• Thinking pink BOOKS
MARTIN SEYMOUR-SMITH
`Commitment' deserves to be relegated to the ' status of pseudo-term: it raises a host of questions, -yet settles none. In The Writer and Commitment (1961) John Mander tried to argue that there is nothing specifically left-wing about the notion of commitment. This was -dis- ingenuous, for his book amounted to little more than left-wing propaganda, and made no - attempt to deal with, let alone define, any kind of hypothetical, non-leftist 'committed' litera- ture. The fact is that the term, now outmoded, has been employed only by left-wing writers, mostly undistinguished, as a vague and essen- tially extra-literary desideratum. What is open to criticism is not at• all the leftness of these ' writers, which is irrelevant, but their crude in- sistence upon their own monopoly of concern for humanity. 'Oh, give me the novel! Let me hear what the novel says,' exclaimed D. H. LaWrence in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine. 'As for the novelist,' he added, `he is usually a dribbling liar.' This is typically inelegant and even ill-tempered, but it nicely exposes the ghastly critical naivete of the so- called committed writer in England.
'Regrettably, Dr M. Adereth's solemn Corn' 'Winter', in Modern French Literature (Gollancz 42s), a well-intentioned study of Peguy, Aragon and Sartre, adds little to the subjectAt might have done so, for the notion of commitment in French literature is altogether a more serious matter—as much more serious as is, say, the French Communist party than its ludicrous British counterpart. But Dr Adereth never makes a serious attempt to define what he means by commitment, and therefore does not bring the term into a significant universe of discourse. At one point, in a discussion of Sartre's essay on Baudelaire, we are told, `My own view is that, in writing great poetry, Baudelaire partly made up for his own un- worthiness, inasmuch as he expressed . . . the mood of his generation. . . . I am naive enough to believe that his art would have gained im- mensely in human greatness if it had not been marred by the personality it reveals.' The criti- cal quality of this muddled and puritanical statement is self-evident. How much greater Blake would have been, one feels like adding, if his art had not been marred by his dyspathy with his generation.
Nothing Dr Adereth writes about Peguy persuades me that this writer is relevant to his argument, such as it is. What Peguy achieved in literature has less to do with his political beliefs than with his psychology, which Dr Adereth more or less ignores. Aragon, whose fiction he overrates, and whose wartime verse has perhaps not much more permanence than John Pudney's, is neither here nor there. But Sartre is a different matter: few would deny that he is both an exciting thinker and, at the very least, an interesting novelist—one in an altogether higher category than Aragon.
Here the author misses a critical oppor- tunity: he might have pointed out how, although Sartre's philosophical arguments in favour of commitment are formidable, possess- ing an intellectual stamina that we are not used
to from left-wing litterateurs in Great Britain, all his dramatic and fictional achievements have been-made in spite of it. When Sartre -is at his best, the novel—or the play—takes over from the polemical intellect of the 'dribbling' novelist himself: his imagination becomes engaged with its material. Nothing less, in literature, will do. And yet the quality of Sartre's. polemic is finer than anything comparable that we have ex- perienced in this country.
What committed writer can we put against - Sartre—or even Aragon? Christopher Logue? Arnold Wesker? Bernard Kops? Adrian Mit- chell? One does not wish to deprecate these entertainers; but the comparison is educative. Let us try to move into territory slightly less embarrassing: critics recently paid lip-service to Alan Sillitoe's novel, A Tree on Fire, which is certainly committed—and in the worst sense. Here is a good example of a writer who has decided to sacrifice what imagination he possesses to the abstract ideas that obsess -him, so that his characters are absurd marionettes limping on the ends of strings that credibility has long since broken: a writer who should have been much more severely castigated than he was for his surrender to his own sterile, unthought-out, anarchistic irritations. My own or anyone else's sympathy with such irritations cannot absolve this author for having written an atrociously silly, immature and humourless novel—an insult to life as it is lived—which reads not like fiction but like a series of adolescent fantasies. The point is simply that, as D. H. Lawrence insisted, the novel has to be better than the novelist.
But no one will accuse Mr Sillitoe of being a thinker; Mr David Caute is another matter. His nihilistic The Decline of the West (1966) was a powerful book, perhaps the nearest we have yet had in English to a genuinely Sartrian work. It makes Mr Sillitoe's latest attempt look puerile; but is it a novel? The lurid power of some of its scenes arises not from the known commitments of the excellent historian David Caute, but from a savagely destructive urge operating at a more primitive, and more imaginatively interesting, level. So far as Mr Caute's conscious intentions are concerned, the successful parts of The Decline of the West are accidental, one might say incidental: some- times, in individual scenes, the characters take over, and behave independently of any theory. But Mr Caute's view of history ultimately proves stronger than his imagination: the result is a series of brilliant cameos, strung too didactically together. You cannot write a novel
to prove something: if your novel succeeds, then you will inevitably end by proving some- thing else.
Mr Sillitoe resembles what ;Gibed Graves twenty-five years ago called the early Cecil Day-Lewis: 'a simple-minded Red.' He has , sacrificed the riches of his imagination for an obsession. Mr Caute, on the contrary, is a subtle and accomplished thinker who dares not surrender to his imaginative impulses, because —I think—their apparently destructive, non- . political power frightens him. This is a pecu, liarly English predicament. Messrs Sillitoe and Cattle are in no sense important novelists— they merely happen to be the most respectable current examples of what happens to English writers when they decide to commit them- selves.
How do more notable English novelists of this century stand in regard to the notion of commitment? When Conrad wrote about politi- cal events he clearly did so from the stand- , point of a novelist, a man apart. Ford Madox Ford as a man had all sorts of poses, and was a liberal humanitarian; The Good Soldier, . the Tietjens tetralogy and his other best books are all totally detached. D. H. Lawrence him- self failed as a novelist when his beliefs cot.- rupted his imagination (Lady Chatterley's Lover is the most glaring example); certain of his short stories triumph because they . seemed to him, in the matter of length, to be incidental to his message. The warmth and humanity of Joyce's comic genius in Ulysses finally overrides the complexity of his literary;. intentions (upon which American professors nevertheless love humourlessly to dilate). Mr. Anthony Powell, one of the most distinguished novelists alive; has been described by Mr Julian Symons as 'high Tory'; but might this be perhaps a not quite appropriate description of a certain brand of good-mannered, sardonic detachment? A Dance to the Music of Time is committed to nothing but truthfulness in respect of the characters it contains; it might well deal with a committed novelist more kindly, and more devastatingly, than any critic could.
Sartre's philosophical intensity about the need for the writer to be committed (anti-com- munists are 'swine') is without humour; but it- does him far less damage, as thinker and artist, than it would any English writer. His fervour. is Gallic, with a kind of humour built into it;. his language is French. For all his atheistic rationalism, he has had hallucinations of lobsters—something a good English marxist could never admit to.
What prevents the English writer, as a writer if not as a man, from being committed to left, right, centre, or to anything else, is the genius of his native language. His beliefs are, of course, important to him; but the imagination is holy. The magnificently indefinable and unique entity of the English language exists to test the worth of, and to challenge, all dogmas and abstrac- tions, the proponents of which often abuse it. The words take over; the purpose is truth. The right words in the right order destroy, or at the least correct and modify, the predilections of the men who write them. A man is not less concerned about the sufferings of humanity because, under the spell of his imagination, he forgets his own anger. All that is truly part of English literature—and drama—by definition eschews all commitment: to the extent that a writer remains intellectually committed in what he writes, he fails.
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