What Ever Happened to Modernism?

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The first extra-curricular lecture I attended at Oxford was an address given to the Literary Society by Lord David Cecil on the topic of ‘The English Novel Today’. It was the autumn of 1958. I had just spent a happy year between school and university getting to know London, the first city I had ever lived in, and using the wonderful Putney and Wandsworth public libraries to read my way through as much of world literature as I could, starting with the writers I had discovered in my last years at school, Eliot, Donne and Kafka, and going on to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Proust and Mann. Now I hurried to Lord David's lecture, eager to discover who were the English writers currently at work who were, so to speak, following in those footsteps.

I remember nothing about the lecture except that it was full to the rafters, suggesting that I was not the only one who had come eager to learn, but I did come away with a list of names: Anthony Powell, Angus Wilson and, said Lord David, a young writer to watch, Iris Murdoch. However, when I borrowed their work from the library I was disappointed to find that they seemed to have nothing whatsoever in common with the writers I had been reading. They told entertaining stories wittily or darkly or with sensationalist panache, and they obviously wrote well, but theirs were not novels which touched me to the core of my being, as had those of Kafka and Proust. Since I had plenty to do learning Anglo-Saxon and reading the authors on the syllabus, plus the still unread works of Thomas Mann, I did not stop to ask myself why this should be so and whether the fault lay with me or with them, but simply let the matter drop.

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