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“The Rope That Connects Me Directly with You”: John Wain and the Movement Writers' Orwell

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

John Rodden
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No British writer has had a greater impact on the Anglo-American generation which came of age in the decade following World War II than George Orwell. His influence has been, and continues to be, deeply felt by intellectuals of all political stripes, including the Marxist Left (Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson), the anarchist Left (George Woodcock, Nicolas Walter), the American liberal-Left (Irving Howe), American neoconservatives (Norman Podhoretz), and the Anglo-American Catholic Right (Christopher Hollis, Russell Kirk).

Perhaps Orwell's broadest imprint, however, was stamped upon the only literary group which has ever regarded him as a model: the Movement writers of the 1950s. Unlike the above-mentioned groups, which have consisted almost entirely of political intellectuals rather than writers—and whose members have responded to him as a political critic first and a writer second—some of the Movement writers saw Orwell not just as a political intellectual but also as the man of letters and/or literary stylist whom they aspired to be.

The Movement writers were primarily an alliance of poet-critics. The “official” members numbered nine poets and novelists; a few other writers and critics loomed on the periphery. Their acknowledged genius, if not leading publicist, was Philip Larkin, who later became Britain's poet laureate. Orwell's plain voice influenced the tone and attitude of Larkin's poetry and that of several other Movement poets, especially Robert Conquest and D. J. Enright. But Orwell shone as an even brighter presence among the poet-novelists, particularly John Wain and Kingsley Amis, whose early fictional anti-heroes were direct descendants of Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) and George Bowling in Coming Up for Air (1939).

Type
Presidential Address North American Conference on British Studies 1987
Information
Albion , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , Spring 1988 , pp. 59 - 76
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1988

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References

1 On Orwell's reception by some of these groups, see my “Ideology, Revisionism and the British Left: Orwell's Marx and the Marxists' Orwell,” Papers in Comparative Studies 5 (1984): 45–60Google Scholar; and “Orwell on Religion: the Catholic and Jewish Questions,” College Literature 11 (1984): 44–58Google Scholar.

2 Blake Morrison has discussed Orwell's influence on Larkin in The Movement (London, 1980), pp. 178, 234Google ScholarPubMed.

3 Wain, John, A House for the Truth (London, 1972), p. 1Google Scholar.

4 Wain, John, “Dear George Orwell: A Personal Letter,” American Scholar (February 1983): p. 22Google Scholar.

5 See Amis's, “Why Lucky Jim Turned Right,” in Amis, Kingsley, What Became of Jane Austen and Other Questions (New York, 1971), p. 202Google Scholar.

6 Wain, , “Dear George Orwell,” pp. 31–32Google Scholar.

7 See Morrison, , The Movement, pp. 10–54Google ScholarPubMed. Wain and Amis also reviewed regularly for the Spectator during the key years of the emergence of the Movement, 1954–55.

8 Quoted in Morrison, , The Movement, p. 89Google ScholarPubMed.

9 Indeed the Movement's character owes something to the rise of logical positivism and the postwar vogue in the British academy for the ordinary language philosophy of the later Wittgenstein and Gilbert Ryle. To some degree, the Movement writers received this influence through Orwell; Hartley calls the author of “Politics and the English Language” and “Notes on Nationalism” the “great popularizer of logical positivism” in the 1950s. See Hartley, Anthony, A State of England (London, 1963), p. 50Google Scholar.

10 On the role which “consolidation” served as a key concept in the Movement's vocabulary, See Morrison, , The Movement, pp. 89–91Google ScholarPubMed.

11 Wain, , “English Poetry: The Immediate Situation,” Sewanee Review 65 (1957): 359Google Scholar.

12 Morrison, , The Movement, p. 73Google ScholarPubMed.

13 Wain, , “The Last of George Orwell,” Twentieth Century (January 1954): p. 71Google Scholar.

14 Ibid.

15 Wain, , “Orwell,” Spectator, 19 November 1954, p. 632Google Scholar.

16 On the “Orwell-derived manner” of much Movement prose, see Lucas, John, “Aspidistra Flyers,” New Statesman 99 (23 May 1980): 286–87Google Scholar.

17 [Scott, J. D.], “In the Movement,” Spectator, 1 October 1954Google ScholarPubMed. This article was anonymous. Scott discusses it and its role in the publicity campaign launched by the Spectator to promote The Movement in “A Chip of Literary History,” Spectator, 16 April 1977.

18 Conquest, Robert, “George Orwell,” in George Orwell: Collected Writings, ed. Bott, George (London, 1958), p. 1Google Scholar.

19 Conquest, Introduction to New Lines (London, 1956), p. 4Google Scholar.

20 Wain, , “Dear George Orwell,” p. 22Google Scholar.

21 John Wain, interview with the author, 14 March 1985.

22 Morrison, , The Movement, p. 92Google ScholarPubMed.

23 Amis, Kingsley, “The Road to Airstrip One,” Spectator, 31 August 1956, p. 292Google Scholar.

24 Wain, John, “The Last of George Orwell,” Twentieth Century (January 1954): p. 78Google Scholar.

25 “Inside the Whale” is printed in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Orwell, Sonia and Angus, Ian, 4 vols. (New York, 1968), 1: 493–526Google Scholar. On Miller's view of Orwell as a foolish idealist for going to fight Spanish fascism, see “The Art of Fiction,” Paris Review 7 (1962): 146–47Google Scholar.

26 Amis, , Socialism and the Intellectuals (London, 1957), p. 8Google Scholar.

27 On Williams' similar volte face between 1955 and 1956, see his essay-review “George Orwell,” Essays in Criticism, vol. 5 (1955), pp. 44–52Google Scholar; and his chapter on Orwell in Culture and Society (London, 1958), which was written during 1956Google ScholarPubMed.

28 On the relation between the Movement and the Angry Young Men phenomenon, see Morrison, , The Movement, pp. 246–48Google ScholarPubMed.

29 Wain, , “English Poetry: The Immediate Situation,” p. 359Google Scholar.

30 Cf. Morrison's discussion of the impact of the events of 1956 on some of the Movement writers, pp. 249–51.

31 See Thompson's influential, hostile essay on Orwell of that title in his Out of Apathy (London, 1960), pp. 158–65, 171–73Google ScholarPubMed.

32 Williams, , George Orwell (London, 1971), p. 96Google Scholar.

33 Hartley, , A State of England, pp. 53–55Google Scholar.

34 Cf. Rogers, Daniel, “‘Look Back in Anger’—To George Orwell,” Notes and Queries (August 1962): 310–11Google Scholar; and Carnall, Geoffrey, “Saints and Human Beings: Orwell, Osborne and Gandhi,” in Essays Presented to Amy G. Stock, ed. Raul, R. K. (Jaipur, 1965), pp. 168–77Google Scholar.

35 By 1957 Wain was already defending Orwell and distancing himself from William Empson and F. R. Leavis. Empson's ambiguity and anti-Romanticism and Leavis's methods of textual “scrutiny” had exerted decisive influence on Movement poetry and criticism. But Wain and other Movement writers came to see “Empsonianism” as arid intellectualism and “Leavisism” as pretentious academicism. The aesthetic-political contradictions in the Movement's credo and thus the inherent instability of the Movement's program, given the family tree formed by its three models, finally revealed themselves. Though the trio shared an emphasis on “Englishness” and pragmatism, Empson's scientistic formalism and Leavis's aggressive elitism were fundamentally at odds with Orwell's sociological literary criticism, democratic socialism, and commitment to the common reader. Professional reasons probably also weighed in Wain's and Amis's preference for Orwell. Wain and Amis rejected the route which Empson and “Dr.” Leavis had taken: the academic career. Wain left Reading University in 1955 to pursue free-lance writing full-time; Amis stopped teaching in 1963. No doubt it was also easier to embrace Orwell because, unlike Empson and Leavis, he was a non-threatening (or already slain) father figure, no longer a judge or rival.

36 West, Anthony, “Hidden Wounds,” New Yorker, 28 January 1956, pp. 71–9Google Scholar.

37 Wain, “Orwell In Perspective,” New World Writing; reprinted in George Orwell: A Collection of Essays, ed. Williams, Raymond (London, 1974), p. 89Google Scholar.

38 Ibid., p. 90.

39 Some of Wain's other poetry and fiction of the period also bore the marks of his Soviet experience. Wildtrack (1965) included several couplets entitled “Attitude of Humanity Toward the Irreducible I.” His novel A Winter in the Hills (1970) told the story of individualistic Welsh nationalists resisting creeping totalitarianism.

40 Wain, , Sprightly Running: Part of An Autobiography (London, 1962), pp. 233–34Google Scholar. “John Wain,“ interview in The Writer's Place, ed. Firchow, Peter (Minneapolis, 1974), p. 327Google Scholar.

41 O'Brien, Conor Cruise, “Orwell Looks At the World,” in George Orwell: A Collection of Essays, ed. Williams, Raymond, p. 158Google Scholar.

42 Wain, , “Here Comes Lower Binfield,” Encounter 17 (October 1961): 71Google Scholar.

43 Ibid., pp. 74, 79.

44 Ibid., p. 76.

45 Amis, , “The Road to Airstrip One,” p. 292Google Scholar.

46 “Kingsley Amis,” interview by James, Clive, New Review, 1 (July 1974): 24Google Scholar.

47 For “callow Marxist,” see Amis, , Socialism and the Intellectuals, p. 5Google Scholar: “name-calling and walking-out stage” is quoted in Morrison, , The Movement, p. 252Google ScholarPubMed.

48 Amis, interview with the author, 12 March 1985.

49 I discuss the duality of Orwell's appeal in The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of ‘St. George’ Orwell (forthcoming, Oxford University Press).

50 Martin Green, interview with the author, 8 November 1984. Green, a long-time English expatriate, first became friendly with Amis when they were colleagues at Cambridge University in 1961–62. For Green's views of Orwell's influence on Amis, see A Mirror for Anglo-Saxons (London, 1961)Google Scholar, and Children of the Sun (New York, 1972)Google ScholarPubMed.

51 Amis, , “Why Lucky Jim Turned Right,” p. 202Google Scholar.

52 Amis, , “Lone Voices,” in What Became of Jane Austen and Other Essays, p. 161Google Scholar.

53 See Morrison for a discussion of Amis's outspoken cultural conservatism, pp. 252–55. See also Gardner, Philip, Kingsley Amis (Boston, 1981), pp. 13–22, 144–52Google Scholar.

54 Amis, , Daily Express, 19 March 1969Google Scholar.

55 Cf. Authors take Sides on Vietnam, ed. Woolf, Cecil and Bagguley, John (London, 1967), pp. 48–9Google Scholar.

56 McCarthy, Mary, “The Writing on the Wall,” The New York Review of Books (6 January 1969): 3–6Google Scholar.

57 Amis, interview with the author, 12 March 1985.

58 Wain, , “Our Situation,” Encounter (May 1963): 8Google Scholar.

59 Wain, , “In The Thirties,” in The World of George Orwell, ed. Gross, Miriam (London, 1971), p. 79Google Scholar. Interestingly, whereas New Left radicals sympathetic to Orwell seized on his revolutionary zeal in Homage to Catalonia, comparing American imperialism to Spanish fascism and seeing Orwell as an erstwhile Che Guevara, Wain and anti-radial critics emphasized the anti-Communism in Catalonia. One comparison of Orwell and Guevara is a letter to the New Statesman, 13 December 1968. See also Chomsky, Noam, American Power and the New Mandarins (New York, 1969), pp. 95–102, 144–48Google Scholar.

60 Wain, , “In The Thirties,” in The World of George Orwell, ed. Gross, Miriam (London, 1971), p. 90Google Scholar.

61 Wian, , “Orwell and the Intelligentsia,” Encounter 21 (December 1968): 74Google Scholar.

62 Ibid., p. 80.

63 See, for example, Podhoretz, Norman, “If Orwell Were Alive Today,” Harper's, January 1983, pp. 30–37Google Scholar.

64 Amis, interview with the author, 12 March 1985.

65 Ibid. Amis's politics have been strongly influenced by the anti-Communism of Conquest, a layman Soviet scholar of Stalinist Russia. Amis's view of the inherent bad faith of radicals is represented by what he sardonically referred to in the interview as “Conquest's Law.” This “law” holds that one's radicalism extends only to those issues irrelevant to one's interests or sphere of competence; one is invariably “conservative” about issues one has a stake in or is knowledgable about. Transforming various institutions (family, education, law, etc.) sounds appealing to a radical outside those institutions. Amis says, but he or she tends to emphasize the need to “understand” the “difficulty” and “complexity” of such schemes when radical proposals involve overturning arrangements benefiting him or her.

66 Wain's proprietary attitude toward Orwell is nothing new for him. See his heated exchange with Tom Hopkinson, author of the first book on Orwell (George Orwell [1953]), in The Twentieth Century, March 1954, pp. 235–36Google Scholar. Also Wain's accusations that George Woodcock, one of Orwell's anarchist friends, was “out to steal [Orwell], to kidnap him and keep him in the ‘anarchist and libertarian’ menagerie” (“On George Orwell,” Commentary [June 1969]: 28–29Google Scholar.) Wain also castigated Williams' “Left Establishment” view of Orwell in his review of Williams' George Orwell in The Observer, 10 January 1971. By the late 1960s, Wain was among the most prominent of the so-called “Enounter Orwellians” who themselves have been accused by the Left (e.g., Conor Cruise O'Brien and Bernard Crick) of “stealing” Orwell.

67 Wain, , “Dear George Orwell,” pp. 26–7Google Scholar.

68 Podhoretz, “If Orwell Were Alive Today.”

69 Wain, , “Dear George Orwell,” p. 26Google Scholar.

70 Ibid., pp. 30–31.

71 Ibid., p. 22.

72 Wain, interview with the author, 14 March 1985.

73 One easily-overlooked source of Wain's impassioned identification with Orwell is surely the striking resemblances of their schooldays and adolescence. In his Sprightly Running Wain recalls, in language that echoes Orwell's “Such, Such Were the Joys,” his miserable schooldays and how they shaped his outlook. Even the character and themes of some of Wain's novels, not to mention his prose style, bear a direct relation to Orwell's work. For example, one cannot help but wonder whether Wain's already-discussed psychological reading of Coming Up For Air reflected his own struggles with his novel The Contenders, written near the same time [1958] as his critical essay and also about a fat man (Joe Shaw) who is really a thin man (“Clarence”) inside.

74 Becker, Ernest, The Denial of Death (Detroit, 1973), pp. 127–58Google Scholar.

75 Cf. Wain, , “Orwell and the Intelligentsia,” pp. 76–77Google Scholar; and Wain's award-winning biography, Samuel Johnson (London, 1975), passimGoogle ScholarPubMed.