Lucky George
TIME AND PLACE. By George Scott. (Staples, 16s.)
MR. GEORGE SCOTT puts himself forward as a representative of a newly developing social class, the class of the talented young men who have been educated up to the highest university standards by the State and are now acquiring positions of influence and authority. The proletariat is providing considerable numbers of George Scotts (and Lucky Jirns) and will provide many more. Their collective attitude towards society and social obligations (if they have one) is therefore a matter of importance for all.
Mr. Scott's book, which is half autobiography and half self- defence, gives us a disturbing document from this point of view. The book was apparently inspired by a controversy with Stephen Spender, who appealed to George Scott and his kind to find some engagement in time and place parallel to the engagement which Spender and his own kind found in the Thirties. Mr. Scott rejects that plea and insists that the Spender generation must be for ever alien to his own, for two reasons.
The first reason is good. At the age of thirty, Mr. Scott can look on the Spanish Civil War as a part of dead history and he makes a devastating criticism of the bloodshot passions and the blind fellow-travelling enthusiasms of that period. Mr. Scott is right in saying that if this is what enthusiastic engagement leads to, he wants none of it.
But his second reason is bad. He says that Spender and his like must always be alien to himself because they were brought up in comfortable middle-class homes, surrounded by books and nourished by intelligent conversation. This disconcerting rejection sets a tone of social resentment which disfigures the whole book. Born in a back street of Middlesbrough, Scott spent his child- hood in the company of the children of the unemployed. He him- self was no partner to the major miseries of that period, but misery was the surrounding air he breathed, and his picture of depressed Middlesbrough is vivid and moving. His description of the Middlesbrough soccer crowd is something other. He says that the fans came to see the Bora' win by fair means or foul. They attempted to demoralise the opposition by loud jeers and gave the same treatment to any of their own players who happened to be off form. There was nothing of the sporting spirit taught in such places as Rugby. George Scott says so himself, but he does not add, `So much the worse of Middlesbrough.'
The book is like that all through. Although George Scott was twice sent by the State to Oxford, where he had an exceedingly good time, he is less concerned with counting his blessings than with noting social discrimination and real or imagined snubs. He says there was a barrier at Oxford between such men as himself and the sons of the ancient public schools. That is no doubt true, but who raised the barrier? One need not be an Old Etonian to be chary of cultivating intimate friendship with men who are ready to take offence at the slightest provocation, or none.
George Scott's analysis of his own attitude is much like the analysis made by the more imaginative critics of the attitude of Lucky Jim. In fact, Lucky Jim is a loafer, a sycophant, a vulgarian who has taken advantage of State bounty to secure a university post when.he is mentally and morally unfit to be a school janitor. If Redbrick has many like Lucky Jim, that institution may be written off. It is finished before it has well begun. If Mr. Scott is right in saying that his own attitude is characteristic of this type, I must admit to being deeply disconcerted. I am also puzzled. For cen- turies the Scottish universities have been educating young men from poorer homes than Scott's and some of these men have reached very high positions without ever being accused of an inferiority complex. Why are the New Men so different? Is it because England is not Scotland? Or is it a subtle corruption of the Welfare idea which leads men who have been given their chance by the State to be perpetually angry at not being able to acquire things that not even State money can buy?
I wish I knew the answer, but while I read through this interest- ing but depressing book, I kept recalling the words spoken by Poincare to Leon Blum at the height of the Dreyfus affair. 'Desinfectez your,' said Poincare. To which I can only add a pious 'Hear, hear!' COLM BROGAN
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