Coffin Corner

The Loved One! My mind goes back to the Paris winter of 1947, to my room in a mangy Left Bank hotel— no heat, no elevator or hot water running, and usually the electricity going off all over the city about five o’clock. I used to keep my duffle coat on with the hood up even indoors, in those days when one could still get the genuine naval-surplus ones from Gamages. Several afternoons a week my Irish friend Hugh would drop in, and after the lights failed we would head down the Boulevard Saint-Michel to Duponts (où tout est bon!’), slip the waiter twenty francs under the table for two empty cups and a pot of water so that we could mix our own Nescafé by candlelight. Nescafé had become the universal exchange medium, superseding cigarettes and supplanting etchings in the come-on jokes.

That was the winter Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One appeared, taking up a whole issue of Cyril Connolly’s Horizon. I might have suspected that Waugh had something of the kind in mind after reading his article on American burial customs in the Tablet, but I did not. My first inkling was when Hugh came pounding on my door one early afternoon, a copy of the grey-covered magazine in his hand. “You must read this!” he almost shouted. “I’ll leave it with you and be back in two hours. You can finish it by then.”

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Francis Russell

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The Loved One! My mind goes back to the Paris winter of 1947, to my room in a mangy Left Bank hotel— no heat, no elevator or hot water running, and usually the electricity going off all over the city about five o’clock. I used to keep my duffle coat on with the hood up even indoors, in those days when one could still get the genuine naval-surplus ones from Gamages. Several afternoons a week my Irish friend Hugh would drop in, and after the lights failed we would head down the Boulevard Saint-Michel to Duponts (où tout est bon!’), slip the waiter twenty francs under the table for two empty cups and a pot of water so that we could mix our own Nescafé by candlelight. Nescafé had become the universal exchange medium, superseding cigarettes and supplanting etchings in the come-on jokes.

That was the winter Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One appeared, taking up a whole issue of Cyril Connolly’s Horizon. I might have suspected that Waugh had something of the kind in mind after reading his article on American burial customs in the Tablet, but I did not. My first inkling was when Hugh came pounding on my door one early afternoon, a copy of the grey-covered magazine in his hand. “You must read this!” he almost shouted. “I’ll leave it with you and be back in two hours. You can finish it by then.”