_ apocalyptic - hobby-horses, have

Conrad. disturbingly modern

’ is at the heart of Mr Watt’s book. He

establishes the use Conrad made of his
own Congo experience, but much more
importantly he places “Heart of Dark-
ness” in the context of the ideological
turbulence of the late nineteenth century:
especially, in the growing awareness of
the political and economic implications of
the European scramble for Africa and in
the disastrous contradications of the Vic-
torian religion of progress. Providing a
sane, balanced, “fairly literal reading”
(as he, a trifle disingenuously, calls it) Mr
Watt rescues Conrad (and Marlow) from
1” ‘arge of “admiring” Kurtz as some

, \ Nietzschean superman. Conrad,

K ironic narrator, was well aware of
tn- -atal attractions of atavistic repres-
sion: alas, lesser men, riding fashionable
suc-
cumbed to the cult of irrationality which
Marlow strove against.

After “Heart of Darkness”, with its
enduring indictment of western imperial-
ism and its intensive inquisition into the
bases of civilisation, “Lord Jim”, the last
of Conrad’s nineteenth-century works,
could seem something of an anti-climax.
But in that novel Conrad is doing more
than conduct an inquiry into the dubious
conduct of an insignificant English sea-
man: he is examining the notions of
honour and heroism, fidelity and solidar-
ity; and he is exploring the strengths and
weaknesses of the varieties of romanti-
cism in nineteenth-century thinking. And
through his deployment of Marlow’s non-
chronological, hesitant, questioning nar-

THE ECONOMIST MAY 24, 1980

»

ration, Conrad gives full fictive expres-
sion to his “sense of. the fragmentary and
elusive quality of individual experience”.

Mr Watt‘s book thus ends with a prop-
er emphasis upon the rapidity of success
with which Conrad had evolvedhis idio-
syncratic narrative methods and had es-
tablished himself, at the end of the Victo-
rian era, as a writer of a disturbingly
modern imagination.

The Englishness of
the English

THE MOVEMENT: English Poetry and
Fiction of the 19503.

By Blake Morrison.
OUP. 326 pages. £8.50.

The very idea of “Englishness” is usually
nowadays greeted with yawning indiffer-
ence. Since the death of F. R. Leavis, no
one person has the authority, or the
audacity, to offer to shore up the crum-
bling dyke of Englishness against the
rising tide of Americanisation. The very
attempt smacks of crankiness and provin-
ciality. To go by the eminently unmerited
prestige of structuralism in the human-
ities and the remorseless rise of American
studies within and without university
English departments (to say nothing of
the state of painting, sculpture and the
cinema) perhaps English culture, like its
beer, cuisine, hospitality, and so on,
survives mainly as rather flat historical
memories.

The Movement was the last—or at
least the latest—cultural spasm of Eng-
lishness. lts principal writers (Kingsley
Amis, John Wain, Philip Larkin, Donald
Davie) belonged to roughly similar back-
grounds: English nonconformity, gram-
mar schools, scholarships to Oxford or
Cambridge and from there to lectureships
in redbrick universities. Growing up in
the 1930s, but too young to have more
than a distant sense of the issues which
were then agitating their literary older
brothers in the Auden generation, the
Movement writers came of age during
and after the war against Hitler. They
took their collective co—ordinates from
Leavis and Empson in literature, and
from Orwell (but late Orwell at that) in
politics. -

They came together over an intense
dislike of the (momentarily) fashionable
Apocalypticism of English poetry in the
19405. When the Movement emerged
into view in 1956, with John Wain’s
anthology “New Lines”, it was already,
as Blake Morrison acutely indicates, on
the verge of losing its collective identity.
The Movement was quickly swallowed up
by another mood, the post-Suez anger of

BOOKS

John Braine and John Osborne, and as
the writers went their own way there
were frequent denials that the Movement
existed at all. Mr Morrison reconstructs
the whole range of social and literary
attitudes which identify the Movement
writers, and adds a needed chapter to the
social history of contemporary culture.
This book lacks the ideological edge of
Francis Mulhem’s “The Moment of Scru-
tiny”, another recent distinguished con-
tribution to cultural history, but Mr Mor-
rison shares Mr Mulhern’s exacting
standard of research and astringent tone.

The Movement was stronger on prohi-
bitions than on enthusiasms. Its writers
were against Dylan Thomas, and, as a
matter of principle, rejected romanti-
cism. They were against modernism, and
looked to Thomas Hardy and Robert
Graves as poets upon whom an alterna-
tive tradition of English poetry might be
based. They agreed that poetry which
strayed too far towards transcendent,
mystical or overtly political modes was to
be avoided. (In later years Messrs Lar-
kin, Amis and Davie have written power-
ful political poems, but they were right-
wing poems and so were acceptable.)
Philip Larkin wrote that “poetry is an
affair of sanity, of seeing things as they
are”. The tradition of the poet as seer,
voyant or prophet was rejected; they
sought a poet who was a responsible
citizen. So much, then, for Blake, Baude-
laire, Rimbaud and Whitman.

Mr Morrison deftly situates the Move-
ment within a literary context, but might
have made more of the originality and
narrowness of its members’ conception of
Englishness. To thriller writers between
the wars, Englishness had virtually talis-
manic powers. A foreigner would give

himself away by the tremor of a jaw, a’

hooded look about the eye, the cut of a
jacket. However misguidedly dosing
while malefactors were at work, that
particular and popular form of English-
ness was a fearsome giant when aroused.
The Englishness of the Movement was

‘more complacent, and, in a curious com-

bination, more aggressive in its compla-
cency than anything which Sapper or
John Buchan would have recognised.

It is more than enjoyable to find the
Movement’s first serious historian re-
garding them as “older men” scornful of
change. But what are the alternatives?
Mr Morrison remains sceptical of the
more hysterical outbursts of the Move-
ment writers, but refrains from offering
alternatives in either politics or in poetry.
Such matters are quite properly left for
another occasion, but the question re-
mains. If the Movement is,‘ for a wide
variety of reasons, that part of the current
literary situation which younger writers
have to clear away, what is left of Eng-

‘129