Entertainer

VILE BODIES--Evelyn Waugh--Cape & Smith ($2.50).

Author Evelyn Waugh, very conscious member of the post-War generation, writes so brightly, wittily, entertainingly that you may swallow this sugar pill of a novel almost without tasting its bitter centre.

Adam Fenwick-Symes has just finished his autobiography in Paris and is bringing it home, but the manuscript is confiscated by the authorities in Dover as obscene. So he becomes a society-gossip writer for a London newspaper: his column, getting more and more imaginative, becomes more and more successful until one day he goes too far. Then he lives on credit, and on the hopes of collecting -L-35,000 which a drunken major wins for him on a horse race. He and the major occasionally meet but always lose each other before the money can change hands. Adam is in love with Nina Blount, who sends him to see her eccentric father in the country and ask him for some money so they can be married. Colonel Blount, whose two passions are the cinema and forgetting people, cheerfully signs a check for -L-1,000; when Adam triumphantly shows it to Nina that evening, she calls his attention to the signature. It is signed "Charlie Chaplin.'' So Nina marries the other man.

Through the wildly grotesque back-ground of this superficially grotesque story revolve the figures of: Mrs. Melrose Ape and her troupe of traveling angels. Chastity, Divine Discontent, etc.; the sinister ubiquitous, omniscient Father Rothschild, the Honorable Walter Outrage, "last week's Prime Minister," Agatha Runcible, loudest if not brightest of the Bright Young People, Lottie Crump, proprietress of the crazy London hotel (it really exists) where everyone drinks champagne from dawn to dusk, where bills are infrequent, irregular, but inescapable.

Author Evelyn Waugh, young (in his 50's), has also written Decline and Fall.

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