LONDON LETTER
ANGLO-SAXON ATTITUDES
Ever since the First World War-and perhaps from before
that-the first problem of any vital, intelligent, and critical young
Englishman is that of "coming back to England." In a volume of essays
by the so-called "Angry Young Men" just published by McGibbon and
Kee, entitled
Declaration,
Mr. Lindsay Anderson expresses sentiments
almost identical with those of D. H. Lawrence in the 1920's when he
wrote
England, my England,
or of W. H. Auden in the 1930's describ–
ing "England this country where no one is well." Anderson writes:
"Coming back to Britain is ... like going back to the nursery. The out·
side world, the dangerous world, is shut away : its sounds are muffled.
Cretonne curtains are drawn, with a pretty pattern on them of the Queen
and her fairy-tale Prince, riding to Westminster in a golden coach.
Nanny
lights the fire, and sits herself down with a nice cup of tea
and yesterday's
Daily Express.
..."
Mr. Lindsay Anderson is, in 1957, lucky, of course, to have, or
have had, a nanny. His reactions, brashly of his generation as they
are,
do indeed strike one already as a bit dated. Their merit-which
they
share with Mr. Osborne's-is to remind us that the Welfare State
has
not turned England into Merrie England, Blake's Jerusalem or even
William Morris's Earthly Paradise. Given the fact that England is more
civilized, decent, humorous, tolerant, and relaxed (to cite Mr. Ander–
son's own epithets) than some other places, perhaps the chief surviving
virtue of this country is that generation after generation of the YOUJII
English have felt furious at what they feel to
be
the loss of vitality,
truth and innocence in this country.
The fury, of course, takes the form of blaming the old, because
they
are felt to be betrayers of life.
If
one traced the hi,tory of this bad
to the First World War, one would find that the young in the trenches
(Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen) blamed the old for
sending them out to be killed; that D. H . Lawrence blamed the old
(particularly the "Georgian" poets) for their peculiar, pastoral attach–
ment to the English countryside; that the young of the 1930's blamed
the old for not fighting fascism; and that today the old are blamed
