Douglas Kerr reviews Orwell & Waugh in Love and War

Who would make a suitable subject for a double biography? Wordsworth and Coleridge, Wilbur and Orville Wright, Morecambe and Wise, very well – but George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh? Wasn’t one of them left-wing and earnest, the other reactionary and comic? Didn’t one of them want a revolution for England, and the other a counter-revolution? Surely one was a Tory who liked aristocrats while the other was a socialist who consorted with tramps, one was skinny and ascetic and pretended not to be a gentleman, the other …. And so on. Yet not only has David Lebedoff written a double biography of Orwell and Waugh, he has even provocatively entitled it The Same Man.

There is something to this. They were born in the same year, 1903, and contemporary Englishmen of the lower upper-middle class were brought up in a pretty homogenous culture and education (unlike Orwell, Waugh went to university, but didn’t spend much of his time there in studying). “The class system absolutely stamped the lives of Orwell and Waugh from early childhood,” says Lebedoff, and he is quite right. His two subjects were also possessed of something like perfect pitch when it came to class awareness. It is something else they had in common. They also shared a serious vocation for literature, but they both had to turn often to more ephemeral forms of writing to pay the rent. Both were exemplary English stylists. Both lost a first wife, remarrying later. Both could be difficult, but had a gift for friendship. Too young for the First World War, both were patriotically keen to serve in the war against Hitler, but most of their wartime work was boring and frustrating.

They had reviewed each other’s work, and corresponded a bit, but they did not meet until Orwell was dying in the Cranham Sanatorium and was visited by Waugh. It is a meeting of which neither left a record, unfortunately, though we do know that each admired the other’s writing, however far apart they were on matters of politics or religion. Afterwards Waugh told his friend Malcolm Muggeridge that he had found Orwell “very near to God,” a phrase that could mean more than one thing.

Apart from matters of provenance, Lebedoff’s central argument for putting the two together is that both were English moralists, and visionaries properly and similarly fearful about the future. They saw not only their own times, he says, but ours. “The real war against the future,” Lebedoff goes on, “would have to be taken to the heart of the enemy camp, which was neither Moscow nor Berlin but the salons of educated but powerless fools in the democracies, where hatred of merit was packaged as disdain for absolute morality.” This is eloquently put, but I am not really convinced that either Orwell or Waugh thought that the future would be decided in salons anywhere. But it’s clear that moral relativism, along with the arrogance of elites, is very much what Lebedoff dislikes about our own times. He takes a bit of a ramble in a late chapter in which Orwell and Waugh – and Aldous Huxley – are enlisted as the godparents of his own diagnosis of modern times.

Part of this is a valiant and interesting attempt to link Orwell and Waugh as champions of spirituality and of the common man. Waugh, he reminds us, was an enemy of authority and expertise in office. Orwell, he notes, worried with increasing urgency “how people would live after ceasing to believe in immortality”. Is this enough of a case for treating them as “the same man”? In the end, Orwell was a democrat, and Waugh was a Christian. It would be a tough assignment to argue that Waugh was a democrat and Orwell was a Christian in any meaningful sense.

Orwellians will find David Lebedoff not always entirely accurate (“As I Please” was not written for The Observer, for example) or up-to-date. He mentions the 20-volume Complete Works but his citations from Orwell are from the 4-volume Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of 1968. Lebedoff’s own style is chatty (“The people of Southwold felt sorry for the poor old Blairs. Every time their unemployed son showed up he looked a little worse”). This can have its charm, but still he should have resisted the temptation to entitle a chapter “The Waugh to End All Waughs”. But though it has its faults, much can be forgiven of a book in which the author’s enthusiasm for his subject –singular or plural – shines through so genially.

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David Lebedoff, The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War. (New York: Random House, 2008).

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Douglas Kerr