Christmas Literary Supplement
THREE ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL
The novel still remains the form of literature with the widest appeal. For this Christmas. Number the " Spectator has invited Emyr Humphreys, one of the most promising of our younger novelists; to discuss the aims and problems of a contemporary novelist as he sees them ; Alvin Whitley,' one of the most intelligent of the younger American critics and teachers, to consider the contrast, among today's American novelists, between those who have been irreverently called " the redskins and the palefaces "; and Joyce Cary, an outstanding novelist of an earlier generation, to write on "The Period Novel".
The "Protestant" Novelist
By Emyr Humphreys A NOVELIST may be called " serious " when it becomes clear that he is creatively concerned with the human situation. (He may view this situation as " comic " or tragic : both views are equally serious.) It is possible to see a parting of the ways after Hardy : the less aesthetic novelists, Wells, Bennett, Gals- worthy, still concentrating on the human animal, both real and imaginary, readers and characters; the greater artist, Joyce, hammering his own monument out of the complexities of his own time. I use this rather over-worn distinction in order to "press this point; the quality of " seriousness" has for too long :now been confined to considerations of art and technique. i'It has not mattered in the past how trivial the substance of a novel has been, provided its style was something to talk about. This does not leave the novel in a strong position to face he contemporary situation. In the business of cultivating one's wn garden there are only a limited number of vacancies, and 'eference is given to authors of pensionable age. The younger novelist, ovelist, or the less well-placed, must contend with and over- orne the inconveniences and obstacles of a situation of which he himself is the tiniest possible fragment. He must have some- thing relevant to say to so many thousands of intelligent and sympathetic readers (and there should be surely some fifteen to twenty thousand of these out of our millions ?) if he wishes to survive.
This is not a comfortable predicament. Leaving aside the thorny paths of livelihood and publication, let us view the great commonplaces of our time; the great crowd crying for Bread and Circuses; the Balcony overlooking the Mediterranean, deserted; in need of repair; Freedom increasingly curtailed or cancelled on papers stamped and handed back by uniformed unsmiling officials who bark out, " Next ! "; the Patrons, like the nymphs, have departed, and no one lingers to hear the end of the pre-war song. And the world beyond our doorstep ? Wars, revolutions, persecutions, famine, witch-hunts, martyr- idoms, crises, rumours, nameless fears, burn like bonfires along the hill-side on a dark night. If he is not overwhelmed by all this, nor stunned into silence, and still persists in his attempts to establish communication with the mythical twenty thousand mentioned above, the novelist must either be graced with the dizzy power to ignore it all, or he must face the predicament as if it were a direct and personal challenge to himself. The serious novel of the middle of. this century will be his response to the challenge. In the process of making contact with " the twenty thousand " at a sufficiently high level, the boldest novelists of today will create those new works which by fulfilling the need of the time will also become entertainment that is valid for all time.
In striving still to entertain and still to have something to say which can be accepted as experimentally true, the novelist Will discover that he must think and feel more deeply about a wider range of knowledge and experience than any of his immediate predecessors found necessary : and this new " high seriousness ' moreover must be a good deal less speculative and less detached than the nineteenth-century variety. To take a random example, if some novelist wishes to extract the Aeschylean conclusion—that man learns wisdom only through suffering—out of a contemporary setting, the ring of truth about the plot, the, characters, the situations, the scenes, must be clearly and immediately, audible to the sympathetic reader; both story and theme wholly integrated into the circum- stances of our time. (Mr. C. P. Snow, it seems to me, has the unusual combination of powers necessary to forge a work of this kind on the grand scale.) It would appear that creative intelligence should now take precedence over the kind of sensi- bility' which dominated the post-Joyce-Woolf era. And it is among those writers in whom this quality is most in evidence that 1 shall be inclined to look for the achievements of the future.
But no intelligence, however powerful, can alone cope with the complexities of our predicament. The novelist's attitude to life, his positive attitude to the human situation, must be grounded on a faith which his reason, his conscience, and his experience can accept and serve. At all times it is true that it is the novelist's particular attitude that lends significance to his work. Today the novelist needs his attitude also as a blind man. needs his stick. The attitude may be no 'more than a quiet, persistent, tough, humility, but it is a fundamental condition of useful survival. Without it, the novelist is in constant danger of being ham-strung by his own hesitations, and his talents trampled upon or' perverted by wills stronger than his own.
Bearing in mind the history of the English novel, its noncon- formist origins and Protestant growth, it would not be inoppor- tune at this point to renew acquaintance with what may be called, for want of a better term, the Protestant principle. " Protestant " is still a controversial word and its own history is the only reliable definition; but no one will deny that personal responsibility has been perhaps the most constant factor in most manifestations of the Protestant historical trend. This is an attitude which may commend itself to the contemporary novelist. He is unwilling to be responsible to the State, or to the social revolution or the Ministries of Information, nor is he inclined to lose himself in the pure mathematics of aesthetic experimentation; yet he would welcome responsibility as a sus- taining force for which he feels a deep and real need.
No one doubts the positive power of the Protestant principle in action. Often in the past the artist has shied away from its crude strength, the constant hoarse whisper of its dynamic conscience. But it possesses a paradoxical combination of simplicity and universal all-embracing complexity : it con- sists in an awareness of the mysterium tremendum, the infinite unconditional nature of God, and the time-bound limitations of man, his self-centred solitude and sin, A novelist who concerns himself with the human situation at once confronts religion. Remembering Greek drama, this need not unduly alarm us. When in communication with an audience of any size, even secular art is never far from the fringe of religion. To a contemporary novelist, however, the Protestant principle has the advantage of belonging to the prophetic rather than the priestly tradition, since professionally the novelist has more to learn, more to gain, from the prophet than the priest. It is part of the prophetic power to grapple with a con- temporary situation and read into it, and out of it, the meaning and the Will of God. No two prophecies are exactly the same, since no two identical situations can be found; and yet history continues to unfold the ancient, ageless mystery of the relation- ship between an unconditional God, an infinite Creator, and the created, finite, conditioned yet aspiring mankind. " There is nothing new under the sun " and yet every moment of living must be something unique. to be carefully and honestly interpreted : at the heart of each significant situation there is a mystery, like the universe in the grain of sand, which he must touch or at least approach : and the mark of his soundness of judgement and sureness of aim will be the glow and flourish of triumph about his work. Sig- nificant action can only come from characters capable of making decisions, of acting and suffering with a degree of awareness and passionate response that will create a situation worth noting. The novelist therefore will not attempt to treat his characters as puppets or pretend to know all about them. He will behave with becoming reticence and humility. He must not think of himself as a grandiose author-producer handling a cast of thdusands on a revolving stage.
In creating both characters and plot, the novelist will be presented with the difficulty of hacking his way through a jungle of misconceptions towards an awareness of, right and wrong, of, good and evil, which will be comprehended by the strata of sympathetic readers (the twenty thousand on the fair horizon still 1) for whom he writes. In fact, he will need to be no mean prophet himself if he is to survive this journey. It is a journey which many will be required to make, and upon which some have embarked already. No doubt, the work which justifies the effort called for will be made en route; that is perhaps as well, since there is always the possibility that, when at last he arrives, the exhausted novelist will find the poet and the dramatist have got there before him and the twenty thousand are sitting in neat rows gazing with rapt attention at the glittering stage.
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