited, for the screen.) 

The term "the loved one" refers to the dead, and the story takes place between the Whispering Glades Memorial Park (a mortuary and cemetery) and the Happier Hunting Ground (a pet cemetery which mimics its well-regarded neighbour). 

The mimicry of great monuments in Whispering Glades (built in modern materials with modern "improvements" to the originals) reminded me of The Venetian casino in Macau, where the inside is a wonderful replica of Venice, including canals, gondolas, singing gondoliers and random arias sung from the fake buildings that line the canals. (It is so good it is obviously fake, much like modern movies that use so much CGI they are more like cartoons than motion pictures.) 

The dark satire follows a bizarre love triangle and the various tragedies that occur are oddly humorous. Prescott suggests that Waugh's novella is short, but thankfully so, because:

At times the joke wears thin, the continued attack seems a little too much like beating a demonstrably dead dog.

The joke is not just on American excess, but on the British in Hollywood and their bizarre attempts to maintain a sense of empire, despite their empire all-but having fallen apart by the time the novella was written. Waugh's satire is very sharp. It isn't so much tongue in cheek or deadpan, but rather so real that you can tell it is false. Hemingway may well have approved. 

That Waugh was an admirer of Hemingway is evident in an interview with The Paris Review in 1963:

I think that Hemingway made real discoveries about the use of language in his first novel, The Sun Also Rises. I admired the way he made drunk people talk.

But the thing with Waugh is that one can never be sure. Is he taking the mickey or is he serious? The point is that he is taking the mickey, but from what I can gather of Waugh's work so far, there are some serious themes underlying the dark humour. As Hemingway wrote in Esquire in October 1935 (By-Line, p. 221):

Good writing is true writing. If a man is making a story up it will be true in proportion to the amount of knowledge of life that he has and how conscientious he is; so that when he makes something up it is as it would truly be.

I now see echoes of Waugh in Colson White's Underground Railway: you know it is fake but it is so well written it is entirely believable. Not like CGI, which is clearly fake, but in a way that one can suspend reality long enough to truly believe the story. Even if I do still shudder a little when I think of the goings on at the mortuary, the idea of fake presented as real is a key theme. 

Take, for instance, Waugh's protagonist, the failed poet Dennis Barlow, whose plagiarism is so good that it is largely undetected. Unless, of course, the target of his plagiarised poetry is too stupid to notice. Of Barlow's "girlfriend", Prescott wrote:

Her IQ was little above idiocy.

Perhaps this is closer to the point. The fakery is so real that we blindly accept stupidity as truth, yet we are too vain to notice the difference. Waugh was indeed brilliant, and that I am unable to tell when he is taking the mickey is probably more a case of him telling me that we are taking the mickey out of ourselves.

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An Encyclopaedia of Procrastination and Substance Abuse?

Mayan music and rituals: painting at Bonampak, Chiapas, Mexico.
Photo: Jacobolus [CC BY-SA 2.0] via Wikimedia.

Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This work is an encyclopaedia of daily rituals, rather than a coherent story. I found it to be interesting and useful in thinking about my own daily rituals. 

Many of the entries are of people I have not heard of before. This was useful because many of these same people had to find time between work and home life to practise their craft. 

One of the problems with looking for inspiration from great artists is that many of them had significant others who did all the daily chores. So many of the greats could shut themselves off from the world around them for long stretches of time - usually while someone else did the cooking and cleaning and laundry or else supported them financially in the early stages. 

For most people, having someone else act as a live-in personal servant is a pipe dream. That doesn't mean that the daily rituals of great artists are not useful when considering one's own rituals, but it does require some realistic adjustments. For example, almost all of the great artists' rituals recorded in this encyclopaedia relied heavily on alcohol, cigarettes, coffee, and/or drugs, with many of them not living very long at all. It seems almost like cheating; if artists were athletes, we wouldn't see their exploits as so remarkable. 

The book is good as an aside, and you can read one or a few entries at a time, but it is not a traditional read. There is an excellent list of references and notes at the back for further reading. I intend to put this book to good use to refine my own writing routine and there is plenty of food for thought about various ways to get work done and to overcome procrastination. Even without drugs.

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The Wisdom of Mr Palomar

Swallow Dance (1878) by Utagawa Hiroshige and Utagawa Hiroshige III [Public Domain] via Wikimedia.

Mr Palomar by Italo Calvino

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Harold Bloom mentions in How to Read and Why (pp.64-66) why Italo Calvino was one of the greatest short story writers and refers specifically to Calvino's "wisdom" (p. 64). Calvino's wisdom is not wanting in this collection of short stories centred on the life of Mr Palomar. 

Each section of the book focuses on a particular activity of Mr Palomar's in various locations, with each story within the theme based around a particular sub-theme. I have often read of literary "constellations" (p. 107), where literature in sum forms "an imaginary outline or meaningful pattern" not in the sky, but in the mind. 

At first, Mr Palomar appears to be suffering from some kind of introverted social awkwardness. Yet as the stories progress, Calvino's wisdom shines through as I began to identify with Palomar and to see his own wisdom beyond his apparent social ineptitude. What I discovered was that Mr Palomar was self-aware, to the point where he is conscious of his failings yet continues to deceive himself. Yet (p. 107):

The universe can perhaps go tranquilly about its business; he surely cannot. The road left open to him is this: he will devote himself from now on to the knowing of himself, he will explore his own inner geography, he will draw the diagram of the moods of his spirit, he will derive from it formulas and theories, he will train his telescope on the orbits of the course of his life rather than those of the constellations.

Here is where I made the connection with Bloom. Bloom often writes of characters "overhearing" themselves, but Calvino makes Mr Palomar "overlook" himself, finding:

We can know nothing about what is outside us, if we overlook ourselves... the universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves.

This link between the individual and environment echoes James Allen's "environment is but his looking glass" (Calvino writes "The universe as mirror") when writing of the interaction between inner and outer life (but with a sense of manifestation of inward conditions on the outside). Palomar laments that he is not like this (104):

To the man who is friend of the universe, the universe is a friend.

Recently, I have been learning more about induction versus deduction in terms of my academic work. Here, Calvino outlines how Mr Palomar is a deductivist (p. 98), rather than an inductivist, and how Palomar likes to construct models of principles and experience, and to force things into the model when experience fails to live up to his model.

Yet for all Mr Palomar's attempts to remain aloof, his models never fit, and when he looks away from the rational geometric designs of his models, he sees human suffering, much like a person who tries to deny their emotions until the pot boils over and the emotions spill out. I came to see much of myself, and dare I say much of all of us, in Mr Palomar. 

The stories seem to grow like a human, from childhood to adolescence, to age and wisdom. My fondness for Mr Palomar grew as his journey progressed. There is much material for introspection in this work, and I found that my selfish desire to introspect through, rather than with, Mr Palomar, was forgiven by Calvino at the conclusion. 

A remarkable work with a tenor that does not, to the best of my knowledge, exist anywhere in Anglophone writing.

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