asserts inLiving in the Present and as Gus Howkins declares in The Pardoner’s Tale.

Wain is also accomplished in his creation of place and atmosphere. In Strike the Father Dead, he fully captures the grayness of a London day, the grayness of lives spent under its pall, the grayness of the people who wander its streets. When Wain describes an afternoon in which Giles Hermitage (The Pardoner’s Tale) forces himself to work in the subdued light at home, when Arthur Geary (The Smaller Sky) walks the platforms at Paddington Station, when Charles Lumley walks in on a literary gathering, or when Roger Furnivall (A Winter in the Hills) makes his way home through the Welsh countryside—at such moments the reader encounters Wain’s mastery of setting and atmosphere.

The themes communicated through Wain’s novels are, like his method, consistent. It is clear that he sees the eighteenth century as a time of dignity, pride, and self-sufficiency—qualities lacking in the twentieth century. Like Samuel Johnson, Wain defends the value of reason, moderation, common sense, moral courage, and intellectual self-respect. Moreover, his fictional themes of the dignity of the human being, the difficulty of survival in the modern world, and the perils of success have established him principally as a moralist concerned with ethical issues. In later works, the value of tradition, the notion of human understanding, and the ability to love and suffer become the chief moral values. In all his novels, he is primarily concerned with the problem of defining the moral worth of the individual. For all these reasons, Wain is recognized as a penetrating observer of the human scene.

One final point should be noted about Wain’s capacities as a novelist. Clearly, the spiritual dimension is missing in the world he describes, yet there is frequently the hint or at least the possibility of renewal, which is the closest Wain comes to any sort of recognized affirmation. Charles Lumley, Joe Shaw, Jeremy Coleman, and Roger Furnivall are all characters who seem to be, by the end of their respective stories, on the verge of rebirth of a sort, on the threshold of reintegration and consequent regeneration. In each case, this renewal depends on the ability of the individual to come to terms with himself and his situation; to confront and accept at a stroke past, present, and future; and to accept and tolerate the contradictions inherent in all three. Wain’s sensitive response to the tragic aspects of life is hardly novel, but his deep compassion for human suffering and his tenderness for the unfortunate are more needed than ever in an age when violence, brutality, and cynicism are all too prevalent.

Born in Captivity

In his first novel, Born in Captivity, Wain comically perceives the difficulties of surviving in a demanding, sometimes fearful world. Detached from political causes and the progress of his own life, the hero is a drifter, seeking to compromise with or to escape from such “evils” as class lines, boredom, hypocrisy, and the conventional perils of success. Although the novel carries a serious moral interest, Wain’s wit, sharp observations, and inventiveness keep the plot moving. His comedy exaggerates, reforms, and criticizes to advocate the reasonable in social behavior and to promote the value and dignity of the individual.

Born in Captivity has the characteristic features of the picaresque novel: a series of short and often comic adventures loosely strung together; an opportunistic and pragmatic hero who seeks to make a living through his wits; and satiric characterization of stock figures rather than individualized portraits. Unlike the eighteenth century picaro, however, who is often hardhearted, cruel, and selfish, Wain’s central character is a well-intentioned drifter who compromises enough to live comfortably. His standby and salvation is a strong sense of humor that enables him to make light of much distress and disaster. Lumley’s character is revealed against the shifting setting of the picaresque world and in his characteristic response to repeated assaults on his fundamental decency and sympathy for others. He remains substantially the same throughout the novel; his many roles—as window cleaner, delivery driver, chauffeur, and the like—place him firmly in the picaresque tradition. Lumley’s versatility and adaptability permit Wain to show his character under a variety of circumstances and in a multiplicity of situations.

Lumley’s character is established almost immediately with the description of his conflict with the landlady in the first chapter. The reader sees him as the adaptable antihero who tries to control his own fate, as a jack of all trades, a skilled manipulator, an adept deceiver, an artist of disguises. Wain stresses Lumley’s ingenuity rather than his mere struggle for survival; at the same time, he develops Lumley’s individual personality, emphasizing the man and his adventures. The role that Lumley plays in the very first scene is one in which he will be cast throughout the story—that of a put-upon young man engaged in an attempt to cope with and outwit the workaday world.

The satire is developed through the characterization. Those who commit themselves to class—who judge others and define themselves by the class structure—are satirized throughout the novel. Surrounding the hero is a host of lightly sketched, “flat,” stock figures, all of whom play their predictable roles. These characters include the proletarian girl, the American, the landlady, the entrepreneur, the middle-class couple, and the artist. In this first novel, Wain’s resources in characterization are limited primarily to caricature. The comedy functions to instruct and entertain. Beneath the horseplay and high spirits, Wain rhetorically manipulates the reader’s moral judgment so that he sympathizes with the hero. In the tradition of Tobias Smollett and Charles Dickens, Wain gives life to the grotesque by emphasizing details of his eccentric characters and by indicating his attitude toward them through the selection of specific bodily and facial characteristics.

Wain has also adopted another convention of eighteenth century fiction: the intrusive author. The active role of this authorial impresario accounts for the distance between the reader and the events of the novel; his exaggerations, his jokes, and his philosophizing prevent the reader from taking Lumley’s fate too seriously. In later novels, Wain’s authorial stance changes as his vision deepens.

Any discussion of comic technique in Born in Captivity leads inevitably to the novel’s resolution. Ordinarily, readers do not like to encounter “perfect” endings to novels; nevertheless, they are not put off by the unrealistic ending to this novel because they know from the beginning that they are reading a comic novel that depends on unrealistic exaggeration of various kinds. Elgin W. Mellown was correct when he called the novel “a pastiche: Walter Mitty’s desire expressed through the actions of the Three Stooges—wish fulfillment carried out through outrageous actions and uncharacteristic behavior.” The reader feels secure in the rightness of the ending as a conclusion to all the comic wrongness that has gone on before.

Strike the Father Dead

In Strike the Father Dead, Wain further extended himself with a work more penetrating than anything he had written before. Not only is it, as Walter Allen said, a “deeply pondered novel,” but it is also a culmination of the promises inherent in Wain’s earlier works. Plot, theme, character, and setting are integrated to tell the story of a son who breaks parental ties, thereby freeing himself to make his own way in life as a jazz pianist. Pointing to the foibles of his fellowman and probing the motives of an indignant parent, Wain’s wit and sarcastic humor lighten this uncompromising study of the nonconformist’s right to assert his nonconformity.

Two later Wain novels—A Winter in the Hills and The Pardoner’s Tale—continue and elaborate on many of the central themes of his fiction, but they surpass the earlier novels in richness and complexity. Both novels exhibit, far more than do his earlier writings, an interest in the tragic implications of romantic love; a greater complexity in character development allows Wain to portray convincingly men whose loneliness borders on self-destruction. Each novel is not simply another story of isolation or spiritual desolation, although it is that. Each hero is cast into a wasteland, and the novel in a sense is the story of his attempts to find the river of life again, or possibly for the first time. One of the themes that develops from this period in Wain’s career is that personal relationships are the most important and yet most elusive forces in society.

The plot of Strike the Father Dead is arranged in an elaborate seven-part time scheme. Parts 1 and 6 occur sometime late in 1957 or early in 1958, part 2 takes place in the immediate prewar years, and the other divisions follow chronologically up to the last, which is set in 1958. The scene shifts back and forth between a provincial university town and the darker, black-market-and-jazz side of London, with a side trip to Paris.

Wain narrates the story from the points of view of four characters. The central figure, Jeremy Coleman, revolts against his father and the academic establishment in search of self-expression as a jazz pianist. Alfred Coleman, Jeremy’s father and a professor of classics, is an atheist devoted to duty and hard work. Eleanor, Alfred’s sister and foster mother to Jeremy, is devoted to Jeremy and finds comfort in innocent religiosity. Percy Brett, a black American jazz musician, offers Jeremy his first real parental leadership. Like Ernest Pontifex, in Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (1903), Jeremy escapes from an oppressive existence; he has a passion for music, and once he has the opportunity to develop, his shrinking personality changes.

Strike the Father Dead marks a considerable advance over Born in Captivity in the thorough rendering of each character and each scene. By employing a succession of first-person narrators, Wain focuses attention more evenly on each of the figures. The result is that the reader comes away knowing Jeremy even better, because what is learned about him comes from not only his own narration but other sources as well. Inasmuch as there are three central characters, Strike the Father Dead represents a larger range for Wain. Each interior monologue is a revelation; the language is personal, distinctive, and descriptive of character.

In the manner of a bildungsroman, Strike the Father Dead is also a novel that recounts the youth and young manhood of a sensitive protagonist who is attempting to learn the nature of the world, discover its meaning and pattern, and acquire a philosophy of life. Setting plays a vital role in this odyssey. The provincial and London backgrounds and the accurate rendering of the language make the novel come alive. Strike the Father Dead moves between two contemporary worlds—a world of rigidity and repression, represented by Alfred, and a world of creativity, international and free, represented by London and Paris. The first world oppresses Jeremy; the second attracts and draws him. He dreams about it and invents fictions about it. Central to this new world is Jeremy’s love of jazz. For him, the experience of jazz means beauty, love, life, growth, freedom, ecstasy—the very qualities he finds missing in the routine, disciplined life of Alfred.

Although Strike the Father Dead tells the story of a British young man who becomes successful, the success is to a certain extent bittersweet. In his triumphs over his home circumstances, Jeremy loses something as well. There are various names given to it: innocence; boyhood; nature; the secure, predictable life at home. The world beyond the academic life waits for Jeremy, and he, unknowingly, does his best to bring it onstage. With such a life comes a developing sense of injustice, deprivation, and suffering. These concerns become focal points in Wain’s subsequent novels, as he turns toward the impulse to define character and dilemma much more objectively and with greater moral responsibility.

A Winter in the Hills

With its setting in Wales, A Winter in the Hills marked a departure from Wain’s first seven novels, all of which were centered in England. The story expresses, perhaps more comprehensively than any other, Wain’s feelings for the provincial world, its cohesion and deep loyalties, and its resistance to innovation from outside. Here the reader finds Wain’s sympathy for the underdog, his respect for decency and the dignity of humanity, and his affirmation of life; here, too, is expressed Wain’s deep interest in the causes and effects of loneliness and alienation.

The reader’s first inclination is to approach the novel as primarily a novel of character, the major interest and emphasis of which is the constantly developing character of Roger Furnivall himself. Using third-person narration, Wain keeps the focus on his main character as he progresses straight through several months that constitute a time of crisis in his life. Through most of the novel, Roger struggles doggedly against a combination of adverse circumstances, always in search of a purpose. Outwardly, he forces himself on Gareth, for example, as a way of improving his idiomatic Welsh. Inwardly, he “needed involvement, needed a human reason for being in the district.” The guilt he carries because of his brother’s suffering and death helps to propel him into a more active engagement with contemporary life. His conflict with Dic Sharp draws him out of his own private grief because he is helping not only Gareth but also an entire community of people.

The reader learns about Roger in another way, too: Wain uses setting to reveal and reflect the protagonist’s emotions and mental states. Roger’s walk in the rain down the country roads, as he attempts to resolve his bitterness and disappointment at Beverley’s rejection of him, is vividly depicted. It carries conviction because Roger’s anxiety has been built up gradually and artistically. The pastoral world is a perpetually shifting landscape, and Wain depicts its shifts and contrasts with an acute eye for telling detail. Especially striking are the sketches of evening coming on in the Welsh hills, with their rocks and timber and vast expanses of green. Such descriptions help to convey Roger’s yearning for happiness in a world that seems bent on denying it to him.

One major theme of the book is the invasion of the peaceful, conservative world of Wales by outsiders who have no roots in the region, and therefore no real concern for its inhabitants. These invaders are characterized by a sophisticated corruption that contrasts sharply with the unspoiled simplicity and honesty of the best of the natives. A related theme is the decline of the town: its economic insecurity, its struggle to resist the progressive and materialistic “cruelty, greed, tyranny, the power of the rich to drive the poor to the wall.” Through Roger’s point of view, Wain expresses his opposition to the pressures—economic, political, cultural—that seek to destroy the Welsh and, by implication, all minority enclaves. Thus, A Winter in the Hills is more than a novel about the growth of one human being from loneliness and alienation to mature and selfless love; it is also a powerful study of the quality of life in the contemporary world, threatened by the encroachments of bureaucracy, greed, and materialism.

The Pardoner’s Tale

The somewhat optimistic resolution of A Winter in the Hills stands in stark contrast to that of The Pardoner’s Tale, Wain’s most somber novel. In no other work by Wain are the characters so lonely, so frustrated, or so obsessed with thoughts of mutability, lost opportunities, and death. The novel is really two stories: a first-person tale about Gus Howkins, an aging Londoner contemplating divorce, and a third-personnarrative (the framing narrative) about Giles Hermitage, an established novelist and bachelor living in an unnamed cathedral town, who gets involved with the Chichester-Redferns, a woman and daughter, while he is working out the story of Howkins. It is the interplay between these two stories that constitutes the plot of The Pardoner’s Tale.

Giles Hermitage is obviously the figure with whom Wain is the most intimately involved. He is a highly idiosyncratic figure with very recognizable weaknesses; he is easily discouraged (there is an early thought of suicide), and he resorts to excessive drinking. The root cause of his death wish and of his drinking is loneliness. Like Wain’s earlier heroes, he is very much a modern man: vague in his religious and humanitarian aspirations, rootless and alienated from the social life of the community in which he lives, and initially weak and confused in his relationships with women. Plagued by anxiety, depression, vague discontent, and a sense of inner emptiness, he seeks peace of mind under conditions that increasingly militate against it. Add to his problems the ever-growing urge toward self-destruction, and the reader begins to recognize in this novel a truly contemporary pulsebeat. Hermitage is a stranger in a world that does not make sense.

Unlike Wain’s earlier heroes, however, Hermitage tries to make sense of the world through the medium of his writing by stepping back into what he calls “the protecting circle of art.” His approach to writing is autobiographical, personal, even subjective. The hero of his novel is a mask for himself. The author is creating a character who is in his own predicament, and the agonies he endures enable him to express his deepest feelings about life. In Hermitage, Wain presents a character who tries to create, as artists do, a new existence out of the chaos of his life.

The remaining major characters in The Pardoner’s Tale bear family resemblances to those in other of Wain’s novels. If the part of the lonely, alienated hero so effectively carried in A Winter in the Hills by Roger Furnivall is here assigned to Giles Hermitage, then the role of the manipulator is assigned in this novel to Mrs. Chichester-Redfern. Although a good deal less ruthless than Dic Sharp, she nevertheless seeks to exploit the hero.

The process by which Mrs. Chichester-Redfern is gradually revealed through the eyes of Hermitage is subtle and delicate. At first merely a stranger, she comes to seem in time a calculating and educated woman, the innocent victim of a man who deserted her, a seventy-year-old woman grasping for answers to some vital questions about her own life. She summons Hermitage under the pretense of wanting to gain insight into her life. From these conversations, the reader learns that she, like Hermitage, is confronted and dislocated by external reality in the form of a personal loss. Also like the hero, she desires to come to some understanding of her unhappy life through the medium of art. Her true motive is revenge, however, and she wants Hermitage to write a novel with her husband in it as a character who suffers pain. Then, she says, “there will be that much justice done in the world.”

In addition to the alienated, lonely hero and the manipulator, most of Wain’s fiction portrays a comforter. In his latest novel, the comforter is embodied in Diana Chichester-Redfern, but the happiness Diana offers is only temporary. In this novel, love is reduced to a meaningless mechanical act: Diana, also, is living in a wasteland.

The basic tension of this novel is a simple and classic one—the life-force confronting the death-force. As surely as Mrs. Chichester-Redfern is the death-force in the novel, Diana is the active and life-giving presence. She is depicted as an abrasive, liberated, sensual, innately selfish modern young woman who stands in positive contrast to the deathlike grayness of her mother. She is earthy and fulfilled, accepting and content with her music (playing the guitar satisfies her need for proficiency), her faith (which takes care of “all the moral issues”) and her sexuality (which she enjoys because she has no choice). Diana goes from one affair to another, not in search of love (she claims she “can’t love anybody”) but out of a need for repetition. Diana defines love and meaning as the fulfillment of a man or woman’s emotional requirements. To her, love does not mean self-sacrifice; rather, love is synonymous with need.

The world of The Pardoner’s Tale is thus the archetypal world of all Wain’s fiction: random, fragmented, lonely, contradictory. It is a world in which wasted lives, debased sexual encounters, and destroyed moral intelligence yield a tragic vision of futility and sterility, isolation from the community, estrangement from those who used to be closest to one, and loneliness in the middle of the universe itself.

Young Shoulders

Amid all this, Wain’s unflinching honesty and his capacity for compassion make his definition of the human condition bearable. Both characteristics are evident in Young Shoulders. Again, Wain focuses on senseless waste. A plane of English schoolchildren crashes in Lisbon, Portugal, killing everyone aboard. Seventeen-year-old Paul Waterford, whose twelve-year-old sister, Clare, was one of the victims, describes his journey to Lisbon with his parents, their encounters with other grief-stricken relatives, the memorial service they attend, and their return to England. Because he is still untainted by convention, Paul feels free to see the other characters as they are, often even to find them funny; however, he has to admit that he can be wrong about people. The seemingly calm Mrs. Richardson, a teacher’s widow, collapses during the memorial service; the restrained Janet Finlayson howls in the hotel lobby that God is punishing them all; Mr. Smithson, whom Paul assessed as a man on his way up, goes crazy on the tarmac; and everyone depends on Paul’s parents: the mother Paul saw only as a drunk and the father Paul dismissed as hopelessly withdrawn.

Because Wain has the eighteenth century writer’s hunger for universals, we may assume that the real subject of Young Shoulders is not how individuals behave in the face of tragedy but what the young protagonist and, by extension, the reader has learned by the end of the novel. Paul comes to see that human beings avoid acknowledging their emotions in so many ways that an outsider’s judgment is likely to be inaccurate. He also recognizes the extent to which he deludes himself, whether by imagining a utopian society he will govern or by addressing “reports” to Clare, thus denying that she is dead. By losing his innocence, Paul gains in compassion.

The Oxford trilogy

With its single plot line, its compressed time scheme, and its limited cast, Young Shoulders is much like a neoclassical play. By contrast, the three novels composing the Oxford trilogy have an epic quality, as indeed they must if they are to “describe and dramatize the Oxford that has been sinking out of sight, and fading from memory, for over thirty years,” as Wain states in his preface to the final volume. The series does indeed cover three decades.

Where the Rivers Meet introduces the protagonist Peter Leonard and takes him through his undergraduate years at Oxford; Comedies begins in 1933, with Leonard’s appointment as a fellow, and ends after World War II; and Hungry Generations covers Leonard’s life from 1947 to 1956. There is a multitude of characters, ranging from Oxford intellectuals to the patrons of the pub that Leonard’s parents run, each with definite ideas about local politics, world news, and the progress of society. Wain’s honesty is reflected in the way he permits all the characters to speak their minds; his compassion is revealed in his attempt to understand even the least appealing of them. These qualities, along with his creative genius and his consummate artistry, should ensure for John Wain a permanent place in twentieth century literary history.