Even in relatively small details like this, Waugh reused names and characters which, cumulatively, go to create the strong sense of a parallel comic universe. (* Mention of Megalopolitan Pictures will remind anyone who’s read Waugh’s short stories that this is the name of the fictional film company mentioned in the 1932 short story lampooning the British film industry, ‘Excursion in Reality’. He now works in the lowly studio press department and the swimming pool which used to flash with the shining limbs of lovely young starlets is now ‘cracked and over-grown with weed’ (an entirely coincidental but slightly eerie overlap with the dominant image from J.G. A generation earlier Sir Francis had been the only Brit with a knighthood in Hollywood, ‘the doyen of English society, chief script-writer in Megalopolitan Pictures* and President of the Cricket Club.’ Twenty-plus years later his career has not prospered. Since he moved to Hollywood, Dennis has lived with Sir Francis Hinsley. Several of our clientele have commented favourably upon it.’ Sir Francis Hinsley It is my combination of melancholy with the English accent. Here, grateful Americans pay to have their pet cats, dogs, parrots, goats and many other species embalmed, stuffed, buried or cremated. ‘He repined, despaired, fled,’ and got a (poorly paid) job at a pet cemetery (The Happier Hunting Ground) run by fast-talking, business-minded Mr Schultz, working alongside brisk Miss Poski.
However, he didn’t like the life of a lackey to the Megalopolitan film studio. He was a budding poet back in Britain but was lured to Hollywood on the promise of extending his literary potential and making a lot of money. We are in the British expat community in Hollywood, California. (Miss Aimée Thanatogenos in The Loved One, page 70) In Hollywood with Dennis Barlow Aren’t you the friend of the strangulated Loved One in the Orchid Room? My memory’s very bad for live faces.’
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