Sprightly Running by John Wain
"Sprightly Running" is an autobiographical work by John Wain, an influential figure in 20th-century British literature. The book, completed in 1960, serves as Wain's reflection on the significant experiences that shaped his identity as a writer, poet, and educator. Through its nine chapters, Wain recounts pivotal moments from his childhood—marked by bullying and alienation—to his critical years at Oxford, where he developed his literary voice under notable mentors like C.S. Lewis. Central to Wain's narrative is a sense of sympathy for the oppressed, influenced by his own experiences and the political climate of his youth, particularly in relation to the rise of Nazism.
Wain's work diverges from the "angry young men" movement of his contemporaries, embodying a more nuanced perspective on literary and social issues. He critiques contemporary poetry and the literary establishment, asserting his independence from the labels imposed by journalists. Furthermore, Wain reflects on personal themes such as the complexities of love, the pain of divorce, and a profound sense of Englishness, all while grappling with the inherent tragedies of human existence. "Sprightly Running" not only serves as a personal narrative but also provides insight into the broader literary landscape of the 1950s, highlighting Wain's distinctive voice and literary philosophy.
Subject Terms
Sprightly Running by John Wain
First published: 1962
Type of work: Autobiography
Time of work: 1925-1960
Locale: England
Principal Personage:
John Wain , the novelist
Form and Content
Though best known for his first novel Hurry On Down (1953; published in the United States as Born in Captivity, 1954), the press reaction to which placed him prominently but uncomfortably among the “angry young men” of the 1950’s, John Wain was among the most prolific and versatile writers of the decade—during which he had also produced two volumes of poetry (1951 and 1956), a collection of short stories (1960), a book of criticism entitled Preliminary Essays (1957), numerous other reviews, and three additional novels: Living in the Present (1955), The Contenders (1958), and A Travelling Woman (1959). Sprightly Running, which was completed in September, 1960, as he “reached the exact half-way point in threescore years and ten,” is his personal assessment of the major influences on his development as a writer, poet, and teacher.
“My 1930s,” the first of the book’s nine chapters, comprises more than one-fourth of its total length. Wain’s depiction of his childhood painstakingly details the isolation of a sensitive and somewhat frail boy who, as a member of the middle class (the son of a dentist), finds himself resented as an outsider and bullied by lower-class “roughs” in the schoolyard and the community at large. Though such persecution is certainly not unique (and he omits its details, noting that its forms remain much the same in any decade), Wain’s early experience as a victim of bullying and intolerance gave him an acute sympathy for victims of persecution elsewhere—particularly, during the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, those in Nazi Germany.
The second chapter, “Love and the War,” begins with the diagnosis of a detached retina in his left eye that confined the sixteen-year-old Wain to bed for three months and left him partially blind, causing him to be rejected for military service at age eighteen. During this time, he also developed an intense and prolonged but unrequited adolescent infatuation with the daughter of an insurance salesman—a “wretched hopeless passion” that continued until his enrollment at Oxford several years later. Influenced by his parents’ support of the pacifist cause in the 1930’s, young Wain again saw himself in a minority that was “oppressed, despised, [and] in possession of the truth but powerless to impose its will,” characterizing his attitude as the Pharisaism of “any youth growing up in the attitude of high-minded martyrdom, such as prevails among pacifists in a liberal country during a war . . . a holier-than-thou attitude.”
Although he had reacted intensely against formal education in his younger years and had received only haphazard grounding in educational fundamentals, he entered St. John’s College, Oxford, in 1943; his experience there is described in the book’s lengthy third chapter. Under the direction of his tutor C.S. Lewis, who taught him the importance of meticulous analysis and rigorously precise writing, he began to shape his identity as a writer, while his friend Charles Williams instilled in him a reverential love of great poetry. During this time he befriended the brilliant but eccentric E.M.W. Meyerstein as well as Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, who were soon to begin their own distinguished literary careers; he also developed an abiding fascination with the life and works of Samuel Johnson, an interest which culminated in Wain’s noteworthy biography of him published in 1975.
About his first marriage (1947) and divorce (1956) Wain discloses very little, giving it only a four-page chapter and declining even to reveal his wife’s name in order to avoid “an unwarranted intrusion on someone else’s privacy.” The marriage’s ending came “slowly, messily, in a welter of tears and agony,” leaving him at the end of
nearly a decade of suffering . . . with the knowledge that parting from someone you care for is the worst kind of pain, the slowest to heal and the most deeply felt . . . the nearest thing to hell that life can offer; and that the most terrible of all words is Good-bye.
“A Literary Chapter,” the book’s fifth, is devoted primarily to Wain’s career as a writer (beginning at age nine with parodies of detective novels) and, from 1947 to 1955, as a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Reading. Though he resigned to become a full-time free-lance writer, Wain’s own university associations were to continue throughout his career, culminating in his position as professor of poetry at Oxford from 1973 to 1978. His assessment of contemporary poetry within Sprightly Running is forthright and acerbic, decrying “the collapse of the consumer wall of the literary triangle” that has allowed the ascendancy of (unnamed) ersatz poets and fame-building publicity-mongers “whose methods make Barnum look like an archbishop.”
Following a brief chapter on “The Wains in History,” describing his now-unknown working-class ancestors as “among the people who carried the heavy weight of England on their backs,” a chapter titled “Thoughts in an Aeroplane” is devoted to his travels in the United States and the Soviet Union. For reasons discussed at length in an article published in truncated form in the Observer but included in full in the chapter called “Criminal Record,” Wain found that, despite the physical beauty of its countryside and the friendliness of its people, “the total effect of being in the Soviet Union was to depress me almost suicidally.” In “Going Home,” the final chapter, Wain assesses the meaning of his own Englishness and reasserts his view of the fundamentally tragic nature of human life.
The book’s title and its epigraph are taken from act 4, scene 1 of John Dryden’s tragedy Aurengzebe (1675)
. . . None would live past years again,
Critical Context
Now recognized as a journalistic catchphrase rather than the name of a full-fledged literary movement, the term “angry young men” was commonly applied to a number of writers of the mid-1950’s, including Kingsley Amis, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, John Osborne, and John Wain. Their individuality and diversity have often been overlooked as certain similarities in their writings have been emphasized—particularly their portrayal of working-class protagonists who ardently voiced their social discontent, as well as their forthright inclusion of formerly “unmentionable” subject matter, “vulgar” language, and raucous comedy. From the outset, however, Wain was particularly uncomfortable with the label, and Sprightly Running is in part an explicit declaration of literary independence:
Speaking for myself, I reject the label, and will always continue to reject it, because (i) it is the creation of journalists who know nothing, and care less than nothing, for the art to which my life is dedicated, (ii) it is a hindrance to anyone who holds serious opinions and is able to be genuinely serious about them, and (iii) because I refuse to be institutionalized, whatever may be the immediate advantages in terms of hard cash.
Wain’s autobiography is also a valuable guide to an understanding of the pessimism that becomes increasingly prominent in his later fiction, which lacks the comic verve of his earlier work. Appropriately, his favorite author is Samuel Johnson, whose observation that “human life is every where a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed” epitomizes a point of view much like Wain’s own.
Although he acknowledges in Sprightly Running that many have found his criticism to be stronger than his creative work (as many subsequent critics have agreed), he has continually refused to confine himself to one type of writing, though he admits a surprising preference for short fiction and poetry to the novel, for which he remains better known.
His middle-class family background and antileftist opinions also fundamentally differentiate him from many “angry young men,” whose origins were more directly in the working class and whose political sympathies were more left-of-center. Like the occasional Cold War tenor of his anti-Soviet rhetoric (however justifiable it may have been), Wain’s disclaimer of revolutionary intent is a recognizable product of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s—a reminder of the comparative mildness of the then-startling “anger” that would, less than a decade later, be supplanted by far more radical and convulsive expressions of revolutionary rage, both in literature and in life.
Bibliography
Creber, J.W. Patrick. “Some Lessons from a Short Story,” in English Journal. LXXVI (February, 1987), p. 82.
Gray, James. Review in Time. LXXXI (May 24, 1963), p. 102.
Pryce-Jones, Alan. Review in Newsweek. LXI (May 13, 1963), p. 108.
Ryan, F.L. Review in Best Sellers. XXIII (May 15, 1963), p. 69.
Salwak, Dale. John Braine and John Wain: A Reference Guide, 1979.
Salwak, Dale. John Wain, 1981.