BOOKS
Enright's Green Insect
DAN JACOBSON
BY
CLEARLY, one should not read a dozen 'little' magazines* one after another: it isn't fair on the magazines and it isn't fair on oneself. After a while, one begins to be depressed by the very things about the magazines which one should find heartening: the earnestness and energy which have gone into their production, the hopes that have been invested in them, the sacrifice of time and money which each of them represents. Behind all little' magazines there is a cry of urgency and aspiration—a cry which sounds most loudly, indeed, in the worst of them—and it is this sound which one begins to attend to, rather than to anything printed styl- ishly or untidily on the page. What is the aspira- tion? Ostensibly the magazines are out to 'help' literature, or the craft of letters: there are very few of them which are published purely for the sake of fashion or pride or personal advance- ment. Nevertheless, one cannot but suspect, as one reads on and on, that certain editors and contributors to these magazines stand to gain far more from literature than they will ever bring to It. for it isn't the craft of letters that they are really anxious to assist or perpetuate, but some- thing vaguer and more comfortable: the literary life, perhaps, or the world of letters, the palace of art or even just the Beat Generation.
The Evergreen Review is a curiously suspect Combination of slick typography and 'extreme' subject-matter (drugs, lunacy, Beats, drugs again); The Critical Quarterly combines an air of formidable academic severity with the softest of hearts; and The Review of English Literature does not even pretend to be severe. X speaks for Soho and The Transatlantic Review for Greenwich Village, one guesses, though it has an address in South Kensington as well as one in New York; New Campus Writing goes back and forth across the American continent, and right through the alphabet, beginning at Antioch College and ending at Yale. These maga- zines are all corpulent and prosperous compared with such skinny waifs as Stand from Leeds, or the cyclostyled Audit, whose address is given as the University of Buffalo, Buffalo NY; there is none of them at which it isn't possible to poke fun : there is also none which does not publish at least one item of genuine interest and value. And that, all criticisms made, is a great deal more than could ever be said about a random selec- tion of commercial magazines.
In one way or another, implicitly or sometimes
* EVERGREEN REVIEW, VOI. 4, No. 11. (Calder, 5s.) THE CRITICAL QUARTERLY, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Univer- sity. Hull, 3s.) A REVIEW OF ENGLISH LITERATURE, VOI. 1, No. 2. (Longmans, 4s.) 'X' REVIEW No. 2. (Barrie and Rockliff, 6s.) THE TRANSATLANTIC REVIEW, No. 3: Spring. (Curwen Press, 6s.) NEW CAMPUS WRITING No. 3. (Calder, 13S.) STAND. (University of Leeds/Blond, 2s.)
AUDIT, Vol. 1. No. 2.
THE NOBLE SAVAGE. Edited by Saul Bellow. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, Its. 6d.) SIDEWALK. (2s.) THE TAMARACK REVIEW. (7s. 6d.) explicitly, the magazines address themselves to the question of the relationship between the writer and his society and the only agreement to be found among them is on the demand that the writer should, at least in his work and prefer- ably in his life as well, assume some kind of exemplary role toward and within his society. The demand is fair enough and traditional enough. What is disappointing is that the real pressure of politics, religion, war, sex, hunger, traffic problems—the real pressures of society, in other words—are felt so faintly within the pages of the magazines. What is surprising, more- over, is the extent to which this faintness seems almost to be a matter of principle: the extent to which the role of the writer is defined almost exhaustively in terms of withdrawal, negation, and denial; and the value of his work is seen in its isolation from society.
Both these attitudes are most interestingly illustrated by almost every contribution to The Evergreen Review, and by a long contribution by George Barker to X. The Evergreen Review seems to argue that our society is so hideous that no spontaneity or creativity is possible unless one has altogether turned one's back on it, and retired into a private world of moment-to- moment 'kicks'; Mr. Barker, on the other hand, insists that the life of art is one of sacrifice, and that if writers are to take their writing seriously they must offer up the world and all the world's pleasures for it. These two arguments may at first sight seem to be contradictory, placing as they do such apparently different values on the oppor- tunities for gratification which our society pro- vides, but in fact they essentially support each other. Both arguments lead to a sharp and (I believe) extremely undesirable cleavage between the life of art and the life of . . . what? The life of life, one supposes. The world is divided easily and conveniently into artists and philis- tines. Beats and Squares, poets and businessmen: each side staring at the other uncomprehendingly, yet each side' needing the other to feed its fantasies.
It has been pointed out before that this must lead only to bad art and worse audiences. What has not, I think, been exposed sufficiently is the bullying insistence which can lie at the heart of this view of literature, for all the airs of sensi- bility and suffering, of meekness and abnegation, with which it is usually presented. The Evergreen Review type of approach to the reader is nothing but an attempt to bully him into the feeling that he (square! slob! philistine!) is insensitive to the hideousness of the society which causes the writer (esthete! Beatnik! poet!) so much pain. And for all the humour with which Mr. Barker writes, there is something of the same insistence in his argument too : there is a suggestion that his poet's attachment to literature makes everyone else's look pale and thin and fickle. Others write for reasons which, whatever they may be at the best, they know to be ignominious at their worst: Mr. Barker's poet writes at the cost of his life. The only thing one can do is to refuse to be bullied. To the argument from hideousness one's reply is that our society may well be ugly, loveless, and suicidal, but it is the only one we have; and that if its ugliness and lovelessness and self-destructiveness really affect us, then we just have to try to make it better, in whatever ways we can, where we are. And as for the sacrifice which Mr. Barker demands of the poet, it seems to me that what he is saying about the poet applies to everyone: life demands unending and bitter sacrifice from the doctor and the house- wife and the teacher and the dustman, too. Isn't it rather arrogant to suppose that only the poet has to deny himself and forgo his own deep gratifications for the sake of his work? 'Life is nothing if not sacrificial said Henry James, who himself wrote some of his finest stories on the theme of the artist's loss: my suggestion is that these stories are as fine as they are precisely be- cause the artist in them becomes the figure for everyman. So far, from sacrifice isolating the artist from the people around him and their life, as Mr. Barker implies, it merely shows again that it is one life we all live.
I hope that all the above can be said without i` being supposed that 1 am arguing that the poet must be a man who works eight hours a day in International Business Machines. ('I decline to believe,' writes Mr. Barker, 'that a poet is by definition a man who devotes eight hours a day to the affairs of International Business Machines, and then, in the evening, sits down to compose some verses on finding a green insect trapped in his typewriter.') All I am saying is that the poet might be a business executive; he might be a Professor of English (like D. J. Enright, who actually wrote that poem about the small green insect . . . etc.); he might be nothing but a poet. But whatever he is and wherever he works he will suffer and enjoy what other people have suffered and enjoyed, and in the same way; he will write
in the words that the others use to describe their own experiences too. The work of the poet is of a very different kind from that of the doctor and the dustman; but he is not, therefore, a different kind of man.
And, as an illustration to the argument, comes The Noble Savage, the best of the magazines under review: an assured, elegant, and radical production from the United States, whose human interests are a great deal wider, and whose literary quality is, as a direct result, a great deal higher than any of the other magazines so far mentioned. Not everything in The Noble Savage is first-rate, there is some dead wood in it, but what a pleasure, after the constrictions and anxieties of the other magazines, to read about the Spanish Civil War and the Ingemar Johansson- Floyd Patterson prize fight; to read a wildly funny story about Jews and Puritan New Englanders in California, and a most unfunny story about a pale Negro boy who is regularly 'resurrected' at revivalist meetings, and who grows up to be an anti-Negro politician. (This story I do not altogether understand, or like; but it is impossible, not to be disturbed by it.) Two last titles. Sidewalk, a new and unpromis- ing Scottish quarterly, signals that Edinburgh, too, of all places, has just surrendered to the Beats. The Tamarack Review comes from Canada, but the particular issue to hand (Winter, 1960) is devoted entirely to the writing of the West Indies—which, to judge from the selection, is almost as much about Europe as it is about the Caribbean. George Lamming, John Hearne and Samuel Selvon all deal lovingly or angrily with the problem of the writer's exile, fearing the isolation which others seem to seek.
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