Against the Day: David Lebedoff on Orwell and Waugh

If Evelyn Waugh might be described as a social alpinist, clambering up one aristocratic pinnacle after another, George Orwell, his exact contemporary — both were born in 1903 — was a spelunker, burrowing ever deeper into the seamiest depths. Waugh loved the high life and made it his domain. Orwell may not have loved the low life, but he valiantly tried to live it. While Waugh was chatting up dukes and duchesses, Orwell was rubbing shoulders with coal miners and tramps. Like a gourmet who sniffs out the most pungent cheeses, he had a nose for the sleazy side of life. Wormwood was to him what Champagne was to Waugh. Both men were, in their way, imposters, but they were imposters with a twist: The deliberate ambiguities of their lives sharpened their appetite for the truth.

As David Lebedoff demonstrates in "The Same Man: George Orwell & Evelyn Waugh in Love and War" (Random House, 279 pages, $26), these two great writers, though seemingly incompatible, were more alike than either realized. Orwell was tall and alarmingly gaunt, Waugh short and stocky; Orwell was an atheist, Waugh a devout Catholic. But both considered "modern life a terrible enemy," as Mr. Lebedoff nicely puts it. "Animal Farm" and "Brideshead Revisited," published in the same year of 1945, might seem worlds apart, and yet both are biting parables of disenchantment. In their prose, too, each was a rare master. "Good prose is like a window pane," Orwell wrote; Waugh was more lyrical, as well as funnier, than Orwell (who pretty much lacked a sense of humor), but he too knew the virtues of transparency. In the end, this was less a question of "style" than of integrity.

"The Same Man" uncovers few new facts, but that isn't really Mr. Lebedoff's purpose. By presenting Waugh's and Orwell's lives in parallel, he casts them in a new and sometimes surprising light. Their differences come to seem strangely complementary, as though they divided the world between them with an equally savage eye. Orwell was haunted by what he called "the golden country," the world of his childhood in the years before 1910. He left that country when he entered St. Cyprian's, the ghastly school he described so unforgettably in his posthumously published essay "Such, such were the joys." It was at St. Cyprian's that Orwell first experienced the grim attractions of sheer physical discomfort — the lumpy bed, the short rations, the taunting and the whippings — which he would seek so assiduously to reproduce in his later forays into the harsh world of the dispossessed. But the school gave him, too, a keen sense of injustice and that, as he said, inspired everything he later wrote.

The world Waugh hankered after, the world of the "Bright Young Things" of the 1920s, turned to dust even as he grasped it. He pursued and won the aristocratic Evelyn Gardner, a ditzy flapper who seems to have stepped straight out of a P.G. Wodehouse novel, though Waugh must have cringed when she referred cuttingly to his father as "a complete Pinkle-Wonk." (The marriage fell apart over her infidelity.) And even when Waugh tried to drown himself, he had to abandon the attempt because the sea was full of jellyfish. In 1930, the same year when Orwell began to publish, Waugh was received into the Catholic Church. For him, baptism was truly a "second birth," which reduced the cruel social niceties of "birth and station" to insignificance. There were no dukes in the Kingdom of Heaven. Waugh and Orwell were both desperate to escape their middle-class origins, though each in his own way — and own direction. Waugh's father, a publisher, was "in trade." In the glittering world Waugh aspired to, that represented an indelible stigma. Richard Blair, Orwell's father, had been a civil servant in India but played the gentleman in his long retirement, and Orwell went to fantastic lengths to shed the burden of that stifling respectability. (Even the name "George Orwell" was a form of disguise: He had been born Eric Blair.) Waugh was a notorious snob; he felt that he belonged among the titled and that only a perverse accident of birth had deprived him of his place. Orwell was also a snob, but a subtler one; though he described himself as coming from the "lower-upper-middle class," he did everything he could to baffle such distinctions. In this he failed. When he consorted with hoboes, he was immediately recognized by his Eton accent and addressed as "Sir," much to his annoyance.

In the end, Waugh got it all: wealth and fame, marriage into the aristocracy, membership in the best clubs, a country estate where he played the squire. But Orwell, too, and despite his best efforts, got it all. In the last four years of his life, first "Animal Farm" and then "1984" showered him with royalties and brought worldwide acclaim.

The two met only once, in late August of 1949. Waugh, who had written Orwell an admiring note, visited him as Orwell lay dying. It was an act of disinterested kindness on the part of a man known more for his rudeness than for his charity. No record remains of their conversation that day. But certainly, as Mr. Lebedoff shows, they were secret sharers, and they recognized it at the last. Seen through the honest window pane of good prose, their worlds were neither high nor low but one and the same. The deepest caves are linked by secret passageways to the peaks.

eormsby@nysun.com