THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

to an uncertain future. The uncertainties were built into an often sardonic, questioning, terse, and jerky new fiction.
The poet Stephen Spender (b. 1909) describes his boyhood and adolescence in his autobiography World Within World
(1951) as a period of growing up ‘in an atmosphere of belief in progress curiously mingled with apprehension’. His
senior, William Gerhardie (originally Gerhardi) (1895-1977), who spent much of the war as a junior attaché in the
British Embassy in Petrograd, viewed the 1920s as a decade in which inhibitions were broken down. ‘Young people’,
he wrote in his comically subversive history of the first half of the twentieth century God’s Fifth Column (1981),
‘disillusioned by inconsistencies of avowed ideals with palpable results, as exemplified by the behaviour of their
parents, discovered a style of life for themselves which allied mature superciliousness about their elders with an
insistence on the advantages of young years and limbs’. A sense of disillusion and an amused superciliousness runs
through Gerhardie’s two first, and best, novels, Futility: A Novel on Russian Themes (1922) and The Polyglots
(1925). Gerhardie, who had been born of British parents in Imperial St Petersburg, was well attuned to things Russian
(he published a pioneer study of Chekhov in 1923 and a sharply observant history of the Romanov tsars in 1940).
Futility is a sub-Chekhovian essay in absurdity, aimlessness, and non-communication set against the background of
the Russian revolutions of 1917. There is a parallel series of diverse fictional manoeuvres between comedy and
tragedy in The Polyglots, whose setting moves panoramically from Japan, to Harbin in Manchuria, to Shanghai before
ending up in the drizzling rain of England. The novel’s narrator, the capriciously named Georges Hamlet Alexander
Diabologh, is a polyglot English outsider, detached both from the displaced and disparate collection of refugees from
Russia he encounters in the East and from the English with whom he is never properly at home. Despite the confusion
of tongues and manners that the novel implies, Diabologh accepts the English language as his medium and uses it to
create what he sees as an Anglo-
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Saxon ‘world of assumed restraint’ as opposed to a ‘Maupassantian ... candour’. ‘The novel’, he also remarks, ‘is a
cumbersome medium for depicting real people.’ Diabologh’s narrative is frequently threatened with dissolution by
confusions of identity, trivialities, seeming inconsequences, and soliloquies (his middle name is not ‘Hamlet’ by
accident). In a sense it enacts the disintegration which is its subject.
Henry Green (1905-73), the pseudonym of Henry Vincent Yorke, was the son of a wealthy Birmingham
industrialist. For Green, writing in his ‘self portrait’ Pack my Bag in the midst of another war in 1940, the domestic
circumstances in which he found himself during the war of 1914-18 had opened up disorienting vistas. The family
house at Tewkesbury had become a convalescent home for wounded officers, one of whom attempted to commit
suicide. The event, coupled with the death of an elder brother at school and ‘the lists of the dead each day in every
paper’, reinforced an acute awareness of mortality. Perhaps as significant was the opportunity provided to learn what
he called ‘the half tones of class’ and to experience ‘those narrow, deep and echoing gulfs which must be bridged’. In
Party Going (1939) Green’s seemingly unpromising subject is the four-hour delay experienced by a young and smart
set of party-goers. Little enough actually happens. Fog forbids departure by train and the group resort to the station
hotel from whence they can look down on the masses of less privileged travellers below them, the ‘thousands of
Smiths, thousands of Alberts, hundreds of Marys, woven tight as any office carpet’. ‘What targets’, someone later
remarks, ‘what targets for a bomb’. In Party Going the few are divided from the thousands, but they are also glimpsed
as incomprehendingly surrounded by the evidence of death and decay. Not only does the order of society seem fragile
when the topic of an air raid is raised (a very present threat in 1939), but the external gloom of the fog and the sudden
illness of Miss Fellowes (who has inexplicably picked up a dead pigeon as the novel opens) serve to cast glancing
shadows over the generally trivial gossip of the young travellers. Social class, and the problems attendant on class
divisions, figure too in Green’s below-stairs vista on country-house life in neutral Ireland, Loving (1945), but his most
impressive achievement remains the neutral study of the commonplaces of Birmingham factory life, Living (1929).
For this, his second novel, he evolved a startlingly abbreviated narrative style, a style which eliminates definite
articles and adjectives, which experiments with verbless sentences, and which allows for the flatness of much
colloquial discourse. It was a style modelled, by his own account, on the reflection of Arabic in the prose of the
Victorian traveller C. M. Doughty (1843-1926) (Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta had been republished in 1921
with an introduction by T. E. Lawrence). There is nothing exotic about Living. As Dupret, the son of the factoryowner,
walks through the artisan streets he remarks on their air of ‘terrible respectability on too little money’ and on a
way of life that consists for all classes of the monotonies of being born, of going to school, of working, of being
married, of bearing children, and of dying. ‘What had you before you
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died?’, he ponders, ‘Grandchildren? The satisfaction of breeding the glorious Anglo Saxon breed?’ This monotony is
briefly relieved by the exploited Lily Gates’s attempted escape to Canada with Bert Jones. The couple’s elopement