Critical Survey

‘All is not dead’ originates from a lesser-known sonnet printed in Larkin’s Collected Poems, entitled ‘A slight relax of air where cold was’. The reason behind the poet’s refusal to print it in an individual collection is indicated by his comment in the margin of the manuscript version: ‘Look at Keats silly old fool’ (MS 6, 7.i.62). Despite Larkin’s harsh evaluation of its literary value when contrasted with a ‘master’ sonneteer, it deserves citing in full, since it illustrates both the critical debates that now surround his work, and my argument that he struggles with humanism in a post-war context

In spite of recent post-modernist challenges to the binary Cartesian spatio-temporal model, the concept of space – how it is produced, and how we situate ourselves within it – still tends to be eclipsed by the more dynamic and fluid concept of time. Space is cumbersomely solid compared with a temporality that has been attractively insubstantial, at least since the onset of modernism: it carries rather old-fashioned suggestions not only of continuity and stability, but also of existing as something apart from and different from the lives and events which find their location in it. For as long as such distinctions are maintained, the interdependent relations which produce and determine our social and cultural spaces remain overlooked. These are false distinctions which distort a fuller understanding of the relations between writer, text and external world, and they are particularly damaging to someone like John Betjeman, whose work has come to be identified with a specifically nostalgic world of Englishness. It is precisely this familiar world that needs to become the location for a revision of Betjeman and the production of English space.

‘I wrote the script and directed it. My name is Orson Welles.’ These words, spoken by the director over a shot of a microphone at the end of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), resonate far beyond their ostensible function of a delayed credit sequence. In the first place, to connoisseurs of Welles’s opus, this is highly ironic: the film for which the director claims entire credit was the first and, to many, the worst case of an endless series of studio cuts, recuts and various tamperings with Welles’s films that was to continue nagging the director throughout his career. The voice-over, therefore, becomes the signifier of a ghost, a voice claiming authorship for a text that no longer exists – the original, unmutilated Ambersons – , or the almost real signature of a fictional author. The real Orson Welles was not the director of this film. But then, who is this ‘Orson Welles’ who addresses the spectator from the fringes of the film?

Since the considerable commercial and critical success of Piaf by Pam Gems in 1978 and Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus in 1979, the British stage has been swept by a wave of plays about famous artists. That trend has not yet come to an end. Rather than offering a representative interpretation of one or more of these plays, either as text or in performance, I would like to discuss an aspect of the creative writing process: what inspires dramatists to write about fellow-artists? I will argue that the writing of plays about artists has to be located in a wider context of developments in society over the last twenty years rather than restricted to theatre in particular or even the arts in general.

Laying Something Down

The Ruin

Noir

Lip-Reading

Snake Words

I Wish I Had Asked

Five Views of the Hinterland

The Gilded Ones

Abbreviated: An Encrypted Alphabet for Europe’s Jewry

Bourgeois Diaspora 1979–1992

Russell Reising, Loose Ends: Closure and Crisis in the American Social Text (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1996), £52.50 cloth, £16.95 paperback, ISBN 0-8223-1891-1.

Linda Simon, Gertrude Stein Remembered (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1994; UK Publication date: October 1997), £13.95, ISBN 0-8032-9248-1 (PB).

Bertolt Brecht, War Primer, translated and edited with an afterword and notes by John Willett, Libris Press, 1998, £35 hardback, ISBN 1-870352-21-1.

Alison Byerly, Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth- Century Literature, Cambridge, New York and Oxford: Cambridge University Press, 1997, £35 hardback, ISBN 05-21-581168.

Jenny Hartley, Millions Like Us: British Women’s Fiction of the Second World War, London: Virago, 1997, £14.99 paperback, ISBN 1-86049-080-8.

Gill Plain, Women’s Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power and Resistance, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996, £14.99 paperback, ISBN 0 7486 0661 0.

Joseph Carroll, Evolution and Literary Theory, University of Missouri Press, 1995, ISBN 0 8262 0979 3.

Dagmar C.G. Lorenz, Keepers of the Motherland, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1997, pp. xxii + 402, £52.50, ISBN 0-8032-2917-8.

Howard Barker: Arguments For A Theatre (Third Edition), ISBN 0-7190-5249-1, paperback.

Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, On the Edge of an Island, 1997, Bloodaxe, ISBN: 1-85224-405-4.

Gillian Ferguson, Air for Sleeping Fish, 1997, Bloodaxe, ISBN:1-85224-416-X.

Katie Donovan, Entering the Mare, 1997, Bloodaxe, ISBN:1-85224-429-1.

John Kinsella, The Hunt & Other Poems, Bloodaxe Books, £7.95, ISBN 1-85224-441-0

David Duncombe, Pencilling In, Redbeck Press, 1997, £3.95, ISBN 0-946980-42-X.

Hugh Dunkerley, Walking to the Fire Tower Redbeck Press, 1997, £3.95, ISBN 0-946980-44-6, £3.95.

Martin Edwards, Coconut Heart Redbeck Press, 1997, £3.95, ISBN 0-946980-45-4, £3.95

Anne Rouse, Timing, Bloodaxe Books, 1997

Ruth Fainlight, Sugar Paper Blue, Bloodaxe Books, 1997

Jane Holland, The Brief History of a Disreputable Woman, Bloodaxe Books, 1997

Philip Ramp, Jonz, Translated by Lydia Stephanou, Athens, 1997, Bilingual Edition.

Glyn Wright, Shindig, Bloodaxe, £6.95, ISBN 1-85224-409-7.

Notes on contributors