Word: waining
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SPRIGHTLY RUNNING (265 pp.)-John Wain-St. Main's Press...
This is neither a young man's manifesto nor an old man's apologia pro vita sua, but an interim report on himself by a clever, likable man of 35. British Novelist-Critic John Wain was 20 when Germany surrendered, and has thus spent his entire maturity on this side of the Hitlerian watershed. This unusual book suggests that most British intellectuals of his generation have settled into the admirable pattern of cultivated men of good will. Not for Wain the grandeurs, miseries and plain fuss of ideological commitments that vexed the '30s. If there...
...Wain is a traditional Englishman, but the kind from which little has been heard because the tradition he comes from is itself unliterary. His family came from a pottery town in Staffordshire. John's father, a dentist with a working-class practice, represented the highest social class in generations of potters and peasants. The family ,was more miserable than the really poor and more deluded than those who shared the attitudes of England's traditional rulers...
...Wain deals with this in a way that is not aloof, but as if it had been observed by a sympathetic stranger. His family portrait serves as a reminder that all the English puritans were not harried out of the land; some stayed in old England to keep up. generation after generation, a solid but mainly silent opposition to the glories of blood and state. The Wains were pacifists, and the family felt holier-than-thou toward both working class and rulers: they alone were "saved" in a world of wicked madmen. Wain records the effect of this upbringing...
...early '50s, some British poets announced themselves as The Movement, a loose flock of low-flying larks (among them Donald Davie, Thorn Gunn, Kingsley Amis, John Wain) who sang in the same octave quietly. They favored a formal elegance, but at the same time retained the note of natural speech, the "neutral tone" of voice in which the British customarily discuss love, death and the weather...