GEORGE WATSON
He saw human beings not as a mass of contradictions but as a
particular sort of person - a great nobleman or a poor scholar or
a spotty-faced announcer from the
BBC .
That was all they were,
and they had to go through life like that.
(Radio Times,
April
18-24, 1987)
271
This perhaps overlooks the protective coloring that genius finds to
mask its sensitivity. "He was an extraordinarily uncomplicated man
who saw life in very simple terms," Powell goes on. But simplicity, Or
at least the sOrt that SCOres in argument or fiction - such as seeing
that fascism and communism are more like each other than either is
like the civilization of the West - is an achieved state of mind,
"costing not less than everything," as T.S. Eliot once said, and only
highly complex beings arrive at it at all. In his autobiography
A Little
Learning
(1964), Waugh remarks that at sixteen he noticed that his
publisher-father, "whom I had grown up to accept with complete
simplicity,» was in fact a highly gifted actor in everything he did.
Orwell's simplicity is like that too. In a famous utterance he held that
good prose was like a windowpane, mattering not in itself but only
by what you see through it. Simple .. . . But anyone who has ever
tried to write prose like that, Or to see human creatures in life or fic–
tion with Waugh's clarity in
Decline and Fall
or
Vile Bodies,
will know
how much clutter of mind has to be cleared away first.
If
Waugh and
Orwell did not exactly despise the complexities of literary modern–
ism, Joyce-style or Eliot-style, at least they recognized, and early,
that such complexities were not for them. Orwell once remarked that
Joyce's
Ulysses
made him feel like a eunuch at a singing lesson, and
Waugh's artist-hero in
Brideshead
briskly calls modern art "bosh."
Stupid people have believed such things about Joyce and the school
of Picasso. But that does not mean that all who believe such things
are stupid.
Seeing the proximity of communism and fascism took a kind of
intelligence that Joyce and Eliot did not have, and one they might
not much have respected.
That proximity is the conclusive point of
Animal Farm,
where
the tale ends on a sudden vision of a resemblance, even an identity:
" ... already it was impossible to say which was which.»
Scoop
had
made that point , almost too flippantly to be noticed, seven years
before. By a supreme irony Waugh was to repeat it , coincidentally,
in the same letter to Nancy Mitford that bore the sad tidings of
Orwell's premature death. That was in January 1950, when Europe
was still reeling from the revelations of the Nazi death camps,
