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opened less than five years before, and the voluminous confirma–
tions of the Nuremberg trial of what war criminals had done there.
Waugh already knew that Nazism was not a conservative idea but a
false and perverted progressive idea, an idealism gone wrong. "Gas
chambers were not a Nazi invention . All 'Progressives' believed in
them , and called it Euthanasia," he wrote to Nancy Mitford,
characteristically spoiling his point a little with hyperbole .
(All
pro–
gressives?)
If
he meant
H.C.
Wells and Havelock Ellis , who half a
century earlier had proclaimed that socialism would require the ex–
termination of the unfit by the state , then he was certainly right , and
if he believed that Hitler's sources included such Victorian socialists,
he is altogether likely to be right . To adapt the last sentence of
Orwell's allegory, it is almost impossible to say which was which, so
intimate are the links between the intellectual socialism of the last
century and the ideological foundations offascism in this one. A pity
Orwell and Waugh had no chance to discuss such weighty issues
when they met, for the first and last time, in 1949. On modern
totalitarianism, there is a kinship of interest between them deeper
than the ocean and higher than the stars .
So, too, is a theme that intensifies in their fiction in middle age,
which I am tempted to call the agony of a lost Eden. The phrase
smacks of Milton , and it might be objected, and against Milton's
epic, that one cannot be said to have lost something one never had .
But of course, as Milton knew, one can. In Waugh and Orwell,
Eden is somewhere else, or somebody else's, or snatched at only for a
moment, or only distantly felt and known . It is lost, so to speak,
almost before it is found : it is certainly never retained . Winston
Smith, Orwell's hero in
Nineteen Eighty-Four,
dimly knows there was
once a free England before the Party seized total power, and he
wanders off into the London slums to find echoes and memories of
it.
Brideshead
too is like that, and it poses some embarrassments as a
novel- or at least it is supposed to do so, for I have always suspected
such critical embarrassments to be more ritual than real . The life of
a great country house is not easily admitted by intellectuals to be
fascinating, and true to form, Orwell, in his notes for the unwritten
Partisan Review
article, names snobbery and Catholicism the two
driving forces in Waugh's book, implying that as a secular radical he
reprobates one as much as the other. In a similar spirit, Kingsley
Amis remarked in a recent interview how much he detested the
novel, though he self-betrayingly added that he often reread it.
"Nobs' appeal," he said, "the appeal of nobs ."
So why is it reread? Orwell offers the beginnings of an answer
