Unknown Admirers
BY KINGSLEY AMIS An November the Times Literary Supple- Lament supplemented itself in turn with a fat wad of articles on what it called the American imagination. These have now been turned into a book,* to the gratified surprise, it seems, of the then editor, Mr. Alan Pryce-Jones, who 'had not anticipated' this sudden development. The volume is, at the very least, a handy work of reference, though it might have been handier still if it had had an index, and it would have been easier to find one's way about in if the articles had been signed, or numbered, or given less fanci- ful titles : we can tell where we are with `The Nature of American Ballet,' but it is less immediately apparent that `A Vocal Group' cele- brates American-Jewish writing and not, say, the Annie Ross-Dave Lambert-Jon Hendricks series of recordings.
The handiness, however, remains. If the accounts of American fiction are not pitched in the key that sends one rushing down to the book- shop to catch up with things, they do give a balanced survey of the work being done and how it is regarded in its country of origin, and there is a very acute appraisal of the role played by society in the American and British novel respec- tively. The analysis of modern American poetry, too, seems to me a model of concision and justice.
I only wish the writer of the article on American prosperity had had more space to develop his notion that the United States, as the richest society ever, may prove the breeding-ground of a creative disillusionment, a quite new kind of asceticism—a prospect summed up in the closing lines of Herbert's `The Pulley,' coincidentally quoted in a different connection a few pages later :
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, then weariness May toss him to my breast.
No work of criticism that sets speculation going in this way can be counted altogether a failure, and doubtless there are similar talking- points in the sections on architecture, painting, art connoisseurship and others that I cannot judge. But there is at least one major sin of omission. Jazz is a unique art-form in several ways, the most relevant of which in this situation is that Americans invented it, and .yet it receives no more than a couple of odd paragraphs here, while the American musical is painstakingly and most respectfully anatomised, `0. what a beauti- ful morning' (which contains in its first phrase the most nauseating diminished seventh in the whole of popular music) being singled out for special commendation. Science fiction, again, is characteristically American, affording—by way of what is mainly, admitted, but not wholly a mass of rubbish—some peculiarly revealing glimpses of the American imagination. There is nothing about it here, which is surprising, for the TLS, while ever mindful of Pope's advice not to be the first by whom the new are tried, might have been expected to have its ear close enough to the ground to catch some reverberation of the minor stir science fiction is beginning to make in cultural diagnostics.
Whatever their qualifications for writing about America, some of the nameless team could do with a refresher course about England. A ponder- ous examination of the university set-up in the United States, notable for a good deal of quiet
• THE AMERICAN IMAGINATION. (Cassell, 25s.) self-congratulation on the independence and amenity enjoyed by the Oxford /Cambridge don, observes that over there most of the final power lies in the hands of lay trustees, but not that this is also the pattern over here in the Redbrick institutions attended by the vast majority. Similarly, scepticism about the value of much American scholarly research, the sort aimed at securing a doctorate or tenure or promotion, is unaccompanied by adequate recognition of the speed with which this kind of waste is invading our own academic market-place. On the whole, however, the attitude to the American educa- tional system shown here is one of genial (and, when we reflect that that system is a preview of what we shall soon have, appalling) optimism : only in the article on Hollywood, seemingly from the pen of some Sight and Sound superannuee, does any real animus, any non-pro-Americanism, come to the surface. (By a splendid trope, inci- dentally, producers are ridiculed for "`baaing" —a word capable of an infinite elasticity—their films on this play or that novel.') Geniality, indeed, is the keynote of this sym- posium. `That American literature is a great literature'—and that American music is a great music, American advertising a great advertising =needs no arguing now,' they all keep saying in a style midway between the drowsy polish of the Times itself and the devoted public-relations warmth, here adapted for a somewhat different end, of the British Council pamphlet. The elegant variation ('the late junior Senator from Wis- consin' is only one of a dozen crossword-clue efforts) turns out not to be, after all, the last refuge of provincial sporting journalists. And on the whole there is too little illustration and anec- dote, too much of that urge to comprehend every- thing in a generalisation which afflicts most writ- ing about America, too much playing for safety —the piece on the drama picks its way with parodic circumspection, falling flat on its face only in its comparison of Arthur Miller with Christopher Fry. But there can be no doubt of the general honest thought and common good to all.
So, at least, almost any British reader would conclude. Mr. Leslie Fiedler, however, comment- ing on the stipplement to the Supplement in a recent Encounter article, seems to think that he has been made the victim of a conspiracy, or at least left out of one, and that what is really being offered here is a fresh piece of Old World condescension, the more insidious for the sugared endearments that overflow it. Without going so far as to lament the fact that `no significant younger British writer has yet been as deeply influenced by an American as, say, Camus by Hemingway,' one must agree that Mr. Fiedler's diagnosis, though I think it in this case mistaken, is wholly understandable, and that the British will have to work hard to undo their puerile Ameri- canophobia, to purge the contempt for American culture with which they have been trying for so long to distract attention from their own inert barbarities. I give The American Imagination a rather dubious and qualified pat on the shoulder for taking half a step in this necessary direction. Before long, of course, the pace will have grown to a positive gallop : it is not merely chic, as Mr. Fiedler has noted, to be non-anti-American, it is, or will be tomorrow, chic as all hell to be as pro- American, in the cultural sphere at any rate, as he or anyone can stand. A reading of the common-room tea-leaves suggests to me that in five years there will be departments of American , literature in every university in Great Britain, with in some cases Americans actually teaching in them—if they can be induced to come.
My final point arises out of a retort to Mr. Fiedler in a later number of Encounter, the issue being American television and the 'egghead fal• lacy' associated with critiques of it, the tendency, that is to say, for commentators on the popular arts not to approach them as things in that' selves, but only as material for cultural diagnosis. That argument is well followed up by the re' torter, who is, as he signs himself, `The Writer of the TLS Article,' adding his address, in a fit of self-betrayal, as 'USA.' For my money, Mr. Fiedler is on the wrong side of the debate hcre too, but why should he have to contend with this faceless phantom? Why should the TLS still pur- sue an outmoded anonymity which can only have bad results, impressing the gullible (on both sides of the Atlantic) with a factitious impartiality, providing shelter for self-interest and rancour, propping up the remains of cultural establish- mentarianism, issuing now in the absurdity of an unsigned book of essays? At the end of his letter `the writer of the article,' incensed by some fancied slight from Mr. Fiedler, declares himself 'forever his enemy.' My oath! I am sure Mr. Fiedler can look after himself, but has he not a right to know who this 'enemy' is? What sort of farce are we all playing, for heaven's sake?
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