Uzbekistan state university of world languages english language faculty №2 Course work Theme: John Wain- his life and work

1.2 John Wain’ works
He was a literary lion in his day, but the unfriendly remarks about him by Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin in their retrospective letters seem to have rubbished his reputation. Wain was 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, extremists who opposed the British establishment and conservative elements of society at that time. Indeed, he did contribute to Declaration, an anthology of strategies by writers associated with the philosophy, and a chapter of his novel, Hurry on Down, was excerpted in a popular paperback sampler, Protest: The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men.
Nevertheless, it may be more accurate to associate Wain with "The Movement", a group of post-war poets including Kingsley Amis, D.J. Enright, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Jennings and Philip Larkin. Amis and Larkin, good friends of Wain's for a time, were also associated, with equal doubtfulness, with the "angrier". But, other than poetry, it is more accurate to refer to these three, as was sometimes done at the time, as "The New University Wits", writers who desired to communicate rather than to experiment, and who often did so in a comic mode. However, they all became more serious after their initial work. Wain is still known for his poetry and literary goods though his work now no longer is as popular as it was previously.
Wain's tutor at Oxford had been C.S. Lewis. He encountered, but did not trust he belonged to, Lewis's literary acquaintances, the Inklings. Wain was as thoughtful about literature as the Inklings, 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 nor their propensity for fantasy.
In 1973, Wain was elected to the 5-year post of Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford: some of his lectures are collected in his book Professing Poetry. He was awarded the 1974 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his biography of Samuel Johnson. Moreover, he had written more type of works which is famous in his life.one of the most popular novel is Harry on Down. Also we wrote novels, poets.
-Hurry on Down. London: Secker & Warburg, 1953; New York: Viking, 1953;
-Mixed Feelings: Nineteen poems. Reading, Berkshire, UK: School of Art, University of Reading, 1951.
- The Pardoner's Tale. London: Macmillan, 1978; New York: Viking, 1978.
Wain's was also an outgoing and affable personality who had no interest in irritable and complaining about society, or in the self- cherished gloom that surrounded his friend Larkin. Indeed, his sociable, outgoing qualities were the most evident feature of Wain when an undergraduate. He got on extremely well with his tutor, CS Lewis, which might seem surprising since Wain himself had no interest in religion or in Lewis's somewhat medieval attitudes to modern life. But they loved drinking beer and discussing affairs and literature together, for both of them had a robust Johnsonian curiosity and pleasure in many different books and subjects; and both were clubbable and convivial in disposition. Indeed, Wain's book on Dr.Johnson, Samuel Johnson (1974), is one of his best, for he understood and loved the man and would have held it an honor to try in part to resemble him and take the same kind of sturdy and downright moral stance.
Wain also used to frequent the Inklings, the literary circle who met in Oxford's pubs to discuss literature and to read their own work. The circle was inaugurated by Lewis and JRR Tolkien, of whom Wain used to give an accurate but benevolent imitation when he was reading his work in progress, The Lord of the Rings. Neither Larkin nor Amis, who had been rather older fellow-students of Wain at St John's College, would have cared much about that kind of thing, but Wain always had a broader and more catholic outlook than they had: nor was his independent political attitude, often radical and usually unorthodox, ever fixed in the kind of Toryism which the other two came to adopt.³
The mid-Fifties were a time of change and initiative in writing and the younger English novelists, for all their obvious variations, did also have something in common. They had an irreverent and iconoclastic attitude to the novel form and to writing generally. Wain's first novel, Hurry On Down (1953), has a good deal in common with Amis's Lucky Jim, published the following year, except that its hero, Charles Lumley, samples a greater variety of occupations - as burglar, hospital worker and window cleaner - than does the pseudo-academic Jim Dixon, nor is he presented with the same contrived fortunate solution to his problems. The humour of the novel is subtly different too - more verbal and less slapstick - nor is there anything naive about the presentation of domestic life. The put-upon young father is admirably done, and there is a splendid moment when a meek little man who has been telling a stately American woman an interminable anecdote about giving a watch to his fiancée is suddenly heard saying loudly 'I'll give the works after we get married.'
For sheer zany wit and liveliness, Wain's early novels certainly vie with those of Amis, and survive much better today than the more ponderous and complacent offerings of John Braine, whose Room at the Top appeared four years after Hurry On Down.
Wain's poetry at the time also showed a strong personality of its own and a marked sense of form. Nevill Coghill, the Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, who interpreted The Canterbury Tales and was both friend and admirer and no mean judge, considered gatherings such as Weep Before God (1961) to be some of the best poetry to have come from a young poet since the Second World War. Certainly Wain later made an excellent Professor of Poetry himself at Oxford, bringing out a can did and searching dimensions of essays on the office called Professing Poetry (1 and giving much help and reassurance to younger colleagues and aspirants of the literary arts. He was at his best a brilliant lecturer and teacher, and I shall always remember a talk he gave on Dickens's Our Mutual Friend which seemed to me to sum up the whole genius of that novel. Wain's friend and one-time colleague Professor Wallace Robson, who died last year, always spoke of Wain's inoperative conversation and teaching in terms of the highest praise.
Wain's sturdy personality made him less supple in moving with the times than were some of his contemporaries. His own deep admiration for novelists like Arnold Bennett inclined him to develop and continue with a style that was no less his own for becoming distinctly old-fashioned and out of tune with post-modernist devices. His series of novels about Oxford town, as opposed to university, typified by Young Shoulders (1982) and Where the Rivers Meet (1988), concerned a young student who moves between two worlds - the academic and the plebeian - and gives a strikingly vivid picture of the town 20 years ago: it may well remain readable when much of today's more modish fiction has been forgotten.
John Wain, Remarks on the short story John Wain EDITOR'S NOTE First published in JSSE n 2, The short story is, of course, sui generis; it is not an unsatisfactory form of the long story. It is a form on its own, with its own laws and its own logic. A short story has its natural length. It is not trying to do the same thing as a novel. It has ground staked out which is its own ground. Historically, it is not an olden form. It is very much a modern form. It belongs to contemporary literature, the literature of about the last hundred years. It comes into being at about the same time as the specifically recent poem, just after Edgar Poe remarked that the long poem was a contradiction in terms. Whether the rise of the modern short story coinciding with the rise of the modern poem is simple coincidence I don t know. I can not express an explanation as to why it should have done this, but it is a noteworthy fact that it did. It also arose at about the same time as Impressionist painting with its obliquity of approach. You know that when an Impressionist paints people, he often puts them at the edge of the painting, or just walking off the painting, as if you catch them in the act of getting on with their ordinary lives, as if the painter were saying, Yes, I’m not sitting this person down right in the middle of the painting and painting them. I’m painting a cafe, and there’s a man and a girl sitting at a table, and they’re over to one side, and about half the painting is made up of empty table, because that s in the picture too, and that is also what I'm painting. And the short story arises at about the same time as these other phenomena. I cannot explain why, but that it did so is obviously true. The short story, vis-à-vis the novel, is almost exactly like a drawing as compared to the painting. When we see a perfectly successful drawing we never say How good that would have been if only it could have been a painting. A painting is an entirely different thing. It has a depth, and it has a richness that the drawing can't have. He wrote more interesting and sociable novels and poems which we take more expression about old period.