>>for
>>instance that the youthkult coffee-bar mentality resulting from the
>>1939-45 war
>Peter, could you please explain this?
>Thanks!
>Philip
Can I claim it was "poetry" and so I don't have to?
>From my particular vantage-point it seeemed that something, call it
"modernism" perhaps, some sense of artistic advance as a culturally
subversive agency, an individualistic challenge to established or
recognised forms, which before the war had been the pursuit of cosmopolitan
intellectuals almost entirely from the upper middle class... after the war
began to sprout on the walls of the coffee bars of Manchester and was
claimed as the prerogative of youth. Even the important communistic/
working class movement of the 1930s sprang principally, it seems to me,
from the public schools and was preached downwards.
I wonder if I am even slightly justified in thinking this shift was due to
the war? I don't know how it happened, I doubt if anyone does, I merely
observed it. It wasn't the work of children born during the war like
myself, but of those born just after it, so it didn't really come into its
own until the 1960s. Artistically, it took up possibilities developed
during the war when, in poetry for instance, there were very rich
developments possible in the freedom from establishment control over
publishing channels -- the experts and professionals were mostly away in
the army and London war-time poetry was an "underground" art of its own,
indulging a great deal of imaginative free-play. The 1950s brought
rationalist pressure back with a vengeance and swept all that way. And
then, quite suddenly, teenagers were the embodiment of a new artistic force
quite beyond the bounds of the gallery concert-hall or book...... And with
that, I think, came an adolescent challenge against the ancestors which was
not integral to pre-war artistic bohemianism. In some sense this conflict
has been going on ever since.
(Compare for instance the way pre-1914 avant-garde artists and poets, when
the war came readily enlisted and mostly became officers, and this was true
in a different way in 39-45. Can you imagine the present avant-gardistes
doing that? That change surely indicates a considerable shift in the sense
of the function of artistic activity, in what it is for. To them it was for
the commonality in some sense, art for patrons, poetry for readers,even for
the nation... now a lot of it is for the self and the museum. As if two
wars had disqualified Society. )
A war can be a very great disruption, not only on public life but
intimately, as in the way we respond to age and parenthood. I doubt that
the now commonplace cliché of "adolescent rebellion" which has hovered over
so much of British artistic activity in the last forty years, had any real
presence before the 39-45 war. Surely a lot of "linguistically innovative
poetry" is still dripping with it. I have a kind of hunch that things
might not go on like that, that the future might lie elsewhere.
/PR
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