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, self-interest, 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 lower-class/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 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” signifies 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.
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: 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 masculinity and literature emerged through literary networks forged in those hoary and familiar institutions of tradition and elitism, Oxford and Cambridge.2 Calculated and deliberate in their aesthetic positions, they saw themselves as ushering in a much-needed English literary and aesthetic change.
The phrase “Angry Young Man,” coined in the mid-fifties, originally referred to angry, or at least frustrated, men in the works of Amis, Wain, Osborne, Hinde, Braine, and Murdoch. It became a catch-all phrase to describe any social-realist novel/text with a young male protagonist on the make, including the radically different trajectories and issues of lower-middle- and middle-class protagonists and the next generation of predominantly working-class protagonists. The Angry Young Man trope, which unfortunately stuck, is still used to describe a variety of very different conglomerations of texts and issues. Kenneth Allsop, in a contemporaneous literary study, points out, “What is so striking about the later wave [Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow, Muriel Spark, David Storey, Harold Pinter, Arnold Wesker, et al.] is how little trace there is of the angry school of fiction that seemed in the middle Fifties to cleave ahead into the far distance, inexorably decisive as the M1—how abruptly it petered out in the mud of abandoned country. Sillitoe, Barstow, and Storey certainly deal in social-realism—but through the eyes and experience of their cobbly lumpenproletariat characters, from a very different angle to that mockingly mutinous jeering of the Redbrick boys of a few years earlier” (8). As Allsop reveals, the later social-realist writers, often conflated with the “Angries,” who turned their sympathetic and sometimes anthropological gaze on the working class, were not particularly angry; nor were their protagonists frustrated at not being acknowledged by the cultural elite. In order to recuperate the distinction between the upwardly mobile, self-interested, neurotic lower-middle-class men and the violent, embourgeoised, but static working-class protagonists, I focus on the “mockingly mutinous jeering of the Redbrick boys” in my reading of Hurry on Down. However, before I do so, I consider the return of realism and its relationship to Englishness and masculinity.
The defiant neo-realism of the Angries was just one of many popular styles in the postwar period. In their contemporary critical, literary analyses, Malcolm Bradbury, Bernard Bergonzi, and David Lodge argue that a closer inspection of novelistic trends of the fifties reveals the plurality of English fiction that was once widely perceived to be in its death throes.3 Contemporaneous critics considered the realists as participating in a “nasty subterfuge” and avoiding the realities of the modern world, and the lessons of Modernism. The “contemporary novel” in “reinstating the materialist liberal realism” (Bradbury 177) and reaching back to Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells (the very people that Woolf rejected in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”), and Henry Fielding was a celebration of its own provincialism. Hence, despite the multiplicity of styles, and indeed the later wild success of the fantasy genre—after all, J. R. R. Tolkien’s mammoth mythic novels were published in the mid-fifties—realism came to exemplify postwar English literature. For these new writers who found success and fame in the fifties, realism was the acceptable and accessible form of the novel; it was also an empiricist, lower-middle-class English aesthetic rebellion against the exclusionary tactics and non-Englishness of Modernism as perpetrated by the upper-class elite.4 Most of the authors who were vocal about the necessary adaptation of nineteenth-century literary traditions hailed from the educated lower-middle and middle classes, who saw themselves as prophets of a native Englishness. Realism and its adaptation was the chosen form of radical anti-establishmentarianism. The new aesthetics was a deliberate revolt against what they perceived as the snobbery, decadence, and imperial cosmopolitanism of the upper classes, since Modernism was seen as emerging from Bloomsbury and Paris, locations that were unquestionably beyond the lower-middle-class purview.5
Perhaps most important, realism imprinted itself in the English cultural imagination, both then and later, because it was perceived as quintessentially English. As Alan Sinfield points out, “An element of national consciousness, a preoccupation with Englishness, fuelled hostility to modernism.” The new writers perceived Modernism to be a particularly non-English, cosmopolitan phenomenon, and “with the passing of British imperial power, Englishness became, even more than before, a sensitive matter” (Sinfield 185). For the writers who became culturally significant in the 1950s, realism symbolized the return of Britain’s, or more precisely England’s, native traditions after the confused amalgamation of cosmopolitanism. The concern with realism and the ensuing debates about the novel are symbolic of the cultural insular turn in postwar Britain. The narrowness of vision, provincialism, dismissal of cosmopolitanism, and deliberate return to older notions of character, plot, and the social web connect with the Orwellian emphasis on English empiricism and “native” values.6 Significantly, as I argue, the “contemporary” manner is deliberately masculinist and stylized, celebrating a return to empiricism and masculinity.
I am indebted to Alan Sinfield’s now classic examination of the Movement’s heteronormative agenda within the paradigm of domestic class conflict. Sinfield schematizes this gender and class divide into a series of binaries: Dominant/Literary, State/Personal, Working Class/Leisure Class, “masculinity”/“femininity.” In his schema, masculinity is opposed to the personal, the leisure class, and the literary. Of course, he does acknowledge that each term is highly vulnerable and unstable, both with reference to itself and in relation to other terms. Sinfield argues that homosexuality is the concealed destabilizing term in his table (66). He does not include how empire shapes each of the binary terms. Nor does he consider how the loss of empire destabilizes each term and alters its relationship to others. In considering the imperial underpinning of “masculinity,” for instance, the personal and “masculinity” are not oppositional but linked and marshaled against “the state,” as exemplified in Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying. This focus on personal, manly autonomy becomes even more explicit in the works of the Angries and the Movement, as we have already seen in Larkin. Also, postwar writers deliberately play with the instability of the link between “the literary” and “the feminine.” The Angries attempted to reconfigure the literary as a masculine activity and situate it within the realist and understandable framework of the middle class. What this reveals, as both this and the previous chapters demonstrate, is the anxiety of their heterosexuality, not to mention the fragility, instability, and neurosis of the accompanying assertion of masculinity. The masculinity as described in the works of the Angries works in and against the insular turn, the anxiety of Modernist influence, the frame of imperial gentlemanliness, and the welfare state. In order to engage with the very specific alterations in gender and the nation, the neo-realists adapted and stylized extant forms.
This returns us to the question of the analytical purchase of separating the earlier Angries from the later social-realists, given that both groups are involved in the literary and cultural renegotiations of English masculinity. The original Angries did not radically deviate from the discursive frame of Englishness, manliness, and nationhood. In point of fact, Allsop’s language captures just why this first set of texts resonated with cultural and literary critics: they were “mutinous,” “jeering” “boys” (8). The protagonists were new but recognizable: they spoke in the same idiom as those they were attacking and ranked just below the Establishment in the class/caste hierarchy. More to the purpose, they explicitly resented their own compartmentalization within a sociocultural framework that simultaneously opened up and foreclosed opportunities. These texts reveal the complicity of their rebellion, not to mention their frustrated attempts to reinvent the idea of the Englishman. The vexed and insecure lower-middle- and middle-middle-class masculinities of these “jeering” “boys” are different from the anarchic violence of Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning or the trials of rugby league player Frank Minchin in David Storey’s This Sporting Life. I distinguish between a new masculinity that emerges from a reviled discourse of the gentleman and one that emerges from the confluence of working-class affluence and consumerism, which owes little to nothing to the gentleman. There are two distinct stylizations of masculinity: post-gentlemanliness (both coming after and derived from) and the new working-class welfare state masculinity that originates from the distinct frames of working-class life.
The two most recent critical studies that examine postwar literature unwittingly reveal this distinction as they examine the Angry Young Man tout court. Both Peter Kalliney’s examination of English exceptionalism via a literary-cultural focus on class in twentieth-century British literature and Susan Brook’s analysis of affect and masculinity in postwar British literature and culture separate out their analyses of the Angries and working-class protagonists. Brook examines the postwar cultural focus on the “feeling male body,” especially in the newly burgeoning field of cultural studies (Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, and Stuart Hall) as “symptom of social crisis and its cure” (1–3). Her nuanced argument on how affect constitutes the masculine mode of rebelling against cultural apathy, consumerism, and the Establishment speaks to what I have been calling the reconfiguration of masculinities in postwar Britain. However, though she gestures toward the narrative of imperial decline leading to crisis of national self-confidence, Brook focuses on internal-social rather than national-imperial structures. She does not engage, either theoretically or historically, with the long imbrication of gender and nation in Britain, especially as it contrapuntally evolved through English imperial history. In contrast, I read Larkin, Wain, Amis, and Fleming within the discourses of imperial gentlemanliness to reveal just how deeply intertwined national reconfiguration, imperial decline, the welfare state, and manliness are. My interpretation opens up the narrative of the Angry Young Man as part of the history of the gentleman and the nation in terms of the cross-hatched discourses of imperial-economic shrinkage and the welfare state while also explicitly revealing the distinct literary-cultural domain of the later writers who consider the shifts in the subordinate masculinities of the working class. To prise apart the Angries from the second generation also allows us to examine the gendered effects of a Durkheimean organic solidarity on which the welfare state is predicated as it presses up against the sovereignty of citizens in a welfare state (Donzelot 172–73). This tension between solidarity and sovereignty, between the collective and the individual, constitutes a primary node of the transition from the gentleman to the post-gentleman.
Paradoxically, contemporaneous literary and cultural critics read this tension between the individual and the collective of the welfare state as “instinctive leftishness,” a lower-class anti-Establishment rebellion.7 While they interpreted it as symptomatic of the bureaucratic revolution of the welfare state and the drawn-out yet certain demise of the empire, later critics have noted that the fifties and its representatives, the Angry Young Men and the Movement, were perennially ambivalent about the status quo, tilting more to the right than the left.8 The protagonists, in fact, illustrated the struggle to affirm post-gentlemanly patriarchal masculinity rather than any genuine radical revolution. Much like the welfare state they came to epitomize, the Movement and the Angry Young Men truly looked backward and forward at the same time, attempting to reframe and democratize postwar England while still being deeply interpellated within hierarchical and imperial structures. The Movement and Angry Young Man texts, in their different ways, celebrate a masculine “authenticity” that is simultaneously oppositional to what these works construct as Establishment or upper-class passivity and effeminacy as well as the uniformity of Americanized mass (low) culture that had presumably drowned out the essence of native Englishness. Kalliney rightly reads this particular brand of aggressive fence-sitting as “Angry ambivalence.” He points out that the Angries with their unstable politics “continually pose the fact of relative material security against the affect of class anger” (14)—since, materially, they had generally accepted the welfare state rhetoric that Britons “have never had it so good,” with full employment, relative material security/prosperity, and mass consumption.9
What is noteworthy about the Angries and their ambivalent anger is their ability to manipulate the terms of the moral high ground of the injured, decent victim and the rhetoric of class and gender politics to suit their own situationally gendered needs. The Angries mobilize the multivalent discourses of masculine authenticity: Susan Brook and Dan Rebellato’s “man of feeling” (or the independent yet contained man fighting against social homogeneity), heterosexual man’s right to power, and apparently radical class politics merge together in the Angries in a confused yet determined effort to construct a successful oppositional masculine identity. In other words, these texts, through their realist, picaresque narratives, explore the marginalized manly Englishman trying to find his way through the nation (mostly from the lower middle to the middle classes). These narratives show the Englishman as he works both within and against the set state expectations of the “family breadwinner,” sympathizing with a decent masculinity that positions itself simultaneously against an imagined sophisticated cosmopolitan man who moves in gilded circles of power and against women who are sirens and tyrants of domestic entrapment. The Angries and the Movement were so easily identifiable as a national shift because they purported to uncover the true Englishmen—Martin Green’s “decent men”—who had been subsumed by the morass of what they deemed to be the effeminate cosmopolitan queerness of E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, and whose emergence would rescue England and Englishness from the wrong members of the family who had been in power, to borrow an Orwellian metaphor. Their focus was not so much on documenting social change as on the process of being a man in this new-old nation. If England/Britain were to find its identity in the wake of postwar reconstruction through welfare state expectations by assuming moral democratic superiority in the face of imperial disintegration, then the victory of the ordinary Englishman was both a symptom and an exemplar of this new Britain.
The Angry Young Man and the Movement constitute a mini-canon because they were seen as the face of the welfare revolution—crucially, they were never seen as symbolic of the changing nation—though both the protagonists and the writers were too old to have benefited from the new educational policies. Writers, celebrants, and the critics who condemned them reinforced this affiliation in cultural discourse. Most infamous of these criticisms were the ones offered by Somerset Maugham and Evelyn Waugh, who variously called the new breed of men “scum” and held them to be embodiments of “philistinism.”10 Maugham and Waugh’s critique of the welfare state was channeled through an attack on the kind of men it was producing. Troubled though they were by what they perceived to be homogenization and the vulgarization of culture, this anger was directed at the type of man who was elevated in the national literary and public domain. Even if Amis’s Jim Dixon, Wain’s Charles Lumley, and, incongruously enough, Fleming’s James Bond were not beneficiaries of the Butler Education Act of 1944 (which provided secondary education for all), they nevertheless are shaped by, and must be read within, the effects of governmental practices, which in turn refracted simultaneously national-imperial decline and national-economic restructuring. To understand how Lumley, Dixon, and Bond were new Englishmen who stood for a transforming nation, it is necessary to consider how exactly Britain had changed.
The welfare state was considered a triumph of the democratic, egalitarian principles for which Britain fought the war.11 July 5, 1948, is known as “the vesting day” of the welfare system (Lloyd 290). Though the Family Allowance and Butler Education Act of 1944 were enacted before the end of the war, the postwar Labor government under the prime ministership of Clement Attlee implemented most of the important acts. By 1949 it was widely accepted that Britain was now a welfare state, and the phrase was used both inside and outside Britain to describe this new avatar of the nation-state (Lloyd 288). Though there is no unanimity on the definition of the welfare state either between or within nations, Rodney Lowe states that this particular form of the nation-state was primarily a phenomenon of the 1940s. It was an effect of “evolutionary changes in governmental policy” in “industrialized nations” that “consciously or unconsciously … transformed the relationship between the state and its citizens,” emerging through the sedimentary process of earlier discrete welfare policies enacted through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It refers to “a society in which the government actively accepts responsibility for the welfare (broadly defined) of all its citizens” (Lowe 13).12 Welfare policies decisively changed the nature of the nation-state, expectations from the government, claims of social justice, and, most important, the meaning of citizenship.
Moving beyond the dichotomy of the state and market, I work with the elaboration of the Foucaultian theorization of governmentality as a productive theoretical model within which to consider the shifts in masculinities and the reworking of the male subject-citizen in this new Britain. Michel Foucault points out that “in the art of government the task is to establish continuity, both an upwards and a downwards direction” (91). Foucault’s analytic of governmentality or “the conduct of conduct” examines the processes of the distribution of power in the modern nation. The focus on “government” enables us to examine intricate connections that underlie all endeavors to guide, shape, and direct conduct of others, whether it is the bureaucratic processes that govern health care; the institutional, economic, and domestic power of the head of the household and family; or the continuing act of self-government that makes a citizen. The governmental practices of the welfare state were fairly extensive in contouring the modes of gendered citizenship, as the government monitored, for benevolent purposes, every aspect of the life of its citizens. These classifications produced the subject-citizen, remaking the British citizen from “the cradle to the grave.”
Simultaneously, the role of expertise and experts expanded to become all-pervasive, which in turn led to increasing emphasis on professionalism; there were experts on the child, the family, the single mother, the working class, the elderly, and the disabled. The discourses of social expertise, the nexus of power/knowledge that classified citizens, produced them simultaneously as subjects and citizens of the nation. Governmental processes working through circuits of expertise produced subject-citizens, while subject-citizens remade themselves through systems of self-government that were derived from expert knowledge. Hence, there was an intricate and reciprocal relationship between the individual and the state-collective. Interestingly, this process of individuation at the moment of invoking the community or the collective was reinforced and disseminated through public broadcasting.13 Lord Reith, the chairman of the BBC, voiced a popular opinion when he called public broadcasting “the integrator for democracy,” as radio and television knitted together the whole nation as a community while it was consumed by individuals in their homes.14
Not surprisingly, critiques of the welfare state coalesced with the critique of professions and expertise. Feminist critics, in particular, pointed to the paternalist underpinnings of social expertise, not just in terms of the male-dominated medical professions where women’s bodies were patri-archally disciplined, but also in terms of the family—the heteronormative family shaped and was shaped by governmental processes—and the institutionalization of gender roles. The Beveridge Report, one of the founding documents of the British welfare state, was revolutionary in its provision and unification of a whole host of social services recasting British society, while also being an extraordinarily paternalist, patriarchal, and heteronormative document.15 While the control of populations has always been one of the crucial tasks of government, the Beveridge Report was particularly concerned about the declining birth rate, and, in addition to benefits, its main focus was on the family, children, and married women. The heteronormative family was the constitutive center of the document, institutionalizing heterosexually determined gender and sexuality. The report determined men and women’s citizenship as being grounded in the family: women as mothers or mothers-in-waiting, and men as family breadwinners and heads of households whose fundamental duty was to be gainfully employed, in order to fulfill their gender roles.
How are these discussions of gendered, heterosexual citizenship, or the subject-citizen produced through governmental practices of the welfare state and the security-driven nation-state relevant to a discussion of the novels by Wain and Fleming? These texts mediate the decline of the empire and the institution of the welfare state and meditate upon the gendered effects of these twin processes through their young male protagonists who work within the inheritance of imperial manliness and negotiate their place in postwar professional society. The struggle between the individual and the state-collective, the process of governance that directly connects the masculine self to state machinery, the expert classification of citizens into types, the patriarchal containment of women, the endeavor to define a masculine self against the institutionalized expectations of marriage and respectability, and finally the emphasis on professionalism are all features of Hurry on Down and Ian Fleming’s Bond novels. While these novels do not directly reference the welfare state—and when they do, it is merely in passing—the issues of what constitutes a man, a professional, and a citizen within a changed Britain play out in different ways in all of them.
Though John Wain’s Hurry on Down (1953) is now a largely forgotten text, at least in terms of critical interest, it was one of the novels of the 1950s that brought back the picaresque to tell the story of a new kind of Englishman. It reflected both the newness and the frustration of postwar Britain and was included in the curriculum of British schools as emblematic of a literary turn and a new cultural landscape. In fact, as Wain points out in his introduction to the seventh reprint of the novel by Penguin, he might have inaugurated the Angry Young Men and/or the Movement, though he continued to doubt the validity of the groupings: “So if there was a ‘movement’ at all, which I am inclined to doubt, I cannot be accused of tagging along behind it. I might even be credited—or blamed, if you will—for having started it” (4). In a contemporaneous review, Walter Allen notes, “A new hero has risen among us. Is he the intellectual tough or the tough intellectual? He is consciously, even conscientiously graceless.” Contemplating the new hero’s lineage, Allen considers him an heir to “the Services, George Orwell, Dr. Leavis and the Logical Positivists” (136). Variously and sometimes together, these names encapsulate hierarchy, empiricism, pragmatism, an organic national tradition, realism, “the common Englishman,” and a return to an insular Englishness. All of these qualities were also, as the writers themselves opined on various occasions, the traits that the postwar realist turn attempted to recuperate from the matrix of what they perceived to be upper-class queer modernisms.16 A new hero is almost inevitable, as what constitutes heroism in this new national structure is necessarily different. What is evident is that the new heroism involves toughness and the struggle to (not) fit. This tension is a consequence of the rewired relationship between the individual and the collective in the new nation state; the narrative of adaptation and “slotting in” takes on a huge national and cultural weight, as it is fundamental to the success of the welfare state.
Charles Lumley, protagonist and exemplar of this roguish new hero, struggles to affirm his masculinity within and through the almost dissonant structures of welfare-state governmental practices and an imperial Edwardian gentlemanly inheritance. Lumley endeavors to escape his gendered legacy and the expectations of bourgeois professionalism and searches for masculine authenticity while traversing the different layers of a postwar, welfare-state English society. An altered form of the eighteenth-century genre the picaresque becomes the most appropriate medium for meditating on the corporatized state, freedom, and a professionalized postwar, post-imperial English masculinity.
The twenty-three-year-old Lumley is from a middle- to upper-middle-class background. He is a public school boy—albeit from a minor public school—and an Oxbridge graduate, although his university is only alluded to as the University. The novel focuses on his quest for authentic identity, which involves him deliberately shedding his middle-class background and entering a series of professions such as window cleaner, transport driver for new vehicles, drug smuggler, hospital orderly, chauffeur, club bouncer, and, finally, writer for radio comedy show. He takes on these occupations to repudiate his gender destiny. Each of these professions, in picaresque fashion, forms a discrete episode; the novel surveys different levels of English society through the lens of Lumley’s shifting masculinity. The novel ends with Lumley abandoning any hope of an isolated masculine existence, and reentering to the bourgeois world of ambition and money. In its protagonist’s rebellion from, and inevitable return to, the bourgeois fold, Hurry on Down is indebted to George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying. In fact, Wain has indicated that this novel was an homage to Orwell’s work.
The critique of suburbia kick-starts the narrative, and Lumley’s hated future sister-in-law, Edith, and her husband, Robert Tharkles, embody the suburban life. Indeed, a confrontation in their kitchen precipitates his rejection of his gender destiny. Lumley’s meeting with them about his prospects and his intentions with regard to marriage occurs during a moment of postwar middle-class domesticity, as Robert “helps” Edith with the washing up. Robert’s helping with the domestic chores is shown to be a sign of both emasculation and postwar change. The narrative marks this scene as symptomatic of postwar egalitarianism, since the disappearance of domestic help, a prewar staple in middle-class life, was seen as a massive upheaval of the cultural, domestic, and socioeconomic landscape.17 What Lumley perceives as his failing in the eyes of the Tharkles is that “he did not wear a uniform. … In their world, it was everyone’s first duty to wear a uniform that announced his status, his calling and his ambitions. … The conventions of clothing saw to it that everyone wore their identity card where it could be seen” (16). Not only does Lumley dismiss the expectations of his classed gender role, but he also rejects the dominant vision of society itself, peopled by a series of types who can be identified and slotted according to their sartorial choices, which, in turn, are determined by their professions. It is a vicious, circumscribed world. The idiom here, as focalized through Lumley, is of a constrained and soul-crushing postwar welfare state: of uniforms, status, and identity cards. The social order is measured, marked, and classified. It is a world driven by statistics, security, and predetermined ends, and one that has no place for Lumley’s apparent free-thinking unconventionality. He throws the dirty washing-up water at the Tharkles to terminate the conversation and his relationship with Sheila. The narrative could not be more heavy-handed about Lumley’s rejection of postwar middle-class domesticity—enacted, after all, in the kitchen, the center of the home—of his responsibilities as breadwinner, husband, and head of household. These are not merely bourgeois expectations; they are articulated with the institutionalized duties of individual, gendered citizenship in a new collectivized welfare system.
This desire to be free of classed expectations and the constraints of citizenship is integral to Lumley’s desire to find himself as a man. Indeed, in each discrete episode he is reborn into a new profession, and each time his profession and hierarchical location alter his sense of personhood. What remains consistent through different professional escapades is his painful awareness of when and how he does not behave like a gentleman. The empire is immanent in this narrative, present in the protagonist’s struggles with and against an inherited and inculcated gentlemanliness. In his autobiographical essay “Along the Tightrope,” Wain claims that in Hurry on Down, he was concerned with “the young man’s problem of how to adapt to ‘life,’ in the sense of an order external to himself, already there when he appeared on the scene, and not necessarily disposed to welcome him” (101). This statement of intent actually works on several different levels, and not just the obvious sense of society being unwelcoming to the young graduate. On one level it is a precise statement about Charles Lumley’s discomfort with his class and gender legacy: the problem of how to reconfigure masculinity in the new phase of a faltering ineffectual Edwardian haute bourgeois gentlemanliness. This reworking of masculinity occurs within what the novel refers to as the “corporate state.” The narrative’s obsessive focus on “types” and “uniforms” reflects the idiom of the expert categorization of welfare governmentality as it enacts its policies at the collective and individual level. So the young Lumley’s journey to “adapt” to an “order external to himself” refers to his desperate attempts not just to repudiate entrenched gentlemanliness but also to make himself anew outside the reaches of the corporate state that classifies everyone and everything.
Lumley believes that liberal education and middle-class rigidity have shaped him, resulting in a warped and timid masculinity, a proleptic Hugh Grant figure. This is a far cry from the original ideals of ethical and ethno-national code of manliness: “His sharp edges, on the other hand, had been systematically blunted by his upbringing and education. From the nursery onwards, he had been taught to modulate the natural loudness of his voice, to efface himself in every possible way, to defer to others. And this was the result! He had been equipped with an upbringing devised to meet the needs of a more fortunate age, and then thrust into the jungle of the nineteen-fifties” (25). The traits that he possesses as a consequence of his education and class background—deference, hesitancy, blunted edges—are the characteristics that P. G. Wodehouse consistently parodied and caricatured in his novels.18 Imperial (gentle)manliness that began as a test of moral, physical, and psychological strength that produced such fictional ideals as Tom Brown and Hugh Drummond had morphed into a retiring ineffectuality bound by paralyzing rules. Charles Lumley’s frustration with this genteel and overly sophisticated version of a more vigorous and rigorous earlier manliness is more than palpable. He is constrained by his upbringing from “mak[ing] an exhibition of himself ” and has to break “the sacred law of self-effacing, mute compliance” in order to get served at a boisterous working-class pub (27). His gentlemanly legacy fails to measure up against the sharp aggressive masculinity of the lower classes that surrounds him. While his gender and cultural inheritance might have been an adequate, and indeed a superlative, measure of a man in a “more fortunate age,” or rather an age where money, empire, and hierarchy were firmly in place, that is no longer the case.
However, even as he is aware of how moribund Edwardian gentlemanliness has become, Lumley, from his vantage point of post-imperial socialist liberalism (though he clearly has problems with the state) condemns the oppressive inequality that structures bourgeois masculinity. In an argument that ends in a punch-up with his college archenemy, Burge, he dares to speak of the structural inequalities that make middle-class manliness possible. Burge, on discovering that Lumley works as a hospital orderly, accuses him of being a traitor to his class, because “there are some classes of society that are born and bred to it” (175). He speaks the language of the public school boy: an associative system that equates “rugger” players with “decent blokes” who follow the codes of conduct laid down for good heterosexual middle-class men and never “let the side down.” Lumley sees this as the discourse of the ossified imperial hierarchy. He abjures the rhetoric and refuses to perform his given role: “And I don’t want your silly Edwardian notions of an upper class Herrenvolk thrown up at me either. By ‘letting the side down’ all you mean is that the nigger-driving Sahib oughtn’t to do anything that reveals that he shares a common humanity with the niggers he drives. That idea is dead everywhere in practice, and it only survives in theory in the minds of people like you” (175). In an Orwellian move, his refusal to conform to his manly duty equals his disavowal of class and race hierarchy. In effect, like Larkin’s Englishman in “Dockery and Son,” Lumley’s renunciation of middle-class masculinity is entangled with his rejection of the frames that shaped and defined England itself. Lumley’s frustration with haute-bourgeois manliness, then, is two-fold: on the one hand, it is an effete mutation of an earlier functional manliness, but on the other hand, both his moribund version and the original virile version are underpinned by racist and classist ideology.
Lumley’s conflicted relationship with his gentlemanly legacy is further complicated by the fact that his disavowal of Burge’s racism and classism is ultimately located in his decency. Lumley is the postwar decent man or the post-gentleman. Decency, as I examined in detail with regard to Orwell’s re-signification and privileging of the term, was gentlemanly disinterestedness expanded to fit Orwell’s egalitarian principles. He extrapolated the gentlemanly trait to float free from its imperial gentlemanly, bourgeois moorings in which it was ultimately rooted. To recapitulate, for Orwell, and for the generation he influenced, decency stood for simplicity, honesty, cleanliness, respectability, stoicism, and grit. More precisely, these virtues are embedded within a middle-class ideal of gentlemanliness carefully inculcated in the nation’s public schools. For Orwell’s disciples, the Angries, it signified masculinity, forthrightness, common sense, empirical language, and heteronormativity. Orwellian decency is key to masculine stylization of the Angries, as evidenced here in Lumley. Lumley’s decency is outraged by Burge’s adherence to outmoded and patently regressive ideology, especially in a time of accepted welfare state democratization. Lumley, then, as post-gentleman, simultaneously rejects a manliness that he cannot escape and extrapolates traits from it to shape his apparently more democratic masculine identity.
Lumley’s attempts to forge a “neutral” democratic and authentic manhood result in his quest. His desire to be individuated, to be separate from the herd, and be a man leads him to occupations that lie outside the range of bourgeois respectability. It gives him an illusion of freedom and allows the narrative to traipse through the various strata of English society (mostly English, because he does briefly venture into Wales). Lumley’s take on people, jobs, and places foregrounds the idea of everyone being a “type” even as his adventures indicate an escape from the oppression of classification. While Lumley works as a car transporter–cum–drug dealer and chauffeur, among other things, it is his escapades within the working class that produce the most radical alterations to his ideas of selfhood. As a window washer and hospital orderly, he (correctly) believes that he is perceived differently, especially by women, and he feels unconstrained by any ideals of chivalry, as the concept, he believes, is quintessentially bourgeois, alien to working-class masculinity. In his confrontation with the landlady of the barn where he ultimately decides to stay with Froulish and Betty (caricatures of the aspiring Modernist writer and his bohemian girlfriend), he feels none of his earlier fear in the presence of the “toothless virago,” because he no “longer came from the class that treated women with deference” (Wain 48). He believes he is now decisive and forceful, and no longer marked by his earlier diffident self-effacement and chivalric tooth-lessness.
Lumley’s perennial self-consciousness regarding his refashioned working-class masculinity only points to the deep encoding of his bourgeois ideals. At every instance that he thinks he is a new man not “endlessly moulded and shaped” by “his upbringing,” he consciously evokes his former bourgeois self in order to measure the gap between what he used to be, and his current, apparently more uncomplicated masculinity (25–28). Lumley is convinced that because of his commitment to physical and “useful” labor, and his rejection of bourgeois values with the donning of working-class apparel, he can no longer be shamed or humiliated, since shame is obviously the flip side of the respectability that he has happily shelved. Lumley’s most sincere celebrations of working-class life and masculine identity are rife with middle-class perceptions and stereotypes.
In the absence of an imperial middle-class purpose, which for middle-class men of a more “fortunate age” was governance, Lumley elevates the antithesis of gentlemanly service—direct, manual labor—to a privileged position. In a post-imperial England, Lumley’s descent to the working class is a means of acquiring the authenticity that he feels is no longer available to him as an educated middle-class Englishman. His quest for manly integrity, much like Gordon Comstock’s before him, means the necessary abandoning of all class signifiers. He congratulates himself on not confusing his quest for an authentic self with a false desire to be “at one” with the “People” like the “expensive young men of the Thirties” (37), since that was determined by the deluded desire to privilege the working class, and not a quest for masculine autonomy. He believes that he is “out in the world learning the truth about things” (176). Once again, the narrative invokes the imperial theater where Englishmen just a generation earlier had gone to learn the truth about themselves and the world, while calling attention to Lumley’s shrunken, national horizons.
In what appears to be contradictory to the notion of autonomy, working-class life is also, according to Lumley’s extraordinarily jaundiced and romanticized eye, a “safe” haven. Being a working man means “nothing ever happened … nothing except things people could understand. No problems, no art, no discussions and perplexities, just birth, death, eating, resting” (190). And yet this life is a “safe” haven because it is the one that, according to Lumley, allows men freedom from the intrusive workings of the state and affective constrictions of middle-class expectations. Lumley’s interpretation of working-class masculinity is simplistic and condescending, but it seems to be one to which he is sincerely committed, and for a longer period than any of his other occupationally determined identities, such as thuggish, laconic criminal or vacillating, silent chauffeur.
The contradictions within Lumley foreground the sedimented layers of masculine stylizations through which Lumley attempts to produce a coherent sense of self. Lumley works within and simultaneously repudiates Edwardian gentlemanliness; he also attempts to connect, undo, and rework gentlemanly traits with working-class masculinity while retaining all his bourgeois prejudices. He works through these antithetical masculinities within the institutionalized gender expectations of the social insurance state. This tortuous quest of masculine self is indelibly tied to his relationship with women.
Lumley’s process of masculine self-definition is dependent on the many women whom he interacts with, loves, rejects, or dismisses.19 The women in the narrative—Rosa, Veronica, even Betty and the landlady—are constitutive to his masculine quest. The often misogynistic narrative description of Lumley’s relationships with these women reveals both the narrator’s and the protagonist’s anxieties about the shifts in women’s roles, sexualities, entry into the public domain, and the concomitant alterations in “femininities.” At the same time, it focuses on how Lumley perceives the women in question as extensions of his sense of current masculine self or the self he desires in the future.
Lumley’s interactions with women are central to his understanding of himself as a man. This is demonstrated by the fact that his continuous alcohol-induced rebirths are necessitated by his falling in love with or rejecting women in different class strata. As mentioned above, Lumley decides to abandon his expected trajectory, despite being in love with Sheila, because he imagines her not as an individual but as an embodiment of the life he despises. In fact, the trope of women as supplements is a narrative feature that is reiterated fairly consistently. As Lumley envisions her in the projected future, she is “of a piece with the prim, hedged gravel from which she flowered” (20). Since she never enters the narrative, she is only ever an extension of Lumley’s self, gradually becoming the constricted, uniform, landscaped lawn of a suburban home. Sheila as the suburban home and as a type of the suburban woman rather than an individual sets the tone for how Lumley sees women.
The “types” of men are products of their occupations: Ern, Lumley’s mysterious partner in the window-cleaning business, is a taciturn, brutal, fair man who is later revealed to be a criminal in hiding, while Arthur Blearney with his easygoing affability and unplaceable accent owns a chain of slightly shady entertainment concerns. The women, on the other hand, though they are immediately slotted into “types” by both Lumley and the narrative’s obsessively classificatory impulse, are categorized in terms of appearance, sartorial choices, and sexuality, not to mention their potential for marriage—in this the novel seems to follow governmental discourse in its determination of women’s role and citizenship. The narrative classifies as “bovine,” “unkempt,” “stupid,” and a “slut” Froulish’s passive girlfriend, who actually finances his lifestyle as “a man of letters” (46–50). Rosa, the working-class woman with whom Lumley “walks out” and intends to marry, is “slightly quaint,” possessing “animal instincts,” “something without individuality, but still powerful” (180–82).
For Lumley, Rosa, like Sheila, is not fully realized as a person, but signifies access to a life that Lumley feels is appropriate for him, remaking him as the man who is “unnoticed,” “free,” and simple (187). She becomes the force whose “wonted blend of strength and repose” “draw[s] and guid[es] him” (181) into the safety of the working class, away from the net of corporate life. Rosa is the gateway to simplicity and mindlessness, where his world and ambitions could be contained within a “stuffy, cozy room” (187), enabling masculine autonomy within the domestic space. In his consideration of her as the embodiment of home, as wife and mother, Lumley projects himself into his working-class future as the patriarch and head of household with complete control over his domestic domain.
If Rosa is the romanticized working-class ideal that will allow him to slide into another self, Veronica is the upper-middle-class yet classless ingénue that is apparently more suited to him. She is a beautiful, sophisticated cipher, an unattainable mistress to a wealthy, older man. Much like Christine Callaghan, the object of Jim Dixon’s lust and adoration in Lucky Jim, Veronica first appears on the arm of another man “to whom she belongs.” The narrator casts Veronica as the perfect love interest, whose personality changes to fit the man she loves, thus making her the ultimate, desirable woman. In Veronica’s case, her occupation is to be Roderick’s mistress—charming, beautiful, and distant. Within the narrative structure, again as in the case of Lucky Jim, and the later Room at the Top by John Braine, this upper-class, mysterious blank of a young woman becomes the means through which the protagonist finds himself and his place in society, though in this and Braine’s novel, it comes at the cost of freedom and integrity. It is love for her (brought on primarily by her beauty and unattainability) that pushes Lumley to abandon his apparent pursuit of individuality in non-bourgeois realms. He realizes that “he would commit any crime … steal, kill, maim, or ruin the lives of people” for “even a remote chance of possessing her” (109). He does, indeed, morph from simple car-transporter to transporter–drug dealer in an effort to make enough money to take her out in style. Though the relationship is abruptly terminated when he discovers that she is Roderick’s mistress and not his niece, Lumley also becomes aware that he cannot marry Rosa, because he is still in love with Veronica.
In the final pages of the novel there is a sharp turn in how Veronica is characterized. Lumley reenters the middle class, albeit in a new and strange profession as a writer for a radio program, and Veronica reappears to revive their relationship. While Lumley’s powerful infatuation rendered him almost idiotically pubescent, in this moment of reconciliation he seems downright cynical. As she details the reasons to give their relationship another try, he interprets her argument as “You’re rich now, you’re doing as well as Roderick. And you’re fifteen years younger” (251). Veronica is shown as self-serving and opportunistic, and yet both the narrative and Lumley do acknowledge that, pragmatically speaking, she’s right: the obstacles of poverty and Veronica’s lover have been miraculously removed to allow their relationship the freedom to flourish in the open. While earlier she is described in the most ridiculously clichéd ways, since the reader perceives her through Lumley’s lovelorn eyes, at the end we are suddenly made aware of Veronica’s unconventionality: she does not take the conformist route and get married to a Robert Tharkles. Even though she was with an older, wealthier man, she makes the choice to “go around” with a man who is without prospects and who is mysterious and secretive. Though she is sophisticated, the narrative deliberately leaves her class background ambiguous. She is, like Lumley after his cross-class travels, classless.
Indeed, the end of the novel reveals that the two are perfectly matched: neither Lumley nor Veronica conforms to “types.” They choose their own rebellious trajectories, rejecting marriage and a decent middle-class job. They live just outside the borders of conventions, cynical, clear-eyed, and making their own way through that minefield of norms of love in the middle classes: “They looked at each other, baffled and inquiring” (252). On the one hand, Veronica’s suddenly self-possessed and interesting personality functions as a complement to Lumley’s newly acquired confidence and stability, making her the appropriate partner for Lumley in this new avatar of successful, classless, yet bourgeois man. On the other hand, Veronica as nonconformist gives a brief glimpse of Veronica as agent of her own unconventional journey, as she too repudiates the gendered narratives of her class and determines her identity through trial and error.
This leads to the issue of narrative investment in patriarchal modes of containing women’s sexuality, especially as it presses up against masculine assertion and autonomy. It is precisely because of their adherence to patriarchal structures that the narrator and the protagonist realize that changing attitudes toward gender norms and women’s sexuality affects masculine control and authority, already revealed as being fragile and unstable. The narrator and the protagonist consistently and coercively read women like Betty and Veronica into the patriarchal norms of morality and modest womanhood, rendering them vulnerable dependents and victims rather than agents. The narrative’s characterization of both women in terms of their deviations from sexuality, and their relationship to men and/or Lumley, reveals pervasive masculine anxieties. Even Rosa, who is shown as a passive embodiment of the working-class home, actively crosses class lines in her decision to be with Lumley. Though he is a hospital orderly, it is evident from his accent and his demeanor that he is not of the same class, a difference of which she is very aware. Rosa’s choice of Lumley makes her individualistic and desirous of social mobility and cultural capital as the wife of an educated middle-class man. This agency is especially noteworthy considering how the narrative is at pains to describe her as inextricably intertwined with the working-class life that Lumley wants.
Meanwhile, Betty, whom both the narrator and Lumley dislike for her bohemianism and absolute lack of femininity (revealing their own heteronormative bourgeois attitudes about women), is noteworthy precisely for her abjuration of bourgeois femininity (she wears slacks!) and sexual mores. Though she accommodates Froulish’s every whim, she does so because of her belief in his value as an artist. As mentioned earlier, her commitment to art and Froulish leads her to exchange sex for money and thereby materially secure his freedom to write. Her attitude toward sex is clinical and pragmatic, whereas Lumley, reading her within the frame of bourgeois sexual morality, sees her as “sluttish.” In her behavior she does not give any indication that she subscribes to these notions of womanly modesty. Sexuality, especially as it is owned and wielded by women like Betty and Veronica, renders them particularly threatening, and Lumley’s anxiety exhibits masculine fears of losing control of women’s sexuality and dependency. The narrative containment also works within welfare governmental practices that, though they are clearly designed to assuage the lives of women in the state, do so within the “natural,” patriarchal, and heteronormative structure that underpins the Beveridge Report, where women are frequently read as wives, mothers, and dependents. Nevertheless, these “types” of classed womanhood match the various “types” of manhood and call attention to the fact that the two are constitutively linked. Lumley’s journey reveals that heterosexual masculine stylizations are yoked to the shifts in ideas regarding women’s agency and sexuality. The narrative’s compulsion toward “types” and its documentation of English societal stratification as it tracks Lumley’s engagement is connected directly to the form of the novel.
The cultural turn to comprehensively map the nation led to a revival of the picaresque. A new breed of writers focused on the picaresque to meditate upon the intimate relationship between the changeable rogue (usually male) protagonist and the changing nation. The quintessential picaresque trait, the journey, foregrounds the male protagonist’s endeavor to remake his gender identity to fit the changing nation. The form explores the reshaping of English masculinity and the reorientation of English manly ideals necessitated by the post-imperial state and welfare structure of Britain. In addition to Hurry on Down, many other novels owed much to the genre, including Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net (1954), Thomas Hinde’s Happy as Larry (1958), John Braine’s Room at the Top (1957), and even Amis’s Lucky Jim, which is usually read as a “campus novel.”20
V. S. Pritchett, in keeping with the auto-ethnographic impulse, not only addressed the new hero in his review of contemporary fiction but also made explicit the connection between the new crop of postwar English novelists and the nation. He noted the sudden reemergence of the picaresque form with its quintessential elements: the novelistic description of the “low view of life”; the isolated, ambivalently decent, selfish protagonists; and the meandering through different “conceptions” of society. He also pointed out that an appropriation of the picaresque and the novelists’ self-conscious affiliation with Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding was indicative of “class revolution” or the welfare state paradigms of these writers and their protagonists: “They discerned that the picaresque novelists were products of revolution; [that] they were engaged in adventure; and that the modern adventure was a rambling journey from one conception of society to another. … I am not saying that the limitless world of Defoe is available to the modern English novelists, for it is not; but there is no doubt that the young novelists of today have a similar ‘low’ view of life, and a sense of being alone and out for themselves” (38). Pritchett’s description of the realist neo-picaresque carries an implicit allusion to the imperial beyond, though his categorization is framed strictly within domestic socioeconomic changes wrought by welfare state consensus. In other words, he alludes to the “limitless[ness]” of Defoe’s world where protagonists can migrate to the colonies, if England cannot accommodate their aspirations and rogueries, as opposed to the more circumscribed spaces of postwar England available to the postwar picaro.
The picaresque, as a mixed form, is a notoriously tricky one to pin down. In each of its manifestations it mutates to accommodate a different set of national-literary conventions and socioeconomic structures.21 Richard Bjornson defines the picaresque as a form that employs a loose “episodic, open-ended narrative” to show a clever and adaptable lower-class protagonist as he/she journeys “through space, time, and various predominantly corrupt social milieux” (4). The postwar neo-picaresque contains each of these quintessential elements, while adhering to documentary-style realism in its attempt to classify and capture the insular welfare state. The postwar picaresque invokes the expansive horizons of imperial romance, of going native, as well as possible limitless options available to a rogue on the road in the picaresque novels of yore, just as it shuts down these possibilities.
Building upon Pritchett and Bjornson’s observations, I argue that the form of the picaresque, particularly in Hurry on Down, intertwines the narrative of the Englishman with that of the nation. The following pages do not prove that the novel is a picaresque, which it most self-consciously is, but rather unfold the points of connection between masculinity, the picaresque, and the welfare state through an exegesis of various aspects of the narrative: its episodic plot, sexual politics, focus on “types,” emphasis on luck, and the various forms of masculinities.
The picaresque novel in its sixteenth-through early nineteenth-century variations, whether in Spain, France, or England, is an “expression of sink-or-swim individualism” (Alter 89). Not surprisingly, it served a similar purpose in the postwar moment, as an index to the social and gender crisis, producing a narrative machinery that allowed for a meditation upon that crisis. The form lends itself to telescopic views of various social classes as “types,” which is also how the categorizing practices of welfare-state expert culture produce the citizen-subject. The novel form shows both Lumley and the English nation’s struggles within inherited contours, while also tracking Lumley’s crisis as intertwined with a changing England.
The important points of the picaresque form—the episodic plot structure, the alienated, rootless male protagonist who tries to find his niche in a changing post-imperial England, the different layers of society with its attendant types, the insouciance and luck of the young man “out for himself”—correspond to the predicament of gentlemanliness. The episodic shift from milieu to milieu that produces a sense of “fragmentation and chaos” parallels the uncertainty of the Englishman and not just the chaos of society (Miller 14). To clarify, each discrete narrative episode that describes a pocket of welfare state England also reveals the picaro’s alienation from that particular niche. Lumley rejects middle-class professionalism and domesticity as emasculating and inauthentic. He descends into the working and artisan classes, but is unable or unwilling to integrate fully, always in search of “neutrality.” As he looks for a “safe haven” to be a man, he remains discontented. He is unable to appropriately inhabit the masculine identities that he has so deliberately searched out, because the Edwardian bourgeois manliness that “moulds” him continues to determine his attitude to working-class and lower-class masculinities.
The neo-picaresque, like the old picaresque, focuses on manly activities—fighting, employment, physical labor, and, most important, sex—that it self-consciously borrows from Henry Fielding’s adaptations of the genre. Lumley’s repudiation of Edwardian codes of manliness necessarily include his renunciation of manly ideals of chivalry and sexual behavior—a point that he emphasizes in his attitude toward the aggressive landlady. The neo-picaresque illustrates the reshaping of English masculinity as it attempts to recapture the easy, frank sexuality of a Tom Jones after the rigorous sexual ethics of hegemonic gentlemanliness. And yet, despite some spirited attempts at repudiating residual gentlemanly standards, the postwar picaro is unable to escape those inscribed sexual codes. Lumley might attempt to shed his chivalry and adopt an amoral attitude toward sex, but he is nevertheless shocked that his friend’s wife supports them through prostitution, and he is very aware of his own departures from the chivalric ideal when he attempts to dismiss the landlady. Sexual politics becomes the arena in which chivalry and sexual modesty clash against their postwar obverse, self-interest. While the male protagonist attempts to engage in a self-interested pursuit of sex, his encoding within chivalric and bourgeois codes disrupts this emphasis on self-interest. For instance, Lumley returns to the middle classes because of his desire to woo and marry Veronica. His inherited bourgeois chivalry prevents him from pursuing a merely self-interested, sexual relationship with her, or, more tellingly, with the willing Rosa. Lumley’s failed quest for masculine spontaneity and sexual self-interest reveals his simultaneous inscription and distance from his inherited gender identity.
The picaresque form also enables the male protagonist to explore any and all avenues of development. In his examination of the elements of the picaresque in novels of the twentieth century, Robert Alter points out that “in an age of compartmentalization and specialization … the picaroon is an individual who can do and be whatever he wants” (123). The picaro defines himself through a conflicted relationship with external social pressures. The picaresque does so through the episodic peregrinations (among other things) of the male protagonist. In Hurry on Down, Lumley escapes the routinized homogeneity of postwar English bourgeoisie and embarks on a series of adventures that would not fall within the purview of respectable professions. His adventures function as a medium for an anthropological study of English class system and subcultures, but, more important, as a circumscribed, insular theater for a play with masculine affects different from, yet always attached to, gentlemanliness.
In the broadest terms, what Richard Bjornson points out as the “picaresque myth” functions as a possible “paradigm for the individual’s unavoidable encounter with external reality and the act of cognition which precedes and shapes his attempt to cope with a dehumanizing society” (11). Wain’s picaresque novel speaks to the specific demands of the social insurance framework of the welfare state. The protagonist’s struggle to come to terms with the new governmental modalities of gendered citizenship are intricately connected to the conceptual shifts in the nation-state, which the formal traits of the realist neo-picaresque spotlight. The picaresque becomes the most appropriate form to explore the push-and-pull of the corporate state and citizen, or the collective and the individual. Lumley is on a quest to reject the constrictions of the welfare state—that is, the beneficent corporate collective paradigm against, and through, which he tries to demonstrate his masculine individuality. Within the expectations of the welfare state socioeconomic structure, he chooses not to fulfill his gendered responsibilities of citizenship, of being husband, breadwinner, and father, which are fundamental to the smooth running of the collectivized state. In disavowing them, he disrupts the give-and-take of the individual-collective that constitutes the social-insurance welfare state. He rejects society, tries several classed modes of being a man, and returns to “corporate life” in a “modern” middle-class profession. He comes to terms with the corporate state, but first he has to journey through the nation to arrive at or even temporarily settle into a gendered, classed identity.
The picaresque narrative does not conclude; it “just stops”—as the narrative in Hurry on Down points out in its meta-textual reference to Moll Flanders—with Lumley’s signing a lucrative three-year contract for a comedic radio program (Wain 250). He enters the middle classes once again, but in a new profession, empty of all the class baggage usually associated with bourgeois professions. Indeed, the show itself is such a pastiche that it is not locatable within any known models: it is a sketch comedy that relies on the telling of humorous anecdotes and jokes that are new, already extant in culture, repackaged, and/or adapted for an unspecified demographic. It fits squarely within the interpretation of broadcasting as a democratizing medium: it is classless, modern, and new, unifying while it also appeals to an individuated consumer. Most tellingly, it uses humor that both reflects and refracts national culture, bringing together jokes that are found in pubs, street corners, clubs, and homes. The show is quite like Lumley himself, who has lived through and experienced the many dimensions of a contained national life and has emerged into a neutral, apparently, classless bourgeois masculine self (although it is definitely inflected by the residues of gentlemanliness). Similarly, the profession he has entered and the radio for which he is a script/joke writer are emblematic of a new neutral, democratic nation.
Lumley’s consistent fortuitous turns, one of which lands him the lucrative job at the end of the novel, are integral to the picaresque myth. Since Gil Blas, one of the quintessential picaresque traits is the picaroon who is a “happily protected creature” (Alter 34). The picaro by dint of his wits, enterprise, and a generous dose of good luck always manages to land on his feet. The signature picaresque element of luck implicitly addresses the safety net of the welfare state. The series of novels that constitute the Angry Young Man canon all have extraordinarily lucky protagonists, most notably, of course, Lucky Jim, so lucky that it had to be written into the title. Luck is tied to the state’s democratic principles and to its economic net of social insurance. In the case of Lumley, for instance, while his relationships with individuals are what get him one lucky break after another (another aspect of the picaresque and the welfare state: the forging of a disparate and natural community), the state framework intervenes at a very crucial point in the narrative. When he is on the run from the law, he is pushed from a moving vehicle by a fellow criminal. He suffers extreme injuries and wakes up in a hospital. While it is not made explicit, the state-mandated health insurance policy allows Lumley to avail himself of treatment options and a place in the public ward until his recovery (38). The very “corporate life” that he rails against saves his life. The element of luck here is the material fact of government-funded public health insurance. What Bruce Robbins refers to as the patronage of the welfare state, albeit an “impersonal, institutional one,” is one that sustains the narrative of luck in the postwar picaresque (196).
Finally, Lumley’s journey depicts insular England as it struggles into its new self-contained form during the socioeconomic alterations of the welfare state and after the expansiveness of empire. Lumley’s escape from his gender code and his being “out for himself” mirror England’s shedding of imperial skin and a concomitant attempt to reshape itself within its island borders, disentangling itself from the rhetoric of British universalism and attempting to rejuvenate a national domestic Englishness. Indeed, Lumley’s return to the fold as joke writer emphasizes this sense of limited but fresh horizons. The picaro’s journey in these postwar novels does not end in the endless possibilities of a country squire’s life and wealth as in the Fielding picaresque, but rather in the modernized, corporatized version of a clerical hack—a cube-dweller. On the one hand, being a media professional spells potential wealth and comfort within the new welfare state, but on the other, it is a far cry from the masculine vigor and authority in search of which Lumley had originally set out. This sense of containment is evidenced in his thoughts on his new life: “Here was his cage, a fine new one, air conditioned, clean, commanding a good view, mod. cons., main services” (Wain 251). Wain is fully aware of the final sense of containment, as the original title of the novel was Born in Captivity. While success in an earlier imperial moment would have ended in roguish protagonists lighting out for the imperial periphery as bureaucrat, officer, or adventurer in postwar England, they can only hope for middle-class comforts and a delimited, professional life—a life based on trafficking in images without the ethos of imperial masculine authenticity.
Like the England symbolized by Larkin’s personae and Charles Lumley—as well as these characters themselves—Ian Fleming’s James Bond occupies the middle space of transition, as Englishmen move from the apparently gendered disinterestedness of imperialism to a more contained domestic, welfare state identity. Since James Bond emerged at the same time, with the same explosive energy and sexual virility as Jim Dixon, Charles Lumley, and Jimmy Porter, it is possible to read Bond as one of these new men. Ian Fleming, fully cognizant of this, and not a little displeased, explicitly removed himself and his creation from the phenomenon of the Angry Young Man, stating, “I am not an angry, young, or even middle-aged man” (“How to Write” 58).
Despite Fleming’s disavowal, Bond does fit in the same paradigm, as both he and the Angry protagonists are connected in, and through, the inherited ideals of gentlemanliness. The primary difference is that while gentlemanliness exists as a legible and inescapable script for the Angries, the James Bond figure and spy series deliberately traffic in both the ethos and the image of the ideal, not least because for Bond the world is still an imperial theater, though British imperial power is in decline. Even as they do so, both reveal the contradictions and tensions inherent in an imperial gentleman qua welfare state professional as he saves postwar England and the world in a time of decolonization and the waning of British power.22 Fleming’s Bond is, to quote Kingsley Amis, “a medium-grade civil servant,” professional, neurotic, occasionally careless, fallible, and an imperialist fantasy.23 As Michael Denning has pointed out in his succinct summary of multiple meanings and identities ascribed to the character, Bond is a “contested figure who has been accented a number of ways” (“Licensed to Look” 58). He has been read as a modern “hero of the corporation” (Comentale 3), the “perfect pipe dream for the organization man” (Symons 246), a traditional anachronistic throwback, a clubland amateur who defends the nation out of gentlemanly patriotism and play, the consummate professional shaped by the service, and the archetypal playboy (Hines 90).
Bond has been read in these myriad, often conflicting ways, because he emerges from and reflects a transitional moment in the nation’s history. More specifically, as a figure that embodies this moment of national shift, he comprises both the gentlemanly traditions and the traits that repudiate and adapt those gendered values. The contemporaneous reviewer Simon Raven characterized Bond and the Bond novels as a visible sign of the old and the new, tradition and modernity, empire and welfare state, combining contemporary ideas of speed and controlled savagery “with the more spacious and gracious atmosphere of old style international intrigue—monocles, medals and milordos” (695). The changing nation is visible in the metonymic figure of Bond, who embodies apparently contradictory stylizations of masculinity that signify the past and present. In what follows, I foreground, and press upon, the overlapping of different masculine stylizations in Bond—of gentlemanliness and classless expert professional—through an analysis of the centrality and mutation of the traits of self-restraint, governance, and chivalry in two early novels, Casino Royale (1953) and Moonraker (1955).
Casino Royale, the first novel in the Bond series, is about a high-stakes game of baccarat with national and international consequences. Beginning in medias res, the novel springs a fully formed Bond into Britain’s collective consciousness. Bond wins the game, is tortured for the money, loses his sense of purpose, recovers, and falls in love with his fellow professional Vesper Lynd. He is well on his way to proposing marriage when she commits suicide, leaving a suicide letter exposing herself as a double agent, which prompts Bond’s return to cold-hearted misogyny and commitment to queen and country. Moonraker (1955) is the only novel in which Bond operates within the national borders of the United Kingdom, or, more pointedly, England. In Moonraker, Bond saves England when he unmasks Hugo Drax, the private entrepreneur responsible for the Moonraker missile that will render Britain invulnerable, as a German neo-Nazi who is out to destroy London with his missile. Bond, once again, works with a beautiful competent professional, Gala Brand. Brand, who is a Scotland Yard officer, is the lynchpin and agent of the mission’s success. She also does not succumb to Bond’s irresistible charm, returning to marry a fellow Scotland Yard inspector. These two novels are symptomatic of the series in their representation of Bond as a threshold figure and yet anomalous in the series in their treatment of Bond’s relationship with women.
Bond’s embodiment of two seemingly antithetical styles of masculinity, his ability to pass with ease between a hierarchical imperialist world of gentlemanly entitlement and a classless, meritocratic world of professional expertise, is evident in the way he moves between the traditional clubland denoted by Blades and the Moonraker project, the symbol of modernity in Moonraker.24 Indeed, as post-gentleman, he simultaneously contains the dominant, residual, and emergent styles of masculinity and hence exemplifies the nation-state that looks back into a distant past and forward into modernity. Unlike Lumley and Dixon’s masculinities, which are defined by their struggles, Bond’s is determined by his ability to mine, or rather pick and choose, which stylization he will adopt according to his professional situation.
Bond’s entrance into, and participation at, a card game at Blades (supposed to be Boodle’s, a signifier for London’s elite gentleman’s clubs) at M’s behest is a perfect example of his ability to pass. M brings Bond in because the chairman of the club suspects the nation’s darling, Hugo Drax, Moonraker’s founder, of cheating at cards and violating an unwritten gentlemanly code of honor. The importance of this code is obvious when the reader is told that the club membership has only two requirements: that a member must “behave like a gentleman and he must be able to ‘show’ 100,000 pounds” (Moonraker 29).25 Drax has the latter but most emphatically does not do the former. Indeed, he is described as a “bullying, boorish, loud-mouthed vulgarian” (39). The plot of the novel is kicked into action because M, Bond, and the gentlemanly Chairman do not approve of Drax’s flouting of this honor code. Bond himself is welcomed into the heart of the club, a metaphor for imperialist England, as an instrument. His function is to preserve the status quo by unmasking the “new money” interloper and saving the institution from scandal. Though he matches M in taste and wins the approval of the steward, the porter, and other club servants (no mean task since their feudal investment in the club makes them preservers of the myth of Englishness), Bond is an outsider or, more accurately, a threshold figure—who can straddle the boundary line between the gentleman and the ungentlemanly professional man (like Hugo Drax, in fact). It is important to recognize that Bond is not a gentleman professional, evident in the way he engages with the history, elegance, and architecture of the club; he does not belong but appreciates the institution’s place in England’s cultural, historical imaginary. He recognizes that “the elegance of the room invested each [member] with a kind of aristocracy” (52). For Bond as well as the narrative, the club space produces its members as the English elite, remaking them into a “corporate display of hegemonic masculinity,” or ideal Englishmen who rule the world even as individually they fail to live up to the ideal (Connell 77).
Bond, unlike Drax, can “behave like a gentleman.” He is discreet, elegant, competent, and appreciative of the good things in life, but he does not quite belong at Blades. Though the narrative allies Bond with the club, it nevertheless emphasizes the difference between Bond and the gentlemen of the club26—hence, my emphasis on Bond as someone who can effectively cross the line that delineates inside and outside. He is there in his professional capacity, as an expert card player, an expertise that he takes very seriously: just before he sets out to meet M, Bond sets aside time to practice and read up on card games and playing. He is able to confirm that Drax is cheating, and then he proceeds to cheat to teach Drax a lesson. M and the Chairman, despite being excellent players, do not possess the expertise to prove that Drax cheats, nor can they cheat to show him up. The code of the gentleman prevents them from doing so; they need to bring in someone else who will do it for them. It is through an emphasis on cheating and breaking the gentlemanly code that the narrative foregrounds Bond’s fluid traversal of the gentlemanly insider and the classless professional outsider.
The card game, then, becomes much more significant than a “private affair between men” (Moonraker 61). It becomes a struggle for the perpetuation of a sanctified hierarchical Englishness indelibly linked to the myth of gentlemanliness. The game is not between the English gentleman and the foreign boor, but rather between two similarly un-English, ungentlemanly meritocratic professionals; the difference is that one of them can appropriately perform English gentlemanliness when required. Later in the novel, Drax explains himself just as he is going to kill Bond, saying, “I knew that all I needed was money and the façade of a gentleman. Gentleman. Pfui Teufel! To me a gentleman is just someone I can take advantage of” (210). Drax, of course, cannot properly “take advantage of the gentleman,” which is why was he was a suspect. Both Bond and Drax recognize the gentleman as the heart of Englishness: Bond protects the ideal and its structuring institutions for the continued existence of the English nation/empire, while Drax understands that he must defeat “the gentleman.” The card game between Drax and Bond is one of national historical significance: it is a fight to preserve and retain the power and prestige of the gentleman and his club. The ghosts of former club members recognize this epic battle and watch Bond mete out “rough justice” to the red-haired, ape-like Drax (57, 63).
He sat back in his chair and for a moment he had the impression that there was a crowd behind him at each elbow, and that faces were peering over his shoulder, waiting to see his cards. He somehow felt that the ghosts were friendly, that they approved of the rough justice that was to be done.
He smiled as he caught himself sending this company of dead gamblers a message, that they should see that all went well. (63)
Significantly, “rough justice” here constitutes cheating, and it can only be meted out by someone who does not belong to the aristocratic and/or gentlemanly community. Bond speaks simultaneously to the imperial gentlemanliness of clubland and to the postwar professional man steeped in a new world of conspicuous consumption, and as a consequence he is neither. He is not quite a gentleman, because he practices at cheating and is brought in precisely for his expertise at not only playing but also cheating at the game. But he’s not like Drax either. If he were, he would not feel quite so at home in clubland; he certainly wouldn’t be invited and appreciated by club members, whether ghostly or alive.
Bond’s postwar public-sector professionalism emerges in the context of the rise and power of the professional in the welfare state, which, according to Harold Perkin, ensured that “human capital in the shape of the educated professional expertise devoted to society’s needs and functions was morally superior” to the “traditional landlords” and “the active capital of the owner-managing business men” (353). He goes on to elaborate that this “professional society” was “structured around career hierarchies rather than classes, one in which people find their place according to trained expertise and the service that they provide rather than the possession or lack of inherited wealth or acquired capital” (359). Bond was born into this professional moment, and he defines the problem of the bourgeois professional in the postwar consumer era. More important, he signifies the public-sector as opposed to the private-sector professional, the two primary warring factions in the socioeconomic landscape of welfare state Britain. The public sector, as a consequence of the expansion of the government, was growing during the mid-century period. It comprised the civil service, local government officers, employees of various welfare services, nationalized industries, armed forces, trade unions, and semi-autonomous nonprofit public institutions such as universities and the BBC. The private sector included the managers and professional employees of private corporations in finance, industry, banks, insurance and investment companies, newspapers, independent television companies, private airlines, and shipping companies (Perkin 399). While Perkin argues that the line between the private- and public-sector professional was a shifting one, the public-sector professions argued for the expansion of the services they provided at the expense to the taxpayer (400), while the private-sector professions predictably enough argued for freedom from taxation and state interference. The public-sector professions emphasized their commitment to social justice and the social good, even if their primary loyalty was to their profession and increasing the value of that profession. In contrast, the private-sector professions focused on autonomy.
Bond falls quite neatly within the purview of the public sector. His worries, when he is not on exotic assignments, are the quotidian worries of the quintessential “medium-grade civil servant”: “He looked at his watch. Eleven o’clock. Mondays were hell. Two days of dockets and files to plough through. And weekends were generally busy times abroad. Empty flats got burgled. People were photographed in compromising positions. … The weekly bags from Washington, Istanbul, and Tokyo would have come in and been sorted. They might hold something for him” (Moonraker 9). It is difficult to reconcile Bond, the man of action and danger, with the man who complains about the hellishness of Mondays because of innumerable dockets that he needs to work through. However, this aspect of Bond’s civil service is frequently emphasized in the early novels. In fact, the narrative informs the reader of his pay grade in the civil service (principal officer), his leave plan (“fortnight’s leave at the end of each assignment”), and his annual pay (“£1500 each year” with an additional “thousand free of tax”). With his worries about interdepartmental politics, and his belief in public service, Bond is not a company man; he is a government man (Moonraker 5–7). The precise narrative details regarding Bond’s professional civil service life follow the pattern of the office memoranda, noting the slightest bureaucratic nuance. The form replicates the content here, foregrounding the fact that he is a mid-level bureaucrat.
Indeed, Bond, the civil servant, owns nothing. Everything is an appurtenance of his government job: the books he owns, the suits he wears, the meals he consumes, and the guns he carries. His only possession is his car, and even that is maintained through governmental channels. As a member of the civil service, his expertise is valued and sustained by the taxpayer. The secret service memo that initiates Bond’s mission to play against Le Chiffre in Casino Royale makes this quite evident: “We therefore recommend that the finest gambler available to the Service should be given the necessary funds and endeavor to out-gamble the man” (13). And while Bond appreciates the professionalism of private entrepreneurs, his loyalty, respect, and devotion are entirely directed toward M and the chief of Scotland Yard as well as others of the bureaucratic ilk. In contrast to Charles Lumley, who repudiates his class destiny and the prospect of being determined by bourgeois professionalism, Bond is the exemplary professional. His belief in his own professional superiority is made possible by the vast structure of the British civil service. Bond is the exemplar of the national gendered subject determined by his profession and expertise as functionary of the state. He is not Lumley or Jim, as he does not seek to escape a professional designation and “the corporate state.”
Bond as a public service professional is the object and subject of discourses of governance and self-restraint—central tenets of gentlemanliness. Not only does he control his emotions (other than revenge and anger), but his body becomes a crucial site for the practice of restraint and governance. More important, the state controls and scrutinizes his body. The third-person narrative alerts us to Bond’s hyper-awareness of his body in the first few lines of Casino Royale: “He always knew when his body or his mind had had enough and he always acted on the knowledge. This helped him to avoid staleness and the sensual bluntness that breeds mistakes” (1). Indeed, our introduction to Bond is rendered through a bodily immersion in the claustrophobic atmosphere of the casino, where the sweat, smoke, and nervous tension would produce a “revolt” of the senses in someone less capable of reading and training his body. The James Bond series begins with Bond’s extreme control of and knowledge of his body, calling attention not only to the importance of this “wonderful machine” over the course of the novels, but also to the reality that he, as well as the state, must govern this machine (Casino 139).
The separation between the mind and body central to the governance and restraint is set up in the first lines of the quotation: “He always knew when his body or his mind had had enough and he always acted on the knowledge.” Self-restraint, or the ability to control and retain control of bodily desire, the will to restrain emotion and desire until an appropriate time, is one of the primary traits of the English gentleman (as discussed in previous chapters). What set the gentleman apart from Other masculinities, including working-class masculinity, was the ability to exercise self-restraint, which was not only the appropriate—that is, limited—display of affect, but also the capacity to channel the inherent excessive manly thumos in the service of society, the nation, and empire. Restraint and governance within this discursive frame are linked, as the ability to restrain affect and the body is synonymous with the ability to govern oneself. Self-governance is the precondition to governance, whether it is of the family, the community, the nation, or the empire. The ability to govern oneself is one of the traits that defined the English gentleman. In the case of Bond, though, self-governance is linked not just to discourses of the nation but also, very specifically, to the governmental practices of the state. His body, subjecthood, and even life are governed by the nation-state.
In Bond, we see how the overlapping of the discourses of gentlemanliness, professionalism, and the welfare state produce his masculinity. Bringing this back to the immediate context of the spy, Allan Hepburn contends that “the spy dwells in the cleavage between rationality and corporeality.” The spy emblematizes the “dialectic of mind over body, in which the body executes orders issued from the brain, command post of the human organism” (14). Bond’s body is constituted within the inherited diktats of gentlemanliness, but, at the same time, the “cleavage between rationality and corporeality” is fundamental to his professional success and his instrumentality to the nation-state. He needs to function at the razor-edge of awareness to fulfill his duties. The overlapping traits of two different types of masculinities are also manifest in the ways that Bond takes care of his body when not on duty. For instance, Bond, in the vein of the ideal of public-school imperial manliness, is ascetic, subjecting his body to cold showers and baths. At the same time, he is an unapologetic gourmand, invested in conspicuous consumption. He oscillates between gentlemanly asceticism and postwar professional ruthless machine.
The ways in which chivalry does or does not underpin Bond’s relationships with women also reveal the contradictions of Bond’s masculinity. Bond’s particular fetishization and consumption of women has frequently been read within the “new organization of sexuality in consumer capitalism,” de-linking Bond’s masculinity from his gentlemanly predecessors such as Hannay and Bulldog Drummond (Denning, Cover Stories 112–13). While the consumption and disposal of the Bond girl is a standard of the narratives, the process actually belies the fragility of Bond’s masculinity. Professional women repeatedly threaten Bond’s masculinity, heterosexual power, and professionalism; as a consequence, chivalry, though obsessively invoked, becomes explicit misogyny.27 Vesper Lynd is an assistant to the Head of S, and picked for the job because she is skilled at communications. Gala Brand is a Scotland Yard policewoman, carefully chosen to go long-term undercover at the Moonraker project, who at the end of the novel is honored by the queen for extraordinary service to the country. Bennett and Woollacott contend that in putting “the girl” back into place beneath him (both literally and metaphorically), Bond functions as an “agent of the patriarchal order, refurbishing its imaginarily impaired structure by quelling the source of disturbance within it” (170). Bond does attempt to be an agent of the patriarchal order (so does the narrative); what this obsessive desire to conquer reveals, however, are the cracks in the patriarchal matrix and in Bond’s masculinity. Bond’s victory is always tenuous, never complete, and ready to crumble at the next imagined sexual and gendered threat.
The fear of this collapse runs through both Casino Royale and Moonraker. Bond resents the presence of women in the public, professional domain. When informed that Vesper is his partner, Bond’s response is a more explicit example of Lumley’s attitude to independent women: “Bond was not amused. ‘What the hell do they want to send me a woman for?’” On the one hand, he does not believe that women “with their hurt feelings and the emotional baggage” should ever be in the profession (Casino 25–26). On the other, when he does meet Vesper and discovers her to be “economical and precise,” cool and direct (much like him), he is threatened by it (32). He takes her reserve as a direct challenge to his heterosexual masculinity and professional authority. She gazes “candidly back at Bond with a touch of ironic disinterest, which, to his annoyance, he wanted to shatter, roughly” (32). Bond wants her to be professional, but when she is, his desire is to destroy her professionalism—a recurrent theme in his relationship with her.
Single-minded about the job at hand, Bond refrains from sex, unless it serves to accomplish his mission, until the job is done. Although the condemnation of sex and women, and their exclusion from the homosocial “Game,” is in place as early as Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (where Kim and Mahmud Ali agree that women only disrupt the Great Game), and anywhere else espionage and danger bring men together, Bond’s repudiation of, and engagement with, women in this situation is the antithesis of gallant chivalry. He is flagrantly brutal and cold. The Head of S tells Vesper Lynd, before she goes out to France to join Bond on the mission, that though “Bond is an expert, he’s absolute hell to work for” and hasn’t “got much heart” (Casino 59–60). Indeed, the adjectives that are most used in the narrative to describe Bond’s expression and appearance are “cold,” “brutal,” and “ironical” (7). His pleasures, when he does think of fulfilling them, have nothing in common with chivalry. While he thinks he is falling in love with Vesper Lynd, he is apparently overtaken by an uncharacteristic “softness” (something that is repeated only once in the thirteen novels written by Fleming). At the same time, his desire for Vesper is marked by violent conquest rather than any approximation of love: “And now he knew that she was profoundly, excitingly sensual, but that the conquest of her body, because of the central privacy in her, would each time have the sweet tang of rape” (159). Bond’s sexual desires fall beyond the pale of the acceptable.
Bond’s masculinity, as conqueror of women and expert masculine professional, depends on the containment of Vesper Lynd’s agency and sexuality, but Bond does not and cannot do so. The cracks become wider as the narrative moves forward. When Lynd is captured through her own seeming stupidity and, more seriously, his (of course as the plot unfolds, the reader discovers that this was all planned in advance by Lynd), he is furious. Bond is caught between the inherited expectations of chivalry that he cannot quite shed and condemnation of her lack of professionalism: “This was just what he had been afraid of. These blithering women who thought they could do a man’s work. Why the hell couldn’t they stay at home and mind their pots and pans and stick to their frocks and gossip and leave men’s work to the men” (99). Interestingly, this sequence does not reveal her as a “blithering woman” so much as it reveals his damning incompetence, given his apparently awe-inspiring 00 status. He does not realize that he is being drawn into a trap. Even when the reader does not know that Lynd is a double agent, Bond’s carelessness is appalling, but in retrospect it is obvious that he is completely outmaneuvered. Bond’s emotionally explosive responses to Vesper as a professional woman reveal the tenuousness of his detachment and self-governance. He can only establish these traits through his conquest of her; sexually dominating and “shattering” her becomes crucial to demonstrating his masculinity and professional supremacy.28
Bond’s response to desire is noteworthy in how his affective self-restraint and detachment morph into a compulsion toward conquest. Desire, here, rather than being an occasion for the loss of control becomes the conduit for control and possession of the woman’s body. Bond does not relinquish his self-governance; rather he channels his pleasures toward controlling the female body that threatens his carefully maintained equilibrium, although he is never able to neutralize that particular threat. The traits of gentlemanliness and what could be their obverse are held in a very fragile yet necessary balance in Bond: chivalry versus cruelty, virility versus harshness, self-governance versus violent conquest, gentility versus meritocratic professionalism, asceticism versus hedonism/conspicuous consumption, insider versus outsider, and English versus un-English.
Finally, the conflict between the gentlemanly and the professional is illustrated through Bond’s very appearance. Unlike “clubland heroes” such as Richard Hannay and Bulldog Drummond, whose heir Bond undoubtedly is, Bond does not look like a gentleman.29 At no point does Ian Fleming use the word to describe Bond. This is a significant omission, as Fleming, the second son of a wealthy, dynastic Scottish family listed in Burke’s Landed Gentry, was steeped in aristocratic clubland circles. In marked contrast to Bond, whose looks and sex appeal the narrator constantly praises, the narrative in Bulldog Drummond emphatically reiterates that the eponymous hero is not good-looking, though it does point out that his eyes, “deep set and steady,” “showed the man for what he was—a sportsman and a gentleman.” The body is the site on which signs of classed and gendered traits are rendered visible. Meanwhile, Bond is frequently described as having “cold grey-blue eyes” and a scarred “lean, hard face” that has a “hungry, competitive edge to it” (Moonraker 26). The hungry competitive edge (almost) allies him with many of his enemies, whose bodies and faces advertise their villainous natures. Bond’s hungriness is what sets him apart from the amateur clubland heroes who project their gentlemanliness and not their professional hunger (since they don’t have any) through their bodies. Bond’s body is marked by his profession, and by his desire to conquer and win. However—and this is fundamental to the contradictions of Bond—he can “pass” among gentlemen either because he can affect the traits so well or because he has some of the necessary traits to carry off the “passing” effectively. Indeed, in the Bond novels the body is a key element in the narrative and the plot, both in its materiality and as a semiotic site that registers national, class, sexual, gender, and professional identities. While the Bond body is the object of control on which the conflict between gentlemanliness and professionalism is inscribed, it is also the site constituted by practices of the nation-state.
The elaboration of Bond’s contradictory masculinities connects him to the Janus-faced nation and the other post-gentlemen in this book. His metonymic relationship to the nation comes to its logical culmination at the moment that Bond as government servant–cum–agent, as England, confronts the nation’s enemies. In Casino Royale, when Bond is captured and tied up naked, his body, as material and discursive site, takes center stage. The hinted-at possible violence and destruction of the body signifies the defeat of English masculinity, which would also explain why Bond can and will never die. Bond’s body in pain and the brutalization of his body is an attack on the national body politic and a violation of the certainty of a gendered, heterosexual body, where the two are mutually constitutive.
It is axiomatic to read Bond as impenetrable; as the quintessential symbol of heterosexual male empowerment, his body is inviolable. In other words, his body can be abused but it does not have any orifices that can be penetrated—one of the defining characteristics of hegemonic masculinity is, of course, that the heterosexual male body cannot and should not be penetrated, and if it is, then it ceases to be masculine.30 Contrary to this popular reading, penetration haunts Bond from the very first novel. Even before we get to the pivotal and gruesome torture scene in Casino Royale, one of the ways in which Le Chiffre tries to get Bond thrown off the card game is when his bodyguard, a “hairy Corsican”—whom just moments before Bond had imagined naked—presses “something hard … right into the cleft between his two buttocks on the padded chair” (81). Bond escapes the threat of being impaled by the gun by heaving backward into his attacker, rather than away. This is a precursor to the extended brutalization of Bond’s body by Le Chiffre, which Simon Raven (Fleming’s contemporary) considered “too monstrous to be excused” (695). After he is captured, Bond is brought to the domestic space of a vacation-home-turned-site-of-torture. Bond is tied naked to a chair whose seat has been removed so his genitalia and buttocks are exposed. Le Chiffre repeatedly hits this exposed part of the body with a carpet beater. Here, too, a description of the imagined naked body of his male captor precedes the torture and the possible penetration (though never explicitly stated). It is not simply the fear and threat of being sodomized that pervades the narrative, but the fact that in both instances there is a conscious invocation of another naked male body undercutting the obvious reading of the fear of penetration; Bond and the narrative seem to teeter between desire and repulsion.
This subtext of homoeroticism emerges during moments of violence perpetrated on Bond’s body. Moreover, this attraction/repulsion is also present in his thoughts every time he is under threat of violation and assault. It is impossible not to read this narrative subtext within contemporaneous cultural-national fears that linked queerness and treachery. The infamous defection in 1951 that revealed high-level intelligence officers Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean—members of clubland with their public school and Cambridge background—as communists served to concretize in the public imagination the apparently natural relationship between homosexuality and national treachery. Homosexuality was only decriminalized with the passing of the Sexual Offences Act in 1967.31 Deep betrayal was felt on many counts, not least because these men were seen as “one of us,” rather than disgruntled disenfranchised radicals. Their defection, unsurprisingly, was a matter of grave embarrassment for the government and particularly the intelligence services.32 However, no British court of law ever “pronounced them guilty of a crime” (Sommer 288). The paranoid fear that the queer was a leaky, penetrable vessel underwrites these moments of violence in the text. Bond’s unconscious desire for the male body and the razor’s edge of potential desire/repulsion is the obverse of all that Bond embodies. It means the possible ceding of control to desire and to another man, and this process renders Bond violable and vulnerable. This is antithetical to his masculine self-government, discipline, and compulsion to conquer. The homoeroticism is threaded through with a potentially masochistic desire. While Bond’s torture is described in rather graphic detail, there is a brief moment where the horror and pain of torture shades into the painful pleasure of the masochist, a fear that Bond consciously invokes in order to suppress it: “He had been told by colleagues who had survived torture … that towards the end there came a wonderful period of warmth and languor leading into a sort of sexual twilight where pain turned to pleasure and where hatred and fear of the torturers turned to a masochistic infatuation. It was the supreme test of will, he had learnt, to avoid showing this form of punch-drunkenness” (114). This fear of succumbing to pleasure derived from pain is linked to Bond’s anxiety that his heterosexuality and professional control will unravel. In apparently avoiding submission (even as he thinks of it) to the masochistic pleasure of the sadist’s violence, he also avoids becoming the porous vessel of betrayal. Yet, as we shall see, not ceding to masochistic desire, though it prevents betrayal and professional failure, nevertheless does not protect the loss of his masculine identity. His body in pain overwhelms his mind.
Le Chiffre’s violence that includes possible penetration renders Bond’s body as body. As Elaine Scarry’s argument about the tortured body reveals, consciousness slowly recedes and is inversely proportional to the overwhelming presence of the body; it drowns out everything beyond the body in pain. She points out that physical pain annihilates all aspects of the self and world.33 Bond’s body ceases to house his self and is reduced to a writhing mass of pain. Speech disappears: he “twitches,” “groans,” “writhes,” “contorts,” “screams,” “his body jangle[s] in the chair like a marionette” (Casino 115). In short, he is “defenceless” and mindless (112). Scarry asserts that “all psychological and mental content that constitutes one’s self and world” ceases to exist for the tortured individual, as the self is constituted through language and language ceases to exist (30).
The disintegration of the self into the body in pain marks the moment Bond ceases to be man and English. The body over which Bond always had such precise control, the body machine so carefully and consciously monitored and governed, on which his gendered professional identity is imprinted, overwhelms him. He is aware of nothing but the body: language, control, and governance, all the things that make him cease to exist. His pain makes him thought-less and self-less, renders him inhuman, vulnerable, not-man. Bond is a public servant and an Englishman by virtue of his self-restraint and self-governance—facets of both gentlemanliness and his professionalism. Without them, he ceases to be. In Bond, self-governance also links up to the governmental practices of the state, which determines his identity. In effect, his un-becoming, in his no longer being an English man as he is tortured by Le Chiffre, is the moment that Englishness and the nation also unravel. Le Chiffre is well aware of this unraveling of masculinity and nationhood when he infantilizes Bond: he calls Bond “dear boy” and insists that Bond is not “equipped” to “play games with adults.” Le Chiffre very deliberately strips Bond of his manhood—“if you do not yield, you will no longer be a man”—as well as his national identity when he mocks Bond’s incompetence and chivalry as being that of a “typical English gentleman” (Casino 117–18). Bond’s inadequacy as an Englishman reflects on the inadequacy and weakness of the nation.
Bond fights back into consciousness, masculinity, heterosexuality, and Englishness by thinking of the violation of the female body, reinforcing the structural necessity of the subordinate woman in the construction of heterosexual masculine identity. He tries to reestablish his sense of self by imagining Vesper’s condition: “He could imagine how she was being used by the two gunmen. … Poor wretch to have been dragged into this. Poor little beast” (Casino 116). While Bond is being tortured, he imagines Vesper is being “used,” and to claw back into his own humanity, he reduces her to a diminutive beast. His torturer methodically emasculates Bond by the targeted attack; Bond is dehumanized and de-nationalized through the pain wrought on his body, and the means that both the narrative and Bond use to think the self again is the “used” body of the woman. Both Bond and the reader later discover that Vesper Lynd was never raped.
The mode in which Bond recovers only serves to reinforce the link between his tortured body and his English masculinity. Bond’s sense of duty, his patriotism, his absolute certainty between right and wrong, good and evil, England and SMERSH (Soviet Counter-Espionage Agency), dissolve with the uncertainty about his sense of self as a consequence of his torture. In other words, the specific kind of bodily violation—anal penetration and the loss of a functional penis (which results in the loss of a sexual and gender identity)—leads to a loss of moral certainty, patriotic duty, and national superiority. His awareness of being “alive” during what Scarry calls “the process of dying” (because it is exactly when the body is most present through pain that the line between life and death is most intensely felt) leads him to question what he perceives to be the arbitrary distinction of good and evil, where Britain is Good and Communism (SMERSH) is Evil. As Bond points out, “Today we are fighting Communism. Okay. If I’d been alive fifty years ago, the brand of Conservatism we have today would have been damn near called Communism and we should have been told to go and fight that” (Casino 135). This is, of course, a very accurate assessment. Welfare state conservatism was more socialist than the Tory party position in the early twentieth century, or even before the war. Bond’s loss of self and body make him a “bloody anarchist” according to the French agent Matthis (135). The narrative, then, makes explicit the connection between hegemonic masculinity, professional patriotic duty, and the gendered heterosexual body, while pointing out that the material body, the body in pain, lies outside these discursive frames. The material body constantly needs to be recuperated into these discourses if the nation is to survive. The danger is that the body can always betray. In fact, the number of times Bond is injured and violated, left defenseless and helpless, emphasizes the tenuousness of these absolute truths that Bond as spy fights to defend. Bond recovers when he is able to contemplate having sex with Vesper. The test he sets for his recovery is the “stir of desire” that he feels when he sees Vesper; and until he knows that he can potentially feel heterosexual desire, he does not allow her to come see him. Once aroused by Vesper, he miraculously abandons his anarchist line of thought. As the narrative indicates, “From that day Bond’s recovery was rapid” (148).
Bond’s body as the point of tension regarding hegemonic masculinity and the national (im)penetrability focuses on the male spy’s body as constitutive of national sovereignty and safety. Unlike the earlier examples of the post-gentleman in this book who struggle with conflicting stylizations of masculinity and their place in the nation, Bond, as a secret agent whose professional and patriotic duty it is to protect the nation-state, frequently exceeds—indeed, must exceed—the acceptable limits of citizenship. Bond, by virtue of his profession, can never be breadwinner, husband, and head of the household. He is determined by his profession and expertise, but those are not commensurate with gendered citizenship. He is the professional who subsumes individuality for the national collective. As a professional and spy, if he is killed, he does not martyr himself for the nation, unlike the imperial Englishman whose descendant he is, because he lies outside the rights offered to the nation-state’s citizens. His body is the site upon which national and state integrity rests, and yet his killing is not read in the same ways as an ordinary citizen: he is merely a “blunt instrument” of the state, and his nationality and humanity are not publically recognized.34 Bond is not produced within the discourse of citizenship of the state; his license to kill moves him beyond those boundaries. While the structures of citizenship are made possible because Bond ensures that the “commodified flows” of income and professionals continues unimpeded in the corporate state (Comentale 10), he can never be a part of it. He is fully cognizant of his unbelonging. As he walks through the hallowed halls of Blades, the narrative opines, “Bond knew that there was something alien and un-English about himself. He knew that he was a difficult man to cover up. Particularly in England. … Abroad was what mattered. Outside the jurisdiction of the Service” (Moonraker 34). Indeed, he thrives on the knowledge that he lies outside state jurisdiction. Abroad, he simultaneously embodies Englishness, acting as the agent of the state, but at the same time, because he is a state agent, he also loses his Englishness to become alien and un-English.
Bond, as has been previously discussed, does not belong to himself. Everything Bond owns belongs to the state even as he exists outside it. The control of Bond’s body speaks to the upward and downward movement of governmental practices in the creation of the subject, in this case, the professional subject working for the nation-state. In Doctor No, M discusses Bond’s physical and mental fitness with Sir James Molony, who cautions M against working his men too hard. While Molony acknowledges that M “ha[s] to treat these men as if they were expendable,” he believes that Bond needs rest and release (Doctor 14). M, meanwhile, is unrepentant, countering with a list of body parts that a man could do without, which he has gathered from the work of an American doctor. Bond’s body as machine, as instrument in the service of the state, rather than his humanity, is of interest to M. He is “blank and cold” as he points out that “it’ll soon show if he’s not up to the work” (13–15). For M, what can and can’t be done to an Englishman is not applicable to Bond. This distinction between human and professional tool is made explicit when Matthis says to Bond during his recovery, “Surround yourself with human beings. … But don’t let me down and become human yourself. We would lose such a wonderful machine” (Casino 139). Bond is clearly not human, or human enough, to warrant the same rights and sympathies as citizens.
The paradox of Bond, as sovereign Englishman and state instrument, is captured in the style of the novels. The matter-of-fact, informative, and what I call memoranda style replicates the contradictions of Bond: he is a government agent who acts on behalf of the state, but at the same time his agency is entirely determined by the state. He is but one officer in the government chain of command. Bond’s assignments are always routed through M, the only part of the chain of command that Bond actually sees, and his missions always begin and end with files and dockets. Indeed, Casino Royale begins with an extended official document/file, and the narrative style of the rest of the novel maintains the same tone and judgment as the file. Critics, most notably Umberto Eco and Kingsley Amis, have remarked on the dissonance in Fleming’s narratives. Fleming’s novels are explicit adventure tales of heroic action, fantasy escapes, and narratives of how one man saves the world. Yet Eco notes how “the minute and leisurely concentration with which he pursues page after page descriptions of articles, landscapes, and events apparently inessential to the course of the story” contrast with “the feverish brevity with which he covers in a few paragraphs the most unexpected and improbable actions” (49).35 The speed, thrill, and suspense of the heroic narrative, then, is offset by an excessive journalistic attention to details about bureaucratic procedure, departmental compromises, intergovernmental coordination, the rules of card games, the mechanics of automobiles, the nuances of gastronomy and alcohol, and the textures and tastes of cigarettes. I focus on this neglected aspect of Fleming’s narrative rather than the thoroughly explored fantasy, rebel hero. The attention to scientific, quotidian, and field-specific detail at the expense of describing the improbable and fantastic replicates the contradictions in Bond, who is both fantasy hero and professional. For instance, in Moonraker, the narrative focuses quite extensively on Bond’s preparation for the card game between Drax and Bond. Bond gives M a report on his expertise, how he came by it and the ways in which one can cheat at cards: “That was the chap. American. Made me work ten hours a day for a week learning a thing called the Riffle Stack and how to deal Seconds and Bottoms and Middles. I wrote a long report about it at the time. Must be buried in Records. He knew every trick in the game. How to wax the aces so that the pack will break at them; Edge Work and Line Work with a razor on the backs on the high cards; Trimming; Arm Pressure Holdouts—mechanical gadgets up your sleeve and feed you cards” (23). The narrative continues to expand on the techniques that Bond learned from the American. What Bond and the narrative reveal here is that while cheating is ungentlemanly, the practice and knowledge of how to cheat is absolutely crucial in a professional. The passage above evacuates cheating of all moral opprobrium and makes it a matter of expertise. This is an interesting paradox: Bond, card (cheat) expert, is brought in to unmask an ungentlemanly cheat. The listing of all the possible ways to cheat (important enough to be filed as a report), then, while it disrupts the suspense of action is necessary because it reveals Bond’s expertise and his professionalism. The language of expertise and the report is fundamental both to Bond’s integrity as a professional and to the narrative’s credibility as the story of a professional man or government man of action.
Casino Royale, more tellingly, begins with a nine-page government memorandum in a chapter on its own. The report, following the conventions of such a document, lists and analyzes enemy operatives, their operations, their flaws, their monetary worth, their links to organizations and foreign governments, the British government’s previous engagements with them, as well as the British government’s coordination with the French and the Americans in attempting to defeat the enemy. It also engages in literary hyperbole. For instance, after describing Le Chiffre’s attempts to invest in prostitution in order to procure “unlimited women for his personal use,” the report points out that “Fate rebuked him with terrifying swiftness” (9). The report also reflects the entrenched racist, sexist, and heteronormative prejudices of the officials writing it, hence institutionalizing and naturalizing a set of prejudicial positions. The document describes Le Chiffre as having a “small, rather feminine mouth” and “ears small with large lobes, indicating Jewish blood” (14). What we have here in miniature is the style of the Bond novel; the memorandum sets the tone for the stylistics of the rest of the novel. With its emphasis on the mechanics of baccarat, pregame rituals, descriptions of Le Chiffre and his henchmen, the details of Bond’s professional and personal routine, the lavish yet minute descriptions of the hotel, food, cars, and radios all follow the same pattern. It is as if the narrative itself is a report that will be filed later.
At the casino, the narrative describes the pregame rituals in which players usually participate. It is an informative moment in the text, and such textual moments abound: “And yet it is convention among roulette players, and Bond rigidly adhered to it, to take careful note of the past history of each session and to be guided by any peculiarities in the run of the wheel” (43). Seemingly gratuitous, the passage invites the reader to an understanding of the game while also offering a rich textured history of the game in its present moment with reference to Bond’s mission. It contextualizes Bond’s actions and once again draws attention to his professionalism and vigilance. Regarding the game itself, the narrator takes pains to set out and explain the nuances of the game, ensuring that the facts are clearly reported. Indeed, the game takes up almost 40 pages of the 180-page novel. Similarly, when one of Le Chiffre’s men ties Bond to a chair, the narrative offers a detailed account of how exactly Bond is tied: “With this he bound Bond’s wrists to the arms of the chair and his ankles to the front legs. He passed a double strand across his chest, under the arm-pits and through the chair-back. He made no mistakes with the knots and left no play in any of the bindings. All of them bit sharply into Bond’s flesh” (112). No doubt, this attention to tying serves to build suspense to a pitch. It also reveals the competence of the henchmen, and it draws attention to Bond’s awareness in a hopeless situation as he watches for any play in the ropes. The passage highlights the specialized knowledge and alertness of both criminal and hero. The passage also reads like a careful documenting and filing away of criminal activity so that no clues will slip into the cracks. While, on the one hand, it allows the reader to visualize and hence enter into the horror of the sequence that follows more vividly, on the other hand, the dry-as-dust tone is that of an official report.
Kingsley Amis calls this process “the Fleming effect,” where the action recedes into the background and aspects of contemporary life and specialized knowledge that seem tangential take center stage in the narrative. He states that Fleming’s prose allows the reader to accept the fantastic and the absurd because it is bolstered by incontrovertible facts. Amis makes this into an aphorism: “The contemporary becomes romantic … the merely romantic solidly contemporary.” Fleming, he points out, takes particular pleasure in the sharing, tracking, and analyzing of particularized knowledge (Amis 137). The government memorandum, as delineated by Fleming within the narrative diegetic space, functions as the template for the narrative style in the Bond novels; it allows for the full expression of expertise and professional competence and Bond as government servant. The Bond narrative—like the memo—appraises, measures, informs, and submits for public/state scrutiny. The prose ensures that even as we admire Bond’s tenacity and vigilance, the reader never forgets that his agency is an effect of his location within the government chain of command.
Bond, as the exile, as the not-quite-gentleman-not-quite-professional, reflects welfare state Britain but can never be at home in it. Determined by inherited codes of gentlemanliness as well as the paradigms of professionalism and expertise of the new expert-based state, Bond nonetheless lies outside the bounds of citizenship. As a secret agent of the state, he does not function within the expected modes of gendered citizenship set by the state governmental practices, though he is shaped by them. He is the threshold figure who ensures the continuity of the modern-traditional Britain, the imperial/professional fantasy ideal that sustains the democratic citizenship of insular welfare capitalism: 007, who is and isn’t English, who is and isn’t a gentleman, who is and isn’t human.
Both James Bond and Charles Lumley embody the slow shift of national hegemonic masculinity from the bourgeois gentleman to the modern classless professional, from gentleman to different variations of the post-gentleman. While Lumley derisively repudiates the code of gentlemanliness and Bond performs it at his convenience for professional purposes, the ideal and its mutation nevertheless determine their contradictory masculinities. Lumley’s travails of gender, mapped by the picaresque, stands in for the movement of the nation from outward-looking empire to welfare-state national totality. While both Lumley and Bond were hailed as “new men” who embodied an untrammeled and uninhibited masculine authenticity, what they really illustrate is a masculinity forever haunted by its gender antecedent, determined by the discourses of a postwar meritocratic yet rigid professionalism and the institutionalized gender expectation of the welfare state. Bond and Lumley are not iconoclastic rebels, as contemporaneous critics read them, but the tenuous emergence of new stylizations of masculinity from a folding over of the old.