John Wain

John Barrington Wain (14 March 1925 - 24 May 1994) was an English poet, novelist, and literary critic, associated with the literary group "The Movement".

John Wain. Courtesy Valancourt Books.

Life

Youth and education

Wain was born and grew up in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire.

He attended St. John's College, Oxford, earning a B.A. in 1946 and M.A. in 1950. He was a Fereday fellow of St. John's between 1946 and 1949.

Career

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 earliest fellow in creative arts at Brasenose College, Oxford (1971-1972), and was appointed a supernumerary fellow in 1973.

For most of his life, he 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.

In 1953 Wain wrote his debut novel Hurry on Down, 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, and William Shakespeare. Among the other writers about whom he has written are 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.

Literary associations

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.

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.

Recognition

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.

Publications

Poetry

• Mixed Feelings: Nineteen poems. Reading, Berkshire, UK: School of Art, University of Reading, 1951.
• A Word Carved on a Sill. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956.
• Weep Before God. London: Macmillan / New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1961.
• Wildtrack: A poem, London: Macmillan, 1965; New York: Viking, 1965.
• Letters to Five Artists: Poems. London: Macmillan, 1969; New York: Viking, 1970.
• The Shape of Feng (illustrated by John Kerr). London: Covent Garden Press, 1972.
• Feng, a poem. London: Macmillan, 1975; New York: Viking, 1975.
• Poems, 1949-79. London & New York: Macmillan, 1980.
• Poems for the Zodiac. London: Pisces Press, 1980.
• The Twofold. Frome, Somerset, UK: Bran's Head at the Hunting Raven Press, 1981.
• Open Country. London: Hutchinson, 1987.

Plays

• Frank (radio play). London: Amber Press, 1984.
• Johnson is Leaving: A monodrama. London: Pisces Press, 1994.

Novels

• Hurry on Down. London: Secker & Warburg, 1953; New York: Viking, 1953;
  • also published in U.S. as Born in Captivity. New York: Knopf, 1954.
• Living in the Present: A novel. London: Secker & Warburg, 1955; New York: Putnam, 1960.
• The Contenders. London: Macmillan / New York: St. Martin's Press, 1957.
• A Travelling Woman: A novel, London: Macmillan / New York: St. Martin's Press, 1959.
• Strike the Father Dead: A novel. London: Macmillan / New York: St. Martin's Press, 1962.
• The Young Visitors: A novel. London: Macmillan, 1965; New York: Viking, 1965.
• The Smaller Sky. London: Macmillan, 1967.
• A Winter in the Hills. London: Macmillan, 1970; New York: Viking, 1970.
• The Pardoner's Tale. London: Macmillan, 1978; New York: Viking, 1978.
• Lizzie's Floating Shop. London: Bodley Head, 1981.
• Young Shoulders. London: Macmillan, 1982;
  • published in U.S. as The Free Zone Starts Here. New York: Delacorte, 1982.
• Where the Rivers Meet. London: Hutchinson, 1988.
• Comedies. London: Hutchinson, 1990.
• Hungry Generations. London: Hutchinson, 1994.

Short fiction

• Nuncle, and other stories. London: Macmillan / New York: St. Martin's Press, 1960.
• Death of the Hind Legs, and other stories. London: Macmillan, 1966; New York: Viking, 1966.
• The Life Guard: Stories. London: Macmillan, 1971.
• The Valentine Generation, and other stories. Harlow, Essex, UK: Longman, 1980.
• The Two Worlds of Ernst, and other stories. Copenhagen: Grafisk Forlag, 1982.

Non-fiction

• Contemporary Reviews of Romantic Poetry. London: G.G. Harrap, 1953; Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1969.
• Interpretations: Essays on twelve English poems. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955.
• Preliminary Essays. London: Macmillan / New York: St. Martin's Press, 1957.
• Gerard Manley Hopkins: An idiom of description. London: Oxford University Press, 1959.
• Essays on Literature and Ideas. London: Macmillan / New York: St. Martin's Press, 1963.
• Sprightly Running: Part of an autobiography. London: Macmillan / New York: St. Martin's Press, 1962.
• Theodore Roethke. Hull: Humberside, UK: Critical Quarterly, 1964.
• Arnold Bennett. New York & London: Columbia University Press, 1967.
• A House for the truth: Critical essays. London: Macmillan, 1972; New York: Viking, 1972.
• Johnson as Critic. London & Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973.
• Samuel Johnson: A biography. London: Macmillan, 1974; New York: Viking, 1974.
• Professing Poetry. London: Macmillan, 1977; New York: Viking, 1978.
• An Edmund Wilson celebration (1978)
• Edmund Wilson: The man and his work. New York: New York University Press, 1978.
• Dear Shadows: Portraits from memory. London: John Murray, 1986.

On Shakespeare

• The Living World of Shakespeare: A playgoer's guide. London: Macmillan / New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964.
• MacBeth: A casebook. London: Macmillan, 1968.
• Othello: A casebook. London: Macmillan, 1971.

Collected editions

• A John Wain Selection: Ten short stories, together with a selection of poems and extracts from two novels (edited by Geoffrey Robert Holson). London: Longman, 1977.
• Selected Poems and Memoirs. Woodstock, Oxford, UK: Sky Books, 2000.

Edited

• Anthology of Modern Poetry. London: Hutchinson, 1963.
• Thomas Hardy, Selected Shorter Poems. London: Macmillan, 1966.
• Thomas Hardy, Selected Stories. London: Macmillan, 1966.
• Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets: A selection. London: Dent / New York: Dutton, 1975.
• Samuel Johnson, Johnson on Johnson: A selection of the personal and autobiographical writings of Samuel Johnson. London: Dent / New York: Dutton, 1976.
• Everyman's Book of English Verse. London: Dent, 1981.
• The Oxford Library of English Poetry. (3 volumes), Oxford, UK, & New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
  • also published as Oxford Anthology of English Poetry. Oxford, UK, & New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
• The Oxford Library of Short Novels. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1990.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

Audio / video

• The Poetry of John Wain (cassette). New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965; Guilford, CT: Jeffrey Norton, 1970.
• John Wain Reads Contemporary Poetry (cassette). New York: McGraw-Hill, [1970's]

  

  Adaptation of 'J.M.W. Turner The Shipwreck.' by John Wain

• The Poetry of Dylan Thomas (cassette). Poulshot, Wiltshire, UK: Sussex, 1975.

See also

• Movement poets
• List of British poets
• List of literary critics

Preceded by Roy Fuller

Oxford Professor of Poetry 1973-1978

Succeeded by John Jones

References

• 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

External links

Poems

• "Apology for Understatement"
• "The Bad Thing"
• John Wain's poetry (2 poems)
• John Wain's Letters to Five More Artists

Audio / video

• John Wain at YouTube

Books

• John Wain at Amazon.com

About

• John Wain in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• John Wain 1925-1994 at Literary Heritage, West Midlands
• Author biography at Valancourt Books
• "John Wain, British Novelist, Poet and Critic, Is Dead at 69," New York Times
• Obituary: John Wain, The Independent.
• The Novels of John Wain by Dr. Krishna Kumar