During this century two changes have taken place in the relationship assumed between writers and readers. The first is summed up in the concept of what was called by F. R. Leavis ‘niass civilization and minority culture’; the second is the rise of literary studies as an academic profession. Though a number of those who believed most fervently that mass literacy was culturally disastrous were professional teachers of literature, the two tendencies were only loosely related. They have both affected ways of looking at literature and these effects have some similarities, but the impulses and beliefs which lie behind them are often very different.1
It is difficult to know how far, in this period, the readership of serious fiction changed either in its personnel or in its conception of itself in relation to the rest of the population. Those who believe that it did can certainly point out that many writers must have seen themselves in a different relationship with their public and with the larger society. Conrad was happy to be published in Blackwood’s Magazine alongside popular writing of many kinds; Hardy saw himself as addressing a large public and was prepared, albeit reluctantly, to tailor his serial publications to the tastes of his readers and publishers; Bennett believed that he could do good critical work in his essays while boiling the pot at the same time. They all, in one way or another, thought of themselves as addressing the same general public as George Eliot or Trollope. They were often disappointed at being less successful than they hoped but it is notable that even James, though he often complained about being overlooked, did not seem to think in terms of there being a minority of specialized readers whom he was failing to find. By contrast, in the next generation, Ulysses first appeared in The Little Review, Virginia Woolf’s novels were printed on her own small private press, and Lawrence’s early work was published in 1910 in Ford Madox Ford’s English Review by that editor of genius who certainly thought of his readers as a literary élite.
Such changes as this have often been interpreted as signs of a disastrous cultural decline and the consequent alienation of many writers and readers in the face of mass triviality. Forster’s Education Act of 1870, it is said, created a reading public which demanded easy satisfactions and this was provided by such immensely successful organs as Tit-Bits, founded in 1880, and the Daily Mail, which first appeared in 1896. A cultural Gresham’s Law began to operate, whereby bad intellectual currency drove out good.
This interpretation seems excessively simplified; it omits a great deal of the evidence and those propounding it normally use it to support strong and often unavowed political assumptions either about the striking wickedness of newspaper magnates who debauch public taste or about the inherent debauchability of the populace. The appetite for sensational triviality was certainly profoundly disheartening for those who had hoped that when literacy became the norm the reading tastes of the majority would be as serious as those of working people who had, against the odds, succeeded in acquiring education in previous centuries. But this was always an unreal expectation and the presence throughout the nineteenth century of popular trash should have warned such optimists. James Catnash, who sold the sensational ‘dying confessions’ of criminals by the million, was only the most successful of many, and G. W. M. Reynolds’s Mysteries of London and Mysteries of the Court of London ran for 624 penny numbers.2 Reynolds’s scabrous republicanism is stirring stuff, but it would be hard to suggest that the millions who read his works were responding at a more refined level than the readers of Tit-Bits.3
Nor is the evidence for the taste of the public at the turn of the century uniformly gloomy. The decades after Forster’s Act saw the end of the expensive three-decker library novel and the general spread of cheaper fiction, both good and bad, with large circulations, as well as the proliferation of cheap reprint series, of which the best known is probably the Everyman’s Library, founded in 1906. The concept of a saving remnant holding out for a while as the tide of rubbish rises about them will hardly survive such facts or a scrutiny of the figures for sales of serious fiction. Most of the writers with whom I am concerned in this study were published by commercial firms and achieved sales which enabled them to live by the pen.
But a concept of the serious writer and his readers as a conscious minority in a debased cultural situation certainly existed for many and has a cultural significance whether or not it rested on an accurate sociological analysis, not least because it has figured so largely in later accounts. By the time of the publication of Ulysses in 1922, say, a number of individuals and groups saw themselves as supporters of genius against philistinism, whether this philistinism was the indifferenee of the Boots’ Lending Library public or the repressive habits of Home Secretaries. Though it seems to me unlikely that there was in reality a greater gap between the reader of serious literature and the mass of the population in 1920 than there had been a hundred or two hundred years before, yet there was one striking difference: the tastes of the readers of the popular press were obvious and undeniable. In the past it had always been possible to hope that education would produce a larger informed reading public and critics were bound to be disheartened, even if the actual public for serious works of literature was larger, to see that it was now a smaller proportion of those who could read.
The sense of alienation of the writer and the serious reader from society extends, of course, far beyond strictly literary matters; there is a natural tendency for those whose main concern is literature to think that literary taste is a reliable index of emotional and moral life. The deplorable literary tastes of a large number of their fellow citizens appeared to many as an indication of a general emotional and social degradation, though in fact it is observable that readers of Tit-Bits and the romances published by Messrs Mills and Boon are every bit as able to manifest decency and even subtlety and refinement in their personal lives as their literary betters. What we see developing from about the 1920s onwards, though it can be traced back at least as far as Ruskin, is the concept of a vanished golden age, a harmonious society of men and women whose work had a meaning for them and whose folk culture embodied permanent values, and its replacement by a rootless, half-educated proletariat which was progressively debased by industrial changes and the machinations of greedy newspaper magnates and the pulp fiction industry. Leavis propounds this view in Mass Civilization and Minority Culture (1930) and it underlies much of his criticism; it can be seen in a more specifically political form in such writings of T. S. Eliot as Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), and it is to this, I think, that one can trace the sometimes grotesque overvaluation of D. H. Lawrence not as a novelist but as a diagnostician of the ills of the modern world.
There is one striking change in the periodicals in which literary works were discussed and new works published which suggests a change not in the mass public but in the élite one; the great journals of the nineteenth century discussed literature alongside politics, economics, and social comment; many of the significant periodicals of the new century tended to be more specifically literary. Though other matters were not totally absent in such magazines as Ford’s English Review, Eliot’s Criterion, Middleton Murry’s Adelphi, and Harriet Weaver’s The Egoist (in which A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man first appeared) they were addressed primarily to a literary public. Many of them were conceived as proselytizing organs and, so far as they concerned themselves with social issues, did so with literary and especially with new and experimental literary works as their starting-point. Increasingly, too, as the academic study of English grew, this specialized public came to be associated with the universities. This can be seen very clearly in one of the most influential of all the journals, Scrutiny, founded in 1932, which lasted until 1953 and which provided the chief forum for the ideas of F. R. Leavis and those associated with him. Unlike earlier magazines, it was not only edited by academics but also addressed to those for whom the study of literature was a primary occupation.
The rise of the discipline of English in universities happened surprisingly late. Cambridge University did not have a professor of English until 1911, though Oxford, buttressing the new subject with linguistic claims, had set up an English Honours School in 1893.4 But by 1940 English studies were firmly established in this country and in the United States. There was thus a far greater chance in 1940 than at the beginning of the century that a man or woman introducing a new book to the public was a professional academic. The writer of a book about some established figure of the past was almost certain to be a professional. This tendency has increased vastly since 1940 and it is now true to say that virtually every book which I mention in this study is a set text. More significantly, many of their readers will have first encountered them as set texts. Nor, though I wish to draw attention to some of the disadvantages of the professionalization of literary studies, can I deny that I am an academic writing a book for a public which will be to some extent an academic one.
The terms of literary discussion in 1890 tended to be those of a confident ruling class, for whom literature was one interest among many, even if the personal status of many literary journalists was not actually what the tone implied. At its best this situation produced well-informed, shrewd judgements of literature, alongside similar judgements about public affairs; at its worst it produced book chat of an excruciatingly self-indulgent and cosy kind. By contrast discussion now suggests that literary study is a communal enterprise, moving forward on a broad front and engaged in by trained professionals. This was neatly exemplified by an article in a recent journal which compared the number of critical studies devoted to six modern novelists and noted that ‘Woolf criticism and scholarship has shown a 25.59% increase in the 1980s; it may be a surprise, even a shock, to Conradians to note that Conrad items have decreased 17.63%’.5
The gains are obvious; we can, for almost all writers, take good editions for granted, together with an abundance of such supplementary matter as letters and biographies; factual accuracy and a sense of responsibility before the text can normally be taken for granted; a greater sophistication in distinguishing connotative and denotative factors (the stated and the implied, the text and the subtext) and a greater understanding of the implications of genre and of the nature of literary tradition are widespread. Not least, a number of good critics have been put in a position to spend their time at a job for which they are suited and this has been of particular importance in making accessible new and difficult works.
But when we consider the two chief ways in which the literary profession has affected our approach to literature - the determination of a canon and the establishment of an appropriate critical approach to individual works - we see that there have been substantial disadvantages which are rooted in the nature of a profession. It is a popular truism that all professions are conspiracies against the public; one does not need to go as far as this to recognize that they are inevitably exclusive; the academic literary one is no different from others in feeling the need to distance itself from the claims of non-members to know how to do the job. This natural tendency has, I think, been exacerbated because literary critics are always in danger of feeling that their skills are not immediately apparent. They must all, at one time or another, have had the experience of finding that nuclear physicists, say, can talk to them intelligently about novels while they are quite unable to reciprocate by sensible comments about quantum mechanics. This fact has surely not been without influence in the tendency of some critics to elaborate a methodology and its accompanying technical vocabulary which implies that the uninitiated are not able properly to understand works of literature until they put themselves to school to the critics. In extreme cases we see books processed as part of a critical argument, with the implication - and sometimes even the proclamation - that this argument is in itself as important as the books which it uses as raw material for its generalizations.6
The most obvious way in which professionalization has served readers ill is its tendency to overvalue those elements in works which give the critic something to do; normally this means either the explication of difficulties or the reinterpretation of works away from their apparent meaning. Most common readers (readers, that is to say, whose immediate reaction to liking a novel is to procure another book by the same writer rather than to read a critic or write a dissertation) are very interested in the characters in books. They tend to talk as if they were real people, though they are not such fools as to believe that they are; it is simply that this is the obvious way of talking about them and they do not feel obliged to mince their words for fear of accusations of naïve mimeticism. They are also concerned if not with the plot (though some often are), then with a sense of some forward movement through the book. These are among the most elementary elements in fiction and in their liking for them common readers resemble the authors of practically every novel written in any language whatever and virtually every critic and commentator until very recent times. Yet, as I have said in the previous chapter, a vast amount of critical discussion of Joyce passes by questions of character and happening in favour of quasi-cryptographic devices of a mechanical but explicable kind. A discussion of the works of Conrad as self-referential metafictions is of the same nature.
The emphasis on that which needs elucidation or on the need to reinterpret works into new categories draws support very often from a misleading metaphor of surface and depth, with its implication that what we can all see is superficial and thus not worthy of discussion, while what is only to be found by excavation is profound and hence the proper subject for scholarly activity. It is, alas, not unusual for innocent readers of major works like Tess of the d’Urbervilles, The Rainbow, or The Secret Agent to seek help from readily available and often widely recommended critical anthologies and to come away either with a baffled sense that they must be stupid not to have noticed hidden significances brought up from the depths by critics busy scraping the barrel, or with a sense that no critics are worth reading because they are not interested in the central features of the novel. Either reaction is deplorable but my preference must be for the latter.
The establishment of a canon is clearly affected by the professionalization of literary studies; it could, indeed, be said to be one of its purposes.7 Moreover a canon enshrined in syllabuses is not easy to change. It seems to be agreed among publishers, for example, that it is very hard to revive minor writers of the inter-war years and to keep them in print unless they find a place on a syllabus. Nor will theoretically based efforts to overturn a canon lead to much greater freedom of choice for the ordinary reader.
The canon of modern literature differs from that of the past in that it has been established in part by the efforts of academic critics. Our estimate of Fielding or Dickens may differ from that of our predecessors, but they were firmly established as major writers long before the rise of English departments. The status of our modern classics owes much to academia. One of the tasks of critics throughout the earlier part of this century, for example, was the valuable one of helping to create the taste for works which broke with established tradition. This involved emphasizing - sometimes polemically overemphasizing - the importance and effectiveness of what was new or experimental in these works with a consequent taking for granted of what was not. But what is taken for granted can easily come to seem unimportant. Once the task was achieved, therefore, and writers such as Joyce, Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf were accepted, the natural tendency of critics to concentrate attention upon what they themselves can do and what the general reader cannot had the effect of making the tradition of Modernism seem not merely one tendency among a number but the only one. The persistent undervaluation of Bennett and the neglect of such writers as Henry Handel Richardson has been brought about in part because they do not fit in with the generalizations which were constructed primarily to link together a number of difficult works.8 One paradoxical effect of this has been to make Bennett, for example, seem not only less important but also much simpler than is justified. He is often a subtle novelist but his works do not lend themselves easily to the critical procedures which emphasize the spatial as against the temporal aspects of the books and which seek symbolically thematic elements as the chief carriers of meaning. It is not that such elements are not present, but they are not dominant and we have paid less attention to matters of narrative dynamics, variations of pace and intensity, and manœuvres to do with suspense, than they deserve.
Ford Madox Ford, by contrast, seems to me to be a writer who has benefited unduly from the preoccupations of criticism. He was an editor of genius; Lawrence was only one of the writers who owed him much. He was very interested in literary techniques; there seems no doubt that he had for a time a very great influence on Conrad and gave him much help in discussion of the need for the mot juste and the potentialities of what he called progression deffet. The manipulation of time which plays so large a part in Conrad’s works was probably encouraged by Ford and, in so far as Conrad thought of himself as a beginner in an art in which Ford was already an established performer, he must have been a great liberator. As what he would certainly have been happy to call un homme de lettres he has an undoubted importance which is not diminished by the fame of his creative memory of various notable figures and his appearances under a thin disguise in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (Fiesta).
But in his novels very real abilities are vitiated by central flaws; the abilities are mostly ones which, in their eschewing of the obvious, require analysis; the flaws are elementary but basic. He wrote thirty novels but by general consent his claims to serious consideration must rest on the tetralogy Parade’s End9 and The Good Soldier (1915). He is often astonishingly good at evoking a scene or a face or a snatch of conversation and at moving the reader from scene to scene so as to achieve unusual perspectives and juxtapositions. But the central personages and the issues of human feelings are very often totally implausible. Christopher Tietjens, the central character of Parade’s End - central enough for it often to be referred to as ‘the Tietjens tetralogy’ - is presented as the last English squire, the last Tory, the representative of all those traditional values which are under threat from the Great War and a general moral collapse.10 Persecuted at the hands of an unspeakably selfish and unfaithful wife, aided by a collection of time-servers, he behaves according to Ford’s concept of the ideal code of a country gentleman, failing to understand a good deal of what is going on around him and remaining quixotically chaste in his relations with a young woman who loves him. It would be possible to make a comic novel from the discrepancies between his conception of how he should behave and the consequence of his behaviour on other people. But Ford remains deadly serious, which has the effect of turning Tietjens into a monster of bumbling self-regard.
The case is even clearer in The Good Soldier. This is a rather Jame-sian work, narrated by a rich and cultured American, in which Ford shows extraordinary dexterity in working over and over the relationships of the narrator, his wife, and a married couple who are their friends and close companions at various watering places. By first concealing matters from us and then revealing them he makes us constantly reassess what we have taken as reliable perceptions. But he requires us to take seriously this narrator whose wife has, by claiming that her heart has been strained by a rough transatlantic crossing, persuaded him not to consummate their marriage for twelve years while cuckolding him for a good deal of this time with his best friend, whose wife is well aware of her husband’s numerous infidelities. Only a complete fool, one feels, could have lived in this ménage à quatre and retained illusions about the lecherous good soldier of the title, but Ford presents him as a thoughtful man whose judgement we must often respect. In concentrating on the technical legerdemain he forgets the actual possibilities of human feelings.
It seems to me obvious that we can only take Ford as a significant novelist if we give all our attention to the elaborate narrative strategies and the subtle effects of echoes and repeated symbols while dismissing as too elementary for discussion questions of psychological plausibility and consequent moral judgements about the results of our actions, including our stupidities.
Belief in a chosen few writers as part of an intellectual and spiritual élite in a world of mass shoddiness is less popular now than it was; it can still be found but its heyday was in the years between the wars and for some little time thereafter. The professionalization of literary studies, on the contrary, shows no decline. The former appears to have influenced a few writers and a number of influential critics. The latter influenced no writers (with the possible exception of Joyce) in the period with which I am concerned in this study, but the situation now is far different. There are writers still in mid-career who know that they are the subject of theses, critical works, and bibliographies and that their novels figure in academic syllabuses. It is difficult to believe that they can all be totally unaffected by this when they envisage their likely readers.
Belief in an élite had far more political implications and could easily include a distaste for the professionalization of study. This professionalization can be political, but usually it is not except at a highly theoretical level; indeed it frequently discusses novels in a manner which removes them altogether from the daily world of action. What both tendencies do is imply the unimportance of the common reader, whether because he is assumed to be tainted by shoddiness or because he is academically untrained. Since it is easier to overawe people by saying that they lack specialized knowledge than by telling them that they are emotionally inferior, academia can probably do more harm than claims for the minority against the mass. Nobody can feel happy about this situation except those who wish literary criticism to be a purely minority pursuit in which professionals talk to professionals about theories, while those outside the walls get on with reading novels. There are those who take this view of the critic’s function but they would find it hard to explain it to the novelists about whom they write.