Exit the hero

It was in The Spectator, in 1954, that the Movement was christened, and its members’ stereotyped image was soon set: white, male (except for Elizabeth Jennings), non-posh poets who rhymed and scanned, hated Abroad, thought T. S. Eliot was arse, Didn’t Come From London, and disconcerted the students at the redbrick universities where they taught by wearing flat caps and scarves in lectures.

Kingsley Amis cast them as a jazz ensemble:

Jack Wain and the Provincial All-Stars

Wain (tpt, voc) directing Phil Larkin (clt), ‘King’ Amis (tmb), Don Davie (alto), Al Alvarez (pno), Tommy Gunn (gtr), George (‘Pops’) Fraser (bs), Wally Robson (ds)

It was at the time a highly effective publicity stunt, but for years afterwards most members of the Movement sensibly denied having anything to do with it in the first place. As one of the fiercest deniers, Thom Gunn, put it in a poem about something else: ‘Their relationship consisted/ In discussing if it existed.’ But that’s no reason, by my lights, not to gather a retrospective anthology of essays about them.

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So: was the Movement a movement? That’s the four-pound-fifty question. The two essays that bookend this collection address that point. Blake Morrison’s fine opening piece concedes that the whole notion was ‘dreamt up one day in 1954 by the editor of The Spectator to get his magazine talked about’, but argues that it was a useful term for talking about that group of writers at that time, and it did, in however loose a way, identify something: ostensibly anti-Modernist and anti-Romantic, but mostly just the debunking, pragmatic and unsentimental spirit that its best practitioners shared.

James Fenton’s essay ‘Kingsley Amis: Against Fakery’ looks at that spirit with droll good sense: ‘Most of us agree with Marianne Moore that there ought to be, in poetry, a place for the genuine; it’s galling to have to admit that there’s a place for the phoney as well.’