It is not necessary, since such a short time has elapsed since the publication of ‘Decline and Fall’, to say that ‘Vile Bodies’ is an extremely funny book. It may not contain any such endearing character as Grimes, but it deals out situation after situation that is authentically comic. Deals out is the right expression; for there is in Mr. Waugh’s apparently casual but actually intricate technique some analogy to a card game. The smooth glossy pieces of paste-board with their conventional design fall before one: the scenes, some of them only a few lines long, by which Mr. Waugh can evoke the atmosphere of a party drearily held by the Bright Young People in a captive dirigible, or an evening at the Rectory when the Colonel has fused the electric light by showing, unasked, his homemade film, and the Rector and his wife finding themselves faced by the prospect of spending Christmas week-end in darkness, or any other focus of human passion. These sort themselves out into suits. There are the spades, the souls sad, however gay, doomed to destruction, however much they wriggle with excess of vitality, such as the gossipwriters (‘At Archie Schwert’s party the fifteenth Marquess of Vanburgh, Earl Vanburgh de Brendon, Baron Brendon, Lord of the Five Isles and Hereditary Grand Falconer to the Kingdom of Connaught, said to the eighth Earl of Balcairn, Viscount Erdinge, Baron Cairn of Balcairn, Red Knight of Lancaster, Count of the Holy Roman Empire and Chenonceaux Herald to the Duchy of Aquitaine, “Hullo,” he said. “Isn’t this a repulsive party? What are you going to say about it?” for they were both of them, as it happened, gossipwriters for the daily papers’) and the deplorable Miss Runcible, who spins like a top at parties, at the motorrace (quite a marvellous piece of reporting here), in the nursing-home till she topples over into dementia and death. There are the clubs, not so fatal as the spades, but still low-priced and fatuous, such as the wastrels who sit and drink with Lottie Crump in her frowsty Shepheard’s Hotel, and the drunken major whose appearances on occasions of public rejoicing give such a dreadful rhythm to the book. There are the diamonds; nobody writing in English has more vividly recorded the horrible magnificence of those whose success stands for nothing honourable or valid than Mr. Waugh when he writes of Lord Metroland, the Circumferences, Mr. Outrage, Lord Monomark. There are the hearts, Adam and Nina, in any other age than this inevitably the raw material for romance, In the monosyllabic conversations of these two, brief as canary cheep,

Mr. Waugh has done something as technically astonishing as the dialogues in Mr. Ernest Hemingway’ s ‘Farewell to Arms’, so cunningly does he persuade the barest formula to carry a weight of intense emotion. There is a game played between these suits, and in the game it is no use declaring hearts. The spades and the clubs and the diamonds score all over them. The book ends with the outbreak of another war, which the author plainly welcomes as the only way of sweeping the cards off the table and beginning a fresh game, an extremity of desperation which makes his work as touching as it is amusing. ‘Vile Bodies’ has, indeed, apart from its success in being really funny, a very considerable value as a further stage in the contemporary literature of disillusionment. That may be said to have started with T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’. Although that work had a supreme emotional effect it was not easy to guess what Mr. Eliot was disillusioned with, and why. He specifically referred his disillusionment to a contemporary state of discontent but did nothing to establish the connection, and a scrutiny of his work suggested that what he was suffering from was an eternally recurrent condition, to which he was attaching undue importance because of a false identification. He had mistaken the malaise that comes on most artists before they create for the whole of his creative experience, and had restricted both his subject material and his treatment to its limitations. This mistake was able to survive and even put on intellectual airs, because Mr. Eliot pointed for evidence that his was a mood of universal importance to this generation’s distaste for life. Then came Mr. Aldous Huxley, whose contribution to the literature of disillusionment left no doubt whatsoever as to what he was disillusioned with, and why. Human beings were, it seemed, equally apelike in their lives and their excretions; highest and lowest were remarkably alike. A scrutiny of his work-suggested that Mr. Huxley was a person of acute insight who (inspired by the researches of certain psychologists) had looked into the human mind and had been shocked by certain regressive forces therein; and had, in the artist’s desire to share his experiences, been tempted into fabricating a universe in which these forces were represented as being much more dominant and less censored than they are. But for this vision of the universe he too gained credence by pointing to this generation’s distaste for life, and claiming that they felt it because they saw with his eyes. Now Mr. Evelyn Waugh comes along to define this distaste, and it rather knocks on the head these attempts to capitalize it. Young people, he tells us, are disgusted with the world because it is full of those who drink too much and think too little. One is willing to concede that the world is full of such, and that their proceedings are loathsome; but one must argue against the assumption that this is anything new. The world that is described