But the Movement is interesting. It is interesting, like other movements, not only in itself, but because of the light which it throws upon the work of writers who are outside of it, perhaps opposed to it.
—J. D. Scott, “In the Movement”
Early in his 1960 volume of essays, The Pleasures of Exile, George Lamming fixes his sharply analytical eye on “an English critic, Mr. Kingsley Amis, discussing West Indian novelists in the Spectator” (28). The discussion in question, Amis's 1958 “Fresh Winds from the West,” treats eight recently released books by Caribbean authors and stands as a testament to the high visibility of Windrush writing on the British cultural scene at the time. However, Lamming is not particularly pleased by the type of attention represented by Amis's article, which he dismisses as ill considered and virtually bereft of literary discernment. Lamming's irritation attaches most strongly to his impression that Amis, despite occupying a high cultural position as novelist, critic, and university teacher, displays the “type of mind [that] cannot register the West Indian writer as a subject for intelligent and thoughtful consideration” (29). Aggrieved at this lack of intellectual seriousness, Lamming proceeds to dissect Amis's critical assumptions, revealing a great deal about the obstacles facing West Indian authors in Britain in the process. For example, Lamming rebukes Amis's comfortable conceptions of Englishness and its inherent superiority, describing how Amis accepts “the privilege so natural and so free of being the child and product and voice of a colonising civilisation” (30). Amis's lack of political engagement and maturity is bitingly condemned, characterized as an ethos of “shouting, in mockery, the adolescent privileges that are the theme of any Mr. Don't-really-care-a-damn-except-to-be-as-decent-as-possible” (30). Lamming also hints at the tacit racism of such a view, imagining that a black writer expressing the pallid decency Amis advocates might be “regarded as a simple, articulate boy,” based on the British assumption of colonialism “as a development and later as an improvement on slavery” (30). The lengthy example from Amis's article with which Lamming begins his caustic assessment suggests one final point of disagreement—one regarding literary form. The passage included by Lamming is the article's opening paragraph, an extended diatribe on literary experiment, a stylistic practice Amis dismisses as risibly fraudulent and misguided. Although Lamming does not explicitly address this aspect of Amis's article, the very style of The Pleasures of Exile (not to mention the four novels Lamming had published by this time) stands in a relation of silent but poignant dissent from Amis's dismissal of the usefulness of experimental prose. Lamming's implicit disagreement points to an important dynamic in postwar literary London, in which younger writers were rebelling against the techniques of prewar modernists such as Woolf and Joyce (both derisively referred to in the passage of Amis's Lamming provides). Lamming's brief excursus on Amis in The Pleasures of Exile in fact encapsulates some of the most crucial issues confronting Windrush writers in Britain, issues revolving around social privilege, politics, race, and—refracted through all of these—literary form. Although Lamming, even here, generally disavows any meaningful interest in Amis, or indeed any other English critics, his very inclusion of Amis in the text suggests the role the British cultural field had in helping shape West Indian literary production in the postwar years.1
As Kenneth Ramchand observes in his seminal study The West Indian Novel and Its Background, during these formative postwar years London “is indisputably the West Indian literary capital” (63), and certainly, following Ramchand, the awkward irony of such an important generation of anticolonial writers working in the metropolitan heart of empire has frequently been noted. However, beyond simple acknowledgment, critics have focused relatively little attention on the ramifications arising from the fact that this pioneering generation of West Indian authors lived and published almost exclusively in London. Most critical accounts that do focus on Windrush writing in London, such as John Clement Ball's Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis or John McLeod's Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis, concentrate their discussion on how this influx of migrant writers affected British literature and culture. They do not extensively consider the ways London, in turn, worked to mold these writers’ literary output.2 And while a good deal of attention has rightly been put on the BBC's Caribbean Voices by insightful commentators like Laurence Breiner and Glyne Griffith, their accounts tend to emphasize the separate, Caribbean-oriented community in the heart of empire that the show's production worked to form rather than examining interactions between Windrush writers and the surrounding British literary culture.
More recently, critics such as Peter Kalliney and Gail Low have focused scholarly attention on the important ways in which the demands and politics of publishing affected West Indian writing in the metropolitan setting of London.3 Focusing on the Windrush writers’ alignments within the British literary system, Kalliney and Low both insist on viewing that system as a malleable, if unavoidably constitutive, feature of West Indian literary production, rather than merely a sinister or oppressive force. This emphasis is fruitful: it acknowledges that the institutional and geographical placement of the Windrush generation has more than a passing thematic or historical significance to an understanding of their work and hence the emergence of postwar Anglophone Caribbean literature itself. Taken in this context, these novelists can be seen working toward the goals of cultural and political autonomy in the Caribbean—as they surely were—but doing so within the formidable constraints imposed by the London literary landscape. As this chapter hopes to show, this landscape is one that became increasingly influenced by the prerogatives of a group of writers originally referred to as the Movement.4 Composed of English writers such as Amis, Donald Davie, Phillip Larkin, and John Wain, the Movement had cultural convictions—proudly philistine, aggressively nationalist, and anxiously concerned with the changing dynamics of class (not race) within Great Britain proper—that were largely antithetical to the concerns of the Windrush writers. If, as this chapter's epigraph suggests, the Movement can be of interest “not only in itself, but because of the light which it throws upon the work of writers who are outside of it, perhaps opposed to it” (J. D. Scott, “In the Movement,” 400), considerable light can be thrown upon the Windrush writers active in London simultaneous with the rise of the Movement. Indeed, a close examination of the combative field of postwar literary London suggests that these pioneering West Indian writers overtly occupied positions both outside and in opposition to the Movement.5 An analytic emphasis on London—undoubtedly the center from which postwar West Indian writing emanated—thus brings the transnational sophistication of the Windrush writers’ achievements more properly into view, showing how, even in its most overtly nationalist stage, Anglophone Caribbean literature was inescapably imbricated (but not imprisoned) in metropolitan circuits of exchange and reception.
It should be emphasized here that Windrush literary production cannot be reduced solely to a reflexive response to the London literary world's governing tastes. Certainly, in Bourdieu's terms, the field is not an inert, impersonal force, but a flexible social space continually constituted via an accumulation of individual actions. These actions, of course, are themselves structurally informed by the all but imperceptible dispositions individuals bring to bear on their choices, a concept for which Bourdieu employs the term habitus.6 In abstract terms, the mutually constitutive interactions between field and habitus—delicately balanced between determinant structure and individual choice—are the process whereby social life unfolds in Bourdieu's system of thought. In more particular terms, this necessitates an acknowledgment that Windrush writers did not come to London as blank screens upon which the modes and mores of the metropole were straightforwardly projected. Certainly, there already existed a legacy of modernist literary practice from the region, embodied in the work of authors such as Alejo Carpentier, Aimé Césaire, Claude McKay, Jean Rhys, and Eric Walrond. Although the Windrush writers manifest little if any overt knowledge of such a cultural inheritance, its very existence suggests that what Dash describes as “the spirit of intellectual dissidence, imaginative restlessness, and dialectical struggle” (Other America, 15) characteristic of the region's modernism emanates from a far-reaching array of influences in both spatial and temporal registers. A multitude of thinkers—including Sidney Mintz, Tzvetan Todorov, and most importantly C. L. R. James—have considered the Caribbean itself to be the inaugural ground of what we think of today as modernity, such that the region can be conceived as a space in which the social forces of alienation, disjuncture, rootlessness, and denaturalization often thought to catalyze modernist aesthetics are present long before the formation of European modernism.7 Along these lines, David Scott's description of (C. L. R. James's depiction of) Toussaint l'Oeverture as a tragic figure of modernity might double as a relatively fitting description of a (male) modernist writer: “inescapably modern as he is obliged by the modern conditions of his life to be, he must seek his freedom in the very technologies, conceptual languages, and institutional formations in which modernity's rationality has sought his enslavement” (Conscripts of Modernity, 168). In some ways, then, as critics such as Dash, Gikandi, and Scott suggest, the critical self-reflexivity characteristic of modernist aesthetics resonates with long-established strategies of Caribbean self-expression and survival.8
At a more individual level, it is clear that Lamming, Mais, Mittelholzer, and Selvon had already established (in various ways, to differing degrees) a self-aware, antibourgeois, oppositional disposition characteristic of their modernist predecessors while living in the Caribbean. Lamming, for example, seems to have developed his proclivity for literary iconoclasm well before he arrived in London in 1950. As he has remarked in interviews, his reading tastes were formed in his teacher Frank Collymore's private library, largely in reaction to the school curriculum, which Lamming describes as “Jane Austen, some Shakespeare, Wells's novel Kipps, and so on…whatever the Cambridge Syndicate demanded” (interview, by Munro and Sander, 6).9 In opposition to this curriculum, one of the most important discoveries Lamming made at this age, in his account, was of Joseph Conrad, whose writing he consistently names as an influence, one that inculcated “a reinforcement of that relation to the word, the word as instrument of exploration,” rather than a merely transparent vehicle of already created thought (“George Lamming Talks,” 11).10 Lamming's early letters to Collymore from Trinidad likewise suggest a keen interest in literary revolt, mentioning his close study of earlier models of rebellion such as T. S. Eliot and William Wordsworth, while drawing comparisons between them and the expressly experimental aims of himself and his peers. In another letter, he invokes the term enfantes terribles to describe his generation of West Indian authors, specifically identifying them as conscious inheritors of a tradition of modernist insurrection.11
Alison Donnell's Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature demonstrates the similarly domestic development of Mais's rebellious literary sensibility, via his critical contention with a locally influential Jamaican poet, J. E. C. McFarlane. For Donnell, Mais's disagreement with McFarlane prompts him into the “recasting of a culturally relevant modernist manifesto” (43) for his own aims. Citing passages from a 1940 article Mais wrote in Public Opinion, “Where the Roots Lie,” Donnell observes Mais “echoing the fierce guidelines of Ezra Pound in ‘A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste’” (48). In this literary call to arms, Mais, like Lamming, is interested in repudiating complacent understandings of “the school syllabus,” identifying heretical energies in the English literary canon itself: “If only you would wake up for long enough to give the matter some thought you would realise that these men in their day were the last syllable in modernity! Chaucer broke new ground and a lot of traditions, so did Milton, so did Shakespeare” (quoted in Donnell, Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature, 48). Early examples of aesthetic philosophizing from Selvon, such as his 1947 Evening News (Trinidad) column, “Michael Wentworth Contends,” or Mittelholzer's recollections in A Swarthy Boy—which closes with the pugnacious artistic credo of his youth, “Victory or death!” (151)—also underscore that the Windrush writers’ aesthetic nonconformism was inaugurated in the Caribbean, well before they arrived in London.12
Nevertheless, in the examples above, the fact that both Lamming and Mais figure their acts of literary insurgence through reference to British forebears introduces an important, if familiar, complication to the perceived autochthony of these writers’ aesthetics. As the shared allusions to the educational system also underscore, the Caribbean space in which the Windrush generation became literate, let alone literary, was thoroughly permeated by a British-derived view of cultural value.13 The habitus these writers brought with them to London, then, appears as a complicated mixture of reverence for the literary tradition of England and animosity (enhanced by the racism encountered on arrival) toward the imperial attitudes such a tradition continued to underwrite. The affective ambivalence of the Windrush writers’ position is captured in Lamming's formulation of “the dubious refuge of a metropolitan culture” to which his generation migrated (Pleasures of Exile, 22) and later by a pessimistic description of the limited choice he and his peers faced between the “eternal dispossession” of exile in London and “the ignorant sneer of a Victorian colonial outpost” back home (47).14 As Lamming famously observed in this same essay, the West Indian writer (at least during the postwar era he was describing) “writes always for the foreign reader” (43). To take this claim merely at face value would be a mistake—Lamming clearly envisions the eventual emergence of a home audience as both possible and desirable. To write it off entirely, on the other hand, would be to ignore Lamming's point about how powerfully geopolitical and economic forces structured the ways in which West Indian culture could at that time be produced. The concentration on London in the pages that follow, then, is not meant to suggest that the Caribbean is unimportant to these writers, whether as an originating source or as an ultimate horizon of value. It is, however, an acknowledgment that the underlying structural features of the British literary field cannot be lightly dismissed. Indeed, it is only through a negotiation of this field that the Windrush writers were able to establish the basis of what we now think of as Anglophone Caribbean literature, a fact emblematic not of cultural subjugation or defeat, but rather of the complex, mutually constitutive nature of the relation between British and West Indian, in the cultural (not to mention the economic and political) sphere.15
The arrival of the SS Empire Windrush—a decommissioned troop transport ship officially carrying 492 Caribbean passengers—at Tilbury docks on 22 June 1948 has become an iconic moment in British history, symbolizing the inauguration of large-scale migration from the territories of the British Empire that led inexorably to Britain's contemporary self-presentation as a multicultural polity.16 Although the Caribbean was not the only region to experience considerable emigration to the “mother country” during this time, its migrants (estimated at around 250,000 in total) attracted a great deal of the attention accorded this population of newcomers to England in the postwar period, and the “Jamaicans,” as they were often erroneously generalized, tended to dominate the media portrayals of England's changing demographics.17 The United Kingdom to which Windrush migrants arrived, however, was most certainly not the proud, invincible nation that had traditionally been promulgated abroad for the edification of Britain's colonial subjects. Ravaged by the war, and deeply in debt to both its colonial holdings and the United States, Britain was uncomfortably coming to terms with the emerging Cold War powers’ eclipse of its previously unrivaled international influence in matters economic and political. As the British historian John Montgomery somberly observed in 1965, the nation's share of worldwide trade by 1955 had been more than halved to 15 percent since 1899, and there seemed little hope of stemming the decline. Such economic vulnerability manifested itself throughout the 1950s by recurrent hard currency crises that threatened the nation's solvency and undermined national confidence. Norman Mackenzie, writing in 1959, captures his generation's sense of beleaguered bewilderment that Britain's world position was far different from its accustomed dominance: “Two world wars, punctuated by a great depression, have made it impossible for the British to compete on equal terms with America or Russia, or even to hold what they have” (Conviction, 12). Long accustomed to a leading role on the international stage, the United Kingdom after World War II was in a palpably precarious position, rapidly losing influence around the world while finding itself without the financial or military resources to preserve even a semblance of its old preeminence.18
Internal to the country, circumstances were likewise uncertain and unstable in the postwar years. Wartime rationing continued well into the 1950s for several basic commodities, and the destructive effects of the Blitz on the nation's housing stock remained visible and acute. Moreover, between the years 1945 and 1951, Clement Attlee's Labour government was engaged in its historic attempt to break down the traditional barriers of British class privilege by instituting a host of innovative social and economic programs, including the creation of the National Health System; the vast expansion of access to a university education through scholarships and the establishment of new “redbrick” universities; and the nationalization of many key industries such as transport, utilities, coal, communications, and banking. Although the ultimate effects of this attempt at dislodging the entrenchment of upper-class hegemony should not be overestimated, concrete social and economic effects were certainly felt, and the subsequent uncertainty resulting from a partial unmooring of status markers was more or less inevitable.19 As Malcolm Bradbury asserts, “in the aftermath of war Britain went through a deep and fundamental revolution, a shift of social power” (Modern British Novel, 269).
This potent combination of external and internal destabilization, it is generally agreed, led to a social world that was unsettled, uncertain, and shot through with a shifting mass of competing cultural, political, and economic agendas that left the British populace struggling to reconsolidate a viable image of national identity. Historian David Childs describes the mood of the country upon Winston Churchill's return as prime minister in 1951 as markedly unstable, noting that “in this changing world Britain experienced difficulty in finding its place, clarifying its position and renewing its identity” (Britain since 1945, 55). Swinging from the social-reform-minded age of austerity immediately after the war to the age of consumer affluence that Tory prime minister Harold Macmillan confidently proclaimed by the end of the 1950s, British life in the early postwar years appears as unusually unpredictable and unsettling, experienced at the time as “a diffuse social unease, as an unnaturally accelerated pace of social change, as an unhingeing of stable patterns, moral points of reference” (Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, 321). Domestic turmoil, coupled with insecurity on the international stage, is commonly presumed to have inspired the somewhat anxious call for national recovery characteristic of much political, social, and cultural discussion in the 1950s, an urgency only further exacerbated by a widespread fear of cultural invasion by American mass culture—especially rock-n-roll and jazz—aroused by the expanding economic and political power of Britain's Cold War partner. Gikandi has observed, moreover, how the arrival of immigrants from the former colonies intensified the perceived crisis of postwar Englishness. In his account, the new immigrants become “a real presence and cultural threat to the pastoral image of England as an island” while the decline of empire “nullifies the value previously invested in colonial subjects and spaces” (Maps of Englishness, 70). While the newly arrived Windrush writers would be actively concerned with the continuing ramifications of Britain's imperial role, Britain's own uneasy public discourse would increasingly concentrate on more insular, domestic matters.
This anxious, inward turn registered discernibly in the cultural trends of the era as well. As Arthur Marwick suggests, “it could reasonably be said that in the forties and early fifties British political and social thought was inward-looking, concentrating, for instance, on the Welfare State, on the British vision of the brave new world…. The novels of the time, too, have a national, even parochial, quality” (British Society since 1945, 76). Similarly, Marina MacKay and Lyndsey Stonebridge's introduction to British Fiction after Modernism describes the collective mood of British writing in terms of a growing insularity, observing that “as their island shrank, mid-century writers became more domestic and domesticated” (1). John Rosselli's plaintive 1958 observation in the London Magazine about the generation's limited literary purview captures a common critique of the day: “now our novelists seem almost extravagant in their refusal to push anywhere far from bed and board and the Sunday paper” (“Mood of the Month,” 39). Robert Hewison has noted that one of the key themes of postwar cultural politics in Britain was “the promotion of a conservative image of English identity” (Culture and Consensus, 45), an uneasy shoring up of national character captured most revealingly in the wholehearted glee with which the entire nation celebrated the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II as cultural commentators proclaimed the inauguration of a “new Elizabethan age.” In a 1960 article, Rayner Heppenstall aptly captures the conservative elements animating the revitalized national feeling, noting “the recrudescence here in the past ten years of an Englishry based on bowler hats and moustaches, churchgoing and dressing for theatres, the re-investment with glamour of Eton…[and] the reconstitution of a royalist mystique which had been long forgotten” (“Divided We Stand,” 45). From the opposite end of the political spectrum, figures like Richard Hoggart were attempting to formulate a definition of Britishness via the assertion of a vibrant, vernacular (and uniquely British) working-class culture.20 Across a broad range of motivations and political alignments, then, the postwar cultural field in Britain finds unity in its collective restiveness about the viability of Britain's national identity.21
In the literary arena, the era's cultural-national disputes were most frequently framed as a confrontation between modernism and realism. The modernist experimentation dominant before the war still attracted powerful cultural adherents, but its influence was clearly on the wane. In self-conscious contrast to the far-reaching ambitions of their modernist predecessors, the decade's proponents of realism consistently portrayed their aesthetic stance to be in keeping with the more modest, inward instincts of the postwar nation, signaling their alignment “with ‘good old English tradition’ (empiricism, common sense, social comedy along the lines of Fielding and Dickens)” (Gasiorek, Post-war British Fiction, 4). Although this struggle for cultural supremacy never reached any permanently decisive conclusion, the decade's neorealist antagonism to modernism ultimately came to predominate the postwar literary discussion in Britain: the broad tenor of the era's literary opinion conveyed in the title of Rubin Rabinovitz's 1967 study, The Reaction against Experiment in the English Novel, 1950–1960, matches most critical accounts and, more important, represents the common perception of the period's literary currents held by writers and commentators at that time.22 Hewison describes the period being subject to a “general call to order, for a return to tradition away from modernism, that had gone out on all fronts in the early 1950’s” (In Anger, 122), while D. J. Taylor assertively identifies the main current of the decade's novels as antiexperimental: “almost without exception their tone is anti-modernist, self-consciously opposed to the ‘serious’ fiction of the pre-war era, its characters and the attitudes they espoused” (After the War, 71).23 Although this critical insistence on the antimodernism of the period can be overdone, it seems fair to say that influential critic and prolific novelist Angus Wilson was correct in declaiming in 1954 that “external observation, social setting, character set firmly in narrative and scene have once again returned” (“Arnold Bennett's Novels,” 60) to literary fashionableness.24 Indeed, by 1958, Francis Wyndham could unequivocally describe the dominant tendency of the decade's literature as “frankly anti-avant-garde, with its self-conscious Philistinism, its emphasis on picaresque narrative, slapstick humour and journalistic prose, it is a reductio almost ad absurdum of the reaction against Bloomsbury” (“New West Indian Writers,” 188).25 Thus, the literary scene in which the Windrush authors found themselves after World War II was characterized by an overt “principle of reaction against modernism in the emerging dominant style” (Head, Cambridge Introduction, 224), a style that was polemically associated with a return to older, more traditional English values.
If not in the ascendant, however, modernism still permeated the literary scene in important ways. Bradbury, for example, asserts that “though Modernism had begun to disappear…it had also never been more influential” (Modern British Novel, 273).26 The process of consecrating modernism in the academy was becoming increasingly evident, and in the contemporary publishing sphere the discussion was by no means one-sided: a variety of critics (mostly associated with prewar literature) defended the tradition of Joyce, Kafka, Proust, and Woolf. Harry Ritchie, particularly, in his account of the period, takes note of the literary “Mandarins,” well-placed critics and writers such as Cyril Connolly, John Lehmann, Stephen Spender, and Phillip Toynbee who had established their careers before the war, held prominent and influential positions as tastemakers in the world of letters in the postwar years, and maintained allegiance to the highbrow aesthetic principles of prewar modernism.27 Lehmann, the editor of London Magazine, assembled a book of essays in 1956, The Craft of Letters in England, which was generally sympathetic to the idea of experiment and a more intellectually inclined type of fiction.28 Toynbee contributed an article to this volume directly addressing the controversy, in which he criticizes the prevalent notion that “the better young novelists in England are at least agreed that the day of the experimental novel is over” (“Experiment and the Future,” 69). Toynbee's article argues against “those critics who insist that the only good style is a plain style,” maintaining that “to be plain in the manner of our modern plainness is simply to be hackneyed and inexpressive” (72). Similarly, in a 1957 article in Twentieth Century, L. D. Lerner takes up a defense of “self-reflective” writing, pleading that “we should not merely deplore this as modern oversophistication” (“Literature as the Subject,” 555).
To depict a view of the decade as characterized by a monolithic rejection of modernist tenets, then, would be to overstate the case. A more accurate lens would register the fact that at midcentury “modernism lingered in the literary imagination” in more complex ways than simply as an anachronistic, discredited, and exhausted foreign nuisance (MacKay and Stonebridge, introduction, 2). John Wain gives a sense of this lingering presence in a 1956 London Magazine piece, using an extended cricket metaphor to describe the influential shadow cast by modernist writers: “a writer setting up business in the 1950’s is like a batsman going out to the wicket as fifth or sixth man, to follow a succession of giants who have all made centuries” (“Writer's Prospect—IV,” 60). Nevertheless, as even Bradbury observes, in the 1950s, realism was the regnant mode: “It was a decade of realism, when the post-war world and the post-war generation saw itself newly depicted in fresh fiction. It was a time of return to the ‘liberal’ novel, the novel of character and personality, and a time of the reconstruction of the tradition, when writers of an earlier period of realism, the Victorian and Edwardian ages, were recuperated and made visible” (Modern British Novel, 358). While still part of the postwar cultural scene, supporters of modernism were surely embattled, fending off aggressive charges of superannuation by critics like J. D. Scott, who in noting the emergence of the Movement in 1954 asserted that anyone still invested in prewar modernist culture belonged to a passing age. For him the sentiment of the times was readily observable: “it's goodbye to the Little Magazines and ‘experimental writing’” (“In the Movement,” 400).
It was this cacophonous and contentious cultural scene that Windrush writers entered upon arrival in Britain. Importantly, however, their initial relation to this scene was largely mediated in advance through Henry Swanzy, editor and producer of the BBC Overseas Service literary magazine radio program Caribbean Voices.29 There can be little doubt that Caribbean Voices played a formative role in the postwar publishing of Caribbean literature: nearly every major Caribbean literary figure of the 1950s and 1960s (and beyond) can be found on a list of contributors to the program, including Michael Anthony, L. E. (Kamau) Brathwaite, Wilson Harris, Lamming, Mais, Mittelholzer, Naipaul, Andrew Salkey, Selvon, and Derek Walcott. Low, in an article on the publishing practices relating to 1950s West Indian writing, forcefully advocates the importance of the show, asserting that “the contribution of the BBC Caribbean Voices programmes in helping to establish the circle of Caribbean writers in the fifties cannot be overestimated” (“Publishing Commonwealth,” 80–81). The program provided a pan-Caribbean literary forum for the discussion and reception of Caribbean literature and served as an incubator for aspiring writers by providing encouragement, regional exposure, contacts with London publishers and agents, and even financial support (both for reading on the program and for submitting pieces that were accepted). Lamming relates in The Pleasures of Exile a commonly held view of Swanzy: “no comprehensive account of writing in the British Caribbean during the last decade could be written without considering his whole achievement and his role in the emergence of the West Indian novel” (67). Significantly, Swanzy himself had sympathies with the aims of prewar culture, and Caribbean Voices, under Swanzy's influence, advocated a literary philosophy that encouraged precisely the type of self-aware experimentation and critical engagement associated with modernist literary practice.
While a great portion of the material that was initially presented on Caribbean Voices was not remotely experimental—indeed, much of the earliest work is ineptly derivative in the worst sense—items appearing as early as 1949 were displaying tendencies matching those then understood as experimental, including a stream-of-consciousness story called “Taxi Mister” by Daniel Samaro Joseph and poems by Lamming such as “Birth” and “Prelude,” which display surrealist strains and were described on the program as “impressionistic” and “not easy” to understand (CV, 9 Jan. 1949).30 The next year, Roy Fuller, a regular critic on the show, though lambasting the Dantesque pretensions of Walcott's verse in general, nevertheless praises the poet for engaging in a literary practice of “healthy experimentation” (CV, 28 May 1950), and in June, Swanzy dedicated the entire month to programs of experimental writing, in which Lamming, Mittelholzer, and Selvon are significantly represented.31 Mittelholzer regularly contributed pieces that had a varying and notable range of narrative techniques and points of view, such as his “Amiable Mr. Britten,” an overtly self-reflexive short story about the writing process and authorship that employs stream-of-consciousness narration; pointed deviations from proper grammar; and a long series of fragmented, impressionistic prose phrases (CV, 5 Feb. 1950). In reviewing an issue of BIM for the program, Mittelholzer editorially advances the cause of literary experiment by singling out Selvon's story “My Girl and the City” as his best work yet and praising it for its experimentation (CV, 6 Oct. 1957). Indeed, under Swanzy's tutelage, Caribbean Voices encouraged and presented experimental works as crucial to the process of realizing any kind of authentic Caribbean literary identity.32
The prevalent notion of experimentation as vital and healthy for Caribbean literature was undoubtedly connected at one level with the uncertain status of a Caribbean literary tradition. Swanzy in particular saw Caribbean Voices as an important conduit for building such a tradition by providing a forum for on-air publication as well as professional critique and discussion. Addressing West Indian poets early in his editorial tenure, Swanzy explains, “this need to discover tradition is the trouble of all pioneers: you don't always realise it, but you are making your own tradition, and later poets will benefit by reference to you” (CV, 27 July 1947). Indeed, Swanzy saw his role in the program (often tinged with a sense of liberal guilt) as one of facilitating the creation of West Indian literature, noting after one of his first on-air six-month summaries of the program that increasing the discussion, quality, and quantity of Caribbean writing was crucial in determining “whether a Caribbean literature develops or not” (CV, 11 Jan. 1948). Caribbean Voices certainly provided one of the most important forums for airing the widespread regional discussion of what could be considered a properly Caribbean tradition, and Swanzy's open encouragement of experimentation was at one level a frank acknowledgment that Caribbean literature was still in its incubation period. More important for the discussion to follow, Swanzy's open-ended and searching approach to literary creation aligned itself much more readily with the internationalist tendencies of modernist experimentation than the largely unquestioned English jingoism so characteristic of the Movement's return to realism.33
More pragmatically, the Windrush writers, upon arriving in Britain, found allies among Ritchie's literary “Mandarins,” who maintained a receding but still viable institutional power in the publishing world at the time. As Kalliney observes, this older generation of literati seemed to welcome the Windrush writers as vital new standard bearers of the highbrow modernist aesthetic of the prewar years. Given the anxieties concerning British culture, the newly arrived authors from the Caribbean “helped London's extant modernists preserve the continuity of high culture in a city at a moment of widespread pessimism” (“Metropolitan Modernism,” 91).34 Swanzy's contacts in the publishing world were instrumental in the initial publications of most, if not all, of the early Windrush novelists, so this alignment of tastes seems more than simply fortuitous. If the Windrush writers are indeed the progenitors of a new West Indian literary aesthetic, this aesthetic emerged out of an intimate, if agonistic, relationship to wider tendencies in postwar British literature.
While literary experimentation was welcomed by London's “Mandarins” and on Caribbean Voices, modernism's attractions for the Windrush generation also seem to lie just as importantly in its still-resonant cultural valences. These valences, not coincidentally, were loudly rejected by Movement writers over the course of the 1950s. The most audible and influential of the Movement writers was none other than Amis, who seems to have had an outsized role in characterizing the views of the decade's new generation of British writers. Bradbury asserts that “Amis himself was central” to the new sensibility of the 1950s and that his “impact on the 1950s came to rival that of Waugh on the 1920s” (“No, Not Bloomsbury,” 65, 63), while D. J. Taylor observes that “no discussion of the post-war novel can journey very far without acknowledging Amis's enormous importance” (After the War, xxv). Ritchie, too, remarks that Amis stands out in the decade as “a continuously influential presence,” making it “difficult to overestimate the importance of Amis's literary career in the fifties” (Success Stories, 64). Amis, as has been well documented, carried no torch for his modernist predecessors; in the words of Bernard Bergonzi, “Amis has shown himself to be assertively anti-modern, anti-experimental, anti-cosmopolitan, to at least the same degree as [C. P.] Snow or William Cooper” (Situation of the Novel, 162).35 As Bergonzi suggests here, Amis and his Movement peers expressed an (often exaggerated) abhorrence for the foreign and the fancy, which they largely associated with modernism. For Windrush writers, in contrast, modernism's perceived cosmopolitanism—a blend of internationalism and associations of cultural sophistication—is a much more amenable outlook: Amis's aesthetic insistence on plain old English culture did not align easily with their prerogatives.
Amis's first novel, Lucky Jim—published in 1954 and perhaps the emblematic novel of the decade—displays a marked scorn for high culture and any pretensions to intellectualism or aesthetic sophistication, directly associating it with the irremediably foreign. For example, the professor L. S. Caton, who becomes something of a running joke in Amis's next few novels, is made an object of derisive fun for editing “a new historical review with an international bias, or something” (14), implying with the careless afterthought the unimportant dreariness of Caton's pretentious endeavor. A similar opinion emerges in the novel's portrayal of Professor Welch's children, Bernard, a loud, self-ordained artist partial to berets, and his younger brother, whom the narrator dismissively describes as the “effeminate writing Michel” (250).36 Amis emphasizes the pretentiousness of their French names—contrasting them with the real, earnest, masculine, and lively hero Jim Dixon—and associates their artistic inclinations with empty, posturing conceit. Endorsed by the novel, the gruff Dixon dismisses any artist figure as someone who manifests a “desire to range himself with children, neurotics, and invalids” (141) and thinks that anybody claiming any type of aesthetic exceptionalism “could be readily gratified with a tattoo of kicks on the bottom” (141). While it is true that Lucky Jim takes aim not at artists and writers in general (it is a novel itself, after all) but at the pretentiousness often associated with such people, Amis makes abundantly clear that people whose cultural tastes extend too extravagantly beyond his own protagonist's appreciation for, in the estimation of one of Amis's contemporaries, “beer, England, and common sense” (Raven, “Kingsley Amis Story”) are to be deplored and shunned.37
Amis's 1958 novel, I Like It Here, can be taken as a further, resonant example of this opposition to high literary culture, which is, again, figured through the foreign. Lehmann, in fact, explicitly uses the novel as an illustration of the contrast between the contemporaneous experimental school of French writing (led by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Michel Butor) and what he considers the moribund aesthetic of the Movement writers, observing: “I Like it Here would seem to have no claims whatsoever to the label of avant-garde; it is conventional and undistinguished in its prose means, conventional too in its comic effects” (“Foreword,” [1958]). The novel centers on a journey abroad by a writer who thinks of the trip as a “deportation” (7) and spends much time bemoaning “the foreign” generally. Its protagonist, Garnet Bowen, a quasi-autobiographical stand-in for Amis himself, is immediately introduced not as a serious writer, but as someone mistaken for such by others: “Until a couple of years ago Bowen had been supposed to be a novelist who was keeping himself and his family going on the proceeds of journalism, wireless talks and a bit of lecturing. In the last six months or so he had started being supposed to be a dramatist who was keeping himself and his family going by the same means” (8). The falsity and economic insignificance of being an artistic writer are stressed from the outset, and even the literary assignment that catalyzes the novel's plot—a trip to Portugal to solve a mystery—is the product of a literary opinion that Bowen had inebriatedly “pretended to think desirable” (7) being taken up by “some misinformed, progressive and well-intentioned fathead” (7). The novel begins, then, with a description that humorously discounts any notions of meaningful literary endeavor on the part of Bowen.38 Subsequently, the only scene of Bowen practicing his “craft” is a ridiculous one in which he writes one line of dramatic dialogue—going through three versions of a sentence that means roughly “you must be kidding”—and feels sabotaged by “the reputed rule that none but aesthetic considerations must dictate the shaping of a work of art” (98). This rule satirizes modernist writing as ethereal and divorced from the reality of everyday life, to which, implicitly, the author is cleverly saying, “you must be kidding.” After the line of dialogue, Bowen “experimentally” writes a lengthy paragraph of “negative stage directions” so that actors and directors will not misunderstand the sentence as other than a purely ordinary, mundane one. In this way, Amis's parody intimates both the silliness of literary experimentation and the histrionic, overly sublime, and congenitally disingenuous tendencies the novel identifies with the “serious” artistic sphere in general.
The sphere of high literary culture is embodied, of course, by the foreigner Bowen calls Buckmaster: the plot hinges on Bowen's attempt to determine for his publisher whether Buckmaster is or is not the celebrated highbrow author Wulfstan Strether. The contrast between Bowen's folksy nickname and the obviously foreign name of the author is pointed, and this contrast is central to the element of mystery at the heart of the plot. As it happens, none of the editors or publishers can tell whether a submitted manuscript was written by the internationally renowned author or somebody “with the kind of mind that wins the literary competitions in the weeklies” (17). Amis inserts a sample of the writing in question, which Lodge deems “a very creditable parody of bad [Henry] James” (351), and then follows with a judgment by Bowen that echoes the everyday, down-to-earth, positivistic literary attitude that Amis himself promulgated: “He wanted to put the man who had written that in the stocks and stand in front of him with a peck, or better a bushel, of ripe tomatoes and throw one at him for each time he failed to justify any phrase in the Frescobaldi-Yelisaveta scene on grounds of clarity, common sense, emotional decency and general morality” (102). The choice of characters’ names is part of the derision, and in this brief but central episode, the novel's contempt for the modernist/symbolist tradition of literature—and its foreignness—is made exceptionally clear.
Beyond the consistent presence of scornful asides regarding Finnegans Wake (23), “a poetic kind of revolutionary style” (99), and Bowen's “gross betrayal into non-ironical cultural discussion” (144), the novel's final damning critique of the old international, intellectual literary world is contained within Bowen's reasons for deciding that Buckmaster is actually Strether. The first reason is the fact that in conveying his own belief that he is a better writer than Henry Fielding (one of Amis's favorite authors due to his comic ability and lack of literary pretension), Strether reveals himself, to Bowen's mind, as a “prancing, posturing phoney” (180). Bowen postulates that being “of the great-writer period” (180), now defunct, Strether could not possibly have even realized that he was perceived as such, thereby proving by his own literary arrogance and lack of understanding that he was a “great” writer. The second reason is more subtly revealed, but it hinges on Bowen's interactions with Emilia, a Portuguese woman with whom he has a brief encounter. Amis goes out of his way to illustrate the narrative significance of this encounter, noting that for Bowen “something was nagging at his mind, something to do with Buckmaster, something that Emilia had said” (155). This something is not revealed until the end of the novel, at which point it emerges as decisive to Bowen's verdict on Buckmaster. What Bowen recalls is the fact that Emilia had spoken in English to him. From this, Bowen concludes that since Buckmaster knew only that Emilia did not speak much English, he must be who he says he is: if he had been a fake, even that small amount of English would have convinced him not to leave them alone for fear of her revealing too much. The underlying point in Bowen's reasoning is a strong disavowal of complex literary monuments. It suggests that in order to reveal important truths about the world—the only important truth as far as the novel is concerned—no sophisticated, literary language is necessary, only the simplified pidgin English of Emilia. As Bowen reasons, not speaking much English “is a pretty wide concept” (181), and more than wide enough to contain any number of mechanisms for communicating the essential truth of the world.
This view of language efficiency and adornment is furthered by the prominence of another piece of text reproduced in the novel, Bowen's wife's letter. Although he criticizes it for some of its simple and predictable syntactical structures, Bowen ultimately attests to his spouse's communicative power via the ingenuous “closing phrases and interjections of her letter. No part of his nature could resist them or put reservations on what they stood for” (162). Thus, again, the simplest and “most honest” language is deemed the best. Amis's novel, of course, self-consciously holds itself up as a more legitimate alternative—a more straightforward, earthy, “pidgin” form of art—to the international aesthetic that Strether, as a fictional stand-in for writers like Conrad, Joyce, and Lawrence (all alluded to in the book), represents. Thus, I Like It Here embodies what Bradbury describes as the era's regnant literary ethos, “one that spoke not for romantic experimentalism but for sense and realism” and “moved toward a more popular and plainer tone” (Modern British Novel, 317).39 Via both form and content, Amis's third novel confidently declares the outmoded irrelevance, even pitiableness of the modernist “great writer period” (180), emphatically locating any value it might have outside the borders of both England proper and proper English.
For Windrush writers, of course, there are a variety of reasons why the consciously English aesthetic found in Amis's novels might not be attractive. For one thing, certainly, in early postwar Britain their racial status immediately marked them as other. Instead of being welcomed into the postwar British welfare state, the Windrush migrants were seen as strange, foreign intruders.40 Donald Hinds has described the common attitudes toward the newcomers among England's working-class population: “There were many things which they believed about the West Indies which produced ‘instant social prejudice.’ For instance…the people lived in trees…they wore no more than a piece of cloth around their waists, the old loin-cloth, you know…. The women nursed their babies in public” (Journey to an Illusion, 174). A 1960 report by the Family Welfare Assocation, The West Indian Comes to England, sketches a similar picture, noting with disapproval that on “several occasions even reputable journals carried feature articles in which were quoted imaginary statistics on the number of migrants, which resulted in creating the general impression that ‘Jamaicans’ were proceeding to the United Kingdom at an enormous rate for the specific purpose of making an easy living through the facilities of the Welfare Services—that they were introducing strange and previously unheard-of tropical diseases, setting up and managing brothels, and encouraging organized prostitution” (Ruck, West Indian Comes, 66). Ruth Glass warns in her 1960 study of West Indian immigration that British social prejudice manifests itself more profoundly for West Indian migrants than for other immigrant groups since “in the case of the West Indians, all difficulties—general or personal, major or minor—are complicated by the inescapable question of colour prejudice” (London's Newcomers, 44). Racial discrimination is a common strain running through both fictional and historical accounts of the arrival of the Windrush generation in Britain, and its prevalence—manifested most explosively in the riotous racial violence in Nottingham and Notting Hill in 1958—would seem to prevent any inclusion in the unproblematically ethno-national community Amis's work imagines. In such a light, the cosmopolitan internationalism associated with modernism—characterized by a desire to transcend or at least complicate the strict segregation of national borders—seems a promising alternative.
Moreover, in contrast to the simplicity and plainness advocated by Amis, the complexity of modernism coded as “intellectual”—no small consideration for writers who belonged to a group of people widely perceived to be primitive and unthinking. An affiliation with modernism in the British context, then, could also be seen to help counteract the British populace's general perception of West Indian primitivism and difference. Such attitudes certainly found their way into the literary discussion. For example, Spender, who admired Lamming's poetry and took some interest in the emerging West Indian literature, might be expected to be a sympathetic and fair-minded critic. However, his comments on Caribbean Voices betray how deeply the British prejudice toward the character and capacity of West Indians extended.41 While generally quite complimentary in his evaluation of West Indian poetry, Spender gives some familiar reasons for liking it, opining that “it isn't originality of form that impresses me so much, as the fact that I really do feel something of the colour and the heat and the passion of that part of the world in reading this poetry” (CV, 5 Aug. 1951). Evoking the perceived exoticism of Caribbean poetry—“like a breath of bright and fresh air from another part of the world”—Spender then devalues any intellectual quality to the work by observing “a tendency to not thinking carefully enough about technique” before once again praising the “highly colourful and passionate” work of West Indian poets.42 While the criticism regarding attention to form is conceivably valid, in the context of Spender's repetition of color and passion, it hints at a somewhat less salutary set of assumptions about the abilities and intellect of the poets he otherwise praises. Wyndham, another prominent advocate for the importance of these early West Indian writers, betrays traces of such an attitude as well. At the end of his article “The New West Indian Writers,” he suggests that West Indian writers should avoid writing about educated, middle-class characters and concentrate on the more appropriate subject matter of the underprivileged peasant classes, with the implication that West Indian society offers no legitimate experience with anything or anybody educated or middle class.
The tendency to devalue the potential intellectualism of West Indian writers appears even more clearly in an anonymous review of West Indian novels that appeared in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) in 1955.43 The article discusses Lamming, Mittelholzer, and Selvon, labeling them as the best known of the West Indian writers. The review praises Mittelholzer's A Morning at the Office for “stating something fundamental to the West Indies at the present time” (Marshall, “Caribbean Voices,” xvi). This important truth is that Caribbean people “are not conscious that the present is largely determined by what has happened in the past or that the future will be determined by what is done to-day. They live far more in the moment than Europeans do, their lack of historic sense depriving them alike of the benefits of past experience and the burdens of over-anxiety. West Indian life is emotional rather than ratiocinative, spontaneous in its gaiety and its anger, but not closely connected with outside reality” (xvi). This litany of stereotypical claims sets up a clear trajectory for the rest of the review's criticism. Discussing Lamming, the article questions “how conscious the author was of what he was doing” in shifting from first to third person in In the Castle of My Skin and goes on to criticize his second novel because of the evidence it betrays that once in London, the author has “got himself a philosophy and an aesthetic which do not fit him” and has “abandoned the intuition” to which he is much more suited (xvii). Selvon, similarly, is criticized for his second novel, An Island Is a World, because it “is muddied by the same intellectualism” (xvii) as Lamming's novels. The article solemnly implies that all three authors should resort to “intuition” in order to better capture the (imagined) Caribbean experience, in short, to be not so much authors as unthinking conduits for exotic sociological description. Such evidence of the critical suppositions and expectations regarding Caribbean writers suggests a milieu in which a less literalist, self-consciously experimental style becomes a clear political statement aimed at frustrating, disrupting, and calling into question British perceptions of West Indians as primitive and incapable of higher intellectual pursuits.
Although it would be irresponsible to assert a direct, unchanging correlation between particular aesthetic and political choices, one can, in a specific context, make determinant, historicized connections between such choices. Thus, it would seem fair to say that, within the literary world of postwar London, Amis's rejection of modernist practice was enmeshed with a certain “Little England” politics. The dismissal of modernism clearly figured as a rejection of the foreign and the international in favor of the cultivation of a properly British identity and cultural practice. This identity, in turn, was associated with a straightforward simplicity that, while potentially similar to racialized notions of the quaintly primitive customs of West Indians, nevertheless resisted assimilation to cultural practices removed from the British Isles. In the postwar era, as Alan Sinfield suggests, “an element of national consciousness, a preoccupation with Englishness, fuelled hostility to Modernism” (Literature, Politics, 184) in the decade's writers. For example, Wain, arguing in “How It Strikes a Contemporary,” positions the ideal contemporary role of culture as being “directed towards the recovery of a national character” (235), and Donald Davie in essays on poetry throughout the 1950s consistently makes parallels between the Movement's emphasis on ordinary syntax and semantic clarity and the broader notion of a traditional English social order and national continuity (Morrison, Movement, 212). In Bergonzi's view, Amis's “attachment to a central thread of English insular nonconformism and his distaste for cosmopolitan modernism” (Situation of the Novel, 164) are both pronounced and importantly related. It is within these local, historical conditions that the Windrush embrace of modernism becomes most legible.
Such an embrace makes even more sense when one looks at the narrowing, quietist implications of the Movement's special mode of politics, which reflected a particularly resigned disposition to the world and any hopes of changing it. If on the surface, the Windrush writers might share a common “outsider,” antiestablishment, vocally resistant position with writers like Amis and Wain, the structure and focus of the Movement writers’ political vision combined uneasily with the more fundamentally transformative politics of Caribbean dissent that the West Indian writers generally sought to advance. That the Movement writers positioned themselves—and were critically accepted—as outsiders cannot be disputed. Both Wain's aggressively new radio magazine and the foundational collection of Movement poetry edited by Robert Conquest, New Lines, explicitly labeled themselves as challenges to the staid, comfortable status quo of the literary world. Based in the provincial universities, the Movement initially gloried in the lower-middle-class status implied by that institutional affiliation, attacking the old Oxbridge elite that was concentrated in London. Noting their urge to overthrow the establishment, Blake Morrison describes them as the “‘coming’ class…identified with a spirit of change in post-war British society…felt to be representative of shifts in power and social structure” (Movement, 57). J. D. Scott's “In the Movement”—the article from which the Movement got its name (and this chapter its epigraph)—explicitly makes this connection as well, arguing for the rising young writers as the literary incarnation of British social change. Morrison notes that many of these writers “identified with a viewpoint hostile to the ‘old order’” (74): they wrote about and listened to jazz music as a gesture toward participating in unsanctified culture, while Amis and Conquest both put out critical work praising science fiction, thus pointedly demonstrating their antiestablishment credentials.
In the end, however, the accumulating success of the Movement revealed its “politics” to be based less on a deep-seated commitment to social change than on a frustrated and largely individualized attempt to assimilate into British society. As Peter Lewis archly notes, the anger that animated these writers “evaporated in the affluence that increasingly blurred the class barriers which had provoked it” (Fifties, 186). Echoing almost precisely Lamming's critique of Amis, Morrison's account of Movement politics is quite emphatic regarding the underlying complacency of its social complaint: “Comparison of the treatment of social class in the work of the Movement with its treatment in the fiction and non-fiction of later writers…reveals the high priority which the Movement placed upon ‘adjustment’ and ‘compromise.’ Though conscious and at times resentful of class distinction and privilege, the work of the Movement never seriously challenges their right to exist. There is little sense that the social structure could be altered; the more common enquiry is whether individuals can succeed in ‘fitting in’” (73).44 Sinfield also notes the somewhat paradoxical relationship of outward disgruntlement and inward respect toward traditional values and distinctions, dubbing the Movement's actual political stance that of “the anti-bourgeois bourgeois” (Literature, Politics, 190). Thus, while perceived as outsiders, especially in a self-consciously cultural sense, these writers seem ultimately much more insiders than their rhetorical stances indicate. For a group of dissident writers such as arrived from the Caribbean at this time, the Movement's rather sanguinely modest and assimilative goal—to be just “normal chaps” in a normative England—did nothing to address the more urgent political, social, and economic issues that dominated the first West Indian novels.45 As one critic noted perspicaciously, the real literary outsiders of the era could perhaps only be found in “the Dominions, especially those, like Nigeria, where the writers in English are black” (Heppenstall, “Divided We Stand,” 45).46
In fact, the politics of the major literati was mostly one of disaffection from politics, so much so that Randall Stevenson's study of the contemporary British novel condemns 1950s fiction as “limited by an anger which is largely self-indulgent rather than—as was often supposed at the time—politically motivated” (British Novel, 129). With the revelations about the nature of the Stalinist state tainting the Sartrean notion of the engaged writer, the apparent entrenchment of policies of domestic social equality, and the comfortable impression of what the Tories styled “the affluent society” of 1950s Britain, one of the most quoted and accepted sentiments of the time was Jimmy Porter's supremely disaffected complaint in John Osborne's seminal 1956 play Look Back in Anger: “there aren't any good, brave causes left” (89). For West Indian writers, whose home polities were still struggling to gain national independence and redress generations of economic exploitation, such a sentiment could only seem egregiously self-satisfied and quietist.
Amis provides a blueprint for this detached ambivalence of Movement politics in a pamphlet he wrote for the Fabian Society in 1957, entitled Socialism and the Intellectuals. Although slippery with irony and vaguely supportive of causes such as the Welfare State and even, without much hope of success, the drive “to pull African and Asian workers up the ladder after” their British counterparts (11), Amis postulates that intellectuals in fact can have no real political interests, though they should, in the interests of self-preservation, keep wary of fascism. His pamphlet dismisses what he terms “romanticism” in politics, which he characterizes as the state of being engaged in interests that have no bearing on one's own personal situation. Instead, Amis advocates his evaluation of “political writing and other activity as a kind of self-administered therapy for personal difficulties rather than as a contribution towards the reform of society” (4). Amis finishes his long assessment of the ideal worthiness but practical worthlessness of a politically engaged intellectualism with a claim that the most reliable political motive is self-interest and in the last line of the essay cynically muses, “how agreeable it must be to have a respectable motive for being politically active” (13). The politics advanced by Amis here—self-preserving quietism and cynicism—find support in other contemporary cultural figures such as Conquest, who echoes Amis's diagnosis of political activity as a symptom of psychological problems. Conquest flatly states, to start his essay in the 1958 International Literary Annual, that “English writers are not at present very concerned with politics” (“Commitment and the Writer,” 13) and goes on to remark that writers who write about great public issues are, “not to put too fine a point on it, crackpots” (19). A critical survey of views published the same year on new novelists notes that “behind their work lies neither the wish nor the capacity to bring about major changes in the lives of their readers” (Quinton et al., “New Novelists,” 14) and also that the “tendency is to handle all subjects lightly [and] to ignore national and international politics” (19). J. D. Scott also observes the insistently humble political goals of the new generation of writers, who appear “prepared to be as comfortable as possible in a wicked, commercial, threatened world which doesn't look, anyway, as if it's going to be changed much by a couple of handfuls of young English writers” (“In the Movement,” 400). Thus, an apolitical preference is professed openly by novelists and identified by their contemporaries as a salient (if not always wholesome) trait, leaving later critics to conclude that “it seems remarkable that supposedly responsible intellectuals found nothing before Suez to command their political attention” (Morrison, Movement, 96).47 The writers of the period seemed not only to be, in Orwell's terminology, inside the whale, but after a bit of fuss over precisely where they could take up position, quite content to be there. Writers from outside these relatively comfortable confines, as Salman Rushdie suggests, could be forgiven for failing generally to see the wisdom in such a sanguine approach.48
The world-weary complacency characteristic of Movement political thought also allowed, conveniently enough, for a general disconnecting from global (and, of course, imperial) affairs. Indeed, the world outside of England did not seem to engage the Movement writers in any serious manner, the Commonwealth hinterlands presumably being the province of the insufferable “old, sloppy internationalism” derided by Wain in a letter to London Magazine (“Correspondence,” 55). Doris Lessing, in a vehement contemporaneous critique of the provincial attitudes of the decade's writing, advances a complaint—very telling in the context of Windrush writing—about this widespread literary evacuation from international concerns: “Do the British people know that all over what is politely referred to as the Commonwealth, millions of people continually discuss and speculate about their probable reactions to this or that event? No, and if they did, they would not care” (“Small Personal Voice,” 198).49 Defending the complacent disposition of the age, W. J. Harvey replies to Lessing's condemnation of British authors as “bounded by their immediate experience of British life and standards” (“Have You Anything,” 53) by hypothetically asking what on earth could be wrong with such a practice. Moreover, the prominent writers’ tradition-bound view of England surely did not encourage engagement with the increasing numbers of immigrants pouring in from the Commonwealth countries and the subsequent racial tensions, except perhaps for the inclusion in a later university novel by Bradbury, Eating People Is Wrong, of a pathetic, caricatured African exchange student named Mr. Eborebelosa. He, however, is a figure of fun for his linguistic solecisms and his clichéd cultural baggage, including his five wives, his bumbling attempts to seduce white women, and a predilection for carrying his grandfather's skull around with him.50 Thus, in important ways, the form of Movement politics led to an inward focus on (white) social-class struggle within Britain. This largely quietist agenda was not nearly broad enough to encompass the concerns of the early West Indian writers coming to London from much more geographically, politically, economically, and racially marginalized positions.
In the literary world of postwar Britain, then, the Movement's aesthetics of earthy literalism were easily (and often explicitly) associated with a nationalist-leaning, conciliatory, and largely disengaged politics. Such associations made realism an unpromising aesthetic mechanism for West Indian authors to use in launching the social critiques they typically wished to advance. For these authors, the state of England was of much less concern than that country's influence on and interactions with the Commonwealth, while conciliation and a total withdrawal from political concerns—the relatively modest goal, in Wain's view, for artists “to keep their heads” (“Along the Tightrope,” 78) and not commit one way or another to any belief or political view—could hardly be an attractive option for any but the most self-concerned Caribbean artist.
It is clear, then, that the Windrush generation of writers, making their “voyage in” to the metropolitan capital, had vastly different concerns than did the British novelists who were becoming influential during the postwar years. While the latter were focused quite narrowly on England and their own place in it, with little concern for politics or psychological self-questionings, the newly arrived Caribbean writers struggled to have their mere humanity recognized. Agonizing over their British cultural inheritance in the face of racist resistance from the purportedly tolerant British populace, they were intensely concerned with questions of identity and ideology, and the economic and political situations from which they had come gave clear cause for their desire that the British recognize their Commonwealth connections and culpability and then approach these issues through an international frame.51 Instead of anxious consolidation of a tradition and culture taken more or less for granted, the Windrush novelists were, in the words of Lamming, seeking to help West Indians “change the very structure, the very basis of [their] values” (Pleasures of Exile, 36). Given this outlook, neither the complacent “politics” nor the (in some senses) related and equally complacent return to a simpler, traditionalist view of language and literature of the Movement aligned with Windrush interests.
In fact, if it is true that Amis and the Movement were considered the voice of “contemporary common sense” (McEwan, Survival of the Novel, 78), then they represent precisely the commonsense notions—about British fair-mindedness, the childishness of colonized peoples, the universality of the British worldview, the timeless and sacred value of British tradition—that the Windrush writers sought to contest. The type of ontological certainty expressed by Amis when he scoffs, “it would be hard to attach any meaning, except as an expression of lunacy or amnesia, to [the question] ‘who am I?’” (“Legion of the Lost,” 831), is incompatible with a colonial subjectivity steeped in the colonizer's culture and ideology and only grudgingly acknowledged as a sentient member of the human race. Indeed, nearly contemporaneous with Amis's dismissal of such self-questioning is Frantz Fanon's pointed explanation of why such a question is meaningful for colonized peoples: “Because it is a systematic negation of the other person and a furious determination to deny the other person all the attributes of humanity, colonialism forces the people it dominates to ask themselves the question constantly: ‘In reality, who am I?’” (Wretched of the Earth, 250). Further, the type of unwavering British tradition circa 1765 propounded by many in the Movement contains a distinctly different resonance to people whose ancestors were likely considered chattel at the time. Thus, within this nexus of political and literary affiliations, the realist mode of fiction that grew to predominate in the literary field of postwar Britain does not appear particularly well suited to West Indian desires for a contestatory ideological critique that extends beyond national borders and seeks to inspire a reconsideration of common assumptions about race, equality, and the residual effects of empire. If on the linguistic level it seems that these emergent postcolonial novelists might have embraced the truth in Lodge's assertion that the hermeneutic instability of language ultimately “returns to sabotage the positivist, commonsense epistemology at the center” (“Modern, the Contemporary,” 349) of Movement work, it seems that the political valences of the Movement would also serve to sabotage any urge for these Commonwealth outsiders to fall in step with the literary fashion of the day.52
Returning to Lamming's critique of Amis in The Pleasures of Exile, it is clear that, although modernism had not been decisively defined at that time, its general cultural valence was far more amenable to the needs and practices of Windrush novelists than the Movement's preferred modes. Modernism's alliance with internationalism and exile—at the root of the Movement's nationalistic rejection of it—was by then a well-known trademark, available to complicate Amis's complacent sense of English normalcy (and, implicitly, superiority). The contestatory, oppositional impulse of modernism is also a definitive feature, and its focus on interpretation, subjective experience, and the operations of language and ideology strongly impugns the ontological, hermeneutical, and epistemological certainty of the Movement writers. Moreover, its considered approach to tradition provides a much more sophisticated and flexible model for thinking about cultural inheritance and production than the largely backward-looking, tradition-bound thrust that Amis and others promulgated. Thus, the particular lineaments of the literary field in postwar London suggest the potential attraction and utility an alignment with modernism might hold for authors like Lamming, Mais, Mittelholzer, and Selvon.
What follows focuses on the novels themselves, tracing the specific ways in which Windrush authors engaged with modernist forms in generating their own complicated, counterconventional, and sometimes contradictory literary output. Emerging in dynamic interaction with the metropolitan heart of empire, the fiction of the Windrush generation strove to interrogate the culturally and geographically narrow boundaries of British fiction. The following chapters, in turn, seek to preserve this originary openness by keeping the British dimension of West Indian fiction firmly in view, exhuming the purpose and meaning behind these paradigmatic Caribbean novelists’ embrace of modernist practice.