BOOKS

Not Talking About Jerusalem

BY KINGSLEY AMIS A moNG many tendencies hostile to good writ- Piing, two have recently become prominent : the academic and the journalistic. The academic tendency, exalting style and treatment at the peril of content, is perhaps, despite the continued existence of Henry James, passing its peak. The journalistic tendency seems to be increasing. It ultimately sees a work of literature as an idea or a message boiled up in style, and for prefer- ence not too much style at that. Thus if the subject-matter of a number of writers can be included in a simple generalisation, a group or school can be assumed to exist and can be written about in terms suitable to the popular press: the Angries emerge. This sort of thing is possibly harmless in itself, but what happens if the writers and serious critics take the jour- nalistic view may be more untoward, or at any rate diffuse more boredom.

The journalistic novelist or dramatist starts off with the laudable and necessary feeling that his subject is more important than anybody else's. Unfortunately he then proceeds to behave as if the urgency of what he has to say relieved him from the task of saying it properly—that is, with due attention to matters of style and treat- ment. He is likely to be hostile to the mere men- tion of such considerations, which may appear to him as trivial, cold, formalistic, indeed academic. To point out that a novel of protest by a coloured South African, say, is illiterate, stagy and incoherent will invite journalistic accusations of pedantry (if of nothing more sinister), even a comparison with Rymer's objections to Othello. And, in such a case, the critic may well feel, if he is anything of a liberal, that 'life' is more important, that human agony takes precedence over esthetic distaste, and that his first duty is to decency. But it is not. It is to literature.

This may seem a grandiose prelude to a dis- cussion of Arnold Wesker's plays.* However, the awesomeness of the tributes he has received justifies the reviewer in any amount of soul- searching. So I will go on in confessional mode and admit freely, even with a touch of legitimate pride, that I have never seen any of these works performed. It is not that I am singling Mr. Wesker out for special treatment: the whole of the recent renaissance of the English stage is to me a closed book, closed theatre rather. For what it may be worth, though, I will confess further that, from what both friend and foe say of it, the revolution I keep hearing about smells rather like a palace revolution. The many change and pass, the one world of the theatre remains. 1 am not of it, which makes me impartial.

If I call Mr. Wesker journalistic, it is not in the sense that I find him an accurate reporter of the contemporary scene. I know little of Jewish households in East London and less of

* CHIPS WITH EVERYTHING. (13s. 6d.) THE KITCHEN. (I2s. 6d.) THE WESKER TRILOGY. (21s.) By Arnold Wesker. (All published by Jonathan Cape.)

rural life in Norfolk and I have never worked in a restaurant kitchen. With the RAF setting

of Chips With Everything I am on firmer ground. In many ways—the miming, the rituals, the tele- scoping of action—this is a deliberately un- realistic play. I recognise, too, that the curious patois spoken by the officers, however much it weakens any possible claim to serious represen- tational interest, may serve the purpose of indicating how remote and fantastic, or how nightmarish, these Establishment figures are when properly seen into. The character of Pip, however, the upper-class rebel who is corrupted by being persuaded to take part in a bayonet practice, surely evidences some realistic inten- tion. And yet he lurches in and out of cumber- some poeticality, uses the word 'also' like a foreigner, is made to say (of peasants with a grievance), 'They voiced themselves well.'

This air of being hastily translated from some other tongue is endemic to Mr. Wesker's dialogue. Here is a short anthology from his earlier plays, which clearly aim at realism (I have avoided obvious attempts at Jewish immigrant speech and East Anglian dialect).

[An industrial society] makes a man stand on his head and then convinces him he is good- looking. (Comment: Mistake for something like 'he looks good like that'?) Ada suckles a beautiful baby. (Surely an archaism in speech?) You're not tired, Harry—you're just drowning with heritage, mate!

He stood out here and he looked around . . . and then he stalked off with a 'see you.' (Conceivable in actual speech?)

. . . You'll never make the beautiful, rustic estate. (Interpretable as 'You'll never build a beautiful life for yourselves in the country.) It is not always easy to distinguish this sort of thing from the innumerable phrases that per- haps might be spoken, but only by stupid and/or intolerably self-melodramatising people, which these are evidently not designed as. (Or are they? Time and time again I had the suspicion that I was reading some fiendishly far-out satirist of sentimental sub-intellectual liberalism. If l'm right, don't throw off the mask, Wesker. They'll assassinate you.) Try these:

Don't you want to feel your life? Savour it gently?

You have never cried [? sc. out] against the jungle of an industrial society.

I suddenly feel unclean.

'Words are bridges,' he wrote, `to get from one place to another.' Wait till he's older and

he learns about silences—they span worlds.

Beatie Bryant could have been a poem—I gave her words—maybe she became one.

—this last in the mouth of a young man de- scribed as talking like a book : surely an insult in most circles, and fully justified here.

'Bookish,' however paradoxical it may seem, is indeed the word for much of Mr. Wesker's

dialogue. Among the books he clearly does not know, however, is Cold Comfort Farm, still re- quired reading for anyone who ventures to por- tray rusticity. And so we wander from 'That ent too bad just yit—few more weeks and the old mowld'll cling' to 'Roots! The things you come from, the things that feed 'you. The things that make you proud of yourself—roots!'

Cries from the heart we doubt ever got cried (we hope they didn't, anyway) stud these pages. They foster the notion that Mr. Wesker's eye and ear for experience are dulled. He cannot even run up a convincing pop lyric; his attempt in Roots fatally resembles the folk songs his characters are perpetually singing to one another. His Jewish families constantly fall into the accents of a TV comedy series—less funny than most; his removal men in I'm Talking About Jerusalem are like Hancock bit-players—only less funny. In particular, the corporal in ChiPs With Everything is far less funny than manY real individuals of the type presumably aimed at—the surly, eccentric, egotistical long-service NCO. And we are far now from lamenting a detachable stylistic shortcoming. Mr. Wesker denigrates by his practice the interestingness and intelligence of the life he purports to know and care about.

This impression survives a longer view of the events portrayed. I cannot believe, for instance, that the semi-rural existence we are shown in Roots need be as thin and uneventful as this, nor that protest (or declamation) about it need be so meagrely motivated and so insubstantial as Beetle's. (At that point, by the way, it is not a speech in a bad book that one is reminded.of, but a speech in a bad film : Charlie Chaplin s in Limelight.) The bearable interludes in the Ser- vices, again, are more bearable than those in parts of Chips With Everything—and officers may.he agents of corruption, but in concrete and varied ways, not as a row of interchangeable phantoms. And there must have been more to working-class

feeling in the Thirties than fighting Mosley and sitting round the fire singing 'England arise, the long long night is over.'

Let me be clear about why I object to .tht1! last part. I am not, I hope, 'afraid of emotion,

nor am I just enjoying a sneer at left-wing

idealism: it is the sentimentality of its ima.ge here I find offensive, as I would find offensir

a tenor dressed as a general singing 'There 11 always be an England.' (I would agree that in that case there would be plenty of other offe,n; sive things too.) Still, I'm sure the 'England arise scene plays well. It's amazing what does.

cannot apply most of these strictures to The Kitchen, in which the factors that make it harder

to read than the others—large cast with fatrlY equally diffused interest, incessant movement`.. may well make it art original and even interest ing piece in actual production. The fact that the characters are mostly foreign tends to concea,t

any inauthenticity in dialogue. And it is poss'b.le that the playwright's claim to be presenting .via the kitchen an allegory of life under capitalism survives in performance the many sledget hammer hints that that is what he is up to. 1311,„ production must be the key, and not only her': As a non-theatregoer who can read, I incline.t'e the widespread view that the presumPtlY, triumphs of the new dramatists rest upon and sympathetic direction—that and the nvetio fashionable liberalism of audiences prepared re go nine-tenths of the way to meet any Pnb.,Iie document that seems to be on the right s.1° is ot

That is how messages are got across. It pity that this message is so puny. But it Is surprising. Ideas are their treatment. 11