Mr Raymond and the Dead Souls

Stuart Hall
"Re-reading Miss Sayers again this week, I remembered how we loved it all at thirteen, and how sophisticated we felt on the train that took us back to the grim Warwickshire prep school. . . . Lord Peter struck it rich in the sexual imaginings of my generation. . . ."John Raymond, "White Tile Or Red Plush?",
New Statesman, June 29, 1956

Universities & Left Review 4 summer 1958

isn't so long ago that Mr. Raymond, ITunder cover of a seemingly light-hearted defence of Dorothy Sayers and the "world" of Lord Peter Whimsey("a house in Audley Square" . . . "eight servants, besides Bunter and the housekeeper" . . . "one more trip to Rome to appease Mussolini" . . . "marriage at St. Cross, Oxford" . . . "honeymoon in a Tudor cottage" . . . "a half dozen of vintage port")unleashed a savage

attack on Scrutiny, the Leavises, and the "sourpusses, the killjoys, the whey-faced hatchetmen, the inside outsiders" of the "literary Left." One made one's faint protest, but was tempted to believe that this was a temporary if unfortunate aberration. We all have our curious favourites in the jungle of the sub-literary world to which Miss Sayerstranslations of Dante notwithstandingproperly belongs. But recently, the cult of attack on the literary Left has been raised to something of the proportions of editorial policy in the backside of the New Statesman, and this phenomenon deserves some comment. These scattered but strategically placed asides reopen the whole question of the relationship between the front and back halves of the New Statesman, and the doubtful cultural

assumptions which appear to hold sway in the latter pages. The backside of the New Statesman has been defended on many occasionsnotably at one of the more electric meetings of the U.L.R. Clubas (1) directed at the nonSocialist majority of Statesman readers who buy the paper because of its literary pages (2) representing the non-political nonpolemical role of literature and the arts (3) "the sugar coating on the pill." All journals, of course, have to survive: whether they should do so at the expense of principle is another matter. The principle here isin what sense is literature and the arts "neutral"? Can culture get on as best it can, at the very moment when we are trying to establish some sort of socialist critique of the quality of life in post-Welfare 81

capitalist society? Is the moral and imaginative life of man to be discounted, at a time when we are trying to restore humanism at the centre of our socialism? Can we at the same time, affirm the richness and potentiality of human experience, and discount the relevance of that experience, when it is given concrete creative form? We cannot separate "high" culture from "popular" cultureor either from the life of the community itself. If there is a split, then that is one of the sets of phenomena which we must study, for it represents the depth of man's alienation from himself and his creations, it betrays the solidarities of class-life in the Opportunity State. The assumptions about human relations, about the just society and the good life which we bring to bear upon the study of our culture revealoften more clearly than political formulationsthe values which underpin our socialism and our perspectives on the future.

Neutral literature
The proposition that "literature is neutral and should be discussed in neutral terms" is a late-Liberal assumption, which one finds, on re-reading recent issues of the New Statesman is more often defended in the abstract than employed in practice. More often than not, the assumptions are quite clearly exposed, though it would presumably be bad taste to call them "commitments"of a kind. Whatever the gloss of neutrality which the critic manages to cast over all, there are values there, which need to be exposed to the light of day. "All humanistsnot to speak of the surrounding circle of us who also struggle, daily and painfully, to be humane men should invest their spare seventy-three bob in this book (one can make up the amount over a period by skipping Mr. Bill Hopkins's novels, Mr. Lindsay Anderson's collected social criticism, Mr. Stuart Holroyd's ethical strictures et, as they say, alia)."J. Raymond, "Bird-Happy," New Statesman, May 3, 1958. This comment, wilfully provocative and misleading as it is (placing Anderson, without comment, in the same bracket as Holroyd and Hopkins, as if they had anything in common) appears at the end of a knowing, cultivated review of Montaigne's Essays and Letters. What matters is not the particular antipathy, so nakedly revealed, of Mr. Raymond to Lindsay Anderson, but the whole tone of the piece. The juxtaposition of "humanists" and

"humane men" is a conscious one, made with a leer and a wink at a sophisticated audience. Humanism is too strong a word for Mr. Raymond. Its commitments are too open and positive. Against the humanists, he sets for contrast "the surrounding circle" of initiates whoso it's impliedby their daily and painful struggle, know what humanism is about. But what circle of "humane men" is this? What distinguishes them from the other fashionable reviewers of the liberal press, all of whom, after all, struggle, daily and painfully, with their fluency at French and their spare seventythree bobs? They are men for whom, presumably, Montaigne can be described with approval, as "the humane CO of that bird-happy rear-base that lies buried in the sediment of every honest man's feelings." One supposes that the purpose of a Booksin-General page devoted to Montaigne is to communicate some sense of the stringency and passion of his sceptical mind, a mind which, incidentally, would have cut through those pretentious references to humane CO's and bird-happy rear-bases. For that metaphor in the context, is anything but neutral. It invokes a spirit, an age, an ethosthe ethos of the First World War and that War seen from the vantage point of the cultivated aristocracy who "blew themselves to hell at the head of their platoons," who enjoyed in the enforced circumstances of the War a certain trenchcameraderie with the "ordinary ranks."

engendered by the Welfare State and make studied exits from the Chamber of the Royal Court Theatre. Mine is a daring and Gaullist solution. Briefly we must resurrect 'the Souls'.""From Eden to Armageddon," New Statesman, May 17, 1958. And why? Were they, too, "the surrounding circle of us, who also struggle, daily and painfully, to be humane men"? Well, they were "grand snubbers," "exceptionally gifted, dashing, selfish, witty and sympathetic," "they adored hunting and loathed the hunting set," "they had far more than their proportionate share of running the country" (you bet they had!), they existed in a "setting . . . as lavish, engaging and out of the present world as the 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 'Thirties
Mr. Raymond commends these values, not merely in contrast with our own, but also with the Thirties, which he is modest enough to dismiss as a period of "shame and squalor,""the age of the bad old men" (Orwell? Cornford? Auden?). The Dead Souls have been summoned to life to stand between Mr. Raymond's sensibilities, and the anger and frustration engendered by the Humbug State. He has summoned them as literary blacklegs, to break the sustained protest from those people who hate snobbery and selfishness, who despise hunting as well as the hunting set, who, in spite of the quiet revolution, still have less than their proportionate share in running the country, who have to live their lives in settings which are neither lavish nor "engaging." The Dead Souls are the reserve army of the Liberal Critic. The success or failure of the New Statesman involves us all. It is the only weekly journal of socialist analysis with stature, tradition, and a large circulation. It has helped to form the political consciousness of many young people. In a period in which genuine socialist journalism has dwindled away, its responsibilities are enormous. We recognize its achievements. At the same time, when doubts arise, they must be honestly stated. There is a serious problem, for a journal which, in some of its pages is pushing out into the uncharted waters beyond the Welfare State, but which, on other pages, offers for our approval, as an image of life, as a set of values, the trivial lives and the plush philistinism of the Smart Set. However strong our commitments to socialism may be, they can be isolated and immunized when they appear in the total context of values and attitudes drawn from elsewhere. The philippics against philistinismLeft and Right which distinguish the front half of the New Statesman are often compromised by the assumptions which hold sway in the cultural pages. One is not pleading for a policy of censorship, but we must take our stand on our own ground, and leave the others to worm their way into print elsewhere. (One is tempted to say, "Leave them to the Spectator," except that in that journal, the treatment of "culture" is far less crass.) While the strongest, principled protest against de Gaulle is issued on the front page, how many people are aware that a "Gaullist solution" is being prepared at the back?

"Troopers and stayers"

This is not an incidental invocation. Mr. Raymond is engaged in a conscious campaign to revive the "troopers and stayers" of another time and another place, and set them up in an angry but skilfully contrived confrontation with the literary Left. Each week he offers readers another "clique" and commends them for some distinction, some personal integrity, which he can set off against his own age. His review 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 for the troopers and stayers of art and life becomes redoubled."New Statesman, May 31, 1958. The old figures crowd in again, treated with affectionate deferenceDame Ethyl Smyth, Mrs. Asquith, the Sitwells, Harold Nicholson and the other Bright Young Things. The stage is crammed with these trivial and insipid socialites from the dead, dreary world of late Evelyn Waugh, fixed in the jazzy setting of the post-war decadence, in a stirring attempt to make them livenot merely in their own time (which, within the limits of autobiography, social history or, even better, satire, is a proper goal)but meaningfully, in our time. In the New Statesman of May 17, 1958, he takes the centre book-page to celebrate the goings-on of Lady Diana Cooper and the Dead Souls, once again as part of a deliberate literary manoeuvre. "Reading this admirable book, I think that I have found a solution: it is one primarily for those of us in our middlethirties who are unwilling to throw up the sponge and join the cultural Republic of Palsthe literary Plevens and Pinays with their hunger for the centre. . . . On the other hand we are too old and complacent to pull angry young faces on the extreme Left, slam our desks in demonstration against the inferiority complex