Introduction

Abstract

To have written this Introduction fifteen, even ten, years ago would have required much more of a defensive strategy than is needed in present circumstances. In 1965, it was felt, the English novel was dwarfed by literary events outside these islands. Arguably the greatest ‘English’ novelist of the period was Samuel Beckett, an Irishman living in Paris and writing in French; possessed of a vision of what T. S. Eliot had earlier described as ‘the horror, the boredom and the glory’, such as no other contemporary English or even Anglo-Irish novelist would have or could have aspired to. Eliot died that year, but Pound, Auden and MacDiarmid lived on, carrying into the 1970s the vitality of the poetic avant garde of the twenties and thirties. By contrast the great experimentalists of the modern novel had all died years ago: James in 1916, Conrad in 1924, Ford in 1939 and Joyce and Virginia Woolf in 1941. Lawrence had returned from New Mexico only to die at Vence in the south of France in 1930. In the fifties and sixties there was no living testimony to the creative energies released in the novel in the first half of the century — only Beckett translating the Joyce inheritance into French; and Forster, the most approachable and least evidently revolutionary of the moderns, who had not published a new novel since A Passage to India in 1924.