BOO KS
rupted urban culture. His concern is for those poets and novelists who
went through the war in their twenties and now, as they get on toward
forty, have to admit that their careers are still fragmentary, their im–
pact on their time not yet made. Mr. Fraser finds that things look
pretty bleak for the serious writer in England. And at the end of his
book he repeats the rather joyless exhortation expressed by Eliot in
"Little Gidding":
Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers.
As
Mr. Fraser judges things, this is not the time for the refurbish–
ing of doctrines. It is a time for a deeply conservative reconsideration
of all those solid and enduring habits and sentiments for which the
English are famous and which humanize individual lives and transmute
a social order into a community and a culture.
One gathers that this is the dominant mood in England these days,
although it is certainly well for an outsider not to try to judge too
closely. Mr. Fraser himself reminds us of this when he flatly misinforms
his readers, on the basis of an essay by Randall Jarrell, that the literary
departments of American universities are manned by phalanxes of
literal-minded disciples of Empson and Leavis. The mood of Mr.
Fraser and his contemporaries is at any rate a very powerful one and in
many ways is paralleled in America.
T he Modern Writer and His World
makes a stand against ideology;
it has an empirical mistrust of ideas themselves. For example, the ques–
tions that would perhaps occur to an American or a French writer
about "alienation" are not even raised. "Alienation" for Mr. Fraser is
not an idea or a historical situation; it is simply a condition to be
avoided.
Mr. Fraser commends contemporary literature for scaling itself
down to more modest but more fundamental interests than it has had
in the past:
Thus if much of the best writing of the 1930s was based on a clear
scheme of notions; and much of the best writing of the 1920s on the
proud self-assertion of the individual sensibility; some of the best novels
and stories of the last ten years, on the other hand, are not based on
either of these things, but rather on a clinging to what seems in hu–
man life, in a shifting and dangerous world, centrally and lastingly
important.
Probably most Americans who are not middlebrows and/or philis–
tines would not allow themselves to say this, lest they sound like Mr.
