Transition to the "New Dark Age"

305 this book will do so at his peril. State University of New York, Fredonia Robert C. Schwelk 2. TRANSITION TO THE "NEW DARK AGE" Harvey Curtis Webster, After the Trauma: Representative British Novelists Since 19_20. Lexington: University of Kentucky P, 1970. $8.00. In his "Apology" (preface) for Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922), Thomas Hardy, novelist, poet, and sage of the transition from the 19th to the 20th century, lamented "the barbarizing of taste in the younger minds by the dark madness of the late war" and the threat of a "new Dark Age." In After the Trauma. Professor Webster , well known for his study of Hardy's mind in On a Darkling Plain, analyzes the pictures of the new Dark Age drawn by eight British novelists. He frames his studies between Chapter I, "The Trauma," and Chapter XI, "War, Cold," linked by Chapter VI, "MidView : the 1930's." The "trauma" of World War I generated forces that caused many novelists to lose their moorings in a world adrift and so to view their world as absurd. Webster's study presents an intellectual world suffering from the hangover that he characterizes in a summary of Graham Greene's fiction. "Hell lies about his children in their infancy and one starts to believe In heaven only because one imagines that all societies . . . are 'in a true sense discarded from· God's presence, and 'implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity.'" After similar observations about modern novels from Rose Macaulay's to C. P. Snow's, Webster says that the "deeply Involved writers" he selected can "help us to comprehend - perhaps even to remake." The "mental rearragnement, particularly after peace was made 'with a vengeance' at Versailles, included a distrust of religion, of politics, of newspapers, of conventional morality." A central theme in Webster's study Is the novelists' search for God that yielded odd mixtures of rationality, self-projection, and superstition. His chapter titles classify the novelists' attitudes toward religions "Rose Macaulay; A Christian a Little Agnostic," "Aldous Huxley: Sceptical Mystic," "Ivy Compton-Burnett: Factualist," "Evelyn Waugh: Catholic Aristocrat," "Graham Greene: Stoical Catholic," "Joyce Cary: Christian Unclassified," "L. P. Hartley: Diffident Christian," and "C. P. Snow: Scientific Humanist." Presenting the personality bias of each novelist, Webster traces the novelist's development in a summary-critique of his best or most representative fictions. For these novels he sums up enough of the action to define the theme and the ideas of leading characters ; he states the theme of lesser novels in a clause or a sentence . His evaluations are even-handed, as in his comment on Evelyn's Waugh's Unconditional Surrender, a story of World War II, as a "beautIful flawed novel," whose beauties and flaws he points 306 out in some detail. He modestly avoids dogma, as in a comment on C. P. Snow: "I know no absolutes that measure novels, do not know exactly how to place any but the valueless novels of our time . . . . Like most writers about reading, first I have an impression, a feeling, a stimulation, an illumination . . . that impels me to read . . . more closely in a poet or novelist I admire." In Webster's analysis. Rose Macaulay's novels "apparently start with ideas rather than with people." Her novels, presenting an unending search for truth, "celebrate seriocomically modern man's errant and formidable effort to find and maintain his own integrity ." Her characters, sometimes flat, reflect the "fads. Ideas, and attitudes that typified England for some forty years." Her The World My Wilderness and Told by an Idiot are analyzed in some detail , the latter telling the story of a typical upper middle-class family from Victorian calm through the trauma, from 1879 to 1923. With a good deal of attention to Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point. Webster says that "Huxley not only created a cast of believable caricatures who represent modern and persistent attitudes; he also . . . created in Quarles a character in the round, one who is more than intellectually involved in a quarrel with himself and others." This character, a successful portrait of intellectuality disliking itself, is what Huxley, the most widely informed man of his time "feared himself to be in...