Vile Bodies

That morning, Lady Metroland announces a lavish party for Mrs. Melrose Ape and her performing “angels.” At the same time, Adam finds an invitation for lunch from Simon Balcairn, the gossip columnist. They meet at an expensive restaurant called Chez Espinosa, where Balcairn receives free meals. Balcairn is depressed because he hasn’t been invited to Metroland’s party; he believes not going will mean the end of his career as Mr. Chatterbox, the gossip columnist for the Daily Excess (a profession which he profoundly hates). He begs Adam to come back to his tiny office on Fleet Street, and to ask Lady Metroland to invite Balcairn to the party. At the office, Adam finds that his engagement with Nina has been formally announced as called off, though it was never announced as on. On the phone, Metroland refuses to accept Balcairn. Balcairn says he wishes he were dead. On his way out, Adam passes a retired military man raging up the stairs and cursing Balcairn’s column.

Adam meets Nina to go to the movies. They are awkward together and they quarrel all the way back to Nina's flat. They have sex again, and Nina remains uncomfortable.

Mrs. Ape’s “angels” bicker with each other and check out the men as they observe Lady Metroland’s party guests, demonstrating the irony in their being named after Christian virtues such as Temperance and Fortitude. They are, in turn, the subject of gossip among the arriving guests. Soon, Mrs. Melrose Ape appears in their room and promises to whip the girls, and deprive them of champagne, if they don’t give a good performance. Later, Lady Metroland suggests that she could find the girls work as prostitutes, a suggestion that the girls take in stride.

The party is a success in terms of burnishing Lady Metroland’s questionable social status. Several partygoers notice an interesting young man with a black beard. A few of the most suspicious among them take him for a spy. Gossip fills the air until Mrs. Melrose Ape commands the attention of the crowd, exclaiming, “Just you look at yourselves” (124). Her audience is offended.

Father Rothschild and Walter Outrage catch the bearded man sending in a report to his newspaper and reveal him to be Simon Balcairn. They rip off his false beard and kick him out of the party. Balcairn goes home and calls in a new story, filled with outrageous lies, which excites the transcribers in the newsroom. After finishing his story, Balcairn dies by suicide after putting his head into a gas oven. His story is rushed to the presses.

Soon after Simon Balcairn’s suicide, Adam and Nina meet Simon’s editor at Chez Espinosa. The editor says that the Daily Excess is facing 62 libel suits due to Simon’s final Mr. Chatterbox column. Now that the column is legally forbidden from mentioning notable names, it has lost its luster. Once the editor has determined that Adam can pick a few new faces out of the tony crowd, she offers the Mr. Chatterbox column to him, an offer he readily accepts. “Now we can get married,” says Nina (136).

Unable to write about actual notable people for his Mr. Chatterbox column, Adam produces a boost in the column’s flagging readership by describing the unusual physical characteristics of less notable English nobles. Next, he visits psychiatric hospitals and finds people there who claim to have royal titles, among other delusions. Finally, he begins making up notable people, using his novelist’s flair for detail. Among his most successful inventions are a modern sculptor named Provna, a fashionable young woman named Imogen Quest, and an Italian Count named Cincinnati. Soon, real famous people in London are claiming to have met these fictional characters, which fuels Adam’s column. Emboldened, Adam invents hotels from whole cloth and describes a completely fictional craze for green bowler hats.

At the November Handicap, the horse race on which Adam bet a thousand pounds, Adam is surprised to find his horse is a 34-to-1 winner. He glimpses the Major in the crowd but can’t catch him to collect his 34 thousand pounds in winnings. While at the racetrack, Adam and Nina meet Nina’s childhood friend Ginger Littlejohn, recently returned from a colonial military post in Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka). Ginger complains that London is dull and that the Mr. Chatterbox column is misleading about things like green bowlers and fashionable meeting spots. Later, Adam writes that Ginger is the new man-about-town, sporting a green bowler hat and appearing at fictionalized meeting spots. Soon, Adam’s publisher, Lord Monomark, forbids Adam from writing about green bowler hats, Count Cincinnati, or the real-life dining spot Chez Espinosa, which once got the publisher’s bill wrong.

Ginger, Adam, and Nina go to a party held on a dirigible. Many of the usual faces are there. The subject of marriage comes up, but by now Adam and Nina discuss it with a touch of boredom. Nina urges Adam to see her father again. They both express misery at having to appear at so many parties. Ginger gets along with a young man named Miles Malpractice until he doesn’t, calling him “queer” (156). At a nightspot later that night, a man named Gilmour calls Adam a “cad” for no reason, but then warms to him once Ginger identifies him as a friend. The party goes to Gilmour’s small flat, where their host gets sick from alcohol.

In the meantime, an older and more conservative party is happening at Anchorage House, featuring an older set of ruling-class elites. Walter Outrage mopes at the failure of his recent romance with the wife of the Japanese diplomat. The older guests criticize young people’s habits of marriage and promiscuity and admire young Edward Throbbing and his fiancée, the Duchess of Stayle, for being stable and grounded, even though they secretly dread being married. General conversation dwells on the next generation. Walter Outrage, Lord Metroland, and Father Rothschild denigrate the younger generation for not participating more enthusiastically in the Great War, and for not being enthusiastic about a brewing war to come—a prospect which Outrage, the Prime Minister, is offended not to have heard anything about.

After the party, Lord Metroland walks the short distance to his home in a depressed funk. When he gets home, his son-in-law tells him repeatedly to “go to hell.” He retreats to his library, musing about the “radical instability” of the present and immersing himself in historical biographies (169). In the meantime, the young Duchess of Stayle receives pressure from her oblivious parents to go through with her sham marriage to Edward Throbbing.

At luncheon the next day, Nina reminds Adam that he should go ask again for Colonel Blount’s permission to marry her. Adam notes that his column is due, and Nina says that she and Ginger will finish it for him with “just the sort of things you say” (174).

Rather than pay for a taxi, Adam takes the bus to Doubting Hall. He overhears a pair of middle-class women talking about their sons’ disillusionment with careers and marriage in an echo of the upper-class conversation the night before. When Adam reaches Doubting Hall, he is told by a stranger that someone is “shooting” Colonel Blount behind the house. At first alarmed, Adam soon realizes that a film crew is shooting a movie about 18th-century Methodist founder John Wesley. Adam spends some time trying to extract himself from a movie producer who mistakes Adam for an investor. Movie-crazed Colonel Blount has been cast as an extra in the film and appears in ridiculous 18th-century garb. Adam and Colonel Blount repeat the same confusion they had before: Blount does not remember Adam at all, and due to his baffled state cannot give his consent for Adam to marry Nina. By the end of his visit, Adam has spent another full and fruitless day at Colonel Blount’s.

When Adam returns to London, he receives a synopsis of what Nina and Ginger have turned in for his Mr. Chatterbox column. To his horror, he realizes that they have methodically mentioned every subject which his publisher expressly forbade him to write about. Monomark fires Adam the next morning and gives the Mr. Chatterbox column to Miles Malpractice. Nina declares that the wedding is off.