Evelyn Waugh, like Adam Fenwyck-Symes, was very much at the heart of modern life in the 1920s. By his friends’ accounts and his own, Waugh indulged in about every fad, fashion, and lifestyle that raged through the generation lost between the two world wars. He loved modernist poetry, unlike his Edwardian father. He was attracted to socialism and cubism, to Hemmingway and (by many accounts) homosexuality—each an unavoidable presence in Oxford at that time. His early essays and editorials display the usual undergraduate disdain for gray heads and old ideas. He wrote in 1921 of his own generation, “they will be above all things, clear-sighted, they will have no use for phrases or shadows. In the nineteenth century the old men saw visions and the young men dreamed dreams. The youngest generation are going to be very hard and analytical … and they will not call their aim ‘Truth.’”

The effect that the First World War had on Waugh’s generation cannot be overstated. Much like the Vietnam war’s impact on the hippie generation, the Great War opened an immense cultural gulf between the Edwardians and the Bright Young Things. The latter believed that the war was an unnecessary tragedy caused by their parents’ pride and false nobility. Humphrey Carpenter illustrates this in his indispensable work, The Brideshead Generation: “Evelyn’s generation’s attitude to the Great War is evoked in Nancy Mitford’s first novel, where a young aesthete states to a returned soldier: ‘We haven’t exactly forgotten it, but it was never anything to do with us. It was your war and I hope you enjoyed it, that’s all.’”

In Vile Bodies, Waugh tells a story of similar feeling. Written in 1930, the novel was the last written before Waugh converted to Catholicism. He had begun his literary career as a satirist of the sacred idols of modern England. Critics praised his first two novels for their heartlessness. The Fortnightly Review compared Vile Bodies to Eliot’s "The Waste Land" and added it to the canon of “contemporary literature of disillusionment.”

The state of Waugh’s personal life at the time was probably unknown to the reviewers at the time. Waugh had married Evelyn Gardiner in 1928 (friends called the couple He-Evelyn and She-Evelyn). The marriage was never strong, and She-Evelyn reportedly began cheating on her new husband only a matter of months after the union was made. The tragedy of the marriage would later become literary fodder for Waugh’s satire, A Handful of Dust. But at the time, the divorce proceedings sent Waugh into depression—Vile Bodies was written out of these circumstances. Waugh’s brother, Alec, recalled how at the time his brother told him, “The trouble about the world today is that there’s not enough religion in it. There’s nothing to stop young people doing whatever they feel like doing at the moment.” A few months after the divorce was finalized, Evelyn formally joined the Church of Rome.

Waugh had always been a moralist of some stripe—it is, after all, part of the job description of a satirist. However, while before his conversion his moral vision could only mock, his post-conversion satire gradually develops an alternative vision to the hopeless wanderings of his generation. In his early fiction, Waugh consistently highlights how his age has lost the ability to feel or to find a consummation of any kind—religious, sexual, or artistic. He makes it clear that this state of frustrated tension is not the result of complacency. The Bright Young Things want nothing more than to find fulfillment of some kind. Why else the frenzy of artistic and bacchanalian activity? The crazed parties in Vile Bodies are manifestations of the younger generation’s desperate need for meaning, according to Waugh; if nothing else, they provide distractions from the interwar hopelessness about everything.