The Changing Novel
BY R. A. SCOTT-JAMES IS it true, as we have been told, that the novel is a decaying art, yielding pride of place to biography, autobiography, travel and other forms of literature? Those who say this can hardly mean that it has ceased to be popular; the contrary can be proved by a few visits to lending libraries and a perusal of the publishers' lists. It can only mean that the good novel is threatened; that genuinely creative writers can no longer find in fiction a satisfying medium of expression; that conditions are not favourable to the novel as an art-form.
Is there anything in this? I have recently been reading a great many novels published during the last five years, and my conclusion is that the pessimists have been begging the question. They have assumed that a novel is something that must conform to a certain prescribed pattern, and if it does not they refuse to call it a novel. I suggest that theirs is an extreme case of nostalgia, and that what they are criticising is not so much the fiction of today as the society which it depicts. The record of fiction-writers in this country in the last five years is, in my opinion, a good one, and I submit that the relevant question is not whether the novel is decaying, but whether and in what way it is changing its character, and to what extent it is affected by its subject-matter.
No doubt critics are justified in regarding the novel as an art sui generis, but that is no reason for defining it arbitrarily. Richardson and Fielding made innovations which entitled them to be called the founders of the novel; but it was Jane Austen who did more than anyone else to establish a pattern which was to become sacred in the eyes of conventional critics for at least a hundred years. Of courSe, in the nineteenth century there were fiction writers who did not conform to the pattern. But there it was, well exemplified by Jane Austen early in the century, by Anthony Trollope in the middle, and Henry James at the end of it—in books such as theirs we were invited, within the limits of a plot or situation, to watch certain characters behaving in a certain way in a certain social and geographical setting. , It was in the nineteenth century that the main development of the novel occurred—in an age of comparative stability, when people (other than the very poor) lived for the most part in enduring homes, were associated with a neighbourhood, and belonged to a society which had pretty clearly established habits of life and codes of conduct. Under the conditions of a society thus relatively stable novelists learnt their trade and built up their procedure; and when all that was taken away from them it is not surprising that some of them, of whom Mr. E. M. Forster is one, should feel that the conditions required for a novel had ceased to exist. Modern England is to a great extent cut off from its past. The great country houses, the squire, the old-time parson, the family business, the small comfortable home with maidservants—all this, and so much besides, is gone. What could a Jane Austen, an Anthony True, a few living novelists, of whom Mr. V. S. Pritchett is a shining example, have managed to discover strata of society with a quite distinctive 'way of life,' as in the suburbia of Mr. Beluncle. But Mr. Pritchett is a rara avis. The majority of the writers of the best novels, when they have not sought refuge in the past or in fantasy (as Mr. Patrick Leigh Fermor in his brilliant The Violins of Saint Jacques), have recognised the conditions of perpetual flux and accepted them as a chal- lenge. If we cannot have the old sort of novel, there must be a new sort. If this is a disordered and disorderly .world, then it is for the novelist to impose his own order upon it even if there is an atomic bomb waiting to be exploded round the corner. If nothing is fixed, he will show human nature under conditions of flux. There may be no homes; but there are pubs. Life is restless, chaotic; then lovers must meet on aeroplanes, or dash .together from cocktail party to cocktail party.
Some are content to depict"the disarray, getting such beauty as they can from scene, from movement and from the clash of emotions. Mr. William Sansom, I think, is one of these. Some deliberately emphasise the transitional character of modern life, presenting persons torn up by the roots from the traditions of their race. In Arrow in the Blue Mr. Arthur Koestler spoke of himself as having been a 'rootless vagabond' in his youth, and rootless vagabonds have been the subject of his novels. In Alex Comfort's A Giant's Strength the most interesting personality is a 'homeless man' who sees 'decent human friendship' shattered by the shouting. 'pig-faced' rulers of the East and the West. Guy Crouchback in Mr. Evelyn Waugh's Officers and Gentlemen recalls the 'classic pattern of army life as he had learned it, the vacuum, the spasm, the precipitation, and with it all the peculiar, impersonal, barely human geniality.' The hero of Mr. Hugo Charteris's A Share of the World is a sort of symbolic modern man, seeking to escape from the web of his own inherited consciousness; for him, the technique of civilisation involves the 'death of feeling.' In Mr. William Golding's brilliant and beautiful little book, Lord of the Flies, the hero, twelve years old, reaches a stage of experience when he perceives 'the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart.' The Bailiff in Mr. Wyndham Lewis's Monstre Gal explains that in the modern age 'We no longer see things in stark black and white'; 'the Good and the Bad are blurred'; the Devil today 'is a very unconvinced devil' and the representative of Heaven is 'a very unconvinced Angel.' In his powerful, unsparingly ,realistic novel, Something of Value, Mr. Robert Ruark includes the whites as well as the blacks of Kenya when he speaks of men 'caught half-way between yesterday and tomorrow.' The hero of Mr. John Wain's Living in the Present is found contemplating suicide, obsessed by the 'unsupportable ennui and pointlessness of human life.'
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