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PARTISAN REVIEW
government by the public, but per–
haps this is because the public had
not read any Zweig.)
Elton's book was a pretty effec–
tive rallying-point for the tradition–
alist decontamination squad; and
there was something of a BBC pro–
gram against "advanced art," coin–
ciding with the sacking of a few
anti-war musicians and script wri–
ters. However, the public managed
to put a stop to that. Where Elton
made a mistake was in attacking
a living writer instead of confining
himself to less heavily defended
targets-and in the following issue
of
Horizon
he received from Sir
Osbert Sitwell what must rank as
the most notable literary kick in
the pants of this generation. I can–
not quote it here, but I strongly
recommend it as a piece of invec–
tive. After describing Elton as a
crocodile-bird, and several less po–
lite things, Sitwell wrote a short
analytical study of philistinism, and
invited further adversaries, and
got none. There was a long lull,
during which such sniping as there
was came from the Left, most of it
either from Communists (against
writers who, when Russia entered
the war, failed to declare it kosher
and non-imperialist), or from peo–
ple who were genuinely concerned
at the absence of popular interpre–
tative art and hoped that the intel–
lectuals could create popular cul–
ture from above, as it were. But
it is only in the last forthnight that
a major action has developed,
again with a book as rallying-point.
The book is
The Edge of the
Abyss,
by Alfred Noyes, C.B.R.,
LL.D., Litt. D., author of
The
Flower of Old Japan, Drake, As–
pects of Modern Poetry
and a good
many other volumes. It was promt–
ly reviewed in
John of London's.
Weekly,
the
Zwolfte Uhr Blatt
of
the movement, by Lord Elton, un-
der the title,
"An
Angry, Urgent
Book." The tactics have been mod–
ified by experience, and possibly
by some staff-work. Heavily de–
fended and live targets, except for
Wells, Shaw and Edmund Wilson,
are left severely alone. The main
objectives are Joyce, Proust, Law–
rence, and the pseudo-intellectuals.
These last seem to be a very good
move-intellectuals are about as
dangerous as copperheads, and one
need only add "pseudo" to make
them cobras. Briefly the thesis is
this: The work of Joyce and Proust
is not merely the infantile drivel
of lunatics and charlatans-it is
something even more sinister, be–
cause, somewhere in the literary
dunghills which these writers man–
aged to erect, there is implicit an
amoral, atheistic propaganda the
intention and effect of which was
to corrupt the youth of the coun–
try and break the tradition and
"the integrity of the ordinary peo–
ple of Britain, the bourgeoisie so
despised by the fashionable coteries
of the day; the quiet and forgotten
man who still read Dickens and
kept his word and, more often than
not, believed in God."
Now I am ready to go a good
deal of the way with Noyes–
when he says that Joyce's more
gibberish works are overrated as
literature, or that the sort of dri–
vel by Wells which passed as criti–
cism of Christian ethics and doc–
trine did harm, if only as poor
logic-but the kernel of the mat–
ter is not that. It is that Joyce and
Proust,
by virtue of their, form and
technique,
were depraved, and
therefore morally contemptible.
Gosse is quoted to prove that
Ulysses
("that foul chaos") is a
symptom of "a vicious, half-witted
second childhood" (Elton) , and
the colossal humbug of critics who
see anything in Proust is scarified.
