On Calling a Spade .
BY V. S. PRITCHETT.
[The other side of this question was put by Miss Rose Macaulay in last week's SPECTATOR.] , " WHAT I like in a writer," says a contemporary aphorist, "is not what he says but what he whispers." He takes pleasure in maiden insinuation fancy free. Spades are such a bore, he says. No spades for him, nor even agricultural implements. "I believe," he says while his brows arch like two black kittens and his finger wags roguishly, "I believe in calling a sp . . . a sp. • . ." High glee among the tea-cups. But the world to-day is not the tea-party it was. One half of it, in fact, would perpetuate the tea-party indefinitely, stirring hard with their whispering sp . . . s, while the other half is making a loud noise with spades outside. The hesitant novelist is in a dilemna ; shall he eke out an acidulated tea-cup wit and help it to continue its feast of euphemism and innuendo ; or, seeing the party stirring the dregs of a culture which is alfeady'beginning to have a museum interest, shall he go out and take up a spade? It is the choice between writing about words- and writing about things ; between catering for the literary drug market and writing what the times display to him.
Now these 'are revOlutionary times and the old drugs are becoming powerless ; and in revolutionary times; as Henri Barbusse has 'pointed out in his spirited book on Zola, there is in literature a return to nature, not to "beautiful "nature the soporific, but just to plain nature. There is a return to the spade in fact. And this return to nature means cutting through a century's tangle of words about words until we find what all the weaving whispering is about. Shocking as this may be, it is about the body ; all the more shocking because much excellent literature has been written in English without regarding the body as much more than a stage costume.
The first step in this revolution has now become a commonplace ; the body was idealized. So that I am informed it is now possible for book societies at their periodical tea parties to recommend a novel in Which two idealized bodies consummate love with or without benefit of clergy, providing that this take place not with lascivious convenience indoors but in antiseptic conditions in the clean open air outside. The Englishman must have his romantic ideal.
Imagine, however, the unhappy case of the novelist who was all for bodies but noted that there Were fat - bodies, gross bodies, diseased bodies, starving bodies, bodies mutilated by war and machines or comically doubled up on the channel steamer. Pirandello has written a story about such a man, for whom romance was always ruined through his observing such things. If Uncle Toby had his escarpment, may not a lady mayoress have chilblains ? What was the unhappy novelist to do ? It was his philanthropic conviction that he had to write of life as he saw it and not as the advertisements of the bungalow and Mayfair furnishing magazines would have liked him to see it. For he saw that if we are to have the idealized beautiful we must for symmetry's sake have the magnified ugly. There is a boom in the outsize " beauti- ful body" novel at the moment, and readers who have been transported in the contemplation of these gods must- not complain if their eyes are directed to the mire as well. It faut sauffrir pour etre belle is a sound literary maxim. The rough and the smooth in. the Modem novel must be taken together. .
There are other novelists—I speak still of those who; being aware of revolutionary times, are, therefore, committed to the body—who have descended from the heights of idealization to sea-level... To them—and this for English minds is a hard saying—the body is just the body. The test to apply to " horrid " passages in the works of these realists is, "Have the novels.a framework strong enough to stand their own realism?" The best of them have. There has probably been no great war book, yet such a novel as All Quiet on the Western Front had a frame which could well stand the horrors it described. A good many people at the tea-party were nauseated. The War would have nauseated them. It is probable, considering these books from a didactic point of view, that the detailed descriptions of exactly what happens when a bayonet goes into a man's stomach have been among the most successful arguments for pacifism which we have had. Novela with a purpose have to brutalise in order to break public complacency.
Still, the .cunning argument arrives, "Literature is not life." But no novelist in his senses thinks that it is ; he• knows the minutely detailed beautiful in. a .novel is no more " life " than the minutely ugly. Novelists worth their salt do not in the final analysis Set out to please readers but to note a series of experiences. When • Mr. L. A. G. Strong in The Garden described exactly what happened hi a horrible motor accident, or when Mr. Hemingway did not draw the line at entrails in an accOunt Of a bullfight, or when Mr. Hanley told what happened to stokers, they were denounced at the tea-party for describing things which the party would "rather not know about." Messrs. Strong, Hemingway and Hanky begged to point out that it was not for any man to decide what he shall see and know, and murmured the contemporary equivalent of "seeing life steadily and seeing it whole." With highly appropriate profes- sional arrogance they said, "If you don't like my goods try the reign of Edward the Peacemaker next door. -Contemporary writers write for contemporary nerves."
The question, "But is it Art and high Art ? " is a misleading one. For half the talk about Art in this connexion is humbug. The only possible reply is the purely tactical one, " Is the latest ' beautiful novel by reason of its 'beauty' high Art either ? " I should like to see the question applied to the Spanish novel, where English stomachs would have a pretty problem of realism to digest. The question is mainly an attempt to insinuate that the other man's meat is poison ; the attempt of a cult of a refinement founded on a literary tradition which no longer has any vital meaning for our times. Let anyone who doubts this write an objective story of slum life, not omitting that people starve in slums and are filthy; depraved and diseased as well as being, in spite of all, human, and he will have the greatest difficulty in finding a single magazine to publish it. That is to say, this tradition depends upon a tacit con-. spiracy to call what is soeially unpleasing,- artistically bad. This point of view has led to ludicrous extremes in the region of morals and ethics, as when a north- country clergyman expressed the quite popular opinion that " murder is cleaner than sex." Obviously a highly realistic- novelist is required to show, this gentleman exactly what a murder is. - - Disease and illness, another branch of horridness, are not often described by novelists arid rarely well. A novelist who has never even cut his finger will -do you a gory scene with gusto ; the dramatic element assists him. But there is no Obvious drama in disease and he commonly has no attitude to it. To him, as to the average man, disease is an-- insidious and inexplicable misfortune not to be thought of in case by thinking it is encouraged. And as in describing disease novelists tend to convey rather their own fear than the knowledge derived from exact observation, they spread abroad their own fears instead of giving us unperturbed pictures. Thomas Mann is the only modern novelist who has any consistent attitude to the subject and as he writes not to terrify but to illustrate his all-embracing hypothesis (that all of life is a state of disease) he has a framework which will stand the strain of his detail.
How much horridness our unconsciously revolutionary novelists may use on their return to nature is a question for themselves and their critics. There are no fixed quantities. Metre are general laws by which all books are measured willy nilly. In the meantime taking a glance at the weekly novels one is impressed less by their occasional touches of horridness than by their innocence of any of the bigger issues of our times. The unspeakable novel about unemployment for example has not been written and whether he writes didactically or otherwise the novelist who taeldes this subject will perforce have to be brutal to make the issues clear if he is writing to-day. It is a most unpleasant time to be living in, for as upheaval increases divisions between men become cruder. On one hand we have a touch of inverted priggishness in the novelist who thanks God he is more horrid in his novels than other novelists are, and can do no other, so help him ; on the other hand there are the battalions of the blameless but unreadable. Nobody, of course, believes in revolution for its own sake but the return to crude nature and the body will have become outmoded and will have exposed its limitations only when the hum ours, the ease as well as the beauties and horrors of the body private and politic can be written. It is consoling to hope for this Elizabethan future. In the meantime spades are trumps in good hands and bad.
Previous page
