1. Throughout This Study I Refer to Historical Periods, Usually the Years Between 1930 and 1949, with Dates Rather Than Words: the 1930S Or the 1940S
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Notes INTRODUCTION IN THE SPACE BETWEEN MoDERNISMs: GEoRGE ORWELL AND THE RADicAL EccENTRics 1. Throughout this study I refer to historical periods, usually the years between 1930 and 1949, with dates rather than words: the 1930s or the 1940s. When referring to the more limited literary-historical periods constructed by classic anthologies or accounts of these periods such as Robin Skelton's Poetry of the Thirties, Samuel Hynes's The Auden Generation, or Valentine Cunningham's British Writers of the Thirties, I use words rather than dates: the Thirties or the Forties. 2. Orwell himself contributed to the critical bias against English prose written after the height of modernism with his influential essay, "Inside the Whale," which contains the oft-cited pronouncement: "No decade in the past hundred and fifty years has been so barren of imaginative prose as the nineteen-thirties. There have been good poems, good sociological works, brilliant pamphlets, but practically no fiction of any value at all" (CE]L I: 518). Until recently, most scholars of modern British literature have come to the same conclusion as Orwell, although they tend to single out the 1940s rather than the 19 30s as especially barren of literary accomplishment. See for example, Michael North's Henry Green and His Generation. Although North is interested in promoting Green's reputation in large part through appreciation of his publications of the 1940s, he echoes the received wisdom of previous critics that "The Second World War lacks a litera ture of its own. The common journalistic cry during the second world war was, 'Where are the war poets?' " He supports the wartime journalists' worries about weak war poetry with citations of Anthony Burgess's and P. H. Newby's studies on the novel without challenging the problematic assumptions about genre and form (not to mention gender) that structure the majority of postwar surveys that "agree that the later war, unlike the first, failed to become a literary event" (North 101). 3. Aside from the explicitly biographical discussions of this study (such as the next section of the introduction or the book's epilogue) my subject throughout this book is almost without exception "Orwell," the figure represented in writings by George Orwell and constructed by those who have reflected on and written about the man and his writing, not George Orwell (or Eric Blair), the actual per son who is the subject of biographies. Similarly, I am most interested in "Smith," 176 NoTES "Anand," or "Holden," the subjects of discourse rather than "true" historical personages. Indicating this distinction between Orwell and "Orwell," or Smith and "Smith" with insertion of quotation marks around proper names would be ridiculously irritating, so I ask readers to remember that I do not write biogra phy, but textual criticism informed by biographical frameworks. It is possible, if slightly dangerous, to make judgments about the personal, historical Orwell of biographies because of the tremendous number of docu ments-public and private-that record his thinking. I admit to assuming this risk in chapter 4, "George Orwell's Invention: The Last Man in Europe." However, I try to limit personal judgments in my discussions of Smith, Anand, and to a lesser extent Holden, because there is not enough documentation avail able to support sure knowledge about their inner lives and private thoughts. Anand certainly has published innumerable pages recording and analyzing his own emotional, intellectual history, but as I explain elsewhere, he is an unreli able witness about his own past. Holden is unusual in having written extensive diaries throughout (and beyond) the years Orwell was alive, but these are full of gaps and are not publicly available. Our knowledge of Smith, the historical per son, is greater than most scholars' knowledge of the "real" Anand or "real" Holden, but even with two good biographies and public collections of Smith's manuscripts, letters, and other writings, it is difficult to determine how closely Smith modeled the opinions of her fictional alter egos upon herself. My focus in these chapters on issues like racism, anti-Semitism, and sexism makes it espe cially important that I make my claims and judgments about the things a critic can discuss with confidence: representations, characters, narrators, styles, lan guages, metaphors, fictions. 4. In Reading the Thirties, Bernard Bergonzi insists that "a group need not neces sarily imply a circle of writers sitting round a cafe table composing a joint man ifesto. A group can still be recognisable as such, even if the separate members rarely meet or do not know each other personally at all" (7). The group I am calling the radical eccentrics did gather round cafe tables but they did not rec ognize themselves as a group, let alone define their group relationship by sign ing manifestos. While there may be other candidates for membership in the radical eccentrics (Anthony Powell comes to mind) and while there are many radical and eccentric artists at work in London contributing to intermodernist movement, I am not aware of anyone whose writings to or about Orwell bring them into regular dialogue with the other members of the group. 5. Bernard Crick's biography of Orwell does a better job than other biographies or memoirs of conveying the sense of the Orwell-Smith-Anand-Holden alliance, in part because he cites Holden's diaries so extensively. Frances Spalding's biog raphy of Smith also tells the story of the writers' friendships, though her foot notes are not as helpful as Crick's. Other than John Rodden's critical study on the history of Orwell's reputation, which foregrounds the constructed or invented nature of his reputation as a lone, eccentric warrior or saint for truth and justice, there are no studies that explicitly set out to understand Orwell's politics or art as an extension of his social relationships and experiences. NoTES 177 6. Margery Sabin's problem is the inverse of my own. Instead of defending cultural values before readers who are likely to be most invested in literary studies, she must defend literary and aesthetic values before readers who are likely to be most invested in cultural and postcolonial studies. 7. This study is most indebted to the discussions of literary scholars working in feminist, postcolonial, working-class, or cultural studies who have already begun this work of discovery. Andy Croft's Red Letter Days: British Fiction in the 1930s ( 1990) and Alison Light's Forever England: Femininity, Literature, and Conservatism between the Wtm (1991) are two early examples of such revisionary literature; Michael T. Saler's The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground (1999); Tyrus Miller's Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts between the \.\Iars (1999); and Janet Montefiore's Men and Women Writers ofthe 1930s (1996) are later important additions. Also of note are Jane Dowson's Women, Modernism, and British Poetry 1910-1939: Resisting Femininity (2002); Elizabeth Maslen's Political and Social Issues in British Womens Fiction (2001); Margaret Stetz's British Womens Comic Fiction, 1890-1990: Not Drowning, But Laughing (2001); Lynne Hapgood and Nancy Paxton's Outside Modernism: In Pursuit of the English Novel 1900-30 (2000); Maroula Joannou's Women Writers of the 1930s: Gender, Politics and History (1999); Keith Williams and Steven Matthews's Rewriting the Thirties: Modernism and After (1997); Patrick Quinn's Recharting the Thirties (1996); and John Carey's The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (1992). The introduction to Patrick Deane's History in Our Hands: A Critical Anthology ofWritings on Literature, Culture and Politics from the 1930s (1998) provides a concise defense of the movement to revise "the Thirties," and an invaluable selection of primary materials written by figures who could represent both a "classic" and "revisionary" 1930s. Revisionary work on the 1940s has also prepared the way for this book. Phyllis Lassner's British Women Writers ofWorld U!ar II (1998); Karen Schneider's Loving Arms: British Women Writing the Second World U!ar (1997); Jenny Hartley's Millions Like Us: British Womens Fiction of the Second World U!ar (1997); and Gill Plain's \%mens Fiction of the Second Wlrld U!ar (1996) have been especially important. See also several revisionary studies of combatants' writing, exemplified by Mark Rawlinson's British Writing ofthe Second Wlrld Ular (2000); Adam Piette's Imagination at U!ar: British Fiction and Poetry 1939-1945 (1995); and Alan Munton's English Fiction ofthe Second Wlrld U!ar (1989), which argue for a new appreciation of British war literature ofWorld War II. 8. My proposal of a new category of intermodernism should be seen as part of the widespread project to rethink mid-century English literary history. Signs of this project include a number of sessions on "new" or alternate modernisms pro posed for the annual conferences of the Modernist Studies Association, a stream of conferences on topics like "British Women in the Thirties" (held at CUNY's Graduate School in September 2000), "Retrieving the 1940s" (held at the Universiry of Leeds in April 2002), and "The Noise of History" (held at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea in November 2003), and special issues of 178 NoTES journals on topics like "Gender and Modernism between the Wars, 1918-1939" (NWSA]ournal's 2003 issue) and "The Thirties Now!" (Sheffield Hallam University's Working Papers on the WCb 2004 issue). Another encouraging sign of scholars' commitment to exploring the new subjects and histories supported by the types of panels and special journal issues mentioned above is the existence of a group called The Space Between.