The 1950s

A Decade of Modern British Fiction

i
 Titles in The Decades Series

The 1950s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction, edited by Nick Bentley,

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

ii
 The 1950s
A Decade of Modern British Fiction

Edited by

Nick Bentley, Alice Ferrebe and Nick Hubble

iii
 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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First published in Great Britain 2019

Copyright © Nick Bentley, Alice Ferrebe, Nick Hubble and Contributors, 2019

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bentley, Nick, editor. | Ferrebe, Alice, 1970– editor. | Hubble, Nick, 1965– editor.
Title: The 1950s : a decade of contemporary British fiction / edited by Nick Bentley,
Alice Ferrebe and Nick Hubble.
Other titles: Nineteen fifties
Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018007004 (print) | LCCN 2018016155 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781350011526 (ePub) | ISBN 9781350011533 (ePDF) |
ISBN 9781350011519 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: English fiction—20th century—History and criticism.
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iv
 Contents

Contributors vii
Series Editors’ Preface x
Acknowledgements xiv

Introduction: The 1950s: A Decade of Change

Nick Bentley, Alice Ferrebe and Nick Hubble 1

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

Nick Hubble 19

2 Angry Young Men? A Product of Their Time

Matthew Crowley 53

3 ‘Mere bird-watching indeed’: Feminist Anthropology and 1950s

Female Fiction
Alice Ferrebe 81

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

Martin Dines 111

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

Matti Ron 141

6 Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On: The Politics of Youth in 1950s Fiction
Nick Bentley 177

7 Detective Fiction and the Prose of Everyday Life: Agatha Christie,

Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and Gladys Mitchell in the 1950s
Nicholas Birns and Margaret Boe Birns 205

8 Chance in the Canon: Uncertainty and the Literary Establishment

of the 1950s
Sebastian Jenner 235

v
vi Contents

Timeline of Works 263

Timeline of National Events 269
Timeline of International Events 273
Biographies of Writers 277
Index 293
 Contributors

Nick Bentley is Senior Lecturer in English at Keele University, UK . He is author

of Contemporary British Fiction: A Reader’s Guide to the Essential Criticism
(Palgrave, 2018); Martin Amis (Northcote House, 2015); Contemporary British
Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2008); Radical Fictions: The English Novel in
the 1950s (Peter Lang, 2007); editor of British Fiction of the 1990s (Routledge,
2005); and co-editor of The 2000s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction
(Bloomsbury, 2015). He has also published journal articles and book chapters
on Monica Ali, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Doris Lessing,
Colin MacInnes, Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Sam Selvon, the city in postmodern
fiction, fictional representations of youth subcultures, and working-class writing.
He is currently working on a monograph: Making a Scene: Youth Subcultures in
Postwar and Contemporary Fiction (Palgrave).

Nicholas Birns is Associate Professor at the Center for Applied Liberal Arts, New
York University. His Theory After Theory: An Intellectual History of Literary
Theory From 1950 to the Early 21st Century appeared from Broadview in 2010.
Other books include Barbarian Memory: The Legacy of Early Medieval History in
Early Modern Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), Contemporary Australian
Literature A World Not Yet Dead, (Sydney University Press in 2015). His co-edited
Options for Teaching Australian and New Zealand Literature was published by the
MLA in 2017. He has contributed to The New York Times Book Review, The
Hollins Critic, Exemplaria, MLQ and Partial Answers.

Margaret Boe Birns is an Associate Teaching Professor at The New School in

New York City, where she teaches twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature.
She has published widely on modern literature, including articles on Anita
Brookner, Iris Murdoch and Agatha Christie for The Continuum Encyclopedia of
British Literature. She has also published five more articles on Christie, including
an analysis of And Then There Were None and The Hollow.

Matthew Crowley is a London-based writer and researcher. He was educated

at Myrtle Springs School, Sheffield, before studying at Central St. Martins
College and Birkbeck College in London. Matthew was awarded his PhD from

vii
viii Contributors

the University of Brighton in 2018 for his work on representations of

working-class masculinities in British culture between 1945 and 1989. Matthew
teaches Cultural and Historical studies at the University of Arts London and
has taught on Twentieth Century British Fiction, Narrative and Poetry at
the University of Brighton. His research interests include, but are not limited to,
post-war British fiction, working-class cultures, masculinities, representations
of Irish republicanism, practices of consumption and the production of
fashion.

Martin Dines is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Kingston University

London where he teaches twentieth-century and contemporary American and
British writing. His research focuses on Anglo-American queer writing from the
1950s to the present, and on literary engagements with space and place. He is
especially interested in the interactions between histories of material places,
desiring bodies and literary form. He is currently completing a book titled The
Literature of Suburban Change: Twentieth-Century Developments, to be published
by Edinburgh University Press, which explores the relationships between
narrative form – in novel sequences and short story cycles, memoir, drama and
comics – and suburban diversification in the US . He is President of the Literary
London Society.

Alice Ferrebe is Subject Leader for English Literature at Liverpool John Moores
University, where she teaches twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature. She
is the author of Masculinity in Male-Authored Fiction 1950–2000 (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005) and Literature of the 1950s: Good, Brave Causes (Edinburgh
University Press, 2012). Her current research explores the intersections between
1950s literature and visual art.

Nick Hubble is Reader in English at Brunel University London, UK . Author of

Mass-Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory (2006/2010) and
The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question (2017); co-author of Ageing,
Narrative and Identity (2013); co-editor of The Science Fiction Handbook (2013),
London in Contemporary British Fiction (2016), The Science Fiction of Iain M.
Banks (2018) and three volumes of Bloomsbury’s ‘British Fiction: The Decades
Series’: The 1970s (2014), The 1990s (2015) and The 2000s (2015); and also co-
editor of special issues of the journals EnterText, Literary London and New
Formations. Nick has published journal articles or book chapters on writers
including Pat Barker, Ford Madox Ford, B.S. Johnson, Naomi Mitchison, George
Orwell, Christopher Priest, John Sommerfield and Edward Upward.
 Contributors ix

Sebastian Jenner is completing a part-time PhD at Brunel University London

while delivering many of their public engagement events and serving as the
Festival Producer for the Hillingdon Literary Festival since its inception in 2015.
His thesis explores the ‘British Aleatory Novel, 1959–1979’ and the performance
of chance procedures in the British avant-garde. This project corresponds
to research interests that include the intersection of musicology and literature,
the mediation between continental avant-garde innovations and marginalized
characteristics of ‘Britishness’, as well as the close synthesis between chance
and order. Other publications include chapters exploring the aleatory form of
B.S. Johnson, collusion and satire in Jonathan Coe’s political novels and liminality
in the work of Will Self. He is also the two-time editor of the annual Hillingdon
Creative Writing Anthology and has taught variously on critical theory and the
Post-Millennial British Novel.

Matti Ron is currently working on his PhD, Representing Revolt: Working-class

representation as a literary and political practice from the General Strike to the
‘Winter of Discontent’, at the University of East Anglia. His research is concerned
with intersectional approaches to class in twentieth-century English literature as
well as the structural limitations of particular forms in representing, both in the
political and literary sense, working-class agency and subjectivity.
 Series Editors’ Preface
Nick Hubble, Philip Tew and Leigh Wilson

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

x
 Series Editors’ Preface xi

together examine critically the periodization of initially contemporary British

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

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

precursors, linking both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through a

detailed and forensic examination of its literary fiction.

Works Cited

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

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

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

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

1
2 The 1950s

2017 lecture, ‘Uncovering the Unspoken’, by the historian David Kynaston,2 it is

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

The postwar consensus

The 1950s’ predecessor, the 1940s, decade of the Second World War, began with
Britain – at the head of the biggest empire the world has ever known – ‘standing
alone’ against Nazi Germany, then continued via struggle and military victory to
end with the successful foundation of the National Health Service and the
Welfare State. The sense of identity gained from the wartime victory was to
underpin a period of more than a quarter of a century when, despite the
transition from the rationed austerity of the late 1940s to the consumer affluence
of the late 1950s, Britain remained a stable entity, characterized by the so-called
postwar political consensus. As Peter Hennessy suggests in his history of the
decade Having it So Good: Britain in the Fifties (2007):

The postwar consensus was perhaps at its most complete in the widely shared
belief in the political parties and within Whitehall about the virtues of the British
constitution in the 1940s and 1950s. These, too, were the years when a ‘decent’
(that great 1940s word) social infrastructure was finally put into place just as the
shared experience of a total war whose front line was as much in Bow as in
Benghazi knitted together a tight little nationalism, and a shared culture to
match built partly on what [Ernest] Gellner called an ‘old and well-established
image’. This [. . .] was to cause particular problems not just in relation to an
integrating Europe in the 1950s and 1960s, but to the domestic integration of the
Queen’s overseas subjects when the sons and daughters of the extended Empire
 Introduction: The 1950s 3

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

While this ‘image’ of a Britain of decency, consensus and fair play clearly did
become well-established in the period – at least within the nation itself – it
served mainly to hide, rather than eradicate, deeper divisions within British
society; both those dating from during and before the war, and those that arose
after it, due to factors such as the changing role of women in society and
immigration.
In particular, class divisions remained entrenched throughout public life. Not
just the residual tripartite upper-middle-lower divisions of the Edwardian
period but also a newer, more explicit form of antagonism resulting from social
changes during the war. As Ross McKibbin concludes in his history of class and
culture in interwar England:

More or less everyone in the interwar years agreed that England was a democracy.
The question was – whose democracy? Before the outbreak of war the question
seemed to have been answered [. . .]: the ruling definition of democracy was
individualist and its proponents chiefly a modernised middle class; in the 1940s
the ruling definition was social-democratic and its proponents chiefly the
organised working class. The class, therefore, which in the 1930s was the class of
progress became in the 1940s the class of resistance. (1998: 531–3)

This ‘resistance’ combined with the sense of British exceptionalism which Angus
Calder (1992) ascribes to the ‘myth of the Blitz’ – the ideological transformation
of the fact that British society held up under the pressures of the defeat of the
army in France, subsequent desperate retreat from Dunkirk, and prolonged
nightly bombing of London and other cities and ports, into the imaginary idea
that ‘no one would have succumbed’ (Calder 1992: 260) to an actual invasion or
conquest by the German army – resulted in ‘the horrid inertia of English culture
in the decade after victory’:

With Labour constructing, if not a New Order, then a welfare state, and with a
middle-class backlash against fair shares and austerity in full swing, the leftist
critics and experimenters of the thirties, already mostly co-opted into the
wartime propaganda effort, were stranded as weary and rather puzzled defenders
of the new Establishment composed of Labourites, statist ‘liberals’ and Planners.
(260)

As a consequence, although the postwar Labour government of Clement

Attlee did set up a welfare state that has proved surprising enduring in many
4 The 1950s

respects, it eventually fell victim to the sheer exhaustion of effectively having to

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

They have women, at least a hundred and fifty women, loving them, or tied to
them, or glad to see the last of them as they go to war.
But the men are the stars of this story. The only heroines are the ships: and the
only villain the cruel sea itself. (9)
 Introduction: The 1950s 5

Calder argues that the novel ‘seems sexist virtually by intention’, before quoting
Alan Munson’s comment that the men in The Cruel Sea fight two battles: ‘one at
sea against U-boats, another at home against women’ (qtd. Calder 1992: 164).
After the first ship, the corvette Compass Rose, is sunk by a torpedo only eleven
men survive, including the captain, Ericson, and the First Lieutenant, Lockhart.
Sometime later, when they are safely back in Britain, Ericson tells Lockhart about
his visit to the wife of their fellow officer, Lieutenant Morell, to tell her about his
death:

‘How was she?’

‘She was in bed.’
‘Oh. . . . Is she taking it badly?
‘I think she was taking it very well,’ said Ericson grimly. ‘There was someone
there with her.’
For a moment, the two men’s eyes met.
‘Damn the war,’ said Lockhart. (344)

Just about all the women in the novel apart from Ericson’s wife and Lockhart’s
girlfriend prove to be unfaithful or in other ways detrimental to their men.
Moreover, it is noticeable how the men who show anything that might be
construed as weakness for women are punished by death in The Cruel Sea. What
is important for Monsarrat is the celebration of male shipboard life and the
homosocial – certainly not homosexual – and paternalistic bonds that bind the
men together; especially Ericson and Lockhart, whose ‘platonic love’ is allowed
to ‘shine forth in the finale’ (Calder 1992: 164).
This mix of an inarticulate but profound manly feeling and a barely latent
misogyny characterizes the (repressed) emotional tenor of the early part of the
decade. Even though a young woman became the head of state in 1952, it
remained the presiding cultural expectation that women were expected faithfully
to fulfil the roles of housewife and mother. As Jane Lewis notes, this expectation
was enshrined in the welfare state developed from the Beveridge Report of
1942:

Beveridge’s picture of married women as housewives fitted the 1930s much

better than his wartime world, or as it transpired, the post-war world. But his
conviction that adult women would normally be economically dependent on
their husbands became embedded in the post-war social security legislation
which in turn had a prescriptive effect. The Beveridge model for married
women’s entitlements to social security was not revised until the middle of the
1970s. (qtd. Hennessy 2007: 123)
6 The 1950s

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

Britain put itself through a straightening-out process of democratisation and

economic levelling, and has come out at the other end with many of the old
values still intact, in a different place and slightly exacerbated by the disruption,
which might be likened to trying to flatten a lump in linoleum: when you look
round it’s heaved up behind you, and anyway the pattern is exactly the same.
(203)

There did seem reason to be angry, even if this anger was only posturing which
helped establish a writer, or little more than a lament for the great causes of the
past. Both cases held for John Osborne and his 1956 play, Look Back in Anger,
with neither the play nor its anti-hero Jimmy Porter able to move forward
 Introduction: The 1950s 7

imaginatively (or stylistically) into a different future. Furthermore, the

ineffectuality of this anger was unsurprising within a context in which, as Allsop
acknowledges, political idealism was seen as suspect. As Doris Lessing has
complained:

To say, in 1957, that one believes artists should be committed, is to arouse

hostility and distrust because of the quantities of bad novels [. . .] produced
under the banner of committedness; [. . .] The reaction is so powerful [. . .] that
one has only to stand up on a public platform and say one still believes in the
class analysis of society and therefore of art, in short that one is a Marxist, for
nine-tenths of the audience immediately to assume that one believes novels
should be simple tracts about factories or strikes or economic injustice. (qtd.
Bentley 2007: 78)

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

Social change and everyday life

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

Birns, and Martin Dines in their chapters for this volume, worked by revealing
hidden aspects of social life and showing the steady changes in attitudes and
lifestyle which were happening at the level of everyday life in the 1950s.
For example, according to Hennessy, ‘in 1950, 10 per cent of the world’s cinema
attendance accumulated in England alone’ and the total audience for the one-
channel television was 344,000 (106, his emphasis). By 1952, the television
audience had risen to 1,449,000, but by 1955, when ITV began broadcasting to
provide a British audience with choice between two channels, ‘a third of British
households had a television. By 1960, 90 per cent owned or rented a TV’ (Todd
2014: 209). By this point, cinema audiences were in a steep decline (see Hennessy
2007: 537). This shift from the public, collective experience of cinema-going to
the more individualistic, or at least domestically-based, process of viewing was
indicative of a wider social change supporting the development of individual
tastes and behaviours in contrast to normative community values. This
development was accentuated by the rise of youth culture, as the mid-decade
arrival in Britain of rock-and-roll in the form of, first, Bill Haley and the Comets
and then, shortly afterwards, Elvis Presley, began the transformation of teenage
behaviour and the expression of (hetero)sexuality.
Fundamental economic changes were underpinned by the Conservative
election victories and their policies of deregulation with respect to mortgages
and credit, which made both easier to gain and thereby enabled ordinary families
to acquire electrical goods such as televisions, fridges and washing machines
through hire-purchase agreements, and, for increasing numbers, to become
home owners. As Selina Todd (2014) explains, both Labour and the Conservatives:

believed that post-war economic growth relied on stimulating demand for the
goods being produced by British manufacturers. However, reliance on
manufacturing was risky. As demand for goods rose, manufacturers increased
prices, either to limit demand or to increase their profits; at a certain point, these
price hikes deterred consumers, who would stop buying their goods, causing
unemployment.
Labour’s price controls, including rationing, had regulated both production and
consumption, but the Conservatives were firmly committed to a free market. They
had to find other ways to stimulate consumption and support profit-making, and
credit was one of them. In 1954 the Conservatives relaxed restrictions on morgtages
and hire-purchase, making it possible for thousands more families to acquire both.
In 1955 Rab Butler, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, introduced purchase tax on
basic household goods such as washboards, while exempting from taxation most
of the more expensive domestic appliances, including automatic washing machines
 Introduction: The 1950s 9

[. . .] All these measures made mass-produced consumer goods increasingly

attractive to working-class wage earners and, apparently, affordable. (203)

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

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

Fiction, the New Left and the birth of cultural studies

One of the important developments in literary and cultural studies in the

universities in the 1950s is the move from a formalist to a historicist approach to
the study of fiction. This represents a shift from the focus on practical criticism,
close reading and the art of literary criticism as imbued with a moral seriousness
associated with the critics F.R. Leavis and I.A. Richards in particular. This New
Criticism, as it had been dubbed, had a profound effect on the way English
literature was taught and understood in schools, universities and amongst the
reading public more generally. Both Leavis and Richards were still producing
work in the 1950s, although the work that established their approaches came
from the 1930s (Leavis 1948, 1952, 1955; Richards, 1955, 1960). However, the
approach to literary criticism that concentrated on a moral evaluation of the
work focused on the words on the page was put under pressure in the 1950s
from a new focus on the broader social, cultural and political contexts in which
literature is produced and consumed. This latter approach moves from the
formalism of the New Critics to the historicist approaches associated with
writers from the New Left and, in particular, the literary critic Raymond Williams,
the cultural studies writer Richard Hoggart, and the historians Christopher Hill,
E.P. Thompson and Raphael Samuel. Williams’ and Hoggart’s work, in particular,
was focused on reading contemporary literary and cultural production with
respect to political and historical contexts in a way that challenged the established
literary canon. One of the main aims of New Left writers was to identify the
specificities and importance of working-class culture as a valid subject for
critical analysis.
One of the important works in this context is Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy:
Aspects of Working-Class Life. Hoggart’s main aim was to examine the cultural
values and practices of working-class culture, both in the contemporary moment
and in the decades before the Second World War. His concerns in the book
were focused on what he saw as the threat to traditional and organic working-
class culture by the arrival of popular cultural forms and practices. With reference
to Matthew Arnold, he dubs this new consumerist, Americanized culture
 Introduction: The 1950s 11

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

the new manners include a variety of ‘democratic’ tones of voice and are decided
by the urge for gaiety and slickness at all costs; the main assumptions are over-
weaning egalitarianism, freedom, tolerance, progress, hedonism, and the cult of
youth. (241)

The role of the mass media was crucial for Hoggart in the creation of this new
society, and he defines examples of mass entertainment as ‘full of a corrupt
brightness, of improper appeals and moral evasions’ (340), perpetuated by ‘those
who provide the entertainment’ (331). Addressing the issue of ‘classlessness’,
Hoggart admits that the new culture promoted a sense in which cultural divisions
were, on the surface at least, breaking down. As he writes, ‘We are becoming
culturally classless’ (342). However, this apparent cultural classlessness masked
the continuing economic divisions between the haves and have-nots.
There is a distinctive style to Hoggart’s book that lies somewhere between
sociological analysis, personal memoir and ethnographic study. The voice of the
text is at once knowledgeable and accessible and he is keen to address what he
describes as the ‘common reader’ and ‘intelligent layman’. As he notes in the
Preface to the book, ‘I have written as clearly as my understanding of the subject
allowed [. . .] For one of the most striking and ominous features of our present
cultural situation is the division between the technical languages of the experts
and the extraordinary low level of the organs of mass communication’ (10).
Clearly Hoggart stresses the deleterious effects of the new mass culture, but there
is also an implicit desire here to be as inclusive as possible, and to avoid a
discourse that might create an alienating distance between the academic
researcher and the working-class subjects of the research. Indeed, he is keen to
12 The 1950s

stress his attachment and belonging to the culture he is examining. As a

‘scholarship boy’, brought up in Leeds, there is a sense in which Hoggart
intuitively knows the working-class environments, life-styles and outlooks he
describes, lending the text a level of authenticity and insider knowledge. In the
book he focuses on the distinction between a ‘visitor’, who might foreground the
‘understandably depressing’ environments of working-class life, and the ‘insider’
who is sensitive to the positive aspects of community and solidarity to be found
in the ‘neighbourhood’ (72–101). Hoggart articulates this distinction in the
vernacular of the working-class culture, as a ‘them and us’ opposition, with the
writer’s role being as a participant-observer representing the culture to an
external addressee (72).
However, implicit in Hoggart’s model of working-class culture there is a
tendency to overlook other aspects of cultural politics such as gender, race and
ethnicity. Hoggart’s approach necessitates, to a certain extent, that the working-
class ‘neighbourhood’ should be maintained as a socially cohesive unit in order
to resist the potentially threatening effects of the newer cultural practices and
products. Part of the approach here means that the ‘organic’, white, working-class
culture defines itself against other marginalized identities. In this context he
refers, for example, to the exclusion of: ‘those who have a daughter who went
wrong’, the ‘housewife’ who is a ‘fusspot and scours her window-ledges and steps
twice a week’ and the ‘young woman [who] had her black child after the annual
visit of the circus’ (60). Here, the theoretical limitations of Hoggart’s model are
revealed by the lack of attention to the specificities of ethnicity and gender which
would undermine the cohesive model of working-class identity he is trying to
produce.
If Hoggart was interested in recording aspects of working-class culture in a
style that was inclusive, then Raymond Williams was keen to produce a
politically-engaged understanding of class that moved Marxist theory closer to
a practical socialism that reflected real-world experiences, rather than theoretical
abstractions. In key texts from the 1950s and early 1960s, Williams worked on a
series of concepts and models that moved between literary criticism and the
newly developing discipline of cultural studies. For Williams, and many in the
New Left more broadly, the key was to develop a Marxist approach to class that
shifted from a focus on the economic base to one of identifying the importance
of cultural practices. In Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution
(1961), in particular, Williams engaged in developing a critical interrogation of
some of the artificial distinctions between the individual and society in Marxism,
a distinction he regarded as historically contextualized and dependent on a
 Introduction: The 1950s 13

range of ‘superstructural’ factors. For Williams, there was a problematic model of

the ‘masses’ (or the proletariat) in traditional Marxist discourse that artificially
made the concept of ‘class’ too abstract for contemporary working-class people
to engage in an active and real-world political engagement. In The Long
Revolution, Williams replaces the Marxist models of ‘class’, the ‘proletariat’,
‘alienation’ and ‘false consciousness’ with a set of alternative concepts for
analysing contemporary (British) working-class culture and society. He
introduces concepts such as ‘structure of feeling’, ‘community’, ‘a whole way of life’
and ‘solidarity’, which together emphasized a holistic model of working-class
society that was sensitive to collective group consciousness. The emphasis was
thus changed from the abstractions of ‘vulgar’ Marxism to a study of culture
based on empirical and experiential evidence. Williams shares with Hoggart a
distrust of the new forces of consumerism, and stresses the importance of
‘community’ as a profound force in the organization of society; as he writes,
‘Unless we achieve some realistic sense of community, our true standard of living
will continue to be distorted’ (299).
Culture and Society and The Long Revolution represent crucial texts in the early
New Left’s agenda of re-assessing traditional Marxist analysis. As with Hoggart,
however, the concentration on the cultural politics of class meant that the models
of cultural analysis being established by Williams were less sensitive to what
Stuart Hall later calls the two ‘interruptions’ of British Cultural Studies: feminism
and ‘race’ (Hall 1992: 282). As with Hoggart, the desire to identify collective and
holistic models of an ‘organic’ working-class culture meant that identifying
divisions with respect to other cultural marginalities might undermine the very
foundations upon which the new model was being established.
The focus on culture for the New Left, however, meant that a new importance
was given to contemporary literary representation of class and several writers
during the period were associated with the New Left. As Stuart Hall notes in a
critical review of John Mander’s The Writer and Commitment:

we need the theory of literature which no critic has attempted to provide [. . .

and] I believe that [. . .] we are constantly being offered, in literature, and more
generally, in our culture, ways of seeing, definitions and meanings, which are not
available in any other way. (Hall 1961: 69)

Hall suggests here that literature provides the possibility to represent con-
temporary society in ways that were denied to contemporary models of
sociological study, and which have the potential to be more successful in the
production of a political consciousness amongst working-class people.
14 The 1950s

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

The 1950s: A decade of modern British fiction

This book includes a number of different research-led approaches to, and ways
of thinking about, the decade. In Chapter 1, ‘ “The Choices of Master Samwise”:
Rethinking 1950s Fiction’, Nick Hubble begins by focusing on arguably the most
successful – certainly in terms of total sales and readership – work of twentieth-
century British fiction, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (1954–5). By reading the
choices faced by the novel’s hero, Sam, as symbolic of those facing ordinary and
working-class soldiers returned from the war, a new perspective is opened on
the decade. Drawing on John Clute’s conception of fantasy as means of revealing
the perceived ‘wrongness’ and ‘thinning’ of modern life, Hubble draws points of
comparison between Tolkien’s work and the science fiction of John Wyndham
with the social realist fiction of the decade, analysing the 1950s fiction of John
Sommerfield as a case study. The chapter closes with a reading of Naomi
Mitchison’s reworking of the Oedipus story in Travel Light (1952), which paved
the way to her own later feminist science fiction, and that of her one-time
protégé, Doris Lessing. In this manner, the 1950s are revealed as ‘the decade in
which the modernist and proletarian literatures of the first half of the century
 Introduction: The 1950s 15

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

In Chapter 5, ‘A Vision of the Future: Race and Anti-Racism in 1950s British

Fiction’, Matti Ron examines the anti-racist strategies of writers of the decade as
containing the basis from which both multiculturalism and its future limitations
would emerge. By contrasting the work of writers such as John Sommerfield and
Colin MacInnes with that of Sam Selvon, George Lamming and E.R. Braithwaite,
Ron reveals commonalities of approach but also key divergencies in political
content and, crucially, literary form. By showing how far the form and voice of
Selvon’s and Lamming’s work differs from Britain’s wider postwar realist literary
culture and its resistance to formal experimentation, Ron analyses the tensions
and confrontations from which a future anti-racism would emerge.
Nick Bentley’s ‘Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On: The Politics of Youth in 1950s
Fiction’, considers the representation and construction of a variety of youth
subcultures in novels from the 1950s, including MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners
(1959), Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and Stella Gibbons’
Here Be Dragons (1956). By showing how the representation of youth in this
fiction cuts across discourses related to other aspects of cultural politics during
the decade, including class, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, Bentley examines the
ways in which youth becomes a prime cultural site for these wider debates and
relates this development to the rise of the New Left. In Chapter  7, ‘Detective
Fiction and the Prose of Everyday Life’, Nicholas Birns and Margaret Boe Birns
argue that, far from being a reactionary and imitative echo of the achievements of
the ‘Golden Age’ of the mystery story in the 1920s, women’s detective fiction of the
1950s, including the later careers of Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Ngaio
Marsh and Gladys Mitchell, carved out a distinctive postwar sense of both subject
and form to make an important contribution to British literature of that era.
Finally, Sebastian Jenner’s ‘Chance in the Canon: Uncertainty and the Literary
Establishment of the Fifties’, rereads the 1950s canon, including the work of
Kingsley Amis and John Wain, as examples of a burgeoning aleatory
compositional practice that came to fruition in the 1960s avant-garde British
novel. In situating the cultural response of the decade to shifting perceptions of
chance within the context of a characteristically British motion towards a more
representative portrayal of reality, Jenner analyses the inherent contradictions of
such an approach and reveals how such paradoxical approaches to delineating
chaos suggest a potential for meaning to spring from the chance procedures
enacted by the reader.
Overall, the collection of chapters contained in The 1950s: A Decade of
Modern British Fiction aims to contribute to, and develop, our understanding of
a literary decade, which is often taken to be the epitome of unexciting, realist
 Introduction: The 1950s 17

prose constrained with the emotional straitjacket of a socially conservative

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

Notes

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

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

Kenny, Michael. The First New Left: British Intellectuals After Stalin. London: Lawrence
and Wishart, 1995.
Kersch, Gerald. Fowlers End. London: Heinemann, 1958.
Leavis, F.R. The Common Pursuit. London: Faber and Faber, 2008 [1952].
Leavis, F.R. The Great Tradition: George Eliot; Henry James; Joseph Conrad. London:
Faber and Faber, 2008 [1948].
Leavis, F.R. D.H. Lawrence: Novelist. London: Penguin, 1993 [1955].
Lessing, Doris. In Pursuit of the English. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1960.
McKibbin, Ross. Classes and Cultures, England 1918–1951. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.
Monsarrat, Nicholas. The Cruel Sea. Trowbridge: Redwood Press, 1971 [1951].
Richards, I.A. Speculative Instruments. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955.
Richards, I.A. So Much Nearer: Essays Toward a World English. London: Harcourt Brace,
1960.
Sillitoe, Alan. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. London: W. H. Allen, 1958.
Spark, Muriel. The Ballad of Peckham Rye. London: Macmillan, 1960.
Sigal, Clancy. Weekend in Dinlock. London: Secker and Warburg, 1960.
Todd, Selina. The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class 1910–2010. London:
John Murray, 2014.
Tomlinson, Sally and Danny Dorling. ‘Brexit Has Its Roots in the British Empire – So
How Do We Explain It to the Young?’ New Statesman. 9 May 2016: https://www.
newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2016/05/brexit-has-its-roots-british-empire-so-
how-do-we-explain-it-young
Wain, John. Hurry on Down. Kansas City : Valancourt, 2013 [1953].
Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780–1950. London: Hogarth, 1958.
Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. London: Chatto and Windus, 1961.
 1

‘The Choices of Master Samwise’:

Rethinking 1950s Fiction
Nick Hubble

At the end of the 1950s, Kenneth Allsop felt himself able to praise the writing of
his time on the grounds that:

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

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

19
20 The 1950s

terms of sales, multiple translations and global awareness in the twenty-first

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

‘Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age’

Although conceived as a single work rather than a trilogy, The Lord of the Rings
was published in three volumes – The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), The Two
Towers (1954) and The Return of the King (1955) – by Allen and Unwin in an
attempt to minimize costs just in case the book should make a loss. Likewise,
they did not pay Tolkien an advance but agreed to pay him half-profits once the
publishing costs were covered (see Hammond and Scull 2008: xxxii). In fact, The
Lord of the Rings proved to be quite successful from the beginning before rapidly
growing in popularity over the subsequent decades to the point at which by
2007, in the aftermath of Peter Jackson’s film adaptations, it had achieved
worldwide sales in excess of 150 million (Wagner 2007: n.p.). The novel originated
as a sequel to Tolkien’s popular pre-war children’s story, The Hobbit (1937), but
grew in scope to include the background of Tolkien’s extensive mythology, which
he had begun creating during the First World War after his return from France
(see Garth 2004: 205–23). The Lord of the Rings was characterized by a much
more sombre tone than the rather more modern idiom of The Hobbit, as the
 ‘The Choices of Master Samwise’ 21

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

I used to think that [adventures] were things the wonderful folk of the stories
went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting
and life was a bit dull, a kind of sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of
it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem
to have been just landed in them, usually – their paths were laid that way, as you
put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they
didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten.
22 The 1950s

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

This question of what sort of tale The Lord of the Rings is rather depends on
who one takes to be the hero of the novel. Sam imagines a small hobbit boy
asking his dad for the story of ‘Frodo and the Ring’ and marvelling at the courage
of ‘the famousest of the hobbits’ (321). But Frodo insists the boy would really say
‘I want to hear more about Sam, dad. Why didn’t they put in more of his talk,
dad? That’s what I like, it makes me laugh. And Frodo wouldn’t have got far
without Sam, would he, dad?’ (322). Not only does this discussion demonstrate a
level of self-reflexivity that is missed in stereotypical dismissals of the critical
value of Tolkien’s fantasy, it also functions as a narrative foreshadowing of the
subsequent events at the top of the stairs to Cirith Ungol, in which Sam fights
off Gollum’s attempt to strangle him before temporarily driving the monstrous
Shelob away from Frodo’s prone body. Even as all seems lost, with Shelob
poised to spring on him and sting him to death before carrying off Frodo, Sam
experiences a moment of ‘eucatastrophe’ – a ‘sudden joyous “turn” ’ (Tolkien
1997: 153) – as the memory of Galadriel inspires him with the hope of the
elves:

And then his tongue was loosed and his voice cried in a language which he did
not know:

A Elbereth Gilthoniel
O menal palan-diriel,
Le nallon si di’nguruthos!
A tiro nin, Fanuilos!

And with that he staggered to his feet and was Samwise the hobbit, Hamfast’s
son, again.
‘Now come, you filth!’ he cried. ‘You’ve hurt my master, you brute, and you’ll
pay for it. We’re going on; but we’ll settle with you first. Come on, and taste it
again!’ (Tolkien 1966b: 338–9)

On one level this is Tolkien acknowledging the heroism of the working classes
– particularly that of the officers’ batmen – he had experienced at first hand in
the trenches (see Garth 2004: 171, 310, passim). Moreover, though, this heroism
 ‘The Choices of Master Samwise’ 23

is for Tolkien the epitome of all heroism: Sam is the character from The Lord of
the Rings who shares most in common with Beren, the central hero of all Tolkien’s
mythology, who demonstrates ‘immeasurable courage and love’ (Garth 2004:
265) greater in value than a priceless Silmaril (much as Sam’s courage and love in
the end triumphs over the power of the One Ring). As Tolkien wrote to his son
on 24 December 1944, ‘Cert. Sam is the most closely drawn character, the
successor to Bilbo of the first book, the genuine hobbit [. . .] The book will prob.
end up with Sam’ (Carpenter 1981: 105). Indeed, the book does close, following
Frodo’s departure from Middle Earth for the Undying Lands in the west, with
Sam’s return to the Shire. The final words of the novel are spoken by him while
sitting with his daughter Elanor in his lap: ‘He drew a deep breath. “Well, I’m
back,” he said’ (Tolkien 1966c: 311). However, when Tolkien was writing to his
son in the autumn of 1944, he had actually intended for there to be an entire
closing chapter, in which ‘Sam is found reading out of an enormous book to his
children, and answering all their questions about what happened to everybody’
(Carpenter 1981: 104). This final chapter was eventually written as an epilogue,
which was then not included in the published version, although Tolkien
harboured misgivings about this omission, complaining in a letter of October
1955 that ‘I still feel the picture incomplete without something on Samwise and
Elanor’ (Carpenter 1981: 227). Different drafts of this epilogue have subsequently
been published. The final version begins with Sam sitting at the desk in Bag End
seventeen years after the destruction of the Ring and writing down the questions
of his children on hearing the story of The Lord of the Rings – as compiled by
Frodo before his departure – read out to them. In this way, we learn what has
happened to members of the ‘Fellowship of the Ring’ such as Gimli, Legolas,
Merry and Pippin, but at the same time the novel is once more centred, as in the
opening chapters, on hobbits and the Shire. Sam then talks to his daughter
Elanor about the passing of the elves from Middle Earth, assuring her that there
will still be things for her to see and do even though a great ‘Age’ has ended. In
particular, he calmly resists her declaration that she will never part from him in
the manner that Arwen, by choosing mortality, did from her immortal father
Elrond: ‘ “Maybe, maybe,” said Sam kissing her gently. “And maybe not. The
choice of Lúthien and Arwen comes to many, Elanorellë, or something like it;
and it isn’t wise to choose before the time” ’ (Tolkien 1992: 125). In this way,
although The Lord of the Rings is notoriously short of female characters, there is
the suggestion that women’s agency will be more central to the emergent new
world order, and a sense that this future is important in itself; the novel is not
purely a lament for an ancient world and the passing of the light.
24 The 1950s

If that sense of a future in which the choices of Elanor will be important does
not quite materialize in the published version of the novel, the most significant
choice in the text remains that of Sam, the unassuming ordinary working-class
hobbit thrust, like hundreds of thousands in the two world wars, into the front
lines of a desperate fight against the forces of oppression. It is not that he is keen
to step up to the occasion; even as the last member of the Fellowship left, with
Frodo lying seemingly dead on the ground, he is extremely reluctant to ‘put
himself forward’: ‘ “I wish I wasn’t the last,” he groaned. “I wish old Gandalf was
here, or somebody. Why am I left all alone to make up my mind?” ’ (Tolkien
1966b: 341). But, of course, he does choose to take the Ring and take on the quest
alone. This, in turn, leads to another choice, because by rejecting the comfortable
lack of responsibility inherent within his socialized class subservience to his
upper-middle-class superiors, such as Frodo and Bilbo, and taking on agency, he
is now confronted by the hitherto unthinkable possibility that he could become
the master:

Already the Ring tempted him, gnawing at his will and reason. Wild fantasies
arose in his mind; and he saw Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age, striding with
a flaming sword across the darkened land, and armies flocking to his call as he
marched to the overthrow of Barad-dûr. And then all the clouds rolled away, and
the white sun shone, and at his command the vale of Gorgoroth became a garden
of flowers and trees and brought forth fruit. He had only to put on the Ring and
claim it for his own, and all this could be. (Tolkien 1966c: 177)

But ‘plain hobbit-sense’ wins out and he chooses to settle for the modest personal
ambition of ‘one small garden of a free gardener’ (177). Without that choice the
quest could not have been completed, and the Shire would not have been enabled
to prosper and progress socially under Sam’s mayorship; rather as without the
genuine commitment of ordinary British soldiers to the anti-Fascist cause of the
war, the subsequent social transformation of Britain would not have happened.
While that sense of Sam coming into his own as the hero of the novel was
central to Tolkien’s thoughts while writing, and clear from the published version
of the text, Tolkien distanced himself from such an interpretation in later life. In
1963, Tolkien wrote that ‘Sam is meant to be lovable and laughable’, but he is the
possessor of ‘a vulgarity – by which I do not mean a mere “down-to-earthiness”
– a mental myopia which is proud of itself, a smugness (in varying degrees) and
cocksureness, and a readiness to measure and sum up all things from a limited
experience, largely enshrined in sententious traditional “wisdom” ’ (Carpenter
1981: 329). Tolkien implies that Sam only transcends these limitations through
 ‘The Choices of Master Samwise’ 25

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

The legacy of the 1930s

In J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (2000), Tom Shippey groups The Lord of
the Rings together with other significant works of the period such as George
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies
(1954) and The Inheritors (1955), and T.H. White’s The Once and Future King
(1958), as expressions of the idea that ‘people could never be trusted, least of all
if they expressed a wish for the betterment of humanity. The major disillusionment
of the twentieth century has been over political good intentions, which have led
only to gulags and killing fields’ (116–7). Aside from the fact that this would
26 The 1950s

make Tolkien’s novel allegorical in exactly the way he denied, this somewhat
sweeping generalization does not actually fit the plots of any of the novels
mentioned. However, it gives a good idea of the ideological stakes originating
from the Cold War, both during the period and after. Shippey goes on to suggest
that The Lord of the Rings was anathema to ‘the literary coterie which ruled and
defined English literature at least for a time, between the wars and after World
War II [. . .] They were committed modernists, upper class, often Etonians, often
professed Communists’ (316). His prime examples are Philip Toynbee and Alfred
Duggan, the author of the anonymous review of The Fellowship of the Ring in the
Times Literary Supplement, which dismissed it as ‘not a work which many adults
will read through more than once’ (qtd. Shippey 2000: 306). However, the
response of the former literary generation of the 1930s to The Lord of the Rings
was rather more diverse than this suggests. In fact, two rather more prominent
members of that generation than Toynbee and Duggan, W.H. Auden and Naomi
Mitchison, were among Tolkien’s leading cheerleaders alongside C.S. Lewis.
Mitchison was already a correspondent of Tolkien’s before publication and read
The Lord of the Rings in proof, providing the flyleaf cover blurb that it was ‘really
super science fiction’ (to Tolkien’s amusement). She reviewed The Fellowship of
the Ring enthusiastically for the New Statesman, while Auden also reviewed it
favourably for both the New York Times Book Review and Encounter. As a
consequence, he also began a correspondence with Tolkien, who sent him the
proofs of The Return of the King.
In his subsequent review of The Return of the King, Auden noted the difference
between considering life as a journey in pursuit of a quest and a more sedentary
modern experience which might be the subject of documentary study. For him,
Tolkien had ‘succeeded more completely than any previous writer in this genre
in using the traditional properties of the Quest’ (qtd. Carpenter 1981: 239). The
implication is that Tolkien’s ‘Quest’ narrative reveals something otherwise
missing from modern 1950s life. One way of analysing such a narrative is to plot
it in terms of John Clute’s four-stage model of fantasy. The first stage is ‘wrongness’,
as evidenced at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings by the presence of the
Nazgûl in the Shire. The second stage is ‘thinning’: the threat of defeat as signified
by the breaking of the fellowship and, more generally, the way in which the land
ceases to resemble realist landscapes and becomes a generic ‘Fantasyland’. Clute
argues that this is the result of a kind of amnesia that happens when the story
forgets itself and then goes on to note that ‘the way to escape the amnesias of
thinning is to tell the Story again’ (115). Such retelling, or remembering, as
undertaken by Frodo and Sam on the stairs to Cirith Ungol, leads to the third
 ‘The Choices of Master Samwise’ 27

stage of ‘recognition’, in which the hero – in this case, Sam – recognizes his own
agency, and ultimately sets up the possibility of the fourth stage of ‘return’: the
possibility of resuming life as it was without wrongness, which is implied in
Sam’s ‘Well, I’m back’ at the end of The Lord of the Rings and set out in more detail
in the unpublished epilogue. On this reading, the value of The Lord of the Rings
in the 1950s was that it both gave expression to a clearly discernible senses of
wrongness in a period marked by the living memory of two world wars and the
threat of nuclear weapons, and offered the promise of an unalienated world to be
recovered.
As we shall see, Tolkien was far from alone in presenting such a fictional
diagnosis and therapy for the times. However, it is important to note that such a
recipe did not appeal solely to the political right as might be supposed from
Shippey’s account but also – as testified to by the fascination of Mitchison and
Auden with Tolkien – to those who had formerly been part of the left-wing
1930s generation. For example, while another member of that generation,
Edward Upward, suffered from literary block for most of the 1950s, when the
volumes of his trilogy The Spiral Ascent appeared over the subsequent two
decades, they revealed a structurally similar response to the ‘wrongness’ of the
times, even if for Upward that wrongness consisted of the British Communist
Party’s post-war abandonment of a revolutionary position (in theory at least) in
favour of the inherent social patriotism of supporting the Labour Government’s
drive for increased industrial production in the late 1940s. For Upward, post-war
wrongness is still manifest in the mock-Tudor beams of jerry-built suburban
housing that had upset George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). Only by
remembering the 1930s story of the leftist intelligentsia ‘going over’ to the side of
the people, is it possible for Upward to regain his sense of agency in the face
of this post-war wrongness:

Once an initial sense of wrongness is acknowledged [in Upward’s trilogy], the

protagonists become caught up in a series of actions which consistently fail
to recapture their dimly-remembered sense of lost wholeness and their
surroundings take on a lack of solidity [. . .] It is only by remembering and
retelling that the protagonist is able to return home as Sebrill does in the
revealing-titled [final volume] No Home But the Struggle. By superimposing
the story of Sebrill’s childhood leading up to the same events that occur at the
beginning of [the first volume] In the Thirties on top of the poetic life that he has
finally achieved by completing his ‘poem’ (that is [. . .] the earlier novels in the
trilogy), Upward literally shows his story remembering itself in the retelling of
itself. Only because the story of Sebrill’s younger self will continue by ‘going over’
28 The 1950s

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

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

In the Britain of the fifties, along every road you moved, the figure of Orwell
seemed to be waiting. If you tried to develop a new kind of popular cultural
analysis, there was Orwell; if you wanted to report on work or ordinary life there
was Orwell; if you engaged in any kind of socialist argument, there was an
enormously inflated statue of Orwell warning you to go back. (Williams 1979:
384)

In Orwell (1991), Williams argues that Orwell’s novels of the 1930s, notably
Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) and Coming Up for Air (1939), ‘created the style
of the drifting anti-hero English novel of the fifties’ (87) such as John Wain’s
 ‘The Choices of Master Samwise’ 29

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

self-centredness that would quickly move towards a reactionary politics – Amis

declared his support for the Conservative Party in an article, ‘Why Lucky Jim
Turned Right’, for the Sunday Telegraph of 2 July 1967 – that would go on to
become one of the dominant forces in British society after 1979.
A more justified criticism of Orwell’s influence on the 1950s relates to his
sentimental representation in The Road to Wigan Pier of the working class in
general and the working-class home in particular.

In a working-class home – I am not thinking at the moment of the unemployed,

but of the comparatively prosperous homes – you breathe a warm, decent, deeply
human atmosphere which it is not so easy to find elsewhere [. . .] I have often
been struck by the peculiar easy completeness, the perfect symmetry as it were,
of a working class interior at its best. Especially on winter evenings after tea,
when the fire glows in the open range and dances mirrored in the steel fender,
when Father, in shirt-sleeves, sits in the rocking chair at one side of the fire
reading the racing finals, and Mother sits on the other with her sewing, and the
children are happy with a pennorth of mint humbugs, and the dog lolls roasting
himself on the rag mat – it is a good place to be in, provided that you can be not
only in it but sufficiently of it to be taken for granted. (Orwell 1998: 107–8)

As Williams points out, Orwell’s ‘documentary’ experiences were shaped by

careful selection and organization to create a particular effect. When he met
working-class people who were socialists or trade unionists, he perceived them
as inhabiting a middle-class atmosphere alien to his fireside conception of
genuine working-class domesticity; ‘If a working man is socialist he is already,
presumably, middle-class, the character of the working class being already
known’ (Williams 1991: 52). In defence of Orwell, it should be noted that there is
clearly an element of parody in his account of mint humbugs and lolling dogs,
which is in keeping with his essential technique of engaging his readers by
offering his authorial persona up as a target of gentle satire. However, the problem
with the particular working-class interior presented in The Road to Wigan Pier
was that it was hopelessly out of date; as he admits himself it was a composite
memory of those he ‘sometimes saw in [his] childhood before the [First World
War]’ (Orwell 1998: 52). Idealized, and with clearly delineated gender roles, it
suggests a bygone traditional world that had little connection with the lives of
modern workers in the 1930s, let alone the 1950s. As Ben Clarke notes, Orwell
was attracted to mining communities because they were ‘stable, cohesive
structures, founded upon “traditional” values, which provided their members
with stable identities’ (Clarke 2007: 53). However, this had changed radically
 ‘The Choices of Master Samwise’ 31

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

The popularity of this idealization of the working-class interior was almost

certainly due to the way in which it occluded the rather more complex changes,
particularly in the sphere of gender relations, taking place in society. For example,
as Humphrey Carpenter notes in The Angry Young Men (2002), Charles Lumley
in Hurry on Down finds the domestic life of his working-class girlfriend’s family
to be reassuringly comforting:

This was Rosa’s father’s Sunday afternoon, and he had been spending it as he always
did, in his armchair by the fire with the News of the World on his knees, fast asleep
. . . Stuffed with ham, cake, bread and butter, and pints of dark tea, they moved from
the table . . . Charles felt that his search was over . . . his demands on life had grown
smaller and smaller, until that stuffy, cosy room contained everything that he
needed to fulfil them. (qtd. Carpenter 2002: 65; Wain 2003: 183–7)

The gender politics of this become clear from Wain’s next sentence – not quoted
by Carpenter – which clarifies that he does in fact ‘need’, or rather want, more
than just the room: ‘That, and a bed upstairs with Rosa in it’ (187). What attracts
Lumley – and one assumes his author, much as Orwell before him – to this vision
of the working-class interior is the way that it serves to legitimize traditional
patriarchal gender relations that it would otherwise be difficult to espouse while
still seeking to be included within a liberal-leftish literary intelligentsia. Tellingly,
Lumley dislikes Rosa’s brother, Stan, because he is trying to ‘better himself ’ by
moving beyond manual work. Earlier in the novel, Lumley differentiates his own
desire to drop out from post-war middle-class society from that of ‘all the
expensive young men of the thirties [. . .] to enter, and be at one with, a vaguely
conceived People, whose minds and lives they could not even begin to imagine,
and who would in any case, had they ever arrived, have made their lives hell’
32 The 1950s

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

John Sommerfield and the politics of social representation

Not all 1950s evocations of working-class domesticity were deployed to

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

Yet for each of us a moment arrives, to some only once in a lifetime, to others
often, when we are possessed with an intimation to our own power. And when
 ‘The Choices of Master Samwise’ 33

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

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

playing a decisive role in the rent strike, it is the people of the street, themselves,
and especially the women, who lead by helping keep the bailiffs away from
evicting one of their neighbours. In this respect, like May Day in which it is a
deposition of the women workers who take the initiative in calling on the Union
committee of the factory to support a strike over working conditions, Trouble in
Porter Street provides a gender-based critique of capitalist society as much as a
class-based one.
The 1954 edition of the novella is different from the original in two significant
ways. First, the representation of working-class speech is altered so that rather
than Rosie saying ‘I would so like an ’oliday’ (Sommerfield 1938: 26) in the pre-
war edition, she now says ‘I would so like a holiday’ (Sommerfield 1954: 25).
While this might be a decision by the publisher, it nonetheless represents a form
of respect for the working class that reflects their change in status under the new
dispensation of the 1945 settlement. Second, the addition of a new chapter at the
end of the novella allows Sommerfield to provide an update on what has
happened to Porter Street sixteen years later. While the street itself is shabbier
but otherwise unchanged, the people had ‘lived through a lot’:

Most of them had managed to survive the war and face up to the threat of still
more horrible wars; they had helped to vote in a Labour Government and later
Mr. Churchill had come back to set them free with plenty of steak and butter in
the shops for everybody. There was the National Health now, holidays with pay,
several television sets in the street, and young Ernie Moult and his pals
swaggering about in Edwardian suits. A lot of changes. But everyone still lived
from one day to the next and the housewives had to pinch and scrape more than
ever. (1954: 56–7)

On the one hand, housewives like Rosie – now the mother of two children – have
gained access to some of the better things in life, such as, in her case, a new flat
with a modern kitchen in a tower block just around the corner from Porter
Street. However, the rent is so high that they can only pay it by Bill working
overtime. Sommerfield takes care to identify high rents as a particular
government policy designed to manage the post-war housing shortage. The
suggested solution is that Rosie and Bill join in with a new borough-wide tenants’
defence movement. Therefore, while the anticipated better world after the war
has not come into existence – Bill is already reduced to the position of voting
Labour ‘without conviction’ as a consequence of his disillusionment with their
failure to have created a lasting ‘fairer deal all round’ during their six years in
power – there is nonetheless a real sense of change having taken place.
 ‘The Choices of Master Samwise’ 35

Sommerfield does not depict a static working class, tied forever to a

sentimental vision of pre-1914 England, but demonstrates rather how certain of
their concerns stayed the same even as social and material change accelerated.
Therefore, although his novel North West Five (1960) also responds to the
ongoing housing shortage, its protagonists are a young working-class couple,
Dan and Liz, seeking to get away from their parents and live together in a context
where they are caught between the ideology of affluence – ‘Mr Macmillan says
we’ve never had things so good’ (159) – and the discourse of social problems.
Moreover, while Dan is a trained carpenter, Liz, a librarian, is the product of the
1944 Education Act and the post-war world of grammar schools and scholarships.
The prospect of a transformed world before them – the text suggests that Dan
would have been avidly enthusiastic about Harold Wilson’s promise of the ‘white
heat of technology’ a few years’ later – suggests a future in which ‘Dan’s skilled
labour [will be] equivalent to Liz’s qualifications within the combined contexts
of their shared working-class background and the collective values of post-war
British society’ (Hubble 2016: 204). While such prospects might appear no more
than illusions when viewed in retrospect from today’s Brexit Britain, it is
important to remember that that future did happen to varying extents for many
across the 1960s and 1970s. Sommerfield’s ‘Author’s Note’ for the 1984 reprint of
May Day might have been expected to bemoan the effects of the Thatcher
Government but instead he chose to emphasize the positive aspects of a longer
social change across the twentieth century: ‘The material circumstances and
social climate of everyday life in this country now would have seemed
unbelievable to the people depicted in May Day’ (Sommerfield 1984: xix). More
particularly, Sommerfield’s work is indicative of the way that the changing lives
of working-class women were as much a feature of the cultural representation of
the post-war British Welfare State, as the valorization of male manual workers
and anti-heroes in works like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Lucky
Jim. In this way, ‘a space for political agency and a gender-based critique of
capitalist class society was held open’ (Hubble 2017: 191). Therefore, in order to
understand the cultural context of something as profoundly socially significant
in modern British history as the sequence of events linking the 1968 strike at
Ford’s Dagenham plant, when 187 women sewing machinists walked out
demanding equal pay with men, to the 1970 Equal Pay Act, it is necessary to
focus on the continuity of left-wing 1930s literary production through the
subsequent decades – as exemplified by the body of work of a writer like
Sommerfield – rather than the self-consciously selfish break of the so-called
‘angry young men’, such as Wain and Amis, with the literary values of the 1930s.
36 The 1950s

However, this is not to say that the social-realist approach of Sommerfield

was entirely adequate to representing the complexities of the age. In his most
ambitious novel of the decade, The Inheritance (1956), he tried to represent the
consequences following on from the squandering of the opportunity that had
been available in 1945 for transforming society by allegorizing that potential
legacy as an actual family inheritance involving a diverse group of possible
beneficiaries, who taken together form a cross-section of British society. The
result is an uneven hybrid of Dickensian social novel and middlebrow family
saga, which still bears the trace of the cinematic techniques he had employed
twenty years before in May Day in terms of the way that the narrative cuts
between different scenes and occasionally adopts a panoramic perspective. In
some places, the novel even reads like a Mass-Observation publication: ‘For the
126,000 inhabitants of Thoresby there are 238 pubs, 119 churches and chapels,
22 cinemas, a football ground, a greyhound track, several municipal statues, and
a variety of other public amenities’ (Sommerfield 1956: 107). Indeed, as Mass-
Observation co-founder Tom Harrisson reveals in Britain Revisited (1961),
Sommerfield also recycled verbatim excerpts of pub conversations he had
overheard while mass-observing in Bolton and Blackpool in The Inheritance and
challenged Harrisson to ‘spot them’ (194). However, despite the recourse to such
documentary techniques and materials, The Inheritance struggles to provide
more than a superficial view of British society consistently.
The problem is not so much a deficiency on Sommerfield’s behalf as the
inadequacy of the realist techniques he deploys to gain purchase beyond a
relatively restricted working-class sphere of domestic interiors and pubs. In
practice, he manages to make a virtue of the superficiality revealed throughout
the text by allowing it to stand for the wrongness of the times:

Something is wrong, something outside his own life and experience and yet of
which his life is a part. People are beginning to talk of another war already, there’s
an atom bomb, there’s something corrupt and dangerous about what is getting
into peoples’ lives; no one seems to be able to say just what it is, but it’s there all
the time, like the smell of staleness when he comes indoors on a fine morning.
(Sommerfield 1956: 84)

This is the viewpoint of Tom Lidstone, a semi-skilled labourer on the London

Underground, who is introduced to us early in the novel as ‘almost too healthy,
clean, and amiable to be true, like some old-fashioned, idealized portrait of a
British Working Man’ (Sommerfield 1956: 26). Along with his wife, Betty, Tom
represents the moral core of the cast of The Inheritance. In a sequence describing
 ‘The Choices of Master Samwise’ 37

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

In [John] Braine’s Room at the Top (1957), Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and
Sunday Morning (1958), David Storey’s This Sporting Life (1960), Stan Barstow’s
38 The 1950s

A Kind of Loving (1960), and Nell Dunn’s Up the Junction (1963), a manner of
attention to British social reality is shadowed by a suspicion, sometimes
amounting to a conviction, of its inauthenticity, its lack of depth and substance,
as if it were a film of illusion covering over an unmeasurable emptiness in which
nothing joins up and makes sense. (83)

The consequence of this awareness that something is always lacking frequently

manifests itself in male protagonists as what Mengham describes as the attempt
to satisfy a demand that will always outstrip desire through ‘the prodigious
acquisition and gargantuan consumption of sex and money’ (99). In this respect,
as discussed above, protagonists such as Sillitoe’s Arthur Seaton and Storey’s
Arthur Machin are working-class versions of the anti-heroes of Wain and Amis.
The difference, however, is that working-class characters are not only closer, and
therefore more aware, of the material constraints of social reality, but they are
also more aware of the inauthenticity of that social reality, which creates a greater
tension to the fictions which depict them. As Mengham argues, such texts
struggle to imagine a creative alternative to the constraints of the present. While
the allure of the apparent certainties of the pre-1914 past is generally resisted in
the actual working-class novels of the decade, the consequence is a gritty,
downbeat sense of lassitude, which was to become something of a marker of
British fictions until at least the end of the 1980s. In this respect, the work of
Sommerfield represents an exception to the norm. While his characters restrict
their ambitions to the modest goals of a decent home and a nice little garden,
this is not the expression of an internalized class-based self-denying humility,
but rather of a genuine belief in the possibilities of the future which will
transform the sense of wrongness generated by the palpable inauthenticity of the
British social reality of the time. For example, Dan’s eternal optimism in North
West Five is reflected by his love of science fiction (the reason why he is a library-
goer and meets Liz), and therefore a faith that the unreality of the present will
change: ‘The perspectives of Welbeck Road, unearthly under sodium vapour
lights, stretching ahead of them long and empty, led towards unknown worlds a
thousand light years away’ (Sommerfield 1960: 34).
Sommerfield’s gesture towards science fiction as a corrective to the problems
of social representation that became manifest in the 1950s was not isolated. In
1958, for example, Angus Wilson noted that social realism was failing to achieve
more than a superficial depiction of life at the time: ‘Without in any way departing
from my adherence to the post-war social novel, I fear that the central characters
are inferior in reality and depth to Virginia Woolf ’s’ (1983a: 133). He went on in
 ‘The Choices of Master Samwise’ 39

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

Cosy catastrophes and generational changes4

John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951), in which the hero and his
socialite girlfriend escape the decimation of Middle England by giant walking
carnivorous plants, is the archetypal form of what Brian Aldiss dubbed the ‘cosy
catastrophe’, in which ‘the hero should have a pretty good time (a girl, free suites
at the Savoy, automobiles for the taking) while everyone else is dying off ’ (Aldiss
and Wingrove 2001: 280). The same basic formula was to feature frequently in
science fiction written over the following years, including works such as John
Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1956) and J.G. Ballard’s The Wind from
Nowhere (1962).
L.J. Hurst has pointed out that the title of chapter one of The Day of the Triffids,
‘The End Begins’, is an ironic reference to Churchill’s speech after victory at
Alamein: ‘This is not the end. It is not the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps,
the end of the beginning’ (qtd. Hubble 2005: 90). That phase of the war
represented the end of interwar individualism, and the beginning of the post-
war order. Wyndham’s fantasy of reversing that wartime beginning can be seen
as creating the model for a genre which superficially appealed to English middle-
class desires to overturn the post-war order but, in fact, implied a much more
radical evisceration of the English class system itself. In this respect, cosy
40 The 1950s

catastrophes deployed ostensibly escapist adventure narratives to imagine the

construction of alternative societies. Hurst has compared the temporal
dislocation within the opening sentence of The Day of the Triffids with other
opening sentences used to signify a novel’s belonging to the genre of alternate
history. The Day of the Triffids opens: ‘When a day that you happen to know is
Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously
wrong somewhere’ (Wyndham 2000: 1). Similarly, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four
begins: ‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen’
(Orwell 1954: 5). As Hurst observes, both sentences establish how ‘the normal
constructs of time broke down in postwar England’ (qtd. Hubble 2005: 91) and
thereby both the exceptionalism and the wrongness of the social conditions
which the books challenge in different ways are highlighted right from the start.
Despite the facts that the triffids are genetically developed in the Soviet Union,
the cereal-killing virus which causes mass-starvation in Christopher’s The Death
of Grass originates in China, and so, by implication, do the winds in The Wind
from Nowhere, these cosy catastrophes can no more simply be reduced to Cold
War anxieties than Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four can. The destruction of the
post-war order is always overdetermined: in Wyndham there are both triffids
and satellite weapons and a plague as well; in Christopher the food shortage is
accompanied by an extremist government’s intention to bomb its own people. It
seems likely that the Cold War simply provided a suitably heightened context
that allowed these overdetermined alternative histories to operate on more than
one main axis: attacking both a specific post-war British complacency and a
more general notion of societal alienation.
Angus Calder’s The Myth of the Blitz (1991) shows how the complacent nature
of post-war British identity developed from the nation’s sense of standing alone
during the war and the consequent feeling of internal solidarity catalysed by this
lone stance, exemplified by the Dunkirk Spirit and the solidarity under fire
during the Blitz. As a result, Britain thought of itself as unique – as outside the
currents of World and European history. The exceptionalism rooted in the ‘Myth
of the Blitz’ is ruthlessly targeted in the cosy catastrophes of the 1950s and early
1960s. Ballard’s attack on the military in The Wind from Nowhere is typically
dismissive: ‘They had the Dunkirk mentality, had already been defeated and were
getting ready to make a triumph out of it, counting up the endless casualty lists,
the catalogues of disaster and destruction, as if these were a measure of their
courage and competence’ (57).
Wyndham, Christopher and Ballard all deploy the metaphor of blindness to
interrogate the deficiencies and wrongness of post-war Britain. At the beginning
 ‘The Choices of Master Samwise’ 41

of The Day of the Triffids, Bill Mason gingerly removes the bandages that have
covered his eyes for a week to find that virtually everyone else in the world has
been permanently blinded. In contrast to this allegorical representation of a
pervasive lack of vision and foresight, as Barry Langford suggests, Wyndham’s
hero’s recovering of his sight represents an opening of eyes by a few (see Langford
2000: x). Only by overcoming the temporary experience of blindness, can
Wyndham and Ballard’s characters learn to see properly and therefore reject
their own complicity with a British form of the death wish. These narratives
thereby follow the example of H.G. Wells’ ‘The Country of the Blind’ (1904) in
rejecting the more traditional trope of blindness representing spiritual insight.
In Wells’ story, the sighted hero, far from becoming King of the country he
discovers, as the famous proverb suggests, ends up dying an outcast rather than
submit to having his eyes surgically removed by the natives, who are outraged by
his difference to them. In contrast to Colin Wilson, who gave the first chapter of
his popular study The Outsider (1956) the same title as Wells’ story and even
defined ‘outsiders’ as those one-eyed men among the blind who are able to see
and therefore, by implication, should be ruling (see C. Wilson 1990: 20), the
writers of the cosy catastrophes rejected such ambitions for being as limited as
the ‘blind’ societies they were seeking to reform. When, in The Death of Grass,
John Custance makes the decision to storm ‘Blind Gill’, the valley in which his
brother’s farm and the prospect of salvation lies, his wife reacts bitterly to what
she perceives to be his driving ambition: ‘ “When you’re King of Blind Gill,” she
said, “how long will it be, I wonder, before they make a crown for you?” ’
(Christopher 1958: 185). The implication is that the ambition to become the
King of the Blind reflects more on the limited vision of the holder than on any
prospect of transforming society. Similarly, Wyndham represents attempts to
build kingdoms among the blind, such as Michael Beadley’s initial plan to use
blind women for an accelerated breeding programme or Torrence’s dream of a
re-born feudal order based on blind serfs, as reactionary.
From the beginning, The Day of the Triffids rejects any form of dependency
on past or existing orders. For example, Bill’s initial reluctance to smash shop
windows for food is due to his recognition that ‘. . . the moment I stove-in one of
those sheets of plate-glass . . . I should become a looter, a sacker, a low scavenger
upon the dead body of the system that had nourished me’ (41). The problem with
parasitism is its generation of political and social inertia as – in a phenomenon
well known to any thinking inhabitant of post-war Britain – the sense of a great
past rapidly grows into a millstone dragging everyone down by the neck: ‘Whole
races have had that sort of inferiority complex which has sunk into lassitude on
42 The 1950s

the tradition of a glorious past’ (209). The character in the novel who acts as the
herald of a new society is the enigmatic figure Coker, whose accent and dialect
modulate to suit his audience, leaving him equally at home quoting Marvell or
cheerily enquiring, ‘Wotcher, mates! ’Ow’s it going?’ (145). Coker is, as he freely
acknowledges, a hybrid; a mixture of lower-class origins and progressive
education, who demolishes Beadley’s argument that sexual essentialism is
necessary for survival through his impassioned polemic concerning the necessity
of everyone being able to do everything:

The point is we’ll all have to learn not simply what we like, but as much as we can
about running a community and supporting it. The men can’t just fill in a voting
paper and hand the job to someone else. And it will no longer be considered that
a woman has fulfilled all her social obligations when she has prevailed upon
some man to support her and provide her with a niche where she can
irresponsibly produce babies for someone else to educate. (150)

In this assault on the ‘mental laziness and parasitism’ (149) of traditional gender
roles, a new vocabulary of moral approbation is coined, which, unlike the
superficially modern attitudes of the Beadley group, contains the force required
to build a liberated society for the future. Therefore, although the novel ends
with the abandonment of England to the triffids, as the protagonists retreat to
the more manageable environs of the Isle of Wight, their repudiation of
traditional class and gender relations holds open the promise of ‘the day when
we, or our children, or their children’ (233) will finally establish a new society.
The popularity of fiction like The Day of the Triffids highlights the extent to
which, however much the combined effects of two world wars and the nuclear
age supported a nostalgic yearning for the lost certainties of pre-1914 England,
there was widespread awareness of the fact that radical social change was coming.
Two classic British science-fiction novels of the decade, Arthur C. Clarke’s
Childhood’s End (1954) and Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), envision
the next generation as so different as to be alien. Of course, there was an element
of horror in such stories and the way they reflected the burgeoning youth
subcultures of the period. Even Tolkien began a sequel to The Lord of the Rings,
The New Shadow, set in the reign of Aragorn’s son, in which a growing social
malaise in Gondor is represented by youths forming gangs and calling themselves
‘orcs’ (see Hammond and Scull 2008: 678).5 But while the alien children in The
Midwich Cuckoos are eventually ‘liquidated’ in the interests of preserving the
human race, the implicit signification of the novel is still, in the words of Leslie
Fiedler quoted by Colin Greenland, that ‘the post-human future is now’ (qtd.
 ‘The Choices of Master Samwise’ 43

Greenland 2012: 2). Fiedler was actually talking about Childhood’s End, in which
the children’s superhuman capacities are due to an evolutionary jump, however
both novels and many others of the period, such as the American science fiction
of writers including Philip K. Dick, Frederick Pohl and William Burroughs
among others, were contributing to what he termed the ‘myth’ of science fiction:

the myth of the end of man, [. . .] or [. . .] transformation (under the impact of

advanced technology and the transfer of traditional human functions to machines)
of homo sapiens into something else: the emergence – to use the language of
Science Fiction itself – of ‘mutants’ among us. (qtd. Greenland 2012: 2)

As Greenland points out, equating the cultural disconnection of the youth

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

‘Forget the story’6

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

and fantasy could both be brought into conjunction with trends in contemporary
literary fiction. For example, the 1956 anthology, Sometime, Never: Three Tales of
the Imagination, collected long stories by Wyndham and Peake together with one
by Golding; a development that was welcomed by Amis in New Maps of Hell.
Ironically, however, it is Golding’s contribution, a comic novella set in imperial
Rome, which now appears badly dated, whereas Wyndham’s ‘Consider Her Ways’
and Peake’s ‘Boy in Darkness’ are both key texts in their respective authors’
oeuvres. Viewed from a different perspective, though, ‘Consider Her Ways’ is the
odd story out because of the way it focuses on a future women-only utopia and
has mainly female characters. Although the protagonist, Jane Waterleigh, who is
psychically projected into this new society as a result of a drug trial, is desperately
unhappy with what she sees as the sterility of life without men, the narrative is
uncompromising in its criticism of not just traditional gender roles and the
consumerism of the 1950s, but also of the ‘useless and dangerous encumbrance’
of men (Wyndham 1957: 112). An elderly historian admonishes Jane:

You keep repeating to me the propaganda of your age. The love you talk about,
my dear, existed in your little sheltered part of the world by polite and profitable
convention. You were scarcely ever allowed to see its other face, unglamourized
by Romance. You were never openly bought or sold, like livestock; you never had
to sell yourself to the first comer in order to live; you did not happen to be one
of the women who through the centuries screamed in agony and suffered and
died under invaders in a sacked city. (113)

Writing about the state of science fiction at the time, Amis noted that ‘the
female-emancipationism’ of Wyndham ‘is too uncommon to be significant’
(Amis 1963: 99). Wyndham’s feminist perspective was not just uncommon in
relation to science fiction but also to the fantasy and related literary fiction of the
period. After all, both The Lord of the Rings and The Lord of the Flies barely even
register female experience. One reason for this, perhaps, is due to their
employment of the narrative model described by Clute – and discussed above –
of wrongness, thinning, recognition and return, which it might be argued traces
out the Oedipal trajectory of the patriarchal order by which the son grows up,
recognizes himself for a man rather than a boy, and returns, symbolically
speaking, to take on his father’s role; a trajectory, of course, which does not
always run any more smoothly than that of Oedipus himself. ‘Consider Her
Ways’ satirizes this trajectory by having a female protagonist following it but
only fully recognising her role in the story from the historian’s sharp criticism of
the gender oppression of her society, which she then chooses to return to. As the
 ‘The Choices of Master Samwise’ 45

historian notes, everything Jane says serves only to demonstrate the extent to
which she has been totally conditioned by the social norms of her society. In this
respect, she is literally trapped within the story. A different approach to breaking
the Oedipal trajectory was taken by Naomi Mitchison.
Mitchison’s Travel Light (1952) is the story of Halla, a princess who is
abandoned at birth after the new Queen tells the King that he must get rid of the
old Queen’s baby. Before she can be left on the hillsides to die, her Finnish nurse
turns into a bear and carries her off to live with dragons. Consequently Halla
grows up on Dragon Mountain, being taught fire, geology and economics, and
getting to dress up in as much jewellery as she likes. The only problem, of course,
is men and their propensity in particular to send heroes – such as George,
Perseus and Siegfried – to interfere with the dragon-princess relationships. But
mostly ‘the dragon made good and all ended for the best’:

Sometimes Halla played at Princesses and Dragons, pretending to be tied to a

tree and then waiting for one of the young dragons to rush at her with his mouth
open, drenching her in delightful tickly flames [she has been fire-proofed!]. And
there would be no horrible hero to interfere. Sometimes Halla found herself
wishing she was a real princess, so that it could all genuinely happen. (21)

Here, the fictional doubling in the story – a Princess wishing she was a Princess –
mirrors the identification process of the reader, or the child having the story read
to them, because they imagine themselves to be the Princess but they are also the
Princess of their own little ‘royal’ family. One of Mitchison’s biographers, Jenni
Calder (1997) notes that the book is ‘obliquely for and about her daughters’ (217)
but one can read a further doubling in which the book is also about Mitchison
herself. These layered-in levels of awareness in the story function to tell or in
some way remind the reader/listener and, indeed, the writer of the story
something they already know but have forgotten or, at least, are not consciously
aware of. And this is that their subjectivity is actually different to the one that
they are officially being interpellated within.
After the dragon she lives with is killed by a hero, Halla follows the advice of
Odin to ‘travel light’. Her journeys take her, via Kiev, all the way to Micklegard, or
Constantinople, where various adventures befall her involving talking animals
and corrupt priests. While there she falls in with a man called Tarkan Der from
Marob, a fictional country bordering the Black Sea which features in Mitchison’s
earlier novel, The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931), and together they
travel north again, past Kiev, and then on with other men towards a city called
Holmgard. As they go, Tarkan Der becomes more interested in talking to the
46 The 1950s

men than Halla, who gets scolded and lags behind talking to mythological
creatures: ‘When she told Tarkan Der about the basilisk, he was worried, almost
angry with her. It was as though he did not want her to be the kind of woman
who talked to basilisks’ (127). In fact, he wants her to be the kind of woman who
is married to him and lives in a small house waiting for him to come home but
Halla thinks ‘No one can travel light with a house on their back, not even a snail’
(129). The story does not end with Halla and Tarkan Der marrying and living
happily ever after but rather with a twist that makes clear it is intended as an
alternative version of the Oedipus story.
As Halla and Tarkan Der sail up a river, they see a house being attacked by
raiders and a young woman being dragged off by a bearded man in armour.
Tarkan Der kills the man and Halla rescues the woman’s father who has been
tied up inside the burning house. The young woman is Alfeida and her husband
is Modolf, who then tells his family story:

It is said that a certain king had a wife who died, and he married again. And there
was a child of the first wife, a baby girl, and the second wife said it must be cast
out into the forest and die. And so it was done. And my forefathers and I, God
help us, through no fault of our own, are children of that king and that wicked
queen. But there has been a continuous punishment and the sins of the fathers
visited on the children. (139)

So the story comes back on itself after many generations: the curse is lifted, Tarkan
Der marries Alfeida and Halla literally rides off into the sunset because she
becomes a Valkyrie. The character who comes closest to completing the four stages
of Clute’s trajectory and completing the Oedipal return home is Tarkan Der. In
contrast, Halla does not complete the cycle: she chooses to continue travelling
lightly. This is not to say that she does not recognize the story but, rather, that she
recognizes it too well from the moment that Tarkan Der starts trying to get her to
keep house for him. But what she also recognizes, or remembers, is that she has an
identity outside the story – one that is unconstrained by the patriarchal symbolic
order. In this respect, Mitchison’s questioning of ‘story’ is more ontological than
Tolkien’s; she neither asks what type of story it is or worries about who is the hero:

“It was a strange thing,” Modolf said, “that the curse held for so long, and all for
the death of one small child. Worse things have been done than that. Yes. Much
worse. Yet perhaps the death of the very innocent always carries a curse.”
“Perhaps she did not die,” said Halla, “perhaps her nurse turned into a bear
and carried her away into the forest. Perhaps she was brought up by bears and
dragons. Perhaps it was better for her in the end than being a king’s child.”
 ‘The Choices of Master Samwise’ 47

“That was never in the story,” said Modolf.

“Forget the story,” said Halla. (140)

In short, Mitchison allows her protagonist to question the validity of ‘story’

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

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

Notes

1 Of course, the literature of the 1930s amounted to rather more than Allsop’s
reductive characterization; see the forthcoming 1930s volume in this series.
2 On this point, see for example novelist and academic, Adam Roberts:

Alterity is fundamental to SF : it is a poetics of otherness and diversity. Now, it so

happens that the encounter with “otherness” – racially, ethnically, in terms of
gender, sexual orientation, disability and trans identity – has been the main driver
of social debate for the last half-century or more. The tidal shift towards global
diversity is the big event of our times, and this is what makes SF the most
relevant literature today. (Roberts 2013, n.p.)
 ‘The Choices of Master Samwise’ 49

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

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52
 2

Angry Young Men? A Product of Their Time

Matthew Crowley

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

53
54 The 1950s

‘social’ and the ‘personal’. The term itself, which Williams acknowledges is
‘difficult’ (1977: 132), with its inherent contradiction between the definite
‘structure’, and the intangible ‘feeling’, points us toward this conclusion. Williams
further developed the concept of ‘structure of feeling’ in The Long Revolution
(1961), a text which continues the inquiry begun in Williams’ Culture & Society:
1780–1950 (1958).
This second phase in the development of the concept is contemporaneous
with the texts studied here, Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
(1958) and David Storey’s This Sporting Life (1960), and marks the genesis of
what would eventually become the practice of ‘cultural materialism’ (Williams,
1977: 5). In The Long Revolution Williams describes the difficulty of ‘get[ting]
hold of ’ the ‘felt sense of the quality of life at a particular place and time: a sense
of the ways in which the particular activities combined into ways of thinking
and living’ (1965: 63). Williams recognizes the value of Fromm’s concept of
‘the “social character” ’, and Benedict’s concept of ‘the “pattern of culture” ’ in
attempting to ‘restor[e] the outlines of a particular organization of life’, but notes
that in each case the ‘way of life’ that is recovered is ‘usually abstract’ (63–4).
Williams continues to suggest that it may be possible to ‘gain the sense of a
further common element, which is neither the character nor the pattern, but as
it were the actual experience through which these were lived’ (64). Williams
states that when ‘the arts of a period’ are ‘measured [. . .] against the external
characteristics of the period’, there can still exist ‘some important common
element that we cannot easily place’: this is precisely what Williams terms
‘structure of feeling’ (64). According to Williams, ‘structure of feeling’ is a concept
that ‘is as firm and definite as “structure” suggests, yet it operates in the most
delicate and least tangible parts of our activity’ (64). The key element of this
phase of the concept is the recognition of the central position the arts occupy
in the analysis of culture as a whole way of life, and how the arts enable us to
understand changes within the system of social reproduction. It becomes
apparent in the study of the arts that a structure of feeling is not formally learned,
but emerges from generationally specific reactions to, and interactions with,
the culture and society of a particular time and place. As Williams states,
‘[o]ne generation may train its successor, with reasonable success, in the social
character or the general cultural pattern, but the new generation will have its
own structure of feeling, which will not appear to have come “from” anywhere’
(64). Although the appropriateness of structures of feeling as a means through
which to study the emergence of new forms of working-class masculinities
is already apparent in the second phase of the concept, at this stage of its
 Angry Young Men? 55

development the scope of the concept is still rather broad, and is complicated
by its focus on the reconciliation of culture and society.
The third phase of the development of the concept of structures of feeling
sees Williams embed the concept as a practical means of conducting textual
analysis within the broader practice of cultural materialism. Williams introduced
the practice of cultural materialism as ‘a theory of the specificities of material
cultural and literary production within historical materialism’ in Marxism and
Literature (1977: 5). With the development of cultural materialism Williams
supersedes the attempts to reconcile ‘culture’ and ‘society’ that form the basis of
his earlier work, positing instead that culture is always already social and material
and must therefore be read as such. Williams argues that writing is a practice
undertaken under definite social relations, and so cannot be understood as
an autonomous cultural category, or as an object that reflects a given reality.
Literature is an inalienable element of the complex social processes that
constitute culture, and thus has a specificity that cannot be reduced. In this
respect, the category of ‘literature’ itself becomes problematic, as it serves as an
exclusionary term that is given to certain types of writing in the construction
of a ‘selective tradition’ (115). Williams describes the selective tradition as ‘an
intentionally selective version of a shaping past and a pre-shaped present, which
is powerfully operative in the process of social and cultural definition and
identification’, argues that ‘this selection is presented and usually successfully
passed off as “the tradition”, “the significant past” ’, and concludes that, in this
sense, any tradition is ‘an aspect of the contemporary social and cultural
organization, in the interest of the dominance of a specific class’ that offers ‘a
sense of predisposed continuity’ (115–6). Cultural materialism is a direct challenge
not only to orthodox Marxist configurations of cultural production, but also to
the idea of the validity of this selective tradition. As cultural materialism develops
its robust theoretical framework, its direct antecedent, ‘structure of feeling’,
becomes a tool for textual analysis within this framework. Although still
developing, by 1954, the concept represents a practical (and radical) means of
understanding lived experience through the analysis of cultural texts.
In understanding structures of feeling as an analytical procedure, it is possible
to consider how the concept might be practically applied. Williams states:
We are talking about the characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone;
specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling
against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness
of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity. We are then defining
these elements as a ‘structure’: as a set, with specific internal relations, at
56 The 1950s

once interlocking and in tension. Yet we are also defining a social experience
which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be
private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating, but which in analysis [. . .] has its
emergent, connecting, and dominant characteristics, indeed its specific
hierarchies. (132)

In ‘defining’ the ‘specific internal relations’ which are ‘at once interlocking and in
tension’ as a ‘structure’, structures of feeling account for, and become apparent
through, the relationship between dominant, residual and emergent cultural
forms. Williams continues to methodologically define structure of feeling as, ‘a
cultural hypothesis, actually derived from attempts to understand such elements
and their connections in a generation or period’ (132–3). My use of structures of
feeling here is twofold. It is employed both as a means to identify and analyse
emergent forms of working-class masculinities at the end of the 1950s, and,
through re-evaluating texts which belong to a ‘selective tradition’ of working-
class writing, as a means to examine the cultural and commercial conditions
under which the commodification of working-class masculinities which led to a
‘working-class moment’ in British culture occurred.
The structure of feeling from which the ‘Angry Young Men’ label emerges is
evident in a number of novels published in the decade that followed the Second
World War. These novels take a young, disaffected, usually lower-middle-class
and university educated, male as their protagonist, and are usually episodic in
structure and comic in tone. They commonly explore themes of entrapment and
escape, particularly in relation to the renegotiation of gendered (particularly
masculine) identities, issues of employment, the sexual relationships of their
protagonists and the continuation of the rigid class stratification of British
society in the post-war period. Philip Larkin’s Jill (1946) is notable as an
early example of such texts, and prefigures what Stuart Laing describes as ‘a
considerable cultural trend’ (1984: 158) that emerged with the ‘Movement’ novels
of Amis and Wain, although Roland Camberton’s Scamp (1950) and Alexander
Trocchi’s Young Adam (1954) clearly demonstrate that this emergent pattern
was not solely generated by writers associated with the ‘Movement’ label. The
writing generated by the ‘Movement’ more broadly took Britain’s diminished
colonial power and influence in world politics as major themes, and represented
the move to a more urban, industrial, consumer driven society, and the decline
of an older more pastoral Britain with a nostalgic melancholy. This is significant
as it demonstrates the sociocultural and historical specificities that underpinned
the writing being discussed, and the shift in tone and approach that occurred
in 1956.
 Angry Young Men? 57

The identification of 1956 as a significant cultural moment in Britain is by no

means new. From its first performance in 1956, John Osborne’s Look Back in
Anger is frequently offered up as a moment of rupture or discontinuity, the
moment at which a new and distinct pattern of representation emerged within
British culture, and the play which gave rise to the term ‘Angry Young Men’. The
retrospective inclusion of writers such as Amis and Wain under the ‘Angry’
banner clearly demonstrates the culturally constructed nature of the ‘Angry
Young Men’ as a literary movement or category, and how the pervasive use of the
term serves to obscure the nuances of a structure of feeling which gradually
develops during the immediate post-war period. The inauthentic, opportunistic,
journalistic and commercially driven nature of the ‘Angry Young Men’ label has
been comprehensively written about elsewhere (see: Allsop, 1964; Bentley, 2007;
2010; Ferrebe, 2005; Maschler, [1957] 1959): suffice to say here that the term
should be treated with caution. What the term does do however, is serve to create
the cultural and commercial conditions from which a ‘working-class moment’
can emerge.
The work which was first collected under the ‘Angry Young Men’ label
(including that to which it was retrospectively applied) was about the alienation
and frustrations of a section of the educated lower-middle-class, and as such the
work can be said to prefigure the ‘anti-establishment spirit’ of what Eric Hopkins
terms ‘the permissive society’ (1991: 178) of the 1960s. Laing identifies a period
between 1957 and 1964 in which a structure of feeling where ‘an unusual degree
of overlap between previously (and subsequently) quite rigidly stratified cultural
sectors in Britain’ (1984: 158) becomes apparent. It is during this period that
Laing identifies an emergent ‘realist style frequently with regional, usually
Northern, and working-class content’ that was ‘simultaneously at the forefront of
serious artistic practice and available (and on offer) to a very large popular
audience’ (1984: 158). In the introduction to the 1964 edition of Kenneth Allsop’s
The Angry Decade he identifies a ‘later wave’ of Northern ‘Angry’ writers which is
founded upon that of the ‘angry school of fiction’ of the ‘middle fifties’; according
to Allsop, these writers, who include Alan Sillitoe and David Storey, approach
their subjects from a ‘very different angle to that mockingly mutinous jeering
of the Redbrick boys of a few years earlier’ (1964: 8). There is a definite shift
in discourse at this point, from what Morton Kroll describes as stories of
‘young men with all or a substantial part of a university education and of
financially difficult middle-class and proletarian backgrounds’ (1959: 556), to
stories which focused on the lives of part-educated, or uneducated, proletariat
by a number of authors who David James describes as ‘northern regionalists’
58 The 1950s

(2008: 42). Jane Mansfield suggests ‘northerness is an integral factor’ (2010: 34)
within these texts. She continues to argue that the re-emergence of what she
terms the ‘brute-hero’, connects to ‘a reappraisal of masculinity during a period
of national insecurity’, and ‘reflects issues of class-mobility in which the
dominance of a particular type of masculinity surges forward in an act of class-
transition’ (34). What Mansfield alludes to here are representations that emerge
from tensions between residual and emergent masculinities, that become
apparent at a time of great sociocultural change, and she continues to offer a
convincing argument which categorizes these works as ‘[c]ondition of England
fiction’ and connects the ‘brute hero’ characters of this Northern realism to
‘earlier rebellious figures of the North’ (34). What becomes apparent in the work
of Sillitoe and Storey then, is the emergence of new discourse around a specific
formation of working-class masculinity, elements of which build on statements
around, and offer some continuation to, the concept of the ‘Angry Young Man’,
but in which Northerness itself becomes a significant means of articulating a
specific kind of masculinity and its relation to contemporary shifts in the
structures of class.
As early as 1957 Tom Maschler suggests that ‘the writers who have set
themselves the task of waking us up have been rendered harmless in the A.Y.M.
cage’ (1959: 7). This is a striking image – an angry masculinity caged by
‘the strenuous efforts of the Press’ (8) – which does little to suggest that the
momentum created by the initial wave of ‘Angry Young Men’ would continue
and develop. However, Maschler continues to assert that the anger of the writers
‘has proved a highly saleable commodity’ (8). This view is supported by Kroll,
who asserts that ‘Angry Young Men’ is a ‘highly marketable label’ (1959: 555). This
is significant as it points towards the incorporation of an oppositional cultural
form by the market. In fact, it suggests the commodification of a specific mode
of masculinity and its concomitant forms of representation. The combined effect
of this commodification and incorporation was to create the material conditions
necessary for the continued production of new ‘Angry’ texts. In turn, this formed
part of a performative loop which fed into the construction, representation and
commodification of a new formulation of working-class masculine identities. It
is to these masculinities, specifically the characters and cultures represented
within Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), and David
Storey’s This Sporting Life (1960), that I now turn.
The landscapes of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and This Sporting Life
form a central stake in the construction of the masculinities represented within
the texts. Much like the ‘Movement’ texts which preceded them, in both texts
 Angry Young Men? 59

there is a sense in which ‘the country’ is reduced to symbolic form, to the

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

[I]ts memory was a fixed picture in Arthur’s mind. The building – you had drawn
your own water from a well, dug your own potatoes out of the garden, taken eggs
from the chicken run to fry with the bacon off your own side of pig hanging
salted from a hook in the pantry. (179)

The sentimentality with which the building and the fantasy of the way of life that
accompanies it are represented suggests what Williams refers to as ‘a myth
60 The 1950s

functioning as memory’ (1975: 57). In this sense Arthur’s fantasy conjures

an ever-receding ‘golden age’ (48), which functions as a tenet within the
construction of the idea of community. This passage serves to bring the change
and discontinuity experienced by the working class of the 1950s into sharp
relief, whilst simultaneously demonstrating Sillitoe’s acute awareness of the
continuities of working-class life, particularly as the passage is qualified by the
acknowledgement that the forge ‘had long ago been destroyed to make room for
advancing armies of new pink houses’ (1961: 179). These new pink houses are
the new Nottingham suburbs that would rehouse many of the city’s working
class, and which, paradoxically, represent both the continuity of working-class
life, and the obliteration of some of its older traditional forms (both material and
cultural). The tensions that underlie this shift are vital in understanding the
structure of feeling from which Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is generated.
The country, and by implication, residual forms of working-class culture are
threatened by the expansion of the city within the representations of Saturday
Night and Sunday Morning. Seaton’s role in this is ambiguous. On the one hand,
he exemplifies this threat: he is, or has retrospectively become, the talisman of an
emergent urban consumer culture. Yet Seaton knows the fields and woods of the
surrounding country ‘like the back of his hand’ (42). Whilst the new houses built
on the outskirts of the city are described as ‘advancing armies’ (179), and the
sawmill at the edge of the woods is ‘set like the camp of an invader’ (42), Seaton
navigates the landscape with an easy familiarity and level of care that sets him
apart from these aggressive infractions. Seaton’s relationship to the landscape
provides the foundation for his relationship with residual forms of working-
class cultures. These country vignettes are undoubtedly nostalgic in tone, and
lack the historicity necessary to construct a recognizable knowable community.
They do however, locate Seaton socially, geographically and temporally in the
North of England, where the industry of the individual has been incorporated
into institutionalized heavy industry. Further, the lack of any sense of an
historical development is in keeping with Seaton’s character. Seaton sees not the
nuances and processes of a specific local history, but ‘then’ and ‘now’ constructed
as oppositional forms: the golden age of the independent craftsman, and the age
of the indentured factory worker, working to pay off televisions ‘installed on the
never never’ (22). Seaton himself exists outside of this dichotomy, having ‘settled’
for the ‘comfortable wage’ of fourteen pounds a week (25). This is his optimum
income, carefully worked out so as to avoid the scrutiny of the tax man and the
rate checker, in order that he might earn his living ‘in spite of the firm’ (25). It is
the freedom that this wage allows that provides Seaton with the opportunity to
 Angry Young Men? 61

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

[Seaton] complicates his resistance to ‘conventional’ sex-gender roles by eagerly

anticipating his eventual identity as husband and primary wage earner,
even adding this gender role to his sexual fantasies. In short, he develops an
understanding of masculinity by simultaneously resisting and inhabiting the
role of husband and breadwinner. (2001: 94)

The representation of Seaton’s relationship to the country, and its close

connection to his sexuality and sexual practices, demonstrates how emergent
masculinities were simultaneously formed upon, and in opposition to, existing
dominant and residual forms of working-class masculinity. Further, when
considering Seaton’s overall narrative trajectory, it becomes apparent how those
emergent forms of masculinity are incorporated, and contribute to, a new
configuration of a hegemonic masculinity that is specific to this structure of
feeling. As Laing correctly observes, in this respect Seaton is ‘the object, not the
subject of his future’ (1986: 68). Perversely, this is perhaps the most subversive
and genuinely oppositional aspect of the text, demonstrating as it does, that
despite the improved material conditions of many within the working class
of 1950s Britain, the horizon of expectations remains the same. Arthur Seaton
is objectified and commodified (although the process of commodification is
less explicit than that represented in This Sporting Life). As William Hutchings
observes, the automatic nature of Seaton’s actions at his lathe reduce him ‘to
mere operative extension of the factory’s machinery’ (1987: 35). Yet, Seaton’s role
at the factory situates him in a complex socio-political structure in which his
objectification allows him to assume the subject-position of consumer. Seaton
clearly benefits from the improved material conditions and increased affluence
amongst the working class. This is demonstrated by the construction of pre-war
and post-war life as diametrically opposed states of being within the text. Pre-
war consists of ‘the dole [. . .] and the big miserying that went with no money and
no way of getting any’, and post-war, ‘all the Woodbines he could smoke, money
for a pint if he wanted one, [. . .] a holiday somewhere, [. . .] and a television
set to look into at home’ (Sillitoe, 1961: 20). As Seaton states, ‘The difference
between before the war and after the war didn’t bear thinking about. War was
a marvellous thing in some ways, when you thought how happy it had made
some people in England’ (20). The implication is that the welfare state and
improvements to the material conditions of working-class life were born out of
the ruptures of war. But, as Kalliney notes, ‘[w]ithin the context of welfare state
prosperity, ambivalence best describes a working-class political position: better
material circumstances did not lead to a more equitable distribution of power,
 Angry Young Men? 63

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

rebelliousness. In itself, Seaton’s formal construction brings the tensions between

continuity and dislocation within working-class culture into sharp relief. Despite
Seaton’s individualistic nature, his rebelliousness, his careful positioning of
himself as outsider, without the subtle patchwork of voices that emanates from
his community he would not exist. This problematizes a reading of Saturday
Night and Sunday Morning as a novel of escape. For all Seaton’s pretentions – his
refusal to drink the firm’s tea, the scorn with which he thinks of ‘slow husbands’
(36), his ‘investment’ (56) in clothing – he cannot, and does not escape, as at a
formal level he is constructed by the voices of his community.
Seaton describes himself as a rebel, explicitly stating his position in the
soliloquy that opens the penultimate chapter. However, as Laing observes, ‘[t]he
slippage between “I” and “you” in Arthur’s reflections indicates how often they
involve not so much his personal problems as his general condition – as a semi-
skilled factory worker on piece-work’ (1986: 70). I suggest that this view be
expanded, that Seaton’s reflections ‘as a semi-skilled factory worker on piece-
work’ represent something of his generational condition. The replacement, or
interchangeability, of the nominative singular pronoun, with the objective, plural
‘you’, serves to make the reader complicit in Seaton’s thoughts, and suggests a
collective disillusionment and disenfranchisement of not only manual workers,
but more broadly, of post-war ‘youth’. This is exemplified in the scene where
Seaton is hit by a passing car – a symbol of consumerism and social climbing,
and, for Seaton, ‘pretentions’ (Sillitoe, 1961: 34) to be held against their owners.
The driver of the car that strikes Seaton epitomizes this generational divide. He
is the lower-middle-class everyman, his face ‘ordinary’, his height ‘medium’ (99),
he is an exemplar of ‘the Establishment’ against which youth identities were
beginning to be defined. This is emphasized when, after the physical and
metaphorical affront of being struck by the car, Seaton and his brother Fred are
harangued by the man responsible: ‘You bloody young fools’ (99, my emphasis).
The man personifies the hypocrisy of ‘the Establishment’ when he accuses Seaton
and his brother of being drunk whilst ‘Waves of [his] whisky-breath came into
their faces’ (99). After more lies from the man about trying to warn them with his
hooter, Seaton explodes with rage. To save the man from a severe beating, which
at this point seems highly likely, Fred suggests that they tip over the man’s car.
Seaton agrees seeing this as ‘perfect justice, punishment for both the actual metal
that had hit him, and for the cranky driver’ (100).
The act which follows, however, takes on an even greater significance: ‘Though
locked in a revengeful act they felt a sublime team-spirit of effort filling their
hearts with a radiant light of unique power and value, of achievement and hope
 Angry Young Men? 65

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

Hammond, and not of his own making. Despite this, Machin strongly resists the
role of domesticated husband, whilst insistently being drawn towards it. Similar
complexities exist within the configuration of Machin’s class position, and
become apparent where the construction of class and masculinity intersect. For
example, Machin opts to lodge in Mrs Hammond’s small terraced house, paying
‘thirty-five bob a week’ (Storey, 1963: 19) for a room of his own in the traditionally
working-class area of the city. This is a move at odds with Machin’s status as
upwardly mobile bachelor and local celebrity, but which allows him to enact the
role of working-class breadwinner within Mrs Hammond’s modest household.
It is left to Machin’s teammate Maurice to assume the role of domesticated
husband after being forced to marry Judith, the secretary of the local mayor,
whom he has made pregnant. Judith and Maurice move into a ‘semi-detached
house’ that is ‘only a few years old’ (201). After the move Judith adopts the habit
of calling Maurice, ‘Morry’ (202), a pet name that indicates his new domesticated
status. Maurice himself takes on domestic labour, such as digging the garden,
and explicitly states that the move and his new roles are part of ‘breaking away
from the past life’ (207).
Despite opting to remain in the working-class area of the city in the enactment
of the male breadwinner role, Machin’s driving to the country represents a literal
and metaphorical attempt to escape his class position. This is demonstrated
by his ‘conspicuous’ independence, designed to show that he ‘d[oesn’t] really
need to notice people anymore’ (80) as he enters the car. Machin does not have
the same deeply personal relationship with the country as Seaton, although it
is still significant within the text. Machin’s engagement with the countryside
encapsulates a significant character trope as he meets the landscape either
confrontationally, or, with an air of detached disinterest. At its crudest, the
confrontation takes the form of a sort of conquering of nature, Arthur’s Jaguar
car eating up the country road, or his crossing the river with Lynda in his arms
(81). Significantly, this incident shows Machin defying Mrs Hammond by taking
her daughter across the fast-flowing stream after she has stated it is too dangerous,
an unnecessary attempt to prove himself the hero, which inevitably causes
Mrs Hammond distress. During the episode we also see Machin imagining
how he would feel if he ‘was responsible for Lynda’s drowning’ (82) in a gesture
towards emotion which ultimately reveals the absence thereof, or rather an
inability to connect to it directly, or articulate it satisfactorily. This is a recurrent
theme within the representation of working-class masculinities, and constitutes
a major trope within the construction of Machin’s character. Despite the
absence of genuine emotional connection, the ‘family focused leisure’ of the
 Angry Young Men? 67

country excursion is an important facet in Machin’s fantasy of fulfilling the role

of breadwinner in the formation of his masculine identity. However, the fact that
Machin and Mrs Hammond are not married undermines the institution upon
which that role, and Machin’s fantasy, are structured, and is the underlying cause
of many of the tensions that exist between them. In relation to this the ruins
of ‘Markham Abbey’ (81) (where the crossing of the river occurs) are significant,
as they represent a residual form of class power, and a crumbling religious
rectitude. This is juxtaposed against Machin’s Jaguar car (here a symbol of the
emergent form of the upwardly mobile consumer), and the pretext of ‘family’
that informs the unmarried couple’s outing. Tellingly, the sheep that inhabit the
grounds of the abbey move around the car ‘as if it were just another part of the
ruins’ (81). Machin imposes himself on the scene by scooping up Lynda and
crossing the river. However, the car is metaphorically swallowed by the country,
an early indication of the precarious nature of Machin’s superficial success, and
the fluid nature of hegemonic control.
Howton Hall is ‘an old country house converted into a hotel and an eating
place for the sort of client that could afford to drive out there for an evening, or
a weekend’ (84). Here again, Machin imposes himself upon the scene, displaying
a bullish confidence that ultimately reveals a lack of cultural capital. As a result
Machin appears out of place, or dislocated. Mrs Hammond’s presence in the
scene is significant. Unlike Seaton, Machin’s motivation in taking his landlady
and lover out of town is not sexual. Rather, the country outings become
representative of the dislocations that accompany social mobility and the
improvement in material conditions experienced by the working class during
this period. Mrs Hammond, older than Machin, represents a previous generation
of the working class, and carries with her a deep sense of shame and impropriety
around the nature of their relationship. Machin, the young upwardly mobile
man, revels in exploring the freedoms that his newfound power as a consumer
affords him, but makes his lack of cultural capital increasingly evident as he does
so. If, as suggested above, the presence of Mrs Hammond and her children on
the excursion feed Machin’s patriarchal fantasies, then his actions during these
scenes demonstrate that these fantasies do not operate simply at the level of
emulation. In simultaneously adopting and consciously undermining the role of
middle-class patriarch, Machin actively challenges the dominant cultural values
of middle-class society. Nowhere is this more evident than in the scene in which
Machin takes Mrs Hammond and her children for lunch at the exclusive
restaurant at Howton Hall. Significantly, upon arrival at the restaurant Machin is
wearing his football boots (his shoes soaked from carrying Lynda over the river
68 The 1950s

at Markham Abbey). The football boots consolidate Machin’s dislocation whilst

explicitly symbolizing the means by which he has accrued his wealth and the
ability to patronize such an establishment. When met by a pretentious waiter
who, thinking they have ‘strayed over to the wrong side of the hotel’ (85), takes
pains to point out how expensive the menu is, Machin responds by ordering
‘everything that cost the most’ (85).
Though lacking cultural capital, Machin has no insecurities about his taste.
Rather, he imposes his masculine authority upon the scene through a blatant act
of conspicuous consumption. Initially Mrs Hammond is terrified, but as she eats
the ‘juicy food’, Machin assumes that ‘the indignity of coming to the place was
somehow worth it’ (85). In contrast to Machin’s brash authority, Mrs Hammond
represents the cultural dislocation associated with class mobility. Unsure of her
own taste, she feels out of place, her habitus dictates that she does not have the
cultural capital to ‘pass’ within the complex, yet unacknowledged social codes that
govern behaviour within the restaurant setting. Machin’s bravado serves to
emphasize Mrs Hammond’s meekness as a symbolic dichotomy between an older,
more ‘traditional’ working class, encased within its own horizon of expectations,
and a dynamic, upwardly mobile masculinity, that typifies the shifting condition
of an emergent English urban structure of feeling. This dichotomy is further
underlined by the presence of Mrs Hammond’s dead husband’s ‘working boots’
(19), which she keeps polished on the hearth. Eric Hammond was killed in an
industrial accident in the same factory at which Machin works as a lathe operator.
Significantly, the factory is owned by Mr Weaver, a patron and leading committee
member of the rugby club for which Machin signs. The ‘working boots’ serve as
a counterpoint to Machin’s football boots, and evoke the spectre of an exploited
and oppressed working-class masculinity. Whilst ostensibly the different boots
demonstrate that Machin has moved beyond the role of exploited worker, the
presence of the ‘working boots’ serve to remind us that this break is neither
complete, nor absolute.
As the meal at Howton Hall concludes, the waiter, who here represents the
establishment (the restaurant), and ‘the Establishment’, attempts to make Machin
wait for his bill. Machin gives the waiter three minutes before rising to leave,
again disrupting the social practices associated with the setting, symbolically
challenging the cultural structures that underpin it, and imposing his own
aggressive masculine presence. On being challenged Machin takes great pleasure
in having the waiter check the bill repeatedly, before carefully counting out
the money and leaving a sixpenny tip. Upon leaving Machin proclaims, ‘We
left Howton Hall with a sense of achievement’ (87), a clear indication of the
 Angry Young Men? 69

subversive motives that have underpinned his behaviour. The episode emphasizes
aspects of the performativity of classed masculinities, and how practices of
consumption were increasingly assimilated into emergent forms of working-
class masculinities during the 1950s. The conflation of money and food is also
significant as it demonstrates both Machin’s physical and economic ability
to consume. The emphasis here however is clearly on the economic, the meal
itself being secondary to Machin’s ability to pay, and importantly, to do so on his
own terms.
This Sporting Life is written entirely in the first person, the narrative structured
around the hypermasculine subjectivity of Arthur Machin. Within the structure
of the novel Machin is imbued with a sort of omniscience (a trait present in
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, but there the voice is less that of Seaton and
more an overarching authorial voice). Machin is able to tell the reader how Mrs
Hammond is feeling, for example, though this perhaps says more about how
women are constructed within this particular structure of feeling than it does
about Machin’s empathetic wisdom. Yet despite the first person narrative, Machin
is repeatedly objectified throughout the text. As Alan Tomlinson points out, this
begins with the onomatopoeic properties of Machin’s name; Machin suggesting
making and macho (1999: 8), to this I would add machination, and, significantly,
machine. When told that it is a surprise that he feels ‘so much about things’
Machin responds by describing himself as a ‘natural professional’, adding,
‘What I don’t get paid for I don’t bother with. If I was paid to feel then I’d probably
make a big splash in that way’ (Storey, 1963: 171). Indeed, in his capacity as a
professional rugby league player, Machin is paid not to feel, to disregard physical
pain and to abjure empathy as he inflicts pain upon others. Paradoxically, it is in
Machin’s professional lack of feeling that his connection to community becomes
most apparent. The community of the team is founded upon self-sacrifice. As
Donald Sabo observes:

The pain principle is crudely evident in the ‘no pain, no gain’ philosophy of so
many coaches and athletes. . . . It stifles men’s awareness of their bodies and
limits our emotional expression. We learn to ignore personal hurts and injuries
because they interfere within ‘efficiency’ and ‘goals’ of the ‘team’. . . . We become
adept at taking the feelings that boil up inside us . . . and channeling them in a
bundle of rage which is directed at opponents and enemies. (Sabo quoted in
Messner, 1992: 61)

There is a distinct sense in the text however, that Machin’s sacrifice to the team is
by no means unconditional. Rather, the sacrifices and pain he endures are part of
70 The 1950s

a transaction in which he achieves the status of hero, and the adoration of his
fans. Machin revels in his ability to make the crowd cheer and roar, and, to some
degree, the attention he receives off of the field. On being recognized in the city
Machin states:

They made me feel I owned the place. Course I strutted about. They expected it.
I couldn’t help it. I walked in front of these people now, and I felt the hero. They
wanted me to be a hero – and I wanted to be a hero. (Storey, 1963: 162)

The nature of the transaction between Machin and the public is clearly apparent
here. They make him feel, and in the process elevate him to the position of hero,
a transaction of mutual benefit. This transaction is not without its complications
however, as Jenni Calder notes:

The sporting hero retains the characteristic duality, i.e. aggressive, and officially
supported, anarchist and institutionalized, testing himself privately for the
benefit of thousands who want to reward him with adoration and imitation. He
is both representative and elite, collective and individual. In many respects he is
a very satisfactory hero for he can be controlled; the world in which he operates
and in which he can succeed is limited. (Calder quoted in Whannel, 2002: 44–5)

There is a clear divide in the text between the element of the transaction that
feeds Machin emotionally, his power on the field; and his emotional deficiencies
off the field, where his brutishness and the absence of feeling result in failure.
Machin struggles to cope with the precariousness of his social position, and the
lack of control he experiences off the field of play.

I wasn’t going to be a footballer forever. But I was an ape. [. . .] No feelings. It’d

always helped to have no feelings. So I had no feelings. I was paid not to have
feelings. It paid me to have none. [. . .] Walking up the road like this they looked
at me exactly as they would look at an ape walking about without a cage. They
liked to see me walking about like this, as if the fact I tried to act and behave like
them added just the right touch the next time they saw me perform. [. . .] It was
just what they needed when they saw me run on to the field, just the thing to
make them stare in awe, and wonder if after all I might be like them. I might be
human. (Storey, 1963: 164)

Machin’s size and physical power become a central theme throughout the
text. He frequently refers to how big he is, or feels. It is this physical prowess
that affords Machin the potential to break through the restrictions of class
stratification. This is tempered however, by the fact that we are first introduced
to Machin broken and infantilized. His front teeth smashed in the scrum, he is
 Angry Young Men? 71

taken to the ‘Children’s Dental Centre’ (15) for emergency treatment. The
juxtaposition of the large powerful man, injured, vulnerable and, in the dentist’s
chair of the ‘Children’s Dental Centre’, literally in the position of a child, takes the
imposition of youth upon traditional structures of working-class masculinity
to its limit. The implied childishness here suggests an underlying petulance in
the subsequent subversive action embedded within the text, that poses questions
about the oppositional position adopted by Machin, and more broadly, by the
text as a whole.
There is an adolescent quality to many of the male protagonists constructed
within texts associated with the ‘Angry’ structure of feeling. As Tomlinson
observes, a common theme in these novels is ‘the doomed, usually repressed,
passion of a barely articulate masculinity and its desire for an adult love and real
emotional relationships’ (1999: 8). A significant moment in This Sporting Life
sees this theme intersect with the theme of escape. Alone and isolated after the
breakdown of his relationship with Mrs Hammond, Machin seeks sanctuary in
his car (a potent symbol of both his masculinity, and his power as an upwardly
mobile consumer). In an attempt to emulate one of his American novellas,
Machin naïvely tries to escape his troubles by leaving town.

I even tried driving out of town fast. But the roads were crammed. [. . .] And I’d
only go a couple of miles before I was in the next bloody place. One started
where the other left off. There was no place to feel free. I was on a chain, and
wherever I went I had to come back the same way. (Storey, 1963: 191)

The tension between Machin’s power as a consumer – the car affords him the
ability to drive out of town – and the limitations of his horizon of expectation
– the world in which he operates and can succeed is clear. Machin is free to
drive wherever he pleases, but the geography, and the social conditions in which
he is situated ensure that he always ends up back where he started. He has the
power to consume, but is trapped within a system that ultimately keeps him in
his place. As Laing notes, ‘the landscape of the industrial North deflates the
fantasy and constrains the possibilities of Arthur’s whole life’ (1986: 73). In many
ways the text deals specifically with the composition of Machin’s fantasies, and
their ultimate deflation. Machin’s power is transient and the fantasies cannot be
consolidated in any real and lasting way.
Machin has no particular passion for rugby, other than as a means of keeping
his ‘head above the general level of crap’ (Storey, 1963: 19). The ‘feeling of power’
of being ‘big’ and ‘strong’ and being able to ‘make people realize it’ (22) must
inevitably end. By the final passage of the novel, which takes place ten years after
72 The 1950s

the narrative begins, Machin is ‘ashamed of being no longer young’ (251). His
ability to sustain his part of the transaction between himself and the crowd is
waning, Machin now enters each game knowing that ‘one mistake, [. . .] and the
whole tragedy of living, of being alive, would come into the crowd’s throat and
roar its pain like a maimed animal’ (252). Machin’s connection to the local
community is severed by his inability to perform as he once had, he ends the
game with ‘mud covering [his] tears’ after his legs have ‘betrayed’ him (252).
Machin’s earlier failure to invest and start a business with Maurice suggests that
the money he has made from playing rugby league will also soon begin to wane.
As Laing points out, ‘Maurice’s plans for a business venture show how, unless the
players use their temporarily higher income to secure their future, their status
quickly evaporates’ (1986: 71).
As Hutchings observes, it is telling that ‘This Sporting Life ends in the locker-
room rather than on the playing field itself because the latter is the site of the
devalued commercial ritual that the game has become’ (1987: 43). By contrast,
the locker-room is the site of masculine rituals which are rooted in the
community of the team. It is here that Machin feels he belongs, rather than
the field, where he belongs to the club. This divide is predicated upon the
commodification of working-class masculinity, a central theme of the text that
is clearly demonstrated in the scene where Machin signs on as a professional.
Before negotiations over Machin’s signing-on fee even begin he is framed as
something to be consumed. Machin is ‘shown into the committee room’ (Storey,
1963: 50) where Wade presents facts about Machin to the committee, ‘so we can
see our meal before we eat it. So to speak’ (51). During the negotiations Machin
is framed as machine, ‘mechanically’ repeating ‘Five hundred down’ (55), until
the signing is finally confirmed. Machin’s objectification is complete as, upon
signing, he observes, ‘Weaver shook my hand softly and looked right into my eye
with a kid’s delight at a new toy’ (57). This objectification is consolidated when
Weaver, whose name paradoxically suggests both dodging and bringing together,
and in West Yorkshire (where the novel is set) perhaps gives an indication of the
origin of his family’s wealth, drives Machin home. Machin observes, ‘I could feel
him polishing me and putting me on the shelf as his latest exhibit’ before Weaver
explicitly states that Machin is now ‘property of the City’ (60).
Throughout the text Machin is both fetishized and emasculated. Fetishized
as he is represented as the exotic, or dangerous, ‘other’ within the interclass and
intergender relationships that are constructed within the text. The women
Machin meets call him ‘Tarzan’ (131), he is ‘the big ape [. . .] known and feared for
his strength’ (163). His emasculation through infantilization at the ‘Children’s
 Angry Young Men? 73

Dental Centre’, a trope which is further developed in the text (Machin repeatedly
refers to Johnson, the scout who vouches for him, as ‘Dad’ for example), is
emphasized during the negotiations for Machin’s signing-on fee. There, Machin
is repeatedly referred to as ‘lad’ and specific mention is made of the fact that he
has not played since leaving school (51). Further reference is made to the fact
that Machin is unmarried, and has ‘no legal ties with anyone – home or anything’
(51). This serves to undermine his relationship with Mrs Hammond and the
responsibility he feels toward her children, and strips Machin of the breadwinner
status which is central to contemporary configurations of traditional working-
class masculinity. A key figure in both the fetishization and emasculation of
Machin is Weaver. Weaver’s assertion that Machin is ‘property of the City’ (60) is
significant, as it makes explicit the fact that Machin has been bought, and now
belongs to the club. Further, it suggests that Machin belongs to the city as a
whole, that he is somehow tied to the place (both geographic and social) of his
birth. This duality is emphasized by the description of Eric Hammond’s death
at Weaver’s factory which immediately follows. Thus, at the moment Weaver
makes the assertion, he is framed as both influential committee member, and
industrialist, establishing a connection between Machin as player and Machin
as factory worker. Both player (Machin), and worker (in this instance Eric) are
dehumanized and commodified, as their worth is reduced to a monetary
transaction. For Machin it is the five hundred pound signing-on fee, for Eric the
fact that Weaver’s abiding memory of the incident is that the firm did not pay
Mrs Hammond compensation. The difference between the individualist social
climber, and the traditional – though absent – paternal working-class figure, is
marked. Eric is killed by his work and is ultimately worth nothing. Machin
inherits his position within the house and is worth five hundred pounds.
There are elements of the bourgeois ‘ladder model’ of escape from the working
class within the text: each man, through his own application, industry and
hard work can potentially climb out of his working-class origins. Although as
Williams observes, the ladder ‘is a device which can only be used individually:
you go up the ladder alone’ (1983: 331). With his increased economic capital, and
his position as local celebrity and sporting hero, Machin is climbing the social
ladder. His attachment to place and refusal to move from Mrs Hammond’s small
terraced house emphasize his increased power as consumer, but isolate him as
an individual and leave both him, and Mrs Hammond, open to what Richard
Hoggart described in 1957 as the ‘harsher [. . .] sanctions’ (1977: 80) of the
working-class community that surrounds them. As Mrs Hammond tells Machin
during the heated exchange that sees her insist that he leave:
74 The 1950s

They all point you out. [. . .] They think you’re trying to be different. They all
point you out. And they point me out. And Lynda. And Ian. We’re not proper
people now because of you. (Storey, 1963: 175)

Ultimately Machin is disillusioned with the limited social mobility he is able

to achieve. This is beautifully illustrated by the events at Weaver’s Christmas Eve
party, the climax of Part One of the novel. The chapter begins with a sort of
enjambement in which the meaning of the previous episode (the last of Machin’s
flashbacks) is carried over. The previous chapter sees Machin challenge his father,
questioning ‘Where have your ideals got you?’ (112). Symbolically this is more
than simply a son’s challenge to a patriarch, it is a challenge to a traditional
working-class patriarchy, and a traditional working-class culture more broadly.
Machin’s father repeats the question bewildered:

‘Where?’ He stared round him as if it was too obvious where his ideals had got
him, where Mrs Shaw’s ideals next door had got her, and Mr Chadwick’s beyond
her had got him. It was only too obvious. (112)

There follows a moment of recognition, when looking through his son’s eyes,
Machin’s father sees ‘the neighbourhood without its affectations and feelings, but
just as a field of broken down ambition’ (112). The chapter ends as his father:

just sat there, the little man with no trousers, his head shaking from side to side
in bewilderment, his face screwed up with inadequacy and self-reproach, half-
blinded with tiredness and with life-fatigue. (112)

The opening of the following chapter is ambiguous, as it begins with the last of
Machin’s anaesthetically induced dreams. Still feeling the effects of his dental
surgery, Machin has fallen asleep in an upstairs bedroom at Weaver’s Christmas
party. The chapter begins:

I can see his face, creased in the darkness, racked with a pain that seems to grow
steadily. Between us is a wall of pain that grows and thickens until it absorbs us
both. It runs across my face in dull spasms. It wakes me. (112)

The image of the face carries over the chapter break, suggesting the face Machin
sees is that of his father. Machin’s father works ‘nights on the railway’ (108),
perhaps the reason the face is ‘creased in the darkness’. Significant here is the
pain that both divides – the pain ‘is a wall’ – and unites – the pain ‘absorbs [them]
both’. In a literal sense, this refers to the physical pain caused by their labour
(Machin’s tongue is resting on the empty front sockets of the removed teeth
when he comes round). However, underlying this there seems to be an emotional
 Angry Young Men? 75

pain, common to father and son, caused by the generational dislocation. When
he awakes at the party Machin finds himself locked in an upstairs bedroom,
locked into the decisions he has made. Significantly he is alone and begins to
‘feel the need to get out of the room’ (113). In contrast, his father, though
purportedly trapped in ‘a field of broken down ambition’ still has the community
of Mr Chadwick and Mrs Shaw (112). Machin achieves his escape by climbing
out of the window and slotting his elbows into the guttering. Here, both literally
and metaphorically, Machin has climbed as high as he can go, and still ends up
in the gutter, hanging precariously.
Upon reaching the ground Machin encounters Wade, who is looking for his
lost dog in the garden. Wade explicitly warns Machin of the ‘risks of ownership’
(115). This ostensibly insignificant comment about a dog is developed throughout
the remainder of the text. For example when Machin publicly insults Mrs
Hammond, Maurice unambiguously echoes the encounter with Wade, telling
Machin, ‘She’s not a dog you’ve trained or bought [. . .] you talk as if you owned
the woman’ (149). Beyond this there are numerous references to owning and
buying people, as the commodification of the working class is represented
through the framing of relationships in transactionary terms. The dog motif
continues, as Machin finds himself back at the party with Weaver and Slomer
(the two most influential and viciously opposed committee members). Upon
entering the room Machin notices ‘an elaborate tapestry of a hunting scene: the
dogs have just got their teeth into a small, pale animal, and it’s already dripping
blood’ (117). Slomer is physically deformed, described variously as ‘thin’, ‘white’,
‘the cripple’, and ‘a prematurely aged boy’ (118–19), echoing the description of the
quarry represented on the tapestry. However, Machin’s physical prowess is here
redundant; in this company he is reduced to ‘the court jester, big and dumb,
a centre of confidential amusement’ (119). Machin is not feared for his size
and brutality here, he is observed for entertainment. His size, coupled with the
adjective ‘dumb’, suggest both inferior intelligence and the lack of a voice. In this
environment Slomer ‘seems to suggest his deformity is the only proper shape for
a body’ (119), an illustration of a self-assured power that transcends physicality.
Even Machin’s power as a consumer is taken away from him; when Slomer
instructs him to ‘drink up young man’ (117) the glass in his hand is already empty.
Eventually it is Slomer who gives Machin permission to leave the room, saying
‘he should be with people his own age downstairs and not with us tired old
dogs’ (119), and so reversing the symbolic imagery of the tapestry: it is Machin
that is the quarry, and Weaver and Slomer the dogs. In short, there is no escape
for Machin. Despite his perceived social climbing, his power as a consumer
76 The 1950s

and improved material conditions, he is variously objectified, commodified and

emasculated, and though dislocated, is ultimately static.
The limits of the horizon of expectation that are represented within these
texts are symptomatic of the hegemonic control that pervades society. Further,
the representation of the incorporation of emergent and residual cultural forms
into the dominant, gendered, class structure, is reproduced in the material
conditions of production that allow for the generation of this particular structure.
That is to say, the perceived anger and the class-position of writers from divergent
cultural positions and backgrounds ‘proved a highly saleable commodity’
(Maschler, 1959: 8). It is worth returning here to the label ‘Angry Young Men’,
and considering the value of a label that incorporated writers as diverse as
Kingsley Amis and Arnold Wesker. Indeed, the term ‘incorporated’ carries great
significance. As Maschler’s assertion that the writers which formed this pattern
were ‘rendered harmless in the A.Y.M. cage’ (7) suggests, the ‘Angry Young Men’
label became a means of commodifying a diverse range of dissenting voices, thus
incorporating them into the dominant social structure. A paradox then emerges,
as in a context where anger is ‘a highly saleable commodity’ (8), ‘the A.Y.M. cage’
(7) also becomes a platform from which to speak. It was that platform, and those
dissenting voices, which provided the material conditions that became the
foundation for the development of the Northern realism which emerged toward
the end of the 1950s, which in turn produced a ‘working-class moment’ in British
culture. That ‘working-class moment’ continued into the 1960s and is epitomized
by figures such as The Beatles, George Best, David Bailey, Michael Caine and
Terence Stamp, all of whom can be viewed as being in some way representative
of the 1960s, and each of whom would acknowledge, and in some instances,
celebrate their working-class origins. Each would alter the cultural field in which
they operated, and all would achieve global celebrity status. The development of
a broader working-class moment is evident in the correlative relationship
between the success of the Northern realist novels and their New Wave cinema
adaptations. As Laing notes, the Pan paperback edition of Saturday Night and
Sunday Morning was first published in 1960 – the same year that the Woodfall
film adaptation was released – and had been reprinted thirteen times by 1964
(1986: 64–5). What emerges as the 1950s draw to a close is a pattern in which a
certain kind of working-class masculinity is itself commodified.
The commodification of working-class masculinity is apparent in the structural
regularities of the texts discussed above. Each features a disillusioned male
protagonist that bears some resemblance to their author. Sillitoe acknowledged that
 Angry Young Men? 77

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

Works cited

Allsop, Kenneth. The Angry Decade, London: Peter Owen Limited, 1964.
Bentley, Nick. Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s, Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007.
Bentley, Nick. ‘New Elizabethans’: The Representation of Youth Subcultures in 1950s
British Fiction. Literature and History, 19 (1) 2010: 16–33.
Brooke, Stephen. Gender and Working Class Identity in Britain During the 1950s.
Journal of Social History, 34 (4) 2001: 773–95.
Campbell, James. ‘A Chekhov of the North’. The Guardian 31 January 2004. Available
online: http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2004/jan/31/theatre.stage (accessed
2 July 2015).
Ferrebe, Alice. Masculinity in Male-Authored Fiction 1950–2000: Keeping it Up,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Haywood, Ian. Working-Class Fiction from Chartism to Trainspotting, Plymouth:
Northcote House Publishers Ltd., 1997.
Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy, 1957. London: Penguin, 1977.
Hopkins, Eric. The Rise and Decline of the English Working Classes 1918–1990, London:
George Weidenfeld & Nicholson Ltd, 1991.
Hutchings, William. ‘The Work of Play: Anger and the Expropriated Athletes of Alan
Sillitoe and David Storey’. Modern Fiction Studies, 33 (1) 1987: 35–47.
James, David. Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space. London:
Continuum, 2008.
Kalliney, P. J. ‘Cities of Affluence: Masculinity, Class, and The Angry Young Men’. Modern
Fiction Studies, 47 (1) 2001: 92–117.
Kroll, Morton. ‘The Politics of Britain’s Angry Young Men’. The Western Political
Quarterly, 12 (2) 1959: 555–7.
Laing, Stuart. ‘Room at the Top: The Morality of Affluence’. Popular Fiction and Social
Change, edited by Pawling, C. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984.
Laing, Stuart. Representations of Working-Class Life 1957–1964, London: Macmillan
Publishers Ltd, 1986.
Langhamer, Claire. ‘The Meanings of Home in Postwar Britain’. Journal of Contemporary
History, 40 (2) 2005: 341–62.
Mansfield, Jane. ‘The Brute-Hero: The 1950s and Echoes of the North’. Literature and
History, 19 (1) 2010: 34–49.
Maschler, Tom, ed. Declaration. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1959.
Messner, Michael. A. Power at Play: Sports and the Problem of Masculinity, Boston:
Beacon Press, 1992.
Osborne, John. Look Back in Anger, 1957. London: Faber and Faber, 1973.
Philips, Deborah. Women’s Fiction 1945–2005: Writing Romance. London: Continuum,
2006.
Sillitoe, Alan. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. 1958. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1961.
Storey, David. This Sporting Life. 1960. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1963.
 Angry Young Men? 79

Tomlinson, Alan. ‘David Storey’s & Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life: Reflections on
the Aestheticisation of the Sporting Body’. Diegesis: Journal of the Association for
Research in Popular Fictions, Summer (4) 1999: 6–13.
Whannel, Garry. Media Sport Stars: Masculinities and Moralities, London: Routledge,
2002.
Williams, Raymond. ([1961] 1965), The Long Revolution, London: Pelican.
Williams, Raymond. ([1973] 1975), The Country and the City, London: Paladin.
Williams, Raymond. (1977), Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Williams, Raymond. ([1958] 1983), Culture & Society: 1780–1950, New York: Columbia
University Press.
Williams, Raymond and Michael Orrom. Preface to Film, London: Film Drama, 1954.
80
 3

‘Mere bird-watching indeed’: Feminist

Anthropology and 1950s Female Fiction
Alice Ferrebe

British fiction of the 1950s is regularly characterized to be profoundly

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

81
82 The 1950s

is an intense anxiety over the overbearing and conflicting symbolism of the

feminine in 1950s culture: ‘we are becoming dominated by female values, by the
characteristic female indifference to anything but immediate, personal suffering’,
Osborne petulantly claimed (1994: 256). Stephanie Spencer notes ‘the uneasy
relationship between individual women and the powerful construction of
“Woman” in the immediate postwar period’ (2005: 2); a construction at the nexus
of national reconstruction, mass culture and consumerism. From 1947 to 1951 a
group of professional women met to consider the whole cultural apparatus of
gender in British culture, including the positioning of women in the economy, the
workplace and the home, and their representation across a variety of media and
texts. ‘Is there a feminine point of view distinguishable in literature?’ they asked,

Are women writers even to-day, when they write so much, influenced by a
masculine pattern and masculine preferences? These questions might be
discussed in sixth form classes with great advantage to the budding writer. Our
literature and our social idea would gain enormously if we had more women
writers with the confidence and originality to force their readers to open their
eyes on a new picture of life – its values, joys, sorrows and sensations as they are
experienced in the lives of women. (Campbell 1952: 43)

Though the Mass Observation archive has proven an opulent source for
historians of women’s history, little attention has so far been paid to the influence
of anthropological approaches on female-authored fiction of the 1950s, and its
potential to yield this ‘new picture of life’. It is a decade routinely understood as a
trough of effective feminist activity. Yet anthropology’s defining strategies, that
calibrate the influences of nature and culture, pragmatic effects and symbolic
significances, hold clear affinities with the work of the feminist Wave that is to
swell during the 1960s. We might at this point speculate as to how its
methodologies are pertinent to a decade fraught, in Marjorie Ferguson’s analysis,
with tensions between ‘individual and group norms, between traditional and
emergent female roles’ (Ferguson 1983: 77).
In 1956, the same year as the opening of Osborne’s seminal play Look Back in
Anger, anthropologist Audrey Richards published Chisungu: A Girl’s Initiation
Ceremony Among the Bemba of Zambia. Her analysis of a rite witnessed during a
1931 field trip broke ground not just in its focus upon an exclusively female
cultural practice, but also in its attempt to relate the symbolism of ritual to the
structure of society, and in its focus upon the importance of symbolism within
kinship roles. Though influenced by the work of her mentor Bronislaw Malinowski,
Richards’ text notably initiates a new and self-reflexive technique that blends both
 ‘Mere bird-watching indeed’ 83

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

The critical focus of its ‘anthropology of anthropologists’ alights upon the

discipline’s dominance by masculine principles, including the ruthless imposition
of pre-ascribed categories of knowledge. Later in the novel anthropologist Alaric
Lydgate hurries to point out ‘that his notes dealt almost entirely with religion and
material culture and would therefore be of very little use to anyone writing a
thesis on social and political structure’: as far as he is concerned, never the twain
of social and political structures shall meet (Pym 2012: 88). Catherine, meanwhile,
is doing more than mere bird-watching of that peacock: her humorous yet
serious comparisons between counter-café and church refute those boundaries
between religious and material culture, just as they uphold the everyday as a site
of potential transcendence.
The novel’s construction of a devotional cult around Tom is a prescient parody
of what Susan Sontag was later to identify in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s professional
practice as the role of ‘the anthropologist as hero’ (Sontag, 1994). Needless to say,
this role is gendered. Tom Harrisson shamelessly sold the Mass Observation
project he co-founded as an opportunity for exotic adventures, in which the ‘wilds
of Lancashire or the mysteries of the East End’ were promoted as being ‘as little
explored as the cannibal interior of the New Hebrides, or the head-hunter
hinterland of Borneo’ (Highmore, 2000: 79). In the anthropological community
surrounding Pym’s fictional Institute, professional heroism can be acquired by
only one route – being ‘in the field’ (and a necessarily foreign field at that) (Pym
2012: 16). The shared recognition of the glamour achieved by (international)
fieldwork is one of the bonds across the generational divide between an older
generation of colonial amateurs (like Alaric Lydgate) and the young, profes-
sionalized social scientists (like Tom Mallow). James Buzard has identified in
ethnographic process ‘a narrative pattern of entrance (close association of culture
and place) and withdrawal (dissociation of culture and place) – a pattern plainly
amenable to masculinist romance’ (Buzard 2005: 27). It is amenable, of course, to
imperial romance too.
Catherine’s professional practice (aside from her amateur, instinctive anthro-
pological work) also involves the fostering of romantic glamour. Her income
depends upon women’s magazines, a medium recognized as a site of the intense
cultural production of gender: ‘These journals [. . .] are about femininity itself, as
a state, a condition, a craft and an art form which comprise a set of practices and
beliefs’ (Ferguson 1983: 1). In the course of the narrative we witness her progress
on, amongst others, ‘The Rose Garden’, a love story, and an article on how to give
an ‘ “in-expensive” cocktail party’ (Pym 2012: 21–2, 240). Pym makes, within
Catherine’s experience, a direct connection between domesticity and romance
 ‘Mere bird-watching indeed’ 85

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

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

This dense passage melds imagery of household industry and economy with
Western Romance (is this Dante’s ‘Beatrice’?) and an imposing African aesthetic:
it symbolises a domestic, visceral process of artistic transformation, and enacts
86 The 1950s

this transformation through its anthropologizing of the feminine everyday from

a perspective located both within and beyond it. We are regularly alerted to the
fact that Catherine is unable quite to ‘do’ domesticity (and thus femininity)
correctly. Digby Fox and Mark Penfold, young anthropologists in the making,
are horrified to find Catherine doing housework in the evening: ‘People [by
which they mean, of course, women] usually do that kind of thing in the
mornings [. . .]. I don’t know what my mother would say’ (22). Catherine can
observe how her sloppy footwear mars her outfit for the in-expensive cocktail
party she is throwing to celebrate Tom’s return – lapsing again into her ‘bright
magazine style’ she registers the inappropriateness of ‘(oh dear!) those shabby
blue espadrilles bought in the market in Périgueux on a fine June morning’ (65).
A token from an intensely felt (and foreign) experience is out of place in a
domestic performance of femininity. ‘Someone is always looking at you’, warned
an advertisement for cosmetics in a 1956 edition of Woman magazine, ‘Your
beauty can never take time off ’ (58). Catherine’s self-surveillance anticipates
John Berger’s analysis of female experience: ‘From earliest childhood,’ he claimed
of Woman in Ways of Seeing, ‘she has been taught and persuaded to survey
herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and surveyed
within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as
a woman’ (Berger 1972: 46). In executing the vigilance necessary to maintain an
acceptable performance of femininity, women are forced to occupy a space that
is both within and without their lives and their culture.
Tom, it is emphasized, has become ‘detribalized’ (Pym 2012: 162, 165, 188):
after so much time away from home, he too observes his native culture and its
ritualized debutante dances and flower shows from the outside, as if they were
part of the African community that he favours for study. He regards his personal
life in the same way. Catherine, he notes, is ‘without kinship ties’, which allows him
to take her up and drop her ‘without the likelihood of awkward repercussions’
(142). When she is finally dropped (in order that Tom can involve himself with
Deidre Swan), kinless Catherine is painfully aware of a lack of female support and
consolation, for after a long relationship with an anthropologist, she seems ‘to
know more men than women’ (155). She stands outside the feminine tribe, and
because of this, she stands outside domesticity as it is currently culturally figured
(in the gathering mass of women’s magazines which her work, ironically,
augments). When Tom is killed in Africa, ‘accidentally shot in a political riot, in
which he had become involved more out of curiosity than passionate conviction’
(238), Deidre’s family ask Catherine ‘to stay with them for a little while and she
thought that she might enjoy it, entering into the comfortable kind of life which
 ‘Mere bird-watching indeed’ 87

she had only seen from the outside’ (248). And she does enjoy, temporarily, the
Swan’s careful observation of the routines of suburban life, before informing them
with characteristic dryness that she must get back to her ‘own squalor’ (255).
Catherine, it seems, is an instinctive anthropologist of the everyday. Tom, the
professional, feels the lack of her expertise when visiting his childhood home, as
he imagines ‘how Catherine would have enjoyed it, her bright eyes darting here
and there, missing no detail’ (183). She shares with Malinowski that ‘intense
interest and suspense with which an Ethnographer enters for the first time the
district that is to be the future scene of his field-work’; she is perpetually ‘on the
lookout for symptoms of deeper, sociological facts’, suspecting ‘many hidden and
mysterious ethnographic phenomena behind the commonplace aspect of things’
(Malinowski 2014: 55). For Catherine, as for Pym, this interest is engendered by
her own national environment, rather than unfamiliar foreign cultures. Deidre is
studying for a degree in Tom’s subject, though ‘she did not always quite
understand what she was doing and was beginning to wonder if it had been a
mistake to embark on the study of anthropology rather than history or English
literature’ (Pym 2012: 8). Catherine, who despite her instinctual anthropological
practice had felt acutely ‘the general uselessness of women if they cannot
understand or reverence a man’s work, or even if they can’ when she was with
Tom (103), is very certain about the purpose of Deidre’s education. Lapsing
again into ‘her woman’s magazine tone’, she brightly encourages the younger
woman: ‘you’ll have your anthropological studies, just think how useful they’ll be
to Tom’ (175). For the members of the ‘Feminine Point of View’ Conference, the
education of girls – the inequity and limitations of a ‘feminine’ curriculum –
forms a particular focus, and is identified as interfering with the conception of a
more diverse range of heterosexual partnerships and of careers for women: the
‘conventional marriage pattern is based on the stereotyped ideal of women [. . .],
an ideal which is both cramping and unrealistic’ (Campbell 1952: 55).
Tom’s death robs Deidre of a ‘career’ as his wife. The life of his jilted childhood
sweetheart, Elaine, has been left in stasis (and doggy spinsterhood) for much the
same reason. The Conference concludes that the ‘new picture of life’ they seek in
a female-authored, female-focused literature is there to be found in the work of
Virginia Woolf and Mary Webb (Campbell 1952: 43). To this list we might
reasonably add Jane Austen, a novelist to whom Pym is compulsively compared
by reviewers. In the strangest moment in the off-beat Less Than Angels, Elaine is
denied potentially reviving insight because, as she is ‘not much of a reader’, she
has no access to Anne Elliott’s poignant and angry words in Persuasion. Pym
goes on to quote them anyway:
88 The 1950s

We certainly do not forget you so soon as you forget us. It is, perhaps, our fate
rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined,
and our feelings prey upon us. You are forced on exertion. You have always
business of some sort or other to take you back into the world immediately, and
continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions. (Pym 2012: 189)

Less Than Angels does not end in marriage: in fact, there are no marriages
functioning in it at all. In the final paragraph, Catherine is left busily burning
Alaric Lydgate’s traditional anthropological trophies – his masks and shields – to
liberate him into a less masked and shielded life, potentially in a relationship with
her (‘what a difficult and peculiar couple they would make’, concludes Deidre’s
well-domesticated aunt Rhoda, 262). Deidre’s future (and her future education)
Pym leaves in the balance. Yet we already know that Deidre herself, though bored
and bemused by the canonical (masculine, colonial) anthropological textbooks
and field trip accounts, shows, like Catherine, a propensity for a domestic, female-
authored anthropology.
Arjun Appadurai has observed how, in imperial discourse, native inhabitants
were positioned as ‘incarcerated’ in their culture, while Western explorers,
administrators, missionaries and eventually anthropologists were ‘regarded as
quintessentially mobile . . .[,] are the movers, the seers, the knowers’ (1988: 37).
When Tom walks Deidre home, the couple hear the sound of a cello drifting
through the warm night air. Deidre explains:

‘That’s Miss Cumberledge [. . .] She plays in an orchestra and you often hear her
practising.’
They stood for a few moments listening, looking up at the sky and the
television aerials silhouetted against it.
‘Almost beautiful, aren’t they,’ said Tom, pointing to them. ‘A symbol of the age
we live in.’
‘So is Mrs Lovell putting out the breakfast cereals,’ said Deirdre as they passed
her neighbour’s house. They could see her through the uncurtained window,
laying the table, placing coloured plastic mugs on it and in the baby’s high chair,
and taking giant packets of cornflakes from the sideboard. (Pym 2012: 153–4)

Though it is Tom’s first visit to suburbia, he is undaunted by the environment’s

utter unfamiliarity. A mover, a seer and a knower, he immediately imposes a
(phallic) symbol of contemporary life – the aerials are his metaphor for (mass
media) society. But then, countering Tom’s ingrained professional impulse
towards overweening public structures, Deidre draws our eye downwards to the
domestic – to the prosaic rituals of family life (equally ‘modern’, with their plastic
 ‘Mere bird-watching indeed’ 89

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

for rather than a benign recognition of human failing, Pope’s ‘An Essay on
Man’ argues that Man (and specifically he) is overreaching, presumptive and
destructive.
George W. Stocking’s survey of British social anthropology characterizes
Bronislaw Malinowski’s approach to the ‘natives’ as one of ‘ “gentle irony” – a
literary mode characteristic of much of modern ethnography’, and of Pym’s
writing too (1999: 272). Deidre’s mousey brother, Malcolm, spends most of his
evenings at a local club, where young men lurk with mixed feelings about young
women: ‘Perhaps,’ Pym ironizes gently, ‘they intimidated the men. Certainly they
often led them captive into marriage’ (Pym 2012: 34). Yet beneath the humour
generated by this cultural relativity lie darker social implications. Malcolm’s and
Deidre’s aunt Rhoda is eagerly awaiting the next instalment in another narrative
of capture: ‘There had been a nasty murder, or series of murders; bodies of
women had been discovered in a house in a not very nice part of London, and
Rhoda, in common with a great many people in all walks of life, was anxious to
read about the latest developments’ (31). This is based, we can suppose, upon the
much publicized case of John Christie. He had been hanged in 1953 for the
murder of at least eight women, including his wife. For all the rueful pseudo-
subservience of Malcolm’s clubmates, female dominance of the domestic
environment, Pym reminds us, is a tenuous one. Rhoda’s lurid imagination,
‘educated’ by magazines and their crude pictures, extends, Catherine intuits, to
Africa, as she imagines the other woman’s response to Tom’s death:

Catherine saw past Rhoda’s shocked face into her thoughts, the shouting mob of
black bodies brandishing spears, or the sly arrow, tipped with poison for which
there was no known antidote, fired from an overhanging jungle tree. (243)

Michael Cots notes of the novel’s interplay between African and British culture
that it is ‘partly comic, but it is also handled to suggest cruel and disturbing
forces’ at work at home (1989: 67). These forces Pym casts as gendered as well as
racial.
A similarly dark comic technique is used by Muriel Spark in the 1958 story
‘The Black Madonna’. The collection in which it appears, The Go-Away Bird, moves
between African and British settings with an ethnographic intent comparable
with Pym’s. ‘The Black Madonna’, set in Whitney Clay, locates its exoticism in the
northern new town’s novelty of geometric urban patterns designed by the Town
Planning Committee. The compulsive deference of its cultural processes of
environmental naming are held up for inspection too. Raymond and Lou Parker
live in flat twenty-two on the fifth floor of Cripps House, named after the late Sir
 ‘Mere bird-watching indeed’ 91

Stafford Cripps, who laid its foundation stone; Cripps House lies on Manders
Road, ‘named after one of the founders of the canning concern, Manders’ Figs in
Syrup’ (Spark 1958: 3). Raymond is employed at the town’s motor works; Lou had
‘been a nurse before her marriage’ (5). The pair have a car, no television (by
choice), and a diverse social circle within the town, and their cultural activities,
voting patterns, religious observances and reading matter (including The Observer,
The Catholic Herald, and Woman’s Own) are all meticulously observed. They are
the only childless couple amongst the four other Catholic households and twenty-
five total families living in the ‘civic chambers’ of the Council’s block (5): their
many siblings all have at least three children each.
The story begins with the ritual installation of its eponymous figure, which
has been carved contemporaneously out of Irish bog oak. The Black Madonna
functions as a devotional symbol both of the Virgin herself, and of the postwar
investment in the role of public, contemporary art in rebuilding Britain – people
come to Whitney Clay from London ‘as if to a museum, to see the line of the
Black Madonna which must not be spoiled by vestments’, despite the regular
congregation’s opinion that she could do with dressing up a bit (2). After fifteen
years of marriage, Raymond and Lou’s worries about childlessness have settled
to a lingering pain and a regular stipend sent to ‘Poor Elizabeth’, Lou’s widowed
sister, towards the rearing of her eight children in Bethnal Green (10). Lou gave
up her career upon marriage at the age of twenty-two. She fills her life with
constant civic and social activity: the Mothers’ Union is ‘the only group she did
not qualify for’ (5). The couple adopt Henry Pierce, a Jamaican working with
Raymond, as a surrogate son, taking him on holiday to London. In time, the
Madonna answers their prayers, both to restore Henry to the Faith, and to
remove his less docile and poetic compatriot Oxford St. John to a job in
Manchester (alone with Lou, Oxford once refers ‘to that question of being black
all over, which made Lou very uncomfortable’, 13–14). These manifestations of
grace, plus reports in the parish magazine ‘pertaining to childless couples’, lead
them to decide ‘to put in for a baby to the Black Madonna’ (16). The echo of an
institutional transaction is not, we can assume by Spark’s strictly observed
phraseological precision, accidental. The Parkers have put in the devotional duty,
and they feel entitled to a reward. Hannah Gavron notes that ‘the opinion is
widely held, that to remain childless is for a woman to offend against her basic
nature, and thus to do herself harm’ (1966: 125). ‘I don’t see why I shouldn’t have
a baby’, Lou says (Spark 1958: 17) and in the negative cast of her expectant
statement Spark suggests the sanctified maternal instinct is (like Whitney Clay
itself) a civic, cultural construct.
92 The 1950s

Spark’s characteristically mobile narrative perspective includes the occasional,

ruthlessly detached observation of her central couples’ prejudices – as when, for
example, ‘Raymond noticed what he thought erroneously to be a box of
contraceptives’ next to Elizabeth’s bed (12). Yet more generally, having established
Raymond and Lou’s political and moral perspectives to be class-based and, as
such, contingent, she insinuates her critique by couching Lou’s escalating
hypocrisy in middle-class, third-person, free-indirect discourse. Lou, as she
emphasizes herself and is echoed by the narrator, is ‘not a snob, only sensible’ (5).
Yet when Henry uses the phrase ‘slum mentality’ in relation to Elizabeth, Lou
snaps at him, ‘thinking wildly, what a cheek him talking like a snob. At least
Elizabeth’s white’ (13). The promiscuous Oxford she considers ‘common’, yet she
cannot complain directly about his presence, for ‘Raymond despised snobbery,
and so did she’ (14).
Lou conceives and delivers a healthy daughter, who is black. She rejects her
baby outright, citing a purportedly biological dogmatism that overrides the
maternal – race: ‘ “I can’t go against my nature”, said Lou’ (24). Raymond demands
that Oxford is tested, but his blood does not match the baby’s. Henry reappears
at the hospital, wanting to say goodbye before embarking home to Jamaica, and
Lou throws him out. No test of his blood is requested or undertaken. The baby is
put up for adoption, and the story ends on a final division between absolute
certainties and cultural values – the priest, Lou says, said her daughter’s removal
was the right thing, though ‘not a good thing’ (27). The story is not without the
possibility of mercy. Lou’s compulsive observance of middle-class mores, her
intoned denial of her snobbery and racism despite evidence to the contrary, we
can intuit to be motivated by the ‘hopeless childhood in Liverpool’ of which we
receive but a glimpse (10). That dirty, ‘grey-white’ early experience, scrubbed
away by the job the nuns got for her to train as a nurse, surfaces in the doctor’s
tenuous suggestion to Raymond that the origins of their black baby daughter
may lie generations back, in ‘black blood in your family or your wife’s’ (23). Lou’s
sister Elizabeth, deprived of their financial support since Lou conceived, is
delighted to invoke ‘a nigro off a ship’ as the possibility of a tainted inheritance
visiting in retribution: ‘well thats funny you have a coloured God is not asleep’,
adding ‘your hubby must think it was that nigro you was showing off ’ (24–5).
Encouraged into anthropological observation by the text’s explicit acts of
ethnography, we can position Spark’s story as profoundly feminist in its study of
a woman emotionally and morally debilitated by a culture that refuses her right
to an identity which is not grounded in motherhood. But, in deference to the
ambiguity that defines Spark’s fiction, we can also read the baby (Dawn – a name
 ‘Mere bird-watching indeed’ 93

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

Kinship and village life

Adam Kuper’s genealogy of British anthropology reads the early 1950s as

dominated by the so-called ‘Manchester School’, founded by Max Gluckman at
the University of Manchester, and notes that ‘[v]irtually all the monographs on
Central African rural societies which members of the school produced
concentrated on village structure, and analysed the processes of conflict and
conflict-resolution inherent in the structure of the community’ (1985: 151). A
Mancunian herself, Marghanita Laski produced a 1952 novel in just this mode,
though her study is focused on a community, Priory Dean, just ‘twenty miles
away’ from London (149). Her writing is furnished with thick description of
housing, clothing and social behaviour that attend beadily to the suffocating
nuances of class. On her retirement, Miss Moody, the draper, scandalously
crosses the village’s foundational social divide between the Priory Hill people
(the ‘gentry’) and the low-lying Station Road people (‘tradespeople’), by
purchasing the loftily located Fernlea. When Miss Porteous, ‘the cultural leader
of Priory Dean society’ (50), infiltrates the house, she is shocked to discover that:

The walls had been distempered a nice warm cream; the curtains at the casement
windows were of that charming mock crossstitch mock-Jacobean linen, and the
furniture, instead of being the tightly stuffed elaborately veneered walnut that
most of the tradespeople bought, consisted of what [she] immediately sized up
as A Few Good Pieces. (135)

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

beneath it) coalesces with a shifting attention towards a wider, textual framework
of representation, as Second Wave thinking begins to swell (Ferrebe 2010).
In The Village, Laski’s writing works to conceptualize the relationship between
environmental detail and the wider influence of village structure, conflict and
cultural change in an explicitly ethnographic way. An anthropological study
(fictional or otherwise) of village life therefore has marked potential in terms of
exploring ideas around cultural relativity, diachronic change and the dynamism
of social behaviours – as such, it offers an enticing field for those concerned with
the role (and class) of women in society.
Laski’s The Village is a study of kinship relations. The novel’s central narrative
focuses upon a battle between endogamy and exogamy, and the pressures
brought to bear upon young Margaret Trevor and Roy Wilson, from Priory Hill
and Station Road respectively. Yet barring that central (romance) narrative, it is
predominantly a novel about the relationships between women. It opens the
‘night the war ended’, as Wendy Trevor and Edith Wilson, the mothers of the
controversial couple-to-be, decide to make a last Watch, because, they believe of
the Germans, it ‘would be just like them to have a last raid, just for spite’ (11, 13).
Through this exercise, redundant in a practical sense, Laski begins with a utopian
vision of how female relationships might operate across classes in the light of
shared female experiences. Wendy confesses that she lost a baby whilst living in
Kenya – Edith, holding her, acknowledges the same loss, and then:

She sat down beside Wendy, and again the two women sipped their tea, talking
now in soft relaxed voices of the children when young, of their husbands, their
parents, remembering the little things that had made up their lives, made them
what they were. Neither had ever talked like this to anyone before and never
would again. (27)

Yet beyond this night and its collaborative creation of a female culture, the novel
characterizes the relationships between women as sites of the most stringent
policing of ossified difference. When Mr Trevor passes Mr Wilson in the midst
of the scandal of hypergamy, they share ‘a glance that agreed that there it was, a
rare old mess and none of their doing but that talking about it was the women’s
business, not theirs’ (248).
The novel’s feminist work is most apparent in its exploration of the kinship
and class relationships between women in relation to issues around housework.
The postwar establishment of the Welfare State made this mode of labour into a
political issue, in response to the Beveridge Report’s demand for the ‘Recognition
of housewives as a distinct insurance class of occupied persons with benefits
 ‘Mere bird-watching indeed’ 95

adjusted to their special needs’ (Beveridge 1997: Section 30, paragraphs 107–17,

n.p.). The 1951 General Election, which restored Churchill as Prime Minister,
fielded an unprecedented number of female candidates (though the victorious
Conservatives furnished the fewest), and was dubbed the ‘Housewives’ Election’.
Bernard Shaw, supporting a Labour woman candidate, drew a direct link between
(a ubiquitous female) housewifery and political savvy: ‘Women who all have to
manage homes and rear children are practical and know where the shoe pinches’
(quoted Adam 2011: 230). One place the pinch was felt postwar (for the middle-
class woman at least) was in relation to the availability, affordability and
desirability of servants – a topic through which Laski, with her sharp anthro-
pological eye, exploits the intersectionality of the personal, the political and the
Political that will be so crucial to feminist thinking of the following decades.
Edith Wilson used to ‘do’ for the Trevor household in its more affluent times.
Wendy Trevor, her upper-middle-class family struggling desperately for money,
now does her own housework ‘incompetently and with a very bad grace’:

To have sat down every week and polished the silver, to have read the recipe-
books and produced appetising meals for her family would have meant, to her,
willing acceptance of the servitude to which she was so unwillingly bound.
(Laski 1952: 62)

Instinctively (for, beyond that last Watch with Edith, Wendy’s life is devoid of
political solidarity) she is aligned with Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein. In Women’s
Two Roles, published in 1956 and one of the decade’s few unwaveringly feminist
texts, they rail that ‘the sentimental cult of domestic virtues is the cheapest
method at society’s disposal of keeping women quiet without seriously
considering their grievances or improving their position’ (166). ‘Mummy’s often
said how bored she is,’ muses Margaret (Laski 1952: 63), but Wendy, exhausted by
their poverty and the attendant social shame, is unable to overturn her well-
meaning husband Gerald’s creed that women of their class ‘didn’t have to work’
(65). She is, in the words of Kay Smallshaw in How to Run Your Home Without
Help (1949), one of ‘those who must be both mistress and maid’ (2005: vi). From
Gerald’s point of view, this work should not happen both outside and inside the
home – as Gavron notes, ‘Women today are considered to have two choices, to
work or to stay at home. This implies that staying at home does not involve work’
(1966: 128). Because of the family’s penury Margaret will have to work outside
the home, and to her mother the least supportable shame of all is the fact that
Margaret has no desire to, preferring housework or, at a pinch, a job as a cook:
Wendy said, ‘You must be mad’ (Laski 1952: 63).
96 The 1950s

Margaret’s falling in love with the lower class Roy Wilson is riddled with
politically loaded implications. Part of his attraction for her, we might surmise, is
that he shares her conception of the ideal (and traditionally gendered) home:
‘Don’t you worry, Mrs. Wilson, you’ll have plenty to do keeping my home nice for
me once the honeymoon’s over’ (182). For Roy, a wife freed from the necessity of
going out to work is a marker of his financial success (Gerald, hearing of Roy’s
decent wage and burgeoning savings, gives ‘a sharp, involuntary gasp’, 209).
Beveridge’s idealized housewives, as a ‘distinct insurance class of occupied
persons’, we might appreciate, are predicated upon the distinct middle-classness
of the women involved. These demarcations manifest as both economic and
ideological – their family can afford for them not to earn, and servants are
undesirable (for their violation, we might speculate of the ‘classless’ ideal home).
This is the class to which Roy aspires. Margaret’s aspirations are difficult to read
in terms of our own notions of political agency, but we can better understand
them in the context of a decade at the end of which the victorious Prime Minister
Harold Macmillan was able to announce with some resonance that the election
had shown ‘that the class war is obsolete’ (‘Conservative’s Hat Trick’, 1959: 6).
Laski locates Margaret at the nexus of competing female roles, both symbolic
and practical. She is the novel’s romantic heroine, and she strives for her right to
be a housewife. She is also its hero, as a committed class rebel. Rather than
explicitly confrontational, however, her commitment is asserted through a
determined refusal to recognize the structuring principles within her own
experience: ‘The trouble with you, Miss Margaret,’ Roy’s sister Maureen tells her
as she sits happily in their kitchen, ‘is that you’ve got no sense of class’ (Laski
1952:113). The ambiguity of ‘class’ here – recalling its function as both political
and economic category – is telling (and likely to be deliberate, for Maureen is no
fool). Margaret rejects the epitome of classy (or at least its proxy – the village’s
Country Club that sports the sons of the upper middle class) for ‘Station Road’
tastes and the company of Roy, and her best friend Jill Morton. In so doing, she
resolutely fails to acknowledge the social significance of the system that makes
such hierarchical distinctions, and which is so live in the lives of her friends. It is
Jill’s reaction to the engagement to Roy that finally brings an end to Margaret’s
determined nostalgie de la boue (the novel is riven with references to earth). Jill,
in her anger at Margaret’s debasement, is forced to speak to her poorer but
classier friend ‘just like I would to a maid’ in an attempt to disrupt her wilful
ignorance of transgression inherent in the engagement (196). The female
friendship offered as a more enduring version of the understanding borne on the
night of the last Watch is defeated by the persistence of class amidst rapidly
 ‘Mere bird-watching indeed’ 97

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

I believe you told me, when the girls first entered school, that you and your
husband had decided that it was your intention to, as it were, invest in your
daughters’ education rather than provide them with – er – I suppose one could
say a dowry when they grew up. (58)

Margaret must marry, for reasons other than romantic inevitability: she is trained for
nothing (or no job, at least, that her mother will countenance for her). Once again,
during the 1950s, the messages around women’s work are multivalent, as differing
media profess the housewifely virtues as vehemently as the potential marital
harmony (and economic benefits) if a woman goes out to work. Noel Streatfeild’s
1950 debutante’s manual, optimistically (in view of its teenage readership) entitled
The Years of Grace, includes a ‘Careers’ section, in which proferred options include
the Civil Service, teaching, nursing and secretarial work). Streatfeild suggests:

The best career for every woman is, of course, taking care of her husband and
home. But not every girl marries the moment she leaves school, and in most
98 The 1950s

cases a good thing too. As well, some girls never marry at all. The days are over,
thank goodness, when it was considered a disgrace not to get married, and girls
married just to be married with all the misery that brings. (Streatfeild 1950: 289)

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

Debutantes at native dances

Audrey Richards’s study Chisungu (1956) takes as its focus a Zambian tribe’s
girl’s initiation ceremony. Richards’s writing style makes use of a self-reflexive
impulse (and an often disarmingly self-referential humour) to draw her reader’s
attention to her graceless presence as ethnographer in the ritual space. By
implying the potential influence of her presence on the events described, she
makes apparent the contradictions inherent in anthropological practice,
freighted as it is by competing demands of subjective experience and objective
analysis. David Scott has noted how, in anthropological writing across the
twentieth century, a ‘distinctive topos of female ethnographic authority develops
around the scene of the native dance’, and that this scene is one which repeatedly
calls into question Malinowski’s definitive practice of participant observation.
‘Frequently describing a circle’, Scott claims,

the women’s dance functions as a handy metonym for the putatively closed circle of
the native culture and occasions that necessary moment of crisis at which the
ethnographer perceives that, though she has physically been in the territory of her
studied people for some time, she has yet to step across that epistemological boundary
dividing her internalized culture from theirs. (Scott 1989: 78, his emphasis)

In Pym’s Less Than Angels, the academic Tom Mallow observes a debutante’s ball,
yet, tellingly, reads the event to be revealing only of the kinship ties he severed
when he became ‘detribalized’ from the social class that was his birthright (Pym
2012: 162). Richards’s text, by contrast, revels in the Chisungu ritual as a dynamic
symbolic practice requiring intense emotional engagement of both participants
and participant observers: ‘If the observations made here under the title of
“pragmatic effects” mean anything,’ Richards writes, ‘they point to the number and
variety of emotional attitudes which can be expressed by symbolic behaviour’
(1982: 69). For Pym, it is Catherine Oliphant’s insights into the ball’s anthropological
context that are revelatory in terms of their observation of cultural relativity and
institutionalized snobbery:
 ‘Mere bird-watching indeed’ 99

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

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

who is ultimately revealed to be the Mayor without his neck chain, her humiliation
is complete. Scott’s study goes on to define ‘native ethnocentrism’ to mean
‘knowing how and when to dance but not grasping the ethnographic significance
of the dance’ (Scott 1989: 78). Rhoda, a native middle-class girl, grasps how and
when and why to dance, yet still fails to execute an effective entry into the
practices and institutions that define and constrict her mother’s identity. The
Mayor’s patriarchal regalia – jewellery, of course, in a neat irony – ‘was all she had
had to distinguish him from the rest of the bald-headed and obese middle-aged
men’, her own father amongst their ranks (Taylor 1968: 217). Unlike Catherine,
Rhoda is an ingénue, not an anthropologist. Rather, the story’s free indirect
discourse demands empathetic engagement at the same time as it conducts a
dispassionate record of details. Taylor’s text makes its readers into participant
observers of a (failed) feminine rite.
In Attia Hosain’s 1953 story ‘The First Party’, the unnamed protagonist’s
unfamiliarity with the urban Indian milieu into which her marriage has brought
her is used to present the reader with a series of anthropological observations
that again combine the analysis of symbolism with a scrutiny (and empathic
engendering) of its emotional effects. Listening to the chatter of the female
party-goers, the unnamed newly-wed, the narrative voice informs us,

found the bi-lingual patchwork distracting, and its pattern, familiar to others,
with allusions and references unrelated to her own experiences, was distressingly
obscure. [. . .] Their different stresses made even talk of dress and appearance
sound unfamiliar. She could not understand the importance of relating clothes
to time and place and not just occasion; nor their preoccupation with limbs and
bodies, which should be covered, and not face and features alone. They made
problems about things she took for granted. (Hosain 1988: 18)

Hosain settled in Britain in 1947, leaving India shortly after partition to avoid
moving to the newly-created Pakistan. Through a varied sequence of settings
and cultural allegiances, her collection Phoenix Fled maintains a focus upon
kinship relations, and the schism between traditional and emergent cultures. In
‘The Street of the Moon’, the young wife Hasina, who ends the story forced to
prostitute herself, represents a rebellious but ultimately abject modernity, but in
‘The First Party’, the new bride sits (albeit shakily on the edge of a chair) as a
bastion of conservatism, experiencing a burgeoning repulsion for the ‘new
women’ around her, the ‘wicked, contemptible, grotesque mimics of the foreign
ones among them for whom she felt no hatred because from them she expected
nothing better’ (21). The story turns upon a paradox – the wife’s realization that
 ‘Mere bird-watching indeed’ 101

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

caught in the middle of a cocktail party conversation (between two men) about
female submission. One man intimates that women are failing society: he
pronounces that they have a duty to resist patriarchy as everyone has a duty to
resist a dictator, yet they give way to men because they have ‘no sense of morality’
(92). Patricia feels, the narrator notes wryly, ‘she could make no contribution,
unless she told the little group they were discussing nothing less than history in
its entirety, not to mention all personal relationships: and that would hardly be
party conversation’ (93). Patricia’s sense of Geertz’s dialectic between the local
and the global is clearly keen. Later she claims of these self-pronounced ‘moralists’
that ‘One could tell they had never encountered the problem they were discussing
as a situation in their own lives’ (94–5). By contrast, she herself is able to move
between participation and observation, dissociating herself at times in order to
try ‘to listen to the party as if she were not in it’ (93).
That the personal is political (and vice versa), for Brophy as it is for Hosain, is
not in doubt. As an institution that so clearly bridges that divide, marriage
offers an ideal field study. Patricia is married to Gavin, a famous actor and an
exemplar (according to one male party guest) of ‘masculine grace’ (97). Part of
her role as ‘the wife, you know, of – ’ (as she is routinely introduced) is to answer
the love letters he receives from other women as fan mail (95). Gavin often talks
about her task to people they have only just met; ‘He seemed to display it as
something sweet in himself; evidence of the happiness of their marriage, their –
what was the political jargon? – solid front’ (97). That phrase ‘political jargon’
suggests not only that to marry is to commit a political act, but also that the
discourse of marriage – of an enduring marriage – is one that is theatrically
exploited by politicians. ‘Solid front’ is thus rendered sinisterly superficial. The
language of performance pervades the account of Patricia’s experience. Gavin’s
masculinity – his self itself – is emphasized as something artful: it is a ‘statuette’
(98), a ‘little masterpiece’ (107). With a Promethean panache, he has ‘moulded
his own figure as if it had been clay: and it was the more-than-realistic, the
theatrical perfection of the figure which bound people to him regardless of
their age and sex’ (98). Peacock worship, it would seem, is ubiquitous in these
social circles. The prescience of Brophy’s gender analysis lies not just in this
explicit demonstration of performativity, but also in Patricia’s ruthless
confrontation of her own complicity in tending and adoring the masculine myth
of her husband’s identity: ‘She asked herself if she was not the most responsible
of all’ (98).
Answering letters in which women offer themselves to Gavin, Patricia
perpetuates a chivalric ideal: ‘she said what she imagined an honourable man
 ‘Mere bird-watching indeed’ 103

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

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

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

Bowlby cannot be blamed any more than Freud for the fact that the meat of both
men’s findings was borrowed from the world of the abnormal, where they were
established from observation of extreme cases of psychic abuse, and applied
over-enthusiastically to normal life. (2007: 228)

Nonetheless, as American anthropologist Margaret Mead was to note of the

prevailing cultural insistence that a mother should never be separated from her
child, this can be interpreted as ‘a new and subtle form of anti-feminism in which
 ‘Mere bird-watching indeed’ 105

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

Desultorily, the children wandered about the enormous nursery, the labels
carefully pinned on net, taffeta and velvet. They looked at each other’s backs and
tittered a little and kept asking, ‘Am I a man or a woman?’ – the only distinction
they seemed to recognise. (Mortimer 1956: 19)

That the category of gender is fundamental to identity is not an assumption

confined to children. Reneging on her role of housewife and mother, Antonia is
lost. So too is Mark when he ceases to return home from work to a redolent
domesticity. Stead’s disquiet at the novel’s elements of fantasy might in part have
been generated by Mortimer’s notable determination to demonstrate the way in
which parental sensuality, long since absented from the ‘not very magnificent act’
of intercourse, becomes bound up in the bodies of children (187). Of his daughter
Charlotte, exquisitely beautiful and unintelligent, Mark ‘only knew that the
thought of her body hurt or offended gave him physical agony. She was his only
sensual pleasure, the only thing in his life whose beauty and delicacy had not
been ravaged by habit’ (99). The bedroom of the widower David’s daughter
expresses his sublimated desires rather than the child’s own preferences. Antonia
discovers it to be a place in which:

the world of childhood had been made terrifying, obscene, by the elimination of
all mystery, eccentricity or pain: wherever the eye searched it fell flatly on sexy
rabbits; winged midgets simpered insanely round the walls; suffused by the rosy
brothel light, the room was a cosy hell, a child’s hell. (215–16)
106 The 1950s

Antonia instinctively rejects a role as surrogate mother to Annette (even as she

explores the possibility of a relationship with David). At a drunken, surreal
(adult) party, the mysterious (and appropriately named) Mr Teasedown teases
Antonia, ‘Presumably maternal attraction, like sex attraction, is discriminating?
You don’t want to fall into bed with every child you meet?’ (200).
Mortimer’s unflinching acknowledgement of the totems and taboos of upper-
middle-class London society is part of a strategy of foregrounding cultural
relativity in order to paint that (polite) society as underlain by inchoate impulses
that threaten constantly to break through its civilized veneer. Antonia approaches
the children at Charlotte’s birthday party ‘like someone approaching a group of
wild animals, feeling that they might suddenly charge or, on a signal from their
leader, break away, swarm delicately and savagely through the house, destroying
it’ (18). Mark, entering another (adult) party, notes its ‘savage and indefinite roar,
the sibilant undertone, the rise and slight shriek and immediate death of
individual voices’ (206). Previously, adrift, drunk and in a pub with Barbara, a
young woman he meets in the hospital at which Charlotte is being treated for
appendicitis, he lashes out at a dachshund in the arms of a ‘terribly queer’ young
man (209). Looking around, he sees how every ‘face was a mirror reflecting a
strange and horrifying image, himself; nowhere could he see reflected the sober
and loving man, husband, father, that he knew himself to be’ (149). His wife, his
speculum, has been misplaced. Rather than focalizing the narrative solely
through Antonia, Mortimer opts for a technique of roving free indirect discourse
that allows insight into the points of view of multiple characters, as well as their
participant observations of the society that both includes and others them. So,
for example, though Antonia provides the novel’s empathetic centre, we also
share Mark’s disorientated terror at his faltering marriage, and David’s detached
observation of Antonia as ‘the embodiment of all the mysteries which in his own
marriage had remained unsolved, a native of a world he had briefly seen and at
the time disliked, frightened then by the peculiar dangers, rigid laws, the
terrifying possibility of instant destruction which now in middle age he found
fascinating’ (164).
Though the novel’s central male characters are treated judiciously in that their
reprehensible behaviour is made comprehensible, it is women – mothers and
daughters – who lie at the centre of Mortimer’s novel and its anthropological
observation. Antonia’s two eldest daughters diverge markedly in their response
to received femininity – Georgina, at twelve, is an ‘awkward, angular child
impossible to think of as a woman’ (87), while it takes her parents days to
distinguish the suffering of Charlotte’s illness from her characteristic, beatific
 ‘Mere bird-watching indeed’ 107

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

Why do you grow old, die, love, weep, grow hungry, why do you live at all?
‘You must ask your mother,’ Mrs Levington said.
‘Does she know?’ ‘Yes,’ Mrs Levington said. (195)

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

The ‘reformer’s science’

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

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

Works cited

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36–49.
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Arderner, Edwin. Coastal Bantu of the Cameroons, Western Africa Part XI, Ethnographic
Survey of Africa. Ed. Daryll Forde. London: International African Institute, 1956.
Barstow, Stan. A Kind of Loving. London: Michael Joseph, 1960.
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Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.

Beveridge, William Henry. ‘Social Insurance and Allied Services’ (‘The Beveridge
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1942beveridge.html (accessed 22 January 2018).
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Bowlby, John. Childcare and the Growth of Love. 1953. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966.
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British Novels. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Campbell, Olwen W. A Report on the Conference of The Feminine Point of View. London:
Williams & Norgate Ltd., 1952.
‘Conservative’s Hat Trick’. The Times, 10 October, 1959: 6.
Cooper, William. Scenes of Provincial Life. 1950. London: Macmillan, 1969.
Cots, Michael. Barbara Pym. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1989.
Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: In the Light of
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Ferrebe, Alice. Masculinity in Male-Authored Fiction 1950–2000. Houndmills: Palgrave
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Ferrebe, Alice. ‘Elizabeth Taylor’s Uses of Romance: Feminist Feeling in 1950s English
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Mead, Margaret. ‘Some Theoretical Considerations on the Problem of Mother-Child

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 4

‘Is it a queer book?’: Re-reading the 1950s

Homosexual Novel
Martin Dines

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

111
112 The 1950s

runs into the impressive figure of guardsman Tom Beeson. Their interaction
follows a well-worn course: a request for a light leads to small talk and their
retirement to a pub for drinks – paid for of course by Laurie – followed up by the
bookseller’s suggestion that he might like to paint the guardsman’s portrait the
next time they meet. If Laurie’s eyes, which are excited by desire, give away his
intentions before either man has a chance to speak, Beeson’s are twice said to
be ‘calculating’. It is not clear whether he is anticipating sexual opportunity or
material gain; for sure, more than any other figure, the guardsman had a long-
standing reputation within queer circles for being easily bought, but also for
proving to be less than a bargain (See Houlbrook 2003). Whether or not he has
designs to ‘tap’ the young bookseller, one thing is clear: Beeson, who initiated the
encounter, knows the score.
The Plaster Fabric’s trajectory – beginning as it does with an erotic encounter
rendered dangerous and disreputable by its public location and its transactional,
cross-class dynamics, and ending with sexual restraint, heterosexual marriage
and domesticity – would seem to confirm a common perception of the period
in which it was written. 1950s Britain has long been associated in the popular
imagination with social conformity and sexual repression, and the decade is
often judged to have been an especially inauspicious time for homosexuals and
other sexual dissidents. Typically, the ‘dark ages’ (Bedell 2007) of the 1950s are
thought to compare unfavourably with the proceeding and following periods.
The upheavals of the Second World War afforded homosexuals numerous
opportunities. After being uprooted from provincial oblivion many encountered
queer sex and society for the first time in the various homosocial environments
engineered by the war effort (see Vickers 2013). And, as Quentin Crisp recalls,
the dangers of the Blitz and the cover of the blackout caused Londoners to lose
their sexual inhibitions: ‘As soon as the bombs began to fall, the city became like
a paved double bed. Voices whispered suggestively to you as you walked along;
hands reached out if you stood still and in dimly lit trains people carried on as
they had once behaved only in taxis.’ (Crisp 1977, 154) The 1960s marked longer-
lasting changes, from the relaxing of censorship following the Lady Chatterley
trial in 1960 to the partial decriminalization of sexual relations between men
in 1967. By contrast, during the 1950s a number of sensational tabloid exposés
helped focus public attention on the particular ‘problem’ of homosexuality; such
scrutiny was in part prompted by a surge in punitive actions by the police and
courts. Increased visibility and vilification undoubtedly shaped the fictional
representation of homosexuality. It is true that the 1950s saw a spate of novels
published in Britain centring on sympathetic male homosexual protagonists
 ‘Is it a queer book?’ 113

who, armed with newly available psychological models of sexual identity,

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

the Welfare State were threatening to break out’ (2000, 166; see also Hennessey
2006). Consequently, Hall insists, the 1950s would be better understood as ‘a
period of instability rather than unthinking smug conventionality’ (2000, 166).
In their introduction to Queer 1950s, Heike Bauer and Matt Cook remark
that, indeed, ‘it is often the ideals and ideologies of the 1950s, rather than their
fault lines, underlying uncertainties and confusions, which have taken the
firmest hold in popular imaginings of the decade’ (2012, 2). In fact, Bauer and
Cook contend, the disruptions and trauma of war had exposed for many the
contingency and the fragility of supposedly entrenched norms (3). Further,
while the decade continues to be understood as a period of stasis, in many
respects it was characterized by transition and flux: ‘movement, relocation
and migration were defining features of the 1950s, as were the concomitant
unsettling and reorientation of lives in new spaces and contexts’ (2). Intense
precariousness shaped the lives of many homosexuals in the 1950s, yet many
also found opportunities within social structures and spaces that were being
reordered, albeit in uneven ways.
The decade’s homosexual novels reflect this instability through, for instance,
their negotiation of different models of intimacy. Typically their protagonists
strive for more egalitarian relationships even while older forms, based on
difference in terms of age and class, and therefore power, remain deeply attractive.
The proliferation of these novels also marked, and contributed to, a widening
awareness of homosexuality, yet their success also helped consolidate a distinctly
queer readership. Indeed, the homosexual novel represents a perhaps surprisingly
self-aware mode of fiction: homosexual characters reading homosexual novels
are a recurrent motif, as are vocalizations about how such literature constitutes a
crucial cultural resource for sexual minorities. Meanwhile, the publication
histories of these novels suggest divergent readerships: respectable-looking first
editions were often followed by mass-market paperback versions, which sported
more salacious covers and appeared, and were consumed, in less salubrious parts
of the city (see Hornsey 2010, 189–200; Dines 2017). The homosexual novel
also exhibits considerable diversity between its covers. Some authors clearly
refused to sustain the levels of seriousness that most readers and publishers
considered appropriate, and some show indifference to or scepticism toward the
frameworks that dominated discussion of homosexuality in the 1950s, namely,
psychiatry and the ‘social problem’.
This chapter explores these developments and contradictions through an
examination of several 1950s homosexual novels. In the following section I
discuss Goff ’s The Plaster Fabric in relation to the intensification of press and
 ‘Is it a queer book?’ 115

police scrutiny of homosexual activity. I then proceed to consider novels by James

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

to the imbrication of narrative and pleasure in (reading) the 1950s homosexual

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

Under surveillance: homosexuality, the media and the police

The Plaster Fabric was not exactly path-breaking. It appeared a few years after an
earlier flurry of homosexual novels – most notably Angus Wilson’s Hemlock and
After (1952), Rodney Garland’s The Heart in Exile (1953) and Mary Renault’s The
Charioteer (1953) – and so could hardly be said to have matched these titles for
impact. (It received some polite reviews, but did not make it into a second
edition.) However, The Plaster Fabric is paradigmatic; its ‘sensitive’ depiction of
queer experience – a quality often trumpeted by publishers – belies the tensions
that defined the 1950s homosexual novel. For instance, while it strives to show
how homosexual desire might be successfully managed and contained, Goff ’s
novel readily describes – and therefore also contributes to – an ever-widening
public awareness of the matter. Laurie is in fact frequently the last to learn that
his needs and behaviour follow well-established patterns. An Italian teenager
who picks him up on the sultry streets of Florence remarks ‘knowingly’ that
many English authors visit the city (1957, 133). Even a priest comments that
Laurie is just one of a long line of homosexual tourists intent on seducing
the local boys (148). Partly to mortify his desires, Laurie abandons the more
obvious – and ‘sordid’ – queer locales of London and Florence for rural Sussex.
 ‘Is it a queer book?’ 117

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

extraordinarily titillating copy and served to confirm ideas about the spread of
homosexual corruption across the barriers of social class. Several titles, however,
broke rank with popular press’s stance on homosexuality by calling for greater
tolerance and indeed legal reform, and many excoriated the press for peddling
what Justin Bengry has described as ‘a kind of respectable pornography’ (2012,
168). Murdoch’s novel is implicitly critical of the influence of the popular
newspapers: she shows that homosexual encounters need not be merely shameful
and damaging. Indeed, the young Toby’s experience is revelatory: ‘his whole
conception of human existence was become in a moment immensely more
complex’ (2004, 177), and he is moved to imagine what it must be like to be the
other man. Evidently, he has learnt far more in these brief moments than he ever
did from reading the News of the World. Laurie’s encounter with Martin in
Goff ’s novel is rather less transformative. Moreover, while the scene supposedly
demonstrates Laurie’s capacity for restraint, thereby refuting a line of attack
commonly made by journalists, he is still being judged by those who have learnt
all about his tendencies from other sources. And, of course, his refusal to act on
his desires is precisely the outcome most wished for by the like of Douglas Warth.
Goff ’s novel therefore is tightly constrained by the very discourse it seeks to
challenge.
Heightened scrutiny of homosexuality in the media was certainly in large
part a result of a dramatic intensification of police surveillance of queer venues:
pubs, cruising grounds and, above all, urinals. According to Matt Houlbrook,
during the late 1940s, the number of incidents involving homosexual activity
that led to proceedings recorded by the Metropolitan Police was nearly three
times higher than before the war; these levels of intervention were sustained
through the 1950s. Houlbrook dismisses, however, the widely held belief that the
British State orchestrated a ‘witch hunt’ against homosexuals in the post-war
years; he argues that the increase in interventions by the police owed much less
to the machinations of homophobic politicians and senior officials than it did
to shifts in police operations at the divisional level. In the mid-1940s, district
officers responded to the perception that homosexual activity had spiralled out
of control in London’s West End, largely thanks to the difficulty of policing it
during the blackout, by bolstering ‘vice squads’ when the resources became
available following the return to peacetime operations. Crucially, the effects of
this increase in police activity were felt unevenly: particular venues and areas in
the West End were heavily targeted; many other sites, private homes especially,
were left relatively undisturbed. Younger, poorer men were more likely to come
into the attentions of the police, since they were more reliant on these sites and
 ‘Is it a queer book?’ 119

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

Figure 1 The Plaster Fabric by Martyn Goff. First edition

 ‘Is it a queer book?’ 121

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

Social problem, private affairs

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

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

of homosexuality that drew on sexological and psychiatric literature produced

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

ordinary so-called normal marriage last [. . .] if there were no legal ties and no
children to hold the partners together?’ (Courage 1959, 249) The implication is
obvious: the institutions of marriage and family are what define ‘ordinariness’;
the lack of legal approbation renders queer relationships otherwise, and
consequently less durable. Other novels, though, are equivocal. In Garland’s The
Heart in Exile, the protagonist Anthony Page – a psychiatrist – reckons a change
in the law would do little to alter public disapproval, and therefore the lot of most
homosexuals: ‘the invert would still be in a minority, with a permanent guilt
feeling, and the hostile pressure of society would, to varying degrees, turn him
into a neurotic’ (2014, 79). In any case it would be difficult to institute a change
to the law. Page has just been talking to a Member of Parliament who is gloomy
about the prospects of reform. The problem is that queers are thought to be
undeserving: they are an untrustworthy lot; indeed, many are Communists.
Psychiatric treatment, the novel suggests, is a more propitious endeavour, as it
will help individuals either to come to terms with their homosexuality, or to cure
them of it. (See Houlbrook and Waters, 2006, for a trenchant analysis of the
novel’s investments in psychiatric models of homosexuality.) Goff ’s The Plaster
Fabric takes the opposite tack. Laurie seems to be making the predictable move
when he declares: ‘The law is the thing. Once someone has to live outside it, his
whole outlook becomes warped.’ (65) But he is quickly persuaded by his
interlocutor Norman, who will shortly become his lover, that this line of
reasoning is just
a way to ‘escape moral responsibility’ (66). Queers don’t need the State, or
psychiatrists for that matter, to show them how to be good. The problem for
Laurie is that he has few signposts to show him the way, especially after the older
Norman is revealed to have a defective moral compass. (Laurie is disgusted by
his suggestion that they embark on an open relationship.) It is no wonder then
that Laurie finds himself back at Marble Arch looking wistfully at guardsmen in
the novel’s final pages: by insisting that he look only to himself for direction,
Laurie ends up following his most heartfelt desires.
Where the decade’s homosexual novels correspond more evenly with the
mechanics of the social problem is in their articulation of domesticity as the
proper locus of homosexuality. As is well known, Wolfenden recommended
the partial decriminalization of sexual relations between men: the Report
stipulated that only private acts involving two consenting adults – aged twenty-
one or over – should be made lawful. The 1967 Sexual Offences Act followed
these recommendations to the letter. (Further exclusions were added, including
for the Armed Forces or Merchant Navy.) Thus the social problem of
 ‘Is it a queer book?’ 125

homosexuality was neutralized by being shunted into the private sphere, where
the State was (and generally still is) presumed to have only limited jurisdiction.
The Report makes its understanding clear on this count: ‘Unless a deliberate
attempt is to be made by society, acting through the agency of law, to equate the
sphere of crime with that of sin, there must be a realm of private morality and
immorality which is, in brief and crude terms, not the law’s business.’ (Committee
on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution. 1957, 7, para. 1.) Wolfenden’s
proposals were more likely to be considered satisfactory by individuals who took
the resource of privacy for granted. Those who were more reliant on public space
for homosexual encounters, though, were left in an even more precarious
position. Indeed, one significant consequence of the legal codification of private
and public sexual acts was a further sanctioning of punitive inventions against
the latter. In the years immediately following the 1967 act, the number of men
convicted for seeking or having sex with other men in public trebled. (See
Higgins 1996: 145–6.) The middle-class men who stood to benefit most from
the partial decriminalization of homosexuality tended to take the liberal view:
legal reform constituted a limited adjustment, a means by which a narrow
set of vital freedoms might be extended to all. In fact, homosexual reform must
be seen as part of a larger bourgeois project. As Hornsey argues, homosexual
reformism had much in common with the post-war rhetoric of urban renewal:
both were invested in a set of scientific discourses that originally emerged in the
late nineteenth century, both relied heavily on the figure of the professional
expert to promote their arguments, and both ‘projected a consensual, happy,
and peaceful postwar society in which latest modern science would finally
dislodge the obsolescent remnants of the Victorian past, under the cover of
which they covertly installed a hegemonic set of bourgeois assumptions about
civic society, domestic respectability, and appropriate urban conduct’ (2010,
118). The homosexual novel, evidently, is shaped by these same assumptions.
Expert voices are commonplace. Audrey Erskine Lindop’s The Details of Jeremy
Stretton, published in 1955, even features a forward written by ‘a Consultant
in Psychiatry’, who endorses the novel’s realistic and responsible depiction of
male homosexuality (1955, x–xi). Without exception these novels are focalized
through middle-class homosexual protagonists who have either secured for
themselves a comfortable home or look likely to inherit soon the rewards of
bourgeois life. And, once again, these men recoil from the prospect of unruly
queer urban milieus that were being excoriated in both the popular press and
the reformist accounts of Westwood and Wildeblood. Moreover, the focus on
domesticity in reformist narratives, fictional or otherwise, was cognate with the
126 The 1950s

new and insistent emphasis on the homosexual’s psychic interiority. Just as the
State was thought to have no legitimate business in the private home, it was
understood to hold no jurisdiction over psychological conditions; only acts of
public indecency fell within its purview.
One problem for the authors of homosexual novels, however, is that they
needed to show how their respectable, domesticated homosexual couples got to
meet in the first place. While queer pubs and house parties were contemptible,
they could not be left out of the story altogether, since they provided by far
the most realistic scenario for homosexual introductions. In Renault’s The
Charioteer, for example, injured servicemen and former schoolmates Laurie
Odell and Ralph Lanyon are reunited at a party held at the flat of Sandy Reid.
Laurie does not warm to the effeminate, facetious host, whom he has met by
chance in the street only a few hours earlier. The contingency of their meeting
discomforts Laurie, but he endures the company of his new acquaintance in the
tawdry surroundings of a queer pub, understanding that ‘somewhere behind
[Sandy] was the comforting solidarity of a group’ (111). But once at the party
Laurie insists he feels little connection with the other guests; observing them
detachedly he realises that ‘nine-tenths of the people [present] were specialists’
who, unlike Laurie, ‘had identified themselves with their limitations’ and, even,
‘were making a career of them’ (132). Ralph’s disdain is even blunter, and once he
has teamed up with Laurie he sees no reason for the two of them to hang around.
The evident need for even well-adjusted, capable individuals like Laurie and
Ralph to attend such queer gatherings is thus downplayed; they are men apart.
This is what they like to tell themselves at least: as the evening plays out, Laurie
learns that Ralph is a familiar figure at Sandy’s. Moreover, Laurie is horrified to
discover that his own facility for bitchy comebacks is as well developed as any of
the career homosexuals present (137).
Garland’s The Heart in Exile seems to get around the unpleasant business of
meeting in queer venues in a rather ingenious way: at the end of the novel
Anthony Page takes up with his male secretary Terry – who was living in his flat
all along! But still Anthony can’t keep out of the pubs. In order to solve the
mystery of the suicide of a former lover he is obliged to revisit the city’s queer
sites, some of which he frequented in a more dissolute period of his life before
the War. Deeply knowledgeable of but apparently aloof from these habitats and
their denizens, Anthony makes for an ideal guide to London’s queer ‘underground’.
Yet his encounters with this degraded realm disturb him profoundly, as they
threaten to rekindle desires which have been repressed in the process of forging
a mature, respectable identity organized around domesticity and professional
 ‘Is it a queer book?’ 127

responsibility. Like The Charioteer’s Laurie, Anthony feels himself detached, but
knows that he is not. These anxieties impel Anthony to retreat back to the private
space of his well-ordered home. Fortunately, a life of solitude is not to be his
destiny; indeed, in taking up with Terry at the novel’s close, Garland indicates
that homosexuality may after all be successfully managed within a loving,
monogamous and domestic configuration.
However, the very organization of the The Heart in Exile indicates how the
homosexual novel is beset by more fundamental problems of representation.
Garland et al. are motivated to depict the kind of homosexual relationship that
would be protected by legal reform: an otherwise conventional companionate,
domesticated union. Unfortunately, these sorts of relationships hardly make
compelling story material, which explains why they are so often pushed to the
edges or even beyond the limits of the narrative. Consequently, homosexual
novels tend to be dominated, in terms of narrative space, by the very locales and
modes of interaction they disavow. They are, moreover, acutely aware of their
paradoxical nature. In The Heart in Exile, Terry declares that if he ever could
write a novel, he would ‘write about the majority [of homosexuals] for whom it
isn’t really tragic’. Anthony knows this would not amount to much: ‘Happiness –
normal or abnormal – is uninteresting’ (142). Appropriately enough, Anthony
feels that his exploration of London’s seething queer underworld takes the form
of a very different kind of fiction: a penny-dreadful. As an object the penny-
dreadful is cheap, showy and disreputable; within its pages it contains the
promise of the sensuous pleasures of the disorderly city. Anthony not only
acknowledges the allure of this realm, he comprehends that the heightened
sensuality of the penny-dreadful’s fictional world renders it more real than real
life: ‘I didn’t want to read a novel and I didn’t want to write novels, I wanted to
live novels. The fact that the novel I wanted to live at this particular moment was
a penny-dreadful, mystery story, was significant, because I always felt the penny-
dreadful was the real novel. As a species it was immortal.’ (144; italics in original.)
Only when he has solved the case of Julian’s death does Anthony feel he is finally
able to close this book. Enduring love and responsibility replace the desire for
excitement; the story ends so that real life may begin. Of course, this amounts to
an acknowledgement that any attempt to represent respectable homosexual lives
cannot avoid – indeed, will inevitably be dominated by – more pleasurable, less
reputable narrative forms. Anthony’s sense of the penny-dreadful’s immortality
is, then, disturbingly apposite.
In The Charioteer, Laurie and Ralph’s union is similarly confirmed only in the
closing pages. As in The Heart in Exile, some evidence of what their relationship
128 The 1950s

will be like is provided, though much of this is coded through interior décor:
austerely masculine interiors are suggestive of the kind of restraint necessary
to sustain long-term relationships (see Dines 2017). And also like Garland’s
novel, The Charioteer is dominated by the kinds of queer interaction it tries to
renounce. The chapter featuring Sandy’s party occupies a central position within
Renault’s narrative; it is also, noticeably, the novel’s longest. The sharply rendered
camp chatter, the drunken dancing and Sandy’s attempted suicide make the
party sequence compelling reading; by comparison, the several chapters focusing
on institutional life – Laurie’s schooldays, his long convalescence in a military
hospital – are pale prospects. There is a laughably awkward, almost metafictive
moment at the party that registers the problematic nature of the narrative.
Feeling isolated at the party, Laurie comforts himself with a copy of Stevenson’s
Treasure Island he has found in the bookshelf next to him. The lines Laurie falls
into reading are soothingly escapist, but he suffers this interruption:

A young man sat down beside him on the divan and, without any kind of
preliminary, said, ‘Is it a queer book?’
‘No’, said Laurie.
‘Oh’, said the young man, on a note of utter deflation. He got up and went
away. (129)

This briefest of exchanges provokes another question that has troubled many a
homosexual reader: what would it mean to be caught reading a novel like The
Charioteer? For, inescapably, Renault’s is a queer book. Were Laurie reading
something similar – a book about someone like himself – it would have been
harder to repel the unwanted attention and, therefore, to distinguish himself
from the other partygoers. In other words, the exchange indicates that the queer
party is, after all, a fitting location for a novel like The Charioteer. The numerous
references to childhood across the chapter provide further confirmation that
Laurie has more in common with this queer scene than he cares to admit. In
addition, they draw attention to the novel’s own narration and its identity as
a queer book. Sandy’s room is a former nursery: a converted toy cupboard and
the protective bars on the windows (116, 128) seem to confirm the revellers’
immaturity, their having ‘turned away from all other reality’ (132). But, of course,
Laurie has shown the same tendencies by burying himself in the pages of
Treasure Island. The nursery setting and the children’s book also invoke Laurie’s
own early past. The novel’s opening chapter has five-year-old Laurie emerging
out of his bedroom to confront his absconding father, a traumatic experience
that presumably will have important consequences for the boy’s psychosexual
 ‘Is it a queer book?’ 129

development. And the book’s physical condition – its ‘friendly’ ‘schoolroom

shabbiness’ – connects with another formative scene, in which Ralph, who is
about to be expelled from school for having had inappropriate relations with
another boy, gives Laurie a copy of that most venerable of queer books, Plato’s
Phaedrus. Laurie comes to cherish most of all Plato’s story of the charioteer, an
allegory of the intellect’s continual struggle with the more unruly passions and
appetites. The passing of the book between these men marks out their shared
commitment to a life of sexual restraint, and suggests a way homosexuals
might come to know one another without all the unpleasantness of the ‘scene’.
Laurie nearly passes the battered, much-read book on to the younger Andrew,
in whom he recognizes incipient homosexuality, as Ralph once did in him. (In
fact the scene in which Andrew interrupts Laurie’s reading prefigures the later
scene at the party.) Ultimately, however, Laurie abandons Andrew, preferring
the younger man to remain innocent and untainted by homosexuality. Alan
Sinfield complains that the novel’s queer heroism thus ‘involves invalidating
queerness’ (1994, 144). I would assert, instead, that Laurie’s withholding the
Phaedrus from Andrew rather confirms the power of queer books – The
Charioteer included – to inculcate and condition homosexuality. The narrative’s
belated attempt to ‘invalidat[e] queerness’ should be seen therefore as a nervous
reaction to concerns about its own status and function, to the fact of its own
queerness.
James Courage’s A Way of Love is the decade’s only novel to be fully centred
on a homosexual affair (Goff ’s 1961 effort, The Youngest Director, does the same;
see Dines 2013). Yet the domesticated relationship between architect Bruce
Quantock and his younger lover Philip Dill produces a narrative conundrum.
Bruce declares his motivation to write a first-person account that shows how
queers are capable of conducting their love lives as well as anyone else, yet his
own story ends in failure. Once again, successful, comfortable relationships
rarely make for interesting stories; Bruce feels obliged to distil a period of
contentment into a single banality: ‘all went well’ (124). But, further, Courage’s
novel indicates the ultimate impossibility of narrating stable queer domestic
lives. Things start promisingly enough. Bruce and Philip first meet at a concert at
the Royal Festival Hall, that jewel in the crown of London’s post-war renewal. No
building better represented modern, democratic Britain; it is, therefore, a most
appropriate venue for the meeting of two model homosexual citizens. And in a
suitably responsible fashion, the pair soon withdraws from public view; the affair
is transferred to Bruce’s small, neat house near Regent’s Park. This arrangement
is understood to be good and proper: Philip delights in the idea of ‘us [living]
130 The 1950s

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

Comic turns: seriousness and the homosexual novel

The homosexual novel was not the period’s only vehicle for examining queer
desire and experience. Gregory Woods declares that the 1950s amounted to ‘a
virtual festival of queer expression’ (1998, 289). Woods is responding to the
‘variety and strength’ of poetry, plays and novels emerging out of both the US
and UK during ‘this notorious period’ (ibid.), but British fiction alone evinced
considerable diversity. One prominent mode was the historical novel, which
featured settings ranging from Athens in the time of Socrates (Renault’s The Last
 ‘Is it a queer book?’ 131

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

less ‘discrete – boundaried – form of public identity’ (2012, 42). An important

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

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

understanding. Indeed, the novel’s lack of seriousness is precisely what enables

its author to take homosexuality for granted: as Woods observes, ‘there are more
important things to worry about – a poorly cooked meal, an ill-chosen tie – than
the trivial matter of being queer’ (1998, vi). What both Brophy’s and Nelson’s
novels suggest then is how a comedic mode militates against the explicit
articulation of homosexuality. Allen’s declaration that the only satisfactory
way of dealing with homosexuality in literature is through comedy could well
be understood to express a desire for silence on the subject. Alternatively, and
more optimistically, an insistence on comedy might suggest a refusal to speak of
homosexuality only through narrow, sanctioned channels, gesturing towards
ways of organizing queerness beyond normative scripts and structures.
Of course, the absence of any explicit queer self-identification in Nelson’s
novel could be seen as simply a reflection of the complacency of the ‘very, very
rich’ (2014, 3). In any case the novel is something of an anachronism: Nelson
wrote the manuscript in the late 1940s and, unsurprisingly, struggled to find a
publisher. But one author who wrote throughout the 1950s, Angus Wilson,
repeatedly sets the concerns of the homosexual novel to comedic modes. Wilson’s
first novel, Hemlock and After, could well be said to have a serious, didactic
import: it works to emphasize both the diversity and fluidity of, respectively,
homosexual experience and desire. The novel’s protagonist, the middle-aged
novelist Bernard Sands, is said to have ‘diverge[d] from sexual orthodoxy [. . .]
comparatively recent[ly]’; by contrast, his former lover, the young stage designer
Terence Lambert, begins an affair with Bernard’s daughter Elizabeth. Certainly,
there seems little will to call on the deterministic models of psychiatry
to rationalize and excuse homosexual desire and behaviour. Psychology is
invoked – and then rather nebulously – only in relation to Bernard’s wife Ella,
who is suffering from the long-term effects of a nervous breakdown. Furthermore,
the ‘caricatured pansy manner’ of the altogether malignant figure of Sherman
Winter has nothing to with his psychic constitution, as is often the way with
abjectly effeminate homosexual figures in other 1950s novels. Instead, Wilson
suggests drolly, it is a mere convenience. Homosexuality, then, is understood less
as the consequence of psychology than as a series of habits or, perhaps more, a
network of cultural forms. As such it has the potential to influence other social
domains; as Ferrebe observes, ‘camp’ styles of speech are spoken by not only all
kinds of homosexual, but by heterosexuals as well, such as Elizabeth (2012, 122).
Noticeably, these contrivances draw on other cultural styles; repeatedly, and
across various social milieus, an affected Cockney accent seems almost sufficient
 ‘Is it a queer book?’ 135

to establish a speech act as camp. Camp styles, then, are as derivative as they
are mobile.
Thus Hemlock and After indicates that comedy – or, at least, a lack of
seriousness – derives from cultural cross currents, from the interactions between
diverse elements of society. Indeed, Bernard is a figure who repeatedly seeks to
‘bridge’ different groups. For instance, his frivolity in the company of the young
is said to be a consequence of a ‘paederastic desire to bridge the years’ (54); at a
party Bernard is conscious that he ‘bridges the gap’ between his own ageing
1920s set, on the one hand, and a group of ‘golden spivs’ on the other, whose
occupation of a ‘homosexual borderland’ so fascinates the writer (102); he
also forms a precarious ‘alliance’ with Eric’s brother, a schools inspector, to
stave off their mother’s oppressive influence over Bernard’s lover (83). Bernard
understands these interactions to be necessary but difficult, fraught with the
potential for social embarrassment – ‘payment’, he thinks to himself, ‘for living in
a transition period’ (57–8). This is key: Hemlock and After is first and foremost
a novel about negotiating relationships of patronage – artistic, political and
sexual – in the new post-war landscape. Bernard has secured support from the
State for a writers’ colony to be housed in Vardon Hall, which – pointedly – was
formerly the seat of an aristocratic family. The sponsorship, Bernard hopes, will
be free from influence – he aims to run it on his own ‘liberal anarchistic’
principles; what will be provided is the kind of leisure time that had been taken
for granted by a pre-war literary culture dominated by the upper classes.
Bernard’s sexual relationships are noticeably organized along similar lines: he
seeks to install his lover Eric in a flat in London so that the young man might
enjoy greater autonomy from both Bernard and Eric’s mother. After vacillating,
Eric seems to appreciate Bernard’s apparently high-minded generosity; by
contrast, techniques of seduction deriving from ‘a very old-fashioned world’ –
those which invoke the robust homosocial utopias of Edward Carpenter and
the Shropshire Lad, or which make flattering references to high culture – merely
bring Eric to tears of laughter. And then there is the matter of homosexuality
and the law. As might be expected of a narrative which argues the importance
of spaces to facilitate self-direction and freedom of expression, the case for
decriminalization is virtually taken as read, and is pronounced almost
offhandedly by Elizabeth: ‘I’m not medieval [. . .] I’d abolish all those ridiculous
laws any day’ (57).
Bernard, however, remains doubtful about the ability of both the State and
himself to remain neutral in their role as patrons. He is right to be. In a pivotal
scene halfway through the novel Bernard witnesses in Leicester Square a man
136 The 1950s

being arrested for importuning. To his horror, watching the arrest stirs in Bernard
a feeling of ‘sadistic excitement’, a ‘hunter’s thrill’; he comes to realize that a
high-minded liberal humanist such as himself is after all quite ‘at home with the
wielders of the knout and the rubber truncheon’ (109). The consequences are
catastrophic: Bernard suffers a heart attack and an evaporation of self-belief. He
proves quite incapable of giving an even moderately effective speech during the
opening ceremony of Vardon Hall, one which might, crucially, keep on board
the disparate, mutually suspicious parties present. Instead his address is an
embarrassment of obscurities, portentous references to motive, and slips,
including the alarming double entendre ‘one can pay too dearly for what one
picks up in the Charing Cross Road’ (153). The audience erupts into chaos; the
project’s future, ever contingent on the State’s continued good will, is thrown into
doubt. This, then, is Bernard’s hemlock-taking moment: once the novelist gadfly
who prided himself on exposing moral and intellectual complacency, he
publically accepts judgement that he is unable to ‘exercise proper authority’, a
refrain he is tormented by for the rest of his days. And again like Socrates, who
was additionally found guilty of corrupting the youth of Athens, he understands
he cannot be trusted not to exercise a malign influence over the young poets at
Vardon Hall, or for that matter, his lover Eric. The ‘After’ of the novel’s title relates
to Bernard’s painful decline towards death, and the ensuing consequences for
those to whom he had responsibilities. Fortunately – thanks largely to the
interventions of the newly recovered Ella – a compromise is struck which secures
the future of a slightly diminished version of the Vardon Hall project. Provision
is also guaranteed for Eric’s accommodation – who, like The King of Rainy
Country’s Susan, seems at the novel’s close ready to take advantage of new
opportunities, and to have broken free from the more limiting formations of
earlier times.
Alan Sinfield argues that Wilson means the scene in Leicester Square to show
that there is little scope in the post-war situation for well-meaning but unreliable
liberal humanists like Bernard Sands; by implication, ‘an impersonal State might
be a more secure source of value and fairness’ (2000, 86–7). Thus, according to
Sinfield, Wilson demonstrates his commitment to a central ideological plank of
the post-war settlement, the belief that a series of liberal-democratic reforms
could usher in a fairer, more inclusive society overseen by a benign State. Bernard,
meanwhile, should not be seen as entirely culpable for his moral failing. Rather,
this is a deformation caused by an iniquitous law, whose reform would enable
homosexuals to participate productively in public life. Sinfield admits he prefers
to regard the Leicester Square incident ‘less as a crisis in Bernard’s moral
 ‘Is it a queer book?’ 137

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

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

Works cited

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Fantasy. London: Routledge, 1993.
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Postwar Years, ed. Heike Bauer and Matt Cook. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2012, 1–10.
Bedell, Geraldine. ‘Coming out of the dark ages’, Observer, 24 June 2007.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2007/jun/24/communities.gayrights.
Bengry, Justin. ‘Queer Profits: Homosexual Scandal and the Origins of Legal Reform
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Brophy, Brigid. The King of a Rainy Country. London: Coelacanth, 2012 [1956].
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Collins, Marcus. Modern Love: An Intimate History of Men and Women in Twentieth-
Century Britain. London: Atlantic, 2004.
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Crisp, Quentin. The Naked Civil Servant. London: Fontana, 1977 [1968].
Dines, Martin. ‘Bringing the boy back home: queer domesticity and egalitarian
relationships in post-war London novels’, Literary London Journal, 10 (2013): (2).
Dines, Martin. ‘Designs for Living Rooms’, in Queering the Interior, ed. Matt
Cook and Andrew Gorman-Murray, London: Bloomsbury, 2017, 95–107.
Dinshaw, Carolyn. Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern.
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Donnelly, Mark. Sixties Britain: Culture, Society and Politics. London: Routledge, 2005.
Drabble, Margaret. Angus Wilson: A Biography. London: Secker and Warburg, 1995.
Ferrebe, Alice. Literature of the 1950s: Good Honest Causes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
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Garland, Rodney [Adam de Hegadus]. The Heart in Exile. Richmond, VA : Valancourt,
2014 [1953].
 ‘Is it a queer book?’ 139

Goff, Martyn. The Plaster Fabric. London: Putnam, 1957.

Gunn, Drewey Wayne. Gay Novels of Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth, 1881–
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Hennessey, Peter. Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties. London: Penguin, 2006.
Higgins, Patrick. Heterosexual Dictatorship: Male Homosexuality in Postwar Britain.
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Hornsey, Richard. The Spiv and the Architect: Unruly Life in Postwar London,
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Houlbrook, Matt. Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–
1957. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Houlbrook, Matt and Chris Waters. ‘The Heart in Exile: Detachment and Desire
in 1950s London’. History Workshop Journal, 62:1 (2006), 142–65.
Kynaston, David. Austerity Britain, 1945–51. London: Bloomsbury, 2008.
Kynaston, David. Family Britain, 1951–57. London: Bloomsbury, 2009.
Langhammer, Claire. ‘Sexual Politics in Mid Twentieth-century Britain: Adultery in
Post-war England’, History Workshop Journal, Issue 62 (1) (2006): 86–115.
Lindop, Audrey Erskine. The Details of Jeremy Stretton. London: William Heinemann,
1955.
Lofts, Nora. The Lute Player. London: Joseph, 1951.
Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge, MA :
Harvard University Press, 2007.
Mort, Frank. Capital Affairs. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.
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history in post-war Britain’ Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Glasgow, 2013.
Murphy, Amy Tooth. ‘Queer around the Edges: Mary Stewart’s Post-war Middlebrow
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edges-mary-stewarts-post-war-middlebrow-fiction/.
Nelson, Michael [Anonymous]. A Room in Chelsea Square. Richmond, VA : Valancourt,
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Renault, Mary. The Charioteer. New York: Vintage, 2003 [1953].

Sinfield, Alan. The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment.
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(ed.), British Queer History: New Approaches and Perspectives. Manchester,
Manchester University Press, 2013, 188–218.
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 5

A Vision of the Future: Race and Anti-Racism

in 1950s British Fiction
Matti Ron

Of all the changes Britain underwent in the immediate postwar period,

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

141
142 The 1950s

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

Racism and anti-racism in postwar Britain

Postwar migration to Britain was enabled by the 1948 British Nationality Act
and its creation of the status ‘Citizen of the United Kingdom and the Colonies’
which ‘sought to continue the extensive category of imperial British subject that
had existed at the height of imperial rule where, in theory at least, all people
under the British monarch’s rule were British subjects [and so] were in theory
“equally entitled to live and work in Britain” ’ (MacPhee, 41). Britain thus found
itself leading a ‘new Commonwealth, “a multi-racial society” ’ (Ramdin, 226),
which in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War’s racially-motivated
atrocities meant it ‘set the pace as moral leader of the world’ (ibid.).
However, beneath this veneer of idealism lay a multitude of complex
assumptions and contradictions: while Caribbean migrants, recruited as solutions
to Britain’s labour shortage, were often excited at the prospect of arrival in their
‘Mother Country’, acceptance into British society ‘would be far more painful and
protracted than the crossing itself ’ (May, 195) and the ‘double-edged process of
welcome and exclusion, of assimilating and demarcating racial categories, meant
that debates about Britishness [. . .] often centred on race’ (195). MacPhee concurs,
arguing the lived experience of postwar immigration contained a disjuncture
between ‘the visible legal category of citizenship, manifested in the universalism
of state legislation, and more informal and often unspoken ethno-nationalist or
racial designations’ (42). Regardless of citizenship status or British pretensions
 A Vision of the Future 143

regarding its ‘multi-racial’ Commonwealth, Caribbean migrants were ultimately

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

provides a particularly illuminating case study in his utilization of the 1957 Act,
whereby he

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

Not only did Caribbean migrants struggle to obtain housing due to widespread
racism but those who would rent to them used that difficulty as an opportunity
for intensified exploitation, giving credence to Nikolanikos’ theorization of
racism as resulting from ‘competition between fractions of labour, which is
structured by fractions of capital in their attempt to lower the cost of variable
capital’ (cited in Anthias and Yuval-Davis, 67).2 As such, class-based anxieties
around increasingly insecure housing tenure were often sublimated into a racial
politics whose fusion with popular narratives of predatory black male sexuality
fomented racial violence, culminating in the 1958 disturbances in Nottingham
and Notting Hill. MacPhee explains how

tensions around housing and sexual relations between black men and white
women came to a head in 1958 [. . .] crowds of whites, instigated by fascist groups
and armed with homemade weapons, attacked the local West Indian population,
who in the absence of effective police protection organised collectively to defend
themselves (45).

Ellis verifies this ineffectiveness of police protection, proclaiming that ‘there

seemed little recourse to the law, either due to police indifference or to the widely
reported sentiment that such attacks were the result of a black presence rather
than white racism’ (Ellis, 216–17). State collusion with racial discourse was
finally cemented by the introduction of the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants
Act, which ‘was not designed to engage with British racism, so much as to
confirm it’ (217), the implication being that ‘in order to eliminate racism in
Britain, it is necessary to practise it at the point of entry’ (217). The 1962 Act
called time on Britain’s ‘long decade’ of supposed idealism regarding migration
and the multi-racial society, with future legislation working ‘to bring the legal
or state-based definition of citizenship into line with the initially unspoken
assumptions of ethno-national identity’ (MacPhee, 42).
However, the Caribbean community in Britain organized themselves
variously to respond to these multifarious political threats. During the tumult of
 A Vision of the Future 145

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

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

Writing the Caribbean from exile

One of the central institutions in the flowering of Caribbean literature in this

period was the BBC ’s Caribbean Voices. Started in 1943, it was under Henry
Swanzy’s editorship in 1946 that the programme was transformed into a vehicle
for original writing. Aside from providing a platform, the programme also
supported Caribbean writers financially, with Swanzy claiming the BBC was
‘subsidising West Indian writing to the tune of £1,500 a year in programme fees
alone’ (28). Swanzy’s contribution, however, went beyond the financial, fostering
community among Caribbean writers in London through ‘informal evenings
of literary discussion at his home. West Indian writers from across the region
could, for the first time, meet and enter regular discussions with each other’
(Nanton, 69). Barbadian writer, George Lamming argued that: ‘No comprehensive
account of writing in the British Caribbean during the last decade could be
written without considering his [Swanzy’s] whole achievement and his role in
the emergence of the West Indian novel’ (2005: 67).
One effect of Caribbean Voices on Caribbean literature was radio’s resultant
focus ‘on the diversity of Caribbean vernaculars’ which ‘drew attention to
narrative form and poetic voice as much as content’ (Griffith, 19–20). Influencing
writers’ approaches to form and voice, it also highlighted an oft-overlooked
tendency within disagreements between the London BBC office and literary
agents in the Caribbean with Griffith observing the ‘ironic situation’ whereby
BBC personnel on Caribbean Voices promoted West Indian accents while
significant sections of the Caribbean literati preferred English accents (15).
Griffith quotes Figueroa’s estimation that ‘when one looks more carefully, and
observes who are strongly praised as readers, one cannot help noticing they are
either English or have very “Oxford English” voices’ (15). It is important to note,
then, that Caribbean writers arriving in London, were also escaping a latent
conservatism within their region’s literary milieus.
 A Vision of the Future 147

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

However, Naipaul is as reviled, particularly by Caribbean critics and writers,

as he is revered. Lamming, for one, accuses him of ‘castrated satire’ and being
‘ashamed of his cultural background and striving like mad to prove himself
through promotion to the peaks of a “superior” culture’ (2005: 225). Eastley
accuses him of misrepresenting Trinidadian society, specifically its political
culture and institutions, in such a way as to reaffirm colonial discourse. Assessing
Naipaul’s depiction of the MLC dinner, Eastley argues Naipaul slips ‘from
satirising systems [. . .] to satirising individuals’ (19), representing Trinidadian
politicians ‘as crude versions of the most uneducated of th[eir] constituents. [. . .]
portray[ing] the leading non-European figures of Trinidadian society in ways
that prompt non-Trinidadian readers to see these figures and their society as
inferior’ (22).
Though Eastley’s position is partially justified, it must be noted that Naipaul
does in fact also satirize the structures of colonial domination. For instance,
before attending the dinner, Ganesh, resolute in his desire to uphold his East
Indian identity, declares he will reject the ‘nonsense’ of ‘knife and fork’ (194).
The trouble, however, is that he is served soup. This seems an apt metaphor for
Trinidadian democracy under colonial rule, whereby nine MLC s were elected
with the other nine appointed by the governor, himself appointed by the British
Colonial Office and holding the decisive tie-breaking vote (5). Just as Ganesh
was free to eat how he pleased, Trinidadians could govern themselves similarly,
but both within structures over which they had no control.
However, while able to locate the hypocrisy and debilitating effects of empire
on Caribbean social and political structures, Naipaul still looks to that empire
for his cultural standards, mercilessly mocking those unable to match up
to them. This contradiction is central to Naipaul’s 1950s texts; as Cudjoe
elucidates, Oxford-educated Naipaul uses ‘the colonisers’ culture as the norm by
which to measure the behaviour of the colonial person. Anything that does not
conform to those standards becomes futile, meaningless, and worthless’ (Cudjoe,
34). One of Naipaul’s primary strategies for this is through contrasting vernacular
and standard forms of English. In Miguel Street (1959), Naipaul masterfully
crafts a series of seemingly separate vignettes about a working-class Trinidadian
neighbourhood which gradually morph into the narrator’s coming-of-age
narrative. One vignette sees high-achieving Elias struggle with ‘litritcher and
poultry’ (29) in the Cambridge Exam. While people in the street put it down to
unfairness, even English conspiracy, this is undermined when the narrator
succeeds where Elias failed. Indeed, the narrator – whose standard English
narration contrasts with the novel’s vernacular dialogues – and his academic
 A Vision of the Future 149

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

Each represented for the other an image of the enemy. [. . .] Even the better
educated who had one way or another gone to the island’s best schools and later
held responsible posts in the Government service, even these were affected by
this image of the enemy [. . .] The image of the enemy, and the enemy was My
People. [. . .] It was the language of the overseer, the language of the lawyers and
doctors who had returned stamped like an envelope with what they called the
culture of the Mother Country. (18–19)

The seamless shift from overseers to the ‘the better educated’ – with their ‘posts
in the Government service’ – creates an equivalence between the two as
administrators of colonial society. Rather than congratulating those successfully
imbibing the culture of empire, as Naipaul does, Lamming perceives in it a facet
of collaboration with colonial oppression. In fact, education also functions as a
150 The 1950s

site of cultural uncertainty. G., the sometimes-narrator and character most

resembling Lamming himself, is markedly ambivalent about his scholarship to
the High School for privileged Barbadian children, feeling disconnected from
both those he grew up with as well as his new academic environment. Regarding
the social life of his neighbours, he feels it now ‘more difficult to participate in
their life’ (211) yet simultaneously feels excluded from the High School’s culture,
explaining ‘they were trying to make gentlemen of us, but it seemed that I didn’t
belong’ (217).
These aspects of Lamming’s novel parallel the theme of the ‘scholarship boy’
underlying much postwar British literature. Estranged from their proletarian
origins yet ill at ease in their new middle-class circles, Richard Hoggart, author
of The Uses of Literacy describes them as recognizable by their ‘lack of poise,
by their uncertainty’ (241), the difficulties arising from their position finding
thematic expression in a range of postwar texts. However, in transplanting the
theme to colonial Barbados, Lamming injects questions of race and colonialism
to what is otherwise treated as a ‘pure’ class issue. The Barbadian ‘scholarship boy’
must not merely live up to middle-class cultural standards but white and British
ones also. Lamming’s appraisal of class, race and colonial oppressions shows an
awareness of their articulation, pre-empting the politics of black liberation by
over a decade.
Another important difference with Naipaul is Lamming’s depiction of
Caribbean political culture. Lamming’s novel renders artistically Barbados’
transition from quasi-feudal traditionalism to capitalism and, while reviewers
have mused it might have been titled ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Barbadian’
(cited in Brown, 675), it is as much, if not more so, about the disintegration
of traditional village life by economic and political developments as it is a
Joycean Künstlerroman. The narrative follows the gradual shift in power from
white landowner Mr Creighton to Mr Slime who, while agitating for national
independence, founds the Penny Bank and Friendly Society, to which all the
villagers pay in, and in doing so brings the logic of capital to the village. Slime’s
seemingly peculiar nomination has an expressly political function and is one
of several covert references to Sartre, recalling the latter’s description in Being
and Nothingness of Slime’s ‘ambiguous character as a “substance in between
two states” ’ (Sartre, 607). In a strike against a shipping company part-owned by
Mr Creighton, Slime is involved neither as a port worker nor as management.
Rather, he sits ‘between’ them, negotiating with management on the workers’
behalf, making clear they ‘should not return till he had thought the conditions
satisfactory’ (Lamming 2010, 87, my emphasis). As the strike boils over into open
 A Vision of the Future 151

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

at the High School we had got used to reading about wars in Europe [. . .] But
the shoemaker’s friends were more interested and concerned because they
seemed to understand the issues much better. [. . .] These things had not only
happened but they happened for certain reasons. And they knew the reasons.
(212–13)

This contrasts starkly with political discussion in Naipaul’s novels, which, when
not self-serving, is comically uninformed: for instance, in Miguel Street when
Errol claims ‘If they just make Lord Anthony Eden Prime Minister, we go beat
up the Germans and them bad bad’ (2011, 56), what is known to author and
reader alike is that Eden was one of the most incompetent Prime Ministers in
British history, serving only two years and overseeing the botched Suez Crisis.
Again, Naipaul’s textual methodology encourages the reader to poke fun at the
Caribbean’s supposed intellectual backwardness whereas Lamming opens space
for the depiction of a working-class intellectual culture able to successfully
apprehend the social world, in this instance ‘much better’ than the middle-class
students of the High School.
152 The 1950s

Yet Lamming does not romanticize a universally savvy Barbadian political

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

The Caribbean novel of arrival

West Indian writers in Britain maintained a heavy emphasis on life in the

Caribbean. Lamming himself returns to the anti-colonial possibilities of the
 A Vision of the Future 153

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

troublesome pupils (58). Braithwaite is, to reference Fanon, ‘battered down’ by

the stories and anecdotes white Britain has of him, bringing him ‘face to face
with something I had either forgotten or completely ignored [. . .] my black skin’
(33). In this realization, Braithwaite captures the disjuncture outlined by
MacPhee between the legal and ethno-nationalist definitions of Britishness:
‘I realised at that moment that I was British, but evidently not a Briton’ (38).
Braithwaite’s pitfalls begin with his relentless acquiescence to racism; he
performs what Anthony Richmond, somewhat problematically, described in
his 1954 Colour Prejudice in Britain as the ‘ideal migrant’ with a ‘ “balanced
personality” who refused to succumb to his aggressive inclinations in response
to ill-treatment by whites’ (cited in Collins, 410). Resultantly, Braithwaite almost
never responds to provocations, even suggesting he ‘might be unnecessarily
sensitive’ (58). In other instances, Braithwaite actively sabotages attempts to
confront racism. Early in the novel, a middle-class woman boards a bus and
refuses the seat next to Braithwaite, the only one available. Tension rises when
she ignores the conductor’s explanation that standing is not permitted, leading a
group of women to aim hostile looks at her ‘in their immediate sympathy and
solidarity with the conductor against someone who was obviously not of their
class’ (4). Braithwaite, however, asks to get off at the next stop thus resolving the
situation in the woman’s favour. The conductor gives ‘an odd disapproving stare,
as if I had in some way betrayed him by leaving before he could have a real set-to
with the woman [. . .] By leaving I had done that conductor a favour, I thought.
He’d never get the better of that female’ (5). By disembarking, Braithwaite
circumvents the possibility for inter-ethnic solidarity. Yet this encounter
does not merely encapsulate Braithwaite’s wider strategy of self-consciously
presenting himself as a non-threatening black male ever-willing to turn the
other cheek but also reveals the class rationale behind it. Braithwaite’s sentiment
of having helped the conductor comes from his (highly politicized) view of an
immutable class hierarchy. However, the conductor, in endeavouring to engage
in a ‘real set-to with the woman’ with the ‘solidarity’ of the working-class female
passengers, symbolically threatens to upend that hierarchy and so, in getting off
the bus, Braithwaite ensures its immutability while simultaneously claiming its
inevitability. Just as name-dropping Chaucer demonstrates his familiarity with
the cultural monuments of bourgeois British life, his forfeiting of white working-
class solidarity for the benefit of a middle-class racist functions to display his
fidelity to British class society. As Birbalsingh explains, Braithwaite ‘constantly
stresses the ease with which he could assimilate into British society if only his
colour were disregarded’ (75). Intended primarily with regards to Braithwaite’s
 A Vision of the Future 155

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

Lamming skilfully represents the process of community formation on the

ship to Britain with passengers ‘initially portrayed as a heterogeneous group’
travelling from various places for various reasons but soon ‘those leaving in
search of “a better break” in England become a distinct group within the wider
one’ (Guarducci, 345). In the early dialogue, ‘None of the characters involved
is mentioned by name; instead, we find a series of “one man said”, “another said” ’
(ibid. 346). The result is a confusion for the reader mirroring that of the characters
themselves, the reader’s introduction to the characters occurring synchronously
with the characters’ introductions to each other. Gradually, individualities come
to the fore, as do the various names/nicknames, personal histories, ambitions
and national rivalries. Yet the slide into parochialism is resisted when one
of them, the Governor, appeals forcefully: ‘doan lemme hear any more o’ this
bullshit ‘bout small islan’ an’ big islan’ [. . .] All you down here is my brothers’
(Lamming 2011, 38–9), the appeal for unity across the boundaries of nationalism
depicting how a common West Indian identity was forged in the émigré
experience.
The process begun on the ship continues upon arrival in London: Trinidadian
Tornado and another character known as ‘the Jamaican’, reunited in a barber’s
shop for the first time since meeting on the journey to England, greet each other
in a way that ‘Anyone would think them wus countrymen’, to which the Jamaican
explains ‘That’s just w’at we is’ (130). Yet the concept of black community is
extended further when an African client at the barber’s shop argues ‘It’s the
Africans in this country that teach you all that [. . .] Teach you the unity of your
people’s [. . .] nowadays it seems we will all soon come to an almost perfect unity
and brotherhood’ (131). While the Jamaican expresses doubt on ‘the unity part’,
he nonetheless, through sharing the same social space as the African, substantiates
his claim as their discussion can only occur precisely because of their burgeoning
coexistence as a black community, the discussion made even more significant by
its eventuation in that early base of community formation, the barber’s shop.
Lamming, building upon the theme explored in his previous novel through
Trumper, depicts the community discussions which informed the construction
of the black political identity discussed by Sivanandan, borne from the migrant
experience of racism, eventually expanded to also include South Asians, and
highly important in the later analytical framework of the British black liberation
movement.
This process of community formation through the shared experience of
racism is evident in the narrative arc of Dickson, whose cultural capital initially
 A Vision of the Future 157

separates him from the wider group, making him an interesting exploration of a
problematic ignored by Braithwaite. As with Braithwaite, Dickson repeatedly
endeavours to prove his attainment of bourgeois British cultural standards but
his encounters with British society make him increasingly aware of his blackness,
culminating in his romance with his white landlady. Though Dickson tells
himself she chose him due to sharing the ‘common language of civilisation’ (264),
this is undermined when, after engaging in sexual activity, she invites her sister
to look at his naked body: ‘The women were consumed with curiosity. They
devoured his body with their eyes. It disintegrated and dissolved in their stare,
gradually regaining its life through the reflection in the mirror’ (266). The interest
in him, then, is categorically not out of a ‘common language of civilisation’ but
precisely its opposite, in the fetishization of his racial difference, his supposed
situation outside of civilization for which his skin is a signifier. Lamming touches
upon similar phenomena to that described by Fanon: meeting the women’s eyes,
their looks burden Dickson, his body ‘disintegrating’ and ‘dissolving’ paralleling
the feeling of nonexistence outlined by Fanon. Indeed, his body only regains life
‘through the reflection in the mirror’, confirming his consciousness of his black
body in white society in the third-person, as an object-for-others to be viewed
externally, rather than as a subject existing for-itself with its own ontology.
The burden is such for Dickson that his life becomes ‘a perpetual struggle to
avoid eyes. [. . .] after that experience with the women [. . .] it was a torture to see
and be seen simultaneously’ (267). Dickson is forced to seek assurance from
London’s emerging black community ‘that he was still there under his clothes,
inside his skin, and these were possibly the only people who could probably
restore the life, the identity, which the eyes of the others had drained away’ (268).
In stark contrast to Braithwaite, Lamming shows that assimilation to British
middle-class cultural values by black individuals is not enough to protect against
the rigours of racist society. Rather, Lamming demonstrates the crises which can
occur from the disparity between the black bourgeois’ self-image and that
imposed onto them through racialization.
Yet Lamming’s differences with Braithwaite go beyond content and into the
form and register of his novel as well as the political conclusions they encourage
in the reader. Lamming, like many of his generation, experimented with
vernacular in his dialogues yet nonetheless distinguishes himself from many of
his contemporaries through his formal experimentation. For example, upon his
characters’ arrival in Britain, Lamming frequently makes use of indentation for
many of the dialogues, sometimes markedly so:
158 The 1950s

‘Ave ‘alf pint o’ bitter John?

My name ain’t John.
Oh no ‘arm meant. Jes’ gettin’ to know
you. ‘Alf a pint for me an’ my pal . . .
‘Ere’s yours, John, an’ yours, darkie . . .
‘E isn’t no darkie. ‘E’s ‘avin’ a drink
with me, an’ that makes ‘im my pal.
Understand? (112)

This technique demarcates the new and unfamiliar situation in which the
emigrants find themselves, reflected in the unfamiliar positioning of the text
on the page, while the use of enjambment and unattributed speech functions
similarly to the earlier dialogues on the ship: to create a comparable sensation of
confusion and alienation from the scene in the reader as that which exists for the
emigrants in their new environment.
While the passage’s formal experimentation reflects the emigrants’ difficulties
in apprehending their new surroundings, it nonetheless implies a certain
optimism for the creation of a convivial multi-ethnic future. Though the epithet
‘darkie’ exhibits the casual nature of 1950s racism, its instant rebuff with ‘E isn’t
no darkie. ‘E’s ‘avin’ a drink with me, an’ that makes ‘im my pal’ points toward a
possible white anti-racism. This is all the more powerful through Lamming’s
deployment of non-standard English prose to represent the working-class
Estuary English accent, functioning not to poke fun at a supposed working-class
ignorance but rather to create an equivalence with the non-standard English of
working-class West Indians elsewhere in the novel. In much the same way as
Smiley Culture would do with his combination of Cockney slang and Jamaican
patois in ‘Cockney Translation’ (Gilroy 2002, 261–55), Lamming creates the
possibility for unity between working-class Britons and West Indians based
precisely on their shared exclusion from conventional conceptions of Englishness.
In contrast to Braithwaite’s utilization of standard English with the purpose of
showing how middle-class blacks can ingratiate themselves with bourgeois
societal norms, Lamming’s use of vernacular (both British and Caribbean) posits
a unity between working-class white and black people based on shared exclusion
from those norms.
Similar themes and narrative techniques are present in Sam Selvon’s classic
The Lonely Londoners (1956), exploring a variety of issues around the intersections
of race, nationhood and class through the roguish misadventures of a group
of working-class Caribbean migrants, held together by the character-narrator
Moses Aloetta. Selvon produces a tableau of the Caribbean experience in
 A Vision of the Future 159

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

is only a foreigner, we have more right than any people from the damn continent
to live and work in this country’ (21). However, perhaps more importantly with
respect to the development of black liberation in Britain, are Selvon’s depictions
of institutional racism. For example, Moses explains how the employment
exchange marks black people’s records: ‘J-A, Col. That mean you from Jamaica
and you black. [. . .] Suppose a vacancy come and they want to send a fellar, first
they will find out if the firm want coloured fellars before they send you’ (28). In
another passage, Moses explains how in the factories, ‘the work is a hard work
and mostly is spades they have working in the factory, paying lower wages than
they would have to pay white fellars’ (52). Selvon thus not only depicts British
racism but also a racial capitalism whereby the racial ‘Other’ is systematically
discriminated against as a strategy for maximizing capital accumulation, the
aforementioned examples portraying the concentration of West Indians, as a
‘fraction of labour’, into the lowest-wage sections of the employment market
(thus reducing overheads on variable capital) or, to the end of actually making
such hyper-exploitation desirable, excluding them from the labour market
entirely. Indeed, Moses’ description of the employment exchange and factory
work presents a marked divergence from the individualized, interpersonal
incidences of bigotry discussed by Braithwaite, foregrounding instead an
articulation of racial and class oppressions and a structural critique of racism
which would be central to the theoretical framework of the black liberation
movement from the mid-1960s.
While showing the effects their new surroundings had upon Caribbean
migrants, Selvon also shows the effects those migrants had upon those
surroundings. MacPhee argues the novel ‘shows how the migrants remake London
and its public and social spaces’, their reappropriation of public space marking
‘an important early moment in the hybridisation of postwar Britain’ (123).
McLeod concurs, describing the fete scene in particular as ‘a way of envisaging
just for a moment a new kind of socially inclusive space which emerges from the
creolizing promise of the dance-floor: tolerant, racially inclusive, pleasurable,
mobile, negotiating between (rather than polarizing) [. . .] the Caribbean and
London’ (2004: 39). An example of the burgeoning cultural hybridization of the
period, it can even be thought to prefigure the importance of musical subcultures
in the anti-racist movement, yet by virtue of its historical moment, such
developments can only be hinted at, making the fete ‘a fragile and utopian space,
where possibilities are glimpsed rather than new social relations cemented’ (39).
Such convivial spaces and their prospects for hybridization were only
possible under the conceptual assumption that Caribbean culture had some
 A Vision of the Future 161

inherent merit worthy of transposition to Britain. Nowhere does Selvon make

this affirmation of Caribbean identity clearer than in his use of Trinidadian
vernacular throughout the novel. When Galahad’s white lover criticizes his
accent, his response – ‘What wrong with it? [. . .] Is English we speaking’ (82) –
asserts the legitimacy of his non-standard syntax. However, unlike the novels
discussed previously, use of vernacular is not limited to dialogue but rather
permeates the whole text via its Trinidadian-inflected narration. Indeed, the
effect of Caribbean Voices on experiments with narrative voice manifests itself
more strongly in Selvon’s novel than in any other from the period, marking what
MacPhee describes as its ‘radical innovation’ in departing from the tradition of
confining dialect to dialogue, which tacitly presents ‘the standard Southern
British English of the narrative voice [. . .] as a “universal” frame of interpretation
and linguistic rectitude’ (120).
In opting for vernacular narration, Selvon abjures this tradition as
‘quarantining’ it to the dialogues would imply ‘a hierarchy of experience between
the language of the characters and that of the narrative voice, which would
decentre and devalue the experience of the West Indian migrants’ (MacPhee,
121). This stands in stark contrast to Braithwaite’s self-conscious use of standard
English (and implied rejection of Caribbean vernacular’s cultural legitimacy)
as well as Naipaul’s mockery of his own characters’ cultural ‘backwardness’
through their inept mastery of it. Though Selvon would be critical of the British
black power movement (see his 1975 novel Moses Ascending), his radical stylistic
innovations nonetheless have radical political implications, affirming a black
identity which prefigure developments in British anti-racism, such as black
power group RAAS ’ reference to the Jamaican vernacular expletive and the
emerging linguistic hybridity represented by Smiley Culture’s aforementioned
‘Cockney Translation’ as well as third-generation West Indians described by Hall
as declaring their “Englishness is black” (59). Indeed, such hybrid identities would
be completely alien to an individual like Braithwaite, whose assertion to have
‘grown up British in every way’ (36) precludes the possibility of hybridization in
its promotion of a narrow definition of Britishness which it elevates above all else.
Yet as was clear from the earlier discussion of the development of British
anti-racism, multiculturalism took root not merely through social interactions
but also social struggle. Though such struggle is largely absent from The Lonely
Londoners, Selvon’s 1957 collection of short stories Ways of Sunlight foregrounds
this aspect more explicitly. Split into two sections, ‘Trinidad’ and ‘London’, the
first section depicts a largely rural poverty written in the folk tale style with a
standard English narrative voice. With the ‘London’ section, however, the tone
162 The 1950s

is notably more picaresque, similar to The Lonely Londoners, with vernacular

narration and jocular tales of its protagonists’ adventures adjusting to city life.
This shift in style therefore represents the characters’ proletarianization as they
turn from peasants (i.e. in ‘Holiday in Five Rivers’, ‘Cane is Bitter’) to transport
and factory workers (i.e. ‘Working the Transport’, ‘Eraser’s Dilemma’, ‘The Cricket
Match’), the picaresque style matching the picaresque behaviour necessary to
survive the urban-industrial context.
Consequently, the text’s largely working-class characters, both black and
white, clumsily engage the difficulties of intercultural exchange, prefiguring
the multicultural society to come. For instance, Charles, Algernon’s English
workmate at the tyre factory, invites the Caribbean men to play cricket, albeit
on the false assumption that ‘everybody who come from the West Indies at
least like the game if they can’t play it’ (‘The Cricket Match’, 161). Though
a misunderstanding based on ethnic stereotypes, it is nonetheless a genuine
attempt at integration in which Charles is only made to look as foolish for
his assumption, as Algernon is for ‘getting on as if [he] invent the game’ (162).
Moreover, the significance of this attempt at integration is intensified by cricket’s
function not only as a common cultural reference point but also part of the
multicultural workforce’s collective refusal of work: to follow the cricket they
have ‘a portable radio they hide from the foreman and they listening to the score
every day’ (161), symbolizing black and white workers finding commonality in
prioritizing their leisure activities over their work.
Similarly, the importance of informal sites of community formation,
particularly migrant-owned businesses, is also prominent. As with the barber’s
shop in The Emigrants, Mangohead seeks out a Trinidadian-owned tailor’s shop
to ask support from Hotboy who is always there ‘talking politics, or else harking
back to the old days in Trinidad’ (‘Calypso in London’, 126). Indeed, when
Mangohead arrives, Hotboy is ‘in a hot debate with Rahamut about the Suez
issue. “If I was Nasser . . .” Hot was saying, and going on to say what and what
he wouldn’t do’ (127). The significance of Mangohead going to a Trinidadian-
owned business for support is enhanced by its existence as a space for political
discussion. Particularly noteworthy, however, is Hotboy’s expression of anti-
colonial sympathies: as Trinidad did not gain independence until 1962, Hotboy
is a British citizen yet in this passage he identifies not with Britain but with
Nasser, the leader of a recently independent Egypt fighting British imperial
interests. Selvon depicts fictionally, then, Sivanandan’s analysis of how informal
communal spaces and anti-colonialism combined to produce strong bases for
the political battles to come.
 A Vision of the Future 163

The contemporary preoccupation with housing is also a recurrent feature in

the collection, similarly underlining the intersectional nature of black working-
class people’s oppressions. One such instance is in the description of Bar 20 and
Fred’s ‘dingy basement room in Paddington what the health authorities warn the
landlord not to rent without renovating’ (‘Basement Lullaby’, 175), reminding
the reader of migrants’ vulnerability in the housing market. However, Selvon’s
migrants, like those of reality, are not merely passive victims of this articulation
of racism with class exploitation, exemplifying in struggle the emerging
intersectionality commonplace in black liberation politics of the 1960s and
1970s. In ‘Obeah in the Grove’, the reader is told that when landlords sell a house
they get more money if the house is empty. So,

to get the tenants out, what some of them was doing was to let out rooms to
spades, and when the white tenants see that [. . .] they hustle to get another room
while the landlord laughing. Next thing, he gives the spades notice, and by the
time he ready to sell the house bam! the whole house empty (168).

Two Ladbroke Grove landlords decide to sell their building in this way. Four
Jamaican men move in and white tenants immediately begin moving out. However,
the Jamaican tenants soon learn of their landlords’ duplicity and avenge themselves
using obeah before moving out. Within days ‘the walls start to crack, the roof
falling down bit by bit [. . .] one day the wife walking up the stairs [. . .] and the
stairs break down and she break she foot’ (174). Eventually, the house ‘get a kind of
look about it [. . .] as if it threatening to collapse any minute.’ (ibid.). The landlords
are eventually forced out themselves and unable to sell.
This narrative sees tenants in conflict with their landlords not in a simple
class dispute but, as with many of the ‘London’ section’s short stories, one
pertaining to exploitation compounded by racial discrimination. Furthermore,
the tenants’ use of obeah, a type of pre-Christian folk magic often used against
slave masters, is symbolically significant, showing how oppressed groups drew
on diverse traditions of struggle, rather than preconceived dogmas regarding
‘class’ or ‘class struggle’, to create intersectional combative identities. Gilroy
theorizes such activity, arguing that class struggle ‘be broadly defined [to]
encompass struggles which bring classes into being as well as struggles between
organised class forces’ (23). Such an analysis, therefore, renders ‘connections
between history and concrete struggles [. . .] intelligible even in situations where
collective actors define themselves and organise as “races”, people, maroons,
ghost-dancers or slaves rather than as a class’ (24). That the political actors
in ‘Obeah in the Grove’ may identify primarily as ‘black’ or ‘Jamaican’ rather
164 The 1950s

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

Writing white anti-racism

Just as black writers reflected the racial politics of their era while also prefiguring
the future, similar phenomena can be observed among some white writers. Many
British novels by white authors from the period tackle the issue of race, though
notably often in relation to the postwar waning of empire, as in Doris Lessing’s
The Grass is Singing (1950), rather than as a domestic issue. However, there
were some attempts by white writers to tackle the issues of race and racism in a
domestic context. One such example is Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday
Morning (1958), which follows working-class philanderer Arthur Seaton as
his drink-fuelled escapades bring him into conflict with the prevailing norms of
postwar Britain. In many ways typical of texts emanating from the ‘Angry Young
Men’ milieu, with its portrayal of a young working-class male’s conflict with
 A Vision of the Future 165

society, Sillitoe also attempts to address racism through the character of Sam, a
black soldier in the British Army who stays with members of Arthur’s extended
family after befriending their son Johnny while serving together in Africa.
Sam is subject to the usual ‘details and anecdotes’, such as Bert’s comment that
he ‘thinks all telegrams are sent by tom-tom’ (191) while on arrival Sam is
showered with questions: ‘Could he read and write? Who taught him, then?’
(192) Yet he is also defended by Arthur’s Aunt Ada, the family matriarch, who,
responding to Bert, ‘turned on him fiercely. [. . .] “you’d better be nice to ‘im,
or Johnny’ll gi’ yer a good thump when ‘e comes ‘ome from Africa.” ’ (193) and
during his brief presence in the narrative, ‘the festive camaraderie of the occasion
extends to him also, and seems to offer him a tentative place within this older
working-class culture’ (Haywood, 104).
However, this example of white working-class solidarity with Sam is severely
undermined by the assumption underpinning everyone’s relationship to him.
As Ada states earlier, ‘He’s a guest’ (Sillitoe, 193); in framing Sam’s presence this
way, Sillitoe not only panders to anti-migrant sentiment in implying only the
‘temporary inconvenience’ of black presence in Britain but also implicitly
attaches temporal conditions to the aforementioned camaraderie while
simultaneously severing Sam from the possibility of more profound and long-
lasting solidarity.5 Sam is accepted but his temporary presence means he is
not subject to the same social tensions of those settling permanently. This is
exacerbated by Sillitoe’s descriptions of Sam as grateful and unimposing, obvious
attempts at undermining stereotypes of black savagery or predatory sexuality
but result in Sam having hardly any personality at all. Alongside his status as
temporary guest, his unimposing nature sidesteps the fact that black migrants
had to (and actually did) impose themselves on the racialized assumptions of
British society. So while ‘Sam beamed with happiness at the universal sympathy
around him’ (196), he is also removed from the social questions and struggles of
black people in Britain, leaving Sillitoe capable of addressing racism only on the
superficial level of individual phobia.
The exact opposite problem is present in John Sommerfield’s North West Five
(1960), in that it attempts to deal with the social problems underpinning white
working-class racism without addressing personal prejudice, or even race and
migration, explicitly at all. The novel revolves around Dan and Liz, a young white
working-class couple caught in the housing crisis, as they try to find somewhere
to live outside their stifling home environments. It is notable that the novel
contains almost no explicit reference to non-white people, especially odd given
the passages set in London’s jazz clubs, limiting mention to an off-hand comment
166 The 1950s

about ‘strolling coloured students’ (44) on a quiet Sunday, implying little more
than non-threatening peripheral coexistence.
The couple’s predicament (and therefore the housing crisis generally) is
located unambiguously in the processes of capitalism. Sommerfield links the
couple’s situation to the proletarian experience of labour’s alienation from its
end product; Dan, a builder, decries his situation of ‘Working on flats I’ll never
be able to afford to live in as long as I live’ (161). But the problem does not lie
with individual landlords but with the housing market itself where Dan feels he
is ‘trying to fight something which had no face, that was invisible’ (161). This
straightforwardly Marxist analysis of the housing question as rooted in capitalism
is an implicit rebuke of the racist narratives which fuelled white working-class
violence in Notting Hill; however, this rebuke becomes almost explicit when
Dan, building upon his feeling of fighting something ‘invisible’, says ‘If there was
somebody or something I could have a bash at it’d be different’ (161), the point
being that there are no such persons, of particular resonance in the aftermath of
racially-motivated unrest based on exactly this fallacy.
The politics of Sommerfield’s thematic approach reflects the Communist
Party’s reductionist anti-racism of the era with the black population’s political
‘presence’ expressed primarily through its absence, intended to underline their
irrelevance in undermining white working-class conditions and thus allowing
Sommerfield to address the ‘real’ economic base buttressing racist ideology.
Sommerfield, himself a Party member from the early 1930s until only a few years
prior to writing North West Five, was undoubtedly steeped in such an approach
and, writing about white working-class housing issues so soon after the Notting
Hill race riots (themselves underpinned by racist narratives around housing),
can certainly be read as putting that political programme into novelistic practice,
subsuming entirely the issues of race and racism under an economistic
framework of class conflict, mirroring entirely the deficiencies of the Communist
Party’s anti-racist praxis in that of his novel.
This orthodox Marxist approach to anti-racism would, however, be transcended
by future generations of anti-racists and one white writer who picked up on the
shortcomings of such an outlook was Colin MacInnes in his novels City of
Spades (1957) and Absolute Beginners (1959). City of Spades recounts the story of
Nigerian student Johnny Fortune’s encounter with white Britain via a narrative
divided between the idiosyncratic subjectivities of himself and British civil servant
Montgomery Pew. As an authentic account of black life in 1950s London,
MacInnes’s novel is problematic due to his tendency to exoticize black characters
by playing on dominant stereotypes, particularly the violence and licentiousness
 A Vision of the Future 167

outlined by Collins. As much as he attempts to present a heterogeneous black

community divided according to national, educational and geographical identities,
he nonetheless ‘cannot avoid adopting a racialising optic’ (McLeod 2004, 48),
homogenizing them according to the common tropes of racial discourse. Misogyny
is rife, whether in the Gambian pimp Billy Whispers’ exploitation of white
women or in Johnny’s own reference to white women as ‘London female rubbish’
(MacInnes 2012, 67), certainly colluding with public anxieties suggesting that
‘misogyny is somehow a constitutive aspect of black men’ (McLeod 2004, 46).
Furthermore, MacInnes, through a range of club and theatre scenes, also seems
to posit ‘dance as the most significant and recurring aspect of black culture’
(47) while another recurring activity seems to be fighting, again almost always
initiated by black characters. Though MacInnes does demonstrate some self-
awareness in this respect, such as when Montgomery is accused of nostalgia de la
boue (MacInnes 2012, 245), he is never quite able to get beyond the ‘racialising
optic’ of the white gaze.
The novel’s real value, however, comes in its highlighting of British hypocrisy
on racism. While the aforementioned complacency regarding its status as head
of a multi-racial Commonwealth dominated British self-image, MacInnes
undermines this throughout the novel. Liberal Montgomery is told early on by
his conservative predecessor at the Colonial Department that the liberal ‘in
relation to the colour question, is a person who feels an irresponsible sympathy
for what he calls oppressed peoples on whom, along with the staunchest Tory,
he’s quite willing to go on being a parasite’ (13–14). Tellingly, Montgomery
concurs, saying ‘Remove the imperial shreds, and I’d be as destitute as a coolie’
(14). MacInnes exposes the parasitical nature of the metropolitan centre’s
relationship to the colonized periphery thus undermining Britain’s paternalistic
self-image vis-à-vis the Commonwealth. While the reader may sympathize
with Montgomery’s liberal take on race, his frank admission of dependence on
colonialism foregrounds the hypocrisy of his supposed progressiveness and,
read alongside his conservative colleague, therefore implicates the entire British
political establishment as a class in the continuance of colonial exploitation.
Furthermore, given the job at the Colonial Department relates specifically
to the settlement of Commonwealth migrants in Britain, MacInnes lays the
groundwork for an understanding of race and racism which links Britain’s
treatment of its nascent black population directly to its colonial history; as a task
of the Colonial Department, the settlement of Commonwealth migrants is thus
an internalization of the colonial project. Such sentiment finds expression in
Montgomery’s predecessor declaring his intention to a take a post in apartheid
168 The 1950s

South Africa arguing that the ‘much maligned’ country may ‘have found a logical
solution for race relations there’ (15). The comment undermines Britain’s moral
superiority, uniting British and South African thinking on race and, coming not
from a rabid fascist but a British civil servant (albeit a conservative one) with
an ‘aloof imperial calm’ (11), serves to place racism (quite literally) at the heart
of Britain’s institutions. The British ‘solution’ differs from its South African
counterpart only in that it is less ‘logical’ with respect to its colonial history but,
ultimately, is based on the same racial premises.
This finds confirmation in the ceaseless harassment of black characters
by police, particularly CID Inspector Purity, whose name itself conjures up
the imagery of apartheid (or even Nazi Germany). Purity encapsulates white
anxieties around the threat of black male sexuality to white women, claiming
black men are ‘corrupting them’ with drugs and ‘making them serve these black
men’s evil ends!’ (83). Later, however, he is more candid, initially stating that
the black population ‘don’t make the copper’s task any the easier’ (215); when
Montgomery asks whether ‘colonials are more trouble than the natives?’, Purity’s
response is telling: ‘ “What natives? Oh, I see what you mean. No, I don’t suppose
so, really. . . but it’s a new problem.” ’ (215). Both Purity’s concern for the safety of
white women from black men and his confusion over the word ‘natives’ bely a
continuance of colonial thinking: by ‘natives’, Montgomery is obviously referring
to white Britons, but for Purity, Commonwealth citizens remain ‘natives’ even
when not in their native country, their status fixed in relation to an immutable
Anglocentric subjecthood. Indeed, Purity views his relationship to them as
merely a transposition of the relationship between colonizer and native to the
metropolitan centre, his job being to control the ‘new problem’ the ‘natives’ (that
is, Commonwealth migrants) pose, whether defending against their threat to
white womanhood (which is, as Ellis points out, a staple of colonial discourse) or,
more generally, the threat of their continued presence to the ‘purity’ of the nation.
In contrast to Braithwaite’s valorization of British institutions, MacInnes’s
portrayal of the police is unequivocally negative. When Johnny is wrongfully
arrested for living off the immoral earnings of a sex worker, he is beaten and
subjected to racial slurs, told ‘Nigger or ponce, it’s all the same’ (261), again
underlining his principal ‘crime’ as his foreign presence rather than any specific
legal infraction. That he is eventually declared innocent (after intervention from
white friends) only to be rearrested and convicted on drug charges, reaffirms
this idea, reminding the reader of his comments to Montgomery earlier in the
narrative that ‘The Law, when it searches, sometimes finds things on a person
that the person didn’t have before the search began’ (80).
 A Vision of the Future 169

As a document of the black population’s lived experience, let alone an attempt

at depicting an anti-racist response, City of Spades leaves much to be desired,
often propagating the same tropes buttressing the very racism MacInnes attempts
to challenge. It is, however, far more successful as an exposé of structural and
institutional racism in 1950s Britain, all the more crucial for the challenge it
posed to the dominant complacency regarding such questions.
In Absolute Beginners, MacInnes presents a more successful literary
representation of anti-racism. Set in London, the novel takes place across four
days separated over four months in the summer of 1958 told via the first-person
narration of an unnamed teenager living in a West London slum he calls Napoli.
The novel documents the burgeoning cultural hybridity emerging from the
postwar British youth subcultures, particularly the jazz scene (accentuating
the conspicuous whiteness of Sommerfield’s jazz clubs). The narrator makes
frequent mention of his adoration for black artists such as ‘Ella’ (Fitzgerald) and
‘Billie H’ (Holiday) as well as the Modern Jazz Quartet, a band of black musicians
fusing classical and jazz genres, manifesting musically a hybridization of black
and white cultures.
For the narrator, as for MacInnes himself, such inter-ethnic youth cultures
hold great liberatory potential, declaring

the great thing about the jazz world, and all the kids that enter into it, is that no
one, not a soul, cares what your class is, or what your race is [. . .] so long as you
dig the scene and can behave yourself, and have left all that crap behind you, too,
when you come in the jazz club door. (83)

Yet while seeing liberatory potential in youth subcultures, MacInnes remains

deeply critical of their naive apolitical conviviality. The impossibility of leaving
‘all that crap behind you’ is exposed several times, whether in the narrator’s own
statement that ‘cross-class marriages don’t work’ (126), despite earlier professions
on the unimportance of class, or his fellow ‘hip’ teenage companion The Wiz who
ends the novel participating in a ‘White Protection League’ rally (268), a reference
to the neo-Nazi White Defence League active in Notting Hill at the time. Most
significantly, however, is how MacInnes reveals the fragility of the utopian vision
of Selvon’s fete in his portrayal of Maria Bethlehem’s concert. Though ‘hundreds
of English boys and girls, and their friends from Africa and the Caribbean’ (230)
dance alongside each other, the utopian vision is shattered, literally upon exiting
the jazz club door, by news of race riots in Nottingham and the following
chapter’s depiction of similar events in Notting Hill; the moral being that leaving
‘all that crap behind you’, even if it were possible (which MacInnes suggests it is
170 The 1950s

not), nonetheless cannot resolve the existence of ‘that crap’ upon exiting the jazz
club door.
MacInnes’s narrative, then, contradicts his protagonist’s initial naive idealism,
pointing instead towards the need for an expressly political anti-racist praxis.
MacInnes (somewhat affectionately) satirizes Marxist musician Ron Todd
(a possible allusion to Communist musician Ewan MacColl) and his supposed
belief that ‘Mississippi jail songs are in praise of sputniks’ (176). Yet political
tradition remains important, manifesting in the narrator inheriting his dead
father’s historical manuscript. McLeod points out the narrator’s father

represents the knowledge of history and politics, precisely the things which
the narrator has chosen to neglect for much of the novel [. . .] In having his
narrator inherit his father’s manuscript, MacInnes suggests that any radical
movement with youth at its heart requires a political conscience and an historical
understanding of the conditions of its own possibility (55–6)

As well as political history, MacInnes is also clear that subcultural coexistence

must be reinforced by political action. This manifests in the teenage photographer’s
decision to enter the fray of the Notting Hill riots, helping a black boy escape
a racist mob by giving him a lift on his Vespa (2011, 250) before being involved
in street-fighting with Teddy Boys alongside two friends from the jazz scene,
overjoyed to see ‘two jazz addicts’ as it showed ‘their great admiration for coloured
greats like Tusdie and Maria really meant something to them’ (255). The actions
of the narrator and his friends show that while critical of the power of youth
subcultures as forces for change in and of themselves, MacInnes nonetheless sees
them as potential incubators for anti-racist political identities, provided they
are infused with an appreciation for political history and practice. As Sinfield
explains, in Absolute Beginners, ‘MacInnes produces a vision rather than a
record’ (170), a vision which prefigured arguably the high point of politicized
inter-ethnic youth culture, Rock Against Racism (RAR ): its break with the
‘Old Left’ does not preclude drawing on political tradition while its belief in the
autonomous value of youth culture is as a base for mobilization rather than
a political end in itself. The actions of the narrator and his friends in the melee
of the riots, and, indeed, the moral lesson of MacInnes’s entire narrative,
anticipate RAR’s dictum that racism cannot be opposed ‘just by holding a dance’
(Gilroy, 168).
Moreover, in a way not dissimilar to Lamming and Selvon, MacInnes also
depicts the informal sites of black political formation in the ‘war cabinet of West
Indians’ (2011, 251) he encounters after escorting a black boy to his home.
 A Vision of the Future 171

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

Conclusion: some visions of the future

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

take increasingly draconian form, bringing legal definitions of citizenship into

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

Notes

1 Here, I am using Gilroy’s definition of conviviality as describing not ‘the absence of

racism or the triumph of tolerance’ but rather ‘the processes of cohabitation and
interaction that have made multiculture an ordinary feature of social life in Britain’s
urban areas’ (2006, xi).
2 Though Nikolanikos is discussing racism directed towards migrant workers for the
downward pressure their hyper-exploitation causes on wages, the trend is analogous
to that of housing in late-1950s London in that black migrants’ vulnerable position
was exploited to the detriment of both black and white working-class populations
while white working-class resentment was directed at their black neighbours rather
than white landlords.
3 From the mid-1960s, these various strands would coalesce into a radical praxis
containing elements of those mentioned previously while equally transcending
them all. For an account of the links between black liberation, anti-colonialism
and Marxism in Britain, see Smith (2010). Similarly, subcultural formations were
important in developing anti-racist identities for both black and white youth,
culminating in Rock Against Racism in 1976, an account of which can be found in
Gilroy (146–302). Lentin (129–48) also covers both these phenomena.
 A Vision of the Future 173

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

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176
 6

Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On: The Politics

of Youth in 1950s Fiction
Nick Bentley

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

177
178 The 1950s

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

Very little seems to have been written about the role of girls in youth cultural
groupings. They are absent from the classic subcultural ethnographic studies, the
pop histories, the personal accounts and the journalistic surveys of the field.
 Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On 179

When girls do appear, it is either in ways which uncritically reinforce the

stereotypical image of women [. . .] or else they are fleetingly and marginally
represented. (105)

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

Youthquake

In the autumn of 1956, a new film that had recently arrived from America – Rock
Around the Clock – was being banned in a number of cinemas in Britain due to
reports of teenagers dancing in the aisles, ripping up cinema seats and fighting.
As one participant remembers, ‘We were tearing off seats, ripping off covers and
throwing stuff into the air. And they said that’s it, everybody out, and they closed
the cinema down. It was just too exciting for words’ (Akhtar and Humphries,
42–3). The arrival of this exciting and exotic movie from across the Atlantic
seemed to British youth to offer a way forward out of the drab austerity of the
postwar experienced by their parents’ generation. It also represented one of the
first moral panics around youth culture in the postwar period, although it
connected in the public imagination with earlier fears about the Teddy boy
subculture.2 Teenagers had arrived and they were going to shake things up. A
variety of new youth subcultures contributed to a manifest sense of change, and
this was not only related to the worrying figures of the teenager and the urban
Teddy boy thug – a variety of new subcultures tried to mark out their own
particular and nuanced response to the dominant and parent cultures against
which they set themselves. Rock and roll, the blues, jazz (trad and mod varieties),
skiffle, ballad and blues, folk and calypso were all varieties of musical subcultures
that emerged in the decade, mostly formed through connection with North
American musical styles of previous decades. Alongside these musical youth
cultures, there were other distinct groups that developed their own appearance,
fashions, attitudes and behavioural codes: bohemians, beatniks and bums, not
to mention discrete youth subcultures formed around specific ethnicities,
sexualities and political movements such as CND.
180 The 1950s

Phil Cohen, writing in the 1970s and attempting to theorize subcultural

affiliation and behaviour, argued that youth subcultures represented ways of
working out anxieties and concerns in the parent culture but through their own
series of relational cultural manifestations. As he writes:

I’m suggesting here that mods, parkas, skinheads, crombies, are a succession of
subcultures which all correspond to the same parent culture and which attempt
to work out, through a system of transformations, the basic problematic or
contradiction which is inserted in the subculture by the parent culture. (90)

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

Teenage rampage

One of the youth figures that gains powerful traction in the 1950s is the teenager,
a subcultural identity that emerges during the decade and is to a large extent
imported from America. As Bill Osgerby notes, the teenager becomes more than
simply an indication of the age of an individual, but a ‘particular style of
conspicuous, leisure-oriented consumption’ (61). According to the popular
articulation of this figure s/he is reasonably affluent and keen to flaunt that new
economic power conspicuously. As the unnamed teenager in Colin MacInnes’s
Absolute Beginners observes:
 Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On 181

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

Colin MacInnes’s novel describes a number of subcultural groups, but it begins

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

this is all a thin and pallid sort of dissipation, a sort of spiritual dry-rot amid the
odour of boiled milk. Many of the customers – their clothes, their hair-styles,
their facial expressions all indicate – are living to a large extent in a myth-world
compounded of a few simple elements which they take to be those of American
life. (248)

As indicated here, part of the problem the New Left had with the new teenage
culture was the threat of Americanization to what Hoggart and others saw as the
182 The 1950s

older, organic working-class culture of the pre-war period. The ‘shiny barbarism’
of American popular culture threatened to undermine those intrinsic values that
were felt to be a distinctive aspect of the working-class life. It is this generational
division that Phil Cohen and others attached to the CCCS established at
Birmingham University in 1964 describe as the difference between subculture(s)
and the parent culture from which they emerge.
Alongside Absolute Beginners, other novels of the decade include reference to
the superficial nature of teenage culture. In John Wain’s Hurry on Down (1953)
for example, Charles Lumley, the main character, encounters working-class
teenage youths as a distinct cultural other. When going to a dance with his
girlfriend Rosa, Lumley notes groups of teenagers with ‘blue or brown suits and
shoes with pointed toes [. . .] their hair swept up into shiny quiffs, stiff with
grease, above the forehead’ (165). As he observes this group as an outsider, he
notes the ritualistic nature of the youth subculture that marks out its difference
for Charles, who is associated at this point in the text with the mainstream,
parent culture: ‘Dances like these, in provincial town halls, were the main
recreation of millions of his fellow Britons below the age of thirty [. . .] Charles
hung back, making a note of the obviously complex traditions of the place before
venturing into the ritual’ (166). Here, Wain’s narrative address shares with the
later New Left approaches of Hoggart the positional externalization of the
ethnographic researcher encountering a strange culture.
Similarly, Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye includes several references
to teenage cultural practices in its examination of 1950s youth culture. Spark’s
novel introduces a disruptive and somewhat impish outsider figure, Dougal
Douglas, who moves into an established community encouraging those he
encounters to reflect on their lives. One of the characters that Dougal particularly
riles is Trevor Lomas, the novel’s main example of delinquent male youth and
leading figure of the area’s youth culture. The following passage describes this
character’s entry into a dancehall to find Beauty, the woman he is currently
trying to attract:

On a midsummer night Trevor Lomas walked with a somnambulistic sway into

Findlater’s Ballroom and looked round for Beauty. The floor was expertly laid and
polished. The walls were pale rose, with concealed lighting. Beauty stood on the
girls’ side, talking to a group of very similar and lustrous girls. They had prepared
themselves for this occasion with diligence, and as they spoke together, they did
not smile much nor attend to each other’s words. As an accepted thing, any of the
girls might break off in the middle of a sentence, should a young man approach
her, and turning to him, might give him her entire and smiling regard. (76)
 Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On 183

Here, Spark foregrounds the performative and gendered aspects of teenage

identity, but nevertheless highlights the inauthenticity of youth behaviour. It is
the devilish impositions of Dougal that cause several teenage characters in the
novel to reflect on their behaviour and ultimately their individual relationship to
the youth cultures they negotiate.
Many descriptions of teenagers and teenage culture, then, focus on the
participants as lacking agency and awareness of the ways in which their youth is
being manipulated by consumer practices and capitalist economic structures. As
MacInnes’s teenager notes:

youth has power, a kind of divine power straight from mother nature [. . .] As for
the boys and girls, the dear young absolute beginners, I sometimes feel that if
they only knew this fact, this very simple fact, namely how powerful they really
are, then they could rise up overnight and enslave the old tax-payers, the whole
dam lot of them. (13, sic.)

For the teenager, this non-recognition of their potential power to challenge

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

Upstairs he flung his greasy overalls aside and selected a suit from a line of
hangers. Brown paper protected them from dust, and he stood for some minutes
in the cold, digging his hands into pockets and turning back lapels, sampling the
184 The 1950s

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

This projection of individual identity onto objects of subcultural display reveals

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

Teddy boys

In his extensive popular history of the late 1950s to the early 1960s, Never Had It
So Good, Dominic Sandbrook identifies the Teddy boys as ‘the real “folk devils”
of the fifties’ (442). As he notes, after a murder committed on Clapham Common
in 1953 by a youth associated with the Teddy boy look, ‘it was common to
identify Teddy boys as vicious young toughs armed with flick knives, the very
stereotype of the juvenile delinquent’ (443). Incidents of this kind, of course, sell
good copy and it is precisely the visibility of the Teddy boy subculture in
 Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On 185

examples of violence that perpetuate this stereotypical image. There are over 170
references to ‘Teddy boys’ in The Times alone between 1954 and 1959, most of
which are pejorative. As Stanley Cohen argues, the Teddy boys ‘were perceptually
merged into a day-to-day delinquency problem’ (151).
This association of the Teds with violence was largely a media-fuelled and
perhaps self-fulfilling identification, but it also seems to have been contributed to
by much of the fiction of the period. To return to MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners,
it is the main Teddy boy character, mockingly nicknamed Ed the Ted, that comes
in for much of the teenager’s invective against the variety of subcultural members
he meets. Although coming from broadly the same area as the teenager it is Ed’s
attraction to violence that marks out his subcultural identity.

I should explain [. . .] that Edward and I were born and bred [. . .] within a bottle’s
throw of each other off the Harrow Road in Kilburn [. . .] Then, when the Ted-
thing became all the rage, Edward signed up for the duration [. . .] the full-
fledged Teddy-boy condition – slit eyes, and cosh, and words of one syllable, and
dirty finger-nails and all [. . .] According to the tales Ed told me, when he left his
jungle occasionally and crossed the frontier into civilized sections of the city and
had a coffee with me, he lived the high old life, brave, bold and splendid, smashing
crockery in all-night cafes and crowning distinguished colleagues with tyre
levers in cul-de-sacs and parking lots, and even appearing in a telly programme
on the Ted question where he stared photogenically, and only grunted. (47)

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

of the emerging multicultural make-up of Britain sits at odds with the Teddy
boys’ xenophobia and racism and it is particularly the behaviour of this
subcultural group that exacerbates these feelings; as the teenager notes after
witnessing an attack on two Sikhs, ‘this little group [the Teds]: it seemed to have
a horrid little mind, if you can call it that, all of its own, and a whole lot of
unexpected force behind it’ (233). The novel has resonances here with Phil
Cohen’s theory of the subculture revealing, in spectacular form, the anxieties
and prejudices of the parent culture, although it is important to note that the
parent culture itself would be split along similar attitudes to immigration. It also
reveals aspects of another subcultural theorist working in the 1950s, albeit in the
different context of American youth gangs: Albert K. Cohen’s 1955 work
Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang. In this ground-breaking study
associated more with the Chicago School of subcultural studies than the CCCS ,
Cohen identifies the internal motivations of individuals, perceived externally as
delinquency, as in fact following a perfectly logical set of ethical choices
meaningful within the group:

Insofar as the new subculture represents a new status system by sanctioning

behaviour tabooed or frowned upon by the larger society, the acquisition of
status within the new group is accompanied by a loss of status outside the group.
[. . .] Indeed, this repudiation of outsiders, necessary in order to protect oneself
from feeling concerned about what they may think, may go so far as to make
nonconformity with the expectations of the outsiders a positive criterion of
status within the group (57–8).

According to Cohen’s position the anti-social behaviour promoted within the

subculture serves to cement solidarity of the subculture against oppositional
forces, whether that comes from mainstream middle-class culture, the working-
class subculture, other subcultures, or indeed other gangs within the same
subculture as in the manifestation of inter-subcultural violence amongst the
Teds in MacInnes’s novel.
The cultural politics of differing subcultural affiliations is dramatized towards
the end of MacInnes’s novel when the teenager is attacked by a group of Teds
after trying to intervene in another racist incident. The teenager is heavily
outnumbered but it is two characters associated with the jazz subculture who
come to his aid, and it is precisely in the subcultural mores that the teenager
identifies crucial anti-racist sentiments: ‘And was I glad it was two kids of my
own age, and two jazz addicts [. . .] because this seemed to show their admiration
for coloured greats like Tusdie and Maria really meant something to them’
 Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On 187

(255). I will discuss the politics of the jazz subculture in greater depth in the next
section, but the point to make here is that the teenager’s two friends offer
resistance from within youth culture itself to the racist violence perpetrated by
the Teds.
In other novels, the Teddy boys are more generally associated with a rebellious
youth culture, but not necessarily with racism, and indeed they become
emblematic of a resistance to dominant cultural practices and behaviours, rather
than a re-articulation of concerns within the parent culture. In Sillitoe’s Saturday
Night and Sunday Morning, for example, Arthur Seaton’s anti-social behaviour is
identified by characters representative of the parent culture with the most readily
recognized youth delinquent group of the period. In the opening chapter of the
novel, Arthur is drunkenly engaging in loutish behaviour at the local club and is
identified thus: ‘Looks like one of them Teddy boys, allus making trouble’ (16). In
fact, Arthur’s behaviour stresses his independence from all group affiliations
including association with youth subcultures, nevertheless the parent culture is
keen to identify any delinquent behaviour with a recognized source of a general
moral panic. Identification of Arthur as a Teddy boy thus serves to contain him
within a definable cultural site of delinquency without attempting to understand
the individual contexts for the relevant behaviours. To draw on theoretical
concepts developed by Louis Althusser (1971), Arthur is thus interpellated or
hailed by dominant culture as a delinquent, and to a certain extent his behaviour
is marked as a self-defining effect of this kind of social demonization. However,
he is also keen to resist such ideological determinism; Arthur’s motto in the text
is ‘don’t let the bastards grind you down’ and his association with youth rebellion
is thus part of a broader concern to evade the entrapment of working-class
factory practices and the imposition of any preconstructed identity. One of the
ways he achieves this is through his love of good quality clothing, as noted in the
previous section, and in a way this also marks his connection to the Teddy boy
subculture. The Teds were marked by their appropriation of a dress style that was
originally intended for upper-middle-class men. As Tony Jefferson has noted,
this focus on sartorial elegance is representative of an aspirational desire amongst
the Teds to deflect from their actual location in an exploitative economic system
that placed them in low paid occupations: ‘I see this choice of uniform as, initially,
an attempt to buy status. . . . Their dress represented a symbolic way of expressing
and negotiating with their social reality; of giving cultural meaning to their social
plight’ (83–4). Dick Hebdige also identifies this aspirational aspect of the specular
style of the Teds: ‘He [the Teddy boy] visibly bracketed off the drab routines of
school, the job and home by affecting an exaggerated style’ (50).
188 The 1950s

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

Birth of the Cool

Jazz, of course, had been a recognized musical form with associated subcultures
several decades before the 1950s, and even though it was born in the United
States, there were examples of jazz clubs and jazz fans in Britain in the 1920s and
1930s. It has, however, a particularly important place in the politics of youth
culture in the 1950s and several novels refer to it as a way of coding the behaviours
and ideological outlooks of characters and environments. Perhaps the first thing
to note is that jazz is not one thing, and the 1950s are a period of particularly
fraught divisions within the jazz subculture between ‘trad jazz’, which harked
back to the establishment of the form in the earlier part of the twentieth century
and the new cool jazz or ‘modern jazz’ that was gaining prominence amongst
younger audiences in the 1950s. Miles Davis’s album Birth of the Cool, for
example, released in 1957, represents a distinctive new style in jazz that was
welcomed by some, but rejected by many in the scene as moving away from the
traditional principles of swing, melody and the interpretation of standards.
This inter-subcultural rift is described most eloquently (if controversially) in
a British literary context by Philip Larkin in his book All What Jazz, that was
published in 1970 but looks back to decades of jazz listening. For Larkin, it is the
advent of modern jazz in the 1950s that represents a break (lamentable for him)
in the tradition that was initiated by the early American greats like Louis
Armstrong, Bessie Smith and the Chicago Rhythm Kings. Larkin’s reading of the
transitions jazz went through in the immediate postwar period interestingly
mirror Richard Hoggart’s reading of the newer commercial forces on traditional
working-class culture. For Larkin, however, it is the increased complexity of
modern jazz that is frustrating: ‘Had jazz been essentially a popular art, full of
tunes you could whistle? Something fundamentally awful had taken place to
ensure that there should be no more tunes’ (7). Larkin felt that ‘the sort of
emotion the music was trying to evoke seemed to have changed’ and he lamented
 Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On 189

the ‘deliberately contrived eccentricity of the phrasing and harmonies’ of the

modern jazz (7). Larkin connects this both to socio-cultural changes and to
shifts in literary practice. In trying to come to terms with the modern jazz
moment he notes: ‘How glibly I had talked of modern jazz, without realizing the
force of the adjective: this was modern jazz, and Parker was a modern jazz player
just as Picasso was modern painter and Pound a modern poet’ (11).
Crucially, Larkin attaches a context of racial emancipation to cool jazz that
goes against his conservative sensibilities. As he writes: ‘I learned that jazz had
now developed, socially and musically: the post-war Negro was better educated,
more politically conscious and culturally aware than his predecessors, and in
consequence the Negro jazz musician was more musically sophisticated [. . .] He
had freed his music as a preliminary to freeing himself ’ (10). This might very
well be a cause for celebration of the new, freer musical landscape in jazz but for
Larkin this is a cause for concern as it is clear he wants to keep jazz as a restricted
and marginalized scene that corresponds to the social and economic segregation
from which the music is ‘authentically’ articulated. Indeed, Larkin’s racism was
identified openly in Andrew Thwaite’s edition of Larkin’s Selected Letters that
came out in the 1990s, but it can also be seen implicitly in his reading of the
social and cultural context informing the development of musical styles in All
What Jazz. It should be stressed that Larkin’s cultural racism is an individual trait
and should not, of course, be seen as a distinctive feature of trad jazz, which
embraced the music of African Americans as much as the new modern varieties.
I begin this discussion of jazz with Larkin’s book because it represents the
importance given to jazz in debates around cultural politics (and especially
racial politics) in the 1950s. Indeed, in contrast to Larkin’s prejudices, modern
jazz was seen by many writers as a particularly inclusive subculture serving as a
site of ideological opposition to the racism identified with the Teds and other
racist elements in mainstream culture. MacInnes’s teenager, for example, is keen
to promote the intersectionality of the jazz subculture, which for him has the
power to transcend social, cultural and economic divisions:

But the great thing about the jazz world, and all the kids that enter into it, is that
no one, not a soul, cares what your class is, or what your race is, or what your
income, or if you’re boy, or girl, or bent, or versatile, or what you are – so long as
you behave yourself, and have left all that crap behind you, too, when you come
in the jazz club door. (68–9)

For MacInnes’s teenager, immersion in the jazz subculture represents a lifestyle

that rejects all prejudices of class, age, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, the very
190 The 1950s

prejudices that could be observed to be part of both the Teddy boy subculture
and mainstream British culture more broadly. The teenager is perhaps associated
more with the modern jazz style but he also embraces all aspects of the jazz
subculture; he listens to the Modern Jazz Quartet with his friend Mr Cool
(pp. 188–91), as well as being a big fan of the more traditional Maria Bethlehem,
his fictionalization of the jazz virtuoso singer Ella Fitzgerald (pp.  228–30).
Politically, the modern form seems, in particular, to embrace the progressive,
inclusive politics of the 1950s and indeed MacInnes’s teenager is close to the
emergent Mod subculture that emerges in the earlier 1960s; what Mike Brake
defines as the ‘mainstream’ mods (75).
For MacInnes, the jazz club represents a form of what Michel Foucault (1986)
describes as a heterotopia – a real space that is imbued with additional meaning
and significance that projects to ideas and beliefs that idealistically re-shape it as
potentially utopian. MacInnes’s teenager fully immerses himself in the experience
and despite his desire to remain an independent observer of the various
subcultures he encounters in the text, he can be said to be affiliated with the jazz
world in a way that provides a voice from the inside. It is clearly significant in his
decision to become actively involved in the racialized politics surrounding the
descriptions of the Notting Hill disturbances in the novel. So much so, that by
the end of the novel when he is contemplating leaving England because he is
sickened by the racist attitudes, he has a change of heart when he sees a group of
newly arrived immigrants at the airport:

Some had on robes, and some had tropical suits, and most of them were young
like me [. . .] and they looked so damned pleased to be in England, at the end of
their long journey, that I was heartbroken at all the disappointments that were in
store for them. And I ran up to them through the water and shouted out above
the engines, Welcome to London! Greetings from England! Meet your first
teenager! We’re all going up to Napoli to have a ball! (285)

Napoli is the teenager’s nickname for Notting Hill, and it is his decision to stay in
England at this point and to embrace the emergent multicultural vibrancy
associated with the new immigration that is in part fuelled by his subcultural
associations with jazz as indicated by the youthful nature of the immigrants he
encounters at this moment.
Although MacInnes’s teenager represents a voice from within the jazz
subculture, there are several works of the decade that identify it as an exotic
other that is both attractive, but also potentially dangerous as a source for an
alternative set of radical ideas and associations. In this way, the jazz subculture
 Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On 191

also becomes attached to a narrative of bohemian existence that rejects the

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

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

Bohemians, beatniks and bums

If Gibbons’s novel describes a bohemian jazz subculture of characters who have

rejected bourgeois conformity, then Roland Camberton’s Scamp (1950) and
Colin Wilson’s Adrift in Soho (1961) both describe a subculture of artists,
dropouts and vagrants who lead precarious lives outside of the recognized
economic and social structures of mainstream society.
Camberton’s Scamp captures the world of the bohemian subcultures of
Bloomsbury, Soho, Fitzrovia and King’s Cross. The main character, Ivan Ginsberg,
a former Cambridge graduate in his early thirties, is leading a precarious life
writing short stories for very little recompense, producing copy for exploitative
editors and providing private language tuition in Russian. Meanwhile he has
ambitions to create and edit his own literary magazine, the eponymous title of
the novel: ‘Scamp, magazine for the younger generation!’ (83). The novel’s plot,
such as it is, revolves around him attempting to encourage various people to
invest in the creation of the magazine, while simultaneously encountering many
in the scene who are more often than not trying to borrow money from him.
Soho and its immediate environment was clearly associated with the bohemian
lifestyle in the 1950s and the novel reveals a series of subcultures who share a
resistance to mainstream culture, whether through inclination or necessity. This
is postwar London and several of the characters are displaced from their pre-war
lives and background, portraying a cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic mix of people
who circulate around a series of pubs, cafés and other insalubrious haunts. The
novel describes a contemporary manifestation of the London bohemia of the
earlier decades of the twentieth century that Peter Brooker has identified as
‘the product of and reaction to the changing forms of modernity’ (7). Brooker
traces the bohemian figure back to mid-nineteenth-century Paris identified in
the figure of the flâneur and manifest in the literary and artistic tradition of
Charles Baudelaire, Gérard de Nerval, Théophile Gautier and Henri Murger. This
figure re-emerges in 1950s London in the form of a loose grouping of
countercultural artists and writers eking out precarious lifestyles. However, the
relationship the individual has to the group is always in tension with the
possibility of success in the mainstream, and most of the characters in Scamp
 Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On 193

navigate between a commitment to, and frustration with, the bohemian lifestyle.
As Brooker notes:‘the bohemian was a non-conformist [. . .] whose nonconformity
was at risk at all points, from indifference, parody, convention and compromise,
since simply to survive, however close to the bread-line, required some means of
livelihood, support or patronage’ (4). Although Brooker, here, is referring
specifically to the nineteenth-century, French model, a similar situation applies
to the various characters encountered in Camberton’s novel.
Unlike Here Be Dragons, the characters in Scamp are thoroughly immersed in
the subcultural life of bohemia and indeed the novel identifies key distinctions
between sub-groups within the underground, some of which are politically
countercultural, represented by characters such as Taffy the anarchist; Tom
Sirpson, who describes himself as a New Communist; and others who have
rejected mainstream society in order to pursue literary and artistic ambitions.
There is also a strict recognition amongst the groups of the nuances of different
subcultural lifestyles and outlooks. For example, the ‘Soho bums’ are defined as a
group who live a destitute, often vagrant life that distinguishes them from those
who come to the area for the piquancy of subcultural association:

Leaning against the wall and pressed into odd corners by the crowd, philosophical,
isolated bums watched the scene with bitter understanding [. . .] In the revelation
of closing time, they saw an immense, terrifying vista of the future, with
themselves caged for ever in this environment of dismal and helpless neurosis.
For the thousandth time they determined never to come again, to pull themselves
together, to extricate themselves from their shoddy Bohemia. (44)

Other subcultural groups appear in the novel including one that pre-empts
the cultural mores and lifestyles of the Teds that appear later in the decade.
This is particularly shown in a fight Ginsberg observes in an all-night café.
Although our hero is part of the Soho underground scene, this group is clearly
externalized as an exotic other by focalizing the narrative through Ginsberg’s
perspective:

They were like specimens from a sociological case-book. In a flash, as the toughs
grappled and slashed he pictured simple patterns which formed this violent
mosaic – the slums of Inner London, the somewhat mentally deficient youngsters,
the High Street, the pin-table saloon, the fish and chip shop, the cinema, the
News of the World, the pub, the dog-track, the racecourse, crime and Borstal,
crime and prison, a ménage with a prostitute or a half witted adolescent, and
then the ganging together for company’s sake with Big Mike or the Seven Dials
mob. (62)
194 The 1950s

The sociological approach taken in this passage is similar to that adopted in later
novels such as MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners and in the observation of youth
cultures by some of the New Left writers such as Hoggart later in the decade. The
identification of the cultural environments and entertainments in this passage,
for example, anticipates Hoggart’s description of the impact on youth of the
‘shiny barbarism’ of an Americanized, popular culture in The Uses of Literacy.
Camberton, however, is perhaps more sympathetic to the ways in which the
individual members congregate into self-protecting groups in order to navigate
the socio-economic conditions in which they find themselves. Scamp, in its
episodic structure and its peripatetic narrative around central London, also
anticipates some later works that map out individual groups within what could
be seen more generally from outside as a mass countercultural grouping.
Although dismissed by one contemporary reviewer, Julian Maclaren-Ross, as
‘devoid of any narrative gift’ and criticized for ‘dragging in disconnectedly and to
little apparent purpose a series of thinly disguised local or literary celebrities’
(n.p.), it is the episodic structure of Scamp that is taken up and celebrated in
many later subcultural novels like Absolute Beginners, and in that sense, Scamp
can be seen as a forerunner to these novels.
The sociological aspects of Scamp continue when Ginsberg drifts from Soho
to the even less salubrious environs of King’s Cross, where he encounters an
underclass of semi-criminal precarity: ‘Ginsberg was intimidated by the faces
which confronted him beneath the fluorescent lighting of the milk bar. They
were not like the faces in Soho; they were poorer, weaker, more degraded. They
had the air of known criminals whose only worry was not whether they would be
caught, but when they would be caught’ (68, italics in the original). Ginsberg’s
‘educated’ eye is deployed here to act as a sociological observer and semi-
participant ethnographer, revealing and recording the lives of marginalized
Londoners in the early 1950s.
Alongside these sociological observations, the novel’s attitude to the bohemian
lifestyle pursued by Ginsberg is ambivalent. In many ways the novel reproduces
the approach taken in an earlier work by the Chicago School theorist Nels
Anderson, The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man, where the life of the
drifting vagrant is, to a certain extent, romanticized as an identity that is able to
evade the interpellation of mid-twentieth-century dominant society, and the
‘hobehemia’ identified by Anderson shares aspects of Camberton’s narrative. The
decision to resist prevailing capitalist practices, for example, in both texts
gestures towards a political resistance organized at the level of the individual
with a sense of personal, authentic freedom that chimes well with the Beat
 Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On 195

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

addresses a set of lifestyles that had become firmly established subcultural and
countercultural entities by the end of the decade.
As with Camberton’s novel, Adrift in Soho is a Bildungsroman, and details the
experiences of nineteen-year-old Harry Preston as he moves to London after
being thrown out of the RAF and working as a labourer in Nottingham. Relayed
in the first person, Harry’s attitude to countercultural life is initially positive; as he
notes: ‘you had to stay outside society, to keep on rebelling’ (105). However, he
begins to lose his romantic view of bohemia as he encounters characters that he
recognizes are more interested in exploiting him than they are in an authentic
evasion of mainstream society. One such character is the charismatic James Street,
a struggling artist, who Harry encounters when he arrives in London, and who is
well versed in a variety of expedient scams that are necessary to maintain a life
outside of society. James is keen to educate the newly arrived nineteen-year-old in
some of these techniques, however it soon becomes clear that the various plans
and deals they agree to carry out benefit James more than Harry. It is only later in
the text, and through a process of gradual existential reflection, that Harry begins
to feel disillusioned with the lifestyle. After beginning a relationship with Doreen,
a woman he meets earlier in the novel, he reflects: ‘however romantic it may sound
when it is described by unrealistic novelists the “Bohemian life” is a bore. The
reader of such a novel adds the extra dimension of detachment. But the events
themselves, flowing past, have a taste of futility; they are leading to nothing’ (117).
Behind the apparent boredom and futility of daily existence as a social dropout,
however, Harry still retains a sense in which freedom from established society is a
better option than conforming. Later in the novel, James offers Harry a more
committed understanding of the philosophical and political ethos behind a
bohemian existence when he describes the moment he realised his adopted lifestyle:

There they were, all on their way to make money for the boss. They’d got caught
in the big machine. They didn’t know what it was like to be alive, to be free. They
just never get a chance from the moment they are born. They get educated. That’s
the trouble. Big Brother tells ’em they’ve got to serve the community [. . .] But I’m
not going to join the game. I’d rather be free. (135)

Although perhaps reflecting something of the romanticism attached to

bohemianism, Harry at this moment is impressed to a certain extent by James’s
philosophical commitment to the outsider lifestyle. James’s character thus becomes
a representative figure of the ambivalences and paradoxes inherent in bohemianism
and that freedom from mainstream society can never represent an absolute
freedom, as the individual is forced to negotiate and accommodate prevailing
 Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On 197

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

Calypso

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

styles such as gangsta rap. As Imruh Bakari has pointed out with respect to the
adoption by mainstream audiences of black music styles in Britain:

Fuelled by iconoclastic narratives of sexual exploits and drug usage, Black music
[. . .] was established in the popular consciousness with a certain attractive
deviancy. Yet for [. . .] Black people [. . .] the perspective on this music and its
associated behaviour was much more sophisticated than the stereotyped image
implied. (100)

As we can see in other texts we have already looked at such as MacInnes’s

Absolute Beginners and Gibbons’s Here Be Dragons, part of the attractiveness of
the subcultural lifestyle is a perceived exoticism that is often problematically
associated with stereotypical and culturally constructed black identities.
The calypso is a popular oral form that can be traced back to the West African
griot tradition but which developed a distinct style in the twentieth century in
Trinidad and Tobago. The form often expresses the concerns, anxieties and
subjugation of a colonized people. Its essential modes are popular lyrical
expression, comedy and satire. As Peter Manuel defines them: ‘calypso texts, as
expressions of popular sentiment, often acquire the nature of important political
statements to be discussed in Parliament and the news media’ (80). In the 1950s,
the form gained popular airplay in Britain as radio stations often played
(politically watered-down) examples resulting in the commercial success of
artists such as Harry Belafonte, Lord Beginner and Lord Kitchener. Calypso thus
represented a palatable form of cultural otherness for mainstream white
audiences, while at the same time offering a vehicle of expression for the
experiences of black and Asian Caribbeans settling in the UK .
One writer who was particularly interested in the satirical and formal
properties of calypso was Sam Selvon, a writer who moved to London in the
early 1950s and published his fourth novel, The Lonely Londoners, in 1956. This
novel describes the experiences of the Windrush generation and the difficulties
they encountered in trying to find employment and residence in a society that
was at best insensitive to their situation and at worst outright racist.
Selvon’s treatment of subcultural identity is of a different order than the
novels that we have discussed so far in as much as the novel not only describes
the practices and behaviours of characters associated with a subculture but
embeds a popular musical style within the very narrative structure and style of
the fiction. Indeed, several critics have identified connections between Selvon’s
style and the form (and subject matter) of calypso songs (Fabre, Nasta, Ramchand,
Thieme, Wyke). Susheila Nasta, for example, suggests ‘the narrative pace of the
 Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On 199

novel is partly driven by the influence of Trinidadian calypso’ (xiii). Similarly,

Kenneth Ramchand cites the calypso form as an important influence for the way
in which The Lonely Londoners can be seen as ‘an admirable illustration of how
writing can feed on oral literature and on the stuff that oral literature itself draws
upon without losing its identity as writing’ (10). The connection between
narrative technique and calypso can be identified in a number of ways. First, the
calypso song is quite often presented as a narrative rather than the lyrical
expression of individual emotion that is the stock-in-trade of the conventional
pop song. In this sense it shares with ballad and blues and folk revival movements
of the 1950s the desire to offer up stories in song, often as expressions of
marginalization or political commentary. Second, The Lonely Londoners has an
episodic structure that relates experiential stories that often read like prose
equivalents of calypso ballads. Third, the calypso often uses comic situations,
picaresque characters and carnival sensibilities as ways of expressing deeper
concerns, again an approach shared with Selvon’s novel. Fourth, the calypso
singer adopts a style of language that stresses a localized Caribbean dialect, or
creolized language.
This last point can be identified in the narrative voice Selvon adopts in The
Lonely Londoners. Unlike some of the novels of subcultural expression we have
looked at so far such as MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners and Wilson’s Adrift in
Soho, which are relayed in the first person, Selvon’s novel has a third-person,
extradiegetic narrator. However, like MacInnes’s teenage narrator, this voice
expresses itself in forms that equate to the vernacular expressions of the members
of the subculture. Indeed, Selvon has commented on his decision to use creolized
expression in The Lonely Londoners as a liberating moment:

when I started to work on my novel The Lonely Londoners I had this great
problem with it that I began to write it in Standard English and it would just not
move along [. . .] It occurred to me that perhaps I should try to do both the
narrative and the dialogue in this form [Trinidadian form of the language . . .] I
started to experiment with it and the book just went very rapidly along [. . .]
With this particular book I just felt that the language that I used worked and
expressed exactly what I wanted it to express. (Nazareth, 421)

The adoption of a creolized style for the third-person narrative achieves two
effects. It establishes a continuum between the subcultural characters being
represented and the narrative voice describing them, an effect that disrupts the
conventional power relationship of implied author over marginalized subject in
much sociologically-influenced fiction. In addition, the rejection of Standard
200 The 1950s

English suggests a decolonization of the language and consequently a

redistribution of power in the text along ethnic and national lines. This aspect of
Selvon’s linguistic technique thus establishes him as a postcolonial writer; as
Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin argue, the use of non-standard English is one of the
important ways in which a postcolonial writer can express a cultural distance
from the established literary conventions of the colonizing power: ‘The crucial
function of language as a medium of power demands that postcolonial writing
define itself by seizing the language of the centre and re-placing it in a discourse
fully adapted to the colonized place’ (38). The register given to the omniscient
narrator in The Lonely Londoners therefore represents such a postcolonial
manipulation of language:

And this sort of thing was happening at a time when the English people starting to
make rab about how too much West Indians coming to the country: this was a
time, when any corner you turn, is ten to one you bound to bounce up a spade. (24)

As Cliff Lashley has argued, the manipulation of language in such texts implicitly
challenges the power relationship between the colonizer and the colonized (48).
In terms of subcultural identity, the adoption of creolized forms, the demotic,
slang and argot parallels the distinctive use of voice in the calypso. Take, for
example, this verse from a calypso recorded by Lord Beginner which describes a
famous victory by the West Indies over England at Lords in 1950:

West Indies was feeling homely,

Their audience had them happy.
When Washbrook’s century had ended,
West Indies voices all blended.
Hats went in the air.
They jumped and shouted without fear;
So at Lord’s was the scenery
Bound to go down in history.

Although jocular, there is an implicit political context to the mild subversion of

‘official’ language here and this linguistic influence clearly parallels Selvon’s text.
In terms of the politics of literary form, Selvon draws influence from the orality
of calypso that corresponds with Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the heteroglossic
function of language to disrupt the ‘verbal-ideological life of the nation and the
epoch [. . . a] heteroglossia consciously opposed to [. . .] literary language’ (273).
Calypso, however, does not only offer a formal influence for Selvon, it also
becomes part of the cultural texture of The Lonely Londoners, and is given several
 Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On 201

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

Conclusion

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

Notes

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

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

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 7

Detective Fiction and the Prose of Everyday

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

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

205
206 The 1950s

dell’arte, in the 1920s and 1930s the detective story was what intellectuals read
when they were off duty, rather than a vital part of the cultural milieu.
This changed after the Second World War, as the detective story became
affected by the uncertainty and cultural transition of British society as a whole,
and its practitioners encountered the influences of existentialism and other
modern and Continental ideas. W.H. Auden’s article on Christie (Auden 1948)
can be counted as the first serious consideration of Christie’s work, though
thorough investigation of her novels will reveal them to be neither as simple,
nor as formulaic as Auden would have it. Furthermore, Auden did not especially
consider Christie’s gender. A fascinating, even constitutive quirk here is that
detective fiction’s major practitioners in the 1950s in terms of sales, critical
esteem and literary reputation were all women, all born in the 1890s or 1900s,
and all with signature detectives. Part of the burden of these four writers is that
they had constructed the personae of their prominent detectives in earlier
and far different times, during what Robert Graves and Alan Hodge called the
long week-end of the 1920s and early 1930s. After the war, they had to adapt
their originally outrageous and at times frivolous personae to the new and
more serious Age of Anxiety, to use Auden’s 1947 term (2011). Christie did
this by more or less working around her principal protagonist, Hercule
Poirot, maintaining his customary foibles and mannerisms, but putting him
in contexts which inevitably addressed social and cultural transformation.
Allingham did this by minimizing the appearances of her eccentric, aristocratic
sleuth, Albert Campion, so that he did not obtrude on plots that became more
urban, contemporary and unpredictable. Marsh and Mitchell created detectives
Inspector Roderick Alleyn and Mrs (later Dame) Beatrice Adela L’Estrange
Bradley who were professionals rather than amateurs, and could work within
larger systems.
What is notable in all four cases is that these writers started out as very young
women and became popular and bestselling in their thirties, giving them
forty- or fifty-year careers which inevitably spanned periods of historical
transformation. Moreover, their detectives – even Christie’s later female detective,
Miss Marple – had all been established before the war, and thus were required
to change as society changed. But consider: the writers did keep the detectives.
And this makes them one of the few instances of formal, stylistic and thematic
continuity in British fiction from the 1920s to the 1950s, through periods of
depression and war in which literary fashions changed frequently. As Campion
says in the 1955 The Beckoning Lady (published as The Estate of the Beckoning
Lady in the USA ), ‘I’ve lived through the Jazz Age, the Age of Appeasement, the
 Detective Fiction and the Prose of Everyday Life 207

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

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

Wreaking havoc: Allingham’s The Tiger in the Smoke

The value of this disjunctive continuity is evident in Allingham’s The Tiger in

the Smoke (1952). In it, her formerly foppish and mannered detective, Albert
Campion, investigates a crime involving a war widow, gang wars and the
urban detritus of contemporary London. To the reader used to Allingham’s
prewar Campion stories, with their country gambols, preposterous villains
and air of diversion and game, this dark, urban, explosive tale came as a
shock. In the novel, a master criminal, Jack Havoc, after a lacuna caused by his
imprisonment, re-commandeers a gang of his conspirers who had during
the war been his platoon mates. Havoc lures his gang with the promise of
a treasure he had heard about from a deceased wartime colleague, Major
Elginbrodde, which is said to be located somewhere off the coast of Europe. A
rogue member of Havoc’s gang attempts to find information from Elginbrodde’s
widow, Meg, by impersonating her late husband; this brings Meg, her current
fiancé, Geoffrey Levett, and ultimately Albert Campion, his wife Amanda
and Inspector Luke into the plot. Once Havoc breaks jail and reaffirms his
leadership of the gang, disposing of the rogue member who had importuned
Meg, it becomes clear that he is not just a swindler who would kill for money but
a master criminal, who embodies the moral disorder referenced by deceased
wartime colleague, Major Elginbrodde, as well as the barely suppressed havoc
of postwar London. In his dialogue with the elderly churchman Canon Hubert
Avril, who had been his teacher and mentor as a child, Havoc states his philosophy
of life:
 Detective Fiction and the Prose of Everyday Life 209

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

Havoc attributes his hard, impersonal criminality to what he calls the ‘Science of
Luck’ (200), a ruthless exploitation of his own gifts, executed with a Nietszchean
brio. Realizing the system has no place for him, Havoc has used his talents to
carve out a place as an enemy of the system. But there is a concrete sociological
grounding to this oppositional ambition: as the Canon bravely reveals to him,
the family treasure of Havoc’s late wartime commander Major Elginbrodde is
hidden in the same Normandy that was the target of the Allied landings on
D-Day. Additionally, Havoc’s gang is comprised of his former wartime mates,
who have not been commensurately rewarded by society for their service, and
thus, though in all cases lacking Havoc’s evil, his ambition, or both, involuntarily
turn to him for leadership. Earlier, Havoc had asked Avril if he was his father,
and although the Canon is not (and thus has a ‘pure’ relationship to Havoc), there
is a sense that Havoc is both an existential and Oedipal rebel against the
established patriarchal order; an outsider seeking the order and meaning
he associates with the inside world. This is a search which he has reified into
an obsession with the treasure at Saint-Odile-sur-Mer in Normandy and the
ruthless killing of anyone who might stand in the way of his attainment of it.
Havoc’s obsession with Elginbrodde’s family treasure underscores the doubling
between Havoc and Elginbrodde, despite their very different social positions,
and elucidates the malevolence Meg senses when she believes her husband may
be alive, a wartime revenant resurfacing in a postwar world.
This doubling is yet another way Havoc evades stark villainy and, in a twisted
way, even embodies a sort of freedom in the novel. Rather than launching a
thorough counter-argument in the mode of the Dostoyevsky of The Brothers
Karamazov, Canon Avril makes such a riposte tacitly by revealing, seemingly
foolishly, the location of the treasure to Havoc, giving him the key to his own fate
and at least in that sense accepting the radical freedom Havoc’s existentialist self-
authorization embraces. Although sympathy is with Canon Avril, Allingham is
not directing the reader to any religious resolution; neither in the rest of her
work nor biographically was Allingham polemical about Christianity (unlike,
for instance, Dorothy L. Sayers). Instead Canon Avril’s status remains that of
Havoc’s childhood counsellor, a link to a time before the war and connected to
the possibility that there is still a vestige of Havoc’s childhood innocence.
210 The 1950s

Although Jack Havoc’s amorality, malice, vulnerability and uncanny charm

make him a singular villain in British detective fiction in this era, Christie and
Marsh also feature ‘Sartrean’ villains in contemporaneous stories. Alice Ferrebe
has spoken of ‘the British reworking of existentialism’s original tenets’ (2012:100)
and has analysed Nigel Dennis’s Cards of Identity as a book determined to
discredit ‘Sartrean’ theories of the self ’ (49). Broadly speaking, Allingham,
Christie and Marsh all wrote novels in the 1950s that were allied with this
discrediting project, indeed out of a more manifest element of opposition
than was true of Dennis, but also revealing both a fascination with existential
thought and an acknowledgement of existentialism as the current mode of the
era. In Christie’s They Came to Baghdad (1951) Edward Goring, the lover
of the novel’s protagonist Victoria Jones, tries to woo her with his vision of
authoritarian, existentialist futurism (the surname’s resemblance to the Nazi
figure cannot be accidental). Victoria’s rejection of his suit is partially inspired by
the archaeological remains of Iraq – not their monumental grandeur, but the
way they reveal evidence that the past had its own everyday reality. Victoria says
she used to think archaeology was just ‘royal graves and palaces’ (Christie 1951:
227). Now she realizes that archaeology is also about ‘the ordinary everyday
people – people like me’ (227). Thus she rejects Edward’s invitation to join him
among the new elite of the existentially superior by affirming her solidarity with
the ordinary. The mundane, the prose of everyday life, is the ultimate rejoinder
to the exploitative amorality of the master criminal.
Victoria’s decision is set against a backdrop not just of social, but also temporal
change. The year 1950 is specifically mentioned in the novel (19), and can be
read in the light of Claire Seiler’s analysis of the mid-century novel as an arena
of suspension, shift and new ideas. Similarly, in Marsh’s 1951 Opening Night,
the actor’s assistant Jacques Doré, or ‘Jacko’, mentions Sartre, and John James
Rutherford, the playwright-villain of the novel, invokes existentialist amorality
for his permission to plagiarize another author: ‘Was it George Moore who said
that the difference between his quotations and those of the next man was that he
left out the inverted commas?’ (Marsh 1951: 234). Rutherford deems those who
believe an author should have to credit his sources ‘uncivilized’ and ‘bourgeois’:
instead, he represents, to his mind, a new, modern master morality.
This might all seem a stereotypical British fear of radical Continental
philosophy, and an association of murderers in detective stories with Sartre, who
publicly identified himself as a Communist. Indeed, the British detective story
as a genre has been rebuked as insufficiently existential (as in William Stowe’s
influential 1983 article ‘From Semiotics to Hermeneutics’), even as the three
 Detective Fiction and the Prose of Everyday Life 211

novelists’ linkage of existential views with murderous behaviour acts to deflect

such critique. It is thus ironic that Christie, once scorned as the antipode to
trendy French philosophers, has in recent years found her cause taken up by
French writers such as Pierre Bayard and Michel Houellebecq. And it is notable
that in the 1950s Allingham’s The Tiger in the Smoke, Christie’s They Came to
Baghdad, and Marsh’s Opening Night refused to flinch from aspects of postwar,
existentialist French philosophy. Indeed, as the 1956 film adaptation of The Tiger
in the Smoke vividly demonstrates, there is a commonality between the novel’s
atmosphere and that of film noir, noted for its existential echoes. Established in
America as representative of ‘Brit noir’, the film shares that genre’s atmosphere of
moral uncertainty or even crisis, suggested by its deployment of dense, shadowy
fog (Savage 2012). The film, like the novel, shares the noir genre’s extension
of sympathy to the rebel or outsider, as well as its existential pessimism. Despite
an ethos of radical freedom, its philosophical perspective is also inclined to a
paradoxical nihilism or fatalism.
Allingham’s criminal, Jack Havoc, is not totally separated from the world that
opposes him. In his original identity as ‘Johnny Cash’, he was not only the ward
of Canon Avril, but also the neighbour and playmate of the young Amanda
Campion, sister of Lord Pontisbright. There is thus a social intimacy between
Havoc and the normative establishment that seeks to police him, an intimacy
which can indicate the unravelling of class hierarchy in postwar Britain. On the
other hand, Havoc’s psychosis could be regarded as estranging him from this
social inclusion, which is interestingly mimed by Amanda’s observation that his
behaviour resembles that of Johnny Cash. But unlike Canon Avril – who fully
discloses his understanding that Cash is Havoc – Amanda never unequivocally
acknowledges this. Amanda outwits him by exploiting his vulnerability, but
never confronts him directly:

Her sudden laughter was the most terrible sound he had ever heard, for he knew
what she was going to say a fraction of a second before he heard the words.
‘You look like the little boy next door, Johnny Cash, who took my toy theatre
and tore it up to get the glitter out of it, and got nothing, poor darling but old bits
of paper and an awful row.’ (305)

By not directly revealing to Havoc that she knows he is Cash, Amanda casts the
tacit as more effective than the direct. This is also a strength of Allingham’s style,
which though economical and austere in its diction is tacit, rather than explicit,
in its thematic messages. The intimate knowledge of the criminal possessed in
different ways by Amanda and Canon Avril provides them psychological insight
212 The 1950s

into Havoc. Yet it also makes them reluctant to expose him. Much of the novel’s
suspense lies in the reader’s fear that this reluctance will permit Havoc to slip
through the meshes of justice. Allingham makes readers wonder why the
investigators are so slow to capture Havoc, extending both the intrigue of
the action and asking readers to question their own convictions. Havoc is an
antihero. But the reader is invited to feel considerable sympathy with him, despite
his murderous and alienated mentality. The novel closes with Havoc’s death
from his own perspective, with a lucid estrangement reminiscent of Camus’s
Meursault:

Beyond the bay the sea was restless, scarred by long shadows and pitted with
bright flecks where the last of the winter sun had caught it. But the pool was
quiet and very still. It looked dark. A man could creep in there and sleep soft and
long. It seemed to him that he had no decision to make and, now that he knew
himself to be fallible, no one to question. Presently he let his feet slide gently
forward. The body was never found. (307)

Though Allingham condemns Havoc’s criminality, there is a certain pleasure in

his evasion of authority even at the end. There is also a sense that Havoc himself
sees through his own limitations and that of his ideology:

The Science of Luck was an impersonal force, vast as the slipstream of the
planets, relentless as a river winding down a hill. He had realized that from the
beginning. That was why Avril had frightened him so when he had appeared to
say the same thing. (303)

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

Mysterious autoethnographies

As Allingham’s biographer, Julia Jones, has made clear, Allingham maintained

a deep connection throughout her life with the county of Essex, spending her
youth there and living there her last two decades in the village of Tolleshunt
 Detective Fiction and the Prose of Everyday Life 213

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

landed estate in After The Funeral to the girls’ boarding school in Cat among
the Pigeons (1959). This may seem faintly absurd, but it is also curiously fitting.
Poirot, who started his fictional career as a Belgian refugee during the First
World War, is a man without a country, an unassimilated refugee. Not English
after forty years’ residency, he is not French either, but Belgian – a nationality less
significant to the English imagination. An expert brought in by the English to
solve problems that have defeated them, Poirot incorporates the outsider element
that makes autoethnography possible.
For Ngaio Marsh, this perspective is accomplished by another route, with
reference to Marsh’s New Zealand origins and obvious Māori first name.
Allingham’s detective Campion is an outsider of another sort, as the name is an
assumed one, and his real identity is that of a European aristocrat or royal heir,
connected presumably with a European, most likely German or Austrian, house.
Thus Campion does not strictly belong to the English rural setting of novels like
The Beckoning Lady, either in terms of his social class or his nationality. But what
makes Campion a real outsider is his very status as a detective. The community
summons Campion to heal the wounds of death and criminality in its midst. Yet
the detective very often reveals the criminal as far more central to the community’s
identity than the original suspect. Furthermore, because his very eccentricity
and talent exclude Campion from normative life, there can be no possibility of
organic harmony. Similarly, in Gladys Mitchell’s books, detective Mrs Bradley’s
professional expertise is what helps her solve social problems, but also confirms
her status as perennial outsider, without a conventional place in the community.
In The Beckoning Lady, Campion cannot be a part of the community even
though he is the brother-in-law of Lord Pontisbright, the local landowner, who
has now sold his land and spends most of his time in South Africa. Further
disruption occurs when Minnie and Tonker Cassand’s lavish midsummer party is
unsettled by the knowledge that Minnie’s honorary uncle, William Faraday, who
appeared to have died naturally in his sleep the previous week, has been murdered.
A festive affirmation of English happiness at the height of summer sunlight is
shadowed by tragedy. But although the detective can treat the wound revealed by
the crime, he cannot cure it. The old order cannot be reconstituted, suggested by
the way the most compelling and three-dimensional character in the novel is the
cleaning woman at the pub, Miss Diane, whose ‘cheerful roar’ (Allingham 1955:
217) is the backbeat of the novel’s moral affirmation. Additionally, Inspector Luke,
the working-class police officer who is as much the detective as Campion himself,
crosses class boundaries and falls in love with the socialite Prunella Scroop-Dory.
Minnie herself claims to be as ‘American as the Eagle’ (70) and alleges descent
 Detective Fiction and the Prose of Everyday Life 215

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

Christie in the 1950s

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

canon in which she had pride of place and in which, in contradistinction to the
highbrow canon, women were considered major practitioners. Nor was her
status entirely middlebrow and popular. She was regularly reviewed in the Times
Literary Supplement, mainly by Philip John Stead, a literary criminologist, but
at times by more ‘literary’ reviewers like Julian Mclaren-Ross, who reviewed
They Came to Baghdad in 1951. Though detective fiction is often associated in
publishing terms with the cheap paperback, all of Christie’s books were first
published in hardcover. In the UK her hardcovers were genre-branded as part of
the Collins Crime Club, but in the US she was published by Dodd, Mead, a trade
hardcover publisher with whom she had a symbiotic relationship: the firm gave
her literary credibility in the US , while she gave the firm a star author it could
rely upon for annual sales, as throughout the 1950s she produced roughly a book
a year. Christie’s, Marsh’s and Allingham’s books all frequently had different titles
in the US and UK , a fact testifying to divergent marketing practices in the two
areas, but also to the growing internationalization, and in particular, the
increasingly transatlantic nature, of book publishing.
Another way Christie remained rooted in the literary world that only half-
accommodated her is by intertextuality. In Mrs McGinty’s Dead (1952), Robert
Browning’s poem ‘Evelyn Hope’ plays a role in identifying the murderer. In
Dead Man’s Folly, the Stubbses are like the Crofts in Jane Austen’s Persuasion
in occupying the traditional estate of another family, the Folliotts, while Amy
Folliott, apparently the last of her line, is exiled to a nearby cottage, like the Elliots
in Austen’s novel. Hattie Stubbs, the wife of the new occupant of the estate, is
a foreigner from Yugoslavia, and her revealed criminality is not unlike that of
Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Like that character, Hattie is not
entirely at fault, as a young English rapscallion drives her to it, compromising the
xenophobia inherent in a foreigner committing the crime. These intertextual
echoes might have hardly occurred to a reader who picks up a Christie novel
for its puzzle or for the diversion of an absorbing plot. But Christie references
some of the major novels in the English canon, all of them female-authored.
She also utilizes an intertextuality of crime, as when the Lily Gamboll case in
Mrs McGinty’s Dead clearly alludes to the notorious 1892 Lizzie Borden murders,
which are cited by name in Ordeal by Innocence (1958).
Christie’s work of the 1950s sees the emergence of Miss Marple as a major
detective, of equal prominence to Poirot. Miss Marple was Agatha Christie’s
own personal favourite, and remains literature’s most famous female fictional
detective. Unlike Hercule Poirot, she is an insider, long established in the rural
hamlet of St. Mary Mead. Like Hercule Poirot, however, her appearance is
 Detective Fiction and the Prose of Everyday Life 217

deceiving – the ‘gentle fluffy old lady’ façade identified by one of the characters
in 1964’s A Caribbean Mystery (Christie 2011a: 139), has by then long been
useful in lulling suspects into a false sense of security. But in point of fact, Miss
Marple uses the everyday wisdom she has acquired through a lifetime as an
ordinary Englishwoman living in the prosy everyday world of a rural village to
investigate private and domestic lives affected by immediate postwar scarcity,
and then by the subsequent cultural change of the ‘You’ve Never Had It So
Good’ period. Yet Miss Marple in this era also tends to evaporate, to become
almost incorporeal. For instance, in They Do it with Mirrors (1952), Christie
foregrounds the multigenerational drama of a thrice-married woman, Carrie
Louise Serrocold, and her children, as well as the employees and inmates of the
reform school for boys she helps run; Marple is notable only at the end, appearing
almost apologetically to offer a solution to the crime. The motives of this
disappearing act of Miss Marple’s are mysterious: she seems to will herself into
invisibility, like Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat.
When she does manifest, we are most likely to be directed to consider Miss
Marple’s age. When we first meet her, in Murder at the Vicarage (1930), she is
between sixty-five and seventy years old, and she is then labelled as a ‘typical
elderly spinster’ (Christie 2011c: 72). In a novel as late as At Bertram’s Hotel
(1965), her age is still regularly referenced and integrated into that novel’s
theme of changing times. There is often a suggestion she is a Victorian period
piece, and an ossified example of the older generation. Yet old age and her roots
in an earlier area are also powerful advantages for her, making her an uncanny
outlier, another kind of foreigner in a society that now places a premium on
the young, the new, the up-to-date. A younger Miss Marple would not possess
these perspectival advantages – her wisdom is a consequence of her having
lived so very long. Because she has secured a Victorian-Edwardian aspect of
England that provides a sense of a Deep England, her memory permits her to
form parallels between past and present, creating continuity within what might
otherwise be disruption.
Certainly all of Christie’s mysteries address the issue of changing times – that
sense of a break with the past is present in all Christie’s work, and fundamentally
speaks to the cataclysm of the First World War – a perspective that is of course
shared with almost all writers of her century. The Second World War produced
yet another definitive discontinuity, one that Christie addresses consistently in
her novels written after 1945. And yet at the same time, Miss Marple is not a
creature of the postwar world, and indeed not a creature of the twentieth century.
In At Bertram’s Hotel, for instance, she recalls visiting the place sixty years ago,
218 The 1950s

when she was fourteen, which suggests she was born in 1890, and raised in what
is remembered as the long golden afternoon of the British Empire. But, as Alison
Light notes, Christie gives ‘little support’ to the idea of ‘a more authentic, proper
past or to a reassertion of an older way of life’ (1981:105). Miss Marple’s purpose
is to point out that although things change, some things remain the same; one
major purpose of her analogies is to mirror the past and the present. In this way,
she is there to establish continuity rather than its opposite.
In addition to her portrayal of the elderly Miss Marple, Christie is also
exceptional at depicting women in young middle age who are single and have no
conventional future, such as Deirdre Henderson in Mrs. McGinty’s Dead, and
Mildred Strete in They Do it with Mirrors: both are women with dowdy names
and domineering mothers, and have been put on the shelf by society. (These
themes are also explored in A Daughter’s A Daughter, a non-mystery novel
Christie published in 1953 as Mary Westmacott.) But Christie is equally adept at
depicting confident young women mastering those professional roles open
to them, as in Miss Grosvenor in A Pocket Full of Rye who is an ‘incredibly
glamorous blonde’ (1953: 2) and maintains ‘poise’ both in serving a demanding
boss and then coping with murder. If, as Niamh Baker states, anti-feminist
polemics in this era insisted that ‘feminism was hostile to true femininity’,
characters like Miss Grosvenor suggest a resistance to that assertion (Baker
1989: 18): a young, glamorous woman is shown exercising as much power in the
workplace as is possible under contemporary conditions. Christie also depicts
older women who have a secure hold on their dignity and secrets, such as Helen
Abernethie in Funerals Are Fatal (1953), and Cora Gillespie, the murderer in
that same novel. 1950s society offers so few truly rewarding career possibilities
to superfluous working-class women in late middle age, that Cora’s crime is
rendered comprehensible, if not pardonable. In addition to the world of the
detective and of the crime itself, Christie offers superb portraits of women and
their predicaments. These are explored most completely in the Westmacott
novels, such as The Burden (1956), about the consequences of an excessive tie
between sisters, but are present in the mysteries as well.
Even the gender of the detective can prove more fungible than it at first
appears. That several Poirot stories of the period, including Funerals are Fatal,
were, when filmed, adapted by replacing Poirot with Miss Marple (played by
Margaret Rutherford) indicates that Christie’s male detective had at this point
become at least semi-dispensable. In Cat among the Pigeons (1959) he does not
appear until the last third, and his presence feels somewhat extrinsic in a novel
with an almost exclusively female cast of characters. But there is also something
 Detective Fiction and the Prose of Everyday Life 219

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

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

Insiders and outsiders: Agatha Christie’s

A Murder is Announced (1950)

A Murder is Announced is Christie’s major novel of the 1950s, and a classic

example of the way her work investigates not simply a murder, but the social
history of her era. It is set in a changing postwar world; the little village of
Chipping Cleghorn is instantly a familiar Christie setting. But this is Chipping
Cleghorn in the wake of the Second World War, and there are a significant
number of characters who are either European or have spent some time in
Europe. Additionally, the postwar English have become more ambulatory. As
Inspector Craddock begins his investigation, he laments how the ration books
and identity cards of the war, which include neither photographs nor fingerprints,
have facilitated impersonation. People can change identities and settle into a
small town with no questions asked; one can even reinvent oneself in a mode far
more likely in a more mobile and less insulated society. It is as if the postwar
world has positively invited reinvention. Miss Marple suggests that, since the war:

Every village and small country place is full of people who’ve just come and
settled there without any ties to bring them. The big houses have been sold, and
the cottages have been converted and changed. And people just come – and all
you know is what they say of themselves. They’ve come, you see, from all over the
 Detective Fiction and the Prose of Everyday Life 221

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

In particular the narrative makes a point of bringing our attention to European

immigrants in the character of our first victim, Rudi Scherz, and our last would-
be victim, Letty’s housekeeper Mitzi Kosinski. There are also English characters
who are connected to figures with European names such as Randall Goedler and
Dmitri Stamfordis. This more diverse country village reflects the way the Second
World War has changed England on a local level, and this description of a less
homogenous England speaks, as Gildersleeve suggested, to Christie’s engagement
with the problems of modernity. In Chipping Cleghorn, those who are not
typically English are targets of fear and distrust and immediately become Other.
Yet in a Christie novel the true Other, the murderer, is often close to home, and
often, indeed, embedded within it. There are secrets and secret identities that
have nothing to do with those scapegoated as Other, but instead are found within
English society itself.
Christie uses foreign incomers to comment on English insularity. For instance,
when the Polish refugee Mitzi Kosinski prepares a delicious cake for guests at
Little Paddocks, Christie includes this bit of table talk:

‘These foreigners certainly understand confectionery,’ said Miss Hinchliffe.

‘What they can’t make is a plain boiled pudding.’

Everybody was respectfully silent, thought it seemed to be hovering on Patrick’s

lips to ask if anyone really wanted a plain boiled pudding. (180)

It is Mitzi’s ‘European’ cake, nicknamed Delicious Death, that has been assimilated
into English life to such an extent that British actor Jane Asher produced the
cake and its recipe to celebrate Agatha Christie’s 120th Birthday. In the novel,
however, the underappreciated refugee Mitzi is viewed with suspicion and
distrust by the locals. She is also the final target of the murderous impulses of her
English employer, syntonic with the way the previous victims of Mitzi’s employer
are also outside the normative standard of social inclusion: a Swiss immigrant, a
woman whose decline into old age is believed to warrant a ‘mercy-killing’, and
a lesbian.
Christie’s first crime scene – a playful ‘Murder Party’ gone wrong – is a
deliberately cluttered one, and even though the subsequent crimes become less
disordered, there will always be a certain amount of muddle which we may find
difficult to truly make tidy. Miss Marple, together with Inspector Craddock,
will eventually sort out the clutter of clues, and additionally Miss Marple’s sharp
222 The 1950s

memory allows her to consult previous incidents that she senses are analogous
to the present one; these analogous incidents will provide her with clarifying
motives. Even more than the intentional clutter of the first crime, Christie’s
establishment of Letty Blacklock, the party’s apparent hostess, as its prime
victim is her major tactic of intrigue – the victim status directs us away from
considering her as the murderer. The use of twins, sisters, couples of various
kinds also complicates things – the doubleness of the murderer Lotty Blacklock,
who disguised herself as her sister Letty, is repeated in the use of other doubles
or couples – the twin sisters known as Pip and Emma, especially. Christie also
confuses the reader about names; the close resemblance between the names
Letty (short for Letitia) and Lotty (short for Charlotte), for example, and the
assumption that ‘Pip’ is a boy’s name, when in fact it is short for Philippa.
Although Lotty’s second murder is not the carefully staged confusion of the
first, it is still an imaginative crime, and once again requires a party, and a cake
so scrumptious it is praised as ‘Delicious Death’. The persiflage of a ‘Murder
Party’ crime and then a birthday party murder are calculated both to delight and
disturb the reader – but Christie will see to it that, for the reader, the ingredient
of delight will go missing in subsequent crimes.
Like the Murder Party, Bunny’s ‘Delicious Death’ birthday party is also a
festive occasion, but is calculated to upset us more – unlike the character of Rudi,
we have come to know Bunny, and to sympathetically identify with her. We learn
that Rudi has been killed because he could identify Letty as Lotty Blacklock, but
essentially he means nothing to our murderer. The death of the second victim,
Dora Bunner or ‘Bunny’, introduces issues that are both more central and more
complex. Dora is murdered by her good friend Lotty Blacklock because she has
referred to her by her true name, and not as the sister she is impersonating. It is
Dora who has kept faith with the murderer’s true identity – she is the keeper of
Lotty, the impaired and wounded sister of the successful Letty, or at least the
keeper of the memory of Lotty. Like Lotty, Dora has been broken by the world,
and finds old age confusing, possibly because, like Lotty, she is on one level still
a child. Dora is often referred to by the childish nickname of Bunny, and was
Lotty’s accomplice in setting up her fairy-tale world, colluding in her make-
believe persona as Letty.
Dora fails to sustain the Letty fantasy, however, and it is the extent to which
Dora is in touch with reality that makes her a danger to her companion. At this
point, however, Lotty is not only still clinging to her make-believe world, she has
convinced herself she is doing good by putting the senescent Dora out of her
misery – even sending her off with a wonderful party and delicious cake. This
 Detective Fiction and the Prose of Everyday Life 223

idea of the ‘altruistic murderer’ is one that Christie had explored in Sad Cypress
in 1940 and in greater depth in her novel Curtain, written during the Second
World War but unpublished until 1975.
The death of the third victim, Amy Murgatroyd, is not one in which Miss
Marple detects any effort to provide a high-minded euthanistic motive. There is
also no ‘murder game’ artistry or birthday party featuring a ‘delicious death’
cake; she is simply, sadly and summarily strangled by an increasingly desperate
Lotty. For the reader, the murder of Murgatroyd may be the most upsetting
of the crimes, since she had much to live for, and her relationship with her
partner, Miss Hinchcliffe, was one of such deep affection. In some ways these two
elderly lesbians are reflections of Charlotte and Bunny, but whereas the former
are living a fantasy life, Murgatroyd and Hinch are a couple who live in the
‘real world’, in the prose of everyday life, and who also serve as a salute to
enduring ‘traditional’ dyed-in-the-wool Englishness, elsewhere often treated
sceptically or satirically. It was Hinch after all, who flew the flag of traditional
English ‘boiled pudding’. But while elsewhere Christie expresses doubts about
English understatement, both culinary and otherwise, here Hinch’s reticence
while mourning is an indication of deep feeling, not its avoidance or suppression.
Rather than demonstrating any kind of marginality as lesbians, one can call
Hinch and Murgatroyd this novel’s most typically ‘English’ couple – their
devotion to each other is reminiscent of the ‘Darby and Joan’ couple of British
proverb. Interestingly, it is only when Hinch is captured and led astray by the
fantasy-plot of Letty’s murder game that tragedy results.
The novel’s fourth victim, however, is a character who interrogates these
values of restraint and reticence, and as far as Chipping Cleghorn is concerned,
she is the village’s ‘least English’ character. A refugee from Poland, Mitzi is subject
to the prejudice of all the reserved British people she encounters, who are unused
to her expressive personality and tend to assume that she exaggerates for effect,
or, even, tells deliberate lies – that her demonstrative personality and theatrical
disposition are the equivalent of lying.
In point of fact, it is an Englishwoman, Letty/Lotty, who is the malevolent liar
– and there are some other fibbing Englishwomen in this novel as well, including
Miss Marple herself. It is she who must coach Mitzi in the lie she tells in order to
lure Lotty into attempting to murder her; furthermore, in order to recruit Mitzi
as part of her scheme Miss Marple confesses, ‘I told her stories of deeds done by
girls in the Resistance movements, some of them true, and some of them I’m
afraid, invented’ (287). This teaming of Mitzi and Miss Marple produces yet
another couple in a novel filled with single women who partner with other single
224 The 1950s

women. For a brief period, Mitzi unwittingly collaborates with Letty through
her production of the ‘Delicious Death’ cake, whose chocolate ingredient will
require the allergic Dora to take the aspirin Letty has adulterated. In the end,
however, Mitzi becomes the partner of the Detective, transforming her status in
the community from that of exclusion to inclusion. Furthermore, there is also
not only the suggestion that the villagers of Chipping Cleghorn might profit by
a cultivation of the more passionate temperament demonstrated by Mitzi, there
is some indication that Lotty herself degenerated into a twisted murderer
precisely because she had been ‘starved of emotion and drama in her life’: the
qualities that Mitzi exemplifies (275).
All of the crimes Lotty commits are motivated by her desperate need to
repudiate the excluded Lotty-self, and secure an existence as the popular,
successful ‘Letty’. As Lotty she was tyrannized by her father, and forced to live as
a secluded invalid because of a disfiguring thyroid goitre; her perennial pearl
necklace conceals the scar from a surgery to remove it that her father had
sadistically long delayed. Her assumption of Letty’s identity allows her to inherit
her sister’s life-history of career success, commanding authority and financial
good fortune; in that regard the pearl necklace is her ‘Letty persona’, covering her
true, scarred Lotty-self. But Lotty’s impersonation of her sister had the effect of
cutting herself off from her own past and her own past self, indicating the dark
side of her reinvention. Here Christie touches on one of her major themes – the
power and importance of memory. It is memory that secures the continuity of
our personal identity, an identity linked to a spiritual core that exists deep within
the layers of the psyche. Despite the crimes Lotty has committed, then, the return
of Dora through the voice of Miss Marple reminds Lotty of her core, kind, self.
Once again, as in Allingham’s The Tiger in the Smoke, there is compassion for the
criminal. This compassion is important to emphasize, since the murder-mystery
formula is often associated with a black hat-white hat melodrama in which polar
opposites of good and evil are locked in mortal combat – in the order of, say,
Dr Moriarty or Colonel Moran in their battles with Sherlock Holmes. This is not
the case in a Christie or an Allingham novel. There are times in Christie’s work,
for instance, when the detective and the criminal are on the same team (The
Murder of Roger Ackroyd, 1926, A Holiday for Murder, 1938), or times when the
criminal and the author are not dissimilar (Murder on the Orient Express, 1934,
And Then There Were None, 1939; The Hollow, 1946), not to mention Curtain,
in which the Great Detective himself is revealed to be the murderer. The criminals
in Christie’s and Allingham’s work of the 1950s are more nuanced, and the idea
of justice itself becomes a complicated one – to the point that at times Christie
 Detective Fiction and the Prose of Everyday Life 225

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

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

The detective as dramaturg; the detective as clinician

Ngaio Marsh’s Opening Night (1951), with its mummer’s plays and rural festivities,
inferentially ironizes English identity. Although Marsh’s detective is the only one
of our four sleuths who is happily settled in heterosexual marriage – Alleyn’s
wife Troy, a sculptor, plays a major role in the series – Marsh herself has been
repeatedly, if diffidently, associated by her biographers with queer sexuality,
although in her lifetime she did not avow a lesbian identity. Marsh’s autobiography,
Black Beech and Honeydew, is in the tradition of unconventional New Zealand
female life-chronicles undertaken by such writers as Katharine Mansfield, Sylvia
Ashton-Warner and later Janet Frame. Marsh’s unmistakably Māori first name
also accentuated her outsider status, which the reader was made to encounter
even if her novels were cosily set in theatrical London. But even in novels where
New Zealand is not named, like Singing in the Shrouds (1958), the opening scene
in the dockyards of London evokes the very idea of nautical travel and points to
New Zealand. In Scales of Justice the Chief Constable is described as a former
‘Chief Commissioner of police in India’ (Marsh 1955: 75) and his latter-day
presence in London is a kind of homecoming or decolonization. The name of the
aristocratic family at the core of the novel’s action, Lacklander, is also an indicator
of a crisis of territoriality.
In Marsh’s novels even the usual eccentric detective Alleyn is mainstreamed
into an official police role. Yet we can forget how the books are subtended by
 Detective Fiction and the Prose of Everyday Life 227

postcoloniality and queerness, and how Marsh’s awareness of the dramatic

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

Of the four writers considered here, Gladys Mitchell was the only one to
graduate from university. She was also the only one of the four to commit herself
exclusively to a woman detective, and unlike Miss Marple, one whose formal
professional training was a major element of her expertise as a sleuth. Mrs
Bradley’s involvement with both science and the occult, lends her an uncanny
quality, while her evasion of traditional gender roles – unlike Miss Marple, she is
imposing and intimidating – foregrounds queer identities in opposition to the
posited heterosexual economy of the Alleyn marriage.
Groaning Spinney (1950) chronicles profound subversion and unease in the
English countryside, an unease that the solution to the mystery does not resolve.
Though Mitchell’s great advocate Philip Larkin was right to praise the ‘calm
exposition’ and curious indeterminacy of Mitchell’s prose, when Larkin says Mrs
Bradley as a character had not ‘changed since 1929’ he was potentially misleading
(Larkin 1983: 271). Spotted Hemlock (1958), for instance, finds the detective
addressing a more turbulent and disrupted society, as the rivalry of male and
female students and the pranks they pull on each other figure a world in which
patriarchy is no longer assured, a theme seconded by the very presence of
Mrs Bradley as detective. Though Mitchell anchored her plots in local English
settings – often using detailed topographical maps to help plan her books –
there is little sense of pastoral innocence in her work. If Mitchell lacks the
ironic, autoethnographic approach to England of Christie and Allingham,
Mrs Bradley puts her toxicological and criminological knowledge to good
use. Yet her scientific, clinical perspective enables, curiously, a creative approach,
one that does need to confine itself to conventional linear logic, but which
can work laterally. In The Man Who Grew Tomatoes (1959), a traditional detective
plot – the murder of incumbent heirs to a landed estate – is solved by
Mrs Bradley’s ability to notice poisoned tomatoes were a predisposing factor in
a death that seemed to be by drowning. Mitchell is also the only one of the
four writers considered here to lack the transatlantic appeal or marketing
advantages the others enjoyed. Partly we might attribute this to Mitchell’s
progressive outlook, including what Samantha Walton calls the way she stood
‘alone’ in her generation of detective writers in exploring ‘psychoanalytic
techniques and modes of interpretation’, which made her less stereotypically
English (Walton 2015: 64). Thus her novels were less exportable to countries
beyond England as what Walton calls the ‘bloodless fodder’ of cosy reaffirmation
(4). Both Mitchell and Marsh, albeit in very different ways, used their detective
novels to navigate away from patriarchal affirmations of gender, sexuality and
nation.
 Detective Fiction and the Prose of Everyday Life 229

Detective fiction and modern form

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

of the modernist novel to the prose level of everyday life. In fusing the
contrivances of ingenuity with the prose of everyday life, detective fiction of the
1950s helped make modernism sustainable. This type of modernist mystery can
also be found in the early works of Iris Murdoch such as Under The Net (1954),
which features many of the traits of the formal detective story, though without
a puzzle. Alice Ferrebe comments that an early Murdoch character, Jake
Donoghue in Under The Net is a composite of ‘an existentialist hero and a
concerned citizen of the Welfare State’ (2012: 49). Melding Albert Campion
and Jack Havoc, Auden’s ‘Age of Anxiety’ and Campion’s ‘Age of the Official’,
Murdoch’s early protagonist embodies many of the same dilemmas that
encompass characters as different as Christie’s Victoria Jones and Marsh’s John
James Rutherford. Murdoch is surely influenced by the récit mode practiced
by Camus, but the vigour, colloquialism and brevity of the British detective
novel also impacted her work. This side of Murdoch might seem to validate
Rubin Rabinovitz’s sense that the 1950s in British fiction represented a reaction
against experiment. Yet it could be said that the two most influential prose styles
in modern Anglophone literature – that of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf –
were at once pervasive in the 1950s. At the same time it must be admitted that
each had particular quirks of brilliance and manner that made them difficult
to emulate. The detective novel – with its mixture of conscious artificiality,
austerity in terms of size and diction, and its registering of modernity –
represented a kind of reusable modernism, one that could animate Murdoch at
the beginning of a long career in which her novels continually threaded the gap
between narrative and philosophy, realism and inventiveness.
Colin Burrow comments on the commonalities between Murdoch’s ‘ultra-
serious moral fictions’ and ‘the ultra-frivolous detective novels of the 1940s and
1950s’ (Burrow 2016; 19). Murdoch’s own use of a female detective novelist,
Emma Sands, in An Unofficial Rose (1962) reinforces this suggestion. But it
could be argued the female detective writers profiled here were already bridging
this gap between their designated genre and mainstream fiction. It is also
possible that Murdoch could have sustained and developed her achievements
in the short novel by studying the detective writers of the 1950s. The explicit
engagement with good and evil in detective fiction in a taut and reticulated
formal prism might have allowed Murdoch to unambiguously interrogate
Sartre’s existentialism, as did The Tiger in the Smoke and other detective novels of
the time. Similar ethical and formal imperatives inflected the novels of our four
female mystery writers, whose prose of everyday life advanced understanding of
the implications of the new, postwar era.
 Detective Fiction and the Prose of Everyday Life 231

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234
 8

Chance in the Canon: Uncertainty and the

Literary Establishment of the 1950s
Sebastian Jenner

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

235
236 The 1950s

between chance and order, of evolutionary change governed by a close synthesis

between random variations and necessity; complex systems echoing former
chance initiations and drifting towards logic. Such a relationship between
seemingly polarizing concepts is perhaps best articulated by Friedrich Nietzsche,
who ruminates in Daybreak (1881) that the ‘iron hands of necessity which shake
the dice box of chance play this game for an infinite length of time so that there
have to be throws which exactly resemble purposiveness and rationality of every
degree’ (130). Certainly, our world does not exist through pure chance, yet nor
does it fall from necessity and reason alone. In the labyrinth of interrelated
designs beneath the most complex of functions and systems, there is always a
role played by the indeterminate. Indeed, Nietzsche posits that even in our own
rationality and attempts to comprehend ‘we ourselves shake the dice-box with
iron hands, [. . .] we ourselves in our most intentional actions do no more than
play the game of necessity’ (130). The clash of these two fundamentally different
states, a negentropy in which order arises from disorder, is a theme that runs
from the depths of our evolutionary makeup, in the symmetry we see in nature,
through to our individual attempts to comprehend, systemize and reflect our
experience. Even attempts to forego chance influences are intrinsically revealing
of such an indeterminate experience, particularly so when considered within the
sphere of literature.
It must be acknowledged that a conscious attempt to articulate structures of
chance in literature is inherently to reduce it to something else, to impose an
order on to it, a pervasive paradox that led Monk to state that ‘chance always
takes on a necessarily fateful quality once it is represented in narrative’ (2).
Nevertheless, Monk goes on to argue that James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) poses a
‘limit point in this study because it comes as close as any novel can to a
representation of chance in narrative’ (109). While vast scientific and cultural
shifts influencing perceptions of chance – such as the continued development of
quantum mechanics, probability theory and the teleonomic principles of
evolution – have manifested since Ulysses, that novel and modernism in general
were to remain significant influences on the literary representation of chance in
the 1950s notwithstanding the ubiquitous social uncertainties that emanated
from the fractured aftermath of the Second World War. As Jordan states, in
Chance and the Modern British Novel, in ‘the period after the 1940s [. . .] artistic
culture ran parallel to a scientific culture in which the doctrine of uncertainty
was in the ascendant’ (28). Therefore, this chapter will contend that the 1950s
were characterized by a burgeoning need to accommodate configurations of
uncertainty and the growing sense of flux that increasingly characterized the
 Chance in the Canon 237

everyday by paradoxically subsuming them within the plot of fiction as different

aspects of fate. In this respect 1950s fiction held true to Virginia Woolf ’s demand
in ‘Modern Fiction’ (1925) that novelists remain faithful to representing the
‘truth’ of experience however random and chaotic that might be:

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo,
a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of conscious-
ness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this
unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may
display. (160)

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

The chance to rebuild

The tumultuous uncertainty of the Second World War inspired a social and
political consensus in its aftermath, a pursuit of the welfare state that was
238 The 1950s

galvanized by the Beveridge Report of 1942 and the Atlee government of the
immediate post-war years. A conciliation between Labour and Conservative
policies toward this common goal established a political hegemony in the 1950s,
a consensus commonly termed ‘Butskellism’. An amalgamation of the names of
the Labour Party’s Chancellor of the Exchequer of the period, R.A. Butler, and
the Conservative Party’s shadow Chancellor, Hugh Gaitskell, this satirical
neologism came to define the socio-political rhetoric of consensus at the
beginning of the 1950s. The aftermath of war offered Britain an opportunity to
recast itself and reckon with a shift in status on the world stage. The breakdown
of the British Empire, formally constituted in 1949 and reconfigured towards the
Commonwealth, reflected a combination of the nation’s realization of its financial
weakness, the growing superpowers of the USSR and USA , as well as the
burgeoning mood of anti-imperialism in British society. Yet, despite Britain’s
diminishing position in the global economy, Kenneth Morgan identifies in
Britain Since 1945: The People’s Peace (1990) that the ‘western world was, for a
time, being remoulded according to the model proposed by the weaker member
of the alliance. Marshall Aid, OEEC , The Brussels Treaty, NATO were all
plausibly viewed as British Triumphs’ (29). There was simultaneously a desire,
therefore, to construct a utopian welfare state while also seeking to rejuvenate
the nostalgic ‘Great’ influence of Britain. It was under such auspices that the 1951
Festival of Britain sought to set the parameters for new citizenry.
Becky Conekin’s Autobiography of a Nation: The 1951 Festival of Britain
(2003), the first monograph dedicated to the Festival, explores the manner in
which culture and education were pivotal to the Festival’s agenda. Conekin
explains that ‘Festival planners imagined “New Britain” as a consensual, unified
society in need of edifying entertainment. The Festival of Britain was
simultaneously a public celebration, an educational undertaking, and a
constructed vision of a new democratic national community’ (9). The Festival
sought to bolster the welfare state project and democratize art, ensuring universal
access to ‘high culture’. The welfare state’s attempt to champion a ‘classless society’,
safeguarding the social and economic well-being of its citizens, meant that the
Festival continued the vision of the Education Act of 1944, celebrated the
mandate of the Arts Council (formed in 1945), and pursued a Leavisite cultural
‘seriousness’ that mirrored the BBC Third Programme (1946–70). The Arts were
therefore the signifier of the success of the welfare state’s aims. The ‘high culture’
that only the upper echelons of society had previously had access to was
envisioned as being enjoyed by ‘the people’. Michael Frayn criticized the inherent
elitism of the approach, in ‘Festival’ (1963), arguing that:
 Chance in the Canon 239

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

Conekin explains that this polemical statement was self-aware, that Frayn
certainly perceived himself as one of the ‘Herbivores’, but his indictment suggests
the fundamental incongruence of the vision of the Festival and the culture of the
1950s more generally. The project to democratize art, an agenda of state support
of culture, failed to foster a classless culture. Instead, as Alan Sinfield declares in
Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain (1989), ‘we now know, people’s
art did not take over in 1945, and literary intellectuals were not incorporated
into a workers’ state. Rather, the welfare-capitalist state turned out to be quite
hospitable to them’ (56).
The significance of the Festival is best revealed in George VI ’s address at the
official opening, as transcribed in Gerald Barry’s ‘The Festival of Britain 1951’
(1952). The King’s rhetoric suggests the instability beneath the grandeur of the
project, and nods towards the pervasive uncertainty of the period:

Two world wars have brought us grievous loss of life and treasure; and though
the nation has made a splendid effort towards recovery new burdens have fallen
upon it and dark clouds still overhang the whole world. Yet this is no time for
despondency; for I see this Festival as a symbol of Britain’s abiding courage and
vitality. (669)

There is an unquestionable reference in the King’s message to the Cold War and
to the threat of nuclear weaponry. Indeed, Conekin’s study details that a planning
document for the Festival, in 1948, made a bold claim toward broadcasting
Britain’s positioning as the only possible voice of reason in the Cold War climate:

a commonly held anxiety about the excesses of science exhibited in the recent
global conflict – and especially about the role of the atomic bomb. Britain was in
a unique position, the document argued: it was the one country capable of
stabilizing Cold War hostilities through the reconciliation of art and science. (58)

Such reliance upon the cultural output to herald a political stability and help
bolster British optimism must therefore make demands of it to address, and
correct, the fundamental uncertainty of the period. However, much of the
canonical British novels of the period are characterized by parochial quietism.
240 The 1950s

Indeed, Bernard Bergonzi declared, in The Situation of the Novel (1970) that
compared to its American equivalent, British fiction of the period was ‘backward
– and inward-looking’ (56). Novels of the period were frequently tethered to a
pre-war setting, plausibly offering the only stable landscapes from which to
ruminate on the present. Symptomatic of this retreat to the past, however, was the
entrenchment of class stratifications that unsettled the vision of a welfare state.
For example, Anthony Powell’s A Question of Upbringing (1951), the first novel of
the Dance to the Music of Time cycle, returns to the environs of the Great War and
portrays a closed circle of high social standing. While the twelve-volume cycle,
published between 1951 and 1975, ultimately spans the period between the First
World War and the 1970s, it nonetheless remains firmly rooted in the picture of
upper-middle-class society. However, particularly when viewed through the lens
of chance, A Question of Upbringing is representative of the pervasive concerns of
the 1950s in its scrutiny of the machinations of time and memory.
The exposition of Powell’s novel portrays a scene of workers that frames the
complete cycle, reminding its protagonist, Nick Jenkins, of the Nicolas Poussin
painting ‘Dance to the Music of Time’ (1634–6):

The image of Time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing

outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure, stepping
slowly, methodically sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take
recognizable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while
partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the
spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of
the dance. (5–6)

Here the intricate relationship between natural order and the complex systems
that arrive from chance are suggested, which form the recurring conceptual
consideration of the cycle. Within this network, simultaneously chaotic and
predictable human behaviours are examined. The novel ruminates upon
negentropic paths that have been already wrought and the inescapable dominion
of time. Such explorations enable Powell to problematize the linearity of both
history and narrative, and therefore quietly comment on the threshold between
science and art that was the remit of the new British cultural citizen. The
overarching image of the dance thereby takes on a symbolic profundity with
relation to the 1950s, regardless of its positioning in the past. Powell’s
consideration illuminates the relationship between indeterminism and logic,
identifying the seemingly infinite chains of causality, as initiated by chance,
moving toward logic and the complex systems encountered by the individual:
 Chance in the Canon 241

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

Configured as requiring observation to determine the design proffers that full

meaning is only revealed by the passages of time and by human experience. Yet
Jenkins ultimately resigns himself to the inability to gain absolute knowledge,
throughout a cycle that illustrates a synthesis of permanence and flux, of the ‘true’
continuum of history. The individual attempting to interpret the logic beneath
the maelstrom of modernity – as Jenkins does, gleaned from reflections upon
interaction with others – places temporal events in to a spatial sphere of memory.
Furthermore, the narrative provides little commentary on the protagonist’s
personal life, other than in interactions with others or in his philosophical
introspections, and is therefore subject to chance insurgences. Indeed, in the
second volume of the cycle, A Buyer’s Market (1952), Jenkins asserts:

another belief: that existence fans out indefinitely into new areas of experience,
and that almost every additional acquaintance offers some supplementary world
with its own hazards and enchantments. As time goes on, of course, these
supposedly different worlds, in fact, draw closer, if not to each other, then to
some pattern common to all; so that, at last, diversity between them, if in truth
existent, seems to be almost imperceptible except in a few crude and exterior
ways: unthinkable, as formerly appeared, any single consummation of cause and
effect. In other words, nearly all the inhabitants of these outwardly disconnected
empires turn out at last to be tenaciously inter-related. (159)

Thus, despite remaining within the closed echelons of a bohemian upper strata
of society, Powell identifies a broad unity that is characterized by a state of being
fundamentally at the mercy of chance. Considered alongside the welfare state
and the vision of a classless society, it is plausible that the ‘previously’ establishment
writers, the ‘Herbivores’, felt compelled to concentrate on dismantling their own
milieu to thereby invest in a new citizenry.
Similarly, L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953) demonstrates nostalgia for
Britain’s global influence, and retreats from the uncertainty of the present. Its
anachronism attempts to embolden the spirit of the British Empire and simulta-
neously examine possibilities of dismantling class boundaries. The protagonist,
Leo Colston, reflects on childhood memories of 1900 and, reminiscing from the
242 The 1950s

vantage of 1952, finds that the past ‘is a foreign country: they do things differently
there’ (7). Indeed, the middle-class boy finds himself in an upper-class milieu,
further offering the delineation of a nation in the liminal space between ‘a ruined
past and a menacing future’ (174); laden with the weight of uncertainty. This
sensibility is configured in the novel through the frequent turn towards
mysticism, and the lines of contestation between order and chaos. Leo’s
internalization of such polarizing forces are configured in the characteristically
British cricket match, between the Hall and the Village, in which he discerns ‘the
struggle between order and lawlessness, between obedience to tradition and
defiance of it, between social stability and revolution, between one attitude to life
and another’ (156). This response to chance houses a tangible notion of hope
despite the contemporary imposition of fear that the Cold War’s threat of
apocalypse asserts. In The Angry Decade (1958), Kenneth Allsop affirms that in
the 1950s:

many oddly arranged forces are at work. There is, first, that enormous umbrella
fact at which hardly anyone does more than sneak an occasional glance, and
which it seems almost brash to mention, the H-bomb, a solitary enormity which
[. . .] is emotionally too big to see. Leaving that out (and somehow we all seem to
do exactly that) the central spectacle of our broken-winded economy is the
extraordinary stubborn effort that has been made in the Fifties to revive the
meaningful panoply of the pre-war Establishment. (31)

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

Freedom and fear: the politicization of chance

The period during the Second World War was characterized by a perception in
which, as Jordan identifies, ‘Chance itself, it almost seemed, could do real damage;
bombs that were impossible to predict, killed; uncertainty was made concrete.
Anything could happen. It seemed for a while that chance was no longer part of
 Chance in the Canon 243

the vocabulary of hope, but part of the vocabulary of terror’ (66) Yet, the post-
war dynamic appears to have resulted in a shift of perception, in which chance
was considered aligned with the liberal freedom of the West. The Soviet doctrine,
arguably, sought to deny chance and refuse the accidental. In its totalitarian
authority it led by absolute design, which was incongruous with the perceived
freedom of the West to view chance as associated with democracy. Steven
Belletto’s study of American Cold War literature, No Accident, Comrade: Chance
and Design in Cold War American Narratives (2012), indicates such a politicization
of chance as representative of Cold War aesthetics and sensibilities. He identifies
that the overarching narrative was to represent the Soviet Union ‘not only as
brutal and nakedly power-mad but also as philosophically misguided because it
excludes, denies, or otherwise attempts to manipulate chance’ (6). Perhaps, then,
the seeming lack of literary texts that explicitly consider the atomic bomb which
both the USSR and USA had been stockpiling, and indeed the Hydrogen bomb –
first tested by the Americans in Operation Ivy in November 1952 – should be
considered a political response to the developments. As Jacques Rancière posits,
in Aesthetics and its Discontents (2009):

Art is not, in the first instance, political because of the messages and sentiments it
conveys concerning the state of the world. Neither is it political because of the
manner in which it might choose to represent society’s structures, or social
groups, their conflicts or identities. It is political because of the very distance it
takes with respect to these functions, because of the type of space and time that it
institutes, and the manner in which it frames this time and peoples this space. (23)

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

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

Because politics were during the Cold War often viewed as being fictions, and
the conflict itself betrayed its narrative quality again and again, the act of literary
fiction making became laden with political significance, as did the use and
theorization of chance within these narratives. (12)

The British literary establishment’s avoidance of nuclear motifs and direct

consideration of the Cold War represent a political rejection of weaponized
narrative. There is a tangible resistance to playing the very game, a war of rhetoric
and narratives, that characterized the Cold War.
Further to the politicization of chance, in response to problematic fictions,
Sinfield describes a sense in which ‘the Cold War made all left-wing thought
appear implicated in Stalinism’ (267). Seemingly the previously mentioned
‘Herbivores’, the left-liberal gatekeepers of ‘high culture’, perceived explicit
literary commentary on the contemporary as too fraught. Indeed, the ideals of
socialism were embroiled with communist associations, and therefore Stalinism.
It was precisely this sensibility that led America’s Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA ) to endeavour to foster a ‘non-communist left’, still faithful to ideals of
socialism but in opposition to Stalin’s regime. The CIA founded the Congress for
Cultural Freedom (CCF ) in 1950, with headquarters in Paris that offered a
varied programme of cultural events aimed at garnering the respect of its elite
intellectuals. Subsequently, the British Society for Cultural Freedom was
established as an affiliate of the CCF, equally funded by the CIA , in 1951. Among
its many involvements in the academic and cultural milieu were the journals
Encounter and Twentieth Century, featuring many prominent authors of the
 Chance in the Canon 245

decade’s ‘high culture’. Encounter was launched in 1953 with Stephen Spender
and Irving Kristol as joint editors, themselves representing a transatlantic union.
The first issue led with the editorial ‘After the Apocalypse’, proposing ‘a breath of
fresh air drifting through the fog which we have been accustomed to take of our
normal atmosphere’ (1) further declaring that Encounter ‘seeks to promote no
“line,” though its editors have opinions they will not hesitate to express. The
CCF, which sponsors this magazine, is made up of individuals of the most
diverse views’ (1). Such a narrative perhaps sought to free the left-leaning literati
to critique and proffer a cultural ‘freedom’, while under the illusion of apolitical
art for art’s sake. Although many held suspicions, it wasn’t until 1967 that reports
of the CIA’s influence and financial control of the publication surfaced. Hugh
Wilford’s study, The CIA, The British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune?
(2003), suggests that:

this monthly, literary-political periodical had rapidly developed a reputation as

one of the best, if not the best, ‘highbrow’ journals in the English-speaking world.
The revelation that such a prestigious intellectual forum had been secretly
subsidized by the CIA [. . .] shocked and disgusted many younger British and
American writers, who interpreted it as damning proof of not only the
immorality of the CIA but also the ideological bankruptcy of the previous
generation of non-communist left intellectuals. (262)

Though Spender was seemingly unaware of the affiliation, and thereafter

resigned, under his leadership the journal served to protect and bolster the
Bloomsbury group’s modernist style. It thereby reinforced American cultural
control in promoting a style that was flourishing in the American left-
establishment. However, it remains clear that British intellectuals gained a great
deal from Encounter, in their own self-promotion and the preservation of the
establishment cultural style. As Wilford identifies, ‘British intellectuals used
Encounter as much as it used them. Initially, it was Bloomsbury literati who
employed the magazine in a local culture war which bore little obvious relevance
to the CIA’s Cultural Cold War objectives’ (289). The journal solidified the
hegemony of the pre-war elite, and was fundamentally incongruous with the
aspirations of a classless society. Such a position encapsulates the logical outcome
of the project of a classless society, a situation in which the gatekeepers of culture
sought to raise up a ‘mass’ to a position deemed acceptable, which, as John Carey
proclaims in The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), meant ‘the difference
between the nineteenth-century mob and the twentieth-century mass is literacy’
(5). Such problematic cultural contestation is exemplified by the position of
246 The 1950s

Encounter. Indeed, Stephen Spender, writing in The Struggle of the Modern

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

The angry dissentients

Despite the seemingly pervasive elitism, the rejuvenated cultural subsidy and
reform of both education and working conditions increased possibilities of
social mobility that became apparent within the literary community. As a result
of the Education Act of 1944, known as the ‘Butler Act’, working-class students
were able to sit eleven-plus examination and gain entry to grammar school
education. In turn, this saw the rise of the ‘Red Brick University’ and fostered a
new strain of educated young, characterizing the emergence of the ‘Angry Young
Men’. The authors frequently clustered in this literary group, such as John
Osborne, John Wain, Kingsley Amis and Alan Sillitoe, however, mostly rejected
the term. Indeed, Kenneth Allsop, in The Angry Decade (1958), raises concern
about the logic of ascribing a collective where there wasn’t necessarily one,
identifying their ‘widely disparate outlooks on modern problems and modern
solutions’ (9). Nonetheless, he acknowledges that such a clustering is useful for
they ‘are all, in differing degrees and for different reasons, dissentients’ (9). These
authors were broadly characterized by a realization of their unsteady positioning
between the traditional strata of cultures and class. Richard Hoggart depicts
these ‘scholarship boys’ in The Uses of Literacy (1957), describing such figures as
the ‘anxious and uprooted’ who are at ‘a friction point between two cultures’
(239), representing an individual that is ‘unhappy in a society which presents
largely a picture of disorder, which is huge and sprawling’ (244). Indeed, the
Angry Young Men made a conscious attempt to confront chance in their writing,
employing the concept to articulate the fundamental dislocations in the culture
of the 1950s. John Osborne’s play, Look Back in Anger (1956), is representative of
a rhetoric that was acutely aware of such disorder and the incongruence of the
welfare state model: ‘There aren’t any good, brave causes left. If the big bang does
come, and we all get killed off, it won’t be in aid of the old fashioned, grand
design. It’ll just be for the Brave-New-nothing-very-much-thank-you’ (94–5).
The play popularized the arrival of the new voices, and thereby championed
Jimmy Porter as the archetypal representative of the Angry Young Men alongside
 Chance in the Canon 247

the characters of Charles Lumley, from John Wain’s Hurry on Down (1953), and
Jim Dixon of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954). In The Fourfold Tradition (1961),
Rayner Heppenstall describes Amis’s protagonist, Jim Dixon, as ‘an archetypal
figure, the new young man produced by free education under the Butler Act’
(216). Such upwardly mobile ‘scholarship boys’ became representative of an
‘acceptable’ leftist disenchantment with the establishment, from within its own
high-castle. Indeed, John Wain and Kingsley Amis were students of English,
alongside Philip Larkin, in the same cohort at St John’s College, Oxford.
For Wain’s protagonist, Charles Lumley, chance offers a means of dismantling
the disquiet of his middle-class experience and becoming ensconced in a
working-class sensibility. Disenfranchised, he cultivates a romantic view of the
working class as having been ‘encouraged by life to develop their sharp edges’
(25). Conversely, he describes how his ‘sharp edges, on the other hand, had been
systematically blunted by his upbringing and education’ (25). Wain composed
the first half of the novel seemingly without plan, stating in the introduction that
‘I had been improvising, writing one scene after another with no idea of what
was coming next, expressing a mood (and very much my own mood of course)
rather than telling a plotted story’ (3). Similarly, the protagonist drifts through
life engaging with chance and embracing its effect, even deciding on where he
will move to, following graduation, using a random pin placement on a map.
However, in ‘a ludicrous coincidence his first jab with the pin had landed on the
name of the one town in England that was useless for his purpose, the town
where he was born and bred’ (10–11). Articulating the luxury of the character’s
manipulation of chance towards his own design, it is on his third attempt that he
settles on Stotwell as an appropriate ‘everyplace’ to reclaim his life after graduation.
Lumley states that his education ‘was fragmentary: partly because the University
had, by its three years’ random and shapeless cramming, unfitted his mind for
serious thinking’ (11) and that this therefore inflects ‘his haphazard approach to
life’ (17). Lumley decides to abscond from his position of privilege and become
a window cleaner, in pursuit of a simple honest working day. Unable to fully
enter the milieu of his desire, however, he begins his transition by living as a
bohemian in a loft apartment alongside a writer who he happens upon. Chance
thereby presents, for Lumley, a power that imposes itself on those without
privilege, one that he has the luxury of manipulating towards his own gain, even
when wishing to surrender to it.
Ultimately it is Lumley’s persistence that enables real change, as exemplified
by the novel’s romantic component: ‘When we met the other night in the Grand
at Stotwell, that wasn’t a coincidence. I’d been hanging about, in that very room,
248 The 1950s

ever since I saw you in there for the first time’ (113). Such combinations of
chance and design are equally exposed in Wain’s approach to writing the novel.
Despite composing in a random manner for the first half of the project, he
reveals that ‘the second half was written as I write novels today – that is, with a
plan’ (4). Nonetheless, he explains that the approaches do not differ greatly,
stating that ‘the episodes in the first half were not really chosen at random,
however much they seemed to be, but grouped themselves in obedience to a
strong instinctive drift’ (4). However, such instinct is inflected with a degree of
chance in its very internal spontaneity. Principally, Lumley seeks to perform the
chance-based experience of the working class, who he views as being better
prepared for the demands of the period: ‘He had been equipped with an
upbringing devised to meet the needs of a more fortunate age, and then thrust
into the jungle of the nineteen-fifties [. . .] he had been deprived of his sting’ (25).
Inviting the hardships of the working class is Lumley’s tactic to combat the
tribulations of this new socio-political landscape. Such romanticizing of a
caricatured working class is revealing of a discomfort with the sensibility of the
‘Herbivore’ attempting to homogenize culture. Such unease indicates an
awareness of being a supposedly classless individual without a cultural scaffold,
of occupying a liminal space between the establishment and ‘the people’. Indeed,
Lumley reflects on this at the novel’s capitulation, stating: ‘I suppose I did turn
down a steady, humdrum life, like you, but it wasn’t a question of breaking out or
kicking over any traces. I never rebelled against my ordinary life: it just never
admitted me, that’s all. I never even got into it’ (248). Lumley recognizes that he
has been trained to become part of an establishment that is increasingly unsteady.
Throughout the process of railing against such a position, chance offers itself as
a force of optimism: ‘he would turn his handlebars at random [. . .] it was a
powerful drug, and he turned eagerly to it whenever his daily toil allowed’ (79).
While Wain’s protagonist is a middle-class Oxbridge graduate abandoning a
position that threatens his capacity for true spontaneity and agency, suggesting a
desire for a different ‘classless society’ to that on offer by the establishment, Amis’s
Jim Dixon, of Lucky Jim, is a lower-middle-class graduate attempting to gain
acceptance in to the academic world. Dixon is a product of class struggle, still
subject to the fear of poverty despite living in the world of the 1944 Butler Act.
He must therefore subscribe and pander to those in the academy, despite his
personal distaste for their values. In such a situation, luck – as signalled by the
title – variously marks much of Jim’s experience throughout the novel. Initially
falling prey to a series of unlucky experiences, his fortune turns at the novel’s
capitulation to contingency and heightens the character’s awareness of its
 Chance in the Canon 249

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

Falling against structuring structures

The interrelationship between chance and choice, within a sphere occupied by

the ‘scholarship boy’, can be analysed by application of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept
of the habitus. His engagement with the term stipulates a unifying system of
acquired sensibilities, tastes and natural responses to everyday encounters. Such
dispositions are internalized embodiments resulting from social structures and
complex fields of identity, expressive of affiliations. Jim Dixon’s working-class
origins appear, therefore, as his primary habitus, an ingrained schema from
which intrinsic characteristics and inclinations materialized and inform his
response to chance. Bourdieu’s concept indicates a determined cyclical system,
250 The 1950s

in which the actions of a social agent are formed by the habitus, but equally
contribute to the structure of the habitus. There is a discernible inertia in this
configuration, as the contributory responses are justified and characterized by
the feedback loop of other agents. The social schema from which we learn from
and contribute to are therefore simultaneously ‘structuring structures’ and
‘structured structures’ that impact on and are impacted by social practice. In
Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory (1997), Bridget Fowler summarises how
Bourdieu has been criticized for having ‘underemphasised working-class
freedom (versus constraint) and the culturally creative energies that can come
from underneath’ (4). For Jim, this dynamism can be traced to the oscillation
between multiple thresholds of social stratification, while thoroughly tethered to
a sense of rising agitation ‘from underneath’. Despite the overarching deter-
minisms of Bourdieu’s early perception of habitus, the boundaries and partitions
of each social field undeniably offer potential for chance configurations arising
from the seemingly infinite possible structural frames of social fields. Indeed,
Bourdieu identifies in The Rules of Art (1992):

The dispositions associated with a certain social origin cannot be fulfilled unless
they are responsive in the shape they take to, on the one hand, the structure
of possibilities opened up by the different positions and position-takings of
their occupants, and, on the other hand, to the position occupied in the field.
(264)

Such dispositions are responsive to and signify a ‘doxa’ of collective social

understanding or common beliefs that inflect a general perception of the world.
The emergent doxa of a synthesis between chance and order can therefore be
read as manifesting in the performance of indeterminism, thereby characterizing
the response to Jim’s habitus. A generalized reading of Bourdieu’s theory stresses
the social origins and collective formulation of the individual, who can therefore
never truly be autonomous. Identity is therein the picture of natural, ingrained
responses to everyday experience. However, chance provides for Jim some
semblance of warped agency in response: ‘He wanted to bet himself it would be
bad so that he might stand a chance of it being good’ (Amis 1954: 247–8).
The concept of habitus was reformulated throughout Bourdieu’s career, more
thoroughly accommodating characteristics of indeterminacy. The cyclical unity
that characterized its early appearance was displaced by a consideration, outlined
in In Other Words: Essays towards a Reflexive Sociology (1990), of ‘generative
spontaneity which asserts itself in an improvised confrontation with ever-
renewed situations, it obeys a practical logic, that of vagueness, of the more-or-
 Chance in the Canon 251

less, which defines one’s ordinary relation to the world’ (77–8). The habitus is
thenceforth read as a process of mobile interaction, which constrains but does
not determine action, from which the agent acts in response to the structuring
elements of the habitus, but is in turn able to manipulate the structure of it from
within; a ‘structuring structure’. Ultimately, in constructing, what Bourdieu terms
in The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society (1993),
‘[n]arratives about the most “personal” difficulties, the apparently most strictly
subjective tensions and contradictions’, both Amis and Wain reflect what
Bourdieu considers as the ability to ‘frequently articulate the deepest structures
of the social world and its contradictions’ (511). The accommodation of chance
therefore mirrors this responsive systemization of the vagaries of potential
experience and the contradictory connections these form in social stratification,
which in Lucky Jim are exemplified by the red-brick university. Indeed, Bourdieu
proposed the notion of a divided identity, a ‘habitus clivé’, in analysis of the young
intellectuals of Algeria during the struggle for independence from France (1958–
62). The concept responds to the internal conflict between formative class identity
and an assumed intellectual position, as a result of higher education and entering
an academic field. This is revealed, in The Algerians (1962), by way of the young
Algerian intellectual, as a state of complex marginalization:

Constantly being faced with alternative ways of behaviour by reason of the

intrusion of new values, and therefore compelled to make a conscious
examination of the implicit premises or the unconscious patterns of his own
tradition, this man, cast between two worlds and rejected by both, lives a sort of
double inner life, is a prey to frustration and inner conflict, with the result that
he is constantly being tempted to adopt either an attitude of uneasy over
identification or one of rebellious negativism. (144)

For Bourdieu, the working-class student assumes a secondary habitus in entering

the academic field that displaces the first, which Deborah Reed-Danahay
identifies in Locating Bourdieu (2005) as a state in which ‘the primary habitus is
devalued as the student acquires the secondary habitus associated with education’
(32). In Lucky Jim we can chart a self-referential problematization of the conflict
and contradiction between these two positions, a resistance to stratification
mirrored by Jim’s celebratory approach to luck. Ultimately, the novel culminates
in this sensibility overcoming the posturing of the establishment, as personified
by Welch and Bertrand, defeated by Jim’s good fortune: ‘Dixon drew in breath
to denounce them both, then blew it all out again in a howl of laughter’ (Amis
1954: 251).
252 The 1950s

A contradictory novel tradition

Despite the seemingly progressive nature of the Angry Young Men, in their
agitation against class structures, their writing is often associated with rampant
misogyny and homophobia. Indeed, in Jim’s victory at the finale of Lucky Jim,
Welch and Bertrand are attacked for having ‘a look of being Gide and Lytton
Strachey’ (251), alluding to their effeminacy. These were fundamentally ‘manly’
works that carried such masculinity as statements of intent in attempting to
navigate space between working-class and establishment rhetoric. However, as
Leslie A. Fiedler remarked in ‘The Un-Angry Young Men: America’s Post-War
Generation’, published in Encounter in 1958, ‘The Angry Young Men of Britain
have managed, whatever their shortcomings, to project themselves and their
dilemma in such figures as Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim’ (5). Though this marks a
‘literary’ arrival, as Encounter finally deemed the subject of the Angry Young
Men worthy of consideration, it did little to circumvent the establishment
perception – as exemplified by Somerset Maugham in a ‘Books of the Year’
survey for The Sunday Times in 1955 – of them being ‘scum. They will in due
course leave the university. Some will doubtless sink back, perhaps with relief,
into the modest class from which they emerged’. Such novels were unbefitting of
the contemporary establishment, not because of bigotry but because they were
unrefined. Attempts to reinvigorate the Bloomsbury style, increasingly associated
with the American establishment, thereby continued a stultifying refrain. There
was, however, a renewed progressive turn in the mid–1950s that instead drew
influence from the experimentation of continental literature.
Jordan argues that ‘Chance had secured its dominion, scientifically, by the
1940s, and, philosophically, once the existentialists’ ideas had become common
currency in intellectual and literary circles of Britain and Europe’ (ix). Indeed,
the influence of the French philosophical landscape had already been seen in
the work of Samuel Beckett. For example, Watt (1953) problematizes the
understanding of chance as the enemy of meaning, its cyclical narratives denying
a realization of the possibilities on display. Furthermore, the English premiere of
Waiting for Godot in 1955 suggested an attack on the class system and the
rhetoric of the Cold War. Yet, as Kenneth Allsop remarks in The Angry Decade,
‘Waiting for Godot may have caused palpitations of conjecture in the Kings Road,
but the argument did not penetrate much farther north than Hampstead Garden
Suburb. It is the vista of Hoggart’s “shiny barbarism” that stares at you, the forces
of modern mass entertainment’ (33). This chapter shall not detail Beckett’s
contribution to configurations of chance in literature, as his oeuvre reflects a
 Chance in the Canon 253

non-Britishness that culminates from a combination of him being both Irish

(often subsumed into British literary studies) and culturally more immersed in a
continental tradition. Nonetheless, as Jordan identifies, ‘Beckett was writing in
an intellectual climate in which the existentialists on the continent had drawn
new associations between chance and existential freedom’ (xi), a sensibility that
was beginning to gain an audience in Britain. Heppenstall acknowledges in The
Fourfold Tradition that the ‘French understand that their tradition is twofold.
Here we speak of “the English tradition” as of something recognizably single’
(90) further stating that a ‘second tradition must always be, in a broad sense,
non-conformist’ (92). Despite noting the success of such British writers as
Lawrence Durrell and William Golding, whose work went ‘some way towards
non-conformity’, his overall perception is that ‘[i]n this country, there is too little
technical enterprise. We have endless conventional novels’ (270). However, a
compromise between experimentation and the mass entertainment that Allsop
identifies arguably characterizes a British approach, one that is in turn more
representative of the synthesis between chance and order.
Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net (1954), for example, is conceptually located
within the contemporary French philosophical politics of existentialism.
However, the novel presents a mediation between the humorous picaresque
novels of Wain and Amis, and the existential considerations of those such as
Beckett and Jean-Paul Sartre. Its ruminations on existentialism uncover a
hopeful refrain in their combination and compromise: ‘Events stream past us
like crowds and the face of each is seen only for a minute. What is urgent is not
urgent for ever but only ephemerally’ (275). Under the Net is an intentionally
paradoxical and complex novel that navigates the relationship between
contingency and necessity, the ambiguities of language, and the nature of
individual freedom. Yet, the novel achieves this within a populist and ludic
manner also characteristic of the novels of the Angry Young Men: ‘Hegel says the
Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to
get past the word’ (25). Indeed, As Frederick Hoffmann has observed, in ‘Iris
Murdoch: The Reality of Persons’ (1964), ‘the essential issue of Under the Net is
tension between theory and situation. Jake continues to revise his conduct, to
guarantee its freedom from theory’ (50). Such a process acts upon an internal
paradox that Murdoch identified in existentialism; its conceptualization of the
private sphere rather than application toward the social. The character of Jake
translates existential French fiction to English, quite potently transposing the left
bank to the London milieu. Crucially, as Allsop remarks, ‘the immense chasm
that there is between him and the more typically Fiftyish Lucky Jim dissentient
254 The 1950s

is that it never occurs to Jake that he is anything other than an intellectual’ (94).
From the vantage of self-awareness, Murdoch examines the contemporary
contradiction in which Britain is both nostalgic for the Empire, intent on
imposing influence on global politics, while also forging an anti-imperialist
welfare state. Such a compromise, yet unfathomed by intellectual and liberal
visions of socialism, is explicitly rendered throughout the text:

You call yourself a socialist, but you were brought up on Britannia rules the
waves like the rest of them. You want to belong to a big show. That’s why you’re
sorry you can’t be a communist. But you can’t be – and neither have you enough
imagination to pull out of the other thing. So you feel hopeless. What you need
is flexibility, flexibility! (112)

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

A burgeoning aleatory style

The second half of the 1950s, with a reinvigorated turn towards experimentation
and the contingent, witnessed a bifurcation of chance in art. In 1955 Werner
Meyer-Eppler adopted the term aleatory, in ‘Statistic and Psychologic Problems
of Sound’, responding to the growing interest shown towards the manipulation
and employment of chance strategies in the shaping of sound and composition.
Stipulating that a ‘process is said to be aleatoric (from Lat. Alea = dice) if its
course is determined in general but depends on chance in detail’ (55), this
 Chance in the Canon 255

concept has since been applied to all artistic practices in which the details
succumb to chance interactions, performed by the audience, within a broadly
determined whole. Such processes signify a sensibility in which the art remains
true to a compositional intent, but permits indeterminate moments to arise that
illuminate the essence. Comprehending the specifics of the aleatory is therefore
most tangible from the basis of music theory, but its application extends more
broadly. In 1955 Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen began separately
composing pieces in a new approach to the use of chance in composition, seeking
to differentiate from John Cage’s method of indeterminacy. While indeterminacy
relies exclusively on chance for all aspects of the compositional process, the
aleatory technique demands a combination of chance and conventional
composition. Such a difference is exemplified by Boulez’s Third Piano Sonata
(1955) and Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke XI (1955) in contrast to Cage’s Music of
Changes (1951). William G. Harbinson identified in ‘Performer Indeterminacy
and Boulez’s Third Sonata’ (1989) that Boulez emphatically dismissed ‘chance’
as a viable compositional technique declaring that ‘What a performer meets
in the Third Piano Sonata is “choice”, not “chance”’(20). For example, Music of
Changes employed the classic Chinese text I Ching – also known as the Book of
Changes, originating from the Han Dynasty – to compose indeterminately. The
method requires a random selection of one of the 64 hexagrams, each charged
with many further possibilities, to determine the pitch, length, dynamic and
rhythm. Boulez and Stockhausen refused to surrender all compositional input to
chance in this manner, and thus opted for a variety of hybridized systems of
aleatory composition. In ‘Sonata, What Do You Want of Me?’ (1963) Boulez states
‘Why compose works that have to be re-created every time they are performed?
Because definitive, once-and-for-all developments seem no longer appropriate
to musical thought as it is today’ (32). The indeterminacy of Cage’s work primarily
situated the instigation of randomness in the hands of the composer. However,
aleatory compositions maintain a sense of composer autonomy and provide a
base from which the performer determines, within defined parameters, the
shape of the work. Composing in this manner resists a conventional sense of
finality in composition, instead requiring audience input to enable the work to
take a new form with each performance.
In The Role of the Reader (1979) Umberto Eco aligned the aleatory technique
with literature, indicating that such chance performances instil ‘a wealth of
different resonances and echoes without impairing its original essence’ (49).
Further proposing a definition of aleatory composition as being works that ‘offer
themselves, not as finite works which prescribe specific repetition along given
256 The 1950s

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

Performing a culture of contradiction

Further to an aleatory sensibility in Murdoch’s Under the Net, Muriel Spark’s The
Comforters (1957) incorporates the performance of a text within its broader
structure, one that suggests a Boulez-like enactment of chance within an
organized frame. The Comforters combats the kitchen-sink realism of the Angry
Young Men and proffers a contradictory synthesis between the ‘truth’ and
narrative fiction. In its articulation of such paradoxical relationships, it ultimately
reveals itself as more representative of reality than its contemporaries. This is
principally achieved in its aleatory performance of chance. Encompassing
themes of spirituality, via its considerations of Catholicism, as well as superstition,
the occult, uncertainty and art, it reflects upon structures an individual performs
 Chance in the Canon 257

to construct meaning. Its protagonist, Caroline, is researching a book concerning

Form in the Modern Novel, only to be disturbed by the Typing Ghost. This figure,
demarcated by the sound of a typewriter, is the manifestation of a novelistic
structure in her life. Despite protestation from her friend Laurence, she comes to
the realization that she is a character in a novel:

‘Caroline, you are wrong, mistaken, mad. There are no voices; there is no
typewriter; it is all a delusion. You must get mental treatment.’ It was on his
tongue to tell her so when [. . .] she told him, ‘I’ve discovered the truth of the
matter’; the truth of the matter being, it transpired, this fabulous idea of
themselves and their friends being used as characters in a novel. (83)

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

‘From my point of view it’s clear that you are getting these ideas into your head
through the influence of a novelist who is contriving some phoney plot. I can see
clearly that your mind is working under the pressure of someone else’s necessity,
and under the suggestive power of some irresponsible writer you are allowing
yourself to become an amateur sleuth in a cheap mystery piece’ (91–2).

Laurence’s novelistic world, however, is seemingly mocked for the superficial

plot devices that reflect the conventions of the popular novel. Instead, Caroline’s
fictional realm seeks to portray the ‘true’ depth and complexity of chance in its
258 The 1950s

ambiguity. In this sense, her novel problematizes what Peter Bürger states in
Theory of the Avant-Garde as the conflict in which ‘It will never be possible to
seize the meaning being searched for in chance events, because, once defined, it
would become part of means-end rationality and thus lose its value as protest’
(66). Such negation of certainty is representative of the resistance to the residual
cause-and-effect realist tradition of the British literary canon. The aleatory
configuration of a need to perform the novel denies the demonstrative
organization of experience that characterizes the traditional novel, but contains
such complex intent within comprehensible boundaries.
Georg Lukács’s defence of traditional realism, in ‘Realism in the Balance’
(1938), declares that ‘the broad mass of the people can learn nothing from avant-
garde literature’ (57). The effect of modernist literature, in his view, stultified
revolutionary possibilities. However, as with Spark’s The Comforters, a neo avant-
garde recognized the potential for innovation to communicate collective
concerns, employing open compositions of personal everyday experience.
Broadly, these aleatory methods upheld the fragmented and introspective
examinations typical of the avant-garde, representing disjointed personal
temporalities and a rejection of absolute truth. However, as Renato Poggioli
identifies in The Theory of the Avant-Garde (1962), the neo avant-garde responded
to the notion that ‘even the avant-garde has to live and work in the present,
accept compromises and adjustments, reconcile itself with the official culture of
the times, and collaborate with at least some part of the public’ (79). It is this
sense of conciliation, of a mediation between avant-garde pursuits and
comprehensibility, that characterizes the aleatory approach to artistic practice.
For Peter Bürger the ‘adaptation’ to incorporate chance into art was ‘the only
possible form of resistance’ (67), and it was therefore in the very contradictions
of the burgeoning aleatory novel that such a possibility was manifest within a
realist model. The cultural delineation of chance, as variously considered
alongside perceptions of class stratifications; weaponized narrative; the
debilitating fear of apocalypse; and a problematizing of personal freedom,
suggest contradictory sites that house the potential for meaning. For the novel to
be representative of the dynamic of uncertainty that was in the ascendant in
British culture in the 1950s, the employment of aleatory strategies were
necessitated. With culture offered as the means of resolving pervasive global
threats and signalling the arrival of a classless society, and chance intrinsically
untameable, a gestured performance arose. Indeed, Culture and Society (1958) by
Raymond Williams suggests itself as the logical limit point of this study, for its
potent arrival at the central concern: ‘The idea of culture describes our common
 Chance in the Canon 259

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

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[1958].
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Belletto, Steven. No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American
Narratives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Bergonzi, Bernard. The Situation of the Novel. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1979 [1970].
Boulez, Pierre et al. ‘Sonata, What Do You Want From Me?’ Perspectives of New Music,
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Bourdieu, Pierre. The Algerians. Trans. by Alan C. M. Ross, Boston: Beacon Press, 1962
[1952].
Bourdieu, Pierre. In Other Words: Essays towards a Reflexive Sociology. Trans. by
Matthew Adamson, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Rules of Art. Trans. by Susan Emanuel, Cambridge: Polity Press,
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Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader. Bloomington and London: Indiana University
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Fowler, Bridget. Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory. London: Sage Publications, 1997.
Frayn, Michael. ‘Festival’ in Age of Austerity, ed. by Michael Sissons and Philip French.
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Harbinson, William G. ‘Performer Indeterminacy and Boulez’s Third Sonata’, Tempo,

No.169, 1989, pp.16–20.
Hartley, L.P. The Go-Between. New York: New York Review of Books, 2011 [1953].
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literatures, with some ethnological and historical asides. London: Barrie and Rockliff,
1961.
Heppenstall, Rayner. The Intellectual Part. London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1963.
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1964.
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[1957].
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and New York: Verso, 2007 [1938].
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Meyer-Eppler, Werner. ‘Statistic and Psychologic Problems of Sound’. Trans. By
Alexander Goehr. in Die Reihe 1, 1957. pp. 55–61.
Monk, Leland. Standard Deviations: Chance and the Modern British Novel. Stanford:
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Murdoch, Iris. Under the Net. London: Vintage, 2002 [1954].
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Osborne, John. Look Back in Anger. London: Faber and Faber, 2013 [1956].
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 Chance in the Canon 261

Wilford, Hugh. The CIA, The British Left and the Cold War: Calling the Tune?, London:
Routledge, 2003.
Williams, Raymond. Society and Culture. London: Penguin, 1985 [1958].
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262
 Timeline of Works

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

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

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

263
264 Timeline of Works

Barbara Pym Excellent Women

Sam Selvon A Brighter Sun
John Sommerfield The Adversaries
Angus Wilson Hemlock and After

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

1954
Kingsley Amis Lucky Jim
Arthur C. Clarke Childhood’s End
Ian Fleming Live and Let Die
William Golding Lord of the Flies
Doris Lessing A Proper Marriage
C.S. Lewis The Horse and His Boy
Penelope Mortimer A Villa in Summer
Iris Murdoch Under the Net
C.P. Snow The New Men
John Sommerfield Trouble in Porter Street, second edition [first published 1938]
J.R.R. Tolkien The Fellowship of the Ring
J.R.R. Tolkien The Two Towers
 Timeline of Works 265

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

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

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

Alistair MacLean The Guns of Navarone

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

1958
Margery Allingham Hide my Eyes
Kingsley Amis I Like it Here
Brian Aldiss Non-Stop
Samuel Beckett The Unnameable
Michael Bond A Bear Called Paddington
Lawrence Durrell Balthazar
Lawrence Durrell Mountolive
Ian Fleming Dr. No
Stella Gibbons White Sand and Grey Sand
William Golding Free Fall
George Lamming Of Age and Innocence
Doris Lessing A Ripple from the Storm
Alistair MacLean South by Java Head
Ngaio Marsh Singing in the Shrouds
Gladys Mitchell Spotted Hemlock
Penelope Mortimer Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting
Iris Murdoch The Bell
V.S. Naipaul The Suffrage of Elvira
Barbara Pym Less than Angels
Mary Renault A Glass of Blessings
Sam Selvon Turn Again Tiger
Alan Sillitoe Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
C.P. Snow The Conscience of the Rich
Muriel Spark Robinson
Angus Wilson The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot
 Timeline of Works 267

1959
Michael Bond More About Paddington
John Braine The Vodi
E.R. Braithwaite To Sir, With Love
James Courage A Way of Love
Ian Fleming Goldfinger
Stella Gibbons A Pink Front Door
Alistair MacLean The Last Frontier
Alistair MacLean Night Without End
Colin MacInnes Absolute Beginners
Gladys Mitchell The Man Who Grew Tomatoes
V.S. Naipaul Miguel Street
Mervyn Peake Titus Alone
Alan Sillitoe The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner
C.P. Snow The Affair
Muriel Spark Memento Mori
Keith Waterhouse Billy Liar
John Wyndham The Outward Urge
268
 Timeline of National Events

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

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

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

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

269
270 Timeline of National Events

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

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

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

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

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

1958
Britain’s first nuclear submarine launched
First Aldermaston march
Nottingham and Notting Hill ‘race disturbances’
Britain’s first motorway, the M6 bypass, is opened
Munich air disaster kills eight members of Manchester United.
 Timeline of National Events 271

1959
Conservative Party win third consecutive General Election
Britain concludes successful talks to found EFTA , which comes into operation the
following year
Mini (car) launched
Obscene Publications Act.
272
 Timeline of International Events

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

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

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

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

273
274 Timeline of International Events

1954
Algerian War begins
West Germany admitted to NATO.

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

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

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

1958
First silicon chip demonstrated at Texas Instruments’ laboratory in Dallas
Beginning of La Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) in French cinema
A 17-year-old Pelé debuts in the World Cup for Brazil, who go on to win.
 Timeline of International Events 275

1959
Conclusion of negotiations to found EFTA , which comes into operation during the
following year
Castro finally overthrows Batista Government in Cuba
Alaska and Hawaii become the 49th and 50th states of US
Plane crash killing Buddy Holly.
276
 Biographies of Writers

Margery Allingham was born in London in 1904 – her father was a journalist, and her
parents both produced fiction for serialization in popular magazines. By the time Margery
was eighteen she had published stories, reviews and film synopses, and her first novel, an
adventure story, was published in 1923. She met Philip (Pip) Youngman Carter, an art
student, in 1921, and they married in 1927. Her increasingly successful writing career
supported her husband through his difficulties in making a career of art, and funded his
increasingly expensive tastes until after the Second World War, when Pip found a niche
writing society columns for The Tatler, which he went on to edit from 1954. From 1931
the couple lived mostly in Essex, a region with which Margery felt a deep affinity,
manifested in many of her works. She published twenty-five novels during her long
career, as well as sixty-four short stories, and a great number of reviews and articles. She
died in 1966, and her contribution to the development of detective fiction, and in
particular its psychological aspects, is now held in high regard. Her post-war novels The
Tiger in The Smoke (1952) and The Beckoning Lady (1955) are generally revered as her
best – the latter was her own favourite.

Kingsley Amis (1922–95), the son of a sales manager for Colman’s Mustard, grew up in
the south London suburb of Norbury and attended the City of London School. He began
a degree in English at Oxford in 1941, where he met and became friends with Philip
Larkin. His studies were interrupted by his military service during the war as a signals
officer from 1942 to 1945. Following his graduation with a First in 1947, Amis married
Hilary Bardwell the following year and went on to work as a lecturer at what was then
called the University College of Swansea from 1949 to 1961. During this time his children
Philip, Martin – who would also become a significant novelist – and Sally were born.
Lucky Jim (1954), Amis’s first novel, was an extremely funny story of a young lecturer at a
provincial university, which caught the public mood of dissatisfaction with the pedantic
idiocies and pretensions of the dominant culture of the time. After going almost
immediately into reprint, the novel became a bestseller and won the 1955 Somerset
Maugham Prize. Subsequent novels such as That Uncertain Feeling (1955) and Take a Girl
Like You (1960) established Amis as one of the leading British novelists of his time; a status
he maintained until the end of the 1980s and which was confirmed by his winning the
Booker Prize for The Old Devils (1986). New Maps of Hell (1960), based on a series of
lectures that Amis gave at Princeton the previous year, was one of the first critical studies
of science fiction. Some of his own novels such as The Alteration (1976) – set in a parallel
universe in which the Reformation did not take place – and Russian Hide-and-Seek (1980)
– set in a twenty-first-century England ruled by the Russians – were clear examples of that

277
278 Biographies of Writers

genre. Briefly a communist, Amis was initially a writer with leftist sympathies but by the
late 1960s he had moved to the right, supporting the Vietnam War and, later, the
government of Margaret Thatcher. Some of his later novels such as Jake’s Thing (1978) and
Stanley and the Women (1984) were criticized for being misogynistic. Amis was knighted
in 1990.

E.R. Braithwaite was born in 1912 in Georgetown, Guyana, to a relatively privileged

family, both his parents being Oxford graduates. During the Second World War, he joined
the Royal Air Force as a fighter pilot, before studying Physics at Cambridge immediately
after. Despite his considerable qualifications, he was unable to find work in his field in
Britain due to widespread racism and so took a teaching position at an East End secondary
school. These experiences formed the basis of his first novel, To Sir With Love (1959), later
turned into the 1967 feature film of the same name starring Sidney Poitier and Lulu.
Braithwaite was then employed by the Department for Child Welfare run by the former
London County Council, responsible for finding foster homes for homeless children.
These experiences would also significantly inform Braithwaite’s writing, providing the
plot to Paid Servant (1962). He also published A Kind of Homecoming (1962), a memoir
of his time travelling around West Africa, and A Choice of Straws (1965), in which
Braithwaite attempts to depict the psyche of adolescent white racists in the characters of
Jack and Dave Bennett, two brothers who fatally stab a black man. His next novel,
Reluctant Neighbours (1972), was set around conversations with a white passenger on a
commuter train, with the latter’s offensive remarks drawing out the author’s personal
history of struggle against bigotry. After the South African apartheid government lifted
their ban on his books, Braithwaite visited the country, receiving the status of ‘honorary
white’, which would become the name for his 1975 book recounting the experience.
Braithwaite was the newly-independent Guyana’s first permanent representative to the
United Nations in 1966 and, later, their ambassador to Venezuela. He also taught at
numerous universities around the United States before settling in Washington, DC . He
died in 2016, aged 104.

Brigid Brophy was born in London in 1929. Her father was John Brophy,
a Liverpool-born writer of Irish descent, and he encouraged her to read widely and write
from an early age. In 1947 she gained a scholarship to St Hugh’s College, Oxford, to read
Classics, but was sent down after an unspecified sexual misdemeanour during her fourth
term. She began working as a typist. In 1953 she published a collection of short stories, The
Crown Princess. Her first novel, Hackenfeller’s Ape, followed later that year, and is a book
credited with initiating the animal liberation movement in Britain. In 1954 Brophy began
an unconventional, joyful and enduring marriage with Michael Levey, who was then
assistant keeper at the National Gallery. The couple had one daughter. Brophy’s writing
career incorporated plays and non-fiction that reflected her range of interests in
psychoanalysis, sexual liberation, art and opera. She was a fervent and articulate
campaigner on a variety of issues, including anti-vivisection and homosexual rights. In
 Biographies of Writers 279

1983 she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She continued to write for as long as she
was able, and died in 1995.

Roland Camberton is the penname of Henry Cohen. Very little is known about Cohen’s
early life but he was born in Manchester in 1921 to Jewish, working-class parents. At
some point in early childhood, he moved with his parents to the East End of London and
attended Hackney Downs School until 1938. He was a wireless mechanic in the Royal Air
Force during the Second World War, during which time he began to write fiction. After
the war, he had several short-term employments as a teacher, copywriter, translator, tutor
and publisher’s traveller. He only published two novels, the first of which, Scamp (1950),
won the Somerset Maugham Prize. His second novel, Rain on the Pavements, was
published in 1951. He does not appear to have published any more fiction after this date,
although he did work as a freelance journalist. He died in 1965 and is buried in Rainham
Jewish Cemetery.

Agatha Christie, née Miller, was born in Devon in 1890, the youngest of three children.
Though her brother and sister were sent away to school, Agatha’s formal education was
minimal. During the First World War she worked with the Voluntary Aid Detachment,
and then in a dispensary. On Christmas Eve 1914 she married Archibald Christie, a
young officer in the Royal Flying Corp, home on his first leave. She had submitted her first
novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, to The Bodley Head, who eventually published it in
America in 1920 (and in Britain the following year). It features a Belgian detective,
Hercule Poirot (by 1938, she told a friend, she felt he had become ‘insufferable’). The
couple’s daughter Rosalind was born in 1919. In 1926 Christie lost her mother and
discovered her husband to be having an affair – the couple divorced in 1928.
She married archaeology professor Max Mallowan in 1930, which also saw publication of
Murder at the Vicarage, her tenth novel, and the first to feature Miss Jane Marple as
detective. Christie continued to write well into her later years: she published more than
seventy detective novels, and was an accomplished playwright. She died in 1976, and her
work remains provocative today.

James Courage was born in 1903 in Christchurch, New Zealand, and grew up on his
family’s sheep farm near Amberley. He was educated at New Zealand’s oldest independent
school, Christ’s College, before moving in 1923 to England where he completed a BA in
English at St John’s College, Oxford. Courage spent most of his adult life in England,
though many of his closest friends were fellow New Zealand émigrés, and he kept in
touch with his home country’s literary scene. His first novel, One House, was published in
1933 by Victor Gollancz, but made little impact. His only staged play, Private History,
about a sexual relationship between two boarding school pupils and their masters’
reaction to its discovery, played to packed houses at the Gate Theatre Studio off the Strand
during its brief run in 1938. Having suffered severely from tuberculosis in the early 1930s,
Courage was declared medically unfit at the outbreak of the Second World War, and
served as a fire warden during London’s Blitz. Between 1940 and 1950 he worked for and
280 Biographies of Writers

then managed Wilson’s Book Shop in Hampstead. After the war Courage had numerous
short stories published as well as seven novels, five of which were set in his native land.
The Young Have Secrets (1954), which draws heavily on the author’s childhood experiences,
received widespread praise in both England and New Zealand. His penultimate book, the
London-set A Way of Love (1959), is often hailed as the first novel about homosexuality
penned by a New Zealand writer. Its publication led to the collapse of Courage’s reputation
in New Zealand, where it was banned. Courage died of a heart attack in 1963 in
Hampstead.

Rodney Garland was a penname first used by the Hungarian émigré Adam de Hegedus.
De Hegedus was born in Budapest in 1906 into a wealthy and well-connected family. De
Hegedus trained for a career in the Hungarian diplomatic service, but after a four-month
stay in London in 1927 decided instead to move into journalism. During the late 1920s
and 1930s he wrote for The Observer and other English and Hungarian periodicals while
moving between Budapest, London and Paris, where he claimed to have befriended
André Gide. He became a naturalized British citizen in 1935 and briefly served during the
Second World War but was discharged after suffering a mental breakdown. De Hegedus
wrote a number of short stories, opinion pieces and autobiographical sketches during the
1930s and 1940s. His sole critical and commercial success, however, was the novel The
Heart in Exile, published by W.H. Allen in 1953 under the Garland pseudonym. While
undoubtedly one of the most influential queer novels of the decade, its author was not
personally in favour with those campaigning for the decriminalization of homosexuality:
a thinly disguised version of de Hegedus appears in Peter Wildeblood’s A Way of Life
(1956) in form of the pessimistic, secretive émigré author Waldemar van Ochs. A second
novel, The Troubled Midnight, obviously inspired by the defections of the spies Burgess
and Maclean, was published in 1954; de Hegedus himself had been of interest to the
British security services since at least 1939. In 1956 W.H. Allen disclosed the identity of
Rodney Garland and announced de Hegedus’s untimely death. (He is usually presumed
to have committed suicide, but his death certificate states he died in 1955 in Westminster
Hospital from acute adrenal failure.) Regardless, W.H. Allen continued to use the Garland
moniker for another three novels published in the 1960s, the last of which, Sorcerer’s
Broth (1966), features a homosexual plotline, and was written by another Hungarian-
born author, Peter de Polnay (1906–84).

Stella Gibbons was born on 5 January 1902 in Kentish Town in North London. Her family
had Irish ancestry and her father, Telford, was a doctor. She was educated at home until
she was thirteen and then attended North London Collegiate School where she first began
to write stories, and later became the vice president of the school’s Senior Dramatic Club.
At the age of twenty-one, she attended University College, London to study for a two-year
diploma in Journalism which she completed in 1923. After university she worked for the
Evening Standard and published several poems. Her first novel, Cold Comfort Farm, was
published in 1932. It won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize and is still her most well-known
work. In 1933 she married the actor and singer Allan Webb and they had one daughter,
 Biographies of Writers 281

Laura, in 1935. During a long writing career she produced over twenty novels including
Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm (1940), Westwood (1946), Here Be Dragons (1956) and
Starlight (1967). She also published short-story collections, volumes of poetry and a
children’s novel. Gibbons became a well-known figure in the London literary scene, often
hosting literary tea parties in her Highgate home, where she lived from 1936 until her
death in 1989.

Martyn Goff was born in 1923, the son of a wealthy Russian immigrant fur trader. Goff
was brought up in Hampstead and was educated at Clifton College, Bristol. He won a
place to read English at Oxford, but instead joined the Royal Air Force and completed his
war service. After being demobilized in 1946 Goff went on to establish three bookshops
on England’s south coast, the first in St Leonard’s. Goff ’s debut novel, The Plaster Fabric
(1957), featured a young homosexual bookseller as its protagonist. Another eight novels
followed, including The Youngest Director (1961), which Angus Wilson claimed helped
change public opinion around homosexuality. He also wrote several works of non-fiction
on topics such as record collecting and Regency architecture. Goff went on to become a
significant figure in British publishing. He was director of the National Book League
(now Booktrust) throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and led numerous campaigns to
promote books and literacy. In the same period he also reviewed fiction for the Daily
Telegraph and the Evening Standard and had his own weekly broadcast on LBC radio. His
most influential role, however, was to oversee the running of the Booker Prize from 1970
to 2006, an institution he helped to turn into a major annual media event that has
reshaped literary fiction publishing in the UK . He served on several Arts Council
committees and on the executive committee of PEN . Goff was appointed OBE in 1977
and CBE in 2005. He died in in London in 2015.

William Golding (1911–91) was born in Newquay, Cornwall, but grew up in Wiltshire,
where his father was a science teacher at Marlborough Grammar School. After attending
the same school as a pupil, Golding went on to Oxford in 1930 and graduated with a
degree in English Literature in 1934. Eventually, Golding became a teacher at, first,
Maidstone Grammar School, and then, following active wartime service in the navy,
Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury, where he taught English until 1961. The
manuscript of his first novel, Lord of the Flies, was rejected several times before eventual
publication by Faber and Faber in 1954. The novel famously describes what happens to a
group of schoolboys stranded on an uninhabited island in the tropics. Golding’s
subsequent novels The Inheritors (1955) – concerning the clash between Neanderthals
and Homo Sapiens – and Pincher Martin (1956) – the narrative of the thoughts of a
drowning sailor – cemented his reputation as a writer exploring moral and existential
issues in depth and with imagination. His later work, including The Spire (1964), remained
popular, culminating in his sea trilogy To the Ends of the Earth, which includes Rites
of Passage (1980), which won the Booker Prize, Close Quarters (1987) and Fire Down
Below (1989). In 1983, Golding won the Nobel Prize for Literature and in 1988 he was
knighted.
282 Biographies of Writers

Attia Hosain was born in Lucknow, India, in 1913. Her education combined an English
liberal schooling with that of a traditional Muslim household, where she learned Persian,
Urdu and Arabic. In 1933 she was the first woman to graduate from the feudal, talukdari
families into which she was born. She was influenced by the nationalist movement and
the Progressive Writers’ Group during the 1930s, and became a journalist, broadcaster
and fiction writer. She remained an ardent socialist all her life. When India became
independent in 1947, she was in England with her husband and two children. He returned
to India, but she chose to remain, supporting her family by presenting her own woman’s
programme on the BBC Eastern service for many years, and undertaking many other
radio, television and theatre jobs. Phoenix Fled, a collection of short stories, was published
in 1953, and her novel, Sunlight on a Broken Column, in 1961: both are characterized by a
graceful prose style that reflects the ornate traditions of Persian and Urdu literature. Her
own harshest critic, she destroyed much of what she wrote, but her working life was
cosmopolitan and politically engaged to the end. Hosain died in 1998.

George Lamming was born in 1927 to a working-class single-parent family in Carrington

Village, Barbados, formerly part of a large sugar farm under the British plantation system.
In his childhood, Lamming witnessed economic insecurity and Barbados’ riotous labour
rebellion of 1937. He won a scholarship to the prestigious Combermere High School
where teacher Frank Collymore, also the founding editor of pioneering Caribbean
literary journal, BIM, nurtured his talent. Many of these experiences from Lamming’s
youth and childhood would be immortalized in his semi-autobiographical novel In the
Castle of My Skin (1953), which won him the Somerset Maugham Award as well as the
acclaim of figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Richard Wright. Lamming moved to
Britain in 1950 (travelling on the same ship as Trinidadian author Sam Selvon), initially
doing factory work before being taken on as a broadcaster for the BBC Colonial Service.
Lamming won the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1954 and, in the same year, published his
second novel, The Emigrants, recounting the stories of recently-arrived Caribbean
migrants to London. Lamming’s later novels also address colonialism and decolonization,
with Of Age and Innocence (1958), Season of Adventure (1960) and Water With Berries
(1972) all centring on the fictional Caribbean island of San Cristobal and exploring
themes of anti-colonial resistance, the colonized psyche and its relation to empire.
Lamming also published The Pleasures of Exile (1960), a collection of essays in which he
reinterprets The Tempest to define the position of Caribbean peoples in the post-colonial
world. In 1967, he entered academia as a writer-in-residence and lecturer at the University
of the West Indies, later taking positions as visiting professor at institutions such as the
University of Pennsylvania and Brown University. The University of the West Indies also
hosts the George Lamming Pedagogical Centre, where Lamming has his own office and
is in residence weekly.

Marghanita Laski was born in London in 1915, the eldest child of six siblings, two of
them adopted. Her early life in Manchester was greatly influenced by her maternal
grandfather Moses Gaster, a scholar and chief rabbi of Sephardi Jews in England, though
 Biographies of Writers 283

before going to university she renounced the Jewish faith and declared herself an atheist.
She read English Language and Literature at Oxford, graduating in 1936 with a third-
class degree. She married John Howard in 1937: he became a publisher and was the
founder of the Cresset Press. They were to have a son and a daughter. Her first novel, Love
on the Supertax, was published in 1944, and was followed by numerous novels, including
Little Boy Lost (1942), The Village (1952) and The Victorian Chaise-Longue (1953). During
the 1960s Laski moved away from fiction, producing a range of thoughtful and thought-
provoking works, often focused upon religious issues, such as the 1961 Ecstasy. She was
perhaps best known as a broadcaster, and served on the committee of the Arts Council.
Yet perhaps her most outstanding (and selfless) contribution to culture was her role as a
voluntary reader for the supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, which she began in
1958. By the publication of the final volume in 1986 she had supplied at least quarter of a
million illustrative examples to the project. Laski died in 1988.

Doris Lessing, née Tayler, was born in Persia (now Iran) in 1919 to British parents but
grew up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) after her parents moved there to run a farm. She
left her convent school at the age of fourteen and her home soon after to become a
nursemaid. In 1937, she moved to Salisbury (now Harare) to become a telephone operator
and subsequently married and had two children. After her first marriage ended in divorce
in 1943, she became involved with the communist politics of the Left Book Club and
there met her second husband Gottfried Lessing. When that marriage ended in 1949, she
moved to Britain. Lessing’s first novel, The Grass is Singing (1950), dealt with racial politics
in Rhodesia and had an immediate impact. The Golden Notebook (1962) marked an
important moment in the post-war rise of feminist consciousness. In the 1970s, similarly
to J.G. Ballard, but probably more influenced by R.D. Laing’s critique of conventional
psychiatry, she chose to focus on ‘inner space’ in novels such as Briefing for a Descent into
Hell (1971) and Memoirs of a Survivor (1977). Shikasta (1979) was the first of five books
in the overtly science-fictional Canopus of Argos series (1979–83), which was a major
factor in Lessing’s award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. While novels such as
The Good Terrorist (1985) were seen by some as evidence of a ‘return to realism’, more
recent work such as The Cleft (2007) and Alfred and Emily (2008) demonstrate speculative
and fantastical elements.

Colin MacInnes was born in 1914 in London to singer, James Campbell McInnes, and
novelist, Angela Thirkell, with Rudyard Kipling his maternal great-uncle. After his parents
separated, he moved with his mother to Australia in 1920, returning to the UK ten years
later. MacInnes served in the British Intelligence Corps during the Second World War and
worked in occupied Germany immediately after, drawing on these experiences for his first
novel, To the Victors the Spoils (1950). Back in London he became a great enthusiast of the
city, living in various locations befitting his bohemian lifestyle from ‘a sinister old slum’ in
Brompton where ‘the ground-floor tenant was a cordial prostitute’ to one-room flats in
areas as diverse as Soho, Pimlico and Spitalfields. These experiences would inform his
trilogy of London novels: City of Spades (1957), following the interwoven experiences of
284 Biographies of Writers

a Nigerian student and British civil servant in the city’s burgeoning black cultural scene;
Absolute Beginners (1959), in which a trendy teenage bohème recounts his adventures of
West London slums, the jazz scene and the 1958 Notting Hill Riots; and Mr Love and
Justice (1960), where a novice pimp and plain-clothes officer find their lives intermingling.
Absolute Beginners would also be adapted into a film starring David Bowie in 1986 and
then a stage play in 2007. MacInnes was also an accomplished essayist, publishing a
collection of journalistic articles in England, Half English (1961), as well as London: City of
Any Dream (1962), a panegyric to his hometown; Sweet Saturday Night (1967), a history
of British music hall; and Loving Them Both (1973), a study of bisexuality drawing on his
own experiences as a bisexual man. In the mid–1970s he left London for the Kent coast
where he died of cancer of the oesophagus in April 1976, aged sixty-one.

Ngaio Marsh was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1895, the only child of a bank
clerk and immigrant from England, and an amateur actress and New Zealander of longer
standing. Her Maori name (pronounced ‘Nyo’) denotes, amongst other things, a sturdy
native coastal tree which, in legend, also grows on the moon. Marsh studied painting, but
joined a professional Shakespeare company, touring Australasia in 1919–20 as an actress.
She continued to act and to paint, and began writing and producing plays. From 1928 to
1932 she visited London, and it was there that she produced her first detective novel, A
Man Lay Dead, featuring Chief Detective-Inspector Roderick Alleyn, CID. Published in
1934, it was followed by thirty others. Marsh divided her time between England and
detective fiction, and New Zealand and the theatre, where she directed, wrote and taught.
She is most revered in her native land for her work in theatre, and herself considered this
her most ‘valuable contribution’. She died in 1982 in her childhood home overlooking
Christchurch. Her private life remains obscure.

Gladys Mitchell (1901–83) was a distinguished and prolific writer of detective novels.
After her first, Speedy Death (1929), she published at least one book per year for the rest
of her life. This novel introduced Mrs Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, detective,
‘psychiatric consultant to the Home Office’, and a feature of all the crime novels written
under Mitchell’s name. Mitchell studied at Goldsmiths’ College and later University
College London, and gained a diploma in European history in 1926, also qualifying as a
teacher. During most of her career she was a dedicated teacher of history, athletics,
English and Spanish at a number of girls’ schools in Middlesex. Though she is counted
amidst the chief practitioners of the golden age tradition of detective fiction, she was not
afraid to turn the genre on its head, unashamedly mixing comedy, parody and horror. She
also produced historical fiction under the pseudonym Stephen Hockaby, and as ‘Malcolm
Torrie’ she explored a lifelong fascination with archaeology and history through the
character Timothy Herring, who combined his detective work with a role as Secretary for
the Society of the Preservation of Historic Buildings.

Naomi Mitchison, who was born in 1897 and died in 1999, was the author of over seventy
books published across eight decades and a central figure in British, especially Scottish,
 Biographies of Writers 285

literary circles of the twentieth century. Initially raised and schooled with boys, she was
educated at home by governesses from the age of twelve but the fact that the family lived
in Oxford and were connected to the intellectual elite meant that she still gained an
unusually good education for her gender at that time. In particular, a love for the classics
informed a range of early historical novels from her first, The Conquered (1923), set in
Roman Gaul, through The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931), set in and around
ancient Greece, and up to The Blood of the Martyrs (1939) set in Nero’s Rome. We Have
Been Warned (1935), a dystopian account of the failure of the leftist politics of the decade
to address the reality of class and gender oppression in Britain, climaxed with a violent
fascist counter-revolution. From 1939, Mitchison lived at Carradale, a Scottish country
estate, where she kept a wartime diary for Mass-Observation (published in 1985 as
Among You Taking Notes . . .). Notable post-war works include a Scottish historical novel,
The Bull Calves (1947), Travel Light (1952) and Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962). The
sister of the eminent geneticist, J.B.S. Haldane, Mitchison was the dedicatee of James
Watson’s account of his role in the discovery of the structure of DNA , The Double Helix
(1968). Her later novels include two genetics-informed complex investigations of the
pursuit of new ways of living in a world threatened by environmental disaster, Solution
Three (1975) and Not By Bread Alone (1983).

Penelope Mortimer, née Fletcher, was born in 1918, the daughter of a Church of England
clergyman who lost his faith early in his career, but continued to serve as a vicar. She
studied to become a journalist at University College, and married Charles Dimont, himself
a journalist, in 1937, publishing her first novel, Johanna, as Penelope Dimont in 1947. The
couple had two daughters. Her novel was unsuccessful, but she persevered, and was
writing too for the New Yorker, and as an agony aunt, ‘Ann Temple’, for the Daily Mail. In
1949 the Dimonts divorced. Penelope had a daughter in 1945 with the scientist Kenneth
Harrison, and another in 1948 with the novelist and playwright Randall Swingler. In 1949
she married writer and barrister John Mortimer. They were to have two children. Her
novel-writing career continued into the 1980s with books that were unflinching in their
analysis of men, women and their relationships. She remained an incisive and productive
journalist, and, after a bizarre commissioning process, produced a biography of the Queen
Mother that ultimately questioned the point of her majesty’s life. She died in 1999.

Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919. Her parents moved to London while she
was still a baby. She studied Classics at Oxford, and between 1944 and 1946 she worked
for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in Europe. She went
on to study philosophy as a postgraduate student at Oxford, and eventually became
a fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford. She published essays on philosophy and a
monograph on Jean-Paul Sartre. Her first novel, Under the Net, was published in 1954.
She went on to publish over twenty more novels, including The Black Prince (1973) and
The Book and the Brotherhood (1987), and several more works of philosophy. Her novel
The Sea, The Sea (1978) won the Booker Prize, and she won numerous other awards for
her fiction. She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in
286 Biographies of Writers

1987. Murdoch developed Alzheimer’s disease in the mid–1990s, and the account by her
husband, John Bayley, of her illness was adapted as a film, Iris (dir. Richard Eyre, 2001).
She died in 1999.

V.S. Naipaul, born in Chaguanas, Trinidad, in 1932, is arguably the Caribbean’s most
internationally celebrated author. Of East Indian heritage, his grandparents had come to
Trinidad as indentured servants while his father, Seepersad Naipaul, was a journalist for
the Trinidad Guardian. In 1939, Naipaul’s family moved to the capital where he attended
the illustrious Queen’s Royal College and, upon graduation, won a scholarship to Oxford
University. In 1954, he moved to London and became a presenter for the BBC ’s Caribbean
Voices radio programme. His first novel, Miguel Street (1959), depicts characters from
Naipaul’s childhood in a series of interrelated vignettes. However, Naipaul’s publisher,
reluctant to publish what seemed a collection of short stories from an unknown author,
instructed him to write a more straightforward novel. Naipaul duly produced The Mystic
Masseur (1957), following a frustrated writer’s rise to political power via a career as a
mystic, and The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), covering the buffoonish chicanery of rural
elections steeped in ethnic tension. His next novel, A House for Mr Biswas (1961), drew
elements from his father’s life to analyse Trinidad’s gradual decolonization and was
Naipaul’s first to gain worldwide acclaim. Naipaul’s extensive travels also inspired
numerous works: The Middle Passage (1962), from his time in the Caribbean and South
America, An Area of Darkness (1964), about his time in India, as well as the novel In a Free
State (1971), inspired by his travels in Africa. A controversial figure drawing criticism
from the likes of Edward Said and George Lamming, Naipaul has won numerous awards
in his career, including the 1971 Booker Prize for In a Free State and the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 2001, as well as being knighted in 1989. He currently lives in Wiltshire,
England.

Barbara Pym was born in Oswestry, Shropshire, in 1913. She was educated at the girl’s
boarding school Huyton College, Liverpool, and St Hilda’s College, Oxford, where she
studied English Literature. After graduation, she lived with her parents as she began
writing novels, and then moved to London, to a bedsit adjoining that of her younger
sister Hilary. The two would keep a home together for the rest of Barbara’s life, barring her
time in the WRNS from 1943–6, when she served in Britain and Naples. She then began
work at the International African Institute in London, and from 1958 was the Assistant
Editor of the Institute’s journal Africa. Pym’s first novel, Some Tame Gazelle, which had
been written during the 1930s, was published in 1950. Her first six novels sold steadily but
unspectacularly, but by the early 1960s the policy of the new Senior Editor at Jonathan
Cape, Tom Maschler – one that serviced both fashion and profit – resulted in the round
rejection of An Unsuitable Attachment when she submitted it in 1963. Fourteen years
without publication followed. Pym continued to work at the Institute, offering her work
to twenty-one publishers, sometimes under an assumed name, always unsuccessfully. She
retired in 1974 to live in Oxfordshire. In 1977 a special edition of the Times Literary
Supplement named her one of the nation’s most underrated novelists – the only author to
 Biographies of Writers 287

be nominated twice, by Philip Larkin (an enduring friend and supporter) and Lord David
Cecil. A renaissance of her work began, with Quartet in Autumn, published the same year,
nominated for the Booker Prize. The Sweet Dove Died followed in 1978, and A Few Green
Leaves was published posthumously. Pym died of breast cancer in 1980, at the age of
sixty-six.

Mary Renault was born Eileen Mary Challans in 1905 in Forest Gate, Essex. She was
educated at St Hugh’s College, Oxford and in 1933 began training as a nurse at the
Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford. During her training she met Julie Mullard, who would
become her lifelong partner. Several of her books drew on her experiences of nursing,
including her debut novel, the hospital romance Purposes of Love (1939), and The
Charioteer (1953), which was informed by her treatment of Dunkirk evacuees at the
Winford Emergency Hospital in Bristol. The latter novel is significant for its frank focus
on male homosexual relationships, although her 1944 novel The Friendly Young Ladies,
meant as a light-hearted riposte to Radclyffe Hall’s landmark novel The Well of Loneliness
(1928), centres on a cohabiting female couple. In 1948 Renault won the MGM award for
best novel of the year for her fourth book Return to Night. The substantial prize money
enabled Renault and Mullard to emigrate to South Africa, where they lived for the rest of
their lives. The couple settled first in Durban, where they enjoyed a more liberal social
climate than that to which they had been accustomed in England. In the 1950s Renault
and Mullard both joined Black Sash, the nonviolent white women’s organization which
campaigned against apartheid; their activism necessitated their relocation to Cape Town.
The Charioteer was Renault’s last work of contemporary fiction, after which she would go
on to write eight novels set in the classical world, as well as a biography of Alexander the
Great. Although Renault was not a trained classicist, her historical novels received acclaim
for their rich detail, and attracted large readerships. Many of Renault’s historical novels
focus on male homosexual love, rendered in noble and heroic terms. However, she was
resistant to being labelled as a gay writer. Renault died in Cape Town in 1983.

Sam Selvon was born in 1923, the sixth of seven children, to East Indian parents in San
Fernando, Trinidad. Selvon began writing while working as a telegraph operator with the
West Indian branch of the Royal Naval Reserve during the Second World War. After the
war, he moved to Port of Spain to work as a journalist for the Trinidad Guardian, writing
short stories under a variety of pseudonyms. He arrived in Britain in 1950 (on the same
boat as Barbadian author George Lamming), doing a myriad of jobs from sweeping
floors and factory labour to working as a clerk at the Indian Embassy, all the while writing
in his spare time. His first novel, A Brighter Sun (1952), explores the prejudices and
mutual distrust between East Indian and Creole communities in 1930s Trinidad. While
his Trinidad-set novels often centred around the nation’s East Indian community, most
notably Turn Again Tiger (1958) about the struggles of an East Indian bookkeeper against
societal racism and his father’s stifling traditionalism, he also became famous for his
novels depicting the experiences of Caribbean migrants in London such as The Lonely
Londoners (1956), following the hardships and roguish misadventures of a group of West
288 Biographies of Writers

Indians in their new home; The Housing Lark (1965), on the difficulties Caribbean
migrants faced finding adequate and reasonably-priced accommodation; and Moses
Ascending (1975), in which The Lonely Londoners narrator returns as the landlord of a
derelict Shepherd’s Bush house. Selvon’s novels are typified by an irreverent humour
which nonetheless evinces his deep sympathy for the plights of his characters. Selvon
won numerous awards in his career, including two Guggenheim Fellowships (1954 and
1968), and held various academic posts. In 1994, during a trip to his native Trinidad,
Selvon died of a respiratory failure at Piarco International Airport, aged 70.

Alan Sillitoe was born in Nottingham in 1928. He came from a working-class background
and his father was a factory worker at the local Raleigh Bicycle Company. Sillitoe left
school at fourteen and joined his father at the Raleigh where he worked for four years
before joining the Air Training Corps and then the Royal Air Force. He served in Malaya
as a wireless operator before returning to Britain, where he was diagnosed with
tuberculosis. It was while he was hospitalized for the condition that he began writing
fiction. After leaving hospital he was sent to Mallorca for convalescence and it was there
he worked on what was to be his first novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. This was
published in 1958 and was followed in 1959 by the collection of short stories The
Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. It was also in Mallorca that Sillitoe met the poet
Ruth Fainlight whom he married in 1959. Sillitoe was associated with the Angry Young
Man during this period, although it was a description he always rejected. During a long
writing career, he produced twenty-three novels including Key to the Door (1961), which
continued his narrative of the Seaton family of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and
is recognized to be his most autobiographical work of fiction; Travels in Nihilon (1972);
and The Storyteller (1979). He also produced more short story collections, plays, travel
writings, children’s books and several volumes of poetry including The Rats and Other
Poems (1960). One of his last novels, The Birthday (2001), returns to the Seaton family
and describes their experience of growing old. Sillitoe died in 2010 and is buried in
Highgate Cemetery.

Although sometimes mistakenly identified as a working-class writer, John Sommerfield

(1908–91), was the son of journalist and editor, Vernon Sommerfield, and attended
University College School in Hampstead alongside Stephen Spender, who is mercilessly
parodied as ‘Mark Pringle’ in Sommerfield’s last novel, The Imprinted (1977). At the age of
sixteen, Sommerfield left school and worked in various jobs, notably as a carpenter’s
labourer at the Scene Shop on the Old Kent Road, before going to sea as a dishwasher
with the United Food Freight Lines, sailing between New York, Buenos Aires, the West
Indies and Liverpool. This experience informs the second half of his first novel, They Die
Young (1930). After joining the Communist Party in the early 1930s, he wrote the two
books for which he is best known: the experimental proletarian novel, May Day (1936),
and his memoir of fighting alongside his friend John Cornford in the defence of
republican Madrid against Franco’s forces in late 1936, Volunteer in Spain (1937). On
his return from the Spanish Civil War, he was recruited as the director of fieldwork
 Biographies of Writers 289

for Mass-Observation’s ‘Worktown’ study in Bolton, where he researched and wrote their
book The Pub and the People (1943). Trouble in Porter Street (1938; revised 1954) was a
propagandist novella about a rent strike, which sold over 80,000 copies. His short stories
written before and during the Second World War, many for Penguin New Writing, were
collected as The Survivors (1947). In the post-war period he wrote screenplays for a
number of documentary films, including Waverley Steps (1947), and continued to publish
novels: The Adversaries (1952), The Inheritance (1956), and North West Five (1960). As
part of the semi-autonomous literary wing of the Communist Party, alongside other
intellectuals such as Jack Lindsay, Edgell Rickword and Randall Swingler, Sommerfield
played his part in turn on the Left Review collective in the 1930s, in various writers’
groups such as the Ralph Fox Group of the 1930s and the Realist Writers’ Group launched
in early 1940, and on the editorial commission of Our Time in the late 1940s; before
leaving the Party in 1956.

Muriel Spark (née Camberg) was born in Edinburgh in 1918 to a Scottish Jewish father
and an English Christian mother. She and her brother attended James Gillespie’s, a small,
fee-paying school, where Muriel flourished under the charismatic Christina Kay, whom
she later immortalized in her sixth and most famous novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
(1961). She left Edinburgh in 1937 for Southern Rhodesia, aged nineteen, to marry
Sydney (Solly) Spark, a schoolteacher. They had met at a dance in Edinburgh, and he had
gone on ahead to take up a job. He was thirteen years her senior, and in 1938 their only
child was born in Bulawayo. By then Solly had become very unstable, and the marriage
had broken down. Spark worked to support herself and her son, eventually affording
passage from South Africa to Liverpool in 1944. Her son Robin joined her from boarding
school the following year. Living in London, she became General Secretary of The Poetry
Society, edited The Poetry Review (somewhat controversially) from 1947–9, and wrote
studies of Mary Shelley, John Masefield and the Brontë sisters. In 1952 she published her
first book of poetry, but it was the award of the Observer Christmas short story prize in
1951 that finally inspired her to write fiction full-time. Her first published novel, The
Comforters (1957), was written three years after Spark converted to Roman Catholicism
and the novel was inspired by her studies on the Book of Job. Between the late 1950s and
the mid–1970s, Spark published close to a novel a year, plus dozens of short stories, plays
and essays; her work always ludic, experimental and freighted with philosophical and
theological questions. She lived in New York and, from 1967, in Italy, dying in 2006 at
home in Tuscany.

David Storey was born in 1933 in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, the third son of a mine-
worker who was determined that his sons should not follow him down the pit. David
went to grammar school, and to then to Slade School of Fine Art in London, which his
father insisted he fund himself. This he did, by signing with Leeds Rugby League Club,
and playing for their A-team for four seasons in the early 1950s with special dispensation
to commute to London every week, a privilege that set him apart, cruelly, from his team-
mates. This divided life proved hard to bear, and Storey gave up football to concentrate on
290 Biographies of Writers

painting and, increasingly, writing. Storey married Barbara Hamilton in 1956, with whom
he had four children. His first novel, This Sporting Life, was published in 1960. His 1963
film adaptation of the novel initiated a long collaboration with director Lindsay Anderson,
initially at the Royal Court and then, later, the National Theatre. Storey produced fiction,
plays and poetry across a prolific fifty year career. He died in 2017.

Elizabeth Taylor, née Coles, was born in Reading in 1912, and educated at the Abbey
School. In her twenties she joined the Communist Party, later transferring her support to
the Labour Party, of which she remained a lifetime supporter. She married John Taylor,
the owner of a confectionary business, in 1936, and the couple had a son and a daughter.
Taylor’s first novel, At Mrs Lippincote’s, was published in 1945, and she produced twelve
novels and four short story collections before her death by cancer in 1975. The milieu of
Taylor’s work is almost exclusively middle class and middle-English. Coupled with her
notorious shyness, this led to a lengthy under-appreciation of her scrupulous stylistics
and unsparing social critique which is finally being critically redressed.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State in 1892
to an English family. But from the age of three, he grew up in England following his
father’s death. Orphaned by the age of twelve, Tolkien attended King Edward’s School,
Birmingham, before going on to graduate in English Literature and Language at Oxford.
After completing his degree in 1915, he enlisted and was commissioned as an officer in
the Lancashire Fusiliers. In 1916, he married Edith Bratt before shipping out to France in
June, where he served at the Battle of the Somme. The courage of the ordinary soldiers he
saw was to prove the inspiration for Samwise Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings and the
rain-sodden mud was to become the ‘Dead Marshes’ before the gates of Mordor.
In October 1916, Tolkien contracted trench fever, necessitating his return
to England. During his convalescence he began creating the mythology of Middle Earth
and the stories, such as that of Beren and Lúthien, which would subsequently be
posthumously published in The Silmarillion (1977) and numerous further volumes edited
by his son, Christopher Tolkien. Following the First World War, Tolkien worked in
academia at the University of Leeds before becoming Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor
of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford in 1925. The Hobbit (1937) originated as stories told to his
children and its success led to demands for a sequel, which eventually manifested after
years of writing as the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings (1954–5). After retiring
from academia in 1959, Tolkien continued to work on his mythology but also published
poems and stories such as The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962) and Smith of Wootton
Major (1967). He died in 1973, two years after the death of Edith.

John Wain (1925–94) was a novelist, poet, essayist, literary critic, journalist, radio
producer, dramatist, cultural commentator and biographer. He was born and grew up in
Stoke-on-Trent. He attended Newcastle-under-Lyme High School in the area before
entering St John’s College, Oxford where he gained a First in 1946 and an MA in 1950.
While at Oxford he met and became friends with Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin. Wain
 Biographies of Writers 291

was a central figure in the literary establishment in the 1950s and 1960s, and was at
various times associated with the Movement Poets and the Angry Young Men. His first
novel Hurry on Down (1953) in many ways established the trend for novels of the 1950s
that focused a critique of contemporary constructions of class through the perspective of
a disaffected young man. Wain produced several more novels in a long writing career
including The Contenders (1958), Strike the Father Dead (1962), and Young Shoulders,
which won the Whitbread Prize in 1982. In addition to his fiction, he produced several
volumes of poetry including A Word Carved on a Sill (1956), and works of literary
criticism including Essays on Literature and Ideas (1963) and Arnold Bennett (1967). He
was also an academic for large periods of his adult life, and worked as a lecturer in English
at the University of Reading in the 1950s and in various posts at Oxford including
Professor of Poetry in the 1970s. Wain died in Oxford in 1994.

Angus Wilson (1913–91) was born in Bexhill, East Sussex, and subsequently educated at
Westminster School and Oxford. In 1937 he became a librarian at the British Museum,
where he was to remain until 1955 with the exception of his wartime work translating
Italian naval codes at Bletchley Park. It was after his return to the museum that he met his
lifelong partner, Tony Garrett. After the publication of short story collections The Wrong
Set (1949) and Such Darling Dodos (1950), his first novel Hemlock and After appeared in
1952 and depicted aspects of homosexual life in contemporary post-war London including
a fairly open plea for decriminalization. Following Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956), a novel
that ostensibly revolves around an archaeological hoax but is also concerned with the
condition of England, The Old Men at the Zoo (1961) was an example of the kind of
satirical science fiction that Wilson would call for critically as a response to the increasing
inability of the post-war social novel to represent the reality of modern life. Late Call
(1964) imaginatively brought together diverse generations in a new town; while No
Laughing Matter (1967) was a family saga narrated in a manner reminiscent of Virginia
Woolf ’s The Years (1937). From 1966 to 1978, Wilson was Professor of English Literature
at the University of East Anglia, where he played a key role in setting up the influential
MA in Creative Writing in 1970. His last novel, Setting the World on Fire, was published in
1980, the year he was knighted. He was President of the Royal Society of Literature from
1982 to 1988.

Colin Wilson was born in Leicester in 1931, the son of Arthur and Annetta Wilson. He
attended Gateway Secondary School where he initially developed a passion for the
sciences. His interests, however, soon turned to literature and, like the hero of his 1961
novel Adrift in Soho, he became a devotee of George Bernard Shaw. It was at this time that
he began to write stories, plays and essays. He undertook his national service in the Royal
Air Force from 1949, but soon left and had a number of jobs before moving to London
with his first wife whom he had married in 1951. Wilson continued to lead a rather
precarious life during the early 1950s and soon split with his wife. He travelled a lot and
spent periods in various parts of the UK and Europe. He married his second wife Joy
Stewart in the mid–1950s and the couple had three children. His breakthrough in terms
292 Biographies of Writers

of writing came with the publication of The Outsider in 1956, a work that examines the
outsider figure in a number of literary and philosophical works. This book captured
something of the zeitgeist of the mid–1950s and the ‘outsider’ became a figure that was
popularized in contemporary culture. He produced a wide range of works during his
career including fiction, biography, literary criticism and works on the occult. Wilson was
a truly prolific writer who by the time he died in 2013 had published over twenty novels
and over 100 works of non-fiction.

John Wyndham, the son of a barrister, was born John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon
Harris in Warwickshire and educated at the relatively liberal Bedales School in Hampshire.
He began writing SF stories in the 1930s and, as John Beynon, published two early novels,
The Secret People (1935) and Planet Plane (1936). During the Second World War he
worked for the Ministry of Information, before serving in the army with the Royal Corps
of Signals. His wartime experience clearly affected Wyndham because his fiction changed
from space opera to work that was predominantly concerned with the needs of people to
respond to some form of extreme disaster and deal with the trauma that arose from it.
Fame came with The Day of the Triffids (1951), which anticipates the social and cultural
revolutions of the 1960s. Wyndham’s ambivalence about the prospect of such wide-
reaching social change is clear from subsequent novels such as The Chrysalids (1955) and
The Midwich Cuckoos (1957). During the 1960s and after, Wyndham’s critical reputation,
if not his popularity, waned, as he came to be seen as no more than a purveyor of cosy
catastrophes. However, over recent years this decline has been reversed and the archiving
of his papers at the University of Liverpool has led to a renewed interest and even the
publication of the hitherto unknown novel, Plan for Chaos (2009).
 Index

Absolute Beginners (MacInnes, 1959) 16, British social anthropology 90, 93

166, 132–3, 137, 169–71, 177, Bronislaw Malinowski 82, 87, 89, 90,
178, 180–3, 185–6, 194, 198, 199 98, 103, 107–8
Adrift in Soho (Wilson, 1961) 177, 192, Clifford Geertz 101, 102, 103
195–7, 199 E. B. Tylor 108
A Kind of Loving (Barstow, 1960) 37, 81 and feminism 82, 98, 108
Aldiss, Brian 39, 43 and kinship 82
aleatory 254–5 ‘Manchester School’ 93
Allen, Walter 133 Margaret Mead 104
Allingham, Marjorie 16, 207, 277 participant observation 98
Albert Campion (detective character) study of culture 81
206–7, 214 ‘the anthropologist as hero’ 84
and Christianity 229 Appadurai, Arjun 88
and Essex 212–13 Arderner, Edwin and Shirley 83, 89, 108
Hide My Eyes (1958) 215 Armstrong, Louis 188
The Beckoning Lady (1955) 206, 213, Arnold, Matthew 10–11
214–15 Ashcroft, Bill 200
The Tiger in the Smoke (1952) 208–13, Atlee, Clement 3–7
215, 224, 230 Auden, W. H. 26, 27, 28
Allsop, Kenneth 6–7, 19, 32, 48n, 57, 242, on Agatha Christie 206
246, 252, 253 ‘Age of Anxiety’ 206, 207, 230
The Angry Decade (1958) 4, 19, 32, 242, autoethnography 213
246, 252
Althusser, Louis 187 Bakari, Imruh 198
Amis, Kingsley 6, 7, 16, 30, 35, 38, 39, Bakhtin, Mikhail 200
44, 235, 246, 247, 248, 251, 252, ballad and blues 179, 197
277–8 Ballard, J.G. 40, 43, 47–8
as Angry Young Man 57, 76 Crash (1973) 48
Jim Dixon (character), 249–50, 251 The Wind from Nowhere (1962) 39, 40
Lucky Jim (1954) 29–30, 35, 53, 237, Bannon, Ann 132
247, 248–9, 251, 252 Bartlett, Neil 115
New Maps of Hell (1961) 39, 44 Baudelaire, Charles 192
Anderson, Nels Bauer, Heike
The Hobo (1923) 194 and Matt Cook 114
Angry Young Men 6, 56, 177, 195, 201, 235, Queer 1950s 114
246, 253, 256 Baxter, Ernest
as adolescent 71 Look Down in Mercy (1951) 131
as commercial label 57, 58, 76 Beat generation 194–5
Colin Wilson 195 beatnik(s) 177, 192–4, 195–6, 201
John Osborne 81–2 Beckett, Samuel 252, 253
anthropology Waiting for Godot (1955) 252
Audrey Richards 82–3, 98, 101 Watt (1953) 252

293
294 Index

Belafonte, Harry 198 Butler Act (1944) 246, 247, 248

Belletto, Steven 243, 244 Buzard, James 84, 213
Bengry, Justin 118
Bentley, Nick 57, 61 Cage, John 255
Benton, Jill 47 Calder, Angus 4–5
Berger, John The Myth of the Blitz (1991), 3, 40
Ways of Seeing (1972) 86 Calder, Jenni 45
Bergonzi, Bernard 240 calypso 177, 178, 180, 197–201
Betjeman, John 111 in The Lonely Londoners (Selvon, 1956)
Beveridge Report (1942) 238 198–201
and housewives 94, 96 Camberton, Roland 279
Beyond the Fringe 7 Scamp (1950) 56, 177, 178, 192–7
Bingham, John 17n Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
bohemia, bohemians 178, 180, 192–7, 201 (CND ) 179
Boulez, Pierre 255, 256 Camus, Albert 195
Bourdieu, Pierre 184, 249 L’Étranger (1942) 197
In Other Words: Essays towards a Carey, John 245
Reflexive Sociology (1990) 250 The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992)
The Algerians (1962) 251 245
The Weight of the World: Social Caribbean Voices (BBC Radio) 146, 155,
Suffering in Contemporary 161
Society (1993) 251 Carpenter, Edward 135
Bowlby, John Carpenter, Humphrey 7, 31
Childcare and the Growth of Love The Angry Young Men (2003) 31
(1953) 104 Carter, Angela 48
Braine, John 19 Carter, Martin 141
Braithwaite, E. R. 16, 141, 153–5, 157, 158, Casino Royale (Fleming, 1953) 243
159, 160, 161, 164, 168, 278 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
To Sir With Love (1959) 153–5 (CCCS ) 177, 178, 182
Brake, Mike 190 Chicago Rhythm Kings 188
Brecht, Bertolt 85 Chicago School 194
Brexit 1, 172 Christie, Agatha 16, 207, 215–26, 279
Brickhill, Paul A Caribbean Mystery (1964) 217
The Great Escape (1950) 4 A Daughter’s A Daughter (as Mary
Britain Revisited (Harrisson, 1960) 36 Westmacott, 1953) 218
British Cultural Studies 10–14 After the Funeral (1953) 213
Brophy, Brigid 15, 115, 278–9 A Holiday for Murder (1938) 224
fictional style 103 A Murder is Announced (1950) 220–6
‘His Wife Survived Him’ (1953) 101–3 And Then There Were None (1939) 224
The King of a Rainy Country (1956) Appointment With Death (1938) 219
132, 133, 135 A Pocket Full of Rye (1953) 218
Brooker, Peter 192–3 At Bertram’s Hotel (1965) 217–18
Bryher (Winifred Ellerman) Cat among the Pigeons (1959) 214,
The Player’s Boy (1953) 130–1 218, 220
Bürger, Peter 258 and Christianity 229
Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) 258 and the Cold War 219, 225
Burgess, Anthony 43 Curtain (1975) 223, 224
A Clockwork Orange (1962) 39 critical reinterpretation of 205
Burroughs, William 43 Dead Man’s Folly (1956) 213, 216, 219
 Index 295

Destination Unknown (1954) 219 Cohen, Henry see Camberton, Roland

ethnic minority characters 219 Cohen, Phil 177, 180, 182, 186
Funerals are Fatal (1953) 218, 219 Cohen, Stanley 185
and gender 218 Cold War 40, 237, 242, 243, 244
Hercule Poirot (detective character) in Agatha Christie’s work 219
206, 207–8, 213–14, 216, 218–19 Communist Party of Great Britain 6
Hickory Dickory Dock (1954) 219 Conekin, Becky 238, 239
and lesbian sexuality 223 Connolly, Cyril 133
Miss Marple (detective character) 206, consumerism
216–18, 221–2, 223 and masculinity 63, 71, 77
Mrs McGinty’s Dead (1952) 213, 216, and youth cultures 61, 63, 65
218, 220 Cook, Matt
Murder at the Vicarage (1930) 217 and Heike Bauer 114
Murder in Mesopotamia (1936) 219 Queer 1950s 114
Murder on the Orient Express (1934) 224 Courage, James 115, 279–80
Ordeal by Innocence (1958) 220 A Way of Love (1959) 123–4, 129–30
The 4:50 From Paddington (1957) 220 Crisp, Quentin 112
The Burden (as Mary Westmacott,
1956) 218 Daily Mail 117
The Hollow (1946) 224 Davis, Miles 188
The Mousetrap (1952) 227 Birth of the Cool 188
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) 224 de Nerval, Gérard 192
They Came to Baghdad (1951) 210, 211, de Hegedus, Adam see Garland, Rodney
216, 219 Delaney, Shelagh
They Do It With Mirrors (1952) 217, 218 A Taste of Honey (1958) 121
Christopher, John 40 Dennis, Nigel
The Death of Grass (1956) 7, 39, 40 Cards of Identity (1955) 210
Churchill, Winston 4, 9, 95 detective fiction 16
City of Spades (MacInnes, 1957) 166–9, 171 Christianity in 229
Clarke, Arthur C. 39 detective characters in 206, 207
Childhood’s End (1953) 42–3 existentialism in 210–11, 230
Clarke, Ben 30 gender in 206
Clarke, John 177 history of 205–6
Clash (Wilkinson, 1929) 31 and Iris Murdoch 230
class 3, 24, 42 relationship with modernism 229
in fiction 96 Dick, Philip K. 43
imagined destruction of 39 Dinshaw, Carolyn 115
lower class 28 domesticity
middle-class society, challenge to 67 housework 84–5, 94–6
mobility, pain of 68 and romance 84–5
upper class 28 Donnelly, Mark 113
working class(es) 9–14, 22, 24, 25, 28, Dorling, Danny 1
29, 30, 32, 35, 36, 37 Drabble, Margaret 137
sentimental representation of in Durrell, Lawrence 253
post-war period 30–1, 35
‘working-class moment’ 56, 76 Eastley, Aaron 148
Clute, John 14, 19, 26, 44, 46 Eco, Umberto 255, 256
Cohen, Albert K. education
Delinquent Boys (1955) 186 of women in the 1950s 89, 97–8
296 Index

Edward II 131 Gautier, Théophile 192

Elizabeth II 6 Gavron, Hannah
Encounter, 244–6, 252 The Captive Wife (1966) 85, 91, 95,
Engels, Friedrich 97 107
Equal Pay Act (1970) 1 Geertz, Clifford 101, 102, 103
ethnography 87, 99 Gibbons, Stella 280–1, 179
‘Hot Stove argument’ 89 Here Be Dragons (1956) 16, 177, 191,
influence on fiction 92, 94, 99 193, 198
existentialism 103, 195 Gielgud, John 117
influence on detective fiction 210–11, 230 Gilroy, Beryl 141
relationship to film noir 211 Gilroy, Paul 143, 163, 172n, 197
Glean, Marion 145
Fanon, Frantz 143, 154, 157, 159 Green, G.F.
fantasy 19, 20, 22, 43, 44, 47, 48 In the Making (1952) 131
John Clute’s four stage model of 26, 44, 46 Greenland, Colin 42–3
feminism Griffiths, Gareth 200
and anthropology 82 Goff, Martyn 111–12, 281
anti-feminism 104–5 The Plaster Fabric (1957) 111–12,
First Wave 93–4 118–19, 124
and housework 94–6 Golding, William 43, 44, 235, 253, 281
in the 1950s 93, 106–7 Lord of the Flies (1954) 25, 45
Women’s Two Roles (Myrdal and The Inheritors (1955) 25
Klein, 1956) 95
Second Wave 82, 94, 108 Hall, Leslie 113–14
femininity Hall, Stuart 141, 147, 164, 177
and domesticity 84–5 Hardyment, Christina 104
and maternal instinct 91, 105, 107 Harrisson, Tom 84
‘The Feminine Point of View Hartley, L.P. 235, 241
Conference’ (1947–51) 82, 87 The Go-Between (1953) 237
and women’s magazines 85, 86, 87, 89 Hebdige, Dick 187
Ferrebe, Alice 29, 57, 81, 94, 131, 210, 230 Hemlock and After (Wilson, 1952) 116,
Masculinity in Male-Authored Fiction, 134–7
1950–2000 (2005) 29 Hennessy, Peter
Festival of Britain, The (1951) 238 Having it So Good: Britain in the Fifties
Fiedler, Leslie A. 42–3, 252 (2007) 2–3, 4, 6
Figueros, John 141, 146 Heppenstall, Rayner 243, 247, 253
First World War 21 The Fourfold Tradition (1961) 247,
Fitzgerald, Ella 190 253
folk music (revival) 179, 197 The Intellectual Part (1963) 243
Foucault, Michel 190 Here Be Dragons (Gibbons, 1956) 16, 177,
Fowler, Bridget 250 191, 193, 198
Frayn, Michael 238, 239 Hill, Christopher 10
Frost, Ernest Hoffman, Frederick 253
The Dark Peninsula (1949) 131 Hoggart, Richard 10–12, 150, 183, 188,
194, 246, 252
Garber, Jenny 178–9 The Uses of Literacy (1956) 10–12, 81,
Garland, Rodney 115, 280 150, 181, 246
The Heart in Exile (1953) 115, 116, 124, homosexuality (and fiction) 111–38
126–7, 133 Homosexual Law Reform Society 137
 Index 297

Horizon 133 In the Castle of My Skin (1953) 149–52,

Hornsey, Richard 125 236
Hosain, Attia 15, 282 Of Age and Innocence (1958) 153
Phoenix Fled (1953) 100 The Emigrants (1954) 155–8, 162
‘The First Party’ (1953) 100–1 Langhammer, Claire 113
‘The Street of the Moon’ (1953) 100 Larkin, Philip 247
Houlbrook, Matt 118–19 All What Jazz (1970) 188–9
Hurry on Down (Wain, 1953) 28–9, 31–2, and Gladys Mitchell 228
53, 177, 182, 191, 237, 247–8 Jill (1946) 56
Hurst, L.J. 39–40 Selected Letters (1993) 189
Lashley, Cliff 200
India, partition of 101 Laski, Marghanita 15, 95, 133, 282–3
In the Castle of My Skin (Lamming, 1953) and kinship 94
149–52, 236 The Village (1952) 93–8
ITV 8 Lawrence, D.H.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover 9–10, 31,
Jack, Ian 1–2, 17n 112
jazz 177, 178, 180, 188–92, 197, 201 Leavis, F.R. 10
in Absolute Beginners (MacInnes, 1959) Less Than Angels (Pym, 1955) 83–90,
186–7, 189–91 98–9
in All What Jazz (Larkin, 1970) 188–9 Lessing, Doris 7, 14, 47–8, 235, 244,
Jefferson, Tony 177, 187 283
Jones, Claudia 141 A Small Personal Voice (1957) 244
Jordan, Julia 236, 242, 252, 253 Canopus in Argos sequence (1979–83)
Chance and the Modern British Novel 47
(2010) 235, 236 Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) 47, 48
Joyce, James The Four-Gated City (1969) 47
Ulysses 236 The Golden Notebook (1962) 47
The Grass is Singing (1950) 164
Kalliney, Peter 61–2, 62–3, 65 Lewis, C.S. 26
King, Francis (Frank Cauldwell) Narnia sequence 25, 43
Man on the Rock (1957) 131 Lewis, Jane 5
The Dark Glasses (1954) 131 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 93
The Firewalkers (1956) 131 Liddell, Robert 83
Kinsey, Alfred Unreal City (1952) 131
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male Light, Alison 205, 218
(1948) 117 Lindop, Audrey Erskine
kinship 82, 86, 93–8 The Details of Jeremy Stretton (1955)
Kynaston, David 2 125
Lofts, Nora
labour The Lute Player (1951) 131
in factories 64, 68 Look Back in Anger (Osborne, 1956) 6–7,
Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence, 1928) 57, 77, 246
9–10, 31, 112 Lord Beginner 198, 200
Lady Chatterley trial (1960) 112 Lord Kitchener 198
Laing, Stuart 56, 57, 62, 71 Love, Heather 115–16
Lamming, George 16, 141, 146, 148, Lucky Jim (Amis, 1954) 29–30, 35, 53, 237,
149–52, 155–8, 159, 164, 170, 247, 248–9, 251, 252
171, 172, 236, 282 Lukács, Georg 258
298 Index

McCarthyism 6 Meyer-Eppler, Werner 254

MacInnes, Colin 16, 81, 166–71, 172, 179, Miguel Street (Naipaul, 1959) 148–9, 151,
236, 283–4 153
Absolute Beginners (1959) 16, 166, Mitchell, Gladys 16, 205, 214, , 228, 284
132–3, 137, 169–71, 177, 178, Groaning Spinney (1950) 228
180–3, 185–6, 194, 198, 199 Mrs Bradley (detective character) 228
City of Spades (1957) 166–9, 171 Spotted Hemlock (1958) 228
McKibbin, Ross 3 The Man Who Grew Tomatoes (1959)
Maclaren-Ross, Julian 194 228
McLeod, John 155, 170 Mitchison, Naomi 14, 26, 27, 45, 48, 284–5
Macmillan, Harold 96 Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962) 47
McRobbie, Angela 178–9 The Corn King and the Spring Queen
Mais, Roger 141, 153 (1931) 45, 47
Brother Man (1954) 153 Travel Light (1952) 14, 45–7
The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953) Mittelholzer, Edgar 141, 147
153 modernism 20, 26, 236
Malinowski, Bronislaw 82, 87, 89, 90, 103, Modern Jazz Quartet 190
107–8 Monk, Leland 236
Mansfield, Jane 58 Standard Deviations: Chance and the
Manuel, Peter 198 Modern British Novel (1993) 235
Marsh, Ngaio 16, 205, 214, 284 Monsarrat, Kevin
Black Beech and Honeydew (1982) 226 The Cruel Sea (1951) 4–5
and influence of drama 227 Montague of Beaulieu, Lord 117
and New Zealand 214, 226, 227 Montagu trials (1953 and 1954) 117, 122
Opening Night (1951) 210, 211, 226–7 Montefiore, Janet 47
Roderick Alleyn (detective character) Moorcock, Michael 39, 43
206, 226–7 Morgan, Kenneth 238
Scales of Justice (1955) 226 ‘Movement’, the 56
sexuality 226 Mortimer, Penelope 15, 285
Singing in the Shrouds (1958) 226 as ‘Ann Temple’ 105
Martin, Kenneth narrative voice 106
Waiting for the Sky to Fall (1959) 137 The Bright Prison (1953) 103–7
Marx, Karl 97 Munson, Alan 5
Maschler, Tom 57, 58, 76 Murdoch, Iris 253–4, 285–6
masculinity An Unofficial Rose (1962) 230
and consumption 63, 71, 76–7 and detective fiction 230
Northern 58 The Bell 117–18
and patriarchy 74 Under The Net (1954) 230, 237, 253–4,
and performativity 102 256
working-class 56, 60, 63, 65, 66, 69 Murger, Henri 192
Mass Observation 36, 81, 82, 84, 113 Murphy, Amy Tooth 132
Maugham, Somerset 251
May Day (Sommerfield, 1936) 32, 33, 34, Naipaul, V. S. 141, 147–9, 150, 151, 152,
35, 36 161, 286
Mayer, Michael Miguel Street (1959) 148–9, 151, 153
The End of the Corridor (1951) 131 The Mystic Masseur (1957) 147–8, 173n
Mead, Margaret 104 The Suffrage of Elvira (1958) 173n
Means-Test Man (Briarley, 1935) 31 Nasta, Susheila 198–9
Mengham, Rod 19, 37–8 National Health Service 2
 Index 299

Nelson, Michael 115 Priestley, J.B. 152

A Room in Chelsea Square (1958) proletarian literature 20, 31, 32
133–4 Private Eye 7
New Left, the 10–14, 16, 181–2, 184, 194 Pullman, Phillip 48
News of the World 117–18, 131 Pym, Barbara 15, 286–7
New Statesman 133 Biography 83
New Wave cinema and Edwin Arderner 83
adaptation of Angry Young Men texts 76 and Jane Austen 87–8
New Wave science fiction 39, 43, 47–8 and fieldwork 83, 84
New Worlds 43 irony of 90
Nietzsche, Friedrich 236 Less Than Angels (1955) 83–90, 98–9
Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell, 1949) 25,
28, 40 queer (theory) 111–38
North [of England], the 60
and masculinity 58 Rabinovitz, Rubin 230
northerness 58 Ramchand, Kenneth 199
‘northern regionalists’ 57 Rancière, Jacques 243
North West Five (Sommerfield, 1960) 35, Raven, Simon
38, 48, 165–6 The Feathers of Death (1959) 131
Reid, Pat
Obscene Publications Act (1959) 9–10 The Colditz Story (1952) 4
Observer 133 Reid, V.S. 141
Oram, Alison 131–2 Renault, Mary 115, 236, 287
Orwell, George 27, 28, 30, 31, 33 The Charioteer (1953) 116, 123, 126,
Animal Farm (1943) 28 127–8, 236
Coming Up for Air (1939) 28, 29 The Last of the Wine (1956) 130–1
Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) 28, 29 Richard I 131
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) 25, 28, 40 Richards, Audrey
The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) 27, 28, Chisungu (1956) 82–3, 98
30, 33 Richards, I.A. 10
Osborne, John 246 Richmond, Anthony 154
Look Back in Anger (1956) 6–7, 57, 77, Colour Prejudice in Britain (1954) 154
246 Riddell, Chris 17n
‘What’s Gone Wrong With Women?’ Rivers, Michael Pitt 117
(1956) 81–2 Roberts, Adam 48n
Osgerby, Bill 180 Robeson, Paul 152
rock and roll 179, 180
patriarchal order 31, 44, 46, 47, 48 Rock Around the Clock (Sears, 1956) 179
Peake, Mervyn 44 Room at the Top (Braine, 1957) 29, 37, 81
Gormenghast trilogy 43 Rowling, J.K. 48
Plato
Phaedrus 129 Salkey, Andrew 141
Poggioli, Renato 258 A Quality of Violence (1959) 153
Pohl, Frederick 39, 43 Escape to an Autumn Pavement (1960) 137
Powell, Anthony 240, 241, 242 Samuel, Raphael 10
A Buyer’s Market (1952) 241 Sandbrook, Dominic
A Question of Upbringing (1951) 237, Never Had It So Good (2005) 184
240–1 Sartre, Jean Paul 150, 195, 210, 253
Pratchett, Terry 48 Being and Nothingness (1943), 150
300
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
(Sillitoe, 1958) 15, 16, 29, 35, 37,
58–65, 81, 164–5, 177, 183–4, 187
pastoral imagery 59–60, 61
sex 61, 62
Sayers, Dorothy L. 209, 229
Scamp (Camberton, 1950) 56, 177, 178,
192–7
Scarrott, Michael
Ambassador of Loss (1955) 131
Scenes of Provincial Life (Cooper, 1950) 81
Scheckley, Robert 39
science fiction 6, 14–15, 20, 26, 38, 39, 42,
43, 44, 47, 48
Second World War 2–5, 10, 21, 112, 141,
201, 236, 237, 242
and founding of Welfare State 62
trauma of 225
Self, Will 48
Selvon, Sam 16, 141, 158–64, 170, 171, 172,
177, 287–8
The Lonely Londoners (1956) 158–61,
198–201
Ways of Sunlight (1957) 161–4
sexuality
and children 105–6
heterosexuality 61
lesbianism
in Agatha Christie’s work 223
Sexual Offences Act (1967) 124
Shils, Ed 6
Shippey, Tom 25–6,
Sillitoe, Alan 19, 57, 171, 288
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
(1958) 15, 16, 29, 35, 37, 58–65,
81, 164–5, 177, 183–4, 187
Sinfield, Alan 121–2, 136, 238
Sivanandan, Ambalavaner 156, 162
skiffle 179
Smallshaw, Kay
How to Run Your Home Without Help
(1949) 95
Smith, Bessie 188
Smith, Patricia Juliana 132
social realism 19, 33, 38, 48
inauthenticity of 19, 36, 37–8
sociology
and 1950s fiction 81
Socrates 130, 135
Index
Sommerfield, John 14, 16, 32–7, 38, 48,
166, 169, 171, 288–9
May Day (1936) 32, 33, 34, 35, 36
North West Five (1960) 35, 38, 48,
165–6
Volunteer in Spain (1937) 32
The Inheritance (1956) 36–7
‘The Worm’s Eye View’ (1943) 32–3
Trouble in Porter Street (1938) 33–4
Trouble in Porter Street (1954) 33–4
Sontag, Susan 84
Sometime, Never: Three Tales of the
Imagination (Golding,
Wyndham, Peake, 1956) 44
Spark, Muriel 15, 179, 289
and ethnography 92
narrative voice 92
The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1959) 177,
182–3
‘The Black Madonna’ (1958) 90–3
The Comforters (1957) 237, 256–8
Storey, David 19, 37, 57, 77, 289–90
This Sporting Life (1960) 15, 58, 65–76,
77
Spender, Stephen 245, 246
The Struggle of the Modern (1963) 246
Stewart, Mary
Wildfire at Midnight (1956) 132
Stockhausen, Karlheinz 255–6
Streatfeild, Noel 97–8
suburbs
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
(Sillitoe, 1958) 60
This Sporting Life (Storey, 1960) 66
Sunday Pictorial 117
Swanzy, Henry 146
Taylor, Elizabeth 15, 290
‘You’ll Enjoy It When You Get There’
(1951) 99–100
Taylor, Valerie 132
Teddy boys (and girls) (Teds) 177–80,
184–8, 189–90, 195, 201
Telegraph, 111
The Ballad of Peckham Rye (Spark, 1959)
177, 182–3
The Bright Prison (Mortimer, 1953) 103–7
The Captive Wife (Gavron, 1966) 85, 91, 95,
107
 Index 301

The Charioteer (Renault, 1953) 116, 123, The Hobbit (1937) 20–1
126, 127–8, 236 The Lord of the Rings (1954–5) 14,
The Comforters (Spark, 1957) 237, 256–8 20–5, 26–7, 29, 32, 42, 43,
‘The Country of the Blind’ (Wells, 1904) 44, 48
41 The New Shadow 42
The Day of the Triffids (Wyndham, 1951) Tomlinson, Sally 1
7, 39–40, 41–2, 244 Trouble in Porter Street (Sommerfield,
The Emigrants (Lamming, 1954) 155–8, 1938) 33–4
162 Twentieth Century 244
The Heart in Exile (Garland, 1953) 115, Tylor, E. B. 108
116, 124, 126–7, 133
The Hobbit (Tolkien, 1937) 20–1 Under The Net (Murdoch, 1954) 230, 237,
The Inheritance (Sommerfield, 1956) 36–7 253–4, 256
The Lonely Londoners (Selvon, 1956) Up the Junction (Dunn, 1963) 37
158–61, 198–201 Upward, Edward 27–8
The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien, 1954–5) 14, The Spiral Ascent (1961–77) 27
20–5, 26–7, 29, 32, 42, 43, 44, 48
The Mystic Masseur (Naipaul, 1957) 147–8, Verel, Shirley
173n The Dark Side of Venus (1960)
Theodosius II of Constantinople 131 Vonnegut, Kurt 43
The Once and Future King (White, 1958) 25
The Outsider (Wilson, 1956) 41, 195 Walcott, Derek 141
The Plaster Fabric (Goff, 1957) 111–12, Wain, John 6, 7, 16, 31–2, 33, 35, 38, 182–3,
118–19, 124 246, 247–8, 290–1
The Road to Wigan Pier (Orwell, 1937) 27, as Angry Young Man 57
28, 30, 33 Hurry on Down (1953) 28–9, 31–2, 53,
The Times 185 177, 182, 191, 237, 247–8
The Uses of Literacy (Hoggart, 1956) Warth, Douglas,
10–12, 81, 150, 181, 246 ‘Evil Men’ (1952) 117
This Sporting Life (Storey, 1960) 58 Waterhouse, Keith 81
and ageing 72 Billy Liar (1959) 29
countryside, imagery of 66–7 Watson, Peter 133
commodification 62 Ways of Sunlight (Selvon, 1957) 161–4
domesticity and family 66–7 Welfare State 2–4, 35, 113–14, 121,
Machin, Arthur 241
infantilization of 70–1 and gender 107
objectification of 69–70, 72–3, 75 and housewives 96
relationship with father 74–5 and the working class 62
rugby league 69–70, 71–2, 77 Wesker, Arnold 76
Thompson, E.P. 10 Westwood, Gordon 125
Thornton, Sarah 184 Society and the Homosexual (1952)
Tiffin, Helen 200 122–3
Treasure Island (Stevenson, 1883) 128 Whannell, Paddy 177
Trocchi, Alexander Wildeblood, Peter 117, 125
Young Adam (1954) 56 Against the Law (1955) 122
Todd, Selina 8–9 A Way of Life (1956) 123
Tolkien, J.R.R. 14, 20–5, 27, 42, 48, 49n, 290 Wilford, Hugh 245
Samwise Gamgee (hobbit protagonist) Williams, Eric
20, 21, 22–6, 28, 29, 37, 48 The Wooden Horse (1949) 4
302
Williams, Raymond 10, 12–14, 28, 30,
258
Culture & Society: 1780–1950 (1958)
12–13, 54, 258–9
cultural materialism 55
‘ladder model’ 73
Marxism and Literature (1977) 55
and Marxist theory 12–13
Orwell (1971) 28
Preface to Film (1954) 53
‘structure of feeling’ 15, 53–8
The Long Revolution (1961) 12–13,
54
Wilson, Angus 19, 38, 43, 115, 291
Hemlock and After (1952) 116,
134–7
The Old Men at the Zoo (1961) 39
Wilson, Colin 6, 41, 179, 291–2
Adrift in Soho (1961) 177, 192, 195–7,
199
The Outsider (1956) 41, 195
Windrush generation, the 141, 142, 153,
155, 197
Index
Wolfenden Report, The (Report of the
Departmental Committee on
Homosexual Offences and
Prostitution) (1957) 7, 111,
122–5
Woman magazine 85, 86
women
education of 87, 89
symbolism in 1950s culture 82, 95, 96,
103
Woods, Gregory 130, 133–4
Woolf, Virginia 19, 38, 132, 236
Wyndham, John 14, 43, 44, 48, 235,
292
‘Consider Her Ways’ (1956) 44–5
The Day of the Triffids (1951) 7, 39–40,
41–2, 244
The Kraken Wakes (1953) 244
The Midwich Cuckoos (1947) 42
youth
culture and subcultures 8, 177–202
rebellion 64
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