Front matter
Reading edition
A NOVEL BY
EVELYN WAUGH
CHAPMAN & HALL
LONDON
FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1930
THIS EDITION, RESET, 1965
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
BUTLER & TANNER LTD
FROME & LONDON
CATALOGUE NO. 4/5055/02
WITH LOVE TO
BRYAN MOYNE AND DIANA MOSLEY
Preface
This was a totally unplanned novel. I had the facility at the age of 25 to sit down at my table, set a few characters on the move, write 3000 words a day, and note with surprise what happened. The composition of Vile Bodies was interrupted by a sharp disturbance in my private life and was finished in a very different mood from that in which it was begun. The reader may, perhaps, notice the transition from gaiety to bitterness.
It was the first of my books to be a popular success. Decline and Fall had been well reviewed but its sales in its first year were small, fewer than 3000 copies if I remember rightly. Vile Bodies caught the public fancy for extraneous reasons. ‘The Bright Young People’ with whom it deals, and of whom I was a member rather on the fringe than in the centre, were one of the newspaper topics of the time. They were totally unlike the various, publicized groups of modern youth, being mostly of good family and education and sharp intelligence, but they were equally anarchic and short-lived. The jargon most of us spoke came new to the novel reader and so captivated one prominent dramatic critic that for weeks he introduced into articles week after week: ‘ “Too sick-making”, as Mr Waugh would say.’ There was also a pretty accurate description of Mrs Rosa Lewis and her Cavendish Hotel, just on the brink of their decline but still famous. I think I can claim that this was the first English novel in which dialogue on the telephone plays a large part. For reasons of novelty the many gross faults were overlooked. There were not many comic writers at that time and I filled a gap. I began under the brief influence of Ronald Firbank but struck out for myself. It is not a book I enjoy re-reading but there are one or two funny scenes which redeem it from banality. I like Colonel Blount, though he is a figure from conventional farce. He was brilliantly played by Athol Stewart in a very poor dramatic version. I may add that at the time I invented ‘Father Rothschild’ I had never met a Jesuit.
E. W.
Combe Florey 1964
‘Well in our country,’ said Alice, still panting a little, ‘you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.’
‘A slow sort of country!’ said the Queen. ‘Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!’
‘If I wasn’t real,’ Alice said—half laughing through her tears, it all seemed so ridiculous—‘I shouldn’t be able to cry.’
‘I hope you don’t suppose those are real tears?’ Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt.
—ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS