576
PARTISAN REVIEW
in
the Spanish War, or were dropped behind enemy lines in Europe
or the Balkans, or simply stood up to the bombing in England, imagined
themselves as Buchan heroes and were all the better for it, provided they
could develop a sense of reality, while retaining their dynamic ro–
manticism. For a sense of hard reality is missing from all these books,
even, I think, from Waugh. These popular English writers are astonish–
ingly innocent. Even Buchan, who spent a lifetime in politics and
'great affairs', has no conception of the real stresses in society, or if he
has, he is not honest in his books. His characters are animated wax–
works, and when one tries to reread him after seeing the inside of
London clubs, struggling with foreign languages and traveling outside
England, one wonders how one ever tolerated his stifling Madame
Tussaud-like atmosphere. Pseudo-literature has a good effect only if
one outgrows it. Mr. Usborne defines the difficulty on the political level
very nicely:
When I was a boy and after I had grown out of imputing omni–
potence to all grownups, I transferred my trust to the infallible English
heroes of the English thrillers I read. . . . I was building up to a let–
down, of course.... I wish it weren't so. I wish I could accept the ap–
pearance of Flying Saucers, and the disappearance of diplomats, as
problems in space, without my thinking that surely some Hannay will
be forthcoming to get the answers. Won't Arbuthnot settle the troubles
in Malaya, Maitland the troubles in Kenya? Why didn't Drummond
go and do something about Pontecorvo? Couldn't Jonah Mansel have
found the Coronation Stone in a matter of days rather than distressing
months?
The reply is No, and we have, in consequence, to discard the old
idea of the Gentleman. He himself, now that he is on the point of
growing up, can see that he is impossible. His mildness has allowed
the development of the Welfare State; the Empire he took for granted
has turned into a Commonwealth; therefore, his natural habitat has
been transformed and the world is no longer to the same extent his
province.
It
is true that he clings with surprising vigor to his old habits;
champagne still flows in Mayfair, on expense accounts, and the
Sketch
and the
T atler
still find faces to photograph. But it is high time we
were offered, in both bad and good literature, some new ideal-un
gentleman mitige mais encore reconnaissable,
who can maintain dash
and good manners on a thousand a year in a semi-detached villa, who
has assimilated Freud and Marx, who has made up his mind to be a
humanitarian agnostic, who has the right attitude to Europe as well
as to America, and who really knows what to do with the Colonies.
J.
G. Weightman
