Britain's Lopsided View:

...Defining a national imagination is a task that calls for imagination...

...But some concrete evidence should have been given of the effect this three-fold heritage has had on the Anglo-Saxon imagination...

...British autobiography, however entertaining, has never, it is maintained, been really interested in the analysis of ideas: The British have no Julian Bendas, nor "even an effective Alfred Kazin...

...Does no one remember Kind Hearts and Coronets, Brief Encounter, The Fallen Idol, etc...

...Instead: "Our memories are cluttered with nannies, teas under the limes, the sound of bat on ball and witty Oxford conversation...

...They cannot exist for themselves, merely to give pleasure, but must have a "national" or "social" purpose...

...Just as no Oxford or Cambridge don could conceivably break through the conventional academic mold, so no single British author or artist can hope to filter through the dense anonymous facade of the TLS to herald a new dawn...

...By current TLS standards, postwar Britain has produced only four novelists worth bothering about: C. P. Snow, Anthony Powell, Angus Wilson and Graham Greene...

...The most striking demonstration of confusion between artistic values and utilitarian ends appears in the articles on British music (almost solely restricted to Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten), British sculpture and architecture...

...In contrast to the promise of tomorrow, the bright vistas of yesteryear now appear dull and dim...

...America is now equated with vigor, freshness, originality, and is earning respect for achieving a successful mass culture...

...triangle...

...For just as it appeared to have discovered America last year, so this year the TLS has discovered an England that is in the throes of social revolution...

...It not only favors the new movies which, unlike the novels, picture the working classes as persons, but suggests that they are superior to the purely artistic ones of the recent past...

...they are "too narrowly literary...

...The very traits once held against us are now seen as worthy of being emulated...

...It is not on the grounds of imagination but of art in the service of society that the impersonal style of contemporary British architecture is justified...

...There is poignance in the writer's bald statement that "Britain is the poor relation in the U.K.-U.S.-U.S.S.R...

...The "jolt," the sudden impact, is overwhelming...

...Undeniably Britain is H. G. Wells, George Orwell and C. P. Snow, but it is also William Blake and John Donne and Dylan Thomas...

...Here the Americans are brought down a peg or two...

...Americans to the rescue again...

...For once, poise, perspective, sense of balance are thrown to the wind...

...A mere sampling of these articles, with their heavy, tiresomely repetitious, impersonal style will suggest that imagination is not one of the TLS's stronger features...

...The newness, the vitality it admired in the American arts, in England are given a heavy-handed evaluation...

...Our novelists have been conspicuously reticent in showing their characters at work," the article writer complains, and by work he means work...

...It approves of the "practical criticism" of F. R. Leavis and Richard Hoggart, who see literature as a moral concern: "the criticism of a society strenuously responding to what threatens its health.'For much the same "health" reasons, one suspects, it champions the new attitude toward poetry as "a gesture of response to life," and as "a socially cooperative activity...

...It is here that the need rises to defend subsidized art: "As the Middle Ages proved so well, a reasonable amount of talent can always be found and made by training and by the prospect of a living afterwards...

...He adds, ingenuously: "We tend to be ignorant of the deepest revolutions in our own lives until chance in the form of a stranger's remark jolts us into an awareness of them...

...A carping, selfdeflating tone dominates nearly all the articles particularly when the achievements of the recent past are discussed...

...There's a condescending reference to Kingsley Amis as a comic writer...

...While British music and ballet are extolled for becoming more "national," English poetry is charged with being "aggressively British," insular and regional in tone, the model today being Robert Graves of the "modest, good poem" rather than the cosmopolite T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound...

...It is from this mixture that British culture derives its marvelous variety, its flexibility, its breadth and depth...

...For while English comic writers always make a social point, the humor of a James Thurber or S. J. Perelman is best characterized as "pure...

...But the situation has its brighter side where the British imagination is concerned...

...A new realism has hit the theater of the East End, and by juxtaposing the non-literary language of Shelagh Delaney and Arnold Wesker to that of Joel Chandler Harris, Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, the TLS writer makes it all sound very respectable and valid...

...It even sees scope for the imagination in jazz which is characterized as "a manifestation of class feeling a democratic revolt in the field of culture...

...There are other confusions...

...That enduring and timeless British publication is the supreme standard by which all literary journalism is measured, particularly in America where awareness of the high seriousness of literature is of relatively recent origin...

...It is only in its comic vision that the modern English novel is deemed superior, and this because it serves a social and moral purpose...

...Without it, there could not have been that incredible conglomeration of practicalness and idealism, common sense and fantasy, earthiness and lyric vision, tradition and experiment that is the sum total of the British imagination...

...In 1958, in a massive special issue titled "The American Imagination," the TLS sang a paean of praise to America that was tantamount to admission into the "Commonwealth of Cultured Nations...

...British writers just aren't in touch: Elizabeth Bowen, P. H. Newby, Ivy Compton-Burnett do not tell us of "the problems of our time...

...And it feels encouraged by the recent tendency in ballet toward a more national choreography that emphasizes narrative and folk tradition...

...The editorial writer speaks of "the consciousness of having grown and changed in the most alarming and unexpected way...

...seems to us a "purer" comic writer than either of these American writers, as does Joyce Cary (also curiously ignored...

...An inferiority complex before the U.S...

...The TLS also sees a future for the British imagination in television and radio where the shining light these days is the playwright Harold Pinter of The Caretaker fame...

...Indeed the TLS has been a kind of thorn in the side of the larger American literary supplements, making them aspire at times to an unreasonably lofty level and, failing at this, drawing to themselves criticism that is essentially unjustified...

...And not only does the English novel lack a Saul Bellow to give it "life," "the sad truth is that we have no women writers comparable in wit and intelligence to Miss Mary McCarthy or in real sensibility to Carson McCullers...

...But will the result be more imaginative...

...Like all British institutions, the TLS has felt the pressures of the new era, and one of its boldest gestures toward it has been a relaxing of characteristic British resistance to American culture...

...But good as these are, they are not Saul Bellow (creator of that four-star model of American vitality, Augie March...

...Presumably this will turn an "aristocratic" medium into a "democratic" one...

...In the fall of 1960, directing the same close scrutiny upon Britain itself, in a sequel called "The British Imagination," the TLS proceeds with much greater caution...

...A related essay begins by berating the English for becoming increasingly insensitive to their language, for cultivating an anti-style so widespread that it threatens to break through social barriers...

...Nona Balakian is a staff member of the New York Times Book Review section and a student of British fiction...

...it is Lewis Carroll, and Walter de la Mare...

...This article consists mainly of paraphrased opinions of a visiting American poet-critic and it somehow manages to lump together William Plomer, John Betjeman, Edwin Muir and Philip Larkin...

...Iris Murdoch (has no one heard of her...

...Again the kudos go to Angus Wilson and Anthony Powell (no mention of Iris Murdoch, John Braine, Keith Waterhouse, etc...

...The influences of this diverse latter group have not, thank heaven, completely vanished yet, though it appears to suit the purpose of the TLS at the moment not to recognize or even to remember them...

...The British imagination in science, for one, is evidently hampered by economics...

...What these super-critics fail to see is that the TLS is a unique British phenomenon, a cultural institution as fixed and autonomous as its ancient universities...

...Only Wilson and Greene are seen as presenting "a realistic picture of the world we live in...

...A towering mound of tradition—like eternity itself—lies in wait, diminishing the reality of the moment, affixing all things to their proper place in the scale...

...it is James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forester...

...Crossing the Atlantic must "purify" humorous writers...

...In a society which is beginning to admit the culture of the working class, it is no longer possible to continue the myth of the raw, the uncouth, the mercenary American...

...But the initial error, perhaps, was in conceiving a British imagination without its Irish, Scotch and Welsh components...

...But lest it appear to be over-pessimistic and out of line with "the raw, new ideas stirring contemporary England," the TLS also does some judicious yea-saying...

...I do not mean that the TLS should have carried separate articles on the contributions of these groups—that is something too intangible...

...in the areas of education and science appears more justified...

...It told the world that we had "arrived...