Robert Graves and Alan Hodges published The Long Weekend, their history of
Britain between the wars, around the time of Dunkirk. When they republished
it in 1949, they remarked that the period before 1940 had come to seem a
“legendary golden age”, and indeed, subsequent historians have generally
painted this period in rosy hues – a fact that is all the more notable in
view of the sombre tone adopted by historians who study Continental Europe
at that time.
Richard Overy does not believe in a “golden age” of interwar Britain. But he
argues that the relatively benign experience of most Britons makes it
striking that so many of them talked in terms of death and decay. This
culture of morbidity was not due to the concern with “relative decline” that
has been seen so often in Britain since the late nineteenth century. Nor was
it just a response to the particular problems that afflicted Europe after
the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Rather, it was a belief that Britain was
threatened, throughout the interwar period, by a general crisis of
civilization. Hitler evoked a powerful response in Britain, but this was
precisely because he was seen as just one manifestation of a general
“barbarism”: Nazism was “the occasion as much as the cause” of concern about
the “shadow side of our civilization”.
In The Morbid Age, Overy ranges widely across cultural history, examining, for
example, how historians became interested in the “dark ages”, or the way in
which psychologists’ work on the unconscious undermined faith in the power
of human reason. Morbidity in the Britain of these years took many forms. At
first, concern with qualitative decline of the “race” predominated in
eugenicist discussion and produced sinister proposals for the sterilization
of “mental defectives” (a motion was defeated in Parliament by 167 votes to
eighty-nine in 1931), or even for the disposal of the handicapped in a
“death chamber”. In the late 1930s, by contrast, concern was focused on the
quantitative discussion of the British population and on positive measures
to help parents raise healthy children. Different conclusions were drawn
from similar material. George Orwell described the population of Sheffield
as “troglodytes”, and regretted that a million of the “best” British men had
been killed in the First World War “before they had a chance to breed”, but
he would have hated the kind of measures to “improve” the stock that were
proposed by, say, Marie Stopes. Notions of war also changed, and Overy
argues that the sense of war as a product of general structural causes
(rooted in the arms race or even human biology) was different from the
interest in the immediate diplomatic causes of war which had dominated
discussion in the 1920s.
For Overy, the notion that civilization was under threat was persuasive
because it seemed to provide a way of linking together so many different
types of crisis. He is particularly interested in the way that ideas derived
from the physical or social sciences pervaded society at large. Mass
communication in interwar Britain meant, in large measure, communication to
the masses rather than from them and this, in turn, gave particular power to
a group of well-connected intellectuals. Lord Reith’s BBC turned over hours
of radio time to the biologist Julian Huxley and the philosopher Bertrand
Russell; new publishing ventures – Allen Lane’s Penguin Specials or Victor
Gollancz’s Left Book Club – were devised to convey highbrow notions (the
very existence of a popular term for intellectuals hints at the impact of
popularization) to a large audience.
This reinterpretation of Britain between the wars is ambitious and
stimulating. It is made with many striking examples and – though Overy
refrains from cheap shots about nudism and nut cutlets – a good deal of
deadpan humour. Like many imaginative and interesting arguments, however, it
raises some objections. An irate reader complained that Leonard Woolf’s
outlook was “warped” by the “matrix of Bloomsbury thinking”. To my mind,
Overy’s book has a bit too much Bloomsbury (both in the literal sense that
many of those discussed in it lived in Gordon Square and in the more general
sense that many of them are drawn from particular families or networks of
friends) and too little matrix (in that we do not always get much sense of
how the various writers discussed might have fitted into broader
structures). There is not much reference to generation – though this
obsessed many interwar writers. Class is another theme that is explored
relatively little. Many intellectuals belonged to Orwell’s “lower upper
middle class”. They felt that their own living standards had fallen since
the late nineteenth century (the absence of cheap servants was a particular
preoccupation) and anyone who has studied the mid-1970s will know how prone
the British middle classes are to equate a decline in their own prosperity
with a general crisis of civilization.
Overy’s scrupulous regard for detail and evidence sometimes seems to undermine
the case that he is trying to make. The attention that he devotes to
biographical case studies makes one wonder why some important figures have
been left out. Why, for example, discuss A. L. Rowse but then omit Rowse’s
Oxford tutor, John Masterman? Masterman spent the First World War interned
in Germany and the Second running double agents out of MI5 headquarters in
London but, if his memoirs are to be believed, he spent the intervening
decades worrying about nothing but cricket and how many chaps from The House
got Firsts. Why, for that matter, cite Rowse’s gloomy diary entries from the
late 1930s but ignore the claim in his autobiography that the early 1920s
were a time of optimism and that “the bleak experience of the first war had
reinforced the strength of idealism”? Overy repeatedly cites sales figures
for books, though these often suggest that the ideas under discussion were
less influential in interwar Britain than they were in other places or at
other times. We learn, for example, that the translation of the first volume
of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West sold almost 3,000 copies in
Britain, but that it sold more in the United States. The volumes of Arnold
Toynbee’s A Study of History that dealt with the breakdown of civilizations
sold 1,290 copies on publication in 1939 but an abridged version sold
300,0000 copies after 1945. Of course, sales figures for any “serious”
author are put into stark perspective when we look at works that were really
popular. A volume of Patience Strong’s verse sold 100,000 copies within a
year of its publication.
At times, The Morbid Age reads like a history of a counter-culture that misses
out the culture that was being countered. Stanley Baldwin pops up to say:
“the bomber will always get through” and Anthony Eden has a walk-on part as
a supporter of sterilizing “defectives”, but there is little about the
Conservative Party or the thinking of the English ruling class more
generally. Overy discusses some churchmen – especially Richard Sheppard –
and Catholic opposition to eugenics. In general, however, he is not much
interested in organized religion, and you could read long passages of this
book without guessing that England had an established Church, or suspecting
that the place from which death, apocalypse and the decline of ancient
civilizations were most frequently talked about was probably the pulpit.
Soldiers, too, are conspicuous by their absence. Overy suggests that the First
World War helped to create the culture of morbidity and that this culture,
in turn, helps to explain British entry into the Second World War, but he
only mentions a handful of eccentric military figures – Guy Chapman, Tom
Wintringham, J. F. C. “Boney” Fuller. We get little sense of how war was
remembered in, say, the British Legion, or how it was anticipated among the
young men who joined the Officers’ Emergency Reserve in 1939. Even the
Spanish Civil War is seen, very largely, through the eyes of those who
stayed at home worrying rather than those who fought, and Overy has almost
nothing to say about those Englishmen – such as Harold Alexander or Ormond
de l’Epée Winter – who fought what they saw as a successful battle to
contain Bolshevism in Eastern and Central Europe during the early 1920s.
The chronology of this book depends on the idea that the interwar period was
different from what came before and what came after. The writers that Overy
cites often looked back with nostalgia to what Canon William Inge called the
“century of hope”. Leonard Woolf presented the First World War as marking a
sharp break, separating an era of optimism from one of cataclysmic
pessimism. I am not sure, however, that the break was always as sharp as it
came to seem to some in retrospect. George Dangerfield’s Strange Death of
Liberal England (1935) argued that Britain had been in crisis before 1914.
Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918) also suggested that the First
World War had been the consequence rather than the cause of faults in
British society. Perhaps Strachey’s view of the pre-1914 era was influenced
by a letter that he received from a friend in 1904: “I don’t know why one
doesn’t commit suicide, except that one is dead and rotten already”. The
author of the letter was Leonard Woolf.
If the First World War was not as much of a beginning as it was sometimes made
to seem, how much of an end was the Second World War? Overy compares his
undergraduate memories, of listening to Leonard Cohen in “rooms made mellow
with too much smoke”, to those of Eric Hobsbawm, who had apparently lived in
the expectation of imminent death thirty years earlier. Overy concludes: “If
the 1930s had seen a painful slithering to the edge of the precipice,
post-1945 could be seen as a brisk uphill walk into the sunlight”. He sees
an intellectual volte face, in which “ideas of eugenic intervention were
modified into positive welfare policies”. I do not buy this. Many saw the
late 1940s as a terrible time – sometimes because they feared the things
that Hobsbawm hoped for. In material terms, the 1950s and 60s were a good
time for the educated middle classes – though I suspect that those who
experienced the legacy of interwar eugenicism in the post-war welfare state
may not have been confined to the “stigmatized or excluded” families, to
whom Overy alludes. But if the post-war period is to be judged, as Overy
judges the interwar one, in terms of culture, then we should remember the
success of novels about the collapse of civilization, such as John Wyndham’s
The Day of the Triffids (1951) or William Golding’s Lord of the Flies
(1954), and the fact that many members of the intelligentsia went to the
Royal Court Theatre to see Billie Whitelaw being buried up to her neck.
There were times when the sense that civilization was in crisis was at least
as acute as it had been in the 1930s. Enoch Powell does not feature in
Richard Overy’s account – though, as an admirer of Nietzsche who said that
he regretted not having been killed in the war, he might well have done.
Powell predicted various kinds of apocalypse throughout the post-war period
and it seems likely that the number of British people in 1968 who admired
the “Rivers of Blood” speech was larger than the number who listened to
Leonard Cohen.
Richard Overy
THE MORBID AGE
Britain between the wars
499pp. Allen Lane. £25.
978 0 713 99563 3
Richard Vinen’s most recent books include The Unfree French: Life under
the Occupation, 2007, and Thatcher’s Britain: The politics and social
upheaval of the Thatcher era, published earlier this year.
