ESSAYS:A generation of poets reassessed, half a century on, reflects on a movement, while all the while reinforcing the power of the individual, writes JOHN MONTAGUEin his review of The Movement Reconsidered: Larkin, Amis, Gunn, Davie, and their Contemporaries, edited by Zachary Leader
IN ONE of the last issues of Penguin New Writing, that slender magazine which had kept up British spirits during the second World War, I came upon a lively essay on the poetry of William Empson. It was by a John Wain, not the cowboy, but a young critic, poet and novelist, who suggested that Empson's terse villanelles would serve as a good corrective for young poets, after the excesses of the New Romantics, like Dylan Thomas, George Barker and Kathleen Raine.
Sometime later, Wain published Hurry On Down, an autobiographical novel, which, unfortunately for him, appeared at the same time as Lucky Jim, the first book by Kingsley Amis, which was immediately hailed as the funniest novel since early Waugh. Both books, however, reached behind the sometimes sombre Modernism of writers such as Joyce and Woolf, to the older, rollicking picaresque tradition of Smollet and Fielding. (Indeed, another young poet-novelist, DJ Enright, has a passage describing Stephen Daedalus as "one of the most unpleasant characters in literature", and chides poor Dylan Thomas for his "deficiency in intellectual conviction".)
So a new generation in poetry, as in prose, was breaking the egg, a powdered wartime egg perhaps, but with a real energy. And this vitality crackled also through the new generation of dramatists connected with the Royal Court Theatre, such as Osborne, Arden and Wesker.
What remains of it all now, over half a century later, The Movement Reconsideredasks. Its editor, Zachary Leader, the biographer of Kingsley Amis, describes how the generational plot was hatched in the pages of the Spectator, and backed by two anthologies of poetry, one edited by Enright, the other by the charming and mysterious Robert Conquest, who is described here as "something secret in the service" but who was also a fine lyric (mainly love) poet. It was the usual log-rolling of literary contemporaries, which provoked a shrewd comment from Evelyn Waugh: "Please let the young people of today get on with their work alone and be treated to the courtesy of individual attention. They are the less, not the more, interesting, if they are treated as a 'Movement'".
Blake Morrison had already analysed this in his The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s,published in 1980, but in this current collection of essays he raises the ante. "Larkin is the greatest English poet of the second half of the twentieth century and Amis the greatest comic novelist . . . (Davie) the outstanding critic . . .". Philip Larkin modestly agrees:
"We shall have stamped our taste on the age between us in the end", he boasts to his crony, Amis. But the most hilarious essay here is Terry Castle's The Lesbianism of Philip Larkin. Larkin was known to have a penchant for pornography, but I did not realise he wrote schoolgirl stories, "full of games mistresses, mash notes, and lubricious hijinks after lights out". The author speculates that Larkin might have been (like Ernest Hemingway!) the male equivalent of a "fag-hag".
A title like "The Movement" has obvious scatological implications, which are neither avoided nor exploited in this book. There is an essay on verbal hygiene and the Movement, which invokes not the anal obsession of Swift, but Orwell's plea for clarity in his essay Politics and the English Language. In his piece on Kingsley Amis, though, James Fenton is more, so to speak, fundamental, quoting Amis's parody of Walter de la Mare: "Look thy last on all things shitty / While thou'rt at it: soccer stars, / Soccer crowds, bedizened bushheads / Jerking over their guitars . . .". Although Amis famously proclaimed, "Nobody wants any more poems about philosophers or paintings . . . or mythology or foreign cities", Thom Gunn, and later Donald Davie, widened the English arc by moving to California. Karl Miller and Alan Jenkins deal with the tough-guy postures of Thom Gunn, which found their apotheosis in the harrowing AIDS poems of Night Sweats. Although Davie was essentially conservative (he left Essex out of exasperation with student unrest), he was still fascinated by the experimental, a dichotomy well analysed by Clive Wilmer and William Pritchard. Early in his career, Davie might have declared "The development from imagism in poetry to fascism in politics is clear and unbroken", but he remained loyal to Pound and his followers, such as Bunting and Creeley, admiring their freer style.
As well as a pervasive anti-Modernism, there was also, within the Movement, the “Little Englanders” attitude to lesser breeds. I found myself in London with a distinguished Irish diplomat, who lofted me to the Garrick Club. Coming down the stairs was a rather inebriated Kingsley Amis, supported by Robert Conquest, who halted to speak to me.
"Kingsley, this is John Montague, the poet," said Robert helpfully. Amis looked at me as if I were something the cat had brought in. "The Irishpoet," prompted Conquest.
"Oh, an Irishpoet," fluted Amis (how eagerly some English rebels allow themselves to be absorbed), but he did not extend his fishlike hand.
As if we were not really writers but more like some kind of provincial and not very attractive vegetable, a peculiar form of Irishturnip. In fact, the Movement did not have much effect in Ireland, although Donald Davie taught briefly at Trinity, where he became a Fellow, and his wife remembered Dublin with fondness. And of course Philip Larkin was a librarian at Queens, where he was "Lonely in Ireland, since it was not home . . .". Home-growths like Kinsella were transplanted into some of the anthologies, while Cronin's Life of Rileycould be described as revived picaresque, with his "figure in the carpet" being the End of Modernity.
And the Movement did not always represent the best of England. While Larkin distils a fine gloom, one misses the dark energy of that fine poet he called “Ted Huge”.
Or the sombre poet-prophet, Geoffrey Hill, or the cool intelligence of Charles Tomlinson, all of the same generation but not allowed space under that fictive umbrella called the Movement. The next putative literary movement in England was the Group, whose members gathered to compare manuscripts, a kind of proto-writing workshop.
Transferred to Belfast under the aegis of Philip Hobsbaum, it developed into the so-called Ulster Renaissance, although, as Derek Mahon has observed: how can one revive something that was never born in the first place? But that is a different story, which will doubtless be told in many another collection of literary essays. Manifestoes, movements and groups may help at the beginning, but surely what matters is the individual gift, the divine spark, or what Kavanagh called “the touch”.
- The Movement Reconsidered: Larkin, Amis, Gunn, Davie, and their Contemporaries, edited by Zachary Leader, Oxford University Press, 320pp, £18.99
John Montague is a poet. His collected stories,
A Ball of Fire
, has just been published by Liberties Press and an 80th birthday homage, Chosen Lights: Poets on Poems by John Montague, is published by the Gallery Press