Sixty Scrutinised Years
The Modern Age. Edited by Boris Ford. (Penguin, 7s. 6d.)
LIKE several of its predecessors, this, the seventh and last volume of The Pelican Guide to English Literature, has rather the air of a ghostly con- tinuation of Scrutiny. If the Master himself is absent, his voice is distinctly audible, and there is a certain predictability about the list of topics discussed: L. H. Myers gets a whole essay, T. F. Powys half an essay (comparing him favourably with Dylan Thomas), while the account of D. H. Lawrence is a respectful manifestation of unease at Dr. Leavis's assessment of Women in Love. But it would be unfair to suggest that this bulky volume is lacking in scope or catholicity of sub- ject; most of the writers of this century are mentioned somewhere in it, even though one might quarrel with the apportioning of emphasis. As an introduction, John Holloway contributes a wide-ranging but discriminating survey of the literary scene during the first six decades of this century, which does an almost impossible job very skilfully.
The best essay on a single author is certainly Arnold Kettle's on Joyce, agreeably free from the Marxist bias which so often encumbers this critic's work. He conveys admirably the pleasure he so evidently gets from reading Joyce, Finnegans Wake included; a pleasure perhaps tinged with guilt, since the Central Writers' Committee surely wouldn't approve. Donald Davie, too, is excel- lent in his analysis of Pound's Mauberley, where he discusses Pound's attitude to England during the years 1908-20 and his subsequent rejection of it. Charles Tomlinson, in a good if severe essay on 'Poetry Today,' also deals with Pound, though his method of going through the Cantos and picking out the good bits—i.e., the four-star lyrical passages—and leaving all the gristly eco- nomics and history is likely to infuriate ortho- dox Poundians. Tomlinson claims that the present insular reaction against the attempt of Pound, Eliot and Yeats 'to put English poetry back into the mainstream of European culture' is nothing short of a disaster (one would like to see Mr. Tomlinson debating this point with Mr. Graham Hough). He pays tribute to unfashion- able poets such as Hugh MacDiarmid and Austin Clarke, and dismisses the Movement out of hand.
It is unfortunate that Mr. Tomlinson, an acute critic of other writers' language, should conclude his essay with a vague verbal gesture: 'what we await is the poet whose individuality is strong enough to stamp itself on the processes of our living, and by the keenness of whose insight those processes may be changed.' This piece of hollow rhetoric invites the attention of a linguistic analyst; in so far as it means anything its messianic flavour presumably reflects the perennial attempt to make the study of literature into a substitute religion, which is such a curse in English studies.
A similar attitude permeates several of the other, less interesting contributors, who fre- quently employ the great to beat down the good. They indulge in a good deal of boringly mechani- cal practical criticism, pecking about like hens on the surface of a poem or prose passage, seek- ing for traces of 'immaturity,' lack of control,' 'emotional self-indulgence' or—infinitely rarer— 'genuine moral seriousness.' These essays make it clear that 'moral' is becoming steadily less meaningful as a critical term, and that a thorough examination of the theoretical founda-
tions of much modern criticism is long overdue.
found some of the more marginal essays much more rewarding, notably E. W. F. Tomlin's on The Prose of Thought' and P. N. Furbank's in- formative piece on 'The Twentieth-Century Best-Seller.'
I must conclude by referring, as succinctly as I can, to the errors, resulting from ignorance or careless proof-reading, with which this book is riddled. A few are merely grotesque, such as Gilbert Phelps's reference to 'Orwell's 1948 (1950)' —1984 was in fact published in 1949—but others are less obvious and therefore more insidious: unfortunately some of the best contributors are most at fault. Thus, John Holloway gives wrong publication dates for Between the Acts, A Pas- sage to India, The Revenge for Love, The New Machiavelli, Principles of Literary Criticism and A Survey of Modernist Poetry, as well as being muddled about names (Professor Wilson Knight's first initial is G., not J., and The Sym- bolist Movement in Literature was by Arthur William Symons, not 'A. J. Symons'). Hollo- way also describes Pound as 'editor of The Egoist and The Little Review, during the years of the Great War.' He wasn't; he was merely foreign editor of The Little Review. On the first page of Arnold Kettle's essay on Joyce there are two wrong dates.
But things are, if anything, worse in the reference section at the end of the book. In some cases a reasonably complete list of an author's books is given, in others only those currently in print, while in others again the prin- ciple of selection is wholly obscure. With a few authors—notably Beckett—no list of works is given. And there are mistakes everywhere. The entry for Pound repeats the error about The Little Review and falsely adds that he was tried for treason. Some entries are incredibly arbi- trary: the list of Wyndham Lewis's books omits two of his best novels, The Revenge for Love and Self Condemned, but includes the distinctly inferior The Red Priest; why?
Perhaps the grossest mixture of error and ar- bitrariness occurs in the entry for Ford Madox Ford. This lists the Tietjens novels more or less correctly, though it calls the final one The Last Post instead of Last Post. It also tries to indicate that Ford was a poet, but does this by merely giving the title of one of the several books of verse he published before 1914 (with the date wrong: 1897 for 1900), making no mention of the Collected Poems of 1914 and 1936. Ford is said to have served in 'a Welsh Regiment'; this should be 'the Welch Regiment.' Finally, the entry concludes by listing a work called Memories and Criticisms, which simply doesn't exist (though I suppose it could refer to the book called Mightier than the Sword in England, and Portraits from Life in America, which is sub- titled 'memories and criticisms'). All this in one short entry.
Not all the reference section is quite on this plane, but it remains an unimaginably slovenly compilation and altogether unreliable. Penguin Books and Professor Boris Ford have little cause to feel proud of this volume. The Downing circles from which it emanates are notorious for their scorn of 'mere' scholarship; nevertheless, accuracy, too, is a moral quality, or so I should be prepared to argue.
BERNARD BEROONZI
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