The Loved One

The Loved One has a historical foundation in the author’s real-life experiences, which shaped his opinions of the American funeral industry and the Hollywood film business. In January 1947, Waugh and his wife took a trip to Los Angeles to confer with MGM studio people about the filming of his novel Brideshead Revisited. While in Southern California, Waugh toured Forest Lawn Memorial Park. He used the famous cemetery and mortuary as a model for the Whispering Glades mortuary in his novel.

In an article posted on the Evelyn Waugh Society’s website, Jeffrey Manley writes:

On the 1947 trip Waugh was keeping a diary, probably with the thought of using the experience for future writings. While Waugh never wrote a travel book describing the trip, he did use his experiences to write The Loved One, several articles on the film industry and its practitioners, as well as an article about American burial customs (Manley, Jeffrey. “75th Anniversary of Waugh’s Trip to Hollywood.” Evelyn Waugh Society, 31 Jan. 2022).

Journalist Ben Ehrenreich notes Waugh’s own opinions of American funeral rituals, which closely mirror the sentiments of his novel’s protagonist. Ehrenreich writes:

Southern California, home to the theme-park necropolis Forest Lawn, came to represent the apotheosis of America’s disturbingly ‘euphoric’ approach to mortality, to borrow Ariès’s term. Angelenos not only failed to tastefully ignore death, they did everything they could to render it sunny, cheerful, lifelike. To Evelyn Waugh, who parodied Forest Lawn in his 1948 novel The Loved One, such vulgarity was symptomatic of the “endless infancy” of West Coast culture (“The End: What Really Happens After You Die? Death in L.A. Can be an Odd Undertaking.” Los Angeles Magazine, 2016).

The Waugh quote about “endless infancy” reflects his feelings about the embalming process. The Loved One’s protagonist, Dennis Barlow, gives fictional voice to Waugh’s anti-embalming sentiments as well as his opinion of Los Angeles in a poem after the death of Sir Francis:

[…] I wept as I remembered how often you and I

Had laughed about Los Angeles and now ‘tis here you’ll lie;

Here pickled in formaldehyde and painted like a whore,

Shrimp-pink incorruptible, not lost nor gone before (76).

According to Ehrenreich’s article:

No aspect of American funereal ritual has been more consistently alarming to foreign observers than embalming, which is practiced nowhere else in the world with the near universality that it achieved in North America.

Journalist Jessica Mitford, too, lambasts embalming in her expose The American Way of Death. In the book, Mitford describes embalming as an expensive practice that has no scientific or medical merit—or any foundation in Judeo-Christian tradition. Waugh converted to Catholicism in 1930 and was a religious traditionalist, yet he clearly had no use for embalming or many other funeral industry practices.

According to Manley’s article “The Fruit of Whispering Glades,” published on September 14, 2017, on the Evelyn Waugh Society’s site, Mitford’s book was “inspired at least in part” by The Loved One, and “Evelyn Waugh reviewed her book positively” in a review titled “Embellishing the loved ones,” which appeared in the Sunday Times on September 29, 1963.