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“A Package Deal” The Descent of Modernism stan smith the english-speaking world “A Package Deal”is the title of a review of Robert Graves’s Steps by an up-and-coming young critic in the Observer shortly after the book was published in 1958.“The title of this review,”writes John Wain,“is an Americanism: I use it as a code signal of solidarity with Mr Graves, whose English vocabulary and sentence-construction are becoming daily more Americanised”: Looking through this book at random, one finds the pages peppered with such words as“rangy” (meaning tall and loose-limbed), cable“collect” (i.e. with charges reversed),“around”(for English“round,”e.g.“around the corner ”),“jibe” (meaning “fit in” — this last in a poem), etc., etc.1 Wain’s donnish indignation seems quaintly mock-antique now, an index of how far the Americanization of English usage has proceeded since the 1950s. His explanation of the phenomenon in Graves is patronizing equally of the English poet and of Americans, with its knowing hints about the transatlantic groupies currently congregating in Deyá, Majorca: The reason is clear: Mr Graves, in his Balearic fastness, talks Spanish with the neighbours and English only with the visitors; many of these same visitors , and especially the young, literary ones who make up Mr Graves’s entourage, are American; as a result, his ear is losing the power to distinguish between the two languages. For Wain, the erosion of English English figures also the failing of cultural and political powers. Not for nothing does he deploy the idiom“losing the power,” with its implicit sense of a decline in both sexual and geopolitical potency. Americanization means the loss of everything at the level of cultural register that has made Britain great, from Jane Austen’s regulated hatred, the reflex of an imperial stiff upper lip, through the Anglicized mandarin subtlety of James and Eliot, those masters of nuance and scruple, to the intrinsically English discriminations of an F. R. Leavis and — no doubt — the columns of the Observer in January 1959. Wain suggests a more than metaphorical connection between loss of linguistic hegemony and commercial decline. The British once traded around (or “round”) the world. Now they have been sold a “package deal” by former colonials: So, as a token of our respect for him, let us speak of this book, even in these English pages, as a package deal. As business men are well aware, a package deal is a way of unloading on to the customer a certain amount of stuff he doesn’t want. The buyer has to take all or nothing; since the package contains certain items he really needs, he takes all. . . . The nauseating blurb gives an arch description of the treat in store for the fortunate child who gets this lovely stocking (“He continues to wear his variegated learning — as lightly as his customary crownless straw hat”) and winds up the catalogue with,“Twenty-two new Poems complete the jaunt.” Graves has become a court jester in the service of his American entourage, a vaudeville entertainer in a straw hat, putting on an act of eccentric stage Englishness to gratify his American patrons. But Britain itself has bought the package, which runs from Lend-Lease through Marshall Plan to the Cold War and Coca-colonial penetration of its economy and culture alike. We inhabit a client state, a subaltern culture, which has sold its heritage for a mess of bubble-gum. Wain has one qualification: “If this book is worth thirty shillings of anybody ’s money,” he says, maintaining the snooty tone of a nation of shopkeepers confronting shoddy foreign imports,“it is the poems that tip the scale.” In Wain’s world, Graves’s poetry remains an island of English purity in the midst of a commercialized — which is to say Americanized — culture.2 The package , that “day-to-day stuff that Mr Graves writes to make a living — all of it more or less pointless and trivial,” is, like newspaper around British fish and chips, “wrapped round twenty-three wonderful pages of poetry.” The offense justifies vandalism: “Probably most discerning readers will tear out the pages of verse and throw away the rest in the interest of conserving shelf-space, and I don’t blame them”: But really it is intolerable when one of the finest poets alive in the Englishspeaking world, a man whose poetry gets better and better, continually purging away its dross, and refining itself...

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