Christmas 1960
At first glance, probably not very much, but if one keeps glancing, differences loom out of the international mist and make themselves plain.
The first distinction which emerges is that all the intellectual leaders of British thought think the British are frightful - unambitious, stupid, resigned, lacking in emotions, tasteless, gullible, conventional and defeatist; a mass of pin-striped lemmings, hurtling (on Public Transport) to disaster, whose behaviour and nature are deemed worse than anywhere else. (The brunt of this disapproval is borne by different classes at different times, but is always loudly evident.)
The British public, however, take absolutely no notice of this, with the result that they are always shouting for leaders of thought, action, or anything else - including people who will write the sort of works they wish to read and hear - much as the leaders of thought shout for an audience intelligent and enlightened enough to appreciate them. Between these two factions lies a sea of contempt and mutual ignorance, which is occasionally bridged by a French film, an American musical, or a novel from the Commonwealth. Perhaps the British would take more notice if the leaders of intellectual thought laughed at them, but this hardly ever happens as the latter are usually too anxious and angry to laugh, and in any case a national fallacy has developed whereby laughter is equated with emotional indifference.
In the centre of all there is a middle class of those who walk a tight rope (and cash in on it) of mass-producing - which involves diluting, complicating and disguising - either Great Thoughts, of frequently unknown antiquity, or current thoughts, of varying sizes, promulgated originally by leading living exponents. The first category often congeals into a platitude, which means, I think, something which has been misunderstood in the same way for a very long time; the second usually produces something which both factions would regard as harmless, i.e., dull and/or un-nourishing, like boiled sweets or tinned beetroot sandwiches - literary frivia or roughage.
The situation arises partly from the facts that the intellectual leaders feel that the external situation can and must be changed (by them), and the British public is desperately trying to catch up with and understand a situation which was at its zenith anything up to thirty years before they came in contact with it. It does not often occur to either of them to discover in what area practical or possible change may lie: if it did, they might appreciate one another more often than they do.
Is this situation peculiarly British? The French intellectuals regard it as graceless and boring to run down the rest of the French; they work that sort of feeling off in frenzied disapproval or cynicism about their political leaders, but the relationship between their public and Malraux, Sartre, Camus, etc., is far more intimate and sympathetic than the approximate equivalent here. The Americans consider it un-American to run down other Americans. If Russian intellectuals said the sort of things about the Russian peoples that the British intellectuals say about the British, it would be the last thing they did. The Italians concentrate upon depreciating their decadent rich minority, who, like grouse, are regarded as fair game, but it really seems that it is only the British who when they denigrate the British, mean very nearly everybody but themselves.
The fitting paradox to this is that more and more books are being published here, and read - whatever publishers, authors and readers will tell you: but this is not the main phenomenon, which is far more arresting and peculiar to this country in particular.
There is a theory, the details of which I cannot remember, but which runs something like this: if a number of monkeys were shown an equal number of typewriters, in four thousand years they would be bound to type a play of Shakespeare’s. This interesting theory cannot be tested here on a really large scale for two reasons. One - a shortage of monkeys; two - a shortage of typewriters. The shortage of monkeys here explains itself; they are very highly strung, and would doubtless be unable to stand intellectual monkeys running down the rest: the shortage of typewriters is a different matter, and arises from a more sinister cause requiring explanation. They are all in use. Why? Excluding a minimum of office work, they are being used by all or any of the population who can buy, hire, borrow or steal them to write verse, novels, biographies, memoirs, travel experiences, vicarious experiences and fantasies of no experience at all.
Works about animals, children, railway, mountains, tropical diseases, morality, Olden Times, the ‘nineties, the ’twenties and the ‘thirties - all subjects which used to be the prerogative of a knowing group of specialists have been so over-run by such an amateur weight of hobby scribblers or pauthors (part-time authors) that the poor specialists are driven to more and more abstruse extremes. It is no good keeping a terrier or a parrot any longer and communicating the joys of your relationship - it has to be a lion cub or at least an otter. And so forth. All this is quite apart from the welter of observation which falls into the loosely generic category of ‘life’. In this one finds every other childhood; every adolescent yearning and every nostalgic ramble from the bye-ways of old age. I have not yet been able to find anyone who, under sufficient pressure, hasn’t admitted to writing verse of some sort some time in their lives, and the phrases ‘starting on, getting down to, trying to finish, a novel’ are such a recurrent cry that they generate no more interest than do people announcing the progress of their ‘flu.
No wonder the British public seem so unappreciative and inert about current thoughts; they simply haven’t got the time to spare from their own writing to read the books that contain it. It has nothing whatever to do with age, or sex, or professional occupation - everybody has had, or wants to set about having experiences in order to write about them. Hale old admirals and brigadiers knock up vast quantities of verse about wild flowers, the weather and foxhunting (Laurie Lee, when judging a poetry competition, received about four hundred poems from a General all about the hooves ringing out on frosty roads, etc., and remarked that the General seemed to suffer from a slight case of Tallyhosis); gloomy young men, consumed with boredom at the banality of life and the cruelty of their (hopeless) situation in it, write novels about gloomy young men consumed with boredom, etc. Intrepid women describe journeys of breathless discomfort (three children, a budgie, a Siamese cat and husband starting afresh in Strange Lands). Kindly old clergymen produce interminable biographies of the more wicked Roman emperors or any other ancient tyrant who takes their fancy. Tidy old ladies keep finding letters of some ancestor in the bottom of a trunk. Frustrated young women with one child, whose marriage is going through a sticky stage, write novels about frustrated young women whose marriage, etc…
Anybody at all over seventy is liable to write their memoirs on the basis that however dull their life has been, it has been going on for a long while and it is high time someone else had to endure it. Eager young men write operas (music and book) based upon Bleak House, War and Peace, Middlemarch, or any other unwieldy classic. Everybody who was a) unhappy at school, b) fought through the war, c) was brought up in any other country but this one, d) whose parents were not both English (‘My father was English and perfectly dull and conventional. He never understood my mother, who was Armenian and a marvellous person. If she did not want to do the washing up, she simply dropped the tray on the kitchen floor. I shall always remember my father’s lack of emotional response as he cleared up the mess, and she stood laughing at him with unconquerable gaiety’): all these people write about all this. Quite a lot of people write plays - about Mary Stuart, Alexander the Great, cosy eccentric families living in the Home Counties and persons so symbolical that they defy description. Hundreds of people write children’s books which, like plays, they erroneously think are ‘easier than novels’. There is almost no inanimate object which has not been endowed with a nauseating personality in this medium not to mention the horses, bunnies, tigers and gnomic characters who abound.
In fact, nowhere in the world is there such a bulk of literary endeavour. When the typewriters give out, they write in exercise books, and they are all of them intent upon publication - thousands and thousands of them pouring in to the publishers and agents, to magazines and newspapers in such quantity that on the receiving end all but the steadiest literary judgements are unhinged. Many publishers get over a thousand typescripts a year, and have to employ a team of readers to deal with them, and if undeserving works slip through the net and get published, nobody can be blamed - on the whole, only ten or twelve per cent, of what is offered is accepted. The rest circulates with random restlessness from house to house and often from agent to agent - affording an honest living to many young professional writers who cannot live upon their writing and are paid to read scripts. By the time one gets a script whose pages are spattered with egg, sugar from bath buns, shreds of ham, little pieces of fern and tiny squashed flies, not to mention biscuit crumbs, cigarette ash, feathers and soot, you know that in spite of being unpublished it has been worth its weight in snacks and fags to half a dozen aspiring writers, one of whom may be really good. So in a mysterious roundabout way it has served its purpose.
And then there is another comforting thought. Out of all the amateur thousands, emerge those few who are necessary and interesting for the continuation of English literature: a great many people have discovered that they can write by writing; therefore the chance that this massive eccentricity (very few people indeed find writing fun) will yield something remarkable is there for all of us - the publisher, the agent, the reader and even the writer. The facts are that what with the English language and the freedom that all those wanting to express an opinion have had for many years now to despise, ridicule and shout about the national traits of their country-men, we have produced a quantity and quality of poetry and prose which is perhaps our largest single influence throughout the rest of the world. The monkeys would have to type very hard indeed to reach - let alone stay in - the same place. In any case, as a vulgar point of evolution, they really ought to start with exercise books.