Audience for Decision

"I found myself daydreaming about whether I would rather have been an American or an English writer," writes English Author C.P. (for Charles Percy) Snow in the New Statesman, and uses his daydream to compare the literary climate of the two nations. Trained as a physicist, now a civil service commissioner, Sir Charles is not only one of England's best novelists (The Conscience of the Rich), but a topnotch literary critic to boot. He can feel just as comfortable enmeshed in American letters as in those of his own country, and is often invited by U.S. universities for a lecture stint.

"The choice existed for Henry James, T.S. Eliot and Auden," he writes, and it still exists today, but the ultimate criterion for a permanent ocean hop is neither political nor financial. "If the U.S. were really sitting pretty, as unchallengeably at the peak of its power as England was, say, in 1830, with 50 invulnerable years as Top Nation ahead, then I should passionately envy American writers. But I do not see their position in those terms at all; I believe that essentially we are in the same boat."

What then makes the comparison meaningful, if the odds are so even? "There is one last general argument," he goes on, and "if I were choosing, it would be decisive ... It is simply that here we know our audience. In America the writers don't really know whom they are writing for--apart from their fellow writer-scholars." In England, "Mr. Macmillan, Mr. Butler, Mr. Gaitskell are all deeply read men, interested in contemporary work; so are a good sprinkling of other members of the House. That would also be true of a surprisingly high proportion of civil servants and miscellaneous administrative bosses ... Do American politicians, civil servants, schoolteachers read as ours do? If they do, the writers do not feel their response. That, I think, is the one great creative stimulus we have, which is denied to them."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.