Here are three quotations:
He spoke sententiously, breaking off abruptly. I had an uneasy feeling, unlikely as this would be, that he might be about to ask me to act as best man at his wedding. I began to think of excuses to avoid such a duty. However, it turned out he had no such intention. It seemed likely, on second thoughts, that he wanted to discuss seriously some matter regarding himself which he feared might, on ventilation, cause amusement.
If it had not been such an intolerably hot evening, Bernard would have suggested remaining in their seats in the interval. He could see no point in a meeting between Eric and Terence, though he had never hidden his relationships from either of them. They would, he felt sure, dislike one another and he dreaded a little his own acquiescence in their criticisms. They would both be so perfectly right, and they would both so perfectly miss the point.
‘Jake,’ said Madge into my shoulder, ‘don't leave me.’
I half carried her to the settee. I felt calm and resolute. I knelt beside her and took her hand, brushing her hair back with my hand. Her face rose towards me like a lifting flower.
‘Jake,’ said Madge, ‘I must have you with me. That was what it was all for. Don't you see?’
I nodded. I drew my hand back over her smooth hair and down to the warmth of her neck.
Each of these extracts, chosen at random, comes from a novel by the writers recommended, back in 1958, by the then Professor of English at Oxford, Lord David Cecil, as being in the vanguard of fiction writing in English. (Why, I wonder now, did he make no mention of Ivy Compton-Burnett? Probably because, his taste being typical of the English establishment, then and now, he did not rate her.) The first comes from At Lady Molly's, by Anthony Powell, published in 1957, the second from Hemlock and After, by Angus Wilson, published in 1952, and the third from Under the Net, Iris Murdoch's first novel, published in 1954. Occasionally they sound dated, as in Powell's ‘which he feared might, on ventilation, cause amusement’, or Wilson's ‘They would both be so perfectly right, and they would both so perfectly miss the point’. But by and large they have stood the test of time pretty well; or rather, they could have been extracts from novels published in England in 2009. They all three do what they set out to do perfectly adequately: they help tell a story and create a world and characters to inhabit that world that do not flout the laws of probability. We never doubt what they are telling us, whether it is about the way someone speaks (‘sententiously’), the weather (‘an intolerably hot evening’) or an action (‘I half carried her to the settee’). It does not matter whether the narrative is in the first or the third person, what the narrator says is, as far as we are concerned, the truth. Such narratives are easy to read. They are also illustrative, in Bacon's sense: they tell a story, they have no life of their own. The two things go together, as both Barthes and Merleau-Ponty showed: the smooth chain of the sentences gives us a sense of security, of comfort even, precisely because it denies the openness, the ‘trembling’ of life itself; the very confidence of the articulation of the narrative gives the lie to our own sense of things being confused, dark, impossible to grasp fully. That of course is why we read them: they take us, for a while, out of our confusions, drawing us into a world that makes some sort of sense, that at the very least can be articulated. By the same token they cannot really satisfy us, since they do not speak to our condition, only make us hungry for more.
As I hope I have made clear, in my discussions of Cervantes and of Golding, for example, a sense of narrative being alive does not depend on the disruption of syntax or the use of demotic speech, but on a much more fundamental relation of the writer to his medium. If Barthes is right and to be modern is to know that some things can no longer be done, then Cervantes is modern and these writers are not.
And what of their successors? Here again are three extracts, chosen at random, all from living writers. The first comes with an endorsement from Anthony Thwaite (‘a prose that has a feline grace’), the second with one from Karl Miller (‘the masterpiece of someone I think of as the best novelist writing in England’), and the third with one from John Braine (‘a beautifully written story’):
‘What is it, Mary?’ Colin said, and reached for her hand. She shrank away, but her eyes were on him … and he shivered as he fumbled for his shirt and stood up. They faced each other across the empty bed. ‘You've had a bad fright,’ Colin said, and began to edge round towards her. Mary nodded and moved towards the french window that gave on to the balcony.
She had always seen decay about her, even while going through all that the society asked of her. Slot machines on railway stations were full of sweets, but she knew they would be empty again; they were meant to be empty, as they had been when she was a child, pieces of junk that no one yet thought of taking away.
We had by now descended the long incline of our street and reached Elizabeth Avenue. No lawn we passed, no driveway, no garage, no lampost, no little brick stoop was without its power over me. Here I had practised my sidearm curve, here on my sled I'd broken a tooth, here I had copped my first feel, here for teasing a friend I had been slapped by my mother, here I had learned that my grandfather was dead.
It is clear, again, that all three passages have more in common than they have differences. One may employ dialogue, one what linguists call style indirecte libre, and one a first person narrator, but all three are concerned with telling a story and telling it in such a way as to make readers feel that they are not reading about a world that has been freshly made but about one that has always existed. Writing in the 1950s about the Citroën DS 19, Barthes pointed out: ‘It is obvious that the new Citroën has fallen from the sky inasmuch as it appears at first sight as a superlative object’. It is characterised, he goes on, at once by ‘a perfection and an absence of origin, a closure and a brilliance, a transformation of life into matter’. A recent commentator on this essay adds: ‘One of the most noteworthy features of the car was its lack of noticeable joints; its panels were not visibly riveted, they appeared to coexist in a state of magical juxtaposition. That is to say, the tangible signs of fabrication, of the labor expended in transforming raw matter into consummable object, had been magicked away.’ Like the Citroen DS 19, the works from which I have just quoted (like the earlier ones of Powell, Wilson and Iris Murdoch) are carefully made objects, exquisitely crafted in order to conceal the joints. The price they pay for this is that they are thin, illustrative, again, in Bacon's sense, recounting anecdotes which may or may not hold our attention but to which we certainly would not want to return, since they lack that sense of density of other worlds suggested but lying beyond words, which we experience when reading Proust or James or Robbe-Grillet. We read them to pass the time, to reassure ourselves that the world has meaning, and then we leave them and move on to the next book.
The first is by a Booker Prize winner, the second by a Nobel Prize winner, and the third is – by Philip Roth. But surely, you may say, Philip Roth is an experimental writer! He writes novels in which a character called Philip Roth appears; he writes novels with titles like The Counterlife, which play with the notion of possible other worlds. Is that not what Modernism is about?
If that is your reaction you have not really been taking in what I have been saying. Cervantes may suddenly suspend his narrative and go on to tell us that the manuscript broke off at this point; Proust may later reveal that what had been said earlier was wrong, and then later still that this new revelation was itself wrong. But it is not these things that make their novels modern. It is partly that they hunger for that ‘relentless contact’ which so haunted Stevens's Comedian and for a form of fiction which transcends the anecdotal – the dreariness of ‘the marquise went out at five’ – so that they are unwilling to settle for that fixed distance from the language they are using and the story they are telling, which is such a feature of the English writers I have just been looking at; and partly (the two are of course interconnected) that they understand that, in Wittgenstein's words, a certain language-game can no longer be played, and that this does not mean that we can simply shift the ground and find another language-game to play. For all Philip Roth's playfulness (a heavy-handed playfulness at the best of times), he never doubts the validity of what he is doing or his ability to find a language adequate to his needs. As a result his works may be funny, they may be thought-provoking, but only as good journalism can be funny and thought-provoking. Those of us who cannot find the words to make sense of our lives may look on in admiration but not feel, as we feel with Sophocles or Duras, that this speaks to us.
Writers of course only do what they can. They instinctively sense, or quite soon work out, what they can and can't do, and what they want and do not want to do (the two are not always the same). Even Dickens, that most self-assured of novelists, provides, in The Pickwick Papers, a fascinating glimpse into all the directions in which he thought for a moment he might go but in the end decided (not consciously, I'm sure) not to explore. Don Quixote hovers over the whole book of course, as it does not over later Dickens, and in Chapter 11 we even find him flirting with two of Poe's favourite genres, Gothic horror (the inset story of the madman's confessions) and the decipherment by the rational mind of a mysterious inscription. His comic take on the latter is evidence both of the English novel's robust common sense, its refusal to be taken in by the pseudo-profound, and of Dickens' rueful acknowledgement that the direction of Poe, Hawthorne and Melville can never be his. But if writers do what they are drawn to do, critics and cultural analysts need to do a little better. It is not Powell, Wilson and Murdoch, not our current Booker and Nobel Prize winners who give cause for concern, but the cultural climate that cannot see the difference between them and those writers who, in Kierkegaard's terms, sense vividly what is lacking and then endeavour to convey a sense of this lack, between works that illustrate and works that live.
An interesting example of our current confusions is the reception recently accorded to Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française. Némirovsky was a Russian-born Jew living in France who wrote in French. The book was written in 1941–2, shortly before its author was deported and murdered. The manuscript surfaced in the early 1990s (it had been lying in her daughter's trunk all the time) and was published to some acclaim in France, but to nothing like the rapturous reception it received in Britain. Doris Lessing and the journalist Robert Fisk compared it to Tolstoy, and Victoria Glendinning, the distinguished biographer, described it as one of the most significant books of the last century.
The first part deals with the fall of France in May 1940 and the subsequent exodus from Paris. Here is an extract from the first pages:
In the Péricand household they listened in shocked silence to the evening news on the radio, but no one passed comment on the latest developments. The Péricands were a cultivated family; their traditions, their way of thinking, their middle-class, Catholic background, their ties with the Church (their eldest son Philippe Péricand was a priest), all these things made them mistrustful of the government of France. On the other hand Monsieur Péricand's position as curator of one of the country's national museums bound them to an administration that showered its faithful with honours and financial rewards.
A cat held a little piece of bony fish tentatively between its sharp teeth, he was afraid to swallow, but he couldn't bring himself to spit it out either.
Madame Péricand finally decided that only a male mind could explain with clarity such strange, serious events.
Némirovsky was a popular novelist of the day and she uses the clichés of the middlebrow novel without embarrassment, quickly filling in the background and sketching in her chosen representative family with the minimum of fuss, then cutting to the cat so as to convey the sense of ordinary life going on regardless of the great events that are unfolding. ‘The Péricands were’, ‘a cat held’ – we remember how Proust felt the chill of death enveloping him when he came across such a use of the past tense in Sainte-Beuve and elsewhere. A story is told and, as in the English extracts above, everything is done to make sure the inventing author is concealed, but the work lies inert on the page, without any life of its own.
The very poignancy of what happened in France in those days in May 1940 makes such stale narrative retellings all the more grotesque. Will it get better when we reach the actual fighting?
‘This is a disaster,’ thought Hubert with a sigh. ‘This is defeat! I am here, watching an enormous defeat, worse than Waterloo. We are all lost. I'll never see Mother or any of my family again. I'm going to die.’ He felt doomed, numb to everything around him, in a terrible state of exhaustion and despair. He didn't hear the order to retreat. He saw men running through the machine-gun fire. Rushing forward, he climbed over a wall into a garden where a baby's pram still stood in the shade. The battle wasn't over. Without tanks, without weapons, without ammunition, they were still trying to defend a few square metres of ground, a bridgehead, while from all directions the German conquerors were sweeping through France.
Though utter chaos is being described, the collapse of a world, Hubert has time to talk to himself in cadenced phrases, to draw comparisons from history. And notice how the baby's pram is conveniently waiting ‘in the shade’ to make the same sort of point as was made by the description of the cat in the first extract. This is run-of-the-mill middlebrow narrative, given poignancy by the subsequent history of its author and of the manuscript itself. It is this, I feel, that has allowed commentators, who secretly warm to this kind of writing but don't quite dare admit it, to grow ecstatic about the book with a clear conscience: the events it describes were terrible and dramatic, the author's fate was tragic, the fate of the manuscript miraculous, so it must be a great book. Contrast (even in my clumsy translation) a real writer tackling the same subject, Claude Simon's attempt to convey what was engulfing France and its army in that same moment of May 1940, seen through the eyes of a cavalry officer still, unbelievable as it might appear, as in 1914, astride a horse, in the face of the armoured onslaught of the Germans. Through the eyes, though, is wrong, itself a cliché: part of the power of Simon's novel comes from the fact that it is an anguished monologue as the narrator tries to explain to the woman in whose bed he is lying, and to explain to himself, what had just happened:
on this road which was nothing but a death-trap, that is, not war but murder pure and simple, a place where they cut you down before you could say ouch, the snipers calmly installed behind a hedge or a bush and taking all the time in the world to get you into their sights, in short a bloody shooting-gallery … which did not stop him from always holding himself stiff and upright in his saddle, as upright as though he'd been reviewing a march past at a 14 July parade and not in the middle of a retreat or rather a rout or rather a disaster in the midst of this kind of decomposition of everything as though not simply an army but the world itself in its entirety and not just its physical reality but the image the mind can make of it (but perhaps it was also the lack of sleep, the fact that for ten days we had practically not slept except in the saddle) … two or three times someone shouted out to him not to go on (how many I don't know, nor who they were: the wounded I imagine, or men hidden in the houses or in the ditch, or perhaps civilians who doggedly went on wandering about in incomprehensible fashion, dragging a battered suitcase after them or pushing one of those children's perambulators filled with vague belongings (not really belongings: just things, useless objects, simply no doubt so as not to wander empty-handed, having the illusion of taking with them, of possessing anything so long as it was personal: a torn pillow or an umbrella or the colour photograph of the grandparents – and so had the arbitrary notion of price, of treasure attached to it) as though what mattered was simply to walk, no matter in what direction…)
My instinct is to say: the difference between the two descriptions is not one of degree but of kind. It is not that Némirovsky is a lesser novelist than Simon, but that she is simply unaware of the inappropriateness of what she is doing, and one has to say that by her writing she makes ‘a written renunciation to all claim to be an author’. Or is this too apocalyptic? Is it simply that she is less good, less aware of what can and cannot be done, less aware of just what it is she wants to convey and therefore of the need to forge a style that will answer to that need?
Again, the question is not why she should have written as she did, but what has happened to our culture that serious and intelligent and well-read reviewers, not to speak of prize-winning novelists and distinguished biographers, many of whom have studied the poems of Eliot or the novels of Virginia Woolf at university, should so betray their calling as to go into ecstasies over books like Némirovsky's while, in their lifetimes and now after their deaths, ignoring the work of novelists like Claude Simon, Georges Perec, Thomas Bernhard and Gert Hofmann.
To answer this would require a sociologist, perhaps, and another book. But a few points are worth making. The first is that though, as the example of Némirovsky shows, we are not dealing here with a purely English phenomenon, there is a greater resistance to or lack of awareness of Modernism right across the board in England than there is in the rest of Europe and even in America. Modernism has its friends over here but they are what the art historian T.J. Clark has called ‘false friends’, that is, those who defend a version of Modernism that is at once crude and superficial and therefore make it even more difficult to grasp what it truly is. A case in point is a recent book by the young English novelist Adam Thirlwell, Miss Herbert, which deals with many of the themes and authors I have been writing about here, but seems (to me) consistently to misrepresent and misunderstand them.
I have already had occasion to quote Thirlwell on Don Quixote, which he reads as ‘the juxtaposition of chivalrously good intentions with the prose of real life’. This, I suggested, is to misunderstand the questions raised by the novel about truth and authority and especially the authority of the novelist himself. For Cervantes, the question of what is ‘real life’ and how an artist today (his today and our today) can claim to deal with it is a fundamental concern; for Thirlwell it isn't an issue. Thus his misreading of Cervantes is symptomatic of his whole book. What he takes both the novel and Modernism to stand for, as far as I can see, is an unflinching realism which resolutely refuses the consolations of poetry and Romanticism. He quotes Flaubert: ‘I want a touch of bitterness in everything – always a jeer in the midst of our triumphs, desolation even in the midst of enthusiasm’, and remarks: ‘That last sentence is Flaubert's description of his new literary form: the novelistic scene, the anti-lyrical poem.’
The touchstone of this new form, a form which will at last ‘be true to the mess which is real life’, is the telling detail: the faint scar on a forehead, the stair carpet turned up at one corner. Thirlwell purrs with pleasure when he finds it in Diderot or Flaubert, in Tolstoy or Nabokov. It is the detail which shows up the impurity of grandiose feelings, which does the job of the novelist and the Modernist, deflating the sentimental, the romantic, the serious. ‘The most radical novels find comedy in places which people do not want to see as comic at all – like sex, or concentration camps.’ This is meant to be shocking but it is merely in bad taste. For Hitler and the camps seem actually to be immune to comedy, as the films Chaplin and Roberto Benigni devoted to those subjects, The Great Dictator and Life is Beautiful, merely serve to demonstrate. Even a great comic novel like Catch22 only works, as David Daiches once pointed out, because it is set at a moment in the Second World War when the Allied victory was already assured.
The notion that the new reality inhering in novels depends on their attention to detail fails to distinguish between ‘reality’ and what theoreticians call ‘the reality-effect’. In fact Thirlwell uses the two terms indiscriminately. But putting a faint scar on a face or alerting us to the fact that the carpet is turned up in the corner, like describing the smell of sweat and semen during the act of sex, no more anchors the novel to ‘reality’ than writing about stars in the eyes of the beloved. The novel is still made up of words, is still the product of a solitary individual, inventing scars, carpets, smells or stars. Of course we warm to a novelist who surprises us with his attention to detail, though as much or more depends on the way it is done, the style, rather than the detail itself, as when Dickens has Sam Weller say: ‘Look at these here boots – eleven pairs o'boots; and one shoe as b'longs to number six, with the wooden leg’, or Proust writes of Swann's arrival at a grand party and the footman's taking his hat and gloves: ‘As he approached Swann, he seemed to be exhibiting at once an utter contempt for his person and the most tender regard for his hat.’ Too often though, especially in Flaubert and the Goncourts, detail seems to be there as a way of convincing us (and the authors themselves?) that what we are dealing with is the stuff of life. Too often the attention to detail in modern novels reminds me of what Clement Greenberg once said of nineteenth-century academic painting: ‘It took talent – among other things – to lead art that far astray. Bourgeois society gave these talents a prescription, and they filled it – with talent.’
Thirlwell's failure to distinguish reality and the ‘reality-effect’ is symptomatic of his – and his English colleagues' – failure to grasp what was obvious to every artist I have been looking at in the course of this book, that what is at issue is reality itself, what it is and how an art which of necessity renounces all claim to contact with the transcendent can relate to it, and, if it cannot, what possible reason it can have for existing. This is not an issue for Thirlwell. ‘The problem of living in Brazil, or Cuba, or Russia, and wanting to write a novel’, he says grandly, ‘is the same problem as living in France, or Britain, and wanting to write a novel. The problem is universal: it is about finding a way of describing real life.’
Thirlwell and his mentor Craig Raine, for all their waving of Modernist credentials, seem as confident as Jane Austen that the ground they stand on is solid. What I have tried to suggest in the course of this book is that, for some artists at least since the time of Dürer, and for any serious artist since 1789, the ground has been anything but solid. And that if this is the case then it is not enough to examine the surface of a work, to admire the artist's skill in doing this or that. What we need to do is to see it from the point of view of the artist – not of course Picasso or Stravinsky or Eliot the man but the maker. The reason for this is that the work itself asks for such a reading. Don Quixote, like Prufrock or Kafka's ‘The New Advocate’, is not just ‘about’ the juxtaposition of romantic beliefs and the world's reality; it recognises itself as implicated in an impossible struggle to reconcile these two, and it implicates the reader.
But our English pseudo-Modernists cannot or will not see this. They pride themselves on their realism, which means their beady-eyed refusal to be taken in by highfalutin language and all the temptations of Romanticism. Love is not about stars in your eyes, it is about the itch of sex; death is not a consummation devoutly to be wished but a dingy and degrading experience; art is there not to make you rejoice but to rub your nose in the dirt. As well as thanking, in the course of his book, his old tutor Craig Raine, Adam Thirlwell thanks Julian Barnes, and Barnes's latest book, Nothing to be Frightened of, perfectly exemplifies this mindset. Shocked by the death of his parents and his realisation that, at sixty, he has not all that much time to go himself, Barnes spends 250 pages telling himself and us how frightened he is at the prospect. What is terrifying about old age is the loss of control, and this is particularly difficult for Barnes because he seems to have inherited his mother's need to be in control at all times and never to be taken in by sentiment, though he recognises the ambiguous roots of such feelings. ‘I was an idealistic adolescent’, he writes, ‘who swerved easily into suspicion when confronted with life's realities. My kicks were those of a disheartened Romantic.’ This is insightful, but he doesn't follow it up. Rather, he seems happy to accept himself as a clear-eyed realist. ‘I hope, Barnes’, one of his teachers says to him, ‘that you're not one of those bloody back-row cynics.’ ‘Me, sir? Cynic, sir? Oh no – I believe in baa-lambs and hedgerow blossoms and human goodness, sir’, the grown-up Barnes responds across the years. But this kind of smartness soon palls. It's bright but it tries too hard to shock, like the joke which he likes so much he repeats it: ‘Alzheimer's? Forget it.’ Barnes, like Thirlwell and Raine, prides himself on his realism, which he likes to think brings him closer to his beloved Flaubert. But the trouble with this English brand of Realism is that it yields an impoverished view of life and leaves Barnes prey to all the fears he has striven to repress.
Reading Barnes, like reading so many of the other English writers of his generation, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Blake Morrison, or a critic from an older generation who belongs with them, John Carey, leaves me feeling that I and the world have been made smaller and meaner. Ah, they will say, but that is just what we wanted, to free you of your illusions. But I don't believe them. I don't buy into their view of life. The irony which at first made one smile, the precision of language, which was at first so satisfying, the cynicism, which at first was used only to puncture pretension, in the end come to seem like a terrible constriction, a fear of opening oneself up to the world. It is sad to see this has infected a writer from the next generation like Adam Thirlwell. All of them ultimately come out of Philip Larkin's overcoat, and clearly their brand of writing and the nature of their vision speaks to the English, for they are among the most successful writers of their generation. I wonder, though, where it came from, this petty-bourgeois uptightness, this terror of not being in control, this schoolboy desire to boast and to shock. We don't find it in Irish or American culture, or in French or German or Italian culture. The English have always been both sentimental and ironical, but there was never that sense of prep-school boys showing off, which is the taste these writers leave on my tongue.
How has it come about? I would venture three points. ‘Like most Victorian novelists’, writes John Bayley, ‘[Dickens'] sense of other places and people was founded on fear and distrust. The Boz of the Sketches seems to hate and fear almost everything even though it fascinates him.’ But this is something that antedates the Victorians. As Linda Colley has shown in her fine book, Britons, from the early eighteenth century on Britons defined themselves in opposition to others, in particular to the large, aggressive Popish nations of Spain and France: Britons are different; Britons never will be slaves, to other nations or to the ideas of other nations. To this must be added the fact that England was just about the only European country not to be overrun by enemy forces during the Second World War, which was a blessing for it, but which has left it strangely innocent and thrown it into the arms, culturally as well as politically, of the even more innocent United States. This has turned a robust pragmatic tradition, always suspicious of the things of the mind, into a philistine one. Though there is something appealing in the resolute determination not to be taken in evinced by Larkin and Amis in the face of European Modernism, something that reminds me of the Just William books I so enjoyed as a child, it soon begins to pall. Taken as a cultural rallying-cry it is little short of disastrous.
Second, and paradoxically, ours is an age which, while being deeply suspicious of the ‘pretentious’, worships the serious and the ‘profound’, so that large novels about massacres in Rwanda or Bosnia, or historical novels with a ‘majestic sweep’, are automatically considered more worthy of attention than the novels of, say, P.G. Wodehouse or Robert Pinget.
Finally, ours is the first generation in which High Art and Fashion have married in a spirit joyously welcomed by both parties. When the speakers at major literary festivals are for the most part politicians, television personalities or foreign correspondents; when we are enjoined to buy three books for the price of two in our major bookshops and a serious newspaper like the Independent offers its readers the chance, as a Christmas bonanza, to gatecrash a book launch of their choice with one of the paper's literary critics, we have truly arrived at an age where art and showbiz are one and the same.
In his delightful novel, Rates of Exchange, Malcolm Bradbury touches on the first of my points when he has his East European magical realist femme fatale, Katya Princip, explain his own history to the bemused British Council lecturer, Dr Petworth:
Oh, Mr. Petwit, I have told you. You are really not a character in the world historical sense. You come from a little island with water all round. When we were oppressed and occupied and when we fought and died, and there were mad mullahs and pogroms against the Jews, what did you have? Queen Victoria and industrial revolution and Alfred Lord Tennyson. We sent Karl Marx to explain everything, but you didn't notice. What did you do with him? Put him in Highgate cemetery, some would say the best place, I know. You never had history, just some customs.
This is so brilliant because it is at the same time an acute assessment of how England relates to Europe, a sending up of what ‘Europe’ in this equation stands for, and a covert thumbs up to traditional English ways. For who, reading this, would not opt for customs rather than history, for Queen Victoria and Alfred Lord Tennyson rather than mad mullahs and pogroms? But is that really the choice? You cannot escape from history with a few comic phrases. As historians, not all Marxist, have been pointing out for rather a long time now, naturally Britain has had a history, but it has preferred to ignore that history. Perhaps the best one can say is that it has had the luxury of not having that history thrust upon it as most of the European nations have.
So many English novelists today confess to wanting to write like Dickens that it might be thought that the difference between England and France and Germany is that we have no great model to look back to, who might give us an understanding of what it might mean to have a European sensibility, that is, to be as English as they come and yet have a real historical awareness. But there is one, as I have suggested: Wordsworth. Unfortunately within English culture he has been consistently misrepresented as either a bucolic poet or a political reactionary. This is a travesty. He occupies the same place in English literary history as, say, Hölderlin and Baudelaire occupy in German and French: someone with all the powers of the Romantic poet at his fingertips but aware of the deep paradoxes of his calling in an age when art itself is in question. Wordsworth, James, Eliot and Virginia Woolf all flourished on these shores. We need to go back and try to understand what they were up to as writers, not dismiss them as reactionaries or misogynists, or adulate them as gay or feminist icons.