The Novel To-day [antikvár]

THE NOVEL TO-DAY I. Introduction Surveys of this kind (and this one is mainly concerned with catching the nineteen-sixties while they are still young) often begin with expressions of rather surprised pleasure at the continuing vitality of the British novel. If 'vitality' means amplitude of output, surprise in any degree is out of place. The publishers' lists overflow, the weekly flood which breaks on the desks of literary editors is prodigious, and it would, in fact, be surprising if such a plethora did not contain enough grains of achievement to justify a sort of optimism—the recognition of another kind of 'vitality'. The term 'novel' has, thanks chiefly to the influence of France, come to mean any imaginative prose composition long enough to be stitched rather than merely stapled (but, as Philip Toynbee and Eric Linklater have recently reminded us, it need not be limited to prose); it even contains its opposite, the 'anti-novel'. Corresponding to this looseness of defmition is the swelling of the group of those who expect to be called novelists. It is considered almost mandatory for every literate person to attempt at least the one novel which he traditionally lias in him. Remarkable oddities are produced by taxi-drivers, safe-breakers and schoolgirls—^inevitably, in this age of the gimmick, over-publicized. At the same time, a kind of cynical professionalism, having caught a best-selling formula, turns out the same book over and over again. Overwhelmed by books, the critic has more than ever before to keep his wits about him: the quietly meritorious is too often missed among the big shouts: genuine promise may be discouraged. It would seem that, if the novel is not to be debased, we must practise an almost cruel stringency of judgement. What, then, makes a good novelist, a significant novelist? How much are we entitled to ask for in the contemporary