LONDON LETTER
piece of literature until the reader has the idea that a whole scene of
life exists only for the purpose of being turned through the machine
of this writer's sensibility, to emerge as beautiful sausages bearing his
peculiar mark-because no one else assuredly could extract so much
from so little. The reader becomes lost in admiration-he could cer–
tainly never have got all this out of such material-and no one any
more
~ares
challenge what is assuredly-from the opening sentence of
the author's journal, to his bogus Notes at the
end-Literature,
than
he would dare dispute the authority of a New Critic.
It seems characteristic of what may really be wrong with England
that "home" or "abroad" are today presented to us by alternatives so
narrow and exclusive as Mr. Durrell's out-of-this-world Alexandria (and,
of course, in criticizing Mr. Durrell I do so because I think his work
is
infinitely the best of its not infrequent kind), and Mr. John Osborne's
lyrically, bitterly self-commiserating attic. For what is quite obvious
about this country is that it is utterly committed to the outside world
and that the real picture of the English situation today would have to
take into account a great deal of "abroad." A good deal of the fl'Ul!–
tration in England comes, I suspect, from a feeling that, at the end
of the war, we accomplished tremendous changes in our own house,
only to discover that, at the very moment when we were doing this,
the context in which we were living had suddenly enormously widened,
producing conditions which made many of those changes almost ir–
relevant. Hence-as has, indeed, happened in other countries-socialism
was accompanied by something like an attack of xenophobia. England
created the Welfare State, but refused to take that lead in Europe which
France, Italy, Greece, and even Germany were looking to us for. To
insure ourselves in Europe would have been to threaten the precarious
economic arrangements (based on the idea that every other nation must
buy luxuries from England while she must import only necessities) on
which English recovery and socialism depended. As a La'bour party
Minister explained to me at the time:
"If
we made a common market
with the French we would have to import French cheeses and other
things which are not necessities."
And now we have woken up to find ourselves engulfed by the
wider context, with Germany the most prosperous country in Europe,
and the prospect of England being forced into a common market under
conditions which will make it extremely difficult for a future Labour
government to maintain the level of the British workers' standard of
living against that of poorer and harder working European workers.
And beyond Europe and the Common Market, there lies Asia, and
