20th-Century Fiction

788 Pages·1983·80.392 MB·English

by  George Woodcock (auth.)

GREAT WRITERS STUDENT LIBRARY
20th-CENTURY
FICTION
INTRODUCfiON BY
GEORGE WOODCOCK
M
GREAT WRITERS STUDENT LIBRARY
I. The Beginnings to 1558
2. The Renaissance Excluding Drama
3. Renaissance Drama
4. Restoration and 18th-Century Prose and Poetry
Excluding Drama and the Novel
5. Restoration and 18th-Century Drama
6. The Romantic Period Excluding the Novel
7. The Victorian Period Excluding the Novel
8. The Novel to 1900
9. 20th-Century Poetry
I 0. 20th-Century Fiction
II. 20th-Century Drama
I 2. American Literature to I 900
13. 20th-Century American Literature
14. Commonwealth Literature
Editor: James Vinson
Associate Editor: D. L. Kirkpatrick
GREAT WRITERS STUDENT LIBRARY
20th-CENTURY
FICTION
©The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1983
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1983 978-0-333-28358-5
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or
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prosecution and civil claims for damages.
First published 1983 by
1HE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
London and Basingstoke
Associated companies in Auckland, Delhi, Dublin,
Gaborone, Hamburg, Harare, Hong Kong, Johannesburg,
Kuala Lumpur, Lagos, Manzini, Melbourne, Mexico City,
Nairobi, New York, Singapore, Tokyo.
ISBN 978-0-333-28359-2 ISBN 978-1-349-17066-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-17066-1
Reprinted 1987
The paperback edition of this book is sold
subject to the condition that it shall not,
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CONTENTS
EDITOR'S NOTE page vii
INTRODUCfiON 21
20th-CENTURY FICTION 21
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 767
EDITOR'S NOTE
The entry for each writer consists of a biography, a complete list of his published books, a
selected list of published bibliographies and critical studies on the writer, and a signed critical
essay on his work.
In the biographies, details of education, military service, and marriage(s) are generally
given before the usual chronological summary of the life of the writer; awards and honours
are given last.
The Publications section is meant to include all book publications, though as a rule
broadsheets, single sermons and lectures, minor pamphlets, exhibition catalogues, etc. are
omitted. Under the heading Collections, we have listed the most recent collections of the
complete works and those of individual genres (verse, plays, novels, stories, and letters); only
those collections which have some editorial authority and were issued after the writer's death
are listed; on-going editions are indicated by a dash after the date of publication; often a
general selection from the writer's works or a selection from the works in the individual
genres listed above is included.
Titles are given in modern spelling, though the essayists were allowed to use original
spelling for titles and quotations; often the titles are "short." The date given is that of the first
book publication, which often followed the first periodical or anthology publication by some
time; we have listed the actual year of publication, often different from that given on the title
page. No attempt has been made to indicate which works were published anonymously or
pseudonymously, or which works of fiction were published in more than one volume. We
have listed plays which were produced but not published, but only since I 700; librettos and
musical plays are listed along with the other plays; no attempt has been made to list lost or
unverified plays. Reprints of books (including facsimile editions) and revivals of plays are not
listed unless a revision or change of title is involved. The most recent edited version of
individual works is included if it supersedes the collected edition cited.
In the essays, short references to critical remarks refer to items cited in the Publications
section or in the Reading List. Introductions, memoirs, editorial matter, etc. in works cited in
the Publications section are not repeated in the Reading List.
vii
INTRODUCfiON
The most striking feature of the literatures of the English-speaking world during the 20th
century has been their division into a number of clearly defined local streams. A tradition that
began as a single strong and noble current has divided and sub-divided in such a way that if
we seek a visual image to convey the reality of English-language writing today, that of the
delta scored and fed by many channels, large and small, is the most appropriate.
A historian looking at Anglo-Celtic literature at the end of the I 8th century would be little
troubled by the need to divide his realm into local categories. There were, indeed, Irish and
Scots writers, but the Irish came to London where they provided for two centuries the most
lively element in the metropolitan literary ambiance, and the Scots, when they stayed at
home, tended to become dialect writers only occasionally worth noticing - Burns was a
remarkable exception - by the critics. And though the United States had shaken itself
politically free from Britain, it had not yet produced a literature that could be termed
independent. Just before the end of the century, in 1798, one of the most distinguished
novelists, Charles Brockden Brown, publishing his masterpiece Wieland, had merely shown
how much in debt he was to William Godwin and to the European Gothicists, how colonial a
writer he had still in fact remained.
Yet from Charles Brockden Brown the line of descent runs to writers like Poe and
Hawthorne, who are distinctly American in attitude and feeling, for all the tatters of alien
romanticism that still cling to them, and by the end of the 19th century, which is also the
beginning of the period covered by the present volume, there was no doubt at all of the
existence of a distinctive and flourishing American literature, represented by some of the
most vigorous and complex writers of their time. By the beginning of the 1980's, when I am
writing, there are probably as many good and original writers working in the United States as
in the rest of the Anglo-Celtic world, and the thorough absorption of vernacular ways of
speaking has made American literature distinct, not only in socio-political traditions and
physical settings, but in language as well, from the literature of Britain. It has been much
more than a matter of Webster changing the spelling, for different forms of experience have
established different connotational patterns. Words do not mean exactly the same, 200 years
after the American revolution, on both sides of the Atlantic, and the patterns in which they
are arranged differ correspondingly.
Just as striking as the emergence of American fiction into a tradition allied to but
independent of the parent tradition is the hiving off of the many literatures of the
Commonwealth, not only in English-speaking regions like Canada and Australia, New
Zealand and the West Indies, but also in places like India and Pakistan and West Africa
where English-first superimposed as the language of the conquerors-now takes its place as
an option among many native regional vernaculars or tribal dialects. In the 19th century
there were indeed novelists of some originality working in CanL ..J:: . nd Australia, like James
de Mille and Marcus Clarke, but they worked well within the current British mental
ambiance, and this was even more the case with the considerable number of formulaic
writers of romance and adventure in those countries, whose concern was less with the
aesthetics of writing than with its financial returns. The defensive pragmatism and the mental
conservatism of pioneer societies inhibited both the artistic impulse and the possibility of
thinking originally, and it was not until a degree of urbanization had taken place in the settler
colonies that distinct cultures began to emerge. (The exception was Quebec, where the
passionate urge to retain the French culture - with the language as its lifeblood - did indeed
produce during the I 9th century a distinct literary tradition.)
2 INTRODUCTION
In the non-settlement colonies, where a small number of British colonial officials and
soldiers, millionaires and merchants, ruled a great majority of non-European subjects, it was
impossible for a literature in English to appear until education in that language had reached a
significant proportion of the population, and that did not happen until the present century.
But its eventual effect, like that of surpassing the pioneer stage in the settlement colonies, was
to produce the highly distinctive groups of fiction by Indian and African and West Indian
writers (and very recently by Samoan and Fijian novelists and poets) which take their place
by the 1980's as representatives of clearly definable regional nuclei within the general pattern
of writing in the English language. The cultures of formerly colonial countries, as they draw
away from the imperial metropoles, demand distinctive ways of expression, and the
inadequacy of tribal models from the pre-colonial past in the context of modern world
problems gives English its special place as a language that is steadily becoming freed from the
stigma of being the tongue of the conquerors and is being adapted by each culture to its own
uses.
At the beginning of our period, in 1900, the age of the Victorian novel was clearly at an
end. Hardy and Meredith, its last great representatives, had both ceased writing novels in the
1890's. Oscar Wilde, who as a fiction writer represented the decay of the Victorian
tradition, and Stephen Crane, who represented the emergence of an American vernacular
tradition, laconically suited to the evocation of men's emotions in extreme and mortal
situations, both died in 1900. George Gissing died in 1903 and Samuel Butler in 1902, but
both of them lived long enough for their best books, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecro{t and
The Way of All Flesh, to be published in the new century. For all its Victorian setting, The
Way ofA II Flesh, with its bitter plainness of speech and its denunciation of familial tyrannies,
became the predecessor of a whole succession of generational novels that appeared especially
after the first World War, when the fathers were blamed for the death of the sons.
The shifts in literary and social standards that develop in the 20th century are already
preluded in the writers whose careers span the turn of century, and whose work even in the
last years of the Victorian age had shown the emergence of new attitudes influenced not only
by such intellectual factors as evolutionary theory, socialist and anarchist denunciations of
existing society, and the erosion of religious faith, but also by the loosening of the moral
structure that in England paralleled the great shifting of class strata which by I 91 8 would
have brought to an end the power of the traditional landed aristocracy, the Whig potentates
celebrated by Trollope. The consciousness of the social earth-moving was a potent factor in
the work of all early 20th-century English novelists who were concerned with the
conformation of society, from Wells and Galsworthy to Waugh and Orwell.
The sense of an inherent instability in social relations was linked with the feeling of
personal alienation that was already strong among Europeans in the 19th century, and the
permeation of psychoanalytical doctrines during the period just before and after the war
tended to accentuate the novelist's concern with the individual's rootlessness. This was
demonstrated in the works of novelists like Aldous Huxley who combined a somewhat
sardonic comedy of manners with the attempt to give fictional shape to the range of modern
ideas. But the influence of Freudian doctrines, especially, went parallel to a concern for
changing ideas of the relationship between the sexes that was at times expressed in orgiastic
rather than scientific terms.
Perhaps D. H. Lawrence, more than any other writer of the time, perceived how the
changing of social relationships was linked with the shift in sexual relationships, and he
devoted much of his writing to giving fictional expression to his insights. As early as 191 3 he
was declaring that "the establishment of a new relation, or the readjustment of the old one"
between the sexes was "the problem of today," and ten years later, in Kangaroo, he was
looking back to 1915 as the year when the old order ended, when London "perished from
being the heart of the world, and became a vortex of broken passions, lusts, hopes, fears and
horrors." In Lady Chatterley's Lover, whatever judgment one may make of the novel's
failures of emotional proportion, Lawrence brought together in a more striking way than any
other writer of his time the link between the social relations that were changing and the
INTRODUCTION 3
sexual relations that must change if men were to salvage a healthy way of life out of the
collapse of the old order.
In a more strictly literary context, one of the most important factors in the change of
character in English-language fiction during the early 20th century was the fascination
wielded by the great French and Russian novelists of the preceding generations, so different
in their approaches and achievements from 19-century British and American writers. It was
not that novelists like Flaubert and Turgenev and Tolstoy had gone unnoticed in 19th-century
England and America. Matthew Arnold and Henry James had both read them percipiently,
one can find traces of their influence even on Hardy, and many writers in the 1890's accepted
them with almost uncritical enthusiasm and even tried to write in a continental manner, as
George Moore did in Esther Waters and Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray. By the turn of
the century continental writers were perhaps being better understood as events began to force
both British and American societies out of their isolation, and as many writers from Anglo
Celtic countries, as varied in their approaches as James Joyce and Edith Wharton, as Arnold
Bennett and Stuart Merrill, began to live for periods - and sometimes for good - in Europe
and especially in France, the Mecca of artistic innovators.
Admittedly, one rarely finds a writer in English - and where one does he is usually a
minor one - who adhered meticulously to any of the theories promulgated by movement
conscious French writers, yet Flaubert's ideal of objectivity, Zola's attempt to achieve a
scientifically exact naturalism, and the Symbolist emphasis on suggestion as opposed to
statement, all had their influence on younger English and American writers at the turn of the
century. Even among their elders, it is hard to imagine how Henry James might have written
in his finest period if he had not fallen in with Flaubert and Turgenev, "the beautiful genius"
as he called him. Yet James can never be mistaken for a European or even an English writer;
for all the resemblances one may catch between his parenthetical constructions and those of
Proust, he remains, at the greatest limit of his disponibilite, an alienated American. Indeed,
perhaps the one writer generally regarded as English in this period whom one can think of as
in some real sense outside the Anglo-Celtic tradition was the alienated Pole, Joseph Conrad,
of whom J. B. Priestley has aptly remarked: "his literary influences were largely French, and
there are times when his prose reads like a translation from French, while in temperament
and outlook he is closer to Eastern Europe than he is to the West." Conrad's novel about
expatriate revolutionaries, Under Western Eyes ( 1911 ), is perhaps the most Russian novel
ever written in English, even though it is dedicated to belittling the Russians, whether as
rebels or as tools of the autocracy; the influence of Turgenev is very evident. Turgenev,
indeed, may well in the end be seen as the most important of the Russian novelists in terms of
the effect of his works on English and American writers. There are clear resemblances
between the way in which he and James portrayed women, and The Princess Casamassima
shows equally clear similarities with Turgenev's Virgin Soil. Yet later, in the 1920's it is
perhaps Chekhov whose representations of social purposelessness and whose dissociative
devices seem often to be echoed in the works of writers like Virginia Woolf.
There is one final area in which influences from outside undoubtedly contributed to the
changing form of the English novel during the 20th century. The idea of a fiction written
specifically to carry "a stream-of-consciousness" (on which paradoxically the fiction itself
moved onward) is not to be found anywhere among Victorian writers. It emerges among
English-speaking novelists during the Great War and early in the 920's, and especially in
James Joyce's Ulysses and in Virginia Woolf's novels, from Jacob's Room onwards. The
origins of the form seem to lie both without and within the literary tradition - in other words
in the general zeitgeist of a period when conventional ideas of time and memory and
consciousness in general were being widely challenged. Undoubtedly the emphasis on the
timeless world of the unconscious by pioneer psychoanalysts contributed a great deal to the
new concepts of fictional form. But Freud did not publish his first important work, The
Interpretation of Dreams, until 1900, and while there is no doubt that the French maverick
philosopher Henri Bergson wielded a wide influence over writers everywhere through works
like Time and Free Will and Maller and Memory, which challenge our ideas of sequential