Social Delinquency in Modern Literature

[an unsigned report]

At a meeting of the Literary Society held at St. Margaret’s College on July 10, the guest speaker for the year, Mr James K. Baxter, delivered an address on ‘Social Delinquency in Modern Literature’. Mr P.A. Smithells presided, and introduced Mr Baxter, who expressed his pleasure at returning to Dunedin to address the Society.

Mr Baxter opened his address by referring to Joyce Cary’s Charlie is My Darling, which was a study in the delinquency of a boy evacuated during the war, from town to country. Cary had been asked how he knew so much about juvenile delinquency, and had replied that his knowledge came from his own childhood. All children were, in fact, delinquent. In this sense delinquency means all that experience and expression which was outside the accepted codes of society – such things as sledging, exploring caves, robbing turnip-fields or orchards, or actual vandalism. Cary showed that his boy- hero’s criminal delinquency, his other activities of the sort mentioned above, and certain creative possibilities that he also possessed, were all part of the one general attitude; and he implied criticism of society as responsible for the delinquent form in which these possibilities were actually expressed.

The attitude of writers to delinquency had changed in recent literature. In Jonathan Wilde Fielding had implied throughout moral criticism of his hero by social standards; in Oliver Twist one was seldom in doubt whether any character was on the side of good or bad, which for Dickens meant respectability or the underworld. But in Brighton Rock the values upheld by the Church cut across those upheld by society: Pinkie was a murderer and something of a monster, yet his girl-friend Rose was in some respects presented as a character more estimable than the law-abiding but irreligious Ida, who in the end brought Pinkie to justice. Not all modern writers shared in this change, which was really a change in their attitude to society; a vast number of middle-brow novels and a good deal of verse did not touch on it at all. But the fact that modern writers of primary importance were uneasy on this question could be illustrated from Cary, Greene, Albert Camus, James Joyce and Herman Melville, among others.

Among the grounds for this change of feeling about social codes the importance of the wars could not be over-estimated. The quietness of thepage 89 pre-war world of Howard’s End, like something seen through glass, had been shaken after 1914. Many writers had come to look on society as no longer a good father, but one not to be trusted, feeling that they had to work out their own codes for themselves. This attitude had been further strengthened by the second war; it was illustrated by a macabre and terrible Italian story by Vitaliano Brancati, ‘Sebastiana’, which seemed to say that in a world at war all that innocence could do for safety was to die, and by the contrast between All Quiet on the Western Front and The Naked and the Dead, a contrast between idealism and nihilism. The same change was even more clearly visible in the poetry of the two wars. Whereas Owen and especially Sassoon had been social critics, the poets of the second war were much more individualistic and judged on purely personal criteria. This was shown in such a poem as Roy Fuller’s ‘Spring 1942’:

Once as we were sitting by
The falling sun, the thickening air,
The chaplain came against the sky
And quietly took a vacant chair.
And under the tobacco smoke:
‘Freedom’, he said and ‘Good’ and ‘Duty’.
We stared as though a savage spoke.
The scene took on a singular beauty.
And we made no reply to that
Obscure, remote communication,
But only stared at where the flat
Meadow dissolved in vegetation.
And thought: O sick, insatiable
And constant lust; O death, our future;
O revolution in the whole
Of human use of man and nature!

The chaplain stood in some degree for the social code, and it was as if Fuller were accusing society of delinquency. In a similar, a social way, Karl Shapiro’s ‘Nostalgia’ expressed only the inevitable death of many men and the coarsening effect of war, while the Australian, John Manifold, in ‘The Tomb of Lieutenant John Learmonth, A.I.F.’ celebrated the courage of the solitary man, explicitly rejecting all social ideals.

In addition, however, to this quarrel with social standards, there was also some measure of collision with the social authorities who enforce them. In Charlie is My Darling the faults were on the side of the probation officer as well as on that of the boy Charlie; in Billy Budd the figure of natural innocence was unjustly accused, and Melville, like Fuller, went out of his way to take a crack at the chaplain. There seemed to be a feeling in somepage 90 minds that the Church had betrayed her function by identifying herself with the repressive social forces, as was suggested by a passage in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The growing adolescent had to form his own opinions on sex, religion, and politics; but he might go further than his growth demanded and reject all moral authority. Such was, as far as it was clear at all, the position of the existentialists. Authority condemns us all anyway, said Camus in The Outsider, so let us reject it, and take as a type for all humanity the condemned criminal. In such a work delinquency was not merely tolerated but entirely justified.

In summing up, Mr Baxter concluded: ‘The different attitude to delinquency springs from a recognition that conflict with social morals and the rejection of some authority is an inevitable part of the growth of any individual. Part of each person’s code of morals in fact belongs to the nursery. The strongest feeling among writers today seems to be that the State is by no means an absolute authority; yet in rejecting this authority, they suffer great insecurity. For the criminal is a loser in his conflict with society insofar as his creative powers have been turned to negative uses. This occurs often because he cannot break the deadlock between too narrow a code and the life that will not be contained by it. On the other hand, the social conformist is not likely to be a good writer. Criticism and growth are essential. The tension is easier for someone who accepts, as I do, the doctrines of the Christian Church. Yet there also one must go on thinking, and the university is a place where many people, however painfully, begin to think and to grow.’

[The following poem accompanied the report]

Song: Drink and the Devil

Oh I was the prettiest boy you could paint,
My father a parson, my mother, a saint,
From which I might follow as day does on night
That drink and the devil are all my delight.

They taught me that none but the married should kiss;
But a widow of forty she proved them amiss;
I warrant she found me a pupil most bright,
For drink and the devil were all my delight.

To make me a doctor they sent me to school,
But the learned professors they held me a fool,
For a pub was my college, a racebook my light,
And drink and the devil were all my delight.

page 91

The publican’s daughter I courted and won;
A month after marriage she bore me a son.
When her old man departed, my sorrow was light –
For drink and the devil were all my delight.

I sit now in clover and watch the mugs come
With a thick wad of bank notes stuck under my bum
And to the young girls I am always polite –
For drink and the devil were all my delight.

So Tom, Dick and Harry, if you would win fame
With a publican’s belly and Sir to your name,
Become a horse owner and do what is right,
Let drink and the devil be all your delight. (Uncollected)

1952 (54)