GEORGE WATSON
269
ing a matter of severe contrasts-black or white, Jew or Gen–
tile - does not discriminate enough. He believes in shadings and
gradings. "Stable and fruitful societies have always been elaborately
graded," he writes, so that the fatal error of apartheid is that it makes
a single distinction and on one ground only-skin-color-and then
elevates into a rigid legal system what should be a matter of personal
inclination.
Orwell would not have put it quite like that. But his writings
too show an organized retreat from the simple dualities of his
youthful Marxism, especially that of bourgeoisie and proletariat.
The first of his books to see print,
Down and Out in Paris and London
(1933) is emphatic that social divisions are a matter of subtly graded
hierarchies, like the gradations insisted on by the staff of the big
Paris hotel where he once worked as a dishwasher. Such subtle divi–
sions are there because ordinary people, even very poor people, de–
mand that they should be there. Hierarchy is not imposed from
above, but demanded from below: a fact that theorists of class con–
flict are powerless to understand and even noticeably bad at remark–
ing on. The contempt of Waugh and Orwell for simplistic systems
like apartheid and communism - black versus white, proletariat ver–
sus bourgeoisie - has nothing to do with egalitarianism. Neither
believed that mankind was equal, or could ever be so, or would ever
want to be so. All systems based on the idea of equality-the point
might be expected in Waugh, but recurs even more forcefully in
Orwell- break down in action. "Some animals are more equal than
others," as the Stalinists put it in
Animal Farm
when they take power.
The folly of Moscow or Pretoria, both would have agreed, lies in
their determination to institutionalize differences where nature has
given us only subtleties and compelxities. Marxism and racism are
"rather modern," as Waugh put it disdainfully, as if conscious that
the medieval schoolmen or Renaissance Jesuits he idolized would
have seen no merit in either of them. They are bookish, theoretical,
and what Orwell in "Inside the Whale" finely calls "largely based on
a sense of personal immunity." Perhaps it is now getting easier to
understand why Orwell was so anxious that Waugh should read his
books: so anxious that he sent him copies, though to a stranger.
As novelists, however, Orwell and Waugh evolve not towards
each other but, in technical terms, in opposite directions. Waugh's
novels grow more realistic as he gets older, and Orwell's less so.
Orwell's fictional career began with several mediocre attempts
at realistic fiction, starting with
Burmese Days
(1934), where he reused
