British Writers of the Thirties

"This is a treasure trove book. It’s enormous and probably best not to be read in one fell swoop – it’s a wonderful dipping book. What I love about it is how it gathers together a huge number of writers from the 1930s and shows that they are using similar kinds of imagery and behaviour. What fascinates me here is to do with fashion – to do with what holds a generation of people together. I’m very drawn to the mercurial and elusive sense of what makes a particular moment, and what makes something important in that moment. This book is a very brilliant form of literary criticism that shows you how certain ideas gather currency and become significant for particular milieux and generations. The book is arranged thematically. You have, for example, a chapter on the movement of the masses which is full of ideas about people moving in mass – about the way people get about, and how the individual related to power and being a part of something big in the thirties. But you also have chapters on how certain people become the ring leaders. He begins with a chapter called Vin Rouge Ordinaire , which is about WH Auden as a vintage wine label of the thirties – how everything is a kind of response to Auden, either arguing with him or flattering him in some way. So it’s a book about how the mood of the times was made up, and how the texture of the literary culture came into being. I’ll answer the second question first. The Spanish Civil War was a great rallying call to the younger generation of literary and political people. If you were a young poet in the thirties, you had to take sides in the Spanish Civil War. There was a book called Writers Take Sides – you had to say what you thought of the war, and if you were going to intervene then you needed to get yourself to the front, which a great many writers did. You were defined in that period by having either military interventionist politics or various forms of passivism – that would go through to Munich and the Second World War itself. The question keeps being asked, “What can art do in the face of political crisis?” Should artists and writers be responding directly to world affairs, should they be writing poetry about conflict, or should they give up their poetry and go to fight? Which a great many did. Or do you take the view – as Virginia Woolf did, partly – that it’s tremendously important in a society to have reasonably objective voices who are not implicated in a cause, who are not taking sides, who are producing a literature that stays outside the realm of propaganda. Which leads in to your first question about the difference between the literature of the thirties and the twenties. The difference is largely politics. The pressure to either intervene or step back from politics is so great that the whole artistic scene is defined by it in a way. In the face of violence and tragedy, what does the artist do? That is one of the great questions of the 1930s. It’s about writers. Cunningham reads their whole lives as part of their art, which I find rather inspiring. Because [the poet] Julian Bell gets on the boat and drives ambulances in the Spanish Civil War, that is one of his artistic decisions of the period but it’s not a poem. There’s a way in which by writing about writers you include all that they do as part of the culture of the times. He writes about a culture, not just about what gets typed up on paper."