ABSTRACT
Any writer, British or American, whose work started in the 1950s, as mine did, is likely to have felt the potent influence of Arthur Miller. And in those days in Britain, the new American writers represented world standards in literature in a way that was now almost absent from our own literary tradition. The demise of Modernism, the disordering of thirties radicalism, the chaos of wartime, the devastated state of postwar Europe, the hideous aftermath both of the Holocaust and the coming of atomic war had created a time of artistic uncertainty, a dislocation of artistic continuity. Writers who had paid pre-war homage to Communism in an age when massive solutions to economic and human problems seemed necessary, now surveyed the new order in Europe and spoke of the God That Failed. The tentative new liberalism born out of the aftermath of war looked over a world that seemed no more stable than what had gone before, and the great new ideological division of the age depressed the imagination and encouraged a naive provincialism.
