A Guide to Twentieth Century Literature in English

Harry Blamires

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000287646
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1983, A Guide to Twentieth Century Literature in English is a detailed and comprehensive guide containing over 500 entries on individual writers from countries including Africa, Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and the UK.

The book contains substantial articles relating to major novelists, poets, and dramatists of the age, as well as a wealth of information on the work of lesser-known writers and the part they have played in cultural history. It focuses in detail on the character and quality of the literature itself, highlighting what is distinctive in the work of the writers being discussed and providing key biographical and contextual details.

A Guide to Twentieth Century Literature in English is ideal for those with an interest in the twentieth century literary scene and the history of literature more broadly.

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SACKVILLE-WEST, VICTORIA (1892-1962). Novelist and poet, born and brought up at Knole, near Sevenoaks, Kent, the palatial ancestral home which the Sackvilles had owned since the sixteenth century and which was to exercise a lifelong spell on her imagination. 'Vita' married Harold Nicolson (q.v.) in 1913. She accompanied her husband on his diplomatic postings to Constantinople and Tehran, she bore two sons and the marriage was ultimately an unshakeable one, but Vita's turbulent relationship with Violet Trefusis caused serious tension between 1918 and 1921 (see Nigel Nicolson, Portrait of a Marriage, 1973). Her most celebrated work in verse was The Land (1926), a pastoral poem that moves through the seasons, celebrating the life of the Kent countryside in the manner of Virgil's Georgics. Collected Poems came out in 1933. Vita made her début as a novelist with Heritage (1919), but it was The Edwardians (1930) and All Passion Spent (1931) that brought big-scale literary success. The Edwardians is an invaluable first-hand picture of life in a ducal residence such as Knole in the years following 1905 when the younger generation first sensed the possible impermanence of the feudal tradition that history had imposed on them. The social and moral codes of the Edwardians are neatly analysed ('Appearances must be respected, though morals might be neglected'; "Thou shalt not be found out'; 'Only the vulgar divorce'). All Passion Spent is a study of an octogenarian widow, Lady Slane, whose life of dutiful devotion to her husband has precluded the fulfilment of her own early artistic ambitions. Vita's own private and family problems are reflected within these books. Her non-fiction output includes Knole and the Sackvilles (1923), an account of the ancestral home. Passage to Teheran (1926) and the biography Aphra Behn (1927). Virginia Woolf's (q.v.) affection for Vita is expressed in the imaginative portrayal of her in Orlando.

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SAHGAL, NYANTARA {née Pandit) (1927-). Journalist and novelist, born in Allahabad, India. She graduated in history from Wellesley College, Massachusetts in 1947. A daughter of Nehru's sister, her upbringing was permeated with Gandhi's ideals; she describes it in Prison and Chocolate Cake (1954). The tensions arising from her 1949 marriage into an affluent business family remote from Gandhian principles are perceptible in another autobiographical book, From Fear Set Free (1962). She began serious journalism in 1965: divorce came in 1967.

Her well-written novels constitute an intellectual repository of the dedicated, humane Gandhian values that overthrew imperialism, and she examines, in Jasbir Jain's words, 'the men and women behind political ideas and actions' [Nyantara Sahgal, 1978). In A Time to Be Happy (1958) and This Time of Morning (1965) politics fail to cohere satisfactorily with the major characters' troublous love stories, but Storm in Chandigarh (1969) successfully dramatizes the effacement of the old idealistic politicians in Punjab by new men of opportunism. The Day in Shadow (1971) searchingly anatomizes the new Indian leadership who proclaim 'time to bury Gandhi'. A Situation in New Delhi (1977), her most cogent fictional expression of Gandhian political morality, examines various concepts of revolution.

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ST OMER, GARTH (1940?-). Novelist, born in Castries, St Lucia, who graduated in French from the University of the West Indies, Jamaica. For some years he lived in turn in France, Ghana and Britain.

St Omer's is the starkest, bleakest West Indian vision of the moral paralysis that neo-colonialism induces in sensitive minds. As Jacqueline Kaye observes, he is influenced by the French existentialists, and his characters perform various masquerades to hide their utter futility. Except in 'Syrop', a novella published in Introduction 2 (Faber. 1964). his major figures rebelliously refuse to take the places in neo-colonial society for which they have been educated, but can find no meaningful alternative. A Room on the Hill (1968). Nor Any Country (1969), J—, Black Bam and the Masqueraders (1972), and the two novellas in Shades of Grey (1968) are closely related in situation, characterization and tone; only Breville in Nor Any Country performs an act of reconciliation with other individuals in what G. Moore regards as an attempt to redeem his past. This flicker is dowsed by the prevailing mood of the next novel: 'We not only make cakes of mud. We eat them as well.'

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SAINTSBURY, GEORGE (1845-1933). Literary historian and critic, born in Southampton, Hampshire, educated at King's College School. London, and Merton College, Oxford. He was schoolmaster, then journalist and eventually Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at Edinburgh University. He read omnivorously and wrote copiously about what he read. Publicatons include A Short History of English Literature (1898). A History of Criticism (three volumes, 1900-4) and The Peace of the Augustans (1916). Saintsbury has been described as 'the first and in many ways the greatest of the long line of academic critics who, in the last 60 years or so, have turned the study of English Literature into a humanistic discipline for undergraduates which may, in the long run, replace Latin and Greek' (G.S. Fraser, The Modern Writer and His World, 1964).

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SAKI (pseudonym of Hector Hugh Munro) (1870-1916). Short-story writer, born in Burma, son of a police officer and brought up by maiden aunts in Devonshire, He started a career in the Burma Police which failure of health quickly terminated. He then turned to journalism and writing. As a correspondent he visited the Balkans, Warsaw, St Petersburg and Paris, then settled in Surrey. Hugh Walpole (q.v.) tells how 'he was to be met with at country houses and London parties, apparently rather cynical, rather idle, and taking life so gently that he might hardly be said to be taking it at all' (quoted in The Bodley Head Saki, 1963, ed. J.W. Lambert), Reginald (1904) gathered together fifteen sketches that had appeared in the Westminster Gazette: they record the conversation of a frivolous, cynical, urbane young man. Reginald in Russia (1910) expands sketches into something more like 'stories', continuing to make game of society life. The Chronicles of Clovis (1911) and Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914) bring Saki's short-story technique to maturity. Here and in the book-length story, The Unbearable Bassington (1912), Saki deals satirically with the vagaries and hypocrisies of high living, at his best achieving a witty epigrammatic bite in the mode of Wilde. ('To be clever in the afternoon argues that one is dining nowhere in the evening.') The mannered polysyllabic narrative style is much of its period, but the dialogue of society women, especially when scoring bitchily off one another, is often hilarious, and the gift of amusing paradox a rare one. ('The art of public life consists to a great extent of knowing exactly where to stop and going a bit further.') When William Came (1914) pictures an England under German occupation. Saki enlisted as a private at the age of 44 and was killed on the Western Front. The wartime sketches, The Square Egg. were published posthumously (1924). There is enough direct and oblique evidence of mysogyny and of interest in cruelty and bloodthirstiness to make Saki's life and works a happy hunting-ground for psychoanalytical critics. ('I'm God! I'm going to destroy the world', he shouted as a boy as he chased his sister round the nursery with a burning hearth-brush.)

A.J. Langguth includes 'Six Short Stories Never Before Collected' in his Saki: A Life of Hector Hugh Munro (1982).

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SALKEY, ANDREW (1928-). Novelist, born in Colon, Panama. He attended Jamaican schools and London University, graduating in 1955. From 1952 he worked variously for BBC radio, which broadcast his plays and poems. He won the Deutscher Kinderbuchpreis (1967) for such outstanding children's novels as Hurricane (1964), Earthquake (1965) and Drought (1966). He has edited many anthologies.

Salkey's zestful but sceptical novels emphasize the bleak West Indian experience of poverty at home and ghetto-culture in London. A Quality of Violence (1959), like Lamming's (q.v.) Season of Adventure and Sylvia Wynter's The Hills of Hebron (1962), vividly describes pocomania spirit possession, including mutual flagellation to the death, though Salkey's central theme is human irrationality. In Escape to an Autumn Pavement (1960), more ambitious style and structure almost disguise the aridity of a West Indian's initiation into London life and sex. The Late Emancipation of Jerry Stover (1968) reveals individualist freedom as unavailing in the continuing colonialism of Jamaican politics. Abused by English society, the Jamaican hero of The Adventures of Catullus Kelly (1969) goes insane, while Come Home, Michael Heartland (1976), though sympathetic to 'the knife thrust of Black consciousness' in Brixton, questions its outcome. Salkey has also published poetry, e.g. In the Hills Where Her Dreams Live (1979) and Away (1980).

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SANSOM, WILLIAM (1912-76). Novelist and short-story writer, educated at Uppingham, Leicestershire. He worked in a bank, then in advertising, till he joined the National Fire Service on the outbreak of the Second World War. His first stories drew on experience of the London blitz (see Fireman Flower, 1944): twenty years later The Stories of William Sansom (1963) selected thirty-three tales from the various collections to date, and Elizabeth Bowen (q.v.) introduced them enthusiastically ('To a point, all Sansom stories are scenic stories. . . . The substance of a Sansom story is sensation. . . . A Sansom story is a tour de force'). Sansom was less successful as a novelist. The Body (1949) has been highly praised for its descriptions of parts of London. It is a study of a simple-minded middle-aged husband whose escalating tendency to self-immolation fabricates tormenting jealousy on the basis of a brash neighbour's interest in his wife. Among later novels are A Bed of Roses (1954), The Loving Eye (1956) and The Cautious Heart (1958). The Last Hours of Sandra Lee (1961) reworks Sansom's most characteristic vein, blanketing the heroine's desperation with a jaded ironic nonchalance. Sandra Lee, innocent office girl of 21, is reluctant to plunge into the permanent security of affectionate marriage until she has acquired 'some kind of past with which to face the future' ('You're a good girl who wants to be bad', her friend tells her).

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SARGESON, FRANK (1903-82). Short-story writer and novelist, born in Hamilton, New Zealand, and educated at the University of New Zealand, Canterbury. His early works arose out of his experience of the 1930s Depression, which 'put a sort of community into life' in spite of the hardships. They are deceptively simple monologues which, by the artful employment of a naive narrator, achieve a poignant tension between surface story and perceived meaning: 'this new way of writing consisted in writing sentences which suggested more than they said'. This indirect, understated and ironic method found a realistic basis in the spare colloquialisms of local speech: 'I was as much excited by the thought of the advance 1 had made towards bringing an appropriate New Zealand language to light as I was by the substance of the story'. Conversations with My Uncle (1936) collected these early short stories and was followed by A Man and his Wife (1940). After That Summer and Other stories (1946) technique and subject matter became more varied, the shift in focus outgrowing the stock-character of the laconic rural underdog established by the earlier stories and reflecting an increasingly complex postwar society in New Zealand. I For One (1952) represented a decided break with his earlier pattern of writings which, although they were quickly recognized as classics, were criticized by some as both constricting his talents as a writer and presenting a one-sided picture of New Zealand life. This novel, set in 1950, follows the frustrations of a schoolmistress by presenting her diary entries for the three months following the death of her father; it was a convincing demonstration of his new-found breadth as a writer. Memoirs of a Peon (1965) was 'a picaresque novel' which took the form of reminiscences by a former lady-killer. The blend of human comedy, ironic charting of New Zealand social manners in the 1920s and complex satire (directed as much at the pedantically facetious narrator as at the milieu he describes) produced a highly original book which further enhanced his stature as a writer: 'I realized that if I could assume the mask of a more literate person it opened up a great deal more'. I Saw in My Dream (1949) expanded an earlier story of 1945 ('When the Wind Blows') in exploring the contradictions between a puritan upbringing and the dominant yet superficial values of an acquisitive society. The book fails largely because of greater complexity in the (later) second section which squares oddly with characters already sketched. The theme has direct New Zealand relevance, as the poet James K. Baxter (q.v.) has observed, and was pursued further in The Hangover (1967), a more tightly constructed work and the first novel with an urban setting. Joy of the Worm (1969), a tragi-comic novel which depicted the effects of parental domination, also dealt with emergence from the protective, religious peace of childhood into the problems of adulthood, while the title story of Man of England Now (1972) presented New Zealand society over the previous fifty years through the eyes of a young English migrant. An old people's home was the setting for Sunset Village (1976). The memoir trilogy, Once is Enough (1972), More than Enough (1975) and Never Enough (1978), provides a good introduction to his life and work. Arguably the outstanding New Zealand prose writer of his time, in his early work Sargeson established a worldwide reputation which did much to enable other New Zealand writers to regard the novel as a possible form; his own later work built on this foundation but extended the range and form of comment so that his published works now constitute a major study of the society of which he was a lively part all his life.

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SASSOON, SIEGFRIED (Captain Siegfried Loraine Sassoon, CBE, MC) (1886-1967). Poet and prose writer, born in the Kentish Weald and brought up there by his mother who had separated from her husband. She was a Thornycroft, daughter of Thomas Thornycroft, sculptor, sister of Sir John, the naval architect, and of Sir Hamo, sculptor. The Sassoons were Jews with social and financial status. ('Ever since I could remember, I had been remotely aware of a lot of rich Sassoon relations. I had great-uncles galore, whom I have never met and they all knew the Prince of Wales' - The Old Century.) Siegfried was educated privately at home, then at Marlborough and at Cambridge, which he left without a degree, for he was too interested in poetry and sport to work at law. The war poetry which catapulted him into fame must not, for all its importance, be overvalued in relation to the extraordinary prose output which provides an essential commentary upon it. He wrote two autobiographical trilogies. The first is a semi-fictionalized record in which Sassoon figures as George Sherston: Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) and Sherston's Progress (1936). The three were issued together as The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston* in 1937. But the presentation of a soldier-huntsman could scarcely do full justice to the inner life of a soldier-poet and Sassoon wrote a second and factual series of memoirs: The Old Century and Seven More Years (1938), The Weald of Youth (1942) and Siegfried's Journey, 1916-1920 (1945), Less even in accomplishment perhaps as a whole than the Sherston trilogy, and inevitably affected adversely at times by the necessity to go over the same ground twice, the volumes are packed with rich evocations of persons and events and also constitute 'an outline of my mental history'. The Old Century recaptures childhood with a prose artistry that blends the re-minted voice of spontaneous childhood simplicity in counterpoint with the idiom of adult reflection. Sassoon's humour (as well as his searing gravities) resides in just such stylistic dualities.

The Weald of Youth records the entry into poethood. Sassoon issued privately printed collections before the war but came to see that his 'pseudo-archaic preciosities' bypassed the real physical world. He made a preliminary breakthrough with The Daffodil Murderer [1913). which began as a parody of Masefield's The Everlasting Mercy and turned into a not unflattering pastiche. So far 'one half of me was hunting-field and the other was gentleman writer'. The war wrpught the change. From experience as a second lieutenant in the trenches on the Somme (where he won the MC) he came home on sick leave in 1916. It is at this point that Siegfried's Journey begins the astonishing story that reached its climax after Sassoon came back to England a second time with a shoulder wound from the Battle of Arras in 1917. The gap between the real war and the home picture of it tormented him. The torment fused with a newly discovered 'talent for satirical epigram' to produce war poems which exploded the established myths of heroic militarism. The work of this, the crucial phase of Sassoon's poetic output, is represented by The Old Huntsman and Other Poems (1917), Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918), The War Poems (1919) and Picture Show (1919). But Sassoon's revulsion against the war was not just a literary matter. He issued a protest against the prolongation of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of authors by country
• Preface and acknowledgements
• A
• B
• C
• D
• E
• F
• G
• H
• I
• J
• K
• L
• M
• N
• O
• P
• Q
• R
• S
• T
• U
• V
• W
• Y