Writing up the Social Ladder

...This is the moment of truth, of exaltation, one of the few moments in life worth living...

...Saul Bellow, Herbert Gold and Norman Mailer, for example, have felt impelled to create heroic characters by sheer muscularity of prose and the force of their own intelligence...

...This is a particularly remarkable achievement since, during the period covered by her memoir (1949-50), the author was close to the Communist movement and, by her own admission, highly susceptible to pronouncements by party members about just who the real workers were and how they should be judged...

...But Amis admires her because her worry is not based on prissy moralism...

...For Rose, socialism is something middle-class people like Mrs...

...Tropez, the jargon of literary criticism and the accents of Oxford or the BBC...

...Yet it is precisely these static remnants of traditional English society that offer the younger writers a base to strike from and a target to strike at...

...Earlier writers of non-U origin like Wells, Shaw and Bennett fell into the literary patterns of reform or compassion—the traditional upper-class modes of dealing with the unhappy lower classes...

...It is not as funny as the earlier novels nor is its tone as consistent...

...Jenny Bunn is the most fully characterized of these companionable heroines and the first to be tormented by the problem of virginity...

...People liked each other...

...V. Sackville-West's No Signposts in the Sea epitomizes the upperclass gentility and forced poeticism that sets Amis' teeth on edge...

...NO SIGNPOST IN THE SEA By V Sackville-West Doubleday...

...Also, the nearly absolute candor with which Doris Lessing describes others does not extend to herself...

...Her memoir has the sense of surprise that occurs when people are observed as they really behave and sound, rather than as the habits of prejudgment or the convenience of familiar pigeonholes might suggest...

...When they come in saying Vote for Me, Vote for Me, I just laugh...

...In these unsubtle surroundings, sex is more of a commodity and money more of a passion than our Western romantic tradition would encourage us to believe...

...Names like Nigel and Vanessa get Patrick's back up, just as for the hero of Lucky Jim Mozart was a dirty word standing for the priggish affectations of the department head who played host at "musical evenings...

...I was reminded of the dancing nymphs in early Chaplin films posed in diaphonous gowns against a bright sky...

...Take A Girl Like You reveals Amis in a kind of literary mid-passage...

...Any artist would understand what I was trying to say...

...In contrast to the kind of political reporting which counts numbers and simplifies reasons, Mrs...

...Nose-thumbing, a hallowed tradition in American writing, is a new and revolutionary stance in British fiction, which explains the remarkable impact Amis and the other so-called "angry young men" have had on British readers...

...Lessing arrived on the London scene fresh from the outposts of Empire...

...But Miss Sackville-West is in deadly earnest...

...You see suddenly, as in a finished picture, the entire shape and design of what you intend to do...

...And don't talk to me about your socialism, it just makes me sick and tired, and that's the truth...

...The war is not political since for him serious politics is as ridiculous and fraudulent as rhapsodies on nature, emotional transports about love, casual references to Cannes and St...

...Amis' rejection of the enthroned pieties calls to mind Mark Twain and Hemingway rather than any British precursors...

...It is simply part of her natural biological drive for a home and family, the weapon with which she breaks down Patrick's resistance to "that huge historical bloody confidence-trick" of marriage...

...The landlord, Dan, who works with his hands and picks up money on the side in dubious transactions, votes Tory...

...It is not politics, however, but sex, money and friendship (roughly in that order) that preoccupy her characters...

...This gives them an advantage over their American counterparts, who have had to work with a more disorderly social structure and a speedier disappearance of familiar values...

...Life at the lower and upper extremes—among the working people in Doris Lessing's memoir and the privileged members of the Establishment in V Sackville-West's "sensitive" short novel—remains as unquestioning and insular as ever...

...But Mrs...

...Lessing's casual method conveys a sense of the actual weight of politics in daily life—marginal, largely unthoughtout, emotional and haphazard...

...You could talk to people if you felt like it, even upperclass people, and no one would think the worse...

...These are the sort of things, Amis insists, that life is really made up of for most people, not the ecstasies and tragedies that pervade "literary" writing...

...In contrast, British writers like Kingsley Amis, John Braine, John Wain, Alan Sillitoe and John Osborne, for all their discontent, seem to be solidly anchored in the society they belabor...

...Yet, despite such artful self-protection, In Pursuit of the English is a memorable updating of Dickens' working-class London...

...Skeffington, a salesman known to the others in the rooming house mainly for the insatiable and audible night-time demands he makes on his vapid wife...

...This, too, marks their difference from American fictional rebels who habitually flee the prosaic life of job and home for the comparatively romantic solitudes of forest, river or foreign lands...

...With Kingsley Amis' Take A Girl Like You, we move a step up the social ladder of Britain's welfare state...

...Reviewed by NATHAN GLICK Contributor, the "Progressive," "Commentary" Judging by these three volumes, the rebellious class consciousness in recent British writing seems to be limited to the educated middle layer...

...Doris Lessing's In Pursuit of the English offers a view of the lower level of this society—not the scabrous tramps and beggars of Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, but the comparatively respectable working people in a London rooming house...

...Churchill reminds Rose of the War, which was the happiest period of her life...

...Like the three earlier Amis heroes, Patrick Standish is a young man of lower-middle-class origins educated beyond his rank and income...

...Lessing is by instinct the novelist Orwell was not...

...Amis and his fellows, on the other hand, flaunt the petty peeves of lower-middle-class life like a pennant...

...And she shares Orwell's faculty for seeing life with an uncensoring eye...

...His attitude toward his heroes' wives and sweethearts is a notable example: Nowhere in either traditional or contemporary writing does one find such likable young women, without pretense, decent in instinct, sensible and sensual...

...while Labor's cause is upheld by Mr...

...2.95...

...The "I" comes out too likable, intelligent and tolerant...

...Well, they don't now, do they...

...Take A Girl Like You bears down on such chronic aspects of the human condition as the unappetizing potatoeyes in the rooming-house dinner, the difficulty of finding parking space on school grounds, and the awkward situations Patrick gets into trying to seduce Jenny Bunn, an elementary school teacher who looks French and sinful but, unfortunately for the hero, is neither...

...The picture that emerges from her book will not hearten Friends of Labor...

...she came from Southern Rhodesia (the scene of her earlier stories and novels) with a small child, no husband and little money...

...but these characters exist in a kind of social void, where relatives and accidentally met individuals can be detected, but no community...

...A Latin master at a second-rate school near London, Patrick conducts a private unheroic war against the tastes, values and language of the Establishment...

...But I like to hear Churchill speak, with his dirty VSign and everything, he enjoys himself, say what you like...

...Nose-thumbing is still indispensable for dissociating oneself from the surrounding phoniness, but hardly enough to sustain a maturing and basically serious writer...

...One would expect a few more irritable reactions, comments not so properly judicial and apt...

...This slim tale of a refined affair aboard ship between a sensitive aristocratic female and a successful journalist who has only a few months to live is the kind of fin de siècle soap opera that makes one feel tender about potato-eyes and parking problems...

...Amis is poking around for moral convictions that do not insult the realities of human nature, but he has not yet come up with any substantial substitutes for the hand-me-down values of traditional piety and traditional revolt...

...Like Orwell, Mrs...

...Gifted and honest as the book is, the reader, like Rose, is made slightly uneasy, by the author's voyeurism...

...Lessing get excited about, though she can understand her stepfather voting Labor since he gets unemployment insurance...

...Amis himself, however, is a repressed but incorrigible romantic, and the tension between programmatic amoralism and lurking idealism gives his books their internal drama and their saving humanity...

...Rose, who works hard in a jewelry shop and allows herself to be exploited by Flo, the landlady, replies to the author's missionary politicking: "I don't care who gets in, I'll get a smack in the eye either way...