Books: Through the Unknown

THE MODERN MOVEMENT by Cyril Connolly. 148 pages. Atheneum. $4.50.

What is modern? There are people now living who can remember when it was a dirty word-something to do with illicit sex, postimpressionist painting and obscure and alarming techniques of writing. For others, perhaps less aged, the word once evoked a passionately held conviction that "modernity" in the arts announced a revolution in the mind and sensibility-offering insights into the nature of life once claimed by religious illumination.

The lively and influential British critic Cyril Connolly was recently commissioned by the London Sunday Times to compile and comment on a list of the hundred key books of modernism in literature. The result (see box) has all the marks of becoming a standard teaching aid in British and U.S. universities. Connolly's hundred also provides a formidable check list against which adult readers may test their knowledge of the literary forces that have helped shape the contemporary mind.

Connolly dates the movement from about a hundred years ago when the word modernity first appeared in its current meaning. (It was coined, says Connolly, in 1858, although its first actual use is attributed by the Oxford English Dictionary to "Hakewilfs Apologie" in 1627.) He sees the Modern Movement as virtually over by the end of the '30s. Only now is it possible to see the scope and define the shape of a vast revolution in consciousness.

The Movement, says Connolly, "began as a revolt against the bourgeois in France, the Victorians in England, the puritanism and materialism of America. The modern spirit was a combination of certain intellectual qualities inherited from the Enlightenment: lucidity, irony, skepticism, intellectual curiosity, combined with the impassioned intensity and enhanced sensibility of the Romantics, their rebellion and sense of technical experiment, their awareness of living in a tragic age. The generation which reconciled these opposites was that of Baudelaire, Flaubert and Dostoevsky, of Whitman, Melville and Ruskin, of Edmond de Goncourt and Matthew Arnold, to which one might add Renan and Turgenev ... all these artists reach out to our own age."

As for what the modern sensibility is, Connolly finds its essence in a quatrain of Baudelaire, as translated by Robert Lowell:

Only when we drink poison are we well-We want, this fire so burns our brain tissue,

To drown in the abyss-heaven or hell,

Who cares? Through the unknown we'll find the new.

Connolly's list will seem perverse and highbrow to many. To a U.S. reader, some exclusions will appear capricious. Huckleberry Finn is omitted because of its "sentimentality," and The Education of Henry Adams is out "because Adams did not write well enough." Nevertheless, the list is an achievement in taste and learning, and it is certain to provoke the unintimidated reader to compile his own.