I've begun a more or less disciplined program of reading books I've long known about but never actually read. I was prompted to do this while reading Larry McMurtry's Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, a very thoughtful essay on reading and writing (and book collecting). McMurtry mentions a number of books that I have always intended to read, and I decided I should go about this in a more organized way.
Something all of these books have in common is a focus on literary culture in England (and to a lesser extent America) between the twentieth-century world wars. I've started with Enemies of Promise by Cyril Connolly. Next up, in no particular order are Good-Bye to All That, Robert Graves' autobiography first published in 1929, Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell's 1933 fictionalized autobiography of his early experiences, and Axel's Castle, Edmund Wilson's influential 1931 study of the modernists.
I actually did read Axel's Castle in graduate school, but that was a long time ago, and now I want to look at it again in context. Wilson is one of my favorites; I've read much of his criticism, but also his fiction (Memoirs of Hecate County) and notebooks and diaries. One of the things I most admire about Wilson was his ability to lead the life of a literary intellectual outside the confines of academe. That made him much more like the English authors I'm reading than other Americans, who tended to be drawn into various academic orbits.
Next up I may include Wilson's To Finland Station and Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier, which will take me somewhat beyond the literary culture, but will introduce some of the social and political concerns of the 1930s and 1940s that were current during the years leading up to the Second World War. This may also bring me back to my earlier interest in Arthur Koestler, but I will let that trajectory develop as it may.
My main object is to do some concentrated thinking about the way those most affected were reacting to the onset of another world catastrophe so soon after experiencing and before completely recovering from a previous one. I'm already getting a strong sense of the frustrations the young writers were feeling from reading Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise. His premise was that writing a book that would be likely to last even ten years had become an almost insurmountable challenge. But while the circumstances he describes and analyzes are rooted firmly in his own moment, they continue to resonate even now. Ironically, and perhaps sadly, his own somewhat autobiographical account of the barriers to successful writing has become a classic of sorts.
I'm not entirely sure what has drawn me to this period. Of course, I have always been attracted to the moderns. Joyce, Eliot, Yeats, and Woolf, as well as Hemingway and Fitzgerald, were among the first serious authors I read. And in my youth they were nearer to being contemporaries than might now appear the case. But as they have receded into the past, I've grown even more interested in them, and in their time. I've also grown more interested in the larger cultural and social context that surrounded them and gave them sustenance.
I suspect this all began about two years ago when I decided finally to sit down and read all of Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time. Since then much of my reading has been about that era and its passing. As I finished Powell's last novels, I found I was seeing them as a chronicle of a dying culture. It's not so much that I would want to return to that world, but that I find myself continuing to be fascinated by it. It was a world I glimpsed when I was a student, and even then I suppose I knew it was dying. Now as an old man I understand what it must have been like for those like Powell (and Connolly) who were already aware of the forces arrayed against us.
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