No Time for Fads

MODERN BRITISH WRITING (320 pp.)--Edited by Denys Val Baker--Vanguard1 ($3.50).

This anthology of recently written British poetry, fiction and criticism is a painfully faithful reflection of current British life: drab, grey, intelligent, courageous.

With an occasional exception, the writing does not shine. Exceptions: George Orwell's deadly attack on the gibberish-jargon of political and literary cliche-journalism, calculated to give hacks the world over the stammers and the shakes; Dylan Thomas' intoxicated poetry, difficult and dense but flashing sparks of overwhelming insight.

These Britons write about the war--perhaps with too much conventionality and decorjum, but at least they don't flee, like so many American fictioneers, from the major experience of the age. And while not so witty or brash or technically, ambidextrous as some of the American advance guardists, the British don't trifle with literary fads; they are in too deep a mess to be able to fool with that sort of thing, and they know it.

When the selections are taken as individual units, they flounder--the poetry worst of all. Most of the British poets here anthologized seem cowed by the fashions of up-to-the-minute taste. Either they are still unrecovered from their burns from the Auden-Spender firecracker of the '30s (Marx, Freud, Oxford, pathos and wisecracks), or they have slumped into a pale, desiccated romanticism ("Sleep, my love, now love is over. . . . Tender about you, my arms will cover").

The fiction is livelier. James Hanley's The Road, a tender tale of a sailor's discovery that his family has been blitzed, and Anna Kavan's Face of My People, a pathos-laden account of a neurotic veteran's resistance to psychoanalytical probing ("They've taken everything; let them not take my silence") are good, solid if not world-shaking stories. Also worth watching is William Sansom, who can't yet create characters but who has a captivating way with machinery.

Probably most intriguing to the U.S. reader are the rich specimens mined from out-of-the-way pockets of the British isles. If E. Glyn Lewis' essay on Welsh literature and Rhys Davies' rich, Chaucerian story about a sin-hunting minister are at all representative, this section is having a lively cultural revival. Precisely why this nook of the world should be so awake when so many other parts of it are dozing will prove a neat problem for some future historian.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.