In the Movement
merent' ANY people in modern Britain, who believe that they have been living in the same place for a lifetime, wake up one day to find they are in fact living in a place. All the small changes have added up, in the EdEiled, to a transformation. The bus service has made the village , a suburb; the gaunt moorland produces a glittering tory; the angry slagheaps sink and melt greenly into the dscape; and the long dull High Street flowers with the black )tulip of Montague Burton, the Tailor of Taste. Within the last year a fair number of people have realised that something of the same kind has happened to the literary Icene. The English literary scene as we have known it was last transformed in the Thirties. It has always been a practice • —calculated to disturb—to appoint young headmasters to ancient public schools, and in 1930 Mr. W. H. Auden arrived Upon the scene like a terrible twenty-six-year-old with a double First and a treble Blue, and began to dismiss the older members .; the staff and give lessons in economic geography to the L'Iassical Sixth :
Get there if you can and scc the land you once were proud to own
Though the roads have almost vanished and the expresses never run. . . .
Mr. Auden's prefects, the Thirties poets—fierce cold-bath rxists—turned upon the comfortable England of their day cl began to give that England the awful beating it has been king pretty continuously ever since. , What was `the movement' of the Thirties? It was formally defined by its historian, Mr. -John Lehmann (New Writing in .1.4rope, 1940), as :
the growth, during the early nineteen thirties, of a group of poets and prose-writers who were conscious of great social, political and moral changes going on around them, and who became increasingly convinced that it was their business to communicate their vision of this process, not merely to the so-called highbrow intellectual public to which their predecessors had addressed themselves, but to the widest possible circles of ordinary people engaged in the daily struggle for existence.
That was the movement, all right I—and every young person Who could put pen to paper set himself to get into it, to become Socially, politically, and morally conscious, to turn from the Se-called highbrow intellectual public, and towards the widest possible circles of ordinary people engaged in the daily struggle for existence. It is of course absurd to judge a movement by Lts manifestoes. No one more highbrow and intellectual than the characteristic figures of that movement ever quoted Engels across the candle-lit table of a country house.
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Go ne. All gone, utterly gone and vanished; its revolutionary young Orators and scattered and famous, acclaimed by Public and applauded at princely Venetian first nights; while On the graves of some of its other reputations the moss is growing thick. _. The war itself produced no ' movement,' nor even a dis- tinctive, central mood. It was not until towards the end of the war that disillusionment about Russia, what Lionel Trilling described as ' the baffled wonder and shame that there is no F984 mood. ssible way of responding to Belsen and Buchenwald,' and rhaps mere lassitude, provoked what might be called the ' Nothing dreadful' [wrote Cyril Connolly] ' is ever done with, Not very jolly : and the spectacle of a young writer adjusting the resonance of his solitude (somelvhat perhaps as one tunes a bass-viol) was an improbable one. But it is true that whatever young writers did in the post-war years, they did individually; whatever excitement there was, it- was not com- munal. Perhaps, after all, the Thirties had left something behind, something less substantial even than a ghost. It may indeed be only a vacuum—an absence of ' the movement.' For years now there has been no coherence in the literary scene, not even the coherence of a mere fashion, a central mode to which conformist talents can conform and in opposition to which non-conformist talents can form themselves. Even the secondary field, the field not of what is currently being written, but of what is admired out of the past, has been eaten bare. The names which meet with approval in cultural circles are still the approved names of the Thirties, and soon they must be quite.worn away. They are, and will remain, great names, but as Taste moves on in its clumsy inexorable way the approved names of each generation must necessarily grow dim, and fade, and be four-fifths forgotten, until at last Taste resurrects them in that long run in which we are all dead. Who do you take with you on the long week-ends in Sussex cottages? Kafka and Kirkegaard, Proust and Henry James ? Dylan Thomas, The Confidential Clerk, The Age of Anxiety, and The Golden Horizon? You belong to an age that is passing.
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It is passing in that unrealised way in which our native countryside is changing. One day we wake up to this change. Why on one day rather than another ? Why the Autumn of 1954 ? The answer is that nothing dates literary fashions so certainly as the emergence of a new movement, and within the last year or so, signs are multiplying that such a thing is, once again, emerging. Writing in these columns some weeks ago Mr. Anthony Hartley remarked upon some of the charac- teristics of the poetry of this new Movement of the Fifties— its metaphysical wit, its glittering intellectuality, its rich Empsonian ambiguities. Poets like Mr. Donald Davie or Mr. Thom Gunn are only less hostile to the political preoccupa- tions of the Thirties than they are to the lush, loose, fashion- able writing of the Forties and Fifties. In prose, three novels have been published—Mr. John Wain's Hurry On Down, Mr. Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, and Miss Iris Murdoch's Under the Net, which have been widely taken to represent the Move- ment. Reviewing Lucky Jim in the New Statesman, Mr. Walter Allen brilliantly indicated the character of the new hero' who goes tough . . . . at the least suspicion of the phoney . . . . One may speculate whence he derives. The Services, certainly, helped to make him; but George 'Orwell, Dr. Leavis and the Logical Positivists—or, rather, the attitudes these represent—all contributed to his genesis.'
Genuflections towards Dr. Leavis and Professor Empsonj admiration for people whom the Thirties by-passed, Orwell above all (and, for another example, Mr. Robert Graves) are indeed signs by which you may recognise the Movement. It is bored by the despair of the Forties, not much interested in suffering, and extremely impatient of poetic sensibility, especially poetic sensibility, about ' the writer and society.' So it's goodbye to all those rather sad little discussions about ' how the writer ought to live,' and it's goodbye to the Little Magazine and experimental writing.' The Movement, as well as being anti-phoney, is anti-wet; sceptical, robust, ironic, prepared to be as comfortable as possible in a wicked, com- mercial, threatened world which doesn't look, anyway, as it it's going to be changed much by a couple of handfuls of young English writers.
It is not very much, three novels, and a dozen or so volumes or pamphlets of verse. The Movement is incohesive, and, as a movement, dumb. But it has already aroused a good deal of controversy. Mr. J. B. Priestley, for example, has accused ' the newest novelists' of creating a new Hero who is basic- ally irresponsible. The idea of la !literature engagee has indeed taken such a grip of us since 1930 that a novel which is not openly on the side of social responsibility seems shocking and improper; as shocking and improper as the early Huxley and the early Waugh seemed in their time. And it is true that in the newest novels, almost everything is made fun of with an off-handed toughness which might make one imagine that the authors, like the Purity League in the song, don't approve of anything. That remains to be seen. But the Movement is interesting. It is interesting, like other movements, not only 'in itself, but because of the light which it throws upon the work of writers who are outside of it, perhaps opposed to it. And small as it is, it is nevertheless a part of the movement of that tide which is pulling us through the Fifties and towards the Sixties.
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