Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

by Peter Watson

  Britain in the 1950s did not yet have a large black population. Black immigrants had been arriving since 1948, their lives chronicled now and then by writers such as Colin Maclnnes, as was referred to above. The first Commonwealth Immigrants Act, restricting admission from the ‘New’ Commonwealth (i.e., predominantly black countries), was not passed until 1961. Until that point, then, there was little threat to the traditional British culture from race. Instead, the ‘alternative’ found its strength in an equivalent social divide that for many created almost as much passion: class.

  In 1955 a small coterie of like-minded serious souls got behind an idea to establish a theatre in London that would endeavour to do something new: find fresh plays from completely new sources, in an effort to revitalise contemporary drama and search out a new audience. They named the venture the English Stage Company and bought the lease of a small theatre known as the Royal Court in Sloane Square in Chelsea. The theatre turned out to be ideal. Set in the heart of bourgeois London, its program was revolutionary.69 The first artistic director was George Devine who had trained in Oxford and in France, and he brought in as his deputy Tony Richardson, twenty-seven, who had been working for the BBC. Devine had experience, Richardson had the flair. In fact, says Oliver Neville in his account of the early days of the ESC, it was the solid Devine who spotted the first piece of flair. While launching the company, he had paid for an all in The Stage, the theatrical weekly, soliciting new plays on contemporary themes, and among the seven hundred manuscripts that arrived ‘almost by return of post’ was one by a playright named John Osborne, which was called Look Back in Anger.70 Devine was much taken by the ‘abrasive’ language that he grasped instinctively would play well on stage. He discovered that the writer was an out-of-work actor, a man who was in many ways typical of a certain post-war figure in Britain. The 1944 Education Act (brought in as a result of the Beveridge Report) had raised the school-leaving age and initiated the modern system of primary, secondary and tertiary schools; it had also provided funds to help lower-class students attend acting schools. But in drab post-war England, there were now more students than jobs. Osborne was one of these over-trained types and so was Jimmy Porter, the ‘hero’ of his play.71

  ‘Hero’ deserves inverted commas because it was one of the hallmarks of Look Back in Anger that its lower-middle-class protagonist, while attacking everything around him, also attacked himself. Jimmy Porter is, in this sense, a direct cousin of Okonkwo, ‘driven by [a] furious energy directed towards a void.’72 The structure of Look Back in Anger has been frequently criticised as falling apart at the end, where Jimmy and his middle-class wife retreated into their private fantasy world of cuddly toys.73 Despite this, the play was a great success and marked the beginning of a time when, as one critic put it, plays ‘would no longer be concerned with middle class heroes, or set in country houses.’74 Its title helped give rise to the phrase ‘angry young men,’ which, together with ‘Kitchen Sink Drama,’ described a number of plays and novels that, in the mid-to late-1920s in Great Britain, drew attention to the experiences of working-class men (they were usually men).75 So it is in this sense that the trend typified by Osborne fits in with the rest of the reconceptualisation of culture, with which we are concerned. In reality, in Osborne’s play, just as in Bernard Kops’s Hamlet of Stepney Green (1957), John Arden’s Waters of Babylon (1957) and Live Like Pigs (1958), Arnold Wesker’s Chicken Soup with Barley (1958) and Roots (1959), together with a raft of novels – John Braine’s Room at the Top (1957), Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night, Sunday Morning (1958), and David Storey’s This Sporting Life (1960) – the main characters were working-class ‘heroes,’ or antiheroes as they came to be called. These antiheroes are all aggressive, all escaping from their lower-class backgrounds because of their educational or other skills, but unsure where they are headed. Although each of these authors could see the shortcomings of lower-class society, no less than other kinds, their work lent a legitimacy to lower-class experience and provided another alternative to traditional cultural forms. In Eliot’s terms, these works were profoundly sceptical.

  A somewhat similar change was overtaking poetry. On 1 October 1954 an anonymous article appeared in the Spectator entitled ‘In the Movement.’ This, actually the work of the magazine’s literary editor, J. D. Scott, identified a new grouping in British literature, a covey of novelists and poets who ‘admired Leavis, Empson, Orwell and Graves,’ were ‘bored by the despair of the forties … extremely impatient of poetic sensibility … and … sceptical, robust, ironic.’76 The Spectator article identified five authors, but after D.J. Enright had published Poets of the 1950s in 1955, and Robert Conquest’s New Lines had appeared a year later, nine poets and novelists came to be regarded as comprising what was by then known as the Movement: Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, Donald Davie, Enright himself, Thom Gunn, Christopher Holloway, Elisabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin, and John Wain. One anthologist, perhaps going a shade over the top, described the Movement as ‘the greatest rupture in cultural tradition since the eighteenth century.’ Its core texts included Wain’s novel, Hurry On Down (1953), and Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954), and its prevailing tone was ‘middlebrow scepticism’ and ‘ironical commonsense.’77

  The most typical poet of the Movement, the man who characterised its approach to life and literature most cleanly, was Larkin (1922–85). He grew up in Coventry, not too far from Auden’s Birmingham, and after Oxford began a career as a university librarian (Leicester, 1946–50; Belfast, 1950–55; Hull, 1955–85) mainly because, as it seems, he needed a regular job. He wrote two early novels, but it was as a poet that he became famous. Larkin liked to say that poetry chose him, rather than the other way around. His poetic voice, as revealed in his first mature collection, The Less Deceived, which appeared in 1955, was ‘sceptical, plain-speaking, unshowy,’ and above all modest, fortified by common sense. It wasn’t angry, like Osborne’s plays, but Larkin’s rejection of old literature, of tradition, lofty ideas, psychoanalysis – the ‘common mythkitty’ as he put it – do echo the down-to-earth qualities of ‘kitchen-sink’ drama, even if the volume control is turned down.78 One of his most famous poems was ‘Church Going,’ with the lines

  I take off

  My cycle-clips in awkward reverence

  which immediately convey Larkin’s ‘intimate sincerity,’ not to mention a certain comic awareness. For Larkin, man ‘has a hunger for meaning but for the most part is not quite sure he is up to the task; the world exists without question – there’s nothing philosophical about it; what’s philosophical is that man can’t do anything about that fact – he is a “helpless bystander”; his feelings have no meaning and therefore no place. Why therefore do we have them? That is the struggle.’ He observes

  the hail

  Of occurrence clobber life out

  To a shape no one sees

  Larkin verges on the sentimental purposely, in order to draw attention to the very shortcomings of sentimentality, only too aware that that is all many people have. His is a world of disenchantment and defeat (‘two can live as stupidly as one’ is his verdict on marriage), a ‘passive realism whose diminished aim in life is not to feel grand passion but to prevent himself from ever hurting.’ It is the message of someone who is aware of just enough science for it to pain and depress him, but who sees through existentialism, and all the other ‘big’ words, come to that. This is why Larkin’s stature has grown; his view may not be heroic, but it is perfectly tenable. As Blake Morrison has pointed out, Larkin was regarded as a minor poet for decades, but at the end of the century, ‘Larkin now seems to dominate the history of English poetry in the second half of the century much as Eliot dominated the first.’79

  Overlapping with the angry young men, and the Movement, or at least with the world they attempted to describe, was Richard Hoggart’s highly original Uses of Literacy. Published a year after Look Back in Anger was first staged, in 1957, Hoggart was, with Raymond Williams, Stuart Had, and E. P. Thompson, one
of the founders of the school of thought (and now academic discipline) known as cultural studies. Born in Leeds in 1918 and educated at the university there, Hoggart saw action in World War II in North Africa and Italy. Military experience had a marked experience on him, as it did on Williams. After the war Hoggart worked alongside Larkin, in his case as a tutor in literature in the Department of Adult Education at the University of Hull, and while there published his first full-length critical work, Auden. But it was in The Uses of Literacy that all his experience, his working-class background, his army life, his teaching in the adult education department of a provincial university, came together. It was as if he had found a vocabulary for a side of life that, hitherto, had lacked one.80

  Hoggart was trained in the traditional methods of practical literary criticism as devised by I. A. Richards (see chapter 18), and the ‘Great Tradition’ of F. R. Leavis, but his actual experience led him in a very different direction. He moved against Leavis rather as Ginsberg had moved against Lionel Triding.81 Instead of Following in the Cambridge tradition, he brought Richards’s methods to bear on the culture he himself knew – from the singing in working men’s clubs to weekly family magazines, from commercial popular songs to the films that ordinary people flocked to time and again. Like an anthropologist he described and analysed the customs he had grown up not even questioning, such as washing the car on a Sunday morning, or scrubbing the front step. His book did two things. It first described in detail the working-class culture, in particular its language – in the books, magazines, songs, and games it employed. In doing so, it showed, second, how rich this culture was, how much more there was to it than its critics alleged. Like Osborne, Hoggart wasn’t blind to its shortcomings, or to the fact that, overall, British society deprived people born into the working class of the chance to escape it. But Hoggart’s aim was more description and analysis than any nakedly political intent. Many responded to Hoggart and Osborne alike. A legitimacy, a voice, was suddenly given to an aspect of affairs that hitherto had been overlooked. Here was another fine tradition.82

  Hoggart led naturally to Raymond Williams. Like Hoggart, Williams had served in the war, though most of his life had been spent in the English Department at Cambridge, where he could not help but be aware of Leavis. Williams was more of a theoretician than Hoggart and a less compelling observer, but he was equally convincing in argument. In a series of books, beginning with Culture and Society in 1958, Williams made plain and put into context what had been implicit in the narrow scope of Hoggart’s work.83 This was in effect a new aesthetic. Williams’s basic idea was that a work of art – a painting, a novel, a poem, a film – does not exist without a context. Even a work with wide applicability, ‘a universal icon,’ has an intellectual, social, and above all a political background. This was Williams’s main argument, that the imagination cannot avoid a relation with power, that the form art takes and our attitudes toward it are themselves a form of politics. Not necessarily party politics but the acknowledgement of this relationship – culture and power – is the ultimate form of self-awareness. In Culture and Society, having first considered Eliot, Richards, and Leavis, all as authors who consider ‘culture’ as having different levels and where only an educated minority can really benefit from and contribute toward the highest level, Williams proceeds to a chapter headed ‘Marxism and Culture.’ In Marxist theory, Williams reminds us, the determining fact of life is the means of production and distribution, and so the progress of culture, like everything else, is dependent upon the material conditions for the production of that culture. Culture therefore cannot help but reflect the social makeup of society, and on such an analysis it is only natural that those at the top should not want change. On this view, then, Eliot and Leavis are merely reflecting the social circumstances of their time, and in so doing are exhibiting a conspicuous lack of self-awareness.84

  Several things follow from this (oversimplified) account of Williams’s arguments. One is that there is no one criterion by which to judge an artist, or a work of art. Elites, as viewed by Eliot or Leavis, are merely one segment of the population with their own special interests. Instead, Williams advises us to trust our own experience as to whether an artist or his work is relevant, the point being that all viewpoints may be equally relevant or valid. In this sense, though Williams himself was steeped in what most people would recognise as high culture, he was attacking that very tradition. Williams’s theories also imply that, in developing new ideas, artists are breaking new ground not only aesthetically but politically as well. It was this conjoining of art and politics that would lead in time to what is sometimes known as the Cultural Left.

  Two final assaults on the Eliot-Leavis-Trilling-Commager canon came from history and from science. The historical challenge was led first by the French Annales school, and second by the British school of Marxist historians. The achievements of their approach will be discussed more fully in chapter 31, but for now it is enough to say that these historians drew attention to the fact that ‘history’ happens to ‘ordinary’ people as well as to kings and generals and prime ministers, that such history as that pertaining to entire peasant villages, as reconstructed from, say, birth, marriage, and death records, can be just as gripping and important as the chronicles of major battles and treaties, that life moves forward and acquires meaning by other ways than war or politics. In so doing, history joined other disciplines in drawing attention to the world of the ‘lower orders,’ revealing how rich their lives could be. What Hoggart had done for the working class of twentieth-century Britain, the Annales school did, for example, for the peasants of fifteenth-century Languedoc or Montaillou. The British Marxist historians – Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, and E. P. Thompson among others – also concentrated on the lives of ‘ordinary’ people: peasants, the lower ranks of the clergy, and in Thompson’s classic work, the English working classes. The thrust of all these studies was that the lower orders were an important element in history and that they knew they were, acting rationally in their own interests, not mere fodder for their social superiors.

  History, anthropology, archaeology, even the discipline of English itself in Williams’s hands and, quite separately, in Achebe’s, Baldwin’s, Ginsberg’s, Hoggart’s, and Osborne’s works, all conspired in the mid-to late 1950s to pull the rug out from under the traditional ideas of what high culture was. New writing, new discoveries, were everywhere. The idea that a limited number of ‘great books’ could provide the backbone, the core, of a civilisation seemed increasingly untenable, remote from reality. In material terms, America was now vastly more prosperous than Europe; why should its people look to European authors? Former colonies were exalted by their newfound histories; what need did they have of any other? There were answers to these questions – good answers – but for a time no one seemed interested. And then came an unexpected blow from a quite different direction.

  The most frontal attack on Eliot-Leavis et alia may be precisely dated and located. The setting was Cambridge, England, and the time a little after five o’clock on the afternoon of 7 May 1959. That was when a ‘bulky, shambling figure approached the lectern at the western end of the Senate House,’ a white stone building in the centre of the city.85 The room, in an ornately plastered neoclassical building, was packed with senior academics, students, and a number of distinguished guests, assembled for one of Cambridge’s ‘showpiece public occasions,’ the annual Rede lecture. That year the speaker was Sir Charles Snow, later to be Lord Snow but universally known by his initials, as C. P. Snow. ‘By the time he sat down over an hour later,’ as Stefan Collini tells the story, ‘Snow had done at least three things: he had launched a phrase, perhaps even a concept, on an unstoppably successful international career; he had formulated a question … which any reflective observer of modern societies needs to address; and he had started a controversy which was to be remarkable for its scope, its duration, and, at least at times, its intensity.’86 The tide of Snow’s lecture was �
�The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,’ and the two cultures he identified were those of ‘the literary intellectuals’ and of the natural scientists, ‘between whom he claimed to find a profound mutual suspicion and incomprehension, which in turn, he said, had damaging consequences for the prospects of applying technology to the world’s problems.’87

  Snow had chosen his moment. Cambridge was Britain’s foremost scientific institution, but it was also the home of F. R. Leavis (and Raymond Williams), as we have seen, one of the country’s foremost advocates of traditional literary culture. And Snow was himself a Cambridge man, who had worked in the Cavendish Laboratory under Ernest Rutherford (though he was an undergraduate at Leicester). His scientific career had suffered a setback in 1932 when, after announcing that he had discovered how to produce vitamin A by artificial methods, he was forced to recant because his calculations proved faulty.88 He never did scientific research again after that but instead became a government scientific adviser and a novelist, with a multivolume series, ‘Strangers and Brothers’, about the decision-making processes in a series of closed communities (such as professional societies or Cambridge colleges). These were much derided by advocates of ‘high’ literature who found, or affected to find, his style stilted and pompous. Snow thus both bridged – and yet did not bridge – the two cultures about which he had such strong views.

  Snow’s central point applied across the world, he said, and the reaction to his lecture certainly justified that claim. But it was also true that it applied more than anywhere in Britain, where it was thrown into its starkest contrast. Literary intellectuals, said Snow, controlled the reins of power both in government and in the higher social circles, which meant that only people with, say, a knowledge of the classics, history, and/or English literature were felt to be educated. Such people did not know much – or often any – science; they rarely thought it important or interesting and as often as not left it out of the equation when discussing policy in government, or regarded it as boring socially. He thought this form of ignorance was disgraceful, dangerous, and when applied to government, that it failed the country. At the same time, he thought scientists culpable in often being ill-educated in the humanities, apt to dismiss literature as invalid subjectivism with nothing to teach them.