To be fair to him, George C. Schoolfield, of Yale University, does admit in his opening sentence that ‘movement’ may be too strong a word to describe the collection of writers on whom his Baedeker focuses. So, I think, may ‘fashion’. Links between authors in these 23 cross-global chapters are certainly thin — here an admiring letter, there a nabbed theme — and with some it is hard to see any link other than date and drivel.
Each country has a chapter, and for that chapter they are allowed usually no more than one representative entry. Thus we get chapters on the decadent movement of Wales (entry: Arthur Machen) as well as that of Australia (Henry Handel Richardson).
Other entries are justified: Huysmans is here, as are Strindberg and Rilke. But from there the names become less familiar and pose another problem — one which Schoolfield is aware of, though helpless before: many texts under discussion have never appeared in English translation, so we are in the dreaded world of plot-summaries. Not many things read so badly as melodramatic novels by Scandinavians in summary.
There are interesting moments. It was good to read about the Belgian Rodenbach whose Bruges-la-Morte gave us Korngold’s very good in places opera Die tote Stadt. On Mann he is good, and I should have liked to have read him on early Hesse.
The intelligent chapter on Huysmans reminded me of an old ponder: whether Powell gave Jenkins’s housemaster the name ‘Le Bas’ with a nod to Huysmans’ Là-Bas; it seems to me a good joke that a man of such harmless rectitude should have to shuffle through life burdened by association with a French novel about a Satanist child-murderer.
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