'Same Man,' or odd couple?

THE SAME MAN: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War
By David Lebedoff
Random House, 264 pp., illustrated, $26

In 1944 Winston Churchill's son, Randolph, appointed Evelyn Waugh as his assistant in a mission to secure support of Tito's Partisans for the Allies in the Balkans. One evening Randolph asked Waugh for his opinion of Winston Churchill's "Life of Marlborough." Waugh replied: "As history it is beneath contempt, the special pleading of a defense lawyer. As literature it is worthless. It is written in a sham Augustan prose which could only have been achieved by a man who thought always in terms of public speech." The response was typical of Waugh: lucid, fearless, and acerbic.

The anecdote is recorded in David Lebedoff's biographical study of George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh, "The Same Man." It is likely that Orwell would have sympathized with Waugh's contempt for the falseness of Churchill's style, and it is perhaps surprising that Lebedoff does not note this, since elsewhere in his book he is at pains to draw parallels between the two men.

Lebedoff admits that calling such contrasting figures as Orwell and Waugh "the same man" will invite dissent. Waugh became a great comic writer in his early 20s. By age 26 he was a minor celebrity, and critically and financially successful. Orwell had none of Waugh's precocious brilliance. He struggled to find his way into print; turned himself into a great essayist by dogged effort; and found popular success only late in life with the publication of "Animal Farm" and "1984."

These differences seem slight when compared with the contrasting political and religious views of Orwell, a socialist, and Waugh, a conservative Catholic. In the 1930s, Waugh declared that if he were Spanish he would fight for Franco; Orwell went to Spain and fought on the Republican side.

The two respected each other's work, but their praise was always tempered by irreconcilable differences. Waugh believed that Orwell's disregard for religion and its institutions prevented him from getting to "the root of the matter" in his writing. Orwell, for his part, thought that Waugh was about as good a novelist as anyone of his generation could be who had "untenable" views on class and religion.

Why, then, does Lebedoff contend that Waugh and Orwell were the "same man"? He argues that they were united by their hatred of moral relativism and its growing influence in modern life. Both men, he observes, opposed fashionable orthodoxy and would have detested modern-day political correctness. Lebedoff admits that Orwell's socialism cannot be reconciled with Waugh's religious beliefs, but argues that both men were committed to the primacy of individual freedom, and that this helps to account for their hostility to all forms of totalitarianism.

Lebedoff does not seek to deny the fundamental differences between the two, but his attempts to stress their similarities are not always convincing. He notes, for instance, that Orwell stated that the main theme of Waugh's novel "Brideshead Revisited" was "the collision between ordinary decent behavior and the Catholic concept of good and evil," and suggests that Waugh "might have thought that 'decent' was an unnecessary word" in that assessment. More important, I think, was the importance of the word to Orwell, and its centrality to his moral code. It indicates the gulf between the two writers - one that cannot be bridged by the notion that a moral core was at the heart of each man's work. Lebedoff's treatment of his subjects' attitude toward language is thought-provoking, but most of his main points about the similarities between their work are made in the final two chapters.

Of the two men, Orwell strikes one as the more complex and the more mysterious. The patient inner compulsion that drove him on throughout the early, unpromising stages of his writing life is perhaps central to our understanding the singular qualities of Orwell's character. The workings of Waugh's phenomenal talent, and his uncompromising and unpredictable personality, lack the mystery of Orwell's self-belief.

Perhaps the most interesting section of this book is Lebedoff's engrossing account of the circumstances of Waugh's only meeting with Orwell. Orwell was gravely ill with tuberculosis when Waugh visited him at Cranham Sanitorium in 1949. Waugh tactfully brought with him the "Etonian socialist farmer" Jack Donaldson: In this way Orwell could not fear that Waugh wished to meet him only in order to convert him. Waugh's actions here may come as a surprise to those who are familiar only with the better-known accounts of his bluntness and pugnacity.

Just as admirable was the way in which Orwell was prepared to acknowledge Waugh's gifts as novelist, despite his inability to sympathize with his religious views. Whether they were in important respects "the same man" is open to debate, but what emerges is that they brought out the best in each other.

Matthew Peters is a freelance book reviewer in England.