English literature (not much)

I rearranged my English fiction and poetry today. It’s a rather scruffy collection, probably half of it inherited: including pre-war German editions of Shaw and Somerset Maugham, odd books of my father’s, others I was given as part-repayment of debt. Other English fiction, including all my Isherwoods and D.H.Lawrence – was lost in a domestic bust-up thirty years back.

I have never managed to read English literature seriously. The older writers, Dickens, Thackeray, Brontë and Trollope, are delightful in rather chaste and proper way, but pall after 200 pages. The interbellum writers like Orwell, Isherwood, Waugh, Somerset Maugham, Galsworthy, Forster and DH Lawrence, can be brilliant. But their material, a society which has lost its way and is feeding on itself, reminds me too much of my late 1960s at university in Cambridge, still decent and maintaining appearances, but hollow. Most of it I read before leaving England in 1973.

After that, isolated good reads, but nothing that has really got under my skin. I do better with the poets, in small doses: Donne, Yeats, Cecil Day Lewis, Larkin, and my favourite, the Welsh poet R.S. Thomas.