response to the devastation of the war, I do not wish to diminish the thirties' special flavor. More than a simple chronological label encompassing a specific ten-year span, the term has acquired the force of a cultural metaphor, so that mention of 'the thirties' evokes a distinct set of social, moral, political, and literary values inevitably associated with the period. Socially (and morally) those values have to do with a serious engagement with issues of injustice and inequality around the world, with a concern for the well-being of the underclasses, with a need, in short, for individuals to move beyond the constraints of their own selves in order to make empathetic contact with others. Politically, of course, the values are those of the left. While very few of the writers of the thirties were actual communists, their overriding sympathies tended to be with them, particularly in the face of the fascist threat posed by Hitler and Mussolini. The Spanish civil war, which broke out in 1936, provided a clear opportunity for choice, and very few could resist supporting the Republican cause. The complicated political tensions and interest groups that -741- developed within the Loyalist side eventually muddied the clarity considerably, but for most of the period the oppression of fascist tyranny (though it had its proponents) was easy to oppose. In a poll taken in 1937 by the magazine Left Review, for example, 127 authors out of the 149 queried listed themselves as sympathetic to the Republic, with only five declaring their allegiance to Franco. Even allowing for the magazine's own interest in compiling such data (not all the responses were published), the results are impressive. It is worth noting in this regard that both «leftish» (1934) and «leftward» (1936) added themselves to the English vocabulary during this period.
The literary sensibility implicit in the metaphor of the thirties follows naturally upon the social and political. The closest we come to a manifesto of that sensibility (though it is really more signpost than manifesto) are the prefaces of two important anthologies of contemporary writing edited by Michael Roberts: a volume of poetry, New Signatures, published in 1932; and New Country (1933), containing both poetry and prose. (It is significant that poetry preceded the appearance of prose in these collections for it is primarily the poets-and their critics-who provided the decade's literary definition of itself. The thirties, in fact, may well be the last period in English literature in which poetry was taken at all seriously.)
In New Signatures, which features the work of W. H. Auden, C. Day Lewis, and Stephen Spender, the three canonical poets of the period, Roberts calls for a new, comprehensible poetry of direct language that can appeal to the 'every day experience of normal human beings.' Part of the job of the poet now is to find solutions to human problems, to 'root out ugliness and evil,' so that he must not only 'be abreast of his own times,' he must be understood by those for whom he writes: a leader, he 'must not be out of sight of his followers.' Constituting a 'clear reaction against esoteric poetry,' New Signatures rejects the obscurity and self-indulgence of T. S. Eliot's Waste Land in favor of a poetry that will struggle to reassert human values, not from a position of privileged distance, but in 'solidarity with others.'
In New Country, Roberts extends the social analysis of New Signatures in explicitly political ways. Having grown up in the shadow of the First World War (he was born in 1902), Roberts notes that his generation is once again facing an unsettled Europe in which 'all that we see is threatened.' The cause is the social system that exploits and tyrannizes the masses. The solution is not 'a new moral code' but 'a social -742- system which will bring people into contact with those… who can advise and help them.' The current class system must be abolished, Roberts argues, an accomplishment that can only be brought about by revolutionary efforts. Such activity is particularly important for the novelist. Since he writes about people, he faces a crucial choice: He can 'either write in a way which shows the fatuity and hopelessness' of the doomed white-collar class, or he can focus instead on the working class, where he will discover 'the clearest symbols of those passions and activities he values, for they will be less confused and muddled by the intricacies of a crumbling system.' And with that commitment, a new prose will develop, freed from the murk and doubt of the past, a prose intelligible to the working class, which will in turn help 'make the revolutionary movement articulate.'
Although Roberts's revolutionary fervor was not blithely shared by many of the writers of his generation, his sense of the social obligations of the poet and novelist became an essential part of the decade's literary sense of itself. It also provided the impetus for an ongoing dialogue within individual writers over the extent to which the claims of art can be reconciled with the commitment to social action. While answers varied-with Spender, for example, despite his early political allegiance to communism, arguing that the artist must not compromise his vision and language in the interests of any cause-few writers were unaffected by the seriousness of the problem. As Spender points out in The Creative Element, if communism did not give writers a positive belief, it at least instilled in them a bad conscience. As long as we recognize that a decade's intellectual and literary complexity can never be reduced to any simplistic set of attitudes, then the concerns enunciated by Roberts in his two prefaces are useful in clarifying some of the meanings associated with the thirties as cultural metaphor.
A perusal of the novelists writing in the thirties makes clear how no generalization can hope to embrace the complexity and variety of the decade's prose fiction. Although demonstrably not an age of experiment, for example, the thirties nevertheless include two of the century's outstanding modernist works: Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939) and Virginia Woolf's The Waves (1931). Arguably the most significant and demanding novels produced in this decade, both, in different ways, seek to extend the linguistic and formal possibilities of fiction. Neither, however, reflects in a significant way any of the characteristic concerns of the period, and it would make little sense, on the basis of these works, — 743- to think of Woolf or Joyce as «belonging» to the thirties. (Others of Woolf's books, such as The Years and particularly the nonfictional Three Guineas, most assuredly do belong.)
A third prodigiously modernist effort, which remains almost entirely unread today, is Wyndham Lewis's Apes of God (1930). A poet, painter, critic, and novelist, Lewis, who was at odds with most forms of modernism, including the work of Joyce and Woolf, founded the vorticist movement in painting before World War I, edited Blast, the movement's futurist magazine, and excoriated all forms of cultural and literary softness. His admiration for hard, precise images in poetry and painting led him also to find hard, intractable political leaders like Hitler appealing, in whose praise he wrote a small book in 1931. Apes is a scathing satire on the mendacity and hollowness of the British literary scene, especially Bloomsbury and the Sitwell family. Clotted, peopled with grotesques of all kinds, it is both excessive and extraordinary, a monument to Lewis's larger-than-life idiosyncracy.
While Woolf and Joyce, as well as Lewis, represent the high point of radical experimentation with form in the period, they were not the only ones to explore new methods. Two lesser-known writers-Dorothy Richardson and Ivy Compton-Burnett-also attempted, less successfully, to devise new forms for their work. Relentlessly pursuing the inner life of her protagonist, Marian, through her ten-volume Pilgrimage begun in 1915, Richardson demonstrates that the stream-of-consciousness technique in itself guarantees neither freshness nor insight. The new possibilities of the narrative method bog down in a wealth of undifferentiated impressions and thoughts. Marian's subjective reality is finally not interesting enough to sustain the reader.
Richardson's implacable interiority contrasts with Compton-Burnett's programmatically external approach to her fiction. In novels like Men and Wives (1931) and More Women Than Men (1933), consisting almost entirely of dialogue, she reveals the cruelty and violence lurking behind decorous late-Victorian family façades. The genteel, stylized nature of the dialogue provides an effective vehicle for her melodramatic plots, abounding in murder and suicide, which convey an unabashedly grim view of human nature.
Her exposure of what lies beneath British domestic surfaces has its overseas counterpart in novels demonstrating some of the social and moral difficulties of Britain's empire. Having served in the Indian Imperial Police for five years in Burma, George Orwell grew to hate -744- imperialism, as he says, 'with a bitterness which I probably cannot make clear.' A product of that hatred, Burmese Days (1934) charts the psychological and moral costs incurred by an indefensible system that finally cause James Flory to blow his brains out. Orwell was one of the period's most engaged political writers. His detestation of fascism led him to join the fight against Franco in Spain, where he was seriously wounded. His experiences in Spain with the complex politics of the left nourished his anticommunism, and his two best-known books, Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949), express his passionate opposition to totalitarian regimes of any kind.
Although not nearly as critical of British imperialism as Orwell, Joyce Cary recognized, during his six years as a civil administrator in Africa, the tensions and cultural contradictions it generated. The crowded landscape of his first three novels, Aissa Saved (1932), An American Visitor (1933), and The African Witch (1936), explore the consequences, for African and Englishman alike, of Britain's colonial presence. The most successful of his African novels, however, is Mister Johnson (1939), the story of the irrepressible African clerk whose uncomprehending enthusiasm for all things British leads inescapably to his death. Johnson's marvelous energy and spontaneity confer upon him an innocence that is unsullied even by the fact that he commits murder. As the creative shaper of his own life, he is the first of Cary's great artist-heroes, whose most brilliant embodiment is the painter Gulley Jimson,
