British Literature in the 1930s: A Decade of Change
By mid-decade, this posture had led to the justification of Auden’s murder in the poem “Spain” (Spain, 1937): “The conscious acceptance of guilt in the fact of murder” (now believe in the necessity of conscious murder). In January 1937, Auden went to Spain, but upon returning from the theater, his fascination with radical ideology came to an end. The first encounter with real violence from both warring sides (a similar theme sounds in E. Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls) marked a philosophical turn to Auden’s poetry, making it ethically more responsible. It is reflected in the poem “September 1, 1939”, where Auden gave the textbook definition of the 1930s as “a low dishonest decade”, or “treacherous thirties.” Immediately after the publication, Auden imposed a ban on reprinting all his early poetry.
The main teachers of the younger generation continued to be British writers – John Conrad, Henry James, Forster, D. H. Lawrence, and James Joyce.
Aldous Huxley’s *Brave New World*
The politicization of the era left its mark on the problems of the most famous works of Huxley (Brave New World, 1932). Its title, ironically taken from a quote from Shakespeare’s “Tempest”, received in the context of the novel a return to its intended value sense. The “beautiful” future, as it is shown by the author, is based on the principles of totalitarianism, the complete suppression of freedom and independent thought. In the strict caste society of the third century, “Ford era”, people reproduce by cloning, and the words “father” and “mother” are perceived as obscene. Citizens of the World State, having been born in the “incubator”, are brought up in care centers, working like ants, serving the newest production, and keeping up to the end of life’s youthful appearance. They are useful to society, and after death, as the phosphorus released during cremation is used for production purposes. The only acceptable form of relationship between the sexes is sexual intimacy without love, and the greatest crime is an attempt to maintain their individuality.
George Orwell and Christopher Isherwood
If we compare some likes of Isherwood, Orwell is much more politicized. He feels guilty for his bourgeois background, making a kind of experiment of “going to the people.” This experience is reflected in the documentary and nonfiction books Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). Homage to Catalonia (1938) is about the Spanish Civil War, which is shown without any starry-eyed illusions.
Orwell and Isherwood are quite traditional; their close conversational style is an adequate manner for the mastered topics. Graham Greene (1904-1991), by contrast, is characterized by unexpected metaphors, narrative drama, and psychological depth, that is, something that is peculiar, and his literary teachers are R. L. Stevenson and John Conrad.
Wyndham Lewis: A Unique Voice
Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) was a painter, poet, and novelist. He published his first novel, Tarr, in 1918. T. S. Eliot once called him “the only novelist of his generation who managed to create a new style in prose.” Lewis claimed to be a guru, a teacher of life. At the same time, he was a man of very insightful and intellectually subtle. This is evidenced by his book Time and the Western Man (1927), written in the genre of “history of ideas” – one of the first European Cultural Studies of the “fourth dimension” and its place in the culture of modernism.
Lewis approached literature largely as a painter, for whom there exists first of all the spatial dimension of creativity. Lewis, therefore, principally avoids portraying the inner world of his characters, emphasizing their puppet-like, sharp bend, grotesque appearance. His characters are, without exaggeration, moving, talkative flesh. This image of a person is perhaps the most natural for satire.
In the 1930s, Lewis became interested in Nietzscheanism and wrote pro-fascist pamphlets. The best of his work from this time is the novel The Revenge for Love (1937). Scenes of the Spanish Civil War and the bustle of London’s Socialists serve as a backdrop for the simple and tragic history of the relationship between Victor and Margot, whom the real world avenges with death for the fact that they love each other. The image of love and of living human emotions attaches a dramatism and emotion that determine the special place of this novel in Lewis’s work.