page 22

Prose Judgments 1941

In The Writer's Day, doses stiff or moderate of careerism conciliated us in our twenties. We were out to make good, and like our elders we believed in that 'Shrieking, bawdy thing called Success' (Sinclair Lewis). We were restive, we suffered from the emotional teething troubles of adolescence, but the sense of frustration, though it irked, did not rankle. The twenty pluses of today suffer much more acutely. A sour soil clogs their sap, and they feel compelled to uproot themselves. Never perhaps has there been such literature of protest as is being written by and for youth today.

This is a hopeful symptom. Whether smoothly phrased as a Change of Heart or a New Order, or bluntly advocated as a 'General Overturn,' a profound moral change is felt to be necessary. If youth were not undergoing the throes of this change, it would be dead indeed—a corpse bound to a corpse.

In every one of these scraps of prose it is easy to find passages symptomatic of a militant antagonism to the sorry scheme of things. Nor is the Negation of Negations lacking. In some cases there is a fear that even Realism may be only a plausible escape from Escapism.

The thinking done round this theme strikes one reader (not a judge—judges and competitions are preposterous) as good. Those people, matured and maybe stereotyped in time-honoured folk ways, should confront and try to refute it. They have concrete proof that the world fashioned by competitive materialism is tumbling about their ears. Of this fact Youth's thinking will provide a theoretical confirmation. And fact is only potent and salutary to the extent that it is used as raw material from which to formulate key theories.

If it be rejoined that only a handful of Victoria College students go in for a Spike Prose Competition, the sur-rejoinder is that these are the articulate minority and, therefore, the people to be noticed. Their apocalyptic view is, moreover, confirmed by our contemporary poets, those starvelings of an age obsessed with price indices and restricted food quotas. Thank Heaven, is the feeling of one ex-teacher, that I am no longer responsible for the handouts palmed off in the name of learning to these misfed and querulous minds! What a diet of shrivelled palimpsests for greedy and growing intellects!

Assessed for their thought value, one therefore rates these scrappy essays high. Their quality as prose is a different matter. A prose style, if Mencken is right, is the last product of cultural maturity. It rarely emerges from the chrysalis before the late thirties. It grows in a soil not merely hurriedly spaded over, but laboriously trenched. And it is a style. That is, it is as characteristic of the writer as his handwriting. It is a mental gait comparable in its uniqueness to his bodily gait. It may be bad, but, bad or good, it is of a piece with its begetter.

page 23

In the opinion of the writer (who, of course, is only one person) none of these pieces of prose has Style. Many of them reflect influences, and many of them are clear and cogent. The best of them go straight at the job of getting across what the writer has to say.

The three selected as most worthwhile in content—as showing the greatest ability to think on paper—are: —

Literature Under Imperialism
Stalin Worship and
With the Wind

These three are bracketed equal.

A suggestion, if there is space for it. Why should not such writings, signed or unsigned, be placed in a receptacle where in Ms. form they would be available to all who cared to read them? If some readers chose to comment or rejoin, so much the better. Such a procedure would be, as it were, a leafage sprouting on the one branch of Anglo-Saxon still living.