"Reflections From A Village" 1969 SWINNERTON, Frank

SWINNERTON, Frank

Frank Arthur Swinnerton was an English novelist, critic, biographer and essayist.

He was the author of more than 50 books, and as a publisher's editor helped other writers including Aldous Huxley and Lytton Strachey. His long life and career in publishing made him one of the last links with the generation of writers that included H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett.

[196] pp.

Hutchinson of London

1969

Third Impression

8 1/2" x 5 5/8"

Jacket and text decorations by J.S. Goodall

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A critic reviewing “Reflections From a Village” in anything but a literary periodical could hardly avoid asking himself for whose benefit his opinions were offered. Not for the author's-he stopped asking for press clippings during World War I. Not for the benefit of the teenagers who mill around the filing cabinets of our more capacious public libraries. (I recently counted 42 copies of Frank Swinnerton's novels, a phalanx that may not have been dusty but certainly looked inert, in that section that remains perennially ungrazed by the education explosion.) Not for the benefit of the dramatists, scenarists and adapters who have seldom bothered to explore his possibilities for their particular bag. And least of all to the ad- vantage of the trim, commuting secretaries who appear to be cheevering their way up the dikes of exurban anthropology within hours of a paperback edition. It is more than 50 years since H. G. Wells wrote of Mr. Swinnerton (1884-) that he "sees life and renders it with a steadiness and detachment and patience quite foreign to my disposition. He has no underlying motive. He sees and tells. • He does not want you or anyone to do anything." Wells's judgment, a sound one then, has been incontestable ever since. Of that handful of Edwardian writers who are still alive, none has been as rigorous as Swinnerton in refusing to subjectify his experiences. Few have been as aloof from controversy, as indifferent to acclaim. If this single-minded devotion to his craft has insulated him from the clamor and the limelight of best-sellerdom, it must have been costly to him in other ways. But the question of "Who reads X nowadays?" is becoming a tedious one, and no more will be said on that topic as it relates to Mr. Swinnerton. The village of his title is Cranleigh, a Surrey community that has been the Swinnertons' home since the 1920's. It is one of those places that a vastly expanded London has gnawed at but failed to swallow, a village in which the remnants of rural life are sometimes more obvious than in large areas of the Midlands or the North. Given its setting, the book is free from that steamy poeticism such memoirs are apt to perpetrate -and, for all its apparent formlessness, it is not haphazardly put together. Country life and characters alternate with backward glances at the London scene. There is, or should be, something for everyone here, and the prose moves smoothly and faultlessly from one rumination to the next. If the book has a weakness, it is in the anecdotes. Some are more droll than others (there is an amusing story about drunken bees), but English rustic humor has never convulsed anybody, and these specimens are far from the best, even of their kind. The London episodes, which are more to my own taste, evoke with hardly more than a flick of the pen a city so distant from our present age that it almost belongs to folklore. When Mr. Swinnerton was born (he is a Londoner but not a Cockney) the capital was post-Dickensian by less than 20 years. Early in the book the point is made that this hiatus was a strangely stagnant one. Sometime between the full impetus of the Industrial Revolution and the death of Queen Victoria, the tempo of change seems to have slowed down. Swinnerton could walk pretty much the same streets and witness the same sights as Dickens did. When he and his wife took possession of their cottage, they were looked after by a housekeeper who had once earned only a shilling a week. The author, who has already written frequently and at length about the best-known novelists of his generation, is rather sparing this time round with literary reminiscence. He recalls Arnold Bennett and Sir Philip Gibbs (both firm friends of his), and there are vignettes of other contemporaries. It is not until the penultimate chapter-"Plea for Contentment" - that we come upon the one truly shocking revelation in the book. In his day, he tells us, “only four men, from Norman Douglas to James Agate, were believed to be homosexuals. We knew nothing of Maugham's lately exaggerated abnormality, and, of course, nothing of the fevers revealed in a recent biography of Lytton Strachey and his companions." Mr. Swinnerton, as noted above, has been publishing books for quite a while. A few more disclosures like that, and he'll be lucky to get his next manuscript in print.