Post-War Novel
After Hitler's devastation of Britain, the country was literally in ruins, torn apart by years of bombardment. The landscape of ruins must also be recognized as forming an integral part of much of the literature of the late 1940s and the early 1950s. It was a landscape that provided a metaphor for broken lives and spirits.
Rose Macaulay and the Expression of Ruin
One of the best expressions in fiction of this ruin and its implications is a novel, The World My Wilderness (1950), by Rose Macaulay (1881-1958). The novel's London is not only post-War but also post-Eliotic:
"Here you belong; you cannot get away, you do not wish to get away, for this is the maquis that lies about the margins of the wrecked world, and here your feet are set... 'Where are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, you cannot say, or guess....' But you can say, you can guess, that it is you yourself, your own roots, that clutch the stony rubbish, the branches of your own being that grow from it and nowhere else."
Macaulay was not the only one to view the post-War period as one requiring the reassemblage of fragments of life and meaning. Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) also gave powerful expression to the post-War experience in her novels The Death of the Heart (1938), Look at all those Roses (1941), The Demon Lover (1945), The Heat of the Day (1949), and The Little Girls (1964). Another important novelist was Rebecca West (pen name of Cecily Isabel Fairfield, 1892-1983), whose works like The Fountain Overflows (1956) and The Birds Fall Down (1966) depict the same devastated world. West wrote on the political climate of the Cold War era and was actively involved in the feminist cause.
Graham Greene: The Pessimistic Novelist
Graham Greene (1904-1991) was a major novelist of the postmodern period who frequently expressed his pessimism. He once remarked, "For a writer, success is always temporary," and "Success is only a delayed failure," in his autobiographical memoir A Sort of Life (1977). He became a popular writer with his novel The Comedians (1965). Greene was a staunch anti-imperialist, resentful of America's rising imperialism and the crumbling British Empire. He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1926, and many of his works are haunted by themes of sin, moral failure, and a commitment to "others" and rebels. Among his twenty-six novels, notable ones include The Power and the Glory (1940), The Ministry of Fear (1943), The End of the Affair (1951), The Heart of the Matter (1948), The Quiet American (1955), and Our Man in Havana (1958).
Anthony Powell and the Upper-Middle-Class Chronicle
Anthony Powell's sequence of twelve novels, collectively named A Dance to the Music of Time, chronicles British upper-middle-class life from the 1920s to the 1950s. It is neither a fictionalized war memoir nor a prose elegy for the decline and fall of a ruling class. Instead, it takes the disasters, disillusions, inconveniences, and changes of society and its war in its leisurely and measured stride.
Samuel Beckett: Innovator and Absurdist
Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) emerged in the mid-1950s as a significant writer, known for his radical innovations. Though Irish by birth, he remained in Paris and wrote much of his work in French. Beckett's famous trilogy, published in London in 1959, includes Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. This trilogy proved to be the most innovative fiction of the fifties. Beckett's early work, More Pricks than Kicks (1934), presents the typical, unconventional, absurdist hero. His novels and plays are often described as illustrations of Sartre's Existentialism. Martin Esslin's summary of Beckett's work highlights the search for man's own identity, a quest that, while despairing and nihilistic, is a fearless and uncompromising enterprise.
Lawrence Durrell and the Alexandria Quartet
Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990), born in India, is best known for his Alexandria Quartet - Justine (1957), Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958), and Clea (1960). True to the spirit of Postmodernism, Beckett's novels could not be interpreted as representations of real life. In his work, the text is maintained as an object of questioning, a space for perpetual deferment of any conclusive meaning. Durrell's work followed Beckett's experiments with the novel's technique and the disintegration of its conventions.
William Golding: Moral Allegorist
William Golding (1911-1993) gained prominence with the publication of Lord of the Flies (1954), a moral allegory set on a desert island. The novel reverses the Victorian tale of optimism into post-Darwinian pessimism, reflecting the spirit and mood of Postmodernism. Golding's other notable works include The Inheritors (1964), Pincher Martin (1956), Free Fall (1959), The Spire (1964), and The Pyramid (1967). Darkness Visible (1979), titled after Milton's Paradise Lost, is one of his significant later works. Golding's fiction explores the darker regions of the human psyche and the nothingness of human existence.
Angus Wilson: The Traditionalist
Angus Wilson (1913-1991) was a leading practitioner of the reaction against experimentalism, aiming to restore the traditional Victorian narrative style. Adopting the realism of Zola and the comic sense of Dickens, Wilson produced a large body of fiction. His notable works include the short story collections The Wrong Set (1949) and Such Darling Dodos (1950), as well as the novels Hemlock and After (1952), The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot (1958), and Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956).
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Iris Murdoch
The most philosophic among the novelists of the fifties was, of course, Iris Murdoch (1919-1999), although she followed the conventional novel form. Starting with her study of Sartre, Sartre, Romantic Rationalist (1953), she produced a large number of novels, which clearly reflect her stance of anti-empirical view of mankind. Her moral philosophy is best illustrated by her The Sovereignty of Good (1970) and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992). Samuel Beckett’s Murphy has been one of the influences on her, to which she pays homage in her own early novels Under the Net (1954) and Bruno’s Dream (1969). Her other novels include They Flight from the Enchanter (1955), The Sea (1978), The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983), The Bell (1958), A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970), The Black Prince (1973), The Time of the Angels (1966), The Sand Castle (1957), A Severed Head (1961), An Unofficial Rose (1962), The Unicom (1963), The Italian Girl (1964), The Red and The Green (1965), The Nice and The Good (1968), An Accidental Man (1971).
Murdoch’s article, “Against Dryness,” argues that we are living in an age (the post-modern) in which “we are left with far too shallow and flimsy an idea of human personality,” in which the relation between art and morality has dwindled “because we are losing our sense of form and structure in the moral world itself.” Like the modernists, she seems firmly to believe in the salvaging power of art. As she argues in The Sovereignty of Good,
Good art, unlike bad art, unlike ‘happenings,’ is something pre-eminently outside us and resistant to our consciousness. We surrender ourselves to its authority with a love which is unpossessive and unselfish. Art shows us the only sense in which the permanent and incorruptible is compatible with the transient; and whether representational or not it reveals to us aspects of our world which our ordinary dull dream—consciousness is unable to see. Art pierces the veil and gives sense to the notion of a reality which lies beyond appearance; it exhibits virtue in its true guise in the context of death and chance.
This view of art and life, of man and age, is reflected in all her fictional work, although not equally powerfully in each. Her The Time of the Angels is still rated by some as her best, although there is no critical unanimity in her case.
Muriel Spark
Another female novelist of the fifties, this prolific decade, was Muriel Spark (b. 1918), who also shares with Murdoch and Golding, a firm commitment to moral issues in relation to fictional form. One of her early novels is The Comforters (1957), which focuses on the life of a neurotic woman writer, who is working on a project, Form in the Modern Novel, having difficulty with her chapter on realism. This writer, Caroline Rose, is determined to write a novel about writing a novel. Spark also did her biography entitled Curriculum Vitae (1992). She not only made a critical study of Mary Shelly (Child of Light), but also wrote some novels in the Gothic style, namely Memento Mori (1959), The Ballad of Lekham Rye (1960), and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). However, the novel that made her famous is The Driver’s Seat (1970), which deals with the first-person account of a woman with a death-wish, who goes to the extreme of plotting circumstances of her own violent murder. Among her later novels figure Not To Disturb (1971), which has its opening quotation from The Duchess of Malfi, and The Abbess of Crewe (1974), making an investigative study of a convent, but avoiding all Gothic temptations. All in all, the focus in her novels, too, remains, just as in the novels of her many a contemporary, on the irrational and darker side of human nature, reflecting the mood and spirit of postmodernism.
Leslie Poles Hartley
A not-so-well-known novelist of the 1950’s was Leslie Poles Hartley (1895-1972). Besides a trilogy called Eustace and Hilda (1944-1947), she has left behind some novels with catchy titles, such as The Hireling (1957), focused on class conflict, and The Go-Between (1953), where the novelist’s discomforting feeling about contemporary society becomes manifest.
Angry Young Men
The novelists of the 1950’s that we have discussed so far did not constitute any group or movement. They might have had broad similarities among them shared by most post-War or post-modern writers, but they did not have any common manifesto or ideology to bind them into a homogeneous group. There was, however, during the same prolific fifties, a definite group of writers who consciously and deliberately followed an agenda in their novels (in some cases, also plays). This group got the brand-name of Angry Young Men of the 50’s. It was John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger (performed in 1956, published in 1957) which supplied the tone and title for the movement. This group of writers, mostly novelists, represented the typical mood and flavour of the decade. These “angry young men” belonged to the middle or lower-middle sections of society, educated not in Oxford or Cambridge, but in what are called Red-brick universities. They had not experienced the War, and were not bitten by the bug of absurdism. Their anger was directed against the old establishment, the liberal-human, largely upper-middle class, Bloomsbury intelligentsia (Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey) symbolized by Horizon. The movement was part social, part cultural. However, the anger they displayed in their novels (and plays) was not of a very serious order. It was not the kind of anger we associate with D.H. Lawrence or Wyndham Lewis, which emanated from a firm commitment to an ideology or morality. The anger or protest of these young men of the 50’s was rather of a lower order, closer to an ordinary disgruntlement. Actually, what they demanded was social and cultural accommodation among the privileged, an extension of upper-class comforts in privileged jobs, etc. Once that was extended to them, the anger soon subsided. No wonder the movement did not last beyond the decade of the 1950’s.
Kingsley Amis
Among these “angries” Kingsley Amis (1922-1995) is considered the leading novelist. His Lucky Jim (1954) provides not only a catchy title but also an effective metaphor for the protesting young men. It is also a campus novel, which exposes the academic racket in the British universities, their social pretensions and pseudoculture that so often accompany it. Amis went on exploring further the various dimensions of the aesthetic cant and snobbery in his subsequent novels, such as I Like It Here (1958) and The Uncertain Feeling (1955), One Fat Englishman (1963). Jim Dixon, the hero of Lucky Jim, remains a representative angry young man of the 1950’s.
John Wain
Another “angry” novelist of the decade was John (Barrington) Wain (1925--), whose Hurry On Down (1953) constructs a more careful portrait of the Angry Young Man. Like other protagonists of the 1950’s, this anti-hero wishes to opt out of the society he despises but stays in it without commitments. According to Raymond Williams in The Long Revolution (1961), the Angry Young Man is a tramp seeking individual rights and freedom without responsibilities. The protagonist, Charles Lumbey, reflects at the novel’s end, “Neutrality; he had found it at last. The running fight between himself and society had ended in a draw.” Wain’s other novels include The Contenders (1952), A Travelling Woman (1959), Strike the Father Dead (1962), and a short story collection called Nuncle (1960).
John Braine
John Braine (b. 1922) is another “angry” novelist. His popular novels are Room at the Top (1957) and Life at the Top (1962), where Joe Lampton is the hero. These novels expose the emptiness of upper-class life, the race for material prosperity and social status, and the no-holds-barred activities that accompany it. Braine shows that once one reaches the top, he finds himself trapped and lonely, and he can’t help being conscious of social contempt. This theme he continues in his other novels, such as The Crying Game (1968), The Queen of a Distant Country (1972), and Waiting for Sheila (1976).
Alan Sillitoe
Alan Sillitoe (b. 1928) is another significant novelist of the period. He generally sets his novels in Nottingham, dealing with working-class characters still haunted by the memories of the Great Depression of the 1930’s. His best-known novels include Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), The Loneliness of the Long-Distant Runner (1959), and The Death of William Posters (1966), a combination of fiction, short stories, and novels.
Women Novelists in Later Decades
Doris Lessing
The later decades of the twentieth century saw significant social changes for women, opening up new opportunities and challenging traditional values. Doris Lessing (1919-2013) emerged as a key figure, known for her groundbreaking novel The Golden Notebook (1962). This work echoed the feminist sentiment of the era, encapsulated in Lessing's exploration of female roles and societal representation.
- Children of Violence Series: Spanning from Martha Quest (1952) to The Four-Gated City (1969), this five-volume epic follows Martha Quest's journey in colonial East Africa, reflecting on race, class, and political awakening.
- The Golden Notebook: Considered her seminal work, it challenges conventional realism and explores fragmented female identity in a changing society.
Angela Carter
Angela Carter (1940-1992) was another influential novelist known for her provocative and feminist perspectives, particularly in works like The Passion of New Eve (1977) and The Bloody Chamber (1979). Her writings challenged traditional gender roles and explored themes of sexuality and identity.
Margaret Drabble
Margaret Drabble (b. 1939) stands out as a representative novelist of later twentieth-century England, known for her insightful explorations of contemporary society and feminist themes. Her novels, such as A Summer Bird-Cage (1963) and The Ice Age (1977), delve into issues of corruption, marriage, and societal alienation.
Other Novelists in Later Decades
John Fowles
John Fowles (1926-2005) made significant contributions with novels like The Collector (1963) and The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), which explore themes of repression and liberation. His works reflect influences of post-Freudian psychology and challenge social norms.
Fraser and Farrell
George Macdonald Fraser (1925-2008) and James Gordon Farrell (1935-1979) captured the colonial experience in India through their novels, offering insights into Victorian-era India and its impact on British society.
- George Macdonald Fraser: Known for the Flashman Papers series, which fictionalizes historical events like the Afghan War and the Indian Mutiny.
- James Gordon Farrell: Notable for The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), examining the Indian Mutiny and colonial dynamics.
Paul Scott
Paul Scott (1920-1978) is renowned for his Raj Quartet, a series of novels including The Jewel in the Crown (1966) and A Division of the Spoils (1975), which provide a comprehensive portrayal of British India during and after World War II.
His novel Staying On (1977) continues the exploration of post-Independence India, focusing on individuals grappling with cultural change and displacement.
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