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PARTISAN REVIEW
The copy of
Animal Farm
that Waugh read in the summer of
1945 to spite his Communist cousin had been sent to him by Orwell
himself, whom he had not yet met. In fact Waugh had just written to
him as to a stranger - "Dear Mr. Orwell. . . . "- thanking him for
his "ingenious and delightful allegory": his gratitude was all the
warmer because, as he flatteringly remarks, he had tried to buy a
copy and found it sold out. Authors like to be told such things. A sec–
ond letter to Orwell is similarly formal, and only the third, dated
July 17, 1949, breaks any ice: "Dear Orwell- Blair? -which do you
prefer?" says Waugh , hesitating between Orwell's famous pen name
and his real one of Eric Blair . And once again he has to thank Orwell
for a new book, this time
Nineteen Eighty-Four.
He sounds grateful but
cool. It had "failed to make my flesh creep," he reports politely- it
was a phrase he was to repeat about it years later in his life of Ronald
Knox (1959) - because it denied the soul and omitted all mention of
the Church. And that, protests Waugh , is simply incredible . How–
ever bad in England things may be by 1984, he cannot believe that
religious feeling would simply have died out. He then promises to
visit Orwell with his friend Frances Donaldson and her husband,
which he did. Lady Donaldson , a neighbor who was eventually to
write his life, tells me that "nothing memorable happened" on that
visit to a Gloucestershire sanatorium where Orwell in his last illness
was taking treatment for tuberculosis - just polite conversation. But
Malcolm Muggeridge remarks in Miriam Gross's
World oj George
Orwell
(1971) that he should have loved to see them together in the
sickroom, and it is still open to anyone to write an imaginary conver–
sation of the event. As Muggeridge says, it must have been visually
if not audibly interesting, with Waugh's "country-gentleman outfit
and Orwell's proletarian one, straight out of back numbers of
Punch. "
Their congeniality was, if nothing else, stylistic. The
debonair style with which they both preferred to handle issues grave
and grim is part of their legacy from P.G. Wodehouse, whose
writings they both adored. In fact they exchanged hints for Orwell's
own essay on Wodehouse, and years after Orwell's death, Waugh
was to praise him in a broadcast for having generously helped to
save Wodehouse from the disgrace of prosecution as a Nazi col–
laborator. Putting Wodehouse's gaiety to a grim purpose is the
stylistic secret of their fiction, and it is a secret they shared . It is
always hard to remember, between readings, that
Brideshead
and
Nineteen Eighty-Four
are funny books: one recalls only the gravity of
