Proposals for projects will only be considered from students who have taken and performed well on creative writing related modules and have a 2.1 average.I qualify. Next I need a proposal. I prepare a mixture of genuine interest and pompous supporting guff. I have an idea. This is it:
Vile Bodies – an Adaptation.
The back cover of the Penguin Classics edition of the Sword of Honour Trilogy carries an enthusiastic recommendation of Waugh by Clive James,
'Waugh’s characters have inexorably established themselves among the enduring fictions … In this respect Waugh is in a direct line with Shakespeare and Dickens.'This proposal has been accepted. I am required to keep 'an online writing log with weekly dated entries.' This will be it although the strict weekly logging is not mandatory until my final semester and so early entries may be less frequent.
Now James is my favourite lyricist and a right clever bugger to boot, so I am quite pleased to find this affirmation of my own prejudice. But Waugh (whom I have loved since my teens) is, I now realise, not unproblematic. Reading Henry Green’s Loving (as part of the Fiction module in Year 1) Anthony Mellors nudged me into an acknowledgement of the snobbery implicit in Brideshead Revisited and as part of that module I compared the two novels, both published in 1945, both set around grand houses, but so markedly different in their perspectives and methods. This experience sent me back to other Waugh novels, most tellingly Vile Bodies.
I suppose Brideshead Revisited would collect most nominations as Waugh’s best novel, with honourable mentions for A Handful of Dust and the three novels of the Sword of Honour sequence. Vile Bodies would attract little or no attention. Even Stephen Fry’s film adaptation adopted a different title – Bright Young Things. Waugh himself affected dissatisfaction with the text, writing in his 1964 preface to a new edition,
'It is not a book I enjoy rereading but there are one or two funny scenes which redeem it from banality.'
This is an affectation we can overlook for this novel is, in Malcolm Bradbury’s words, ‘The high point of the original Waugh … the modernity of mood … matched by an equal modernity of style and manners.’ It also has a disconcerting, some might say discordant ending which I find completely fascinating. The anti-heroic Adam sits on ‘a splintered tree stump in the biggest battlefield in the history of the world’ and reads a letter from his former occasional fiancée Nina. He is then disturbed by a character hitherto known to us only as the Drunk Major, but by now sober and raised to generalship. Together they retrieve the General’s stricken Daimler which contains a case of champagne and a sleeping showgirl. Adam falls asleep and as the General seduces the showgirl, the sounds of battle begin to return ‘like a circling typhoon.’ All of this is comprised in a short chapter titled ‘Happy Ending’ and is utterly outside the context of the earlier plot centred on the parties and loveless passions of the bright young things whose outlook was blighted by the shadow of the Great War and in particular by their perception that its repetition was inevitable.
A stage adaptation of the text was written by H. Dennis Bradley and ran for six weeks in 1932 on the London stage. It has, so far as I can ascertain, never been revived. In his Notes to the Penguin edition of the novel Richard Jacobs describes the play-text as making for ‘dispiriting reading.’ Waugh himself deemed it ‘a very poor dramatic version.’ I am attempting to track down a copy of the play but have so far been unsuccessful.
Waugh suggested in the 1964 Preface that the bleak tone of the novel’s ending owed something to his desertion by his first wife during the book’s genesis. Again he seems to dismiss any greater significance, but I rather admire the jarring surreality of the final chapter and it is this atonal conflict which I would like to try to dramatise for the stage.
My proposal is to examine the potential for putting on stage a version of Vile Bodies which will pay sufficient attention to the bitter tone of the conclusion of Waugh’s novel. I do not believe it is sufficient to ignore this scene and to produce a merely comic representation of those hedonistic inter-war years. The particular pessimism of the era should not be overlooked in the light of the more optimistic tones provoked by the second ‘just’ World War. Waugh in fact was himself to debunk the romantic view of the second war in the Sword of Honour trilogy, whose title is an ironic comment upon the ceremonial gift of the British people to Stalin. There are even intimations of Waugh’s disillusionment with the prospects of a post-war Britain in Brideshead Revisited. Waugh was modest enough to acknowledge that his fears may have been exaggerated when he wrote a prologue to a 1959 edition of that novel,
'And the English aristocracy has maintained itself to a degree that then seemed impossible. The advance of Hooper has been held up at several points. Much of this book therefore is a panegyric preached over an open coffin.'
I believe this vivid analogy could equally well have been applied to the extraordinary conclusion of Vile Bodies. That conclusion speaks from a (mercifully misplaced) profound pessimism. A stage dramatisation of this book will need to acknowledge the spirit of its peculiar and challenging ending.
My proposal is to consider the adaptation of the text for the stage as a whole but clearly a complete adaptation would be longer than required by this module. I therefore intend to concentrate on the production of an outline structure for a stage version but then to write in full and for submission a scene or scenes comprising approximately 4000 words. In particular I wish to investigate how the spirit of the book’s ending can be honoured in the dramatic form. In undertaking this project I will consider previous adaptations of Waugh including both television and film versions of Brideshead Revisited (one of which works, the other doesn’t), the television adaptation of Sword of Honour, the film of A Handful of Dust, and numerous radio productions of Waugh's work.
