SPRING BOOKS
The New Provincialism
IT is now possible to travel from London to New York be- tween meals, and from London to Paris between drinks, but writers and intellectuals in these three capitals are further apart than they have been for a hundred years. This separation has grown much wider since the war; it is growing wider now; and it has dangers, which we ought to recognise.
If one reads the journals of writers dating from the days when writers could still afford this unremunerative form of self-expression—if one reads the journals of our immediate predecessors, the great and lesser mandarins of the period 1900-39, one is struck in diverse places by the attitude of the dedicated artist and by a sense 41 a world which was his oyster, a world of books and ideas, exhibitions and concerts, a world of salons and travel, of journeys made to pay respects, a world full of echoes of evenings chez Mallarme and dinners chez Magny. This world was to a large extent an international one. In the early spring' of 1912 Arnold Bennett wa's staying in Cannes, reading Dostoievsky; on February 19 'the Frank Harrises called and took us to St. Raphael for lunch'; on March 6 `Larbaud brought Andre Gide in at 5.30. And we kept them to dinner and had a grand evening that finished at 10 p.m.'
The specialised, conservatory life of moneyed intellectuals, 'the .High Bohemia of the Ritzes aad Rivieras,' as Mr. Wyndham Lewis called it, came in for a good deal of distrust and criticism while it was still going on. But even those who criticised, whether openly or by implication, were themselves `High Bohemians.' Lawrence might lash out at Bloomsbury : Don't be sucked in by the su-superior, Don't swallow the culture-bait, but he shared many of the Bloomsbury values; in particular he was almost morbidly well-travelled and well-read. Mr. Wyndham Lewis himself is 'cultured' to the nth degree. And Mr. Hemingway, with his values of action and stoicism taken from beyond the borders of the Ritzes and Rivieras, is cosmo- politan in the most serious sense that word hermits, and even perhaps in ,a sense more serious than it does permit. But Lawrence, Mr. Wyndham Lewis and Mr. Hemingway, as truly as such quintessential mandarins as Gide or Henry James, belong to before the war, and since the war the world that was their oyster has gone bad. • French intellectual provincialism today has at least this dis- tinction: it has a respectable historical basis. To be as far on the Left as possible is the most profound element in the political consciousness of a very large number of French people, and of an (at least) proportionately large number of French intellectuals. Gide himself showed the way to Com- munism at the beginning of the Thirties, and the way back a few years later. Many have followed both paths since. During the last ten years the almost obsessive need to satisfy this element in the political consciousness, and the prolonged crise de conscience which this has involved in relation-to the Com- munist Party, has withdrawn French intellectuals and writers from sympathetic contacts with their fellows in Britain and America.
An interesting study, which startlingly but apparently un- intentionally illuminates this isolation, has recently been pub- lished. It is Mlle. Simone de Beauvoir's novel, Les Mandarins. Not a work of very profound insight (or for that matter of vaulting pretensions), it is nevertheless, in its honesty, intelli- gence and sympathy, the story of the crise de conscience. Here we see, at length and in detail, those supreme mandarins, the leaders of the French Intellectual Left. on the rack between. creative writing and political journalism, between the Com- munist Party and the non-Communist Left, between an 'objective' view of the Russian prison camps and the feelings of common humanity. The book has an added interest from the fact that the author is the wife of Jean-Paul Sartre, and her work has been generally taken as being in part at least a roman a clef, in which there is fun to be had in trying to identify M. Sartre himself, M. Camus and others. Now one would expect French intellectuals to be the prisoners of his- toric attitudes, as we must all be, but it is a remarkable fact that throUghout this immensely long novel they are so rigidly caught that in their almost interminable discussions British politics are never once mentioned or referred to. So far as the café mandarins of l'Espoir are concerned, the British Labour Government and the welfare state. Mr. Aneurin Bevan and Sir Stafford Cripps, might as well have existed on another planet. Now this is highly characteristic of intellectuals playing politics. No real politician would have been so unsmart as this. (Tito, for instance, who is a real politician, has known for a long time that there were things to be learned from British politics.) It is also very noticeable that when American politics and American representatives appear in Les Mandarins it is as stereotypes, bogeymen from the pages of Krododil. It is hard to say whether Mlle.' de Beauvoir is herself conscious of the provincialism of her characters' political thought. One is inclined to think she is not. But she is certainly conscious of— and she displays with feeling and power—their withdrawal from literature, their agonised suspicion of 'culture.' Nadine, aged eighteen, and currently communist, is trying to get her father out of the office of the review which he edits:
— DeNche-toi, ca pue de la littdrature ici. —Quelle odcur ea a, la littdrature?
— Unc odeur do view; monsieur qui se neglige.
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In America, it is not literature but politics which stinks like an old gentleman who neglects himself; and this leaves, to the younger American writer:; at any rate, a field of interest which, to the outside observer, appears as specialised as that of the French mandarins. A literary preoccupation with psychiatry (passim), cybernetics (see, for example, Mr. Bernard Wolfe's Limbo 90) and what might be called the personnel manage- ment side of anti-communism (see the works of Miss. Mary McCarthy) a manner which can be inexpressibly portentous (as in the works of Mr. Paul Bowles) or Brimful of Fun (as in Mr. Randall Jarrell's Pictures from an Institution)—these are some of the marks of that American literature written since the war which has been most consciously Intellectual, most purposefully avant-garde. Like the New Criticism, American intellectual writing becomes ever more esoteric. more inbred, more than ever a Village-and-Campus family joke.
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