This article appears in the following The Cambridge Quarterly issue: Special Issue: AFTER MODERNISM? [View the issue table of contents]
Introduction: After Modernism?
THIS SPECIAL ISSUE OF THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY looks at the literary history of the richly ambiguous middle decades of the twentieth century, the years from 1930 to 1960. Our title - After Modernism? – deliberately takes the form of a question. It suggests a hesitation, an awkward moment, a great expectation reluctantly abandoned. Let us ventriloquise for a moment the voice of the anxious spirit of the age as it scans the newspapers of Europe's great cities on the morning of 1 January 1930. ‘With so many imagined futures already failing, so many heroic experiments decaying into whimsy, do we have the compassion, the generosity, the lucidity that the coming age will require of us? Or are we condemned to repeat an already obsolete vanguardism? Have we superseded that polyglot American-in-Paris cosmopolitanism? What diminished powers will the poetic word possess, in this the age of electro-mechanical reproduction, the age in which cinema and radio perfect the lucrative and demonic art of shaping our desires?’.
The six essays gathered here address the work of an extended generation of major English-Irish writers: W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, George Orwell, John Betjeman, Philip Larkin and Elizabeth Taylor. Growing up among stifled memories of a great war, coming to maturity in the shadow of another, surviving that ordeal to face the ever more apocalyptic idea of a third, this generation variously re-discovered the potent virtues of the national-popular. They observed, sometimes with a cool eye, the urgent quest for a newly imagined collective identity, a new Heimlichkeit. What would it be like to belong, to be ordinary, to find a home in modernity, to contribute to the common purpose? They emerge, in 1945, chastened yet still dissenting, to chronicle, to question and to satirise a world of Coronation, Cold War and somnolent consumerism.
John Farrell opens with a strongly sustained close reading of Auden's ‘Spain’, that symptomatically disavowed meditation on the perplexing imperatives of political agency, ethical truth and poetic authority. Farrell argues vigorously with Auden, with Auden's version of Freud, and with Auden's conception of moral solitude.
Tom Walker follows with an account of Louis MacNeice's early visual-aesthetic education. This took the form of a dialogue with MacNeice's mentor and school-friend Anthony Blunt. Drawing on the themes of an earlier English modernism, as represented by Roger Fry, Blunt was the eloquent advocate of a purified painterly abstraction. MacNeice responded eagerly at first, but he soon reached out beyond such formulaic austerity, retrieving the human subject and treating it with a humanist imagination. ‘Snow’, perhaps MacNeice's most distinctive early achievement, is the triumphant outcome of this argument with abstraction.
In a different vein, Neil Corcoran celebrates and explores MacNeice's distinctive use of repetition, As both device and theme, his mastery of repetition was an acknowledgement of cultural continuities, a connection back, a covert affinity with the luxuriant poetics of Yeats and Housman. MacNeice's repetitions also constituted an implicit critique of a certain modernist affectation. MacNeice castigated that form of repetition as mere psittacism, ‘mechanical, repetitive, vain, narcissistic, preening attitudinising’.
Peter Lowe's contribution, ‘Englishness in a Time of Crisis’, couples George Orwell and John Betjeman. Lowe shows how these apparently antithetical figures both revised their previous dissenting ‘positions’ during the early years of the Second World War. As they contemplated the possibility that England would be invaded they began to ask aloud some awkward questions. What did they value about their country? Was a cohesive Englishness possible or, indeed, desirable? What kind of England should emerge from the conflict?
Neil Reeve examines one delicately oblique post-war answer to those questions. Elizabeth Taylor's novel, The Sleeping Beauty, was published in 1953. Reeve situates it as a reconstruction-novel, alongside several other novels of the same vintage, namely Rosamund Lehmann's The Echoing Grove and L. P. Hartley's The Go-Between. They portrayed a new and difficult structure of feeling: ‘the collective or even coercive sense of release into new conditions ... together with the array of repressions and smoothings-over that are likely to accompany any such thing’.
Finally, Peter Robinson offers a judiciously quarrelsome reading of Philip Larkin's much-celebrated short poem ‘Deceptions’. Coming at Larkin via The Waste Land, Robinson observes that ‘[t]wo of the twentieth-century's key poems ... contain a rape and an account of an unsatisfactory sexual encounter narrated by a man’. Scrutinising the poet's tendentious manipulation of his source text in Mayhew, in conjunction with the admiringly collusive responses of Larkin's critics, Robinson concludes, teasingly and memorably, that ‘Larkin has himself stumbled, at the end of his poem, into the wrong attic’.
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