Diary

I completed my memoir World within World in 1950, when I was 41. Reading it now, 42 years later, it seems to me that much of it represents the situation of a generation of English writers during the Thirties, novelists and poets, coming from a background of the professional middle class, and most of them born between 1905 and 1910. The accident of the time, as well as of the social class into which they were born, accounts for many of their attitudes during a period that covered two world wars – or perhaps only one war, lasting from 1914 to 1945, with a truce under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles between 1918 and 1939. Such is the rapidity of historical change in the present century that generations seem to succeed one another at intervals of five or ten, rather than thirty, years. We think in decades. The Thirties generation to which my colleagues and I belonged was separated by what seemed an abyss from the one ten years older, so many of whom had taken part in the 1914-18 war. The fact that they had been in the war when we were children created a gulf between generations profounder than that of the few years’ difference. Moreover, ten years after 1918, these former soldiers – as though summoned by the ghosts of their comrades in the trenches – started turning back to their war experiences, about which they wrote books which are today rightly regarded as classics.

We were a generation that had missed out on the war and who were not competed with by the previous generation. There were nevertheless older writers who had not fought in the war but who had absorbed into their writing, perhaps even more than the soldier writers, its lessons for our civilisation: Joyce, Eliot, Lawrence. These were the older generation to whom we looked for examples. They did not reflect in their work the conditions of the Western Front, but they shared a generalised despair about Western civilisation. In the masterpieces of Joyce and Eliot, two thousand and more years of history seemed to be encapsulated within a moment of contemporary ‘modern’ consciousness: rather like the vision of his life which supposedly passes before the eyes of someone drowning. This idea of the modern epoch as the end of civilisation persisted until the Eighties in the work of James Joyce’s former amanuensis, Samuel Beckett. It is implicit indeed in the title of his play, Endgame. The work – today unfashionable – which seemed to authenticate this vision was Spengler’s Decline of the West.

Our generation of writers was, very emphatically and very consciously, ‘young’. We were not, before 1932 or 1933, involved, as writers, in any kind of political action, though our sympathies as voters were vaguely socialist. But the way we voted had nothing to do with our conscience as artists. Politics was to us, at this time, just one more set of symptoms of that dying civilisation. Indeed, we considered politics the enemy of art. This was the view which we derived from reading the works of Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, etc. In their poetry and fiction they created imaginary worlds – and imaginary worlds seemed to have nothing to do with politics. In this view most members of our generation, as distinct from the highly politicised Communist poets of the generation immediately following – those who fought in the Spanish Civil War – continued fundamentally always to believe.