LITERARY SURVEY

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 134, 8 June 1935, Page 24

LITERARY SURVEY

WRITERS OF THE REIGN

POST-WAR PESSIMISTS

(By Nelle M. Scanlan.)

The very name of London's districts calls up a specific vision. Mayfair, East End, Soho, Chelsea, Bloomsbury—with each is associated a certain type of person and mode of life. Mayfair indicates the social Smart Set. The East End is the poor quarter, with many Jews and Cockneys. Soho is the foreign quarter, with its French and Italian restaurants. Chelsea is associated with artists. But Bloomsbury, which was once a famous residential area, then converted into boardinghouses and private hotels, is at the very door of the British Museum. In recent years, Bloomsbury has been redeemed from the boarding-house atmosphere, though these institutions still abound, and has become the home of the literary intelligentsia. As Mr. Swinnerton says, "the seat of intellectualism lies in Bloomsbury." The author states frankly: "I must make two things clear. \ First, that 1 write harshly of Bloomsbury from sheer malice. I have suffered no ill from Bloomsbury; whenever I have had any relation with its chief figures that relation lias been mutually kind. My dislike of it is due to what seems to me to be a conflict between its performance and its presumption. .. . Bloomsbury really does imagine itself as suffering from' the assaults of Philistia. Bloomsbury wants to boss and impress people into reading what it has written, whether they like it or not;, that .is, it wants to be read from snobbery—a snobbery of culture: and by writing above the heads of Tom, Dick, and Harry, to lead Tom, Dick, and Harry to higher things. The odd thing about Bloomsbury is that •ft is politically Left and only intellectually Royalist—royalist, you understand, to itself. It has a powerful wish to dominate the Labour Party, but it will not do this in the end because it wants to form an aristocratic caucus, a kind of group dictatorship, of brain. Further, it alienates the very people it would impress- by its determined patronage of the arts and artists, and a tremendous parade of refinement. Ostentatious refinement, indeed, is a part of its assertion of superiority, and I have so long believed all ostentation to be vulgar, that I am sure Bloomsbury, at heart, is vulgar." First "Bloomsbury".is Bertrand Russell. He belongs to one of the oldest aristocratic families in England, which traces its descent from the god Thor. Russell is a mathematician, a sceptic, and a Communist. The author remarks: "His universe' is a material universe; his ideal world represents for me a tyranny of the reason." Roger Fry and Clive Bell represent Bloomsbury's opinion in the realm of art. Lytton Strachey, who was largely responsible for the newer form of biography, with his picture of "Eminent Victorians," and "Queen Victoria," was an extraordinary figure. He was fairly tall, but excessively thin, with a bulbous nose, wore large spectacles, and had a large shaggy red beard. "He drooped if he stood upright, and sagged if he sat down. He had wit and malice enough to point every likeness; he had a clear, if not profound, sense of character; a pen vivid and free. He could not endure the boisterousness of aggressive men and therefore sat aside and ridiculed it He was on the side of the weak, those who could hot fight for themselves." Virginia Woolf is the woman who represents Bloomsbury in this summary. Mr. Swinnerton, apparently, likes a little more meat than Virginia Woolf offers in her writings. He says: "Objective reality has little importance to Virginia Woolf; her interest is almost solely subjective, in flutterings of mood and fancy. She will take, a person apd show us the jumping :of thought that goes on. all the time in a person's consciousness. Nor has the quiver and shake of their thoughts, for me, any deeper, revelation than that of a kind of mental sickness, the sort of jumble that people have in their heads when they are going under or emerging from an anaesthetic." After the Bloomsbury bunch come the Post-Freud: May Sinclair, Dorothy Richardson, Rebecca West, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, and James Joyce. Rebecca West's reputation was founded_ on her brilliant critical studies and reviews of novels. She was scarcely out of her teens when she was noted as an alert commentator. From ■ the first she was an ardent suffragist, with a. pen as full of fire. Of her own novels, the author writes: "She amused, she stung, but she held fast to her own standard of quality, and was just." LAWRENCE WILL LIVE. So much has been written about those controversial figures, D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce, that there is little to add. Mr. Swinnerton states: "Lawrence's effect upon the young has been great; his effect upon the old has often enough been that of nausea. It is difficult to foresee his future; it is even more difficult in such an atmosphere calmly to assess his genius. Much of the fuss about Lawrence has been purely temporary. It was bound to be so. Psycho-analysis has been a new hobby for thousands of people, and Lawrence is a writer who lends himself—only too readily—to psychoanalysis. He asks for it; demands it. His private life has been turned inside out. There he is; the man, the author. Was he mad? Was he a good friend, an ungrateful biter of the hand that fed him? Are his works obscene or fiercely moral?" Mr. Swinnerton concludes his long, critical estimate of Lawrence with these words: "Let there be no mistake, however, in a hundred years he will probably still be on the literary map, while I, and those like me, will have sunk without trace from every record of the Georgian age." "If Lawrence was unsophisticated, Joyce is the reverse," says the author. "What Joyce has is his great knowledge of the seamy side of life and character. He has unrivalled power to represent the thoughts and feelings of some very odd people. He now stands high as a psychological realist." A POST-WAR SYMPTOM. We are introduced to Edgar Wallace, as a "Post-War Symptom." Edgar Wallace was the son of an actress who deserted him, and at the age of nine days he was adopted by a Billingsgate fish porter. When he was. very small he sold papers from a pitch at the bottom of Fleet Street—a street which in later years he knew so well. He went to sea, joined the army, wrote doggerel verse, became a journalist, arid acted as Reuters correspondent when the Boer War broke out, and he was the first to transmit to England the news. that peace had been signed. His first book, "The Four Just Men," lost money. He went to the Congo to investigate the atrocities in the Belgian Congo, as representative ;:fo«, the ; "Daily , Mail," and "Sanders of the River" was the' result. (Recently the film of this story

attracted one of the smartest of London's audiences when it was shown in aid of a Press charity.) "After the war came his almost incredible success," says Mr. Swinnerton. "Because the people were crying for distraction from misery, disgust, and boredom. He became the bestknown writer in the world. The success of his tales owe nothing to suggestiveness, and his conversation was freer from coarseness than more intellectually ambitious circles. He drank little, if at all, except copious draughts of tea. He worked and gambled from morning till night. Wallace was a superlatively honest, capable, strongwilled, shrewd man of the people, who had taught himself how to write and was an inveterate gambler. He was more original and had greater talent than many much more pretentious writers, and he is distinctly a figure in the Georgian literary scene." The Post-War Pessimists are led off by Aldous Huxley, followed by Noel Coward, then Richard Aldington and Wyndham Lewis. "Aldous Huxley is the one considerable intellectual of his generation who has a great heart and a great humour, who is fastidious as a maiden aunt, as bawdy as a highbrow, and as unaffected in his amusement as a common man. At the present time, when the 'modns' are all scientific intellectuals, this causes him to be what is called a fashionable writer, but Huxley does not command the suffrages of Bloomsbury, because, to the disgust of the exclusives, he has become a popular and very widely-read writer. When he set out for a journey round the world, he took the whole 'Encyclopaedia Britannica' with him." NOEL COWARD AND MODERNS. Noel Coward was born when they were singing "Dolly Grey" and "Soldiers of the Queen" in , London. Noel Coward had written plays and music for revues, and he has faced the cheers of the audience on a first night, and also the boos of the gallery. He has had several plays banned by the censor. He knows all the smart people, and he neither drinks nor stays up late. He works terrifically hard. "His quality lies in his fun," writes Mr. Swinnerton. "He has a great sense of the stage; he has a sense of dramatic surprise.". Finally, under the heading "Some Later Novelists." we have P. G. Wodehouse, J. B. Priestley, and A. P. Herbert. "Wodehouse is neither a prig nor a buffoon. He merely creates merriment—for fun. In a period when laughter has been difficult, he has made men laugh without shame. He has done it by means of his comic invention. The story is told of how Lord Oxford, leaving Paisley after the election defeat which ended his Parliamentary life, and suffering bitterly from the knowledge of all that was involved, opened his bag when he got in the train and produced the latest Wodehouse, and'lived again." Yorkshire people are among the unsolved problems of the British Isles. They are blunt. When they praise they patronise; when they blame, they insult. They are heavy-handed but thin-skinned. These are a few of the comments Mr. Swinnerton makes about the Yorkshire man, before introducing J. B. Priestley. "He has clearly a vigorous and courageous intellect; his writing, though not so distinguished as to place him high among stylists of our literature, is fluent and sincere; he has marked intelligence and integrity. But it is a practical intelligence, a practical courage, rather aggressive in the Yorkshire manner, without quicksilver or subtlety." A. P. Herbert of "Punch," president Of the Black Lion Skittles Club, author of "The Water Gipsies" and a great deal of propaganda in recent years, is an Oxford man. "He sails a barge. wants to change the licensing laws, and see the Thames River used as a thoroughfare. He is a good speaker, but sometimes he is so serious, so earn est about the 'Cause' his humour becomes lost and buried. But he has, wit arid eloquence."