The New Novelists of the 1950s

(from The Short Oxford History of English Literature, by Andrew Sanders)

Samuel Beckett's trilogy, pulished together in London in 1959 under the English titles Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, was in every sense the most radically innovative fictional statement of the 1950s. The edition bore the announcement that the three novels had been 'translated from the original French by the author'. Beckett's pre-war fiction in English—the episodic novel A Dream of Fair to Middling Women (written in 1932, but published posthumously in 1992), the ten interconnected stories derived from it and given the title More Pricks than Kicks (1934) and the novel Murphy (1938)—had responded with a gauche confidence to the challenge of Joyce's experimental 'work in progress', Finnegans Wake. The titles of the first two of his pre-war works (one being loosely adapted from Chaucer, the other bawdily punning on a phrase of St. Paul's) also suggest the degree to which Beckett was self-consciously attempting to regenerate and re-energize the literary traditions of his native language. Murphy is the most substantial of the three. Its solitary title character, who 'sat it out, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton', is an Irishman in London, precisely placed in time and space (it is Thursday, 12 September 1935) and he has an unbroken view from his window to the northwest). His 'mew' (a bird-coop, originally one designed for moultin falcomry) is condemned (we presume as unfit for human habitation) and Murphy must contemplate the upheaval of removal ('Soon he would have to buckle to and start eating, drinking, sleeping and putting his clothes on and off, in quite alien surroundings'). Ostensibly, Murphy is constructed around the drab rituals and the vacuous repetitions of a largely inert life passed in a confined urban space. More profoundly, it seeks to represent a man's energetic inner life which finds its own repetitive rhythms and patterns and its own time-scheme distinct from those of the outside world.

When Beckett returned to fiction after the Second World War, he opted for the discipline of writing in French rather than in English. He also chose the form of a fluid monologue, a positively gushing 'stream of consciousness', rather than that of a third-person narrative. Molloy (written in 1947, published in Paris in 1951, and subsequently translated into English in 1955) shares a deliberate ambiguity of telling with its two successors. Each of the ageing narrators in the trilogy habitually contradicts himself, stumbles over the contortions of his syntax, and is obliged to pause in order to reflect on precisely how he has to express himself or on what he feels pressed to say. Both the flow of narrative and the language employed threaten to break under the strain. Beginnings are vexed or subverted, tenses shift between past and present, and what seem to be digressions or interpolations assume a vital momentum. Molloy (the very title of which may possibly, with the addition of one simple vowel, glance back to Joyce's superlatively fluid consciousness, Molly) is built around two self-explorative consciousnesses, the one seeking the other. Much as the disabled Molloy melts disconcertingly into his contemporary other half, the self-abused, decayed Moran, in the first novel, so both Molloy and Moran are subsumed in the other compulsive story-tellers of the trilogy, Malone and the isolated, unnamed narrator of The Unnamable. The last anguished and lachrymose teller recognizes the extent to which he has assimilated and now disowns the experiences of his narrative forebears: 'All these Murphys, Molloys and Malones do not fool me. They have made me waste my time, suffer for nothing . . . I though I was right in enlisting these sufferers in my pains. I was wrong. They never suffered my pains, their pains are nothing, compared to mine, a mere tittle of mine, the tittle I thought I could put from me, in order to witness it . . . these creatures have never been, only I and this black void have ever been.' Whereas Murphy sits it out 'as though he were free', this man of sorrows, the Unnamable, wrenches phrases from himself in his isolation and probes the implications of the perception that he is neither truly alone nor free of a larger humanity ('the little murmur of unconsenting man, to murmur what it is their humanity stifles'). The trilogy ends with an ultimate contradiction in terms: 'in silence you don't know, you must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on.' 

Beckett's experiments with narrative form and with the disintegration of narrative form had few immediate echoes in the more popular fiction of the 1950s. The one British writer of the period who keenly responded to the idea of creating an avowedly 'Modernist' fiction, and whose experiments were enthusiastically received by a wide public, was Lawrence Durrell (1912-90). Durrell was born in India of parents whose families had made the sub-continent their home for several generations. Although he became briefly acclimatized to bohemian (as opposed to 'respectable') England in the early 1930s, Durrell found what he regarded as his spiritual home in the Mediterranean, moving first to Corfu and then, after the German invasion of Greece, to Egypt. As a young man he also responded to the liberating influence of two modern writers in particular, D. H. Lawrence (with whom he shared an antipathy to British reserve as much as to British rain) and the Paris-based American novelist Henry Miller (with whom he embarked on a long correspondence). Miller's influence can be felt on Durrell's The Black Book: An Agon, 'a savage charcoa sketch of spiritual and sexual etiolation', which was privately printed in Paris in 1938 (its overt eroticism precluded its publication in Britain until 1973). In 1944, as Press Officer of the British Information Service in Egypt, Durrell was posted to Alexandria, the city of 'five races, five languages, a dozen creeds' which inspired the four novels of his 'Alexandria Quartet'— Justine (1957), Balthazar, Mountolive (both 1958), and Clea (1960). Durrell's dusty, sweaty, multi-layered Aleandria, a city he described in Balthazar as 'half-imagined (yet wholly real), [which] begins and ends in us', is a phantasmagoric, Eliotic place in which men and women dissolve into one another and ancient splendours melt into modern inconveniences. The city's real and imagined disconnections provide the setting for a series of interlocked fictions describing interconnected, unfulfilling love-affairs. The narrator, Darley, is both a self-conscious, self-referential teller and an incorporator of the narrative voices of other tellers, notably that of a fellow-writer, Pursewarden. In one of the 'workpoints'—sentences, ideas, and occasionally poems or translations seemingly discarded from the main narrative of Justine and then appended to it as a kind of afterthought—Pursewarden's 'n-dimensional novel' is described by its author as having a forward narrative momentum which is 'counter-sprung by references backwards in time, giving the impression of a book which is not travelling from a to b but standing above time and turning slowly on its own axis to comprehend the whole pattern'. Readers are doubtless meant to read Darley's actual narrative as somehow shadowing Pursewarden's speculative one. The Alexandria Quartet, in common with Durrell's yet more ambitious 'Avignon Quintet'—Monsieur (1974), Livia (1978), Constance (1982), Sebastian (1983), and Quincx (1985)—attempts to break down preconceptions of time as much as it assaults inherited prejudices in favour of fictional realism. Durrell's literary reputation, so buoyant in the breezy, liberal climate of the early 1960s, tended to sag thereafter. Where his contemporary, Beckett, was economical, he was prodigal; where Beckett saw the force of scrupulous compression, he indulged in a passion for words which is more often libertine than it is liberating.

William Golding's first and most enduringly popular novel, Lord of the Flies (1954), gives a surer indication of his continuing concern with moral allegory than it does of his subsequent experiments with fictional form. Golding (1911-93) set the novel on a desert island on which a marooned party of boys from an English cathedral choir-school gradually falls away from the genteel civilization that has so far shaped it and regresses into dirt, barbarism, and murder. The island is cut off both from the disciplined harmony of the boys' musical background and from a disharmonious world of grown-ups at war. The novel is shaped intellectually by an intermixture of the Christian concept of original sin, a post-Darwinist and post-Wellsian pessimism, and a systematic undoing of R. M. Ballantyne's adventure story of plucky and resourceful boys, The Coral Island (1857). At the end of the story an officer from the warship that rescues the boys dejectedly remarks, 'I should have thought that a pack of British boys . . . would have been able to put up a better show than that'. The sudden shift of viewpoint and the dejection were re-explored, with subtle variations and darker ramifications, in each of Golding's subsequent novels. As the range of his fiction shows, Golding emerged as a major successor to an established line of Modernist mythopoeists. Unlike Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, or Jones, however, he was not content with a reanimation of ancient myth; he was intent on overturning and superseding a variety of modern rationalist formulations and on replacing them with charged, unorthodox moral shapes. It is not just British boys who reveal their innate depravity, but the whole human race. The Inheritors (1955) moves back into an anthropological, rather than Adamic, prehistory in which the talented, if thoroughly nasty and brutish, progenitors of Homo sapiens exterminate their gentler, simpler-minded Neanderthal precursors. The dense, difficult Pincher Martin (1956) has as its greedy egotistical 'hero' a drowned sailor, lost from a torpedoed destroyer, whose body is rolled by the Atlantic. But the 'Pincher' is also a survivor, one whose consciousness tries desperately to hold on to its fragmented identity in a watery purgatory. This identity attaches itslf to an imagined rock, one that Martin names 'Rocall' and one which he also recognized in its rhymed naval transmogrification as 'Buggerall' (a hellish nothing). Golding experimented with a similar metaphorical structue in Free Fall (1959), a tortuous exploration of free will and fallen humanity in relation to the scientific idea of the unrestrained movement of a body under the force of gravity. The subject of  The Spire of 1964 was both more concrete and more elusive. Jocelin, the ambitious Dean of an unnamed English cathedral at an unspecified point in the Middle Ages, is a fallen man obsessed with raising a tall stone spire above his cathedral. His obsession is determined by a serpentine knot of motives—architectural, theological, visionary, psychological, sexual, self-deprecating, and self-aggrandizing. Jocelin both achieves his desire and fails in it; he builds and awe-inspiring structure on shaky foundations, but he is also forced to experience its maiming; he erects an airy reflection of heavenly glory, but he is also obliged to recognize the hot, distracting force of the phallus; he periodically escapes upwards, with a vertiginous thrill, into a Gothic fretwork, but he is held earthbound by the overloaded, creaking pillars that have to support his aspiration. Finally struck down by a mortal paralysis, and attended by a priest known as Father Adam, the dying Jocelin struggles to find the meaning of his life's work, a meaning which gradually forms itself around the metaphoric core of the lost earthly paradise: 'In the tide, flying like a bluebird, struggling, shouting, screaing to leave behind the words of magic and incomprehension—It's like the appletree!'

Golding's The Pyramid (1967) was followed by what appeared to be an abstention from fiction, an abstention broken in 1979 by Darkness Visible. All Goldint's opening scenes, suggestions, and sentences are disconcertingly striking. None is more so than that of Darkness  Visible, a compelling evocation of an intense fire-storm in the London Blitz out of which walks a fearfully burned child: 'He was naked and the miles o light lit him variously . . . The brighness of his left side was not an effect of light. The burn was even more visible on the left side of his head.' From the terrible beauty of this beginning there develops an intense and sometimes confusing exploration of the polarities of redemptive saintliness and destructive malignity, of disinterested love and calculated terrorism. The four novels published since Darkness Visible—Rites of Passage (1980), its sequels Close Quarters (1987) and Fire Down Below (1989), and The Paper Men (1984)—have extended what can be seen as an established rhythm of contrasted sea-stories and land-stories all of which are concerned with extremity and isolation. The most successful is Rites of Passage, the first volume of a sea-trilogy set on a decayed man-of-war bound for Australia in the opening years of the nineteenth-century. Its cocky, journal-writing narrator, Edmund Talbot, is alerted to the problems of 'too much understanding' but can himself comprehend littls of 'all that is monstrous under the sun'. Talbot, like all Golding's central characters, is rawly exposed both to his darker self and to the grinding despair of one of his fellow-passengers. Although Golding's work has sometimes been compared to that of Conrad, it is often closer in spirit, and in its aspirations to the condition of poetry, to that of Eliot. Each of Golding's male protagonists seemes obliged to re-articulate the agonized, incomprehending, unspecific question of Gerontion: 'After such knowledge, what forgiveness?'

As his novels of the 1950s suggest, Angus Wilson (1913-91) seems to have been intent on restoring Victorian narrative styles to English fiction in opposition to what he saw as the errant experimentalism of the Modernists. In contrast to the slim, even anorexic, shapes accepted by his contemporaries, he steadily swelled the physical shape of the novel to something approaching its nineteenth-century proportions. As a means of emphasizing where his artistic loyalties lay, he published a fine, but decidedly untheoretical, study of Émile Zola in 1952 (though revised in 1965); in 1970 he added an observant, semi-biographical, critical introduction to Deickens and in 1977 an essay on Kipling  Wilson recognized in Dickens a writer who combined 'art and entertainment' and whose works made up 'a complete whole—the World of Charles Dickens'. In 1961 he also proclaimed his continuing confidence in the 'God's eye view', the omniscient narrative stance of many of many of the Victorian novelists that he admired. Although some critics have attempted to draw parallels between Wilson's own work and that of Zola, Dickens, and even George Eliot, the parallels cannot really be sustained. He was, it is true, a convinced realist who occasionally indulged in grotesquerie and fantasy and a finely tuned comic writer who habitually allowed for the intrusions of tragedy and cruelty, but the world of his own novels is idiosyncratic and decidedly that of the mid-twentieth century. Wilson, who began his literary career with two volumes of short stories, The Wrong Set (1949) and Such Darling Dodos (1950), had a talent more developed for creating scenes, set pieces, and characters than for the spruce and ordered fictional shapes that defined themselves against what Henry James had dismissed as 'loose baggy monsters'. Wilson's novels, from his first, Hemlock and After (1952) to his last, Setting the World on Fire (1980), are essentially comedies of manners in which the comedy winces, sometimes gratuitously, with pain. As an observer and mimic, Wilson also had an exceptionally sharp ear and eye for the whims, voices, vogues, pretensions, and pomposities of his time. He had a particularly fastidious distaste for the kind of social gatherings which represent what he called in his essay The Wild Garden, or Speaking of Writing (1963) 'the hell of the human failure to communicate', where the damned are 'the social climbers, those wanting to be loved, the unloved women who push people around, the organization men who fall to pieces when they are alone'. His two most 'traditional' novels, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956) and The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (1958), are also probably his surest comments on the cultural, social, and sexual tensions of a period struggling to come to terms with the conflicting claims of tradition and novelty. Anglo-Saxon Attitudes is especially adept in its panoramic movement from scene to scene and in its gradual establishment of connections between a disparate number of characters. Wilson beds his novel in an archaeological fraud (perpetrated in 1912 before the narrative begins) whose ramifications return to darken the present of Gerald Middleton, an ageing historian. Late Call (1964) also introduces the idea of historical determination (its opening 'Prologue' is set in 1911) but it narrows the scope of its plot to an account of the alienation of the retired Sylvia Calvert amid the affected liberalism and the engineered environment of one of the 'New Towns' (social experiments much promoted by government planners in the late 1950s). The latter part of Wilson's career was marked by an increasing experimentalism, not all of it successful. Late Call is notable for its deliberate use of pastiche and its undercutting of cliché; Old Men at the Zoo (1961, but set in an 'utterly improbable' 1970-3) for its juxtapositions of men and beasts against a background of 'wars, domestic and foreign'; No Laughing Matter (1967) for its long time-span (1912-67), for its parodies, and for the introduction of scenes presented as if they were written for the stage. Neither the capricious As If By Magic (1973) nor the yet wilder Setting the World on Fire (1980), however, exhibit quite the vivacious panache of Wilson's earlier work.

Iris Murdoch (born in Dublin in 1919) was, in the early part of her career, to remain equally faithful to traditional fictional shapes. Unlike Wilson, however, she underpinned her novels with arguments derived from a scrupulous investigation of the problems posed by moral philosophy. This underpinning has been consstently enhanced by a series of independent philosophical studies, notably Sartre, Romantic Rationalist (1953), The Sovereignty of Good (1970) and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992). If Murdoch was amongst the earliest readers to respond positively to Beckett's fiction (she read Murphy as an undergraduate at Oxford and paid homage to it in her own first published novel, Under the Net, in 1954), her only work of fiction whih can be said to draw directly from Beckett's example is Bruno's Dream (1969), a study of the atrophying consciousness of an old man. Murdoch sketched the nature of her own philosophical and literary standpoint in an article entitled 'Against Dryness' in 1961. 'We live in a scientific and anti-metaphysical age, she argued, an age in which 'we have been left with far too shallow and flimsy an idea of human personality' and in which the connection between art and the ora life had languished 'because we are losing our sense of form and structure in the moral world itself'. The problem with much modern writing, as she saw it, lay in 'our tendeny to produce works which are either crystalline or journalistic'; writers needed to turn away from 'the dry symbol, the bogus individual, the false whole, towards the real impenetrable human person'. Against the 'consolations of form, the clean crystalline work, the simplified fantasy-myth', writers should pit 'the destructive power of the now so unfashionable naturalistic idea of character'.

None of Murdoch's own novels could remotely be called 'dry', despite the determining concern with ethical dilemmas that each betrays.  All of them are carefully patterned, though the rules of the obscure game which decide these patterns often seem to be broken, reformed, and realigned by the very nature of the freedom which she allows her characters. Jake Donaghue, the male narrator of Under the Net, both resists and creates theoretical patterns with words which, like nets, entrap and constrain perceptions of a larger and expanding reality. As a range of novels from The Flight from the Enchater (1955) to The Sea, The Sea (1978) and The Philosopher's Pupil (1983) suggest, those characters who attempt to impose nets, theories, mystical enchantments, 'artistic' arrangements, or restrictive myths upon reality must themselves adapt to a world which of necessity eludes predetermined human systems of control. In The Bell (1958) and A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970) the loss or fragmentation of objects also seems to suggest why established patterns of relationships between characters must themselves be removed and reordered. As Rupert warns in the latter novel, 'some general view . . . makes you blind to obvious immediate things in human life'. In some senses, Murdoch's fascination with spiritually gifted outsiders, androgynes, and foreigners (particularly East Europeans) further emphasizes the fictional significance she places on inteterminacy, difference, and strangeness. The Bell, set in a lay religious community established in a country mansion near to a convent of enclosed nuns, begins with a fragmenting marriage and gradually explores the emotional, sexual, and moral tensions which force the community itself to break up and re-form. The convent bell, from which the novel takes its title, bears the inscription 'Vox ego sum amoris' ('I am the voice of Love'); it is at once an aesthetic focus and a disturbing catalyst, an ideal and a breaker of ideals. It proves to be less of a link back to a restrictive and legendary past, than an announcer of new freedoms and the rightness of new contingencies. As the Abbess, one of Murdoch's first spiritually gifted outsiders, has announced, 'all our failures are failures in love'. New contingencies also determine the nature and the structure of what remains Murdoch's most experimental novel, The Black Prince (1973). Its narrator, Bradley Pearson, a novelist, both tells the story and, in as sense, is the story. 'Art', he remarks, is telling the truth, and is the only available method for telling certain truths. Yet how almost impossibly difficult it is not to let the marvels of the instrument itself interfere with the task to which it is dedicated'. The Black Prince is, on one level, a contrived intellectual thriller; on another it is an equally contrived multiple and untrustworthy narrative. It opens with two Forewords, the first by a supposed editor, Loxias (whose name is derived from the Greek word for 'oblique'); the second by Pearson himself. As the narrative line develops, so do different ways of approaching and understanding 'truth' and 'reality'. It ends with six separate, disparate and, to some degree, conflicting postscripts, four of them written by different members of what Murdoch describes as her 'dramatis personae'. The use of this theatrical term serves as a deliberate reminder of the Shakespearian echoes and connections with which the narrrative has played and with which it finally fragments ('Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you, nothing'). If Loxias, the supposed editor of the manuscript, is here echoing Pearson's own sentiments, he is also playing a Horatio to a dead Hamlet, an uncloaked Prospero, deprived of his charms, asking for the indulgence of an audience.

Muriel Spark (b. 1918), a Catholic convert of Jewish descent and Scottish birth, shares with Murdoch and Golding a pressing commitment to moral issues and to their relation to fictional form. Her first novel, The Comforters (1957), is concerned with a neurotic woman writer, Caroline Rose, having to come to terms with her new-found Catholicism, with her hallucinations, and with her God-like status as a creator. Rose, is not merely working on a study of contemporary fiction entitled Form in the Modern Novel (and having particular difficulty with the chapter on realism), she has also resolved to write a novel about writing a novel. Spark has been as consistently fascinated by the narrative problems posed by self-consciously literary texts as she has been preoccupied with the theological problem of evil. As the opening paragraph of her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae (1992), serves to suggest, she has been equally determined to explore the potential of light to dispel darkness and to illuminate the creatures, the thoughts, the motives, and the sins that dwell in darkness.

It is not insignificant that in 1951, before she had embarked on her own career as a novelist, Spark published a critical reassessment of the work of Mary Shelley under the title Child of Light. Her own early novels marked new advances in the often distinctly British exploration of the Gothic. If, on one level, she revealed herself as the Scots heir to the tradition of Burns, Hogg, and Stevenson, on another, hers is a Gothic enlivened by a decidedly post-Calvinist glee. Memento Mori (1959), which was recommended to readers as a 'brilliant and singularly gruesome achievement' by Evelyn Waugh, is concerned with a diverse group of London geriatrics who receive anonymous telephone calls telling them to remember the inevitable fact of their impending deaths. Spark's title recalls the skulls and funerary desk ornaments favoured by baroque meditators on mortality, but her own narrative is wry, blunt, and provocatively funny. She ends the novel with dry medical case histories as one of her characters, paralysed by a stroke, searches through his mind, 'as through a card-index', for the causes of his friends' mortal sicknesses: 'Leslie colston, he recited to himself, comminuted fractures of the skull; Godfrey Colston, hypostatic pneumonia; Charmian Colston, uraemia; Jean Taylor, myocardial degeneration; Tempest Sidebottome, cancirnoma of the bronchus; Guy Lees, arteriosclerosis; Hanry Mortimer, coronary thrombosis . . . ' His litany is broken by the third-person narrator turning to a separate meditation, one that finally turns on the reader with the words of a children's catechism: 'Jean Taylor lingered for a time, employing her pain to magnify the Lord, and meditating sometimes confidently upon Death, the first of the four last things to be ever remembered.' The Gothic of The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) is quite distinct in its comic chill. both novels are, in their different ways, concerned with possession; the first with necromancy in a south London suburb in the 1950s, the second with the peculiar exercise of psychological power in an Edinburgh's girls' school in the 1930s. Miss Brodie's superbly poised and precisely defined moral sway over her favourite pupils is compared by one of her protégées to that of 'the God of Calvin'; the narrator, however, suggests a more delationary contemporary parallel, based on Miss Brodie's fondness for pointing out the common Latin root of the words 'educare' and 'Duce': 'Mussolini stood on a platform like a gym teacher or a Guides mistress . . . the Brodie set was Miss Brodie's fascisti.' 

The dispassionate, sometimes ironic, sometimes disingenuous tone of Spark's narrators helps her to create a sense of discordance between the aberrance of what happens and its cool, precise delineation. This is particularly true of her 'metaphysical shocker', The Driver's Seat (1970), a carefully ordered, even meticulous, present-tense account of a woman with a death-wish who plots the circumstances of her own violent murder. The novel undermines easy assumptions about cause and effect as much as it challenges ideas of authorial authority and control. If Not to Disturb (1971)—with its opening quotation from The Duchess of Malfi, its foul weather, and its 'zestful' aristocratic cretin imprisoned in a wing of a Swiss château—is Gothic in the traditional sense of the term, Spark's The Abbess of Crewe (1974), a brusque investigagion of an upper-crust English convent, completely avoids the prurience traditionally inspirational to earlier Gothic novelists. The convent is ruled by an Abbess adept in expoiting all the technological and propagandist skills of the twentieth century in order to manipulate her sisters into compliance with her will. She not only appreciates the state of the art, she is also, like so many of Spark's protagonists, something of an artist herself. 'Scenarios', the Abbess tells the nuns, 'are an art-form . . . based on facts. A good scenario is a garble. A bad one is a bungle. They need not be plausible, only hypnotic, like all good art'. Throughout the narrative, she has revealed a remarkable taste for secular literature. (Machiavelli jostles with a wide range of poetry). At the end, when she meets her Watergate, she gives orders 'for the selection and orchestration of the transcripts of her tape-recordings'. At certain points in the transcripts she includes the explanatory instruction 'Poetry deleted'. It is distinctly more elegant, but no less polite, than the phrase it echoes, Richard Nixon's 'Expletive deleted'.

Bunting and Larkin

—oOo—

To be continued...