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Opposite Is True Of 2 Brits

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By ROGER K. MILLER

The Tampa Tribune

Published: August 10, 2008

"The Same Man: George Orwell & Evelyn Waugh in Love and War," by David Lebedoff (Random House, $26)
George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh were at opposite ends of a spectrum that met in a circle. Though by nearly every external measure polar opposites - Orwell, the atheist/socialist champion of the proletariat, and Waugh, the Catholic convert/Tory hobnobber with the aristocracy - they were at their core astonishingly similar writers and thinkers, David Lebedoff concludes in "The Same Man."

This book, based on biographies and other secondary works and a close analysis of the two men's own writings, contains nothing fundamentally new. But Lebedoff, author of several previous books (including "Cleaning Up," about the Exxon Valdez case), offers here an intriguing comparison of their lives and comes up with a strong case for closely shared values.

Waugh and Orwell (born Eric Arthur Blair) did have a few basic things in common. Both were born in 1903 into, despite differences in family income, roughly the same social class. Each, of course, became a world-renowned author whose works, decades after initial publication, sell in the hundreds of thousands a year.

But "Waugh was hard and funny and elegant," Lebedoff writes, "while Blair was soft and quiet and shabby." Boarding school gave Orwell his foundational understanding of the world as harsh, bullying, unequal and unfair. He did not belong, he did not want to belong, and he did not want success as defined by a society he loathed.

Waugh, on the other hand, thrived at school. There his lifelong social-climbing began. Whereas Orwell was bullied, Waugh was an enthusiastic bully.

Orwell was deliberately impoverished and stoic, interested primarily in this world and its politics, despising the empire and the class that ran it. Waugh reveled in the wealth that his early novelistic triumphs brought him and eagerly sought the company of ruling elites.

Yet, with his second novel, "Vile Bodies" (1930), he wrote a book that was not just "funny," but funny with a bleak world view. An "indictment of a whole society" through depiction of hedonistic Bright Young People, the book ends, Lebedoff maintains, as hopeless as the conclusion of Orwell's "1984."

Both "saw in modern life a terrible enemy." Both were committed to moral principles; Waugh's connected to the next world, Orwell's to this.

Theirs was a fight against not only the totalitarianism that loomed in their own time, but also against the future, which they feared would strip humans of their humanity. They hated moral relativism.

In Waugh's many novels, and in Orwell's "Animal Farm" and "1984" and perhaps most of all in his matchless essays ("treasures of our culture"), Lebedoff believes, these two giants of 20th century British literature warned us of what was to come and "came to be, improbably enough, the same man."

Roger K. Miller, author of the novel "Invisible Hero," is working on his second book, "Chenango Street Boy."

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