History of English Literature, Volume 8: From the Late Inter-War Years to 2010 1789974038, 9781789974034

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Volume 8 Book 1

Volume 8 continues with the 1920s and the 1930s, when the Depression, the Spanish Civil War, Fascist dictatorships, and the threat of a second war challenged apolitical Modernism. Poets led by Auden, novelists like Orwell and figures such as Lawrence of Arabia defined the period. By the end of the Second World War, a realist, satirical or comic tradition resurfaces in the novel, while in poetry the affirmation of a pre-war neo-Romantic vein, especially with Dylan Thomas, is reacted against by various movements that lead poetry back to the common man. Two important years are 1953, when Waiting for Godot by Beckett is staged, and 1956, when Look Back in Anger by Osborne gives life to the ‘angry’ novel and theatre. Extensive discussions not only of writers now become classics (Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, Heaney, Hill and Ted Hughes) but also of other leading ones (such as Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan) are included.

www.peterlang.com

Franco Marucci

Franco Marucci is a former Professor of English at the Universities of Siena, Florence and Venice Ca’ Foscari. His publications include Il senso interrotto. Autonomia e codificazione nella poesia di Dylan Thomas (1976), The Fine Delight that Fathers Thought: Rhetoric and Medievalism in Gerard Manley Hopkins (1994), L’inchiostro del mago. Saggi di letteratura inglese dell’Ottocento (2009) and Joyce (2013). His Storia della letteratura inglese in eight volumes was published by Le Lettere / Editoriale Srl, 2003–2018. As a creative writer he is the author of Pentapoli (2011), followed by Il Michelin del sacro (2012). He runs the blog , with comments and features on literature and music, and a weekly sports page.

Histor y of English Literature

History of English Literature is a comprehensive, eight-volume survey of English literature from the Middle Ages to the early twenty-first century. This reference work provides insightful and often revisionary readings of core texts in the English literary canon. Richly informative analyses are framed by the biographical, historical and intellectual context for each author.

From the Late Inter-War Years to 2010

‘Franco Marucci’s History of English Literature is unique in its field. There is no other book that combines such erudition and authority in such a compact format. An indispensable work of reference.’ — J. B. Bullen, Visiting Fellow, Kellogg College, Oxford

History of English Literature

From the Late Inter-War Years to 2010

Franco Marucci

Peter Lang

Volume 8 Book 1

History of English Literature

History of English Literature Volume 8 Book 1

From the Late Inter-War Years to 2010 Franco Marucci Translated from the Italian by Alexander Gillan

PETER LANG

Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche National-bibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Marucci, Franco, 1949- author. Title: From the late inter-war years to 2010 / Franco Marucci. Other titles: Storia della letteratura inglese. Dal 1922 al 2000. English Description: Oxford ; New York : Peter Lang AG, [2019] | Series: History of English literature ; volume 8 | Translation of Storia della letteratura inglese - Volume V, Tomo II, dal 1922 al 2000 : dal secondo anteguerra al 2000. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018032661 | ISBN 9781789974010 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: English literature--20th century--History and criticism. | English literature--21st century--History and criticism. Classification: LCC PR97 .M3713 2018 | DDC 820.9/0091--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018032661 Originally published in Italian as Storia della letteratura inglese – Dal secondo anteguerra al 2000 by Casa Editrice Le Lettere (2011). Cover image: Graham Sutherland, Devastation, 1941: An East End Street (1941). Cover design by Brian Melville. ISBN 978-1-78997-402-7 (print) • ISBN 978-1-78874-126-2 (ePDF) ISBN 978-1-78874-127-9 (ePub) • ISBN 978-1-78874-128-6 (mobi) © Peter Lang AG 2019 Published by Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers, 52 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LU, United Kingdom [email protected], www.peterlang.com Franco Marucci has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work. All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed. Printed in Germany

Contents

List of abbreviations § 1.

  2.

English literature from the late inter-war years to 2010 From reconstruction to desocialization

xvii/I 1/I 10/I

Part I

Writers against Totalitarian Regimes   3–12.

Auden

17/I 19/I

§ 3. The burnt-out meteor. Militancy and disengagement in the leader of the poets of the 1930s, p. 19. § 4. Cabaret theatre, p. 33. § 5. Solipsism shaken by the call to action, p. 50. § 6. Poetry until 1939, p. 61. § 7. An emigrant from the islands, p. 68. § 8. The post-war age of anxiety, p. 71. § 9. Uncollected poems until 1957, p. 82. § 10. The critic, p. 85. § 11. The songbook of the passé intellectual, p. 90. § 12. Opera librettos, p. 92.

  13–14.

Isherwood

99/I

§ 13. The Berlin sagas, p. 99. § 14. The painful and doubtful awareness of diversity, p. 107.

  15–16.

Spender § 15. The imperious question: ‘Why do I write?’, p. 113. § 16. Romantic heroism between the wars, p. 118.

113/I

vi/I

§§ 17–18. MacNeice

124/I



§ 17. A communist supporter without a party card, p. 124. § 18. The Autumn calendars, p. 131.

  19–20.

Day Lewis



§ 19. Anthems and choruses of the marching proletariat, p. 141. § 20. Poems of political disillusion, p. 151.

  21–29.

Orwell



§ 21. The safeguard of intellectual integrity, p. 154. § 22. Evolution of his political and aesthetic thinking, p. 174. § 23. The reportages, p. 187. § 24. Burmese Days. Outcasts in Burma, p. 197. § 25. A Clergyman’s Daughter, p. 203. § 26. Keep the Aspidistra Flying, p. 207. § 27. Coming Up for Air. Petit bourgeois hedonism gains awareness, p. 211. § 28. Animal Farm. Stalinism unmasked, p. 215. § 29. Nineteen Eighty-Four. The last man, the last humanist, p. 219.

  30.

Caudwell 

234/I

  31.

T. E. Lawrence

240/I

141/I

154/I

Part II

The Novel after Modernism

245/II

  32–36.

Huxley

247/II



§ 32. The retaliation of evolutionism, p. 247. § 33. The wasted youth of the 1920s, p. 255. § 34. Brave New World. God ousted by Ford, p. 276. § 35. Ataraxic detachment from the world and history, p. 283. § 36. Dystopian fantasies, p. 289.

vii/I



§§ 37–40. Bowen

293/II



§ 37. Irish enchantments, p. 293. § 38. Covert dramas of dreaming adolescence, p. 300. § 39. Chill and hallucination before and during the war, p. 306. § 40. Childhood: memories and nostalgia, p. 309.

  41–43.

Green 



§ 41. Idiosyncrasies of an auxiliary modernist, p. 313. § 42. Early experiments in the documentary and fantastic genres, p. 321. § 43. Satires, parodies and burlesques in enclosed microcosms, p. 328.

  44.

Hartley

334/II

  45–48.

Waugh

341/II



§ 45. Farces of an unredeemed world, p. 341. § 46. The explosion of comedy, p. 348. § 47. Brideshead Revisited. The twitch upon the thread, p. 357. § 48. The war trilogy, p. 363.

  49–55.

Greene



§ 49. The tussle with God, p. 370. § 50. Siding with Judas, p. 379. § 51. Brighton Rock. The satanic saint, p. 388. § 52. The Power and the Glory. The theology of the repentant thief, p. 395. § 53. The Heart of the Matter. The judge judged, p. 401. § 54. Novels of espionage and exoticism, p. 407. § 55. The human factor, p. 415.

  56–57.

Snow 



§  56. Humanism and science join forces, p.  420. §  57. Strangers and Brothers. Intrigues of politics and academic life, p. 428.

313/II

370/II

420/II

viii/I

§§ 58–61.

Powell 

437/II



§ 58. Farces on impotence and power, p. 437. §§ 59–61. A Dance to the Music of Time (§ 59. Refined entertainments for a relaxed intelligentsia, p. 446. § 60. Splendours and miseries of the bourgeoisie, p. 456. § 61. Rise and fall of the arriviste, p. 463).

  62.

Cary

467/II

  63.

Lowry

477/II

  64–67.

Durrell

482/II



§  64. The mythographer of ageless cities, p.  482. §  65. Prospero’s flight, p. 487. § 66. The Alexandria Quartet, p. 491. § 67. The Avignon postlude, p. 499.

   68.

Minor novelists between the two world wars

506/II

Part III

Poetry until the 1980s

515/II

  69–73.

Dylan Thomas

517/II



§ 69. ‘Shut in a tower of words’, p. 517. § 70. Hallucinations of genesis, p. 525. § 71. The Map of Love, p. 534. § 72. Faith overturned, p. 536. § 73. Under Milk Wood, p. 543.

   74.

Surrealist and New Apocalyptic poets

   75.

The Movement ‘and after’

551/II 560/II

ix/I



§§ 76–77. Larkin

568/II



§ 76. Novels and early poems, p. 568. § 77. The exquisite miniaturist, p. 575.

  78–80.

Gunn 



§ 78. The celebration of entropy, p. 584. § 79. Stasis and motion, p. 589. § 80. Gunn ‘on the road’, p. 595.

   81.

Jennings, Davie 

598/II

  82.

Empson

601/II

  83.

Richards, Leavis

606/II

  84.

Tomlinson

608/II

  85.

Betjeman

613/II

  86–91.

Ted Hughes

619/II



§ 86. The force of nature, p. 619. § 87. Autobiography and self-mythologizing, p. 623. § 88. The bestiaries, p. 631. § 89. Crow, p. 639. § 90. Diaries of farm life, p. 642. § 91. Poems on fish and flowers, p. 647.

  92–96.

Hill



§ 92. After the fall, p. 651. § 93. Reservations on the votive word, p.  659. §  94. The Mercian Hymns, p.  664. §  95. Tenebrae and The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy, p.  666. §  96. Ventriloquist digressions on unredeemed history, p. 668.

584/II

651/II

The Index of names and Thematic index for Volume 8 can be found at the end of Book 2.

x/I Part IV

Regional Literatures

1/II

§ 97. Muir

3/II

  98.

MacDiarmid

11/II

  99.

The Scottish Renaissance

19/II

  100.

Irish poetry after Yeats

24/II

  101.

Welsh poetry

33/II

Part V

The Theatre of the Absurd, the ‘Angry Young Men’, and Political Theatre35/II   102–104.

Coward



§ 102. The prancing, fatuous middle class, p. 37. § 103. Three case studies of marriage, p. 38. § 104. Operettas and dreamlike plays, p. 43.

  105–112.

Beckett



§ 105. Stations of ‘negative anthropology’, p. 45. § 106. The art of mathematics, p. 60. § 107. The mock-heroics of Belacqua, p. 66. § 108. The narrative trilogy, p. 80. § 109. Watt, p. 101. § 110. The tetralogy of the absurd, p. 111. § 111. Multimedial and minimalist theatre, p. 128. § 112. The ‘short prose’ and the mirlitonnades, p. 137.

37/II

45/II

xi/I



§ 113.

Simpson, Nichols

  114.

The ‘angry young men’ and the theatrical revolution of the 1950s and after 149/II

  115.

Kingsley Amis

157/II

  116.

Sillitoe

160/II

  117.

Other ‘angry’ novelists

168/II

  118–119

Osborne

171/II



§ 118. Invective and regret in Look Back in Anger, p. 171. § 119. Other plays for lead actors, p. 176.

  120.

Delaney, Jellicoe

183/II

  121–124.

Pinter

185/II



§ 121. Post-Beckettian atmospheres and resonances, p. 185. § 122. Protection and aggression of the stateless man, p. 192. § 123. The self-deceptions of memory, p. 200. § 124. The shorts, p. 206.

  125–126.

Wesker



§ 125. The half-spent torch of socialism, p. 208. § 126. Later plays of a marginalized Jew, p. 213.

127–129. Arden

§ 127. Showstopping ambivalences, p. 220. § 128. The sextet of major works, p. 224. § 129. Co-produced political theatre outside circuits, p. 233.

148/II

208/II

220/II

xii/I

§§ 130–134. Bond

236/II



§ 130. Sermons of non-violence?, p. 236. § 131. The iconoclastic early plays, p. 241. § 132. Exotic parables on the theme of power, p. 247. § 133. History’s missed opportunities, p. 251. § 134. Human survival in the post-atomic future, p. 257.

  135.

Orton

262/II

  136.

Shaffer

265/II

  137.

Behan

269/II

Part VI

Contemporary Writers

273/II

  138–139. Angus Wilson

275/II



§ 138. Velleities and ineptitudes of the managing class, p. 275. § 139. The Old Men at the Zoo, p. 285.

  140–144. Golding

§§  140–141. Tales of primitiveness (§  140. Lord of the Flies, p.  293. §  141. The Inheritors and Pincher Martin, p. 304). § 142. The Spire. The devil in the cathedral, p. 311. § 143. Transitional fantasies and satires, p. 315. § 144. The end of the ancien régime, p. 319.

  145.

Rhys

  146–150. Murdoch

293/II

325/II 328/II

xiii/I



§ 146. The inquiry into the intelligibility of reality, p. 328. § 147. Case studies of psychic dependence, p. 335. § 148. The Red and the Green and the reinterpretation of Irish heroism, p. 345. § 149. Marital infidelity, p. 354. § 150. Final studies of intellectual charisma, p. 365.

§§ 151–156. Spark

§ 151. Diabolical whims and criminal plans of a writerly god, p.  375. §  152. Vocal intrusions from the afterlife, p.  384. §  153. The prime of Miss Muriel Spark, p.  389. § 154. Theological thrillers, p. 400. § 155. Grotesque and neo-Gothic divertissements, p. 409. § 156. Last-minute variations, p. 416.

  157–164. Lessing

375/II

418/II

§ 157. Lay madonnas of a novelist without faiths, p. 418. § 158. Searching for one’s identity, but not finding it. The formative saga of Martha Quest, p. 429. § 159. Notebooks of a disillusioned communist, p.  440. §  160. Descent into the oneiric and resurfacing to reality after 1962, p. 443. § 161. Canopus in Argos. Fun and apocalypse in the science fiction cycle, p. 448. § 162. The Diaries of Jane Somers. Mutual assistance among women, p. 454. § 163. The dissolution of the family unit, p. 458. § 164. In the beginning was the woman. Final novels from the early 2000s, p. 465.

   165. Berger

474/II

   166. Brookner

476/II

   167–175. Fowles

478/II

xiv/I

§ 167. Metanarrative variations on negative existentialism, p. 478. § 168. Heraclitus’ last disciple, p. 484. § 169. The Collector. Playing with the ‘tempest’, p. 489. § 170. The Magus. The stuff that dreams are made on, p. 491. § 171. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. A Victorian kaleidoscope, p. 497. § 172. The Ebony Tower, p. 502. § 173. Daniel Martin, p. 504. § 174. Mantissa. A postmodern anamnesis of inspiration, p. 506. § 175. A Maggot. A historical and imaginary reconstruction of the eighteenth-century milieu, p. 507.

§ 176. Burgess

510/II

 177–182. Carter

518/II



§ 177. Fantasies and utopias, p. 518. § 178. Unease, anger, psychosis in the 1968 student class, p. 524. § 179. The diptych of novels on counter-creation, p. 537. § 180. The Sadeian woman, p. 544. § 181. The short stories, p. 549. § 182. Final extravaganzas, p. 551.

 183.

Barnes

554/II

  184.

Rushdie, Kureishi

558/II

 185.

McEwan

566/II

  186.

Graham Swift

576/II

  187.

Martin Amis

582/II

  188.

Ishiguro, Mo

590/II

  189.

Other postmodern novelists

598/II

 190–193. Heaney

607/II

xv/I



§ 190. Nostalgia for the spade, p. 607. § 191. Digging into the strata of civilization, p. 613. § 192. Poetry from the 1980s, p. 617. § 193. The ‘remembering machine’, p. 621.

§ 194.

Mahon, Muldoon

625/II

 195.

Harrison

631/II

  196.

English poetry today

636/II

  197.

Friel, McGahern, Banville

641/II

 198–206. Stoppard

647/II



§  198. A theatre of communicating vessels and of the bibliophile, p. 647. § 199. Shakespeare the catalyst, p. 654. § 200. The Real Inspector Hound, or dramatic reversibilities, p. 657. § 201. The radio dramas, p. 660. § 202. The marriage of farce and ideas, p. 662. § 203. The committed plays, p. 667. § 204. The Real Thing. Dangerous liaisons, p. 669. § 205. History and fantasy literature, p. 670. § 206. The trilogy on the harbingers of the Bolshevik revolution, p. 675.

 207.

Ayckbourn

677/II

 208.

Gray

682/II

  209.

Griffiths, Edgar

684/II

  210.

Hare, Brenton

686/II

  211.

Howard Barker

690/II

 212.

Churchill

692/II

§ 213. Frayn

695/II

  214.

Alan Bennett

696/II

 215.

Hampton

697/II

Index of names

699/II

Thematic index

725/II

List of abbreviations AAA ATD BAUGH BRM CAB CLA CMM CRHE DES DUN HAP HYN IDM IZZO KET KPE

J. R. Taylor, Anger and After: A Guide to the New British Drama, Harmondsworth 1963. W. Allen, Tradition and Dream: The English and American Novel from the Twenties to Our Time, London 1986. A Literary History of England, ed. A. C. Baugh, 4 vols, London 1967. Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930, ed. M. Bradbury and J. McFarlane, Harmondsworth 1991 (1st edn 1976). I contemporanei – Letteratura inglese, ed. V. Amoruso and F. Binni, 2 vols, Roma 1982. M. Praz, Cronache letterarie anglosassoni, 4 vols, Roma 1951 and 1966. Modernismo / Modernismi. Dall’avanguardia storica agli anni Trenta e oltre, ed. G. Cianci, Milano 1991. The Critical Heritage of individual authors, London, with editors and publication years indicated in the bibliographies. V. De Sola Pinto, Crisis in English Poetry 1880–1940, London 1963 (1st edn 1951). D. Dunn, ‘Language and Liberty’, Introduction to The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry, ed. D. Dunn, London 1992. Hopkins Among the Poets, ed. R. F. Giles, Hamilton 1985. S. Hynes, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s, London 1976. F. Marucci, L’inchiostro del mago. Saggi di letteratura inglese dell’Ottocento, Pisa 2009. C. Izzo, Storia della letteratura inglese, 2 vols, Milano 1961 and 1963. A. Kettle, An Introduction to the English Novel, vol. II, London 1972 (1st edn London 1953). F. Kermode, Puzzles and Epiphanies: Essays and Reviews 1958–1961, London 1962.

xviii/I

List of abbreviations

KRG

F. R. Karl, A Reader’s Guide to the Contemporary English Novel, London 1968. Letture. Libro e spettacolo. Mensile di studi e rassegne. The London Review of Books. Storia della civiltà letteraria inglese, ed. F. Marenco, 4 vols, Torino 1996. G. Melchiori, I funamboli. Il manierismo nella letteratura inglese da Joyce ai giovani arrabbiati, It. trans., Torino 1974 (1st Eng. edn The Tightrope Walkers, London 1956). L. Mittner, Storia della letteratura tedesca, 3 vols in 4 tomes, Torino 1964–1977. J. H. Miller, Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers, Cambridge, MA 1965. G. Orwell, Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, ed. S. Orwell and I. Angus, 4 vols, Harmondsworth 1970. The Pelican Guide to English Literature, ed. B. Ford, 7 vols, Harmondsworth 1966 (1st edn 1954). M. Praz, Storia della letteratura inglese, Firenze 1968. M. Praz, Studi e svaghi inglesi, 2 vols, Milano 1983 (1st edn 1937). The Times Literary Supplement. A. C. Ward, 20th Century English Literature 1901–1960, London 1964 (1st edn 1928).

LET LRB MAR MEF MIT MPR OCE PGU PSL SSI TLS WAR

Volume 1 Volume 2 Volume 3 Volume 4 Volume 5 Volume 6 Volume 7

F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 1, Oxford 2018. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 2, Oxford 2018. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 3, Oxford 2018. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 4, Oxford 2019. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 5, Oxford 2019. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 6, Oxford 2019. F. Marucci, History of English Literature, vol. 7, Oxford 2019.

Note. Except for the above abbreviations, full publication information of cited works will be found in the bibliographies for each author.

§ 1. English literature from the late inter-war years to 2010 Setting out on this Volume 8 of my work, my observations need to go back to a good fifteen years before 1945, to introduce and contextualize figures, movements and literary experiences parallel to Modernism, or merely touched by it or decidedly and contentiously outside its area. Without this, late twentieth-century literature would not be complete, precisely because in their various transformations they announce developments well beyond the watershed of the War. In the main I have selected the following criteria for inclusion, in ascending hierarchical order: 1) by date of birth, with the automatic sine qua non that authors should debut after 1921–1922, and therefore that they should be born after 1900 (with some slight exceptions, nonetheless); 2) formal. As early as the late 1920s, the updated formula of the traditional novel began to re-enter fiction: we have seen that modernist fiction looked back to the eighteenth-century variety of Sterne, Smollett and Fielding, although in that tradition there lay other competing seeds destined to blossom in the long term. In poetry, save for clamorous exceptions, we witness the repudiation of Eliot’s poetics of fragmentation, of the mythical method and of every kind of neo-Romanticism, and a greater adherence to daily life; 3) semiotic: that is, a much more polarized attention to the addressee, somewhat more present than previously in literary communication, and more targeted, more directly brought into play. A greater interaction is also sought, instead of adjusting the product to coteries or eliminating the reader tout court by opting for self-communication; 4) one consequence is the decline of the supremacy of the signifier, of linguistic playfulness, of parody and generally speaking also of the technical and tightrope experiment; every uncouth emphasis on content over form is avoided, but an emphasis on, and imbalance towards, the formal tend to be reduced; 5) commitment: an undertaking to reform society, to approve and appropriate a poetics and practice of intervention which led writers off to the war fronts wherever freedom was being violated; a concretely socialist and communist commitment. As I mentioned in the previous volume, D. H. Lawrence too emphasized content over form, but fought for a cultural and sexual revolution, not one first and foremost political; 6) the inverse of the above: religious and spiritual commitment, with an expressly Catholic literature, the photographic negative of Bolshevism, also because human

2/I

§ 1. English literature from the late inter-war years to 2010

beings are portrayed as being in a vertical relationship with the absolute in the first instance, rather than as members of a horizontal community from which they are separated. In certain cases, the two groups intermingle since they are fighting for the same objective, but this merger arises more in the passage of Bolshevist sympathizers to forms of spiritualism than the contrary. This scenario will lead to borderline cases, and up to 1945, and also a little beyond, it will prove impossible to clearly separate epigonal Modernism from commitment, notably in Henry Green, or other experiences that dilute it or make it instrumental to political intervention, as in early Auden, in the Orwell of Coming Up for Air and others. One can foresee incorporating likewise the final backlashes of Modernism itself, with the last ‘tightrope walkers’, the last pasticheurs, and all of the postmodern up to the threshold of the third millennium. At this point we must introduce, postulate and register a second interstice, those writers who emerged during the first half of the century, in the inter-war years, and were active afterwards as well, in some cases with fifty- and sixty-year-long careers (such as Graham Greene). In what follows the points listed briefly above will be expanded upon, while other later transitions will be anticipated in the form of general coordinates, the subject of the six parts that make up this volume. 2. In the chronology of twentieth-century English literature it is possible, and indeed essential, to establish the decade as the unit of measure, not the twenty-five-year generation; or even the discriminating factor of the year of birth. Being born in the early 1890s had a quasi-mathematical effect: taking part as adults in the First World War. Being born in the first years of the new century meant eschewing it, and not even living it as witnesses or as combatants, while growing up in the atmosphere of decay and disillusionment of the early post-war years. Being born in the early 1920s or 1930s was something totally different again. And so, to repeat, twentiethcentury English literature can also be divided up generally speaking by date of birth. As 1844 was for the Victorians, so the years from 1903 to 1907 were of grace for the new generation. Common traits can be found among those born in those years, in Waugh, Greene, Green, Powell, Beckett, and Snow, who read one another even if they were not really close, and who had mostly followed the Eton-Oxford scholastic model, exhibited a note of Modernism that was not that of Joyce, and were brought together under the sign of

§ 1. English literature from the late inter-war years to 2010

3/I

the burlesque and the dialogic fantasy. Having arrived too late for the First World War they fought, some of them, in the Second; but first they had to face the crossroads or triple crossroads between Protestantism, Catholicism, and humanist agnosticism or Bolshevism. In the 1920s, apathy, disaffection and irresponsibility reigned, as shown by the small turnout for the 1919 elections, with Prime Minister Baldwin gaining success because his was not a politics of principles. The Great Strike of 1926 called urgently to public responsibility a young intelligentsia that believed they could burn themselves out before the age of thirty, and whose daredevil capricious vicissitudes are described impassively in the early novels of Huxley, Waugh and Powell. It is no coincidence that the main alternative to Modernism is the Auden generation of the 1930s, taking its cue therefore from the similar characters of a group of writer-friends animated by common purposes and objectives in that decade. The task of every historian of this decade-long literary movement has been made easier by Samuel Hynes’s book, The Auden Generation (1976), an extremely useful spectrogram of the politicized, socialist and Marxist literature that recognized Auden as its leader. In fact, into this network were gathered, tangentially or directly, all the great and less great writers with few exceptions, and exceptions that are signally the whole of historical Modernism, which is unquestionably not insignificant. Hynes’s book is also a calendar that measures and categorizes – taking the pulse, as it were, of the literary community year after year and even month after month – the development of the aesthetic and ideological debate, as well as the curve of simple moods, against the convulsive background of the major historical events. Above all, Hynes reconstructs the mixed sentiment of the generations of university graduates born during the first decade of the century, who felt envious of those who had gone to war, and regretted not being of an age to fight. Their vision of the First World War was substantially filtered through the poetry of Owen, who, in his most famous aesthetic definition, disavowed blind and fanatical heroism: ‘the poetry is in the pity’. This notwithstanding, an alternative myth of the war was being formed. In the wake of the panorama of futility and destruction in The Waste Land, two groups were born: Waugh’s ‘bright young things’, and the political activists who gathered around Auden, who himself nevertheless held the most ambiguous and indecisive political ideology of them all.

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At the end of the 1920s, the Oxford Poetry series began to appear, which, in anthologies edited also by Auden, gathered together the compositions of that university’s aspiring poets. Each yearly issue opened with a preface, and these prefaces represent a gradual becoming aware of the relationship between art and society. Already in 1930, nostalgia for the myth of the First World War, with its repercussions and deformations, confused itself and overlapped with the fear of a second war, which even translated into a search for a hero to invest in, who could be a fascist and communist at one and the same time: in concrete terms, the two Lawrences, D. H. and T. E. Room was made for the dream or reality of a revolution, which, however, had to lead to the basically Georgian goal of a primitive, rural, uncontaminated England: ‘Merrie Olde England’. Apart from the poetry magazines and those of a miscellaneous nature,1 politicized publishing was born by merit of Victor Gollancz, whose first work, which appeared in 1933, was a catalogue of victims of Nazism, and who in 1936 founded the Left Book Club with the goal of politically educating the masses. The emergency caused new and more politically committed literary genres to open like a fan, such as the documentary, in film as well as in print, and reportage, since, in certain cases, writing was synonymous with informing; another fortunate repertoire was the travel book, aimed at restoring to the reading public the sense of an enlarged world, and at once a surrogate for exploration and heroic adventure. In 1936, when the first warnings came of the intercontinental storm brewing, the committed writer had gradually to repudiate the traditional pacifism of left-wing writers. But the distressing outcome of the Spanish experience was retraction, apathy, and resignation. The farewell to the 1930s was meted out in the most ferocious terms of indifference and abjuration by Malcolm Muggeridge in his The Thirties 1

Many of those just born, which distinguished themselves in editorial programmes and policies from the modernist magazines, included in their title the adjective ‘new’, as in New Signatures, brought to life in 1932 by Michael Roberts, where the politicized writers of the 1930s espoused the idea of literature as an instrument of change; or New Country, edited by Roberts again since 1933, or John Lehmann’s New Writing. That same year The Cambridge Left was born. Grigson’s New Verse, from 1933 to 1939, reinstated the criterion of quality, toning down the political content.

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(1939). But a debunking had already come from Auden, who defined the political experience, which he himself had originated, a ‘low dishonest’ decade, virtually the same words as in Christopher Caudwell’s verdict. The protagonists accused themselves of having taken their stance too much on the heat of the moment, of having abandoned themselves to gross error and spontaneous gestures, and above all of having cultivated so many ambiguities, and been prone to a great deal of indecision and uncertainty of aims. Orwell and Caudwell had been right: the courage to become out-and-out politicized writers had been lacking. The essay by Virginia Woolf, ‘The Leaning Tower’, written in 1940, annihilated a generation roosting as on a Tower of Pisa, leaning and above all of ivory, a generation that founded its subsistence on the alienation of the masses but felt threatened by the world’s revolution: one therefore that propelled whoever lived on the tower downwards towards the masses. For others, the Oxfordians’ obvious sense of guilt was due to the privilege of living off and exploiting the workers as well as the wealth coming from the Empire, were it not for the fact that this warmth towards the workers was romantic, mythical, and sentimental, rather than being a coherent political vision. Reams have been written to say and remind us that, in the final analysis, Marx was adopted by the Thirties poets as a convenient tool to act more freely, and to write poetry undisturbed, with no real intention of repudiating the middle classes. 3. Socialism and communism immediately after the War, and Anglicanism and Catholicism, alternatively or also consecutively offered themselves as an anchor to which to cling in a world in decline to those born in the early years of the twentieth century, who had escaped the glory and ignominy of the First World War by dint of their age (and this is largely Orwell’s diagnosis, as we shall see, in ‘Inside the Whale’). Viewed statistically, Catholicism was more tempting and won out over communism: the writers of the 1920s were almost all communists, convicted or potential, and if some continued heatedly to be so, others crossed to the opposite pole. What was it that these writers found in Catholicism? Waugh converted from atheist nihilism, apolitical and therefore not socialist, and did so as a form of interpreting and normalizing the contemporary world. The Catholicism of the last decade of the nineteenth century, aesthetic and decadent, imbued with mysticism and sensuality, and as such a compromise,

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fascinated him. It was no coincidence that Waugh became Catholic after studying Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites and the ambiguous cult of the saints, especially the female ones. Greene too let himself become infected, since his Catholicism – which, he would always maintain, was not emotional, but abstract and intellectual – was an upturned gradus ad Parnassum, that is, a mystique of sin and hell. These two writers, in particular, conceive human life as a Baroque, Counter-Reformation agon, contextualized in everyday life, between the sinning man and the pursuing God (above all Greene). But, we come to realize, this is a representation, and the representation of Nineties Catholicism – that of Johnson, Dowson, and Francis Thompson – which dated back to Hopkins. Ford Madox Ford, too, who was benevolently prefaced by Greene, depicted himself as a damned soul incapable of defeating the seductions of sin, particularly of the sexual kind, cultivated and caressed satanism and had it fight with the instinct of purification. It was only a short step to another Catholic sui generis with daring ideas on sexual morality, born only a decade and a half later: Muriel Spark. The polarity between the Catholic generation and the politicized poetry of the 1930s is highlighted by one fact: Auden’s affiliates could not live alone, while Waugh and Greene could not but live alone.2 At the same time, it is an implicit result that while Auden and his group were poets, the Catholic generation, and in any case another contemporary generation outside Auden’s, were novelists and prose writers operating on two radically divergent aesthetics: serialism and indeterminateness. Some of them built coordinated, closed and interrelated oeuvres, and were authors of sagas and sequels, or novels modelled on one another and obedient to a fixed formula as regards setting, layout, time and place (Powell, Snow, even Beckett), whom we might even call classicists or neoclassicists. Others – Angus Wilson, among many others – did not write even one novel the same as another; they reject any principle of internal order, surprise and faze the reader, each novel representing a new beginning.

2

See in Couto 1988 (bibliography of Greene, § 49.1), the conclusive interview with the novelist, and his irony concerning that ‘gang’ to which he glories in not having belonged, and his approval, as a general rule, of writing in isolation.

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4. Poetry, the novel and the theatre came to operate over the last half-century against a background formed by the added parameters of the sociology of mass communication, of the literary market and of the huge broadening of the field of English language literature, but ipso facto no longer English or even British. New elements, factors and phenomena of the scenario to take into account are the increased leisure time, which made further room available for reading and entertainment; it was radio, cinema, and above all television that emptied the theatres where musicals and the commercial repertoire had always held sway. Poetry, from the time of Larkin and the Movement, has tried desperately to find a remedy for its intrinsically elite nature, by means of a relative lowering of its formal and lexical difficulty, while at the same time attempting to produce texts that can be recited, performed, even sung, or serve as a vehicle of protest and a festival event. The novel has lately become torn between the trap of market demand and absolute inspiration, a market gone mad and turned savage due to the profound crisis of publishing, the advent of the Internet and a disaffection with quality reading, a market conditioned by the predominance of the escapist, sensationalist, instant sale variety. Is a compromise possible? The media maintains the exact opposite and often persuades even the most cautious and presumably objective and unswayable of critics that this or that novel will pass into history, that it is the masterpiece of the current century and will continue to be so into the next. Indeed, the typical novelist of our times appears tyrannized and obsessed by the market, and when an author has debuted with a successful novel, which may even be deeply felt, he or she is pestered by the publishers and obliged, while the iron is still hot, to come out immediately and fatally with a less polished and convincing product. With the aid of advertising, writers therefore dissimulate their collusion with the bookshop system. It is also true that they often make the risky wager of lampooning mass culture, perhaps like Amis in Money, simply by describing it and exploiting its expressive means and idiolects. The most questionable aspect is that many novels written by wily authors are already designed to be transposed for the cinema or as television series. And in any case the highest accolade for a novel is to be transposed for these media, whilst the digital encyclopaedias rush to say, as if it were a certificate of guarantee, that it has been filmed by and

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with whom, listing also the book prizes won, which, it is easily intended, are obtained by a sapient hype. As things stand, various contemporary novelists who have just passed on have remained the authors of a single book, having then produced in series largely forgotten works, as in the case of Anthony Burgess. 5. Flexibly, as many do following a formula of compromise, I too shall imply as ‘English literature’ that of the British Isles including Ireland. The term ‘English literature’ has now become notoriously improper, but is retained here in this unquestionably imprecise sub-significance. As a result African, Indian, Australian, Canadian and Caribbean writers in English will be excluded. Pending are cases such as those of writers who were born and grew up in Commonwealth countries and moved to England as adolescents, youths, or young adults: these are situations to be resolved case by case using common sense, without splitting hairs, and according to the variable extent to which they have become part of the literary establishment centred in England and in particular in London. I am no less perfectly aware of the error or impropriety committed in separating and splitting up a literary universe in the English language like today’s, that is, globalized and hence cemented by strong internal ties; aware, in short, of the myopia that hinders conceiving it and considering it as such, in place of the literature of ‘little old England’. They are both undoubtedly overlapping universes, separate and independent yet sutured together by the English language in which the literary works are written. A second problem concerns the inclusion and exclusion of living and hence still active writers. It would have been a transgression against the principles underlying this work to aim at exhaustiveness. This is of course a mirage, found in many cadastral surveys of twentieth-century literature that are repeatedly unleashed onto the market, since there is barely the time to write about and interpret in a makeshift way a work that has just come out that another takes its place. According to Eliot’s well-known criterion, each new work alters the provisional vision of even a single writer, when it does not render it completely obsolete. I for my part will not fall victim here to encyclopaedic ambitions, and have resisted the temptation, or rather the unrealistic ambition of the card index or catalogue raisonné. My objective is not to level off and set everything on substantially the same

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plane, but to map the geography and dig deep, highlighting the differences and eminences, passing quickly over that which stands out the least and over the flatter surfaces. The second reason is that history is not a news commentary, and I believe that, by and large, for up to at least two thirds of a writer’s career it is not possible to draft a credible, objective summary that is not arbitrary and subjective, or still conjectural. The panorama of English letters in the last twenty-thirty years remains indecipherable, too fragmented, too cacophonous, too fleeting, eluding intelligible classification and even semi-definitive evaluation. This means that dozens and dozens of the latest authors, or even those on everyone’s lips, will not be found included here. Talking about this work of mine with friends and colleagues I have often heard glowingly recommended the name of this or that writer to be dealt with indispensably over any other – entirely unjustified enthusiasms for a historian. To these invitations I reply that it is still too early, and that prudence is wanted, elicited by writers who were alive thirty years ago, on whom incautious critics decided to write overly premature books that now have very little or no value, since they have become obsolete or have been superseded by later works of this or that poet or playwright, whose developments were unforeseen. Hence, readers of this volume should by no means be surprised if, assuming the voice of Jiminy Cricket, I shall complain to the point of tedium about these cases of precipitousness concerning writers such as Durrell, Golding, Spark, Angus Wilson and others. This is to say that literary events, writers and their works should be and will be seen in perspective, a word that implies fully realized detachment from the experience in question, and presupposes, above all, the coming into being and the availability of a literary experience in its totality or virtual totality, and not in mid-stream. Similarly, amongst the late twentieth-century writers open to historical analysis, and whose production is closed by now, some only have been singled out for attention. Living writers at the height of their powers will not be dealt with save for a few exceptions; but others will, such as Geoffrey Hill and Doris Lessing,3 since they are so advanced in years that 3

Lessing and Hill were living when this Volume 8 was first published [translator’s note].

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§ 2. From reconstruction to desocialization

it is difficult to think that their further productions can radically alter an estimation that has already been well defined and delineated as their work developed. In taking this decision – no living writers, save for the documented exceptions – I automatically exclude not only promising authors in their thirties and forties, but also some writers now in their sixties of undoubted and already proven importance, certain of whom are conceivably on their way to becoming in twenty or thirty years the most representative of their generation. This I readily concede. § 2. From reconstruction to desocialization It was the very historians and sociologists of the second half of the twentieth century who suggested to compress these fifty years according to these two antithetical terms and concepts, reconstruction and desocialization, which are also two poles that never come close by their very nature. And they cannot, given that, since 1945, politics and society have been travelling on two asymptotic, or better divergent, roads, progressively deaf and mute to one another, as it were. Politics may rebuild houses destroyed by the war, in concrete terms, and return to filling citizens’ wallets; but re-establishing society needs educators and inspirers. It is easy to notice that with the Second World War the maîtres à penser or even just the cultural mediators disappear, the last being Orwell and T. S. Eliot, who, in updated horizons, covered the function carried out by Ruskin, Matthew Arnold and, in his small way, Hopkins in the nineteenth century. Other potential educators, such as Marcuse, denied that they were so, with their implicitly disintegrating message. But there were also fewer charismatic leaders and even the reference point of the monarchy faded out. British politics has only counted two important figures from 1945 until today, if Churchill’s last cabinet is excluded, and two figures who, with their name and antonomasia could leave their mark on an epoch or, at least, on a segment of an epoch, and thus faintly comparable to a Peel or Disraeli in the most recent past: and they are Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. The sufficiently marked character of these premierships can be gathered from the fact that terms have been created from them that have become part of the political lexicon, such as ‘Thatcherism’ or ‘Blairism’, whereas in the period 1945–1970 the two main parties were not excessively distinguishable in

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terms of differences of opinion, and were somewhat camouflaged, so much so that it was common to speak of ‘Butskellism’.1 And as I shall explain, a distinctive or more distinctive programmatic objective of Thatcher and Blair’s mandate was precisely that of the reconstitution of the community, or at least of a community (desocialization means nothing less than the collapse of Matthew Arnold’s organic social unity). With all of her tact and discretion, or precisely in virtue of this, Queen Elizabeth II, whose reign has now surpassed in length that of Victoria and her namesake Elizabeth I, could not aspire to define these sixty years as ‘Elizabethan’ without running into an unfortunate equivocation. However, to return to my opening assertion, there could not be any mediator or educating agency in the late twentieth century precisely because the battle against the principle of authority had been won, and continues to be won daily hands down. This could prove to be a very general key to understanding this recently ended half-century as well as the one that has just begun. The components and proofs are various, as are the phenomena. After 1945, there was an explosion of anarchic and individual freedoms after an unconscious, centurylong repression; and oppression was something that British society, the grandchild of its Victorian ancestors, knew well. A kind of domino effect rapidly began, which led to questioning and destroying everything that had been acquired and become time-encrusted. Above all, there was a desire to re-dictate history ipso facto and one that until then had been identified with violence, extermination and war. Immediately after 1945, Britain was very far from embracing a radical disarmament, in fact it launched and financed research into the H-bomb, and was ready to intervene militarily worldwide to support any armed revolt against communism, to keep under control various strategic areas and points on the globe, such as Gibraltar and Singapore, and to preserve precious bridgeheads. The British protests and marches of the 1950s against nuclear arms and the atomic threat were not aggressions, since an apparently contradictory culture had begun to spread

1

From a combination of the names of the politicians Butler, Tory, and Gaitskell, Labour (M. Fforde, Storia della Gran Bretagna, Bari 2002, 345). Neither of them, repeatedly predicted to become Prime Minister, would ever be elected.

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from America, one of good graces, gentleness, flowers, and respect for the environment. The ‘beat’ root covered a multitude of semes, among which the two most significant were the ‘beaten’ and the ‘blessed’. The so-called ‘generation gap’, which is actually an eternal sociological fact and a constant in history, became radicalized in this half-century. The young moved to the assault and arrived in the front line in the name of the revenge of fantasy, and in the name of fantasy wanted to eradicate everything old and gangrenous.2 The ideal of eternal youth seems a typically contemporary, modern myth, with the young who must remain young, attractive and without an ounce of adipose tissue, and who attend the gym daily to have a body that is slim, lithe and muscular; but the adults go too, to become young again, while the ladies subject themselves to lifting and plastic surgery. In reality, this was a Faustian dream, an eternal myth, which thirty years earlier had been expressed by Waugh’s ‘bright young things’, for whom there was no tomorrow, and even if there was, it did not count. The boomerang of repression is permissiveness. In the early 1960s, the use of contraceptives was no longer clandestine or prohibited, surrounded by an air of scandal and demonized. The myth of virginity and feminine purity was superseded and demolished from one day to the next, like that of the family nucleus as the basis of society. In an unstoppable vortex one by one the myths of respectability collapsed, while those that until yesterday had seemed insurmountable barriers of ethics and morals were shattered. The revolution in the world of fashion consists in the fact that its only constriction is freedom, the freedom to mate garments, mix colours, upset traditional combinations of dress and occasion – in a nutshell, to write new rules for the system; and this principle extended also to hairstyles and hairdos. The ‘informal’ was not merely an exquisitely artistic phenomenon, which had to do with pop art or Ian Fleming and Le Carré who had staggering sales while the purely literary-cultural limped onwards; or with cinema that, with Reisz, Richardson and Loach accompanied and often prevailed over 2

Along with the protagonists of the plays and novels of the ‘angry generation’, which I shall be studying, we might recall here another document of the sudden exaltation of anarchic freedom and the ascent to national fame of the teenage class, the in-itself mediocre novel Absolute Beginners (1959) by C. MacInnes.

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the literary communication, by making it more flowing, while broadening youthful rage and feminine protest. On the contrary the ‘informal’ also means a social behaviour that can be observed in the fashions of first-name terms at first sight, of walking barefoot around the house or removing your shoes on the train and putting your feet on the seat being tolerated by ticket inspectors. But this fancy is also prone to abandon past fetishisms simply to adopt others, picking up fleeting, infectious, plagiarized fashions one after another, such as toe nails lacquered now with pale diaphanous varnishes and now with gaudy ones. As a penultimate, tangible symptom, or even as an allegory of the clash between the repressive Crown and individual freedom, some have interpreted the otherwise inexplicable national grief over the death of Princess Diana. 2. The country in debt, the state coffers dried up, 600,000 war casualties, its prestige as a pre-war superpower, above all else, faded and gone: for Britain