knowledgeable and perceptive critic.
In the early 1950s the English literary world was dominated not by the modernist writers but by the critics, reviewers, and academics who were their apologists. Enthusiastic about experimental writing, these critics seemed to the next generation of writers too authoritarian, too dismissive of nineteenth-century writing, and too ready to use the modernists in promoting their own elitist views.
The 1950s writers rebelled. Their views became dominant, and eventually they replaced the previous generation of critics. Traditionalism was no longer unfashionable, and the social novel displaced the novel of alienation. But in their revolutionary zeal many members of the new generation of writers adopted the tactics of the old. Too often, their goal was not merely to open the way for one style of writing but also to close it to others. Thus, in destroying one establishment, the 1950s writers created another; and its parochialism was no less repressive. The reputations of writers like Joyce and Woolf were finally not very much damaged by the antimodernist movement. But at the time the message for unpublished novelists was unmistakable: climb onto the antimodernist bandwagon or be left behind.
Angus Wilson was one of the first to describe how a new dogmatism was springing up in place of the old. 'Orthodoxy of the social novel,' he wrote in 1954, 'would be as deplorable as the orthodoxy of Blooms-915- bury. I should be happy to see more than Mr. William Golding swimming against the tide with success.'
It is with good cause that Wilson mentioned Golding: the latter was one of the novelists being attacked at that time. Lord of the Flies, Golding's first novel (and for many readers his best), was published in 1954; the reviews ranged from lukewarm to very hostile. In particular, Golding was scolded for the deviations from realism introduced by the allegorical aspects of his novel. It was not until a number of years had passed and Lord of the Flies appeared in paperback that the book found a sympathetic audience.
The novels of Lawrence Durrell were given an equally hostile reception. Here again it is worth quoting Wilson, who notes a connection between the insularity of Durrell's critics and the vehemence of their attacks:
Since France, and with her most of Western Europe, has persisted in experimental novel writing, all this tends to increase the division between English literary culture and European, to encourage a a self-satisfied insular attitude which reaches occasional peaks in the clownishness in Kingsley Amis' attacks on 'abroad.' It was to be seen very clearly when Lawrence Durrell's quartet appeared. On the whole the work received a fierce handling from English critics. In many ways it deserved it. Mr. Durrell's aims are magnificent, but his execution was often slipshod and pretentious, and the language floridly vulgar.
Yet too often the implication of English critics was that Durrell's novel had failed because it was experimental and therefore out-of-date; what is more, there was a distinct implication that this was bound to happen when a chap becomes an expatriate, lives abroad, and cuts himself off from the main stream of his country's development. This sort of criticism is too illiberal, mistaken and bad. It is the dangerous result of a too- rigid swing of the pendulum.
Some observers have argued that this kind of literary xenophobia ended with the 1950s. But if the insularity Wilson deplored became less common in the next decade, it had not disappeared. For example, B. S. Johnson, a young English writer who published a number of experimental novels in the 1960s, was left bitter by the experience. In the introduction to his Aren't You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs (1973), he complained about the refusal of English readers to come to terms with writers like Joyce and Beckett, and about the persistent hostility to anything that came close to avant-garde writing.
A year later, in a radio discussion, Kingsley Amis's son Martin (himself a novelist of some repute) discussed his father's rejection of experi-916- mental writing. 'I have always thought it remarkable,' said the younger Amis, 'that someone who is as linguistically aware as my father should never have sought to experiment in prose at all, or to have seen any virtue whatever in slightly experimental prose.' This remains a central question: why the advocacy of one style should so insistently demand the rejection of another.I hope it is clear that I am not attacking traditionalism in fiction, or saying that the 1950s novelists should have followed a modernist style: Anglo-Saxon Attitudes is an example of the memorable fiction that can be produced when a writer returns to a traditional style. Rather, my point is that art produced in an atmosphere of repression and conformity can become dull, weak, tame, colorless; and that this in fact often occurred in the English fiction of the 1950s.
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Sleeping with the Enemy: Doris Lessing in the Century of Destruction
There's something I have to reach. I have to tell people. People don't know it but it is as if they are living in a poisoned air. They are not awake. They've been knocked on the head, long ago, and they don't know that is why they are living like zombies and killing each other.
The reason, as we all know, why readers yearn to «believe» cosmologies and tidy systems of thought is that we live in dreadful and marvellous times where the certainties of yesterday dissolve as we live.
WHEN Doris Lessing immigrated to London from Rhodesia at the end of the decade that opened with World War II and closed with the Iron Curtain coming down, her host nation had strong and cohesive opinions about its culture. A challenge to the distinction between high and low culture had yet to be successfully mounted, and high culture remained largely the preserve of white men born in England, educated at Oxford or Cambridge, and working in or publishing out of London. In that London of the fifties, Lessing recalls in a recent sketch published in
