308
PARTISAN REVIEW
As Craig says, many of these new writers were of the people : Behan, a
house painter from Dublin ; Alan Sillitoe , who began his working life in the
Raleigh bicycle factory in Nottingham; Shelagh Delaney , a shop assistant
from Salford ; David Storey, a miner 's son from the West Riding of Yorkshire
who once played professional rugby . (There are others, of course, who do not
fit into this social mold , and in any case the reward , or price, of success is
normally a flat in London and integration into some faction of the loose
fraternity ofmetropolitan intellectuals .) But when Craig comes to analyze the
value of this populist renaissance, I can only partly agree with him .
Craig treats the blessings of the New Wave as moral , social and literary.
Now it is certainly true that many of these writers, particularly the novelists ,
quickly bridged the gap between low- and high-brow audiences and brought
home to both groups the old truth that literature can, seriously and
amusingly , deal v:ith commonplace reality (work) as well as exotica or studied
seediness. They also produced a literature of class which, evading recent
Marxist pitfalls, marvellously conveyed an underlying British populist
characteristic: hatred of the boss and "them" combined with a distrust of
politics . They showed us an industrial Britain , still grey and filthy under the
shadow of its satanic mills , where a young worker for the first time had enough
money in his pocket to mount a powerful motorbike and demonstrate his
iconoclasm noisily and sometimes violently. As Sillitoe's hero Arthur Seaton
put it , " No one's telling
me
what to do." This was both new and a return to
an older tradition: with the outstanding exception of Orwell, the literary
rebels of the thirties , almost invariably public school and Oxbridge , had been
as low on knowledge of the Common People as they had been high on
Marxism.
Craig explains the social basis of this new writing very well; in other
words, he patiently explores the fabric of a counter-culture which, unlike its
American variant, did not self-consciously label itselfas such, but which came
to dominate the cultural landscape at a time , paradoxically , when the Tories
were winning one election after another with the slogan, "You've Never Had
It So Good ." But Craig also pleads literary virtues for the New Wave which I
am more reluctant to accept. He believes that the return to vernacular sources
brings literature closer to its characters, avoids the aloof, standing-back
posture of writers like Eliot , Greene and Auden , who rely on " received
standard" English, and, finally , permits" ordinary life" to dramatize itself
"in its own medium" with a bluntness which can be subtle, rich and morally
searching.
It is here that Craig, in my opinion, is contributing to the paralyzing
nostalgia so endemic in British culture. Here again we have in essence a
reaffirmation of the mimetic aesthetic principles of the nineteenth century,
