The Social and Political World
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One useful way of approaching the Inter-War period
is through the title of one of the most popular accounts
of the period, The Long Weekend. The image of the Long Weekend n
nicely expresses the general but shifting character of the inter-War period, moving
from the gaiety of the Jazz-Age twenties to the more sober reflectiveness of the 1930s.
If that is true, then Saturday Morning begins with a monumental
sense of nausea and regret, far more than a hangover! For writers
such as D H Lawrence, for whom the Great war had been a "wound
through my side", the first of this century's "total
wars" had been totally traumatic: amongst upper and middle
classes the War represented a complete break with a century-long
tradition of gradual progress, social reform and social consolidation.
In retrospect, as the popularity of H E Bates' The Go-Between
or Isobel Colegate's The Shooting Party illustrates, the
long hot summers of the Edwardian golden age would swiftly become
a fond memory, and subject of elegy and lament. Philip Larkin's
'MCMXIV', with its repeated line "Never such innocence again",
nicely conveys that vision of an Edwardian Age which would be
killed off by the guns of August. Similarly, the post-war popularity
of writers such as A E Housman, or the Georgian poets, with their
elegaic visions of a pastoral England of the heart, Housman's
"land of lost content", is yet another example of how
significant this sense of a "breaking with the past"
was to prove for the generation of 1918: the vision of a pre-War
Edenic Age haunts much of the literary and cultural vision of
the 1920s. It was to be some time before the War was written about
directly, most notably in Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That,
so traumatic had been the impact of the 1914-18 War. The culture
which emerged after 1918 was shot through, therefore, with this
sense of trauma and loss, and British writing of the 1920s needs
to be approached from this perspective.
At the same time, however, writers of the immediate post-War years found a new and pressing need to find a style and voice in order to speak of the new social, cultural and moral realities of the post-War world, a world of new technologies (especially transport and communications), and of new landscapes, a mass capitalist urban culture, based not in the country, but in the new cosmopolitan centres - London, New York, Paris, Berlin, etc. This new world, however "brave", was so often viewed as an alien and hostile landscape, a world of alienation, exile, rootlessness, of dingy bedsits, ugliness, anonymity, the hordes of blank-faced commuters. In this new civilisation it was no longer possible to write in the style of Jane Austen, and a new style, new modes of expression, had to be found. We will return to this later in the lecture.
It is important to note, however, that whilst the
War dramatically accelerated this need to embrace the realities
of urbanism, industrialisation, consumer capitalism etc., the
tensions between pastoralism and modernism go back to the 1850s
(*in the novels of Dickens, for example), or possibly back further
to the late eighteenth century (in the works of Austen or the
Romantics). What was new was the need to adjust to the pace of
change, with what Robert Hughes calls the "Shock of the New".
This is an important point to note because pre-War literary culture,
especially the period 1901-14, witnessed the first concerted attempt
to deal head on with the Modern Age and modern landscapes: Howards
End, Eliot's Preludes, or the work of the imagist and futurists.
There is, therefore, some sense of continuity between pre and
post-War literary culture in this respect.
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One recurrent issue for writers throughout the inter-War period was the need to come to terms fully with the loss of a sense of an absolute moral order, of living in an "Age of Unbelief". This continues pre-War concerns (expressed in Nietzsche's proclamation of the "death of God"), but the sense of loss was dramatically heightened by the impact of the War. Two further influences compounded this need to face the implications of living in secular times.
Whilst not wholly understood they did nevertheless permeate the cultural and intellectual atmosphere of the inter-War period, leading to a sense of fundamental questioning - "of what can we be fully certain?", "Is there any such thing as Absolute truth?", and "Is what I see and believe simply the result of my own subjective point of view, relative only to me?". Even the most fundamental of absolutes, the concept of Time itself, was radically undermined by Bergson's concept of personal time. Mrs Dalloway, for example, with its juxtaposition between that most public of clocks, Big Ben, and Mrs Dalloway's will-o'-the'wisp consciousness, is but one example of this general move towards subjectivism, perspectivalism and internalisation within the inter-War novel. Dorothy Richardson's mammoth 12-volume novel Pilgrimage, with its dazzling exploration of "stream-of-consciousness", was another expression of this movement towards the inner consciousness, to personal experience and personal time. Whilst pre-War writing had been marked by such traits, (eg. Conrad's Heart of Darkness), it was the post-War period which saw the most radical expressions of these approaches.
In (very) general terms it is worth distinguishing between 1920s and 1930s responses to these issues of faith and belief. In the first decade we see writers struggling to come to terms with the implications of living in an age of uncertainty, of relativism and provisionality, amongst the "chaos and futility which is the panorama of contemporary history" (Eliot), of asking "What does it all mean?" (Woolf). In The Waste Land, for example, the modern world is presented as a place of sterility, chaos, aridity, a world which has broken contact with its spiritual and anthropological roots: Eliot was attempting little less than a reconstruction of some sense of order and permanence amongst the contemporary rubble. Similarly, in Forster's A Passage to India, the hollowness and emptiness of the Marabar Caves, with their mysterious 'ou-boum', suggest the ultimate precariousness of the Western humanist vision, and it is an echo which haunts this apparently straightforward tale of the British in India. Alternatively, the 1920s novels of Woolf reveal a shell-shocked world, traumatised by the War and its aftermath, with the portrayal of characters such as the suicidal Septimus Smith, or the enigmatic uncertainties of Mrs Dalloway herself. Finally, in The Great Gatsby, the hollowness and ultimate futility of the Jazz Agers is revealed in the "wasteland", the patch of wilderness which is presided over by an advertisement for Dr Eckelberg, and his mysterious all-seeing eyes.
Writers of the 1930s, however, can be seen to respond in contrasting ways, realising that faith is a necessity in the "Devil's Decade", and one must choose a faith, irrespective of its final or ultimate truth. Richard Johnstone has described this in his study The Will to Believe, and the phrase is a useful one. In the politically polarised atmosphere of the 1930s the choices were stark - Fascism, Communism, Catholicism, Liberalism or Conservativism - and questions of commitment and engagement became paramount. T S Eliot, in the 1930s, finds a faith (and a home) in Anglo-Catholicism; writers of the "Auden generation" - Spender, Auden, Isherwood - find a home in Communism or left-of-centre politics; Graham Green and Evelyn Waugh find a home in Catholicism; writers such as Huxley or Forster remain true to their belief in liberal humanism, in individualism and the notion of "Man as the Measure"; writers such as Yeats and Lawrence had, in the 1920s, immersed themselves in faiths based in folk cultures, and earned the suspicion of flirtations with fascism. Orwell, part liberal humanist and part socialist in the 1930s, was but one writer who realised that the challenge of the 1930s meant that no writer could really afford the luxury of not taking sides.
For middle class writers throughout the period questions of commitment and engagement abound, more emphatically so in the period from 1926 onwards, but most definitely in the 1930s, when the realities of working class poverty and unemployment were brought home to them. This was coupled with the an increasing realisation of living in a new type of "mass society", in which the interests of the individual, no matter how talented or privileged, were outweighed by the development of a mass consumer society: this is perhaps why questions of individualism, of personal authenticity as opposed to mass identity, were so important to writers of the 1930s, as they continued to be for writers of the post-1945 period. Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying was but one exploration of the conflict between individual and society within this period.
There were various responses to the challenges of writing of these new transformed times. Huxley's Brave New World, with its nightmare vision of a 'Fordist' society, with its mixture of eugenic conformity and social control, is part of an enduring tradition of twentieth century dystopian fiction (which includes Orwell's 1984). Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier, by contrast, was part of that tradition of social exploration which was seen also in the documentary/Mass Observation movements of the 1930s: novels such as Walter Greenwood's Love on the Dole (1933) had alerted middle class readers to the realities of working class life and culture, and Orwell's accounts of mining life were equally influential in attempting to change cultural perceptions of the working class. Graham Greene's Brighton Rock, with its portrayal of Pinkie's haunted Catholic conscience, presents an equally clear picture of the pleasure-seeking world of the Bank Holiday daytrippers, who have little grasp of, or interest in, profounder truths or questions.
Woolf's two extraordinary extended essays, A Room
of One's Own and Three Guineas, illustrate a final
key issue for writers of the inter-War period, the need to acknowledge
the experience and status of women: her highly articulate defences
of a feminist agenda were but two examples of a new and more sustained
attempt to face what Edwardian writers had presented as being
the "Woman Question".
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All of the above issues lead back to a question which we started with, how did writers within this period find a voice and a means of expressing the new realities of the post-1918 world? The underlying realisation was that one could no longer write in the Classic realist way, with its solid knowable characters, tidy endings and with the "bad and selfish ending unhappily". Within the period, as in the period immediately before it, there was a huge variety of styles - modernism, expressionism, social or cinematic realism, stream of consciousness, symbolism, futurism. This was true not just of literature, but across the Arts.
One starting point is provided by Virginia Woolf's widely quoted remark that "On or about December 1910 human nature changed". The immediate context for her remarks was the Post-Impressionist exhibition in London which had been organised by her friend Roger Fry. In an influential essay, "Modern Fiction" (1919), Woolf went on to call for a new style of writing, one more suited to modern views of psychology, which would celebrate the uniqueness and complexity of the internal life: this is often taken, not always correctly, as a kind of manifesto for the "stream of consciousness" technique. Alternatively writers such as James Joyce (in Ulysses) or T S Eliot, resorted to myth and symbol, in an attempt to convey the complexity of individual minds in complex times.
Behind the experimentalism lay a single question - how does one write about a "Real World out there" if one can no longer believe (or prove) that there really is a "Real World". Modernism, whether literary or aesthetic, had been one attempt to rise to the challenge posed by this question, and its qualities (abstract, obscure, defamiliarising and unsettling) had been an attempt to respond to (and even whole-heartedly embrace) the challenges of the "New".
Modernism in Britain, however, was never really whole-hearted, and writers of the 1930s particularly, in their wish to respond to burning political and social issues, turned back to the more realist/empirical style. Modernist experimentation was, for writers such as Orwell, a bourgeois luxury which could no longer be afforded given the urgent challenges of the "Devil's Decade".