Home
Away
Far Away

 

The English Literary Scene (1966)

It seems odd that authors so rarely record the tougher realities of the literary life, especially since one’s most attentive readers are invariably other writers who, one supposes, would like to know in the most honest terms how their peers work, think and feel. In print, writers will speak to no end of their non-literary activities; but in private conversation, particularly with other writers, they are more inclined to discuss such professional problems as the difficulties in getting decently paid, the lethargy and/or stinginess of publishers and editors, and the availability of easy, quick, lucrative, uninvolving side work. Perhaps writers feel that to commit themselves in print on such practical matters tarnishes some unrealistic image of themselves as disinterested savants; however, writers are generally as practical, if not as retrospectively embittered, as anyone else who feels the world undervalues his training and labor. Readers should know that these seemingly ephemeral matters are more important than they customarily think; for the life the writer leads, as well as the structure and values and tone of his literary society, can both shape and limit the possibilities of what one can read. The report that follows largely discusses critical writing since it is the segment of the literary business that I know best.

My presupposition is that the structural customs of a literary scene—the ways things happen—considerably determines the writer’s career; it follows that the cast of his career influences his intellectual style and tone. The first question is how an English literary critic, in contrast to an American, initiates his trade? One eminent, politically radical English critic informed me that every successful literary journalist he knew had “come down” from either Oxford or Cambridge. When I expressed shock at a custom that excluded the majority of English graduates, he dismissed my objection, assuming, as most Oxbridge men do, that a bright young man simply cannot “get a good education” anywhere else. (In fact, there are a few non-Oxbridge reviewers such as Anthony Burgess and Walter Allen; but even they assume their colleagues are Oxbridge until they discover contrary exceptions. Most of these incipient critics begin by writing for Oxbridge undergraduate magazines or newspapers; and since these publications are frequently scanned by writers, publishers and editors in London (who are likewise Oxbridge, of course), a promising undergraduate may receive a letter inviting him to “drop by” the next time he comes to London. Should he get on well with the older man, the latter may offer to find a publisher for the young man’s usually unwritten book, or produce an assignment from a friendly editor, or even give the young man one of his own commissions; probably the older man will take the younger to a gathering where he will meet other writers and editors. Should the older man take a liking to his junior, the former man, in short, will launch the younger out of fairly generous motives and the younger will be forever indebted for his aid. As a smaller percentage of Englishmen receive post-high school education, its literature-reading populace is less in size than America’s; and as the channels for entering into the literary trades are narrow, so its sea of literary writers is remarkably small.

If a young man at Oxbridge is not discovered as an undergraduate, his chances are not yet gone; for from time to time officials or teachers at his university will meet London editors. The latter will offer his standard gambit of his need for bright young men; the former will reply with the names of his favorite ex-students and fellows. The editor then asks the budding writer if he would like to contribute, probably inviting him out to lunch or cocktails and only rarely asking for a sample of his work. (Old English adage: “To recognize a man’s existence is to make him your friend.”) If the young man had instead approached the editor directly, either in person or by mail, he would have had a smaller, if not negligible, chance of getting the same commission; for a strong personal recommendation is a more persuasive reference than actual evidence of writing talent. For an unknown writer to submit an unsolicited review in England is comparable to dropping pennies in a well. Not only are a remarkably large number of young writers the sons of established figures, who bestow not only inherited talent but a precedent for solicitous interest, but these sons suffer no embarrassment, as a comparable American surely would, at echoing their father’s characteristic styles and attitudes (e.g., Auberon Waugh, John Fuller, David Pryce-Jones, et al.). The elements common to both these patterns are the Oxbridge ambience and the practice of established men serving as intermediaries between young aspirants and other older ones. I have met a few English critics who tell me they got started simply by writing to an editor and asking to review books; however, these writers are without exception rather old, and evidence suggests that the system is nowadays more constricted than before.

In America, in contrast, nearly every writer of note I know, whether of fiction or criticism, was discovered by mail—by approaching editors he had never met and with whom he probably had no mutual acquaintances, with an unsolicited manuscript he had prepared in advance. Even later in their careers, many, if not most, active American critics, unlike English, write for editors they have not met before (and may never meet at all); and they know personally only a few, if any, of the magazine’s other contributors. (There are, of course, a few known exceptions to this pattern; however, most remain, years later, so conspicuously the servile proteges of the men who originally launched them that they never achieve an identity of their own.) The most reasonable way to account for this is the peculiar structure of the American literary scene—the absence of a continuous cultural community, the diversity of writers’ social and cultural backgrounds, the general habit of residing outside established literary centers, the absence of writers who are sons or nephews or sons-in-law of other writers, and most important, the American belief that a record of proven achievement is more persuasive than personal references.

Most crucial, as they structure the writer’s possibilities, are the numerous more-or-less independent quarterlies which frequently discover, nearly always by mail, the unknown and talented. True, the editors of American quarterlies, so overworked and under-staffed and -paid, are so deluged with manuscripts that they cannot give every one the careful scrutiny it deserves while others represent nothing more than closed coteries; yet from time to time, most of them do discover promising writers. Indeed, most of America’s major novelists, poets and critics today first published in one of these little magazines. Although groups in New York and/or Boston have claimed the laurel of “literary establishment” or have had a claim made on their behalf, American culture has a multiplicity of establishments, each with its own idols and hacks, novelists and magazines, hierarchies of reputations and acknowledged antagonists. Moreover, no American establishment has absolute power, even on its own turf. As the American novelist Barbara Probst Solomon noted, “It is also true that one can [live in New York], do one’s own work and be published without having any contact with the literary mafia of Morningside Heights.” This pluralism, achieved largely through a proliferation of pressure groups, makes America an intellectual “freemarket” to an extent inconceivable to the English writer, conditioned to a system of interlocking acquaintances. (Indicatively, in A. Alvarez’s post-Kennedy survey for the BBC, reprinted as Under Pressure, all but a few of the American writers live in the New York area; only an Englishman or a Parisian, could have such a parochial view of the American literary scene.)

In practice, then, the young Englishman must personally know persons of authority—whom you know and who you are— while the American must have something to show for himself— what you know and what you’ve done. This contrast produces and parallels other differences. First, the fact that a young Englishman with fortunate connections can so easily start a career explains why there are so many actively publishing critics in their twenties in England and so few in America. The Englishman is given the opportunity to develop his talent in print; the American must mature before he can ever reach print. Secondly, the American writer thinks, perhaps naively, he can live anywhere without risking intellectual isolation or exclusion from the possibility of publishing. The greatest modem American novelist, William Faulkner, spent most of his life in Oxford, Mississippi, which is culturally comparable to New York as the Orkney Islands are to London; and the permanent addresses of some of our greatest writers seem almost a parody of provincial rusticity: Pine Grove Mills, Pa., Covington, La., Missoula, Montana, Wellfleet, Mass., Amenia, New York. Most important, whereas the English writer seems to believe that forces and circumstances outside his control shape his future, the American writer knows that man makes his own destiny, that his own limitations are his biggest enemy; and this is, to me, the decisive spiritual difference between English and American culture.

In addition to diversifying the culture, the numerous American quarterlies provide the sole regular outlet for the intelligent, 5,000-word-plus essay. One can, with some reason, make jokes about this form—so often a reworking of the one-hour classroom or public lecture—but it is still the vehicle for some of America’s most influential and definitive critical and social thought, as well as one that offers intellectuals the opportunity to test hypotheses before expanding them into a full-length book. England, in contrast, has few outlets for prose pieces longer than 2,000 words and shorter than a book. Little magazines, American-style, are few and far between in Britain; many of them do not publish essays. Of the few that do, most are conspicuously, if not notoriously, the vehicle of a coterie of acquaintances and, sometimes, their acquaintances. What happens, of course, is that disaffiliated writers do not attempt to express anything that would require a 5,000-word form; and unless they wish to embellish their notions into a book, their thoughts go unrecorded. (One can rightly conjecture that, if James Baldwin were an unknown Englishman today, he could never have published “Down at the Cross”; nor could T.S. Eliot, if likewise unknown, now place “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”) This lack of outlets for extended work explains why English writers, even when given the opportunity, are rarely able to provide an effectively well-organized, well-balanced 5,000 word essay; most pieces written at this length, such as the front-page reviews in The Times Literary Supplement, indicatively have three distinct parts, 1500-words or so in length, divided by horizontal lines of dots to pull the sprinting writer (and readers) across transitions that a more experienced middle-distance essayist would have made with ease. Moreover, just as this absence of outlets discourages a certain kind of comprehensive argument, so it also prevents perspicacious analyses of underlying forces—by the time the English writer has explained the problem’s surface, he has simply run out of space. Indeed, the few contemporary critics of note who can successfully manage the longer form, such as Frank Kermode, Sir Herbert Read or F. R. Leavis, developed the knack by writing either for the two great English quarterlies, both long-defunct, The Criterion and Scrutiny, or for American little magazines.

The literary sections of American magazines are run differently from those in England; and this difference in operations shapes contrasts in product. In general, an American magazine informs a reviewer that it would like to have his contributions; and then he generally goes to the latest fat number of Publishers Weekly, looks over the advertisements for forthcoming books, decides which ones he would like to review, and sends out lists to the various magazines that solicit his interest. Quite often, he makes advance notes, thinking that a book is not really worth the effort unless he strongly likes or dislikes it or believes he can use it as a touchstone to say something important about the writer or the subject; and more often than not, his review will show signs of such long-standing interest. In America, from time to time, an editor will ask a reviewer to cover a book of the editor’s choice; but this does not happen too often, and it is a practice that many, such as myself, try to discourage.

In England, the editor taps a writer to be a regular reviewer; and although the writer may ask to review a certain book (or make checks on a list of what the editor feels are important in forthcoming books), his requests are not generally honored. Editors, so one told me, suspect reviewers who are eager to do a particular book, fearing that they will either want to condemn it unmercifully (which is the sort of review English weekly editors, unlike American, do not like to run, partly because of England’s more stringent libel laws), or gush with excess enthusiasm over the work of a friend. Therefore, in practice, most English reviewers receive books in which they are only faintly interested, about which they are unprepared to say anything uncommon; but, rather than return the book and lose their editor’s confidence, they offer either half-hearted words of praise or repeat currently standard opinions, whatever they may be. This practice explains why so many English reviews give the impression that the writer is reporting a received judgment not particularly his own or giving a summary in lieu of his own insights and analyses—without, in Mrs. Leavis’s phrases, “as a literary critic, any individuality, personal taste or character.” (Indeed, in my own experience, nearly every review that editors found unconventional in these respects, even if they commissioned it, went recompensed but unpublished.) This practice also explains, albeit only partially, how a supposedly serious English critic could write clichés an American would find beneath contempt. One promising young Oxford don, Christopher Ricks, closed his review of Angus Wilson’s Late Call with such unashamed puffery as, “It is a novel that cares, and it made me care.” Although reviewing hardly resembles boxing, the sport offers the appropriate analogies. An American reviewer catches the book as he leans forward, swinging his weight behind a premeditated plan; the English reviewer, more over-worked, catches the book on the back of his heels and, dazed, directs his facility toward getting rid of it as soon as possible.

Just as the situation of the English reviewer forces him to be hasty and methodical, so the American writer can exploit his more favorable relationship to be original and riskily provocative. Furthermore, since the American critic writes so much less than the British reviewer and since his editors are less inclined to use him regularly, he tries very hard to stand out from the page, assuming, sometimes almost desperately, that no one will ever notice him unless he distinguishes his work from the mass of prose. The Englishman knows he has an audience; the American feels the need to make one for himself. This explains why an American’s ironies, for instance, are often outrageous and barbed, rather than the English way of measured and considerate, in addition to why many of the best American essayists—Norman Mailer, Leslie A. Fiedler, Stanley Edgar Hyman, John Simon—are so much more trenchant and witty than all British writers and why they achieve an intensity of style and argument unknown in England since D.H. Lawrence’s notices. Secondly, the American reviewer tends to make a different kind of comment than the English. As the English critic Alan Brien perceptively noted:

Too often a review here is little more than a vivid and colorful description of the work under discussion, plus a few personal expressions of preference and prejudice as a last-minute footnote. But too often a review there (in the States) is so much-devoted to arguing out the nature of drama or the purposes of criticism.

That is, the American reviewer uses the book’s publication as an “occasion” to say some things he feels are more important than a mere judgment—to comment upon large questions the book raises or make some general observations. Rather than accepting the book at its face value, the American extracts significances, often analyzing an argument or achievement in some depth. Especially in the quarterlies, so shameless is the American critic about using the review as a springboard that many of the essays he collects into books started their life as mere reviews.

The English reviewer seems to want to blend into the page, perhaps marginally differentiating himself, especially if he is young, by a slight sharpness of tone; even if he has some specific thoughts to express, he is not obvious about his point, often muffling his message beneath a patter of polite rhetoric and shy didacticism. John Bayley’s remarks on V. S. Pritchett (“our best critic of fiction today”) epitomize these values: “He is also one of the rare critics who lets us continue the argument and draw conclusions for ourselves, instead of insisting every step of the way.” Whereas the serious American critic fears dullness and conspicuous soft-heartedness, the English reviewer feels the worst sins are sloppiness of style, heavy-handedness of manner and opinions that might be considered evidence of rudeness or bad taste. During his year editing Encounter in the middle fifties, Dwight Macdonald observed “an exaggerated fear of being ‘heavy’ or ‘boring,’ “even though, he adds, “some ideas are “heavy” by nature, often the greatest.” The British ideal seems to be as Q.D. Leavis noted of E.M. Forster, “a balance between a critical and a charming stance.”

The Englishman presumes that a book per se deserves sympathy; thus, if it is bad or dull, his negative words are rarely harsh enough to offend, as perfunctory praise will never be as implicitly murderous as he sometimes believes. The Englishman strives to appear clean, cool, personally uncommitted, competent and efficient; and should he deviate sharply from current opinion, he offers profuse apologies to the other respected minds who have commented differently on the subject. Indicatively, what Raymond Williams calls the typically English “habit of tentative statement” characterizes Williams’s own writing to a tortuous degree; and when the British drama critic Bernard Levin made a brutally acute remark about Sir Alec Douglas-Home on television, the British press rebuked not the content of Levin’s statement but its outrageous manner. That kind of demolition job so frequent in American quarterlies is rare in England, for no writer is strongly attacked until he is so prominent that the hot pan affects neither him, his following, his ideas nor the reputation of the attacker. Leavis on Snow, Trevor-Roper on Toynbee and A.J.P. Taylor, and so forth—these polemics are exchanged primarily among eminent and successful men on behalf of their established cliques or viewpoints. (To my mind, the image of English intellectual life as rife with controversies, proffered as recently as 1963 in Ved Metha’s Fly and the Fly Bottle, is as untenable as the English image of America as totally conformist.) “What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed” is an English virtue and an American vice.

In contrast, the best American reviewers attempt to be primary critics, thinking that since they deliver the opening comment on a controversial book they can perhaps initiate or sway established opinion; and they pride themselves on polemical deviation from the horde of other reviewers. English figures, even the best of them, appear to think of themselves as secondary figures, at the service of the primary force of reigning continuity. Even in The New York Review of Books, the featured essays come from Americans; the competent “filler” from Englishmen. The American critic at his best strives to be intense, rather than fluid, often concocting long sentences that gather choppily, rather than gracefully flowing. The American’s style impresses itself upon readers, rather than striking notes of diffidence. The American wants to stand out from these pages, rather than blending into it. These differences in intellectual style perhaps account for why so many eminent American writers live more conservatively than their styles would suggest—William Faulkner, Marshall McLuhan, Herman Melville—and why, conversely, some major English writers, so I am told, are far more eccentric in deed than in print.

Although the existence of Established Opinion in England is apparent to everyone, it is difficult for an outside observer to discern its precise origins. Quite often, for instance, I asked who was the first to suggest that Angus Wilson was England’s major contemporary novelist—an opinion accepted in most established circles (but not in America or on the continent)—and my respondents could offer either no explanation or a reply as evasive as, “No one. It just happened, because his novels are so good.” The reason for such mystery is that primary opinion in England is not usually exposed to the public; it is thrashed out at private parties which, unlike those in America, are really attended by the prime shapers of opinion. These prime movers are few in number, and many of the few double or triple in role among the following functions: university teacher, translator, BBC producer, publishers’ reader (if not director), literary adviser, reviewer, review editor, television and/or radio panelist, juror of prizes, Arts Council official; and the power of certain British writers is, by American standards, incredibly concentrated.

In America, primary highbrow opinion can be traced to public outlets, usually quarterlies; and as there are a multiplicity of quarterlies, one hierarchy of potentially primary opinion must compete with the others. Thus, it takes more time in America for primary opinion to enter the mainstream of a culture—usually signaled by its unanimous acceptance in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times Book Review; and even then, it succeeds only in a distorted and compromised form. Much of the currently established literary opinion in America was, for instance, first posited in Partisan Review some twenty years ago; and certain writers who appeared extensively in Partisan at that time—Bellow, Mary McCarthy, Sartre—are now the reigning luminaries; similarly, Faulkner’s reputation had essentially coterie origins before it became general currency. What separates England from America in this respect is, once again, the American pluralism; no one group in America can ever control or even influence enough of the media to foist its enthusiasm upon a large public without the implicit consent of other hierarchies. In England, one is amazed to learn how many eminent native writers, methodically praised by their peers, are rarely read at home and never abroad. Had Kingsley Amis not written Lucky Jim, he would be in the same sad situation as John Wain.

Paradoxically, the English scene’s overarching blandness makes it a sure target for the easiest form of rebellion—a noisy rejection of pervasive puffiness. Indeed, almost all English literary rebellions follow an established pattern: The rebels attack the obvious dullness (that everyone acknowledges but rarely mentions) of the established theatre-cinema-critics-periodicals; but as an alternative they offer little more specific than their youth and the liveliness of their minds and styles. When attacked by the squares, they develop both a sharper tone and the nucleus of a following. Once they succeed in establishing a beach-head from which to launch their own shots, the rebels get a chance to offer their own notions of salvation, which invariably prove untenable, prosaic or irrelevant. So Kenneth Tynan’s rebellion expired on Brecht and political literature, Lindsay Anderson’s on prosaically realistic films, F.R. Leavis’s on D.H. Lawrence, and David Holbrook’s on mature married love. Nowadays, John Osborne, still in his middle thirties, lives in Belgravia, and his wife is the drama critic for one of the posh Sunday papers that his protagonist, Jimmy Porter, threw down in disgust. To another posh Sunday sheet Osborne himself occasionally contributes his spikey salvos (perhaps because nowhere else would they have such huge publicity and, thanks to deflection, so little impact). “One and all,” Alan Pryce-Jones once cynically quipped, “show a tendency to turn into the same literary man. I fully expect, before I die, to find Wesker and Pinter and the rest living in vicarages, walking the downs cape on back.”

England’s cultural blandness makes the rebel’s career more facile; for given less competition in rebellion than, say, an American or French radical would encounter, he cannot help but marshal a standing audience of dissidents and gain both more confidence and following than his ideas may deserve. (In London thrive several conspicuously rebellious American writers, some almost parodying a cowboy act, who would merely blend into the crowd in New York.) Once the rebel writer in England has a taste of acclaim, London culture assimilates him with an unerring efficiency, perhaps because neither he nor it can conceive of a sustained, anti-establishment existence. In contrast, I cannot imagine an English off-beat writer as old and eminent as Kenneth Rexroth pursuing a similarly incipiently impolite, defiant, shamelessly modest bohemian existence; and the image of Rexroth (or Allen Ginsberg, or Gary Snyder, or Judith Malina) dining at a Lord’s table is a pleasant joke. The gnawing question, then, is why do the English rebels become marooned and/or compromised so easily? The obvious answer posits a failure of personal character, but so individual a cause hardly explains a cultural tendency so unanimous.

All this resistance to sustained disagreement partially accounts for the general unanimity of English critical opinion a-cross the entire spectrum that extends from the quality Sunday papers through the weeklies to the monthlies like Encounter and The London Magazine. Indicatively, it is not unusual, as it would be in America, to find many writers frequently contributing to all three types of journals, nor is it unusual to find a mediocre book by a respected writer receiving suspiciously faint praise in every public medium (only to be sometimes damned in private conversation). One reason is that the intellectual level of one set of magazines barely differs from that of another. A more conclusive explanation is the fact that so few people, especially in contrast to France or America, write (or are assigned to write) book reviews, and several of the few are offered the opportunity to publish twice or thrice as much as the most prolific American. John Gross, whose capacity to blend into every sort of page is astonishing, must produce at least 100,000 words of undistinguished prose a year; and Anthony Burgess, a far more brilliant man, closer to 150,000 words. In addition to his novels and other books, his weekly appearances on television and radio, Burgess reviewed, in the spring of 1965, books once a month for The Guardian, television once every three weeks and books twice a month for The Listener, opera for the fortnightly The Queen, a book once a month for The Observer, theatre once a week and books once a fortnight for The Spectator, scholarly works on linguistics occasionally for The Times Literary Supplement, all sorts of things once in a while for Encounter, etc., etc. Others review so many novels per month that they cannot possibly give them the close reading a contemporary novel, especially an experimental one, deserves; so when in doubt, the reviewer offers a plot summary cribbed from the dust jacket and a few standard words of praise—or ignores it completely. (I know of one publisher of an especially difficult first novel who, perhaps in disservice to his writer, put only an excerpt on the dust-jacket; and the book had only a few short notices, all uncomprehending.) In contrast to American magazines, whose turnover in reviewers is conspicuous, English journals are loyal to their regular contributors, giving them frequent assignments, inviting them to parties, and even retaining them for occasional work long after they have ceased to be interesting or pertinent. They desire, as one editor told me, to “establish a continuity of names,” and on the scene as a whole, such continuities frequently overlap.

Unlike America, where literary editors and book publishers generally keep a more wary distance and are not at all reluctant to offend each other, in England the two groups are noticeably friendly. (“To recognize a man’s existence is to make him your friend.” Reviewers and review editors earn money writing publishers’ reports on books they may in the future need to judge professionally, thereby warning the publishers in advance of the book’s probable critical reception. (In poetry publishing, in particular, such outsider’s reports are more crucial in England than America, and it is possible for a poetry czar to keep another poet unpublished in book form for the other’s lifetime.) Publishers frequently take not only literary editors but regular reviewers out to lunch or dinner, show them future lists, give them forthcoming books, even outrightly ask them to coax their editors into reviewing or letting them review a certain volume. In England I once happened to tell a literary editor that such-and-such was a very bad book and explained why. Some days later, I encountered him again; and he told me the book’s publisher thought my arguments were pernicious and that I was a less-than-reputable person for holding such opinions. The editor suggested that I explain myself in writing to the publisher, which out of deference to the editor, I foolishly did. If the publisher investigated the sources and earlier American reviews I suggested he check, he offered no evidence of such care, replying only with some platitudinous defense of his author. The point is that no American literary editor I know would accept a publisher’s authority as greater than that of an independent critic; indeed, if anything, American editors too easily side with the critics, regardless of their authority, against the publisher.

Writers in England seem to see more of each other than Americans do; and whereas I can think of several American critics of some eminence who have never met their equally prominent peers, in England almost everyone is personally acquainted with everyone else. In London, even political enemies are, more often than not, personally cordial to each other and V.S. Pritchett has recorded “the ugly fact that nearly all English writers and editors are on speaking terms.” (In New York, by contrast, C. P. Snow notes, “Distinguished literary figures show a cheerful unawareness of each other’s existence.”) The business of reviewing in England often becomes back-slapping among friends or friends-of-friends; and suspiciously ebullient notices are publicly rationalized with such remarks as, “Oh, they’re old friends,” or “He’s a good chap, and his book needs a push.” As any reviewer knows, a kind word for a friend, particularly one whose book has not received the praise it deserves, is the most natural of human gestures; however, in England such promotional charity gets out of hand, debasing the purpose and integrity of criticism. “Critics in England do not accept bribes,” Cyril Connolly observed in Enemies of Promise (1938), “but they discover one day that in a sense their whole life is an accepted bribe, a fabric of compromises based on personal relationships.” Predisposed patronage gives the favored writer the deleterious impression that, given the right credentials and supporters, he need not write well. “It is obvious,” Q.D. Leavis writes, “that these are not judgments of literary criticism but gestures of social solidarity—the only kind of criticism that isn’t Bad Form.” Conversely, when a reviewer at a party saw a writer enter whose book he had recently panned, the reviewer felt obliged to leave the affair. Peter Fleming once wrote a let editor condemning Malcolm Muggeridge’s harsh words about his brother Ian solely because Muggeridge had once been a guest at the Fleming home. Similarly, when I fulfilled a commission with a scathingly negative review, the editor thought I once had a “run in” with the American author, apparently assuming that I had no reason to despise the book unless I hated the man; in fact, we had never met and we have, to my knowledge, no close friends in common. Only in England are the values of intellectual criticism and social propriety so intimately linked.

The superficiality of nearly all reviews, coupled with suspicions and/or awareness of collusive sympathy, explains why English reviewing is held in low esteem by publishers, literary people and readers alike; subsequently, few Englishmen, especially since Scrutiny, take the profession of criticism as seriously as many Americans do. This attitude in turn brings less professional reviewing, as intention and habit join hands in a neatly closed circle. Publishers find they can bully and entice reviewers and review editors; literary people look upon it as low-grade hackwork (I suspect that if Anthony Burgess stopped writing so much journalism, his reputation as a novelist, lower in England than in America, would automatically increase); readers have learned that there are alarmingly few book reviewers whose judgments they can trust. My own research project in England was a critical study of contemporary English fiction; yet I never found myself fetching a book on a reviewer’s recommendation although, occasionally, I could detect a possibly interesting book behind a perfunctory description.

The young English writer, as I said, finds it propitious to blend into the existing arrangement; the young American usually aims to stand out from it as much as possible. Yet, paradoxically, where the young English writer starts by obliterating his literary personality, when he becomes established he learns to exploit it—to transform himself into a marginal eccentric. Success and fame permit a public crankiness that would be intolerable in an unknown; and the media help the process by transforming a serious writer into a crank, often against his will (e.g., Malcolm Muggeridge or F. R. Leavis). In England, to be a “character” on the literary scene is not to be a radical—indeed, most eccentrics have the squarest of political persuasions and a vested interest in the literary establishment (e.g., the Sitwells). Rather, the eccentric exploits a certain prejudice—a hate of Leavis, a sneer at the decaying upper class, a distaste for the promiscuity of the young, a love for science fiction or detective stories, a claim to represent one’s generation, a fortuitous family relationship, intimate acquaintance with everyone literary since 1900—until this single privilege literally becomes not only a trademark but all the writer has to offer. Whereas an American writer has definable ideas and tries to be known by them, one can think of many an English “critic” of whom it would not be unfair to say, “He had a mind so fine no idea could violate it.” It is perhaps indicative that no weekly English language reviewer writes as well as Cyril Connolly and says so disappointingly little. Others have mastered what Mrs. Leavis defined as “that air of saying gracefully something profound and final which disguises saying nothing,” and many reveal “some kind of mental habit that prohibits self-discipline and sustained effort.” Whereas American editors may call upon a writer to put forth his fairly predictable ideas—the socialists Norman Thomas and Michael Harrington have, for examples, always fulfilled this role—the English editor will ask an eccentric writer, like Malcolm Muggeridge, to be little more than his predictable self. The Americans, in short, look for content—what a man says; the English emphasize form—the way a man expresses himself and the kind of judgments he makes.

Not surprisingly, literary England is uncommonly interested in biography and autobiography; and many a mediocre poet has made a reputation by writing about a slightly different childhood, perhaps in a slightly esoteric area of England. Just as nearly all writers of note seem eventually to get around to offering their autobiography, often in several volumes, so these books are praised invariably in loving and uncritical terms by all reviewers. Indeed, “personality” seems such a natural English genre that one notices that even a critic as serious as Kenneth Tynan, in his book Curtains (1962), seems more expansive and comfortable in his portraiture. Of the eighteen eminent writers asked by The Observer to select their three favorite books for Christmas, 1964, only three (one of them an American; the others Harold Pinter and C.P. Snow) did not mention biographical works. As literature or history, biography has always been a comparatively minor mode; and more trivial nonsense and deception appear in this form of non-fiction than in any other. This tendency, coupled with a preference for novels that record familiar places and experiences, would indicate that the English reading public, from top to bottom, is more interested in ephemeral writing than either substantial expository work or literary art—more comfortable with the amateur’s doodlings than with the professional’s craft.

An American looking at contemporary English culture, whether literary or intellectual, invariably discovers, first, a marked discrepancy between what is talked about and what, to an objective outside observer, seems truly important and, second, a concomitant willingness to accept both surface comprehension and current truths as sufficient. Just as post-War England contributes little to primary scientific thought, so there have been no distinctively new and/or influential approaches in, say, literary criticism, sociology, musicology, and historiography. All the major speculations and programmes on such a pressing contemporary issue as thermonuclear war, for instance, have been non-English. What passes for political analyses in English magazines are easily digestible nuggets of boiled-down, highly simplified versions of complex issues and phenomena; no English commentator I know compares in perception and profundity with, say, James Reston, Walter Lippmann, Hans Morgenthau, or Reinhold Niebuhr. In speculative social criticism, Raymond Williams’s The Long Revolution seems positively prosaic next to the writings of Buckminster Fuller, Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death, andPaul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd. In criticism of the new electronic media, such books as Raymond Williams’s Communications or Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel’s The Popular Arts are pathetic next to Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. (A principal exception, of course, is William Empson, who spent most of his professional life abroad, and whose work and career are still rather neglected at home.). In his anthology on The Establishment (1958), Hugh Thomas finds its preference for “obvious beauties” over “profound” or “difficult” art; and his collaborator, John Vaizey, identifies a taste for “lightness, or a lack of passion, that accords closely with their diffident, somewhat distant manner.”

Similarly, current English literary criticism, even in books, inclines to “simplistic appreciation” which has been passé in America since the decline of Mark Van Doren’s reputation. Indicatively, English intellectuals prefer rather elementary American critics—like Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin and George Steiner—to the neglect of more imaginative and profound critical minds like Kenneth Burke, Yvor Winters, R.P. Blackmur, Northrop Frye and Joseph Frank. Even critical writing by English academics is frequently simplistic, barely aware of its penchant for superficial explanations or of literary criticism as a problem meriting various methods. Even a book with the provocative, incipiently incendiary title of Anarchy and Order (1954), by Herbert Read, opens with this unironic sentence: “Many years ago I was present at a formal dinner of some kind and found myself next to a lady well-known in the political world, a member of the Conservative party.” The next lines are scarcely pithier. Just as many Englishmen, even the most cosmopolitan, have emotional distaste for England’s inclusion in the Common Market, so their literary taste turns toward realistic novels specifically about life in England today; and they seem only faintly aware of writers in their midst who, because of such qualities as brilliance of style, originality of form and universality of perception and theme, are achieving less parochial, more international, which is to say more significant, reputations.

Yet there is much in England that an American intellectual cannot help but find admirable. The cultural scene as a broad whole seems generally more intelligent than the American— while little attains an excellence comparable to America’s best books and quarterlies, English culture on the middle levels is superior to American. No regular American weekly reviewer writes as well, or learnedly, as Cyril Connolly in The Sunday Times. English daily newspaper reviewing, for instance, far surpasses American, particularly in books, theatre and television. (And thus could a second-string London newspaperman, like Clive Barnes, so quickly and easily become prominent in the States). Perhaps because the British weeklies lack the ideological rigidity, both political and critical-artistic, of comparable American journals, the former are eminently readable, though, as Macdonald judged, “not exactly highbrow—their circulations are too large, their writing too relaxed.” The most outrageous forms of philistinism, pretentiousness and preposterousness—all of which so often find an audience in America— are conspicuously less in evidence and distinctly less aggressive in England. For example, when some commercial theatre-managers in late summer, 1964, attacked the state-subsidized Royal Shakespeare Company for its “programme” of “dirty plays” (by Samuel Beckett, Peter Weiss, David Rudkin, and Shakespeare!), every major English critic, in both the dailies and the weeklies, unveiled the attackers as venal and philistine. (I cannot imagine such agreeable unanimity among New York’s newspaper critics.) Furthermore, although English cultural weeklies and the two better Sunday newspapers do not seem to be taken as authoritatively by their readers as American journals, both appear to be read assiduously by more non-intellectuals than would ever touch them in America. England is still a predominantly literate culture—the practice of three mail deliveries a day and the preference for conducting business by note are signs of this. Still, the cultural programs on television display considerably higher quality, in both form and content, than comparable American offerings; and they have a large impact, even among intellectuals. The other public arts, theatre and film, are greatly superior in England; and although the neglect of serious contemporary music is scandalous, English concert seasons are less dependent upon tired war horses and semi-classical produce. To extend the comparison, whereas American culture has several distinct levels with little overlap, the English situation is closer to one sustained middlebrow level. The final paradoxes are these: Whereas America is basically a philistine country with a vulgar appearance but with a thriving high culture, England has a generally more intelligent and tasteful populace and a civilized demeanor but a lesser high-cultural achievement. American culture is, as usual, both better and worse.

As a milieu for human beings, the English scene is more congenial. The editors and writers one encounters are friendlier than their American counterparts, particularly if the visitor has an acceptable introduction; in conversation English writers eschew as bad taste the public slight that is so annoying in New York. The intellectuals seem generally more secure in their existences and less alienated from their surroundings—in all, less neurotic; for as England treats its writers with respect, they in turn support the existing establishment with a unanimity unparalleled elsewhere. The literary life in England is, for the favored, more stable, more regular, more humane, more predictable/ (For the excluded, however, it is thoroughly frustrating). Bohemianism, when it exists, is more an off-beat style for public display than a way of life; and nearly all writers attain a personal reliability that is distinctly bourgeois and, nonetheless, attractive. (Conversely, however, it is hard to imagine either Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Ezra Pound or D.H. Lawrence as an employee or house panelist for the B.B.C.) With considerable insight, the Irishman Frank O’Connor once wrote: “A young American [writer] of our own time or a young Russian of Turgenev’s might look forward with a certain amount of cynicism to a measure of success and influence; nothing but bad luck would prevent a young Englishman’s achieving it even today; while a young Irishman can still expect nothing but incomprehension, ridicule and injustice.” This statement, while not entirely true, is still more perceptive than less.

To the American or French intellectual who believes that either a culture is lively or it is depressing, England seems pervasively mediocre and dull—”inoffensively unalive,” in Martin Green’s perceptive phrase. Paradoxically, in England the literary scene often looks more attractive than it ultimately is; in America the scene first appears worse than it really is. Many Americans admire the English magazines; but I, for one, found it difficult to read any of them with the enthusiasm I have for certain American journals. (The late Encore, and The Times Literary Supplement, were sometimes exceptions.) In reading American journals I can expect to be stimulated, to be exposed to new arguments, to be persuaded to read something I never heard of before or to investigate a familiar work again; but English journals provide only the same medicine over and over again. In all, England has much that is admirable and good; but with so little incentive to surpass one’s peers and so much reward for fitting into a niche, the result is a pervasive absence of high excellence, or even aspirations to it—so many unconscious self-restrictions, such a limited sense of personal possibility. Indicatively, just as many of England’s most enterprising young businessmen are immigrants—Welsh, Scottish, Canadian, Jewish, West Indian, African—so many of her best young writers have either recently immigrated to England or, if English-born, have lived most of their adult lives abroad. “The advantages Americans enjoy,” F.R. Leavis observed in 1939, “from having no public-school system, no ancient universities and no tradition of a closed literary society run on Civil Service lines, can hardly be exaggerated.”

Today, Britain seems to recognize that on the world scene it is no longer a primary culture; but the rationalizations for its lagging industrial society—it would require an inhuman effort to excel; it may not look good but it usually works—are also customarily used to explain away its intellectual deficiencies. Literary people know that even a magazine with the pretensions of Encounter (co-edited by American, who probably couldn’t do as well back home) hardly represents the best that could possibly be said and thought; less ambitious magazines do no better. However, few I encountered, even among the young, believed that the situation could be improved or, even more sadly, that it would be worth their while to try. “Never.” Edward Shils wrote of England in 1956, “has an intellectual class found its society and its culture so much to its satisfaction,” and his remarks are as true a decade later. Culturally, as well as industrially, England seems fated to lag behind both America and the rest of Europe; and although Englishmen worry continually (and, usually, ineffectually) about the state of their economy, even their intellectuals worry little about the state of their culture. The younger generation, those now under 30, seem considerable different from their elders; but they must work against a tradition of needless compromise with possibilities for excellence.