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PARTISAN REVIEW
but can I add-after being allowed to embrace Mme Feuillere figura–
tively and with infinite respect- that it was not the greatest conceivable
performance? ... I am sure I heard, with my own ears,
<Soleil je
Ie
viens voir pour la dernier' fois.'
Is it possible that Mme Feuillere could
have missed one of the most beautiful e mutes in French literature? I
prefer to think I had a momentary black-out ..." This illustrates an
aspect of the English scene which Christopher Isherwood escaped
from
to Berlin in the 1930's and which Mr. Anderson reacts to by filming
"the people of Covent Garden," much as Tom Harrison reacted in the
1930's by founding Mass Observation.
All the same, there may be virtue in prostrating oneself before a
French e mute, and if to do so is snobbery, I doubt whether it equals
that of Mr. John Osborne who, in another essay in
Declaration,
seems
to take the view that no one is worth his consideration who was not
brought up in a house with an outside lavatory.
The only question worth asking about a younger generation of
writers in England, at any time, is whether-given our complacent
provincialism-they are a reaction or a revolution? Reaction means
"do–
ing the reverse on all occasions, till you end up just the same."
Revo–
lution means really rooting yourself in values which are stronger and
truer than those you are opposed to. This is something quite different
from introducing new inverted snobberies, and capturing the position
of your opponents. D . H. Lawrence, George Orwell, T. S. Eliot (when
he was young) and F. R. Leavis, are examples of writers not just "re–
acting" but really taking up a revolutionary position within the intel·
lectual life of their time.
The "Angries" have often the look of vociferous labor politicians
who are doomed to be quickly swallowed up by their opponents. They
are critical (and often intelligently so) but it must strike the reader of
Declaration
that most of them seem lacking in the self·criticism which
certainly characterized all the writers I have mentioned in the previous
paragraph. However, unlike the Apocalyptics, and half a dozen other
movements, several of them do have something new to say, and
say
it well. Kingsley Amis and John Wain combine critical standards
with
provincial toughness. They have a strong sense of the time and place
in which they are writing. It is significant that what is perhaps the
best critical essay by John Wain should be on Arnold Bennett.
There is nothing in
Declaration
by Kingsley Amis except a
mes–
sage to the editor saying why he does not want to participate. The
essay by John Wain is distinguished by scholarship, critical sense, and
intellect from everything else in the volume. Amis and Wain are intel·
