hurry on down [john wain]

Hurry on Down is a novel that I arrived at via Humphrey Carpenter’s lucid review of the Angry Young Men, with eponymous title. Wain is not a fashionable author; indeed none of the authors that feature in his book, save perhaps Larkin, (who it could be argued was somewhat shoe-horned into the group by Carpenter). have succeeded in retaining their status. Colin Wilson, John Braine, John Osbourne, John Wain, Kingsley Amis, etc, all white educated males whose stock has fallen. First the sixties happened, then Rushdie and Amis M, then, by and large, oblivion. Old copies of Wain’s novel will adorn the shelves of my parent’s generation, but will rarely be read. 

However, as Carpenter’s book reveals, in its day, Hurry on Down was a groundbreaking text, which, along with Lucky Jim and other works of the Angry Young Men, denoted a generational break, a new way of thinking. It’s intriguing to contemplate why that was the case, and also why the novel has since fallen out of favour. I don’t imagine it pops up on the syllabus of many 20th century literature courses. 

The novel tells the story of Charles Lumley, an Oxford graduate, who, unenthused by the destiny life appears to have chosen for him, decides he’s going to choose another course. This leads to him getting a job as a window cleaner, which leads to him becoming a driver, a drug smuggler, a hospital orderly, a chauffeur, a down-and-out, a bouncer and finally he ends up a gag-writer for radio. The list is indicative of the fact this is a picaresque novel. In the book’s final pages, there’s a direct reference to Moll Flanders, but perhaps the model might be the works of Fielding, Joseph Andrews or Tom Jones. The novel used as a way of creating an over-arching portrayal of society, its values and, above all, its class structure. Lumley is a rebel in large part because he chooses to go against his class, a class he despises. He seeks to break down the rigid stratification of post-war British society. He seems a prototype of the generation of the sixties which would follow, one that ostensibly wanted to cast off their inherited shackles and embrace something altogether more “free”. Lumley’s chosen word is “neutral”. He wishes to remove himself from the prejudices of the class struggle altogether, dreaming of living, a la Crusoe, on an island, even though he recognises that this dream is a chimera. Whenever he gets close to realising it, he finds himself compelled to dive back into the maelstrom. 

The protagonist’s picaresque journey is knitted together by his love for the slightly nebulous Veronica. The book perhaps suffers from a slight tone of existential disdain: Lumley’s reluctance to commit to any kind of role in society could be read as inverted snobbery. However, this laconic attitude (again echoing new ways of thinking being perpetrated on the other side of the channel) clearly struck a chord with a generation sick of the war and the way in which war stratifies society. Wain succeeds in never mentioning the war, which all his characters would have experienced in one form or another; this erasure of itself must have felt like  a relief to a generation desperate to look forwards rather than backwards. 

As to the reasons the novel has fallen out of fashion. Perhaps it’s not enough to say that the stories of white, educated post-war males no longer have agency in today’s Britain. After all, we’re a society inclined to recycle anything and everything from our cultural history if it can be sold. Rather, it might be that the portrait of Britain it offers is not one that lends itself to this process. In contrast with a novel like Waugh’s Brideshead, it offers a portrayal of Britain as a slightly, squalid, class-ridden society, consumed by petty jealousy and shit jobs. (Macjobs, if you like). There’s no redeeming narrative whereby these petty jealousies are ultimately superseded as the characters acquire wisdom. Lumley’s is a lone crusade, which doesn’t really go anywhere. The ending is wilfully ambivalent. Wain’s novel might have come just before and after events which are now seen as defining of recent British history, (The War, mass immigration, the sixties, the fraught relationship with Europe, multiculturalism etc), but in this way it feels like his book poses a question that remains unanswered. Why does our society continue to be so class-ridden, why does a vision of middle-class Britain feel so removed from a working-class vision of the same geographical space? A question which has lead, directly, to Brexit, but also one that the middle-class has shied away from. Other stories have been viewed as more urgent, or perhaps been allowed to distract from the seismic breach which Wain’s novel identifies. The tone might sometimes feel too knowing, but being knowing doesn’t mean the author hadn’t touched a nerve, a nerve that has never gone away.