Introducing William Plomer:
WEBSTER, HARVEY CURTIS
WRITERS and WRITING Introducing William Plomer "Why, dear America, do you not read William Plomer more?"—E. M. Forster (quoted on the jacket of William Plomer's Museum Pieces). DEAR MR. FORSTER:...
...Yours sincerely, Harvey Curtis Webster...
...Forster, he represents the humane spirit of intelligence which today's hystericals overlook or suppress...
...children afraid of the night, we want to read certainties and reassurances precisely because the modern world contains so little of either...
...Uncomfortable wisdom, that (like yours in Two Cheers for Democracy), but it is what Americans have to learn to ponder if America is ever to come of age...
...And another lesson we could learn from William Plomer is the un-American fact that there's more virtue in an aristocrat of good will (like Toby) than there is in a predatory capitalist or a proletarian without the sensitivity to realize that means condition ends...
...Plomer does not, I am afraid, convey adequately what I believe to be his special quality as an artist and a man...
...Like all first-rate artists, he does not oversimplify...
...All of his characters—low-, high- or middlebrow?are presented not only vividly but with the charity that good sense and good heart together can achieve...
...There is a more basic reason, though...
...The right publishers and the right critics didn't happen to find out about Plomer until recently, and they can't be blamed altogether, considering the more than 10,000 books England publishes every year...
...Look how long it took to discover you...
...He writes magnificently and makes one see the scaffold grandeur that has always been the most that the best of men can attain...
...He cares intensely, as you do, for civilization and for people in any class who care for it...
...Now William Plomer, whom I have read too little and will read more, is above all a disinterested intelligence...
...We distrust, most of us, disinterested intelligence...
...Of course, Toby was never defeated, really, and is an admirable hero...
...FORSTER: I cannot pretend to answer for America, but I can guess why we have neglected William Plomer and tell you why I agree that we shouldn't have...
...Plomer can go from fun to pathos without losing his integrity, because he is an integrated diversity himself...
...You are civilizing and maiming influences, and I can see no hope for mankind if powerful America does not become intelligent America, too...
...he emphasizes the in-dubitable fact that all people are many people: what they seem to themselves, to others, what they really are, what they might have been and might still become...
...Part of it is chance...
...Like you, Mr...
...Whatever mistakes he made, he never prided himself on being a member of "an interestingly emancipated 'lost generation,'" and he was always one who regarded "violence, organized murder and destruction, cruelty and famine as unnecessary, senseless and disgusting, and who at the same time had no belief that mankind has grown or is likely to grow more sensible...
...I am sorry William Plomer is not read more in America, and I am afraid he won't be read widely for a long time despite the fact that the reviewers have been enthusiastic and he has found a publisher who will certainly bring out some more of the nineteen books he has had printed in England...
...Yes, and he commits suicide because he can't afford a long illness, so to those who want answers or consolation he seems an unsatisfactory hero...
...But Mr...
...He is not a culture snob or a class snob...
...No, that is not quite true...
...He was "a civilized man...
...What I have said about Mr...
...So he loves the "decadent" Toby, who doesn't become a success because he won't accept any shabby way of exploiting his aristocracy and who has too high ideals to escape from "the real sickness of our century—that sense of not belonging anywhere, of not being rooted, of not taking part in the life of the community...
...Plomer, like you and the Bloomsbury group that was never really a group, is primarily concerned with the more conscious people who desire a life that has "splendor, color, pace, spirit, panache, style, idiosyncrasy...
...Certainly I hope both he and you will be read more and pondered more...
...As he says in his witty, moving and profound novel, Museum Pieces (Noonday, $3.50), beneath "the more conscious members of a nation or a community, there seethes the vast mass of 'ordinary people,' fertile, unpredictable in all its potency and potentiality, the breeding ground of all genius...
...Most readers and critics prefer books that represent a fashionable trend or that pander to our quest for a dogmatic answer to assuage the fear that constantly inhabits us...
Vol. 38 • March 1955 • No. 11
