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MAX BYRD
CITY LIGHTS
THE COUNTRY AND THE CITY. By Raymond Williams. Oxford
University Press. $9.75.
CITIES OF LIGHT AND SONS OF THE MORNING. By Martin Green.
Little, Brown and Company. $15.00.
It
is a work-song, Raymond Williams observes of Herrick's
little seventeenth-century country poem
Th e Hock-Cart,
but it "is that
special kind of work-song, addressed to the work of others." And he goes
on to blast its embarrassing, patrician blindness to the actual misery of
country workers, cut and ragged victims as he sees them of an indif–
ferent, many-edged economy. Or again, describing a rebellious wheel–
wright facing down magistrates in 1830, he interrupts his own account
abruptly -- "Violence solves nothing? Submission solved nothing
either." To his familiar strengths of subtlety and concreteness, as these
sentences may suggest, Williams has added in
The Country and the City
a
new tone of impatient, personal anger and also an autobiographical
context fer his anger: "I have heard my grandfather talk of the
'labourer's supper,' " he writes, "with what seemed to me then as now an
understandable pride: a rabbit knocked off behind the hedge, a swede
[rutabaga] knocked off at the edge of the path: a meal for eight
children.
If
there are any now ready to mourn the loss of a country way
of life, let them mourn the 'poachers' who were caught and savagely
punished, until a different and urban conscience exerted some controls.
Or if there are any who wish to attack those who destroyed country
customs, let them attack the thieves who made the finding of food into
theft." Again and again in the course of this long, remarkable survey of
English history he recurs as he has not before to his own experiences for
evidence, to his boyhood and to his father's and grandfather's lives, to
his present life as scholar and socialist, even to his daily entry into
Cambridge (a city in several senses) from the flat East Anglia country.
The anger that converges from all these directions is aimed chiefly at the
hobbled consciousness of English writers, past and present, who failed, as
Herrick did, to see the social realities of the countryside around them;
but Williams concludes with a more generalized anger at the forces
creating the present crisis of cities and countries and with, if one may say
so, a rather urbane call for revolution. The book that results is at once
polemical and academic, ultimately a moving if not quite a stirring
cultural history.
Martin Green's
Cities of Light and Sons of the Morning
also sets out
to analyze historical cities and the political revolutions they have
nourished or disarmed, and he too centers his account around the
