A History of English Literature

Overview

The change after 1955 is clearest in drama, where Beckett’s impact over-

turned conventions. The marked change from Rattigan and Waugh to Pinter

and provincial fiction has as much to do with class and social readjustment as

with literary approach. The original talent of William Golding stood aside from

conventional social realism. Muriel Spark, too, is an inventive moralist rather

than a social chronicler. The dominant poetic voice was Philip Larkin’s, his

social irony concealing a disappointed hope in human love. Although mocking

the Establishment (a word of the 1960s), he and others stood back from the

sexual and social liberation of that decade.

About 1955 the post-war era was ending, both in politics and in literature. Except to
the young, the war had come as less of a shock than in 1914, and British casualties
had been fewer, but reserves were very low. Bomb-sites still marked some cities. A
Labour government built up a Welfare State, unchallenged until 1979. When
Churchill retired, Eden finally succeeded. His attempt to reverse Nasser’s takeover of
the Suez Canal deeply divided British opinion, and in forcing a Franco-British with-
drawal from Suez, the USA announced that Europe should give up all colonies.
Russian tanks crushed a Hungarian rising; the Cold War intensified. After 1958, anti-
nuclear protest played a part in politics for twenty years. Harold Macmillan
announced in 1960 that Britain would give up her African colonies. The British
Empire was closing down.
The leading writers of the post-war decade were well known in 1939: Eliot,
Auden, Thomas; Hartley, Bowen, Waugh, Greene, Powell; Rattigan, Fry. In 1955–6,
Beckett, Osborne and Pinter altered drama. In 1954, William Golding published
his non-realist Lord of the Flies. Novels by Kingsley Amis and others made less
established voices heard. In 1955 came Philip Larkin’s The Less Deceived, and other
poets began to publish: Thom Gunn, Donald Davie, Elizabeth Jennings, Ted
Hughes.They were Oxbridge-educated but from grammar schools; Evelyn Waugh
hailed them, in an open letter to Nancy Mitford in 1955, with delighted disdain:
‘these grim young people coming off the assembly lines in their hundreds every
year and finding employment as critics, even as poets and novelists’. The new tone
was more puritanical, less ‘social’, more mocking. New breezes blew, and in the

Contents

Drama 381

Samuel Beckett 381

John Osborne 384

Harold Pinter 385

Established protest 386

Novels galore 387

William Golding 388

Muriel Spark 389

Ir is Murdoch 391

Other writers 391

Poetr y 393

Philip Larkin 395

Ted Hughes 397

Geoffrey Hill 397

Tony Harrison 397

Seamus Heaney

Further reading 400

379

Beginning Again:

1955–80

14

CHAPTER