302
PARTISAN REVIEW
tual
who resents that he cannot go abroad or import foreign pictures or
books, for ten professional men who grumble because they are taxed
back into the working classes without the working-class consolation of
happy unambitious irresponsibility, there are thirty workers whose con–
ditions of life have been radically transformed for the better. In spite of
all their efforts the Conservatives have
no~
regained the ear of the people
and it is the people and not the
fa~ers
or the lawyers or the soldiers
who decide an election. South Hammersmith, however,
is
worth watch–
ing as being a desperate effort of the Tory party to break its disastrous
sequence of by-election failures.
There hasn't been much
to
report in the world of the arts, which I
hope to deal with in my next letter. Denton Welch died of injuries from
an auto accident at thirty-one with his last book of short stories,
The
Quick and the Dead,
just out, and a novel nearly finished. He was a prom–
ising, no, an accomplished story teller, verbal artist and childhood explorer,
with a gift of communicating excitement about himself and a sensual
visual quality like Truman Capote's. E. M. Forster, whose novels de–
lighted our parents, became our most unlikely septuagenarian. T. S. Eliot
returned with his Nobel Prize check-eleven thousand pounds free of
tax-from Sweden.
There are two remarkable
art
exhibitions. Forty-thousand years of
Modern Art (Institute of Contemporary Arts) in which marvellous
Negro sculpture from Benin and other works from New Guinea and the
Bismarcks put to shame the School of Paris, and the Chantrey bequest
collection at the Burlington House. These are pictures bought for the
nation since 1870 by a joint committee from the Royal Academy and
the Tate. The Tate are in a minority and provoked the exhibition to
expose the taste of the Royal Academy. (Many of the most expensive
purchases were the work of presidents of the Royal Academy themselves.)
The exhibition reveals not only the bankruptcy of English nineteenth
century official
art,
but the strange morbidity of the Victorian psyche.
In this mild "midwinter spripg" between Saturnalia and Lupercalia
many of our best are out of the country. There is now only one true
class distinction: are you rich or eminent enough to winter in America
or do you have to remain at home? Before the war anyone with twenty
pounds could go to the Mediterranean or take a cheap skiing holiday;
now it is New York and Nassau or stay here and hang up your muffler
on the peg. But London life is by no means all unpleasure, Partisans,
I assure you.
Cyril Connolly
