I do not propose to follow in any detail Healy’s activities in the following years. They were characterized by persistent attempts to find the mot juste to describe his colleagues—Sexton, Dillon, O’Brien, later Redmond—and they led Healy, through many tortuous passages, into that rather shabby isolation which ultimately proved the condition of his survival. Yet it was probably in those years—in 1891, the year of the hounding of Parnell, and the years of aimless snapping that followed—that his character impinged most forcibly upon his country’s history. It was he more than anyone who brought the Irish party into discredit, and so cleared the way for Sinn Fein. To hear Healy speak, to read what he wrote, must have had the effect on many of disgusting them with cleverness and oratory, of turning them towards self-discipline and the idea of a violence that was cleaner for not being wholly verbal. It was, from the point of view of Sinn Fein, an excellent thing that the Irish party should have carried within itself its own destruction in the shape of a Bantry lawyer experimenting with words. Historically it was fitting that he should have been rewarded with the ceremonial headship of the new state which issued from the insurrection. Symbolically there was a tragic fitness in the fact that the Ireland over which he presided was torn by civil war.
Bricriu, I suppose, is always with us in one form or another; there will always be among us the descendants of those bards who could raise the three blisters of contempt upon those who displeased them. There is no point in lamenting this national Thersites complex, as one might call it. It has to be accepted as existing and it adds much to the interest and the fun of life, for the non-blistered. But to raise any crop, even a crop of blisters, is a costly business and one of the few questions which a student of Healy’s career may ask is: how much is a crop of blisters worth? The Greek Church, I believe, had a word for the practice of a charitable, and often silent, tolerance: it called this practice Economy. In that sense, as perhaps in others, economy is not one of our virtues and Healy was one of the supreme examples of the uneconomic Irishman. We could not afford many more like him.
Lady Gregory tells us that Yeats once wrote formally to Healy, then Governor-General, asking His Excellency for an interview. The old man wrote back, “My dear Boy, come and see me whenever you like in the bee-loud glade” and signed Tim Healy. One thinks of Sir James O’Connor’s description of Healy’s personality in private life: “He pleases without effort, he is full of fun and sympathy, he has a winning eye, a pleasing and caressing voice.” The affection of Healy’s family and his intimate friends confirms this picture of a kind and lively man, simple in manner and rich in intelligent reminiscence. Where then have we left the arrogant and vindictive public man, the political scald-crow with his terrible beak? I raise the question here, not to answer it but to show where our survey must stop. We have not attempted in this survey to plumb the mysteries of human personality, but to assess the style and effects of certain personalities in action at a given moment of our country’s history.
In that sense one can, if one adopts the historical retrospect of Sinn Fein, regard Healy as a sort of salutary plague, speeding the rot of parliamentarianism: clearing the ground for a new and better Ireland. If on the other hand one feels, as on the whole I do, that the destruction of the movement which Parnell had created maimed Ireland in some important ways, then one is likely to echo the phrase with which Tom Kettle, years ago, saluted Healy: “A Brilliant Disaster.”
V
FOUR CRITICS
GENERATION OF SAINTS
Joyce, Proust and Mann being representative writers of “the first generation,” the representative writers of “the second generation” chosen by Professor R. W. B. Lewis are Moravia, Camus, Silone, Faulkner, Graham Greene and—in an epilogue, for some reason—André Malraux. The “second generation” writers have their “representative hero,” the picaresque saint: “a person who is something of a saint, in the contemporary manner of sainthood, but who is also something of a rogue.” Along with this, his unifying theme, Professor Lewis stresses certain other common elements—concern with death, metaphysical sense of loss, human companionship, need to “exist.” Sub-themes appear as well:
If, in the generation-wide struggle to come alive, Moravia represents the erotic motif; if Camus represents human reason in its compassionate workings; if Silone represents the conversion of the political ambition into the charitable urge, and Faulkner the conversion of darkness into light and the old into the new; if Greene represents the interplay of the more than human with the less than human—then Malraux may be said to represent all of these things or versions of them.
As a critic Professor Lewis is always attentive, often perceptive. Taken separately, his essays are never less than intelligent introductions to their subjects and sometimes—as on Silone and Faulkner—considerably more:
The English regarded Faulkner’s verbal eccentricities in somewhat the way Italians of a traditionalist temper regarded the unconventional irregularities of Silone’s prose. The irregularities of James Joyce, for the English, remained conventional ones: recognizable deviations from the known center, the only center; but Faulkner’s idiom, which came from no center known to them, seemed simply unforgivably bad writing. His hot Southern American Protestant rhetoric fell on deaf Anglican ears; his “ideas” seemed extravagant and intrusive; and his recurrent expression of outrage appeared dubious to a country which was to wait another decade or so before producing its own race of angry young men.
Without altogether relinquishing the suspicion that “hot Southern American Protestant rhetoric” may sometimes be a synonym for bombast, one must concede that Professor Lewis is here carrying out one of the most important functions of the critic: the exposure of prejudices and complacencies which hinder the understanding of a work of art.
The Picaresque Saint is, however—as its publishers state—“no random collection of literary essays.” It is an ambitious attempt to isolate determining characteristics in contemporary writing. The attempt, well worth making, and made with enthusiasm as well as intelligence, has proved, in my opinion, a respectable failure. And I believe that the reasons for its failure are fundamental and identifiable. There are also, of course, preliminary difficulties of definition. “Generations” are not really so easy to sort out: what “generation” did Gide belong to? Professor Lewis puts him firmly in the “first generation,” in “a world in which the aesthetic experience was supreme.” André Walter fits neatly into such a world, but the mature Gide was not an aesthete at all but mainly an odd kind of moralist—a picaresque saint, in fact, disqualified by the age limit which Professor Lewis, by his terms of reference, has to impose. The idea of “representative writers” is also open to question. Such “representatives” tend to be elected by the critic alone: is Moravia a more “representative writer” than Auden or Brecht?
These difficulties, and even the critic’s apparent indifference to their existence, would not necessarily imply the failure of the enterprise. Professor Lewis has chosen an interesting group of contemporary writers, and if he did in fact isolate characteristics present in them, and not in comparable earlier writers, we could accept readily enough phrases like “representative writers” and “second generation.” But the characteristics on which he concentrates most of his attention turn out to be as easy to find in earlier writers as in his group taken as a whole. Thus what he considers to be the most fertile of his themes, that of the picaresque saint, is not present to any significant extent in several of his “second generation” authors and is to some extent present in many authors of past generations. Only in the work of Silone and Greene are there heroes who are both “saints” and picaresque. As against this rather meagre and doubtfully classified collection, the nineteenth century can show numerous and authentic examples of the picaresque saint, both in life and literature: Tolstoy’s Pierre, Dostoevsky and almost any of his heroes, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Claudel’s Tête d’or, Léon Bloy and his self-portraits, Lionel Johnson … The “picaresque saint�
� idea, in fact, far from providing an identifying symbol for the “second generation” of twentieth-century writers, could be considered with less difficulty as a nineteenth-century heirloom, somewhat marked down. The way it has been marked down—the journey from Rimbaud to Pinkie Brown—would be worth study, but to treat it as a highly significant contemporary invention is misleading.
When we are asked to consider a group of twentieth-century writers, why should we dwell on themes inherited from the nineteenth century? Is there really nothing distinctive about these writers, marking them off from their predecessors? It is Professor Lewis himself who suggests the answers, when he says that “the form or soul of the modern epoch, its essential plot, is the shape of the experience of political history. Or rather: it is the shape of individual experience during a period when political history affects all experience.” If this is so, the critic, in dealing with the writers of this epoch, ought to examine, in every case and as a matter of primary importance, the writer’s relation to the political experience of his place and time. This is precisely what Professor Lewis fails to do, or refrains from doing, in the case of all his authors except Silone. (It is no accident that the essay on Silone is much the most solid in the book.) Thus in the case of Camus we are given no clue to the probable political relevance of La Chute —the implicit link between the ironic withdrawal of the “penitent judge” and Camus’s own withdrawal from judgment on the Algerian War. Indeed Professor Lewis gives no sign of being aware that there is any war in Algeria—a rather strange omission on the part of one who expresses such strong views on the literary relevance of political history. Again in the case of Malraux, where it is even more difficult to ignore politics, Professor Lewis largely succeeds in doing so, mainly by concentrating on La Voie royale and Les Noyers d’Altenburg and ignoring La Condition humaine and L’Espoir. In the case of Faulkner, although he does not altogether ignore the relevance of the peculiar institutions of Mississippi, he suggests that Faulkner’s central insight is “a sense of the fertile and highly ambiguous possibility of moral freedom in the new world.” The critic, like the turtle, is a specialist in fertile ambiguity: it is useful for survival.
In a political age literary criticism which attempts to leave out politics inevitably becomes detached from reality. A literary criticism which brings in politics, however, is obviously open to the dangers of becoming doctrinaire, passion-blinded or corrupt. These are dangers; the unreality which comes from “leaving politics out”—when dealing with writers profoundly affected by politics—is not a danger but a certain calamity. The critic must therefore confront these difficulties, and cope with them as best he can; he will also have to cope with certain pressures—the “reader-over-his-shoulder” will begin to wear a different expression. Like the creative writer, and after the creative writer, he will be drawn or dragged into politics. We rightly condemn those Soviet “politico-literary” critics who are ready to act as gendarmes controlling the writers of Russia. And we applaud those Polish critics—some of them represented in Mr. Lionel Trilling’s valuable collection The Broken Mirror—who have struggled, often with the aid of “fertile ambiguities,” to defend the idea of freedom, both in relation to literature and to their people. What we easily fail to see is that the “non-political” Western critic resembles his Soviet rather than his Polish colleagues by the way in which he acquiesces in the orthodoxy which prevails in his society. Soviet orthodoxy falsely pretends that literature can be produced in conformity with a predetermined political line; Western orthodoxy falsely pretends that literature, being connected with spiritual values, can be kept out of politics, which belongs to a baser, more material sphere. Both of these false doctrines are closely related to political realities in their areas of origin, because they are ways of diverting serious critical attention from these realities. The Soviet effort in this direction, backed as it is by harsh penalties and centralized power, is clearly much more thorough; the Western pressure, vaguer and more diffuse, almost impalpable, is probably more effective than we realize.
The Picaresque Saint is a particularly disturbing symptom of the effects of this pressure, for here we have an intelligent critic explicitly conscious of the importance of politics in relation to literature and yet turning aside, time after time, from political implications clearly present in his subject—indeed, turning aside always except where the implications concern fascism, officially dead, or communism, officially “hell” (his own word). This kind of criticism—acute on small matters and absent-minded on very large ones, inventive of diversions, cosmically concerned and terrestrially calm—is important not in itself but as marking a dangerously close intellectual atmosphere. The canary in the mine shaft is important when its song hesitates and stops.
BEARS
Tolstoy asked Aylmer Maude: “How is it … that these gentlemen do not understand that, even in the face of death, two and two still make four?” The “gentlemen” in question were members of the Orthodox hierarchy who were endeavouring to bring the novelist back into the fold. But the challenge is addressed even more crucially to the metaphysics of the irrational put forward by Dostoevsky. “What have I to do with the Laws of Nature,” demanded the narrator in the Letters from the Underworld, “or with arithmetic, when all the time those laws and the formula that twice two make four do not meet with my acceptance?”
Mr. Steiner’s “essay in contrast”* contains many fruitful juxtapositions of this kind, and propagates them wisely. Although he himself seems to lean to the view that two and two do not make four—and therefore to the side of Dostoevsky—he does not abound in that sense. He has indeed an unusual combination of breadth of sympathy with excitement about his subject. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are not, for him, fodder for critical “strategies,” but living forces with which he as a person, not as a technician, must wrestle. Although he is obviously, and usefully, familiar with the techniques of what is still known, especially in America, as the “new criticism,” he rejects its dominant attitudes and openly claims to return to “the old criticism.”
The old criticism is engendered by admiration. It sometimes steps back from the text to look upon moral purpose. It thinks of literature as existing not in isolation but as central to the play of historical and political energies. Above all the old criticism is philosophic in range and temper.
The principles of “the old criticism,” thus revived and interpreted, could, and probably will, encourage vague and pretentious writing and provide cover for the type of literary propagandist whom the methodological rigours of the “new criticism” so effectively discouraged. The manifesto part of Mr. Steiner’s opening therefore arouses some misgivings. As far as Mr. Steiner’s own practice as a critic is concerned, however, these misgivings prove almost entirely unfounded. His tone is modest, his literary judgments precise and shrewd, and adequately insulated from his political opinions, which are quite another matter. The principles of “the old criticism” invoked by him are a way of giving elbow- room to the kind of critic he is; and they are thereby justified, for he is a remarkably good critic.
The area covered by Tolstoy or Dostoevsky is vast; Mr. Steiner’s arguments are numerous, close in themselves and yet rather loosely connected. The book, therefore, defies summary; it has to be read. In what follows I shall do no more than take up those of his themes that have particularly interested me, and have consequently aroused at least some degree of disagreement.
The fifty years or so before the Revolution of 1905 were, as Mr. Steiner points out, “the anni mirabiles of Russian fiction.” As he also points out, “the Russian novel”—he might have widened the judgment to include the Russian theatre—“was conceived under a single sign of the historical Zodiac—the sign of approaching upheaval.” Underlying most of what Mr. Steiner has to say about Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is the question of their relationship to that “approaching upheaval.” On the whole he agrees with Communist criticism in seeing Tolstoy as “for” the Revolution and Dostoevsky as “against.” On Tolst
oy’s Christianity he twice quotes Gorky with approval and with telling effect. On Tolstoy and Christ: “When he speaks about Christ it is always peculiarly poor—no enthusiasm, no feeling in his words, and no spark of real fire. I think he regards Christ as simple and deserving of pity; and although at times he admires him, he hardly loves him.” On Tolstoy and God: “With God he has very suspicious relations; they sometimes remind me of the relations of ‘two bears in one den.’”
This Tolstoy is essentially a man of the Enlightenment, rationalist, authoritarian, supremely confident in a reasoned program for the improvement of man’s life on earth, contemptuous of tradition and rituals—in short the Voltaire of the Russian Revolution. With Tolstoy—who said “I love truth more than anything in the world”—is contrasted Dostoevsky who said that he would remain with Christ even if “someone had proved that Christ is outside the truth.” And it was Dostoevsky, with his perception of the dark and tragic in human nature, who, on this view, turned out to be right. “The univers concentrationnaire—the world of the death camps—confirms beyond denial,” writes Mr. Steiner, “Dostoevsky’s insights into the savagery of men” … It was Dostoevsky who foreshadowed, and Tolstoy—provisionally and rather shyly identified with Ivan Karamazov’s Grand Inquisitor —who is in some degree responsible for the totalitarian regimes and the brutish delight of the masses in the musical and dance-like rituals of the Nuremberg rallies and the Moscow Sports Palace.
Writers and Politics Page 17