GEORGE WATSON
267
their themes , never the gaiety of their prose, so that every rereading
surprises .
More than that, they were both masters of a species of invective
at once blunt and insidious, abusing with the quick penetration of
the knock-out blow rather than the bruising weight of a bludgeon.
"Pow, and you're down," Normal Mailer once remarked admiringly,
in a televised interview, of Orwell's prose, imitating in a boxer's
punch the flash of a fist you hardly see . It is a gift Waugh and Orwell
shared . When Orwell calls the left of his day "Bolshevik commisars ,
half-gangster, half-gramophone, escaped quakers, vegetarian cranks
and back-room Labour Party crawlers," or dismisses Marxist dialec–
tic as a "pea-and-thimble trick," you feel but do not see the flash of
the fist. Or when Waugh reviews Stephen Spender's autobiography
World within World:
To see him fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to ex–
perience all the horror of seeing a Sevres vase in the hands of a
chimpanzee .
(Tablet,
May 5, 1951)
One imagines two such masters of the merciless put-down studying
each other through
t~le
English civil wars of the thirties intelligentsia
with a mounting respect that no dogmatic divide could dim.
If
not
soul mates, they were style mates. The fierce trenchancy that char–
acterizes British literary life at its best - "British intellectual knife–
throwing," an American once called it admiringly - never found
finer exponents in our century. Sad that Orwell should be bedridden
and dying when they met for the first and last time. They might have
enjoyed each other .
There are profounder kinships . Orwell's discovery in Barcelona
in
1937
that extremes meet, that fascism and communism are much
alike , is one Waugh had already made for himself. The charge that
he was ever knowingly soft on fascism is unjustified . His views on
Ethiopia and Spain in
1935-6
were wrongheaded, most would say,
but it is questionable whether fascism , in his own estimation,
entered into the matter at all. His view of black states and the op–
pressions endemic to all primitive societies are comically presented
in
Black MischieJ(1932).
As a convert to Rome in
1930,
he saw the
Spanish Republic as bitterly hostile to the church he loved, which it
plainly was . In any case, he had the deepest contempt for the facile
conceptualizing that often passes for advanced thought. When there
is an attempted coup in Ishmaelia in
Scoop
(1938),
intellectual opin-
