Letter from London

...None of these novelists is a blatantly self-promoting pseudowritec like Erica Jong...

...Christmas Book Issue LETTER FROM LONDON BY PEARL K. BELL BY now it is hardly news in the United States or anywhere else that England is in a bad way, with all the alarming signs of crisis pointing in the one melancholy, irreversible direction of decline and fall...

...These five writers, born into solid middle-class families, superlatively educated at public schools and Oxford or Cambridge, and for a rime committed by conscience and fashion to Communism, never came to represent a clear-cut "movement...

...To portray the literary generation born during the first decade of the century that came of age in the early '30s, the exhibit traces the early lives and careers, up to the beginning of World War II, of five representative writers?W...

...Symptomatically, the only important literary event in England this fall has been the publication of N-H, the second supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary...

...literary scene has been intensified by a recent exhibit, Young Writers of the Thirties, at the National Portrait Gallery, that fascinating archive in Trafalgar Square of the great English faces—or rather, the faces of the English great—across the centuries...

...Only Auden would eventually prove himself truly great, but what is so enormously moving about the display of portraits from the past is the serene glow of confidence in their handsome young faces, at once innocent and knowing, canny and naive...

...But the fact remains that there is not a novelist in England today who comes anywhere close to Bellow in imaginative power, intellectual breadth, or comic energy?an adventurous writer with something important to say, not a spinner of fictional adventure—though not so long ago I would have singled out Amis as the unequivocal exception...

...all, however, began their literary careers as aggressive modernists...

...As artists they would find "new signatures" (the name of Michael Roberts' influential anthology of the new verse, published in 1931) in poetry and the novel...

...For poetry did have a function and purpose which allowed these young writers to face the world with singular panache, to hold up their fine heads with unassailable pride...

...It is undeniably a stunt of sorts to grind out a book a year, but Henry and Cato is artfulness, not art, and more breathlessly boring than usual...

...Whatever satiric irony Amis hoped to enact in his novel is fatally diminished by his capricious, and uninspired, fooling around...

...It is the most wide-ranging and certainly the liveliest display to date of the enduring British genius for lexicography, for keeping track and clearly recording the complex shifts and changes in the language since the monumental OED was completed in 1931...

...Tickets to the spectacular productions of Marlowe, Stoppard, Synge, and Goldoni that have launched the new, architecturally dazzling National Theatre on the South Bank of the Thames are hard to come by, though I can't begin to figure out how the middle-class audiences can afford these pricey pleasures when food and clothing cost more than they do in America and salaries are so much lower...

...Plainly, as one thinks back to Woolf, Austen and Eliot, being women does not explain why the range of observation, thought and psychological acumen among the prominent femaie novelists in Britain today seems on the whole so limited, so narcissistically constricted, compared with the important novelists, male and female, of the past...

...They totally rejected the easy seductions of con fusion, disaffection and despondency...

...Nor are these women writers merely producing the crude, aggressive morality tales of liberation that a shrilly aroused feminism has spawned to such excess in the United States...

...they understood, even in young manhood, the disturbing "chaos of values" that marked their time and could deface their fate, but they were nonetheless stimulated by the challenge of cataclysm...

...There is a slackness, an insubstantiality of nerve, emotion and intelligence even in the most technically skillful British novelists today, of both sexes...

...In the National Portrait Gallery, these images of a vanished generation of radiant young men, brimming with energy, hope and ambition in a tormented time, form the most depressing contrast imaginable to the debilitated and cheerless present of an Engliand that has become gray on gray...

...With cunning sleight-of-mind, Amis envisions a Western world almost entirely ruled by a brutally tyrannical Roman Catholic Church that long ago was the victor over the Reformation...

...By 1935, when Auden had already begun to mistrust the young-rebel misalliance between art and politics, he was still concerned with stressing the moral force of art...

...Whether the astonishing vigor, the sheer amount of cultural activity that manages to be seen, heard and read in England today can in fact be equated with a high level of cultural achievement is another matter...

...When the quality of life seems to be moving inexorably away, day after exasperating day, from civility and comfort toward private shabbiness and public collapse, not even the most assured literary genius can calmly sit down to write War and Peace or, for that matter, Lucky Jim...

...Precisely the opposite is true of English literary culture today...

...And somehow the narrow perspective and undernourished intellectual and esthetic ambition, this self-ordained smallness of purpose and view that infects even the aggrieved and lamentative jeremiads of Doris Lessing, seem very much of a piece with the demoralized mood of the county as a whole...

...As Auden wrote in 1935...

...Instead, as Kingsley Amis has just demonstrated in his new novel, The Alteration, it's easier for the novelist to turn his imagination entirely away from the unbearably oppressive immediacies of real life, and construct a sly historical fantasy that might also be read as a kind of social-science fiction...

...Amis, who has of late become something of a pushbutton sourpuss, had the chutzpah to sneer at the Nobel Prize in a column in the Observer, because "after all, Saul Bellow has just got the one for literature...

...H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice, and C. Day Lewis—through family photos, boyhood journals, letters, and impersonal memorabilia salvaged from the appalling political events of the time...

...Yet all the earnest British reviewers, starved for home-brewed fiction of genuine substance, have solemnly celebrated The Alteration as a profound parable about tyranny...

...But that, alas, is the trouble with The Alteration: What reads like a serious work part of the way is for no good reason suddenly made as tricky and inconsequential as the cunningly delayed revelations of a whodunit...

...It is interesting and perhaps curiously significant that the most energetically confident novelists at work in England today, the most prolific, extravagantly praised, and "clever," to use a peculiarly British term of honor, are women: Murdoch, Muriel Spark, Margaret Drabble, Doris Lessing, Beryl Bainbridge, Edna O'Brien, and—the oldest yet most fiercely original?Jean Rhys, still going strong in her 80s with a superb new book of stories, Sleep It Off, Lady...

...One must show those who come to poetry for a message, for calendar thoughts, that they have come to the wrong door, that poetry may illuminate but it will not dictate...

...With all the superbly well-informed and eloquent literary opinion that is aired all over the place in London, it is a sadly ironic fact that scarcely any of the English fiction now being published and soberly evaluated here seems worth the time and praise reviewers are so willing to dispense...

...With the hounds of economic and social bankruptcy howling at the tarnished gates, life has become too indiscriminately difficult for the serious tranquilities of large-minded fiction...

...As young Communists (though their party allegiance was in most cases short-lived and never very ardent) they felt extraordinarily invigorated by the heady conviction that art could become a new-forged instrument of justice—that poets were once again to be, as Shelley had declared, the unacknowledged legislators of the world...

...To an interested observer, there seems to have been no significant quantitative decline in the writing and publication of novels, criticism, literary biography, or memoirs—that quintessentially British form of classy literary gossip—and all are reviewed with prompt and serious attention not only in the Times Literary Supplement but in such less obvious quarters as the Economist and the Financial Times...

...they would be new voices speaking out stridently, shockingly, against the stifling puritanism of bourgeois capitalism at home and the fascist menace that was rising in Spain and Germany...

...a self-indulgent fondness for game-playing and sophisticated inventiveness as ends in themselves...

...The plot turns on the cruel attempt of the Church hierarchy to preserve a gifted boy soprano's voice by castration, and it would be unfair to give away the booby-trap that Amis springs at the end...

...in The Poet's Tongue, "Poetry is not concerned with telling people what to do, but with extending our knowledge of good and evil . leading us to the point where it is possible for us to make a rational and moral choice...

...The year is 1976, but not as we know it...

...While the British middle class bleeds to death in the '70s, the literary form most distinctively and gloriously the product of middle-class vitality and strength—the novel —is being trivialized to death...

...The world was their oyster, not because it held no dangers for them (quite the contrary), but because literature, through its moral imperatives and clear esthetic power, could confront the abyss...

...Indeed, I find it dismally characteristic of England's present state of pervasive unhealth that Iris Murdoch, churning out the same tiresome mechanical romance once a year, year in and year out, is discussed with awed solemnity by critics who, a decade or so earlier, would have summoned up little but amused disdain for her pseudophilosophical melodramas with their plastic, interchangeable lovers, their creaky dialogue no living creature can sanely be accused of speaking, their contrived and motiveless manipulation of accident, death and passion...

...When Henry and Cato, the 1976-model Murdoch sedan was unveiled in London recently, its soporifically predictable infatuations and absurdities, accompanied by incessant and irredeemably vague natter about love oh love oh foolish love, the familiar Schnitzlerian round of musical beds, were acclaimed once again as the feat of a master...

...Yet British culture seems unperturbed by the ruinous inflation and the dwindling pound...

...They were acutely conscious of the burden imposed upon them by growing up in a world of economic depression and fascism, of living in the shadow of the War they had been too young for and of the more terrifying conflict to come...

...But none, on the other hand, has the formal audacity of Virginia Woolf, the tough and nimble discernment of Jane Austen, and certainly not the intellectual and psychological boldness of George Eliot...

...Like the SF devotee (and sometime practitioner) he is, Amis devises his mythical late-20th-century Catholic England with meticulously detailed time-warps of dress, language, architecture, social custom, and sexual mores...

...In a Britain that seems to be dying of vague and nameless poisons of the spirit—economic sterility and bureaucratic incompetence are only the visible symptoms of the dismaying ooze of malaise contaminating every heart and brain—these young writers of the 1930s, with their irrepressible arrogance and reckless self-esteem, represent a spirit as alien to the 1970s as that of Victorian imperialism in its prime...