4

Chaos in the Social Order: Fielding and Conrad

‘Having known real chaos in the social order, at the Fall of Singapore, for example, I recognise the horror of chaos more than some of you may; and I’m sure that at the social and political level Shakespeare believed in that order.’

Ian Watt, undergraduate lecture on Troilus and Cressida (undated)1

‘Things are not allowed to become unduly emotional, although we often know that Fielding feels very strongly indeed.’

Claude Rawson, Henry Fielding (1968)2

Fielding is ‘an easier novelist to live with than Richardson’, according to Alan D. McKillop in his 1956 survey of the field not yet known as the rise of the novel, and many readers of The Rise of the Novel have sensed the lapse of momentum in its closing chapters, when Watt turns from Richardson to Fielding, and from ‘realism of presentation’ to ‘realism of assessment’.3 This feeling of lower critical urgency has typically been understood as Watt’s perceived devaluation of Fielding. As early as 1961, in his classic The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne C. Booth used Watt as an example of an able reader who was nonetheless incapable of appreciating Fielding’s self-consciously fictive mode. According to Booth, Fielding can never match up to Defoe and Richardson because ‘Watt’s all-pervasive assumption is that “realism of presentation” is a good thing in itself’.4 Booth casts Watt’s explicit disavowals of any such claim in The Rise of the Novel as merely a perfunctory protest, Watt’s ‘repeated demurrer’.5 Robert Alter pursued a similar line in his 1968 study of Fielding when he suggested that one side effect of Watt’s ‘canonization’ of formal realism was ‘to excommunicate’ fiction like Fielding’s.6 Thirty years on, the otherwise sympathetic Joseph Frank (a former colleague of Watt) repeated the old consensus on Watt’s ‘implied disparagement of Fielding’: ‘Watt does his best to be fair to Fielding, but continual comparison with the inventors of “formal realism” puts the more traditionally literary Fielding at a disadvantage.’7 Fielding scholar Jill Campbell comes closest to Watt’s expressed intentions when she writes of Watt’s ‘decorous appearance of fairness in his respective treatments of Richardson and Fielding, granting to each what belongs to each’.8

As far as Watt’s private views are concerned, he called himself a ‘Fielding-ite’ in a 1980 letter to W. R. Irwin: ‘I consider myself to be one despite what some other people say.’9 With that in mind, this chapter argues that there may be a more profitable way to think about Watt’s attitude to Fielding, and the palpable lowering of the critical temperature that attends the discussion of his fiction in The Rise of the Novel, than to discount Watt’s categorical statements as merely pro forma disclaimers. There may be a reason, after all, why his analysis of Fielding reads so differently from his plainer fascination with Defoe’s hard-minded entrepreneurs, his unease with Pamela’s saleable wishful thinking, or his identification with the self-condemned Clarissa. Reading his discussions of group consciousness and shared values in Fielding and Conrad alongside ideas of prison-camp community, this chapter proposes that what these novelists offer Watt is a defence of social order that is no less necessary for being psychologically so constraining. As Watt once put it in a public lecture on Jane Austen, ‘without being overtly anti-social, how very little we like paying the price that social life exacts!’10

‘The adaptation of the individual to society’

Watt draws a shorthand distinction between Clarissa and Tom Jones when he describes how their initially similar female plots diverge. In both novels, the heroine’s mercenary family tries to force her into an economically useful marriage with a sexually repulsive man—Solmes, Blifil—but, ‘whereas Richardson depicts the crucifixion of the individual by society, Fielding portrays the successful adaptation of the individual to society’ (RN 270). The tension between the relative claims of the self and the group goes to the heart of the prison-camp experience, and, discussing Watt’s dislike of what he took to be the individualist fantasies of mass culture, I have already suggested that their wartime experience compounded in critics like him a reluctant but genuine institutional-mindedness. As I shall argue, Watt’s powerful feeling for group identity and normative, sometimes even deeply traditional, standards helps to explain his otherwise puzzling inclusion in The Rise of the Novel of Fielding, who, with implications described most comprehensively by Michael McKeon in Origins of the English Novel, jeopardizes the book’s main argument about the rise of the novel as the rise of formal realism and individualism.

Due allowances can be made first for the most prosaic reason why Watt’s treatment of ‘realism of assessment’ is relatively slight: when he had to shorten his manuscript for publication he edited the material on Fielding significantly (there was to have been a second chapter on Tom Jones), and cancelled chapters on Laurence Sterne and Tobias Smollett. With that abandoned prospectus in mind, Irving Howe was more correct than he could have known when, in his otherwise laudatory review, he described the unsatisfactory final section of The Rise of the Novel as ‘by comparison, incomplete’.11 Watt came to regret his decision to cut from the second half of the manuscript when he found that doing so had left the book vulnerable to being thought ‘rather more simpleminded in its advocacy of “realism of presentation” than it might have been otherwise’.12 To Watt’s mind, Fielding and the novelists who learned from him were performing no less important a role in the novel’s development by emphasizing social and moral consensus over the individualistic and interior perspectives of Defoe and Richardson. As Watt’s epilogue makes explicit, the reason why he admired Austen over the writers whom he had discussed at greater length earlier in the book was his view that she had managed to give her characters an absorbing inner life while still maintaining an intelligently distanced and civic-minded wisdom, or what he had described as Fielding’s realism of assessment.

But the example of Fielding inevitably shows up the troublesome slipperiness of the concept of realism. To incorporate Fielding into The Rise of the Novel, the term needs to be able to accommodate meanings that are almost contradictory. So, whereas realism in the context of Defoe and Richardson means—or at least purports to mean—a form of unselective-seeming representation, the verisimilitude produced by accumulated circumstantial detail, Fielding’s realism means something almost entirely evaluative. One definition speaks to perspective as an individual narrative situation, intimate but necessarily limited; the other sees it as a considered attitude towards the world in the light of shared kinds of wisdom. Realism is no longer a descriptive principle, but a normative one: ‘a kind of control or discrimination, a depth of understanding’, in Ronald Paulson’s fine gloss on Watt’s terminology.13 Even the highly critical Alter was doing no more than replaying Watt’s terms when he wrote that ‘Fielding’s decision to avoid the grossness of exhaustive realism generates in his novels another kind of realism, which is essentially social and moral in nature’.14 But this was exactly what Watt meant by ‘realism of assessment’: shared standards, self-consciously adopted even in the face of alternatives such as those Richardson had made available with his famous new species of writing. This is less ‘realism’ in any literary or technical sense than realism in its semi-moralistic everyday usage, where to be ‘realistic’ is to temper our desires and expectations, to recognize and work within the limitations imposed by inhospitable circumstances instead of kicking against the pricks.

To put it another way, Watt attributes to Fielding a ‘realism’ that he later attributes to Conrad, whose fiction, we are told early in Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, ‘is mainly concerned with how to maneouvre among intolerable and yet intractable realities’ (C. 8). This morally pragmatic Conrad can be seen, for example, in Watt’s reading of the much-analysed ‘destructive element’ passage in Lord Jim. (‘It seems to be a universal principle in criticism that the more interpretation a passage has had, the more it shall be given’ (C. 325).) Jim has survived the immediate disgrace of deserting his ship, but he is tormented by his own memory of an act of cowardice irreconcilable with a self-image anchored in the heroic aspirations he has derived from fiction. Marlow consults his friend Stein on what they see as Jim’s unforgiving romanticism:

‘A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns—nicht wahr?…No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up.’15

Watt argues that Stein’s cryptic injunction about submitting yourself to ‘the destructive element’ is absolutely nothing to do with following your bliss or embracing some proto-counter-cultural form of romantic oblivion. Properly understood, the passage means exactly the opposite. Watt looks back to Conrad’s less ambiguous previous draft in which the opening line is ‘A man that is born is like a man who falls into the sea’—nothing about dreams there—and finds a parable about playing whatever unlucky hand you have been dealt:

Of course you don’t like being thrown into the sea, that is, into the reality where you find yourself; but if you try and escape into the air, into unreality, you will merely drown; so your only chance of survival is to force yourself to accept the reality which surrounds you, and use it to keep your head above water and go on living. (C. 329)

Only later does Watt consider how the final section of Lord Jim arguably legitimizes the protagonist’s romanticism: after all, Jim never actually has to learn to accommodate his circumstances, since the novel’s plot instead accommodates Jim to make him ‘a genuine hero of romance’ (C. 346). Like Conrad, Fielding appeals to the hard-minded side of Watt, to the extent that both novelists become even more anti-idealistic than many would consider them.

One of the main conclusions that Watt explicitly drew from his years of imprisonment was the need to temper individual aspirations and expectations. ‘It isn’t only on the walls of the Sorbonne that we can see the slogan “It is forbidden to forbid” ’, he told an audience at Stanford in 1971, describing the difficult necessity of submitting to institutional demands: ‘It is written on all individuals at birth, in the form “It is forbidden to forbid me”.’16 Explaining why that sense of entitlement is as destructive as it is attractive takes him back to the prison camps of the Burma–Thailand Railway, and specifically to an early breakdown of discipline at Chungkai:

It’s probably true that at the beginning of our captivity many of us thought that at last the moment had arrived for revolt, if not against the Japanese, at least against our own military discipline and anything else that interfered with our individual liberty. But then circumstances forced us to see that this would be suicidal. We were terribly short of food, clothes, and medicine; theft soon became a real threat to everyone; and so we had to organize our own police.17

The disciplinary order that suppresses ‘individual liberty’ is initially resisted but finally supported (‘our own police’) because it offers everyone’s best hope of survival. It is difficult not to think that he had his time as a junior officer at Chungkai in mind when he wrote of the treatment of hostility towards ships’ officers in Conrad’s fiction: ‘On the one hand this kind of hostility is universal, and undoubtedly effective in cementing in-group cohesion; on the other hand it may go so far as to endanger the existence of the larger group to which they belong and on which they depend’ (C. 102–3). Or, as he wrote of the prison camp, although ‘it was easy to blame our terrible lack of food, clothes, and drugs on our own superior officers’, ‘it was soon brought home to us, however, that we absolutely needed a strict organization, and that the only possible form of it was a military one’.18

Pausing on the crisis situation at the Chungkai camp can give us some idea of what Watt believed was at stake in this reluctant subordination of self. I have already suggested that his manner in speaking of his wartime experiences can be understated, and the situation at Chungkai was, in fact, sometimes utterly desperate. Because of the vast size of Chungkai, where at times up to 10,000 prisoners were held, its camp culture is recorded more fully than most. Numerous eyewitnesses left reports of this breakdown of morale, and they help us to see why Watt cared so much about the restoration of social order that he identified approvingly with Fielding and then Conrad.

What these eyewitnesses describe is little short of anarchy—and Watt himself used the word in a manuscript draft of this lecture, although, characteristically, he excised it from the public version. The breakdown of ordinary social standards, civilian or military, was nearly total. Pricelessly scarce medicines were stolen to sell for private profit; the sick and dying were stripped of their possessions where they lay; the bodies of those who had died in the night were looted; and graves were secretly reopened in case the dead still had anything on their corpses worth robbing. The camp’s apparently very capable commanding officer, Colonel Cary Owtram, established the internal police force in response to what his memoirs describe as ‘a very low moral code in operation’.19 ‘No one knew how long it might be before we were released, and life is very dear,’ he explains: ‘Any man of weak character was liable to be influenced by the temptation now placed before him, knowing that his only chance of life lay in more and better food, and food cost money.’20

One veteran who described the collapse of discipline especially vividly was Captain Ernest Gordon of the 93rd (Argyll and Sutherland) Highlanders. (The original ‘thin red line’ of the Crimean War, this Scottish regiment had borne the brunt of the fighting in Malaya.) Like Watt, Gordon was an officer at Chungkai, and his account is rather more expressive than Watt’s cool summary of what must have been an extremely frightening period in the camp’s history. ‘In Changi the patterns of army life had sustained us,’ Gordon wrote, but the move north to undertake hard labour in the dreadful conditions at Chungkai, followed by a terrifying first outbreak of cholera, saw an end to the self-protective military solidarity of the early phases of captivity:

As conditions steadily worsened, as starvation, exhaustion and disease took an ever-increasing toll, the atmosphere in which we lived became poisoned by selfishness, hate and fear. We were slipping rapidly down the slope of degradation…Existence had become so miserable, the odds so heavy against survival, that, to most of the prisoners, nothing mattered except to survive. We lived by the law of the jungle, ‘red in tooth and claw’—the law of the survival of the fittest. It was a case of ‘I look out for myself and to hell with everyone else’.

This attitude became our norm. We called it ‘The Ladder Club’. Its motto was ‘I’ve got the ladder up, Jack. I’m all right.’ The weak were trampled underfoot, the sick ignored or resented, the dead forgotten. When a man lay dying we had no word of comfort for him. When he cried we averted our heads . . .Everyone was his own keeper. It was free enterprise at its worst, with all the restraints of morality gone.21

The ‘ladder club’ and its variants (such as ‘a ladder job’ or ‘got your ladder’) were universal idioms in the prison camps, according to an unpublished essay that Watt co-authored in the late 1940s with another former prisoner, Henry Fowler. They attributed the phrase’s ubiquity to its ability ‘to describe an aspect of human nature seen very clearly in the bad times’.22

In the war memoir of another Scottish prisoner, Lance-Corporal Donald Smith (like Gordon, a future clergyman), this collapsing camp is ‘Chungkai, Chungkai. The place where the Englishmen come to die.’23 An inmate driven insane on the Burma–Thailand Railway chants this couplet over and over again: even aside from minds giving way under intolerable stress, dementia as an organic consequence of pellagra (niacin deficiency) or cerebral malaria was a familiar but frightening feature of the camps. Seventy years later, one veteran still remembered its victims with horror: ‘even now as I write, I feel my hair crawling at their screams and laughter.’24

Like Watt, the young officer Smith had been taken prisoner at the fall of Singapore with the 18th Division, and something of his experience can be inferred from the fact that he was demobilized weighing only six stone and with his eyesight permanently destroyed by malnutrition. Wounded on the railway, Smith was sent disabled down country to Chungkai in an ostensible reprieve from the hard labour that was killing him, but he left at the first opportunity when he saw that Chungkai ‘was no hospital camp, but a dark, tragic burial-ground’, peopled by ‘broken-down skeletons of what had once been Allied soldiers [who] terrified me by their strange looks and dumb, silent suffering’.25 Prisoners oust the disabled Smith by force from his precarious edge of vacant sleeping platform; they make it plain how much they grudge his pitiful rice ration; the water bottle he needs to survive is stolen the moment he puts it down. These are the conclusions Smith reached after only a single day and night at Chungkai:

This was a vile, wicked place where men who had once marched shoulder to shoulder in a common cause could strip their very comrades and leave them for dead. There was no good Samaritan in Chungkai. Men passed by their brothers on the other side of the way, their heads averted. I had never believed that I could become so bitter as I was that night as I lay down to sleep.26

Smith records that, even in his debilitated state, he took the potentially suicidal decision to let himself be returned sick to the railway rather than ‘set foot in that accursed camp again’.27 His memoir suggests that it was less painful to confront what the Japanese were doing to the prisoners than what fear and need had led the prisoners to do to each other.

This is all rather a far cry, then, from Watt’s scrupulous but rhetorically low-key account of Chungkai (‘theft soon became a real threat to everyone’). It is nonetheless entirely in keeping with how other eyewitnesses describe prison camps when whatever vestigial social cohesion that has survived capture breaks down under the brutalizing pressures of sickness and starvation. Compared to their Japanese counterparts, the German Stalags were much less cruel places for Western prisoners of war, as evidenced by a mortality rate among American prisoners around twelve times lower there than for their compatriots in the Far East.28 (However it is salutary to be reminded that more Americans died in German captivity than at either Pearl Harbor or on D-Day, given how relatively little their experience features in American war memory.29) A Darwinian vocabulary informs William V. Spanos’s account of the German camp where he was imprisoned in the final year of the war. The prison camp was ‘like a jungle, in which everyone was a prey’, Spanos writes: this was ‘an infernal space, where the brutal and degrading reality of the cage prevailed’ because ‘the deprivation not simply of human rights but also of the basic amenities of civilized life—sanitation, clothing, and bodily nourishment, above all, food—had reduced all too many of them to instinctual life, to the elemental condition of biological survivors’.30 Spanos found no trace of fellow feeling among his comrades, now lone competitors: ‘hunger dehumanized us, turned our inner selves into single-minded wills committed to nothing more than survival, even at the expense of each other.’31

In fact, it is instructive to compare the dystopian description of Chungkai offered by Gordon and Smith, and the similarly Darwinian accounts of many other wartime prison camps, not with the professorial poise with which Watt spoke almost thirty years later, but with the description he gave in ‘The Ways of Guilt’. This rendering of events is more overtly literary, but it was written when the events being described would have been painfully fresh in Watt’s mind:

Theft of every kind, and selfishness of every kind, had increased violently. Everywhere hunger and fear silenced or confused the voices of the past, confronting us everyday with choices that could be easily resolved in terms of ‘my life or yours’, blinding us with the insidious priorities of survival.

There were a few who yielded completely, gang-robbers who stole a sick man’s only blanket off his body at night, knowing he would be too weak to resist, and that someone would be glad to buy a blanket without asking questions. Perhaps a cry went down the hospital hut, but the thief always escaped; it was murder, but everyone had his own troubles. When a man died no possessions of any kind were ever found on him: no one discovered who it was that snatched a gold ring or a good shirt off the body before it was cold. Slowly we were forced to learn the new code of hunger and fear: all round us, every day, we could see the weakest going to the wall as the ruthless grew sleek, and the conclusion was powerful to corrupt.32

Watt said nothing quite like this in his public comments on the camps. Still, it is newly clear what sort of social dissolution he had in mind when he wrote of Robinson Crusoe that Defoe’s castaway is pure fantasy because in real life what has happened to people when the cultural supports have been kicked away is ‘at best uninspiring’: ‘At worst, harassed by fear and dogged by ecological degradation, they sank more and more to the level of animals’ (RN 88).

‘Defoe disregarded two important facts: the social nature of all human economies, and the actual psychological effects of solitude’; Crusoe’s sense of freedom from other people would be ‘disastrous for human happiness’ (RN 87). By avoiding the ‘actual economic effects and psychological effects’ of solitude, Defoe ‘make[s] his hero’s struggles more cheering than they might otherwise have been’ (RN 89). Or, as Watt put it even more bluntly in an essay on Robinson Crusoe written only a few years after demobilization, the fact that Crusoe ‘turns his forsaken estate into a triumph’ is no less than ‘a flagrant unreality’.33 ‘An inner voice continually suggests to us that the human isolation which individualism has fostered is painful and tends ultimately to a life of apathetic animality and mental derangement,’ he wrote, but, given what he had witnessed as a young man, Watt hardly needed his ‘inner voice’ to tell him so (RN 89). The demoralizing story of breakdown that Defoe avoids in Robinson Crusoe is far closer to what Watt had known at first hand, and no distance at all from accounts by other veterans of how people, stripped of ‘the basic amenities of civilized life’, are brought down to ‘the elemental condition of biological survivors’. ‘Darwinists call it survival of the fittest, don’t they? What that means is survival of the most selfish bastards imaginable,’ Reg Twigg remembered: ‘Helping yourself was paramount; helping a mate was risky; helping anybody else was a luxury nobody could afford.’34 Russell Braddon recalled feeling that even his first months of imprisonment had already changed him: ‘the old Braddon was the nicer one…the present Braddon was probably not nice at all. I nevertheless faced up finally to the fact that what I had become was, if I were to survive, what I would stay.’35

So the real surprise, then, is that prisoners nonetheless managed to reassemble an almost tolerable society from this very low point. Another former prisoner of war, captured in Libya in 1942, English economist R. A. Radford argued that ‘the social institutions, ideas and habits of groups in the outside world are to be found reflected in a Prisoner of War Camp. It is an unusual but a vital society.’36 Some camps had to work harder than others to achieve this social equilibrium, or, as medical historian Charles Roland more clinically describes their achievement, ‘a successful reversion to a primitive level of existence’, when ‘a condition of relative balance resulted, morbidity stabilized, and mortality rates fell’.37 The impulse towards collective rehabilitation and the restoration of order can be felt in Watt’s feeling for Fielding and for the ‘realism of assessment’ for which he made him stand. To borrow John Richetti’s eloquent description of the differences between Fielding and the introspective mode that he rejected, Fielding represents a turn away from a way of thinking that ‘overvalues an isolated and aberrant individuality’; his novels are ultimately ‘affirmations of community and defenders of a neglected sense of connection and tradition’.38

Affirmations of Retrospect

In 1959, Ernest Gordon wrote to Watt after reading his ‘Bridges Over the Kwai’, an essay on David Lean’s film that appeared in different versions in Partisan Review and the BBC magazine the Listener. Gordon’s criticism was not of Watt’s understated treatment of the prisoners’ appalling conditions—characteristically, Watt had said little about them, although Gordon was about to publish the account from which I have quoted—but with the pessimistic conclusions that Watt had drawn from the fragility of the prisoners’ solidarity. An interesting post-war figure in his own right, Gordon was by now also resident in the United States as Dean of the Princeton University Chapel; a friend of Martin Luther King and his family, he was strongly committed to the Civil Rights movement, perhaps in keeping with the practical Christianity that he outlined in his prisoner-of-war memoir. In the memoir, Gordon recounts how he had been converted to Christianity on the Burma–Thailand Railway by witnessing or hearing of acts of selflessness and courage there, ‘stories of self-sacrifice, heroism, faith and love’.39

There is no indication in his letter to Watt that they knew each other beforehand, but they would have had a fairly similar war experience (aside from Gordon’s religious conversion) as British junior officers in some of the same camps at the same time: Changi on Singapore, and Chungkai and Kanchanaburi in Thailand. They both later contributed to a book titled Beyond Hatred (1969), edited by Guthrie Moir, a prisoner friend of Watt’s. What motivated Gordon’s letter was the wish to mitigate the bleakness of Watt’s conclusion, which I have already quoted in part: ‘that survival, always a selfish business, gets more so when it is difficult; and that the greatest difficulties of the task are the result not of any exceptional cruelty or folly but only of the cumulative effects of man’s ordinary blindness and egotism and inertia.’40 This was surely not the whole story, Gordon wrote a little reproachfully in his otherwise appreciative letter, since some people showed themselves able to rise above their terrible conditions in inspirational ways.41

Gordon’s published account of his captivity insists upon this transcendence of a hunger-induced individualism. As much a spiritual autobiography as a war memoir, his book recounts how he and those around him redeemed themselves from the Darwinian squalor of the camp by developing out of a few tentative acts of kindness some sense of corporate responsibility. ‘And this is what the Christian faith is all about,’ Gordon gently sermonizes in his contribution to Moir’s volume: ‘The love of God in Christ, and through the Holy Spirit in the community of love, brings men together in the one family.’42 But from the theological point of view, what is most telling about Gordon’s effort to explain how this agnostic young soldier became a believing Christian, and ultimately an ordained minister, is its emphasis on very materially human interventions. Gordon is concerned not with faith but with works, and he advances an altogether ecumenical ideal of fellowship and solidarity as a conscious antidote to the lonely misery and division of dog-eat-dog. Indeed, he writes uncharacteristically scathingly of the religious sectarians of his puritanical Scottish childhood who ‘regarded themselves as God’s anointed’ in their ‘grey, sunless abode of the faithful where everybody was angry with everybody else’.43 In that respect, Gordon’s memoir recalls the broadminded Christian fellowship one finds in Fielding—fellowship, that is, as opposed to the more schismatic, and perhaps more easily faked, forms of religious enthusiasm that Fielding invariably derided, as when in Tom Jones the hypocrite Captain Blifil (whose prior association with what the novel calls ‘the pernicious principles of Methodism’ already damns him) sets out ‘with great learning’ to prove to Allworthy ‘that the word charity in Scripture nowhere means beneficence or generosity’.44 In Joseph Andrews the benevolent Parson Adams denounces ‘the detestable Doctrine of Faith against good Works…for surely, that Doctrine was coined in Hell, and one would think none but the Devil himself could have the Confidence to preach it’.45 Gordon’s version of Christianity follows the same lines as Allworthy’s response to Blifil’s self-interested sophistry: ‘there is one degree of generosity (of charity I would have called it) which seems to have some show of merit, and that is, where, from a principle of benevolence and Christian love, we bestow on another what we really want ourselves; where, in order to lessen the distresses of another, we condescend to share some part of them, by giving what even our own necessities cannot well spare’.46

With its insistence on the final triumph of charity and fellowship, Gordon’s is the kind of prisoner-of-war memoir that might be taken to provide support for Terrence Des Pres’s claim, in his controversial book about the concentration-camp survivor, that, however prevalent social atomization becomes in extreme conditions, total dissolution is intrinsically a temporary condition even there: ‘A war of all against all must be imposed by force, and no sooner has it started than those who suffer it begin, spontaneously and without plan, to transcend it.’47 Writing about the Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet gulags, Des Pres finds that ‘survival is an experience with a definite structure, neither random nor regressive nor amoral’: ‘the most significant fact about their [the survivors’] struggle is that it depended on fixed activities: on forms of social bonding and interchange, on collective resistance, on keeping dignity and moral sense alive.’48

Needless to say, Des Pres’s claim about the non-arbitrary and fundamentally explicable nature of survival—that people survive in inhuman conditions by spontaneously improvising some form of social order—feels less believable when it turns into the argument that the will to sociality is a biological imperative, an instinct hardwired in the human animal. ‘How comforting’, Stephen Greenblatt mordantly commented in his review of Des Pres’s The Survivor.49 (Whether or not he had read the book, Watt saved a clipping of Greenblatt’s review.) But if we set aside the quasi-biological determinism to which it leads, Des Pres’s more plausible general argument about the utility of social organization in the camps is borne out not only by the prisoners in Europe with whom Des Pres is concerned but to some degree by prisoners of the Japanese as well.

For sure, these reports are seldom as wholeheartedly affirmative as that of Gordon, as we shall see, and it is obviously important to keep in mind that Gordon’s memoir has a marked Christian tendency, if not an agenda as such. Particularly in his readings of Conrad, Watt insists on the need to resist grasping at the happier moral of people’s fundamental goodness as a way of overwriting an unsettling experience that points in exactly the opposite direction. Thus, for example, Conrad may have summed up a whole code of redemptive values as ‘the sense of reality, vigilance, and duty’, but Watt felt that institutional life, in the form of his experience at sea, would have shown Conrad something altogether different about people’s attitude towards social obligation: ‘No one knew better than Conrad that actual human behaviour reveals solidarities that are at best irresolute and only occasionally conscious’ (C. 81).50 Regardless of what Conrad’s narrators claim, what actually happens in Conrad’s novels proves that solidarity ‘seems to operate fully only in moments of acute crisis; and most of its manifestations are wayward, fragile, and impermanent’ (C. 116). ‘Fidelity is the supreme value in Conrad’s ethic, but it is always menaced and often defeated or betrayed,’ he wrote (C. 6), and, although Conrad’s Marlow reverentially describes in Lord Jim ‘an obscure body of men held together by a community of inglorious toil and by fidelity to a certain standard of conduct’, even the most rudimentary summary of that novel—the consequences of Jim abandoning his post when overcome by self-protective fear—abundantly demonstrates that Conrad never underestimated, in Watt’s words, ‘the strength of the various forces which are arrayed against solidarity, and especially of the almost universal and continuous power of individual egoism’ (C. 109).51

The basis of Gordon’s argument with Watt was the fact that individual egotism did not prove ‘universal and continuous’ in the camps. But it could surely be claimed with equal justification that the near-ubiquity of individualism in its rawest forms is attested to by the literally life-changing effect on Gordon of encountering just a few acts of unselfish decency when it was no longer to be looked for. In a section of Conrad in the Nineteenth Century titled ‘The Affirmations of Retrospect’, Watt described how Conrad idealized people from his time at sea, and there is ‘an obvious discrepancy between his nostalgic affection for his sailor comrades and what he has actually shown them doing in the narrative’ (C. 120). Watt’s verdict on Conrad’s idealizations of comradeship is this: ‘From a distance of months or years, a few special moments may stand out whose absolute quality almost obliterates all those other unremembered moments which brought the commoner message that as usual no one has quite come up to snuff’ (C. 122).

But a familiar paradox of the prison camp is that self-interest may itself dictate solidarity. Or, as Watt explained, again ostensibly with reference to Conrad, ‘throughout history…individuals are driven by circumstances into the traditional forms of human solidarity’ and solidarity is ‘derived from the economic necessities to which men find themselves involuntarily but inexorably exposed’.52 Watt’s reading of Conrad’s sea fiction stresses that ‘all those on board share an immediate mutual dependence in which everyone’s survival is continuously at stake’ and reminds us of ‘our utter, but usually forgotten, dependence on the labors of others’ (C. 116, 125). ‘We exist only in so far as we hang together,’ argues Marlow in Lord Jim, explaining why Jim experiences his desertion of the Patna as so disastrous a betrayal.53 To the extent that Jim is rehabilitated, it is thanks to ‘courage, work, and self-discipline’, Watt writes (C. 339). Traditional values prevail in Conrad just as they would prevail in the prison camps—although only just.

Conrad saw that ‘dependence on others was a necessary condition for the very existence of the individual self’ (C. 33), and what the prisoners describe substantially accords both with Watt’s Conradian perspective and with Des Pres’s claim that ‘solidarity becomes power in proportion to the degree of disciplined order’.54 In 1943, while the Allied prisoners confronted the second year of their captivity, American psychologist Abraham Maslow was publishing his famous, but individualistic, hierarchy of needs that made human relationships (love, belonging, esteem) stand on the broader base of physiological imperatives already met. On the other side of the world, the Burma–Thailand Railway had flipped the pyramid over, for only when social belonging became possible could basic needs be addressed—not ‘met’, for they never were—better than they could be under the prevailing misery of dog-eat-dog.

Without suggesting, then, that such awed memories as Gordon’s of prisoners pulling together in the deeply adverse circumstances of the Burma–Thailand Railway are largely ‘the affirmations of retrospect’, we more usually find a marked uncertainty in former prisoners’ recollections about the relative dominance of antisocial feelings within their camp cultures, or what one of Watt’s friends in captivity remembered as ‘the personal tugs-of-war in the darkest days of the railway between altruism and self-preservation’.55 According to Graham Hough: ‘There was comradeship, there was mutual help; but a degree of insensibility to anything but your own situation was, I suppose, a necessity for survival.’56 To dwell on the disintegration of morale could be taken as a betrayal of fellow veterans, however, and the earlier the memoir, the greater the reticence on this matter. ‘In such a struggle for survival, there were, inevitably, selfishness, racketeering, meanness and injustice,’ wrote the journalist Rohan Rivett in the virtually instantaneous memoir he published in the autumn of 1945; but there was also, he immediately adds, ‘the unbeatable courage and optimism and the sterling loyalty to comrades with which the vast majority faced starvation, disease and persecution’.57

‘Only group cohesion could have ensured group survival,’ writes Clifford Kinvig, even though ‘the squalor and oppression of the situation did encourage…an attitude of sauve qui peut’.58 The veterans tended to take this more qualified line that altruism was virtually out of the question, but cooperation saved their lives. ‘It cannot be too strongly stressed how, in those days, the individual had to subordinate his desires to society rules if that society were to survive,’ Russell Braddon wrote:

The three things that could, at any time, kill us all off were work, disease and starvation.

To overcome the murderous effects of the almost impossible tasks set us by the Japanese, team work was required to the nth degree. Only split-second timing and simultaneous effort by a squad of sick men could enable them to lift huge dredge cups on to railway trucks—and, having lifted them, to deposit them so gently that fingers and limbs were not severed. Only rigid self-discipline could keep latrines un-fouled so that the maggots did not breed round them and the disease-carrying fly increase its numbers. Only a faithful adherence to the rules could ensure that the tiny quantity of food which came into the camps would keep everyone alive: and that the limited water available would slake one’s thirst, keep one clean and wash one’s eating irons. All those things were managed. The prisoner-of-war life of those four years was an object lesson in living together.59

Or, as he put it more succinctly in a later work: ‘Over a period of almost four years we prisoners of war had built for ourselves, out of a chaos of disease and starvation and degradation and brutality, a society that was good.’60 What the prisoners assembled was a kind of simulacrum of ordinary life even in the absence of ordinary amenities. Durnford ended up at Chungkai after the restoration of order and was astonished to find people playing bridge in the evenings, or discussing literature, or paying formal visits to their friends’ huts, with all the ‘civilised urbanities and absurdities’.61 They remind him of ‘shipwrecked sailors suddenly found in more agreeable circumstances’.62 The protagonist of Australian prisoner Leslie Greener’s novel No Time to Look Back (1951) marvels at the peculiarity of a camp society in which ‘We have nothing, yet we have everything like a little world. We exist on a starvation diet, yet we go out to lunch. We have hardly a shirt to our backs and we live in hovels, yet we go visiting, we have theatres, churches.’63 Lest it all become too self-congratulatory, another character interjects: ‘And we never know if to-morrow isn’t zero day for us all to get our throats cut.’64 This protective imitation of normalcy in the face of deadly threat must surely have been at the back of Watt’s mind when, in the context of Conrad, he defined civilization as ‘a structure of behaviour and belief which can sometimes keep the darkness at bay’ (C. 250).

‘That so many people should have died seemed obvious enough, considering our conditions of life,’ Watt once wrote of the Japanese prison camps: ‘What was difficult to understand was rather how so many managed to survive.’65 Of course he knew that they survived through the construction of the society they improvised out of chaos. The structure of recovery is identical with the one he projected onto the importance—positive and negative—of Defoe in The Rise of the Novel, where Watt ends his reading of Robinson Crusoe by arguing that it marks the point at which traditional solidarities have been undone with such devastating comprehensiveness that new allegiances must come into being:

Defoe’s story is perhaps not a novel in the usual sense since it deals so little with personal relations. But it is appropriate that the tradition of the novel should begin with a work that annihilated the relationships of the traditional social order, and thus drew attention to the opportunity and the need of building up a network of personal relationships on a new and conscious pattern; the terms of the problem of the novel and of modern thought alike were established when the old order of moral and social relationships was shipwrecked, with Robinson Crusoe, by the rising tide of individualism. (RN 92)

If the catastrophic ‘shipwreck’ of civilization at Chungkai makes it clearer what Watt would have meant when he attributed a fundamentally fantastical quality to Defoe’s robust Robinson Crusoe, whose selfhood survives so bravely the degradations imposed by his environment, it is clearer, too, what he meant when he wrote of Fielding that his worldliness finally ‘brought [the novel] into contact with the whole tradition of civilised values’ (RN 288); this, he later claimed, was ‘the ultimate aim of “realism of assessment” ’.66 Watt praises Fielding for giving the novel ‘something that is ultimately even more important than narrative technique—a responsible wisdom about human affairs’ (RN 288). Fielding has ‘a true grasp of human reality, never deceived or deceiving about himself, his characters or the human lot in general’ (RN 288). By rejecting Richardson’s inwardness, Fielding ‘converts the novel into a social and indeed into a sociable literary form’ (RN 285). Watt did not have terms of approbation stronger than these. Watt’s intellectual and moral acceptance of Fielding’s values may have been such that he had relatively little to say about them. The problems Defoe and Richardson’s ideas of selfhood raised were far more unsettling, but they were also much more compelling as a result.

The language in which he praises Fielding prefigures the language in which, only two years after the appearance of The Rise of the Novel, he would praise another favourite eighteenth-century writer, the more pessimistic Samuel Johnson, for his ‘steady awareness of mankind’s limitations’.67 Watt sees the resistance to unrestrained individualism (or, say, ‘free enterprise at its worst, with all the restraints of morality gone’, as Gordon had put it in his account of the disorder at Chungkai) as the great strength of Fielding’s world view, with its belief that ‘society and the larger order which it represents must have priority’ (RN 271). ‘Restraint’ is as important a concept for Watt as it had been for Conrad in Heart of Darkness: ‘a quality which is not usually needed in modern society, where all necessary sanctions on conduct are supplied externally’ (C. 227).

‘The power of doing what we please’

Fielding’s anti-individualism is obviously not simply a matter of style, or of the opposite of ‘realism of presentation’, but also of attention at the level of argument to individualism’s potentially corrosive human effects. In his 1958 essay on Tom Jones, William Empson argued that after Joseph Andrews ‘Fielding set himself up as a moral theorist…because he decided he could refute the view of Hobbes, and of various thinkers prominent at the time who derived from Hobbes, that incessant Egotism is logically inevitable or a condition of our being’.68 Fielding’s engagement with selfishness is especially marked in the books most explicitly about crime, Jonathan Wild (1743) and Amelia (1751). Here, criminality and individualism are linked as strongly as in Defoe’s fiction, only from a completely different moral perspective. Early in Amelia we meet Jonathan Thrasher, a corrupt Justice of the Peace who is a legal ignoramus but comprehensively ‘well versed in the Laws of Nature’:

He perfectly well understood that fundamental Principle so strongly laid down in the Institutes of the learned Rochefoucault; by which the Duty of Self-love is so strongly enforced, and every Man is taught to consider himself as the Centre of Gravity, and to attract all things thither. To speak the Truth plainly, the Justice was never indifferent in a Cause, but when he could get nothing on either Side.69

Not long afterwards, Fielding has Billy Booth voice his own disgust for cynical individualism, in a conversation with the fallen Fanny Mathews about the provocatively amoral arguments of Bernard Mandeville (here, unambiguously, ‘Man-devil’):

‘I look upon the two Words you mention [Virtue and Religion], to serve only as Cloaks under which Hypocrisy may be the better enabled to cheat the World. I have been of that Opinion ever since I read that charming Fellow Mandevil.’

‘Pardon me, Madam,’ answered Booth, ‘I hope you do not agree with Mandevil neither, who hath represented human Nature in a Picture of the highest Deformity. He hath left out of his System the best Passion which the Mind can possess, and attempts to derive the Effects or Energies of that Passion, from the base Impulses of Pride or Fear. Whereas, it is as certain that Love exists in the Mind of Man, as that its opposite Hatred doth, and the same Reasons will equally prove the Existence of the one as the Existence of the other.’70

In an even more negative vein, Fielding connected individualism and crime through the disgusted mockery of antisocial ideas of distinction in Jonathan Wild. The triumph of the individual means that everyone else must suffer for his solitary good: ‘Lastly, when I consider whole Nations extirpated only to bring Tears into the Eyes of a great man, that he hath no more Nations to extirpate, then indeed I am almost inclined to wish that Nature had spared us this her masterpiece, and that no great man had ever been born into the World.’71 Famously, Alexander the Great was said to weep because there were no more worlds to conquer; to borrow the phrasings of Amelia, Alexander is among ‘all the Heroes who have ever infested the Earth’, and it would be no cause for grief should such heroes be ‘hanged all together in a String’.72 The gang-master, thief-taker protagonist Jonathan Wild is likened to such heroes as Alexander throughout, and Newgate turns out to be ‘a Castle very far from being an improper, or misbecoming Habitation for any great Man whatever’.73 To these novels’ attacks on a ruinous and aggrandizing individualism, we might even add Shamela (1741), which Tom Keymer has argued is not ‘a reactionary attack on plebeian adventurism’ but a denunciation of ‘enterprise culture’ and ‘the corrupt and pharisaical entrepreneur’.74

In his powerful autobiographical travelogue The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755), the dying Fielding wrote of the social and economic havoc caused by ‘the vague and uncertain use of a word called Liberty’: ‘commonly understood [as] the power of doing what we please’.75 Paulson writes of this final work that its ‘general theme…is degeneration’, a reflection of the deepening social pessimism born of Fielding’s years as a magistrate, when he saw at close quarters the loose weave of the social fabric.76 Along with ‘the heroic struggles for human betterment which he conducted as a magistrate under the most adverse personal circumstances’, Watt names Fielding’s Journal as the place where Fielding’s ‘moral qualities’ (which Watt names as his ‘dignity and generosity’) are most apparent (RN 287).

In the last-ditch journey to Lisbon to save his life, Fielding’s physical dependence upon those around him—his helplessly immobile body is mere ‘dead luggage…incapable of any bodily motion without external impulse’—can only have enhanced the acuteness of his perceptions of human vulnerability and the problem of self-interest.77 The Journal is full of dismay at how enterprising individuals take amoral advantage of the dependency of others, such as the greedy innkeeper Mrs Francis of Ryde and her fellows on the coast who profit from the need of those caught offshore, or in even worse circumstances: ‘they are so far from taking any share in the distresses of mankind, or of being moved with any compassion for them, that they look upon them as blessings shower’d down from above; and which the more they improve to their own use, the greater is their gratitude and piety.’78 Watt would have known this phenomenon of old. Another former prisoner recalled the ‘exorbitant profit’ made by prisoners who found themselves in better circumstances than others, and supposed that while no one would ‘object to them making a degree of profit for their trouble…there is something immoral in their greed for exorbitant profit from their position of advantage over our helplessness’.79

This kind of entrepreneurship is a recurrent feature of Fielding’s Journal. As he waits, both chair-bound and ship-bound, for wind enough to move the boat forward, Fielding finds that Kent boatmen take advantage of the ability to name their own prices for supplying passengers immobilized on their ships off the coast. Darker forms of exploitation are implied, however, by the ‘monsters’ who are ‘triumphing…in the miseries of those, who are, in many circumstances at least, their fellow-creatures, and considering the distresses of a wretched seaman, from his being wrecked to his being barely wind-bound, as a blessing sent among them from above, and calling it by that blasphemous name’.80 Perhaps social disorder is always lamentable when it is seen from above, Fielding’s usual social perspective; it may, after all, be an ominous symptom of threat to one’s own class privilege. What makes the Journal so affecting, though, is that Fielding is seeing disorder as if from below, having become through his sickness and fragility the underdog he had previously championed on more patrician principles. Hearing the watermen of Rotherhithe uproariously ridicule his failing body—disfigured by dropsy and paralysed by gout, Fielding knows that it is ‘a spectacle of the highest horror’—Fielding describes the episode as ‘a lively picture of that cruelty and inhumanity, in the nature of men, which I have often contemplated with concern; and which leads the mind into a train of very uncomfortable and melancholy thoughts’.81

The sobering conservatism of Fielding is not an uncritical acceptance of the hierarchical status quo. Nor is what emerges in the recollections of prisoners of war as they describe their painful efforts to remake a society in the camps any unreflective embrace of hierarchical discipline in the old style. On the contrary, memoirs describe how efforts by senior officers to cling to their old power and privileges were mockingly nicknamed ‘Aldershot of the jungle’ and ‘The Imperial War Museum’.82 The prisoners’ point is that solidarity requires discipline, and discipline commits officers to not pulling rank for privilege or asking for more than others have.

Against unthinking observance of hierarchy, submission to the social order for the collective good is ‘necessary’—here Watt is ostensibly ventriloquizing Conrad—in ‘a world where nobody works or accepts any social constraint willingly’ (C. 111). Because, of course, things could have been much worse for Watt, as he explained in ‘The Liberty of the Prison’, because, while prisoners of war are typically taken individually and lost in the anonymous mass of prisoner-strangers, ‘we had our own old social organization as some sort of basis for communal life’.83 The deadly predicament of the Asian civilian labourers brought home every day to the Allied prisoners what was at stake: as one English prisoner recalled: ‘With no organisation to bind them together, and no one to speak up for them, their society has disintegrated until nobody has the will to do anything.’84

But, if banding together was a strategy for literal survival, it was a strategy for psychological salvation too. ‘Role-playing is safer than idleness’, Alexander explained, ‘and make-believe morale better than demoralisation’.85 Watt also wrote of ‘rather an innocent schoolboy world—the world of the public surface that we felt free to elaborate, rather than the inner private world that was still full of nameless fears’.86 This was the mock society that Durnford and Greener described, with its recreational card games and churchgoing. The cost was that subjective feelings had to be subordinated or simply denied. ‘Looking back I can see that there were whole ranges of emotion that were taboo,’ Watt wrote, although of course he never elaborated what those emotions were.87 We can infer something, perhaps, from his comments on Conrad: ‘although the sceptical mind knows that all ideological structures are really illusions, they may in practice be necessary restraints upon human egoism, laziness, or despair’ (C. 248).

Adam Piette’s important survey of British Second World War writing Imagination at War (1995) explicitly rules out consideration of prisoners of war, but Piette captures sharply the way in which those who lived through the period experienced the disparity between social and emotional life: ‘The public stories stressed vital resistance, public heroism, stoic good humour; the private stories are stories about broken minds, anaesthetized feelings, deep depression and loss of any sense of value.’88 One prisoner summed up how he had schooled his emotional habits in order to survive:

Adapt, alter, redirect thoughts, suppress emotions, control temper, twist and distort your personality to accommodate circumstances forced upon you, to create a defensive shell, to be part of a bond of togetherness with those around you. For it was that bond, loyalty to each other and concern for each other, that forged a tough shield of mutual protection. Without it you were too vulnerable—you could simply fall apart.89

Watt’s attitude is similarly utilitarian: that, when life itself is at stake, the ‘inner private world’ populated by ‘nameless fears’ assuredly cannot help you, whereas ‘the world of the public surface’ just might. The narrative equivalent is the cool, ironic distance of a Fielding as an antidote to what Richetti sums up as ‘the interminable analytic sessions’ of the psychological fiction that reached its first shattering apotheosis in Clarissa.90 Rawson captures well this combination of self-suppression and deep feeling when he writes that ‘things are not allowed to become unduly emotional, although we often know that Fielding feels very strongly indeed’. This is why, as McKillop said, Fielding is ‘an easier novelist to live with’.

Modern Augustans, Modern Memory

‘Fielding’s plot invites the reader to detachment, and thence to conscious assessment,’ Watt wrote in an essay looking back at The Rise of the Novel a decade later.91 He views this tendency towards distanced evaluation as a positive social force, despite the fact that it leaves Fielding’s position open to the charge ‘that it’s conformist, cautious, cold; too much superego and too little id’.92 This maps directly onto his prison-camp sense of ‘the world of the public surface’ as dismissal of and protection against ‘the inner private world that was still full of nameless fears’, as well as onto his more sceptical ruminations on institutional consciousness in Conrad, where he speculates that ‘solidarity may be only the code of those whom experience has brought into an un-protesting conformity with the attitudes of their group’ (C. 351). But the same accusations of coldness and conformism proved the underlying ground of his approval in an essay on the Augustans, where he praised their characteristic ‘civic sense’, their ‘equable, independent, and wide-eyed self-command’: they are ‘skeptical, observant, worldly wise…rational, polite, controlled’.93 Watt ends this essay with a major claim, but he articulates it only in a self-consciously anticlimactic style that mimics the restraint being described:

Actually one of the constants in Augustan writing is a sense of the cost of preserving civilization. Deeply committed to social order, the Augustans made the necessary sacrifices with open eyes. Johnson and Pope would have agreed with [theologian] William Law when he wrote that ‘our Imaginations and Desires…are the greatest Reality we have’. The public good, in their view, required man to discipline the impulses of his imagination and his passions.94

The claim initially suggests a reading of eighteenth-century culture through Freud, who, in the paragraph immediately prior, is said to ‘have made us aware of how deeply traditional civilization arose from psychological and social repression’.95 In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud wrote of ‘the instinctual repression upon which is based all that is most precious in human civilization’; in Civilization and its Discontents, he argued that ‘it is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction…of powerful instincts’.96 Watt is suggesting that you can care as deeply about the preservation of the social order as the eighteenth-century anti-individualists did only if you know from your own emotional reality what that social order is asking you to give up.

‘The replacement of the power of the individual by the power of a community constitutes the decisive step of civilization,’ Freud wrote.97 Arguing against what he saw as the modern critical tendency to make too much of ‘the more unsettling and nihilistic side of their vision’ (C. 167), Watt wrote of the similarities between Conrad and Freud as contemporaries who were looking for a route out of the predicament they had identified:

Freud had a much deeper belief in systematic thought than Conrad, but they shared much the same vision of how they should direct their moral energies: they saw that culture was insecurely based on repression and restraint, and yet what seemed most worth their effort was to promote a greater understanding of man’s destructive tendencies, and at the same time support the modest countertruths on which civilisation depends. As against the more absolute negations of Rimbaud and Nietzsche, or the equally absolute transcendental affirmations of Dostoevsky or Yeats, both Freud and Conrad defend a practical social ethic based on their fairly similar reformulations of the Victorian trinity of work, duty, and restraint. (C. 166–7)

Notwithstanding his own lack of conviction about ‘systematic thought’ when it came to literature, all Watt’s writing is shot through with a relatively uncritical acceptance of psychoanalysis in its broadest outlines, probably reflecting Freud’s impact on the generation who came of age intellectually between the wars.98 Still, Watt’s renunciatory reading of the eighteenth century may have less to do with the diffusion of psychoanalysis than with the curious topicality that recent history had given the Augustans’ worldly and ironic perspectives.

Like Watt a junior officer during the Second World War, Paul Fussell presents the closest comparison. Universally known in modern literary studies for his dark classic The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), he was, in fact, already a very distinguished scholar of Augustan literature before that, as the author or editor of numerous books on topics ranging from Samuel Johnson to eighteenth-century theories of prosody. But the book that helps to explain how he became so compelling a critic of modern war literature is his intensely sympathetic treatment of conservative irony in The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism (1965). To understand that ‘rhetorical world’, Fussell argued there, it is necessary to appreciate the death-haunted atmosphere that brought it into being, a pervasive sense ‘of horror, and shock, and fear’.99 Perhaps the ironic and civic stoicism of the Augustans felt newly timely for those who had experienced the Second World War: ‘Indeed, the power and…the fury of Augustan humanist expression suggests ideas of actual wartime conditions,’ and Fussell devotes a whole chapter to these writers’ surprisingly insistent use of military metaphors.100 ‘The human being is essentially a failure,’ Fussell paraphrases: ‘He must operate as a social and public creature only because he is too frail and incomplete to exist by himself.’101 Evident throughout the book is Fussell’s sympathy with the fear and anxiety underlying the protective sociability of the Augustans, and their belief that ‘the life of solitude is ultimately anti-human’.102

The veterans Fussell and Watt emphasize that Augustan writers thought they knew what anarchy looked like, and that these writers believed they were living through the breakdown of the once-accepted values and norms that kept society together. Even though he writes that many eighteenth-century fears were ‘blown out of all proportion’, J. Paul Hunter asks us to take them seriously nonetheless:

They share the same urgent fear that something valuable (they are often not sure what) is being lost in the brave new world. Tradition is the most common name for it in belletristic texts, but other terms describe it equally well: family coherence, community values, cultural loyalty, shared ethical standards, human dignity, heritage, honor, integrity, continuity. It may be wise ultimately not to choose among these terms. All of them meant, to the persons who defended them then, much the same thing: a loss of familiarity most often expressed as the waning prestige of religion. Fading religious values may have been only a metaphor for a lost sense of balance or for a lost explanation of human history, and perhaps it does not matter much what we call either the loss or the fear. But it is important that we take seriously the feelings themselves and allow dignity to the structure of belief that sponsored them, however we feel about the beliefs themselves.103

Watt’s corresponding worries about individualism had no religious underpinning; in his unfinished final book he joked that the concern with the afterlife in the Don Juan story ‘is rather uncongenial for those who, like myself, and Lord Chesterfield, make their main concern about death not “to be buried alive” ’ (MMI 115). Still, much of what Hunter says of the Augustans’ beleaguered values—cultural continuity, shared moral norms, human dignity, heritage, and honour—would have resonated powerfully as the opposite of individualism.

These are the values that Watt found in Fielding, so he might well have been, as he professed, a ‘Fielding-ite’. Alter writes that Fielding’s ‘literary method works on the tacit assumption of a community of values’, but Fielding ‘creates rather than reinforces shared outlooks, for Fielding is clearly aware that in his age the community of values, like the community of men, has lost much of the wholeness it may once have had’.104 There is darkness and anger even in the sunniest of Fielding’s novels. We see this in, for example, the emphasis on degradation and suffering in the ostensibly comic Joseph Andrews, where prospects of help from others are chronically uncertain. (Or: ‘Common Charity, a F—t!’ as Mrs Tow-wouse declares when she wishes to evict from his apparent deathbed the stripped and battered Joseph.105) In Tom Jones, perhaps, the most engagingly arranged of plots compensates for as well as attests to a fundamental sense of moral disorder, but it is still far distant from ‘old Harry Fielding’s hearty Englishness’, as Alter sums up one common mid-century underestimate of this writer: ‘all right for the casual entertainment of readers who relish foaming English ale, cheery English inns, plump and blushing English wenches, crackling hearthfires, mutton on the spit, and the occasional rousing interlude of a two-fisted free-for-all’.106 Watt always took Fielding far more seriously than this. In his afterword to a 1966 reprint of Joseph Andrews, for example, we find that Fielding’s Cervantic road narratives are not opportunities for good-hearted manly romping but, startlingly, ‘a way of mirroring the full range of the world’s selfishness, brutality, and stupidity’.107

Because Alter was concerned with Fielding’s technical importance, he found it noteworthy that ‘Watt’s desire to be fair-minded ultimately reduces him to praising Fielding in oddly nineteenth-century terms for his “wisdom” ’.108 But it is difficult to suppose that Watt would have found this a troubling complaint. This is not only because he treats Fielding ‘as a great humanistic writer rather than as a novelist’, as McKillop saw in his review of The Rise of the Novel, but because, and as Daniel Schwartz shrewdly noted in 1983, something much like wisdom was central to Watt’s project as a critic.109 With mocking apology, Watt told a 1978 lecture audience that he was ‘properly ashamed to thus affront your sophistication with such fly-blown terms as wisdom and truth; but they are—and not very obscurely—part of my overt concern in The Rise of the Novel’.110 ‘Watt enacts in his criticism the argument that a literary critic must also be an experienced, mature, judicious observer of human behavior,’ Schwartz writes: ‘Watt judges behavior and motives from the stance of his own rational, humanistic, and egalitarian impulses’.111

From an altogether different perspective, David Hirsch had already noted this propensity to judge in The Rise of the Novel. His inexplicably bad-tempered 1969 essay ‘The Reality of Ian Watt’ denounces Watt first for misreading John Locke, and then for not needing Locke anyhow when what is ‘real’ depends finally on Watt’s own judgement:

when Watt comes to speak about realism in the novel he can speak of it only as a feeling or a belief or an intuition. That is to say that Watt, who represents himself as a wholly objective critic, is in truth a most subjective critic. This subjectivity is concealed beneath such stylistic subterfuges as authoritative expletives and declarations of reality, and by appeal to a supposedly universal emotional and intellectual response by a mysterious ‘we’. But who has given Watt the authority to declare reality?112

Hirsch exaggerates on the ‘supposedly universal’, but he is entirely correct to suggest that Watt either presupposes or attempts to create a community of readers who will share his sense of what is plausible and acceptable. Yet it is hard to imagine Watt finding this a wounding line of attack, given his declared conviction that ‘literary criticism is essentially a social rather than a philosophical activity’.113

In conclusion, the ‘wisdom’—as he was perfectly happy to call it—of writers like Fielding mattered to Watt as an antidote to what he saw as an increasingly impoverished individualism. On the famous opening of Rousseau’s Confessions (‘Whether Nature did well or ill in breaking the mould in which she formed me…’), he recounted: ‘I once heard an eminent devotee of Augustan literature comment on the passage, “Isn’t it enough to ruin your whole day?” ’ (MMI 177). ‘Since the brave days of the Romantics’, he wrote elsewhere, ‘the idea of existence as essentially an escape by the individual to realise his private dream had been widely diffused and progressively debased both in literature and in life’ (C. 52). His anti-Romanticism is a distaste for ‘the developing imperatives of Romantic individualism, with its Faustian ideal of absolute liberation from religious, social, and ethical norms in the pursuit of experience’ (C. 163), and, above all, for the dissemination of ‘antirational and anti-collective attitudes’.114

Of course, it is not a controversial claim to suggest that the main thread running through Watt’s scholarly career is the relationship between individualism and the novel. But he was no cheerleader for individualism, and became increasingly outspoken about what he considered its politically and socially incapacitating effects. Although they were published at spaces of roughly twenty years apart, his three monographs The Rise of the Novel, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, and Myths of Modern Individualism were all conceived at the beginning of his career. Research for the Conrad book had begun in 1955, two years prior to the publication of The Rise of the Novel, although it was published twenty-two years after it, while the first essay on Robinson Crusoe as a ‘myth’ of modern individualism alongside Faust, Don Juan, and Don Quixote, the subject of the book left unrevised at Watt’s final illness, was published back in 1951. If one reads the books in the order of their writing, though, it is impossible not to notice their increasingly forthright pessimism about the socially damaging effects of individualism, and these apprehensions explain better than anything his admiration for Fielding, the great misfit in The Rise of the Novel. Perhaps, Watt surmised, ‘writers of great literature’ all believe in ‘various traditional moral values, such as selflessness, courage, resolution, kindness, and intellectual realism’.115 In Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, he wrote of Conrad’s concern with the ‘values of courage, tenacity, honour, responsibility and abnegation’ (C. 7), and argued that his novels show ‘a moral strength and sanity that remains unrivalled in the literature of our century’ (C. 25). Finally, he wondered in the coda to his unrevised final work if the only redeeming cultural values to set against the ‘current perversions of modern individualism’ might ‘all turn out to be anti-individualist: a sense of history, an absolute ethic of right and wrong, awareness of the rights and feelings of others, discipline…’ (MMI 271).

1 Ian Watt, ‘Shakespeare’s Wisdom: An Approach’, Stanford University Special Collections, SC401-ACCN 1994-106, Box 23, Folder 3.

2 C. J. Rawson, Henry Fielding (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), 7.

3 McKillop, The Early Masters of English Fiction, 133. Watt and McKillop reviewed each other’s books respectfully in consecutive issues of Modern Philology (55/2 (November 1957), 132–4, and 55/3 (February 1958), 208–10).

4 Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1991), 41.

5 Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 41.

6 Robert Alter, Fielding and the Nature of the Novel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 25.

7 Frank, ‘The Consequence of Ian Watt’, 503.

8 Jill Campbell, Natural Masques: Gender and Identity in Fielding’s Plays and Novels (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 121.

9 Letter to W. R. Irwin dated 1 February 1980, Stanford University Special Collections, SC401-ACCN 1990-131, Box 18, Folder ‘IAUPE 1980’.

10 Ian Watt, ‘Jane Austen and the Tradition of Comic Aggression’, Fall Honors Lecture, Washington University in St Louis, 22 September 1982, Office of Public Affairs, Assembly Series Administrative Records, University Archives, Department of Special Collections, Washington University Libraries.

11 Howe, ‘Criticism at its Best’, 146.

12 Watt, ‘Serious Reflections on The Rise of the Novel’, 4.

13 Ronald Paulson, The Life of Henry Fielding (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 146.

14 Alter, Fielding and the Nature of the Novel, 43.

15 Conrad, Lord Jim, 154; ellipsis in original.

16 Watt, ‘The Bridge over the River Kwai as Myth’, 206.

17 Watt, ‘The Bridge over the River Kwai as Myth’, 206.

18 Watt, ‘The Liberty of the Prison’, 519.

19 Owtram, 1000 Days on the River Kwai, 49.

20 Owtram, 1000 Days on the River Kwai, 49.

21 Gordon, Miracle on the River Kwai, 87–8; ellipses added.

22 H. W. Fowler and I. P. Watt, ‘Japanese—Prisoner of War Language’, Stanford University Special Collections, SC401-ACCN 1994-106, Box 24, Folder 4.

23 Donald Smith, And All the Trumpets (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1954), 105.

24 Twigg, Survivor on the River Kwai, 176.

25 Smith, And All the Trumpets, 101, 102.

26 Smith, And All the Trumpets, 105.

27 Smith, And All the Trumpets, 108.

28 The relative survivability of German camps applied only to Western prisoners. Their death rate of around 58%, amounting to 3.3 million deaths, indicates the categorically different experience of Soviet prisoners (Frank Biess, Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 3). For a useful summary of the mistreatment of prisoners on the Eastern Front by both German and Soviet armies, see MacKenzie, ‘The Treatment of Prisoners of War’, 504–12.

29 Clifford G. Holderness and Jeffrey Pontiff, ‘Hierarchies and the Survival of Prisoners of War during World War II’, Management Science, 58/10 (October 2012), 1875.

30 Spanos, In the Neighborhood of Zero, 66.

31 Spanos, In the Neighborhood of Zero, 86.

32 Watt, ‘The Ways of Guilt’.

33 Ian Watt, ‘Robinson Crusoe as a Myth’, Essays in Criticism, 1/2 (April 1951), 107.

34 Twigg, Survivor on the River Kwai, 150, 154.

35 Braddon, The Naked Island, 121.

36 Radford, ‘The Economic Organisation of a P. O. W. Camp’, 189.

37 Charles G. Roland, ‘Stripping Away the Veneer: P. O. W. Survival in the Far East as an Index of Cultural Atavism’, Journal of Military History, 53/1 (January 1989), 79.

38 Richetti, The English Novel in History, 121.

39 Gordon, Miracle on the River Kwai, 113.

40 Watt, ‘Bridges over the Kwai’, 218.

41 Letter from Ernest Gordon dated 14 September 1959, Stanford University Special Collections, SC401-ACCN 1994-106, Box 25, Folder ‘Bridge—Correspondence’.

42 Ernest Gordon, ‘No Hatred in My Heart’, in Guthrie Moir (ed.), Beyond Hatred (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970), 20.

43 Gordon, Miracle on the River Kwai, 131.

44 Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 373, 81, 81.

45 Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela (London: Penguin, 1999), 113.

46 Fielding, Tom Jones, 82–3.

47 Des Pres, The Survivor, 142.

48 Des Pres, The Survivor, v, vii.

49 Stephen Greenblatt, ‘The Survivor: Life in the Death Camps’, San Francisco Review of Books, 2 (May 1976), 13.

50 Conrad, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, 98.

51 Conrad, Lord Jim, 37.

52 Watt, ‘Joseph Conrad: Alienation and Commitment’, 14.

53 Conrad, Lord Jim, 162.

54 Des Pres, The Survivor, 121.

55 Alexander, Sweet Kwai, 1.

56 Hough, ‘Prisoners’, 8.

57 Rivett, Behind Bamboo, ix.

58 Kinvig, River Kwai Railway, 96.

59 Braddon, The Naked Island, 117.

60 Braddon, End of a Hate, 22.

61 Durnford, Branch Line to Burma, 126.

62 Durnford, Branch Line to Burma, 127.

63 Leslie Greener, No Time to Look Back (London: Gollancz, 1951), 34.

64 Greener, No Time to Look Back, 34.

65 Watt, ‘The Liberty of the Prison’, 515.

66 Watt, ‘Serious Reflections on The Rise of the Novel’, 12.

67 Ian Watt, ‘Dr Samuel Johnson after 250 Years’, Listener, 24 September 1959, 478.

68 William Empson, ‘Tom Jones’, Kenyon Review, 20/2 (Spring 1958), 224.

69 Fielding, Amelia, 21.

70 Fielding, Amelia, 114–15.

71 Henry Fielding, Jonathan Wild (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 43.

72 Fielding, Amelia, 359.

73 Fielding, Jonathan Wild, 124.

74 Tom Keymer, Richardson’s Clarissa and the Eighteenth-Century Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 25.

75 Henry Fielding, The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (London: Chiswick Press, 1892), 121, 122.

76 Paulson, Henry Fielding, 322.

77 Fielding, Voyage to Lisbon, 94.

78 Fielding, Voyage to Lisbon, 84.

79 Peek, One Fourteenth, 200–1.

80 Fielding, Voyage to Lisbon, 85.

81 Fielding, Voyage to Lisbon, 46.

82 Durnford, Branch Line to Burma, 44, 166. In an intriguing quantitative study, survival rates among US prisoners during the Second World War were found to decline the closer the camp environment corresponded to military hierarchies. Holderness and Pontiff, ‘Hierarchies and the Survival of Prisoners’, 1873–86.

83 Watt, ‘The Liberty of the Prison’, 519.

84 Peek, One Fourteenth, 252–3.

85 Alexander, Sweet Kwai, 72.

86 Watt, ‘The Liberty of the Prison’, 526–7.

87 Watt, ‘The Liberty of the Prison’, 527.

88 Adam Piette, Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry 1939–1945 (London: Papermac, 1995), 5.

89 Peek, One Fourteenth, 666; emphasis in original.

90 Richetti, The English Novel in History, 122.

91 Watt, ‘Serious Reflections on The Rise of the Novel’, 15.

92 Watt, ‘Serious Reflections on The Rise of the Novel’, 19.

93 Ian Watt, ‘The Augustan Age’, in Watt, The Literal Imagination, 27, 27, 32.

94 Watt, ‘The Augustan Age’, 36; ellipsis in original.

95 Watt, ‘The Augustan Age’, 36.

96 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 50. Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, 51–2.

97 Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 49.

98 Broad outlines, that is, because Watt was sceptical about more programmatic uses of psychoanalysis: on the one hand, ‘we may agree that, out of the whole gamut of human behaviour in general, very little, if any, is wholly rational and conscious’; on the other hand, psychoanalytic criticism often entails ‘the discovery of nonliteral meanings to support whatever conceptual apparatus is being applied’, and ‘you either believe in night journeys and primal scenes or you don’t’ (C. 239).

99 Paul Fussell, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism: Ethics and Imagery from Swift to Burke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 290.

100 Fussell, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism, 21. See the chapter titled ‘Moral Warfare: Strategy and Tactics’, 139–70.

101 Fussell, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism, 53.

102 Fussell, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism, 32.

103 Hunter, Before Novels, 243–4.

104 Alter, Fielding and the Nature of the Novel, 45.

105 Fielding, Joseph Andrews, 93.

106 Alter, Fielding and the Nature of the Novel, 4.

107 Ian Watt, ‘On Reading Joseph Andrews’, in Watt, The Literal Imagination, 118.

108 Alter, Fielding and the Nature of the Novel, 6.

109 Alan D. McKillop, ‘The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, by Ian Watt’, Modern Philology, 55/3 (February 1958), 209.

110 Watt, ‘Flat-Footed’, 62.

111 Daniel R. Schwartz, ‘The Importance of Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel’, Journal of Narrative Technique, 13/2 (Spring 1983), 66.

112 David H. Hirsch, ‘The Reality of Ian Watt’, Critical Quarterly, 2/2 (Summer 1969), 178.

113 Todorov, Literature and its Theorists, 116.

114 Watt, ‘The Humanities on the River Kwai’, 234.

115 Ian Watt, Joseph Conrad: Nostromo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 79.

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