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Chapter Two: "A Moral Genius": Orwell and the Movement Writers of the 1950s
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A lthough Orwell’s significance for understanding the London Left of the interwar and wartime era is well-known, it is also true that no British writer has had a greater impact on the Anglo-American generation which came of age in the decade following World War II than George Orwell. His influence was deeply felt by intellectuals from his own and the next generation of all political stripes, including the Marxist Left (Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson), the anarchist Left (George Woodcock, Nicolas Walter), the American liberal-Left (Irving Howe), American neoconservatives (Norman Podhoretz), and the Anglo-American Catholic Right (Christopher Hollis, Russell Kirk).1 Perhaps Orwell’s broadest imprint, however, was stamped upon the only literary group which has ever regarded him as a model: the Movement writers of the 1950s. Unlike the above-mentioned groups, which have consisted almost entirely of political intellectuals rather than writers—and whose members have responded to him as a political critic first and a writer second—some of the Movement writers saw Orwell not just as a political intellectual but also as the man of letters and/or literary stylist whom they aspired to be. The Movement writers were primarily an alliance of poet-critics. The “official ” members numbered nine poets and novelists; a few other writers and critics loomed on the periphery. Their acknowledged genius, if not leading publicist, was Philip Larkin (who later was offered the post of Britain’s poet laureate, but refused it). Orwell’s plain voice influenced the tone and attitude of Larkin’s poetry and those of several other Movement poets, especially Robert Conquest and D. J. Enright.2 But Orwell shone as an even brighter presence among the poetnovelists , particularly John Wain (1925–1994) and Kingsley Amis (1922–1996), both of whom I interviewed about their lifelong preoccupation with Orwell. Both Wain and Amis openly acknowledged that Orwell’s example deeply influenced them as prose writers—and that their early fictional anti-heroes were direct dechapter two “A Moral Genius” Orwell and the Movement Writers of the 1950s 34 their orwell, left and right scendants of Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) and George Bowling in Coming Up for Air (1939). For Wain above all, Orwell was a literary-intellectual model, “a moral hero.”3 Wain’s admiration for Orwell—unlike Amis’s—never wavered; he cherished, and mused on, the unfulfilled tributes to him in the 1950s as “Orwell’s natural successor .” Ever afterward he continued to hold fast to “the rope that . . . connect[s] me directly with you,” however frayed his Orwell connection sometimes seemed to unsympathetic observers and however rough-and-tumble his tug-of-war with other political intellectuals for Orwell’s mantle sometimes became.4 Into the 1990s, Orwell remained a constant presence in Wain’s life, though his history of impassioned response modulated with changes in his personal life and the literarypolitical scene. This chapter centers on Wain’s reception of Orwell, periodically comparing it to Amis’s response and placing them in the contexts of both the Movement’s history and larger political currents. Wain’s and the Movement writers’ image of Orwell developed against a wide panorama of cultural history, evolving in four stages. This reception history alters focus through the Movement’s ascendancy in the mid-1950s, through its breakup in the late 1950s and its members’ growing fear of totalitarianism in the early 1960s, through the years of the New Left and Vietnam War, and finally through the Reagan-Thatcher era of renewed EastWest hostility. Like Amis and most other Movement writers, Wain in the 1960s and 1970s adopted Toryism (“Experience is a Tory,” Amis once quipped)5 and a fierce anti-Communism—and, in turn, projected a sharply ideological, indeed curmudgeonly, conservative image of Orwell. In searching for the Orwell in himself , that is, Wain came to spotlight the John Wain that he perceived in George Orwell. He even went so far in 1983, with the political showdown that would lead to the longest miners’ strike in British history looming, as to try to explain in an open letter to “Dear George Orwell” why Orwell’s sympathetic view of the miners (recounted in The Road to Wigan Pier) was obsolete and why Wain’s harder line toward trade unionism was necessary.6 Wain’s reception history of Orwell thus constitutes not only a barometer of the fluctuations in the postwar British cultural climate and a glimpse into the ideology and aspirations...