Editor's Notes
BY KINGSLEY AMIS TO the eye of today, the young men of the Thirties will look as if they started their literary careers under the burden of immoderate advantages. In the households which produced them, it might well be that the reading and even the writing of books were regarded as normal adult Pursuits, that artists of various kinds would come to stay, Some of them all the way from abroad, and that abroad itself Would be visited early and repeatedly. Should some or all of these conditions be lacking, self-improvement was likely to be available through the medium of talking to father's friends, reading his books, looking at all those hand-done pictures, wandering into the servants' hall, being at Eton, at Trinity, nattily in London, where tea with Virginia Woolf was ap- Patently compulsory. In those days, it seems, artists were still a community, and in addition it was the duty of the intellectual to Concern himself with most forms of art. Even if most of this cultural furniture had to be got rid of later, at least no time had been wasted by having painfully and unaided to acquire it first. The end of that great cultural era can be located at 1939 rather than 1914.
So at any rate these things may strike the intellectual of the Fifties, who feels (like all his predecessors) that no change of mach importance can have antedated his own arrival. Whether relevantly or not, whether excitedly or not, he can reflect that, for example, he met his first butler on visiting the Master for tea in company with a couple of dozen other* freshmen. He Would have arrived on that threshold from a grammar school, or from the sort of public school where people are always reminding each other that it is a public school. His non-literary interests, if he has any, are less liable to be presided over by the shade of Darer or of Monteverdi than by the sinister living figure of Mr. Louis Armstrong. Dfirer and Monteverdi, together with Bonnard and Prokofiev, first editions, tableware and furniture more than a decade old', meeting foreign intellec- tuals, even Proust, even Joyce, tend to get lumped together as a waste of time and—where applicable—of money. To the Charge of holding defiant, dour, scholarship-boy views on culture, he may retort, rather uneasily perhaps, that anyway Ile is thereby rescued from the 'real' Philistinism of the dilettante. And it might be seriously argued that, for the prac- titioner if for, nobody else, culture made in one's own private still is more potent than that which comes to table in a decanter. Some such general reflection as the above, massive in its objectivity, will present itself to many readers of Mr. John Lehmann's autobiography.* The amateur historian of literary s THE WHISPERING GALLERY : AUTOBIOGRAPHY I. By John Lehmann (Longmans, 21s.) movements may further be struck by the parallels between Mr. Lehmann's earlier years and, say, those of the Rossettis with their bouts-rimes, those happy times at Kelmscott Manor, those evenings at Lord Houghton's, even perhaps 1850 and The Germ, with Mr. Lehmann himself in the role of a more talented and less clannish William Michael. It is only when this or a similar parallel has been drawn ,that the post-war reader can appreciate the kind of impact made on that world by the rise of fascism and the Spanish War, and can properly estimate the response of the young intellectuals of those days, to who'll the awakened conscience meant, not Holman Hunt sentimen- talities, but getting angry. Nothing is easier, as an Orwell- indoctrinated intelligentsia has demonstrated, than to jeer at the parlour-socialism of the Thirties writers, their 'platonic affection for the proletariat.' It is true that parts of The, Dog Beneath the Skin, to take an obvious instance, look pretty silly today. But the silliness derives from a naivety about art rather than about politics, which in any case is a sphere where an attitude can be naive and valid at the same time. The validity of the prevailing Thirties attitude is easily forgotten at a time when the chic attitude is a Right-wing one. To re-examine the validity of the first, as Mr. Lehmann helps us to do, may lead some of his readers to examine the validity of the second. (Mr. Henry Fairlie please reply by telegram.) The Whispering Gallery is certain to find its way eventually into the 'Background' section of reading lists for the Twentieth Century Literature examination paper. It is, however, much more of a book than that may imply. As a self-portrait its virtues are uncommon and indeed old-fashioned: Mr. Lehmann himself emerges as not only entirely honest, but also humble, disinterested, unmalicious, his shoulder bare of chips. His story in this volume takes us from a childhood remembered in extra- ordinary detail, through life at Eton (which he had the temerity to rather enjoy), and on to his connection with the Hogarth Press, his friendships with other young writers of the day and the launching of New Writing. Nobody is likely to underrate the importance of this last-named venture, but it is easy to overlook the catholicity of its editorship, which made it some- thing other than a platform for one school of writers. An editor who printed Mr. James Hanley as well as Mr. William Plomer, Mr. Dan Davin as well as Mr. David Gascoyne, can hardly be accused of narrow partisanship. Mr. Lehmann is a man who enjoys more different kinds of literature than might be thought physiologically viable at a time like the present. It is no matter if many of his swans turned out to be geese : a swans /geese ratio of 1:10 is all we can demand. Mr. Lehmann did us much prouder than that. And it was he who by cajolery or threats got Orwell to turn out 'Shooting an Elephant,' he who saw to it that Mr. Christopher Isherwood produced Goodbye to Berlin out of abandoned material. There are innumerable people who should be grateful to the founder of New Writing.
Anyone who thinks he likes or dislikes the Thirties should read Mr. Lehmann's account of them—and I would recom- mend it in particular to that dying breed who see its author as a sort of spider of the Ivy, organising, with the aid of Mr. Stephen Spender and the head of the Third Programme, the metropolitan literary racket. One effect of the book will be to help on the recent revival of interest in the work of the Thirties. This revival is overdue. Mr. W. H. Auden and Mr. Isherwood, to name nobody else, were after all the masters of quite a few post-war writers. They were dangerous masters, and the lessons they taught have in large part been modified or even abandoned, but these are characteristics of all valuable teaching. The only oddity is that that teaching has been abandoned by the masters themselves. What happened to them? Why have only the minor talents of the period kept going on their old level? How did the man who wrote Poems (1930) come to write The Age of Anxiety, the author of Mr. Norris Changes Trains turn into the author of The World in the Evening? My own most vivid memory of the Penguin New Wt;iting is of snatching up \from the bookshop counter an issue with `Christopher Isherwood : The Day at La Verne' on the cover, and finding this to be, not a new short story, but the announce- ment of an abdication : Herr Issyvoo had got religion. Mr. Auden's farewell to his own genius was less obvious at the lime, though the notes to New Year Letter should have shown us the red light. Each had played out in extenso the decline manifested within' the first section of Journey to the Border, the single novel of the Thirties writers' grey eminence, Mr. Edward Upward. There the break can be pinpointed at page 40. Until then, we have fantastically brilliant naturalism, the whole Protest of the period concentrated and sharpened by comedy; afterwards there is nothing but ideology run, dismally riot. One may be prompted to the reflection that the writer who embraces a faith—be it Marxism, yoga or sectarian religion— had better do it before he reaches maturity. The struggle of the fox to metamorphose himself into a hedgehog may prove a fatal drain upon energy. But I have merely restated the problem. What, I repeat, happened to them all? That is the question I should like to ask Mr. Lehmann.
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