27 AUGUST 1965, Page 18

East-West Al

Under Pressure. The Writer in Society: Eastern Europe and the U.S.A. By A. Alvarez.

THE god of the literary interview is Janus. For the interviewer must have two tongues and two minds. One of his faces asks questions designed to lull or stimulate the subject into self-analysis or self-revelation; this face plays the part of the interested friend, who wants to know exactly who the subject is and what is bothering him. But the second face of the interviewer hides an incom- - plete script, already patterned according to his preconceptions or prejudices; this face seeks to trap the subject by netted questions into giving evidence to support the social theories of the interviewer.

Mr. Alvarez uses both faces in his interviews with chosen writers and critics of Eastern Europe and the US. His object is to get a coherent Third Programme script out of the interviews; he wants to find out how writers react to the pressures of their society upon them; his preconception is that Marx dominates the Eastern world and Freud the Western one; yet he has enough of an intelli- gent sympathy with his talking documentation to allow his victims to appear as inconsistent liTimans as well as supporting evidence. The virtue of the radio scripts is that they are coherent without being rigid; Mr. Alvarez does not edit &qualifications out of his spoken material. The hesitation of some of his witnesses persuades the reader that Mr. Alvarez is coaxing his literary lions to stand on their decorated pedestals in a formal pattern rather than cracking his whip to make them jump through hoops by Pavlovian reflex.

The insights into the society of Eastern Europe of the first part of Under Pressure are admirable for their brevity. A brilliant body of commen- tators pick out the differences in their own coun- tries and cities; the disgruntled and excitable Wi-rsaw is set apart from baroque Prague, elegant Buda is divided by more than the Danube from business Pest, Yugoslavia is described as locality in search of nationality. The analyses are too simple, perhaps, but they are remarkable for their combination of interest and conciseness.

Yet, on the US, Mr. Alvarez is Jess successful, because he thinks Freud is the touchstone of the vt7riter's role in iociety. By talking exclusively to the urban intellectual and looking at the steel Sild concrete skein of communications which binds together America, he thinks that the US is the 'only country in the world which is, for better and for worse, squarely, uncompromisingly in the tientieth century.. . . devoted, with startling single-mindedness, to making life easy.' He even qiiotes with approval a remark about America's invisible poor, that the nation 'has the best- dressed poverty the world has ever known.'

Of course, any traveller in the American back country would find this to be untrue. The Vic- torianism of American society outside urban areas is more stifling and censorious than that of England; the barefooted white women in shifts picking over the debris at the auction of the effects of a Negro floor-sweeper provided me with the worst-dressed poverty I have ever seen ()inside certain areas of Southern Europe--and this was in prosperous Iowa, not in the South. Even superficially, Appalachia looks much more run-down than Bosnia. Mr. Alvarez should have interviewed some tucked-away rural or small- town writers before he generalised so readily on American modernity. The highways and subur- ban facade of America may shriek of the twen- tieth century; but the very mobility of that restless society makes it cling on to various Victorian taboos in a way that would seem square in Mill Hill. Freud is important in the US because he buttresses Victorian prejudices, not because he liberates men from them. If the Americans had really wanted to seek after the liberty of the indi- vidual, they would have chosen Havelock Ellis as their guru, not Freud.

Yet, even in America, Mr. Alvarez is such a good collector of considered trifles that he is always interesting in his selection of the remarks of others. Under Pressure, deliberately restricted to the limitations of the printed radio programme with its over-simplification and false drama (for which Mr. Alvarez apologises), is like the excellent sketch for an excellent, but unwritten, book. To paraphrase Marx, it is not enough to explain the changes needed to write a great book; the thing is to make those changes.

If Mr. Alvarez succeeds in splicing together his interviews to make absorbing radio programmes, Mr. Newquist opts out of making sense alto- gether. He selects sixty-three writers of the Eng- lish language, the quality of whose work ranges from alpha to omega minus, and sets down his

interviews with them in alphabetical order— an order which has nothing to do with their merit. What governed his choice of the writers in ques- tion, other than their availability to see him, re- mains a mystery. If there is anything in common between Doris Lessing and Bennett Cerf, or Pamela Hansford Johnson and Sterling Hayden, I'd love to know it; but Mr. Newquist doesn't provide the answer. He just records. Here it is, he says, a jumble interview; pick your own quotable quotes.

Some interesting things are said by the few good authors interviewed; but the overall impres- sion left by the book is of the curious commit- ment to their own importance felt by second-rate writers. There seems to be art inverse sense of merit in the craft; the better a writer is, the more despairingly he views his, own achievement. I have found that the leaders of their profession, such as William Golding in English fiction and Richard Hofstadter in American history, are worried about what they produce and wonder why they didn't do it better or differently. Not so the hacks of the intelligentsia, who seem to find that their sales prove their worth. The certainty that genius loses on the swings, the mediocre sure pick up