Part 5: Post-war fiction 1945-1975

Introduction

In addition to forming the subject matter of several key works of fiction, the Second World War was a catalyst for a number of significant social changes which were reflected in the literature from this time. Publishers from this period were also more alive to the potential of the dust jacket as a marketing tool with the result that more effort was expended on their design and they were more likely to be retained by readers meaning that jacketed copies should be easier to track down by today’s collectors of modern fiction.

World War 2

Like the Great War, the Second World War forms the subject matter of many enduring works of fiction, a notable example being Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. After being drafted into the US army Mailer served in the Philippines and his experiences provided the material for the novel which is set on the South Pacific island of Anopopei where General Cummings’ force is attempting to drive out the Japanese. The novel focuses on the varied characters in a reconnaissance platoon sent on a mission behind enemy lines and is an engaging study of the tensions that can arise between men in a war situation, capturing both the intensity of combat and the boredom of the intervening lulls.

Joseph Heller also saw active service flying 60 combat missions as a bombardier in a B-25 with the US Air Corps and drew upon these experiences in his debut novel Catch-22. The exploits of the novel’s central character, Captain John Yossarian, contain a strong autobiographical element with the central theme being Yossarian’s increasingly desperate attempts to avoid flying any more missions using a variety of ruses such as pretending to be insane. The novel is populated with a large cast of absurd characters including Milo Minderbinder, the mess officer and war profiteer, who is a satire on the capitalist ideal taken to extremes, at one point even hiring out his planes to the Germans to enable them to bomb his own airfield. The book’s title has entered common usage as a term meaning a “no-win” situation several examples of which appear in the book. The most notable of these is that Yossarian’s attempts to avoid combat missions by feigning mental instability prove that he is thinking rationally in order to avoid danger and is therefore sane and must continue to fly.

Graham Greene

Graham Greene was undoubtedly one of the leading literary figures from the last century and one who managed to achieve both critical acclaim and high sales. Whilst his 26 novels were published in a period that spans from 1929 to 1988, 10 of these appeared during the period under consideration here.

As a boy Greene attended Berkhamstead School where his father Charles was the Second Master. His experiences in being required to move between the worlds of the pupils and the teaching staff undoubtedly influenced his work with many of his novels dealing with the themes of divided loyalties and betrayal. A good example of this is The Third Man, published in 1949. Here pulp western novelist Rollo Martins travels to war-torn Vienna at the request of his former school friend Harry Lime. Upon arriving he is informed by the authorities that Lime is engaged in black market activities and, whilst he initially disbelieves this, he eventually has to make a decision as to which side to take. The Third Man was unusual for having originally been written as a preliminary for Greene’s work on the screenplay for Carol Reed’s classic film. There are a number of differences between the film and Greene’s novella, including the change of Lime’s nationality from English to American to accommodate the film’s star Orson Welles. The English first, published by Heinemann, also features the short story The Fallen Idol and is today worth up to £400. Green’s subsequent works become progressively cheaper and easier to obtain such that The Honorary Consul (published in 1973) can be had for under £60.

The “Angry Young Men”

One of the social changes that became apparent after the war was an increased dissatisfaction amongst the young with the established social order. In Britain, this trend manifested itself in the form of the “Angry Young Men”. Whilst the terms drew it’s origins from the promotion for John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, it came to be applied as a loose term encompassing the works of a number of young writers which seemed to express disillusionment with traditional society.

Prominent among these was Kingsley Amis, whose debut novel Lucky Jim, was published by Gollancz in 1954. The novel’s protagonist Jim Dixon is a lecturer in medieval history at an unnamed provincial university, and it takes the form of a satire on academic life. Initially Dixon, who is a grammar school-educated working class boy, struggles to fit in with the conventions of his middle class existence but eventually comes to see though its pretensions and pomposity. Like Greene, Amis enjoyed a long career as an author, publishing more than 20 novels before his death in 1995 although his later works were increasingly characterised by a more conservative viewpoint than that expressed in Lucky Jim. By this time his literary mantle had been taken on by his son Martin, whose debut work The Rachel Papers was published in 1973.

Many of the other writers who (often unwillingly) were labelled “Angry Young Men” produced novels that contained a strong element of social realism in their depictions of working class life and, as such, had much in common with the “kitchen sink” dramas of Arnold Wesker and Shelagh Delaney. For example, Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning focuses on the drinking and sexual exploits of Arthur Seaton, a young lathe operator at a bicycle factory in Nottingham. Similarly, the principal character of David Storey’s This Sporting Life is also a lathe operator named Arthur Machin who lives in an unnamed Northern city. However, Machin’s size and athleticism enable him to rise above his contemporaries and carve out a lucrative existence as a rugby league forward, until the day when he starts to feel his age catching up on him. The authenticity of This Sporting Life is heightened by the fact that Storey himself spent four seasons playing professional rugby league and the collectability of both these novels has been enhanced by their forming the basis of iconic films starring Albert Finney and Richard Harris respectively.

The Beat Generation

In America, nonconformist attitudes found literary expression in the works of the “Beat Generation” whose leading novelists were Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. Kerouac’s best known work On the Road details a trans-American road trip that Kerouac took with his friend Neil Cassady. Kerouac originally wrote the novel in an intensive three-week writing session in the spring of 1951, typing the manuscript onto a series of sixteen-foot long rolls of paper that he had found in his loft. The book was finally published in 1957 by Viking and today a jacketed copy of the US first can fetch a healthy £3,000. However, the book’s value as a cultural icon can be judged by the fact that when Kerouac’s original manuscript scroll was auctioned by Christie’s in May 2001 the owner of the Indianapolis Colts American football team Jim Irsay paid an astounding $2,200,000.

Burroughs’ most famous work The Naked Lunch defies easy categorisation being an amalgam of many disparate elements including drug-induced hallucinatory episodes, bizarre sexual fantasies, wildly inventive science fiction and hard-boiled crime. This variety of styles, and the non-linear nature of the narrative, derive largely from the fact that the work was composed using the “cut up technique” whereby Burroughs recombined a number of separate manuscript passages that he had brought with him to Paris in 1958 for publication by Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press.

Both Kerouac and Burroughs were known for their dissolute lifestyles, Kerouac dying from internal bleeding caused by alcohol abuse in 1969 aged 47 whilst Burroughs, a long-term heroin addict, perversely lived to a ripe old age of 83 until his death in 1997.

Dystopias

Whilst novels imagining a future world where people’s actions are governed by a repressive and authoritarian government are a feature of many ages (earlier examples include Trollope’s The Fixed Period and Jack London’s The Iron Heel) two celebrated examples of this genre were published in the post-war period.

Perhaps the best known of these is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which follows the attempts of Winston Smith to break free of the totalitarian influence of “the Party” and assert his freedom to think and pursue a love affair with his work colleague at the Ministry of Truth Julia. Orwell envisions a world where the state controls every elements of human life through a potent combination of relentless propaganda, mind control (exercised through techniques such a limiting vocabulary) and continuous surveillance (even spying on its citizens though their television screens). The novel’s popularity and influence is such that many of the phrases that appear in it - such as “Big Brother” (the Party’s public face) and “doublethink” - have entered common usage.  

Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange envisions a new future where the younger generation is out of control. The principal character, fifteen year old Alex, spends his time drinking drug-laced milk and alcohol in bars before roaming the streets with his gang beating up random passers by, robbing shops, burgling houses and raping the occupants. After being caught Alex is subjected to an experimental form of aversion therapy to rid him of his violent impulses.

Burgess wrote the A Clockwork Orange in 1959-60 during a period of intense creativity after he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour and (mistakenly) only given a year to live with the intention that his widow would be able to live off the royalties. Eventually published in the UK by Heinemann in 1962, the novel gained greater prominence following the release of Stanley Kubrik’s film version nine years later. The film’s bleak ending stems from the fact that it was based upon the US version of the novel, which omits the final chapter in which Alex starts to yearn for a more settled existence with a wife and family. Burgess claims that the chapter was dropped at the suggestion of Eric Swenson, vice-president of his US publishers W W Norton – possibly the first time a publisher has demanded greater pessimism for the American market!

The central theme of A Clockwork Orange is the question of whether it is better for a person to be able to choose to perform evil acts or be compelled to perform good ones. The choice between good and evil also forms the basis of another key work from this period with dystopian elements – William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Here a group of schoolboys are marooned on a deserted island following a plane crash. In the absence of any adults they set about forming their own society, although conflicting factions arise led by the liberal Ralph and the autocratic Jack. The ensuing descent into savagery reflects Golding’s pessimistic view that, in the absence of order and constraint, man’s brutal and violent impulses will triumph.

POST-WAR FICTION: 1945-1975 – SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

A guide to current values of first editions in Very Good condition (with dust jackets).

Mailer, Norman: THE NAKED AND THE DEAD

(Rinehart, US, 1948)…….…………………............................£30-£40 (£300-£400)

Ditto (Allan Wingate, 1949)………………...............................£10-£15 (£50-£100)

Orwell, George: NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR

(Secker & Warburg, 1949)…….………………….......................£60-£80 (£1,000+)

Ditto (Harcourt Brace, US, 1949)……………………........…......£20-£30 (£80-£100)

Greene, Graham: THE THIRD MAN & THE FALLEN IDOL

            (Heinemann, 1950).............................................................£30-£40 (£300-£400)

Amis, Kingsley: LUCKY JIM

(Gollancz, 1953 [1954])…….……..………………….......£200-£300 (£2,500-£3,000)

Golding, William: LORD OF THE FLIES

(Faber & Faber, 1954).…....…..………………….….......£300-£400 (£2,500-£4,000)

Kerouac, Jack: ON THE ROAD

(Viking, US, 1957)…….………………..........................£400-£600 (£2,000-£3,000)

Ditto (Andre Deutsch, 1958)(1^st issue, author’s photo on

rear dust-jacket flap)……………………….................…......£100-£150 (£600-£800)

Sillitoe, Alan: SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING

(W.H. Allen, 1958)…….…………….…………….…................£30-£40 (£400-£600)

Burroughs, William: THE NAKED LUNCH

(Olympia Press, Paris, 1959)(1^st issue, green border on title page,

“Francs 1500” on rear dust-jacket, wrappers)…............£200-£300 (£1,000-£1,250)

Storey, David: THIS SPORTING LIFE

(Longmans, 1960)…….………………………….................... £20-£30 (£100-£150)

Heller, Joseph: CATCH-22

(Simon & Schuster, US, 1961).…………….......................£100-£150 (£600-£700)

Ditto (Jonathan Cape, 1962)………….……...........................£20-£30 (£150-£200)

Burgess, Anthony: A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

            (Heinemann, 1962).……….........…….................…………£100-£125 (£700-£900)

Amis, Martin: THE RACHEL PAPERS

            (Jonathan Cape, 1973)........................................................£25-£35 (£200-£300)

Greene, Graham: THE HONORARY CONSUL

            (The Bodley Head, 1973)..........................................................£8-£10 (£40-£60)

Part 6: Contemporary fiction from 1975 to the present