Two English Masters

The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War, by David Lebedoff;  Scribe, 2008, 264 pages, $29.95.

This intriguing and insightful book has captured much attention and appreciation from readers internationally. Its author is a practising lawyer in Minnesota, who graduated from the Harvard Law School and whose other books include one on the Exxon-Valdez oil spillage litigation. Lebedoff’s present work is a parallel study of aspects of the lives and work of two leading English writers, the atheist George Orwell and the Catholic convert Evelyn Waugh, who at first might seem poles apart in nature, background and outlook—but who prove, on closer analysis, to have shared a deep regard for objective truths and an almost visceral dislike of all “political correctness”. The author’s prologue sets the scene by contrasting a ducal dinner party attended by Waugh in June 1930 “at the height of a brilliant London season”, whilst Eric Blair (later known as George Orwell) was “working alone in a small, shabby room in the working-class section of Leeds” writing Down and Out in Paris and London.

That prologue will immediately find some resonance with Australian readers, as it notes an encounter, at the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough’s dinner party, between Dame Nellie Melba and Miss (later Dame) Edith Sitwell, two formidable characters who clearly had the measure of each other. Indeed, the author also points out that whilst by 1930 Waugh had already published successful books including Vile Bodies, the few small articles Blair had into print at that time included a review of “Edith Sitwell’s book on Alexander Pope”. More in a moment about the writers’ contrasts. Lebedoff summarises the gist of the analysis in his book as follows:

though they wrote for different readers and in different voices, they left us a shared vision of their own time, and ours … And both of them hated, really hated, that time—the twentieth century, from the First through to the Second World War—and what they knew was to follow it. They saw in modern life a terrible enemy. It was not only totalitarianism that they loathed but virtually everything that would come even if totalitarianism was defeated. They saw an end to common sense and common purpose. They saw the futility of life without roots or faith. They saw the emptiness of an existence whose only point was material consumption. And in the great work of their lives, which was to warn us of what was to come, they came to be, improbably enough, in many ways the same man.

Improbable indeed, it may seem, to assimilate Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and Scoop with Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, but scratch the surface and get to the real messages of these works and one can well understand why Waugh and Orwell deeply appreciated each other’s works and why, when they finally met just the once, shortly before Orwell’s death in 1950, they enjoyed each other’s company very much.

It is best to begin with Waugh’s side of the “equation” (or if not that, the “relation”) which Lebedoff argues. Scoop is undoubtedly one of the funniest comic pieces ever written in English, and it incisively lampoons the world of twentieth-century journalism and newspaper publishers: the “questing vole” passage has become a familiar tag in the pages of the Spectator and it may even have inspired the “lean and nosey, like a ferret” motto of the late Gordon Barton’s creation, the now defunct Nation Review in Australia. Scoop bears some, albeit distant, relation to the ominous messages in Orwell’s two best-known books, about political control and the distortion of the language for political purposes: the twin pillars of what has come to be known as “political correctness”. Scoop is more of a miniature—and wryly comic—portrayal of modern inanity.

It is Brideshead Revisited which throws up what are at once the more interesting aspects of contrast and also some similarities of purpose, as between Waugh and Orwell. Many read Brideshead at a surface level only, as a languorous tale of an English aristocratic family in decline, decadence at Oxford in the 1920s, the troubles of the 1930s and the coming of the Second World War. The Catholic elements are seen as mere incidents; for many, they may not carry much significance. Yet, as Lebedoff shows, what Waugh was writing about deeply concerned matters of Catholic belief and personal integrity, along with a strong critique of what postwar “modernity” would bring. The signs are clear in the text—not only the drama of Lord Marchmain’s deathbed return to Faith, but in Charles Ryder’s own meditations on returning to Brideshead. Some pay little or no regard to the fact of his religious conversion. Perhaps fewer still notice that at least twice in the text of Waugh’s book, he quotes words from the Lamentations of Jeremiah: Quomodo sola cedet civitas? (How is it that the city has become so solitary?) They related to Jerusalem, but Waugh points the Lamentations to refer also to the history of Christian faith in England.

Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four are at once much more obviously and overtly critical in a socio-political-cultural sense than Waugh’s books. However, the points made and the morals to be drawn are not dissimilar—especially when it comes to the decline in manners and the distortions of language which accompany or are at least the lamentable harbingers of modern “totalitarian” tendencies.

The points of overlap between Orwell and Waugh, their backgrounds and their outlooks, are well illustrated by Lebedoff in chapters about the personal, family and domestic lives of each author, set against the 1920s, 1930s, the Second World War and the immediate postwar period. There were similarities of origin in the English middle classes and Lebedoff has an acute sense of the observed gradations thereof in the 1930s (Waugh would walk miles to post letters to his grander friends like Harold Acton via a postbox in “Hampstead”, to avoid the postmark “Golder’s Green”). Orwell attended Eton, whilst Waugh went to Lancing. Orwell was annoyed that even when dossing down with homeless tramps, his unmistakeable gentlemanly bearing led them to address him as “Sir”.

Lebedoff gives us many interesting details from the lives and careers of the two writers. The story of the hard time Orwell had in getting Animal Farm published includes T.S. Eliot’s (suitably arch) delaying/rejection letter to Orwell returning the manuscript from Faber & Faber; and Victor Gollancz’s “hot potato” return of the same script to Orwell’s agent—by a letter “dictated by Mr Gollancz but signed in his absence”. He also tells us that Jonathan Cape’s rejection of the book arose because someone at Cape’s decided to seek the views on it of a man in the Ministry of Information, whose advice led to Cape’s telling Orwell “it was highly ill-advised to publish at the present time … Another thing: it would be less offensive if the predominant caste in the fable were not pigs.” (Never mind that Plato’s Republic refers to “the life of pigs” not in the literal sense, but in a political/figurative sense!) It duly turned out that the man from the Ministry whom Cape’s consulted was later exposed as a Soviet agent. Lebedoff also informs us that: “[Orwell] even made an effort to find an American publisher, but Dial Press turned it down with the statement that it was impossible to sell animal stories in the USA. Nonpolitical publishers had blinders of their own.” Ultimately, this great book was published by the “small house” of Secker & Warburg.

We get a good sketch of Waugh’s disastrous first marriage to “She-Evelyn” Gardner, his conversion to the Catholic faith in 1930 and his marriage to the Hon. Laura Herbert. The nuances of their family life are discussed, including the notorious incident of Waugh’s nonchalant consumption, in front of his children, of all the few bananas allowed to the family at one point under rationing (in a chapter Lebedoff gives the inspired title “Yes, We Have No Bananas”). Likewise, there is a careful exploration of Blair/Orwell’s origins, as what Lebedoff in a photo caption describes as “the pudgy offspring of Empire”, the son of a rather self-satisfied retired colonial civil servant. The always ebullient schoolboy Waugh, whose father was a publisher and reviewer, is captioned as “young but scrappy”. His transitions from riotous Oxford party-goer and soak, to a period of schoolmastering in the provinces with not even a “bad third” degree, thereafter rising quickly to become a celebrated author, and settlement into a “cranky” but countrified maturity, are well covered.

Orwell’s life is discussed in terms of the key early influences: of a brief “golden age” of youth spent in the English countryside before the First World War, followed by his attendance at a hated boarding school. Orwell’s experiences there went deep into his soul; and they re-emerged much later in life, when having achieved success and some money at last, Orwell chose, despite severe respiratory illness, to take his adopted son to live on a Scottish island after his first wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy’s tragic, premature death in 1945. This was some kind of exorcism of the Victorian/Edwardian “cult of Scotland” at his old school. Living in the harsh climate of the island probably hastened Orwell’s death—but his son thrived there.

Overall, this is a fine and telling book. It shows that both Waugh and Orwell were the sworn enemies of what is now entrenched as “political correctness”. It also expands on that theme, to provide a sharp and devastating analysis of the role now played by what Lebedoff and others have rightly called the “New Elite”. He indicates that Waugh and Orwell both knew that

the real war against the future would have to be taken to the heart of the enemy camp, which was neither Moscow nor Berlin but the salons of educated but [then] powerless fools in the democracies, where hatred of merit was packaged as disdain for absolute morality. ‘The common people,’ Orwell wrote, ‘are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since escaped’.

Lebedoff notes that

Orwell and Waugh felt that merit should not be stifled by caste, but they saw very clearly that a society based on test-score ‘merit’, once it had displaced the old High class, would be just as contemptuous of the Middle and Low classes as the old peerage had been. This realization came later to Orwell and must have been particularly embittering …

This, of course, has happened. Much of the anger and polarization in our current politics reflects the growing dominance of a new elite and the reaction of both rich and poor against it.

This theme is taken up and superbly expounded in the chapter entitled “The Same Man” and it builds on what David Lebedoff wrote in The New Elite.

It is only fair to note that in his review titled “Contra Mundum”, in Evelyn Waugh Newsletter and Studies (Spring 2008), Robert Murray Davis of the University of Oklahoma expressed reservations about some of Lebedoff’s conclusions and views. One does not have to agree with every particular of the author’s view of Waugh and Orwell in order to see that he makes a strong case for their common ground in condemning “moral relativism”. The warm rapport evinced in their brief correspondence about their respective works, culminating with their single meeting in the summer of 1949, is not only a moving tale of two great masters of the written word in English, but a cautionary summons against all political correctness.

Dr Hassall wrote on the painter William Frater in the March issue.