LONDON LETTER
287
Land. All the creative effort of Eliot, Yeats and Auden, and the painful
fight to establish critical standards and a fresh tradition by men like
Richards, Leavis and Empson, have apparently done no good at all.
It is as though the Victorians had suddenly tried to reverse the order
of things by building up Mr. Betjeman's counterpart, Thomas Hood,
into a major poet. As Stevenson said on another occasion: "I'm too
old to cry, but it hurts too much to laugh."
Politically, the craze for Mr. Betjeman's work is not so unexpected.
According to the Gallup polls, the Conservatives are still ahead, despite
everything. And Mr. Betjeman's Toryism is of the witty, nostalgic
brand that the English always find irresistable. It is, at least, nowhere
near so tiresome or offensive as, say, Sir Osbert Sitwell's ponderous
assaults on the Welfare State.
It may be that this peculiar taste for Mr. Betjeman's work is not
such a lugubrious portent for the state of British culture as I have
made out. He has had, after all, a minor success of late as a TV
eccentric. But it is more likely that it is simply a manifestation of the
Englishmen'S insatiable passion for clever light verse, particularly when
it reminds them of their Old School. But I must add that they seem to
have no compensating passion for serious poetry. For instance, Edwin
Muir, who, with Robert Graves, was one of the most distinguished and
original native British poets to survive the First World War, died of a
heart attack on January 3rd. Despite his distinction as a poet he was
still, at the age of seventy-one, having to support himself as best he
could by the dreary grind of reviewing. A number of his friends have
suggested that the continual pressure of hack work may well have
hastened his death. My point is quite simply that if the Great British
Public paid its distinguished poets a fraction of the attention it lavishes
on its light versifiers "the hope for poetry" would be a goo'd deal brighter.
As it is, Edwin Muir had to drudge away at Sunday reviews until his
death. The glowing, almost apologetic, obituaries must have been very
cold comfort.
Not all the signs, however, are bad. One of the best, and most
unexpected, is that Miss Hannah Arendt's great contribution to poli–
tical philosophy,
The Human Condition,
was chosen as one of the
three best books of the year by three different critics in
The Observer's
annual round-up. Considering the seriousness and difficulty of Miss
Arendt's book and the competition from the usual memoirs of the
usual fading aristocrats, this must be almost unprecedented.
There are also stirrings on the literary left. In the spring of 1957,
