Assaults on the British Novel

...One could confidently predict, however, that if Burgess were to fall victim to cancer tomorrow, or to be crushed by a juggernaut, or to check out on drugs, the English would not give the Mancunian polymath the sort of send-off the French gave Sartre...

...We can see the comédie convention of meting out apt punishments and contriving improbable conversions becoming quite strained in the 19th century, indeed as early as Shakespeare...

...Interwoven with the jokes (still quite funny) are recondite observations about Mussorgsky and marathon soliloquies on art, as if James had set out to write a pastiche of Point Counterpoint...

...They write designer paragraphs about designer drugs and would-be shocking sexual stunts, but the only new thing these literary Goths have to offer is novelty itself...

...Who got about in sedan chairs...

...Though not, strictly speaking, a great thinker, he does, like Saul Bellow, vitally incorporate Ideas into his novels...

...Even Oliver Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield is still widely and affectionately read...

...Since the publication of Samuel Richardson's Pamela in 1740 many thousands of novels have appeared, ranging from Humphry Clinker and Oliver Twist to Tombstones are for Quitters and We A11 Killed Grandma—a diverse lot in every respect...

...In a standard comedy the rejected heroine lingers at the end and is usually given some good lines to set the record straight...

...They have to wean their audience onto the hard stuff—Derrida, Robbe-Grillet, Barthes—by clothing it in rather undemanding prose...

...Perhaps in 20 or 30 years, James and his confreres will have succeeded—à la Kipling's "softly, softly, catchee monkey"—in making the purely intellectual novel a commercial proposition on these shores...

...Actually, the box is probably a benign influence, helping to sell dramatized novels (the "As seen on TV" stamp pushed sales of Brideshead Revisited past the million mark in 1984) and, through arts programs, generating an interest in new fiction...

...With a little mining of the Collected Works it was possible to uncover material that could be targeted at Britain in the 1980s...

...football was "an Orwellian entertainment...

...Suddenly everything became Orwellian: The government was Orwellian...

...Perspectives ASSAULTS ON THE BRITISH NOVEL BY GRUB SMITH London When Jean-Paul Sartre died of kidney failure in April 1980, preparations for a massive funeral were begun immediately...

...his contemporaries composed emotional farewells (some, embarrassingly, in verse...

...If one had to identify it with a geographical region of Great Britain the obvious choice would be the Home Counties, that southeastern corner of England so beloved of John Betjeman, full of chintz and tea shops and similarly endearing, albeit faintly ridiculous, things...

...Martin Amis—still an enfant terrible of London letters though nearing 40—has certainly contributed to the evolution of its comic subgenre...

...Naturally, the Orwell phase is long since past...

...Television is frequently cited as the main reason that young people (supposedly) do not read enough High Literature...

...Amis has chosen to gradually dismantle the accepted forms of fiction in England...

...A prime example was their predictable elevation of George Orwell in 1984 to the status of a cult figure "with a message for the youth of today...

...Grub Smith, a previous contributor lo the NL, has written for the Taller, Private Fye and the Literary Review...

...Evelyn Waugh, Saki and Nancy Mitford have never been out of paperback...

...Should this prove to be the shape of things to come as well, writers like Anthony Burgess will all too soon be turning in unremembered graves...

...James, very much the capo di tutti capi, made his name originally as a funny man, writing doggerel and hosting TV specials...

...But those that haveendured and remained popular have a remarkably consistent feel...

...Like Sussex and Berkshire, the welllooked-upon English novel is characterized by—one might almost say embalmed in—good taste and charm...

...Bradley and that whole school of humanistic criticism that says people behave logically...

...Because the style magazines make a lot of money, young writers have not been slow to mimic their formula for success...

...The festivities at the conclusion of Much Ado About Nothing are hurriedly assembled and, as Amis puts it, "frightful shits are allowed to marry nice girls, just because it's a comedy and everyone's getting married...

...newspapers in France and throughout the world published lengthy obituaries...

...His pale inferiors, children of the magazine generation, would like to demolish it in one clumsy blow...

...Is TV stultifying the readers of tomorrow...

...Of course, there is a progressive opposition to this cozy genre, a movement toward a more cerebral novel, written for the Hampstead intelligentsia rather than the haute bourgeoisie...

...on the last page of Amis' The Rachel Papers, Charles Highway says, of the corresponding character, "she left without telling me a thing or two about myself, without asking if I knew what my trouble was, without providing any sort of comeuppance at all...

...And not only are theirs the most hyped new novels here now, but they are disproportionately popular...

...Save for the general atmosphere of sorrow, the scene was indistinguishable from those associated with a royal wedding or the arrival of a Pope...

...Personally, I find it curious that television has been blamed for the parlous state of writing by and for the under-30 crowd when magazines seem no less culpable...

...Clive James' new book, The Remake, falls into this category and is easily recognized as such, not least because many of its characters are based onmembers of that particular literary mafia...

...English novelists have long reflected our national indifference to ideas and -isms, preferring on the whole to be intelligent rather than intellectual...

...As Sartre's cortège proceeded through the 14th arrondissement to the Montparnasse cemetery, it was followed by a crowd of 50,000 stretching along twoand-a-half miles of narrow Parisian streets...

...The current batch of "civilized writers" is every bit as successful as its forebears...

...and he inveighed against the bomb and the menace of totalitarianism...

...For the melancholy truth is that Englishmen en masse reserve their grief for dead TV celebrities, sportsmen and racehorses...

...Particularly meretricious is the crop of widely read "style magazines" in this country, with names like Blitz, Face and Fred...

...even compact discs were deemed "symbolic of retrogressive progress in an Orwellian way...

...the Falklands...

...Fortunately, a handful of writers, equally removed from the ideal of English charm, are taking steps toward agenuine restructuring of the novel...

...Whereas Clive James' namedropping is informed by a genuine, if uneasy, intelligence, the literary one-upmanship in these glossy rags is entirely bogus...

...If y ou read the Sun every day and keep your wits about you, you see that motivation has been exaggerated in the novel—you have something much woolier than motivation in real life...

...Their literary output remains worth following if only to judge the success of their experiment in gradual inoculation...

...Dixon had noticed that the Welches were wearing one another's hats, and his reaction delivers the comedy...

...he frowned on imperialism (cf...

...and various Left Bank intellectuals marked their mourning by wearing even more black clothing than is customary for bohemian intellectuals...

...Dickens and Hardy never will be...

...Penelope Lively's gentle love story, Moon Tiger, won the most recent Booker Prize, Britain's premier literary award, and other chroniclers of the middle classes, notably A.N...

...the latest figure to get the popular icon treatment is Karl Kraus...

...yet from the start he hankered after the status of resident intellectual...

...Even the appalling television broadcasts of the Booker Prize ceremony, which have roughly the same format as the Miss World contest, help to publicize and sell novels...

...Now it appears that James has found his true vocation as a namedropper: The Remake reads like a Who's Who, or really a Who's He?, of arcane European thinkers...

...Thus we have a groundswell of self-confessedly "cool" novelists whose works are apparently all the more pristine for not having been filtered through a brain...

...He too wrote when there were 3 million unemployed...

...Wilson and John Mortimer, have garnered plaudits for their delightful if undemanding stories—profiting from the fact that English readers are, like a Kiev jukebox, always about 30 years behind the times...

...As thecritic David Taylor pointed out, Orwell's appeal to them was two-fold: He was subversive, and he had relevance...

...queried a recent Sunday Times headline...

...Goldsmith, who wrote for men in wigs...

...Meanwhile, the novels of their intellectual superiors, which teased the mind, and not the fancy—works such as Cyril Connolly's The Rock Pool and Wyndham Lewis' Tan—lie moldering in university libraries and second-hand bookshops...

...Rock writers who could scarcely articulate their own thoughts indulged in heavyweight allusions to Keep the Aspidistra Flying...

...Yet not until Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim was this clumsy and unlifelike device thrown over: When, after getting his girl, the hero Dixon reencountered the execrable Welch family, he "drew in his breath to denounce them both, then blew it out again in a howl of laughter...

...The author comments: "The fact that (the character] Fielding Goodney lies without motivation is a great affront to A.C...

...The fact that Clive James dilutes his encyclopedic ramblings with stand-up wisecracks about breasts, bushes and dongers neatly illustrates the quandary facing our new breed of serious authors...

...England has no exact counterpart to the author of L'âge de raison at present —it is hard to produce a popular philosopher in a country where philosophy has never been popular—but Anthony Burgess probably fits the bill as our current "intellectual father ligure...

...In Martin Amis' most recent novel, Money, he lays waste to the myth of motivation—the notion that every action must always have a reason...

...Would that George were here today, the line went, so that he might lay into that Thatcher gang...

...When Robert Graves, another grand old man of letters, died a year ago, a national newspaper devoted only three lines, headed "Bye, Claudius," to his passing...

...One sincerely hopes that the best-selling author of End of '77 ("Everything she knew about punk rock you could have written on a gnat's cock and still had room for the complete works of Shakespeare"), among others, will not outlast his first few fireflash moments of celebrity...