History of English Literature, Volume 7 : English Modernism 1789973988, 9781789973983

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Volume 7

History of English Literature

Volume 7 is dedicated to the four main figures of English Modernism. It opens by discussing ‘interstitial’ novelists, such as Galsworthy, Bennett, Wells and Forster; essayists like Chesterton; and the war poets. The study then turns to a close analysis of the key writers of the period: T. S. Eliot is looking for ‘roots’ and the anchors for a modern society facing dissolution; D. H. Lawrence is the exponent of a Modernism of contents rather than of forms, which undermines the aesthetics of the movement; Joyce is the builder of a ‘palace of art’, with an archetypal plot each time updated and stylistically more refined; and Virginia Woolf is, finally, the writer who pursues the utopia of the finished work, the metaphor of her life.

www.peterlang.com

Franco Marucci

Franco Marucci is a former Professor of English at the Universities of Siena, Florence and Venice Ca’ Foscari. His publications include Il senso interrotto. Autonomia e codificazione nella poesia di Dylan Thomas (1976), The Fine Delight that Fathers Thought: Rhetoric and Medievalism in Gerard Manley Hopkins (1994), L’inchiostro del mago. Saggi di letteratura inglese dell’Ottocento (2009) and Joyce (2013). His Storia della letteratura inglese in eight volumes was published by Le Lettere / Editoriale Srl, 2003–2018. As a creative writer he is the author of Pentapoli (2011), followed by Il Michelin del sacro (2012). He runs the blog , with comments and features on literature and music, and a weekly sports page.

English Modernism

History of English Literature is a comprehensive, eight-volume survey of English literature from the Middle Ages to the early twenty-first century. This reference work provides insightful and often revisionary readings of core texts in the English literary canon. Richly informative analyses are framed by the biographical, historical and intellectual context for each author.

Histor y of English Literature

‘Franco Marucci’s History of English Literature is unique in its field. There is no other book that combines such erudition and authority in such a compact format. An indispensable work of reference.’ — J. B. Bullen, Visiting Fellow, Kellogg College, Oxford

English Modernism

Franco Marucci

Peter Lang

Volume 7

History of English Literature

History of English Literature Volume 7

English Modernism Franco Marucci Translated from the Italian by Elena Gualtieri, Colin Parmar, Kallina Temperini, Ciáran Durkan and Denis Gailor

PETER LANG

Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Names: Marucci, Franco, 1949- author. Title: English modernism / Franco Marucci. Other titles: Storia della letteratura inglese. Modernismo. English Description: Oxford ; New York : Peter Lang, [2019] | Series: History of English literature ; volume 7 | Translation of Il modernismo, volume 5, tome 1 of Storia della letteratura inglese. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018032658 | ISBN 9781789973983 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: English fiction--20th century--History and criticism. | Modernism (Literature)--Great Britain. Classification: LCC PR97 .M3713 2018 | DDC 820.9/009--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018032658 Originally published in Italian as Storia della letteratura inglese – Dal 1922 al 2000 – Il modernismo by Casa Editrice Le Lettere (2011).

Cover image: John William Waterhouse, Ulysses and the Sirens (1891). Cover design by Brian Melville. ISBN 978-1-78997-398-3 (print) • ISBN 978-1-78874-112-5 (ePDF) ISBN 978-1-78874-113-2 (ePub) • ISBN 978-1-78874-114-9 (mobi) © Peter Lang AG 2019 Published by Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers, 52 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LU, United Kingdom [email protected], www.peterlang.com Franco Marucci has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work. All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed. Printed in Germany

Contents

List of abbreviations

xiii/I

Part I

Interstitial Literature

1/I

§ 1.

Interstitial literature

3/I

  2–7.

Shaw after 1921

7/I

§  2. From the Nobel Prize to nonsense. Popularity and decline of an international playwright, p. 7. § 3. Saint Joan. The divine call, an unthinkable ‘maybe’, p. 14. § 4. Burlesques on the powers-that-be, p.  21. §  5. Too True to Be Good, p. 23. § 6. Other extravaganzas and socio-political fables, p. 26. § 7. Last plays, p. 35.

 8–11.

O’Casey

38/I

§ 8. The Irish powder keg explodes, p. 38. § 9. The Dublin trilogy, p. 43. § 10. Wrestling with Catholicism, p. 50. § 11. The oneacters, p. 60.

  12.

Priestley, Rattigan

62/I

 13–16.

Wells

68/I

§ 13. The multifaceted intellectual, a modern, amateurish Leonardo da Vinci, p. 68. § 14. The unknowns of science, p. 79. § 15. Odysseys of a salesman, p. 98. § 16. Three intellectuals, Wells’s alter egos facing history, p. 112.

vi/I

§§ 17–22. Arnold Bennett

123/I

§ 17. A Victorian photograph album, p. 123. §18. A provincial in the city, p. 132. §§ 19–21. The Five Towns novels (§ 19. Anna of the Five Towns, p. 137. § 20. The Old Wives’ Tale, p. 142. § 21. Clayhanger, p. 154). § 22. Trying to keep up in the post-war era, p. 162.

 23–28. Galsworthy

169/I

§ 23. The funerals of aristocracy, p. 169. § 24. Skirmishes against self-righteousness, p. 175. §§ 25–27. The Forsyte Saga (§ 25. The threat of entrepreneurial security, p. 180. § 26. The melancholy calendar of the generational turnover, p. 198. § 27. Nostalgia for chivalrous times, p. 205). § 28. The dramas, p. 209.

  29–38. Forster

215/I

§ 29. Against the falsity of the educational tradition. The bridge between the two cultures, p. 215. § 30. Where Angels Fear to Tread. The immature hearts, p. 222. § 31. The Longest Journey, p. 229. §§ 32–33. A Room with a View (§ 32. The stubborn self-deception of a tourist in search of herself, p. 231. § 33. The rescue of the ‘buoni uomini’, p. 235). §§ 34–36. Howards End (§ 34. The three nations, p. 241. § 35. Who shall inherit England?, p. 246. § 36. The urbanized farmer welcomed back into his habitat, p. 250). § 37. Maurice, p. 253. § 38. A Passage to India. The unreconciled diversities, p. 256.

 39–41. Beerbohm § 39. Reanimating aestheticism, p. 259. § 40. Exercises in style, p. 263. § 41. Zuleika Dobson and other sketches, p. 267.

259/I

vii/I



§§ 42–47. Chesterton

274/I

§ 42. The crusade against contemporary isms, p. 274. § 43. The myth of the tavern, p. 280. § 44. Heresy and orthodoxy, p. 284. § 45. Two fantasies on the present and the future, p. 288. § 46. The Father Brown stories, p. 293. § 47. Other works of fiction, p. 301.

  48.

Belloc, C. S. Lewis, Tolkien

304/I

  49.

The Powys brothers

317/I

  50.

Vernon Lee

325/I

 51–58. Maugham

333/I

§  51. A humble, self-taught craftsman, p. 333. § 52. Naturalist fiction and drama up to 1914, p. 336. § 53. Of Human Bondage. Bitter loves, p. 341. § 54. The Moon and Sixpence. The artist, integrated and disintegrated, p. 348. § 55. Plays of the 1920s, p. 350. § 56. Cakes and Ale. The subtle, caustic, metabiographical suggestions of the life of Hardy, p. 353. § 57. The amnesty of adultery, p. 356. § 58. The short stories, p. 362.

  59.

Chesney, Buchan, Saki and the ‘war of the future’

365/I

  60.

The Georgian poets

371/I

  61.

The poetry of the Great War

376/I

 62.

Owen

380/I

 63.

Sassoon

389/I

viii/I

§ 64. Brooke

396/I

  65–66.

406/I

Edward Thomas § 65. Diaries and prose from before the war, p. 406. § 66. The poetic songbook, p. 417.

 67.

Rosenberg

422/I

  68.

Other war poets

429/I

 69.

Graves

439/I

 70.

Masefield

448/I

  71.

De la Mare

453/I

  72.

Stevie Smith 

460/I

  73.

Edwardian music

463/I

The Index of names and Thematic index for Volume 7 can be found at the end of Book 2. Part II

Modernism1/II § 74.

England from 1922 to 1945

3/II

 75.

Modernism

10/II

 76.

Imagism

18/II

ix/I



§§ 77–85.

Yeats after 1919

23/II



§ 77. The book and the image, p. 23. § 78. The lunar pseudophilosophy, p. 32. § 79. The tail end of The Wild Swans at Coole, p. 45. § 80. Michael Robartes and the Dancer. The marriage of body and spirit, p. 51. § 81. The Tower. The second coming, p. 59. § 82. The Winding Stair and Other Poems. The Platonic idea and the revenge of the human, p. 68. § 83. From A Full Moon in March, p. 75. § 84. Testaments, p. 77. § 85. The dramas, p. 85.

  86.

Edith Sitwell 

101/II

  87.

Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell 

108/II

 88.

Firbank

111/II

  89–91.

Wyndham Lewis

126/II



§ 89. The roar of Vorticism, p. 126. § 90. That lonely old volcano of the Right, p. 135. § 91. The trilogy of the hereafter, p. 142.

  92–105.

T. S. Eliot



§ 92. The roots that clutch, p. 146. § 93. The overwhelming question, p. 160. § 94. Prufrock and Other Observations. The moment to its crisis, p. 168. § 95. Gerontion and the poems of 1920, p. 185. §§ 96–97. The Waste Land (§ 96. The orchestration, p. 199. § 97. Witnesses of the pastiche, p. 208). § 98. The Hollow Men and Ash-Wednesday, p. 219. § 99. Nonsense, minor and incidental poetry, p. 226. §§ 100–101. Four Quartets (§ 100. The music of time, p. 230. § 101. The alpha and the omega, from the rose garden to the thorn bush, p. 241). § 102. Liturgical action and propedeutics for

146/II

x/I atonement in Eliot’s drama, p. 255. § 103. The literary system, p. 270. § 104. Other works of criticism, p. 283. § 105. The English patient, p. 285.

§ 106. Bunting

294/II

  107.

Christopher Fry

299/II

 108.

Whiting

304/II

  109–122. Lawrence

305/II



§ 109. The messiah of phallic reawakening, p. 305. § 110. The early novels, p. 315. § 111. Sons and Lovers. The mining scenario and the Oedipal dilemma, p. 322. § 112. The short stories, p. 330. § 113. The Rainbow. Analysis and management of passions, p.  333. §  114. Women in Love. The agon between life and death, p. 343. § 115. The Lost Girl, p. 356. § 116. Aaron’s Rod. The biblical wanderer, p. 361. § 117. Kangaroo. An Australian fable, p. 368. § 118. The Plumed Serpent. In an imaginary Mexico, p.  375. §  119. Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Broken taboos, p. 388. § 120. Later short novels and stories, p. 395. § 121. The poetry, p. 398. § 122. Prophecy and prejudice in Lawrence’s non-fiction, p. 408.

  123–124. Dorothy Richardson 

§§  123–124. Pilgrimage (§  123. The English harbinger of monologue interieur, p. 418. § 124. Towards self-knowledge, p. 427).

  125–127. Ford Madox Ford

418/II

§ 125. The restorer of the old order from the trenches of formal Modernism, p. 431. § 126. The Good Soldier. The crisis

431/II

xi/I

of chivalric ideals, p. 437. § 127. Parade’s End. A consciousness in the Great War, p. 445.

§§ 128–151. Joyce

§ 128. The bygmester of the palace of art, p. 457. § 129. Biography, p. 470. § 130. Essays on criticism and aesthetics, p. 476. § 131. The epiphanies, p. 481. § 132. The poetry, p. 485. §§ 133–135. Dubliners (§ 133. Devices of Joyce’s short story, p.  493. §  134. Paralysis in the three human ages, p. 498. § 135. ‘The Dead’. The game of cardinal points, p. 506). §§ 136–138. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (§ 136. The first two versions, p. 514. § 137. The impossible perfection of faith, p. 520. § 138. The investiture of the artist, p. 526). § 139. The journalist and lecturer, p. 529. §§ 140–141. Exiles (§ 140. The betrayed, betrayable and betraying husband, p. 532. § 141. Towards a new alter ego, p. 534). §§ 142–147. Ulysses (§ 142. The endogenesis, p. 538. § 143. Threads in the maze, p. 546. § 144. From morning to noon, p. 551. § 145. Afternoon and evening, p. 559. § 146. The night, p. 565. § 147. Molly’s monologue, p. 570). §§ 148–151. Finnegans Wake (§ 148. The connections, p. 573. § 149. The sources, p. 584. § 150. Technique, p. 587. § 151. The language, p. 592).

  152.

Stephens, O’Brien

 153–156. Mansfield

457/II

596/II 601/II

§ 153. Out of Eden, but towards purgatory, p. 601. § 154. In a German Pension. Sketches at the spa, p. 612. § 155. Bliss and Other Stories. Existentialist motifs in Mansfield’s stories, p. 617. § 156. The Garden Party. Rites of passage, p. 621.

 157–168. Woolf

627/II

xii/I

§ 157. Exorcisms of incompletion, p. 627. § 158. Woolf ’s hours in a library, p. 637. § 159. Biography, p. 649. § 160. The Voyage Out, p. 655. § 161. Night and Day, p. 660. § 162. Jacob’s Room. The novel as a splintered biography, p. 663. § 163. Mrs Dalloway. Life, death and resurrection, p. 668. § 164. To the Lighthouse. The metaphysical parable of a landing: failed, delayed, successful, with human losses, p. 675. § 165. Orlando. The historical cavalcade of the hermaphrodite, p. 683. § 166. The Waves. Six soliloquists, stereophonic voices of a single author, p. 688. § 167. The Years. The crowded kaleidoscope of modern times, p. 692. § 168. Between the Acts. A forecast of the future, p. 696.

§ 169.

Bloomsbury, Roger Fry, Strachey

  170–174. Compton-Burnett 

701/II 707/II



§ 170. The dirty laundry of Victorianism, p. 707. § 171. The beginnings, p. 717. § 172. The nemesis of parental tyranny, p. 721. § 173. Novels of servants and of three generations, p. 727. § 174. Sour family comedies, p. 731.

 175.

Garnett

735/II

  176.

Poets of the Second World War

737/II

Index of names 

745/II

Thematic index 

769/II

List of abbreviations J. R. Taylor, Anger and After: A Guide to the New British Drama, Harmondsworth 1963. BAUGH A Literary History of England, ed. A. C. Baugh, 4 vols, London 1967. BRM Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930, ed. M. Bradbury and J. McFarlane, Harmondsworth 1991 (1st edn 1976). CAB I contemporanei - Letteratura inglese, ed. V. Amoruso and F. Binni, 2 vols, Roma 1982. CLA M. Praz, Cronache letterarie anglosassoni, 4 vols, Roma 1951 and 1966. CMM Modernismo / Modernismi. Dall’avanguardia storica agli anni Trenta e oltre, ed. G. Cianci, Milano 1991. CRHE The Critical Heritage, anthologies of criticism on single authors, published in London, with editors and dates of publication as stated in the bibliographies. CSI E. Cecchi, Scrittori inglesi e americani, 2 vols, Milano 1954 (1st edn 1935). DES V. De Sola Pinto, Crisis in English Poetry 1880–1940, London 1963 (1st edn 1951). EMW J. I. M. Stewart, Eight Modern Writers, Oxford 1963. GSM H. J. C. Grierson and J. C. Smith, A Critical History of English Poetry, London 1956. HAP Hopkins Among the Poets, ed. R. F. Giles, Hamilton 1985. HWP B. Russell, History of Western Philosophy, London 1964 (1st edn 1946). HYN S. Hynes, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s, London 1976. IDM F. Marucci, L’inchiostro del mago. Saggi di letteratura inglese dell’Ottocento, Pisa 2009. KPE F. Kermode, Puzzles and Epiphanies: Essays and Reviews 1958– 1961, London 1962. KRG F. R. Karl, A Reader’s Guide to the Contemporary English Novel, London 1968. AAA

xiv/I

KRI LET LRB MAR MEF MIT MPR OCE PCS PGU PLE PSL SSI TLS WAR WAX WEL Volume 1 Volume 2 Volume 3 Volume 4 Volume 5 Volume 6 Volume 8

List of abbreviations

F. Kermode, Romantic Image, London 1971 (1st edn 1957). Letture. Libro e spettacolo. Mensile di studi e rassegne. The London Review of Books. F. Marenco, Storia della civiltà letteraria inglese, 4 vols, Torino 1996. G. Melchiori, I funamboli. Il manierismo nella letteratura inglese da Joyce ai giovani arrabbiati, Torino 1974 (1st edn 1963). L. Mittner, Storia della letteratura tedesca, 3 vols in 4 tomes, Torino 1964–1977. J. H. Miller, Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers, Cambridge, MA 1965. G. Orwell, Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, ed. S. Orwell and I. Angus, 4 vols, Harmondsworth 1970. M. Praz, Il patto col serpente, Milano 1973 (1st edn 1972). The Pelican Guide to English Literature, ed. B. Ford, 7 vols, Harmondsworth 1968 and 1970. M. Pagnini, Letteratura e ermeneutica, Firenze 2002. M. Praz, Storia della letteratura inglese, Firenze 1968. M. Praz, Studi e svaghi inglesi, 2 vols, Milano 1983 (1st edn 1937). The Times Literary Supplement. A. C. Ward, 20th Century English Literature 1901–1960, London 1964 (1st edn 1928). E. Wilson, Axel’s Castle, London and Glasgow 1971 (1st edn New York 1931). R. Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, 8 vols, New Haven, CT 1955–1992. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 1, Oxford 2018. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 2, Oxford 2018. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 3, Oxford 2018. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 4, Oxford 2019. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 5, Oxford 2019. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 6, Oxford 2019. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 8, Oxford 2019.

Note. Except for the above abbreviations, full publication information of cited works will be found in the bibliography for each author.

Part I

Interstitial Literature

§ 1. Interstitial literature Any wide-ranging study of literary history compels the critic and historian to move the authors at stake backwards and forwards, like a strategist shifting his armies in front or behind a certain line on the map, or a chessplayer with his pieces. The category of ‘interstitial’ or ‘in-between’ literature is not a recognized one in the periodization of twentieth-century English literature.1 I have coined the phrase in order to place and study some of the writers, texts or sets of texts that could not or would not be included in the previous volume of this History, and for the reasons I shall explain shortly. Their inclusion here is justified at times by the very specific way in which some of these writers balanced a number of multiple interests and themes, at others by their lateness compared to others and to the main current or currents in English literature after 1921. Rather than labelling them ‘interstitial,’ I could have easily identified these writers as belated, or unclassifiable. They were all born and grew up in the Victorian era; they made their mark well before the watershed of 1921, even if they continued to write after that date, in a kind of drift. Edwardian and Georgian by dates, they first published before those signposts, and continued to write afterwards. But they never caught up, did not innovate at all, or not enough to be numbered among the modernists. They would be ill served if seen as twentieth-century writers in full garb, but neither would it work to relegate them to Victorians tout court. 2. The main triad of these long-lived writers on the cusp of 1921 (and the most awkward one for the purposes of classification) is that of Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy. This close-knit triad seems to have been conceived by intelligent design: all its members are like twins or near-twins, their dates of birth within a few years or even months from each other. They were all three born in 1866 or 1867, were all indefatigable workers, authors of tens if not hundreds of books,2 with a near-perfect synchrony for their literary debuts a few months from the end of the nineteenth century, while at least two of them died within months of each other, covered in fame and glory. And yet the crème of the innovators bunched them all together and decried their novels as superficial and shoddy, partly on the 1 2

English history up to 1921 is dealt with in Volume 6, § 250. Bennett and Galsworthy both wrote sagas, working in the long form and not on short novels. That too is a significant difference from the production of modernist writers.

4/I

Part I  Interstitial Literature

objective judgement (applicable to all three) that their post-war production had degraded into nameless and consumerist fare. Despite their shared literary origins, they were all born in three different parts of England, and each followed a seemingly different course of apprenticeship. Wells was to all intents and purposes a Londoner, and nearly working class in origin; Bennett and Galsworthy, both sons of lawyers, came to London to become writers from the industrial Midlands and the hills of Surrey respectively. Wells and Bennett wrote to each other constantly, with the former issuing slightly patronizing letters whenever Bennett published a new novel, to which Bennett bowed, yet always with touches of biting irony. Galsworthy on his part had with Bennett a close epistolary exchange and friendship, less so with Wells. But what joined all three was Conrad. The first to note impressionistically their common matrix was Orwell, who studied and read voraciously at least two of them. He contrasted their shared Conradian origin with the typology of the younger writer, represented for him by Lawrence and Joyce. To Orwell, the new, modern writer of the 1920s chiselled his material like a sculptor, was less prolific, more painstaking, more devoted to narrative form, less optimistic. Above all, he was less well-read, with a lighter ideological baggage (expect than in the case of Wells). The difference between the interstitial triad and the modern writers was the same, in Orwell’s view, as that between Dickens and Flaubert.3 3. Orwell had then understood everything: that the reference point for this triad was Dickens, or at the very least that the wider area and tradition they were looking at was that of nineteenth-century realism. The three writers should not nevertheless be ignored, or be dismissed and mocked as they were by their contemporaries and those who followed shortly after, like Orwell all exponents of a radical intelligentsia with its unacknowledged Bloomsbury roots. The sheer volume of their work is impressive, as well as an anti-modern and anti-modernist feature. Wells was the least gifted as a writer, yet he reinvented the Victorian dystopian genre, leaving a void behind him, even if after 1900 he could not find a new vein, and his writing effectively petered out. Bennett is the finest nib of the three, unmatched in his rendering of the comic pathos of the suburban village undergoing a transition and in the mock-heroic burlesque. Mostly a great imitator, he 3

OCE, vol. II, 231.

§ 1. Interstitial literature

5/I

wrote one single masterpiece surrounded by a number of mediocre blockbusters. Galsworthy did not write for money, and reached the peak of his fame in the early 1920s, when Bennett’s reputation was in decline, with a saga that seems aimed at flattering the wealthy middle class. Galsworthy is interstitial for his theme, the transition to modernity, which he sees from a nostalgic standpoint, but some other features of his writing – the sense of writing in a void, and the retreat from serialization – are already more modernist. Galsworthy had explicitly no affinity with formal Modernism, towards which he was openly dismissive and impatient after 1922.4 But his writing practice speaks of a desire to catch up with the new expressive instruments, particularly through his aural imitation of a strand of stream of consciousness that was watered-down and unspecific, yet still stream of consciousness it was. For Forster, Galsworthy was part of a generation of writers who ‘got their impressions and formed their attitudes in an earlier period, before the first of the two world-wars’.5 4. There are however many more writers whose temporal location and status should be reviewed: Chesterton, Beerbohm, de la Mare, Firbank. The first two are emblematic cases. Beerbohm is an aesthete born a little too late, and therefore not fully enlisted in the aesthetic movement. He watches it as a younger member would, bearing testimony, but from the side-lines, observing it under a veil of nostalgia, or more often casting it in the guise of reductive parody. Chesterton was Beerbohm’s age, and would perhaps have followed in his wake had he gone to Oxford, hotbed of aesthetes. His painterly education brought him close to the aesthetes; he regularly considered suicide, might have been briefly a homosexual, flirted with paganism. In the end, though, he effected his own revolution. His love and nostalgia for the Middle Ages, which were enlivened by Morris’s work, had none of Pre-Raphaelite delicacy, but rather a Dickens-like exuberance and rowdiness. While Beerbohm has some rare overlaps with Modernism, Chesterton has none, even if this is one label this crusader against –isms does not contest. At the fin-de-siècle, then, Catholicism emerges as a gathering station, a life-choice that rebuts various popular doctrines, like socialism. Chesterton, Belloc, Ford Madox Ford, but particularly the first two,

4 5

See Gindin’s 1987 biography, 477–8, cited in § 23.1, bibliography. E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, Harmondsworth 1970, 288.

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Part I  Interstitial Literature

gave birth to a warring, fighting, fundamentalist version of Catholicism, by which they lived. Other, later strands of Catholicism like those of Waugh and Greene will be only cold ideology, not exuberant life-scripts. Another small group impossible to categorize is that of the poets who died in the Great War, who are objectively and by contrast not belated but in many instances looking ahead. The same age as the others named above, they write naturally and before 1921, but will be published after that date, giving them posthumous impact and resonance. But interstitial too are those writers who only lived through the brief Edwardian era of nine years, or those who just lived through the Georgian period, dying in 1921 or shortly afterwards. The borders and temporal markers of the writers’ lives are in these cases out of sync with literary periodization. In this context, another phenomenon to be analysed is that of the possible metamorphic energy evident in the career of other writers. Some long-lived writers underwent a process of renewal; others stayed the same and ended up repeating themselves during their careers. Wells went through three phases, but in some ways these were regressions and involutions rather than innovations. While his first phase genuinely opened up new territories, the following two were one the re-hashing and resurrection of the typically Victorian social comedy, and the other a return to the conversation piece and the novel of ideas. Lastly, Yeats and Shaw after 1919 and 1921 are two writers who cannot be analysed under this heading as they do not belong to either of its currents. Yeats changes his skin much more often than Shaw, but he can never be called ‘belated’. 5. My discriminating criterion will then be that of the dates of birth, starting from the empirically determined point of 1860. Ultimately, though, the choice of whom to include in this category of interstitial literature is made instinctively, on the basis of an instant reaction, of a sweep of the landscape, of a glance. A more intrinsic demarcation is provided by the more unequivocally modern and Modernist writers who looked upon these survivors of an earlier age as at their acid test, as a kind of writing to be overtaken and rejected in order to start anew. The clearest and more unambiguous of these rejections is Woolf ’s ‘Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown’, a far from memorable essay, partial and unfair, but which implicitly calls for this category of interstitial literature.6 6

On Woolf see below, § 158.1.

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§ 2. Shaw after 1921* I: From the Nobel Prize to nonsense. Popularity and decline of an international playwright Saint Joan brought Shaw the Nobel Prize in 1925 and consolidated his reputation as the Great Elder of literary Europe,1 the most widely known and accessible writer in English after Wilde in the whole world, from London to New York and up to the shores of the Middle East. His popularity was astonishing: his plays had runs of weeks on end, were almost simultaneously translated and produced in all the main European languages; even where they were not because of censorship, they still managed to scandalize. The première was often held abroad; at home a dedicated festival was established for Shaw in the spa town of Malvern in 1927. Soon Shaw took to adapting his plays for radio and film, thus increasing their popularity. He lived in a beautiful retreat surrounded by the green spaces of Hertfordshire, but was acclaimed everywhere, the subject of photographs, paintings and sculptures (a bust by Rodin) that depicted him both in public roles and in intimate settings. Like an old-fashioned Victorian diva, he regularly crossed the oceans to reach America, South Africa, India; in 1931 he travelled to Russia and was met by Stalin. He was the very definition of the genius playwright, an opinion-maker in great demand, the entertainer who still made people think with his quips, the voice of a certain kind of England (everyone took him for English): outspoken, pragmatic, agnostic yet respectful of religions seen in terms of a historical convergence, and the spoke-figure of a moderate rather than fundamentalist social-communism, duly diluted by a good dose of classical liberalism. Shaw also had a striking physicality: gaunt, the long face framed by a curly white beard always neatly trimmed, his head covered in a short, snowy main. Most distinctive was his eccentric jaegerlike attire: tassel boots, stripy woollen socks, knickerbockers with matching jacket and alpenstock. To many he looked like a merry boy scout, with

*

The bibliography on Shaw in Volume 6, § 287, must be completed with Shaw: An Autobiography 1898–1950: The Playwright Years, ed. S. Weintraub, New York 1970, and The Unexpected Shaw: Biographical Approaches to G. B. S. and His Work, New York 1982. Prefaces to the plays will be cited as Prefaces from Prefaces by Bernard Shaw, London 1938.

1

CRHE, 300.

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the suppleness of an athlete. In 1924 he received a public accolade from Pirandello; the German playwright Siegfried Trebitsch was also a follower, and his translator;2 at Shaw’s death, Thomas Mann and many others wrote a deferential obituary. Popularity is not however necessarily true greatness. At home, T. S. Eliot remembered Shaw with his typically ambiguous caution; in one of his rare remarks on his fellow Irishman, Yeats identified in Shaw his polar opposite, the absence of creativity; the critic William Archer’s frank quip aptly noted that Shaw had made a lot of noise but left no trace.3 As a counterweight, we should note that after 1921 Shaw rested on his laurels, and that the few complete plays he wrote (just nine), apart from a few other slight works, have not survived the test of time, even though they were an immediate success. In terms of absolute and lasting value, only Saint Joan has enjoyed and continues to enjoy a nearly unanimous consensus, as well as being retained in the repertoire. This downward slope is mirrored by critics, who sometimes stop abruptly after Saint Joan, while at other times they offer simply a rapid overview, in the name of a lenient assessment that would see Shaw in decline but still capable of flashes of style and humour. The most frequent criticism against late Shaw is that his characters lack 2

3

One of the plays Shaw generously admitted into his canon was the translation of one of the works of his own translator, Jitta’s Atonement. Trebitsch’s original play premièred in Vienna in 1920; it was translated by Shaw – who did not have much German – through a ‘telepathic method of absorption’, to the point where we could actually speak of a ‘co-invention’ with Trebitsch (Purdom 1964, 276). The play was sporadically shown in New York and in London in the early 1920s. It centres on a three-way relationship between two university professors and a woman, Jitta, married to one of them, and lover to the other. During a meeting, Jitta’s lover has a heart attack, and she promises him she will get her lover’s book, loosely inspired by psychoanalysis and in effect their co-creation, published under her husband’s name. After the funeral, her husband inquires as to the identity of the woman who was with his colleague while he lay dying, but is reluctant to put his name to the other’s work. Jitta confesses the truth, but forces her reluctant husband to publish his colleague’s work as his in order to avoid a scandal that would ruin the surviving man. In the end, the plot is uncovered, but precisely because everyone has something to confess, the happy ending is assured. The Shavian theme is common with much fin-de-siècle pessimism: the critique of the indissolubility of marriage, when faced with the difficulty of a lasting compatibility between spouses. CRHE, 301.

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psychological depth and the plots real action; his characters are seen to be moving against increasingly sketchy backdrops, without ties to scenery. ‘Most of my plays are almost independent of scenery’, he conceded.4 2. Like Shaw, Orwell too was active during the same three decades and reflected on the foundations of the equally totalitarian fascist and communist regimes, incubating his novel and his ‘socialist’ political essays in the decade of 1920–1930. This is the time when he argued that English literature would have to choose between taking refuge ‘in the belly of the whale’ (and maybe the very whale of Bloomsbury’s post-aestheticism) and becoming politicized. The difference is that Shaw writes under a veil of allegory, of play and irreverence, and through layers and layers of character parody, burlesque, macaronic even. His genre is that of the bagatelle, of theatrical nonsense, at times taking off from a short-lived if deadly serious news item which is often demystified by Shaw, who resorted to the category of ‘tomfoolery.’ Some lighter pieces from 1910 and the following years had already ushered in a theatre of snapshots, of splinters, of sketches that petered out into jokes. The Glimpse of Reality becomes a Plautus-like farce in one frame with a disguised friar, a hoodwinked count and other stereotypes of classical Greek and Latin comedy. Even in the more complex dramas Shaw tends to lapse into incidental gags, such as the predictable and overused spat between an impertinent, witty and (involuntarily) provocative subaltern and his short-tempered superior, a skit that plays on the unexpected, misunderstandings, puns, and witticisms. In the 1930s, Shaw’s specializes in dream-like or quasi-dream-like drama, surreal, fantastic and therefore absurd. The Apple Cart takes place entirely in the realms of fantasy and fable, but others too while starting from a realistic base soon deviate. Shaw is a master of this game on the borderline, where both characters and the action move and develop here and there unexpectedly and surprisingly. In this way he invents a new form or formula for theatre in which the dramatic guarantee is disappointed in favour of the propensity towards a theatre that stages the unexpected. Here the playwright’s incursions, normally prohibited, are entrusted to the character whose turn it is to act as the playwright’s spokesman. We

4

Quoted in Holroyd 1991, 14.

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can therefore speak of Shaw’s own dramatic Modernism. He had already displayed a certain Brechtian alienation before 1921, an alienation which intensifies after 1921 through the repeated process of staging a character that breaks out of his role and through the anachronism of the staging.5 Even more experimental is Shaw the ‘minimalist,’ with plays in one act or even one scene and a stripped down dialogue, which may suggest a distant preview of Beckett and Pinter. 3. The lustre lost in the plays remains intact in at least some of the prefaces, which relate to the plays in a loose way, without providing new information. Shaw remains an elegant prose writer, too elegant perhaps. By the stylistic standards of his time he is an academic essayist, pompous, learned, adept at writing a Latinate prose – smug, embellished – that almost no one would be writing after the war6. This is particularly evident in his periods, unit of measure of this style, which become longer, curled around his main clauses, and with subordinate ones imbricated in other subordinates, all in Latinate polysyllabic lexemes. His prose uses barely any comma or other intermediate punctuation, so that reading is laborious in terms of sentence construction as well as for the density of his concepts. Shaw thought of himself as a ‘critic and moral chastiser through ridicule (otherwise known as a comedy writer).’ He was a concerned witness of the social and political situation, but studied it with detachment and levity, not with anguish. He confessed that he had lived ‘between two world wars without having missed a meal and always having slept the night in his own bed’; his typist reported that in twenty-eight years he had only lost his patience twice.7 In his essays and prefaces, his method is often to defend a humanitarian, enlightened,8 tolerant thesis, dictated by common sense, though not to the point of being blind to the reasons of the opposite position. Killing animals for sports is unacceptable, but never killing animals on principle untenable, since some animals will have to be killed, even just in self-defence. Making prisons more humane and less punitive, better 5 6 7 8

See on this the useful qualifications of Weintraub 1982, 222–3. The Latin grammar was the only one he had ever studied, as he confessed (Prefaces, 775). Holroyd 1991, 26. See for instance W. Archer in CRHE, 300, for a frequent comparison between Shaw and Voltaire.

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still abolishing them would be a good thing; yet it is useless to pretend that prisoners are not at times violent, and that persuasion and meekness do not always work. In Shaw’s preface to the Webbs’ study of the English prison system, we hear the development of many of the arguments made by Dickens and Reade, and some of Butler’s. He admits that there are incurable criminals, but by and large he believes prisons to be populated by petty criminals who are often less guilty than many others who got away with it. He saw crime as the product of circumstances, but jail deprives prisoners of freedom and quality of life, making them relapse once they are out. Improve the circumstances and you will have fewer criminals. Thumbs down, similarly, on the system of separate incarceration, on which the Victorians had hotly debated for decades. In politics too Shaw was inclined towards tolerance and equidistance, shunning radicalism as a thinker not given to millenarian hopes nor confiding in divine and magic interventions from above to solve the situation. Shortly after the Great War, and after having supported the socialist MacDonald, Shaw moved to the right up to the point of supporting the pro-fascist Mosley and continental dictatorships. Behind his disquisitions he had the same fundamental, socialist objective as Orwell: to make life ‘decent,’ that is, liveable: ‘If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions’.9 With Orwell, Shaw believes the English tend towards anarchism, and that the socialist dream of a perfectly organized society, without poverty and overwork, clashes with the aspiration to mould one’s life and with the loathing of state interference. The ideal system, the cornerstone of the Shavian utopia is that governments should be decision-making bodies, and therefore strong, but without undermining the notion that ‘the individual is a law unto itself,’ and thus leaving him practically all the fundamental freedoms.10 The idea of social organization as a prison was shared among many nineteenth-century reformers. Dickens coined McChoakumchild, Shaw rhymed ‘child training’ with ‘child taming’.11 Shaw’s brand of socialism is partly the detached, jargon-laden, ‘armchair’ variety that Orwell abhorred. Shaw never got into the trenches in defence of endangered freedom as Orwell did: he was 9 10 11

Prefaces, 299. Prefaces, 300. Prefaces, 317.

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too old to fight, and more importantly his ideology did not demand that kind of commitment. His disagreement with Orwell became an outright fight when Fabianism, and indeed Shaw’s brand of social-communism, came to idolize Stalin and the Great Dictator. The preface to the play The Millionairess analyses the individual charisma of the ‘born bosses’, the great leaders, the magnetic historical figures like William the Conqueror and Napoleon. In it, Shaw reviews recent history to demonstrate how the failure of the democratic system will facilitate the rise of the boss, that is of dictatorships. But Mussolini is far from satirized in this preface; he is seen as a Machiavellian hero who took note of the fact that the era of freedom was over and that it was necessary to return to a functioning state. And fascist Italy, Shaw believed, did work. He proclaimed himself an admirer of Einstein, but then came out with anti-Semitic blunders such as the following: ‘Now no doubt Jews are most obnoxious creatures’, and ‘it would have been better for the world if the Jews had never existed’,12 only to then correct himself as usual, and add that we all have mixed blood, not least Hitler himself. The preface to Saint Joan turns the Maid of Orleans into another representative of the category of the charismatic historical leaders, like Socrates and Napoleon; but Shaw also argues that the saintly ‘bosses’ are violently eliminated because of the fear they inspire, and as a consolation, that in 99 cases out of 100 the dictator goes crazy. With The Apple Cart, both the play and the preface, Shaw makes it manifest that he had converted to monarchism, having first been a democrat. Then he corrects himself: he had in fact intended to show the limitations of both systems, at least in so far as they are understood by idealists. The conflict is really between plutocracy on the one hand and the two other systems on the other; it is the rich who have swallowed democracy. The play was meant to draw attention to the delays and inconveniences of the democratic system of parliamentary representation. A public speech Shaw would have held on the disadvantages of democracy is reproduced verbatim. Of the latter Shaw does not accept the principle that it is a government by the people, which he considers a mirage. He revisits Mill’s notion that good governance is what

12

Prefaces, 487.

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does the minimum to allow the autonomy of the individual to have free range.13 On the other hand, he finds that society has evolved into a form of socialism, because the state manages and coordinates almost everywhere several public services. The point of the preface to The Apple Cart is that a false belief in democracy leads to an Orwellian oligarchy that ‘abuses power for its own gain’. 4. Shaw declared himself a secular man with three articles of faith: creative evolution, socialism, and vegetarianism; by 1942 he more simply identified as republican and communist. But by declaring Joan of Arc a saint he polluted this secularism with traces of religious belief. In the preface to the play, for instance, he credits the Saint’s telepathy, voices and visions, or at least gives them a psychological and psychic justification. His rather forced explanation is that they were the dramatization of the pressure exercised on her by the force behind evolution; they were in fact an ‘evolutionary appetite’.14 On the relationship between science and faith, the theme also of In Good King Charles’s Golden Days, Shaw confessed his repentance: he had believed in science as a religion, he was now going back to religious belief. He argued that science generates credulity, religion scepticism. At the time of the play (1935), he had come to look upon science with suspicion, but with respect and sympathy at the insights of poets and prophets.15 While explicit and uncompromising on the fallacies and incompleteness of the Bible, Shaw on the other hand recalls the old Arnold, since even though the Scriptures are a jumble of illusions, of blunders, of tales, they are indispensable, and have a very high historical and poetic value. Creative evolution is not a totalitarian creed, a theological system that cuts out other systems and finds them inconceivable (even an orthodox Catholic like Teilhard de Chardin was an evolutionist). It is also true that Shaw declared himself an agnostic and non-believer in the revealed religions, but as every

13 14

15

Prefaces, 331. Grene 1987, 132–50, is among the few critics that discuss what Shaw really thought, and would like his public to think about the ‘voices’ Joan claims to hear, and about miracles. Grene observes that Shaw, clearly embarrassed, regards miracles as inventions, that is conjectures that stand in place of ‘tedious explanations’. Prefaces, 636.

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honest English sceptic he continued to investigate the phenomenon of religion. In a beautiful page of the prefaces he summarizes who was Jesus, that is the usual historical, gifted and eclectic character, to be analysed as a human being. This troubled yet secular interest leads him to tackle problematic articles of faith in a sense paradoxically even more religious than a believer – as he does in his obsessive involvement with the visions and voices of Joan of Arc. After all the theory of creative evolution must declare who determines and operates it, who is its Aristotelian prime mover, unless it espouses the thesis of self-generation of the evolutionary movement. Creative Evolution is, to be frank, increasingly a ball and chain for Shaw’s ideology, often forcing the playwright into acrobatics in order to make it the deus ex machina of his plays. Of Shaw’s short stories ‘The Black Girl in Her Search for God’ (1931–1932), the most famous, is a theological parable illustrating through parody the changes in the divine imago throughout the various books of the Bible. ‘The Aerial Football’ is a ‘Catholic’ joke, featuring a bishop and a poor woman at the gates of paradise, where they receive a surprise. In ‘The Miraculous Revenge’ an Irishman digs up a grave to investigate a ‘Catholic’ miracle, an example of that genre of grotesque and macabre associated quintessentially with Stevenson. ‘The Emperor and the Little Girl’ (1916) is a fable suffused with unusual pathos, featuring a Kaiser overcome with remorse who haunts the battlefields while addressing as equal a little girl who ends up torn apart by bombs. ‘A Dressing Room Secret’ is yet another product of Shaw’s polemic with Shakespeare, whose Othello and Macbeth he considered overrated. § 3. Shaw after 1921 II: ‘Saint Joan’. The divine call, an unthinkable ‘maybe’ The first of the short plays alternating with the long ones, The Admirable Bashville; Or, Constancy Unrewarded,16 appeared in 1901, penned by a Shaw who re-writes himself in the genre, as he put it, of a ‘literary joke’. It is a blank verse adaptation of his early novel Cashel Byron’s Profession, to which 16

The title echoes that of a famous play by Barrie (Volume 6, § 299.2). Compared to the novel, Shaw shifts the focus to the brisk servant and his unrequited love for his mistress.

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Shaw resorted to prevent pirate copies circulating in America.17 The story centres on the situation of the weary Lydia who longs for a man without art or culture, and finds him in the beefy Cashel, who attempts to leave the boxing ring for her sake. After a winning match, though, Cashel is wanted by the police for disturbance of the peace and thrown in prison. But a final twist reveals Cashel is of noble origin and marriage to Lydia follows. It is a successful entertainment farce, whose heap of improbable developments and twists reveals its origin in the Victorian serial. The sheen of verse makes it akin to Gay’s parodic theatre, with echoes and casts from Shakespeare and Milton that turn it sometimes into a delicious and delighting hybrid pastiche, particularly since its subject, boxing matches, is alien and resistant to treatment in verse. In Press Cuttings (1909),18 which aims to be a hilarious farce of militarism and feminism, sprinkled with a succession of comical one-liners, the historical figure of General Kitchener receives at the Ministry of War a suffragette sent to him by the Prime Minister. This opening turns out to be a hilarious coup de théâtre: the Prime Minister – whose name, Balsquith, is a riotous fusion of Asquith and Balfour – has used this ploy to forestall the ferocity of the suffragettes’ campaigns and to escape controls and avoid trouble. It is indeed a time of chaos, as laws that would exclude women from a two-mile perimeter around Westminster are being debated in Parliament. Paradoxically and provocatively, the debate hinges on the feasibility and usefulness of martial law, supported by the general with candid but abhorrent arguments which are rejected by the PM. This battle precedes The Apple Cart because it voices, without completely burying it, the view that governing a country requires the use of force and that democracy has limits. And in fact the repudiation of authoritarian militarism stems solely from the General’s pompous speech,

17

18

In blank verse is also the swift, amusing parodic sketch ‘Shakes versus Shav’, (1949), the last opus of Shaw’s canon. The Bard is imagined to be reborn and to show up at Malvern Festival to unmask his presumptive reincarnation, Shaw himself, who answers back to Shakespeare placing his own masterpieces on the same plane as Shakespeare’s immortal works – indeed, according to his opinion, above. The performance of this play was prohibited until the names of the protagonists were camouflaged.

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which reveals all the resources at its disposal. As some ad hoc allusions hint, the historical setting is that of the Anglo-Prussian war of the ‘battleships’ and of the feared Prussian invasion of England. A speech more grimly militaristic, warmongering, deafer to appeasement than that of the General is inconceivable. In the second part, the Prime Minister receives in the same Ministry a delegation from the Anti-Suffragette League. Dramatic contrast is provided by the general’s housekeeper, who expresses the position of public opinion, pragmatic and indifferent to the great ideological questions that preoccupy the powerful. The Anti-Suffrage League is picturesque and pompously belligerent: its two representatives pose as Amazons, and their dialogue with the general is peppered with somewhat threadbare verbal gags. Their frenzied thirst for action induces even the general, advocate of authoritarianism, to practice moderation.19 The play then loses its thread as it descends into hard-core absurd with a series of burlesque weddings celebrated on stage. The Glimpse of Reality (1909), an historical ‘little tragedy,’ starts well, with a scandalous situation, close to Browning in appearance: an aged friar confesses a girl with no dowry, who plots to obtain it by attracting a wealthy patron to her father’s tavern. The disgusting monk, 113 years old and with sagging limbs, evokes glimmers of that macabre attraction Salome feels for Jokanaan, but for a moment only and therefore for the sake of parody. He turns out to be a disguised count, the same one that the girl and her publican father are about to kill in order to rob and who, after shedding the disguise, turns vehemently against his assassin. In short, the point of the play hinges on how the innkeeper will manage to kill the count to earn the ten crowns promised by the local lord to the murderer, and how the count will parry his wily attempts. But the short piece languishes well before the denouement: the count tries to kill the assassin, but stays alive, though blackmailed; the crowns flow into the girl’s dowry. In Passion, Poison and Petrifaction; Or, the Fatal Gazogene (1905) a murderer enters a house of a gaudy splendour, where a tired pretentious woman has just fallen asleep. It is her husband, who is approaching the 19

The assertion that the great historical warriors were women in disguise, and that women ‘govern the world using men’, obviously recalls the philosophical background in Man and Superman.

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bed but is held back by a sneeze of the sleeper. In evening dress, her lover then knocks on her door; the husband offers the guest a glass of poisoned whisky. Here, more than in any other of these little plays, Shaw would like us to enjoy the humour in his puns. Eventually the husband has the wife all to himself, while the dying lover can be saved with an antidote made of lime peeled from the ceiling. The absurd result is that the dying person is transformed into a living statue, which blesses the reconciled couple. The Fascinating Foundling (1909), not without spikes of invaluable humour, pivots on the encounter between an orphaned fop and the Lord Chancellor, who is asked to provide the youth with a theatre career and an aging wife. Immediately after a handsome suffragette, also orphaned, enters the office: she is the right person, and the deal is done. The little scene is among the wittiest, particularly in the very frank and truthful jokes of valets and orderlies, figures with which Shaw always centres the target. The Music-Cure (1914) describes the plight of a young politician who has bought shares he believed would have risen, but have instead collapsed, reducing him to a state of nervous exhaustion. This is also an absurd farce of weak hold: the patient, asleep with opium, thinks he is seeing crocodiles, and believes that Strega, a pianist who enters the room, is one of them. The latter, a sort of virago, was sent by his mother; on hearing her play a polonaise by Chopin, the young politician falls in love, and offers himself as a domesticated little husband in need of protection (delighted, even, by the prospect of some beatings). 2. The external occasion for Saint Joan (1923) was the canonization of the Maid by the Holy Office in 1920, but in fact a play about her figure had been brewing for some time.20 Shaw researched her life thoroughly, and retraced it in six scenes plus an epilogue, to show the fateful end met

20 Sidetracking many (see e.g. Woodbridge 1963, 117), Shaw claimed that the idea came to him by chance. He did not know what to write, so why not write ab