George Watson
ORWELL AND WAUGH
At the safe distance of half a century or so, George Orwell
and Evelyn Waugh look like reverse sides of the same medal, forever
irreconcilable -left against right, secular against Christian - and
forever loathe to be reconciled.
So they must have seemed even to one other. Exact coevals–
they were born in 1903-they met only once, in 1949, when Orwell
was dying. Only a few letters seem to have passed between them,
composed in polite terms as to strangers. For some twenty years they
had taken opposite sides, reliably and predictably, in the resounding
issues of religion and politics. And yet there is evidence that each
read the other with respect, even avidity, and occasionally sent
copies of their most recent books as if somehow eager for comment
and commendation.
Their contest of mind barely peeps above the surface of surviv–
ing documents. Some months before his early death in January
1950, Orwell agreed to write an article for
Partisan Review
on
Waugh. That was in March 1949; the article advanced no further
than a few notes, to be published posthumously years later at the end
of his widow's four-volume edition of his work,
Collected Essays, Jour–
nalism and Letters
(1968). The notes are mainly about
Brideshead
Revisited,
Waugh's most recent full-length novel, though Orwell
remarks in a letter that he is reading (or rereading) all Waugh's early
works, even his biographies, and the task was evidently one he ap–
proached with enthusiasm. And yet the notes are sadly predictable
in their dogmatism . Waugh was "about as good a novelist as one can
be ... while holding untenable opinions" - a good writer ruined,
says Orwell, by superstition. The death of Lord Marchmain at the
end of
Brideshead
inevitably repelled him, where a dying and seem–
ingly unregenerate peer makes the sign of the cross, and the two
lovers, though divorced, realize in a religious ecstasy that they can
never marry. "The veneer is bound to crack sooner or later," Orwell
remarks acidly about the scene . "One cannot really be a Catholic
and grown up."
That is the secular side. For the reverse of the medal, Waugh
had already reviewed Orwell's
Critical Essays
in the Catholic journal
The Tablet
(April 6, 1946), praising Orwell in distant and disdainful
