A few weeks ago, a writer friend texted me, “Rose I’m at the worst reading ever”. I debated showing up late but wasn’t dressed for it: I would have to go home, change into something chic and nonchalant, grab my Tabi boots. There would be photographers. Soon he texted me again: he wanted to give up writing and get a job at Palantir.

Over the past two years, readings have become all the rage. They’re how London’s literati typically socialise now. There is the Soho Reading Series, presided over by Tom Willis, which flits around the city for readings in Peckham arts centres and galas in cavernous Walthamstow warehouses. There’s Deleted Scenes by Paul Johnathan, where young women in minimal make-up and pearl necklaces crane their necks from the stairwell to listen to readings in the basement of a Soho bar basement. There are many others too, and sometimes, the readings are very good. Sometimes they’re unremarkable or actively torturous. This is largely besides the point.

I turned up to one event recently and found that there were no readings at all, but rather plates of aesthetically presented fruit slices arrayed on a table for aperitifs. This is the ideal literary reading: it’s about the party, not the writing. These events are, to a degree, reactions against the stuffy book launches of the respectable literary world, where you have to schmooze your way to editors and agents. The organisers are trying to reclaim an older mode of sociality, boozier and more irreverent, more like the literary scenes of Twenties London, where you could land in an unfamiliar city and find your feet in Soho’s pubs and the upper rooms of restaurants.

Such circles produced some of the greatest works written in English. Joyce’s Ulysses might never have found a publisher without the avant-garde literary scenes of Chicago and Paris; Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, first published by his own magazine, The Criterion, and then by Hogarth Press, made its way into the English canon through the patronage of friends. Little magazines, such as the Adelphi, the English Review, Colosseum, The Nation and Athenaeum and The New Statesman, flourished. The world of early 20th-century modernism was highly social: it meant parties at Ford Madox Ford’s house in Kensington; country retreats at Ottoline Morrell’s Garsington estate, where bohemians mixed freely with Oxford intellectuals; a secret map of pubs in Soho and Fitzrovia full of heavy drinkers and aristocrats.

While Bloomsbury has eclipsed the others in popular imagination, you couldn’t throw a stone in London without hitting some literary circle. Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and the Vorticists met in an upstairs room of the Eiffel Tower restaurant on Percy Street, a location chosen both for its having been the haunt of imagist writer T.E. Hulme and his Poets’ Club, and for its proximity to Bloomsbury, where Lewis’s literary enemies dwelt. Contributors to Eliot’s Criterion also met there, or else at The Cock on Fleet Street. At Tom Burns’ house in St Leonard’s Terrace Chelsea, Catholics of illiberal persuasions — David Jones, Bernard Wall, Christopher Dawson — gathered for an informal salon which produced a short-lived periodical called Order. A dancing unicorn by Jones graced its cover, alongside a quotation from Aquinas’ Summa Contra Gentiles: “those are called wise who put things in their right order and control them well.”

London’s literary scene in these years was distinguished by its unusual political and religious diversity: there were traditionalist Anglo-Catholics, romantic back-to-the-land Catholic distributists, the odd fascist, socialists and old-fashioned liberals. It was a period before these ideas had calcified into the strict polarities of Right and Left. After the First World War, writers and artists threw themselves into articulating the problems and possible trajectories of modernity, which was understood as an artistic question as much as a political or economic one. The future was unmarked territory, and the diversity of literary circles — in their views and their formal characteristics as well as the various sorts they attracted — mirrored the range of possibilities for the modern age.

By the Thirties, the notion of a “literary scene” was coming in for criticism. Roy Campbell’s verse satire The Georgiad (1931) protested the literary mediocrity of Bloomsbury: “For they’re all members of the self-same school / And drilled, like Fascists, to enforce on all / The standards of the middling and the small.” For Wyndham Lewis, the Bloomsbury scene amounted to the “societification of art, where all are geniuses, before whose creations the other members of the Club, in an invariable ritual, must swoon with appreciation”. D.H. Lawrence satirised London’s literary scene in Women in Love, as did Ezra Pound in his poem “Portrait d’une Femme”. The same forces of friendship and social status which allowed Joyce or Eliot or Pound to find an audience in the little magazines seemed, at the same time, to promote vacuity and mediocrity among socialites wary of alienating their friends.

Both Campbell and Lewis had another axe to grind, having found themselves at odds with the general political tenor of London’s literary scene. Lewis’s 1937 novel The Revenge for Love had been attacked for its pro-Franco sympathies; the publishing group Left Book Club made a coordinated attempt to prevent its being stocked by booksellers. Two years earlier, Lewis declared in his “Freedom that destroys itself” essay that a “repressive ‘Left-wing’ orthodoxy has for long existed in Great Britain”, a view echoed by Orwell in 1948 when he wrote that “Obviously, for about fifteen years past, the dominant orthodoxy, especially among the young, has been ‘Left’.”

That characterisation was generally accurate. Though the Twenties had tolerated a variety of political perspectives, the beginning of the Spanish Civil War starkly divided London’s writers into two camps. The* Left Review* published, in 1937, a survey of writers’ support for Franco or the Republicans respectively; of the 147 responses, 126 supported the Republican cause, with only five pledging their allegiance to Franco (among them were Evelyn Waugh and Arthur Machen.) In his final edition of The Criterion in 1939, Eliot spoke of the years between 1918 and 1926 as a “period of illusions”, before which the features of the post-war world had clearly emerged. As it became necessary to take a side, to nail down one’s sympathies for socialism or fascism, so the open-ended, speculative quality of modernist writing began to seem naïve, and experimentation seemed to indicate a lack of moral fibre or a failure to appreciate the seriousness of the age. As Eliot reflected in that final editorial, “For myself, a right political philosophy came more and more to imply a right theology—and right economics to depend upon right ethics: leading to emphases which somewhat stretched the original framework of a literary review.”

Part of the “edginess” of today’s literary readings is their laxer affiliation to the Left. At Soho Reading Series, Tom Willis introduces the proceedings with a mumbled reference to Dimes Square, the New York downtown scene which brought together it-girl writers and podcasters with start-up founders and Right-wing internet personalities, and parties that allegedly had Peter Thiel’s money behind the bar. Willis told me that the idea for Soho Reading Series came out of his time in New York, where readings had a counter-cultural excitement lacking in London’s typically fusty literary scene. Some of the readers at Soho Reading Series have been drafted in from Dimes Square, among them Honor Levy and Dean Kissick, occasioning backlash from the Left for their perceived proximity to reactionary politics.

The house style at London’s readings is alt-lit autofiction, a genre pioneered by mainly New York-based writers like Tao Lin and Mira Gonzalez in the early 2010s, and characterised by its experimental, internet-inflected style, flat affect and personal subject matter. Its popular resurgence since 2020 has kept pace with the Rightward shift in American culture; Anika Levy’s debut novel Flat Earth, for instance, is studded with references to Right-wing esoteric health trends, incels and cryptocurrency. Madeline Cash, Levy’s co-editor at Forever Magazine, gestured at the vogue for avoiding seed oils and converting to Catholicism in her 2023 short story collection Earth Angel. Both are reading at Soho Reading Series this month.

The heavily ironic style of alt lit permits a level of engagement with Right-wing culture without pinning down its writers as Right-wing; the same irony was stretched, in New York, to real-life fraternisation with reactionaries. Since Trump’s second term began, however, writers who traded on Dimes Square edginess have taken pains to distance themselves and reclaim their Leftist credentials. Honor Levy gave an interview to Vanity Fair claiming that “I thought reactionary meant just reacting, for years, and now I know it means conservative, or whatever”. At London’s Soho Reading Series, Levy is billed alongside readers hailing from publications such as Jacobin and The New Left Review; their stories concern blowjobs, colonialism and black queer experience. Heterodoxy is permitted to the extent that it’s chic and exciting — and the Right, having not yet won on this side of the Atlantic, retains more of its transgressive cool — but London’s literary readings remain avowedly socialist in their outlook.

Is there any connection, then, between literary scenes and literary movements? Alt lit, at least, gave us something new and distinctive, and emerged naturally from its New York context — the era of terminally online, drug-abusing oversharers filtering a sense of self through their online brands. Clearly, great works of literature can and have come out of cool literary circles, and this relationship isn’t accidental: modernism couldn’t have been invented from a cabin in the woods, concerned as it is with the rapid transformations of urban and intellectual life, sexuality and the family, and reflecting in its style the transformations of social life that formed its social context. And yet 21st-century London has produced no distinctive style, no group of works which could be collectively recognised as a movement.

“21st-century London has produced no distinctive style, no group of works which could be collectively recognised as a movement.”

Part of this, I think, is that despite the veneer of irreverence surrounding today’s literary readings, there is too much political uniformity to permit the imaginative forays and experimentation which initiate literary innovation. Autofiction, even in its edgier formulations, is shaped by the same Leftist bonafides that govern the rest of the literary world: writing should be based on lived experience and should be fundamentally democratic — anyone can write well, everyone should be allowed to give voice to their own story. As Jeremy Corbyn has remarked: “there is a poem, a painting, a novel, a play in all of us.” The logical conclusion of such an aesthetic philosophy is that qualitative distinctions between good and bad writing are less important than maximally egalitarian expression.

As such, there is no habit of critique at readings. The poems and stories read aren’t referred to in the conversation which follows, which takes up the more important topics of parties and people. Perhaps critique does happen in private, in WhatsApp groups and collaborative Google Docs, but it is never invited in public. Rather, everything about these events emphasises the ephemerality of the work. Organisers don’t ask to read the work beforehand or ask for submissions; they may be familiar with a writer’s published work before asking them to read, but the name on the poster is more important than the quality of what they might choose to read. There is little of the sifting and rejection which allows a literary movement to coalesce.

Therein lies one difference between the literary circles of 100 years ago and those of today. The new and experimental writing of the Twenties came out of careful thought about the aims and purpose of literature. Eliot described his editorial endeavours in *The Criterion *as an attempt “to maintain literary standards increasingly repudiated in the modern world”. He was prepared to be brutal in his criticism, not even sparing his friends. It is difficult to cultivate a literary scene which allows you to do this, and more difficult still without the patronage which funded The Criterion and other little magazines in the Twenties and Thirties. As a business, writing is more reliant on friendships and connections than ever before. The risk of criticising a potentially valuable ally only makes sense for a writer with independent means and no need of the social capital to be gained from flattering bad writers at literary readings.

The second significant difference is that the social world of modernism took in intellectuals — philosophers, political theorists, sociologists, psychoanalysts, even theologians. Some of these were Marxists, particularly in the circles of the Left Review and Left Book Club which emerged in the Thirties. Today’s literary intellectuals are almost uniformly progressive. While there are contemporary equivalents to Bloomsbury and the Left Book Club, there is nothing like Bernard Wall’s The Colosseum or The English Review under Douglas Jerrold, or even Eliot’s Criterion. In the New York scene that London takes as its model, it was common for people to socialise across political divides. It seemed easier to shrug off the cancellation attempts based on guilt by association. After a reading I organised at Verdurin, a Left-wing friend of mine was criticised for attending an event where “fascists” were present and forced to issue an apology on X. While London has its own Right-wing intellectuals, these have scarcely any overlap with hyper-cool Gen Z literary readings. The British Right is the land of The Spectator and policy wonks, severely lacking in cultural clout. When there is no opportunity for writers to encounter new and unfamiliar ideas or to be challenged, intellectual and creative stagnation results.

This is not to suggest that good literature must be Right-wing. But new literary movements are intellectually expensive: they require concerted effort to dream up a philosophy and a style suited to the contemporary world. They require an ability to clearly perceive that world and to diagnose its ills. More fundamentally, a new literary movement definitionally requires the capacity to differentiate between good and bad art, to set out what’s wrong with existing literature and to do something else. Contemporary literary scenes, even in their most irreverent iterations, are too wedded to egalitarianism to accomplish this feat.