Playing to the gallery
Peter Ackroyd The Auden Generation Samuel Hynes (Bodley Head £6.50)
There are two distinct versions of the 'thirties. There is the orthodox view of it as part of the ongoing history of English taste, with poems and novels which have led naturally to the great literary achievements of the Arts Council. Many of the shining knights of the 'thirties, after all, live on—mostly in villas in Southern France, but they do live and sometimes add lustre to the literary journals. The other version is a little more convincing —it is, quite simply, that English culture in general, and English poetry in particular, started to go badly wrong in the 'thirties, and that they have never recovered. Mr Hynes's concise and elegant study of that decade treats these matters only indirectly, but he does in passing suggest a third version of the period under review: he discusses the writers of the 'thirties (and particularly those middle-class poets who were grouped around that doyen of the middle class, W. H. Auden) in the context of technical and formal innovation. Hynes's subject is 'specifically the growth of literary forms' and, Mr Hynes suggests, it was in that sense that Auden and his university friends were making it new. They were a very selfconscious generation with, as Auden put it, 'an altering speech for altering things'. All poets with an eye to the main chance say such things, but there was something in the air of the period which made it seem more than usually appropriate. Even T. S. Eliot was impressed by all the publicity, and he dismissed the great modernist works of the 'twenties (including his own) as 'the intellectual and artistic output of the previous seven years had been rather the last efforts of an old world than the struggles of a new'.
It must have been a very brave, or very harsh, new world to have impressed such an ironist. And Eliot would no doubt have appreciated the fact that this dawning world should have had, in retrospect, such timid and traditional chroniclers. This is Mr Hynes's story, and he tells it very well. From his account, the 'thirties are part of some other and distant culture; the selfimages of the age—mountain climbing, the Truly Strong Man, the quest, History—are all but incomprehensible now. It was a time when poetry was taken seriously. It was a time when young writers were not wholly at the mercy of publishing economics (there was no end of arcane and theoretical titles). And since literary matters were not in those days conducted at the level of TV book programmes and Guardian profiles, there was a real and consistent questioning of civilised values—What is the role of poetry? What is the significance of documentary techniques ? What does 'realism' really mean ? Questions which nobody would now understand or, if they did, would care to answer. So the 'thirties was a period of intense activity, and as a consequence most of the written work has that winning combination of vitality and clumsiness. But were Auden and his gang really making it new, as they insisted they were? And, if so, why did their poetry age so rapidly into the magazine verse of the 'forties and 'fifties ?
Mr Hynes does not address himself directly to such questions, but in this exhaustive survey he implies the answers. That generaion grew up in the shadow of great events.
Such was the preoccupation of writers like Auden, Spender and Day Lewis with public causes that they felt they could safely lay aside the modernist works of Pound, Eliot and Joyce in order to confront politics head-on, to make public and polemical statements. But they did this from a position of relative naïveté and, it must be said, relative security—so they were at the mercy of political theories, of which there was no lack, and wholly in the grip of the peculiar, myth-making habits of young poets. Mr Hynes is an acute judge of such matters and describes precisely the wayward progress of these innocents at home; but he should not take so much at face value. He documents Auden's political beliefs (or the lack of them) and his poetic development (or the absence of it), but it must also be remembered that Auden was a very sharp operator indeed. He found a publisher and he found an eager audience by playing to the gallery; he never ceased to do so, and this is part of the legacy of the 'thirties. Given this combination of myth-making and fraudulence,
Spectator 19 June 1976 much of the verse of the 'thirties now seeMs dull ; like all other matters, politics canNt be handled directly in poetry without be' coming rhetorical or meretricious. But, since it was a matter of rhetoric, the political mood did not last long; it did riot even survive the period which Mr Hynes covers in his book. The main transition, as he describes it, is one from left-wing poletilie and political activity to the middle-class de' lights of what had really always been a solid , and comfortable poetry: 'The men who had been sentimental Marxists in their Ytnith were in their thirties, were reviewing for the Daily Telegraph and writing books on corn' mission.' So, having entertained a class audience with their rhetoric, biel could now begin to live comfortably off the proceeds. Or, as Spender put it more diPlematically, 'poetry is not the same as actioti and a poem is not the same as .a political thesis'. But this magnanimous gesture on the part of the 'thirties poets, this solentu return to their true calling, is not quite the formative act of an Eliot or a Joyce. It rather a return to an easy and empty art. Having failed to qualify politically, theY de* cided to 'make do' artistically. Mr Hynes does not make any final judg. ments of this kind, but he does prepare the way for them when he documents the er),,,,".. ventional origins of that brave new 11°6'4 of the 'thirties: 'So one might say that t110'e of the contributors to New Signatures wer already Hogarth "house pets". .. . Nothing, could have been more conventional or lese' revolutionary than the way in which tilers,. young reputations were launched'. And for all those protestations about an •altecing speech', the actual poetry remains cony°. tional and readily accessible. The achievdel ments of Eliot and Pound were ignoreot European modernist movements were n understood; the language was never devet; oped beyond a dull; referential level will:ell is still the standard for established Engldisst poetry. The 'thirties poets, in other wbr.,,I represented a return to English rp ovinciP life. They were parlour poets, and theY e74; ploited what seemed at the time to bee. particularly modern form of parloUr tone. As Hynes puts it, 'New poets a renascence when a public wants and tlee7s a renascence, and Spender and his frienure were celebrated almost before they published because they seemed to offer responses to new problems'. And at lek3sitc one might add, there was then a pU which actually cared about such things.n"e problem with the 'thirties is now simPlY dye of senility: our new literary giants ha_f never left that parlour. The publishers books of verse and the editors of literar'..t magazines, who were for the mostPa_ie weaned on that notion of English taste, aelr still printing imitations of the ulari which Auden and Spender introduced. 0L70 now, forty provincial years later, there is 11n public left to care. Mr Hynes has provide, "; precise and thoughtful book, but the re,, history of English taste has yet written.
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