Stephen Spender
AMERICA AND ENGLAND
Just as Americans measured their civilization against the
European, so today the English measure theirs against the American
achievement.
England does not have the advantage which the Americans once
had of an immense future. Nor does it have very much even of its
past. With the distancing in time from its historic heritage, with the
destruction of its landscape, and with its towns becoming changed
into drab examples of international vertical-box architecture, the past
is a shrinking asset.
Some English literature since 1945 has become provincial - not
just in relation to America but in relation also to the English past,
perhaps even in relation to Europe. The provincialism is not that
of Hawthorne's New England, to which so little that was complex
and aesthetically civilizing had happened, but of an old England
tapering down to the diminished scale of postwar urban planning,
Red Brick Universities, the Welfare State. This new provincialism
provided the subject matter of the early fiction of Kingsley
Amis,
John
Braine, David Storey, John Wain, and other post-war novelists. Angus
Wilson drew pictures of a society of idealistic, serious-minded plan–
ners (by some irony of history outdated at the very moment at which
they had the opportunity to put into practice their planned society)
contrasted with the far from socially responsive, cynical, mini-plea–
sure-bent younger generation, sons of Belial of the New Planned City.
In
their novels and criticism, some of these writers turned ad–
miringly toward the gritty realism of Arnold Bennett's tales of the
Five Towns, and disliked the fi ctionized poetic sensibility of Lawrence,
