![]() ![]() In 1948, Evelyn Waugh introduced his novel The Loved One with a warning that his story, which he called a gruesome “little nightmare,” was not for the “squeamish.” He actually suggested that squeamish people should “return their copies to the library or the bookstore unread,” and save themselves from this mad, mortuary love-triangle. He found, in the end, wonderful material for a story to satirize the bizarre American funeral-home industry. He found vulgar euphemisms marketed and crafted by entrepreneurial racketeers. Waugh found in that “ theme-park necropolis” a grotesque denial of the reality of death, the opposite extreme of Donne’s holy sonnet. ![]() ( Walt Disney’s remains, along with those of myriad other celebrities, are enshrined there.) Mr. Waugh found the cemetery dripping with saccharine sentimentality, edged with macabre memorials, and repellent with cuteness. He had heard it praised as a place unsurpassed in beauty, taste, and sensitivity a place where “faith and consolation, religion and art had been brought to their highest possible association.” But Mr. When Evelyn Waugh came to Hollywood in 1947 to discuss the film rights for Brideshead Revisited, he visited a graveyard: Forest Lawn Memorial Park. ![]()
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