Really All Too Bogus (Review in the Sydney Morning Herald)

David Lebedoff
The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War
Scribe; $29.95; 264pp

Two photographs in The Same Man illustrate perfectly the size of the task that its US author David Lebedoff has set himself.

Each shows a writer hard at work. One of them is on the chubby side and wearing a snazzy three-piece suit. Behind him stand magnificent shelves decorated with Ionic volutes. In one hand he holds an old-fashioned pen and, in the other, a fat cigar.

The second writer is dangerously thin and wears a jacket of coarse material. Behind him, makeshift-looking shelves are crammed with tattered paperbacks. His large hands hover over a typewriter, while a scruffy rollup dangles from his lips.

The writers are Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell, and the cosmetic differences between the two reflect, of course, their very different life choices. Born into what Orwell would famously describe as the lower-upper-middle class (of gentle birth but strapped for cash), Waugh tried to climb the social ladder, while Orwell himself, after a spell in the colonies, sought to escape his origins, going ‘down and out’ in Paris and London.

Despite these conspicuous differences, Lebedoff argues that Waugh and Orwell were less chalk and cheese than cheese and biscuits. To this end, he follows their progress through school, their attempts to cover over their tracks (John le Carré once remarked that while Orwell tried to hide the fact that he’d been to Eton, Waugh sought to hide the fact that he hadn’t!), their romantic conquests and disappointments, their various political and religious attachments and, most touchingly, their brief correspondence and meeting at the end of Orwell’s life. The result is an occasionally interesting book, but one that, ultimately, put me in mind of Miss Runcible’s words in Waugh’s Vile Bodies: ‘Oh, dear,’ she said, ‘this really is all too bogus.’

Lebedoff paints a convincing picture of Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. However, he makes a number of mistakes. For example, he writes ‘English’ when he should write ‘British’. (‘It is no wonder the English invented radar’, he writes, in respect of their class-awareness. In fact, the inventor of radar was a Scot.) And the British aristocracy is not mostly ‘Protestant’. It is Church of England – a different thing. A recovering Anglo-Saxon myself, I still have enough regard for Pommy Land to find such errors irritating. (Or perhaps that should be ‘An-glosaxon’. ‘England’, when it falls across a line, is hyphenated as ‘En-gland’, rather than ‘Eng-land’.)

More serious are the literary and biographical errors. ‘Shooting an Elephant’ is not a ‘short story’. It is, by general consent, an essay (there are some doubts about its veracity but Orwell always characterised it as such). Also, Orwell’s ‘As I Please’ column was published in Tribune, not ‘the London Observer’. Nor did Orwell, strictly speaking, kill anyone in the Spanish Civil War, though it’s true he took part in POUM offensives on enemy positions in which fascists were killed.

These, however, are tiny matters as compared to Lebedoff’s central point: that Waugh and Orwell are ‘very much the same man’ – a literary shotgun wedding to be sure. Lebedoff argues that Waugh and Orwell were united by their hatred of moral relativism, fear of the future and ‘reliance on tradition’ – a thesis that has the double effect of making Orwell look more reactionary, and Waugh more political, than was the case. Neither man benefits from comparison with the other, except, of course, by way of contrast. It is true that Orwell admired Waugh (when he died he was working on an essay on his novels), but he had no time for his Catholicism and snobbery. Waugh wanted to retain the class system. Orwell wanted to tear it down. That’s not an incidental difference.

There’s certainly an interesting study to be made here. But The Same Man, I’m sorry to say, is not it. By attempting to prove that Waugh and Orwell were different sides of the same literary coin, Lebedoff robs both of their literary value.