The Writers’ Dilemma, Edit. S. Spender

[p025] The Writer's Dilemma. Essays first published in ‘The Times Literary Supplement’. Introduction by Stephen Spender. Oxford University Press, 12s. 6d. ‘What are the limits beyond his own control that threaten the modern writer?’ The Editor of ‘The Times Literary Supplement’ put the question to ten authors and the book consists of their replies. The question was vague and slovenly, and the answers are little better. Arnold Toynbee is pompous and pontificating, Lawrence Durrell con- descendingly pessimistic, Gerald Heard mystical. William Golding is afraid that ‘the supply of teachable material is as limited as the supply of people who can teach.’ Saul Bellow’s essay deserves to be taken more _ seriously. He is impressed by the uniformity, mono- tony and emptiness of life for millions of Americans who enjoy material comfort. While many of them read with taste and discrimination, they

[p026] 64 do not communicate. Culture is con- sumed by individuals in solitude. It plays little part in a social life buil around barbecues, baseball and poker. This is reflected in American writing, where ‘disappointment with its human material is built into the con- temporary novel.’ At moments Saul Bellow seems almost to approach the Marxist con- cept of alienation. Marx showed that in capitalist society man is_ set against man by conflicting class interests. Men are degraded as their labour-power — their vitality and creativity—is turned into a commo- dity. Work is not a part of life, an expression of community, but some- thing sacrificed from life to secure the means of survival. But for Bellow it is not the structure of society but only the techniques of production and the accompanying growth of population which have ‘ dwarfed the individual ’. Alan Sillitoe approaches the core of the problem from another angle. Rejecting Marxism he nonetheless sees the reflection of capitalism in the contemporary novel, with its over- whelmingly middle-class preoccupa- tions. ‘Working men and women who tread’, he points out, ‘do not have the privilege of seeing themselves honestly and realistically portrayed in novels.’ In an oblique way Richard Wollheim comes closest of all to an accurate assessment. While making no serious attempt to see the situation whole he does recognize one facet. The division of labour, with its frag- mentation of industrial operations, has destroyed the link between art and production. In these conditions art becomes ‘ irrational’, ‘ arbitrary ’ and esoteric. The book is about the sickness of bourgeois culture. It expresses the patchiness and superficiality of bour- geois ideas. H.C. Consumer Exploited