Books of the Day
Advance in Formation
New Writing in Europe. By John Lehmann. (Pelican Books. 6d.)
MR. JOHN LEHMANN'S New Writing in Europe is the examination, explanation and history of a movement whose full effects have still to be judged. The book could hardly be clearer or better planned ; it was needed, and Mr. Lehmann, as editor of New Writing, is the ideal author for it. We owe a debt to the Pelican Books for initiating a series that fills wants and for issuing works of immediate interest at a price that prohibits no one from buying them. In fact,. these publications are one of the most hopeful signs of the times ; they are democratic in the most concrete sense. Up to lately, high prices made for a time-lag between a book's appearance and its reception by the mass of the people for whom it may have been meant.
The new writing movement of the 'thirties was the Romantic Movement of our century. Its start had a major poetic impetus ; its direction was, explicitly, political, though in most of the writers it had a subjective source. To call this movement literary would be, in its own view, to misname and tven stigmatise it : it was literary in only a secondary way. The writers' attitude to language was the inventor-mechanic's ; they undertook a de- carbonisation of language in the interests of swifter impact and better use—since the romantic start of the nineteenth century a new coating of falseness, over diction and feeling, had formed itself. And the movement, like all revolutions, was a reaction: it reacted against the analytic, static and on the whole rather prostrate mood of the 'twenties. In terms of achievement, the movement's greatest value was in attack: the norm of most writing in England was (and to an extent, sadly, remains) the norm of middle-class sensibility: art condoled with and flattered, but largely condoled with, the well-to-do. This traffic the writers of the new movement abjured completely—though their publica- tions came, by their own merit, to lie on the drawing-room tables of the inquisitive rich.
In essence, the movement was European: this Mr. Lehmann stresses, while giving, for English readers, most largely the English facets of it. It was active in France (with Malraux, Chamson, Giono) and in pre-Nazi Germany, in Spain with Sender, in Italy with Silone. Also, it was abreast with left-wing America, and it was towered over by an idea, its idea, of the U.S.S.R. The war in Spain was its crux and rallying point. To the dullest of general minds the war in Spain was a symbol ; to the writers it was not only this, it was, in degrees of closeness, the final explanatory experience. So much so that one is left with the impression that after Spain they reacted to nothing more. Mr. Lehmann writes of the Spanish war with a capital W and of the present war with a small one.
Do we owe to the movement our three poets in the purest and strongest English tradition—Auden, Spender, Day Lewis- oi do we owe the movement to these three poets? Actually, I doubt whether major poets have much to do with any movement at all. I believe a godlike irresponsibility and infidelity to be generic in the poet's make-up: such people cast off ideas that, long after they have forgotten or even denied them, continue to germinate in slower, dutiful minds. The movement, again, will bz remembered for its experiments in poetic drama—the Auden- I,herwood pieces, with their choruses and their power to epater (though actually the conventions were narrow, and the satire had a fairly limited range) and Stephen Spender's deeper and more memorable Trial of a judge. Mr. Lehmann gives a chapter to the extension, through the work of the Group and Unity theatres, of the movement's idea. . . . It would i.ppear that, at least in England, prose was the medium used by the movement with least effect: the prose-writers cut less ice than the poets and poet-dramatists—the exception to this has been Christopher Isherwood, whose prose Mr. Lehmann rightly calls " seductive," and who is, also, funny. Possibly some of the others, like high- minded women of the last generation, too completely ignored or despised the seductive arts. Possibly they assumed that the Interest of their subject—the lives of workers—should be self- evident. But should documentation wholly succeed illusion? In stories appears the American influence, but this had been felt, and used, before the movement began. There was also a conscious and desired convergence between reportage and creative narrative art, and while this produced some magnificent reportage—see Mr. Lehmann's quotations from books on the Spanish war—on the storyteller it had a flattening effect. On the whole, the movement's realists are unmoving: the happiest prose-adventures, also the most stylish, have been (as with Edward Upward and Rex Warner) into realms of Kafka-like fantasy. New Writing has been the headquarters of writers whose integrity has been absolute. But to integrity must be added dynamic power—and this has, rather, appeared in the
last decade in those other novelists Mr. Lehmann discusses under the well-found heading of " Allies and Independents "- James Hanley, Arthur Calder-Marshall and Graham Greene.
The movement had two more outstanding characteristics: it was youthful and it was masculine—the eclipse of feminine talent has been marked, and is not, I think, wholly to be deplored. But the obstinate and almost professional youthful- ness of the young Englishmen did set certain limitations about their art. Also, one finds in the prose an absence of background, a lack of power either to generalise or to synthesise, that seems to come from the abnegation of social experience. There is a lack of irony, a lack of michancere. There are no Julien Sorels among the movement, because there is, I suppose, no longer a beau monde. But there will always remain the tendency to idealise some world by which one does not by birth belong, and those of the young men who were of middle-class origin sought an idealised proletariat. Also, they became " intellectuals "- it is notable that Mr. Lehmann identifies intellectuals with writers—and, by grouping, located themselves, whether abroad or in England, inside the intellectuals' world : isolated, special, intensive, charged with personal feeling and, in the long run, as claustrophobic as any middle-class home. Would it be unfair to say of this group of writers that, though they changed their milieu, they never fully emerged, but remained life's delicate children after all?
And do movements move? Can writers proceed in groups— that is to say, past a point that is early reached? Whatever the answer be, the New Writing movement will always deserve honour for its altruism, its energy and the defenceless honesty
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