Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War

by David Lebedoff

Overview

One climbed to the very top of the social ladder, the other chose to live among tramps. One was a celebrity at twenty-three, the other virtually unknown until his dying days. One was right-wing and religious, the other a socialist and an atheist. Yet, as this ingenious and important new book reveals, at the heart of their lives and writing, Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell were essentially the same man.

Orwell is best known for Animal Farm and 1984, Waugh for Brideshead Revisited and comic novels like Scoop and Vile Bodies. However different they may seem, these two towering figures of twentieth-century literature are linked for the first time in this engaging and unconventional biography, which goes beyond the story of their amazing lives to reach the core of their beliefs–a shared vision that was startlingly prescient about our own troubled times.

Both Waugh and Orwell were born in 1903, into the same comfortable stratum of England’s class-obsessed society. But at first glance they seem to have lived opposite lives. Waugh married into the high aristocracy, writing hilarious novels that captured the amoral time between the wars. He converted to Catholicism after his wife’s infidelity and their divorce. Orwell married a moneyless student of Tolkien’s who followed him to Barcelona, where he fought in the Spanish Civil War. She saved his life there–twice–but her own fate was tragic.

Waugh and Orwell would meet only once, as the latter lay dying of tuberculosis, yet as The Same Man brilliantly shows, in their life and work both writers rebelled against a modern world run by a privileged, sometimes brutal, few. Orwell and Waugh were almost alone among their peers in seeing what the future–our time–would bring, and they dedicated their lives to warning us against what was coming: a world of material wealth but few values, an existence without tradition or community or common purpose, where lives are measured in dollars, not sense. They explained why, despite prosperity, so many people feel that our society is headed in the wrong direction. David Lebedoff believes that we need both Orwell and Waugh now more than ever.

Unique in its insights and filled with vivid scenes of these two fascinating men and their tumultuous times, The Same Man is an amazing story and an original work of literary biography.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781588367082
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/05/2008
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

David Lebedoff is the award-winning author of five books, including Cleaning Up, about the Exxon Valdez case, and The Uncivil War: How a New Elite Is Destroying Our Democracy. Lebedoff is a graduate of the University of Minnesota and the Harvard Law School. He lives in Minneapolis with his wife and three children.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1
 
Cutting Class
 
When Eric Blair’s father, Richard Walmesley Blair, retired from his lifetime work as an imperial civil servant in India, he returned to England and ended his days at a small seaside resort town called Southwold. He was neither rich nor highly educated, nor had his career been marked by anything that might be considered noteworthy. But he was, in his own eyes and in the eyes of Southwold, a man who clearly commanded respect.
 
Sunday in Southwold was a day of promenade. Nearly everyone in town turned out for a leisurely stroll, but that does not mean that they fraternized. One only greeted, or indeed even acknowledged, others more or less of one’s own class—and there were nearly as many gradations of class in Southwold as there were families.
 
Take, for example, Jack Wilkenson Denny, the leading tailor in town. He had made three-piece suits, flannel trousers, and riding breeches for the Blairs; his cloth and workmanship were of the highest quality.
 
It was a small town. Richard Blair was a regular customer of Jack Denny. And yet when they passed on the Southwold promenade, “Mr. Blair would walk straight past him without a gesture of recognition,” one villager remembered.
 
This was not the least bit surprising to the slighted Mr. Denny. It was part of the natural order of things. “Old man Blair was truly aristocratic,” he said, by way of explaining the snub, “a typical retired civil servant.”
 
And Denny, for his own part, was quick to describe himself as a “high class” tradesman—and therefore entitled to withhold cordiality when passing the village grocer, who in turn could look down on someone else.
 
It is impossible to exaggerate the power of class distinctions in England in the early years of the twentieth century, when both Evelyn Waugh and Eric Blair were raised. It is difficult today even to imagine it. Life was a scoreboard, and each person’s score was posted at birth.
 
Everyone knew who was above or below them in social ranking. Total strangers could be socially slotted within seconds with appalling precision. (Eric Blair, as George Orwell, later wrote that he had been born into “the lower-upper-middle class.”) Most people could just sense the social standing of anyone they encountered. It is no wonder the English invented radar.
 
Richard Blair may have seemed aristocratic to his tailor, but he couldn’t fool a real aristocrat. His only upper-class connection was to one Charles Blair (1743–1820), Eric’s great-great-grandfather, a rich man (sugar and slaves) who had married Mary Fane, the youngest daughter of the eighth Earl of Westmorland. One of their sons was Richard’s grandfather. So Richard had only a very distant relationship to the aristocracy. He had a portrait of his ancestress and some monogrammed silver. Nothing more.
 
The class system was so powerful, though, that those tenuous little threads to a distant noble past, however thinly stretched, remained unbroken and revered. Even after he had transformed himself into George Orwell, Eric kept Mary Fane’s portrait with him all his life, transferring it from one squalid dwelling to the next. It was like the light from a dead star, still traveling through time and space.
 
But one can’t live on that. And Richard Blair had to make a living. Jobs at home were scarce, but fortunately for Richard the British had an empire. The imperial civil service was often the only avenue open to men of gentle birth but limited means. It offered respectable careers in exotic lands, but only to those on Richard’s rung or higher on the social ladder. Members of the working class did not share in this opportunity. Their sons never rose in the British Empire.
 
Richard Blair, however, came from a family to which imperial service was not only an option but a godsend, and something of a family tradition. Richard’s father had also found work abroad, becoming an Anglican deacon in Calcutta, then a priest in Tasmania, and finally returning home to end his days as a well-paid vicar in Dorset, thanks to the not-quite-unraveled Fane connection.
 
So Richard went into the family business of occupying imperial sinecures. At the age of eighteen he left England to become a minor official in the Opium Department of the Government of India. He began as an Assistant Sub-Deputy Opium Agent, third grade, and for three decades slowly moved upward, ending his career as Sub-Deputy Opium Agent, first grade. The empire provided him with a wife as well as a career. Ida Limouzin was much younger than Richard. The daughter of a Frenchman and an Englishwoman, she had lived most of her life in Burma, where the Limouzins were long established. She married Richard in India, in 1896.
 
The Opium Department of the Government of India, despite its unequivocal name, was not really Indian at all. It was run by Englishmen on behalf of their empire, and was in the highly lucrative business of growing poppies and producing the drug in India, where it was illegal, and then selling it to the people of China, millions of whom became hopelessly addicted. The Chinese government tried to block its ports from this insidious trade. It was for moments like this that England had a navy—ships of the fleet sailed out and bombarded forts along the Chinese coast. Thereafter England could export addiction and crime to China with impunity. Since history is written by the winners, this triumph of thuggery is known simply as the Opium War, which could leave the impression that England was trying to stop the Chinese from selling opium to them. It is as if Colombians had destroyed all U.S. border facilities and thereafter, without restriction, hooked the American population on cocaine. This was, for wellborn Englishmen, the nineteenth-century version of the global economy.
 
It was an economy that provided a secure place for Richard Blair. He led a more comfortable life in India than was attainable for him at home, and his friends, like his speech, remained exclusively English. He waited a long time to get married and, despite the plentitude of servants, seemed in no hurry to fill his house with children. It’s almost as if he wanted to postpone family life until he was closer to retirement.

Table of Contents

Prologue     xi
Cutting Class     3
At the Bottom of the Hill     25
Mr. Toad on Top     45
Love Finds Eric Blair     75
The Waugh to End All Waughs     89
The Home Fires Burning     111
Yes, We Have No Bananas     131
The Meeting     157
The Same Man     181
Epilogue     213
Acknowledgments     219
Appendix 1     223
Appendix 2     227
Works     235
Bibliography     239
Notes     243
Index     255
Photograph Insert Credits     263

Editorial Reviews

Mr. Lebedoff is adept at communicating his admiration for Orwell and Waugh's work, and nimble and provocative when it comes to explicating their fiction…The Same Man provides a breezy, highlights-only tour through both writers' lives.
—The New York Times

Michiko Kakutani

For those wearied by doorstop biographies, this lean and urbane dual portrait is a breath of fresh air. As lawyer and writer Lebedoff (Cleaning Up) makes clear, on the surface no two British writers could be more different. Evelyn Waugh was a loud convert to Catholicism, an even louder social climber and very much a man of Empire. George Orwell (Eric Blair) could best be described as a long-suffering atheistic humanist, a utopian socialist and dreamer. Waugh succeeded early; Orwell was an obscure polemicist until his masterpieces Animal Farm and 1984, which were written at the end of his life. But both men were born the same year (1903) and came from the same class. They admired each other's writing and moral courage, says Lebedoff, and finally met six months before the bed-ridden Orwell's death in 1950. Both men, the author says, rejected not only the immorality of dictators in their own time but the moral relativism they foresaw in the future. Aside from a slightly rambling chapter of summation, Lebedoff nimbly compares and contrasts the lives and art of these literary titans. 8 pages of photos. (Aug. 5)

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Publishers Weekly

Lebedoff's (The Uncivil War) thesis is that writers George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh, opposites in nearly all other respects, were at heart alike, namely, in their fierce and undying opposition to and foreseeing of such evils as moral relativism and the corruption of language. Lebedoff's unpretentious writing style, marked by a preference for proletarian short sentences, crackles with wit and playfulness as well as ardent advocacy for these embattled twin prophets. He laces his two brief biographies with sharp-edged details that brightly illuminate his subjects' innermost characters. The 19-year-old Orwell (whose life story Lebedoff treats as an Ein Heldenleben) grew to hate the English class system and his role in Burma as "visible overseer of empire." So began his willed descent down the social ladder, to a point of view that thereafter informed his writing. Concurrently, his contemporary, Waugh, who hungered after wealth and fame as a writer, too, reached a point of self-loathing, abandoning "the vacuity of life without faith" through conversion to Catholicism. Brief and to the point, this thrillingly written study of two of the 20th century's great social icons will impel readers to return to their timeless works. Recommended for all libraries.
—Charles C. Nash

Library Journal

A brief comparative study of the lives, works and attitudes of two great 20th-century authors. Hardly an original work, Lebedoff (The Uncivil War: How a New Elite is Destroying Our Democracy, 2004, etc.) offers a series of linked analyses and speculations based on information readily available in standard biographies and related works about the worlds in which both men lived and did battle. This book's premise and purpose, however, are distinctive, in that Lebedoff surveys his subjects' histories as illustrative of their essential similarity, even oneness (hence his title), despite obvious differences in personality, social standing and worldviews. Waugh was a ferociously devout Catholic, Orwell an equally impassioned anti-communist and socialist "concerned entirely with this world . . . [while Waugh was preoccupied] with the next." Lebedoff thus compares and contrasts Waugh's celebrity-obsessed school experiences, abortive teaching career and disastrous first marriage with the stoicism exhibited by Eric Blair (before he adopted the famous nom de plume), who renounced any possibility of rising socially, joining the British civil service as a policeman stationed in Burma. Subsequently, there are juxtaposed considerations of each man's literary trials and triumphs; Waugh's misadventures in Croatia as a scandalously unconventional officer and gentleman; the increasingly tubercular Orwell's days as a Home Guard during the London Blitz; both men as husbands and fathers. Pages are filled by such risible expedients as a potted biography of the Mitford sisters, a needless summary of the overfamiliar plot of Brideshead Revisited and a labored analysis of this "masterpiece" and Orwell's 1984 aseach author's grave Final Statement. Fortunately, both Orwell and Waugh are such engagingly stubborn and heroic figures that there's no resisting such deservedly well-known anecdotes as Captain Waugh's maliciously merry rumor-mongering insistence that Yugoslavia's Marshall Tito was a woman. We've heard it all before, but it's well worth hearing again. Agent: Jonathon Lazear/The Lazear Agency

Kirkus Reviews

“Nimble and provocative.”—Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
“The peace that Orwell and Waugh found with each other suggests a common ground for liberals and conservatives of today.”—Los Angeles Times
“Lebedoff has pulled off a literary hat trick. It isn't possible to find two 20th-century literary peers who, at first glance, seem more different in ambition, temperament and subject matter than the authors of, respectively, 1984 and Brideshead Revisited (both of which have been filmed twice, including a version of Brideshead currently in theaters). The connections, though, have been there all along, slipping past previous literary scholars who couldn't see beyond appearance.”—Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
“The Same Man places the work of these two literary giants cheek by jowl. Comparisons are riveting, but the conclusion is dire. For as we read Orwell and Waugh's prophetic warnings we cannot help a shiver of recognition. We have created a world they would have abhorred.”— The Times (London)
“Just the kind of book that both Waugh and Orwell, full of passion and conviction themselves, might have enjoyed—or enjoyed arguing with.”—Wall Street Journal
“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 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.”—New York Sun
“A pithy, thoughtful study of two brilliant authors who, were they alive today, might very well have ended up supping together at a faded gentlemen's club lamenting the idiocies of the modern age and what Orwell aptly termed its "smelly little orthodoxies."—Toronto Star
“For those wearied by doorstop biographies, this lean and urbane dual portrait is a breath of fresh air. . . . Lebedoff nimbly compares and contrasts the lives and art of these literary titans.”—Publishers Weekly
“This thrillingly written study of two of the 20th century’s great social icons will impel readers to return to their timeless works.”—Library Journal
"Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell exemplified the brilliance of British writing in the 20th century, but we usually think of them as very different men. David Lebedoff shows how they were, in fact, quite alike in their discomfort with the modern age. This is especially reassuring to those of us who admire both of these writers."––Walter Issacson, author of Einstein: His Life and Universe
"An insightful, witty, immensely readable account of two giants of English literature whose work, in very different ways, prefigured the moral and political dilemmas bedeviling our society today.”––Lynne Olson, author of Troublesome Young Men

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