THE 1950s AND AFTER IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

THE 1950s AND AFTER IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

The 1950s are often conveniently categorized as the period in which the welfare state wrought great changes in British society, the time of the Angry Young Men, when the literature , as in other areas, class barriers were broken down.

Such accounts have only a limited use for the period was one of great diversity. As in the '30s, writers new and old produced work that was lively and energetic. If they sometimes formed alliances, they also knew the wisdom of D.J. Enright's remark that "the best movement is one that doesn't move far in the same direction". It is difficult to discern any real populism in the writing of the '50s. The revolution, if there was one, was founded on honest impatience with the cant and hypocricy, genteel pretentiousness, and shifty incompetences that find shelter in the trenches of carelessly perpetuated privilege. The iconoclastic writers of 13313h71n the '50s resembled those of the '30s. They valued common sense, order, clarity, wit, and self-knowledge, and they were not scrupulous in their conduct toward those who appeared to lack these qualities. In later decades, when, as Orwel had ruefully predicted, cant and hypocrisy became as much a weapon of the left as of the right, it is hardly surprising that many of the Angry Young Men were to be found on the opposite side of the barricades.

PROSE

Kingsley Amis, at different stages of his life the writer of official pamphlets on behalf of both the Labour and Conservative parties, was by far the best of the iconoclastic novelists to emerge in the '50s (the others included John Wain, John Braine, and Alan Silitoe). Lucky Jim, 1953, established from the first Amis's continuing qualities- his baleful comic stare, his uncanny ear for the quirks of contemporary speech, and the enormous cunning with which he establishes the authority of a central persona who is entirely ordinary yet also improbably alert to the most telling distinctions and deceptions in the life around him.

Like Waugh, Amis is a relentless tease who courts outrage and rejection. His weaker novels lapse sometimes into facetiousness, but the uniqueness of this persona, more interesting than any question of ideology, has been remarkably consistent from Lucky Jim to Stanley and the Women.

Amis remained a realist in the novel, a contemporary practitioner of the long, liberal humanist tradition, which puts the novelist's imaginative and linguistic gifts primarily at the service of character and therefore of life. His two most important contemporaries, Iris Murdoch and Sir Angus Wilson, also stands solidly within that tradition, but they are more concerned with the structural problem of writing such novel at a time when society not longer supplies a coherent and comunnual pattern of experience. Iris Murdoch's novels explore good and evil, the nature of power, and the possibility of love from a stand point that is neither traditional nor modernist but creates its own flavour,as do the novels of Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett. Murdoch's lively gift of social observation is a powerfully, sometimes grotesquely, combined with an insistent psychological, sexual or mythical patterning: it is as though the transparent surface of the comedy of manners has been stretched and darkened to embrace the calamitous events of tragedy.

Even more directly than Iris Murdoch, Sir Angus Wilson takes as his subject the crisis of educated middle-class society in England since Word War I. Novelists such as C. P. Snow ( Strangers and Brothers - 1940-1970), treated similar themes in an entirely conventional way, as though they were writing 19^th century novels in modern dress. But if Snow's sequence is compared with Wilson's panoramic novel No Laughing Matter - 1967, with its ingenious combination of realism, fantasy and parody, it will be seen that it is Wilson who has contrived to tell the reader more about reality.

Such accommodations between the novel of character and the pressures of contemporary fictional theory have been extremely important: they have preserved the English novel's relation to life while renewing its vitality as an art. A welcome feature of the period is the cross-fertilization between the newer writers and a number of older novelists. Other examples are Elisabeth Bowen ( The Heat of the Day - 1949, A World of Love - 1955), L. P. Hartley ( The Go-Between - 1953, The Hireling - 1957), Nancy Mitford ( The Blessing - 1951, Don't Tell Alfred - 1960), Rebecca West ( The Fountain Overflows - 1956, The Birds Fall Down - 1966), Jean Rhys ( Wide Sargasso Sea - 1966 ), Richard Hughes ( The Human Predicament - 1961-73), Olivia Mannings ( The Balkan Trilogy - 1969-65), Elisabeth Taylor ( Angel - 1957), and Sybille Bedford ( A Legacy - 1956).

Realism, arguably, is what the English navel does best, but complacency on that score can lead to a deadly predictability. Yet Iris Murdoch's insistence that " the function of the writer is to write the best books he knows how to write" is a salutary reminder of the strength of the intuitive English tradition. In the 1960s and after, the better novelists may have become more overtly concerned with problems of form, but they still derived strength and variety from grafting these concerns onto their firm adherence to the liberal novel, in a marked contrast to the arid pretentiounesness of so much continental fiction. Examples of this strength may be found in the work of: William Golding, Anthony Burgess, Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark and V. S. Naipaul.

POETRY

The state of poetry in the 1950s in many ways resembled that of the novel; indeed the period was remarkable in that Fuller, Larkin, Wain, Amis and Enright were competent practitioners in both genres. These poets formed the nucleus of a group briefly known as The Movement, represented in Robert Conquest's anthology New Lines - 1956. As ever, the grouping conceals diversity, but it is largely true that the Movement poets cultivated plainsong rather than polyphony. The typical Movement poemis sober, reflectivelypublic and somewhat flat. It parades the poet as ordinary man, his tones and themes defined by his membership in the educated middle class. The poet who partakes of the Movement's virtues but transcends its defect is Philip Larkin. Larkin uses words and rhythms to paint suble and individual impressions an the mind. He has a rare gift of control and organization and he can distill beauty from ordinariness and dullness and pain, renewing the force of Keats's assertion that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty". He is the latest in that honourable line of English poets who demonstrate that greatness can speak in a minor key.

In the '60s those who found the Movement poets limited and insular championed the work of Ted Hughes with its controlled violence, inwardness with animal instinct and powerful investigation of the untamed part of human personality. Also interesting are more compact, tautly elegant poet Thom Gunn; the Austrian poet Peter Porter and the learned, ambiguous and resonant poetry of Geoffrey Hill.

The poet who built most fruitfully on the Larkin-Hughes dichotomy of the'60s, gradually acquiring his own oblique but authoritative voice, is the Irishman Seamus Heaney, who emerged in the 1970s as the strongest and most influential poet writing today. His works include north - 1975, Field Work - 1979 and Station Island - 1984.

Bibliography:

OXFORD COMPANION TO ENGLISH LITERATURE, edited by Sir Paul Harvey

THE OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

THE CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH NOVEL, Malcolm Bradbury

THE PENGUIN BOOK OF CONTEMPORARY BRITISH POETRY, Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion.