British and American Literature. Учебно-методическое пособие

English short story, both Lawrence and Joyce (in Dubliners) being masters of the form. But perhaps the greatest of them was Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923), the New Zealand writer who spent most of her brief maturity in England and Europe. She learned her techniques from Chekhov, and remained the quintessential short-story writer. She had the ability to load the brief scene, the passing incident, with such meaning that it carried with it the seeds of the past and future – as in the meeting of two old lovers in A Dill Pickle. In her masterpiece, The Daughters of the Late Colonel, we follow two sisters in the week after they have been liberated by the death of their absurd, monstrous tyrant of a father. We see their faint struggles to assert long-suppressed personalities, to recapture old hopes and desires, we see the humour that has kept these poor things sane. And we know at the end that the brief sparks of life will soon again gutter and die out. These stories are filled with great psychological insight, including an understanding sympathy for perversity, neuroticism and madness. Mansfield is a recognized original and experimenting writer. Her stories vary greatly in length and tone from impressionistic evocations of family life (At the Bay, The Prelude) to short, sharp sketches. It seems that any significant fragment of life was enough for her. She observed it minutely, described it simply and objectively, and at the end the point had been made, without apparent effort, leaving the reader thrilled, disturbed or emotionally enlightened.

William Somerset Maugham (1874–1965), like Bernard Shaw, lived a long life. He became a well-known writer and playwright already before World War I. Though he claims he is a mere teller of tales and a good craftsman, he has become universally recognized as a master in the modern world of fiction. Many of Maugham’s stories are the result of his travel to China, Indo-China, Burma, Borneo and other countries. The technique of the short story has always interested the writer. De Maupassant and Chechov influenced him but he developed a form of a story that has the unmistakable Maugham flavour. The qualities that distinguish them are variety of material, lucidity of plot, sharpness of characterization, naturalness of dialogue, absence of pretentious straining. His early novel Liza of Lambeth (1897) belongs to the period when tales of Cockney life were in fashion. The grim realism of his portraits of slum life shows the influence of Zola. He is considered to be the best English naturalist (naturalism is an artistic trend tending to portray a limited range of observed facts, often insignificant, pathological and non-typical). In 1916 he published an excellent novel Of Human Bondage, an autobiographical

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novel. The Moon and the Sixpence (1919) recounts the life of Charles Strickland, Gauguin’s prototype, who neglects duty for art. There is no romantic illusion, so characteristic of the early Maugham. In the novel Cakes and Ale (1930) he again raises the problem of art. The novel has brilliance, general pathos and beauty. Maugham’s sardonic wit and satire do not drive out human sympathy and understanding. It deals with Driffield, a Grand Old Man of Letters, whose attraction to common things and common people makes him faintly derisive of his own fame as an author. Contemporaries recognized Thomas Hardy in him. Another character of the novel, Alroy Kear, was recognized as Hugh Walpole, the contemporary writer, who was very popular in the first half of the XX century, but always worried about “being outfashioned”. The character of Rosie, the barmaid who becomes Driffield’s first wife, is Maugham’s masterpiece and one of the great creations in English fiction.

Somerset Maugham was also a prominent playwright. His play Lady Frederick, a comedy of marriage and money, was staged in 1907, had a crashing success and since that time all his plays were in great demand and are still seen on stage and screen. Among his other popular plays are Our Betters – a satire on title-hunting Americans, an anti-war play For Services Rendered.

Despite his unrivalled position as the most popular and financially successful writer of his time, Maugham never enjoyed critical acclaim. Literary critics accused him of shallowness of his characters and a verbal predictability.

The other group of writers of the first half of the XX century belonged to the generation that had grown up during World War I, but they were young enough to participate in it. Almost all of them belonged to the middle class and got their education in public schools. They grew to political awareness in the period of disillusion after the war, after the General Strike of 1926, and the Wall Street Crash of 1929, with the resulting depression in Europe and America. Their later books were influenced by World War II. Evelyn Waugh wrote about his generation: “It is a queer world which the old men have left them, and they will have few ideals and illusions to console them.” It is true enough.

Evelyn Waugh (1902–1966) published his first novel Decline and Fall in 1928, which was followed by Vile Bodies, Black Mischief, A Handful of Dust and others. In these books Waugh not only embodies a powerful sense of empty absurdity of traditional British institutions – public school education, the judiciary, the Empire, etc. – but also conveys the clear im-

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pression that he has seen these absurdities from inside. These combine high comedy and social satire that capture the brittle, cynical frivolity of post-war generation. In Decline and Fall, for example, Paul Pennyfeather, a schoolmaster at a minor public school, after the arrest, though he was innocent, goes to prison, which he finds quite congenial, because “anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison”. A Handful of Dust (1934) is Waugh’s most savage portrayal of the idleness and decadence of the “Bright Young Things”. His most known post-war book is the trilogy Sword of Honour, which consists of the novels Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, and Unconditional Surrender. This book describes Waugh’s war-time experiences in Crete and Jugoslavia.

John Boynton Priestley (1894–1984) achieved his success as a novelist with The Good Companions (1929), an account of theatrical adventures on the road. None of his later novels surpassed it. Though critics consider this novel to be rather clumsy from the technical point of view, it has a flair for comic characterization, a general warm heartedness. Angel Pavement (1930) is one of the most prominent novels of this writer, a treatment of London on the Eve of the Depression. Priestley also wrote about fifty plays and dramatic adaptations. Some of his dramatic works, as in Time and the Convays (1937), I Have Been Here Before (1937) showed his interest in the Time theories of Dunne and Ouspensky (they tried to account for such phenomena as precognition, provisional dreaming, etc). These works are sociological investigations but they never achieved the heights of Herbert Wells’ works. An Inspector Calls (1947) is a psychological mystery, a thriller, written in a conventional naturalistic style. In his plays and novels Priestley identified himself with the movement towards improved social conditions and discovered a lively method of conveying his themes dramatically. His production was prolific and some of his plays have a gift of comedy and observation. During World War II Priestley worked as a war correspondent and his sharp anti-war articles can be compared to those of Ilya Erenburg. Priestley made a distinctive contribution to a national morale through his war-time broadcasts.

Tasks

1. Here is an extract from Ulysses by James Joyce, which says about Mr.Bloom’s presence at the funeral of Paddy Dignam, a jolly drunkard. Read it and answer the questions:

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–Can you separate the narrator’s descriptions from Mr.Bloom’s thoughts?

–Do you find this type of writing attractive?

Gentle sweet air blew round the bared heads in a whisper. Whisper. The boy at the graveyard held his wreath with both hands staring quietly in the black open space. Mr.Bloom moved behind the portly kindly caretaker. Well cut frockcoat. Weighing them up perhaps to see which will go next. Well, it is a long rest. Feel no more. It’s the moment you feel. Must be damned unpleasant. Can’t believe it at first. Mistake must be: someone else. Try the house opposite. Wait, I wanted to. I haven’t yet. Then darkened deathchamber. Light they want. Whispering around you. Would you like to see a priest? Then rambling and wandering. Delirium all you hid all your life. The death struggle. His sleep is not natural. Press his lower eyelid. Watching is his nose pointed is his jaw sinking are the soles of his feet yellow. Pull the pillow away and finish it off on the floor since he is doomed…

2.The Rainbow established Lawrence as a gifted and controversial writer. It was banned for a time on grounds of immorality. It deals with the life of three generations in a farming family who work the land near an expanding industrial area. Read the extract given below and answer the questions:

– Why do you think the women moved about the house with surety?

– Find examples of figurative language.

In autumn the partridges whirred up, birds in flocks blew like spray across the fallow, rooks appeared on the gray, watery heavens, and flew cawing into the winter. Then the men sat by the fire in the house where the women moved about with surety, and the limbs and the body of the men were impregnated with the day, cattle and earth and vegetation and the sky, the men sat by the fire and their brains were inert, as their blood flowed heavy with the accumulation from the living day.

3.Here is an extract from the novel Brave New World by Huxley in which John and the Controller discuss God. The latter thinks that God can exist, but says that even if he does, new society has no need of him. John protests against the rules of such a society and says that he would rather have God, freedom and art. Can you speak about intertextual links with the chapter about Grand Inquisitor from Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov?

“But if you know about God, why don't you tell them?“ asked the Savage indignantly. “Why don't you give them these books about God?“

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“For the same reason as we don't give them Othello: They're old; they're about God hundreds of years ago. Not about God now.“

“But God doesn't change.“ “Men do, though.“

“What difference does that make?“

“All the difference in the world,“ said Mustapha Mond. He got up again and walked to the safe. “There was a man called Cardinal Newman,“ he said. “A cardinal,“ he exclaimed parenthetically, “was a kind of Arch-Community-Songster.“

“'I Pandulph, of fair Milan, cardinal.' I've read about them in Shakespeare.“

“Of course you have. Well, as I was saying, there was a man called Cardinal Newman. Ah, here's the book.“ He pulled it out. “And while I'm about it I'11 take this one too. It's by a man called Maine de Biran. He was a philosopher, if you know what that was.“

“A man who dreams of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth,“ said the Savage promptly.

“Quite so. I'll read you one of the things he did dream of in a moment. Meanwhile, listen to what this old Arch-Community-Songster said.“ He opened the book at the place marked by a slip of paper and began to read. “ 'We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters. We are God's property. Is it not our happiness thus to view the matter?

4. How does Maugham treat the theme of art in his novels?

Chapter X

BRITISH LITERATURE AFTER WORLD WAR II

In 1939 once again the country was involved in a total war, which demanded the mobilization of the economy and society. After World War II Britain found itself in a predicament. On the one hand the war unified the nation and demonstrated its strength. On the other hand the process of the disruption of the Empire started. It was followed by general disappointment with the British role in international affairs, which found its reflection in the post-war literature. The older and traditional loyalties of patriotism, family, public service have come to seem absurd to the post-war generation. The persistence of war, the constant possibility of nuclear holocaust created a sense of despair and disillusion. The English novel

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was turning aside from the mainstream of European literature, often retreated into defeatism, but there were outstanding moments of protest, honesty, defiance. Walter Allen wrote that English literature about World War II was not that good as American, but the war was inside everybody, and even if there were no war scenes in the novels, the events depicted in them could be a kind of reflection of war-time events. To show post-war literary development, it is convenient to divide all writers into several categories: the survivors of the thirties (those who gained recognition between the two World Wars); writers of the same period who achieved maturity and gained acclaim after World War II; the so-called “Angry Young Men”, or those related to them in theme or approach; a group of women writers; a group of anti-imperialist writers, and a group of writers who gained considerable reputation, but has nothing in common with any of the above-mentioned groups. As for the trends, one can speak about the development of realistic (or popular) novel and post-modernism.

The first group is represented by such writers as Charles Percy Snow, Joyce Cary, Graham Greene and others.

Сharles Percy Snow (1905–1980) is a novelist of unique experience. At a period of history when the worlds of literature, and of science and technology were sharply separated from each other, he held a key-position in both simultaneously. He was educated as a scientist, but decided to turn to literature.

As a beginning he wrote two novels, a detective story and a Wellsian work of scientific imagination. His first serious novel was The Search, but later Snow said: “It was a false start. I wanted to say something about people first and foremost, and then people-in-society, in a quite different way, and at a quite different level from anything in this book.”

On I January, 1935, Snow records that his new original idea is quite sharp – he decided to write the chain of novels, which is commonly known as the Lewis Eliot series, and which has finally been given the title borne by the first book in the series, Strangers and Brothers. It is clear now that whereas The Search was a study of individual character against a background of society, Strangers and Brothers is a study, at once more penetrating and more revealing, of individual character acting upon society and reacting to it. By 1939 Snow had laid down the general pattern of the series and had written the first volume. Then war broke out. He put writing aside, and did not resume until 1945.

Meanwhile, since 1947, Snow published such novels as The Light and the Dark, Time of Hope, The Masters, Corridors of Power, etc. which

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complete the Strangers and Brothers cycle. The settings of the novels are largely academic or scientific. In content this cycle is essentially a personal story – the story of a man's life, through which is revealed his psychological and his moral structure – yet by extension and implication it is an enquiry into the psychological and moral structure of a large fraction of the society of our times. It is a slightly laborious chronicle of men who rise to the positions of some power or influence – “Establishment” men. As further volumes appear its form is disclosed as massive and intricate, yet fundamentally simple. And in concept it has been seminal: several other serious writers have more recently been able to do the same.

The most significant novels of the sequence are The Masters (1951) and The Affair (1960). The Masters is the story not of one man but of a group of men – the Fellows of Lewis's Cambridge College, engaged during the year 1937 in electing a new Master. Although there are only thirteen Fellows involved, thirteen academic persons locked away in an ancient institution, the novel is about men's love of power and their equivocal needs to indulge and subdue it. Throughout the rituals of the dining hall and the combination room, runs the motive force of political intrigue.

While The Masters was a study in politics, The Affair is a study in justice, actually justice tied down and regulated by a “fine-structure“ of politics, with the College microcosm symbolizing the macrocosm.

Strangers and Brothers, the title states at once the deepest theme of the sequence as a whole – that all men, locked away in the isolation of their own selves, are lonely, strangers to each other; while in the similarity and resonance between them, in their joys, aspirations and sufferings, they are all brothers. And every man exists in his own dynamic equilibrium between the two, sometimes more stranger than brother, sometimes more brother than stranger. What are men in themselves? And how, in their common experiences, are they brothers? These are the two main questions which Snow sets out to investigate; experimentally, with techniques like those of a scientist, making hypotheses about the natures of his characters and testing them against the way those characters behave, suggesting theories about how in general their actions arise, yet concerning himself always with individual acts and their causes. And these are the two main questions whose answers, so far as they are to be found, Snow conveys to the reader by means of the techniques of art, adopting a tone of evocation and revelation, so that the reader, as well as being told the answers, knows them – he becomes aware that he is a stranger and a brother himself.

It is clear that to do this he had to portray the society in which his characters were embedded, and to study the moral and political health of that

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society. In Strangers and Brothers the extent of the society under examination is as broad as Balzac's, ranging from the provincial lower middleclass to cosmopolitan aristocracy: it includes the worlds of government, university and industry. And the period of time will, in the end, encompass half a century, The sounding of the moral and political health of society is generally implicit, made plain to the reader through the behaviour of the characters as seen by Lewis Eliot. His story is the central story of the sequence, strong and simple: through it are interwoven the stories of his friends. The social relationship of the different characters to each other is intricate; but it is the intricate relationship of their experience with Lewis's experience, that enables Snow to build up a novel of remarkable psychological and social solidity.

While appearing simple his style is strong and subtly poetic. Snow chooses to write mainly in simple common words, words that we all use all of the time, especially at moments when we are struggling to express something difficult. His underlying aesthetic theory is clear. The simple common words, because we use them all the time, often using the same word for different purposes, are the words which have come to acquire separately the most elaborate nexus of allusions; and therefore, strung together they can make the most subtle and pregnant of sentences. Furthermore, because they are simple and common they do not distract in a “literary” sense: because they are familiar, one feels naked to their meaning. Both structurally and syntactically, Snow's style is also more complex and more calculated than it seems. The fact that Snow has such a wide experience and understanding of life in England naturally gives what he writes a peculiar authority: his style, simple, unaffected and moving is such as to make what he writes immediately recognizable as plain truth.

Henry Graham Greene (1904–1990) was known before World War II, but the post-war period became the peak of his literary activity. He defined himself as a political writer. In The Quiet American (1955), set in Vietnam, Our Man in Havana (1958) relating Cuba shortly before Batista’s fall, The Comedians (1966) about Papa Doc’s Haiti, and The Honorary Council (1973) Greene reflects political conflicts of his time. He knew many politicians personally, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh and Salvador Allende among them. In The Quite American Greene draws excellent characters of a Vietnamese girl and the villain Pyle. The narrator, Fowler, too, becomes a person almost seen in the round, as narrators seldom are. Like Greene, Fowler is a war journalist. The plot proceeds faultlessly, sped by the thrills, that Greene is so skilful in producing. It is a kind of a

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report with its clarity and detail. The novel is full of problems, but they emerge as part of the life, which is so energetically, vividly and frankly suggested for our inspection. Greene also uses late colonial conflict and political struggle as a context for the examination of individual’s moral concerns. In all his novels Greene managed to draw together thriller and intellectual fiction, adding moral and psychological depth to the thriller, and elements of adventure to literary fiction.

Arthur Joyce Cary (1888–1957) started with the publication of his “African” novels in which he showed the relations between Africans and their British administrators. The novels displayed the author’s search for rightness of style and form. The peak of his literary achievement is represented by two trilogies. The first one was written in the 1940s and is chiefly concerned with the life of the artist Gulley Jimson. The purpose of the second trilogy written just after the war was, according to the author’s words “…to show English history, through English eyes, for the last sixty years.” It consists of Prisoner of Grace, Except the Lord and Not Honour More.

In both trilogies the grasp of historical process is remarkable. Cary is excellent at interlocking political events with individual destinies, sensing gradual change within the social structure, showing subtle shifts in public and private morality. His other aim is the presentation of his characters through their individual way of thought and feeling.

In 1945 Evelyn Waugh published his novel Brideshead Revisited. It is set in a war-time framework of prologue and epilogue, but the action is a glamorized reconstruction of Oxford in the 1920-ies. In some respect this part of the novel is a kind of a campus novel, as it deals with students’ life. Waugh was closely linked with the institutions and social system of his time, but he was also anarchic and rebellious, which led him to undermining and ridiculing those institutions. In Brideshead Revisited the writer attacks the Catholic church, and one of the main characters, Lady Marchmaid, who combines good intentions with catastrophic effects, becomes a symbol of Catholic church. The lady ruins the lives of her daughter and son. Waugh also poses the problem of the state of post-war literature. He comments on the novel written by Ludovic, one of the characters: “…half a dozen other English writers, averting themselves sickly from privations of war and apprehensions of the social consequences of the peace, were even then, severally and secretly, unknown to one another…composing or preparing to compose books which would turn from the drab alleys of the thirties into the odorous gardens of a recent past transformed and illuminated by disor-

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dered memory and imagination.” Evelyn Waugh also writes in this book that the war heroes had to die so that things might be made safe for the traveling salesman. So, wars are absurd. It can also be considered a kind of Escapist literature, it does not confront reality but allows the reader to dwell temporary in a pleasant world of reminiscences.

Another representative of this literary trend is John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1982–1973). His phenomenon is unique. In the 1960s the Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford suddenly became a cult figure. Professionally he was concerned with Beowulf and the whole subject of the dragon in legend, seeing it as ”a potent creation of man’s imagination”, and an equally potent symbol of evil. He reflected it in the sequence The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955) – an extraordinary mixture of adventure story and Nordic and Arthurian legend. Critics all over the world immediately saw allegory in it and suggested all kinds of interpretations – from the historical and political to the religious and psychoanalytical. Of course it can be said that the book is about the nature of power, the power that is based on lie and violence, and wants to enslave Man. Everybody who capitulates dies. The other theme is that of human dignity which must be saved at any price.

Tolkien was against such interpretations. He said that he had written the book because the modern world was parched for the lack of viable myths. So these books belong to escapist literature too, but at this time its author dwells into the world of dream and fantasy. We can call it a fantasy because it is about a fantastic world full of dwarfs, giants, etc. The Tolkien obsession that still goes on suggests that he was right, new myths are needed to escape from the dull reality. In 1977 there appeared another book with some details of Middle-Earth, The Silmarillion, in 1980 – Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-Earth.

George Orwell, whose real name is Eric Arthur Blair (1903–1950), began his literary career with an experiment of living for short periods among the poor and deprived in order to establish himself as a professional writer. This period is reflected in Orwell’s first major publication Down and Out in Paris and London. The book consists of two narratives – that of Boris the Russian waiter in Paris and Paddy the Irish tramp in London. It is a kind of a social analysis. The following novels confirmed his political awareness.

During the Spanish Civil War Orwell participated in it and was badly wounded. His war experience was reflected in the novel Homage to Cata-

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