Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (92 page)

This development in anthropology was aided by a parallel change in its sister discipline, archaeology. In 1959 Basil Davidson published
Old Africa Rediscovered,
a detailed account of the ‘Dark Continent’s’ distant past. A later year, Oxford University Press released its magisterial
History of African Music.
Both these works will be properly considered in chapter 31, where we examine new concepts in historical thinking.
⁶⁸
But they belong here too, for running through the work of Ellison, Baldwin, Maclnnes, Achebe, Lévi-Strauss, and Basil Davidson was the experience of being black in a non-black world. Responses differed, but what they shared was a growing awareness that the art, history, language, and very experience of being black had been deliberately devalued, or rendered invisible, in the past. That history, that language, that experience, needed to be urgently reclaimed, and given a shape and a voice. It was a different alternative culture to that of the Beats, but it was no less rich, varied, or valid. Here was a common pursuit that had its own great tradition.

Britain in the 1950s did not yet have a large black population. Black immigrants
had been arriving since 1948, their lives chronicled now and then by writers such as Colin Maclnnes, as was referred to above. The first Commonwealth Immigrants Act, restricting admission from the ‘New’ Commonwealth (i.e., predominantly black countries), was not passed until 1961. Until that point, then, there was little threat to the traditional British culture from race. Instead, the ‘alternative’ found its strength in an equivalent social divide that for many created almost as much passion: class.

In 1955 a small coterie of like-minded serious souls got behind an idea to establish a theatre in London that would endeavour to do something new: find fresh plays from completely new sources, in an effort to revitalise contemporary drama and search out a new audience. They named the venture the English Stage Company and bought the lease of a small theatre known as the Royal Court in Sloane Square in Chelsea. The theatre turned out to be ideal. Set in the heart of bourgeois London, its program was revolutionary.
⁶⁹
The first artistic director was George Devine who had trained in Oxford and in France, and he brought in as his deputy Tony Richardson, twenty-seven, who had been working for the BBC. Devine had experience, Richardson had the flair. In fact, says Oliver Neville in his account of the early days of the ESC, it was the solid Devine who spotted the first piece of flair. While launching the company, he had paid for an all in
The Stage,
the theatrical weekly, soliciting new plays on contemporary themes, and among the seven hundred manuscripts that arrived ‘almost by return of post’ was one by a playright named John Osborne, which was called
Look Back in Anger.
⁷⁰
Devine was much taken by the ‘abrasive’ language that he grasped instinctively would play well on stage. He discovered that the writer was an out-of-work actor, a man who was in many ways typical of a certain post-war figure in Britain. The 1944 Education Act (brought in as a result of the Beveridge Report) had raised the school-leaving age and initiated the modern system of primary, secondary and tertiary schools; it had also provided funds to help lower-class students attend acting schools. But in drab post-war England, there were now more students than jobs. Osborne was one of these over-trained types and so was Jimmy Porter, the ‘hero’ of his play.
⁷¹

‘Hero’ deserves inverted commas because it was one of the hallmarks of
Look Back in Anger
that its lower-middle-class protagonist, while attacking everything around him, also attacked himself. Jimmy Porter is, in this sense, a direct cousin of Okonkwo, ‘driven by [a] furious energy directed towards a void.’
⁷²
The structure of
Look Back in Anger
has been frequently criticised as falling apart at the end, where Jimmy and his middle-class wife retreated into their private fantasy world of cuddly toys.
⁷³
Despite this, the play was a great success and marked the beginning of a time when, as one critic put it, plays ‘would no longer be concerned with middle class heroes, or set in country houses.’
⁷⁴
Its title helped give rise to the phrase ‘angry young men,’ which, together with ‘Kitchen Sink Drama,’ described a number of plays and novels that, in the mid-to late-1920s in Great Britain, drew attention to the experiences of working-class men (they were usually men).
⁷⁵
So it is in this sense that the trend typified by Osborne fits in with the rest of the reconceptualisation of culture, with which we are concerned. In reality, in Osborne’s play, just as in Bernard
Kops’s
Hamlet of Stepney Green
(1957), John Arden’s
Waters of Babylon
(1957) and
Live Like Pigs
(1958), Arnold Wesker’s
Chicken Soup with Barley
(1958) and
Roots
(1959), together with a raft of novels – John Braine’s
Room at the Top
(1957), Alan Sillitoe’s
Saturday Night, Sunday Morning
(1958), and David Storey’s
This Sporting Life
(1960) – the main characters were working-class ‘heroes,’ or antiheroes as they came to be called. These antiheroes are all aggressive, all
escaping
from their lower-class backgrounds because of their educational or other skills, but unsure where they are headed. Although each of these authors could see the shortcomings of lower-class society, no less than other kinds, their work lent a legitimacy to lower-class experience and provided another alternative to traditional cultural forms. In Eliot’s terms, these works were profoundly sceptical.

A somewhat similar change was overtaking poetry. On 1 October 1954 an anonymous article appeared in the
Spectator
entitled ‘In the Movement.’ This, actually the work of the magazine’s literary editor, J. D. Scott, identified a new grouping in British literature, a covey of novelists and poets who ‘admired Leavis, Empson, Orwell and Graves,’ were ‘bored by the despair of the forties … extremely impatient of poetic sensibility … and … sceptical, robust, ironic.’
⁷⁶
The
Spectator
article identified five authors, but after D.J. Enright had published
Poets of the 1950s
in 1955, and Robert Conquest’s
New Lines
had appeared a year later, nine poets and novelists came to be regarded as comprising what was by then known as the Movement: Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, Donald Davie, Enright himself, Thom Gunn, Christopher Holloway, Elisabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin, and John Wain. One anthologist, perhaps going a shade over the top, described the Movement as ‘the greatest rupture in cultural tradition since the eighteenth century.’ Its core texts included Wain’s novel,
Hurry On Down
(1953), and Amis’s
Lucky Jim
(1954), and its prevailing tone was ‘middlebrow scepticism’ and ‘ironical commonsense.’
⁷⁷

The most typical poet of the Movement, the man who characterised its approach to life and literature most cleanly, was Larkin (1922–85). He grew up in Coventry, not too far from Auden’s Birmingham, and after Oxford began a career as a university librarian (Leicester, 1946–50; Belfast, 1950–55; Hull, 1955–85) mainly because, as it seems, he needed a regular job. He wrote two early novels, but it was as a poet that he became famous. Larkin liked to say that poetry chose him, rather than the other way around. His poetic voice, as revealed in his first mature collection,
The Less Deceived,
which appeared in 1955, was ‘sceptical, plain-speaking, unshowy,’ and above all modest, fortified by common sense. It wasn’t angry, like Osborne’s plays, but Larkin’s rejection of old literature, of tradition, lofty ideas, psychoanalysis – the ‘common mythkitty’ as he put it – do echo the down-to-earth qualities of ‘kitchen-sink’ drama, even if the volume control is turned down.
⁷⁸
One of his most famous poems was ‘Church Going,’ with the lines

which immediately convey Larkin’s ‘intimate sincerity,’ not to mention a
certain comic awareness. For Larkin, man ‘has a hunger for meaning but for the most part is not quite sure he is up to the task; the world exists without question – there’s nothing philosophical about it; what’s philosophical is that man can’t do anything about that fact – he is a “helpless bystander”; his feelings have no meaning and therefore no place. Why therefore do we have them? That is the struggle.’ He observes

Larkin verges on the sentimental purposely, in order to draw attention to the very shortcomings of sentimentality, only too aware that that is all many people have. His is a world of disenchantment and defeat (‘two can live as stupidly as one’ is his verdict on marriage), a ‘passive realism whose diminished aim in life is not to feel grand passion but to prevent himself from ever hurting.’ It is the message of someone who is aware of just enough science for it to pain and depress him, but who sees through existentialism, and all the other ‘big’ words, come to that. This is why Larkin’s stature has grown; his view may not be heroic, but it is perfectly tenable. As Blake Morrison has pointed out, Larkin was regarded as a minor poet for decades, but at the end of the century, ‘Larkin now seems to dominate the history of English poetry in the second half of the century much as Eliot dominated the first.’
⁷⁹

Overlapping with the angry young men, and the Movement, or at least with the world they attempted to describe, was Richard Hoggart’s highly original
Uses of Literacy.
Published a year after
Look Back in Anger
was first staged, in 1957, Hoggart was, with Raymond Williams, Stuart Had, and E. P. Thompson, one of the founders of the school of thought (and now academic discipline) known as cultural studies. Born in Leeds in 1918 and educated at the university there, Hoggart saw action in World War II in North Africa and Italy. Military experience had a marked experience on him, as it did on Williams. After the war Hoggart worked alongside Larkin, in his case as a tutor in literature in the Department of Adult Education at the University of Hull, and while there published his first full-length critical work,
Auden.
But it was in
The Uses of Literacy
that all his experience, his working-class background, his army life, his teaching in the adult education department of a provincial university, came together. It was as if he had found a vocabulary for a side of life that, hitherto, had lacked one.
⁸⁰

Hoggart was trained in the traditional methods of practical literary criticism as devised by I. A. Richards (see chapter 18), and the ‘Great Tradition’ of F. R. Leavis, but his actual experience led him in a very different direction. He moved against Leavis rather as Ginsberg had moved against Lionel Triding.
⁸¹
Instead of Following in the Cambridge tradition, he brought Richards’s methods to bear on the culture he himself knew – from the singing in working men’s clubs to weekly family magazines, from commercial popular songs to the films
that ordinary people flocked to time and again. Like an anthropologist he described and analysed the customs he had grown up not even questioning, such as washing the car on a Sunday morning, or scrubbing the front step. His book did two things. It first described in detail the working-class culture, in particular its language – in the books, magazines, songs, and games it employed. In doing so, it showed, second, how rich this culture was, how much more there was to it than its critics alleged. Like Osborne, Hoggart wasn’t blind to its shortcomings, or to the fact that, overall, British society deprived people born into the working class of the chance to escape it. But Hoggart’s aim was more description and analysis than any nakedly political intent. Many responded to Hoggart and Osborne alike. A legitimacy, a voice, was suddenly given to an aspect of affairs that hitherto had been overlooked. Here was another fine tradition.
⁸²

Hoggart led naturally to Raymond Williams. Like Hoggart, Williams had served in the war, though most of his life had been spent in the English Department at Cambridge, where he could not help but be aware of Leavis. Williams was more of a theoretician than Hoggart and a less compelling observer, but he was equally convincing in argument. In a series of books, beginning with
Culture and Society
in 1958, Williams made plain and put into context what had been implicit in the narrow scope of Hoggart’s work.
⁸³
This was in effect a new aesthetic. Williams’s basic idea was that a work of art – a painting, a novel, a poem, a film – does not exist without a context. Even a work with wide applicability, ‘a universal icon,’ has an intellectual, social, and above all a political background. This was Williams’s main argument, that the imagination cannot avoid a relation with power, that the form art takes and our attitudes toward it are themselves a form of politics. Not necessarily party politics but the acknowledgement of this relationship – culture and power – is the ultimate form of self-awareness. In
Culture and Society,
having first considered Eliot, Richards, and Leavis, all as authors who consider ‘culture’ as having different levels and where only an educated minority can really benefit from and contribute toward the highest level, Williams proceeds to a chapter headed ‘Marxism and Culture.’ In Marxist theory, Williams reminds us, the determining fact of life is the means of production and distribution, and so the progress of culture, like everything else, is dependent upon the material conditions for the production of that culture. Culture therefore cannot help but reflect the social makeup of society, and on such an analysis it is only natural that those at the top should not want change. On this view, then, Eliot and Leavis are merely reflecting the social circumstances of their time, and in so doing are exhibiting a conspicuous lack of self-awareness.
⁸⁴