LONDON LETTER
for the naivete of their anti-fascism, and for living a:broad. In each
case, what is being blamed is a previous generation's attempt to express
exactly that dissatisfaction with the England of nannies and
The Daily
Express
which makes the young foam at the mouth twenty years later.
Members of the older generation in the 1930's were extremely reluctant
to take up the crusade of the young of that time against fascism, pre–
cisely because the mOlit lively and angry of the young men in 1916 had
been so bitterly opposed to the "war to save democracy."
The attack on all the attitudes of an older generation just because
they come from an older generation provides little more than fodder
for journalists, and gives rise to events such as the meteoric career of
Mr. Colin Wilson.
It
means also that in the battle against complacency
the positions won by a previous generation are abandoned, because to
be
old is in itself considered to be complacent. The very effective satire
directed by Wyndham Lewis twenty-five years ago against the "war
of generations" goes disregarded. In the reaction against what Mr.
Martin Seymour-Smith (in a sympathetic criticism) calls the 1930s'
"failure to distinguish between human suffering and the crude mani–
festations of politics," lessons for which some very intelligent men gave
their lives and which others analyzed in all their complexity, are dis–
missed.
One truth understood by all the angry young men of three genera–
tions is that England is sadly provincial. Those who do not readily
accept the Oxford and Cambridge and London cliques have for long
sought alternatives to the dismal standards emanating from the literary
world of admiring friendships and cagey enmities: one, to get away
from England and go to one of the "centers of civilization" still op–
timistically supposed to exist on the continent, or to America; the
other, to withdraw into a narrower, more concentrated kind of Fortress
Province, based on some tough unsnobbish local traditions, or perhaps
on some regional culture (Scotland? Wales? Cornwall?), or even on
the lives led, the language used, in certain back streets.
A generation ago, the first of these alternatives-going abroad–
was the reaction to "England," with the result that Cyril Connolly and
Raymond Mortimer, so insistent on the values which they derive from
reading French, represent for today's young the London-and-Oxford
soaked-in-cosmopolitanism that they feel themselves up against. And it
is true-as D. H. Lawrence well knew-that there is a great deal of
snobbism about the Frenchiness of this older generation. Mr. Lindsay
Anderson quotes from
The N ew Statesman
an exquisite example of
the literary manners of this kind of thing: "It was a great performance,
