Scarecrows of Chivalry: English Masculinities After Empire 081393382X, 9780813933825

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Scarecrows of Chivalry

Scarecrows of Chivalry English Masculinities after Empire

PRA S EEDA GOPI NAT H

University of Virginia Press Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press © 2013 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper First published 2013 135798642 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gopinath, Praseeda, 1975– Scarecrows of Chivalry : English Masculinities after Empire / Praseeda Gopinath. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8139-3382-5 (pbk. : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-8139-3381-8 (cloth : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-8139-3383-2 (e-book) 1. English literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Masculinity in literature. 3. Chivalry in literature. I. Title. PR478.M34G67 2013 820.9⬘00914—dc23 2012039740

For my parents, Sreedevi Gopinath and C. R. Gopinath

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: English Masculinities in Transition

ix

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1. Manly Independent Men: (De)constructing the English Gentleman

22

2. Out of Place: Evelyn Waugh and the Retreating Gentleman

41

3. An Orphaned Manliness: George Orwell and the Bovex Man

66

4. “One of Those Old-Type Natural Fouled-Up Guys”: Posting the Gentleman in Philip Larkin’s Poetry

89

5. “Moulded and Shaped”: John Wain, Ian Fleming, and Threshold Masculinities

117

6. Writing Women, Reading Men: A. S. Byatt, Barbara Pym, and the Post-Gentlemen

165

Epilogue: The Postcolonial Gentleman

204

Notes

219

Bibliography

245

Index

261

Acknowledgments

have incurred a debt of gratitude to many people who have contributed immeasurably to this project that began life as a dissertation. I would like to thank my advisors Jed Esty and Joe Valente, who helped to define and shape this study. They were, and continue to be, my models for intellectual rigor, generosity, and scholarship. I am also grateful to many scholars whose input at various stages was so crucial to my thinking on this book: Kristin Bluemel, Robert Caserio, Debra Rae Cohen, Tim Dean, Patrick Deer, Matt Hart, Jim Hansen, Allan Hepburn, Suvir Kaul, Phyllis Lassner, Ania Loomba, William Maxwell, Bruce Robbins, Juliet Shields, Paul Schleuse, and Julia Saville. Fellowships and release time from the University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign; Binghamton University; and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Binghamton University, made this project possible. At the University of Virginia Press, Cathie Brettschneider has been unbelievably supportive as she shepherded this manuscript to publication. I would also like to thank my copyeditor, Colleen Romick Clark, for being so thorough and responsive during the final stages of preparing the manuscript for press. I am very grateful to the extremely generous anonymous reviewers, whose incisive and detailed feedback has made this a much better book. Not only did my colleagues and friends at Binghamton University, State University of New York, make me feel welcome, but the breadth and diversity of their work enabled my own research to expand in new directions. I would like to thank David Bartine, Michael Conlon, Marilynn Desmond, Thomas Glave, Scott Henkel, Leslie Heywood, Kelly Kinney, Bob Miklus, Peter Mileur, Bill Spanos, Susan Strehle, and Lisa Yun. Thanks also to my graduate student and research assistant, Minjeong Kim, for her tireless assistance on the preparation of this manuscript. I am very grateful for the friendship, guidance, and intellectual exchange offered by Donette Francis, Pamela Gay, Joe Keith, Robert Ji-Song Ku, Monika Mehta, Jennifer

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Acknowledgments

Stoever-Ackerman and Nancy Um. To Keguro Macharia, Deepti Misri, Dan Tracy, Yogita Goyal, and Melissa Free, some of whom have probably read parts of this manuscript more times than is good for them, I want to say thank you so much. Your comments made this work tighter and sharper than I could ever have hoped to produce on my own. More than anything, though, thank you for being there through it all. To this list, I would add Pallavi Mansingh and my sister, Praveena Gopinath-Kapur, who always listened and encouraged. To my parents, Sreedevi Gopinath and C. R. Gopinath, who instilled in me the courage to chart my own path and the perseverance to stay on it, whose faith has never faltered (even though my father couldn’t understand why it was taking so long!), I dedicate this book. Finally, to Diwakar Gupta, who reminds me every day that there is life beyond this book, I cannot possibly express my gratitude and affection, so I shall leave it at that. I am grateful to Studies in the Novel, Taylor and Francis Ltd., and Johns Hopkins University Press for permission to reprint portions of chapters 1, 3, and 5 that originally appeared in Studies in the Novel 41.2 (2009), Textual Practice 23.3 (2009), and Modern Fiction Studies 58.2 (2012), respectively.

Scarecrows of Chivalry

Introduction English Masculinities in Transition You cannot say you know England until you know the English gentleman. V. S. Naipaul

hen eric blair decided to adopt the pseudonym George Orwell— based on England’s patron saint and the little river that ran beyond the garden of his childhood home—he deliberately crafted what he believed to be a quintessentially English everyman persona: an Englishman who was patriotic, but reasonably so; one who believed in the English countryside as the heart of the nation, in the English people, in “decency,” and in the quotidian virtues of life. He emphasized common sense, egalitarianism, and the empirical perspective, while still believing in the long-standing traditions of a national culture, looking forward and back at the same time. He was the spokesperson for the intelligent and the traditional ordinary Englishman. In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), part-ethnography and partautobiography—written for Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club—Orwell calls himself a “sufficiently typical example” of the English middle class even as he attacks its attitudes and prejudices. The book, published on the eve of World War II, sits on the cusp of massive cultural change. Over the course of the next two decades, England participated in a world war, conceded independence to many of its colonies, and established the welfare state. Ostensibly a documentary account of the poverty in working-class communities and the failure of socialism in Britain, it is actually an ethnographic account of the state of England and what it means to be a middle-class Englishman in a transitory time. As a “typical example” of the middle-class

W

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Englishman, he describes his background and prejudices, and in doing so, he tracks his own evolution from Eric Blair to George Orwell, connecting it to the larger national changes: “I was born into what you might describe as the lower-upper-middleclass. The upper-middle class, which had its heyday in the ’eighties and ’nineties, with Kipling as its poet laureate, was a sort of mound of wreckage left behind when the tide of Victorian prosperity receded” (Road 121). This is a surprisingly accurate rendition of the mood of the 1930s, especially as seen through the perspective of the middle-class Englishman. The interwar years were, as Alison Light has argued, a period of tumultuous change as far as the middle classes were concerned: “The ‘middle class’ was undergoing radical revision between the wars,” and this revised class included “the beautician as well as the civil servant, the florist and the lady doctor . . . and the manifold differences in between” (13–14). This particular description of Orwell’s hyphenated and nuanced background is often used to illustrate the upheavals of the middle classes and the attendant financial and class insecurities of the interwar period. In interesting ways, Orwell the persona, especially in terms of his own nonfictive biographical writings, is synecdochic of national tumult. As Orwell points out, he came of age after the luxury and privilege of the Edwardian era, when the empire was on the wane and the bright sheen of wealth, power, and prestige was slowly ebbing away from the lower reaches of the upper-middle class and the middle class in general. Orwell’s trajectory reflected this shift, but in the case of his crafted, gendered persona, it also reflected both the decline and the expansion of the class system. Orwell’s belatedness as an upper-middle-class English gentleman enabled him to be aware of the unjust hierarchy that propped up his own cultural, social, and gender delineations, and consequentially allowed him to see himself as a product of those hierarchies. In a proto-Bourdieuvian move, Orwell links class origin to identity and taste. Raymond Williams, in his astute analyses of Orwell’s life and literature, points to Eric Blair’s precarious class position—of being “simultaneously dominator and dominated”—as instigating a conflict in Blair that brought about a crisis of identity. It is Blair’s “double vision” that led to the creation of George Orwell.1 In this interstitial moment, he attempted to shed the fastidiousness and unself-conscious snobbery and gentlemanliness of Eric Blair by reinventing himself as George Orwell. However, his commitment to the values of the gentleman—and, by extension, Englishness—determined his “good,” solid English name with its associations of St. George and the countryside. Even as Orwell re-

Introduction

3

moved himself from the taint of the bourgeoisie’s oppressive hierarchy, he was inescapably encoded by a gendered and classed Englishness that was his cultural inheritance. His ideals of abstract Englishness are inflected by his culturally inherited gentlemanliness.2 What becomes apparent is that his gentlemanliness is rendered explicit at the very moment of his selfdistanciation from the class of his birth. Being a gentleman, Orwell could not reject the ideals of the gentleman within which he was belatedly inscribed even as he dismissed bourgeois ideology en masse. He embodied in his persona the crisis and contradictions of the declassed and subsequently new middle-class Englishman: he drew on the upper-middle-class public school values of gentlemanliness while expanding and transmuting them to fit the entire range of clerks, hairdressers, copywriters, traveling salesmen, and advertising agents that rose up the ranks as well as the working classes, or, to use Orwell’s vernacular, the ordinary, decent Englishman. While he persistently distanced himself from his lower-upper-middle-class background, the abstract ideals that he espoused in the name of socialism and Englishness were embedded within his bourgeois gentlemanliness: fair play, brotherhood, decency, honesty, forthrightness, and hardiness. This list reads like a catalog of ideals that headmasters of Victorian/ Edwardian public schools would have exhorted their boys to pursue. Indeed, they overlap rather unsurprisingly with the ideals set out by Hely Hutchinson Almond, the headmaster of Loretto in 1897: “Truth, purity, courage, simplicity, hardiness and reverence; to set honesty above cleverness, manliness above refinement, character above attainments, moral and physical perfection above abundance of possessions and elaboration of surroundings” (qtd. in Mangnan 26). Hence, Orwell’s values for a classless society, which he purports are the values of the English as a whole, are actually values that English gentlemen since the mid-nineteenth century were urged to embody. The belief in the rarified traits of Englishness as divorced from class hierarchy is symptomatic of Orwell’s being etched within hegemonic and naturalized ideals of manliness. Orwell’s reiteration of the ideal of “decency,” for instance, as a particularly English virtue that transcends class, is indelibly tied to bourgeois respectability. According to John Rodden, Orwell uses “decency” to evoke a “great variety of attributes which he held in high esteem: simplicity, honesty, homey coziness, warmth, cleanliness, respectability, stoicism [and] grit” (Rodden 171). More precisely, these virtues are public school virtues: cleanliness, respectability, stoicism, grit, and honesty are ideals that public

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school boys were expected to cultivate. Orwell abstracts “decency” from its hierarchical underpinnings to float free as an intangible English virtue, which English people inherently possess but don’t necessarily enact. Orwell, then, is a transitional figure whose ideals of masculinity—derived from his own inherited gentlemanliness—shaped and influenced postwar literary representations of masculinity. Considering Orwell in this way also reveals the obscured genealogy of masculinity that runs from the Victorian/ Edwardian periods through the postwar era. He marks the move from the still functioning ideals of gentlemanliness in their fragmented form in the late imperial moment to the democratized, post-imperial petit bourgeois mutations of an inherited gentlemanliness adapted to a shrunken ex-centric island, as explored in the works of postwar writers such as Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, and John Wain.3 Considering George Orwell as an exemplar and influential figure, Scarecrows of Chivalry argues that the stylization of English masculinity becomes the central theme, focal lens, and formal conceit for many literary texts that represent the “condition of Britain” in the 1930s and the immediate postwar era. This study reveals that alterations in the ideal of the gentleman, forged in the interstices of metropole and colony, are fundamental to the formation of metropolitan Englishness post-1945. Scarecrows of Chivalry, then, unfolds a masculine narrative of the nation, while closely attending to issues of race, sexuality, and class. It tracks how hegemonic masculinity alters as an effect of the increasing diffusion of cultural, economic, and national-imperial power from the 1930s through the 1960s. Englishmen thus become what Philip Larkin calls “scarecrows of chivalry,” trafficking in earlier models of masculinity within the contours of the post-imperial, postwar welfare state. Through a careful analysis of the literary adaptation of key facets of the gentleman and of Englishness—selfrestraint, governance, disinterestedness or decency, chivalry, and detachment—in postwar literary texts, the following pages will uncover the continued determining presence of an earlier gender script. Though the shifting ideal of the gentleman stretches at least as far back as the sixteenth century,4 I am concerned with the mid-nineteenth-century public school avatar of what I call gentlemanliness, which I will outline in detail in the next chapter. Emphasizing the longue durée of the Victorian gentleman, Scarecrows of Chivalry stresses the post-imperial breakup of conventional languages and types of masculinity and expands the standard analytic frames of reference such as the welfare state, World War II, and rising feminism.

Introduction

5

Methodologically oriented by postcolonial and feminist masculinity studies, this book demonstrates how literary works that have been read as object lessons in gender-neutral class politics are in fact structured by imperial gendered geographies. The postcolonial lens of this study reveals that empire inflects nationally bounded late-imperial and postwar literature, and in doing so it challenges the insular frame within which this literature has usually been read by a generation of critics. The book explores the role of the empire, state infrastructure, and the rise of professionalism (especially welfare state practices) in the literary construction of the male citizen-subject in late-imperial and post-imperial Britain. The narrative arc of my argument connects the periods before and after World War II—two periods that most literary and cultural scholars read as historically distinct. By doing so, the book searches out and emphasizes the connective threads between prewar and postwar masculinities.

Gendering the Nation Gender as constitutive of the nation, nationalism, and national identity is now axiomatic. As Anne McClintock points out, “All nations depend on powerful constructions of gender. . . . Nations have historically amounted to the sanctioned institutionalization of gender difference” (Imperial Leather 352–53). The regulation of sexualities and the enforcement of the heterosexual imperative structure these national and foundational processes. It needs to be emphasized here that the disciplining and surveillance of women proceeds dialectically with the construction of a national masculinity. While woman functions as a metaphor for the nation, men’s relationship to the nation and nationalism is “typically metonymic,” where men are contiguous with, and representative of, the national whole (Boehmer 6). This book, examining Englishmen as “an equally constructed category” vis-à-vis the imperial nation-state (Mayer 5), follows the making of, and alterations within, this metonymic gender formation through the literature of the mid-century. What becomes evident when one considers masculinity as a constructed category that evolves in a symbiotic relationship with the nation is that all men are not metonymic of the nation (Boehmer 6). The vectors of class, race, and sexuality intersect with masculinity to delineate the particular gender norm that is aligned with the nation. R. W. Connell’s theorization of “hegemonic masculinity” differentiates the various orders of masculinity within the nation-state and beyond:

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that is, those who might be considered metonymic of the nation and those who are marginalized, excluded, and subordinated. Hegemonic masculinity is “the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women,” only possible when cultural ideals and institutional power are wedded together (77). The theory makes a clear distinction between individual men in power who do not live up to this fantasy ideal in their real lives and the “public or corporate ideal or display of masculinity that cannot be shaken.” The analytical purchase of Connell’s classic sociological theory lies in its fluidity and its emphasis on relationality. It is a relational construct produced at the intersection of class, race, sexuality, and gender practices.5 At its most general, hegemonic masculinity is often taken to stand for manly traits that are naturalized and “common sense” in a particular social formation. In this book I will use it more precisely to refer to the gendered norms that are held as the most valuable by the politically dominant class, which, in turn, authorize and legitimate its power and status. Because of its long historical perspective, my analysis revises Connell’s conceptualization of “hegemonic masculinity.” Whereas Connell focuses on the relationality of hegemonic masculinity as a construct within a synchronic frame, I call attention to its alterations within a diachronic frame. As it relies on the Gramscian theory of hegemony, hegemonic masculinity emphasizes the dynamism and changeability of this relational construct through time, and when considered in tandem with the temporal narratives of the nation, such a formulation allows us to see how earlier scripts of masculinity determine changes in hegemonic masculinity and also how it is altered by newer, emergent gender norms. For instance, as we shall see in the case of gentlemanliness in the nineteenth century, the ideal drew from earlier aristocratic investments in social hierarchy and manners and newer bourgeois norms of a work ethic and pragmatism. In this paradigm, hegemonic masculinity at any given point in time is a product of residual, emergent, and dominant ideals of masculinity.6 Changes in national masculinity are never isolated and always occur in relation to existing ideas of gender and the demands of the nation. In examining the alterations in hegemonic masculinity through the mid-century moment, this study intervenes in current postcolonial studies of Englishness. The focus on masculinity reveals that national cul-

Introduction

7

ture—in this case, Englishness in the twentieth century—is determined by the politics of masculinity. Since Edward Said’s postcolonial call to analyze cultures “contrapuntally,” or with attention to “the mutual imbrication of both colonizer and colonized in the making of modern cultural and social formations” (18), there have been a number of rigorously theorized and historicized postcolonial analyses of Englishness, but there have been no full-length studies that consider the relationship between masculinity and Englishness in the late imperial and postwar periods.7 I consider the gendered, specifically masculine, genealogy that constitutes national culture. As the epigraph from V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival indicates, the English gentleman was the quintessence of England. Even a casual listing of the traits associated with the English in the popular imagination both abroad and at home connects them to the traits of the gentleman: the stiff upper lip, restraint, decency, love for tradition married to a love of liberalism, common sense, steadfastness, and plain speaking. The traits of gentlemanliness were also the traits of Englishness. I show that what are assumed to be core, essential values of Englishness are gentlemanly, and as the nation changes, so does national masculinity. Masculinity and the nation exist in a symbiotic relationship, and revisions of the nation and national identity imply a reworking of hegemonic/national masculinity: shifts in and adaptations of gentlemanliness are not just sociocultural phenomena but national ones. Writing in 1959, the cultural and literary critic Martin Green unwittingly drew attention to how dominant ideas of masculinity and the nation change in relation to each other. Asked to comment about the state of the nation and literature for the U.S. Kenyon Review, he declared that the dominant national type, the gentleman, had “outlived his usefulness” (“British Decency” 507). He believed that a “new type,” “the decent man,” had replaced the gentleman (509). As a disciple of F. R. Leavis’s notions of organic, self-contained Englishness and a decent man himself, Green had a vested interest in the transition. Nevertheless, his observations about the national elevation of a group of male English realist writers are accurate. Green argued that the process, begun with D. H. Lawrence and George Orwell, had gained momentum with the success of the Angry Young Men and their Anglo-Saxon rebellion. The Angry Young Man was a much criticized journalistic catchphrase used to describe a number of young male realist writers whose young male protagonists of the lower-middle and the middle classes thumbed their noses at the Establishment. Green does not point to

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why the gentleman had “outlasted his usefulness” or why the “decent man” “replaced” him. Scarecrows of Chivalry suggests that this purported shift from one style of hegemonic masculinity to another is an effect of the reconfiguration of the nation-state. In part, national reconfiguration involved a gradual turn inward, where England became important in the wake of the collapse of the outward-looking, expansive empire that gradually emptied the nation’s coffers and its essence.8 However, tracing the move from gentleman to decent man also reveals another aspect of national shifts: even as the empire shrinks, the nation finds a new confidence in shedding its imperial baggage and embracing the self-contained “new” nation. While the imperial nation, as Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn have argued, was an “outward presence,” it was offset by “an inward lack” (Nairn 285). Building on this, Krishan Kumar points out that there is no “epic of English nationalism” precisely because England saw itself as an “agent of civilization and progress,” an “elect nation” called to “carry out a particular, God-given mission in the world. Only when this sense failed them, only when they had serious qualms about it, did they turn inwards towards themselves, and begin to ask themselves who they were” (196; my italics). The institution of the welfare state—which was a necessity to stem economic decline—with its logic of collective responsibility and organic unity, is a defining moment of rediscovery. The new state was popularly seen as a victory of the common Englishman and England’s apparent egalitarianism, a triumph of “the people’s war.”9 The decent man is the figure that emerges to stand for the new nation when the hegemonic ideal of the outward-looking, detached gentleman alters and devolves to fit the postwar nation. Or, as Green so succinctly put it, the decent man takes the place of the gentleman, who has “outlasted [his] usefulness.” In keeping with the notion of a continuous genealogy of national masculinity, the attempt to disentangle from the empire begins in the interwar period and, as Alison Light argues, was represented by the home, “the little man,” and ordinariness (10). The crystallization of the quotidian and ordinary Englishman that occurred in the thirties carried on through the war and beyond. The decent man, an Orwellian invention (at least, in terms of its later circulation), became significantly more important in the national imaginary during World War II and after. Yet, as I have demonstrated, the figure had emerged earlier, in the invention of the Orwell persona and its dissemination in his early novels Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) and Coming Up for Air (1939). The “decent man” was a response to the nation’s

Introduction

9

de-linking from a failing empire and the fear of an impending war. Orwell, through his persona and his protagonists, negotiated the residual presence of the dominant gentlemanly ideal and the emergent masculine values of an ordinary, middle-class, consumerist society. Anthony Hartley contends that the “the ‘no-nonsense’ air” of an entire postwar generation came from Orwell, whose ideas of “decency” and “common sense” underpinned the masculine affects of the postwar writers (State of England 47–48). The ordinary “decent man” was defined by “a concern with right and wrong,” “decency, marriage, filial and parental duties.” He was primarily “concerned with every subtlety and profundity of truth, but rendering them plainly, relating them always to the great moral imperatives,” invested in the heteronormative family structure and committed to “country, civilization and the four-square citizen” (Green, “British Decency” 507–10). The discourse of the ordinary Englishman and English people gained momentum during World War II, even as there was a corollary cultural emphasis on the potential “remasculinization” of the nation as an effect of the crisis of war (S. Rose 178–79). British masculinities during World War II lie outside the purview of this book, since the examination of the emergence and consolidation of wartime masculinities would involve a different analytic framework and a different set of discursive considerations; the nation during wartime is in a state of emergency, in which all “normal” ideas of nationhood and society cease to function and/or are deliberately suspended. Nevertheless, Sonya Rose’s brief but informative essay contends that wartime Britain saw the concretization of a “temperate masculinity” (193) as opposed to the hypermasculinity of the Nazis, drawing on nineteenth-century ideals of manliness and foregrounding virtues such as emotional reserve, rationality, and stoicism (178–79). This continues the reign of the ideals of gentlemanliness, now disseminated across the hierarchical landscape of English society. Postwar masculinity, because of its links to the prewar Orwellian influences, is Janus-faced: the Englishman so often celebrated in the literature of the early fifties is shaped by the very discourses of the Establishment or the gentleman that they claim to repudiate. In other words, the new Englishman celebrated by Green and the postwar writers is genealogically linked to the gentleman, and is what I call “the post-gentleman.” In uncovering these continuities, Scarecrows of Chivalry expands the paradigms for the analysis of the gentleman in the twentieth century from the insular national and the purely personal, and the analysis of the postwar new hero

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within a social-cultural frame.10 My distinctly postcolonial argument, because it considers Englishmen and gentlemanliness as determined by the narratives of imperial decline and post-imperial national resurgence, does not see the cultural preoccupation with new masculinities as a “social” crisis, but as a national preoccupation with how to define the nation-state: redefining the nation is inextricably tied to reworking national masculinity. Most important, my reading allows us to see that the changes in hegemonic masculinity—the shift from the gentleman to “post-gentleman”—is necessarily coterminous with imperial-national changes. The “new man” is not new, but rather a reconfiguration of the old dominant ideals. The book reads the upper- and middle-class gentleman and the lower-class, postwar new man as being part of the same discourse of dominant masculinity. In its consideration of gentlemanliness as metonymic of the imperial nation, it also opens up twentieth-century literary explorations of the gentleman as analyses of national masculinity and national-imperial shifts, and not just a search for “personal truths” by individual authors (Berberich 13). The term “post-gentleman” perfectly captures the contradictions and multiple layers inherent in the constructions of postwar masculinity: the turn away from the imperial to the post-imperial; the turn toward the energy and newness of the welfare state and the idea of a new England/ Britain; the emergence of a “new” national masculinity as inescapably contoured by the classed and raced ideals of gentlemanliness that persist, even when the “new hero” ostensibly dismisses gentlemanliness as outmoded; the reconfiguration of the traits of gentlemanliness; and finally, the overlapping of Englishness and the traits of masculinity. The post-gentleman is signified by the postwar decent man and his cohorts: the Angry Young Man, the common man, the ordinary man. They are all examples of English essence, of the national and/or regional, of the attempts to come to terms with the post-imperial as opposed to the imperial gentleman. Tom Paulin’s reference to “personality” in his analysis of Philip Larkin’s poetry has broad national resonance when he says, “Larkin speaks not for the imperial male—too transcendental a subject that—but for the English male, middle-class, professional, outwardly confident, controlled and in control” (239–40). Indeed, my chapter on Philip Larkin traces exactly how Larkin’s post-gentlemanly personae navigate the inherited traits of gentlemanliness in a changing nation, and how much of that “control” is a painful negotiation of classed, gendered expectations. Scarecrows of Chivalry maps this rearrangement of hegemonic English masculinity from gentleman to ordinary Englishman, from imperial Englishness to post-imperial nation.

Introduction

11

The through line of gentlemanliness in the history of Englishness recasts the postwar period not as a moment of rupture, but rather as one of transition. This book will show how the literature of the period treads a double edge: it is simultaneously conservative and iconoclastic; (post)imperial and national; melancholy and confident; old and new. The Janusfaced Englishman, like the nation he symbolizes, looks back in time and ahead: he embodies the melancholia of England’s imperial decline, but also the newly minted egalitarian energy of a self-contained nation. He is conservative in terms of gender and sexual politics, as the new man emerges through an exclusionary assertion of a heteronormative/ homosocial masculinity. Yet he is ostensibly progressive in his class politics, because national masculinity expands to include the ordinary EveryEnglishman. By examining the intertwined relationship between the nation and a dominant masculinity, this study stresses that the national permeates the personal. The literature of the mid-century, ranging from Orwell’s Burmese Days (1934) to John Braine’s Room at the Top (1957), is littered with examples of men who attempt to remake themselves as men of integrity and worth within the contours of a national masculine ideal. They struggle against and within domesticity: for instance, protagonists like Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1937) forge their sense of self within the suburban domestic space in a consumerist world, while those like Jimmy Porter in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956) violently resent it, even as they perceive it to be their sole domain of masculine assertion. The national turn penetrates to the very core of personality, as evidenced in Larkin’s male personae. Larkin’s Englishmen struggle with objectivity and self-restraint, traits that are culturally and imperially determined; and as they attempt to conduct their professional and personal lives in an England of lowered horizons, these qualities bleed over into self-consciousness and paralysis. The “new hero” in literature “has one skin too few”11 as he shuttles between anxiety and aggression in the postimperial welfare state. The intimate emotional and social struggles of the postwar man express the anxieties of the nation, not just in terms of a structural alignment, but in the gender scripts that determine what Englishmen should and should not do, how they must and must not behave. This argument also alters our current understanding of late-imperial and post-imperial writers through its focus on the Englishman and the resulting narrative arc. For example, while Evelyn Waugh is frequently read as a satirist, existing studies have surprisingly overlooked one of the foci of his satire, the travails of the upper-middle- to middle-class gentleman in

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relation to England and the empire—a fundamental theme that I explore. I also show how the theme of gentlemen and the shifts in the gender ideal connect Orwell’s early works to many of the postwar writers contemporaneously raised to national significance. In the process this study challenges the critically accepted consensus about Orwell’s gender-neutral politics and offers a new gendered take on George Orwell, the persona, and his notions of “decency.” Orwell and his postwar disciples—Kingsley Amis, John Wain, Philip Larkin, and Robert Conquest, to name a few—have commonly been read within the paradigm of class mobility. These writers have been frequently cited as anti-elitist and anti-modernist (usually conflated) advocates of welfare state egalitarianism: traits that made them seem iconoclastic and representative of the postwar nation. However, they were not all anti-modernist—both Orwell and Larkin frequently cited and celebrated modernist works. Nor did many of the writers endorse welfare state capitalism/socialism; in fact, many of them were rather critical of it. I show that what links most of these writers and makes them seem radically new was their return to, and celebration of, decency, the ordinary man, and heterosexual/ heteronormative masculinity. Their politics of masculinity is the vehicle through which they endeavored to dismantle the entitlement and values of the ancien régime, characterized as the Establishment. It is not enough to catalog that these realist male writers were exponents of xenophobia, provincialism, democracy, classlessness, and realism.12 It is also important to see that these traits for which they are famous emerge from a primary concern about Englishmen struggling to find a place in a transitioning England. Criticism that ignores the issue of masculinity in these texts blindly reads the newness, which is actually an adaptation to the old, as motivated solely by class. It is not. Class is, of course, vitally important, but I argue that it is masculinity and its relationship to the nation, empire, and state along with strategic leverage of “class” that consistently defines these texts.

The Decent Man and the Postwar Nation Examining the works of postwar authors such as Amis, Wain, and Ian Fleming with a focus on gender allows us to see the overwhelming narrative focus on the tribulations of being a man in postwar England. These works carefully and deliberately chart the transmutation of the English masculine ideals along a continuous spectrum, from gentleman to decent

Introduction

13

man. The protagonists work within and through inherited, possibly outmoded imperial gender scripts, the discourses of the welfare state citizensubject and professionalism. The post-gentleman displaces the gentleman in the national imaginary as the dominant ideal. The traits of the postgentleman—decency, an ambivalent chivalry, straightforwardness, vigor, moral rectitude, self-interest, detachment—are traits separated from the code of gentlemanliness. They have mutated with the pressures of imperial decline, the rise of welfare state governmental practices, and the insular turn as an imperial nation attempts to assert its post-imperial, postwar identity. World War II and the ensuing victory had two contradictory effects on the state of the British nation. On the one hand, the prohibitive costs of maintaining control in various parts of the empire and the vanquished nations (Germany, India, Egypt, Palestine, “the Far East,” as well as several British colonies in Africa) necessitated gradual withdrawal. The relinquishing of control was particularly resonant as Britain was entirely dependent on the United States for financial recovery. On the other hand, the fraught institution of the welfare state, in the midst of this narrative of imperial decline, was a huge accomplishment, a “British revolution” (Beveridge 17). Economically, politically, and culturally, the welfare state signified the conceptual and geographic demise of the old British empire and the arrival of a newly insular egalitarian nation whose focus was on domestic and socialist liberal policies. The welfare state was the product of John Maynard Keynes’s “managed capitalism,” where “collective interests could modify the actions of private individuals and firms” resulting in a stable economy and ensured the continuance of the nation-state (Esty 171). In fact, as Timothy Mitchell points out, the move from free to the managed market redrew the conceptual boundaries of the economy from the inclusive and sprawling British empire to the more significantly exclusive nation as defined by English cultural traditions: “The General Theory replaced the abstraction [the market], which had no geographical or political definition, with ‘economic system as a whole,’ a system whose limits corresponded to geopolitical boundaries” (89). The reconceptualization of the nation and its relationship to the world was signified by the dropping of the “British” from the title of the new Commonwealth of Nations in 1949—though Britain still headed the organization. Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, published in 1954, illustrates how this national turn inflected stylizations of English masculinity. Jim Dixon’s

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masculine subjectivity mirrors the emergence of the egalitarian state from the imperial nation. The novel was contemporaneously read as “Zeitgeist literature” and seen as ushering in the age of a “new man.”13 My analysis of this, perhaps the most famous of the Angry Young Man novels, sets the tone for the study of the post-gentleman in a post-imperial nation in this book. Lucky Jim is the story of lower-middle-class Jim Dixon, employed as a temporary history lecturer at a provincial university. The narrative satirizes the affectations of the inhabitants of the college. It details Jim’s escapades as he navigates between the despised and pretentious Welches, members of the provincial bourgeoisie, the tortured academic Margaret—with whom he is carrying on an affair—and the beautiful, upper-class Christine, the woman he loves. Welch as the caricature of “the gentleman” and Jim as the post-gentleman signify Green’s narrative of displacement and national shifts. Jim is the spokesman for the ordinary man, for egalitarian values, for England, and for the redrawn nation. Meanwhile, Welch and his wife are “pretentious” cosmopolitans, independently wealthy and useless amateurs, and the protectors of an unfair hierarchy. The narrator sympathizes with the uncertainty of Jim’s situation, especially as his vulnerable outsider position is accentuated by the fact that he has to defer and submit to his senior, Professor Welch, in order to be made permanent. He is also bullied by Welch’s son, Bertrand Welch, because of his lower-class credentials. Ultimately, through his display of masculine enthusiasm and common sense, he wins Christine and the approval of her wealthy uncle, Gore-Urquhart, and escapes to a well-paid job in London. The comic-realist novel of utopian wish-fulfillment portrays three different types of classed masculinity: the lower-middle-class decent man; the provincial, ineffectual upper-middle-class gentleman poseur; and the upper-class “natural” gentleman who recognizes Jim as a kindred spirit among inauthentic men. The protagonist, Jim Dixon, is poor, but he is possessed of physical, emotional, and intellectual vitality. He embodies this masculine affect: he is “on the short side, fair and round-faced, with an unusual breadth of shoulders that had never been accompanied by any special physical strength or skill” (8). He is the ordinary everyman whose physique is decidedly neither upper class nor working class but carries within it an innate sense of power that does not need to be proven in feats of athletic accomplishment. Since his job depends on pleasing Professor Welch, the pseudo-cosmopolitan provincial upper-class gentleman, he must stifle his innate vitality. Welch is “tall and weedy, with limp whitening hair” (8).

Introduction

15

Everything about Welch is drooping and symptomatic not just of the loss of power but also, significantly, of his unmanliness and his lack of discipline: to be erect is not just the obvious phallic sign of masculine virility but also indicates discipline, the discipline of holding oneself straight and tall. The body, then, visibly renders these differences in classed masculinities. The third-person narrative focalized through Jim clearly aligns the reader with Jim’s value system, which is positioned as the genuine and masculine one and ridicules Welch’s sons as “the effeminate writing Michel and the bearded pacifist painting Bertrand” (13). While Jim tries to preserve his sanity, oscillating “between a collapse into helpless fatigue and a tautening with anarchic fury,” in the face of Welch’s onslaught of pretension, the narrative focuses on two different stylizations of masculinity, each vying for hegemony.14 Indeed, this struggle for dominance is explicit, as the dominant metaphor in the novel is that of war: Jim engages in “campaigns” against the Welches and celebrates every “tactical” success. Even though the style is mock-heroic, the narrative mobilizes the language of warfare (of both class and masculinity) to depict Jim’s struggle to assert his gender identity. It enlists the reader into this discourse of authentic, masculine common sense and, by extension, Englishness, in opposition to Welch’s inauthenticity, verbal and behavioral unreliability, and adherence to “Continental” ideals. However, what makes this novel critically interesting is not the simple juxtaposition of the upper- and lower-class men, but rather how it disrupts and complicates this simple binary with its depiction of Julius Gore-Urquhart. Gore-Urquhart occupies the apex of narrative class hierarchy, and his patronage is highly desired. He is the natural “gentleman,” who is “most charming” with the “most beautiful manners,” “quite the real thing,” and a “bit of a change after the bearded monster” (105). GoreUrquhart is apparently the “real thing,” which the reader is meant to accept as a “real” gentleman, who does not abuse his class privilege and who remains down-to-earth, ordinary, and manly. This authenticity and manliness is illustrated through his ability to “get pints” of beer at the college function where only “halves” are being served. He does so by forging a connection with the college server, Maconochie, revealing that, unlike the proudly elitist Bertrand and Professor Welch, he is a man of the people, while also having “the most beautiful manners.” Moreover, he does not notice anything untoward in Jim’s asking about pints, while Margaret and Bertrand are embarrassed by this show of philistinism. Jim and Gore-Urquhart are simpatico precisely because they are the embodiments of manly virtues:

16 Scarecrows of Chivalry Gore-Urquhart by being a “real” gentleman and Jim as the “decent man” of the lower classes both embody the disarticulated values of gentlemanliness. He does not possess Gore-Urquhart’s manners, charm, or classed savoir faire, but he shares the same straightforward honesty and common sense, making him the true inheritor of those national gentlemanly traits. This affiliation is further cemented through a homosocial exchange, as Jim “wins” Christine, Gore-Urquhart’s niece. Jim’s social and economic ascent through luck and character point to the ascendance of democratized and disarticulated values of gentlemanliness translated into lower-middle-class masculinity. The novel replaces a traditional hierarchy of classed masculinity with a hierarchy of different stylizations of masculinity. Jim’s decent masculinity and Gore-Urquhart’s gentlemanliness, both rooted in English commonsense triumph over the Welches’ pseudo-cosmopolitan, artificial, and un-English masculinity.15 Jim Dixon, the decent man, is what I call the post-gentleman. He is the emergent new man who embodies the contradictions of postwar, postgentlemanly masculine stylizations. On the one hand, as already discussed, he embodies common sense, a manly straightforwardness, and also a sense of decency—traits of gentlemanliness. On the other hand, he rebels against the older ideals of gentlemanliness. He repudiates responsibility and publicservice professionalism, and he behaves like an overgrown schoolboy with no self-restraint: he plays pranks on the Welches, and gets rip-roaringly drunk on several public occasions. Both these contradictory set of behaviors, in fact, reveal just how much this new masculinity is articulated within the residual dominant ideals of gentlemanliness.16 For instance, Jim’s decency, seen as quintessential to the postwar “new hero,” is derivative of, and determined by, the gentlemanly ideal against which it rebels. Decency takes on great weight in a postwar Orwellian world. It is the circumscribed and “common man” version of gentlemanly fair play and imperial disinterestedness, the manly gesture of doing the right and ethical thing, even when it might be against one’s self-interest. Interestingly, Jim is the only one who behaves decently, and indeed appears to work from a frame of puritanical (Green’s term) gentlemanly chivalry and morality. In a key moment, when Jim could have won Christine’s affection away from Bertrand with “a few words,” that is, by telling her that Bertrand was cheating on her, he chooses not to do so. In addition to thinking of what “she [would] think of him,” Jim decides that “there’d never be a valid opportunity to make that disclosure to anyone” (201). The narrative indicates that Jim’s innate decency mani-

Introduction

17

fests at a point when the people to whom he was behaving decently (Bertrand) certainly do not deserve any such consideration. In fact, he is rather shocked at Bertrand’s duplicity as well as the cavalier attitude of Carol Goldsmith (Bertrand’s partner in adultery). Decency becomes the preserve of the lower-middle-class Jim, and not the provincial upper-middleclass Welch. The narration focalized through Jim incorporates the reader into sympathizing with this attitude, thereby colluding in apparent class rebellion. Jim’s decent behavior also becomes symptomatic of the return and assertion of Englishness and authentic/appropriate masculinity over the selfishness and un-English, “Continental” cosmopolitanism of Bertrand Welch. While the novel is realist in form, it is nevertheless a comic narrative of fantasy that ends in the hero’s lucky success and, more important, with the centering of his triumphant masculinity. He occupies his rightful place in English society when his ideals of decency, fair play, and chivalric homosociality intertwined with his lower-middle-class self-interest emerge victorious. The shifts in hegemonic masculinity, from gentlemanliness to the postgentleman (or the new man) and from imperial nation to the welfare state, determine the choice of texts in Scarecrows of Chivalry. Three principles govern these choices: (a) tracking the dual narrative of decline and confidence through the late-imperial and post-imperial periods; (b) the national canonization of Englishmen writing about Englishmen as they struggle to establish a new late-imperial, post-imperial masculinity extrapolated from gentlemanliness, in response to the new demands of the nation-state; and (c) critiques of and challenges to English male narratives of the changes in English national masculinity. To capture that double narrative, I begin with an overview of gentlemanliness and its constituent traits as they emerge and alter from the midnineteenth century to the thirties. The subsequent chapters on Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell chart the simultaneous decline and mutation of the gender ideal in the literature of the interwar years. Chapter 2, “Out of Place: Evelyn Waugh and the Retreating Gentleman,” rereads Waugh within this new frame of gendered imperial geographies. My analysis of Waugh’s Scoop (1937) shows how the discourses of the imperial English gentleman shape Waugh’s distinctly detached, ambivalent, wickedly ironic style. The narrator ironizes everything that he observes: the belatedness and disintegration of the English gentleman protagonist, the nationalcultural attempt to salvage Englishness through a country gentry in stasis,

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and the frenetic chaos of the metropolitan center and the imperial periphery. Scoop, as the last of Waugh’s “lighthearted” black satires, perfectly captures the predicament of the country gentleman as it brings together the city, the country, the metropole, and the periphery under the rubric of the corrupt modern machine, the press. Chapter 3, “An Orphaned Manliness: George Orwell and the Bovex Man,” as already suggested at the beginning of this introduction, situates George Orwell as the crucial link between literary depictions of the prewar and postwar gentleman. Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), set in the imperial center, denotes the painful transition from a residual aristocratic model of manliness to a professionalized suburban model through a formal amalgam of “domesticated” imperial romance, neo-picaresque, and documentary-style realism. The two chapters together track how the focus on the protracted disintegration of manliness in the novels of Waugh and Orwell shapes the form and style of these radically different writers canonized as major examples of Englishness. The early novels of both writers, sadly neglected, perfectly capture the difficulties of being gentlemen at different ends of the social hierarchy during the “shrinking” of the 1930s (Esty). By the end of World War II, the rise of the welfare state and the arduous de-linking of former colonies, Englishness, and ideals of gentlemanliness mutate and reconfigure to produce a new man, as evident in the texts that constitute a mini-canon of the postwar period. Orwellian reconfigurations of the ideals of gentlemanliness, as mentioned earlier, seed postwar stylizations of masculinity; he is the pivotal link to the postwar writers Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, and John Wain, who were widely seen as exemplifying postwar literary culture and the nation-state. In addition to calling the novels by Wain and Amis “Zeitgeist literature,” David Marquand proclaims that a “new social type” had arrived on the scene with these two novels. Leslie Fiedler, in Encounter, points to these writers as “representing a new class on its way into a controlling position in the culture of this country” (4). Meanwhile, dissenters, such as Somerset Maugham and Evelyn Waugh, also recognized the national significance of this “new class” of writers and their protagonists. For them, the new protagonists and their creators were indicative of a civilization and nation in decline. Maugham saw the new Englishman as opportunistic, “[having] no manners,” and “woefully unable to deal with any social predicament” (44). In fact, he perceived them to be the very opposite of the imperial Englishmen of another time, the sort that populated his books.

Introduction

19

Historical momentum necessitated the renegotiation of national and hegemonic masculine identity. Gentlemanliness, as it shifts into the postgentleman, manifests the tortuous reshaping of the nation from imperial omnipotent center to European nation-state. The literary meditation on retooled masculinities reflects the dual narrative of imperial de-linking and assertive nation. In chapter 4, “ ‘One of Those Old-Type Natural Fouled-Up Guys’: Posting the Gentleman in Philip Larkin’s Poetry,” I study Larkin’s poetic personae, who belong to a “new class” of Englishman, as negotiating an inherited imperial gentlemanliness in a shrunken island. Philip Larkin’s Englishmen fold into themselves and attempt to carve out a mode of being in their ironic self-conscious withdrawal from social structures—the consequence of a contempt for the obsolete ideals of manliness, and an effect of the very same. Hence, I read Larkin’s famed solitude and misanthropy, which seemed to find a collective resonance in English culture, as a historic inevitability of the Victorian gender construct of gentlemanliness. Many signature Larkin poems, such as “The Importance of Elsewhere,” “Dockery and Son,” and “Mr. Bleaney,” written between 1954 and 1964, render Englishmen as they writhe within the manly ideals of restraint and detachment that shape their existence even as the socioeconomic pressures of postwar England distort these creaky ideals. Larkin’s unique twist on the lyric form—his ironic, deflationary, restrained poetic personae and the almost defiant focus on the quotidian in postwar England—exposes excruciating self-awareness as an effect of the historical distance between the personae as Englishmen in the postwar era and their imperial predecessors who continue to haunt them. Chapter 5, “ ‘Moulded and Shaped’: John Wain, Ian Fleming, and Threshold Masculinities,” continues the investigation of the postgentleman’s struggle into being as he presses up against the constrictions of imperial gentlemanliness, the newly instituted governmental expectations of the gendered citizen, and the demands of professionalism. The first part of the chapter, focusing on John Wain’s Hurry on Down (1953), looks at how the novel adapts the eighteenth-century picaresque (with its tradition of the itinerant rogue defined by bodily pleasures and good fortune) to a realist idiom. I consider how the coming of age of the “Angry Young Man” as he journeys across welfare-state English society symbolizes the changes in the Englishman and the nation-state. The neo-picaresque, through its rendering of the conflicted bourgeois Englishman in search of a profession, simultaneously meditates on the foreshortened horizons of opportunity of

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post-empire and the emergence of an apparent egalitarian space. The second part of the chapter continues the examination of the threshold masculine figure, but in an expansive fantasy global setting, through a study of Fleming’s James Bond. Taking Amis and Wain as examples of the Angry Young Man, I turn to a short reading of another postwar iconic man, Bond, to demonstrate that he and the Angry Young Man, who appear to occupy opposite ends of the gentleman spectrum, are kin. Charles Lumley, Jim Dixon, and James Bond, despite their radically different origins, professions, and class locations, are post-gentlemen and are similarly metonymic of the post-imperial welfare state. However, as a consummate professional, Bond, unlike Dixon and Lumley, emblematizes the ideal of governance that defines both the gentleman and the postwar welfare state subject. The journalistic, bureaucratic memorandum style of Fleming’s novels speaks to the paradox of Bond as sovereign English professional and government tool. As a “blunt instrument” of the state, Bond’s masculinity, Englishness, and even humanity are repeatedly called into question (Hellman 32). Even as he is metonymic of, and protects, the Janus-faced nation-state, Bond the bureaucratic spy lies outside the boundaries of citizenship. Chapter 6 shifts focus to women’s narratives that were written in a moment of masculinized national rejuvenation. “Writing Women, Reading Men: A. S. Byatt, Barbara Pym, and the Post-Gentlemen” argues that the novels of Pym and Byatt speak to the repressed histories against which postimperial masculinities have defined themselves. Barbara Pym’s An Unsuitable Attachment (1963, 1982) addresses the works of Larkin and Amis. Pym’s trademark ironic free indirect discourse expresses the simultaneous self-awareness and self-delusion of various gentlewomen and gentlemen as they adapt to their belatedness and marginality within London’s shifting urban landscape, synecdochic of England. A. S. Byatt’s The Shadow of the Sun (1964) telescopes and deconstructs the culturally privileged literary and masculine struggle of the Angry Young Men from the perspective of a female outsider. Female middle-class subjectivity in these novels executes a delicate maneuver between the dual pressures of patriarchal authority and the defensive aggression of the “new man,” at a time when “kitchen-sink” reality increasingly symbolizes the shrinking of national horizons. The novels by Byatt and Pym work as a necessary response to the issue of the post-imperial new man (Angry Young Man) and the holdover gentleman (upper-class Englishman shown in Waugh). This chapter, together with the epilogue about the postcolonial gentleman, challenges the narratives about

Introduction

21

Englishmen by Englishmen. At the same time, the female protagonists are fully realized; they emerge into selfhood by navigating outmoded gender expectations and the postwar man. The final chapter is not meant to be an exhaustive critical commentary on the transitions in the discourses of femininity, but a feminist bookend to the male perspectives on display in the preceding chapters. While the book’s argument focuses mainly on the disintegration and transformation of English manly ideals in the metropole, the epilogue, “The Postcolonial Gentleman,” deliberates on the postcolonial gentleman’s perspective. The final section engages briefly with the gentleman who is not English, and most crucially, not white, as he appropriates the traits of gentlemanliness to conceptualize a new stylization of masculinity. I consider Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown (1964) and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988). The epilogue—in unpacking tensions implicit in the idea of a non-white, non-English man who reworks gentlemanliness— gestures toward new types of the post-imperial gentleman and, paradoxically, his decline as well. The postcolonial gentleman brings me to briefly discuss the origins of this project. The gentleman as a term circulated with varying degrees of frequency among members of my family and their extended friends’ circle of urban middle-class Indians, born just after India became independent in 1947. Indeed, they deployed the vocabulary of “gentlemanliness” to appreciatively describe acquaintances who were ethical, mannered, and dignified. As I grew older, I noticed that only a very exclusive group of men were described as gentlemanly: the English-educated, upper-class Indian man or the upper-class Englishman; more often than not, they were civil servants, gentlemanly administrators. Growing up on a steady diet of Enid Blyton, P. G. Wodehouse, and Charles Dickens, I connected the Englishmen in these novels (though some of them were indescribably silly)—with all their associations of power, wealth, privilege, Englishness, and that ever elusive, but apparently inherent, quality, “class”—with the gentlemanly civil servants around me. I had always been aware that not everyone could be gentlemanly: never the lower classes, and never women. Even among gentlemen, there were some who were more so than others. This book is the result of that childhood awareness, of the desire to see what the big deal was, of the desire to uncover the race, class, and gender privilege that made the gentleman such a global, mythic icon.

1

Manly Independent Men (De)constructing the English Gentleman Before the war you were either a gentleman or not a gentleman, and if you were a gentleman you struggled to behave as such, whatever your income might be. George Orwell

n order to track the changes in hegemonic masculinity, the change from gentleman to post-gentleman, in the middle decades of the twentieth century, it is necessary to go back to the Victorian ideal of the gentleman. As I delineated in the introduction, many of the protagonists in the literature of the interwar and postwar period rework, adopt, and disavow gentlemanly traits—such as restraint, chivalry, disinterestedness, service, and detachment—which are also the virtues of the English/ British tout court. To study how gentlemanliness affected subsequent iterations of national masculinity, we must consider, albeit briefly, how and why the gentleman became the national, imperial ideal, and, more important, how those constituent traits became fundamental to national and masculine identity. The gentleman was mass-produced under the specific system of the Victorian public schools that had acquired unparalleled hegemonic status by the end of the nineteenth century. The public school was instrumental in creating a ruling class where meritocracy and exclusivity worked in tandem; as Perry Anderson describes, they were “designed to socialize the sons of the—new or old—rich into a uniform pattern that henceforth became the fetishized criterion of a ‘gentleman’ ” (22). The gentleman became the instrument through which the mercantile bourgeoisie and the

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aristocracy coalesced in the nineteenth century, a union that defined English polity and society well into the mid-twentieth century. From this amalgam emerged the hegemonic traits of Englishness and gentlemanliness that Perry Anderson calls “traditionalism” and “empiricism”—traits that continued to define Englishness in the mid-century moment, as seen in Martin Green’s rendering of the decent man. Assumed to have begun with Thomas Arnold’s reform of Rugby in 1827, public schools became training grounds for future administrators and national leaders—in short, a new ruling class—in response to the new demands of industrialization and an expanding empire. Public schools defined and articulated the ideals of Englishness and English manhood, ideals that crystallized through a sustained interaction between the industrial/ capitalist exigencies (the merging of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy) and the theater of empire (the conquest and administration of colonies). This interaction entwined national and cultural identity with national/imperial institutions. Public school boys were educated into “a vocation of ruling”: the curriculum specifically designed to produce “better-trained and informed administrators” (Viswanathan 56). According to Sarah Cole, they “became the purveyors of an ideological vision that centered on the perpetuation of England’s imperial mission, provided the core training for Britain’s ruling elite, creating a set of norms about how to live and what to believe that touched nearly all sectors of British life, at home and in the expanding empire” (Cole 32). The course of studies in English public schools was designed to foster those leadership qualities required of a governing elite: “independent thinking, a strong sense of personal identity, and an ability to make decisions on one’s own authority” (Viswanathan 56). The ideal gentleman, then, connected the personal code of ethical manliness— how to behave as a gentleman—with the ethno-national code of appropriate leadership—how to behave as an Englishman. The traits of public school gentlemanliness are inextricably linked to the ideals of Englishness and national identity, illustrating the structural presence of empire in the consolidation of English national gender identity. The 1869 Clarendon Commission report on the nation’s public schools makes this link clear: It is not easy to estimate the degree to which the English people are indebted to these schools for the qualities on which they pique themselves most—for their capacity to govern others and control themselves, their aptitude for combining freedom with order, their vigour and manliness of character,

24 Scarecrows of Chivalry their strong but not slavish respect for public opinion, and their love for healthy sport and exercise. These schools have been the chief nurseries of our statesmen; in them and in schools modelled after them, men of all the various classes that make up English society, destined for every profession and career, have been brought up on a footing of social equality, and have contracted the most enduring friendships, and some of the ruling habits of their lives; and they have had perhaps the largest share in the moulding of the character of the “English Gentleman.” (Simon and Bradley 153)

The commission connected the qualities of the gentleman with Englishness. The “English Gentleman,” with his respect for authority, control, vigor, and aptitude for governance, symbolized the qualities of the English people. It is significant that the English gentleman is defined by his ability to control himself and “govern others.” The public schools create not just a classed, gendered identity, but a classed, gender, and national identity, that makes the English gentleman inherently suitable to imperial and national governance. E. M. Forster, in his “Notes on the English Character,” also observes this particular phenomenon when he opines that “just as the heart of England is the middle classes, so the heart of the middle class is the public-school system . . . as it perfectly expresses the character” of the Anglo-Saxon (Abinger Harvest 3). While the public school, as Harold Perkin shows, emphasized the professional ideal, a great deal of their energy was focused on ensuring the training of professionals to head out to colonial spaces. Mangan argues, “Once the Empire was established, the public schools sustained it” (21). In the words of G. Kendall, a former headmaster of University College School, “The public schools claim that it is they who, if they did not make the Empire (for most of them were hardly in existence when the Empire was made), at least maintained and administered it through their members” (qtd. in Bamford 241). The headmasters of public schools announced their commitment to the empire; for them, “the white man’s burden signified moral status as well as moral duty” (Wilkinson 102). The imperial civil and military careers required specific kinds of training, and in the schools, “the classical and modern sides evolved their curricula and conditions in response to this requirement” (Mangan 22). Tom Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) quite explicitly ties together the elements of the curricula—in this case, cricket, one of the team sports that was part of what J. A. Mangan calls “the games ethic”—to char-

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acter building aimed at ruling the self, dependents, and, finally, the world. The novel that transformed England’s perception of public schools as well as popularized Thomas Arnold’s conception of manliness and education, has acquired almost canonical status, not just in terms of children’s literature but also within the larger framework of Victorian gender and culture studies. Tom Brown’s maturation toward a disinterested, disciplined selfassertion is revealed in the final section of the book with his captaincy of the Cricket Eleven, clearly the acme of his public school career. In a passage that has acquired canonical status in its own right, the captain of the Eleven, Arthur, and a young master deliberate upon the wonder that is cricket: “I’m beginning to understand the game scientifically. What a noble game it is, too!” “Isn’t it? But it’s more than a game. It’s an institution,” said Tom. “Yes,” said Arthur, “the birthright of British boys old and young, as habeas corpus and trial by jury are of British men.” “The discipline and reliance on one another which it teaches is so valuable, I think,” went on the master, “it ought to be such an unselfish game. It merges the individual in the eleven; he doesn’t play that he may win, but that his side may.” “That’s very true, said Tom, “and that’s why football and cricket, now one comes to think of it, are much better games than fives . . . or any others where the object is to come in first or to win one’s self, and not that one’s side may win.” “And then the Captain of the eleven!” said the master, “what a post is his in our School-world! Almost as hard as the Doctor’s, requiring skill and gentleness, and firmness. “What a sight it is,” broke in the master, “the Doctor as a ruler! Perhaps ours is the only little corner of the British Empire, which is thoroughly, wisely, and strongly ruled just now.” (312)1

While being undoubtedly a paean to cricket, what is interesting here the natural movement from cricket pitch to empire. Cricket is equated with the legal mechanisms of “habeas corpus” and “trial by jury” as quintessentially English contributions to the world. Cricket is an important English institution because it inculcates the values of unselfishness in its players. Boys who play cricket subsume their desire for personal glory and merge into one, so that “the side can win.” The discourse of not letting the side

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down becomes a crucial marker of gentlemanly behavior: from following codes of appropriate classed behavior, to behaving in a manner appropriate to English imperial rulers. Qualities crucial to victory on the cricket pitch, such as discipline and unselfishness, are exponentially expanded to include the national and imperial arena. In fact, Tom makes this point more explicitly when he praises fellow Rugbean Harry East, a commissioned officer in India: “No fellow could handle boys better, and I suppose soldiers are like boys” (Hughes 318). Gentlemanliness is constituted at the crux of class, nation, and empire and thereby is its most perfect exemplum, a fact of which the text is extremely aware as the narrative vision gradually stretches to include the speakers, the game, the school, and the imperial horizon, paralleling Tom’s growth from the “Little World” of Rugby—an idyllic microcosm of the imperial nation—into the widening world of Oxford, England, and the imperial periphery. To return to the Public Schools Commission report, it also seemed to indicate that public schools unified men across social classes, which is highly debatable, although the qualities cultivated in these schools certainly acquired cultural cachet across the spectrum of British society. Even schools that were not public schools, but a sort of second cousin to these elite institutions catering to the less wealthy middle classes, followed the patterns set by public schools, and the ideology of gentlemanliness certainly percolated down to the lower classes through sermons and boys’ weeklies.2 The national-cultural ideal of the gentleman cemented in the public school system extended to the institutions of church and university, hence consolidating bourgeois power.3 By the early decades of the twentieth century, through militaristic organizations such as the Boy Scouts and Boys’ Brigades, the hegemonic ideal of manliness had spread to sections of the lower-middle and even working classes (Springhall 53). Gentlemanliness, as I read it, is a metropolitan gender ideal, that is, one that emerges in the imperial center. The ideal evolved along two tracks: the domestic hierarchical landscape, and in relation to the expanding empire that also structured and sustained it. In my parsing of the gentleman ideal below, I focus on, and meld, both tracks, since it is difficult to separate out the purely domestic and the purely imperial in nineteenth-century metropolitan culture and gender formation. The ideals of the gentleman emerge at the cusp of the national and the imperial, as both Catherine Hall and Mrinalini Sinha have variously shown. Hall argues that “manly independent men,” or the Englishmen of the ruling classes, only emerged “in re-

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lation to the dependent and subjected”—women, children, colonized, and working classes (170). Sinha, building on this, contends that British and Indian notions of masculinity/gender in the nineteenth century “cannot be understood simply from the framework of discrete ‘national’ cultures.” Her work illustrates the “prior significance of imperialism in the construction of both ‘national’ British and ‘colonial’ Indian politics of masculinity” in the late nineteenth century. Sinha’s focus is on the “effeminate Bengali”; however, her historicized paradigm of the imperial social formation of masculinities reveals that English national masculinity is imperially structured (Colonial Masculinity 7). I use Hall and Sinha’s theorization of the metropolitan gentleman as a starting point and trace the alterations in the icon through the literature of the interwar and mid-century periods. My book focuses on how historical pressures, the institution of the welfare state, and the disintegration of the empire that sustained and globalized the ideal affect this hegemonic gender configuration. The next few pages lay out the emergence and evolution of some of the key gentlemanly virtues that inform all subsequent versions of late-imperial and postwar literary representations of masculinity examined in this book. Gentlemanliness, as I use the term, constitutes a core set of traits that are associated with the middleclass Englishman/gentleman. Even as the gentlemanly ideal shifts between the various segments of the middle and upper classes (of which there are many, a fact to which this book pays close attention), those who considered themselves gentlemen, or were expected to behave as gentlemen, operated within the coherent, yet dynamic, code of gentlemanliness.

The Traits of a Gentleman Gentlemanliness was always structured in relation to an Other. The working classes formed the perfect dialectical antithesis to the synthesis of the gentleman construct. The working-class man represented an undiluted, almost primitive form of masculinity against which gentlemanliness was the acme of discipline, self-restraint, and Englishness. What distinguished the physicality of gentlemanliness from the working-class male body was its moral dimension: the vigor and virility of manliness was tempered and disciplined (Kingsley 19). In an earlier iteration of the argument he develops in his recent The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880–1922, Joseph Valente explicates this point further: “The normative (gentle)man was . . . seen to be invested with great and effective moral energy for the re-

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straint, discipline, and redirection of his urgent and brutish desires. A muscular ideal of manhood consisted precisely in the simultaneous necessity for and exercise of this capacity for rational self-control—in strong passions strongly checked—from which the virtues of conventional ‘masculinity’ (fortitude, tenacity, industry, candor) were assumed to derive.”4 He goes on to argue that the productive tension between this almost animalistic male energy and the moral imperatives of self-discipline set manliness apart, ensuring the superiority of the middle-class gentleman. Valente refers to this “closed-circuit self-referencing tension between [manhood’s] component energies” as a sort of “discordia concors” where gentlemanly selfgovernment and self-restraint became the markers of autonomy and right to self-determination and, as a consequence, the right to govern others. In the same quarter, the disciplined manliness of the English gentleman was set against, and defined by, the effeminate or inadequate masculinity of the imperial Other. Thomas Carlyle’s Englishness, as he defined it in his “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question,” depended on the decisive and forceful manliness of the Englishman as opposed to the idle chaotic primitivism of the “Quashee.” Carlyle argues for the superiority of the English by legitimizing a specific stylization of English middle-class manliness, and he feminizes and “unmans” the “Quashee”: “Do I, then, hate the Negro? No; except when the soul is killed out of him, I decidedly like poor Quashee; and find him a pretty kind of man. . . . A swift, supple fellow; a merry hearted, grinning, dancing, singing, affectionate kind of creature, with a great deal of melody and amenability in his composition” (311; italics mine). The Jamaican Negro stands in antithesis to the vigorous manliness of the Englishman. The Englishman’s manliness depends on the coding of Quashee as feminine, soft, and frivolous, which in turn defines and concretizes the superiority of Englishness. However, at the very moment of the articulation of that difference, the difference is also consolidated and made over into myth. One of the defining traits of hegemonic English manhood was the expansive service ideal, which was predicated on the Englishman’s inherent moral superiority and detachment. The notion of detachment was most clearly and influentially articulated by Matthew Arnold in On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867). Arnold’s conceptualization of this inherently English ideal was itself underwritten by the domestic empire within Britain. Arnold, while ostensibly making a case for the preservation of Celtic literature, details the inherently hybrid identity of Englishness. He contends that

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the “English genius” is a “composite of the Germanic genius, the Celtic genius, the Norman genius” (Arnold 87). Englishness in itself, it seems, does not exist; it is, according to Arnold, the commingling of the best of different racial traits. While the Normans, the Saxons, and the Celts (in particular) possess an essence, a myth, and an eternal spirit, the English possess no such thing, and therein lies their greatest strength. For Arnold, the absence of an inherent essence allowed the English the privilege of detached observation. As opposed to the Normans, Saxons, and Celts, who were limited by their holistic essence, the English, in the absence of a predetermined cultural and racial memory, could disinterestedly absorb and control the totality of others. Other Europeans, Arnold points out, have noted the Englishman’s inherent self-consciousness, which he asserts is a direct consequence of the “English nature being mixed . . . while the Latin nature is all of a piece, and so is the German nature, and the Celtic nature” (102). When Arnold talks about the Englishman, he refers to the middle-class or upper-middle-class Englishman; he certainly does not mean the lumpen working-class man. He attributes this self-consciousness to Englishness as an admixture of racial traits produced by a long history of conquest and dominance, where England itself was both conquered and conquering. The Englishman strives to maintain a balance within his contradictory racial heritage, an effort that makes him acutely self-conscious. Here the almost deprecatory self-consciousness is actually a form of selfawareness. Englishmen, as an effect of their history of conquest, possess an inherent balance and detachment that others lack. This detachment and balance, coupled with Saxon pragmatism, ensured that the English were particularly suited for cultural and racial dominance. Arnold’s ideas of disinterestedness were further consolidated as constitutive of Englishness and manliness throughout the nineteenth century, as the parliamentary and public debates that raged around the criteria for the Indian civil service in the nineteenth century demonstrate. In fact, disinterested governance and the quintessentially English “gentlemanly administrator” who embodied that myth emerged from an imperial issue, a protracted struggle to ensure that Indians did not gain mass entry into the Indian civil service in 1866.5 The far-reaching effects of this debate resulted in the three-tier integration of the public school, university, and civil service and the creation of a “new mythology, translating the upper-classes’ monopolisation of administrative power into an ideal of disinterested governance. . . . That ideal still resonated more than a century later in a . . .

30 Scarecrows of Chivalry description of the British civil service as a classless class of well-bred men” (Goodlad 134). The connection between public school and Oxbridge domination of the imperial civil services exposes that the national representation of “English” masculinity was tied to “a strictly provincial representation of ‘native’ masculinity of Indians” (Sinha, Colonial Masculinity 9). It also validated what Graham Dawson has called “English-British masculinity,” one that underscored the “Englishness” in the identity of the “British” centralized in the civil service as a result of the Public Service Commission. Significantly, the imperial matrix that formed Indian masculinity and English manliness explains the public school emphasis on making “men of vigour, tact, courage, and integrity, men who are brave and chivalrous and true, men who in the words of the academical prayer are ‘duly qualified to serve God both in Church and state’ ” (Weldon 823). The requirement of appropriate gentlemanly behavior not only restricted the entry of Indians into the service, but within England it hegemonized certain types of manly behavior over others. Englishmen were required to be noble, disinterested, disciplined, physically strong, and morally righteous. Within the national frame of bourgeois capitalism, these traits combined the romantic ideals of chivalry with a strong bourgeois morality. Disinterestedness, that prime virtue of the English gentleman, was the Englishman’s rigorously maintained ability to subsume self-interest for the greater good and engage with all situations and peoples impartially and objectively. The burden of the elite Englishman was to rule and civilize; hence, the service ideal and disinterestedness were conjoined. This culture of altruism, or disinterested service, which, according to Stefan Collini, was a pervasive, almost obsessive aspect of Victorian culture, is an integral constituent of gentlemanly vigor and conduct. For Leslie Stephen, father of Virginia Woolf, a gentleman is one who pursues “the higher motives” and must learn “to think of himself as part of a greater whole, whose conduct has been habitually directed to noble ends” (Stephen 279). Hence, altruism, in the Victorian and Edwardian sense of duty toward others, meant rigorous self-discipline for the good of others, and, indeed, superiority of the masculine self is consolidated through an awareness of, and working for, the social good. This gentlemanly obsession with altruism and duty developed in the larger context of the nation and the empire and continued to inform the ideal of the gentlemen well into the mid-twentieth century, as seen in the good clergymen who populated Barbara Pym’s novels. Duty toward dependents—whether they were women, the working classes, or the

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less civilized and primitive inhabitants of the imperial periphery—provided a sense of purpose, and this sense of purpose motivated, to use Michel Foucault’s phrase, a rigorous technology of the self, which in turn delineated the morally superior English gentleman from the decadent aristocrat or the lumpen working-class man.6 The melding of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy in the nation’s public schools produced an elevated and glamorized service ethic, embedded as it was within an altered and ostensibly more democratized tradition of chivalry and aristocracy appropriated from the tales of medieval and Renaissance Europe. Prince Albert became the iconic representation of this marriage of aristocratic glamour with the more practical, mundane values of the bourgeoisie. Prince Albert helped to yoke “essentially bourgeois values with the traditions of chivalry.”7 This notion of service and dedicating one’s life for the benefit of others was underpinned by the notion of knight errantry.8 This code of the gentleman in a devolved mode inflected the masculine stylizations of the decent, postwar man, even as they attempted to repudiate it. The code of chivalry was reformulated in order to provide the nineteenthcentury gentleman with an appropriately significant code of ethics—the gentleman was seen as the epitome of purity and honor and “endowed with a sense of noblesse oblige towards women, children and social inferiors” (Richards 113). While it would never be called noblesse oblige, a concerted public school move was to raise the tone of middle-class manliness and skew it toward the upper echelons of society, prioritizing duty and virtue. At this juncture, it is necessary to point out that gentlemanliness was not static: the ideal took several forms through the course of the century. The early form of manliness, or “moral manliness,” molded along Christian principles became more secularized as an effect of the increasing political importance of empire as well as internal changes in the gender order (Viswanathan 100–110). By the end of the century, Christianity had almost disappeared as one of the explicit and essential ingredients of public school gentlemanliness. The “games ethic” had taken its place. As Mangan points out, “The chosen medium for the fostering of [the] virtues [of the English gentleman] were team games. . . . And by means of this ethic the public schoolboy supposedly learned inter alia the basic tools of imperial command: courage, endurance, assertion, control and self-control. . . . There was a further dimension to the later concept of ‘manliness’: its relevance to both dominance and deference” (Mangan 18). The fin de siècle—marked

32 Scarecrows of Chivalry by what Tim Middleton calls “the increasing turbulence surrounding gender roles (occasioned in part by the phenomenon of the New Woman) and the anxieties about the impact of this perceived cause of national decline in the (real and feared) imperialist clashes of the 1880s and ’90s”—produced a refashioning of hegemonic manliness as a more muscular, more virile version of its earlier morality-laden stylization (Middleton 137). This perceived discourse of decline in the fin de siècle is responsible for the rise of the New Imperialism and a muscular manliness.9 Despite these shifts through the Victorian and pre–World War I eras, the qualities of gentlemanliness retained a certain sense of continuity.10 The key gentlemanly virtues consolidated during the nineteenth century— chivalry, self-restraint, disinterestedness, detachment, vigor—devolve, decline, mutate, and shape subsequent versions of English masculinity in the literature of the twentieth century. The trauma and massive loss of young male lives during World War I destabilized the strength of the manly ethic that had underwritten the empire and the imperial nation. On the one hand, Paul Fussell, Elaine Showalter, Michael Roper, and Sandra Gilbert argue that World War I saw the end of the ideals of manliness that defined the late Victorian and Edwardian imperial nation, where Victorian “fantasies of historical heroism gave way to modernist visions of irony and unreality.”11 On the other hand, Joanna Bourke and Allen Frantzen have shown that ideals of hegemonic manliness were reconfigured to incorporate, and focus on, themes of pain, fear, and sacrifice. While I agree with Bourke and Frantzen, I believe the code of gentlemanliness involves disintegration and alteration. This uncertainty regarding hegemonic English imperial masculine authority was concomitant with what Barbara Bush has called the “feminization” of empire (80). After 1918, as a consequence of “the skills and character” women had acquired during the war, they were increasingly represented as “Empire Builders” (Bush 81). The relationship between women, nation, and empire altered substantially, particularly following the Sex Disqualification Removal Act of 1919, which allowed them to enter male professions. The increased presence of women—whether elite professionals, lower-ranked working women, or bourgeois wives—transformed imperial masculinities. Ideas of chivalry, male (homoerotic or otherwise) bonding, fair play, masculine public spaces, and colonial clubs all became sites of contention and, as a consequence, objects of mockery in Waugh’s novels. In the subcontinent, for instance, the Government of India Act of 1919, which was a sop to agitating Indians following their par-

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ticipation in World War I, allowed Indians access to “every branch of administration,” enabling educated Indians to enter the imperial bureaucracy in unprecedented numbers.12 Anglicized native men in the administration challenged Englishmen and their inherent manly superiority by their very existence. The native gentlemen embodied gentlemanly values that defined English raced, classed superiority, and threatened the very idea of English gentlemanly superiority. The British, then, had to deal with mass uprisings and demonstrations that undercut ideas of imperial control (the Indian Civil Disobedience movements under Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi) while being challenged on their gentlemanly virtues of fair play, legality, restraint, and civility. The hegemonic ideal of English gentlemanliness, as a consequence of these intersecting changes, became increasingly fraught and destabilized. In the face of such inevitable political and cultural change, the certainties of racial, classed, manly superiority that both defined and determined the ideal of the gentleman slowly shifted. In the section that follows, through a brief reading of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), I examine how the text represents not only the qualities of hegemonic imperial English manliness delineated above, but also its decline and alteration in imperial spaces. While the novel has been the object of a great deal of critical (feminist, queer, postcolonial, formalist) study, critics have never considered the narrative’s representation of English manliness and its relationship to imperial authority, an oversight that illustrates the naturalization of that imbrication. The reading functions as a pivot point that connects the Victorian and Edwardian formulation of gentlemanliness to the slow disintegration and change through the 1930s into the postwar period.

Gentlemen in Decline Though the British empire was at its largest and most expansive in the 1920s and ’30s, that same period also witnessed the beginning of the end of imperial authority. Following the devastation of the Great War, these decades saw the gaining momentum of the Indian independence movement, the founding of the Irish Free State, and mass labor strikes across Africa. The works of George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, and Evelyn Waugh, among others, chart the steady deterioration of imperial confidence both at home and in the empire. A Passage to India shows the fragility of the discourses of manliness and imperial power even as it demonstrates its progressive devo-

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lution. This is especially the case as colonial nationalist resistance that signaled the end of empire challenges the authority of imperial Englishmen. The unraveling of manliness in tandem with authority becomes particularly evident in late imperial spaces where the pukka sahib is increasingly split from gentlemanliness. The pukka sahib is an imperial mediation of the domestic ideal of the gentleman, where the ethno-national or the racialtribal code takes precedence over the personal-ethical code: race becomes the defining factor of the Englishman. Ann Laura Stoler in her unpacking of the making of the classed bourgeois body points out that “bourgeois identities in metropole and colony emerge as tacitly and emphatically coded by race” (Stoler 144). The difference, and it is a difference of degree and not kind, is that metropolitan gentlemanliness was implicitly racially encoded while the Englishman was explicitly so. The English gentleman at home and the imperial Englishman in the periphery, the pukka sahib, are interlocked, forming a codependent relationship, where separating one from the other spells the end of both. A Passage to India is an extended meditation on this inevitable and overdetermined fissure in the long, slow decline of empire, even as it simultaneously illustrates the continued mythic power of the disintegrating ideal. A Passage to India, set between 1912 and the early 1920s in colonial India and now canonized as a text of empire, is the story of the alleged rape of an Englishwoman intertwined with the attempted friendship between an Indian man and an Englishman. Feminist and postcolonial critics have claimed that its central trope of rape represents (hetero)sexual violence and imperialism, respectively. Recently, critics have argued that the novel attempts to breach colonial differences through the transformation of the homosocial terrain of empire by a racially transgressive homoerotic desire.13 Whereas the early historicized discussions of A Passage to India focus on how it disrupts the sedimented paranoia of the Mutiny of 1857—that is, the perennial fear of the Indian man’s desire for the white woman—I consider the novel’s overlooked description of empire as a theater of manliness. In this homosocial space where Indian and English women become the counters through which imperial power is consolidated (and hence also bear the burden for the impossibility of colonial camaraderie between Englishmen and Indian men), I consider the imperial trajectories of Ronny Heaslop and Cyril Fielding as two concurrent types of public school manliness.14 Through the character of Heaslop, Forster parodies the gender ideal by transporting it back to the imperial terrain that helped constitute it.

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Fielding, on the other hand, embodies the Englishman whose gentlemanliness stretches the boundaries of the ideal—much like Forster himself—as it is altered by changes in the imperial situation, and more crucially the erotics of empire. To fully understand the reach of the narrative’s meditation on imperial manliness, it is necessary to consider its historical span even as it seems to shy away from specific historical events. The novel’s period of gestation stretches between Forster’s first visit to India in 1912 and his second in 1921, spanning World War I, the repressive measures of the Rowlatt Acts, the upsurge of nationalist feeling, the civil disobedience movement, the rise of Gandhi, the first Government of India Act, and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Broad in scale, it telescopes its critique of manliness and the mutations in the ideal. Heaslop’s zealous desire to fulfill his imperial duty is a part of the public school manliness that echoes Tom Brown’s desire in Tom Brown’s Schooldays to be at “work in the world.” He fervently believes that the English are not in India to be “pleasant” but to “do justice and keep the peace” (51).15 Heaslop’s identity as an Englishman in India lies in his ability to dispense justice and do his duty to his “caste.” Subsuming himself to his imperial destiny, he becomes a type, a much-desired transformation according to the district collector, Turton. There is no Heaslop outside his identity as pukka sahib and the homosocial Anglo-Indian community. In binding himself so emphatically to the code of the sahibs, he perpetuates the code he has acquired in his public school: that of the dutiful English gentleman who never lets his side down. To emphasize the continuity of the gentlemanly/public-school/imperial code, one must return to the central trope of rape. Critics, most notably Jenny Sharpe, have already uncovered the ideological ramifications inherent in the victimization of the English woman and the Indian man within the framework of colonial power dynamics.16 I want to point out that Heaslop’s martyrdom attributed to him by the Anglo-Indian community, emphasizing the homosocial dynamic of the English in India—a dynamic whose origins lie in the Mutiny of 1857 and its aftermath—also reveals the fracture of established ideas of English manliness. An act of violence upon the Englishwoman’s body in colonial India is read as an attack on imperial authority. It is also more crucially, I argue, interpreted by the Anglo-Indian community as an attack on Englishmen, metonymic of the imperial nation. Earlier, colonial insubordination would have been answered by the righteous wrath of the chivalric Englishman and a reestablishment of his power.

36 Scarecrows of Chivalry However, with the upsurge of colonial nationalism and its appropriation of the discourse of law, imperial authority is necessarily predicated on continued restraint and an adherence to the legal system, especially following General Dyer’s Amritsar massacre of 1919.17 General Dyer’s reign of terror was also centered on and justified by the chivalric honor of the Englishman. He instituted the infamous crawling order in the wake of an attack on a missionary woman. Dyer’s “suitable punishment” for this flagrant assault on white womanhood by a single Indian man was for all Indians to crawl on their bellies, if they wished to pass through the street on which the attack took place. Indeed, his rationale for the order unequivocally reinscribes the sanctity of the English Lady and the priestly chivalric duty of Englishmen devoted to preserve it: “The order meant that the street should be regarded as holy ground, and that, to mark this fact, no one was to traverse it except in a manner in which a place of special sanctity might naturally in the East be traversed” (qtd. in Sayer 142). Forster’s narrative, which alludes to both the 1857 Mutiny and Dyer’s order, exposes the flaws of colonial ideology by unambiguously connecting the consolidation of English manliness and colonial power. The Anglo-Indian response to the alleged assault on Adela should be read within the discursive frame not only of the 1857 Mutiny but also of the debate between John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle over the actions of Governor Eyre in Jamaica in 1865—an event echoed by General Dyer’s conduct. In October 1865, responding to a riot in Morant Bay, the British governor of Jamaica, Edward Eyre, proclaimed martial law and sent in the troops, resulting in the deaths of 439 natives and the flogging of 600. Governor Eyre’s actions became the focal point around which prominent members of English society debated the mode of English imperialism, the superiority of English civilization, and the perceptions of English nationhood.18 Interestingly, this debate came to be focalized through the manliness of Governor Eyre and the English, and the degenerate masculinity of the natives so brutally repressed. The Governor Eyre controversy emphasized that hegemonic manliness is the medium through which ideals of Englishness are routed, delineating middle-class manliness through a sense of difference from black/ brown men, from black/ brown and white women, and from the English working classes (Hall 191). It also demonstrates a moment where, as Catherine Hall argues, two competing forms of middle-class manliness vie for hegemony. Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, and Charles Kingsley, members of

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the Eyre Defence Committee, argued that Eyre’s military actions were appropriately decisive and necessary. It was, they said, in keeping with the chivalric duty of safeguarding English interests: Eyre took the altruistic yet necessarily cruel action to maintain order and continue the civilizing process of Jamaica. On the opposing side, John Stuart Mill condemned Eyre for his inappropriate manliness and claimed it revealed a lack of reason and compassion. For Mill, Eyre’s extralegal arrogance had to be punished by the sane impartiality of English law, if England’s claim to a civilizing imperialism was to be justified. The Anglo-Indian community in Forster’s Chandrapore wishes to reenact the chivalric violent anger of 1857 and 1865. Their communal desire stands in contradistinction to the logic of due legal process on the basis of which the English justify their rule and requires that they exercise restraint and detachment à la Mill. Forster’s narrative deliberately splits the tenuously balanced contradictions that are constitutive of English manliness in empire: righteous anger and restraint. Righteous aggression must be contained with the specter of the Indian nationalists challenging the English on the grounds of their own legal system. The imperial Englishman is stripped of the justificatory chivalric violence that established his superiority over the “cunning,” “effeminate” Indian man. Restraint, illustrative of the Englishman’s moral superiority in face of the brutal cunning of the Indian rapist, no longer connotes strength, as the community perceives it not as a willed act but rather as the evitable helplessness of legality. Ronny Heaslop’s impotence becomes particularly evident in his characterization by the Anglo-Indian community as “poor suffering Heaslop” (Forster 211). His only possible act of vengeance against his impugned honor is to deny Aziz bail. On the other hand, in the character of Cyril Fielding, the liberal Englishman, there is the splicing of the gentleman from the pukka sahib that tests the bounds of the imperial ideal. Fielding is unusual in that he “has been caught by India late” (Forster 63). In his forties by the time he arrives in India as principal of the local college in Chandrapore, he is not fully integrated into the discourse of the pukka sahib. His ideas of manly fair play and close male friendships, derivative of the public-school gentlemanly ethic, disrupt English manliness in empire, precisely because they cross taboo racial lines. Fielding disarticulates the gender code and denotes a crisis of imperial homosociality: from the beginning Fielding refuses to engage in the misogynistic chivalry that is expected of the pukka sahib, as he does not condescend to the ladies at the club, annoying them in the pro-

38 Scarecrows of Chivalry cess. The question here is not (primarily) about the effect of desire on masculinity, but rather about Fielding’s belief that the values of gentlemanliness are universally applicable; that is, they are not racially delimited. It is only when Fielding’s gentlemanliness, unhitched from ethno-tribal affiliations, simultaneously intersects with intimacy and desire that a reconfigured style of manliness emerges.19 As long as it does not shade into homosexuality, homoerotic desire—an open secret—between English gentlemen is conducive and necessary to the consolidation of both Englishness and manliness, as indicated by Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam and any number of public school narratives, beginning with Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Sarah Cole and Tim Middleton (among others) point to the rigorous policing of the border between the homosocial and the homosexual (137), and how gentlemanly bonds shifted constantly along the continuum of homoeroticism and homosociality. The “romance” (not necessarily always sexual) between young men at various all-male institutions was a well-known and openly acknowledged fact.20 In contrast, intimate egalitarian friendships across racial boundaries defy conventional imperial standards and “leave a gap in the line” (Forster 190).21 Fielding’s gentlemanliness—which privileges intimacy over nation, justice and fair play over race—is seeded by the code of the gentleman. But the further he stretches those abstract ideals, the further he is from being a pukka sahib in the empire. In other words, he deracializes the gentlemanly ideal. In siding with Aziz after Adela’s claim of rape, Fielding prioritizes his intimacy with Aziz over his duty to his countrymen. Paradoxically, it is his gentlemanly ethic of disinterested justice that impels his refusal to proclaim Aziz’s guilt. His gentlemanly fair play is not circumscribed by whiteness or Englishness, but rather extends to the native, brown, though Anglicized, man. The police chief McBride points out the necessity of subsuming the self for the community, of privileging race/nation over justice: “But at a time like this there’s no room for—well—personal views. The man who doesn’t toe the line is lost. . . . He not only loses himself, he weakens his friends. If you leave the line, you leave a gap in the line” (190). Intimate friendships between Englishmen serve to strengthen the national/racial “line”—a telling sports and military metaphor—while sexual intimacy (both heterosexual and homoerotic) with an equal across the line leaves it open for attack from the opposing side (a metaphor that recurs in the texts that I consider in this book). In not channeling his affect appropriately, in not rallying around the victimized white body of the Englishwoman, Fielding

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disrupts the affective heterosexually charged homosocial terrain of postMutiny imperial India. He stretches English manliness in the empire as far as it can go before it ceases to be either Englishness or manliness; he abandons both national/racial pride and chivalry for affection and universal justice. The difference between Heaslop and Fielding is evident not only in their approach to imperial duty and their relationship to their “side”; it is also made particularly obvious in their interactions with Dr. Aziz, the primary Indian character in this imperial drama. Ironically enough, Heaslop cannot see Aziz as anything other than a generic native, whereas the narrative individuates Aziz far more than it does Heaslop. Heaslop’s entrenched identity as sahib is so entirely dependent on the native man as inferior and emasculated that he can only see Aziz as an incomplete mimic Englishman.22 On finding Aziz with Adela and his mother at Fielding’s house at a tea party, Heaslop demeans Aziz by reducing him to a type in order to reestablish masculine hierarchy: “Aziz was exquisitely dressed, from tie-pin to spats, but he had forgotten his back collar-stud, and there you have the Indian all over: inattention to detail; the fundamental slackness that reveals the race” (87). In an Englishman, sartorial splendor is a mark of status, but in an Indian man it is mere dandified mimicry. The deliberate use of the term “exquisite” feminizes Aziz, as it is usually used to describe a beautifully dressed woman. Heaslop reserves his most devastating blow for what he considers Aziz’s racial, manly failing—his slackness. Aziz might dress like an Englishman, but he will never be one, as he lacks the fundamental quality of an Englishman: discipline. Aziz’s self-conscious, imperfect mimicry only serves to highlight the difference between him and the unselfconscious disciplined Englishman. It is worth mentioning here that Aziz did start out the evening with a collar stud, but he gave it to Fielding in a gesture of friendship and intimacy, which only heightens the irony of Heaslop’s declamation. In contrast, Fielding, though he does not typify Aziz, indulges Aziz’s childlike emotional spontaneity—an Orientalist perspective shared by the narrative. Fielding’s affection is based on a deliberate narrative infantilization of Aziz, which maintains Fielding’s English gentlemanliness against Aziz’s Indian undisciplined emotionalism. Nevertheless, Fielding’s treatment of Aziz as an individual and a focus of obscured desire and obvious affection foregrounds his different approach to English manliness. This recognition of the native as individual and man complements Fielding’s re-

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fusal to rally around Adela Quested as victimized body. He refuses to participate in the dance of chivalric homosociality when he engages with Adela as a person to be reasoned with, rather than a female body around which an emotional/ hysterical Anglo-India must close ranks. After Adela’s ordeal, in which she definitely repudiates the narrative of the Englishwoman as victim of dark male desire by retracting her allegation of rape, Fielding is the only one to offer her refuge. He is the only one who considers her an individual agent rather than a vulnerable symbol of imperial English manliness. Adela’s refusal to be the victimized English lady in need of protection aligns with Fielding’s abandonment of the discourse of chivalry to undo the gender dynamic that structures imperial power. Fielding’s gentlemanliness, then, exemplifies the dissolution of imperial manliness that is a direct consequence of the upsurge in nationalist sentiment, and an acknowledgment of (Westernized) Indians and women as equals. The narrative critique of the intersection of racist, sexist, and heteronormative ideologies that produce and consolidate Ronny Heaslop establishes Cyril Fielding as the gentlemanly antithesis to Heaslop’s sahib. However, Fielding’s dismissal of the imperial codes transmutes the idea of the Englishman in empire only at the price of its own unraveling. This reading of A Passage to India demonstrates how the ideals of gentlemanliness—duty, disinterestedness, discipline, chivalry, and racialized homosocial/ homoerotic bonding—altered during imperial decline, but it also examines how they existed in a push-and-pull in imperial spaces. It further emphasizes the intricate knot between gentlemanliness/middleclass English manhood, nation, and empire. The focus on the gentlemanly traits as they emerge, alter, and circulate through the 1920s–1930s and beyond into the literature of the mid-century not only makes explicit the intertwined relationship between traits of hegemonic masculinity and the nation, but also reveals how deep-rooted these ideals of gentlemanliness are as ideals of Englishness. As we shall see in the next chapter, Evelyn Waugh’s work, in form and content, explores the travails of the gentleman and gentlemanliness in the interwar years. While the gentleman before the Great War knew that he was a gentleman, as George Orwell stated, things would become increasingly hazy and difficult for him after the war.

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Out of Place Evelyn Waugh and the Retreating Gentleman “But,” said Paul Pennyfeather, “there is my honour. For generations the British bourgeoisie have spoken of themselves as gentlemen, and by that they have meant, among other things, a self-respecting scorn of irregular perquisites. It is the quality that distinguishes the gentleman from the artist and the aristocrat. Now, I am a gentleman. I can’t help it: it’s born in me.” Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall

aul penny feather, the supinely good protagonist of Decline and Fall, contends that gentlemen, the backbone of the English middle classes and the imperial nation, are defined by their commitment to honor. Pennyfeather’s idea of honor, however, is a “scorn of irregular perquisites,” a narrative stroke that is masterful in its irony: the grand and chivalric idea of gentlemanly honor is reduced to a refusal of tips (54). We have here the quintessence of the early and most beloved Evelyn Waugh, celebrating and damning a way of life within the same brief conversational moment with little to no editorial or narrative commentary. In a move that similarly scales down the grand ethical traditions of the gentleman, William Boot in Scoop (1937), potential country squire and accidental journalist, is so unworldly that he does not recognize when the editor of Beast, in a most ungentlemanly manner, attempts to bribe him. Instead, childlike, he can only insist that his dearest wish is to “go on living at home” and continue writing his little nature column (43). Boot’s feebleness and naïveté undercut the ideal of the proud assertive independence of the gentleman. Boot and Pennyfeather’s attitudes reveal the gap between an inherited grand tradition of the gentleman and its current diminished state.

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Waugh, one of the more serious members of the Bright Young People, established himself as a novelist by virtue of this ability to represent with precise wit and absurdist style the rupture between gentlemanly ideals and their practice.1 Waugh’s narrative, in both instances, deflates a nationalcultural paradigm—the whole frame of tradition—through deft “structural” wit, where wit emerges from the structure of the narrative rather than being imposed from without (“Firbank” 57). Both the style and the subject of the above examples inform almost every single one of Evelyn Waugh’s works. Many of his novels (with the possible exception of the Basil Seal novels) render the story of the good but passive English gentleman as he travels through the world, but the travails of the principled yet ineffective gentleman protagonist is wittily told through the perspective of a detached, urbane English gentleman. The narrator and the protagonist, as this chapter will show, through its analysis of Scoop, are antithetical representations of the English gentleman out of joint: affected by post–World War I destabilization of hegemonic ideals of masculinity, imperial shifts (rise of nationalist anti-colonialist movements across the empire), and the impending doom of World War II. As E. M. Forster puts it, the Englishman, though admirable in many ways, is now an “incomplete person.” Indeed, his incompleteness is metonymic of the imperial nation in transition. The languages and history of the English gentleman structure Waugh’s “balanced interrelation of subject and form,” rendering his work historically apposite and specific to the mid-century.2 Indeed, Evelyn Waugh’s entire oeuvre—from Decline and Fall (1928) to the epic saga about English involvement in World War II, The Sword of Honour Trilogy (1952–61)—explores the demise of the gentleman within the context of dying traditions and changes in the empire. The broader history of the gentleman is not only the focal point of his thematic explorations of Englishness and modernity but also shapes his distinctly satirical style. In Scoop, the gentlemanly and urbane narrative voice that ostensibly casts a dispassionate eye over the world does not really see or commit to any stable world order. It produces and derives pleasure and amusement from the ironic representation of the world it observes. The narrator, in his ability to see outrageous things with equanimity and irony, spins dizzily within the urbanity and detachment that he condemns. His detachment comprises simultaneously an implicit moral center from which to judge and an amoral inhumanity that enables laughter, resulting in a “radical instability” (Waugh, Vile Bodies 183). This narrator looks upon all spaces—the modern

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metropolis, the sacrosanct English countryside, the manor house, the imperial periphery—with the same degree of distance and skepticism. To fully parse the dual models of gentlemanliness and the workings of Waugh’s narrative detachment in Scoop, I begin by situating Waugh’s distinct style and focus on the gentleman in the late imperial moment, and elaborating on the relationship between Englishmen, gentlemanly disinterestedness, and empire.

The Gentlemanly Eye: Distance and Disengagement Waugh’s textual and formal engagement with the state of the gentleman emblematizes the ambivalences inherent in what Jed Esty has termed the “cultural turn” mediating between narratives of disintegration and of salvaged core. The 1930s were, according to Esty’s suggestive argument, the moment of an “anthropological turn,” when the wholeness and totality usually ascribed to primitive and colonial cultures in opposition to the mobile, metacultural, composite nature of imperial Englishness were repatriated to the metropolitan center. In the 1930s, Esty argues, England was “refigured as the object of its own imperial discourse,” subject to its own anthropological “documentary gaze,” a phenomenon evidenced in Mass Observation (40–41). While Esty focuses on the anthropological turn in the later works of modernists such as Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and E. M. Forster as they endeavored to reimagine a national totality via hoary country traditions, I read Waugh’s urbane satires as being structured by the same discursive turn. Waugh’s mobile satires direct the dispassionate selfuniversalizing “anthropological” gaze of the Englishman back on the English and Englishness itself, particularly evident in the representation of the country and the country house in Scoop. The narrative, multidirectional in its wit, parodies and ironizes everything that it observes and describes, even as the English gentleman always constitutes the focus and the lens. While it seems counterintuitive to connect Waugh’s surreal farces designed to entertain to Mass Observation’s realist documentary-style observations, both are motivated by the ethnographic gaze come home to roost. However, the key difference here is that while Mass Observation’s language of ethnography presumed a national totality through its intense focus on bounded, domestic, regional minutiae, Waugh’s novel deliberately takes the wider, imperial view as the narrative observes, situates, and examines a nation within its imperial web. At the same time, the narrator is detached from everything

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that he observes: the empire, the metropole, the country, the city, and his own kind, that is, the upper-middle-class English. Waugh’s disaffected narrator engages the historical and cultural dimensions of the gentlemanly voice that is a function of a gendered “metropolitan perception” (R. Williams 46). Raymond Williams’s explanatory framework for modernism is appropriate here. The metropolis as delineated by Williams—a place that develops out of the “magnetic concentration of wealth and power in imperial capitals and the simultaneous cosmopolitan access to a wide variety of subordinate cultures” (44)—structures the gendered narrative style. This style, in turn, is determined by the narrative perspective of the English gentleman.3 The narrative voice is the voice of the gentleman—a classed, gendered, culturally, and institutionally produced perspective. In other words, the ambivalent cosmopolitanism and ironic detachment that shapes Waugh’s freewheeling narrative style is produced by, and within, the historical and cultural specificities of Britain’s long imperial history.4 This mobile panoptic eye, I contend, is a product of an English imperial detachment, which Matthew Arnold traced through English literature and culture. Arnold propounds the trait as a quintessentially English, upper-class universal standard of judgment, or what Anthony Easthope in his study of Englishness has termed the “voice of the poised empiricist subject, detached, critical, not self-deceived, confident of submitting the world to a controlling gaze” (185). As I have already argued in the previous chapter, Arnoldian detachment, constitutively gendered and raced, described and prescribed a universalizing Englishness through an emphasis on what it lacks (essence). Amanda Anderson, in her analysis of detachment in Victorian practices of the self, argues that the ideal of detachment was always conceptualized as “a dialectic between detachment and engagement, between a cultivated distance and a newly informed partiality” (6). Though various writers of the Victorian era articulated detachment and the cultivation of distance differently, the rhetoric of moral ennoblement underpinned the various formulations of detachment. The Arnoldian formulation of Englishness is that the poised gendered subject who is confident of submitting the world to a controlling gaze is dialectically produced through empire. Indeed, altruistic responsibility and detached empiricism are mediated through the structure of a self-universalizing standard of English gentlemanliness produced by the fact of empire. Forster rearticulates the pragmatism and disinterestedness of the English national character as embodied in the public-school-educated En-

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glishman. He echoes Arnold’s emotionally tempered and pragmatic Englishness when he argues that the Englishman’s primary concern is the ethics of governance, of self and other; the Englishman’s religion demands that he be “just,” “merciful,” and “protect what is good.” The Englishman’s religion is an ethical code of chivalric benevolence.5 The Englishman, he contends, has an “innate decency,” always “thinking of others rather than himself. Right conduct is his aim. The argument underlying these scattered notes is that the Englishman is an incomplete person. Not a cold or unspiritual one. But undeveloped, incomplete” (“Notes” 9–10).6 Forster then emphasizes the inherent altruism and detached justice of the Englishman, even as he foregrounds how they slide into indifference and arrogance: “But the English character is incomplete in a way that is particularly annoying to the foreign observer. It has a bad surface—self-complacent, unsympathetic, and reserved. It is the machinery that is wrong” (13). The complacency, lack of sympathy, and reserve read as the vices and uncertainties of a privileged and conquering race. Seen in the light of Arnold’s delineations of the English character, they are negative interpretations of Arnoldian positives: detachment, pragmatism, and reserve. When the “machinery” is geared to create a culture and character designed for imperial governance, then detachment and superiority are absolutely crucial ingredients of national character. The public school gentleman, for all his virtues, according to Forster and Waugh, is dysfunctional and inadequate in post–World War I England, because the purpose and reasons for which he was created have shifted.7 In other words, the technology of the gentleman is obsolete in a changing world. I situate the transformation of the universalized gaze and detachment evident in Waugh’s narrative style within the larger destabilization of the gender ideal. The horrific loss of men’s lives and the effects of trench warfare in World War I buffet and undo the code of the gentleman; the effects of the war were only partially appropriated by the hegemonic code. The trauma and loss of young male lives during World War I destabilized the ideals of imperial gentlemanliness and the nation. In the wake of the almost incomprehensible number of dead and the level of neurasthenia among the survivors, there was a period of profound uncertainty, reassessment, and reconfiguration of the ideals of gentlemanliness that propelled the imperial British nation (Roper 343). At the same time, Joanna Bourke and Allen Frantzen demonstrate how the gender code now incorporated issues of pain, fear, and sacrifice, even as its tenets were increasingly questioned, while Michael Roper argues that the Great War occasioned the shat-

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tering of the externally oriented code of manliness, and the movement to an interiorized understanding of the self. Many novels of the interwar period represent these profound shifts and ambivalences in post–World War I structures of imperial gentlemanliness, because the effects of World War I can only be fully understood within the context of empire. As I have examined elsewhere, E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) and George Orwell’s Burmese Days (1934) explore the separation of the personal-ethical code of gentlemanliness from the ethno-national code of imperial gentlemanliness in empire, in tandem with imperial unrest and the increasing destabilization of imperial authority.8 These strands had originally been fused together to create the Victorian/ Edwardian imperial gentleman. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and The Waves (1931), Peter, Hugh Whitbread, Richard Dalloway, and the perennial absent presence, Percival, variously represent the disintegration, reconfiguration, and mythification of the imperial Englishman. Mrs. Dalloway, in fact, connects the fate of the shell-shocked, lower-middle-class soldier Septimus Smith, whose life has been determined by the discourse of hegemonic English masculinity, to Peter Walsh, the failed colonial bureaucrat, who doesn’t quite live up to the expectations of the imperial gentleman, as they crisscross each other in the metropolitan center. Both men, in different ways, represent the fissures in hegemonic imperial gentlemanliness. Even so, what these novels reveal is that gentlemanliness with all its historical weight and hegemony continued to hold sway as a gender ideal even as it fractured. Waugh’s narratives are a part of this larger cultural focus on the state of the Englishman/gentleman: he traces both the reconfiguration and the marginalization of the gender ideal. Indeed, like Woolf’s, his representation of the English gentleman is multifaceted as it attempts to trace the various alterations of gentlemanliness in such wide-ranging characters as the dissolute Basil Seal, the honorable Guy Crouchback, the ineffectual Paul Pennyfeather, and the insidious Charles Ryder. The distanced gentlemanly narrative voice of Waugh’s early novels, I argue, is a representation, among many others, of these shifts in gentlemanliness. Waugh’s focus on the gentleman inflects his narrative style and voice; that is, the indifferently amused narrator who defines Waugh’s distinct style is a gentlemanly voice molded by imperial detachment and the erosion of the gentlemanly code. It produces “the external method” or a reconceptualization of the humanist notion of character.9 The “external method” that defines Waugh’s early narratives necessarily demands a perspective from a carefully cultivated distance. Here, narrative detachment is a function, and

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an almost inhuman perversion, of the altruism and disinterestedness of the imperial gentleman necessary for the appropriate practice of governance: the distanced and empiricist view from the outside prevents any overt sympathetic or empathetic affective attachment. The careful dialectic between gentlemanly engagement and detachment breaks down to become amoral disengagement and amusement that constitute Waugh’s distinctive style.

The Gentleman Amused by the World Waugh’s expansive and unapologetically disengaged narrative perspective, which looks both outward and inward in order to comprehensively mock the English gentleman at home and abroad, is nowhere more evident than in Scoop. Published in 1937, Scoop is his last truly anarchic satire before he shifts gears to a nostalgic realist form, and it is the final hurrah of the ambivalently detached gentleman narrator. In his later novels, the narrator’s sympathies and prejudices, still shot through with irony, are fairly straightforward in comparison to his earlier unrelenting black humor. Based on Evelyn Waugh’s own experiences as a foreign correspondent in Abyssinia, Scoop was primarily intended as a satire on the mendacity and power of the press. Moving between the equally “far away” places of Ishmaelia and the English estate of Boot Magna, as well as that crucible of madness, London, enables Waugh to indulge in an expansive satirical project that includes financial global imperialism, the free press, Communism, Fascism, colonial modernity, a dying gentry, and a primitive English countryside. Interestingly enough, the circular plot of Scoop—where the decent Englishman after his ordeals in a savage chaotic world retreats to the cocoon of “civilization” to begin again—rehearses the circularity of Waugh’s first novel, Decline and Fall, written almost a decade earlier. The final reiteration of this narrative circularity signals the exhaustion of this particular form to tell the story of the gentleman as the world and the gentleman’s place in it had radically altered. The beginning of World War II, Britain’s dissipating financial and political power, the full knowledge of the horrors of Nazism, the opportunism and bureaucratic bungling of the British ruling classes (gently satirized in The Sword of Honor Trilogy) rendered this particular brand of detached, absurdist humor an impossibility. His later, more serious narratives were threaded through by his trademark irony, but they never again displayed the same level of anarchic playfulness; nor did the dissolute indifferent gentleman narrator reappear to function as the governing narrative consciousness.

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To briefly summarize Scoop’s plot: William Boot, resident of Boot Magna, reclusive country squire, and minor nature columnist who writes “Lush Places” for the national daily, the Beast, is mistakenly shipped off to Ishmaelia as the paper’s foreign correspondent to cover the political and national upheavals of that country. The third-person narrative perspective describes Boot’s adventures in the confusing and confused offices of the Beast, in the streets of London, and the chaos of Ishmaelia as he searches for the scoop to end all scoops in the company of an international (European and American) corps of professional journalists. Bewildered, inert, but not entirely stupid, Boot encounters old prep-school friends, international financiers, and falls in love with a con artist. Through a stroke of blind luck, Boot is the first to break news of a revolutionary coup. He flies home to discover himself an international success. However, he decides to retreat from the chaos of fame, success, and, most important, the city, to the decay of Boot Magna and resume writing his nature column. The bored distance of the gentlemanly voice in Scoop is evident through his representations of foreign and domestic spaces. The urbane, cosmopolitan, gentlemanly voice describes and creates the world it sees, drawing the reader into the ambit of his knowledge and points of reference. This is illustrated in an extended narrative introduction to the country of Ishmaelia: Various courageous Europeans, in the seventies of the last century, came to Ishmaelia, or near it, furnished with suitable equipment of cuckoo clocks, phonographs, opera hats, draft treaties and flags of the nations which they have been obliged to leave. They came as missionaries, ambassadors, tradesman, prospectors, natural scientists. None returned. They were eaten, every one of them; some raw, others stewed and seasoned—according to local usage and the calendar (for the better sort of Ishmaelites have been Christian for many centuries and will not publicly eat human flesh, uncooked, in Lent, without special and costly dispensation from their bishop). (106)

The tone is matter-of-fact, dry, and all-seeing. The narrative voice, from its carefully cultivated distance, views everyone with the same dispassionate eye. It mocks European attempts to conquer through the tried-and-true con of exchanging land for trinkets. Slipped in among the worthless detritus of European culture are the totems of colonization: draft treaties and flags. Moreover, the people who arrive in Ishmaelia (or near it) are those who establish the Foucauldian power/ knowledge nexus: professionals who map, classify, name, and colonize. The passage also mocks the Ishmaelites

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and their savage ways, again recited as a series of boring facts with no hint of horror at the layering of cannibalism and Christianity, the religion of the civilized.10 This is Waugh’s satire at its best—apparently empirical description with no editorial comment, an omnipotent and omnipresent narrator who knows it all and has seen it all. The only hint of the potentially nonempirical in this extended description is the careful note on how the Europeans were eaten—raw, stewed, or seasoned. The narrator is wryly amused by the shenanigans of both the conquerors and those who refuse to be conquered; however, his pleasure in the chaos becomes particularly pointed when he mentions how the stew made from European was seasoned. Offering a different facet of imperial gentlemanly detachment, the narrative voice is also comfortable in, knowledgeable about, and yet distanced from all the sites that he inhabits and observes. This is clear from his authoritative, succinct, and highly skeptical account of Ishmaelia’s long and complex history. He sounds like a British imperial bureaucrat surveying his domain. Geographically protected by swamps, forests, and deserts “from those more favoured regions which the statesmen of Berlin and Geneva have put to school under European masters,” Ishmaelia comprises “an inhospitable race,” who “pass their days in the perfect leisure which those people alone enjoy who are untroubled by the speculative and artistic itch” (105). The narrator notices the tactics of the imperial powers (citing the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 and the Scramble for Africa) that infantilize, parcel out, and “school” those commercially viable regions of Africa—exploitation for profit veiled by the rhetoric of the civilizing mission. In the very next sentence, he comments on the Ishamelites, acknowledging their independent spirit and barbarism. He notes that the Ishmaelites are “inhospitable,” a euphemism for their refusal to buckle to European might. He also casually observes that they are able to spend their days in endless leisure because they lack the evolutionary development to pursue either technological development or art, which he reads as markers of humanity. This description is understated and veined with irony. Ethical standards are implicit in the passage, and neither the conquered nor the conquerors meet those standards: the Europeans are money-grubbing tradesmen, while the Ishmaelites are self-contained savages incapable of progress. The narrator, of course, dispassionately surveys and judges the Europeans and the Ishmaelites from his position on high; his is the universal objective perspective, while those he surveys muddle through their petty lives. This tone of detached irony, a product of gendered imperial and racial

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discourses, becomes markedly less empirical in his description of the sprawling Jackson family that rules over Ishmaelia: “A pious old darky named Mr. Samuel Smiles Jackson . . . was put in as the first President. . . . A Mr. Jackson Rathbone held his grandfather’s office in succession to his father Pankhurst, while the chief posts of the state were held by Messrs. Garnett Jackson, Mander Jackson, Huxley Jackson, his uncle and brothers, and by Mrs. ‘Teeny’ Athol (nee Jackson), his aunt” (107). The narrative tone shifts in and out of different voices. The narrator seems to channel the racist colloquialism of Corker, the lower-middle-class journalist professional, when he calls Samuel Smiles Jackson “a pious old darky,” but without comment, hence incorporating the idiom and endorsing it. However, the matter-of-fact listing that follows is in keeping with the narrative style, which implies rather than states the obvious: the Ishmaelian government is a dynastic, though ragtag, nepotistic affair, gesturing toward the idea that democracy is a foreign and underdeveloped concept not indigenous or suited to a people who are incapable of understanding the nuances of modern political systems. The process of listing also reveals that the Jacksons do not have the competence or background for running a government; it is merely through manipulation and playing on the weakness and stupidity of the people that the status quo is perpetuated. Ishmaelia is a failed state and conglomeration of accidents.11 Indeed, the narrative represents the civil war between Communist and conservative/ Fascist factions in the government (the events that journalists in Ishmaelia are expected to cover) as a farce, of Africans mindlessly aping two European ideologies that are already absurd. The Young Ishmaelites, a not very veiled reference to the secular and modern Jeunesse d’Ethiopie, are shown as attempting to bring an alien modernity and egalitarianism to a clearly barbaric nation.12 The narrator, par for the course, mocks the modernized youth—they are “natty young negroes” (217)—the old guard who are shambolic and primitive, the journalists who report on this news, and the newspapers who publish them. Once again, the irony emerges from the discrepancy between what the detached narrator represents and the inherent standard implicit in his descriptions. The narration, structured by disengagement, enables both the reader and the narrator to always engage with events from a distance. The humor emerges from this unsympathetic detachment and a deliberate disconnection from that which the narrative describes. The narrator’s privileged raced, classed, gendered, and imperial location produces this distinctive sophisticated, unsympathetic satire.

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The gentlemanly narrator’s detachment in Scoop (and other novels) wavers between an Arnoldian imperial ethical framework, the “powers of distance,” and its obverse, where distance, as delineated by Forster, produces an uncomfortable lack of sympathy and disengagement from the life observed. Georg Simmel’s theory of the sophisticated metropolitan blasé attitude is apt here. Simmel points out that the blasé person “experiences all things as being of an equally dull and grey hue, as not worth getting excited about, particularly where the will is concerned” (Philosophy 256). I would argue that being blasé is not only a metropolitan, modern privilege but also a state that is differently determined across gender, class, and national lines.13 The blasé, apathetic gentleman is culpable as a national failure. In his failure to be a disinterested ethical gentleman who acts for his country and his countrymen, the blasé gentleman is a perversion of the ethical ideal and represents the decadence of the imperial nation. The apathy of will, the lack of desire to act or to govern either the self or the other for the public good, marks the breakdown of gentlemanly detachment. Waugh’s narrators are caught within this duality: the disinterestedness required for imperial governance and the apathy produced by that very superior detachment in the absence or impossibility of a functional ethical frame. The narrator is aware of, yet not quite committed to, the traditional frames of a meaningful existence. This is Forster’s “incomplete” Englishman, a product of the trenches of Flanders and the imperial exhaustion of a gargantuan and ever uncontrollable empire. The narrator’s unsympathetic detachment is not limited to the savage periphery but is turned, with equal precision, on the metropolitan center. This is evident in the narrative rendering of the modern commercial press and how they report or produce news. The satirical humor derives from the discrepancy between the absurdity of journalism and journalists and the standards of normative civilized behavior.

Observing the Press: Trade and Profession Much of Scoop’s narrative is taken up with the unethical behavior and pervasive mendacity of the press. In the early part of the twentieth century, the state of the press was a subject of much debate, between those who believed that the press modernized and democratized by media barons such as Lord Northcliffe (proprietor of the Daily Mail) was a symbol of revolutionary change, and those who believed the increasingly commercialized press was an agent of linguistic, cultural, and national decline.14 It is not sur-

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prising that the critiques far outpaced any celebration of the popular press— though the modern press’s astronomical growth is indication enough that the critiques did not impact the industry in any way. Most of the critiques, as summed up in a 1929 Fortnightly Review commentary, claimed that “the gigantic newspaper organizations of to-day are prospering on the weaknesses of the public mind and are deepening them by subtly obscuring the boundaries between fact and fiction” (Hedderwick 76). In Scoop, foreign correspondents are shown to frequently make up stories for copy: Wenlock Jakes “scooped the world with an eye-witness account of the Lusitania four hours before she was hit” (92). Newspapers are fleeting and fictional, driven by the profit motive and the need to entertain, rather than any serious desire to inform and educate on world or national affairs, which in turn determines the modes in which journalists operate to “procure” news. As Corker, Boot’s journalistic guru, points out, “News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. And it’s only news until he’s read it. After that it’s dead. We’re paid to supply news. If someone else had sent a story before us, our story isn’t news” (91). The press corps out to cover the coup in Ishmaelia lionize and spy on Wenlock Jakes, the most powerful and well-known foreign correspondent, “syndicated all over America,” who shot to fame through an entirely concocted revolution simply because he had overslept and got off at the wrong station in the wrong Balkan country. Following the American lead, every “special” in Europe is rushed out to the unspecified Balkan country where they proceed to shore up Jakes’s “thousand words of blood and thunder a day,” as “it was as much as their jobs were worth to say so” (93). The effect: “Government stocks dropped, financial panic, state of emergency declared, army mobilized, famine, mutiny,” and a Nobel Peace Prize for Jakes. Corker, who tells the story, celebrates this as an example of “the power of the press” (93). Meanwhile, the narrative voice renders this story without comment. Waugh’s irony emerges from the narrative tone: the narrator is, once again, disengaged, merely observing empirical facts and not really bothered by it. The absence of any outrage is what makes this deviation from an implicit normative ethical standard so humorous. The absurdity of the situation, of course, originates precisely in the wholesale inversion of the expectations of professional and ethical conduct—of the sullying of a liberal profession by money-grabbing entrepreneurs. Implicit in this wry recitation of observed events is the “empiricist” standard of ethical professionalism from which these celebrations of fiction as news so starkly depart.15

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Journalism’s shift from profession to commerce was part of the debate that raged around the degeneracy of the press. Kennedy Jones’s reviews of 1920 in Fleet Street and Downing Street caused an uproar because he addressed this opposition, pointing out that the “the daily Press . . . is a commercial organization” (305–6). In another piece he argued that it was more “trade” than a “profession,” as the latter implied “the existence of certain fixed principles, ascertained facts, codes of conduct, knowledge of which can be acquired by study,” none of which journalism purported to practice (qtd. in Collier 24). The narrative further elaborates on this particular conflict, whether journalism is a profession or a trade, through the conversations between William Boot and Corker. Though William Boot, the inadvertent journalist, is mocked for being unschooled in the ways of the world, as a public school man, he is well versed in the ideals of the disinterested professional service ethic, where veracity and integrity of a news report are of importance. Meanwhile, for Corker, the news is a trade. The exchange between Boot and Corker on the role of news agencies makes this particularly clear: “And all the papers have reports from three or four agencies?” “Yes.” “But if we all send the same thing it seems a waste.” “There would soon be a row if we did.” “But isn’t it very confusing if we all send different news?” “It gives them a choice. They all have different policies so of course they have different news.” (90)

Boot’s commonsense perspective, the idea that there can be only one set of facts, is shot down by Corker. News, Corker argues, is entirely dependent on the policies of the newspapers, which determine the type of story that will ultimately become news. Facts, as such, do not exist, only stories that will entertain and generate profit. Corker and the other journalists do not uncover facts; they fabricate stories that are shaped by particular policies of different newspapers, whose policies in turn are determined by the profit motive. The narrative here focalizes both the implicit professional standard and the unabashed “trade” deviation through the dialogue of two opposing characters: Boot, the naïve gentleman, and Corker, the lower-middle-class mercenary journalist-for-hire. On the one hand, while it appears that sympathy and common sense are with Boot, he is nevertheless painfully and ridiculously anachronistic and hence the object of narrative amusement.

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On the other hand, while Corker is seen as crass, materialistic, and a callow agent of profit, nevertheless, his energy and enthusiasm are notable in contrast to Boot’s passivity. The narrator is not so wedded to professional integrity and sincerity that he does not note Boot’s lack of energy and inertia of will. The shock/outrage of the deviation from ethical norms does not overwhelm the gentleman narrator, who occupies a space of simultaneous outrage and amusement. This is the crux of the irony in Waugh’s novels. He mocks both Corker and Boot, representatives of the degenerate commercial press and emblem of passive gentlemanly integrity. In this amused but cinematically precise depiction of the event, the narrator has a privileged, doubled perspective: bored yet judgmental, detached but sympathetic, modern yet traditional English gentleman. Waugh’s wit emerges through the structure of the narrative and the ethics of gentlemanly detachment. The gentleman narrator can observe and measure against the ethical standards of public-service professionalism that the press so flagrantly repudiates, but at the same time he is too blasé to be affected by such an abuse of ethics and, in fact, derives amusement from it. The devolution of detachment into boredom signifies the collapse of the balance of ethical detachment that distinguished the imperial gentleman. While the gentlemanly code meant a very careful cultivation of affect in the practice of good governance, the absence of will to engage indicates the dissolution of the detachment ideal. His amoral detachment and blasé attitude enable him to dissociate from local investments and ethics. Everything is equally appalling and chaotic: Ishmaelia, the modern press, and, finally, even the sacrosanct country are targets of the narrator’s dispassionate eagle-eye.

Looking at the English Countryside: Barbarism at Home In Scoop, the narrator’s calculated ironic depiction of the inhabitants of “England’s green and pleasant land” is a deliberate send-up of cultural compulsion to celebrate the country as the essence of Englishness. It fits in with his apathetic and amused perspective on everyone and everything. The idea of the countryside as the “true England” was fairly well worn by the thirties, but as Raphael Samuel’s monumental historical and cultural work demonstrates, there was a more concerted rural turn in the interregnum between the two world wars.16 The countryside, “pastoral as England,” functioned as a cultural national trope for authentic Englishness, as evidenced in such

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works as Edmund Blunden’s The Face of England (1932) and Henry Williamson’s The Village Book (1930). Unsurprisingly, the novel mocks these salvage maneuvers by satirizing the English gentry and peasantry. The Boot family is an unrelenting caricature of the ineffectual country family living off a decaying estate. The very English Boots parallel the Ishmaelite Jacksons. The long list of relatives and their particular occupations deliberately echoes the cataloging of the Jacksons and their positions. The narrator describes the general trivialities that preoccupy the Boots, young and old. The household consists of William, “who owned the house and estate”; his widowed mother, “who owned the contents of the house and exercised ill-defined rights over the flower garden”; William’s “widowed grandmother who was said to own ‘the money’ ”; Uncle Roderick, “the least eccentric”; Uncle Bernard, whose life of scholarship “had received little recognition”; and the innumerable old servants who occasionally wait on the family. Uncle Theodore, the aged uncle who used to be the cad-about-town, introduces the house, singing, “Change and decay in all around I see” (20). The house signifies decay rather than change. The narrative voice cinematically reveals the hopeless state of the estate, sweeping over the “tastefully disposed” trees now shot through with rot and suffering from “old age,” and the man-made lakes flooding pastures because the “secret” of sluice-gates died with “the old man from the lodge” who knew its workings (20–21). It points to the progressive and inevitable decline of the estate, foretelling the impossibility of its renewal. Waugh’s novels are particularly ambivalent about the estate as an undying symbol of Englishness: while they celebrate the elegance, wealth, and noblesse oblige of the aristocracy, they condemn the manor, because in the absence of a dutiful lord of the manor, there is no hope of redemption. Boot Magna in Scoop is a magnified version of Hetton Abbey in A Handful of Dust and presages the countryside and the houses in Put Out More Flags and Brideshead Revisited. While these houses invoke the cultural and national significance of the estate and the tradition of the estate novel, they only do so to illustrate how the tradition itself is fundamentally broken. Whereas earlier in the novelistic tradition, the house (metonymic of England) in crisis is restored to order and civility by some judicious characterological and architectural maneuvers, Brideshead, Hetton Abbey, Malfrey Park, and Boot Magna are all dysfunctional and obsolete, because there is no patriarch. The lord of the manor is either missing or unwilling to fulfill the functions of the head of the family and estate, thereby unbinding the

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intimate relationship between the lord and the land. In the absence of the family patriarch, there is no organic relationship between the manor and the adjoining countryside; the possibility of a völkisch tradition overseen and maintained by the squire and his family does not exist. The country gentry are not the repository of all things English. The narrator’s privileged and detached perspective enables him to note the difference between the ideal of what the estate represents and what it actually is in the case of Boot Magna. While the Boot family is harmless, their pointless and self-involved existence is a severe fall from the manner in which the estate ought to function. Yet, once again, while the narrator’s representation illuminates the discrepancy, the amusement far outweighs the sadness or outrage. The narrator is removed from any ethical investments in Englishness, just as he was removed from any engagement with the rhetoric of the imperial burden with the Ishmaelites, even as his detached perspective was shaped by that imperial English discourse. The narrator does not care, but at the same time, he cares and sees enough to note the distance between what is and what should be. This narrative view extends to the countryside as a whole, though it shifts perspective to the timid, decidedly suburban city professional, Salter—to whom “there was something un-English about ‘the country’ ” (34). Salter visits Boot at his estate after his successful scoop in Ishmaelia to make sure that Boot does not sign with the rival paper, the Brute. The narrative tone matches the description of Boot’s trip into and through Ishmaelia. The irony here, quite expectedly, is double-edged. It mocks both the suburban Salter and the barbaric country. The savagery begins almost as soon as Salter leaves the confines of the city. The natives on the train shock him: instead of screening themselves behind newspapers like civilized people, they “stared at him fixedly and uncritically and suddenly addressed him on the subject of the weather in barely intelligible accents” (285). This representation of England as primitive—foregrounding the fact that the primitive is not inherent to the colonial periphery—becomes even more marked when Salter encounters the estate farmhand who has been deputed to collect him from the station. Described as a “cretinous native youth” who seems unable to carry on an intelligible conversation, the country native is emblematic of this alien space within England (285). Salter’s conversation with the boy closely parallels an earlier exchange between an Ishmaelian driver and British journalists. This attempt at simple communication, too, is shot through with misunderstanding, language problems, and cultural unintelligibility.17

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By the end of the visit, in which Salter has been subject to the individual and collective eccentricities of natives of both rank and file, he feels justifiably and characteristically victimized and alien. Resonating with echoes of Conrad’s representation of England as one of the dark places of the earth, the narrative describes Salter’s feelings on his country jaunt: “He was in a strange country. These people were not his people nor their laws his. He felt like a Roman legionary, heavily armed, weighted with the steel and cast brass of civilization, tramping through forests beyond the Roman pale, harassed by silent, illusive savages, the vanguard of an advance that had pushed too far and lost touch with the base . . . or was he the abandoned rearguard of a retreat; had the legions sailed?” (304). If the earlier sections of the novel set in Ishmaelia mocked the African nation’s attempts to imitate European modernity with its conflict between the Red Fascists and the Black Communists, its foreign missions and rival passports, then this passage reveals that the heart of darkness resides in the very core of deep England. It is significant also that Salter sees himself as a Roman legionary. Rome, as a symbol of civilization, is itself suspect here, since the Roman empire collapsed because of excess, barbarity, and decadence, which London and the offices of the Beast exemplify.18 Even as the narrative emphasizes the barbarity at the very heart of Englishness, at the same time, it invokes rather explicitly the Conradian idea that England itself was once the outpost of another empire. Though the narrator corroborates Salter’s perspective of “cretinous youths” and savage locals, he nevertheless is also the object of mockery in his desire to see himself as a Roman legionary. The narrative reveals that there is no originary or linear progressive modernity that is then taken up and imitated badly in the colonial periphery. Rather, all places are isomorphically savage. Though undoubtedly a surrealist farce, what the narrative illustrates is that there is no home: every space becomes an Othered space of nightmare and discomfort. While on the one hand, London scenes of socialite lunches and the chaotic workings of Lord Copper’s Beast, which precede descriptions of Boot Magna, only seek to accentuate the decline of Boot Magna and the savagery of the countryside, yet on the other, London itself hardly functions as the center of order and civility. Both modernity and the atavistic country are chaotic, a chaos that the detached narrator is able to survey but not control or change, and from which he derives a disengaged amusement. Waugh’s clear-eyed, imperial narrator deliberately and methodically blurs the distinction and forces

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the reader to ask, to quote Mariana Torgovnik, “What’s ‘primitive,’ what’s ‘modern’? What’s ‘savage,’ what’s ‘civilized’? Increasingly it becomes difficult to tell” (37–38).19 The narrator from his cultivated distance ridicules everything. The countryside is as barbaric and uncouth as the anarchic African country. He is at home everywhere and nowhere, as he can survey and classify the foibles of every site without any commitment. He finds everything amusing and unsurprising. It is a formal gentlemanly engagement with a world gone wrong juxtaposed with a narrative examination of the belated gentleman’s, or William Boot’s, place in this modern world. National change fragments the certainty and power of the English imperial man, and while one can argue that the apparent certainty of the narrative voice indicates wholeness, the devolved blasé subjectivity of the gentlemanly voice emerges formally in the lack of empathy and ethical outrage. This, then, is the gentlemanly subjectivity that has morphed from distance in the interest of governance and ethical administration to an inhuman, urbane, and urban detachment. The gentlemanly narrative voice that delineates the world as grotesque, full of flat caricatures who have no control over their lives and the world, is a gentleman gone wrong—a gentleman emotionally unmoored from the ethics of governance and responsibility. Gentlemanly disinterestedness cultivated in the interest of service and necessary to the art of governance, of both self and other, here becomes a sophisticated disengagement from the world. The flip side of this unsympathetic mocking gentleman is the obsolete and ineffective gentleman as embodied by William Boot.

Out of Place: The Retreat of the Gentleman Heir to Boot Magna, William Boot is of the same genetic type as Tony Last in A Handful of Dust: passive because he adheres to a code of honor, integrity, and chivalry that is obsolete in an amoral world, not to mention empty of any moral or religious conviction. Safely ensconced in a slow, eternal, deadend manorial routine focused around great-aunts, great-uncles, and grandmothers, he is on the margins—culturally, ideologically, and geographically. Significantly, though the heir, he does not fulfill any responsibilities of the squire, because he does not seem to have emerged from his “minority.” Indeed, he seems to be entirely unaware of any such duty or function. Infantilized and protected by, and in, his life at Boot Magna, all he wants “is the best possible excuse for remaining uninterruptedly in the country” (25). He

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even needs Nannie Bloggs’s permission and money in order to go to London on business. Nor does he want to venture beyond the estate, and “the atrocious city” of London, especially, is akin to a foreign land (30). The country gentleman is not a redemptive force of Englishness. Indeed, as the narrative is at pains to show, the country gentleman is an anachronism and has no purchase in the modern world. William Boot, the emblem of the country gentry who would ordinarily save England, is shown as childlike and ineffective at home. This childlike naïveté is exacerbated but less culpable when he is thrown into the world of mendacious self-promotion and shifting allegiances—a world of airplanes, parachuting financiers, mini-cars, and press telegraph speak.20 Boot is reactive (most of the time, not even that), bewildered by what he sees around him, and unable to position himself either for or against London and the world as he subscribes to a set of archaic rules that run counter to technology, the modern, and its corollary of opportunism and shiftlessness. His response to the signifiers of modernity, which the narrative voice takes so utterly for granted, is a clear indication of the difference between the belated, passive gentleman of the estate and the urban gentleman narrator. Anything outside the confines of Boot Magna is classified as a “foreign and hostile world” (29). Boot is overwhelmed and bemused by the anarchy of the offices of the Beast, the unending streams of people, and the pace of the multiple lifts operated by “Caucasian lift girls.” Boot wanders around in a “daze,” while the narrative voice is unconcerned by the rush of visual, aural, and tactile stimulation (51). Boot’s accidental foray into the city only emphasizes his alienation. The ersatz, hostile metropolis prevents any understanding on Boot’s part. The narrative, focalized through his perspective, emphasizes this through its description of the hotel room in which Boot stays. It is likened to an artificial, air-conditioned box with no reference to the natural world as understood either by Boot or even by the narrator—though the narrative voice seems to be fully conversant with the mechanics of modern rooms, and Boot is not: “The room was large and faultless. A psychologist hired from Cambridge had planned decorations—magenta and gamboges; colours which— it had been demonstrated by experiments on poultry and mice—conduce to a mood of dignified gaiety. . . . A gentle whining note filled the apartment, emanating from a plant which was thought to ‘condition’ the atmosphere. . . . Presently, a valet entered, drew back four or five layers of curtain, and revealed the window—a model of ingenuity, devised to keep out

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the noise of traffic and admit the therapeutic elements of common daylight” (48–49). In opposition to the organic dilapidation of Boot Magna, the London hotel room is carefully crafted for maximum efficiency. Its décor, furniture, and upholstery are deliberately manufactured to create artificiality, to remove it as far as possible from natural sound, air, or even light. It is not for nothing that Boot’s only occupation is to write a column called “Lush Places” about the English countryside. This occupation emphasizes Boot’s displacement. In the hotel room he is as far as can be from his natural habitat. Boot’s discomfort and sense of disorientation in this hotel room is simultaneously a testament to his dissociation from ersatz and unpleasant modernity—the narrative’s matter-of-fact tone illustrates the hideousness of both the color scheme as well as the psychological reasons behind it—and evidence of his inability to function within and fulfill the demands of contemporary English life. His response to another classic symbol of modernity, the airplane, accentuates the difference between the gentlemanly narrative voice and himself, and this illustrative difference further reveals his inadequacy as a modern man. The contrast between the “austere economy” of the description of the airplane’s ascent into the sky and Boot’s responses to finally flying is striking (“Firbank” 57): “The machine moved forward, gathered speed, hurtled and bumped across the rough turf, ceased to bump, floated clear of the earth, mounted and wheeled above the smoke and the traffic and very soon hung, it seemed motionless, above the Channel, where the track of a steamer, far below them, lay in the bright water like a line of smoke on a still morning” (73). The narrative description of the plane’s struggle to ascend is precise, staccato, matter-of-fact, and picturesque for that very reason.21 The narrative voice harnesses wonder to reference the quotidian— the picture postcard, smoke on a still morning—while Boot’s response is extravagant, euphoric, and above all tied to nature and the English country: “William’s heart rose with it and gloried, larklike, in the high places” (73). The narrative describes and connects while Boot feels overwhelmed— one is empirical, observant, and disassociated while the other is awed and enraptured. The narrator is the too-distant, gentlemanly, calculating, sophisticated intelligence who is not charmed, while Boot is the naïve, insular country gentleman swept away, in this case, by the wonders of the modern world. Boot’s inability to process modernity and its signifiers is primarily illustrated through his unwitting entrenchment in the world of the press. To put it mildly, the fact that Boot is thrown into the vicious pit of the fourth es-

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tate—which, if anything, embraces capitalist modernity with enthusiasm— only serves to underscore Boot’s dislocation. As already indicated, Boot inadvertently joins a nest of professional journalists who are little better than parasites. Though not engaged in any profession, Boot as a public school gentleman is keenly aware of ethical conduct and professional integrity; he is both a neophyte and a latecomer to the corrupted idea of professionalism in the press that is determined by the entrepreneurial (trade) ideas of profiteering, competition, and celebrity culture, rather than any gentlemanly ideas of truth and public service.22 His inability to duplicate the language of the telegraph, invented by the press for inexpensive express communication, marks his incompetence as a correspondent and his unwillingness to descend to the levels of absurdity and profiteering demanded by the job. In an apparent effort to evolve the most cost-efficient method of filing stories and sending instructions, the international press corps has developed its own language.23 These telegrams also become comedic moments in the narrative, as they are so patently ridiculous.24 One of the first telegrams that Boot receives from the London offices of the Beast seems utterly incomprehensible, a feeling the reader shares as the narrative does not clarify its meaning, signifying new and strange languages of modernity: “opposition splashing frontward speediliest stop aden reported prepared warwise flash facts beast” (94). Indeed, the only thing that Boot understands is “stop aden.” It is only after Corker explains it that both the reader and Boot begin to grasp this invented language. Corker, quite typically, only explains after he has found out that his news agency and the Beast are pooling their news sources, and he and Boot are no longer competing for the same scoop: “ ‘Opposition splashing’ means that the rival papers are giving a lot of space to this story. ‘Frontward Speediliest’—go to the front as fast as you can—full stop. Aden is reported here to be prepared on a wartime footing; ‘Flash facts’—send them the details of this preparation at once” (96). The structural juxtaposition of Boot’s innocence, Corker’s competitive survival instinct, the telegrams, and their interpretation reveals the narrative’s implicit mockery of all three. While Boot learns to decipher press cables, he is incapable of replying to them in a similar manner: “no news at present thanks warning about cabling prices but ive plenty money left and anyway when i offered to pay wireless man said it was all right paid other end raining hard hope all is well england will cable again if any news” (173). Boot’s telegrams negate the capitalist sensationalism of the press, the melodramatic

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quality of winning and losing scoops, the equation of not just news with money but words with money as manifest in the telegraphic language. His telegrams reveal his inability to engage with modern commercial life itself. Boot’s cables, like Bertie Wooster’s in P. G. Wodehouse’s novels, pay attention to the niceties of polite English conversation while ignoring the price value of words. These amusing telegraphs function as multidirectional critiques: on the one hand, they speak to Boot’s ignorance and privilege, sheltered as he is from the realities of financial hardship. On the other hand, Boot’s cables are more English than the incomprehensible messages concocted by necessities of journalism, in that they follow the classed civilities of social interaction. They might be meandering, but their idiom is straightforward and accessible to everyone. More important, they do not indulge in hyperbole or sensationalism. They are gentlemanly, straightforward, and understated. Boot’s only deliberately positive act also turns out to be truly symptomatic of his gentlemanliness, his ex-centricity, and his inability to engage with the modern world: he falls in love with Katchen, a young German woman— prostitute, femme fatale, and victim. While several unrelated characters point out Katchen’s true intent to Boot, he steadfastly refuses to consider it. Not only does Katchen take advantage of Boot—although it is possible to read her sympathetically as someone who has to make use of whatever is at her disposal in order to survive—but in doing so she becomes the archetypal “figure of the consuming [modern] woman” with a voracious appetite for material goods. Rita Felski has argued that the consuming woman was “a semiotically dense site of cultural imaginings of the modern and its implications for the relations between women and men” (Gender of Modernity 65). Katchen’s association with modernity, artifice, performance, and the trope of the femme fatale is marked right from the moment of her introduction, when Corker refers to Katchen as “the Garbo” (149). On discovering that Boot is paid for his expenses, she offers to become his news-gatherer; and because he “likes” her more than fellow journalist Jakes likes his retainer, Paleologue, she charges him a hundred dollars a week for her services, in addition to buying her clothes, a new hairdo, and assorted consumer goods. Boot’s old-world chivalry reads like admirable idiocy in a situation where the woman in question, with her carefully crafted childishness designed to manipulate Boot’s gentlemanliness, symbolizes the worst of capitalist modernity. The materialist and callow modern woman is a recurrent trope in Waugh’s fiction; she is always shown to be the downfall of the unsuspecting

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chivalric gentleman—Margot Metroland and Paul Pennyfeather in Decline and Fall and Tony and Brenda Last in A Handful of Dust are but two examples. The telegraphed trope illustrates the relationship between traditional gentlemanliness and modern femininity in a world gone awry, where men are out of their depth and the inherent shallowness of women allows them to crest the waves of modernity. Boot chivalrously pays not just for Katchen’s dresses, gloves, and hats but also for her and her German lover’s safe passage out of Ishmaelia. The narrator implicitly derides Boot’s naïve adherence to a chivalric code when the lady herself is revealed as a confidence artist whose goal is to survive in an unethical world. Boot’s gentlemanly ideals of chivalry and integrity are belated as opportunism, profit, and pleasure drive the imperial center. The narrative clearly, if amusedly, sets up the dichotomy between Boot’s insular idealism and the modern world in which he lives. In contrast to Katchen’s careful pragmatic manipulations where she suggests that Boot should buy her husband’s stones for twenty pounds to keep them safe, Boot’s love is described in metaphors laden with emotion and sincerity: “Now for the first time he was far from shore, submerged below wind and tide . . . in submarine twilight. A lush place” (181). In a move similar in tone to his responses to the experience of flying, Boot’s experience of love is steeped in a romantic otherworldliness, while the woman with whom he is in love uses him for her own ends: a juxtaposition of romantic chivalry and modern, rationalized quotidian. As is evident from the above discussion, the narrator and Boot function as the antithesis to each other. The narrator sympathizes with Boot, but also condescends to him. He is sympathetic to Boot’s ethics but condescends precisely because Boot is determined by them, and is unable to survey and comprehend the modern world in all its contradictory capaciousness. In contrast, the narrator, with his scrutinizing all-seeing gaze, flattens the trials and tribulations of characters such as Boot, Salter, and Katchen. The narrative’s “external method” renders these characters as caricatures since they are not fully realized or rounded humanistic characters. As David Lodge argues, the narrative voice does not “bend his verbal medium to fit the contours of his characters’ sensibility,” as the characters are never really shown as anything other than one-dimensional types (Evelyn Waugh 5). We are never shown the internal thoughts of any character, not even the protagonist, whose passive meekness we see through his interactions with other characters. Everything is related as a matter of course, and the misunderstandings, miseries, disasters, and pratfalls emerge through the scene

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rather than in the telling, in the manner of the cinema.25 All the characters are flattened out and echo one another in the narrative’s sophisticated know-it-all English cosmopolitan perspective. There is, then, an interesting paradox in terms of the form and content of Scoop. While Boot’s naïve gentlemanliness is equated with “deep” yet routinized, dead pastoral England and can only survive if it returns to its native petrified setting, the urbane, ironic, detached narrative that comments on Boot and submits the world to its controlling yet amused vision is also gentlemanly. This doubled perspective of and on gentlemanliness is made evident when, for all its detachment from and mockery of William Boot, the narrative voice seemingly aligns itself with him. Boot is hapless and helpless, more so than everyone else, and yet, through the reliable working of the old prep school/public school network, it is Boot and not the seasoned experts who unwittingly breaks the scoop of the minute from Ishmaelia. Boot’s childhood friend “Moke,” vice-consul to the British Consulate in Ishmaelia, is able to offer William “Beastly” Boot confidential information that he gathers as a “hobby” over dinner and glasses of port. The use of nicknames, the hail-fellow-well-met casualness of the old-boy network that thoroughly and naturally excludes the lower-class Corker, is the means through which Boot accidentally gets the scoop of the day. Both Boot’s privilege and innocence are on display here—a privilege that the narrative voice shares.26 The narrative cautiously mourns Boot’s chivalry, integrity, and commitment to gentlemanly values even as it illustrates and predicts their demise; he, in fact, is either too good or too stupid for this world, or both. Boot decides not to return to London to be honored at Lord Copper’s feast because he does not want to look like “an ass,” or rather because he is unwilling to take credit for something he did not do (303). Boot is fully cognizant of the fact that his success has nothing to do with his competence as a journalist and has everything to do with luck, especially in knowing the right people in the right places. His gentlemanly ethics prevent him from accepting praise that he does not deserve, even as he is tempted by the idea of celebrity. Boot, then, at this moment in the text is an ethical, assertive gentleman. Boot finally takes an independent stand: he decides against participating in the farce of celebrity culture and the modern press. On the one hand, Boot symbolizes the Englishman to be mourned proleptically, for the future belongs to financiers like Mr. Baldwin, the chameleon-like, unethical venture capitalist and globetrotting maverick. Baldwin is able to avert a national disaster in Ishmaelia by negotiating with the European powers who want to exploit

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Ishmaelia’s mineral deposits and the Ishmaelian national government. And yet the unempathetic narrative returns Boot, his naïveté and gentlemanliness, back to the bosom of his deathly family that most emphatically does not symbolize “deep” England as demi-paradise. He retreats to the cocoon of paralysis, comfort, and death. In contrast to Waugh’s gentleman in retreat, in the next chapter I consider George Orwell’s representation of the troubled Englishman in transition. I connect these disparate writers together, because though they are from opposite ends of the political spectrum, together they explore the state of England and empire through the journey and perspective of young gentlemen. Though Waugh focuses exclusively on the upper-middle-class/ middle-class gentleman, Orwell studies the young Englishman at the lower rungs of the middle-class ladder. Interestingly, the gentleman’s struggles as he accommodates to a “shrinking nation” in the 1930s shape the very different styles and formal experiments of Waugh and Orwell. If Waugh catalogs the gentleman’s increasing marginalization, George Orwell reworks and shifts the narrative of Englishness and gentlemanliness from hierarchical imperialism to suburban compromise and, ultimately, allegories of hopelessness.

3

An Orphaned Manliness George Orwell and the Bovex Man Mr. Orwell is still a victim of that early atmosphere, in his home and public school, which he himself has so eloquently exposed. His conscience, his sense of decency, his understanding of realities tell him to declare himself a Socialist: but fighting against this compulsion there is in him all the time a compulsion far less conscious but almost—though fortunately not quite—as strong: the compulsion to conform to the mental habits of his class. Victor Gollancz

nthony powell characterized George Orwell as being half in love with the thing he was rebelling against, since Orwell roundly dismissed the socioeconomic hierarchy of England as outmoded and unjust but nevertheless relied upon its tenets for his ideas of a “decent” English society (A. Taylor 13). Orwell was both a contrarian and a contradictory figure. This is evident in the zeal with which he is claimed by both the Right and the Left as a defender of truth and justice. In his contradictory allegiances—his love for the past coexisting with his desire to alter the present inflected by that past—he embodies the transitions of, and within, the English middle class in general, and the devolution and adaptation of English gentlemanliness in particular. The persona of “George Orwell” and his works reveal the protracted unraveling of bourgeois manliness in two registers: on the one hand as it devolves and mutates into a potentially more democratized masculinity, and on the other as it continues to persist as a gender construct—even as it becomes obsolete—that structures and imprisons its belated inhabitants.1 This chapter explores these Orwellian negotiations of a new manly identity in a suburbanized England as consonant with Orwell’s own re-

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working of his gentlemanly identity to fit the democratizing inward turn to counter the rise of European fascist nationalism and the slow death of empire. This is not to downplay Orwell’s often polemical critique of the class system for which he is renowned, but rather to frame his contradictory politics within the discursive frame of gentlemanliness. To track back briefly to the introduction, Orwell’s location in the “lower-upper-middleclass,” as he details in The Road to Wigan Pier, explains his prejudices and political contradictions.2 To consider what Raymond Williams sees as a crisis of identity through the lens of masculinity is to note that Orwell’s critique of bourgeois ideology and his self-consciousness regarding his own gentlemanliness are very specifically gendered and heteronormative. His intellectual critique and affective responses were products of his belated upper-class gentlemanliness, born just as the comfortable hegemony of the English upper-middle class was coming to an end. In reinventing himself as George Orwell, he abstracted the ideals of gentlemanliness from its middleand upper-middle-class moorings and remade them into those of the ordinary, decent Englishman, who was apparently classless but grounded in the heteronormative traditions of Englishness. Orwell embodies the values of gentlemanliness while rejecting the class prestige and hierarchy that constituted the gender identity in the first place: his critique of the gentleman is an insider’s critique. He tries to distill a new masculine identity and a new England from the hierarchical violence of the past. He is the gentleman qua gentleman, as he considers the English bourgeoisie of the 1930s decadent, complacent, and responsible for the grinding poverty of the empire and the English working classes in England. But he nevertheless values the ideals of service, fair play, “decency,” endurance, and cleanliness and the work ethic of the English middle-class gentleman that were structured by the very hierarchies he rejects. In this regard Orwell’s celebration of “decency” as an English virtue is significant, to reiterate my analysis in the introduction. Orwell uses “decency” to evoke a “great variety of attributes which he held in high esteem: simplicity, honesty, homey coziness, warmth, cleanliness, respectability, stoicism[, and] grit” (Rodden 171). As we saw, these virtues match with those that public schools strove to inculcate in their boys: the virtues of cleanliness, respectability, stoicism, grit, and honesty. Orwell extrapolates “decency” from its hierarchical, bourgeois/upper-class setting and adapts it to include all English people, a virtue, he argues, that all English people inherently possess but don’t necessarily enact. Orwell’s ambivalence toward the bourgeoisie and its values is manifest

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in “England Your England.” In this essay, while he condemns the middle and upper classes, his disapproval takes some surprising turns. It is not just an attack on the ruling class; rather, he criticizes the “decay in the ability of the ruling class,” and the cause of this decay, he argues, lies in an end to their “usefulness” (Essays 269). They are disaffected and decadent, having lost the energy or the disinterestedness that made them committed patriots. Hence, it is the Englishman’s obsolescence as a consequence of his loss of purpose, and not his constitutive values, that Orwell condemns. The balancing on the knife-edge of attack and praise is also evident in his essay “Rudyard Kipling,” where he locates Kipling within his appreciation of “men of action.” And though he agrees that Kipling can be “crude” and “vulgar,” he nevertheless admires his “sense of responsibility” (Essays 120). Orwell appreciates the imperial Englishman’s “sense of responsibility,” or the ethics of disinterestedness and service. And while he does not endorse the snobbery and cruelty of either Kipling or “the Blimps,” he prefers it to the bourgeois Left’s hypocritical Socialist dissidence, particularly as they are cushioned by the labors of the imperial Blimps whom they condemn. This paradoxical glorification of the values of a classed gender identity that he hated only serves to emphasize the inescapable and pervasive power of the ideals of gentlemanliness and their coalescence with the ideals of Englishness. Orwell’s particular reworking of masculinity owes much to his deliberate separation of the intertwined strains of English manliness: the institutionally structured homosocial and potentially homoerotic ideals of manliness linking men, institutions, nation, and empire in an unbroken bond of loyalty and love held in tenuous balance with the homosocial/ heterosexual system that sustained the economic and social power of men and the successful imperial nation.3 He distances himself from what he perceives to be homoerotic/ homosexual intellectual elites whose decadence and indecency are entirely antithetical to his heterosexual, virile, stoic, decent common man. Thus, Orwell democratizes gentlemanliness by deliberately disavowing the homoeroticism and male intimacy that originally underpinned the ideology of gentlemanliness. What Alan Sinfield calls his “tilt at homosexuals,” which was really venomous homophobia, and his dislike for “softness” and “crankishness” that seeped down from the upper classes— or indeed anything anti-normative—points to an overwhelming commitment to the heteronormative principles of the gentleman (Literature, Politics 79). For him, the common man represented the authentic values of Englishness.

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Orwell’s early documentary-realist novels are laserlike in their focus on how lower-middle-class Englishmen, who are troubled by their own place in the sociocultural hierarchy of manly Englishness, come to terms with their gentlemanly inheritance in the new shifting terrain of an empire in decline and a nation turning inward. These Englishmen try to remake or abandon constitutive gentlemanly traits such as disinterestedness, chivalry, and manly autonomy that they unwittingly inhabit through new-old theaters of the home, the quest, and the profession. Indeed, the fate of disarticulated gentlemanly virtues in the wake of a crumbling imperial-national grid that articulated them as well as the shifting post–World War I economy is the terrain for his anti-consumerist, ultimately suburban Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936). In this early novel, Orwell works through a series of genres as he examines gentlemanly idealism shifting into domestic, suburban, advertising professionalism in the figure of the poverty-stricken Gordon Comstock.4

Gentlemen, Form, and the Middle Classes By analyzing Orwell’s appropriation, adaptation, and dissemination of the classed manly ideals of clarity, decency, honesty, and empirical experiential reality, I demonstrate his desire to work within the parameters of the realist novel as the genre that would adequately speak to, and of, the ordinary Englishman. Raymond Williams has already pointed out in no uncertain terms that the “diagnosis of ‘realism’ as a bourgeois form is cant”; he goes on to show how realism furthered the case of working-class politics (“Lecture on Realism” 64). Following Andrzej Gasiorek’s advice to pay attention to the context of production and consumption of particular realist texts— that is, “they should be seen in relation to the socio-cultural ‘forms of life’ in which they participate” (12)—I consider the gendered “forms of life” that are produced and affected by Orwellian experiments with realism: Orwell’s early engagements with realism are both a direct effect of his democratic adaptations of manliness and a specific effect of the in-betweenness of the interwar years. While both Tyrus Miller and Gasiorek point to the literature of the 1930s as the “world in between” an aesthetic modernism and the gritty realism of the 1950s, my paradigm, while it overlaps with the “space between,” does so through the lens of imperial and masculine decline. In his analysis, Michael Levenson, in partial agreement with Miller, contends that Orwell is self-conscious about his literary belatedness: that is, conscious of writing after modernism and in its shadow while simultaneously

70 Scarecrows of Chivalry beset with a sense of “social emergency.” For Levenson, Orwell’s thirties novels are failed realist novels about failure, signaling that the “form is doomed, as the autonomous individual is doomed” because “the age of totalitarianism is imminent” (59, 74). I argue that rather than signaling the death of the autonomous individual and the realist novel, Orwell’s novels rework the idea of the Englishman and consequentially experiment with a cross-hatching of genres within the realist frame. Orwell’s documentary realism is born out of a gendered political imperative: it emerges from a necessity to reshape both English manliness and Englishness as it turns inward to resuscitate the nation in the wake of imperial decline and change. Keep the Aspidistra Flying is either critically ignored or filed under Orwell’s failed attempts at realism. In terms of the themes that the novel partially explores, such as ersatz modernity, consumerism, and the impending doom of World War II, Coming Up for Air is often read as the better and tighter early novel. In terms of form, Keep the Aspidistra Flying is not so much a failed realist novel as a mixed bag of genres and generic conventions: Orwell mobilizes techniques of documentary realism and ethnographic survey (made famous by the Mass Observation movement just a year later), the suburban, domestic narrative, and a domesticated version of the imperial romance, and he skirts the rules of the “middlebrow” even as he takes on the ideas of artistic and literary merit in relation to commercialized, mass-produced art. This play with genres is an effect of Orwell’s attempt to track the lower-middle-class literary English gentleman as he navigates a new gender identity, working his way through the city, advertising, consumerism, and suburbia in interwar London. Gordon Comstock, much like Orwell himself, is born into a middleclass family whose prosperity has been in steady decline since his Victorian grandfather’s imperial entrepreneurial success. He is the last in a long line of Comstocks—“a peculiarly dull, shabby, dead-alive, ineffectual family” (38). He sets out to be a poet trying to create art untainted by the crass commercialism he sees everywhere. Unable to fit himself into an appropriately mindless, middling job, and in pursuit of the pure artist’s life, Comstock declares war on the “money-god” and settles into low-paying dead-end jobs. His determination to live outside the upwardly mobile, financially viable social framework leads him to live in dire, masochistic poverty, experiencing the dirty underbelly of London life, complicating his relationships with his long-suffering, kind-hearted girlfriend, Rosemary, and his rich Socialist friend, Ravelston. Comstock’s apparent battle with the respectable life

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symbolized by the aspidistra is a long and rather arduous exercise in selfpity, anger, frustration, and misogynistic cruelty enacted upon Rosemary and his sister.5 His descent into complete destitution is halted by Rosemary’s pregnancy and his decision to do the “decent” thing and marry her. His return to the (lower) middle-class, now suburban, fold is accompanied by a self-conscious alignment with the values of the “law abiding little cit” and the necessary purchase of an aspidistra (238). The narrative offers a nuanced anthropological background for Comstock’s particular brand of literary idealism and gentlemanly pretensions. The Comstock family’s wealth and status were indelibly tied to the wealth generated by their involvement in imperialism. They “belonged to the most dismal of all classes, the middle-middle class, the landless gentry . . . merely one of those families which rose on the wave of Victorian prosperity and then sank again faster than the wave itself. . . . Gran’pa Comstock plundered the proletariat and the foreigner of fifty thousand pounds” (37). The brief wave of Victorian prosperity defines the status of the Comstock family. Their inability to do anything since—to retain and multiply their fortunes—is directly tied to imperialist recession and the financial crisis that sinks the middle class. The Comstock family’s economic stability is directly related to imperial success, and their decline is emblematic of not only England’s imperial and economic decline but also the necessary negotiation of class identity and status that accompanied such decline. As already mentioned, the period saw tumultuous change as far as the middle classes were concerned: “The ‘middle class’ was undergoing radical revision between the wars,” and this revised class included “the beautician as well as the civil servant, the florist and the lady doctor . . . [,] and the manifold differences in between” (Light 13–14). As the ranks of the middle classes were expanding from below, the standard of life of the middle classes was slipping, resulting in the crossing of class lines and defensive closing in of ranks. The Comstock family denotes the loss of “caste” that Nicola Humble argues was characteristic of the time. Not just the decayed gentry but a significant portion of the middle class suffered economically as a result of World War I. High rates of income tax, surtax, and death duties introduced during the war and maintained at nearly the same level since affected the standard of living of the middle classes.6 The remaining members of the family, significantly both women, desperately cling to the vestiges of respectability that delineates them from the parvenus, hairdressers, suburban housewives, and secretaries rising

72 Scarecrows of Chivalry from the morass of working classes. In a bid to hold onto whatever caste they can, and in keeping with the Comstock family’s pretensions of Victorian gentility long after they can actually afford it, Gordon Comstock is sent to the “right kind of school (that is, a public school or an imitation of one),” resulting in an appropriately useless education for someone of his background, possessing cultural but no economic capital (40). Because of his public school, gentlemanly background, Comstock sees himself as above such attempts to cling to the middle class. He believes his gentlemanly idealism and the integrity of his literary pursuits free him from both the necessities of the money-making racket and the need to maintain caste. Indeed, his gentlemanliness (however imitation a public school it may be) makes him inherently superior, or so he believes. The novel begins with Comstock as a shop-walker at a bookshop/ lending library in the grittier part of town, as he tries to live the life of artistic integrity outside the capitalist rat race. The proto–Mass Observation style of realism that permeates the descriptions of the shop, the street on which the shop is located, Gordon Comstock, the women who frequent the bookshop/ lending library, and the books that are read by the different classes of women reveals the novel’s investment in cataloging the changing nature of urban London. To borrow Tom Harrisson and Charles Madge’s words from their Mass Observation manifesto, the narrative here renders visible “the sphere of unwritten laws and invisible pressures and forces.” Rather ironically, Comstock’s gentlemanly demeanor allows him to be the ideal bookshop attendant. He can speak with the right accent about the right sort of literature, and he can shift attitudes to speak to women (because lending libraries, as the narrative makes clear, are frequented by women) of differing tastes and classes, while maintaining his innate sense of superiority. He adopts a “homey, family-doctor geniality with the library subscribers”—a gendered mode of familiarity, comfort, and indisputable authority (10). With Mrs. Penn, a “red-cheeked,” middle-middle-class female reader who carries her copy of John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga with the title facing outward so that everyone knows she was a “highbrow,” he can share an arch, ironic look of “highbrow to highbrow” behind the back of Mrs. Weaver. Mrs. Weaver, on the other hand, is a “dejected, roundshouldered, lower-class woman, looking like a draggled duck nosing among garbage” (10). Her “dim-wittedness” and preference for lowbrow Ethel Dell over the equally lowbrow Deeping produces an awkward moment where Comstock has to juggle and please both women’s tastes without los-

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ing face with either. Interestingly, this moment of skillful salesmanship is immediately followed by Comstock’s bitterness at the success of these middlebrow and pulp-fiction writers while his own volume of poems, presumably “real art,” languishes in the dusty upper reaches of the shelves. His chameleon skills of being able to adapt to the demands of the customer contrast with his failure at being an artist of integrity: it is an ironic contradiction between success in the capitalist rat race that he disdains and failure at literary manly autonomy free of the mass market. The gendered nature of the shop/ lending library floor, too, is telling. The women who consume mass-produced novels are clearly uneducated in the ways of true art. Meanwhile, Comstock’s manly authenticity (he also sets himself apart from the Nancy boys who float from Oxford straight to the literary reviews—a not so veiled referenced to Evelyn Waugh, Cecil Beaton, Harold Acton, and the Bright Young Things) allows him not only to inherently judge good art from bad but also to produce it; it’s just not recognized in the debased world of consumerist, feminized London. This moment of contemptuous but hidden gendered superiority parses very closely to Orwell’s sociological and cultural observations about fiction and the reading public: “It is not true that men don’t read novels, but it is true that there are whole branches of fiction that they avoid. Roughly speaking, what one might call the average novel—the ordinary, good-bad, Galsworthy-andwater stuff which is the norm of the English novel—seem to exist only for women. . . . Dell’s novels, of course, are read solely by women, but women of all kinds and ages and not, as one might expect, merely by wistful spinsters and the fat wives of tobacconists” (An Age Like This 244). Orwell’s misogyny and snobbery in this passage are quite ludicrously close to Comstock’s, but they also emphasize both the position of the observer and the ethnographic observations of the narrator. The bookshop is a dense site where the narrative, through Comstock, observes in subtle detail the gendered, classed, and even sexual affect of people from across the spectrum of London society, ranging from the women just mentioned to a “Nancy,” the back of whose neck was “as silky-smooth as the inside of a shell,” flipping through a book on Russian ballet (14); two upper-middle-class women in furs with braying voices scanning the coffee table books on cats and dogs; and the “ugly” salesgirl who wants a “modern” “hot-stuff love-story” (17–18). The descriptions, as they catalog, reveal Comstock and the narrative’s snobbery, misogyny, and homophobic homoeroticism (a regular feature in Orwell’s work). Through each of these separate encounters, Com-

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stock cycles between “gentlemanly servile” and the “insouciant air” of the gentleman (17, 13). The narrator does not merely categorize the customers, but also turns his anthropological eye on Comstock. The narrative’s deliberate reliance on cinematic foreshortening, its documentary interest in the effects of advertising on young Comstock, not to mention Comstock’s relationship to mass culture (whether literature or advertising), emphasize its investment in anthropological techniques to map and describe the changes in the national cultural terrain. Though Comstock himself is extremely aware of his own performances, the narrative locates his self-conscious mode of gentlemanliness squarely within the purview of advertising and the uncertain middle class. His need for artistic authenticity and integrity lead him to shun the modern world of mass culture, but he is steeped in it. Comstock’s desire to retain his manly independence, “to breathe free air” and “break free of the money-stink,” is juxtaposed with the littleness of the clerical stooge, the “typical little bowler-hatted sneak” iconized as “Strube’s ‘little man’—the docile little cit.” Artistry and “writing” enable “an anchorite existence” while inserting oneself into the commercial engine only leads to the homogenization and diminution of the Englishman (48–49). Advertising—especially in its ubiquitous avatar of the billboard that sold the idea of a modernized, homogenized England—symbolizes for Comstock the death and decay not only of English culture but of the independence of English manhood. According to Don Slater, “The burgeoning advertising and marketing of this era were not just selling consumer goods, but consumerism itself as the shining path to modernity: they incited their publics to modernize themselves, modernize their homes, their means of transport.”7 Comstock’s successful salesmanship is followed by his contemplation of a sea of billboards that sell the amenities and luxuries that would modernize life and remake the Englishman himself through mass-produced goods. The one he finds most oppressive is a Bovex advertisement: “A spectacled rat-faced clerk, with patent-leather hair, sitting at a café table grinning over a white mug of Bovex. ‘Corner Table enjoys his meal with Bovex,’ the legend ran” (5). The young clerk, as focalized through Comstock, is likened to a rat with artificial, shiny hair, symptomatic of ersatz modernity engendering an aestheticized unnaturalness.8 Within the diegetic space of the advertisement, the clerk’s individuality is reduced to his location in the café: he is the Corner Table. This metonymic move displaces personhood, and the narrative reveals how advertising and consumer culture reduce in-

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dividuals to the objects they consume. For Comstock, this image symbolizes English masculinity at the moment of England’s immersion in consumerism and mass-culture modernity. Significantly, in a move that replicates the cinematic sweep of the camera in the burgeoning 1930s documentaryfilm industry, the narrative and the protagonist shorten focus from a vision of the rat-faced clerk to the protagonist’s reflection in the glass. He does not seem to fare much better than the Corner Table: unlike the false homogeneity of the clerk, Comstock is faded, unkempt, and mousy with no defined features. Both the Bovex man and Gordon Comstock, perceived as they are on the same visual spectrum, represent the opposite ends of English manliness within the context of the “money-world.” Comstock, in declaring war on the “money stink,” thinks he embodies the residual manly ideals of authenticity and independence, while the Corner Table signifies the illusory ideal of upward mobility and “making good” in an increasingly mechanized and formulaic world. Though Comstock desperately tries to play up the idea of gentlemanly autonomy, in apparent contrast to the homogeneity of the Bovex man, his mode of occupying the city and its streets emphasizes the ludicrousness of the idea. Comstock attempts to be the urbane flâneur, a detached observer at ease in the urban jungle of modernity, someone who is capable of reading the signifiers of modernity as well as the streams of London’s humanity. He wants to be the undomesticated spectator, not bound by the discourses of class, caste, or money, but is, nevertheless, deeply interpellated within all three. It is instructive to rehearse Baudelaire’s description of the fin de siècle modern male urban figure here, to foreground how the narrative situates Comstock within the conventions of the flâneur only to reveal his being a flâneur manqué: “The crowd is his element. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitudes, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world” (9). Peter Walsh in Mrs. Dalloway to some extent embodies the Baudlerian and Benjaminian flâneur; in fact, he has frequently been read as such.9 He is self-contained and revels in his walk through bustling urban London, sexualizing and romanticizing it from his perspective on high. However, Peter, though he walks the streets of London as if he owns them, is nevertheless shaped by what Peter Kalliney calls “the imperial geography of the metropole” (82). The city’s architecture, its

76 Scarecrows of Chivalry monuments, its park spaces, and its inhabitants all serve to reinforce and bolster Peter’s identity as an imperial Englishman, even as it reminds the city’s inhabitants that they are in the heart of a great and powerful empire. Comstock’s experience of the city is the exact opposite. He is a part of the crowd even as he is a spectator, but he does not take pleasure in it, nor does he seem to do so out of choice. His poverty and his helplessness make him feel homeless, bereft, and frustrated: “In the deadly glare of the Neon lights the pavements were densely crowded. Gordon threaded his way, a small shabby figure with pale face and unkempt hair. The crowd slid past him; he avoided and was avoided. There is something horrible about London at night; the coldness, the anonymity, the aloofness. The street swarmed with pretty girls. By scores they streamed past him, their faces averted or unseeing; cold nymph-creatures, dreading the eyes of the male. That too was money” (71). Comstock is both part of and distinct from the Eliotic undead crowds that flow over London. Here, the women who would ordinarily constitute accessible objects of aesthetic and sexual contemplation for the flâneur—indicated by the fact that Comstock does indeed note the astonishing number of pretty women—are cold and aloof. The pretty girls do not flirtatiously seek his gaze, because such interactions are determined by the sheen of money and caste, which neither Comstock nor the other poor men in the crowd have. The narrative implicitly echoes the pleasures of the stroll and the blasé cosmopolitan attitude through Comstock’s long walk through the streets of London—Covent Garden, Waterloo Bridge, Embankment to Westminster, Trafalgar Square, the Strand, and Charing Cross Road—but his walk of observant contemplation is not a pleasurable stroll. Familiarity with the city does not breed comfort but rather its opposite; his poverty, lack of status, and generally unprepossessing demeanor render him more like Leonard Bast than Baudelaire’s dandy as he contemplates every aspect of city life available to the young urban man but utterly inaccessible to him—women, restaurants, the theater, the talking pictures, and the pubs. The city’s architecture and its consumer palaces contribute to his alienation and precariousness; they remind him that he is not the imperial gentleman who makes the city and is in turn made by it. The city underscores the fact that he is one of the castoffs. Even as he walks along thinking of lines for his poem—an act of the urbane artist if ever there was one—he is more concerned with “the Joey, or the three-penny bit” that symbolizes his potential emasculation and humiliation at the hands of the shopgirl. The unrelenting gritty realism, in stark contrast to the modernist pleasures of

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the stroll, draws attention to the pain and uncertainty of Comstock’s ambiguous gendered, classed location in his attempts to inhabit the city. Because of his gentlemanly background, shaky though it may be, he is selfconsciously aware of how he could own it: hence the casual listing of names, places, and people, but his own precarious position within the hierarchy prevents any such autonomous detachment.

Escaping Domesticity and the Downward Spiral In his escape to the underworld, Comstock turns inward to the private, as distinct from, indeed, antithetical to, the domestic. He tries to live out the ideals of integrity and independence of both artist and Englishman in a less restrictive setting. Comstock hopes to enact the residual traces of a gentlemanly self-sufficiency in his travels. I refer, of course, to Raymond Williams’s theorization of residual and emergent cultural processes that I outlined earlier in the book. Comstock and his quest embody the necessary negotiations among residual, dominant, and emergent masculine stylizations: Comstock negotiates between the residual traces of the dominant gentlemanly ideal and the emergent masculine values of a consumerist society.10 He endeavors manly self-sufficiency as he journeys through the underclass without the safety or anchor of either bourgeois values or the solidity attributed to the working class. He considers it a liberating experience that offers him a vantage point from which to judge those who are still caught within the vicious hierarchy of money. Though he wallows in endless self-pity and resentment for his chosen poverty-stricken state, he still feels an extraordinary righteousness in apparently holding himself aloof from the demands of economics. The discursive national turn toward the private and the domestic, though not new, took on a new significance as an effect of the destabilizing of hegemonic manliness by World War I and waves of resistance across the baggy behemoth of empire. This discourse of privacy penetrated to the very core of subject-citizen and self as evidenced in the Orwellian examination of Comstock’s gendered, classed sense of self. Lynette Hunter points this out when she says Orwell’s thirties fiction explored the private self within a nation-state structured by “the commodification of need” and “the commodification of the individual,” but her argument elides the ways in which gender constitutively alters the terms of the private and public in Orwell’s fiction (203–6).

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Orwell’s protagonists are primarily male, with the exception of Dorothy in A Clergyman’s Daughter, and the narratives focus on precisely why these young men are caught within the tension of the private and public. It is noteworthy that most of them are gentlemen of some type, born into various strata of the middle class. Comstock, for instance, due to the pressures of his economic and, indeed, historical circumstances, is forced to shape his masculine identity through a definitive split between his private self and his public self: the private self is the independent, manly, anti-consumerist poet, and the public self is the competent advertising copywriter. This split when read within the discourse of English hegemonic manliness reveals both the continuity and the folds within masculine identity as the dual pressures of imperial decline and consumerist, capitalist modernity alter the very delineations of nationhood and male subjectivity. As Larkinesque poetics of a later period illustrate in their extreme emphasis on solitude, the realm of the private—which has become even more enclosed—is the only viable space of masculinity, free from the heteronormative demands of family and the socioeconomic pressures of labor.11 Comstock’s separation of his private masculine self from the expectations of a public corporate masculinity emphasizes his distance from his Victorian/ Edwardian gentlemanly inheritance. The Englishman’s disinterested commitment to nation and society did not disrupt his role as husband and father, as evidenced by Gran’pa Comstock, who built up a successful business plundering “foreigners and the working class” while managing to father eleven children over whom he ruled with an iron fist. In fact, the one contributed to the other—private and public integrity coalesce. For Comstock, the opposite is true: the integrity of his private masculine self is antithetical to what he obviously considers the conformity and intellectual prostitution of his public self or the increasing commodification of the Englishman. In rejecting this public self, he attempts to de-link the private self from the realm of domesticity. However, this particular perspective undergoes a radical revision toward the end of the novel, as it shifts genres from a mutated documentary-realist narrative of descent to the sentimental novel of domesticity. However, during Comstock’s anti-capitalist drift into the wilderness of London’s underbelly, domesticity becomes the conduit through which the fragmented and untrue public self infiltrates and subverts the integrity of the private, masculine self, thus jeopardizing manly independence. Indeed, his constant rants against women and domesticity, synony-

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mous in his declamatory tirades, are central to his construction of manly self-sufficiency. Alison Light points out that the “outpourings of virulent misogyny in the inter-war years signal an implicit anxiety about the treacherous instability of former models of masculine power” (8). I agree that such misogyny is a product of the crisis within older models of hegemonic masculinity, but, more important, it also constitutes the recoding within middle-class manliness as it seeks to mold those older models to fit the constraints of a domestic, privatized ideal of Englishness and consumerist modernity. In his attempt to establish his private masculine self, Comstock categorizes women and the domestic as part of the public self; the foul demands of consumerism structure women and their essentialized desire to establish a home. To Comstock, the domestic itself is a product of capitalism. This phenomenon, of masculine integrity forged in opposition to feminized domestic space, is also an integral part of the postwar literary landscape, at least in the culturally elevated novels by the Angry Young Men. Women, in a post-suffrage, post–World War I flapper era, are no longer the passive recipients and submissive complements to manly honor. Their entry into consumerist and labor publics make them an integral component of the national public. Comstock points out this link between women and homogenized consumerism that leads to the emasculated masculinity of the “law abiding cit”: “ ‘That’s what women say. “Chuck away your decency, and suck the blacking off the boss’s boots and buy me a better fur coat than the woman next door.” Every man you can see has got some blasted woman hanging round his neck like a mermaid, dragging him down and down—down to some beastly little semi-detached villa in Putney, with hire-purchase furniture and a portable radio and an aspidistra in the window. It’s the women who make all progress impossible. Not that I believe in progress,’ he added rather unsatisfactorily” (114). Drifting in the in-between spaces of poor lodging houses and bookstores allows Comstock to see all relationships with women resulting in corporate masculinity, of being a “docile little cit,” of keeping up appearances, and the acquisition of useless, uniform worldly goods. Heterosocial relationships mean the end of masculine independence, both psychological and physical. The semidetached villa and the aspidistra that signify lukewarm prosperity and stability imprison and destroy the freedom and gentlemanly integrity of men. As Judy Giles states with reference to Orwell’s Coming Up for Air, “Suburban domesticity, symbolized by the family, colludes with the forces of tyranny which are in turn linked to the techno-bureaucratic manifestations of

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state control” that constrain masculine identity (41). Women, it seems, are enthusiastic collaborators in the emasculation of men as women, in their biological need to nest and reproduce, “believe in the money-code” and through the trap of sexual intercourse and marriage make the “men obey it” (114). Rosemary, Comstock’s girlfriend, is subjected to Comstock’s nearhysterical diatribes against women. Rather interestingly, she represents the selfless and commonsense counterpoint to Comstock’s self-indulgent escapism in the novel. As mentioned earlier, while the narrative shares Comstock’s distaste for the Bovex man and the mangy owner of the Putney villa, it nevertheless ironizes Comstock’s fetishization of money. Rosemary views money as a necessity for a comfortable and decent life—a position that the narrative endorses. She is credited with “common sense” over Comstock’s more childish “abstract ideal,” when in an attempt to stem his selfdestruction—once she realizes that his poverty and self-pity have nullified his own search for artistic integrity—she encourages him to return to work at the New Albion (195). As noted earlier, both “common sense” and “abstract ideal” are loaded phrases within Orwellian discourse: common sense is always weighted over and above abstract ideals, as the former is rooted in the experiential, empirical, and quotidian existence of the common man, while the latter is a product of intellectual and economic elitism. It is the same argument that weights Comstock’s naïve abandonment of money over Ravelston’s platitudinous mouthing of Socialist doctrine even as he lives in economic comfort. Comstock attempts to establish himself through his opposition to and separation from women, as they are the tools of the money-god. Though the narrative—through the sympathetic treatment of Rosemary—reveals this ascription as callow and youthful, it nevertheless shows Comstock’s journey as a necessary component in his transition from the gentlemanly code to corporate masculinity. On the one hand, it is his attempt to consolidate his independence in the face of an assault from a new form of capitalist uniformity; on the other hand, it is part of his movement from an imbrication within the residues of an earlier public school manliness to a realization of his own inability to fully enact those ideals due to his economic and social circumstances. The duality that haunts Comstock also propels his journey downward through the many layers of urban life. If Waugh’s novels described the rarefied realms of the aristocracy and those in power, Orwell’s map the down-

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ward trajectory of the gentleman who has cultural capital but no wealth to shore up a gentlemanly life. Orwell’s focus on the ordinary man and the uncertain middle class as they come to terms with an island nation in the wake of the Great Crash of 1929 occasions Comstock’s quest narrative. Orwell’s domestic journeys were indubitably part of the larger anthropological, domestic move. Orwell himself embarked on these journeys in such nonfiction accounts as Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier, which were part anthropological documents, part Socialist manifestos, and part quest narratives that try to reach and examine the limits of a bourgeois masculine self. While I would hesitate to characterize Comstock’s journey into the London underclass as a full-on imperial romance, I nevertheless see it referencing some of the traits of that genre. If Susan Jones’s handy enumeration of the characteristics of the imperial romance is accurate, where “the identity of the protagonist is at stake, undergoes a ‘test,’ temptations in the encounter with the ‘other’ in exotic and hazardous locations and ideally (but by no means exclusively) remains secure and attached to the mores of his society on the return,” then Comstock’s journey is very much a domesticated quest romance (408). Jones draws on Richard Patteson’s “twelve most recurring plot functions of the imperialist romance.” I will rehearse the ones that are most relevant here: Comstock journeys into the unknown wilderness with “clearly defined goals” that are “idealistic,” not “materialistic”; he descends into the “caves” of the female-dominated lending libraries, where he is smothered by crass anti-intellectualism; he encounters “the other” in the drifters and vagrants of the underclass, over whom he establishes superiority through his bourgeois intellectual superiority and classificatory mechanisms; he is apparently trapped by prostitutes (indigenous women) during his drunken debaucheries who strip him of his money; and finally, though he does not establish order in the wilderness, he does return to the bourgeois purlieu changed and yet intact (Patteson 112–13). Moreover, as James Buzard has argued, the auto-ethnography of the 1930s drew on nineteenth-century “bourgeois literature of social exploration” in which “the poor” are always present waiting to be discovered. Often enough, “the objects of exploration tend to be defined (in the sense of ‘fenced in’) in contrast to the explorer’s and the novelist’s free-moving persona” (105). Comstock’s journey downward into the slummy quarters of Lambeth rehearse this story of exploration, only in the case of Comstock, even as he goes “native,” that is, even as he abandons fastidious personal

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hygiene, respectable clothing, and the routines of a fulfilling work ethic— traits constructed as inherently bourgeois—he remains detached. He does not go native to the extent that he becomes entrenched in the routines of manual labor or the concerns of a working-class existence. He fancies himself a self-righteous man, but he is really a gadfly who repudiates corporate expectations but at the same time does not accept the apparently ennobling values of a proletariat existence. He is, to appropriate Buzard’s phrase, “a free-moving persona” who crosses borders, inhabits liminal spaces, and is a reluctant participant-observer. Both the narrator’s and Comstock’s categorizing eye, as the analysis of the lending library reveals, is trained on the world’s unseen (London’s poor) and seen (gradations of the bourgeoisie). While the quest narrative focuses on how far Comstock can and will go in search of literary manly autonomy, the ethnographic eye is also quite emphatically concerned with “the condition of England”—hence, the appropriation of techniques of Victorian novels of exploration as well as the newly pervasive methodology legitimated by the consolidation of anthropology as a discipline, thanks to the popularity and influence of Bronislaw Malinowski. On the one hand, the dark unknown of the urban underworld mimics the imperial theater; on the other, the urban underclass is a more appropriate terrain for exploring identity in an era defined by the domestic, anthropological turn most visibly embodied by the documentary film and Mass Observation movements, where historical and economic momentum had turned English attention from the empire to England in an effort to “capture the whole national culture” (Esty 45).12 Comstock never quite fits into the world that he enters. His relentless desire to sink leads him to a Dickensian “underground” where his fellows are the criminals, prostitutes, and vagrants, and little better than domesticated animals. Indeed, he is on a desperate adventure to leave “decency” behind, and he is adamant that he not fit into any type of community whatsoever. In deliberately inhabiting a “world where decency no longer mattered,” Comstock’s journey mimics the dangers and uncertainty of the imperial periphery (203). He considers his separation from respectable society and his sinking into anomie an appropriate means to access both his literary talent and his socially suppressed masculine independence. While the narrative and Comstock detail the “huge graceless wilderness where you could lose yourself forever” and the “murky streets where sepiashadowed faces of tea-drunkards drifted through the mist,” in which he experiences the feelings of being “submerged” in ever grungier lodging

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rooms with all the zeal of the anthropologist, Comstock always remains distinct from the objects of his gaze (204). Though he is tempted to join the ranks of the great unwashed—symbolized by his succumbing to the mindless “escapist” fiction that he peddles—he is always aware of the distance between what he used to be and what he is. Indeed, it is this awareness that emphasizes the romance quest aspect of his spiral into sloth and indecency: the door is always open to his return. Even as he succumbs, his bourgeois values are held as hidden threads that tie him back to the world of ambition and self-respect. More so, as both Comstock and the narrative consistently invoke the names of Rosemary, Ravelston, and, less effectually, Gordon’s sister, even when Comstock is at his most debauched and disaffected.

Aspidistras and Lounges Comstock’s spiral into death, decay, and the reading of trashy novels halts when he finds out that Rosemary is pregnant. His horror at her planned abortion catalyzes his return. While this trope is usually seen as a convenient plot device—indeed, Alok Rai has read this as another instance of formal “deformative, disjunctive violence” (41) symptomatic of Orwell’s early novels—I view it as a necessary twist in the narrative, since the narrative trajectory already signified this inevitability; Comstock’s obsession with the absence of a bourgeois life was too marked to be dismissive. The novel’s examination of the middle-class Englishman’s crisis of identity necessitates the generic shift through the trope of pregnancy and impending fatherhood. It signals Comstock’s shift from his delusions of being an independent literary gentleman to being a decent, ordinary, lower-middle-class advertising man. This shift is manifest in the narrative’s generic turn from the ethnographic narrative of the slide into the wilderness to the conventions of the middlebrow domestic novel. The middlebrow domestic novel, as Nicola Humble argues, tracked the subtle shifts of middle-class gender identities through this period of middle-class turmoil (59).13 Keep the Aspidistra Flying morphs into a middlebrow domestic novel that pays careful attention to the shifts in gendered bourgeois identities through its portrayal of the necessary alterations in Comstock’s understanding of a masculine self. This attention to the nuances of bourgeois values is evident when the seeding of the nuclear family kick-starts Comstock’s dormant sense of chivalry and decency, where decency is a democratized Orwellian rendering of a

84 Scarecrows of Chivalry constituent trait of gentlemanliness: disinterestedness. While the narrator had been sympathetic to Comstock’s war against the standardization and commodification of people, Comstock’s abandoning of decency had been treated with narrative disdain. “Decency,” or doing the right thing, thus becomes the force that binds Comstock back into the social framework. It is the scaled-down quotidian version of manly disinterestedness (constitutive of the imperial gentleman) that enables him to see beyond his private crisis to the larger questions of family and community. In Comstock’s striving to be decent, the narrative returns him to the respectability of the home and its attendant social hierarchies, engendering a masculine identity produced by and fitted into the reduced frames of a lower-middle-class, suburban citizenship. The modes in which modernization changed the idea of the home directly shaped female and male subjectivities within the domestic space. This, coupled with the national discursive turn toward the “private life” in the wake of imperial decline and World War I, made the domestic space a significant site for the renegotiation of gender and class identity. In her materialist cultural studies analysis of how women’s histories and experiences have been written out of the theorizations of modernity, Judy Giles points out that “for millions of women the parlour and the suburb rather than the city were the physical spaces in which they experienced the effects of modernization. These were also the spaces that shaped the imaginations from which came their expressions of modernity” (11). Comstock’s reconciliation with his new “businessman,” lower-middle-class identity, through the acquisition of a flat of his own and the ability to “keep” Rosemary and the baby, occurs in and through the modernized domestic space. His return to the domestic space is made possible through his corporate instrumentality, and as a consequence it disrupts Giles’s narrative of the domestic as a space for women’s encounter with modernity. Indeed, it is corporate masculinity that enables domestic modernity. Comstock capitulates to corporate masculinity and sheds his gentlemanly autonomy in order to make possible the warm hearth; he becomes a responsible patriarch of the home through his advertising job. Comstock’s gender identity, layered as it is with an awareness of the manliness that he has consciously shed, occurs through the parlor that is interpenetrated by capitalist modernity writ large in the advertising world of which he is a part. This switch from the lone artist who despises the domestic consumerist space to proud homeowner and husband is both expected and not,

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as illustrated by Comstock’s extreme self-awareness. The return to the middle-class fold, and acceptance of familial, manly responsibilities in the heteronormative institution of the nuclear family, signifies growth and maturity—a maturing process that was protracted, but one that was never in doubt. The logic of the realist quest narrative always impelled Comstock toward this bourgeois return. And yet the narrative’s playing with the conventions of the middlebrow, whether in content (the library sequence) or in form (Comstock’s happy immersion in domesticity), means that this maturity is necessarily fraught. He has not abandoned or forgotten his reservations. Indeed, his continued skepticism toward the life to which he commits reveals the layering of the old and new manly identities. Comstock at the moment of his capitulation thinks: Quite quickly, now that he had taken the first step, he would develop the cynical, blinkered business mentality. He would forget his fine disgusts, cease to rage against the tyranny of money—cease to be aware of it, even—cease to squirm at the ads for Bovex and Breakfast Crisps. He would sell his soul so utterly that he would forget it had ever been his. He would get married, settle down, prosper moderately, push a pram, have a villa, and a radio and an aspidistra. He would be a law-abiding cit like any other law-abiding cit—a soldier in the strap-hanging army. Probably it was better so. (238)

The duality of Comstock’s middle-class masculine identity is more than evident here: whereas the earlier border crossing illustrated his earnest, if self-pitying, commitment to independence and integrity, his new lowermiddle-class identity demands a narrow-minded, cynical commitment to the powers-that-be of capitalism. His identity comprises simultaneously the remnants of, and nostalgia for, that earlier independence and earnestness, and the outlines of a newer identity formed by the demands of consumerism. He moves from gentleman to “businessman,” a term that he reiterates as he heads off for his interview. Indeed, the very ethos of the advertising man denigrates the ideas of gentlemanliness and disinterested public service, as his specific province is the selling of goods and lifestyles to a susceptible public. The shift from culture and autonomy to trade and corporate cog harks back to Harold Perkin’s theorization of the shifts in the 1930s, of the professional move from public service to corporations so scathingly illustrated in Scoop. Comstock resolves to become “a soldier in the strap-hanging army” of commuter businessmen living identical lives in identical suburban houses,

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as he realizes that “it was probably better so.” This is a telling summation: being a cog in the machine is redeemed by the promise and intimacy of family. While he is entirely aware of the fact that “civilization is based on greed and fear” brought on by a fetishization of money, he believes that “in the lives of the common man the greed and fear are mysteriously transmuted into something nobler” where “they have contrived to keep their decency” (239). The narrative’s and Comstock’s final celebration of the quietist life of the ordinary man who does not concern himself with larger global issues—capitalist greed, standardization, “the fear of being blown to hell by bombs”—is the final turn away from the imperial Englishman and imperial England’s grandiloquent perceptions of itself.14 In this turn, Comstock nevertheless maintains an awareness of that earlier model of manliness that is no longer viable. Within the private space of the home, which is also the defining space of Englishness, the “natural” processes of life—“of being born, being married, begetting, working, dying”—ennoble the public, professional identities of men and women defined through their relation to consumerism (239). Moreover, the nobility of the quotidian is enabled by succumbing to the market. The narrative moves from the relentless whine against the forces of the market to the cautious celebration of the modernized hearth. Drawing on the conventions of the sentimental middlebrow novel, the narrative addresses the material and symbolic significance of interior decorations and the brands of furniture and appliances acquired. The young newlyweds rush into their furnished flat, their first, having lived only in lodging houses. The narrator records their “absurd raptures” over their possessions, which are enthusiastically itemized—the double bed, the linen, towels, the chest of drawers, the gate-leg table, the divan, four hard chairs, the coal scuttle—hired on the never-never, or the hire purchase scheme (245). The possessions they are finally able to own constitute a large part of the young couple’s happiness. The scene of domesticity that follows where they try out their new saucepans and have coffee served on their new “red lacquer” tray in the lounge seems to be from another novel altogether. The narrative here embraces the middlebrow novel of suburban domesticity complete with the aspidistra; though the flat is near the center of London, the quietness of it and the evocative mood of cozy warmth make the unfriendly city spaces that Comstock walked seem spatially and psychologically distant. Thus, capitalism and modernity are not shut out to make this an atemporal space of comfort; rather, they determine the home.

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It would seem incomplete to end this analysis without a note on the significance of the aspidistra. The meaning of it changes in tandem with Comstock’s engagement with different models of manliness. In the beginning the aspidistra symbolizes the pathetic, slavish respectability embodied by his sister and the Bovex man: a respectability that is antithetical to Comstock’s own inherited and institutionally consolidated gentlemanly independence and integrity. Comstock only notices the aspidistra as it appears in lodging rooms and bedsits, never in homes. The aspidistra signifies the worst of transience and “making good.” His gradual realization of the impossibility of gentlemanly autonomy, the power of the ineffable bonds of family, and the “decency” of a lower-middle class lead to a self-conscious reconciliation and entry into a masculine public identity structured by consumerism. The aspidistra, at the end of the novel, stands for the ordinary but “noble” aspirations of the “common man” that are integral to the family hearth. The title is densely evocative: the motion gestures, of course, to the relentless march of modernity, but it also suggests the folding of middle-class modernity into Englishness—keep the flag flying—speaking to the inward turn within a nationalist frame. Gordon Comstock is the Englishman as he transitions from one model of hegemonic manliness into another. He is belatedly inscribed within hegemonic gender ideals that are gradually waning in power even as the contours of the imperial nation shrink. The novel illustrates the relationship between the narrative form and the negotiations of manliness and national identity in the long twilight of empire. In Keep the Aspidistra Flying and in the creation of George Orwell from Eric Blair, there is a deliberate transition from the expansive gentlemanly disinterestedness enacted for the purpose of imperial- and self-governance to a contained idea of decency more fitting to the 1930s. Orwell’s explorations within the realist form to meditate upon the articulation of the shifts in manliness and national reconfiguration lead to a mixed bag of genres: from Mass Observation–style documentary realism to toying with a domesticated imperial romance, and culminating in a suburban domestic narrative, along with the invocation of both the modernist flâneur and the conventions of middlebrow sentimentalism. Orwellian representations of masculine tussles with domesticity, women, nation, and English manliness as England gradually democratizes itself are significant, not only because of how they depict this particular phase of transition but also because they offer a paradigm for postwar

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cinematic and literary analyses of English masculinity. This link with Orwell, evident in works by Philip Larkin, John Wain, and Kingsley Amis, reveals the continuity of manly negotiations and the deep underlying thread of “conservative modernity” that characterize the representations of national gender identity in a “new class” of male writers in the 1950s, and their engagement with narrative and poetic form. In the following chapter on Philip Larkin’s poetry, I examine the series of dualities (raised in different ways in both Orwell and Waugh) that continue to structure masculine negotiations and the reworking of the lyric in the postwar period: domestic/manly independence, older ideals of manliness/newer models of masculinity, empire/ home, restraint/action, and men/women. Further, the move from gentleman as hegemonic model to ordinary “decent” man, begun with George Orwell, shifts into high gear in the postwar period, foregrounding underlying tensions as England turns from imperial power to postwar nation.

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“One of Those Old-Type Natural Fouled-Up Guys” Posting the Gentleman in Philip Larkin’s Poetry For, though I’ve no idea What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth, .

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A serious house on serious earth it is, In whose blent air all our compulsions meet, Are recognised, and robed as destinies. Philip Larkin

he british nation from the end of the Second World War to the mid1960s is a “hybrid affair, assembled out of tales about the past as well as narratives of the future” (Conekin et al. 3). As theories of the nation have frequently pointed out, the Janus-faced nation simultaneously looks backward to “invented” tradition, invoking the collective “memory” of the imagined community, and forward into its own future.1 Philip Larkin’s poetry both emblematizes and brings into being, through an English manly inflection, the quotidian, poignantly Janus-faced, and cautiously hopeful state of postwar, post-imperial England, as it captures the contradictory impulses of a changing nation-state. The beginning of the slow and arduous shift from a hegemonic gentlemanliness to a domesticated, suburban Englishman that Orwell examined so well becomes the central feature of Larkin’s poetics. The poem “Church Going,” from which the epigraph of this chapter is taken, captures the distinct doubleness of the Englishman in transition.

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The speaker’s considered yet casual agnostic dismissal of the church’s sanctified silence as being “Brewed God knows how long” is nevertheless shot through with and undercut by the seriousness and secular transcendence at the end of the poem.2 The final verse rises out of the skeptical, mild mockery of the immediate present to acknowledge the potential grasped-for spirituality that the hallowed ground of the church offers, even if it is by virtue of its architecture, “a serious house on a serious earth,” and the sedimented belief of others (59). The poem’s “bicycle-clipped” Englishman, though irreverent, cannot quite bring himself to dismiss belief and spirituality as completely as he would have liked. He is caught between a modern secular, ironic dismissal and the inheritance of a more earnest structure of belief. The past and present ways of being mesh to create the Englishman who is at “a loss” but nevertheless stops often at wayside churches. Philip Larkin’s poetry assumed cultural and national resonance in postwar England because of its imbrication within, and adaptation of, an inherited stylization of hegemonic masculinity, or an imperially inflected gentlemanliness.3 Critics have identified Larkin with “an essential and enduring Englishness” because of the “colloquial tenor,” “ironic humor,” and “clearsighted realism” of his verse, which was seen as “English in its self-restraint and ironic reserve”; yet they have failed to see that these national traits are also gendered ones (Regan 1). Larkin’s poetry is focalized through the postimperial middle-class Englishman, who gives voice to the condition of England. His poetic personae exhibit a sense of ambivalence within the culturally pervasive contradictions of a post-imperial England. They lament the passing of a glorious past even as they offer a tempered celebration of the present—“one of those old-type natural fouled-up guys” that Larkin had foreseen in “Posterity” (Poems 139).4 Theirs is a complicated negotiation between what was and what is, even as the present struggles into being. Larkin’s engagement with the postwar moment encompasses both a lament and a cautiously defiant hope for the present. Rather than the singular trope of imperial nostalgia and lament that critics usually read in his poems (as indicated earlier), I argue that Larkin’s poems describe, in nuanced and tortured detail, the trials and quotidian comforts of postwar, post-imperial English life. Indeed, his deliberate focus on English rather than British culture is itself a function of the duality of postwar British culture, a feature he shares with his peers who comprise the Angry Young Men. The celebration of Englishness marked as white and provincial is an effect of the resurgence of apparently indigenous traditions submerged by cosmopolitan

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imperialism in the decolonizing metropolitan center.5 Paradoxically, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the revival of hoary traditions is simultaneous with the establishment of the welfare state that caused revolutionary changes in the economic, political, and social spheres—the arrival of immigrants from former colonies and the gathering devolutionary momentum within the British Isles—changes that radically alter the idea of a stable and inherited national identity. Larkin’s England is racially unmarked—representative of Englishness in its sheer taken-for-granted universality—and spotlights insular, solid middle-class English life in the decolonizing metropolitan center. However, as Tom Paulin has noted, the focus on the professional Englishman reveals that this transition is painful and confusing (240). By shifting the terms of reference from Paulin’s intuitive understanding of “personality” to an explicitly gendered understanding of national and imperial identity, I demonstrate that Larkin’s personae struggle within, adapt, and appropriate an inherited hegemonic masculine ideal—an institutionalized ideal that is historically and culturally knitted with the imperial Englishman that Paulin dismisses. Larkin’s personae are the post-gentlemen. Larkin’s personae find themselves torn between an inherited, traditional identity of the middle-class gentleman and the pressures on that identity produced by the post-imperial welfare state, even as the latter strives to define and consolidate itself. Thus, Larkin speaks of Englishmen who are mere “scarecrows of chivalry” caught within “lost displays” in the absence of either the conviction or the logic that produced and enabled chivalry in an earlier generation; they are form without content. Like Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Larkin’s personae tentatively shift into the present even as they are shaped and structured by gender ideals of the past. And yet, Larkinesque self-conscious irony gives a new meaning to the inherited form, as it produces a poetics and a class, gender, and national identity that straddle the negotiation of the old and the new, the imperial and the post-imperial. More immediately, like Donald Davie’s contemporaneous poem “Remembering the ’Thirties”—which exemplified postwar literary neutrality and the ambivalently ironic dismissal of the activist sentiments of the Auden generation—Larkin’s “Poetry of Departures” also measures its masculine affect against the heroism of the thirties. Before I analyze the poem, a very brief examination of Davie’s representative poem will serve to thicken the literary-historical context of Larkin’s poetics of ironic manliness. “Remembering the ’Thirties” most famously and almost assur-

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edly declaimed that “a neutral tone is preferred nowadays,” but turns this assurance inside out when it wonders whether it is not perhaps “better” to “praise a stance impressive and absurd / Than not to see the hero for the dust.” Heroism is both dismissed as “too dated, Audenesque” in an age where prewar events are “high brow thrillers,” and yet longed for as decisive, virile, and manly. Further layering this tense ambivalence is the casual mockery of the earnest heroic stance as effeminate and sexually dubious anyway, as evidenced in the Auden generation’s “craze / For showing that Hector was a mother’s boy” (Davie 34–35). Similarly, in “Poetry of Departures,” which seemingly glorifies the manly and decisive repudiation of a tedious and narrow life, the poet sets up a dichotomy between two styles of masculinity: one that harks back to a more imperial, active manliness, and the other, which is more appropriate to a more circumscribed, suburban post-imperial life. The idea of “clear[ing] off” and “chuck[ing] up everything” is considered “purifying,” “elemental,” and “audacious.” The opening lines resonate with zest and energy; the “elemental” nature of such spontaneity is connected later in the poem with sexual conquest and a satisfactory revenge (Poems 64). The speaker’s envy of a robust masculinity is hard to miss with his exhortation of manly activities in which he would like to participate: swaggering, taking off dresses, and being a “stubbly” sailor. However, the last verse, characteristic of Larkinesque ambivalence, undercuts the preceding celebration of such primal audacity. The persona’s boring, “sober” “industrious[ness],” it seems, is preferred over the world of manly adventure and excitement, of “[swaggering] the nut-strewn roads” and “[Crouching] in the foc’s’les.” The act of throwing up everything and leaving for adventures would have been fulfilling and worthwhile if “It weren’t so artificial / Such a deliberate step backwards” (64). Heroic exploits and voyages are artificial and inappropriate in a circumscribed contemporary world that seems made up of books, china, beds, and rooms. Indeed, grand gestures and quests for adventure in such circumstances are melodramatic and meaningless. As “Remembering the ’Thirties” so succinctly reveals, what for the “veterans” of the thirties were “agonies,” for the fifties poets were “worlds more removed than Ithaca or Rome”—post-imperial and postwar Britain is no theater of heroic manliness (Davie 34). The poet persona begins with envy for the robust spontaneity of adventurous manliness, but ends on a more tempered note that privileges his ironic self-consciousness for its maturity and sobriety.

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“Poetry of Departures” is significantly sandwiched between “Toads,” where tedious white-collar labor is simultaneously condemned and soberly celebrated, and “Triple Time,” which considers the bland, autumnal days of the present as quintessentially representative of “adult enterprise” (Poems 65). Clearly, virile manliness with its association of exploration and conquest is outmoded in a new suburban England of “toads,” pensions, bills, and “[a] time unrecommended by event” that calls for sobriety and restraint (65). Martin Green, as we have seen, theorizes this self-consciousness as reflective of national readjustment in the ideals of masculinity: “There are many national types, and the dominant one, the Establishment type, the gentleman, has outlived its usefulness” (Green, “British Decency” 507). However, as I mentioned earlier, it is not a simple case of one style of masculine affect superseding another. Larkin’s poetry (like many postwar cultural texts) revealed that an emergent masculine affect, or what I have termed the post-gentleman, is paradoxically deeply implicated in the gender codes that it rejects. Indeed, The Less Deceived is a testament to the post-imperial melancholia, negotiation, and almost defiant ordinariness of English middle-class life in the 1950s. Larkin’s critics have focused on his representations of gender in the domestic context of the welfare state, or on his seemingly ungendered relationship to the dissolution of empire.6 For instance, much has already been made of Larkin as the post-imperial poet of England, as the “poet of lowered insights and patiently diminished expectations” who, through his lyrical mutterings, represents the ex-centric position of the once powerful imperial center.7 As John Goodby points out, his time in the “elsewhere” of Belfast allowed him to “develop poetic strategies which made use of and thereby justified his sense of otherness and isolation” and to resituate his Englishness (132).8 Indeed, according to Larkin, it was in the Othered space of Belfast that “things reawoke somehow” (Required Writing 68). Nevertheless, even Goodby’s extremely rigorous examination of the “selves” in Larkin’s poetry inflected by the elsewhere of (Northern) Ireland ignores the question of gender. The following readings will bring the critical trends of culturally embedded examinations of gender in Larkin’s poetry into dialogue with postcolonial analyses of Englishness by arguing that Larkin constructs a belated manliness that is both English and post-imperial. Through an examination of Larkin’s ironic lyric voice, I reveal the unraveling and alteration of the imperially inflected moral and behavioral codes that produced the iconic, universalized figure of the Englishman, and the changes in his world.

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“Joining and Parting Lines”: The Englishman in Transition One of Larkin’s most celebrated postcolonial poems, “The Importance of Elsewhere,” is his take on the Englishman as the persona negotiates his gender inheritance in the moment of imperial unraveling. It explores, in detail, the Englishman’s dilemma at the moment of post-imperial de-linking, or rather the self-aware disintegration of the Englishman’s identity in the absence of the structuring Other of the empire. As Nigel Alderman’s excellent reading reveals, the English self can only be achieved through a sense of separation from others; “the success of the ‘separate’ ‘me’ is measured by how workable it is, arguing that the failure of ‘home,’ of England, lies in the production of the ‘unworkable’ self.” He argues that it is the move away from the “universal rhetoric” of British imperialism able to absorb and incorporate other cultures to a “rhetoric of difference,” of post-imperial England, that signifies the decline of the nation (282). While I agree with this reading, I want to point out that it works only because the speaker in the poem is not just English, but gendered male: the English manly self is deliberately poised on the cusp of the imperial and the post-imperial. To clarify, the occasional female personae in Larkin’s oeuvre are immediately recognizable because of their unself-conscious emotional immediacy. It is only the male speakers who are wholly self-conscious, contemplative, and ironic about their relationship to national traditions and classed gender expectations. Rather than argue that Englishness, in the absence of its imperial underpinning, necessarily slides into a life with “a hole in it”9 (which it does, in one register), I want to establish how the speaker’s discomfort in his own national institutions more tellingly reveals the necessary transition of a gendered national identity. The poem moves from stabilizing difference in a colonial space to an uncomfortable distance from any sense of Burkean organic unity in England.10 The first section of the poem illustrates the enactment of the English identity in Ireland, where the speaker can still concretize this identity through the residual framework of imperialism. Ireland’s difference defines the speaker’s self: “Lonely in Ireland, since it was not home, / Strangeness made sense.” He argues that the “difference” makes him feel “welcome” (105). He is the colonizer among the formerly colonized at the moment of decolonization; hence, his Englishness is consolidated in opposition to the strange Other. They “prove [him] separate, not unworkable.” The phrase “not unworkable” is peculiarly Larkinesque, in that he deliberately uses a

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double negative to indicate a positive: part of Larkin’s contemporary appeal as a post-imperial poet lay in his ability to inscribe the positive or ordinary dimensions of post-imperial English life within a series of negations that managed to evoke the loss of empire and the simultaneous gain of a more manageable, authentic Englishness. “Unworkable” as a term becomes even more loaded because he uses it so sparingly. In fact, he had used it only once before, in his poem for Sally Amis, “Born Yesterday” in The Less Deceived, where he hopes that she will have an ordinary and dull life, if that means an “enthralled catching of happiness.” He wishes “Nothing uncustomary / To pull you off your balance, / That unworkable itself, / Stops all the rest from working” (54). To be unworkable is to be knocked off balance, and it is not confined to the unworkable individual; it arrests the workability of those around her as well. To read these traces in “The Importance of Elsewhere” in The Whitsun Weddings is to understand that to be “not unworkable” necessarily indicates balance: the stable Other of Ireland structures his balance, thereby concretizing his identity. In fact, the alien, uncustomary nature of Ireland produces his balanced workability. Strangeness is a cognate for distance; hence, at a distance from home, self-distanciation made sense, but at home it does not. The poem moves perspective from the imperial Englishman in the former colony to the post-imperial Englishman back in England where “elsewhere” no longer underpins home. The rhyme scheme of the poem illustrates this movement from difference to similitude. In the first two verses, the lines only half rhyme: “home” is paired with “welcome,” and “speech” with “touch,” “faint” with “went,” “stable” with “unworkable.” This partial rhyme replicates the disjunction that produces the workable English identity. However, in the final verse, the rhyme scheme tightens, replicating the sameness of England as opposed to the separateness of Ireland. Living in England has no such excuse: These are my customs and establishments It would be much more serious to refuse. Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence. (105)

While the separateness of Ireland makes his English self “not unworkable,” the similitude of home—home unstructured by the difference of empire— makes the defining national customs oppressive rather than comforting and familiar, a structure reflected in the strong rhymes of “excuse”/“re-

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fuse” and “establishments”/“existence.” And yet, even here, the rhyme is not quite perfect, exhibiting subtly the Englishman’s dissonant fit into his own national and gendered identity. The meter of the last verse also reinforces this sense of partial identification: the lines of the last verse are primarily trochaic with the last syllables dropped, ending with a stressed syllable. Hence “ex-cuse”/“re-fuse” are masculine rhymes that give the impression of full rhymes but are not. Living in England, his identity of Englishman is called into question because he cannot comfortably plug himself into the network and traditions that would ensure a stable gender and national identity, and yet he cannot separate himself from his gendered cultural inheritance either. As a post-gentleman, he is unable, or refuses, to insert himself into his “customs and establishments,” implying a casting off of national and gendered moorings, for the Englishman is historically intertwined with his national institutions: he is a product of his “customs and establishments,” culturally formulated through the means of institutions in order to fit seamlessly back into them. To clarify, a slight recapitulation is necessary: the middleclass public school Englishman—synonymous with the English public school gentleman, at least from the middle of the nineteenth century—embodies the ideals of Englishness, what the Clarendon Commission called “the capacity to govern others and control themselves . . . their vigour and manliness of character.” Ideals of Englishness and English manliness consolidated in the public schools grew out of a long interaction between industrial/capitalist exigencies and the empire that sustained the power and cultural hegemony of the ruling class, connecting national and cultural identity with national/imperial institutions. Larkin’s Englishman, though not a direct product of the public school system, is necessarily inflected by the ideology of these national institutions that constituted the ideals of normative English manliness and of Englishness in general.11 Connell’s delineation of hegemonic masculinity is once again useful in understanding how traits of public school manliness structurally constitute Larkin’s middle-class, postwar professional Englishman. In the postwar period, despite the celebration of class mobility and the mythic notion of classlessness, the most visibly powerful embodiments of corporate masculinity were still public school men, and the traits of this ethic of manliness underpinned and determined all English masculine affects. Hence, to reject the “establishments” woven into the very fabric of English manly identity is to arrive at a point of crisis and

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negotiation of national, gender identity. The Burkean associations of “customs and establishments” only serve to emphasize the unconscious weight of nation and history: to refuse to align with the customs and traditions of England and not integrate smoothly with the English nation is a “serious” case of national misanthropy.12 Larkin’s Englishman is revealed as being isolated and unsure, unable to get a toehold on a sense of “workable” self in the absence of functional framing devices, but also aware of his unworkable position. He is entirely self-aware of the seriousness of his disidentification: his interstitial position of being neither an imperial nor yet a post-imperial Englishman allows him the distance to examine the code of imperially structured English manliness within which he is inscribed. In the absence of an “elsewhere [that] underwrites his existence,” then, he cannot wholeheartedly insert himself into, nor separate himself from, his national customs and identity.

“The Wish to Be Alone” While “The Importance of Elsewhere” illustrates the Englishman’s inability to be comfortably absorbed into the nation in a post-imperial Britain, Larkin’s poems detailing the Englishman’s resistance to the family—the core of a heteronormatively structured nation—only serve to reinforce his discomfort with old established ideals, understood as “natural,” in a new, more uncertain English world where manly autonomy is no longer reconcilable with familial duty. “Dockery and Son,” invoking Victorian patrimony through its associations with Dombey and Son, ironically enough depicts the trajectory of a solitary Englishman as he contemplates his own life in comparison to his peer, Dockery, on a visit to his old college. On discovering that Dockery’s son now studies at the same college, the persona is amazed at Dockery’s confidence that “he should be added to.” The emphasis on the exclusively masculine continues through the course of the poem, from the all-male Oxford college, to the poetically evoked worlds of the military, the industrial landscape, and, of course, sons and fathers. The poem, long by Larkin’s standards, is in the form of a rambling, contemplative, inner monologue. The first three verses, as he wanders around college—nostalgically recalling his days of undergraduate mayhem, and trying to recall what Dockery looked like and with whom he roomed—follow a regular rhyme scheme. The life experienced and the life observed follow a certain ordinary ease, and

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an expected, conventional pattern. And yet there are already indications that he is not really a part of it, a “death-suited visitant” whose youthful belonging is contrasted with his current status: “I tried the door where I used to live: / Locked. The lawn spreads dazzlingly wide” (108). The openness and integration of earlier times is indicated not only by his old college room but also by the invitation and open-endedness of the colon, which is deceptive, as it is abruptly arrested by the strong consonant at the end of the monosyllabic “Locked,” which is entrapped by a period. The visual impact of “locked,” trapped between two wide-open spaces—his happy past, and the wide, sunny lawns—reveals the speaker’s own problematic position in the world that he contemplates. Locked out and “ignored,” he leaves the known world of the past and heads off into the empty future from which all familiar views are gradually erased. In the last three verses, when he begins to contemplate what it means to marry, and why men like Dockery would choose to do so, the hint of dissent/ discomfort shades into a lack of discernable rhyme scheme, and by the final verse the rhythm is harsh and jagged, having completely lost any degree of calm or complacency. The rhythmic dissonance emphasizes the potential for social disruptiveness; the speaker’s questioning of heteronormative impulses—whether they are in fact impulses, and not some ingrained habit— destabilizes the calm, complacent conventionality of life that the first three verses seemed to affirm. There is a shift in tone that occurs at the end of the last line of the first verse, when he sees the reflection of the “unhindered moon” on the coupling and uncoupling railway tracks, signifying his uneasy fit into the conventions and expectations of English manliness: “Unhindered moon. To have no son, no wife, / No house or land still seemed quite natural” (108). His kinship with the solitary moon is an effect of his own solitude, not having a wife, family, home, or land. Through the invocation of the moon, he hijacks the “natural” from its association with family and reproduction and links it to a childless and solitary state. The choice of image is further significant because the moon and its poetic connotations of chaste femininity reverberate in a poem that is explicitly coded male. The poetic persona de-genders himself through his lunar identification, refusing to enter the procreative realm of adult manhood, and instead floats free in a seemingly asexual celibate integrity. The poetic persona makes visible what Robyn Wiegman calls the “seeming naturalness of adult masculinity— heterosexuality, fatherhood, family governance[,] . . . citizenry,” rendering it instead as a “set of prescriptive norms that contain potential contradic-

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tions within and between men” (43). The (un)conscious articulation of the different aspects of an adult life, and his decision not to pursue that life, echo the rejection of Burkean organic unity in “The Importance of Elsewhere”—which precedes “Dockery and Son” in The Whitsun Weddings. Hence, within the logic of this particular volume, Larkin emphasizes the disjunction between the Englishman as he is and the Englishman as he was and is supposed to be. In this, Larkin represents and reflects the pervasive social and cultural concern regarding the increasing domestication of men, and, indeed, of English culture. This discourse of domestication began during the interwar years, as we have seen, and gained momentum to counteract the rise of Fascism and imperialist nationalism in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s: the British—hegemonically represented by the English—were increasingly constructed as a shy, modest, unassuming people, a nation consciously defined by ordinary, private pleasures and modest ambitions.13 This particular strand of national ideology—inwardness and domesticity—which seemed to coexist with imperialism even in the interwar years, became a national inevitability in the 1950s, with the gradual disintegration of empire that began in 1947 with the independence of India, the need for national rebuilding after the upheavals of World War II, and the initiation of the welfare state. Lynn Segal argues that both men and women were more closely associated with the home in the postwar period, though for men, home involved appropriately masculine leisure pursuits such as watching television and do-it-yourself projects rather than any share of the housework. She points out, “Men, too, in popular consciousness, were being domesticated. They had returned from the battlefield to bungalow with new expectations of comforts and pleasures” (3). However, this new emphasis on the domestic was accompanied by rampant fears of emasculation, loss of masculine horizons and ambition, and a general obsession with constructions of masculinity produced by an explicitly domesticated England—shorn of any imperial and global weight. These fears permeated the national fabric and constituted the subject of exploration in virtually every cultural outlet of the period, tying together the crisis of national self-presentation with the crisis of masculine renegotiation.14 Segal registers the paradox of domestication and its concomitant emphasis on manly autonomy when she points out the sudden cultural explosion of the “male adventure story linking masculinity and rugged individualism,” evidencing a deep-seated nostalgia for the exclusively mascu-

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line domains of the battlefield and empire (20). Hence, Englishmen were torn between two conflicting discourses: the nostalgia for an imperial and prewar world of solitary, yet homosocial, manly activity and integrity, and the economic and social pressures of interwar and postwar domesticity. In a homosocial imperial economy, manly solitude and domesticity balanced each other out; in an increasingly heterosocial postwar domestic economy, the two ideals conflict. Larkin’s Englishman in “Dockery and Son” ruminates precisely on this masculine problematic: of heterosexual desire and family on the one hand, and on the other, his need for manly solitude and separateness derived from a long, entrenched history of masculine activity in the national public sphere and the empire. The speaker chooses his autonomy over what he considers the claustrophobia of domesticity. Whereas earlier, the primarily masculine terrain of activity—the public sphere and/or empire—was complemented by the comfort of domesticity, in the post-imperial world of the poem, domesticity appears to be the only terrain where a middle-class manhood can be consolidated (a fact Gordon Comstock reluctantly realized), and the speaker emphatically rejects it as unsuitable for his own masculine authenticity. This movement from a homosocial terrain to a purely heterosocial terrain is mirrored in the poetic content: though the poem speaks only of men, it moves from the exclusively masculine spaces to a predominant and overwhelming focus on questions of family and heteronormativity. And the speaker cannot, and does not want to, insert himself into the expected role of husband, father, homeowner, and landowner. This domestic failure follows upon the Englishman’s inability to satisfactorily identify himself as Englishman in “The Importance of Elsewhere.” While reproduction, heternormative coupling, and filial responsibility are all the rightful duties of a middle-class Englishman—which would only serve to consolidate his middle-class masculine identity—for the speaker these expected duties only mean “dilution,” a gradual chipping away at his own sense of unadulterated self.15 What is significant is that the speaker’s outsider position—as postwar, middle-class Englishman structured by ideals of an inherited manliness—allows him a vantage point from which to question these naturalized assumptions: “Why did he think adding meant increase? / To me it was dilution” (109). However, the almost involuntary act of abstraction from, and questioning of, “innate assumptions” is not without uncertainty: the internal catalexis in the first line of the verse— between “think” and “adding”—produces a pause that repeats the perso-

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na’s hesitation and his attempt to grope toward an understanding of heteronormative and reproductive compulsions. This characteristic questioning hesitation scattered through many of Larkin’s poems, such as “Church Going” and “Reasons for Attendance,” for example, only emphasizes the painful transition of English middle-class manliness, and the concomitant negotiations within the middle-class English man. The speaker is caught between the “naturalness” of inherited heteronormativity as the means to consolidate middle-class manhood, and the awareness that in postwar, post-imperial England, this very familial melding might destroy his carefully preserved manly integrity. Significantly, only the male speakers in Larkin’s poems have such a problematic relationship with marriage and domesticity. Female speakers in such poems as “Wedding Wind” and the earlier “Deep Analysis” wholly identify with their surrender to marriage and the domestic ideal.16 In fact, these poems are acknowledged as Larkin’s most Lawrentian poems because of their emotional intensity and immediacy.17 The female persona within Larkinesque poetics becomes the medium that enables an exploration of spontaneous emotion, unlike the male speaker who cautiously parses his emotions through the skein of rigid self-control. In spite of his uncertainty, then, the persona realizes that the ideals of family, home, and land are neither embedded truths nor deepest desires; he sees them merely as style hardened into habit, and hence is all too aware of their historical development to consider them the essential pattern of gender behavior: “Where do these / Innate assumptions come from? Not from what / We think truest, or most want to do: / . . . They’re more a style” (109). He interprets naturalized heteronormative structures as “habit,” which points to a proto-queer critique of social conventions: the progression of “style” to “habit,” to “suddenly harden[ing] into all we’ve got.”18 Gender expectations, especially appropriate manly middle-class English behavior, began as style and have become the essential foundation of manliness. And Larkin’s Englishman struggles precisely against these hardened “style[s],” preferring to prioritize manly solitude and wholeness at the expense of marital and reproductive dilution. In such a situation, Larkin’s obsession with solitary and, indeed, solipsistic eroticism in such poems as “Best Society,” where the persona “viciously” shuts himself away from the intrusion and babble of society in order to “unfold” in “the giant palm,” is the only mode of erotic satisfaction and autonomous integrity.19 Two complementary styles of manly behavior—preservation of solitary integrity, and

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reproductive duty—once fused in the special ideological complexion and historical character of the Victorian gentleman and middle-class English manliness, have in Larkin’s poetic rendering of postwar England become irreconcilable with the national inward turn toward the domestic, and the consequential collapse of the private and public spheres. While “Dockery and Son” critiques heteronormative “impulses” and domesticity, “Sunny Prestatyn” moves further along the spectrum of heterosexuality and is a complex meditation on chivalry, desire, and differently coded masculinities.

“My Swivel Eye Hungers from Pose to Pose”: The Violence of Chivalry Unlike the poems examined so far, which describe worlds devoid of women, “Sunny Prestatyn” focuses on a woman, but unsurprisingly it is more interested in the masculine responses evoked by the woman. Janice Rossen has pointed out that women in Larkin’s poetry are usually mediated through artistic representation: photographs, advertisements, and fiction (“Difficulties with Girls” 135–40). They are not, in fact, “empirically true” and very rarely are “real girl[s] in real place[s],” unlike the many troubled and hesitant men whose hesitance and doubt underscore their reality (Poems 43). This only serves to emphasize their inaccessibility and mystique within the world of the specific poem, a mystique that both bewilders the man in question and accentuates his longing. Larkin often uses the images of women to metaphorize a sense of loss and wistfulness. In fact, “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album,” which opens The Less Deceived, sets the volume’s tone of wistful longing for a past that is perfect in its distance and passivity. Nevertheless, “Sunny Prestatyn”—as indeed other Larkin poems featuring women—needs to be read at the intersection of several different registers: the aesthetic representation of the woman in a consumerist framework, the classed, post-imperial masculine response to the portrayal, as well as the speaker’s ironic, self-conscious engagement with the witnessed tableau. The poem immediately succeeds “The Importance of Elsewhere” and precedes “First Sight”—a nature poem about new life—and “Dockery and Son,” which explores the vicissitudes of patrilineal duty. The four poems, or at least the three that focus on human subjects, reveal the multifaceted nature of classed, gender negotiation in post-imperial En-

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gland. In the first poem, the Englishman tries to realign his national gender identity in the absence of established structures; in the second, he grapples with ideas of chivalry and his own middle-class manliness as juxtaposed with lower-class masculine violence vis-à-vis heterosexual desire in a postimperial England; and in the third poem, the speaker rejects the naturalized heteronormative conventions that supposedly solidify his classed manhood. Obviously, the volume does not depict anything as simplistic as a linear progression from masculine crisis to nihilism, although it is possible to trace such a narrative from The Less Deceived to High Windows. However, to do so would be to miss Larkin’s layered representations of “how something” pushed Englishmen to “the side of their own lives,” as well as his interspersed poems of hope and love amid such marginalization (Poems 115). In fact, The Whitsun Weddings continues the theme of the present past from The Less Deceived. It considers the diminished, more honest and self-aware present in terms of a grand, lost past: in its titular poem, and the scattered images of “immeasurable surprise,” it focuses on the potential for happiness in the present and ends on a characteristically guarded gesture of hope: “our almost-instinct almost true: / What will survive of us is love” (107, 117). More important, to consider the three poems together is also to clearly see the link between the Englishman as he comes to terms with a new/old England and the post-imperial nation as it transitions: the “Importance of Elsewhere” offers the master narrative within which the details of the other two need to be read. In other words, the uncertainty, the doubt, the paradox of violent chivalry, and the repudiation of heteronormativity can only be understood within the larger trope of a now diminished Englishman who is no longer underwritten by an “elsewhere.” “Sunny Prestatyn” even begins with an invocation of beautiful tropical beaches, which once would have been part of the imperial periphery, but in postwar England refer to the domestic exotic of Wales—which, as an ancient colony, has been appropriated as a subsidiary fiefdom in the English body politic. The woman not only is a two-dimensional poster image but, furthermore, coalesces with a beach resort waiting to be plundered. The opening verse is a careful and deliberate tangle of woman and tropical resort, whose “breast-lifting arms” and “palms” coalesce through the explicit rhyme of palms and arms. Behind her, a “hunk of coast” spread from her thighs encourages inferences of sex, as “hunk” is slang for an attractive man, in addition to being an outcrop of land. The image privileges

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the fleshly, welcoming reality of the semi-naked woman open for conquest rather than the beach that the poster apparently advertises. Provocatively positioned for the male gaze, she laughs coyly, with her “tautened” satin, spread thighs and open arms. Advertising makes objects of desire of her and the beach, with which she merges. She is perceived as using her sexuality to produce desire in the male observer, a fact the speaker makes evident in his description of the poster as sexual fantasy. This provocation of advertising meets with swift and sudden retribution through the violence of graffiti: “She was slapped up one day in March / . . . and her face / Was snaggletoothed and boss-eyed; / Huge tits and a fissured crotch / Were scored well in, and the space” (106). The abrupt shift in rhythm mimics the viciousness of the violence perpetrated on the provocative, vulnerable woman. It is possible to argue that the graffiti violates the rich and luxurious life being advertised, but the pointed sexual nature of the violence—“she was slapped up”—indicates that the anger is primarily directed against the woman and not motivated by a critical and subversive Marxist agenda. The beauty and fertility of “March” deliberately counterpoints the violence done to her “fissured crotch” in the rhyme of “March”/“crotch,” while her face that denotes beauty and individuality is denigrated to empty space in the “face”/“space” juxtaposition. The language of the poem that describes the act mimics the figurative violent rape that sets the woman “astride tuberous cock and balls” and makes her “snaggle-toothed” and “boss-eyed.” The sadistic attack asserts the masculine power of Titch Thomas (the graffiti “artist”) over her, while the violent language asserts the speaker’s revenge over unfulfilled and provoked sexual fantasy. The speaker, despite his detachment—“Titch” is a traditional derisive nickname for a very small man—is clearly complicit in this sexual violence. This complicity is made more evident when the vulgarity of language apparently imitates the speech of the lower-class hooligan, Titch Thomas: “tits,” “crotch,” “cock,” “balls,” and “snaggle-toothed” mingles with “tuberous” and “fissured,” which clearly lie outside his linguistic idiom. The unevenness of the idiom reveals that the speaker unwittingly shares Titch Thomas’s anger while he tries to maintain his detachment from, and condescension for, such crude and violent behavior of the lower-class man.20 At this juncture it is necessary to pause and consider the speaker’s location in this triangulated tableau. As mentioned earlier, the speaker is clearly affected by the image of the woman in the advertisement: he, like

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Titch Thomas, reads her pose as provocative; indeed, his description is almost pornographic in its attention to detail. For him the advertisement is not of the tropical resort but of the woman offering herself. His complicity, then, with Titch Thomas’s violence is evident in the second verse. There is righteousness to his complicity, as he not only shares in the desecration but also derives a salacious enjoyment from it, as it punishes the poster woman’s audacious teasing and apparent flaunting of sexual power over supposedly powerless men, without any potential for fulfillment. Indeed, the idea of women as “unearthly” and “separate” from men of all classes is explored earlier in the volume in “The Large Cool Store,” where the speaker’s condescension for those who live in “low terraced houses” working in “factory, yard and site” suddenly collapses in a moment of inclusion: he too is part of a fraternity of men who are bewildered by women (101). However, what sets this speaker’s detached, educated, middle-class masculinity apart from Thomas’s brutality, within the logic of the poem, is the throwaway line amid tears and stabbings: “She was too good for this world” (106). The speaker’s chivalric elevation of the unearthly woman leads to this ironically pious pronouncement after his complicit violence in the previous verse. The speaker is a “scarecrow of chivalry” who mouths, and indeed believes, the ideals of a normative manhood, and is able to assert his superior classed manliness in the face of such a brutal example of lower-class masculinity. However, in a typically Larkinesque move, the statement is saturated with irony, because the flip side of mystification of women is the frustrated desire, resentment, and objectification that such etherealization produces. The poem reveals both aspects of the speaker’s chivalry, which is played out both in tandem with and against Thomas’s crude graffiti. “Sunny Prestatyn” is an example of the Englishman’s engagement with women and the world of advertising. Women are too good, and hence subject to intense misogynistic violence, both physical and emotional. The trope of postwar domestication put intense pressure on the relations between men and women, and any hint of threat to manly autonomy and equilibrium led to an almost vicious response that was nearly always justified within the emotional logic of the text.21 Larkin’s inherited chivalry is more than evident in poems such as “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album,” “Maiden Name,” “The Large Cool Store,” “Sunny Prestatyn,” and “If My Darling,” where women are perfect, ethereal, and encapsulated in images and ideas. These poems also carry the implicit, and some-

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times explicit, separation of women from a comprehensible and empirical reality that the speakers inhabit. Separation and distance accentuate desire and preclude desire’s fulfillment that sometimes results in violence. In the poems where women are very real presences, the male speakers can only perceive them through the lens of heterosexual conventions that frustrate masculine desire just as effectively as aesthetic representation. In “Self’s the Man,” Arnold “married a woman to stop her from getting away / now she’s there all day,” and she embodies the trap of heteronormative duty; she does not exist as an individual, merely as an abhorred embodiment of the trivialities and loss of freedom that married life entails (95). In both representations of womanhood, the male speaker is usually a victim of femininity—either through the inevitability of desire and its nonfulfillment, or desire’s fulfillment through the entrapment of marriage and the dissolution of the masculine self. In Larkin’s postwar, post-imperial England, manly autonomy is always under threat from women. In “Sunny Prestatyn,” lower-class masculinity avenges itself through a brutal and sadistic attack, while the middle-class male speaker asserts himself through his vicarious enjoyment of the act, and simultaneously distances himself through his sympathetic idealization of the violated woman. The poem shows, with characteristic Larkinesque irony, the ambivalence of an inherited chivalry in a domesticated England where the stabilizing hierarchical structures that produced and sustained chivalry and the fulfillment of desire no longer exist. A similar metamorphosis is visible in the ideal of restraint—an ideal that governed both heterosocial affect and reserved solitude.

“I Stay Outside”: Restraint and Detachment “Reasons for Attendance” explores the transmutation of the normative manly ideal of restraint and detachment. Self-restraint had occupied, and, indeed, continues to occupy, a privileged position in the selfcharacterization of the English. Since the hegemonic and tentacular reach of the public-school ideals of manliness weighted down the ideals of normative English masculinity and Englishness with its emphasis on self-control, setting it apart from femininity and non-English masculinities, self-control continues to determine appropriate English manly behavior. After all, Victorian and Edwardian codes of English gentlemanliness, which shaped the middle-class Englishman in the twentieth century, distinguished the

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gentleman, or the middle-class Englishman, from the primal working-class figure—and the primitive native—through an ascetic cultivation of restraint and appropriate distribution of affect. The professional man validated his masculinity through an ascetic physical and emotional regimen, the rigor of which differentiated it from feminine self-denial and spirituality. James Eli Adams argues with reference to Victorian manliness, “The gentleman was thereby rendered compatible with a masculinity understood as a strenuous psychic regimen, which could be affirmed outside the economic arena, but nonetheless could be embodied as charismatic self-mastery” (7). Martin Francis, in his examination of the politics of restraint in the construction of the postwar Labor Party, argues that the rhetoric of rationality and progress that dominated the postwar reconstruction of England along Socialist principles was necessarily accompanied by a related emphasis on self-control. He goes on to point out, “Self-discipline was prioritised because it was perceived as vital to the complex task of social and economic reconstruction. An emphasis on restraint matched contemporary codes of manliness, at a time when masculinity seemed to be under threat from a blurring of gender roles and the increased visibility of homosexuality. Uncontrolled emotion also transgressed a conception of the British (or at least English) national identity which was rooted in self-restraint” (153). Larkin, though not a Labour politician, clearly falls into this category of the restrained, middle-class Englishman. Though he is not a gentleman, Larkin’s ironic restraint is embedded within the inherited residual gender script of the Victorian gentleman, rendering him a post-gentleman. In “Reasons for Attendance,” he explores this particular defining trait of the Englishman, as well as the damning effects of restraint and rationality especially in the context of jazz and youthful desire. The poem is set in the pleasure-filled and youthful, energetic world of either a dance hall or a jazz club, where the sound and mood of jazz permeates the scene. The speaker too, for all his apparent detachment, cannot entirely disassociate himself, as he is unwittingly drawn to the “loud and authoritative” call of the trumpet. He vicariously enjoys the animal pleasures of the dancing young people through the “lighted glass.” The immediacy of the witnessed bodily bliss is more than apparent in the “sense” of “smoke and sweat,” of the reality of life in which he does not participate. The sensual and fleshly “wonder/ful” “feel” of girls only serves to foreground the sensual life that the speaker misses by staying “out here” while he could be “in there” with full girls; the subtle lascivious innuendo of “in

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there” following upon the fullness of the girls is typical of a publicly restrained desire, which is a recurrent feature in Larkin’s poetry (Poems 48).22 The speaker tries to veer away from slipping into envy and longing through an abrupt question, “Sex, yes, but what / Is sex?” (48). Steve Clark points out that the question is answered by the arrangement of the rhyme “what”/ “sweat” (Clark 95). The importance of sex, desire, and pleasure is reduced to a bodily emission. As a consequence, the speaker sets up his superior, detached rationality and restraint against the mindless, flushed dancing couples who “shift intently.” And while he seems to emphatically reject the equation of sex and happiness, the crucial break in the line undercuts the dismissal: “Of happiness in couples—sheer / Inaccuracy, as far as I am concerned” (48). In the gap between “sheer” and “inaccuracy” emerges the chasm of doubt; his desire emerges in its disavowal. The tussle between restraint and spontaneity in any form, especially desire that defines the middle-class Englishman, plays out with understated power in the second verse and in the first line of the third, as quoted above. Here, at its most succinct, is the refusal to give in, the rational rejection of coupling as happiness, and yet the caesura indicates the knife-edge of that refusal—the undertone is that of the powerful pull of desire, an undertone whose “beat” plays through the poem from the authoritative call of the trumpet at the very beginning. The compelling undertow of desire is also evident in the double signification of the trumpet: “What calls me is that lifted, rough-tongued bell / (Art, if you like) whose individual sound / Insists I too am individual” (48). In an effort to convince himself of his own uniqueness and not dissociate himself from the subcultural pull of jazz, the speaker deliberately and paradoxically signifies the trumpet as symbolic of art and individuality—or, perhaps, it is the trumpet’s single, lifted note separating it from the rest of the tune/ beat that symbolizes individuality. Nevertheless, the “roughtongued” bell, though semantically linked to the world of sensuality and sex, is translated into art and individuality. It is paradoxical because the bell—with its abrasive, sensual physicality of “rough” and “tongue”—points to the body and senses, but the speaker firmly rationalizes it as a symbol for art. In this one image, the speaker conflates sensuality and art/individuality, while privileging the latter. The same sound calls the couples to “maul to and fro” in animalistic fervor, and the speaker to witness their mating dance and rationally engage with the effects and deeper meaning of their mauling. His choice to consider the trumpet as a “bell” that beckons him

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toward artistic solitude indicates a precarious victory of restraint and rationality over desire. So the trumpet is desire: powerful and potential cause of happiness, and the loss of individuality and solitude. Hence, to succumb to desire is both wanted and unwanted. Poised on the cusp of restraint and desire, the speaker apparently has overcome desire through the sheer resoluteness of his restraint, and his wish to preserve his artistic and manly integrity. The structure of the lines that refer to possible interpretations of the trumpet’s call replicates its double signification: “It speaks; I hear; others may hear as well / But not for me, nor I for them; and so / With happiness. Therefore I stay outside” (48). The semicolons between “it speaks,” “I hear,” and “others may as well” indicate the distinct separation and yet connection between what he and others hear, which is reinforced by the fact that each group goes their separate ways: “But not for me, nor I for them.” His apparent satisfaction with staying outside, which he was so keen to establish, is, however, undercut in typical Larkinesque fashion in the last two lines: “Believing that; and both are satisfied, / If no one has misjudged himself. Or lied” (48). He gains a distinctly rational overview and insight through his detachment, and yet this insight also allows him to be aware of his own possible equivocation, for the last line hints at the possibility of self-delusion, further accentuated by the rhyme of “satisfied”/“lied.” While the speaker might have retained his individuality through restraint, then, the poetic undertone—signified by the powerful pull of desire—reveals that his restraint is not so much a matter of will as an inability to act. He refuses to, or perhaps cannot, surrender to desire. The speaker’s encoded middle-class English restraint allows him access to only restraint and not sex, or at least that is the dichotomy he has set up for himself. This paralysis of restraint becomes even more problematic because he does feel the pull of jazz. Jazz, according to Eric Hobsbawm (or Francis Newton, his jazz alias), was a protest against upper-class culture and respectability, “a rude word” (215). Simon Frith, using Larkin as his example, argues that the ascendant, suburban petty-bourgeois embedded in middle-class ideology identified jazz as the means to unlock an “authenticity” that enabled emotional and physical spontaneity—a sloughing off of the circumscribed gender script and suburban life (58). Both these ideas underwrite the speaker’s own reluctance to dismiss the power of jazz. In fact, the poem is not a rejection of jazz at all, but rather the speaker’s own ambivalent longing for, and concomitant repudiation of, the sexual and emotional freedom that jazz enables.

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A brief detour is necessary here in order to comprehend the significance of jazz for Larkin and the persona’s relationship to it. Larkin’s obsession with, and attitude toward, jazz informs the speaker’s attitude toward what he witnesses. For Larkin, jazz, more than any other art form, symbolized a direct connection to the unconscious and desire. As he explains in an unpublished essay from 1943, “Jazz is the closest description of the unconscious we have. . . . Jazz is the new art of the unconscious, and is therefore improvised, for it cannot call upon consciousness to express its own divorce from consciousness” (qtd. in Motion 57). In the introduction to his collection of journalistic reviews of jazz albums and artists, All What Jazz, Larkin explains what drew him to jazz was its rawness, and the forbidden exuberance of its “hot numbers” (Required Writing 286). His derision of the arrival of modernism in jazz produced the oft-quoted Larkin statement: “The tension between artist and audience in jazz slackened when the Negro stopped wanting to entertain the white man” (294). Jazz was only worthwhile, in Larkin’s opinion, when it was aimed at entertaining the white man, where the music contained the raw emotionalism inherent in blackness that the white man could vicariously enjoy. Reading Larkin’s interpretation of jazz within the discourse of English manliness is particularly revelatory. English manly restraint was a signifier of superiority in relation to the more uncontrolled primal masculinities of the native and the workingclass male and the passive emotionalism of women. Within this context, jazz, as produced by “the Negro,” allowed for the vicarious pleasure of “hotness” and the unconscious. It allowed for the white man to maintain his distance and detachment as “the Negro” played jazz, specifically for the pleasure and entertainment of the white man/audience. The white man did not have to engage directly with it; he enjoyed it at a remove, maintaining his control over his unconscious desires while being entertained by the black man’s surrender to his. And as Larkin saw it, when jazz became Modernist, racial qualities were betrayed as the unconscious now gave way to the intellect, and, accordingly, the power of jazz faded for Larkin. To return to the poem, the persona tries to appropriate jazz’s subversive potential, in his own meager way, into his commitment to solitude. Unlike his peers, though, he cannot subsume himself within it; he is unable to entirely reject his inherited gender ideology even as he unwittingly longs to do so. To abandon himself to the animalistic pleasure would be to abandon the distinct characteristics of his own white, middle-class manliness, which he both longs to do and yet cannot. The associations of primitive,

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animalistic sexuality, even as a symbol of liberation recuperated through its Anglicization, derived its subversive power because it made desirable the unrestrained and spontaneous sexuality of an apparently primitive black masculinity against which English manliness was originally defined. John Baxendale, while describing criticisms of jazz in the interwar years, points out that jazz was denigrated specifically on the grounds of its savagery—an argument that structures its desirability for a postwar suburban youth who want to mildly protest bourgeois respectability: “It was read as coming from outside culture altogether—from ‘the jungle’; it was a force of nature, expressing sexuality and savagery, and invested by both critics and aficionados with the power to undermine culture” (148). Hence, the absent imperial periphery underwrites the suburban, manly fascination with jazz; indeed, it is no longer the periphery so much as the empire coming home to the center and the potential threat to Englishness with the arrival of HMS Windrush in 1948. The unconscious, and not so unconscious, invocations of imperially structured masculinities, both black and white, underpin the speaker’s unwitting restraint in the face of, and ambivalent wish for surrender to, the power of jazz. To surrender means a repudiation of suburban expectations and respectability, but that very surrender also signifies a relinquishment of both a desirable and an undesirable superior, rational, manly identity. And yet, the speaker’s distance from his internalized gender code of restraint and rationality also produces a self-conscious awareness of his own. He is once again caught between opposing discourses: the desire to submerge in an unmediated, primitive sexual spontaneity on the one hand, and on the other, the inherited, imperially structured ideal of English manly restraint. Hence, it is the ability to identify with both jazz and youth, and his conscious awareness of his own inherited ideal of restraint, that produces the honesty and devastating irony of the last two lines of the poem. Rather than wallow in the smug complacency of his superior awareness and unwillingness to be drawn into the callow, youthful world of spontaneity, he locates himself among the deluded too. This particular irony marks the transition of the Englishman, his attempted arbitration of the old and new gender scripts. The excruciating self-awareness exhibited by the poetic personae in the last two lines of the poem, and indeed all the poems analyzed thus far, is an effect of the historical distance between the personae as Englishmen in the postwar era who engage with the sociocultural alterations of post-imperial

112 Scarecrows of Chivalry England, and established ideals of English manly behavior that shape and haunt their existence. This ever-present ironic distance, which Larkin’s work represents, is a self-aware mode of functioning within a gender ideology that he knows has outlasted its usefulness, but from which he is nevertheless unable to separate himself. To put it another way, detachment and irony are not voluntary traits—neither is the liminal position of the insider/outsider—but Larkin’s poetics makes this threshold, ironic position a way of being, as it were. The involuntary ironic and self-conscious position explains not only the thwarted eroticism, which is, more often than not, rationalized away in poems such as “Reasons for Attendance,” but also the proto-queer critique of heteronormative assumptions in a poem such as “Dockery and Son.” Liminality allows him the painful insight of seeing as well as living the ambivalence, of not being able to act but able to honestly gauge his own hesitant responses. An unambivalent “I” can “emerge” in “uncontradicting solitude”; social interaction only results in the quicksand of spiraling irony and self-consciousness. The poetic personae in “Reasons for Attendance,” “Dockery and Son,” “The Importance of Elsewhere,” “Best Society,” and any number of Larkin’s poems cannot be other than they are: detached, uncertain, ironically self-conscious, and solitary. They are historically fated to be so; they are the Englishmen in transition from the imperial to the post-imperial.

Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps: Destabilized Empiricism of the Postwar Englishman The historically inflected ironic style of the post-gentleman (or the postwar middle-class Englishman), the pervasive self-consciousness and sustained use of the ordinary and the prosaic—what one can call Larkinesque poetics—are effects of Philip Larkin’s engagement with the code of gentlemanliness. As I have argued, Englishness, the nation, and the changing styles of masculinity were linked, and the putative representativeness of Larkin’s work was part of a larger cultural obsession with representations of masculinity and values of Englishness in postwar England. The Angry Young Man and the Movement are literary testaments to the national focus on the intertwined relationship between masculinity and Englishness. Indeed, in Robert Conquest’s manifesto to the anthology introducing the Movement poets, he proclaims a return to a “robust” poetry, “empirical in its attitude” (xiv–xv) to counter the metaphorical and linguistic excesses of the poets of the forties and before, which were coded feminine.23

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Anthony Easthope, in his study of Englishness, argues that Philip Larkin, “riding on the back of the Movement,” symbolized the return of the empirical observer in English poetry. Analyzing “The Whitsun Weddings,” he argues that “the speaker of the poem is presented as detached, critical, not self-deceived, confident of submitting the world to a controlling gaze; in other words, very much the poised, individualized, empiricist subject whose voice has been represented as speaking English poetry for over two centuries” (185). The traits that Easthope lists are the traits that I have thus far argued as being specific to the Englishman—remarkably similar, in fact, to the ideals of Englishness and English manliness as laid out by the Clarendon Commission. And while I agree with the idea that Larkin is clearly committed to empirical observation and heavily invested in material life, I disagree with Easthope when he argues that the speaker is “confident of submitting the world to his controlling gaze.” The male speaker in most Larkin poems begins with the encoded detached superiority of the middleclass Englishman who can see and interpret more clearly than others. However, that confidence increasingly falters, and by the end of the poem, the detached gaze has turned inward to include the speaker/observer himself within its own dispassionate gaze, producing an instability that is at odds with the original confidence.24 For instance, in the poem immediately following “The Whitsun Weddings,” “Self’s the Man,” the speaker begins with the confident assertion that Arnold is less selfish than he because of Arnold’s entry into married domesticity, but he progresses toward a realization that he is not more selfish than Arnold. He simply has different goals and knows better what he “could stand” “without them sending the van.” The last line undercuts the whole confident, detached superiority of the speaker with the qualification “Or I suppose I can” (96). The solitary Englishman has turned his dispassionately critical gaze upon himself and ironically observed that he “supposes” he knows better—the irony has rearranged the meaning of the entire poem. He is no better than Arnold, as the only thing that set them apart was his ability to see and know. However, the self-distancing irony has revealed that he is possibly as deluded as Arnold. Clearly, the persona reveals the pitfalls of detached empiricism when turned in on oneself; it is almost as if he is caught in a vortex of empiricism that cannibalizes and destabilizes itself. One of Larkin’s most famous poems, “Mr. Bleaney,” represents this vortex of empiricism within which the persona is inextricably caught. A dramatized narrative lyric, in iambic pentameter with a regular rhyme scheme, it consists of two scenes: the first scene concerns a prospective tenant (the

114 Scarecrows of Chivalry speaker) being shown a room in a lodging house, and the second focuses on the persona’s thoughts in the room he has taken. Beginning in media res, the first five stanzas of the poem reveal the speaker’s detachment from, and sense of superiority over, both the landlady and the former tenant, Mr. Bleaney. Observing the room with a clinical eye, and listening to the landlady’s prattle, he notices the “thin and frayed” flowered curtains that don’t quite reach the sill, “the tussocky and littered” strip of building land, and the bare and spartan room itself (81). The tone, though factual, catalogs images of neglect and despair. The landlady, with her insistent informational chatter about Mr. Bleaney, becomes a figure of ironic humor, as does Mr. Bleaney, who haunts the poem. The speaker later ruminates on the narrowness of Mr. Bleaney’s monotonous life, with his regularized “plugging at the four aways,” the summer trip to the Frinton folk, and his diligent work on the landlady’s “bit of garden.” Mr. Bleaney’s pathetic, or alternately heroic, attempt to garden becomes a poignant metaphor, as it describes not only Mr. Bleaney’s life but post-imperial English life as well, represented here by the “jabbering radio,” the “fusty bed,” and the littered building land: a tortuous adaptation to a shrunken, cold life that was lived on a much grander scale (81). The location of this poem within The Whitsun Weddings only reinforces this vision of England: sandwiched between the opening poem “Here,” with its yearning for “an unfenced existence,” and “Nothing to Be Said,” where “life is slow dying,” English life is cold, empty, and filled with a melancholic yearning—simultaneously heroic and resigned (79–82). The speaker most emphatically does not see any common ground between himself and Mr. Bleaney. The superiority and difference emerge and solidify in the cataloging of Mr. Bleaney’s habits. The speaker has books, unlike Mr. Bleaney, as the room has no shelves for books, nor hooks for bags. He has to stuff his ears with cotton to drown out the radio that Mr. Bleaney, obviously less sophisticated than the speaker himself, encouraged the landlady to buy. This comfortable superiority is rather abruptly undercut by the last two verses of the poem, signaled by the “But if” that marks the beginning of introspection and self-doubt: “But if he stood and watched the frigid wind / Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed / Telling himself that this was home, and grinned” (81). The speaker, initially cocooned by his intelligence, realizes through the act of occupying the same space as Mr. Bleaney that his solitariness is not unique. Through the fact of the shared bedsit, the speaker’s detached superior-

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ity devolves into a contemplative self-consciousness. The duality collapses, and Mr. Bleaney, who was a comic, pathetic figure, almost coalesces into the speaker. The speaker, who held himself aloof with the use of the collective pronoun “we,” includes himself in his own detached observation. He too must “measure” his “nature” on the basis of how he lives, and in living in the same “hired box” that Mr. Bleaney did, his life is remarkably like Mr. Bleaney’s: “That how we live measures our own nature, / And at his age having no more to show / Than one hired box should make him pretty sure” (81). The internal catalexis in the line, between “our own” and “nature,” reveals a quintessentially Larkinesque hesitation as the speaker’s attempts to come to terms with the gradual revelation of his own frailty. On his realization of this shared trajectory of loneliness, his ability to judge and ironize the observed world melts into doubt and self-ironization. His inability to adjudicate on either his or Mr. Bleaney’s life with the final “I don’t know” reveals the ultimate abdication of detached judgment: from his initial position of ironic, indifferent observation, the speaker’s self-distancing irony leads to silence and ambiguity. As in “Self’s the Man,” the speaker’s inclusion of himself within his own ironic gaze reorganizes the poem: he is Mr. Bleaney. Hence, while Larkin’s adherence to empiricism would imply a resurrection of the confident and sensible Englishman, what in fact happens is that the empiricism and common sense of the Englishman, in the absence of the functional hierarchical tropes—or rather in the absence of defined class and gender boundaries—and taken to its logical end, reveals the fragmentation of the inherited English manly code as it folds up against a new and altered Britain. The absence of “elsewhere” inevitably alters the nature of the controlled and controlling gaze, as the universalized rhetoric of imperial Englishness that incorporated and controlled other cultures is replaced by a national inward turn. The Englishman as a consequence of the domestic turn is shown as being caught within his own amplified and inverted empiricism—an effect of a specifically gendered inheritance. Indeed, the Englishmen in Larkin’s poems are immersed in a pervasive awareness of the inherited Orwellian mask of English manliness even as they face the new structures and demands of the postwar world. The Englishman in “The Importance of Elsewhere” comes to terms with a new national and gender identity in the absence of the “elsewhere” that structured imperial English manliness; the speaker in “Dockery and Son” confronts the “warp tight-shut” doors of a threatening and all-consuming het-

116 Scarecrows of Chivalry eronormativity in a domesticated postwar England that offers no alternative space for masculine assertion; and the detached Englishman in “Reasons for Attendance” engages with his own paralyzing manly restraint even as he longs for the sexual liberation offered by the modernity of jazz. While Larkin’s Englishmen represent the tortuous shifting of inherited discursive expressions of manliness into newer stylizations suitable to a quotidian and insular Englishness, the post-gentlemen in the novels of Kingsley Amis, John Wain, and Ian Fleming endeavor to forge a more aggressive, virile, self-seeking professional masculinity in an era of feminism, domesticity, decolonization, and sexual liberation. Indeed, Charles Lumley, as he embarks on a quest to forge an English postwar masculinity, finds that he nevertheless exists in a tight dialectical relationship with the gentlemanliness that he attempts to reject.

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“Moulded and Shaped” John Wain, Ian Fleming, and Threshold Masculinities If a sort of H.C.F. of decent behavior and tolerable living could be established that would be enough to be going on with. Anthony Hartley

oving from philip larkin’s self-reflective and self-conscious masculine poetics to the aggressive yet neurotic stylizations of the Englishman in the novels of John Wain and, (not so) surprisingly, Ian Fleming reveals another facet of the literary transition into postwar masculinity. Altered by and within governmental practices of the welfare state, the Englishman, in such signature postwar novels as Wain’s Hurry on Down (1953) and Kingsley Amis’s better-known Lucky Jim (1954), embodies the “new man” or the post-gentleman. The “new man” emerges through the extrapolation, mutation, and repudiation of gentlemanly traits. The constituent traits of the new hero/ Englishman—common sense, decency, selfinterest, and an almost violent heterosexuality, in conflict with what writers construct as the cosmopolitan, elite effeminate manliness of the upper classes—derived from bourgeois gentlemanliness. While contemporary and contemporaneous critics read the decent antiheroes of Lucky Jim, Hurry on Down, and John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956) as affective lowerclass/working-class men dismantling hegemonic masculinity, I read these protagonists and their creators (a conflation encouraged by the latter) as post-gentlemen, since they come after the Victorian/Edwardian gentleman even as they remake the traits of the gentleman that they mock and repudiate. Though Ian Fleming’s James Bond series, inaugurated with Casino

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Royale (1953), does not comfortably fit into the mold of decency, Bond’s constrained professionalism, gendered anxieties, and consequent aggressive heterosexuality articulate with the changes of the fifties; Bond as the simultaneously professional and extraordinary Englishman is a distinctly new figuration of the old, speaking to both the realities and the fantasies of the new corporate British state. The literary and cultural figuration of the post-gentleman, then, emerges at the intersection of imperial/national shifts and the pressures of the welfare state as it redefines the expectations of the gendered citizen-subject. The new hero/new masculinity manifests both the anxieties and the resurgence of confidence in a new egalitarian postwar, post-imperial Britain. The appearance of the “new man” signifies the emergence of a “modern” Britain of the welfare state, reinforcing the cross-hatched discourses of nation and gender formation. National and racial characteristics that are associated with the English inhere in the Englishman, in whatever age he may live. So with every major historical and cultural shift in the nation, English masculinity, too, undergoes a complementary shift.

Angry Young Men and the Condition of England Throughout the fifties and sixties, writers such as Wain, Amis, Thomas Hinde, John Braine, David Storey, Alan Sillitoe, and Iris Murdoch (in her earliest writing) were seen by reviewers and critics as typifying “a new class of uprooted people” produced by the beneficent upheavals of the welfare state. Novels by these writers, mostly in the realist vein, were about the “new man” in a “modern” Britain, who emerged from the lower classes as a direct consequence of postwar restructuring (Rabinowitz 23). David Marquand’s characterization of Amis and Wain’s novels as “Zeitgeist literature” in the inaugural issue of Universities and Left Review set the tone for the reception and consumption of these novels (Marquand 57–60).1 In an equally significant article published anonymously in The Spectator in 1954 entitled “In the Movement” (later attributed to J. D. Scott), the changes in poetry as exemplified by Philip Larkin and Donald Davie were linked to the new realist novels in the picaresque mode. The shifts in literature, then, were explicitly connected to the social changes of “modern Britain,” where “all the small changes have added up, in the end, to a transformation” (399–400). The proponents of new realism and post-imperial masculine values came to be grouped under two rubrics, often used interchangeably:

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the Movement and the Angry Young Man. The Movement, mostly a poetic movement, comprised writers of the middle-middle to lower-middle classes who went to Oxbridge as scholarship boys. This category included writers such as Philip Larkin, John Wain, Kingsley Amis, and Donald Davie. While these writers were defiantly provincial, and certainly focused on Englishness universalized as Britishness, their representations of emergent postwar English masculinity and literature emerged through literary networks forged in those hoary and familiar institutions of tradition and elitism, Oxford and Cambridge.2 Calculated and deliberate in their aesthetic positions, they saw themselves as ushering in a much-needed English literary and aesthetic change. The phrase “Angry Young Man,” coined in the mid-fifties, originally referred to angry, or at least frustrated, men in the works of Amis, Wain, Osborne, Hinde, Braine, and Murdoch. It became a catch-all phrase to describe any social-realist novel/text with a young male protagonist on the make, including the radically different trajectories and issues of lowermiddle- and middle-class protagonists and the next generation of predominantly working-class protagonists. The Angry Young Man trope, which unfortunately stuck, is still used to describe a variety of very different conglomerations of texts and issues. Kenneth Allsop, in a contemporaneous literary study, points out, “What is so striking about the later wave [Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow, Muriel Spark, David Storey, Harold Pinter, Arnold Wesker, et al.] is how little trace there is of the angry school of fiction that seemed in the middle Fifties to cleave ahead into the far distance, inexorably decisive as the M1—how abruptly it petered out in the mud of abandoned country. Sillitoe, Barstow, and Storey certainly deal in social-realism—but through the eyes and experience of their cobbly lumpenproletariat characters, from a very different angle to that mockingly mutinous jeering of the Redbrick boys of a few years earlier” (8). As Allsop reveals, the later socialrealist writers, often conflated with the “Angries,” who turned their sympathetic and sometimes anthropological gaze on the working class, were not particularly angry; nor were their protagonists frustrated at not being acknowledged by the cultural elite. In order to recuperate the distinction between the upwardly mobile, self-interested, neurotic lower-middle-class men and the violent, embourgeoised, but static working-class protagonists, I focus on the “mockingly mutinous jeering of the Redbrick boys” in my reading of Hurry on Down. However, before I do so, I consider the return of realism and its relationship to Englishness and masculinity.

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The defiant neo-realism of the Angries was just one of many popular styles in the postwar period. In their contemporary critical, literary analyses, Malcolm Bradbury, Bernard Bergonzi, and David Lodge argue that a closer inspection of novelistic trends of the fifties reveals the plurality of English fiction that was once widely perceived to be in its death throes.3 Contemporaneous critics considered the realists as participating in a “nasty subterfuge” and avoiding the realities of the modern world, and the lessons of Modernism. The “contemporary novel” in “reinstating the materialist liberal realism” (Bradbury 177) and reaching back to Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells (the very people that Woolf rejected in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”), and Henry Fielding was a celebration of its own provincialism. Hence, despite the multiplicity of styles, and indeed the later wild success of the fantasy genre—after all, J. R. R. Tolkien’s mammoth mythic novels were published in the mid-fifties—realism came to exemplify postwar English literature. For these new writers who found success and fame in the fifties, realism was the acceptable and accessible form of the novel; it was also an empiricist, lower-middle-class English aesthetic rebellion against the exclusionary tactics and non-Englishness of Modernism as perpetrated by the upper-class elite.4 Most of the authors who were vocal about the necessary adaptation of nineteenth-century literary traditions hailed from the educated lower-middle and middle classes, who saw themselves as prophets of a native Englishness. Realism and its adaptation was the chosen form of radical anti-establishmentarianism. The new aesthetics was a deliberate revolt against what they perceived as the snobbery, decadence, and imperial cosmopolitanism of the upper classes, since Modernism was seen as emerging from Bloomsbury and Paris, locations that were unquestionably beyond the lower-middle-class purview.5 Perhaps most important, realism imprinted itself in the English cultural imagination, both then and later, because it was perceived as quintessentially English. As Alan Sinfield points out, “An element of national consciousness, a preoccupation with Englishness, fuelled hostility to modernism.” The new writers perceived Modernism to be a particularly nonEnglish, cosmopolitan phenomenon, and “with the passing of British imperial power, Englishness became, even more than before, a sensitive matter” (Sinfield 185). For the writers who became culturally significant in the 1950s, realism symbolized the return of Britain’s, or more precisely England’s, native traditions after the confused amalgamation of cosmopolitanism. The concern with realism and the ensuing debates about the novel

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are symbolic of the cultural insular turn in postwar Britain. The narrowness of vision, provincialism, dismissal of cosmopolitanism, and deliberate return to older notions of character, plot, and the social web connect with the Orwellian emphasis on English empiricism and “native” values.6 Significantly, as I argue, the “contemporary” manner is deliberately masculinist and stylized, celebrating a return to empiricism and masculinity. I am indebted to Alan Sinfield’s now classic examination of the Movement’s heteronormative agenda within the paradigm of domestic class conflict. Sinfield schematizes this gender and class divide into a series of binaries: Dominant/ Literary, State/ Personal, Working Class/ Leisure Class, “masculinity”/“femininity.” In his schema, masculinity is opposed to the personal, the leisure class, and the literary. Of course, he does acknowledge that each term is highly vulnerable and unstable, both with reference to itself and in relation to other terms. Sinfield argues that homosexuality is the concealed destabilizing term in his table (66). He does not include how empire shapes each of the binary terms. Nor does he consider how the loss of empire destabilizes each term and alters its relationship to others. In considering the imperial underpinning of “masculinity,” for instance, the personal and “masculinity” are not oppositional but linked and marshaled against “the state,” as exemplified in Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying. This focus on personal, manly autonomy becomes even more explicit in the works of the Angries and the Movement, as we have already seen in Larkin. Also, postwar writers deliberately play with the instability of the link between “the literary” and “the feminine.” The Angries attempted to reconfigure the literary as a masculine activity and situate it within the realist and understandable framework of the middle class. What this reveals, as both this and the previous chapters demonstrate, is the anxiety of their heterosexuality, not to mention the fragility, instability, and neurosis of the accompanying assertion of masculinity. The masculinity as described in the works of the Angries works in and against the insular turn, the anxiety of Modernist influence, the frame of imperial gentlemanliness, and the welfare state. In order to engage with the very specific alterations in gender and the nation, the neo-realists adapted and stylized extant forms. This returns us to the question of the analytical purchase of separating the earlier Angries from the later social-realists, given that both groups are involved in the literary and cultural renegotiations of English masculinity. The original Angries did not radically deviate from the discursive frame of Englishness, manliness, and nationhood. In point of fact, Allsop’s lan-

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guage captures just why this first set of texts resonated with cultural and literary critics: they were “mutinous,” “jeering” “boys” (8). The protagonists were new but recognizable: they spoke in the same idiom as those they were attacking and ranked just below the Establishment in the class/caste hierarchy. More to the purpose, they explicitly resented their own compartmentalization within a sociocultural framework that simultaneously opened up and foreclosed opportunities. These texts reveal the complicity of their rebellion, not to mention their frustrated attempts to reinvent the idea of the Englishman. The vexed and insecure lower-middle- and middlemiddle-class masculinities of these “jeering” “boys” are different from the anarchic violence of Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning or the trials of rugby league player Frank Minchin in David Storey’s This Sporting Life. I distinguish between a new masculinity that emerges from a reviled discourse of the gentleman and one that emerges from the confluence of working-class affluence and consumerism, which owes little to nothing to the gentleman. There are two distinct stylizations of masculinity: post-gentlemanliness (both coming after and derived from) and the new working-class welfare state masculinity that originates from the distinct frames of working-class life. The two most recent critical studies that examine postwar literature unwittingly reveal this distinction as they examine the Angry Young Man tout court. Both Peter Kalliney’s examination of English exceptionalism via a literary-cultural focus on class in twentieth-century British literature and Susan Brook’s analysis of affect and masculinity in postwar British literature and culture separate out their analyses of the Angries and workingclass protagonists. Brook examines the postwar cultural focus on the “feeling male body,” especially in the newly burgeoning field of cultural studies (Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, and Stuart Hall) as “symptom of social crisis and its cure” (1–3). Her nuanced argument on how affect constitutes the masculine mode of rebelling against cultural apathy, consumerism, and the Establishment speaks to what I have been calling the reconfiguration of masculinities in postwar Britain. However, though she gestures toward the narrative of imperial decline leading to crisis of national selfconfidence, Brook focuses on internal-social rather than national-imperial structures. She does not engage, either theoretically or historically, with the long imbrication of gender and nation in Britain, especially as it contrapuntally evolved through English imperial history. In contrast, I read Larkin, Wain, Amis, and Fleming within the discourses of imperial gentle-

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manliness to reveal just how deeply intertwined national reconfiguration, imperial decline, the welfare state, and manliness are. My interpretation opens up the narrative of the Angry Young Man as part of the history of the gentleman and the nation in terms of the cross-hatched discourses of imperial-economic shrinkage and the welfare state while also explicitly revealing the distinct literary-cultural domain of the later writers who consider the shifts in the subordinate masculinities of the working class. To prise apart the Angries from the second generation also allows us to examine the gendered effects of a Durkheimean organic solidarity on which the welfare state is predicated as it presses up against the sovereignty of citizens in a welfare state (Donzelot 172–73). This tension between solidarity and sovereignty, between the collective and the individual, constitutes a primary node of the transition from the gentleman to the post-gentleman. Paradoxically, contemporaneous literary and cultural critics read this tension between the individual and the collective of the welfare state as “instinctive leftishness,” a lower-class anti-Establishment rebellion.7 While they interpreted it as symptomatic of the bureaucratic revolution of the welfare state and the drawn-out yet certain demise of the empire, later critics have noted that the fifties and its representatives, the Angry Young Men and the Movement, were perennially ambivalent about the status quo, tilting more to the right than the left.8 The protagonists, in fact, illustrated the struggle to affirm post-gentlemanly patriarchal masculinity rather than any genuine radical revolution. Much like the welfare state they came to epitomize, the Movement and the Angry Young Men truly looked backward and forward at the same time, attempting to reframe and democratize postwar England while still being deeply interpellated within hierarchical and imperial structures. The Movement and Angry Young Man texts, in their different ways, celebrate a masculine “authenticity” that is simultaneously oppositional to what these works construct as Establishment or upper-class passivity and effeminacy as well as the uniformity of Americanized mass (low) culture that had presumably drowned out the essence of native Englishness. Kalliney rightly reads this particular brand of aggressive fencesitting as “Angry ambivalence.” He points out that the Angries with their unstable politics “continually pose the fact of relative material security against the affect of class anger” (14)—since, materially, they had generally accepted the welfare state rhetoric that Britons “have never had it so good,” with full employment, relative material security/prosperity, and mass consumption.9

124 Scarecrows of Chivalry What is noteworthy about the Angries and their ambivalent anger is their ability to manipulate the terms of the moral high ground of the injured, decent victim and the rhetoric of class and gender politics to suit their own situationally gendered needs. The Angries mobilize the multivalent discourses of masculine authenticity: Susan Brook and Dan Rebellato’s “man of feeling” (or the independent yet contained man fighting against social homogeneity), heterosexual man’s right to power, and apparently radical class politics merge together in the Angries in a confused yet determined effort to construct a successful oppositional masculine identity. In other words, these texts, through their realist, picaresque narratives, explore the marginalized manly Englishman trying to find his way through the nation (mostly from the lower middle to the middle classes). These narratives show the Englishman as he works both within and against the set state expectations of the “family breadwinner,” sympathizing with a decent masculinity that positions itself simultaneously against an imagined sophisticated cosmopolitan man who moves in gilded circles of power and against women who are sirens and tyrants of domestic entrapment. The Angries and the Movement were so easily identifiable as a national shift because they purported to uncover the true Englishmen—Martin Green’s “decent men”—who had been subsumed by the morass of what they deemed to be the effeminate cosmopolitan queerness of E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, and whose emergence would rescue England and Englishness from the wrong members of the family who had been in power, to borrow an Orwellian metaphor. Their focus was not so much on documenting social change as on the process of being a man in this new-old nation. If England/ Britain were to find its identity in the wake of postwar reconstruction through welfare state expectations by assuming moral democratic superiority in the face of imperial disintegration, then the victory of the ordinary Englishman was both a symptom and an exemplar of this new Britain. The Angry Young Man and the Movement constitute a mini-canon because they were seen as the face of the welfare revolution—crucially, they were never seen as symbolic of the changing nation—though both the protagonists and the writers were too old to have benefited from the new educational policies. Writers, celebrants, and the critics who condemned them reinforced this affiliation in cultural discourse. Most infamous of these criticisms were the ones offered by Somerset Maugham and Evelyn Waugh, who variously called the new breed of men “scum” and held them to be embodiments of “philistinism.”10 Maugham and Waugh’s critique

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of the welfare state was channeled through an attack on the kind of men it was producing. Troubled though they were by what they perceived to be homogenization and the vulgarization of culture, this anger was directed at the type of man who was elevated in the national literary and public domain. Even if Amis’s Jim Dixon, Wain’s Charles Lumley, and, incongruously enough, Fleming’s James Bond were not beneficiaries of the Butler Education Act of 1944 (which provided secondary education for all), they nevertheless are shaped by, and must be read within, the effects of governmental practices, which in turn refracted simultaneously national-imperial decline and national-economic restructuring. To understand how Lumley, Dixon, and Bond were new Englishmen who stood for a transforming nation, it is necessary to consider how exactly Britain had changed.

From the Cradle to the Grave The welfare state was considered a triumph of the democratic, egalitarian principles for which Britain fought the war.11 July 5, 1948, is known as “the vesting day” of the welfare system (Lloyd 290). Though the Family Allowance and Butler Education Act of 1944 were enacted before the end of the war, the postwar Labor government under the prime ministership of Clement Attlee implemented most of the important acts. By 1949 it was widely accepted that Britain was now a welfare state, and the phrase was used both inside and outside Britain to describe this new avatar of the nation-state (Lloyd 288). Though there is no unanimity on the definition of the welfare state either between or within nations, Rodney Lowe states that this particular form of the nation-state was primarily a phenomenon of the 1940s. It was an effect of “evolutionary changes in governmental policy” in “industrialized nations” that “consciously or unconsciously . . . transformed the relationship between the state and its citizens,” emerging through the sedimentary process of earlier discrete welfare policies enacted through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It refers to “a society in which the government actively accepts responsibility for the welfare (broadly defined) of all its citizens” (Lowe 13).12 Welfare policies decisively changed the nature of the nation-state, expectations from the government, claims of social justice, and, most important, the meaning of citizenship. Moving beyond the dichotomy of the state and market, I work with the elaboration of the Foucaultian theorization of governmentality as a productive theoretical model within which to consider the shifts in masculinities

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and the reworking of the male subject-citizen in this new Britain. Michel Foucault points out that “in the art of government the task is to establish continuity, both an upwards and a downwards direction” (91). Foucault’s analytic of governmentality or “the conduct of conduct” examines the processes of the distribution of power in the modern nation. The focus on “government” enables us to examine intricate connections that underlie all endeavors to guide, shape, and direct conduct of others, whether it is the bureaucratic processes that govern health care; the institutional, economic, and domestic power of the head of the household and family; or the continuing act of self-government that makes a citizen. The governmental practices of the welfare state were fairly extensive in contouring the modes of gendered citizenship, as the government monitored, for benevolent purposes, every aspect of the life of its citizens. These classifications produced the subject-citizen, remaking the British citizen from “the cradle to the grave.” Simultaneously, the role of expertise and experts expanded to become all-pervasive, which in turn led to increasing emphasis on professionalism; there were experts on the child, the family, the single mother, the working class, the elderly, and the disabled. The discourses of social expertise, the nexus of power/ knowledge that classified citizens, produced them simultaneously as subjects and citizens of the nation. Governmental processes working through circuits of expertise produced subject-citizens, while subject-citizens remade themselves through systems of self-government that were derived from expert knowledge. Hence, there was an intricate and reciprocal relationship between the individual and the state-collective. Interestingly, this process of individuation at the moment of invoking the community or the collective was reinforced and disseminated through public broadcasting.13 Lord Reith, the chairman of the BBC, voiced a popular opinion when he called public broadcasting “the integrator for democracy,” as radio and television knitted together the whole nation as a community while it was consumed by individuals in their homes.14 Not surprisingly, critiques of the welfare state coalesced with the critique of professions and expertise. Feminist critics, in particular, pointed to the paternalist underpinnings of social expertise, not just in terms of the male-dominated medical professions where women’s bodies were patriarchally disciplined, but also in terms of the family—the heteronormative family shaped and was shaped by governmental processes—and the institutionalization of gender roles. The Beveridge Report, one of the founding

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documents of the British welfare state, was revolutionary in its provision and unification of a whole host of social services recasting British society, while also being an extraordinarily paternalist, patriarchal, and heteronormative document.15 While the control of populations has always been one of the crucial tasks of government, the Beveridge Report was particularly concerned about the declining birth rate, and, in addition to benefits, its main focus was on the family, children, and married women. The heteronormative family was the constitutive center of the document, institutionalizing heterosexually determined gender and sexuality. The report determined men and women’s citizenship as being grounded in the family: women as mothers or mothers-in-waiting, and men as family breadwinners and heads of households whose fundamental duty was to be gainfully employed, in order to fulfill their gender roles. How are these discussions of gendered, heterosexual citizenship, or the subject-citizen produced through governmental practices of the welfare state and the security-driven nation-state relevant to a discussion of the novels by Wain and Fleming? These texts mediate the decline of the empire and the institution of the welfare state and meditate upon the gendered effects of these twin processes through their young male protagonists who work within the inheritance of imperial manliness and negotiate their place in postwar professional society. The struggle between the individual and the state-collective, the process of governance that directly connects the masculine self to state machinery, the expert classification of citizens into types, the patriarchal containment of women, the endeavor to define a masculine self against the institutionalized expectations of marriage and respectability, and finally the emphasis on professionalism are all features of Hurry on Down and Ian Fleming’s Bond novels. While these novels do not directly reference the welfare state—and when they do, it is merely in passing—the issues of what constitutes a man, a professional, and a citizen within a changed Britain play out in different ways in all of them.

“Endlessly Moulded and Shaped”: The Bourgeois Englishman in Hurry on Down Though John Wain’s Hurry on Down (1953) is now a largely forgotten text, at least in terms of critical interest, it was one of the novels of the 1950s that brought back the picaresque to tell the story of a new kind of Englishman. It reflected both the newness and the frustration of postwar Britain and was

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included in the curriculum of British schools as emblematic of a literary turn and a new cultural landscape. In fact, as Wain points out in his introduction to the seventh reprint of the novel by Penguin, he might have inaugurated the Angry Young Men and/or the Movement, though he continued to doubt the validity of the groupings: “So if there was a ‘movement’ at all, which I am inclined to doubt, I cannot be accused of tagging along behind it. I might even be credited—or blamed, if you will—for having started it” (4). In a contemporaneous review, Walter Allen notes, “A new hero has risen among us. Is he the intellectual tough or the tough intellectual? He is consciously, even conscientiously graceless.” Contemplating the new hero’s lineage, Allen considers him an heir to “the Services, George Orwell, Dr. Leavis and the Logical Positivists” (136). Variously and sometimes together, these names encapsulate hierarchy, empiricism, pragmatism, an organic national tradition, realism, “the common Englishman,” and a return to an insular Englishness. All of these qualities were also, as the writers themselves opined on various occasions, the traits that the postwar realist turn attempted to recuperate from the matrix of what they perceived to be upper-class queer modernisms.16 A new hero is almost inevitable, as what constitutes heroism in this new national structure is necessarily different. What is evident is that the new heroism involves toughness and the struggle to (not) fit. This tension is a consequence of the rewired relationship between the individual and the collective in the new nation state; the narrative of adaptation and “slotting in” takes on a huge national and cultural weight, as it is fundamental to the success of the welfare state. Charles Lumley, protagonist and exemplar of this roguish new hero, struggles to affirm his masculinity within and through the almost dissonant structures of welfare-state governmental practices and an imperial Edwardian gentlemanly inheritance. Lumley endeavors to escape his gendered legacy and the expectations of bourgeois professionalism and searches for masculine authenticity while traversing the different layers of a postwar, welfare-state English society. An altered form of the eighteenth-century genre the picaresque becomes the most appropriate medium for meditating on the corporatized state, freedom, and a professionalized postwar, post-imperial English masculinity. The twenty-three-year-old Lumley is from a middle- to upper-middleclass background. He is a public school boy—albeit from a minor public school—and an Oxbridge graduate, although his university is only alluded to as the University. The novel focuses on his quest for authentic identity,

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which involves him deliberately shedding his middle-class background and entering a series of professions such as window cleaner, transport driver for new vehicles, drug smuggler, hospital orderly, chauffeur, club bouncer, and, finally, writer for radio comedy show. He takes on these occupations to repudiate his gender destiny. Each of these professions, in picaresque fashion, forms a discrete episode; the novel surveys different levels of English society through the lens of Lumley’s shifting masculinity. The novel ends with Lumley abandoning any hope of an isolated masculine existence, and reentering to the bourgeois world of ambition and money. In its protagonist’s rebellion from, and inevitable return to, the bourgeois fold, Hurry on Down is indebted to George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying. In fact, Wain has indicated that this novel was an homage to Orwell’s work. The critique of suburbia kick-starts the narrative, and Lumley’s hated future sister-in-law, Edith, and her husband, Robert Tharkles, embody the suburban life. Indeed, a confrontation in their kitchen precipitates his rejection of his gender destiny. Lumley’s meeting with them about his prospects and his intentions with regard to marriage occurs during a moment of postwar middle-class domesticity, as Robert “helps” Edith with the washing up. Robert’s helping with the domestic chores is shown to be a sign of both emasculation and postwar change. The narrative marks this scene as symptomatic of postwar egalitarianism, since the disappearance of domestic help, a prewar staple in middle-class life, was seen as a massive upheaval of the cultural, domestic, and socioeconomic landscape.17 What Lumley perceives as his failing in the eyes of the Tharkles is that “he did not wear a uniform. . . . In their world, it was everyone’s first duty to wear a uniform that announced his status, his calling and his ambitions. . . . The conventions of clothing saw to it that everyone wore their identity card where it could be seen” (16). Not only does Lumley dismiss the expectations of his classed gender role, but he also rejects the dominant vision of society itself, peopled by a series of types who can be identified and slotted according to their sartorial choices, which, in turn, are determined by their professions. It is a vicious, circumscribed world. The idiom here, as focalized through Lumley, is of a constrained and soul-crushing postwar welfare state: of uniforms, status, and identity cards. The social order is measured, marked, and classified. It is a world driven by statistics, security, and predetermined ends, and one that has no place for Lumley’s apparent free-thinking unconventionality. He throws the dirty washing-up water at the Tharkles to terminate the conversation and his relationship with Sheila. The narra-

130 Scarecrows of Chivalry tive could not be more heavy-handed about Lumley’s rejection of postwar middle-class domesticity—enacted, after all, in the kitchen, the center of the home—of his responsibilities as breadwinner, husband, and head of household. These are not merely bourgeois expectations; they are articulated with the institutionalized duties of individual, gendered citizenship in a new collectivized welfare system. This desire to be free of classed expectations and the constraints of citizenship is integral to Lumley’s desire to find himself as a man. Indeed, in each discrete episode he is reborn into a new profession, and each time his profession and hierarchical location alter his sense of personhood. What remains consistent through different professional escapades is his painful awareness of when and how he does not behave like a gentleman. The empire is immanent in this narrative, present in the protagonist’s struggles with and against an inherited and inculcated gentlemanliness. In his autobiographical essay “Along the Tightrope,” Wain claims that in Hurry on Down, he was concerned with “the young man’s problem of how to adapt to ‘life,’ in the sense of an order external to himself, already there when he appeared on the scene, and not necessarily disposed to welcome him” (101). This statement of intent actually works on several different levels, and not just the obvious sense of society being unwelcoming to the young graduate. On one level it is a precise statement about Charles Lumley’s discomfort with his class and gender legacy: the problem of how to reconfigure masculinity in the new phase of a faltering ineffectual Edwardian haute bourgeois gentlemanliness. This reworking of masculinity occurs within what the novel refers to as the “corporate state.” The narrative’s obsessive focus on “types” and “uniforms” reflects the idiom of the expert categorization of welfare governmentality as it enacts its policies at the collective and individual level. So the young Lumley’s journey to “adapt” to an “order external to himself” refers to his desperate attempts not just to repudiate entrenched gentlemanliness but also to make himself anew outside the reaches of the corporate state that classifies everyone and everything. Lumley believes that liberal education and middle-class rigidity have shaped him, resulting in a warped and timid masculinity, a proleptic Hugh Grant figure. This is a far cry from the original ideals of ethical and ethnonational code of manliness: “His sharp edges, on the other hand, had been systematically blunted by his upbringing and education. From the nursery onwards, he had been taught to modulate the natural loudness of his voice, to efface himself in every possible way, to defer to others. And this was the

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result! 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 nineteenfifties” (25). The traits that he possesses as a consequence of his education and class background—deference, hesitancy, blunted edges—are the characteristics that P. G. Wodehouse consistently parodied and caricatured in his novels.18 Imperial (gentle)manliness that began as a test of moral, physical, and psychological strength that produced such fictional ideals as Tom Brown and Hugh Drummond had morphed into a retiring ineffectuality bound by paralyzing rules. Charles Lumley’s frustration with this genteel and overly sophisticated version of a more vigorous and rigorous earlier manliness is more than palpable. He is constrained by his upbringing from “mak[ing] an exhibition of himself ” and has to break “the sacred law of self-effacing, mute compliance” in order to get served at a boisterous working-class pub (27). His gentlemanly legacy fails to measure up against the sharp aggressive masculinity of the lower classes that surrounds him. While his gender and cultural inheritance might have been an adequate, and indeed a superlative, measure of a man in a “more fortunate age,” or rather an age where money, empire, and hierarchy were firmly in place, that is no longer the case. However, even as he is aware of how moribund Edwardian gentlemanliness has become, Lumley, from his vantage point of post-imperial socialist liberalism (though he clearly has problems with the state) condemns the oppressive inequality that structures bourgeois masculinity. In an argument that ends in a punch-up with his college archenemy, Burge, he dares to speak of the structural inequalities that make middle-class manliness possible. Burge, on discovering that Lumley works as a hospital orderly, accuses him of being a traitor to his class, because “there are some classes of society that are born and bred to it” (175). He speaks the language of the public school boy: an associative system that equates “rugger” players with “decent blokes” who follow the codes of conduct laid down for good heterosexual middle-class men and never “let the side down.” Lumley sees this as the discourse of the ossified imperial hierarchy. He abjures the rhetoric and refuses to perform his given role: “And I don’t want your silly Edwardian notions of an upper class Herrenvolk thrown up at me either. By ‘letting the side down’ all you mean is that the nigger-driving Sahib oughtn’t to do anything that reveals that he shares a common humanity with the niggers he drives. That idea is dead everywhere in practice, and it only survives in theory in the minds of people like you” (175). In an Orwellian move, his

132 Scarecrows of Chivalry refusal to conform to his manly duty equals his disavowal of class and race hierarchy. In effect, like Larkin’s Englishman in “Dockery and Son,” Lumley’s renunciation of middle-class masculinity is entangled with his rejection of the frames that shaped and defined England itself. Lumley’s frustration with haute-bourgeois manliness, then, is two-fold: on the one hand, it is an effete mutation of an earlier functional manliness, but on the other hand, both his moribund version and the original virile version are underpinned by racist and classist ideology. Lumley’s conflicted relationship with his gentlemanly legacy is further complicated by the fact that his disavowal of Burge’s racism and classism is ultimately located in his decency. Lumley is the postwar decent man or the post-gentleman. Decency, as I examined in detail with regard to Orwell’s re-signification and privileging of the term, was gentlemanly disinterestedness expanded to fit Orwell’s egalitarian principles. He extrapolated the gentlemanly trait to float free from its imperial gentlemanly, bourgeois moorings in which it was ultimately rooted. To recapitulate, for Orwell, and for the generation he influenced, decency stood for simplicity, honesty, cleanliness, respectability, stoicism, and grit. More precisely, these virtues are embedded within a middle-class ideal of gentlemanliness carefully inculcated in the nation’s public schools. For Orwell’s disciples, the Angries, it signified masculinity, forthrightness, common sense, empirical language, and heteronormativity. Orwellian decency is key to masculine stylization of the Angries, as evidenced here in Lumley. Lumley’s decency is outraged by Burge’s adherence to outmoded and patently regressive ideology, especially in a time of accepted welfare state democratization. Lumley, then, as post-gentleman, simultaneously rejects a manliness that he cannot escape and extrapolates traits from it to shape his apparently more democratic masculine identity. Lumley’s attempts to forge a “neutral” democratic and authentic manhood result in his quest. His desire to be individuated, to be separate from the herd, and be a man leads him to occupations that lie outside the range of bourgeois respectability. It gives him an illusion of freedom and allows the narrative to traipse through the various strata of English society (mostly English, because he does briefly venture into Wales). Lumley’s take on people, jobs, and places foregrounds the idea of everyone being a “type” even as his adventures indicate an escape from the oppression of classification. While Lumley works as a car transporter– cum– drug dealer and chauffeur, among other things, it is his escapades within the working

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class that produce the most radical alterations to his ideas of selfhood. As a window washer and hospital orderly, he (correctly) believes that he is perceived differently, especially by women, and he feels unconstrained by any ideals of chivalry, as the concept, he believes, is quintessentially bourgeois, alien to working-class masculinity. In his confrontation with the landlady of the barn where he ultimately decides to stay with Froulish and Betty (caricatures of the aspiring Modernist writer and his bohemian girlfriend), he feels none of his earlier fear in the presence of the “toothless virago,” because he no “longer came from the class that treated women with deference” (Wain 48). He believes he is now decisive and forceful, and no longer marked by his earlier diffident self-effacement and chivalric toothlessness. Lumley’s perennial self-consciousness regarding his refashioned working-class masculinity only points to the deep encoding of his bourgeois ideals. At every instance that he thinks he is a new man not “endlessly moulded and shaped” by “his upbringing,” he consciously evokes his former bourgeois self in order to measure the gap between what he used to be, and his current, apparently more uncomplicated masculinity (25–28). Lumley is convinced that because of his commitment to physical and “useful” labor, and his rejection of bourgeois values with the donning of workingclass apparel, he can no longer be shamed or humiliated, since shame is obviously the flip side of the respectability that he has happily shelved. Lumley’s most sincere celebrations of working-class life and masculine identity are rife with middle-class perceptions and stereotypes. In the absence of an imperial middle-class purpose, which for middleclass men of a more “fortunate age” was governance, Lumley elevates the antithesis of gentlemanly service—direct, manual labor—to a privileged position. In a post-imperial England, Lumley’s descent to the working class is a means of acquiring the authenticity that he feels is no longer available to him as an educated middle-class Englishman. His quest for manly integrity, much like Gordon Comstock’s before him, means the necessary abandoning of all class signifiers. He congratulates himself on not confusing his quest for an authentic self with a false desire to be “at one” with the “People” like the “expensive young men of the Thirties” (37), since that was determined by the deluded desire to privilege the working class, and not a quest for masculine autonomy. He believes that he is “out in the world learning the truth about things” (176). Once again, the narrative invokes the imperial theater where Englishmen just a generation earlier had gone

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to learn the truth about themselves and the world, while calling attention to Lumley’s shrunken, national horizons. In what appears to be contradictory to the notion of autonomy, workingclass life is also, according to Lumley’s extraordinarily jaundiced and romanticized eye, a “safe” haven. Being a working man means “nothing ever happened . . . nothing except things people could understand. No problems, no art, no discussions and perplexities, just birth, death, eating, resting” (190). And yet this life is a “safe” haven because it is the one that, according to Lumley, allows men freedom from the intrusive workings of the state and affective constrictions of middle-class expectations. Lumley’s interpretation of working-class masculinity is simplistic and condescending, but it seems to be one to which he is sincerely committed, and for a longer period than any of his other occupationally determined identities, such as thuggish, laconic criminal or vacillating, silent chauffeur. The contradictions within Lumley foreground the sedimented layers of masculine stylizations through which Lumley attempts to produce a coherent sense of self. Lumley works within and simultaneously repudiates Edwardian gentlemanliness; he also attempts to connect, undo, and rework gentlemanly traits with working-class masculinity while retaining all his bourgeois prejudices. He works through these antithetical masculinities within the institutionalized gender expectations of the social insurance state. This tortuous quest of masculine self is indelibly tied to his relationship with women.

Women and Love Lumley’s process of masculine self-definition is dependent on the many women whom he interacts with, loves, rejects, or dismisses.19 The women in the narrative—Rosa, Veronica, even Betty and the landlady—are constitutive to his masculine quest. The often misogynistic narrative description of Lumley’s relationships with these women reveals both the narrator’s and the protagonist’s anxieties about the shifts in women’s roles, sexualities, entry into the public domain, and the concomitant alterations in “femininities.” At the same time, it focuses on how Lumley perceives the women in question as extensions of his sense of current masculine self or the self he desires in the future. Lumley’s interactions with women are central to his understanding of himself as a man. This is demonstrated by the fact that his continuous

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alcohol-induced rebirths are necessitated by his falling in love with or rejecting women in different class strata. As mentioned above, Lumley decides to abandon his expected trajectory, despite being in love with Sheila, because he imagines her not as an individual but as an embodiment of the life he despises. In fact, the trope of women as supplements is a narrative feature that is reiterated fairly consistently. As Lumley envisions her in the projected future, she is “of a piece with the prim, hedged gravel from which she flowered” (20). Since she never enters the narrative, she is only ever an extension of Lumley’s self, gradually becoming the constricted, uniform, landscaped lawn of a suburban home. Sheila as the suburban home and as a type of the suburban woman rather than an individual sets the tone for how Lumley sees women. The “types” of men are products of their occupations: Ern, Lumley’s mysterious partner in the window-cleaning business, is a taciturn, brutal, fair man who is later revealed to be a criminal in hiding, while Arthur Blearney with his easygoing affability and unplaceable accent owns a chain of slightly shady entertainment concerns. The women, on the other hand, though they are immediately slotted into “types” by both Lumley and the narrative’s obsessively classificatory impulse, are categorized in terms of appearance, sartorial choices, and sexuality, not to mention their potential for marriage—in this the novel seems to follow governmental discourse in its determination of women’s role and citizenship. The narrative classifies as “bovine,” “unkempt,” “stupid,” and a “slut” Froulish’s passive girlfriend, who actually finances his lifestyle as “a man of letters” (46–50). Rosa, the working-class woman with whom Lumley “walks out” and intends to marry, is “slightly quaint,” possessing “animal instincts,” “something without individuality, but still powerful” (180–82). For Lumley, Rosa, like Sheila, is not fully realized as a person, but signifies access to a life that Lumley feels is appropriate for him, remaking him as the man who is “unnoticed,” “free,” and simple (187). She becomes the force whose “wonted blend of strength and repose” “draw[s] and guid[es] him” (181) into the safety of the working class, away from the net of corporate life. Rosa is the gateway to simplicity and mindlessness, where his world and ambitions could be contained within a “stuffy, cozy room” (187), enabling masculine autonomy within the domestic space. In his consideration of her as the embodiment of home, as wife and mother, Lumley projects himself into his working-class future as the patriarch and head of household with complete control over his domestic domain.

136 Scarecrows of Chivalry If Rosa is the romanticized working-class ideal that will allow him to slide into another self, Veronica is the upper-middle-class yet classless ingénue that is apparently more suited to him. She is a beautiful, sophisticated cipher, an unattainable mistress to a wealthy, older man. Much like Christine Callaghan, the object of Jim Dixon’s lust and adoration in Lucky Jim, Veronica first appears on the arm of another man “to whom she belongs.” The narrator casts Veronica as the perfect love interest, whose personality changes to fit the man she loves, thus making her the ultimate, desirable woman. In Veronica’s case, her occupation is to be Roderick’s mistress—charming, beautiful, and distant. Within the narrative structure, again as in the case of Lucky Jim, and the later Room at the Top by John Braine, this upper-class, mysterious blank of a young woman becomes the means through which the protagonist finds himself and his place in society, though in this and Braine’s novel, it comes at the cost of freedom and integrity. It is love for her (brought on primarily by her beauty and unattainability) that pushes Lumley to abandon his apparent pursuit of individuality in non-bourgeois realms. He realizes that “he would commit any crime . . . steal, kill, maim, or ruin the lives of people” for “even a remote chance of possessing her” (109). He does, indeed, morph from simple car-transporter to transporter–drug dealer in an effort to make enough money to take her out in style. Though the relationship is abruptly terminated when he discovers that she is Roderick’s mistress and not his niece, Lumley also becomes aware that he cannot marry Rosa, because he is still in love with Veronica. In the final pages of the novel there is a sharp turn in how Veronica is characterized. Lumley reenters the middle class, albeit in a new and strange profession as a writer for a radio program, and Veronica reappears to revive their relationship. While Lumley’s powerful infatuation rendered him almost idiotically pubescent, in this moment of reconciliation he seems downright cynical. As she details the reasons to give their relationship another try, he interprets her argument as “You’re rich now, you’re doing as well as Roderick. And you’re fifteen years younger” (251). Veronica is shown as self-serving and opportunistic, and yet both the narrative and Lumley do acknowledge that, pragmatically speaking, she’s right: the obstacles of poverty and Veronica’s lover have been miraculously removed to allow their relationship the freedom to flourish in the open. While earlier she is described in the most ridiculously clichéd ways, since the reader perceives her through Lumley’s lovelorn eyes, at the end we are suddenly made aware of Veronica’s unconventionality: she does not take the conformist

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route and get married to a Robert Tharkles. Even though she was with an older, wealthier man, she makes the choice to “go around” with a man who is without prospects and who is mysterious and secretive. Though she is sophisticated, the narrative deliberately leaves her class background ambiguous. She is, like Lumley after his cross-class travels, classless. Indeed, the end of the novel reveals that the two are perfectly matched: neither Lumley nor Veronica conforms to “types.” They choose their own rebellious trajectories, rejecting marriage and a decent middle-class job. They live just outside the borders of conventions, cynical, clear-eyed, and making their own way through that minefield of norms of love in the middle classes: “They looked at each other, baffled and inquiring” (252). On the one hand, Veronica’s suddenly self-possessed and interesting personality functions as a complement to Lumley’s newly acquired confidence and stability, making her the appropriate partner for Lumley in this new avatar of successful, classless, yet bourgeois man. On the other hand, Veronica as nonconformist gives a brief glimpse of Veronica as agent of her own unconventional journey, as she too repudiates the gendered narratives of her class and determines her identity through trial and error. This leads to the issue of narrative investment in patriarchal modes of containing women’s sexuality, especially as it presses up against masculine assertion and autonomy. It is precisely because of their adherence to patriarchal structures that the narrator and the protagonist realize that changing attitudes toward gender norms and women’s sexuality affects masculine control and authority, already revealed as being fragile and unstable. The narrator and the protagonist consistently and coercively read women like Betty and Veronica into the patriarchal norms of morality and modest womanhood, rendering them vulnerable dependents and victims rather than agents. The narrative’s characterization of both women in terms of their deviations from sexuality, and their relationship to men and/or Lumley, reveals pervasive masculine anxieties. Even Rosa, who is shown as a passive embodiment of the working-class home, actively crosses class lines in her decision to be with Lumley. Though he is a hospital orderly, it is evident from his accent and his demeanor that he is not of the same class, a difference of which she is very aware. Rosa’s choice of Lumley makes her individualistic and desirous of social mobility and cultural capital as the wife of an educated middle-class man. This agency is especially noteworthy considering how the narrative is at pains to describe her as inextricably intertwined with the working-class life that Lumley wants.

138 Scarecrows of Chivalry Meanwhile, Betty, whom both the narrator and Lumley dislike for her bohemianism and absolute lack of femininity (revealing their own heteronormative bourgeois attitudes about women), is noteworthy precisely for her abjuration of bourgeois femininity (she wears slacks!) and sexual mores. Though she accommodates Froulish’s every whim, she does so because of her belief in his value as an artist. As mentioned earlier, her commitment to art and Froulish leads her to exchange sex for money and thereby materially secure his freedom to write. Her attitude toward sex is clinical and pragmatic, whereas Lumley, reading her within the frame of bourgeois sexual morality, sees her as “sluttish.” In her behavior she does not give any indication that she subscribes to these notions of womanly modesty. Sexuality, especially as it is owned and wielded by women like Betty and Veronica, renders them particularly threatening, and Lumley’s anxiety exhibits masculine fears of losing control of women’s sexuality and dependency. The narrative containment also works within welfare governmental practices that, though they are clearly designed to assuage the lives of women in the state, do so within the “natural,” patriarchal, and heteronormative structure that underpins the Beveridge Report, where women are frequently read as wives, mothers, and dependents. Nevertheless, these “types” of classed womanhood match the various “types” of manhood and call attention to the fact that the two are constitutively linked. Lumley’s journey reveals that heterosexual masculine stylizations are yoked to the shifts in ideas regarding women’s agency and sexuality. The narrative’s compulsion toward “types” and its documentation of English societal stratification as it tracks Lumley’s engagement is connected directly to the form of the novel.

The Neo-picaresque The cultural turn to comprehensively map the nation led to a revival of the picaresque. A new breed of writers focused on the picaresque to meditate upon the intimate relationship between the changeable rogue (usually male) protagonist and the changing nation. The quintessential picaresque trait, the journey, foregrounds the male protagonist’s endeavor to remake his gender identity to fit the changing nation. The form explores the reshaping of English masculinity and the reorientation of English manly ideals necessitated by the post-imperial state and welfare structure of Britain. In addition to Hurry on Down, many other novels owed much to the genre,

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including Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net (1954), Thomas Hinde’s Happy as Larry (1958), John Braine’s Room at the Top (1957), and even Amis’s Lucky Jim, which is usually read as a “campus novel.”20 V. S. Pritchett, in keeping with the auto-ethnographic impulse, not only addressed the new hero in his review of contemporary fiction but also made explicit the connection between the new crop of postwar English novelists and the nation. He noted the sudden reemergence of the picaresque form with its quintessential elements: the novelistic description of the “low view of life”; the isolated, ambivalently decent, selfish protagonists; and the meandering through different “conceptions” of society. He also pointed out that an appropriation of the picaresque and the novelists’ self-conscious affiliation with Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding was indicative of “class revolution” or the welfare state paradigms of these writers and their protagonists: “They discerned that the picaresque novelists were products of revolution; [that] they were engaged in adventure; and that the modern adventure was a rambling journey from one conception of society to another. . . . I am not saying that the limitless world of Defoe is available to the modern English novelists, for it is not; but there is no doubt that the young novelists of today have a similar ‘low’ view of life, and a sense of being alone and out for themselves” (38). Pritchett’s description of the realist neo-picaresque carries an implicit allusion to the imperial beyond, though his categorization is framed strictly within domestic socioeconomic changes wrought by welfare state consensus. In other words, he alludes to the “limitless[ness]” of Defoe’s world where protagonists can migrate to the colonies, if England cannot accommodate their aspirations and rogueries, as opposed to the more circumscribed spaces of postwar England available to the postwar picaro. The picaresque, as a mixed form, is a notoriously tricky one to pin down. In each of its manifestations it mutates to accommodate a different set of national-literary conventions and socioeconomic structures.21 Richard Bjornson defines the picaresque as a form that employs a loose “episodic, open-ended narrative” to show a clever and adaptable lower-class protagonist as he/she journeys “through space, time, and various predominantly corrupt social milieux” (4). The postwar neo-picaresque contains each of these quintessential elements, while adhering to documentary-style realism in its attempt to classify and capture the insular welfare state. The postwar picaresque invokes the expansive horizons of imperial romance, of going native, as well as possible limitless options available to a rogue on

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the road in the picaresque novels of yore, just as it shuts down these possibilities. Building upon Pritchett and Bjornson’s observations, I argue that the form of the picaresque, particularly in Hurry on Down, intertwines the narrative of the Englishman with that of the nation. The following pages do not prove that the novel is a picaresque, which it most self-consciously is, but rather unfold the points of connection between masculinity, the picaresque, and the welfare state through an exegesis of various aspects of the narrative: its episodic plot, sexual politics, focus on “types,” emphasis on luck, and the various forms of masculinities. The picaresque novel in its sixteenth- through early nineteenth-century variations, whether in Spain, France, or England, is an “expression of sinkor-swim individualism” (Alter 89). Not surprisingly, it served a similar purpose in the postwar moment, as an index to the social and gender crisis, producing a narrative machinery that allowed for a meditation upon that crisis. The form lends itself to telescopic views of various social classes as “types,” which is also how the categorizing practices of welfare-state expert culture produce the citizen-subject. The novel form shows both Lumley and the English nation’s struggles within inherited contours, while also tracking Lumley’s crisis as intertwined with a changing England. The important points of the picaresque form—the episodic plot structure, the alienated, rootless male protagonist who tries to find his niche in a changing post-imperial England, the different layers of society with its attendant types, the insouciance and luck of the young man “out for himself”—correspond to the predicament of gentlemanliness. The episodic shift from milieu to milieu that produces a sense of “fragmentation and chaos” parallels the uncertainty of the Englishman and not just the chaos of society (Miller 14). To clarify, each discrete narrative episode that describes a pocket of welfare state England also reveals the picaro’s alienation from that particular niche. Lumley rejects middle-class professionalism and domesticity as emasculating and inauthentic. He descends into the working and artisan classes, but is unable or unwilling to integrate fully, always in search of “neutrality.” As he looks for a “safe haven” to be a man, he remains discontented. He is unable to appropriately inhabit the masculine identities that he has so deliberately searched out, because the Edwardian bourgeois manliness that “moulds” him continues to determine his attitude to working-class and lower-class masculinities. The neo-picaresque, like the old picaresque, focuses on manly activi-

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ties—fighting, employment, physical labor, and, most important, sex—that it self-consciously borrows from Henry Fielding’s adaptations of the genre. Lumley’s repudiation of Edwardian codes of manliness necessarily include his renunciation of manly ideals of chivalry and sexual behavior—a point that he emphasizes in his attitude toward the aggressive landlady. The neopicaresque illustrates the reshaping of English masculinity as it attempts to recapture the easy, frank sexuality of a Tom Jones after the rigorous sexual ethics of hegemonic gentlemanliness. And yet, despite some spirited attempts at repudiating residual gentlemanly standards, the postwar picaro is unable to escape those inscribed sexual codes. Lumley might attempt to shed his chivalry and adopt an amoral attitude toward sex, but he is nevertheless shocked that his friend’s wife supports them through prostitution, and he is very aware of his own departures from the chivalric ideal when he attempts to dismiss the landlady. Sexual politics becomes the arena in which chivalry and sexual modesty clash against their postwar obverse, selfinterest. While the male protagonist attempts to engage in a self-interested pursuit of sex, his encoding within chivalric and bourgeois codes disrupts this emphasis on self-interest. For instance, Lumley returns to the middle classes because of his desire to woo and marry Veronica. His inherited bourgeois chivalry prevents him from pursuing a merely self-interested, sexual relationship with her, or, more tellingly, with the willing Rosa. Lumley’s failed quest for masculine spontaneity and sexual self-interest reveals his simultaneous inscription and distance from his inherited gender identity. The picaresque form also enables the male protagonist to explore any and all avenues of development. In his examination of the elements of the picaresque in novels of the twentieth century, Robert Alter points out that “in an age of compartmentalization and specialization . . . the picaroon is an individual who can do and be whatever he wants” (123). The picaro defines himself through a conflicted relationship with external social pressures. The picaresque does so through the episodic peregrinations (among other things) of the male protagonist. In Hurry on Down, Lumley escapes the routinized homogeneity of postwar English bourgeoisie and embarks on a series of adventures that would not fall within the purview of respectable professions. His adventures function as a medium for an anthropological study of English class system and subcultures, but, more important, as a circumscribed, insular theater for a play with masculine affects different from, yet always attached to, gentlemanliness. In the broadest terms, what Richard Bjornson points out as the “pica-

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resque myth” functions as a possible “paradigm for the individual’s unavoidable encounter with external reality and the act of cognition which precedes and shapes his attempt to cope with a dehumanizing society” (11). Wain’s picaresque novel speaks to the specific demands of the social insurance framework of the welfare state. The protagonist’s struggle to come to terms with the new governmental modalities of gendered citizenship are intricately connected to the conceptual shifts in the nation-state, which the formal traits of the realist neo-picaresque spotlight. The picaresque becomes the most appropriate form to explore the push-and-pull of the corporate state and citizen, or the collective and the individual. Lumley is on a quest to reject the constrictions of the welfare state—that is, the beneficent corporate collective paradigm against, and through, which he tries to demonstrate his masculine individuality. Within the expectations of the welfare state socioeconomic structure, he chooses not to fulfill his gendered responsibilities of citizenship, of being husband, breadwinner, and father, which are fundamental to the smooth running of the collectivized state. In disavowing them, he disrupts the give-and-take of the individual-collective that constitutes the social-insurance welfare state. He rejects society, tries several classed modes of being a man, and returns to “corporate life” in a “modern” middle-class profession. He comes to terms with the corporate state, but first he has to journey through the nation to arrive at or even temporarily settle into a gendered, classed identity. The picaresque narrative does not conclude; it “just stops”—as the narrative in Hurry on Down points out in its meta-textual reference to Moll Flanders—with Lumley’s signing a lucrative three-year contract for a comedic radio program (Wain 250). He enters the middle classes once again, but in a new profession, empty of all the class baggage usually associated with bourgeois professions. Indeed, the show itself is such a pastiche that it is not locatable within any known models: it is a sketch comedy that relies on the telling of humorous anecdotes and jokes that are new, already extant in culture, repackaged, and/or adapted for an unspecified demographic. It fits squarely within the interpretation of broadcasting as a democratizing medium: it is classless, modern, and new, unifying while it also appeals to an individuated consumer. Most tellingly, it uses humor that both reflects and refracts national culture, bringing together jokes that are found in pubs, street corners, clubs, and homes. The show is quite like Lumley himself, who has lived through and experienced the many dimensions of a contained national life and has emerged into a neutral, apparently, classless

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bourgeois masculine self (although it is definitely inflected by the residues of gentlemanliness). Similarly, the profession he has entered and the radio for which he is a script/joke writer are emblematic of a new neutral, democratic nation. Lumley’s consistent fortuitous turns, one of which lands him the lucrative job at the end of the novel, are integral to the picaresque myth. Since Gil Blas, one of the quintessential picaresque traits is the picaroon who is a “happily protected creature” (Alter 34). The picaro by dint of his wits, enterprise, and a generous dose of good luck always manages to land on his feet. The signature picaresque element of luck implicitly addresses the safety net of the welfare state. The series of novels that constitute the Angry Young Man canon all have extraordinarily lucky protagonists, most notably, of course, Lucky Jim, so lucky that it had to be written into the title. Luck is tied to the state’s democratic principles and to its economic net of social insurance. In the case of Lumley, for instance, while his relationships with individuals are what get him one lucky break after another (another aspect of the picaresque and the welfare state: the forging of a disparate and natural community), the state framework intervenes at a very crucial point in the narrative. When he is on the run from the law, he is pushed from a moving vehicle by a fellow criminal. He suffers extreme injuries and wakes up in a hospital. While it is not made explicit, the state-mandated health insurance policy allows Lumley to avail himself of treatment options and a place in the public ward until his recovery (38). The very “corporate life” that he rails against saves his life. The element of luck here is the material fact of government-funded public health insurance. What Bruce Robbins refers to as the patronage of the welfare state, albeit an “impersonal, institutional one,” is one that sustains the narrative of luck in the postwar picaresque (196). Finally, Lumley’s journey depicts insular England as it struggles into its new self-contained form during the socioeconomic alterations of the welfare state and after the expansiveness of empire. Lumley’s escape from his gender code and his being “out for himself” mirror England’s shedding of imperial skin and a concomitant attempt to reshape itself within its island borders, disentangling itself from the rhetoric of British universalism and attempting to rejuvenate a national domestic Englishness. Indeed, Lumley’s return to the fold as joke writer emphasizes this sense of limited but fresh horizons. The picaro’s journey in these postwar novels does not end in the endless possibilities of a country squire’s life and wealth as in the

144 Scarecrows of Chivalry Fielding picaresque, but rather in the modernized, corporatized version of a clerical hack—a cube-dweller. On the one hand, being a media professional spells potential wealth and comfort within the new welfare state, but on the other, it is a far cry from the masculine vigor and authority in search of which Lumley had originally set out. This sense of containment is evidenced in his thoughts on his new life: “Here was his cage, a fine new one, air conditioned, clean, commanding a good view, mod. cons., main services” (Wain 251). Wain is fully aware of the final sense of containment, as the original title of the novel was Born in Captivity. While success in an earlier imperial moment would have ended in roguish protagonists lighting out for the imperial periphery as bureaucrat, officer, or adventurer in postwar England, they can only hope for middle-class comforts and a delimited, professional life—a life based on trafficking in images without the ethos of imperial masculine authenticity.

“The Medium-Grade Civil Servant Who Loved Me”: James Bond as Threshold Figure Like the England symbolized by Larkin’s personae and Charles Lumley— as well as these characters themselves—Ian Fleming’s James Bond occupies the middle space of transition, as Englishmen move from the apparently gendered disinterestedness of imperialism to a more contained domestic, welfare state identity. Since James Bond emerged at the same time, with the same explosive energy and sexual virility as Jim Dixon, Charles Lumley, and Jimmy Porter, it is possible to read Bond as one of these new men. Ian Fleming, fully cognizant of this, and not a little displeased, explicitly removed himself and his creation from the phenomenon of the Angry Young Man, stating, “I am not an angry, young, or even middle-aged man” (“How to Write” 58). Despite Fleming’s disavowal, Bond does fit in the same paradigm, as both he and the Angry protagonists are connected in, and through, the inherited ideals of gentlemanliness. The primary difference is that while gentlemanliness exists as a legible and inescapable script for the Angries, the James Bond figure and spy series deliberately traffic in both the ethos and the image of the ideal, not least because for Bond the world is still an imperial theater, though British imperial power is in decline. Even as they do so, both reveal the contradictions and tensions inherent in an imperial gentleman qua welfare state professional as he saves postwar En-

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gland and the world in a time of decolonization and the waning of British power.22 Fleming’s Bond is, to quote Kingsley Amis, “a medium-grade civil servant,” professional, neurotic, occasionally careless, fallible, and an imperialist fantasy.23 As Michael Denning has pointed out in his succinct summary of multiple meanings and identities ascribed to the character, Bond is a “contested figure who has been accented a number of ways” (“Licensed to Look” 58). He has been read as a modern “hero of the corporation” (Comentale 3), the “perfect pipe dream for the organization man” (Symons 246), a traditional anachronistic throwback, a clubland amateur who defends the nation out of gentlemanly patriotism and play, the consummate professional shaped by the service, and the archetypal playboy (Hines 90). Bond has been read in these myriad, often conflicting ways, because he emerges from and reflects a transitional moment in the nation’s history. More specifically, as a figure that embodies this moment of national shift, he comprises both the gentlemanly traditions and the traits that repudiate and adapt those gendered values. The contemporaneous reviewer Simon Raven characterized Bond and the Bond novels as a visible sign of the old and the new, tradition and modernity, empire and welfare state, combining contemporary ideas of speed and controlled savagery “with the more spacious and gracious atmosphere of old style international intrigue—monocles, medals and milordos” (695). The changing nation is visible in the metonymic figure of Bond, who embodies apparently contradictory stylizations of masculinity that signify the past and present. In what follows, I foreground, and press upon, the overlapping of different masculine stylizations in Bond—of gentlemanliness and classless expert professional—through an analysis of the centrality and mutation of the traits of self-restraint, governance, and chivalry in two early novels, Casino Royale (1953) and Moonraker (1955). Casino Royale, the first novel in the Bond series, is about a high-stakes game of baccarat with national and international consequences. Beginning in medias res, the novel springs a fully formed Bond into Britain’s collective consciousness. Bond wins the game, is tortured for the money, loses his sense of purpose, recovers, and falls in love with his fellow professional Vesper Lynd. He is well on his way to proposing marriage when she commits suicide, leaving a suicide letter exposing herself as a double agent, which prompts Bond’s return to cold-hearted misogyny and commitment to queen and country. Moonraker (1955) is the only novel in which Bond operates within the national borders of the United Kingdom, or, more pointedly, En-

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gland. In Moonraker, Bond saves England when he unmasks Hugo Drax, the private entrepreneur responsible for the Moonraker missile that will render Britain invulnerable, as a German neo-Nazi who is out to destroy London with his missile. Bond, once again, works with a beautiful competent professional, Gala Brand. Brand, who is a Scotland Yard officer, is the lynchpin and agent of the mission’s success. She also does not succumb to Bond’s irresistible charm, returning to marry a fellow Scotland Yard inspector. These two novels are symptomatic of the series in their representation of Bond as a threshold figure and yet anomalous in the series in their treatment of Bond’s relationship with women. Bond’s embodiment of two seemingly antithetical styles of masculinity, his ability to pass with ease between a hierarchical imperialist world of gentlemanly entitlement and a classless, meritocratic world of professional expertise, is evident in the way he moves between the traditional clubland denoted by Blades and the Moonraker project, the symbol of modernity in Moonraker.24 Indeed, as post-gentleman, he simultaneously contains the dominant, residual, and emergent styles of masculinity and hence exemplifies the nation-state that looks back into a distant past and forward into modernity. Unlike Lumley and Dixon’s masculinities, which are defined by their struggles, Bond’s is determined by his ability to mine, or rather pick and choose, which stylization he will adopt according to his professional situation. Bond’s entrance into, and participation at, a card game at Blades (supposed to be Boodle’s, a signifier for London’s elite gentleman’s clubs) at M’s behest is a perfect example of his ability to pass. M brings Bond in because the chairman of the club suspects the nation’s darling, Hugo Drax, Moonraker’s founder, of cheating at cards and violating an unwritten gentlemanly code of honor. The importance of this code is obvious when the reader is told that the club membership has only two requirements: that a member must “behave like a gentleman and he must be able to ‘show’ 100,000 pounds” (Moonraker 29).25 Drax has the latter but most emphatically does not do the former. Indeed, he is described as a “bullying, boorish, loud-mouthed vulgarian” (39). The plot of the novel is kicked into action because M, Bond, and the gentlemanly Chairman do not approve of Drax’s flouting of this honor code. Bond himself is welcomed into the heart of the club, a metaphor for imperialist England, as an instrument. His function is to preserve the status quo by unmasking the “new money” interloper and saving the institution from scandal. Though he matches M in taste and wins

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the approval of the steward, the porter, and other club servants (no mean task since their feudal investment in the club makes them preservers of the myth of Englishness), Bond is an outsider or, more accurately, a threshold figure—who can straddle the boundary line between the gentleman and the ungentlemanly professional man (like Hugo Drax, in fact). It is important to recognize that Bond is not a gentleman professional, evident in the way he engages with the history, elegance, and architecture of the club; he does not belong but appreciates the institution’s place in England’s cultural, historical imaginary. He recognizes that “the elegance of the room invested each [member] with a kind of aristocracy” (52). For Bond as well as the narrative, the club space produces its members as the English elite, remaking them into a “corporate display of hegemonic masculinity,” or ideal Englishmen who rule the world even as individually they fail to live up to the ideal (Connell 77). Bond, unlike Drax, can “behave like a gentleman.” He is discreet, elegant, competent, and appreciative of the good things in life, but he does not quite belong at Blades. Though the narrative allies Bond with the club, it nevertheless emphasizes the difference between Bond and the gentlemen of the club26—hence, my emphasis on Bond as someone who can effectively cross the line that delineates inside and outside. He is there in his professional capacity, as an expert card player, an expertise that he takes very seriously: just before he sets out to meet M, Bond sets aside time to practice and read up on card games and playing. He is able to confirm that Drax is cheating, and then he proceeds to cheat to teach Drax a lesson. M and the Chairman, despite being excellent players, do not possess the expertise to prove that Drax cheats, nor can they cheat to show him up. The code of the gentleman prevents them from doing so; they need to bring in someone else who will do it for them. It is through an emphasis on cheating and breaking the gentlemanly code that the narrative foregrounds Bond’s fluid traversal of the gentlemanly insider and the classless professional outsider. The card game, then, becomes much more significant than a “private affair between men” (Moonraker 61). It becomes a struggle for the perpetuation of a sanctified hierarchical Englishness indelibly linked to the myth of gentlemanliness. The game is not between the English gentleman and the foreign boor, but rather between two similarly un-English, ungentlemanly meritocratic professionals; the difference is that one of them can appropriately perform English gentlemanliness when required. Later in the novel, Drax explains himself just as he is going to kill Bond, saying, “I knew that all

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I needed was money and the façade of a gentleman. Gentleman. Pfui Teufel! To me a gentleman is just someone I can take advantage of” (210). Drax, of course, cannot properly “take advantage of the gentleman,” which is why was he was a suspect. Both Bond and Drax recognize the gentleman as the heart of Englishness: Bond protects the ideal and its structuring institutions for the continued existence of the English nation/empire, while Drax understands that he must defeat “the gentleman.” The card game between Drax and Bond is one of national historical significance: it is a fight to preserve and retain the power and prestige of the gentleman and his club. The ghosts of former club members recognize this epic battle and watch Bond mete out “rough justice” to the red-haired, ape-like Drax (57, 63). He sat back in his chair and for a moment he had the impression that there was a crowd behind him at each elbow, and that faces were peering over his shoulder, waiting to see his cards. He somehow felt that the ghosts were friendly, that they approved of the rough justice that was to be done. He smiled as he caught himself sending this company of dead gamblers a message, that they should see that all went well. (63)

Significantly, “rough justice” here constitutes cheating, and it can only be meted out by someone who does not belong to the aristocratic and/or gentlemanly community. Bond speaks simultaneously to the imperial gentlemanliness of clubland and to the postwar professional man steeped in a new world of conspicuous consumption, and as a consequence he is neither. He is not quite a gentleman, because he practices at cheating and is brought in precisely for his expertise at not only playing but also cheating at the game. But he’s not like Drax either. If he were, he would not feel quite so at home in clubland; he certainly wouldn’t be invited and appreciated by club members, whether ghostly or alive. Bond’s postwar public-sector professionalism emerges in the context of the rise and power of the professional in the welfare state, which, according to Harold Perkin, ensured that “human capital in the shape of the educated professional expertise devoted to society’s needs and functions was morally superior” to the “traditional landlords” and “the active capital of the owner-managing business men” (353). He goes on to elaborate that this “professional society” was “structured around career hierarchies rather than classes, one in which people find their place according to trained expertise and the service that they provide rather than the possession or lack of inherited wealth or acquired capital” (359). Bond was born into this

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professional moment, and he defines the problem of the bourgeois professional in the postwar consumer era. More important, he signifies the public-sector as opposed to the private-sector professional, the two primary warring factions in the socioeconomic landscape of welfare state Britain. The public sector, as a consequence of the expansion of the government, was growing during the mid-century period. It comprised the civil service, local government officers, employees of various welfare services, nationalized industries, armed forces, trade unions, and semi-autonomous nonprofit public institutions such as universities and the BBC. The private sector included the managers and professional employees of private corporations in finance, industry, banks, insurance and investment companies, newspapers, independent television companies, private airlines, and shipping companies (Perkin 399). While Perkin argues that the line between the private- and public-sector professional was a shifting one, the publicsector professions argued for the expansion of the services they provided at the expense to the taxpayer (400), while the private-sector professions predictably enough argued for freedom from taxation and state interference. The public-sector professions emphasized their commitment to social justice and the social good, even if their primary loyalty was to their profession and increasing the value of that profession. In contrast, the private-sector professions focused on autonomy. Bond falls quite neatly within the purview of the public sector. His worries, when he is not on exotic assignments, are the quotidian worries of the quintessential “medium-grade civil servant”: “He looked at his watch. Eleven o’clock. Mondays were hell. Two days of dockets and files to plough through. And weekends were generally busy times abroad. Empty flats got burgled. People were photographed in compromising positions. . . . The weekly bags from Washington, Istanbul, and Tokyo would have come in and been sorted. They might hold something for him” (Moonraker 9). It is difficult to reconcile Bond, the man of action and danger, with the man who complains about the hellishness of Mondays because of innumerable dockets that he needs to work through. However, this aspect of Bond’s civil service is frequently emphasized in the early novels. In fact, the narrative informs the reader of his pay grade in the civil service (principal officer), his leave plan (“fortnight’s leave at the end of each assignment”), and his annual pay (“£1500 each year” with an additional “thousand free of tax”). With his worries about interdepartmental politics, and his belief in public service, Bond is not a company man; he is a government man (Moonraker

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5–7). The precise narrative details regarding Bond’s professional civil service life follow the pattern of the office memoranda, noting the slightest bureaucratic nuance. The form replicates the content here, foregrounding the fact that he is a mid-level bureaucrat. Indeed, Bond, the civil servant, owns nothing. Everything is an appurtenance of his government job: the books he owns, the suits he wears, the meals he consumes, and the guns he carries. His only possession is his car, and even that is maintained through governmental channels. As a member of the civil service, his expertise is valued and sustained by the taxpayer. The secret service memo that initiates Bond’s mission to play against Le Chiffre in Casino Royale makes this quite evident: “We therefore recommend that the finest gambler available to the Service should be given the necessary funds and endeavor to out-gamble the man” (13). And while Bond appreciates the professionalism of private entrepreneurs, his loyalty, respect, and devotion are entirely directed toward M and the chief of Scotland Yard as well as others of the bureaucratic ilk. In contrast to Charles Lumley, who repudiates his class destiny and the prospect of being determined by bourgeois professionalism, Bond is the exemplary professional. His belief in his own professional superiority is made possible by the vast structure of the British civil service. Bond is the exemplar of the national gendered subject determined by his profession and expertise as functionary of the state. He is not Lumley or Jim, as he does not seek to escape a professional designation and “the corporate state.”

The Restrained Body: Governance, Gentlemanliness, and Professionalism Bond as a public service professional is the object and subject of discourses of governance and self-restraint—central tenets of gentlemanliness. Not only does he control his emotions (other than revenge and anger), but his body becomes a crucial site for the practice of restraint and governance. More important, the state controls and scrutinizes his body. The thirdperson narrative alerts us to Bond’s hyper-awareness of his body in the first few lines of Casino Royale: “He always knew when his body or his mind had had enough and he always acted on the knowledge. This helped him to avoid staleness and the sensual bluntness that breeds mistakes” (1). Indeed, our introduction to Bond is rendered through a bodily immersion in the claustrophobic atmosphere of the casino, where the sweat, smoke, and

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nervous tension would produce a “revolt” of the senses in someone less capable of reading and training his body. The James Bond series begins with Bond’s extreme control of and knowledge of his body, calling attention not only to the importance of this “wonderful machine” over the course of the novels, but also to the reality that he, as well as the state, must govern this machine (Casino 139). The separation between the mind and body central to the governance and restraint is set up in the first lines of the quotation: “He always knew when his body or his mind had had enough and he always acted on the knowledge.” Self-restraint, or the ability to control and retain control of bodily desire, the will to restrain emotion and desire until an appropriate time, is one of the primary traits of the English gentleman (as discussed in previous chapters). What set the gentleman apart from Other masculinities, including working-class masculinity, was the ability to exercise selfrestraint, which was not only the appropriate—that is, limited—display of affect, but also the capacity to channel the inherent excessive manly thumos in the service of society, the nation, and empire. Restraint and governance within this discursive frame are linked, as the ability to restrain affect and the body is synonymous with the ability to govern oneself. Self-governance is the precondition to governance, whether it is of the family, the community, the nation, or the empire. The ability to govern oneself is one of the traits that defined the English gentleman. In the case of Bond, though, selfgovernance is linked not just to discourses of the nation but also, very specifically, to the governmental practices of the state. His body, subjecthood, and even life are governed by the nation-state. In Bond, we see how the overlapping of the discourses of gentlemanliness, professionalism, and the welfare state produce his masculinity. Bringing this back to the immediate context of the spy, Allan Hepburn contends that “the spy dwells in the cleavage between rationality and corporeality.” The spy emblematizes the “dialectic of mind over body, in which the body executes orders issued from the brain, command post of the human organism” (14). Bond’s body is constituted within the inherited diktats of gentlemanliness, but, at the same time, the “cleavage between rationality and corporeality” is fundamental to his professional success and his instrumentality to the nation-state. He needs to function at the razor-edge of awareness to fulfill his duties. The overlapping traits of two different types of masculinities are also manifest in the ways that Bond takes care of his body when not on duty. For instance, Bond, in the vein of the ideal

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of public-school imperial manliness, is ascetic, subjecting his body to cold showers and baths. At the same time, he is an unapologetic gourmand, invested in conspicuous consumption. He oscillates between gentlemanly asceticism and postwar professional ruthless machine. The ways in which chivalry does or does not underpin Bond’s relationships with women also reveal the contradictions of Bond’s masculinity. Bond’s particular fetishization and consumption of women has frequently been read within the “new organization of sexuality in consumer capitalism,” de-linking Bond’s masculinity from his gentlemanly predecessors such as Hannay and Bulldog Drummond (Denning, Cover Stories 112–13). While the consumption and disposal of the Bond girl is a standard of the narratives, the process actually belies the fragility of Bond’s masculinity. Professional women repeatedly threaten Bond’s masculinity, heterosexual power, and professionalism; as a consequence, chivalry, though obsessively invoked, becomes explicit misogyny.27 Vesper Lynd is an assistant to the Head of S, and picked for the job because she is skilled at communications. Gala Brand is a Scotland Yard policewoman, carefully chosen to go longterm undercover at the Moonraker project, who at the end of the novel is honored by the queen for extraordinary service to the country. Bennett and Woollacott contend that in putting “the girl” back into place beneath him (both literally and metaphorically), Bond functions as an “agent of the patriarchal order, refurbishing its imaginarily impaired structure by quelling the source of disturbance within it” (170). Bond does attempt to be an agent of the patriarchal order (so does the narrative); what this obsessive desire to conquer reveals, however, are the cracks in the patriarchal matrix and in Bond’s masculinity. Bond’s victory is always tenuous, never complete, and ready to crumble at the next imagined sexual and gendered threat. The fear of this collapse runs through both Casino Royale and Moonraker. Bond resents the presence of women in the public, professional domain. When informed that Vesper is his partner, Bond’s response is a more explicit example of Lumley’s attitude to independent women: “Bond was not amused. ‘What the hell do they want to send me a woman for?’ ” On the one hand, he does not believe that women “with their hurt feelings and the emotional baggage” should ever be in the profession (Casino 25–26). On the other, when he does meet Vesper and discovers her to be “economical and precise,” cool and direct (much like him), he is threatened by it (32). He takes her reserve as a direct challenge to his heterosexual masculinity and professional authority. She gazes “candidly back at Bond with a touch of

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ironic disinterest, which, to his annoyance, he wanted to shatter, roughly” (32). Bond wants her to be professional, but when she is, his desire is to destroy her professionalism—a recurrent theme in his relationship with her. Single-minded about the job at hand, Bond refrains from sex, unless it serves to accomplish his mission, until the job is done. Although the condemnation of sex and women, and their exclusion from the homosocial “Game,” is in place as early as Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (where Kim and Mahmud Ali agree that women only disrupt the Great Game), and anywhere else espionage and danger bring men together, Bond’s repudiation of, and engagement with, women in this situation is the antithesis of gallant chivalry. He is flagrantly brutal and cold. The Head of S tells Vesper Lynd, before she goes out to France to join Bond on the mission, that though “Bond is an expert, he’s absolute hell to work for” and hasn’t “got much heart” (Casino 59–60). Indeed, the adjectives that are most used in the narrative to describe Bond’s expression and appearance are “cold,” “brutal,” and “ironical” (7). His pleasures, when he does think of fulfilling them, have nothing in common with chivalry. While he thinks he is falling in love with Vesper Lynd, he is apparently overtaken by an uncharacteristic “softness” (something that is repeated only once in the thirteen novels written by Fleming). At the same time, his desire for Vesper is marked by violent conquest rather than any approximation of love: “And now he knew that she was profoundly, excitingly sensual, but that the conquest of her body, because of the central privacy in her, would each time have the sweet tang of rape” (159). Bond’s sexual desires fall beyond the pale of the acceptable. Bond’s masculinity, as conqueror of women and expert masculine professional, depends on the containment of Vesper Lynd’s agency and sexuality, but Bond does not and cannot do so. The cracks become wider as the narrative moves forward. When Lynd is captured through her own seeming stupidity and, more seriously, his (of course as the plot unfolds, the reader discovers that this was all planned in advance by Lynd), he is furious. Bond is caught between the inherited expectations of chivalry that he cannot quite shed and condemnation of her lack of professionalism: “This was just what he had been afraid of. These blithering women who thought they could do a man’s work. Why the hell couldn’t they stay at home and mind their pots and pans and stick to their frocks and gossip and leave men’s work to the men” (99). Interestingly, this sequence does not reveal her as a “blithering woman” so much as it reveals his damning incompetence, given his apparently awe-inspiring 00 status. He does not realize that he is

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being drawn into a trap. Even when the reader does not know that Lynd is a double agent, Bond’s carelessness is appalling, but in retrospect it is obvious that he is completely outmaneuvered. Bond’s emotionally explosive responses to Vesper as a professional woman reveal the tenuousness of his detachment and self-governance. He can only establish these traits through his conquest of her; sexually dominating and “shattering” her becomes crucial to demonstrating his masculinity and professional supremacy.28 Bond’s response to desire is noteworthy in how his affective selfrestraint and detachment morph into a compulsion toward conquest. Desire, here, rather than being an occasion for the loss of control becomes the conduit for control and possession of the woman’s body. Bond does not relinquish his self-governance; rather he channels his pleasures toward controlling the female body that threatens his carefully maintained equilibrium, although he is never able to neutralize that particular threat. The traits of gentlemanliness and what could be their obverse are held in a very fragile yet necessary balance in Bond: chivalry versus cruelty, virility versus harshness, self-governance versus violent conquest, gentility versus meritocratic professionalism, asceticism versus hedonism/conspicuous consumption, insider versus outsider, and English versus un-English. Finally, the conflict between the gentlemanly and the professional is illustrated through Bond’s very appearance. Unlike “clubland heroes” such as Richard Hannay and Bulldog Drummond, whose heir Bond undoubtedly is, Bond does not look like a gentleman.29 At no point does Ian Fleming use the word to describe Bond. This is a significant omission, as Fleming, the second son of a wealthy, dynastic Scottish family listed in Burke’s Landed Gentry, was steeped in aristocratic clubland circles. In marked contrast to Bond, whose looks and sex appeal the narrator constantly praises, the narrative in Bulldog Drummond emphatically reiterates that the eponymous hero is not good-looking, though it does point out that his eyes, “deep set and steady,” “showed the man for what he was—a sportsman and a gentleman.” The body is the site on which signs of classed and gendered traits are rendered visible. Meanwhile, Bond is frequently described as having “cold grey-blue eyes” and a scarred “lean, hard face” that has a “hungry, competitive edge to it” (Moonraker 26). The hungry competitive edge (almost) allies him with many of his enemies, whose bodies and faces advertise their villainous natures. Bond’s hungriness is what sets him apart from the amateur clubland heroes who project their gentlemanliness and not their professional hunger (since they don’t have any) through their bodies.

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Bond’s body is marked by his profession, and by his desire to conquer and win. However—and this is fundamental to the contradictions of Bond—he can “pass” among gentlemen either because he can affect the traits so well or because he has some of the necessary traits to carry off the “passing” effectively. Indeed, in the Bond novels the body is a key element in the narrative and the plot, both in its materiality and as a semiotic site that registers national, class, sexual, gender, and professional identities. While the Bond body is the object of control on which the conflict between gentlemanliness and professionalism is inscribed, it is also the site constituted by practices of the nation-state.

The Material Body and the Nation-State The elaboration of Bond’s contradictory masculinities connects him to the Janus-faced nation and the other post-gentlemen in this book. His metonymic relationship to the nation comes to its logical culmination at the moment that Bond as government servant–cum–agent, as England, confronts the nation’s enemies. In Casino Royale, when Bond is captured and tied up naked, his body, as material and discursive site, takes center stage. The hinted-at possible violence and destruction of the body signifies the defeat of English masculinity, which would also explain why Bond can and will never die. Bond’s body in pain and the brutalization of his body is an attack on the national body politic and a violation of the certainty of a gendered, heterosexual body, where the two are mutually constitutive. It is axiomatic to read Bond as impenetrable; as the quintessential symbol of heterosexual male empowerment, his body is inviolable. In other words, his body can be abused but it does not have any orifices that can be penetrated—one of the defining characteristics of hegemonic masculinity is, of course, that the heterosexual male body cannot and should not be penetrated, and if it is, then it ceases to be masculine.30 Contrary to this popular reading, penetration haunts Bond from the very first novel. Even before we get to the pivotal and gruesome torture scene in Casino Royale, one of the ways in which Le Chiffre tries to get Bond thrown off the card game is when his bodyguard, a “hairy Corsican”—whom just moments before Bond had imagined naked—presses “something hard . . . right into the cleft between his two buttocks on the padded chair” (81). Bond escapes the threat of being impaled by the gun by heaving backward into his attacker, rather than away. This is a precursor to the extended brutalization

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of Bond’s body by Le Chiffre, which Simon Raven (Fleming’s contemporary) considered “too monstrous to be excused” (695). After he is captured, Bond is brought to the domestic space of a vacation-home-turned-siteof-torture. Bond is tied naked to a chair whose seat has been removed so his genitalia and buttocks are exposed. Le Chiffre repeatedly hits this exposed part of the body with a carpet beater. Here, too, a description of the imagined naked body of his male captor precedes the torture and the possible penetration (though never explicitly stated). It is not simply the fear and threat of being sodomized that pervades the narrative, but the fact that in both instances there is a conscious invocation of another naked male body undercutting the obvious reading of the fear of penetration; Bond and the narrative seem to teeter between desire and repulsion. This subtext of homoeroticism emerges during moments of violence perpetrated on Bond’s body. Moreover, this attraction/repulsion is also present in his thoughts every time he is under threat of violation and assault. It is impossible not to read this narrative subtext within contemporaneous cultural-national fears that linked queerness and treachery. The infamous defection in 1951 that revealed high-level intelligence officers Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean—members of clubland with their public school and Cambridge background—as communists served to concretize in the public imagination the apparently natural relationship between homosexuality and national treachery. Homosexuality was only decriminalized with the passing of the Sexual Offences Act in 1967.31 Deep betrayal was felt on many counts, not least because these men were seen as “one of us,” rather than disgruntled disenfranchised radicals. Their defection, unsurprisingly, was a matter of grave embarrassment for the government and particularly the intelligence services.32 However, no British court of law ever “pronounced them guilty of a crime” (Sommer 288). The paranoid fear that the queer was a leaky, penetrable vessel underwrites these moments of violence in the text. Bond’s unconscious desire for the male body and the razor’s edge of potential desire/repulsion is the obverse of all that Bond embodies. It means the possible ceding of control to desire and to another man, and this process renders Bond violable and vulnerable. This is antithetical to his masculine self-government, discipline, and compulsion to conquer. The homoeroticism is threaded through with a potentially masochistic desire. While Bond’s torture is described in rather graphic detail, there is a brief moment where the horror and pain of torture shades into the painful pleasure of the masochist, a fear that Bond consciously invokes in

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order to suppress it: “He had been told by colleagues who had survived torture . . . that towards the end there came a wonderful period of warmth and languor leading into a sort of sexual twilight where pain turned to pleasure and where hatred and fear of the torturers turned to a masochistic infatuation. It was the supreme test of will, he had learnt, to avoid showing this form of punch-drunkenness” (114). This fear of succumbing to pleasure derived from pain is linked to Bond’s anxiety that his heterosexuality and professional control will unravel. In apparently avoiding submission (even as he thinks of it) to the masochistic pleasure of the sadist’s violence, he also avoids becoming the porous vessel of betrayal. Yet, as we shall see, not ceding to masochistic desire, though it prevents betrayal and professional failure, nevertheless does not protect the loss of his masculine identity. His body in pain overwhelms his mind. Le Chiffre’s violence that includes possible penetration renders Bond’s body as body. As Elaine Scarry’s argument about the tortured body reveals, consciousness slowly recedes and is inversely proportional to the overwhelming presence of the body; it drowns out everything beyond the body in pain. She points out that physical pain annihilates all aspects of the self and world.33 Bond’s body ceases to house his self and is reduced to a writhing mass of pain. Speech disappears: he “twitches,” “groans,” “writhes,” “contorts,” “screams,” “his body jangle[s] in the chair like a marionette” (Casino 115). In short, he is “defenceless” and mindless (112). Scarry asserts that “all psychological and mental content that constitutes one’s self and world” ceases to exist for the tortured individual, as the self is constituted through language and language ceases to exist (30). The disintegration of the self into the body in pain marks the moment Bond ceases to be man and English. The body over which Bond always had such precise control, the body machine so carefully and consciously monitored and governed, on which his gendered professional identity is imprinted, overwhelms him. He is aware of nothing but the body: language, control, and governance, all the things that make him cease to exist. His pain makes him thought-less and self-less, renders him inhuman, vulnerable, not-man. Bond is a public servant and an Englishman by virtue of his self-restraint and self-governance—facets of both gentlemanliness and his professionalism. Without them, he ceases to be. In Bond, self-governance also links up to the governmental practices of the state, which determines his identity. In effect, his un-becoming, in his no longer being an English man as he is tortured by Le Chiffre, is the moment that Englishness and the

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nation also unravel. Le Chiffre is well aware of this unraveling of masculinity and nationhood when he infantilizes Bond: he calls Bond “dear boy” and insists that Bond is not “equipped” to “play games with adults.” Le Chiffre very deliberately strips Bond of his manhood—“if you do not yield, you will no longer be a man”—as well as his national identity when he mocks Bond’s incompetence and chivalry as being that of a “typical English gentleman” (Casino 117–18). Bond’s inadequacy as an Englishman reflects on the inadequacy and weakness of the nation. Bond fights back into consciousness, masculinity, heterosexuality, and Englishness by thinking of the violation of the female body, reinforcing the structural necessity of the subordinate woman in the construction of heterosexual masculine identity. He tries to reestablish his sense of self by imagining Vesper’s condition: “He could imagine how she was being used by the two gunmen. . . . Poor wretch to have been dragged into this. Poor little beast” (Casino 116). While Bond is being tortured, he imagines Vesper is being “used,” and to claw back into his own humanity, he reduces her to a diminutive beast. His torturer methodically emasculates Bond by the targeted attack; Bond is dehumanized and de-nationalized through the pain wrought on his body, and the means that both the narrative and Bond use to think the self again is the “used” body of the woman. Both Bond and the reader later discover that Vesper Lynd was never raped. The mode in which Bond recovers only serves to reinforce the link between his tortured body and his English masculinity. Bond’s sense of duty, his patriotism, his absolute certainty between right and wrong, good and evil, England and SMERSH (Soviet Counter-Espionage Agency), dissolve with the uncertainty about his sense of self as a consequence of his torture. In other words, the specific kind of bodily violation—anal penetration and the loss of a functional penis (which results in the loss of a sexual and gender identity)—leads to a loss of moral certainty, patriotic duty, and national superiority. His awareness of being “alive” during what Scarry calls “the process of dying” (because it is exactly when the body is most present through pain that the line between life and death is most intensely felt) leads him to question what he perceives to be the arbitrary distinction of good and evil, where Britain is Good and Communism (SMERSH) is Evil. As Bond points out, “Today we are fighting Communism. Okay. If I’d been alive fifty years ago, the brand of Conservatism we have today would have been damn near called Communism and we should have been told to go and fight that” (Casino 135). This is, of course, a very accurate assessment. Wel-

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fare state conservatism was more socialist than the Tory party position in the early twentieth century, or even before the war. Bond’s loss of self and body make him a “bloody anarchist” according to the French agent Matthis (135). The narrative, then, makes explicit the connection between hegemonic masculinity, professional patriotic duty, and the gendered heterosexual body, while pointing out that the material body, the body in pain, lies outside these discursive frames. The material body constantly needs to be recuperated into these discourses if the nation is to survive. The danger is that the body can always betray. In fact, the number of times Bond is injured and violated, left defenseless and helpless, emphasizes the tenuousness of these absolute truths that Bond as spy fights to defend. Bond recovers when he is able to contemplate having sex with Vesper. The test he sets for his recovery is the “stir of desire” that he feels when he sees Vesper; and until he knows that he can potentially feel heterosexual desire, he does not allow her to come see him. Once aroused by Vesper, he miraculously abandons his anarchist line of thought. As the narrative indicates, “From that day Bond’s recovery was rapid” (148). Bond’s body as the point of tension regarding hegemonic masculinity and the national (im)penetrability focuses on the male spy’s body as constitutive of national sovereignty and safety. Unlike the earlier examples of the post-gentleman in this book who struggle with conflicting stylizations of masculinity and their place in the nation, Bond, as a secret agent whose professional and patriotic duty it is to protect the nation-state, frequently exceeds—indeed, must exceed—the acceptable limits of citizenship. Bond, by virtue of his profession, can never be breadwinner, husband, and head of the household. He is determined by his profession and expertise, but those are not commensurate with gendered citizenship. He is the professional who subsumes individuality for the national collective. As a professional and spy, if he is killed, he does not martyr himself for the nation, unlike the imperial Englishman whose descendant he is, because he lies outside the rights offered to the nation-state’s citizens. His body is the site upon which national and state integrity rests, and yet his killing is not read in the same ways as an ordinary citizen: he is merely a “blunt instrument” of the state, and his nationality and humanity are not publically recognized.34 Bond is not produced within the discourse of citizenship of the state; his license to kill moves him beyond those boundaries. While the structures of citizenship are made possible because Bond ensures that the “commodified flows” of income and professionals continues unimpeded in the corporate state

160 Scarecrows of Chivalry (Comentale 10), he can never be a part of it. He is fully cognizant of his unbelonging. As he walks through the hallowed halls of Blades, the narrative opines, “Bond knew that there was something alien and un-English about himself. He knew that he was a difficult man to cover up. Particularly in England. . . . Abroad was what mattered. Outside the jurisdiction of the Service” (Moonraker 34). Indeed, he thrives on the knowledge that he lies outside state jurisdiction. Abroad, he simultaneously embodies Englishness, acting as the agent of the state, but at the same time, because he is a state agent, he also loses his Englishness to become alien and un-English. Bond, as has been previously discussed, does not belong to himself. Everything Bond owns belongs to the state even as he exists outside it. The control of Bond’s body speaks to the upward and downward movement of governmental practices in the creation of the subject, in this case, the professional subject working for the nation-state. In Doctor No, M discusses Bond’s physical and mental fitness with Sir James Molony, who cautions M against working his men too hard. While Molony acknowledges that M “ha[s] to treat these men as if they were expendable,” he believes that Bond needs rest and release (Doctor 14). M, meanwhile, is unrepentant, countering with a list of body parts that a man could do without, which he has gathered from the work of an American doctor. Bond’s body as machine, as instrument in the service of the state, rather than his humanity, is of interest to M. He is “blank and cold” as he points out that “it’ll soon show if he’s not up to the work” (13–15). For M, what can and can’t be done to an Englishman is not applicable to Bond. This distinction between human and professional tool is made explicit when Matthis says to Bond during his recovery, “Surround yourself with human beings. . . . But don’t let me down and become human yourself. We would lose such a wonderful machine” (Casino 139). Bond is clearly not human, or human enough, to warrant the same rights and sympathies as citizens.

Coda: James Bond and the Memorandum The paradox of Bond, as sovereign Englishman and state instrument, is captured in the style of the novels. The matter-of-fact, informative, and what I call memoranda style replicates the contradictions of Bond: he is a government agent who acts on behalf of the state, but at the same time his agency is entirely determined by the state. He is but one officer in the government chain of command. Bond’s assignments are always routed through M, the

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only part of the chain of command that Bond actually sees, and his missions always begin and end with files and dockets. Indeed, Casino Royale begins with an extended official document/fi le, and the narrative style of the rest of the novel maintains the same tone and judgment as the file. Critics, most notably Umberto Eco and Kingsley Amis, have remarked on the dissonance in Fleming’s narratives. Fleming’s novels are explicit adventure tales of heroic action, fantasy escapes, and narratives of how one man saves the world. Yet Eco notes how “the minute and leisurely concentration with which he pursues page after page descriptions of articles, landscapes, and events apparently inessential to the course of the story” contrast with “the feverish brevity with which he covers in a few paragraphs the most unexpected and improbable actions” (49).35 The speed, thrill, and suspense of the heroic narrative, then, is offset by an excessive journalistic attention to details about bureaucratic procedure, departmental compromises, intergovernmental coordination, the rules of card games, the mechanics of automobiles, the nuances of gastronomy and alcohol, and the textures and tastes of cigarettes. I focus on this neglected aspect of Fleming’s narrative rather than the thoroughly explored fantasy, rebel hero. The attention to scientific, quotidian, and field-specific detail at the expense of describing the improbable and fantastic replicates the contradictions in Bond, who is both fantasy hero and professional. For instance, in Moonraker, the narrative focuses quite extensively on Bond’s preparation for the card game between Drax and Bond. Bond gives M a report on his expertise, how he came by it and the ways in which one can cheat at cards: “That was the chap. American. Made me work ten hours a day for a week learning a thing called the Riffle Stack and how to deal Seconds and Bottoms and Middles. I wrote a long report about it at the time. Must be buried in Records. He knew every trick in the game. How to wax the aces so that the pack will break at them; Edge Work and Line Work with a razor on the backs on the high cards; Trimming; Arm Pressure Holdouts—mechanical gadgets up your sleeve and feed you cards” (23). The narrative continues to expand on the techniques that Bond learned from the American. What Bond and the narrative reveal here is that while cheating is ungentlemanly, the practice and knowledge of how to cheat is absolutely crucial in a professional. The passage above evacuates cheating of all moral opprobrium and makes it a matter of expertise. This is an interesting paradox: Bond, card (cheat) expert, is brought in to unmask an ungentlemanly cheat. The listing of all the possible ways to cheat (important enough to be filed as a report), then, while it disrupts the

162 Scarecrows of Chivalry suspense of action is necessary because it reveals Bond’s expertise and his professionalism. The language of expertise and the report is fundamental both to Bond’s integrity as a professional and to the narrative’s credibility as the story of a professional man or government man of action. Casino Royale, more tellingly, begins with a nine-page government memorandum in a chapter on its own. The report, following the conventions of such a document, lists and analyzes enemy operatives, their operations, their flaws, their monetary worth, their links to organizations and foreign governments, the British government’s previous engagements with them, as well as the British government’s coordination with the French and the Americans in attempting to defeat the enemy. It also engages in literary hyperbole. For instance, after describing Le Chiffre’s attempts to invest in prostitution in order to procure “unlimited women for his personal use,” the report points out that “Fate rebuked him with terrifying swiftness” (9). The report also reflects the entrenched racist, sexist, and heteronormative prejudices of the officials writing it, hence institutionalizing and naturalizing a set of prejudicial positions. The document describes Le Chiffre as having a “small, rather feminine mouth” and “ears small with large lobes, indicating Jewish blood” (14). What we have here in miniature is the style of the Bond novel; the memorandum sets the tone for the stylistics of the rest of the novel. With its emphasis on the mechanics of baccarat, pregame rituals, descriptions of Le Chiffre and his henchmen, the details of Bond’s professional and personal routine, the lavish yet minute descriptions of the hotel, food, cars, and radios all follow the same pattern. It is as if the narrative itself is a report that will be filed later. At the casino, the narrative describes the pregame rituals in which players usually participate. It is an informative moment in the text, and such textual moments abound: “And yet it is convention among roulette players, and Bond rigidly adhered to it, to take careful note of the past history of each session and to be guided by any peculiarities in the run of the wheel” (43). Seemingly gratuitous, the passage invites the reader to an understanding of the game while also offering a rich textured history of the game in its present moment with reference to Bond’s mission. It contextualizes Bond’s actions and once again draws attention to his professionalism and vigilance. Regarding the game itself, the narrator takes pains to set out and explain the nuances of the game, ensuring that the facts are clearly reported. Indeed, the game takes up almost 40 pages of the 180-page novel. Similarly, when one of Le Chiffre’s men ties Bond to a chair, the narrative

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offers a detailed account of how exactly Bond is tied: “With this he bound Bond’s wrists to the arms of the chair and his ankles to the front legs. He passed a double strand across his chest, under the arm-pits and through the chair-back. He made no mistakes with the knots and left no play in any of the bindings. All of them bit sharply into Bond’s flesh” (112). No doubt, this attention to tying serves to build suspense to a pitch. It also reveals the competence of the henchmen, and it draws attention to Bond’s awareness in a hopeless situation as he watches for any play in the ropes. The passage highlights the specialized knowledge and alertness of both criminal and hero. The passage also reads like a careful documenting and filing away of criminal activity so that no clues will slip into the cracks. While, on the one hand, it allows the reader to visualize and hence enter into the horror of the sequence that follows more vividly, on the other hand, the dry-as-dust tone is that of an official report. Kingsley Amis calls this process “the Fleming effect,” where the action recedes into the background and aspects of contemporary life and specialized knowledge that seem tangential take center stage in the narrative. He states that Fleming’s prose allows the reader to accept the fantastic and the absurd because it is bolstered by incontrovertible facts. Amis makes this into an aphorism: “The contemporary becomes romantic . . . the merely romantic solidly contemporary.” Fleming, he points out, takes particular pleasure in the sharing, tracking, and analyzing of particularized knowledge (Amis 137). The government memorandum, as delineated by Fleming within the narrative diegetic space, functions as the template for the narrative style in the Bond novels; it allows for the full expression of expertise and professional competence and Bond as government servant. The Bond narrative—like the memo—appraises, measures, informs, and submits for public/state scrutiny. The prose ensures that even as we admire Bond’s tenacity and vigilance, the reader never forgets that his agency is an effect of his location within the government chain of command. Bond, as the exile, as the not-quite-gentleman-not-quite-professional, reflects welfare state Britain but can never be at home in it. Determined by inherited codes of gentlemanliness as well as the paradigms of professionalism and expertise of the new expert-based state, Bond nonetheless lies outside the bounds of citizenship. As a secret agent of the state, he does not function within the expected modes of gendered citizenship set by the state governmental practices, though he is shaped by them. He is the threshold figure who ensures the continuity of the modern-traditional Britain, the

164 Scarecrows of Chivalry imperial/professional fantasy ideal that sustains the democratic citizenship of insular welfare capitalism: 007, who is and isn’t English, who is and isn’t a gentleman, who is and isn’t human. Both James Bond and Charles Lumley embody the slow shift of national hegemonic masculinity from the bourgeois gentleman to the modern classless professional, from gentleman to different variations of the postgentleman. While Lumley derisively repudiates the code of gentlemanliness and Bond performs it at his convenience for professional purposes, the ideal and its mutation nevertheless determine their contradictory masculinities. Lumley’s travails of gender, mapped by the picaresque, stands in for the movement of the nation from outward-looking empire to welfarestate national totality. While both Lumley and Bond were hailed as “new men” who embodied an untrammeled and uninhibited masculine authenticity, what they really illustrate is a masculinity forever haunted by its gender antecedent, determined by the discourses of a postwar meritocratic yet rigid professionalism and the institutionalized gender expectation of the welfare state. Bond and Lumley are not iconoclastic rebels, as contemporaneous critics read them, but the tenuous emergence of new stylizations of masculinity from a folding over of the old.

6

Writing Women, Reading Men A. S. Byatt, Barbara Pym, and the Post-Gentlemen

he dissolution of the code of English gentlemanliness and the simultaneous adaptation of specific traits of that code in the literature of postwar, post-imperial England signifies both the decline of the English gentleman and the paradoxical persistence of the ideals that define Englishness and Englishmen. The focus in earlier chapters has been on middle- to lower-class male protagonists who struggle against the weight of an inherited upper-class gentlemanliness that emerged during the halcyon expansiveness of the empire. The struggle occurs in tandem with their attempt to reshape codes of gentlemanliness to suit the possibilities of the welfare state, with its paradoxical associations of renewed national confidence and containment. This final chapter shifts that focus and considers the marginalized stories of middle-class female protagonists against and through which the post-gentlemen defined themselves. At the same time, these narratives by women also challenge the narratives of the post-gentlemen as they are focalized through the female protagonist. The two intertwined tracks in the story of the postwar, middle-class Englishwoman best emerge in the very different works of A. S. Byatt and Barbara Pym, a yoking that might appear violent and counterintuitive, but they both depict the newly opened possibilities and constraints for the middle-class female protagonist effected by the tumultuous socioeconomic restructuring of Britain. Byatt’s The Shadow of the Sun (1964) and Pym’s An Unsuitable Attachment (1962, 1982) address the changes in the middle-class woman as she negotiates the changes of postwar Britain. This chapter explores not just a reversal where the gentleman and the “new man” are now subject to the middle-class female gaze, but it also

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166 Scarecrows of Chivalry addresses how this perspective reevaluates those narratives where women are marginalized and/or represented as tokens of exchange. This final chapter constitutes a feminist critical response (in a slightly different mode than the earlier chapters) to Englishmen writing about themselves and the women that they either dismiss or attempt to possess on their journey of self-discovery. These particular novels by women about middle-class men and women are crucial to an understanding of post-imperial masculinities and the politics of gender. “Writing Women” is not meant to be an exhaustive analysis of the postwar woman: I do not offer a similar genealogical paradigm for the alterations of femininity as I have done with gentlemanliness. It works more inductively than the previous chapters, which read the post-gentleman within an imperial gendered genealogy. My close textual analysis reveals that women novelists frequently invoke characters or tropes from the works of their male counterparts in order to deconstruct them. The two texts examined here speak back to works considered so far, making it clear that the negotiations of the “new man” with his inherited gender scripts intertwines with struggles of the Englishwoman who endeavors to do the same. In other words, Charles Lumley in Hurry on Down and Anna Severell in The Shadow of the Sun work within the concentric and overlapping circles of inherited gender conventions and ideals of Englishness while they attempt to construct a postimperial gendered subjectivity in what seems to be a modernized, insular England. The double-helix of foreclosed horizons and newly awakened possibility that informs the masculine narratives of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, John Wain’s Hurry on Down, and even Philip Larkin’s poetics of melancholy optimism runs through The Shadow of the Sun and An Unsuitable Attachment. The key difference is that the difficulty of the female protagonist’s struggle is compounded by the aggressive, masculinist presence of the Angry Young Man. Like the works by the male writers, Byatt and Pym’s novels illustrate the raggedness that comes with possibility: the working within and against gendered expectations in a new phase of Englishness, but for the women involved, the horizons are foreshortened by the narratives of domesticity, where female subjectivity is always in danger of being subsumed by the male presence.

Anna and Antonia: Vision Quest A. S. Byatt’s The Shadow of the Sun, though published in 1964, was written between 1954 and 1957 while she was a doctoral student at Cambridge.1 It is

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the story of the teenage Anna Severell, the daughter of a famous novelist, Henry Severell, who attempts to break free from the circle of her father’s artistic influence, as well as the constraints of her middle-class upbringing. Her mother, Caroline, the archetype of the “self-sacrificing” wife, arranges the life of the family so that her husband’s needs come first: his study is “the centre of the house, and round what went on in it everything else was ordered” (5). Anna struggles to establish her identity as woman and artist, separate from both her mother and father. The Leavisite critic Oliver—who, along with his wife, Margaret, comes to stay with the Severell family over the summer—helps her in the endeavor. Once in Cambridge, Anna and Oliver embark on a secret affair, which contributes to Margaret’s decline and precipitates a crisis in the Severell family. Anna, pregnant by Oliver, decides to marry the upper-class Peter. The novel ends on a note of open-ended possibility: of her striking out on her own, or staying with Oliver, a far more problematic proposition even though he aided in her selfdiscovery. Byatt’s novel on female artistry and independence, much like the Angry Young Man novels it responds to and challenges, is concerned with the question of female artistic subjectivity that the dynamics of postimperial gender configuration produces. In her 1991 introduction, Byatt addresses the problem of finding a narrative voice (distinct from the masculinist comic novels that had attained national status), one that articulates the relationship between a female artistic subjectivity and the gender expectations within which she is inscribed: “I had awful problems with the form of the novel. I had no model I found at all satisfactory. I should say now that the available models, Elizabeth Bowen, Rosamund Lehmann, Forster, Woolf, were all too suffused with ‘sensibility’ but that I disliked the jokey social comedy of Amis and Wain considerably more than I disliked ‘sensibility’ ” (x). For Byatt, neither the modernist style of Woolf, Forster, et al. nor the masculine social satire of the Movement and Angry Young Man writers proved suitable to represent a middle-class woman in postwar England. Byatt’s hesitant explorations of the realist form replicate her protagonist’s endeavor to move out from under the shadow of her father’s visionary genius. Byatt rejects the violent masculine madness of “the Coleridge of the flashing eyes and floating hair, or the Blake who saw infinity in a grain of sand.” Yet she cannot find appropriate exemplars of female visionaries either, as they are only cast as the “self-abnegating” “mad exploited Sybil” (ix). The writer in The Shadow of the Sun is therefore a man with the visionary gift for which Byatt secretly longed. And though she yearns for an unam-

168 Scarecrows of Chivalry bivalent, powerful artistic genius even as she shies away from the “nervous sensibility” of a Virginia Woolf, Byatt, through Anna, strives to represent an alternative model for a female artist. In writing the novel, Byatt implicitly rejects the new masculine form made popular by Amis and Wain, and explicitly disavows the genealogy of authorial paternalism. Fraught with insecurities and tensions, Anna experiences the anxiety of paternal influence before she realizes the value of her own distinct visions. As Anna walks by the river in Cambridge one night, watching the moon, she feels she sees the light of the world in what is represented as an artistic vision: “I must put all of myself into seeing, she told herself” (237). Yet the world is mediated through her father, as she can only see the world as a “second hand reflection.” In comparison to her father’s visionary writing derived from the sun, which has a “violent power”—a “savagery”—her vision is inadequate; she “can’t make it, [she] shall never make it.” Her father’s genius shapes her life and art, since “when it came to writing Henry was crushing” (16). The sun becomes the all-powerful metaphor for Henry’s creativity, which is seen as overwhelming and all-encompassing, against which Anna’s vision of a “blob of concentrated light that must have been the moon” appears paltry and insignificant (236). And yet, despite the sense of inadequacy that haunt Anna and Byatt, the text regards Henry’s powerful and transcendent visions with some skepticism. Oliver’s common sense routinely undercuts the attendant awe that Henry’s visions produce even though he does not dispute Henry’s creative genius. Similarly, Anna and the third-person narrative frequently use adjectives that connote violence and savagery to describe Henry’s visions; in short, in addition to his being described as a broad-shouldered giant of a man who looks like an Old Testament patriarch, his visions are hypermasculinist. Christien Franken in her reading of the novel argues that Henry, who represents Burkean sublime/masculinity, is always under threat by femininity and love.2 Within Burkean discourse, the sublime is assumed to be masculine while the beautiful is frequently read as feminine. Hence, Burke’s sublime is “deeply gendered” and exists only by virtue of its excluded opposite: women and femininity (Franken 44–45). I agree with this particular interpretation insofar as Henry’s masculine artistry is reliant on his wife’s common sense and self-abnegation. However, this interpretation of masculinity and femininity as monolithic constructs effaces more complex histories of class and nation embodied in the figures of the gentleman and his “others.” Henry’s artistic masculinity emerges from a comfortable

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gentility, carefully delineated from Oliver’s aggressive, lower-class masculinity that consolidates Henry’s own hegemonic masculine artistry. Crucially, Henry’s hypermasculinist strength, once his “humanity” is engaged, mutates into something smaller and more manageable. In other words, he changes from distant, benevolent father figure around whom everyone’s lives revolve to inadequate father and friend: he descends from his pedestal into complicated, flawed relationships with his daughter and Margaret. His trajectory is from the hypermasculinist, sun-worshipping Lawrentian archetype to a “loss of solitude,” to something “smaller, greyer, more ordinary” (279). Henry realizes that this transition is necessary and inevitable, and sketches, accordingly, the “dramatically suitable punishment for [the] hubris” of his earlier “disproportionate splendour” (279). His masculinity is contained, cut down to size, in keeping with his necessary acquiescence and involvement with his family and friends. Given the paradoxical envious awe and suspicion that surrounds the metaphor of the sun, it is not surprising that Anna’s visions, despite her myriad insecurities, center on the moon, moonlight, and water. Anna’s most unambiguous vision occurs early in the novel. Significantly, unlike her father’s visions, which occur out in the open country under the fierce sun, Anna’s vision occurs in the beautiful modernized bathroom of her home: she sees “a drowned world, a sunken secret world with pillars and planes of light shining gently in its corners and the odd brightness of a tap, or the sliver of light along the edge of the basin, winking like living creatures, strange fish suspended and swaying in the darkness” (133). The play of refracted light and shadows bouncing off bathroom fixtures, the wash of cool colors on the shelves, the flash and glint of water in a glass make her out-of-body experience blissful, calm, yet brimming with potential. She is held, and holds herself, in a contained, constrained space that nevertheless opens up avenues of imagination and possibility. Feeling “balanced and complete,” she thinks, “I can do something with this. I can do something with this, that matters” (134). Anna’s vision in the modern bathroom shifts the meaning of the title of the novel: in this vision of shadows and contained light produced by water and glass, shadows do not indicate a failed visionary quest, but a positive moment of potential creativity.3 The positive associations of water, glass, and light are repeated later in the text, when Anna, twirling a glass of water, confidently says, “Sometimes . . . I think perhaps I have no limitations” (135). The passage also reveals a vision that is different from, and, indeed,

170 Scarecrows of Chivalry antithetical to, the violent monstrous power of Henry’s visions from which he emerges bruised and battered. Anna’s vision, in contrast, allows her to feel balanced, stable, and complete for the first time in her life. While it is possible to read Anna’s vision of water within Helen Cixous’s model of l’ecriture feminine and the traditional associations of female sexuality with water and fluidity, the crucial use of the term “balance” to describe Anna disrupts that particular reading. Anna’s vision, while it sustains the mystery of a vision, nevertheless occurs in the structured space of the home: the sliver of light caught on “the edge of the basin,” the sunken world of pillars, the odd brightness of the tap, and the geometric shapes of green and silver shelves. The ideal of balance and the geography of the cleansing space of the bathroom echo the quotidian of Oliver’s “eternal kitchen sink.” Significantly, she transforms and adapts the quotidian to reflect her own location; she is not trapped, at least at this particular point in the novel, by the practicalities of everyday life. She acknowledges, as Oliver does, her inscription within structural constraints, but she remakes them to fit her potential and artistry.

Reading Men: Oliver and Peter Anna’s struggle to find artistic equilibrium mirrors her attempts to find a necessary balance in her life, as she forges an identity in relation to the young men and potential suitors that dominate her life. Anna’s focalized perspective offers a critical female exploration of two stylizations of masculinity: the Angry Young Man, and the gentleman. The narrative is Byatt’s response to the cult of the Angry Young Man. Oliver, the Angry Young Man figure, is unpleasant, frustrated, and insecure. He is not the protagonist; he is, indeed, focalized primarily through the teenage protagonist, Anna. On the one hand, the text illustrates the tensile homosocial relationship between Henry—symbol of established literary upper-class masculinity— and Oliver—example of a rising lower-middle-class decent masculinity—as defined by the exchange of young Anna. On the other hand, the fact that the story is about Anna’s maturation into individual and artist disrupts this trope of homosocial exchange. The emergence of Anna’s individuated female subjectivity is a torturous exercise of navigation between different masculinities, as embodied by Oliver and Peter, and the easy surrender to the patriarchal and institutionalized expectations of marriage and motherhood.

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In her introduction Byatt considers Oliver’s place in Anna’s development as artist and independent woman. She situates him within the discourse of the young man from the “coming classes” who, as Green’s “decent man,” saw himself as the vehicle for rejuvenation of English values and the nation itself. She points out that “he would have been the hero of any male version of this story, l’homme moyen sensual, suspicious of Henry’s wilder edges, guilty about his wife and girl, but essentially ‘decent.’ This novel doesn’t see him quite that way. It is afraid of him, though I only understand now how much” (x). Oliver, the Jim Dixon or Charles Lumley figure, is revealed as aggressive, bullying, critical, and, in fact, as someone whom Anna finds wearying and oppressive. He is a defiant victim of his insecurities in relation to the almost mythic figure of Henry Severell. He strives to be “decent” and to educate Anna in order to aid her on her path to an intellectual life and individuality. As Byatt points out, he is the “Other” in the novel; he is as illegible in Anna’s narrative as the female figures in the Angry Young Man novels of the time. In making Oliver unknowable, Byatt marginalizes the central cultural and literary icon of the coming “new man.” Indeed, much of the text’s energy, and Anna’s, is spent in challenging the power of the Angry Young Man narratives that cast such a powerful shadow on the cultural landscape of the period. The relationship between Anna and Oliver is mined with class and gender anxieties. He is the professional academic (of working/ lower-middle-class background) married to an upper-middle-class woman, not entirely at ease in the bohemian yet gentrified country household of the Severell family. He is in awe of Henry Severell as an upper-class patriarch and artistic genius. Oliver is unsure of his own class status: he does not have the stability or certainty that comes of middle-class privilege so pervasive in the Severell family, evident in Jeremy (Anna’s schoolboy brother) and Henry. These anxieties manifest themselves in occasional emotional outbursts that he directs against Anna and Henry, but especially the former. When he meets one of Anna’s secret crushes, Michael, on an errand to the riding stables, Oliver “struts like a fighting cock and tear[s]” into the blond, beautiful, upper-class boy, leaving him bewildered and confused (77). For Oliver, Michael is not a shy, unsure teenager but a symbol for a “dead way of living” (82). Going on the offensive, he impresses upon Anna that Michael signifies everything that is stagnant and oppressive in the English class system: “I’ve taught them. Nice jolly puppies, with no pretensions to brains, normally very friendly. . . . Once a year they get horribly

172 Scarecrows of Chivalry drunk over some boat that bumped some boat—I may be without humour, I persist in thinking that childish—and they systematically destroy the room of some outsider who can’t run, or went to the wrong school, or works a bit too obviously for a First. . . . I’m an outsider myself, but call that irresponsible and wicked” (81). Oliver recapitulates and contextualizes the narrative of the outsider who is wittingly or unwittingly harassed by the privileged, public school type at Oxbridge—a figure who appears in such diverse literary texts as Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall (1929) and Philip Larkin’s Jill (1945). His defensive anger is coupled with his moral high ground, making him self-righteous in what he perceives to be a justified taking down of the public school boy. And yet it is his insecurity vis-à-vis his class status and Michael’s that produces a critical aggressiveness incommensurate with the moment of banal social interaction. Even as he writhes within his own anxieties, an effect of his uncertain social location, Oliver, as the narrative makes clear, is in a position of masculine power and knowledge in relation to Anna—whose youth and gender make her particularly susceptible. After his confrontation with Michael, for which Anna rebukes him, he directs his anger at her ostensible stupidity. In his jealous anger, he savagely declares that she is making an “exhibition” of herself. In the next breath, he provokes her by insisting that her marriage (a hyperbolic forecast of her future) to Michael would make her mother happy and lead to her own intellectual and emotional death. Anna feels “battered” by him (82). Anna constantly feels that Oliver is “cruel,” “bullying,” “battering,” “fierce, intimidating and a dreadful strain” (144). His hold on her encompasses the psychological, intellectual, and emotional. The text constructs his wiry physicality and his intellectual precision as a menacing presence that disrupts not just the lives of those around him but the very peace of the pastoral landscape. Even the detached Henry finds Oliver unnerving in his constant excavation and criticism of Henry’s work and as an unwanted judge of Henry’s life. Oliver brings along with him a life and an idea of England with which Henry is unfamiliar and uninterested in exploring (a mark of Henry’s privilege). While rambling around Henry’s orchard and looking beyond the walls, Oliver mentions how artificial and archaic such idyllic slices of England appear to him. It is an unreal England “before subtopia got it, before concrete and corrugated iron and diesel fumes, before London and Birmingham and Manchester started putting out feelers . . . and spreading smoke further than that” (31). For Henry, Oliver’s England does not even exist within his purview, artistic or

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otherwise, and he feels that Oliver, through his unsolicited commentary on the state of England, is a forerunner of the subtopia that he apparently condemns, because Oliver “talk[ed] limits into land . . . that was easily limitless” (32). For Henry, Oliver symbolizes diminished, plebeian, and postindustrial England, like Hooper in Brideshead Revisited. Oliver condemns Henry for dissembling in his novels. Like a “terrier with a rat,” Oliver batters Henry for his reliance on false dichotomies of natural versus unnatural. He insists that “it is a minor version of the William Morris crankiness, the golden age, of beautiful mediævalism, the appeal to nature, whatever nature is” (115). This is a very clear narrative intertextual reference to Jim Dixon’s famous drunken public rant against Merrie Olde England in Amis’s Lucky Jim, where Jim condemns this obsession with a certain kind of nostalgia, arguing that “Merrie England” was “the most un-Merrie period in our history” (227). In a text that assiduously focuses on art and the visionary artist, Oliver stands for an ideal of art and England where there is no place for the limitless paganism of a D. H. Lawrence, nor of the mannered yet mythic pastoral of an E. M. Forster. For both Henry and the text, Oliver is the harsh and unpleasant presence who embodies constraints and foreshortened horizons of postwar England. While the rest of the Severell family, and Margaret (Oliver’s wife), are awed by, and indulgent of, Henry’s abrupt visionary pilgrimages where he disappears into the country for days and weeks, Oliver is disgusted with this eccentric and flamboyant behavior: “I can’t get away from this feeling that all this struggling with the elements just won’t wash any longer. We’ve got it under control—it’s a lie to pretend we haven’t” (88). Oliver, as the true representative of the postwar empiricist Everyman, looks at Henry’s escapades from the perspective of masculinist common sense, ostensibly integral to the Angry Young Man. Oliver emblematizes the transition from the larger-than-life force of nature that is Henry and his masculine artistry to the resolutely noncreative but precisely critical masculine energy that is suitable to the world of “life as it is lived by most human beings, or at least most English ones, jobs and marriages and culture, town planning and the Obscene Publications Act”—in short, the Larkinesque world of the quotidian and the mundane (91). Oliver’s alignment with the “new man,” in terms both of literary and masculine stylization and of the Movement and the Angry Young Man, is hammered home in this moment. In keeping with Orwellian ideals of the decent Englishman, and the ethic of the quotidian, Oliver, like the new

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crop of writers, wants to be seen as an average, ordinary man who just happened to enjoy and write literature. The new writers were employed professionals: Larkin was a librarian, and Amis and Wain were lecturers. The necessity of work as distinct from art was a significant part of their masculinity and perspective on art: if art was a reflection of everyday humanity, then the artist had to be intimately involved in the fabric of social life. A. Alvarez clarifies this point when he says, “The Movement poet is just like the man next door—in fact, he probably is the man next door. His work is aimed at the Common Reader because he is himself a Common Man—an ordinary person whose feelings and experiences are those of ‘everyone else’ ” (25). Their commitment to work emphasized their bourgeois ethics of masculine labor. Philip Larkin, while speaking of his own inclination to work, ties it specifically to his “solid background in which everybody worked. No question of it. It was immoral not to work” (qtd. in Oakes 65). Oliver clearly speaks from this position of defiant and worthwhile ordinariness, of not just the dignity but the necessity of earning one’s living. As his rant makes clear, art must reflect the life of the ordinary English person, which is about “jobs, marriages . . . and town planning.” In stark contrast to Oliver is Peter Hughes-Winterton. Peter is the adult embodiment of the young golden Michael against whom Oliver railed so violently. He is the pattern of the ideal gentleman that Oliver disrupts and condemns, Green’s “Establishment ideal” against whom “the decent man” is pitted. Unlike Michael, who was a befuddled teenager, Peter possesses “a generous indignation and genuine moral superiority” (290). Anna relies on his warmth, “honesty,” “strength,” and “simplicity.” If Oliver is the “decent man,” Peter is timeless Englishness, of the country, the estate, the empire, the public school, and the civil service. However, though he is “solid” and “golden” for Anna, the narrative reveals the stagnancy of the upperclass Englishman and his world. He is not an individual, but rather a massproduced pattern replicated through generations of the upper classes: “He rowed, and talked, spoke rhetorically and not very well, but with obvious honesty, in the Union, and went out with the Trinity Foot Beagles. These things became him. They were what he had been born and bred for.” Peter’s father, once he had been told that he had a son, had imagined him as “a tall, blond, elegant undergraduate at his own college” and “had waited for the actualization of this . . . so that Peter, for him, was now ideal Peter.” However, the cracks in the pattern emerge when the narrative slyly informs the reader that it is “more unlikely [Peter] would pass [the civil service ex-

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amination] than his father’s generation could conceive” (147). Sir Walter Hughes-Winterton and Peter are out of step with the times, unable to imagine that Peter might not make it through the examination they have assumed it is his birthright to pass. Cloistered within their perfect imagined realms of upper-class Englishness, they cannot quite fathom Oliver and his “subtopian” England. To consider Anna, Oliver, and Peter within the frame of changing Englishness and masculinities is to understand how this particular text, though published in the 1960s, sought to correct, and complicate, the sympathetic cultural reading of the Angry Young Man. The narrative does not only read Oliver’s insecurities and aggression as a rebellion against the oppressive straitjacket of the Establishment and the class system. More important, it locates Oliver within a web of gendered and classed relationships in the post-imperial period where his ascendance and assertion are connected to the decline of the hegemonic model and the quest for female empowerment. While Peter Hughes-Winterton is far more sympathetic than Oliver, he nevertheless signifies the mindless routinization of privileged upperclass life. The narrative draws particular attention to the unacknowledged power and stagnation of the landed gentry. However, what is most striking, of course, is that Anna’s quest for self-assertion is determined within the contours of her relationship with men, different though they are, and the stringent expectations of a patriarchal society.

Anna’s Choices: Companionship, Marriage, and Freedom Anna experiences both the possibility and the limitations of being an educated, independent woman in the 1950s. While Anna attempts to assert her independent (artistic) identity, she does so against already extant models of idealized middle-class femininity as represented by Oliver’s wife, Margaret. Margaret conforms to, or at least desperately clings to, the ideal of the perfect homemaker. Elizabeth Wilson argues that “special role of the homemaker” whose sole role was the welfare of her family constituted one of the central tenets of postwar discourse of womanhood. As befitting an affluent society, this “special role” was integrated with an “acquisitive slant” (37). The growth and orientation of women’s magazines promoted the ideas of the glamorous yet pragmatic housewife who fills her home with the most tasteful and up-to-date objects and gadgets, which reflect both her and her husband’s status.4 Margaret, whom Anna initially envisions as the perfect

176 Scarecrows of Chivalry woman inhabiting a fulfilled married life, can only imagine herself in terms of tropes offered to her by magazines: of idealized wife and mother, particularly in terms of the self-abnegation apparently required in these roles. She denotes the beautiful and poised but personality-less women who marry the lower-class, virile man in the Angry Young Man narratives. Indeed, her descent into madness is Byatt’s interpretation of what happens to these disposable women who are merely counters to mark the successful upward movement of the Angry protagonist. Margaret’s ideas about home, family, and love are shaped by women’s magazines, though she feigns condescension toward them. She is “addicted” to them, not following the “bright little hints for improving one’s ‘home’ and appearance” but “[knowing] her way about it altogether” (22). Indeed, when her marriage falls apart, and Oliver no longer pays any attention to her, her apathy and depression morph into a maniacal loss of proportion as she gazes at the magnified images of eyes and lips in a fashion magazine. She slips inside the magnified images, becoming one of the “jumble of bright dead things” cataloged and photographed in Vogue. She begins to think that bits of her were “separate and falling irretrievably away” (182). For her, being a wife means reworking herself to become what her husband wants. She longs to be formed by Oliver, waiting as a “willing tabula rasa,” and the deliberate withdrawal of his attentions leaves her floundering without any sense of who she is, having repudiated her old self, her life, her parents, and her friends in order to reshape herself for him (129). Her madness and breakdown occur precisely because without the “male eye” to please, “Margaret was lost” (177). Margaret stands at the extreme limit of conforming to the social-cultural practices of middle-class womanhood. These cultural expectations shape Anna’s life and choices. She goes to Cambridge and has the potential to forge whatever career she might choose. However, as a woman, and as her mother’s daughter, marriage and domesticity haunt her as an expected gender trajectory, and a potential foreclosure to any attempts at writing or self-discovery. As a woman, she is “constantly tempted as [her father] would never have been, to give up, to rest on someone else’s endeavour, to expend her energy ‘usefully’ at the kitchen sink.” She has to withstand the “socially approved” temptation “to stay where one was” (201). It must be stressed here that social approval refers to the pervasive discourse of motherhood and marriage institutionalized by the welfare state. It is not merely the effect of the accumulated weight of patriarchal conventions, but rather those conventions that are enshrined in postwar governmental and media practices.

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The welfare state, even as it eased the burden of mothers and married women, did so by institutionalizing and making explicit the gendered nature of the nation-state. McClintock contends that the gendering of the nation is multidimensional; it is based on gendering both space and time. Imagining the nation as community relies on the “prior naturalizing of women and children within the domestic sphere” and at the same time signifies the female body as primordial and the repository of national tradition (“No Longer” 89). In this narrative, the female symbolizes the unchanging past, while the male is the active, dynamic agent of progress, looking to the future. Elleke Boehmer, too, notes this aspect of national processes, emphasizing the discursive link between the rhetoric of the modern family and the larger national community, which idealize and entrench gender roles. Even as women are citizens, they continue to be subordinated within national discourse through the containment of “their sexuality, mobility, the trope of motherhood, [and] rights of citizenship” (De Mel 2). As discussed briefly in the previous chapter, welfare state policies legitimized this particular discourse of the nation. Wilson argues that the welfare state is “not just a set of services, it is also a set of ideas about society, about the family, and—not least important—about women, who have a centrally important role within the family, as its lynchpin” (Wilson 9). The assumption underpinning the proposals of the Beveridge Report was that in a “domestic partnership” the wife would be economically dependent (the husband would make insurance payments for both himself and his wife) while she would bear and rear children for king and country. Indeed, in a particularly infamous passage, Beveridge points out that “the attitude of the housewife to gainful employment outside the home is not and should not be the same as that of a single woman. She has other duties” (para. 114). The report institutionalized women’s citizenship as ultimately determined by their reproductive function and familial role of being unpaid caretakers of the family; the corollary to this enshrining of the heteronormative family was the fundamental duty of every man to be gainfully employed and be the family breadwinner/ head of household.5 Anna’s options are circumscribed by a set of gendered assumptions that set her at a disadvantage from the male protagonists who similarly struggle with their own class and inherited gender ideals. Indeed, the narrative hammers this point home through her pregnancy. Her pregnancy means that she has to leave Cambridge, and instead of telling Oliver, she decides to marry the chivalric and eminently suitable Peter Hughes-Winterton, who is “a pillar of strength,” “blond, solid and confident” (148). She believes she

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has decided on the perfect escape: she can please her mother, fulfill gender expectations, repudiate Oliver, and avoid the stigma of unwed motherhood. However, she discovers that the comfortable world of “hunting, rowing, and politics” is deadening and cyclical. Anna is expected to shed any individuality and conform to the faceless pattern of country gentry (148). Her prospective mother-in-law assumes that once Peter and Anna marry, Anna will drop the pursuit of a degree and live at home with her so as to allow Peter to finish his degree without any distractions. Her wishes are not consulted, nor is there any doubt that this would be the course that Anna herself would choose to take. For Anna, this most suitable and expected of trajectories is stifling, claustrophobic, and soul-destroying. The reality of the “kitchen sink” here is the material consequence of being a middle-class woman, of biology as destiny. Even as she remakes herself as an independent writing subject, separating herself from her father, she links her future to two different types of men: the “socially approved” temptation of marriage and love frame Anna’s search for independence. The novel’s title, as well its epigraph, emphasizes this crucial role of love in Anna’s trajectory. The title is drawn from Sir Walter Raleigh’s poem “A Farewell to False Love,” which is also the epigraph: A fortress foil’d which reason did defend, A siren song, a fever of the mind, A maze wherein affection finds no end, A ranging cloud that runs before the wind, A substance like the shadow of the sun, A goal of grief for which the wisest run.

Byatt declares that she chose it “as a wry comment on the female belief in, or illusion of, the need to be ‘in love’ which was the danger which threatened the autonomy of my heroine” (xi). Although acquiring girlfriends was an integral part of successfully asserting their independent masculinity for protagonists like Jim Dixon and Charles Lumley, it did not imply the curtailment of autonomy, nor were these new men steeped in, or shaped by, the discourse of love. On the contrary, having a suitable (ladylike) upperclass girlfriend enabled their upward mobility in what they saw as a homosocial environment, and only served to concretize their independence and triumph. While this is not to discount the fear of domesticity and what was seen as potential emasculation through marriage, the Angry Young Man novels of wish-fulfillment resolved those fears by depicting beautiful and submissive women as love objects and vilifying “high-powered,” educated

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women. To return to Anna, the gendered importance of love and the discursive imperative of marriage determine her trajectory of self-assertion. Significantly, Anna does not quite submit nor is she consumed by the power of love in the same way as Margaret. She “feels distant from things,” including Oliver (229). As Oliver tells her, she is not capable of devotion. She is not particularly interested in Oliver’s life or his difficulties. Nor is she consumed by her love for him; rather, through the course of their relationship, she insists that she wants “someone to talk to” and to not have to “worry about people’s feelings all the time” (231). Yet, for all her lack of interest, Anna’s choice is set up as necessarily foreclosed: if she chooses companionship and a sexual relationship, she has no choice but to follow that into domesticity and marriage because of her pregnancy. Her identity is determined in terms of her relationships within a strictly patriarchal frame. She will reflect others rather than assert herself through art, although, at the end of the novel, there is a slight hint of an alternative path, of independence in, and through, companionship. Toward the end of the novel, Anna vacillates between Peter, Oliver, and her independence. There are several key moments in the text where Anna’s horizons open up, precisely because she is the intelligent daughter of a well-known and wealthy author. At Cambridge, when Henry finds that she is unhappy, he offers to support her endeavors to find herself. The sensation of freedom and flight is palpable in the narrative energy focalized through Anna: “And to be alone. What not escape? . . . Why not fly in the face of this bureaucratic deity, why not take what was offered, what one could get . . . ?” (202). This sensation of breaking loose reoccurs when Anna decides to leave Peter and Oliver for Mexico. For the only time in the text, Anna, who is usually passive to the point of paralysis, is caught up in a “blaze of decision” (297). However, in both these moments, her relationship with Oliver impels her to alter her decision. When she meets Oliver as she heads out the door to leave for Mexico, she says: “I was just going,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t have gone far, I suspect.” Oliver’s grip was like a claw on her elbow; he was holding himself together terribly; he looked at her directly, with a tremendous effort, but his face twitched, and Anna noticed suddenly that his knees were trembling. (279)

On the one hand, the novel seems to indicate Anna’s failure to achieve independence as an individuated writing subject, since Oliver has his claws in

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Anna. She watches “her last chance, or illusion, which? slip away as Oliver held her from it” (297). On the other hand, though her independence is certainly curtailed and Oliver’s oppressive presence seems entrenched in her life, the end still carries a suggestion (not a very strong one) for her movement toward a mature, assured writer. Even if she were to continue with Oliver, the dynamic of power appears to have shifted slightly in her favor, as it is she who supports him through his moment of extreme emotion, for he is “shaking” while she is calm. Further, in choosing Oliver over Peter, the lesser of two evils, Anna has chosen the possibility of a more equitable relationship, as Oliver’s insecurities match her own struggles to establish her identity, while staying with Peter would have resulted in her absorption into the chivalric, homosocial world in which she would only produce more Peter Hughes-Wintertons. But the text, for its particular dislike of Oliver, nevertheless connects Anna’s neuroses with Oliver’s; they perceive themselves to be mirror images of one another. It is the “eternal reality of the kitchen sink”—of the double bind of possibilities and limitations that frame both Anna and Oliver’s lives—that ultimately brings them together. Anna and Oliver experience the “world of love and the sun [in] manageable proportions” (210). Their lives are the lives of containment and practicalities, of “greyness, and remembered brightness” (298). Unlike Henry, who stands for the Lawrentian pastoral and Blakean vision, and Peter, who is the comforting but bland representative of a gentlemanly pattern, Anna and Oliver represent the straitened possibilities of postwar England. In a similar vein, Barbara Pym’s An Unsuitable Attachment engages with the potential egalitarianism and cautious hopefulness of a postwar future, even as her narrative is steeped in a melancholy for a bygone era. The novel depicts the alterations in the men and women of the upper-middle class as they continue to live their self-contained parish lives while West Indian immigrants and lucky Jims arrive in their midst. Pym’s novel of manners ironizes and sympathizes with these circumscribed lives, but at the same time anthropologically documents them as part of a changing, or fading, Englishness.

“Very Barbara Pym”: Englishness, Englishwomen, and Literary Traditions It is fitting that this chapter, and this book, ends with an examination of Barbara Pym’s ironic, detached style in An Unsuitable Attachment (1963,

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1982), with its upper-middle-class women, ineffective gentlemen, and the titular “unsuitable attachment” between a “new man” and upper-middleclass (gentle)woman. In considering Pym’s style, her novel of manners, and her engagement with community, this final section moves away from the central argument about men with which this book has so far been concerned. The focus on Pym’s women inevitably necessitates a shift in terms of both analytical and generic concerns. And yet, Pym is integral to the vision of this book as she considers the eruption of the “new man” in the context of upper-middle-class men and women who usually circulate in the background in Wain, Amis, and even Fleming. Pym’s anthropological detachment mediated by gendered and classed sympathy, her Austenian irony, and her perfectly crafted “miniatures”6—worlds inhabited by “excellent women,” suitable men, and the clergy in self-contained parish communities centered on the church—make her oeuvre unique, as it shows a very specific segment of the English middle class in a time of the Angry Young Man. Her miniature worlds focused on very specific kinds of Englishwomen, and their lives rendered them both middlebrow and anachronistic, to the point that contemporary critical works on the literature and culture of the period ranging from Kenneth Allsop to Rubin Rabinovitz did not include Pym in their list of significant postwar writers.7 In contrast to what was seen as zeitgeist literature, Pym’s narratives represent an upperclass churchgoing English world that is at once timeless and dying.8 She offers the view from the other side; paradoxically, hers is a response to the Angries, and also, perhaps more surprisingly, to Evelyn Waugh. In An Unsuitable Attachment, she connects the Angry Young Man to the lower echelons of the upper-middle class, the realm occupied by Wavian protagonists such as Charles Ryder and Paul Pennyfeather. Written between 1960 and 1962, An Unsuitable Attachment was Pym’s seventh novel. Ianthe Broome, a chinchilla-wearing librarian and canon’s daughter, buys a house and moves into a quiet North London parish on the death of her mother. The parish of St. Basil is the center around which all events occur. The parish as community gives Pym’s novels a distinctly English flavor.9 Ianthe Brooke meets and falls in love with John Challow, the new librarian and an unsuitable man, while being courted by Rupert Stonebird and Mervyn Cantrell, who want to marry her for her ornamentalism and her good furniture respectively. The second protagonist is Sophia Ainger, the vicar’s wife, who does not possess the humanity, tolerance, and warmth that vicar’s wives are supposed to inherently possess. She has

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an unsuitable attachment to her cat, Faustina, and Emma-like, she tries to engineer a marriage between her sister Penelope, who is desperate to get married, and the suitable Rupert Stonebird. The novel ends with Ianthe’s wedding to John and his joining the parish, a return to the equilibrium of quintessential Englishness.10 Hazel Holt, Pym’s friend, colleague, and literary executor, noted that the phrase “very Barbara Pym” became convenient literary shorthand that readers used to invoke the very particular postwar English world and style of Pym’s novels (Holt xiii). In fact, it is used as shorthand to invoke Englishness itself, as Pym and her novels became synonymous with an evanescent but distinctive national culture. Pym’s Englishness signifies the “ordinary sane novels about ordinary sane things” (Larkin, Selected Letters 376–78). In this, her worlds align with the versions that have appeared in this book (those of Orwell, Wain, and Larkin), but what makes her take different is that it is underpinned by the Anglican Church. In Jane and Prudence, she observes the church during Harvest Festival, “an English scene . . . and a precious thing” (26). Pym’s understanding of Christianity’s place in English culture matched T. S. Eliot’s view that culture and religion were “different aspects of the same thing” (Eliot, Notes 27).11 Her English world is gentler and happier than that of Philip Larkin, with whom she had the most in common in terms of both literary style and tone of Englishness. Larkin’s bicycle-clipped Englishman in “Church Going” who stands “up at the holy end,” “[b]ored, uninformed,” and out of place in a church, doesn’t seem to share much with Pym’s ardent churchgoers who religiously participate in church fairs (58–59). Yet they undoubtedly belong to the same England, an England of containment, pragmatism tinged with melancholia, and the quotidian far removed from the center of things. Brian Firth noted the similarity between the two and pointed out that, like Larkin, Pym writes with “an unpretentious stoicism and an unscornful but ironic view of man’s potential.”12 If Larkin’s poetic personae are the conflicted, solitary, middle-class Englishmen trying to find their place in postwar society, Pym’s novel of manners describe the upper-middle-class English gentlemen who continue to exist within a gentlemanly purview—as clergymen, Oxford dons, anthropologists, and civil servants. However, these gentlemen too, like Larkin’s Englishmen (and Waugh’s), are distanced, detached, and curiously ineffective. There are, however, other differences: Pym’s Englishmen are resolutely upper-middle-class; more significant, they are objects of the female

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gaze, and the reader rarely has access to their thoughts. Pym’s novels famously focus on and are focalized through women who, in other narratives, would be on the margins of the central romance plot, unmarried “on-theshelf” gentlewomen or, to use her term, “spinsters.” Though these women conform to social and gendered expectations of upper-class womanhood, or at least their version of it—of modesty, piety, and service—they are often pointedly critical and ironic about them. The Pym narrator is observant and sharply ironic, particularly in her depictions of men. An Unsuitable Attachment signaled the end of Pym’s career, when Jonathan Cape, Pym’s publisher since 1949, curtly rejected it, as did twentythree other publishers.13 This rejection indicated the marginalization of a certain kind of Englishness interleaved with rejection of a particular literary style and tradition, especially since Pym and her world were seen as being out of step with the contemporary reconfiguration of nation and national identity. Pym did not publish again, though she continued to write novels, until she was named the most underrated writer of the past seventyfive years by two literary judges (the only living writer to be named by more than one participant) in a Times Literary Supplement poll, published on January 21, 1977. Both Philip Larkin, poet and national monument, and Lord David Cecil, former Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, praised her; Larkin celebrated her “unique eye . . . for the small poignancies and comedies of everyday life” (“Reputations Revisited” 66) while Cecil held up her novels as “the finest examples of high comedy” (67). A day later, TLS did a front-page feature on Pym. In the wake of such a singular turn of media events, she was courted by a number of presses, and Macmillan published Quartet in Autumn, while An Unsuitable Attachment was published posthumously in 1982.14 One of the most often cited reasons for the strange death and revival of Pym’s career is that Tom Maschler, the new senior editor at Cape, rejected it.15 Maschler had been brought in to revolutionize their lists and update them to the spirit of the 1960s, a time of sexual revolution and racial unrest in Britain, where Pym’s closed world of spinsters and church jumble sales did not possess cultural interest or importance. Pym acknowledged this fact when she says of her book, “It seemed to be me that it might appear naïve and unsophisticated, though it isn’t really, to an unsympathetic publisher’s reader hoping for that novel about negro homosexuals, young men in advertising, etc.” (Private 220). Critics often cite this letter as evidence of her ability to distance herself from her pain, but seem to ignore the implica-

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tions of the phrase. Though the letter is undoubtedly written during a time of rejection and crisis of self-confidence, Pym’s bitterness manifests itself in the throwaway lines about advertising, negroes, and homosexuals—a reference to James Baldwin—with its casual snobbery, racism, and homophobia (this last is possibly an unfair charge, as her novels consistently featured many sympathetic portrayals of queer men, both stereotypical and not, but they certainly were not “negro homosexuals”). Larkin returned to the “negro-Homosexual rubbish” when he wrote caustically to Charles Monteith of Faber and Faber encouraging him to consider Pym’s work. Indeed, Larkin went so far as to ridicule everything extant in the market: “I feel it is a great shame if ordinary sane novels about ordinary sane things can’t find a publisher these days. This is the tradition of Jane Austen and Trollope, and I refuse to believe that no one wants its successors today. Why should I have to choose between spy rubbish, science fiction rubbish, Negro-homosexual rubbish, or dope-take nervous-breakdown rubbish?” (Monteith 552). For Larkin, Pym followed in the Great Tradition of Austen and Trollope, while genre fiction with its mixed heritage had flooded the book market. In his catalog, the fiction he cites does not merit the label of art, while Pym’s does. Furthermore, he compares her novels about “sane ordinary things” to the “rubbish” that publishers appear to favor. Sane, ordinary novels about ordinary English things are contrasted to the “negro homosexual,” exemplar of the outlandish and bizarre. The latter threatens the cultural insularity of Pym’s English worlds, since narratives about his life edge out her understated novels about fading gentlewomen and gentlemen. Publishers, Pym argues, ignored her works for novels about strangers and interlopers. Funnily enough, her rejected novel engages with the question of strangers in England, more so than any earlier or later novels. I will return to the issue of the West Indian presence in An Unsuitable Attachment, which doesn’t quite construct them as interlopers but seems ambiguous about their being in London. While secondary to the issue of the queer black man, Pym also classes the novel about the “young man in advertising” as more desirable to publishers, since he is a sign of the times. Indeed, the Angries and their descendants were exactly this group of people; John Wain’s Hurry on Down springs to mind: lucky Jims blithely crossing class boundaries to land new-fangled jobs in television, radio, and advertising, though, again, her rejected novel does feature one of these young men as a love interest for the protagonist. This rejection of her novels, which is a rejection of her literary style and her fictional worlds, mimics the lives of

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English men and women in her novels. The parishes and villages in Pym’s worlds seem to be “push[ed] / To the side of their own lives,” to appropriate a line from Philip Larkin (115).16 The life of the nation seems to happen off the pages, somewhere else, far away from Ianthe Broome and Mark and Sophia Ainger. The reader is made aware of this when Ianthe goes to visit John in his bedsit, the representative dwelling in many popular literary and cultural texts of the period, but seen through Ianthe’s eyes, it seems to be another country with which she is unfamiliar and uncomfortable. Of course, the presence of West Indians in the parish, and the brief throwaway mention of the Notting Hill riots of 1958, also emphasize the sense of distance from the change, even as the narrative notes the shift: “Race relations seemed almost cozy discussed at this distance from Notting Hill or Brixton . . . But that had been last month” (86). Notting Hill was, of course, the event that forced Britain to confront its history of empire, race, and class at home. It was sparked when a group of Teddy Boys (a working-class youth subculture that emerged in response to the simultaneous decline of working-class communal networks and increased spending power) attacked several West Indian men in different incidents over the course of a week. These attacks occurred in the wake of increasing aggressiveness by the Teddy Boys (influenced by the right-wing Union Movement founded by Sir Oswald Mosley) toward West Indian immigrants in North Kensington. The Notting Hills Riots of 1958 lasted two weeks and shaped government policy toward immigration, discourses of assimilation, policy on race relations, and, most important, all subsequent discussions of British national identity. In Pym’s novel it is cordoned off as a distant event and the subject of a “cozy” chat in a landlady’s flat. Pym, unsurprisingly, felt that her novels were seen as naïve and unsophisticated because they were neither about, nor written by, “men and Americans”; they also did not deal with the issues on the front pages of newspapers.

Remote and Detached Gentlemen Barbara Pym’s narratives, of course, did engage with men, but they were the antitheses of the men favored by the book market. John Halperin argues that the men and women in Pym’s novels are engaged in “a war of the sexes,” where men are “overbearing and egotistical, on the one hand, and on the other, weak and incompetent” dependent on the tireless and unselfish support of “excellent women” (89). While Pym’s clear-eyed, ironic

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narrator consistently punctures patriarchal and masculine assumptions, to read women as good and men as bad is patently reductive. Pym, in fact, locates Mark and Rupert within their gentlemanly and professional milieu. Mark, as vicar and shepherd of souls, clearly believes he has a vocation. He also operates within the gentlemanly ideal of service. Hence he chooses the poor, marginal parish of St. Basil’s Church in North London rather than the more fashionable and wealthy neighborhoods of Kensington. Mark fits into the literary tradition of the good clergymen traced back to Austen and Trollope; he believes in Christian charity and fraternity. However, his practice of it is uncertain and awkward. The reader first encounters Mark as he walks to the “fringe” of his parish, to the “big gaunt houses” too “near to railway to ever become residentially desirable,” in order to “establish some kind of contact” with his “exotic parishioners” (16).17 Both Mark and the narrator are clearly outside their comfort zone of Englishness. As is evident from Mark’s thoughts, he thinks of the West Indian immigrants in his parish, in London, as exotic strangers and the street that separates his respectable neighborhood from theirs becomes the “contact zone.”18 The street where the West Indians live has “brightly—almost garishly—painted houses” and is forever marked off as an Othered space, ever since Sophia Ainger mistook tomatoes in a window as exotic fruit, prompting her to name the district “love apple” (16). Mark constantly returns to the exoticism and strangeness of the West Indians even as he refers to them as “his” parishioners. He is never quite able to view them as people like him or his English church members. In fact, the West Indians are never individuated either in his mind or in the narrative; they always exist as a group, as the “strangers in our midst” (21). Even as he does not succeed in fully integrating his parish, Mark’s sense of duty and distant benevolence speaks directly to both his profession as a clergyman and his gentlemanly ancestry.19 He visits the West Indian families in the hope of discovering “likely boys and men to sing in the choir and serve at the altar” (16).20 However, he does not seem to have much luck, nor does he seem to pursue the matter. This reveals the apparently unbridgeable distance between the new immigrants and the English natives—even the most well-meaning yet ineffectual churchman cannot connect.21 The inability to connect lies in the continued exoticization and Othering of the West Indians; as a corollary, the inability to individuate them repeats the imperial affect in the new contact zone. This attempted interaction also shows Mark’s central character trait and possible failing, his remoteness,

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further emphasized during a conversation with Sister Dew. The narrative deliberately contrasts Mark with Sister Dew, physically, spiritually, and socially: “Sister Dew smiled up at Mark, for she was a little dumpy woman. Her prominent blue eyes, seeming to bulge with curiosity, met Mark’s eyes, which were also blue, but with that remote expression sometimes found in the eyes of sailors or explorers. Although invariably kind and courteous he had the air of seeming not to be particularly interested in human beings—a somewhat doubtful quality in a parish priest, though it has its advantages” (17). Sister Dew is “dumpy,” “tedious,” and “petty-minded” in spite of her belonging to the “noble profession” of nursing (17–18). In contrast, Mark is tall and spare with “remote” blue eyes. Moreover, his courtesy and gravitas contrast with her officiousness. They embody their class differences. Sister Dew’s speech further marks this difference when she tells Mark, “But you wouldn’t want pussy going on in your lounge, would you?” (17). Mark silently contemplates whether a vicarage could ever have a lounge, with its associations of classless modernity. He also silently judges Sister Dew’s inappropriately playful reference to their cat, Faustina, as “pussy.” The juxtaposition between the lower-class tedious woman and the upperclass remote clergyman becomes particularly striking in the description of Mark’s detachment: his eyes have the “remote expression sometimes found in sailors and explorers” (17). This evocative phrase invokes and condenses the entire history of the imperial Englishman. He is detached from his immediate setting to always contemplate something beyond the horizon, unable to get involved in the petty concerns of Sister Dew, church fairs, and jumble sales, though he is at the center of these events. As his wife says of him, “he is not of this world” (99). And yet he is a clergyman in a North London parish, and content to be so. Mark could fit into either of the two versions of bourgeois gentlemanliness that Jimmy Porter delineates in Look Back in Anger. Porter empathizes with his upper-middle-class wife Alison’s father, Colonel Redfern, the old military man recently retired from the Indian Army, while despising Alison’s mother. Porter calls Colonel Redfern “one of those sturdy old plants left over from the Edwardian Wilderness that can’t understand why the sun isn’t shining any more” (Osborne, Look Back 66). The textual rendering of Mark in An Unsuitable Attachment as remote and forever looking off into an ever-receding horizon carries the same note of melancholy and circumscription. Porter interprets Alison’s brother, Nigel, a member of his own generation, differently, stripping him of any imperial author-

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ity even though he has been educated in the same mold of command and restraint. He accuses Nigel of “Vaguery in the Field” because “his knowledge of life and ordinary human beings is so hazy, he really deserves some sort of decoration for it” (20). Pym and Osborne, though they come from opposite ends of the gender and class spectrum, offer similar depictions of upper-middle-class men. However, while Osborne’s play is condemnatory and Pym’s novel is more sympathetic, both recognize the shifts of empire and nation as registering in individual men’s lives and temperaments, especially in terms of remoteness and distance. In the case of Rupert Stonebird, this gentlemanly detachment is exacerbated or rather professionalized in his occupation as an anthropologist. Rupert, a university lecturer and researcher, spends most of his time marking student papers, reading, writing articles for scholarly journals, and attending lectures. He is disengaged from social and communal rituals, but he is a keen observer, as befitting his profession and his gentlemanly antecedents. The novel opens with Rupert watching two women walking down the street, and his metaphor to describe their mutual observation is once again striking and instructive: “For as an anthropologist he knew that men and women may observe each other as warily as wild animals hidden in long grass” (13). Rupert’s description brings the empire (Africa) and the site of his research into tribal kinship patterns right into the heart of the parish. This world is apparently antithetical to the primitive tribes, but ever since Joseph Conrad read London as the heart of darkness, the civilized/primitive divide when invoked is always ironic, and Pym with her anthropologically inflected style is especially so. In the parish Rupert observes Sophia and Penelope, Sophia observes and speculates upon Rupert and Ianthe, and Ianthe observes Rupert and Sophia. Each individual hides and considers the others, assessing and measuring before establishing contact. As a social anthropologist who examines “the behavior of men in society,” Rupert examines his neighborhood with the same detachment as his usual object of study (34). As a consequence, he consciously attempts to fade into the background, changing into a “dark suit, so that he could sit quietly observing rather than being observed” (38). Rupert’s detachment prevents him from fully participating in the activities of the community, which makes him unmanly. He fades into the background and does not assert himself as men have been normalized to do. He, like Larkin’s postgentlemen, turns that detachment into an examination of his own patterns of behavior, studying if, and when, he deviates from his normative routine,

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and why. He finds himself returning to the church that he had left in his youth, which leaves him with an “uncomfortable and disturbing” sensation (35). Indeed, the manner of his contemplation of his own belief is illustrative of his distance and consequent uncertainty: “And now . . . in a poorly attended North London church of hideous architecture and amid clouds of strong incense, he seemed to have regained that faith” (35). He notices the minutiae of his return to belief: the poorly attended church, the hideous architecture, and the strong incense. In other words, he notes the decline in belief in the neighborhood that reflects national decline. In the 1950s only 10 percent of the population were regular churchgoers (Marwick 101). He passes judgment on the ugliness of the architecture and the overly strong incense. And yet the doubt implicit in the syntax undercuts the possible authenticity and absoluteness of faith. He “seemed to have regained his faith”; he does not know if he has, and he is not certain. His selfaware detachment leads him to speculate if it wasn’t merely “nostalgia for his boyhood” brought on by the smell of incense and the feel of the spring evening that prompted him to go to church (35). Despite an absence of certainty in his faith, he does attempt to reintegrate into Englishness, as he decides to attend the social functions that are integral to the practice of churchgoing. Like Larkin’s personae, who also do not quite fit into their “customs and establishments” (Poems 105) and are painfully self-conscious, Stonebird, uncomfortable in England, is the object of his own studious detachment.22 However, Rupert’s desire to engage with the community signals his desire to assimilate into his English social structure even though he is never quite at home. He attempts to “retribalize” himself. His detachment is directed both toward his social setting, and inward, to consider how he does or does not conform to classed norms of manhood. His acquaintances and friends can see his discomfort in being an Englishman in England among others of his class. For instance, Rupert confuses Penelope (Sophia’s sister), since he does not quite conform to ideas of masculinity to which she is accustomed. He is “inhibited in his conversation, and unresponsive to her semi-flirtatious looks and remarks” (83). He is shy and restrained. Because Rupert fails to read social cues and does not participate in courtship rituals, Penelope reads him as not “quite manly, or not manly in the way she was used to” (83). He is not a modern postwar man, like the men in “the City, or in advertising, chartered accountancy, or even television” (83). Except for the City, all of the fields listed are representative of postwar modernity

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and professionalism. Rupert, a retiring and detached academic, appears unmanly and anachronistic to Penelope. He is out of step. However, Rupert perseveres in his awkward attempts to join in the rituals that bind the community together: he attends Ianthe’s wedding. When confronted by teary-eyed Penelope and Sophia, Rupert responds “stiffly” and pedantically that the whole atmosphere of a wedding “generates emotion,” emotion that he quite clearly does not feel (250). When informed that the ivory prayer book that the bride held in her hand belonged to her mother, Rupert, the anthropologist, connects a personal memento to the larger imperial flows of goods and raw materials determined by unequal power dynamics: “When I was in East Africa I didn’t somehow associate the tusks of elephants with covers for Anglican devotional books” (251). He is absolutely right, of course. However, his statement disrupts the flow of emotion that constitutes the conversation. He connects colonial exploitation directly to the English quotidian and ornamental. In the process he has moved from the emotional to the impersonal, from the human to the structural. Indeed, this is further evidence of his detachment and his inability to participate. Penelope and Sophia, put off by his impersonality, leave him to “observe the scene. After all, [he is] used to doing that” (251). The final scene, like the opening sequence, involves Rupert observing. Though he is left alone and dispirited, there is the possibility of forging a connection when he sees Penelope eating her lunch alone and decides to join her. Once again, Rupert observes her from afar, and contemplates approaching her. His continued awareness of his inability to fulfill the requirements of middle-class English manhood haunts him. For all that, in this final scene, he is poised for emotional investment and connection. Rupert and Mark, unlike Larkin’s personae, are gentlemen in that they are comfortably upper-middle class and products of Oxbridge and public schools, although the latter is never made explicitly clear. By virtue of class, educational background, and descent, they are the Establishment against which Philip Larkin, John Wain, Kinsgley Amis, and John Osborne rebelled. Yet they, too, are post-gentlemen, gentlemen in the process of alteration, unsure of themselves and their place in the world, as the imperial ethic that sustained the gentleman ideal slowly fades into obsolescence. By the early sixties, Britain had been forced to withdraw from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Malaysia, the Gold Coast, and South Africa. Britain withdrew from Palestine, leaving the impending Israel/ Palestine conflict for the United Nations to resolve. Most significantly, the Suez crisis of 1956,

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a watershed moment in imperial disintegration, had already occurred, hastening the decolonization process in Africa through the course of the 1960s. It seems far-fetched to see the empire in Pym’s tight, insular miniatures, but that, as I have already demonstrated, is not the case. The empire is present everywhere in Pym’s world-building—in her language, her method, her content, and, of course, the delineation of her male characters. Mark has the “remote eyes” of a sailor, while Rupert as one who codifies and studies primitive tribes in former and decolonizing imperial spaces is detached to the point of alienation from his society. Meanwhile, the presence of the “exotic” West Indians on “love apple” road across the street brings the contact zone right into the heart of this English upper-middleclass North London parish.

Spinsters, Clergymen’s Wives, and Unsuitable Men In direct contrast to these upper-middle-class men, John Challow is neither remote nor detached. Unlike Rupert and Mark, who are unquestionably suitable by virtue of their unimpeachable class credentials—Rupert is the son of an archdeacon, and Mark, though not possessed of a private income like his wife, is the son of a clergyman—John seems to erupt into the quiet parish from obscure origins that the narrative leaves deliberately vague. He is mysterious within the diegetic space of the narrative, but only because he is incomprehensible to the upper-middle-class characters, and lies outside their purview of knowability. John’s unusual status as a hypermasculine figure is signaled by Ianthe’s immediate discomfort. He is a handsome young man “whose brown eyes looked at her in a way she found slightly disturbing” (45). Physical attraction and the frisson of sexual interest mark him off from the men that Ianthe knows, especially the eminently suitable but dull Rupert. John always looks at her “intently,” with a “penetrating gaze” (114). He is forthright, almost aggressive in his interest (50). Ianthe becomes fully aware of John’s hypermasculinity when she finally acknowledges that she is not merely taking a sisterly interest in John’s well-being. He is “different from the men she had been seeing on her holiday and indeed all her life—different from Mark Ainger and Basil Branche, from Edwin Pettigrew and Rupert Stonebird, and from all the ranks of clergymen and schoolmasters stretching back into the past like pale imitations of men, it now seemed” (198). While Mark and Rupert, caught within their remoteness and detachment, are “pale imitations of men,” Ianthe perceives

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John, who lives paycheck to paycheck and whose previous employment was doing “crowd work” and “dancing in a night club scene” in films, as a real man, unlike any man she has ever encountered within her own class (46). For Ianthe, despite his unsuitability, John, then, is manlier, more forthright, more assertive, more emotionally invested, more sincere than any other man. Significantly, this matches the characterization of the Angry Young Men by the Angry Young Men, especially in the way the upper-class women in these texts saw the often violent protagonists. In Look Back in Anger, when the upper-class Alison describes her first encounter with the lower-class Jimmy to a friend, she says, “Everything about him seemed to burn, his face, the edges of his hair glistened and seemed to spring off his head, and his eyes were so blue and full of the sun” (Osborne 45). Of course, this is an extreme glorification of the virility and authenticity of the lowerclass man who blazes into a phlegmatic and restrained upper-class world. Ianthe’s perspective on John Challow is a much more measured version of the same sentiment. Larkin, in his critique of the novel, argued that this relationship between John and Ianthe was never fully realized—a critique with which Pym agreed. Pym struggled with the romance.23 In one of the earlier drafts, the relationship ends once John is exposed as the cad, and Ianthe marries the more appropriate Rupert. Pym’s struggles with the relationship reveal the difficulty of breaking the almost hermetically sealed space of the upper-middle-class parish community, of bringing an external factor that does not quite conform to the unspoken rules of gendered and respectable behavior. The relationship in its final form occurs in fits and starts and is left deliberately inchoate. In fact, the final revelation of love happens off the page. The narrative’s take on the relationship successfully illustrates the complications of crossing class boundaries in a constrained world where women are overdetermined by scripts of respectability. The relationship mirrors the central romances in the novels of the Angry Young Men where the lower-middle-class man marries a woman who is his social superior, but a cipher; in the Angry narratives she functions as an appropriately beautiful token in a homosocial exchange. The primary focus of the Angry narrative is the successful upward mobility of the lucky lower-middle-class man, such as Jim, and the necessary accomplishment of that goal occurs through the triumphant acquisition of an upper-class woman, usually won from an upper-class man. Though there is a triangle here, where Ianthe is at the center, fought over by John Challow and Mervyn Cantrell, the narrative

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ridicules both the triangle and the Angry narratives, when Cantrell, the suitable man, though coded queer, only takes an interest in Ianthe once he finds she has “a Pembroke table” that he covets (239). The effeminacy of the upper-class man in the triangle was always shown as one of the reasons that the Angry Young Man triumphed, because he was an authentically masculine man as opposed to the ineffective effeminacy of the gentleman. However, Pym takes that narrative trope and ridicules it by coding Cantrell as queer, eliminating the idea of sexual competition over the female body. Moreover, Ianthe as the focalizer of the romance defamiliarizes the standard triangle and trope. The narrative catalogs the shifts in Ianthe’s subjectivity as she consciously acknowledges her desire for John. It also follows the ripple effect of this relationship, as it lays bare the prejudices of the parish so implicit that it is never actually vocalized and forces the community to alter its view of Ianthe. The parish comes to see her as an individual rather than a symbol of chaste and respectable womanhood who is “one of the pillars of the Church and whom the Church certainly couldn’t do without” (195). Indeed, Sophia goes so far as to counsel her not to marry because Ianthe is “one of those women who shouldn’t marry . . . [a woman] somehow destined not to marry” (194). The narrative charts the shifts in Ianthe’s understanding of herself, of her sense of selfhood, as it traces her slow awareness into a growing sexual attraction, possessiveness, and love for John. It portrays her personal struggles with the inculcated values of gendered respectability, as well as her courage in repudiating her class-bound prejudices. For example, Ianthe shies away from John after he surprises her with violets at an office Christmas present exchange: “She often found herself making excuses to avoid him though in some ways she was interested in him, even attracted to him. But he was younger than she was and so very much not the type of person she was used to meeting. Ianthe was not as yet bold enough to break away from her upbringing and background, and while she did not often think of herself as marrying now, she still hoped, perhaps even expected, that somebody ‘suitable’ would turn up one day” (93–94). The third-person narrator slips in and out of Ianthe’s consciousness. In an ironic style reminiscent of Austen’s free indirect discourse, the narrator delineates Ianthe’s thoughts— her retreat from John, her attempts to repress her own attraction to him, as well as her hope that she might marry someone appropriate. It then briefly separates from Ianthe’s inner monologue when it points out that Ianthe was not yet ready to “reject her upbringing and background.” Although, later

194 Scarecrows of Chivalry on, Ianthe does exactly that, at this point in the text she is only beginning to realize the extent of her desire and endeavors to channel her expectations in a more respectable direction. The novel attempts to similarly defamiliarize Sophia, who, as a clergyman’s wife, never quite fulfills her role—although it must be said that Pym’s clergymen’s wives never quite fit the stereotype of the jolly and helpful vicar’s wife. This is most notably illustrated by Jane in Jane and Prudence; Jane is neither domestic nor interested in, nor skilled at, organizing church events to weld the parish together. Her primary interests are in her literary pursuits (though she is not particularly dedicated to them) and her friendship with Prudence, an unmarried friend. Sophia is a little more outspoken than Pym’s other protagonists. However, she too is consistently judged and perceived within the diktats of the conventions of gender. When Rupert ventures his opinion of Sophia, Ianthe is appalled. Rupert contends that Sophia might be a “pessimistic Victorian,” and quotes Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” to describe what he believes to be Sophia’s attitude to life, that “there really is neither joy nor love nor light” (216). Ianthe is offended even though it is an accurate description of the cynical Sophia, because she cannot comprehend that a clergyman’s wife might be pessimistic and cynical. Ianthe tries to fit Sophia back into the mold of the clergyman’s wife, or the stereotype of the good-natured and kind helpmeet to the vicar. Yet for all her lack of verbal repression, Sophia seems more regressive than Ianthe. At Ianthe’s wedding she confesses to Rupert that it was dreadful, and she “hoped that somebody might stand up at the back of the church and forbid the marriage . . . and expose John as an impostor” (254). Not only does she disapprove of Ianthe’s choice of husband as someone who is not of her class, but she also does not appreciate the fact that Ianthe shattered the image that Sophia had built for her. She is perhaps the least likeable of Pym’s heroines, excluding Leonara in The Sweet Dove Died. She deliberately and carefully manipulates social situations in order to throw together Rupert and her sister, Penelope, because she has decided that Rupert would be a good choice for Penelope. She disregards any possible conflict in taste, interests, or even temperaments between the two of them. Though this behavior is clearly Emma-like in trying to work for her sister’s happiness, Sophia’s interference becomes ethically problematic: she maliciously attempts to remove Ianthe from the picture, and routinely attempts to control Ianthe’s life. It is interesting to note that both Sophia and Ianthe, despite being the closest in age and background, misunderstand and mis-

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interpret each other. More important, each wants to firmly locate the other within the image of conventional models of upper-class femininity—of spinster devoted to the church, and happy, doting clergyman’s wife. However, in each case, the woman in question disrupts the image of acceptable womanhood to forge her own identity and live her life on her own terms.

The Anthropological Gaze and the Novel of Manners Pym’s gendered narrative style and her novel of manners represent a slice of upper-class life in the mid-fifties. Her particular adaptation of the novel of manners is determined by her anthropological, auto-ethnographic perspective. Pym’s novels capture the melancholia and the shifts in an Englishwoman’s way of life that is “pushed to the side,” that is, culturally and nationally marginalized. In contrast to Waugh’s gentlemanly narrative voice, Pym’s gendered voice is that of the upper-middle-class woman. While she, too, is detached, this detachment is not inflected by the lineage of gentlemanliness. In the case of Waugh, and later Larkin, such detachment floating free of its imperial structural moorings spirals into either anarchy in the case of the former, or paralysis in the case of the latter. Pym’s Austenian dual-voiced, detached narrative style is anthropologically inflected and as a consequence is self-consciously auto-ethnographic. It is a style that is anchored in a fast-fading structure of the church community. Pym’s involvement with anthropology is well documented. After her stint in the Wrens in World War II, Pym worked as an assistant editor at the International African Institute, where she edited both scholarly monographs and the institute’s journal, Africa. She was fully versed in shifts in the academic language of anthropology, simultaneously mocking and using it in her novels and private journals. She was cognizant of the change in the discipline as it moved from amateur enterprise to streamlined professionalism in the postwar period.24 She notes the shifts in methodology and the attitudes of the anthropologists as the discipline changes in her novels. Though she was frequently conflicted about her employment, finding it “dull” (Private 220), she nevertheless very carefully adopted elements of its methodology and sensibility in her own work. In a BBC radio address in 1978, she acknowledged the influence of her “day-job” on her narrative aesthetics: “I learned how it was possible and even essential to cultivate an attitude of detachment towards life and people, and how the novelist could even do ‘field-work’ as the anthropologist did” (“Finding a Voice”

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384). This particular emphasis on detachment in British anthropology was an influence of Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, who is credited with having introduced the intellectual discipline of French sociology to British anthropology. Radcliffe-Brown’s main concern was always with the “formal situation of rules and rituals” (Kuper 39). This self-conscious anthropological distance marks a distinction between Pym’s detached irony and that of the male writers in this book. Though Pym’s works and the writers examined thus far are shaped by the larger national turn, Pym’s narrative style, unlike the carefully crafted works of Waugh and Larkin, for instance, is not produced within a distinct inheritance of cultural and national masculine expectations. Pym’s novels of manners are structured by the disciplinary practices of anthropology. For Pym, the minute anthropological study of her own immediate community constitutes “field work.” The novels produced through her “field work” closely scrutinize manners, hierarchy, and cultural gender ideals. Pym elaborates on her anthropologist-novelist desire to collect facts and yokes the need for precision in observed fact to literature and a vanishing civilization in a series of journal entries. In this she draws on the wellworn ideas of Bronislaw Malinowski, where he insists that the field worker must work out “the rules and regularities of native custom” and focus on the “imponderabilia of everyday life” (Malinowski 17–24). On November 10, 1971, “She observes Mr. C in the library—he is having his lunch, eating a sandwich with a knife and fork, a glass of milk near at hand. Oh, why can’t I write things like that any more—why is this kind of thing no longer acceptable?” The entry for February 4 of the following year notes “the unimaginable horror” of the imminent closing of the London department store Gamages, which she reads as the sign of a “whole period of civilization gone” (Private 266–67). On March 6, she once again wonders, “What is the future of my kind of writing? What can my notebooks contain except the normal kinds of bits and pieces that can never (?) now be worked into fiction” (Private 267). Pym connects the noting of trivia—of Mr. C’s eating a sandwich with a knife and fork, an instance of how dining etiquette carries over into fast-food—as the illustration of a moment in a middle-class life, a nuance that indicates the changes in a whole way of being. The tying together of the mundane to the larger issue of national-cultural shifts is made explicit when she marks the closing down of Gamages (the store that opened in the late nineteenth century and served as a consumer institution for generations of the British middle class via its mailing catalog) as the passing

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of a civilization.25 This notion of the passing of a way of life is a recurring theme in the journals, almost inevitably expressed through the consistent rejection of “her kind of writing” with “its normal kinds of bits and pieces.” Her interest in the everyday and minutiae of lived life takes an interesting turn, since privileging of trivia and routine is very specifically gendered.26 Judy Little notes this and points to how Pym “textualizes the trivial” (76, 116). Pym follows in Virginia Woolf’s literary and ideological footsteps in validating the trivial and reverses the gendered discourse where women’s contributions, interests, and lives are devalued as “trivial,” whereas men’s activities are frequently read as “important” (Room 76–77). After reading a review of The Sweet Dove Died, Pym asked in her journal, “What is wrong with being obsessed with trivia? What are the minds of critics filled with? What nobler and more worthwhile things?” (Private 260). While the gendered discourse of trivia is noteworthy, I am more interested in connecting Pym’s narrative focus on the gendered “imponderabilia of daily life” and customs to the larger narrative of Englishness. In the mode of Claude Levi Strauss, Pym produces a thick description of her corner of Englishness, drawing meta-cultural conclusions through the meticulous collection and cataloging of the trivia. For Pym, trivia is the very stuff of life; “the boring cozyness of the everyday” (Private 245) constitutes “normal” life. The daily round constructs a sense of self, binds this self to the culture of the nation and community. This fact is what prompted Larkin to name her as one of most underrated writers of the century, when he celebrated her for “small poignancies and comedies of everyday life” (Larkin 66).27 The description is appropriate for almost all her novels. It is not about life as dull and unimportant, but life as both ordinary and full. This is, of course, a marked contrast from the movement-driven plots of the Angries, where young men lurch from place to place and from one profession to another trying to find their niche in the postwar world. Nevertheless, it also speaks to the diminished horizons of postwar Britain, of making a virtue of necessity, which links her to Wain, Larkin, and Amis.28 For instance, the narrative takes the time to describe Ianthe’s daily life, her morning commute, her work at the library, where and what she has for lunch (including the awkwardness of eating alone), her shopping trip, and her commute home. Through the careful cataloging of the trivial, the narrator creates and sums up an entire way of life and way of being. The mundane act of being offered a seat in a crowded train reveals how Ianthe’s innate “lady-like” fragility invokes chivalry from a stranger. It becomes an occasion to where the “graceful”

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Ianthe is shown to be distinct and anachronistic, since the narrative juxtaposes Ianthe’s elegance and restraint/timidity with the “modern” postwar woman who is “aggressive,” and “thrusting.” In some ways this particular incident echoes Charles Lumley’s feelings whilst being in a working-class pub, where he feels that he had “been equipped with an upbringing devised to meet the needs of a more fortunate age” (Wain, Hurry on Down 25). Legitimizing trivia while maintaining distance are Pym’s adaptations from anthropology; each act complicates the other. While the focus on trivia and detachment both imply a sense of distance on the part of the observer—that is, one who stands apart from the community to note and classify the mundane on who does what and why—the attention to the quotidian customs simultaneously produces a sense of routine and commitment. Pym’s revival and appropriation of the novel of manners is an effect of this dialectic of push-and-pull of detachment and community, of reserve and emotional and communal networks, and of the observation of minutiae of ritual and custom. While Pym’s novels have frequently been read as novels of manners, it is important to consider how her careful anthropological representations of self-contained upper-middle-class English parish life contour Pym’s take on the genre.29 Her detached style documents native rituals and customs, what they represent to the community and the nation, as well as individual deviations from these cultural community-building norms. Pym’s auto-ethnographic novel of manners offers a perspective that is simultaneously intimate and distanced. The focus on intimate, daily routines implies distance even as it connects at the most private and personal level of a middle-class Englishwoman’s daily life. Like the picaresque, “the novel of manners” as a genre appears rather difficult to pin down. Attempts to delineate the form always write it back into a broad generic frame of realism, as, for instance, when Bege K. Bowers and Barbara Brothers define it as being “concerned with selfhood and morality within a cultural context and thus depict the inevitable conflict between private and public persona and between illusion (imagination and desire and the actualities of everyday life” (Bowers and Brothers 4). However, what is of interest in this definition is the phrase “actualities of everyday life.” This addresses an earlier, perhaps more apropos, definition of the genre by Lionel Trilling, especially as it pertains to Pym’s work. Trilling contends that the novel of manners represents “culture’s hum and buzz of implication, . . . the whole evanescent context in which its explicit statements are made, . . . that part of a culture which is made up of half-uttered

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or unuttered or unutterable expressions of value [and in which] assumption rules” (200–201). Pym’s particular anthropological reshaping of the genre attends to “the manners, customs, folkways, conventions, traditions, and mores” of a specific social group (Tuttleton 10). As we shall see below, her novels tease out the nuances of the observable and observed rituals of conversation and social practice (with all its attendant disciplinary connotations). They foreground the everyday as it links up to national culture, and in the process they pay attention to the half-expressed and the evanescent within a community. This also enables a connection with the past, even as it offers an image of a whole identifiable community in the present. An Unsuitable Attachment is a perfect example of Pym’s novel of manners. The narrative turns its ethnographic eye on the men and women of an insular upper-middle-class parish in North London even as strangers hover on the outskirts. It documents the rituals and deviations from those rituals within a self-contained and thoroughly English community. The narrative emphasizes this sense of self-containment through the circulation of a halfexpressed assumption that underlies the community, fully coherent only to its members: the titular “unsuitable.” Most of the parish members, including Ianthe, consistently reiterate John Challow’s “unsuitability.” What it means to be unsuitable is never clearly defined by any of those who insist upon it, other than Ianthe’s uncle and aunt who make their class snobbery explicit when they argue that John is “inferior to [Ianthe] socially” (222). Penelope, on meeting John at a party, instantly dismisses him as a potential suitor, saying that “one could hardly count John as being in the running” (69). Sophia echoes exactly the same sentiment when Ianthe gently hints that there might be an attraction between John and herself, when she cynically and offensively points out, “He isn’t the sort of person one would marry” (194). The repeated dismissal of John as “unsuitable” to the point that the reasons do not need to be vocalized reveals the implicitness (and prejudices) of a shared value system where people who belong to the same socioeconomic, cultural background can innately parse the nuances of behavioral codes. No explanations or elaborations are necessary; codes are unspoken and understood, an effect of the closed and homogenous nature of the upper-middle-class community. Indeed, one of the reviews of the posthumously published novel addresses this anthropological tendency, linking the minute to the civilizational, when it points out that the narrative gestured “beyond its miniature exactness to the vast panorama of a vanished civilization” (Milton 11). The review captures how Pym’s narra-

200 Scarecrows of Chivalry tives of the trivial, the quotidian, and the minutiae of social behavior are intertwined with the larger narratives of Englishness, class, and gender. The novel of manners, with its attention to the evanescent “actualities of everyday life,” perfectly captures this connection to the capacious issues of national culture. While it is perhaps a little hyperbolic to cast Englishness as a “vanished civilization,” the review nevertheless does call attention to the fact that Pym’s narrative offers a “thick description” of a mode of being and a culture. Indeed, love and marriage, central themes in the novel of manners, become instruments to mark the shifts in the parish community of St. Basil. Barbara Brothers contends that Pym’s novels about love (or the absence thereof) situate them within the tradition of the novel of manners.30 The marriage in An Unsuitable Attachment, as in novels by Jane Austen, for instance, is a matter of public consumption and signifies the gradual alteration of the parameters of the community, moving from an exclusive group of upper-class people of the same socioeconomic background to the incorporation of someone who has crossed class boundaries, thereby expanding the frames of the parish community. While it engages with the intimacies of romance, as discussed earlier, the narrative focuses on Ianthe’s gradual alterations of self as she sheds her class-bound prejudices to fall in love with someone outside her ken, to someone unsuitable. The narrative demonstrates that John and Ianthe’s love and marriage is not just an exchange of romantic emotions between two people, but one that is structured by classed and gendered rules that Ianthe slowly but thoroughly repudiates. Sophia, on hearing of Ianthe’s impending nuptials, is disappointed that “Ianthe should be acting out of character” (222). With the arrival of John Challow, there is a ripple of acknowledgment, or at least a strong undercurrent of the awareness of a different stylization of masculinity in their midst. Once again, this change, or the presence of something alien as a different masculinity, is focalized through Sophia, who, when she is told that John is putting up shelves in Ianthe’s home, thinks “there is a certain type of man who is always putting up shelves” and immediately follows this up with “Mark is rather hopeless” (Unsuitable 245). The narrative, through its demonstration of conversational cues and thoughts, documents the changing parish. The unpleasantness of change and the resistance to it is rendered explicit at the wedding, or, to put it in anthropological terms as the text does, at the “marriage ceremonies” (249). Sophia and Rupert comment on its being “dreadful” and how they had “hope that somebody might stand up at the back and forbid the marriage” (254). Rupert mimics

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the ironic detachment of the narrator and points out, “How dreadful we are basically in our so-called civilized society” (254). Both Rupert and the narrator scrutinize “the wedding ceremony” through the disciplinary eye of anthropology and come to similar conclusions—although the narrator is at one further remove than Rupert, as she studies Rupert making the observation and points out that he does so “smugly.” Continuing with its focus on customs and their signification, but drawing attention to the most routine of daily practices, the narrative shows the English upper-middle classes in terms of how individuals conform to, or deviate from, gendered conventions. Gender and culture emerge in the minutiae of everyday life, in the manners that men and women must follow. For instance, at dinner in Rome, while Mark and Basil Branche, a vicar they met in Rome, consult on the wine, Rupert Stonebird feels that he was “showing himself to be not quite a man by allowing them to do this” (178). As an anthropologist, he assumes the place of the narrator’s anthropological eye, and assesses upper-class English masculinity as a conventional practice emerging in the quotidian ritual of choosing the appropriate wine for the table, and in particular for the ladies present. Rupert becomes aware that he does not know anything about wine, nor does he take charge of the wine selection along with other men. He feels that he does not quite measure up to gendered, classed, and even national norms in such a moment. He connects his personal gendered inadequacy to larger social expectations that are signified by Penelope. The passage reflects on how personal relations only flow through the well-worn tracks of classed, cultural traditions. Rupert’s masculinity, then, lies in its performance and perception, which, in turn, only emerges through the right practice of etiquette and manners of English men and women at dinner. While Pym’s detached and ironic narrative style catalogs English conventions, and implicit half-expressed assumptions of the community, there is a particularly gendered inflection that emerges when it intersects with the focalized consciousness of a female protagonist, evident from the earlier discussion of the dissonance between Sophia and Ianthe’s inner thoughts and outward expression. Laura L. Doan describes this as “the dual-voiced narrative” where the on the surface, the narrative voice is “fully compliant with normal social expectations” (74), but underneath “another voice speaks to challenge, even to ridicule, a social order that calls for the repression of unkind retorts” (63–64).31 Orphia Jane Allen also notes the “polyphonic narrative style” and contends that it is an effect of the tensile relationship between an individual’s desires and social expectation.32 I would

202 Scarecrows of Chivalry argue that this narrative format is symptomatic of Pym’s anthropologically detached style. Rather than read this particular style as radical or resistant, which is how critics usually read Pym’s form, I believe it is more accurate to interpret the detachment as an ethnographic style that captures the duality inherent in the study of men and women in a transitioning community. The irony lies in how individual women deviate from the conventions of gendered affect and behavior. In the process the narrator delineates the norm, the woman’s attitude toward the norm, and her negotiation of it. In a throwaway incident as Ianthe attempts to locate John’s bedsit on a sickroom visit, her dressmaker points out that she is in front of a lodging house that has mostly “Indians and commercial travelers.” The implication, of course, is that Ianthe could not possibly have anything to do with such a place, nor should she. Ianthe’s response is a firm but neutral, “Yes, my friend lives here,” but she is “tempted to add” (italics mine) that “he was an Indian commercial traveler” as a deliberate attempt to subvert all the assumptions about herself, Indians, and commercial travelers (110). In a few economical strokes, the narrator classifies the dressmaker’s social and gendered assumptions; Ianthe’s deviation as she is going to see an “unsuitable” young man; and how Ianthe represses what she actually wants to say, which would dismantle stereotypes about Englishwomen, Indians, and commercial travelers. Similarly, when Rupert and Sophia converse about Ianthe and John’s engagement, Sophia mouths the appropriate and well-mannered platitudes expected of a clergyman’s wife: “Oh, he seems charming and is obviously devoted to her” (248). However, when she contemplates the two together, her spontaneous response is not remotely generous; rather, she “trie[s] to feel glad for them” (248). In this instance, Doan’s “dual-voiced narrative” is very much in evidence: Sophia conforms to the expectations of her position, but what she actually feels is antithetical to what she should feel. Even though Sophia later voices her disapproval, this disapproval eventually fades in the face of John and Ianthe’s happiness. The polyphonic narrative style reiterates not so much fracture and disruption, but rather a running ironic undercurrent to patriarchal classed norms. Pym’s narratives—because of their detached anthropological documentation, their precise attention to everyday life of a community and alterations in gendered and classed ideals of Englishness—are surprisingly invested in the idea of the continuation of the community/ Englishness even as it alters. In An Unsuitable Attachment, the narrative ends on the potentiality of forged connections, especially as it occurs in and through the rituals

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of the parish. John, on marrying Ianthe, becomes a member of the church, even though he is not religious. While originally considered unsuitable, he is welcomed into the parish. Rupert, uncertain about his faith, nevertheless commits to church rituals, attending weddings and church fairs and seeking out Penelope. In her narratives, upper-middle-class women and post-gentlemen struggle to work through inherited gender scripts while they come to terms with the new horizons of postwar Britain. Pym’s style, for all its ironic distanciation, is about community, which, even as it might be on the margins of the nation, stands for Englishness. Contrary to the solitary solipsism in Larkin’s poems, or the isolated couples in Lucky Jim and Hurry on Down, the end of An Unsuitable Attachment sees the parish changing and growing. It has accepted and absorbed John, and Mark Ainger holds out the perennial hope that the West Indians from “love apple” road will join the congregation. While the nature of the parish might be different, the end of the narrative offers the fragile hope that the close-knit community will continue to survive. While An Unsuitable Attachment is simultaneously melancholy and hopeful about the future of Englishness as exemplified by the parish community of North London, Pym’s novel of manners also notes changes in the minutiae of English life and character as evidenced through the marriage of Ianthe Broom and John Challow. In Ianthe, the narrative illustrates the adaptability and alteration of the Englishwoman in response to not just the “new man” but also the changing hierarchy of her corner of London. The Shadow of the Sun, too, foregrounds the trajectory of the educated middle-class woman in relation to the “new man” as Anna endeavors to access an independent artistic identity. This complicated realist narrative is as much about the attempt to find a form that can tell the story of the modern Englishwoman as it is about the protagonist’s struggle against the oppressive aggression of the “new man” and the institutionalized expectations of postwar womanhood. This novel too ends on a note of hesitant hope, but has the possibility of tipping over into despair for the young Anna. Both Pym and Byatt explore the difficulties of the formation of a female subjectivity as it butts up against postwar men. Both novels critically engage with the celebratory tropes of the narratives of the “new man” as written by Englishmen, deconstructing the homosocial triangle at the center of the Angry narratives and revealing the “new man” to be either oppressive or opportunistic or both. Yet both Ianthe Broome and Anna Severell, like the men with whom they are partnered, signal newness.

Epilogue The Postcolonial Gentleman

his book has examined literary iterations of the simultaneous disintegration and mutation of the gentlemanly ideal in the immediate postwar period as the imperial nation redefined and rediscovered itself. Though the texts that I have considered illustrate insular Englishmen by the English, the argument focuses on how race and empire shape gentlemanliness and its subsequent adaptations. This epilogue turns away from the post-imperial Englishman to consider the opposite end of the dialectic: the postcolonial appropriations of gentlemanliness. It suggests that the study of such literary (cultural and historical) representations in former colonies is the complement to the alterations in, and adaptations of, English hegemonic gentlemanliness in a changing Britain. Building on the critical work that parses the discursive processes through which Indian masculinities were produced as the necessary Other to constructions of English imperial manliness in the long nineteenth century, I make a modest gesture here at moving the argument into the postcolonial period by examining the postcolonial gentleman who extrapolates traits of gentlemanliness to create a new masculine identity. In the process he both undoes and reworks gentlemanliness. Mindful of Anne McClintock’s warning about the potential homogenization of postcolonial identities and narratives, I only study the postcolonial Indian gentleman. I look at two variations of such gentlemen: Mr. Srinivasan in Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown (1964), the Indian gentleman who exemplifies disinterestedness in his ability look to critically at the British, filtered through the narrator’s post-imperial nostalgia; and Saladin Chamcha in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1989), whose performative gentlemanliness

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brings into being a new, fluid diasporic masculine stylization. Both Srinivasan and Saladin Chamcha’s upper-middle-class masculine identities emerge in, and through, the discursive frame of imperial gender formation, that is, in tandem with, and in response to, imperial English manliness. While each nation, region, culture, tribe, and caste inflects postcolonial middle-class masculinities, these forms are often also shaped by the languages of imperial English manliness that appear to function as the master narrative. My brief readings suggest future avenues for the analysis of the contradictory processes of compulsory inheritance and appropriation of gentlemanly ideals by bourgeois men in Britain’s former colonies. The postcolonial gentleman emerges via two intersecting processes that I examine separately: (1) the extrapolation of definitive traits of the English gentleman such as disinterestedness, detachment, and restraint leads to the creation of a new identity, that of the postcolonial gentleman, who subjects the English and Englishmen to a detached, restrained, and assessing gaze; and (2) in embodying these traits, in being “not quite/not white” (Bhabha 131), this new gentleman signifies the disconnecting of manliness from its original constituent factor of race, thereby democratizing, de-racializing, and remaking gentlemanliness. Mr. Srinivasan in The Jewel in the Crown is an example of the first, an Indian gentleman who turns his gentlemanly, disinterested eye on the English during, and after, their rule. For the brief moment that he is in the novel, his views on the events that he describes function as the authoritative still point of judgment. Srinivasan is an Indian lawyer who had been an active member of the Indian National Congress in the tumultuous 1930s– 1940s. The English narrator meets Srinivasan on a visit to Mayapore in independent India, when he arrives to research the events for his historical novel. Significantly, the narrator’s interpretation of, and undisguised respect for, Srinivasan, and the narrative rendering of the relationship between Srinivasan and the imperial administrator, Deputy Commissioner Robin White, trade on ideals of gentlemanliness. To situate this segment, it is perhaps necessary to give a brief summary of the novel. The narrative chronicles the protracted end of the British empire through a detailed study of Mayapore and its inhabitants. The narrative moves back and forth in time, charting Mayapore in its precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods, but the plot, referencing A Passage to India, hinges on the alleged rape of a young Englishwoman named Daphne Manners. It reiterates Forster’s challenge of the easy trope, but makes explicit the charged homoeroticism

206 Scarecrows of Chivalry between the Indian and the Englishman. Scott’s novel creates a homoerotically inflected love triangle between Daphne Manners, Hari Kumar (an English gentleman unable to find a new identity), and Ronald Merrick (the police officer). Here, the novel renders as text the subtext of Forster’s antiimperial novel. The polyphonic narrative structure foregrounds multiple voices and lives, crisscrossing class, race, and gender lines, as it traces the effects of national/imperial upheavals on the subjectivities of both the British and the Indians. Srinivasan is just one of the many components of the narrative fractal. It is significant because it reveals the professional and personal affinity between an Indian and an English gentleman, an alliance that crosses racial and administrative boundaries. In doing so this relationship exemplifies a facet of the imperial narrative of transition, in which Indian independence was perceived as the transfer of power between two sets of gentlemen. The English narrator’s encounter with Srinivasan occurs in independent India, where he reflects upon his preferences and prejudices while being acutely aware of his own racial privilege. At the Club, which used to be the exclusive heart of colonial Englishness in Mayapore, the narrator notes the difference between the sophistication and formality of Mr. Srinivasan and the boorish English people who are in India in their professional and corporate capacities: “Mr. Srinivasan is of medium height, thin, punctilious in manner. His skin has a high polish. He is immaculately turned out. The light-weight suit, the collar and tie, point another interesting difference. The inheritors come properly dressed but the Englishmen expose their thick beefy necks and beefy arms” (166). The elegance of his bearing, and the immaculateness of his clothes and manners, are in sharp contrast to the new English arrivals, who do not possess Srinivasan’s sartorial grace and refinement. The word “inheritors” is particularly charged in this instance. At its most obvious, it indicates the inheritance of political and administrative control, which also means the inheritance of the Club. However, it also signifies the inheritance of a gendered mode of being. Srinivasan inhabits the ideal of the imperial gentleman, but it is an appropriated gendered mode, adapted and reworked to formulate a classed Indian gender ideal; while Larkin’s personae and Amis’s and Wain’s protagonists navigated their inherited frames of gentlemanliness to create a postwar English masculinity, Srinivasan exemplifies the bourgeois native, who is both educated into and reconfigures the gendered idiom of the imperial colonizer to create a new Indian masculine identity.

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Though the focus of the narrative is not on Srinivasan’s background— he is one of the many peripheral characters—it is not entirely coincidental that there is not much information on his regional and linguistic background.1 Srinivasan, as a lawyer, a member of the English-speaking middle class and the Indian National Congress, is evacuated of any parochial or even any religious affiliations, and is metonymic of the mythicized secular, progressive, newly independent nation. Srinivasan’s detachment and disinterestedness as he looks upon his compatriots (his peers and the younger generation) and the postwar British professionals is distinctly similar to English gentlemanly traits. He oscillates between respect and admiration for someone like Robin White, and disdain for the English and their rule. He is distanced and affectively detached, and he views himself, his relationships with Englishmen, and imperial rule with a rational yet sharply critical eye. His surprisingly non-cynical and astute observations about the new generation of English people in independent India are a testament to this detached objectivity: He laughs at what the Gymkhana used to represent—which is why I suppose he comes dressed in shorts and short-sleeved shirts and uses vulgar expressions. He knows almost nothing about British-Indian history, so writes off everything that seems to be connected with it as an example of old-type British snobbery. Which means also that in a way he writes us off too. . . . In his heart he also shares with that old ruling class he affects to despise a desire to be looked-up to abroad, and shares with them also the sense of deprivation because he has not been able to inherit the Empire he always saw as a purely ruling-class institution. (193)

Srinivasan is able to look upon the explicit racism of the British people in the Club dispassionately; he interprets and situates their racism and resentment within their particular classed background and post-imperial melancholy. Though not in the segment quoted above, he then turns his detached perspective on himself and other members of his class and generation to observe their troubled love-hate relationship with their former colonial overlords. Srinivasan’s gendered subject position—more specifically, his detached, gentlemanly perspective that produces such ambivalently rational and affective responses vis-à-vis the British and the Indians—is the product of the colonial habitus. He is also able to turn what he feels is an empirical gaze on his countrymen. However, his perspective is determined by his Indianizing of gentlemanly ideals.

208 Scarecrows of Chivalry Rather than unthinking mimicry of a prestigious racial ideal, Srinivasan’s affect is the reformulation of an imperial ideal to fit his own national purposes. Srinivasan embodies the adaptation of gentlemanliness as it emerges as one of many versions of Indian middle-class masculinity. He emblematizes gentlemanliness that is de-racialized and nationalized, and in his inhabiting this contradictory gendered style, he undoes the superiority of English gentlemanliness, and uses it for his national and ethical purposes. The traits of disinterestedness, detachment, and restraint, imperially structured in the Englishman, discursively circulate as the racially, culturally, superior manly traits, desirable precisely because of their whiteness and Englishness. However, while the bourgeois Anglicized native might have been educated into the desirability of these traits, his particular circumstance, as colonized native subject to the rhetoric and reality of imperial power, allows him to critically engage with the myth of Englishness and Englishmanliness. Srinivasan is the bourgeois native man who is critically aware of both the strengths and failings of imperial authority and imperial gentlemanliness. As evident from the above passage, he turns his colonially inculcated detached eye on the English in independent India, but more powerfully, he turns his gaze on Englishmen, Clubland, and English fairness during the final days of the empire. In Srinivasan, detachment and disinterestedness are abstracted from their English imperial setting and turned upon the imperial Englishman himself to challenge his right to claim superiority over the Indian and India. The apparent disinterested gaze implies that Srinivasan notes that which is praiseworthy and also that which falls short of an implied standard of judgment. In short, he judges the English by their, and now his, gentlemanly standards. In describing his meeting with Robin White, Srinivasan reveals that he and his colleagues were initially cautious about White, waiting to see what sort of man he was, whether he was “clever and well-disposed” to the cause of Indian independence, or was “a fool,” and if so, “a useful fool or a dangerous fool?” (187). White’s subtlety and care in dealing with bureaucratic, political, and religious tensions set Srinivasan’s mind at ease. The perspective is Srinivasan’s, and the reader is drawn into his assessment of the English administrator.2 The disciplinary gaze is turned back onto the Englishman. Perhaps most noteworthy is that White earns Srinivasan’s trust and respect through his careful and diplomatic use of the English language. Through the reading and writing of official memoranda, they come to

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realize not only how attuned they are to the nuances of language, but also that they share a similar set of values. Srinivasan approves of Robin White precisely because he understands the power of words and knows how to deploy them. For Srinivasan, the defining moment occurs when White diplomatically asks the Mayapore division of the Indian National Congress to reconsider their policy of making the “salutation of the Congress flag” compulsory in the local primary schools (189). Srinivasan appreciatively quotes “the perfect English flexibility” of White’s sentence: “It is perhaps unwise to leave an impression on their minds of the kind of exclusion Congress is itself at pains to eradicate” (190). Srinivasan recognizes both White’s diplomacy and his skillful revelation of his own sympathies with the Congress agenda. White confirms Srinivasan’s perception of his intelligence and rhetorical precision when he identifies the one sentence of a redrafted response from the Congress committee to White as written by Srinivasan. They recognize each other as like-minded men through their skill at the written and spoken word. Their respect and admiration for each other is cemented through a love for, and ability to, skillfully wield the English language; this shared love of language becomes the means through which they realize that they share a value system. As Srinivasan says, “From that moment we were friends” (191). It is a case of like meeting like, but the story is Srinivasan’s and the judgments are his, and it is White who is judged and found to be acceptable, not the other way around—a reversal that undoes the usual flow of narrative and discursive power that characterizes empire. This reversal of the disciplinary gaze is evident in the description of that sanctum of Englishness, the Club, since it is, once again, Srinivasan’s perspective that the narrative offers. The beginning of his description is laden with irony: “Do you know what struck me most about it? Its old fashioned shabbiness” (187). Srinivasan’s characterization echoes and invokes Orwell’s description of the Club in Burmese Days, where the dilapidation of the “dumpy one-storey wooden building,” with the “forlorn” library of “mildewed novels” and its “mangy billiard table,” reflects the obsolescence of its members (17–20). Unlike Orwell’s narrator, Srinivasan is not English, nor does he dwell on the hypocrisy of the Club, because he takes for granted the corruption of its members. In his interpretation, precisely because it is from the perspective of the educated Indian actively involved in campaigning against colonial rule, the Club’s shabbiness signifies ordinariness. He demystifies the Club, which he refers to, rather mockingly, as “this sacred

210 Scarecrows of Chivalry edifice,” since its sanctity was maintained by the systematic banning of Indians. In categorizing the Club as ordinary, Srinivasan does not condemn it for its banality, but rather sees it as a signifier of respectability and professionalism. In its ordinariness, it fits someone like Robin White, and not the people who usually populate it: the racist pukka sahibs and colonial Blimps who do not conform to Srinivasan’s ideas of ethical and acceptable behavior. White and the Club, on the other hand, reflect each other in their shabby ordinariness and well-appointed comfort—like a good middle-class home, in fact. For Srinivasan, White was a good man and worthy friend/opponent because he possesses a “sense of responsibility that enabled him to accept his privileged position with dignity” (192). It is White’s professionalism that Srinivasan admires. He sees White practice, in good faith, the ideals of disinterestedness, fair play, justice, and responsibility, but one that is not contained by racial boundaries. He says as much when he contends that in the moment of recognizing the Club and Robin White as reflective of each other, he “understood what it was the English always imagined lay but only rarely succeeded in showing did lie behind all the flummery of their power and influence” (192). In White, the personal-ethical coalesces into good professional practice, traits that Srinivasan recognizes and values, as they are qualities that he embodies. Though Srinivasan clearly does not believe in the idea of England’s destiny as bringer of civilization to the world, he nevertheless sees, though for the first time, what the English saw as their best selves, or at least the myth of their best selves. The narrative, once again, emphasizes that it is Srinivasan who functions as the standard of professionalism and gentlemanliness, and it is White who is perceived through Srinivasan’s parameters. Srinivasan is engaged in an ethnographic study, dissecting the structures and myths of imperial Englishness in India through his observations of both White and the Club. He looks at and classifies the English and Englishmen to parse their culture and their motivations, but does not lose sight of the personal, as his scrutiny of Robin White leads to genuine respect and admiration for the man. What the narrative structure makes explicit, thereby privileging Srinivasan’s voice, is that if White can earn the respect of someone as intelligent, subtle, and ethical as Srinivasan, then he must be a worthwhile man. Srinivasan occupies the still point of discernment. In this reversal, the narrative emphasizes the idea of an appropriated gentlemanliness that is entirely Indian, and is neither imitative nor repre-

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sentational. The inheritors of a colonial nation and colonial/imperial gender style have remade them into a postcolonial nation and a postcolonial gentlemanliness. Srinivasan’s upper-middle-class or middle-class masculine identity is restrained and detached, but it is entirely Indian in its perspective. He situates the English, both past and present, within their deluded myths and prejudices. While he condemns their imperial and racist practices in India from his own confident position of Indian man, who has/ had right on his side—by virtue of fighting for independence and “the rights of man”—he can also see the virtues of individual men in the race that oppressed him. At this point it is necessary to address the obvious fact that the novel is written by an Englishman in the first blush of the loss of India and during the dismantling of empire. Though the novel is anti-imperial, it still engages in nostalgia about India as a former colony. Moreover, the narrative is entirely mediated by an English narrator. Both of these factors contribute to the characterization of Srinivasan, who—though critical of, and distanced from, the English imperialists—speaks with affection about individual imperial administrators, such as Robin White. While I have been reading this as symptomatic of Srinivasan’s confident attitude of a gentlemanly Indian masculinity, which it is, the potential for reading him as a permanent residue of Englishness in India, even after the empire has collapsed, always exists. Yet to do so would be to ignore the fact that Srinivasan’s identity is forged both within and against imperial discourses. His agency in this case is mobilized against the English and not for the perpetuation of the status quo. While it is an English description of an Indian man, the English narrator makes a distinction between the Indian Srinivasan and Hari Kumar, who does not know what he is. Srinivasan’s identitarian certitude and Indian gentlemanliness stand in stark opposition to Hari Kumar. Hari Kumar’s or Harry Coomer’s identity crisis is brought on by being rejected by the English, who he thought were his people. In fact, the juxtaposition of the two reveals that Hari Kumar, deliberately educated to be an English gentleman, is a cipher. His sense of self is imitative; he is not fully aware of the racial and national axes that structure his gentlemanly identity until he is forced to confront his Indian background. Brought up as English in England, Kumar is sent to the uppercrust public school Chillingborough. He fulfills his father’s ambitions and sees himself as wholly English. He only becomes aware of his not being English, and being different, when he realizes that his Englishness and his

212 Scarecrows of Chivalry gentlemanliness are not recognized when not underpinned by his father Duleep’s wealth. Indeed, Kumar’s gentlemanliness is completely revoked by Duleep’s suicide, prompted by his financial demise. Duleep’s English lawyer interprets the suicide as an effect of his going “right off his head” when his “financial manipulation” took a turn for the worse. For the lawyer, Duleep’s suicide is the moment when “blood, background, that sort of thing, finally begin to tell” (225). Kumar’s English gentlemanliness, so carefully cultivated by his father and so unconsciously inhabited by Kumar, disappears, and he is forced to return to India, where he drifts, unable to craft a new identity for much of the novel. Though he is supported by a network of aunts and uncles, in the relative comfort of a lower-middle- to middle-class existence, he lives, as he sees it, in squalor and poverty that “drain him layer by layer of his Englishness” (228). He despises Indians, whom he still considers “they”; he also comes to hate the British in India, who, bound by the racial prejudice of the pukka sahib, cannot see past the color of his skin to recognize in him the Englishman he is (232). Kumar’s tragedy is that he sees himself as an exile who longs to return home, but for him, home no longer exists. His exile is one of the foreclosed tragedies in The Jewel in the Crown; the moment he returns to India, his fate is sealed. The narrative is merely an unfolding of his inability to create a new identity for himself, despite coming into contact with young educated Indian men actively involved in the fight for political and national freedom with whom he could potentially forge friendships. Kumar resembles the many literary versions of “mimic men,” who emerge from vastly different colonial situations, ranging from V. S. Naipaul’s novel of the same name published in 1967 to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, published in 1988. However, unlike Hari Kumar, these “mimic men” eventually manage to carve their distinct postcolonial masculine identities, adapting components of gentlemanliness to their own needs, moving away from their initial slavish internalization of superior English manliness. Saladin Chamcha, né Sallahudin Chamchawalla, in The Satanic Verses is a surreal diasporic variation of a masculine style determined by the discourses of English manliness circulating in postcolonial India and postimperial Britain. While it is difficult and unnecessary to summarize the labyrinthine plot of the novel, a short mapping of Chamcha’s trajectory is pertinent here. The son of a wealthy Bombay businessman, Saladin Chamcha dreams of escaping to England, away from his father’s iron control. He longs to be English, as a repudiation of his father and the chaos of India.

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In his desire to both possess and become one with England, he marries an Englishwoman and constructs a successful career as a voice-actor. At the point at which the novel begins in medias res, Saladin Chamcha, one of only two survivors of a bombed flight from India (along with Gibreel Farishta), is transformed from man to hairy goat, only to be humiliated, incarcerated, admitted to hospital, and, eventually, forced to go into hiding in the heart of the lower-middle-class/working-class Asian neighborhood in London. Chamcha’s post-disaster transformation and journey are allegorical of the immigrant experience in Britain. He miraculously becomes human again, returns to India to reconcile with his dying father, and decides to settle in India. His very name, in true Rushdie fashion, delineates his character. Though Chamcha translates into “spoon” in Urdu, it also has a secondary meaning: toady, mimic, and suck-up. Saladin Chamcha blindly and obsessively imitates Englishness and English gentlemanliness. Rushdie’s definition of the phrase connects it directly to the empire: “Colloquially a chamcha is a person who sucks up to a powerful people, a yes-man, a sycophant. The British Empire would not have lasted a week without such collaborators among its colonized peoples” (“Empire Writes Back” 8). Having internalized his Indian inferiority at a very early age, Chamcha desires Englishness and England, “that dream-Vilayet of poise and moderation” (Satanic Verses 43). He wants “to become the thing his father was-not-could-never-be, that is, a goodandproper Englishman” (43). In wanting to be an Englishman and the antithesis of his father, Chamcha clearly echoes Hari Kumar’s Englishness and his racialized Oedipal issues. In becoming such a man, Chamcha sheds the confusion and “superabundance” of Bombay and India (37), which, for him, is filtered through the prism of his comfortable upper-middle-class existence. Chamcha’s transformation into “proper” English gentlemanliness begins, unsurprisingly enough, in an English public school, where, humiliated by his inability to eat kippers, that quintessential English breakfast of the upper and middle classes, he vows to conquer the fish and the culture symbolized by the bony fish. For Chamcha, “The eaten kipper was his first victory, the first step in his conquest of England” (45). Chamcha’s Englishness, then, is entirely regressive, a “traditional” Englishness that was disseminated to such great effect in the former imperial colony. Chamcha longs for and becomes a defender of an Englishness that is predicated not only on a racial, but also a classed, cultural homogenous totality, entrenched in an exclusive upper-middle-class world. Englishness

214 Scarecrows of Chivalry is “that voice stinking of Yorkshire pudding and hearts of oak, that hearty rubicund voice of ye olde dream-England which he so desperately wanted to inhabit” (186). So enamored is Chamcha with this idea of heritage-site, Waugh-inspired Englishness that he marries an upper-class woman whose voice instantly invokes that world. In marrying Pamela, Chamcha continues his endeavors to conquer England, fulfilling the classic colonial trope of the black man possessing the white world that oppresses him through the conquest of the white woman. Ironically, Pamela marries Chamcha to escape the claustrophobia and snobbery of that world, while he marries her because, for him, she is the quintessential English Rose. In this way, he sheds his Indianness and attempts to meld into Englishmanliness. The narrative emphasizes the deliberate creation of such an identity by making Chamcha an actor: he begins “to find masks that these fellows would recognize, paleface masks, clown-masks until he fooled them into thinking he was okay, he was people-like-us” (44). Chamcha’s greatest skill is at becoming ”people-like-us,” that is, a distinct and exclusive upper-middle-class English world. It is of note that in a novel where everyone, immigrant and native, focuses on listing England/ Britain’s shortcomings, Chamcha—blinkered by his obsession with mythic Englishness—is the one who defends the nation. His only companion in the defense of Englishness is the media producer, the Thatcherite Hal Valance, who celebrates traditional Englishness only to commodify and “sell the arse off it” for his own self-interested socioeconomic advancement. Valance is an example of the Thatcherite rhetoric of aggressive individualism and ambition (277). However, unlike Chamcha, he despises the “wooly incompetent buggers from Surrey and Hampshire,” or “the dead men” (278–79). In other words, Valance hates gentlemen, those who comprise Oxbridge and the civil service, those who have been mythicized as metonymic of a great nation. Moreover, he associates the English south, the land of pastoral beauty and signifier of idyllic Englishness, with the despised plutocracy. It is precisely this group of “dead men” of the South that Chamcha venerates, and on whom he models himself. Valance, in contrast, is a man of the lower-middle class, one of the excluded and “hungry guys with the wrong education” (278–79). He has become successful by sheer determination, aggression, and a complete lack of ethics. Traditional Englishness for Valance is a commodity from which he wishes to profit, while Chamcha believes in it as an ideal of moderation and civilization. In an interesting twist, Chamcha attempts to embody traditional

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gentlemanliness while Valance endeavors to overthrow the Establishment ideal. Yet both of them are a threat to the established plutocracy, mythic or not. While one is of the lower classes and decidedly not of the public school, the other, though an old-boy, is not of the right ethnicity, but they threaten the classed and ethnic homogeneity of traditional Englishness. There are two contradictory effects of Chamcha’s process of becoming a “goodandproper” Englishman. On the one hand, Chamcha, publicschool-educated-kipper-eater, crafts a masculinity that is determined by the gentleman colonial-administrator and upper-class English plutocracy. Through his constructed gender identity, he glorifies an Englishness that excludes not only immigrants and former colonials, like himself, but also the working classes, whose labor and marginalization produced the gentlemanliness and Englishness he so desperately covets. He eventually realizes that the Englishness he idolizes is a myth that does not exist anywhere, and only deluded colonials like him still continue to believe and defend it. On the other hand, though he becomes aware that this Englishness, and in particular English manliness, is a fiction crafted for, and perpetuated, by the English imperialists abroad and the upper and middle classes at home, nevertheless, in inhabiting this particular style of English manliness, he has made it his own. In being an Indian man who is nevertheless an English gentleman, he brings into being a new type of English man. Though it begins as internalization of the powerful discourses of imperialism, Chamcha has remade the gendered ethno-national discourse, disconnecting it from its ethnic and cultural moorings to restylize it as a gendered diasporic identity. This process echoes Srinivasan. Chamcha’s diasporic location in Thatcherite Britain makes his gendered practice more fraught and fragile, determined as it is by diasporic frames of class-inflected Indianness in Britain, and the oppressive and discriminatory weight of a racialized Englishness. Chamcha’s gendered practice, and its gradual evolution, disrupts the naturalized assumptions of a classed racialized English manliness from which it is drawn, and the monolithic notions of Indianness that he apparently repudiates. His British-Indian reworking of classed English manliness disrupts the easy assumption of manliness and Englishness in Britain, even as it validates it. He is an upper-middle-class Indian immigrant who is more English and gentlemanly than the Englishmen he meets such as Hal Valance. In the process he reconceptualizes Englishness and gentlemanliness, because he is a brown English gentleman. For instance, for Pamela, Chamcha “turned

216 Scarecrows of Chivalry out to be too much like” her parents and the upper-class English world from which she tries to escape, and yet he is unlike them, because it takes her years of being married to him to come to a realization of his similarity to her English parents. He is “not quite/not white.” Critics have often read Chamcha and The Satanic Verses as transforming, reflecting, and producing the narratives of diaspora.3 Indeed, Homi Bhabha famously reads the novel as emblematizing “the indeterminacy of diasporic identity” and the “heresy” of hybridity (322, 38). Bhabha argues that “Chamcha stands, quite literally, in-between two border conditions” (320). Though Bhabha refers to Chamcha’s being caught between the defensive insular migrant position of his landlord, Hind, and the secular “ ’colonial’ metropolitan” understanding of the migrant as posited by her husband, Sufiyan, I read Chamcha’s initial absorption and imitation of English manliness as already definitive of a border condition: he is not quite an Indian man, and he is not quite an Englishman, yet he is both and neither, or a new version of each.4 Though others, native and immigrant, accuse him of being a pathetic mimic and a traitor to his roots, nevertheless his performative gentlemanliness is disruptive on both ends, particularly in terms of the gendered identity that he consciously creates. Chamcha is, after all, one of the examples of how “newness come[s] into the world” (8). Chamcha as Indian-English gentleman simultaneously challenges and validates the myth of the “goodandproper Englishman.” He both legitimizes the power of the myth and undoes it as he endeavors to inhabit the ideal. While much of the narrative focuses on Chamcha’s English-Indian manliness, the narrative foregrounds the shifting and fluid nature of the process of masculine stylizations. Chamcha’s English-Indian manliness is neither permanent nor confining, though neither is it purely willed or agentive. The simultaneously determined and agentive changeability of masculinity is borne out by the end of the novel, when Chamcha returns to India and the process of fashioning a new masculine self begins anew. He contemplates the end of his previous life and the beginning of a new one: “If the old could not die, the new could not be born” (561). To begin a new life in a place that was once home carries with it the implicit assumption of the emergence of a new identity, which necessarily means new masculine modes of being. Srinivasan and Saladin Chamcha, along with their English counterparts in the works of Philip Larkin, George Orwell, John Wain, Kingsley Amis, and even Ian Fleming, signify the changes in gentlemanliness as it devolves from an ethno-national, classed, imperial gender code into vari-

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ous forms of masculinity, a process that reveals the democratization, disintegration, and dissemination of the ideal. Gentlemanliness, increasingly evacuated of its racial and imperial connotations, exists as a vaunted myth, valorizing the virtues of manly restraint, disinterestedness, decorum, and “dominance and deference.” At the same time, now split into its constituent parts, gentlemanliness is no longer the national-imperial hegemonic masculinity or personal-ethical code, but one that is/can be parsed and appropriated by all men, including those whose exclusion enabled its consolidation: the formerly primitive colonials and lower classes. The myth of the gentleman, disseminated at a global-cultural level, persists and fascinates. At the same time, the gentlemanly ideal, now accessible across ethnicities, cultures, and classes, is but one model of masculinity among many.

Notes

Introduction 1. Raymond Williams, George Orwell 15. Williams goes on to argue that in spite of Orwell’s deliberate cultivation of a socialist consciousness, he never escapes his embedded class ideology, as evidenced by his troubled and troubling representations of the working classes. Williams takes particular issue with the “stale revolutionary romanticism” in the representation of the “proles” in Animal Farm and 1984. In these texts, he argues, “both the consciousness of the workers and the possibility of an authentic revolution are denied” (73). Orwell’s simultaneous celebration and patronization of the working classes in his documentary piece The Road to Wigan Pier only serves to reinforce Williams’s argument. 2. Later, Philip Larkin’s poetics and his adaptation of the lyric seek to engage with a similar question of detached manly self-awareness in the fully domesticated and insular postwar era, when the purpose for which it was cultivated—imperial and national governance—is no longer the birthright or the responsibility of the middleclass Englishman. See also Paulin, “She Did Not Change.” 3. Alison Light’s phrase “conservative modernity” is particularly apt to describe the writers mentioned above, for the “conservative modernity” that characterized the 1930s “simultaneously looks backwards and forwards; it could accommodate the past in the new forms of the present” (10). Indeed, Becky Conekin, Frank Mort, and Chris Waters adapt the same phrase to describe the ferment of the postwar period in the introduction to their revisionist anthology of essays on postwar Britain. See Conekin et al. 1–25. 4. See Berberich and Mason. 5. Indeed, Connell offers three other categories of masculinity: complicit, subordinate, and marginalized; the last two define masculinities that emerge from factors that lie outside the gender order, i.e., race, class, and sexuality (although sexuality, while a distinct concept, is linked to gender identity in ways that race and class are not). 6. The residual, emergent, and dominant is an adaptation of Raymond Williams’s supple concept of “structures of feeling,” which he defines as “meanings and values as they are actively felt and lived.” I find these terms particularly useful as the play and push between the three terms addresses the stylizations of masculinity that constitute the dominant norm (“Structures of Feeling” 132). Also see Williams, “Dominant, Residual, and Emergent” 121–27.

220 Notes to Pages 7–25 7. Postcolonial studies of English culture range from Ian Baucom’s Out of Place, an examination of the centrality of imperial place/space in the shifting constructions of Englishness from the nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries; Jed Esty’s Shrinking Island, an influential analysis of the generic shifts in the works of the high modernists as they come to terms with a “shrinking island”; John Marx’s Modernist Novel, a consideration of the decline of England and the rise of English; and, more recently, Peter Kalliney’s study of English exceptionalism that focuses on the English class system, Cities of Affluence and Anger. 8. See Esty 1–20, Light 8–10, and Sinfield, Literature, Politics 186–87. 9. See Morgan, People’s Peace. 10. See Berberich 15–29, and Brook 1–3. 11. W. Allen, “New Novels” 136. 12. See Morrison, Gindin, and Gasiorek. 13. Marquand 57. Also see Rabinowitz 23. 14. Critics from Walter Allen to James English have read Jim Dixon’s conflict with the upper-class Welches and the world of the academia as the lower-class insurgent’s dissatisfaction with the claustrophobic and pretentious world of upper-class academia to which his new education has allowed him access. See Allen, Tradition and Dream, and English 138. 15. It is necessary to point out here that Gore-Urquhart is Scottish, so the masculine values that are validated can be considered British, but within this novel and others by Kingsley Amis, British values are English values. He frequently mocks what he considers to be excessive regional pride. See, for instance, his mockery of Welsh nationalists in That Uncertain Feeling (1955). Indeed, Englishness is the unacknowledged universal default within Britishness. 16. This also explains why the lower-middle-class and middle-class protagonists and personae in works by Philip Larkin, John Osborne, John Wain, Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, and even John Braine were canonized as the new Englishmen in postwar literature, and not working-class protagonists such as Arthur Seaton in Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958). The new emergent forms of masculinity that cultural and literary commentators saw as potentially hegemonic were always already determined by older scripts. Of course, there is the deliberate shedding of imperial weight, as evident in the case of Larkin’s personae and Amis’s Jim Dixon, the turn inward and toward egalitarianism, but it is not a rupture from that which it repudiates. Working-class masculinity does not inflect the aggression, anxious decency, insecurity, and controlled explosions of affect. Indeed, Alan Sillitoe’s famous representative working-class text of the period, exquisitely stylized as it is, and sympathetic though it may be to Arthur’s growing pains and feelings of entrapment, is filtered through an elite, educated, and almost ethnographic narrative consciousness. The life that is represented for the reader’s consumption is an ethnographic rendering made accessible by the learned narrative voice.

1. Manly Independent Men 1. Thomas Hughes’s novel, interestingly enough, published in 1857, is one of the earliest school stories for boys. The narrative distills the ideals of moral man-

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liness as it was disseminated through the public school by its influential headmaster, Thomas Arnold. It transformed England’s perception of public schools. Set in 1830s Rugby, Tom Brown’s Schooldays charts the life of its eponymous hero as he makes his way through the hierarchy of that famous public school. Woven into Tom Brown’s growth into sturdy, earnest gentlemanliness is a passionate commitment to society, nation, and empire. 2. Boys’ magazines such as Boy’s Weekly and Boy’s Own Paper, and organizations such as the Boys’ Brigade and later the Boy Scouts, started by Baden-Powell, were instrumental in disseminating the idea of public school gentlemanliness: they not only romanticized the idea of the heroic conqueror and colonizer but also reified the idea of the manly Englishman arbitrating justice to the colonized and the heathen. As John Springhall reveals, “The portrayal of manliness became the most essential staple of the Boy’s Own Paper, so much so that it has been called the ‘unofficial organ’ of the ‘muscular Christianity’ movement.” He goes on to argue that the agencies that attempted to channel public school manliness from above were “in general much more attractive to the upwardly aspiring upper-working-class or lower-middle-class parent than to the families of the non-respectable ‘rough’ working class.” Nevertheless, what is significant here is that these ideals of gender conduct extended beyond the base of the wealthy public schools and became widespread enough to be read as constituting a national character. See Springhall 65–70. 3. While Reverend Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes—deriving their ideas from Samuel Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, F. D. Maurice, and Thomas Arnold—attempted to spread the ideals of manliness through their writings and sermons, the early ideals of manliness were rooted in, and sowed through, the church—or at least in the name of the church, through liberal interpretations of Protestantism. Obviously there were several currents of manliness that did not fit into the public school form of Christianity. For example, the later Oxford Movement, with its leanings toward Catholicism, ran counter to the liberal socialism of Arnold, Hughes, Kingsley, and Maurice, all of whom were reformists and radicals. And yet, as James Eli Adams’s seminal study of Victorian manliness, Dandies and Desert Saints, reveals, the ideals of ascetic discipline informed the antithetical manliness of Tractarianism (Oxford Movement), Carlylean heroism, and the more robust Christian manliness of Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes (15). 4. Valente, “Neither Fish nor Flesh” 98–99. Also see Valente, Myth of Manliness 2–4. 5. Goodlad 134. The Clarendon Commission Report was published in 1864: it is not possible to miss the proximity of the dates, or the link between the two in terms of the traits that the ruling class of Englishmen should embody. 6. Disinterestedness is very different from feminine compassion or selfrenunciation. Victorian discourses of gender difference delineated woman as the embodiment of all angelic virtues, “the angel of the hearth,” who through her selflessness and “influence” worked tirelessly for her children and her husband. However, unlike manly unselfishness, which is a strategic technology of the self, feminine selflessness is a matter of passivity. There is no vigorous struggle or discipline involved; women do not have the requisite emotional strength required by virtue of

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their essence and sex. Their sphere is the circumscribed sphere of domestic influence. 7. Vance 20. Prince Albert’s obituary in the Saturday Review reflected this marriage of chivalric and bourgeois values, portraying him as the epitome of honor and virtue, committed to “all those benevolent enterprises for the relief of misery, and for improving the lot and character of the people, which are the prosaic but solid substitutes for the visionary enterprises of knight-errantry in forming the character of a gentleman in the present day” (Saturday Review 12 [December 1861]: 631). Vance charts the revival of chivalry as a consequence of the intertwining of the militaristic vigor of the Napoleonic wars with the “pragmatic moral decency” of Anthony Trollope’s and Charles Dickens’s manly heroes in industrial England. 8. It must be emphasized here that many proponents of manliness were explicitly against the use of the word “chivalry” to describe their particular stylizations of manliness, as it smacked too much of a set of feudal values antithetical to their own ostensibly more democratic impulses. For instance, in reacting to the exclusive brotherhood of the Tractarians, Thomas Arnold argued against “that sort of religious aristocratical chivalry so catching to young men” which subsumed duty to the superficial attribute of “Honour” (qtd. in Adams 97). Here he condemns the privileging of the religious virtue of cloisters divorced from the world. Of course, it is notable that Arnold’s Rugbeans could very well fall under the same category—though they were committed to good in the world—as they too formed an exclusive brotherhood, a collective including other public school men that came to acquire incredible power and prestige in the form of the Old Boys’ network. However, bracketing the disdain for decadent aristocracy, an altered and appropriated form of chivalry is a useful way of looking at the values of gentlemanliness and groups of gentlemen themselves. 9. As is evident from even a cursory reading of Heart of Darkness, manliness was always a fragile process in practice, even during its making, mutation, and hegemonic consolidation in both metropole and colony—hence its existence as an ideal. To name a few examples, metropolitan middle-class Englishmen such as Thomas Hughes struggled to embody the articulated ethic without slipping into the extremes of either passivity or violence in the 1850s; Kipling’s earthy soldiers endeavored to preserve their manly virile identities in the face of India’s psychosexual terrors in the 1880s–1890s; and Conrad’s reflective (anti)heroes tormented themselves from their fall from Englishmanly grace during the fin de siècle. This is not to say that the gender ideal loses either its potency or its hegemonic status. The texts reveal simultaneously the straining after the gender ideal as well as the shifting contours of hegemonic gender constructs during specific historical moments/phases. 10. See Newsome. Also see Simon and Bradley 1–20. 11. See Gilbert, “Soldier’s Heart” 207. Also see Showalter, “Rivers and Sassoon” 61–69; Fussell; and Roper. 12. See David Potter for the transformation of the Indian civil service. 13. For critiques that read Adela Quested’s rape within the larger context of women’s oppression, see Showalter and Silver. For a corrective to these readings

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that locates women (Indian and English) within the frame of colonial relations, see Sharpe, Allegories of Empire. For an examination of the text as an exploration of homoerotic desire, see Suleri, Baucom, Lane, and Krishnaswamy. 14. As Eve Sedgwick argues, the homosocial was always inflected with the possibility of the homosexual, and in this case, I would argue, most definitely underwritten by the homoerotic. See Sedgwick 185. 15. Anglo-Indian as a term invokes the notion of displacement: cultural, geographical, and racial. It denotes different categories of people at different historical moments. However, in this novel, it refers to the English colonizers in India. 16. Jenny Sharpe reads the alleged rape in A Passage to India within the discursive frame of the Mutiny of 1857. The novel, she argues, “recreates in the drama surrounding Aziz’s arrest the precariousness of the imperialist mission under threat from insurrection” (“Unspeakable Limits” 40). Moreover, through Adela’s retraction of her allegations of rape and her exercise of agency, the narrative not only emphasizes the flattening of the English lady as symbol and the erasure of her personhood, but also challenges the racist and sexist structures of the official discourse. 17. The infamous Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar, Punjab, Derek Sayer argues, was “the single event which by common consent did most to undo British rule in India” (131). On April 13, 1919, General Dyer ordered his troops to open fire, without warning, on a protest meeting of about twenty thousand people that was held in defiance of his proclamation banning such gatherings. The meeting was held in Jallianwala Bagh, a piece of land enclosed on all sides, and accessible through only one main entrance, which Dyer blocked. The firing continued for ten minutes until the ammunition was virtually exhausted. No provision was made for the wounded. Dyer later said that it was only by virtue of architectural issues that he had not been able to use the armored vehicles mounted with machine guns that he had brought for the purpose. 18. Ian Baucom and Simon Gikandi both take this moment as constitutive in their theorizations of Englishness as a contrapuntal imperial production. 19. Joseph Boone, Philip Holden, and Ian Baucom have variously pointed out queer desire’s potentially ambivalent relationship with imperial authority and discourse. For a more subtle examination of Forster’s queer anti-imperialism, see Matz. 20. See Symonds, Parker, and Gathorne-Hardy. 21. It is important to point out here that colonial intimacies, as demonstrated by Ann Stoler, were an integral and necessary component to the maintenance and sustenance of empires (hence, always unstable and labile), but these were carefully delineated along axes of power. 22. Of course, the subversiveness of mimicry as a structural effect of colonial discourse, as theorized by Homi Bhabha, is very much at play here (132). Aziz’s performative Anglicized manliness, which is “not quite, not white,” only underscores how Heaslop’s manliness is dependent on an appropriate practice of the sahib affect. Heaslop’s “originary” manliness and authority is called into question by Aziz’s mimicry of it. See Bhabha 131.

224 Notes to Pages 42–45 2. Out of Place 1. According to D. J. Taylor, the phenomenon of the Bright Young People referred to the “restless, rackety” youth of Mayfair, with their “endless flights to nowhere in particular, fractured alliances and emotional dead ends.” While they were wary of acknowledging themselves as the Bright Young People, they were an obsession for the national press, acquiring a generational focus and represented as symbolic of the existential crisis of post–World War I. Taylor points out that they were “at once heterogenous, too far-flung and at the same time too precisely located,” ranging from the rich and aristocratic to the disreputable (Bright Young People 7–8). 2. Of Firbank, Waugh wrote, “He is the first quite modern writer to solve for himself, quite unobtrusively and probably more or less unconsciously, the aesthetic problem of representation in fiction; to achieve, that is to say, a new, balanced interrelation of subject and form” (57). 3. While Evelyn Waugh had a famously vexed relationship with modernism and modernity, his novels are stylistically immersed in the very modernity that they ideologically condemn. His early critical writings, and even his literary works, celebrated the formal experiments of artists such as Picasso, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway. Because of his own later condemnation of both social modernity and what he termed modernist excess, he has usually been read as a conservative satirist. As Rita Barnard points out, his emphasis on literary entertainment and comedic tone led to his dismissal at “the historical moment of modernist canon formation, when Steven Marcus judged in a Partisan Review essay of 1956 that Waugh’s attention to the ‘art of entertainment’ marked him as a fine novelist— of the second rate” (163). In the recent past, there has been a flurry of interest in Evelyn Waugh’s style, and a concerted attempt to incorporate him into the modernist canon, beginning with Barnard’s essay in which she reads Black Mischief at the intersection of modernist studies and colonialist discourse studies. 4. Terry Eagleton, in a now classic analysis of Waugh, makes a similar though gender neutral point. He points to how Waugh’s “cool externality of style is not, at root, a ‘placing’ externality at all: as a mode of perception, it is part of the world it sees” (49). 5. This particularly English attitude toward religion can be explained by the long tradition of empiricism that suffused English philosophy and public discourse with its emphasis on materiality and rationalism, which necessarily disparaged its Other in the form of the abstract and the nonrational. As Anthony Easthope argues with reference to the rise of Calvinism in mid-seventeenth-century England, “The sense of regenerate and unregenerate does not vanish—rather, the extreme Protestant conception of self, choice, and morality is transplanted into empiricist ethical discourse” (92). Easthope charts the tradition of empiricist discourse and its imbrication in the construction of Englishness and English national identity from Francis Bacon to the Guardian. 6. Arnold also considered the possibility that the lack of essence could be detrimental to English culture, even as he celebrated its expansiveness and modernity.

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He says, “We might be more successful if we were all of a piece. Our want of sureness of taste, our eccentricity, come in great measure, no doubt from our not being all of one piece, from our having no fixed, fatal, spiritual centre of gravity. The Rue de Rivoli is one thing, and Nuremberg is another, and Stonehenge is another; but we have a turn of all three, and lump them all up together” (Celtic Literature 131). 7. It must be pointed out that hegemonic gender constructs, though discursively produced and maintained, always have permeable boundaries and exist as aspirational models; this is particularly true for the personal-physical-ethical code that constitutes gentlemanliness. As mentioned earlier, it, like all hegemonic gender constructs, was always a fragile process in practice—hence, its existence as an ideal. See Adams and Middleton. 8. See my essay “An Orphaned Manliness.” 9. Both Jonathan Greenberg and Lisa Colletta have examined this particular stylistic trait as crucial to the success of Waugh’s satire, though neither investigates its gendered history. See Greenberg, “Cannibals and Catholics,” and Colletta. 10. See Torgovnick (8) for a detailed examination of the discussion of primitivist tropes in modern and modernist literature and culture. 11. While Waugh refrains from moralizing in the novel, this is not the case in the travelog. In Waugh in Abyssinia, he embarks on a long disquisition on the benefits of civilization that Fascist Italy brings to the barbaric tribal chaos of Abyssinia as Italy invades the country. See Waugh Abroad 712. His celebration of the Fascists was controversial at the time, given Britain’s increasing politicization and growing awareness of the real dangers of the ideology. See also “We Can Applaud Italy” (1935) (Essays 162–64); “Official Note Addressed by the Italian Government to the League of Nations” (1936) (Essays 185); and “The Conquest of Abyssinia” (1936) (Essays 186). 12. Interestingly enough, Waugh footnotes the Jeunesse d’Ethiopie as “the society of ‘progressive’ Abyssinians” in Waugh in Abyssinia (in Waugh Abroad 569). A clear indication of what he means with reference to the progressive is evident in his placing it within quotation marks. Waugh was often particularly vicious about what he considered disorganized and inefficient attempts to overlay a shallow modernity over indigenous modes of existence. 13. Greenberg, “Cannibals and Catholics” 126. Greenberg elaborates on the significance of boredom and sophistication in his excellent argument on the transgressive nature of, and the consequential circulation of, affect in Waugh’s satire. 14. For more on the debate, see Collier. 15. While the professional ideal, one of the central tenets of gentlemanliness, was on the ascent, there was an ever-widening internal split within professionalism: between public service and liberal professions on the one hand and between trade and industry on the other (a separation that defined the gentlemanly ideal even in its incipient stages). Or perhaps, more precisely, the gentlemanly ethic of disinterested service was submerged by the increasing importance of profit and money within all professions. The professional class, the stable and expanding center of the British imperial nation, was in crisis. As Tyrus Miller has argued, citing Orwell,

226 Notes to Pages 54–59 “There was a pulverization of professional society in train from the late 1920s on— the collective désoeuvrement of the middle strata, not just in the sense that the heirs of the Edwardian bourgeoisie were without jobs, but also, more fundamentally, that they were bereft of vocation, of any calling in which they sincerely believe” (8). Indeed, newspapers were rife with articles and editorials about Britain’s lost young men, those who were too young to fight and came of age in the aftermath of the most destructive war in human history. Waugh wrote a series of tongue-in-cheek articles in January and February of 1929 for Passing Show entitled “Careers for Our Sons,” in which each column examined the (un)suitability of a profession (Education, Literature, Crime, Journalism) for the educated gentleman and how to “make good” in them. Success always seemed to entail corruption, ineptitude, and nepotism, or all three at once. See Waugh, Essays 47–52. 16. See Samuel, Theatres of Memory 229. To counter the chaos of the metropole, the contracting domestic economy, colonial unrest, and the rise of aggressive Fascist nationalism in continental Europe, England turned inward toward the country in an attempt to salvage and revivify a peaceful, organic national culture. See Valentine Cunningham for a comprehensive overview of the ruralist trend in the 1930s–1940s. He reveals that in addition to a slew of guidebooks for domestic tourism, there was also a focused interest on the English village, among both the Right and the Left (228–30, 234–36). Also see Lowerson 262–63. 17. However, this does not negate the racism and patronization embedded within this recitation when it comes to the constant reference to Ishmaelia’s black inhabitants in various offensively racist terms, even if they and the English peasantry are painted with same brush of barbarity. 18. The city does not escape the gentlemanly narrator’s judgmental eye. London here is dynamic, absurdly fast-paced, and surreal, but it is defined by two principal figures—the fashionable, beautiful, and benevolently manipulative Mrs. Stitch, and the prestige-conscious, competitive, and monstrous entrepreneur Lord Copper. They represent the duality of the feminine and the masculine, the cultured and the monied, the traditionally wealthy and the nouveau riche at its most obvious and most caricatured. Mrs. Stitch manipulates Lord Copper into hiring Boot (the wrong Boot, as it turns out) for his newspaper. There is no logic to the functioning of the city—it runs at the whim of the rich, beautiful, and powerful. If rationalization is a feature of the metropolis, the narrator’s view of London gives the lie to that particular discourse. While Mrs. Stitch is unlike the usual Waugh heroine who symbolizes all the evils of modernity, nevertheless she sets the chaos of the city into motion; there is no possibility of order when the fancies of beautiful, intelligent women determine the destinies of young men and large corporations. 19. Waugh self-consciously invokes almost the entire gamut of connotations that Torgovnick lays out in her examination of the modern and modernist discourse of primitivism, and yet he also just as carefully brings them back “home” to define the modern English metropolis as well as the countryside. 20. In Waugh’s later, more explicitly Catholic, novels, it is the Catholic gentleman who embodies the dying traditions of England. The marginalization and

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obsolescence of gentlemanliness is equated with the marginal position of the English Catholics. Waugh appropriates the gentleman—a construct rooted in Protestant capitalism as the bedrock of Englishness—for twentieth-century English Catholicism. Brideshead Revisited and The Sword of Honour trilogy describe the slow death of civility and chivalry. Significantly, the gentlemen who represent the best traditions of a dying Englishness are Catholic. 21. The airplane and the automobile make repeated appearances in Waugh’s fiction. They always function as symbols of a debilitating and destructive modernity. In Vile Bodies (1929), for instance, before Nina takes her first ride, her companion speaks poetically about viewing England’s landscape from the air, quoting scraps from John of Gaunt’s famous “scepter’d isle” speech, but Nina’s experience is of an altogether unpleasant sort, negating her pleasurable sense of anticipation: “Nina looked down and saw inclined at an odd angle a horizon of straggling red suburb; arterial roads dotted with little cars; factories, some of them working, others empty and decaying; a disused canal; some distant hills sown with bungalows; wireless masts and overhead power cables; men and women were indiscernible except as tiny spots; they were marrying and shopping and making money and having children. The scene lurched and tilted again as the aeroplane struck a current of air. ‘I think I am going to be sick,’ said Nina” (284). Here, the narrative voice piles on the horror of technology in a paragraph that gathers momentum with each semicolon, detailing the hideousness of suburbanization, of the destruction of the countryside, of the homogenization and reduction of human life to urban sprawl, not to mention the unnaturalness and discomfort of being up in the air and looking at the earth from unnatural angles. 22. Interestingly enough, we do get a glimpse of the ideal professional gentleman, and he is perhaps the only character, though his appearance is brief, who is not subject to the narrator’s own amused disdain. Algernon Stitch, Conservative English cabinet minister, who looks every inch the part, is shown leaving his house. He is scrupulously dressed, polite, never or rarely surprised (much like the narrative voice), and a paragon of dignity who is liked by everyone; even the “Labour members loved him” (5). His presence makes the repeated appearances of Lord Copper, loosely based on Lord Beaverbrook, the proprietor of Daily Express, obsessed with his status, his wealth, and crushing the competition, all the more vapid, soulless, and idiotic. This juxtaposition of the public service professional and the capitalist (trade) entrepreneur emerges through the structure of the narrative itself, where Copper’s days are spent in trying to draw cows whose ears are never quite right. 23. While the telegrams in Scoop are clearly exaggerated for comedic value, they were not that far removed from the telegrams that Waugh received during his sojourn in Abyssinia. See Waugh Abroad 622. 24. The narrative focus on the absurdity and illegibility of press speak also directly addresses the contemporary fears about the disintegration of the English language constitutive of English culture and “the race” itself as a consequence of the new mode of writing popularized by the modern press. Collier points out that what

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was considered the flattening of language, “compressing complex politics into slogans, simultaneously reducing complexity of real life to catch-words and inflating the trivial” was seen as an “unmooring of public attitudes from any stable standard of values” (32). 25. Waugh was acutely aware of the power of cinema as a new artistic medium and of its ability to influence other creative forms, especially literature. Waugh often used cinematic devices and traits to explain and elaborate on his literary style. In a letter written in 1921 advising a friend on his manuscript, he said, “Try and bring home thoughts by actions and incidents. Don’t make everything said. This is the inestimable value of Cinema to novelists (don’t scoff at this as a cheap epigram, it is really true.) Make things happen. . . . Don’t bring characters on simply to draw their characters and make them talk. Fit them into a design. . . . GO TO THE CINEMA and risk the headache” (Letters 464). 26. This strange alignment is bolstered by biographical fact, as Waugh allowed Boot to break news that he so unluckily missed by minutes when he was a correspondent in Abyssinia.

3. An Orphaned Manliness 1. My examination of “George Orwell” focuses on the carefully constructed persona rather than a biographical study of the man; hence, all references to “Orwell” are always meant to be read within scare quotes. However, for the sake of aesthetics and clarity, I will assume the quotes as a given. 2. His inherent contradictoriness was so pervasive, in fact, that the legend of George Orwell has been appropriated and excoriated by both the Right and the Left simultaneously. For a detailed examination of the construction of “George Orwell,” his legacy, and how it came to be celebrated by both the Conservatives and the Socialists, see Rodden. 3. As Sarah Cole points out, “Within the ordinary constructs of gendered existence, intimate male relations occupied a complex position, for their all-male character might easily point in the direction of a vexed homoerotics, at the same time that the very bastions of economic, political, and social power tended to be sites of exclusive masculinity and vaunted bonding. The nineteenth century, that is, constructed venues and institutions that functioned simultaneously as strongholds of patriarchal, middle-class power, and as forms of resistance against the dominance of domestic ideology” (24). 4. The plain-speaking irony, the narrative realism, and the deeply divided Englishmen of these novels are taken up by Orwell’s stylistic disciples of the postwar generation. Kingsley Amis’s and John Wain’s representative postwar Englishmen struggle both with and within an Orwellian inheritance of unstable democratized English gentlemanliness, even as they contest upper-middle-class cultural and political hegemony. The problems that underlie Orwell’s endeavors to abstract the values of gentlemanliness while rejecting the class prestige and racial hierarchy that constituted the ideal in the first place determine the stylizations of postwar masculinity.

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5. Comstock is the prototype for many of postwar literature’s famous protagonists, ranging from Charles Lumley in Hurry on Down (1953) to Jimmy in Look Back in Anger (1957) and to Joe Lampton in Room at the Top (1957). 6. Humble 72; A. Taylor 176. 7. He adds, “The world was to be modernized partly through consumption; consumer culture itself was dominated by the idea that everyday life could and should be modern” (Slater 12–13). 8. The idea of the ersatz and unnatural as exemplary of modernity is explored in more detail in Orwell’s Coming Up for Air, an unusual novel in Orwell’s oeuvre simply by virtue of its focus on a family man caught up in the very heart of consumerist modernity with his job as traveling insurance salesman. George Bowling, having gone to a “modern” milk bar, bites into a frankfurter and examines it as a symbol of modernity: “I’d read in the paper somewhere about these food-factories in Germany where everything’s made out of something else. Ersatz, they call it. I remembered reading that they were making sausages out of fish, and fish, no doubt, out of something different. It gave me the feeling that I’d bitten into the modern world and discovered what it was made of. That’s the way we’re going nowadays. Everything slick and streamlined. Everything made out of something else. Celluloid, rubber, chromium-steel everywhere, arc-lamps blazing all night . . . no vegetation left, everything cemented over, mock-turtles grazing under neutral fruittrees. . . . Bombs of filth bursting inside your mouth” (27–28). 9. Walter Benjamin’s theorization of the flâneur underpins several critical readings of Mrs. Dalloway. See Parsons, Bowlby, McCue, and Lord. 10. To complicate matters, Comstock views the emergent ideals of consumerist masculinity as being aligned to a Smilesian manliness—which depended on, borrowed from, and yet was subordinate to the dominant ideals of gentlemanliness. 11. The emphasis on the private and domestic as the definition of English nationhood gains power through the thirties, World War II, and the immediate postwar period, not only in opposition to rising Fascist nationalisms in Europe and the mechanized destruction of World War II, but also as a necessary inward turn during the period of imperial disintegration in the years immediately following the war. 12. The domesticated quest narrative that occurs within the borders of the nation—indeed, the urban center—even as it mimics the imperial adventure narrative, signals a circling of the drain rather than an expansive outward movement of the original. As Martin Green writes of the original adventure stories, “[They] prepared the young men of England to go out to the colonies, to rule, for their families to rejoice in their fates out there” (Dreams 38). This is a far cry from Comstock’s final return, after his adventures in the London underbelly, to the life of the suburban petit bourgeois. On the one hand, as mentioned, it is an attempt to grasp and rediscover the nation in its totality, a totality that was not possible earlier; on the other, it is a symptom of the inevitable narrowing of horizons. 13. Humble carefully delineates between the male middlebrow writers and the female middlebrow writers. She points out that the men often wrote about classes other than their own: Evelyn Waugh and P. G. Wodehouse wrote about the aristoc-

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racy while George Orwell and Edward Upward anatomized the working classes. As I argue in this and the previous chapter, that is not quite true in the case of Orwell and Waugh. While the worlds they explore are the aristocratic and the shifting underbelly of the middle classes, their protagonists are invariably from some form of the middle class. 14. This was also a perspective that Orwell laid out in his famous essay “Inside the Whale,” which assessed the imbrication of politics, art, and history, ultimately ending with the rejection of politics in art—represented in the 1930s by the Auden generation, whose political art Orwell condemned as juvenile, self-indulgent fantasy. Instead, aligning with Henry Miller’s quietism in The Tropic of Cancer, he argues that there is valor in a clear-sighted acceptance of the horrors of the world and in living ordinary lives in the face of looming disaster. He says that Miller is “inside the whale . . . [and] he feels no impulse to alter or control the process he is undergoing. He has performed the essential Jonah act of allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining passive, accepting” (Essays 245). While this is an interesting statement coming from a man who was known for his strident, though sometimes ambivalent, political views, this acceptance is illustrated via his fictional characters of the thirties: John Flory (whose traumatic negotiations with the sahib code in which he was interpellated ultimately leads to his suicide), Gordon Comstock, and George Bowling.

4. “One of Those Old-Type Natural Fouled-Up Guys” 1. See Hobsbawm, Invention of Tradition 11, and Nairn 317. Also see Benedict Anderson 6. 2. Larkin, “Church Going,” Poems 58–59. Hereafter cited in text by page number. All quotations are from the 2003 edition of Poems unless otherwise noted. 3. Indeed, the cultural uproar in 1993, precipitated by the publication of Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life and The Selected Letters: Philip Larkin, only served to emphasize his perceived centrality to the discourse of Englishness and the English literary canon, as the quintessential poet of postwar Englishness. This cultural perception of Larkin as the bard of postwar Britain made the revelations of his sexism, racism, and xenophobia seem like a national betrayal. There were acrimonious debates in the media about the terms of Englishness: whether it could be freed from the taint of imperialism, and whether it was a valid term of cultural identity in a multiracial, multicultural devolutionary Britain. Some of the major articles that focused on this discussion were John Bayley’s “Becoming a Girl” and “Aardvark,” Martin Amis’s “Don Juan in Hull,” and Lisa Jardine’s “Saxon Violence.” 4. Of course, in true Larkinesque fashion, this is how Larkin imagined his future American biographer would characterize him. 5. Bill Schwarz contends that “manifestations of ethnic belonging” in the 1950s and 1960s “represented an active reworking of older forms of ethnic identity and marked a particular response to a new set of social circumstances—not least to the closure of Britain’s colonial epoch . . . They were shaped by memories of empire in which the legacies of actually existing England played only a part . . . To employ the

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rhetoric of a ‘white man’s country’ was to revive an older imperial vocabulary . . . To think in these terms was to believe that the frontier—between the white English and their black others—had truly come home, the primal colonial encounter now relocated onto the domestic domain itself” (192). 6. For culturally situated examinations of Larkin’s exploration of sexual and gender dynamics, see Rossen, “Difficulties with Girls”; Clark; and Booth, introduction. For an influential postcolonial analysis, see Heaney. 7. Davie, “Landscapes of Larkin” 71. 8. Goodby also notes that despite Larkin’s avowed commitment to the British empire, “Larkin allows Belfast to become ‘Ireland’ ” (133). 9. From Larkin, “Life with a Hole in It,” Poems (1988) 202. 10. Edmund Burke famously characterized the forms of English government— and indeed English life—as a natural extension of the English landscape; that is, “in the method of nature,” England is the place where nations, peoples, land, and civilization are organically connected (184). 11. In a similar vein, Peter Bailey examines the power and influence of a not quite fully residual gender script that continues to structure postwar English masculinity in the upper, middle, and even the working classes. In his autobiographical discussion of the effects of jazz in 1950s Coventry, Bailey notes that his headmaster’s reference letter to Oxford affirmed that the working-class Bailey “is a gentleman.” Bailey’s humorous comment on this particular aid to his upward trajectory serves to emphasize the structural compulsions to conform to an elitist and appropriate ideal of manliness. He says, “[The reference] thus implicat[ed] Bailey more deeply in the dialectic of pretension and insecurity which attended the transient in the English class system” (25). 12. In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke argues for the integrity of English civilization while defending the inequality of possession and social inequality. He points out that the appropriate flow of ideals—and national riches—through the hierarchical structure of “customs” and “establishments” of English society is beneficial to all (333). 13. See, for example, Orwell, “England Your England.” For historical and cultural analyses, see Light 8–18, and Samuel, introduction. 14. For instance, the burgeoning film industry saw the success of such movies as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and Tom Jones (1963), which oozed macho masculinity underscored by vulnerability as portrayed by Albert Finney; British theater was apparently galvanized by the gritty realism and masculine anger of Look Back in Anger (1956) and Chips with Everything (1962). Many of the Angry texts sympathetically characterize their protagonists’ violence and virulent misogyny as an inevitable consequence of the stifling constraints placed on “true” masculinity—elements that some of Larkin’s poems such as “Sunny Prestatyn,” which I will analyze later in this chapter, also point toward. Protagonists such as Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger, Joe Lampton in Room at the Top (1957), and Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning turn their frustration with a perceived lack of autonomy, and the absence of opportunities for masculine indepen-

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dence, against the women with whom they shared both the domestic space and domesticated England. Men attained autonomy by perpetrating physical, verbal, and emotional violence on women. 15. Solitude and solitary wholeness as leitmotifs in Larkin’s work as evidenced by the sheer number of poems—“Reasons for Attendance” and “Wants” in The Less Deceived (1955), “Here” and “Mr. Bleaney” in The Whitsun Weddings (1964), “To the Sea,” “High Windows,” and “Vers de Societe” in High Windows (1974)—make sense in light of the compulsive coupling and social cohesion necessitated by the ideology of domestication. As Larkin aged, the tone of each volume shifted from an obsessive desire for solitude to a wish for oblivion and an intense focus on what Raphaël Inglebien calls the “nihilistic sublime” (220). 16. The speakers in these poems experience unalloyed emotion without any trace of irony or distance. In both poems, the female speaker melds into her relationship and has no identity outside of her identification with the man. In “Wedding Wind,” the speaker experiences a pure, almost religious joy at the moment of her new married life. In “Deep Analysis,” the speaker wishes for union with her beloved and has no qualms about her loss of selfhood. She symbolizes emotional surrender while her beloved is “sharpened,” “vigilant” and “watchful” against her (Poems 4). 17. Larkin’s own continuous and fluctuating relationship with D. H. Lawrence’s literature reveals his entrenchment within middle-class manliness, as he admires Lawrentian iconoclastic and “essential” masculinity but cannot—and, indeed, does not wish to—transmit Lawrentian ideals into his own exploration of English manliness. See Johnson 41–48. Larkin had employed the dichotomy of the feminine/masculine earlier in his career to escape his writer’s block when he took on the persona and pseudonym of Brunette Coleman. John Carey goes so far as to “isolate” two voices of Larkin that he considers uniform through Larkin’s poetry, and at the risk of gender stereotyping, he categorizes them as masculine and feminine: the masculine is the “demotic,” “coarse,” “aggressive” Larkin, and the feminine becomes the “sensitive,” “educated,” “tender” Larkin. Carey explains that the “stridently masculine idiom” is a compensatory move on Larkin’s part to silence the fear that his “artistry and his homosexuality may mark him as feminine” (51–53). While I do see the distinct separation of the masculine and the feminine, I read them as being a function of Larkin’s inherited English manliness. 18. Larkin’s crush on, and “few messy encounters” with, his Oxford roommate Philip Brown, as noted in Andrew Motion’s biography, and his penchant for writing slightly salacious stories about schoolgirls at boarding schools—under the pseudonym of Brunette Coleman—does point to a willingness to consider sexuality outside the rigidly constrained boundaries of heterosexual behavior. Of Brunette Coleman, he was said to have remarked that “homosexuality has been completely replaced by lesbianism in my character”—which still appears to be a provocative and intriguing statement for a neo-realist, middle-class, apparently masculinist Movement writer to make (letter to Kingsley Amis, 7 September 1943, qtd. in Motion 86). The present scope of this chapter does not allow a full-fledged exploration of Larkin’s willingness to explore alternative sexualities, at least within the confines of his writing.

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But it does seem worth pointing out that his discomfort with his gender inheritance—the tightly reined, restrained, and almost obsessively detached middle-class Englishman—led to what would appear to be fruitfully escapist attempts into realms of pleasure-filled sexualities where he shed the burden of being a middle-class Englishman. 19. Larkin, “Best Society,” Poems (1988) 150. 20. For a reading of the poem as Titch Thomas’s act of classed rebellion, see Whalen 44. 21. John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger is the most famous example of this: Jimmy scapegoats the upper-class Alison, her mother, and her friend Helena. The women, all from upper classes, are held responsible for his own straitened and frustrated circumstances, as he feels that it is their controlling domesticity and unfeeling frigidity that thwart his manly independence. 22. It makes an appearance in “Wild Oats” in The Whitsun Weddings, where the appearance of a “bosomy English rose” “sparked / The whole shooting match-off,” a salacious indication of masturbation, reinforced especially when the reader is later informed that he carried around her photograph for years, even though he was actually involved with her “friend in specs” (112). 23. Blake Morrison, in his study of the group, writes, “The identity of the Movement has, it seems, transcended both the group and decade, coming to stand for certain characteristics in English writing—rationalism, realism, empiricism—which continue to exert their influence today” (9). 24. Stan Smith argues that Larkin’s “distance [is] the very ground of his humanity.” I agree with this assessment: it is self-awareness and detachment that enable Larkin’s personae to establish a link—however tenuous—between himself as observer and those he observes. Smith, “Margins of Tolerance” 179.

5. “Moulded and Shaped” 1. Critics who have mapped the relation between social realism and class configurations include Walter Allen (Tradition and Dream), Kenneth Allsop, James Gindin, Robert Hewison, Frederick Karl, Blake Morrison, and Rubin Rabinowitz. 2. For an analysis of the media’s role in the creation of the Angry Young Man and the Movement, as well as the ways in which the writers of these two constructed groups harnessed the media for their own ends, see Ritchie and Hewison. For instance, John Wain, as the editor and presenter of the BBC Third Program’s influential literary arts show, read extracts of Lucky Jim on his very first broadcast in April 1953, before it was published. In the process, he established it as a significant novel and shaped its subsequent reception in the broader public. See Carpenter 54–55. Harry Ritchie points out that Amis and Wain were frequently linked together as emblematic of the iconoclastic new men of postwar Britain. 3. Such a crisis is similarly attributed to fiction of the Modernist era, but in the postwar moment, there was a slightly different take on the issue: the assumption was that since Modernists such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce had apparently stretched the form to its limits, innovations were no longer possible.

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4. Part of this privileging of the common Englishman was the deliberate Movement endeavor to undo the Romantic and Modernist myth of artist as prophet and antihero. The Movement regarded this very rejection of the myth as an “example of serving the community” (Morrison 172). Serving the community and accepting social responsibilities are the defining characteristics of this new commonsense masculinity, resulting in a focus on the value of labor and professionalism. This is intertwined with the apparent aesthetic and political rejection of “Modernist poetics of impersonality and extreme subjectivity,” which was “a revolt against the traditional relation of the subject and the outside world” (Eysteinsson 28). 5. The Movement writers were influenced, to varying degrees, by F. R. Leavis’s ideas about Englishness and literature, even as many of them publicly disavowed, and some actively disliked, him. Leavis and his supporters privileged the study of English literature itself as the means to disseminate Englishness, continuity, and tradition in the tumultuous aftermath of World War I. He believed that the “great tradition” with its exploration of native English communitarian ethics and humanitarian values of liberalism could stem the increasing mechanization of the modern world. The Movement writers imported Leavisite attitudes into their aesthetic position. Their ostensibly radical subversion of the hegemonic ideas regarding art, literature, and Englishness is underpinned by regressive attitudes regarding gender roles and expectations. Their reactionary gender and sexual politics emerged in opposition to Modernist ambiguity and destabilization of gender and sexuality. 6. Blake Morrison makes a distinction between “regionalism” and the Movement’s unrepentant “provincialism.” Regionalism had the taint of nostalgia and sentimentalism that only the upper classes could indulge in, as it disregarded the yoke of poverty that weighed down all the other classes. Provincialism, on the other hand, was a left-leaning anti-Establishment revelation of life among the urban poor, of life scarred by class divisions and exacerbated by the process of industrialization (Morrison 61). 7. Kenneth Tynan uses the phrase to describe the radicalism of Look Back in Anger in his influential review of the play, though Jimmy, the verbally abusive, frustrated, and misogynist protagonist, never indicates any political commitments and is instead wildly incoherent in his stance. See Tynan 178. 8. Neil Nehring, in his Gramscian and Hebdigesque reading of postwar British culture, Flowers in the Dustbin, argues that Movement and Angry Young Man writers who claimed to be the new voices from below were really failed, fake rebels in comparison to the truly radical, ideological dissent embodied in the subcultural style of the 1960s. More recently, Nick Bentley, while arguing for, and exploring, the form and ideological radicalism of the 1950s novel corroborates Angry Young Man literature as a “literature of containment.” See Bentley 127. While I agree with this broad argument, I believe the Movement/Angry Young Men nevertheless signify a shift from the trajectory of the residual Edwardian upper classes. Without them the later stylized dissent of the subcultures would not have been possible. However, as I indicated above, the writers and artists of the 1950s were deeply imbricated in the traditions and values they rejected. To locate them within a historical-literary tra-

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jectory: Osborne, Amis, Wain, and Larkin demonstrate the necessary and visible transition from the hegemony of the Edwardian upper classes to the more explicit dissent of the youth subcultures of the sixties and seventies—the Mods, the Teds, and the later Punks. 9. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan used this phrase in a speech at a Conservative rally in Bedford on July 20, 1957. The phrase, subject to much criticism then and since, has become the most oft-used description of Britain’s welfare state policies. In the same speech, Macmillan also pointed to Britain’s new leadership role as the head of the Commonwealth even as the empire and Britain’s global reach continued to shrink. Significantly, the imperial rhetoric of paternal condescension was still firmly in place when he said, “The pattern of the Commonwealth is changing and with it is changing Britain’s position as the Mother Country. Our children are growing up.” See Jefferys 64. 10. Waugh, “Open Letter” 11–21; Maugham 4. 11. However, it must be remembered that imperial-economic decline and the creation of the welfare state go hand in hand. Britain’s fall from the position of premier imperial power was irrecoverable. The relinquishing of control was particularly resonant, as Britain was entirely dependent on the United States for financial recovery and, indeed, had to concede independence because of American financial and political pressure. The emergence of the United States as a global superpower with Britain as the junior partner was made explicit during the Suez Crisis in 1956, one of the few international events consistently referenced in the overwhelmingly insular texts of the Angries and the Movement. The British decision to withdraw troops that were sent in to prevent President Nasser of Egypt from nationalizing the Suez Canal was seen as the national and international signal of the decline of British power. It was pressure from the United Nations led by the United States that led to a humiliating withdrawal and loss of prestige both at home and abroad. The loss of face was precipitated not just because of blatant imperial arrogance and the ensuing capitulation to the more powerful United States, but also because of the dishonesty with which Britain conducted the attack. This moment of national humiliation was inevitably read within the discourse of emasculation: Englishmen were impotent and powerless in the face of the American potency. 12. Asa Briggs’s classic definition of the welfare state enumerates the state’s core functions: “A ‘welfare state’ is a state in which organized power is deliberately used (through politics and administration) in an effort to modify the play of market forces in at least three directions—first, by guaranteeing individuals and families a minimum income irrespective of the market value of their work or property; second, by narrowing the extent of insecurity by enabling individuals and families to meet certain social contingencies (for example, sickness, old age and unemployment) which lead otherwise to individual and family crises; and third, by ensuring that all citizens without distinction of status or class are offered the best standards available in relation to a certain agreed range of social services” (Briggs 228). 13. In fact, Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation ceremony in 1953 was broadcast on the new postwar medium, television. It was a national spectacle that invoked an

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imagined community through its hoary rituals and traditions but was also an intimate drama as it was consumed in the familiar and private space of the home. It is estimated that over twenty million people, that is, over half the population of Britain, watched (Conekin et al. 2). According to Rodney Lowe, the period after 1945 saw a “cultural revolution.” It was driven by advertising and consumerism, especially after the advent of commercial television in 1955. Through the postwar years, the number of televisions owned went from 350,000 in 1950 to 91 percent of households with televisions in 1971 (Lowe 101). 14. Qtd. in Nicholas Rose 82. 15. Elizabeth Wilson argues that it was “one of the most crudely ideological documents of its kind ever written” (148). 16. Richard Hoggart, the Left cultural critic who considered the new writers revolutionary because of their apparently outspoken attitude toward the hegemonic elite, clearly considered the classed literary conflict in gendered and sexual terms. He argues that the Arts Council was represented in the media as “a ‘fiddle’ by a lot of cissies who despise the amusement of the plain Englishman,” an obvious remnant of the earlier days (138). 17. The decline and disappearance of domestic servants from the middle-class homes from the 1930s through the postwar period meant that the parameters of middle-class womanhood were changing. Housework came to be considered stylish, or, at least, this ideology was increasingly disseminated through women’s magazines, cookery books, and hostess manuals. The shift in ideology was reflected in the sudden explosion of women’s magazines: at least sixty new magazines were started between 1920 and 1945. Middle-class women were the target demographic for such magazines as Women and Home, Good Housekeeping, and Modern Home, where the emphasis was on helping the middle-class woman run her home without servants while still maintaining her respectability, dignity, and style. Postwar discourse, with its return to the home and the importance of motherhood in the face of a declining birth rate, saw homemaking as an appropriate career for all women, which required training, competence, diligence, and knowledge. 18. P. G. Wodehouse’s many novels, though they are exaggerated farces, deal with exactly this sad and ineffectual group of upper- and middle-class men of an earlier generation. With names like Bertie, Bingo, and Tuppy, indicative of their boyishness, upper-class Englishmen are affectionately caricatured as being incapable of useful employment or even decisive action. The characters are deliberately infantile, living life as overgrown schoolboys and incapable of fulfilling the roles into which they have been educated—that is, as the responsible Englishman who serves monarch and empire by participating in the heteronormative, imperial economy. Bertie, from the famous series, along with Wodehouse’s other rich young Englishmen, is bound up in trivialities: attempting to escape marriage without being unchivalrous, avoiding dictatorial aunts, and generally attempting to run away from everything that will prevent his hanging around in their gentleman clubs. Wodehouse’s charming farcical world is one in which young men attempt to make their way through the minefield of inherited ideals of manliness where the concept

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of duty is reduced to visiting and accompanying rich uncles and aunts to country houses, and where pleasure and dissolution are made possible by a rigid economic, social, and imperial hierarchy. The protagonists of the new postwar novels, rather paradoxically, are descendants of this tradition, despite their class origins and commitment to a different masculinity. While the farcical and infantile Wodehousian characters swim around in their eroded ideal of gentlemanliness, the new adolescent young men of post-imperial Britain try to negotiate a similar set of culturally inherited ideals even as they try to assert their differently classed masculinity. 19. David Cairns and Shaun Richards argue that “woman [becomes] one of the terrains on to which the discourse of metropolitan superiority vis-à-vis the colonial [is] transposed in decolonizing and ‘post-colonial’ Britain” (194). 20. See English’s “Barbarism as Culturism.” 21. For more on the migration and transformation of the picaresque, see Alter, Bjornson, Blackburn, Whitbourn, and Stuart Miller. 22. Janet Woollacott and Tony Bennett’s analysis of the reception of the Bond novels reinforces the idea of Bond as both an imperial throwback and a modern welfare state professional: theirs is a materialist cultural studies examination of the reception history of the Bond novels; they do not focus, as I do, on how this paradox inflects, even as it is illustrated through, Bond’s masculinity. The original readers of the novels, whom Fleming had in mind when he wrote them, were the “knowing” “metropolitan intelligentsia,” those who would be comfortable in the apparently exotic and luxurious worlds of which Bond was a part. These readers, in fact, were a part of the upper-class/aristocratic elite (Bennett and Woollacott 14). The turning point, when Bond went from snobby literary character to national-cultural icon, came when From Russia with Love was serialized in the Daily Express. The readers of the Daily Express, unlike the original readers, were predominantly of the lower middle class and read Bond as an emblem of classless modernity and meritocratic professionalism. Bond, then, is received simultaneously as elite clubland descendant and hero of modern Britain by two different sets of audiences. Indeed, he is simultaneously both and neither. See Bennett and Woollacott. 23. Kingsley Amis, James Bond Dossier 11. In Fleming’s narrative of his creation of Bond, the character was a product of British aristocratic/upper-class “ritual frivolity,” or the dilettantish desire for authorial success without looking as though he tried too hard to achieve it. Joan Rockwell coined the phrase “ritual frivolity” to describe a pervasive myth about the British aristocracy, that “the elite can do everything well, and they can do it with ease, without practice, while the lower orders must work at their tasks arduously and still the results of their efforts are bound to be inferior.” Interestingly, for Bond himself, things do not come easily; he has to train and acquire the necessary expertise belying his professional status. See Rosenberg and Stewart 15. 24. Jeremy Black in The Politics of James Bond has pointed out that Britain had just become the world’s third atomic power in 1952, when Fleming was writing the novel. The novel illustrates the very real fears that the acquisition of such power prompted during the Cold War: the “Joint Intelligence Committee” warned that

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Britain could be the target of rocket attacks from the USSR, and leading to “the end of British invulnerability” (16). 25. Amis contends that the two requirements would inevitably rule out not just Bond, who is not a member but a guest, but M himself. He can undoubtedly fulfill the first requirement (as can Bond). But he cannot “show” the requisite amount, since as a government servant, albeit a senior one, he does not have that kind of income (Bond Dossier 29). 26. I disagree with Brian Patton here, who argues that the narrative’s conflation of Bond with M and the gentlemen is “deceptive” and that Bond is merely someone who serves (Patton 156). 27. In this I agree with Christine Bold, who argues that though the novels “reproduce the power imbalance, [they] do foreground women as the enabling mechanism of the spy’s fictional universe”; or, more explicitly, they emphasize the fact that these women are almost always professionals like Bond himself (171). 28. His relationship with Gala Brand in Moonraker is similar but slightly less fraught. He does recognize her as a competent policewoman, which, of course, does not prevent him from eroticizing her. Even when Gala is awarded a George Cross for her exemplary service to the nation, the chief of Scotland Yard, M, and Bond agree that she was a “good girl” and she deserved it. More important, she is the first who breaks the case, stealing the codes at the appropriate time, figuring out precisely what Drax is up to, and giving Bond the right configurations to program the missile to divert it into the North Sea rather than London. It is possible to argue that she is the one who actually does all the key espionage work, while Bond functions as muscle. Also, while he is daydreaming about taking her on a sexed-up vacation in the aftermath of the case, she arrives to tell him that she is engaged to be married to a fellow police officer, leaving him to “shift the pain of failure” (246). 29. See Denning’s Cover Stories, Usborne’s Clubland Heroes, and Watson’s Snobbery with Violence. These works are, respectively, a scholarly study, a nostalgic celebratory work, and a deeply critical analysis of the phenomenon of the “clubland hero.” 30. The desire to maintain the myth of the invulnerable body of the Englishman once again invokes the events of the Mutiny of 1857, where reports of bodily violation perpetrated by the Indian rebels were limited to the graphic descriptions of the ravaged English Lady’s body. The reports were suspiciously silent about mutilation of Englishmen, as that would mean the repudiation of national and racial power at the very moment that such power needed to be reinforced. Any revelation of the dismemberment of the Englishman’s body would signify the vulnerability of the English nation and its civilizational superiority. See Sharpe, “Unspeakable Limits” 34. 31. Though the law was only passed in the late sixties, the recommendations to decriminalize homosexuality were made in the Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, better known as the Wolfenden Report, published almost a decade earlier in 1958. 32. See Green, Children of the Sun 432–64. 33. Scarry elaborates on this point: “It is the intense pain that destroys a person’s

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self and world, a destruction experienced either spatially or the contraction of the universe to the immediate vicinity of the body or the body swelling to fill the entire universe” (35). 34. It is possible to read Bond as the exile in Giorgio Agamben’s definition of the term—that which exists inside and outside the state. Agamben contends that “what has been banned is delivered over to its own separateness and, at the same time, consigned to the mercy of the one who abandons it—at once excluded and included.” In this, the exile is akin to homo sacer, the man “that can be killed but not sacrificed,” and it is in killing that sovereignty is established (110). Sovereignty as theorized by both Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben is the moment when all laws have been suspended due to a crisis of power, and the one who takes decisions on behalf of the state during “the state of exception” is the sovereign; it is in and through the state of exception that sovereignty emerges. However, unlike homo sacri, Bond functions with an awareness of his outcast status. See Agamben and Schmitt. 35. Umberto Eco’s now classic structuralist examination of the narrative tropes and plot points of the Bond novels highlight this paradox, where Fleming “composes elementary and violent plots” according to “archetypal oppositions” played against “fabulous opposition” and “revised fantasy” (53–55). Eco goes on to elaborate that the narrative of the Bond novels contains a series of paradoxes, and indeed their success is an effect of how easily the structure contains these contradictions (55).

6. Writing Women, Reading Men 1. It was first published as Shadow of a Sun on the advice of her editor, Cecil Day Lewis. Byatt reverted to her original title when it was republished; the definite article in front of “Sun” captures just how deterministic Anna’s life is and how difficult it is to grow up in the shadow of that all-powerful singular sun that is the power and genius of Henry Severell. See Byatt, introduction to Shadow of the Sun, xiii. 2. She further argues that Henry only maintains his artistic, visionary male identity by overcoming any vulnerability: “repressing his love for his daughter and any sympathy he may feel for Oliver and Anna” and relying unself-consciously on his wife’s self-abnegation (Franken 49). This particular “invulnerability” transitions into a more domesticated vision towards the end of the novel. 3. Byatt often uses the conjunction of water, light, and glass to describe her own creative process. In her introduction, Byatt defines her own writing as “heliotropic,” which means turning toward sunlight. In a lecture, she refers to “light” and “glass” as images of her creative self: “When I started writing, I had what I now see was a kind of post-Romantic metaphor for the self—and this was to do with light, rather than desire—which was the human being as a burning glass. . . . And I always thought of the work of art as the fire that would break out if you concentrated the light, so that it went through, whereas if it simply all came in, and had no way out, you would be shattered” (“Identity and the Writer” 26). 4. Part of what women’s magazines attempted to do in tandem with the pervasive cultural and institutionalized discourse of gender was to validate domestic

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work. Wilson says, “The sexual division of labour was not questioned, but it was recognized that women’s domestic work was work and it implied social democratic measures to bring women in their domestic role—as paid workers had been—within the wider consensual circle of full citizenship” (23). Moreover, magazines endeavored to project a classless ideal of motherhood and homemaker, unifying workingand middle-class women under the false but powerful rubrics of woman, wife, and mother. 5. Even as the Beveridge Report reinforced gender and sexual stereotypes, it addressed the major issue of the vulnerability of the married, economically dependent woman. Benefits for married women, such as maternity leave, children’s allowance, and insurance in case of divorce and separation, alleviated the miseries of this particularly vulnerable segment of society. This fact was noted by a housewife who had read the Beveridge Report: “His scheme will appeal more even to women than to men, for it is they who bear the real burden of unemployment, sickness, child-bearing and the ones who, up to now, have come off worse.” This response was echoed by surveys that were done before and after the implementation of Beveridge’s proposals. See Last 227. For surveys and results, see Political and Economic Planning, and Young and Willmott. 6. Philip Larkin uses the word to describe the skilled craftsmanship of her novels. In his overview of Pym’s novels, which he had first offered to write though she put it off, he compares her work to Austen’s. He celebrates several traits of her novels: “the underlying loneliness of life, enduring this, the unpretentious adherence to the Church of England, the absence of self-pity, the scrupulousness of one’s relations with others, the small blameless comforts” (“World of Barbara Pym” 260). With the exception of the implicit and explicit belief in Christianity, these characteristics could be attributed to his work as well. 7. Her novels are also missing from the critical analyses and compilations of James Gindin, Robert Hewison, and Steven Connor. 8. For a sample range of reviews spanning decades that consider Pym’s novels as celebrating a very “English way of life,” see Holloway 14, Hugh-Jones 13, Daemon 18, and Cullinah 658–59. For critical works that examine Pym within an English literary and cultural tradition predating postcolonial analyses of Englishness, see Rossen and Rowse. 9. T. S. Eliot points out that the traditional unit of the Christian community in England had always been the parish (Idea of a Christian Society 29). 10. In addition to the shadowy John, there are two other factors that make this an unusual Pym novel. First, there is the consistent presence of immigrants of color who are always on the margins of the cozy Englishness that is the novel’s primary focus, or perhaps this version of the Englishness is increasingly on margins of London of the time. Second, the parishioners leave the confines of England to journey to Rome as part of a church holiday, an anomaly in a Pym novel. However, the Rome vacation highlights the insularity of the group. Italy in its lush exoticism seems to serve the same function here as it does in Forster’s Italian novels, entrenching Englishness even as it opens up the possibilities of change.

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11. In a BBC interview, Pym articulated this explicitly and clearly when she said, “I have always loved churchgoing. I do like the tradition of the Anglican Church. I do like hymns, buildings, and everything connected with the church” (qtd. in Biber 23). 12. Since then there have been a number of essays comparing the stylistic and temperamental similarities between the two writers. Joseph Epstein notes that the art of both Larkin and Pym is one “in which the ironic, the comic, the understated, the fearlessly honest are given full play. . . . Excitement in such an art derives from precision of language and subtlety of sentiment, not from tension” (45). Also see Thomas. 13. The persistent rejection of her work significantly changed her style, form, and characterization. Pym altered her narrative world in the wake of her multiple rejections. Quartet in Autumn (1977) and The Sweet Dove Died (1978) were much bleaker novels and departed both in content and in tone from her previous novels. She only returned to her communal parish world with her last, rather elegiac novel, A Few Green Leaves (1980), as indicated by the title. The novel affectionately shows the end of an era as the doctor’s surgery replaces the church at the heart of the village as a place of worship, and the doctor replaces the vicar as the shepherd of the community. It is a village world where church attendance is almost nonexistent, and the vicar is reluctant to visit members of his parish so as not to disturb their television viewing, while the gentry no longer influence the rhythms of village life. 14. Pym was featured in magazine articles, was interviewed, was the subject of a BBC television program following Cecil and Larkin’s endorsement, and received publicity until her death in 1980. 15. Tom Maschler is now considered one of the most important publishers of the twentieth century. In the mid-century he was publishing Ian Fleming, Alan Sillitoe, John Fowles, Doris Lessing, Kurt Vonnegut, and Philip Roth. He later went on to publish Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, and Julian Barnes. Pym’s novels appear anachronistic and mild among the literary fireworks of this set. Before he joined Cape, he edited and published the polemical Declaration, a collection of essays by such postwar icons as Doris Lessing, John Osborne, John Wain, and Lindsay Anderson, which later came to be seen as an Angry Young Man manifesto, although the essays in themselves seem to have nothing in common. 16. John Brannigan in his survey of post-1945 British makes the same point and says that Pym’s novels were “not quite in keeping with debates in contemporary magazines, nor with media images of the modern woman” (Orwell to the Present 100). The contrast between Byatt’s Anna and Margaret, who are so determined by the postwar discourses of motherhood and professionalism, and Pym’s Ianthe Broome, still shaped by gentlewomanly ideals, makes this particularly clear. 17. By the early 1960s, the period in which An Unsuitable Attachment is set, West Indian immigrants constituted a significant percentage of the population of North London. Ruth Glass in her contemporaneous account, London’s Newcomers, points out that 4 to 8 percent of the immigrant population settled in North London. Unscrupulous landlords seeing the opportunity to exploit the increasingly beleaguered

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immigrant population converted and leased dilapidated Victorian houses on the verge of being torn down, usually in the undesirable locations, near the railways or noisy markets. 18. I refer to Mary Louise Pratt’s theorization of “the contact zone,” which “invokes the space and time where subjects previously separated by geography and history are co-present, the point at which their trajectories now intersect” (8). 19. Beginning with 1950, the British Council of Churches was actively and officially involved in condemning racial discrimination and hostility, issuing a statement to that effect in the wake of the Notting Hill Riots of 1958 (Patterson 325). However, these strong official statements were not often backed up by any concrete practices; rather, Mark Ainger’s ineffectual attempts to engage the West Indian men in his parish is an illustration of what Sheila Patterson calls “benevolent laissez-faire” (258). 20. Samuel Selvon’s Lonely Londoners (1956) narrates the lives of these West Indians, mostly men, who live in these houses in North London. The novel offers a noteworthy counterpoint to Pym’s narrative of the vibrant but silenced West Indian community. Selvon’s novel, focusing primarily on a group of West Indian men, follows their attempts to establish a life in a cold and unforgiving London that, though it has invited them, has no place for them. 21. In a nationwide Gallup poll carried out in September 1958 when the London riots were happening, more than 61 percent of the people surveyed said that they would definitely move or might possibly move if “colored people” moved into their district (Glass 124). 22. This is not an unusual trait for Pym’s gentleman because, as seen with the “remote” Mark, they are not fully present, but this characteristic becomes even more exaggerated in the case of the anthropologists. Tom Mallow, an anthropologist in Less than Angels who is the heir to Mallow manor, is so detached that he has become “detribalized.” When he walks by his aunt’s house during a coming-out party, he realizes that he cannot quite bring himself to enter the house (163–64). Like Rupert, Tom studies his own reaction, wondering if it is “just his clothes” that prevent him from entering, but then comes to the inchoate yet certain conclusion that “it must be something more than that” (164). Unlike Rupert, Tom never reconciles himself to his class and gender expectations. At the end of the novel, he leaves England and “the complexity of personal relationships” to return to “soothing” Africa where he can he be at home, observing everything with “the anthropologist’s calm detachment” (186). Tom retreats from England back to the empire, to do what his gender inheritance and profession have trained him to do: observe, measure, and catalog. Tom dies in the field. 23. She had originally intended John “to be much worse—almost the kind of man who would bigamously marry a spinster, older than himself for the sake of £50 in the P. O. Savings Bank” (Private 222). 24. British social anthropology entered a period of expansion after the war. Universities established new departments, and, interestingly, new institutes of social research emerged in the colonies, particularly in Africa. Anthropology became a vi-

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able career option with opportunities for employment and funding. Pym’s novels in particular reflected this change, for there is a proliferation of minor and major characters in her novels who are career anthropologists. See Kuper 115. 25. The Gamages Department Store was a giant maze of rooms, steps, and passages, popular with children and adults alike. It offered a very wide selection of goods, including haberdashery, furniture, sporting goods, gardening supplies and utensils, camping equipment, and clothing, shipping its products throughout the empire. Gamages was the official supplier of uniforms to the Boy Scout movement. See http://www.bl.uk/ learning/ langlit/texts/empire/gam/1913.html. 26. Her “celebration of the mundane” has garnered much critical attention. See also Larson 17–22 and Snow. 27. Her ability to capture Englishness in all its evanescence and ineffableness was evident from her very first novel. Elizabeth Jenkins notes that the novel, Some Tame Gazelle (1950), is “an enchanting book about village life, but no more to be described than a delicious taste or smell” (19). 28. Janice Rossen takes this national overview one step further and contends that “Pym’s fiction shows a definite strain of nationalism,” where the focus on England is sharpened by the consciousness of a mysterious, heathen world which surrounds England” (105). While I agree with the exclusive focus on Englishness, as opposed to Britishness, and the slightly patronizing amusement directed at other cultures, her England is the subject of very pointed satire. 29. See Brothers and Weld. 30. However, Brothers goes on to point out that Pym’s novels “demonstrate the absurdity of the Victorian ideal of the family. . . . Pym makes the ideal absurd by mocking romantic love and depicting the many forms that loving takes—platonic, love between men, friendship between women” (158). 31. Doan and Griffin; see also Orphia Allen xiv–xv. 32. Barbara Griffin points out that Pym’s narrative strategy is one where the female protagonist usually offers a “multi-voiced resistance” to external forces.

Epilogue 1. The fact that he is Brahmin is mentioned in passing by other characters, as the novel moves backward into the past. This is an indication of both contemporaneous ways of identifying individuals and his occupying the acme of the caste hierarchy. However, more significantly, there is no marker of caste in his manly affect. Indeed, subsuming all parochial, linguistic, and caste identifications in the name of the nation is emblematic of his being a secular Indian man, an identity that he consciously forges. 2. Robin White’s “voice” is only rendered much later in the narrative in the form of letters, official documents, and transcript. At this late point in the narrative, the focus is on the Manners-Kumar-Merrick triangle and the debate about India’s involvement, or lack thereof, as fought over by the British and the Indian National Congress. White does not speak of the event that Srinivasan describes. Hence, Srinivasan’s is the sole, and therefore privileged, perspective on the matter.

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3. See Brennan; also Appignanesi and Maitland. 4. Sufiyan, according to Bhabha, examines the postcolonial migrant position in terms of the classical contrast offered by Lucretius and Ovid, between complete freedom from the self and superficial alterations while the essence continues unchanged. See Bhabha 320–21.

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Index

advertising: in Larkin’s “Sunny Prestatyn,” 102, 104, 105; in Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 74–75, 78, 85 Albert, Prince, 31, 222n7 Allen, Walter, 128 Allsop, Kenneth, 119, 121–22, 181 All What Jazz (Larkin), 110 “Along the Tightrope” (Wain), 130 Amis, Kingsley: in Angry Young Men, 119; on James Bond, 145, 161, 238n25; British values as English values in, 220n15; Byatt rejects masculine form of, 168; examining works with focus on gender, 12–13; on Fleming effect, 163; in the Movement, 119; new man in works of, 118; Orwell as pivotal link to, 4, 18, 88, 228n4; on post-imperial gentlemanliness, 4; as professional, 174; protagonists of, 220n16; Pym’s An Unsuitable Attachment and, 20, 190, 197; read within discourse of imperial gentlemanliness, 122–23; read within paradigm of class mobility, 12; Zeitgeist novels of, 14, 18, 118. See also Lucky Jim Angry Young Men, 118–25; Amis’s Lucky Jim as most famous novel of, 14; on autonomy, 121; James Bond compared with, 20, 144; Byatt and Pym’s works compared with those of, 166, 203; Byatt’s The Shadow of the Sun and, 20, 167, 170, 171, 173, 175, 176, 178; central romances in novels of, 192–93; changes in Englishman

and nation-state symbolized in works of, 19; on constraints on true masculinity, 231n14; on decency, 132; Larkin compared with, 90; lucky antagonists of, 143; male protagonists in, 7–8; masculine integrity forged in opposition to feminine domestic space in works of, 79; on masculinity and Englishness as related, 112; media’s role in creation of, 233n2; political ambivalence of, 123–24, 234n8; post-gentleman signified by, 10; Pym’s An Unsuitable Attachment and, 181, 184, 192–93, 197; realism of, 7, 118, 120; term coined, 119; Wain and, 128; welfare state associated with, 121, 124. See also Amis, Kingsley; Braine, John; Osborne, John; Wain, John Arnold, Matthew, 28–29, 44, 45, 51, 194, 224n6 Arnold, Thomas, 23, 25, 221n1, 221n3, 222n8 Auden, W. H., 91, 92, 230n14 Austen, Jane, 181, 184, 186, 193, 194, 195, 200, 240n6 autonomy: in Larkin’s poetry, 99–100, 105, 106, 121; male protagonists perceive lack of, 231n14; Wain’s Hurry on Down attributes to working class, 134; women’s sexuality and masculine, 137 “Best Society” (Larkin), 101, 112 Beveridge Report, 126–27, 177, 240n5 blasé attitude, 51, 58

262 Blunden, Edmund, 55 Bond, James. See James Bond novels “Born Yesterday” (Larkin), 95 bourgeoisie. See middle class (bourgeoisie) Bourke, Joanna, 32, 45 Bowen, Elizabeth, 167 Boy Scouts, 26, 221n2, 243n25 boys’ magazines, 26, 221n2 Braine, John: in Angry Young Men, 119; new man in works of, 118; protagonists of, 220n16; Room at the Top, 11, 136, 139, 229n5, 231n14 Brideshead Revisited (Waugh), 55, 173 Bright Young People, 42, 73, 224n1 Bulldog Drummond (McNeile), 152, 154 Burgess, Guy, 156 Burke, Edmund, 97, 99, 168, 231n10, 231n12 Burmese Days (Orwell), 11, 46, 209, 210 Byatt, A. S.: middle-class female protagonist depicted by, 165; speaks of repressed histories against which post-imperial masculinities have defined themselves, 20; water-lightglass used to describe creative process by, 239n3. See also Shadow of the Sun, The Carlyle, Thomas, 28, 36, 221n3 Casino Royale (Fleming), 150–59; Bond as civil servant in, 150; fear of collapse in, 152; inaugurates James Bond series, 117–18, 145; narrative style, 161, 162–63; plot summary, 145; torture of Bond in, 155–57; women in, 152–53 Cecil, Lord David, 183 chivalry: in James Bond, 152; chivalric homosociality, 40; colonial insubordination versus English, 35, 36; concerns about word, 222n8; in English religion, 45; as gentlemanly trait, 4, 22, 40, 63, 69; Larkin on, 91, 103,

Index 105, 106; in Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 83; Prince Albert marries bourgeois values and, 31, 222n7; as public school virtue, 30; of pukka sahib, 37; in Pym’s An Unsuitable Attachment, 197; as site of contention, 32; in Wain’s Hurry on Down, 141; in Waugh’s Scoop, 62, 63, 64 “Church Going” (Larkin), 89–90, 101, 182 civil service, 29–30, 214 Clarendon Commission, 23–24, 26, 96, 113, 221n5 class: Angry Young Men on, 124; in Byatt’s The Shadow of the Sun, 171–72, 175; classed civilities, 62; in gender norms, 5, 6; mobility, 12, 75, 192; Orwell on, 2, 67, 68, 84; the picaresque and, 139; public schools create classed society, 24; in Pym’s An Unsuitable Attachment, 191–94; in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, 215; in Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown, 206; in Wain’s Hurry on Down, 129, 130, 131–32, 137, 141; warfare, 15; in Waugh’s Scoop, 44, 50 Clergyman’s Daughter, A (Orwell), 78 Coming Up for Air (Orwell), 8, 70, 79, 229n8 common sense: in Amis’s Lucky Jim, 14, 16; in Byatt’s The Shadow of the Sun, 168; in decency, 132; in Englishness, 1, 7, 15, 16, 115, 117; in masculinity, 6, 15; Orwell on, 9, 80; in Waugh’s Scoop, 53 Connell, R. W., 5–6, 96, 219n5 Conquest, Robert, 12, 112, 220n16 Conrad, Joseph, 57, 188, 222n9 consumerism: Larkin’s “Sunny Prestatyn” on, 102; new masculinity and, 122; Orwell on gentlemanly ideal and, 9; in Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 11, 69, 70, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 84, 87, 229n10; in Waugh’s Scoop, 62

Index Davie, Donald, 91–92, 118, 119 decency: in Amis’s Lucky Jim, 14, 16– 17; Angry Young Men on, 124; James Bond novels breaks mold of, 118; in Byatt’s The Shadow of the Sun, 171, 174; decent man and the postwar nation, 12–21; gentleman replaced by decent man, 7–8, 12–13; as mark of Englishness and gentlemanliness, 3, 4, 7, 117; Orwell on, 3–4, 8, 16, 67, 69, 87, 88, 132; in Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 71, 79, 83–84, 87; in Wain’s Hurry on Down, 132 Decline and Fall (Waugh), 41, 42, 47, 63, 172 “Deep Analysis” (Larkin), 101, 232n16 Defoe, Daniel, 139, 142 Dell, Ethel M., 72, 73 detachment: in anthropology, 196; Arnoldian, 44; devolution into boredom, 54; as gentlemanly trait, 54, 58, 205; in Larkin’s poetry, 106, 112, 113, 116; in postcolonial gentleman, 205, 208; in Pym’s An Unsuitable Attachment, 185–91; in Pym’s narrative style, 195, 196, 198, 201–3; in service ideal, 28; in Waugh’s early novels, 46–47; in Waugh’s Scoop, 42, 43–45, 47, 49, 50–51, 54, 56, 57, 64 diasporic identity, 216 “Difficulties with Girls” (Larkin), 102 disinteredness: blasé attitude contrasted with, 51; as English trait, 29– 31, 44–45; feminine self-renunciation distinguished from, 221n6; as gentlemanly trait, 4, 22, 30–31, 32, 38, 40, 58, 69, 84, 87, 132; in Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays, 25; imperial, 16, 210; in Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 84, 87; in postcolonial gentleman, 205, 208; in professional service ethic, 53; in Waugh’s Scoop, 51 “Dockery and Son” (Larkin), 19, 97– 103, 112, 115, 132

263 Doctor No (Fleming), 160 domesticity: in Byatt’s The Shadow of the Sun, 176, 177, 179; home as defining space of Englishness, 86; in Larkin’s “Dockery and Son,” 98– 102; in Larkin’s “Self’s the Man,” 113; in Larkin’s “Sunny Prestatyn,” 105; modernization changes, 84; in Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 69, 70, 77–83, 86, 87; suburban, 11, 79, 86, 87, 89; in Wain’s Hurry on Down, 129, 130 domestic servants, 129, 236n17 Down and Out in Paris and London (Orwell), 81 Dyer, Reginald E. H., 36, 223n17 Eco, Umberto, 161, 239n35 egalitarianism: in Amis’s Lucky Jim, 14; new hero reflects anxieties of, 118; Orwell on, 1, 132; postwar writers seen as advocates of, 12, 220n16; in Wain’s Hurry on Down, 129; welfare state signifies, 13, 125 Eliot, T. S., 43, 182, 224n3, 240n9 emasculation, 99 Empire: colonial collaborators with, 213; cosmopolitan imperialism, 90– 91; deterioration of imperial confidence, 33–34; dissolution of, 190–91; gentlemanliness emerges with, 26– 27, 204; imperial nostalgia, 90; Larkin and dissolution of, 93, 99; public schools in making of, 23, 24; in Pym’s work, 191; welfare state creation and decline of, 235n11; women become Empire builders, 32. See also postcolonial gentleman empiricism: in decency, 132; in Englishness, 115; of Larkin, 112–16; of Orwell, 1, 121; of Wain, 128 “England Your England” (Orwell), 68 Englishness: Angry Young Men on, 124; Arnold on, 28–29, 44; James Bond’s, 20, 157–58, 164; in Brit-

264 Englishness (continued) ish identity, 30, 119; in Byatt’s The Shadow of the Sun, 166, 171, 173, 174, 175; canonization of Englishmen writing about Englishmen, 17, 21; Carlyle on, 28; common sense of, 1, 7, 15, 16, 115, 117; the countryside seen as essence of, 54–56; decency as characteristic of, 3, 4, 7, 117; disinterestedness as characteristic of, 29–31, 44–45, 205; folding middleclass modernity into, 87; Forster on Englishman as incomplete person, 42, 51; in Forster’s A Passage to India, 33–40; gentlemanliness linked to, 147, 148; home as defining space of, 86; imperial, 10, 17, 18, 33, 34, 37, 40, 43, 46, 56, 68, 76, 86, 91, 114, 115, 133–34, 159, 187; as Janus-faced, 9, 11, 89, 155; in Larkin’s poetry, 89–116, 182; Leavis on, 7, 234n5; as metonymic of imperial nation, 35; middle-class, 1–2, 3, 27, 29, 40, 44, 69, 83, 90, 91, 100, 101, 102, 106–7, 108, 109, 112, 113, 127–34; Modernism seen as non-English, 120; ordinary Englishman, 8–9, 12, 14; Orwell on, 2–4, 69, 70; overlaps with masculinity, 10, 112; and postcolonial gentleman, 21, 205; postcolonial studies of, 6–7, 220n7; post-imperial, 90, 94, 95, 97, 101, 106, 111–12, 118; privatized ideal of, 79; professional Englishmen, 91, 96; public schools articulate ideals of, 23, 96; in Pym’s An Unsuitable Attachment, 182–83, 186–87, 189, 197–98, 203; as racially encoded, 34; religion in, 45, 224n5; in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, 213–15; sartorial splendor as mark of status in, 39; in Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown, 206, 208, 209, 211– 12; self-restraint as trait of, 106–7, 108, 110, 157, 205; shared traits with

Index gentlemanliness, 4, 7, 10, 22–24, 27; traits of, 4, 7, 113, 117, 205; as white and provincial, 90, 230n5 Eyre, Edward, 36–37 Face of England, The (Blunden), 55 “Farewell to False Love, A” (Raleigh), 178 Few Green Leaves, A (Pym), 241n13 Fielding, Henry, 139, 141, 144 Firbank, Arthur Annesley Ronald, 42, 224n2 “First Sight” (Larkin), 102–3 Fleming, Ian: aristocratic background of, 154; examining works with focus on gender, 12–13; read within discourse of imperial gentlemanliness, 122–23. See also James Bond novels Forster, E. M.: Angry Young Men contrasted with, 124; anthropological turn in works of, 43; Byatt and, 167, 173; on detachment in English character, 44–45; on Englishman as incomplete person, 42, 51; “Notes on the English Character,” 24; on public schools and middle class, 24; visits to India, 35. See also Passage to India, A Forsyte Saga, The (Galsworthy), 72 Frantzen, Allen, 32, 45 Galsworthy, John, 72, 73 games ethic, 24, 31 gender: Angry Young Men on, 124; in Byatt’s The Shadow of the Sun, 171, 177, 179; and class, 5, 6; in everyday life, 197, 201; in Fleming’s James Bond novels, 118; in Forster’s A Passage to India, 34–35; gendering the nation, 5–12; inherited scripts, 166, 203; in Larkin’s poetry, 93, 101, 112; Orwell’s gendered Englishness, 2, 3, 67, 68, 69; in Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 70, 73, 77, 84; postwar

Index gentleman as conservative in terms of, 11; public schools create gendered society, 24; in Pym’s style, 195; in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, 215; in Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown, 206, 211; in Wain’s Hurry on Down, 128, 129, 130, 131, 134, 143; in Waugh’s Scoop, 44, 49–50; in welfare state, 126–27; women deviate from conventions of, 202; World War I affects code of, 45. See also masculinity; women gentlemen: aristocratic and bourgeois elements in, 6, 22–23; blasé attitude in, 51; James Bond’s gentlemanliness, 144–45, 146–48, 151–52, 154, 163, 164; in Byatt’s The Shadow of the Sun, 170; Catholic, 226n20; chivalry as trait of, 4, 22, 31, 40, 63, 69; clubs, 146–47; code of honor for, 146, 147; constructing, 22–40; country, 17–18, 56, 59, 60; decent man replaces, 7–8, 12–13; democratized, 4, 16, 68; detachment as trait of, 54, 58, 205; disinteredness as trait of, 4, 22, 30–31, 32, 38, 40, 58, 69, 84, 87, 132, 205; effeminacy attributed to, 193; Englishness linked to, 147, 148; in Forster’s A Passage to India, 33– 40; ideal evolves over time, 31–32, 216–17; imperial, 10, 19, 45, 46, 47, 49, 54, 76, 84, 121, 122–23, 128, 131, 132, 144–46, 206; integration and alteration in, 32; in Larkin’s poetry, 89–116; as metropolitan ideal, 26–27; middle class associated with, 27, 91; modern femininity and traditional, 63; native, 33; natural, 14, 15; as not letting the side down, 25–26, 131; Orwell and ideals of, 2–4, 66–88; as out of place in Waugh’s Scoop, 58– 65; performative gentlemanliness, 204–5; post-gentleman displaces, 13, 14, 17, 19, 22; professional, 227n22;

265 public schools in production of, 3–4, 22–26, 30, 35, 37, 44–45, 61, 96, 132; in Pym’s An Unsuitable Attachment, 185–91; real, 15, 16; shared traits with Englishness, 3, 4, 7, 22–24, 27; as structured in relation to an Other, 27–28; traits of, 4, 7, 21, 22, 27–33, 40, 69; as universal, 38; Victorian/ Edwardian, 33, 46, 78, 106, 117, 128, 134; in Wain’s Hurry on Down, 164; Waugh’s satires of, 11–12, 41; in Waugh’s Scoop, 41–65. See also postcolonial gentleman; post-gentleman Government of India Act of 1919, 32–33 Green, Martin, 7–8, 9, 14, 16, 23, 93, 124, 171, 174, 229n12 Handful of Dust, A (Waugh), 55, 58, 63 Happy as Larry (Hinde), 139 Harrison, Tom, 72 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 57, 188, 222n9 “Here” (Larkin), 232n15 heteronormativity: in decency, 132; in James Bond novels, 162; of Larkin, 100, 101, 102, 103, 106, 112, 115–16; of the Movement, 121; of Orwell, 67, 78; realist male writers’ return to, 12; in Wain’s Hurry on Down, 138; of welfare state, 126–27 heterosexuality: anxiety of Angry Young Men’s, 121; as characteristic of new man, 117; enforcement of, 5; of Fleming’s James Bond, 118, 155, 157, 158, 159; in Forster’s A Passage to India, 39; realist male writers’ return to, 12; welfare state institutionalizes, 127 highbrow culture, 72 High Windows (Larkin), 103, 232n15 Hinde, Thomas, 118, 119, 139 homosexuality: continuum of homosociality and, 38, 40, 223n14; decriminalization of, 156, 238n31; homoerot-

266 homosexuality (continued) icism in James Bond novels, 156–57; increased visibility of, 107; Larkin and alternative sexualities, 232n18; Orwell on, 68, 73; in Pym’s novels, 184, 193; in Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown, 205–6; seen as destabilizing, 121 homosociality: in Angry Young Man narratives, 203; in Byatt’s The Shadow of the Sun, 170; chivalric, 40; continuum of homosexuality and, 38, 40, 223n14; in imperial world, 100; institutionally structured, 68, 228n3; in Pym’s An Unsuitable Attachment, 192; women excluded from, 153 Hughes, Tom, 24–26, 35, 38, 131, 220n1, 221n3, 222n9 Hurry on Down (Wain), 127–44; James Bond compared with Charles Lumley, 20, 144, 146, 150, 164; Byatt’s The Shadow of the Sun compared with, 166, 171, 178; gentlemanliness in, 164; lucky antagonist of, 143; as neo-picaresque, 19, 138, 140, 141–44; “new man” in, 117; original title of, 144; Orwell’s Comstock as prototype for Charles Lumley, 229n5; Pym’s An Unsuitable Attachment compared with, 166, 184, 198, 203; seem as dismantling hegemonic masculinity, 117; welfare state in shaping of, 125, 127, 134, 142; women and love in, 134–38 “If My Darling” (Larkin), 105 imperial romances, 18, 70, 81 “Importance of Elsewhere, The” (Larkin), 19, 94–97, 99, 100, 102–3, 112, 115 In Memoriam (Tennyson), 38 “Inside the Whale” (Orwell), 230n14 “In the Movement” (Scott), 118

Index irony: Larkinesque, 91, 93, 106, 111, 112; in Pym’s An Unsuitable Attachment, 180, 181, 185, 196, 201; in Waugh’s Scoop, 42, 43, 44, 47, 49, 50, 52, 54, 56, 64 James Bond novels, 144–64; Angry Young Man and Bond compared, 20, 144; appearance of Bond, 154; Bond as civil servant, 149–50, 157; Bond as post-gentleman, 20, 146, 155, 159; Bond as threshold figure, 144–50; Bond’s hyper-awareness of his body, 150–55; breaks mold of decency, 117– 18; Cold War context of, 237n24; conflicting readings of Bond, 145; creation of Bond, 237n23; Doctor No, 160; Englishness of Bond, 20, 157– 58, 164; gentlemanliness of Bond, 144–48, 151–52, 154, 163, 164; heterosexuality of Bond, 118, 155, 157; original readers of, 237n22; professionalism of Bond, 118, 145–55, 159; style of, 160–64; stylizations of masculinity in, 20, 145, 146, 151–52, 153, 155, 158; unbelongingness of Bond, 159–60, 163–64, 239n34; violence perpetrated on Bond’s body, 155–60; Wain’s Hurry on Down compared with, 20, 144, 146, 150, 164; welfare state in shaping of Bond, 125, 127, 144, 149, 151, 158–59, 237n22. See also Casino Royale; Moonraker Jane and Prudence (Pym), 182, 194 jazz, 108–11 Jewel in the Crown, The (Scott), 204–12 Jill (Larkin), 172 Jones, Kennedy, 53 journalism, Waugh’s Scoop as satire on, 47, 51–54, 61–62 Keep the Aspidistra Flying (Orwell), 70–88; aspidistra’s significance, 87; Larkin’s personae compared with

Index Comstock, 91; masculinity and the personal linked in, 121; as mixed bag of genres, 69, 70, 87; morphs into middlebrow domestic novel, 83, 85, 86, 87; narrative trajectory of, 83; Orwell persona in, 8, 87; struggle against and within domesticity in, 11; transition from residual aristocratic to professionalized suburban model of manliness in, 18, 85; Wain’s Hurry on Down compared with, 129, 133 Kingsley, Charles, 27–28, 36, 221n3 Kipling, Rudyard, 2, 68, 153, 222n9 “Large Cool Store, The” (Larkin), 105 Larkin, Philip, 89–116; All What Jazz, 110; and alternative sexualities, 232n18; autonomy in works of, 99– 100, 105, 106, 121; “Best Society,” 101, 112; James Bond and personae of, 144; “Born Yesterday,” 95; Byatt’s The Shadow of the Sun and, 166, 173; “Church Going,” 89–90, 101, 182; “Deep Analysis,” 101, 232n16; “Difficulties with Girls,” 102; “Dockery and Son,” 19, 97–103, 112, 115, 132; empiricism of, 112–16; female personae in works of, 94; “First Sight,” 102–3; “Here,” 232n15; High Windows, 103, 232n15; “High Windows,” 232n15; “If My Darling,” 105; “The Importance of Elsewhere,” 19, 94–97, 99, 100, 102–3, 112, 115; on jazz, 108–11; Jill, 172; “The Large Cool Store,” 105; later poetics of, 219n2; and Lawrence, 232n17; The Less Deceived, 93, 95, 102, 103, 232n15; “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album,” 102, 105; “Maiden Name,” 105; male personae of, 10, 11, 19; modernism celebrated by, 12; in the Movement, 119; “Mr. Bleaney,” 19, 113–15, 232n15; new realist novels linked to, 118; Orwell

267 as pivotal link to, 4, 18, 88; as poet of postwar England, 90, 93, 230n3; poetry imbricated in hegemonic masculinity, 90; “Poetry of Departures,” 91, 92–93; “Posterity,” 90; on post-imperial gentlemanliness, 4, 10; as professional, 174; protagonists of, 220n16; pseudonym Brunette Coleman, 232n17, 232n18; on Pym, 183, 184, 197, 240n6; Pym’s An Unsuitable Attachment and, 20, 166, 188, 189, 190, 192, 203; Pym’s work compared with that of, 182, 195, 196, 241n12; read within discourse of imperial gentlemanliness, 122– 23; read within paradigm of class mobility, 12; “Reason for Attendance,” 101, 106–12, 116, 232n15; as restrained, middle-class Englishman, 107; “Self’s the Man,” 106, 113, 115; solitude and misanthropy of, 19; “Sunny Prestatyn,” 102–6, 231n14; “Toads,” 93; “To the Sea,” 232n15; “Triple Time,” 93; “Vers de Societe,” 232n15; “Wants,” 232n15; “Wedding Wind,” 101, 232n16; “The Whitsun Weddings,” 113; The Whitsun Weddings, 95, 99, 103, 114, 232n15; “Wild Oats,” 233n22 Lawrence, D. H., 7, 169, 173, 232n17 Leavis, F. R., 7, 128, 167, 234n5 Lehmann, Rosamund, 167 Less Deceived, The (Larkin), 93, 95, 102, 103, 232n15 Less than Angels (Pym), 242n22 Light, Alison, 2, 8, 79, 219n3 “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album” (Larkin), 102, 105 London: in Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 70, 73, 75–76, 81–82; in Waugh’s Scoop, 59–60, 226n18 Look Back in Anger (Osborne): James Bond compared Jimmy Porter, 144; film of, 231n14; on lack of autonomy,

268 Look Back in Anger (Osborne) (continued) 231n14; nation and masculinity intertwined in, 11; Orwell’s Comstock as prototype for Jimmy Dixon, 229n5; political ambivalence in, 234n7; Pym’s An Unsuitable Attachment compared with, 187–88, 192; seen as dismantling hegemonic masculinity, 117; women scapegoated in, 233n21 Lucky Jim (Amis): James Bond compared with Jim Dixon, 20, 144, 146; Byatt’s The Shadow of the Sun compared with, 166, 171, 173, 178; lucky antagonist of, 143; on masculinity in postwar nation, 13–17; as neopicaresque, 139; “new man” in, 117; Pym’s An Unsuitable Attachment compared with, 166, 184, 203; seen as dismantling hegemonic masculinity, 117; Wain reads on the radio, 233n2; Wain’s Hurry on Down compared with, 136; welfare state in shaping of Jim Dixon, 125 MacLean, Donald, 156 Madge, Charles, 72 “Maiden Name” (Larkin), 105 Maschler, Tom, 183, 241n15 masculinity: adventurous, 92; Arnold’s conception of manliness, 25; James Bond’s, 20, 145, 146, 151–52, 153, 155, 158; Christian ideal of, 31, 221n3; corporate, 78, 79, 80, 84, 85–86; democratized, 66, 69; film depictions of, 231n14; as fragile, 33, 152, 222n9; gendering the nation, 5–12; hegemonic, 5–8, 10, 17, 19, 22, 28, 32, 33, 46, 77, 78, 79, 87, 90, 91, 96, 117, 147, 155, 159, 164, 169, 217; heteronormative, 11, 12, 40; imperial, 32, 144, 166, 204; Indian, 30, 37, 204, 206, 208, 211, 216; Kingsley on, 27–28; in Larkin’s poetry, 89–

Index 116; literature as masculine activity, 121; lower-class, 103, 105, 106; middle-class, 28, 66, 85, 100, 101, 102, 103, 122, 132, 142, 205, 208, 211; ordinary Englishman, 1, 8–9, 10, 69, 124; Orwell’s ideals of, 4, 67–88; overlaps with Englishness, 10, 112; post-gentleman defined against and through female protagonists, 165– 203; post-imperial, 17, 20, 102, 118, 128; private versus public, 78; public school manliness, 30, 34, 96, 106, 152; as racially encoded, 34; service ideal in, 28–29; stylizations of English, 4, 13, 15, 16, 18, 21, 89, 116, 122, 134, 145, 170–75; suburban, 18, 92, 93; threshold, 117–64; in transition, 1–21; two styles of, 92, 101–2; upper-class, 117, 193, 201; in Wain’s Hurry on Down, 127–44; wartime, 9; welfare state, 122, 125–26; workingclass, 27–28, 122, 131–32, 133, 134, 151, 169, 220n16; World War I destabilizes, 32, 45–46, 77. See also gentlemen; “new man” mass culture, 74, 75 Mass Observation, 43, 70, 72, 82, 87 Maugham, Somerset, 18, 124–25 middlebrow culture, 70, 73, 83, 85, 86, 87 middle class (bourgeoisie): in Amis’s Lucky Jim, 14; bourgeois femininity, 138, 175; Englishmen, 1–2, 3, 27, 29, 40, 44, 69, 83, 90, 91, 100, 101, 102, 106–7, 108, 109, 112, 113, 120, 127– 34, 181, 182, 190, 198; gentlemanliness associated with, 27; in Larkin’s poetry, 90, 91, 93, 96, 100, 106–7; lower, 14, 16, 69, 70, 71, 83–84, 85, 87, 119, 120, 170, 192, 212, 213; masculinity, 28, 66, 85, 100, 101, 102, 103, 122, 132, 142, 205, 208, 211; Orwell as example of, 1–4; Orwell’s criticism of, 67–68; in Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 71–72, 83–85,

Index 87; professionalism, 128, 142, 149; and public schools, 24, 26, 221n2; radical revision between the wars, 2; social exploration literature of, 81–82; upper, 2, 3, 14, 29, 44, 67, 136, 171, 180–83, 190, 191, 192, 195, 198, 199, 201, 203, 211, 213, 214; in Wain’s Hurry on Down, 128–34, 136, 141, 142; women, 20, 32, 165–203 Mill, John Stuart, 36–37 mimic men, 212 modernism: Angry Young Men and influence of, 121; anti-modernism, 12; Byatt and, 167; crisis seen in, 233n3; the Movement’s rejection of, 234n4; realists contrasted with, 120, 128; Wain’s Hurry on Down caricatures, 133; Waugh and, 44, 224n3 Moonraker (Fleming), 146–50; on Bond’s un-Englishness, 160; fear of collapse in, 152; narrative style of, 161–62; plot summary of, 145–46; women in, 152, 238n28 Movement, the: on the artist, 234n4; on autonomy, 121; Byatt and, 167; empiricism of, 113, 233n23; Leavis as influence on, 234n5; on masculinity and Englishness as related, 112; media’s role in creation of, 233n2; members of, 119; political ambivalence of, 123, 234n8; provincialism of, 234n6; Wain and, 128; welfare state associated with, 124; work aimed at common reader, 174. See also Amis, Kingsley; Larkin, Philip; Wain, John “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (Woolf), 120 “Mr. Bleaney” (Larkin), 19, 113–15, 232n15 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), 46, 75 Murdoch, Iris, 118, 119, 139 “muscular Christianity” movement, 221n2 Mutiny of 1857, 34, 35, 36, 39, 238n30

269 Naipaul, V. S., 1, 7, 212 Nancy boys, 73 neo-picaresque, 18, 19–20, 118, 127, 128, 129, 138–44, 198 “new man”: Amis’s Lucky Jim ushers in age of, 14, 16, 117; in Angry Young Men’s writings, 118, 178; James Bond as, 144, 164; in Byatt’s The Shadow of the Sun, 171, 173, 203; conservative gender and sexual politics of, 11; emerges from gentlemanly traits, 117; female subjectivity and, 20, 165, 166; Orwell and, 66, 67, 85; in Pym’s An Unsuitable Attachment, 181, 203; as reconfiguration of old ideals, 10; shift from hegemonic masculinity to, 17, 18; signifies emergence of modern Britain, 118; in Wain’s Hurry on Down, 133, 164 “Notes on the English Character” (Forster), 24 Notting Hill Riots of 1958, 185, 242n19, 242n21 novels of manners, 181, 182, 196, 198– 200, 203 “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question” (Carlyle), 28 On the Study of Celtic Literature (Arnold), 28 Orwell, George, 66–88; Burmese Days, 11, 46, 209, 210; on class, 2, 67, 219n1; A Clergyman’s Daughter, 78; Coming Up for Air, 8, 70, 79, 229n8; contradictoriness of, 66, 67, 228n2; on decency, 3–4, 8, 16, 67, 69, 87, 88, 132; deterioration of imperial confidence as context of works of, 33; Down and Out in Paris and London, 81; early documentary-realist novels of, 69; in elevation of male English realist writers, 7; on empiricism, 1, 121; “England Your England,” 68; as example of English middle class, 1–4; gender-neutral politics attrib-

270 Orwell, George (continued) uted to, 12; “Inside the Whale,” 230n14; middle class criticized by, 67–68; modernism celebrated by, 12; persona “George Orwell,” 1, 66, 67, 87; as pivotal link to postwar writers, 4, 18, 88; postwar writers compared with early, 12; on prewar gentleman, 22; protracted disintegration of manliness in novels of, 18; realism of, 69– 70, 87; The Road to Wigan Pier, 1–2, 67, 81, 219n1; “Rudyard Kipling,” 68; Wain compared with, 128; Waugh contrasted with, 65, 80–81; writes about classes other than his own, 229n13. See also Keep the Aspidistra Flying Osborne, John: in Angry Young Men, 119; protagonists of, 220n16; Pym’s An Unsuitable Attachment and, 190. See also Look Back in Anger Passage to India, A (Forster), 33–40; feminist and postcolonial criticism of, 33, 34; Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown references, 205–6; on separation of personal-ethical and ethnonational, 46; as text of empire, 34 Perkin, Harold, 24, 85, 148, 149 “Poetry of Departures” (Larkin), 91, 92–93 postcolonial gentleman, 204–17; as neither English nor white, 21; processes in emergence of, 205 “Posterity” (Larkin), 90 post-gentleman: in Amis’s Lucky Jim, 14, 16, 117; Angry Young Men affirm, 123; James Bond as, 20, 146, 155, 159; contradictions and multiple layers in, 10; defined against and through female protagonists, 165– 203; gentleman displaced by, 13, 14, 17, 19, 22; as gentleman of postwar writers, 9; in Larkin’s poetry, 93,

Index 188; origins of, 122; in Pym’s An Unsuitable Attachment, 190; struggle against constrictions of imperial gentlemanliness, 19; struggle against inherited gender scripts, 203; in Wain’s Hurry on Down, 117, 132 Pritchett, V. S., 139 privacy, discourse of, 77–78 professionalism: in Byatt’s The Shadow of the Sun, 171; of Fleming’s James Bond, 118, 145– 55, 159; in journalism, 52– 53, 61; middleclass, 128, 142, 149; new writers as professionals, 174; in Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 69; professional Englishmen, 91, 96; professional gentleman, 227n22; professional women, 152– 54; public schools in training of professionals, 24, 53; public-sector, 148, 149, 150; in Pym’s An Unsuitable Attachment, 189– 90; in Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown, 210; self-restraint as characteristic of, 107; service ethic in, 53, 54; split in, 225n15; suburban professionals, 56; in Wain’s Hurry on Down, 128, 129, 130, 142; in welfare state, 126 public schools: bourgeoisie and aristocracy melded in, 31; Burgess-MacLean spy ring, 156; in Byatt’s The Shadow of the Sun, 172; and civil service, 29, 30; gentlemen produced by, 3–4, 22–26, 30, 35, 37, 44–45, 61, 96, 132; ideals of Englishness articulated by, 23, 96; manliness inculcated by, 30, 34, 96, 106, 152; old-boy networks, 64; in Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 72; professional idealism emphasized by, 24, 53; in Pym’s An Unsuitable Attachment, 190; in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, 213, 215; in Wain’s Hurry on Down, 128, 131 pukka sahib, 34, 37, 210, 212

Index Put Out More Flags (Waugh), 55 Pym, Barbara: in anthropology, 195–97, 198, 199, 242n24; clergymen’s wives in works of, 194; Empire in works of, 191; A Few Green Leaves, 241n13; gendered style of, 195; Jane and Prudence, 182, 194; Larkin on, 183, 184, 240n6; Larkin’s work compared with that of, 182, 241n12; Less than Angels, 242n22; middle-class female protagonist depicted by, 165; narrative style of, 195, 201–3; nationalism of, 243n28; novels of manners of, 196, 198–200; Quartet in Autumn, 183, 241n13; rejection of works of, 183–85, 241n13; service ideal in works of, 30; Some Tame Gazelle, 243n27; speaks of repressed histories against which post-imperial masculinities have defined themselves, 20; The Sweet Dove Died, 194, 197, 241n13; textualizes the trivial, 197; “very Barbara Pym,” 182; “war of the sexes” in novels of, 185. See also Unsuitable Attachment, An Quartet in Autumn (Pym), 183, 241n13 quest narratives, 69, 77, 81, 82, 83, 85, 229n12 race: Englishness and masculinity as racially encoded, 34; in Forster’s A Passage to India, 38; in gender norms, 5, 6; gentlemanliness shaped by, 204; Notting Hill Riots of 1958, 185, 242n19; racism in James Bond novels, 162; Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown on racism, 207, 210, 212; in Wain’s Hurry on Down, 131–32; in Waugh’s Scoop, 49–50 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 178 Raven, Simon, 145, 156 realism: Amis’s Lucky Jim as comicrealist, 14, 17; of Angry Young Men,

271 7, 118, 120; of Byatt, 167; comes to exemplify postwar English literature, 120–21; elevation of group of male realist writers, 7, 12; gritty, 69, 231n14; “kitchen-sink,” 20, 178; in Mass Observation, 43, 87; of Orwell, 69–70, 87; in Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 18, 72, 76, 78, 85; social-realism, 119, 121–22; of Wain, 19, 128; Waugh shifts to a nostalgic, 47 “Reason for Attendance” (Larkin), 101, 106–12, 116, 232n15 “Remembering the ’Thirties” (Davie), 91–92 Road to Wigan Pier, The (Orwell), 1–2, 67, 81, 219n1 Room at the Top (Braine), 11, 136, 139, 229n5, 231n14 “Rudyard Kipling” (Orwell), 68 Rushdie, Salman, 204–5, 212–16 Satanic Verses, The (Rushdie), 204–5, 212–16 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Sillitoe), 122, 220n16, 231n14 Scarry, Elaine, 157, 158, 238n33 Scoop (Waugh), 41–65; Boot as out of place, 58–65; circularity of, 47; on the countryside, 54–58; discourses of imperial English gentleman shape style of, 17–18; distanced gentlemanly narrative voice in, 43–51; irony in, 42, 43, 44, 47, 49, 50, 52, 54, 56, 64; paradox between form and content of, 64; plot summary, 48; as satire on journalism, 47, 51–54, 61– 62; tone of, 48; on transition from public service to corporations, 53, 54, 85 Scott, J. D., 118 Scott, Paul, 204–12 Sedgwick, Eve, 223n14 self-governance, 87, 151, 157

272 self-restraint: in Amis’s Lucky Jim, 16; of James Bond, 151, 157; as English trait, 106–7, 108, 110, 157, 205; as gentlemanly trait, 4, 7, 22, 27–28, 32, 151; Larkin’s Englishmen struggle with, 11, 19, 108, 111 “Self’s the Man” (Larkin), 106, 113, 115 Selvon, Samuel, 242n20 service ideal, 28–29, 53, 54, 85, 225n15 sexuality: in gender norms, 5, 6. See also heteronormativity; homosexuality Shadow of the Sun, The (Byatt), 166– 80; addresses changes in middleclass woman in postwar Britain, 165; on Angry Young Men, 20, 167, 170, 171, 173, 175, 176, 178; engages with “new man,” 203; plot summary of, 167; search for female artistic vision in, 166–70; stylizations of masculinity in, 170–75; title change for, 239n1; title’s source, 178; women’s choices in, 175–80 Sharpe, Jenny, 35, 223n16 Sillitoe, Alan: and Angry Young Men, 119; new man in works of, 118; Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 122, 220n16, 231n14 Simmel, Georg, 51 social-realism, 119, 121–22 Some Tame Gazelle (Pym), 243n27 Springhall, John, 221n2 Stephen, Leslie, 30 Storey, David, 118, 119, 122 suburbanization: Larkin on, 89; in Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 69, 70, 71, 84, 85; suburban domesticity, 11, 79, 86, 87, 89; suburban masculinity, 18, 92, 93; suburban professionals, 56; suburban respectability, 111; suburban women, 71; in Wain’s Hurry on Down, 129 Suez Crisis of 1956, 190–91, 235n11 “Sunny Prestatyn” (Larkin), 102–6, 231n14

Index Sweet Dove Died, The (Pym), 194, 197, 241n13 Sword of Honour Trilogy, The (Waugh), 42, 47 Teddy Boys, 185 Tennyson, Alfred, 38 This Sporting Life (Storey), 122 “Toads” (Larkin), 93 Tom Brown’s Schooldays (Hughes), 24– 26, 35, 38, 131, 220n1 Torgovnik, Mariana, 58, 226n19 “To the Sea” (Larkin), 232n15 “Triple Time” (Larkin), 93 Unsuitable Attachment, An (Pym), 180– 203; addresses changes in middle-class woman in postwar Britain, 165; detached gentleman in, 185–91; ending of, 202– 3; engages with “new man,” 203; on gentlemen and gentlewomen adapting to shifting urban landscape, 20; the marriage in, 200– 201; as novel of manners, 199, 203; plot summary, 181–82; posthumous publication of, 183; rejection of, 183; unsuitable relationships in, 191– 95; as unusual Pym novel, 240n10; West Indian presence in, 184, 185, 186, 191, 203, 241n17, 242n20 upper class: in Amis’s Lucky Jim, 14; in Byatt’s The Shadow of the Sun, 170; masculinity, 117, 193, 201; Orwell on, 68; in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, 215, 216; in Wain’s Hurry on Down, 136; Wodehouse’s depictions of men, 236n18; women, 183, 192, 195 Upward, Edward, 229n13 Valente, Joseph, 27–28 “Vers de Societe” (Larkin), 232n15 Vile Bodies (Waugh), 42, 227n21 Village Book, The (Williamson), 55

Index Wain, John: “Along the Tightrope,” 130; in Angry Young Men, 119; Byatt rejects masculine form of, 168; examining works with focus on gender, 12– 13; in the Movement, 119; new man in works of, 118; Orwell as pivotal link to, 4, 18, 88, 228n4; on post-imperial gentlemanliness, 4; as professional, 174; protagonists of, 220n16; Pym’s An Unsuitable Attachment and, 190, 197; reads Amis’s Lucky Jim on the radio, 233n2; read within discourse of imperial gentlemanliness, 122–23; read within paradigm of class mobility, 12; Zeitgeist novels of, 18, 118. See also Hurry on Down “Wants” (Larkin), 232n15 Waugh, Evelyn, 41–65; airplanes and automobiles in works of, 227n21; anthropological turn in works of, 43; Brideshead Revisited, 55, 173; in Bright Young People, 42; on Catholic gentlemen, 226n20; on cinema’s power, 228n25; Decline and Fall, 41, 42, 47, 63, 172; deterioration of imperial confidence as context of works of, 33; distanced gentlemanly narrative voice in early works of, 43–47; A Handful of Dust, 55, 58, 63; on materialist and callow modern woman, 62–63; on modernism, 224n3; on new Englishman, 18; Orwell contrasted with, 65, 80–81; Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying refers to, 73; on professions for gentlemen, 226n15; protracted disintegration of manliness in novels of, 18; Put Out More Flags, 55; Pym and, 181, 195, 196; as satirist of upper-middle- to middle-class gentleman, 11–12, 32, 42; The Sword of Honour Trilogy, 42, 47; Vile Bodies, 42, 227n21; Waugh in Abyssinia, 225n11, 225n12; on welfare state and those it produced, 124–

273 25; writes about classes other then his own, 229n13. See also Scoop Waugh in Abyssinia (Waugh), 225n11, 225n12 Waves, The (Woolf), 46 “Wedding Wind” (Larkin), 101, 232n16 welfare state, 125–27; Angry Young Men and, 121, 124; James Bond shaped by, 125, 127, 144, 149, 151, 158–59, 237n22; defined, 125, 235n12; as defining moment of new postwar state, 8, 13; discourse of motherhood and marriage institutionalized in, 176–77; feminist critique of, 126–27; imperial decline and creation of, 235n11; Larkin on gender in context of, 93; luck and safety net of, 143; masculinity, 122, 125–26; “new hero” in literature and, 11, 117, 118; the picaresque and, 139; post-gentleman and turn to, 10; postwar writers seen as advocates of, 12, 13; revival of hoary traditions simultaneous with establishment of, 91; shift from imperial nation to, 17; solidarity and sovereignty in tension in, 123; Wain’s Hurry on Down and, 125, 127, 134, 142 Whitsun Weddings, The (Larkin), 95, 99, 103, 114, 232n15 “Whitsun Weddings, The” (Larkin), 113 “Wild Oats” (Larkin), 233n22 Williams, Raymond, 2, 44, 67, 69, 77, 122, 219n1, 219n6 Williamson, Henry, 55 Wodehouse, P. G., 62, 131, 229n13, 236n18 women: become Empire builders, 32; in James Bond novels, 145, 146, 152– 53; bourgeois femininity, 138, 175; l’ecriture feminine, 170; emotionalism attributed to, 110; feminist critique of welfare state, 126–27;

274 women (continued) housework for middle-class, 236n17; in Larkin’s “Reason for Attendance,” 107–8; in Larkin’s “Sunny Prestatyn,” 102–6; as metaphor for the nation, 5; middle-class, 20, 32, 178, 198, 203; in Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 71–72, 76, 78– 80; post-gentleman defined against and through female protagonists, 165–203; professional, 152–54; selfrenunciation attributed to, 221n6; suburban, 71; upper-class, 183, 192, 195; in Wain’s Hurry on Down, 134– 38; Waugh on materialist and callow modern, 62–63 women’s magazines, 175–76, 239n4 Woolf, Virginia: Angry Young Men contrasted with, 124; anthropological turn in works of, 43; and Byatt, 167, 168; and crisis in Modernism, 233n3;

Index deterioration of imperial confidence as context of works of, 33; “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” 120; Mrs. Dalloway, 46, 75; Pym influenced by, 197; The Waves, 46 working class: in Angry Young Men, 117, 119, 122; Arnold excludes, 29; in Byatt’s The Shadow of the Sun, 171; as dialectical antithesis of the gentleman, 27–28; masculinity, 27– 28, 122, 131–32, 133, 134, 151, 169, 220n16; middle-class self-restraint contrasted with, 107; Orwell on, 3; public school values for, 221n2; in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, 213, 215; social-realist writers on, 119; Teddy Boys, 185; in Wain’s Hurry on Down, 127, 131–34, 136, 137 Zeitgeist novels, 14, 18, 118