Evelyn Waugh liked to make the provoking claim that he and Graham Greene
and Anthony Powell were craftsmen producing well-made novels of classic form for
civilized readers, as if Queen Anne were still on the throne. Waugh was successful
from 1928, Greene hugely so from 1932. Powell was the dark horse of the trio,
emerging as the others faded. All three were products of select boarding schools –
‘public school men’ – as were Auden and his circle in the Thirties. Their achieve-
ments in the novel now stand out, with those of Elizabeth Bowen, above those of
the less conventional Henry Green, the Powys brothers, Richard Hughes, Ivy
Compto n-Burnett, Sylvia Townsend Warner or the popular J. B. Priestley and
Compton Mackenzie.
Modernism fails to catch on
The modernist novel, it seems, made little impact in England, a country avoided by
its later pra ctitioners,Samuel Beckett(1906–1989),Malcolm Lowry(1909–1957)
and Christine Brooke-Rose(1923– ). Despite the art novels of James and Conrad,
the social and entertaining tradition of the English Victorian novel persisted. The
successors to these ‘loose, baggy monsters’ (James’s phrase) are neater, yet have a
family resemblance.Their natural imitation of life, rather than of art, lacks the
intensity and ambition of modernist poetry, though this is in part a matter of style.
For whatever reason,Women in Lov e and Ulysses had no major successor, whereas in
European fiction modernism continued. It may be England’s insularity which makes
her exceptional, though it is normal for a revolution to be followed by settlement.
The English stage was finally boarded by modernism in 1955, with Beckett’s Waiting
for Godot, translated by an Irishman from his original French. Only in poetry did
modernism have an evident effect.
NON-MODERNISM:THE TWENTIES AND THIRTIES 365Publications 1929–39
1929 Richard Aldington, Death of a Hero; Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That; Richard Hughes,
A High Wind in Jamaica; Henry Green, Living
1930 T. S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday; Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies; W. H. Auden, Poems; Noël Coward,
Private Lives
1931 Anthony Powell, Afternoon Men; Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer;
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
1932 Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song; Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
1933 W. B. Yeats, The Winding Stair; George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
1934 Graves, I, Claudius; Dylan Thomas, Eighteen Poems; Waugh, A Handful of Dust
1935 Ivy Compton-Burnett, A House and its Head; Louis MacNeice, Poems; Eliot, Murder in the
Cathedral; W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, The Dog Beneath the Skin; Isherwood,
Mr Norris Changes Trains
1936 Eliot, Burnt Norton; J. C. Powys, Maiden Castle; Auden, Look, Stranger!; Yeats (ed.), The
Oxford Book of Modern Verse; Michael Roberts (ed.), The Faber Book of Modern Verse
1937 David Jones, In Parenthesis; J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
1938 Samuel Beckett, Murphy; Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart; Graham Greene,
Brighton Rock
1939 Joyce Cary, Mister Johnson; Eliot, The Family Reunion; James Joyce, Finnegans Wake;
MacNeice, Autumn Journal; Dylan Thomas, The Map of Love; Jean Rhys, Good Morning,
Midnight