Modern English and American literature

The present community is planning to install a bell of its own, and it occurs to Dora and Toby Gashe that a bell they have located at the bottom of the lake should be substituted for the new one. The one at the bottom, they feel, is the bell of the legend; the substitution will provoke astonishment and also provide them with entertainment.

John Robert Fowles

1926-2005

John Robert Fowles was born March 31, 1926 in Leigh-on-Sea, a small town located about 40 miles from London in the county of Essex, England. He recalls the English suburban culture of the 1930s as oppressively conformist and his family life as intensely conventional. Of his childhood, Fowles says “I have tried to escape ever since.”

Fowles attended Bedford School, a large boarding school designed to prepare boys for university, from ages 13 to 18. After briefly attending the University of Edinburgh, Fowles began compulsory military service and within two years was promoted to lieutenant.

Fowles then spent four years at Oxford, where he discovered the writings of the French existentialists. In particular he admired Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, whose writings corresponded with his own ideas about conformity and the will of the individual. He received a degree in French in 1950 and began to consider a career as a writer.

Several teaching jobs followed: a year lecturing in English literature at the University of Poitiers, France; two years teaching English at Anargyrios College on the Greek island of Spetsai; and finally, between 1954 and 1963, teaching English at St. Godric's College in London, where he ultimately served as the department head.

The time spent in Greece was of great importance to Fowles. During his tenure on the island he began to write poetry and to overcome a long-time repression about writing. Between 1952 and 1960 he wrote several novels but offered none to a publisher, considering them all incomplete in some way and too lengthy.

In late 1960 Fowles completed the first draft of The Collector in just four weeks. He continued to revise it until the summer of 1962, when he submitted it to a publisher; it appeared in the spring of 1963 and was an immediate best-seller. The critical acclaim and commercial success of the book allowed Fowles to devote all of his time to writing.

The Aristos, a collection of philosophical thoughts and musings on art, human nature and other subjects, appeared the following year. Then in 1965, The Magus was published. Among the seven novels that Fowles has written, The Magus has perhaps generated the most enduring interest, becoming something of a cult novel, particularly in the U.S.

With parallels to Shakespeare's The Tempest and Homer's The Odyssey, The Magus is a traditional quest story made complex by the incorporation of dilemmas involving freedom, hazard and a variety of existential uncertainties. Fowles compared it to a detective story because of the way it teases the reader: “You mislead them ideally to lead them into a greater truth...it's a trap which I hope will hook the reader,” he says.

The most commercially successful of Fowles' novels, The French Lieutenant's Woman, appeared in 1969. It resembles a Victorian novel in structure and detail, while pushing the traditional boundaries of narrative in a very modern manner. Winner of several awards it is the book that today's casual readers seem to most associate with Fowles.

In the 1970s Fowles worked on a variety of literary projects, including a series of essays on nature, and in 1973 he published a collection of poetry, Poems. He also worked on translations from French, including adaptations of Cinderella and the novella Ourika. His translation of Marie de France's 12th century story Eliduc served as an inspiration for The Ebony Tower, a novella and four short stories that appeared in 1974.

Daniel Martin, a long and somewhat autobiographical novel spanning over 40 years in the life of a screenwriter, appeared in 1977, along with a revised version of The Magus. These were followed by Mantissa (1982), a fable about a novelist's struggle with his muse; and A Maggot (1985), an 18th century mystery which combines science fiction and history.

In addition to The Aristos, Fowles has written a variety of non-fiction pieces including many essays, reviews. He has also written the text for several photographic compilations, including Shipwreck (1975), Islands (1978) and The Tree (1979).

Since 1968, Fowles has lived on the southern coast of England in the small harbour town of Lyme Regis (the setting for The French Lieutenant's Woman). His interest in the town's local history resulted in his appointment as curator of the Lyme Regis Museum in 1979, a position he filled for a decade.

A book of essays, Wormholes was published in May 1998, devoted to literature, conservation, natural history and a variety of other interests.

The Collector is the story of the abduction and imprisonment of Miranda Grey by Frederick Clegg, told first from his point of view, and then from hers by means of a diary she has kept, with a return in the last few pages to Clegg's narration of her illness and death.

Clegg's section begins with his recalling how he used to watch Miranda entering and leaving her house, across the street from the town hall in which he worked. He describes keeping an “observation diary” about her, whom he thinks of as “a rarity”, and his mention of meetings of the “Bug Section” confirms that he is an amateur lepidopterist. On the first page, then, Clegg reveals himself to possess the mind-set of a collector, one whose attitude leads him to regard Miranda as he would a beautiful butterfly, as an object from which he may derive pleasurable control, even if “collecting” her will deprive her of freedom and life.

Clegg goes on to describe events leading up to his abduction of her, from dreams about Miranda and memories of his stepparents or coworkers to his winning a “small fortune” in a football pool. When his family immigrates to Australia and Clegg finds himself on his own, he begins to fantasize about how Miranda would like him if only she knew him. He buys a van and a house in the country with an enclosed room in its basement that he remodels to make securable and hideable. When he returns to London, Clegg watches Miranda for 10 days. Then, as she is walking home alone from a movie, he captures her, using a rag soaked in chloroform, ties her up in his van, takes her to his house, and locks her in the basement room.

When she awakens, Clegg finds Miranda sharper than “normal people” like himself. She sees through some of his explanations, and recognizes him as the person whose picture was in the paper when he won the pool. Because he is somewhat confused by her unwillingness to be his “guest” and embarrassed by his inadvertent declaration of love, he agrees to let her go in one month. He attributes her resentment to the difference in their social background: “There was always class between us.”

Clegg tries to please Miranda by providing for her immediate needs. He buys her a Mozart record and thinks, “She liked it and so me for buying it.” He fails to understand human relations except in terms of things. About her appreciation for the music, he comments, “It sounded like all the rest to me but of course she was musical.” There is indeed a vast difference between them, but he fails to recognize the nature of the difference because of the terms he thinks in. When he shows her his butterfly collection, Miranda tells him that he thinks like a scientist rather than an artist, someone who classifies and names and then forgets about things. She sees a deadening tendency, too, in his photography, his use of cant, and his decoration of the house. As a student of art and a maker of drawings, her values contrast with his: Clegg can judge her work only in terms of its representationalism, or photographic realism. In despair at his insensitivity when he comments that all of her pictures are “nice”, she says that his name should be Caliban, the subhuman creature in Shakespeare's The Tempest.

Miranda uses several ploys in attempts to escape. She feigns appendicitis, but Clegg, only pretends to leave, and sees her recover immediately. She tries to slip a message into the reassuring note that he says he will send to her parents, but he finds it. When he goes to London, she asks for a number of articles that will be difficult to find, so that she will have time to try to dig her way out with a nail she has found, but that effort also is futile.

When the first month has elapsed, Miranda dresses up for what she hopes will be their last dinner. She looks so beautiful that Clegg has difficulty responding except with confusion. When she refuses his present of diamonds and offer of marriage, he tells her that he will not release her after all. She tries to escape by kicking a log out of the fire, but he catches her and chloroforms her again, this time taking off her outer clothing while she is unconscious and photographing her in her underwear.

Increasingly desperate, Miranda tries to kill Clegg with an axe he has left out when he was escorting her to take a bath upstairs. She injures him, but he is able to prevent her from escaping. Finally, she tries to seduce him, but he is unable to respond, and leaves, feeling humiliated. He pretends that he will allow her to move upstairs, with the stipulation that she must allow him to take pornographic photographs of her. She reluctantly cooperates, and he immediately develops the pictures, preferring the ones with her face cut off.

Having caught a cold from Clegg, Miranda becomes seriously ill, but Clegg hesitates to bring a doctor to the house. He does get her some pills, but she becomes delirious, and the first section ends with Clegg's recollection: “I thought I was acting for the best and within my rights.”

The second section is Miranda's diary, which rehearses the same events from her point of view, but includes much autobiographical reflection on her life before her abduction. She begins with her feelings over the first seven days, before she had paper to write on. She observes that she never knew before how much she wanted to live.

Miranda describes her thoughts about Clegg as she tries to understand him. She describes her view of the house and ponders the unfairness of the whole situation. She frequently remembers things said by G. P., who gradually is revealed to be a middle-aged man who is a painter and mentor whom Miranda admires. She recreates a conversation with Clegg over, among other things, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. She gets him to promise to send a contribution, but he only pretends to. She admits that he's now the only real person in her world.

Miranda associates Clegg's shortcomings with “the blindness, deadness, out-of-dateless, stodginess and, yes, sheer jealous malice of the great bulk of England”, and she begins to lose hope. She gets Clegg to read The Catcher in the Rye, but he doesn't understand it. Miranda feels more alone and more desperate, and her reflections become more philosophical. She describes her reasons for thinking that seducing Clegg might change him, and does not regret the subsequent failed attempt, but she fears that he now can hope only to keep her prisoner.

Miranda begins to think of what she will do if she ever gets free, including revive her relationship with G. P. on any terms as a commitment to life. Miranda becomes sick with Clegg's cold, literally as well as metaphorically. As she becomes increasingly ill, her entries in the journal become short, declarative sentences and lamentations.

The third section is Clegg's, and picks up where his first left off. He tells of becoming worried over her symptoms and over her belief that she is dying. When he takes her temperature, Clegg realizes how ill Miranda is and decides to go for a doctor. As he sits in the waiting room, Clegg begins to feel insecure, and he goes to a drugstore instead, where the pharmacist refuses to help him. When he returns and finds Miranda worse, Clegg goes back to town in the middle of the night, to wake a doctor; this time an inquisitive policeman frightens him off. Miranda dies, and Clegg plans to commit suicide.

In the final section, less than three pages long, Clegg decides that he is not responsible for Miranda's death, that his mistake was kidnapping someone too far above him, socially. As the novel ends, Clegg is thinking about how he will have to do things somewhat differently when he abducts a more suitable girl that he has seen working in Woolworth's.

Comprehension Questions and Tasks

1. What are the chief characteristics of Galsworthy's works? Comment on the most typical features of the Forsyte family. What is the Forsytes' attitude to works of art, to love and marriage? Which is the most typical snob in the Forsyte family? Speak on the subject of The Forsyte Saga.

2. What is characteristic of Bernard Shaw's dramatic works? Why did Bernard Shaw make society itself the principal character in his play Widowers' Houses?

How does Bernard Shaw depict the working class people in his play Pygmalion?

3. Why is George Wells called the great English writer who looked into the future? What was his attitude towards scientific progress? How did the idea of writing the novel The War of the Worlds come to Wells? What did he aim at?

What is the contribution of Wells to world literature?

4. Say a few words about Somerset Maugham's life. What is the popularity of the novel Of Human Bondage due to? What is the main theme of The Moon and Sixpence? Does Maugham try to be impartial in his attitude to his characters?

5. Say what is the meaning of the term 'the lost generation'. How does Richard Aldington see the social scene of prewar England and what is the attitude towards it of the young generation he describes? What is Aldington's altitude towards World War I?

6. Briefly tell Cronin's biography. Name the novels written by Cronin before The Citadel. What is the main theme of The Citadel? Comment on the negative characters of the book. What are the most attractive characters in the novel?

7. What are the chief contradictions in Graham Greene's works? Give a brief account of his life and literary work. Name the most popular novels of the writer. Comment on the main theme of most of his novels. What motivates the plot of The Quiet American?

8. What philosophyc ideas influenced on the creative activity of I. Murdoch? How does Murdoch combine serious and ridiculous material in her works? How does she reveal the features of her characters in the novel The Bell? Comment on the principles of life, which on Murdoch's opinion give the moral advancement and correct vision?

UNIT 3. ANGRY YOUNG MEN WRITERS. THE GENERATION OF GENERAL DISCONTENT

Angry young men - a new trend in English literature appeared in the fifties of the XX century as a result of disillusionment in post-war bourgeois reality. The writers of the trend criticize contemporary society, but do not show the way out of the impasse.

They were not “angry” in the strict sense of the word, they were not all young and not all men either (Doris Lessing and Iris Murdoch are women), but all the members of the group shared a strong fresh viewpoint which had made them unquestionably a new and interesting literary phenomenon of the post-war years. These writers of the fifties, judging by their works and their manner of writing are widely different. At the same time these writers have also much in common. They all belong to the young writers who came into literature after World War II. In different ways and in many voices the younger generation of writers, critics, poets and intelligentsia in the age group of roughly 25 to 35 had been expressing irritation at the scene around them. With the production and immense success of J. Osborne's Look Back in Anger which was staged at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1956, they found a symbol of their dissatisfaction. The term derived from the play itself - “Angry Young Men” has by now passed into the language. The theatre was an important forum for the “angry young men” and for their more radical contemporaries. Harold Pinter (b.1930) with his works The Caretaker, The Homecoming, No Man's Land, and other dramatist of the time associated with the Theatre of the Absurd abandoned realism, plot and characterization in order to communicate a sense of emptiness and absurdity of modern existence.

The best known writers of the group are the novelists. Kingsley Amis, John Wain and John Braine, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, and playwright John Osborne.

All these writers pictured the life of young people dissatisfied with something in their surrounding life. Their works are full of irritation and confusion caused, on the one hand, by the bourgeois way of life and on the other, by their lack of purpose.

There were some concrete social factors which called forth the general discontent among the post-war younger generation. When World War II came to an end, many people in the Western countries expected democratic reforms. This expectation was especially strong in England where the Labour Party promised a free and prosperous life to millions of common people. Therefore many people supported the Labour Party which was going to carry but a social revolution. Years passed, however, and nothing changed for the better. Politicians are marvels of energy and principle when they are out of office, but when they are in they simply run behind the machine. As soon as the British Labourists came to power they forgot to abide by their commitments. These social factors also determined the peculiarities of literary works by the young writers of the fifties.

The young people of the 50s can rightly be called “second lost generation”. The two generations lived in the same time and conditions - the war and post-war time. They both lost their previous beliefs in the governments who promised them better life, they were disillusioned and disappointed, they did not enjoy real democracy and their bitterness and anger was endless.

But there is a great difference between the two generations. Lost generation actively fought for better life in the trenches of World War I, while angry young men were passive. They did not take part in the war; they were young people fresh from red-brick universities with the diplomas in their pockets. They could not use their knowledge. They spoke much about faithfulness but they were not devoted to their friends and beloved. Their disillusion concerns primarily their conditions and unsettledness. Daily routine sharpened their realization of being useless in the society on which they laid their hopes. They cried out their hearts and souls undertaking no steps to make the life better. Angry young men declared that they were not only “lost” but also “betrayed” and directed their bitter abuses at everybody and everything.

They belong to the English post-war generation which has not found its place in life. They did not, however, have any noble cause in the name of which they would be ready to fight. Being limited by their petty-bourgeois world outlook, and their own individualism, their protest is passive. Their rebellion is that of petty-bourgeois youth, a social section, which was very numerous in England in the 50s of the XX-th century. In general, the heroes of the “angry young men” writers are young men who came from the lower quarters to the upper decent society by either getting education or by marrying a girl from a rich family. The society was strange and hostile to the young men. Some of them fought tooth and nail against pusillanimous sycophantic representatives of the upper class, others returned to their own folk. Many of them, in case they returned to their own class, loathed the idea of suffering disabilities in all aspects of life. But all these people had one common feeling - the aversion to the Establishment.

John Osborne

1929-1994

John Osborne was born on December 12, 1929 in Fulham, London. His father was an advertising copywriter. He died in 1941, leaving John Osborne an insurance settlement which gave the boy the possibility to enroll at Belmont College in Devon from which he was expelled after striking the headmaster at the age of sixteen. Later he spent about eight years as an actor in a provincial repertory theatre. After serving as actor-manager for some repertory companies he decided to try his hand at playwriting. When his first produced play Look Back in Anger appeared at the Royal Court Theatre, its author was totally unknown. But immediately after the staging of the play Osborne became noted as a representative of a new generation of dramatists. His play is considered by many critics to be the turning point in post-war British theatre and his character Jimmy Porter came to represent the entire generation of young men of the period.

In 1957 The Entertainer was produced, at the Royal Court. Osborne continues to examine the society, showing the life of three generations of entertainers which symbolizes the decline of England after World War II. Epitaph for George Dillon appeared in 1958. Since that time J. Osborne has written many other plays staged by both British theatres and theatres abroad, including The World of Paul Slickey (1959) and Luther (1961), Inadmissible Evidence (1965), as well as numerous articles and autobiographical essays.

John Osborne died on December 24, 1994 due to complications caused by diabetes. His literary heritage is large. Besides his works for the stage he left several autobiographical works.

Look Back in Anger. In the years immediately after the war the best of the notably successful dramatists wrote mainly about the problems of the rich and well-to-do. Working-class characters rarely appeared and when they did, it was usually to supply comic relief. With the production of Look Back in Anger the whole situation changed.

It is a play about the rebellion of an educated young man of “the lower classes” against the contemporary society, and about loving and being loved. It was written by a young author about his own generation.

The most noticeable feature about this work is the presence of a dominating male hero - Jimmy Porter, an aggressive and unsuccessful university graduate. Jimmy Porter got married to Alison, a girl from a rich family whose world is alien to him. He lives in a tiny room with the pretty young woman, but he is appalled by the indifference and apathy around him.

Jimmy Porter is probably the best known manifestation of the angry spirit in Britain. He is also a very disagreeable hero - a self-centered bully filled with self pity, but pitiless with others. He is angry with his wife and with his mother-in-law, likewise with education, religion, love, the government and almost anything and everything that happens to come his way. He is in conflict with the world around him. People do not seem to be capable of dying for high principles and motives. Jimmy Porter's famous statement about the causes is as personally revealing as it is politically pointed: “I suppose people of our generation aren't able to die for good causes any longer. We had all that done for us, in the thirties and the forties, when we were still kids. There aren't any good, brave causes left. If the big bang does come, and we all get killed off, it won't be in aid of the old-fashioned, grand design. It'll just be for the Brave New-nothing-very-much-thank you. About as pointless and inglorious as stepping in front of a bus.” The statement expresses both political skepticism and personal frustration. It is a comment on society and a way for Jimmy to express his anger churning within him. Causes are, and always were, too abstract for people like Jimmy.

Jimmy Porter comes from a worker's family, but has broken from his own class and become a cultural snob (he reads only the safe classics and the Sunday Paper, likes only traditional jazz), he lives in an attic flat in a drab Midland town and makes his living by keeping a sweet stall in the market. Everything in his life dissatisfies him, and the tone of his conversation being mainly monologue is one of complaint. Jimmy doesn't act but speaks much. He hates everything and everybody. “God. How I hate Sundays”, he exclaims, “it's always so depressing, always the same. We never seem to get any further, do we? Always the same ritual. Reading the papers, drinking tea, ironing... Nobody thinks, nobody cares. No beliefs, no convictions and no enthusiasm. Just another Sunday evening.” The principal sufferer from all this is his wife. Jimmy says that “She's moved long ago into a lovely little cottage of her soul, cut right off from the ugly problems of the 20-th century altogether. She prefers to be cut off from all the conveniences we've fought to get for centuries.” When Alison's friend Helena, an actress, arrives she makes the situation intolerable by her presence and packs off Alison to her home and family. In the third act Jimmy turns out to be settled fairly happily with Helena because she stands up to him more and partly because he is not bound to her by anything. Having lost her baby, Alison comes back, and Helena leaves Jimmy. In his frustration Jimmy voices what is his indictment of society: “They all want to escape from the pain of being alive. And, most of all, from love. I always knew something like this would turn up - some problem, like an ill wife - and it would be too much for those delicate, hot-house feelings of yours. It's no good trying to fool yourself about love. You can't fall into it like a soft job, without dirtying up your hands. It takes muscles and guts. And if you can't bear the thought of messing up your nice, clean soul, you'd better give up the whole idea of life.”

Both Helena and Alison seem to understand what Jimmy is saying. They love him, not because they agree with his attacks on religion, love or genteel society, but because they recognize and respond to his human energy.

The other characters of the play only help to reveal Jimmy's conflict with the society, the reasons of his anger, bitterness and solitude that runs through the whole play. Jimmy protests against his being inferior, against decency of the society, respectability of the middle class. He is a tragic figure: no ideals, no hope, no love. Jimmy is a rebel, having no programme and aim. He is dull - neither negative nor positive. We feel concerned with his irritable character as if everything got mixed in him, with his own jargon, his own mode of life, his brusque humour and bitter irony. His protest is typical for a definite age of 20 and 30 years. But at least he is honest: he protests against being inferior in the society. “Do you know - I have discovered what is wrong with Jimmy?” says Helena. “It's very simple really. He was born out of his time. There's no place for people like that any longer - in sex, or politics, or anything... he thinks he's still in the middle of the French Revolution. He doesn't know where he is, or where he's going.”

Although in Osborne's play the hero is at odds with the world around him, still he is deeply related to this society even when he is rebelling against it, rebelling without aim, for the world of today is not treating him according to his expectations.

Another Osborne's play Epitaph for George Dillon also displays a good deal of sympathy for the English life he satirizes. A young man, George Dillon, who wishes to write great plays, is taken in by a lower middle-class family. George thinks of the family as a series of caricatures, a group of people who speak only in terms of accounts and ads and the latest programmes on television. Yet dull and commonplace as these people are, George takes advantage of them. He sponges money and food, seduces their daughter, plays upon the mother's feeling for their son who was killed in the war. He begins to write trash for weekly repertory theatres and makes a good deal of money. The family, insensitive to his artistic betrayal, are delighted that all their notions of an artist and a gentleman have been so grandly reinforced. Yet George's success and the fact that the daughter of the house has become pregnant force George into marrying the girl and becoming a permanent part of the family.

All Osborne's heroes are young men, who have obtained a university education in some second-rate provincial university. After graduation they work, as a rule, at some modest post as librarians, office clerks, salesmen, etc. Their behaviour is often challenging and far from being correct. Their dull life depresses them and therefore they are “angry” with themselves and with the people they come in touch with. But after having loudly uttered their discontent, they all make, each in a different way, a compromise with the society they have been revolting against, they become easily satisfied with some material gain. They do not have any higher social ideals.

Kingsley Amis

1922-1995

One of the most widely read of contemporary British writers, Kingsley Amis was born in London. He began to write poetry when he was still a student at Oxford. Soon several successful novels followed: Lucky Jim (1953), That Uncertain Feeling (1955), I Like It Here (1958), Take a Girl Like You (1960), One Fat Englishman (1963).

Besides the above mentioned novels, he has written a survey of contemporary science fiction. His literary journalism is straightforward, lucid and highly intelligent.

Until 1961 Kingsley Amis lectured on English literature at the University College, Swansea, then in Cambridge.

After the publication of his first two novels Lucky Jim and That Uncertain Feeling Amis became one of the most popular prose writers in England. Bourgeois criticism laid stress on the comic nature of his novels. He became a popular talented English humourist. The most characteristic feature of Amis's novels, is, however, the central hero, “the angry young man”, dissatisfied with everything and everybody in his surrounding world. The novels contain many farcical scenes. But it is not the comic side which is the most important. The main value of Amis's novels lies in the realistic portrayal of young English intellectuals, and in the presentation of the social scene in the post-war fifties.

In 60s and 70s of the XX-th century Amis turned his attention to science fiction (New Maps of Hell. A Survey of Science Fiction. 1960; The Alteration. 1976) and to the theme of crime (The Crime of the Century). In 1986 he became the winner of the Booker prize.

Lucky Jim. The hero of the novel Jim Dixon, honest but a bit awkward and not self-confident youth, is a recent university graduate where he has taken up medieval history because it is the easiest subject at the university. But he had no interest in it, although he recognizes and respects good teaching and scholarship. He gets a post as an assistant at a provincial university. Dixon finds the whole atmosphere at the university uninspiring and dull. He despises his work and his colleagues, especially professor Welch whose accent he parodies. Dixon is in a kind of opposition to the genteel hypocrisy at the university. But Jim's aim, however, is not so much any opposition as a kind of advertisement of his wounded egocentricity.

Perpetual acting has become Jim's second nature. It has also made him gloomy, sadistic and solitary. He does not mix with anybody. The reader realizes that Jim has been attached to the university by some mistake. An academic career does not suit him. Once in a drunken state he reveals his “real” self, and becomes bold and determined. He delivers a lecture on “Merry Old England” before the academic people, a lecture in which he pours out his bottled-up anger at them. This also marks the end of his university career; he is dismissed on the spot.

It would have been more natural, perhaps, if Amis had ended the story at this point. The author had, however, no intention to be too radical and undermine the foundations of bourgeois society. Thus he made the novel end happy. A good-natured and unprejudiced businessman, who likes Jim's bold address to the hypocritical academics decides to take Jim into his service and makes him a new person, a “lucky Jim”. Jim is engaged to a girl from a wealthy family and gets a good profitable post. Like that of other “angry young men” his revolt against hypocrisy and falsity becomes meaningless. He makes a compromise with bourgeois society, and stops being an “angry young man”.

John Braine

1922-1986

John Braine was born in Bradford and spent his early years there. He is well remembered in Bradford and he was included in the local newspaper's survey of Bradford's best 100. John Braine attended Bradford Grammar School. After taking various odd jobs he became a library assistant at Bingley, and followed this career, with an interval for war service in the Royal Navy, until the success of Room at the Top (1957) enabled him to devote his whole time to writing. In 1951 he spent some time in London in the vain hope of making a living by writing. His verse play The Desert in the Mirror was produced, but without success.

In the early 1950s Braine wrote a short piece Number Nine Rock about courting in Ripley Glen, which is as much part of the Blackersford district as the textile mills. The line of happiness is the route by which the people of Blackersford reach the Glen which is freedom and space and where there is Number Nine Rock which is simply the place where you take your girl: “The happiness can be pinpointed, a line starting at the top of Edward's Way, the broad avenue that leads into Ripley Glen, past Ripley memorial Hospital, past the Albert Institute, with its four stone lions (unsuccessful entrants in the Trafalgar Square competition), past the fire station which looks like a Methodist chapel and over the canal to the huge sprawling hulk of Ripley Mills. Ripley Mills haven't changed much since 1850 when Seth Ripley first built them... Ripley is fixed permanently in the Victorian age. But in one of .its bright patches; Ripley, with its faults, was built for human beings to live in; it was designed as a village, a living community; it's not just a sprawl of mean houses, a huddle of rent books. The happiness isn't an accident, for it doesn't have to fight for survival here; Ripley holds it like a sponge, it's cumulative, a kind of benign lead acetate accumulating ever since 1850.”

His second novel The Vodi was published in 1959, Life at the Top, a sequel to Room at the Top in 1962. Then the novel The Jealous God came out in 1964.

Room at the Top and its sequel Life at the Top. On the basis of his first novel Room at the Top John Braine has been grouped among “the angry young men”. Nevertheless, he has been different from the writers of this group. Braine penetrates deeper into the conflict between the hero and society. He depicts the tragedy of a working man, who, in search of a career, corrupts his own soul, becomes cynical, calculating and cruel. His greatest achievement in the novel is his original way of exposing the inhumanity of bourgeois society.

The hero of the novel Joe Lampton has been brought up on the fringes of poverty and squalor in a provincial town in the North. His sole aim is to fight his way up into the world of money and influence. So when he goes to a new town and a new job, and starts to move among comfortable-off, intelligent people it looks as if the campaign is succeeding. Since he is an attractive and energetic young man, it is not long before a pretty girl, Susan, the daughter of a wealthy mill-owner, falls in love with him. Only one thing holds him back: his love for another woman, Alice. She is married and older than Joe, and her looks are beginning to fade, but between them an extraordinary love has grown up. But he is striving for a place in the society, he is doing his best to win room at the top. Joe marries his boss' daughter, and even ten years after his marriage (Life at the Top), he is living the dream life of the successful executive, complete with a luxurious suburban house, and two lovely children. His ultimate objective seems to have been reached: the light grey carpet, the built-in wardrobe, the electric oven, the mixing machine, the pink wall table. But all this belongs to his father-in-law, and he himself is not the master of the situation, he is Brown's “son-in-law”. “I would never be any more than a sound reliable man obeying orders without question”, he says. He cannot completely forget his background, and when he is coaxed into becoming a Tory councilor, he revolts against their crude self-interest in the council chambers, and makes a startling denunciation of them. However, he is caught in a trap of his own making-trapped by the emptiness of life at the top. Joe's greatest feelings are for his daughter Barbara. She is the apple of his eye. When Joe looks at her, speaks to her, plays with her he wants to cry with happiness. But Joe is briskly stripped of his illusions, that is, if he ever had any. Once when he returns home from his business trip earlier than planned, he finds his wife making love in their bedroom with Mark. His first impulse was to kill the man, but he thought that the noise would frighten Barbara and the whole scene would crash her world. Later he finds out that Barbara was Mark's daughter, not his. He decides to blow up the prison door and makes up his mind to leave Susan. He gets infatuated with Norah. He is free now. But he got so used to the luxury of his previous life that after his short stay in London with Norah he returns to Susan and to the conveniences of which he became a slave.

The special merit of Braine's novel is the evolution of the hero. Joe Lampton is so typical, so true-to life a portrait that his name has become a literary common noun in England.

Comprehension Questions and Tasks

1. Explain the term “angry young men”. What were the main ideas and slogans of the generation of general discontent? Why were they called “the lost generation”?

2. Give a brief account of John Osborne's life and literary work. Comment on the main theme of most of his novels. Speak on the subject of Look Back in Anger. Name all the characters of the novel and describe their relationship.

3. Say a few words about Kinsley Amis's biography. Can we call Kinsley Amis the “angry young man” or the central hero of his novels? Name his chief novels and themes they deal with.

4. What facts from John Braine's biography do you know? Speak on the plot of Room at the Top. Why has the hero's name become a literary common noun in England?

UNIT 4. A FEW MORE GLIMPSES OF POST-WAR LITERATURE

The woman who has become one of the most popular and prolific of all English detective novelists, acknowledged throughout the world as the Queen of Crime Fiction, Agatha Christie (1890-1976), gained popularity largely, it would seem, by virtue of the skillfully engineered complexity of her plots. Among the books by Agatha Christie are Murder on the Links (1923), Elephants Can Remember (1972) and many others.

Once, after reading in a magazine that she was “the world's most mysterious woman,” Agatha Christie complained to her agent: “What do they suggest I am! A Bank Robber or a Bank Robber's wife? I'm an ordinary successful hard-working author - like any other author.” Her success was not exactly ordinary. Her seventy-six detective novels and books of stories have been translated into every major language.

She was born in Torquay in 1890 and began writing at the end of the First World War. In her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), she created the now-famous vivacious little Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, the most popular sleuth in fiction since Sherlock Holmes. Poirot and Miss Marples have also been portrayed in the many films, radio programs and stage plays based on her books.

In 1926 her novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was published. It is considered to be one of her best works due to its most original non-traditional concept for detective novels - the story is narrated by Dr.Sheppard.

Agatha Christie was also the author of six romantic novels, written under the pseudonym of Mary Westmacott, and a book of poems and several plays. One of her plays, The Mousetrap, opened in London in 1952 and is still running.

Postern of Fate was the last book she wrote before her death in 1976, but in 1975 Curtain: Poirot's Last Case, which she had written in the 1940's, was published for the first time.

She became Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1956 and Dame of the British Empire in 1971.

A group of a few women born in the second decade of the century might together illustrate the diversity of the twentieth-century novelist's interests. Elizabeth Taylor (1912-1975), the author the novels The Soul of Kindness and Blaming, 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 commuter land. Some of her later novels are In a Summer Season (1961), and The Wedding Group (1968). Elizabeth Taylor has humour and compassion as well as disciplined artistry, and has logically been compared with Jane Austen.

So has Barbara Pym (1913-1980) who tasted fame, sadly enough, only at the end of her life (her real name was Mary Crampton). Another restrained and perceptive artist, she is a master of ingenuous and candid dialogue and reflection which are resonant with comic overtones. Critics called her “modern” Jane Austin. 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 no less engaging in their blend of pathos and comedy.

One might well put beside these two English writers the Irish writer Mary Lavin (1912-1996), 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 (1917-1980) who found herself, with her husband, in Bucharest in 1939, to be driven 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.

Another woman who was in the right place at the right time as a future novelist is Doris Lessing (b.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 self-centered woman, against the fetters of sexual, social and political conventions. Her latest novels of 2005 are The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter and Griot and the Snow Dog.

The fascination of the twentieth century history has touched other writers too. Richard Hughes's (1900-1976) two volumes of his trilogy, The Human Predicament, on events that culminated in the Second World War, include 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.

William Trevor (b.1928), is an Irish novelist and short-story 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 are 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. Trevor has continued to be productive as a novelist (The Children of Dynmouth, 1976, and Other People's Worlds, 1980), and he is also a versatile writer of short stories. The tales in Angels at the Ritz (1974) show an interest in personal experiences of frustration and anti-climax which naturally called out comparisons with Joyce's Dubliners. In 2000 W.Trevor published The Hill Bachelors, delicately revelatory Irish stories and worries about ageing and family. The Story of Luce Gault (2002) and A Bit On the Side (2004), a collection of short stories on adultery, are William Trevor's latest books.

A talent of matching distinction, if not of comparable imaginative range, is that of Jennifer Johnston (b.1930), the daughter of the Irish playwright Denis Johnston, herself a novelist and a playwright. She portrays the Anglo-Irish landed gentry with a subtle registration of their awkward relationship to local peasants and retainers. Since her first novel The Captains and the Kings (1972) she has published many novels. In The Gates (1973) Major MacMahon decays alcoholically while his orphaned niece finds consolation with a peasant boy. In How Many Miles to Babylon (1974) 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 turn their impulsive affection for each other into a cause of tragedy. Her novel The Gingerbread Woman (2000) is a story of personal tragedy intersecting with the national one in present-day Ireland inside a novel being written by the main woman character. Other novels include: The Invisible Worm (1991), dealing with the subject of sexual abuse; This is Not a Novel (2002), and most recently published Grace and Truth (2005).

Among younger novelists now at work A.N. Wilson (b. 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 thinks she is clear and the English don, Pamela Cooper, struggles unnecessarily to accommodate herself to a death sentence. Pamela, an Anglo-Catholic, 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.

Sheila Jansen grew up in Newcastle upon Tyne. In her mid-twenties she moved to London where she spent ten years before going to America. She lives in California with her husband, professor of wild-land sciences.

Sheila Jansen created a brilliant novel Mary Maddison (1991) about a tragic fate of Elizabeth and her little daughter Mary after the death of Mary's grandparents when her uncle Joseph inherited everything and drove Elizabeth and her daughter off the house. “Look here, Elizabeth, I can lend you a few pounds to help you get started and you can pay me back when you get a job.” To which Elizabeth replied: “You can keep your conscience money.” Forced to leave the family home they face the deprivation of one of Newcastle's poorer areas. Elizabeth, tired and exhausted by daily work died of diabetes the day before Mary's thirteen birthday and Mary's wanderings in life began. Mary becomes a factory worker where she meets Joe Cowley. When she gets pregnant Joe refuses to bear any responsibility for the child. Mary is thrown back on her own resources once more.

Amanda Brookfield (b.1960), an Oxford graduate with a First Class Honour degree lives with her family in South London. Her best novels are Alice Alone, A Cast of Smiles, Walls of Glass, The Lover, A family Man. Her latest novel Sisters and Husbands was published in 2002. It's a breathtaking story about two sisters - Anna Lawrence, with a successful career in broadcasting and marriage to David, a wealthy man with a luxurious country home, and Becky, who lives in a dilapidated house in South London, and has to contend with her husband Joe who is struggling to become the chef, and Jenny, his eleven-year-old daughter of the first marriage.

Edward Rutherfurd (b.1948) was born in Salisbury, and educated in Wiltshire and Cambridge. For some time he lived in New York, but returned to his roots to research and write the novel Sarum, based on the history of his native town Salisbury. His second novel Russka tells the history of Russia from the Cossack horsemen of the steppes to the events of the Bolshevik revolution. His newer work is the historical novel London (1997) - a saga about the most magnificent city in the world from the days of the Romans through sixteen centuries to the Victorian time and the end of the twentieth century. The last chapter 21 is dated by 1997. Rutherfurd's latest novels, published in 2005, include The Princess of Ireland and The Rebels of Ireland.

Andrew Taylor (b.1965) has written over twenty books, mainly crime novels and thrillers. They include the series featuring William Dougal, a detective who occasionally commits murders as well as solves them; an espionage trilogy whose chronology stretches from the 1930s to the 1980s; psychological thrillers; and books for younger readers. His first novel Caroline Minuscule appeared in 1982. Then came the psychological thriller The Office of the Dead (2000), (the third volume of the Roth Trilogy), and Death's Own Door (2001), the sixth novel in the Lydmouth Series, which is set about fifty years ago on the Anglo-Welsh borders. His latest novels also include The Judgment of Strangers (1998), Where Roses Fade (2000), Requiem For an Angel (2002), The American Boy (2003) and Call the Dying (2004).