BOOKS

Mr. West's Good Wine

By BRIAN INGLIS

ONE of the last places where it is possible to play the old literary game of guessing the author from the text is the New Yorker, where a headline alone is employed to attract the reader's attention, and the writer's name is not revealed until the end. Some contributors pro- claim their identity in their trade tricks, like S. I. Perelman; others, like Frank O'Connor, by their stage props; but there is one who announces him- self simply because his writing has 'a quality that, although it is hard to define, is immediately recog- nisable . . . it informs one that what is to follow is to be an exhibition of an artist's complete con- trol of content and technique.' The quotation comes from Anthony West's collection of New Yorker essays,* where it is applied to The End of the Affair; but it expresses, I imagine, the feeling which many a New Yorker reader has about Mr. West's own good wine.

Mr. West's critical objective, he explains in an introduction, is to rip away the honeysuckle; to reveal books and authors as they were, or are— not as fashion, piety or prejudice has disguised them. To do this, it is essential to study the author's character:

The extent to which a writer will evade the realities of his relationships, and fudge and dodge facts in presenting himself to the world, gives one a good measure of his integrity. The falsification he indulges in while fabricating the persona he presents for public consumption generally show up in his books as falsities; and if one is aware of the deliberate or compulsive distortions that shape his life one is better equipped to judge by how much his work is a contribution to knowledge, and by how much it is a simple reflection of his psychological necessities. Biographical criticism is often de- structive of a pose, and of values fabricated to sustain it; but it is, in my view, a soundly creative technique when it comes to literary assessments.

I had not realised, reading these criticisms singly as they appeared in the New Yorker, how undeserved is the label 'destructive' so often applied to his criticisms, how preoccupied he is with essentially constructive designs. He works to a rule of living—and, by extension, of writing —which might be called positivist liberalism; by its standards he measures everything which conies before him. 'Positivist' in the sense that it rejects the Voltairean concept of absolute free- dom to differ; seeing the hideous mess which liberals got into—for example, through allow- ing themselves to be used as 'fronts' for Com- munist purposes—he insists that they should abandon old ideas of tolerance and, instead, begin to apply firm distinctions between worthy and unworthy. Positivist, too, in that it also rejects Orwellian pessimism—rejects it, in Principles and Persuasions, with what is perhaps the most damning essay in the book, where Orwell's fan- tasies are grimly related to his failure to grow up—his inability to realise that the world is not an extension of his repellent preparatory school.

From this point Mr. West takes his departure; he comes back to it again and again, dealing with writers who fail to meet his standards. Mauriac, for one : 'it is hard to see how writing, even though rich and elaborate, that is in favour of negation and sterility and that has, in the long run, nothing more to offer than a cry of protest against the nature of man's physical being, can have any real value.' And Zola; the critics who objected to his preoccupation with sex and sewage, Mr. West argues, may not have been hypocrites; 'it may be that their reaction was a healthy one and that what they disliked so much was not his honesty but a fundamental flaw in his writing.'

The operative word is healthy; a sick writer, Mr. West is constantly implying, is ultimately a bad, a dangerous, writer, because he drags us down with him. The neurotic pessimism of an Orwell or a Mauriac cannot be justified on the grounds that it is a reflection of our time; we may have Buchenwald and Hiroshima on our con- science, but we have only to read The Reason Why, or Son of Oscar Wilde, to realise how

• PRINCIPLES AND PERSUASIONS. (Eyre and Spottis- woode, 21s.) astonishingly society has changed for the better. We are less indifferent, less cruel; more under- standing, and more adult. We are growing up; always an erratic process, subject to setbacks, but measurable by comparison with what our ances- tors did and thought. It is the test of a writer, Mr. West feels, how far he understands and assists this progress.

I hope I have not oversimplified Mr. West's attitude. Certainly I do not want to suggest that he indulges in what the Irish call `sunburstry.' If he did, it would surely have revealed itself In the essays on the writers or books of which he approves. No great skill is needed to cut card- board literary figures like Hugh Walpole down to size: it is much more difficult to assess, say, the in- fluence of Graham Greene. Mr. West does not fudge around with excuses; he comes out with the pronouncement that The End of the Affair is 'undeniably a major work of art'; and the skill with which he justifies this judgment reveals a shrewd understanding of a writer who has been too often praised for the wrong reasons. There Is a good appreciative study, too, of Denis Johnston, a talent much neglected, notably by Denis John- ston.

Reading these essays together, though, it is pos- sible to see a defect which was not apparent reading them singly when they first appeared : priggishness. This is most evident in the onslaught which begins, characteristically : Edwin O'Connor's The Last Hurrah arrived festooned with pre-publication laurels. It was the Book of the Month Club selection, it won the accolade of the Reader's Digest, and it was the Atlantic prize novel of 1955. In view of all this, one is tempted to raise one's hat silently to the cortege and let it pass on its way to oblivion with the best possible grace.

—and ends, also characteristically, after Mr. West has resisted this temptation at some length : Mr. O'Connor's sentimental presentation of that barbaric figure [Skeffington, the Boston Irish political boss] as a fairy godmother of widows and orphans is more than hard to take. It persuasively pretends that mean vices are virtues, and it is that rare thing, a genuinely subversive book.

But that is precisely what it does not do; and is not. Mr. O'Connor never for a moment con- fused vices with virtues; all that he tried to show in The Last Hurrah was that they often are confused, in the same man, so that an unscrupu- lous and cruel politician may be at the same time a delightful and kindly man. The book is subversive only of Mr. West's belief in blacks and whites; not the same blacks and whites, to be sure, that our ancestors believed in, but clear- cut in a way they never are in private or in public life. The Last Hurrah was, admittedly, an in- different novel—with its selfconsciously con- trived method of narration and its frequent near- sentimentality—but not for Mr. West's reasons.

Mr. West is too often distracted in this way by his devotion to his own good standards. Even his handling of Tire End of the Affair is a little

Poled by the feeling that the reason he liked It is chiefly because it revealed (prematurely; as It turns out) that 'the negative aspects' of Graham Greene's beliefs `have gone into the discard.' The trouble with Mr. West is that he is what Theodor Iteik has described as a `moral climber'; he is always nagging at writers to get them to live beyond their moral means. But all writers worth the name do what they have to do; the absurdity of trying to convert them all to positivist liberal, Ism can be judged by applying it, as a standard of criticism, to Proust, or Joyce, or Swift. Mr. West actually quotes with approval a French critic who said of Swift that `he carries the rational criticism of values to a point where it menaces and impairs the very reasons for living' verdict which, though true, is really irrelevant, 45 Mr. West's own biographical approach should help him to understand. As soon as Swift's nature ----his mania, his egotism, his vanity, his cruel rage—and the reasons for it are understood, he can be read without the risk (if any really exists) Of moral contamination.

The only other criticism of Principles and persuasions is that on balance the targets are a little too easy. Mr. West has a reasonable defence against this charge : 'the mind bloats on and softens on a diet of pap, and there is good reason for reminding the general reader from time to time that pap is pap, and not good red meat.' Rut readers who have suffered from pap-prone- ness, and are rescued from it by reading these essays, will not find much guidance from them about where the red meat is in the world's literary larder. Certainly they will benefit (return- ing to his earlier simile) from his revelation of the real Shaw, or the real Dickens, after the honeysuckle has been cut down; but rather too often—notably when Ivy is cut down—nothing whatsoever remains. Entertaining and often salutary though it is to watch the sickle at work, I wish Mr. West would more' often apply his talents as he did in his essay on Greene.