TY - JOUR
AU - Leader, Zachary
AB - Abstract The writers associated with the Movement helped to promote a notion of Englishness sometimes characterised as regressive or reactionary. They did so in their poems but also in their fiction and reviewing. In the novels of Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, John Wain, and D. J. Enright, particularly those written in the 1940s and 1950s when the group came to prominence, the connections between nationalism and literary health are more subtly anatomised than is conventionally thought. The novels are worth returning to not only for their influence on post-war British fiction but for the light they shed on questions still very much alive today. The literary influence of the Movement poets – Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Thom Gunn, Donald Davie, John Wain, D. J. Enright, Elizabeth Jennings, and Robert Conquest – was more than merely poetical. It also helped to shape the fiction of post-war Britain, from the 1950s onwards. Four of the Movement poets – Larkin, Enright, Wain, and Amis – not only wrote novels, but reviewed fiction in the broadsheet press and the weeklies. They brought to their novels the themes and values of their poetry, in particular a view of England and Englishness often characterised as regressive or reactionary. Nationhood and literature were interconnected for the Movement writers, and they thought of this interconnection as vital to literary health, as in their view of the decline of W. H. Auden's poetry. In John Wain's words, ‘what smashed it was not the war, but Auden's renunciation of English nationality’.1 This essay begins with what the Movement writers understood by ‘English nationality’. It draws its examples from the four writers mentioned above, the ones who published fiction and reviewed widely in the 1940s and 1950s, when the grouping came to prominence, and includes discussion of novels influential at the time, but little read today, long out of print, and of varying quality. None of these writers was happy with the group label, though all four, to varying degrees, played some part in promoting it. As they rightly claimed, it was a journalistic contrivance (born of an anonymous leading article in the Spectator of 1 October 1954, ‘In the Movement’, designed to create controversy and boost sales). Wain, Larkin, and Amis had been friends and fellow students of English at St John's College, Oxford, in the early 1940s; Enright, who went to Downing College, Cambridge, where he was taught by F. R. Leavis, only got to know them in the 1950s, and did not know them well until decades later. In some respects, the differences between the friends increased over the years, as did the differences between writers in the larger grouping. However, in their early novels (in Larkin's case, his only novels) a common view, or set of views, emerges about national identity. Other British novelists not in the grouping, also prominent fiction reviewers, had similar or related views, among them V. S. Pritchett, Angus Wilson, Anthony Powell, and C. P. Snow, all of whom played a part in bringing Movement novels, in some cases the Movement label itself, to public prominence. Other British novelists? The nationality of writers born or long resident in England is sometimes referred to as British, sometimes as English. To most foreigners, the terms British and English are synonymous. To most natives, including native writers, they are different, though not always, nor in the same way, nor merely because a British person can come from Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland as well as England. For John Fowles, for example, in ‘On Being English but Not British’ (1964),2 being British is bad and being English is good (nationalism, according to George Orwell, is ‘the habit of assuming that … whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled “good” or “bad”’3). ‘Britain’, Fowles writes, ‘now seems in retrospect a slogan word that was most useful when we had a historical duty to be a powerful military nation, for which patriotism was an essential emotional force’ (p. 79). This view is partly seconded by the historian Linda Colley, for whom British identity was not so much a matter of the ‘integration and homogenization of disparate cultures’ (more crudely, of the English ‘imposing [their] cultural and political hegemony on a helpless and defrauded Celtic periphery’), as of an identity ‘superimposed over an array of internal differences in response to contact with the Other, and above all in response to conflict with the Other’ (where ‘Other’ means principally France).4 ‘Britain’ or ‘Great Britain’ was a creation of the Georgians and the Victorians, meant to designate a nation not just stronger but rightly stronger than other nations. In Fowles's view, however, ‘the true Englishman has never willingly believed this’ (p. 80), being subversive, more concerned with justice than strength, insular and withdrawn: ‘What John Bull is to the Red-White-and-Blue Britain, Robin Hood is to the green England’ (p. 83). Fowles sees Max Beerbohm, ‘malgré le nom’, as an archetypal English writer, ‘a tireless debunker and deflater of the royal family, of Kipling, of Shaw, of Wells – all forms, to a true Green Englishman, of British vulgarity’. Beerbohm belongs in a line that stretches from Swift (‘the most English Irishman there ever was’), through Rowlandson and Gillray, ‘and that is continued today most clearly in Kingsley Amis’.5 In this view – though one thinks of supporters of the English Defence League waving their flags of St George – the true Englishman is ‘unbigoted, unimperial – in a word, un-British’ (p. 84). Hilary Mantel, in ‘No Passes or Documents Are Needed: The Writer at Home in Europe’ (2002),6 takes a quite different view. For Mantel, born on the northern tip of the Peak District, the child of Irish immigrants, neither term will do. ‘British’ to her is simply ‘a geographical term’, with no fixed cultural associations. ‘As for calling me “an English writer” – it is simply what I am not’ (p. 94). She uses the terms indiscriminately, like a foreigner. The society she was born into in 1952 was anxious, because of the war and rationing, and complacent, ‘because – as my elders would have it – England had won again. We had not been invaded. The gaunt old virgin Britannia had once again spat in the eye of the European rapist. The island status, the separateness of Britain, or England, was essential to her understanding of herself’ (pp. 94–5). Here the qualities Fowles is so eager to separate, Mantel rolls together and rejects. When it comes to invasion, aggression, the arrogant assumption of superiority, a writer with Irish Catholic antecedents is unlikely to distinguish between British and English. In school in England, Mantel writes, clashes with the Irish were ‘seen as a result of the Irish nation's stubborn refusal to recognise that it was, for all practical purposes, English’ (p. 95). For Mantel, being ‘English’ means possessing not only those alienating qualities Fowles calls ‘British’, but being ‘white, male, southern, Protestant, and middle class’ (p. 96). Movement writers prefer ‘English’ to ‘British’ without always distinguishing between the two. In this preference they are like George Orwell, as important an influence on the grouping as early Auden, William Empson, and Robert Graves. In ‘England Your England’ (1940),7 Orwell, like Mantel, sees no point in distinguishing between British and English aggression, between ‘“the nation”, “England”, “Britain”’ (p. 83). The distinctions that interest Orwell, and that help to define Englishness, are of class rather than national nomenclature, which is true of the Movement writers as well. To speak of England or Britain or Great Britain or the British Isles or the United Kingdom ‘as though forty-five million souls could somehow be treated as a unit’, as he puts it, is foolish for a number of reasons, notably that ‘England [is] notoriously two nations, the rich and the poor’ (p. 83). He might as easily have said three nations, the rich, the poor, and the middle-class. Or more than three, given his propensity to draw distinctions within classes. Social hierarchy is thus a source both of difference within the nation and of national identity, to natives and foreigners alike. As John Wain puts it, in ‘Who Talks of My Nation?’ (1955),8 ‘something in every English breast hankers for the medieval chain of relationships, with everyone paying feudal homage to the person next above and receiving it from the person next below’. In 1940, though, as Orwell sees it, the class system, and with it a sense of Englishness, was under pressure, principally through ‘the upward and downward extension of the middle classes’ (‘England Your England’, p. 97). This extension was accelerated by the war, the Butler Education Act of 1944, and the welfare state reforms and nationalisations of the Labour government of 1945. The Movement writers, both personally and in their writing, were more concerned with the downward than the upward branch of this extension, coming as they did from the lower-middle and upper-lower classes. Of the Movement writers who published novels, Larkin was the son of a municipal official, Amis of a clerk, Wain of a dentist, and Enright of a postman. Three of the four were educated at grammar schools, Amis was a scholarship boy at the City of London School, all went on to Oxbridge, two on scholarships (Amis and Enright). The restrictions and indignities faced by the heroes in Movement fiction are mostly imposed by those just above them, whom they view with ill-disguised irritation or exasperation or contempt rather than violence or hatred. That this moderation is ‘English’ as well as comic is suggested by a famous passage in ‘England Your England’,9 in which Orwell describes his country as resembling a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control – that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase. (p. 88)Orwell, here, is like Edmund Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790),10 describing English liberties as ‘in a sort of family settlement’ (p. 53). Families can be tyrannical, but one can't ‘overthrow’ them. One can despair of or deplore one's family, or mock its failings, as in the Orwell passage, or pack up and leave – all common reactions to ‘England’ or ‘Englishness’ in Movement fiction – but it is still one's family. To the extent that Movement writers think of England in these familial or Burkean terms, they can be described as politically conservative. No Englishman, claims Fowles, in terms that fit the Movement writers, ‘could sincerely believe that this is the worst of all possible worlds. It is not absolutely the best, of course, but it will do, and our job in it is to reform justly, or at least ensure that just reform is always a possibility’ (‘On Being English But Not British’, p. 88). The Movement writers came to prominence a decade after the war and had other reasons, aside from their ‘Englishness’, for rejecting extreme political positions, for seeing their oppressors as ‘irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts’ rather than greedy, gouging capitalists. Kingsley Amis joined the army in 1942, after a year at Oxford, where he was an open member of the Communist Party. During the war, he and a fellow officer, E. Frank Coles, worked on but never finished a thinly autobiographical novel, ‘Who Else Is Rank’, filled with complaints about the officer class and its cod-gentlemanly standards. This class rather than Germany figures as the enemy (as it does in Amis's story ‘My Enemy's Enemy’, also set in wartime, also thinly autobiographical). By the end of the war, Amis, like the protagonist of ‘Who Else Is Rank’, ceased to be a communist. The war had taught him how scarce the qualities required of revolution were, particularly those of self-sacrifice and altruism, among men and officers alike, though especially among officers. When in 1945 Amis voted Labour by proxy, what he sought was what the protagonist of ‘I Spy Strangers’, another wartime story, sought: ‘decent houses and decent jobs and being your own boss’ (in addition to ‘girls and drink and jazz and booze’, the pleasures denied him by the war). ‘I didn't expect the government to bring me girls’, he was later to tell an interviewer, ‘but I did share in the general feeling of optimism and liberty abroad at the time’.11 As the extent of Nazi and Soviet atrocities became known in the decade after the war, the dangers posed by extreme or totalitarian ideologies, whether of left or right, contributed to the moderation of Movement politics and to pride in English moderation, in being ‘the less deceived’, the title of Larkin's third collection of poems, published in 1955. They may also have played a part in the Movement writers' distrust of overarching literary theories or programmes, as in their disavowals of group identity. That some Movement poets were also novelists, unlike the major modernist poets, ought not to surprise, since, speaking very broadly, Movement poetry shares key aims, interests, and qualities with the novel. To begin with, it seeks out ‘ordinary’ or ‘general’ readers, including the sort who rarely or never read books of poetry and are put off by poetical obscurity. Its concerns are often social, at least initially. Descriptions of things or ideas in Movement poems matter because they reveal character, both of the speaker and of those spoken about. Larkin cites Thomas Hardy, ‘who found clouds, mists and mountains “unimportant beside the wear of a threshold, or the print of a hand”’.12 What Amis says of light verse applies more generally to Movement poetry, that it is ‘close to the interests of the novel: men and women among their fellows, seen as members of a group or class in a way that emphasises manners, social forms, amusements, fashion (from millinery to philosophy), topicality, even gossip’.13 According to his biographer Andrew Motion, when Philip Larkin praised John Betjeman, whose poetry clearly fits Amis's description, he was helping ‘to create the taste by which he wished his own work to be judged’.14 On Betjeman's appointment as Poet Laureate in 1972, Larkin wrote that ‘in a sense Betjeman was Poet Laureate already: he outsells the rest (without being required reading in the Universities) and his audience overflows the poetry reading public … Lucky old England to have him’.15 * * * Though he was the first of the Movement poets to publish a novel, Larkin's fictional career ended almost as soon as it began. His first novel, Jill (1946), made little initial impact, appearing under an obscure imprint; his second, A Girl in Winter (1947), published by Faber, was well and widely reviewed.16 After several failed attempts to write a third novel he gave up fiction completely. His growing fame as a poet, however, and his prominence as a reviewer, principally of poetry and jazz, ensured that his novels were read and reprinted. Despite its inauspicious debut, Jill is now better known than A Girl in Winter. It is set in wartime Oxford and concerns John Kemp, a newly arrived undergraduate. Kemp is on scholarship from ‘Huddlesford’ Grammar School, the son of a Lancashire policeman. As with the protagonists in John Wain's Hurry on Down (1953) and Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954) and That Uncertain Feeling (1955), he is made to confront the manners and values of a different class.17 In the 1963 Faber reprint, Larkin's introduction mentions that an American critic (James Grindin, in 1962) identified Kemp as ‘the first example of that characteristic landmark of the British post-war novel, the displaced working-class hero’. Without denying this possibility, Larkin plays it down: ‘In 1940 our impulse was still to minimize social differences rather than to exaggerate them. My hero's background, though an integral part of the story, was not what the story was about’ (p. 11). The novel neither romanticises Kemp's background nor challenges the class system. The depiction of a fellow undergraduate of similar origins, horrible Whitbread, ‘The Yorkshire Scholar’, makes clear Larkin's distance from anything like working-class solidarity. Whitbread's eagerness at Oxford is embarrassing, ‘like watching a man scouring his plate with a piece of bread’ (p. 53). Partly for historical reasons, Kemp's desire to fit in at Oxford is seen neither as unrealistic nor as class betrayal. Whitbread's ambition is embarrassing because of the kind of person he is. He may be a working-class ‘type’, but working-class ambition per se is not embarrassing. Given wartime privations, Oxford in 1940 was very different from the Oxford ‘of Michael Fane and his fine bindings, or Charles Ryder and his plovers’ eggs' (p. 12). In addition to lacking glamour, it lacked snobbery, ‘was singularly free of such traditional distinctions’. ‘Life in college was austere’ (p. 11), Larkin writes, as is life in Huddlesford; the boorish, braying manners of Kemp's room-mate, Christopher Warner, are those of what Orwell calls the ‘cheap private schools’,18 a point seen not by Kemp but by the chippy Whitbread, as much a snob in his way as Warner and his friends. ‘Someone of consequence’, Whitbread tells Kemp, ‘from Eton or Harrow, say – I can respect them. Someone of breeding … But these fellows like Warner, trying to jump into a class above them, coming from tinpot public schools like Lamprey’ (p. 207). The novel derides Whitbread, even as it confirms his view of Warner and his circle, through details like the ‘self-parodying southern coo’ of Elizabeth Dowling (‘It will take hours to boil. Simply hours. And I'm dying for another cup’ (p. 28)) or the ‘short barks of laughter’ of Eddie Makepeace, ‘irritating because they sounded forced’ (p. 31). Both Whitbread, on the one hand, and Warner and his friends, on the other, act out class identities Larkin presents as dated or inauthentic, as if from the Oxford of Waugh or Compton Mackenzie. Class prejudice is ‘integral’ to Jill, along with wartime privation, because it forces Kemp, who is already ‘intensely shy’ (p. 34), further into himself. In protection against isolation he constructs an imaginary world, that of an invented sister, ‘Jill’, soon changed to an invented almost-girlfriend, described by Larkin as ‘a hallucination of innocence’ (p. 135). ‘Jill’ is away at ‘Willow Gables’, an invented school, imported from the sly parodies of girls' school stories Larkin diverted himself and his friends with while an undergraduate. In the initial stream of newsy letters Kemp writes to her he turns Oxford into the place of his dreams, where he belongs. The novel is ‘about’ several things: the drab and excluding circumstances that have driven Kemp to such a pass; the needs his fantasy fulfils, for both innocence and gratified desire; and what proves the ultimate incompatibility of those needs. The girl of Kemp's dreams is wholesome, untouched, but he desires her. Part of what makes her wholesome is her Englishness. Here is how Larkin describes the moment Kemp changes her from sister to girlfriend: His pen hung over the word ‘Kemp’. He did not like it. He did not, he found, want to connect her with himself in that way. What should he call her? After a moment he finished it: Miss Jill Bradley. Bradley was a nice name, it was English, it was like saddle-leather and stables. (p. 131)English girls' school stories lack the political overtones Orwell located in boys' school stories. As James Booth puts it, ‘they generate little sense that the British Empire was won on the playing-fields of Roedean or Wycombe Abbey’ (p. xi).19 But in Larkin's or Kemp's hands at least, they feed into an older national identification: of England as pastoral, Arcadian, Blake's ‘green and pleasant land’, Fowles's ‘Green England’. ‘England is the country and the country is England’, declared Stanley Baldwin in 1924, a sentiment Betjeman's poems extend to the green belt, as in the formulation of a later prime minister, John Major: ‘a country of long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs’.20 That this England is a fantasy is revealed to Kemp when he meets a real-life Jill, a 15-year-old Oxford schoolgirl, Gillian, the cousin of one of Warner's friends. Kemp's hope is that ‘through her he might enter this life, this other innocent life’ (p. 170). When he makes an awkward pass at Gillian and is rejected, the imagined Jill disappears as well. She becomes ‘a false light he had stopped following through strength of will’ (p. 230). In a feverish dream, after the failed pass, Kemp imagines embracing Gillian, but can feel only her lips not her body. From within the dream, he concludes that ‘the love they had shared was dead’ (p. 242). Awake, he wonders if Gillian had accepted him in the dream, ‘and as this confusion increased, it spread to fulfilment or unfulfilment, which merged and became inseparable. The difference between them vanished.’ His conclusion is that ‘love died, whether fulfilled or unfulfilled’ (p. 242). Kemp's muted, wintery acceptance of this conclusion, his refusal to inflate or romanticise, even to protest, is a characteristic Movement trait, an especially austere species of the English stiff upper lip. In Larkin's second novel, A Girl in Winter, national identity is a central theme, partly because its heroine, Katherine Lind, is a foreign visitor to England. The novel is set during the war in an unnamed provincial town. Katherine is 22, university-educated, and an exile from an unnamed European country (that the Rhine is said to flow through this country suggests Germany, which Larkin had visited in 1936 with his father). Six years previously she spent a summer in Oxfordshire to improve her English, staying with a family, the Fennels, who are ‘nothing if not English’ (p. 22). The middle section of the novel, a flashback, is set in that summer and describes Katherine's initial impressions of England. These impressions are Arcadian. The Fennels live in a large but unimposing house by a river and an ancient village. Soft green hills surround the scene. The family is polite and kind to Katherine but reserved. Robin Fennel, also 16, with whom Katherine has been corresponding, is preternaturally reserved, like ‘a prince regent and foreign ambassador combined’ (p. 90). His sister calls him ‘the perfect Englishman’ (p. 130). Robin and the sister take Katherine to a gymkhana, which she finds ‘very English and interesting’ (p. 113). They go punting and play tennis on the Fennels' court (a Betjeman touch). The Englishness of Katherine's summer is like Jill's Englishness: the beauty of Oxfordshire is wholesome, the landscape equivalent of the beauty of Christine, the heroine in Amis's Lucky Jim (1954), whose ‘hair smells of well-brushed hair’ (p. 146). The relations between Robin and Katherine are innocent, their pursuits healthy. Until the very end of the Oxfordshire idyll, Robin treats Katherine ‘as he might a boy of his own age whom he wanted to impress’ (p. 117). Katherine, however, begins to be attracted to him physically, which confuses her and makes her feel guilty. Her situation is like John Kemp's, as is its outcome. On her final day, on the river, Robin at last kisses her, ‘inexpertly with tight lips’ (p. 173). A kiss is what Katherine wants, but now also fears. Sexual desire threatens the innocence both of the summer and of her image of Robin. A second disastrous kiss occurs in the closing section of the novel, which returns us to the narrative present. After six years, Katherine and Robin meet again. In her gathering isolation, partly willed, partly a product of Englishness, ‘characterized in time of war by antagonism to every foreign country, friendly or unfriendly, as a simple matter of instinct’ (p. 25), she has closed herself off from life. ‘She was not going to trust anybody. She was not going to love anybody’ (p. 185). The prospect of seeing Robin, however, agitates and excites Katherine. When finally he appears, on thirty-six-hour leave, he seems uneasy, restless, ‘roaring out something like “Well, let's have a look at you”’. His jauntiness is forced, masking nerves; he has been drinking. When he begins to kiss her, she backs away, has to shout to stop him. Later, more soberly, he asks her to sleep with him. ‘It wouldn't mean anything’, she replies. ‘Dammit’, he answers, ‘what does that matter?’ (p. 242). As Andrew Motion shrewdly comments, ‘both remarks rephrase the conclusion of Jill, arguing that “love dies, whether fulfilled, or unfulfilled”’ (p. 164). Larkin described A Girl in Winter as ‘a deathly book’ about ‘the relinquishing of live response to life. The central character, Katherine, picks up where John [Kemp] left off and carries the story into the frozen wastes.’21 Why Katherine and Kemp withdraw from life is only hinted at in their respective novels. Their shyness is an extreme form of reserve or repression, proverbially English qualities in twentieth-century writing (Katherine is a very English foreigner), as in the poems of W. H. Auden and the novels of D. H. Lawrence. Auden's influence on the Movement writers is widely acknowledged; Lawrence's influence is peculiar to Larkin. What is Laurentian in Larkin's novels and atypical of Movement fiction is the intensity of suffering occasioned by social constraint. For Lawrence, reserve and repression can be overcome: he cannot, for example, understand why Vronsky and Anna in Anna Karenina don't simply run away and live happily ever after.22 Larkin and his fellow Movement writers are less deceived. Only in a very few Amis novels does love of the sort Katherine and Kemp and Anna Karenina dream of triumph, and then only in obvious romance or fairy-tale fashion, for example in the admittedly crowd-pleasing ending of Lucky Jim, when Dixon and Christine run off together. As Amis explained, ‘a young man at odds with his surroundings, and trying to make his way, and suffering comic misfortunes, and getting the girl – it can't fail, really’.23 Movement heroes who run off in other novels, like Packet in D. J. Enright's Academic Year (1955) and its sequel Heaven Knows Where (1957), end up back home. Those who run off figuratively, from social norms, as does Charles Lumley in John Wain's Hurry on Down (1953), only part succeed. For Lumley, at the novel's conclusion, ‘the running fight between himself and society had ended in a draw’ (p. 250). A Girl in Winter is the least comic of Movement novels but it has its comic moments. In the narrative present, Katherine works in a branch library as depressing as the town it serves. Her boss, Mr Anstey, is like Whitbread in Jill, horrible and chippy (without a university education, filling in for the real boss, who is away in the army). Anstey's most marked quality, aside from his unpleasantness, is his tendency to ‘perform’ his personality, in the manner of Whitbread and Christopher Warner and his friends. When dressing down Katherine, a frequent occurrence, he makes ‘a theatrical gesture of resignation … another of his performances’ (p. 20). When interrogating her, he adopts ‘a third manner, that of the judiciary alert to learn all the facts of the case’ (p. 22). Katherine describes him as ‘theatrical, scraggy and rude’ (p. 24). Elsewhere she notes his ‘unfunny theatrical leer’ (p. 208). Self-performers like Anstey are comic staples; the discrepancies between real and perceived or wished-for identities are a frequent source of laughter and comic pathos. What makes such characters especially English is what James Wood calls ‘the class saturation’ of English comic fiction, especially in the post-war period.24 Because the war, as Larkin puts it, ‘minimize[d] social differences’, raising expectations, it encouraged Anstey-like performing tendencies in all classes, the aspiring and the encroached-upon alike. Self-expansion or self-inflation was also boosted, paradoxically, by national decline. Wood describes the characters in V. S. Pritchett's stories as ‘travelling in the opposite direction to the little grey determinism of their times. But to no avail. Pritchett's stories overflow with failure. And one notices something very English, that unlike the comic fantasists in Proust or Gogol or Tolstoy, or even sometimes in Chekhov, comic expansion is simultaneously the measure of failure’ (pp. 15–16), as it is with Anstey. In A Girl in Winter, in addition to Mr Anstey, there is the Fennels' friend, Jack Stormaway, an English colonial official on leave from India. Stormaway drives a crimson sports car, over whose loud roar ‘he had no difficulty making himself heard’ (p. 158). Six foot tall and strong, he has a face that speaks ‘of little but a sense of his authority’ (p. 159). He is what John Fowles would call British. Though the novel contains no direct reference to Indian independence, achieved the year it was published, Stormaway and his family, we learn, have returned permanently to England, partly because ‘some people said it was just the chance of a civil war, if England started getting the worst of it [in Europe, that is]’ (p. 234). Stormaway irritates Katherine, but the Fennels like him. He fits the pattern Wood identifies in Pritchett's stories, where the ‘characters’ expansions are cheap domestic versions of their country's enlargements: as their country once expanded, so they now expand’ (p. 14). In the novel's closing section, Robin Fennel, who admired Stormaway in his youth, apes his expansiveness, no longer Katherine's perfect or dream Englishman, no longer her Jill. ‘He had lost the self-possession he had moved with when a boy, and was given over to the restlessness of his body … and because he could not control it he pretended he enjoyed it, to the extent of telling himself he was having a jolly good time … It had driven him to play the gay officer’ (p. 241). In both of Larkin's novels, then, the same ‘English’ ingredients appear: class anxiety, particularly in relation to the middle classes; repression and reserve; comic self-inflation and self-performance, connected to national decline; a vision of England and Englishness as innocent and natural; loss of faith in this vision; a refusal to be deceived, both by fantasies of national identity and by totalitarian ideologies or programmes; and tough-minded stoicism in the face of loss and disillusion. * * * John Wain's Hurry on Down takes up the theme of social constraint directly. Charles Lumley, a 23-year-old university graduate with ‘a mediocre degree in History’, vows ‘independence of money and social position’ (p. 79). By dropping out – and down, like Gordon Comstocke in Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) – Lumley hopes to reverse what he sees as the deforming influence of his middle-class background and education, in particular the systematic blunting of his ‘sharp edges’, by which he means his instincts and emotions. ‘From the nursery onwards, he had been taught to modulate the natural loudness of his voice, to efface himself in every possible way, to defer to others’ (p. 25). As in Larkin's novels, unhappiness derives from social constraint and repression, ‘the exaggerated reserve implanted in him by his upbringing’ (p. 12). The school Lumley attended is like Lamprey, ‘a fake Rugby like so many minor schools of its period’ (p. 33). The class anxieties it serves turn pupils and staff into familiar self-performers. ‘“Well now Lumley”’, asks the headmaster, ‘“and what can I”, here he paused for an instant, and spoke the next three words with unnecessary distinctness, as if to parody them, “do for you?”’ (p. 34). At university, a Whitbread character, George Hutchins, ‘an unpleasantly dogged and humourless young man’, lectures Lumley on the virtues of hard work, but is too ashamed of his working-class parents to introduce them. Hutchins, a would-be don, smokes a pipe ‘for the successful acting of his part’ (p. 68). Later in the novel, Lumley, slumming as a chauffeur, insults him. ‘If you have taken a job as a chauffeur’, Hutchins replies, ‘behave like a chauffeur.’ ‘Of course’, Lumley replies, ‘you're a great believer in acting the part, aren't you?’ (p. 206). Another character, a jaunty impresario, surprises Lumley: ‘Mr. Blearney was the first man he had ever met who combined a hearty manner with genuine self-confidence. He contradicted the general rule that heartiness is a sign of self-distrust, thus confirming it’ (p. 100). The self-performing or self-inflating propensities Lumley detects are explicitly identified with post-war change, a product of increased social mobility and national decline. As Lumley puts it, ‘he had been equipped with an upbringing devised to meet the needs of a more fortunate age, and then thrust into the jungle of the nineteen-fifties’ (p. 25). When the brother of Lumley's working-class girlfriend determines to ‘better himself’ he adopts the speech not of the English middle class but of a different nationality entirely: ‘the demotic English of the mid twentieth century, rapid, slurred, essentially a city dialect and, in origin, American’. Lumley is drawn to what he sees as the authenticity of working-class culture, but knows its days are numbered. Listening to his girlfriend's father is a pleasure, because ‘his speech had been formed, along with all his other habits, before 1914’ (p. 185). ‘The world's moving too fast for dear old Arthur’, declares Mr Blearney. ‘Here was I trying to size you up, and failing because you didn't fit into any type I knew, and now it turns out you've got a job I've never even heard of … It's all upside down these days.’ To which Lumley replies, ‘Well at least you know it's upside-down … Most people of your generation … haven't cottoned on to these changes’ (p. 99). The violence or extremity of Lumley's refusal to conform is striking. Almost alone among Movement protagonists, Lumley consistently speaks his anger and acts on it. Jim Dixon in Lucky Jim mostly hides his, in unseen mockery and fantasies of revenge (pushing a bead up Margaret Peel's nose, beating his boss around the head and shoulders with a bottle until he explains why he gave his sons French names). Lumley sneers rather than smirks, gets into fights, insults people to their face, throws a pail of soapy dishwater over a girlfriend's disapproving relations. Dixon's violent fantasies are comic; Lumley's are just violent, as in ‘Charles wanted to stamp on his stomach’ (p. 114) (that both writers were identified as Angry Young Men, a later label they also disavowed, ought not to surprise). In addition to menial jobs (window washer, hospital cleaner, chauffeur, nightclub bouncer), Lumley smuggles drugs, without compunction. There's an existential overlay to his disaffection, recalling Camus's Mersault or a character from Dostoevsky: ‘something had happened to the part of him that ought to be feeling fear, pity, remorse, excitement: he felt no trace of any of them’ (p. 148); ‘he knew that he would commit any crime, that he would steal, kill, maim, or ruin the lives of people who had never done him harm, for the sake, not of possessing her, but of giving himself even a remote chance of possessing her’ (p. 109). Statements like these mark Lumley off from most Movement heroes and most Movement Englishmen. Wain was by far the most active publicist among the Movement writers, being something of a literary operator and zeitgeist man, which may explain both the existential colouring he gives Lumley's essentially social disaffection and ‘the mushroom-shaped cloud that lived perpetually in a cave at the back of [Lumley's] mind’ (p. 29) (yet is nowhere else mentioned in the novel). What is disturbing about such moments is the hero's explicit distrust of fashionable theories and ideologies, as in his denunciation of intellectuals who ‘attempt to look through two telescopes at the same time: one fashioned of German psychology and pointed at themselves, the other Russian economics and directed at the working class’ (p. 38). At the novel's conclusion, Lumley gets the girl he has been pursuing and takes a lucrative job writing scripts for some of the top-rank radio shows. That the girl is a prostitute of sorts and the job valueless again sounds a note of foreign or continental nihilism, marking the ending off from that of Lucky Jim. Both novels are undeceived, but in very different ways, Amis's by offering an obvious fantasy ending, Wain's by undercutting fantasy expectations. Wain wrote three other novels in the 1950s, none as successful as Hurry on Down.25 In Living in the Present (1955), the protagonist, Edgar Banks, decides to commit suicide. Before doing so, he wants ‘to give a farewell present to life’, by murdering the most obnoxious person he knows. The novel is broadly comic, or meant to be, in the style of Wodehouse or Waugh, but it keeps veering into more serious territory (Amis thought Wain had progressed ‘from the Orwell of Keep the Aspidistra Flying to the Orwell of Coming Up for Air’26). Banks feels cut off from the world, as if living behind ‘plate-glass, cold, invisible, squarely built round him’ (p. 151). He also feels cut off from himself, partly because he's ‘so ruddy English’. ‘Can't we relax the code just for once’, he asks a friend, ‘and register some kind of feeling?’ (p. 158). What he does not do is ‘erect this sense of futility into a “system”’, as Hurry on Down at moments seems to do. ‘He was English enough to feel a savage contempt for modish philosophers who went about preaching a profitable brand of nihilism … meanwhile making a good living and enjoying life hugely’ (p. 6). At the end of the novel, Banks abandons his plan, ashamed of ‘the foolish theatricality of his original idea’ (pp. 176–7); his ‘real self’ speaks up, ‘thrusting his play-acting self out of the way’ (p. 188). The cause of this rebirth is a girl, like Dixon's Christine, a sensible English girl, without affectation. Banks is attracted to ‘the clarity and smoothness of her skin, the easy simplicity of the way her hair lay across her head from left to right’ (p.188), physical equivalents of her straightforward personality. The sexual allure of this sort of girl recalls another Amis heroine, Barbara Bowen, wife of the hero of I Like It Here (1955).27 ‘Going to bed with all that slender brunette beauty’, her husband marvels, ‘continued to be both emotionally edifying and unbeatable fun – as if the Iliad or some other gruelling cultural monument had turned out to be a good read as well as a masterpiece’ (p. 29). Under the influence of love, Banks decides that ‘the best way to make a present to life was to be happy’ (p. 249). Clarity and simplicity are identified in Living in the Present as English virtues. In Movement writing generally they are formal as well as thematic virtues, contrasted with the difficulty and obscurity of modernist or experimental writing, seen, variously, as foreign, cosmopolitan, metropolitan. Wain was influenced by a range of writers, including Joyce, Beckett, Camus, and Sartre, but in his third novel, The Contenders (1958), he explicitly champions provincial values.28 He was born in Stoke-on-Trent, and several of his novels have Midlands settings. In addition, in an essay of 1957, ‘The Quality of Arnold Bennett’, he defended Bennett against the influential strictures of Virginia Woolf in ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’ (1924). Woolf's championing of the inner life, of individual consciousness, is set against Bennett's preoccupation with what she calls ‘the fabric of things’, social or material realities.29The Contenders self-consciously follows in Bennett's footsteps. The inner lives of its characters barely figure, or figure crudely. Even Larkin, the novel's dedicatee, told Wain he thought his character-drawing ‘could stand a great deal more complexity’.30 The novel concerns three friends from schooldays: an artist, a businessman, and a journalist, the novel's narrator. The artist and the businessman are the contenders; the journalist, their friend, is a mediating figure, deploring both total devotion to art and total devotion to material success. The setting is an unnamed town in the Potteries, a Bennett setting. The journalist, who still lives in the town, unlike the artist, but like the businessman, calls it ‘the place you stop at on the way to Manchester – the one where you look out of the train window when it's slowing down, and think, “Well, at least I don't live here”’ (p. 5). The town's inhabitants ‘aren't dour, like Northerners; on the other hand they aren't shut up inside themselves, like the southern English; they're volatile, friendly and sardonic’ (p. 47). The suggestion here that English means ‘southern’ recalls Hilary Mantel, who thinks of Englishness as ‘white, male, southern, Protestant and middle-class’. So, too, the complaint about southerners being ‘shut up inside themselves’, like Edgar Banks in Living in the Present, who thinks of his isolation as a middle-class affliction. In The Contenders, anxiety about being provincial is also seen as middle-class. ‘In England, so much depends on where you live’, the narrator declares early in the novel – not for the working class (the lives of working men in Hammersmith and in Wolverhampton are little different), ‘but for the bourgeoisie’, for whom unless you live in London you live ‘in the provinces’ (p. 5). The Movement fight against metropolitan bias, against Bloomsbury and literary modernism, is partly a fight of the lower-middle-class against the haute bourgeoisie, with the lower-middle-class identified as English or in the English tradition. A similar theme or bias is sounded in Kingsley Amis's That Uncertain Feeling (1955), his second novel, though because it is set in Wales, class status and Englishness are differently configured. As the novel's hero, John Lewis, the son of a minor administrator in a colliery, mixes with the Welsh bourgeoisie or crachach of Aberdarcey (a thinly disguised Swansea, where Amis lectured), he enters enemy territory, being ‘a sworn foe of the bourgeoisie, and especially the Aberdarcey bourgeoisie, and especially the anglicised Aberdarcey bourgeoisie’ (p. 41). Anglicised by accent and education, the Aberdarcey bourgeoisie is glittering, seductive, and corrupt, like London in The Contenders. At the novel's end, Lewis rejects it, along with the promise of career advancement, returning to the village of his father, a figure of perfect goodness. To some, the ending is damagingly improbable; to others, it is like Dixon's escape with Christine at the end of Lucky Jim, an obvious fantasy. * * * In addition to being thought of as provincial, the Movement writers were accused of being Little Englanders, hostile to all things foreign. According to Blake Morrison, author of what is still the best and fullest book on the Movement,31 when Jim Dixon dreams of torturing his boss, Professor Welch, for giving his sons French names, ‘two contemporary prejudices are simultaneously enlisted – one against abroad, the other against upper-middle-class pretentiousness’ (p. 61). Amis always denied the first charge, and in fact spent a good deal of time abroad, especially for a man terrified of travel. It was Larkin who was hostile to abroad, as well as to its pretentious champions. When the foreign figures in Movement fiction of the 1950s, its qualities are neither romanticised nor patronised (foreign characters are caricatured and laughed at, but then so are English characters). Often, however, it functions as a way of discussing English or British national identity, as in the 1950s novels of D. J. Enright, editor of Poets of the 1950s (1955), a key Movement anthology. Far from being insular or anti-foreign, Enright spent much of the early part of his career abroad; both the novels he wrote in the 1950s are set outside England, and Poets of the 1950s was edited and first published in Japan, where Enright lived and taught from 1953 to 1956. Academic Year (1955), Enright's first novel, is set in Egypt, in Alexandria, and concerns the adventures of Packet (his first name is not given), an English lecturer and aspiring writer (Enright taught at the University of Alexandria from 1947 to 1950). Packet is what Fowles would call English. Brian Brett, the ‘new man at the Cultural Centre’ (p. 16), is crudely British (Enright uses British and English indiscriminately in the novel, with one exception), ‘wearing that particular look of confidence, business-like and yet tolerant, which is often seen on the faces of Englishmen in the East’ (p. 10). Brett is upper-middle-class, whereas Packett is lower-middle-class or upper-lower-class, ‘born into a sort of Methodist family of narrow means’ (p. 41), a scholarship boy both at the local grammar and at Cambridge. Like Wain's protagonists, Packet spends his youth and early manhood ‘combating that muggy “goodness,” the unwritten and shapeless but desperately clung-to conception of “the proper” and “like everyone else”’ (p. 45). Part of what attracts him to Egypt, both as a person and a writer, is the idea of encountering ‘emotions as found in the hotter climates of the Middle East, in their pure forms’ (p. 22). A true Movement type, he barely notices the look of Alexandria, even of the Mediterranean, but then the Mediterranean ‘was a bit of nature, and he was interested in man’ (p. 226). In search of pleasure, ‘happy to put the sawdusty buns of post-war England behind him’ (p. 179), Packet avoids those of his compatriots who complain about its inefficiency and corruption, oblivious to the gathering tensions that will bring about Suez. At the end of the novel, Packet finally returns to England, in part because of these tensions. He still feels affection for Egypt, but now sees the qualities of its people and their needs clear-sightedly. Though his feelings are confused, ‘there was something happy about his confusion: a hint of release from false gods’ (p. 252). The temptation to romanticise foreign places and peoples, to worship false gods, was especially hard to resist in the 1950s, when travel books, as Packet puts it, were ‘all the go’ (p. 57). Enright, like Packet, feels this temptation, and to resist it, sets Heaven Knows Where (1957), the sequel to Academic Year, in an imaginary realm, the island of Velo in the South China Sea (after Alexandria and a stint in Berlin, Enright lectured at universities in South-East Asia). Packet himself explains his creator's rationale: ‘The person who aims at writing an exotic travel book is … under the obligation to invent an imaginary country of his own … Only then can he guard himself from exploiting anyone or anything other than himself and his own imagination. The drawback is that his book will then be classified as a novel – and novels, I gather, are not selling so very well these days’ (p. 58). Packet's line is like that of Amis in ‘Is the Travel Book Dead?’, a review that appeared in the Spectator on 17 June 1955, and gave rise to an extended correspondence in its letters pages. Amis thought the genre escapist, ‘only with difficulty to be distinguished from the feeling that the other fellow's grass is greener’. Stylistically, ‘it was given to an empty and indecent poeticism’. Heaven Knows Where opens with an epigraph from The Prelude, about finding happiness ‘Not in Utopia, subterranean fields, | Or some secreted island’, but in the real world, ‘the place where in the end | We find our happiness, or not at all.’ When Packet fails to secure a university lectureship in Britain, he accepts a position as Velo's ‘Tutor in English Literature’. The qualities that make Velo a paradise gently guy Movement values. Its kindly king read English at Cambridge, even got a Ph.D. in English. When addressing his people, his only aim is to be ‘simple, clear and exact’. The secret to the happiness of his subjects is their ‘just appreciation of human nature. They did not overestimate it, nor did they undervalue it. I never met among them one whom we should describe as cynical, nor anyone whom we should consider sentimental’ (p. 64). Like his people, the king admires order, but ‘the idea of any central [religious] authority disturbs us, for it seems outside nature’ (p. 62). Though the Velonians are a ‘volatile people’, not in the least repressed, ‘their communal life was a spectacle of most impressive stability’ (p. 49). They value pleasure, and have more festivals and feasts than days in the year. Over the course of the novel, Velo is invaded and briefly conquered by its larger neighbour, Dertha, a dystopia. ‘Dertha was a Principled State’, its occupying commander tells the Velonians, ‘one of its principles being that other states should not be left to go unprincipled’ (p. 174). Heaven Knows Where was published a year before Amis's I Like It Here, which also questions the fashion for travel books. Unlike Packet, Garnet Bowen, Amis's hero, dislikes going abroad and only does so for money. A large magazine commission and an entreaty from his publisher lure him to Portugal to find just the sort of writer the Movement sought to displace, the wonderfully named Wulfstan Strether. If alive, Strether would be the last survivor of what Bowen calls ‘the great-writer period’, identified as ‘roughly between Roderick Hudson and about 1930, death of Lawrence and the next bunch just starting off – Greene, Waugh, Isherwood, Powell’ (p. 180). The immodesty of great writers was an Amis theme: ‘The one unifying characteristic of our giants – the Jameses, the Woolfs, the Lawrences – was the immense seriousness with which they took themselves’,32 a comment which recalls Oscar Wilde's preference for pleasure over happiness, quoted disapprovingly by the narrator of The Contenders: ‘because pleasure had tragic possibilities’ (p. 203). Bowen's objections to Strether's writing are Movement objections, ‘on grounds of clarity, common sense, emotional decency and general morality’ (p. 102). His impressions of Portugal, reworked from letters Amis wrote to Larkin while spending a summer there on a Somerset Maugham Award, make clear the nature of his and his creator's objections to foreign places. These objections have nothing to do with the specific qualities of the people and customs encountered, described with Packet-like dispassion and humour, except that they aren't English: It's a very nice-looking place all round and if you exclude the Government and the upper classes the people are as decent as you'd find anywhere. It's just that the place is located abroad and the people are foreigners, which for the purposes of this discussion merely means that they and I belong to different nations, so we can't understand each other or get to know each other as well as chaps from the same nation can. (p. 185)Getting to know foreigners and joining in on their way of living is like ‘going through foreign poetry with the dictionary and telling yourself you're reading it’ (p. 185). ‘I wonder if you read much foreign poetry?’ Larkin was once asked. ‘Foreign poetry? No.’33 * * * In Lucky Jim, the best-known and most influential of 1950s Movement novels, and by far the funniest, nearly all the ‘English’ ingredients identified in the novels of Larkin, Wain, and Enright figure. Jim Dixon, a junior lecturer in a provincial university, is a conventional Movement hero, neither especially brave, moral talented nor successful. His background is lower-middle-class. He represses his true feelings, which emerge in violent fantasies and ill-disguised mockery. He wants happiness, understood as pleasure without tragic consequences (something in short supply in his world). The girl he is drawn to is wholesome and unaffected (also of a higher class). The bosses and older people who block his way are comic foils, self-inflaters and self-performers (Professor Welsh, who sets great store on being called Professor, is like the jumped-up Territorial Army officers in ‘Who Else Is Rank’, ‘who attach so much importance to not having a Sir left out’34); in Orwell's terms, the wrong people are in charge (the wrong relatives, since overthrowing them is impossible). Jim does not buck or best society, good fortune opens up for him magically (Gore-Urquhart's intervention is like the unexpected appearance of a rich relative in a Victorian novel). That Jim is ‘lucky’ is good enough for Amis's purpose, which is to please the reader. Hence also the novel's style, which is straightforward and understandable, ‘within the main English tradition’,35 by which Amis means the tradition not so much of Arnold Bennett as of Henry Fielding for whom, as the preface to Joseph Andrews explains, the only source of comedy is ‘affectation, which has two aspects: vanity and hypocrisy’ (p. 10). Fielding's tomb is visited in Portugal by Bowen and Strether, in a scene in which Strether declares that ‘the utterances of comedy [cannot] … move us as we are moved by the authentic voice of tragedy’. Therefore, he tells Bowen, ‘I am unable to consider [Fielding] my equal’. The next paragraph begins: ‘A monosyllable of demented laughter broke from Bowen before he had time to arrange a coughing fit’ (p. 168). What helped to earn Lucky Jim its notoriety is the intensity of its attack on high culture, conceived of by Jim as the province of the haute bourgeoisie. The novel's attack is distinguished from that of The Contenders by its refusal to romanticise provincial values or to demonise the metropolis; it is London to which Jim and Christine escape. A similar intensity marks Amis's reviewing in the 1950s. At the end of January 1954, shortly before publication of Lucky Jim, Amis was appointed chief fiction reviewer of the Spectator. In the remaining eleven months of the year he reviewed seventy-five novels, in omnibus reviews of three or four novels per week, and he continued to review for the Spectator throughout the decade. Soon, as Paul Fussell puts it, ‘other critics and commentators were imitating [Amis's] no-nonsense, can-the-bullshit tone’, as well as the serious attention he paid to American and genre fiction, particularly science fiction (p. 66).36 Amis the reviewer betrays the same prejudices as Amis the novelist, against Romantic notions of the artist as privileged genius, and Frenchified notions of alienation and ennui. In Take a Girl Like You (1960), begun in 1955, and worked on intermittently throughout the decade, ‘Anna le Page’ (not her real name), a painter who pretends she's French, patronises Jenny Bunn, another unaffected English dream girl. Anna has obviously been reading Colin Wilson's The Outsider (1956), reviewed by Amis in the Spectator (15 June 1956). She behaves, in the review's description of the outsider type, as if possessed of a ‘larger share, if not a monopoly, of depth and honesty and sensitivity and intensity and acuity and insight and courage and adulthood’, virtues derived from having confronted ‘the chaos of existence … the unreality of what the literal-minded take to be reality’. She's both a fantasist and an escapist, like a travel writer. The impulse to escape reality, as we have seen, is fed by notions of Englishness as well as by foreign or Romantic notions. Fowles on ‘Green England’ and Robin Hood connects to fantasies of Merrie England, which Jim tears to bits in his speech, the most famous of the set pieces in Lucky Jim (delivered first in imitation of Professor Welsh, then in imitation of the principal). Jim objects to the culture of the Welsh family not just because it affects the foreign (‘Couldn't they have chosen an English play?’ (p. 44), he asks, instead of one by Anouilh), but because it affects an ersatz English or folk purity (madrigals, recorders, organic husbandry, home-made pottery). Both foreign and domestic strands of bourgeois culture, as Jim sees it, evade reality, the foreign because it thinks reality an illusion, the domestic or English because it thinks illusion reality. Amis is undeceived, which is his great thing in the novel, the Movement thing (unless one sees the novel's ending, and Christine's goodness and availability, as unconscious as opposed to conscious wish-fulfilment). That Jim has no illusions about his own hypocrisy – is a clear-sighted hypocrite, not only with Welsh, who holds the key to his future, but with Margaret, his unsatisfactory girlfriend – is what lifts him above the Fieldingesque hypocrites and egomaniacs who surround him. In Movement terms, it is also what marks him as English. 1 John Wain, ‘The Reputation of Ezra Pound’, The London Magazine, 55/2 (Oct. 1955). 2 Fowles, ‘On Being English but Not British’ (1964) reprinted in Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings, ed. John Reif (London, 1998). 3 ‘Notes on Nationalism’, Polemic (Oct. 1945), repr. in George Orwell, Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays (Harmondsworth 1965) p. 155. 4 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (1992; London 1994) p. 6. See also pp. 106–13 on John Wilkes and Englishness, liberty, subversion, and Protestantism. 5 To Amis, however, in ‘Max’, a review of S. N. Behrman, Conversation with Max, Spectator (25 Nov. 1960), reprinted in Kingsley Amis, The Amis Collection: Selected Non-Fiction 1954–1990 (Harmondsworth, 1990), p.40: ‘the only real oddities about Beerbohm are not in him or in his work, but in how it ever got about in the first place that he was worth taking seriously, and in how, having got about, it still stays about’. 6 Hilary Mantel, ‘No Passes or Documents Needed: The Writer at Home in Europe,’ in On Modern British Fiction, ed. Zachary Leader (Oxford, 2002). 7 George Orwell, ‘England Your England (1940)’, part 1 of The Lion and the Unicorn (1961), reprinted in My Country Right or Left 1940–1943, vol. 2 of Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, eds., The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, 4 vols. (1968; Harmondsworth, 1970). 8 Wain, ‘Who Talks of My Nation?’, Spectator (1955). 9 George Orwell, ‘England Your England (1940)’, part 1 of The Lion and the Unicorn (1961), reprinted in My Country Right or Left 1940–1943, vol. 2 of Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, eds., The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, 4 vols. (1968; Harmondsworth, 1970). 10 The quote is from Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790; Chicago, 1955). 11 Kingsley Amis, interview with Michael Barber, ‘The Art of Fiction LIX’, Paris Review, 16/64 (Winter 1975) p. 176. The unpublished ‘Who Else Is Rank’ is among the Amis Papers in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. ‘My Enemy's Enemy’ was first published in Encounter (June 1955) and repr. in Amis, My Enemy's Enemy (1962; Harmondsworth 1965), where ‘I Spy Strangers’ first appeared (see p. 85 for the quotation about ‘girls and drinks and jazz’). 12 Philip Larkin, ‘It Could Only Happen in England: A Study of John Betjeman's Poems for American Readers’, written as an introduction to the American edition of John Betjeman's enlarged Collected Poems (Boston 1971), repr. in Required Reading: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955–1982 (London 1983) p. 211. 13 Kingsley Amis, The New Oxford Book of Light Verse (Oxford 1978) p. v. 14 Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life (London 1994) p. 292. 15 Quoted in A. N. Wilson, Betjeman (London 2006) p . 294. 16 Philip Larkin, Jill (1946; edn. London, 1963), A Girl in Winter (1947; edn. London, 1975). 17 John Wain, Hurry on Down (1953; edn Harmondsworth, 1971); Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (1954; edn Harmondsworth, 1976); That Uncertain Feeling (1955; edn Harmondsworth, 1985). 18 See George Orwell, ‘Boys' Weeklies’, Horizon (Mar. 1940), repr. in unabridged form in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. i: An Age Like This, 1920–1940, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (Harmondsworth 1970) p. 512. 19 From James Booth's introduction to Philip Larkin, Trouble at Willow Gables and Other Fictions, ed. James Booth (London, 2002). 20 See Stanley Baldwin, On England and Other Addresses (1926; Harmondsworth 1938) p. 6, which reprints a speech Baldwin delivered in May 1924; John Major's well-known quotation comes from a speech to the Conservative Group for Europe, 22 April 1993, quoted in David Butler and Gareth Butler (eds.), Twentieth Century British Political Facts 1900–2000 (London 2008) p. 296. 21 Philip Larkin to J. B. Sutton, 20 Sept. 1945, in Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940–1985, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London 1992) p. 109. 22 For Lawrence on Anna and Vronsky see ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ (1936), excerpted in D. H. Lawrence, A Selection from Phoenix, ed. A. A. H. Inglis (1971; Harmondsworth 1979) pp. 205–6. 23 Quoted in Zachary Leader, The Life of Kingsley Amis (London 2006) p. 266. 24 James Wood, ‘V.S. Pritchett and English Comedy’, in On Modern British Fiction, ed. Zachary Leader (Oxford, 2002). 25 The third of these novels, A Travelling Woman (1959), does not feature in this chapter, in part because its concerns are primarily psychosexual and moral, with little if any reference to national identity. There is nothing explicitly ‘English’ or class-specific about its portrayals of marriage and adultery, and of the boredom of fidelity. The novel's plot and register owe something to Restoration comedy, Wycherley's The Country Wife in particular. Given the anti-metropolitan bias of The Contenders, however, with its sense, as we shall see, of the provinces as the supposed site of old-fashioned English values, it is perhaps worth noting that the adulteries in A Travelling Woman mostly take place in the metropolis. When the adulterous impulse seizes the novel's main character he is ‘racked by the wild impulse to hurry off to London’ (p. 146). 26 Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin, 15 Mar. 1958, in The Letters of Kingsley Amis, ed. Zachary Leader (London 2000) p. 531. 27 Kingsley Amis, I Like It Here (1958; edn. Harmondsworth, 1968). 28 The identification of the Movement writers with the provinces was widespread. In a letter to the New Statesman (1 Aug. 1953), the influential poet and critic G. S. Fraser described them as ‘young dons, and often young dons in provincial universities’ who ‘think metropolitan urbanity rather hollow and metropolitan smartness rather vulgar’. 29 For Woolf, in ‘Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown’, ‘life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end’. The realist novelist, however, feels constrained ‘to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole. … Is life like this? Must novels be like this?’ (quoted in John Wain, ‘The Quality of Arnold Bennett’, Twentieth Century (Sept./Oct. 1954), repr. in John Wain, Preliminary Essays (London 1957) p. 154). 30 Quoted in Humphrey Carpenter, The Angry Young Men: A Literary Comedy of the 1950s (London 2002) p. 167. Carpenter's source note for the quotation reads ‘Wain papers’ (identified in the bibliography as ‘photostats lent by William Wain of letters to his father by Philip Larkin’). 31 Blake Morrison, The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s (Oxford, 1980). 32 Amis, ‘Art and Craft’, Spectator (13 July 1956). 33 See Larkin interview with Ian Hamilton, in Philip Larkin, Further Requirements: Interviews, Broadcasts, Statements and Book Reviews, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London 2001) p. 25. 34 Amis, ‘Who Else Is Rank’, chapter 11 (page numbers are sometimes missing or duplicated). 35 Quoted in Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel 1878–2001 (1993; Harmondsworth 2001) p. 341. 36 Paul Fussell, The Anti-Egotist: Kingsley Amis, Man of Letters (Oxford, 1994) © The Author, 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Cambridge Quarterly. All rights reserved. For permissions please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - Movement Fiction and Englishness
JO - The Cambridge Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/camqtly/bft025
DA - 2013-09-01
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DP - DeepDyve
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