Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by D. J. Taylor
List of Illustrations
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
Monetary Values
Introduction: Taste: Awareness: Possibility
PART ONE: Tradition and Dissent
1. Landscape with Figures
2. The Georgian Twilight
3. Dancing on the Hecatomb: Modern Movements
Hugh Walpole: The Perils of Success
4. Highbrows, Lowbrows and Those In Between
5. The Pink Decade
Orwell in the 1930s
6. Making a Living I 1918–1939
PART TWO: Citadels of Power
7. University English I
8. Late Bloomsbury
9. Editors at War
10. Waiting for the Barbarians
11. Making a Living II 1939–1970
Alec Waugh: The First Best-seller
12. New Men
13. Common Readers: The Mid-century Audience
PART THREE: The Modern Age
14. Metropolitan Critics
Lady Writers
15. Reaching Out
A. S. Byatt and the 1960s
16. University English II
The Unschooled Reader
17. Beyond the Publishing Crisis
Mrs Thatcher and the Writers
18. Making a Living III 1970–
19. Enemies of Promise
Picture Section
Notes and Further Reading
Acknowledgements
Index
Copyright
Great Eastern Land
Real Life
English Settlement
After Bathing at Baxter’s: Stories
Trespass
The Comedy Man
Kept: A Victorian Mystery
Ask Alice
At the Chime of a City Clock
Derby Day
Secondhand Daylight
The Windsor Faction
From the Heart
Wrote for Luck: Stories
A Vain Conceit: British Fiction in the 1980s
Other People: Portraits from the ’90s (with Marcus Berkmann)
After the War: The Novel and England Since 1945
Thackeray
Orwell: The Life
On the Corinthian Spirit: The Decline of Amateurism in Sport
Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918–1940
What You Didn’t Miss: A Book of Literary Parodies
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Copyright © D. J. Taylor 2016
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First published by Chatto & Windus in 2016
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ISBN: 9780701186135
In memory of John Gross 1935–2011
I often remember him in terms of the warmth and surprising depth of his speaking voice … the amusement in his twinkling brown eyes, the despairing sighs that rang through the house when he was at his typewriter. The little daughter of a friend once remarked to her mother: ‘Mr Mortimer is a very cuddly man.’ She was quite right, but woe betide the would-be cuddler who let drop an incorrect date or a fault in pronunciation or grammar! A debatable point would send him in hot haste to the next room, where he would be found down on his knees, consulting one of the stout volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary. Long conversations on these themes led to Crichel being nicknamed ‘The Prose Factory’.
Frances Partridge recalling the critic Raymond Mortimer and his home Long Crichel House in Dorset, Everything to Lose: Diaries 1945–1960 (1985)
If we wish to understand writers in our time, we cannot forget that writing is a profession – or at least a lucrative activity – practised within the framework of economic systems which exert undeniable influences on creativity. We cannot forget, if we wish to understand literature, that a book is a manufactured product, commercially distributed, and thus subject to the laws of supply and demand.
Robert Escarpit, Sociology of Literature (1958)
‘Well, I trust everyone,’ says Miss Callendar, ‘but no one especially over everyone else. I suppose I don’t believe in group virtue. It seems to me such an individual achievement. Which, I imagine, is why you teach sociology and I teach literature.’ ‘Ah, yes,’ says Howard, ‘but how do you teach it?’ ‘Do you mean am I a structuralist or a Leavisite or a psycho-linguistician or a formalist or a Christian existentialist or a phenomenologist?’ ‘Yes,’ says Howard. ‘Ah,’ says Miss Callendar, ‘well, I’m none of them.’ ‘What do you do, then?’ asks Howard. ‘I read books and talk to people about them.’ ‘Without a method?’ asks Howard. ‘That’s right,’ says Miss Callendar. ‘It doesn’t sound very convincing,’ says Howard. ‘No,’ says Miss Callendar, ‘I have a taste for remaining a little elusive.’ ‘You can’t,’ says Howard. ‘With every word you utter, you state your world view.’ ‘I know,’ says Miss Callendar, ‘I’m trying to find a way round that.’ ‘There isn’t one,’ says Howard, ‘you have to know what you are.’ ‘I’m a nineteenth-century liberal,’ says Miss Callendar. ‘You can’t be,’ says Howard, ‘this is the twentieth century, near the end of it. There are no resources.’ ‘I know,’ says Miss Callendar, ‘that’s why I am one.’
Malcolm Bradbury, The History Man (1975)
There’s more to life than books you know, but not much more.
The Smiths, ‘Handsome Devil’ (1983)
Much of this book is concerned with what writers earned for the material they supplied to publishers and magazine editors. For purposes of comparison, £1 in the mid-1920s would be worth approximately £43 today; the equivalent amounts for the mid-1930s, the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s are, respectively, £48, £18 and £9. Thus, to offer a few benchmarks, Arnold Bennett’s income in the years after the Great War was, by modern standards, around £1 million; George Orwell’s a decade later as low as £10,000. Twenty years later Evelyn Waugh was earning between £180,000 and £200,000 per annum. The £250 advance paid to Martin Amis for his first novel in 1973 would now be worth around £2,300.
First picture section
1: T. S. Eliot, unknown photographer, 1926 (© NPG, London)
2: Virginia Woolf (© Chatto & Windus Archive); J. B. Priestley, 1930s (© Priestley Archive, University of Bradford); Georgian football XI (© Waugh family)
3: George Orwell, 1930s (© Orwell Archive); Evelyn and Alec Waugh in Villefranche, France, 1931 (© Waugh family); dustjacket for Desmond MacCarthy: The Man & His Writings, introduced by David Cecil (© MacCarthy family)
4: Professor F. R. Leavis (© Chatto & Windus Archive); William Empson (© Chatto & Windus Archive)
5: Horizon frontispiece, June 1948; Cyril Connolly at the Horizon offices, 1948 (© Deirdre Levi); cartoon of Osbert Lancaster’s poet ‘Bill Tipple’ in Drayneflete Revealed, published in 1949 (© Clare Hastings)
6: Cyril Connolly and friends (© Deirdre Levi); George Orwell, T. S. Eliot and William Empson amongst other contributors at the BBC (© BBC Archive)
7: Publisher Allen Lane and penguins, c.1960 (© Penguin Archive, University of Bristol); E. M. Forster and Raymond Mortimer (© Frances Partridge Archive, King’s College, Cambridge)
8: Penguin New Writing, edited by John Lehman, July 1941 (Author’s own collection)
Second picture section
1: Anthony Powell en route to Holland, 1958 (© Powell family); Powell in old age with a young fan, The Chantry, Somerset, 1994 (© Sally Soames)
2: Poet and critic D. J. Enright (© Chatto & Windus Archive); novelist Alan Sillitoe, early 1960s (© Ruth Fainlight); ‘The One Subject Man’ cartoon from Punch (© Punch Archive)
3: ‘Kingsley Aimless’ and ‘The Senile Club’ cartoons from the Spectator, both drawn by the young William Rushton, 1962 (© Spectator)
4: Poet, editor and critic Ian Hamilton, 1980s (© Matthew Hamilton); Philip Larkin and Anthony Thwaite in Norfolk, 1970s (© Ann Thwaite)
5: Alan Ross, 1990s (© Jane Rye); J. L. Carr, 1980s (Author’s own collection); J. R. Ackerley at home, 1940s (© Estate of J. R. Ackerley)
6: Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge, University of Birmingham, 1978 (© Paul Morby); Angela Carter and Lorna Sage, 1980s (© University of East Anglia Archive)
7: A. S. Byatt, c.1964; Iris Murdoch, early 1960s (© Chatto & Windus Archive); Writers’ Tour of North Wales, 1969 (© Dame Margaret Drabble)
8: Author photograph of Richard Burns on the dustjacket for his novel, Fond and Foolish Lovers, first published in 1990; John Carey, 1970s (© John Carey)
When the distinguished literary agent Deborah Rogers died in the spring of 2014, more than one obituarist, reckoning up the extent of her achievements, declared that she had ‘shaped the taste of a generation’. Even allowing for the licence traditionally extended to the memorial-writer, this seems a very substantial claim. Certainly, at least half a dozen of the novelists who came to dominate mainstream English literary culture in the 1980s – Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, William Boyd and Peter Carey amongst them – did so under her direct supervision. On the other hand, she could not be said to have ‘discovered’ these bright gems in the diadem of Thatcher-era fiction. McEwan and Boyd, for example, made their initial reputation with short stories published in little magazines whose circulation rarely exceeded a few thousand copies. As a highly circumspect professional adviser, Rogers was integral to her clients’ success: she polished up their work for mass publication, pressed it upon sympathetic editors and brokered deals that would allow it to obtain the widest possible exposure. But her relationship with the distinctive cultural and commercial environment in which the writers whom her agency represented made their mark was largely indirect. A book-trade historian, seeking to explain the ‘success’ of a McEwan or a Rushdie in the 1980s would probably point to a number of factors quite beyond their talent as novelists: unprecedented media interest in what was then beginning to be known as the ‘literary novel’, stimulated by marketing initiatives and closely fought prize adjudications; a reconfiguration and refinancing of the British publishing industry in which commentators frequently assumed that what the writer was thought to be earning was quite as important as what he or she wrote; and a reorganisation and expansion of broadsheet newspapers which led to more space for arts coverage. Books, to put it starkly, and for all kinds of socio-economic reasons, were more fashionable in the late 1980s than they had been in the late 1970s – when publishers despaired of their diminishing returns and an early number of Granta appeared under the banner ‘Beyond the publishing crisis’ – and for a substantial number of writers, several of them represented by Deborah Rogers, the going was good. But while she undoubtedly played a significant part in the literary culture of her day, to claim that she ‘shaped its tastes’ is radically to overstate the case.
The question of what Deborah Rogers achieved, and the writers by whom she was able to achieve it, stirs two enquiries that lie at the heart of this book. What is ‘literary culture’? And what is ‘taste’? The first I take to be the environment in which books – any kind of book, and not just those written by Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie – are conceived, written, brokered, published, distributed, reviewed, received, brought to the book-buying public and, in rare cases, taken beyond it into the much vaguer and less strictly demarcated world of film and television. Naturally, when compared to other industries, in which success and failure tend to be measured in straightforwardly economic terms, literary culture works in peculiar ways. A book, for example, can enjoy an influence wholly disproportionate to its sales. A literary magazine can dispose of 1,000 copies an issue direct to its subscribers, never be seen on a newsagent’s stand and yet have an incalculable effect on the young and impressionable minds that fall under its spell. All these tendencies are exacerbated if the author of the book, or the editor of the magazine, is a distinctive personality, capable of sending out disciples to spread the word. To the library browser of the 1950s the names of T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis and Cyril Connolly may not have meant very much. At the same time their interventions and their status in the literary world created a framework for the evaluation of contemporary literature that thousands of library browsers regularly discovered they were responding to, even if the response was indirect or the influence accidental. And if literary culture works in mysterious ways, then what about the abstract which literary culture ends up cultivating, usually in a number of different varieties and never with any great confidence that the evaluative methods employed are anything less than partial – taste?
What, when it comes down to it, is taste? The Shorter Oxford offers a number of definitions, the best of which is probably ‘the mental perception of quality’, to which could be added the refinement that this perception will generally be shared by a body of readers who believe that their definition of ‘quality’ is superior to most of the other ones available. Taste in the world of books is a more or less solid bloc of opinion – passive when expressed by the hundreds of thousands of purchasers of a paperback novel, much more aggressive when espoused by members of smaller and more exclusive groups and when employed as evidence in any kind of cultural debate, almost certainly not the expression of a majority preference, and capable of achieving its aims by way of a kind of osmosis. Richard Bradford has written interestingly about the way in which during the period after the Great War ‘the consensus’ shifted in favour of the modernist poets who had been routinely disparaged before it, a shift that, crucially, involved praising a writer such as T. S. Eliot for characteristics (incoherence, ambiguity, allusion and so forth) that had previously been used to damn him. ‘Taste’, as imagined by an Eliot, a Leavis or a Connolly, is by definition elitist. It is Eliot’s taste, born of long hours of agonised brooding on the part played by literature in human existence: hieratic, Olympian and calculated to make anyone less well read than Eliot – the vast majority of the population, that is – feel faintly uneasy, and yet at the same time inspiring a terrific sense of partisanship in his admirers, sometimes extending to outright sectarianism. Some of the most subversive moments in literature arrive when a particular brand of fashionable, minority taste declares itself in ways that may be incomprehensible to the reader who hasn’t yet cracked its code. There is, for example, an entry in Anthony Powell’s Journals 1987–1989 in which Powell records his friend the former Chancellor of the Exchequer Roy Jenkins’ account of a conversation with Léopold Senghor, the decidedly literary-minded president of Senegal. Senghor asks Jenkins which twentieth-century French novelists he thinks the best. Jenkins chooses Proust and Simenon, to which Senghor responds ‘Why Simenon?’ After which Powell adds ‘As Roy remarked, the more chic answer would be “Why Proust?”’ To the less cosmopolitan domestic reader, brought up to believe that Proust is one of the great masters of modern literature and Simenon a detective novelist, all this will be faintly baffling. Why should ‘chic’ opinion plump for Simenon? What sort of perverse, highbrow parlour game is being played here? Clearly, the reader suspects, there are one or two badges of cultural affiliation briefly on display, impenetrable to general readers, which a little more knowledge, a little more information – a little more taste – might allow them to decipher.
A century and a half before, that information would have been much more readily to hand. If ‘taste’ in the early Victorian era was that much more assimilable, it was because there were so comparatively few people actively at work to promulgate it. The serious reading public of the 1830s and 1840s was tiny, consisting of no more than a few thousand people; the sales of even ‘best-selling’ books were correspondingly small: only Dickens, for example, could be sure of selling more than a few thousand copies. Even then, though, the palisades of post-Romantic-era taste were ready to be forced open by mass literacy, and in the case of Dickens’s novels, whose monthly instalments were frequently read aloud to audiences gathered in the upstairs rooms of public houses, newfangled channels of distribution. Literacy rates doubled between 1840 and 1900 to the point where 97 per cent of brides and grooms were able to sign their names on the marriage register. The threat posed to the taste-making pundits of the Spectator or the Quarterly Review by this new reading public, further expanded by the reforms of successive Education Acts, lay in the fact that so much of it existed beyond the reach of serious criticism, and one of the features of the Victorian age is the rise of the influential amateur critic, quite often with religious affiliations, whose followers demanded the same kind of guidance that they expected to receive, in spiritual matters, from the pulpit. Many of the cultural wars of the later nineteenth century, consequently, are those fought out between two kinds of taste: respectable opinion rebuking what it imagined to be upstart nonentities who are either producing or promoting what respectable opinion imagined to be rubbish. Early Victorian novels are full of these kind of antagonisms making their presence felt among the tea-tables – see, for example, the scene in Mrs Gaskell’s Cranford (1853) in which Captain Brown regales an audience of genteel spinsters with extracts from the current number of The Pickwick Papers. His hostess, a clergyman’s daughter brought up on a diet of Johnson, will only allow that ‘perhaps the author is young. Let him persist’, while declaring that she considers it ‘vulgar, and below the dignity of literature, to publish in numbers’.
As this exchange perhaps demonstrates, many of the battles fought by ‘taste’ of the brand espoused by Miss Deborah Jenkyns and her circle in early Victorian Cheshire had their origins in social class. As late as the 1890s, in certain quarters, it was thought proper to prefer Thackeray to Dickens on the grounds that the author of Vanity Fair was a gentleman and Dickens an arriviste.fn1 There had been an all-too symbolic encapsulation of this stand-off in the famous Garrick Club row of the later 1850s, in which Thackeray, supported by half a dozen baronets, had Dickens’s protégé Edmund Yates driven out of the premises for using gossip picked up in the club as the basis for a magazine profile. The attitudes struck by the Bloomsbury Group half a century later had a similar grounding in the assumption of a cultural supremacy which is, simultaneously, a form of social superiority. A visitor to a Gordon Square party in the 1920s was amused by the spectacle of a pair of guardsmen in scarlet tunics, invited in off the street, setting hungrily about the buffet while the other guests gathered around them exclaiming ‘How they eat!’ But the same kind of incredulity, manifest incomprehension of how other people lived, was frequently brought to books of which Bloomsbury disapproved written by authors from social spheres which Bloomsbury had not cared to penetrate.
Naturally, as the twentieth century wore on and the talent pool from which literature recruited became more diverse, these prejudices were capable of quietly inverting themselves. The great literary casualties of the early 1960s, for example, an age in which the shadow of the ‘working-class writer’ began to loom over literary London, were middle-class writers who were thought either to have lost touch with some of the social realities they were attempting to describe, or to be addressing parts of the societal fabric that were scarcely worth writing about in the first place. The publication of Elizabeth Taylor’s In a Summer Season (1961) stirred a curious unanimity among its reviewers. The New Statesman’s critic admitted to ‘a brutish dislike for gracious upper-middle-class charm, at least in novels’. A radio panellist alleged that the author’s merits were seriously undermined by the fact that, in terms of subject matter, ‘we cannot be sure that she herself understands how marginal and decadent this part of English society has become’. Even The Times, while acknowledging the ‘skilled craftsmanship’, noted that ‘Perhaps the setting is too conventional. Perhaps the book is too much of a type.’ Miss Taylor, in other words, is being damned on what are essentially non-literary grounds, for having the temerity to write a novel set in that sink of moral iniquity the Home Counties, awash with well-heeled middle-class characters, when the smart money is being laid out on disaffected young proletarians from north of the Trent.
Not, by this stage in the proceedings, that there was such a thing as a single, dominant taste. In his study of the Movement, the loosely affiliated band of university critics and ironising poets who feature so largely in literary histories of the 1950s, Blake Morrison talks about the impending dissolution of the mid-twentieth-century’s ‘homogeneous literary culture’, but it could be argued that this culture had been disintegrating since at least the 1880s. Such late Victorian novels as touch on the workings of the literary world reveal an environment with numberless coigns of vantage, in which old-fashioned gentlemen of letters continue to write novels in three volumes for a select contingent of library subscribers while sharp-eyed careerists concentrate on the rewards offered by mass-circulation weeklies such as Chums and Tit Bits, and the magazine editors’ offices are full of flint-eyed opportunists such as Gissing’s Jasper Milvain, who frankly allows that he writes ‘for the market’ and despises the readers he is labouring to entertain. By the 1920s, consequently, with the gods of the Victorian circulating library on their way to superannuation, there is no such thing as old-style homogeneous ‘taste’ – if, that is, this desirable entity had ever really existed in the first place.
The gravamen of Q. D. Leavis’s researches into literary sociology, after all, was that there had existed in the late sixteenth century a more or less uniform literary public, and that the uneducated seeker after pleasure was compelled either to watch Shakespeare or pursue some other leisure pursuit altogether. The evidence, on the other hand, suggests that such people, if they could read, devoured low-level pamphlet literature by which Mrs Leavis would have been righteously appalled had she ever deigned to acknowledge its existence. It was not, perhaps, that the cultural divisions of the 1920s were anything new; rather, that the antagonisms they provoked were fought out with an unprecedented violence. It was an age of modernists and traditionalists, of highbrows and lowbrows, of middle-class reactionaries, as Orwell once put it, thanking God that they weren’t brainy. It was also, and perhaps necessarily, an age in which sophisticated arbiters of ‘taste’, rather than operating as literary journalists, were increasingly migrating to university English departments, where small groups of influential pundits talked up the merits of books and poets which less stringent readers congratulated themselves on being unable – or unwilling – to comprehend.
One can exaggerate these distinctions. Small-scale, and involving only a few thousand participants, the literary world of the 1920s was, at one level, so closely knit as to make the gaps between its constituent parts seem more flagrant on paper than they were in practice. And, perhaps even more important, the poets, essayists, dramatists and novelists who plied their trade in the immediately post-war years, whatever their aesthetic or ideological differences, were united by a shared tradition. It was not that most of them had been to the same schools, but that they had been brought up to read many of the same books: even the conservative critics of The Waste Land prided themselves on their ability to decode the classical allusions. Nearly a century later, on the other hand, the diffusion of ‘taste’ begun in the age of Eliot and J. C. Squire, the hidebound editor of the London Mercury, has made an exponential leap. Frank Swinnerton’s The Georgian Literary Scene (1935) described a world that, for all its individual compartments, was broadly coherent. Such a survey could presumably still be written now, but it would be dated from the moment it appeared. Neither would it possess any authority, for the idea of the taste-broker, able to convince large numbers of people of the rightness of his, or her, opinions, has all but disappeared. Mass rallyings around the flag of major literary prizes are all that remain. Like Eliot’s ‘objective correlative’ – the suggestion that it could be possible, with the right training, for every serious reader to acquire the powers of judgement necessary for them to formulate the correct opinions about books – he, or she, is the victim of a mass- and consumer-oriented and technologically driven marketplace where power is exercised by those who shout the loudest through the greatest number of portals. There are still influential critics, whether disseminating their opinions in newspaper review pages or from university lecture-hall podiums, but the days in which Arnold Bennett could sell out an edition with a scratch of his pen or F. R. Leavis ruin a reputation on the strength of a few well-chosen insults are two or even three literary generations behind us.
The average reader – not, of course, that there is such a thing – may very probably suspect that this is a step in the right direction. The ‘objective correlative’ always seemed to me an immensely dreary way of instilling uniformity, for it assumed that literature, in the end, was broadly susceptible to the laws of cause and effect, when one of the principal joys of the art of reading is that it is unregulated, that you can think what you like about the work presented for your inspection. At the other end of the scale, to inspect a clutch of Amazon reviewers going about their work can be a deeply unsettling experience, merely because so many of them have no conception of where the books they are pronouncing on came from, the contexts they inhabit, or even, in exceptional circumstances, whether the artefact they are contemplating is a novel or a biography. If it is unlikely that these evaluative holes will ever be filled, then at the same time certain remnants of the old, collective taste – a series of shared assumptions that were as much moral as literary – are still capable of making their presence felt. Anyone born into the English middle classes during the period 1955–65 who chances upon Francis Spufford’s The Child That Books Built (2002), for example, is likely to emerge from it with a painful twinge of recognition, for the great formative influence on Spufford’s mental life turns out to be the Puffin paperbacks of the 1960s and 1970s: a sensible, sensitive and no doubt bourgeois world populated by the Ingalls family of Little House on the Prairie, the Moomins, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Henry Treece’s Viking sagas and much else besides. There are comparable modern examples – let us say the Harry Potter books – but it is notable that they inhabit the much more intimate and immediate landscape of children’s literature. The number of modern adults brought up on and morally conditioned by, say, the works of Ian McEwan and Martin Amis is probably rather small.
This is a study of the recent development of literary culture in England, an enquiry into the diffusion of taste that was a part of that development, an examination of the influences at work – many of them in university English departments and the mass media – to bring these changes about, and an investigation into the ways in which those involved in the world of books over the last century have attempted to fashion, consolidate or reimagine ‘taste’ and use it for their own ends. Why in the English twentieth century did certain kinds of writing prosper only for others to fall by the wayside? Why did certain critics succeed in forming or altering the opinions of the literary public and others fail? What assumptions did a reader who picked up a novel in the 1930s, the 1970s, or the 2000s, bring both to the book itself and the figure of the person who wrote it? Inevitably, there are no definite answers to any of these questions, but in posing them we not only learn something about the complex process by which a book is brought to its audience; we can also address the well-nigh alchemical transformation which lies at the heart of reading – the way in which literature, of whatever kind, works its effect.
fn1 An echo of this survives as late as Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage (1916).
Oh, you heavy-laden who at this hour sit down to the cursed travail of the pen … Year after year the number of you is multiplied; you crowd the doors of publishers and editors, hustling, grappling and exchanging maledictions. Oh, sorry spectacle grotesque and heart-breaking.
George Gissing, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903)
John Pickford, BBC World Service, came to interview me about George Orwell … I tried to think of any literary figure, comparable with Orwell in international reputation, interviewed by oneself in the 1930s, perhaps a friend of Wilde’s. These imaginings brought home to me the utter impossibility of reconstructing any ‘literary period’ of the past.
Anthony Powell, journal entry, 27 October 1983
If there was one shared assumption that the thousands of people involved in English literary life brought back from the Great War, it was that nothing would ever be the same again. As with politics, finance, domestic arrangements, relations between the sexes – all parts of the national fabric pitched irrevocably out of kilter by the events of 1914–18 – so with the much more limited purlieu of books. Naturally, these developments were felt in myriad ways. Some were instantly apparent; others took decades to leach into the public consciousness. The psychological effects of the Flanders campaigns, and their impact on the literary men who fought in them, were still making their presence felt twenty or even thirty years after the weapons had been set down. At bedrock level, the consequences of a long-drawn-out and attritional land war swiftly reduced themselves to a case of missing personnel, empty seats at the table, a casualty list that cut a swathe through the ranks of poets, novelists and essayists alike. As the critic Edgell Rickword put it, in reviewing J. C. Squire’s Selections from Modern Poets (1921), ‘Had there been no war with Germany, and none with Ireland, it would have been reasonable to expect all the poets in Mr Squire’s anthology to be alive today.’ As it was, Brooke, Owen, Rosenberg and dozens like them were dead. Philip Larkin, hard at work in the Bodleian Library on the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (1973) half a century later, noted how often his researches into individual poets of the Great War era led him to a slim and solitary volume whose author had died shortly after – if not shortly before – the date of publication. The removal, almost at a stroke, of substantial numbers of the personnel who might have been expected to populate both the bookshelves and the pages of the literary reviews in the 1920s may have created a wealth of opportunity for those who remained, but it also – again, almost at a stroke – forged a myth of titanic forebears, by whom the poets of the interwar era would be judged and in whose absence the majority of them would be found badly wanting. One of the great, insuperable drawbacks faced by a J. C. Squire, an Edward Shanks, a John Freeman or half a dozen other tinkling ‘Georgian’ poets was the simple fact that they had survived while Rupert Brooke had gone to his grave on Skyros.
And if the poet of the 1920s was uneasily conscious of the fact that he stood, as it were, on the shoulders of giants, that other men who had accomplished what he was trying to do had done it better, bequeathing as they went a subject of such magnitude that many a Georgian versifier opted to ignore it altogether, then the difficulties faced by the average novelist were quite as far-reaching. Again, some of them were located not so much in procedurals as in psychology, that great wave of mental anguish that hangs over the English novel in the 1920s, even before the fiction specifically dealing with the Great War had begun to be written, and gives it characters with hugely symbolic names such as ‘Mark Sabre’ and ‘Ransom Heritage’. At the same time, many of them are horribly mundane, a matter of small but highly significant protocols, road maps into the heart of character and motivation, which virtually no novel written in the period 1918–39 could altogether ignore. Most strikingly, no male character could be introduced into the plot of a conventionally framed interwar-era novel without a description of what he had or had not done in the war. Simultaneously, four years of military conflict had a long-lasting, if sometimes surreptitious, effect on the novelist’s ability to devise a plot. As Alec Waugh once pointed out, for at least a decade after the war’s end the cradle-to-grave novel that had been so popular in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras could no longer be written, if only because the reader, watching its male lead wander down Piccadilly in the early summer of 1914, would be able instantly to predict the course of his life over the next half-decade.
The Great War’s shadow hangs over English fiction until deep into the second half of the twentieth century, creating in the end a kind of behavioural code of whose implications the majority of novel-readers would have been all too aware. When in Anthony Powell’s At Lady Molly’s (1957), a novel set in the early 1930s, Ted Jeavons is identified by the narrator, Nick Jenkins, as ‘something left over from the war’, the effect would have been to set off a chain of assumptions in the original reader’s mind, a suspicion that in however indirect a way he, or she, knows the kind of person Jeavons is meant to be. Powell (born 1905) was too young to have fought in the war, but the ironies that sometimes sharpen up his descriptions of those who had harbour the seeds of another of war’s incidental effects on literature: the difference between combatant and non-combatant. Alec Waugh (born 1898) had fought in Flanders; his brother Evelyn (born 1903) was several years too young. Evelyn, consequently, was able to populate his first novel, Decline and Fall (1928), with characters such as the pederastic Captain Grimes, who reminisces: ‘You’re too young to have fought in the war, I suppose? Those were the days old boy … I don’t suppose I was really sober for more than a few hours’ and regrets that the cheque he sent to the War Memorial Fund never got through. Alec, who had commanded a machine-gun unit and spent time in a prisoner-of-war camp, would not have wanted to go so far.
Meanwhile, from the angle of those who earned their living from the pen, there was the question of the war’s effect on the literary world as a professional environment, the way in which it was organised and the hierarchies through which its business was conducted. Here, too, profound changes had been at work. It was not that ‘literary culture’ had ceased to exist during the Great War – books had continued to be published, and poetry in particular had enjoyed a tremendous vogue – rather that the conflict had an inevitable impact on the principal medium through which that culture was expressed. Newspapers had not stopped reviewing books but in the majority of cases they ceased to employ freelance critics and parcelled the work out among members of staff whose livelihoods would otherwise have been thrown into jeopardy. The Daily Telegraph’s war-time novel-reviewing, for example, was mostly undertaken by its golf correspondent. Many a senior literary figure, too, had been claimed by what was essentially propaganda work. Hilaire Belloc wrote a weekly column on military strategy for Land and Water; G. K. Chesterton was engaged by the Illustrated London News; H. G. Wells’s Mr Britling Sees it Through (1915) declares itself, from the title down, as a Home Front novel: provisional, hopeful, tenacious, quite unable to see the reality of what lies ahead. On the other hand, in terms of its status as a leisure activity, a pastime or even a branch of the entertainment industry, ‘literature’ was about to undergo a seismic disturbance, the implications of which had been apparent to interested insiders well before the Great War began. What had once been a mass interest was teetering on the brink of long, slow and irrevocable decline. Philip Waller’s survey of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras makes this point with some force: ‘The late Victorian period ushered in an unprecedented phenomenon, a mass reading public. We may now want to add that this was both the first and the only mass reading public.’
We may indeed. Powered by Victorian educational reforms, the move towards mass literacy and the emergence of a new range of mass-market newspapers and periodicals, reading – once one leaves aside its chief rival, organised sport – had by the early years of the twentieth century become the principal British leisure activity. At the same time, this cultural dominance was extraordinarily short-lived. The mass take-up of radio and cinema was already in prospect. Ominously enough, once Waller has staked his claim about the existence of a mass reading public he straightaway goes on to quote a New Statesman statistic from 1914 suggesting that for the first time the number of books borrowed from public libraries in Edinburgh has fallen. The significance of the story lies not in the fact that this turning aside from literature took place in Edinburgh, ‘but that it is said to have happened as a result of the popularity of cinematograph’. In strict, taxonomic terms, consequently, the history of English literary culture in the period after 1918 is a chronicle of dissolution. Radio, cinema – and later television – did not destroy reading. All three took much of their material from literature, forged what were in some cases symbiotic relationships with it and provided valuable employment for writers who had previously been confined to the decent obscurity of the printed page. But the heights that the book and the magazine had scaled in the later nineteenth century would never be reached again. Henceforward the world of books, for all its centrality to the idea of ‘culture’ and for all the abstract glamour with which it was attended, would be a minority pursuit, whose decision-making processes, protocols and subject matter would be largely controlled by a cultivated elite.
At one level – the level of direct cultural influence – there is nothing very astounding about this retreat. The eighteenth-century bookseller-publisher, busy compiling his subscription lists and flattering his aristocratic patrons, was just as much of an opinion-broker as the New Statesman’s founding editorial board. In the same way, any literary historian who examines the working environment of 1918 cannot fail to be struck by a lurking sense of continuity. This tendency was most marked in the area of personnel. By and large it was the under-35s who had got themselves killed in Flanders; in their absence most of the giants of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras pressed indefatigably on into the post-war world. A. C. Benson, whose quasi-philosophical essays, filed under such titles as The Upton Letters (1905) and From a College Window (1906) won him an enormous popular audience, died in 1925. George Saintsbury, ‘King Saintsbury’, the undisputed doyen of the late Victorian quarterly review, whose early work had appeared so long ago as to be praised by Matthew Arnold, went on until 1933. Sir Edmund Gosse, the greatest of all the Edwardian literary panjandrums, sponsor of countless up-and-coming reputations and the dispenser of high-class critical judgements to readers of the Sunday Times, survived until 1928: a totem pole around which the aspiring critics of a later generation were, as they acknowledged, more than happy to dance. As Geoffrey Grigson recalled: ‘Those of us who were born after 1905 grew up into the world in which Sir Edmund Gosse wrote week by week … six feet above contradiction like an archdeacon in the pulpit or an auctioneer on the rostrum.’
And just as the denizens of an older literary world had survived to ornament the newfangled landscapes of the 1920s, so many of the young literary modernists who were to cause such an outcry in the post-1918 era had spent the war years quietly establishing their reputations – reputations that might only have been sustained by a handful of magazine readers, but were to prove invaluable weapons in the cultural wars that lay ahead. Eliot, Pound, F. S. Flint and Harold Monro were hard at work in the pages of the English Review, Poetry and Drama and Art and Letters, and the contents of Eliot’s influential Poems 1909–1925 (1925) go all the way back to the reign of Edward VII. But quite as much a fixture of the new literary world of the 1920s were the ‘sages’ of the Edwardian era – Chesterton, Belloc, Shaw and Wells – several of whom had twenty or even thirty years of professional life before them, and all of whom possessed bands of fanatical supporters ready to follow them from book to book while filling the subscription lists of the magazines in which they periodically set up home. Several of the planning meetings that preceded the launch of the New Statesman in 1913 were, for example, spent calculating just how many readers – the tally hovered between 500 and 1,000 – Shaw might bring with him if his name were secured for the masthead.
No doubt the readers of Shaw, Wells or Chesterton or half a dozen other post-Victorian behemoths were worth having. On the other hand, the days when the name of a famous writer was enough to guarantee a periodical’s success – Dickens with Household Words and All the Year Round, Thackeray with the Cornhill, Trollope with St Paul’s Magazine – were fast disappearing. G. K.’s Weekly, which pursued an erratic course through the 1920s and 1930s, was never a paying proposition. While there were still magazines that came stamped with their editors’ personalities – Eliot’s Criterion, Squire’s London Mercury, even, to a certain extent Time and Tide, owned by the feminist Lady Rhondda – these tended to be small-scale affairs, frequently sustained by private subsidy, too idiosyncratic ever to move out into the mass market. There were other ways, too, in which the literary milieux of pre-war days were becoming increasingly prone to fracture. Eliot once remarked that when Gosse died he created a vacancy that would never be filled: the post of titular head of English letters had ceased to exist. In making this point Eliot was, however stealthily, comparing the author of Father and Son to himself: the one addressing a mass audience against a backdrop of standards which it was assumed that critic and reader shared; the other anxious, in an age of increasing specialisation, to set down authoritative judgements for the benefit of an ever more exclusive band of subscribers.
Both Gosse and Eliot, in their very separate ways, were by-products of that mass reading public brought into existence by the Victorian board-school reforms, which simultaneously increased the number of people in zealous pursuit of ‘literature’ while fragmenting their margins into an almost infinite number of splinter groups. Judged by the standards that prevailed a century later, the early Victorian reading public had been microscopic: Vanity Fair (1847–8), for example, sold a modest 10,000 copies in its author’s lifetime. More to the point, perhaps, the book was bought, and read, by an audience whose cultural frame of reference was largely Thackeray’s own, who could decipher his classical references and his cultural allusions and appreciate his in-jokes. If by the 1890s, while one part of the literary world had grown bigger and brasher, then another, and by no means less influential part had turned more exclusive, more stylised, more self-consciously detached. As John Gross once put it, if it was the decade of Lord Northcliffe, the self-aggrandising proprietor of the Daily Mail, then it was also Aubrey Beardsley’s, a time of coteries and collectors’ items, ornate trifles and exotic reviews, not only the Yellow Book and the Savoy, but the Dome, the Pageant, the Quarto, the Hobby Horse, the Chameleon, the Rose Leaf and others so exquisitely obscure that there is no mention of them to be found even in the index of Holbrook Jackson’s The Eighteen Nineties. The gap between the mass-market periodical that sold 500,000 copies and the recondite quarterly backed by private money that sold 500 is not always as wide as early modernists sometimes like to insist – after all, the one professional marker flag that unites Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Conrad is that each of them at some point in their careers submitted work to Tit Bits – but by and large fragmentation was the order of the day.
Come the 1920s this divergence had become an unsealable fissure, to the point where one sometimes breezes through the contents page of an obscure highbrow magazine wondering exactly who, other than the editorial staff, could be expected to take an interest in it. If all this made literary culture steadily less homogeneous at the professional level, then it also had serious implications for the leisure pursuit that ultimately sustained and financed it. To be ‘fond of reading’, as so many of the respondents to interwar social surveys clearly were, meant different things to different readers. Even in the infinitely narrower spectrum of book reviewing, the gap between a highbrow periodical such as the Athenaeum under John Middleton Murry’s editorship and a magazine like John O’London’s Weekly, aimed squarely at the Boots Library-subscribing traditionalist, could sometimes seem all but unbridgeable.
One effect of these oscillations back and forth along the intellectual scale was to limit – in some cases severely limit – the usefulness of certain hitherto valuable terms of cultural reference. ‘Taste’ in the 1920s, for example, has so many meanings that the word is probably best left out of literary criticism altogether. There is the ‘taste’ of T. S. Eliot and the ‘taste’ of the hundreds and thousands of predominantly female readers who enjoyed the work of Herbert Allingham, who contributed short stories at the rate of three or four a month to a variety of women’s magazines for the best part of half a century. There is the ‘taste’ of the left-leaning public school poet scrabbling for a foothold in the columns of Twentieth Century Verse, and the ‘taste’ – a precise and well-nigh forensic taste – of the patron of the Hampstead bookshop library staffed by Gordon Comstock in Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) who demands ‘something – well you know – modern. Sex-problems and divorce and all that, you know’, and is finally appeased with a copy of Seven Scarlet Nights