It’s only words
The Prose Factory Literary Life in England Since 1918 by D J Taylor
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D J TAYLOR has read an enormous number of good books and an impressive number of bad, or baddish, ones. He has also written 22. Here he examines what fiction has been read or admired by the English since 1918. This leads to discussion of publishers, critics, editors, magazines, dons, education, how writers earn money, how they are regarded and influenced – a bold undertaking. Many half-forgotten and some wholly forgotten figures appear. Though it is occasionally possible to sense his disapproval, Taylor is so scrupulously fair that I sometimes longed for passionate prejudices to intrude; but it was an unworthy longing.
A pattern emerges as the dominating figures of one period are cast out, young rebels take over and then are cast out in their turn. It is not, however, and the phrase could recur in every chapter, as simple as that. The public lag behind and continue to read authors that have become unacceptable to opinion formers. Jonathan Miller once said that successful television adaptations prolong the life of books that deserve to disappear. I think he was referring to The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy. And what effect do unsuccessful series have? C P Snow’s sequence was adapted but that did not save him. So was Anthony Powell’s, who, though not forgotten, appears to be in some danger.
But this is to run ahead. Let us glance at one decade. Immediately after the First World War the Georgian Poets were in vogue, and (the wholly forgotten?) J C Squire was all over the place organising support. Taylor has some difficulty defining them, but quotes the ‘ Punchendorsed’ popular conception of ‘a kind of compound of briar pipes, foaming tankards, cricket matches on village greens, rolling English drunkards and rolling English roads’. But T S Eliot was at hand, not to mention Bloomsbury. Lytton Strachey called Squire ‘that little worm’ and Virginia Woolf thought him ‘more repulsive than words can express’. Meanwhile Evelyn Waugh and the Sitwells, skilful at self-promotion, but not at ease with Bloomsbury, were great friends with Harold Acton, who famously declaimed ‘The Waste Land’ through a megaphone while at Oxford. Squire continued to write and edit but was sidelined. Eliot edited the Criterion, which spoke for his views on poetry and criticism but published a wide range of authors. The Times Literary Supplement was afraid that there was ‘a low standard of literary courtesy’. The public went on reading Hugh Walpole. Novelists and poets wrote about their experiences in the war. It is a tangle.
Most of these people met one another in London. A lasting theme is the resentment of a metropolitan clique of publishers, editors and reviewers thought to be assisting one another’s careers. It has always been said, always denied and is always a bit true. Later F R Leavis achieved lasting influence for his austere views without leaving Cambridge, through his ability to cast a spell over students who went out as teachers to spread the word. Later still Kingsley Amis began by championing a provincial rebel, but is soon to be found hobnobbing at the Garrick. At the end of Billy Liar, Billy catches a train to London.
Taylor employs novelists concerned with the literary world as guides, particularly George Orwell, Anthony Powell and Patrick Hamilton. Alec Waugh is a useful example in that he began young with a bestseller, faltered, wrote short stories when they were profitable, kept going and hit the jackpot with a big, bad Hollywood movie ( The Island in the Sun). Cyril Connolly is eloquent about the writer’s plight, but there is a danger that really he is only talking about himself. The following decades are no more coherent. Perhaps most readers will skim and skip, see what Taylor makes of ‘The Movement’, whether A J Cronin gets a mention (half a page) or if the Arts Council was hopeless in the early Sixties (it was). Personally, I have resolved to read A S Byatt’s sequence of novels about life in Britain from 1950 (I have done Drabble). Searching for something that the inexhaustible Taylor may have underestimated, I lit on the Man Booker Prize. For many years it has been said that the influence of critics has declined. Now online reviewers are often shown up as friends or, worse still, enemies of the authors they review. But the everchanging jury of the Man Booker delivers a reasonably unbiased choice of the most interesting novels of each year and draws them to the attention of the public. Surely that is useful?