INSIDE/OUTSIDE THE BRITISH NOVEL IN THE 1950s by JAMES EDWIN MCCLUNG (Under the Direction of Adam Parkes) ABSTRACT This study aims to examine the nature and quality of the novel in Britain in the middle decade of the twentieth century. Apart from a comprehensive view, the study adopts an initiative approach to reconsidering the work of West Indian novelists Samuel Selvon and George Lamming as well as the work of Colin MacInnes as important texts from the period due to their particular ability to communicate and describe the condition of Britain in the post‐war period. Historicizing and contextualizing the period from the 1948 docking of the Empire Windrush to Enoch Powell’s infamous 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech, I propose to lay the proper groundwork for a clear recognition of the role played by each of these authors within and without the major social and historical conversations of the day: the perceived role of a “new” postwar imperial Britain in global affairs and culture, the significant influx of colonial (particularly West Indian) emigrants, and the remarkable change in the class organization of England, within and throughout London especially. For some time, the generally‐held impression among critics of twentieth century British literature suggested that very little significant work was produced in the period following the Second World War and the deaths of Yeats, Joyce and Woolf. The feeling in many of the periodical and literary outlets of the late 1940s was one of finality. The British novel was publicly pronounced dead in the Observer, in newspapers, on radio and elsewhere. This study argues in particular that the movement of the novel in the 1950s often combines the experimentalism of the modernists with the realism of previous generations and a recognition that the novel had both an ability and a responsibility to document important social and cultural changes during a period of reevaluation of what it meant to be British and the relation of that nation with former colonial holdings and the rest of the world. INDEX WORDS: British novel, 1950s, Windrush, Enoch Powell, Colin MacInnes, Samuel Selvon, George Lamming, post‐colonial, modernism, twentieth century, realism, fabulism, novel, English, West Indian, Caribbean, emigrant, immigrant, migration, diaspora, London, teenager, Notting Hill, race, citizenship, black, Barbados, Trinidad Jamaica, Caribbean, colonial, Commonwealth, empire, post‐war INSIDE/OUTSIDE THE BRITISH NOVEL IN THE 1950s by JAMES EDWIN MCCLUNG B.A., Oglethorpe University, 1998 M.A., University of Georgia, 2001 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2009 © 2009 JAMES E. MCCLUNG All Rights Reserved INSIDE/OUTSIDE THE BRITISH NOVEL IN THE 1950s by JAMES EDWIN MCCLUNG Major Professor: Adam Parkes Committee: Richard Menke Carl Rapp Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia December 2009 DEDICATION To Robyn, the most remarkable supporter I could ever be fortunate enough to have. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS As with any work of hoped‐for substance and import, I can hardly argue that this text is entirely and exclusively the result of my own efforts. Special thanks are due to Dr. Adam Parkes, University of Georgia and Dr. David Bradshaw, Worcester College, Oxford University for their professional and personal guidance and direction during both the research and writing phases of this study. Gratitude is also due to the UGA Graduate School Dean’s Award for research travel, as a substantial portion of this document would not have been possible without that award. Thanks also to the UGA at Oxford Program, which has afforded me access to some of the most comprehensive research facilities in the field. Finally, sincere and boundless thanks are due to my parents, Jerry and Kaye McClung, who have been a constant source of patient support throughout my life and educational pursuits. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................................. v CHAPTER 1 Wither, the Novel? ............................................................................................................ 1 2 An Absolute Beginning .................................................................................................. 27 3 Talking to the Colour Black ........................................................................................... 84 4 There’s More in the Mortar than the Pestle ............................................................... 133 5 Grown from Old Roots ................................................................................................. 183 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................................... 196 vi Chapter 1– Wither, the Novel? “Is the Novel Dead?” The question was posed as a prompt to a year‐long interrogatory exchange in The Observer in 1954. Over the course of that year many would engage in the debate, but as one might expect from any journal ultimately and primarily aiming to sell copy, there was great deliberation, furious assertion, sweeping generalization and ultimately no resolution. Meanwhile, disputations smoldered while in the intervening year dozens of works fitting in various ways under the blanket description “novel” were published in Great Britain. Anyone likely to have supposed an answer to the question when first encountering it as a banner headline in The Observer was unlikely to have been swayed by any of the arguments under it and almost assuredly finished the year with the original unconsidered answer in mind. However, in practical terms even if in no other way, the response to that question over time has proven a solid “no.” The more even‐tempered and cautious may choose to respond advisedly with a “no, not yet,” and the pessimistic or cynic might always be prepared with a ready, “soon.” Whatever the case, the real issue is that the question itself is suspect because it is imprecise–unfair because indistinct. The novel evades ready definition. In The English Novel: An Introduction (2005), Terry Eagleton describes this resistance to taxonomy, pointing out that “It is true that if your definition of the automobile is fuzzy enough, it is hard not to trace the BMW back to the ancient Roman 1 chariot,” before going on to suggest parenthetically that “This may help also to explain why so many premature obituary notices of the novel have been issued. What they usually indicate is that one kind of the novel has died, while another has come into existence.”1 Even by accepting this hypothesis and narrowing the question accordingly in order to ask, “Is the ______ Novel dead?,” there is little promise of a clear answer. Nevertheless, Rubin Rabinowitz did attempt to provide just such a resolution by proposing that in the 1950s there was a death of the “Experimental Novel,” prototypically represented by James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931).2 Yet anyone who has encountered B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969), Malcolm Lowrey’s Under the Volcano (1947), or Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962), to name but a few, is likely to realize that experimentation with the form of the novel was still a literary pursuit for some time after that mode was pronounced defunct. Apart from the still quite active experimental novel, there were novels written in the 1950s that spoke clearly to the emergent and very real constitution of a new phase in Britain’s social history. This age was one particular to the post‐war world and represented a new direction for the former empire. A clearer, more immediate perspective on this state of affairs in Britain can be easily found in the works of Colin MacInnes, Samuel Selvon and George Lamming. Their perspectives are not ignorant of the efforts of authors who had come before them, nor are they unaware of Britain’s long and august and literary heritage, but each of these authors in his own ways departs for new territory in the British novel, recovering the form, if it was wandering in some sense. Rather than focusing on recovering what was past in regard both to the novel and 2 to the nation, MacInnes, Selvon and Lamming spent enormous amounts of their literary capital in trying to depict through their novels the delineation and formation of a new, mid‐century Britain occurring around them. For MacInnes, that nation was marked by progressive social and moral attitudes, changing racial relations and the vim of youth in direct conflict with the established and reluctant‐to‐relent notions of the past British attitudes and behavior. Selvon and Lamming, too, recognize the state of race relations as having a grand effect on the formation of a new Britain, but as West Indian immigrants they bring a particular notion of the outsider’s sense of a “homeland” that only exists in histories and questionable accounts from the past. This fictionalized home becomes a central image in their individual attempts to focus literary energies in a new direction. No longer working from the stable platform of a clear cultural and global standing, the British novelist in the mid century is forced to abandon the experimental as an end unto itself. The rapidly shifting realities of national and individual life demanded attention. The racial riots, legislative acts constantly redefining