The Quest
Richard Calvocoressi
t has become almost a cliche of literary I history that English writers in the 1930s were attracted to one of two sharply con- trasting beliefs: Marxism and Roman Catholicism. And yet to my knowledge Richard Johnstone is the first critic to ex- amine this phenomenon in any detail. He inquires deeply into the nature of belief itself, with all its contradictions and incon- sistencies, and finds that commitment to an ideal or a code sprang initially from the writer's instinctive need to have reality simplified and explained, and his place within society defined. Such a desire for personal identity was invariably rationalis- ed at the earliest opportunity; but the emo- tional rather than the intellectual basis for belief is seen by Mr Johnstone as having been the dominant motivating force.
The writers discussed in Johnstone's book are, or were, all novelists: Edward Upward and Rex Warner (whose The Aerodrome has just been reissued in paper- back), Waugh and Greene, Orwell and Isherwood. Two Communists, two Catholics, and two who pursued a less or- thodox course — Isherwood ironic, scep- tical, incapable of committing himself, Orwell consciously adopting an isolated position midway between the rival dogmas of Moscow and Rome. Yet even Isherwood recognised and could make the subject of much of his fiction the central paradox fac- ing all committed artists: the conflict bet- ween individual self-assertion and the sacrifice of individuality to a collective ideal. The possibility that the artist might have to renounce his independence prevented Orwell from subscribing to a political ideology or religious creed, although, as Mr Johnstone points out, his sentimental attachment to the Church of England and his irrational adherence to no- tions of decent,, civilised behaviour amounted to a conviction that positive values could still be extracted from a hostile and unstable world.
In The Road to Wigan Pier Orwell claim- ed that 'many of the qualities we admire in human beings can only function in opposi- tion to some kind of disaster, pain or dif- ficulty'. The realisation that evil must exist if values are to be preserved was, Mr Johnstone suggests, ultimately responsible for the uncertainty and loss of faith ex- perienced by left-wing novelists such as Warner and Upward. For whereas Catholicism conferred meaning on the believer's actions, no matter how insignifi- cant or discreditable and offered him a way of coming to terms with an otherwise ab- surd and incomprehensible world, Marxism went one stage further: it showed him hoot to change reality for the better. Revolu- tionary action, which gave purpose to the hero's life, was dependent upon a repressive society. Once that repression Was eliminated the hero would disappear an" the individual cease to be relevant.
Mr Johnstone has deliberately taken as his subject authors of similar sociw background. All six were born into the tiP" per middle class and were educated private- ly; all, with the exception of Orwell, went to either Oxford or Cambridge. And it was the,. public school experience — the rebellion ol imaginative youth against authority, and the consciousness of belonging to an esoteric group — which influenced the waY, many of them interpreted adult life, and especially politics. Mr Johnstone detects an element of escapism in Warner's and Up" ward's apparent desire to revert in their novels to the 'unrealistic simplicity of the schoolboy world, where the out-of-bounds areas are strictly defined, and the presenta- tion of genuine social action is backed by 8 notion of schoolboy heroics'. Waugh's conversion to Catholicism Was judged by Orwell as a deliberate escape from the uncertainties of adulthood. yet however keen Orwell was to appear the most 'grown-up' of his generation, his sen- sibility was deeply rooted in the Edwardian England of his childhood. (This longing .if°r a world of order and security is, nlr, Johnstone emphasises, noticeably abseil' from working-class fiction of the Thirties.) The Thirties generation liked to present itself as rootless, on the move; its tri°st characteristic motif was the journey or quest. But the search for a distant, primitive or dangerous place turned in" evitably into a metaphorical search for the self. The Will to Believe concludes hy, developing an argument first put forward by Mr Johnstone two years ago in the Lon- don Magazine: that Thirties writers, fed 13, P with England, abandon it for foreign lands, only to find themselves made infinitely more conscious of their Englishness, of the values of their upbringing and class. Mr Johnstone has made a valuable con' tribution to our understanding of the Thir- ties by bringing to the surface some of that decade's most sensitive moral and aesthetic issues. He throws light on the everlasting problem of the artist's relationship to socie" ty, and especially his involvement rn politics. Had he extended his range to elude poets as well as novelists, we would have had an even more absorbing book. It is true that Auden's ,powerful impact on a certain band of writers is frequently refer- red to, but there is no mention of the former's eventual disillusion with liberal ,„ humanism and conversion to Anglicanis' so movingly described in Humphrey Carpenter's biography of the poet. An aver" sion to rationalism reached satirical er tremes in Waugh but, as Mr Johnstone demonstrates, it was a feeling which, 10 a greater or lesser degree, they all shared.
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