GEORGE WATSON
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terms as representing "at its best" the new humanism of the Com–
mon Man . That Rooseveltian phrase was very much in the air on
both sides of the Atlantic, and it was a populist view for which
Waugh never troubled to disguise his distaste. "I do not presume to
counsel my sovereign on the choice of her advisers," he once told a
journalist who had rashly asked him how he was going to vote in a
general election. But the review is not ungenerous. He aptly com–
pares Orwell to Edmund Wilson, and one feels that Orwell's own
formula could easily be turned back on himself: about as good a
writer as one can be while holding untenable opinions . ... Waugh
especially admires Orwell's magnificent essay on the social implica–
tions of the vulgar English seaside postcard, "The Art of Donald
McGill ." But he conscientiously regrets Orwell's total incapacity to
esteem or even entertain any hint of religious sentiment - all the
more striking and regrettable , he argues, in a man plainly endowed
with "an unusually high moral sense and respect for truth and
justice."
The standoff looks complete. But it still may be worth striving,
now that passions have cooled, to see the left-right medal of that con–
tentious era as one , its opposite sides complementary as well as an–
tagonistic. Like the American and the French, the English in–
telligentsia in that age was at war with itself: the screaming-point
being reached in
1935-6,
when Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, and
Franco crossed from Morocco into Spain to save a Christian land
from Bolshevism and restore order, church and monarchy. Waugh
and Orwell naturally took opposite sides on Ethiopia and Spain, but
not on Hitler, for whom Waugh never showed a particle of sym–
pathy . In fact when he joined a commando unit in
1941,
Orwell
remarked admiringly to Anthony Powell: "Why can't someone on
the left do something like that?" Beneath their opposition there was
always a powerful undercurrent of fellow-feeling. "Unlike a lot of
people, I thought
Brideshead Revisited
very good," Orwell wrote to
Julian Symons in July
1948,
"in spite of hideous faults on the sur–
face." Waugh , who was one day to admit those faults , had already
read
Animal Farm
in order, as he explained in his diary (August
31,
1945),
to spite his Communist cousin Claud Cockburn, who as a
loyal Communist Party man had just warned him over dinner
against reading Trotskyite literature .
Animal Farm
was evidently a
pleasure to Waugh , not a duty , part of that pleasure being political,
and there is an added spice to Waugh's enjoyment of a fiercely anti–
Stalinist tale that needs to be pondered.
