FICTION CH ,RONICLE
THE FOX IN THE ATIIC. By Richerd Hughes. Herper. $4.50.
THE END OF THE BATILE. By Evelyn Weugh. Little, Brown. $4.50.
THE MIGHTY AND THEIR FALL. By Ivy Compton-Burnett. Simon end
Schuster. $4.50.
ISLAND. By Aldous Huxley. Herper. $4.00.
BORDER COUNTRY. By Reymond Williems. Horizon. $4.50.
KEY TO THE DOOR. By Alen Sillitoe. Knopf. $5.95.
Class-how it conditions morality and even how it binds
or dissolves national communities--continues to preoccupy English
novelists; the more serious and ambitious they feel, the franker their
expressions on this topic. The first three novels in the list above are all
by very senior writers, and they all watch the world from the privileged
point of view afforded by superior birth and education. Mr. Huxley,
who used to do so, does so no longer; but he has abandoned both
England and fiction, and so is not a genuine exception. Mr. Williams
and Mr. Sillitoe in their very different ways speak as men who achieved
literacy without the advantages of wealth, but admit that humble
origins affect one's way of looking, so that their books about Life are
also books about Class. Class, indeed, might seem to be as crippling
a self-imposed limitation on English writers as Intelligence is on French;
but the truth is that it is less of an impediment than might be sup–
posed, especially since the generation of powerful myths expressive
of the emotional force of the topic. For instance, class in actual life
seems merely a more or less odious weapon in the universal struggle
for prestige and money, but it does not feel like that to people who
possess it ; they like to think of it as belonging, like some ancestral
sword, to a lost epoch when everybody knew his place and all the talk
was of the obligations, not the privileges of nobility. History is a
record of the decay of this happy arrangement, and to understand our
present miseries one needs to study history in this light. And that is why
there are at present in progress, or recently completed, so surprising a
number of many-volumed novels by serious writers, all variously pre–
occupied with class and the history of England in this century. Powell
in
The Music of Time,
Snow in
Strangers and Brothers,
Waugh in
his now completed trilogy, all need history to explain the decline and
rise of classes; and now Richard Hughes has published the first part
of a three- or four-volume novel to be called
The Human Predicament,
assuming-and why not?-that a study of the English and German
