A New Verismo

John Bayley

• The Master Eccentric: The Journals of Rayner Heppenstall 1969-1981 edited by Jonathan Goodman
  Allison and Busby, 278 pp, £14.95, December 1986, ISBN 0 85031 536 0
• The Pier by Rayner Heppenstall
  Allison and Busby, 192 pp, £9.95, December 1986, ISBN 0 85031 450 X

It seems likely that critics in the future will see the literature of our age as being peculiarly obsessed with a perverse version of mimesis. They will have no trouble in classifying its tendencies, and attributing them to the waning influence of classic 19th-century doctrines – realism, naturalism, verismo. They will also note that our own fashionable critics bent over backwards to point out that the whole thing was a con: that literature, of no matter what kind, can never in the smallest degree be like life but only like other examples of literature. The paradox may briefly amuse them. They may conclude that whereas writers – novelists particularly – were instinctively conditioned to make reading seem like living, critics were programmed in the opposite direction – to point out that all was artifice.