Introduction: Literature of the 1950s and 1960s

Abstract

Introduction: Literature of the 1950s and 1960s TRACY HARGREAVES and ALICE FERREBE University of Leeds, UK, and Liverpool John Moores University, UK John Lehmann might well have been responding directly to Cyril Connolly’s view that ‘war shrinks everything’ when he declared the middle of the twentieth century to be an age ‘without giants’.1 The desire to fathom a new identity for postwar letters surfaced quickly after the end of the Second World War, and the pervasive postwar exhaustion, prolonged austerity, and Imperial diminution were swiftly aligned with the state of English culture. A game of major and minor, of Empire/modernism versus Welfare State/realism, began to be played out, first in the review pages and literary journals and then in the critical studies of the 1950s and 1960s. Some critics and literary journalists thought that the apparent exhaustion of modernism offered a welcome opportunity for it to be laid to rest. Modernism at its zenith ‘died from starvation’, C. P. Snow suggested, ‘because its intake of human stuff was so low’; for L. P. Hartley, its deliberate difficulty finally ‘incurr[ed] the nemesis of a reductio ad absurdum’.2 Attempts to discern a new literary identity and an emerging generation of writers were persistent in the postwar years. Rose Macaulay found a dearth of new voices as early as 1946,3 and this claim was to rattle down the next few years in the pages of the New Statesman, Observer, Times Literary Supplement, Encounter, London Magazine, and Spectator. T. C. Worsley, in the New Statesman, was waiting for an imminent ‘literary revival’ in 1950, as was Alan Pryce-Jones, writing in a special edition of the Times Literary Supplement in 1 John Lehmann, ‘Introduction’, in The Craft of Letters in England: A Symposium, ed. by J. Lehmann (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), pp. 1–5 (p. 2); Cyril Connolly, ‘Writers and Society, 1940–1943’, in The Selected Works of Cyril Connolly, ed. by Matthew Connolly, 2 vols (London: Picador 2002), i: The Modern Movement, pp. 321–48 (p. 334). 2 C. P. Snow, Sunday Times, 27 December 1953, cited in Rubin Rabinovitz, The Reaction against Experiment in the English Novel, – (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), p. 98; L. P. Hartley, ‘The Future of Fiction, §IV’, in New Writing and Daylight, ed. by John Lehmann (London: John Lehmann, 1946), pp. 86–90 (p. 87). See also Stephen Spender, The Struggle of the Modern (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963), pp. 254, 259. 3 Rose Macaulay, ‘The Future of Fiction, §I’, in New Writing and Daylight, ed. by Lehmann, pp. 71–74. Yearbook of English Studies, 42 (2012), 1–12© Modern Humanities Research Association 2012 August 1952 about the currently ‘inhibited state of our own literature’.4 Two years later, in 1954, the Observer held a ‘death of the novel’ symposium, although the obituary was, as ever, premature. From the end of 1953 a number of writers and critics began to note the creeping emergence of recurring tendencies in both fiction and poetry, starting with Stephen Spender in Encounter (November 1953), Anthony Hartley in the Spectator (8 January 1954), John Lehmann in the London Magazine (March 1954), J. D. Scott in the Spectator (1 October 1954), and the TLS on 7 January 1955. Scott’s decisive, now well-known, piece in the October Spectator appeared in the anonymously written leader article, which named a new literary movement as ‘the Movement’ and confidently enumerated its characteristics. As with the designation ‘Angry Young Man’, attributed two years later to George Fearon, the Royal Court Theatre’s Press Officer, and applied to John Osborne, these terms caught on, to be both repudiated and defended and later to be given literary-historical shape and order by Harry Ritchie, Blake Morrison, Robert Hewison, and Humphrey Carpenter.5 Scott managed to be both clear-cut and elusive when he gestured to an indefinable something in the Zeitgeist. He had, he claimed, a quasi-mystical ‘feeling that amounts almost to knowledge that a literary renaissance is about to take place’, and a ‘belief that this creative drive will find new things to say; if not new things then at least old things worth saying again and important to...