George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh were at opposite ends of a spectrum that met in a circle. Though by nearly every external measure polar opposites — Orwell the atheist/socialist champion of the proletariat and Waugh the Catholic convert/Tory hobnobber with the aristocracy — they were at their core astonishingly similar writers and thinkers, David Lebedoff concludes in “The Same Man.”
This book, based on biographies and other secondary works and a close analysis of the two men’s writings, contains nothing fundamentally new. But Lebedoff, author of several previous books (including “Cleaning Up,” about the Exxon Valdez case), offers here an intriguing comparison of their lives and comes up with a strong case for closely shared values.
A few basic things Waugh and Orwell (born Eric Arthur Blair) did have in common: Both were born in 1903 into, despite differences in family income, roughly the same social class. Their early boyhoods were relatively pleasant, especially Orwell’s; his schoolmate and longtime friend Cyril Connolly said Orwell was “a radical who was permanently in love with the year 1910.” Each, of course, became a world-renowned author whose works, decades after initial publication, sell in the hundreds of thousands a year.
But “Waugh was hard and funny and elegant,” Lebedoff writes, “while Blair was soft and quiet and shabby.” Boarding school gave Orwell his foundational understanding of the world as harsh, bullying, unequal and unfair. He did not belong, he did not want to belong, and he did not want success as defined by a society he loathed.
“Failure seemed to me the only true virtue,” he said after returning from serving five years as a British Imperial policeman in Burma, success a “species of bullying.”
Waugh, on the other hand, thrived at school. There his lifelong social-climbing began. Whereas Orwell was bullied, Waugh was an enthusiastic bully. (This recalls Tom Wolfe’s remark that bullies become conservatives, the bullied, liberals.)
Orwell was a deliberately impoverished stoic and materialist, interested primarily in this world and its politics, despising the empire and the class that ran it. Waugh reveled in the wealth that his early novelistic triumphs brought him and eagerly sought the company of ruling elites. As for politics, his Roman Catholicism taught him that was a thing of this world and he had little interest in it.
Yet, with his second novel, “Vile Bodies” (1930) — an even bigger hit than the first, “Decline and Fall” — he wrote a book that was not just “funny,” but funny with a bleak worldview. An “indictment of a whole society” through depiction of hedonistic Bright Young People, its final pages, Lebedoff maintains, are as hopeless as the conclusion of Orwell’s “1984.”
The two men had been prescient about the prospect of war, and, though in poor physical shape, wanted active military service when it came, though only Waugh got it. Orwell had to be satisfied with the Home Guard, but his service on the anti-fascist side in the Spanish Civil War (he was badly wounded) was probably as hazardous as anything Waugh endured as a Royal Marine.
Both were devoted to their writing, to the exclusion and detriment of their families and social lives. Each admired the other’s writing tremendously. They met once, at Waugh’s wish, shortly before Orwell’s death in January 1950.
But more than all that, in the author’s estimation, “they saw in modern life a terrible enemy.” Orwell was the nicer human being — for all his intense religious faith, Waugh remained shockingly cruel and bad-mannered — but both were committed to moral principles, one connected to the next world, one to this.
Theirs was a fight against not only the totalitarianism that loomed in their own time, but against the future, which they feared would strip humans of their humanity. The enemy camp in the future would be not in Berlin or Moscow but in the salons of educated but rootless fools.
They hated moral relativism. Oddly, the radical Orwell and the conservative Waugh both relied on tradition in standing up for individual freedom. They deplored the assault on language as being an assault on thought. They saw the emptiness of an existence whose only point was material consumption.
In Waugh’s many novels, and in Orwell’s “Animal Farm” and “1984” and perhaps most of all in his matchless essays (“treasures of our culture”), Lebedoff believes, these two giants of 20th century British literature warned us of what was to come and “came to be, improbably enough, the same man.”
Roger K. Miller, author of the novel “Invisible Hero,” is working on his second book, “Chenango Street Boy.”
NONFICTION
The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War
, by David Lebedoff, $26
