Books of the Week
The Reader Vanishes
By DONALD DAVIE 0 those who hold, as I do, that Mr. G. S. Fraser is at present the best of the regular reviewers of new poetry, his new book* will be a disappointment. Very little of it is written at that level. Mr. Fraser rises to it nearly always when he quotes some lines of verse and elucidates them; and also in his last chapter, on " The Trends of Criticism," which has cost him, as he admits, " if not more pains, at least more time than all the rest of the book." But much more is written by that less impressive Mr. Fraser who is or has been co-editor of Nine and Colonnade; and much more again not by Mr. Fraser at all but by that drably efficient generic figure of our time, the British Council and WEA lecturer. (There are admirable exceptions, no doubt, but I speak of the type.) It is the co-editor of Colonnade who gives the impression that Lionel Johnson is a better poet .than Kipling chiefly because he was a better Latinist. And it is the lecturer who is unhappy until he finds in his authors an affection for " the common man," and who reads into the most unlikely texts (Ulysses, for instance) a message of earnest optimism.
This ventriloquism becomes less surprising when we learn that the book was originally a series of lectures to Japanese students of English literature. And one begins to fear the worst as early as the second sentence of the first chapter: " In a book of this sort, it is impossible . . . to exclude one's personal judgments, but I am at least attempting to be as objective as possible; I am trying to record the view of contemporary English literature that one thinks `most people' take and by ' most people' there one probably means certain critics of an older generation, certain friends of one's own generation, whose judgment one respects."
What we are to get, it seems, is not what Mr. Fraser really thinks about these writers, but the prices they are currently offered at in the open market of literary opinion. Ah, but it is to be the best such opinion. Well, but who is to judge what is the best ? Why, Mr. Fraser, of course. So what we are offered is Mr. Fraser's judgment after all, though at one remove. But what, in that case, is the point of the whole manoeuvre, unless it is to allow of shuffle and double-talk and equivocation ? He goes on, " I am refraining from emphasis- ing my own personal reserves about, or qualifications of, a ' generally accepted ' point of view." But there is not any longer—and Mr. Fraser's quotation-marks admit as much—any such " generally accepted " view; and that, one would have thought, is one of the first things to be said about that world to which his modern writers are to be related. Again, " My task, in fact, is less the final task of criticism than the pre- liminary task of getting a literary scene into perspective." But what perspective, or whose ? Even if we agree that before one can begin to criticise an author, one has to know what price he is fetching in the market (and that's a novel view), in any case it can't be done—the prices fluctuate uncontrollably. Finally, " I have attempted as it were to dig out and put tidily upon the page that rough working scheme of the development of English literature in the last fifty years which, I suppose, every practising, critic has somewhere at the back of his head." Alas, and is it then the consensus of opinion among practising critics, that Mr. Anthony Powell and Mr. Nigel Balchin deserve several hundred words apiece, where Mr. Arthur Koestler gets a brief acrimonious footnote ? That Mr.. Graham Greene deserves four pages, where Conrad gets one ? That " Edward Thomas's is perhaps completely typical of what we mean by Georgian verse " ? That Huxley [speaks] for the intellect, Mrs. Woolf for the sensibilities, and Lawrence for
* The Modern Writer and his World. By G. S. Fraser. (Derek Verschoyle. 16s.)
the emotions " ? If these judgments, implicit and explicit, are to be justified at all, they must be justified as the highly personal responses of one queer fish. Let us not suppose that the consensus of opinion is behind them; the situation is bad enough, but it's not yet so bad as that.
It seemed best to lodge these complaints to begin with, because there are, as a matter of fact, some good things in this book. As I have already said, and as we should expect, Mr. Fraser is at his best when he quotes, specimens of verse and examines them. This method, too, has its dangers; when, for instance, we are asked to compare specimens of Mr. Auden, Mr. Spender, Mr. Day Lewis, and Mr. MacNeice, Mr. Day Lewis has to be judged on a quite unrepresentative passage that is well below his best, even below his norm. But the section I found most instructive was of this kind: three groups of examples for comparison, which traced the development and modification of " writing in images," from surrealism to something far more controlled and lucid in Mr. George Barker, Mr. Gascoyne, Mr. Dylan Thomas and others, and so to the poetry of the image in Miss Raine, Mr. Graves, Dr. Sitwell, Mr. Heath-Stubbs and Mr. Muir. I don't think anything of this sort has been done before for this poetry of the 'forties, and one reader who had always found it irritating will regard it henceforward, if with no less suspicion, at least with greater sympathy and comprehension. If the book as a whole must be said to fail, its failure is instructive. It may be due in part to Mr. Fraser's tempera- ment: one has the impression of a man too easily worried, too sympathetic, too ready to believe the best. But to a far greater extent, the causes are sociological. He has recently remarked himself, in another place, that many writers nowadays find their centre of gravity no longer in the metropolis, but in Oxford and Cambridge, Sheffield, Bristol, or Nottingham. He does not mean that they are regionalists—even in such centres of regional literature as Cardiff, Glasgow, Belfast, there occur nowadays writers addressing not just the region, but the country at large, yet addressing it fpm these vantage-points, not from its traditional centre in London. This may be no accident. London may soon be the most provincial of our cities. At any rate, many young writers now prize the approval of Dr. Leavis or Mr. Bateson beyond the accolade of Mr. Raymond Mortimer or Mr. Connolly or Sir Harold Nicolson; and they may be right to do so. Mr. Fraser seems to look for " the generally accepted view " in the conversations of Hamp- stead and Notting Hill, in the literary pages of the Sunday papers, or among what few survive of the occasional. literary magazines. He might come nearer to it in the common-rooms of provincial universities. However that may be, the impasse and the paradox remain. At a time when there exists a machinery more elaborate than ever before for telling well- disposed foreigners and the under-privileged of our own nation how the educated Englishman regards his own literature, that representative educated Englishman has vanished into thin air. The harassed lecturer pretends that he still exists, that there is still a court of appeal. But everyone knows that there isn't. Mr. Fraser writes very sensibly, and very sympathetically too, about middle-brow literature. But the fragmentation of our culture has gone far beyond the now conventional division into " highbrow," " middlebrow," " low- brow." The highbrows themselves are split into a multitude of little chapels, differing to the death not just about the rating of specific authors (that might not matter), but about the whole approach to literature, its nature and its value. It is easy and idle to rebuke the " coterie " habit. But a writer or a teacher either lives in complete isolation, a lone wolf among the philistines, or else willy-nilly he finds himself in a coterie, which is no less a coterie for proclaiming and believing that it is the only true church, standing by the articles of the faith in a hostile world. Mr. Fraser, who castigates the coterie habits one by one, himself drifts into coterie attitudes. He cannot help it. It is natural and honourable for a man addressing an audience less well- informed than himself, to shrink from presenting as standard opinions, Judgments which are, in fact, his own. But as things stand, he has no alternative. His only cue is arrogance. And when the critic is so able as we know Mr. Fraser to be, an impracticable modesty is more than ever out of place. Whatever may be the case in Japanese, there Is no lack in English of such potted surveys as this one. If in fact they meet a need (which I doubt), that need has been met. Surely What we ask of Mr. Fraser is that he trust his own judgment, and write for no preconceived audience but posterity.
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