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Mr Raymond and

Stuart Hall

the Dead Souls

"Re-reading Miss Sayers again thisweek, I remembered how we loved it allat thirteen, and how sophisticated we felton the train that took us back to the grimWarwickshire prep school. . . . LordPeter struck it rich in the sexual imagin-ings of my generation. . . ."JohnRaymond, "White Tile Or Red Plush?",New Statesman, June 29, 1956

IT isn't so long ago that Mr. Raymond,under cover of a seemingly light-hearteddefence of Dorothy Sayers and the "world"of Lord Peter Whimsey("a house inAudley Square" . . . "eight servants, besidesBunter and the housekeeper" . . . "one moretrip to Rome to appease Mussolini" . . ."marriage at St. Cross, Oxford" . . . "honey-moon in a Tudor cottage" . . . "a half dozenof vintage port")unleashed a savage

attack on Scrutiny, the Leavises, and the"sourpusses, the killjoys, the whey-facedhatchetmen, the inside outsiders" of the"literary Left." One made one's faintprotest, but was tempted to believe that thiswas a temporary if unfortunate aberration.We all have our curious favourites in the

jungle of the sub-literary world to whichMiss Sayerstranslations of Dante not-

withstandingproperly belongs. But re-cently, the cult of attack on the literary Lefthas been raised to something of the pro-portions of editorial policy in the backsideof the New Statesman, and this phenomenondeserves some comment. These scatteredbut strategically placed asides reopen thewhole question of the relationship betweenthe front and back halves of the NewStatesman, and the doubtful cultural

assumptions which appear to hold sway inthe latter pages.

The backside of the New Statesman hasbeen defended on many occasionsnotablyat one of the more electric meetings of theU.L.R. Clubas (1) directed at the non-Socialist majority ofStatesman readers whobuy the paper because of its literary pages(2) representing the non-political non-

polemical role of literature and the arts (3)"the sugar coating on the pill." Alljournals, of course, have to survive: whetherthey should do so at the expense of prin-ciple is another matter. The principle hereisin what sense is literature and the arts"neutral"? Can culture get on as best itcan, at the very moment when we are tryingto establish some sort of socialist critiqueof the quality of life in post-Welfare

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capitalist society? Is the moral andimaginative life of man to be discounted,at a time when we are trying to restorehumanism at the centre of our socialism?Can we at the same time, affirm the richnessand potentiality of human experience, anddiscount the relevance of that experience,when it is given concrete creative form?We cannot separate "high" culture from"popular" cultureor either from the lifeof the community itself. If there is a split,then that is one of the sets of phenomenawhich we must study, for it represents the

depth of man's alienation from himself andhis creations, it betrays the solidarities ofclass-life in the Opportunity State. Theassumptions about human relations, aboutthe just society and the good life which webring to bear upon the study of our culturerevealoften more clearly than politicalformulationsthe values which underpinour socialism and our perspectives on thefuture.

Neutral literatureThe proposition that "literature is

neutral and should be discussed in neutralterms" is a late-Liberal assumption, whichone finds, on re-reading recent issues of the

New Statesman is more often defended inthe abstract than employed in practice.More often than not, the assumptions arequite clearly exposed, though it would pre-sumably be bad taste to call them "commit-ments"of a kind. Whatever the gloss ofneutrality which the critic manages to castover all, there are values there, which needto be exposed to the light of day.

"All humanistsnot to speak of thesurrounding circle of us who also struggle,daily and painfully, to be humane menshould invest their spare seventy-threebob in this book (one can make up theamount over a period by skipping Mr.Bill Hopkins's novels, Mr. LindsayAnderson's collected social criticism,Mr. Stuart Holroyd's ethical strictureset, as they say, alia)."J. Raymond,

"Bird-Happy," New Statesman, May 3,1958.

This comment, wilfully provocative andmisleading as it is (placing Anderson,without comment, in the same bracket asHolroyd and Hopkins, as if they had any-thing in common) appears at the end of aknowing, cultivated review of Montaigne's

Essays and Letters. What matters is notthe particular antipathy, so nakedly re-vealed, of Mr. Raymond to LindsayAnderson, but the whole tone of the piece.The juxtaposition of "humanists" and

"humane men" is a conscious one, madewith a leer and a wink at a sophisticatedaudience. Humanism is too strong a wordfor Mr. Raymond. Its commitments are tooopen and positive. Against the humanists,he sets for contrast "the surrounding circle"of initiates whoso it's impliedby theirdaily and painful struggle, know whathumanism is about. But what circle of"humane men" is this? What distinguishesthem from the other fashionable reviewersof the liberal press, all of whom, after all,struggle, daily and painfully, with their

fluency at French and their spare seventy-three bobs? They are men for whom,presumably, Montaigne can be describedwith approval, as "the humane CO of thatbird-happy rear-base that lies buried in thesediment of every honest man's feelings."One supposes that the purpose of a Books-in-General page devoted to Montaigne isto communicate some sense of the strin-gency and passion of his sceptical mind, amind which, incidentally, would have cutthrough those pretentious references tohumane CO's and bird-happy rear-bases.For that metaphor in the context, is any-thing but neutral. It invokes a spirit, anage, an ethosthe ethos of the First WorldWar and that War seen from the vantagepoint of the cultivated aristocracy who"blew themselves to hell at the head of their

platoons," who enjoyed in the enforcedcircumstances of the War a certain trench-cameraderie with the "ordinary ranks."

"Troopers and stayers"This is not an incidental invocation. Mr.

Raymond is engaged in a consciouscampaign to revive the "troopers andstayers" of another time and another place,and set them up in an angry but skilfullycontrived confrontation with the literaryLeft. Each week he offers readers another"clique" and commends them for somedistinction, some personal integrity, whichhe can set off against his own age. Hisreview of Mr. Beverly Nichols's The Sweet

And Twenties is a case in point."In an age that produces a new Young

Angry every fortnight, one's affections forthe troopers and stayers of art and lifebecomes redoubled."New Statesman,May 31, 1958.

The old figures crowd in again, treatedwith affectionate deferenceDame EthylSmyth, Mrs. Asquith, the Sitwells, HaroldNicholson and the other Bright YoungThings. The stage is crammed with thesetrivial and insipid socialites from the dead,dreary world of late Evelyn Waugh, fixedin the jazzy setting of the post-war de-cadence, in a stirring attempt to make themlivenot merely in their own time (which,within the limits of autobiography, socialhistory or, even better, satire, is a propergoal)but meaningfully, in our time. Inthe New Statesman of May 17, 1958, hetakes the centre book-page to celebrate thegoings-on of Lady Diana Cooper and theDead Souls, once again as part of adeliberate literary manoeuvre.

"Reading this admirable book, I thinkthat I have found a solution: it is oneprimarily for those of us in our middle-thirties who are unwilling to throw upthe sponge and join the cultural Republicof Palsthe literary Plevens and Pinayswith their hunger for the centre. . . . Onthe other hand we are too old and com-placent to pull angry young faces on theextreme Left, slam our desks in demon-stration against the inferiority complex

engendered by the Welfare State andmake studied exits from the Chamber ofthe Royal Court Theatre. Mine is adaring and Gaullist solution. Briefly wemust resurrect 'the Souls'.""FromEden to Armageddon," New Statesman,May 17, 1958.

And why? Were they, too, "the surround-ing circle of us, who also struggle, dailyand painfully, to be humane men"?

Well, they were "grand snubbers,""exceptionally gifted, dashing, selfish, wittyand sympathetic," "they adored huntingand loathed the hunting set," "they had farmore than their proportionate share ofrunning the country" (you bet they had!),they existed in a "setting . . . as lavish,engaging and out of the present world asthe most Disraelian reader could wish for"and their vapid lives are celebrated in a"threnody for doomed youth" which is"witty, original and modish." So much for"neutral criticism."

Shameful 'ThirtiesMr. Raymond commends these values,

not merely in contrast with our own, butalso with the Thirties, which he is modestenough to dismiss as a period of "shameand squalor,""the age of the bad oldmen" (Orwell? Cornford? Auden?). TheDead Souls have been summoned to life tostand between Mr. Raymond's sensibilities,and the anger and frustration engenderedby the Humbug State. He has summonedthem as literary blacklegs, to break thesustained protest from those people whohate snobbery and selfishness, who despisehunting as well as the hunting set, who, inspite of the quiet revolution, still have lessthan their proportionate share in runningthe country, who have to live their lives insettings which are neither lavish nor"engaging." The Dead Souls are thereserve army of the Liberal Critic.

The success or failure of the New States-man involves us all. It is the only weekly

journal of socialist analysis with stature,tradition, and a large circulation. It hashelped to form the political consciousnessof many young people. In a period inwhich genuine socialist journalism hasdwindled away, its responsibilities areenormous. We recognize its achievements.At the same time, when doubts arise, theymust be honestly stated. There is a seriousproblem, for a journal which, in some of itspages is pushing out into the unchartedwaters beyond the Welfare State, but which,on other pages, offers for our approval, asan image of life, as a set of values, thetrivial lives and the plush philistinism ofthe Smart Set. However strong our com-mitments to socialism may be, they can beisolated and immunized when they appearin the total context of values and attitudesdrawn from elsewhere. The philippicsagainst philistinismLeft and Rightwhich distinguish the front half of the NewStatesman are often compromised by theassumptions which hold sway in thecultural pages. One is not pleading for apolicy of censorship, but we must take ourstand on our own ground, and leave theothers to worm their way into print else-where. (One is tempted to say, "Leavethem to the Spectator," except that in that

journal, the treatment of "culture" is farless crass.) While the strongest, principledprotest against de Gaulle is issued on thefront page, how many people are aware thata "Gaullist solution" is being prepared atthe back?