BOOKS
307
TH E PEOPLE, YES
THE REAL FOUNDATIONS . LITERATURE AND SOCIAL CHANGE.
By David Craig. Oxford University Press. $8.95.
Where radical American culture is typically innovatory, its British
counterpart is renovatory. My own experience in both countries confirms the
core of truth in the cliche that whereas the past means less than it should to
most Americans, it tends to dominate the British imagination to a paralyzing
degree. Admittedly there's currently a nostalgia boom in the United States–
the fifties, short hair, old movies- but such rain bows are not anchored below
the horizon . The British are perpetually searching for true values , for that
moment of authentic experience, in some past age of austerity or national
danger when life was (apparently) sane , cohesive, and "real. " An exultant
festival dedicated to the Age of Steam-steam locomotives, steam rollers,
steam organs, steam tractors-is held annually on a wild Dorset hilltop and
attracts ten thousand pilgrims a day . The BBC, forsaking the shabby present,
has abandoned practically its entire schedule to radio comedians of the
thirties, forties , and-for our younger listeners-the fifties. A nurse currently
tending a hospital ward of geriatrics pointed out to me how old people whose
minds have gone tend to imagine themselves to be eternally inhabiting one
particular, crystallized past situation .
In
this particular ward of University
College Hospital , the most popu lar choice is the war, the blitz; one old lady,
ever alert to the wailing sirens and the menacing throb of the Heinkels
overhead, regularly orders her bed-ridden neighbors down into the Piccadilly
underground station , a call enthusiastically heeded amid a bedlam of
clattering bedpans and wailing nurses.
The " real foundations" to which David Craig's title refers are really
historical , cultural, linguistic and geographical roots which an industrialized
society and particularly its sophisticated writers take for granted or ignore
until it is toO late-almost. Thus, in search of authenticity , the road ahead
must be the road back to folksong, the poetry of dialect , the vernacular of
ordinary people. Time and again in the history of British literature, as Craig
sees it, redemption and refreshment have emanated from voices close to the
provincial working class , after the polite, metropolitan arts had elaborated
themselves into a dead-end . This was true of the demotic novel of Defoe and
Fielding , the poetry of Burns , the fiction of Dickens , and of the era of Shaw,
Wells , and Lawrence . More recently , the New Wave of the fifties rescued us
from " three decades in which literature of some significance was written by
metropolitan intellectuals."
