The 1950s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction 9781350011519, 9781350011540, 9781350011533

Table of contents :
Cover page
Halftitle page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Contributors
Series Editors’ Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The 1950s: A Decade of Change
The postwar consensus
Social change and everyday life
Fiction, the New Left and the birth of cultural studies
The 1950s: A decade of modern British fiction
Notes
Works cited
1 ‘The Choices of Master Samwise’: Rethinking 1950s Fiction
‘Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age’
The legacy of the 1930s
John Sommerfield and the politics of social representation
Cosy catastrophes and generational changes 4
‘Forget the story’ 6
Notes
Works cited
2 Angry Young Men? A Product of Their Time
Works cited
3 ‘Mere bird-watching indeed’: Feminist Anthropology and 1950s Female Fiction
Kinship and village life
Debutantes at native dances
The ‘reformer’s science’
Works cited
4 ‘Is it a queer book?’: Re- reading the 1950s Homosexual Novel
Under surveillance: homosexuality, the media and the police
Social problem, private affairs
Comic turns: seriousness and the homosexual novel
Works cited
5 A Vision of the Future: Race and Anti-Racism in 1950s British Fiction
Racism and anti-racism in postwar Britain
Writing the Caribbean from exile
The Caribbean novel of arrival
Writing white anti-racism
Conclusion: some visions of the future
Notes
Works cited
6 Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On: The Politics of Youth in 1950s Fiction
Youthquake
Teenage rampage
Teddy boys
Birth of the Cool
Bohemians, beatniks and bums
Calypso
Conclusion
Notes
Works cited
7 Detective Fiction and the Prose of Everyday Life: Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and Gladys Mitchell in the 1950s
Wreaking havoc: Allingham’s The Tiger in the Smoke
Mysterious autoethnographies
Christie in the 1950s
Insiders and outsiders: Agatha Christie’s A Murder is Announced (1950)
The detective as dramaturg; the detective as clinician
Detective fiction and modern form
Works Cited
Detective fiction and modern form
8 Chance in the Canon: Uncertainty and the Literary Establishment of the 1950s
The chance to rebuild
Freedom and fear: the politicization of chance
The angry dissentients
Falling against structuring structures
A contradictory novel tradition
A burgeoning aleatory style
Performing a culture of contradiction
Works cited
Timeline of Works
Timeline of National Events
Timeline of International Events
Biographies of Writers
Index
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D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
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T
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W
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Citation preview

The 1950s A Decade of Modern British Fiction

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Titles in The Decades Series The 1950s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction, edited by Nick Bentley, Alice Ferrebe and Nick Hubble The 1960s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction, edited by Philip Tew, James Riley and Melanie Seddon The 1970s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction, edited by Nick Hubble, John McLeod and Philip Tew The 1980s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction, edited by Emily Horton, Philip Tew and Leigh Wilson The 1990s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction, edited by Nick Hubble, Philip Tew and Leigh Wilson The 2000s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction, edited by Nick Bentley, Nick Hubble and Leigh Wilson

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The 1950s A Decade of Modern British Fiction Edited by Nick Bentley, Alice Ferrebe and Nick Hubble

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC 1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Copyright © Nick Bentley, Alice Ferrebe, Nick Hubble and Contributors, 2019 Nick Bentley, Alice Ferrebe and Nick Hubble have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xiv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bentley, Nick, editor. | Ferrebe, Alice, 1970– editor. | Hubble, Nick, 1965– editor. Title: The 1950s : a decade of contemporary British fiction / edited by Nick Bentley, Alice Ferrebe and Nick Hubble. Other titles: Nineteen fifties Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018007004 (print) | LCCN 2018016155 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350011526 (ePub) | ISBN 9781350011533 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781350011519 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: English fiction—20th century—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PR881 (ebook) | LCC PR881 .A13 2018 (print) | DDC 823/.91409—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018007004 ISBN : HB : 978-1-3500-1151-9 ePDF : 978-1-3500-1153-3 eBook: 978-1-3500-1152-6 Series: The Decades Series Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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Contents Contributors Series Editors’ Preface Acknowledgements

Introduction: The 1950s: A Decade of Change Nick Bentley, Alice Ferrebe and Nick Hubble 1 2 3

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1

‘The Choices of Master Samwise’: Rethinking 1950s Fiction Nick Hubble

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Angry Young Men? A Product of Their Time Matthew Crowley

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‘Mere bird-watching indeed’: Feminist Anthropology and 1950s Female Fiction Alice Ferrebe

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‘Is it a queer book?’: Re-reading the 1950s Homosexual Novel Martin Dines

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A Vision of the Future: Race and Anti-Racism in 1950s British Fiction Matti Ron 141

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Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On: The Politics of Youth in 1950s Fiction Nick Bentley

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Detective Fiction and the Prose of Everyday Life: Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and Gladys Mitchell in the 1950s Nicholas Birns and Margaret Boe Birns

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Chance in the Canon: Uncertainty and the Literary Establishment of the 1950s Sebastian Jenner

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Timeline of Works Timeline of National Events Timeline of International Events Biographies of Writers Index

Contents 263 269 273 277 293

Contributors Nick Bentley is Senior Lecturer in English at Keele University, UK . He is author of Contemporary British Fiction: A Reader’s Guide to the Essential Criticism (Palgrave, 2018); Martin Amis (Northcote House, 2015); Contemporary British Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2008); Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s (Peter Lang, 2007); editor of British Fiction of the 1990s (Routledge, 2005); and co-editor of The 2000s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2015). He has also published journal articles and book chapters on Monica Ali, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Doris Lessing, Colin MacInnes, Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Sam Selvon, the city in postmodern fiction, fictional representations of youth subcultures, and working-class writing. He is currently working on a monograph: Making a Scene: Youth Subcultures in Postwar and Contemporary Fiction (Palgrave). Nicholas Birns is Associate Professor at the Center for Applied Liberal Arts, New York University. His Theory After Theory: An Intellectual History of Literary Theory From 1950 to the Early 21st Century appeared from Broadview in 2010. Other books include Barbarian Memory: The Legacy of Early Medieval History in Early Modern Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), Contemporary Australian Literature A World Not Yet Dead, (Sydney University Press in 2015). His co-edited Options for Teaching Australian and New Zealand Literature was published by the MLA in 2017. He has contributed to The New York Times Book Review, The Hollins Critic, Exemplaria, MLQ and Partial Answers. Margaret Boe Birns is an Associate Teaching Professor at The New School in New York City, where she teaches twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature. She has published widely on modern literature, including articles on Anita Brookner, Iris Murdoch and Agatha Christie for The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Literature. She has also published five more articles on Christie, including an analysis of And Then There Were None and The Hollow. Matthew Crowley is a London-based writer and researcher. He was educated at Myrtle Springs School, Sheffield, before studying at Central St. Martins College and Birkbeck College in London. Matthew was awarded his PhD from

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the University of Brighton in 2018 for his work on representations of working-class masculinities in British culture between 1945 and 1989. Matthew teaches Cultural and Historical studies at the University of Arts London and has taught on Twentieth Century British Fiction, Narrative and Poetry at the University of Brighton. His research interests include, but are not limited to, post-war British fiction, working-class cultures, masculinities, representations of Irish republicanism, practices of consumption and the production of fashion. Martin Dines is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Kingston University London where he teaches twentieth-century and contemporary American and British writing. His research focuses on Anglo-American queer writing from the 1950s to the present, and on literary engagements with space and place. He is especially interested in the interactions between histories of material places, desiring bodies and literary form. He is currently completing a book titled The Literature of Suburban Change: Twentieth-Century Developments, to be published by Edinburgh University Press, which explores the relationships between narrative form – in novel sequences and short story cycles, memoir, drama and comics – and suburban diversification in the US . He is President of the Literary London Society. Alice Ferrebe is Subject Leader for English Literature at Liverpool John Moores University, where she teaches twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature. She is the author of Masculinity in Male-Authored Fiction 1950–2000 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and Literature of the 1950s: Good, Brave Causes (Edinburgh University Press, 2012). Her current research explores the intersections between 1950s literature and visual art. Nick Hubble is Reader in English at Brunel University London, UK . Author of Mass-Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory (2006/2010) and The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question (2017); co-author of Ageing, Narrative and Identity (2013); co-editor of The Science Fiction Handbook (2013), London in Contemporary British Fiction (2016), The Science Fiction of Iain M. Banks (2018) and three volumes of Bloomsbury’s ‘British Fiction: The Decades Series’: The 1970s (2014), The 1990s (2015) and The 2000s (2015); and also coeditor of special issues of the journals EnterText, Literary London and New Formations. Nick has published journal articles or book chapters on writers including Pat Barker, Ford Madox Ford, B.S. Johnson, Naomi Mitchison, George Orwell, Christopher Priest, John Sommerfield and Edward Upward.

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Sebastian Jenner is completing a part-time PhD at Brunel University London while delivering many of their public engagement events and serving as the Festival Producer for the Hillingdon Literary Festival since its inception in 2015. His thesis explores the ‘British Aleatory Novel, 1959–1979’ and the performance of chance procedures in the British avant-garde. This project corresponds to research interests that include the intersection of musicology and literature, the mediation between continental avant-garde innovations and marginalized characteristics of ‘Britishness’, as well as the close synthesis between chance and order. Other publications include chapters exploring the aleatory form of B.S. Johnson, collusion and satire in Jonathan Coe’s political novels and liminality in the work of Will Self. He is also the two-time editor of the annual Hillingdon Creative Writing Anthology and has taught variously on critical theory and the Post-Millennial British Novel. Matti Ron is currently working on his PhD, Representing Revolt: Working-class representation as a literary and political practice from the General Strike to the ‘Winter of Discontent’, at the University of East Anglia. His research is concerned with intersectional approaches to class in twentieth-century English literature as well as the structural limitations of particular forms in representing, both in the political and literary sense, working-class agency and subjectivity.

Series Editors’ Preface Nick Hubble, Philip Tew and Leigh Wilson

The series began with a focus on Contemporary British fiction published from 1970 to the present, an expanding area of academic interest, becoming a major area of academic study in the last twenty-five years and attracting a seemingly ever-increasing global scholarship. However, that very speed of the growth of research in this field has perhaps precluded any really nuanced analysis of its key defining terms and has restricted consideration of its chronological development. This series addresses such issues in an informative and structured manner through a set of extended contributions combining wide-reaching survey work with in-depth research-led analysis. Naturally, many older British academics assume at least some personal knowledge in charting this field, drawing on their own life experience, but increasingly many such coordinates represent the distant past of pre-birth or childhood not only for students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, but also younger academics. Given that most people’s memories of their first five to ten years are vague and localized, an academic born in the early to mid-1980s will only have real first-hand knowledge of less than half these forty-plus years, while a member of the current generation of new undergraduates, born in the very late-1990s, will have no adult experience of the period at all. The apparently self-evident nature of this chronological, experiential reality disguises the rather complex challenges it poses to any assessment of the contemporary (or of the past in terms of precursory periods). Therefore, the aim of these volumes, which include timelines and biographical information on the writers covered, is to provide the contextual framework that is now necessary for the study of the British fiction of these four decades and beyond. Each of the volumes in this Decades Series emerged from a series of workshops hosted by the Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing (BCCW ) located in the now vanished School of Arts at Brunel University London, UK . These events assembled specially invited teams of leading internationally recognized scholars in the field, together with emergent younger figures, in order that they might x

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together examine critically the periodization of initially contemporary British fiction (which overall chronology was later expanded by adding previous decades) by dividing it into its four constituent decades: the 1970s symposium was held on 12 March 2010; the 1980s on 7 July 2010; the 1990s on 3 December 2010; and the 2000s on 1 April 2011. Subsequent seminars expanding the series included the 1960s on 18 March 2015 and the 1950s on 22 April 2015. During workshops draft papers were offered and discussions ensued, exchanging ideas and ensuring both continuity and also fruitful interaction (including productive dissonances) between what would become chapters of volumes that would hopefully exceed the sum of their parts. The division of the series by decade could be charged with being too obvious and therefore rather too contentious. In the latter camp, no doubt, would be Ferdinand Mount, who in a 2006 article for the London Review of Books concerned primarily with the 1950s, ‘The Doctrine of Unripe Time’, complained ‘When did decaditis first strike? When did people begin to think that slicing the past up into periods of ten years was a useful thing to do?’ However, he does admit still that such characterization has long been associated with aesthetic production and its relationship to a larger sense of the times. In The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, published in 1967, Frank Kermode argued that divisions of time, like novels, are ways of making meaning. And clearly both can also shape our comprehension of an ideological and aesthetic period that seem to co-exist, but are perhaps not necessarily coterminous in their dominant inflections. The scholars involved in our BCCW symposia discussed the potential arbitrariness of all periodizations (which at times is reflected by contributors by extending the parameters of the decade under scrutiny), but nevertheless acknowledged the importance of such divisions, their experiential resonances and symbolic possibilities. They analysed the decades in question in terms of not only leading figures, the cultural zeitgeist and sociohistorical perspectives, but also in the context of the changing configuration of Britishness within larger, shifting global processes. The volume participants also reconsidered the effects and meaning of headline events and cultural shifts such as the miners’ strike of 1984–5, the collapse of communism, Blairism and cool Britannia, 9/11 and 7/7, to name only a very few. Perhaps ironically to prove the point about the possibilities inherent in such an approach, in his LRB article Mount concedes that ‘For the historian . . . if the 1950s are famous for anything, it is for being dull’, adding a comment on the ‘shiny barbarism of the new affluence’. Hence, even for Mount, a decade may still possess certain unifying qualities, those shaping and shaped by its overriding cultural mood.

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After the various symposia had taken place at Brunel, guided by the editors of the particular volumes, the individuals dispersed and wrote up their papers into full-length chapters (generally 10,000–12,000 words), revised in the light of other papers, the workshop discussions and subsequent further research. These chapters form the core of the book series, which, therefore, may be seen as the result of a collaborative research project bringing together initially twenty-four academics from Britain, Europe and North America. Two further seminars and volumes have now added scholars to this ongoing project, which is continuing to expand. Each volume shares a common, although not necessarily identical, structure. Following a critical introduction shaped by research, the first chapter of each volume addresses the ‘Literary History of the Decade’ by offering an overview of the key writers, themes, issues and debates, including such factors as emergent literary practices, deaths, prizes, controversies, key developments, movements and best-sellers. The next two chapters are generally themed around topics that have been specially chosen for each decade, and which also relate to themes of the preceding and succeeding decades, enabling detailed readings of key texts to emerge in full historical and theoretical context. The tone and context having been set in this way, the remaining chapters fill out a complex but comprehensible picture of each decade. A ‘Colonial/Postcolonial/Ethnic Voices’ chapter addresses the ongoing experience and legacy of Britain’s Empire and the rise of a new globalization, which is arguably the most significant long-term influence on contemporary British writing. Generally a literary historical context will feature in at least one other chapter, which is potentially concerned not just with historical novels but the construction of the past in general, and thus the later volumes will be considering constructions of the earlier decades so that a complex multi-layered account of the historicity of the contemporary will emerge over the series. A chapter on ‘Experimental Writing’ highlights the interaction between the socio-cultural contexts, established in earlier chapters, and aesthetic concerns, and another will focus on women’s writing and that particular gendered form of voice, perception and written response to both literary impulses and historical eventfulness. Various other chapters with a variety of focuses are added according to the dynamics and literary compulsions of each particular decade, which may feature international contexts or a specific sub-genre of the novel form, for instance. Each decade is different, but common threads are seen to emerge. In the future it is planned that the Decades Series will offer additional volumes, in effect reconnecting Contemporary British Fiction with its modernist

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precursors, linking both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through a detailed and forensic examination of its literary fiction.

Works Cited Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. Mount, Ferdinand. ‘The Doctrine of Unripe Time’. London Review of Books 28 (22) (16 November 2006): 28–30, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n22/ferdinand-mount/ the-doctrine-of-unripe-time. N.P.

Acknowledgements We would like to thank all our contributors for their expertise, patience and generosity when responding to our queries and guidance as this book has gradually taken shape. We have enjoyed excellent support throughout from the editorial team at Bloomsbury, especially David Avital, Mark Richardson and Clara Herberg, who have been instrumental in bringing this book to fruition. We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Brunel University Research and Knowledge Transfer Committee for providing the funding which enabled the Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing to host various events in the ‘British Fiction Decades Seminar Series’ during 2010, 2011 and 2015, which have led to the publication of the volumes in this book series. Without the support of administrative and catering staff at Brunel these events could not have taken place. We would also like to thank all the academics and postgraduate students who attended and contributed to the discussions at these events. We would also like to mention the staff at Brunel University Library, the British Library, the National Library of Wales and other research libraries who have provided support to the contributors to this volume. Special thanks to our contributors and in particular to Martin Dines and Matti Ron for the brief biographies they have written of writers discussed in their chapters. We would like to thank Neil Parkinson, Archives and Collections Manager at the Royal College of Art, for permission to reproduce John Minton’s cover illustration for Martyn Goff ’s novel The Plaster Fabric, first published in 1957.

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Introduction: The 1950s: A Decade of Change Nick Bentley, Alice Ferrebe and Nick Hubble

The idea of ‘a return to the 1950s’ has become a regular refrain of the second decade of the twenty-first century whether in reference to ‘Brexit’ – the idea of Britain leaving the European Union, as supported by 51.9 per cent of those who voted in the UK-wide referendum on Thursday 23 June 2016 – or more specific policies or social trends, such as the Conservative Party manifesto pledge during the 2017 General Election to reintroduce Grammar Schools.1 This return may be portrayed as either desirable or undesirable according to political viewpoint and sense of history. For example, it is not difficult to make an argument that the 1950s were inherently more socially conservative than the decade that followed. The 1960s were marked by social legislation in Britain, which saw the death penalty abolished, homosexuality legalized, divorce liberalized, forms of racial discrimination prohibited and, finally, right at the end of the decade, the Equal Pay Act of 1970. Furthermore, as Sally Tomlinson and Danny Dorling observe, ‘until the 1960s [g]enerations of pupils were taught that the bits [of the world map on the classroom wall] coloured pink “belonged to Britain” ’ (2016). Therefore, from this kind of historical perspective, the notion of a ‘return to the 1950s’ is reactionary because it seems dependent on either a desire to reverse that liberalizing legislation, or to be motivated by a melancholy sense of loss stemming from the dissolution of the British Empire. The counter argument to this is that people attracted by the idea of a return to the 1950s are not necessarily talking about specific legislation, but referring to more everyday concepts such as community values, social respect and a relative absence of vandalism; as well as historical features of the decade, such as the existence of full employment and the coverage of the pre-Beeching rail network. In practice, however, it is often difficult to disentangle motivations because, as Ian Jack (2017) points out, people saying they voted in the referendum ‘to get our country back’ may mean both ‘from immigrants’ and ‘to the way it was before’. As Jack continues, referring to a 1

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2017 lecture, ‘Uncovering the Unspoken’, by the historian David Kynaston,2 it is the subjective nature of memories, experience and valuation which drives the cultural economy surrounding feelings about the past: ‘we don’t need to have witnessed the real thing to feel nostalgic for it. It often helps if we haven’t.’ These feelings, therefore, are often unattached to specific external events or facts. Indeed, because they were mostly not explicitly articulated, they represent a problem for historians to uncover, which is only in part solved by analysis of memoirs, diaries and letters. It is the almost subconscious nature of these feelings which makes them so strong, driving a sense of nostalgia, loss and sometimes anger which inhibits the rational discussion of contemporary Britain’s relationship with its past. One argument, therefore, for studying the fiction of the 1950s is that, because it reveals a finer-grain picture of the structure of feeling of the decade than is readily available elsewhere, it has much to offer contemporary attempts to understand the nature of postwar Britishness.

The postwar consensus The 1950s’ predecessor, the 1940s, decade of the Second World War, began with Britain – at the head of the biggest empire the world has ever known – ‘standing alone’ against Nazi Germany, then continued via struggle and military victory to end with the successful foundation of the National Health Service and the Welfare State. The sense of identity gained from the wartime victory was to underpin a period of more than a quarter of a century when, despite the transition from the rationed austerity of the late 1940s to the consumer affluence of the late 1950s, Britain remained a stable entity, characterized by the so-called postwar political consensus. As Peter Hennessy suggests in his history of the decade Having it So Good: Britain in the Fifties (2007): The postwar consensus was perhaps at its most complete in the widely shared belief in the political parties and within Whitehall about the virtues of the British constitution in the 1940s and 1950s. These, too, were the years when a ‘decent’ (that great 1940s word) social infrastructure was finally put into place just as the shared experience of a total war whose front line was as much in Bow as in Benghazi knitted together a tight little nationalism, and a shared culture to match built partly on what [Ernest] Gellner called an ‘old and well-established image’. This [. . .] was to cause particular problems not just in relation to an integrating Europe in the 1950s and 1960s, but to the domestic integration of the Queen’s overseas subjects when the sons and daughters of the extended Empire

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began to arrive on the boat trains at Waterloo, and, later, long-haul flights to Heathrow, in considerable numbers. (Hennessy 2007: 68–9)

While this ‘image’ of a Britain of decency, consensus and fair play clearly did become well-established in the period – at least within the nation itself – it served mainly to hide, rather than eradicate, deeper divisions within British society; both those dating from during and before the war, and those that arose after it, due to factors such as the changing role of women in society and immigration. In particular, class divisions remained entrenched throughout public life. Not just the residual tripartite upper-middle-lower divisions of the Edwardian period but also a newer, more explicit form of antagonism resulting from social changes during the war. As Ross McKibbin concludes in his history of class and culture in interwar England: More or less everyone in the interwar years agreed that England was a democracy. The question was – whose democracy? Before the outbreak of war the question seemed to have been answered [. . .]: the ruling definition of democracy was individualist and its proponents chiefly a modernised middle class; in the 1940s the ruling definition was social-democratic and its proponents chiefly the organised working class. The class, therefore, which in the 1930s was the class of progress became in the 1940s the class of resistance. (1998: 531–3)

This ‘resistance’ combined with the sense of British exceptionalism which Angus Calder (1992) ascribes to the ‘myth of the Blitz’ – the ideological transformation of the fact that British society held up under the pressures of the defeat of the army in France, subsequent desperate retreat from Dunkirk, and prolonged nightly bombing of London and other cities and ports, into the imaginary idea that ‘no one would have succumbed’ (Calder 1992: 260) to an actual invasion or conquest by the German army – resulted in ‘the horrid inertia of English culture in the decade after victory’: With Labour constructing, if not a New Order, then a welfare state, and with a middle-class backlash against fair shares and austerity in full swing, the leftist critics and experimenters of the thirties, already mostly co-opted into the wartime propaganda effort, were stranded as weary and rather puzzled defenders of the new Establishment composed of Labourites, statist ‘liberals’ and Planners. (260)

As a consequence, although the postwar Labour government of Clement Attlee did set up a welfare state that has proved surprising enduring in many

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respects, it eventually fell victim to the sheer exhaustion of effectively having to maintain a wartime intensity of focus in order to push through an entirely government-led restructuring of the state in the face of concerted opposition. Labour’s landslide majority of 1945 was cut to only five seats in the 1950 General Election and then, when Attlee felt obliged to go to the polls again only a year later, they lost despite winning the most votes (13,948,605, a total which has only ever been surpassed once in the history of UK General Elections). According to Hennessy, one of the factors in the victory of the Conservatives and the attendant return of Winston Churchill to the role of Prime Minister, was that the third party, the Liberals, could only afford to field 109 candidates rather than the 475 they had put forward in 1950 and what would have been their vote went more to the Conservatives than to Labour, who otherwise might well have won a third consecutive election. Churchill himself ascribed his victory to ‘houses and meat and not being scuppered’ (qtd. Hennessy 2007: 192). In other words, the Conservative’s pledges to build 300,000 houses a year and end rationing (which they did in 1954) while maintaining the stability of postwar Britain and its self-image of decency swayed enough of the public to allow them to begin the long process of breaking the country away from its wartime structure of feeling. The war, of course, was still everywhere in Britain at the beginning of the 1950s; present not only in rationing and the bombsites of cities and towns (some of which would remain until at least the 1970s), but also in the books people read and the films they watched. Non-fiction stories of escapes from prisoner-of-war camps, such as Eric Williams’s The Wooden Horse (1949), Paul Brickhill’s The Great Escape (1950) and Pat Reid’s The Colditz Story (1952), were particular popular at the turn of the decade. Indeed, one of Kenneth Allsop’s more heartfelt passages of praise for the ‘Angry Young Men’ in his 1958 critical survey The Angry Decade concerns the fact that at least they had displaced stories ‘by men who had escaped from a Stalag’ from the bestseller lists (Allsop 1985: 198). Such wartime stories did not feature many women, although few presented this as a virtue in quite the same way as Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Cruel Sea (1951); a novel narrating ‘the story – the long and true story – of one ocean, two ships, and about a hundred and fifty men’ (9). Monsarrat writes of these men: They have women, at least a hundred and fifty women, loving them, or tied to them, or glad to see the last of them as they go to war. But the men are the stars of this story. The only heroines are the ships: and the only villain the cruel sea itself. (9)

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Calder argues that the novel ‘seems sexist virtually by intention’, before quoting Alan Munson’s comment that the men in The Cruel Sea fight two battles: ‘one at sea against U-boats, another at home against women’ (qtd. Calder 1992: 164). After the first ship, the corvette Compass Rose, is sunk by a torpedo only eleven men survive, including the captain, Ericson, and the First Lieutenant, Lockhart. Sometime later, when they are safely back in Britain, Ericson tells Lockhart about his visit to the wife of their fellow officer, Lieutenant Morell, to tell her about his death: ‘How was she?’ ‘She was in bed.’ ‘Oh. . . . Is she taking it badly? ‘I think she was taking it very well,’ said Ericson grimly. ‘There was someone there with her.’ For a moment, the two men’s eyes met. ‘Damn the war,’ said Lockhart. (344)

Just about all the women in the novel apart from Ericson’s wife and Lockhart’s girlfriend prove to be unfaithful or in other ways detrimental to their men. Moreover, it is noticeable how the men who show anything that might be construed as weakness for women are punished by death in The Cruel Sea. What is important for Monsarrat is the celebration of male shipboard life and the homosocial – certainly not homosexual – and paternalistic bonds that bind the men together; especially Ericson and Lockhart, whose ‘platonic love’ is allowed to ‘shine forth in the finale’ (Calder 1992: 164). This mix of an inarticulate but profound manly feeling and a barely latent misogyny characterizes the (repressed) emotional tenor of the early part of the decade. Even though a young woman became the head of state in 1952, it remained the presiding cultural expectation that women were expected faithfully to fulfil the roles of housewife and mother. As Jane Lewis notes, this expectation was enshrined in the welfare state developed from the Beveridge Report of 1942: Beveridge’s picture of married women as housewives fitted the 1930s much better than his wartime world, or as it transpired, the post-war world. But his conviction that adult women would normally be economically dependent on their husbands became embedded in the post-war social security legislation which in turn had a prescriptive effect. The Beveridge model for married women’s entitlements to social security was not revised until the middle of the 1970s. (qtd. Hennessy 2007: 123)

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The coronation of a queen did not alter this normative social model or the structure of feeling in Britain, because Elizabeth II was primarily perceived as the embodiment of the monarchical system which continued, as the American sociologist Ed Shils noted in 1956, to anchor the deference of the working and middle classes not just to her, but also to her government. Moreover, he argued: ‘The acceptance of hierarchy in British society permits the Government to retain its secrets, with little challenge or resentment’ (qtd. Hennessy 2007: 170). In practice, there was a shared social understanding operating in Britain in the first half of the 1950s, in which not only did everybody have a place, but also everybody could depend on everybody else knowing their place. Thus, as Hennessy notes, although MI5 kept members of the Communist Party of Great Britain under close surveillance, they were confident that the working-class members, at least, posed no threat of espionage or subversion and that, to all intents and purposes, the Party was a political party like other political parties. Likewise, the elite upper-class members of the British political system and civil service could be relied upon not to descend into anything so vulgar as the McCarthyism gripping America by forming a ‘House of Commons Select Committee on Un-British Activities’ (169). While such an apparently consensual stasis might look attractive from periods of accelerated social change and unrest, such as the penultimate decade of the twentieth century or the second decade of the twenty-first century, this was not what those who thought about such things at the time anticipated. While ‘trying to think how this decade will look to someone in 1984’, Allsop imagines that the obvious class-consciousness and conformity to protocols would somewhat undermine the ‘exhibitionist “rebelling” ’ of the Angry Young Men, such as Kingsley Amis, John Wain and Colin Wilson. He cannot help sounding frustrated at the irony of the turn of events since 1940: Britain put itself through a straightening-out process of democratisation and economic levelling, and has come out at the other end with many of the old values still intact, in a different place and slightly exacerbated by the disruption, which might be likened to trying to flatten a lump in linoleum: when you look round it’s heaved up behind you, and anyway the pattern is exactly the same. (203)

There did seem reason to be angry, even if this anger was only posturing which helped establish a writer, or little more than a lament for the great causes of the past. Both cases held for John Osborne and his 1956 play, Look Back in Anger, with neither the play nor its anti-hero Jimmy Porter able to move forward

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imaginatively (or stylistically) into a different future. Furthermore, the ineffectuality of this anger was unsurprising within a context in which, as Allsop acknowledges, political idealism was seen as suspect. As Doris Lessing has complained: To say, in 1957, that one believes artists should be committed, is to arouse hostility and distrust because of the quantities of bad novels [. . .] produced under the banner of committedness; [. . .] The reaction is so powerful [. . .] that one has only to stand up on a public platform and say one still believes in the class analysis of society and therefore of art, in short that one is a Marxist, for nine-tenths of the audience immediately to assume that one believes novels should be simple tracts about factories or strikes or economic injustice. (qtd. Bentley 2007: 78)

In other words, writers in the 1950s could not directly challenge the political and social conditions of the time in the way that had been commonplace in the 1930s. Aside from the resistance to the literature of political commitment, the economic and social wisdom of the postwar period saw the 1930s, as Alan Milward notes, ‘as wasted years’ (qtd. Hennessy 2007: 28) and therefore not relevant to the new Elizabethan Britain.

Social change and everyday life It was not that writers could not provide social criticism of the times, but rather that they had to find ways of presenting this in accordance with the public distaste for anything reminiscent of the 1930s. Science fiction of the period, such as John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951) and John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1956) openly portrayed the collapse of the socially-static postwar order but only as the result of some scientific disaster, such as a disease destroying all grain plants (see Nick Hubble’s chapter in this volume). The ‘Angry’ novels of Amis and Wain functioned by highlighting the absurdities of 1950s society to comic effect. As Humphrey Carpenter suggests, the legacy of the ‘Angries’ was the satire boom which began in May 1961 when the revue Beyond the Fringe, written and performed by Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore, arrived in the West End, to be shortly followed by Cook’s opening of a satirical nightclub, The Establishment, and the launch of Private Eye (see Carpenter 2003: 207). Other fiction of the period, such as the novels by women and gay writers discussed by Alice Ferrebe, Nicholas Birns and Margaret Boe

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Birns, and Martin Dines in their chapters for this volume, worked by revealing hidden aspects of social life and showing the steady changes in attitudes and lifestyle which were happening at the level of everyday life in the 1950s. For example, according to Hennessy, ‘in 1950, 10 per cent of the world’s cinema attendance accumulated in England alone’ and the total audience for the onechannel television was 344,000 (106, his emphasis). By 1952, the television audience had risen to 1,449,000, but by 1955, when ITV began broadcasting to provide a British audience with choice between two channels, ‘a third of British households had a television. By 1960, 90 per cent owned or rented a TV’ (Todd 2014: 209). By this point, cinema audiences were in a steep decline (see Hennessy 2007: 537). This shift from the public, collective experience of cinema-going to the more individualistic, or at least domestically-based, process of viewing was indicative of a wider social change supporting the development of individual tastes and behaviours in contrast to normative community values. This development was accentuated by the rise of youth culture, as the mid-decade arrival in Britain of rock-and-roll in the form of, first, Bill Haley and the Comets and then, shortly afterwards, Elvis Presley, began the transformation of teenage behaviour and the expression of (hetero)sexuality. Fundamental economic changes were underpinned by the Conservative election victories and their policies of deregulation with respect to mortgages and credit, which made both easier to gain and thereby enabled ordinary families to acquire electrical goods such as televisions, fridges and washing machines through hire-purchase agreements, and, for increasing numbers, to become home owners. As Selina Todd (2014) explains, both Labour and the Conservatives: believed that post-war economic growth relied on stimulating demand for the goods being produced by British manufacturers. However, reliance on manufacturing was risky. As demand for goods rose, manufacturers increased prices, either to limit demand or to increase their profits; at a certain point, these price hikes deterred consumers, who would stop buying their goods, causing unemployment. Labour’s price controls, including rationing, had regulated both production and consumption, but the Conservatives were firmly committed to a free market. They had to find other ways to stimulate consumption and support profit-making, and credit was one of them. In 1954 the Conservatives relaxed restrictions on morgtages and hire-purchase, making it possible for thousands more families to acquire both. In 1955 Rab Butler, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, introduced purchase tax on basic household goods such as washboards, while exempting from taxation most of the more expensive domestic appliances, including automatic washing machines

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[. . .] All these measures made mass-produced consumer goods increasingly attractive to working-class wage earners and, apparently, affordable. (203)

As Todd points out, one of the reasons that working-class families could afford these consumer items was because in over a third of them, the wife worked. In contrast to Beveridge’s conception of married women as housewives and mothers, ‘the women of the fifties were the first generation likely to remain in paid employment throughout their adult lives, with only a temporary break to have children’ (209). These material changes, within the wider context of full employment and the welfare state, finally began to deliver on the wartime promises of a better way of life for everyone. However, they still came at a cost. For example, the link between smoking and cancer was demonstrated in 1950 but no serious government action was taken to reduce smoking during the decade because the taxation revenue from it – £670m a year in the mid-1950s (see Hennessy 2007: 221) – was essential to funding the welfare state and other government expenditure. Moreover, government intervention to ban or restrict smoking would not have been in keeping with the promotion of individualism and consumerism that became central to the decade. In fact, it may well be that nothing could have halted the almost continual social change at the level of everyday life. Migration from the Caribbean, for instance, grew steadily throughout the first half of the decade, rising from 2,000 in 1953 to 27,500 in 1955 and although it fell back to 23,000 in 1957, that year also saw the arrival of 6,620 people from India and 5,189 from Pakistan. Although Churchill apparently considered ‘Keep England White’ as a possible political slogan in 1955, an elite attachment to the old Commonwealth meant that the British political establishment did not seriously countenance migration controls during the decade so that Britain’s transformation into a multicultural society was well underway before the 1960s began (see Hennessy 2007: 223–5, 496). In fact, before the end of the 1950s, most of the social attitudes that enabled the liberalizing legislation of the 1960s were already in place. Indeed, the Conservative-dominated House of Commons even voted to abolish the death penalty as early as 1956 only to have the decision overturned in the House of Lords (see Hennessy 2007: 514). It was necessary to wait a few more years for that piece of legislation to pass, and also for the decriminalization of homosexuality, despite the advocacy of the Wolfenden Report of 1957. However, a tranche of socially-liberal government acts were passed over the closing turn of the decade, including the Obscene Publications Act of 1959, which enabled Penguin to publish D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover as a result of the

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The 1950s

famous trial in the following year, the 1960 Betting and Gaming Act, which legalized betting shops; and the 1961 Licensing Act, which extended pub opening hours. Viewed in this context, the liberal 1960s were a straightforward continuation of the decade that preceded them.

Fiction, the New Left and the birth of cultural studies One of the important developments in literary and cultural studies in the universities in the 1950s is the move from a formalist to a historicist approach to the study of fiction. This represents a shift from the focus on practical criticism, close reading and the art of literary criticism as imbued with a moral seriousness associated with the critics F.R. Leavis and I.A. Richards in particular. This New Criticism, as it had been dubbed, had a profound effect on the way English literature was taught and understood in schools, universities and amongst the reading public more generally. Both Leavis and Richards were still producing work in the 1950s, although the work that established their approaches came from the 1930s (Leavis 1948, 1952, 1955; Richards, 1955, 1960). However, the approach to literary criticism that concentrated on a moral evaluation of the work focused on the words on the page was put under pressure in the 1950s from a new focus on the broader social, cultural and political contexts in which literature is produced and consumed. This latter approach moves from the formalism of the New Critics to the historicist approaches associated with writers from the New Left and, in particular, the literary critic Raymond Williams, the cultural studies writer Richard Hoggart, and the historians Christopher Hill, E.P. Thompson and Raphael Samuel. Williams’ and Hoggart’s work, in particular, was focused on reading contemporary literary and cultural production with respect to political and historical contexts in a way that challenged the established literary canon. One of the main aims of New Left writers was to identify the specificities and importance of working-class culture as a valid subject for critical analysis. One of the important works in this context is Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life. Hoggart’s main aim was to examine the cultural values and practices of working-class culture, both in the contemporary moment and in the decades before the Second World War. His concerns in the book were focused on what he saw as the threat to traditional and organic workingclass culture by the arrival of popular cultural forms and practices. With reference to Matthew Arnold, he dubs this new consumerist, Americanized culture

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‘shiny barbarism’ because of its cheap sensationalism and its surface appeal masked by what he saw as an insidious cultural banality and decline (Hoggart 1958: 193). He describes this new consumerism as a ‘limitless “progressivism” of things’ (172) and reads anti-intellectual, ‘highbrow-hating’ (183) tendencies as underlying its focus on the instant gratification of shiny products of mass consumption such as commercial pop songs, weekly family magazines, and ‘sex and violence’ novels. One of the dangers Hoggart identifies is that the products of this new consumerism were focused on individual pleasure, rather than a sense of community culture; as he notes: ‘The temptations, especially as they appear in mass-publications, are towards a gratification of the self and towards what may be called a “hedonistic-group-individualism” ’ (173). The result of this exposure to shiny barbarism was the imprecise use of moral definitions such as ‘freedom’ and ‘tolerance’: the new manners include a variety of ‘democratic’ tones of voice and are decided by the urge for gaiety and slickness at all costs; the main assumptions are overweaning egalitarianism, freedom, tolerance, progress, hedonism, and the cult of youth. (241)

The role of the mass media was crucial for Hoggart in the creation of this new society, and he defines examples of mass entertainment as ‘full of a corrupt brightness, of improper appeals and moral evasions’ (340), perpetuated by ‘those who provide the entertainment’ (331). Addressing the issue of ‘classlessness’, Hoggart admits that the new culture promoted a sense in which cultural divisions were, on the surface at least, breaking down. As he writes, ‘We are becoming culturally classless’ (342). However, this apparent cultural classlessness masked the continuing economic divisions between the haves and have-nots. There is a distinctive style to Hoggart’s book that lies somewhere between sociological analysis, personal memoir and ethnographic study. The voice of the text is at once knowledgeable and accessible and he is keen to address what he describes as the ‘common reader’ and ‘intelligent layman’. As he notes in the Preface to the book, ‘I have written as clearly as my understanding of the subject allowed [. . .] For one of the most striking and ominous features of our present cultural situation is the division between the technical languages of the experts and the extraordinary low level of the organs of mass communication’ (10). Clearly Hoggart stresses the deleterious effects of the new mass culture, but there is also an implicit desire here to be as inclusive as possible, and to avoid a discourse that might create an alienating distance between the academic researcher and the working-class subjects of the research. Indeed, he is keen to

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stress his attachment and belonging to the culture he is examining. As a ‘scholarship boy’, brought up in Leeds, there is a sense in which Hoggart intuitively knows the working-class environments, life-styles and outlooks he describes, lending the text a level of authenticity and insider knowledge. In the book he focuses on the distinction between a ‘visitor’, who might foreground the ‘understandably depressing’ environments of working-class life, and the ‘insider’ who is sensitive to the positive aspects of community and solidarity to be found in the ‘neighbourhood’ (72–101). Hoggart articulates this distinction in the vernacular of the working-class culture, as a ‘them and us’ opposition, with the writer’s role being as a participant-observer representing the culture to an external addressee (72). However, implicit in Hoggart’s model of working-class culture there is a tendency to overlook other aspects of cultural politics such as gender, race and ethnicity. Hoggart’s approach necessitates, to a certain extent, that the workingclass ‘neighbourhood’ should be maintained as a socially cohesive unit in order to resist the potentially threatening effects of the newer cultural practices and products. Part of the approach here means that the ‘organic’, white, working-class culture defines itself against other marginalized identities. In this context he refers, for example, to the exclusion of: ‘those who have a daughter who went wrong’, the ‘housewife’ who is a ‘fusspot and scours her window-ledges and steps twice a week’ and the ‘young woman [who] had her black child after the annual visit of the circus’ (60). Here, the theoretical limitations of Hoggart’s model are revealed by the lack of attention to the specificities of ethnicity and gender which would undermine the cohesive model of working-class identity he is trying to produce. If Hoggart was interested in recording aspects of working-class culture in a style that was inclusive, then Raymond Williams was keen to produce a politically-engaged understanding of class that moved Marxist theory closer to a practical socialism that reflected real-world experiences, rather than theoretical abstractions. In key texts from the 1950s and early 1960s, Williams worked on a series of concepts and models that moved between literary criticism and the newly developing discipline of cultural studies. For Williams, and many in the New Left more broadly, the key was to develop a Marxist approach to class that shifted from a focus on the economic base to one of identifying the importance of cultural practices. In Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961), in particular, Williams engaged in developing a critical interrogation of some of the artificial distinctions between the individual and society in Marxism, a distinction he regarded as historically contextualized and dependent on a

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range of ‘superstructural’ factors. For Williams, there was a problematic model of the ‘masses’ (or the proletariat) in traditional Marxist discourse that artificially made the concept of ‘class’ too abstract for contemporary working-class people to engage in an active and real-world political engagement. In The Long Revolution, Williams replaces the Marxist models of ‘class’, the ‘proletariat’, ‘alienation’ and ‘false consciousness’ with a set of alternative concepts for analysing contemporary (British) working-class culture and society. He introduces concepts such as ‘structure of feeling’, ‘community’, ‘a whole way of life’ and ‘solidarity’, which together emphasized a holistic model of working-class society that was sensitive to collective group consciousness. The emphasis was thus changed from the abstractions of ‘vulgar’ Marxism to a study of culture based on empirical and experiential evidence. Williams shares with Hoggart a distrust of the new forces of consumerism, and stresses the importance of ‘community’ as a profound force in the organization of society; as he writes, ‘Unless we achieve some realistic sense of community, our true standard of living will continue to be distorted’ (299). Culture and Society and The Long Revolution represent crucial texts in the early New Left’s agenda of re-assessing traditional Marxist analysis. As with Hoggart, however, the concentration on the cultural politics of class meant that the models of cultural analysis being established by Williams were less sensitive to what Stuart Hall later calls the two ‘interruptions’ of British Cultural Studies: feminism and ‘race’ (Hall 1992: 282). As with Hoggart, the desire to identify collective and holistic models of an ‘organic’ working-class culture meant that identifying divisions with respect to other cultural marginalities might undermine the very foundations upon which the new model was being established. The focus on culture for the New Left, however, meant that a new importance was given to contemporary literary representation of class and several writers during the period were associated with the New Left. As Stuart Hall notes in a critical review of John Mander’s The Writer and Commitment: we need the theory of literature which no critic has attempted to provide [. . . and] I believe that [. . .] we are constantly being offered, in literature, and more generally, in our culture, ways of seeing, definitions and meanings, which are not available in any other way. (Hall 1961: 69)

Hall suggests here that literature provides the possibility to represent contemporary society in ways that were denied to contemporary models of sociological study, and which have the potential to be more successful in the production of a political consciousness amongst working-class people.

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Fiction and drama, in particular, provided a key site for the exploration of political ideas, and the relationship between fiction and other fields of critical and cultural production was particularly strong in the 1950s. Through its articulation of authentic voices and experiences, fiction could reveal and articulate working-class concerns while evading the alienating distance created in contemporary political and sociological studies of class. The importance of this connection can be seen in the large number of novelists and dramatists identified by Michael Kenny in his study of the early New Left, including John Osborne, Dennis Potter, Shelagh Delaney, Doris Lessing, John Braine, Kenneth Tynan, and Alan Sillitoe (99). Alongside the more obvious engagements with working-class culture in works by the ‘Angry Young Man’ writers (Alan Sillitoe, John Braine, David Storey) it is also illuminating to note how many writers normally regarded as middle class who were keen to explore working-class life in their novels, for example, Gerald Kersch’s Fowlers End (1958), Doris Lessing’s semi-autobiographical, In Pursuit of the English, Clancy Sigal’s Weekend in Dinlock, Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye (all 1960) and John Wain’s Hurry on Down (1953). Some of these novels will be discussed in greater depth in the chapters included in this collection.

The 1950s: A decade of modern British fiction This book includes a number of different research-led approaches to, and ways of thinking about, the decade. In Chapter 1, ‘ “The Choices of Master Samwise”: Rethinking 1950s Fiction’, Nick Hubble begins by focusing on arguably the most successful – certainly in terms of total sales and readership – work of twentiethcentury British fiction, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (1954–5). By reading the choices faced by the novel’s hero, Sam, as symbolic of those facing ordinary and working-class soldiers returned from the war, a new perspective is opened on the decade. Drawing on John Clute’s conception of fantasy as means of revealing the perceived ‘wrongness’ and ‘thinning’ of modern life, Hubble draws points of comparison between Tolkien’s work and the science fiction of John Wyndham with the social realist fiction of the decade, analysing the 1950s fiction of John Sommerfield as a case study. The chapter closes with a reading of Naomi Mitchison’s reworking of the Oedipus story in Travel Light (1952), which paved the way to her own later feminist science fiction, and that of her one-time protégé, Doris Lessing. In this manner, the 1950s are revealed as ‘the decade in which the modernist and proletarian literatures of the first half of the century

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met the types of writing which would eventually become as important as them in the late twentieth and twenty-first century: science fiction and fantasy’. Matthew Crowley’s ‘Angry Young Men? A Product of Their Time’, examines the effect of the emergent consumer capitalist culture of 1950s Britain upon contemporaneous representations of working-class masculinities. By utilizing Raymond Williams’s theory of ‘structures of feeling’ as an analytical procedure, Crowley unpacks tensions that become apparent between emergent youth and consumer cultures, and dominant and residual forms of masculinity. By focusing in particular on Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and David Storey’s This Sporting Life (1960), the chapter reevaluates Williams’ original reading of this emergent pattern of texts as narratives of escape, by arguing that the discontinuities represented within the texts, which Williams sees as problematic within representations of working-class life, actually serve to demonstrate significant cultural and historical shifts that occur during this particular period. By showing how the structure of feeling examined becomes apparent as a moment of commodification of working-class masculinities as ‘Angry Young Men’, Crowley lays bare the processes that made both the writers and their characters quite literally a product of their time In her ‘ “Mere bird-watching indeed”: Feminist Anthropology and 1950s Female Fiction’, Alice Ferrebe considers the influence of anthropology on women’s fiction of the decade, considering work by writers including Brigid Brophy, Attia Hosain, Marghanita Laski, Penelope Mortimer, Barbara Pym, Muriel Spark, and Elizabeth Taylor, tracing a social critique that anticipates the second-wave feminism of the following decades. In Chapter 4,‘ “Is it a queer book?”: Re-reading the 1950s Homosexual Novel’, Martin Dines considers the moral ambiguity of the decade which saw a spate of novels centring on sympathetic male homosexual protagonists who, armed with newly available psychological models of sexual identity, typically refuse to apologize for their sexual orientation. On the one hand, these novels are largely cautious and circumscribed, with protagonists who conform to conventions of bourgeois respectability and masculine deportment, and repudiate the perceived moral dissolution of queer urban milieus for a restrained, private existence. On the other hand, in their working through of different models of homosexual intimacy, these novels not only contributed to the widening awareness of homosexuality and the emergence of queer readerships, but also reward the twenty-first century queer reader with a form of counter-reading that pursues desires which these texts purport to resist or deflect through a framing narrative, and whose force is forever undermined by the very persistent presence of disreputable bodies and locales.

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In Chapter 5, ‘A Vision of the Future: Race and Anti-Racism in 1950s British Fiction’, Matti Ron examines the anti-racist strategies of writers of the decade as containing the basis from which both multiculturalism and its future limitations would emerge. By contrasting the work of writers such as John Sommerfield and Colin MacInnes with that of Sam Selvon, George Lamming and E.R. Braithwaite, Ron reveals commonalities of approach but also key divergencies in political content and, crucially, literary form. By showing how far the form and voice of Selvon’s and Lamming’s work differs from Britain’s wider postwar realist literary culture and its resistance to formal experimentation, Ron analyses the tensions and confrontations from which a future anti-racism would emerge. Nick Bentley’s ‘Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On: The Politics of Youth in 1950s Fiction’, considers the representation and construction of a variety of youth subcultures in novels from the 1950s, including MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners (1959), Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and Stella Gibbons’ Here Be Dragons (1956). By showing how the representation of youth in this fiction cuts across discourses related to other aspects of cultural politics during the decade, including class, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, Bentley examines the ways in which youth becomes a prime cultural site for these wider debates and relates this development to the rise of the New Left. In Chapter  7, ‘Detective Fiction and the Prose of Everyday Life’, Nicholas Birns and Margaret Boe Birns argue that, far from being a reactionary and imitative echo of the achievements of the ‘Golden Age’ of the mystery story in the 1920s, women’s detective fiction of the 1950s, including the later careers of Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and Gladys Mitchell, carved out a distinctive postwar sense of both subject and form to make an important contribution to British literature of that era. Finally, Sebastian Jenner’s ‘Chance in the Canon: Uncertainty and the Literary Establishment of the Fifties’, rereads the 1950s canon, including the work of Kingsley Amis and John Wain, as examples of a burgeoning aleatory compositional practice that came to fruition in the 1960s avant-garde British novel. In situating the cultural response of the decade to shifting perceptions of chance within the context of a characteristically British motion towards a more representative portrayal of reality, Jenner analyses the inherent contradictions of such an approach and reveals how such paradoxical approaches to delineating chaos suggest a potential for meaning to spring from the chance procedures enacted by the reader. Overall, the collection of chapters contained in The 1950s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction aims to contribute to, and develop, our understanding of a literary decade, which is often taken to be the epitome of unexciting, realist

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prose constrained with the emotional straitjacket of a socially conservative epoch. In fact, as the research in this book demonstrates, it is time to rethink the 1950s as a crucial decade of change. The more we understand how the values of modernity penetrated everyday life and spread through British society during the mid-century years, the more obvious it will become that a ‘return to the 1950s’ could only be accomplished by fully embracing a continual process of social change.

Notes 1 See, for example, John Bingham, ‘Return of the 1950s Housewife’, Daily Telegraph, 2 July 2015: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/11711300/Returnof-the-1950s-housewife-Young-mothers-swap-careerism-for-home.html; Chris Riddell, ‘We’re Heading Back to the 1950s’, Observer, 11 September 2016: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2016/sep/11/were-headingback-to-the-1950s; Ian Jack, ‘A Generation Hooked on Nostalgia is Trying to Return Britain to the Past’. Guardian, 1 April 2017: https://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/ 2017/apr/01/generation-nostalgia-britain-past-brexit-immigration 2 Given at the British Library on 13 March 2017. Available to watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLfRlnATXKs

Works cited Allsop, Kenneth. The Angry Decade. Wendover: John Goodchild Publishers, 1985 [1958]. Bentley, Nick. Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s. Bern: Peter Lang, 2007. Calder, Angus. The Myth of the Blitz. London: Pimlico, 1992 [1991]. Carpenter, Humphrey. The Angry Young Men: A Literary Comedy of the 1950s. London: Penguin, 2003. Hennessy, Peter. Having it So Good: Britain in the Fifties. London: Penguin, 2007. Jack, Ian. ‘A Generation Hooked on Nostalgia is Trying to Return Britain to the Past’. Guardian, 1 April 2017: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/01/ generation-nostalgia-britain-past-brexit-immigration Hall, Stuart. ‘Commitment Dilemma’. New Left Review, 10 (1961): 67–9. Hall, Stuart. ‘Cultural Studies and its Legacies’. In Laurence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula A. Treichler, Eds. Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 1992, 277–94. Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life. London: Penguin, 1958 [1957].

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Kenny, Michael. The First New Left: British Intellectuals After Stalin. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1995. Kersch, Gerald. Fowlers End. London: Heinemann, 1958. Leavis, F.R. The Common Pursuit. London: Faber and Faber, 2008 [1952]. Leavis, F.R. The Great Tradition: George Eliot; Henry James; Joseph Conrad. London: Faber and Faber, 2008 [1948]. Leavis, F.R. D.H. Lawrence: Novelist. London: Penguin, 1993 [1955]. Lessing, Doris. In Pursuit of the English. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1960. McKibbin, Ross. Classes and Cultures, England 1918–1951. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Monsarrat, Nicholas. The Cruel Sea. Trowbridge: Redwood Press, 1971 [1951]. Richards, I.A. Speculative Instruments. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955. Richards, I.A. So Much Nearer: Essays Toward a World English. London: Harcourt Brace, 1960. Sillitoe, Alan. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. London: W. H. Allen, 1958. Spark, Muriel. The Ballad of Peckham Rye. London: Macmillan, 1960. Sigal, Clancy. Weekend in Dinlock. London: Secker and Warburg, 1960. Todd, Selina. The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class 1910–2010. London: John Murray, 2014. Tomlinson, Sally and Danny Dorling. ‘Brexit Has Its Roots in the British Empire – So How Do We Explain It to the Young?’ New Statesman. 9 May 2016: https://www. newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2016/05/brexit-has-its-roots-british-empire-sohow-do-we-explain-it-young Wain, John. Hurry on Down. Kansas City : Valancourt, 2013 [1953]. Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780–1950. London: Hogarth, 1958. Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. London: Chatto and Windus, 1961.

1

‘The Choices of Master Samwise’: Rethinking 1950s Fiction Nick Hubble

At the end of the 1950s, Kenneth Allsop felt himself able to praise the writing of his time on the grounds that: the Fifties is turning out to be the most actively creative decade in Britain since the Twenties – far more so than the Thirties, which despite its atmosphere of sincerity and serious endeavour creaked with ‘automatic’ writing: the outcome of political cheer-leading and party-lining which produced much unadmirable joycamp poetry and literature, that conscientious period of John Grierson and the dedicated romantics of documentary films, of Ralph Fox’s The Novel and the People, of W.H. Auden’s embarrassing experiments in the blues idiom. (Allsop 1985: 197–8)

Few would probably agree with this assessment now but, as I hope to show in this chapter, Allsop does reflect one key aspect of the 1950s: the failure of the dominant social realism of the period, which seemed to have arisen directly from the concerns of the 1930s, to portray life convincingly. In the same year that Allsop was writing, Angus Wilson ruefully noted that the ‘central characters [of the post-war social novel] are inferior in reality and depth to Virginia Woolf ’s’ (1983a: 133). Subsequently, Rod Mengham has argued that the ‘attention to British social reality’ in the work of John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, David Storey and others is haunted by a suspicion ‘of its inauthenticity’ (2011: 83). In this context, one of the positive values of the fiction of the 1950s is the way in which it ultimately exposes any straightforward appeal to authenticity as, to use Allsop’s terminology, an unadmirable form of 1930s romanticism.1 In what follows below I relate this sense of ‘inauthenticity’ to the sense of ‘wrongness’ which John Clute has identified as an integral element of fantasy fiction generally and in particular of far and away the most successful work – in 19

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terms of sales, multiple translations and global awareness in the twenty-first century – of British 1950s fiction, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954–5). In doing so, my aim is to give a different perspective on what is often considered a conservative and boring decade, overshadowed by its wartime predecessor and its ‘swinging’ successor. As critics including Nick Bentley have argued, ‘the dominant critical reading of fifties English literature as anti-modernist, antiexperimental and representing a return to traditional or conventional realist forms is a distortion of the actual heterogeneous nature of the novel produced during this period’ (Bentley 2007: 16). There are a number of ways in which 1950s fiction contests the apparently politically conservative status quo of the period ranging from experimentation with narrative forms to articulating the concerns of marginalized groups and many of these are discussed and analysed in the subsequent chapters of this volume. This chapter takes an alternative approach by arguing the case for the 1950s to be considered the key literary decade of the century because of the way in which it marks a crucial transition. It is the decade in which the modernist and proletarian literatures of the first half of the century met the types of writing which would eventually become as important as them in the late twentieth and twenty-first century: science fiction and fantasy.2

‘Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age’ Although conceived as a single work rather than a trilogy, The Lord of the Rings was published in three volumes – The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), The Two Towers (1954) and The Return of the King (1955) – by Allen and Unwin in an attempt to minimize costs just in case the book should make a loss. Likewise, they did not pay Tolkien an advance but agreed to pay him half-profits once the publishing costs were covered (see Hammond and Scull 2008: xxxii). In fact, The Lord of the Rings proved to be quite successful from the beginning before rapidly growing in popularity over the subsequent decades to the point at which by 2007, in the aftermath of Peter Jackson’s film adaptations, it had achieved worldwide sales in excess of 150 million (Wagner 2007: n.p.). The novel originated as a sequel to Tolkien’s popular pre-war children’s story, The Hobbit (1937), but grew in scope to include the background of Tolkien’s extensive mythology, which he had begun creating during the First World War after his return from France (see Garth 2004: 205–23). The Lord of the Rings was characterized by a much more sombre tone than the rather more modern idiom of The Hobbit, as the

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magic ring found by Bilbo Baggins in that tale turns out to be the all-powerful ‘One Ring’ of the Dark Lord, Sauron, which can be destroyed only by undertaking a perilous quest to the Cracks of Doom in Mordor. Indeed, the turn of events required significant revisions to be made to the second edition of The Hobbit – particularly to the story of how Bilbo acquired his ring in the chapter, ‘Riddles in the Dark’ – which was published in 1951. In the ‘Foreword’ to the second edition (1966) of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien explains how the process of the novel’s composition began in 1936, before the publication of The Hobbit, and was only completed in 1949.3 Strikingly, he links the progress of much of the quest to destroy the One Ring to the duration of the Second World War, so that we learn that the tale had not reached the end of Book I by the end of 1939 and was only to reach Lothlórien late in 1941. Thereafter, his work slowed as he wrote parts of what would become Books III and V at night. It was only in 1944 that he ‘forced’ himself ‘to tackle the journey of Frodo to Mordor’: ‘These chapters, eventually to become Book IV, were written and sent out to my son, Christopher, then in South Africa with the R.A.F.’ (Tolkien 1966a: 6). Although Tolkien was emphatic that the novel is ‘neither allegorical nor topical’ (ibid), these chapters in particular have a historical depth and power in the way they link Tolkien’s own experiences in the First World War with the last full year of its successor. Tolkien went out to France in June 1916 and subsequently fought at the Battle of the Somme before contracting trench fever. Of course, it was not just his personal experiences of the war that affected him, as he notes in his ‘Foreword’: ‘By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead’ (7). These wartime experiences inform the sequence in which Frodo, Sam and Gollum cross the ‘Dead Marshes’, a no-man’s-land of ‘sticky ooze’ and ‘dark meres’ left over from the months’ long battle for the plain in front of the Black Gates of Mordor that had taken place centuries earlier. When Sam trips and falls down head first, he recoils from what he sees: ‘ “There are dead things, dead faces in the water,” he said with horror. “Dead faces!” ’ (Tolkien 1966b: 235). Such experiences form part of a process of self-discovery for Sam who has hitherto thought of himself merely in relation to the interests of his master, Frodo: I used to think that [adventures] were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually – their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten.

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The 1950s We hear about those as just went on – and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same – like old Mr. Bilbo. But those aren’t always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of tale we’ve fallen into? (Tolkien 1966b: 321)

This question of what sort of tale The Lord of the Rings is rather depends on who one takes to be the hero of the novel. Sam imagines a small hobbit boy asking his dad for the story of ‘Frodo and the Ring’ and marvelling at the courage of ‘the famousest of the hobbits’ (321). But Frodo insists the boy would really say ‘I want to hear more about Sam, dad. Why didn’t they put in more of his talk, dad? That’s what I like, it makes me laugh. And Frodo wouldn’t have got far without Sam, would he, dad?’ (322). Not only does this discussion demonstrate a level of self-reflexivity that is missed in stereotypical dismissals of the critical value of Tolkien’s fantasy, it also functions as a narrative foreshadowing of the subsequent events at the top of the stairs to Cirith Ungol, in which Sam fights off Gollum’s attempt to strangle him before temporarily driving the monstrous Shelob away from Frodo’s prone body. Even as all seems lost, with Shelob poised to spring on him and sting him to death before carrying off Frodo, Sam experiences a moment of ‘eucatastrophe’ – a ‘sudden joyous “turn” ’ (Tolkien 1997: 153) – as the memory of Galadriel inspires him with the hope of the elves: And then his tongue was loosed and his voice cried in a language which he did not know: A Elbereth Gilthoniel O menal palan-diriel, Le nallon si di’nguruthos! A tiro nin, Fanuilos! And with that he staggered to his feet and was Samwise the hobbit, Hamfast’s son, again. ‘Now come, you filth!’ he cried. ‘You’ve hurt my master, you brute, and you’ll pay for it. We’re going on; but we’ll settle with you first. Come on, and taste it again!’ (Tolkien 1966b: 338–9)

On one level this is Tolkien acknowledging the heroism of the working classes – particularly that of the officers’ batmen – he had experienced at first hand in the trenches (see Garth 2004: 171, 310, passim). Moreover, though, this heroism

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is for Tolkien the epitome of all heroism: Sam is the character from The Lord of the Rings who shares most in common with Beren, the central hero of all Tolkien’s mythology, who demonstrates ‘immeasurable courage and love’ (Garth 2004: 265) greater in value than a priceless Silmaril (much as Sam’s courage and love in the end triumphs over the power of the One Ring). As Tolkien wrote to his son on 24 December 1944, ‘Cert. Sam is the most closely drawn character, the successor to Bilbo of the first book, the genuine hobbit [. . .] The book will prob. end up with Sam’ (Carpenter 1981: 105). Indeed, the book does close, following Frodo’s departure from Middle Earth for the Undying Lands in the west, with Sam’s return to the Shire. The final words of the novel are spoken by him while sitting with his daughter Elanor in his lap: ‘He drew a deep breath. “Well, I’m back,” he said’ (Tolkien 1966c: 311). However, when Tolkien was writing to his son in the autumn of 1944, he had actually intended for there to be an entire closing chapter, in which ‘Sam is found reading out of an enormous book to his children, and answering all their questions about what happened to everybody’ (Carpenter 1981: 104). This final chapter was eventually written as an epilogue, which was then not included in the published version, although Tolkien harboured misgivings about this omission, complaining in a letter of October 1955 that ‘I still feel the picture incomplete without something on Samwise and Elanor’ (Carpenter 1981: 227). Different drafts of this epilogue have subsequently been published. The final version begins with Sam sitting at the desk in Bag End seventeen years after the destruction of the Ring and writing down the questions of his children on hearing the story of The Lord of the Rings – as compiled by Frodo before his departure – read out to them. In this way, we learn what has happened to members of the ‘Fellowship of the Ring’ such as Gimli, Legolas, Merry and Pippin, but at the same time the novel is once more centred, as in the opening chapters, on hobbits and the Shire. Sam then talks to his daughter Elanor about the passing of the elves from Middle Earth, assuring her that there will still be things for her to see and do even though a great ‘Age’ has ended. In particular, he calmly resists her declaration that she will never part from him in the manner that Arwen, by choosing mortality, did from her immortal father Elrond: ‘ “Maybe, maybe,” said Sam kissing her gently. “And maybe not. The choice of Lúthien and Arwen comes to many, Elanorellë, or something like it; and it isn’t wise to choose before the time” ’ (Tolkien 1992: 125). In this way, although The Lord of the Rings is notoriously short of female characters, there is the suggestion that women’s agency will be more central to the emergent new world order, and a sense that this future is important in itself; the novel is not purely a lament for an ancient world and the passing of the light.

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If that sense of a future in which the choices of Elanor will be important does not quite materialize in the published version of the novel, the most significant choice in the text remains that of Sam, the unassuming ordinary working-class hobbit thrust, like hundreds of thousands in the two world wars, into the front lines of a desperate fight against the forces of oppression. It is not that he is keen to step up to the occasion; even as the last member of the Fellowship left, with Frodo lying seemingly dead on the ground, he is extremely reluctant to ‘put himself forward’: ‘ “I wish I wasn’t the last,” he groaned. “I wish old Gandalf was here, or somebody. Why am I left all alone to make up my mind?” ’ (Tolkien 1966b: 341). But, of course, he does choose to take the Ring and take on the quest alone. This, in turn, leads to another choice, because by rejecting the comfortable lack of responsibility inherent within his socialized class subservience to his upper-middle-class superiors, such as Frodo and Bilbo, and taking on agency, he is now confronted by the hitherto unthinkable possibility that he could become the master: Already the Ring tempted him, gnawing at his will and reason. Wild fantasies arose in his mind; and he saw Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age, striding with a flaming sword across the darkened land, and armies flocking to his call as he marched to the overthrow of Barad-dûr. And then all the clouds rolled away, and the white sun shone, and at his command the vale of Gorgoroth became a garden of flowers and trees and brought forth fruit. He had only to put on the Ring and claim it for his own, and all this could be. (Tolkien 1966c: 177)

But ‘plain hobbit-sense’ wins out and he chooses to settle for the modest personal ambition of ‘one small garden of a free gardener’ (177). Without that choice the quest could not have been completed, and the Shire would not have been enabled to prosper and progress socially under Sam’s mayorship; rather as without the genuine commitment of ordinary British soldiers to the anti-Fascist cause of the war, the subsequent social transformation of Britain would not have happened. While that sense of Sam coming into his own as the hero of the novel was central to Tolkien’s thoughts while writing, and clear from the published version of the text, Tolkien distanced himself from such an interpretation in later life. In 1963, Tolkien wrote that ‘Sam is meant to be lovable and laughable’, but he is the possessor of ‘a vulgarity – by which I do not mean a mere “down-to-earthiness” – a mental myopia which is proud of itself, a smugness (in varying degrees) and cocksureness, and a readiness to measure and sum up all things from a limited experience, largely enshrined in sententious traditional “wisdom” ’ (Carpenter 1981: 329). Tolkien implies that Sam only transcends these limitations through

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service to Frodo, and eventually learns the concepts of service to a greater good and how to see the damaged remains of good in even the most corrupt person. Ironically, through his unhappiness with the ‘cocksureness’ of post-war workingclass Britain, Tolkien came close to casting his novel as the religious allegory that he had previously resisted. He goes on in the same draft letter to imply that it is Sam’s treatment of Gollum which tips the latter’s divided character to his bad side and makes the trip to Shelob’s Lair inevitable. If Sam has shown pity earlier, runs his argument, the remainder of the novel would have played out differently, with the dramatic interest shifting to Gollum. While Tolkien thinks that this still-divided Gollum would also have taken the ring, he posits that, with the desire for the ring satisfied by possession, Gollum ‘would then have sacrificed himself for Frodo’s sake and have voluntarily cast himself into the fiery abyss’ (Carpenter 1981: 330). It is interesting to speculate whether this version of the novel, more obviously rooted in a religious idea of redemption, would have been as successful as the published version has been. There is little doubt, however, that such an approach would now feel more dated to a twenty-first-century readership in the same manner that the heavy-handed Christian allegory of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia novels of the same period clearly does. Moreover, such a transformation of the roles of Sam and Gollum would hardly be in keeping with the majority of the novel: Sam’s suspicion is a key aspect of his plain hobbitsense, and it is his plain hobbit-sense, like that of Bilbo in The Hobbit, which enables the quest’s successful completion. An exemplar of the returned soldiers of the period, he was a worthy ‘Hero of the Age’, but the choices he faced had a wider resonance across the literature of the period: did he and his fellow soldiers create a smug self-satisfied culture of vulgar cocksureness or did they genuinely cultivate new gardens?

The legacy of the 1930s In J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (2000), Tom Shippey groups The Lord of the Rings together with other significant works of the period such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies (1954) and The Inheritors (1955), and T.H. White’s The Once and Future King (1958), as expressions of the idea that ‘people could never be trusted, least of all if they expressed a wish for the betterment of humanity. The major disillusionment of the twentieth century has been over political good intentions, which have led only to gulags and killing fields’ (116–7). Aside from the fact that this would

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make Tolkien’s novel allegorical in exactly the way he denied, this somewhat sweeping generalization does not actually fit the plots of any of the novels mentioned. However, it gives a good idea of the ideological stakes originating from the Cold War, both during the period and after. Shippey goes on to suggest that The Lord of the Rings was anathema to ‘the literary coterie which ruled and defined English literature at least for a time, between the wars and after World War II [. . .] They were committed modernists, upper class, often Etonians, often professed Communists’ (316). His prime examples are Philip Toynbee and Alfred Duggan, the author of the anonymous review of The Fellowship of the Ring in the Times Literary Supplement, which dismissed it as ‘not a work which many adults will read through more than once’ (qtd. Shippey 2000: 306). However, the response of the former literary generation of the 1930s to The Lord of the Rings was rather more diverse than this suggests. In fact, two rather more prominent members of that generation than Toynbee and Duggan, W.H. Auden and Naomi Mitchison, were among Tolkien’s leading cheerleaders alongside C.S. Lewis. Mitchison was already a correspondent of Tolkien’s before publication and read The Lord of the Rings in proof, providing the flyleaf cover blurb that it was ‘really super science fiction’ (to Tolkien’s amusement). She reviewed The Fellowship of the Ring enthusiastically for the New Statesman, while Auden also reviewed it favourably for both the New York Times Book Review and Encounter. As a consequence, he also began a correspondence with Tolkien, who sent him the proofs of The Return of the King. In his subsequent review of The Return of the King, Auden noted the difference between considering life as a journey in pursuit of a quest and a more sedentary modern experience which might be the subject of documentary study. For him, Tolkien had ‘succeeded more completely than any previous writer in this genre in using the traditional properties of the Quest’ (qtd. Carpenter 1981: 239). The implication is that Tolkien’s ‘Quest’ narrative reveals something otherwise missing from modern 1950s life. One way of analysing such a narrative is to plot it in terms of John Clute’s four-stage model of fantasy. The first stage is ‘wrongness’, as evidenced at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings by the presence of the Nazgûl in the Shire. The second stage is ‘thinning’: the threat of defeat as signified by the breaking of the fellowship and, more generally, the way in which the land ceases to resemble realist landscapes and becomes a generic ‘Fantasyland’. Clute argues that this is the result of a kind of amnesia that happens when the story forgets itself and then goes on to note that ‘the way to escape the amnesias of thinning is to tell the Story again’ (115). Such retelling, or remembering, as undertaken by Frodo and Sam on the stairs to Cirith Ungol, leads to the third

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stage of ‘recognition’, in which the hero – in this case, Sam – recognizes his own agency, and ultimately sets up the possibility of the fourth stage of ‘return’: the possibility of resuming life as it was without wrongness, which is implied in Sam’s ‘Well, I’m back’ at the end of The Lord of the Rings and set out in more detail in the unpublished epilogue. On this reading, the value of The Lord of the Rings in the 1950s was that it both gave expression to a clearly discernible senses of wrongness in a period marked by the living memory of two world wars and the threat of nuclear weapons, and offered the promise of an unalienated world to be recovered. As we shall see, Tolkien was far from alone in presenting such a fictional diagnosis and therapy for the times. However, it is important to note that such a recipe did not appeal solely to the political right as might be supposed from Shippey’s account but also – as testified to by the fascination of Mitchison and Auden with Tolkien – to those who had formerly been part of the left-wing 1930s generation. For example, while another member of that generation, Edward Upward, suffered from literary block for most of the 1950s, when the volumes of his trilogy The Spiral Ascent appeared over the subsequent two decades, they revealed a structurally similar response to the ‘wrongness’ of the times, even if for Upward that wrongness consisted of the British Communist Party’s post-war abandonment of a revolutionary position (in theory at least) in favour of the inherent social patriotism of supporting the Labour Government’s drive for increased industrial production in the late 1940s. For Upward, post-war wrongness is still manifest in the mock-Tudor beams of jerry-built suburban housing that had upset George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). Only by remembering the 1930s story of the leftist intelligentsia ‘going over’ to the side of the people, is it possible for Upward to regain his sense of agency in the face of this post-war wrongness: Once an initial sense of wrongness is acknowledged [in Upward’s trilogy], the protagonists become caught up in a series of actions which consistently fail to recapture their dimly-remembered sense of lost wholeness and their surroundings take on a lack of solidity [. . .] It is only by remembering and retelling that the protagonist is able to return home as Sebrill does in the revealing-titled [final volume] No Home But the Struggle. By superimposing the story of Sebrill’s childhood leading up to the same events that occur at the beginning of [the first volume] In the Thirties on top of the poetic life that he has finally achieved by completing his ‘poem’ (that is [. . .] the earlier novels in the trilogy), Upward literally shows his story remembering itself in the retelling of itself. Only because the story of Sebrill’s younger self will continue by ‘going over’

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The 1950s to the side of the proletariat through joining the Communist Party can his older self sit out on his veranda and find himself through writing it. Only through this narrative time loop can Upward finally find a way of reconciling the distinction between politics and poetry that does not diminish their fundamental difference. (Hubble 2013: 12)

On one level, Upward eventually finds peace with his own demons and the wrongness of the post-war decades by making a similar choice to Tolkien’s Sam, and settling for ‘one small garden’ rather than an heroic transformation of the entire age. However, this did not necessarily appear progressive to contemporary commentators. Looking back in 1979, in the face of a dawning public awareness that British society was not after all going to be transformed into a socialist state by extending the institutional arrangements developed during the war, Raymond Williams described Upward’s trilogy as ‘an even more complete regression than Orwell’s to the aesthetic self-preoccupations of the twenties’ (Williams 1979: 389). For Williams, writers such as Auden, Upward and Orwell had effectively been a left-wing supplement to the Bloomsbury Group, following the same wellestablished social pattern by which ‘a fraction of an upper class, breaking from its dominant majority, relates to a lower class as a matter of conscience’ (148). On this reading, the whole concept of ‘going over’ to the people was an example of negative identification: a generation of upper-class intellectuals rejected the system and ideology in which they were educated and identified with the cause of the working class, who were seen as the symbolic victims of the injustice that was being rebelled against (see Williams 1991: 19–20). Williams found Upward more honourable than most in this respect because of the honesty with which he wrote of his relationship to Communism. The problem with Orwell was not so much related to honour and honesty, or the lack thereof, but his posthumous centrality to the public culture of the 1950s following the huge success of Animal Farm (1943) and Nineteen Eighty-Four: In the Britain of the fifties, along every road you moved, the figure of Orwell seemed to be waiting. If you tried to develop a new kind of popular cultural analysis, there was Orwell; if you wanted to report on work or ordinary life there was Orwell; if you engaged in any kind of socialist argument, there was an enormously inflated statue of Orwell warning you to go back. (Williams 1979: 384)

In Orwell (1991), Williams argues that Orwell’s novels of the 1930s, notably Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) and Coming Up for Air (1939), ‘created the style of the drifting anti-hero English novel of the fifties’ (87) such as John Wain’s

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Hurry on Down (1953) and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954). Indeed, even the self-consciously working-class writing of the decade, such as Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) also followed a similar anti-hero model. Sillitoe’s Arthur Seaton is dissatisfied and rebellious but he does not want to be part of a socialist appropriation of the means of production as much as simply to be liberated from the constraints of work and traditional workingclass life. Ultimately, all of these fictions – also including, for example, John Braine’s Room at the Top (1957) and Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar (1959) – served to varying degrees to promote universally the kind of liberated masculinity that had only been available to bourgeois men in the nineteenth century. As Alice Ferrebe argues in Masculinity in Male-Authored Fiction, 1950–2000 (2005), Lucky Jim exemplifies, both in terms of narrative technique and the critical and media attention it attracted, ‘the post-war desire for peer-recognition and validation of a self constructed upon masculine principles’ (34). Ferrebe goes on to explain how the novel presents a double selfhood in which the ‘real I’ inside the male anti-hero is constrained from doing the ‘nice things’ it wants to do by the sham ‘exterior self compromised into civility and sacrifice’ (ibid.). In essence, the plot moves through the same stages of wrongness, thinning, recognition and return as found in The Lord of the Rings. The difference is that Jim associates all the wrongness of the period with the way in which he is being treated and therefore, at the point when he recognizes his own agency and power, he makes the opposite choice to Sam and metaphorically takes the Ring to wield for himself. He is going to be the one who possesses the signs of sexual privilege and has an important job at the cultural centre. In effect, the novel boils down to an endorsement of Jim’s acceptance of the principle that ‘doing what you wanted to do was the only training, and the only preliminary, needed for doing more of what you wanted to do’ (Amis 1983: 146). It is somewhat unfair to imply that Lucky Jim follows a similar trajectory to Keep the Aspidistra Flying or Coming Up for Air, because while both of those novels feature anti-heroes who initially interpret the wrongness they perceive around them as personal affronts, the protagonists do eventually become capable of meaningful self-reflection, and choose to go back to their respective female partners and not put their individual needs above those of society as a whole. If Lucky Jim had genuinely followed the logic of those works, then it would have ended with Jim reconciled with Margaret, and thereby opened up new ground towards depicting a genuinely equal relationship, which might in turn have helped to demonstrate the possibility of a more equal society. As it is, the novel can be retrospectively identified as displaying an unapologetically masculine

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self-centredness that would quickly move towards a reactionary politics – Amis declared his support for the Conservative Party in an article, ‘Why Lucky Jim Turned Right’, for the Sunday Telegraph of 2 July 1967 – that would go on to become one of the dominant forces in British society after 1979. A more justified criticism of Orwell’s influence on the 1950s relates to his sentimental representation in The Road to Wigan Pier of the working class in general and the working-class home in particular. In a working-class home – I am not thinking at the moment of the unemployed, but of the comparatively prosperous homes – you breathe a warm, decent, deeply human atmosphere which it is not so easy to find elsewhere [. . .] I have often been struck by the peculiar easy completeness, the perfect symmetry as it were, of a working class interior at its best. Especially on winter evenings after tea, when the fire glows in the open range and dances mirrored in the steel fender, when Father, in shirt-sleeves, sits in the rocking chair at one side of the fire reading the racing finals, and Mother sits on the other with her sewing, and the children are happy with a pennorth of mint humbugs, and the dog lolls roasting himself on the rag mat – it is a good place to be in, provided that you can be not only in it but sufficiently of it to be taken for granted. (Orwell 1998: 107–8)

As Williams points out, Orwell’s ‘documentary’ experiences were shaped by careful selection and organization to create a particular effect. When he met working-class people who were socialists or trade unionists, he perceived them as inhabiting a middle-class atmosphere alien to his fireside conception of genuine working-class domesticity; ‘If a working man is socialist he is already, presumably, middle-class, the character of the working class being already known’ (Williams 1991: 52). In defence of Orwell, it should be noted that there is clearly an element of parody in his account of mint humbugs and lolling dogs, which is in keeping with his essential technique of engaging his readers by offering his authorial persona up as a target of gentle satire. However, the problem with the particular working-class interior presented in The Road to Wigan Pier was that it was hopelessly out of date; as he admits himself it was a composite memory of those he ‘sometimes saw in [his] childhood before the [First World War]’ (Orwell 1998: 52). Idealized, and with clearly delineated gender roles, it suggests a bygone traditional world that had little connection with the lives of modern workers in the 1930s, let alone the 1950s. As Ben Clarke notes, Orwell was attracted to mining communities because they were ‘stable, cohesive structures, founded upon “traditional” values, which provided their members with stable identities’ (Clarke 2007: 53). However, this had changed radically

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since the defeat of the General Strike in 1926. Interwar novels set in mining communities such as D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), Ellen Wilkinson’s Crash (1929) and Walter Brierley’s Means-Test Man (1935) indicate the sharp changes in gender relationships that were occurring at the time. As I have argued elsewhere: Orwell’s vision of the working-class interior, which was to become much better known in the postwar period than the vast majority of proletarian literature, conceals the gendered and politicised social changes that marked working-class communities in the 1930s. Although it notionally places the working-class at the centre of its conception of a good society, Wigan Pier upholds class differences. Even while it manifests an admiration for the authenticity of male manual workers, it marginalises the experience of working-class women. (Hubble 2017: 181)

The popularity of this idealization of the working-class interior was almost certainly due to the way in which it occluded the rather more complex changes, particularly in the sphere of gender relations, taking place in society. For example, as Humphrey Carpenter notes in The Angry Young Men (2002), Charles Lumley in Hurry on Down finds the domestic life of his working-class girlfriend’s family to be reassuringly comforting: This was Rosa’s father’s Sunday afternoon, and he had been spending it as he always did, in his armchair by the fire with the News of the World on his knees, fast asleep . . . Stuffed with ham, cake, bread and butter, and pints of dark tea, they moved from the table . . . Charles felt that his search was over . . . his demands on life had grown smaller and smaller, until that stuffy, cosy room contained everything that he needed to fulfil them. (qtd. Carpenter 2002: 65; Wain 2003: 183–7)

The gender politics of this become clear from Wain’s next sentence – not quoted by Carpenter – which clarifies that he does in fact ‘need’, or rather want, more than just the room: ‘That, and a bed upstairs with Rosa in it’ (187). What attracts Lumley – and one assumes his author, much as Orwell before him – to this vision of the working-class interior is the way that it serves to legitimize traditional patriarchal gender relations that it would otherwise be difficult to espouse while still seeking to be included within a liberal-leftish literary intelligentsia. Tellingly, Lumley dislikes Rosa’s brother, Stan, because he is trying to ‘better himself ’ by moving beyond manual work. Earlier in the novel, Lumley differentiates his own desire to drop out from post-war middle-class society from that of ‘all the expensive young men of the thirties [. . .] to enter, and be at one with, a vaguely conceived People, whose minds and lives they could not even begin to imagine, and who would in any case, had they ever arrived, have made their lives hell’

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(37–8). When these elements of the novel are considered together, Hurry on Down seems a much more clear-cut example than The Lord of the Rings of both Shippey’s idea that certain fiction of the period expresses a disillusionment with the idea of political good intentions enacted in the name of ‘the People’, and the decade’s general antipathy towards commitment.

John Sommerfield and the politics of social representation Not all 1950s evocations of working-class domesticity were deployed to contradict the dominant left-wing literary sensibility of the 1930s, or to occlude the actual gendered and politicized social changes which were occurring within the working class. John Sommerfield is a prime example of one of those ‘young men of the thirties’ who continued to identify with and write about ‘the People’; although not necessarily in the same way as before. Best known for his experimental proletarian novel, May Day (1936), and memoir of fighting with the international brigades, Volunteer in Spain (1937), Sommerfield was a communist who also worked as Director of Field Operations for MassObservation in Bolton in the late 1930s before serving in the RAF during the Second World War. May Day focuses on the network of social and political relations spreading out from the workers of one London factory and ends with a forecast of the intensification of the class struggle: ‘Everyone has agreed on the need for a big change’ (Sommerfield 1936: 242). Virtually the same line occurs in one of Sommerfield’s wartime stories published in Penguin New Writing, ‘The Worm’s-Eye View’ (1943). It is voiced by the stereotypically plucky working-class airman, Tommy Banks, in refutation of the middle-class narrator’s gloomy prognostication that conditions after the war will be much worse than before: ‘there’ll have to a big change in the way things are run [. . . because] everybody feels there’s got to be a big change’ (32). The narrator’s reluctance to accept this optimistic view is indicative of a cynicism born from the thwarted revolutionary dreams of the 1930s such as those expressed in May Day, which Sommerfield – echoing Allsop’s judgement in The Angry Decade – later came to categorize as ‘early 30s communist romanticism’ (Sommerfield 1984: xviii–xix). However, as the night goes on, he comes round to the idea that Tommy’s belief in the need for change is not just an individual political aspiration but representative of a more widespread attitude: Yet for each of us a moment arrives, to some only once in a lifetime, to others often, when we are possessed with an intimation to our own power. And when

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this comes to whole classes of people at the same time then it is that men make history instead of history making them. This evening (long ago it seemed) Tommy had said: ‘Everybody feels there’s got to be a big change’ and hearing it I had told myself it was a voice of hope, the words had echoed countless other voices speaking all over the world now, at this moment, as I lay on the warm sand fraternising with the moon, the voice of a hope that was not built upon dreams of the past. The past was dead, the future would be as we made it. (Sommerfield 1943: 34)

Going into the post-war period, therefore, Sommerfield had a renewed belief in ‘the People’ that was orientated to the possibilities of that future opening up before them, rather than being rooted in the class struggles of the 1930s. If the future was to be a socialist and collective one in which the working class were not marginalized, then their agency and experience could be straightforwardly represented without the need for the formal and experimental techniques deployed in May Day. Accordingly, Sommerfield’s post-war writing would be much more social realist in register than the novel for which he is best known. In fact, Sommerfield had already started writing in a more realist style before the war in his novella Trouble in Porter Street (1938), a deliberate work of communist propaganda describing how the working-class residents of a London street set up a rent strike and eventually succeed in getting their rents reduced. The 64-page novella, selling for tuppence, sold ‘over 80,000 copies’ (Croft 1998: 147). Somewhat ironically, given the supposed social change of the post-war period, a second edition of Trouble in Porter Street was published by Lawrence & Wishart in 1954, as housing shortages and rising rents continued to impact on the quality of working-class lives. Therefore, Sommerfield can be seen as providing a counter example to Orwell of how a 1930s representation of domestic working-class life could continue to reverberate to progressive political effect in the 1950s. Rather than the idealization of The Road to Wigan Pier and derivative representations such as that found in Hurry on Down, Trouble in Porter Street reflects social change within the working class. Porter Street is divided between the significantly better-paid, more prosperous and respectable railway workers and the ‘rough’ market men, but the central couple, railwayman Bill Dixon and Rosie from a market family, have married across this divide. The implication is that Rosie got her way over the wishes of her family, and that this is characteristic of her desire not to expend her days in drudgery, but to access some of the better things in life, such as annual holidays, which provides the motivation for the rent strike and the agency that drives the plot. Rather than the Communist Party

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playing a decisive role in the rent strike, it is the people of the street, themselves, and especially the women, who lead by helping keep the bailiffs away from evicting one of their neighbours. In this respect, like May Day in which it is a deposition of the women workers who take the initiative in calling on the Union committee of the factory to support a strike over working conditions, Trouble in Porter Street provides a gender-based critique of capitalist society as much as a class-based one. The 1954 edition of the novella is different from the original in two significant ways. First, the representation of working-class speech is altered so that rather than Rosie saying ‘I would so like an ’oliday’ (Sommerfield 1938: 26) in the prewar edition, she now says ‘I would so like a holiday’ (Sommerfield 1954: 25). While this might be a decision by the publisher, it nonetheless represents a form of respect for the working class that reflects their change in status under the new dispensation of the 1945 settlement. Second, the addition of a new chapter at the end of the novella allows Sommerfield to provide an update on what has happened to Porter Street sixteen years later. While the street itself is shabbier but otherwise unchanged, the people had ‘lived through a lot’: Most of them had managed to survive the war and face up to the threat of still more horrible wars; they had helped to vote in a Labour Government and later Mr. Churchill had come back to set them free with plenty of steak and butter in the shops for everybody. There was the National Health now, holidays with pay, several television sets in the street, and young Ernie Moult and his pals swaggering about in Edwardian suits. A lot of changes. But everyone still lived from one day to the next and the housewives had to pinch and scrape more than ever. (1954: 56–7)

On the one hand, housewives like Rosie – now the mother of two children – have gained access to some of the better things in life, such as, in her case, a new flat with a modern kitchen in a tower block just around the corner from Porter Street. However, the rent is so high that they can only pay it by Bill working overtime. Sommerfield takes care to identify high rents as a particular government policy designed to manage the post-war housing shortage. The suggested solution is that Rosie and Bill join in with a new borough-wide tenants’ defence movement. Therefore, while the anticipated better world after the war has not come into existence – Bill is already reduced to the position of voting Labour ‘without conviction’ as a consequence of his disillusionment with their failure to have created a lasting ‘fairer deal all round’ during their six years in power – there is nonetheless a real sense of change having taken place.

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Sommerfield does not depict a static working class, tied forever to a sentimental vision of pre-1914 England, but demonstrates rather how certain of their concerns stayed the same even as social and material change accelerated. Therefore, although his novel North West Five (1960) also responds to the ongoing housing shortage, its protagonists are a young working-class couple, Dan and Liz, seeking to get away from their parents and live together in a context where they are caught between the ideology of affluence – ‘Mr Macmillan says we’ve never had things so good’ (159) – and the discourse of social problems. Moreover, while Dan is a trained carpenter, Liz, a librarian, is the product of the 1944 Education Act and the post-war world of grammar schools and scholarships. The prospect of a transformed world before them – the text suggests that Dan would have been avidly enthusiastic about Harold Wilson’s promise of the ‘white heat of technology’ a few years’ later – suggests a future in which ‘Dan’s skilled labour [will be] equivalent to Liz’s qualifications within the combined contexts of their shared working-class background and the collective values of post-war British society’ (Hubble 2016: 204). While such prospects might appear no more than illusions when viewed in retrospect from today’s Brexit Britain, it is important to remember that that future did happen to varying extents for many across the 1960s and 1970s. Sommerfield’s ‘Author’s Note’ for the 1984 reprint of May Day might have been expected to bemoan the effects of the Thatcher Government but instead he chose to emphasize the positive aspects of a longer social change across the twentieth century: ‘The material circumstances and social climate of everyday life in this country now would have seemed unbelievable to the people depicted in May Day’ (Sommerfield 1984: xix). More particularly, Sommerfield’s work is indicative of the way that the changing lives of working-class women were as much a feature of the cultural representation of the post-war British Welfare State, as the valorization of male manual workers and anti-heroes in works like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Lucky Jim. In this way, ‘a space for political agency and a gender-based critique of capitalist class society was held open’ (Hubble 2017: 191). Therefore, in order to understand the cultural context of something as profoundly socially significant in modern British history as the sequence of events linking the 1968 strike at Ford’s Dagenham plant, when 187 women sewing machinists walked out demanding equal pay with men, to the 1970 Equal Pay Act, it is necessary to focus on the continuity of left-wing 1930s literary production through the subsequent decades – as exemplified by the body of work of a writer like Sommerfield – rather than the self-consciously selfish break of the so-called ‘angry young men’, such as Wain and Amis, with the literary values of the 1930s.

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However, this is not to say that the social-realist approach of Sommerfield was entirely adequate to representing the complexities of the age. In his most ambitious novel of the decade, The Inheritance (1956), he tried to represent the consequences following on from the squandering of the opportunity that had been available in 1945 for transforming society by allegorizing that potential legacy as an actual family inheritance involving a diverse group of possible beneficiaries, who taken together form a cross-section of British society. The result is an uneven hybrid of Dickensian social novel and middlebrow family saga, which still bears the trace of the cinematic techniques he had employed twenty years before in May Day in terms of the way that the narrative cuts between different scenes and occasionally adopts a panoramic perspective. In some places, the novel even reads like a Mass-Observation publication: ‘For the 126,000 inhabitants of Thoresby there are 238 pubs, 119 churches and chapels, 22 cinemas, a football ground, a greyhound track, several municipal statues, and a variety of other public amenities’ (Sommerfield 1956: 107). Indeed, as MassObservation co-founder Tom Harrisson reveals in Britain Revisited (1961), Sommerfield also recycled verbatim excerpts of pub conversations he had overheard while mass-observing in Bolton and Blackpool in The Inheritance and challenged Harrisson to ‘spot them’ (194). However, despite the recourse to such documentary techniques and materials, The Inheritance struggles to provide more than a superficial view of British society consistently. The problem is not so much a deficiency on Sommerfield’s behalf as the inadequacy of the realist techniques he deploys to gain purchase beyond a relatively restricted working-class sphere of domestic interiors and pubs. In practice, he manages to make a virtue of the superficiality revealed throughout the text by allowing it to stand for the wrongness of the times: Something is wrong, something outside his own life and experience and yet of which his life is a part. People are beginning to talk of another war already, there’s an atom bomb, there’s something corrupt and dangerous about what is getting into peoples’ lives; no one seems to be able to say just what it is, but it’s there all the time, like the smell of staleness when he comes indoors on a fine morning. (Sommerfield 1956: 84)

This is the viewpoint of Tom Lidstone, a semi-skilled labourer on the London Underground, who is introduced to us early in the novel as ‘almost too healthy, clean, and amiable to be true, like some old-fashioned, idealized portrait of a British Working Man’ (Sommerfield 1956: 26). Along with his wife, Betty, Tom represents the moral core of the cast of The Inheritance. In a sequence describing

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what all the possible benefactors of old Sarah Lidstone’s fortune hope to be able to do if they inherit, Tom and Betty are distinguished by the modest nature of their aspirations for a little house of their own; with Betty also hoping for a chance of ‘bettering themselves’ and Tom – in the manner of Sam Gamgee – hoping for a ‘decent garden’ with a lean-to greenhouse (29–31). However, it gradually becomes apparent that their actual satisfaction in life, which for Tom lies in the fact that he works collectively as one of a group, is being undermined by a false promise: ‘the prospect of inheritance had transformed all their pleasures into a future over which they had no control’ (64). Tom comes to feel that any hope of a fresh start or being able to change things at all socially is just a false hope that would be better avoided. However, in keeping with Sommerfield’s awareness of gender politics, it is Betty that manages to convince him that change is possible; not from the family inheritance, which does indeed turn out to be a false hope, but by her realization that things will ‘never go back to 1939’ (196). The logic is that change has to be made for the good by the actions of people. Betty gets a job as a bus conductor, joins the union and, to Tom’s discomfort, even starts talking politics in the pub. Eventually, she even talks him into letting her adopt the baby of an unmarried teenage mother, despite his initial misgivings that such a child must inevitably turn out for the bad, and the novel ends with Tom sitting in the garden of their ground-floor flat in Fulham, while feeding the baby: ‘The baby is an inheritance from the past, too, he was thinking, the result of an unhappy, corrupted past, and the human material of a future that would be good or bad according to how people made it for themselves’ (293). Thus, the wrongness of the times is redeemed and the overall tendency of the novel supports that of Sommerfield’s other work of the decade as discussed above. However, unlike those other texts, The Inheritance is much more revealing of the limitations of Sommerfield’s politics, dependent as they are on the fragile maintenance of a working-class culture at a level sufficiently above mere subsistence in order to allow it to grow and develop out of itself principally through the emergent agency of women, which it enabled. The other strands in the novel do not reveal anything so positive but rather the emergence of an opposed line of thinking that would eventually assume dominance in the 1980s: ‘Society doesn’t really exist’ (118). In his chapter, ‘Bad Teeth: British Social Realism in Fiction’ (2011), Rod Mengham suggests that an almost Sartrean awareness of the nothingness underlying social reality haunts much fiction of the 1950s: In [John] Braine’s Room at the Top (1957), Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), David Storey’s This Sporting Life (1960), Stan Barstow’s

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The consequence of this awareness that something is always lacking frequently manifests itself in male protagonists as what Mengham describes as the attempt to satisfy a demand that will always outstrip desire through ‘the prodigious acquisition and gargantuan consumption of sex and money’ (99). In this respect, as discussed above, protagonists such as Sillitoe’s Arthur Seaton and Storey’s Arthur Machin are working-class versions of the anti-heroes of Wain and Amis. The difference, however, is that working-class characters are not only closer, and therefore more aware, of the material constraints of social reality, but they are also more aware of the inauthenticity of that social reality, which creates a greater tension to the fictions which depict them. As Mengham argues, such texts struggle to imagine a creative alternative to the constraints of the present. While the allure of the apparent certainties of the pre-1914 past is generally resisted in the actual working-class novels of the decade, the consequence is a gritty, downbeat sense of lassitude, which was to become something of a marker of British fictions until at least the end of the 1980s. In this respect, the work of Sommerfield represents an exception to the norm. While his characters restrict their ambitions to the modest goals of a decent home and a nice little garden, this is not the expression of an internalized class-based self-denying humility, but rather of a genuine belief in the possibilities of the future which will transform the sense of wrongness generated by the palpable inauthenticity of the British social reality of the time. For example, Dan’s eternal optimism in North West Five is reflected by his love of science fiction (the reason why he is a librarygoer and meets Liz), and therefore a faith that the unreality of the present will change: ‘The perspectives of Welbeck Road, unearthly under sodium vapour lights, stretching ahead of them long and empty, led towards unknown worlds a thousand light years away’ (Sommerfield 1960: 34). Sommerfield’s gesture towards science fiction as a corrective to the problems of social representation that became manifest in the 1950s was not isolated. In 1958, for example, Angus Wilson noted that social realism was failing to achieve more than a superficial depiction of life at the time: ‘Without in any way departing from my adherence to the post-war social novel, I fear that the central characters are inferior in reality and depth to Virginia Woolf ’s’ (1983a: 133). He went on in

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the 1960s to call for a renegotiation of the aesthetic terms of the post-war settlement by ‘the liberation of fancy, the liberation of imagination, the liberation from the real world around us’ (1983b: 243) through science fiction such as his own The Old Men in the Zoo (1961) and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962). Subsequently, Wilson was to become a supporter of Michael Moorcock and the New Wave, which is discussed briefly further below. Another supporter of science fiction at the time was Amis, whose New Maps of Hell (1961), originally a lecture series delivered at Princeton University in 1959, is one of the first critical studies of the genre. Amis’s goal was to challenge the state of affairs by which ‘in otherwise intelligent circles, the term “science fiction” is still often used as an adverse value-judgment’ (132) and to make the point that ‘a new volume by [Frederick] Pohl or [Robert] Scheckley or Arthur [C.] Clarke ought, for instance, to be reviewed as general fiction’ (129). In retrospect, as the next section of this chapter demonstrates, the virtues of science fiction which Wilson and Amis identified as the 1950s turned into the 1960s were already a significant feature of British fiction from the beginning of the decade.

Cosy catastrophes and generational changes4 John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951), in which the hero and his socialite girlfriend escape the decimation of Middle England by giant walking carnivorous plants, is the archetypal form of what Brian Aldiss dubbed the ‘cosy catastrophe’, in which ‘the hero should have a pretty good time (a girl, free suites at the Savoy, automobiles for the taking) while everyone else is dying off ’ (Aldiss and Wingrove 2001: 280). The same basic formula was to feature frequently in science fiction written over the following years, including works such as John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1956) and J.G. Ballard’s The Wind from Nowhere (1962). L.J. Hurst has pointed out that the title of chapter one of The Day of the Triffids, ‘The End Begins’, is an ironic reference to Churchill’s speech after victory at Alamein: ‘This is not the end. It is not the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning’ (qtd. Hubble 2005: 90). That phase of the war represented the end of interwar individualism, and the beginning of the postwar order. Wyndham’s fantasy of reversing that wartime beginning can be seen as creating the model for a genre which superficially appealed to English middleclass desires to overturn the post-war order but, in fact, implied a much more radical evisceration of the English class system itself. In this respect, cosy

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catastrophes deployed ostensibly escapist adventure narratives to imagine the construction of alternative societies. Hurst has compared the temporal dislocation within the opening sentence of The Day of the Triffids with other opening sentences used to signify a novel’s belonging to the genre of alternate history. The Day of the Triffids opens: ‘When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere’ (Wyndham 2000: 1). Similarly, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four begins: ‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen’ (Orwell 1954: 5). As Hurst observes, both sentences establish how ‘the normal constructs of time broke down in postwar England’ (qtd. Hubble 2005: 91) and thereby both the exceptionalism and the wrongness of the social conditions which the books challenge in different ways are highlighted right from the start. Despite the facts that the triffids are genetically developed in the Soviet Union, the cereal-killing virus which causes mass-starvation in Christopher’s The Death of Grass originates in China, and so, by implication, do the winds in The Wind from Nowhere, these cosy catastrophes can no more simply be reduced to Cold War anxieties than Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four can. The destruction of the post-war order is always overdetermined: in Wyndham there are both triffids and satellite weapons and a plague as well; in Christopher the food shortage is accompanied by an extremist government’s intention to bomb its own people. It seems likely that the Cold War simply provided a suitably heightened context that allowed these overdetermined alternative histories to operate on more than one main axis: attacking both a specific post-war British complacency and a more general notion of societal alienation. Angus Calder’s The Myth of the Blitz (1991) shows how the complacent nature of post-war British identity developed from the nation’s sense of standing alone during the war and the consequent feeling of internal solidarity catalysed by this lone stance, exemplified by the Dunkirk Spirit and the solidarity under fire during the Blitz. As a result, Britain thought of itself as unique – as outside the currents of World and European history. The exceptionalism rooted in the ‘Myth of the Blitz’ is ruthlessly targeted in the cosy catastrophes of the 1950s and early 1960s. Ballard’s attack on the military in The Wind from Nowhere is typically dismissive: ‘They had the Dunkirk mentality, had already been defeated and were getting ready to make a triumph out of it, counting up the endless casualty lists, the catalogues of disaster and destruction, as if these were a measure of their courage and competence’ (57). Wyndham, Christopher and Ballard all deploy the metaphor of blindness to interrogate the deficiencies and wrongness of post-war Britain. At the beginning

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of The Day of the Triffids, Bill Mason gingerly removes the bandages that have covered his eyes for a week to find that virtually everyone else in the world has been permanently blinded. In contrast to this allegorical representation of a pervasive lack of vision and foresight, as Barry Langford suggests, Wyndham’s hero’s recovering of his sight represents an opening of eyes by a few (see Langford 2000: x). Only by overcoming the temporary experience of blindness, can Wyndham and Ballard’s characters learn to see properly and therefore reject their own complicity with a British form of the death wish. These narratives thereby follow the example of H.G. Wells’ ‘The Country of the Blind’ (1904) in rejecting the more traditional trope of blindness representing spiritual insight. In Wells’ story, the sighted hero, far from becoming King of the country he discovers, as the famous proverb suggests, ends up dying an outcast rather than submit to having his eyes surgically removed by the natives, who are outraged by his difference to them. In contrast to Colin Wilson, who gave the first chapter of his popular study The Outsider (1956) the same title as Wells’ story and even defined ‘outsiders’ as those one-eyed men among the blind who are able to see and therefore, by implication, should be ruling (see C. Wilson 1990: 20), the writers of the cosy catastrophes rejected such ambitions for being as limited as the ‘blind’ societies they were seeking to reform. When, in The Death of Grass, John Custance makes the decision to storm ‘Blind Gill’, the valley in which his brother’s farm and the prospect of salvation lies, his wife reacts bitterly to what she perceives to be his driving ambition: ‘ “When you’re King of Blind Gill,” she said, “how long will it be, I wonder, before they make a crown for you?” ’ (Christopher 1958: 185). The implication is that the ambition to become the King of the Blind reflects more on the limited vision of the holder than on any prospect of transforming society. Similarly, Wyndham represents attempts to build kingdoms among the blind, such as Michael Beadley’s initial plan to use blind women for an accelerated breeding programme or Torrence’s dream of a re-born feudal order based on blind serfs, as reactionary. From the beginning, The Day of the Triffids rejects any form of dependency on past or existing orders. For example, Bill’s initial reluctance to smash shop windows for food is due to his recognition that ‘. . . the moment I stove-in one of those sheets of plate-glass . . . I should become a looter, a sacker, a low scavenger upon the dead body of the system that had nourished me’ (41). The problem with parasitism is its generation of political and social inertia as – in a phenomenon well known to any thinking inhabitant of post-war Britain – the sense of a great past rapidly grows into a millstone dragging everyone down by the neck: ‘Whole races have had that sort of inferiority complex which has sunk into lassitude on

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the tradition of a glorious past’ (209). The character in the novel who acts as the herald of a new society is the enigmatic figure Coker, whose accent and dialect modulate to suit his audience, leaving him equally at home quoting Marvell or cheerily enquiring, ‘Wotcher, mates! ’Ow’s it going?’ (145). Coker is, as he freely acknowledges, a hybrid; a mixture of lower-class origins and progressive education, who demolishes Beadley’s argument that sexual essentialism is necessary for survival through his impassioned polemic concerning the necessity of everyone being able to do everything: The point is we’ll all have to learn not simply what we like, but as much as we can about running a community and supporting it. The men can’t just fill in a voting paper and hand the job to someone else. And it will no longer be considered that a woman has fulfilled all her social obligations when she has prevailed upon some man to support her and provide her with a niche where she can irresponsibly produce babies for someone else to educate. (150)

In this assault on the ‘mental laziness and parasitism’ (149) of traditional gender roles, a new vocabulary of moral approbation is coined, which, unlike the superficially modern attitudes of the Beadley group, contains the force required to build a liberated society for the future. Therefore, although the novel ends with the abandonment of England to the triffids, as the protagonists retreat to the more manageable environs of the Isle of Wight, their repudiation of traditional class and gender relations holds open the promise of ‘the day when we, or our children, or their children’ (233) will finally establish a new society. The popularity of fiction like The Day of the Triffids highlights the extent to which, however much the combined effects of two world wars and the nuclear age supported a nostalgic yearning for the lost certainties of pre-1914 England, there was widespread awareness of the fact that radical social change was coming. Two classic British science-fiction novels of the decade, Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (1954) and Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), envision the next generation as so different as to be alien. Of course, there was an element of horror in such stories and the way they reflected the burgeoning youth subcultures of the period. Even Tolkien began a sequel to The Lord of the Rings, The New Shadow, set in the reign of Aragorn’s son, in which a growing social malaise in Gondor is represented by youths forming gangs and calling themselves ‘orcs’ (see Hammond and Scull 2008: 678).5 But while the alien children in The Midwich Cuckoos are eventually ‘liquidated’ in the interests of preserving the human race, the implicit signification of the novel is still, in the words of Leslie Fiedler quoted by Colin Greenland, that ‘the post-human future is now’ (qtd.

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Greenland 2012: 2). Fiedler was actually talking about Childhood’s End, in which the children’s superhuman capacities are due to an evolutionary jump, however both novels and many others of the period, such as the American science fiction of writers including Philip K. Dick, Frederick Pohl and William Burroughs among others, were contributing to what he termed the ‘myth’ of science fiction: the myth of the end of man, [. . .] or [. . .] transformation (under the impact of advanced technology and the transfer of traditional human functions to machines) of homo sapiens into something else: the emergence – to use the language of Science Fiction itself – of ‘mutants’ among us. (qtd. Greenland 2012: 2)

As Greenland points out, equating the cultural disconnection of the youth generation of the mid-1960s (when Fiedler was writing) to an evolutionary mutation is not valid in biological terms but nevertheless it was an understanding shared with others at the time. Fiedler echoes Angus Wilson in his evocation of a serious science fiction being written by writers as various as Anthony Burgess, William Golding and Kurt Vonnegut (see Greenland 2012: 3). Looking back on the turn of the 1950s into the 1960s, therefore, it is possible to see how an alignment between generational change, the hostility of sciencefiction writers such as Wyndham to British exceptionalism and the idolization of the imperial past, and the emergence of serious literary-critical treatment of science fiction, was creating a new cultural constellation that would eventually find its public expression in Britain around the magazine New Worlds, edited by Michael Moorcock. As Greenland notes in his history of this ‘New Wave’ in science fiction, Moorcock and the writers he gathered around him, including Ballard and Brian Aldiss, ‘were the first generation in science fiction to consider and discuss their work principally as art’ (Greenland 2012: 10). The New Wave would become the key literary movement, or at least one of the key literary movements, in Britain in the 1960s (see the 1960s volume in this series); but the foundation for that development was very much laid down in the 1950s.

‘Forget the story’6 Fast though science fiction was growing in significance, fantasy was even better established in the 1950s. Indeed the publication of not just The Lord of the Rings and the Narnia sequence, but also the final two volumes of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy (1946–59) make the decade one of huge significance for the genre in Britain. Moreover, there were indications at the time that science fiction

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and fantasy could both be brought into conjunction with trends in contemporary literary fiction. For example, the 1956 anthology, Sometime, Never: Three Tales of the Imagination, collected long stories by Wyndham and Peake together with one by Golding; a development that was welcomed by Amis in New Maps of Hell. Ironically, however, it is Golding’s contribution, a comic novella set in imperial Rome, which now appears badly dated, whereas Wyndham’s ‘Consider Her Ways’ and Peake’s ‘Boy in Darkness’ are both key texts in their respective authors’ oeuvres. Viewed from a different perspective, though, ‘Consider Her Ways’ is the odd story out because of the way it focuses on a future women-only utopia and has mainly female characters. Although the protagonist, Jane Waterleigh, who is psychically projected into this new society as a result of a drug trial, is desperately unhappy with what she sees as the sterility of life without men, the narrative is uncompromising in its criticism of not just traditional gender roles and the consumerism of the 1950s, but also of the ‘useless and dangerous encumbrance’ of men (Wyndham 1957: 112). An elderly historian admonishes Jane: You keep repeating to me the propaganda of your age. The love you talk about, my dear, existed in your little sheltered part of the world by polite and profitable convention. You were scarcely ever allowed to see its other face, unglamourized by Romance. You were never openly bought or sold, like livestock; you never had to sell yourself to the first comer in order to live; you did not happen to be one of the women who through the centuries screamed in agony and suffered and died under invaders in a sacked city. (113)

Writing about the state of science fiction at the time, Amis noted that ‘the female-emancipationism’ of Wyndham ‘is too uncommon to be significant’ (Amis 1963: 99). Wyndham’s feminist perspective was not just uncommon in relation to science fiction but also to the fantasy and related literary fiction of the period. After all, both The Lord of the Rings and The Lord of the Flies barely even register female experience. One reason for this, perhaps, is due to their employment of the narrative model described by Clute – and discussed above – of wrongness, thinning, recognition and return, which it might be argued traces out the Oedipal trajectory of the patriarchal order by which the son grows up, recognizes himself for a man rather than a boy, and returns, symbolically speaking, to take on his father’s role; a trajectory, of course, which does not always run any more smoothly than that of Oedipus himself. ‘Consider Her Ways’ satirizes this trajectory by having a female protagonist following it but only fully recognising her role in the story from the historian’s sharp criticism of the gender oppression of her society, which she then chooses to return to. As the

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historian notes, everything Jane says serves only to demonstrate the extent to which she has been totally conditioned by the social norms of her society. In this respect, she is literally trapped within the story. A different approach to breaking the Oedipal trajectory was taken by Naomi Mitchison. Mitchison’s Travel Light (1952) is the story of Halla, a princess who is abandoned at birth after the new Queen tells the King that he must get rid of the old Queen’s baby. Before she can be left on the hillsides to die, her Finnish nurse turns into a bear and carries her off to live with dragons. Consequently Halla grows up on Dragon Mountain, being taught fire, geology and economics, and getting to dress up in as much jewellery as she likes. The only problem, of course, is men and their propensity in particular to send heroes – such as George, Perseus and Siegfried – to interfere with the dragon-princess relationships. But mostly ‘the dragon made good and all ended for the best’: Sometimes Halla played at Princesses and Dragons, pretending to be tied to a tree and then waiting for one of the young dragons to rush at her with his mouth open, drenching her in delightful tickly flames [she has been fire-proofed!]. And there would be no horrible hero to interfere. Sometimes Halla found herself wishing she was a real princess, so that it could all genuinely happen. (21)

Here, the fictional doubling in the story – a Princess wishing she was a Princess – mirrors the identification process of the reader, or the child having the story read to them, because they imagine themselves to be the Princess but they are also the Princess of their own little ‘royal’ family. One of Mitchison’s biographers, Jenni Calder (1997) notes that the book is ‘obliquely for and about her daughters’ (217) but one can read a further doubling in which the book is also about Mitchison herself. These layered-in levels of awareness in the story function to tell or in some way remind the reader/listener and, indeed, the writer of the story something they already know but have forgotten or, at least, are not consciously aware of. And this is that their subjectivity is actually different to the one that they are officially being interpellated within. After the dragon she lives with is killed by a hero, Halla follows the advice of Odin to ‘travel light’. Her journeys take her, via Kiev, all the way to Micklegard, or Constantinople, where various adventures befall her involving talking animals and corrupt priests. While there she falls in with a man called Tarkan Der from Marob, a fictional country bordering the Black Sea which features in Mitchison’s earlier novel, The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931), and together they travel north again, past Kiev, and then on with other men towards a city called Holmgard. As they go, Tarkan Der becomes more interested in talking to the

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men than Halla, who gets scolded and lags behind talking to mythological creatures: ‘When she told Tarkan Der about the basilisk, he was worried, almost angry with her. It was as though he did not want her to be the kind of woman who talked to basilisks’ (127). In fact, he wants her to be the kind of woman who is married to him and lives in a small house waiting for him to come home but Halla thinks ‘No one can travel light with a house on their back, not even a snail’ (129). The story does not end with Halla and Tarkan Der marrying and living happily ever after but rather with a twist that makes clear it is intended as an alternative version of the Oedipus story. As Halla and Tarkan Der sail up a river, they see a house being attacked by raiders and a young woman being dragged off by a bearded man in armour. Tarkan Der kills the man and Halla rescues the woman’s father who has been tied up inside the burning house. The young woman is Alfeida and her husband is Modolf, who then tells his family story: It is said that a certain king had a wife who died, and he married again. And there was a child of the first wife, a baby girl, and the second wife said it must be cast out into the forest and die. And so it was done. And my forefathers and I, God help us, through no fault of our own, are children of that king and that wicked queen. But there has been a continuous punishment and the sins of the fathers visited on the children. (139)

So the story comes back on itself after many generations: the curse is lifted, Tarkan Der marries Alfeida and Halla literally rides off into the sunset because she becomes a Valkyrie. The character who comes closest to completing the four stages of Clute’s trajectory and completing the Oedipal return home is Tarkan Der. In contrast, Halla does not complete the cycle: she chooses to continue travelling lightly. This is not to say that she does not recognize the story but, rather, that she recognizes it too well from the moment that Tarkan Der starts trying to get her to keep house for him. But what she also recognizes, or remembers, is that she has an identity outside the story – one that is unconstrained by the patriarchal symbolic order. In this respect, Mitchison’s questioning of ‘story’ is more ontological than Tolkien’s; she neither asks what type of story it is or worries about who is the hero: “It was a strange thing,” Modolf said, “that the curse held for so long, and all for the death of one small child. Worse things have been done than that. Yes. Much worse. Yet perhaps the death of the very innocent always carries a curse.” “Perhaps she did not die,” said Halla, “perhaps her nurse turned into a bear and carried her away into the forest. Perhaps she was brought up by bears and dragons. Perhaps it was better for her in the end than being a king’s child.”

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“That was never in the story,” said Modolf. “Forget the story,” said Halla. (140)

In short, Mitchison allows her protagonist to question the validity of ‘story’ itself and to abandon the symbolic order that typifies narrative structure so that she can live purely in the realm of the imaginary outside of any such order as might be expected of ‘the kind of woman who talked to basilisks’. In this context, that Travel Light shares the fictional setting of Marob with The Corn King and the Spring Queen is perhaps significant. As Janet Montefiore notes, the protagonist of that novel, Erif Der’s eventual ‘metamorphosis into a divine snake has [parallels with] Hélène Cixous’s “The Laugh of the Medusa” ’ (167). Montefiore’s implication is that Mitchison was writing a version of écriture feminine; a form of bodily writing allowing women to express their identity outside the patriarchal gender binary. Erif Der was just one of a number of fictional personas that Mitchison experimented with during the 1930s, but by the 1950s she was struggling against being reduced, at least in terms of her public persona, to the role of a politician’s wife. Travel Light was the way she wrote herself back into the landscape of the imaginary and thus bridged the gap between her novels of the 1930s and her subsequent science fiction. In particular, Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962) concerns an inter-species communications expert who becomes so committed to maintaining a polymorphous openness to difference and the future that she is prepared to run the risk of such profound change to herself that she becomes ‘someone else’ (Mitchison 1976: 159). As Jill Benton (1992) argues, what links The Corn King and the Spring Queen, Travel Light and Memoirs of a Spacewoman is a concept of ‘the female hero’ who transcends human binary structuring and is ‘gifted with empathy’, capable of communicating ‘with all forms of life in the universe’ (145). Mitchison was not alone in moving in the direction of science fiction and fantasy. Her one-time protégé, Doris Lessing, also increasingly began to use fantastical devices in her novels of the 1960s, such as The Golden Notebook (1962) and The Four-Gated City (1969), before moving on to more uncompromising science-fictional works, such as Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) and the Canopus in Argos sequence (1979–83). By using such devices she was able to penetrate much further into the changing nature of post-war Britain and especially of the experience of women living within it. Lessing’s description of her work as an exploration of inner space chimes with how Ballard also conceived of his work from his early inverted cosy catastrophes – in which rather than trying to escape, the protagonists head to the centre of the disaster zone – and on through the New

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Wave and after. Novels such as Memoirs of a Survivor and Ballard’s Crash (1973) get much closer to the sense and causes of the social and psychological breakdown of the mid-1970s than the social-realist novels of that time (see the 1970s volume of this series). By the time that Lessing’s and Ballard’s careers came to an end in the twenty-first century, the literary sphere had completely transformed from that of the 1950s and 1960s in which they established themselves. Social realism was no longer a dominant or even a residual force in a Britain, where a readership had grown up not only with writers like Ballard and Lessing, and their successors such as Angela Carter and Will Self, but also with Tolkien and his successors such as Terry Pratchett, Phillip Pullman and J.K. Rowling. In this context, the literary significance of the 1950s is as the decade in which science fiction and fantasy first emerged as a serious challenger to social realism and mainstream fiction. Looking back, then, at the choices facing Samwise Gamgee and the returning ordinary soldiers he represents, their decision on balance to opt for nice gardens over vulgar, or even ‘angry’, cocksureness is retrospectively vindicated to the extent that it made room for small-scale gains such as Sommerfield’s Tom and Betty Lidstone developing their relationship in the light of her having a job and talking politics in the pub; or Liz the librarian from North West Five marrying her carpenter boyfriend and getting a flat of her own. Symbolically, the fact that The Lord of the Rings ends with Sam sitting with his baby daughter in his lap is just enough to hold open the promise of a future in which Elanor Gamgee’s choices will be important. However, that future – our present – was also dependent on other developments in cultural representation in the 1950s such as Wyndham’s Coker proclaiming the end of the old gender stereotypes, and Mitchison’s Halla abandoning the patriarchal story altogether.

Notes 1 Of course, the literature of the 1930s amounted to rather more than Allsop’s reductive characterization; see the forthcoming 1930s volume in this series. 2 On this point, see for example novelist and academic, Adam Roberts: Alterity is fundamental to SF : it is a poetics of otherness and diversity. Now, it so happens that the encounter with “otherness” – racially, ethnically, in terms of gender, sexual orientation, disability and trans identity – has been the main driver of social debate for the last half-century or more. The tidal shift towards global diversity is the big event of our times, and this is what makes SF the most relevant literature today. (Roberts 2013, n.p.)

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3 Tolkien was misremembering slightly here as he only began writing in 1937 and he is slightly out in the timings of his discussion of progress throughout the war until he gets to the point of sending chapters of Book IV to his son in South Africa; but the essence of what he says here is correct (see Hammond and Scull 2008: lxxi–lxxiii). 4 Some of the material in this section is a revised version of my article, ‘Five English Disaster Novels, 1951’, Foundation, 95 (2005). 5 However, he quickly abandoned it on the grounds that it would have been no more than a plot-driven thriller (see Hammond and Scull 2008: 678). 6 Some of the material in this section is a revised version of my article, ‘ “The Kind of Woman who Talked to Basilisks”: Travelling Light through Naomi Mitchison’s Landscape of the Imaginary’ The Luminary, 7 (2016).

Works cited Aldiss, Brian and David Wingrove. Trillion Year Spree. London: House of Stratus, 2001 [1968]. Allsop, Kenneth. The Angry Decade. Wendover: John Goodchild, 1985 [1958]. Amis, Kingsley. Lucky Jim. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983 [1954]. Amis, Kingsley. New Maps of Hell. London: Four Square Books, 1963 [1960]. Ballard, J.G. The Wind from Nowhere. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967 [1962]. Bentley, Nick. Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s. Bern: Peter Lang, 2007. Benton, Jill. Naomi Mitchison: A Biography. London: Pandora Press, 1992. Calder, Jenni. The Nine Lives of Naomi Mitchison. London: Virago, 1997. Carpenter, Humphrey. The Angry Young Men. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002 Carpenter, Humphrey with Christopher Tolkien (eds) The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. London: Allen & Unwin, 1981. Christopher, John. The Death of Grass. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958 [1956]. Clarke, Ben. Orwell in Context. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Clute, John. Pardon this Intrusion: Fantastika in the World Storm. Harold Wood: Beccon, 2011. Croft, Andy. ‘The Boys Round the Corner: The Story of Fore Publications’. In Andy Croft, ed., A Weapon in the Struggle: The Cultural History of the Communist Party in Britain, London, Pluto Press, 1998: 142–62. Ferrebe, Alice. Masculinity in Male-Authored Fiction, 1950–2000. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Garth, John. Tolkien and the Great War. Hammersmith: Harper Collins, 2004. Golding, William, John Wyndham and Mervyn Peake. Sometime, Never: Three Tales of the Imagination. New York: Ballantine Books, 1957 [1956]. Greenland, Colin. The Entropy Exhibition: Michael Moorcock and the British ‘New Wave’ in Science Fiction. Abingdon: Routledge, 2012 [1983].

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Hammond, Wayne G. and Christina Scull. The Lord of the Rings: A Reader’s Companion. London: Harper Collins, 2008. Harrisson, Tom. Britain Revisited. London: Gollancz, 1961. Hubble, Nick. ‘Common People: Class, Gender and Social Change in the London Fiction of Virginia Woolf, John Sommerfield and Zadie Smith’. Nick Hubble and Philip Tew, eds, London in Contemporary British Fiction: The City Beyond the City. London: Bloomsbury, 2016: 195–210. Hubble, Nick. ‘Five English Disaster Novels, 1951–1972’. Foundation 95, (2005): 89–103. Hubble, Nick. The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Hubble, Nick. ‘Radical Eccentricity and Postwar Ordinariness’, Benjamin Kohlmann, ed., Edward Upward and Left-Wing Literary Culture in Britain. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013: 83–97. Langford, Barry. ‘Introduction’ to John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 2000: vii–xvii. Mengham, Rod. ‘Bad Teeth: British Social Realism in Fiction’. In British Social Realism in the Arts since 1940. Ed. David Tucker. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011: 81–102. Mitchison, Naomi. Memoirs of a Spacewoman. London: New English Library, 1976 [1962]. Mitchison, Naomi. Travel Light. London: Virago, 1985 [1952]. Montefiore, Janet. Men and Women Writers of the 1930s: The Dangerous Flood of History. London: Routledge, 1996. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954 [1949]. Orwell, George. The Road to Wigan Pier. Secker & Warburg, 1998 [1937]. Roberts, Adam. ‘War of the Worlds? Who Owns the Political Soul of Science Fiction’, Guardian, 8 April 2013: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/apr/08/adamroberts-political-soul-sf Shippey, Tom. J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. Hammersmith: Harper Collins, 2000. Sommerfield, John. ‘Author’s Note’. May Day. Lawrence & Wishart, 1984: xviii–xix. Sommerfield, John. The Inheritance. London, Heinemann, 1956. Sommerfield, John. May Day. Lawrence & Wishart, 1936. Sommerfield, John. North West Five. London, Heinemann, 1960. Sommerfield, John. Trouble in Porter Street. London: Key Books, 1938. Sommerfield, John. Trouble in Porter Street. Second edition. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1954. Sommerfield, John. ‘The Worms-Eye View’. Penguin New Writing, April–June 1943: 15–34. Tolkien, J.R.R. The Fellowship of the Ring. London: Allen & Unwin, 1966a [1954]. Tolkien, J.R.R. The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. London: Harper Collins, 1997.

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Tolkien, J.R.R. Sauron Defeated. London: Harper Collins, 1992. Tolkien, J.R.R. The Two Towers. London: Allen & Unwin, 1966b [1954]. Tolkien, J.R.R. The Return of the King. London: Allen & Unwin, 1966c [1955]. Wain, John. Hurry on Down. Maentwrog: Smaller Sky, 2003 [1953]. Wagner, Vit. ‘Tolkien Proves He’s Still the King’. Toronto Star, 16 April 2007: https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/2007/04/16/tolkien_proves_hes_still_ the_king.html Williams, Raymond. Orwell. Hammersmith: Fontana, 1991 [1971]. Williams, Raymond. Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review. London: New Left Books, 1979. Williams, Raymond. Problems in Materialism and Culture. London: Verso, 1997 [1980]. Wilson, Angus. ‘Diversity and Depth’. In Diversity and Depth in Fiction: Selected Critical Writings of Angus Wilson. Ed. Kerry McSweeney. London: Secker and Warburg, 1983a [1958]: 130–4. Wilson, Angus. ‘The Dilemma of the Contemporary Novelist’. In Diversity and Depth in Fiction: Selected Critical Writings of Angus Wilson. Ed. Kerry McSweeney. London: Secker and Warburg, 1983b [1967]: 238–51. Wilson, Colin. The Outsider. London: Gollancz, 1990 [1956]. Wyndham, John. ‘Consider Her Ways’. In William Golding, John Wyndham and Mervyn Peake. Sometime, Never: Three Tales of the Imagination. New York: Ballantine Books, 1957 [1956]: 63–125. Wyndham, John. The Day of the Triffids. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 2000 [1951].

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2

Angry Young Men? A Product of Their Time Matthew Crowley

By the end of the 1950s what I term a ‘working-class moment’ in British culture had begun to emerge. This ‘working-class moment’ is most commonly associated with the democratizing tendencies of the 1960s and the success, and cultural significance, of working-class figures such as The Beatles, David Bailey, George Best, Michael Caine and Terrence Stamp, but its origins are firmly rooted in a pattern of commodification of working-class masculinities that emerged in 1950s Britain. This chapter utilizes Raymond Williams’ concept of ‘structure of feeling’ (1954: 21) to trace the origin of that commodification to the emergence of new discourses of masculinities from the ‘Movement’ novels of Kingsley Amis and John Wain, through the so-called ‘Angry Young Men’, before focusing upon a less easily distinguishable, but discrete and significant, pattern of (largely) Northern realism in British fiction. ‘Structure of feeling’ is a key concept within the academic project of Raymond Williams, initially deployed in Preface to Film (1954). Its genesis is contemporaneous with Wain’s Hurry on Down (1953) and Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954), and as such the concept itself belongs to a structure of feeling in which the standards and conventions of British culture and society were being challenged. ‘Structure of feeling’ remains a contentious concept, due, at least in part, to the fact that its definitions have remained elusive and ambiguous. However, there are three distinct phases in the development of the concept, which, whilst not entirely discrete, are recognizably different. Williams’ original use of the concept in Preface to Film clearly indicates his intention to provide an alternative interpretative framework for Marxist cultural analysis. It demonstrates a direct challenge to the existing orthodox Marxist formula in which cultural production is understood to be a superstructural corollary of the economic base, and presents as the foundational stage of a cultural hypothesis that seeks to break down the perceived barriers between ‘culture’ and ‘society’, between the 53

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‘social’ and the ‘personal’. The term itself, which Williams acknowledges is ‘difficult’ (1977: 132), with its inherent contradiction between the definite ‘structure’, and the intangible ‘feeling’, points us toward this conclusion. Williams further developed the concept of ‘structure of feeling’ in The Long Revolution (1961), a text which continues the inquiry begun in Williams’ Culture & Society: 1780–1950 (1958). This second phase in the development of the concept is contemporaneous with the texts studied here, Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and David Storey’s This Sporting Life (1960), and marks the genesis of what would eventually become the practice of ‘cultural materialism’ (Williams, 1977: 5). In The Long Revolution Williams describes the difficulty of ‘get[ting] hold of ’ the ‘felt sense of the quality of life at a particular place and time: a sense of the ways in which the particular activities combined into ways of thinking and living’ (1965: 63). Williams recognizes the value of Fromm’s concept of ‘the “social character” ’, and Benedict’s concept of ‘the “pattern of culture” ’ in attempting to ‘restor[e] the outlines of a particular organization of life’, but notes that in each case the ‘way of life’ that is recovered is ‘usually abstract’ (63–4). Williams continues to suggest that it may be possible to ‘gain the sense of a further common element, which is neither the character nor the pattern, but as it were the actual experience through which these were lived’ (64). Williams states that when ‘the arts of a period’ are ‘measured [. . .] against the external characteristics of the period’, there can still exist ‘some important common element that we cannot easily place’: this is precisely what Williams terms ‘structure of feeling’ (64). According to Williams, ‘structure of feeling’ is a concept that ‘is as firm and definite as “structure” suggests, yet it operates in the most delicate and least tangible parts of our activity’ (64). The key element of this phase of the concept is the recognition of the central position the arts occupy in the analysis of culture as a whole way of life, and how the arts enable us to understand changes within the system of social reproduction. It becomes apparent in the study of the arts that a structure of feeling is not formally learned, but emerges from generationally specific reactions to, and interactions with, the culture and society of a particular time and place. As Williams states, ‘[o]ne generation may train its successor, with reasonable success, in the social character or the general cultural pattern, but the new generation will have its own structure of feeling, which will not appear to have come “from” anywhere’ (64). Although the appropriateness of structures of feeling as a means through which to study the emergence of new forms of working-class masculinities is already apparent in the second phase of the concept, at this stage of its

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development the scope of the concept is still rather broad, and is complicated by its focus on the reconciliation of culture and society. The third phase of the development of the concept of structures of feeling sees Williams embed the concept as a practical means of conducting textual analysis within the broader practice of cultural materialism. Williams introduced the practice of cultural materialism as ‘a theory of the specificities of material cultural and literary production within historical materialism’ in Marxism and Literature (1977: 5). With the development of cultural materialism Williams supersedes the attempts to reconcile ‘culture’ and ‘society’ that form the basis of his earlier work, positing instead that culture is always already social and material and must therefore be read as such. Williams argues that writing is a practice undertaken under definite social relations, and so cannot be understood as an autonomous cultural category, or as an object that reflects a given reality. Literature is an inalienable element of the complex social processes that constitute culture, and thus has a specificity that cannot be reduced. In this respect, the category of ‘literature’ itself becomes problematic, as it serves as an exclusionary term that is given to certain types of writing in the construction of a ‘selective tradition’ (115). Williams describes the selective tradition as ‘an intentionally selective version of a shaping past and a pre-shaped present, which is powerfully operative in the process of social and cultural definition and identification’, argues that ‘this selection is presented and usually successfully passed off as “the tradition”, “the significant past” ’, and concludes that, in this sense, any tradition is ‘an aspect of the contemporary social and cultural organization, in the interest of the dominance of a specific class’ that offers ‘a sense of predisposed continuity’ (115–6). Cultural materialism is a direct challenge not only to orthodox Marxist configurations of cultural production, but also to the idea of the validity of this selective tradition. As cultural materialism develops its robust theoretical framework, its direct antecedent, ‘structure of feeling’, becomes a tool for textual analysis within this framework. Although still developing, by 1954, the concept represents a practical (and radical) means of understanding lived experience through the analysis of cultural texts. In understanding structures of feeling as an analytical procedure, it is possible to consider how the concept might be practically applied. Williams states: We are talking about the characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity. We are then defining these elements as a ‘structure’: as a set, with specific internal relations, at

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In ‘defining’ the ‘specific internal relations’ which are ‘at once interlocking and in tension’ as a ‘structure’, structures of feeling account for, and become apparent through, the relationship between dominant, residual and emergent cultural forms. Williams continues to methodologically define structure of feeling as, ‘a cultural hypothesis, actually derived from attempts to understand such elements and their connections in a generation or period’ (132–3). My use of structures of feeling here is twofold. It is employed both as a means to identify and analyse emergent forms of working-class masculinities at the end of the 1950s, and, through re-evaluating texts which belong to a ‘selective tradition’ of workingclass writing, as a means to examine the cultural and commercial conditions under which the commodification of working-class masculinities which led to a ‘working-class moment’ in British culture occurred. The structure of feeling from which the ‘Angry Young Men’ label emerges is evident in a number of novels published in the decade that followed the Second World War. These novels take a young, disaffected, usually lower-middle-class and university educated, male as their protagonist, and are usually episodic in structure and comic in tone. They commonly explore themes of entrapment and escape, particularly in relation to the renegotiation of gendered (particularly masculine) identities, issues of employment, the sexual relationships of their protagonists and the continuation of the rigid class stratification of British society in the post-war period. Philip Larkin’s Jill (1946) is notable as an early example of such texts, and prefigures what Stuart Laing describes as ‘a considerable cultural trend’ (1984: 158) that emerged with the ‘Movement’ novels of Amis and Wain, although Roland Camberton’s Scamp (1950) and Alexander Trocchi’s Young Adam (1954) clearly demonstrate that this emergent pattern was not solely generated by writers associated with the ‘Movement’ label. The writing generated by the ‘Movement’ more broadly took Britain’s diminished colonial power and influence in world politics as major themes, and represented the move to a more urban, industrial, consumer driven society, and the decline of an older more pastoral Britain with a nostalgic melancholy. This is significant as it demonstrates the sociocultural and historical specificities that underpinned the writing being discussed, and the shift in tone and approach that occurred in 1956.

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The identification of 1956 as a significant cultural moment in Britain is by no means new. From its first performance in 1956, John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger is frequently offered up as a moment of rupture or discontinuity, the moment at which a new and distinct pattern of representation emerged within British culture, and the play which gave rise to the term ‘Angry Young Men’. The retrospective inclusion of writers such as Amis and Wain under the ‘Angry’ banner clearly demonstrates the culturally constructed nature of the ‘Angry Young Men’ as a literary movement or category, and how the pervasive use of the term serves to obscure the nuances of a structure of feeling which gradually develops during the immediate post-war period. The inauthentic, opportunistic, journalistic and commercially driven nature of the ‘Angry Young Men’ label has been comprehensively written about elsewhere (see: Allsop, 1964; Bentley, 2007; 2010; Ferrebe, 2005; Maschler, [1957] 1959): suffice to say here that the term should be treated with caution. What the term does do however, is serve to create the cultural and commercial conditions from which a ‘working-class moment’ can emerge. The work which was first collected under the ‘Angry Young Men’ label (including that to which it was retrospectively applied) was about the alienation and frustrations of a section of the educated lower-middle-class, and as such the work can be said to prefigure the ‘anti-establishment spirit’ of what Eric Hopkins terms ‘the permissive society’ (1991: 178) of the 1960s. Laing identifies a period between 1957 and 1964 in which a structure of feeling where ‘an unusual degree of overlap between previously (and subsequently) quite rigidly stratified cultural sectors in Britain’ (1984: 158) becomes apparent. It is during this period that Laing identifies an emergent ‘realist style frequently with regional, usually Northern, and working-class content’ that was ‘simultaneously at the forefront of serious artistic practice and available (and on offer) to a very large popular audience’ (1984: 158). In the introduction to the 1964 edition of Kenneth Allsop’s The Angry Decade he identifies a ‘later wave’ of Northern ‘Angry’ writers which is founded upon that of the ‘angry school of fiction’ of the ‘middle fifties’; according to Allsop, these writers, who include Alan Sillitoe and David Storey, approach their subjects from a ‘very different angle to that mockingly mutinous jeering of the Redbrick boys of a few years earlier’ (1964: 8). There is a definite shift in discourse at this point, from what Morton Kroll describes as stories of ‘young men with all or a substantial part of a university education and of financially difficult middle-class and proletarian backgrounds’ (1959: 556), to stories which focused on the lives of part-educated, or uneducated, proletariat by a number of authors who David James describes as ‘northern regionalists’

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(2008: 42). Jane Mansfield suggests ‘northerness is an integral factor’ (2010: 34) within these texts. She continues to argue that the re-emergence of what she terms the ‘brute-hero’, connects to ‘a reappraisal of masculinity during a period of national insecurity’, and ‘reflects issues of class-mobility in which the dominance of a particular type of masculinity surges forward in an act of classtransition’ (34). What Mansfield alludes to here are representations that emerge from tensions between residual and emergent masculinities, that become apparent at a time of great sociocultural change, and she continues to offer a convincing argument which categorizes these works as ‘[c]ondition of England fiction’ and connects the ‘brute hero’ characters of this Northern realism to ‘earlier rebellious figures of the North’ (34). What becomes apparent in the work of Sillitoe and Storey then, is the emergence of new discourse around a specific formation of working-class masculinity, elements of which build on statements around, and offer some continuation to, the concept of the ‘Angry Young Man’, but in which Northerness itself becomes a significant means of articulating a specific kind of masculinity and its relation to contemporary shifts in the structures of class. As early as 1957 Tom Maschler suggests that ‘the writers who have set themselves the task of waking us up have been rendered harmless in the A.Y.M. cage’ (1959: 7). This is a striking image – an angry masculinity caged by ‘the strenuous efforts of the Press’ (8) – which does little to suggest that the momentum created by the initial wave of ‘Angry Young Men’ would continue and develop. However, Maschler continues to assert that the anger of the writers ‘has proved a highly saleable commodity’ (8). This view is supported by Kroll, who asserts that ‘Angry Young Men’ is a ‘highly marketable label’ (1959: 555). This is significant as it points towards the incorporation of an oppositional cultural form by the market. In fact, it suggests the commodification of a specific mode of masculinity and its concomitant forms of representation. The combined effect of this commodification and incorporation was to create the material conditions necessary for the continued production of new ‘Angry’ texts. In turn, this formed part of a performative loop which fed into the construction, representation and commodification of a new formulation of working-class masculine identities. It is to these masculinities, specifically the characters and cultures represented within Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), and David Storey’s This Sporting Life (1960), that I now turn. The landscapes of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and This Sporting Life form a central stake in the construction of the masculinities represented within the texts. Much like the ‘Movement’ texts which preceded them, in both texts

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there is a sense in which ‘the country’ is reduced to symbolic form, to the perception of residual cultures that serve as totems of an earlier, simpler and happier rural England. Yet both texts resist a representation of the country which is completely sentimental. As James notes, ‘Sillitoe refuses to let his own sensuous prospect of that home-county sentimentalize the townscape it enframes. [. . .] Instead, Saturday Night’s symbolism complements its scrutiny’ (2008: 51). Further, in a continuation of the themes that inform the ‘Movement’ and ‘Angry’ novels that precede them, ‘the country’, or the suburbs that are slowly eroding it, become places of escape and entrapment. Escape in that they offer sanctuary, a location to which the protagonists can retreat and be away from the battles that form their daily existence. Entrapment in that, invariably, those battles are internalized and travel with the protagonists, and in that the country, though accessible, cannot be traversed. In this sense, the country frames the urban settings of the novels, showing them in stark relief, and interning them and their inhabitants. The achievement of the country vignettes in both Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and This Sporting Life is the representation of the persistence of certain romantic cultural ideals, the patriarchal nuclear family, or the selfprovisioning working class; and a sense of how changes to the rhythms, and the material and social conditions, of working-class life cut across those residual forms. The tensions between persistence and change are represented elsewhere in the texts, as in the fact that Arthur Seaton still lives at home despite his emergent power as a consumer. However, the country vignettes situate these tensions within the wider historical context of dislocation, and thus best demonstrate the interplay between emergent, residual, and dominant cultural forms, and the forms of masculinity, of this particular structure of feeling. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is interspersed with vignettes in which Arthur Seaton visits the countryside. Significantly, these are the scenes in which Arthur seems most contented, or at least more relaxed. In a particularly telling scene Arthur remembers his grandfather ‘who had been a blacksmith, and had a house and forge at Wollaton village’ (1961: 178–9). Of the smith’s forge Sillitoe writes: [I]ts memory was a fixed picture in Arthur’s mind. The building – you had drawn your own water from a well, dug your own potatoes out of the garden, taken eggs from the chicken run to fry with the bacon off your own side of pig hanging salted from a hook in the pantry. (179)

The sentimentality with which the building and the fantasy of the way of life that accompanies it are represented suggests what Williams refers to as ‘a myth

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functioning as memory’ (1975: 57). In this sense Arthur’s fantasy conjures an ever-receding ‘golden age’ (48), which functions as a tenet within the construction of the idea of community. This passage serves to bring the change and discontinuity experienced by the working class of the 1950s into sharp relief, whilst simultaneously demonstrating Sillitoe’s acute awareness of the continuities of working-class life, particularly as the passage is qualified by the acknowledgement that the forge ‘had long ago been destroyed to make room for advancing armies of new pink houses’ (1961: 179). These new pink houses are the new Nottingham suburbs that would rehouse many of the city’s working class, and which, paradoxically, represent both the continuity of working-class life, and the obliteration of some of its older traditional forms (both material and cultural). The tensions that underlie this shift are vital in understanding the structure of feeling from which Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is generated. The country, and by implication, residual forms of working-class culture are threatened by the expansion of the city within the representations of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Seaton’s role in this is ambiguous. On the one hand, he exemplifies this threat: he is, or has retrospectively become, the talisman of an emergent urban consumer culture. Yet Seaton knows the fields and woods of the surrounding country ‘like the back of his hand’ (42). Whilst the new houses built on the outskirts of the city are described as ‘advancing armies’ (179), and the sawmill at the edge of the woods is ‘set like the camp of an invader’ (42), Seaton navigates the landscape with an easy familiarity and level of care that sets him apart from these aggressive infractions. Seaton’s relationship to the landscape provides the foundation for his relationship with residual forms of workingclass cultures. These country vignettes are undoubtedly nostalgic in tone, and lack the historicity necessary to construct a recognizable knowable community. They do however, locate Seaton socially, geographically and temporally in the North of England, where the industry of the individual has been incorporated into institutionalized heavy industry. Further, the lack of any sense of an historical development is in keeping with Seaton’s character. Seaton sees not the nuances and processes of a specific local history, but ‘then’ and ‘now’ constructed as oppositional forms: the golden age of the independent craftsman, and the age of the indentured factory worker, working to pay off televisions ‘installed on the never never’ (22). Seaton himself exists outside of this dichotomy, having ‘settled’ for the ‘comfortable wage’ of fourteen pounds a week (25). This is his optimum income, carefully worked out so as to avoid the scrutiny of the tax man and the rate checker, in order that he might earn his living ‘in spite of the firm’ (25). It is the freedom that this wage allows that provides Seaton with the opportunity to

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take his leisure in the country, thus reconnecting with the residual cultural forms, or at least his perceptions of them. Arthur Seaton represents an emergent form of working-class masculinity of the late 1950s. The juxtaposition of this young, fashionably dressed urban working-class male, recognizable to contemporary audiences as some sort of Teddy Boy, and the ‘silence and peace’ (112) of the Nottinghamshire countryside, serves to underscore the societal shifts occurring in the wake of the war. Seaton is the young urban consumer writ large against nostalgic representations of rural England. The resistance, or discontinuity, that this connotes is complicated by a number of facts. Seaton can be read as a continuation of a long tradition of radical working-class protagonists (Haywood, 1997). However, his refusal of active political engagement and his pronounced individualism frame his resistance as something which diverges from traditional representations of class conscious radicals. Seaton’s engagement with fashion and his rebelliousness demonstrate the significance of emergent consumer-driven youth cultures within this structure of feeling. As Nick Bentley notes, ‘although Arthur is represented as an individualist throughout the text he negotiates two competing forces in his Bildungsroman narrative’, and these forces are ‘the working class of his parents’ generation’ and ‘the new consumerist boom of the late 1950s’ (2010: 25). I suggest that this dichotomy stretches beyond the parent generation to include older residual forms of working-class culture also, that Seaton’s character is founded upon the continuation of traditional forms of working-class masculinity, whilst many of his actions simultaneously destabilize those traditional forms. This is clearly apparent in Seaton’s relationship with the country, where he uses his knowledge of the local geography (and his cunning) to conduct illicit affairs with married women. His actions here undermine the older, more traditional forms of masculinity represented within the texts, the ‘slow husbands’ who treated their wives as ‘ornaments and skivvies’ (Sillitoe, 1961: 36). Seaton attributes much of his ‘success’ with women to the fact that he can ‘make a woman enjoy being in bed’, and ‘make sure a woman got her fun’ (37) whilst he is getting his own. Whilst the language that communicates these revelations retains more than an air of sexism, Seaton’s attitude toward such matters does demonstrate a shift in the discourse of sexuality, and sexual practice during this period. As Stephen Brooke notes, from the 1940s onwards ‘it does seem that active and fulfilling sexual lives were increasingly perceived by women as crucial to companionate marriages and relationships’ (2001: 783). However, this ostensibly radical departure from traditional forms of working-class masculinity is not as straightforward as it seems. As Peter Kalliney observes,

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The representation of Seaton’s relationship to the country, and its close connection to his sexuality and sexual practices, demonstrates how emergent masculinities were simultaneously formed upon, and in opposition to, existing dominant and residual forms of working-class masculinity. Further, when considering Seaton’s overall narrative trajectory, it becomes apparent how those emergent forms of masculinity are incorporated, and contribute to, a new configuration of a hegemonic masculinity that is specific to this structure of feeling. As Laing correctly observes, in this respect Seaton is ‘the object, not the subject of his future’ (1986: 68). Perversely, this is perhaps the most subversive and genuinely oppositional aspect of the text, demonstrating as it does, that despite the improved material conditions of many within the working class of 1950s Britain, the horizon of expectations remains the same. Arthur Seaton is objectified and commodified (although the process of commodification is less explicit than that represented in This Sporting Life). As William Hutchings observes, the automatic nature of Seaton’s actions at his lathe reduce him ‘to mere operative extension of the factory’s machinery’ (1987: 35). Yet, Seaton’s role at the factory situates him in a complex socio-political structure in which his objectification allows him to assume the subject-position of consumer. Seaton clearly benefits from the improved material conditions and increased affluence amongst the working class. This is demonstrated by the construction of pre-war and post-war life as diametrically opposed states of being within the text. Prewar consists of ‘the dole [. . .] and the big miserying that went with no money and no way of getting any’, and post-war, ‘all the Woodbines he could smoke, money for a pint if he wanted one, [. . .] a holiday somewhere, [. . .] and a television set to look into at home’ (Sillitoe, 1961: 20). As Seaton states, ‘The difference between before the war and after the war didn’t bear thinking about. War was a marvellous thing in some ways, when you thought how happy it had made some people in England’ (20). The implication is that the welfare state and improvements to the material conditions of working-class life were born out of the ruptures of war. But, as Kalliney notes, ‘[w]ithin the context of welfare state prosperity, ambivalence best describes a working-class political position: better material circumstances did not lead to a more equitable distribution of power,

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and Seaton’s rage is a gendered response to this situation’ (2001: 94). For Kalliney, Seaton’s masculinity is formed through his simultaneous rejection of, and adherence to, the breadwinner role. That is to say that Seaton ultimately conforms to the underlying values of working-class society, even whilst, momentarily, resisting its norms. Kalliney presents the convincing argument that this is only made possible by the ‘political and social circumstances of the welfare state when homes, jobs, and commodities all become more readily available to England’s urban working-class’ (94). Kalliney continues, ‘Seaton fashions his masculinity through participation in consumption as well as through the role of family provider – both of which depend upon steady work and good wages’ (94). For Seaton, the practice of consumption incorporates the corporeal as well as the financial. The opening scene of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning sees Seaton enter into a drinking competition with a loudmouthed sailor who reminds Arthur ‘of a sergeant-major who once put him on a charge’ (Sillitoe, 1961: 6). There is a financial aspect to the exchange, as the contest will decide a wager where the ‘Loser pays the bill’ (7). Here however, the focus is upon Seaton’s physical ability to consume more than his opponent. In this context, his victory over the sailor (after seven gins and ten pints of beer) is more than merely an opportunity of ‘free booze’ (7). The contest serves as a symbolic resistance of traditional forms of masculinity through consumption, and demonstrates the emergent power of the youthful consumer. The fact that the wager is contested in the traditionally masculine arena of the pub demonstrates Seaton’s connection to place and tradition. That is, it demonstrates that Seaton represents an emergent masculinity that generates from, and maintains, many of the internal structures of more ‘traditional’ masculinities, and dominant cultural forms. This in turn emphasizes the tensions between the continuities of working-class culture and new patterns formed from the dislocations of the 1950s, a fact which is further demonstrated in the form of the novel itself. The free indirect discourse employed by Sillitoe (to circumvent the problem of writing a novel from the perspective of ‘a man who has never read a book’ (Sillitoe quoted in Laing, 1986: 69)), ensures that, in part, Seaton is formally constructed by the voices of the community that surrounds him. For example, in the opening scene we see Seaton through the eyes of a group of rowdy singers in the bar, the waiter who discovers him at the bottom of the stairs, and the elderly man who steps over him thinking ‘how jolly yet sinful it would be if he possessed the weakness yet strength of character to get so drunk’ (Sillitoe, 1961: 8). This last example further emphasizes a growing generation gap through its representations of Seaton’s youthful, hedonistic

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rebelliousness. In itself, Seaton’s formal construction brings the tensions between continuity and dislocation within working-class culture into sharp relief. Despite Seaton’s individualistic nature, his rebelliousness, his careful positioning of himself as outsider, without the subtle patchwork of voices that emanates from his community he would not exist. This problematizes a reading of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning as a novel of escape. For all Seaton’s pretentions – his refusal to drink the firm’s tea, the scorn with which he thinks of ‘slow husbands’ (36), his ‘investment’ (56) in clothing – he cannot, and does not escape, as at a formal level he is constructed by the voices of his community. Seaton describes himself as a rebel, explicitly stating his position in the soliloquy that opens the penultimate chapter. However, as Laing observes, ‘[t]he slippage between “I” and “you” in Arthur’s reflections indicates how often they involve not so much his personal problems as his general condition – as a semiskilled factory worker on piece-work’ (1986: 70). I suggest that this view be expanded, that Seaton’s reflections ‘as a semi-skilled factory worker on piecework’ represent something of his generational condition. The replacement, or interchangeability, of the nominative singular pronoun, with the objective, plural ‘you’, serves to make the reader complicit in Seaton’s thoughts, and suggests a collective disillusionment and disenfranchisement of not only manual workers, but more broadly, of post-war ‘youth’. This is exemplified in the scene where Seaton is hit by a passing car – a symbol of consumerism and social climbing, and, for Seaton, ‘pretentions’ (Sillitoe, 1961: 34) to be held against their owners. The driver of the car that strikes Seaton epitomizes this generational divide. He is the lower-middle-class everyman, his face ‘ordinary’, his height ‘medium’ (99), he is an exemplar of ‘the Establishment’ against which youth identities were beginning to be defined. This is emphasized when, after the physical and metaphorical affront of being struck by the car, Seaton and his brother Fred are harangued by the man responsible: ‘You bloody young fools’ (99, my emphasis). The man personifies the hypocrisy of ‘the Establishment’ when he accuses Seaton and his brother of being drunk whilst ‘Waves of [his] whisky-breath came into their faces’ (99). After more lies from the man about trying to warn them with his hooter, Seaton explodes with rage. To save the man from a severe beating, which at this point seems highly likely, Fred suggests that they tip over the man’s car. Seaton agrees seeing this as ‘perfect justice, punishment for both the actual metal that had hit him, and for the cranky driver’ (100). The act which follows, however, takes on an even greater significance: ‘Though locked in a revengeful act they felt a sublime team-spirit of effort filling their hearts with a radiant light of unique power and value, of achievement and hope

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for greater and better things’ (100). The language here is reminiscent of that used in describing the war effort. The ‘sublime team-spirit’ and its resultant ‘power’, ‘value’ and ‘achievement’, and perhaps most significant of all, the ‘hope for greater and better things’, all represent definite assertions that are a long way in register from the slippages into second-person address that punctuate the majority of the text. In an inversion of contemporary value systems, the tipping of the car is the fulfilment of the war’s potential for social change, and represents a moment of radical behaviour in which the attributes which were aligned with the ‘hope for greater and better things’ are realized, temporarily and in isolation, at home. This inversion operates in two specific, interrelated ways. First, it separates practices of consumption into conformism and individualism. To have a car is to conform to the prevailing consumer boom, whilst Seaton’s own consumption represents a heightened individualism – although this is complicated by the fact that, in many ways, his consumption conforms to the emergent youth cultures of the 1950s. Second, this separation allows the tipping of the car to be viewed as a rejection of a certain type of consumerism, and thus, a political statement which rejects the compromises of the post-war settlement. Here Kalliney’s reading of the text is particularly useful as it clearly demonstrates the paradoxes that underlie Seaton’s position. First, Seaton is only able to situate himself as outsider in the manner that he does because of the increased affluence and material improvements brought about by the welfare state. Second, and more significantly, ultimately Seaton constructs his notion of masculinity upon, and measures his masculinity against, the role of traditional working-class breadwinner, father, husband and head of household. Thus, the tensions between residual and emergent forms of masculinity are apparent in the construction of Seaton’s identity, whilst the narrative arc, and the success of the novel itself, demonstrates how they are incorporated into the dominant culture of the period. To put this another way, it is a hegemonic masculinity which ensures Seaton’s relative class position remains the same, despite the material improvements of increased wages, access to consumer goods and enough disposable income to invest in clothing. This goes some way to explaining the sense of inevitability with which Seaton considers his future. Seaton ultimately becomes a man by conforming to the cultural construction of what it means to be a man within the confines of his class and his locality, and accepts his impending future as husband, father and breadwinner with his girlfriend, Doreen, in the new Nottingham suburbs. Arthur Machin’s relationship to domestication in This Sporting Life (1960) is complex. On the one hand, Machin revels in what Claire Langhamer refers to as ‘family focused leisure’ (2005: 341), though the family is that of the widowed Mrs

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Hammond, and not of his own making. Despite this, Machin strongly resists the role of domesticated husband, whilst insistently being drawn towards it. Similar complexities exist within the configuration of Machin’s class position, and become apparent where the construction of class and masculinity intersect. For example, Machin opts to lodge in Mrs Hammond’s small terraced house, paying ‘thirty-five bob a week’ (Storey, 1963: 19) for a room of his own in the traditionally working-class area of the city. This is a move at odds with Machin’s status as upwardly mobile bachelor and local celebrity, but which allows him to enact the role of working-class breadwinner within Mrs Hammond’s modest household. It is left to Machin’s teammate Maurice to assume the role of domesticated husband after being forced to marry Judith, the secretary of the local mayor, whom he has made pregnant. Judith and Maurice move into a ‘semi-detached house’ that is ‘only a few years old’ (201). After the move Judith adopts the habit of calling Maurice, ‘Morry’ (202), a pet name that indicates his new domesticated status. Maurice himself takes on domestic labour, such as digging the garden, and explicitly states that the move and his new roles are part of ‘breaking away from the past life’ (207). Despite opting to remain in the working-class area of the city in the enactment of the male breadwinner role, Machin’s driving to the country represents a literal and metaphorical attempt to escape his class position. This is demonstrated by his ‘conspicuous’ independence, designed to show that he ‘d[oesn’t] really need to notice people anymore’ (80) as he enters the car. Machin does not have the same deeply personal relationship with the country as Seaton, although it is still significant within the text. Machin’s engagement with the countryside encapsulates a significant character trope as he meets the landscape either confrontationally, or, with an air of detached disinterest. At its crudest, the confrontation takes the form of a sort of conquering of nature, Arthur’s Jaguar car eating up the country road, or his crossing the river with Lynda in his arms (81). Significantly, this incident shows Machin defying Mrs Hammond by taking her daughter across the fast-flowing stream after she has stated it is too dangerous, an unnecessary attempt to prove himself the hero, which inevitably causes Mrs Hammond distress. During the episode we also see Machin imagining how he would feel if he ‘was responsible for Lynda’s drowning’ (82) in a gesture towards emotion which ultimately reveals the absence thereof, or rather an inability to connect to it directly, or articulate it satisfactorily. This is a recurrent theme within the representation of working-class masculinities, and constitutes a major trope within the construction of Machin’s character. Despite the absence of genuine emotional connection, the ‘family focused leisure’ of the

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country excursion is an important facet in Machin’s fantasy of fulfilling the role of breadwinner in the formation of his masculine identity. However, the fact that Machin and Mrs Hammond are not married undermines the institution upon which that role, and Machin’s fantasy, are structured, and is the underlying cause of many of the tensions that exist between them. In relation to this the ruins of ‘Markham Abbey’ (81) (where the crossing of the river occurs) are significant, as they represent a residual form of class power, and a crumbling religious rectitude. This is juxtaposed against Machin’s Jaguar car (here a symbol of the emergent form of the upwardly mobile consumer), and the pretext of ‘family’ that informs the unmarried couple’s outing. Tellingly, the sheep that inhabit the grounds of the abbey move around the car ‘as if it were just another part of the ruins’ (81). Machin imposes himself on the scene by scooping up Lynda and crossing the river. However, the car is metaphorically swallowed by the country, an early indication of the precarious nature of Machin’s superficial success, and the fluid nature of hegemonic control. Howton Hall is ‘an old country house converted into a hotel and an eating place for the sort of client that could afford to drive out there for an evening, or a weekend’ (84). Here again, Machin imposes himself upon the scene, displaying a bullish confidence that ultimately reveals a lack of cultural capital. As a result Machin appears out of place, or dislocated. Mrs Hammond’s presence in the scene is significant. Unlike Seaton, Machin’s motivation in taking his landlady and lover out of town is not sexual. Rather, the country outings become representative of the dislocations that accompany social mobility and the improvement in material conditions experienced by the working class during this period. Mrs Hammond, older than Machin, represents a previous generation of the working class, and carries with her a deep sense of shame and impropriety around the nature of their relationship. Machin, the young upwardly mobile man, revels in exploring the freedoms that his newfound power as a consumer affords him, but makes his lack of cultural capital increasingly evident as he does so. If, as suggested above, the presence of Mrs Hammond and her children on the excursion feed Machin’s patriarchal fantasies, then his actions during these scenes demonstrate that these fantasies do not operate simply at the level of emulation. In simultaneously adopting and consciously undermining the role of middle-class patriarch, Machin actively challenges the dominant cultural values of middle-class society. Nowhere is this more evident than in the scene in which Machin takes Mrs Hammond and her children for lunch at the exclusive restaurant at Howton Hall. Significantly, upon arrival at the restaurant Machin is wearing his football boots (his shoes soaked from carrying Lynda over the river

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at Markham Abbey). The football boots consolidate Machin’s dislocation whilst explicitly symbolizing the means by which he has accrued his wealth and the ability to patronize such an establishment. When met by a pretentious waiter who, thinking they have ‘strayed over to the wrong side of the hotel’ (85), takes pains to point out how expensive the menu is, Machin responds by ordering ‘everything that cost the most’ (85). Though lacking cultural capital, Machin has no insecurities about his taste. Rather, he imposes his masculine authority upon the scene through a blatant act of conspicuous consumption. Initially Mrs Hammond is terrified, but as she eats the ‘juicy food’, Machin assumes that ‘the indignity of coming to the place was somehow worth it’ (85). In contrast to Machin’s brash authority, Mrs Hammond represents the cultural dislocation associated with class mobility. Unsure of her own taste, she feels out of place, her habitus dictates that she does not have the cultural capital to ‘pass’ within the complex, yet unacknowledged social codes that govern behaviour within the restaurant setting. Machin’s bravado serves to emphasize Mrs Hammond’s meekness as a symbolic dichotomy between an older, more ‘traditional’ working class, encased within its own horizon of expectations, and a dynamic, upwardly mobile masculinity, that typifies the shifting condition of an emergent English urban structure of feeling. This dichotomy is further underlined by the presence of Mrs Hammond’s dead husband’s ‘working boots’ (19), which she keeps polished on the hearth. Eric Hammond was killed in an industrial accident in the same factory at which Machin works as a lathe operator. Significantly, the factory is owned by Mr Weaver, a patron and leading committee member of the rugby club for which Machin signs. The ‘working boots’ serve as a counterpoint to Machin’s football boots, and evoke the spectre of an exploited and oppressed working-class masculinity. Whilst ostensibly the different boots demonstrate that Machin has moved beyond the role of exploited worker, the presence of the ‘working boots’ serve to remind us that this break is neither complete, nor absolute. As the meal at Howton Hall concludes, the waiter, who here represents the establishment (the restaurant), and ‘the Establishment’, attempts to make Machin wait for his bill. Machin gives the waiter three minutes before rising to leave, again disrupting the social practices associated with the setting, symbolically challenging the cultural structures that underpin it, and imposing his own aggressive masculine presence. On being challenged Machin takes great pleasure in having the waiter check the bill repeatedly, before carefully counting out the money and leaving a sixpenny tip. Upon leaving Machin proclaims, ‘We left Howton Hall with a sense of achievement’ (87), a clear indication of the

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subversive motives that have underpinned his behaviour. The episode emphasizes aspects of the performativity of classed masculinities, and how practices of consumption were increasingly assimilated into emergent forms of workingclass masculinities during the 1950s. The conflation of money and food is also significant as it demonstrates both Machin’s physical and economic ability to consume. The emphasis here however is clearly on the economic, the meal itself being secondary to Machin’s ability to pay, and importantly, to do so on his own terms. This Sporting Life is written entirely in the first person, the narrative structured around the hypermasculine subjectivity of Arthur Machin. Within the structure of the novel Machin is imbued with a sort of omniscience (a trait present in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, but there the voice is less that of Seaton and more an overarching authorial voice). Machin is able to tell the reader how Mrs Hammond is feeling, for example, though this perhaps says more about how women are constructed within this particular structure of feeling than it does about Machin’s empathetic wisdom. Yet despite the first person narrative, Machin is repeatedly objectified throughout the text. As Alan Tomlinson points out, this begins with the onomatopoeic properties of Machin’s name; Machin suggesting making and macho (1999: 8), to this I would add machination, and, significantly, machine. When told that it is a surprise that he feels ‘so much about things’ Machin responds by describing himself as a ‘natural professional’, adding, ‘What I don’t get paid for I don’t bother with. If I was paid to feel then I’d probably make a big splash in that way’ (Storey, 1963: 171). Indeed, in his capacity as a professional rugby league player, Machin is paid not to feel, to disregard physical pain and to abjure empathy as he inflicts pain upon others. Paradoxically, it is in Machin’s professional lack of feeling that his connection to community becomes most apparent. The community of the team is founded upon self-sacrifice. As Donald Sabo observes: The pain principle is crudely evident in the ‘no pain, no gain’ philosophy of so many coaches and athletes. . . . It stifles men’s awareness of their bodies and limits our emotional expression. We learn to ignore personal hurts and injuries because they interfere within ‘efficiency’ and ‘goals’ of the ‘team’. . . . We become adept at taking the feelings that boil up inside us . . . and channeling them in a bundle of rage which is directed at opponents and enemies. (Sabo quoted in Messner, 1992: 61)

There is a distinct sense in the text however, that Machin’s sacrifice to the team is by no means unconditional. Rather, the sacrifices and pain he endures are part of

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a transaction in which he achieves the status of hero, and the adoration of his fans. Machin revels in his ability to make the crowd cheer and roar, and, to some degree, the attention he receives off of the field. On being recognized in the city Machin states: They made me feel I owned the place. Course I strutted about. They expected it. I couldn’t help it. I walked in front of these people now, and I felt the hero. They wanted me to be a hero – and I wanted to be a hero. (Storey, 1963: 162)

The nature of the transaction between Machin and the public is clearly apparent here. They make him feel, and in the process elevate him to the position of hero, a transaction of mutual benefit. This transaction is not without its complications however, as Jenni Calder notes: The sporting hero retains the characteristic duality, i.e. aggressive, and officially supported, anarchist and institutionalized, testing himself privately for the benefit of thousands who want to reward him with adoration and imitation. He is both representative and elite, collective and individual. In many respects he is a very satisfactory hero for he can be controlled; the world in which he operates and in which he can succeed is limited. (Calder quoted in Whannel, 2002: 44–5)

There is a clear divide in the text between the element of the transaction that feeds Machin emotionally, his power on the field; and his emotional deficiencies off the field, where his brutishness and the absence of feeling result in failure. Machin struggles to cope with the precariousness of his social position, and the lack of control he experiences off the field of play. I wasn’t going to be a footballer forever. But I was an ape. [. . .] No feelings. It’d always helped to have no feelings. So I had no feelings. I was paid not to have feelings. It paid me to have none. [. . .] Walking up the road like this they looked at me exactly as they would look at an ape walking about without a cage. They liked to see me walking about like this, as if the fact I tried to act and behave like them added just the right touch the next time they saw me perform. [. . .] It was just what they needed when they saw me run on to the field, just the thing to make them stare in awe, and wonder if after all I might be like them. I might be human. (Storey, 1963: 164)

Machin’s size and physical power become a central theme throughout the text. He frequently refers to how big he is, or feels. It is this physical prowess that affords Machin the potential to break through the restrictions of class stratification. This is tempered however, by the fact that we are first introduced to Machin broken and infantilized. His front teeth smashed in the scrum, he is

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taken to the ‘Children’s Dental Centre’ (15) for emergency treatment. The juxtaposition of the large powerful man, injured, vulnerable and, in the dentist’s chair of the ‘Children’s Dental Centre’, literally in the position of a child, takes the imposition of youth upon traditional structures of working-class masculinity to its limit. The implied childishness here suggests an underlying petulance in the subsequent subversive action embedded within the text, that poses questions about the oppositional position adopted by Machin, and more broadly, by the text as a whole. There is an adolescent quality to many of the male protagonists constructed within texts associated with the ‘Angry’ structure of feeling. As Tomlinson observes, a common theme in these novels is ‘the doomed, usually repressed, passion of a barely articulate masculinity and its desire for an adult love and real emotional relationships’ (1999: 8). A significant moment in This Sporting Life sees this theme intersect with the theme of escape. Alone and isolated after the breakdown of his relationship with Mrs Hammond, Machin seeks sanctuary in his car (a potent symbol of both his masculinity, and his power as an upwardly mobile consumer). In an attempt to emulate one of his American novellas, Machin naïvely tries to escape his troubles by leaving town. I even tried driving out of town fast. But the roads were crammed. [. . .] And I’d only go a couple of miles before I was in the next bloody place. One started where the other left off. There was no place to feel free. I was on a chain, and wherever I went I had to come back the same way. (Storey, 1963: 191)

The tension between Machin’s power as a consumer – the car affords him the ability to drive out of town – and the limitations of his horizon of expectation – the world in which he operates and can succeed is clear. Machin is free to drive wherever he pleases, but the geography, and the social conditions in which he is situated ensure that he always ends up back where he started. He has the power to consume, but is trapped within a system that ultimately keeps him in his place. As Laing notes, ‘the landscape of the industrial North deflates the fantasy and constrains the possibilities of Arthur’s whole life’ (1986: 73). In many ways the text deals specifically with the composition of Machin’s fantasies, and their ultimate deflation. Machin’s power is transient and the fantasies cannot be consolidated in any real and lasting way. Machin has no particular passion for rugby, other than as a means of keeping his ‘head above the general level of crap’ (Storey, 1963: 19). The ‘feeling of power’ of being ‘big’ and ‘strong’ and being able to ‘make people realize it’ (22) must inevitably end. By the final passage of the novel, which takes place ten years after

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the narrative begins, Machin is ‘ashamed of being no longer young’ (251). His ability to sustain his part of the transaction between himself and the crowd is waning, Machin now enters each game knowing that ‘one mistake, [. . .] and the whole tragedy of living, of being alive, would come into the crowd’s throat and roar its pain like a maimed animal’ (252). Machin’s connection to the local community is severed by his inability to perform as he once had, he ends the game with ‘mud covering [his] tears’ after his legs have ‘betrayed’ him (252). Machin’s earlier failure to invest and start a business with Maurice suggests that the money he has made from playing rugby league will also soon begin to wane. As Laing points out, ‘Maurice’s plans for a business venture show how, unless the players use their temporarily higher income to secure their future, their status quickly evaporates’ (1986: 71). As Hutchings observes, it is telling that ‘This Sporting Life ends in the lockerroom rather than on the playing field itself because the latter is the site of the devalued commercial ritual that the game has become’ (1987: 43). By contrast, the locker-room is the site of masculine rituals which are rooted in the community of the team. It is here that Machin feels he belongs, rather than the field, where he belongs to the club. This divide is predicated upon the commodification of working-class masculinity, a central theme of the text that is clearly demonstrated in the scene where Machin signs on as a professional. Before negotiations over Machin’s signing-on fee even begin he is framed as something to be consumed. Machin is ‘shown into the committee room’ (Storey, 1963: 50) where Wade presents facts about Machin to the committee, ‘so we can see our meal before we eat it. So to speak’ (51). During the negotiations Machin is framed as machine, ‘mechanically’ repeating ‘Five hundred down’ (55), until the signing is finally confirmed. Machin’s objectification is complete as, upon signing, he observes, ‘Weaver shook my hand softly and looked right into my eye with a kid’s delight at a new toy’ (57). This objectification is consolidated when Weaver, whose name paradoxically suggests both dodging and bringing together, and in West Yorkshire (where the novel is set) perhaps gives an indication of the origin of his family’s wealth, drives Machin home. Machin observes, ‘I could feel him polishing me and putting me on the shelf as his latest exhibit’ before Weaver explicitly states that Machin is now ‘property of the City’ (60). Throughout the text Machin is both fetishized and emasculated. Fetishized as he is represented as the exotic, or dangerous, ‘other’ within the interclass and intergender relationships that are constructed within the text. The women Machin meets call him ‘Tarzan’ (131), he is ‘the big ape [. . .] known and feared for his strength’ (163). His emasculation through infantilization at the ‘Children’s

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Dental Centre’, a trope which is further developed in the text (Machin repeatedly refers to Johnson, the scout who vouches for him, as ‘Dad’ for example), is emphasized during the negotiations for Machin’s signing-on fee. There, Machin is repeatedly referred to as ‘lad’ and specific mention is made of the fact that he has not played since leaving school (51). Further reference is made to the fact that Machin is unmarried, and has ‘no legal ties with anyone – home or anything’ (51). This serves to undermine his relationship with Mrs Hammond and the responsibility he feels toward her children, and strips Machin of the breadwinner status which is central to contemporary configurations of traditional workingclass masculinity. A key figure in both the fetishization and emasculation of Machin is Weaver. Weaver’s assertion that Machin is ‘property of the City’ (60) is significant, as it makes explicit the fact that Machin has been bought, and now belongs to the club. Further, it suggests that Machin belongs to the city as a whole, that he is somehow tied to the place (both geographic and social) of his birth. This duality is emphasized by the description of Eric Hammond’s death at Weaver’s factory which immediately follows. Thus, at the moment Weaver makes the assertion, he is framed as both influential committee member, and industrialist, establishing a connection between Machin as player and Machin as factory worker. Both player (Machin), and worker (in this instance Eric) are dehumanized and commodified, as their worth is reduced to a monetary transaction. For Machin it is the five hundred pound signing-on fee, for Eric the fact that Weaver’s abiding memory of the incident is that the firm did not pay Mrs Hammond compensation. The difference between the individualist social climber, and the traditional – though absent – paternal working-class figure, is marked. Eric is killed by his work and is ultimately worth nothing. Machin inherits his position within the house and is worth five hundred pounds. There are elements of the bourgeois ‘ladder model’ of escape from the working class within the text: each man, through his own application, industry and hard work can potentially climb out of his working-class origins. Although as Williams observes, the ladder ‘is a device which can only be used individually: you go up the ladder alone’ (1983: 331). With his increased economic capital, and his position as local celebrity and sporting hero, Machin is climbing the social ladder. His attachment to place and refusal to move from Mrs Hammond’s small terraced house emphasize his increased power as consumer, but isolate him as an individual and leave both him, and Mrs Hammond, open to what Richard Hoggart described in 1957 as the ‘harsher [. . .] sanctions’ (1977: 80) of the working-class community that surrounds them. As Mrs Hammond tells Machin during the heated exchange that sees her insist that he leave:

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Ultimately Machin is disillusioned with the limited social mobility he is able to achieve. This is beautifully illustrated by the events at Weaver’s Christmas Eve party, the climax of Part One of the novel. The chapter begins with a sort of enjambement in which the meaning of the previous episode (the last of Machin’s flashbacks) is carried over. The previous chapter sees Machin challenge his father, questioning ‘Where have your ideals got you?’ (112). Symbolically this is more than simply a son’s challenge to a patriarch, it is a challenge to a traditional working-class patriarchy, and a traditional working-class culture more broadly. Machin’s father repeats the question bewildered: ‘Where?’ He stared round him as if it was too obvious where his ideals had got him, where Mrs Shaw’s ideals next door had got her, and Mr Chadwick’s beyond her had got him. It was only too obvious. (112)

There follows a moment of recognition, when looking through his son’s eyes, Machin’s father sees ‘the neighbourhood without its affectations and feelings, but just as a field of broken down ambition’ (112). The chapter ends as his father: just sat there, the little man with no trousers, his head shaking from side to side in bewilderment, his face screwed up with inadequacy and self-reproach, halfblinded with tiredness and with life-fatigue. (112)

The opening of the following chapter is ambiguous, as it begins with the last of Machin’s anaesthetically induced dreams. Still feeling the effects of his dental surgery, Machin has fallen asleep in an upstairs bedroom at Weaver’s Christmas party. The chapter begins: I can see his face, creased in the darkness, racked with a pain that seems to grow steadily. Between us is a wall of pain that grows and thickens until it absorbs us both. It runs across my face in dull spasms. It wakes me. (112)

The image of the face carries over the chapter break, suggesting the face Machin sees is that of his father. Machin’s father works ‘nights on the railway’ (108), perhaps the reason the face is ‘creased in the darkness’. Significant here is the pain that both divides – the pain ‘is a wall’ – and unites – the pain ‘absorbs [them] both’. In a literal sense, this refers to the physical pain caused by their labour (Machin’s tongue is resting on the empty front sockets of the removed teeth when he comes round). However, underlying this there seems to be an emotional

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pain, common to father and son, caused by the generational dislocation. When he awakes at the party Machin finds himself locked in an upstairs bedroom, locked into the decisions he has made. Significantly he is alone and begins to ‘feel the need to get out of the room’ (113). In contrast, his father, though purportedly trapped in ‘a field of broken down ambition’ still has the community of Mr Chadwick and Mrs Shaw (112). Machin achieves his escape by climbing out of the window and slotting his elbows into the guttering. Here, both literally and metaphorically, Machin has climbed as high as he can go, and still ends up in the gutter, hanging precariously. Upon reaching the ground Machin encounters Wade, who is looking for his lost dog in the garden. Wade explicitly warns Machin of the ‘risks of ownership’ (115). This ostensibly insignificant comment about a dog is developed throughout the remainder of the text. For example when Machin publicly insults Mrs Hammond, Maurice unambiguously echoes the encounter with Wade, telling Machin, ‘She’s not a dog you’ve trained or bought [. . .] you talk as if you owned the woman’ (149). Beyond this there are numerous references to owning and buying people, as the commodification of the working class is represented through the framing of relationships in transactionary terms. The dog motif continues, as Machin finds himself back at the party with Weaver and Slomer (the two most influential and viciously opposed committee members). Upon entering the room Machin notices ‘an elaborate tapestry of a hunting scene: the dogs have just got their teeth into a small, pale animal, and it’s already dripping blood’ (117). Slomer is physically deformed, described variously as ‘thin’, ‘white’, ‘the cripple’, and ‘a prematurely aged boy’ (118–19), echoing the description of the quarry represented on the tapestry. However, Machin’s physical prowess is here redundant; in this company he is reduced to ‘the court jester, big and dumb, a centre of confidential amusement’ (119). Machin is not feared for his size and brutality here, he is observed for entertainment. His size, coupled with the adjective ‘dumb’, suggest both inferior intelligence and the lack of a voice. In this environment Slomer ‘seems to suggest his deformity is the only proper shape for a body’ (119), an illustration of a self-assured power that transcends physicality. Even Machin’s power as a consumer is taken away from him; when Slomer instructs him to ‘drink up young man’ (117) the glass in his hand is already empty. Eventually it is Slomer who gives Machin permission to leave the room, saying ‘he should be with people his own age downstairs and not with us tired old dogs’ (119), and so reversing the symbolic imagery of the tapestry: it is Machin that is the quarry, and Weaver and Slomer the dogs. In short, there is no escape for Machin. Despite his perceived social climbing, his power as a consumer

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and improved material conditions, he is variously objectified, commodified and emasculated, and though dislocated, is ultimately static. The limits of the horizon of expectation that are represented within these texts are symptomatic of the hegemonic control that pervades society. Further, the representation of the incorporation of emergent and residual cultural forms into the dominant, gendered, class structure, is reproduced in the material conditions of production that allow for the generation of this particular structure. That is to say, the perceived anger and the class-position of writers from divergent cultural positions and backgrounds ‘proved a highly saleable commodity’ (Maschler, 1959: 8). It is worth returning here to the label ‘Angry Young Men’, and considering the value of a label that incorporated writers as diverse as Kingsley Amis and Arnold Wesker. Indeed, the term ‘incorporated’ carries great significance. As Maschler’s assertion that the writers which formed this pattern were ‘rendered harmless in the A.Y.M. cage’ (7) suggests, the ‘Angry Young Men’ label became a means of commodifying a diverse range of dissenting voices, thus incorporating them into the dominant social structure. A paradox then emerges, as in a context where anger is ‘a highly saleable commodity’ (8), ‘the A.Y.M. cage’ (7) also becomes a platform from which to speak. It was that platform, and those dissenting voices, which provided the material conditions that became the foundation for the development of the Northern realism which emerged toward the end of the 1950s, which in turn produced a ‘working-class moment’ in British culture. That ‘working-class moment’ continued into the 1960s and is epitomized by figures such as The Beatles, George Best, David Bailey, Michael Caine and Terence Stamp, all of whom can be viewed as being in some way representative of the 1960s, and each of whom would acknowledge, and in some instances, celebrate their working-class origins. Each would alter the cultural field in which they operated, and all would achieve global celebrity status. The development of a broader working-class moment is evident in the correlative relationship between the success of the Northern realist novels and their New Wave cinema adaptations. As Laing notes, the Pan paperback edition of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was first published in 1960 – the same year that the Woodfall film adaptation was released – and had been reprinted thirteen times by 1964 (1986: 64–5). What emerges as the 1950s draw to a close is a pattern in which a certain kind of working-class masculinity is itself commodified. The commodification of working-class masculinity is apparent in the structural regularities of the texts discussed above. Each features a disillusioned male protagonist that bears some resemblance to their author. Sillitoe acknowledged that

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Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was the result of ‘bringing [his] experience from the Forties into the Fifties’ (Sillitoe quoted in Laing, 1986: 66). Whilst This Sporting Life was written at a time when, after signing a fourteen-year contract to play professional rugby league for Leeds, and being accepted at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, Storey spent his time travelling between the two by train, writing a novel about the alienation he was experiencing as a result (Campbell, 2004). Both are characterized by anger, ambiguity and alienation. Each epitomizes a specific type of working-class masculinity, which, whilst different, are structured upon common uncertainties of the period. Primary amongst these is the combative relationships with the opposite sex, characterized by simultaneous feelings of entrapment and isolation, and by the protagonist’s need to assert his masculinity in various, but often aggressive and oppressive ways. This in itself relates back to what Deborah Philips refers to as ‘the loss of a heroic masculinity’ (2006: 22), or as Osborne’s Jimmy Porter would have it in 1956, the lack of ‘good, brave causes’ (1973: 84) in the wake of the Second World War. Seaton and Machin are characters who are old enough to remember the war, but not old enough to have fought in it. They are old enough to remember the promises of a better, fairer England, young enough to benefit from the material gains of the consumer boom of the 1950s, but savvy enough to question what had really changed. Of course, these themes manifest in various ways across the texts, but the protagonists’ responses vary little. Both adopt a selfish individualism in order to reaffirm their masculinity. In doing so each enacts an approximation of a specific kind of traditional working-class masculinity, yet simultaneously represents an emergent cultural force generated from within this structure, whether it be Jimmy Porter and his university education, Arthur Machin’s engagement with the practices of consumption that Hoggart terms ‘shiny barbarism’ (1977: 193), or the power of Arthur Seaton’s youthfulness. Equally the pattern which is formed by the representation of these emergent masculinities, itself represents an emergent cultural form. In each case the protagonists, and often their authors, act outwith the cultural norms of the contemporary structure, resisting residual conservatism, and superficially opposing the Establishment. In each case there is an authentic attempt to present an oppositional form. However, this is undermined by the very individualism with which it is enacted, as ultimately, though dislocated, the characters remain socially static and are forced to embrace residual social positions in order to consolidate their own masculinity. Whilst in a broader context, that masculinity itself is commodified and sold, making both characters and authors, a product of their time.

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Works cited Allsop, Kenneth. The Angry Decade, London: Peter Owen Limited, 1964. Bentley, Nick. Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s, Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007. Bentley, Nick. ‘New Elizabethans’: The Representation of Youth Subcultures in 1950s British Fiction. Literature and History, 19 (1) 2010: 16–33. Brooke, Stephen. Gender and Working Class Identity in Britain During the 1950s. Journal of Social History, 34 (4) 2001: 773–95. Campbell, James. ‘A Chekhov of the North’. The Guardian 31 January 2004. Available online: http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2004/jan/31/theatre.stage (accessed 2 July 2015). Ferrebe, Alice. Masculinity in Male-Authored Fiction 1950–2000: Keeping it Up, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Haywood, Ian. Working-Class Fiction from Chartism to Trainspotting, Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers Ltd., 1997. Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy, 1957. London: Penguin, 1977. Hopkins, Eric. The Rise and Decline of the English Working Classes 1918–1990, London: George Weidenfeld & Nicholson Ltd, 1991. Hutchings, William. ‘The Work of Play: Anger and the Expropriated Athletes of Alan Sillitoe and David Storey’. Modern Fiction Studies, 33 (1) 1987: 35–47. James, David. Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space. London: Continuum, 2008. Kalliney, P. J. ‘Cities of Affluence: Masculinity, Class, and The Angry Young Men’. Modern Fiction Studies, 47 (1) 2001: 92–117. Kroll, Morton. ‘The Politics of Britain’s Angry Young Men’. The Western Political Quarterly, 12 (2) 1959: 555–7. Laing, Stuart. ‘Room at the Top: The Morality of Affluence’. Popular Fiction and Social Change, edited by Pawling, C. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984. Laing, Stuart. Representations of Working-Class Life 1957–1964, London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd, 1986. Langhamer, Claire. ‘The Meanings of Home in Postwar Britain’. Journal of Contemporary History, 40 (2) 2005: 341–62. Mansfield, Jane. ‘The Brute-Hero: The 1950s and Echoes of the North’. Literature and History, 19 (1) 2010: 34–49. Maschler, Tom, ed. Declaration. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1959. Messner, Michael. A. Power at Play: Sports and the Problem of Masculinity, Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. Osborne, John. Look Back in Anger, 1957. London: Faber and Faber, 1973. Philips, Deborah. Women’s Fiction 1945–2005: Writing Romance. London: Continuum, 2006. Sillitoe, Alan. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. 1958. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1961. Storey, David. This Sporting Life. 1960. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1963.

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Tomlinson, Alan. ‘David Storey’s & Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life: Reflections on the Aestheticisation of the Sporting Body’. Diegesis: Journal of the Association for Research in Popular Fictions, Summer (4) 1999: 6–13. Whannel, Garry. Media Sport Stars: Masculinities and Moralities, London: Routledge, 2002. Williams, Raymond. ([1961] 1965), The Long Revolution, London: Pelican. Williams, Raymond. ([1973] 1975), The Country and the City, London: Paladin. Williams, Raymond. (1977), Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, Raymond. ([1958] 1983), Culture & Society: 1780–1950, New York: Columbia University Press. Williams, Raymond and Michael Orrom. Preface to Film, London: Film Drama, 1954.

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‘Mere bird-watching indeed’: Feminist Anthropology and 1950s Female Fiction Alice Ferrebe

British fiction of the 1950s is regularly characterized to be profoundly sociological. This categorization signifies that prominent writing from the decade is closely engaged with issues around class and class mobility, and that its structure and form are governed by a belief in the intrinsic ability of the novel realistically to represent social realities. Under these terms, a familiar canon has been defined to bookend the decade, including Scenes of Provincial Life (1950), Room at the Top (1957), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), This Sporting Life (1960), and A Kind of Loving (1960), and indebted to Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy (1957) as an epoch-defining work of (notably literary) sociology. If sociology takes society as its focus, anthropology is the analysis of that society’s culture. The Mass Observation project, which from 1937 had rallied volunteers to observe and record their own lives to produce a collaborative ‘anthropology of ourselves’, had changed hands in 1949, and its research thereafter tended to be carried out by market research and polling companies (Highmore 2000: 79). Nonetheless, postwar British culture retained a certain taste for the anthropological perspective, as populist practitioners like Keith Waterhouse and Colin MacInnes exploited an exoticizing tone in their forays into the unfamiliar territories of, for example, youth and immigrant culture. As Empire, the ‘traditional laboratory of the discipline’ of anthropology, continued its precipitous collapse, local field trips seemed expedient, and the vertiginous pace of cultural change in the 1950s filled them with novel observational data (Kuper 1985: 168). The decade’s canon of fiction traced above is, of course, exclusively male in its authorship, and, as I have explored elsewhere, profoundly masculine in its concerns (Ferrebe: 2005). ‘What’s Gone Wrong With Women?’ yelled John Osborne in the Daily Mail in 1956, and if his article reveals anything beyond the misogyny that underpinned the Angry stance of its most celebrated progenitor, it 81

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is an intense anxiety over the overbearing and conflicting symbolism of the feminine in 1950s culture: ‘we are becoming dominated by female values, by the characteristic female indifference to anything but immediate, personal suffering’, Osborne petulantly claimed (1994: 256). Stephanie Spencer notes ‘the uneasy relationship between individual women and the powerful construction of “Woman” in the immediate postwar period’ (2005: 2); a construction at the nexus of national reconstruction, mass culture and consumerism. From 1947 to 1951 a group of professional women met to consider the whole cultural apparatus of gender in British culture, including the positioning of women in the economy, the workplace and the home, and their representation across a variety of media and texts. ‘Is there a feminine point of view distinguishable in literature?’ they asked, Are women writers even to-day, when they write so much, influenced by a masculine pattern and masculine preferences? These questions might be discussed in sixth form classes with great advantage to the budding writer. Our literature and our social idea would gain enormously if we had more women writers with the confidence and originality to force their readers to open their eyes on a new picture of life – its values, joys, sorrows and sensations as they are experienced in the lives of women. (Campbell 1952: 43)

Though the Mass Observation archive has proven an opulent source for historians of women’s history, little attention has so far been paid to the influence of anthropological approaches on female-authored fiction of the 1950s, and its potential to yield this ‘new picture of life’. It is a decade routinely understood as a trough of effective feminist activity. Yet anthropology’s defining strategies, that calibrate the influences of nature and culture, pragmatic effects and symbolic significances, hold clear affinities with the work of the feminist Wave that is to swell during the 1960s. We might at this point speculate as to how its methodologies are pertinent to a decade fraught, in Marjorie Ferguson’s analysis, with tensions between ‘individual and group norms, between traditional and emergent female roles’ (Ferguson 1983: 77). In 1956, the same year as the opening of Osborne’s seminal play Look Back in Anger, anthropologist Audrey Richards published Chisungu: A Girl’s Initiation Ceremony Among the Bemba of Zambia. Her analysis of a rite witnessed during a 1931 field trip broke ground not just in its focus upon an exclusively female cultural practice, but also in its attempt to relate the symbolism of ritual to the structure of society, and in its focus upon the importance of symbolism within kinship roles. Though influenced by the work of her mentor Bronislaw Malinowski, Richards’ text notably initiates a new and self-reflexive technique that blends both

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functionalist and structuralist methodologies. Edwin Arderner who, with his wife Shirley, was later to develop the ‘muted-group theory’ so inspirational to feminist scholar Elaine Showalter, cited Richards’ book in his 1976 ‘Belief and the Problem of Women’ as one that ‘raised and anticipated many of the problems with which this paper will deal’ (1). In the discipline of anthropology, he claimed, with rare exceptions like Richards, ‘women anthropologists, of whom so much was hoped, have been among the first to retire from the problem’ (1), so that the ‘study of women is on a level little higher than the study of the ducks and fowls they commonly own – a mere bird-watching indeed’ (1–2). This chapter will assert that at least some of these missing ‘women anthropologists’ might be found, in the 1950s at least, in the field of fiction, with key disciplinary questions around culture, category and observation influencing and animating their styles and subject matter in previously unrecognized ways. The Arderners knew at least one fiction writer, Barbara Pym, well – Edwin’s Coastal Bantu of the Cameroons was first published in 1956 by the International African Institute, where Pym worked, and the editor’s introduction thanks Pym on Arderner’s behalf ‘for her help during the final editing of the manuscript’ (vi). Hazel Holt, Pym’s biographer, identifies a distinct mode of practice in Pym’s work, noting how, even when her novels fell out of publication, her ‘natural curiosity, her detective work, her “research into the lives of ordinary people” continued, to become (especially in her notebooks) what the keeping of field notes is to an anthropologist’ (Pym, 1984: xv). It is Pym’s third novel, the 1955 Less Than Angels which offers, in Muriel Schulz’s words, an ‘anthropology of anthropologists’ (1987: 113). It opens with an extraordinary paragraph in which the observations of Catherine Oliphant, a young(ish) writer herself, meld the inappropriately ornate décor of a drab London counter-café (peacock mosaics, no less) with the Byzantine interior of an Italian church, concluding from its denizens’ indifference that ‘the cult of peacock worship, if it had ever existed, had fallen into disuse’ (Pym 2012: 1). Immediately, Pym has established a foundational principle for her novel. Home, the passage emphasizes, is a site of anthropological significance, and one which can be transfigured by a combination of careful observation and creativity. The cult of peacock worship parodies what Michael Cots identifies as the ‘structuring principle’ of the novel – the character Tom Mallow (1989: 66). Such central maleness is atypical in Pym’s oeuvre (though Tom’s predominantly absent presence, prefigured by the café customers’ obliviousness to the peacock’s masculine magnificence, undermines it). Yet this is an unusual Pymian novel in other ways too; the assigning of a merely marginal role to the Church, and the fact that, in Robert Liddell’s words, it is so ‘nearly a love-story’, for example (1989: 59).

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The critical focus of its ‘anthropology of anthropologists’ alights upon the discipline’s dominance by masculine principles, including the ruthless imposition of pre-ascribed categories of knowledge. Later in the novel anthropologist Alaric Lydgate hurries to point out ‘that his notes dealt almost entirely with religion and material culture and would therefore be of very little use to anyone writing a thesis on social and political structure’: as far as he is concerned, never the twain of social and political structures shall meet (Pym 2012: 88). Catherine, meanwhile, is doing more than mere bird-watching of that peacock: her humorous yet serious comparisons between counter-café and church refute those boundaries between religious and material culture, just as they uphold the everyday as a site of potential transcendence. The novel’s construction of a devotional cult around Tom is a prescient parody of what Susan Sontag was later to identify in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s professional practice as the role of ‘the anthropologist as hero’ (Sontag, 1994). Needless to say, this role is gendered. Tom Harrisson shamelessly sold the Mass Observation project he co-founded as an opportunity for exotic adventures, in which the ‘wilds of Lancashire or the mysteries of the East End’ were promoted as being ‘as little explored as the cannibal interior of the New Hebrides, or the head-hunter hinterland of Borneo’ (Highmore, 2000: 79). In the anthropological community surrounding Pym’s fictional Institute, professional heroism can be acquired by only one route – being ‘in the field’ (and a necessarily foreign field at that) (Pym 2012: 16). The shared recognition of the glamour achieved by (international) fieldwork is one of the bonds across the generational divide between an older generation of colonial amateurs (like Alaric Lydgate) and the young, professionalized social scientists (like Tom Mallow). James Buzard has identified in ethnographic process ‘a narrative pattern of entrance (close association of culture and place) and withdrawal (dissociation of culture and place) – a pattern plainly amenable to masculinist romance’ (Buzard 2005: 27). It is amenable, of course, to imperial romance too. Catherine’s professional practice (aside from her amateur, instinctive anthropological work) also involves the fostering of romantic glamour. Her income depends upon women’s magazines, a medium recognized as a site of the intense cultural production of gender: ‘These journals [. . .] are about femininity itself, as a state, a condition, a craft and an art form which comprise a set of practices and beliefs’ (Ferguson 1983: 1). In the course of the narrative we witness her progress on, amongst others, ‘The Rose Garden’, a love story, and an article on how to give an ‘ “in-expensive” cocktail party’ (Pym 2012: 21–2, 240). Pym makes, within Catherine’s experience, a direct connection between domesticity and romance

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writing, telling us that Catherine ‘loved housework when she felt in the mood for it and was often inspired with ideas for romantic fiction when shaking the mop out of the window or polishing a table’ (22). Acting the housewife, it is suggested, makes Catherine able to write for housewives. Nonetheless, this is acting. By 1966, in The Captive Wife: Conflicts of Housebound Mothers, Hannah Gavron is asserting that: the ‘problem’ of women represents a network of conflicting roles which interact with each other, thereby aggravating the situation. At the centre of the network is ‘Woman’ about whose capabilities and responsibilities, conceptions and norms have radically altered in the last sixty years. (142).

During the 1950s, the artificiality of that figure of ‘Woman’ was already apparent to all those able to recognize the conflicts inherent in the competing roles so vehemently promoted by the likes of Woman and Woman’s Own – radiant housewife, efficient household manager, canny consumer and beatific mother among them. Catherine is well aware of her tendency to fall into a ‘woman’s magazine tone’ in feminine moments, as when counselling Deidre Swan on how to keep herself occupied in Tom’s absence: ‘learn a foreign language in the long winter evenings’ (Pym 2012: 175), she tells her with studied gaiety. Acting (and writing) feminine is lucrative for Catherine, and can be fun, but the act of transformation that it involves is one of concealment rather than revelation. Pym discloses at the very beginning of the novel that her writer-heroine must ‘draw her inspiration from everyday life, though life itself was sometimes too strong and raw and must be made palatable by fancy, as tough meat may be made tender by mincing’ (1–2). Bertolt Brecht’s condemnation of ‘culinary’ theatre – the easy consumption it facilitates, and its negation of the possibility of social critique – is brought to mind (Willett, 1964: 214). Later in the novel, a description of Catherine’s actual (rather than metaphorical) mincing machine suggests a more complex figuring of female creativity: [H]er mincing machine, which was called ‘Beatrice’ [was] a strangely gentle and gracious name for the fierce little iron contraption whose strong teeth so ruthlessly pounded up meat and gristle. It always reminded Catherine of an African god with its square head and little short arms, and it was not at all unlike some of the crudely carved images with evil expressions and aggressively pointed breasts which Tom had brought back from Africa. (Pym 2012: 23)

This dense passage melds imagery of household industry and economy with Western Romance (is this Dante’s ‘Beatrice’?) and an imposing African aesthetic: it symbolises a domestic, visceral process of artistic transformation, and enacts

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this transformation through its anthropologizing of the feminine everyday from a perspective located both within and beyond it. We are regularly alerted to the fact that Catherine is unable quite to ‘do’ domesticity (and thus femininity) correctly. Digby Fox and Mark Penfold, young anthropologists in the making, are horrified to find Catherine doing housework in the evening: ‘People [by which they mean, of course, women] usually do that kind of thing in the mornings [. . .]. I don’t know what my mother would say’ (22). Catherine can observe how her sloppy footwear mars her outfit for the in-expensive cocktail party she is throwing to celebrate Tom’s return – lapsing again into her ‘bright magazine style’ she registers the inappropriateness of ‘(oh dear!) those shabby blue espadrilles bought in the market in Périgueux on a fine June morning’ (65). A token from an intensely felt (and foreign) experience is out of place in a domestic performance of femininity. ‘Someone is always looking at you’, warned an advertisement for cosmetics in a 1956 edition of Woman magazine, ‘Your beauty can never take time off ’ (58). Catherine’s self-surveillance anticipates John Berger’s analysis of female experience: ‘From earliest childhood,’ he claimed of Woman in Ways of Seeing, ‘she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman’ (Berger 1972: 46). In executing the vigilance necessary to maintain an acceptable performance of femininity, women are forced to occupy a space that is both within and without their lives and their culture. Tom, it is emphasized, has become ‘detribalized’ (Pym 2012: 162, 165, 188): after so much time away from home, he too observes his native culture and its ritualized debutante dances and flower shows from the outside, as if they were part of the African community that he favours for study. He regards his personal life in the same way. Catherine, he notes, is ‘without kinship ties’, which allows him to take her up and drop her ‘without the likelihood of awkward repercussions’ (142). When she is finally dropped (in order that Tom can involve himself with Deidre Swan), kinless Catherine is painfully aware of a lack of female support and consolation, for after a long relationship with an anthropologist, she seems ‘to know more men than women’ (155). She stands outside the feminine tribe, and because of this, she stands outside domesticity as it is currently culturally figured (in the gathering mass of women’s magazines which her work, ironically, augments). When Tom is killed in Africa, ‘accidentally shot in a political riot, in which he had become involved more out of curiosity than passionate conviction’ (238), Deidre’s family ask Catherine ‘to stay with them for a little while and she thought that she might enjoy it, entering into the comfortable kind of life which

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she had only seen from the outside’ (248). And she does enjoy, temporarily, the Swan’s careful observation of the routines of suburban life, before informing them with characteristic dryness that she must get back to her ‘own squalor’ (255). Catherine, it seems, is an instinctive anthropologist of the everyday. Tom, the professional, feels the lack of her expertise when visiting his childhood home, as he imagines ‘how Catherine would have enjoyed it, her bright eyes darting here and there, missing no detail’ (183). She shares with Malinowski that ‘intense interest and suspense with which an Ethnographer enters for the first time the district that is to be the future scene of his field-work’; she is perpetually ‘on the lookout for symptoms of deeper, sociological facts’, suspecting ‘many hidden and mysterious ethnographic phenomena behind the commonplace aspect of things’ (Malinowski 2014: 55). For Catherine, as for Pym, this interest is engendered by her own national environment, rather than unfamiliar foreign cultures. Deidre is studying for a degree in Tom’s subject, though ‘she did not always quite understand what she was doing and was beginning to wonder if it had been a mistake to embark on the study of anthropology rather than history or English literature’ (Pym 2012: 8). Catherine, who despite her instinctual anthropological practice had felt acutely ‘the general uselessness of women if they cannot understand or reverence a man’s work, or even if they can’ when she was with Tom (103), is very certain about the purpose of Deidre’s education. Lapsing again into ‘her woman’s magazine tone’, she brightly encourages the younger woman: ‘you’ll have your anthropological studies, just think how useful they’ll be to Tom’ (175). For the members of the ‘Feminine Point of View’ Conference, the education of girls – the inequity and limitations of a ‘feminine’ curriculum – forms a particular focus, and is identified as interfering with the conception of a more diverse range of heterosexual partnerships and of careers for women: the ‘conventional marriage pattern is based on the stereotyped ideal of women [. . .], an ideal which is both cramping and unrealistic’ (Campbell 1952: 55). Tom’s death robs Deidre of a ‘career’ as his wife. The life of his jilted childhood sweetheart, Elaine, has been left in stasis (and doggy spinsterhood) for much the same reason. The Conference concludes that the ‘new picture of life’ they seek in a female-authored, female-focused literature is there to be found in the work of Virginia Woolf and Mary Webb (Campbell 1952: 43). To this list we might reasonably add Jane Austen, a novelist to whom Pym is compulsively compared by reviewers. In the strangest moment in the off-beat Less Than Angels, Elaine is denied potentially reviving insight because, as she is ‘not much of a reader’, she has no access to Anne Elliott’s poignant and angry words in Persuasion. Pym goes on to quote them anyway:

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Less Than Angels does not end in marriage: in fact, there are no marriages functioning in it at all. In the final paragraph, Catherine is left busily burning Alaric Lydgate’s traditional anthropological trophies – his masks and shields – to liberate him into a less masked and shielded life, potentially in a relationship with her (‘what a difficult and peculiar couple they would make’, concludes Deidre’s well-domesticated aunt Rhoda, 262). Deidre’s future (and her future education) Pym leaves in the balance. Yet we already know that Deidre herself, though bored and bemused by the canonical (masculine, colonial) anthropological textbooks and field trip accounts, shows, like Catherine, a propensity for a domestic, femaleauthored anthropology. Arjun Appadurai has observed how, in imperial discourse, native inhabitants were positioned as ‘incarcerated’ in their culture, while Western explorers, administrators, missionaries and eventually anthropologists were ‘regarded as quintessentially mobile . . .[,] are the movers, the seers, the knowers’ (1988: 37). When Tom walks Deidre home, the couple hear the sound of a cello drifting through the warm night air. Deidre explains: ‘That’s Miss Cumberledge [. . .] She plays in an orchestra and you often hear her practising.’ They stood for a few moments listening, looking up at the sky and the television aerials silhouetted against it. ‘Almost beautiful, aren’t they,’ said Tom, pointing to them. ‘A symbol of the age we live in.’ ‘So is Mrs Lovell putting out the breakfast cereals,’ said Deirdre as they passed her neighbour’s house. They could see her through the uncurtained window, laying the table, placing coloured plastic mugs on it and in the baby’s high chair, and taking giant packets of cornflakes from the sideboard. (Pym 2012: 153–4)

Though it is Tom’s first visit to suburbia, he is undaunted by the environment’s utter unfamiliarity. A mover, a seer and a knower, he immediately imposes a (phallic) symbol of contemporary life – the aerials are his metaphor for (mass media) society. But then, countering Tom’s ingrained professional impulse towards overweening public structures, Deidre draws our eye downwards to the domestic – to the prosaic rituals of family life (equally ‘modern’, with their plastic

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cups and breakfast cereals), and a woman’s role within them. In his exploration of the absence of women from traditional ethnography, Edwin Ardener invoked what he called the ‘Hot Stove’ argument; that ‘women through concern with the realities of childbirth and child-rearing have less time for or less propensity towards the making of models of society, for each other, for men, or for ethnographers’ (1975: 3). ‘[A]ll such ways of bounding society against society, including our own’, he concluded, ‘may have an inherent maleness’ (6). Pym’s sentence structure leaves ambiguity as to whether Deidre is claiming Mrs Lovell’s quiet preparations as a ‘symbol of [or model for] the age we live in’, but the tableau she creates as she observes the life in which she participates exceeds the ‘almost beautiful’ in its thick description of an everyday experience. As the widespread anxiety about the education of girls attests, women of the 1950s did not necessarily feel themselves to be well schooled for contemporary life. Yet one intensely educative experience is that tension between ‘individual and group norms, between traditional and emergent female roles’ identified by Ferguson, to which she adds a gulf between ‘what women’s magazines were saying and what women of many different kinds were doing’ (Ferguson 1983: 77). Catherine’s economic independence is predicated upon her ‘magazine voice’ and thus her ability to observe, and reproduce, the contemporary, profoundly traditionalist, 1950s feminine orthodoxies, fully aware in so doing of their arbitrary and constructed nature. Tom is taken aback at the idea of a male editor of one of her women’s magazines: she, cognizant of the dissonance between those magazines and her own experience, responds lightly: ‘Men do know something about women or at least like to form their tastes for them’ (Pym 2012: 128). As we have observed, Catherine’s detribalization maintains her in the position of an (albeit rather gloriously bohemian) outsider to her culture. Kuper notes how, ‘After Malinowski, the anthropologists based their methods upon participant observation, which required intimate and free contact with the peoples they studied’ (1985: 120). Deidre, a native of her suburban field, and a member (though a disorientated one) of the anthropological academy, has the power to refine Catherine’s lonely work further, and to revoke Tom’s habitualized method of superior detachment, the undesirability of which is underlined by his death ‘as a spectator’ rather than an engaged participant (Liddell 1989: 63). Professor Mainwaring, addressing the group of junior anthropologists (two male, two female) who are jockeying for Institutional field trip funding, concludes a discussion of anthropological celibacy in the field by quoting Alexander Pope – ‘And little less than angel, would be more’. ‘[H]is argument is not altogether appropriate here,’ he glosses, before swiftly moving on (Pym 2012: 210). It is not,

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for rather than a benign recognition of human failing, Pope’s ‘An Essay on Man’ argues that Man (and specifically he) is overreaching, presumptive and destructive. George W. Stocking’s survey of British social anthropology characterizes Bronislaw Malinowski’s approach to the ‘natives’ as one of ‘ “gentle irony” – a literary mode characteristic of much of modern ethnography’, and of Pym’s writing too (1999: 272). Deidre’s mousey brother, Malcolm, spends most of his evenings at a local club, where young men lurk with mixed feelings about young women: ‘Perhaps,’ Pym ironizes gently, ‘they intimidated the men. Certainly they often led them captive into marriage’ (Pym 2012: 34). Yet beneath the humour generated by this cultural relativity lie darker social implications. Malcolm’s and Deidre’s aunt Rhoda is eagerly awaiting the next instalment in another narrative of capture: ‘There had been a nasty murder, or series of murders; bodies of women had been discovered in a house in a not very nice part of London, and Rhoda, in common with a great many people in all walks of life, was anxious to read about the latest developments’ (31). This is based, we can suppose, upon the much publicized case of John Christie. He had been hanged in 1953 for the murder of at least eight women, including his wife. For all the rueful pseudosubservience of Malcolm’s clubmates, female dominance of the domestic environment, Pym reminds us, is a tenuous one. Rhoda’s lurid imagination, ‘educated’ by magazines and their crude pictures, extends, Catherine intuits, to Africa, as she imagines the other woman’s response to Tom’s death: Catherine saw past Rhoda’s shocked face into her thoughts, the shouting mob of black bodies brandishing spears, or the sly arrow, tipped with poison for which there was no known antidote, fired from an overhanging jungle tree. (243)

Michael Cots notes of the novel’s interplay between African and British culture that it is ‘partly comic, but it is also handled to suggest cruel and disturbing forces’ at work at home (1989: 67). These forces Pym casts as gendered as well as racial. A similarly dark comic technique is used by Muriel Spark in the 1958 story ‘The Black Madonna’. The collection in which it appears, The Go-Away Bird, moves between African and British settings with an ethnographic intent comparable with Pym’s. ‘The Black Madonna’, set in Whitney Clay, locates its exoticism in the northern new town’s novelty of geometric urban patterns designed by the Town Planning Committee. The compulsive deference of its cultural processes of environmental naming are held up for inspection too. Raymond and Lou Parker live in flat twenty-two on the fifth floor of Cripps House, named after the late Sir

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Stafford Cripps, who laid its foundation stone; Cripps House lies on Manders Road, ‘named after one of the founders of the canning concern, Manders’ Figs in Syrup’ (Spark 1958: 3). Raymond is employed at the town’s motor works; Lou had ‘been a nurse before her marriage’ (5). The pair have a car, no television (by choice), and a diverse social circle within the town, and their cultural activities, voting patterns, religious observances and reading matter (including The Observer, The Catholic Herald, and Woman’s Own) are all meticulously observed. They are the only childless couple amongst the four other Catholic households and twentyfive total families living in the ‘civic chambers’ of the Council’s block (5): their many siblings all have at least three children each. The story begins with the ritual installation of its eponymous figure, which has been carved contemporaneously out of Irish bog oak. The Black Madonna functions as a devotional symbol both of the Virgin herself, and of the postwar investment in the role of public, contemporary art in rebuilding Britain – people come to Whitney Clay from London ‘as if to a museum, to see the line of the Black Madonna which must not be spoiled by vestments’, despite the regular congregation’s opinion that she could do with dressing up a bit (2). After fifteen years of marriage, Raymond and Lou’s worries about childlessness have settled to a lingering pain and a regular stipend sent to ‘Poor Elizabeth’, Lou’s widowed sister, towards the rearing of her eight children in Bethnal Green (10). Lou gave up her career upon marriage at the age of twenty-two. She fills her life with constant civic and social activity: the Mothers’ Union is ‘the only group she did not qualify for’ (5). The couple adopt Henry Pierce, a Jamaican working with Raymond, as a surrogate son, taking him on holiday to London. In time, the Madonna answers their prayers, both to restore Henry to the Faith, and to remove his less docile and poetic compatriot Oxford St. John to a job in Manchester (alone with Lou, Oxford once refers ‘to that question of being black all over, which made Lou very uncomfortable’, 13–14). These manifestations of grace, plus reports in the parish magazine ‘pertaining to childless couples’, lead them to decide ‘to put in for a baby to the Black Madonna’ (16). The echo of an institutional transaction is not, we can assume by Spark’s strictly observed phraseological precision, accidental. The Parkers have put in the devotional duty, and they feel entitled to a reward. Hannah Gavron notes that ‘the opinion is widely held, that to remain childless is for a woman to offend against her basic nature, and thus to do herself harm’ (1966: 125). ‘I don’t see why I shouldn’t have a baby’, Lou says (Spark 1958: 17) and in the negative cast of her expectant statement Spark suggests the sanctified maternal instinct is (like Whitney Clay itself) a civic, cultural construct.

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Spark’s characteristically mobile narrative perspective includes the occasional, ruthlessly detached observation of her central couples’ prejudices – as when, for example, ‘Raymond noticed what he thought erroneously to be a box of contraceptives’ next to Elizabeth’s bed (12). Yet more generally, having established Raymond and Lou’s political and moral perspectives to be class-based and, as such, contingent, she insinuates her critique by couching Lou’s escalating hypocrisy in middle-class, third-person, free-indirect discourse. Lou, as she emphasizes herself and is echoed by the narrator, is ‘not a snob, only sensible’ (5). Yet when Henry uses the phrase ‘slum mentality’ in relation to Elizabeth, Lou snaps at him, ‘thinking wildly, what a cheek him talking like a snob. At least Elizabeth’s white’ (13). The promiscuous Oxford she considers ‘common’, yet she cannot complain directly about his presence, for ‘Raymond despised snobbery, and so did she’ (14). Lou conceives and delivers a healthy daughter, who is black. She rejects her baby outright, citing a purportedly biological dogmatism that overrides the maternal – race: ‘ “I can’t go against my nature”, said Lou’ (24). Raymond demands that Oxford is tested, but his blood does not match the baby’s. Henry reappears at the hospital, wanting to say goodbye before embarking home to Jamaica, and Lou throws him out. No test of his blood is requested or undertaken. The baby is put up for adoption, and the story ends on a final division between absolute certainties and cultural values – the priest, Lou says, said her daughter’s removal was the right thing, though ‘not a good thing’ (27). The story is not without the possibility of mercy. Lou’s compulsive observance of middle-class mores, her intoned denial of her snobbery and racism despite evidence to the contrary, we can intuit to be motivated by the ‘hopeless childhood in Liverpool’ of which we receive but a glimpse (10). That dirty, ‘grey-white’ early experience, scrubbed away by the job the nuns got for her to train as a nurse, surfaces in the doctor’s tenuous suggestion to Raymond that the origins of their black baby daughter may lie generations back, in ‘black blood in your family or your wife’s’ (23). Lou’s sister Elizabeth, deprived of their financial support since Lou conceived, is delighted to invoke ‘a nigro off a ship’ as the possibility of a tainted inheritance visiting in retribution: ‘well thats funny you have a coloured God is not asleep’, adding ‘your hubby must think it was that nigro you was showing off ’ (24–5). Encouraged into anthropological observation by the text’s explicit acts of ethnography, we can position Spark’s story as profoundly feminist in its study of a woman emotionally and morally debilitated by a culture that refuses her right to an identity which is not grounded in motherhood. But, in deference to the ambiguity that defines Spark’s fiction, we can also read the baby (Dawn – a name

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Lou chooses before the birth) as symbolic of a divine test, and one that is failed by Lou, as her maternity is made unholy by her refusal to submit to suffering or sacrifice.

Kinship and village life Adam Kuper’s genealogy of British anthropology reads the early 1950s as dominated by the so-called ‘Manchester School’, founded by Max Gluckman at the University of Manchester, and notes that ‘[v]irtually all the monographs on Central African rural societies which members of the school produced concentrated on village structure, and analysed the processes of conflict and conflict-resolution inherent in the structure of the community’ (1985: 151). A Mancunian herself, Marghanita Laski produced a 1952 novel in just this mode, though her study is focused on a community, Priory Dean, just ‘twenty miles away’ from London (149). Her writing is furnished with thick description of housing, clothing and social behaviour that attend beadily to the suffocating nuances of class. On her retirement, Miss Moody, the draper, scandalously crosses the village’s foundational social divide between the Priory Hill people (the ‘gentry’) and the low-lying Station Road people (‘tradespeople’), by purchasing the loftily located Fernlea. When Miss Porteous, ‘the cultural leader of Priory Dean society’ (50), infiltrates the house, she is shocked to discover that: The walls had been distempered a nice warm cream; the curtains at the casement windows were of that charming mock crossstitch mock-Jacobean linen, and the furniture, instead of being the tightly stuffed elaborately veneered walnut that most of the tradespeople bought, consisted of what [she] immediately sized up as A Few Good Pieces. (135)

Despite this surprisingly seemly defection, as the Second World War ends, the village remains a site of class warfare, with its battles pitched between gentry and tradespeople, and also between country life and an encroaching urbanity. In postwar British social anthropology, the frequent debates around village and kinship structure might be characterized by the conflict of narratives of structural-functional stability, and a sense of culture and kinship (under the burgeoning influence of Claude Lévi-Strauss) as a more fluid ‘language’ of exchange. We might feasibly align this with a confrontation I have traced elsewhere within 1950s feminism. In it, the First Wave antagonism towards the patriarchal legal and social structures that bore its brunt (and cracked

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beneath it) coalesces with a shifting attention towards a wider, textual framework of representation, as Second Wave thinking begins to swell (Ferrebe 2010). In The Village, Laski’s writing works to conceptualize the relationship between environmental detail and the wider influence of village structure, conflict and cultural change in an explicitly ethnographic way. An anthropological study (fictional or otherwise) of village life therefore has marked potential in terms of exploring ideas around cultural relativity, diachronic change and the dynamism of social behaviours – as such, it offers an enticing field for those concerned with the role (and class) of women in society. Laski’s The Village is a study of kinship relations. The novel’s central narrative focuses upon a battle between endogamy and exogamy, and the pressures brought to bear upon young Margaret Trevor and Roy Wilson, from Priory Hill and Station Road respectively. Yet barring that central (romance) narrative, it is predominantly a novel about the relationships between women. It opens the ‘night the war ended’, as Wendy Trevor and Edith Wilson, the mothers of the controversial couple-to-be, decide to make a last Watch, because, they believe of the Germans, it ‘would be just like them to have a last raid, just for spite’ (11, 13). Through this exercise, redundant in a practical sense, Laski begins with a utopian vision of how female relationships might operate across classes in the light of shared female experiences. Wendy confesses that she lost a baby whilst living in Kenya – Edith, holding her, acknowledges the same loss, and then: She sat down beside Wendy, and again the two women sipped their tea, talking now in soft relaxed voices of the children when young, of their husbands, their parents, remembering the little things that had made up their lives, made them what they were. Neither had ever talked like this to anyone before and never would again. (27)

Yet beyond this night and its collaborative creation of a female culture, the novel characterizes the relationships between women as sites of the most stringent policing of ossified difference. When Mr Trevor passes Mr Wilson in the midst of the scandal of hypergamy, they share ‘a glance that agreed that there it was, a rare old mess and none of their doing but that talking about it was the women’s business, not theirs’ (248). The novel’s feminist work is most apparent in its exploration of the kinship and class relationships between women in relation to issues around housework. The postwar establishment of the Welfare State made this mode of labour into a political issue, in response to the Beveridge Report’s demand for the ‘Recognition of housewives as a distinct insurance class of occupied persons with benefits

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adjusted to their special needs’ (Beveridge 1997: Section 30, paragraphs 107–17, n.p.). The 1951 General Election, which restored Churchill as Prime Minister, fielded an unprecedented number of female candidates (though the victorious Conservatives furnished the fewest), and was dubbed the ‘Housewives’ Election’. Bernard Shaw, supporting a Labour woman candidate, drew a direct link between (a ubiquitous female) housewifery and political savvy: ‘Women who all have to manage homes and rear children are practical and know where the shoe pinches’ (quoted Adam 2011: 230). One place the pinch was felt postwar (for the middleclass woman at least) was in relation to the availability, affordability and desirability of servants – a topic through which Laski, with her sharp anthropological eye, exploits the intersectionality of the personal, the political and the Political that will be so crucial to feminist thinking of the following decades. Edith Wilson used to ‘do’ for the Trevor household in its more affluent times. Wendy Trevor, her upper-middle-class family struggling desperately for money, now does her own housework ‘incompetently and with a very bad grace’: To have sat down every week and polished the silver, to have read the recipebooks and produced appetising meals for her family would have meant, to her, willing acceptance of the servitude to which she was so unwillingly bound. (Laski 1952: 62)

Instinctively (for, beyond that last Watch with Edith, Wendy’s life is devoid of political solidarity) she is aligned with Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein. In Women’s Two Roles, published in 1956 and one of the decade’s few unwaveringly feminist texts, they rail that ‘the sentimental cult of domestic virtues is the cheapest method at society’s disposal of keeping women quiet without seriously considering their grievances or improving their position’ (166). ‘Mummy’s often said how bored she is,’ muses Margaret (Laski 1952: 63), but Wendy, exhausted by their poverty and the attendant social shame, is unable to overturn her wellmeaning husband Gerald’s creed that women of their class ‘didn’t have to work’ (65). She is, in the words of Kay Smallshaw in How to Run Your Home Without Help (1949), one of ‘those who must be both mistress and maid’ (2005: vi). From Gerald’s point of view, this work should not happen both outside and inside the home – as Gavron notes, ‘Women today are considered to have two choices, to work or to stay at home. This implies that staying at home does not involve work’ (1966: 128). Because of the family’s penury Margaret will have to work outside the home, and to her mother the least supportable shame of all is the fact that Margaret has no desire to, preferring housework or, at a pinch, a job as a cook: Wendy said, ‘You must be mad’ (Laski 1952: 63).

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Margaret’s falling in love with the lower class Roy Wilson is riddled with politically loaded implications. Part of his attraction for her, we might surmise, is that he shares her conception of the ideal (and traditionally gendered) home: ‘Don’t you worry, Mrs. Wilson, you’ll have plenty to do keeping my home nice for me once the honeymoon’s over’ (182). For Roy, a wife freed from the necessity of going out to work is a marker of his financial success (Gerald, hearing of Roy’s decent wage and burgeoning savings, gives ‘a sharp, involuntary gasp’, 209). Beveridge’s idealized housewives, as a ‘distinct insurance class of occupied persons’, we might appreciate, are predicated upon the distinct middle-classness of the women involved. These demarcations manifest as both economic and ideological – their family can afford for them not to earn, and servants are undesirable (for their violation, we might speculate of the ‘classless’ ideal home). This is the class to which Roy aspires. Margaret’s aspirations are difficult to read in terms of our own notions of political agency, but we can better understand them in the context of a decade at the end of which the victorious Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was able to announce with some resonance that the election had shown ‘that the class war is obsolete’ (‘Conservative’s Hat Trick’, 1959: 6). Laski locates Margaret at the nexus of competing female roles, both symbolic and practical. She is the novel’s romantic heroine, and she strives for her right to be a housewife. She is also its hero, as a committed class rebel. Rather than explicitly confrontational, however, her commitment is asserted through a determined refusal to recognize the structuring principles within her own experience: ‘The trouble with you, Miss Margaret,’ Roy’s sister Maureen tells her as she sits happily in their kitchen, ‘is that you’ve got no sense of class’ (Laski 1952:113). The ambiguity of ‘class’ here – recalling its function as both political and economic category – is telling (and likely to be deliberate, for Maureen is no fool). Margaret rejects the epitome of classy (or at least its proxy – the village’s Country Club that sports the sons of the upper middle class) for ‘Station Road’ tastes and the company of Roy, and her best friend Jill Morton. In so doing, she resolutely fails to acknowledge the social significance of the system that makes such hierarchical distinctions, and which is so live in the lives of her friends. It is Jill’s reaction to the engagement to Roy that finally brings an end to Margaret’s determined nostalgie de la boue (the novel is riven with references to earth). Jill, in her anger at Margaret’s debasement, is forced to speak to her poorer but classier friend ‘just like I would to a maid’ in an attempt to disrupt her wilful ignorance of transgression inherent in the engagement (196). The female friendship offered as a more enduring version of the understanding borne on the night of the last Watch is defeated by the persistence of class amidst rapidly

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changing social structures. Friedrich Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: In the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan (1884) repeatedly emphasized the distinction between class and wealth – a crucial distinction in Priory Dean – and was partially based upon Karl Marx’s notes in response to the work of Morgan, the thinker credited with establishing the terms and parameters of the study of kinship. The origins of Marxist analysis, then, are underpinned by anthropological investigation, and Laski reworks that allegiance in her fictional study of female kinship. Stung by Jill’s reaction, Margaret is ultimately provoked to acknowledge and articulate her position: ‘If class is something that says that one kind of people can fall in love and another kind can’t, then it’s a wicked thing’ (Laski 1952: 253). Margaret wins her battle to marry Roy. Yet, as the narrator is quick to emphasize, ‘She had won with an exhibition of power such as she had never imagined herself possessing and never would possess again’ (253). The couple agree to emigrate. Laski lays repeated emphasis on the fact that Margaret is not (academically) bright: her private education provides no alternative path for her, defined as it is by headmistress Miss Latimer and her conviction that ‘girls who weren’t clever did something or other until they got married, and what it was they did didn’t really matter very much’ (57). Yet the plotting of such a path, through the expense of a private education that has, apparently, contributed to the crippling of the family’s finances, was her mother’s only clear political assertion. Miss Latimer tells Wendy, delicately, I believe you told me, when the girls first entered school, that you and your husband had decided that it was your intention to, as it were, invest in your daughters’ education rather than provide them with – er – I suppose one could say a dowry when they grew up. (58)

Margaret must marry, for reasons other than romantic inevitability: she is trained for nothing (or no job, at least, that her mother will countenance for her). Once again, during the 1950s, the messages around women’s work are multivalent, as differing media profess the housewifely virtues as vehemently as the potential marital harmony (and economic benefits) if a woman goes out to work. Noel Streatfeild’s 1950 debutante’s manual, optimistically (in view of its teenage readership) entitled The Years of Grace, includes a ‘Careers’ section, in which proferred options include the Civil Service, teaching, nursing and secretarial work). Streatfeild suggests: The best career for every woman is, of course, taking care of her husband and home. But not every girl marries the moment she leaves school, and in most

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Her furious hedging captures the decade’s conflict around women’s careers – what girls should aspire to, and train for – exactly.

Debutantes at native dances Audrey Richards’s study Chisungu (1956) takes as its focus a Zambian tribe’s girl’s initiation ceremony. Richards’s writing style makes use of a self-reflexive impulse (and an often disarmingly self-referential humour) to draw her reader’s attention to her graceless presence as ethnographer in the ritual space. By implying the potential influence of her presence on the events described, she makes apparent the contradictions inherent in anthropological practice, freighted as it is by competing demands of subjective experience and objective analysis. David Scott has noted how, in anthropological writing across the twentieth century, a ‘distinctive topos of female ethnographic authority develops around the scene of the native dance’, and that this scene is one which repeatedly calls into question Malinowski’s definitive practice of participant observation. ‘Frequently describing a circle’, Scott claims, the women’s dance functions as a handy metonym for the putatively closed circle of the native culture and occasions that necessary moment of crisis at which the ethnographer perceives that, though she has physically been in the territory of her studied people for some time, she has yet to step across that epistemological boundary dividing her internalized culture from theirs. (Scott 1989: 78, his emphasis)

In Pym’s Less Than Angels, the academic Tom Mallow observes a debutante’s ball, yet, tellingly, reads the event to be revealing only of the kinship ties he severed when he became ‘detribalized’ from the social class that was his birthright (Pym 2012: 162). Richards’s text, by contrast, revels in the Chisungu ritual as a dynamic symbolic practice requiring intense emotional engagement of both participants and participant observers: ‘If the observations made here under the title of “pragmatic effects” mean anything,’ Richards writes, ‘they point to the number and variety of emotional attitudes which can be expressed by symbolic behaviour’ (1982: 69). For Pym, it is Catherine Oliphant’s insights into the ball’s anthropological context that are revelatory in terms of their observation of cultural relativity and institutionalized snobbery:

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She had often wondered why it was that anthropologists seemed to explore only the lower strata of their own society. Perhaps it was a kind of hidden fear that they might prove unworthy in some way, for she was sure that the experience of a debutante dance in Belgravia would be as rewarding for them as any piece of native ceremonial. (Pym 2012: 136)

Tom believes ‘women had this almost superstitious fear of expressing their feelings in words’ (152), yet it is Catherine’s practice of an anthropological method that attends both to descriptions of ‘symbolic behaviour’ and ‘the number and variety of emotional attitudes’ which it expresses that provides the novel’s most acute observations regarding social structure and gender politics (Richards 1982: 69). Catherine’s insight, like Deidre’s, comes from her transgression of what Scott calls the ‘ethnographic principle of native ethnocentrism [which] mandates that being an insider means, above all, not seeing the culture of which one is a part’ (Scott 1989: 78). Women’s fiction from the 1950s returns regularly to that ‘distinctive topos of female ethnographic authority’, the native dance, as a site yielding particular insight into gendered cultural practices (78). A number of writers of the short form make use of such a scene of initiation to explore the performances and paradoxes of adult femininity. Elizabeth Taylor’s 1951 story ‘You’ll Enjoy It When You Get There’, is an account of the social debut of an eighteen-year-old girl, Rhoda. Her mother laid low by a bout of jaundice (brought on, it is implied, by ‘immoderate’ drinking in a spare but telling sketch of the strains of maintaining a feminine social performance), Rhoda accompanies her father to the Norley Trade Banquet, an event involving a train journey north to the Midlands, and overnight stay in a ‘great station hotel’ (Taylor 1968: 207, 209). Rhoda’s anxious attempts to mimic the mores of middle-class society and its stipulations of femininity offer the opportunity for a scrupulous record of the particularity of these rituals, and the inherent suggestion of their contingency. Taylor’s thirdperson narration compromises the possibility of purely detached observation through its intense focalization through Rhoda, necessitating an empathetic identification with the feminine requirement, for example, elegantly to manage ‘bag, bouquet and skirt’ (212), daintily to consume the ‘acid-tasting, red soup’ (213), and to wear an attritional smile ‘as if she were enchanted’ (215). Her gauche attempts to overcome the Mayor’s attraction to the competing (and much more successful) ‘feminine flattery and cajolery’ on offer in the dinner guest to his far side by regaling him with a paean to her Burmese cat are unsuccessful at first airing (212). When she repeats them verbatim to a tubby, ageing waltz partner

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who is ultimately revealed to be the Mayor without his neck chain, her humiliation is complete. Scott’s study goes on to define ‘native ethnocentrism’ to mean ‘knowing how and when to dance but not grasping the ethnographic significance of the dance’ (Scott 1989: 78). Rhoda, a native middle-class girl, grasps how and when and why to dance, yet still fails to execute an effective entry into the practices and institutions that define and constrict her mother’s identity. The Mayor’s patriarchal regalia – jewellery, of course, in a neat irony – ‘was all she had had to distinguish him from the rest of the bald-headed and obese middle-aged men’, her own father amongst their ranks (Taylor 1968: 217). Unlike Catherine, Rhoda is an ingénue, not an anthropologist. Rather, the story’s free indirect discourse demands empathetic engagement at the same time as it conducts a dispassionate record of details. Taylor’s text makes its readers into participant observers of a (failed) feminine rite. In Attia Hosain’s 1953 story ‘The First Party’, the unnamed protagonist’s unfamiliarity with the urban Indian milieu into which her marriage has brought her is used to present the reader with a series of anthropological observations that again combine the analysis of symbolism with a scrutiny (and empathic engendering) of its emotional effects. Listening to the chatter of the female party-goers, the unnamed newly-wed, the narrative voice informs us, found the bi-lingual patchwork distracting, and its pattern, familiar to others, with allusions and references unrelated to her own experiences, was distressingly obscure. [. . .] Their different stresses made even talk of dress and appearance sound unfamiliar. She could not understand the importance of relating clothes to time and place and not just occasion; nor their preoccupation with limbs and bodies, which should be covered, and not face and features alone. They made problems about things she took for granted. (Hosain 1988: 18)

Hosain settled in Britain in 1947, leaving India shortly after partition to avoid moving to the newly-created Pakistan. Through a varied sequence of settings and cultural allegiances, her collection Phoenix Fled maintains a focus upon kinship relations, and the schism between traditional and emergent cultures. In ‘The Street of the Moon’, the young wife Hasina, who ends the story forced to prostitute herself, represents a rebellious but ultimately abject modernity, but in ‘The First Party’, the new bride sits (albeit shakily on the edge of a chair) as a bastion of conservatism, experiencing a burgeoning repulsion for the ‘new women’ around her, the ‘wicked, contemptible, grotesque mimics of the foreign ones among them for whom she felt no hatred because from them she expected nothing better’ (21). The story turns upon a paradox – the wife’s realization that

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conformity to this new society, though abhorrent, is her traditional duty: ‘now she saw her husband was one of the destroyers; and yet she knew that above all others was the belief that her life must be one with his. In confusion and despair she was surrounded by ruins’ (22). ‘The First Party’ offers its reader a complex series of anthropological observations: it renders a Western-style femininity reproduced by Indian women in a pre-partition nation as it is perceived by the daughter of an older cultural tradition of gendered behaviour. As such, the femininity contemporary to the 1950s British reader – and by that token, all femininity – is revealed as mobile and contingent. At the same time, the fear engendered in the bride by a future she perceives to be disturbingly unrestricted – one in which familiar walls lie in ruins – can be read as a response not solely to social, domestic structures, but to national and imperial ones as well. Reflecting upon his own ethnographic experience and his contribution to anthropological theory, Clifford Geertz stressed ‘the characteristic intellectual movement, the inward conceptual rhythm, in each of these analyses, and indeed in all similar analyses, including those of Malinowksi – namely, a continuous dialectical tacking between the most local of local detail and the most global of global structure in such a way as to bring them into simultaneous view’ (Geertz 1983: 69). Hosain’s anthropological fictional practice reveals the supposedly ‘private sphere’ of female emotional experience to be radically implicated in the public processes of social, cultural and political change (and vice versa). Again, this is achieved through a technique of third-person narration with exclusive and intense focalization through the central female character. The dynamics of anthropology then, are perpetual and dialectical, demanding emotional engagement, performative commitment and scrupulous observation. Though largely missing from the academy (Richards is a notable exception), a body of women authors of the 1950s were inscribing in their fiction an anthropology of their everyday experience of the cultural productions and expectations surrounding their gender. Inured as they were to the unmistakeable artifice and conflicting roles of hegemonic feminine culture, the liminal role of participant observer, so problematic within the binary discourse of the patriarchy, was already embedded in their artistic practice. This anthropology of the feminine can, despite enduring accusations of the political apathy of women of the decade, be understood as an explicitly feminist act. Both Taylor and Hosain use initiation into a particular cultural context in order to expose a society’s expectations of femininity. By contrast, Brigid Brophy’s 1953 story ‘His Wife Survived Him’ uses an exit – from a party and the way of life it symbolizes – to effect its feminist critique. As the story opens, the central character, Patricia, is

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caught in the middle of a cocktail party conversation (between two men) about female submission. One man intimates that women are failing society: he pronounces that they have a duty to resist patriarchy as everyone has a duty to resist a dictator, yet they give way to men because they have ‘no sense of morality’ (92). Patricia feels, the narrator notes wryly, ‘she could make no contribution, unless she told the little group they were discussing nothing less than history in its entirety, not to mention all personal relationships: and that would hardly be party conversation’ (93). Patricia’s sense of Geertz’s dialectic between the local and the global is clearly keen. Later she claims of these self-pronounced ‘moralists’ that ‘One could tell they had never encountered the problem they were discussing as a situation in their own lives’ (94–5). By contrast, she herself is able to move between participation and observation, dissociating herself at times in order to try ‘to listen to the party as if she were not in it’ (93). That the personal is political (and vice versa), for Brophy as it is for Hosain, is not in doubt. As an institution that so clearly bridges that divide, marriage offers an ideal field study. Patricia is married to Gavin, a famous actor and an exemplar (according to one male party guest) of ‘masculine grace’ (97). Part of her role as ‘the wife, you know, of – ’ (as she is routinely introduced) is to answer the love letters he receives from other women as fan mail (95). Gavin often talks about her task to people they have only just met; ‘He seemed to display it as something sweet in himself; evidence of the happiness of their marriage, their – what was the political jargon? – solid front’ (97). That phrase ‘political jargon’ suggests not only that to marry is to commit a political act, but also that the discourse of marriage – of an enduring marriage – is one that is theatrically exploited by politicians. ‘Solid front’ is thus rendered sinisterly superficial. The language of performance pervades the account of Patricia’s experience. Gavin’s masculinity – his self itself – is emphasized as something artful: it is a ‘statuette’ (98), a ‘little masterpiece’ (107). With a Promethean panache, he has ‘moulded his own figure as if it had been clay: and it was the more-than-realistic, the theatrical perfection of the figure which bound people to him regardless of their age and sex’ (98). Peacock worship, it would seem, is ubiquitous in these social circles. The prescience of Brophy’s gender analysis lies not just in this explicit demonstration of performativity, but also in Patricia’s ruthless confrontation of her own complicity in tending and adoring the masculine myth of her husband’s identity: ‘She asked herself if she was not the most responsible of all’ (98). Answering letters in which women offer themselves to Gavin, Patricia perpetuates a chivalric ideal: ‘she said what she imagined an honourable man

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would say’ (103–4). One of these letters will arrive, after the party, from a woman who spends the evening gazing at Gavin, a model of ideal femininity in that from ‘the face, as it attended to Gavin, you could read only Gavin’s character. The woman’s was the face to be affected, his to affect’. Her spectacular, specular beauty is ‘of the type to which thought and emotion added nothing’ – it is a reflecting surface (102). Patricia bears witness to this moment, and responds to it later in a letter ‘from’ Gavin: ‘You will realise there is very little I can honourably say to you except that I have read your letter and not lightly considered it. Please be assured that it is destroyed’ (113). It is this confrontation with the Platonic passivity of ideal femininity that provokes Patricia to act. Women, the narrator claims, ‘had a resistance to mobility, even mobility suggested by a raging sea, and a bias towards the status quo. For them, adventure was to cultivate the old fields. For them endurance of pain was courage’ (109). Having moved in and out of participation and observation in the ‘continual dialectical tacking’ Geertz identifies as characteristic of the anthropological impulse, Patricia decides to leave Gavin, to assert herself in an act of self-individuation amongst the conformative ritual gender practice both of the party and her marriage (Geertz 1983: 69). Yet Brophy does not afford us unmitigated heroic consolation of the existentialist creed. Contemplating her exit, Patricia ‘had a notion a great blankness, a lack of direction and intention, would come down upon her once she had settled into the state of not being Gavin’s wife, but to cease to be Gavin’s wife – that was an act’ (Brophy 1953: 114–15). That word ‘act’, though, in a story about the bad faith of actors, has ambiguous existential significance. Brophy’s style in ‘His Wife Survived Him’ is conspicuously experimental. Though the story adopts a combination of third-person narrative voice and focalization through the central female character, both voice and focalization sporadically drift beyond Patricia, providing a textual model of a more indeterminate selfhood in a blend of symbolic analysis and realist experience. Penelope Mortimer’s 1956 novel The Bright Prison (the prison is marriage; the brightness, financial and social privilege) adopts a similar approach in the inclusion, in its latter half, of a plot development that functions on the level of psychic symbolism to the point of surreality. Again we might meaningfully trace a shift across the writing gathered here similar to that identified by Kuper in postwar anthropology: ‘Many were ready to shift their interest from norms and action [‘what really happens’, in Malinowski’s phrase] to symbolic systems’ (1985: 168). Contemporary reviewers showed displeasure with this breach of the realist style that dominated so much 1950s fiction: Philip John Stead in the Times Literary Supplement considered the early part of The Bright Prison to be:

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credible and just, but in the later chapters it hovers uneasily between fantasy and realism when the husband and wife find ephemeral partners who turn out to be already involved with each other. There is an arbitrary symbolism about this that quite unnecessarily takes away from the truth of the earlier writing. (Stead 1956: 590)

In fact, that ‘uneasy’ state between fantasy and realism is invoked with regularity throughout the novel, in its dedicated recognition of the role of myth and symbol in everyday experience. Antonia and Mark Painton married thirteen years ago, conceiving their first daughter, Georgina, within a month. Their experience thereafter – three more children, a beautiful house, Antonia’s domestic role, the servicing of Mark’s legal career – has been dictated by convention: they ‘did things not because they were right or wrong, pleasant or unpleasant, but because there was no alternative’ (Mortimer 1956: 36). As such, the bright myth of their ‘ideal’ marriage now feels to both to be a tenuous thing, subject to disruption by any change: in their beautifully appointed dining room, the frame of their wedding photo shines, but the picture inside ‘was dark, indistinct’ (29). Change erupts with the sudden illness of their daughter Charlotte, and their insecurities are proven correct, as their ideal home swiftly becomes a deserted house, its cushions un-plumped by the absent housewife, and fog creeping in through an open front door, and drifting from room to room (109). To Antonia, the ‘house no longer meant anything to her: it was a myth in which, disillusioned but without rancor, she no longer believed’ (178). With Antonia’s reckless abandonment of her domestic and maternal duties, Mortimer invokes a current of feeling approximating a postwar folk panic. John Bowlby’s 1953 study Childcare and the Growth of Love came from his report commissioned by the World Health Organization after the Second World War, in which he was charged to consider the presiding assumptions and methods of institutions caring for homeless children. The risk of his concept of ‘maternal deprivation’ was taken up as rife in any situation in which a mother was absent. Christina Hardyment states judiciously that: Bowlby cannot be blamed any more than Freud for the fact that the meat of both men’s findings was borrowed from the world of the abnormal, where they were established from observation of extreme cases of psychic abuse, and applied over-enthusiastically to normal life. (2007: 228)

Nonetheless, as American anthropologist Margaret Mead was to note of the prevailing cultural insistence that a mother should never be separated from her child, this can be interpreted as ‘a new and subtle form of anti-feminism in which

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men – under the guise of exalting the importance of maternity – are tying women more tightly to their children’ (1954: 480). Mortimer, like Pym’s Catherine Oliphant, derives income from a ‘bright magazine style’ of writing – in Mortimer’s case, pseudonymously, as ‘Ann Temple’, agony aunt of the Daily Mail (Pym 2012: 65). Her various voices of the 1950s – in newspaper columns and novels – testify to an array of competing valences of orthodox femininity, economic necessity and editorial line. Having castigated a correspondent weighing up the social pressures and financial implications of a baby for her reluctant tone when considering ‘the miracle that transforms both of you into full and complete human beings, that links you with all the past and all the future so that you have the feeling if not the understanding of the permanence and the meaning and the purpose of life’, she then soothes, ‘Don’t think I am unsympathetic with you’ (Temple 1952: 2). At the opening of The Bright Prison, Charlotte is turning seven, and a ritual gathering has been organized in the house, involving a guessing game in which the names of figures from history are attached, unseen, to each child: Desultorily, the children wandered about the enormous nursery, the labels carefully pinned on net, taffeta and velvet. They looked at each other’s backs and tittered a little and kept asking, ‘Am I a man or a woman?’ – the only distinction they seemed to recognise. (Mortimer 1956: 19)

That the category of gender is fundamental to identity is not an assumption confined to children. Reneging on her role of housewife and mother, Antonia is lost. So too is Mark when he ceases to return home from work to a redolent domesticity. Stead’s disquiet at the novel’s elements of fantasy might in part have been generated by Mortimer’s notable determination to demonstrate the way in which parental sensuality, long since absented from the ‘not very magnificent act’ of intercourse, becomes bound up in the bodies of children (187). Of his daughter Charlotte, exquisitely beautiful and unintelligent, Mark ‘only knew that the thought of her body hurt or offended gave him physical agony. She was his only sensual pleasure, the only thing in his life whose beauty and delicacy had not been ravaged by habit’ (99). The bedroom of the widower David’s daughter expresses his sublimated desires rather than the child’s own preferences. Antonia discovers it to be a place in which: the world of childhood had been made terrifying, obscene, by the elimination of all mystery, eccentricity or pain: wherever the eye searched it fell flatly on sexy rabbits; winged midgets simpered insanely round the walls; suffused by the rosy brothel light, the room was a cosy hell, a child’s hell. (215–16)

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Antonia instinctively rejects a role as surrogate mother to Annette (even as she explores the possibility of a relationship with David). At a drunken, surreal (adult) party, the mysterious (and appropriately named) Mr Teasedown teases Antonia, ‘Presumably maternal attraction, like sex attraction, is discriminating? You don’t want to fall into bed with every child you meet?’ (200). Mortimer’s unflinching acknowledgement of the totems and taboos of uppermiddle-class London society is part of a strategy of foregrounding cultural relativity in order to paint that (polite) society as underlain by inchoate impulses that threaten constantly to break through its civilized veneer. Antonia approaches the children at Charlotte’s birthday party ‘like someone approaching a group of wild animals, feeling that they might suddenly charge or, on a signal from their leader, break away, swarm delicately and savagely through the house, destroying it’ (18). Mark, entering another (adult) party, notes its ‘savage and indefinite roar, the sibilant undertone, the rise and slight shriek and immediate death of individual voices’ (206). Previously, adrift, drunk and in a pub with Barbara, a young woman he meets in the hospital at which Charlotte is being treated for appendicitis, he lashes out at a dachshund in the arms of a ‘terribly queer’ young man (209). Looking around, he sees how every ‘face was a mirror reflecting a strange and horrifying image, himself; nowhere could he see reflected the sober and loving man, husband, father, that he knew himself to be’ (149). His wife, his speculum, has been misplaced. Rather than focalizing the narrative solely through Antonia, Mortimer opts for a technique of roving free indirect discourse that allows insight into the points of view of multiple characters, as well as their participant observations of the society that both includes and others them. So, for example, though Antonia provides the novel’s empathetic centre, we also share Mark’s disorientated terror at his faltering marriage, and David’s detached observation of Antonia as ‘the embodiment of all the mysteries which in his own marriage had remained unsolved, a native of a world he had briefly seen and at the time disliked, frightened then by the peculiar dangers, rigid laws, the terrifying possibility of instant destruction which now in middle age he found fascinating’ (164). Though the novel’s central male characters are treated judiciously in that their reprehensible behaviour is made comprehensible, it is women – mothers and daughters – who lie at the centre of Mortimer’s novel and its anthropological observation. Antonia’s two eldest daughters diverge markedly in their response to received femininity – Georgina, at twelve, is an ‘awkward, angular child impossible to think of as a woman’ (87), while it takes her parents days to distinguish the suffering of Charlotte’s illness from her characteristic, beatific

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passivity. Annette, David’s daughter, who has lost her mother so young, maintains a faux innocence that is more a comfort to her father than it is to herself – receiving a toy rabbit, she decides to call it Cuddlepie, rightly believing ‘that her father liked these sweet names she found for her toys, she thought that she might placate him’ (175). Both Mark and David locate a kind of tortured respite in an idealized femininity that can exist only in girls rather than grown women. Barbara, tantalizingly childlike and referred to as ‘the girl’ throughout the novel, dandles the potential, perhaps, of a new womanhood, but lapses ultimately into convention to give Annette a ‘nice Mummy to bath her and put her to bed’ (222). Hannah Gavron emphatically noted that, for the middle-class respondents to her survey, the ‘impact of the birth of the first child on the young mothers in this sample was tremendous, because it changed them from being a new kind of woman to being the traditional woman’ (Gavron 1966: 135). Barbara’s own mother, in hospital, likes to see her daily, but not for long – after all, Barbara claims to Mark, ‘It’s terribly difficult to think of anything to say, especially to one’s mother’ (Mortimer 1956: 97). Antonia’s own mother, having modelled domestic complicity all her life, is landed with the two youngest Painton children as their parents rove apart. Battered by Felicity’s questions, she has but one response: Why do you grow old, die, love, weep, grow hungry, why do you live at all? ‘You must ask your mother,’ Mrs Levington said. ‘Does she know?’ ‘Yes,’ Mrs Levington said. (195)

She promptly dies, desperately maintaining the idea that her own relentless battle (‘food reduced to meals, dirt trapped, mending wrestled with, disorder vanquished, victory gained’, 57) has made her daughter’s life both easier and more meaningful. Yet Antonia’s agonized confusion, and Barbara’s dull detachment, belie that idea of a continuum of maternal wisdom or an enduring female history (or herstory). At Charlotte’s party, one child, given Antonia’s clue of ‘a woman. In history. With red hair’, can only proffer, hopelessly, ‘Rita Hayworth?’ (20).

The ‘reformer’s science’ The great national and social work of Britain in the 1950s – the Welfare State, and the rebuilding of Britain – was underpinned by a particular model of gender. The decade’s femininity is easily identified – in media, cultural and policy texts – as a powerful organizing concept privileged to the extent that it purportedly overrides any other economic, personal or social differences. Yet Bronislaw Malinowski’s observation on what he called ‘savage society’ might equally be

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applied to its ideology, for it was ‘not a consistent logical scheme, but rather a seething mixture of conflicting principles’ (1926: 121). During a time in which debates around the proper education of young women were similarly seething, the experience of femininity had the potential to school female authors in the cognitive expertise that underpinned Malinowski’s professional practice – that of participant observation, in which the anthropologist operates at two levels simultaneously, engaging and scrutinizing. Anthropology’s inherent concern with incipient bias and the power structures of observation and reporting make it a mode of study that prompts attention to writing style and narrative voice, and the relationship of both with political power. The fiction considered here unanimously conducts its work in third-person free indirect narration, which enables and demands the ‘dialectical tacking’ that Geertz identifies as the ‘inward conceptual rhythm’ of the anthropological discipline (Geertz 1983: 69). It understands the female experience that it documents at both a symbolic and a lived level, balancing attention to the individual psyche and its cultural environment, and prefiguring a dual approach that is to underpin the work of the Second Wave. As Edwin Ardener was to put it, ‘Men’s models of society are expressed at a metalevel which purports to define women. Only at the level of the analysis of belief can the voiceless masses be restored to speech’ (Arderner 1975: 14). E.B. Tylor, holder of the first university post in anthropology in 1884, called anthropology the ‘reformer’s science’. The findings of his discipline, he anticipated would allow the ‘great modern nations to understand themselves, to weigh in a just balance their own merits and defects, and even in some measure to forecast [. . .] the possibilities of the future’ (Tylor 1896: v). 1950s feminist discourse may not often be explicit in its fiction, but women writing through the decade are nonetheless evincing a project that will realize at least some of these future possibilities.

Works cited Adam, Ruth. A Woman’s Place: 1910–1975. London: Persephone, 2011. Appadurai, Arjun. ‘Putting Hierarchy in its Place’. Cultural Anthropology 3: 1 (1988): 36–49. Arderner, Edwin. ‘Belief and the Problem of Women’. Perceiving Women, edited by Shirley Ardener. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1975. 1–17. Arderner, Edwin. Coastal Bantu of the Cameroons, Western Africa Part XI, Ethnographic Survey of Africa. Ed. Daryll Forde. London: International African Institute, 1956. Barstow, Stan. A Kind of Loving. London: Michael Joseph, 1960.

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Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. Beveridge, William Henry. ‘Social Insurance and Allied Services’ (‘The Beveridge Report’), Internet Modern History Sourcebook, edited by Paul Halsall. 1942. Fordham University, New York 1997. Available online: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/ 1942beveridge.html (accessed 22 January 2018). Braine, John. Room at the Top. 1957. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959. Brophy, Brigid. ‘His Wife Survived Him’. The Crown Princess & Other Stories. London: Collins, 1953, 92–115. Bowlby, John. Childcare and the Growth of Love. 1953. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966. Buzard, James. Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005. Campbell, Olwen W. A Report on the Conference of The Feminine Point of View. London: Williams & Norgate Ltd., 1952. ‘Conservative’s Hat Trick’. The Times, 10 October, 1959: 6. Cooper, William. Scenes of Provincial Life. 1950. London: Macmillan, 1969. Cots, Michael. Barbara Pym. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1989. Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: In the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan. 1884. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1941. Ferguson, Marjorie. Forever Feminine: Women’s Magazines and the Cult of Femininity. London: Heinemann, 1983. Ferrebe, Alice. Masculinity in Male-Authored Fiction 1950–2000. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Ferrebe, Alice. ‘Elizabeth Taylor’s Uses of Romance: Feminist Feeling in 1950s English Fiction’, Literature and History 1: 19 (2010): 50–64. Gavron, Hannah. The Captive Wife: Conflicts of Housebound Mothers. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966. Geertz, Clifford. ‘From the Native’s Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding’. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books, 1983, 55–70. Hardyment, Christina. Dream Babies: Childcare Advice from John Locke to Gina Forde. London: Francis Lincoln Ltd, 2007. Highmore, Ben. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 2000. Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-class Life, with Special References to Publications and Entertainments. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957. Hosain, Attia. Phoenix Fled. 1953. London: Virago, 1988. Kuper, Adam. Anthropology and Anthropologists. London: Routledge, 1985. Laski, Marghanita. The Village. London: The Cresset Press, 1952. Liddell, Robert. A Mind at Ease: Barbara Pym and Her Novels. London: Peter Owen, 1989. Malinowski, Bronislaw. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. 1922. Routledge: London, 2014. Malinowski, Bronislaw. Crime and Custom in Savage Society. 1926. Paterson, NJ : Littlefield, Adams, 1972.

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Mead, Margaret. ‘Some Theoretical Considerations on the Problem of Mother-Child Separation.’ American Journal of Orthopsychiatry (1954), 24: 471–83. Mortimer, Penelope. The Bright Prison. London: Michael Joseph, 1956. Myrdal, Alva and Viola Klein. Women’s Two Roles. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956. Osborne, John. ‘What’s Gone Wrong with Women?’ Daily Mail, 14 November 1956, included in Damn You, England: Collected Prose. London: Faber & Faber, 1994. 255–8. Pym, Barbara. Less Than Angels. 1955. London: Virago, 2012. Pym, Barbara. A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography in Diaries and Letters, edited by Hazel Holt and Hilary Pym. New York: E. P. Dutton Inc., 1984. Richards, Audrey. Chisungu: A Girl’s Initiation Ceremony Among the Bemba of Zambia. 1956. London: Tavistock, 1982. Scott, David. ‘Locating the Anthropological Subject: Postcolonial Anthropologists in Other Places.’ Inscriptions 5 (1989): 75–85. Schulz, Muriel. ‘The Novelist as Anthropologist’. The Life and Work of Barbara Pym, edited by Dale Salwak. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1987, 101–19. Sillitoe, Alan. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. London: W. H. Allen, 1958. Sontag, Susan. The Anthropologist as Hero, Against Interpretation. 1963. London: Vintage, 1994. Smallshaw, Kay. How to Run Your Home Without Help. 1949. London: Persephone, 2005. Spark, Muriel. ‘The Black Madonna’. The Go-Away Bird. London: MacMillan & Co, 1958. 1–27. Spencer, Stephanie. Gender, Work and Education in Britain in the 1950s. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Stead, Philip John. ‘The Bond and the Free’. Times Literary Supplement. 5 October 1956: 590. Streatfeild, Noel (Ed.). The Years of Grace: A Book for Girls. London: Evans Brothers Limited, 1950. Stocking, George W. Jr. After Tylor: British Social Anthropology 1888–1951. London: The Athlone Press, 1999. Storey, David. This Sporting Life. London: Macmillan, 1960. Taylor, Elizabeth. ‘You’ll Enjoy It When You Get There’. The Blush. 1951. London: Peter Davies, 1968, 207–17. Temple, Ann. ‘To Have a Child or Not?’. Daily Mail, 5 June 1952: 2. Tylor, E.B. ‘Introduction’. The History of Mankind, by Professor Friedrich Ratzel. Translated from the second German edition by A.J. Butler. London and New York: The Macmillan Co., 1896. Willett, John. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. New York, Macmillan: 1964. Woman. Advertisement for No. 7 cosmetics. 26 May 1956: 58.

4

‘Is it a queer book?’: Re-reading the 1950s Homosexual Novel Martin Dines

In Britain in the 1950s, writing and publishing fiction about male homosexuality was thought to be a risky business. And yet, no previous period had produced quite so many ‘queer books’. According to one bibliography, nearly thirty titles had appeared by the decade’s close (Gunn 2014), many of which ran to several editions. Evidently, the topic of homosexuality made for good business. In any case, everybody seemed to be talking about it, in the national press particularly, and the second half of the decade saw the first tentative steps taken toward legal reform. Nevertheless, even after the publication in 1957 of the Wolfenden Report, which recommended the partial decriminalization of sexual relations between men, many in the book trade were still jittery about the subject. That same year, for instance, Martyn Goff ’s editors at Putnam warned him that the release of his debut novel The Plaster Fabric ‘would land them all in the Old Bailey’ (City Limits 1983). It did nothing of the sort; possibly a prompt, sympathetic review in the Telegraph by John Betjeman helped head off any condemnation. Actually, there is little in the novel to frighten the horses. Indeed, one of the things that Betjeman applauds in his review is the convincing manner in which the novel’s sensitive homosexual protagonist ultimately overcomes physical temptation (Betjeman 1957). Moreover, at the novel’s climax, the protagonist’s self-restraint helps save his friends’ beleaguered heterosexual marriage. The suggestion that the repudiation of homosexual desire helps prevent social dislocation almost certainly made The Plaster Fabric palatable to more conservative readers; the novel apparently even received a glowing review penned by Goff ’s local vicar for a parish magazine from the depths of suburban Surrey (City Limits 1983). The Plaster Fabric does however open in more dangerous – or promising – territory, with what is, unquestionably, a pick-up scene involving two men. On the fog-bound streets near Marble Arch, Laurie Kingston, a young bookseller, 111

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runs into the impressive figure of guardsman Tom Beeson. Their interaction follows a well-worn course: a request for a light leads to small talk and their retirement to a pub for drinks – paid for of course by Laurie – followed up by the bookseller’s suggestion that he might like to paint the guardsman’s portrait the next time they meet. If Laurie’s eyes, which are excited by desire, give away his intentions before either man has a chance to speak, Beeson’s are twice said to be ‘calculating’. It is not clear whether he is anticipating sexual opportunity or material gain; for sure, more than any other figure, the guardsman had a longstanding reputation within queer circles for being easily bought, but also for proving to be less than a bargain (See Houlbrook 2003). Whether or not he has designs to ‘tap’ the young bookseller, one thing is clear: Beeson, who initiated the encounter, knows the score. The Plaster Fabric’s trajectory – beginning as it does with an erotic encounter rendered dangerous and disreputable by its public location and its transactional, cross-class dynamics, and ending with sexual restraint, heterosexual marriage and domesticity – would seem to confirm a common perception of the period in which it was written. 1950s Britain has long been associated in the popular imagination with social conformity and sexual repression, and the decade is often judged to have been an especially inauspicious time for homosexuals and other sexual dissidents. Typically, the ‘dark ages’ (Bedell 2007) of the 1950s are thought to compare unfavourably with the proceeding and following periods. The upheavals of the Second World War afforded homosexuals numerous opportunities. After being uprooted from provincial oblivion many encountered queer sex and society for the first time in the various homosocial environments engineered by the war effort (see Vickers 2013). And, as Quentin Crisp recalls, the dangers of the Blitz and the cover of the blackout caused Londoners to lose their sexual inhibitions: ‘As soon as the bombs began to fall, the city became like a paved double bed. Voices whispered suggestively to you as you walked along; hands reached out if you stood still and in dimly lit trains people carried on as they had once behaved only in taxis.’ (Crisp 1977, 154) The 1960s marked longerlasting changes, from the relaxing of censorship following the Lady Chatterley trial in 1960 to the partial decriminalization of sexual relations between men in 1967. By contrast, during the 1950s a number of sensational tabloid exposés helped focus public attention on the particular ‘problem’ of homosexuality; such scrutiny was in part prompted by a surge in punitive actions by the police and courts. Increased visibility and vilification undoubtedly shaped the fictional representation of homosexuality. It is true that the 1950s saw a spate of novels published in Britain centring on sympathetic male homosexual protagonists

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who, armed with newly available psychological models of sexual identity, typically refuse to apologize for their sexual orientation. But these ‘homosexual novels’ are otherwise cautious and circumscribed. Their protagonists typically conform to conventions of bourgeois respectability and masculine deportment, and repudiate the perceived moral dissolution of queer urban milieus for a restrained, private existence. By situating their homosexual protagonists firmly within middle-class domesticity, these novels reproduce a principal argument of liberal reformers: that the right to conduct sexual relations should be extended to homosexual men, so long as such affairs take place in private. In so doing, the 1950s homosexual novel implicitly sanctioned the homophobic interventions of the law and the media which mainly targeted the public urban spaces that men with fewer material resources relied upon to sustain affective and erotic relationships with other men. In recent years, however, there has been a growing appreciation that these fictions, and the broader story we tell ourselves about sexuality in the 1950s, are partial accounts. Several historians have taken issue with the common view that the beginning of the 1960s marked a decisive break with the tedium and traditionalism of the 1950s, and thereby challenge ‘progressivist’ histories of sexuality that describe a relentless onward march toward a more liberal and tolerant present (see Thomas 2008; Mort 2010). Mark Donnelly contends that, in fact, ‘many aspects of sixties change were fiercely contested at the time’; further, for a great number of British people, the swinging sixties was ‘a party that was happening somewhere else’ (Donnelly 2005, xii-xiii). Others have identified significant shifts in attitudes to sex that were taking place during or even before the 1950s. Several national surveys conducted in the immediate post-war years reveal decidedly mixed feelings across the population. For instance, the 1949 Mass Observation Study, nicknamed ‘little Kinsey’, found that, while a clear majority of respondents disapproved of homosexuality or extra-marital sex (although one in three admitted to having sex before or outside marriage), most approved of divorce, birth control and sex education (Kynaston 2008, 374–5). And though marriage and divorce rates would seem to confirm the popular notion that the decade was a ‘golden age’ for marriage, according to Claire Langhammer, the greater emphasis upon companionship and sexual intimacy in the post-war period actually ‘made marital infidelity more, rather than less, likely as well as increasingly capable of dealing a fatal blow to the marriage itself ’ (2006, 110). A rise in standards of living, however, is the most frequently cited reason for changing sexual behaviour in the 1950s. Leslie Hall, for instance, speaks of a widespread sense that ‘erotic energies nurtured by a buoyant economy and

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the Welfare State were threatening to break out’ (2000, 166; see also Hennessey 2006). Consequently, Hall insists, the 1950s would be better understood as ‘a period of instability rather than unthinking smug conventionality’ (2000, 166). In their introduction to Queer 1950s, Heike Bauer and Matt Cook remark that, indeed, ‘it is often the ideals and ideologies of the 1950s, rather than their fault lines, underlying uncertainties and confusions, which have taken the firmest hold in popular imaginings of the decade’ (2012, 2). In fact, Bauer and Cook contend, the disruptions and trauma of war had exposed for many the contingency and the fragility of supposedly entrenched norms (3). Further, while the decade continues to be understood as a period of stasis, in many respects it was characterized by transition and flux: ‘movement, relocation and migration were defining features of the 1950s, as were the concomitant unsettling and reorientation of lives in new spaces and contexts’ (2). Intense precariousness shaped the lives of many homosexuals in the 1950s, yet many also found opportunities within social structures and spaces that were being reordered, albeit in uneven ways. The decade’s homosexual novels reflect this instability through, for instance, their negotiation of different models of intimacy. Typically their protagonists strive for more egalitarian relationships even while older forms, based on difference in terms of age and class, and therefore power, remain deeply attractive. The proliferation of these novels also marked, and contributed to, a widening awareness of homosexuality, yet their success also helped consolidate a distinctly queer readership. Indeed, the homosexual novel represents a perhaps surprisingly self-aware mode of fiction: homosexual characters reading homosexual novels are a recurrent motif, as are vocalizations about how such literature constitutes a crucial cultural resource for sexual minorities. Meanwhile, the publication histories of these novels suggest divergent readerships: respectable-looking first editions were often followed by mass-market paperback versions, which sported more salacious covers and appeared, and were consumed, in less salubrious parts of the city (see Hornsey 2010, 189–200; Dines 2017). The homosexual novel also exhibits considerable diversity between its covers. Some authors clearly refused to sustain the levels of seriousness that most readers and publishers considered appropriate, and some show indifference to or scepticism toward the frameworks that dominated discussion of homosexuality in the 1950s, namely, psychiatry and the ‘social problem’. This chapter explores these developments and contradictions through an examination of several 1950s homosexual novels. In the following section I discuss Goff ’s The Plaster Fabric in relation to the intensification of press and

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police scrutiny of homosexual activity. I then proceed to consider novels by James Courage, Rodney Garland and Mary Renault as responses to the principal paradigm for appraising homosexuality in the post-war period, the social problem, itself in part a reaction to the homophobia of the popular press. In the chapter’s final section I turn to the work of Angus Wilson and, more briefly, Michael Nelson and Brigid Brophy (who authored the only significant British lesbian novel of the decade). I explore how the investment in comedic modes by these authors helped shape visions of homosexual life that differed from those emerging out of mainstream reformist agendas. I show how the decade’s homosexual novels variously sustain, evade and problematize the prevailing liberal discourse on homosexuality; I contend that they cannot therefore be recruited straightforwardly to a progressivist history of sexuality. But my chapter also constitutes a response to playwright Neil Bartlett’s admission, made in an introduction to a 1996 edition of Rodney Garland’s The Heart in Exile, that he has developed rather a taste for the neurotic (and, I would add, sanctimonious) protagonist of the 1950s homosexual novel. What then are the distinct pleasures that these works of fiction – several of which have recently been brought back into print – hold for the twenty-first-century reader? I argue that a principal pleasure to be derived from these novels does not lie in the recognition of and identification with particular forms of queer experience; such presentism may, after all, merely flatten out differences between social formations of particular historical junctures. (I acknowledge, however, Carolyn Dinshaw’s influential argument that queer historians might productively invest in ‘partial connections, queer relations between incommensurate lives and phenomena [. . .] that unveil and contest normativity’, 1999, 134, 138; my emphasis.) In any case, the pleasures I recognize are located not so much at the level of character than narrative: they emerge out of a kind of counter-reading that pursues the desires that these texts attempt to resist or deflect. The homosexual novel is, I will show, shaped – or, rather, deformed – by the persistent presence of disreputable and pleasurable intimacies, locations and narrative modes. My focus on pleasure then differs from those whose scrutiny of queer fictions from the past harnesses negative feelings. Heather Love for instance argues that ‘dark texts’, i.e. stories that articulate the suffering and confusion that comes from having to bear an ‘unwanted being’ (2007, 26), continue to be instructive: ‘backward feelings serve as an index to the ruined state of the social world; they indicate continuities between the bad gay past and the present; and they show up the inadequacy of queer narratives of progress’ (27). I am not contesting the importance Love attributes to negative feelings; however, I would assert that paying close attention

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to the imbrication of narrative and pleasure in (reading) the 1950s homosexual novel is potentially productive, not least because doing so helps bring into focus how works of fiction articulate the desirability of disavowed queer ways of being. In short, narrative pleasures interrupt narratives of progress. These novels may be oriented toward a normative future, yet they are distorted by their preoccupation with the very dangers and delights their protagonists steadfastly renounce. My re-reading of these fictions is thus an avowedly queer enterprise. Such a declaration, obviously, necessitates clarification about my use of the term ‘queer’ in this chapter. Principally, the word designates – as it frequently did in the 1950s – same-sex eroticism and various corresponding identifications, including homosexuality. Additionally – especially in relation to my own reading – the term signals, in the critical mode of much queer theory, a questioning of both the dominance and coherence of normative scripts and categories of gender and sexuality. Specifically, then, my queer reading constitutes an interrogation of the narrative bases for certain forms of homosexual identity. More precisely still, it is an operation that attends to, and takes pleasure in, a particular kind of narrative failure: a failure to contain and control pleasure.

Under surveillance: homosexuality, the media and the police The Plaster Fabric was not exactly path-breaking. It appeared a few years after an earlier flurry of homosexual novels – most notably Angus Wilson’s Hemlock and After (1952), Rodney Garland’s The Heart in Exile (1953) and Mary Renault’s The Charioteer (1953) – and so could hardly be said to have matched these titles for impact. (It received some polite reviews, but did not make it into a second edition.) However, The Plaster Fabric is paradigmatic; its ‘sensitive’ depiction of queer experience – a quality often trumpeted by publishers – belies the tensions that defined the 1950s homosexual novel. For instance, while it strives to show how homosexual desire might be successfully managed and contained, Goff ’s novel readily describes – and therefore also contributes to – an ever-widening public awareness of the matter. Laurie is in fact frequently the last to learn that his needs and behaviour follow well-established patterns. An Italian teenager who picks him up on the sultry streets of Florence remarks ‘knowingly’ that many English authors visit the city (1957, 133). Even a priest comments that Laurie is just one of a long line of homosexual tourists intent on seducing the local boys (148). Partly to mortify his desires, Laurie abandons the more obvious – and ‘sordid’ – queer locales of London and Florence for rural Sussex.

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But even the simple life gets complicated. Laurie is obliged to share a bed with the comely teenager Martin, whom Laurie tantalizingly sees unclothed. The boy is wise beyond his years: incredibly, he warns Laurie to hold off his advances so as not to be overcome by shame the next morning. Arguably the novel’s depiction of such broad cognisance reflects a growing awareness of homosexuality in Britain. Indeed, an equivalent scene in Iris Murdoch’s 1958 novel The Bell makes clear the principal source of this public knowledge. Eighteen-year-old Toby Gashe’s disorientation after having been kissed by an older man is shown to stem from his limited exposure to homosexuality: ‘as his education had included Latin and no Greek his acquaintance with the excesses of the ancients was fragmentary. [. . .] What he did know came mainly from popular newspapers.’ (2004, 164) The post-war period saw more frequent and frank discussion in the British press of sexual matters generally, particularly following the publication of Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948. In the early 1950s, sensational headlines about male homosexuality peppered the popular press, and the leading titles devoted more and more column inches to the subject in their pursuit of higher circulation figures. Douglas Warth’s notorious three-part ‘Evil Men’ series of articles for the Sunday Pictorial in 1952 set the tone by arguing that ‘the veil of secrecy’ that surrounded the subject had merely provided cover for homosexuals to spread their corruption to all levels of society and all regions of the country. This was a problem that could no longer be met with silence; justifying the intense journalistic scrutiny that was to come, Warth (1952, 6) declares that homosexuality ‘must be faced if it is ever to be controlled’. Any further toleration would lead to Britain falling into decadence, just as France – where homosexuality was decriminalized – had suffered ‘an alarming fall in the birthrate’ (15). Its rival the News of the World – which in the early 1950s found its way into threequarters of British households (Higgins 1996, 278) – was not to be outdone. While it had for several decades reported regularly on court cases involving all manner of sexual offences, in 1953 alone the paper covered more than 100 trials for homosexual offences. That same year, a number of cases involving prominent men – the actor Sir John Gielgud, the Labour MP William Field, the author Robert Cooke-Croft – caused a veritable frenzy across the British press. Most sensational of all were the Montagu trials of 1953 and 1954, which ended with the conviction and imprisonment of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and his friends Michael Pitt Rivers and the diplomatic editor for the Daily Mail Peter Wildeblood. The details of the two cases – involving a peer of the realm embroiled with firstly boy scouts, and then airmen and several others in an orgiastic party – both made

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extraordinarily titillating copy and served to confirm ideas about the spread of homosexual corruption across the barriers of social class. Several titles, however, broke rank with popular press’s stance on homosexuality by calling for greater tolerance and indeed legal reform, and many excoriated the press for peddling what Justin Bengry has described as ‘a kind of respectable pornography’ (2012, 168). Murdoch’s novel is implicitly critical of the influence of the popular newspapers: she shows that homosexual encounters need not be merely shameful and damaging. Indeed, the young Toby’s experience is revelatory: ‘his whole conception of human existence was become in a moment immensely more complex’ (2004, 177), and he is moved to imagine what it must be like to be the other man. Evidently, he has learnt far more in these brief moments than he ever did from reading the News of the World. Laurie’s encounter with Martin in Goff ’s novel is rather less transformative. Moreover, while the scene supposedly demonstrates Laurie’s capacity for restraint, thereby refuting a line of attack commonly made by journalists, he is still being judged by those who have learnt all about his tendencies from other sources. And, of course, his refusal to act on his desires is precisely the outcome most wished for by the like of Douglas Warth. Goff ’s novel therefore is tightly constrained by the very discourse it seeks to challenge. Heightened scrutiny of homosexuality in the media was certainly in large part a result of a dramatic intensification of police surveillance of queer venues: pubs, cruising grounds and, above all, urinals. According to Matt Houlbrook, during the late 1940s, the number of incidents involving homosexual activity that led to proceedings recorded by the Metropolitan Police was nearly three times higher than before the war; these levels of intervention were sustained through the 1950s. Houlbrook dismisses, however, the widely held belief that the British State orchestrated a ‘witch hunt’ against homosexuals in the post-war years; he argues that the increase in interventions by the police owed much less to the machinations of homophobic politicians and senior officials than it did to shifts in police operations at the divisional level. In the mid-1940s, district officers responded to the perception that homosexual activity had spiralled out of control in London’s West End, largely thanks to the difficulty of policing it during the blackout, by bolstering ‘vice squads’ when the resources became available following the return to peacetime operations. Crucially, the effects of this increase in police activity were felt unevenly: particular venues and areas in the West End were heavily targeted; many other sites, private homes especially, were left relatively undisturbed. Younger, poorer men were more likely to come into the attentions of the police, since they were more reliant on these sites and

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less able to access the safer, private domestic spaces that many older, wealthier men took for granted. (Houlbrook 2005, 31–7) It is hardly surprising therefore that many homosexual novels of the 1950s exhibit a retreat from these increasingly visible, dangerous locations and express enthusiasm for the safety and respectability of middle-class domesticity. Once again, then, the narrative trajectory of The Plaster Fabric, which begins with Laurie’s electric but risky encounter in the West End and ends with his search for more reassuring settings and interactions at some remove from the capital, is typical. Yet even while Laurie appears to escape the dissolute and dangerous city for a more secure and respectable domestic setting, as his encounter with the teenaged Martin suggests, he never manages to free himself from either temptation or scrutiny. The attempted shift away from obvious and dubious kinds of queer encounter has a temporal as well as a spatial dimension. The Plaster Fabric evinces an awareness of a history of homosexuality, and articulates the need to break with older models of queer intimacy, in particular, those organized around pecuniary exchange and differentials in age and class (See Houlbrook 2005, 167–94). Although Goff ’s novel provides no illustration of an ideal homosexual relationship, Laurie’s various objectionable and unrewarding affairs help outline its probable form. Like other homosexual novels from the period, The Plaster Fabric gestures toward a mode of companionship that is monogamous, domesticated and egalitarian, in other words, one which mirrors ideals of heterosexual marriage that were dominant in the mid-twentieth century (See Collins 2004; Kynaston 2009). And yet, troublingly, other kinds of encounter continue to prove attractive. Laurie attempts to sublimate such desires by way of art. Whereas initially he exploits his interest in painting as a sexual ruse, he goes on to try to elevate his baser passions through what he hopes is genuine artistic expression. Unfortunately, Laurie’s paintings are all too accurate. A portrait of Beeson succeeds only in reproducing the guardsman’s ‘calculating look’, thereby invoking the very kind of interaction from which Laurie is trying to distance himself. In a similar way, Goff ’s novel cannot fully manage the desires it steadfastly insists it can contain. The sheer physicality of Beeson impresses on the narrative throughout. The guardsman’s powerful hands – rendered as great rough-hewn paws in John Minton’s illustration on the cover of the first edition (see Fig. 1) – never leave Laurie’s mind, in part because they so often leave their mark on his body: he is repeatedly grasped (or wishes that he were) and, finally, is groped ‘unambiguously’ (253) by Beeson. These various grapplings seem to have a much longer afterlife, to my mind at least, than their ultimate repudiation. The novel’s title, then, can be seen to be unintentionally appropriate. While it

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Figure 1 The Plaster Fabric by Martyn Goff. First edition

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invokes the travails of being true to oneself – Laurie continually anguishes over the various dissimulations he must weave so as ‘to ensure a smooth and comfortable life’ (47) – the novel’s ‘moral’ conclusion is itself little more than a flimsy fabrication plastered over more visceral desires. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the novel’s final lines are suggestive of the ‘backward glance’ of a man cruising for sex – a glance that also looks back to an earlier time of easier pleasures. Immediately after Beeson’s departure Laurie returns to the same streets in which he first met the guardsman, whereupon he is suffused with ‘a mood of nostalgia for the past’. (255) Not atypically, Goff ’s novel looks both forward and back; its circuitous narrative evinces a desire to both abandon and return to outmoded, disavowed forms of queer interaction. Caught between his transgressive desires on the one hand and his ambitions for a normal life on the other, always on the move yet ultimately going nowhere, Laurie is the archetypal queer protagonist of 1950s fiction.

Social problem, private affairs Alan Sinfield and others have argued that the dominant discursive construction through which homosexuality was understood in the post-war years was the ‘social problem’. Following Foucault, we have become used to the idea that homosexuality has, at different historical moments, been conceptualized through distinct discursive frameworks, which in turn have mobilized new regulatory regimes. The late nineteenth century saw the earliest medical taxonomies of abnormal sexual behaviour; whereas previously homosexual acts had been conceived of as sinful and/or criminal, the recognition of homosexuality as a clinical condition mandated the treatment rather than the punishment of those so afflicted. Supported by the rise of sociology and social work as a profession, the social problem provided consensus-era Britain its principal vehicle for apprehending social instability. Homosexuality and other forms of aberrant behaviour were increasingly understood to be the result of social failures, ‘thereby necessitating the application of a unique battery of problem-solving techniques’ (Waters 2013, 193). It was not so much that the conditions of post-war society produced more problems (though in the 1950s, they appeared to proliferate: single mothers, teenage delinquency, prostitution and the colour bar all jostled for attention alongside homosexuality; in contemporary kitchen sink dramas multiple issues became concatenated, as in Shelagh Delaney’s 1958 play A Taste of Honey). Rather, the social problem provided the Welfare State the necessary

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conceptual and practical means to fulfil its primary functions which, broad agreement had it, were to ‘ameliorate injustices, smooth over inequalities, and secure steady general progress’. (Sinfield 1999, 238) For Sinfield, the 1957 Wolfenden Report – officially, the Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution – is the ‘textbook instance’ of the post-war social problem, in that it represents a juncture within a standard sequence that proceeds in the following way: ‘a social problem is nominated and the State declares its readiness to respond to parliamentary and media concern; a committee of the wise and the good is set up, and further discussion is invited; the committee reports, more discussion follows, and the State passes laws to improve matters’ (ibid.). Some have interpreted the decade-long period that Parliament took to act on the recommendations of the Wolfenden Report as indicative of how homosexuality proved an especially difficult problem for the British state to assimilate (see, for example, Higgins 1996, 123–48). Sinfield disagrees: it took roughly the same length of time to introduce commercial television (2014, 271). The ‘wise and the good’ who served on or who were invited to contribute to the Wolfenden Committee, which began meeting in 1954, mostly comprised doctors, lawyers, police officers and churchmen. While the social problem constituted the principal formation through which homosexuality was regulated in the post-war years, the fields of medicine, law and religion all continued to provide competing explanations. In fact, as Chris Waters has shown, studies of homosexuality produced in the 1950s demonstrated a widespread slippage between the methodological registers of psychiatry and sociology, though by the end of the decade, the latter was most definitely in the ascendant (Waters 2013, 205). As I outlined in the previous section, reporting in the popular press from earlier in the decade was decidedly less nuanced, stressing the moral turpitude of homosexuals and the threat they posed to the wider public. As the 1950s progressed, however, what Richard Hornsey has described as a ‘counterdiscursive project’ (2010, 116) gained momentum. Key contributions alongside Wolfenden included Gordon Westwood’s 1952 Society and the Homosexual (the first booklength study of homosexuality that addressed a non-expert readership), Peter Wildeblood’s 1955 book Against the Law, a scathing account of his treatment by the British legal establishment published after completing the prison sentence he received for homosexual offences at the second Montagu trial the previous year (the book attracted a wide audience and was reissued as a Penguin paperback in 1957), as well as numerous broadsheet editorials. These interventions shared a reformist agenda, central to which was the articulation of an alternative aetiology

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of homosexuality that drew on sexological and psychiatric literature produced in the first half of the century. Largely eschewing behavioural models that understood homosexuality as the repeated capitulation to temptation stemming from moral weakness or corruption, reformers presented homosexuality as a permanent psychological condition that had its origins in childhood or adolescence. Crucially, this alternative aetiology transferred culpability for the homosexual’s condition onto the institutions of family and education. With the individual no longer to blame for his homosexuality, the principal question became how he managed his condition; as one of the protagonists in Renault’s The Charioteer has it, ‘it’s not what one is, it’s what one does with it’ (2003, 131). Westwood distinguishes the ‘socially-conscious homosexual’ – the otherwise well-adjusted, law-abiding individual – from the immoral agents of corruption familiar from tabloid reporting. The social opprobrium faced by homosexuals, Westwood argues, was not only unfair to the more conscientious members of that group, it was potentially damaging: homosexuals were left to feel they had no stake in society, which in turn encouraged them to adopt antisocial forms of behaviour. Westwood et al. did not suggest that widespread public hostility toward homosexuality could or even should be overturned, but they did insist that the conscientious homosexual deserved a place in a modern, diverse Britain. Antiquated laws lagged behind advances in scientific understandings of sexuality: as Westwood insists, ‘the new medical and psychological discoveries of the last fifty years have changed our social needs, but the sex code has remained as before, producing a continual disparity between our lives and our rules’ (Westwood 1952, 107). In this manner psychological models for homosexuality were being put to the service of legal reform in the 1950s; the psychiatrist and the sexologist joined the ranks of the experts mobilized by the State to tackle the period’s most pressing social problems. Hornsey suggests that many of the decade’s homosexual novels were aligned with this reformist agenda. One would therefore expect these stories to speak in concert with Wolfenden, by outlining how legal reform would repair the situation of many men whose lives had been distorted by being on the wrong side of the law, enabling otherwise honest and capable men to make a full and proper contribution to society. James Courage’s 1959 novel A Way of Love seems fashioned in this manner; indeed, its very title echoes that of Peter Wildeblood’s second book A Way of Life, published in 1956, which explored the experiences of homosexual men from different class backgrounds. At the end of Courage’s novel, some queer friends are discussing the demise of the protagonist’s two-year relationship with another man. One comments, ‘how long would many an

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ordinary so-called normal marriage last [. . .] if there were no legal ties and no children to hold the partners together?’ (Courage 1959, 249) The implication is obvious: the institutions of marriage and family are what define ‘ordinariness’; the lack of legal approbation renders queer relationships otherwise, and consequently less durable. Other novels, though, are equivocal. In Garland’s The Heart in Exile, the protagonist Anthony Page – a psychiatrist – reckons a change in the law would do little to alter public disapproval, and therefore the lot of most homosexuals: ‘the invert would still be in a minority, with a permanent guilt feeling, and the hostile pressure of society would, to varying degrees, turn him into a neurotic’ (2014, 79). In any case it would be difficult to institute a change to the law. Page has just been talking to a Member of Parliament who is gloomy about the prospects of reform. The problem is that queers are thought to be undeserving: they are an untrustworthy lot; indeed, many are Communists. Psychiatric treatment, the novel suggests, is a more propitious endeavour, as it will help individuals either to come to terms with their homosexuality, or to cure them of it. (See Houlbrook and Waters, 2006, for a trenchant analysis of the novel’s investments in psychiatric models of homosexuality.) Goff ’s The Plaster Fabric takes the opposite tack. Laurie seems to be making the predictable move when he declares: ‘The law is the thing. Once someone has to live outside it, his whole outlook becomes warped.’ (65) But he is quickly persuaded by his interlocutor Norman, who will shortly become his lover, that this line of reasoning is just a way to ‘escape moral responsibility’ (66). Queers don’t need the State, or psychiatrists for that matter, to show them how to be good. The problem for Laurie is that he has few signposts to show him the way, especially after the older Norman is revealed to have a defective moral compass. (Laurie is disgusted by his suggestion that they embark on an open relationship.) It is no wonder then that Laurie finds himself back at Marble Arch looking wistfully at guardsmen in the novel’s final pages: by insisting that he look only to himself for direction, Laurie ends up following his most heartfelt desires. Where the decade’s homosexual novels correspond more evenly with the mechanics of the social problem is in their articulation of domesticity as the proper locus of homosexuality. As is well known, Wolfenden recommended the partial decriminalization of sexual relations between men: the Report stipulated that only private acts involving two consenting adults – aged twentyone or over – should be made lawful. The 1967 Sexual Offences Act followed these recommendations to the letter. (Further exclusions were added, including for the Armed Forces or Merchant Navy.) Thus the social problem of

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homosexuality was neutralized by being shunted into the private sphere, where the State was (and generally still is) presumed to have only limited jurisdiction. The Report makes its understanding clear on this count: ‘Unless a deliberate attempt is to be made by society, acting through the agency of law, to equate the sphere of crime with that of sin, there must be a realm of private morality and immorality which is, in brief and crude terms, not the law’s business.’ (Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution. 1957, 7, para. 1.) Wolfenden’s proposals were more likely to be considered satisfactory by individuals who took the resource of privacy for granted. Those who were more reliant on public space for homosexual encounters, though, were left in an even more precarious position. Indeed, one significant consequence of the legal codification of private and public sexual acts was a further sanctioning of punitive inventions against the latter. In the years immediately following the 1967 act, the number of men convicted for seeking or having sex with other men in public trebled. (See Higgins 1996: 145–6.) The middle-class men who stood to benefit most from the partial decriminalization of homosexuality tended to take the liberal view: legal reform constituted a limited adjustment, a means by which a narrow set of vital freedoms might be extended to all. In fact, homosexual reform must be seen as part of a larger bourgeois project. As Hornsey argues, homosexual reformism had much in common with the post-war rhetoric of urban renewal: both were invested in a set of scientific discourses that originally emerged in the late nineteenth century, both relied heavily on the figure of the professional expert to promote their arguments, and both ‘projected a consensual, happy, and peaceful postwar society in which latest modern science would finally dislodge the obsolescent remnants of the Victorian past, under the cover of which they covertly installed a hegemonic set of bourgeois assumptions about civic society, domestic respectability, and appropriate urban conduct’ (2010, 118). The homosexual novel, evidently, is shaped by these same assumptions. Expert voices are commonplace. Audrey Erskine Lindop’s The Details of Jeremy Stretton, published in 1955, even features a forward written by ‘a Consultant in Psychiatry’, who endorses the novel’s realistic and responsible depiction of male homosexuality (1955, x–xi). Without exception these novels are focalized through middle-class homosexual protagonists who have either secured for themselves a comfortable home or look likely to inherit soon the rewards of bourgeois life. And, once again, these men recoil from the prospect of unruly queer urban milieus that were being excoriated in both the popular press and the reformist accounts of Westwood and Wildeblood. Moreover, the focus on domesticity in reformist narratives, fictional or otherwise, was cognate with the

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new and insistent emphasis on the homosexual’s psychic interiority. Just as the State was thought to have no legitimate business in the private home, it was understood to hold no jurisdiction over psychological conditions; only acts of public indecency fell within its purview. One problem for the authors of homosexual novels, however, is that they needed to show how their respectable, domesticated homosexual couples got to meet in the first place. While queer pubs and house parties were contemptible, they could not be left out of the story altogether, since they provided by far the most realistic scenario for homosexual introductions. In Renault’s The Charioteer, for example, injured servicemen and former schoolmates Laurie Odell and Ralph Lanyon are reunited at a party held at the flat of Sandy Reid. Laurie does not warm to the effeminate, facetious host, whom he has met by chance in the street only a few hours earlier. The contingency of their meeting discomforts Laurie, but he endures the company of his new acquaintance in the tawdry surroundings of a queer pub, understanding that ‘somewhere behind [Sandy] was the comforting solidarity of a group’ (111). But once at the party Laurie insists he feels little connection with the other guests; observing them detachedly he realises that ‘nine-tenths of the people [present] were specialists’ who, unlike Laurie, ‘had identified themselves with their limitations’ and, even, ‘were making a career of them’ (132). Ralph’s disdain is even blunter, and once he has teamed up with Laurie he sees no reason for the two of them to hang around. The evident need for even well-adjusted, capable individuals like Laurie and Ralph to attend such queer gatherings is thus downplayed; they are men apart. This is what they like to tell themselves at least: as the evening plays out, Laurie learns that Ralph is a familiar figure at Sandy’s. Moreover, Laurie is horrified to discover that his own facility for bitchy comebacks is as well developed as any of the career homosexuals present (137). Garland’s The Heart in Exile seems to get around the unpleasant business of meeting in queer venues in a rather ingenious way: at the end of the novel Anthony Page takes up with his male secretary Terry – who was living in his flat all along! But still Anthony can’t keep out of the pubs. In order to solve the mystery of the suicide of a former lover he is obliged to revisit the city’s queer sites, some of which he frequented in a more dissolute period of his life before the War. Deeply knowledgeable of but apparently aloof from these habitats and their denizens, Anthony makes for an ideal guide to London’s queer ‘underground’. Yet his encounters with this degraded realm disturb him profoundly, as they threaten to rekindle desires which have been repressed in the process of forging a mature, respectable identity organized around domesticity and professional

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responsibility. Like The Charioteer’s Laurie, Anthony feels himself detached, but knows that he is not. These anxieties impel Anthony to retreat back to the private space of his well-ordered home. Fortunately, a life of solitude is not to be his destiny; indeed, in taking up with Terry at the novel’s close, Garland indicates that homosexuality may after all be successfully managed within a loving, monogamous and domestic configuration. However, the very organization of the The Heart in Exile indicates how the homosexual novel is beset by more fundamental problems of representation. Garland et al. are motivated to depict the kind of homosexual relationship that would be protected by legal reform: an otherwise conventional companionate, domesticated union. Unfortunately, these sorts of relationships hardly make compelling story material, which explains why they are so often pushed to the edges or even beyond the limits of the narrative. Consequently, homosexual novels tend to be dominated, in terms of narrative space, by the very locales and modes of interaction they disavow. They are, moreover, acutely aware of their paradoxical nature. In The Heart in Exile, Terry declares that if he ever could write a novel, he would ‘write about the majority [of homosexuals] for whom it isn’t really tragic’. Anthony knows this would not amount to much: ‘Happiness – normal or abnormal – is uninteresting’ (142). Appropriately enough, Anthony feels that his exploration of London’s seething queer underworld takes the form of a very different kind of fiction: a penny-dreadful. As an object the pennydreadful is cheap, showy and disreputable; within its pages it contains the promise of the sensuous pleasures of the disorderly city. Anthony not only acknowledges the allure of this realm, he comprehends that the heightened sensuality of the penny-dreadful’s fictional world renders it more real than real life: ‘I didn’t want to read a novel and I didn’t want to write novels, I wanted to live novels. The fact that the novel I wanted to live at this particular moment was a penny-dreadful, mystery story, was significant, because I always felt the pennydreadful was the real novel. As a species it was immortal.’ (144; italics in original.) Only when he has solved the case of Julian’s death does Anthony feel he is finally able to close this book. Enduring love and responsibility replace the desire for excitement; the story ends so that real life may begin. Of course, this amounts to an acknowledgement that any attempt to represent respectable homosexual lives cannot avoid – indeed, will inevitably be dominated by – more pleasurable, less reputable narrative forms. Anthony’s sense of the penny-dreadful’s immortality is, then, disturbingly apposite. In The Charioteer, Laurie and Ralph’s union is similarly confirmed only in the closing pages. As in The Heart in Exile, some evidence of what their relationship

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will be like is provided, though much of this is coded through interior décor: austerely masculine interiors are suggestive of the kind of restraint necessary to sustain long-term relationships (see Dines 2017). And also like Garland’s novel, The Charioteer is dominated by the kinds of queer interaction it tries to renounce. The chapter featuring Sandy’s party occupies a central position within Renault’s narrative; it is also, noticeably, the novel’s longest. The sharply rendered camp chatter, the drunken dancing and Sandy’s attempted suicide make the party sequence compelling reading; by comparison, the several chapters focusing on institutional life – Laurie’s schooldays, his long convalescence in a military hospital – are pale prospects. There is a laughably awkward, almost metafictive moment at the party that registers the problematic nature of the narrative. Feeling isolated at the party, Laurie comforts himself with a copy of Stevenson’s Treasure Island he has found in the bookshelf next to him. The lines Laurie falls into reading are soothingly escapist, but he suffers this interruption: A young man sat down beside him on the divan and, without any kind of preliminary, said, ‘Is it a queer book?’ ‘No’, said Laurie. ‘Oh’, said the young man, on a note of utter deflation. He got up and went away. (129)

This briefest of exchanges provokes another question that has troubled many a homosexual reader: what would it mean to be caught reading a novel like The Charioteer? For, inescapably, Renault’s is a queer book. Were Laurie reading something similar – a book about someone like himself – it would have been harder to repel the unwanted attention and, therefore, to distinguish himself from the other partygoers. In other words, the exchange indicates that the queer party is, after all, a fitting location for a novel like The Charioteer. The numerous references to childhood across the chapter provide further confirmation that Laurie has more in common with this queer scene than he cares to admit. In addition, they draw attention to the novel’s own narration and its identity as a queer book. Sandy’s room is a former nursery: a converted toy cupboard and the protective bars on the windows (116, 128) seem to confirm the revellers’ immaturity, their having ‘turned away from all other reality’ (132). But, of course, Laurie has shown the same tendencies by burying himself in the pages of Treasure Island. The nursery setting and the children’s book also invoke Laurie’s own early past. The novel’s opening chapter has five-year-old Laurie emerging out of his bedroom to confront his absconding father, a traumatic experience that presumably will have important consequences for the boy’s psychosexual

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development. And the book’s physical condition – its ‘friendly’ ‘schoolroom shabbiness’ – connects with another formative scene, in which Ralph, who is about to be expelled from school for having had inappropriate relations with another boy, gives Laurie a copy of that most venerable of queer books, Plato’s Phaedrus. Laurie comes to cherish most of all Plato’s story of the charioteer, an allegory of the intellect’s continual struggle with the more unruly passions and appetites. The passing of the book between these men marks out their shared commitment to a life of sexual restraint, and suggests a way homosexuals might come to know one another without all the unpleasantness of the ‘scene’. Laurie nearly passes the battered, much-read book on to the younger Andrew, in whom he recognizes incipient homosexuality, as Ralph once did in him. (In fact the scene in which Andrew interrupts Laurie’s reading prefigures the later scene at the party.) Ultimately, however, Laurie abandons Andrew, preferring the younger man to remain innocent and untainted by homosexuality. Alan Sinfield complains that the novel’s queer heroism thus ‘involves invalidating queerness’ (1994, 144). I would assert, instead, that Laurie’s withholding the Phaedrus from Andrew rather confirms the power of queer books – The Charioteer included – to inculcate and condition homosexuality. The narrative’s belated attempt to ‘invalidat[e] queerness’ should be seen therefore as a nervous reaction to concerns about its own status and function, to the fact of its own queerness. James Courage’s A Way of Love is the decade’s only novel to be fully centred on a homosexual affair (Goff ’s 1961 effort, The Youngest Director, does the same; see Dines 2013). Yet the domesticated relationship between architect Bruce Quantock and his younger lover Philip Dill produces a narrative conundrum. Bruce declares his motivation to write a first-person account that shows how queers are capable of conducting their love lives as well as anyone else, yet his own story ends in failure. Once again, successful, comfortable relationships rarely make for interesting stories; Bruce feels obliged to distil a period of contentment into a single banality: ‘all went well’ (124). But, further, Courage’s novel indicates the ultimate impossibility of narrating stable queer domestic lives. Things start promisingly enough. Bruce and Philip first meet at a concert at the Royal Festival Hall, that jewel in the crown of London’s post-war renewal. No building better represented modern, democratic Britain; it is, therefore, a most appropriate venue for the meeting of two model homosexual citizens. And in a suitably responsible fashion, the pair soon withdraws from public view; the affair is transferred to Bruce’s small, neat house near Regent’s Park. This arrangement is understood to be good and proper: Philip delights in the idea of ‘us [living]

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together as though we were married’ (124), and Bruce speaks of their ‘relax[ing] into the private persons we essentially desired to be’ (137). But Bruce realizes that he cannot both pursue an affair and write about it, as either activity places exhaustive demands on his private life. As his friend Wallace puts it, a choice must be made between ‘book or bed’ (112). Failure, then, stands as the only available narrative option; the alternative is not to write at all. But in telling his story, Bruce comes perilously close to suggesting that there is, after all, something wrong with staying at home. And indeed, Bruce and Philip’s relationship founders when the younger man comes to understand that they are aping normal family life; he feels trapped in a second father-son relationship. In any case, Philip cannot stomach Bruce’s circle of friends. They stop socializing; Bruce worries whether their isolation is sustainable. In an especially frank aside he admits suffering ‘a certain homesickness for the company of [. . .] members of what I may call without exaggeration our immense league – members who were scattered and for the most part strangers to one another, but who shared a common erotic compulsion [. . .] and who rejoiced in the anonymity of cities’ (145). All too easily, then, Courage’s novel shows that the homosexual’s attachment to bourgeois decorum is weak; Bruce’s ‘homesickness’ suggests an entirely different set of loyalties and habits. Thus the authors of homosexual novels are in a double bind. On the one hand they aim to show how being on the wrong side of the law has a distorting effect on the lives of homosexuals; on the other, they must present the sort of model relationship deserving of decriminalization. But queer domestic relationships cannot properly be made into a public matter; their respectability rests on their taking place behind closed doors. This tension precipitates a kind of narrative distortion, whereby the model relationship comes to be framed within, and ultimately sidelined by, more disreputable narrative modes and social alignments.

Comic turns: seriousness and the homosexual novel The homosexual novel was not the period’s only vehicle for examining queer desire and experience. Gregory Woods declares that the 1950s amounted to ‘a virtual festival of queer expression’ (1998, 289). Woods is responding to the ‘variety and strength’ of poetry, plays and novels emerging out of both the US and UK during ‘this notorious period’ (ibid.), but British fiction alone evinced considerable diversity. One prominent mode was the historical novel, which featured settings ranging from Athens in the time of Socrates (Renault’s The Last

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of the Wine, 1956) through to the theatre world of Jacobean England (Bryher’s The Player’s Boy, 1953). Usually, these novels focused on rulers whose intimate lives have been associated with homosexuality: the Roman emperor Heliogabalus, Theodosius II of Constantinople, and the English monarchs Richard I and Edward II (see Gunn 2014, 77–9). As such, these novels are, implicitly at least, preoccupied with the relationship between homosexuality and the law, in a manner not dissimilar to those novels with contemporary and less exotic settings. In addition familiar assertions of the blamelessness of sexual orientation recur: In The Lute Player (1951), for instance, author Nora Lofts has Richard I declare on his deathbed ‘but God makes us, you know, and He did not make me – a lover of women – it was not my choice’ (554). Other novels look back to more proximate times and places. Some tell of institutional life: of homosexual experience in the homosocial world of public school before the War (Michael Mayer’s The End of the Corridor, 1951; G.F. Green’s In the Making, 1952; Michael Scarrott’s Ambassador of Loss, 1955) or in the military during and after it (Ernest Frost’s The Dark Peninsula, 1949; Walter Baxter’s Look Down in Mercy, 1951; Simon Raven’s The Feathers of Death, 1959). Others continue a tradition of reflection on the particular legacies, opportunities and dangers afforded to Western homosexuals by Mediterranean locations (Robert Liddell’s Unreal City, 1952; Francis King’s novels The Dark Glasses, 1954; The Firewalkers, 1956, published under the pseudonym Frank Cauldwell; and Man on the Rock, 1957). (See Aldrich 1993.) Conspicuous by their absence from the 1950s publishing scene in Britain, however, are novels primarily focused on lesbian desire and experience. This partly stems from the prominence of queer men relative to women, lesbian or otherwise, in the literary establishment moving into the post-war period. But mostly it has to do with the fact that sexual relations between women were not illegal, meaning that lesbianism was not generally considered a social problem requiring same degree of scrutiny and intervention as male homosexuality. Alice Ferrebe suggests that only later – i.e. in the 1960s – did lesbianism became ‘part of the discussion’ (2012, 112), although Alison Oram qualifies this widely held presumption with a nuanced account of the ways the popular British press tackled female homosexuality during the 1950s. While the word ‘lesbianism’ would not appear in newspaper print until 1959 (in the News of the World), Oram finds that the press found other formulations for conceptualizing female homosexuality, located typically within the genres of crime and divorce case reporting. If such representations were much less prevalent and prominent than coverage of male homosexuality in the popular press, they also articulated a

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less ‘discrete – boundaried – form of public identity’ (2012, 42). An important corollary of this is that homosexuality could be conceived to range across female experience, allowing for the disturbing possibility that lesbianism ‘might also be found in the heart of the apparently normative family’ (41). A weak sense of female homosexuality as a distinct public identity then helps explain the lack of ‘lesbian novels’ in the 1950s. It is seemingly what shapes Brigid Brophy’s The King of a Rainy Country (1956), whose female protagonist Susan, rather like Woolf ’s Clarissa Dalloway, is beset by a recurring epiphanic memory of a homoerotic encounter which cannot be acted upon or even adequately voiced. Patricia Juliana Smith suggests that the novel’s ‘stratagems [. . .] of silence and unspeakability’ (1995, 133) are a reflection of the mores of the period. If lesbian desire and identity remains, as in Woolf ’s time, unnamed and unnameable, Brophy’s response is metafictive. The novel harnesses a variety of narrative modes – the homoerotic girls’ school narrative, the romantic quest, even stories taken from opera – and subverts, exhausts and discards them, in order to demonstrate ‘their emptiness, purposelessness, and in the case of lesbian desire, perniciousness’ (143). The novel concludes optimistically, with two women – the twenty-year-old Susan and the middle-aged Helena – appearing to discreetly acknowledge their covert sexuality to one another. Moreover, the young protagonist evades entrapment in heterosexual wedlock and seems determined to direct for herself her future life course – though noticeably the novel remains unable to represent such a life directly. It was left to imported American material, such as the ‘pulp’ romances of Ann Bannon, Valerie Taylor and others (some of which were reissued as mass-market paperbacks by British publishers), to render lesbian identity and subculture as a viable and sometimes even attractive possibility (see Murphy 2013). Otherwise lesbian characters made occasional cameo appearances in British middlebrow novels, such as Mary Stewart’s Wildfire at Midnight (1956). Amy Tooth Murphy’s case for the significance of this material is similar to the one Oram makes about lesbian desire in the popular press: ‘Much post-war middlebrow fiction, Stewart’s included, points to a growing cultural awareness of queerness as an identity position existing in the everyday world, but also reflects cultural anxieties and suspicions about this dangerous “other” that walks among us’ (Murphy 2014). Frequently these representations flattered the urbane reader ‘with an opportunity to feel part of a knowledgeable and worldly in-crowd’ (ibid.). They were, to be sure, exploitative: such characters usually operated as mere plot devices, and rarely if ever were they not punished for or saved from their non-normative sexual relations. More appealing lesbian figures would appear only occasionally

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– for example, in the shape of Big Jill in Colin MacInnes’s 1958 novel Absolute Beginners. However, readers would have to wait till 1960 for the first British novel – in the shape of Shirley Verel’s The Dark Side of Venus – which put its lesbian characters centre stage and whose fates entailed neither a violent death nor heterosexual marriage. The Dark Side of Venus has in common with the male homosexual novel a seriousness of purpose. The humourlessness of this literature is a measure of the gravity of the ‘problem’ at hand; presumably it was understood to be the most effective way of advancing the position of homosexuals, serving, for instance, to counter associations between male homosexuality and frivolity. Publishers rarely missed the opportunity to emphasize the serious and honest manner in which their authors dealt with the subject of homosexuality, and reviewers by and large applauded such an approach. For example, in a review for the Observer, Marghanita Laski calls Garland’s The Heart in Exile ‘a sad, serious first novel’ which ‘cannot fairly be ignored’. She continues: ‘its detached picture of barren tragic love and desire [. . .] can arouse no disgust but only a deep pity coupled with a new understanding’ (cited in Polchin 2016). The publisher’s introduction on the flyleaf of a 1958 reprint by W.H. Allen of The Heart in Exile echoes these sentiments: ‘this is a serious and moving novel that has already won wide acclaim as an honest treatment of a subject that has excited increasing interest in recent years’. However, a few critics demurred. In his review of the same novel for the New Statesman, Walter Allen opines that ‘the only possible satisfactory rendering of the subject [of homosexuality] – or of any other perversion – is in terms of comedy’ (cited in Polchin 2016). For this reason he found Garland’s novel lacking in appeal. Two novels published in the 1950s seem to fulfil Allen’s requirement for the comic treatment of homosexuality. Brophy’s The King of a Rainy Country draws on and manipulates narratives characterized by either a lack, or a humorous excess, of seriousness: the bohemian love affair, the picaresque, the operatic marriage plot. Michael Nelson’s A Room in Chelsea Square, first published in 1958, lampoons the languid extravagance of a fabulously wealthy circle of queer men on the periphery of London’s artistic and literary scene. That the book was initially published anonymously is less a measure of its tackling a controversial subject than of its scurrility: its lascivious protagonists are based, rather obviously, on figures involved with the literary magazine Horizon, Cyril Connolly and Peter Watson. Indeed, as Gregory Woods points out, the novel ‘deliberately steps aside from the script about the homosexual in society’ (Nelson 2014, x). The central characters’ homosexuality is never referred to explicitly, even in pejorative terms; there are no pleas for tolerance and

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understanding. Indeed, the novel’s lack of seriousness is precisely what enables its author to take homosexuality for granted: as Woods observes, ‘there are more important things to worry about – a poorly cooked meal, an ill-chosen tie – than the trivial matter of being queer’ (1998, vi). What both Brophy’s and Nelson’s novels suggest then is how a comedic mode militates against the explicit articulation of homosexuality. Allen’s declaration that the only satisfactory way of dealing with homosexuality in literature is through comedy could well be understood to express a desire for silence on the subject. Alternatively, and more optimistically, an insistence on comedy might suggest a refusal to speak of homosexuality only through narrow, sanctioned channels, gesturing towards ways of organizing queerness beyond normative scripts and structures. Of course, the absence of any explicit queer self-identification in Nelson’s novel could be seen as simply a reflection of the complacency of the ‘very, very rich’ (2014, 3). In any case the novel is something of an anachronism: Nelson wrote the manuscript in the late 1940s and, unsurprisingly, struggled to find a publisher. But one author who wrote throughout the 1950s, Angus Wilson, repeatedly sets the concerns of the homosexual novel to comedic modes. Wilson’s first novel, Hemlock and After, could well be said to have a serious, didactic import: it works to emphasize both the diversity and fluidity of, respectively, homosexual experience and desire. The novel’s protagonist, the middle-aged novelist Bernard Sands, is said to have ‘diverge[d] from sexual orthodoxy [. . .] comparatively recent[ly]’; by contrast, his former lover, the young stage designer Terence Lambert, begins an affair with Bernard’s daughter Elizabeth. Certainly, there seems little will to call on the deterministic models of psychiatry to rationalize and excuse homosexual desire and behaviour. Psychology is invoked – and then rather nebulously – only in relation to Bernard’s wife Ella, who is suffering from the long-term effects of a nervous breakdown. Furthermore, the ‘caricatured pansy manner’ of the altogether malignant figure of Sherman Winter has nothing to with his psychic constitution, as is often the way with abjectly effeminate homosexual figures in other 1950s novels. Instead, Wilson suggests drolly, it is a mere convenience. Homosexuality, then, is understood less as the consequence of psychology than as a series of habits or, perhaps more, a network of cultural forms. As such it has the potential to influence other social domains; as Ferrebe observes, ‘camp’ styles of speech are spoken by not only all kinds of homosexual, but by heterosexuals as well, such as Elizabeth (2012, 122). Noticeably, these contrivances draw on other cultural styles; repeatedly, and across various social milieus, an affected Cockney accent seems almost sufficient

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to establish a speech act as camp. Camp styles, then, are as derivative as they are mobile. Thus Hemlock and After indicates that comedy – or, at least, a lack of seriousness – derives from cultural cross currents, from the interactions between diverse elements of society. Indeed, Bernard is a figure who repeatedly seeks to ‘bridge’ different groups. For instance, his frivolity in the company of the young is said to be a consequence of a ‘paederastic desire to bridge the years’ (54); at a party Bernard is conscious that he ‘bridges the gap’ between his own ageing 1920s set, on the one hand, and a group of ‘golden spivs’ on the other, whose occupation of a ‘homosexual borderland’ so fascinates the writer (102); he also forms a precarious ‘alliance’ with Eric’s brother, a schools inspector, to stave off their mother’s oppressive influence over Bernard’s lover (83). Bernard understands these interactions to be necessary but difficult, fraught with the potential for social embarrassment – ‘payment’, he thinks to himself, ‘for living in a transition period’ (57–8). This is key: Hemlock and After is first and foremost a novel about negotiating relationships of patronage – artistic, political and sexual – in the new post-war landscape. Bernard has secured support from the State for a writers’ colony to be housed in Vardon Hall, which – pointedly – was formerly the seat of an aristocratic family. The sponsorship, Bernard hopes, will be free from influence – he aims to run it on his own ‘liberal anarchistic’ principles; what will be provided is the kind of leisure time that had been taken for granted by a pre-war literary culture dominated by the upper classes. Bernard’s sexual relationships are noticeably organized along similar lines: he seeks to install his lover Eric in a flat in London so that the young man might enjoy greater autonomy from both Bernard and Eric’s mother. After vacillating, Eric seems to appreciate Bernard’s apparently high-minded generosity; by contrast, techniques of seduction deriving from ‘a very old-fashioned world’ – those which invoke the robust homosocial utopias of Edward Carpenter and the Shropshire Lad, or which make flattering references to high culture – merely bring Eric to tears of laughter. And then there is the matter of homosexuality and the law. As might be expected of a narrative which argues the importance of spaces to facilitate self-direction and freedom of expression, the case for decriminalization is virtually taken as read, and is pronounced almost offhandedly by Elizabeth: ‘I’m not medieval [. . .] I’d abolish all those ridiculous laws any day’ (57). Bernard, however, remains doubtful about the ability of both the State and himself to remain neutral in their role as patrons. He is right to be. In a pivotal scene halfway through the novel Bernard witnesses in Leicester Square a man

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being arrested for importuning. To his horror, watching the arrest stirs in Bernard a feeling of ‘sadistic excitement’, a ‘hunter’s thrill’; he comes to realize that a high-minded liberal humanist such as himself is after all quite ‘at home with the wielders of the knout and the rubber truncheon’ (109). The consequences are catastrophic: Bernard suffers a heart attack and an evaporation of self-belief. He proves quite incapable of giving an even moderately effective speech during the opening ceremony of Vardon Hall, one which might, crucially, keep on board the disparate, mutually suspicious parties present. Instead his address is an embarrassment of obscurities, portentous references to motive, and slips, including the alarming double entendre ‘one can pay too dearly for what one picks up in the Charing Cross Road’ (153). The audience erupts into chaos; the project’s future, ever contingent on the State’s continued good will, is thrown into doubt. This, then, is Bernard’s hemlock-taking moment: once the novelist gadfly who prided himself on exposing moral and intellectual complacency, he publically accepts judgement that he is unable to ‘exercise proper authority’, a refrain he is tormented by for the rest of his days. And again like Socrates, who was additionally found guilty of corrupting the youth of Athens, he understands he cannot be trusted not to exercise a malign influence over the young poets at Vardon Hall, or for that matter, his lover Eric. The ‘After’ of the novel’s title relates to Bernard’s painful decline towards death, and the ensuing consequences for those to whom he had responsibilities. Fortunately – thanks largely to the interventions of the newly recovered Ella – a compromise is struck which secures the future of a slightly diminished version of the Vardon Hall project. Provision is also guaranteed for Eric’s accommodation – who, like The King of Rainy Country’s Susan, seems at the novel’s close ready to take advantage of new opportunities, and to have broken free from the more limiting formations of earlier times. Alan Sinfield argues that Wilson means the scene in Leicester Square to show that there is little scope in the post-war situation for well-meaning but unreliable liberal humanists like Bernard Sands; by implication, ‘an impersonal State might be a more secure source of value and fairness’ (2000, 86–7). Thus, according to Sinfield, Wilson demonstrates his commitment to a central ideological plank of the post-war settlement, the belief that a series of liberal-democratic reforms could usher in a fairer, more inclusive society overseen by a benign State. Bernard, meanwhile, should not be seen as entirely culpable for his moral failing. Rather, this is a deformation caused by an iniquitous law, whose reform would enable homosexuals to participate productively in public life. Sinfield admits he prefers to regard the Leicester Square incident ‘less as a crisis in Bernard’s moral

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conscience than as a still familiar mode of police harassment’ (88); I would say, further, that I find it difficult to square Bernard’s beholding of State violence with such an optimistic vision of post-war society. Indeed, scepticism about the State’s benign influence pervades the novel. Charles, the civil servant set to take over the running of Vardon Hall, is so overworked that he has little time for the arts (106); Ella and Bernard ensure the imprisonment of the malevolent Mrs Curry, a procuress for paedophiles who had planned to turn Vardon Hall into a roadhouse, but it seems the State will not see fit to keep her away for long; and Eric’s new life owes nothing to legal reform and everything to the ministrations of private individuals. Wilson would go on to be a founding member of the Homosexual Law Reform Society in 1958; his first novel, however, suggests his considerable ambivalence about the State’s involvement in queer life. Margaret Drabble asserts that Wilson understood himself to occupy ‘a moral arena where codes were not fixed. Homosexuals, living outside the law, had to create their own rules.’ (1995, 182) For this reason Wilson’s preference was for the insouciant Eric over the hypocritical Bernard, whose passing suggests the dawning of a new era. ‘It is a liberating book’, Drabble declares; ‘There is Life after Hemlock’ (183). On the other hand, the ascendency of the golden spivs would appear to provide one reason to be cautious as the world shudders on into uncharted moral territory. It is fitting to conclude this chapter with an ambivalent vision of the future from a novel published early in the decade, just as I began with a text published towards the decade’s end which looks back anxiously, and longingly, to queer habits from the past. For it makes little sense to try to coordinate the 1950s homosexual novel with a progressivist history of sexuality. It is true that by the end of the decade a number of queer-themed works of fiction showed a noticeable reorientation away from bourgeois domesticity and toward an urban scene that had been dynamized by Black immigration and the commercial revival of London’s West End: consider for instance Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners (1959), Kenneth Martin’s Waiting for the Sky to Fall (1959) and Andrew Salkey’s Escape to an Autumn Pavement (1960). The homosexual novel, then, operated within a narrow historical window; it is a distinctly 1950s formation. For sure, it would not be unreasonable to claim that the homosexual novel was shaped by its time. But its shape is a strange one, conditioned by the shifting and contradictory ways in which homosexuality was conceived. Indeed, what is most remarkable about these narratives is not their common dissidence so much as their internal dissonance. The principal aim of these fictions is to present a model of honourable homosexuality, but this is always overtaken by a fraught

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search for an appropriate narrative vehicle with which to do so. In this latter respect the homosexual novel always ends in failure, since it relies on, and is overtaken by, improper narratives. In its quest, though, it takes its readers to some extremely alluring times and places. The 1950s homosexual novel then is indeed a ‘queer book’: twisted, misshapen – echoing the etymology of the word ‘queer’ – by its inability to close off multiple disreputable pleasures.

Works cited Aldrich, Robert. The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art and Homosexual Fantasy. London: Routledge, 1993. Bauer, Heike and Matt Cook. ‘Introduction’, in Queer 1950s: Rethinking Sexuality in the Postwar Years, ed. Heike Bauer and Matt Cook. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 1–10. Bedell, Geraldine. ‘Coming out of the dark ages’, Observer, 24 June 2007. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2007/jun/24/communities.gayrights. Bengry, Justin. ‘Queer Profits: Homosexual Scandal and the Origins of Legal Reform in Britain’, in Queer 1950s: Rethinking Sexuality in the Postwar Years, ed. Heike Bauer and Matt Cook. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 167–82. Betjeman, John. No title. Daily Telegraph, 26 April 1957: 12. Brophy, Brigid. The King of a Rainy Country. London: Coelacanth, 2012 [1956]. City Limits. ‘Out Again’, 16 September 1983: 14. Collins, Marcus. Modern Love: An Intimate History of Men and Women in TwentiethCentury Britain. London: Atlantic, 2004. Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution. Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1957. Courage, James. A Way of Love. London: Jonathan Cape, 1959. Crisp, Quentin. The Naked Civil Servant. London: Fontana, 1977 [1968]. Dines, Martin. ‘Bringing the boy back home: queer domesticity and egalitarian relationships in post-war London novels’, Literary London Journal, 10 (2013): (2). Dines, Martin. ‘Designs for Living Rooms’, in Queering the Interior, ed. Matt Cook and Andrew Gorman-Murray, London: Bloomsbury, 2017, 95–107. Dinshaw, Carolyn. Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern. Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 1999. Donnelly, Mark. Sixties Britain: Culture, Society and Politics. London: Routledge, 2005. Drabble, Margaret. Angus Wilson: A Biography. London: Secker and Warburg, 1995. Ferrebe, Alice. Literature of the 1950s: Good Honest Causes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. Garland, Rodney [Adam de Hegadus]. The Heart in Exile. Richmond, VA : Valancourt, 2014 [1953].

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Goff, Martyn. The Plaster Fabric. London: Putnam, 1957. Gunn, Drewey Wayne. Gay Novels of Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth, 1881– 1981: A Reader’s Guide. Jefferson, NC : McFarland, 2014. Hall, Lesley, A. Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1880. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Hennessey, Peter. Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties. London: Penguin, 2006. Higgins, Patrick. Heterosexual Dictatorship: Male Homosexuality in Postwar Britain. London: Fourth Estate, 1996. Hornsey, Richard. The Spiv and the Architect: Unruly Life in Postwar London, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Houlbrook, Matt. ‘Soldier Heroes and Rent Boys: Homosex, Masculinities and Britishness in the Brigade of Guardsmen, c. 1900–1960’, Journal of British Studies 42, no. 3 (2003): 351–88. Houlbrook, Matt. Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918– 1957. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Houlbrook, Matt and Chris Waters. ‘The Heart in Exile: Detachment and Desire in 1950s London’. History Workshop Journal, 62:1 (2006), 142–65. Kynaston, David. Austerity Britain, 1945–51. London: Bloomsbury, 2008. Kynaston, David. Family Britain, 1951–57. London: Bloomsbury, 2009. Langhammer, Claire. ‘Sexual Politics in Mid Twentieth-century Britain: Adultery in Post-war England’, History Workshop Journal, Issue 62 (1) (2006): 86–115. Lindop, Audrey Erskine. The Details of Jeremy Stretton. London: William Heinemann, 1955. Lofts, Nora. The Lute Player. London: Joseph, 1951. Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2007. Mort, Frank. Capital Affairs. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Murdoch, Iris. The Bell. London: Vintage, 2004 [1958]. Murphy, Amy Tooth. ‘Reading the lives between the lines: lesbian literature and oral history in post-war Britain’ Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Glasgow, 2013. Murphy, Amy Tooth. ‘Queer around the Edges: Mary Stewart’s Post-war Middlebrow Fiction’, Notches, 6 May 2014. http://notchesblog.com/2014/05/06/queer-round-theedges-mary-stewarts-post-war-middlebrow-fiction/. Nelson, Michael [Anonymous]. A Room in Chelsea Square. Richmond, VA : Valancourt, 2014 [1958]. Oram, Alison. ‘ “Off the Rails” or “Over the Teacups”: Lesbian Desire and Female Sexualities in the 1950s British Popular Press’, in Queer 1950s: Rethinking Sexuality in the Postwar Years, ed. Heike Bauer and Matt Cook. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 41–60. Polchin, James. ‘Travels in the Queer City : Rodney Garland’s The Heart in Exile and Post-War London’, paper presented at the Literary London Conference, UK , 6 July 2016.

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Renault, Mary. The Charioteer. New York: Vintage, 2003 [1953]. Sinfield, Alan. The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment. London: Cassell, 1994. Sinfield, Alan. Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Sinfield, Alan. ‘Culture, Consensus and the difference: Angus Wilson to Alan Hollinghurst’, in Alastair Davies and Alan Sinfield (eds), British Culture of the Postwar: An Introduction to Literature and Society, 1945–1999. London Routledge, 2000, 83–102. Sinfield, Alan. ‘Out of the 1950s: Cultural History, Queer Thought’, History Workshop Journal, 77:1 (2014): 264–73. Smith, Patricia Juliana. Lesbian Panic: Homoeroticism in Modern British Women’s Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Thomas, Nick. ‘Will the real 1950s please stand up?’ Cultural and Social History 5, no. 2, (June 2008): 227–35. Vickers, Emma. Queen and Country: Same-Sex Desire in the British Armed Forces, 1939–45. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Warth, Douglas. Sunday Pictorial, 25 May 1952: 6, 15. Waters, Chris. ‘The Homosexual as a social being in Britain, 1945–1968’, in Brian Lewis (ed.), British Queer History: New Approaches and Perspectives. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013, 188–218. Westwood, Gordon [Michael Schofield]. Society and the Homosexual. London: Gollancz, 1952. Wilson, Angus. Hemlock and After. London: Penguin, 1992 [1956]. Woods, Gregory. A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

5

A Vision of the Future: Race and Anti-Racism in 1950s British Fiction Matti Ron

Of all the changes Britain underwent in the immediate postwar period, arguably none had so long-lasting an effect in reconfiguring British life as the commencement of Commonwealth migration. While migration to Britain was far from new, the 1948 arrival from the Caribbean of the Empire Windrush, though carrying fewer than 500 passengers, nonetheless signalled the start of a cultural process which, through a combination of mutual fascination, suspicion and, above all, collective struggle, saw the emergence of conviviality1 and a range of hybrid cultural identities that altered the social landscape of Britain’s conurbations. While many came primarily to work, many also came to participate in Britain’s cultural and intellectual life. Beyond Caribbean labour’s contribution to the reconstruction effort following the devastation of the Second World War, the (often overlooked) contribution of the ‘Windrush Generation’ to British intellectual life was equally astonishing: from Trinidad came epoch-making novelists Sam Selvon and V.S. Naipaul as well as Marxist activist and Notting Hill Carnival founder, Claudia Jones; from Jamaica came eminent intellectual Stuart Hall alongside writers Andrew Salkey, John Figueroa and Roger Mais; Edgar Mittelholzer, E.R. Braithwaite and Beryl Gilroy were among Guyana’s migrants to the UK while Barbados contributed arguably two of the generation’s most important writers in novelist George Lamming and poet E.K. Braithwaite. This is without mentioning those writers who did not move to Britain but whose work was published here, such as Derek Walcott, Martin Carter and V.S. Reid, among others. These writers contributed a literature reflecting the concerns and debates of the wider expatriate community, both regarding their new home and developments in their countries of origin. Meanwhile, white writers were also impelled (though with less urgency) by the phenomena of Commonwealth 141

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migration and Britain’s changing place in the world to address issues of race and waning empire. Though Britain’s iconic anti-racist struggles would take place a generation later, their roots lie in the political and cultural formations of the immediate postwar period. Both black and white writers of the 1950s responded to those formations, which navigated the hardships of the Caribbean migrant experience in the metropolitan heart of empire. Depicting the experiences and struggles of those who would usher in one of twentieth-century Britain’s greatest societal shifts, their texts indicate the socio-political paths then unfolding. Though West Indians were neither the only migrant community to arrive in Britain after the war, nor the only one to put their experiences in writing – significant contributions also came from both South Asian and African communities – the writings of the ‘Windrush Generation’ are nevertheless also inherently an investigation into the early years of British anti-racism.

Racism and anti-racism in postwar Britain Postwar migration to Britain was enabled by the 1948 British Nationality Act and its creation of the status ‘Citizen of the United Kingdom and the Colonies’ which ‘sought to continue the extensive category of imperial British subject that had existed at the height of imperial rule where, in theory at least, all people under the British monarch’s rule were British subjects [and so] were in theory “equally entitled to live and work in Britain” ’ (MacPhee, 41). Britain thus found itself leading a ‘new Commonwealth, “a multi-racial society” ’ (Ramdin, 226), which in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War’s racially-motivated atrocities meant it ‘set the pace as moral leader of the world’ (ibid.). However, beneath this veneer of idealism lay a multitude of complex assumptions and contradictions: while Caribbean migrants, recruited as solutions to Britain’s labour shortage, were often excited at the prospect of arrival in their ‘Mother Country’, acceptance into British society ‘would be far more painful and protracted than the crossing itself ’ (May, 195) and the ‘double-edged process of welcome and exclusion, of assimilating and demarcating racial categories, meant that debates about Britishness [. . .] often centred on race’ (195). MacPhee concurs, arguing the lived experience of postwar immigration contained a disjuncture between ‘the visible legal category of citizenship, manifested in the universalism of state legislation, and more informal and often unspoken ethno-nationalist or racial designations’ (42). Regardless of citizenship status or British pretensions

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regarding its ‘multi-racial’ Commonwealth, Caribbean migrants were ultimately defined by their ‘racial’ difference. Frantz Fanon theorized this phenomenon of black existence in (and, in significant part, exclusion from) the white world, arguing black people are forced to be ‘black in relation to the white man’ (83). Fanon describes how his (and others’) blackness is fixed by the eyes of white society, how in that moment an ‘unfamiliar weight burdened me’, creating a ‘Consciousness of the body [. . .] a third-person consciousness’ (83); that is, constant awareness of his own body in terms of its apprehension (and therefore also partial construction) by white society. Discussing the child who sees him and remarks ‘Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!’ (84) Fanon shows how the boy does not merely see Fanon himself, nor even just his skin, but also the multifarious narratives surrounding them. Being ‘black in relation to the white man’, then, is not a position of equal difference but one defined by inferiority to and exclusion from whiteness. Fanon’s blackness is thus woven for him by white society, ‘out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories’, he is ‘battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency’ (84) and this dominant Western society, ‘the only honorable one’ has ‘barred [him] from all participation’ (86). Fanon sums up his position thusly: ‘A feeling of inferiority? No, a feeling of nonexistence. [. . .] I am guilty. I do not know of what, but I know that I am no good’ (106). The issues outlined by Fanon would manifest variously in 1950s racial discourse. One common ‘anecdote’ was the threat of black male sexuality, often at the forefront of public discussions on race. Collins contends that ‘the prominence of West Indian men was more than merely numerical. It was cultural, stemming from the fascination-cum-revulsion of whites who customarily regarded them as vicious, indolent, violent, licentious, and antifamilial’ (391). In particular, argues Gilroy, it was miscegenation which ‘captured the descent of white womanhood and recast it as a signifier of the social problems associated with the black presence’ (2002: 97) while Ellis argues that ‘concerns for the safety of white women (always an aspect of colonial discourse) were retained and recycled into tales of pimps and prostitution and combined with issues more specific to postwar Britain’ (218). One such issue was housing, a central pillar of racial anxieties in 1950s Britain. In the midst of a housing crisis adversely affecting all working-class people and exacerbated by the 1957 Rent Act, which removed rent control obligations from private landlords, Britain saw recently-arrived migrants experience an exploitation shared by the class generally articulated with their specific exploitation as a disadvantaged ethnic group. Infamous slumlord Peter Rachman

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provides a particularly illuminating case study in his utilization of the 1957 Act, whereby he evicted white tenants, kept the accommodation empty in order to have rent controls removed, and then took recent immigrants as new tenants. At a time when black migrants found it hard to get housing, Rachman was able to charge them exorbitant rents for overcrowded and unsanitary conditions. (Todd, 188)

Not only did Caribbean migrants struggle to obtain housing due to widespread racism but those who would rent to them used that difficulty as an opportunity for intensified exploitation, giving credence to Nikolanikos’ theorization of racism as resulting from ‘competition between fractions of labour, which is structured by fractions of capital in their attempt to lower the cost of variable capital’ (cited in Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 67).2 As such, class-based anxieties around increasingly insecure housing tenure were often sublimated into a racial politics whose fusion with popular narratives of predatory black male sexuality fomented racial violence, culminating in the 1958 disturbances in Nottingham and Notting Hill. MacPhee explains how tensions around housing and sexual relations between black men and white women came to a head in 1958 [. . .] crowds of whites, instigated by fascist groups and armed with homemade weapons, attacked the local West Indian population, who in the absence of effective police protection organised collectively to defend themselves (45).

Ellis verifies this ineffectiveness of police protection, proclaiming that ‘there seemed little recourse to the law, either due to police indifference or to the widely reported sentiment that such attacks were the result of a black presence rather than white racism’ (Ellis, 216–17). State collusion with racial discourse was finally cemented by the introduction of the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which ‘was not designed to engage with British racism, so much as to confirm it’ (217), the implication being that ‘in order to eliminate racism in Britain, it is necessary to practise it at the point of entry’ (217). The 1962 Act called time on Britain’s ‘long decade’ of supposed idealism regarding migration and the multi-racial society, with future legislation working ‘to bring the legal or state-based definition of citizenship into line with the initially unspoken assumptions of ethno-national identity’ (MacPhee, 42). However, the Caribbean community in Britain organized themselves variously to respond to these multifarious political threats. During the tumult of

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1958, West Indians formed defence squads, escorting black residents home and arming themselves against racist attacks: ‘We were not leaving our homes and going out attacking anyone, but if you attack our homes you would be met [. . .] Make no mistake, there were iron bars, there were machetes, there were all kinds of arms’ (Baron, n.p). Such informal community self-organization, which provided support for everything from racism at work to borrowing money to buy property, arose ‘through meetings held in rooms, in basements, street corners, markets, cafes and barber shops. The barber shops, in particular, served as community centres where West Indian newspapers were read and discussed, where all the latest news was heard’ (Ramdin, 222–3). These strong yet informal community bases were largely separate from the formal Caribbean political organizations of the 1950s and early 1960s, which Ramdin describes as being largely ‘tolerant and accommodationist’ (371). The West Indian Standing Conference, a top-down effort founded following the 1958 race riots by the High Commission of the West Indies Federation, under the proviso it ‘should pursue no policies which might be embarrassing to the Commission’ (Shukra, 12), was one such example. Its activity focused largely on discussion groups, research and social events with the High Commission wanting ‘to ensure that the work of the Caribbean establishment would not be compromised by events in Britain’ (13). The Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD ) also exemplified this tendency, excluding workingclass black organizations, such as the Indian Workers’ Association, preferring a legalistic route of lobbying and petitions (Ramdin, 420–1). Resultantly, founding member Marion Glean criticized CARD as having ‘no base in the immigrant communities from which [it] could either speak or try to bargain’ (15). Anti-colonialism was another important aspect of the postwar black community’s political culture. Anti-colonial politics brought great inspiration to diaspora communities in Britain as anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles began to ‘break down island and ethnic affiliations and associations and to re-form them in terms of the immediate realities of social and racial relations, engendering in the process strong community bases for the shop floor battles to come’ (Sivanandan, 96). Indeed, it was here that the initial seeds of political blackness, as an identity combining African, Caribbean and South Asian anticolonial unities, were sown. The postwar white left’s anti-racism also merits recognition largely for its deficiencies. The Communist Party, by far the largest organization to Labour’s left, reduced their 1958 anti-racist policy to a single sentence: ‘It [the British labour movement] needs to fight against the color [sic] bar and racial discrimination,

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and for the full social, economic and political equality of colonial people in Britain’ (cited in Smith 2008: 465–6). This sentence, included under a section entitled ‘For Colonial Freedom’, simultaneously designates anti-racism as a ‘foreign’ problem while subordinating it to a narrowly-defined economic class struggle, exemplifying how throughout the 1950s and even into the 1960s, ‘the Party’s theory of race “contained a reductionist thrust” that reduced the issue of racism to below “the ‘bread and butter’ struggles of socialists”’ (469)3.

Writing the Caribbean from exile One of the central institutions in the flowering of Caribbean literature in this period was the BBC ’s Caribbean Voices. Started in 1943, it was under Henry Swanzy’s editorship in 1946 that the programme was transformed into a vehicle for original writing. Aside from providing a platform, the programme also supported Caribbean writers financially, with Swanzy claiming the BBC was ‘subsidising West Indian writing to the tune of £1,500 a year in programme fees alone’ (28). Swanzy’s contribution, however, went beyond the financial, fostering community among Caribbean writers in London through ‘informal evenings of literary discussion at his home. West Indian writers from across the region could, for the first time, meet and enter regular discussions with each other’ (Nanton, 69). Barbadian writer, George Lamming argued that: ‘No comprehensive account of writing in the British Caribbean during the last decade could be written without considering his [Swanzy’s] whole achievement and his role in the emergence of the West Indian novel’ (2005: 67). One effect of Caribbean Voices on Caribbean literature was radio’s resultant focus ‘on the diversity of Caribbean vernaculars’ which ‘drew attention to narrative form and poetic voice as much as content’ (Griffith, 19–20). Influencing writers’ approaches to form and voice, it also highlighted an oft-overlooked tendency within disagreements between the London BBC office and literary agents in the Caribbean with Griffith observing the ‘ironic situation’ whereby BBC personnel on Caribbean Voices promoted West Indian accents while significant sections of the Caribbean literati preferred English accents (15). Griffith quotes Figueroa’s estimation that ‘when one looks more carefully, and observes who are strongly praised as readers, one cannot help noticing they are either English or have very “Oxford English” voices’ (15). It is important to note, then, that Caribbean writers arriving in London, were also escaping a latent conservatism within their region’s literary milieus.

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Possibly the first postwar Caribbean writer to arrive in the UK and gain a European readership was Edgar Mittelholzer, who moved to London in 1948 and wrote prolifically, publishing well over a dozen books during the 1950s alone. His 1950 novel, A Morning at the Office, ‘thought by some critics to have begun the great decade of the West Indian novel’ (Hughes, 90), uses the office interactions of its characters to explore the subtle hierarchies of class and ethnicity in Trinidadian society. Horace Xavier and Mary Barker, black office boy and sweeper respectively, find themselves bottom of the class/racial hierarchy, above them various mixed-race clerks and typists as well as East Indians, Chinese and Spanish creoles while the office’s English managers top the hierarchy. Through office intrigues and gossip, Mittelholzer reveals West Indians’ acute awareness of differences in hair or skin tone, and the social inferences thus made: Horace reproves himself for his infatuation with Mrs Hinckson as ‘he was only a black boy, whereas she was a coloured lady [. . .] His complexion was dark brown; hers was a pale olive. His hair was kinky; hers was full of large waves [. . .] He was low-class; she was middle-class’ (9). Race acts as a signifier for class, in a way similar to Hall’s comments regarding the Caribbean’s repleteness with ‘practical semioticians’ able to ‘compute and calculate anybody’s social status by grading the particular quality of their hair versus the particular quality of the family they came from and which street they lived in’ (53). Though worth noting, as Maes-Jelinek does, that Mittelholzer’s wider oeuvre is far more ambivalent regarding race and Caribbean multiculturalism, often viewing (regardless of his own mixed-heritage) ‘colour and miscegenation major causes of disorientation in Caribbean society’ and his characters’ colour a ‘taint’ associated with ‘the weaker side of their personality while their white inheritance accounts for their strength’ (128), A Morning at the Office is an interesting depiction of ethnic identity and tension in colonial Trinidad. Interestingly, these themes are also ever present in the works of V.S. Naipaul. For example, Naipaul’s The Mystic Masseur (1957), follows aspiring writer Ganesh’s rise from obscurity to political power. After coming to national fame as a Hindu mystic, Ganesh and his supporters pack the Trinidadian Hindu Association’s conference and subvert its democratic structures, one supporter crying ‘enough of this damn nonsense motion and commotion [. . .] It is my motion that the constitution should be [. . .] suspended, or anyway that part which say that members have to pay before they vote. Suspended for this meeting, and this meeting only’ (182–3). Once leader, he contests an election against his more intellectually adroit rival, holding prayer meetings rather than debating policies and wins outright, becoming a Member of the Legislative Council (MLC ).

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However, Naipaul is as reviled, particularly by Caribbean critics and writers, as he is revered. Lamming, for one, accuses him of ‘castrated satire’ and being ‘ashamed of his cultural background and striving like mad to prove himself through promotion to the peaks of a “superior” culture’ (2005: 225). Eastley accuses him of misrepresenting Trinidadian society, specifically its political culture and institutions, in such a way as to reaffirm colonial discourse. Assessing Naipaul’s depiction of the MLC dinner, Eastley argues Naipaul slips ‘from satirising systems [. . .] to satirising individuals’ (19), representing Trinidadian politicians ‘as crude versions of the most uneducated of th[eir] constituents. [. . .] portray[ing] the leading non-European figures of Trinidadian society in ways that prompt non-Trinidadian readers to see these figures and their society as inferior’ (22). Though Eastley’s position is partially justified, it must be noted that Naipaul does in fact also satirize the structures of colonial domination. For instance, before attending the dinner, Ganesh, resolute in his desire to uphold his East Indian identity, declares he will reject the ‘nonsense’ of ‘knife and fork’ (194). The trouble, however, is that he is served soup. This seems an apt metaphor for Trinidadian democracy under colonial rule, whereby nine MLC s were elected with the other nine appointed by the governor, himself appointed by the British Colonial Office and holding the decisive tie-breaking vote (5). Just as Ganesh was free to eat how he pleased, Trinidadians could govern themselves similarly, but both within structures over which they had no control. However, while able to locate the hypocrisy and debilitating effects of empire on Caribbean social and political structures, Naipaul still looks to that empire for his cultural standards, mercilessly mocking those unable to match up to them. This contradiction is central to Naipaul’s 1950s texts; as Cudjoe elucidates, Oxford-educated Naipaul uses ‘the colonisers’ culture as the norm by which to measure the behaviour of the colonial person. Anything that does not conform to those standards becomes futile, meaningless, and worthless’ (Cudjoe, 34). One of Naipaul’s primary strategies for this is through contrasting vernacular and standard forms of English. In Miguel Street (1959), Naipaul masterfully crafts a series of seemingly separate vignettes about a working-class Trinidadian neighbourhood which gradually morph into the narrator’s coming-of-age narrative. One vignette sees high-achieving Elias struggle with ‘litritcher and poultry’ (29) in the Cambridge Exam. While people in the street put it down to unfairness, even English conspiracy, this is undermined when the narrator succeeds where Elias failed. Indeed, the narrator – whose standard English narration contrasts with the novel’s vernacular dialogues – and his academic

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success distinguish him not merely from Elias but from the general failure, fecklessness and lack of ambition which typifies his neighbours. Certainly, ‘as the narrator grows older, and his English becomes more standard, the level of his “education” becomes the measure of [. . .] his distance from the world of the street’ (Mustafa, 34). Indeed, while the narrator ends the novel travelling to England, Elias settles for a life driving a scavenging-cart. Similarly, when the narrator describes Eddoes as a ‘saga-boy’, qualifying that this ‘didn’t mean that he wrote epic poetry. It meant that he was a “sweet-man,” a man of leisure, well-dressed, and keen on women’ (93), the narrator’s assumption is not only of a reader sufficiently educated to understand the joke; rather, the joke hangs on the impossibility of Eddoes understanding it. It demonstrates the narrator’s transcendence of the street, more at home exchanging witticisms with those au fait with epic poetry than those who would not understand them. Literacy therefore ‘gathers an ideological force’ (Mustafa, 34) and the ability ‘to read and write standard English in an anglophone Caribbean setting, the satirical edge of Naipaul’s early fiction insists, is the only claim to legitimacy’ (35). Naipaul, then, embodies the sense of crisis described by Fanon, valorizing the colonizer culture as ‘the only honorable one’ while always (at least partially) excluded from it, leading Maes-Jelenik to argue that ‘the never wholly controlled insecurity, fear, and hysteria one detects in [Naipaul’s work] make him perhaps more subtly West Indian than his fellow writers’ (143). By contrast, Lamming’s semi-autobiographical novel about growing up in rural Barbados, In the Castle of My Skin (1953) directly confronts the separation between educated and uneducated. Describing the tense relationship between overseers and villagers, he explains Each represented for the other an image of the enemy. [. . .] Even the better educated who had one way or another gone to the island’s best schools and later held responsible posts in the Government service, even these were affected by this image of the enemy [. . .] The image of the enemy, and the enemy was My People. [. . .] It was the language of the overseer, the language of the lawyers and doctors who had returned stamped like an envelope with what they called the culture of the Mother Country. (18–19)

The seamless shift from overseers to the ‘the better educated’ – with their ‘posts in the Government service’ – creates an equivalence between the two as administrators of colonial society. Rather than congratulating those successfully imbibing the culture of empire, as Naipaul does, Lamming perceives in it a facet of collaboration with colonial oppression. In fact, education also functions as a

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site of cultural uncertainty. G., the sometimes-narrator and character most resembling Lamming himself, is markedly ambivalent about his scholarship to the High School for privileged Barbadian children, feeling disconnected from both those he grew up with as well as his new academic environment. Regarding the social life of his neighbours, he feels it now ‘more difficult to participate in their life’ (211) yet simultaneously feels excluded from the High School’s culture, explaining ‘they were trying to make gentlemen of us, but it seemed that I didn’t belong’ (217). These aspects of Lamming’s novel parallel the theme of the ‘scholarship boy’ underlying much postwar British literature. Estranged from their proletarian origins yet ill at ease in their new middle-class circles, Richard Hoggart, author of The Uses of Literacy describes them as recognizable by their ‘lack of poise, by their uncertainty’ (241), the difficulties arising from their position finding thematic expression in a range of postwar texts. However, in transplanting the theme to colonial Barbados, Lamming injects questions of race and colonialism to what is otherwise treated as a ‘pure’ class issue. The Barbadian ‘scholarship boy’ must not merely live up to middle-class cultural standards but white and British ones also. Lamming’s appraisal of class, race and colonial oppressions shows an awareness of their articulation, pre-empting the politics of black liberation by over a decade. Another important difference with Naipaul is Lamming’s depiction of Caribbean political culture. Lamming’s novel renders artistically Barbados’ transition from quasi-feudal traditionalism to capitalism and, while reviewers have mused it might have been titled ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Barbadian’ (cited in Brown, 675), it is as much, if not more so, about the disintegration of traditional village life by economic and political developments as it is a Joycean Künstlerroman. The narrative follows the gradual shift in power from white landowner Mr Creighton to Mr Slime who, while agitating for national independence, founds the Penny Bank and Friendly Society, to which all the villagers pay in, and in doing so brings the logic of capital to the village. Slime’s seemingly peculiar nomination has an expressly political function and is one of several covert references to Sartre, recalling the latter’s description in Being and Nothingness of Slime’s ‘ambiguous character as a “substance in between two states” ’ (Sartre, 607). In a strike against a shipping company part-owned by Mr Creighton, Slime is involved neither as a port worker nor as management. Rather, he sits ‘between’ them, negotiating with management on the workers’ behalf, making clear they ‘should not return till he had thought the conditions satisfactory’ (Lamming 2010, 87, my emphasis). As the strike boils over into open

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rebellion, he is once again between the two sides, this time quite literally, standing between the insurrectionary workers and the white landlord (200). Towards the end of the novel, with the transition from feudalism to capitalism complete, Slime, in his new position, is once again ‘between’ the states of old and new: certainly, Slime is not of the old colonial world; however, despite his promise to Pa that ‘he goin’ to make us owners o’ this land’ (71), nor is he part of the democratic postcolonial aspirations of many villagers. Rather, his is of the neocolonial bourgeoisie; technically of the colonized but not for them, distinct from the colonizers but not necessarily against them, needing their cooperation to buy the land while using the villagers’ money raised via the Penny Bank to dispossess them (again, only possible because he is neither one nor other). In so doing, he fulfils Boy Blue’s earlier prediction that ‘The landlord will sort o’ stay where he is in the big house, but Mr. Slime will be sort o’ captain o’ this ship’ (159). Parallels can therefore be drawn between Lamming’s and Naipaul’s depictions of fraudulent colonial politicians4. Yet the political culture within which Lamming situates them is one infinitely more nuanced. Naipaul’s Trinidad is a cultural and political wasteland inhabited by quacks, charlatans and buffoons. Conversely, Lamming’s Barbados is replete with characters interested in and capable of interrogating their social environment. The shoemaker, enamoured with socialist writer J.B. Priestley, hosts informal discussions around his shop whose participants G. claims ‘prophesied’ the Second World War (212): at the High School we had got used to reading about wars in Europe [. . .] But the shoemaker’s friends were more interested and concerned because they seemed to understand the issues much better. [. . .] These things had not only happened but they happened for certain reasons. And they knew the reasons. (212–13)

This contrasts starkly with political discussion in Naipaul’s novels, which, when not self-serving, is comically uninformed: for instance, in Miguel Street when Errol claims ‘If they just make Lord Anthony Eden Prime Minister, we go beat up the Germans and them bad bad’ (2011, 56), what is known to author and reader alike is that Eden was one of the most incompetent Prime Ministers in British history, serving only two years and overseeing the botched Suez Crisis. Again, Naipaul’s textual methodology encourages the reader to poke fun at the Caribbean’s supposed intellectual backwardness whereas Lamming opens space for the depiction of a working-class intellectual culture able to successfully apprehend the social world, in this instance ‘much better’ than the middle-class students of the High School.

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Yet Lamming does not romanticize a universally savvy Barbadian political culture: nobody foresees Slime’s duplicity and even the Shoemaker is unable to comprehend fully his dispossession by the ascendant logic of capitalist property relations. Similarly, G.’s friend Trumper returns from America filled with an ingenuous proto-black power fervour: ‘I’m going to fight for the rights o’ the Negroes, and I’ll die fighting. That’s what any black man in the States will say’ (289). Jonas claims the ‘inadequacy’ of Trumper’s politics is ‘exposed by its ironical context’ (352) against the backdrop of the villagers’ dispossession at the hands of a black bourgeoisie. However, while Trumper’s views do contain a naïve over-enthusiasm about the existing conditions for black liberation, he does point towards a more refined approach when he states ‘this world is a world o’ camps [. . .] And above everything else keep [your] camp clean’ (Lamming 2010: 280) compounded by his symbolic playing of a song by Communist-sympathizer Paul Robeson, who he describes as ‘One o’ the greatest o’ my people’ (287). Interestingly, G., expressing insecurity in Trumper’s political vision, adds that ‘we had known the differences between the well-to-do blacks and the simpler less prosperous ones. [. . .] certain blacks employed a similar subterfuge to exclude other blacks who weren’t equal to their demands’ (290). Whereas Naipaul uses his educated narrators to impose (an often wry) coherence on the social and political events of his novels, Lamming’s disrupts such coherence and diffuses understanding between his characters. No individual, not even the educated narrator, can construct a coherent political picture; rather, political coherence can only be constructed collectively and cumulatively through the pieces held by various characters as well as the narrative arc more generally. G.’s musing on the tension between ‘well-to-do’ and ‘less prosperous’ black people inserts a class component to Trumper’s politics, as do the references to socialists J.B. Priestley and Paul Robeson, while Trumper’s comment on the imperative of ‘keeping the camp clean’ implies a ‘cleaning out’ of treacherous elements (with Slime specifically in mind). Taken together, these details indicate a marrying of anti-racism and anti-colonialism with a classbased political framework, which would come to prominence in Britain only much later.

The Caribbean novel of arrival West Indian writers in Britain maintained a heavy emphasis on life in the Caribbean. Lamming himself returns to the anti-colonial possibilities of the

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region, though on the fictional island of San Cristobal, in Of Age and Innocence (1958). Equally, Andrew Salkey’s 1959 A Quality of Violence and Roger Mais’ trilogy of novels before his death in 1955 all focus on their native Jamaica, though in significantly different ways: Salkey depicts early twentieth-century rural Jamaica in the throes of drought descending into uncontrollable violence while Mais’ first two novels, The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953) and Brother Man (1954), look at Jamaican yard life in a way comparable to Miguel Street. However, Mais’ approach is considerably more empathetic towards his workingclass characters and the constraints poverty imposes upon them. Indeed, the closing scenes of The Hills see Surjue shot while attempting to escape prison spliced against descriptions of the fire engulfing his girlfriend Rema; the confined nature of Surjue’s existence is reaffirmed in death as in life while Rema’s grisly end confirms the characters’ overarching hopelessness. While most Caribbean writers of the 1950s focused on the Caribbean itself, there are a number of particularly significant texts which document the experiences of the ‘Windrush Generation’. These texts, taking inspiration directly from the lives of postwar migrants, were steeped far more explicitly in the contemporary debates of the Caribbean community and arguably reflect more directly the parallels between social reality and novelistic responses to it. One such response is E.R. Braithwaite’s autobiographical To Sir With Love (1959), based on his experiences teaching in an East London secondary school. The text follows Braithwaite as his romantic illusions about Britain and Britishness are shattered by the poverty he sees and the racism he experiences; expecting ‘the London of Chaucer and Erasmus’ (5) he is disappointed by the ‘slipshod shopfronts and gaping bomb sites’ (5) of the postwar East End as well as exasperated by his debarment from employment due to racism. As will be detailed below, though Braithwaite’s text is problematic with respect to its cultural assumptions and anti-racist textual strategies, his description of British racism is very realistic. His accounts of the colour bar in employment, the anxieties induced by assumptions regarding his sexuality, his frequent racialization, all correspond with those experiences recounted by numerous contemporary and present-day commentators. Told at one interview he is ‘in terms of qualification, ability and experience [. . .] abundantly suited to the post’, the hero is nonetheless rejected as placing him in a position of authority over white staff would ‘adversely affect the balance of good relationship which has always obtained in this firm’ (33). Eventually finding employment, he is instantly (and incessantly) racialized by his colleague Mr Weston, referring to him pointedly as a ‘black sheep’ (11) and suggesting he use ‘black magic’ on

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troublesome pupils (58). Braithwaite is, to reference Fanon, ‘battered down’ by the stories and anecdotes white Britain has of him, bringing him ‘face to face with something I had either forgotten or completely ignored [. . .] my black skin’ (33). In this realization, Braithwaite captures the disjuncture outlined by MacPhee between the legal and ethno-nationalist definitions of Britishness: ‘I realised at that moment that I was British, but evidently not a Briton’ (38). Braithwaite’s pitfalls begin with his relentless acquiescence to racism; he performs what Anthony Richmond, somewhat problematically, described in his 1954 Colour Prejudice in Britain as the ‘ideal migrant’ with a ‘ “balanced personality” who refused to succumb to his aggressive inclinations in response to ill-treatment by whites’ (cited in Collins, 410). Resultantly, Braithwaite almost never responds to provocations, even suggesting he ‘might be unnecessarily sensitive’ (58). In other instances, Braithwaite actively sabotages attempts to confront racism. Early in the novel, a middle-class woman boards a bus and refuses the seat next to Braithwaite, the only one available. Tension rises when she ignores the conductor’s explanation that standing is not permitted, leading a group of women to aim hostile looks at her ‘in their immediate sympathy and solidarity with the conductor against someone who was obviously not of their class’ (4). Braithwaite, however, asks to get off at the next stop thus resolving the situation in the woman’s favour. The conductor gives ‘an odd disapproving stare, as if I had in some way betrayed him by leaving before he could have a real set-to with the woman [. . .] By leaving I had done that conductor a favour, I thought. He’d never get the better of that female’ (5). By disembarking, Braithwaite circumvents the possibility for inter-ethnic solidarity. Yet this encounter does not merely encapsulate Braithwaite’s wider strategy of self-consciously presenting himself as a non-threatening black male ever-willing to turn the other cheek but also reveals the class rationale behind it. Braithwaite’s sentiment of having helped the conductor comes from his (highly politicized) view of an immutable class hierarchy. However, the conductor, in endeavouring to engage in a ‘real set-to with the woman’ with the ‘solidarity’ of the working-class female passengers, symbolically threatens to upend that hierarchy and so, in getting off the bus, Braithwaite ensures its immutability while simultaneously claiming its inevitability. Just as name-dropping Chaucer demonstrates his familiarity with the cultural monuments of bourgeois British life, his forfeiting of white workingclass solidarity for the benefit of a middle-class racist functions to display his fidelity to British class society. As Birbalsingh explains, Braithwaite ‘constantly stresses the ease with which he could assimilate into British society if only his colour were disregarded’ (75). Intended primarily with regards to Braithwaite’s

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sentiment that his cultural capital makes him ‘under his skin [. . .] as British as Britons themselves’ (75), it can equally be applied to his suppression of class conflict throughout the novel. Indeed, the suppression of such conflict arises again between Braithwaite’s working-class students and Mr Bell, a middle-class authoritarian formerly of the Army Education Service. Resented by the pupils, they eventually revolt against him due to his relentless bullying of a classmate. Here, again, Braithwaite dampens revolt, explicitly phrasing opposition to his pupils’ actions in the language of adherence to the norms of class society: ‘Mr Bell was the master there [. . .] In two weeks you’ll all be at work and lots of things will happen which will annoy you, make you wild. Are you going to resort to clubs and knives every time you’re upset or angered?’ (156) Not only is Mr Bell’s position as ‘master’ invoked as one necessitating obedience but education’s preparatory purpose for the transition of working-class children into the workplace is also expressed unequivocally: in work, as in school, they can expect their ‘masters’ to annoy them and make them wild but, nonetheless, they must contain their urge to revolt. The incident is concluded when Braithwaite succeeds in getting the pupils to apologize to Mr Bell for their mutinous behaviour. While Braithwaite attempts to foreground a narrative asserting his ability to live up to the standards of bourgeois Britain, the spectre haunting his text, its pensée sauvage which he attempts to suppress, is an anxiety surrounding working-class revolt against middle-class society, including, or even particularly, when that revolt aligns itself with the struggle against racial prejudice, thus paralleling the ‘tolerant and accommodationist’ black organizations of the period, particularly the Standing Organisation’s reluctance to engage in activity which might embarrass the High Commission and CARD’s later eschewing of working-class activism more generally. Significantly, as McLeod discusses in this volume’s companion, The 1970s (2014), Braithwaite’s rejection of class solidarity in favour of a utopian belief in British cultural values eventually led to despondent rejection of those values in favour of ‘a more militant and separatist position’ (104). Braithwaite is notably absent from much discussion of the 1950s West Indian literary milieu and his choice of register certainly contrasts sharply with much of its output, no doubt in part due to his novel’s publication after the discontinuation of Caribbean Voices. One novel which highlights the distinctness of Braithwaite’s text from the work of that milieu is Lamming’s The Emigrants (1954), depicting the experiences of a group of ‘Windrush Generation’ migrants (or, rather, emigrants) from their journey across the Atlantic to settlement in England.

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Lamming skilfully represents the process of community formation on the ship to Britain with passengers ‘initially portrayed as a heterogeneous group’ travelling from various places for various reasons but soon ‘those leaving in search of “a better break” in England become a distinct group within the wider one’ (Guarducci, 345). In the early dialogue, ‘None of the characters involved is mentioned by name; instead, we find a series of “one man said”, “another said” ’ (ibid. 346). The result is a confusion for the reader mirroring that of the characters themselves, the reader’s introduction to the characters occurring synchronously with the characters’ introductions to each other. Gradually, individualities come to the fore, as do the various names/nicknames, personal histories, ambitions and national rivalries. Yet the slide into parochialism is resisted when one of them, the Governor, appeals forcefully: ‘doan lemme hear any more o’ this bullshit ‘bout small islan’ an’ big islan’ [. . .] All you down here is my brothers’ (Lamming 2011, 38–9), the appeal for unity across the boundaries of nationalism depicting how a common West Indian identity was forged in the émigré experience. The process begun on the ship continues upon arrival in London: Trinidadian Tornado and another character known as ‘the Jamaican’, reunited in a barber’s shop for the first time since meeting on the journey to England, greet each other in a way that ‘Anyone would think them wus countrymen’, to which the Jamaican explains ‘That’s just w’at we is’ (130). Yet the concept of black community is extended further when an African client at the barber’s shop argues ‘It’s the Africans in this country that teach you all that [. . .] Teach you the unity of your people’s [. . .] nowadays it seems we will all soon come to an almost perfect unity and brotherhood’ (131). While the Jamaican expresses doubt on ‘the unity part’, he nonetheless, through sharing the same social space as the African, substantiates his claim as their discussion can only occur precisely because of their burgeoning coexistence as a black community, the discussion made even more significant by its eventuation in that early base of community formation, the barber’s shop. Lamming, building upon the theme explored in his previous novel through Trumper, depicts the community discussions which informed the construction of the black political identity discussed by Sivanandan, borne from the migrant experience of racism, eventually expanded to also include South Asians, and highly important in the later analytical framework of the British black liberation movement. This process of community formation through the shared experience of racism is evident in the narrative arc of Dickson, whose cultural capital initially

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separates him from the wider group, making him an interesting exploration of a problematic ignored by Braithwaite. As with Braithwaite, Dickson repeatedly endeavours to prove his attainment of bourgeois British cultural standards but his encounters with British society make him increasingly aware of his blackness, culminating in his romance with his white landlady. Though Dickson tells himself she chose him due to sharing the ‘common language of civilisation’ (264), this is undermined when, after engaging in sexual activity, she invites her sister to look at his naked body: ‘The women were consumed with curiosity. They devoured his body with their eyes. It disintegrated and dissolved in their stare, gradually regaining its life through the reflection in the mirror’ (266). The interest in him, then, is categorically not out of a ‘common language of civilisation’ but precisely its opposite, in the fetishization of his racial difference, his supposed situation outside of civilization for which his skin is a signifier. Lamming touches upon similar phenomena to that described by Fanon: meeting the women’s eyes, their looks burden Dickson, his body ‘disintegrating’ and ‘dissolving’ paralleling the feeling of nonexistence outlined by Fanon. Indeed, his body only regains life ‘through the reflection in the mirror’, confirming his consciousness of his black body in white society in the third-person, as an object-for-others to be viewed externally, rather than as a subject existing for-itself with its own ontology. The burden is such for Dickson that his life becomes ‘a perpetual struggle to avoid eyes. [. . .] after that experience with the women [. . .] it was a torture to see and be seen simultaneously’ (267). Dickson is forced to seek assurance from London’s emerging black community ‘that he was still there under his clothes, inside his skin, and these were possibly the only people who could probably restore the life, the identity, which the eyes of the others had drained away’ (268). In stark contrast to Braithwaite, Lamming shows that assimilation to British middle-class cultural values by black individuals is not enough to protect against the rigours of racist society. Rather, Lamming demonstrates the crises which can occur from the disparity between the black bourgeois’ self-image and that imposed onto them through racialization. Yet Lamming’s differences with Braithwaite go beyond content and into the form and register of his novel as well as the political conclusions they encourage in the reader. Lamming, like many of his generation, experimented with vernacular in his dialogues yet nonetheless distinguishes himself from many of his contemporaries through his formal experimentation. For example, upon his characters’ arrival in Britain, Lamming frequently makes use of indentation for many of the dialogues, sometimes markedly so:

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This technique demarcates the new and unfamiliar situation in which the emigrants find themselves, reflected in the unfamiliar positioning of the text on the page, while the use of enjambment and unattributed speech functions similarly to the earlier dialogues on the ship: to create a comparable sensation of confusion and alienation from the scene in the reader as that which exists for the emigrants in their new environment. While the passage’s formal experimentation reflects the emigrants’ difficulties in apprehending their new surroundings, it nonetheless implies a certain optimism for the creation of a convivial multi-ethnic future. Though the epithet ‘darkie’ exhibits the casual nature of 1950s racism, its instant rebuff with ‘E isn’t no darkie. ‘E’s ‘avin’ a drink with me, an’ that makes ‘im my pal’ points toward a possible white anti-racism. This is all the more powerful through Lamming’s deployment of non-standard English prose to represent the working-class Estuary English accent, functioning not to poke fun at a supposed working-class ignorance but rather to create an equivalence with the non-standard English of working-class West Indians elsewhere in the novel. In much the same way as Smiley Culture would do with his combination of Cockney slang and Jamaican patois in ‘Cockney Translation’ (Gilroy 2002, 261–55), Lamming creates the possibility for unity between working-class Britons and West Indians based precisely on their shared exclusion from conventional conceptions of Englishness. In contrast to Braithwaite’s utilization of standard English with the purpose of showing how middle-class blacks can ingratiate themselves with bourgeois societal norms, Lamming’s use of vernacular (both British and Caribbean) posits a unity between working-class white and black people based on shared exclusion from those norms. Similar themes and narrative techniques are present in Sam Selvon’s classic The Lonely Londoners (1956), exploring a variety of issues around the intersections of race, nationhood and class through the roguish misadventures of a group of working-class Caribbean migrants, held together by the character-narrator Moses Aloetta. Selvon produces a tableau of the Caribbean experience in

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London, balancing the tragic with the comic and the cynical with the optimistic, vindicating Stein’s assessment that Windrush-era texts contain ‘a peculiar romance with London [. . .] and romance, of course, brings with it a fair amount of volatility’ (22). This is perhaps more true of Selvon’s novel than any other, his characters swinging from great highs to grim lows from almost one paragraph to the next. One passage sees recent arrival Galahad walking around the city ‘cool as a lord [. . .] This is London, this is life oh lord, to walk like a king with money in your pocket’ (2006, 75). Yet his self-assurance is threatened by the reminder of his racial ‘Otherness’ when a white child indicates him in the street saying ‘Mummy, look at that black man!’ (76) while the mother uneasily extricates herself from Galahad’s attempts at conversation. Earlier incidences of this kind certainly affect Galahad more deeply, once leaving him in bed at night talking to the colour of his hand, saying ‘Colour, is you that causing all this [. . .] you causing misery all over the world! [. . .] Why the hell you can’t change colour?’ (77). Selvon’s correspondences with Fanon are uncanny: Galahad’s incident with the boy parallels Fanon’s own ‘Mama, see the Negro!’ while his conversation with his complexion corresponds with Fanon’s analysis of black self-consciousness of their own bodies in the third-person; Galahad talks to it as to an external entity, blaming it for the problems it causes all over the (white) world and, again à la Fanon, locates this guilt merely in its existence as an ‘aberration’ from the white norm. Yet with Galahad’s interaction with the woman and child, Selvon diverges from Fanon with Moses pointing out that ‘at this stage Galahad like duck back when rain fall – everything running off ’ (76). Galahad has built up a resilience against racism, allowing him to survive the ‘battering’ from white society’s stories and anecdotes. As with Lamming and Braithwaite, Selvon shows black identity’s, at least partial, formation through white society’s conception of it, but unlike the previous texts, he also shows how this identity formation can strengthen individual capacity to survive societal racism. Selvon also addresses some of the specific themes in 1950s British racism. The fear of miscegenation is represented when the character Bart is thrown out of his white girlfriend’s house by her father ‘because he don’t want no curly-hair children in the family’ (51). Similarly, the tension discussed by MacPhee between the codified, legal definitions of Britishness and its unspoken ethno-nationalist counterpart finds expression in Moses’ rancour towards a Polish restaurateur who refuses service to black people: ‘The Pole who have that restaurant, he ain’t have no more right in this country than we. In fact, we is British subjects and he

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is only a foreigner, we have more right than any people from the damn continent to live and work in this country’ (21). However, perhaps more importantly with respect to the development of black liberation in Britain, are Selvon’s depictions of institutional racism. For example, Moses explains how the employment exchange marks black people’s records: ‘J-A, Col. That mean you from Jamaica and you black. [. . .] Suppose a vacancy come and they want to send a fellar, first they will find out if the firm want coloured fellars before they send you’ (28). In another passage, Moses explains how in the factories, ‘the work is a hard work and mostly is spades they have working in the factory, paying lower wages than they would have to pay white fellars’ (52). Selvon thus not only depicts British racism but also a racial capitalism whereby the racial ‘Other’ is systematically discriminated against as a strategy for maximizing capital accumulation, the aforementioned examples portraying the concentration of West Indians, as a ‘fraction of labour’, into the lowest-wage sections of the employment market (thus reducing overheads on variable capital) or, to the end of actually making such hyper-exploitation desirable, excluding them from the labour market entirely. Indeed, Moses’ description of the employment exchange and factory work presents a marked divergence from the individualized, interpersonal incidences of bigotry discussed by Braithwaite, foregrounding instead an articulation of racial and class oppressions and a structural critique of racism which would be central to the theoretical framework of the black liberation movement from the mid-1960s. While showing the effects their new surroundings had upon Caribbean migrants, Selvon also shows the effects those migrants had upon those surroundings. MacPhee argues the novel ‘shows how the migrants remake London and its public and social spaces’, their reappropriation of public space marking ‘an important early moment in the hybridisation of postwar Britain’ (123). McLeod concurs, describing the fete scene in particular as ‘a way of envisaging just for a moment a new kind of socially inclusive space which emerges from the creolizing promise of the dance-floor: tolerant, racially inclusive, pleasurable, mobile, negotiating between (rather than polarizing) [. . .] the Caribbean and London’ (2004: 39). An example of the burgeoning cultural hybridization of the period, it can even be thought to prefigure the importance of musical subcultures in the anti-racist movement, yet by virtue of its historical moment, such developments can only be hinted at, making the fete ‘a fragile and utopian space, where possibilities are glimpsed rather than new social relations cemented’ (39). Such convivial spaces and their prospects for hybridization were only possible under the conceptual assumption that Caribbean culture had some

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inherent merit worthy of transposition to Britain. Nowhere does Selvon make this affirmation of Caribbean identity clearer than in his use of Trinidadian vernacular throughout the novel. When Galahad’s white lover criticizes his accent, his response – ‘What wrong with it? [. . .] Is English we speaking’ (82) – asserts the legitimacy of his non-standard syntax. However, unlike the novels discussed previously, use of vernacular is not limited to dialogue but rather permeates the whole text via its Trinidadian-inflected narration. Indeed, the effect of Caribbean Voices on experiments with narrative voice manifests itself more strongly in Selvon’s novel than in any other from the period, marking what MacPhee describes as its ‘radical innovation’ in departing from the tradition of confining dialect to dialogue, which tacitly presents ‘the standard Southern British English of the narrative voice [. . .] as a “universal” frame of interpretation and linguistic rectitude’ (120). In opting for vernacular narration, Selvon abjures this tradition as ‘quarantining’ it to the dialogues would imply ‘a hierarchy of experience between the language of the characters and that of the narrative voice, which would decentre and devalue the experience of the West Indian migrants’ (MacPhee, 121). This stands in stark contrast to Braithwaite’s self-conscious use of standard English (and implied rejection of Caribbean vernacular’s cultural legitimacy) as well as Naipaul’s mockery of his own characters’ cultural ‘backwardness’ through their inept mastery of it. Though Selvon would be critical of the British black power movement (see his 1975 novel Moses Ascending), his radical stylistic innovations nonetheless have radical political implications, affirming a black identity which prefigure developments in British anti-racism, such as black power group RAAS ’ reference to the Jamaican vernacular expletive and the emerging linguistic hybridity represented by Smiley Culture’s aforementioned ‘Cockney Translation’ as well as third-generation West Indians described by Hall as declaring their “Englishness is black” (59). Indeed, such hybrid identities would be completely alien to an individual like Braithwaite, whose assertion to have ‘grown up British in every way’ (36) precludes the possibility of hybridization in its promotion of a narrow definition of Britishness which it elevates above all else. Yet as was clear from the earlier discussion of the development of British anti-racism, multiculturalism took root not merely through social interactions but also social struggle. Though such struggle is largely absent from The Lonely Londoners, Selvon’s 1957 collection of short stories Ways of Sunlight foregrounds this aspect more explicitly. Split into two sections, ‘Trinidad’ and ‘London’, the first section depicts a largely rural poverty written in the folk tale style with a standard English narrative voice. With the ‘London’ section, however, the tone

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is notably more picaresque, similar to The Lonely Londoners, with vernacular narration and jocular tales of its protagonists’ adventures adjusting to city life. This shift in style therefore represents the characters’ proletarianization as they turn from peasants (i.e. in ‘Holiday in Five Rivers’, ‘Cane is Bitter’) to transport and factory workers (i.e. ‘Working the Transport’, ‘Eraser’s Dilemma’, ‘The Cricket Match’), the picaresque style matching the picaresque behaviour necessary to survive the urban-industrial context. Consequently, the text’s largely working-class characters, both black and white, clumsily engage the difficulties of intercultural exchange, prefiguring the multicultural society to come. For instance, Charles, Algernon’s English workmate at the tyre factory, invites the Caribbean men to play cricket, albeit on the false assumption that ‘everybody who come from the West Indies at least like the game if they can’t play it’ (‘The Cricket Match’, 161). Though a misunderstanding based on ethnic stereotypes, it is nonetheless a genuine attempt at integration in which Charles is only made to look as foolish for his assumption, as Algernon is for ‘getting on as if [he] invent the game’ (162). Moreover, the significance of this attempt at integration is intensified by cricket’s function not only as a common cultural reference point but also part of the multicultural workforce’s collective refusal of work: to follow the cricket they have ‘a portable radio they hide from the foreman and they listening to the score every day’ (161), symbolizing black and white workers finding commonality in prioritizing their leisure activities over their work. Similarly, the importance of informal sites of community formation, particularly migrant-owned businesses, is also prominent. As with the barber’s shop in The Emigrants, Mangohead seeks out a Trinidadian-owned tailor’s shop to ask support from Hotboy who is always there ‘talking politics, or else harking back to the old days in Trinidad’ (‘Calypso in London’, 126). Indeed, when Mangohead arrives, Hotboy is ‘in a hot debate with Rahamut about the Suez issue. “If I was Nasser . . .” Hot was saying, and going on to say what and what he wouldn’t do’ (127). The significance of Mangohead going to a Trinidadianowned business for support is enhanced by its existence as a space for political discussion. Particularly noteworthy, however, is Hotboy’s expression of anticolonial sympathies: as Trinidad did not gain independence until 1962, Hotboy is a British citizen yet in this passage he identifies not with Britain but with Nasser, the leader of a recently independent Egypt fighting British imperial interests. Selvon depicts fictionally, then, Sivanandan’s analysis of how informal communal spaces and anti-colonialism combined to produce strong bases for the political battles to come.

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The contemporary preoccupation with housing is also a recurrent feature in the collection, similarly underlining the intersectional nature of black workingclass people’s oppressions. One such instance is in the description of Bar 20 and Fred’s ‘dingy basement room in Paddington what the health authorities warn the landlord not to rent without renovating’ (‘Basement Lullaby’, 175), reminding the reader of migrants’ vulnerability in the housing market. However, Selvon’s migrants, like those of reality, are not merely passive victims of this articulation of racism with class exploitation, exemplifying in struggle the emerging intersectionality commonplace in black liberation politics of the 1960s and 1970s. In ‘Obeah in the Grove’, the reader is told that when landlords sell a house they get more money if the house is empty. So, to get the tenants out, what some of them was doing was to let out rooms to spades, and when the white tenants see that [. . .] they hustle to get another room while the landlord laughing. Next thing, he gives the spades notice, and by the time he ready to sell the house bam! the whole house empty (168).

Two Ladbroke Grove landlords decide to sell their building in this way. Four Jamaican men move in and white tenants immediately begin moving out. However, the Jamaican tenants soon learn of their landlords’ duplicity and avenge themselves using obeah before moving out. Within days ‘the walls start to crack, the roof falling down bit by bit [. . .] one day the wife walking up the stairs [. . .] and the stairs break down and she break she foot’ (174). Eventually, the house ‘get a kind of look about it [. . .] as if it threatening to collapse any minute.’ (ibid.). The landlords are eventually forced out themselves and unable to sell. This narrative sees tenants in conflict with their landlords not in a simple class dispute but, as with many of the ‘London’ section’s short stories, one pertaining to exploitation compounded by racial discrimination. Furthermore, the tenants’ use of obeah, a type of pre-Christian folk magic often used against slave masters, is symbolically significant, showing how oppressed groups drew on diverse traditions of struggle, rather than preconceived dogmas regarding ‘class’ or ‘class struggle’, to create intersectional combative identities. Gilroy theorizes such activity, arguing that class struggle ‘be broadly defined [to] encompass struggles which bring classes into being as well as struggles between organised class forces’ (23). Such an analysis, therefore, renders ‘connections between history and concrete struggles [. . .] intelligible even in situations where collective actors define themselves and organise as “races”, people, maroons, ghost-dancers or slaves rather than as a class’ (24). That the political actors in ‘Obeah in the Grove’ may identify primarily as ‘black’ or ‘Jamaican’ rather

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than ‘working class’ does not preclude the action itself being ‘class struggle’. Rather, it forces a redefinition of class struggle to include the struggle against the multiplicity of oppressions, and not merely the economic experience, of being working class. The London-set works of Selvon and Lamming also portray the ‘making’ of the black British working class not merely through their content but also their decentred experimental narrative forms. Whereas Braithwaite, in keeping with the dominant ideology of formal black organizations of the time, understands racism primarily as an issue of personal prejudice and accordingly structures his novel around the struggles of an exemplary individual challenging those prejudices, both Lamming and Selvon, in depicting the fortunes of larger groups of migrants, capture the mass nature of postwar Caribbean migration to Britain, the societal nature of racism and therefore the collective nature of the response to it. By so doing, Selvon and Lamming produce texts depicting the emerging social and political tendencies within the Caribbean expatriate community which would inform the next generation’s anti-racist movement, reconceptualizing class and class struggle as well as pluralizing definitions of Britishness. If Braithwaite reflects the ‘tolerant and accommodationist’ black leadership of the 1950s, Lamming and Selvon can be thought to transcend them. If, as Hall argues, identity is in part a narrative ‘which is narrated in one’s own self ’ (49), Lamming’s and Selvon’s works must be understood as contributing to the formation of a cultural narrative which would underpin the assertive hybrid black British identity then in ascendance.

Writing white anti-racism Just as black writers reflected the racial politics of their era while also prefiguring the future, similar phenomena can be observed among some white writers. Many British novels by white authors from the period tackle the issue of race, though notably often in relation to the postwar waning of empire, as in Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing (1950), rather than as a domestic issue. However, there were some attempts by white writers to tackle the issues of race and racism in a domestic context. One such example is Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), which follows working-class philanderer Arthur Seaton as his drink-fuelled escapades bring him into conflict with the prevailing norms of postwar Britain. In many ways typical of texts emanating from the ‘Angry Young Men’ milieu, with its portrayal of a young working-class male’s conflict with

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society, Sillitoe also attempts to address racism through the character of Sam, a black soldier in the British Army who stays with members of Arthur’s extended family after befriending their son Johnny while serving together in Africa. Sam is subject to the usual ‘details and anecdotes’, such as Bert’s comment that he ‘thinks all telegrams are sent by tom-tom’ (191) while on arrival Sam is showered with questions: ‘Could he read and write? Who taught him, then?’ (192) Yet he is also defended by Arthur’s Aunt Ada, the family matriarch, who, responding to Bert, ‘turned on him fiercely. [. . .] “you’d better be nice to ‘im, or Johnny’ll gi’ yer a good thump when ‘e comes ‘ome from Africa.” ’ (193) and during his brief presence in the narrative, ‘the festive camaraderie of the occasion extends to him also, and seems to offer him a tentative place within this older working-class culture’ (Haywood, 104). However, this example of white working-class solidarity with Sam is severely undermined by the assumption underpinning everyone’s relationship to him. As Ada states earlier, ‘He’s a guest’ (Sillitoe, 193); in framing Sam’s presence this way, Sillitoe not only panders to anti-migrant sentiment in implying only the ‘temporary inconvenience’ of black presence in Britain but also implicitly attaches temporal conditions to the aforementioned camaraderie while simultaneously severing Sam from the possibility of more profound and longlasting solidarity.5 Sam is accepted but his temporary presence means he is not subject to the same social tensions of those settling permanently. This is exacerbated by Sillitoe’s descriptions of Sam as grateful and unimposing, obvious attempts at undermining stereotypes of black savagery or predatory sexuality but result in Sam having hardly any personality at all. Alongside his status as temporary guest, his unimposing nature sidesteps the fact that black migrants had to (and actually did) impose themselves on the racialized assumptions of British society. So while ‘Sam beamed with happiness at the universal sympathy around him’ (196), he is also removed from the social questions and struggles of black people in Britain, leaving Sillitoe capable of addressing racism only on the superficial level of individual phobia. The exact opposite problem is present in John Sommerfield’s North West Five (1960), in that it attempts to deal with the social problems underpinning white working-class racism without addressing personal prejudice, or even race and migration, explicitly at all. The novel revolves around Dan and Liz, a young white working-class couple caught in the housing crisis, as they try to find somewhere to live outside their stifling home environments. It is notable that the novel contains almost no explicit reference to non-white people, especially odd given the passages set in London’s jazz clubs, limiting mention to an off-hand comment

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about ‘strolling coloured students’ (44) on a quiet Sunday, implying little more than non-threatening peripheral coexistence. The couple’s predicament (and therefore the housing crisis generally) is located unambiguously in the processes of capitalism. Sommerfield links the couple’s situation to the proletarian experience of labour’s alienation from its end product; Dan, a builder, decries his situation of ‘Working on flats I’ll never be able to afford to live in as long as I live’ (161). But the problem does not lie with individual landlords but with the housing market itself where Dan feels he is ‘trying to fight something which had no face, that was invisible’ (161). This straightforwardly Marxist analysis of the housing question as rooted in capitalism is an implicit rebuke of the racist narratives which fuelled white working-class violence in Notting Hill; however, this rebuke becomes almost explicit when Dan, building upon his feeling of fighting something ‘invisible’, says ‘If there was somebody or something I could have a bash at it’d be different’ (161), the point being that there are no such persons, of particular resonance in the aftermath of racially-motivated unrest based on exactly this fallacy. The politics of Sommerfield’s thematic approach reflects the Communist Party’s reductionist anti-racism of the era with the black population’s political ‘presence’ expressed primarily through its absence, intended to underline their irrelevance in undermining white working-class conditions and thus allowing Sommerfield to address the ‘real’ economic base buttressing racist ideology. Sommerfield, himself a Party member from the early 1930s until only a few years prior to writing North West Five, was undoubtedly steeped in such an approach and, writing about white working-class housing issues so soon after the Notting Hill race riots (themselves underpinned by racist narratives around housing), can certainly be read as putting that political programme into novelistic practice, subsuming entirely the issues of race and racism under an economistic framework of class conflict, mirroring entirely the deficiencies of the Communist Party’s anti-racist praxis in that of his novel. This orthodox Marxist approach to anti-racism would, however, be transcended by future generations of anti-racists and one white writer who picked up on the shortcomings of such an outlook was Colin MacInnes in his novels City of Spades (1957) and Absolute Beginners (1959). City of Spades recounts the story of Nigerian student Johnny Fortune’s encounter with white Britain via a narrative divided between the idiosyncratic subjectivities of himself and British civil servant Montgomery Pew. As an authentic account of black life in 1950s London, MacInnes’s novel is problematic due to his tendency to exoticize black characters by playing on dominant stereotypes, particularly the violence and licentiousness

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outlined by Collins. As much as he attempts to present a heterogeneous black community divided according to national, educational and geographical identities, he nonetheless ‘cannot avoid adopting a racialising optic’ (McLeod 2004, 48), homogenizing them according to the common tropes of racial discourse. Misogyny is rife, whether in the Gambian pimp Billy Whispers’ exploitation of white women or in Johnny’s own reference to white women as ‘London female rubbish’ (MacInnes 2012, 67), certainly colluding with public anxieties suggesting that ‘misogyny is somehow a constitutive aspect of black men’ (McLeod 2004, 46). Furthermore, MacInnes, through a range of club and theatre scenes, also seems to posit ‘dance as the most significant and recurring aspect of black culture’ (47) while another recurring activity seems to be fighting, again almost always initiated by black characters. Though MacInnes does demonstrate some selfawareness in this respect, such as when Montgomery is accused of nostalgia de la boue (MacInnes 2012, 245), he is never quite able to get beyond the ‘racialising optic’ of the white gaze. The novel’s real value, however, comes in its highlighting of British hypocrisy on racism. While the aforementioned complacency regarding its status as head of a multi-racial Commonwealth dominated British self-image, MacInnes undermines this throughout the novel. Liberal Montgomery is told early on by his conservative predecessor at the Colonial Department that the liberal ‘in relation to the colour question, is a person who feels an irresponsible sympathy for what he calls oppressed peoples on whom, along with the staunchest Tory, he’s quite willing to go on being a parasite’ (13–14). Tellingly, Montgomery concurs, saying ‘Remove the imperial shreds, and I’d be as destitute as a coolie’ (14). MacInnes exposes the parasitical nature of the metropolitan centre’s relationship to the colonized periphery thus undermining Britain’s paternalistic self-image vis-à-vis the Commonwealth. While the reader may sympathize with Montgomery’s liberal take on race, his frank admission of dependence on colonialism foregrounds the hypocrisy of his supposed progressiveness and, read alongside his conservative colleague, therefore implicates the entire British political establishment as a class in the continuance of colonial exploitation. Furthermore, given the job at the Colonial Department relates specifically to the settlement of Commonwealth migrants in Britain, MacInnes lays the groundwork for an understanding of race and racism which links Britain’s treatment of its nascent black population directly to its colonial history; as a task of the Colonial Department, the settlement of Commonwealth migrants is thus an internalization of the colonial project. Such sentiment finds expression in Montgomery’s predecessor declaring his intention to a take a post in apartheid

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South Africa arguing that the ‘much maligned’ country may ‘have found a logical solution for race relations there’ (15). The comment undermines Britain’s moral superiority, uniting British and South African thinking on race and, coming not from a rabid fascist but a British civil servant (albeit a conservative one) with an ‘aloof imperial calm’ (11), serves to place racism (quite literally) at the heart of Britain’s institutions. The British ‘solution’ differs from its South African counterpart only in that it is less ‘logical’ with respect to its colonial history but, ultimately, is based on the same racial premises. This finds confirmation in the ceaseless harassment of black characters by police, particularly CID Inspector Purity, whose name itself conjures up the imagery of apartheid (or even Nazi Germany). Purity encapsulates white anxieties around the threat of black male sexuality to white women, claiming black men are ‘corrupting them’ with drugs and ‘making them serve these black men’s evil ends!’ (83). Later, however, he is more candid, initially stating that the black population ‘don’t make the copper’s task any the easier’ (215); when Montgomery asks whether ‘colonials are more trouble than the natives?’, Purity’s response is telling: ‘ “What natives? Oh, I see what you mean. No, I don’t suppose so, really. . . but it’s a new problem.” ’ (215). Both Purity’s concern for the safety of white women from black men and his confusion over the word ‘natives’ bely a continuance of colonial thinking: by ‘natives’, Montgomery is obviously referring to white Britons, but for Purity, Commonwealth citizens remain ‘natives’ even when not in their native country, their status fixed in relation to an immutable Anglocentric subjecthood. Indeed, Purity views his relationship to them as merely a transposition of the relationship between colonizer and native to the metropolitan centre, his job being to control the ‘new problem’ the ‘natives’ (that is, Commonwealth migrants) pose, whether defending against their threat to white womanhood (which is, as Ellis points out, a staple of colonial discourse) or, more generally, the threat of their continued presence to the ‘purity’ of the nation. In contrast to Braithwaite’s valorization of British institutions, MacInnes’s portrayal of the police is unequivocally negative. When Johnny is wrongfully arrested for living off the immoral earnings of a sex worker, he is beaten and subjected to racial slurs, told ‘Nigger or ponce, it’s all the same’ (261), again underlining his principal ‘crime’ as his foreign presence rather than any specific legal infraction. That he is eventually declared innocent (after intervention from white friends) only to be rearrested and convicted on drug charges, reaffirms this idea, reminding the reader of his comments to Montgomery earlier in the narrative that ‘The Law, when it searches, sometimes finds things on a person that the person didn’t have before the search began’ (80).

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As a document of the black population’s lived experience, let alone an attempt at depicting an anti-racist response, City of Spades leaves much to be desired, often propagating the same tropes buttressing the very racism MacInnes attempts to challenge. It is, however, far more successful as an exposé of structural and institutional racism in 1950s Britain, all the more crucial for the challenge it posed to the dominant complacency regarding such questions. In Absolute Beginners, MacInnes presents a more successful literary representation of anti-racism. Set in London, the novel takes place across four days separated over four months in the summer of 1958 told via the first-person narration of an unnamed teenager living in a West London slum he calls Napoli. The novel documents the burgeoning cultural hybridity emerging from the postwar British youth subcultures, particularly the jazz scene (accentuating the conspicuous whiteness of Sommerfield’s jazz clubs). The narrator makes frequent mention of his adoration for black artists such as ‘Ella’ (Fitzgerald) and ‘Billie H’ (Holiday) as well as the Modern Jazz Quartet, a band of black musicians fusing classical and jazz genres, manifesting musically a hybridization of black and white cultures. For the narrator, as for MacInnes himself, such inter-ethnic youth cultures hold great liberatory potential, declaring the great thing about the jazz world, and all the kids that enter into it, is that no one, not a soul, cares what your class is, or what your race is [. . .] so long as you dig the scene and can behave yourself, and have left all that crap behind you, too, when you come in the jazz club door. (83)

Yet while seeing liberatory potential in youth subcultures, MacInnes remains deeply critical of their naive apolitical conviviality. The impossibility of leaving ‘all that crap behind you’ is exposed several times, whether in the narrator’s own statement that ‘cross-class marriages don’t work’ (126), despite earlier professions on the unimportance of class, or his fellow ‘hip’ teenage companion The Wiz who ends the novel participating in a ‘White Protection League’ rally (268), a reference to the neo-Nazi White Defence League active in Notting Hill at the time. Most significantly, however, is how MacInnes reveals the fragility of the utopian vision of Selvon’s fete in his portrayal of Maria Bethlehem’s concert. Though ‘hundreds of English boys and girls, and their friends from Africa and the Caribbean’ (230) dance alongside each other, the utopian vision is shattered, literally upon exiting the jazz club door, by news of race riots in Nottingham and the following chapter’s depiction of similar events in Notting Hill; the moral being that leaving ‘all that crap behind you’, even if it were possible (which MacInnes suggests it is

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not), nonetheless cannot resolve the existence of ‘that crap’ upon exiting the jazz club door. MacInnes’s narrative, then, contradicts his protagonist’s initial naive idealism, pointing instead towards the need for an expressly political anti-racist praxis. MacInnes (somewhat affectionately) satirizes Marxist musician Ron Todd (a possible allusion to Communist musician Ewan MacColl) and his supposed belief that ‘Mississippi jail songs are in praise of sputniks’ (176). Yet political tradition remains important, manifesting in the narrator inheriting his dead father’s historical manuscript. McLeod points out the narrator’s father represents the knowledge of history and politics, precisely the things which the narrator has chosen to neglect for much of the novel [. . .] In having his narrator inherit his father’s manuscript, MacInnes suggests that any radical movement with youth at its heart requires a political conscience and an historical understanding of the conditions of its own possibility (55–6)

As well as political history, MacInnes is also clear that subcultural coexistence must be reinforced by political action. This manifests in the teenage photographer’s decision to enter the fray of the Notting Hill riots, helping a black boy escape a racist mob by giving him a lift on his Vespa (2011, 250) before being involved in street-fighting with Teddy Boys alongside two friends from the jazz scene, overjoyed to see ‘two jazz addicts’ as it showed ‘their great admiration for coloured greats like Tusdie and Maria really meant something to them’ (255). The actions of the narrator and his friends show that while critical of the power of youth subcultures as forces for change in and of themselves, MacInnes nonetheless sees them as potential incubators for anti-racist political identities, provided they are infused with an appreciation for political history and practice. As Sinfield explains, in Absolute Beginners, ‘MacInnes produces a vision rather than a record’ (170), a vision which prefigured arguably the high point of politicized inter-ethnic youth culture, Rock Against Racism (RAR ): its break with the ‘Old Left’ does not preclude drawing on political tradition while its belief in the autonomous value of youth culture is as a base for mobilization rather than a political end in itself. The actions of the narrator and his friends in the melee of the riots, and, indeed, the moral lesson of MacInnes’s entire narrative, anticipate RAR’s dictum that racism cannot be opposed ‘just by holding a dance’ (Gilroy, 168). Moreover, in a way not dissimilar to Lamming and Selvon, MacInnes also depicts the informal sites of black political formation in the ‘war cabinet of West Indians’ (2011, 251) he encounters after escorting a black boy to his home.

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Echoing Ellis, as well as debates within the Caribbean community, ‘one said the law was no use whatever, they must set up vigilantes; and another said anyway, they’d got to organise as a community, and keep it that way in future’ (253) and bears a striking resemblance to Baker Baron’s account of black self-defence during the Notting Hill riots, heralding the creation of a militant black politics at odds with the ‘class before race’ approach then espoused by much of the left. Alongside the novel’s prefiguration of RAR , convivial youth subcultures and autonomous black politics, MacInnes also portrays a reimagining of British cultural identity shorn of its racial aspects. For instance, Cool, ‘a young coloured kid [. . .] born and bred on this island of both races’ (66), whose only suit is ‘a striped Italian black’ (67), is described by the narrator as being ‘as much a native London kid as any of the millions’ (74). When Cool recounts being told to ‘Get back to your own country’, the narrator responds, ‘But this is your country’ to which Cool replies ‘That’s what I told them’ (190). Cool therefore represents the emergence of black Britishness, his ‘striped Italian black’ suit representing his hybrid black and white background while its being Italian relates to his being a native of the London district nicknamed Napoli. His identity is therefore defined by his place of birth rather than ethnicity, a reaffirmation of ius soli, an assertive defiance of racial definitions of Britishness.

Conclusion: some visions of the future Just as Selvon’s and Lamming’s texts act as harbingers of the black political formations that would transcend the moderate leadership of its time, so too does MacInnes represent the early signs of a white anti-racism that views racism as more than mere personal prejudice (contra Sillitoe) or epiphenomena of economic class (contra Sommerfield). While City of Spades highlights the structural nature of racism endemic in Britain’s institutions, Absolute Beginners underlines the importance of youth subcultures in incubating anti-racist politico-cultural identities and, similarly to Selvon, widens the scope for political activity away from a narrowly-defined class struggle. Ultimately, MacInnes preempts the phenomenon of RAR by almost two decades and provides a glimpse of the future pluralization of Britishness away from the narrow ethno-nationalist definitions hitherto existent. It should be noted that the processes of cultural formation represented in these 1950s texts did not initiate a process of unending progress with regards racism in Britain. Rather, immigration legislation from 1962 onwards would

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take increasingly draconian form, bringing legal definitions of citizenship into line with those based on ‘blood’ ties to an ethnically unified nation with Thatcher’s 1981 British Nationality Act eliminating entirely the automatic application of ius soli. Indeed, developments since the millennium, from 9/11 to Brexit, have seen the ascendance of nationalist, anti-immigrant and Islamaphobic politics. Yet, conversely, a parallel, contradictory (if more localized) process was also in progress: the pluralization of Britishness, creating space for hybridized identities whether ‘black British’ or an outward-looking white Britishness influenced by the generations of migration in their locality. Limited largely to Britain’s urban centres, such developments were enabled by the flourishing of a mass, militant anti-racist movement which drew strength from black community organization and convivial youth subcultures. What Lamming, Selvon and MacInnes achieve, then, is the apprehension, in their most embryonic form, of several strands then in existence which would form the essential elements coalescing into the mass anti-racist movements of the late-1960s and beyond. In so doing, they produce texts which are not only documents of what Britain was in the 1950s but visions of what it could, and in some places would, eventually become.

Notes 1 Here, I am using Gilroy’s definition of conviviality as describing not ‘the absence of racism or the triumph of tolerance’ but rather ‘the processes of cohabitation and interaction that have made multiculture an ordinary feature of social life in Britain’s urban areas’ (2006, xi). 2 Though Nikolanikos is discussing racism directed towards migrant workers for the downward pressure their hyper-exploitation causes on wages, the trend is analogous to that of housing in late-1950s London in that black migrants’ vulnerable position was exploited to the detriment of both black and white working-class populations while white working-class resentment was directed at their black neighbours rather than white landlords. 3 From the mid-1960s, these various strands would coalesce into a radical praxis containing elements of those mentioned previously while equally transcending them all. For an account of the links between black liberation, anti-colonialism and Marxism in Britain, see Smith (2010). Similarly, subcultural formations were important in developing anti-racist identities for both black and white youth, culminating in Rock Against Racism in 1976, an account of which can be found in Gilroy (146–302). Lentin (129–48) also covers both these phenomena.

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4 While true of The Mystic Masseur, fraudulent politicians and concomitant rotten politico-intellectual culture also form the central thematic elements of Naipaul’s 1958 novel, The Suffrage of Elvira. 5 Similar could be said of the novel’s other non-white character, South Asian Chumley, whose residence in Britain is also signalled as temporary: ‘Doreen’s mother said [. . .] after three years he could go back to Bombay with a thousand pounds saved, where, she said, you could be a millionaire with a thousand pounds.’ (210)

Works cited Anthias, Floya and Nira Yuval-Davis. Racialised Boundaries. London: Routledge, 1996. Baron, Baker. ‘Beating back Mosely in Notting Hill, 1958.’ libcom.org. Web. Accessed: Wednesday 25 May 2016. Birbalsingh, F.M. ‘To John Bull, With Hate.’ Caribbean Quarterly, 14.4 (December 1968): 74–81. Braithwaite, E.R. To Sir With Love. London: Vintage, 2005. Brown, J. Dillon. ‘Exile and Cunning: The Tactical Difficulties of George Lamming.’ Contemporary Literature, 47.4 (Winter, 2006): 669–94. Collins, Marcus. ‘Pride and Prejudice: West Indian Men in Mid-Twentieth Century Britain.’ Journal of British Studies 40.3 (July 2001): 391–418. Cudjoe, Selwyn Reginald. VS Naipaul: A Materialist Reading. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. Eastley, Aaron. ‘VS Naipaul and the 1946 Trinidad General Election.’ Twentieth Century Literature 55.1 (Spring 2009): 1–35. Ellis, David. ‘ “The Produce of More Than One Country”: Race, Identity and Discourse in Post-Windrush Britain.” Journal of Narrative Theory 31.2 (Summer, 2001): 214–32. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press, 2008. Gilroy, Paul. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: the Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. London: Routledge, 2002. Gilroy, Paul. After empire: melancholia or convivial culture? London: Routledge, 2006. Glean, Marion. Whatever Happened to CARD ? Race Today (January 1973): 13–15. Griffith, Glyne. Deconstructing Nationalisms: Henry Swanzy, Caribbean Voices, and the Development of West Indian Literature. Small Axe 10 (September 2001): 1–20. Guarducci, Maria Paola. ‘ “Only the ship remained”: The Sea Journey in George Lamming’s The Emigrants’. Textus 23 (2010): 339–54. Hall, Stuart. ‘Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities.’ Culture, Globalisation and the World System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity. Ed. Anthony D. King. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. 41–68. Haywood, Ian. Working-Class Fiction from Chartism to Trainspotting. Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers, 1997.

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Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy, 1957. London: Penguin, 1977. Hughes, Michael. A Companion to West Indian Literature. London: Collins, 1979. Jonas, Joyce E. ‘Carnival Strategies in Lamming’s In The Castle of My Skin.’ Callaloo 35 (Spring, 1988): 346–60. Lamming, George. The Emigrants. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. Lamming, George. In the Castle of My Skin. Harlow : Longman, 2010. Lamming, George. The Pleasures of Exile. London: Pluto Press, 2005. Lentin, Alana. Racism and Anti-Racism in Europe. London: Pluto Press, 2004. MacPhee, Graham. Postwar British Literature and Postcolonial Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Maes-Jelinek, Hena. ‘The Novel from 1950 to 1970.’ A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Vol. 2: English- and Dutch-Speaking Regions. Ed. A. James Arnold. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2001. MacInnes, Colin. Absolute Beginners. London: Allison & Busby, 2011. MacInnes, Colin. City of Spades. London: Allison & Busby, 2012. May, William. Postwar Literature: 1950–1990. London: York Press, 2010. McLeod, John. Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis. Abingdon: Routledge, 2004. McLeod, John. Black British Culture and Fiction in the 1970s’. The 1970s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction. Eds Nick Hubble, John McLeod and Philip Tew. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. 93–116. Mittelholzer, Edgar. A Morning at the Office. London: Heinemann, 1979. Mustafa, Fawzia. VS Naipaul. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Digital. Naipaul, V.S.. Miguel Street. London: Picador, 2011. Naipaul, V.S.. The Mystic Masseur. London: Picador, 2011. Naipaul, V.S.. The Suffrage of Elvira. London: Penguin, 1969. Nanton, Philip. ‘What Does Mr. Swanzy Want – Shaping or Reflecting? An assessment of Henry Swanzy’s contribution to the development of Caribbean Literature.’ Caribbean Quarterly 46.1 (March 2000): 61–72. Ramdin, Ron. The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain. Aldershot: Gower, 1987. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. London: Methuen & Co., 1976. Selvon, Sam. The Lonely Londoners. London: Penguin Books, 2006. Selvon, Sam. Ways of Sunlight. Harlow : Longman, 1985. Shukra, Kalbir. The Changing Pattern of Black Politics in Britain. London: Pluto Press, 2008. Sillitoe, Alan. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. London: Harper Perennial, 2006. Sinfield, Alan. Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989. Sivanandan, Ambalavaner. Catching History on the Wing: Race, Culture and Globalisation. London: Pluto Press, 2008. Smith, Evan. ‘ “Class before Race”: British Communism and the Place of Empire in Postwar Race Relations.’ Science & Society 72.4 (October 2008): 455–81.

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Smith, Evan. ‘Conflicting Narratives of Black Youth Rebellion in Modern Britain.’ Ethnicity and Race in a Changing World: A Review Journal 2.1 (Spring 2010): 16–31. Sommerfield, John. North West Five. London: Heinemann, 1960. Stein, Mark. Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004. Swanzy, Henry. ‘Caribbean Voices: Prolegomena to a West Indian Culture.’ Caribbean Quarterly 1.2 (July–September 1949): 21–8. Todd, Selina. The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class. London: John Murray, 2014.

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Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On: The Politics of Youth in 1950s Fiction Nick Bentley

The 1950s are often seen as the decade that saw the birth of modern youth culture. This was the period that witnessed the arrival in Britain of the teenager, Teddy boy and beatnik, a new popularization of musical forms such as calypso and jazz, especially in its modern, ‘cool’ form as opposed to the traditional jazz of the 1920s and 1930s. It also saw the arrival on the scene of popular, largely media-fuelled, figures such as the outsider, the delinquent and the Angry Young Man. Subcultural theorists associated with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS ) that emerged and developed in the 1960s and 1970s, such as John Clarke, Phil Cohen, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson and Paddy Whannell read the emergence of these groups as young people trying to negotiate the unique pressures of the postwar world in relation to the economic, social and cultural shifts represented by new consumerism, discourses around classlessness and the development of Britain as a multicultural society. This chapter will explore these contexts with respect to the representation and construction of a variety of youth subcultures in several novels from the 1950s (and early 1960s) including Roland Camberton’s Scamp (1950) Stella Gibbons’ Here Be Dragons (1956), Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners (1959), Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956), Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960), John Wain’s Hurry on Down (1953) and Colin Wilson’s Adrift in Soho (1961).1 The profound social and cultural changes taking place alongside the rise of youth cultures were treated with a mixture of celebration, suspicion and moral panic. Those on the political Left, in particular, were unsure whether to see these new youth groups as indicative of a consumer-led Americanization of traditional working-class British culture or as potential sites for cultural (and political) rebellion. This chapter will show that it was the specific combination of a number 177

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of factors prevalent in the immediate postwar period that was conducive to the development of youth subcultures during the 1950s, which was then registered in the fiction. First, the continuing disruption of traditional collective identities related to class, gender, ethnicity and generational distinctions as a consequence of the social upheavals of war (including the continuation of national service and other changing aspects of the postwar labour market). Secondly, the concomitant tensions brought to bear on traditional family structures that were in part to do with generational differences concerning career and life expectations for young people growing up in the 1950s and their parents. Thirdly, the development of forms of consumer culture, often imported from North America, that were targeted specifically at youth markets. Fourthly, the economic boom in the latter half of the 1950s which resulted in young people having greater access to capital in order to consume the products and lifestyles promoted to them. As we shall see, this resulted in both the development of distinctly new youth subcultures such as teenagers and Teds alongside new configurations of older sub- and counter-cultural scenes such as jazz, bohemians and calypso. The chapter will be organized by looking at distinct subcultures in the 1950s, but there are a series of overlaps that need to be borne in mind, such as the flow of individuals across, and between, specific subcultural identities such as jazz, bohemians and left-wing politicals. In addition, it will be apparent that some of the novels discussed in the chapter portray and articulate a number of different subcultures and often present them as competing identities to which individual characters are either attracted or retain a critical distance. This can be seen for example in Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners and Roland Camberton’s Scamp. One issue to be borne in mind throughout the analysis is the traditional focus of predominantly male affiliation with and constitution of youth subcultures in the period, a belief promoted in both popular media representations and in the cultural studies and sociological work done by the CCCS during the period and into the 1960s and 1970s. Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber (2005 [1975]) noted in the mid-1970s that the media and academic identification of youth subcultures as predominantly male is, in fact, a misrepresentation of the actual gender constitution of youth groups in the period from the 1950s to the 1970s. As they argued: Very little seems to have been written about the role of girls in youth cultural groupings. They are absent from the classic subcultural ethnographic studies, the pop histories, the personal accounts and the journalistic surveys of the field.

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When girls do appear, it is either in ways which uncritically reinforce the stereotypical image of women [. . .] or else they are fleetingly and marginally represented. (105)

What analysis of the fiction rather than the media and ethnographic studies shows is that although there is still a male bias the fiction is far more representative of a gender balance in the lived experience of subcultures. In the description of such groups in novels by Colin MacInnes, Stella Gibbons, Muriel Spark and Colin Wilson for example, there is clear representation of both male and female engagement in specific youth subcultures.

Youthquake In the autumn of 1956, a new film that had recently arrived from America – Rock Around the Clock – was being banned in a number of cinemas in Britain due to reports of teenagers dancing in the aisles, ripping up cinema seats and fighting. As one participant remembers, ‘We were tearing off seats, ripping off covers and throwing stuff into the air. And they said that’s it, everybody out, and they closed the cinema down. It was just too exciting for words’ (Akhtar and Humphries, 42–3). The arrival of this exciting and exotic movie from across the Atlantic seemed to British youth to offer a way forward out of the drab austerity of the postwar experienced by their parents’ generation. It also represented one of the first moral panics around youth culture in the postwar period, although it connected in the public imagination with earlier fears about the Teddy boy subculture.2 Teenagers had arrived and they were going to shake things up. A variety of new youth subcultures contributed to a manifest sense of change, and this was not only related to the worrying figures of the teenager and the urban Teddy boy thug – a variety of new subcultures tried to mark out their own particular and nuanced response to the dominant and parent cultures against which they set themselves. Rock and roll, the blues, jazz (trad and mod varieties), skiffle, ballad and blues, folk and calypso were all varieties of musical subcultures that emerged in the decade, mostly formed through connection with North American musical styles of previous decades. Alongside these musical youth cultures, there were other distinct groups that developed their own appearance, fashions, attitudes and behavioural codes: bohemians, beatniks and bums, not to mention discrete youth subcultures formed around specific ethnicities, sexualities and political movements such as CND.

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Phil Cohen, writing in the 1970s and attempting to theorize subcultural affiliation and behaviour, argued that youth subcultures represented ways of working out anxieties and concerns in the parent culture but through their own series of relational cultural manifestations. As he writes: I’m suggesting here that mods, parkas, skinheads, crombies, are a succession of subcultures which all correspond to the same parent culture and which attempt to work out, through a system of transformations, the basic problematic or contradiction which is inserted in the subculture by the parent culture. (90)

Cohen was particularly interested in class relations and his theory can have valence with respect to the nuances of subcultural formation in the 1950s in relation to the working-class cultures from which they most often emerged. It is not that the youth emerging in the 1950s had specifically new anxieties and concerns, but that they were finding new ways of expressing and living through them, which often created anxieties for the dominant and parent cultures. Alongside being a visible cultural feature and cause for moral panic, the representation and construction of subcultures forms an important aspect of the literary fiction of the period and this literature became a fruitful cultural site in which these anxieties and concerns could be articulated and addressed. Youthful characters, of course, are present in most novels, but it is perhaps a significant aspect of 1950s fiction that specific subcultural groups begin to be identified from a number of perspectives: as potentially liberating collective groupings for individual characters; as indications of changing social and economic relations; or as the cause for anxiety around moral and cultural decline. In what follows, I will identify five (of the many) important subcultural affiliations that were influential in the decade: teenagers; Teddy boys and rock and roll; jazz; bohemians; and calypso.

Teenage rampage One of the youth figures that gains powerful traction in the 1950s is the teenager, a subcultural identity that emerges during the decade and is to a large extent imported from America. As Bill Osgerby notes, the teenager becomes more than simply an indication of the age of an individual, but a ‘particular style of conspicuous, leisure-oriented consumption’ (61). According to the popular articulation of this figure s/he is reasonably affluent and keen to flaunt that new economic power conspicuously. As the unnamed teenager in Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners observes:

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here in this Soho, the headquarters of the adult mafia, you could everywhere see the signs of un-silent teenage revolution. The disc shops with those lovely sleeves set in their windows, the most original thing to come out in our lifetime, and the kids inside them purchasing guitars, or spending fortunes on the songs of the Top Twenty. The shirt-stores and bra-stores with cine-star photos in the window selling all the exclusive teenage drag I’ve been describing. The hair-style saloons where they inflict the blow-wave torture on the kids for hours on end. The cosmetic shops – to make girls of seventeen, fifteen, even thirteen, look like pale rinsed-out sophisticates. Scooters and bubble-cars driven madly down the roads by kids who, a few years ago, were pushing toy ones on the pavement. (74)

Colin MacInnes’s novel describes a number of subcultural groups, but it begins by focusing on the teenager phenomenon, just as the nineteen-year-old narrator feels he is now able to reflect back on its influence. MacInnes’s narrator is significantly ambivalent about the consumerist aspect of this ‘un-silent revolution’, nevertheless it is the ownership and display of certain products and appearances that drives the sense of generational difference in this account. As Peter Laurie noted in the mid-1960s: ‘The distinctive fact about teenagers’ behaviour is economic [. . .] they spend a lot of money on clothes, records, concerts, make-up, magazines: all things that give immediate pleasure and little lasting use’ (1965: 9). There is a suggestion in these accounts that the teenager is suffering from a form of commodity fetishism and false consciousness under which they are lured into parting with their surplus capital for cheap and tawdry goods. This response to teenage culture was picked up by some of the writers associated with the New Left and the emerging discipline of cultural studies in their approach to interpreting popular culture in the 1950s. An example of this approach can be seen in Richard Hoggart’s ground-breaking book of 1957, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life, which includes descriptions of what he calls the ‘juke-box boys’ – teenagers who congregate in coffee bars and listen to popular chart music. For Hoggart, these teenagers are blindly drawn to what he sees as the superficial attractions of popular cultural products and lifestyles: this is all a thin and pallid sort of dissipation, a sort of spiritual dry-rot amid the odour of boiled milk. Many of the customers – their clothes, their hair-styles, their facial expressions all indicate – are living to a large extent in a myth-world compounded of a few simple elements which they take to be those of American life. (248)

As indicated here, part of the problem the New Left had with the new teenage culture was the threat of Americanization to what Hoggart and others saw as the

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older, organic working-class culture of the pre-war period. The ‘shiny barbarism’ of American popular culture threatened to undermine those intrinsic values that were felt to be a distinctive aspect of the working-class life. It is this generational division that Phil Cohen and others attached to the CCCS established at Birmingham University in 1964 describe as the difference between subculture(s) and the parent culture from which they emerge. Alongside Absolute Beginners, other novels of the decade include reference to the superficial nature of teenage culture. In John Wain’s Hurry on Down (1953) for example, Charles Lumley, the main character, encounters working-class teenage youths as a distinct cultural other. When going to a dance with his girlfriend Rosa, Lumley notes groups of teenagers with ‘blue or brown suits and shoes with pointed toes [. . .] their hair swept up into shiny quiffs, stiff with grease, above the forehead’ (165). As he observes this group as an outsider, he notes the ritualistic nature of the youth subculture that marks out its difference for Charles, who is associated at this point in the text with the mainstream, parent culture: ‘Dances like these, in provincial town halls, were the main recreation of millions of his fellow Britons below the age of thirty [. . .] Charles hung back, making a note of the obviously complex traditions of the place before venturing into the ritual’ (166). Here, Wain’s narrative address shares with the later New Left approaches of Hoggart the positional externalization of the ethnographic researcher encountering a strange culture. Similarly, Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye includes several references to teenage cultural practices in its examination of 1950s youth culture. Spark’s novel introduces a disruptive and somewhat impish outsider figure, Dougal Douglas, who moves into an established community encouraging those he encounters to reflect on their lives. One of the characters that Dougal particularly riles is Trevor Lomas, the novel’s main example of delinquent male youth and leading figure of the area’s youth culture. The following passage describes this character’s entry into a dancehall to find Beauty, the woman he is currently trying to attract: On a midsummer night Trevor Lomas walked with a somnambulistic sway into Findlater’s Ballroom and looked round for Beauty. The floor was expertly laid and polished. The walls were pale rose, with concealed lighting. Beauty stood on the girls’ side, talking to a group of very similar and lustrous girls. They had prepared themselves for this occasion with diligence, and as they spoke together, they did not smile much nor attend to each other’s words. As an accepted thing, any of the girls might break off in the middle of a sentence, should a young man approach her, and turning to him, might give him her entire and smiling regard. (76)

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Here, Spark foregrounds the performative and gendered aspects of teenage identity, but nevertheless highlights the inauthenticity of youth behaviour. It is the devilish impositions of Dougal that cause several teenage characters in the novel to reflect on their behaviour and ultimately their individual relationship to the youth cultures they negotiate. Many descriptions of teenagers and teenage culture, then, focus on the participants as lacking agency and awareness of the ways in which their youth is being manipulated by consumer practices and capitalist economic structures. As MacInnes’s teenager notes: youth has power, a kind of divine power straight from mother nature [. . .] As for the boys and girls, the dear young absolute beginners, I sometimes feel that if they only knew this fact, this very simple fact, namely how powerful they really are, then they could rise up overnight and enslave the old tax-payers, the whole dam lot of them. (13, sic.)

For the teenager, this non-recognition of their potential power to challenge dominant power relationships in a patriarchal society is lamentable and he is well aware of the impact of consumer capitalism in diluting the potential of youth as a force for social change. MacInnes’s teenager is aware of this process of containment – ‘They buy us younger every year’ (10) – however, he is ready to consent with the prevailing forces, rather than challenge them. As Alice Ferrebe notes: ‘one of the radical characteristics of the narrator’s male teenage-hood is his easy, guilt free adoption and exploitation of the principles of the consumer market’ (146). Hoggart, Spark, Wain and to a certain extent MacInnes all read contemporary teenage culture as an inauthentic ritualistic group mentality that represents a broader cultural decline associated with new consumerist practices. However, there are other examples that identify the ways in which fashion and popular culture products contain emotional and affective qualities for the teenagers far beyond the purely economic. In Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, for example, the main character Arthur Seaton emphasizes how the suits he buys with the money he earns in the local bicycle factory engender a sense of personal pride that extends beyond the New Left dismissal of such fashionable items as consumer frippery. When not at work, Arthur’s personal investment in his clothes is foregrounded: Upstairs he flung his greasy overalls aside and selected a suit from a line of hangers. Brown paper protected them from dust, and he stood for some minutes in the cold, digging his hands into pockets and turning back lapels, sampling the

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good hundred pounds’ worth of property hanging from an iron-bar. These were his riches, and he told himself that money paid-out on clothes was a sensible investment because it made him feel good as well as look good. (66)

This projection of individual identity onto objects of subcultural display reveals what Sarah Thornton (1995) has described as the importance of ‘subcultural capital’ for youths associated with particular subcultural affiliations. Adapting Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital, subcultural capital represents a complex set of hierarchal identifications of practices, behaviours and objects imbued with values beyond the purely economic. Thornton writes with respect to the club culture of the 1990s, however, her general point applies to a subculture’s understanding of its internal stratifications at any time, and can be seen in Arthur Seaton’s recognition of the real value of his suits, both economic and personal. The semiotic significance of these acts of display is, therefore, far from the unthinking acceptance of consumer products assumed by the New Left reading of youth culture’s relationship with contemporary capitalism. Alongside the view of youth as passive consumers lacking individual agency, then, there is another set of positions in 1950s fiction that address the active construction of alternative and marginalized identities. This ranges from youth culture as a source of violent, disruptive and delinquent behaviour to positive and potentially liberating aspects, as well as also offering a more balanced evaluation of the range of ideological positions associated with various specific subcultures. In terms of positive, left-leaning politics of youth this chapter will later analyse the representation in fiction of three subcultures in particular: jazz; bohemians and beatniks; and calypso. However, before looking at these potentially utopian and/or resistant subcultures it is illuminating to identify the way in which a moral panic is developed around one specific subculture of the 1950s – the Teddy boys.

Teddy boys In his extensive popular history of the late 1950s to the early 1960s, Never Had It So Good, Dominic Sandbrook identifies the Teddy boys as ‘the real “folk devils” of the fifties’ (442). As he notes, after a murder committed on Clapham Common in 1953 by a youth associated with the Teddy boy look, ‘it was common to identify Teddy boys as vicious young toughs armed with flick knives, the very stereotype of the juvenile delinquent’ (443). Incidents of this kind, of course, sell good copy and it is precisely the visibility of the Teddy boy subculture in

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examples of violence that perpetuate this stereotypical image. There are over 170 references to ‘Teddy boys’ in The Times alone between 1954 and 1959, most of which are pejorative. As Stanley Cohen argues, the Teddy boys ‘were perceptually merged into a day-to-day delinquency problem’ (151). This association of the Teds with violence was largely a media-fuelled and perhaps self-fulfilling identification, but it also seems to have been contributed to by much of the fiction of the period. To return to MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners, it is the main Teddy boy character, mockingly nicknamed Ed the Ted, that comes in for much of the teenager’s invective against the variety of subcultural members he meets. Although coming from broadly the same area as the teenager it is Ed’s attraction to violence that marks out his subcultural identity. I should explain [. . .] that Edward and I were born and bred [. . .] within a bottle’s throw of each other off the Harrow Road in Kilburn [. . .] Then, when the Tedthing became all the rage, Edward signed up for the duration [. . .] the fullfledged Teddy-boy condition – slit eyes, and cosh, and words of one syllable, and dirty finger-nails and all [. . .] According to the tales Ed told me, when he left his jungle occasionally and crossed the frontier into civilized sections of the city and had a coffee with me, he lived the high old life, brave, bold and splendid, smashing crockery in all-night cafes and crowning distinguished colleagues with tyre levers in cul-de-sacs and parking lots, and even appearing in a telly programme on the Ted question where he stared photogenically, and only grunted. (47)

Here, MacInnes reproduces the stereotypical image of the Teddy boy as it was being constructed in the media at the time. The attention to Ed’s lack of intelligence and penchant for violence are marked out as the distinctive aspects of his subcultural activity. The context for this construction of the Teddy boy subculture is later corroborated by the Notting Hill race riots that form the backdrop for the latter stages of the novel. White Teddy boys were implicated in much of the violence reported in the events of autumn 1958 and Absolute Beginners records a number of unprovoked attacks on black and Asian people by members of the youth subculture. According to one of the characters in the novel, Mr Cool, a mixed-race friend of the teenager, this shift in attitudes is a worrying new feature of race relations as experienced on the street. As Mr Cool notes, ‘Up till now, it’s been white Teds against whites’ (191), but the atmosphere is changing and aggression amongst the Teds is increasingly being directed at those of non-white racial heritage. In MacInnes’s representation of the politics of youth culture in the 1950s, it is predominantly the Teddy boys that are associated with right-wing attitudes to immigrants. The teenager’s celebration

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of the emerging multicultural make-up of Britain sits at odds with the Teddy boys’ xenophobia and racism and it is particularly the behaviour of this subcultural group that exacerbates these feelings; as the teenager notes after witnessing an attack on two Sikhs, ‘this little group [the Teds]: it seemed to have a horrid little mind, if you can call it that, all of its own, and a whole lot of unexpected force behind it’ (233). The novel has resonances here with Phil Cohen’s theory of the subculture revealing, in spectacular form, the anxieties and prejudices of the parent culture, although it is important to note that the parent culture itself would be split along similar attitudes to immigration. It also reveals aspects of another subcultural theorist working in the 1950s, albeit in the different context of American youth gangs: Albert K. Cohen’s 1955 work Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang. In this ground-breaking study associated more with the Chicago School of subcultural studies than the CCCS , Cohen identifies the internal motivations of individuals, perceived externally as delinquency, as in fact following a perfectly logical set of ethical choices meaningful within the group: Insofar as the new subculture represents a new status system by sanctioning behaviour tabooed or frowned upon by the larger society, the acquisition of status within the new group is accompanied by a loss of status outside the group. [. . .] Indeed, this repudiation of outsiders, necessary in order to protect oneself from feeling concerned about what they may think, may go so far as to make nonconformity with the expectations of the outsiders a positive criterion of status within the group (57–8).

According to Cohen’s position the anti-social behaviour promoted within the subculture serves to cement solidarity of the subculture against oppositional forces, whether that comes from mainstream middle-class culture, the workingclass subculture, other subcultures, or indeed other gangs within the same subculture as in the manifestation of inter-subcultural violence amongst the Teds in MacInnes’s novel. The cultural politics of differing subcultural affiliations is dramatized towards the end of MacInnes’s novel when the teenager is attacked by a group of Teds after trying to intervene in another racist incident. The teenager is heavily outnumbered but it is two characters associated with the jazz subculture who come to his aid, and it is precisely in the subcultural mores that the teenager identifies crucial anti-racist sentiments: ‘And was I glad it was two kids of my own age, and two jazz addicts [. . .] because this seemed to show their admiration for coloured greats like Tusdie and Maria really meant something to them’

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(255). I will discuss the politics of the jazz subculture in greater depth in the next section, but the point to make here is that the teenager’s two friends offer resistance from within youth culture itself to the racist violence perpetrated by the Teds. In other novels, the Teddy boys are more generally associated with a rebellious youth culture, but not necessarily with racism, and indeed they become emblematic of a resistance to dominant cultural practices and behaviours, rather than a re-articulation of concerns within the parent culture. In Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, for example, Arthur Seaton’s anti-social behaviour is identified by characters representative of the parent culture with the most readily recognized youth delinquent group of the period. In the opening chapter of the novel, Arthur is drunkenly engaging in loutish behaviour at the local club and is identified thus: ‘Looks like one of them Teddy boys, allus making trouble’ (16). In fact, Arthur’s behaviour stresses his independence from all group affiliations including association with youth subcultures, nevertheless the parent culture is keen to identify any delinquent behaviour with a recognized source of a general moral panic. Identification of Arthur as a Teddy boy thus serves to contain him within a definable cultural site of delinquency without attempting to understand the individual contexts for the relevant behaviours. To draw on theoretical concepts developed by Louis Althusser (1971), Arthur is thus interpellated or hailed by dominant culture as a delinquent, and to a certain extent his behaviour is marked as a self-defining effect of this kind of social demonization. However, he is also keen to resist such ideological determinism; Arthur’s motto in the text is ‘don’t let the bastards grind you down’ and his association with youth rebellion is thus part of a broader concern to evade the entrapment of working-class factory practices and the imposition of any preconstructed identity. One of the ways he achieves this is through his love of good quality clothing, as noted in the previous section, and in a way this also marks his connection to the Teddy boy subculture. The Teds were marked by their appropriation of a dress style that was originally intended for upper-middle-class men. As Tony Jefferson has noted, this focus on sartorial elegance is representative of an aspirational desire amongst the Teds to deflect from their actual location in an exploitative economic system that placed them in low paid occupations: ‘I see this choice of uniform as, initially, an attempt to buy status. . . . Their dress represented a symbolic way of expressing and negotiating with their social reality; of giving cultural meaning to their social plight’ (83–4). Dick Hebdige also identifies this aspirational aspect of the specular style of the Teds: ‘He [the Teddy boy] visibly bracketed off the drab routines of school, the job and home by affecting an exaggerated style’ (50).

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The variety of articulations of the Teddy boy subculture in the fiction of the period represents an antidote to the stereotyping and homogenization of the figure by the mainstream media. Nevertheless, for many, the Ted represented a convenient demonic figure of youth subculture upon which a number of social and cultural ills could be laid. In the next section I will examine jazz, a scene more often associated with progressive forces within 1950s society, but which also represents a complex range of cultural, political and ideological associations.

Birth of the Cool Jazz, of course, had been a recognized musical form with associated subcultures several decades before the 1950s, and even though it was born in the United States, there were examples of jazz clubs and jazz fans in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. It has, however, a particularly important place in the politics of youth culture in the 1950s and several novels refer to it as a way of coding the behaviours and ideological outlooks of characters and environments. Perhaps the first thing to note is that jazz is not one thing, and the 1950s are a period of particularly fraught divisions within the jazz subculture between ‘trad jazz’, which harked back to the establishment of the form in the earlier part of the twentieth century and the new cool jazz or ‘modern jazz’ that was gaining prominence amongst younger audiences in the 1950s. Miles Davis’s album Birth of the Cool, for example, released in 1957, represents a distinctive new style in jazz that was welcomed by some, but rejected by many in the scene as moving away from the traditional principles of swing, melody and the interpretation of standards. This inter-subcultural rift is described most eloquently (if controversially) in a British literary context by Philip Larkin in his book All What Jazz, that was published in 1970 but looks back to decades of jazz listening. For Larkin, it is the advent of modern jazz in the 1950s that represents a break (lamentable for him) in the tradition that was initiated by the early American greats like Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith and the Chicago Rhythm Kings. Larkin’s reading of the transitions jazz went through in the immediate postwar period interestingly mirror Richard Hoggart’s reading of the newer commercial forces on traditional working-class culture. For Larkin, however, it is the increased complexity of modern jazz that is frustrating: ‘Had jazz been essentially a popular art, full of tunes you could whistle? Something fundamentally awful had taken place to ensure that there should be no more tunes’ (7). Larkin felt that ‘the sort of emotion the music was trying to evoke seemed to have changed’ and he lamented

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the ‘deliberately contrived eccentricity of the phrasing and harmonies’ of the modern jazz (7). Larkin connects this both to socio-cultural changes and to shifts in literary practice. In trying to come to terms with the modern jazz moment he notes: ‘How glibly I had talked of modern jazz, without realizing the force of the adjective: this was modern jazz, and Parker was a modern jazz player just as Picasso was modern painter and Pound a modern poet’ (11). Crucially, Larkin attaches a context of racial emancipation to cool jazz that goes against his conservative sensibilities. As he writes: ‘I learned that jazz had now developed, socially and musically: the post-war Negro was better educated, more politically conscious and culturally aware than his predecessors, and in consequence the Negro jazz musician was more musically sophisticated [. . .] He had freed his music as a preliminary to freeing himself ’ (10). This might very well be a cause for celebration of the new, freer musical landscape in jazz but for Larkin this is a cause for concern as it is clear he wants to keep jazz as a restricted and marginalized scene that corresponds to the social and economic segregation from which the music is ‘authentically’ articulated. Indeed, Larkin’s racism was identified openly in Andrew Thwaite’s edition of Larkin’s Selected Letters that came out in the 1990s, but it can also be seen implicitly in his reading of the social and cultural context informing the development of musical styles in All What Jazz. It should be stressed that Larkin’s cultural racism is an individual trait and should not, of course, be seen as a distinctive feature of trad jazz, which embraced the music of African Americans as much as the new modern varieties. I begin this discussion of jazz with Larkin’s book because it represents the importance given to jazz in debates around cultural politics (and especially racial politics) in the 1950s. Indeed, in contrast to Larkin’s prejudices, modern jazz was seen by many writers as a particularly inclusive subculture serving as a site of ideological opposition to the racism identified with the Teds and other racist elements in mainstream culture. MacInnes’s teenager, for example, is keen to promote the intersectionality of the jazz subculture, which for him has the power to transcend social, cultural and economic divisions: But the great thing about the jazz world, and all the kids that enter into it, is that no one, not a soul, cares what your class is, or what your race is, or what your income, or if you’re boy, or girl, or bent, or versatile, or what you are – so long as you behave yourself, and have left all that crap behind you, too, when you come in the jazz club door. (68–9)

For MacInnes’s teenager, immersion in the jazz subculture represents a lifestyle that rejects all prejudices of class, age, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, the very

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prejudices that could be observed to be part of both the Teddy boy subculture and mainstream British culture more broadly. The teenager is perhaps associated more with the modern jazz style but he also embraces all aspects of the jazz subculture; he listens to the Modern Jazz Quartet with his friend Mr Cool (pp. 188–91), as well as being a big fan of the more traditional Maria Bethlehem, his fictionalization of the jazz virtuoso singer Ella Fitzgerald (pp.  228–30). Politically, the modern form seems, in particular, to embrace the progressive, inclusive politics of the 1950s and indeed MacInnes’s teenager is close to the emergent Mod subculture that emerges in the earlier 1960s; what Mike Brake defines as the ‘mainstream’ mods (75). For MacInnes, the jazz club represents a form of what Michel Foucault (1986) describes as a heterotopia – a real space that is imbued with additional meaning and significance that projects to ideas and beliefs that idealistically re-shape it as potentially utopian. MacInnes’s teenager fully immerses himself in the experience and despite his desire to remain an independent observer of the various subcultures he encounters in the text, he can be said to be affiliated with the jazz world in a way that provides a voice from the inside. It is clearly significant in his decision to become actively involved in the racialized politics surrounding the descriptions of the Notting Hill disturbances in the novel. So much so, that by the end of the novel when he is contemplating leaving England because he is sickened by the racist attitudes, he has a change of heart when he sees a group of newly arrived immigrants at the airport: Some had on robes, and some had tropical suits, and most of them were young like me [. . .] and they looked so damned pleased to be in England, at the end of their long journey, that I was heartbroken at all the disappointments that were in store for them. And I ran up to them through the water and shouted out above the engines, Welcome to London! Greetings from England! Meet your first teenager! We’re all going up to Napoli to have a ball! (285)

Napoli is the teenager’s nickname for Notting Hill, and it is his decision to stay in England at this point and to embrace the emergent multicultural vibrancy associated with the new immigration that is in part fuelled by his subcultural associations with jazz as indicated by the youthful nature of the immigrants he encounters at this moment. Although MacInnes’s teenager represents a voice from within the jazz subculture, there are several works of the decade that identify it as an exotic other that is both attractive, but also potentially dangerous as a source for an alternative set of radical ideas and associations. In this way, the jazz subculture

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also becomes attached to a narrative of bohemian existence that rejects the dominant bourgeois sensibilities that were felt by many to be such a stifling part of British culture in the 1950s. I will discuss bohemianism as a form of subculture in more detail in the next section, but here it is worth noting a couple of novels that describe the experience of attending jazz clubs. In Stella Gibbons’s Here Be Dragons, nineteen-year-old Nell Sely moves from rural Dorset to Hampstead to stay with her aristocratic aunt. While in London, she becomes involved with a group of young party-goers and would-be bohemians and there are various descriptions in the novel of the clubs, coffee bars and apartments that the group frequents. The association with an alternative scene has a particularly attractive piquancy for this daughter of staid, bourgeois parents from the country and reveals something of the exoticization of the exciting youth culture she encounters when she moves to the metropolitan centre. Part of this exoticization is encountering people of differing ethnicities in London, although unlike MacInnes’s novel, there are no black, Asian or minority ethnic characters who are developed. At one point in the novel Nell describes walking from Goodge Street Station to her new office near Tottenham Court Road and seeing ‘eight black men (Jamaicans?)’ (60). This is clearly a new experience for Nell and she is aware how it might look to her bourgeois relations; later she notes, ‘if she were questioned that evening about its respectability, she would not mention the black men’ (64). Despite her interest being piqued by association with the alternative bohemian lifestyle represented in the jazz clubs, Nell remains an externalized figure, similar to Charles in Hurry on Down, and her observations of the subculture smack more of the external ethnographer than the participant observer. Take, for example, this description of a jazz club crowd: ‘they all made their way into one of those long, low and dimly lit rooms in which contemporary youth takes its austere pleasures; austere in the sense that no concession is made to the minor senses, but satisfaction is direct between audience and performer’ (244). Later in the novel, she describes a jazz band, a description that reveals something of the ambivalence she feels towards this alternative culture: ‘the band [. . .] in jeans and shirtsleeves and with cigarettes hanging from lip, began to saunter onto the low platform at one end of the room [. . .] They were a type, yet it was difficult to say in what the typicalness lay’ (245). The differing descriptions from Larkin, MacInnes and Gibbons reveal the variety of interpretations placed on jazz as a marker of differing political positions. In this way the subculture becomes overdetermined in the literary discourse carrying a set of partly authentic, partly constructed ideological

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connotations. What the fiction makes clear is that where you stood on the formal debates around jazz placed you with respect to a recognized set of political and cultural attitudes.

Bohemians, beatniks and bums If Gibbons’s novel describes a bohemian jazz subculture of characters who have rejected bourgeois conformity, then Roland Camberton’s Scamp (1950) and Colin Wilson’s Adrift in Soho (1961) both describe a subculture of artists, dropouts and vagrants who lead precarious lives outside of the recognized economic and social structures of mainstream society. Camberton’s Scamp captures the world of the bohemian subcultures of Bloomsbury, Soho, Fitzrovia and King’s Cross. The main character, Ivan Ginsberg, a former Cambridge graduate in his early thirties, is leading a precarious life writing short stories for very little recompense, producing copy for exploitative editors and providing private language tuition in Russian. Meanwhile he has ambitions to create and edit his own literary magazine, the eponymous title of the novel: ‘Scamp, magazine for the younger generation!’ (83). The novel’s plot, such as it is, revolves around him attempting to encourage various people to invest in the creation of the magazine, while simultaneously encountering many in the scene who are more often than not trying to borrow money from him. Soho and its immediate environment was clearly associated with the bohemian lifestyle in the 1950s and the novel reveals a series of subcultures who share a resistance to mainstream culture, whether through inclination or necessity. This is postwar London and several of the characters are displaced from their pre-war lives and background, portraying a cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic mix of people who circulate around a series of pubs, cafés and other insalubrious haunts. The novel describes a contemporary manifestation of the London bohemia of the earlier decades of the twentieth century that Peter Brooker has identified as ‘the product of and reaction to the changing forms of modernity’ (7). Brooker traces the bohemian figure back to mid-nineteenth-century Paris identified in the figure of the flâneur and manifest in the literary and artistic tradition of Charles Baudelaire, Gérard de Nerval, Théophile Gautier and Henri Murger. This figure re-emerges in 1950s London in the form of a loose grouping of countercultural artists and writers eking out precarious lifestyles. However, the relationship the individual has to the group is always in tension with the possibility of success in the mainstream, and most of the characters in Scamp

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navigate between a commitment to, and frustration with, the bohemian lifestyle. As Brooker notes:‘the bohemian was a non-conformist [. . .] whose nonconformity was at risk at all points, from indifference, parody, convention and compromise, since simply to survive, however close to the bread-line, required some means of livelihood, support or patronage’ (4). Although Brooker, here, is referring specifically to the nineteenth-century, French model, a similar situation applies to the various characters encountered in Camberton’s novel. Unlike Here Be Dragons, the characters in Scamp are thoroughly immersed in the subcultural life of bohemia and indeed the novel identifies key distinctions between sub-groups within the underground, some of which are politically countercultural, represented by characters such as Taffy the anarchist; Tom Sirpson, who describes himself as a New Communist; and others who have rejected mainstream society in order to pursue literary and artistic ambitions. There is also a strict recognition amongst the groups of the nuances of different subcultural lifestyles and outlooks. For example, the ‘Soho bums’ are defined as a group who live a destitute, often vagrant life that distinguishes them from those who come to the area for the piquancy of subcultural association: Leaning against the wall and pressed into odd corners by the crowd, philosophical, isolated bums watched the scene with bitter understanding [. . .] In the revelation of closing time, they saw an immense, terrifying vista of the future, with themselves caged for ever in this environment of dismal and helpless neurosis. For the thousandth time they determined never to come again, to pull themselves together, to extricate themselves from their shoddy Bohemia. (44)

Other subcultural groups appear in the novel including one that pre-empts the cultural mores and lifestyles of the Teds that appear later in the decade. This is particularly shown in a fight Ginsberg observes in an all-night café. Although our hero is part of the Soho underground scene, this group is clearly externalized as an exotic other by focalizing the narrative through Ginsberg’s perspective: They were like specimens from a sociological case-book. In a flash, as the toughs grappled and slashed he pictured simple patterns which formed this violent mosaic – the slums of Inner London, the somewhat mentally deficient youngsters, the High Street, the pin-table saloon, the fish and chip shop, the cinema, the News of the World, the pub, the dog-track, the racecourse, crime and Borstal, crime and prison, a ménage with a prostitute or a half witted adolescent, and then the ganging together for company’s sake with Big Mike or the Seven Dials mob. (62)

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The sociological approach taken in this passage is similar to that adopted in later novels such as MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners and in the observation of youth cultures by some of the New Left writers such as Hoggart later in the decade. The identification of the cultural environments and entertainments in this passage, for example, anticipates Hoggart’s description of the impact on youth of the ‘shiny barbarism’ of an Americanized, popular culture in The Uses of Literacy. Camberton, however, is perhaps more sympathetic to the ways in which the individual members congregate into self-protecting groups in order to navigate the socio-economic conditions in which they find themselves. Scamp, in its episodic structure and its peripatetic narrative around central London, also anticipates some later works that map out individual groups within what could be seen more generally from outside as a mass countercultural grouping. Although dismissed by one contemporary reviewer, Julian Maclaren-Ross, as ‘devoid of any narrative gift’ and criticized for ‘dragging in disconnectedly and to little apparent purpose a series of thinly disguised local or literary celebrities’ (n.p.), it is the episodic structure of Scamp that is taken up and celebrated in many later subcultural novels like Absolute Beginners, and in that sense, Scamp can be seen as a forerunner to these novels. The sociological aspects of Scamp continue when Ginsberg drifts from Soho to the even less salubrious environs of King’s Cross, where he encounters an underclass of semi-criminal precarity: ‘Ginsberg was intimidated by the faces which confronted him beneath the fluorescent lighting of the milk bar. They were not like the faces in Soho; they were poorer, weaker, more degraded. They had the air of known criminals whose only worry was not whether they would be caught, but when they would be caught’ (68, italics in the original). Ginsberg’s ‘educated’ eye is deployed here to act as a sociological observer and semiparticipant ethnographer, revealing and recording the lives of marginalized Londoners in the early 1950s. Alongside these sociological observations, the novel’s attitude to the bohemian lifestyle pursued by Ginsberg is ambivalent. In many ways the novel reproduces the approach taken in an earlier work by the Chicago School theorist Nels Anderson, The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man, where the life of the drifting vagrant is, to a certain extent, romanticized as an identity that is able to evade the interpellation of mid-twentieth-century dominant society, and the ‘hobehemia’ identified by Anderson shares aspects of Camberton’s narrative. The decision to resist prevailing capitalist practices, for example, in both texts gestures towards a political resistance organized at the level of the individual with a sense of personal, authentic freedom that chimes well with the Beat

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generation in the 1950s. The politics of this lifestyle are messy and some of the characters Ginsberg encounters, such as the communist Sirpson, are involved in collective political action. Most, however, practice their resistance in the form of a personal navigation of the variety of positions and belief systems they encounter. Indeed, Ginsberg’s attempt to launch his magazine reflects much of the ambivalences to mainstream culture registered in the novel. Although he is keen for it to be a vehicle for a new articulation of the marginalized experiences of contemporary youth, he is beholden to established capitalist practices in order to get it up and running and much of the novel is taken up with his attempts to find investors to fund the venture. Like many of the novels discussed in this chapter, Scamp, is a kind of Bildungsroman, even if its main protagonist is older than the typical hero of the coming-of-age novel. In this context, its ending marks the replacement of Ginsberg’s romantic ambitions of carving out an alternative lifestyle of artistic and political expression with the expediency of gaining remunerative employment. After a series of disappointments, he reflects: ‘Yes, with absolute sincerity he could say that he had no more ambition left [. . .] Money; that was what he had come out for, and that was what he was going to get’ (303). However, despite this apparent surrender to the forces of capital, Ginsberg retains a modicum of freedom in his success in extricating himself from the exploitative practices of freelance journalism with which he has been bound up through most of the novel. Brooker’s description of bohemia as a negotiation between nonconformity and convention certainly seems to be borne out in Ginsberg’s position at the end of the book. Colin Wilson’s Adrift in Soho represents an interesting contrast to Camberton’s novel as they bookend the decade and describe similar geographical locations and cultural milieus. Although not published until 1961, Adrift in Soho is set in the late 1950s and like Scamp, Wilson’s novel is a modern metropolitan picaresque in which the main character, Henry Preston, encounters a series of bums, bohemians and beatniks. There are two main differences between the novels. Firstly, where Scamp is closer to a sociological survey of the experiences and expediencies of the bohemian lifestyle, Adrift in Soho continues Wilson’s interest in an existential examination of condition of modern life. Wilson’s first major work, the non-fictional The Outsider (1956) had captured the 1950s zeitgeist of the Angry Young Man and the introspective, existential examination of contemporary life and had been celebrated as a British equivalent of the ideas coming across the channel from Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Secondly, where Camberton’s novel deals with groups that had not yet reached mainstream public attention, such as the nascent Teddy boys and beatniks, Wilson’s novel

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addresses a set of lifestyles that had become firmly established subcultural and countercultural entities by the end of the decade. As with Camberton’s novel, Adrift in Soho is a Bildungsroman, and details the experiences of nineteen-year-old Harry Preston as he moves to London after being thrown out of the RAF and working as a labourer in Nottingham. Relayed in the first person, Harry’s attitude to countercultural life is initially positive; as he notes: ‘you had to stay outside society, to keep on rebelling’ (105). However, he begins to lose his romantic view of bohemia as he encounters characters that he recognizes are more interested in exploiting him than they are in an authentic evasion of mainstream society. One such character is the charismatic James Street, a struggling artist, who Harry encounters when he arrives in London, and who is well versed in a variety of expedient scams that are necessary to maintain a life outside of society. James is keen to educate the newly arrived nineteen-year-old in some of these techniques, however it soon becomes clear that the various plans and deals they agree to carry out benefit James more than Harry. It is only later in the text, and through a process of gradual existential reflection, that Harry begins to feel disillusioned with the lifestyle. After beginning a relationship with Doreen, a woman he meets earlier in the novel, he reflects: ‘however romantic it may sound when it is described by unrealistic novelists the “Bohemian life” is a bore. The reader of such a novel adds the extra dimension of detachment. But the events themselves, flowing past, have a taste of futility; they are leading to nothing’ (117). Behind the apparent boredom and futility of daily existence as a social dropout, however, Harry still retains a sense in which freedom from established society is a better option than conforming. Later in the novel, James offers Harry a more committed understanding of the philosophical and political ethos behind a bohemian existence when he describes the moment he realised his adopted lifestyle: There they were, all on their way to make money for the boss. They’d got caught in the big machine. They didn’t know what it was like to be alive, to be free. They just never get a chance from the moment they are born. They get educated. That’s the trouble. Big Brother tells ’em they’ve got to serve the community [. . .] But I’m not going to join the game. I’d rather be free. (135)

Although perhaps reflecting something of the romanticism attached to bohemianism, Harry at this moment is impressed to a certain extent by James’s philosophical commitment to the outsider lifestyle. James’s character thus becomes a representative figure of the ambivalences and paradoxes inherent in bohemianism and that freedom from mainstream society can never represent an absolute freedom, as the individual is forced to negotiate and accommodate prevailing

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rules and mores whilst ostensibly rejecting them. This is similar to Meursault’s understanding at the end of Albert Camus’s L’Étranger that the condemned man has a personal freedom that exceeds whatever bounds are placed upon him/her by society. Harry, indeed, is not averse to compromise and this absolute but futile freedom is rejected at the end of the novel which finds him living with Doreen and a newly-successful artist friend in Notting Hill and accepting a job with a publisher that produces ‘worthwhile religious and philosophical works’ (209). His final situation achieves a kind of insider-outsider status for Harry, representing a pleasing resolution that he describes as ‘real and permanent’. Both Scamp and Adrift in Soho, then, suggest that the bohemian lifestyle represents a legitimate and commendable subcultural space, although the main characters in both are suspicious of the dangers of committing oneself wholly to it. These two texts bookend the 1950s and represent an indication of the importance of bohemia as a kind of heterotopian space in the decade that the individual can navigate. In a decade in which the organized political affiliations of left and right are under pressure, bohemia represents a partly real and partly imagined location in which one can register disavowal of dominant society, whilst not committing oneself wholly to a recognized political or ideological movement.

Calypso Alongside jazz, ballad and blues, and the folk revival, one other musical subculture prominent in the 1950s that also offers a critical voice without being allied to a particular ideology is calypso. Formed in what was then predominantly (and problematically) called the West Indies, calypso was imported to Britain along with the Caribbean diaspora that became a significant feature of the period. The Windrush generation, as it came to be known, established social and cultural communities in Britain that intersected with the mix of other youth subcultures of the decade. Indeed, one of the ways in which a marginalized community maintains its sense of identity is through the cultural styles that are brought from the place of origin to the new location. As several critics (for example Gilroy, 1987) have noted, the celebration of popular and oral traditions can become important sites of positive identity formation for a diasporic community. There is, however, the danger of appropriation of marginalized forms by the dominant culture, especially if those forms achieve popular success, as was the case with calypso in the 1950s. Popular youth forms can also work to re-create prejudicial and stereotypical representations of marginalized ethnic identities, as in more recent subcultural

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styles such as gangsta rap. As Imruh Bakari has pointed out with respect to the adoption by mainstream audiences of black music styles in Britain: Fuelled by iconoclastic narratives of sexual exploits and drug usage, Black music [. . .] was established in the popular consciousness with a certain attractive deviancy. Yet for [. . .] Black people [. . .] the perspective on this music and its associated behaviour was much more sophisticated than the stereotyped image implied. (100)

As we can see in other texts we have already looked at such as MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners and Gibbons’s Here Be Dragons, part of the attractiveness of the subcultural lifestyle is a perceived exoticism that is often problematically associated with stereotypical and culturally constructed black identities. The calypso is a popular oral form that can be traced back to the West African griot tradition but which developed a distinct style in the twentieth century in Trinidad and Tobago. The form often expresses the concerns, anxieties and subjugation of a colonized people. Its essential modes are popular lyrical expression, comedy and satire. As Peter Manuel defines them: ‘calypso texts, as expressions of popular sentiment, often acquire the nature of important political statements to be discussed in Parliament and the news media’ (80). In the 1950s, the form gained popular airplay in Britain as radio stations often played (politically watered-down) examples resulting in the commercial success of artists such as Harry Belafonte, Lord Beginner and Lord Kitchener. Calypso thus represented a palatable form of cultural otherness for mainstream white audiences, while at the same time offering a vehicle of expression for the experiences of black and Asian Caribbeans settling in the UK . One writer who was particularly interested in the satirical and formal properties of calypso was Sam Selvon, a writer who moved to London in the early 1950s and published his fourth novel, The Lonely Londoners, in 1956. This novel describes the experiences of the Windrush generation and the difficulties they encountered in trying to find employment and residence in a society that was at best insensitive to their situation and at worst outright racist. Selvon’s treatment of subcultural identity is of a different order than the novels that we have discussed so far in as much as the novel not only describes the practices and behaviours of characters associated with a subculture but embeds a popular musical style within the very narrative structure and style of the fiction. Indeed, several critics have identified connections between Selvon’s style and the form (and subject matter) of calypso songs (Fabre, Nasta, Ramchand, Thieme, Wyke). Susheila Nasta, for example, suggests ‘the narrative pace of the

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novel is partly driven by the influence of Trinidadian calypso’ (xiii). Similarly, Kenneth Ramchand cites the calypso form as an important influence for the way in which The Lonely Londoners can be seen as ‘an admirable illustration of how writing can feed on oral literature and on the stuff that oral literature itself draws upon without losing its identity as writing’ (10). The connection between narrative technique and calypso can be identified in a number of ways. First, the calypso song is quite often presented as a narrative rather than the lyrical expression of individual emotion that is the stock-in-trade of the conventional pop song. In this sense it shares with ballad and blues and folk revival movements of the 1950s the desire to offer up stories in song, often as expressions of marginalization or political commentary. Second, The Lonely Londoners has an episodic structure that relates experiential stories that often read like prose equivalents of calypso ballads. Third, the calypso often uses comic situations, picaresque characters and carnival sensibilities as ways of expressing deeper concerns, again an approach shared with Selvon’s novel. Fourth, the calypso singer adopts a style of language that stresses a localized Caribbean dialect, or creolized language. This last point can be identified in the narrative voice Selvon adopts in The Lonely Londoners. Unlike some of the novels of subcultural expression we have looked at so far such as MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners and Wilson’s Adrift in Soho, which are relayed in the first person, Selvon’s novel has a third-person, extradiegetic narrator. However, like MacInnes’s teenage narrator, this voice expresses itself in forms that equate to the vernacular expressions of the members of the subculture. Indeed, Selvon has commented on his decision to use creolized expression in The Lonely Londoners as a liberating moment: when I started to work on my novel The Lonely Londoners I had this great problem with it that I began to write it in Standard English and it would just not move along [. . .] It occurred to me that perhaps I should try to do both the narrative and the dialogue in this form [Trinidadian form of the language . . .] I started to experiment with it and the book just went very rapidly along [. . .] With this particular book I just felt that the language that I used worked and expressed exactly what I wanted it to express. (Nazareth, 421)

The adoption of a creolized style for the third-person narrative achieves two effects. It establishes a continuum between the subcultural characters being represented and the narrative voice describing them, an effect that disrupts the conventional power relationship of implied author over marginalized subject in much sociologically-influenced fiction. In addition, the rejection of Standard

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English suggests a decolonization of the language and consequently a redistribution of power in the text along ethnic and national lines. This aspect of Selvon’s linguistic technique thus establishes him as a postcolonial writer; as Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin argue, the use of non-standard English is one of the important ways in which a postcolonial writer can express a cultural distance from the established literary conventions of the colonizing power: ‘The crucial function of language as a medium of power demands that postcolonial writing define itself by seizing the language of the centre and re-placing it in a discourse fully adapted to the colonized place’ (38). The register given to the omniscient narrator in The Lonely Londoners therefore represents such a postcolonial manipulation of language: And this sort of thing was happening at a time when the English people starting to make rab about how too much West Indians coming to the country: this was a time, when any corner you turn, is ten to one you bound to bounce up a spade. (24)

As Cliff Lashley has argued, the manipulation of language in such texts implicitly challenges the power relationship between the colonizer and the colonized (48). In terms of subcultural identity, the adoption of creolized forms, the demotic, slang and argot parallels the distinctive use of voice in the calypso. Take, for example, this verse from a calypso recorded by Lord Beginner which describes a famous victory by the West Indies over England at Lords in 1950: West Indies was feeling homely, Their audience had them happy. When Washbrook’s century had ended, West Indies voices all blended. Hats went in the air. They jumped and shouted without fear; So at Lord’s was the scenery Bound to go down in history.

Although jocular, there is an implicit political context to the mild subversion of ‘official’ language here and this linguistic influence clearly parallels Selvon’s text. In terms of the politics of literary form, Selvon draws influence from the orality of calypso that corresponds with Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the heteroglossic function of language to disrupt the ‘verbal-ideological life of the nation and the epoch [. . . a] heteroglossia consciously opposed to [. . .] literary language’ (273). Calypso, however, does not only offer a formal influence for Selvon, it also becomes part of the cultural texture of The Lonely Londoners, and is given several

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references across the text: for example, ‘the latest calypso number’ is one of the things the main character Moses Aloetta always wants to discover when meeting new arrivals from the Caribbean at Waterloo Station (4); and when an ‘Indian fellar’ murders his wife and is hanged ‘the boys make a big calypso out of it’ (129). The musical style thus becomes part of the fabric of experience for Caribbean immigrants to London and contributes to their initial attempts to make sense of their new surroundings.

Conclusion Calypso, then, is one of a series of distinct subcultural styles and identities that provide a rich source for writers keen to capture the experience of living through the contemporary moment of the 1950s. It perhaps should be noted that these subcultures are not exclusively enjoyed and practised by youth, but they are an important part of the new cultural landscape of the decade. It should also be noted that this chapter has only been able to discuss some of the many subcultural affiliations and stratifications that form such a rich aspect of 1950s Britain. Alongside the teenager, Teddy boys, jazz, bohemia, beatniks and calypso, it is possible to identify many other groupings in the fiction that offer clear and powerful subcultural identities for individuals such as the scholarship boys and girls, the Angry Young Man, and gay and lesbian subcultures.3 The development of this plethora of groups at this particular moment suggests that there was something about belonging to an alternative collectively that was distinctive to broader social and cultural factors of the period. In this sense, the set of scenes, styles and cultures that were so prominent at this time can be seen to represent a means by which individuals could negotiate the rapid and profound social changes experienced in the first full decade after the Second World War. It is clear that attachment to a set of subcultures appealed to youths who were navigating individual and collective identities at a time when the traditional identities of class, gender, ethnicity, nationality and sexuality were being put under strain.

Notes 1 The years here refer to the original publication and not necessarily the editions referenced in this chapter. 2 Dominic Sandbrook notes the moral panic around the Teddy boys in the 1950s can be seen to connect with a series of youth subcultures associated with

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violence stretching back to (at least) the Victorian period. See Sandbrook, 2006, 442–7. 3 For a discussion of these latter two groups see the chapters in this collection by Matthew Crowley and Martin Dines respectively.

Works cited Akhtar, Miriam and Steve Humphries. The Fifties and Sixties: A Lifestyle Revolution. London: Macmillan, 2001. Althusser, Louis, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. by Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1971, 122–73. Anderson, Nels. The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London and New York: Routledge, 1989. Bakari, Imruh. ‘Exploding Silence: African-Caribbean and African-American Music in British Culture Towards 2000’. Living Through Pop. Ed. by Andrew Blake. London and New York: Routledge, 1999, 98–111. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. ‘Discourse in the Novel’. In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Ed. by M. Holquist. Trans. by Carl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981, 259–422. Brake, Mike. The Sociology of Youth Culture: Sex and Drugs and Rock’n’roll. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980. Brooker, Peter. Bohemia in London: The Social Scene of Early Modernism. London: Palgrave, 2007. Camberton, Roland. Scamp. London: New London Editions, 2010 [1950]. Camus, Albert. L’Étranger. Paris: Gallimard, 1942. Cohen, Albert K. ‘A General Theory of Subcultures’. The Subcultures Readers. Second Edition. Ed. Ken Gelder. London and New York, 2005, 50–9. Cohen, Phil. ‘Subcultural Conflict and Working-class Community [1972]’. The Subcultures Readers. Second Edition. Ed. Ken Gelder. London and New York, 2005, 86–93. Cohen, Stanley. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of Mods and Rockers. London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1972. Davis, Miles. Birth of the Cool. New York: Capitol Records, 1957. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 1979. Fabre, Michel. ‘From Trinidad to London: Tone and Language in Samuel Selvon’s Novels’ Critical Perspectives on Sam Selvon. Ed. by Susheila Nasta. Washington DC : Three Continents Press, 1988, 213–22.

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Ferrebe, Alice. Masculinity in Male-Authored Fiction, 1950–2000: Keeping it Up. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005. Foucault, Michel. ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics: A Contemporary View of Criticism, 16.1 (1986), 22–7. Gibbons, Stella. Here Be Dragons. London: Vintage, 2011 [1956]. Gilroy, Paul. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. London: Hutchison, 1987. Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life. London: Penguin, 1958 [1957]. Jefferson, Tony. ‘Cultural Responses of the Teds’. Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain. London: Hutchinson, 1976 [1975]. Larkin, Philip. All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961–68. London: Faber & Faber, 1970. Lashley, Cliff. Towards a Critical Framework for Jamaican Literature: A Reading of the Fiction of Victor Stafford Reid and Other Jamaican Writers. PhD Dissertation. St. Augustine, Trinidad: University of the West Indies, 1984. Laurie, Peter. The Teenage Revolution. London: Blond, 1965. Lord Beginner (Egbert Moore). ‘Victory Test Match-Calypso’. Melodisc, 1950. MacInnes, Colin. Absolute Beginners. London: Allison & Busby, 2011 [1959]. Maclaren-Ross, Julian. ‘Review of Roland Camberton’s Scamp’. Times Literary Supplement, 10 November 1950. Manuel, Peter. Popular Musics of the Non-Western World. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. McRobbie, Angela and Jenny Garber. ‘Girls and Subcultures’ The Subcultures Readers. Second Edition. Ed. Ken Gelder. London and New York, 2005, 105–12. Nasta, Susheila ‘Introduction’. In Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners. London: Penguin, 2006, v–xvii. Nazareth, Peter. ‘Interview with Sam Selvon’. World Literature Written in English. 18 (1979): 420–37. Osgerby, Bill. Youth Media. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Rock Around the Clock. Dir. Fred F. Sears. Columbia Pictures, 1956. Ramchand, Kenneth. ‘An Introduction to This Novel’. In Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners. Harlow: Longman, 2006, 3–20. Sandbrook, Dominic. Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles. London: Abacus, 2006 [2005]. Selvon, Sam. The Lonely Londoners (London: Penguin, 2006 [1956]). Sillitoe, Alan. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. London: Flamingo, 1994 [1958]. Spark, Muriel, The Ballad of Peckham Rye. London: Macmillan & Co, 1960. Thieme, John. ‘ “The World Turned Upside Down”: Carnival Patterns in “The Lonely Londoners” ’. The Toronto South Asian Review, 5 (1986): 191–204. Thornton, Sarah. Clubcultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. London: Polity Press, 1995.

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Thwaite, Anthony (ed.). The Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1940–1985. London: Faber and Faber, 1993. Wain, John. Hurry on Down. Kansas City : Valancourt, 2013 [1953]. Wilson, Colin. Adrift in Soho. London: New London Editions, 2011 [1961]. Wilson, Colin. The Outsider. London: Pan, 1978 [1956]. Wyke, Clement H. Sam Selvon’s Dialectical Style and Fictional Strategy. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1991.

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Detective Fiction and the Prose of Everyday Life: Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and Gladys Mitchell in the 1950s Nicholas Birns and Margaret Boe Birns

Women’s British detective fiction in the 1950s has often been perceived as, at best, a successful but imitative echo of the achievements of the ‘Golden Age’ of the mystery story in the 1920s, and at worst a generic arm of what Rubin Rabinovitz called the reaction against experiment in the English novel. In the 1990s, though, feminist scholars such as Gillian Gill and Alison Light reclaimed the work of Agatha Christie, in part as a vital source of information about the social history of the mid-twentieth century, and also as an arm of mid-century literary experimentation in gender and genre. More recently, Jessica Gildersleeve has interpreted Christie’s late fiction as enacting ‘a social and cultural anxiety arising from the problems of modernity’ (Gildersleeve 2016: 36), and J.C. Bernthal and Lydia Kyzlinková have situated Christie’s work in a postwar context. Although Christie’s contemporaries as writers of detective fiction – Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and Gladys Mitchell – have received less critical attention, biographies of Marsh and Allingham by Joanne Drayton and Julia Jones, respectively, have illuminated their oeuvres, and Samantha Walton has situated Mitchell’s work in the context of twentieth-century psychoanalysis and science. This chapter will argue that women’s detective fiction of the 1950s, including the later careers of Christie, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and Gladys Mitchell, forged a distinctive postwar sense of both subject and form to make an important contribution to British literature of that era. The twentieth-century British detective story assumed its distinctive contour in the 1920s. Its image was cerebral, ludic and frivolous: an intellectual distraction and ultimately more a pastime than a genre to be taken literally. Although analogies could be made between the ingenuity and depersonalized portraiture of the detective stories to modernist interest in allegory and the commedia 205

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dell’arte, in the 1920s and 1930s the detective story was what intellectuals read when they were off duty, rather than a vital part of the cultural milieu. This changed after the Second World War, as the detective story became affected by the uncertainty and cultural transition of British society as a whole, and its practitioners encountered the influences of existentialism and other modern and Continental ideas. W.H. Auden’s article on Christie (Auden 1948) can be counted as the first serious consideration of Christie’s work, though thorough investigation of her novels will reveal them to be neither as simple, nor as formulaic as Auden would have it. Furthermore, Auden did not especially consider Christie’s gender. A fascinating, even constitutive quirk here is that detective fiction’s major practitioners in the 1950s in terms of sales, critical esteem and literary reputation were all women, all born in the 1890s or 1900s, and all with signature detectives. Part of the burden of these four writers is that they had constructed the personae of their prominent detectives in earlier and far different times, during what Robert Graves and Alan Hodge called the long week-end of the 1920s and early 1930s. After the war, they had to adapt their originally outrageous and at times frivolous personae to the new and more serious Age of Anxiety, to use Auden’s 1947 term (2011). Christie did this by more or less working around her principal protagonist, Hercule Poirot, maintaining his customary foibles and mannerisms, but putting him in contexts which inevitably addressed social and cultural transformation. Allingham did this by minimizing the appearances of her eccentric, aristocratic sleuth, Albert Campion, so that he did not obtrude on plots that became more urban, contemporary and unpredictable. Marsh and Mitchell created detectives Inspector Roderick Alleyn and Mrs (later Dame) Beatrice Adela L’Estrange Bradley who were professionals rather than amateurs, and could work within larger systems. What is notable in all four cases is that these writers started out as very young women and became popular and bestselling in their thirties, giving them forty- or fifty-year careers which inevitably spanned periods of historical transformation. Moreover, their detectives – even Christie’s later female detective, Miss Marple – had all been established before the war, and thus were required to change as society changed. But consider: the writers did keep the detectives. And this makes them one of the few instances of formal, stylistic and thematic continuity in British fiction from the 1920s to the 1950s, through periods of depression and war in which literary fashions changed frequently. As Campion says in the 1955 The Beckoning Lady (published as The Estate of the Beckoning Lady in the USA ), ‘I’ve lived through the Jazz Age, the Age of Appeasement, the

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Battle Age. Now it’s the Age of the Official’ (Allingham 1955: 75). ‘The Age of the Official’ is an alternate reading of the 1950s to Auden’s ‘Age of Anxiety’ – stressing social organization rather than mood – but it lays similar stress on the 1950s as a distinctive postwar age, at once different from the eras that preceded it, but also a consequence of them. Campion lives through these eras as a textual effect as well as a character, and his creator enjoys as well as transcends this continuity. The retention of the prewar detective in an era whose concerns become more cultural and existential might seem a commercial necessity: after all, the popularity of these writers was closely linked with the fame and familiarity of their sleuths, and jettisoning them would have been a counterintuitive career move. When Christie’s mystery writer character Ariadne Oliver laments that she is trapped with her Finnish detective, Sven Hjerson, even though she knows or cares nothing about Finland, Christie is metafictively grousing about her own authorial predicament with respect to her Belgian (H.R.F. Keating, quoted Bargainnier 1987: 8). That being said, if any of the four authors truly felt constrained by their detectives it was not impossible for them to cut ties with them. The consequent publicity of this gesture might have made up for a loss of sales from readers who were ultimately a fan of the detective, not the author. But the retention of the detective has the bonus of foregrounding the disjunction between prewar and postwar modes, of understanding the ways in which the 1950s were different from previous decades by dint of tension and paradox, not simply seamless differentiation. That Christie and Allingham continued with their detectives allowed them to some degree to repudiate and radicalize their original premise; their retained detectives, however, were there to explain why these changes were necessary. Also, in both Christie’s Poirot and his metafictive counterpart, Ariadne Oliver’s Hjerson, it was important that the detective remain a foreigner. The writers’ refusal to abandon them becomes tantamount to a refusal to relinquish the foreign and subside acquiescently into an exclusively English cultural field. Poirot’s foreignness and innocuous façade – even the suspicion that he may be a charlatan or a fraud – allows him to surprise his suspects (and perhaps a certain insular kind of English reader) with his brilliance. The mysterious discrepancy between Poirot’s generally harmless appearance and his ruthless intellect has been a source of both amusement and fascination for generations of readers. By the 1950s, however, Christie demonstrates less interest in Poirot’s preposterous façade and is more likely to draw our attention to his ruthless intellect, his tenacity and his percipience as he mercilessly dismantles the false

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appearances that had been governing our perceptions, like a riposte to the ‘Age of the Official’. Furthermore, in the 1950s Poirot is often less of a presence than in earlier decades, sharing the task of detection with other characters, or at times simply retreating from the narrative altogether. This is also true of Campion, who as Allingham’s oeuvre proceeds, is no more than a co-investigator with his wife Amanda, Inspector Luke of Scotland Yard, and other police officers. In Allingham’s work, the air of the ‘detective novel’s dependence on the privileged lives . . . of the aristocracy’ is diminished (Latham 2003: 176). In general, the detectives become more detachable from their plots as the genre enters the 1950s. Campion, who first appeared in The Crime at Black Dudley as a minor character and not the detective, drifts back into the supplementary role in which he began.

Wreaking havoc: Allingham’s The Tiger in the Smoke The value of this disjunctive continuity is evident in Allingham’s The Tiger in the Smoke (1952). In it, her formerly foppish and mannered detective, Albert Campion, investigates a crime involving a war widow, gang wars and the urban detritus of contemporary London. To the reader used to Allingham’s prewar Campion stories, with their country gambols, preposterous villains and air of diversion and game, this dark, urban, explosive tale came as a shock. In the novel, a master criminal, Jack Havoc, after a lacuna caused by his imprisonment, re-commandeers a gang of his conspirers who had during the war been his platoon mates. Havoc lures his gang with the promise of a treasure he had heard about from a deceased wartime colleague, Major Elginbrodde, which is said to be located somewhere off the coast of Europe. A rogue member of Havoc’s gang attempts to find information from Elginbrodde’s widow, Meg, by impersonating her late husband; this brings Meg, her current fiancé, Geoffrey Levett, and ultimately Albert Campion, his wife Amanda and Inspector Luke into the plot. Once Havoc breaks jail and reaffirms his leadership of the gang, disposing of the rogue member who had importuned Meg, it becomes clear that he is not just a swindler who would kill for money but a master criminal, who embodies the moral disorder referenced by deceased wartime colleague, Major Elginbrodde, as well as the barely suppressed havoc of postwar London. In his dialogue with the elderly churchman Canon Hubert Avril, who had been his teacher and mentor as a child, Havoc states his philosophy of life:

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‘You watch, do you? That takes a lot of self-discipline.’ ‘Of course it does, but it’s worth it. I watch everything, all the time. I’m one of the lucky ones. I’ve got the gift. I knew it when I was a kid but I didn’t grasp it.’ The murmur had intensified. ‘This last time, when I was alone so long, I got it right. I watch for every opportunity and I never do the soft thing.’ (Allingham 1952: 269)

Havoc attributes his hard, impersonal criminality to what he calls the ‘Science of Luck’ (200), a ruthless exploitation of his own gifts, executed with a Nietszchean brio. Realizing the system has no place for him, Havoc has used his talents to carve out a place as an enemy of the system. But there is a concrete sociological grounding to this oppositional ambition: as the Canon bravely reveals to him, the family treasure of Havoc’s late wartime commander Major Elginbrodde is hidden in the same Normandy that was the target of the Allied landings on D-Day. Additionally, Havoc’s gang is comprised of his former wartime mates, who have not been commensurately rewarded by society for their service, and thus, though in all cases lacking Havoc’s evil, his ambition, or both, involuntarily turn to him for leadership. Earlier, Havoc had asked Avril if he was his father, and although the Canon is not (and thus has a ‘pure’ relationship to Havoc), there is a sense that Havoc is both an existential and Oedipal rebel against the established patriarchal order; an outsider seeking the order and meaning he associates with the inside world. This is a search which he has reified into an obsession with the treasure at Saint-Odile-sur-Mer in Normandy and the ruthless killing of anyone who might stand in the way of his attainment of it. Havoc’s obsession with Elginbrodde’s family treasure underscores the doubling between Havoc and Elginbrodde, despite their very different social positions, and elucidates the malevolence Meg senses when she believes her husband may be alive, a wartime revenant resurfacing in a postwar world. This doubling is yet another way Havoc evades stark villainy and, in a twisted way, even embodies a sort of freedom in the novel. Rather than launching a thorough counter-argument in the mode of the Dostoyevsky of The Brothers Karamazov, Canon Avril makes such a riposte tacitly by revealing, seemingly foolishly, the location of the treasure to Havoc, giving him the key to his own fate and at least in that sense accepting the radical freedom Havoc’s existentialist selfauthorization embraces. Although sympathy is with Canon Avril, Allingham is not directing the reader to any religious resolution; neither in the rest of her work nor biographically was Allingham polemical about Christianity (unlike, for instance, Dorothy L. Sayers). Instead Canon Avril’s status remains that of Havoc’s childhood counsellor, a link to a time before the war and connected to the possibility that there is still a vestige of Havoc’s childhood innocence.

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Although Jack Havoc’s amorality, malice, vulnerability and uncanny charm make him a singular villain in British detective fiction in this era, Christie and Marsh also feature ‘Sartrean’ villains in contemporaneous stories. Alice Ferrebe has spoken of ‘the British reworking of existentialism’s original tenets’ (2012:100) and has analysed Nigel Dennis’s Cards of Identity as a book determined to discredit ‘Sartrean’ theories of the self ’ (49). Broadly speaking, Allingham, Christie and Marsh all wrote novels in the 1950s that were allied with this discrediting project, indeed out of a more manifest element of opposition than was true of Dennis, but also revealing both a fascination with existential thought and an acknowledgement of existentialism as the current mode of the era. In Christie’s They Came to Baghdad (1951) Edward Goring, the lover of the novel’s protagonist Victoria Jones, tries to woo her with his vision of authoritarian, existentialist futurism (the surname’s resemblance to the Nazi figure cannot be accidental). Victoria’s rejection of his suit is partially inspired by the archaeological remains of Iraq – not their monumental grandeur, but the way they reveal evidence that the past had its own everyday reality. Victoria says she used to think archaeology was just ‘royal graves and palaces’ (Christie 1951: 227). Now she realizes that archaeology is also about ‘the ordinary everyday people – people like me’ (227). Thus she rejects Edward’s invitation to join him among the new elite of the existentially superior by affirming her solidarity with the ordinary. The mundane, the prose of everyday life, is the ultimate rejoinder to the exploitative amorality of the master criminal. Victoria’s decision is set against a backdrop not just of social, but also temporal change. The year 1950 is specifically mentioned in the novel (19), and can be read in the light of Claire Seiler’s analysis of the mid-century novel as an arena of suspension, shift and new ideas. Similarly, in Marsh’s 1951 Opening Night, the actor’s assistant Jacques Doré, or ‘Jacko’, mentions Sartre, and John James Rutherford, the playwright-villain of the novel, invokes existentialist amorality for his permission to plagiarize another author: ‘Was it George Moore who said that the difference between his quotations and those of the next man was that he left out the inverted commas?’ (Marsh 1951: 234). Rutherford deems those who believe an author should have to credit his sources ‘uncivilized’ and ‘bourgeois’: instead, he represents, to his mind, a new, modern master morality. This might all seem a stereotypical British fear of radical Continental philosophy, and an association of murderers in detective stories with Sartre, who publicly identified himself as a Communist. Indeed, the British detective story as a genre has been rebuked as insufficiently existential (as in William Stowe’s influential 1983 article ‘From Semiotics to Hermeneutics’), even as the three

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novelists’ linkage of existential views with murderous behaviour acts to deflect such critique. It is thus ironic that Christie, once scorned as the antipode to trendy French philosophers, has in recent years found her cause taken up by French writers such as Pierre Bayard and Michel Houellebecq. And it is notable that in the 1950s Allingham’s The Tiger in the Smoke, Christie’s They Came to Baghdad, and Marsh’s Opening Night refused to flinch from aspects of postwar, existentialist French philosophy. Indeed, as the 1956 film adaptation of The Tiger in the Smoke vividly demonstrates, there is a commonality between the novel’s atmosphere and that of film noir, noted for its existential echoes. Established in America as representative of ‘Brit noir’, the film shares that genre’s atmosphere of moral uncertainty or even crisis, suggested by its deployment of dense, shadowy fog (Savage 2012). The film, like the novel, shares the noir genre’s extension of sympathy to the rebel or outsider, as well as its existential pessimism. Despite an ethos of radical freedom, its philosophical perspective is also inclined to a paradoxical nihilism or fatalism. Allingham’s criminal, Jack Havoc, is not totally separated from the world that opposes him. In his original identity as ‘Johnny Cash’, he was not only the ward of Canon Avril, but also the neighbour and playmate of the young Amanda Campion, sister of Lord Pontisbright. There is thus a social intimacy between Havoc and the normative establishment that seeks to police him, an intimacy which can indicate the unravelling of class hierarchy in postwar Britain. On the other hand, Havoc’s psychosis could be regarded as estranging him from this social inclusion, which is interestingly mimed by Amanda’s observation that his behaviour resembles that of Johnny Cash. But unlike Canon Avril – who fully discloses his understanding that Cash is Havoc – Amanda never unequivocally acknowledges this. Amanda outwits him by exploiting his vulnerability, but never confronts him directly: Her sudden laughter was the most terrible sound he had ever heard, for he knew what she was going to say a fraction of a second before he heard the words. ‘You look like the little boy next door, Johnny Cash, who took my toy theatre and tore it up to get the glitter out of it, and got nothing, poor darling but old bits of paper and an awful row.’ (305)

By not directly revealing to Havoc that she knows he is Cash, Amanda casts the tacit as more effective than the direct. This is also a strength of Allingham’s style, which though economical and austere in its diction is tacit, rather than explicit, in its thematic messages. The intimate knowledge of the criminal possessed in different ways by Amanda and Canon Avril provides them psychological insight

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into Havoc. Yet it also makes them reluctant to expose him. Much of the novel’s suspense lies in the reader’s fear that this reluctance will permit Havoc to slip through the meshes of justice. Allingham makes readers wonder why the investigators are so slow to capture Havoc, extending both the intrigue of the action and asking readers to question their own convictions. Havoc is an antihero. But the reader is invited to feel considerable sympathy with him, despite his murderous and alienated mentality. The novel closes with Havoc’s death from his own perspective, with a lucid estrangement reminiscent of Camus’s Meursault: Beyond the bay the sea was restless, scarred by long shadows and pitted with bright flecks where the last of the winter sun had caught it. But the pool was quiet and very still. It looked dark. A man could creep in there and sleep soft and long. It seemed to him that he had no decision to make and, now that he knew himself to be fallible, no one to question. Presently he let his feet slide gently forward. The body was never found. (307)

Though Allingham condemns Havoc’s criminality, there is a certain pleasure in his evasion of authority even at the end. There is also a sense that Havoc himself sees through his own limitations and that of his ideology: The Science of Luck was an impersonal force, vast as the slipstream of the planets, relentless as a river winding down a hill. He had realized that from the beginning. That was why Avril had frightened him so when he had appeared to say the same thing. (303)

The Tiger in the Smoke, in its existential candour, its gritty rendering of an anarchic, threatening London, the clipped austerity of its composition (as seen in the spare, staccato sentences quoted above), and its sense of a distinctly postwar world, is not only one of the finest English mysteries of the twentieth century but can stand face to face with European fiction of the same era by Albert Camus, Elio Vittorini and Friedrich Dürrenmatt; a valuation that has been occluded, we might speculate, only by Allingham’s gender and chosen genre.

Mysterious autoethnographies As Allingham’s biographer, Julia Jones, has made clear, Allingham maintained a deep connection throughout her life with the county of Essex, spending her youth there and living there her last two decades in the village of Tolleshunt

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d’Arcy. Jones refers to the ‘slightly Spartan, definitely insular way of country life’ (Jones 2009: 22) that Allingham encountered as a child sojourning in Essex, and speaks of the ‘interesting and important sense of place’ (130) that experiences in Essex and other Home Counties such as Surrey provided to Allingham’s early Campion stories. Allingham can be called an Essex regionalist, if there can be such a thing at this late date (given the rapid suburbization of the county and the way it is increasingly considered a part of greater London), whose books are set in still-rural spaces just outside an expanding metropolis. That Essex is so close to London, though, means that an organic regionalism is less then viable, and indeed Allingham’s countryside tends to be more hyperlocal than subsidiary, with little pockets of verdant bliss infiltrated and corrupted by her murders. Though ultimately solved, these lie uneasily within the enduring pastoral scene. Christie, on the other hand, in setting novels such as Dead Man’s Folly (1956) in Devon, and repeatedly featuring characters with Cornish surnames like Restarick and Trefusis, carves out a fictive redoubt as far away from London as one could get within the south of England. Although Christie’s and Allingham’s settings are almost diametrically opposite in terms of the English shires, they both reveal an England that has indelibly changed. Allingham’s fiction, especially, acquires a sense of what James Buzard has termed ‘autoethnography’, in which the homeland is chronicled and depicted as if it were a foreign place, or in ways inspired by the depiction of foreign places. Such a process checked any sense of rural England as a stable pastoral base, both through the disquiet of murder and the self-consciousness arising from the autoethnographic gesture. After The Tiger in the Smoke, readers might have expected continuing radicalization from Allingham. Instead, her next book The Beckoning Lady (1955) seems, in its rural gambols (the title is the name of a local pub), to harken back to the prewar books. But Jed Esty, in A Shrinking Island, has noted the prominence of village pageants in modern English fiction, as in Virginia Woolf ’s Between the Acts. This reenactment of the rituals of English village life, he claims, cannot be innocent. As decolonization progresses, it might be that pageantry is all England has left. Whether this is true or not, the affirmation of territory that predicates that pageantry cannot escape the mediation and unease of colonialism. More immediately, the countryside setting is irremediably changed by the war. In Christie’s After the Funeral (1953), a pier built during wartime is not rebuilt, and the postal service has deteriorated; in Mrs McGinty’s Dead (1952), the most prestigious family in the village of Broadhinny must make ends meet by taking in a boarder (who happens to be Hercule Poirot). Christie drops Poirot down in sundry English rural locales across her novels of the 1950s, from the Abernathy

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landed estate in After The Funeral to the girls’ boarding school in Cat among the Pigeons (1959). This may seem faintly absurd, but it is also curiously fitting. Poirot, who started his fictional career as a Belgian refugee during the First World War, is a man without a country, an unassimilated refugee. Not English after forty years’ residency, he is not French either, but Belgian – a nationality less significant to the English imagination. An expert brought in by the English to solve problems that have defeated them, Poirot incorporates the outsider element that makes autoethnography possible. For Ngaio Marsh, this perspective is accomplished by another route, with reference to Marsh’s New Zealand origins and obvious Māori first name. Allingham’s detective Campion is an outsider of another sort, as the name is an assumed one, and his real identity is that of a European aristocrat or royal heir, connected presumably with a European, most likely German or Austrian, house. Thus Campion does not strictly belong to the English rural setting of novels like The Beckoning Lady, either in terms of his social class or his nationality. But what makes Campion a real outsider is his very status as a detective. The community summons Campion to heal the wounds of death and criminality in its midst. Yet the detective very often reveals the criminal as far more central to the community’s identity than the original suspect. Furthermore, because his very eccentricity and talent exclude Campion from normative life, there can be no possibility of organic harmony. Similarly, in Gladys Mitchell’s books, detective Mrs Bradley’s professional expertise is what helps her solve social problems, but also confirms her status as perennial outsider, without a conventional place in the community. In The Beckoning Lady, Campion cannot be a part of the community even though he is the brother-in-law of Lord Pontisbright, the local landowner, who has now sold his land and spends most of his time in South Africa. Further disruption occurs when Minnie and Tonker Cassand’s lavish midsummer party is unsettled by the knowledge that Minnie’s honorary uncle, William Faraday, who appeared to have died naturally in his sleep the previous week, has been murdered. A festive affirmation of English happiness at the height of summer sunlight is shadowed by tragedy. But although the detective can treat the wound revealed by the crime, he cannot cure it. The old order cannot be reconstituted, suggested by the way the most compelling and three-dimensional character in the novel is the cleaning woman at the pub, Miss Diane, whose ‘cheerful roar’ (Allingham 1955: 217) is the backbeat of the novel’s moral affirmation. Additionally, Inspector Luke, the working-class police officer who is as much the detective as Campion himself, crosses class boundaries and falls in love with the socialite Prunella Scroop-Dory. Minnie herself claims to be as ‘American as the Eagle’ (70) and alleges descent

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from Pocahontas. There is no return to the old order, and the ‘fathomless skies’ (1) of The Beckoning Lady reveal a social instability analogous to that of the London of The Tiger in the Smoke. Allingham’s last novel of the 1950s, Hide My Eyes (1958), returns to London, into what Gillian Mary Hanson calls the ‘enclosed space’ of the urban (2004: 40). Its first scene features a seemingly random crime on a stolen public bus. The novel is centred in the shabby-genteel neighbourhood of Garden Green and its constituent cul-de-sac of Tether’s End. Here, autoethnography inscribes the form of a curio museum, established by the widowed Polly Tassie, as a monument to her late husband: it is a collection of bric-a-brac of high and mostly low quality which substitutes an amalgam of things for a living memory. But when Polly’s niece by marriage, Annabelle, comes from ‘deep in the shires’ (Allingham 1958: 99) to stay with her, the younger woman finds that Polly’s love life is very much in the present – she is drawn to Gerry Hawker, revealed early in the narrative as the perpetrator of the first crime, and murderer of several more victims. Like Jack Havoc, Hawker has developed an amoral philosophy, believing that if a man has affection he ‘loses his identity and loses his efficiency’ (96). As a Major during the war who is now keeping up appearances as a lodger at a shabby but respectable Kensington hotel, Hawker is not an outcast like Havoc. And he does not lack human feeling: even though in the end he burns down Polly’s house and its bibelots, he makes the effort to save her. In turn, Campion and Luke believe Polly will remain loyal to Gerry, even when he stands trial for murder. The detectives think Polly is a ‘fool’ for continuing to love Gerry, the ‘cold headed monster’ (215). Polly knows Gerry is a murderer; she is appalled by it, but has concluded that murder is also an evil for the murderer: ‘Men who murder turn against themselves and commit suicide by giving themselves away’ (192). In killing others they are also killing themselves. Hawker confesses his crimes to Polly, reassuring her that he will not be caught because he is both careful and thorough, but expressing no moral compunction. The reader may hope, with the detectives, that Hawker will hang. But Polly’s misplaced loyalty to Hawker is certainly more vital than the museum in which she languished among the relics of the past.

Christie in the 1950s In the 1950s, Agatha Christie had little high-literary reputation outside of the detective genre, and was often patronized as at once too minor and too popular. But this restriction had its advantages, since she was part of a practically separate

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canon in which she had pride of place and in which, in contradistinction to the highbrow canon, women were considered major practitioners. Nor was her status entirely middlebrow and popular. She was regularly reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, mainly by Philip John Stead, a literary criminologist, but at times by more ‘literary’ reviewers like Julian Mclaren-Ross, who reviewed They Came to Baghdad in 1951. Though detective fiction is often associated in publishing terms with the cheap paperback, all of Christie’s books were first published in hardcover. In the UK her hardcovers were genre-branded as part of the Collins Crime Club, but in the US she was published by Dodd, Mead, a trade hardcover publisher with whom she had a symbiotic relationship: the firm gave her literary credibility in the US , while she gave the firm a star author it could rely upon for annual sales, as throughout the 1950s she produced roughly a book a year. Christie’s, Marsh’s and Allingham’s books all frequently had different titles in the US and UK , a fact testifying to divergent marketing practices in the two areas, but also to the growing internationalization, and in particular, the increasingly transatlantic nature, of book publishing. Another way Christie remained rooted in the literary world that only halfaccommodated her is by intertextuality. In Mrs McGinty’s Dead (1952), Robert Browning’s poem ‘Evelyn Hope’ plays a role in identifying the murderer. In Dead Man’s Folly, the Stubbses are like the Crofts in Jane Austen’s Persuasion in occupying the traditional estate of another family, the Folliotts, while Amy Folliott, apparently the last of her line, is exiled to a nearby cottage, like the Elliots in Austen’s novel. Hattie Stubbs, the wife of the new occupant of the estate, is a foreigner from Yugoslavia, and her revealed criminality is not unlike that of Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Like that character, Hattie is not entirely at fault, as a young English rapscallion drives her to it, compromising the xenophobia inherent in a foreigner committing the crime. These intertextual echoes might have hardly occurred to a reader who picks up a Christie novel for its puzzle or for the diversion of an absorbing plot. But Christie references some of the major novels in the English canon, all of them female-authored. She also utilizes an intertextuality of crime, as when the Lily Gamboll case in Mrs McGinty’s Dead clearly alludes to the notorious 1892 Lizzie Borden murders, which are cited by name in Ordeal by Innocence (1958). Christie’s work of the 1950s sees the emergence of Miss Marple as a major detective, of equal prominence to Poirot. Miss Marple was Agatha Christie’s own personal favourite, and remains literature’s most famous female fictional detective. Unlike Hercule Poirot, she is an insider, long established in the rural hamlet of St. Mary Mead. Like Hercule Poirot, however, her appearance is

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deceiving – the ‘gentle fluffy old lady’ façade identified by one of the characters in 1964’s A Caribbean Mystery (Christie 2011a: 139), has by then long been useful in lulling suspects into a false sense of security. But in point of fact, Miss Marple uses the everyday wisdom she has acquired through a lifetime as an ordinary Englishwoman living in the prosy everyday world of a rural village to investigate private and domestic lives affected by immediate postwar scarcity, and then by the subsequent cultural change of the ‘You’ve Never Had It So Good’ period. Yet Miss Marple in this era also tends to evaporate, to become almost incorporeal. For instance, in They Do it with Mirrors (1952), Christie foregrounds the multigenerational drama of a thrice-married woman, Carrie Louise Serrocold, and her children, as well as the employees and inmates of the reform school for boys she helps run; Marple is notable only at the end, appearing almost apologetically to offer a solution to the crime. The motives of this disappearing act of Miss Marple’s are mysterious: she seems to will herself into invisibility, like Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat. When she does manifest, we are most likely to be directed to consider Miss Marple’s age. When we first meet her, in Murder at the Vicarage (1930), she is between sixty-five and seventy years old, and she is then labelled as a ‘typical elderly spinster’ (Christie 2011c: 72). In a novel as late as At Bertram’s Hotel (1965), her age is still regularly referenced and integrated into that novel’s theme of changing times. There is often a suggestion she is a Victorian period piece, and an ossified example of the older generation. Yet old age and her roots in an earlier area are also powerful advantages for her, making her an uncanny outlier, another kind of foreigner in a society that now places a premium on the young, the new, the up-to-date. A younger Miss Marple would not possess these perspectival advantages – her wisdom is a consequence of her having lived so very long. Because she has secured a Victorian-Edwardian aspect of England that provides a sense of a Deep England, her memory permits her to form parallels between past and present, creating continuity within what might otherwise be disruption. Certainly all of Christie’s mysteries address the issue of changing times – that sense of a break with the past is present in all Christie’s work, and fundamentally speaks to the cataclysm of the First World War – a perspective that is of course shared with almost all writers of her century. The Second World War produced yet another definitive discontinuity, one that Christie addresses consistently in her novels written after 1945. And yet at the same time, Miss Marple is not a creature of the postwar world, and indeed not a creature of the twentieth century. In At Bertram’s Hotel, for instance, she recalls visiting the place sixty years ago,

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when she was fourteen, which suggests she was born in 1890, and raised in what is remembered as the long golden afternoon of the British Empire. But, as Alison Light notes, Christie gives ‘little support’ to the idea of ‘a more authentic, proper past or to a reassertion of an older way of life’ (1981:105). Miss Marple’s purpose is to point out that although things change, some things remain the same; one major purpose of her analogies is to mirror the past and the present. In this way, she is there to establish continuity rather than its opposite. In addition to her portrayal of the elderly Miss Marple, Christie is also exceptional at depicting women in young middle age who are single and have no conventional future, such as Deirdre Henderson in Mrs. McGinty’s Dead, and Mildred Strete in They Do it with Mirrors: both are women with dowdy names and domineering mothers, and have been put on the shelf by society. (These themes are also explored in A Daughter’s A Daughter, a non-mystery novel Christie published in 1953 as Mary Westmacott.) But Christie is equally adept at depicting confident young women mastering those professional roles open to them, as in Miss Grosvenor in A Pocket Full of Rye who is an ‘incredibly glamorous blonde’ (1953: 2) and maintains ‘poise’ both in serving a demanding boss and then coping with murder. If, as Niamh Baker states, anti-feminist polemics in this era insisted that ‘feminism was hostile to true femininity’, characters like Miss Grosvenor suggest a resistance to that assertion (Baker 1989: 18): a young, glamorous woman is shown exercising as much power in the workplace as is possible under contemporary conditions. Christie also depicts older women who have a secure hold on their dignity and secrets, such as Helen Abernethie in Funerals Are Fatal (1953), and Cora Gillespie, the murderer in that same novel. 1950s society offers so few truly rewarding career possibilities to superfluous working-class women in late middle age, that Cora’s crime is rendered comprehensible, if not pardonable. In addition to the world of the detective and of the crime itself, Christie offers superb portraits of women and their predicaments. These are explored most completely in the Westmacott novels, such as The Burden (1956), about the consequences of an excessive tie between sisters, but are present in the mysteries as well. Even the gender of the detective can prove more fungible than it at first appears. That several Poirot stories of the period, including Funerals are Fatal, were, when filmed, adapted by replacing Poirot with Miss Marple (played by Margaret Rutherford) indicates that Christie’s male detective had at this point become at least semi-dispensable. In Cat among the Pigeons (1959) he does not appear until the last third, and his presence feels somewhat extrinsic in a novel with an almost exclusively female cast of characters. But there is also something

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in the sheer artificiality of Poirot – for one thing, if he is retired in the 1920s he must be a centenarian by the 1950s, making his survival magical-realist in mode – that does enable him to extend to different worlds. Increasingly, Poirot sees his mission not just as solving the crime and fingering the culprit, but also as addressing the social and psychological problems posed by all the characters. We may witness, for example, his discernment of Helen Abernethie’s hidden past in Funerals, or his encouragement of young Marilyn’s educational aspirations in Dead Man’s Folly, in the hopes that the younger girl’s intelligence will enable her to evade the sad end that visited her beauty-obsessed sister, Marlene. Hickory Dickory Dock (1954) is set in a students’ boarding house, and features, in minor roles, the Caribbean woman Elizabeth Johnston, nicknamed ‘Black Bess’, and the African Mr Akibombo. These characters are unsubtle – Elizabeth is studious but has little self-expression, and Mr Akibombo merry and slightly uncomprehending – and one could castigate Christie for superficially capturing changes in British society with these sketches of African and Caribbean migrants. Yet, although such inclusions are stock and limited, they do attest to the increasingly multicultural London of the 1950s. Furthermore, it is important that neither Mr. Akibombo or Elizabeth Johnston are revealed to be the criminal – this role is assigned to an upper-class Englishman, Nigel Chapman. Mr Akibombo is part of the circle of characters that reaffirm life and stability after the revelation of Nigel’s series of murders. But even if in a broad and overly typical way, Hickory Dickory Dock perceptively depicts the London encountered at the time by migrant writers such as George Lamming and Wole Soyinka. Christie anticipated the ‘wind of change’ (to use Harold Macmillan’s phrase in his 1960 speech recognizing African decolonization) of a post-imperial era ahead of much of the British political establishment. Thrillers such as They Came to Baghdad and Destination Unknown (1954) are set in the Arab world, which is shown to be no longer the comfortable domain of British mandates and archaeological digs that characterize Christie’s earlier work (see Murder in Mesopotamia, 1936, or Appointment With Death, 1938), but a Cold War world in which national independence for Arab countries is on the horizon. Notably, in her Cold War thrillers Christie avoids melodramatically demonizing Communism, and the threat is as likely to come from neo-fascists such as Goring in Baghdad as from deluded Communist moles like Alec Legge in Dead Man’s Folly. If Christie’s Cold War novels did not recognize the erosion of British power in favour of America, the same was true of the early John le Carré and the George Orwell of 1984. As Christie’s reading public generally was most enthusiastic about her detective novels, the thrillers were a bit of a generic risk. Indeed, at the heart

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of Christie’s 1950s achievement is its generic variety: the pastoral romp of The 4:50 From Paddington (1957) contrasts with the serious social and psychological study of Mrs McGinty’s Dead, which centres the plot on James Pearson, a man unjustly framed for murder by a more privileged man, Robin Upward, in a gambit that exposes both the fragilities of the criminal justice system and the realities of class discrimination. Similarly, the stark moral drama of Ordeal by Innocence (1958), in which an unfairly convicted man dies before he can receive justice, contrasts to the bizarre hybrid of Cat among the Pigeons (1959), centred around a girls’ boarding school called Meadowbank, an international jewel theft and a Yemeni sheikdom. Christie’s books were never cookie-cutter productions. And although her prolific work in the 1950s did range from the slight and the minor to the major and the significant, she continued to interrogate the formal properties of the mystery genre; having mastered the conventions of the mystery early in her career, by the 1950s she had long asserted the freedom to experiment with the form.

Insiders and outsiders: Agatha Christie’s A Murder is Announced (1950) A Murder is Announced is Christie’s major novel of the 1950s, and a classic example of the way her work investigates not simply a murder, but the social history of her era. It is set in a changing postwar world; the little village of Chipping Cleghorn is instantly a familiar Christie setting. But this is Chipping Cleghorn in the wake of the Second World War, and there are a significant number of characters who are either European or have spent some time in Europe. Additionally, the postwar English have become more ambulatory. As Inspector Craddock begins his investigation, he laments how the ration books and identity cards of the war, which include neither photographs nor fingerprints, have facilitated impersonation. People can change identities and settle into a small town with no questions asked; one can even reinvent oneself in a mode far more likely in a more mobile and less insulated society. It is as if the postwar world has positively invited reinvention. Miss Marple suggests that, since the war: Every village and small country place is full of people who’ve just come and settled there without any ties to bring them. The big houses have been sold, and the cottages have been converted and changed. And people just come – and all you know is what they say of themselves. They’ve come, you see, from all over the

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world. People from India and Hong Kong and China, and people who used to live in France and Italy in little cheap places and odd islands. (Christie 2011b: 126)

In particular the narrative makes a point of bringing our attention to European immigrants in the character of our first victim, Rudi Scherz, and our last wouldbe victim, Letty’s housekeeper Mitzi Kosinski. There are also English characters who are connected to figures with European names such as Randall Goedler and Dmitri Stamfordis. This more diverse country village reflects the way the Second World War has changed England on a local level, and this description of a less homogenous England speaks, as Gildersleeve suggested, to Christie’s engagement with the problems of modernity. In Chipping Cleghorn, those who are not typically English are targets of fear and distrust and immediately become Other. Yet in a Christie novel the true Other, the murderer, is often close to home, and often, indeed, embedded within it. There are secrets and secret identities that have nothing to do with those scapegoated as Other, but instead are found within English society itself. Christie uses foreign incomers to comment on English insularity. For instance, when the Polish refugee Mitzi Kosinski prepares a delicious cake for guests at Little Paddocks, Christie includes this bit of table talk: ‘These foreigners certainly understand confectionery,’ said Miss Hinchliffe. ‘What they can’t make is a plain boiled pudding.’ Everybody was respectfully silent, thought it seemed to be hovering on Patrick’s lips to ask if anyone really wanted a plain boiled pudding. (180)

It is Mitzi’s ‘European’ cake, nicknamed Delicious Death, that has been assimilated into English life to such an extent that British actor Jane Asher produced the cake and its recipe to celebrate Agatha Christie’s 120th Birthday. In the novel, however, the underappreciated refugee Mitzi is viewed with suspicion and distrust by the locals. She is also the final target of the murderous impulses of her English employer, syntonic with the way the previous victims of Mitzi’s employer are also outside the normative standard of social inclusion: a Swiss immigrant, a woman whose decline into old age is believed to warrant a ‘mercy-killing’, and a lesbian. Christie’s first crime scene – a playful ‘Murder Party’ gone wrong – is a deliberately cluttered one, and even though the subsequent crimes become less disordered, there will always be a certain amount of muddle which we may find difficult to truly make tidy. Miss Marple, together with Inspector Craddock, will eventually sort out the clutter of clues, and additionally Miss Marple’s sharp

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memory allows her to consult previous incidents that she senses are analogous to the present one; these analogous incidents will provide her with clarifying motives. Even more than the intentional clutter of the first crime, Christie’s establishment of Letty Blacklock, the party’s apparent hostess, as its prime victim is her major tactic of intrigue – the victim status directs us away from considering her as the murderer. The use of twins, sisters, couples of various kinds also complicates things – the doubleness of the murderer Lotty Blacklock, who disguised herself as her sister Letty, is repeated in the use of other doubles or couples – the twin sisters known as Pip and Emma, especially. Christie also confuses the reader about names; the close resemblance between the names Letty (short for Letitia) and Lotty (short for Charlotte), for example, and the assumption that ‘Pip’ is a boy’s name, when in fact it is short for Philippa. Although Lotty’s second murder is not the carefully staged confusion of the first, it is still an imaginative crime, and once again requires a party, and a cake so scrumptious it is praised as ‘Delicious Death’. The persiflage of a ‘Murder Party’ crime and then a birthday party murder are calculated both to delight and disturb the reader – but Christie will see to it that, for the reader, the ingredient of delight will go missing in subsequent crimes. Like the Murder Party, Bunny’s ‘Delicious Death’ birthday party is also a festive occasion, but is calculated to upset us more – unlike the character of Rudi, we have come to know Bunny, and to sympathetically identify with her. We learn that Rudi has been killed because he could identify Letty as Lotty Blacklock, but essentially he means nothing to our murderer. The death of the second victim, Dora Bunner or ‘Bunny’, introduces issues that are both more central and more complex. Dora is murdered by her good friend Lotty Blacklock because she has referred to her by her true name, and not as the sister she is impersonating. It is Dora who has kept faith with the murderer’s true identity – she is the keeper of Lotty, the impaired and wounded sister of the successful Letty, or at least the keeper of the memory of Lotty. Like Lotty, Dora has been broken by the world, and finds old age confusing, possibly because, like Lotty, she is on one level still a child. Dora is often referred to by the childish nickname of Bunny, and was Lotty’s accomplice in setting up her fairy-tale world, colluding in her makebelieve persona as Letty. Dora fails to sustain the Letty fantasy, however, and it is the extent to which Dora is in touch with reality that makes her a danger to her companion. At this point, however, Lotty is not only still clinging to her make-believe world, she has convinced herself she is doing good by putting the senescent Dora out of her misery – even sending her off with a wonderful party and delicious cake. This

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idea of the ‘altruistic murderer’ is one that Christie had explored in Sad Cypress in 1940 and in greater depth in her novel Curtain, written during the Second World War but unpublished until 1975. The death of the third victim, Amy Murgatroyd, is not one in which Miss Marple detects any effort to provide a high-minded euthanistic motive. There is also no ‘murder game’ artistry or birthday party featuring a ‘delicious death’ cake; she is simply, sadly and summarily strangled by an increasingly desperate Lotty. For the reader, the murder of Murgatroyd may be the most upsetting of the crimes, since she had much to live for, and her relationship with her partner, Miss Hinchcliffe, was one of such deep affection. In some ways these two elderly lesbians are reflections of Charlotte and Bunny, but whereas the former are living a fantasy life, Murgatroyd and Hinch are a couple who live in the ‘real world’, in the prose of everyday life, and who also serve as a salute to enduring ‘traditional’ dyed-in-the-wool Englishness, elsewhere often treated sceptically or satirically. It was Hinch after all, who flew the flag of traditional English ‘boiled pudding’. But while elsewhere Christie expresses doubts about English understatement, both culinary and otherwise, here Hinch’s reticence while mourning is an indication of deep feeling, not its avoidance or suppression. Rather than demonstrating any kind of marginality as lesbians, one can call Hinch and Murgatroyd this novel’s most typically ‘English’ couple – their devotion to each other is reminiscent of the ‘Darby and Joan’ couple of British proverb. Interestingly, it is only when Hinch is captured and led astray by the fantasy-plot of Letty’s murder game that tragedy results. The novel’s fourth victim, however, is a character who interrogates these values of restraint and reticence, and as far as Chipping Cleghorn is concerned, she is the village’s ‘least English’ character. A refugee from Poland, Mitzi is subject to the prejudice of all the reserved British people she encounters, who are unused to her expressive personality and tend to assume that she exaggerates for effect, or, even, tells deliberate lies – that her demonstrative personality and theatrical disposition are the equivalent of lying. In point of fact, it is an Englishwoman, Letty/Lotty, who is the malevolent liar – and there are some other fibbing Englishwomen in this novel as well, including Miss Marple herself. It is she who must coach Mitzi in the lie she tells in order to lure Lotty into attempting to murder her; furthermore, in order to recruit Mitzi as part of her scheme Miss Marple confesses, ‘I told her stories of deeds done by girls in the Resistance movements, some of them true, and some of them I’m afraid, invented’ (287). This teaming of Mitzi and Miss Marple produces yet another couple in a novel filled with single women who partner with other single

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women. For a brief period, Mitzi unwittingly collaborates with Letty through her production of the ‘Delicious Death’ cake, whose chocolate ingredient will require the allergic Dora to take the aspirin Letty has adulterated. In the end, however, Mitzi becomes the partner of the Detective, transforming her status in the community from that of exclusion to inclusion. Furthermore, there is also not only the suggestion that the villagers of Chipping Cleghorn might profit by a cultivation of the more passionate temperament demonstrated by Mitzi, there is some indication that Lotty herself degenerated into a twisted murderer precisely because she had been ‘starved of emotion and drama in her life’: the qualities that Mitzi exemplifies (275). All of the crimes Lotty commits are motivated by her desperate need to repudiate the excluded Lotty-self, and secure an existence as the popular, successful ‘Letty’. As Lotty she was tyrannized by her father, and forced to live as a secluded invalid because of a disfiguring thyroid goitre; her perennial pearl necklace conceals the scar from a surgery to remove it that her father had sadistically long delayed. Her assumption of Letty’s identity allows her to inherit her sister’s life-history of career success, commanding authority and financial good fortune; in that regard the pearl necklace is her ‘Letty persona’, covering her true, scarred Lotty-self. But Lotty’s impersonation of her sister had the effect of cutting herself off from her own past and her own past self, indicating the dark side of her reinvention. Here Christie touches on one of her major themes – the power and importance of memory. It is memory that secures the continuity of our personal identity, an identity linked to a spiritual core that exists deep within the layers of the psyche. Despite the crimes Lotty has committed, then, the return of Dora through the voice of Miss Marple reminds Lotty of her core, kind, self. Once again, as in Allingham’s The Tiger in the Smoke, there is compassion for the criminal. This compassion is important to emphasize, since the murder-mystery formula is often associated with a black hat-white hat melodrama in which polar opposites of good and evil are locked in mortal combat – in the order of, say, Dr Moriarty or Colonel Moran in their battles with Sherlock Holmes. This is not the case in a Christie or an Allingham novel. There are times in Christie’s work, for instance, when the detective and the criminal are on the same team (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, 1926, A Holiday for Murder, 1938), or times when the criminal and the author are not dissimilar (Murder on the Orient Express, 1934, And Then There Were None, 1939; The Hollow, 1946), not to mention Curtain, in which the Great Detective himself is revealed to be the murderer. The criminals in Christie’s and Allingham’s work of the 1950s are more nuanced, and the idea of justice itself becomes a complicated one – to the point that at times Christie

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will deliberately refuse to bring a murderer to justice, or at least into the British justice system. Once again, the compassion for the criminal demonstrates the liminal status of these mysteries as they drift beyond the conventions of their genre and embrace the tenets of the psychological novel. In A Murder is Announced, the way deception can isolate one from others is demonstrated by Lotty in particular, but it is also explored in the more minor character of Philippa Haynes. While Mitzi is deployed as a stereotype of an excitable Middle-European, Philippa has constructed a persona that represents stereotypical ‘Englishness’, even though, as it turns out, she has not spent very much time in England. Her lover Edmund continues this motif by quoting Tennyson’s Maud to describe Philippa: ‘Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null’ (138). It is Philippa’s inhibition of expression that is characterized as typically English, and apt to frustrate intimacy. As Miss Marple points out, Philippa has cut herself off from everyone around her by means of her remarkably reserved presentation of self. We eventually learn that Philippa, too, is playing a part, and impersonating the stock idea of an Englishwoman. The characters of both Philippa and her sister Julia harbour traumatic experience of the Second World War – Philippa is a war widow, and Julia worked for a time with the French Resistance. But each is determined to occlude this in the interests of creating new postwar opportunities by means of reinvented selves. In the end, however, an open and honest Philippa marries the novelist Edmund Swettenham, a union that at once secures and interrogates the village’s reconstituted stability after the solution of the crimes. Philippa is the niece of a capitalist, and Edmund is a Communist. At this time these two perspectives waged the Cold War, but here it seems these representatives of oppositional views have somehow worked it out. Certainly the marriage indicates that history has turned a page. The war is over – the 1950s have begun. And although this is an era marked by the Cold War, the sense of crisis has passed; Philippa’s new life in Chipping Cleghorn represents this turning point. It is also significant that Edward assimilates into the community and softens his dead-earnest, hard-line stance by writing a successful comic play. Edward can be said to represent an entire cohort of intellectuals whose adamant, uncompromising Communist politics during the crisis of the war were valued as anti-fascist. After the war is over, this ceases to be the case – Edward clearly understands this and recalibrates, softening his approach. There is also a conflict involving newspaper subscriptions, which returns us to the beginning of the novel, with an advert in the local Gazette inviting one and all to a ‘murder party’. Edmund has subscribed to the leftist New Statesman and the more radical Daily Worker, but newsagent Mrs Totman has

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also put the couple down for the local Gazette, suggesting that without it, the globally sophisticated Edmund would be a political idiot on the local level, or the all-important level of the ‘everyday’. It is also a gesture of social inclusion: in assigning the new young couple the Gazette, Mrs Totman welcomes a couple that old-school Chipping Cleghorn might consider questionable. The marriage of Edmund and Philippa gives us a couple far less provincial than would be so in the Chipping Cleghorn of yesteryear. As is true of all of Christie’s work, we are tracking social changes, historical changes and the changing of the guard as a new generation emerges. At the same time, Christie will always retain something that salutes Deep England, in this case the traditionalist Gazette, a symbol of the unchanging ways of village life. The local paper reveals advertisements for false teeth, dogs, chickens, but of course it also conceals dark and secret things, hidden within a seemingly harmless invitation to a party. It is this enduring darkness that requires the attentive presence of Miss Marple.

The detective as dramaturg; the detective as clinician Ngaio Marsh’s Opening Night (1951), with its mummer’s plays and rural festivities, inferentially ironizes English identity. Although Marsh’s detective is the only one of our four sleuths who is happily settled in heterosexual marriage – Alleyn’s wife Troy, a sculptor, plays a major role in the series – Marsh herself has been repeatedly, if diffidently, associated by her biographers with queer sexuality, although in her lifetime she did not avow a lesbian identity. Marsh’s autobiography, Black Beech and Honeydew, is in the tradition of unconventional New Zealand female life-chronicles undertaken by such writers as Katharine Mansfield, Sylvia Ashton-Warner and later Janet Frame. Marsh’s unmistakably Māori first name also accentuated her outsider status, which the reader was made to encounter even if her novels were cosily set in theatrical London. But even in novels where New Zealand is not named, like Singing in the Shrouds (1958), the opening scene in the dockyards of London evokes the very idea of nautical travel and points to New Zealand. In Scales of Justice the Chief Constable is described as a former ‘Chief Commissioner of police in India’ (Marsh 1955: 75) and his latter-day presence in London is a kind of homecoming or decolonization. The name of the aristocratic family at the core of the novel’s action, Lacklander, is also an indicator of a crisis of territoriality. In Marsh’s novels even the usual eccentric detective Alleyn is mainstreamed into an official police role. Yet we can forget how the books are subtended by

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postcoloniality and queerness, and how Marsh’s awareness of the dramatic structure of her books heightens a metafictional consciousness. Christie often includes casts of characters in her books, and the amenability of her and Allingham’s novels for adaptation to radio drama in the 1950s, as well as the premiere of Christie’s long-running play The Mousetrap in 1952, underscore the formal affinities of the detective genre to drama. Drama, with its open artificiality and its interrogation of the realist frame, can affect the detective story as much can the genre of the novel. At this time, especially, the novel insisted on realism, an insistence if anything renewed by the emergence of the novels of the Angry Young Men. When, in Opening Night, Alleyn comments ‘We are creatures of convention and like our tragedies to take a recognizable form,’ (Marsh 1951: 216) he is making a comment about the drama in which he himself is embedded, and also disclosing both the strengths and weaknesses of Marsh’s approach. It relies on a certain conventionality, but also magnifies an awareness of the conventionality of human culture itself. In that intensification of the consciousness of convention, Marsh’s fiction shares a spirit with the attempted revival of ritual drama in the twentieth century by writers as different as W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot and Hugo von Hofmansthal. Marsh is aware that neither total interior invention nor generic stereotypes are adequate to imaginative narrative, and that her answer lies somewhere in between. As young Martyn Taine, the New Zealand theatrical ingénue who is the novel’s point of focalization, observes, her artistry requires ‘a real and profound distress beyond “a façade of stock emotionalism”’ (80). While one can call Marsh’s police detective Alleyn a dramaturg whose mysteries become his case-histories and his repertory, Marsh herself employed dramatic form both to suture and to expose the contrivance of her plots. Although her books convey what Julie Kim calls ‘the customary detective novel concern with what happened when’ (Kim 2005: 58), Marsh’s inventive deployment of the dreamlike and expressionistic idiom of the theatre added a formal consciousness, and she wedded this to what she saw as her own advantageous identity as a New Zealander. That Alleyn’s name alludes to the Elizabethan actor and colleague of Shakespeare indicates a neo-Elizabethanism which, in the hands of a New Zealander, is both appreciative and ironic. The dedication of Opening Act, ‘ To the Management and Company of the New Zealand Student Players of 1949 in love and gratitude’, foregrounds the Antipodean valence of a book whose setting appears so reassuringly English, and indicates the inspired collaboration between her theatrical inclinations and the ever-present exotic interrogations of her New Zealand origins.

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Of the four writers considered here, Gladys Mitchell was the only one to graduate from university. She was also the only one of the four to commit herself exclusively to a woman detective, and unlike Miss Marple, one whose formal professional training was a major element of her expertise as a sleuth. Mrs Bradley’s involvement with both science and the occult, lends her an uncanny quality, while her evasion of traditional gender roles – unlike Miss Marple, she is imposing and intimidating – foregrounds queer identities in opposition to the posited heterosexual economy of the Alleyn marriage. Groaning Spinney (1950) chronicles profound subversion and unease in the English countryside, an unease that the solution to the mystery does not resolve. Though Mitchell’s great advocate Philip Larkin was right to praise the ‘calm exposition’ and curious indeterminacy of Mitchell’s prose, when Larkin says Mrs Bradley as a character had not ‘changed since 1929’ he was potentially misleading (Larkin 1983: 271). Spotted Hemlock (1958), for instance, finds the detective addressing a more turbulent and disrupted society, as the rivalry of male and female students and the pranks they pull on each other figure a world in which patriarchy is no longer assured, a theme seconded by the very presence of Mrs Bradley as detective. Though Mitchell anchored her plots in local English settings – often using detailed topographical maps to help plan her books – there is little sense of pastoral innocence in her work. If Mitchell lacks the ironic, autoethnographic approach to England of Christie and Allingham, Mrs Bradley puts her toxicological and criminological knowledge to good use. Yet her scientific, clinical perspective enables, curiously, a creative approach, one that does need to confine itself to conventional linear logic, but which can work laterally. In The Man Who Grew Tomatoes (1959), a traditional detective plot – the murder of incumbent heirs to a landed estate – is solved by Mrs Bradley’s ability to notice poisoned tomatoes were a predisposing factor in a death that seemed to be by drowning. Mitchell is also the only one of the four writers considered here to lack the transatlantic appeal or marketing advantages the others enjoyed. Partly we might attribute this to Mitchell’s progressive outlook, including what Samantha Walton calls the way she stood ‘alone’ in her generation of detective writers in exploring ‘psychoanalytic techniques and modes of interpretation’, which made her less stereotypically English (Walton 2015: 64). Thus her novels were less exportable to countries beyond England as what Walton calls the ‘bloodless fodder’ of cosy reaffirmation (4). Both Mitchell and Marsh, albeit in very different ways, used their detective novels to navigate away from patriarchal affirmations of gender, sexuality and nation.

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Detective fiction and modern form We will close with two speculations. Dorothy L. Sayers was one of the most prominent and acclaimed detective story writers of the 1920s and 1930s, but published no more detective stories after 1937. That Sayers left the scene inevitably led to the English detective story’s losing its close association with both Christianity and elite universities, turning it towards more secular and middle-class venues. In the detective fiction of the 1950s, Sayers was conspicuous by her absence. The absence of Sayers from the scene meant that detective fiction could not be a part of the neo-Christian project associated with T.S. Eliot and, in another way, C.S. Lewis. Though both Christie and Allingham made clear their respect for the Church and their willingness to ally with Christian morality to call out evil, their detectives nonetheless operated as alternate secular sources of ethical and therapeutic consolation. Nor did Christie, Allingham, Marsh or Mitchell ever represent a systematic conservatism or nostalgia for a past order, true of at least some elements of Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey. Though individual books of theirs might have shown the outsider mocked or deterred, their works overall give a convincing sense of a more progressive and pluralistic society. Sayers also wrote in a flamboyant, erudite and allusive style, quite unlike the functional and austere style favoured by the four writers surveyed here. But in the absence of Sayers the genre leaned away from residual elements of highVictorian farce and towards a mode at once more streamlined but also highly conscious both of its status of art, and the way in which its inhabiting the detective genre enabled it to at least partially disguise its art. That the detective story and the modernist genre of the récit – the short, translucently written, but fundamentally enigmatic novel – have a mutual influence, is demonstrated most visibly in the work of Georges Simenon, but is visible elsewhere in late modernism. Key here is that what might seem a merely commercial aspect of the detective novel – that it is short and written without an excess of ornate vocabulary – coincided with a modernist revolt against ornate form and towards what in 1953 Roland Barthes called ‘writing degree zero’. The juxtaposition of the writers considered here with Simenon, Camus and Iris Murdoch is intended to suggest that this resemblance is not just mere coincidence. The short, dramatic, lucid, cerebral and mysterious novel, narrated in a limited third person point of view, became associated with a normative modernism in the 1950s, and in this chapter we place it as of a piece with the detective fiction of the above four authors in its representation of a certain vernacular adaptation

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of the modernist novel to the prose level of everyday life. In fusing the contrivances of ingenuity with the prose of everyday life, detective fiction of the 1950s helped make modernism sustainable. This type of modernist mystery can also be found in the early works of Iris Murdoch such as Under The Net (1954), which features many of the traits of the formal detective story, though without a puzzle. Alice Ferrebe comments that an early Murdoch character, Jake Donoghue in Under The Net is a composite of ‘an existentialist hero and a concerned citizen of the Welfare State’ (2012: 49). Melding Albert Campion and Jack Havoc, Auden’s ‘Age of Anxiety’ and Campion’s ‘Age of the Official’, Murdoch’s early protagonist embodies many of the same dilemmas that encompass characters as different as Christie’s Victoria Jones and Marsh’s John James Rutherford. Murdoch is surely influenced by the récit mode practiced by Camus, but the vigour, colloquialism and brevity of the British detective novel also impacted her work. This side of Murdoch might seem to validate Rubin Rabinovitz’s sense that the 1950s in British fiction represented a reaction against experiment. Yet it could be said that the two most influential prose styles in modern Anglophone literature – that of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf – were at once pervasive in the 1950s. At the same time it must be admitted that each had particular quirks of brilliance and manner that made them difficult to emulate. The detective novel – with its mixture of conscious artificiality, austerity in terms of size and diction, and its registering of modernity – represented a kind of reusable modernism, one that could animate Murdoch at the beginning of a long career in which her novels continually threaded the gap between narrative and philosophy, realism and inventiveness. Colin Burrow comments on the commonalities between Murdoch’s ‘ultraserious moral fictions’ and ‘the ultra-frivolous detective novels of the 1940s and 1950s’ (Burrow 2016; 19). Murdoch’s own use of a female detective novelist, Emma Sands, in An Unofficial Rose (1962) reinforces this suggestion. But it could be argued the female detective writers profiled here were already bridging this gap between their designated genre and mainstream fiction. It is also possible that Murdoch could have sustained and developed her achievements in the short novel by studying the detective writers of the 1950s. The explicit engagement with good and evil in detective fiction in a taut and reticulated formal prism might have allowed Murdoch to unambiguously interrogate Sartre’s existentialism, as did The Tiger in the Smoke and other detective novels of the time. Similar ethical and formal imperatives inflected the novels of our four female mystery writers, whose prose of everyday life advanced understanding of the implications of the new, postwar era.

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Works Cited Allingham, Margery. The Tiger in the Smoke. New York: Doubleday, 1952. Allingham, Margery. The Estate of the Beckoning Lady. New York: Doubleday, 1955. Allingham, Margery. Hide My Eyes. London: Chatto & Windus, 1958. Auden, W.H. The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue. Edited and with an introduction by Alan Jacobs. 1947. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Auden, W.H. ‘The Guilty Vicarage’, Harper’s Magazine, May 1948: 406–11. Baker, Niamh. Happily Ever After? Women’s Fiction in Postwar Britain 1945–60. London: St Martin’s Press, 1989. Bargainnier, Earl. Comic Crime. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. Barthes, Roland. Le degré zéro de l’écriture. Paris: Le Seuil, 1953. Bayard, Pierre. Qui a tué Roger Ackroyd? Paris: Minuit, 1998. Bernthal, J.C. Queering Agatha Christie: Revisiting the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. New York: Palgrave, 2016. Burrow, Colin. ‘I Am a Severed Head.’ The London Review of Books, Vol. 38, No. 16, 11 August 2016: 19–20. Buzard, James. Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Christie, Agatha. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, London: Collins, 1926. Christie, Agatha, Murder at the Vicarage. 1930. New York: William Morrow, 2011c. Christie, Agatha. Murder on the Orient Express. London: Collins Crime Club, 1934. Christie, Agatha. Murder in Mesopotamia. London: Collins Crime Club, 1936. Christie, Agatha. Appointment With Death. London: Collins Crime Club, 1938. Christie, Agatha. A Holiday for Murder. London: Collins Crime Club, 1938. Christie, Agatha. And Then There Were None. London: Collins Crime Club, 1939. Christie, Agatha. Sad Cypress. London: Collins Crime Club, 1940. Christie, Agatha. The Hollow. London: Collins Crime Club, 1946. Christie, Agatha. A Murder Is Announced. 1950. New York: William Morrow, 2011b. Christie, Agatha. They Came to Baghdad. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1951. Christie, Agatha. Mrs McGinty’s Dead. London: Collins Crime Club, 1952. Christie, Agatha. They Do it with Mirrors. London: Collins Crime Club, 1952. Christie, Agatha. After the Funeral. London: Collins Crime Club, 1953. Christie, Agatha. A Pocket Full of Rye. London: Collins Crime Club, 1953. Christie, Agatha. Funerals are Fatal. London: Collins Crime Club, 1953. Christie, Agatha. Destination Unknown. London: Collins Crime Club 1954 Christie, Agatha. Hickory Dickory Dock. London: Collins Crime Club, 1954. Christie, Agatha. Dead Man’s Folly. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1956. Christie, Agatha. The 4:50 From Paddington. London: Collins Crime Club, 1957. Christie, Agatha. Ordeal by Innocence. London: Collins Crime Club, 1958. Christie, Agatha. Cat among the Pigeons. London: Collins Crime Club, 1959.

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Christie, Agatha. A Caribbean Mystery. London: Collins Crime Club, 1964. New York: William Morrow, 2011a Christie, Agatha. At Bertram’s Hotel. London: Collins Crime Club, 1965. Christie, Agatha. Curtain. London: Collins Crime Club, 1975. Drayton, Joanne. Ngaio Marsh: Her Life In Crime. Pymble, NSW: Harper Collins, 2010. Esty, Jed. A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England. Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2003. Ferrebe, Alice. Literature of the 1950s: Good, Brave Causes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. Gill, Gillian. Agatha Christie: The Woman and Her Mysteries. New York: Touchstone, 1992. Gildersleeve, Jessica. ‘Nowadays: Trauma and Modernity in Agatha Christie’s Late Poirot Novels,’ Clues 34.1 (Spring 2016): 96–104. Hanson, Gillian Mary. City and Shore: The Function of Setting in the British Mystery. Jefferson: McFarland, 2004. Houellebecq, Michel. Platform. New York: Vintage, 2004. Jones, Julia. The Adventures of Margery Allingham. Chelmsford: Golden Duck, 2009. Kim, Julie. Race and Religion in the Postcolonial British Detective Story: Ten Essays. Jefferson, NC : McFarland, 2005. Kyzlinková, Lidia. ‘Social Issues in Agatha Christie’s Mysteries: Class, Crime, Country, Clothes and Children’. Brno Studies in English, 23 (1997): 115–29. Larkin, Philip. ‘The Great Gladys’. In Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955–1982. 271–73. London: Faber & Faber, 1983. Latham, Sean. Am I A Snob? Modernism and the Novel. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Light, Alison. Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars. London: Routledge, 1981. Marsh, Ngaio. A Night At the Vulcan. Boston: Little Brown 1951. (Published in the UK as Opening Night). Marsh, Ngaio. Scales of Justice. London: Collins, 1955. Marsh, Ngaio. Singing in the Shrouds. London: Collins, 1958. Marsh, Ngaio. Black Beech and Honeydew. London: Collins, 1982. Mitchell, Gladys. Groaning Spinney. London: Michael Joseph, 1950. Mitchell, Gladys. Spotted Hemlock. London: Michael Joseph, 1958. Mitchell, Gladys. The Man Who Grew Tomatoes. London: Michael Joseph, 1959. Murdoch, Iris. An Unofficial Rose. London: Chatto & Windus, 1962. Murdoch, Iris. Under the Net. London: Chatto & Windus, 1954. Rabinovitz, Rubin. The Reaction Against Experiment in the English Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1967. Savage, Guy. ‘Class and patriarchy,’ Film Noir of the Week, 14 February 2012. Available online at http://www.noiroftheweek/2012/tiger-in-smoke–1956.html (accessed September 2017).

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Seiler, Claire. ‘At Midcentury: Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day’. Modernism/ Modernity Vol. 21, No. 1, January 2014: 125–45. Stowe, William. ‘From Semiotics to Hermeneutics: Modes of Detection in Doyle and Chandler’. In The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory, edited by Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe, 368–84. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. Walton, Samantha. Guilty But Insane: Mind and Law in Golden Age Detective Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Westmacott, Mary. [Agatha Christie]. A Daughter’s A Daughter. London: William Heinemann, 1952. Westmacott, Mary. [Agatha Christie]. The Burden. London: William Heinemann, 1956.

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Chance in the Canon: Uncertainty and the Literary Establishment of the 1950s Sebastian Jenner

Chance assumed a greater potency in everyday life from the very beginning of the 1950s, emboldened by the uncertain aftermath of the British Empire and the burgeoning Cold War. An understanding of uncertainty morphed drastically following scientific and cultural developments and ultimately combined towards a politicization of narratives of chance. Along the way, some of the most prominent figures in the British Novel of the 1950s – such as Kingsley Amis and the Angry Young Men, Iris Murdoch, William Golding, Doris Lessing, John Wyndham and L.P. Hartley – all sought to incorporate changing perceptions of chance in their writing. In recent years there have been several academic explorations of the theme of chance in British fiction, the most notable being Leland Monk’s Standard Deviations: Chance and the Modern British Novel (1993) and Julia Jordan’s Chance and the Modern British Novel (2010). These studies have begun to unravel the significance of chance in fiction and reveal a great deal about a subject, which as Monk identifies, ‘literary and critical studies usually dismiss, discount or altogether ignore’ (3). Encompassing a labyrinth of interconnected concepts, including luck, risk, probability, uncertainty, randomness and chaos, chance is simultaneously blamed and blessed for its destructive and creative interjections into our lives, and can be the spring from which a sense of being is articulated and understood. It frames our experience, from the chance factors of conception and birth that result in the outcomes of our sex, nationality, class and aptitudes, to the harsh possibility of life coming to an end at any point. Pervasively, chance invades even the most commonplace daily experiences. It can be located within all logical structures and systems we construct around us, in the uncertain behaviour of the atoms at the core of all that appears so stable, and in the vagaries of the stock market. Indeed, life and civilization is the picture of a persistent interaction 235

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between chance and order, of evolutionary change governed by a close synthesis between random variations and necessity; complex systems echoing former chance initiations and drifting towards logic. Such a relationship between seemingly polarizing concepts is perhaps best articulated by Friedrich Nietzsche, who ruminates in Daybreak (1881) that the ‘iron hands of necessity which shake the dice box of chance play this game for an infinite length of time so that there have to be throws which exactly resemble purposiveness and rationality of every degree’ (130). Certainly, our world does not exist through pure chance, yet nor does it fall from necessity and reason alone. In the labyrinth of interrelated designs beneath the most complex of functions and systems, there is always a role played by the indeterminate. Indeed, Nietzsche posits that even in our own rationality and attempts to comprehend ‘we ourselves shake the dice-box with iron hands, [. . .] we ourselves in our most intentional actions do no more than play the game of necessity’ (130). The clash of these two fundamentally different states, a negentropy in which order arises from disorder, is a theme that runs from the depths of our evolutionary makeup, in the symmetry we see in nature, through to our individual attempts to comprehend, systemize and reflect our experience. Even attempts to forego chance influences are intrinsically revealing of such an indeterminate experience, particularly so when considered within the sphere of literature. It must be acknowledged that a conscious attempt to articulate structures of chance in literature is inherently to reduce it to something else, to impose an order on to it, a pervasive paradox that led Monk to state that ‘chance always takes on a necessarily fateful quality once it is represented in narrative’ (2). Nevertheless, Monk goes on to argue that James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) poses a ‘limit point in this study because it comes as close as any novel can to a representation of chance in narrative’ (109). While vast scientific and cultural shifts influencing perceptions of chance – such as the continued development of quantum mechanics, probability theory and the teleonomic principles of evolution – have manifested since Ulysses, that novel and modernism in general were to remain significant influences on the literary representation of chance in the 1950s notwithstanding the ubiquitous social uncertainties that emanated from the fractured aftermath of the Second World War. As Jordan states, in Chance and the Modern British Novel, in ‘the period after the 1940s [. . .] artistic culture ran parallel to a scientific culture in which the doctrine of uncertainty was in the ascendant’ (28). Therefore, this chapter will contend that the 1950s were characterized by a burgeoning need to accommodate configurations of uncertainty and the growing sense of flux that increasingly characterized the

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everyday by paradoxically subsuming them within the plot of fiction as different aspects of fate. In this respect 1950s fiction held true to Virginia Woolf ’s demand in ‘Modern Fiction’ (1925) that novelists remain faithful to representing the ‘truth’ of experience however random and chaotic that might be: Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display. (160)

This chapter will explore the multifarious concept of chance as revealed in its inherent contradictions, suggesting that such uncertainty articulates a principal concern in the cultural output of the 1950s. Furthermore, chance offers a useful lens from which the broader mechanics and thematic considerations of the period can be elucidated. This chapter will, therefore, reconsider the most significant socio-political concerns – such as the ‘classless society’, the Cold War and the dissolution of the British Empire – alongside some of the most commonly discussed texts of the period, viewing the responses through the lens of chance and uncertainty. The reasoning for this lies in that marginalized literature, by its positioning in agitation against the status quo, can be easily read as utilizing treatments of chance and uncertainty. Consider, for example, George Lamming’s In the Castle of my Skin (1953) and its explorations of race, the immigrant experience and the uncertainty of self; Mary Renault’s The Charioteer (1953) and the concerns regarding fear, masculinity and homosexuality, not to mention the turn in the late 1950s of the counter-culture revolution seen in the likes of Colin MacInnes, and the working-class voices of those such as Alan Sillitoe. I therefore hope to illuminate the ubiquity of uncertainty in the narratives of the era through a reading of Anthony Powell’s A Question of Upbringing (1951), L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953), John Wain’s Hurry on Down (1953), Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954), Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net (1954) and Muriel Spark’s The Comforter (1957), precisely because these texts represent the most commonly canonized novels of 1950s literature.

The chance to rebuild The tumultuous uncertainty of the Second World War inspired a social and political consensus in its aftermath, a pursuit of the welfare state that was

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galvanized by the Beveridge Report of 1942 and the Atlee government of the immediate post-war years. A conciliation between Labour and Conservative policies toward this common goal established a political hegemony in the 1950s, a consensus commonly termed ‘Butskellism’. An amalgamation of the names of the Labour Party’s Chancellor of the Exchequer of the period, R.A. Butler, and the Conservative Party’s shadow Chancellor, Hugh Gaitskell, this satirical neologism came to define the socio-political rhetoric of consensus at the beginning of the 1950s. The aftermath of war offered Britain an opportunity to recast itself and reckon with a shift in status on the world stage. The breakdown of the British Empire, formally constituted in 1949 and reconfigured towards the Commonwealth, reflected a combination of the nation’s realization of its financial weakness, the growing superpowers of the USSR and USA , as well as the burgeoning mood of anti-imperialism in British society. Yet, despite Britain’s diminishing position in the global economy, Kenneth Morgan identifies in Britain Since 1945: The People’s Peace (1990) that the ‘western world was, for a time, being remoulded according to the model proposed by the weaker member of the alliance. Marshall Aid, OEEC , The Brussels Treaty, NATO were all plausibly viewed as British Triumphs’ (29). There was simultaneously a desire, therefore, to construct a utopian welfare state while also seeking to rejuvenate the nostalgic ‘Great’ influence of Britain. It was under such auspices that the 1951 Festival of Britain sought to set the parameters for new citizenry. Becky Conekin’s Autobiography of a Nation: The 1951 Festival of Britain (2003), the first monograph dedicated to the Festival, explores the manner in which culture and education were pivotal to the Festival’s agenda. Conekin explains that ‘Festival planners imagined “New Britain” as a consensual, unified society in need of edifying entertainment. The Festival of Britain was simultaneously a public celebration, an educational undertaking, and a constructed vision of a new democratic national community’ (9). The Festival sought to bolster the welfare state project and democratize art, ensuring universal access to ‘high culture’. The welfare state’s attempt to champion a ‘classless society’, safeguarding the social and economic well-being of its citizens, meant that the Festival continued the vision of the Education Act of 1944, celebrated the mandate of the Arts Council (formed in 1945), and pursued a Leavisite cultural ‘seriousness’ that mirrored the BBC Third Programme (1946–70). The Arts were therefore the signifier of the success of the welfare state’s aims. The ‘high culture’ that only the upper echelons of society had previously had access to was envisioned as being enjoyed by ‘the people’. Michael Frayn criticized the inherent elitism of the approach, in ‘Festival’ (1963), arguing that:

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Festival Britain was the Britain of the radical middle-classes? the do-gooders; News Chronicle, the Guardian and the Observer, the signers of petitions; the backbone of the BBC . In short, the Herbivores, or gentle ruminants, who took out from the lush pastures which are their natural station in life with eyes full of sorrow for less fortunate creatures, guiltily conscious of their advantages, though not usually ceasing to eat the grass. (301–2)

Conekin explains that this polemical statement was self-aware, that Frayn certainly perceived himself as one of the ‘Herbivores’, but his indictment suggests the fundamental incongruence of the vision of the Festival and the culture of the 1950s more generally. The project to democratize art, an agenda of state support of culture, failed to foster a classless culture. Instead, as Alan Sinfield declares in Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain (1989), ‘we now know, people’s art did not take over in 1945, and literary intellectuals were not incorporated into a workers’ state. Rather, the welfare-capitalist state turned out to be quite hospitable to them’ (56). The significance of the Festival is best revealed in George VI ’s address at the official opening, as transcribed in Gerald Barry’s ‘The Festival of Britain 1951’ (1952). The King’s rhetoric suggests the instability beneath the grandeur of the project, and nods towards the pervasive uncertainty of the period: Two world wars have brought us grievous loss of life and treasure; and though the nation has made a splendid effort towards recovery new burdens have fallen upon it and dark clouds still overhang the whole world. Yet this is no time for despondency; for I see this Festival as a symbol of Britain’s abiding courage and vitality. (669)

There is an unquestionable reference in the King’s message to the Cold War and to the threat of nuclear weaponry. Indeed, Conekin’s study details that a planning document for the Festival, in 1948, made a bold claim toward broadcasting Britain’s positioning as the only possible voice of reason in the Cold War climate: a commonly held anxiety about the excesses of science exhibited in the recent global conflict – and especially about the role of the atomic bomb. Britain was in a unique position, the document argued: it was the one country capable of stabilizing Cold War hostilities through the reconciliation of art and science. (58)

Such reliance upon the cultural output to herald a political stability and help bolster British optimism must therefore make demands of it to address, and correct, the fundamental uncertainty of the period. However, much of the canonical British novels of the period are characterized by parochial quietism.

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Indeed, Bernard Bergonzi declared, in The Situation of the Novel (1970) that compared to its American equivalent, British fiction of the period was ‘backward – and inward-looking’ (56). Novels of the period were frequently tethered to a pre-war setting, plausibly offering the only stable landscapes from which to ruminate on the present. Symptomatic of this retreat to the past, however, was the entrenchment of class stratifications that unsettled the vision of a welfare state. For example, Anthony Powell’s A Question of Upbringing (1951), the first novel of the Dance to the Music of Time cycle, returns to the environs of the Great War and portrays a closed circle of high social standing. While the twelve-volume cycle, published between 1951 and 1975, ultimately spans the period between the First World War and the 1970s, it nonetheless remains firmly rooted in the picture of upper-middle-class society. However, particularly when viewed through the lens of chance, A Question of Upbringing is representative of the pervasive concerns of the 1950s in its scrutiny of the machinations of time and memory. The exposition of Powell’s novel portrays a scene of workers that frames the complete cycle, reminding its protagonist, Nick Jenkins, of the Nicolas Poussin painting ‘Dance to the Music of Time’ (1634–6): The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure, stepping slowly, methodically sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognizable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance. (5–6)

Here the intricate relationship between natural order and the complex systems that arrive from chance are suggested, which form the recurring conceptual consideration of the cycle. Within this network, simultaneously chaotic and predictable human behaviours are examined. The novel ruminates upon negentropic paths that have been already wrought and the inescapable dominion of time. Such explorations enable Powell to problematize the linearity of both history and narrative, and therefore quietly comment on the threshold between science and art that was the remit of the new British cultural citizen. The overarching image of the dance thereby takes on a symbolic profundity with relation to the 1950s, regardless of its positioning in the past. Powell’s consideration illuminates the relationship between indeterminism and logic, identifying the seemingly infinite chains of causality, as initiated by chance, moving toward logic and the complex systems encountered by the individual:

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the four of us emerged to take up new positions in the formal dance with which human life is concerned. At the time its charm seemed to reside is a difference from the usual run of things. Certainly the chief attraction of the projected visit would be absence of all previous plan. But, in a sense, nothing in life is planned – or everything is – because in the dance every step is the corollary of the step before; the consequence of being the kind of person one chances to be. (69–70)

Configured as requiring observation to determine the design proffers that full meaning is only revealed by the passages of time and by human experience. Yet Jenkins ultimately resigns himself to the inability to gain absolute knowledge, throughout a cycle that illustrates a synthesis of permanence and flux, of the ‘true’ continuum of history. The individual attempting to interpret the logic beneath the maelstrom of modernity – as Jenkins does, gleaned from reflections upon interaction with others – places temporal events in to a spatial sphere of memory. Furthermore, the narrative provides little commentary on the protagonist’s personal life, other than in interactions with others or in his philosophical introspections, and is therefore subject to chance insurgences. Indeed, in the second volume of the cycle, A Buyer’s Market (1952), Jenkins asserts: another belief: that existence fans out indefinitely into new areas of experience, and that almost every additional acquaintance offers some supplementary world with its own hazards and enchantments. As time goes on, of course, these supposedly different worlds, in fact, draw closer, if not to each other, then to some pattern common to all; so that, at last, diversity between them, if in truth existent, seems to be almost imperceptible except in a few crude and exterior ways: unthinkable, as formerly appeared, any single consummation of cause and effect. In other words, nearly all the inhabitants of these outwardly disconnected empires turn out at last to be tenaciously inter-related. (159)

Thus, despite remaining within the closed echelons of a bohemian upper strata of society, Powell identifies a broad unity that is characterized by a state of being fundamentally at the mercy of chance. Considered alongside the welfare state and the vision of a classless society, it is plausible that the ‘previously’ establishment writers, the ‘Herbivores’, felt compelled to concentrate on dismantling their own milieu to thereby invest in a new citizenry. Similarly, L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953) demonstrates nostalgia for Britain’s global influence, and retreats from the uncertainty of the present. Its anachronism attempts to embolden the spirit of the British Empire and simultaneously examine possibilities of dismantling class boundaries. The protagonist, Leo Colston, reflects on childhood memories of 1900 and, reminiscing from the

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vantage of 1952, finds that the past ‘is a foreign country: they do things differently there’ (7). Indeed, the middle-class boy finds himself in an upper-class milieu, further offering the delineation of a nation in the liminal space between ‘a ruined past and a menacing future’ (174); laden with the weight of uncertainty. This sensibility is configured in the novel through the frequent turn towards mysticism, and the lines of contestation between order and chaos. Leo’s internalization of such polarizing forces are configured in the characteristically British cricket match, between the Hall and the Village, in which he discerns ‘the struggle between order and lawlessness, between obedience to tradition and defiance of it, between social stability and revolution, between one attitude to life and another’ (156). This response to chance houses a tangible notion of hope despite the contemporary imposition of fear that the Cold War’s threat of apocalypse asserts. In The Angry Decade (1958), Kenneth Allsop affirms that in the 1950s: many oddly arranged forces are at work. There is, first, that enormous umbrella fact at which hardly anyone does more than sneak an occasional glance, and which it seems almost brash to mention, the H-bomb, a solitary enormity which [. . .] is emotionally too big to see. Leaving that out (and somehow we all seem to do exactly that) the central spectacle of our broken-winded economy is the extraordinary stubborn effort that has been made in the Fifties to revive the meaningful panoply of the pre-war Establishment. (31)

Just as was demarcated in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, I contend that the two disparate concerns Allsop outlines were in fact enmeshed. Attempts to retreat to the stability of the pre-war establishment, to dismantle its social mores, was an act in response to the threat of nuclear war. With Leavisite culture concomitant to the classless reformation of British society and the Cold War perceived as demanding Britain’s traditional global influence, literary considerations of the former British Empire and its entrenched social stratifications in fact suggest a response to the new uncertain climate.

Freedom and fear: the politicization of chance The period during the Second World War was characterized by a perception in which, as Jordan identifies, ‘Chance itself, it almost seemed, could do real damage; bombs that were impossible to predict, killed; uncertainty was made concrete. Anything could happen. It seemed for a while that chance was no longer part of

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the vocabulary of hope, but part of the vocabulary of terror’ (66) Yet, the postwar dynamic appears to have resulted in a shift of perception, in which chance was considered aligned with the liberal freedom of the West. The Soviet doctrine, arguably, sought to deny chance and refuse the accidental. In its totalitarian authority it led by absolute design, which was incongruous with the perceived freedom of the West to view chance as associated with democracy. Steven Belletto’s study of American Cold War literature, No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives (2012), indicates such a politicization of chance as representative of Cold War aesthetics and sensibilities. He identifies that the overarching narrative was to represent the Soviet Union ‘not only as brutal and nakedly power-mad but also as philosophically misguided because it excludes, denies, or otherwise attempts to manipulate chance’ (6). Perhaps, then, the seeming lack of literary texts that explicitly consider the atomic bomb which both the USSR and USA had been stockpiling, and indeed the Hydrogen bomb – first tested by the Americans in Operation Ivy in November 1952 – should be considered a political response to the developments. As Jacques Rancière posits, in Aesthetics and its Discontents (2009): Art is not, in the first instance, political because of the messages and sentiments it conveys concerning the state of the world. Neither is it political because of the manner in which it might choose to represent society’s structures, or social groups, their conflicts or identities. It is political because of the very distance it takes with respect to these functions, because of the type of space and time that it institutes, and the manner in which it frames this time and peoples this space. (23)

The Cold War was entwined with very real apocalyptic possibilities, far beyond the influence of any individual or indeed common comprehension; any political denunciation of the conflict required a dogmatic narrative incongruous with the notion of freedom. The ‘high culture’ novel’s inability to explicitly discuss the threat of nuclear war and the horrific magnitude of the atomic bomb thereby manifested in a politicization of chance. Granted, such a claim places great agency in an act of quietism within the compositional intent of the contemporary novelists, but the subject’s absence from the bulk of the literary fiction in the first half of the 1950s is unavoidably curious. Rayner Heppenstall, in The Intellectual Part (1963), claimed that the shadow of apocalypse did not disturb the individual, and that ‘the effects of nuclear warfare, being unimaginable, are therefore also unfrightening’ (221). However, there are numerous examples in the period of ‘popular fiction’ making forays into the conceptualization of extensive jeopardy. Spy novels exemplified by Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale (1953) represent the

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machinations of political espionage and risk, while science fiction novels, such as John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951) and The Kraken Wakes (1953), explicitly reference Cold War political altercations within an apocalyptic context. Indeed, Doris Lessing’s essays on truth-telling in the popular novel, A Small Personal Voice (1957), encapsulates the abject destruction that had fast become a very real possibility, in detailing ‘the tiny units of the matter of my hand, my flesh, are shared with walls, tables, pavements, trees, flowers, soil . . . and suddenly, and at any moment, a madman may throw a switch, and flesh and soil and leaves may begin to dance together in a flame of destruction’ (18). It remains plausible, therefore, that the absence of explicit thematic considerations of nuclear weaponry or of apocalyptic political narratives was itself a politically laden approach. Further to such a deliberate omission, perhaps what Steven Belletto considers to have characterized American literary fiction of the time may be equally applicable to the British output: Because politics were during the Cold War often viewed as being fictions, and the conflict itself betrayed its narrative quality again and again, the act of literary fiction making became laden with political significance, as did the use and theorization of chance within these narratives. (12)

The British literary establishment’s avoidance of nuclear motifs and direct consideration of the Cold War represent a political rejection of weaponized narrative. There is a tangible resistance to playing the very game, a war of rhetoric and narratives, that characterized the Cold War. Further to the politicization of chance, in response to problematic fictions, Sinfield describes a sense in which ‘the Cold War made all left-wing thought appear implicated in Stalinism’ (267). Seemingly the previously mentioned ‘Herbivores’, the left-liberal gatekeepers of ‘high culture’, perceived explicit literary commentary on the contemporary as too fraught. Indeed, the ideals of socialism were embroiled with communist associations, and therefore Stalinism. It was precisely this sensibility that led America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ) to endeavour to foster a ‘non-communist left’, still faithful to ideals of socialism but in opposition to Stalin’s regime. The CIA founded the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF ) in 1950, with headquarters in Paris that offered a varied programme of cultural events aimed at garnering the respect of its elite intellectuals. Subsequently, the British Society for Cultural Freedom was established as an affiliate of the CCF, equally funded by the CIA , in 1951. Among its many involvements in the academic and cultural milieu were the journals Encounter and Twentieth Century, featuring many prominent authors of the

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decade’s ‘high culture’. Encounter was launched in 1953 with Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol as joint editors, themselves representing a transatlantic union. The first issue led with the editorial ‘After the Apocalypse’, proposing ‘a breath of fresh air drifting through the fog which we have been accustomed to take of our normal atmosphere’ (1) further declaring that Encounter ‘seeks to promote no “line,” though its editors have opinions they will not hesitate to express. The CCF, which sponsors this magazine, is made up of individuals of the most diverse views’ (1). Such a narrative perhaps sought to free the left-leaning literati to critique and proffer a cultural ‘freedom’, while under the illusion of apolitical art for art’s sake. Although many held suspicions, it wasn’t until 1967 that reports of the CIA’s influence and financial control of the publication surfaced. Hugh Wilford’s study, The CIA, The British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune? (2003), suggests that: this monthly, literary-political periodical had rapidly developed a reputation as one of the best, if not the best, ‘highbrow’ journals in the English-speaking world. The revelation that such a prestigious intellectual forum had been secretly subsidized by the CIA [. . .] shocked and disgusted many younger British and American writers, who interpreted it as damning proof of not only the immorality of the CIA but also the ideological bankruptcy of the previous generation of non-communist left intellectuals. (262)

Though Spender was seemingly unaware of the affiliation, and thereafter resigned, under his leadership the journal served to protect and bolster the Bloomsbury group’s modernist style. It thereby reinforced American cultural control in promoting a style that was flourishing in the American leftestablishment. However, it remains clear that British intellectuals gained a great deal from Encounter, in their own self-promotion and the preservation of the establishment cultural style. As Wilford identifies, ‘British intellectuals used Encounter as much as it used them. Initially, it was Bloomsbury literati who employed the magazine in a local culture war which bore little obvious relevance to the CIA’s Cultural Cold War objectives’ (289). The journal solidified the hegemony of the pre-war elite, and was fundamentally incongruous with the aspirations of a classless society. Such a position encapsulates the logical outcome of the project of a classless society, a situation in which the gatekeepers of culture sought to raise up a ‘mass’ to a position deemed acceptable, which, as John Carey proclaims in The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), meant ‘the difference between the nineteenth-century mob and the twentieth-century mass is literacy’ (5). Such problematic cultural contestation is exemplified by the position of

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Encounter. Indeed, Stephen Spender, writing in The Struggle of the Modern (1963), considered the English novel to be increasingly ‘weighed down with sociology and written by class-conscious young people concerned not with inventing values of life, but with communicating information about their working-class origins, or the Red Brick University’ (130).

The angry dissentients Despite the seemingly pervasive elitism, the rejuvenated cultural subsidy and reform of both education and working conditions increased possibilities of social mobility that became apparent within the literary community. As a result of the Education Act of 1944, known as the ‘Butler Act’, working-class students were able to sit eleven-plus examination and gain entry to grammar school education. In turn, this saw the rise of the ‘Red Brick University’ and fostered a new strain of educated young, characterizing the emergence of the ‘Angry Young Men’. The authors frequently clustered in this literary group, such as John Osborne, John Wain, Kingsley Amis and Alan Sillitoe, however, mostly rejected the term. Indeed, Kenneth Allsop, in The Angry Decade (1958), raises concern about the logic of ascribing a collective where there wasn’t necessarily one, identifying their ‘widely disparate outlooks on modern problems and modern solutions’ (9). Nonetheless, he acknowledges that such a clustering is useful for they ‘are all, in differing degrees and for different reasons, dissentients’ (9). These authors were broadly characterized by a realization of their unsteady positioning between the traditional strata of cultures and class. Richard Hoggart depicts these ‘scholarship boys’ in The Uses of Literacy (1957), describing such figures as the ‘anxious and uprooted’ who are at ‘a friction point between two cultures’ (239), representing an individual that is ‘unhappy in a society which presents largely a picture of disorder, which is huge and sprawling’ (244). Indeed, the Angry Young Men made a conscious attempt to confront chance in their writing, employing the concept to articulate the fundamental dislocations in the culture of the 1950s. John Osborne’s play, Look Back in Anger (1956), is representative of a rhetoric that was acutely aware of such disorder and the incongruence of the welfare state model: ‘There aren’t any good, brave causes left. If the big bang does come, and we all get killed off, it won’t be in aid of the old fashioned, grand design. It’ll just be for the Brave-New-nothing-very-much-thank-you’ (94–5). The play popularized the arrival of the new voices, and thereby championed Jimmy Porter as the archetypal representative of the Angry Young Men alongside

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the characters of Charles Lumley, from John Wain’s Hurry on Down (1953), and Jim Dixon of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954). In The Fourfold Tradition (1961), Rayner Heppenstall describes Amis’s protagonist, Jim Dixon, as ‘an archetypal figure, the new young man produced by free education under the Butler Act’ (216). Such upwardly mobile ‘scholarship boys’ became representative of an ‘acceptable’ leftist disenchantment with the establishment, from within its own high-castle. Indeed, John Wain and Kingsley Amis were students of English, alongside Philip Larkin, in the same cohort at St John’s College, Oxford. For Wain’s protagonist, Charles Lumley, chance offers a means of dismantling the disquiet of his middle-class experience and becoming ensconced in a working-class sensibility. Disenfranchised, he cultivates a romantic view of the working class as having been ‘encouraged by life to develop their sharp edges’ (25). Conversely, he describes how his ‘sharp edges, on the other hand, had been systematically blunted by his upbringing and education’ (25). Wain composed the first half of the novel seemingly without plan, stating in the introduction that ‘I had been improvising, writing one scene after another with no idea of what was coming next, expressing a mood (and very much my own mood of course) rather than telling a plotted story’ (3). Similarly, the protagonist drifts through life engaging with chance and embracing its effect, even deciding on where he will move to, following graduation, using a random pin placement on a map. However, in ‘a ludicrous coincidence his first jab with the pin had landed on the name of the one town in England that was useless for his purpose, the town where he was born and bred’ (10–11). Articulating the luxury of the character’s manipulation of chance towards his own design, it is on his third attempt that he settles on Stotwell as an appropriate ‘everyplace’ to reclaim his life after graduation. Lumley states that his education ‘was fragmentary: partly because the University had, by its three years’ random and shapeless cramming, unfitted his mind for serious thinking’ (11) and that this therefore inflects ‘his haphazard approach to life’ (17). Lumley decides to abscond from his position of privilege and become a window cleaner, in pursuit of a simple honest working day. Unable to fully enter the milieu of his desire, however, he begins his transition by living as a bohemian in a loft apartment alongside a writer who he happens upon. Chance thereby presents, for Lumley, a power that imposes itself on those without privilege, one that he has the luxury of manipulating towards his own gain, even when wishing to surrender to it. Ultimately it is Lumley’s persistence that enables real change, as exemplified by the novel’s romantic component: ‘When we met the other night in the Grand at Stotwell, that wasn’t a coincidence. I’d been hanging about, in that very room,

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ever since I saw you in there for the first time’ (113). Such combinations of chance and design are equally exposed in Wain’s approach to writing the novel. Despite composing in a random manner for the first half of the project, he reveals that ‘the second half was written as I write novels today – that is, with a plan’ (4). Nonetheless, he explains that the approaches do not differ greatly, stating that ‘the episodes in the first half were not really chosen at random, however much they seemed to be, but grouped themselves in obedience to a strong instinctive drift’ (4). However, such instinct is inflected with a degree of chance in its very internal spontaneity. Principally, Lumley seeks to perform the chance-based experience of the working class, who he views as being better prepared for the demands of the period: ‘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 [. . .] he had been deprived of his sting’ (25). Inviting the hardships of the working class is Lumley’s tactic to combat the tribulations of this new socio-political landscape. Such romanticizing of a caricatured working class is revealing of a discomfort with the sensibility of the ‘Herbivore’ attempting to homogenize culture. Such unease indicates an awareness of being a supposedly classless individual without a cultural scaffold, of occupying a liminal space between the establishment and ‘the people’. Indeed, Lumley reflects on this at the novel’s capitulation, stating: ‘I suppose I did turn down a steady, humdrum life, like you, but it wasn’t a question of breaking out or kicking over any traces. I never rebelled against my ordinary life: it just never admitted me, that’s all. I never even got into it’ (248). Lumley recognizes that he has been trained to become part of an establishment that is increasingly unsteady. Throughout the process of railing against such a position, chance offers itself as a force of optimism: ‘he would turn his handlebars at random [. . .] it was a powerful drug, and he turned eagerly to it whenever his daily toil allowed’ (79). While Wain’s protagonist is a middle-class Oxbridge graduate abandoning a position that threatens his capacity for true spontaneity and agency, suggesting a desire for a different ‘classless society’ to that on offer by the establishment, Amis’s Jim Dixon, of Lucky Jim, is a lower-middle-class graduate attempting to gain acceptance in to the academic world. Dixon is a product of class struggle, still subject to the fear of poverty despite living in the world of the 1944 Butler Act. He must therefore subscribe and pander to those in the academy, despite his personal distaste for their values. In such a situation, luck – as signalled by the title – variously marks much of Jim’s experience throughout the novel. Initially falling prey to a series of unlucky experiences, his fortune turns at the novel’s capitulation to contingency and heightens the character’s awareness of its

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influence: ‘It was luck you needed all along; with just a little more luck he’d have been able to switch his life on to a momentarily adjoining track, a track destined to swing aside at once away from his own’ (19). Though the bad luck that initially pursues Jim is a signifier of how little opportunity he has to forge his own place in the world, his fortune is transformed once he acknowledges the role of chance in his experience. The acceptance of uncertainty enables Jim to advance his career, despite an academy that leaves nothing to chance. What Jim appears to glean from his experience, in a milieu that dismisses error, is that he must celebrate personal ‘truths’ despite the obvious limitation of academic knowledge. He becomes able to confidently recognize the inauthenticity and falsities that he frequently encounters, and increasingly celebrates such insight. Indeed, ‘one indispensable answer to an environment bristling with people and things one thought were bad was to go on finding out new ways in which one could think they were bad’ (129). Ultimately though, chance is presented as remaining entrenched within a landscape of privilege. Despite Jim learning to place faith in the absence of full knowledge and trust in a position of unknowability, this arrives via a perception of his relative lack of opportunity: ‘Why hadn’t he himself had parents whose money so far exceeded their sense as to install their son in London. The very thought of it would be a torment. If he’d had that chance, things would be very different for him now’ (178). Fundamentally, Jim Dixon and Charles Lumley identify that the elite are afforded numerous chances, while those less fortunate must develop the courage to identify and act upon chances when they arise. This ideological position is evidently one that belies a socially responsible understanding of privilege, choice and class stratification, offering only a recipe for middle-class upward mobility.

Falling against structuring structures The interrelationship between chance and choice, within a sphere occupied by the ‘scholarship boy’, can be analysed by application of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus. His engagement with the term stipulates a unifying system of acquired sensibilities, tastes and natural responses to everyday encounters. Such dispositions are internalized embodiments resulting from social structures and complex fields of identity, expressive of affiliations. Jim Dixon’s working-class origins appear, therefore, as his primary habitus, an ingrained schema from which intrinsic characteristics and inclinations materialized and inform his response to chance. Bourdieu’s concept indicates a determined cyclical system,

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in which the actions of a social agent are formed by the habitus, but equally contribute to the structure of the habitus. There is a discernible inertia in this configuration, as the contributory responses are justified and characterized by the feedback loop of other agents. The social schema from which we learn from and contribute to are therefore simultaneously ‘structuring structures’ and ‘structured structures’ that impact on and are impacted by social practice. In Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory (1997), Bridget Fowler summarises how Bourdieu has been criticized for having ‘underemphasised working-class freedom (versus constraint) and the culturally creative energies that can come from underneath’ (4). For Jim, this dynamism can be traced to the oscillation between multiple thresholds of social stratification, while thoroughly tethered to a sense of rising agitation ‘from underneath’. Despite the overarching determinisms of Bourdieu’s early perception of habitus, the boundaries and partitions of each social field undeniably offer potential for chance configurations arising from the seemingly infinite possible structural frames of social fields. Indeed, Bourdieu identifies in The Rules of Art (1992): The dispositions associated with a certain social origin cannot be fulfilled unless they are responsive in the shape they take to, on the one hand, the structure of possibilities opened up by the different positions and position-takings of their occupants, and, on the other hand, to the position occupied in the field. (264)

Such dispositions are responsive to and signify a ‘doxa’ of collective social understanding or common beliefs that inflect a general perception of the world. The emergent doxa of a synthesis between chance and order can therefore be read as manifesting in the performance of indeterminism, thereby characterizing the response to Jim’s habitus. A generalized reading of Bourdieu’s theory stresses the social origins and collective formulation of the individual, who can therefore never truly be autonomous. Identity is therein the picture of natural, ingrained responses to everyday experience. However, chance provides for Jim some semblance of warped agency in response: ‘He wanted to bet himself it would be bad so that he might stand a chance of it being good’ (Amis 1954: 247–8). The concept of habitus was reformulated throughout Bourdieu’s career, more thoroughly accommodating characteristics of indeterminacy. The cyclical unity that characterized its early appearance was displaced by a consideration, outlined in In Other Words: Essays towards a Reflexive Sociology (1990), of ‘generative spontaneity which asserts itself in an improvised confrontation with everrenewed situations, it obeys a practical logic, that of vagueness, of the more-or-

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less, which defines one’s ordinary relation to the world’ (77–8). The habitus is thenceforth read as a process of mobile interaction, which constrains but does not determine action, from which the agent acts in response to the structuring elements of the habitus, but is in turn able to manipulate the structure of it from within; a ‘structuring structure’. Ultimately, in constructing, what Bourdieu terms in The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society (1993), ‘[n]arratives about the most “personal” difficulties, the apparently most strictly subjective tensions and contradictions’, both Amis and Wain reflect what Bourdieu considers as the ability to ‘frequently articulate the deepest structures of the social world and its contradictions’ (511). The accommodation of chance therefore mirrors this responsive systemization of the vagaries of potential experience and the contradictory connections these form in social stratification, which in Lucky Jim are exemplified by the red-brick university. Indeed, Bourdieu proposed the notion of a divided identity, a ‘habitus clivé’, in analysis of the young intellectuals of Algeria during the struggle for independence from France (1958– 62). The concept responds to the internal conflict between formative class identity and an assumed intellectual position, as a result of higher education and entering an academic field. This is revealed, in The Algerians (1962), by way of the young Algerian intellectual, as a state of complex marginalization: Constantly being faced with alternative ways of behaviour by reason of the intrusion of new values, and therefore compelled to make a conscious examination of the implicit premises or the unconscious patterns of his own tradition, this man, cast between two worlds and rejected by both, lives a sort of double inner life, is a prey to frustration and inner conflict, with the result that he is constantly being tempted to adopt either an attitude of uneasy over identification or one of rebellious negativism. (144)

For Bourdieu, the working-class student assumes a secondary habitus in entering the academic field that displaces the first, which Deborah Reed-Danahay identifies in Locating Bourdieu (2005) as a state in which ‘the primary habitus is devalued as the student acquires the secondary habitus associated with education’ (32). In Lucky Jim we can chart a self-referential problematization of the conflict and contradiction between these two positions, a resistance to stratification mirrored by Jim’s celebratory approach to luck. Ultimately, the novel culminates in this sensibility overcoming the posturing of the establishment, as personified by Welch and Bertrand, defeated by Jim’s good fortune: ‘Dixon drew in breath to denounce them both, then blew it all out again in a howl of laughter’ (Amis 1954: 251).

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A contradictory novel tradition Despite the seemingly progressive nature of the Angry Young Men, in their agitation against class structures, their writing is often associated with rampant misogyny and homophobia. Indeed, in Jim’s victory at the finale of Lucky Jim, Welch and Bertrand are attacked for having ‘a look of being Gide and Lytton Strachey’ (251), alluding to their effeminacy. These were fundamentally ‘manly’ works that carried such masculinity as statements of intent in attempting to navigate space between working-class and establishment rhetoric. However, as Leslie A. Fiedler remarked in ‘The Un-Angry Young Men: America’s Post-War Generation’, published in Encounter in 1958, ‘The Angry Young Men of Britain have managed, whatever their shortcomings, to project themselves and their dilemma in such figures as Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim’ (5). Though this marks a ‘literary’ arrival, as Encounter finally deemed the subject of the Angry Young Men worthy of consideration, it did little to circumvent the establishment perception – as exemplified by Somerset Maugham in a ‘Books of the Year’ survey for The Sunday Times in 1955 – of them being ‘scum. They will in due course leave the university. Some will doubtless sink back, perhaps with relief, into the modest class from which they emerged’. Such novels were unbefitting of the contemporary establishment, not because of bigotry but because they were unrefined. Attempts to reinvigorate the Bloomsbury style, increasingly associated with the American establishment, thereby continued a stultifying refrain. There was, however, a renewed progressive turn in the mid–1950s that instead drew influence from the experimentation of continental literature. Jordan argues that ‘Chance had secured its dominion, scientifically, by the 1940s, and, philosophically, once the existentialists’ ideas had become common currency in intellectual and literary circles of Britain and Europe’ (ix). Indeed, the influence of the French philosophical landscape had already been seen in the work of Samuel Beckett. For example, Watt (1953) problematizes the understanding of chance as the enemy of meaning, its cyclical narratives denying a realization of the possibilities on display. Furthermore, the English premiere of Waiting for Godot in 1955 suggested an attack on the class system and the rhetoric of the Cold War. Yet, as Kenneth Allsop remarks in The Angry Decade, ‘Waiting for Godot may have caused palpitations of conjecture in the Kings Road, but the argument did not penetrate much farther north than Hampstead Garden Suburb. It is the vista of Hoggart’s “shiny barbarism” that stares at you, the forces of modern mass entertainment’ (33). This chapter shall not detail Beckett’s contribution to configurations of chance in literature, as his oeuvre reflects a

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non-Britishness that culminates from a combination of him being both Irish (often subsumed into British literary studies) and culturally more immersed in a continental tradition. Nonetheless, as Jordan identifies, ‘Beckett was writing in an intellectual climate in which the existentialists on the continent had drawn new associations between chance and existential freedom’ (xi), a sensibility that was beginning to gain an audience in Britain. Heppenstall acknowledges in The Fourfold Tradition that the ‘French understand that their tradition is twofold. Here we speak of “the English tradition” as of something recognizably single’ (90) further stating that a ‘second tradition must always be, in a broad sense, non-conformist’ (92). Despite noting the success of such British writers as Lawrence Durrell and William Golding, whose work went ‘some way towards non-conformity’, his overall perception is that ‘[i]n this country, there is too little technical enterprise. We have endless conventional novels’ (270). However, a compromise between experimentation and the mass entertainment that Allsop identifies arguably characterizes a British approach, one that is in turn more representative of the synthesis between chance and order. Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net (1954), for example, is conceptually located within the contemporary French philosophical politics of existentialism. However, the novel presents a mediation between the humorous picaresque novels of Wain and Amis, and the existential considerations of those such as Beckett and Jean-Paul Sartre. Its ruminations on existentialism uncover a hopeful refrain in their combination and compromise: ‘Events stream past us like crowds and the face of each is seen only for a minute. What is urgent is not urgent for ever but only ephemerally’ (275). Under the Net is an intentionally paradoxical and complex novel that navigates the relationship between contingency and necessity, the ambiguities of language, and the nature of individual freedom. Yet, the novel achieves this within a populist and ludic manner also characteristic of the novels of the Angry Young Men: ‘Hegel says the Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to get past the word’ (25). Indeed, As Frederick Hoffmann has observed, in ‘Iris Murdoch: The Reality of Persons’ (1964), ‘the essential issue of Under the Net is tension between theory and situation. Jake continues to revise his conduct, to guarantee its freedom from theory’ (50). Such a process acts upon an internal paradox that Murdoch identified in existentialism; its conceptualization of the private sphere rather than application toward the social. The character of Jake translates existential French fiction to English, quite potently transposing the left bank to the London milieu. Crucially, as Allsop remarks, ‘the immense chasm that there is between him and the more typically Fiftyish Lucky Jim dissentient

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is that it never occurs to Jake that he is anything other than an intellectual’ (94). From the vantage of self-awareness, Murdoch examines the contemporary contradiction in which Britain is both nostalgic for the Empire, intent on imposing influence on global politics, while also forging an anti-imperialist welfare state. Such a compromise, yet unfathomed by intellectual and liberal visions of socialism, is explicitly rendered throughout the text: You call yourself a socialist, but you were brought up on Britannia rules the waves like the rest of them. You want to belong to a big show. That’s why you’re sorry you can’t be a communist. But you can’t be – and neither have you enough imagination to pull out of the other thing. So you feel hopeless. What you need is flexibility, flexibility! (112)

Indeed, the novel presents possibility and chance as the means to achieve such a problematic and complex vision. Ultimately it is literature itself, complex and celebratory of contradictions, that offers a solution and resolves Jake’s search for the ‘truth’. Such possibility is revealed in sites of contradiction, manifested in the novel that Jake is writing. His text consciously represents Hugo’s view that ‘language is a machine for making falsehoods’, and thereby determines that a ‘movement away from theory and generality is the movement toward truth [. . .] however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net’ (91). The contingency of language is furthered in the physical realm by a construal of London as representative of the maelstrom of New Britain: ‘There are some parts of London which are necessary and some which are contingent’ (91). Indeed, Jake’s odyssey leads him through only those regions, ‘west of Earls Court’, identified as contingent space. Ultimately, Murdoch’s demarcation makes demands of the reader to perform chance within the defined parameters of Jake’s novel, thereby maintaining a broader control.

A burgeoning aleatory style The second half of the 1950s, with a reinvigorated turn towards experimentation and the contingent, witnessed a bifurcation of chance in art. In 1955 Werner Meyer-Eppler adopted the term aleatory, in ‘Statistic and Psychologic Problems of Sound’, responding to the growing interest shown towards the manipulation and employment of chance strategies in the shaping of sound and composition. Stipulating that a ‘process is said to be aleatoric (from Lat. Alea = dice) if its course is determined in general but depends on chance in detail’ (55), this

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concept has since been applied to all artistic practices in which the details succumb to chance interactions, performed by the audience, within a broadly determined whole. Such processes signify a sensibility in which the art remains true to a compositional intent, but permits indeterminate moments to arise that illuminate the essence. Comprehending the specifics of the aleatory is therefore most tangible from the basis of music theory, but its application extends more broadly. In 1955 Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen began separately composing pieces in a new approach to the use of chance in composition, seeking to differentiate from John Cage’s method of indeterminacy. While indeterminacy relies exclusively on chance for all aspects of the compositional process, the aleatory technique demands a combination of chance and conventional composition. Such a difference is exemplified by Boulez’s Third Piano Sonata (1955) and Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke XI (1955) in contrast to Cage’s Music of Changes (1951). William G. Harbinson identified in ‘Performer Indeterminacy and Boulez’s Third Sonata’ (1989) that Boulez emphatically dismissed ‘chance’ as a viable compositional technique declaring that ‘What a performer meets in the Third Piano Sonata is “choice”, not “chance”’(20). For example, Music of Changes employed the classic Chinese text I Ching – also known as the Book of Changes, originating from the Han Dynasty – to compose indeterminately. The method requires a random selection of one of the 64 hexagrams, each charged with many further possibilities, to determine the pitch, length, dynamic and rhythm. Boulez and Stockhausen refused to surrender all compositional input to chance in this manner, and thus opted for a variety of hybridized systems of aleatory composition. In ‘Sonata, What Do You Want of Me?’ (1963) Boulez states ‘Why compose works that have to be re-created every time they are performed? Because definitive, once-and-for-all developments seem no longer appropriate to musical thought as it is today’ (32). The indeterminacy of Cage’s work primarily situated the instigation of randomness in the hands of the composer. However, aleatory compositions maintain a sense of composer autonomy and provide a base from which the performer determines, within defined parameters, the shape of the work. Composing in this manner resists a conventional sense of finality in composition, instead requiring audience input to enable the work to take a new form with each performance. In The Role of the Reader (1979) Umberto Eco aligned the aleatory technique with literature, indicating that such chance performances instil ‘a wealth of different resonances and echoes without impairing its original essence’ (49). Further proposing a definition of aleatory composition as being works that ‘offer themselves, not as finite works which prescribe specific repetition along given

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structural coordinates, but as “open” works, which are brought to their conclusion by the performer at the same time as he experiences them on an aesthetic plane’ (48). In his analysis Eco refers to the Boulez and Stockhausen works previously mentioned, in addition to Henri Pousseur’s Scambi (1957) and Luciano Berio’s Sequenza I (1958), which are ‘linked by a common feature: the considerable autonomy left to the individual performer in the way he chooses to play the work’ (47). Rather than compromising the integrity of composition with absolute chance, Boulez considered the aleatory technique as the logical intermediary due to his claim that in ‘any construction containing as many ramifications as a modern work of art total indeterminacy is not possible, since it contradicts – to the point of absurdity – the very idea of mental organization and style’ (34) The inherent paradox within aleatoricism and the meeting of contradictory processes, within a contained logic, succinctly mirrors our encounters with chance in daily experience. This struggle between the mental organization and systemization of chance encounters – an assimilation of swirling random signs, and an attempt to grasp at a tangible logic sprung from the roots of randomness is what enriches and characterizes a search for meaning. Writing on the development of the aleatory style, in ‘Sonata, What Do You Want of Me?’, Pierre Boulez revealed that ‘literary affiliations played a more important part than purely musical considerations [. . .] I believe that some writers at the present time have gone much further than composers in the organization, the actual mental structure of their works’ (32). Indeed, the aleatory celebration of compromise and contradiction, inviting the performance of chance procedures within an organized frame, is representative of the new writing that emerged in the 1950s.

Performing a culture of contradiction Further to an aleatory sensibility in Murdoch’s Under the Net, Muriel Spark’s The Comforters (1957) incorporates the performance of a text within its broader structure, one that suggests a Boulez-like enactment of chance within an organized frame. The Comforters combats the kitchen-sink realism of the Angry Young Men and proffers a contradictory synthesis between the ‘truth’ and narrative fiction. In its articulation of such paradoxical relationships, it ultimately reveals itself as more representative of reality than its contemporaries. This is principally achieved in its aleatory performance of chance. Encompassing themes of spirituality, via its considerations of Catholicism, as well as superstition, the occult, uncertainty and art, it reflects upon structures an individual performs

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to construct meaning. Its protagonist, Caroline, is researching a book concerning Form in the Modern Novel, only to be disturbed by the Typing Ghost. This figure, demarcated by the sound of a typewriter, is the manifestation of a novelistic structure in her life. Despite protestation from her friend Laurence, she comes to the realization that she is a character in a novel: ‘Caroline, you are wrong, mistaken, mad. There are no voices; there is no typewriter; it is all a delusion. You must get mental treatment.’ It was on his tongue to tell her so when [. . .] she told him, ‘I’ve discovered the truth of the matter’; the truth of the matter being, it transpired, this fabulous idea of themselves and their friends being used as characters in a novel. (83)

This spectre illuminates her own fictionality and yet equally shows her to be a composed character of reason via the unmasking of the mechanics of the novel itself. Such a technique demands the reader’s involvement in the text, as an aleatory instigator of chance configurations: ‘At this point in the narrative, it might be as well to state that the characters in this novel are all fictitious, and do not refer to any living persons whatsoever. Tap-tappity-tap. At this point in the narrative. . .’ (59). Foreshadowing this revelation, the novel commences in a style that repeats on to itself and confronts the reader with the intentionally strained and repetitive writerly narrative: ‘ “It is unhealthy,” his mother had lately told him. “It’s the only unhealthy thing about your mind, the way you notice absurd details, it’s absurd of you.” ’ (4). Indeed, that Laurence observes details is a further blunt foreshadowing of a plot development in which he discovers that his Grandmother ‘sticks diamonds in the bread’ after coming ‘across a loaf weirdly cut at both ends’ (19). Laurence concludes that she ‘runs a gang. I’m completely in the dark as to what sort of gang, but I should probably think they are Communist spies’ (19). Such a leap mirrors the communist tropes in the contemporary popular spy fiction of those such as Ian Fleming, and therefore gestures towards Laurence also being in his own narrative realm. Indeed, Caroline remarks to Laurence: ‘From my point of view it’s clear that you are getting these ideas into your head through the influence of a novelist who is contriving some phoney plot. I can see clearly that your mind is working under the pressure of someone else’s necessity, and under the suggestive power of some irresponsible writer you are allowing yourself to become an amateur sleuth in a cheap mystery piece’ (91–2).

Laurence’s novelistic world, however, is seemingly mocked for the superficial plot devices that reflect the conventions of the popular novel. Instead, Caroline’s fictional realm seeks to portray the ‘true’ depth and complexity of chance in its

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ambiguity. In this sense, her novel problematizes what Peter Bürger states in Theory of the Avant-Garde as the conflict in which ‘It will never be possible to seize the meaning being searched for in chance events, because, once defined, it would become part of means-end rationality and thus lose its value as protest’ (66). Such negation of certainty is representative of the resistance to the residual cause-and-effect realist tradition of the British literary canon. The aleatory configuration of a need to perform the novel denies the demonstrative organization of experience that characterizes the traditional novel, but contains such complex intent within comprehensible boundaries. Georg Lukács’s defence of traditional realism, in ‘Realism in the Balance’ (1938), declares that ‘the broad mass of the people can learn nothing from avantgarde literature’ (57). The effect of modernist literature, in his view, stultified revolutionary possibilities. However, as with Spark’s The Comforters, a neo avantgarde recognized the potential for innovation to communicate collective concerns, employing open compositions of personal everyday experience. Broadly, these aleatory methods upheld the fragmented and introspective examinations typical of the avant-garde, representing disjointed personal temporalities and a rejection of absolute truth. However, as Renato Poggioli identifies in The Theory of the Avant-Garde (1962), the neo avant-garde responded to the notion that ‘even the avant-garde has to live and work in the present, accept compromises and adjustments, reconcile itself with the official culture of the times, and collaborate with at least some part of the public’ (79). It is this sense of conciliation, of a mediation between avant-garde pursuits and comprehensibility, that characterizes the aleatory approach to artistic practice. For Peter Bürger the ‘adaptation’ to incorporate chance into art was ‘the only possible form of resistance’ (67), and it was therefore in the very contradictions of the burgeoning aleatory novel that such a possibility was manifest within a realist model. The cultural delineation of chance, as variously considered alongside perceptions of class stratifications; weaponized narrative; the debilitating fear of apocalypse; and a problematizing of personal freedom, suggest contradictory sites that house the potential for meaning. For the novel to be representative of the dynamic of uncertainty that was in the ascendant in British culture in the 1950s, the employment of aleatory strategies were necessitated. With culture offered as the means of resolving pervasive global threats and signalling the arrival of a classless society, and chance intrinsically untameable, a gestured performance arose. Indeed, Culture and Society (1958) by Raymond Williams suggests itself as the logical limit point of this study, for its potent arrival at the central concern: ‘The idea of culture describes our common

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inquiry but our conclusions are diverse, as our starting points were diverse. The word, culture, cannot automatically be pressed into service as any kind of social or personal directive’ (285). This influential text heralds the moment of realization of the overarching concept of ‘culture’ itself being subject to chance machinations; diversely performed.

Works cited Allsop, Kenneth. The Angry Decade. Wendover: John Goodchild Publishers, 1985 [1958]. Amis, Kingsley. Lucky Jim. London: Penguin Books, 2000 [1954]. Barry, Gerald. ‘The Festival of Britain 1951’ in Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol. 100, No. 4880, 1952, pp. 667–704. www.jstor.org/stable/41365427 Belletto, Steven. No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Bergonzi, Bernard. The Situation of the Novel. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979 [1970]. Boulez, Pierre et al. ‘Sonata, What Do You Want From Me?’ Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1963, pp. 32–44. www.jstor.org/stable/832101 Bourdieu, Pierre. The Algerians. Trans. by Alan C. M. Ross, Boston: Beacon Press, 1962 [1952]. Bourdieu, Pierre. In Other Words: Essays towards a Reflexive Sociology. Trans. by Matthew Adamson, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Rules of Art. Trans. by Susan Emanuel, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996 [1992]. Bourdieu, Pierre et al. The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999 [1993]. Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. by Michael Shaw, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2007 [1974]. Carey, John. The Intellectuals and the Masses. London: Faber and Faber, 2012 [1992]. Conekin, Becky. Autobiography of a Nation: The 1951 Festival of Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1979. Fielder, Leslie A. ‘The Un-Angry Young Men: America’s Post-War Generation’ in Encounter, Issue 26, January 1958, pp. 3–12. http://www.unz.org/Pub/ Encounter–1958jan–00003 Fowler, Bridget. Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory. London: Sage Publications, 1997. Frayn, Michael. ‘Festival’ in Age of Austerity, ed. by Michael Sissons and Philip French. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963. pp. 305–28.

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Harbinson, William G. ‘Performer Indeterminacy and Boulez’s Third Sonata’, Tempo, No.169, 1989, pp.16–20. Hartley, L.P. The Go-Between. New York: New York Review of Books, 2011 [1953]. Heppenstall, Rayner. The Fourfold Tradition: Notes on the French and English literatures, with some ethnological and historical asides. London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1961. Heppenstall, Rayner. The Intellectual Part. London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1963. Hoffmann, Frederick. ‘Iris Murdoch: The Reality of Persons’ in Critique, VII , Spring, 1964. Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy. London: Penguin, 2009 [1957]. Jordan, Julia. Chance and the Modern British Novel. London: Continuum, 2010. Lessing, Doris. A Small Personal Voice. Ed. by Paul Schlueter, New York: Vintage, 1972 [1957]. Lukács, Georg. ‘Realism in the Balance’, in Adorno et al. Aesthetics and Politics. London and New York: Verso, 2007 [1938]. Maugham, Somerset. ‘Books of the Year’ in Sunday Times. 25 December, 1955. Meyer-Eppler, Werner. ‘Statistic and Psychologic Problems of Sound’. Trans. By Alexander Goehr. in Die Reihe 1, 1957. pp. 55–61. Monk, Leland. Standard Deviations: Chance and the Modern British Novel. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. Morgan, Kenneth. Britain Since 1945: The People’s Peace. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001 [1990]. Murdoch, Iris. Under the Net. London: Vintage, 2002 [1954]. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Daybreak. Trans. by R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982 [1881]. Osborne, John. Look Back in Anger. London: Faber and Faber, 2013 [1956]. Poggioli, Renato. The Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. by Gerald Fitzgerald. London and Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1968 [1962]. Powell, Anthony. A Question of Upbringing. London: Arrow Books, 2005 [1951]. Powell, Anthony. A Buyer’s Market. London: Arrow Books, 2005 [1952]. Rancière, Jacques. Aesthetics and its Discontents. Trans. by Steven Corcoran. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009 [2004]. Reed-Danahay, Deborah. Locating Bourdieu. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005. Sinfield, Alan. Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain. London and New York: Continuum, 2004 [1989]. Spark, Muriel. The Comforters. London: Virago Press, 2013 [1957]. Spender, Stephen and Kristol, Irving. ‘After the Apocalypse’ in Encounter. October 1953, pp. 1–4. Spender, Stephen. The Struggle of the Modern. Berkley : University of California Press, 1965 [1963]. Wain, John. Hurry on Down. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985 [1953].

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Wilford, Hugh. The CIA, The British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune?, London: Routledge, 2003. Williams, Raymond. Society and Culture. London: Penguin, 1985 [1958]. Woolf, Virginia. ‘Modern Fiction’ [1925]. In The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Volume 4: 1925 to 1928. Ed. By Andrew McNeille. London: The Hogarth Press, 1984. pp.157–65.

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Timeline of Works 1950 Roland Camberton Scamp Agatha Christie A Murder is Announced Doris Lessing The Grass is Singing C.S. Lewis The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Colin MacInnes To the Victor the Spoils Gladys Mitchell Groaning Spinney Naomi Mitchison The Big House Mervyn Peake Gormenghast Barbara Pym Some Tame Gazelle Nevil Shute A Town Like Alice

1951 Samuel Beckett Molloy Roland Camberton Rain on the Pavements Stella Gibbons The Swiss Summer C.S. Lewis Prince Caspian Ngaio Marsh Opening Night (US : A Night At the Vulcan) Nicholas Monsarrat The Cruel Sea Anthony Powell A Question of Upbringing C.P. Snow The Masters Elizabeth Taylor A Game of Hide and Seek J.R.R. Tolkien The Hobbit, second edition [first published 1937] John Wyndham The Day of the Triffids

1952 Margery Allingham The Tiger in the Smoke Doris Lessing Martha Quest C.S. Lewis The Voyage of the Dawn Treader Colin MacInnes June in her Spring Naomi Mitchison Travel Light Anthony Powell A Buyer’s Market

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Barbara Pym Excellent Women Sam Selvon A Brighter Sun John Sommerfield The Adversaries Angus Wilson Hemlock and After

1953 Samuel Beckett Watt Brigid Brophy The Crown Princess and Other Stories Brigid Brophy Hackenfeller’s Ape Agatha Christie After the Funeral Ian Fleming Casino Royale Rodney Garland The Heart in Exile Stella Gibbons Fort of the Bear L.P. Hartley The Go-Between Attia Hosain Phoenix Fled George Lamming In the Castle of My Skin C.S. Lewis The Silver Chair Mervyn Peake Mr Pye Barbara Pym Jane and Prudence Mary Renault The Charioteer Elizabeth Taylor The Sleeping Beauty John Wain Hurry on Down John Wyndham The Kraken Wakes

1954 Kingsley Amis Lucky Jim Arthur C. Clarke Childhood’s End Ian Fleming Live and Let Die William Golding Lord of the Flies Doris Lessing A Proper Marriage C.S. Lewis The Horse and His Boy Penelope Mortimer A Villa in Summer Iris Murdoch Under the Net C.P. Snow The New Men John Sommerfield Trouble in Porter Street, second edition [first published 1938] J.R.R. Tolkien The Fellowship of the Ring J.R.R. Tolkien The Two Towers

Timeline of Works

1955 Margery Allingham The Beckoning Lady Kingsley Amis That Uncertain Feeling Ian Fleming Moonraker Stella Gibbons The Shadow of a Sorcerer William Golding The Inheritors C.S. Lewis The Magician’s Nephew Alistair MacLean HMS Ulysses Ngaio Marsh Scales of Justice Naomi Mitchison To the Chapel Perilous Anthony Powell The Acceptance World Barbara Pym Less than Angels J.R.R. Tolkien The Return of the King John Wyndham The Chrysalids

1956 Samuel Beckett Malone Dies Brigid Brophy The King of a Rainy Country John Christopher The Death of Grass Ian Fleming Diamonds are Forever Stella Gibbons Here Be Dragons Martyn Goff The Plaster Fabric William Golding Pincher Martin C.S. Lewis The Last Battle Penelope Mortimer The Bright Prison Iris Murdoch The Flight from the Enchanter Mary Renault The Last of the Wine Sam Selvon The Lonely Londoners C.P. Snow Homecomings John Sommerfield The Inheritance Angus Wilson Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

1957 John Braine Room at the Top Agatha Christie 4.50 from Paddington Lawrence Durrell Justine Ian Fleming From Russia, with Love William Golding, John Wyndham and Mervyn Peake Sometimes, Never Colin MacInnes City of Spades

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Alistair MacLean The Guns of Navarone Naomi Mitchison Behold Your King Iris Murdoch The Sandcastle V.S. Naipaul The Mystic Masseur Anthony Powell At Lady Molly’s Sam Selvon Ways of Sunlight Nevil Shute On the Beach Muriel Spark The Comforters Elizabeth Taylor Angel John Wyndham The Midwich Cuckoos

1958 Margery Allingham Hide my Eyes Kingsley Amis I Like it Here Brian Aldiss Non-Stop Samuel Beckett The Unnameable Michael Bond A Bear Called Paddington Lawrence Durrell Balthazar Lawrence Durrell Mountolive Ian Fleming Dr. No Stella Gibbons White Sand and Grey Sand William Golding Free Fall George Lamming Of Age and Innocence Doris Lessing A Ripple from the Storm Alistair MacLean South by Java Head Ngaio Marsh Singing in the Shrouds Gladys Mitchell Spotted Hemlock Penelope Mortimer Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting Iris Murdoch The Bell V.S. Naipaul The Suffrage of Elvira Barbara Pym Less than Angels Mary Renault A Glass of Blessings Sam Selvon Turn Again Tiger Alan Sillitoe Saturday Night and Sunday Morning C.P. Snow The Conscience of the Rich Muriel Spark Robinson Angus Wilson The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot

Timeline of Works

1959 Michael Bond More About Paddington John Braine The Vodi E.R. Braithwaite To Sir, With Love James Courage A Way of Love Ian Fleming Goldfinger Stella Gibbons A Pink Front Door Alistair MacLean The Last Frontier Alistair MacLean Night Without End Colin MacInnes Absolute Beginners Gladys Mitchell The Man Who Grew Tomatoes V.S. Naipaul Miguel Street Mervyn Peake Titus Alone Alan Sillitoe The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner C.P. Snow The Affair Muriel Spark Memento Mori Keith Waterhouse Billy Liar John Wyndham The Outward Urge

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Timeline of National Events 1950 Labour win majority of only 5 seats in General Election Legal Aid extended to cover divorce The England football team lose 1–0 to the USA in the World Cup in Brazil.

1951 Aneurin (Nye) Bevan and Harold Wilson resign from Attlee’s cabinet in April over the introduction of limited Health Service charges and increased Government expenditure on rearmament in response to the Korean War Conservatives win General Election and Winston Churchill becomes Prime Minister again at the age of 76 Festival of Britain Burgess and Maclean flee to Moscow (but their whereabouts only became known in 1956) CPGB publish The British Road to Socialism marking a break from revolutionary politics to support an internal British policy of industrialization and nationalization.

1952 King George VI dies and is succeeded by Queen Elizabeth II Wartime identity cards abolished The Great Smog (smoke-infused fog) encloses London in gloom for several days Britain test atomic bomb off the coast of Australia.

1953 The Coronation of Elizabeth II Nineteen-year-old Derek Bentley hanged for the fatal shooting of PC Sydney Miles although he did not fire a weapon (his conviction was subsequently ruled unsafe by the Appeal Court in 1998)

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The Matthews Cup Final; England lose 6–3 to Hungary at Wembley; England regain Ashes for the first time in 19 years after Dennis Compton scores the winning runs against Australia at the Oval.

1954 End of rationing Roger Bannister runs first sub 4-minute mile.

1955 Churchill retires and Anthony Eden takes over as leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister, before going on to win the General Election Ruth Ellis is the last woman to be hanged in the UK Commercial broadcasting by ITV begins.

1956 Suez Crisis Exodus of left wing intellectuals from Communist Party of Great Britain Clean Air Act Premium Bonds launched Look Back in Anger by John Osbourne opens at the Royal Court.

1957 Eden resigns as Prime Minister and is replaced by Harold Macmillan, who later that year claims in a famous speech that the British public ‘have never had it so good’ First British H-bomb tested Foundation of CND Wolfenden Report recommends decriminalising homosexuality Foundation of the Consumer Association and Which?

1958 Britain’s first nuclear submarine launched First Aldermaston march Nottingham and Notting Hill ‘race disturbances’ Britain’s first motorway, the M6 bypass, is opened Munich air disaster kills eight members of Manchester United.

Timeline of National Events

1959 Conservative Party win third consecutive General Election Britain concludes successful talks to found EFTA , which comes into operation the following year Mini (car) launched Obscene Publications Act.

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Timeline of International Events 1950 Senator Joseph McCarthy rises to prominence following his Lincoln Day speech in which he claims the US State Department is infested by communists Korean War begins Immorality Act and Population Registration Act in South Africa help cement the newly founded Apartheid system.

1951 The European Coal and Steel Community, forerunner of the European Common Market, founded by the Treaty of Paris.

1952 USA tests first H-bomb Mau-Mau uprising begins in Kenya Eisenhower wins US election The first ever scheduled jet airliner flight takes place from Heathrow to Johannesburg.

1953 Cuban revolution begins Death of Stalin Workers’ uprising in East Berlin Korean Armistice signed Egypt leaves Commonwealth Tensing and Hillary climb Mount Everest Crick and Watson publish helical structure of DNA after developing work of Rosalind Franklin, amongst others Rock Around the Clock recorded by Bill Haley and the Comets Churchill wins Nobel Prize for Literature.

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1954 Algerian War begins West Germany admitted to NATO.

1955 Vietnam War begins Warsaw Pact came into being in response to West Germany joining NATO Rosa Parks becomes a symbol of resistance to US racial segregation after refusing to give up her seat in the bus to a white passenger First franchised McDonalds opens in Illinois.

1956 Sudan gains independence Khruschev’s ‘secret speech’ denouncing Stalin Suez Crisis – Israel, France and Britain invade Egypt in response to the nationalization of the Suez Canal by General Nasser Hungary revolts against the government and its Soviet-imposed policies. Revolution crushed by invading Soviet troops Release of Elvis Presley’s first single Heartbreak Hotel.

1957 The Gold Coast gains independence as Ghana The Federation of Malaya gains independence (becoming Malaysia in 1963) European Common Market, which subsequently became the European Union in 1993, established by the Treaty of Rome Sputnik launched and ‘Space Race’ begins; the Soviet Union launch first animal, Laika the dog, into orbit.

1958 First silicon chip demonstrated at Texas Instruments’ laboratory in Dallas Beginning of La Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) in French cinema A 17-year-old Pelé debuts in the World Cup for Brazil, who go on to win.

Timeline of International Events

1959 Conclusion of negotiations to found EFTA , which comes into operation during the following year Castro finally overthrows Batista Government in Cuba Alaska and Hawaii become the 49th and 50th states of US Plane crash killing Buddy Holly.

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Biographies of Writers Margery Allingham was born in London in 1904 – her father was a journalist, and her parents both produced fiction for serialization in popular magazines. By the time Margery was eighteen she had published stories, reviews and film synopses, and her first novel, an adventure story, was published in 1923. She met Philip (Pip) Youngman Carter, an art student, in 1921, and they married in 1927. Her increasingly successful writing career supported her husband through his difficulties in making a career of art, and funded his increasingly expensive tastes until after the Second World War, when Pip found a niche writing society columns for The Tatler, which he went on to edit from 1954. From 1931 the couple lived mostly in Essex, a region with which Margery felt a deep affinity, manifested in many of her works. She published twenty-five novels during her long career, as well as sixty-four short stories, and a great number of reviews and articles. She died in 1966, and her contribution to the development of detective fiction, and in particular its psychological aspects, is now held in high regard. Her post-war novels The Tiger in The Smoke (1952) and The Beckoning Lady (1955) are generally revered as her best – the latter was her own favourite. Kingsley Amis (1922–95), the son of a sales manager for Colman’s Mustard, grew up in the south London suburb of Norbury and attended the City of London School. He began a degree in English at Oxford in 1941, where he met and became friends with Philip Larkin. His studies were interrupted by his military service during the war as a signals officer from 1942 to 1945. Following his graduation with a First in 1947, Amis married Hilary Bardwell the following year and went on to work as a lecturer at what was then called the University College of Swansea from 1949 to 1961. During this time his children Philip, Martin – who would also become a significant novelist – and Sally were born. Lucky Jim (1954), Amis’s first novel, was an extremely funny story of a young lecturer at a provincial university, which caught the public mood of dissatisfaction with the pedantic idiocies and pretensions of the dominant culture of the time. After going almost immediately into reprint, the novel became a bestseller and won the 1955 Somerset Maugham Prize. Subsequent novels such as That Uncertain Feeling (1955) and Take a Girl Like You (1960) established Amis as one of the leading British novelists of his time; a status he maintained until the end of the 1980s and which was confirmed by his winning the Booker Prize for The Old Devils (1986). New Maps of Hell (1960), based on a series of lectures that Amis gave at Princeton the previous year, was one of the first critical studies of science fiction. Some of his own novels such as The Alteration (1976) – set in a parallel universe in which the Reformation did not take place – and Russian Hide-and-Seek (1980) – set in a twenty-first-century England ruled by the Russians – were clear examples of that

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genre. Briefly a communist, Amis was initially a writer with leftist sympathies but by the late 1960s he had moved to the right, supporting the Vietnam War and, later, the government of Margaret Thatcher. Some of his later novels such as Jake’s Thing (1978) and Stanley and the Women (1984) were criticized for being misogynistic. Amis was knighted in 1990. E.R. Braithwaite was born in 1912 in Georgetown, Guyana, to a relatively privileged family, both his parents being Oxford graduates. During the Second World War, he joined the Royal Air Force as a fighter pilot, before studying Physics at Cambridge immediately after. Despite his considerable qualifications, he was unable to find work in his field in Britain due to widespread racism and so took a teaching position at an East End secondary school. These experiences formed the basis of his first novel, To Sir With Love (1959), later turned into the 1967 feature film of the same name starring Sidney Poitier and Lulu. Braithwaite was then employed by the Department for Child Welfare run by the former London County Council, responsible for finding foster homes for homeless children. These experiences would also significantly inform Braithwaite’s writing, providing the plot to Paid Servant (1962). He also published A Kind of Homecoming (1962), a memoir of his time travelling around West Africa, and A Choice of Straws (1965), in which Braithwaite attempts to depict the psyche of adolescent white racists in the characters of Jack and Dave Bennett, two brothers who fatally stab a black man. His next novel, Reluctant Neighbours (1972), was set around conversations with a white passenger on a commuter train, with the latter’s offensive remarks drawing out the author’s personal history of struggle against bigotry. After the South African apartheid government lifted their ban on his books, Braithwaite visited the country, receiving the status of ‘honorary white’, which would become the name for his 1975 book recounting the experience. Braithwaite was the newly-independent Guyana’s first permanent representative to the United Nations in 1966 and, later, their ambassador to Venezuela. He also taught at numerous universities around the United States before settling in Washington, DC . He died in 2016, aged 104. Brigid Brophy was born in London in 1929. Her father was John Brophy, a Liverpool-born writer of Irish descent, and he encouraged her to read widely and write from an early age. In 1947 she gained a scholarship to St Hugh’s College, Oxford, to read Classics, but was sent down after an unspecified sexual misdemeanour during her fourth term. She began working as a typist. In 1953 she published a collection of short stories, The Crown Princess. Her first novel, Hackenfeller’s Ape, followed later that year, and is a book credited with initiating the animal liberation movement in Britain. In 1954 Brophy began an unconventional, joyful and enduring marriage with Michael Levey, who was then assistant keeper at the National Gallery. The couple had one daughter. Brophy’s writing career incorporated plays and non-fiction that reflected her range of interests in psychoanalysis, sexual liberation, art and opera. She was a fervent and articulate campaigner on a variety of issues, including anti-vivisection and homosexual rights. In

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1983 she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She continued to write for as long as she was able, and died in 1995. Roland Camberton is the penname of Henry Cohen. Very little is known about Cohen’s early life but he was born in Manchester in 1921 to Jewish, working-class parents. At some point in early childhood, he moved with his parents to the East End of London and attended Hackney Downs School until 1938. He was a wireless mechanic in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, during which time he began to write fiction. After the war, he had several short-term employments as a teacher, copywriter, translator, tutor and publisher’s traveller. He only published two novels, the first of which, Scamp (1950), won the Somerset Maugham Prize. His second novel, Rain on the Pavements, was published in 1951. He does not appear to have published any more fiction after this date, although he did work as a freelance journalist. He died in 1965 and is buried in Rainham Jewish Cemetery. Agatha Christie, née Miller, was born in Devon in 1890, the youngest of three children. Though her brother and sister were sent away to school, Agatha’s formal education was minimal. During the First World War she worked with the Voluntary Aid Detachment, and then in a dispensary. On Christmas Eve 1914 she married Archibald Christie, a young officer in the Royal Flying Corp, home on his first leave. She had submitted her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, to The Bodley Head, who eventually published it in America in 1920 (and in Britain the following year). It features a Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot (by 1938, she told a friend, she felt he had become ‘insufferable’). The couple’s daughter Rosalind was born in 1919. In 1926 Christie lost her mother and discovered her husband to be having an affair – the couple divorced in 1928. She married archaeology professor Max Mallowan in 1930, which also saw publication of Murder at the Vicarage, her tenth novel, and the first to feature Miss Jane Marple as detective. Christie continued to write well into her later years: she published more than seventy detective novels, and was an accomplished playwright. She died in 1976, and her work remains provocative today. James Courage was born in 1903 in Christchurch, New Zealand, and grew up on his family’s sheep farm near Amberley. He was educated at New Zealand’s oldest independent school, Christ’s College, before moving in 1923 to England where he completed a BA in English at St John’s College, Oxford. Courage spent most of his adult life in England, though many of his closest friends were fellow New Zealand émigrés, and he kept in touch with his home country’s literary scene. His first novel, One House, was published in 1933 by Victor Gollancz, but made little impact. His only staged play, Private History, about a sexual relationship between two boarding school pupils and their masters’ reaction to its discovery, played to packed houses at the Gate Theatre Studio off the Strand during its brief run in 1938. Having suffered severely from tuberculosis in the early 1930s, Courage was declared medically unfit at the outbreak of the Second World War, and served as a fire warden during London’s Blitz. Between 1940 and 1950 he worked for and

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then managed Wilson’s Book Shop in Hampstead. After the war Courage had numerous short stories published as well as seven novels, five of which were set in his native land. The Young Have Secrets (1954), which draws heavily on the author’s childhood experiences, received widespread praise in both England and New Zealand. His penultimate book, the London-set A Way of Love (1959), is often hailed as the first novel about homosexuality penned by a New Zealand writer. Its publication led to the collapse of Courage’s reputation in New Zealand, where it was banned. Courage died of a heart attack in 1963 in Hampstead. Rodney Garland was a penname first used by the Hungarian émigré Adam de Hegedus. De Hegedus was born in Budapest in 1906 into a wealthy and well-connected family. De Hegedus trained for a career in the Hungarian diplomatic service, but after a four-month stay in London in 1927 decided instead to move into journalism. During the late 1920s and 1930s he wrote for The Observer and other English and Hungarian periodicals while moving between Budapest, London and Paris, where he claimed to have befriended André Gide. He became a naturalized British citizen in 1935 and briefly served during the Second World War but was discharged after suffering a mental breakdown. De Hegedus wrote a number of short stories, opinion pieces and autobiographical sketches during the 1930s and 1940s. His sole critical and commercial success, however, was the novel The Heart in Exile, published by W.H. Allen in 1953 under the Garland pseudonym. While undoubtedly one of the most influential queer novels of the decade, its author was not personally in favour with those campaigning for the decriminalization of homosexuality: a thinly disguised version of de Hegedus appears in Peter Wildeblood’s A Way of Life (1956) in form of the pessimistic, secretive émigré author Waldemar van Ochs. A second novel, The Troubled Midnight, obviously inspired by the defections of the spies Burgess and Maclean, was published in 1954; de Hegedus himself had been of interest to the British security services since at least 1939. In 1956 W.H. Allen disclosed the identity of Rodney Garland and announced de Hegedus’s untimely death. (He is usually presumed to have committed suicide, but his death certificate states he died in 1955 in Westminster Hospital from acute adrenal failure.) Regardless, W.H. Allen continued to use the Garland moniker for another three novels published in the 1960s, the last of which, Sorcerer’s Broth (1966), features a homosexual plotline, and was written by another Hungarianborn author, Peter de Polnay (1906–84). Stella Gibbons was born on 5 January 1902 in Kentish Town in North London. Her family had Irish ancestry and her father, Telford, was a doctor. She was educated at home until she was thirteen and then attended North London Collegiate School where she first began to write stories, and later became the vice president of the school’s Senior Dramatic Club. At the age of twenty-one, she attended University College, London to study for a two-year diploma in Journalism which she completed in 1923. After university she worked for the Evening Standard and published several poems. Her first novel, Cold Comfort Farm, was published in 1932. It won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize and is still her most well-known work. In 1933 she married the actor and singer Allan Webb and they had one daughter,

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Laura, in 1935. During a long writing career she produced over twenty novels including Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm (1940), Westwood (1946), Here Be Dragons (1956) and Starlight (1967). She also published short-story collections, volumes of poetry and a children’s novel. Gibbons became a well-known figure in the London literary scene, often hosting literary tea parties in her Highgate home, where she lived from 1936 until her death in 1989. Martyn Goff was born in 1923, the son of a wealthy Russian immigrant fur trader. Goff was brought up in Hampstead and was educated at Clifton College, Bristol. He won a place to read English at Oxford, but instead joined the Royal Air Force and completed his war service. After being demobilized in 1946 Goff went on to establish three bookshops on England’s south coast, the first in St Leonard’s. Goff ’s debut novel, The Plaster Fabric (1957), featured a young homosexual bookseller as its protagonist. Another eight novels followed, including The Youngest Director (1961), which Angus Wilson claimed helped change public opinion around homosexuality. He also wrote several works of non-fiction on topics such as record collecting and Regency architecture. Goff went on to become a significant figure in British publishing. He was director of the National Book League (now Booktrust) throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and led numerous campaigns to promote books and literacy. In the same period he also reviewed fiction for the Daily Telegraph and the Evening Standard and had his own weekly broadcast on LBC radio. His most influential role, however, was to oversee the running of the Booker Prize from 1970 to 2006, an institution he helped to turn into a major annual media event that has reshaped literary fiction publishing in the UK . He served on several Arts Council committees and on the executive committee of PEN . Goff was appointed OBE in 1977 and CBE in 2005. He died in in London in 2015. William Golding (1911–91) was born in Newquay, Cornwall, but grew up in Wiltshire, where his father was a science teacher at Marlborough Grammar School. After attending the same school as a pupil, Golding went on to Oxford in 1930 and graduated with a degree in English Literature in 1934. Eventually, Golding became a teacher at, first, Maidstone Grammar School, and then, following active wartime service in the navy, Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury, where he taught English until 1961. The manuscript of his first novel, Lord of the Flies, was rejected several times before eventual publication by Faber and Faber in 1954. The novel famously describes what happens to a group of schoolboys stranded on an uninhabited island in the tropics. Golding’s subsequent novels The Inheritors (1955) – concerning the clash between Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens – and Pincher Martin (1956) – the narrative of the thoughts of a drowning sailor – cemented his reputation as a writer exploring moral and existential issues in depth and with imagination. His later work, including The Spire (1964), remained popular, culminating in his sea trilogy To the Ends of the Earth, which includes Rites of Passage (1980), which won the Booker Prize, Close Quarters (1987) and Fire Down Below (1989). In 1983, Golding won the Nobel Prize for Literature and in 1988 he was knighted.

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Attia Hosain was born in Lucknow, India, in 1913. Her education combined an English liberal schooling with that of a traditional Muslim household, where she learned Persian, Urdu and Arabic. In 1933 she was the first woman to graduate from the feudal, talukdari families into which she was born. She was influenced by the nationalist movement and the Progressive Writers’ Group during the 1930s, and became a journalist, broadcaster and fiction writer. She remained an ardent socialist all her life. When India became independent in 1947, she was in England with her husband and two children. He returned to India, but she chose to remain, supporting her family by presenting her own woman’s programme on the BBC Eastern service for many years, and undertaking many other radio, television and theatre jobs. Phoenix Fled, a collection of short stories, was published in 1953, and her novel, Sunlight on a Broken Column, in 1961: both are characterized by a graceful prose style that reflects the ornate traditions of Persian and Urdu literature. Her own harshest critic, she destroyed much of what she wrote, but her working life was cosmopolitan and politically engaged to the end. Hosain died in 1998. George Lamming was born in 1927 to a working-class single-parent family in Carrington Village, Barbados, formerly part of a large sugar farm under the British plantation system. In his childhood, Lamming witnessed economic insecurity and Barbados’ riotous labour rebellion of 1937. He won a scholarship to the prestigious Combermere High School where teacher Frank Collymore, also the founding editor of pioneering Caribbean literary journal, BIM, nurtured his talent. Many of these experiences from Lamming’s youth and childhood would be immortalized in his semi-autobiographical novel In the Castle of My Skin (1953), which won him the Somerset Maugham Award as well as the acclaim of figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Richard Wright. Lamming moved to Britain in 1950 (travelling on the same ship as Trinidadian author Sam Selvon), initially doing factory work before being taken on as a broadcaster for the BBC Colonial Service. Lamming won the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1954 and, in the same year, published his second novel, The Emigrants, recounting the stories of recently-arrived Caribbean migrants to London. Lamming’s later novels also address colonialism and decolonization, with Of Age and Innocence (1958), Season of Adventure (1960) and Water With Berries (1972) all centring on the fictional Caribbean island of San Cristobal and exploring themes of anti-colonial resistance, the colonized psyche and its relation to empire. Lamming also published The Pleasures of Exile (1960), a collection of essays in which he reinterprets The Tempest to define the position of Caribbean peoples in the post-colonial world. In 1967, he entered academia as a writer-in-residence and lecturer at the University of the West Indies, later taking positions as visiting professor at institutions such as the University of Pennsylvania and Brown University. The University of the West Indies also hosts the George Lamming Pedagogical Centre, where Lamming has his own office and is in residence weekly. Marghanita Laski was born in London in 1915, the eldest child of six siblings, two of them adopted. Her early life in Manchester was greatly influenced by her maternal grandfather Moses Gaster, a scholar and chief rabbi of Sephardi Jews in England, though

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before going to university she renounced the Jewish faith and declared herself an atheist. She read English Language and Literature at Oxford, graduating in 1936 with a thirdclass degree. She married John Howard in 1937: he became a publisher and was the founder of the Cresset Press. They were to have a son and a daughter. Her first novel, Love on the Supertax, was published in 1944, and was followed by numerous novels, including Little Boy Lost (1942), The Village (1952) and The Victorian Chaise-Longue (1953). During the 1960s Laski moved away from fiction, producing a range of thoughtful and thoughtprovoking works, often focused upon religious issues, such as the 1961 Ecstasy. She was perhaps best known as a broadcaster, and served on the committee of the Arts Council. Yet perhaps her most outstanding (and selfless) contribution to culture was her role as a voluntary reader for the supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, which she began in 1958. By the publication of the final volume in 1986 she had supplied at least quarter of a million illustrative examples to the project. Laski died in 1988. Doris Lessing, née Tayler, was born in Persia (now Iran) in 1919 to British parents but grew up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) after her parents moved there to run a farm. She left her convent school at the age of fourteen and her home soon after to become a nursemaid. In 1937, she moved to Salisbury (now Harare) to become a telephone operator and subsequently married and had two children. After her first marriage ended in divorce in 1943, she became involved with the communist politics of the Left Book Club and there met her second husband Gottfried Lessing. When that marriage ended in 1949, she moved to Britain. Lessing’s first novel, The Grass is Singing (1950), dealt with racial politics in Rhodesia and had an immediate impact. The Golden Notebook (1962) marked an important moment in the post-war rise of feminist consciousness. In the 1970s, similarly to J.G. Ballard, but probably more influenced by R.D. Laing’s critique of conventional psychiatry, she chose to focus on ‘inner space’ in novels such as Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) and Memoirs of a Survivor (1977). Shikasta (1979) was the first of five books in the overtly science-fictional Canopus of Argos series (1979–83), which was a major factor in Lessing’s award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. While novels such as The Good Terrorist (1985) were seen by some as evidence of a ‘return to realism’, more recent work such as The Cleft (2007) and Alfred and Emily (2008) demonstrate speculative and fantastical elements. Colin MacInnes was born in 1914 in London to singer, James Campbell McInnes, and novelist, Angela Thirkell, with Rudyard Kipling his maternal great-uncle. After his parents separated, he moved with his mother to Australia in 1920, returning to the UK ten years later. MacInnes served in the British Intelligence Corps during the Second World War and worked in occupied Germany immediately after, drawing on these experiences for his first novel, To the Victors the Spoils (1950). Back in London he became a great enthusiast of the city, living in various locations befitting his bohemian lifestyle from ‘a sinister old slum’ in Brompton where ‘the ground-floor tenant was a cordial prostitute’ to one-room flats in areas as diverse as Soho, Pimlico and Spitalfields. These experiences would inform his trilogy of London novels: City of Spades (1957), following the interwoven experiences of

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a Nigerian student and British civil servant in the city’s burgeoning black cultural scene; Absolute Beginners (1959), in which a trendy teenage bohème recounts his adventures of West London slums, the jazz scene and the 1958 Notting Hill Riots; and Mr Love and Justice (1960), where a novice pimp and plain-clothes officer find their lives intermingling. Absolute Beginners would also be adapted into a film starring David Bowie in 1986 and then a stage play in 2007. MacInnes was also an accomplished essayist, publishing a collection of journalistic articles in England, Half English (1961), as well as London: City of Any Dream (1962), a panegyric to his hometown; Sweet Saturday Night (1967), a history of British music hall; and Loving Them Both (1973), a study of bisexuality drawing on his own experiences as a bisexual man. In the mid–1970s he left London for the Kent coast where he died of cancer of the oesophagus in April 1976, aged sixty-one. Ngaio Marsh was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1895, the only child of a bank clerk and immigrant from England, and an amateur actress and New Zealander of longer standing. Her Maori name (pronounced ‘Nyo’) denotes, amongst other things, a sturdy native coastal tree which, in legend, also grows on the moon. Marsh studied painting, but joined a professional Shakespeare company, touring Australasia in 1919–20 as an actress. She continued to act and to paint, and began writing and producing plays. From 1928 to 1932 she visited London, and it was there that she produced her first detective novel, A Man Lay Dead, featuring Chief Detective-Inspector Roderick Alleyn, CID. Published in 1934, it was followed by thirty others. Marsh divided her time between England and detective fiction, and New Zealand and the theatre, where she directed, wrote and taught. She is most revered in her native land for her work in theatre, and herself considered this her most ‘valuable contribution’. She died in 1982 in her childhood home overlooking Christchurch. Her private life remains obscure. Gladys Mitchell (1901–83) was a distinguished and prolific writer of detective novels. After her first, Speedy Death (1929), she published at least one book per year for the rest of her life. This novel introduced Mrs Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, detective, ‘psychiatric consultant to the Home Office’, and a feature of all the crime novels written under Mitchell’s name. Mitchell studied at Goldsmiths’ College and later University College London, and gained a diploma in European history in 1926, also qualifying as a teacher. During most of her career she was a dedicated teacher of history, athletics, English and Spanish at a number of girls’ schools in Middlesex. Though she is counted amidst the chief practitioners of the golden age tradition of detective fiction, she was not afraid to turn the genre on its head, unashamedly mixing comedy, parody and horror. She also produced historical fiction under the pseudonym Stephen Hockaby, and as ‘Malcolm Torrie’ she explored a lifelong fascination with archaeology and history through the character Timothy Herring, who combined his detective work with a role as Secretary for the Society of the Preservation of Historic Buildings. Naomi Mitchison, who was born in 1897 and died in 1999, was the author of over seventy books published across eight decades and a central figure in British, especially Scottish,

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literary circles of the twentieth century. Initially raised and schooled with boys, she was educated at home by governesses from the age of twelve but the fact that the family lived in Oxford and were connected to the intellectual elite meant that she still gained an unusually good education for her gender at that time. In particular, a love for the classics informed a range of early historical novels from her first, The Conquered (1923), set in Roman Gaul, through The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931), set in and around ancient Greece, and up to The Blood of the Martyrs (1939) set in Nero’s Rome. We Have Been Warned (1935), a dystopian account of the failure of the leftist politics of the decade to address the reality of class and gender oppression in Britain, climaxed with a violent fascist counter-revolution. From 1939, Mitchison lived at Carradale, a Scottish country estate, where she kept a wartime diary for Mass-Observation (published in 1985 as Among You Taking Notes . . .). Notable post-war works include a Scottish historical novel, The Bull Calves (1947), Travel Light (1952) and Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962). The sister of the eminent geneticist, J.B.S. Haldane, Mitchison was the dedicatee of James Watson’s account of his role in the discovery of the structure of DNA , The Double Helix (1968). Her later novels include two genetics-informed complex investigations of the pursuit of new ways of living in a world threatened by environmental disaster, Solution Three (1975) and Not By Bread Alone (1983). Penelope Mortimer, née Fletcher, was born in 1918, the daughter of a Church of England clergyman who lost his faith early in his career, but continued to serve as a vicar. She studied to become a journalist at University College, and married Charles Dimont, himself a journalist, in 1937, publishing her first novel, Johanna, as Penelope Dimont in 1947. The couple had two daughters. Her novel was unsuccessful, but she persevered, and was writing too for the New Yorker, and as an agony aunt, ‘Ann Temple’, for the Daily Mail. In 1949 the Dimonts divorced. Penelope had a daughter in 1945 with the scientist Kenneth Harrison, and another in 1948 with the novelist and playwright Randall Swingler. In 1949 she married writer and barrister John Mortimer. They were to have two children. Her novel-writing career continued into the 1980s with books that were unflinching in their analysis of men, women and their relationships. She remained an incisive and productive journalist, and, after a bizarre commissioning process, produced a biography of the Queen Mother that ultimately questioned the point of her majesty’s life. She died in 1999. Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919. Her parents moved to London while she was still a baby. She studied Classics at Oxford, and between 1944 and 1946 she worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in Europe. She went on to study philosophy as a postgraduate student at Oxford, and eventually became a fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford. She published essays on philosophy and a monograph on Jean-Paul Sartre. Her first novel, Under the Net, was published in 1954. She went on to publish over twenty more novels, including The Black Prince (1973) and The Book and the Brotherhood (1987), and several more works of philosophy. Her novel The Sea, The Sea (1978) won the Booker Prize, and she won numerous other awards for her fiction. She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in

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1987. Murdoch developed Alzheimer’s disease in the mid–1990s, and the account by her husband, John Bayley, of her illness was adapted as a film, Iris (dir. Richard Eyre, 2001). She died in 1999. V.S. Naipaul, born in Chaguanas, Trinidad, in 1932, is arguably the Caribbean’s most internationally celebrated author. Of East Indian heritage, his grandparents had come to Trinidad as indentured servants while his father, Seepersad Naipaul, was a journalist for the Trinidad Guardian. In 1939, Naipaul’s family moved to the capital where he attended the illustrious Queen’s Royal College and, upon graduation, won a scholarship to Oxford University. In 1954, he moved to London and became a presenter for the BBC ’s Caribbean Voices radio programme. His first novel, Miguel Street (1959), depicts characters from Naipaul’s childhood in a series of interrelated vignettes. However, Naipaul’s publisher, reluctant to publish what seemed a collection of short stories from an unknown author, instructed him to write a more straightforward novel. Naipaul duly produced The Mystic Masseur (1957), following a frustrated writer’s rise to political power via a career as a mystic, and The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), covering the buffoonish chicanery of rural elections steeped in ethnic tension. His next novel, A House for Mr Biswas (1961), drew elements from his father’s life to analyse Trinidad’s gradual decolonization and was Naipaul’s first to gain worldwide acclaim. Naipaul’s extensive travels also inspired numerous works: The Middle Passage (1962), from his time in the Caribbean and South America, An Area of Darkness (1964), about his time in India, as well as the novel In a Free State (1971), inspired by his travels in Africa. A controversial figure drawing criticism from the likes of Edward Said and George Lamming, Naipaul has won numerous awards in his career, including the 1971 Booker Prize for In a Free State and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, as well as being knighted in 1989. He currently lives in Wiltshire, England. Barbara Pym was born in Oswestry, Shropshire, in 1913. She was educated at the girl’s boarding school Huyton College, Liverpool, and St Hilda’s College, Oxford, where she studied English Literature. After graduation, she lived with her parents as she began writing novels, and then moved to London, to a bedsit adjoining that of her younger sister Hilary. The two would keep a home together for the rest of Barbara’s life, barring her time in the WRNS from 1943–6, when she served in Britain and Naples. She then began work at the International African Institute in London, and from 1958 was the Assistant Editor of the Institute’s journal Africa. Pym’s first novel, Some Tame Gazelle, which had been written during the 1930s, was published in 1950. Her first six novels sold steadily but unspectacularly, but by the early 1960s the policy of the new Senior Editor at Jonathan Cape, Tom Maschler – one that serviced both fashion and profit – resulted in the round rejection of An Unsuitable Attachment when she submitted it in 1963. Fourteen years without publication followed. Pym continued to work at the Institute, offering her work to twenty-one publishers, sometimes under an assumed name, always unsuccessfully. She retired in 1974 to live in Oxfordshire. In 1977 a special edition of the Times Literary Supplement named her one of the nation’s most underrated novelists – the only author to

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be nominated twice, by Philip Larkin (an enduring friend and supporter) and Lord David Cecil. A renaissance of her work began, with Quartet in Autumn, published the same year, nominated for the Booker Prize. The Sweet Dove Died followed in 1978, and A Few Green Leaves was published posthumously. Pym died of breast cancer in 1980, at the age of sixty-six. Mary Renault was born Eileen Mary Challans in 1905 in Forest Gate, Essex. She was educated at St Hugh’s College, Oxford and in 1933 began training as a nurse at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford. During her training she met Julie Mullard, who would become her lifelong partner. Several of her books drew on her experiences of nursing, including her debut novel, the hospital romance Purposes of Love (1939), and The Charioteer (1953), which was informed by her treatment of Dunkirk evacuees at the Winford Emergency Hospital in Bristol. The latter novel is significant for its frank focus on male homosexual relationships, although her 1944 novel The Friendly Young Ladies, meant as a light-hearted riposte to Radclyffe Hall’s landmark novel The Well of Loneliness (1928), centres on a cohabiting female couple. In 1948 Renault won the MGM award for best novel of the year for her fourth book Return to Night. The substantial prize money enabled Renault and Mullard to emigrate to South Africa, where they lived for the rest of their lives. The couple settled first in Durban, where they enjoyed a more liberal social climate than that to which they had been accustomed in England. In the 1950s Renault and Mullard both joined Black Sash, the nonviolent white women’s organization which campaigned against apartheid; their activism necessitated their relocation to Cape Town. The Charioteer was Renault’s last work of contemporary fiction, after which she would go on to write eight novels set in the classical world, as well as a biography of Alexander the Great. Although Renault was not a trained classicist, her historical novels received acclaim for their rich detail, and attracted large readerships. Many of Renault’s historical novels focus on male homosexual love, rendered in noble and heroic terms. However, she was resistant to being labelled as a gay writer. Renault died in Cape Town in 1983. Sam Selvon was born in 1923, the sixth of seven children, to East Indian parents in San Fernando, Trinidad. Selvon began writing while working as a telegraph operator with the West Indian branch of the Royal Naval Reserve during the Second World War. After the war, he moved to Port of Spain to work as a journalist for the Trinidad Guardian, writing short stories under a variety of pseudonyms. He arrived in Britain in 1950 (on the same boat as Barbadian author George Lamming), doing a myriad of jobs from sweeping floors and factory labour to working as a clerk at the Indian Embassy, all the while writing in his spare time. His first novel, A Brighter Sun (1952), explores the prejudices and mutual distrust between East Indian and Creole communities in 1930s Trinidad. While his Trinidad-set novels often centred around the nation’s East Indian community, most notably Turn Again Tiger (1958) about the struggles of an East Indian bookkeeper against societal racism and his father’s stifling traditionalism, he also became famous for his novels depicting the experiences of Caribbean migrants in London such as The Lonely Londoners (1956), following the hardships and roguish misadventures of a group of West

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Indians in their new home; The Housing Lark (1965), on the difficulties Caribbean migrants faced finding adequate and reasonably-priced accommodation; and Moses Ascending (1975), in which The Lonely Londoners narrator returns as the landlord of a derelict Shepherd’s Bush house. Selvon’s novels are typified by an irreverent humour which nonetheless evinces his deep sympathy for the plights of his characters. Selvon won numerous awards in his career, including two Guggenheim Fellowships (1954 and 1968), and held various academic posts. In 1994, during a trip to his native Trinidad, Selvon died of a respiratory failure at Piarco International Airport, aged 70. Alan Sillitoe was born in Nottingham in 1928. He came from a working-class background and his father was a factory worker at the local Raleigh Bicycle Company. Sillitoe left school at fourteen and joined his father at the Raleigh where he worked for four years before joining the Air Training Corps and then the Royal Air Force. He served in Malaya as a wireless operator before returning to Britain, where he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. It was while he was hospitalized for the condition that he began writing fiction. After leaving hospital he was sent to Mallorca for convalescence and it was there he worked on what was to be his first novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. This was published in 1958 and was followed in 1959 by the collection of short stories The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. It was also in Mallorca that Sillitoe met the poet Ruth Fainlight whom he married in 1959. Sillitoe was associated with the Angry Young Man during this period, although it was a description he always rejected. During a long writing career, he produced twenty-three novels including Key to the Door (1961), which continued his narrative of the Seaton family of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and is recognized to be his most autobiographical work of fiction; Travels in Nihilon (1972); and The Storyteller (1979). He also produced more short story collections, plays, travel writings, children’s books and several volumes of poetry including The Rats and Other Poems (1960). One of his last novels, The Birthday (2001), returns to the Seaton family and describes their experience of growing old. Sillitoe died in 2010 and is buried in Highgate Cemetery. Although sometimes mistakenly identified as a working-class writer, John Sommerfield (1908–91), was the son of journalist and editor, Vernon Sommerfield, and attended University College School in Hampstead alongside Stephen Spender, who is mercilessly parodied as ‘Mark Pringle’ in Sommerfield’s last novel, The Imprinted (1977). At the age of sixteen, Sommerfield left school and worked in various jobs, notably as a carpenter’s labourer at the Scene Shop on the Old Kent Road, before going to sea as a dishwasher with the United Food Freight Lines, sailing between New York, Buenos Aires, the West Indies and Liverpool. This experience informs the second half of his first novel, They Die Young (1930). After joining the Communist Party in the early 1930s, he wrote the two books for which he is best known: the experimental proletarian novel, May Day (1936), and his memoir of fighting alongside his friend John Cornford in the defence of republican Madrid against Franco’s forces in late 1936, Volunteer in Spain (1937). On his return from the Spanish Civil War, he was recruited as the director of fieldwork

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for Mass-Observation’s ‘Worktown’ study in Bolton, where he researched and wrote their book The Pub and the People (1943). Trouble in Porter Street (1938; revised 1954) was a propagandist novella about a rent strike, which sold over 80,000 copies. His short stories written before and during the Second World War, many for Penguin New Writing, were collected as The Survivors (1947). In the post-war period he wrote screenplays for a number of documentary films, including Waverley Steps (1947), and continued to publish novels: The Adversaries (1952), The Inheritance (1956), and North West Five (1960). As part of the semi-autonomous literary wing of the Communist Party, alongside other intellectuals such as Jack Lindsay, Edgell Rickword and Randall Swingler, Sommerfield played his part in turn on the Left Review collective in the 1930s, in various writers’ groups such as the Ralph Fox Group of the 1930s and the Realist Writers’ Group launched in early 1940, and on the editorial commission of Our Time in the late 1940s; before leaving the Party in 1956. Muriel Spark (née Camberg) was born in Edinburgh in 1918 to a Scottish Jewish father and an English Christian mother. She and her brother attended James Gillespie’s, a small, fee-paying school, where Muriel flourished under the charismatic Christina Kay, whom she later immortalized in her sixth and most famous novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). She left Edinburgh in 1937 for Southern Rhodesia, aged nineteen, to marry Sydney (Solly) Spark, a schoolteacher. They had met at a dance in Edinburgh, and he had gone on ahead to take up a job. He was thirteen years her senior, and in 1938 their only child was born in Bulawayo. By then Solly had become very unstable, and the marriage had broken down. Spark worked to support herself and her son, eventually affording passage from South Africa to Liverpool in 1944. Her son Robin joined her from boarding school the following year. Living in London, she became General Secretary of The Poetry Society, edited The Poetry Review (somewhat controversially) from 1947–9, and wrote studies of Mary Shelley, John Masefield and the Brontë sisters. In 1952 she published her first book of poetry, but it was the award of the Observer Christmas short story prize in 1951 that finally inspired her to write fiction full-time. Her first published novel, The Comforters (1957), was written three years after Spark converted to Roman Catholicism and the novel was inspired by her studies on the Book of Job. Between the late 1950s and the mid–1970s, Spark published close to a novel a year, plus dozens of short stories, plays and essays; her work always ludic, experimental and freighted with philosophical and theological questions. She lived in New York and, from 1967, in Italy, dying in 2006 at home in Tuscany. David Storey was born in 1933 in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, the third son of a mineworker who was determined that his sons should not follow him down the pit. David went to grammar school, and to then to Slade School of Fine Art in London, which his father insisted he fund himself. This he did, by signing with Leeds Rugby League Club, and playing for their A-team for four seasons in the early 1950s with special dispensation to commute to London every week, a privilege that set him apart, cruelly, from his teammates. This divided life proved hard to bear, and Storey gave up football to concentrate on

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Biographies of Writers

painting and, increasingly, writing. Storey married Barbara Hamilton in 1956, with whom he had four children. His first novel, This Sporting Life, was published in 1960. His 1963 film adaptation of the novel initiated a long collaboration with director Lindsay Anderson, initially at the Royal Court and then, later, the National Theatre. Storey produced fiction, plays and poetry across a prolific fifty year career. He died in 2017. Elizabeth Taylor, née Coles, was born in Reading in 1912, and educated at the Abbey School. In her twenties she joined the Communist Party, later transferring her support to the Labour Party, of which she remained a lifetime supporter. She married John Taylor, the owner of a confectionary business, in 1936, and the couple had a son and a daughter. Taylor’s first novel, At Mrs Lippincote’s, was published in 1945, and she produced twelve novels and four short story collections before her death by cancer in 1975. The milieu of Taylor’s work is almost exclusively middle class and middle-English. Coupled with her notorious shyness, this led to a lengthy under-appreciation of her scrupulous stylistics and unsparing social critique which is finally being critically redressed. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State in 1892 to an English family. But from the age of three, he grew up in England following his father’s death. Orphaned by the age of twelve, Tolkien attended King Edward’s School, Birmingham, before going on to graduate in English Literature and Language at Oxford. After completing his degree in 1915, he enlisted and was commissioned as an officer in the Lancashire Fusiliers. In 1916, he married Edith Bratt before shipping out to France in June, where he served at the Battle of the Somme. The courage of the ordinary soldiers he saw was to prove the inspiration for Samwise Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings and the rain-sodden mud was to become the ‘Dead Marshes’ before the gates of Mordor. In October 1916, Tolkien contracted trench fever, necessitating his return to England. During his convalescence he began creating the mythology of Middle Earth and the stories, such as that of Beren and Lúthien, which would subsequently be posthumously published in The Silmarillion (1977) and numerous further volumes edited by his son, Christopher Tolkien. Following the First World War, Tolkien worked in academia at the University of Leeds before becoming Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford in 1925. The Hobbit (1937) originated as stories told to his children and its success led to demands for a sequel, which eventually manifested after years of writing as the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings (1954–5). After retiring from academia in 1959, Tolkien continued to work on his mythology but also published poems and stories such as The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962) and Smith of Wootton Major (1967). He died in 1973, two years after the death of Edith. John Wain (1925–94) was a novelist, poet, essayist, literary critic, journalist, radio producer, dramatist, cultural commentator and biographer. He was born and grew up in Stoke-on-Trent. He attended Newcastle-under-Lyme High School in the area before entering St John’s College, Oxford where he gained a First in 1946 and an MA in 1950. While at Oxford he met and became friends with Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin. Wain

Biographies of Writers

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was a central figure in the literary establishment in the 1950s and 1960s, and was at various times associated with the Movement Poets and the Angry Young Men. His first novel Hurry on Down (1953) in many ways established the trend for novels of the 1950s that focused a critique of contemporary constructions of class through the perspective of a disaffected young man. Wain produced several more novels in a long writing career including The Contenders (1958), Strike the Father Dead (1962), and Young Shoulders, which won the Whitbread Prize in 1982. In addition to his fiction, he produced several volumes of poetry including A Word Carved on a Sill (1956), and works of literary criticism including Essays on Literature and Ideas (1963) and Arnold Bennett (1967). He was also an academic for large periods of his adult life, and worked as a lecturer in English at the University of Reading in the 1950s and in various posts at Oxford including Professor of Poetry in the 1970s. Wain died in Oxford in 1994. Angus Wilson (1913–91) was born in Bexhill, East Sussex, and subsequently educated at Westminster School and Oxford. In 1937 he became a librarian at the British Museum, where he was to remain until 1955 with the exception of his wartime work translating Italian naval codes at Bletchley Park. It was after his return to the museum that he met his lifelong partner, Tony Garrett. After the publication of short story collections The Wrong Set (1949) and Such Darling Dodos (1950), his first novel Hemlock and After appeared in 1952 and depicted aspects of homosexual life in contemporary post-war London including a fairly open plea for decriminalization. Following Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956), a novel that ostensibly revolves around an archaeological hoax but is also concerned with the condition of England, The Old Men at the Zoo (1961) was an example of the kind of satirical science fiction that Wilson would call for critically as a response to the increasing inability of the post-war social novel to represent the reality of modern life. Late Call (1964) imaginatively brought together diverse generations in a new town; while No Laughing Matter (1967) was a family saga narrated in a manner reminiscent of Virginia Woolf ’s The Years (1937). From 1966 to 1978, Wilson was Professor of English Literature at the University of East Anglia, where he played a key role in setting up the influential MA in Creative Writing in 1970. His last novel, Setting the World on Fire, was published in 1980, the year he was knighted. He was President of the Royal Society of Literature from 1982 to 1988. Colin Wilson was born in Leicester in 1931, the son of Arthur and Annetta Wilson. He attended Gateway Secondary School where he initially developed a passion for the sciences. His interests, however, soon turned to literature and, like the hero of his 1961 novel Adrift in Soho, he became a devotee of George Bernard Shaw. It was at this time that he began to write stories, plays and essays. He undertook his national service in the Royal Air Force from 1949, but soon left and had a number of jobs before moving to London with his first wife whom he had married in 1951. Wilson continued to lead a rather precarious life during the early 1950s and soon split with his wife. He travelled a lot and spent periods in various parts of the UK and Europe. He married his second wife Joy Stewart in the mid–1950s and the couple had three children. His breakthrough in terms

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Biographies of Writers

of writing came with the publication of The Outsider in 1956, a work that examines the outsider figure in a number of literary and philosophical works. This book captured something of the zeitgeist of the mid–1950s and the ‘outsider’ became a figure that was popularized in contemporary culture. He produced a wide range of works during his career including fiction, biography, literary criticism and works on the occult. Wilson was a truly prolific writer who by the time he died in 2013 had published over twenty novels and over 100 works of non-fiction. John Wyndham, the son of a barrister, was born John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris in Warwickshire and educated at the relatively liberal Bedales School in Hampshire. He began writing SF stories in the 1930s and, as John Beynon, published two early novels, The Secret People (1935) and Planet Plane (1936). During the Second World War he worked for the Ministry of Information, before serving in the army with the Royal Corps of Signals. His wartime experience clearly affected Wyndham because his fiction changed from space opera to work that was predominantly concerned with the needs of people to respond to some form of extreme disaster and deal with the trauma that arose from it. Fame came with The Day of the Triffids (1951), which anticipates the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s. Wyndham’s ambivalence about the prospect of such widereaching social change is clear from subsequent novels such as The Chrysalids (1955) and The Midwich Cuckoos (1957). During the 1960s and after, Wyndham’s critical reputation, if not his popularity, waned, as he came to be seen as no more than a purveyor of cosy catastrophes. However, over recent years this decline has been reversed and the archiving of his papers at the University of Liverpool has led to a renewed interest and even the publication of the hitherto unknown novel, Plan for Chaos (2009).

Index Absolute Beginners (MacInnes, 1959) 16, 166, 132–3, 137, 169–71, 177, 178, 180–3, 185–6, 194, 198, 199 Adrift in Soho (Wilson, 1961) 177, 192, 195–7, 199 A Kind of Loving (Barstow, 1960) 37, 81 Aldiss, Brian 39, 43 aleatory 254–5 Allen, Walter 133 Allingham, Marjorie 16, 207, 277 Albert Campion (detective character) 206–7, 214 and Christianity 229 and Essex 212–13 Hide My Eyes (1958) 215 The Beckoning Lady (1955) 206, 213, 214–15 The Tiger in the Smoke (1952) 208–13, 215, 224, 230 Allsop, Kenneth 6–7, 19, 32, 48n, 57, 242, 246, 252, 253 The Angry Decade (1958) 4, 19, 32, 242, 246, 252 Althusser, Louis 187 Amis, Kingsley 6, 7, 16, 30, 35, 38, 39, 44, 235, 246, 247, 248, 251, 252, 277–8 as Angry Young Man 57, 76 Jim Dixon (character), 249–50, 251 Lucky Jim (1954) 29–30, 35, 53, 237, 247, 248–9, 251, 252 New Maps of Hell (1961) 39, 44 Anderson, Nels The Hobo (1923) 194 Angry Young Men 6, 56, 177, 195, 201, 235, 246, 253, 256 as adolescent 71 as commercial label 57, 58, 76 Colin Wilson 195 John Osborne 81–2 anthropology Audrey Richards 82–3, 98, 101

British social anthropology 90, 93 Bronislaw Malinowski 82, 87, 89, 90, 98, 103, 107–8 Clifford Geertz 101, 102, 103 E. B. Tylor 108 and feminism 82, 98, 108 and kinship 82 ‘Manchester School’ 93 Margaret Mead 104 participant observation 98 study of culture 81 ‘the anthropologist as hero’ 84 Appadurai, Arjun 88 Arderner, Edwin and Shirley 83, 89, 108 Armstrong, Louis 188 Arnold, Matthew 10–11 Ashcroft, Bill 200 Atlee, Clement 3–7 Auden, W. H. 26, 27, 28 on Agatha Christie 206 ‘Age of Anxiety’ 206, 207, 230 autoethnography 213 Bakari, Imruh 198 Bakhtin, Mikhail 200 ballad and blues 179, 197 Ballard, J.G. 40, 43, 47–8 Crash (1973) 48 The Wind from Nowhere (1962) 39, 40 Bannon, Ann 132 Bartlett, Neil 115 Baudelaire, Charles 192 Bauer, Heike and Matt Cook 114 Queer 1950s 114 Baxter, Ernest Look Down in Mercy (1951) 131 Beat generation 194–5 beatnik(s) 177, 192–4, 195–6, 201 Beckett, Samuel 252, 253 Waiting for Godot (1955) 252 Watt (1953) 252

293

294 Belafonte, Harry 198 Belletto, Steven 243, 244 Bengry, Justin 118 Bentley, Nick 57, 61 Benton, Jill 47 Berger, John Ways of Seeing (1972) 86 Bergonzi, Bernard 240 Betjeman, John 111 Beveridge Report (1942) 238 and housewives 94, 96 Beyond the Fringe 7 Bingham, John 17n bohemia, bohemians 178, 180, 192–7, 201 Boulez, Pierre 255, 256 Bourdieu, Pierre 184, 249 In Other Words: Essays towards a Reflexive Sociology (1990) 250 The Algerians (1962) 251 The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society (1993) 251 Bowlby, John Childcare and the Growth of Love (1953) 104 Braine, John 19 Braithwaite, E. R. 16, 141, 153–5, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 164, 168, 278 To Sir With Love (1959) 153–5 Brake, Mike 190 Brecht, Bertolt 85 Brexit 1, 172 Brickhill, Paul The Great Escape (1950) 4 Britain Revisited (Harrisson, 1960) 36 British Cultural Studies 10–14 Brophy, Brigid 15, 115, 278–9 fictional style 103 ‘His Wife Survived Him’ (1953) 101–3 The King of a Rainy Country (1956) 132, 133, 135 Brooker, Peter 192–3 Bryher (Winifred Ellerman) The Player’s Boy (1953) 130–1 Bürger, Peter 258 Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) 258 Burgess, Anthony 43 A Clockwork Orange (1962) 39 Burroughs, William 43

Index Butler Act (1944) 246, 247, 248 Buzard, James 84, 213 Cage, John 255 Calder, Angus 4–5 The Myth of the Blitz (1991), 3, 40 Calder, Jenni 45 calypso 177, 178, 180, 197–201 in The Lonely Londoners (Selvon, 1956) 198–201 Camberton, Roland 279 Scamp (1950) 56, 177, 178, 192–7 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND ) 179 Camus, Albert 195 L’Étranger (1942) 197 Carey, John 245 The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992) 245 Caribbean Voices (BBC Radio) 146, 155, 161 Carpenter, Edward 135 Carpenter, Humphrey 7, 31 The Angry Young Men (2003) 31 Carter, Angela 48 Carter, Martin 141 Casino Royale (Fleming, 1953) 243 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS ) 177, 178, 182 Chicago Rhythm Kings 188 Chicago School 194 Christie, Agatha 16, 207, 215–26, 279 A Caribbean Mystery (1964) 217 A Daughter’s A Daughter (as Mary Westmacott, 1953) 218 After the Funeral (1953) 213 A Holiday for Murder (1938) 224 A Murder is Announced (1950) 220–6 And Then There Were None (1939) 224 Appointment With Death (1938) 219 A Pocket Full of Rye (1953) 218 At Bertram’s Hotel (1965) 217–18 Cat among the Pigeons (1959) 214, 218, 220 and Christianity 229 and the Cold War 219, 225 Curtain (1975) 223, 224 critical reinterpretation of 205 Dead Man’s Folly (1956) 213, 216, 219

Index Destination Unknown (1954) 219 ethnic minority characters 219 Funerals are Fatal (1953) 218, 219 and gender 218 Hercule Poirot (detective character) 206, 207–8, 213–14, 216, 218–19 Hickory Dickory Dock (1954) 219 and lesbian sexuality 223 Miss Marple (detective character) 206, 216–18, 221–2, 223 Mrs McGinty’s Dead (1952) 213, 216, 218, 220 Murder at the Vicarage (1930) 217 Murder in Mesopotamia (1936) 219 Murder on the Orient Express (1934) 224 Ordeal by Innocence (1958) 220 The 4:50 From Paddington (1957) 220 The Burden (as Mary Westmacott, 1956) 218 The Hollow (1946) 224 The Mousetrap (1952) 227 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) 224 They Came to Baghdad (1951) 210, 211, 216, 219 They Do It With Mirrors (1952) 217, 218 Christopher, John 40 The Death of Grass (1956) 7, 39, 40 Churchill, Winston 4, 9, 95 City of Spades (MacInnes, 1957) 166–9, 171 Clarke, Arthur C. 39 Childhood’s End (1953) 42–3 Clarke, Ben 30 Clarke, John 177 Clash (Wilkinson, 1929) 31 class 3, 24, 42 in fiction 96 imagined destruction of 39 lower class 28 middle-class society, challenge to 67 mobility, pain of 68 upper class 28 working class(es) 9–14, 22, 24, 25, 28, 29, 30, 32, 35, 36, 37 sentimental representation of in post-war period 30–1, 35 ‘working-class moment’ 56, 76 Clute, John 14, 19, 26, 44, 46 Cohen, Albert K. Delinquent Boys (1955) 186

295

Cohen, Henry see Camberton, Roland Cohen, Phil 177, 180, 182, 186 Cohen, Stanley 185 Cold War 40, 237, 242, 243, 244 in Agatha Christie’s work 219 Communist Party of Great Britain 6 Conekin, Becky 238, 239 Connolly, Cyril 133 consumerism and masculinity 63, 71, 77 and youth cultures 61, 63, 65 Cook, Matt and Heike Bauer 114 Queer 1950s 114 Courage, James 115, 279–80 A Way of Love (1959) 123–4, 129–30 Crisp, Quentin 112 Daily Mail 117 Davis, Miles 188 Birth of the Cool 188 de Nerval, Gérard 192 de Hegedus, Adam see Garland, Rodney Delaney, Shelagh A Taste of Honey (1958) 121 Dennis, Nigel Cards of Identity (1955) 210 detective fiction 16 Christianity in 229 detective characters in 206, 207 existentialism in 210–11, 230 gender in 206 history of 205–6 and Iris Murdoch 230 relationship with modernism 229 Dick, Philip K. 43 Dinshaw, Carolyn 115 domesticity housework 84–5, 94–6 and romance 84–5 Donnelly, Mark 113 Dorling, Danny 1 Drabble, Margaret 137 Durrell, Lawrence 253 Eastley, Aaron 148 Eco, Umberto 255, 256 education of women in the 1950s 89, 97–8

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Edward II 131 Elizabeth II 6 Encounter, 244–6, 252 Engels, Friedrich 97 Equal Pay Act (1970) 1 ethnography 87, 99 ‘Hot Stove argument’ 89 influence on fiction 92, 94, 99 existentialism 103, 195 influence on detective fiction 210–11, 230 relationship to film noir 211 Fanon, Frantz 143, 154, 157, 159 fantasy 19, 20, 22, 43, 44, 47, 48 John Clute’s four stage model of 26, 44, 46 feminism and anthropology 82 anti-feminism 104–5 First Wave 93–4 and housework 94–6 in the 1950s 93, 106–7 Women’s Two Roles (Myrdal and Klein, 1956) 95 Second Wave 82, 94, 108 femininity and domesticity 84–5 and maternal instinct 91, 105, 107 ‘The Feminine Point of View Conference’ (1947–51) 82, 87 and women’s magazines 85, 86, 87, 89 Ferrebe, Alice 29, 57, 81, 94, 131, 210, 230 Masculinity in Male-Authored Fiction, 1950–2000 (2005) 29 Festival of Britain, The (1951) 238 Fiedler, Leslie A. 42–3, 252 Figueros, John 141, 146 First World War 21 Fitzgerald, Ella 190 folk music (revival) 179, 197 Foucault, Michel 190 Fowler, Bridget 250 Frayn, Michael 238, 239 Frost, Ernest The Dark Peninsula (1949) 131 Garber, Jenny 178–9 Garland, Rodney 115, 280 The Heart in Exile (1953) 115, 116, 124, 126–7, 133

Gautier, Théophile 192 Gavron, Hannah The Captive Wife (1966) 85, 91, 95, 107 Geertz, Clifford 101, 102, 103 Gibbons, Stella 280–1, 179 Here Be Dragons (1956) 16, 177, 191, 193, 198 Gielgud, John 117 Gilroy, Beryl 141 Gilroy, Paul 143, 163, 172n, 197 Glean, Marion 145 Green, G.F. In the Making (1952) 131 Greenland, Colin 42–3 Griffiths, Gareth 200 Goff, Martyn 111–12, 281 The Plaster Fabric (1957) 111–12, 118–19, 124 Golding, William 43, 44, 235, 253, 281 Lord of the Flies (1954) 25, 45 The Inheritors (1955) 25 Hall, Leslie 113–14 Hall, Stuart 141, 147, 164, 177 Hardyment, Christina 104 Harrisson, Tom 84 Hartley, L.P. 235, 241 The Go-Between (1953) 237 Hebdige, Dick 187 Hemlock and After (Wilson, 1952) 116, 134–7 Hennessy, Peter Having it So Good: Britain in the Fifties (2007) 2–3, 4, 6 Heppenstall, Rayner 243, 247, 253 The Fourfold Tradition (1961) 247, 253 The Intellectual Part (1963) 243 Here Be Dragons (Gibbons, 1956) 16, 177, 191, 193, 198 Hill, Christopher 10 Hoffman, Frederick 253 Hoggart, Richard 10–12, 150, 183, 188, 194, 246, 252 The Uses of Literacy (1956) 10–12, 81, 150, 181, 246 homosexuality (and fiction) 111–38 Homosexual Law Reform Society 137

Index Horizon 133 Hornsey, Richard 125 Hosain, Attia 15, 282 Phoenix Fled (1953) 100 ‘The First Party’ (1953) 100–1 ‘The Street of the Moon’ (1953) 100 Houlbrook, Matt 118–19 Hurry on Down (Wain, 1953) 28–9, 31–2, 53, 177, 182, 191, 237, 247–8 Hurst, L.J. 39–40 India, partition of 101 In the Castle of My Skin (Lamming, 1953) 149–52, 236 ITV 8 Jack, Ian 1–2, 17n jazz 177, 178, 180, 188–92, 197, 201 in Absolute Beginners (MacInnes, 1959) 186–7, 189–91 in All What Jazz (Larkin, 1970) 188–9 Jefferson, Tony 177, 187 Jones, Claudia 141 Jordan, Julia 236, 242, 252, 253 Chance and the Modern British Novel (2010) 235, 236 Joyce, James Ulysses 236 Kalliney, Peter 61–2, 62–3, 65 King, Francis (Frank Cauldwell) Man on the Rock (1957) 131 The Dark Glasses (1954) 131 The Firewalkers (1956) 131 Kinsey, Alfred Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) 117 kinship 82, 86, 93–8 Kynaston, David 2 labour in factories 64, 68 Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence, 1928) 9–10, 31, 112 Lady Chatterley trial (1960) 112 Laing, Stuart 56, 57, 62, 71 Lamming, George 16, 141, 146, 148, 149–52, 155–8, 159, 164, 170, 171, 172, 236, 282

297

In the Castle of My Skin (1953) 149–52, 236 Of Age and Innocence (1958) 153 The Emigrants (1954) 155–8, 162 Langhammer, Claire 113 Larkin, Philip 247 All What Jazz (1970) 188–9 and Gladys Mitchell 228 Jill (1946) 56 Selected Letters (1993) 189 Lashley, Cliff 200 Laski, Marghanita 15, 95, 133, 282–3 and kinship 94 The Village (1952) 93–8 Lawrence, D.H. Lady Chatterley’s Lover 9–10, 31, 112 Leavis, F.R. 10 Less Than Angels (Pym, 1955) 83–90, 98–9 Lessing, Doris 7, 14, 47–8, 235, 244, 283 A Small Personal Voice (1957) 244 Canopus in Argos sequence (1979–83) 47 Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) 47, 48 The Four-Gated City (1969) 47 The Golden Notebook (1962) 47 The Grass is Singing (1950) 164 Lewis, C.S. 26 Narnia sequence 25, 43 Lewis, Jane 5 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 93 Liddell, Robert 83 Unreal City (1952) 131 Light, Alison 205, 218 Lindop, Audrey Erskine The Details of Jeremy Stretton (1955) 125 Lofts, Nora The Lute Player (1951) 131 Look Back in Anger (Osborne, 1956) 6–7, 57, 77, 246 Lord Beginner 198, 200 Lord Kitchener 198 Love, Heather 115–16 Lucky Jim (Amis, 1954) 29–30, 35, 53, 237, 247, 248–9, 251, 252 Lukács, Georg 258

298 McCarthyism 6 MacInnes, Colin 16, 81, 166–71, 172, 179, 236, 283–4 Absolute Beginners (1959) 16, 166, 132–3, 137, 169–71, 177, 178, 180–3, 185–6, 194, 198, 199 City of Spades (1957) 166–9, 171 McKibbin, Ross 3 Maclaren-Ross, Julian 194 McLeod, John 155, 170 Macmillan, Harold 96 McRobbie, Angela 178–9 Mais, Roger 141, 153 Brother Man (1954) 153 The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953) 153 Malinowski, Bronislaw 82, 87, 89, 90, 103, 107–8 Mansfield, Jane 58 Manuel, Peter 198 Marsh, Ngaio 16, 205, 214, 284 Black Beech and Honeydew (1982) 226 and influence of drama 227 and New Zealand 214, 226, 227 Opening Night (1951) 210, 211, 226–7 Roderick Alleyn (detective character) 206, 226–7 Scales of Justice (1955) 226 sexuality 226 Singing in the Shrouds (1958) 226 Martin, Kenneth Waiting for the Sky to Fall (1959) 137 Marx, Karl 97 Maschler, Tom 57, 58, 76 masculinity and consumption 63, 71, 76–7 Northern 58 and patriarchy 74 and performativity 102 working-class 56, 60, 63, 65, 66, 69 Mass Observation 36, 81, 82, 84, 113 Maugham, Somerset 251 May Day (Sommerfield, 1936) 32, 33, 34, 35, 36 Mayer, Michael The End of the Corridor (1951) 131 Mead, Margaret 104 Means-Test Man (Briarley, 1935) 31 Mengham, Rod 19, 37–8

Index Meyer-Eppler, Werner 254 Miguel Street (Naipaul, 1959) 148–9, 151, 153 Mitchell, Gladys 16, 205, 214, , 228, 284 Groaning Spinney (1950) 228 Mrs Bradley (detective character) 228 Spotted Hemlock (1958) 228 The Man Who Grew Tomatoes (1959) 228 Mitchison, Naomi 14, 26, 27, 45, 48, 284–5 Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962) 47 The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931) 45, 47 Travel Light (1952) 14, 45–7 Mittelholzer, Edgar 141, 147 modernism 20, 26, 236 Modern Jazz Quartet 190 Monk, Leland 236 Standard Deviations: Chance and the Modern British Novel (1993) 235 Monsarrat, Kevin The Cruel Sea (1951) 4–5 Montague of Beaulieu, Lord 117 Montagu trials (1953 and 1954) 117, 122 Montefiore, Janet 47 Moorcock, Michael 39, 43 Morgan, Kenneth 238 ‘Movement’, the 56 Mortimer, Penelope 15, 285 as ‘Ann Temple’ 105 narrative voice 106 The Bright Prison (1953) 103–7 Munson, Alan 5 Murdoch, Iris 253–4, 285–6 An Unofficial Rose (1962) 230 and detective fiction 230 The Bell 117–18 Under The Net (1954) 230, 237, 253–4, 256 Murger, Henri 192 Murphy, Amy Tooth 132 Naipaul, V. S. 141, 147–9, 150, 151, 152, 161, 286 Miguel Street (1959) 148–9, 151, 153 The Mystic Masseur (1957) 147–8, 173n The Suffrage of Elvira (1958) 173n Nasta, Susheila 198–9 National Health Service 2

Index Nelson, Michael 115 A Room in Chelsea Square (1958) 133–4 New Left, the 10–14, 16, 181–2, 184, 194 News of the World 117–18, 131 New Statesman 133 New Wave cinema adaptation of Angry Young Men texts 76 New Wave science fiction 39, 43, 47–8 New Worlds 43 Nietzsche, Friedrich 236 Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell, 1949) 25, 28, 40 North [of England], the 60 and masculinity 58 northerness 58 ‘northern regionalists’ 57 North West Five (Sommerfield, 1960) 35, 38, 48, 165–6 Obscene Publications Act (1959) 9–10 Observer 133 Oram, Alison 131–2 Orwell, George 27, 28, 30, 31, 33 Animal Farm (1943) 28 Coming Up for Air (1939) 28, 29 Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) 28, 29 Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) 25, 28, 40 The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) 27, 28, 30, 33 Osborne, John 246 Look Back in Anger (1956) 6–7, 57, 77, 246 ‘What’s Gone Wrong With Women?’ (1956) 81–2 Osgerby, Bill 180 patriarchal order 31, 44, 46, 47, 48 Peake, Mervyn 44 Gormenghast trilogy 43 Plato Phaedrus 129 Poggioli, Renato 258 Pohl, Frederick 39, 43 Powell, Anthony 240, 241, 242 A Buyer’s Market (1952) 241 A Question of Upbringing (1951) 237, 240–1 Pratchett, Terry 48

299

Priestley, J.B. 152 proletarian literature 20, 31, 32 Private Eye 7 Pullman, Phillip 48 Pym, Barbara 15, 286–7 Biography 83 and Edwin Arderner 83 and Jane Austen 87–8 and fieldwork 83, 84 irony of 90 Less Than Angels (1955) 83–90, 98–9 queer (theory) 111–38 Rabinovitz, Rubin 230 Ramchand, Kenneth 199 Rancière, Jacques 243 Raven, Simon The Feathers of Death (1959) 131 Reid, Pat The Colditz Story (1952) 4 Reid, V.S. 141 Renault, Mary 115, 236, 287 The Charioteer (1953) 116, 123, 126, 127–8, 236 The Last of the Wine (1956) 130–1 Richard I 131 Richards, Audrey Chisungu (1956) 82–3, 98 Richards, I.A. 10 Richmond, Anthony 154 Colour Prejudice in Britain (1954) 154 Riddell, Chris 17n Rivers, Michael Pitt 117 Roberts, Adam 48n Robeson, Paul 152 rock and roll 179, 180 Rock Around the Clock (Sears, 1956) 179 Room at the Top (Braine, 1957) 29, 37, 81 Rowling, J.K. 48 Salkey, Andrew 141 A Quality of Violence (1959) 153 Escape to an Autumn Pavement (1960) 137 Samuel, Raphael 10 Sandbrook, Dominic Never Had It So Good (2005) 184 Sartre, Jean Paul 150, 195, 210, 253 Being and Nothingness (1943), 150

300

Index

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Sillitoe, 1958) 15, 16, 29, 35, 37, 58–65, 81, 164–5, 177, 183–4, 187 pastoral imagery 59–60, 61 sex 61, 62 Sayers, Dorothy L. 209, 229 Scamp (Camberton, 1950) 56, 177, 178, 192–7 Scarrott, Michael Ambassador of Loss (1955) 131 Scenes of Provincial Life (Cooper, 1950) 81 Scheckley, Robert 39 science fiction 6, 14–15, 20, 26, 38, 39, 42, 43, 44, 47, 48 Second World War 2–5, 10, 21, 112, 141, 201, 236, 237, 242 and founding of Welfare State 62 trauma of 225 Self, Will 48 Selvon, Sam 16, 141, 158–64, 170, 171, 172, 177, 287–8 The Lonely Londoners (1956) 158–61, 198–201 Ways of Sunlight (1957) 161–4 sexuality and children 105–6 heterosexuality 61 lesbianism in Agatha Christie’s work 223 Sexual Offences Act (1967) 124 Shils, Ed 6 Shippey, Tom 25–6, Sillitoe, Alan 19, 57, 171, 288 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) 15, 16, 29, 35, 37, 58–65, 81, 164–5, 177, 183–4, 187 Sinfield, Alan 121–2, 136, 238 Sivanandan, Ambalavaner 156, 162 skiffle 179 Smallshaw, Kay How to Run Your Home Without Help (1949) 95 Smith, Bessie 188 Smith, Patricia Juliana 132 social realism 19, 33, 38, 48 inauthenticity of 19, 36, 37–8 sociology and 1950s fiction 81 Socrates 130, 135

Sommerfield, John 14, 16, 32–7, 38, 48, 166, 169, 171, 288–9 May Day (1936) 32, 33, 34, 35, 36 North West Five (1960) 35, 38, 48, 165–6 Volunteer in Spain (1937) 32 The Inheritance (1956) 36–7 ‘The Worm’s Eye View’ (1943) 32–3 Trouble in Porter Street (1938) 33–4 Trouble in Porter Street (1954) 33–4 Sontag, Susan 84 Sometime, Never: Three Tales of the Imagination (Golding, Wyndham, Peake, 1956) 44 Spark, Muriel 15, 179, 289 and ethnography 92 narrative voice 92 The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1959) 177, 182–3 ‘The Black Madonna’ (1958) 90–3 The Comforters (1957) 237, 256–8 Storey, David 19, 37, 57, 77, 289–90 This Sporting Life (1960) 15, 58, 65–76, 77 Spender, Stephen 245, 246 The Struggle of the Modern (1963) 246 Stewart, Mary Wildfire at Midnight (1956) 132 Stockhausen, Karlheinz 255–6 Streatfeild, Noel 97–8 suburbs Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Sillitoe, 1958) 60 This Sporting Life (Storey, 1960) 66 Sunday Pictorial 117 Swanzy, Henry 146 Taylor, Elizabeth 15, 290 ‘You’ll Enjoy It When You Get There’ (1951) 99–100 Taylor, Valerie 132 Teddy boys (and girls) (Teds) 177–80, 184–8, 189–90, 195, 201 Telegraph, 111 The Ballad of Peckham Rye (Spark, 1959) 177, 182–3 The Bright Prison (Mortimer, 1953) 103–7 The Captive Wife (Gavron, 1966) 85, 91, 95, 107

Index The Charioteer (Renault, 1953) 116, 123, 126, 127–8, 236 The Comforters (Spark, 1957) 237, 256–8 ‘The Country of the Blind’ (Wells, 1904) 41 The Day of the Triffids (Wyndham, 1951) 7, 39–40, 41–2, 244 The Emigrants (Lamming, 1954) 155–8, 162 The Heart in Exile (Garland, 1953) 115, 116, 124, 126–7, 133 The Hobbit (Tolkien, 1937) 20–1 The Inheritance (Sommerfield, 1956) 36–7 The Lonely Londoners (Selvon, 1956) 158–61, 198–201 The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien, 1954–5) 14, 20–5, 26–7, 29, 32, 42, 43, 44, 48 The Mystic Masseur (Naipaul, 1957) 147–8, 173n Theodosius II of Constantinople 131 The Once and Future King (White, 1958) 25 The Outsider (Wilson, 1956) 41, 195 The Plaster Fabric (Goff, 1957) 111–12, 118–19, 124 The Road to Wigan Pier (Orwell, 1937) 27, 28, 30, 33 The Times 185 The Uses of Literacy (Hoggart, 1956) 10–12, 81, 150, 181, 246 This Sporting Life (Storey, 1960) 58 and ageing 72 countryside, imagery of 66–7 commodification 62 domesticity and family 66–7 Machin, Arthur infantilization of 70–1 objectification of 69–70, 72–3, 75 relationship with father 74–5 rugby league 69–70, 71–2, 77 Thompson, E.P. 10 Thornton, Sarah 184 Tiffin, Helen 200 Treasure Island (Stevenson, 1883) 128 Trocchi, Alexander Young Adam (1954) 56 Todd, Selina 8–9 Tolkien, J.R.R. 14, 20–5, 27, 42, 48, 49n, 290 Samwise Gamgee (hobbit protagonist) 20, 21, 22–6, 28, 29, 37, 48

301

The Hobbit (1937) 20–1 The Lord of the Rings (1954–5) 14, 20–5, 26–7, 29, 32, 42, 43, 44, 48 The New Shadow 42 Tomlinson, Sally 1 Trouble in Porter Street (Sommerfield, 1938) 33–4 Twentieth Century 244 Tylor, E. B. 108 Under The Net (Murdoch, 1954) 230, 237, 253–4, 256 Up the Junction (Dunn, 1963) 37 Upward, Edward 27–8 The Spiral Ascent (1961–77) 27 Verel, Shirley The Dark Side of Venus (1960) Vonnegut, Kurt 43 Walcott, Derek 141 Wain, John 6, 7, 16, 31–2, 33, 35, 38, 182–3, 246, 247–8, 290–1 as Angry Young Man 57 Hurry on Down (1953) 28–9, 31–2, 53, 177, 182, 191, 237, 247–8 Warth, Douglas, ‘Evil Men’ (1952) 117 Waterhouse, Keith 81 Billy Liar (1959) 29 Watson, Peter 133 Ways of Sunlight (Selvon, 1957) 161–4 Welfare State 2–4, 35, 113–14, 121, 241 and gender 107 and housewives 96 and the working class 62 Wesker, Arnold 76 Westwood, Gordon 125 Society and the Homosexual (1952) 122–3 Whannell, Paddy 177 Wildeblood, Peter 117, 125 Against the Law (1955) 122 A Way of Life (1956) 123 Wilford, Hugh 245 Williams, Eric The Wooden Horse (1949) 4

302 Williams, Raymond 10, 12–14, 28, 30, 258 Culture & Society: 1780–1950 (1958) 12–13, 54, 258–9 cultural materialism 55 ‘ladder model’ 73 Marxism and Literature (1977) 55 and Marxist theory 12–13 Orwell (1971) 28 Preface to Film (1954) 53 ‘structure of feeling’ 15, 53–8 The Long Revolution (1961) 12–13, 54 Wilson, Angus 19, 38, 43, 115, 291 Hemlock and After (1952) 116, 134–7 The Old Men at the Zoo (1961) 39 Wilson, Colin 6, 41, 179, 291–2 Adrift in Soho (1961) 177, 192, 195–7, 199 The Outsider (1956) 41, 195 Windrush generation, the 141, 142, 153, 155, 197

Index Wolfenden Report, The (Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution) (1957) 7, 111, 122–5 Woman magazine 85, 86 women education of 87, 89 symbolism in 1950s culture 82, 95, 96, 103 Woods, Gregory 130, 133–4 Woolf, Virginia 19, 38, 132, 236 Wyndham, John 14, 43, 44, 48, 235, 292 ‘Consider Her Ways’ (1956) 44–5 The Day of the Triffids (1951) 7, 39–40, 41–2, 244 The Kraken Wakes (1953) 244 The Midwich Cuckoos (1947) 42 youth culture and subcultures 8, 177–202 rebellion 64

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