LONDON LETTER
THE DEBUTANTE INTELLECTUALS
The one dominant fact of the English winter is 'flu. And
winter, in England, lasts from late October until the end of April. In
all that time the sun may shine pallidly now and then, or the fog may
muffle the scene enough to give an appearance almost of mildness, but
no one is ever quite well. That withdrawn air for which the English
are famous is not reserve; it is simply preoccupation. They are wonder–
ing, all the time, when their next draught of patent cough medicine,
their next encapsulated dose of quinine and cinnamon is due, how
many aspirins they have taken with the mid-morning tea, where on
earth they left their pocket inhalant. This year the scourge took on a
new form: instead of ordinary 'flu, which knocks you out for a week
and then goes, there was an unexpected variation, intermittent 'flu.
It
knocked you down, let you get up, and then knocked you flat again.
And so on for weeks on end. It passed meaninglessly around like some
devaluated currency. Bosses would hand it across the desk to their
secretaries. The secretaries would mind it a few days and then pass it
dutifully back again. One B.B.C. talks producer and his secretary kept
the game going for nearly three months. But whether or not this is an
official record I cannot say.
Precious little manages to break through the 'flu barrier. In litera–
ture particularly all has been very quiet. The only real poetic events
are American importations: Robert Lowell's new volume,
Life Studies,
and a collection, at last, of John Berryman's poetry, which before was
virtually and shamefully unknown in England. Both books are not only
important in themselves, they are also useful, though perhaps painful,
reminders that somewhere, somehow, standards of excellence still exist;
that poets write because they have original things to say and original
ways in which to say them. The reminder came at a critical moment:
the Tory craze for the poems of John Betjeman having run its extra–
ordinary course (the only sane comment on it came from Betjeman
himself: "I am," he remarked, "the Ella Wheeler Wilcox of the Nine–
teen-Fifties."), the machinery of the Left began to grind into motion
to push a specious but wholly unoriginal Marxist pasticheur called
