1. Raymond Williams, George Orwell 15. Williams goes on to argue that in spite of Orwell’s deliberate cultivation of a socialist consciousness, he never escapes his embedded class ideology, as evidenced by his troubled and troubling representations of the working classes. Williams takes particular issue with the “stale revolutionary romanticism” in the representation of the “proles” in Animal Farm and 1984. In these texts, he argues, “both the consciousness of the workers and the possibility of an authentic revolution are denied” (73). Orwell’s simultaneous celebration and patronization of the working classes in his documentary piece The Road to Wigan Pier only serves to reinforce Williams’s argument.
2. Later, Philip Larkin’s poetics and his adaptation of the lyric seek to engage with a similar question of detached manly self-awareness in the fully domesticated and insular postwar era, when the purpose for which it was cultivated—imperial and national governance—is no longer the birthright or the responsibility of the middle-class Englishman. See also Paulin, “She Did Not Change.”
3. Alison Light’s phrase “conservative modernity” is particularly apt to describe the writers mentioned above, for the “conservative modernity” that characterized the 1930s “simultaneously looks backwards and forwards; it could accommodate the past in the new forms of the present” (10). Indeed, Becky Conekin, Frank Mort, and Chris Waters adapt the same phrase to describe the ferment of the postwar period in the introduction to their revisionist anthology of essays on postwar Britain. See Conekin et al. 1–25.
4. See Berberich and Mason.
5. Indeed, Connell offers three other categories of masculinity: complicit, subordinate, and marginalized; the last two define masculinities that emerge from factors that lie outside the gender order, i.e., race, class, and sexuality (although sexuality, while a distinct concept, is linked to gender identity in ways that race and class are not).
6. The residual, emergent, and dominant is an adaptation of Raymond Williams’s supple concept of “structures of feeling,” which he defines as “meanings and values as they are actively felt and lived.” I find these terms particularly useful as the play and push between the three terms addresses the stylizations of masculinity that constitute the dominant norm (“Structures of Feeling” 132). Also see Williams, “Dominant, Residual, and Emergent” 121–27.
7. Postcolonial studies of English culture range from Ian Baucom’s Out of Place, an examination of the centrality of imperial place/space in the shifting constructions of Englishness from the nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries; Jed Esty’s Shrinking Island, an influential analysis of the generic shifts in the works of the high modernists as they come to terms with a “shrinking island”; John Marx’s Modernist Novel, a consideration of the decline of England and the rise of English; and, more recently, Peter Kalliney’s study of English exceptionalism that focuses on the English class system, Cities of Affluence and Anger.
8. See Esty 1–20, Light 8–10, and Sinfield, Literature, Politics 186–87.
9. See Morgan, People’s Peace.
10. See Berberich 15–29, and Brook 1–3.
11. W. Allen, “New Novels” 136.
12. See Morrison, Gindin, and Gasiorek.
13. Marquand 57. Also see Rabinowitz 23.
14. Critics from Walter Allen to James English have read Jim Dixon’s conflict with the upper-class Welches and the world of the academia as the lower-class insurgent’s dissatisfaction with the claustrophobic and pretentious world of upper-class academia to which his new education has allowed him access. See Allen, Tradition and Dream, and English 138.
15. It is necessary to point out here that Gore-Urquhart is Scottish, so the masculine values that are validated can be considered British, but within this novel and others by Kingsley Amis, British values are English values. He frequently mocks what he considers to be excessive regional pride. See, for instance, his mockery of Welsh nationalists in That Uncertain Feeling (1955). Indeed, Englishness is the unacknowledged universal default within Britishness.
16. This also explains why the lower-middle-class and middle-class protagonists and personae in works by Philip Larkin, John Osborne, John Wain, Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, and even John Braine were canonized as the new Englishmen in postwar literature, and not working-class protagonists such as Arthur Seaton in Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958). The new emergent forms of masculinity that cultural and literary commentators saw as potentially hegemonic were always already determined by older scripts. Of course, there is the deliberate shedding of imperial weight, as evident in the case of Larkin’s personae and Amis’s Jim Dixon, the turn inward and toward egalitarianism, but it is not a rupture from that which it repudiates. Working-class masculinity does not inflect the aggression, anxious decency, insecurity, and controlled explosions of affect. Indeed, Alan Sillitoe’s famous representative working-class text of the period, exquisitely stylized as it is, and sympathetic though it may be to Arthur’s growing pains and feelings of entrapment, is filtered through an elite, educated, and almost ethnographic narrative consciousness. The life that is represented for the reader’s consumption is an ethnographic rendering made accessible by the learned narrative voice.
1. Thomas Hughes’s novel, interestingly enough, published in 1857, is one of the earliest school stories for boys. The narrative distills the ideals of moral manliness as it was disseminated through the public school by its influential headmaster, Thomas Arnold. It transformed England’s perception of public schools. Set in 1830s Rugby, Tom Brown’s Schooldays charts the life of its eponymous hero as he makes his way through the hierarchy of that famous public school. Woven into Tom Brown’s growth into sturdy, earnest gentlemanliness is a passionate commitment to society, nation, and empire.
2. Boys’ magazines such as Boy’s Weekly and Boy’s Own Paper, and organizations such as the Boys’ Brigade and later the Boy Scouts, started by Baden-Powell, were instrumental in disseminating the idea of public school gentlemanliness: they not only romanticized the idea of the heroic conqueror and colonizer but also reified the idea of the manly Englishman arbitrating justice to the colonized and the heathen. As John Springhall reveals, “The portrayal of manliness became the most essential staple of the Boy’s Own Paper, so much so that it has been called the ‘unofficial organ’ of the ‘muscular Christianity’ movement.” He goes on to argue that the agencies that attempted to channel public school manliness from above were “in general much more attractive to the upwardly aspiring upper-working-class or lower-middle-class parent than to the families of the non-respectable ‘rough’ working class.” Nevertheless, what is significant here is that these ideals of gender conduct extended beyond the base of the wealthy public schools and became widespread enough to be read as constituting a national character. See Springhall 65–70.
3. While Reverend Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes—deriving their ideas from Samuel Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, F. D. Maurice, and Thomas Arnold—attempted to spread the ideals of manliness through their writings and sermons, the early ideals of manliness were rooted in, and sowed through, the church—or at least in the name of the church, through liberal interpretations of Protestantism. Obviously there were several currents of manliness that did not fit into the public school form of Christianity. For example, the later Oxford Movement, with its leanings toward Catholicism, ran counter to the liberal socialism of Arnold, Hughes, Kingsley, and Maurice, all of whom were reformists and radicals. And yet, as James Eli Adams’s seminal study of Victorian manliness, Dandies and Desert Saints, reveals, the ideals of ascetic discipline informed the antithetical manliness of Tractarianism (Oxford Movement), Carlylean heroism, and the more robust Christian manliness of Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes (15).
4. Valente, “Neither Fish nor Flesh” 98–99. Also see Valente, Myth of Manliness 2–4.
5. Goodlad 134. The Clarendon Commission Report was published in 1864: it is not possible to miss the proximity of the dates, or the link between the two in terms of the traits that the ruling class of Englishmen should embody.
6. Disinterestedness is very different from feminine compassion or self-renunciation. Victorian discourses of gender difference delineated woman as the embodiment of all angelic virtues, “the angel of the hearth,” who through her selflessness and “influence” worked tirelessly for her children and her husband. However, unlike manly unselfishness, which is a strategic technology of the self, feminine selflessness is a matter of passivity. There is no vigorous struggle or discipline involved; women do not have the requisite emotional strength required by virtue of their essence and sex. Their sphere is the circumscribed sphere of domestic influence.
7. Vance 20. Prince Albert’s obituary in the Saturday Review reflected this marriage of chivalric and bourgeois values, portraying him as the epitome of honor and virtue, committed to “all those benevolent enterprises for the relief of misery, and for improving the lot and character of the people, which are the prosaic but solid substitutes for the visionary enterprises of knight-errantry in forming the character of a gentleman in the present day” (Saturday Review 12 [December 1861]: 631). Vance charts the revival of chivalry as a consequence of the intertwining of the militaristic vigor of the Napoleonic wars with the “pragmatic moral decency” of Anthony Trollope’s and Charles Dickens’s manly heroes in industrial England.
8. It must be emphasized here that many proponents of manliness were explicitly against the use of the word “chivalry” to describe their particular stylizations of manliness, as it smacked too much of a set of feudal values antithetical to their own ostensibly more democratic impulses. For instance, in reacting to the exclusive brotherhood of the Tractarians, Thomas Arnold argued against “that sort of religious aristocratical chivalry so catching to young men” which subsumed duty to the superficial attribute of “Honour” (qtd. in Adams 97). Here he condemns the privileging of the religious virtue of cloisters divorced from the world. Of course, it is notable that Arnold’s Rugbeans could very well fall under the same category—though they were committed to good in the world—as they too formed an exclusive brotherhood, a collective including other public school men that came to acquire incredible power and prestige in the form of the Old Boys’ network. However, bracketing the disdain for decadent aristocracy, an altered and appropriated form of chivalry is a useful way of looking at the values of gentlemanliness and groups of gentlemen themselves.
9. As is evident from even a cursory reading of Heart of Darkness, manliness was always a fragile process in practice, even during its making, mutation, and hegemonic consolidation in both metropole and colony—hence its existence as an ideal. To name a few examples, metropolitan middle-class Englishmen such as Thomas Hughes struggled to embody the articulated ethic without slipping into the extremes of either passivity or violence in the 1850s; Kipling’s earthy soldiers endeavored to preserve their manly virile identities in the face of India’s psychosexual terrors in the 1880s–1890s; and Conrad’s reflective (anti)heroes tormented themselves from their fall from Englishmanly grace during the fin de siècle. This is not to say that the gender ideal loses either its potency or its hegemonic status. The texts reveal simultaneously the straining after the gender ideal as well as the shifting contours of hegemonic gender constructs during specific historical moments/phases.
10. See Newsome. Also see Simon and Bradley 1–20.
11. See Gilbert, “Soldier’s Heart” 207. Also see Showalter, “Rivers and Sassoon” 61–69; Fussell; and Roper.
12. See David Potter for the transformation of the Indian civil service.
13. For critiques that read Adela Quested’s rape within the larger context of women’s oppression, see Showalter and Silver. For a corrective to these readings that locates women (Indian and English) within the frame of colonial relations, see Sharpe, Allegories of Empire. For an examination of the text as an exploration of homoerotic desire, see Suleri, Baucom, Lane, and Krishnaswamy.
14. As Eve Sedgwick argues, the homosocial was always inflected with the possibility of the homosexual, and in this case, I would argue, most definitely underwritten by the homoerotic. See Sedgwick 185.
15. Anglo-Indian as a term invokes the notion of displacement: cultural, geographical, and racial. It denotes different categories of people at different historical moments. However, in this novel, it refers to the English colonizers in India.
16. Jenny Sharpe reads the alleged rape in A Passage to India within the discursive frame of the Mutiny of 1857. The novel, she argues, “recreates in the drama surrounding Aziz’s arrest the precariousness of the imperialist mission under threat from insurrection” (“Unspeakable Limits” 40). Moreover, through Adela’s retraction of her allegations of rape and her exercise of agency, the narrative not only emphasizes the flattening of the English lady as symbol and the erasure of her personhood, but also challenges the racist and sexist structures of the official discourse.
17. The infamous Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar, Punjab, Derek Sayer argues, was “the single event which by common consent did most to undo British rule in India” (131). On April 13, 1919, General Dyer ordered his troops to open fire, without warning, on a protest meeting of about twenty thousand people that was held in defiance of his proclamation banning such gatherings. The meeting was held in Jallianwala Bagh, a piece of land enclosed on all sides, and accessible through only one main entrance, which Dyer blocked. The firing continued for ten minutes until the ammunition was virtually exhausted. No provision was made for the wounded. Dyer later said that it was only by virtue of architectural issues that he had not been able to use the armored vehicles mounted with machine guns that he had brought for the purpose.
18. Ian Baucom and Simon Gikandi both take this moment as constitutive in their theorizations of Englishness as a contrapuntal imperial production.
19. Joseph Boone, Philip Holden, and Ian Baucom have variously pointed out queer desire’s potentially ambivalent relationship with imperial authority and discourse. For a more subtle examination of Forster’s queer anti-imperialism, see Matz.
20. See Symonds, Parker, and Gathorne-Hardy.
21. It is important to point out here that colonial intimacies, as demonstrated by Ann Stoler, were an integral and necessary component to the maintenance and sustenance of empires (hence, always unstable and labile), but these were carefully delineated along axes of power.
22. Of course, the subversiveness of mimicry as a structural effect of colonial discourse, as theorized by Homi Bhabha, is very much at play here (132). Aziz’s performative Anglicized manliness, which is “not quite, not white,” only underscores how Heaslop’s manliness is dependent on an appropriate practice of the sahib affect. Heaslop’s “originary” manliness and authority is called into question by Aziz’s mimicry of it. See Bhabha 131.
1. According to D. J. Taylor, the phenomenon of the Bright Young People referred to the “restless, rackety” youth of Mayfair, with their “endless flights to nowhere in particular, fractured alliances and emotional dead ends.” While they were wary of acknowledging themselves as the Bright Young People, they were an obsession for the national press, acquiring a generational focus and represented as symbolic of the existential crisis of post–World War I. Taylor points out that they were “at once heterogenous, too far-flung and at the same time too precisely located,” ranging from the rich and aristocratic to the disreputable (Bright Young People 7–8).
2. Of Firbank, Waugh wrote, “He is the first quite modern writer to solve for himself, quite unobtrusively and probably more or less unconsciously, the aesthetic problem of representation in fiction; to achieve, that is to say, a new, balanced interrelation of subject and form” (57).
3. While Evelyn Waugh had a famously vexed relationship with modernism and modernity, his novels are stylistically immersed in the very modernity that they ideologically condemn. His early critical writings, and even his literary works, celebrated the formal experiments of artists such as Picasso, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway. Because of his own later condemnation of both social modernity and what he termed modernist excess, he has usually been read as a conservative satirist. As Rita Barnard points out, his emphasis on literary entertainment and comedic tone led to his dismissal at “the historical moment of modernist canon formation, when Steven Marcus judged in a Partisan Review essay of 1956 that Waugh’s attention to the ‘art of entertainment’ marked him as a fine novelist—of the second rate” (163). In the recent past, there has been a flurry of interest in Evelyn Waugh’s style, and a concerted attempt to incorporate him into the modernist canon, beginning with Barnard’s essay in which she reads Black Mischief at the intersection of modernist studies and colonialist discourse studies.
4. Terry Eagleton, in a now classic analysis of Waugh, makes a similar though gender neutral point. He points to how Waugh’s “cool externality of style is not, at root, a ‘placing’ externality at all: as a mode of perception, it is part of the world it sees” (49).
5. This particularly English attitude toward religion can be explained by the long tradition of empiricism that suffused English philosophy and public discourse with its emphasis on materiality and rationalism, which necessarily disparaged its Other in the form of the abstract and the nonrational. As Anthony Easthope argues with reference to the rise of Calvinism in mid-seventeenth-century England, “The sense of regenerate and unregenerate does not vanish—rather, the extreme Protestant conception of self, choice, and morality is transplanted into empiricist ethical discourse” (92). Easthope charts the tradition of empiricist discourse and its imbrication in the construction of Englishness and English national identity from Francis Bacon to the Guardian.
6. Arnold also considered the possibility that the lack of essence could be detrimental to English culture, even as he celebrated its expansiveness and modernity. He says, “We might be more successful if we were all of a piece. Our want of sureness of taste, our eccentricity, come in great measure, no doubt from our not being all of one piece, from our having no fixed, fatal, spiritual centre of gravity. The Rue de Rivoli is one thing, and Nuremberg is another, and Stonehenge is another; but we have a turn of all three, and lump them all up together” (Celtic Literature 131).
7. It must be pointed out that hegemonic gender constructs, though discursively produced and maintained, always have permeable boundaries and exist as aspirational models; this is particularly true for the personal-physical-ethical code that constitutes gentlemanliness. As mentioned earlier, it, like all hegemonic gender constructs, was always a fragile process in practice—hence, its existence as an ideal. See Adams and Middleton.
8. See my essay “An Orphaned Manliness.”
9. Both Jonathan Greenberg and Lisa Colletta have examined this particular stylistic trait as crucial to the success of Waugh’s satire, though neither investigates its gendered history. See Greenberg, “Cannibals and Catholics,” and Colletta.
10. See Torgovnick (8) for a detailed examination of the discussion of primitivist tropes in modern and modernist literature and culture.
11. While Waugh refrains from moralizing in the novel, this is not the case in the travelog. In Waugh in Abyssinia, he embarks on a long disquisition on the benefits of civilization that Fascist Italy brings to the barbaric tribal chaos of Abyssinia as Italy invades the country. See Waugh Abroad 712. His celebration of the Fascists was controversial at the time, given Britain’s increasing politicization and growing awareness of the real dangers of the ideology. See also “We Can Applaud Italy” (1935) (Essays 162–64); “Official Note Addressed by the Italian Government to the League of Nations” (1936) (Essays 185); and “The Conquest of Abyssinia” (1936) (Essays 186).
12. Interestingly enough, Waugh footnotes the Jeunesse d’Ethiopie as “the society of ‘progressive’ Abyssinians” in Waugh in Abyssinia (in Waugh Abroad 569). A clear indication of what he means with reference to the progressive is evident in his placing it within quotation marks. Waugh was often particularly vicious about what he considered disorganized and inefficient attempts to overlay a shallow modernity over indigenous modes of existence.
13. Greenberg, “Cannibals and Catholics” 126. Greenberg elaborates on the significance of boredom and sophistication in his excellent argument on the transgressive nature of, and the consequential circulation of, affect in Waugh’s satire.
14. For more on the debate, see Collier.
15. While the professional ideal, one of the central tenets of gentlemanliness, was on the ascent, there was an ever-widening internal split within professionalism: between public service and liberal professions on the one hand and between trade and industry on the other (a separation that defined the gentlemanly ideal even in its incipient stages). Or perhaps, more precisely, the gentlemanly ethic of disinterested service was submerged by the increasing importance of profit and money within all professions. The professional class, the stable and expanding center of the British imperial nation, was in crisis. As Tyrus Miller has argued, citing Orwell, “There was a pulverization of professional society in train from the late 1920s on—the collective désoeuvrement of the middle strata, not just in the sense that the heirs of the Edwardian bourgeoisie were without jobs, but also, more fundamentally, that they were bereft of vocation, of any calling in which they sincerely believe” (8). Indeed, newspapers were rife with articles and editorials about Britain’s lost young men, those who were too young to fight and came of age in the aftermath of the most destructive war in human history. Waugh wrote a series of tongue-in-cheek articles in January and February of 1929 for Passing Show entitled “Careers for Our Sons,” in which each column examined the (un)suitability of a profession (Education, Literature, Crime, Journalism) for the educated gentleman and how to “make good” in them. Success always seemed to entail corruption, ineptitude, and nepotism, or all three at once. See Waugh, Essays 47–52.
16. See Samuel, Theatres of Memory 229. To counter the chaos of the metropole, the contracting domestic economy, colonial unrest, and the rise of aggressive Fascist nationalism in continental Europe, England turned inward toward the country in an attempt to salvage and revivify a peaceful, organic national culture. See Valentine Cunningham for a comprehensive overview of the ruralist trend in the 1930s–1940s. He reveals that in addition to a slew of guidebooks for domestic tourism, there was also a focused interest on the English village, among both the Right and the Left (228–30, 234–36). Also see Lowerson 262–63.
17. However, this does not negate the racism and patronization embedded within this recitation when it comes to the constant reference to Ishmaelia’s black inhabitants in various offensively racist terms, even if they and the English peasantry are painted with same brush of barbarity.
18. The city does not escape the gentlemanly narrator’s judgmental eye. London here is dynamic, absurdly fast-paced, and surreal, but it is defined by two principal figures—the fashionable, beautiful, and benevolently manipulative Mrs. Stitch, and the prestige-conscious, competitive, and monstrous entrepreneur Lord Copper. They represent the duality of the feminine and the masculine, the cultured and the monied, the traditionally wealthy and the nouveau riche at its most obvious and most caricatured. Mrs. Stitch manipulates Lord Copper into hiring Boot (the wrong Boot, as it turns out) for his newspaper. There is no logic to the functioning of the city—it runs at the whim of the rich, beautiful, and powerful. If rationalization is a feature of the metropolis, the narrator’s view of London gives the lie to that particular discourse. While Mrs. Stitch is unlike the usual Waugh heroine who symbolizes all the evils of modernity, nevertheless she sets the chaos of the city into motion; there is no possibility of order when the fancies of beautiful, intelligent women determine the destinies of young men and large corporations.
19. Waugh self-consciously invokes almost the entire gamut of connotations that Torgovnick lays out in her examination of the modern and modernist discourse of primitivism, and yet he also just as carefully brings them back “home” to define the modern English metropolis as well as the countryside.
20. In Waugh’s later, more explicitly Catholic, novels, it is the Catholic gentleman who embodies the dying traditions of England. The marginalization and obsolescence of gentlemanliness is equated with the marginal position of the English Catholics. Waugh appropriates the gentleman—a construct rooted in Protestant capitalism as the bedrock of Englishness—for twentieth-century English Catholicism. Brideshead Revisited and The Sword of Honour trilogy describe the slow death of civility and chivalry. Significantly, the gentlemen who represent the best traditions of a dying Englishness are Catholic.
21. The airplane and the automobile make repeated appearances in Waugh’s fiction. They always function as symbols of a debilitating and destructive modernity. In Vile Bodies (1929), for instance, before Nina takes her first ride, her companion speaks poetically about viewing England’s landscape from the air, quoting scraps from John of Gaunt’s famous “scepter’d isle” speech, but Nina’s experience is of an altogether unpleasant sort, negating her pleasurable sense of anticipation: “Nina looked down and saw inclined at an odd angle a horizon of straggling red suburb; arterial roads dotted with little cars; factories, some of them working, others empty and decaying; a disused canal; some distant hills sown with bungalows; wireless masts and overhead power cables; men and women were indiscernible except as tiny spots; they were marrying and shopping and making money and having children. The scene lurched and tilted again as the aeroplane struck a current of air. ‘I think I am going to be sick,’ said Nina” (284). Here, the narrative voice piles on the horror of technology in a paragraph that gathers momentum with each semicolon, detailing the hideousness of suburbanization, of the destruction of the countryside, of the homogenization and reduction of human life to urban sprawl, not to mention the unnaturalness and discomfort of being up in the air and looking at the earth from unnatural angles.
22. Interestingly enough, we do get a glimpse of the ideal professional gentleman, and he is perhaps the only character, though his appearance is brief, who is not subject to the narrator’s own amused disdain. Algernon Stitch, Conservative English cabinet minister, who looks every inch the part, is shown leaving his house. He is scrupulously dressed, polite, never or rarely surprised (much like the narrative voice), and a paragon of dignity who is liked by everyone; even the “Labour members loved him” (5). His presence makes the repeated appearances of Lord Copper, loosely based on Lord Beaverbrook, the proprietor of Daily Express, obsessed with his status, his wealth, and crushing the competition, all the more vapid, soulless, and idiotic. This juxtaposition of the public service professional and the capitalist (trade) entrepreneur emerges through the structure of the narrative itself, where Copper’s days are spent in trying to draw cows whose ears are never quite right.
23. While the telegrams in Scoop are clearly exaggerated for comedic value, they were not that far removed from the telegrams that Waugh received during his sojourn in Abyssinia. See Waugh Abroad 622.
24. The narrative focus on the absurdity and illegibility of press speak also directly addresses the contemporary fears about the disintegration of the English language constitutive of English culture and “the race” itself as a consequence of the new mode of writing popularized by the modern press. Collier points out that what was considered the flattening of language, “compressing complex politics into slogans, simultaneously reducing complexity of real life to catch-words and inflating the trivial” was seen as an “unmooring of public attitudes from any stable standard of values” (32).
25. Waugh was acutely aware of the power of cinema as a new artistic medium and of its ability to influence other creative forms, especially literature. Waugh often used cinematic devices and traits to explain and elaborate on his literary style. In a letter written in 1921 advising a friend on his manuscript, he said, “Try and bring home thoughts by actions and incidents. Don’t make everything said. This is the inestimable value of Cinema to novelists (don’t scoff at this as a cheap epigram, it is really true.) Make things happen. … Don’t bring characters on simply to draw their characters and make them talk. Fit them into a design. … GO TO THE CINEMA and risk the headache” (Letters 464).
26. This strange alignment is bolstered by biographical fact, as Waugh allowed Boot to break news that he so unluckily missed by minutes when he was a correspondent in Abyssinia.
1. My examination of “George Orwell” focuses on the carefully constructed persona rather than a biographical study of the man; hence, all references to “Orwell” are always meant to be read within scare quotes. However, for the sake of aesthetics and clarity, I will assume the quotes as a given.
2. His inherent contradictoriness was so pervasive, in fact, that the legend of George Orwell has been appropriated and excoriated by both the Right and the Left simultaneously. For a detailed examination of the construction of “George Orwell,” his legacy, and how it came to be celebrated by both the Conservatives and the Socialists, see Rodden.
3. As Sarah Cole points out, “Within the ordinary constructs of gendered existence, intimate male relations occupied a complex position, for their all-male character might easily point in the direction of a vexed homoerotics, at the same time that the very bastions of economic, political, and social power tended to be sites of exclusive masculinity and vaunted bonding. The nineteenth century, that is, constructed venues and institutions that functioned simultaneously as strongholds of patriarchal, middle-class power, and as forms of resistance against the dominance of domestic ideology” (24).
4. The plain-speaking irony, the narrative realism, and the deeply divided Englishmen of these novels are taken up by Orwell’s stylistic disciples of the postwar generation. Kingsley Amis’s and John Wain’s representative postwar Englishmen struggle both with and within an Orwellian inheritance of unstable democratized English gentlemanliness, even as they contest upper-middle-class cultural and political hegemony. The problems that underlie Orwell’s endeavors to abstract the values of gentlemanliness while rejecting the class prestige and racial hierarchy that constituted the ideal in the first place determine the stylizations of postwar masculinity.
5. Comstock is the prototype for many of postwar literature’s famous protagonists, ranging from Charles Lumley in Hurry on Down (1953) to Jimmy in Look Back in Anger (1957) and to Joe Lampton in Room at the Top (1957).
6. Humble 72; A. Taylor 176.
7. He adds, “The world was to be modernized partly through consumption; consumer culture itself was dominated by the idea that everyday life could and should be modern” (Slater 12–13).
8. The idea of the ersatz and unnatural as exemplary of modernity is explored in more detail in Orwell’s Coming Up for Air, an unusual novel in Orwell’s oeuvre simply by virtue of its focus on a family man caught up in the very heart of consumerist modernity with his job as traveling insurance salesman. George Bowling, having gone to a “modern” milk bar, bites into a frankfurter and examines it as a symbol of modernity: “I’d read in the paper somewhere about these food-factories in Germany where everything’s made out of something else. Ersatz, they call it. I remembered reading that they were making sausages out of fish, and fish, no doubt, out of something different. It gave me the feeling that I’d bitten into the modern world and discovered what it was made of. That’s the way we’re going nowadays. Everything slick and streamlined. Everything made out of something else. Celluloid, rubber, chromium-steel everywhere, arc-lamps blazing all night … no vegetation left, everything cemented over, mock-turtles grazing under neutral fruit-trees. … Bombs of filth bursting inside your mouth” (27–28).
9. Walter Benjamin’s theorization of the flâneur underpins several critical readings of Mrs. Dalloway. See Parsons, Bowlby, McCue, and Lord.
10. To complicate matters, Comstock views the emergent ideals of consumerist masculinity as being aligned to a Smilesian manliness—which depended on, borrowed from, and yet was subordinate to the dominant ideals of gentlemanliness.
11. The emphasis on the private and domestic as the definition of English nationhood gains power through the thirties, World War II, and the immediate postwar period, not only in opposition to rising Fascist nationalisms in Europe and the mechanized destruction of World War II, but also as a necessary inward turn during the period of imperial disintegration in the years immediately following the war.
12. The domesticated quest narrative that occurs within the borders of the nation—indeed, the urban center—even as it mimics the imperial adventure narrative, signals a circling of the drain rather than an expansive outward movement of the original. As Martin Green writes of the original adventure stories, “[They] prepared the young men of England to go out to the colonies, to rule, for their families to rejoice in their fates out there” (Dreams 38). This is a far cry from Comstock’s final return, after his adventures in the London underbelly, to the life of the suburban petit bourgeois. On the one hand, as mentioned, it is an attempt to grasp and rediscover the nation in its totality, a totality that was not possible earlier; on the other, it is a symptom of the inevitable narrowing of horizons.
13. Humble carefully delineates between the male middlebrow writers and the female middlebrow writers. She points out that the men often wrote about classes other than their own: Evelyn Waugh and P. G. Wodehouse wrote about the aristocracy while George Orwell and Edward Upward anatomized the working classes. As I argue in this and the previous chapter, that is not quite true in the case of Orwell and Waugh. While the worlds they explore are the aristocratic and the shifting underbelly of the middle classes, their protagonists are invariably from some form of the middle class.
14. This was also a perspective that Orwell laid out in his famous essay “Inside the Whale,” which assessed the imbrication of politics, art, and history, ultimately ending with the rejection of politics in art—represented in the 1930s by the Auden generation, whose political art Orwell condemned as juvenile, self-indulgent fantasy. Instead, aligning with Henry Miller’s quietism in The Tropic of Cancer, he argues that there is valor in a clear-sighted acceptance of the horrors of the world and in living ordinary lives in the face of looming disaster. He says that Miller is “inside the whale … [and] he feels no impulse to alter or control the process he is undergoing. He has performed the essential Jonah act of allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining passive, accepting” (Essays 245). While this is an interesting statement coming from a man who was known for his strident, though sometimes ambivalent, political views, this acceptance is illustrated via his fictional characters of the thirties: John Flory (whose traumatic negotiations with the sahib code in which he was interpellated ultimately leads to his suicide), Gordon Comstock, and George Bowling.
1. See Hobsbawm, Invention of Tradition 11, and Nairn 317. Also see Benedict Anderson 6.
2. Larkin, “Church Going,” Poems 58–59. Hereafter cited in text by page number. All quotations are from the 2003 edition of Poems unless otherwise noted.
3. Indeed, the cultural uproar in 1993, precipitated by the publication of Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life and The Selected Letters: Philip Larkin, only served to emphasize his perceived centrality to the discourse of Englishness and the English literary canon, as the quintessential poet of postwar Englishness. This cultural perception of Larkin as the bard of postwar Britain made the revelations of his sexism, racism, and xenophobia seem like a national betrayal. There were acrimonious debates in the media about the terms of Englishness: whether it could be freed from the taint of imperialism, and whether it was a valid term of cultural identity in a multiracial, multicultural devolutionary Britain. Some of the major articles that focused on this discussion were John Bayley’s “Becoming a Girl” and “Aardvark,” Martin Amis’s “Don Juan in Hull,” and Lisa Jardine’s “Saxon Violence.”
4. Of course, in true Larkinesque fashion, this is how Larkin imagined his future American biographer would characterize him.
5. Bill Schwarz contends that “manifestations of ethnic belonging” in the 1950s and 1960s “represented an active reworking of older forms of ethnic identity and marked a particular response to a new set of social circumstances—not least to the closure of Britain’s colonial epoch … They were shaped by memories of empire in which the legacies of actually existing England played only a part … To employ the rhetoric of a ‘white man’s country’ was to revive an older imperial vocabulary … To think in these terms was to believe that the frontier—between the white English and their black others—had truly come home, the primal colonial encounter now relocated onto the domestic domain itself” (192).
6. For culturally situated examinations of Larkin’s exploration of sexual and gender dynamics, see Rossen, “Difficulties with Girls”; Clark; and Booth, introduction. For an influential postcolonial analysis, see Heaney.
7. Davie, “Landscapes of Larkin” 71.
8. Goodby also notes that despite Larkin’s avowed commitment to the British empire, “Larkin allows Belfast to become ‘Ireland’” (133).
9. From Larkin, “Life with a Hole in It,” Poems (1988) 202.
10. Edmund Burke famously characterized the forms of English government—and indeed English life—as a natural extension of the English landscape; that is, “in the method of nature,” England is the place where nations, peoples, land, and civilization are organically connected (184).
11. In a similar vein, Peter Bailey examines the power and influence of a not quite fully residual gender script that continues to structure postwar English masculinity in the upper, middle, and even the working classes. In his autobiographical discussion of the effects of jazz in 1950s Coventry, Bailey notes that his headmaster’s reference letter to Oxford affirmed that the working-class Bailey “is a gentleman.” Bailey’s humorous comment on this particular aid to his upward trajectory serves to emphasize the structural compulsions to conform to an elitist and appropriate ideal of manliness. He says, “[The reference] thus implicat[ed] Bailey more deeply in the dialectic of pretension and insecurity which attended the transient in the English class system” (25).
12. In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke argues for the integrity of English civilization while defending the inequality of possession and social inequality. He points out that the appropriate flow of ideals—and national riches—through the hierarchical structure of “customs” and “establishments” of English society is beneficial to all (333).
13. See, for example, Orwell, “England Your England.” For historical and cultural analyses, see Light 8–18, and Samuel, introduction.
14. For instance, the burgeoning film industry saw the success of such movies as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and Tom Jones (1963), which oozed macho masculinity underscored by vulnerability as portrayed by Albert Finney; British theater was apparently galvanized by the gritty realism and masculine anger of Look Back in Anger (1956) and Chips with Everything (1962). Many of the Angry texts sympathetically characterize their protagonists’ violence and virulent misogyny as an inevitable consequence of the stifling constraints placed on “true” masculinity—elements that some of Larkin’s poems such as “Sunny Prestatyn,” which I will analyze later in this chapter, also point toward. Protagonists such as Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger, Joe Lampton in Room at the Top (1957), and Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning turn their frustration with a perceived lack of autonomy, and the absence of opportunities for masculine independence, against the women with whom they shared both the domestic space and domesticated England. Men attained autonomy by perpetrating physical, verbal, and emotional violence on women.
15. Solitude and solitary wholeness as leitmotifs in Larkin’s work as evidenced by the sheer number of poems—“Reasons for Attendance” and “Wants” in The Less Deceived (1955), “Here” and “Mr. Bleaney” in The Whitsun Weddings (1964), “To the Sea,” “High Windows,” and “Vers de Societe” in High Windows (1974)—make sense in light of the compulsive coupling and social cohesion necessitated by the ideology of domestication. As Larkin aged, the tone of each volume shifted from an obsessive desire for solitude to a wish for oblivion and an intense focus on what Raphaël Inglebien calls the “nihilistic sublime” (220).
16. The speakers in these poems experience unalloyed emotion without any trace of irony or distance. In both poems, the female speaker melds into her relationship and has no identity outside of her identification with the man. In “Wedding Wind,” the speaker experiences a pure, almost religious joy at the moment of her new married life. In “Deep Analysis,” the speaker wishes for union with her beloved and has no qualms about her loss of selfhood. She symbolizes emotional surrender while her beloved is “sharpened,” “vigilant” and “watchful” against her (Poems 4).
17. Larkin’s own continuous and fluctuating relationship with D. H. Lawrence’s literature reveals his entrenchment within middle-class manliness, as he admires Lawrentian iconoclastic and “essential” masculinity but cannot—and, indeed, does not wish to—transmit Lawrentian ideals into his own exploration of English manliness. See Johnson 41–48. Larkin had employed the dichotomy of the feminine/masculine earlier in his career to escape his writer’s block when he took on the persona and pseudonym of Brunette Coleman. John Carey goes so far as to “isolate” two voices of Larkin that he considers uniform through Larkin’s poetry, and at the risk of gender stereotyping, he categorizes them as masculine and feminine: the masculine is the “demotic,” “coarse,” “aggressive” Larkin, and the feminine becomes the “sensitive,” “educated,” “tender” Larkin. Carey explains that the “stridently masculine idiom” is a compensatory move on Larkin’s part to silence the fear that his “artistry and his homosexuality may mark him as feminine” (51–53). While I do see the distinct separation of the masculine and the feminine, I read them as being a function of Larkin’s inherited English manliness.
18. Larkin’s crush on, and “few messy encounters” with, his Oxford roommate Philip Brown, as noted in Andrew Motion’s biography, and his penchant for writing slightly salacious stories about schoolgirls at boarding schools—under the pseudonym of Brunette Coleman—does point to a willingness to consider sexuality outside the rigidly constrained boundaries of heterosexual behavior. Of Brunette Coleman, he was said to have remarked that “homosexuality has been completely replaced by lesbianism in my character”—which still appears to be a provocative and intriguing statement for a neo-realist, middle-class, apparently masculinist Movement writer to make (letter to Kingsley Amis, 7 September 1943, qtd. in Motion 86). The present scope of this chapter does not allow a full-fledged exploration of Larkin’s willingness to explore alternative sexualities, at least within the confines of his writing. But it does seem worth pointing out that his discomfort with his gender inheritance—the tightly reined, restrained, and almost obsessively detached middle-class Englishman—led to what would appear to be fruitfully escapist attempts into realms of pleasure-filled sexualities where he shed the burden of being a middle-class Englishman.
19. Larkin, “Best Society,” Poems (1988) 150.
20. For a reading of the poem as Titch Thomas’s act of classed rebellion, see Whalen 44.
21. John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger is the most famous example of this: Jimmy scapegoats the upper-class Alison, her mother, and her friend Helena. The women, all from upper classes, are held responsible for his own straitened and frustrated circumstances, as he feels that it is their controlling domesticity and unfeeling frigidity that thwart his manly independence.
22. It makes an appearance in “Wild Oats” in The Whitsun Weddings, where the appearance of a “bosomy English rose” “sparked/The whole shooting match-off,” a salacious indication of masturbation, reinforced especially when the reader is later informed that he carried around her photograph for years, even though he was actually involved with her “friend in specs” (112).
23. Blake Morrison, in his study of the group, writes, “The identity of the Movement has, it seems, transcended both the group and decade, coming to stand for certain characteristics in English writing—rationalism, realism, empiricism—which continue to exert their influence today” (9).
24. Stan Smith argues that Larkin’s “distance [is] the very ground of his humanity.” I agree with this assessment: it is self-awareness and detachment that enable Larkin’s personae to establish a link—however tenuous—between himself as observer and those he observes. Smith, “Margins of Tolerance” 179.
1. Critics who have mapped the relation between social realism and class configurations include Walter Allen (Tradition and Dream), Kenneth Allsop, James Gindin, Robert Hewison, Frederick Karl, Blake Morrison, and Rubin Rabinowitz.
2. For an analysis of the media’s role in the creation of the Angry Young Man and the Movement, as well as the ways in which the writers of these two constructed groups harnessed the media for their own ends, see Ritchie and Hewison. For instance, John Wain, as the editor and presenter of the BBC Third Program’s influential literary arts show, read extracts of Lucky Jim on his very first broadcast in April 1953, before it was published. In the process, he established it as a significant novel and shaped its subsequent reception in the broader public. See Carpenter 54–55. Harry Ritchie points out that Amis and Wain were frequently linked together as emblematic of the iconoclastic new men of postwar Britain.
3. Such a crisis is similarly attributed to fiction of the Modernist era, but in the postwar moment, there was a slightly different take on the issue: the assumption was that since Modernists such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce had apparently stretched the form to its limits, innovations were no longer possible.
4. Part of this privileging of the common Englishman was the deliberate Movement endeavor to undo the Romantic and Modernist myth of artist as prophet and antihero. The Movement regarded this very rejection of the myth as an “example of serving the community” (Morrison 172). Serving the community and accepting social responsibilities are the defining characteristics of this new commonsense masculinity, resulting in a focus on the value of labor and professionalism. This is intertwined with the apparent aesthetic and political rejection of “Modernist poetics of impersonality and extreme subjectivity,” which was “a revolt against the traditional relation of the subject and the outside world” (Eysteinsson 28).
5. The Movement writers were influenced, to varying degrees, by F. R. Leavis’s ideas about Englishness and literature, even as many of them publicly disavowed, and some actively disliked, him. Leavis and his supporters privileged the study of English literature itself as the means to disseminate Englishness, continuity, and tradition in the tumultuous aftermath of World War I. He believed that the “great tradition” with its exploration of native English communitarian ethics and humanitarian values of liberalism could stem the increasing mechanization of the modern world. The Movement writers imported Leavisite attitudes into their aesthetic position. Their ostensibly radical subversion of the hegemonic ideas regarding art, literature, and Englishness is underpinned by regressive attitudes regarding gender roles and expectations. Their reactionary gender and sexual politics emerged in opposition to Modernist ambiguity and destabilization of gender and sexuality.
6. Blake Morrison makes a distinction between “regionalism” and the Movement’s unrepentant “provincialism.” Regionalism had the taint of nostalgia and sentimentalism that only the upper classes could indulge in, as it disregarded the yoke of poverty that weighed down all the other classes. Provincialism, on the other hand, was a left-leaning anti-Establishment revelation of life among the urban poor, of life scarred by class divisions and exacerbated by the process of industrialization (Morrison 61).
7. Kenneth Tynan uses the phrase to describe the radicalism of Look Back in Anger in his influential review of the play, though Jimmy, the verbally abusive, frustrated, and misogynist protagonist, never indicates any political commitments and is instead wildly incoherent in his stance. See Tynan 178.
8. Neil Nehring, in his Gramscian and Hebdigesque reading of postwar British culture, Flowers in the Dustbin, argues that Movement and Angry Young Man writers who claimed to be the new voices from below were really failed, fake rebels in comparison to the truly radical, ideological dissent embodied in the subcultural style of the 1960s. More recently, Nick Bentley, while arguing for, and exploring, the form and ideological radicalism of the 1950s novel corroborates Angry Young Man literature as a “literature of containment.” See Bentley 127. While I agree with this broad argument, I believe the Movement/Angry Young Men nevertheless signify a shift from the trajectory of the residual Edwardian upper classes. Without them the later stylized dissent of the subcultures would not have been possible. However, as I indicated above, the writers and artists of the 1950s were deeply imbricated in the traditions and values they rejected. To locate them within a historical-literary trajectory: Osborne, Amis, Wain, and Larkin demonstrate the necessary and visible transition from the hegemony of the Edwardian upper classes to the more explicit dissent of the youth subcultures of the sixties and seventies—the Mods, the Teds, and the later Punks.
9. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan used this phrase in a speech at a Conservative rally in Bedford on July 20, 1957. The phrase, subject to much criticism then and since, has become the most oft-used description of Britain’s welfare state policies. In the same speech, Macmillan also pointed to Britain’s new leadership role as the head of the Commonwealth even as the empire and Britain’s global reach continued to shrink. Significantly, the imperial rhetoric of paternal condescension was still firmly in place when he said, “The pattern of the Commonwealth is changing and with it is changing Britain’s position as the Mother Country. Our children are growing up.” See Jefferys 64.
10. Waugh, “Open Letter” 11–21; Maugham 4.
11. However, it must be remembered that imperial-economic decline and the creation of the welfare state go hand in hand. Britain’s fall from the position of premier imperial power was irrecoverable. The relinquishing of control was particularly resonant, as Britain was entirely dependent on the United States for financial recovery and, indeed, had to concede independence because of American financial and political pressure. The emergence of the United States as a global superpower with Britain as the junior partner was made explicit during the Suez Crisis in 1956, one of the few international events consistently referenced in the overwhelmingly insular texts of the Angries and the Movement. The British decision to withdraw troops that were sent in to prevent President Nasser of Egypt from nationalizing the Suez Canal was seen as the national and international signal of the decline of British power. It was pressure from the United Nations led by the United States that led to a humiliating withdrawal and loss of prestige both at home and abroad. The loss of face was precipitated not just because of blatant imperial arrogance and the ensuing capitulation to the more powerful United States, but also because of the dishonesty with which Britain conducted the attack. This moment of national humiliation was inevitably read within the discourse of emasculation: Englishmen were impotent and powerless in the face of the American potency.
12. Asa Briggs’s classic definition of the welfare state enumerates the state’s core functions: “A ‘welfare state’ is a state in which organized power is deliberately used (through politics and administration) in an effort to modify the play of market forces in at least three directions—first, by guaranteeing individuals and families a minimum income irrespective of the market value of their work or property; second, by narrowing the extent of insecurity by enabling individuals and families to meet certain social contingencies (for example, sickness, old age and unemployment) which lead otherwise to individual and family crises; and third, by ensuring that all citizens without distinction of status or class are offered the best standards available in relation to a certain agreed range of social services” (Briggs 228).
13. In fact, Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation ceremony in 1953 was broadcast on the new postwar medium, television. It was a national spectacle that invoked an imagined community through its hoary rituals and traditions but was also an intimate drama as it was consumed in the familiar and private space of the home. It is estimated that over twenty million people, that is, over half the population of Britain, watched (Conekin et al. 2). According to Rodney Lowe, the period after 1945 saw a “cultural revolution.” It was driven by advertising and consumerism, especially after the advent of commercial television in 1955. Through the postwar years, the number of televisions owned went from 350,000 in 1950 to 91 percent of households with televisions in 1971 (Lowe 101).
14. Qtd. in Nicholas Rose 82.
15. Elizabeth Wilson argues that it was “one of the most crudely ideological documents of its kind ever written” (148).
16. Richard Hoggart, the Left cultural critic who considered the new writers revolutionary because of their apparently outspoken attitude toward the hegemonic elite, clearly considered the classed literary conflict in gendered and sexual terms. He argues that the Arts Council was represented in the media as “a ‘fiddle’ by a lot of cissies who despise the amusement of the plain Englishman,” an obvious remnant of the earlier days (138).
17. The decline and disappearance of domestic servants from the middle-class homes from the 1930s through the postwar period meant that the parameters of middle-class womanhood were changing. Housework came to be considered stylish, or, at least, this ideology was increasingly disseminated through women’s magazines, cookery books, and hostess manuals. The shift in ideology was reflected in the sudden explosion of women’s magazines: at least sixty new magazines were started between 1920 and 1945. Middle-class women were the target demographic for such magazines as Women and Home, Good Housekeeping, and Modern Home, where the emphasis was on helping the middle-class woman run her home without servants while still maintaining her respectability, dignity, and style. Postwar discourse, with its return to the home and the importance of motherhood in the face of a declining birth rate, saw homemaking as an appropriate career for all women, which required training, competence, diligence, and knowledge.
18. P. G. Wodehouse’s many novels, though they are exaggerated farces, deal with exactly this sad and ineffectual group of upper- and middle-class men of an earlier generation. With names like Bertie, Bingo, and Tuppy, indicative of their boyishness, upper-class Englishmen are affectionately caricatured as being incapable of useful employment or even decisive action. The characters are deliberately infantile, living life as overgrown schoolboys and incapable of fulfilling the roles into which they have been educated—that is, as the responsible Englishman who serves monarch and empire by participating in the heteronormative, imperial economy. Bertie, from the famous series, along with Wodehouse’s other rich young Englishmen, is bound up in trivialities: attempting to escape marriage without being unchivalrous, avoiding dictatorial aunts, and generally attempting to run away from everything that will prevent his hanging around in their gentleman clubs. Wodehouse’s charming farcical world is one in which young men attempt to make their way through the minefield of inherited ideals of manliness where the concept of duty is reduced to visiting and accompanying rich uncles and aunts to country houses, and where pleasure and dissolution are made possible by a rigid economic, social, and imperial hierarchy. The protagonists of the new postwar novels, rather paradoxically, are descendants of this tradition, despite their class origins and commitment to a different masculinity. While the farcical and infantile Wodehousian characters swim around in their eroded ideal of gentlemanliness, the new adolescent young men of post-imperial Britain try to negotiate a similar set of culturally inherited ideals even as they try to assert their differently classed masculinity.
19. David Cairns and Shaun Richards argue that “woman [becomes] one of the terrains on to which the discourse of metropolitan superiority vis-à-vis the colonial [is] transposed in decolonizing and ‘postcolonial’ Britain” (194).
20. See English’s “Barbarism as Culturism.”
21. For more on the migration and transformation of the picaresque, see Alter, Bjornson, Blackburn, Whitbourn, and Stuart Miller.
22. Janet Woollacott and Tony Bennett’s analysis of the reception of the Bond novels reinforces the idea of Bond as both an imperial throwback and a modern welfare state professional: theirs is a materialist cultural studies examination of the reception history of the Bond novels; they do not focus, as I do, on how this paradox inflects, even as it is illustrated through, Bond’s masculinity. The original readers of the novels, whom Fleming had in mind when he wrote them, were the “knowing” “metropolitan intelligentsia,” those who would be comfortable in the apparently exotic and luxurious worlds of which Bond was a part. These readers, in fact, were a part of the upper-class/aristocratic elite (Bennett and Woollacott 14). The turning point, when Bond went from snobby literary character to national-cultural icon, came when From Russia with Love was serialized in the Daily Express. The readers of the Daily Express, unlike the original readers, were predominantly of the lower middle class and read Bond as an emblem of classless modernity and meritocratic professionalism. Bond, then, is received simultaneously as elite clubland descendant and hero of modern Britain by two different sets of audiences. Indeed, he is simultaneously both and neither. See Bennett and Woollacott.
23. Kingsley Amis, James Bond Dossier 11. In Fleming’s narrative of his creation of Bond, the character was a product of British aristocratic/upper-class “ritual frivolity,” or the dilettantish desire for authorial success without looking as though he tried too hard to achieve it. Joan Rockwell coined the phrase “ritual frivolity” to describe a pervasive myth about the British aristocracy, that “the elite can do everything well, and they can do it with ease, without practice, while the lower orders must work at their tasks arduously and still the results of their efforts are bound to be inferior.” Interestingly, for Bond himself, things do not come easily; he has to train and acquire the necessary expertise belying his professional status. See Rosenberg and Stewart 15.
24. Jeremy Black in The Politics of James Bond has pointed out that Britain had just become the world’s third atomic power in 1952, when Fleming was writing the novel. The novel illustrates the very real fears that the acquisition of such power prompted during the Cold War: the “Joint Intelligence Committee” warned that Britain could be the target of rocket attacks from the USSR, and leading to “the end of British invulnerability” (16).
25. Amis contends that the two requirements would inevitably rule out not just Bond, who is not a member but a guest, but M himself. He can undoubtedly fulfill the first requirement (as can Bond). But he cannot “show” the requisite amount, since as a government servant, albeit a senior one, he does not have that kind of income (Bond Dossier 29).
26. I disagree with Brian Patton here, who argues that the narrative’s conflation of Bond with M and the gentlemen is “deceptive” and that Bond is merely someone who serves (Patton 156).
27. In this I agree with Christine Bold, who argues that though the novels “reproduce the power imbalance, [they] do foreground women as the enabling mechanism of the spy’s fictional universe”; or, more explicitly, they emphasize the fact that these women are almost always professionals like Bond himself (171).
28. His relationship with Gala Brand in Moonraker is similar but slightly less fraught. He does recognize her as a competent policewoman, which, of course, does not prevent him from eroticizing her. Even when Gala is awarded a George Cross for her exemplary service to the nation, the chief of Scotland Yard, M, and Bond agree that she was a “good girl” and she deserved it. More important, she is the first who breaks the case, stealing the codes at the appropriate time, figuring out precisely what Drax is up to, and giving Bond the right configurations to program the missile to divert it into the North Sea rather than London. It is possible to argue that she is the one who actually does all the key espionage work, while Bond functions as muscle. Also, while he is daydreaming about taking her on a sexed-up vacation in the aftermath of the case, she arrives to tell him that she is engaged to be married to a fellow police officer, leaving him to “shift the pain of failure” (246).
29. See Denning’s Cover Stories, Usborne’s Clubland Heroes, and Watson’s Snobbery with Violence. These works are, respectively, a scholarly study, a nostalgic celebratory work, and a deeply critical analysis of the phenomenon of the “clubland hero.”
30. The desire to maintain the myth of the invulnerable body of the Englishman once again invokes the events of the Mutiny of 1857, where reports of bodily violation perpetrated by the Indian rebels were limited to the graphic descriptions of the ravaged English Lady’s body. The reports were suspiciously silent about mutilation of Englishmen, as that would mean the repudiation of national and racial power at the very moment that such power needed to be reinforced. Any revelation of the dismemberment of the Englishman’s body would signify the vulnerability of the English nation and its civilizational superiority. See Sharpe, “Unspeakable Limits” 34.
31. Though the law was only passed in the late sixties, the recommendations to decriminalize homosexuality were made in the Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, better known as the Wolfenden Report, published almost a decade earlier in 1958.
32. See Green, Children of the Sun 432–64.
33. Scarry elaborates on this point: “It is the intense pain that destroys a person’s self and world, a destruction experienced either spatially or the contraction of the universe to the immediate vicinity of the body or the body swelling to fill the entire universe” (35).
34. It is possible to read Bond as the exile in Giorgio Agamben’s definition of the term—that which exists inside and outside the state. Agamben contends that “what has been banned is delivered over to its own separateness and, at the same time, consigned to the mercy of the one who abandons it—at once excluded and included.” In this, the exile is akin to homo sacer, the man “that can be killed but not sacrificed,” and it is in killing that sovereignty is established (110). Sovereignty as theorized by both Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben is the moment when all laws have been suspended due to a crisis of power, and the one who takes decisions on behalf of the state during “the state of exception” is the sovereign; it is in and through the state of exception that sovereignty emerges. However, unlike homo sacri, Bond functions with an awareness of his outcast status. See Agamben and Schmitt.
35. Umberto Eco’s now classic structuralist examination of the narrative tropes and plot points of the Bond novels highlight this paradox, where Fleming “composes elementary and violent plots” according to “archetypal oppositions” played against “fabulous opposition” and “revised fantasy” (53–55). Eco goes on to elaborate that the narrative of the Bond novels contains a series of paradoxes, and indeed their success is an effect of how easily the structure contains these contradictions (55).
1. It was first published as Shadow of a Sun on the advice of her editor, Cecil Day Lewis. Byatt reverted to her original title when it was republished; the definite article in front of “Sun” captures just how deterministic Anna’s life is and how difficult it is to grow up in the shadow of that all-powerful singular sun that is the power and genius of Henry Severell. See Byatt, introduction to Shadow of the Sun, xiii.
2. She further argues that Henry only maintains his artistic, visionary male identity by overcoming any vulnerability: “repressing his love for his daughter and any sympathy he may feel for Oliver and Anna” and relying unself-consciously on his wife’s self-abnegation (Franken 49). This particular “invulnerability” transitions into a more domesticated vision towards the end of the novel.
3. Byatt often uses the conjunction of water, light, and glass to describe her own creative process. In her introduction, Byatt defines her own writing as “heliotropic,” which means turning toward sunlight. In a lecture, she refers to “light” and “glass” as images of her creative self: “When I started writing, I had what I now see was a kind of post-Romantic metaphor for the self—and this was to do with light, rather than desire—which was the human being as a burning glass. … And I always thought of the work of art as the fire that would break out if you concentrated the light, so that it went through, whereas if it simply all came in, and had no way out, you would be shattered” (“Identity and the Writer” 26).
4. Part of what women’s magazines attempted to do in tandem with the pervasive cultural and institutionalized discourse of gender was to validate domestic work. Wilson says, “The sexual division of labour was not questioned, but it was recognized that women’s domestic work was work and it implied social democratic measures to bring women in their domestic role—as paid workers had been—within the wider consensual circle of full citizenship” (23). Moreover, magazines endeavored to project a classless ideal of motherhood and homemaker, unifying working-and middle-class women under the false but powerful rubrics of woman, wife, and mother.
5. Even as the Beveridge Report reinforced gender and sexual stereotypes, it addressed the major issue of the vulnerability of the married, economically dependent woman. Benefits for married women, such as maternity leave, children’s allowance, and insurance in case of divorce and separation, alleviated the miseries of this particularly vulnerable segment of society. This fact was noted by a housewife who had read the Beveridge Report: “His scheme will appeal more even to women than to men, for it is they who bear the real burden of unemployment, sickness, child-bearing and the ones who, up to now, have come off worse.” This response was echoed by surveys that were done before and after the implementation of Beveridge’s proposals. See Last 227. For surveys and results, see Political and Economic Planning, and Young and Willmott.
6. Philip Larkin uses the word to describe the skilled craftsmanship of her novels. In his overview of Pym’s novels, which he had first offered to write though she put it off, he compares her work to Austen’s. He celebrates several traits of her novels: “the underlying loneliness of life, enduring this, the unpretentious adherence to the Church of England, the absence of self-pity, the scrupulousness of one’s relations with others, the small blameless comforts” (“World of Barbara Pym” 260). With the exception of the implicit and explicit belief in Christianity, these characteristics could be attributed to his work as well.
7. Her novels are also missing from the critical analyses and compilations of James Gindin, Robert Hewison, and Steven Connor.
8. For a sample range of reviews spanning decades that consider Pym’s novels as celebrating a very “English way of life,” see Holloway 14, Hugh-Jones 13, Daemon 18, and Cullinah 658–59. For critical works that examine Pym within an English literary and cultural tradition predating postcolonial analyses of Englishness, see Rossen and Rowse.
9. T. S. Eliot points out that the traditional unit of the Christian community in England had always been the parish (Idea of a Christian Society 29).
10. In addition to the shadowy John, there are two other factors that make this an unusual Pym novel. First, there is the consistent presence of immigrants of color who are always on the margins of the cozy Englishness that is the novel’s primary focus, or perhaps this version of the Englishness is increasingly on margins of London of the time. Second, the parishioners leave the confines of England to journey to Rome as part of a church holiday, an anomaly in a Pym novel. However, the Rome vacation highlights the insularity of the group. Italy in its lush exoticism seems to serve the same function here as it does in Forster’s Italian novels, entrenching Englishness even as it opens up the possibilities of change.
11. In a BBC interview, Pym articulated this explicitly and clearly when she said, “I have always loved churchgoing. I do like the tradition of the Anglican Church. I do like hymns, buildings, and everything connected with the church” (qtd. in Biber 23).
12. Since then there have been a number of essays comparing the stylistic and temperamental similarities between the two writers. Joseph Epstein notes that the art of both Larkin and Pym is one “in which the ironic, the comic, the understated, the fearlessly honest are given full play. … Excitement in such an art derives from precision of language and subtlety of sentiment, not from tension” (45). Also see Thomas.
13. The persistent rejection of her work significantly changed her style, form, and characterization. Pym altered her narrative world in the wake of her multiple rejections. Quartet in Autumn (1977) and The Sweet Dove Died (1978) were much bleaker novels and departed both in content and in tone from her previous novels. She only returned to her communal parish world with her last, rather elegiac novel, A Few Green Leaves (1980), as indicated by the title. The novel affectionately shows the end of an era as the doctor’s surgery replaces the church at the heart of the village as a place of worship, and the doctor replaces the vicar as the shepherd of the community. It is a village world where church attendance is almost nonexistent, and the vicar is reluctant to visit members of his parish so as not to disturb their television viewing, while the gentry no longer influence the rhythms of village life.
14. Pym was featured in magazine articles, was interviewed, was the subject of a BBC television program following Cecil and Larkin’s endorsement, and received publicity until her death in 1980.
15. Tom Maschler is now considered one of the most important publishers of the twentieth century. In the mid-century he was publishing Ian Fleming, Alan Sillitoe, John Fowles, Doris Lessing, Kurt Vonnegut, and Philip Roth. He later went on to publish Gabriel García Márquez, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, and Julian Barnes. Pym’s novels appear anachronistic and mild among the literary fireworks of this set. Before he joined Cape, he edited and published the polemical Declaration, a collection of essays by such postwar icons as Doris Lessing, John Osborne, John Wain, and Lindsay Anderson, which later came to be seen as an Angry Young Man manifesto, although the essays in themselves seem to have nothing in common.
16. John Brannigan in his survey of post-1945 British makes the same point and says that Pym’s novels were “not quite in keeping with debates in contemporary magazines, nor with media images of the modern woman” (Orwell to the Present 100). The contrast between Byatt’s Anna and Margaret, who are so determined by the postwar discourses of motherhood and professionalism, and Pym’s Ianthe Broome, still shaped by gentlewomanly ideals, makes this particularly clear.
17. By the early 1960s, the period in which An Unsuitable Attachment is set, West Indian immigrants constituted a significant percentage of the population of North London. Ruth Glass in her contemporaneous account, London’s Newcomers, points out that 4 to 8 percent of the immigrant population settled in North London. Unscrupulous landlords seeing the opportunity to exploit the increasingly beleaguered immigrant population converted and leased dilapidated Victorian houses on the verge of being torn down, usually in the undesirable locations, near the railways or noisy markets.
18. I refer to Mary Louise Pratt’s theorization of “the contact zone,” which “invokes the space and time where subjects previously separated by geography and history are co-present, the point at which their trajectories now intersect” (8).
19. Beginning with 1950, the British Council of Churches was actively and officially involved in condemning racial discrimination and hostility, issuing a statement to that effect in the wake of the Notting Hill Riots of 1958 (Patterson 325). However, these strong official statements were not often backed up by any concrete practices; rather, Mark Ainger’s ineffectual attempts to engage the West Indian men in his parish is an illustration of what Sheila Patterson calls “benevolent laissez-faire” (258).
20. Samuel Selvon’s Lonely Londoners (1956) narrates the lives of these West Indians, mostly men, who live in these houses in North London. The novel offers a noteworthy counterpoint to Pym’s narrative of the vibrant but silenced West Indian community. Selvon’s novel, focusing primarily on a group of West Indian men, follows their attempts to establish a life in a cold and unforgiving London that, though it has invited them, has no place for them.
21. In a nationwide Gallup poll carried out in September 1958 when the London riots were happening, more than 61 percent of the people surveyed said that they would definitely move or might possibly move if “colored people” moved into their district (Glass 124).
22. This is not an unusual trait for Pym’s gentleman because, as seen with the “remote” Mark, they are not fully present, but this characteristic becomes even more exaggerated in the case of the anthropologists. Tom Mallow, an anthropologist in Less than Angels who is the heir to Mallow manor, is so detached that he has become “detribalized.” When he walks by his aunt’s house during a coming-out party, he realizes that he cannot quite bring himself to enter the house (163–64). Like Rupert, Tom studies his own reaction, wondering if it is “just his clothes” that prevent him from entering, but then comes to the inchoate yet certain conclusion that “it must be something more than that” (164). Unlike Rupert, Tom never reconciles himself to his class and gender expectations. At the end of the novel, he leaves England and “the complexity of personal relationships” to return to “soothing” Africa where he can he be at home, observing everything with “the anthropologist’s calm detachment” (186). Tom retreats from England back to the empire, to do what his gender inheritance and profession have trained him to do: observe, measure, and catalog. Tom dies in the field.
23. She had originally intended John “to be much worse—almost the kind of man who would bigamously marry a spinster, older than himself for the sake of £50 in the P. O. Savings Bank” (Private 222).
24. British social anthropology entered a period of expansion after the war. Universities established new departments, and, interestingly, new institutes of social research emerged in the colonies, particularly in Africa. Anthropology became a viable career option with opportunities for employment and funding. Pym’s novels in particular reflected this change, for there is a proliferation of minor and major characters in her novels who are career anthropologists. See Kuper 115.
25. The Gamages Department Store was a giant maze of rooms, steps, and passages, popular with children and adults alike. It offered a very wide selection of goods, including haberdashery, furniture, sporting goods, gardening supplies and utensils, camping equipment, and clothing, shipping its products throughout the empire. Gamages was the official supplier of uniforms to the Boy Scout movement. See http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/texts/empire/gam/1913.html.
26. Her “celebration of the mundane” has garnered much critical attention. See also Larson 17–22 and Snow.
27. Her ability to capture Englishness in all its evanescence and ineffableness was evident from her very first novel. Elizabeth Jenkins notes that the novel, Some Tame Gazelle (1950), is “an enchanting book about village life, but no more to be described than a delicious taste or smell” (19).
28. Janice Rossen takes this national overview one step further and contends that “Pym’s fiction shows a definite strain of nationalism,” where the focus on England is sharpened by the consciousness of a mysterious, heathen world which surrounds England” (105). While I agree with the exclusive focus on Englishness, as opposed to Britishness, and the slightly patronizing amusement directed at other cultures, her England is the subject of very pointed satire.
29. See Brothers and Weld.
30. However, Brothers goes on to point out that Pym’s novels “demonstrate the absurdity of the Victorian ideal of the family. … Pym makes the ideal absurd by mocking romantic love and depicting the many forms that loving takes—platonic, love between men, friendship between women” (158).
31. Doan and Griffin; see also Orphia Allen xiv–xv.
32. Barbara Griffin points out that Pym’s narrative strategy is one where the female protagonist usually offers a “multi-voiced resistance” to external forces.
1. The fact that he is Brahmin is mentioned in passing by other characters, as the novel moves backward into the past. This is an indication of both contemporaneous ways of identifying individuals and his occupying the acme of the caste hierarchy. However, more significantly, there is no marker of caste in his manly affect. Indeed, subsuming all parochial, linguistic, and caste identifications in the name of the nation is emblematic of his being a secular Indian man, an identity that he consciously forges.
2. Robin White’s “voice” is only rendered much later in the narrative in the form of letters, official documents, and transcript. At this late point in the narrative, the focus is on the Manners-Kumar-Merrick triangle and the debate about India’s involvement, or lack thereof, as fought over by the British and the Indian National Congress. White does not speak of the event that Srinivasan describes. Hence, Srinivasan’s is the sole, and therefore privileged, perspective on the matter.
3. See Brennan; also Appignanesi and Maitland.
4. Sufiyan, according to Bhabha, examines the postcolonial migrant position in terms of the classical contrast offered by Lucretius and Ovid, between complete freedom from the self and superficial alterations while the essence continues unchanged. See Bhabha 320–21.