288
PA RT IS A N REVIEW
Stuart Hall, a young Jamaican Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, hopefully
founded yet another left-wing periodical. The reaction, even then, was
surprisingly enthusiastic and now, after five numbers, the circulation of
the
Universities and Left Review
is over 7000. It deserves to be. It is
one of the very few periodicals in England now publishing really serious,
detailed articles, written with coherent and defined criteria-like them
or not-and allowing its contributors all the acerbity and space they
need, sometimes to the point of tedium.
It
is also the only non-specialist
magazine in England to get to work on that great new American
industry, mass culture. The
U.L.R.
has its faults: it is too doctrinaire,
too predictable; it has from time to time a pie-in-the-sky idealism that
sorts oddly with its sane, intellectual toughness; and the poetry, chosen
presumably solely for its content, is for the most part appalling. But
it shows signs of life and activity that are unusual in the London
intellectual world.
One of the signs is to have opened up a coffee-bar,
The Partisan,
which, when it has paid for itself, will plough back its profits into the
U.L.R. The Partisan,
officially, is an anti-coffee-bar coffee-bar: no plants
climb up your leg
if
you sit there more than half an hour; no stuffed
parrots eye you coldly through bamboo lattice-work; there is no back–
ground music to put you off your food; the only gesture toward
current Bohemian cafe fashions is the optional chess-sets. Instead, the
place has been designed in the best air-raid shelter style: sparsely
painted concrete, skeletal stairs, two levels, and a dug-out within the
dug-out below for the boys. Heaven knows, the air-raid atmosphere is
contagious: I kept thinking uneasily that one bomb on this lot and
the British left-wing intelligentsia would largely be done for. But other–
wise the tone of the place in the evening was relaxed enough. It had
none of the feeling most usual in Bohemian cafes that everyone reo
sented everyone else as somehow detracting from his unique act. Instead,
the inmates were unusually cheerful and friendly with each other, as
though they were all there to sign up for some crusade-which perhaps
they were. In the afternoons, however, the art-students take over, and
the mixture is as self-conscious as anywhere else.
Finally, there is
Lolita.
Of course. I doubt if any book since the
King James Bible has been more eagerly awaited and so avidly discussed,
particularly since I have met almost no one who has in fact read it.
It has been brought up by the M . P.'s in the House of Commons and by
the police in Bow Street Station; by critics, lawyers,
aficionados
of all
banned books regardless of race, color or quality; by defenders of public
