John Wain

John Wain (born John Barrington Wain, March 14, 1925 - May 24, 1994) was an English poet, novelist, and critic, associated with the literary group The Movement. For most of his life, Wain worked as a freelance journalist and author, writing and reviewing for newspapers and the radio.

Life

Wain was born and raised in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, and attended St. John's College, Oxford, graduating B.A. in 1946 and M.A. in 1950. He wrote his first novel Hurry on Down in 1953, a comic picaresque about an unsettled college graduate who turns his life against conventional society. Other notable novels include Strike the father dead (1962), a tale of a jazzman's rebellion against his conventional father, and Young shoulders (1982), winner of the Whitbread Prize, the searing tale of a young boy facing the death of loved ones. Wain's use of non-capital letters for his novels indicates his non-conventional manner.

Wain was also a prolific poet and critic, with critical works on fellow Midlands writers Arnold Bennett, Samuel Johnson, and William Shakespeare. Among the other writers he has written works about are the Americans Theodore Roethke and Edmund Wilson. He himself was the subject of a bibliography by David Gerard.

Wain taught at the University of Reading in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and in 1973 was elected to the five-year lectureship post of Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford: some of his lectures are collected in his book Professing Poetry.

Literary associations

Wain was (much to his own annoyance) often referred to as one of the Angry Young Men, a term applied to 1950s writers such as John Braine, John Osborne, Alan Sillitoe and Keith Waterhouse thought to be radicals who bitterly opposed the British establishment and conservative elements of society at that time. But it is more accurate to associate Wain with The Movement, a group of post-war poets including luminaries such as Kingsley Amis, D.J. Enright, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Jennings and Philip Larkin. Amis and Larkin, close friends of Wain's for a time, were also associated, with equal dubiousness, with the "angries". But if looking beyond poetry, it is more accurate to refer to these three, as was sometimes done at the time, as "The New University Wits", writers who aimed to communicate rather than to experiment, and who often did so in a comic mode. However, they all turned more serious after their initial work. Wain's poetry was criticised more than his other work, with some seeing it as brittle and contrived.

Wain's tutor at Oxford had been C.S. Lewis. He encountered, but did not feel he belonged to, Lewis's literary circle, the Inklings. Wain took literature as seriously as the Inklings did, and believed as they did in the primacy of literature as communication, but as a modern realist writer he shared neither their conservative social beliefs or their propensity for fantasy.

Works

Novels

• Hurry on Down (1953) aka Born in captivity (US title)
• Living in the present (1953)
• The Contenders (1958)
• A Travelling Woman (1959)
• Strike the father dead (1962)
• The Young Visitors (1965)
• The Smaller Sky (1967)
• A Winter in the Hills (1970)
• The Pardoner's Tale (1978)
• Lizzie's floating shop (1981)
• Young shoulders (1982) aka The free zone starts here (winner of the Whitbread Prize)
• Where the rivers meet (1988)
• Comedies (1990)
• Hungry generations (1994)

Poetry

• A word carved on a sill (1956)
• Weep before God (1961)
• Wildtrack (1965)
• Letters to five artists, poems (1969)
• Feng, a poem (1975)
• Poems 1949-79 (1980)
• Poems for the Zodiac (1980)
• The Twofold (1981)
• Open country (1987)

Plays

• Johnson is leaving (1973) (monodrama)
• Harry in the night (1975)
• Frank (1984) (radio play)

Short story collections

• Nuncle and Other Stories (1960)
• Death of the Hind Legs and Other Stories (1966)
• The Life Guard (1971)

Literary criticism

• Interpretations, essays on twelve English poems (1955 and 1972)
• Preliminary Essays (1957)
• American Allegory (1959)
• Essays on Literature and Ideas (1963)
• The Living World of Shakespeare, a playgoer's guide (1964)
• Theodore Roethke (1964) (in Critical Quarterly)
• Arnold Bennett (1967)
• A House for the truth, critical essays (1972)
• Johnson as critic (1973)
• An Edmund Wilson celebration (1978)
• Edmund Wilson, the man and his work (1978)
• Professing poetry (1979)