Vile Bodies was published in 1930. Hitler and the threat of fascism was still yet a few years on down the road, but already for many people what the world was like before it rallied together to fight off German pipedreams of conquest the first time around was already a hazy memory threatening to transform into myth. Evelyn Waugh was not one of those people. He definitely remembered what the world was like before the Great War and, what’s more, he was none too happy about what it had become in the aftermath.
Vile Bodies is a title somewhat more than ironic because it is not so much the body that is vile as the mind. Unless one reads the title as referring to the body politic—that social construct to which entire populations belong—in which case the entire body of post-World War I British consciousness and a good deal of the rest of the world was more than merely vile. It a rotting carcass of pure putrescence.
For many decades it was probably difficult of modern readers to really get a grasp on Vile Bodies. It just seems so far out of time and place with no distinct pop culture reference on which to hang. Then came along a little British TV show called Downton Abbey and suddenly there it was, a story about exactly what Waugh was talking about. Although not very similar in fact, the TV show and Waugh’s novel share the same psychic space. They both reference that time period of transition in British history when abstract concepts like honor, duty, morality, patriotism and selfless devotion to the bigger picture underwent turbulent reconstructions. Well, not really, but to people like Waugh it certainly seemed as though it had. Call it the Cult of Conservatism or whatever you wish, but the fundamental premise remains always the same: things were better back then.
Vile Bodies presents a never-ending stream of characters placed into an infinite number of circumstances in which the point always seems to be that people were better back in Waugh’s day. The opening line sets the situation and what follows thereupon confirms the premise: “It was clearly going to be a bad crossing.” The line refers, of course, specifically to a cruise liner, but symbolically it is talking about the crossing the line for society from the days before the Great War to the days in which Waugh was writing his novel. The title is a reference to what happens to the body when it begins to decay and rotting commences and the noxious gases of decomposition begin to stink up the joint. In this case, the decay is moral rather than physiological and the noxious stink is the death of civilization as defined by the British Empire circa 1913.
