Paradoxy of Modernism by Scholes Robert E

Author:Scholes, Robert E.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2006-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

6

Iridescent Mediocrity: Dornford Yates and Others

The more books we read, the sooner we perceive that the

true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and

that no other task is of any consequence. Obvious though this

should be, how few writers will admit it, or having made

the admission, will be prepared to lay aside the piece of

iridescent mediocrity on which they have embarked!

Sometimes, at great garden parties, literary luncheons, or in the

quiet of an exclusive gunroom, a laugh rings out. The sad, formal

faces for a moment relax and a smaller group is formed within

the larger. They are admirers of Dornford Yates who have found

out each other. We are badly organized, we know little about

our hero, but we appreciate fine writing when we come across

it, and a wit that is ageless united to a courtesy that is extinct.

There is, as you will have noticed, a striking contradiction between these two views. The first seems to set out the official program of High Modernism, while the second praises the work of a writer who never approached canonization in the Modernist pantheon. In fact, that gorgeous phrase “iridescent mediocrity” in the first statement might seem a particularly apt description of “the Berry volumes of Dornford Yates,” which are the subject of the second. The first of these pronouncements was made by Cyril Connolly. It is from the opening paragraph of his extended literary meditation, The Unquiet Grave. The second statement, as it happens, was also made by Connolly, at about the same time. It appeared in an essay called “The Novel-Addict’s Cupboard,” collected in The Condemned Playground. Clearly Connolly was a master of negative capability, holding two conflicting ideas in mind with consummate ease. Even the titles of these two books stand in eerie opposition to one another. But I bring these two passages together not to embarrass the shade of Connolly, who has, no doubt, greater things to atone for, but to point out something about the literature and doctrine of High Modernism itself.

Connolly, we may need to remind ourselves, was one of the few writers of his time to understand what James Joyce’s Ulysses was all about. His essay “The Position of Joyce,” written in 1929 and collected in the same volume as the remarks on Dornford Yates, is an eloquent argument for all of Joyce’s work, including the experimental Work in Progress. In this essay, Connolly makes a very persuasive case for Ulysses as a novel in which the central emotion is “remorse.” He really did understand both Joyce in particular and Modernism in general. His remark on the necessity of producing masterpieces is quintessentially Modernist. It describes what Joyce, Eliot, Ford, and Pound, for example, all thought they were doing. And Connolly, who edited one of the best literary magazines of the forties, Horizon, fully sympathized with the projects of those High Modernist writers and others who shared their aspirations.

How does it happen, then, that a person so committed to the High Modernist enterprise should single out for special praise a writer like Dornford Yates (the pen name of C.

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