Scarecrows of Chivalry: English Masculinities after Empire

5. “Moulded and Shaped”

5 “Moulded and Shaped” John Wain, Ian Fleming, and Threshold Masculinities If a sort of H.C.F. of decent behavior and tolerable living could be established that would be enough to be going on with. Anthony Hartley Moving from philip larkin’s self-reflective and self-conscious masculine poetics to the aggressive yet neurotic stylizations of the Englishman in the novels of John Wain and, (not so) surprisingly, Ian Fleming reveals another facet of the literary transition into postwar masculinity. Altered by and within governmental practices of the welfare state, the Englishman, in such signature postwar novels as Wain’s Hurry on Down (1953) and Kingsley Amis’s better-known Lucky Jim (1954), embodies the “new man” or the post-gentleman. The “new man” emerges through the extrapolation, mutation, and repudiation of gentlemanly traits. The constituent traits of the new hero/Englishman—common sense, decency, selfinterest , and an almost violent heterosexuality, in conflict with what writers construct as the cosmopolitan, elite effeminate manliness of the upper classes—derived from bourgeois gentlemanliness. While contemporary and contemporaneous critics read the decent antiheroes of Lucky Jim, Hurry on Down, and John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956) as affective lowerclass /working-class men dismantling hegemonic masculinity, I read these protagonists and their creators (a conflation encouraged by the latter) as post-gentlemen, since they come after the Victorian/Edwardian gentleman even as they remake the traits of the gentleman that they mock and repudiate . Though Ian Fleming’s James Bond series, inaugurated with Casino 118 Scarecrows of Chivalry Royale (1953), does not comfortably fit into the mold of decency, Bond’s constrained professionalism, gendered anxieties, and consequent aggressive heterosexuality articulate with the changes of the fifties; Bond as the simultaneously professional and extraordinary Englishman is a distinctly new figuration of the old, speaking to both the realities and the fantasies of the new corporate British state. The literary and cultural figuration of the post-gentleman, then, emerges at the intersection of imperial/national shifts and the pressures of the welfare state as it redefines the expectations of the gendered citizen-subject. The new hero/new masculinity manifests both the anxieties and the resurgence of confidence in a new egalitarian postwar, post-imperial Britain. The appearance of the “new man” signi- fies the emergence of a “modern” Britain of the welfare state, reinforcing the cross-hatched discourses of nation and gender formation. National and racial characteristics that are associated with the English inhere in the Englishman , in whatever age he may live. So with every major historical and cultural shift in the nation, English masculinity, too, undergoes a complementary shift. Angry Young Men and the Condition of England Throughout the fifties and sixties, writers such as Wain, Amis, Thomas Hinde, John Braine, David Storey, Alan Sillitoe, and Iris Murdoch (in her earliest writing) were seen by reviewers and critics as typifying “a new class of uprooted people” produced by the beneficent upheavals of the welfare state. Novels by these writers, mostly in the realist vein, were about the “new man” in a “modern” Britain, who emerged from the lower classes as a direct consequence of postwar restructuring (Rabinowitz 23). David Marquand’s characterization of Amis and Wain’s novels as “Zeitgeist literature ” in the inaugural issue of Universities and Left Review set the tone for the reception and consumption of these novels (Marquand 57–60).1 In an equally significant article published anonymously in The Spectator in 1954 entitled “In the Movement” (later attributed to J. D. Scott), the changes in poetry as exemplified by Philip Larkin and Donald Davie were linked to the new realist novels in the picaresque mode. The shifts in literature, then, were explicitly connected to the social changes of “modern Britain,” where “all the small changes have added up, in the end, to a transformation” (399–400). The proponents of new realism and post-imperial masculine values came to be grouped under two rubrics, often used interchangeably: “Moulded and Shaped” 119 the Movement and the Angry Young Man. The Movement, mostly a poetic movement, comprised writers of the middle-middle to lower-middle classes who went to Oxbridge as scholarship boys. This category included writers such as Philip Larkin, John Wain, Kingsley Amis, and Donald Davie. While these writers were defiantly provincial, and certainly focused on Englishness universalized as Britishness, their representations of emergent postwar English...