Byron is depicted by Max Beerbohm as shaking the dust of England from his shoes, but it is in an elegiac mood that he looks back at Newstead. ‘Oh, to be’ and ‘Would I were’ are echoed often enough in English poetry composed abroad.
Milton went to Italy, hoped to go on to Greece, but returned home when things looked bad there. But the writers of the Diaspora leave England because they hate it, and continue (with some significant exceptions) to hate it to the end. The nostos (Greek word for homecoming) makes no appeal to them.
With Lawrence and Douglas and Huxley and Graves,, Durrell, Isherwood and Auden, departure is attended by the conviction that England is uninhabitable because it is not like abroad .
An insistent leitmotif of writing between the wars, for both successful and would-be escapees, is I Hate It Here.’ He quotes from a letter written by Cyril Connolly in 1929. ‘I do think that during the war something in this country got killed ... I have plumped against England ... I do feel it is a dying civilisation – decadent, but in such a damned dull way – going stuffy and comatose instead of collapsing beautifully like France.’
I wonder what Mrs Thatcher, (great reader that she was) would have said about them.
Milton went to Italy, hoped to go on to Greece, but returned home when things looked bad there. But the writers of the Diaspora leave England because they hate it, and continue (with some significant exceptions) to hate it to the end. The nostos (Greek word for homecoming) makes no appeal to them.
With Lawrence and Douglas and Huxley and Graves,, Durrell, Isherwood and Auden, departure is attended by the conviction that England is uninhabitable because it is not like abroad .
An insistent leitmotif of writing between the wars, for both successful and would-be escapees, is I Hate It Here.’ He quotes from a letter written by Cyril Connolly in 1929. ‘I do think that during the war something in this country got killed ... I have plumped against England ... I do feel it is a dying civilisation – decadent, but in such a damned dull way – going stuffy and comatose instead of collapsing beautifully like France.’
I wonder what Mrs Thatcher, (great reader that she was) would have said about them.
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