38
PARTISAN REVIEW
erywhere. Poor little Leonard at the bottom of the lower - lowest! -
middle class is a mere clerk, the kind Bloomsbury knew only across a very
wide gulf. Virginia Woolf, on
Ulysses,
in her diary for 1922, saw it all as:
a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples ... An illiterate,
underbred book it seems to me, the book of a self-taught working–
man,
&
we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent,
raw, striking
&
ultimately nauseating. When one can have cooked
flesh, why have the raw?
And then there was John Maynard Keynes writing to Duncan Grant
some years earlier, "I must go to tea now to meet some bloody working
men who will be I expect as ugly as men can be." But Leonard Bast is
not even a working man. Bloomsbury could not have imagined a work–
ing man, since such did not - certainly not in 1910 - listen
to
Beethoven's Fifth at the Queen's Hall or try to follow Ruskin's verbal
ecstasies over architecture in
The Stolles oj Vel/ice.
Leonard was imaginable
to Forster because he was "an illiterate, underbred" striver after CUL–
TURE, and Forster and friends certainly had a lot of that. When Forster
said in his splendid book,
Aspects oj the Novel,
that a character is real to
the reader when the novelist knows all about the character, he was per–
haps congratulating himself for knowing Leonard up and down as a so–
cial type - the hanger-on where he does not belong, the ultimate in
pathos and powerlessness. Why so much of both? Why so
I1Il1ch
wretchedness without respite to Leonard Bast? Because of his being nei–
ther bourgeois nor working man but a clerk in an insurance company
looking to better himself. A snob without justification, always looking
up the backsides of those he finds it natural to idealize, he is the type a
mandarin of culture finds unbearable. He is the type the English most
easily sacrifice and dismiss. Leonard has no party and no friends or associ–
ates. He is uneasy with his live-in "companion," Jacky, who is lower-class
all right but somehow contemptible because she lives with the likes of
him.
Let us face it: Leonard Bast does not know his place, and that is far
worse than having
some
place, even at the bottom. Meeting Margaret
Schlegel at the concert hall where Beethoven's Fifth will manifest "panic
and emptiness" in its growling ups and downs and finally wonderful
resurgence of the human spirit over its private terror, Leonard becomes a
bother from the very first because of his social unsuredness. "She wished
that he was not so anxious to hand a lady downstairs, or to carry a
lady's programme for her - his class was near enough her own for its
manners to vex her." Near enough her own? Remember that Leonard
