John Barrington Wain (14 March 1925 – 24 May 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. He seems to have married in 1947, since C. S. Lewis wrote a poem for his wedding in June of that year.

Early life and education[link]

Wain was born and grew up in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, and attended St. John's College, Oxford, gaining a B.A. in 1946 and M.A. in 1950. He was a Fereday Fellow of St John's between 1946 and 1949.^[1]

Literary career[link]

He wrote his first novel Hurry on Down in 1953, a comic picaresque story about an unsettled university graduate who rejects the standards of 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 tale of a young boy dealing with the death of loved ones. Wain's use of lower-case letters in the titles of his novels indicate his non-conventional manner.

Wain was also a prolific poet and critic, with critical works on fellow Midlands writers Arnold Bennett, Samuel Johnson (for which he was awarded the 1974 James Tait Black Memorial Prize), and William Shakespeare. Among the other writers about whom he has written are the Americans Theodore Roethke and Edmund Wilson. He himself was the subject of a bibliography by David Gerard. He was a literary lion in his day, but the unpleasant remarks about him by Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin in their posthumous letters seem to have rubbished his reputation.

Academic career[link]

Wain taught at the University of Reading during the late 1940s and early 1950s, and in 1963 spent a term as professor of rhetoric at Gresham College, London. He was the first Fellow in creative arts at Brasenose College, Oxford (1971–1972), and was appointed a supernumerary fellow in 1973.^[1] In that same year, he was elected to the five-year post of Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford: some of his lectures are collected in his book Professing Poetry.

Literary associations[link]

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, radicals who opposed the British establishment and conservative elements of society at that time. Indeed, he did contribute to Declaration, an anthology of manifestos 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.^[2][3]

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 dubiousness, with the "angries". 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 (his Apology for Understatement is as good as anything written at the time) and literary interests (see his work for "The Observer"), 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 believe he belonged to, Lewis's literary acquaintances, the Inklings. Wain was as serious 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.

Works[link]

Novels[link]

• 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[link]

• 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)

Short Stories[link]

• Manhood (1980)
• The Valentine Generation
• Down our Way
• A Message from the Pig-man

Plays[link]

• Johnson is Leaving (1973) (monodrama)
• Harry in the Night (1975)
• Frank (1984) (radio play)

Short story collections[link]

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

Literary criticism[link]

• Interpretations, essays on twelve English poems (1955 and 1972)
• Preliminary Essays (1957)
• American Allegory (1959)
• Strength and Isolation in "The Living Milton", ed. Frank Kermode (1960)
• 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)
• Introduction to Milton's Paradise Lost (1991) published by The Folio Society (2003)

Biography[link]

• Sprightly Running: Part of an Autobiography (1962)
• Samuel Johnson: A Biography (1975)

See also[link]

Poetry portal

• List of Gresham Professors of Rhetoric

• Hatziolou, Elizabeth (1997). John Wain, A Man of Letters.

• Glyer, Diana (2007). The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community. ISBN 978-0-87338-890-0.

• "L'Art de John Wain, Poete": Edward Black, PhD Thesis, Universite de Caen 1965.
• "The Novels of John Wain": Dr. K. Kumar, PhD Thesis, Ranchi University, 1979

References[link]