Rejecting Smelly Orthodoxies Poem by gershon hepner

“You cannot be both Catholic and grown up, ”
George Orwell once declared Evelyn Waugh.
The devil with whom you must chose to sup
doesn’t care what gods you might adore
so long as you don’t worship that same one
in whom he finds belief to be impossible;
though he accepts the Father and the Son,
he says the Holy Ghost is not cognoscible.
Rejecting smelly orthodoxies, he
prefers to be eclectic in belief;
to those who hate him he’s a Pharisee,
a title he accepts with great relief.

In the NYT Book Review, August 31,2008, Jim Holt reviews “The Same Man, ” by David Lebedoff which claims that George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh had very similar approaches to life:
This book (“The Same Man, ” David Lebedoff) has a thesis, and it is, on the face of it, a preposterous one: Gerge Orwell = Evelyn Waugh. Why is this preposterous? Because Orwell and Waugh were, in almost every salient respect, precise opposites. Orwell conjured up the nightmarish dystopia of “1984.” Waugh’s best-known work, “Brideshead Revisited, ” was a reverie about a vanished age of Oxford privilege, titled Catholic families, large country houses and fastidious conscience. Orwell was tall, gaunt and self-mortifying, a socialist with an affinity for mineworkers and tramps. Waugh was a short, plump, florid social climber and a proud reactionary who declared, “I do not aspire to advise my sovereign in her choice of servants.” Orwell fought on the loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War. Waugh announced, “If I were a Spaniard I should be fighting for General Franco.” Orwell could tell you how to make a perfect cup of tea or where the best place was to roast a potato (under the meat) . Waugh could give you advice on laying down a wine cellar or dressing like Beau Brummel on a budget. Orwell thought “good prose is like a window pane, ” forceful and direct. Waugh was an elaborate stylist whose prose ranged from the dryly ironical to the richly ornamented and rhetorical. Orwell was solitary and fiercely earnest. Waugh was convivial and brutally funny. And, perhaps most important, Orwell was a secularist whose greatest fear was the emergence of Big Brother in this world. Waugh was a Roman Catholic convert whose greatest hope lay with God in the next. Indeed, about the only thing Orwell and Waugh seem to have had in common was the rather boring fact that they were both Englishmen born to middle-class families in 1903… Both Orwell and Waugh, for example, were uncommonly brave in war. And in each case, that bravery seemed born of an almost foolhardy contempt for danger. Orwell was shot through the throat and nearly killed by a fascist sniper in the Spanish Civil War when he casually stood up in the trenches to light a cigarette. Waugh showed similar sang-froid in the Second World War when he calmly strolled through Luftwaffe machine-gun fire wearing a bright white duffle coat that presented the perfect target. “You bloody little swine, take off that coat! ” yelled his friend and fellow officer Randolph Churchill (son of Winston) . To which the unruffled Waugh replied, “I’ll tell you what I think of your repulsive manners when the bombardment is over.” Such anecdotes of physical bravery go to a deeper affinity between the two men: their shared fearlessness in opposing what Orwell called the “smelly little orthodoxies” of the day. For Orwell, the smelliest of these was the reverence of the British left for Stalin. His genius was to write a children’s fable, “Animal Farm, ” with its wonderfully named pigs Napoleon and Snowball, that broke the hold of Soviet propaganda on the English intelligentsia. (Lebedoff stresses how hard it was for Orwell to get the manuscript published, with even editors like T. S. Eliot chary of offending Uncle Joe.)


9/2/08