In 1947 Evelyn Waugh visited California for the first time, with the hope of agreeing terms for a Hollywood film of Brideshead Revisited. (He turned down an offer of at least $125000 for the film rights though he needed money most of his life. His reasons were that the film-makers saw the novel as a love story and wished to eliminate the religious message, and that they refused to concede him the right of final approval. Recent research has shown that the film company, in investigating the suitability of the book for filming, had fallen foul of the Hays Code, which stated that ‘The sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home shall be upheld. Pictures shall not infer that low forms of sex relationships are the accepted or common thing’. It seems that Charles and Julia’s relationship in the book infringed this article.)
While in California Waugh became fascinated by the cemetery of Forest Lawn, which he visited several times. In a letter to his agent A.D. Peters he wrote ‘It is wonderful literary raw material.’ It gave him the background for articles and for the novel The Loved One as well as for this radio talk. If you wish to investigate this topic further, I have put his article Half in Love with Easeful Death (The Tablet, 18th October 1947) on a separate page here.
LISTEN to
excerpts from Evelyn Waugh’s original talk.
The file is in mp3 form,
is 394 KB long, and takes about 90 seconds to download at normal telephone
speeds. The excerpt lasts 100 seconds.
Behind the largest wrought-iron gates in the world lie three hundred acres of parkland judiciously planted with evergreen, for no plant that sheds its leaf has a place there. The visitor is soothed by countless radios concealed about the vegetation which perpetually discourse the Hindu Love-Song and other popular melodies, and the amplified twittering of caged birds.
Embalming is so widely practised in California that many believe it to be a legal obligation. We are very far here from the traditional conception of the adult soul naked at the judgment-seat and a body turning to corruption. In Forest Lawn, as the Builder claims, these old values are reversed. The body does not decay; it lives on, more chic in death than ever before, in an indestructible class A steel and concrete shelf. The soul goes straight from the Slumber Room to Paradise, where it enjoys an endless infancy. That, I think, is the Message.
To those of us too old-fashioned to listen respectfully, there is the hope that we may find ourselves, one day beyond Time, standing at the balustrade of Heaven among the unrecognisably grown-up denizens of Forest Lawn and, leaning there beside them, amicably gaze down on Southern California and share with them the huge joke of what the Professors of Anthropology will make of it all.
