Writers' Town

An angry young man of the left in his day, British Poet and Critic Stephen Spender is now a respected and respectable member of the tight little club that is London's literary set. This week in the New York Times Book Review, while pondering the effects of togetherness on himself and his friends, Spender offered a fascinating guidebook for nonmembers.

Literary London, says Spender, is "not an intellectual center, like Paris, where ideas are endlessly discussed, for the English do not like discussing ideas, and consider it bad form to talk shop ... In the early part of this century the attitude of literary London to men like D. H. Lawrence and Ezra Pound, who took writing, and life, too seriously, was that they were 'bores,' and rather embarrassing. Conversation should not be too serious, no one should attempt to monopolize it, and it should not deal with subjects such as foreign countries, illness, heaven or hell."

Spender, who knows both cities well, also finds London different from New York, "where business is done and writers become successes. For in London success is considered not only vulgar but superfluous, since essentially, in England, the only success that really counts is getting to know the people you want to know. . . Literary London might be defined as a place where writers know each other."

The Indiscreet Tradition. Because of their intimacy, London's writers are a gossipy set with little sense of a public beyond their own circle. "An American editor told me recently how shocked he was to hear English reviewers speak with frivolous disrespect of a novel by a well-known colleague which, in their reviews, they had discussed at length and seriously." The gossip. Spender hazards, grows out of "a long tradition of discreet indiscretion, which is perhaps the virtue, or polite corruption, passed on by an upper class long used to revealing, and covering over, the misdemeanors of royal persons."

To justify the difference between what they write in their reviews and what they tell each other over cocktails, the writers ''would probably say that the novel was not so bad as to be worth attacking, that they liked the author and met him frequently, and to be nice to him in private and publicly nasty would seem uncalled for.'' One example of the deceptive consequences of this attitude was the novels of the late Charles (The Fountain] Morgan. ''His last two or three novels," notes Spender, "were received with almost the same praise as his earlier ones. It was only apparent when he died, from the obituaries, how the bottom had quietly fallen out of his reputation."

But, despite this clubby code, the conflict between friendship and literary honesty can become so painful as to prompt some of London's literary men to take solemn oaths never to review the works of friends. "One notices, for example, that two of the most frequent reviewers, Raymond Mortimer and Cyril Connolly, seem to devote a disproportionate amount of their attention to reviewing books of memoirs of royalty and books about the smaller mammals or the larger spiders." Some reviewers, of course, remain ''insistently outspoken." Here the onus shifts to the editors, one of whom told Spender: "I realize that to employ X to write a review is a hostile act, and I feel unhappy whenever I ask him to deal with a book by one of my friends."

No Brothel. Every so often these arrangements are threatened by literary rebellions like that of the Angry Young Men of the 1950s. But, says Spender: "Just as the Japanese are allowed to behave more or less as they please when they are drunk, English writers are given exceptional latitude when they are young." Result is that "the young writer soon finds that the talk about cliques was nonsense ; there is only one clique, and he is in it."

Spender does credit the London set with maintaining literary standards "of a very high average." "When a young writer, who has mistakenly been accepted, fails to make the grade, he is savagely treated, as happened with Colin Wilson, whose first book was overpraised, his second attacked with fury by those who felt he let the side down." But "no one is loved for rising too far above" the generally agreed-upon standards--which means that "the real English danger is of forming a society of mutual noncompetitiveness." All in all, concludes Spender dryly, "the English literary scene does not resemble so much a battlefield or a brothel as a conspiracy."

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