Ford Madox Ford

It was left to a serving soldier to do full justice to the larger theme of the historic changes effected by the First World War. Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) had collaborated with Conrad on two of Conrads earlier works (The Inheritors, 1901, and Romance, 1903). A friend of Pound and a champion of Joyce, Ford was anxious to free the novel from narrative techniques that do violence to the minds encounter with lifes disordered impressions, and also to exploit further the technique of oblique reportage, so that reading can never lead to single-track interpretation that falsifies the character of experience. Thus Dowell, the narrator of The Good Soldier (1915), is himself a protaganist. He is heavily involved in all he speaks of, and his own oddities of act and response tease our curiosity; but there is no guidance from an omniscient author to help us to a decisive judgement on the reliability of his record or the accuracy of his selfrevelation. The book is a little masterpiece, and a fit precursor to the four novels together called Parades End: Some Do Not (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up (1926) and Last Post (1928).

They investigate the effect of the First World War on English society by tracing the career of one of the gentry (Christopher Tietjens) damaged by it. Tietjens, son of a Yorkshire landowner, proud, generous, a gentleman with too little concern for his own interests and his own image, is tricked into marriage with a worthless woman. Personal happiness is long in abeyance because of her machinations and because of his old-fashioned chivalrous reluctance to take advantage of the love of a congenial girl who has brains, ideals and generosity like his own The first three books move from pre-war days to the end of hostilities, and the fourth book is in the nature of an epilogue. Characterization is vital; narrative presentation cunningly counterpoints the inner life with the outer life and the present with the past. Momentous social and psychological changes effected by the war are registered in acutely diagnosed personal predicaments. Richard Aldington Richard Aldington (1892-1962), a young poet before he went off to fight in France, was indelibly marked by his experience there. His novel, Death of a Hero (1929), draws a bitter contrast between civilian life at home and the harrowing experience of the front-line soldier that cuts him off from meaningful communication with those left behind.

Katherine Mansfield
Literature, of course, saw the war in retrospect. During the years of bloodshed many writers were peacefully at work who had long established themselves and some who were just hoping to find their feet. Among the latter, Katherine Mansfield (properly Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp, 1880-1923) was writing short stories of her native New Zealand, determined to bring the life of her homeland into the consciousness of the old world (see Bliss, 1920); Saki Saki (Hector Hugh Munro) (1870-1916), an altogether sourer ironist, was to lose his life on the Western Front, but not before he had made high mockery of English society life. He began by recording the conversation of a frivolous young cynic in the sketches collected as Reginald (1904), and then refined his technique of mordant ridicule in short stories and in the novel The Unbearable Bassington (1912). Dialogue is often sophisticatedly hilarious. Saki is master of the bitchy riposte and the cynical slap-down (If one hides ones talent under a bushel, one must be careful to point out to everyone the exact bushel under which it is hidden).

Somerset Maugham
There is no fantasy in the world of Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), a novelist and dramatist who qualified as a doctor before turning to writing. There is clinical detachment in his study of human character and surgical precision in ironic judgement. Of Human Bondage (1915) contains autobiographical material. Philip Carey, an orphan with a club foot (Maugham himself had a stammer), tries vainly to become an artist. E.M. Forster Nor is there fantasy in the world of E.M. Forster (1879-1970). He organizes his material in a dualistic pattern whereby opposed attitudes to life collide and their respective representatives fail to bridge the gap between them. In Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) the conflict is between English middle-class respectability (Forsters favourite target) which, under a hypocritical exterior, is narrow-minded, provincial and crudely insensitive, and Italian warmth and impetuosity. In Howards End (1910) the collision is between the solidly efficient but insensitive English family, the Wilcoxes, and the more cultured and sensitive Schlegel sisters, who are half-German. The Wilcoxes world is that of commerce, imperialism and philistinism, while the Schlegels are socialists and go to symphony concerts. A Passage to India (1924) explores the difficulty of achieving a mutual understanding between the English and the natives in British India.

Forsters message throughout his work is based on respect for passion and truth, for personal relations, for integrity, as opposed to conventionalism and rule by accepted catchwords. Of course the dichotomies he relies upon soon became the clichs of a new conventionalism whose demolition is now under way. GEORGIAN NOVELISTS The accession of George V in 1910 offers a convenient line of division, and if we agree to call the Wells-Galsworthy-Bennett group "Edwardians," it is safe to say that the movement in English fiction for the full, frank, and free treatment of the subject of sex arrived at its height with the Georgians -- the group of younger novelists who came to the front after the beginning of King George's reign, including D. H. Lawrence, Hugh Walpole, Gilbert Cannan, and Compton Mackenzie. It was a change not only in literary fashions but in manners, in morals, and in current opinion. The psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Jung, the investigations into the morbid psychology of sex by Havelock Ellis, the growing licence of French fiction from Zola to Proust all had a share in the change, but it was not entirely a matter of literature or science; it was part of the general breakdown of Puritan inhibitions, which was encouraged, though not originated, by the War.

Henry James, in the essay on 'The New Novel', not only congratulated the new Georgian novelists on the courage with which they tackled the sex question, but also on the genial force of their saturation in and possession of their material. What he criticized in them with great severity was their failure to exercise the power of selection. Even on the "slice of life" theory the novelist's duty of selection cannot be evaded. There can be no such thing as an amorphous slice; it has been born of naught else but measured excision.

What then Henry James finds missing in this group of Georgian novelists is treatment, composition, structure, fusion, a centre of interest, and he ascribes this to the pernicious influence of Tolstoy, "the great illustrative master-hand on all this ground of the disconnection of method from matter." The new novels are "social documents, imaginative history, crusades, reactions, biology, or natural science," but they are not works of art; they lack style, and they lack form. Their accumulation of material circumstance is "the inevitable result of the autobiographical obsession obtruding upon the critical, the measuring, the selective faculty. The energy of an unconscious self-expression is too much for them." Every novelist reproduces more or less indirectly his own experience and observation. De Maupassant, one of the most objective of writers of fiction, says: "We can only vary our characters by altering the a circumstances of life of that ego which nature has in fact enclosed in an insurmountable barrier of organs of sense. Skill consists in not betraying this ego to the reader, under the various masks which we employ to cover it."

Here and there in the work of this group of the Georgian novelists, one may discern (as in the work of their predecessors) autobiography more or less assimilated to the artistic purpose they have in view; but the charge of unassimilated autobiography cannot be brought with justice against their work as a whole, or, indeed against that of any particular author. What Henry James condemns as a disregard of the essential principles of art and what the alternative view holds to be unconscious self-absorption may be really a deliberate effort to produce the effect of the variety -- even the haphazard confusion - of life. The grouping -- of character and circumstance round a central theme may be an aim they have not merely not endeavoured to attain, but have consciously striven to avoid, and to criticize them for not reaching it is simply to disapprove of the theory of art they have taken over, either from the older English novelists or from the Russians. In process of time the "new" Georgians became no longer "new" or even young, and lost their hold on the public, with the exception of D. H. Lawrence, who never had any great popularity to lose but retained the high opinion of the critics. The Edwardian group for a while recovered their place in the sun, especially Galsworthy. Wells was too preachy for the younger generation of Georgians, and Bennett was ridiculed as old-fashioned. Mrs. Woolf, the leader of the younger Georgians, dismissed the whole Edwardian trio as "materialists."

"It is because they are concerned not with the spirit but with the body that they have disappointed us, and left us with the feeling that the sooner English fiction turns its back on them, as politely as may be, and marches, if only into the desert, the better for its soul." Galsworthy, she argues, is deficient in vitality; the serious characters of Wells are merely bores; and Bennett's method is simply the accumulation of physical detail. In an essay entitled 'Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,' read in 1924 to the Cambridge academic society called "The Heretics," Mrs. Woolf pictured herself as a younger novelist asking the Edwardians how to set about the creation of a character, say Mrs. Brown. "And they said, 'Begin by saying that her father kept a shop in Harrogate. Ascertain the rent. Ascertain the wages of shop assistants in the years 1878. Discover what her mother died of. Describe cancer. Describe calico. Describe . . ' But I cried 'Stop! Stop!' And I regret to say that I threw that ugly, that clumsy, that incongruous tool out of the window, for I knew that if I began describing the cancer and the calico, my Mrs. Brown, that vision to which I cling, though I know no way of imparting it to you, would have been dulled and tarnished and vanished for ever." Whether the method Mrs. Woolf ultimately adopted really advanced the English novel on its destined way is a matter for later discussion. She is not inclined to overestimate her own achievements or those of her contemporaries. In her opinion the novelists of the first quarter of the twentieth century fall far behind those of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, because they lack faith.