VARIETY
selves in a man's body as constipa–
tion and in his mind as the fixed,
repetitive patterns of hysteria.
Their expression in the arts dis–
plays a great complexity. From the
closed ranks of a school to the
copyright style of an individualist,
the deliberate blocking of creative
impulse takes many forms . Acad–
emic traditionalism, art for art's
sake, catch-penny novelty and ag–
gressive romanticism are all re–
petitive and hysterical.
It is dangerous for an artist to
take his art too seriously. A poet
should always be willing to sur–
render
his
poetry like Rimbaud
and Humilis. The paradox is that
a willingness to be sterile or to lie
fallow frequently prevents a man
from becoming sterile or lying fal–
low for so long that he turns sour
and reverts to death.
The war has made me see life
as something rather less conclusive
than I had thought. I now find it
less difficult to listen with patience
to the oriental theories of rein–
carnation. I find that I have less
sense of urgency. Far larger hunks
of life are Kafkaesque than I had
thought. I am inclined to think
now that Kafka was a greater real–
ist than Zola. The imitators of
Kafka employ his discoveries as
an elegant literary flourish. They
forget that Kafka learned to see
the world like this by a life of ap–
palling drudgery and no elegance.
I
Of the writing that has been
done and published during the
war, it seems to me that the best
was done by older writers. I have
seen nothing by a young poet to
put against the war-time volumes
283
of T. S. Eliot, Cecil Day Lewis and
Edith Sitwell. I have liked what I
have seen of Laurie Lee's because
it was gay. Alex Comfort I judge
from his work to be extremely gift–
ed but puffed up with ambition.
In prose fiction, matters are
much as they were. The new lum–
inaries are, I suppose, Philip Toyn–
bee and Henry Green, William
Sansom and
J.
Maclaren-Ross. I
fear for Toynbee that he may pre–
fer to be a
New Statesman
smart
Alick consorting with X. Y.,
Z.-and other boudoir lilies. I
fear for Sansom that he may lose
himself in the contemplation of
his own exquisite phraseology (the
deliberate, wrong-headed imitation
of Kafka will pass) . I do not think
that I have any particular fears
for Green or 1\.faclaren-Ross.
France has a Green, and we have
three, and they are all pretty good.
F.
L.
Green is good too. Koestler's
war-time record is excellent. We
have had the most ambitious
Hemingway and the two Eudora
Welty collections from America.
Evelyn Waugh's tin gods marched
into Valhalla in a cloud of talcum
powder. Two years ago, a short
novel called
Morgan Bible
made
me wonder for a moment whether
our finest living novelist were per–
haps not Elizabeth Bowen, not
Graham Greene, not Rosamund
Lehmann, but ... Caradoc Evans?
This improbable tragi-farce is the
one book during the war which
excited me by its mere language.
I do not remember prose of an
equal splendour since Djuna Bar–
nes'
Nightwood.
Caradoc Evans
died recently. A complete read–
ing· of his work is one of the treats
