Echoing through the writings of these and other English novelists of the 1950s is the complaint that modernist fiction had so baffled the public that readers were giving up on novel reading. As Pamela Hansford Johnson (who later would marry C. P. Snow) said in 1949,
In the nineteenth century [the ordinary reader] was happy. Dickens wrote for him; and Trollope, and Thackeray, and George Eliot… But today he is seriously worried. Reading some of the weekend literary columns, he finds himself urged to admire some work which, when he buys or borrows it, he finds arid, unenjoyable, and not infrequently incomprehensible. He turns back from book to review. He thinks, 'Is this man crazy or am I?' He has been taught to respect the critic. If the lesson is well-learned he may start to lose faith in himself. If he preserves his independence he then takes refuge, more often than not, in the detective story.
William Cooper, a friend of C. P. Snow's, felt that it was necessary to attack the experimental novel in order to find an audience for his own kind of fiction:
During the last years of the war a literary comrade-in-arms and I, not prepared to wait for Time's ever- rolling stream to bear Experimental Writing away, made our own private plans to run it out of town as soon as we picked up our pens again-if you look at the work of the next generation of English novelists to come up after us, you'll observe that we didn't entirely lack success in our efforts… We meant to write a different kind of novel from that of the thirties and we saw that the thirties novel, the Experimental Novel, had got to be brushed out of the way before we could get a proper hearing.
It was Cooper's view that there was a strain of intellectual decadence in modernist writing:
The impulse behind much Experimental Writing is an attack from the inside on intellect in general, made by intellectuals so decadent that they no longer mind if intellect persists-in fact some of them sound as if they would be happier if it didn't… In any part of intellectual society the decadent are at the present moment of history immediately identifiable: they are plugging a theory that everybody really knows won't work.
What exactly this 'attack from the inside on intellect in general' was Cooper did not explain; nor did he indicate why, if the experimental writers were 'plugging a theory that… won't work,' he was so intent on attacking it. -897-
John Wain, another author whose fiction first appeared in the 1950s, assured his readers that 'the experimental novel died with Joyce.' After Ulysses, there was little experimental novel writing that was 'serious, or motivated by anything more than faddishness or the irritable search for new gimmicks.' Wain included in this category even the novels of Samuel Beckett.
Persuaded that the time for experimentation was over, the antimodernist authors chose to model their own fiction on more traditional forms. For Doris Lessing, this meant returning to the style of the nineteenth-century realistic novelists:
For me the highest point of literature was the novel of the nineteenth century, the work of Tolstoy, Stendhal, Dostoyevsky, Balzac, Turgenev, Chekhov; the work of the great realists… I hold the view that the realist novel, the realist story, is the highest form of prose writing; higher than and out of the reach of any comparison with expressionism, impressionism, symbolism, naturalism, or any other ism.
While similar views were held by many other novelists of this period, I have chosen to focus on Amis, Snow, and Wilson because they were prolific both as critics and as novelists. The three are linked by some other similarities: they attended Oxford or Cambridge, for a time were engaged in university teaching, and eventually were knighted. (Snow, some years after receiving his knighthood, was made a life peer as Baron Snow).
Amis, Snow, and Wilson also had in common a strain of antielitism that influenced their aesthetic outlooks. To them, modernism seemed arcane, highbrow, antidemocratic-the relict style of a superannuated establishment. One of the set pieces in Amis's novels is a satirical turn directed at the posturing of pompous culturati. Wilson similarly expressed opposition to elitist pretensions; in a 1950 talk broadcast by the BBC he attacked Virginia Woolf because her 'sort of elitist middle-class sensibility or at any rate that of her imitators had been one of the deepest complacencies that had brought England near to destruction.' To Snow, modernism epitomized a return to aristocratic values that presented an impediment to the evolution of the new British meritocracy. All three authors, then, found in modernism-an apparently progressive literary movement-a strong element of social conservatism; often, this belief gave impetus to their attacks on it. -898-
In 1954, in the Spectator, Kingsley Amis announced his desire to ban from literature 'all use of allegory, symbol, or other mystification capable of inducing a sober blurb-writer or reviewer to invoke the name of Kafka.' Discussing Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Amis complained about the profusion of stylistic attributes such as 'pun, allusion, neologism, alliteration, cynghanedd, apostrophe, parenthesis, rhetorical question, French, Latin, 'anent, 'perchance, 'would fain, 'for the nonce. 'Lolita, according to Amis, was 'bad as a work of art… and morally bad.' Reviewing Nabokov's Pnin, Amis was no less hostile: 'That this limp, tasteless salad of Joyce, Chaplin, Mary McCarthy, and of course Nabokov (who should know better) has had delighted noises made over it by Edmund Wilson, Randall Jarrell, and Graham Greene is a mystery of dimensions.'
Amis's objections to Nabokov held for other authors whose prose showed signs of similar attributes:
Style, a personal style, a distinguished style, usually turns out in idiosyncratic noise level in the writing, with wow from imagery, syntax, and diction: Donne, Pater, Woolf. There is, however, a good deal of nostalgia for style nowadays among people of oldster age-group or literary training; it shows in snorting accusations of gracelessness levelled against some younger novelists and merges into the hankering for «experiment» that still dies hard.
In another article Amis went into detail about his aversion to experimental writing:
The idea about experiment being the life-blood of the English novel is one that dies hard. 'Experiment,' in this context, boils down pretty regularly to 'obtruded oddity,' whether in construction-multiple viewpoints and such-or in style; it is not felt that adventurousness in subject matter or attitude or tone really counts. Shift from one scene to the next in midsentence, cut down on verbs or definite articles, and you are putting yourself right up in the forefront, at any rate in the eyes of those who were reared on Joyce and Virginia Woolf and take a jaundiced view of more recent developments.
In mentioning 'recent developments' Amis indicates that for him the age of modernism is past, and anything on the contemporary scene that resembles it should therefore be jettisoned. He does not, however, apply the same dismissive criterion to other writing from earlier eras. Amis considers himself a follower in the tradition of the English novelists of -899- the eighteenth century, and has discussed his affinity for the fiction of Henry Fielding.
Amis has in a number of respects been influenced by Fielding. In Amis's first novel,
Some of Amis's other novels similarly follow in the eighteenth-century tradition.
