Loose Canons

Edward Mendelson

• History and Value: The Clarendon Lectures and the Northcliffe Lectures 1987 by Frank Kermode
  Oxford, 160 pp, £15.00, June 1988, ISBN 0 19 812381 7
• Nya by Stephen Haggard and Frank Kermode
  Oxford, 475 pp, £5.95, June 1988, ISBN 0 19 282135 0
• British Writers of the Thirties by Valentine Cunningham
  Oxford, 530 pp, £30.00, February 1988, ISBN 0 19 212267 3

Frank Kermode’s History and Value reads the literature of the Thirties as ‘a love story, almost a story of forbidden love’. The story is usually told in political terms, but the characters and actions in Kermode’s version and in the conventional version are the same: the poets and novelists who hoped to serve a proletarian revolution that would abolish their privilege and consume their class. In the received version of the ‘Thirties myth’, the middle-class writers who took up left-wing views succeeded only in deceiving themselves and betraying their gifts. In Kermode’s counter-myth, these writers braved a dangerous passage across a social and psychological frontier in the hope of offering their work and their lives to a class that, to them, was a strange and wondrous Other, the image and agent of apocalyptic power. Their border-passages were transgressions. They violated social and artistic tabus. Transgression always evokes pious horror among those who, in Auden’s words, ‘would rather be ruined than changed’. But these transgressions were acts of conscience, imagination and love.