There was povery and there were even class distinctions, but
except for the Negroes there was no permanently submerged class.
except for the Negroes there was no permanently submerged class.
Orwell
But in his own age and ours he has been popular chiefly because he was able to
express in a comic, simplified and therefore memorable form the native decency of the
common man. And it is important that from this point of view people of very different
types can be described as ‘common’. In a country like England, in spite of its class-
structure, there does exist a certain cultural unity. All through the Christian ages, and
especially since the French Revolution, the Western world has been haunted by the idea
of freedom and equality; it is only an IDEA, but it has penetrated to all ranks of society.
The most atrocious injustices, cruelties, lies, snobberies exist everywhere, but there are
not many people who can regard these things with the same indifference as, say, a Roman
slave-owner. Even the millionaire suffers from a vague sense of guilt, like a dog eating a
stolen leg of mutton. Nearly everyone, whatever his actual conduct may be, responds
emotionally to the idea of human brotherhood. Dickens voiced a code which was and on
the whole still is believed in, even by people who violate it. It is difficult otherwise to
explain why he could be both read by working people (a thing that has happened to no
other novelist of his stature) and buried in Westminster Abbey.
When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of
seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the
writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal,
Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like
and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer OUGHT to have. Well,
in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens’s photographs,
though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high
colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no
malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who
fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is GENEROUSLY
ANGRY — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type
hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for
our souls.
CHARLES READE (1940)
Since Charles Reade’s books are published in cheap editions one can assume that he still
has his following, but it is unusual to meet anyone who has voluntarily read him. In most
people his name seems to evoke, at most, a vague memory of ‘doing’ THE CLOISTER
AND THE HEARTH as a school holiday task. It is his bad luck to be remembered by this
particular book, rather as Mark Twain, thanks to the films, is chiefly remembered by A
CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR’S COURT. Reade wrote several dull
books, and THE CLOISTER AND THE HEARTH is one of them. But he also wrote
three novels which I personally would back to outlive the entire works of Meredith and
George Eliot, besides some brilliant long-short stories such as A JACK OF ALL
TRADES and THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A THIEF.
What is the attraction of Reade? At bottom it is the same charm as one finds in R. Austin
Freeman’s detective stories or Lieutenant-Commander Gould’s collections of
curiosities — the charm of useless knowledge. Reade was a man of what one might call
penny-encyclopaedic learning. He possessed vast stocks of disconnected information
which a lively narrative gift allowed him to cram into books which would at any rate pass
as novels. If you have the sort of mind that takes a pleasure in dates, lists, catalogues,
concrete details, descriptions of processes, junk-shop windows and back numbers of the
EXCHANGE AND MART, the sort of mind that likes knowing exactly how a medieval
catapult worked or just what objects a prison cell of the eighteen-forties contained, then
you can hardly help enjoying Reade. He himself, of course, did not see his work in quite
this light. He prided himself on his accuracy and compiled his books largely from
newspaper cuttings, but the strange facts which he collected were subsidiary to what he
would have regarded as his ‘purpose’. For he was a social reformer in a fragmentary way,
and made vigorous attacks on such diverse evils as blood-letting, the treadmill, private
asylums, clerical celibacy and tight-lacing.
My own favourite has always been FOUL PLAY, which as it happens is not an attack on
anything in particular. Like most nineteenth-century novels FOUL PLAY is too
complicated to be summarized, but its central story is that of a young clergyman, Robert
Penfold, who is unjustly convicted of forgery, is transported to Australia, absconds in
disguise, and is wrecked on a desert island together with the heroine. Here, of course,
Reade is in his element. Of all men who ever lived, he was the best fitted to write a
desert-island story. Some desert-island stories, of course, are worse than others, but none
is altogether bad when it sticks to the actual concrete details of the struggle to keep alive.
A list of the objects in a shipwrecked man’s possession is probably the surest winner in
fiction, surer even than a trial scene. Nearly thirty years after reading the book I can still
remember more or less exactly what things the three heroes of Ballantyne’s CORAL
ISLAND possessed between them. (A telescope, six yards of whipcord, a penknife, a
brass ring and a piece of hoop iron. ) Even a dismal book like ROBINSON CRUSOE, so
unreadable as a whole that few people even know that the second part exists, becomes
interesting when it describes Crusoe’s efforts to make a table, glaze earthenware and
grow a patch of wheat. Reade, however, was an expert on desert islands, or at any rate he
was very well up in the geography textbooks of the time. Moreover he was the kind of
man who would have been at home on a desert island himself. He would never, like
Crusoe, have been stumped by such an easy problem as that of leavening bread and,
unlike Ballantyne, he knew that civilized men cannot make fire by rubbing sticks
together.
The hero of FOUL PLAY, like most of Reade’s heroes, is a kind of supennan. He is hero,
saint, scholar, gentleman, athlete, pugilist, navigator, physiologist, botanist, blacksmith
and carpenter all rolled into one, the sort of compendium of all the talents that Reade
honestly imagined to be the normal product of an English university. Needless to say, it is
only a month or two before this wonderful clergyman has got the desert island running
like a West End hotel. Even before reaching the island, when the last survivors of the
wrecked ship are dying of thirst in an open boat, he has shown his ingenuity by
constructing a distilling apparatus with ajar, a hot- water bottle and a piece of tubing. But
his best stroke of all is the way in which he contrives to leave the island. He himself, with
a price on his head, would be glad enough to remain, but the heroine, Helen Rollestone,
who has no idea that he is a convict, is naturally anxious to escape. She asks Robert to
turn his ‘great mind’ to this problem. The first difficulty, of course, is to discover exactly
where the island is. Luckily, however, Helen is still wearing her watch, which is still
keeping Sydney time. By fixing a stick in the ground and watching its shadow Robert
notes the exact moment of noon, after which it is a simple matter to work out the
longitude — for naturally a man of his calibre would know the longitude of Sydney. It is
equally natural that he can detennine the latitude within a degree or two by the nature of
the vegetation. But the next difficulty is to send a message to the outside world. After
some thought Robert writes a series of messages on pieces of parchment made from
seals’ bladders, with ink obtained from cochineal insects. He has noticed that migrant
birds often use the island as a stopping-place, and he fixes on ducks as the likeliest
messengers, because every duck is liable to be shot sooner or later. By a stratagem often
used in India he captures a number of ducks, ties a message to each of their legs and lets
them go. Finally, of course, one of the ducks takes refuge on a ship, and the couple are
rescued, but even then the story is barely half finished. There follow enonnous
ramifications, plots and counterplots, intrigues, triumphs and disasters, ending with the
vindication of Robert, and wedding bells.
In any of Reade’s three best books, FOUL PLAY, HARD CASH and IT IS NEVER TOO
LATE TO MEND, it is not fair to say that the sole interest is in the technical detail. His
power of descriptive writing, especially of describing violent action, is also very striking,
and on a serial-story level he is a wonderful contriver of plots. Simply as a novelist it is
impossible to take him seriously, because he has no sense whatever of character or of
probability, but he himself had the advantage of believing in even the absurdest details of
his own stories. He wrote of life as he saw it, and many Victorians saw it in the same
way: that is, as a series of tremendous melodramas, with virtue triumphant every time. Of
all the nineteenth-century novelists who have remained readable, he is perhaps the only
one who is completely in tune with his own age. For all his unconventionality, his
‘purpose’, his eagerness to expose abuses, he never makes a fundamental criticism. Save
for a few surface evils he sees nothing wrong in an acquisitive society, with its equation
of money and virtue, its pious millionaires and erastian clergymen. Perhaps nothing gives
one his measure better than the fact that in introducing Robert Penfold, at the beginning
of FOUL PLAY, he mentions that he is a scholar and a cricketer and only thirdly and
almost casually adds that he is a priest.
That is not to say that Reade’s social conscience was not sound so far as it went, and in
several minor ways he probably helped to educate public opinion. His attack on the
prison system in IT IS NEVER TOO LATE TO MEND is relevant to this day, or was so
till very recently, and in his medical theories he is said to have been a long way ahead of
his time. What he lacked was any notion that the early railway age, with the special
scheme of values appropriate to it, was not going to last for ever. This is a little surprising
when one remembers that he was the brother of Winwood Reade. However hastily and
unbalanced Winwood Reade’s MARTYRDOM OF MAN may seem now, it is a book
that shows an astonishing width of vision, and it is probably the unacknowledged
grandparent of the ‘outlines’ so popular today. Charles Reade might have written an
‘outline’ of phrenology, cabinet-making or the habits of whales, but not of human history.
He was simply a middle-class gentleman with a little more conscience than most, a
scholar who happened to prefer popular science to the classics. Just for that reason he is
one of the best ‘escape’ novelists we have. FOUL PLAY and HARD CASH would be
good books to send to a soldier enduring the miseries of trench warfare, for instance.
There are no problems in them, no genuine ‘messages’, merely the fascination of a gifted
mind functioning within very narrow limits, and offering as complete a detachment from
real life as a game of chess or a jigsaw puzzle.
INSIDE THE WHALE (1940)
I
When Henry Miller’s novel, TROPIC OF CANCER, appeared in 1935, it was greeted
with rather cautious praise, obviously conditioned in some cases by a fear of seeming to
enjoy pornography. Among the people who praised it were T. S. Eliot, Herbert Read,
Aldous Huxley, John dos Passes, Ezra Pound — on the whole, not the writers who are in
fashion at this moment. And in fact the subject matter ofthebook, and to a certain extent
its mental atmosphere, belong to the twenties rather than to the thirties.
TROPIC OF CANCER is a novel in the first person, or autobiography in the form of a
novel, whichever way you like to look at it. Miller himself insists that it is straight
autobiography, but the tempo and method of telling the story are those of a novel. It is a
story of the American Paris, but not along quite the usual lines, because the Americans
who figure in it happen to be people without money. During the boom years, when
dollars were plentiful and the exchange-value of the franc was low, Paris was invaded by
such a swarm of artists, writers, students, dilettanti, sight-seers, debauchees, and plain
idlers as the world has probably never seen. In some quarters of the town the so-called
artists must actually have outnumbered the working population — indeed, it has been
reckoned thatm the late twenties ther were as many as 30,000 painters in Paris, most of
them impostors. The populace had grown so hardened to artists that gruff-voiced lesbians
in corduroy breeches and young men in Grecian or medieval costume could walk the
streets without attracting a glance, and along the Seine banks Notre Dame it was almost
impossible to pick one’s way between the sketching-stools. It was the age of dark horses
and neglected genii; the phrase on everybody’s lips was ‘QUAND JE SERAI LANCE’.
As it turned out, nobody was ‘LANCE’, the slump descended like another Ice Age, the
cosmopolitan mob of artists vanished, and the huge Montparnasse cafes which only ten
years ago were filled till the small hours by hordes of shrieking poseurs have turned into
darkened tombs in which there arc not even any ghosts. It is this world — described in,
among other novels, Wyndham Lewis’s TARR — that Miller is writing about, but he is
dealing only with the under side of it, the lumpen-proletarian fringe which has been able
to survive the slump because it is composed partly of genuine artists and partly of
genuine scoundrels. The neglected genii, the paranoiacs who art always ‘going to’ write
the novel that will knock Proust into a cocked hat, are there, but they are only genii in the
rather rare moments when they are not scouting about for the next meal. For the most part
it is a story of bug-ridden rooms in working-men’s hotels, of fights, drinking bouts, cheap
brothels, Russian refugees, cadging, swindling, and temporary jobs. And the whole
atmosphere of the poor quarters of Paris as a foreigner sees them — the cobbled alleys, the
sour reek of refuse, the bistros with their greasy zinc counters and worn brick floors, the
green waters of the Seine, the blue cloaks of the Republican Guard, the crumbling iron
urinals, the peculiar sweetish smell of the Metro stations, the cigarettes that come to
pieces, the pigeons in the Luxembourg Gardens — it is all there, or at any rate the feeling
of it is there.
On the face of it no material could be less promising. When TROPIC OF CANCER was
published the Italians were marching into Abyssinia and Hitler’s concentration camps
were already bulging. The intellectual foci of the world were Rome, Moscow, and Berlin.
It did not seem to be a moment at which a novel of outstanding value was likely to be
written about American dead-beats cadging drinks in the Latin Quarter. Of course a
novelist is not obliged to write directly about contemporary history, but a novelist who
simply disregards the major public events of the moment is generally either a footler or a
plain idiot. From a mere account of the subject matter of TROPIC OF CANCER most
people would probably assume it to be no more thatt a bit of naughty-naughty left over
from the twenties. Actually, nearly everyone who read it saw at once that it was nothing
of the kind, but a very remarkable book. How or why remarkable? That question is never
easy to answer. It is better to begin by describing the impression that TROPIC OF
CANCER has left on my own mind.
When I first opened TROPIC OF CANCER and saw that it was full of unprintable words,
my immediate reaction was a refusal to be impressed. Most people’s would be the same, I
believe. Nevertheless, after a lapse of time the atmosphere of the book, besides
innumerable details, seemed to linger in my memory in a peculiar way. A year later
Miller’s second book, BLACK SPRING, was published. By this tim? TROPIC OF
CANCER was much more vividly present in my mind than it had been when I first read
it. My first feeling about BLACK SPRING was that it showed a falling-off, and it is a
fact that it has not the same unity as the other book. Yet after another year there were
many passages in BLACK SPRING that had also rooted themselves in my memory.
Evidently these books are of the sort to leave a flavour behind them — books that ‘create a
world of their own’, as the saying goes. The books that do this are not necessarily good
books, they may be good bad books like RAFFLES or the SHERLOCK HOLMES
stories, or perverse and morbid books like WUTHERING HEIGHTS or THE HOUSE
WITH THE GREEN SHUTTERS. But now and again there appears a novel which opens
up a new world not by revealing what is strange, but by revealing what is familiar. The
truly remarkable thing about ULYSSES, for instance, is the commonplaceness of its
material. Of course there is much more in ULYSSES than this, because Joyce is a kind of
poet and also an elephantine pedant, but his real achievement has been to get the familiar
on to paper. He dared — for it is a matter of DARING just as much as of technique — to
expose the imbecilities of the inner mind, and in doing so he discovered an America
which was under everybody’s nose. Here is a whole world of stuff which you supposed to
be of its nature incommunicable, and somebody has managed to communicate it. The
effect is to break down, at any rate momentarily, the solitude in which the human being
lives. When you read certain passages in ULYSSES you feel that Joyce’s mind and your
mind are one, that he knows ah about you though he has never heard your name, that
there some world outside time and space in which you and he are together. And though
he does not resemble Joyce in other ways, there is a touch of this quality in Henry Miller.
Not everywhere, because his work is very uneven, and sometimes, especially in BLACK
SPRING, tends to slide away into more verbiage or into the squashy universe of the
surresalists. But read him for five pages, ten pages, and you feel the peculiar relief that
comes not so much from understanding as from being UNDERSTOOD. ‘He knows ah
about me,’ you feel; ‘he wrote this specially for me’. It is as though you could hear a
voice speaking to you, a friendly Amierican voice, with no humbug in it, no moral
purpose, merely an implicit assumption that we are ah alike. For the moment you have
got away from the lies and simplifications, the stylized, marionette-like quality of
ordinary fiction, even quite good fiction, and are dealing with the recognizable
experiences of human beings.
But what kind of experience? What kind of human beings? Miller is writing about the
man in the street, and it is incidentally rather a pity that it should be a street full of
brothers. That is the penalty of leaving your native land. It means transferring your roots
into shallower soil. Exile is probably more damaging to a novelist than to a painter or
even a poet, because its effect is to take him out of contact with working life and narrow
down his range to the street, the cafe, the church, the brothel and the studio. On the
whole, in Miller’s books you are reading about people living the expatriate life, people
drinking, talking, meditating, and fornicating, not about people working, marrying, and
bringing up children; a pity, because he would have described the one set of activities as
well as the other. In BLACK SPRING there is a wonderful flashback of New York, the
swarming Irish-infested New York of the O. Henry period, but the Paris scenes are the
best, and, granted their utter worthlessness as social types, the drunks and dead-beats of
the cafes are handled with a feeling for character and a mastery of technique that are
unapproached in any at all recent novel. All of them are not only credible but completely
familiar; you have the feeling that all their adventures have happened to yourself. Not
that they are anything very startling in the way of adventures. Henry gets a job with a
melancholy Indian student, gets another job at a dreadful French school during a cold
snap when the lavatories are frozen solid, goes on drinking bouts in Le Havre with his
friend Collins, the sea captain, goes tse brothels where there are wonderful Negresses,
talks with his friend Van Norden, the novelist, who has got the great novel of the world in
his head but can never bring himself to begin writing it. His friend Karl, on the verge of
starvation, is picked up by a wealthy widow who wishes to marry him. There are
intenninable Hamlet-like conversations in which Karl tries to decide which is worse,
being hungry or sleeping with an old woman. In great detail he describes his visits to the
widow, how he went to the hotel dressed in his best, how before going in he neglected to
urinate, so that the whole evening was one long crescendo of torment etc. , etc. And after
all, none of it is true, the widow doesn’t even exist — Karl has simply invented her in
order to make himself seem important. The whole book is in this vein, more or less. Why
is it that these monstrous trivialities are so engrossing? Simply because the whole
atmosphere is deeply familiar, because you have all the while the feeling that these things
are happening to YOU. And you have this feeling because somebody has chosen to drop
the Geneva language of the ordinary novel and drag the REAL-POLITIK of the inner
mind into the open. In Miller’s case it is not so much a question of exploring the
mechanisms of the mind as of owning up to everyday facts and everyday emotions. For
the truth is that many ordinary people, perhaps an actual majority, do speak and behave in
just the way that is recorded here. The callous coarseness with which the characters in
TROPIC OF CANCER talk is very rare in fiction, but it is extremely common in real life;
again and again I have heard just such conversations from people who were not even
aware that they were talking coarsely. It is worth noticing that TROPIC OF CANCER is
not a young man’s book. Miller was in his forties when it was published, and though
since then he has produced three or four others, it is obvious that this first book had been
lived with for years. It is one of those books that are slowly matured in poverty and
obscurity, by people who know what they have got to do and therefore are able to wait.
The prose is astonishing, and in parts of BLACK SPRING is even better. Unfortunately I
cannot quote; unprintable words occur almost everywhere. But get hold of TROPIC OF
CANCER, get hold of BLACK SPRING and read especially the first hundred pages.
They give you an idea of what can still be done, even at this late date, with English prose.
In them, English is treated as a spoken language, but spoken WITHOUT FEAR, i. e.
without fear of rhetoric or of the unusual or poetical word. The adjective has come back,
after its ten years’ exile. It is a flowing, swelling prose, a prose with rhythms in it,
something quite different from the flat cautious statements and snack-bar dialects that are
now in fashion.
When a book like TROPIC OF CANCER appears, it is only natural that the first thing
people notice should be its obscenity. Given our current notions of literary decency, it is
not at all easy to approach an unprintable book with detachment. Either one is shocked
and disgusted, or one is morbidly thrilled, or one is determined above all else not to be
impressed. The last is probably the commonest reaction, with the result that unprintable
books often get less attention than they deserve. It is rather the fashion to say that nothing
is easier than to write an obscene book, that people only do it in order to get themselves
talked about and make money, etc. , etc. What makes it obvious that this is not the case is
that books which are obscene in the police-court sense are distinctly uncommon. If there
were easy money to be made out of dirty words, a lot more people would be making it.
But, because ‘obscene’ books do not appear very frequently, there is a tendency to lump
them together, as a rule quite unjustifiably. TROPIC OF CANCER has been vaguely
associated with two other books, ULYSSES and VOYAGE AU BOUT DE LA NUIT,
but in neither case is there much resemblance. What Miller has in common with Joyce is
a willingness to mention the inane, squalid facts of everyday life. Putting aside
differences of technique, the funeral scene in ULYSSES, for instance, would fit into
TROPIC OF CANCER; the whole chapter is a sort of confession, an expose of the
frightful inner callousness of the human being. But there the resemblance ends. As a
novel, TROPIC OF CANCER is far inferior to ULYSSES. Joyce is an artist, in a sense in
which Miller is not and probably would not wish to be, and in any case he is attempting
much more. He is exploring different states of consciousness, dream, reverie (the
‘bronze-by-gold’ chapter), drunkenness, etc. , and dovetailing them all into a huge
complex pattern, almost like a Victorian ‘plot’. Miller is simply a hard-boiled person
talking about life, an ordinary American businessman with intellectual courage and a gift
for words. It is perhaps significant that he looks exactly like everyone’s idea of an
American businessman. As for the comparison with VOYAGE AU BOUT DE LA NUIT,
it is even further from the point. Both books, use unprintable words, both are in some
sense autobiographical, but that is all. VOYAGE AU BEUT DE LA NUIT is a book-
with-a-purpose, and its purpose is to protest against the horror and meaninglessness of
modem life — actually, indeed, of LIFE. It is a cry of unbearable disgust, a voice from the
cesspool. TROPIC OF CANCER is almost exactly the opposite. The thing has become so
unusual as to seem almost anomalous, but it is the book of a man who is happy. So is
BLACK SPRING, though slightly less so, because tinged in places with nostalgia. With
years of lumpen-proletarian life behind him, hunger, vagabondage, dirt, failure, nights in
the open, battles with immigration officers, endless struggles for a bit of cash, Miller
finds that he is enjoying himself. Exactly the aspects of life that feel Celine with horror
are the ones that appeal to him. So far from protesting, he is ACCEPTING. And the very
word ‘acceptance’ calls up his real affinity, another American, Walt Whitman.
But there is something rather curious in being Whitman in the nineteen- thirties. It is not
certain that if Whitman himself were alive at the moment he would write anything in the
least degree resembling LEAVES OF GRASS. For what he is saying, after all, is ‘I
accept’, and there is a radical difference between acceptance now and acceptance then.
Whitman was writing in a time of unexampled prosperity, but more than that, he was
writing in a country where freedom was something more than a word. The democracy,
equality, and comradeship that he is always talking about arc not remote ideals, but
something that existed in front of his eyes. In mid-nineteenth-century America men felt
themselves free and equal, WERE free and equal, so far as that is possible outside-a
society of pure communism.
There was povery and there were even class distinctions, but
except for the Negroes there was no permanently submerged class. Everyone had inside
him, like a kind of core, the, iteaowledge that he could earn a decent living, and earn it
without bootlicking. When you read about Mark Twain’s Mississippi raftsmen and pilots,
or Bret Harte’s Western gold-miners, they seem more remote than the cannibals of the
Stone Age. The reason is simply that they are free human beings. But it is the same even
with the peaceful domesticated America of the Eastern states, the America of the LITTLE
WOMEN, HELEN’S BABIES, and RIDING DOWN FROM BANGOR. Life has a
buoyant, carefree quality that you can feel as you read, like a physical sensation in your
belly. If is this that Whitman is celebrating, though actually he does it very badly,
because he is one of those writers who tell you what you ought to feel instead of making
you feel it. Luckilly for his beliefs, perhaps, he died too early to see the deterioration in
American life that came with the rise of large-scale industry and the exploiting of cheap
immigrant labour.
Millers outlook is deeply akin to that of Whitman, and neaarly everyone who has read
him has remarked on this. TROPIC OF CANCER ends with an especially Whitmanesque
passage, in which, after the lecheries, the swindles, the fights, the drinking bouts, and the
imbecilities, he simply sits down and watches the Seine flowing past, in a sort of mystical
acceptance of thihg-as-it-is. Only, what is he accepting? In the first place, not America,
but the ancient bone -heap of Europe, where every grain of soil has passed through
innumerable human bodies. Secondly, not an epoch of expansion and liberty, but an
epoch of fear, tyranny, and regimentation. To say ‘I accept’ in an age like our own is to
say that you accept concentration camps, rubber truncheons. Hitler, Stalin, bombs,
aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas
masks, submarines, spies, PROVOCATEURS, press censorship, secret prisons, aspirins,
Hollywood films, and political murders. Not only those things, of course, but, those
things among-others. And on the whole this is Henry Miller’s attitude. Not quite always,
because at moments he shows signs of a fairly ordinary kind of literary nostalgia. There is
a long passage in the earlier part of BLACK SPRING, in praise of the Middle Ages,
which as prose must be one of the most remarkable pieces of writing in recent years, but
which displays an attitude not very different from that of Chesterton. In MAX AND THE
WHITE PHAGOCYTES there is an attack on modem American civilization (breakfast
cereals, cellophane, etc. ) from the usual angle of the literary man who hates industrialism.
But in general the attitude is ‘Let’s swallow it whole’. And hence the seeming
preocupation with indecency and with the dirty-handkerchief sidd of life. It is only
seeming, for the truth is that ordinary everyday life consists far more largely of horrors
than writers of fiction usually care to admit. Whitman himself ‘accepted’ a great deal that
his contemporaries found unmentionable. For he is not only writing of the prairie, he also
wanders through the city and notes the shattered skull of the suicide, the ‘grey sick faces
of onanists’, etc, etc. But unquestionably our own age, at any rate in Western Europe, is
less healthy and less hopeful than the age in which Whitman was writing. Unlike
Whitman, we live in a SHRINKING world. The ‘democratic vistas’ have ended in barbed
wire. There is less feeling of creation and growth, less and less emphasis on the cradle,
endlessly rocking, more and more emphasis on the teapot, endlessly stewing. To accept
civilization as it is practically means accepting decay. It has ceased to be a strenuous
attitude and become a passive attitude — even ‘decadent’, if that word means anything.
But precisely because, in one sense, he is passive to experience. Miller is able to get
nearer to the ordinary man than is possible to more purposive writers. For the ordinary
man is also passive. Within a narrow circle (home life, and perhaps the trade union or
local politics) he feels himself master of his fate, but against major events he is as
helpless as against the elements. So far from endeavouring to influence the future, he
simply lies down and lets things happen to him. During the past ten years literature has
involved itself more and more deeply in politics, with the result that there is now less
room in it for the ordinary man than at any time during the past two centuries. One can
see the change in the prevailing literary attitude by comparing the books written about the
Spanish civil war with those written about the war of 1914-18. The immediately striking
thing about the Spanish war books, at any rate those written in English, is their shocking
dullness and badness. But what is more significant is that almost all of them, right-wing
or left-wing, are written from a political angle, by cocksure partisans telling you what to
think, whereas the books about the Great War were written by common soldiers or junior
officers who did not even pretend to understand what the whole thing was about. Books
like ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, LE FEU, A FAREWELL TO ARMS,
DEATH OF A HERO, GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT, MEMOIRS OF AN INFANTRY
OFFICER, and A SUBALTERN ON THE SOMME were written not by propagandists
but by VICTIMS. They are saying in effect, ‘What the hell is all this about? God knows.
All we can do is to endure. ’ And though he is not writing about war, nor, on the whole,
about unhappiness, this is nearer to Miller’s attitude than the omniscience which is now
fashionable. The BOOSTER, a short-lived periodical of which he was part-editor, used to
describe itself in its advertisements as ‘non-political, non-educational, non-progressive,
non-co-operative, non-ethical, non-literary, non-consistent, non-contemporary’, and
Miller’s own work could be described in nearly the same terms. It is a voice from the
crowd, from the underling, from the third-class carriage, from the ordinary, non-political,
non-moral, passive man.
I have been using the phrase ‘ordinary man’ rather loosely, and I have taken it for granted
that the ‘ordinary man’ exists, a thing now denied by some people. I do not mean that the
people Miller is writing about constitute a majority, still less that he is writing about
proletarians. No English or American novelist has as yet seriously attempted that. And
again, the people in TROPIC OF CANCER fall short of being ordinary to the extent that
they are idle, disreputable, and more or less ‘artistic’. As I have said already, this a pity,
but it is the necessary result of expatriation. Miller’s ‘ordinary man’ is neither the manual
worker nor the suburban householder, but the derelict, the DECLASSE, the adventurer,
the American intellectual without roots and without money. Still, the experiences even of
this type overlap fairly widely with those of more nonnal people. Milter has been able to
get the most out of his rather limited material because he has had the courage to identify
with it. The ordinary man, the ‘average sensual man’, has been given the power of
speech, like Balaam’s ass.
It will be seen that this is something out of date, or at any rate out of fashion. The average
sensual man is out of fashion. Preoccupation with sex and truthfulness about the inner life
are out of fashion. American Paris is out of fashion. A book like TROPIC OF CANCER,
published at such a time, must be either a tedious preciosity or something unusual, and I
think a majority of the people who have read it would agree that it is not the first. It is
worth trying to discover just what, this escape from the current literary fashion means.
But to do that one has got to see it against its background — that is, against the general
development of English literature in the twenty years since the Great War.
II
When one says that a writer is fashionable one practically always means that he is
admired by people under thirty. At the beginning of the period I am speaking of, the years
during and immediately after the war, the writer who had the deepest hold upon the
thinking young was almost certainly Housman. Among people who were adolescent in
the years 1910-25, Housman had an influence which was enonnous and is now not at all
easy to understand. In 1920, when I was about seventeen, I probably knew the whole of
the SHROPSHIRE LAD by heart. I wonder how much impression the SHROPSHIRE
LAD makes at this moment on a boy of the same age and more or less the same cast of
mind? No doubt he has heard of it and even glanced into it; it might strike him as cheaply
clever — probably that would be about all. Yet these are the poems that I and my
contemporaries used to recite to ourselves, over and over, in a kind of ecstasy, just as
earlier generations had recited Meredith’s ‘Love in a Valley’, Swinburne’s ‘Garden of
Proserpine’ etc. , etc.
With rue my heart is laden For golden friends I had, For many a roselipt maiden And
many a lightfoot lad.
By brooks too broad for leaping The lightfoot boys are laid; The roselipt girls arc
sleeping In fields Where roses fade.
It just tinkles. But it did not seem to tinkle in 1920. Why does the bubble always burst?
To answer that question one has to take account of the EXTERNAL conditions that make
certain writers popular at certain times. Housman’s poems had not attracted much notice
when they were first published. What was there in them that appealed so deeply to a
single generation, the generation bom round about 1900?
In the first place, Housman is a ‘country’ poet. His poems are full of the chann of buried
villages, the nostalgia of place-names, Clunton and Clunbury, Knighton, Ludlow, ‘on
Wenlock Edge’, ‘in summer time on Bredon’, thatched roofs and the jingle of smithies,
the wild jonquils in the pastures, the ‘blue, remembered hills’. War poems apart, English
verse of the 1910-25 period is mostly ‘country’. The reason no doubt was that the
RENTIER-professional class was ceasing once and for all to have any real relationship
with the soil; but at any rate there prevailed then, far more than now, a kind of snobbism
of belonging to the country and despising the town. England at that time was hardly more
an agricultural country than it is now, but before the light industries began to spread
themselves it was easier to think of it as one. Most middle-class boys grew up within
sight of a farm, and naturally it was the picturesque side of farm life that appealed to
them — the ploughing, harvesting, stack-thrashing and so forth. Unless he has to do it
himself a boy is not likely to notice the horrible drudgery of hoeing turnip, milking cows
with chapped teats at four o’clock in the morning, etc. , etc. Just before, just after, and for
that matter, during the war was the great age of the ‘Nature poet’, the heyday of Richard
Jefferies and W. H. Hudson. Rupert Brooke’s ‘Grantchester’, the star poem of 1913, is
nothing but an enormous gush of ‘country’ sentiment, a sort of accumulated vomit from a
stomach stuffed with place-names. Considered as a poem ‘Grantchester’ is something
wors than worthless, but as an illustration of what the thinking middle-class young of that
period FELT it is a valuable document.
Housman, however, did not enthuse over the rambler roses in the week-ending spirit of
Brooke and the others. The ‘country’ motif is there all the time, but mainly as a
background. Most of the poems have a quasi-human subject, a kind of idealized rustic, in
reality Strephon or Corydon brought up to date. This in itself had a deep appeal.
Experience shows that overcivilized people enjoy reading about rustics (key-phrase,
‘close to the soil’) because they imagine them to be more primitive and passionate than
themselves. Hence the ‘dark earth’ novel of Sheila Kaye-Smith, etc. And at that time a
middle-class boy, with his ‘country’ bias, would identify with an agricultural worker as
he would never have done with a town worker. Most boys had in their minds a vision of
an idealized ploughman, gipsy, poacher, or gamekeeper, always pictured as a wild, free,
roving blade, living a life of rabbit-snaring, cockfighting, horses, beer, and women.
Masefield’s ‘Everlasting Mercy’, another valuable period-piece, immensely popular with
boys round about the war years, gives you this vision in a very crude fonn. But
Housman’s Maurices and Terences could be taken seriously where Masefield’s Saul
Kane could not; on this side of him, Housman was Masefield with a dash of Theocritus.
Moreover all his themes are adolescent — murder, suicide, unhappy love, early death.
They deal with the simple, intelligible disasters that give you the feeling of being up
against the ‘bedrock facts’of life:
The sun burns on the half-mown hill, By now the blood has dried; And Maurice among
the hay lies still And my knife is in his side.
And again:
They hand us now in Shrewsbury jail And whistles blow forlorn. And trains all night
groan on the rail To men who die at morn.
It is all more or less in the same tune. Everything comes unstuck. ‘Ned lies long in the
churchyard and Tom lies long in jail’. And notice also the exquisite self-pity — the
‘nobody loves me’ feeling:
The diamond drops adorning The low mound on the lea, These arc the tears of morning,
That weeps, but not for thee.
Hard cheese, old chap! Such poems might have been written expressly for adolescents.
And the unvarying sexual pessimism (the girl always dies or marries somebody else)
seemed like wisdom to boys who were herded together in public schools and were half-
inclined to think of women as something unattainable. Whether Housman ever had the
same appeal for girls I doubt. In his poems the woman’s point of view is not considered,
she is merely the nymph, the siren, the treacherous half-human creature who leads you a
little distance and then gives you the slip.
But Housman would not have appealed so deeply to the people who were young in 1920
if it had not been for another strain in him, and that was his blasphemous, antinomian,
‘cynical’ strain. The fight that always occurs between the generations was exceptionally
bitter at the end of the Great War; this was partly due to the war itself, and partly it was
an indirect result of the Russian Revolution, but an intellectual struggle was in any case
due at about that date. Owing probably to the ease and security of life in England, which
even the war hardly disturbed, many people whose ideas were formed in the eighties or
earlier had carried them quite unmodified into the nineteen-twenties. Meanwhile, so far
as the younger generation was concerned, the official beliefs were dissolving like sand-
castles. The slump in religious belief, for instance, was spectacular. For several years the
old-young antagonism took on a quality of real hatred. What was left of the war
generation had crept out of the massacre to find their elders still bellowing the slogans of
1914, and a slightly younger generation of boys were writhing under dirty-minded
celibate schoolmasters. It was to these that Housman appealed, with his implied sexual
revolt and his personal grievance against God. He was patriotic, it was true, but in a
harmless old-fashioned way, to the tune of red coats and ‘God save the Queen’ rather
than steel helmets and ‘Hang the Kaiser’. And he was satisfyingly anti-Christian — he
stood for a kind of bitter, defiant paganism, the conviction that life is short and the gods
are against you, which exactly fitted the prevailing mood of the young; and all in
charming fragile verse that was composed almost entirely of words of one syllable.
It will be seen that I have discussed Housman as though he were merely a propagandist,
an utterer of maxims and quotable ‘bits’. Obviously he was more than that. There is no
need to under-rate him now because he was over-rated a few years ago. Although one
gets into trouble nowadays for saying so, there are a number of his poems (‘Into my heart
an air that kills’, for instance, and ‘Is my team ploughing? ’) that are not likely to remain
long out of favour. But at bottom it is always a writer’s tendency, his ‘purpose’, his
‘message’, that makes him liked or disliked. The proof of this is the extreme difficulty of
seeing any literary merit in a book that seriously damages your deepest beliefs. And no
book is ever truly neutral. Some or other tendency is always discernible, in verse as much
as in prose, even if it does no more than detennine the fonn and the choice of imagery.
But poets who attain wide popularity, Uke Housman, are as a rule definitely gnomic
writers.
After the war, after Housman and the Nature poets, there appears a group of writers of
completely different tendency — Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Lawrence, Wyndham, Lewis,
Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey. So far as the middle and late twenties go, these are ‘the
movement’, as surely as the Auden-Spender group have been ‘the movement’ during the
past few years. It is true that not all of the gifted writers of the period can be fitted into
the pattern. E. M. Forster, for instance, though he wrote his best book in 1923 or
thereabouts, was essentially, pre-war, and Yeats does not seem in either of his phases to
belong to the twenties. Others who were still living, Moore, Conrad, Bennett, Wells,
Norman Douglas, had shot their bolt before the war ever happened. On the other hand, a
writer who should be added to the group, though in the narrowly literary sense he hardly
‘belongs’, is Somerset Maughami. Of course the dates do not fit exactly; most of these
writers had already published books before the war, but they can be classified as post-war
in the same sense that the younger men now writing are post-slump. Equally, of course,
you could read through most of the literary papers of the time without grasping that these
people are ‘the movement’. Even more then than at most times the big shots of literary
journalism were busy pretending that the age-before-last had not come to an end. Squire
ruled the LONDON MERCURY Gibbs and Walpole were the gods of the lending
libraries, there was a cult of cheeriness and manliness, beer and cricket, briar pipes and
monogamy, and it was at all times possible to earn a few guineas by writing an article
denouncing ‘high-brows’. But all the same it was the despised highbrows who had
captured the young. The wind was blowing from Europe, and long before 1930 it had
blowu the beer-and-cricket school naked, except for their knight-hoods.
But the first thing one would notice about the group of writers I have named above is that
they do not look like a group. Moreover several of them would strongly object to being
coupled with several of the others. Lawrence and Eliot were in reality antipathetic,
Huxley worshipped Lawrence but was repelled by Joyce, most of the others would have
looked down on Huxley, Strachey, and Maugham, and Lewis attacked everyone in turn;
indeed, his reputation as a writer rests largely on these attacks. And yet there is a certain
temperamental similarity, evident enough now, though it would not have been so a dozen
years ago. What it amounts to is PESSIMISM OF OUTLOOK. But it is necessary to
make clear what is meant by pessimism.
If the keynote of the Georgian poets was ‘beauty of Nature’, the keynote of the post-war
writers would be ‘tragic sense of life’. The spirit behind Housman’s poems for instance,
is not tragic, merely querulous; it is hedonism disappointed. The same is true of Hardy,
though one ought to make an exception of THE DYNASTS. But the Joyce-Eliot group
come later in time, puritanism is not their main adversary, they are able from the start to
‘see through’ most of the things that their predecessors had fought for. All of them are
temperamentally hostile to the notion of ‘progress’; it is felt that progress not only
doesn’t happen, but OUGHT not to happen. Given this general similarity, there are, of
course, differences of approach between the writers I have named as well as different
degrees of talent. Eliot’s pessimism is partly the Christian pessimism, which implies a
certain indifference to human misery, partly a lament over the decadence of Western
civilization (‘We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men’, etc. , etc. ), a sort of
twilight-of-the-gods feeling, which finally leads him, in Sweeney Agonistes for instance,
to achieve the difficult feat of making modern life out to be worse than it is. With
Strachey it is merely a polite eighteenth-century scepticism mixed up with a taste for
debunking. With Maugham it is a kind of stoical resignation, the stiff upper lip of the
pukka sahib somewhere east of Suez, carrying on with his job without believing in it, like
an Antonine Emperor. Lawrence at first sight does not seem to be a pessimistic writer,
because, like Dickens, he is a ‘change-of-heart’ man and constantly insisting that life here
and now would be all right if only you looked at it a little differently. But what he is
demanding is a movement away from our mechanized civilization, which is not going to
happen. Therefore his exasperation with the present turns once more into idealization of
the past, this time a safely mythical past, the Bronze Age. When bawrence prefers the
Etruscans (his Etruscans) to ourselves it is difficult not to agree with him, and yet, after
all, it is a species of defeatism, because that is not the direction in which the world is
moving. The kind of life that he is always pointing to, a life centring round the simple
mysteries — sex, earth, fire, water, blood — is merely a lost cause. All he has been able to
produce, therefore, is a wish that things would happen in a way in which they are
manifestly not going to happen. ‘A wave of generosity or a wave of death’, he says, but it
is obvious that there are no waves of generosity this side of the horizon. So he flees to
Mexico, and then dies at forty-five, a few years before the wave of death gets going. It
will be seen that once again I am speaking of these people as though they were not artists,
as though they were merely propagandists putting a ‘message’ across. And once again it
is obvious that all of them are more than that. It would be absurd, for instance, to look on
ULYSSES as MERELY a show-up of the horror of modern life, the ‘dirty DAILY MAIL
era’, as Pound put it. Joyce actually is more of a ‘pure artist’ than most writers. But
ULYSSES could not have been written by someone who was merely dabbling with word-
patterns; it is the product of a special vision of life, the vision of a Catholic who has lost
his faith. What Joyce is saying is ‘Here is life without God. Just look at it! ’ and his
technical innovations, important though they are, are primarily to serve this purpose.
But what is noticeable about all these writers is that what ‘purpose’ they have is very
much up in the air. There is no attention to the urgent problems of the moment, above all
no politics in the narrower sense. Our eyes are directed to Rome, to Byzantium, to
Montparnasse, to Mexico, to the Etruscans, to the Subconscious, to the solar plexus — to
everywhere except the places where things are actually happening. When one looks back
at the twenties, nothing is queerer than the way in which every important event in Europe
escaped the notice of the English intelligentsia. The Russian Revolution, for instance, all
but vanishes from the English consciousness between the death of Lenin and the Ukraine
famine — about ten years. Throughout those years Russia means Tolstoy, Dostoievsky,
and exiled counts driving taxi-cabs. Italy means picture-galleries, ruins, churches, and
museums — but not Black-shirts. Gennany means films, nudism, and psychoanalysis — but
not Hitler, of whom hardly anyone had heard till 1931. In ‘cultured’ circles art-for-art’s-
saking extended practically to a worship of the meaningless. Literature was supposed to
consist solely in the manipulation of words. To judge a book by its subject matter was the
unforgivable sin, and even to be aware of its subject matter was looked on as a lapse of a
taste. About 1928, in one of the three genuinely funny jokes that PUNCH has produced
since the Great War, an intolerable youth is pictured infonning his aunt that he intends to
‘write’. ‘And what are you going to write about, dear? ’ asks the aunt. ‘My dear aunt,’
says the youth crushingly, ‘one doesn’t write ABOUT anything, one just WRITES. ’ The
best writers of the twenties did not subscribe to this doctrine, their ‘purpose’ is in most
cases fairly overt, but it is usually ‘purpose’ along moral-religious-cultural lines. Also,
when translatable into political terms, it is in no case ‘left’. In one way or another the
tendency of all the writers in this group is conservative.
express in a comic, simplified and therefore memorable form the native decency of the
common man. And it is important that from this point of view people of very different
types can be described as ‘common’. In a country like England, in spite of its class-
structure, there does exist a certain cultural unity. All through the Christian ages, and
especially since the French Revolution, the Western world has been haunted by the idea
of freedom and equality; it is only an IDEA, but it has penetrated to all ranks of society.
The most atrocious injustices, cruelties, lies, snobberies exist everywhere, but there are
not many people who can regard these things with the same indifference as, say, a Roman
slave-owner. Even the millionaire suffers from a vague sense of guilt, like a dog eating a
stolen leg of mutton. Nearly everyone, whatever his actual conduct may be, responds
emotionally to the idea of human brotherhood. Dickens voiced a code which was and on
the whole still is believed in, even by people who violate it. It is difficult otherwise to
explain why he could be both read by working people (a thing that has happened to no
other novelist of his stature) and buried in Westminster Abbey.
When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of
seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the
writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal,
Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like
and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer OUGHT to have. Well,
in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens’s photographs,
though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high
colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no
malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who
fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is GENEROUSLY
ANGRY — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type
hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for
our souls.
CHARLES READE (1940)
Since Charles Reade’s books are published in cheap editions one can assume that he still
has his following, but it is unusual to meet anyone who has voluntarily read him. In most
people his name seems to evoke, at most, a vague memory of ‘doing’ THE CLOISTER
AND THE HEARTH as a school holiday task. It is his bad luck to be remembered by this
particular book, rather as Mark Twain, thanks to the films, is chiefly remembered by A
CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR’S COURT. Reade wrote several dull
books, and THE CLOISTER AND THE HEARTH is one of them. But he also wrote
three novels which I personally would back to outlive the entire works of Meredith and
George Eliot, besides some brilliant long-short stories such as A JACK OF ALL
TRADES and THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A THIEF.
What is the attraction of Reade? At bottom it is the same charm as one finds in R. Austin
Freeman’s detective stories or Lieutenant-Commander Gould’s collections of
curiosities — the charm of useless knowledge. Reade was a man of what one might call
penny-encyclopaedic learning. He possessed vast stocks of disconnected information
which a lively narrative gift allowed him to cram into books which would at any rate pass
as novels. If you have the sort of mind that takes a pleasure in dates, lists, catalogues,
concrete details, descriptions of processes, junk-shop windows and back numbers of the
EXCHANGE AND MART, the sort of mind that likes knowing exactly how a medieval
catapult worked or just what objects a prison cell of the eighteen-forties contained, then
you can hardly help enjoying Reade. He himself, of course, did not see his work in quite
this light. He prided himself on his accuracy and compiled his books largely from
newspaper cuttings, but the strange facts which he collected were subsidiary to what he
would have regarded as his ‘purpose’. For he was a social reformer in a fragmentary way,
and made vigorous attacks on such diverse evils as blood-letting, the treadmill, private
asylums, clerical celibacy and tight-lacing.
My own favourite has always been FOUL PLAY, which as it happens is not an attack on
anything in particular. Like most nineteenth-century novels FOUL PLAY is too
complicated to be summarized, but its central story is that of a young clergyman, Robert
Penfold, who is unjustly convicted of forgery, is transported to Australia, absconds in
disguise, and is wrecked on a desert island together with the heroine. Here, of course,
Reade is in his element. Of all men who ever lived, he was the best fitted to write a
desert-island story. Some desert-island stories, of course, are worse than others, but none
is altogether bad when it sticks to the actual concrete details of the struggle to keep alive.
A list of the objects in a shipwrecked man’s possession is probably the surest winner in
fiction, surer even than a trial scene. Nearly thirty years after reading the book I can still
remember more or less exactly what things the three heroes of Ballantyne’s CORAL
ISLAND possessed between them. (A telescope, six yards of whipcord, a penknife, a
brass ring and a piece of hoop iron. ) Even a dismal book like ROBINSON CRUSOE, so
unreadable as a whole that few people even know that the second part exists, becomes
interesting when it describes Crusoe’s efforts to make a table, glaze earthenware and
grow a patch of wheat. Reade, however, was an expert on desert islands, or at any rate he
was very well up in the geography textbooks of the time. Moreover he was the kind of
man who would have been at home on a desert island himself. He would never, like
Crusoe, have been stumped by such an easy problem as that of leavening bread and,
unlike Ballantyne, he knew that civilized men cannot make fire by rubbing sticks
together.
The hero of FOUL PLAY, like most of Reade’s heroes, is a kind of supennan. He is hero,
saint, scholar, gentleman, athlete, pugilist, navigator, physiologist, botanist, blacksmith
and carpenter all rolled into one, the sort of compendium of all the talents that Reade
honestly imagined to be the normal product of an English university. Needless to say, it is
only a month or two before this wonderful clergyman has got the desert island running
like a West End hotel. Even before reaching the island, when the last survivors of the
wrecked ship are dying of thirst in an open boat, he has shown his ingenuity by
constructing a distilling apparatus with ajar, a hot- water bottle and a piece of tubing. But
his best stroke of all is the way in which he contrives to leave the island. He himself, with
a price on his head, would be glad enough to remain, but the heroine, Helen Rollestone,
who has no idea that he is a convict, is naturally anxious to escape. She asks Robert to
turn his ‘great mind’ to this problem. The first difficulty, of course, is to discover exactly
where the island is. Luckily, however, Helen is still wearing her watch, which is still
keeping Sydney time. By fixing a stick in the ground and watching its shadow Robert
notes the exact moment of noon, after which it is a simple matter to work out the
longitude — for naturally a man of his calibre would know the longitude of Sydney. It is
equally natural that he can detennine the latitude within a degree or two by the nature of
the vegetation. But the next difficulty is to send a message to the outside world. After
some thought Robert writes a series of messages on pieces of parchment made from
seals’ bladders, with ink obtained from cochineal insects. He has noticed that migrant
birds often use the island as a stopping-place, and he fixes on ducks as the likeliest
messengers, because every duck is liable to be shot sooner or later. By a stratagem often
used in India he captures a number of ducks, ties a message to each of their legs and lets
them go. Finally, of course, one of the ducks takes refuge on a ship, and the couple are
rescued, but even then the story is barely half finished. There follow enonnous
ramifications, plots and counterplots, intrigues, triumphs and disasters, ending with the
vindication of Robert, and wedding bells.
In any of Reade’s three best books, FOUL PLAY, HARD CASH and IT IS NEVER TOO
LATE TO MEND, it is not fair to say that the sole interest is in the technical detail. His
power of descriptive writing, especially of describing violent action, is also very striking,
and on a serial-story level he is a wonderful contriver of plots. Simply as a novelist it is
impossible to take him seriously, because he has no sense whatever of character or of
probability, but he himself had the advantage of believing in even the absurdest details of
his own stories. He wrote of life as he saw it, and many Victorians saw it in the same
way: that is, as a series of tremendous melodramas, with virtue triumphant every time. Of
all the nineteenth-century novelists who have remained readable, he is perhaps the only
one who is completely in tune with his own age. For all his unconventionality, his
‘purpose’, his eagerness to expose abuses, he never makes a fundamental criticism. Save
for a few surface evils he sees nothing wrong in an acquisitive society, with its equation
of money and virtue, its pious millionaires and erastian clergymen. Perhaps nothing gives
one his measure better than the fact that in introducing Robert Penfold, at the beginning
of FOUL PLAY, he mentions that he is a scholar and a cricketer and only thirdly and
almost casually adds that he is a priest.
That is not to say that Reade’s social conscience was not sound so far as it went, and in
several minor ways he probably helped to educate public opinion. His attack on the
prison system in IT IS NEVER TOO LATE TO MEND is relevant to this day, or was so
till very recently, and in his medical theories he is said to have been a long way ahead of
his time. What he lacked was any notion that the early railway age, with the special
scheme of values appropriate to it, was not going to last for ever. This is a little surprising
when one remembers that he was the brother of Winwood Reade. However hastily and
unbalanced Winwood Reade’s MARTYRDOM OF MAN may seem now, it is a book
that shows an astonishing width of vision, and it is probably the unacknowledged
grandparent of the ‘outlines’ so popular today. Charles Reade might have written an
‘outline’ of phrenology, cabinet-making or the habits of whales, but not of human history.
He was simply a middle-class gentleman with a little more conscience than most, a
scholar who happened to prefer popular science to the classics. Just for that reason he is
one of the best ‘escape’ novelists we have. FOUL PLAY and HARD CASH would be
good books to send to a soldier enduring the miseries of trench warfare, for instance.
There are no problems in them, no genuine ‘messages’, merely the fascination of a gifted
mind functioning within very narrow limits, and offering as complete a detachment from
real life as a game of chess or a jigsaw puzzle.
INSIDE THE WHALE (1940)
I
When Henry Miller’s novel, TROPIC OF CANCER, appeared in 1935, it was greeted
with rather cautious praise, obviously conditioned in some cases by a fear of seeming to
enjoy pornography. Among the people who praised it were T. S. Eliot, Herbert Read,
Aldous Huxley, John dos Passes, Ezra Pound — on the whole, not the writers who are in
fashion at this moment. And in fact the subject matter ofthebook, and to a certain extent
its mental atmosphere, belong to the twenties rather than to the thirties.
TROPIC OF CANCER is a novel in the first person, or autobiography in the form of a
novel, whichever way you like to look at it. Miller himself insists that it is straight
autobiography, but the tempo and method of telling the story are those of a novel. It is a
story of the American Paris, but not along quite the usual lines, because the Americans
who figure in it happen to be people without money. During the boom years, when
dollars were plentiful and the exchange-value of the franc was low, Paris was invaded by
such a swarm of artists, writers, students, dilettanti, sight-seers, debauchees, and plain
idlers as the world has probably never seen. In some quarters of the town the so-called
artists must actually have outnumbered the working population — indeed, it has been
reckoned thatm the late twenties ther were as many as 30,000 painters in Paris, most of
them impostors. The populace had grown so hardened to artists that gruff-voiced lesbians
in corduroy breeches and young men in Grecian or medieval costume could walk the
streets without attracting a glance, and along the Seine banks Notre Dame it was almost
impossible to pick one’s way between the sketching-stools. It was the age of dark horses
and neglected genii; the phrase on everybody’s lips was ‘QUAND JE SERAI LANCE’.
As it turned out, nobody was ‘LANCE’, the slump descended like another Ice Age, the
cosmopolitan mob of artists vanished, and the huge Montparnasse cafes which only ten
years ago were filled till the small hours by hordes of shrieking poseurs have turned into
darkened tombs in which there arc not even any ghosts. It is this world — described in,
among other novels, Wyndham Lewis’s TARR — that Miller is writing about, but he is
dealing only with the under side of it, the lumpen-proletarian fringe which has been able
to survive the slump because it is composed partly of genuine artists and partly of
genuine scoundrels. The neglected genii, the paranoiacs who art always ‘going to’ write
the novel that will knock Proust into a cocked hat, are there, but they are only genii in the
rather rare moments when they are not scouting about for the next meal. For the most part
it is a story of bug-ridden rooms in working-men’s hotels, of fights, drinking bouts, cheap
brothels, Russian refugees, cadging, swindling, and temporary jobs. And the whole
atmosphere of the poor quarters of Paris as a foreigner sees them — the cobbled alleys, the
sour reek of refuse, the bistros with their greasy zinc counters and worn brick floors, the
green waters of the Seine, the blue cloaks of the Republican Guard, the crumbling iron
urinals, the peculiar sweetish smell of the Metro stations, the cigarettes that come to
pieces, the pigeons in the Luxembourg Gardens — it is all there, or at any rate the feeling
of it is there.
On the face of it no material could be less promising. When TROPIC OF CANCER was
published the Italians were marching into Abyssinia and Hitler’s concentration camps
were already bulging. The intellectual foci of the world were Rome, Moscow, and Berlin.
It did not seem to be a moment at which a novel of outstanding value was likely to be
written about American dead-beats cadging drinks in the Latin Quarter. Of course a
novelist is not obliged to write directly about contemporary history, but a novelist who
simply disregards the major public events of the moment is generally either a footler or a
plain idiot. From a mere account of the subject matter of TROPIC OF CANCER most
people would probably assume it to be no more thatt a bit of naughty-naughty left over
from the twenties. Actually, nearly everyone who read it saw at once that it was nothing
of the kind, but a very remarkable book. How or why remarkable? That question is never
easy to answer. It is better to begin by describing the impression that TROPIC OF
CANCER has left on my own mind.
When I first opened TROPIC OF CANCER and saw that it was full of unprintable words,
my immediate reaction was a refusal to be impressed. Most people’s would be the same, I
believe. Nevertheless, after a lapse of time the atmosphere of the book, besides
innumerable details, seemed to linger in my memory in a peculiar way. A year later
Miller’s second book, BLACK SPRING, was published. By this tim? TROPIC OF
CANCER was much more vividly present in my mind than it had been when I first read
it. My first feeling about BLACK SPRING was that it showed a falling-off, and it is a
fact that it has not the same unity as the other book. Yet after another year there were
many passages in BLACK SPRING that had also rooted themselves in my memory.
Evidently these books are of the sort to leave a flavour behind them — books that ‘create a
world of their own’, as the saying goes. The books that do this are not necessarily good
books, they may be good bad books like RAFFLES or the SHERLOCK HOLMES
stories, or perverse and morbid books like WUTHERING HEIGHTS or THE HOUSE
WITH THE GREEN SHUTTERS. But now and again there appears a novel which opens
up a new world not by revealing what is strange, but by revealing what is familiar. The
truly remarkable thing about ULYSSES, for instance, is the commonplaceness of its
material. Of course there is much more in ULYSSES than this, because Joyce is a kind of
poet and also an elephantine pedant, but his real achievement has been to get the familiar
on to paper. He dared — for it is a matter of DARING just as much as of technique — to
expose the imbecilities of the inner mind, and in doing so he discovered an America
which was under everybody’s nose. Here is a whole world of stuff which you supposed to
be of its nature incommunicable, and somebody has managed to communicate it. The
effect is to break down, at any rate momentarily, the solitude in which the human being
lives. When you read certain passages in ULYSSES you feel that Joyce’s mind and your
mind are one, that he knows ah about you though he has never heard your name, that
there some world outside time and space in which you and he are together. And though
he does not resemble Joyce in other ways, there is a touch of this quality in Henry Miller.
Not everywhere, because his work is very uneven, and sometimes, especially in BLACK
SPRING, tends to slide away into more verbiage or into the squashy universe of the
surresalists. But read him for five pages, ten pages, and you feel the peculiar relief that
comes not so much from understanding as from being UNDERSTOOD. ‘He knows ah
about me,’ you feel; ‘he wrote this specially for me’. It is as though you could hear a
voice speaking to you, a friendly Amierican voice, with no humbug in it, no moral
purpose, merely an implicit assumption that we are ah alike. For the moment you have
got away from the lies and simplifications, the stylized, marionette-like quality of
ordinary fiction, even quite good fiction, and are dealing with the recognizable
experiences of human beings.
But what kind of experience? What kind of human beings? Miller is writing about the
man in the street, and it is incidentally rather a pity that it should be a street full of
brothers. That is the penalty of leaving your native land. It means transferring your roots
into shallower soil. Exile is probably more damaging to a novelist than to a painter or
even a poet, because its effect is to take him out of contact with working life and narrow
down his range to the street, the cafe, the church, the brothel and the studio. On the
whole, in Miller’s books you are reading about people living the expatriate life, people
drinking, talking, meditating, and fornicating, not about people working, marrying, and
bringing up children; a pity, because he would have described the one set of activities as
well as the other. In BLACK SPRING there is a wonderful flashback of New York, the
swarming Irish-infested New York of the O. Henry period, but the Paris scenes are the
best, and, granted their utter worthlessness as social types, the drunks and dead-beats of
the cafes are handled with a feeling for character and a mastery of technique that are
unapproached in any at all recent novel. All of them are not only credible but completely
familiar; you have the feeling that all their adventures have happened to yourself. Not
that they are anything very startling in the way of adventures. Henry gets a job with a
melancholy Indian student, gets another job at a dreadful French school during a cold
snap when the lavatories are frozen solid, goes on drinking bouts in Le Havre with his
friend Collins, the sea captain, goes tse brothels where there are wonderful Negresses,
talks with his friend Van Norden, the novelist, who has got the great novel of the world in
his head but can never bring himself to begin writing it. His friend Karl, on the verge of
starvation, is picked up by a wealthy widow who wishes to marry him. There are
intenninable Hamlet-like conversations in which Karl tries to decide which is worse,
being hungry or sleeping with an old woman. In great detail he describes his visits to the
widow, how he went to the hotel dressed in his best, how before going in he neglected to
urinate, so that the whole evening was one long crescendo of torment etc. , etc. And after
all, none of it is true, the widow doesn’t even exist — Karl has simply invented her in
order to make himself seem important. The whole book is in this vein, more or less. Why
is it that these monstrous trivialities are so engrossing? Simply because the whole
atmosphere is deeply familiar, because you have all the while the feeling that these things
are happening to YOU. And you have this feeling because somebody has chosen to drop
the Geneva language of the ordinary novel and drag the REAL-POLITIK of the inner
mind into the open. In Miller’s case it is not so much a question of exploring the
mechanisms of the mind as of owning up to everyday facts and everyday emotions. For
the truth is that many ordinary people, perhaps an actual majority, do speak and behave in
just the way that is recorded here. The callous coarseness with which the characters in
TROPIC OF CANCER talk is very rare in fiction, but it is extremely common in real life;
again and again I have heard just such conversations from people who were not even
aware that they were talking coarsely. It is worth noticing that TROPIC OF CANCER is
not a young man’s book. Miller was in his forties when it was published, and though
since then he has produced three or four others, it is obvious that this first book had been
lived with for years. It is one of those books that are slowly matured in poverty and
obscurity, by people who know what they have got to do and therefore are able to wait.
The prose is astonishing, and in parts of BLACK SPRING is even better. Unfortunately I
cannot quote; unprintable words occur almost everywhere. But get hold of TROPIC OF
CANCER, get hold of BLACK SPRING and read especially the first hundred pages.
They give you an idea of what can still be done, even at this late date, with English prose.
In them, English is treated as a spoken language, but spoken WITHOUT FEAR, i. e.
without fear of rhetoric or of the unusual or poetical word. The adjective has come back,
after its ten years’ exile. It is a flowing, swelling prose, a prose with rhythms in it,
something quite different from the flat cautious statements and snack-bar dialects that are
now in fashion.
When a book like TROPIC OF CANCER appears, it is only natural that the first thing
people notice should be its obscenity. Given our current notions of literary decency, it is
not at all easy to approach an unprintable book with detachment. Either one is shocked
and disgusted, or one is morbidly thrilled, or one is determined above all else not to be
impressed. The last is probably the commonest reaction, with the result that unprintable
books often get less attention than they deserve. It is rather the fashion to say that nothing
is easier than to write an obscene book, that people only do it in order to get themselves
talked about and make money, etc. , etc. What makes it obvious that this is not the case is
that books which are obscene in the police-court sense are distinctly uncommon. If there
were easy money to be made out of dirty words, a lot more people would be making it.
But, because ‘obscene’ books do not appear very frequently, there is a tendency to lump
them together, as a rule quite unjustifiably. TROPIC OF CANCER has been vaguely
associated with two other books, ULYSSES and VOYAGE AU BOUT DE LA NUIT,
but in neither case is there much resemblance. What Miller has in common with Joyce is
a willingness to mention the inane, squalid facts of everyday life. Putting aside
differences of technique, the funeral scene in ULYSSES, for instance, would fit into
TROPIC OF CANCER; the whole chapter is a sort of confession, an expose of the
frightful inner callousness of the human being. But there the resemblance ends. As a
novel, TROPIC OF CANCER is far inferior to ULYSSES. Joyce is an artist, in a sense in
which Miller is not and probably would not wish to be, and in any case he is attempting
much more. He is exploring different states of consciousness, dream, reverie (the
‘bronze-by-gold’ chapter), drunkenness, etc. , and dovetailing them all into a huge
complex pattern, almost like a Victorian ‘plot’. Miller is simply a hard-boiled person
talking about life, an ordinary American businessman with intellectual courage and a gift
for words. It is perhaps significant that he looks exactly like everyone’s idea of an
American businessman. As for the comparison with VOYAGE AU BOUT DE LA NUIT,
it is even further from the point. Both books, use unprintable words, both are in some
sense autobiographical, but that is all. VOYAGE AU BEUT DE LA NUIT is a book-
with-a-purpose, and its purpose is to protest against the horror and meaninglessness of
modem life — actually, indeed, of LIFE. It is a cry of unbearable disgust, a voice from the
cesspool. TROPIC OF CANCER is almost exactly the opposite. The thing has become so
unusual as to seem almost anomalous, but it is the book of a man who is happy. So is
BLACK SPRING, though slightly less so, because tinged in places with nostalgia. With
years of lumpen-proletarian life behind him, hunger, vagabondage, dirt, failure, nights in
the open, battles with immigration officers, endless struggles for a bit of cash, Miller
finds that he is enjoying himself. Exactly the aspects of life that feel Celine with horror
are the ones that appeal to him. So far from protesting, he is ACCEPTING. And the very
word ‘acceptance’ calls up his real affinity, another American, Walt Whitman.
But there is something rather curious in being Whitman in the nineteen- thirties. It is not
certain that if Whitman himself were alive at the moment he would write anything in the
least degree resembling LEAVES OF GRASS. For what he is saying, after all, is ‘I
accept’, and there is a radical difference between acceptance now and acceptance then.
Whitman was writing in a time of unexampled prosperity, but more than that, he was
writing in a country where freedom was something more than a word. The democracy,
equality, and comradeship that he is always talking about arc not remote ideals, but
something that existed in front of his eyes. In mid-nineteenth-century America men felt
themselves free and equal, WERE free and equal, so far as that is possible outside-a
society of pure communism.
There was povery and there were even class distinctions, but
except for the Negroes there was no permanently submerged class. Everyone had inside
him, like a kind of core, the, iteaowledge that he could earn a decent living, and earn it
without bootlicking. When you read about Mark Twain’s Mississippi raftsmen and pilots,
or Bret Harte’s Western gold-miners, they seem more remote than the cannibals of the
Stone Age. The reason is simply that they are free human beings. But it is the same even
with the peaceful domesticated America of the Eastern states, the America of the LITTLE
WOMEN, HELEN’S BABIES, and RIDING DOWN FROM BANGOR. Life has a
buoyant, carefree quality that you can feel as you read, like a physical sensation in your
belly. If is this that Whitman is celebrating, though actually he does it very badly,
because he is one of those writers who tell you what you ought to feel instead of making
you feel it. Luckilly for his beliefs, perhaps, he died too early to see the deterioration in
American life that came with the rise of large-scale industry and the exploiting of cheap
immigrant labour.
Millers outlook is deeply akin to that of Whitman, and neaarly everyone who has read
him has remarked on this. TROPIC OF CANCER ends with an especially Whitmanesque
passage, in which, after the lecheries, the swindles, the fights, the drinking bouts, and the
imbecilities, he simply sits down and watches the Seine flowing past, in a sort of mystical
acceptance of thihg-as-it-is. Only, what is he accepting? In the first place, not America,
but the ancient bone -heap of Europe, where every grain of soil has passed through
innumerable human bodies. Secondly, not an epoch of expansion and liberty, but an
epoch of fear, tyranny, and regimentation. To say ‘I accept’ in an age like our own is to
say that you accept concentration camps, rubber truncheons. Hitler, Stalin, bombs,
aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas
masks, submarines, spies, PROVOCATEURS, press censorship, secret prisons, aspirins,
Hollywood films, and political murders. Not only those things, of course, but, those
things among-others. And on the whole this is Henry Miller’s attitude. Not quite always,
because at moments he shows signs of a fairly ordinary kind of literary nostalgia. There is
a long passage in the earlier part of BLACK SPRING, in praise of the Middle Ages,
which as prose must be one of the most remarkable pieces of writing in recent years, but
which displays an attitude not very different from that of Chesterton. In MAX AND THE
WHITE PHAGOCYTES there is an attack on modem American civilization (breakfast
cereals, cellophane, etc. ) from the usual angle of the literary man who hates industrialism.
But in general the attitude is ‘Let’s swallow it whole’. And hence the seeming
preocupation with indecency and with the dirty-handkerchief sidd of life. It is only
seeming, for the truth is that ordinary everyday life consists far more largely of horrors
than writers of fiction usually care to admit. Whitman himself ‘accepted’ a great deal that
his contemporaries found unmentionable. For he is not only writing of the prairie, he also
wanders through the city and notes the shattered skull of the suicide, the ‘grey sick faces
of onanists’, etc, etc. But unquestionably our own age, at any rate in Western Europe, is
less healthy and less hopeful than the age in which Whitman was writing. Unlike
Whitman, we live in a SHRINKING world. The ‘democratic vistas’ have ended in barbed
wire. There is less feeling of creation and growth, less and less emphasis on the cradle,
endlessly rocking, more and more emphasis on the teapot, endlessly stewing. To accept
civilization as it is practically means accepting decay. It has ceased to be a strenuous
attitude and become a passive attitude — even ‘decadent’, if that word means anything.
But precisely because, in one sense, he is passive to experience. Miller is able to get
nearer to the ordinary man than is possible to more purposive writers. For the ordinary
man is also passive. Within a narrow circle (home life, and perhaps the trade union or
local politics) he feels himself master of his fate, but against major events he is as
helpless as against the elements. So far from endeavouring to influence the future, he
simply lies down and lets things happen to him. During the past ten years literature has
involved itself more and more deeply in politics, with the result that there is now less
room in it for the ordinary man than at any time during the past two centuries. One can
see the change in the prevailing literary attitude by comparing the books written about the
Spanish civil war with those written about the war of 1914-18. The immediately striking
thing about the Spanish war books, at any rate those written in English, is their shocking
dullness and badness. But what is more significant is that almost all of them, right-wing
or left-wing, are written from a political angle, by cocksure partisans telling you what to
think, whereas the books about the Great War were written by common soldiers or junior
officers who did not even pretend to understand what the whole thing was about. Books
like ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, LE FEU, A FAREWELL TO ARMS,
DEATH OF A HERO, GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT, MEMOIRS OF AN INFANTRY
OFFICER, and A SUBALTERN ON THE SOMME were written not by propagandists
but by VICTIMS. They are saying in effect, ‘What the hell is all this about? God knows.
All we can do is to endure. ’ And though he is not writing about war, nor, on the whole,
about unhappiness, this is nearer to Miller’s attitude than the omniscience which is now
fashionable. The BOOSTER, a short-lived periodical of which he was part-editor, used to
describe itself in its advertisements as ‘non-political, non-educational, non-progressive,
non-co-operative, non-ethical, non-literary, non-consistent, non-contemporary’, and
Miller’s own work could be described in nearly the same terms. It is a voice from the
crowd, from the underling, from the third-class carriage, from the ordinary, non-political,
non-moral, passive man.
I have been using the phrase ‘ordinary man’ rather loosely, and I have taken it for granted
that the ‘ordinary man’ exists, a thing now denied by some people. I do not mean that the
people Miller is writing about constitute a majority, still less that he is writing about
proletarians. No English or American novelist has as yet seriously attempted that. And
again, the people in TROPIC OF CANCER fall short of being ordinary to the extent that
they are idle, disreputable, and more or less ‘artistic’. As I have said already, this a pity,
but it is the necessary result of expatriation. Miller’s ‘ordinary man’ is neither the manual
worker nor the suburban householder, but the derelict, the DECLASSE, the adventurer,
the American intellectual without roots and without money. Still, the experiences even of
this type overlap fairly widely with those of more nonnal people. Milter has been able to
get the most out of his rather limited material because he has had the courage to identify
with it. The ordinary man, the ‘average sensual man’, has been given the power of
speech, like Balaam’s ass.
It will be seen that this is something out of date, or at any rate out of fashion. The average
sensual man is out of fashion. Preoccupation with sex and truthfulness about the inner life
are out of fashion. American Paris is out of fashion. A book like TROPIC OF CANCER,
published at such a time, must be either a tedious preciosity or something unusual, and I
think a majority of the people who have read it would agree that it is not the first. It is
worth trying to discover just what, this escape from the current literary fashion means.
But to do that one has got to see it against its background — that is, against the general
development of English literature in the twenty years since the Great War.
II
When one says that a writer is fashionable one practically always means that he is
admired by people under thirty. At the beginning of the period I am speaking of, the years
during and immediately after the war, the writer who had the deepest hold upon the
thinking young was almost certainly Housman. Among people who were adolescent in
the years 1910-25, Housman had an influence which was enonnous and is now not at all
easy to understand. In 1920, when I was about seventeen, I probably knew the whole of
the SHROPSHIRE LAD by heart. I wonder how much impression the SHROPSHIRE
LAD makes at this moment on a boy of the same age and more or less the same cast of
mind? No doubt he has heard of it and even glanced into it; it might strike him as cheaply
clever — probably that would be about all. Yet these are the poems that I and my
contemporaries used to recite to ourselves, over and over, in a kind of ecstasy, just as
earlier generations had recited Meredith’s ‘Love in a Valley’, Swinburne’s ‘Garden of
Proserpine’ etc. , etc.
With rue my heart is laden For golden friends I had, For many a roselipt maiden And
many a lightfoot lad.
By brooks too broad for leaping The lightfoot boys are laid; The roselipt girls arc
sleeping In fields Where roses fade.
It just tinkles. But it did not seem to tinkle in 1920. Why does the bubble always burst?
To answer that question one has to take account of the EXTERNAL conditions that make
certain writers popular at certain times. Housman’s poems had not attracted much notice
when they were first published. What was there in them that appealed so deeply to a
single generation, the generation bom round about 1900?
In the first place, Housman is a ‘country’ poet. His poems are full of the chann of buried
villages, the nostalgia of place-names, Clunton and Clunbury, Knighton, Ludlow, ‘on
Wenlock Edge’, ‘in summer time on Bredon’, thatched roofs and the jingle of smithies,
the wild jonquils in the pastures, the ‘blue, remembered hills’. War poems apart, English
verse of the 1910-25 period is mostly ‘country’. The reason no doubt was that the
RENTIER-professional class was ceasing once and for all to have any real relationship
with the soil; but at any rate there prevailed then, far more than now, a kind of snobbism
of belonging to the country and despising the town. England at that time was hardly more
an agricultural country than it is now, but before the light industries began to spread
themselves it was easier to think of it as one. Most middle-class boys grew up within
sight of a farm, and naturally it was the picturesque side of farm life that appealed to
them — the ploughing, harvesting, stack-thrashing and so forth. Unless he has to do it
himself a boy is not likely to notice the horrible drudgery of hoeing turnip, milking cows
with chapped teats at four o’clock in the morning, etc. , etc. Just before, just after, and for
that matter, during the war was the great age of the ‘Nature poet’, the heyday of Richard
Jefferies and W. H. Hudson. Rupert Brooke’s ‘Grantchester’, the star poem of 1913, is
nothing but an enormous gush of ‘country’ sentiment, a sort of accumulated vomit from a
stomach stuffed with place-names. Considered as a poem ‘Grantchester’ is something
wors than worthless, but as an illustration of what the thinking middle-class young of that
period FELT it is a valuable document.
Housman, however, did not enthuse over the rambler roses in the week-ending spirit of
Brooke and the others. The ‘country’ motif is there all the time, but mainly as a
background. Most of the poems have a quasi-human subject, a kind of idealized rustic, in
reality Strephon or Corydon brought up to date. This in itself had a deep appeal.
Experience shows that overcivilized people enjoy reading about rustics (key-phrase,
‘close to the soil’) because they imagine them to be more primitive and passionate than
themselves. Hence the ‘dark earth’ novel of Sheila Kaye-Smith, etc. And at that time a
middle-class boy, with his ‘country’ bias, would identify with an agricultural worker as
he would never have done with a town worker. Most boys had in their minds a vision of
an idealized ploughman, gipsy, poacher, or gamekeeper, always pictured as a wild, free,
roving blade, living a life of rabbit-snaring, cockfighting, horses, beer, and women.
Masefield’s ‘Everlasting Mercy’, another valuable period-piece, immensely popular with
boys round about the war years, gives you this vision in a very crude fonn. But
Housman’s Maurices and Terences could be taken seriously where Masefield’s Saul
Kane could not; on this side of him, Housman was Masefield with a dash of Theocritus.
Moreover all his themes are adolescent — murder, suicide, unhappy love, early death.
They deal with the simple, intelligible disasters that give you the feeling of being up
against the ‘bedrock facts’of life:
The sun burns on the half-mown hill, By now the blood has dried; And Maurice among
the hay lies still And my knife is in his side.
And again:
They hand us now in Shrewsbury jail And whistles blow forlorn. And trains all night
groan on the rail To men who die at morn.
It is all more or less in the same tune. Everything comes unstuck. ‘Ned lies long in the
churchyard and Tom lies long in jail’. And notice also the exquisite self-pity — the
‘nobody loves me’ feeling:
The diamond drops adorning The low mound on the lea, These arc the tears of morning,
That weeps, but not for thee.
Hard cheese, old chap! Such poems might have been written expressly for adolescents.
And the unvarying sexual pessimism (the girl always dies or marries somebody else)
seemed like wisdom to boys who were herded together in public schools and were half-
inclined to think of women as something unattainable. Whether Housman ever had the
same appeal for girls I doubt. In his poems the woman’s point of view is not considered,
she is merely the nymph, the siren, the treacherous half-human creature who leads you a
little distance and then gives you the slip.
But Housman would not have appealed so deeply to the people who were young in 1920
if it had not been for another strain in him, and that was his blasphemous, antinomian,
‘cynical’ strain. The fight that always occurs between the generations was exceptionally
bitter at the end of the Great War; this was partly due to the war itself, and partly it was
an indirect result of the Russian Revolution, but an intellectual struggle was in any case
due at about that date. Owing probably to the ease and security of life in England, which
even the war hardly disturbed, many people whose ideas were formed in the eighties or
earlier had carried them quite unmodified into the nineteen-twenties. Meanwhile, so far
as the younger generation was concerned, the official beliefs were dissolving like sand-
castles. The slump in religious belief, for instance, was spectacular. For several years the
old-young antagonism took on a quality of real hatred. What was left of the war
generation had crept out of the massacre to find their elders still bellowing the slogans of
1914, and a slightly younger generation of boys were writhing under dirty-minded
celibate schoolmasters. It was to these that Housman appealed, with his implied sexual
revolt and his personal grievance against God. He was patriotic, it was true, but in a
harmless old-fashioned way, to the tune of red coats and ‘God save the Queen’ rather
than steel helmets and ‘Hang the Kaiser’. And he was satisfyingly anti-Christian — he
stood for a kind of bitter, defiant paganism, the conviction that life is short and the gods
are against you, which exactly fitted the prevailing mood of the young; and all in
charming fragile verse that was composed almost entirely of words of one syllable.
It will be seen that I have discussed Housman as though he were merely a propagandist,
an utterer of maxims and quotable ‘bits’. Obviously he was more than that. There is no
need to under-rate him now because he was over-rated a few years ago. Although one
gets into trouble nowadays for saying so, there are a number of his poems (‘Into my heart
an air that kills’, for instance, and ‘Is my team ploughing? ’) that are not likely to remain
long out of favour. But at bottom it is always a writer’s tendency, his ‘purpose’, his
‘message’, that makes him liked or disliked. The proof of this is the extreme difficulty of
seeing any literary merit in a book that seriously damages your deepest beliefs. And no
book is ever truly neutral. Some or other tendency is always discernible, in verse as much
as in prose, even if it does no more than detennine the fonn and the choice of imagery.
But poets who attain wide popularity, Uke Housman, are as a rule definitely gnomic
writers.
After the war, after Housman and the Nature poets, there appears a group of writers of
completely different tendency — Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Lawrence, Wyndham, Lewis,
Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey. So far as the middle and late twenties go, these are ‘the
movement’, as surely as the Auden-Spender group have been ‘the movement’ during the
past few years. It is true that not all of the gifted writers of the period can be fitted into
the pattern. E. M. Forster, for instance, though he wrote his best book in 1923 or
thereabouts, was essentially, pre-war, and Yeats does not seem in either of his phases to
belong to the twenties. Others who were still living, Moore, Conrad, Bennett, Wells,
Norman Douglas, had shot their bolt before the war ever happened. On the other hand, a
writer who should be added to the group, though in the narrowly literary sense he hardly
‘belongs’, is Somerset Maughami. Of course the dates do not fit exactly; most of these
writers had already published books before the war, but they can be classified as post-war
in the same sense that the younger men now writing are post-slump. Equally, of course,
you could read through most of the literary papers of the time without grasping that these
people are ‘the movement’. Even more then than at most times the big shots of literary
journalism were busy pretending that the age-before-last had not come to an end. Squire
ruled the LONDON MERCURY Gibbs and Walpole were the gods of the lending
libraries, there was a cult of cheeriness and manliness, beer and cricket, briar pipes and
monogamy, and it was at all times possible to earn a few guineas by writing an article
denouncing ‘high-brows’. But all the same it was the despised highbrows who had
captured the young. The wind was blowing from Europe, and long before 1930 it had
blowu the beer-and-cricket school naked, except for their knight-hoods.
But the first thing one would notice about the group of writers I have named above is that
they do not look like a group. Moreover several of them would strongly object to being
coupled with several of the others. Lawrence and Eliot were in reality antipathetic,
Huxley worshipped Lawrence but was repelled by Joyce, most of the others would have
looked down on Huxley, Strachey, and Maugham, and Lewis attacked everyone in turn;
indeed, his reputation as a writer rests largely on these attacks. And yet there is a certain
temperamental similarity, evident enough now, though it would not have been so a dozen
years ago. What it amounts to is PESSIMISM OF OUTLOOK. But it is necessary to
make clear what is meant by pessimism.
If the keynote of the Georgian poets was ‘beauty of Nature’, the keynote of the post-war
writers would be ‘tragic sense of life’. The spirit behind Housman’s poems for instance,
is not tragic, merely querulous; it is hedonism disappointed. The same is true of Hardy,
though one ought to make an exception of THE DYNASTS. But the Joyce-Eliot group
come later in time, puritanism is not their main adversary, they are able from the start to
‘see through’ most of the things that their predecessors had fought for. All of them are
temperamentally hostile to the notion of ‘progress’; it is felt that progress not only
doesn’t happen, but OUGHT not to happen. Given this general similarity, there are, of
course, differences of approach between the writers I have named as well as different
degrees of talent. Eliot’s pessimism is partly the Christian pessimism, which implies a
certain indifference to human misery, partly a lament over the decadence of Western
civilization (‘We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men’, etc. , etc. ), a sort of
twilight-of-the-gods feeling, which finally leads him, in Sweeney Agonistes for instance,
to achieve the difficult feat of making modern life out to be worse than it is. With
Strachey it is merely a polite eighteenth-century scepticism mixed up with a taste for
debunking. With Maugham it is a kind of stoical resignation, the stiff upper lip of the
pukka sahib somewhere east of Suez, carrying on with his job without believing in it, like
an Antonine Emperor. Lawrence at first sight does not seem to be a pessimistic writer,
because, like Dickens, he is a ‘change-of-heart’ man and constantly insisting that life here
and now would be all right if only you looked at it a little differently. But what he is
demanding is a movement away from our mechanized civilization, which is not going to
happen. Therefore his exasperation with the present turns once more into idealization of
the past, this time a safely mythical past, the Bronze Age. When bawrence prefers the
Etruscans (his Etruscans) to ourselves it is difficult not to agree with him, and yet, after
all, it is a species of defeatism, because that is not the direction in which the world is
moving. The kind of life that he is always pointing to, a life centring round the simple
mysteries — sex, earth, fire, water, blood — is merely a lost cause. All he has been able to
produce, therefore, is a wish that things would happen in a way in which they are
manifestly not going to happen. ‘A wave of generosity or a wave of death’, he says, but it
is obvious that there are no waves of generosity this side of the horizon. So he flees to
Mexico, and then dies at forty-five, a few years before the wave of death gets going. It
will be seen that once again I am speaking of these people as though they were not artists,
as though they were merely propagandists putting a ‘message’ across. And once again it
is obvious that all of them are more than that. It would be absurd, for instance, to look on
ULYSSES as MERELY a show-up of the horror of modern life, the ‘dirty DAILY MAIL
era’, as Pound put it. Joyce actually is more of a ‘pure artist’ than most writers. But
ULYSSES could not have been written by someone who was merely dabbling with word-
patterns; it is the product of a special vision of life, the vision of a Catholic who has lost
his faith. What Joyce is saying is ‘Here is life without God. Just look at it! ’ and his
technical innovations, important though they are, are primarily to serve this purpose.
But what is noticeable about all these writers is that what ‘purpose’ they have is very
much up in the air. There is no attention to the urgent problems of the moment, above all
no politics in the narrower sense. Our eyes are directed to Rome, to Byzantium, to
Montparnasse, to Mexico, to the Etruscans, to the Subconscious, to the solar plexus — to
everywhere except the places where things are actually happening. When one looks back
at the twenties, nothing is queerer than the way in which every important event in Europe
escaped the notice of the English intelligentsia. The Russian Revolution, for instance, all
but vanishes from the English consciousness between the death of Lenin and the Ukraine
famine — about ten years. Throughout those years Russia means Tolstoy, Dostoievsky,
and exiled counts driving taxi-cabs. Italy means picture-galleries, ruins, churches, and
museums — but not Black-shirts. Gennany means films, nudism, and psychoanalysis — but
not Hitler, of whom hardly anyone had heard till 1931. In ‘cultured’ circles art-for-art’s-
saking extended practically to a worship of the meaningless. Literature was supposed to
consist solely in the manipulation of words. To judge a book by its subject matter was the
unforgivable sin, and even to be aware of its subject matter was looked on as a lapse of a
taste. About 1928, in one of the three genuinely funny jokes that PUNCH has produced
since the Great War, an intolerable youth is pictured infonning his aunt that he intends to
‘write’. ‘And what are you going to write about, dear? ’ asks the aunt. ‘My dear aunt,’
says the youth crushingly, ‘one doesn’t write ABOUT anything, one just WRITES. ’ The
best writers of the twenties did not subscribe to this doctrine, their ‘purpose’ is in most
cases fairly overt, but it is usually ‘purpose’ along moral-religious-cultural lines. Also,
when translatable into political terms, it is in no case ‘left’. In one way or another the
tendency of all the writers in this group is conservative.
