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Catholic-feudal one. But it is certainly not the case that all or even a majority of the best writers of
the time were Puritans. And more than this, there exist "good" writers whose world-view would in
any age be recognised as false and silly. Edgar Allan Poe is an example. Poe's outlook is at best a
wild romanticism and at worst is not far from being insane in the literal clinical sense. Why is it, then,
that stories like "The Black Cat," "The Tell-tale Heart," "The Fall of the House of Usher" and so
forth, which might very nearly have been written by a lunatic, do not convey a feeling of falsity?
Because they are true within a certain framework, they keep the rules of their own peculiar world,
like a Japanese picture. But it appears that to write successfully about such a world you have got to
believe in it. One sees the difference immediately if one compares Poe's Tales with what is, in my
opinion, an insincere attempt to work up a similar atmosphere, Julian Green's Minuit. 33 The thing that
immediately strikes one about Minuit is that there is no reason why any of the events in it should
happen. Everything is completely arbitrary; there is no emotional sequence. But this is exactly what
one does not feel with Poe's stories. Their maniacal logic, in its own setting, is quite convincing.
When, for instance, the drunkard seizes the black cat and cuts its eye out with his penknife, one knows
exactly why he did it, even to the point of feeling that one would have done the same oneself. It seems
therefore that for a creative writer possession of the "truth" is less important than emotional sincerity.
Even Mr. Upward would not claim that a writer needs nothing beyond a Marxist training. He also
needs talent. But talent, apparently, is a matter of being able to care, of really believing in your
beliefs, whether they are true or false. The difference between, for instance, Céline and Evelyn
Waugh is a difference of emotional intensity. It is the difference between a genuine despair and a
despair that is at least partly a pretence. And with this there goes another consideration which is
perhaps less obvious: that there are occasions when an "untrue" belief is more likely to be sincerely
held than a "true" one.
If one looks at the books of personal reminiscence written about the war of 1914–18, one
notices that nearly all that have remained readable after a lapse of time are written from a passive,
negative angle. They are the records of something completely meaningless, a nightmare happening in a
void. That was not actually the truth about the war, but it was the truth about the individual reaction.
The soldier advancing into a machine-gun barrage or standing waist-deep in a flooded trench knew
only that here was an appalling experience in which he was all but helpless. He was likelier to make
a good book out of his helplessness and his ignorance than out of a pretended power to see the whole
thing in perspective. As for the books that were written during the war itself, the best of them were
nearly all the work of people who simply turned their backs and tried not to notice that the war was
happening. Mr. E. M. Forster 34 has described how in 1917 he read "Prufrock" and others of Eliot's
early poems, and how it heartened him at such a time to get hold of poems that were "innocent of
public-spiritedness":
They sang of private disgust and diffidence, and of people who seemed genuine
because they were unattractive or weak ... Here was a protest, and a feeble one,
and the more congenial for being feeble ... He who could turn aside to complain
of ladies and drawing-rooms preserved a tiny drop of our self-respect, he carried
on the human heritage.
That is very well said. Mr. MacNeice, in the book I have referred to already, quotes this
passage and somewhat smugly adds: