The Comic Bad Men of English Letters
The British have rarely produced the philosophical novel, the serious
political novel or the novel of esthetic exactitude.
What they have produced is the writer of many
mediations, the writer who is party to commonplace and ordinary stuff of
life, the realist, the observer, the humorist. Political and social attitudes,
even strong ideas, may play a part, but it is best if these are presented as
prejudices, instincts or eccentricities rather than theories or ideologies.
Indeed, one of the things that has mediated social,
political and intellectual life in Britain is its capacity for manifest humor.
And this may be why one of the great triumphs and major pleasures of the
British fictional tradition is the comic novel; we have a great comic line in
the novel, and it still goes on.
But even in this matter the British taste has been generally
for the untheoretical. Indeed, the ideologically or
philosophically obsessed have usually seemed, in British comic fiction, the
enemies of reality and the true comic instinct - Thwackum
and Square in ''Tom Jones,'' the dreaming Transcendentalists in ''Martin Chuzzlewit,'' and so on to Professor Welch and his
Bloomsbury artistic coterie in Kingsley Amis's ''Lucky Jim,'' a novel that
undoubtedly owed as much of its success to maintaining the 18th-century
fictional tradition as it did to providing a radical view of its own time, the
1950's. This is not the only place where Amis does homage to Fielding, and in
British fiction he has been far from alone. ''Tom Jones,'' said Edward Gibbon,
''may be considered the history of human nature,'' and the comic novel of human
nature has long been found the true British way of doing fictional things.
Evelyn Waugh is one of the genre's great modern practitioners
- a writer of the very highest distinction and originality, whose irascible
disguises served to hide him from readers, strangers and much of the argument
of the world, who was able to sustain at the highest level of arrogance a
virtually unattainable intellectual and social position, and in general to
claim as the very center of writing the proprietorial,
seigneurial rights of the English eccentric.
As it happens, and as it often happens, Waugh possessed remarkable
intellectual qualities - a strong sense of history, which he had maneuvered
into a theory of a decline and fall that had started with the end of Roman
Catholic dominance in Britain and was now quite irredeemable. Edmund Wilson,
the great American critic who had a good deal of Waugh's temper, and admired
him greatly until he met him and found himself treated - as an American - with
contempt, aptly identified his fictional and social manner with that of
Benjamin Jowett's advice to the gentleman: ''Never apologize; never explain.''
Waugh did not explain, or not in public; the diaries explain, and explain him,
a good deal. He invented remarkable new techniques for fiction, but professed
enormous dislike for the modernist avant-garde - indeed, as time went on, for
everything that had happened in his own lifetime.
When World War II ended, Waugh's style, shaken by the
experiences of wartime and the coming of the welfare state that followed,
seemed half-spent. The new generation of writers gradually emerged, their air
apparently puritanical and socially of the lower middle class, their tweedy
sports jackets hanging badly off their shoulders, their mildly left-of-center
social principles asserted everywhere. It was not, it seemed to Waugh, a
climate for his kind of writing, and he raged against it. As for the most
comically assured of the new writers, Kingsley Amis, whose impact on the 1950's
came to rival that of Waugh on the 1920's, he seemed in almost every respect
Waugh's antithesis.
Waugh had portrayed British society in a state of irremediable
historical decadence. Amis mocked the past, and spoke straight from the plain
and ordinary present. Waugh found an older history from which he could gain
some sustenance; Amis attacked all that was nostalgic and medievalizing
in the British character, every notion of a Merrie
England, and found his sustenance in the commonplace, the provincial, the
bottle of beer and the blonde. Waugh had a religious rage with the contemporary
historical world; Amis seemed full of secular delight in its stuff and its
ways.
If the two looked like literary opposites, the distinction
applied equally in political matters. Waugh was not simply a writer of
conservative instincts; he offered himself as the one true conservative. Amis,
on the other hand, appeared part of the New Left that was emerging in postwar
Britain, in an era when there was a new appeal for literary commitment. At St.
John's College, Oxford, in 1941 he had indeed been an undergraduate Communist
(''the only party I have ever joined''), of course at a time when Britain and
the Soviet Union were allies. During the 1950's he was teaching at a British
''redbrick,'' Swansea, and announcing himself a probable lifetime Labor voter.
Later, forsaking the redbrick world about which he had written, he went to a
fellowship at Peterhouse, Cambridge, with every
prospect of a career uniting the academic and the literary, the critical and
creative functions. But Cambridge did not suit, whether because of its often
backbiting attitude toward those with literary ambitions, or because criticism
itself was being pushed heavily toward more theoretical preoccupations, is not
quite clear. It was now that Amis entered on the life of the full-time writer,
with great success.
Even so, matters were changing. ''Lucky Jim'' and the books
that immediately followed were enormously successful and caught the temper of
the times, coupling brilliant comic effects with a sharp sense of social
process and even social protest. The poetry was admirable in the new, rational-critical,
antimodernist way, and displayed comic vision, good
feeling and common sense. In an era of purity of diction, Amis's essays were
forceful and accessible pieces of literary criticism, and he was clearly a
central figure of the new antimodernist ''Movement''
mood.
But the manner was shifting, along with his political
sympathies. Amis might well protest it was the world that was changing, and he
remaining the same, but the fiction seems to record a different story. At any
rate his politics moved toward the right, and today he defines himself as a
Tory ''with a few liberal bits,'' on hanging, homosexuality, abortion. But the
''liberal bits'' are only occasionally noticeable. The writer who began to
write in the spirit of humanist common sense in a postwar time took on rage and
spleen, sometimes invested against the human condition itself, as in the very
good ''Ending Up'' (1974), one of his deepest novels, and sometimes in a
latter-day social ire arrayed against the entire modernity of the modern world.
The writer who wrote compassionately in ''Take a Girl Like You'' (1960) of the change in sexual and emotional
manners became in later books, like ''Jake's Thing'' (1978), a notable
misogynist in the age of feminism. The critic who admired the radical impact of
American fiction in the 50's began to rage against the worthlessness of
American writing. INDEED, in many ways Kingsley Amis seemed slowly to have
inherited the role of the Comic Bad Man of English Letters, which Waugh had so
powerfully sustained a generation earlier. Now the similarities begin to look
very evident. Both of them had begun as spectacular Young Turks - writing the
novels of their new age, in which the topic of the younger generation was very
much discussed - and turned into Angry Old Men. Both had captured, in subject
and style, the manners, moral upsets, cultural dislocations and social
instabilities generated by a recent war. Both were strictly antiromantic
writers who carried to their work a secret but gradually more explicit
nostalgia. Both revolted against the extremities of experimentalism and the
modern movement. Both darkened deeply with the years, taking on a pervasive
awareness of the absurdity of the social world as well as the hideous weight of
mortality into which human life is born, so that their comedy is touched with
pain.
Both turned youthful attitudes that seemed fresh and exciting
into something crusted with an air of powerful prejudice, and protected those
prejudices with an engaging but troubling comic conviction. Both, as they grew
into public figures, turned their comic masks into public faces, into a manner
that was both clubbable and crusty, amusing and
bitter, rotund and misanthropic, a disguise that did not quite seem to disguise
everything. And both -this can certainly be said of Waugh, and I think we will
say it of Amis - turned, with their virtues and their faults, into major
writers of extraordinary dimensions and decided influence.
It has been said that few contemporary comic writers can get
free of the intonations of Kingsley Amis, and the tradition of modern comic
fiction in Britain has an inescapable source in Evelyn Waugh, who will, I
think, be seen as one of the great black humorists of the century. Both suggest
that the comic is a rare stylistic capacity and also a form of human pain, and
both indicate what I think is a very British way of dealing with it, which may
have striking limitations and peculiar strengths. And both are difficult to
write about as a result, provoking annoyance and respect, a sense of a talent
often imperfect yet of an extraordinary force.
Published in March 22, 1987
By Malcolm Bradbury
On The New York Times On The Web
Copyright
1998 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/01/specials/bradbury-comic.html
Other interesting
articles written by Bradbury: [Next] [1] [2]
[3]
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