3bO
STEPHEN SPENDER
British eyes. In 1971 he published a memoir,
Kathleen and Frank,
based on the journals and letters of
his
father and mother, and ex–
tending from the end of the last century to the 1950s, a book which
documents the period of history described in the novels of Forster
and Virginia Woolf, up to the time of the visit of Isherwood to the
ruins of Wyberslegh Hall, in 1956, the house where his grandparents
and parents lived and where he spent much of his childhood.
There is a feeling here, as in the partial return of Auden to Eng–
land, of the wheel come full circle, as though the significance of the
ex-patriotism of these two English writers was to understand Amer–
ica and then to come back at a later stage of their lives to a better
understanding of the England that they had rejected. The English
and the American experience remain however very separate, as they
do also in the novels of Aldous Huxley. They do not assimilate one
another.
There is not, and probably cannot now be, an Anglo-American
literature, written by English writers living in the United States, the
twentieth-century counterpart of that which James envisaged a hun–
dred years ago. The English writer either disappears into American
literature - as has happened with the poet Denise Levertov - or
remains outside it: unless he remains outside both England and
America, as seems the case with Thorn Gunn in his recent poetry.
Another poet, Donald Davie, has gone to Stanford College, from
where he has written a book,
Thomas Hardy and British Poetry,
which seems the result of understanding his own country the better
by viewing it from a distance. In this book, he sees recent English
poetry (that of Philip Larkin) in the role of precursor of the situation
of the imagination in an industrialized society in which nature is al–
most completely destroyed. "English poetry is the first ," Davie writes,
which, with Wordsworth, "expressed ideas of elemental sanctity and
natural piety; and it seems it must be English poetry which asks what
to do with these ideas in a landscape where virtually all the sanctuaries
have been violated, all the pieties blasphemed." He sees also that this
situation although worse perhaps in England than in any other coun–
try is really a representative one because other countries are well on
their way to becoming completely industrialized and suburbanized .
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