The Common Pursuit (42 page)

The words in Little Gidding are points of intersection. They join, in the tolerance of a convening insight, the worlds which in common experience are divided and distinguished. Always they bring us back to what is known, but it is the familiar made different by exploration, the 'intimate yet identifiable', the everyday alchemized into abiding strangeness.

Does this kind of gloss add anything to anyone's understanding or appreciation of the text ? It is true that Dr Rajan goes on to say:

It is most difficult to do justice to Little Gidding. You have to do the impossible, to say four things at once; and if you try to say them successively you end up by saying something different.

The moral is that you should be very clear with yourself as to precisely what function you are undertaking to perform. It will hardly be that of doing justice'—an aim which would most likely result in the commentator's producing (as Miss Bradbrook puts it) a 'debilitating rehash of what his author may be supposed to " mean"'. What can reasonably be undertaken is to point out the nature of the organization, and that task, it should be recognized, is one for a disciplined effort of intelligence. But it cannot be satisfactorily performed except by an analyst with a good sensibility. That is, it demands a critic, capable of first-hand response and independent judgment.

It must be said that Miss Anne Ridler, in her chosen mode of commentary, shows herself very much at home. She gives as her

subject, *A Question of Speech 5 , and approaches it as herself an English poet. 'For myself, I should say, it was Eliot who first made me despair of becoming a poet; Auden (with, of course, dead poets, notably Sir Thomas Wyatt) who first made me think I saw how to become one*. She discusses (among other things) the relation between poetry and music, and thinks

the differences more suggestive than the similarities. The elementary fact that poetry has no sustained notes is a big one;' duration in time* is therefore quite a different thing for her, and she cannot mingle her themes in the way that music does. To compensate for her inability to keep several voices at once, she has her hidden dimension of memory and association: this is the 'Invisible Knight' that is her constant companion.

Miss Ridler doesn't, however, try to give force to these observations (or any others she makes) by any detailed analysis of particular poems or passages. Of Mr Eliot she remarks that *As a critic, he has kept his preferences while shedding his prejudices', and gives as illustration (among others—one concerns Milton) the difference between his early essay, The Function of Criticism, and 'the much less acid What is a Classic? 9 —A classic is what, of its kind, I should myself call The Function of Criticism ; on the other hand, I couldn't disagree when I heard the less 'acid* performance described as being more like an exercise in tight-rope-walking than a feat of critical thinking. But Miss Ridler has a poise of her own that is in its own way impressive: I suspect it to be very much an Oxford way, and I think: I suggest the interest and significance of her essay rightly when I recommend it for study as an Oxford product. I can't, however, see what part it has in a book planned (that is the claim)'in such a way as to make the consecutive study of the poems possible'.

Mr Mankowitz does a close analysis of that very fine early poem, Gerontion. But the contribution I read with some marked pleasure and stimulus was Philip Wheelwright's on Eliot's Philosophical Themes, which, it will be noted, doesn't offer a point-by-point elucidation of any poem, and won't, I think, be among the aids most resorted to.

It will be gathered, then, that I shouldn't like to think of this book's being accepted (it very well may be) as a standard

introduction and guide-book to Eliot. It contains some respectable things, but it seems to me calculated in sum to promote, not the impact of Eliot's genius—a disturbing force and therefore capable of ministering to life—but his establishment as a safe academic classic.

THE PROGRESS OF POESY

IN 1930, in the shadow of, but not too close to, Mr J. Alfred Prufrock, the Poems of Mr W. H. Auden first appeared. Mr T. S. Eliot's Waste Land had prepared the way by showing out the Georgians as gracefully but as finally as his Bloomsbury lady pours out tea.

There is a recurrent embarrassment facing anyone who is concerned for the contemporary function of criticism: the call for certain observations and judgments comes endlessly, and certain things have unavoidably to be said again and again, or there is no point in offering to deal with the contemporary scene; yet there is a limit to profitable reiteration, and—is this (comes the question) once more an occasion that, after so much abstinence, must not be ignored ? The passage quoted above opens a full-page review in the Times Literary Supplement (Oct. 23, 1948) of W. H. Auden's The Age of Anxiety, and the review does seem an occasion that one must take.

The effect of die passage is not, as might have been supposed, an unfortunate accident of expression. The critic himself doesn't actually say, as die acclaimers of that Poetic Renaissance in which Mr Auden played the leading part did, that Auden superseded Eliot, but his commentary may fairly be said to be in resonance with that view. That is, if we are to grant that what he offers is serious criticism, then die fashionable relegation of Mr Eliot that marked die advancing nineteen-thirties was critically respectable: it was die supersession, as die reigning power in poetry, of one creative genius by another, who understood better how to satisfy the needs of the time. 1

As a matter of fact, we are left in doubt whether the critic considers Mr Eliot a really major poet: he speaks of his 'grey unruffled language' and his 'gende and exquisite language'. However, it is hardly worth while to pursue the evaluative

1 It was interesting to observe in the universities how, at senior levels, conventional taste that had continued to resist Eliot was able to leave him behind and achieve a superior advancedness by acclaiming Modern Poetry in Auden-

implications of these astonishing phrases. We need do no more than contemplate the way in which the critic gives as grounds for treating Itr Auden as a great poet the very characteristics that make him so decidedly not one—and make him something not seriously co be compared with Mr Eliot. Mr Auden's poetry, we are told,

was pbilds aphy undigested but illuminated by a poet's intuition. It was poetry tafcen from the same events as those recorded in the daily newspapers. Its range was as sensational, its attitude as unpedantic, its acute-ness in reading the signs of the weather a hundred times greater For

good measure he threwinto his verse, like toys, the names of Freud and Rilke; le made the Mother-symbol smart; he made poetry out of dance lyrics.. . .

Of this poetry we are told that it was 'politically honest and self-searching', that it 'could shame a generation into political awareness, a personal guilt' and that it 'diagnosed the causes of the struggle correctly and clear-sightedly'. Mr Auden's honesty there is no need to question; it may perhaps be said to manifest itself in the opeon*ess with which his poetry admits that it doesn't know how serious it supposes itself to be. He was no doubt 'self-searching ', just as a thousand public-school boys going up to the university in those days were 'self-searching'. But to talk of his being' correct' and 'dear-sighted' in 'diagnosis' is about as absurd a misuse of words as can be imagined. It was not clear-sightedness that mad«fc him an irresistible influence. The 'political awareness' and the s personal guilt' into which he 'shamed a generation' were of a kxnl that it cost them very little to be shamed into. They asked fin nothing better, and his poetry stilled any uncomfortable suspicion chat there might be something better (if less comforting) to ask for. There it was, flatteringly modern and sophisticated, offering an intellectual and psychological profundity that didn't challenge them to any painful effort or discipline, and assuring them dm in wearing a modish Leftishness they could hold up their heads in a. guaranteed rightness—for the play with Depressed Areas, rusty machinery, and the bourgeois Dance of Death had essenti ally not the function of destroying complacency. No wonder they took mo re kindly to him than to Mr Eliot, who had no such attractions to offer.

The conditions that account for the arrest of Mr Auden's remarkable talent at the stage of undergraduate 'brilliance' are not, we are disconcertingly reminded, less potent now than they were. Our critic says that Mr Auden * was the Oxford intellectual with a bag of poetic squibs in his pocket', without seeming to realize that he was the undergraduate intellectual—permanently undergraduate and representing an immaturity that the ancient universities, not so long ago, expected their better undergraduates to transcend. It is the more disconcerting in that one can't avoid the suspicion (the signs are strong) that in this criticism we have a voice from the university—and not, of course, a junior one. It judges Mr Auden's last book a failure ('his one dull book, his one failure'), but we get no hint of any perceived relation between this failure and the earlier career that the reviewer has described.

If Mr Auden's successor doesn't become acquainted with serious criticism and die standards of maturity at the university, he will not readily find help towards remedying the lack when he enters the larger literary world. The Times Literary Supplement critic's way of seeing in Mr Auden's bright topicality the major poet's kind of authority called to mind a number of Horizon (July, 1947) that had been lying by some months among the 'documents' and signs of the times. In an editorial 'Comment' we read:

In order to prepare an edition of essays from Horizon for translation into German it was necessary last week to run through all ninety-odd numbers ... many of the fireworks in earlier numbers which achieved immediate popularity are now inclined to appear superficial and shoddy. One is also conscious of a change of policy which would appear to be justified. This change is expressed in our belief that the honeymoon between literature and action, once so promising, is over. We can see, looking through these old Horizons, a left-wing and sometimes revolutionary political attitude among writers, heritage of Guernica and Munich, boiling up to a certain aggressive optimism in the war years, gradually declining after D-day and soon after the victorious general election despondently fizzing out. It would be too easy to attribute this to the policy of the editors, their war-weariness, ana advancing years. The fact remains that a Socialist Government, besides doing practically nothing to help artists and writers (unless die closing down of magazines during the fuel crisis can be interpreted as an aid to incubation), has also quite failed to stir up either intellect or

imagination; the English renaissance, whose false dawn we have so enthusiastically greeted, is further away than ever.

Here, in these guileless reflections and avowals, we have an idea of the function of an intellectual literary organ corresponding to the Times Literary Supplement writer's idea of the poet. The nature of the' acuteness in reading the signs of the weather' lauded in both cases is obvious. The consequences for criticism of Horizon s idea of its own function are manifested on a large scale in the later pages of the same number. Further on in the 'Comment' we read:

In the light of the comparative failure of the 'progressive* movement of the last few years to rise above intelligent political journalism into the realms of literature, we must look elsewhere, either to the mad and lonely, or to those who have with a certain angry obstinacy meticulously cultivated their garden. Among these the Sitwells shine out, for during the darkest years of the war they managed not only to produce their best work and to grow enormously in stature, but to find time to be of immense help to others. Many poets and writers were consoled by their encouragement as well as by their intransigent example, and so this number, at the risk of the inevitable accusations that we support a literary clique, is wholeheartedly dedicated to diem. It includes a new poem by Miss Sitwell, an essay on her later poetry by Sir Kenneth Clark which mentions her most recent work. The Shadow of Cain (published by John Lehmann, and among much else a magnificent anti-atomic protest) and a new fragment of Sir Osbert*s autobiography in which the Father-Son conflict is treated with bis engaging aigre-douceur de vivre.

Dr Edith Sitwell, then, is a great poet, with an established acceptance that would have seemed incredible if foretold ten years 50 (there are now—Yeats being dead—Edith Sitwell and T. S.

Eliot) and Sir Osbert's autobiography is a glory of contemporary English literature. 1

If a serious attempt should be made to assert a different (and traditional) idea of die function of criticism in a world in which Horizon's idea of it reigns, and in which the intransigence of the

1 'Next week Sir Osbert and Miss Edith Sitwell begin a lecture tour in America described as *a lecture-manager's tragedy* on account of its briefness compared with the thirst of the American public to Lear and see these two " irly English geniuses.'— Sunday Times, November 7,1948.

Sitwells avails to such exemplary effect, then it will appear as it does to the writer of another document that lies to hand: Mr John Hayward. In Prose Literature since 1939, published for the British Council, he refers in a passing mention to the 'minority group' of critics (led apparently by the 'cold intellectual', Dr F. R. Leavis), 'whose methodical and uncompromising destruction of reputations periodically enlivens the pages of the hypercritical but bracing magazine Scrutiny?

It would of course be hypercritical to suggest (though Americans and foreigners in the present writer's hearing have said it) that nothing could be worse for the prestige and influence of British Letters abroad than Mr Hayward's presentment of the currency-values of Metropolitan literary society and the associated University milieux as the distinctions and achievements of contemporary England.

No work of the period, at all events, has provoked livelier or more intelligent discussion among the critically-minded. Its merits and faults have been widely debated—to the dismay, doubtless, of its detractors, who, having dismissed the book in its original limited issue as the darling of a coterie, were to see 20,000 copies of two ordinary editions sold out on publication. By that time 'Palinurus* had been identified as Cyril Connolly, editor of the literary monthly Horizon, and leader of the intellectual avant-garde.