114
PARTISAN REVIEW
us have allowed our personal love for our neighbor to be stifled by
the idea that we all belong to a socially just state.
His characters have the vitality of people who can act out their
situations- the same kind of life as the characters in
Under Milk Wood.
As yet, though, they show no sign of the inner spiritual or even physical
life independent of circumstances one finds in the characters of D. H.
Lawrence. For I take Lawrence to
be
the touchstone by which one can
judge all the other movements. He himself, in his letters, makes up
lists
such as
"J.
C. Squire, Robert Lynd, and T. S. Eliot" as if he can throw
all his contemporaries into the same bag. What they have in common,
one sees, is "literature," journalism, and a public ; and, one might add,
"literary criticism." Lawrence stands outside these things, and it is dif–
ficult to think of anyone else, except Robert Graves, who does so. The
depressing thing about the young is that, fighting their battle against
literary journalism, they scarcely seem aware of such dangers. Even
John Wain-the most critically intelligent of them-moans plaintively
in his essay in
Declaration
that he has a right to expect "critical
standards" which would give his second novel a bett«r reception than,
apparently, it received.
The young writers, with all their complaints about England, seem
scarcely conscious of a world outside England. Or if they are, it
is
either to get the hell out of here into, or to dismiss as a literary fashion.
Programmatically, Mr. Kingsley Amis hopes that there will be no more
books about "abroad" (he is just about to publish one himself, but I
am sure it will be "with a difference") . The kind of "abroad" writing
he might, I think, justifiably feel reserved about, is Mr. Lawrence
Dur–
rell's
Justine:
a volume (to which another is now to be added) in
which exotic overtones and the myriad-mystified and glamorized back–
ground of Alexandria are provided for-a heroine whom most of the
characters are in love with. In Kensington, Hampstead, Greenwich
Village or any other less opalescent place than Alexandria, Mr. Durrell's
heroine would seem a demanding bore. It is easy enough to see that
part of the smooth, pleasant, cultured dilettanteism of British letten
which the brittle young react against comes from too easy victories over
local scenery and people, away from the problem of "coming back
to
England."
Not that Mr. Durrell is facile. His faults are those most excusable
and sympathetic ones of Rilke (in
M alte Laurids Britge),
Proust when
he is writing about Albertine, Henry Miller when he is writing about
Greece-complete self-indulgence in the writer's capacity to exaggerate
any drop of real experience into an enormously inflated and glamorized
