SAUCE FOR THE GANDER
I BELIEVE it is nowadays generally agreed that literary excellence, unlike that of some other arts, is critically inseparable from the material used in its composition and must therefore be examined, not only from the point of view of style and method, but from that of the ideas embodied by them. The literary bibelot is as nearly as possible valueless, however " pure " it may claim to be. Now, none of the writers represented in these absorbingly important volumes has any desire to be a " pure " writer, whatever that may mean ; almost without exception their work expresses, not indeed a richly integrated view of life, but a mere ideology which is—why not admit it, though Mr. Lehmann be unwilling to ?—a Communist one. This seems inevitable ; for since our unfortunate age is harried by Pragmatist gales howling alternately from East and West, to the confusion of truth, it would be surprising indeed if passionate and con- scientious youth did not find itself whirled away by one or the other—Communist or Fascist. The programme which both these doctrines entail is arrogant, scornful, trustful, and brave ; it is also superficial—the philosophy of the Short Cut. Now, if history teaches anything, it is that all short cuts end, with maddening obduracy and in spite of Karl Marx, in a simple return to the outside of the maze ; for a short cut is a form of violence, and violence is for ever sterile—a recoiling spring of self-hatred. Communist and Fascist, each stoking the other's fire, heavily risk the delicate body of civilised life and the ends—human and divine—which it serves. The main virtues of these writings, then, are those I have touched on : a high arrogance, a well-expressed scorn, a generous belief in the results of heroic action. Their faults are equally plain : brittle impatience, over-emphasis, lack of stylistic amenity. A certain blindness, too. The concept of brotherhood, for instance, is ubiquitous in these volumes ; but so is the evident conviction that this idea is exemplified nowadays only by Communists, or at any rate the proletariat : an untenable thesis. The heroics of this idea, which are now being struck in Spain, the latest focus for all, types of romanticism, as well, it may be, as the testing-ground of future reality, here give rise to some very fine and moving poetry ; but heroics are the poetry of violence, in what- ever intention they are struck, and one's respect for, say, John Cornford's controlled fanaticism is a little impaired by the feeling that his war poems could equally well have been written by a Nazi, while his one love poem commands a far wider allegiance. I wonder if the' authors of that question- begging symposium, The Mild in Chains (the theoretical companion-piece to New Writing), ever reflected on the fact that Walter Savage Landor, who in youth got together a brigade to help free Spain from Napoleon, is now remem- bered for work of a more absolute order and of no political significance whatever. The escape into political or social propaganda is now the line of least resistance for young writers with sensitive consciences. It is to be hoped that the most talented of them will not long succumb to so easy a seduction ; for the fatal error, made by so many thinkers, from Plato to Wells, is to imagine that there is anything better to be than a poet. The true poet is the essential creator and cannot kill, however hard he may try : that is his strength. The dry rod blooms in his hand, in spite of him ; whereas, in the hands of the propagandist, it remains dry. The quality, then, which one looks for in the work of young writers is, first of all, true (i.e., poetical) imagination, and one certainly finds a good deal here—in the work of Ralph Fox, Andre Chamson (Mr. Lehmann is especially to be thanked for introducing English readers to this steely young French- man), Ralph Bates, V. S. Pritchett, as well as in the actual poems of Auden, Margot Heinemann, Rex Warner and R. B. Fuller. Failing this the most genuine mark of literary talent, the most striking quality to be found here, is something that one might call the New Realism (the Super-storey has sensibly been knocked off), the features of which are a clear, bitter eye, a ruthless ear for the characteristic rhythm of different kinds of speech, and an absolutely plain style in description. The latter may imply a conscious rejection of ornament or it may simply be a sign of immaturity ; in any case, the result is like watching a duel—is, in fact, so near to drama that it is probably more effective read aloud. The adepts of this style are called Tom Burns, Leslie Halward (author of that perfect story, " Some Day They'll Marry "), G. F. Green, 'George Orwell, Morton Freedgood, Clifford Dyment, Georg Anders, and Gore Graham. Such a short-circuiting of emotion as these writers practise, though it has nothing of the Hemingway style, is eventually rather suffocating ; and one relaxes, for example, in the comparative sophistication of T. C. Worsley's " A Boy's Love," in itself a most remarkable and excruciating piece of observation. The New Realism makes a certain kind of perfection not hard to attain ; methods which conjugate more faculties are more difficult, but in the end perhaps better worth while. Failing conscious artistry, good reporting is not to be sneezed at ; and there is plenty of it here. George Garrett, Alfred Mendes, Alfred Kantorowicz, Rudolf Leonard, William Plomer (" A Letter from the Seaside ") here enter that category, however they may appear elsewhere ; and I feel that the American is perhaps more successful in this genre than the Englishman, simply because the former's reports are invariably leavened by irony. Of the nations here competing, the English emerges vic- torious. I do not think it is mere prejudice on my part that I can see nothing in any (except Pasternak) of the Russian authors voluminously represented, except the watery, nostalgic view of life, set forth in fairy-tale prose, and already made familiar to us by Tchekov, Turgenev, Schedrin and other nineteenth-century writers. Underneath the thin veneer of New Hope the Tzigane music of the Slav soul is still there, in all its sugary, unrhythmical vagueness. Fantasy, again, requires a quite special kind of inspiration, allied to a cast-iron technique, and the examples given are conspicuously unacceptable. This goes for Rex Warner, whose satire employs a blunderbuss where a skewer is the only admissible weapon ; for Edward Upward, for whose novel-in- progress much is claimed (the straightforward, realistic passages have indeed a certain originality) ; for Jean Casson ; and for Auden's " Alfred." I suppose they have all read Joyce, Kafka and Dos Passos ; but as yet they are far from reaching the former two writers' poetically satisfying subtlety. On the other hand, the standard among the actual poems in these volumes is very high indeed; from which certain conclusions may be drawn . . . All things considered, there is remarkably little in New Writing that can be called downright bad. Apart from the essays in fantasy, I should single out only Louis Guilloux's slovenly melodrama, the clotted, emphatic pathos—a la Leon Bloy—of James Hanley, and the cliché-ridden periods of James Stern, as examples of how not to write. Mr. Lehmann is a clever—a very clever editor ; he has exactly the right talent for the job he has undertaken. It is to be hoped that he and his periodical volumes will become a perpetual institution—a kind of international clearing-house for new writers.
EDWARD SACKVILLE-WEST.
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