Lebedoff, David. The Same Man: George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh in Love and War. Scribe, August 2008. RRP $29.95
A devout Roman Catholic and an atheist; a relentless social climber and a perpetual outsider; a sparkling social satirist and a literary polemicist. Outwardly, no two individuals could have less in common than George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh.
Yet the legendarily callous Waugh not only requested but was permitted to visit the reclusive and dying Orwell in hospital — his expression of a lengthy mutual admiration that, for Orwell, culminated in an (unfinished) essay in praise of Waugh's writings.
In The Same Man David Lebedoff attempts a conceptual high-wire act, arguing that these two men actually had far more in common than they had in conflict. Occupying the aesthetic, philosophical and political poles of their generation, the two authors gave very distinct voice to the dreams and dreads of a nation in flux — a nation whose present was in the process of becoming past, without any notion of where its future lay.
Inextricably linked to the concerns of a material age that both frightened and digusted them, Orwell turned to parable and Waugh to satire. It is in the brutal honesty of their cautionary visions, and their shared disgust for moral relativism that Lebedoff sees Orwell and Waugh united, arriving at a point of moral — if not spiritual — agreement from fundamentally opposing directions.
If Lebedoff's book is not a standard biography, it is no mere gimmick either. The provocative — some might say counter-intuitive — thesis that he puts forward serves to focus the bulky social and personal histories that fall within his remit, and yields an original angle of approach to two such canonical figures and a particularly ubiquitous period of world history.
If the result is occasionally guilty of an over-exuberant slanting of the evidence, it nevertheless makes for a compelling and provocative introduction to its subject matter.
At a mere 200 pages, The Same Man bucks the prevailing trend for comprehensive and exhaustive biography, opting instead for a more elegantly selective approach.
Structured around a series of touchstones — education, war, family life — the book allows its central figures to emerge gradually in parallel: Waugh's beloved country home at Piers Court set against Orwell's retreat in Jura, and his military service in Croatia juxtaposed with Orwell's experiences in the Spanish Civil War, with direct