'New Men' and 'Old Establishments'
BROGAN, D. W.
'New Men' and 'Old Establishments' A Mirror for Anglo-Saxons. By Martin Green. Harpers. 178 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by D. W. Brogan Professor of Political Science, Cambridge; Author, "The American...
...I should have thought that the state of English architecture was as depressing as the state of English fiction...
...Going to the American Middle West from Cambridge (England) as a graduate student...
...they look different from the decadent upper and upper-middle class...
...We must revere F. R. Leavis of Cambridge...
...Walt Tyler-Bevan is dead and the fight over the wrecks of the Labor party is a fight among members of the Establishment...
...Here I find the greatest weakness in this timely tract for the times...
...Green notes (others have done so too) that what is now called "the Establishment," the net of the "top people" in business, government, education, the arts, the mass media, was never more complete than it is today...
...This is a very timely book...
...What America has to teach them escapes them entirely...
...In a sense, Green is bound to be right...
...It is the domination of English life by the obsolete and deadly idea of "gentlemanliness...
...We must encourage Kingsley Amis to protest against the Establishment...
...They have more to give and more to take...
...He moved into a society that was novel and disturbing and which at once put him on the defensive...
...But for what he has given us, his attack on English complacency and his acute and justifiably scornful analysis of fashionable English anti-Americanism...
...But Green is not merely protesting against a "certain condescension" in Englishmen...
...But what Green has to offer as a remedy is a different canon of literary achievement...
...F. R. Leavis, in the English school at Cambridge, he found the world of middle America novel and disturbing but exciting and rewarding...
...There are a few useful figures...
...Suppose the public doesn't want better novels of the kind Green yearns for...
...These rising young men (out of Wells if you need a literary parallel) are more important than the decent young men out of Lawrence...
...At worst, it is a cultural Siberia, to be endured in anguish...
...The rising lower-middle class that will count, that is counting, is largely a technically trained group...
...He is concerned with the depressing state of England...
...there is what I can only call a preposterous evocation of "the Commonwealth" as a world power, based on no realities that I can identify...
...When members of what it is not, in this context, absurd to call "the lower orders" enter the picture, they are caricatured...
...Against the gentleman, as fossilized a concept as that of the mandarin, Green puts the "decent" lower-middle class type who is the representative man and the hope (if there is one) of the English future...
...If Green returns or has returned to England, I hope he sets to work again and produces a more systematic survey of English education and "culture...
...I agree in most things, though not in all, with Green's diagnosis...
...Green's main interest is in English literature and he notes with displeasure the degree to which the novel in England represents the gentlemanly tradition...
...But what is wrong with England...
...A good deal in English life and attitudes that is unintelligible to most Americans is made more understandable here...
...As such, it is well worth reading, as any candid account of an able young man's adjustment or revolt must be...
...There aren't enough of them...
...But his French and Turkish experiences serve simply to immunize him against the belief that there is hope in Europe outside...
...And it should be noted that he sees England not only with America as a background, but with France and Turkey as backgrounds...
...The new business class that Green ignores is linked with the technologists and cut off from the merely "cultured" recruits to "the Establishment" not only by training but by income...
...At best, America is a powerful but fundamentally funny country full of barbarous eccentricities...
...Green sees the new type as physically identifiable...
...Well, and what then...
...They see its follies, its barbarism, its ignorance...
...Suppose the traditional Puritan respect for probity, courage, responsibility can't be restored by more and better fiction...
...The great figure of modern English literature (and life...
...I fear it may be so and it will be so if we refuse really to look at contemporary England, the most urbanized community in the world, living on a perilous economic margin, carrying a heavy burden of irrelevant tradition in all classes...
...I am very grateful...
...The institution that gives modern Cambridge its "note" is not the English faculty but the Cavendish Laboratory...
...To have to defend what he had learned in England to an audience not respectful of any authority and ignorant of the weight of English tradition was a new form of education for him...
...But what will this "class" be...
...And he came out of it not a blind but a passionate pro-American, finding in the United States life and energy and hope that were all sadly missing in England...
...This class will dominate by numbers and ability...
...Against this presumptuous nonsense...
...We want more people like George Orwell who, coming into this world from the outside, can see it not as comic or even as tragic, but as worthy and hopeful...
...It is a discussion of the relations between two cultures and the use of the experience of one culture to sharpen both the appreciation and the analysis of the other...
...They have far more possibilities of life...
...Green does not use this political analogy (his political views don't seem important to him) but he is sound on the sociological fact...
...This inbred, sterile culture, reduced to its most ludicrous revelation in radio quizzes appealing to the "intellectual" snob values of the dead traditional culture, blankets spontaneity, warmth, "decency...
...But it is more than that...
...Green suffered a salutary shock...
...If the Labor party was moved by a revolt of the "people of England" of Chesterton's poem, the revolt has failed...
...Faced with freshmen who had not had anything that, in England, would be called a serious education, he did not flee to his ivory tower or take refuge in bitter superiority...
...Whether we like it or not, the dominant force in our culture today is natural science (including its child, technology...
...It is possible—it may even be likely—that the "New Men" will be taken over by the old Establishment, that Eton and Oxford will get them or get their sons...
...Evelyn Waugh, Angus Wilson...
...But much more serious is the ignoring of the problem put by C. P. Snow in his famous lectures...
...We want more writers like him preaching and exemplifying the lower-middle class virtues...
...Compared with the United States (and France) England is an astonishingly, a dangerously, unified country...
...We need a new urban culture, not even the semi-industrial Midlands culture of Lawrence's youth...
...Their carapace of conceit protects them against the American world...
...Wells' dream went wrong...
...is D. H. Lawrence...
...The lesson of Lady Chatterley can't be taught, practically or symbolically, by gamekeepers...
...Trained—conditioned is perhaps a better word—in the English system of the "sixth form" in the grammar school, then under Dr...
...Even the seedy characters who are not, in their conduct, gentlemen, are anti-gentlemen like Basil Seal...
...Graham Greene...
...Author, "The American Character" THIS HIGHLY stimulating and important book is, in part, a spiritual autobiography, an "Education of Martin Green...
...There is nothing—or next to nothing—about poetry, the theater, music, the visual arts...
...Anthony Powell, report on the life of a tiny minority of the English people...
...All this is admirably done and although Green will probably not like the comparison, recalls to me the dreams and ambitions of H. G. Wells' prime...
...they notice that it is un-English, that in the Middle West it is not even trying to be English (of course, the attempt would be doomed to failure anyway...
...What will happen to Green's...
...Green makes a spirited, highly intelligent and admirably phrased protest...
...If there is hope, it is in America...
...Green has an almost purely literary view of what culture consists in, a purely bookish view of how a national ethos changes...
...Suppose Amis doesn't learn to write better novels...
...The need for the acceptance into the English body politic of the millions who have moved up from the old "working class" into the lower-middle class that Green sees as making up the overwhelming majority of the population (and as containing the most valuable elements of the population) is evident and has been for a long time...
...It is oddly revealing that Green should ignore the other arts so completely...
...This is worth noting, for Green asserts land I believe rightly) that for too few Englishmen going out to American universities come prepared to learn as well as teach...
...And he has not abandoned that original impression, the foundation of faith in the possibilities of life that America gave him...
Vol. 43 • December 1960 • No. 48
