The Isles of the Blest

While the U.S. keeps looking around uncertainly for its misplaced national purpose, Britain last week was taking a comfortable look at its native culture. A 76-page addition to the London Times Literary Supplement examined "The British Imagination" in a score of fields, ranging from poetry to science, women to snobbery. What the critical searchlight revealed, concluded the Times editorially, was "more diversity than richness, [a] greater sense of experimentation, consolidation, detachment, compromise (all the British virtues in fact) than actual positive achievement."

Inevitable Comparisons. There is bland acceptance of the fact that much that is now truly and distinctively British was originally borrowed from abroad--largely from France and the U.S. The most prized national characteristic, it was argued, is the universal belief among Britons that they possess a superb sense of humor. British writers, in fact, use humor to put across "a social message which might otherwise seem either boring or too plainly parsonical." Comparisons, odious though they may be, were inevitable. Where "an American novelist wishing to criticize advertising, does so headon, with moralistic violence," says the Times, a Briton, e.g. Aldous Huxley in Antic Hay, takes a gentler and--inferentially--more engaging approach. Writers such as Kingsley (Lucky Jim) Amis similarly express the " 'Leave Us Alone' philosophy of young people" in largely humorous terms.

Some things were found puzzling. Why do British novelists shy away from any description of work? The conclusion: "Many of them never do a day's work in their lives (except in wartime) ... Those who come from the working class emancipate themselves from it as quickly as possible." Ultimately, "the things our novelists know about are the grades and subtleties and shifts of society . . . with a special emphasis on childhood which leads them towards fantasies of guilt and innocence." What the British novel needs to day, says the oracular Times, is "not less art, but more life."

Snobs & Anti-Snobs. Religion is disposed of in half a page (largely because of the "dominant English contentment with half-knowledge"), but snobbery gets, naturally, twice the space: "It is a poor thing indeed, but we have made it all our own." Postwar prosperity has done some damage to the barriers of class: "The extremes of English society are still inalienably English, but much in the middle is half American." Most of the population "is constantly engaged in trying to talk more grandly than its parents did ... It is painful to experience. It is like trying to force a left-handed child to use his right." In Britain, even the anti-snobs feel like snobs, and no matter how a man may dodge or duck, no matter what his protective coloration or self-effacement, "however warily, modestly, gently you tread, some snob or other will find a category for you, and drop you into your class like a wayward pea returned to the pod."

The British, as always, says the Times, are good at the solid, reflective, sermonizing and vaguely hypocritical arts. "What we are bad at is the rapid give-and-take of ideas, which alone frightens us into silence." The Times describes a stodgy, smugly happy land with probably more poets per capita than any other land in the West, but one where the composite poet "is rather anxious not to look like a poet." Through all the chaotic years, Britain's genius remains intact: that racial talent "for the oblique approach, for a middle-class way of achieving revolutionary ends."

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