It is a country so profoundly parochial that people like myself, coming in from outside, never cease to marvel. Do the British people know that all over what is politely referred to as the Commonwealth, millions of people continually discuss and speculate about their probable reactions to this or that event? No, and if they did, they would not care. I remember being in the House of Commons one afternoon when some Colonial issue was being discussed. There were more Africans in the Strangers’ Gallery than there were Members of Parliament who thought the matter important enough to take their seats in the House. Does the Labour movement understand that hundreds of thousands of the more intelligent people in the Colonies, people whose awakening has very often been fed by the generous age of British literature – poets like Shelley and Byron and Burns, writers like Dickens – look to them for help and guidance? For the most part, socialists are not very interested in what is going on in the Colonies. To discuss politics in Britain with most people means that in five minutes one is astounded to find that the talk is of whether old Freddie or Tony is going to be sent out to govern New South Wales, or whether brother John or Jack will be the next secretary of the Trade Union.
Thinking internationally means choosing a particular shade of half-envious, half-patronizing emotion to feel about the United States; or collecting money for Hungary, or taking little holidays in Europe, or liking French or Italian films.
Meanwhile the world churns, bubbles, and ferments.
All over that enormous land mass, the Soviet Union and China, the most epic movement of change ever known in history is taking place. It is the greatest event of our time, and one in which we are all involved. But, to quote a young intellectual aged about twenty-five: ‘All that sort of thing, my dear, is really rather vieux jeu, isn’t it? I mean to say, progress and all that is rather old hat.’
And the most exciting and interesting writers we are producing in this country, for all their vitality, are sunk inside the parochialism.
Mr Amis, for instance, who says he envies writers who have a cause to inspire them: Colonial freedom, for instance. This is the Victorian charitable view; the poor are always with us, suitable objects for uplifting emotions. For apparently Mr Amis, although a Welshman*, does not see Britain in intimate relation and interaction with other countries. Mr Amis also says that self-interest is the only authentic political motive. Without going into the psychological analysis of motives, which always cuts too many ways to be useful, the fact is that everywhere in the world people with nothing to gain from being socialists (nothing to gain in the sense that Mr Amis uses) have become, are becoming, and will become, socialists of one kind or another. Most of the people I have known during the past fifteen years have devoted themselves to causes against their self-interest. Britain has been supremely a country which fed people into various crusading movements, either at home or abroad, people with nothing to gain but the maintenance of their self-respect. Mr Amis is generalizing from an emotion which is current among a section of his generation now. It is a temporary mood of disillusion.
There is Mr Colin Wilson, who sees no reason why he should not state that: ‘Like all my generation I am anti-humanist and anti-materialist.’ Mr Wilson has every right to be anti-humanist and anti-materialist; but it is a sign of his invincible British provincialism that he should claim to speak for his generation. The fact is that outside the very small subclass of humanity Mr Wilson belongs to, vast numbers of young people are both humanist and materialist. Millions of young people in China, the Soviet Union, and India, for instance. And the passions that excite the young African nationalist, five years literate, watching the progress of dams being built in India and China, because he knows that what goes on in other countries intimately affects himself, have little in common with the passions of Mr Wilson. Mr Wilson may find the desire of backward people not to starve, not to remain illiterate, rather uninteresting, but he and people like him should at least try and understand it exists, and what a great and creative force it is, one which will affect us all.
Then there is Mr Osborne, whose work, if I understand it rightly, is a passionate protest against littleness. There are no great causes left to fight for. Jimmy Porter is doomed to futility because he was born too late for the French Revolution. Admittedly Stendhal exclaimed: ‘Happy the heroes who died before 1804,’ but that was quite a long time ago. But because other people have done the fighting for Jimmy Porter in the thirties and the forties, there is nothing for it but to stagnate and submit to being sucked dry by women. I think I quote more or less correctly.
But when it reaches the point where we are offered the sex war as a serious substitute for social struggle, even if ironically, then it is time to examine the reasons. That there are no pure causes left? True; but occasions as simply and obviously just as the Storming of the Bastille don’t often occur in history. And in the thirties a good deal of passion went into causes complicated by the split in the socialist movement; and in the forties people were prepared to die in order to defend the bad against the worse.
The other day I met a girl who said she envied me because I had had at least ten years of being able to believe in the purity of communism, which advantage was denied to her generation. All of us, she said, were living off the accumulated fat of the socialist hump. She was a socialist herself, but without any enthusiasm.
But what is this socialist hump it seems that we, the middle-aged, are living off? Somebody once said that there was nothing more arrogant than to demand a perfect cause to identify oneself with. It is true that when I became a communist, emotionally if not organizationally, in 1942, my picture of socialism as developed in the Soviet Union was, to say the least, inaccurate. But after fifteen years of uncomfortable adjustment to reality I still find myself in the possession of an optimism about the future obviously considered jejune by anyone under the age of thirty. (In Britain, that is.) Perhaps it is that the result of having been a communist is to be a humanist.
For a while I imagined that the key to this disillusionment might be found by comparing our time with the disillusionment which followed the French Revolution. To this end I reread Stendhal. ‘Injustice and absurdity still made him angry in spite of himself, and he was still angrier at being so, and at taking an interest in that absurd and rascally mob which forms the immense majority of mankind.’ ‘It is the party spirit,’ replied Altamira. ‘There are no longer any genuine passions in the nineteenth century; that is why people are so bored in France. We commit the greatest cruelties, but without cruelty.’ Such remarks seem contemporary enough.
Yet we are all of us, directly or indirectly, caught up in a great whirlwind of change; and I believe that if an artist has once felt this, in himself, and felt himself as part of it; if he has once made the effort of imagination necessary to comprehend it, it is an end of despair, and the aridity of self-pity. It is the beginning of something else which I think is the minimum act of humility for a writer: to know that one is a writer at all because one represents, makes articulate, is continuously and invisibly fed by, numbers of people who are inarticulate, to whom one belongs, to whom one is responsible.
Because this is not a great age of literature it is easy to fall into despondency and frustration. For a time I was depressed because I thought it likely that the novel might very well be on the way out altogether. It was, after all, born with the middle class, and might die with the middle class. A hundred years ago people used to wait impatiently for the next instalment of a novel. Cinema and television have been added to the popular arts, where once the novel was alone.
But the novelist has one advantage denied to any of the other artists. The novel is the only popular art-form left where the artist speaks directly, in clear words, to his audience. Film-makers, playwrights, television writers, have to reach people through a barrier of financiers, actors, producers, directors. The novelist talks, as an individual to individuals, in a small personal voice. In an age of committee art, public art, people may begin to feel again a need for the small personal voice; and this will feed