Richard Luckett on a Marxist in town and country
"The old men say their fathers told them that soon after the fields were left to themselves a change began to be visible. It became green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended, so that all the country looked alike." So runs the opening paragraph of Richard Jefferies's After London, in which Jefferies, whose feeling for and response to nature was of an intensity that has hardly been equalled, had his revenge on the metropolis where he was compelled by economic necessity to earn his living. Some vast, unidentified catastrophe devastates the city, and in five slow but surely moving and magnificently detailed chapters we learn how cultivation ceases, and the forces of nature slowly assert themselves, until London becomes a noisome swamp at the end of an inland sea which floods the valley of the Thames.
It was when he had completed his geographical and historical account of the aftermath of the catastrophe that Jefferies found himself in difficulty. He had always hated cities, but by the time that he wrote After London in 1885 he hated the squirearchical tyrannies of the countryside also. He could exorcise the metropolis, but he was too realistic to evade the likely structure of the society that would arise when it had gone: small heavily defended settlements in a wilderness, feudally organised — in short, 'barbarism There would be civilisation of a kind, albeit tenuous, but it could only survive in the security offered by the forts, whose barons might be relatively cultured but were far more likely to be philistine bullies. Having established this, Jefferies failed to develop his account of the problem. Ill, short of time, and hamstrung by his preconceptions about the expectations of the novel-reading public he finished the book in a manner which is often disturbingly reminiscent of Rider Haggard. After numerous adventures the hero, Felix, becomes king of a nation of shepherd-tribes, whom he finally leaves in order to return to the significantly named Aurora, his beloved. But this ending, for all that it is perfunctorily set down, is not without its interest and ironies: the nomadic grazing economy of the tribes is the least capitalist of any of the organised societies that we encounter in the book; at the same time Felix, who sympathises with this, attains his kingship in part through his superior technological knowledge. Equally illuminating is the note of self-absorption on which the book concludes.
I offer this account of After London, because, perhaps paradoxically, it serves as a considerable clarification of much that happens in Raymond Williams's The Country and the City.* In the first place it indicates something of the area and terms of his concern: the relationship between the country and city as seen by British writers from the sixteenth century to the present, and the realism or lack of it inherent in that vision. Secondly, it reveals the tensions implicit in such an endeavour: Jefferies could not decide
whether he was writing a book about the world as he wanted it to be or the world as it all too palpably was, and he had a further problem, in that the vehicle for all this was supposedly a novel. Dr Williams, it seems to me, has similar difficulties, with the difference that in his case the apparent vehicle is that of literary history thematically conceived. A third clarification offered by After London is evident if the book is used as a test case: how does Dr Williams's reading of it compare with the one I have proposed?
In fact he has little to say, calling it " a powerful but acrid vision of the metropolis reclaimed by the swamp and the reappearance of a woodland feudal society (the ' rural ' equivalent of William Morris's 'medievalism ')." This view is advanced in the context of the "strange relation to an active delight in trees and flowers and birds" of "a virtually unconscious extension of the values and attachments of an unjust and arbitrary society. "In other words, Dr Williams condemns Jefferies for not realising precisely those difficulties that, in my opinion, he no tably does realise. This is surely a significant point. After London is for Dr Williams a handy illustration of a thesis: that the writer who feelingly celebrates the beauties of nature is often blankly unfeeling towards the injustices of the social system which obtains in that countryside. In his endeavour to tag this argument with a work of literature he has unhappily chosen a book which, closely examined, may well be taken to prove the exception to his thesis. Any assessment of the literary qualities or deficiencies of this book is significantly absent, yet as it happens the strengths and weaknesses of the novel as a work of art exist in a demonstrable relationship to the author's social concerns.
It is unreasonable to labour one instance of carelessness or insensitivity at the expense of a study which is in general careful and, given certain important qualifications, sensitive. Dr Williams's range is great, his acquaintance with English literature formidable, and in his chapters on Dickens and Hardy he shows that he is capable of criticism of a high order. Furthermore his honesty is admirable; his book is prefaced by an explanation of his motives for exploring his chosen theme, and it concludes with an attempt to summarise what he has learnt, in personal terms, from his investigation. In some ways these sections are the most stimulating, not least because they reveal precisely that dichotomy of feeling we have already observed in Jefferies s love of the countryside and simultaneoys hatred of the social order that dominates it. Jefferies, however, having rejected both the metropolitan solution and the system which he saw as its most probable substitute, retreated into mysticism; Dr Williams marches on, sustained by his belief in the ultimate possibility of social justice.
It will be seen from this that Dr Williams is above all a moralist. His insistent demand is for truth; writers who write about the country (or the city, one supposes, but whilst he o hard on the rural sentimentalists he neglects their numerous urban counterparts) must not confuse either their own nostalgia or that of other people with the,:realities of village life and agricultural conditions; the good old days are a mirage in the mind's retrospect and onlY serve to emphasise the failure of those who fall back on the idea because they are unable to think in positive terms. With these criteria he conducts his enquiry, censuring not merely those writers who present what he considers to be false truths about rural life, but also, implicitly, those readers who fail to discern the conditioning social realities present in the works of the writers who we may deservedly admire. His assessments of those factors that make up the reality ofrural life are open to question, but his argument is consistent and stringent. Cobbett christened the ornamental copses planted by landscape-gar; deners in the course of 'improvements "cockney-clumps "; Dr Williams puts an axe to their literary equivalent with grim determi nation. The difficulty arises when we decide that a given clump is better than cockney, when an artist is aware that his own view point is partial, but is content that this should be so, since his real aim is not the transcrip
tion of social conditions but the presentation of a state of mind or the adumbration of a reality determined by non-economic factors.
I do not believe that Dr Williams is unaware of this. But since his morality is essen tially that prescribed by dialectical material
ism he is concerned, in all sincerity, to beat certain devils down. An expression which he uses more than once is "bad faith," and as a Marxist he employs it in the sense of a failure to follow the economic argument through and to accept its full implications. It is cer tainly not a charge that can be levelled against Dr Williams, always provided that one is content to accept this usage. If, however, one prefers to regard it in another way, then it becomes more than a little double , edged. For in dealing with works of art it is surely necessary to bear in mind standards of artistic excellence, to accept the possibility of some kind of aesthetic ordering that is not subservient to social justice because it has more to do with the way we judge than with
what we judge. Guards in concentration camps dextrous in Bach and with an encyclo
paedic knowledge of Shakespeare are neither here not there; judgements about expression are separable from judgements about con tent, and in our consideration of works of art we are largely (though never exclusively) concerned with questions of expression. A
further, related judgement concerns seriousness and in a work of art we are usually prepared to recognise that seriousness can operate rather differently from the way that it does in real life. This Dr Williams appears unwilling to admit; he offers us dull Crabbe, excruciating James Thomson (B. V.) and boring Gissing as though these contained the germs of literary excellence; he treats passages from Ulysses with a gravity that is next to ludicrous. Pastoral yields up practically nothing to him, though on counter-pastoral he is illuminating and worthwhile. In making this criticism — and I believe it to be a major one — it should be stressed that it stems not so much from Dr Williams's failure to respond in one area as from the magnitude of his response in another. His theme, after all, is one of the utmost importance; it is the essence of much that is deeply thought and felt, as well as of much fashionable cant. In the noise, dirt and solitude of cities we long for the opportunities for peace and community provided by the village, and in the circumstances of such community we are prone to believe that there may be a cure for many of our characteristic evils. Dr Williams takes the argument further, pointing out the world's need for agricultural produce and indicating the consumption of food as a basic index of human quality. In so doing he seeks to rescue the country-lover from the charge of sentimentality and to make an assertion about human needs. He criticises socialist countries as freely as those with freeenterprise capitalism, and he relates his argument firmly to the requirements of the third world. He realises that Marxism has a damaging ambiguity where the relations between town and country are concerned. His study is as much tract as literary history, and there are places where it can only be understood as such. I have already commended Dr Williams for his honesty, and not the least of my reasons is that when he ends his book with an abjuration to us to rally against capitalism and thus defend the environment he makes 'explicit much that has been implicit earlier. Nevertheless this is not the whole story. Williams's wishes depend for their fulfilment on the possibility that the masses can be persuaded to accept his assumptions: that equality is not merely desirable within nations but between nations, that environment is more important than possessions, even that a decline in our standard of living may be a social good. In thinking of this I am reminded of those bleak passages with which Edmund Wilson ended Upstate, his splendid and moving journar of life at his holiday home in the country of Northern New York. In them Wilson, a firm democrat, seemingly accepts that the destruction of the countryside which he knew and loved is inevitable, and that his regrets are the natural but irrelevant emotions of a member of a doomed class. This opinion is worth recalling because it raises the question as to whether Dr. Williams's feelings are not equally otiose. The argument from class won't do, unless it is modified into one from status, since the two men are from totally different backgrdunds. It is sufficient that both men have in common a delight in natural creation and the rural community. Both share certain social goals, though they would be unlikely to agree on the means by which these should be attained. But these goals are defined in moral abstracts — ' equity ', ' good ' — and the concrete vision of these goals is totally different. For Wilson the end is distant, advance towards it will be onerous, and in the process much that he values will vanish. Williams is prepared to argue that the things that he values and can describe themselves represent the end of progress. His vision is the more attractive and, I would say, by far the more unlikely. The paradox is that it embodies judgements that are surely aesthetic, and aesthetic in a fairly restricted sense; it is as though he is prepared to accept in the formation of his social vision qualities which he rejects when he encounters them in the context of a work of literature. This in turn can be brought back to the way in which he misses the point of After London: Jefferies's sense that what he -wanted was unobtainable comes too near the weak point in Williams's own argument.
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