274
PARTISAN REVIEW
Waugh wanted every day to be like that. And if that is what
An·
thony Powell calls simple, long live simplicity. As Matthew Arnold
once put it, echoing the dream of all industrial mankind:
o
Joy,
0
joy,
For the humming street, and the child with its toy,
For the priest, and the bell, and the holy well ...
The best part of
Nineteen Eighty-Four,
Waugh told Orwell in his letter
ofJuly 1949, announcing his visit, was "the delicious conversation in
the pub when Winston tries to pump the old man for memories of
pre-revolutionary days." One might easily have guessed Waugh
would like that episode best.
In a way, Orwell's point here is more interesting than Waugh's,
and more interesting simply because he was Orwell. Everyone
_knows that conservatives are in love with the past: everyone expects
it.
It
took an Orwell to see that radicals need to be in love with it
too-and need it rather more than conservatives. "He who controls
the past controls the future." A sense of history is a form of power,
since men are guided and governed by a collective sense of what
their nation means and has meant in the world. When Winston
Smith and O'Brien pledge themselves to revolution against the dic–
tatorship, the toast is not to the future but to the past. "The past is
more important," as O'Brien puts it with mock gravity. We under–
stand the world we are in, -if at all, only because we understand
where it came from. And it is only because we understand it, or
think we do, that we aspire to change it. So radicals need the past
not just as much as conservatives, but even more than they do.
At the age of twenty, Evelyn Waugh wrote a story for Harold
Acton called "Anthony, Who Sought the Things That Were Lost."
That is what Winston Smith does in Orwell's last book, when he
walks into the slums of London to find someone old enough to
remember an El1gland he himself never knew. At the end of
Brideshead
Waugh's hero is defeated in a similar search, though not
defeated altogether. Waugh glimpsed that resemblance himself, and
he chided Orwell in his letter on
Nineteen Eighty-Four
with one of the
most potent jibes he ever made: "Men who love a crucified God need
never think of torture as all-powerful." That, at the end of Orwell's
book, is just what Winston Smith has been forced to think: subjected
under torture in mind as well as body, "he loved Big Brother." It is
interesting, and in stereotypical terms highly surprising, that the
