Orwell to the Present

Literature in England, 1945-2000

John Brannigan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781350308855
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Englische Literaturkritik

This essential introductory guide provides a comprehensive critical survey of the diverse and rich body of literary writing produced in England in the postwar period. John Brannigan explores the relationship between literature and history, and analyses how poets, playwrights and novelists have revisited notions of Englishness, represented Englands of the past, and sought to make new 'maps' of English culture and society. Orwell to the Present: Literature in England, 1945-2000 combines original readings of familiar texts with wide-ranging explorations of the principal themes and historical and cultural contexts of literature since the end of the Second World War. Writers considered in detail include: Martin Amis, Simon Armitage, Pat Barker, John Betjeman, Edward Bond, Angela Carter, Margaret Drabble, Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill, Jean Rhys, Salman Rushdie, Sam Selvon, Graham Swift and Evelyn Waugh.

Part I

England Revisited

1 ‘Small Disturbances’: England in 1945

‘War shook up the geography of England, unsettling people and their objects, transforming landscapes, moving things to where they weren’t before.’

David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (173)

On Wednesday 9 May 1945, after an absence of almost six years, the weather returned to England. Or, to be more precise, it was once again possible to read or hear the weather forecast. The Air Ministry issued the first forecast to the public since September 1939: ‘A large depression between Ireland and the Azores is almost stationary and small disturbances are moving northward over the British Isles. Weather will continue warm and thundery, with bright intervals in most districts’.¹ The weather, that curious register of the mutability and continuity of English life, had remained a national secret for six years, but with the official declaration of the end of hostilities in Europe, the ‘small disturbances’ could once again enter public discourse. As Homi Bhabha argues, the weather is central to the ‘imaginative geography’ of ‘deep’, conservative England: ‘It encourages memories of the “deep” nation crafted in chalk and limestone; the quilted downs; the moors menaced by the wind; the quiet cathedral towns; that corner of a foreign field that is forever England’ (Bhabha 1994, 169). War temporarily interrupted the ritual vision of the weather splashing its dappled hues across the English landscape, which perhaps explains the peculiar absence of meteorological images from Orwell’s vision of ‘deep’ England in ‘England Your England’ (1941). When they resumed in May 1945, then, the weather forecasts symbolised the end of ‘wartime’ England, and seemed to fulfil Orwell’s prophecy that when the traumas and disruptions of war were over, ‘England will still be England’ (Orwell 1957, 90).

In the immediate aftermath of the war, the notion of a deep, continuous England, unbroken and even re-enervated by war, became an important constituent in representing the nation to itself. It appeared in the familiar form of representations of the landscape or weather, to suggest at once the permanence and unknowable essence of this England. As Robert Hewison records, the imagery and iconography of the uninterrupted nation even found its way into the budget statement of the Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Dalton, in April 1946:

There is still a wonderful, incomparable beauty in Britain, in the sunshine on the hills, the mists adrift the moors, the wind on the downs, the deep peace of the woodlands, the wash of the waves against the white unconquerable cliffs which Hitler never scaled. There is beauty and history in all these places. (Hewison 1995, 22)

Dalton was announcing a scheme to purchase sites of ‘national’ interest, of beauty or of history, so that they would be preserved as the heritage shrines of the nation, at once protecting and defining the topographical icons of Englishness. The war itself had served to enshrine the landscape as the imaginative site on which the struggle for English ways of life was being fought. This was epitomised, of course, in Churchill’s wartime evocations of pastoral scenes threatened by invasion, but such conservative visions of national community were by no means confined to the right. The politics of the immediate postwar years may have shifted to the left in terms of social and economic policy, but they registered and helped to shape a conservative conception of English national community, crystallised in sentimental celebrations of communal resilience in the blitz as well as the familiar marshalling of English pastoral. The literary representations of the end of the war, I will argue in this chapter, returned to these symbolic and imaginative landscapes, and constructed England primarily through scenic and topographical modes of depiction. This chapter takes as its subject the literary depictions of England produced in 1945. It is in part a minor exercise in annualised literary history (of which the best recent examples are James Chandler, England in 1819 (1998) and Michael North, Reading 1922 (1999)), which seeks to question the notion of literary period through a close analysis of the ‘starting point’ of the period covered in this volume.² In examining the literary and historical meanings of 1945 as a point of cultural reference, the chapter will argue that literary texts are inevitably caught up in a liminal space between immediate relevance to historical contexts (in this case the end of the war), and a more durable dialogic relationship with literary and cultural traditions. The particular thematic focus here is the significance of landscape in the literary productions of 1945. The chapter argues that English landscape and its accompanying weather conditions exercised a powerful hold in the literary imagination of the mid-1940s, and served to reinforce popular conceptions of national community.

The poetry of John Betjeman perhaps best exemplifies the scenic mode in English literature of the mid-1940s. Betjeman was not yet as popular as he became in the 1950s, when his Collected Poems (1958) became a best selling book, but he had become known, as Jessica Maynard argues, for ‘a poetry which celebrated a particular English geography’ (Maynard 1997, 31), and not least for his poetic celebrations of suburban England, or ‘metroland’. Not surprisingly, his wartime poetry continued to evoke English places and scenes. The collection he produced at the end of the war, New Bats in Old Belfries (1945), included poems on Henley-on-Thames, Bristol, Margate, Lincolnshire, Oxford, Bath, Cornwall, East Anglia, Swindon, and South London. As the title of the collection implies, Betjeman’s poems drew new topics or places into old forms of poetic expression. The conservatism of his poetic forms, and the provincial landscapes he depicts, in part explain his mass appeal, although Betjeman’s suburban pastorals also appear to invite ironic readings.

‘Margate, 1940’, for example, suggests in its last verse that the ‘fairy-lit sights’ of Margate, a Kentish seaside resort, are what ‘we are fighting for, foremost of all’ (Betjeman 1979, 100–1). War, the poem suggests, perhaps incredibly, is raging across Europe for the cause of such sights as a ‘putting-course’, ‘a thé dansant’, ‘Harold Road’, ‘Norfolk Road’, and a shabby, provincial hotel, ‘the Queen’s Highcliffe’, with its ‘tables for two laid as tables for four’. It is possible, maybe even desirable, to read this suggestion as ironic, particularly as the poem proceeds to offer a lightly comic portrait of the holiday-makers who return from the beach to ‘wash the ozone from their skins / The sand from their legs and the rock from their chins, / To prepare for an evening of dancing and cards’. How is it possible that such mundane scenes and provincial pleasures are the cause of war?

The poem recalls happy memories of holidays spent in ‘the salt-scented town’, ‘putting’ on the course, hearing ‘the strains of a band’, and walking ‘by the Queen’s Promenade’. It begins with these personal recollections:

From out the Queen’s Highcliffe for weeks at a stretch

I watched how the mower evaded the vetch,

So that over the putting-course rashes were seen

Of pink and of yellow among the burnt green. (Betjeman 1979)

The scenes remembered in the poem are associated distinctly with a specific place – the streets and hotel names register that this is Margate – but at the same time, Margate is represented as a site of symbolic significance for England in general. Similarly, the sights the poem describes are the particular memories of the poet, and yet at the same time are what we are apparently fighting for. The poem moves, in fact, from the personal memories of the first verse, to the metaphorical significance of these memories for the imaginative community of England as a whole:

Beside the Queen’s Highcliffe now rank grows the vetch,

Now dark is the terrace, a storm-battered stretch;

And I think, as the fairy-lit sights I recall,

It is those we are fighting for, foremost of all. (Betjeman 1979)

As a coastal resort, facing occupied Europe across the English channel, Margate symbolises the ‘storm-battered stretch’ of English coastline threatened by enemy invasion. The poem uses meteorological and topographical metaphors to suggest the effects of war and the danger of imminent invasion. Already, the vetch has grown rank, the terrace has darkened, in ominous anticipation of the destruction of Margate and its familiar sights and customs. Margate symbolised, then, a way of life, a distinctly English way of life, of holidays spent pleasurably in run-down hotels with their ‘bottles of sauce and Kia-Ora and squash’, and the children looking down to ‘the sea / As it washed in the shingle the scraps of their tea’. Betjeman’s poem elevates what appear to be the marginal, the obscure, the provincial aspects of English life to represent its very foundations.

Philip Larkin memorably celebrated Betjeman’s representations of England as ‘what I should want to remember ... if I were a soldier leaving England’ (Larkin 1983, 214), a remark which seems particularly relevant to ‘Margate, 1940’. Larkin produced his first collection of poems, The North Ship, in 1945, but had not yet found the poetic voice and style for which he became renowned in the 1950s and 60s. The North Ship imitated too closely the style and rhythm of Yeats. According to Larkin, in his own retrospective preface to The North Ship, it wasn’t until he discovered Hardy’s poetry after 1946 that he cast off his infatuation with Yeats, and thereafter began to write the poems which would appear in The Less Deceived (1955) (Larkin 1966, 9–10).³ More than any other contemporary English poet, Larkin came to share many of Betjeman’s preoccupations, particularly his poetic representations of quotidian suburban and provincial England. But there is little evidence of this in The North Ship, which abounds in abstruse Yeatsian symbolism.

Betjeman’s England presented itself in ways which seemed too frank and translucent to require the complexities of modernist aesthetics. This is why Betjeman’s poems sometimes appear to be self-parodically simple. A poem such as ‘A Subaltern’s Love-song’, for example, uses a highly audible, repetitive rhyming scheme in the quatrain form (which was widely used in the nineteenth-century Anglican hymns which Betjeman admired) to give the poem a lighthearted, jaunty tone:

Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn,

Furnish’d and burnish’d by Aldershot sun,

What strenuous singles we played after tea,

We in the tournament – you against me! (Betjeman 1979, 87–8)

The ‘love-song’ recounts the subaltern’s gleeful infatuation with Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, as they play tennis singles, then take ‘lime-juice and gin’ on the verandah, and then drive to a dance. The poem concludes with a fairy-tale happy ending: ‘We sat in the car park till twenty to one/ And now I’m engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn’. With its traditional quatrain form, its light-hearted treatment of love, and its romantic, happy conclusion, ‘A Subaltern’s Love-song’ is, in some respects, a peculiarly anti-modern, historically naïve poem. When Betjeman wrote it, the world had been swept into mass carnage for the second time in his life, and the skills and intelligence of human beings were attuned to inventing new and more brutal methods of destruction. Modernist art and literature had attempted to wrestle with the grave difficulty of representing such a world in artistic form. But Betjeman’s poetry seems an oasis of faith in traditional and familiar forms, of continuity with the self-confidence and enlightenment beliefs of the Victorians. ‘In a century that has restlessly destabilized the formal poetic line’, writes Dennis Brown, ‘Betjeman’s work has consistently held to traditional boundaries, as if these constituted the essence of poetic Englishness’ (Brown 1999, 5). This seems to render Betjeman somehow anachronistic, outside of his own time, and constitutes something of a problem for the attempt to situate him within a neat period chronology. Does Betjeman’s collection belong to the historical moment of 1945? Or are they more properly situated anachronistically in relation to Victorian and Edwardian poetic forms?

Larkin presented this traditionalist, nostalgic aspect of Betjeman’s work as a kind of studied myopia: ‘For him there has been no symbolism, no objective correlative, no T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound’ (Larkin 1959). To put it another way, Betjeman’s poetry seems to declare itself as the progenic heir of specific lines of English poetry, which are formally conventional and resistant both to foreign and modernist influences. ‘A Subaltern’s Love-song’ does this in its quatrain form, but also in its imagery and allusions. The poem refers to tennis, tea, ‘the six-o’clock news’, ‘lime-juice and gin’, ‘the Golf club’, ‘blazer and shorts’, to ‘the Hillman’ car, as well as ‘Rovers and Austins’. These images and allusions describe a social world which is quite specific to the English upper middle class. This makes it all the more significant that the poem is written from the perspective of a ‘subaltern’, which we might assume to mean a junior officer in the military, but which also carries with it the implication of lower social status. From this perspective the poem’s fetishistic representations of the detail of upper-middle-class life is a revealing indication of social and cultural differences between the subaltern and ‘Miss Joan Hunter Dunn’. We learn much from the poem about what Joan Hunter Dunn drinks and wears, what kind of house she lives in and car she drives, how and where she spends her days and evenings:

The Hillman is waiting, the light’s in the hall,

The pictures of Egypt are bright on the wall,

My sweet, I am standing beside the oak stair

And there on the landing’s the light on your hair. (Betjeman 1979)

The objects in Joan Hunter Dunn’s possession, or which surround her, appear to be of greater interest to the ‘subaltern’ than she herself. The closest the subaltern comes to describing her, near the end of the poem, avoids any form of sentimental or romantic depiction: ‘here on my right is the girl of my choice, / With the tilt of her nose and the chime of her voice’. These are hardly flattering terms of description, and perhaps suggest an attempt at precision rather than romantic evocation. The subaltern is precise about her name, about the time and place – twenty to one, Camberley, in Surrey – about the smells and sounds and sights, and also the feelings, which surround he and Joan Hunter Dunn on the night of their engagement. Even when he lapses into romantic declarations – ‘I am weak from your loveliness’ – there is the attempt to be precise about the quality and texture of romantic feeling.

‘A Subaltern’s Love-song’ is, then, in this reading, an anti-romantic treatment of love. It attempts to describe a romantic relationship with careful precision, gently relieved by a jaunty rhyming scheme, and in contrast to the abstraction and vague sentimentality associated with neo-romantic poets such as Dylan Thomas and W.R. Rodgers. Betjeman’s gravitation towards ‘objective’ description in this poem, towards localised, empirical detail, set the agenda for the ‘Movement’ poets of the 1950s, which included Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie and D.J. Enright. Larkin described the influence of Yeats, and of the neo-romanticists of the 1940s, as a kind of ‘Celtic fever’, from which he was cured only when he turned to the English lines of Hardy (Larkin 1966, 10). This conception of English forms of poetic representation as the antithesis of foreign experimental or romantic modes typifies one important strand of English writing at the end of the war, one that persists throughout the postwar period. England in its insularity, as an embodiment of intrinsic values and forms, became the subject of intense literary and cultural interest.

The reaction against modernism, and the intensification of interest in describing and representing Englishness in isolation, was not simply brought about by the experience of world war. It was present in the work of Evelyn Waugh, J.B. Priestley, W.H. Auden, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and indeed John Betjeman, among many others, before the war. But the end of the war also gave a particular significance to this trend, partly because of the experiences of combatants returning to England from the war, and partly also because of the introspective questions raised by the war itself. Both of these elements are addressed in Richard Goodman’s poem, ‘Return to England’, which was published in John Lehmann’s Penguin New Writing in 1945. Lehmann sought literary contributions from new writers fresh from the experiences of war, to give a kind of urgency and contemporary relevance to writing. Goodman had served with the navy in North Africa, Sicily and Normandy, and his poem ranges across these experiences in considering the meanings of Englishness to the returning serviceman.

The images of England depicted in the poem are hardly original – England is imagined as a tree, ‘that singing sap which powers our million lives’, and as a landscape, a valley pictured in ‘ascending peace’ (Goodman 1945, 172–73). England’s attractions are made all the more alluring in the poem by contrasting them with the unhomely, cruel landscapes of the European and North African battlefields. The poem imagines England in its tranquility and modesty after three verses which describe the harsh scenes elsewhere – ‘the sour dust of Sicilian roads’, ‘the leprous stone of Malta’s caves’, ‘Algiers where the sirocco crawls / To paralyse the will and the brain reels’, ‘the orange whirlwind blown from Ras el Ma / To silt the gates of Fez’. The landscapes of North Africa and Sicily are sickening, unaccommodating in contrast to England, to which the poem turns in eulogy in the fifth verse:

to see from the easy train the first slim wood

misted by autumn sun and the hedged road,

to watch quietly

the harrow pattern with care the Devon field

and the sheep crowd silent in the safe fold;

to hear again the rooks chatter at evening,

etching with lines of flight the day’s ending,

and the last wind mourn

the departed swallows, while a skylark strings

its bubbled music through the curlews’ songs.

(Richard Goodman 1945)

This is a vision of the English landscape in which all is in order – even the sheep are in their ‘safe fold’. The fields are ‘patterned’ by human agriculture, the roads are ‘hedged’, and time is marked by the rooks and swallows. It is a modern vision, one seen from a train, which enabled a way of seeing or discovering England quite distinct from other modes of transport, and which John Lucas argues became a recurrent perspective in twentieth-century English poetry (Lucas 1997, 37–55).

The images of England which Goodman depicts in his poem have echoes in some of the poets Lucas considers – Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas, Louis MacNeice – especially, perhaps, in Thomas’s search for the ‘heart’ of England. But this is what is most intriguing about Goodman’s poem, for Thomas’s view from a train – ‘Adlestrop’ is the obvious poem here – represented this deep, pastoral England as a place remembered only, lost in time, corroded and changed irrevocably by war. In Goodman’s poem, the combatants return to rediscover this England, to pledge their renewed faith in an idyllic, continuous England:

We who were born of England, who are bound forever,

being of her strange earth, to be her lover;

whose precious dead

walk, still erect, in her flowers and speak to us

in her rivers’ murmur and he...