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STEPHEN SPENDER
Forster, and Woolf. But Bennett was describing a self-confident, ex–
panding, ebullient society, not the England that was con tracting. His
England of bumptious wealth and humiliated poverty, the lives of
"cards" and millionaires, spinsters and shopwalkers, was a') remote
from the England of the 1950s and '60s as that of Forster's Wiltshire
Downs. The postwar England, described by Angus Wilson and David
Storey, was that of hole-in-the-corner planned towns where just beyond
the Public Library or Civic Center or arty cafe, hideouts could be
found for unhygienic, unplanned delights and squalor.
The postwar novelists and playwrights depicted a new and cyn–
ical England of the young, emerging from the smooth, clean planned
society. This was much closer to the world of Graham Greene's
Brigh–
ton Rock
than to the honest brick-and-muck Midlands of Arnold
Bennett.
Richard Hoggart made the point, in his
T he Uses of Literacy,
that much of the folklore and handicrafts of the rural England,
which had been driven into the dark barracks of the slums, had per–
sisted throughout the industrial revolution. His book gives a picture
of myths and games and weaving - codes of the organic community
transmitted through the genes of slum-dwellers - which
is
moving,
yet it scarcely accounts for the Teddy Boys, the Beatles, the Hell's
Angels, the Skin-heads - the country of Anthony Burgess's
A
Clock–
work Orange.
If
there was an England of vivid life before the industrial revolu–
tion which had passed through the tunnel of the nineteenth-century
factories, mines, and slums and emerged into the suburban sunlight of
the Welfare State, this was not a sociologist's dream of the resurrected
English village. It was a London and Liverpool of youths who
looked like survivors from village greens in Good King Charles's Gol–
den Days. They were in fancy dress and with hair, long and lux–
uriant and rolled in locks like those adored by Milton, cascading over
their shoulders. Among them were marvelous mimics and actors who
seemed like inspired impertinent children from the novels of Dickens,
and artists with a taste for the local and irreverent. There were also
some excellent playwrights. The best and most characteristic thing
that came out of this postwar England was the
performance:
as
though the life which had been suppressed by Puritanism, industry,
and respectability, wa') that of comedians, the Sh:1.kespearean clowns,
the proletariat of the funnies and of Pop art.
