The social and political background. Its influence on the literature

ENGLISH LITERATURE

THE PERIOD 1917 - 1945

THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL BACKGROUND. ITS INFLUENCE ON THE LITERATURE

The period is full of different historical events in the world as well as in Britain itself. The global social processes influenced greatly upon the state of human society in various countries and on the literary activity in particular. The intensity of the social life gives us the reason to divide this period into 2 parts: 1) 1917-1930; 2)1930-1945.

l) The first part of the period was the time when the political crisis in many countries reached its highest point and revolutions took place in them (Russia, Germany and Hungary). The writers of this time show how a new society might be built up. But, many writers who were opposed to revolutions saw nothing but chaos and anarchy before them. They explained this crisis as a failure of civilization.

A symbolic method of writing had already started early in the 20th century. It was in the twenties, along with works of realism produced by Shaw, Wells, and Galsworthy, but appeared writers who refused to acknowledge reality as such. They would not believe that the mind of man reflected reality,—that is to say, nature and society. They would not believe that social relations between people influenced not only the formation of character in individuals, but also historical events. The cause of everything that happened was the irrational, the unconscious and the mystical in man. These writers called the inner psychological process the stream of consciousness and based a new literary technique upon it.

The most important author to use this new literary technique was James Joyce (1882—1941). He influenced many writers on both sides of the Atlantic. The portrayal of the stream of consciousness as a literary technique is particularly evident in his major novel Ulysses (1922). The task he set before himself was to present a day in ordinary life as a miniature picture of the whole of human history; his characters being not only individuals but also universal representations of mankind in general. Therefore the text of Ulysses is a combination of different manners of writing and different styles. The actual characters of the book are often associated with people existing only in the memories of the character, but also within literary, historical and mythological figures.

Among the writers of short stories who used the realistic method were Katherine Mansfield and Somerset Maugham. Though the works of these writers differ very much in their artistic approach, their authors had one feature in common. To them the stability of the existing social and political order seemed unquestionable.

2) In the second part in the development of English literature was the decade between 1930 and World War II.

The world economic crisis spread over the whole world in the beginning of the thirties. The Hunger March of the unemployed in 1933 was the most memorable event in Britain. The unemployed marched from Glasgow to London holding meetings in every town they passed. _;

In Germany the resentment of the masses was exploited by Nazi
demagogues for their nationalist and militarist propaganda. Hitler came
to power in 1933.

In 1936 the fascist mutiny of General Franco led to the Civil War in Spain

Many British intellectuals and workers joined the ranks of the international Brigade. Every one of them clearly realized that the struggle against fascism in Spain was at the same time a struggle for the freedom of their own country.

The Second World War broke out in 1939. When the Germans began massive bombing air raids in 1940, England was on the verge of defeat. However, later developments brought a change.

These turbulent times made everyone take a definite stand on ideological and political questions.

A new generation of realist writers, among them Richard Aldington, J.I.Priestley and A.J.Cronin appear on the literary scene.

POST WAR AND MODERN LITERATURE

After World War II appeared many young writers like such as James Aldridge, who were ready to keep up the standard of wholesome optimism, and mature writers, who have passed through a certain creative crisis, but who were now working to discover humanism with a positive set of values. Such a writer is Graham Greene.

In the fifties there appears a very interesting trend in literature, the followers of which were called 'The Angry Young Men'. The post-war changes had given a chance to a large number of young people from the more democratic layers of society to receive higher education at universities. But on graduating, these students found they had no prospects in life. Unemployment had increased after the war and besides that, English society continued to follow the old conservative rules of life and apparently did not need them. No one was interested to learn what their ideas on life and society were. They felt deceived and became angry.

There appeared works dealing with such characters, angry young men who were angry with everything and everybody. Outstanding writers of this trend were John Wain, Kingsley Amis and the dramatist John Osborne.

Modern literature that began in the sixties saw a new type of criticism in the cultural life of Britain. This criticism was revealed in the 'working-class novel', as it was called. These novels deal with characters coming from the working class, but they have a petty-bourgeois psychology. The best known writer of this trend is Alan Sillitoe.

So, in this period one can differ the Post War Literature itself and the Modern Literature that began in the sixties with the new type of cultural life of Britain.

Since sixties the literary life in Great Britain has developed greatly. The new time brings new heroes, new experience in theatrical life and poetry, new forms and standards in prosaic works. The specific feature of nowadays literature is the variety of genres and styles, which enrich the world's literature. Alongside with the realistic method the symbolic one takes place and develops further. On the one hand, the themes in the modem literary works concern more global problems: the Peace and War, the environmental protection, the relations between the mankind and the Universe. But on the other hand, the duties and obligations of the individual man, the psychology.

William Somerset Maugham

William Somerset Maugham was born in Paris in 1874. His parents died when he was very little, and the boy was brought up by his uncle, a clergyman.

In his book The Summing Up (1938) Maugham recollects: "My parents died when I was so young, my mother when I was eight, my father when I was ten, that I know little of them but from hearsay. My father, I do not know why unless he was drawn by some such restlessness for the unknown as has consumed his son, went to Paris and became solicitor to the British Embassy.... He was a great traveller for those days. He had been to Turkey, Greece, and Asia Minor and in Morocco... He had a considerable library of travel books..."

Evidently, William took after his father. It was his cherished desire from childhood to see different continents and as soon as he got the opportunity he set out to real­ize his dream.

After his parents' death the boy was taken away from the French school which he had attended, and went daily for his lessons to the apartment of the English clergyman attached to the Embassy.

"His method of teaching me English," writes Maugham, "was to make me read aloud the police-court news in The Standard and I can still remember the horror with which I read the ghastly details of a murder in the train between Paris and Calais. I must then have been nine." (The Summing Up)

Maugham expects the reader to draw his own conclusions about the characters and events described in his novels: "I do not seek to persuade anybody. I am devoid of the pedagogic instinct and when I know a thing, I never feel in myself the desire to impart it to others. I do not much care if people agree with me... Nor does it greatly disturb me to discover that my judgement is at variance with that of the majority." (The Summing Up)

Other most prominent works by Somerset Maugham are the novels: Cakes and Ale (1930), Theatre (1937) and the Razor's Edge (1944).

Somerset Maugham triumphed not only as a novelist but as a short-story writer as well. He produced some of the finest stories in modern English literature. They are usually very sincere, interest­ing, well-constructed and logically developed. No matter how many times you read them, they always give you the same feeling of freshness and excitement that you experienced on the first reading.

Many of Maugham's stories are set in foreign lands where the author was as easily at home as he was in his native England. They were inspired by his travels in China, Malaya, Borneo, Siam and many other countries.

"I have sojourned in most parts of the world, and while I writing stories I could seldom stay anywhere for any length of tea without getting the material for one or more tales," says Maugham in his preface to Rain and Other Stories.

His rich experience of life and his acute insight into human and, true gave Maugham an analytical and critical quality which found its expression in the vivid depiction of characters and situations.

The technique of short-story writing always interested Maugham He expressed his opinion on the subject in the following way:

"I like a story that fits. I did not take to writing stories seriously ill I had had much experience as a dramatist, and this experience taught me to leave out everything that did not service the dramatic value of my story. It taught me to make incident follow incident insuch a manner as to lead up to the climax I had in mind...

Maugham has stated repeatedly that a story must have a beginning, a middle and an end.

"I should define ashort story as a piece of fiction that has unit ofimpression and that can be read at a single sitting. I should inclined to say that the only test of its excellence is that of interest..."

Maugham believes that the charm of a story lies in its interesting plot and exciting situation, but we cannot share this opinion: his own stories, though they are indeed interesting and exciting, at the same time convey deep thought, keen observation and sharpness of characterization. These very qualities assure Maugham an outstanding place in the annals of literature and in the hearts of all who love good stories.

Maugham was strongly influenced by De Maupassant and Chekh­ov in his story-writing. Like his great predecessors, he shows us people of various occupations and belonging to different social groups. Moreover his sympathy invariably lies with the common people.

Though Maugham does not give a broad panorama of contemporary society and does not go deep into social problems, he shows many different aspects of life. Every novelette of his is a piece of vivid realism, original, deep and exciting. He is equally at his best in his tragic stories and in his humorous ones.

A realistic portrayal of life, keen character observation, interesting plots coupled with beautiful, expressive language and a simple and lucid style, all place Somerset Maugham on a level with the greatest English writers of the 20th century.

ENGLISH POST WAR AND THE NEWEST NOVELISTS

The traditions of realism of Zolya and Balzak, Tolstoi and Dickens were continued by Charts Percy Snow (1905-80). He regarded the specifity of the realistic novel in the complex feature learning of man and society as to the social, moral, psychological and intellectual aspects, that are interinfluenced and interconnected with each other. C. P. Snow was varcity scientist and civil servant and knew all about what goes on behind

Cambridge senior-common-room doors and within Whitehall corridors, but his curiously unexciting revelations scarcely stir the appetite for either academic or administrative status. Being the writer-humanist, C.P. Snow in his literary works and social-political activity made all his best to put away the break between the technique and humanistic cultures at the age of Technical Scientific Progress, at the age dangerous because of unlashing the war. Refusing from the carrier of the physicist, Snow had devoted himself to the social and writer's activity.

Snow had created the epic cycle Strangers and Brothers, which consists of several novels, where the description of English reality comprises some decades. The characteristic features of Snow's novels are: the variety of plots in one and the same work, and group scenes. In the epic cycle there are groups of the novels, which differ by their genres differentiation. Among his famous works are biographical and psychological novels The Light and the Dark, Tune of Hope, Homecomings. The novels-'researches' are presented by The Affair, in which the author expresses his point of view upon the contemporary capitalistic society. The novel Corridors of Power may be referred to the genre of political novel. The problem 'the man and society' is decided in his works as 'the man and office, where he serves'. This turn in the solving of the problem is explained by the realistic knowledge of the contemporary structure of the capitalistic society - a society with the complex state machine. The individual is described as a part of a giant administrative apparatus, as an 'organization's man'.

The prominent place in modern English literature is taken by William Golding (1911-) due to his philosophic and allegoric novels. He was educated at Grammar School and at Oxford. He was in the Navy during the 2-nd World War. Golding is the author of a number of essays, radio plays, short stories, a good deal of poetry, but his name first became known to the general public when his novel Lord of Flies was published in 1954. The cruelty of fascism and the war horrors made the writer think over the fate of mankind and nature of man. His novel Lord of Flies is written as a warning about the subsequences of fascism, he said that the tasks of evil must be found inside the country and its people. This novel has been called a modern classic and has had great popularity. The story tells of how nice people can, under certain circumstances, become savages very quickly. It is a story about a group of boys who found themselves on a desert island when their plane was shot down, and all the grown-ups perished. The island is not a real island, it symbolizes everyone who tries to act with common sense: to keep order, to built huts on the beach, to keep a fire on the mountain top as a signal. Simon and Piggy are the only boys whom Ralph really trust. Jack is only interested in hunting and power. The boys regress to savagery. In reversing the pattern of children's

adventure stories and locating evil in the boys themselves, Golding re­energized the notion of original sin. Facile fashionable doctrines of progress and evolution are up-ended in The Inheritors (1935) where we see a crucial stage in the rise of our species through the eyes of Neanderthal man (and hear a good deal of his utterance too). Neanderthal man is innocent, pious and amiable, while our own progenitor. Homo sapiens, who comes to displace him in the process of evolutionary development, is double-minted and capable of self-deception. The theme of the human Tall¹ is present again. Golding makes no concessions to the novelist's natural desire to work to a promising briefer to repeat experiments that have proved successful. In Pincher Martin (1956) a shipwrecked sailor imagines that he is clinging to a bare rock desperate to survive. His past is recalled; but at the end we learn that he died in the wreck and that the whole recollection has taken place at the point of drowning. Free Fall (1959) is the study of Sammy Mountjoy, a successful artist, how he loses his soul and is brought up against the consequences when the girl he has seduced goes insane. If Martin is a mock-up Prometheus, Sammy is a parodic Dante who destroys his Beatrice. In The Spire (1965) Golding studies the moral and spiritual condition of Jocelin, dean of a cathedral, whose obsessive resolve to build a spire has a dual motivation in faith and in sheer self-assertion, through which the powers of heaven and hell collide. Golding has continued to produce novels (Darkness Visible, 1979; Rites of Passage, 1980) in which he experiments boldly with substance and style, in each case sustaining his vision on a symbolic framework which gives moral thrust and coherence to the whole.

A group of seven women born in the second decade of the century might together illustrate the diversity of the twentieth-century novelist's interests. Elizabeth Taylor (1912-75) is a refined stylist whose swift flashes of dialogue and reflection and deft sketches of the wider background give vitality to her portrayals of well-to-do family life in commuterland. (See In a Summer Season, 1961, and The Wedding Group, 1968.) Mrs Taylor has humour and compassion as well as disciplined artistry, and has logically been compared with Jane Austen. So has Barbara Pvm (1913-80) who tasted fame, sadly enough, only at the end other life. Another restrained and perceptive artist, she is mistress of ostensibly ingenuous and candid dialogue and reflection which are resonant with comic overtones. Excellent Women (1952) and A Glass of Blessings (1958) were reprinted in the late 1970s when Philip Larkin and David Cecil drew attention to the quality of her neglected work. Later novels, The Sweet Dove Died (1978) and Quartet in Autumn (1978), are more sombre but no less engaging in their blend of pathos and comedy. One might well put

beside these two English writers the Irish writer Mary Lavin (1912-), whose short stories focus on the ups and downs of family life with quiet pathos and humour. Her novels, The House in Clewes Street (1945) and Mary O'Grady (1950), are family histories presented with psychological sensitivity and a delicious vein of irony.

The public domain intrudes more into the work of Olivia Manning (1917-80) who found herself, with her husband, in Bucharest in 1939, to be driven thence by German advances first to Greece, then to Egypt. She recorded her experience in her Balkan Trilogy: The Great Fortune (1960), The Spoilt City (1962) and Friends and Heroes (1965), documenting how people behaved as the Nazi menace encroached on English residents. The private story of Harriet Pringle and her husband Guy is one of colliding temperaments, but for those in the know the trilogy has fascination as a roman a clef.

Another woman who was in the right place at the right time as a future novelist is Doris Lessing (1919-), brought up in Southern Rhodesia. Her sequence of five novels called Children of Violence begins with Martha Quest (1952) and -tells the story of Martha's upbringing and development. It is a story of personal search and struggle, by a somewhat tempestuous and self-centred woman, against the fetters of sexual, social and political conventions. Iris Murdoch (1919-), on the other hand, is a professional philosopher who has used the novel as a vehicle for studying the problem of freedom and responsibility. Under the Net (1954) is heavily overplotted but often very amusing, while The Bell (1958) is somewhat over-organized in terms of symbol and characterization.

Muriel Spark (1918-) first made an impact with a novel, Robinson (1958), which, curiously enough, like Golding's Lord of the Flies, owes something to Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. January Marlow and two other survivors of a plane crash spend three months on a manshaped island inhabited only by Robinson and his servant. Robinson, a semi-mythical figure - benefactor, host and provider, yet also governor and director -withdraws for a space to contrive temporary freedom' for the survivors, and their relationships reenact passages from January's past. In Memento Mori (1959) aged characters have the tenor of their ways shaken by intermittent telephone calls reminding them that they must die. Thus Muriel Spark subjects her characters to specialized laboratory conditions that intensify aspects of the inescapable human condition - they are marooned in exile or under threat of mortality. Her little words become microcosms of the larger reality. Dimensions of awareness are lightly opened up. The Devil turns up at a London factory in the shape of a lively Scotsman in The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960). The Bachelors (1960) is a quieter study of what the title suggests: the intrusion of the

unknown. Other is in this case represented by spiritualism. The Prime Miss Jean Brodie (1962) is the study of an Edinburgh school teacher whose methods challenge authority and subject her favourite pupils tc over-pressurized hot-house development, socially and sexually. There is autobiographical material here, as in the much later novel, Loitering with Intent (1981). Muriel Spark is a witty writer with an epigrammatic crispness in dialogue. Technically she engineers time shifts and modes of presentation with adroitness. The human conditions she explores may have dimensional openness to the possibility of the extra-naturalistic, but she steers well clear of mechanical allegory or over-contrived symbolism. Her imaginative worlds exist in their own right. She is considered to be a representative of the critical realism in the newest English literature. Spark won popularity as a novelettes or short-story writer. But the basis of her views is rather, contradictory. On the one hand she tried to show absurdity of human's life and his fatalism. On the other hand she represents herself as a writer, who know the morality, psychology of i 'middle class', she reflects the atmosphere of hypocricy and snobism of bourgeois society. She writes about the absence of moral values and spiritual emptyness and cynism of the contemporary people. The writer draws the pictures of real life with hyperbolies and exaggerations according to her manner of realistic satire.

The 1950s saw a literary phenomenon which journalists conceptualized for a mass public with the phrase 'Angry Young Men'. That post-war socialism gave university education to young men from the working classes and then left them cut off from elidst circles, social and cultural, no doubt helps to explain the rise of the anti-hero, venomously, comically or patronizingly dismissive of establishment and inhibitions.

William Cooper (1910—) has been credited with ushering in the anti-hero of the 1950s with Joe Lunn in Scenes from Provincial Life (1950), but it was Lucky Jim (1954) by Kingsiev Amis (1922-) that provided the journalists with a protest hero to partner Osbome's Jimmy Porter. In fact, of course, Amis is essentially a comic writer and Jim Dixon, the young university lecturer, is up against a target as much represented by pretentiousness and phony dilettantism as by anything likely to get under the skin of an ardent social egalitarian. Amis, developing his comic talent in later novels, took up the handy sex recipes. A more standard specimen of iuvenis iratus is Joe Lampton, a West Riding hero with his eyes on the¹' money, in Room at the Top (1957) by John Braine (1922-). Lampton, a war orphan and local authority clerk, gets his revenge on the local social establishment that rejects him by marrying into it. The emotional and moral cost of ambition is analysed with penetration. Braine tackles a real human issue.

Arthur Seaton, in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) by Alan SiUitoe (1928-), is a Midlands factory hand who lacks a meaningful place in society and whose physically dirty working hours are balanced by morally seedy week-ends. A more thought-out study in the search for social adjustment is provided by John Wain (1925-) in Hurry on Down (1953). Charles Lumjey, a young university graduate, faces difficulties supposedly due to the fact that (in Wain's words) 'there is an unhealed split between the educational system and the assumptions that underlie life'.

Relationships between the British and the natives are explored at every level of personal and public life. The work is complex in construction yet fluent and compelling. The fascination of recent history has touched other writers too. Richard Hughes planned a trilogy, The Human Predicament, on events that culminated in the Second World War and published two volumes, The Fox in the Attic (1961) and The Wooden Shepherdess (1972), covering the years from Hitler's putsch in 1923 to the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. In Troubles (1970V J. G. Farrell (1935-79)portrayed life in a decaying Irish hotel during the troubled years between 1919 and 1921, and then tackled two other episodes in British imperial decline, the Indian Mutiny (The Siege of Krishnapur,1973) and the Fall of Singapore (The Singapore Grip, 1978).

William Trevor (1928-) is a writer of broader range and richer gifts, perhaps the most distinctive novelist to emerge Since William Golding and Muriel Spark. In The Old Boys (1964) he focuses on a group of cranky old human misfits in a story of an old boys' association and their annual reunion, and in The Boarding House (1965) on the inhabitants of an establishment equally conducive to the harbouring of mildly potty and inadequate individuals. Trevor's terse, crisp dialogue, and his dry, detached portrayal of seediness, ill-humour or pointless pemicketiness is fetchingly entertaining. And there is compassion too. Trevor extended his range in Mrs Eckdorfin O'Neill's Hotel (1970). A woman photographer is seeking material for her next coffee-table documentary at a Dublin hotel that has decayed from its former splendour and is now used as a brothel. The counterpoindng of various themes in Dublin life is neatly controlled and gives textural richness to the novel. Trevor has continued to be productive as a novelist (see The Children of Dynmouth, 1976, and Other People's Worlds, 1980), and he is also aversatile writer of short stories. The tales in Angels at the Ritz (1975) show an interest in personal experiences of frustration and anti-climax which naturally called out comparisons with Joyce's Dubliners. A talent of matching distinction, if not of comparable imaginative range, is that of JenniferJohnston (1930-), the daughter of the playwright Denis_ Johnston. She portrays the Anglo-Irish landed gentry with a subtle registration of their awkward relationship to local peasants and retainers. In The Gates

(1973)Major MacMahon decays alcoholically while his orphaned niece finds consolation with a peasant boy. In How Many Miles to Babylon Irish heir and peasant boy go off to fight together as officer and private in the First World War, and the mechanical pressures of military discipline tum their impulsive affection for each other into a cause of tragedy.

Among younger novelists now at work A. N. Wilson (1950-) has a comparably beguiling sense of humour. In The Healing Art (1980) X-ray reports on two Oxford women are mixed up so that the housewife wrongly hinks she is clear and the English don, Pamela Cooper, struggles unnecessarily to accommodate herself to a death sentence. Pamela, an Anglo-Cathotic, is persuaded to seek miraculous healing at the shrine at Walsingham and a seeming miracle ensues. Wilson's registration of the contemporary scene is acutely ironic; yet-his strength is that he is not pure satirist, pure humourist or pure moralist, but a piquant blend of all three. The humour is the sharper for the moral seriousness with which it runs in harness. In some of the short stories in First Love, Last Rites (1975) Ian McEwan (1948-) enters the child's mind with disturbing penetration, and does so in a style that is taut direct and exact. In his novel The Cement Garden (1978) four children are given prematurely oy me deaths of their parents the adult freedom that corrupts Golding's schoolboys in Lord of the Flies. The symbolism, the atmosphere of intense, claustrophobic eeriness and the unreality of the children's isolation in a decaying urban area together give this concise tale the qualities of fantasy and fable. There is neither constriction nor conciseness in the work of William Bovd (1952-), but his novel An Ice-Cream War (1982) is a remarkable product of patient research. It tells the story of the campaign in East Africa during the 1914-18 war, and thus sheds light on a little-publicized aspect of the struggle

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