BOOKS
In a Glass, Darkly
By ALAN BRIEN
MR. MARTIN GREEN'S cojection ot essays* proclaims itself a mirror held up to British nature and it certainly beams a few brilliant reflections. Designed in the Midlands, ground in Cambridge and polished in America, his glass contains some odd warps and flaws but in it we can still see some familiar and disturbing images of our society. There is our island all right look- ing as ever like an old dandy in a night-cap sitting up in bed, or a top-heavy knight founder- ing on a tiny horse. And these are probably the most heroic emblems we can discover from the patterns provided in this Rorschach test.
Mr. Green's view seems to be that we are castaways pretending to be hermits, aged pygmies hoping to be mistaken for infant giants. We are hamstrung by gentlemanliness, petrified by good manners, riddled by snobbery, embalmed by tradition, blinded by ugliness and doped by inefficiency. Our great days are all in the past. We patronise Americans, snub Europeans and ignore Asians. We are a family grown too exhausted even to quarrel among ourselves but, in Orwell's phrase, 'with the wrong members in control.' Our culture exists only in one dictionary sense—'the artificial development of microscopic organisms'—and mould grows on all our arts. We harvest a tiny crop of shallow sensitiveness, brittle elegance and stunted sophistication.
It is one of the many blurred spots on Mr. Green's mirror that he does not seem to realise that this picture is as well known as it is well painted. Each of his four heroes—D. H. Law- rence, George Orwell, F. R. Leavis and Kingsley Amis—is now tolerably famous. They have all mapped the dead places of the British heart, transfused new blood into shrivelled veins, in books which are on the shelves of every educated man in the kingdom. Indeed, such is their influence that the Establishment is already launching against them its favourite tactical trick —the mass counter-attack which precedes any enemy invasion, and advances from a position of strength crying 'Backs to the wall.' Already the officially inspired rumour is being spread that our literature is too outspoken, our theatre too earthy, our criticism too robust. Whom the Gods would destroy, they first make a la mode. 'Fashionable' is a dirty word among those who dictate fashion. I hope, and believe, that this black propaganda has delayed too long to succeed.
The picture has indeed begun to change even if Mr. Green is still too much in love with his own brushwork to notice it. If the powers-that- be overstress the extent of the revolution for their own purposes, he understresses it for his. He picks the right generals but puts them in the wrong armour. I cannot believe that Dr. Lcavis will fight better with a gaping hole left in his breast-plate by his ex-pupil's boast that Leavis • A MIRROR FOR ANGLO-SAXONS. (Longmans, 18s.) is 'the only immature person to attend the University of Cambridge in the last forty years:
It is easy to sympathise with Mr. Green's feel- ings but it is often almost impossible to follow his argument. His book seems constructed with perverse ingenuity to frustrate précis and evade analysis. It cannot surely have been simple laziness which persuaded him to reprint his seven essays, most of which were published in Ameri- can little magazines between 1951 and 1958, with so small an amount of rewriting and editing to fit them to the facts of 1961. Almost every piece is presented with a bibliographer's care for its place in the decade, as though these were key documents for the study of a vanished race. His sole consistency is a habit of hanging himself from the wrong trees: at every stage he has the right instincts but the wrong reactions, the right solutions to the wrong problems, the right conclusions based on the wrong examples. He sees that the scenery of Southern England is often really a pretty, dainty garden-scape in- visibly tended by a lady in a flowered house- coat with a pair of secateurs, and immediately he declares that the slag heaps and smoky horizons of the North are more real and true and beautiful. He understands that much of our culture is like a tree with a chain tight round its middle—the leaves grow tinier and paler and more delicate while the sap grows thick and sour in the roots. Yet he denies that any such thing as a working-class way of thought even exists, and asserts that the proletarian is a sub-division of the lower middle class. He himself seems to have as little first-hand knowledge of life below the chain as any effete gentleman—'even farm labourers go to Paris in the spring,' he com- plains. He cites Alfred Doolittle in the American musical My Fair Lady as proof of his rule that the non-U underdog is only allowed into British art as comic relief. He seems to have missed, in his visits to New York and London, the emergence of Shelagh Delaney's North Country heroines or Arnold Wesker's Jewish Cockneys. He considers The Colditz Story, a film not much on the lips of cineastes or even film fans, as summing up all that is most false,
dead and cold in the relations between the classes
on the British screen. He has never heard tell of The Long and the Short and the Tall which,
in both film and stage versions, depicted no soldier above the rank of sergeant, and he must be reading the wildly enthusiastic New York
reviews of Albert Finney's performance in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning with under- standable amazement.
Mr. Green is a passionate and lively advocate of a familiar case which he has somewhat con- fused, though not entirely spoiled, by a hasty misreading of much of his evidence. What is important about his book is the portrait of a split individual which it reveals. He is a young man from a lower-middle-class home who went to Cambridge and was shown the probing tools
of the critical trade in Dr. Leavis's surgery. Un- fortunately, Mr. Green began to operate before he had learned his anatomy. Even more fatally, he was trying to amputate organs he did not possess. A Mirror for Anglo-Saxons is the case- history of an all too common obsession among bright young graduates from the provincial grammar schools—they all are haunted by the fear that they are turning into gentlemen. In Mr. Green's words: 'At twenty-one, with my BA from Cambridge, 1 faced the world completely transformed, a gilded youth 1 had slid over from Grade Fields to Anthony Eden there hadn seemed to be any halt-way mark I am sorry to disappoint Mr Green. especially atter all the guilt and the heart-searching which have driven him from France to Turkey to America to find 'my first glimpse at a truly democratic society': the infection is a false alarm I'm al raid the dullest scion of Them would see through him at a glance—and Evelyn Waugh or Angus Wilson would probably be able to identify his class origin as quickly as Professor Higgins identified
Eliza's address.
This is not to say that the society ot gentlemen could not reward Mr. Green for his enterprise, and attempt to make him feel at home, at least in the anteroom, if he put his talents at their disposal. But he would never be in any danger of being elected to White's or chosen for a safe Tory seat in the Home Counties. It is true that even as a critic of the Establishment (and this, I agree, is one of its most irritating tricks) he would be accorded most of the privileges and pleasures of the 'A readership' world. The door marked 'Push' is the one for him, not the door marked 'Pull.' But this is one of the unavoidable, facts of life in a materialist society where there is a seller for every buyer—I do not think he will find the formula very different in his adopted America. What the educated lower classes like him and me are being offered is a war-time commission in the bourgeoisie (not all of whom were are, or ever will be, gentlemen). And the bourgeoisie is a class of achievement—we have the word of Marx and Engels for that. ('It has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals.' Conununist Manifesto, 1848.) Man was born in chains and only the bourgeoisie has become free. Why should we not want to share their profits and their powers, and want our relatives and friends to want them too? Must we be beer connoisseurs but not wine lovers? Why are the bicycle and the open-necked shirt so much more moral than the Morris Minor and the bow- tie? When we regard a taxi-driver as a servant rather than as a working-man who drives a car for hire, we supply ttic guilt, not he. If we are embarrassed in the presence of waiters (and Mr. Green thinks it rather honourable that we should be), it is we who are degrading a job regarded as useful and enjoyable all over the rest of Europe. The shame felt by the working-class under- graduate for his simple parents, mentioned by Alan Bullock last week, springs not from a promotion in class but from an advance in knowledge. It is not only the children of the poor who are ill at ease at home—many a reactionary Duke has been scorned by his Com- munist son, many a poet daughter has blushed for the ignorance of her millionaire father. It is their duty to spread the enlightenment among the family—not pack it in a bag and smuggle it into America. Come home, Mr. Green, you've spent too long in front of that mirror. Prove to the gents that it is possible to be human though educated. We promise not to call you 'Sir.'
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