National Service Act (more drastic
than our peace-time draft) hangs
over the head of every young man,
and then there is a general feeling
of depression and a chronic ex–
haustion that are not conducive to
good work. In general, he consid–
ers that Gilbert and Sullivan have
done a permanent disservice to
English humor, and that Kafka
"the herald of the depressed age"
has had a disastrous effect on £ev–
eral writers whom he "could name
but won't . . . " He finds Dylan
Thomas and George Barker the
best of the younger poets, and Wil–
liam Sansom and P.
H.
Newby
(with his "fantastic sense of at–
mosphere") the best of the younger
prose writers. Of the artists he par–
ticularly admires Henry Moore,
Graham Sutherland and John Pip–
er, and of the musicians William
Walton, Benjamin Britten, Michael
Tippett, and Alan Rawsthorne.
The most immediate danger to the
future of the arts in England is
the tremendous economic pressure
on the artist caused by the in–
creased cost of living and enorm–
ous taxation bringing with it the
gradual disappearance of the pa–
tron class, and an almost inevitable
drag away from individual creative
work towards such State Institu–
tions as the B.B.C., where creative
talent is likely to be blighted.
Nowadays the English artist is
"compelled to sell himself for--oh,
at any rate . . . for a mess."
America is "the only country in
1367
the world, outside Europe,
tO
pro–
duce writers of world scope," and
his admiration for Melville, Whit–
man, T. S. Eliot ("he epitomizes
an age") and Henry James is un–
bGundcd-though of the latter he
finds that he wrote "a great deal
of piffle about English country
houses by which he was much too
impressed." The present-day writ–
ers he most admires here are
Faulkner ("but what gets in his
way is his style") and Henry Mil–
ler, whose powers of imagination
and tremendous vitality compen–
sate for his defects. The best poets,
he thinks, are Marianne Moore,
E. E. Cummings, and John Crowe
Ransom, "who has the rare gift of
a vocabulary almost as precise as
The pedect gift for
admirers of Proust
The Maxims of
MARCEL
PROUST
Edited, with a Translation,
by .fl,JSTIN O'BRIEN.
More than 400 aphoristic
remarks selected and trans–
lated from REMEMBRANCE
OF THINGS PAST - the
heart of Proust's philosophy.
French and English on facing
pag,es.
At all bookstores.
$3.00
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
PRESS
New York, 27
Publishers of
THE COLUMBIA ENCYCLOPEDIA
