Ten Years After

The Making of a Movement

BY ELIZABETH JENNINGS AFTER a decade of what has been widely tiknown, at least in literary circles, as 'The Movement,' it has become impossible—much as one wishes to—to goon referring to it as 'The So-Called Movement.' I think it is individual writers, rather than the general reader, who have been reluctant to attach themselves to anything which might suggest the uniform, the drilled, the similar; I know that I myself have had a strong resistance to being linked with other poets who would seem to me to share little but a nearness in age, and sometimes not even that.

It seems almost incredible that it was as much as ten years ago in the Spectator of October 1, 1954, that J. D. Scott declared in his tour d'horizon, 'In the Movement,' that: '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 multiply- ing that such a thing is, once again, emerging.... Poets like Mr. Donald Davie or Mr. Thom Gunn are Only less hostile to the political pre- occupations of the Thirties than they are to the lush, loose, fashionable writing of the Forties and Fifties.' Mr. Scott went on to comment on such novelists as John Wain, Kingsley Amis and Iris Murdoch.

There are two important and fascinating facts about this. Movement; one is that none of these poets and novelists ever consciously formed a movement; the similarities were natural, the qualities they shared were almost a matter of chance. Secondly, they shared this fact with the poets of the Thirties. Indeed, one is tempted to think that literary Movements only become true Movements when they are not too zealously formulated, not lined up or grouped together— not, in fact, consciously created at all by those who are to become regarded as members of them.

Many factors seem to have been present in the literary movement which was initiated and

christened ten, or roughly ten, years ago—most of them arbitrary : Lucky Ihn appeared, George Fraser published his anthology Springtime (1953), Philip Larkin emerged from the relative obscurity of an Irish university with a handful of very remarkable poems; a younger man, Thom Gunn, did the same thing when he came down from Cambridge, and the Fantasy Press, a platform for a large group of Oxford and Cam- bridge poets, received a good deal of attention in the London press. There was, too, firstly, the inauguration of John Lehmann's fine broadcast literary magazine which lasted all too short a time, then his London Magazine which attempted to do in print what New Soundings had suc- ceeded in doing on the radio—that is to say, in providing both encouragement and publication for young poets and prose writers. The radio programme and the printed magazine, as edited by Lehmann, both failed for lack of financial support; the general public which was genuinely interested in them could not always afford' them, while those who could seemed to have slipped into a sort of literary lassitude.

Then in 1956, Robert Conquest, one of the Movement poets, edited New Lines, the manifesto (though by no means a flamboyant or belligerent one) of the Movement poets. G. S. Fraser had already produced Springtime, but he was more cautious and altogether less assured than Con- quest. In his introduction to New Lines, Conquest announced unequivocally that 'The connoisseur of influences would probably find that the general recognition of Yeats as the great poet of the century is reflected in a considerable debt of matter and method among the poets in this book. Writers such as Robert Graves and Edwin Muir also have their echoes. . . . Auden, too, casts an obvious shadow here and there. . .

The tendency, then, among the poets of the Fifties, was to avoid the grandiose (though we must not forget that Yeats himself could be ex- tremely rhetorical), visionary and vague, and to seek out the simple, down-to-earth and concrete. As the decade proceeded, new writers, such as R. S. Thomas, were added to the group. Seldom, in fact, have so many remarkably different poets been enlisted, without question or permission, into a particular assembly of other writers. Even Ted H ughes,, a much younger poet than most of the others in the Movement (which consisted mainly of men in their middle to late thirties .or more, such as Davie, Amis, Larkin, Conquest, Enright, Holloway and Wain), 'was somehow forced into the gang, though it is now extremely hard to see how his often Lawrence- influenced' verse could ever have been considered lacking in flamboyance or belligerence.

But before we examine how a literary group disperses, we must examine many more of the ways in which it was formed. We have seen already that this one was not deliberately formed,

and also that, looked back at from this distance, many of the writers who were included in it by critics had little in common except a taste for formal verse (both yers fibre and obscurity were out). What was called at the time a distaste for

'the phoney' tended to mean little more than a lack of interest in religion (although the present writer was a practising Roman Catholic, while

R. S. Thomas, itt later member of the Movement, was a Welsh Anglican parson). I think that it was how a subject was treated, not so much what that subject was, that really united these writers.

When we consider the chief novelists of the period-- -.John Wain (the real instigator of the picaresque novel), Kingsley Amis, whose knock- about humour and hatred of 'culture' were his' chief characteristics, and Iris Murdoch, a writer of romantic fantasies who unintentionally de- ceived her early readers by seeming to mingle Wittgenstein with a highly-developed visual imagination- when we consider these, we see how little they really shared.

The most acclaimed of these writers were, among the poet's, Thom Gunn and Philip Larkin, and, among the novelists, Kingsley Amis. Gunn' and Larkin could hardly be more different, the former being tough and violent, while the latter was and is a quiet lyricist with a flawless ear.. Larkin seems deliberately to have opted out of much common, human experience, while Gunn is in the very middle of it. Similarly, one can't• help feeling gt times that Amis has made almost a fetish of his admiration for the tough, the extrovert, even, at times, the cruel. In an anthology brought out by D. J. Enright in Japan, Poets of the 50s, we find Larkin, for instance, declaring, 'I write poems to preserve things I have seen/thought/felt (if I may so indi- cate a composite and complex experience) both for myself and for others. . . .' Gunn would never agree with an attitude that appears so passive; his poems are philosophical, ways of trying to understand, yet never abstract or vague.

As the various writers of the Movement de- veloped, it became more and more difficult to discern precisely what had linked them in the first place. Some critics viewed them as an arti- ficially contrived gang, set up for personal advancement rather than for love of literature, while yet others felt that most of them had little in common except nearness in age, an avoidance of certain subjects and of dealing with those subjects, together with a refusal to be over- emotional, on the one hand, or too obsessed with large public events, on the other. Where the poets of the Thirties attempted to unite, and often succeeded in uniting, private experience with public or political events (and often found their chief subject in the Spanish Civil War), the

poets of the Fifties had only the Cold War and the aftermath of a world conflict, of which only a few had had more than a National Service- man's experience.

But what really matters in the whole of this decade is whether any good poetry grew out of it or not. We cannot deny that 'Wedding- Wind,' Church-Going' and 'The Whitsun Wed- dings,' by Philip Larkin, have a quality which will last. The common idea nowadays is that if a poem is popular in its own period in history, then it is likely to last for a very long time indeed. Perhaps the most important literary event of the past ten years is the extreme self-consciousness which we have inadvertently developed about such things. Thus, a comparatively short time after New Lines appeared, A. Alvarez, in 1962, published in Pen- guin books an anthology, significantly entitled The New Poetry, which contained works by some of the New Lines poets, but also included some interesting new names, while it omitted a num- ber of the previously best-known and most highly regarded of the Movement poets. Alvarez clearly showed very different views and tastes from those of Conquest. In the introduction to The New Poetry, he declared, 'We are gradually being made to realise that all our lives are in- fluenced profoundly by forces which have nothing to do with gentility, decency, or polite- ness.' This reminds us of the obsession of most of the poets of the Thirties with politics, social change, and the Spanish Civil War. But the great difference lies in the fact that few poets in The New Poetry, except Ted Hughes per- haps, really had anything to offer in the way of passionate feeling about or experience of violence. One cannot help thinking that there is a good deal of wishful thinking in this an- thology, and something highly artificial about it, too. The same may be said, but much more mildly, of A Group Anthology (1963). Here is the work of a collection of poets who have, quite self-consciously and deliberately, formed themselves into a group. They meet regularly, read their poems to each other, and criticise one another. One or two talents are indeed remarkable; for example, Peter Porter and David Weyill, but, on the whole, A Group Anthology has nothing of the power or strength of a real literary manifesto.

What is the position of the original Move- ment poets now? They have separated, developed their own ,original talents, and matured. Few, I think, have completely fallen by the way, either poets or novelists.' None now seems truly to resemble another. That they are a true and naturally developed literary movement I am sure, and that there are now some genuinely impor- tant writers in the Movement I am convinced.