narrator of Cary's best book, The Horse's Mouth (1944).
Graham Greene is a major writer of the century who succeeds, through his relatively little-known minor works of the thirties, in catching the period's anxieties, its forebodings about the advent of another war, better than anybody else. Thrillers like Stambul Train (1932) and A Gun for Sale (1936), which he deprecatingly cast as 'entertainments,' are in fact well crafted, tautly written novels whose crisply noted descriptive details take on the force of metaphor. The shabby, sordid London in A Gun for Sale and It's a Battlefield (1934) moves beyond naturalistic observation to constitute the moral and psychological atmosphere for a generation trapped, isolated, scared. Characters in these early novels live in a world essentially devoid of meaning and go about their business without knowing what they are doing. The Assistant Commissioner investigating a murder in It's a Battlefield, for example, has no more understanding of what the issues really are than does -745- Raven in A Gun for Sale, who commits a murder for profit without any idea of why he was told to do so.
The brooding sense of evil permeating the early novels continues in Brighton Rock (1938), Greene's best- known work of the thirties, but here achieves a particular human focus in Pinkie, the unregenerate teenage killer. Ruthless and without compassion, the Catholic Pinkie is ultimately brought to justice by the efforts of Ida Arnold, the blowsy sensualist who knows the difference between right and wrong. In the conflict between the tormented ascetic (Pinkie is sexually a mess after having as a child regularly witnessed his parents copulating on Saturday nights-one of the novel's few false notes) and the innocent nonbeliever, Greene, a practicing Catholic, treats those great themes of the nature of evil, of sin and redemption, which he goes on to explore in his later fiction.
Greene was fascinated with the way popular forms (hence his attraction to the thriller-including Brighton Rock) could express the only true 'subject-matter for art, life as it is and life as it ought to be.' Part of that fascination led him to a lifelong interest in film, an interest shared, among others, by Waugh, Huxley, and Isherwood. In Greene's case, the influence of film on his fiction is evident in his use of realistic but highly charged detail, quick narrative cuts, and spare, telling dialogue. His thirties universe of doubt, distrust, and betrayal is masterfully fashioned out of these techniques.
Good novelists of the thirties, of course, are numerous. In paying attention to some I think prominent and interesting, I don't mean to slight the host of accomplished otherswriters like William Plomer, Rose Macaulay, Anthony Powell, Rosamond Lehmann, Jean Rhys, Elizabeth Bowen, John Cowper Powys, Rex Warner, and Ralph Bates, to name a few-whose work is also of value. The extent of worthwhile fiction in the thirties simply exceeds the capacity of this discussion to deal with all of it.
Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood were two very different kinds of writers and human beings whose lives, fundamentally studies in contrasts, at the same time share some curious parallels. Grandson on his father's side of the great Victorian biologist and intellectual T. H. Huxley, and related on his mother's side to Matthew Arnold, Huxley was born into one of the families-the Darwins, Wedgwoods, Macaulays, Arnolds, and Trevelyans are the others-who made up the ruling class of Britain's intellectual aristocracy. The history of nine-746- nine- scientific, social, and educational thought was shaped by their influence. Along with impeccable genes, Huxley also inherited, as his friend Gerald Heard said, a substantial 'weight of intellectual authority and a momentum of moral obligations.' Isherwood's family, on the other hand, while respectably upper middle class and properly affluent, had no significant cultural legacy to leave to Christopher: his father was a soldier.
Huxley loved his mother deeply. Her death from cancer when he was fourteen was a tremendous blow to him. The death of Isherwood's father in the war when Christopher was only eleven was debilitating in different ways. It not only deprived him of a father, it left him to struggle with the mythic legacy of father-as-war-hero, a burden that took an immense toll on his own quest for a viable, stable identity. Equally important, it put him entirely in the hands of a mother whom he grew rapidly to loathe as manipulative and self-serving. The figure of the Evil Mother, as Cyril Connolly terms her, appears in Isherwood's first two novels as the embodiment of everything that must be resisted by the protagonists. Part of Isherwood's lifelong rebellion against the forces of convention and hypocrisy stems from his perception of the need to escape his mother's entrapment.
Huxleys were expected not only to succeed academically but to contribute something important to the world in one way or another. Aldous took those assumptions with him to Eton and then to Oxford, where he earned a First in English as well as the prestigious Stanhope Historical Essay Prize. Isherwood went to Cambridge where the necessity of frustrating his mother's expectations that he would become a don required him to fail. After deliberately not studying for the tripos examination at the end of his second year, he assured his failure by answering the questions with a mixture of gentle mockery, mediocre verse made up on the spot, and satire. Needless to say, he succeeded in convincing college authorities that he should not be there. Called back to Cambridge at the end of term, after he had left for London, he was permitted to remove his name from the college books to avoid the embarrassment of expulsion.
Such were the disparate origins of two writers who came to represent both the post- and prewar sensibilities of their generation. Given the differences, it is interesting to note some of the similarities in their careers: while traveling abroad both wrote the books that captured Britain's between-the-wars disillusionment and anxiety; both left -747- Britain permanently in the thirties and settled in California (where they became friends and even collaborated on some projects); both engaged in profitable stints of film writing in Hollywood; and both moved through an absence of religious commitment to find, while in California, some nourishing belief in mysticism and Eastern religion.
Despite Huxley's enormous popularity, particularly among students and the young intellectuals of his generation, no lasting consensus has developed about his status as a novelist, or even about whether he should be considered a novelist at all. Sir Isaiah Berlin saw him as one of the culture heroes of his time, helping to sweep away the intellectual and moral cobwebs of the past. Critic Jocelyn Brooks insisted, in 1963, that 'no one under fifty can quite realize how exciting Huxley seemed to us who were schoolboys or undergraduates in the twenties.' NovelistAngus Wilson is even more specific: 'Antic Hay was all that I had devoutly hoped for… Aldous Huxley was the god of my adolescence.' At the same time critics have often dismissed him as an essayist in novelist's clothing, as an essentially nonserious writer who somehow caught the nonserious spirit of the era. In his influential survey of the British novel, written in 1955, Walter Allen omitted him entirely from his chapter '1914 and After.' Although critics recently have paid more attention to him, the dilemma still remains.
Huxley himself addressed part of the difficulty in understanding what he was doing through an entry in the notebooks of Philip Quarles, Huxley's novelist-surrogate in Point Counter Point:
Novel of ideas. The character of each personage must be implied, as far as possible, in the ideas of which he is a mouthpiece. In so far as theories are rationalizations of sentiments, instincts, dispositions of soul, this is feasible. The chief defect of the novel of ideas is that you must write about people who have ideas to express-which excludes all but about.01 per cent of the human race. Hence the real, the congenital novelists don't write such books. But then I never pretended to be a congenital novelist.
Quarles's commitment to the novel of ideas was Huxley's own and immediately suggests the difference between his practice and that of the «real» novelists. Huxley felt he had no particular gift for storytelling or plotting or character development-qualities traditionally associated with the art of the novel. Nor had he any reverence for them. 'There aren't any divinely laid down canons of the novel,' he wrote. 'All you need is to be interesting.' -748-
In his search to be interesting, Huxley eschewed the tightly wrought, highly conscious formal structures of, say, Henry James or Conrad or Virginia Woolf. He needed something looser and more capacious: 'My own aim is to arrive, technically, at a perfect fusion of the novel and the essay, a novel in which one can put all one's ideas, a novel like a holdall.' For one steeped in the knowledge of English fiction, as Huxley was, formal inspiration for the hold-all novel was instantly at hand in the work of Thomas Love Peacock, whose novels such as Headlong Hall (1816), Nightmare Abbey (1818), and Crotchet Castle (1831) bring various eccentric characters to a country house where they reveal themselves through polite conversation. Essentially a static form, the country house novel frees the novelist from having to worry about plot, or the before and after of the characters' existence. It was perfect for Huxley's purposes, and Crome Yellow (1921), Huxley's first novel (which he explicitly called 'Peacockian') descends directly from it.
The advantages of a ready-made form that permited his characters to do what they do best-talk-and required little else were not lost on Huxley. Even as he finished his first Peacockian effort, he was seized by an idea for a second, 'a gigantic one in an Italian scene.' The vision persisted through the interruption of Antic Hay, and in
