Impersonality

Letters

Vol. 10 No. 21 · 24 November 1988

From Editors, ‘London Review’

In Barbara Everett’s article ‘Impersonality’ (LRB, 10 November), the following sentence should have read: ‘In this presentation of conjugal love as fairly dreadful and character-testing, but lacking any real alternative in experience, this theoretically realistic and humorous novel is not unlike The Waste Land, the show-piece of Modernism and Impersonality.’

Editors, ‘London Review’

Vol. 10 No. 22 · 8 December 1988

From Gabriel Josipovici

Barbara Everett’s thoughtful, often profound review of Hugh Kenner’s A Sinking Island (LRB, 10 November) prompts a few comments. When one reads Kenner or Hartman one longs for the earthiness of an Everett or a Bayley. Conversely, though, when one reads Barbara Everett or John Bayley on the ‘thinginess’ of the greatest literature something seems to be missing and one longs for Kenner or Hartman. I suppose criticism works by overstatement and no one critic can speak ‘the truth’.

Barbara Everett is right to insist that Eliot’s impact depends on the interconnection of the aesthetic and the moral in his work, and that ‘the inward debate of authority’ is crucial to our sense of him. The same is true of Beckett, and the attempt to see both as ‘high priests of Modernism’ does a disservice to them and to Modernism, suggesting as it does that they wish to substitute art for religion. But the mere introduction of Beckett into the picture makes one see the weakness of Everett’s attempt to see Amis’s work as in some way akin to Eliot’s and as unjustifiably slandered by Kenner. Those novelists who are highly regarded in their own countries and in the rest of Europe, but not in Britain, such as Thomas Bernhard and Peter Handke, Claude Simon and Marguerite Duras, Yakov Shabtai and Aharon Appelfeld, have all, like Eliot and Beckett, sensed that to speak ‘with the voice of a person subject to his own experience, like everyone else: not a preacher, not a poet’ (Everett’s words about Larkin) requires a formal adventurousness, a willingness to take risks with the manner of speaking, which is quite absent from the work of Amis and the other much-touted English writers of the present.

Of course one can go on playing the game of who ‘really’ is in the Modernist tradition and who isn’t. I myself, like Everett, would make Auden rather than Bunting central. But that, as I understand it, is not the main thrust of Kenner’s argument. In this country, today, ‘ambitious’ tends to mean ‘long’; ‘wildly imaginative’ tends to mean ‘working in the minor mode of fantasy’; ‘sensitive’ and ‘compassionate’ to mean ‘this author still writes like Hardy.’ Instead of the ambition of an Eliot, a Kafka, or Beckett, to speak the truth at whatever cost in terms of popularity, we have variants on Hemingway’s absurd boast that he could take Tolstoy to 15 rounds, or the even more debased ambition to win a major prize. What I find absent from the bulk of contemporary English fiction and poetry, clever and witty as much of it is, is precisely that sense of the voice of a person subject to his or her own experience, which Everett finds in Larkin. ‘Defeated, the poet starts to sound like a person: unique,’ she writes. I think she is right, and not just about Larkin: there is a profound conjunction between the acknowledgment of defeat – as a writer, as well as as a person – and the quality of art. But the implications of that have not, it seems to me, ever really been taken on board in England. I don’t think American letters have all that much to boast about at present, but unfortunately more of Kenner’s critique of English writing holds than Everett is prepared to accept.

Gabriel Josipovici
Lewes, Sussex