BOOKS

Re-Enter the Hero

13v DON AT O'DONNELL

Mtt. COLIN WILSON, in his new book,* is concerned with Man and Society. He is troubled by the apparent insignificance of the individual and the oppressive power of organ- ised people. He illustrates these themes by examples from a few contemporary American sociologists—principally Riesman and Whyte— and many modern writers, including Herman Wouk, James Jones, Tennessee Williams, Sartre, Quints,. Zola, Joyce, Shaw, Yeats and others too numerous to be mentioned (in a book 157 pages.long) by anyone other than Mr. Wilson. He makes an attempt to introduce 'the sociological evidence' into the consideration of' contemporary literature, but in-practice this turns out to be little more than -a pinning of Riesm-an's labels 'inner- directed' (good) and 'other-directed' (had) on to various writers. The book concludes with a plea for reviving the 'inner-directed' Hero, by means Of a new existentialism 'based upon recognition of the irrational urge that underlies man's con- scious reason.'

Many micjdle-aged readers, and no doubt some Younger ones, will find The Age of Defeat scarcely less irritating than Mr. Wilson's earlier books are said by most of their more intelligent readers to have been. They will resent—as I do—his 'classics- in-1ictures' summaries of so many books, and the disc-jockey commentary*: .`It was startling that a book of such extraordinary merit [Room at the Top] should have been written, not by a widely travelled journalist, but by a Yorkshire librarian.' Most of all they will resent his careless pontifica- tion ('Marxian materialism and Freudian psy- chology are excuses for laziness') and—as a last straw—his citation of solemn inanities from like- minded or otherwise dubious sages: 'Stuart Hol- royd has written : "in our time, the writer who does not dare to be great cannot hope to be any- thing." "This penetrates to the heart of the prob- lem.' 'The writer should not underestimate his possible influence.' Alexander Werth states that the attitude of Les Temps Moclernes helped to dis- courage the Americans from launching an anti- cioviet crusade at the time of the witch-hunts.'

'let, trying as he can be, Mr. Wilson is not without importance. He has a real curiosity about life and about books and he can apparently com- municate his interest to others. This makes him a

medium of communication, a line of approach to various fields of thought for people to whom these fields might otherwise remain closed. His useful- ness here is not diminished by his endurance of platitudes. Undue sensitivity to platitude is, after all, the form of arrogance which most effectively blocks communication between intellectuals and others, and it is often unwarrantably assumed. (As a boy I used to cherish an excessive contempt for the philosopher Plato, in the belief that the w9rcT platitude was derived from his name.) Nor

does Mr. Wilson's prophetic posture lessen his value as a teacher. 'I-he successful teacher has to be something of a charlatan and Mr. Wilson * Tim Auli ur DLULM. By Colin Wilson. 16s.) possesses this qualification in good measure. It is more fun to read something called The Age of Defeat, and feel in the movement,' than to read something called, say, Introductory notes on some modern writers, and feel a neophyte.

There is a sense, then, in which Mr. Colin Wil- son is a more relevant critic than Mr. William' Empson : more relevant because more readable, and more read—although Mr. Einpson is so much more perceptive than Mr. Wilson that the word 'critic' to cover the two becomes almost empty of meaning. The point is, though, that Mr. Wilson, writing brightly and urgently about valuable ideas, is a great deal better than nothing; and nothing, if we are to believe Mr. Koestler and others, is what large numbers of educated young people now are most inclined to read. If Mr. Wilson can catch their attention, so much the better. It is not exactly a question of 'the dark places where his apostolate lies'—to adopt a memorable phrase once used in The Tablet by Mr. Waugh about Mr. Greene. What seems to have happened, rather, is that more gifted 'apostles' have been too busy discussing abstruse points' in undertones for any clear message from them to reach a new generation; and the mOk lively transmitter of literary culture today there- fore is apt to be someone like Mr. Colin Wilson. Those of us who are middle-aged may reflect that our Wilson was Edmund—a -teacher-critic, too, but with higher standards and lower preten- sions than are now fashionable in that field.

Through Colin Wilson a certain romantic dis- satisfaction with the quality of modern life and literature makes itself heard. That this is in some degree healthy no one who has read The-Organ- isation Man or The Captive Mind is likely to doubt. That the protest can be much more deeply felt, and of much higher quality, anyone who reads the work of young Polish writers in the collection The Broken Mirror (edited by Lionel Trilling) will easily agree. But Mr. Wilson's pro- test, too, is real and in its own way moving. His breathless, jerky accounts of so many books are the notes of a man who is looking for something and not finding it. He is genuinely oppressed by the discovery that the sense of the individual's insignificance which pervades modern urban life informs also the literature of that life. The Age of Defeat often suggests the state of feeling of the young Chesterton : A cloud was on the minds of man and wailing went the weather Yea a great cloud upon the mind, when we were boys together.

Unlike Chesterton. Mr. Wilson hopes the cloud may be dispelled by autonomous human exertion. A criticism renewed by sociology—he seems to imply—can help to renew literature by restoring 'the hero.' and 'the hero' will re-accredit in real life the image of the 'inner-directed' man. This theory raises, but does not answer, a number of more or less interesting questions. What can sociology in tact contribute to literary criticism? Can literary criticism have a fundamental effect on

literary practice? Is the restoration of 'the hero' in literature desirable? If it occurred would it make the 'inner-directed' man more acceptable in real life? And. to what extent is it desirable to rehabili- tate the inner-directed man?

U1' these questions, the two most worth dis- cussing are piobably the first and last. Sociology, like historiography and other 'human' studies, is obviously related both to literature itself and, as a method of investigation, to literary criticism.

Literary criticism has long been very conscious of historical and social factors and ought to be able to use the insights and discoveries of recent sociologists. In a serious sense literary critics have surely much to learn from the best examples of sociological method. The appendix 'On Intellec- tual Craftsmanship' in Professor Wright Mills's

new book The Sociological Imagination is a model for critics as for other workers in the science/art

borderland. And certain pairs of sociological con-

cepts, like Mr. David Riesman's 'other-directed' and 'inner-directed,' can stimulate. and (within limits) help the literary critic as well as, say., the politician. Yet literary criticism remains a bight' specific form, dealing with so complex, 'filtered and unusual a human activity- that it has little enough in , common with other social sciences.

Ideally, the literary critic should know a great deal about the social sciences and then leave them to one side, forgetting above all their jargon, when he does his proper wOrk. Unfortunately, and natur- ally, current practice is often very different. 'I know the end of the story,' said the society lady, interrupting Leon Bloy's account of the Prodigal Son, 'the son left the swine and came to his father.' 'No, Madame,' said Bloy, 'it was the swine who came.'

Similar considerations apply to the idea of re- habilitating the inner-directed man. Which inner- directed man? Hitler or Gandhi? The terms 'inner-directed' and 'other-directed' had useful meaning in Mr. Riesman's critique of American society; they 'are probably lesS useful as general categories. There is much, naturally, in Mr. Ries- man's analysis that is specifically American : other-directedness, in its malignant form, is the disease of a society•which has had to be a melting- pot, a society also with a short history of spec- tacularly quick development. This is a society in which the opinions of elders—who are both 'out- of-date' and often less 'American'—are neces- sarily at a discount. It is in this way that, for lack of anything else, the opinion of contempor- aries tends to become the super-ego. To generalise from the American case is difficult and rather dangerous, particularly when the generalisation

is intended, as in The Age of Defeat, to prop up a cult of the hero, as against a supposedly prevailing 'cult of the Ordinary chap.'

Mr. Wilson occasionally shows a rather uneasy awareness that parts of his programme—cult of the hero. emphasis on will, recognition of the irrational—were associated with an earlier twentieth-century myth. But what he completely ignores is that his programme is being put into practice before his eyes, in one of the three countries he is writing about. Modern French literature is not, as he suggests, exclusively dominated by a 'cult of insignificance,' inculcated by Sartre and Camus. It has long had a very

influential ,`cult of the hero' school, in which, the

leading writer was M. Andr6 Malraux who now, as Minister for Culture, is giving the watchwords

of heroism—inn-lace, energie,- grandeur---to the

dynamic French youth of today. The Algerian war, as has been rightly said, is a school for

heroism. And the cult of -the hero is a school far the Algerian war. Some French people seem to feel that 'the cult of the ordinary chap' may nut, after all, have been entirely a bad thing.