George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh were very different men, yet in their critique of the modern age they were of one mind. That, in a nutshell, is the message of David Lebedoff's The Same Man: George Orwell & Evelyn Waugh in Love and War. Lebedoff takes the reader on a richly researched yet fast-paced walk through the lives and ideas of his two subjects, and in its biographical endeavors, the book succeeds admirably. But the simplicity with which Lebedoff streamlines their lives does not give his subjects' beliefs the nuance they deserve.

Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell (Orwell was a pseudonym for Eric Blair) were both born in 1903 to families of status in an age when, Lebedoff writes, "Life was a scoreboard, and each person's score was posted at birth." After a happy childhood at home—the "golden country" of 1984—Orwell attended a boarding school where he was absolutely miserable. His schoolmates hated him for having less money than they, and he came to feel that he would always be a failure in life. He was, however, successful enough to attend Eton College as a King's Scholar—the most prestigious scholarship at the most prestigious school in Britain. One might have expected him to go up to Oxford and become a man of letters or finance. But he rejected the whole stratum he had entered and shipped off to Burma to join the imperial administration.

In the loneliness of the colonies Orwell had time to collect the thoughts he would one day publish. Upon returning to England, he worked in the poorest and most wretched conditions he could find. These experiences provided the fodder for his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, as well as those still to come. Orwell would then marry Eileen O'Shaunnessey, who accompanied him to Spain to fight with the socialists against Franco. The two barely escaped with their lives and settled in squalor in Wallington. It was as an essayist and reviewer that Orwell made his mark. His early fiction did not have great success, though all that changed with Animal Farm in 1944.

Orwell's path stands in sharp contrast to that of Evelyn Waugh. "To say that Evelyn Waugh was a social climber," Lebedoff writes, "is to describe Everest as a hill." Where Orwell had been bullied, Waugh was the bully. He was older when he entered a boarding school, which may have accounted, in part, for the differences in their academic experiences. After boarding school, Waugh attended Lancing, and though the school was less prestigious than Eton, he was one of the wealthier students.

From Lancing, Waugh went up to Oxford, where his social climbing began in earnest. He made up for not having attended Eton by associating primarily with Etonian aesthetes. Through it all, Waugh kept a diary, which he would mine in writing his stories later: the adventures at Oxford for Brideshead Revisited; his year teaching in Wales for Decline and Fall; and the following years in London with the Bright Young People for Vile Bodies. Along the way, Waugh married Evelyn Gardner—he-Evelyn and she-Evelyn, they were called—though the two divorced a year later after she-Evelyn's adultery.

The endless parties and marital infidelity had taken their toll on Waugh. Vile Bodies, writes Lebedoff, is about "the vacuity of life without faith." Waugh found the answer to this hopelessness and vacuity in Roman Catholicism, converting the same year he published Vile Bodies and divorced Evelyn Gardner. Though his cruel manners remained much the same, his life was decidedly changed: "Ten years of that world sufficed to show that life there, or anywhere, was unintelligible or unendurable without God … . My life since then has been an endless delightful tour of discovery in the huge area of which I was made free."

When World War II broke out, both Waugh and Orwell sought to fight totalitarianism not only with words, but with tangible weapons too. Though neither was initially deemed fit for military service—Orwell was too sick and Waugh too irascible—Orwell joined the Home Guard and Waugh served as an officer under Winston Churchill's son Randolph in Croatia. Two of the funniest stories in the book come from this period. One night while enemy planes strafed from above, Waugh, wearing a white duffle coat "which might have been designed to attract fire," ran from the command's quarters to the ditch where Churchill hid. Orwell, meanwhile, had become a war correspondent in liberated Paris. To protect himself from assassination by Communists, he went unannounced to Ernest Hemingway's room at the Ritz and asked to borrow a pistol. Hemingway didn't think much of his worries, but admired Orwell's Homage to Catalonia and loaned him his Colt .32.

Up to this point, The Same Man serves as a witty and brisk biography of the two men. But Lebedoff's analysis lacks depth. The last chapter is nothing more than a lightly fleshed-out list of comparisons between the two. The greatest enemy they saw was, as Waugh put it, "the Modern Age in arms." They hated totalitarianism with a passion but saw that even if totalitarianism was defeated, civilization as they knew it would remain in danger. Lebedoff writes: "What both believed—their core, who they were—was that individual freedom mattered more than anything else on earth and reliance on tradition was the best way to maintain it." (Here the lack of nuance in Lebedoff's analysis is glaringly apparent.) But reliance on tradition was in decline. Also in decline was a belief in objective reality and objective truth, which Orwell so deeply probed in 1984. Lebedoff also writes of their trust in the common sense of the common man against the condescension of an upper-middle class. The catalogue of ideological similarities ends in an all-encompassing synthesis: "It was in the freedom and courage to choose one's own life that Orwell and Waugh were most nearly the same. That their lives were deliberately chosen is the most valuable legacy that both offer to us now, in our own so-busy time."

Ugh. Clearly there has to be something more, something deeper that unites them than the "deliberate chosenness" of their lives. Or it might be that despite their similar critiques of the modern age, they were different men at the core. If this were the case, the place they were most different was in the area of religion. Both writers saw the need for man to believe in a moral code, but Orwell thought he could have morality without religion . He wrote to Waugh that he liked Brideshead except for "hideous faults on the surface," one of these being the book's Catholic themes. But Waugh did not believe that morality would last without faith. For him, the days of spending Christianity's cultural and moral capital without embracing its creeds were coming to a swift end.

In light of that impending end, Lebedoff writes, Orwell sought to improve this world by embracing and advocating a moral code to be lived in this life. Waugh, by contrast, deemed this world lost and thought that only by religious belief could one attain happiness in the next life. Such a caricature makes Waugh into a kind of Gnostic, and his Catholicism a kind of religious escapism. But that is far from true. Moral codes in this world mattered a great deal to Waugh, as he shows with the end of Julia and Charles' relationship in Brideshead. Both men cared deeply about right actions, but Orwell wanted to save the world through politics and Waugh through Catholicism. In the end, that would prove to be their greatest difference. They saw the same symptoms of societal disease but proposed different cures.

Both men saw society continue to decline despite their warnings. Orwell's politics could slow the impending disaster but provide little hope. The end of 1984 and Animal Farm show that clear as day. But Waugh's Catholicism gave him a flicker of hope. For as Charles Ryder stands in the ruins of the world he knew before World War II, he finds the "small red flame" indicating Christ's presence in the tabernacle of the chapel, the sign that no matter how far society falls, there is always hope of a resurrection. Indeed, Waugh wrote to Orwell that he had one problem with the hopelessness of 1984's Oceania: "But what makes your version spurious to me is the disappearance of the Church. I wrote of you once that you seemed unaware of its existence now when it is everywhere manifest … . I believe it is inextinguishable, though of course it can be extinguished in a certain place for a certain time … . The Brotherhood which can confound the party is one of love—not adultery in Berkshire, still less throwing vitriol in children's faces. And men who love a crucified God need never think of torture as all-powerful."

David Lebedoff's The Same Man is strongest when it tells the story of Waugh's and Orwell's lives, and useful when it shows the similarity of their critiques of modern society. But its treatment of their similarities and differences is too simplistic, especially in its account of the remedies they propose. For these remedies were answers to life's ultimate questions, answers that finally separated Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell at the deepest level.

Nathaniel Peters is an assistant editor at First Things.

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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