In particular since the last war,
we've all become much more educated
in what really is violence and sadism and savagery and so on.
For the writers of the 1950s, the Second World War changed everything.
What you're admitting is that millions of people can be killed.
It will be too late to regret it when this bomb has dropped.
The post-war world brought change and upheaval on an unprecedented scale.
I wrote about the things that I knew of, the tensions of Berlin which I witnessed,
institutional behaviour, of British nostalgia for power.
The blueprint for the world which we inhabit now was being laid down then,
the world of consumer goods, package holidays, jet travel, high rises.
Change was in the air.
This is the story of how the British novel was reinvented in the post-war years.
It became an outlet to explore the anxieties of the time,
a way of coming to terms with a displaced and changing nation.
Britain in the early '50s.
A nation devastated by war,
physically and psychologically.
The horrors of the Nazi genocide had been exposed,
the terrifying power of the atomic bomb unleashed.
Many feared that World War Three was just around the corner.
We had entered what the poet WH Auden described as "the age of anxiety".
BELL CHIMES
The British novel took nearly a decade to recover its confidence.
Novelists seemed unsure of the style or subject matter appropriate to the post-war age.
Then in 1954, there was a sudden renaissance in fiction.
Four of the most significant British novels of the 20th century were published in a single year.
Each in its own way seemed a response to the uncertainty of the time.
And they were to kick-start a new phase in British literature.
One of the first of these novels was by an elderly Oxford don.
JRR Tolkien was 62 years old when he published The Fellowship Of The Ring,
the first book in what would become the Lord Of The Rings trilogy.
Tolkien created an entire fantasy world,
a world of hobbits and elves, wizards and magic, good and evil.
He even created his own language.
SPEAKS IN MADE-UP LANGUAGE
'One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
'One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them,
'In the land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.'
I invented that in the bath, I remember.
I remember inventing that in one of the baths...when I was having a bath at 20 Northmoor Road.
I remember kicking the sponge out of the bath when I got the last line, thinking, "That will do all right."
'Frodo began to feel restless and the old paths seemed too well trodden...'
The novel follows the fortunes of a young hobbit
on a quest to rid the world of a ring with dark, magical qualities and devastating power.
But this was no mere fairy tale.
If you really come down to any large story that interests people
and can hold their attention for a considerable time or make...
The stories are practically always human stories and practically always about one thing, aren't they? Death.
And the inevitability of death.
After the horrors of the Second World War,
many were keen to see Tolkien's work as allegory.
Hooray!
Many, but not Tolkien himself.
People do not understand the difference between an allegory and an application.
You can go to a Shakespeare play and apply it to things in your mind, but they're not allegories.
Many people apply the ring to the nuclear bomb
and think that the whole thing is an allegory of it.
Well, it isn't.
FIREWORKS EXPLODE
That's a good one.
One sees that evil comes from the east,
one sees that there's a Christ figure almost
who is brought back to life.
One could make a case for arguing that The Lord Of The Rings was a massive allegory,
yet Tolkien said it was the furthest thing from his mind.
It's certainly a novel about good and evil,
but it doesn't necessarily mean that that good and evil has a particular mid-20th century focus.
For Tolkien, fantasy was little more than a form of escapism.
But other writers used their fiction to engage with questions of good and evil in a more direct way.
'William Golding works as a schoolmaster in Salisbury.
'He teaches at Bishop Wordsworth's School in the Cathedral Close.
'He teaches Philosophy, Greek and English.
'His first novel Lord Of The Flies was about a group of schoolboys
'stranded on an island after an air crash.
'He chose schoolboys because he wanted a subject
'out of his own experience and they were what he knew best.'
Lord Of The Flies is an allegorical tale about the collapse of civilisation.
It describes the rapid descent into savagery and violence of a group of schoolchildren,
freed from the constraints of adult supervision.
Good morning. Good morning, sir. Right, sit down, please.
How far have we got? Act Two, Scene One, sir.
Right, lend me a book, somebody.
I don't know how he put the characters in Lord Of The Flies together.
But they do, each of them, have meanings within the narrative.
There is the good leader,
the ugly, kind man who is despised,
the saint, the bad leader.
And these rush around on the island
and get into absolutely archetypal religious confrontations,
the one with the other.
And there's the allegorical outside world with atomic bombs raining down from the heavens.
And finally, the naval officer appearing like an archangel
to deliver judgment on these trivial little boys.
All that is, as it were, like a Dantesque or a Miltonic picture of heaven and hell.
Golding's tale, set in the aftermath of some kind of atomic conflict,
seemed to reflect his anxiety about the recent war
and mankind's innate propensity for evil.
I plan a novel from the beginning right to the end...
..before I write anything in detail.
I see it in the air as a kind of boundless shape about so long
from here to here, then the detail begins to fill in
and I work it out until almost the last flick of an eyelid,
then I write it through from one side to the other.
'I don't know about other people, but I am not satisfied with my books.
'People find them pessimistic.
'But I'm not a pessimist, I'm an optimist.
'And if that optimism which is obvious to me as the background of my books,
'if that optimism doesn't come out,
'then I ought to have conveyed it more explicitly, more vividly and more importantly.'
Golding and Tolkien were both scholarly novelists.
But there was another academic author who was to make a major impact that year.
Iris Murdoch was an Anglo-Irish writer and philosopher
who had looked to France for inspiration after the war.
# Les roulottes se sont arretees
# Sur la place du village... #
After years of Nazi occupation, post-war Paris was in the grip
of a new mode of thinking - existentialism,
a philosophy that emphasised the importance of human individuality and free will
in giving life meaning.
# Les chiens et les singes savants
# La p'tite fille de quatre ans s'est casse le bras
# Mais fait son numero gentiment... #
Murdoch was to channel these ideas into her novels,
though she was careful not to let them dominate.
# Avec les yeux brillants... #
As a novelist, one is just the pupil of great novelists of the past in a quite straightforward way.
I don't think being a philosopher alters or certainly doesn't help one's job as an artist
when writing a novel.
I suppose my interests in philosophy are chiefly in moral philosophy and in political philosophy
and possibly, to some extent, thinking about situations in moral philosophy,
thinking about problems of freedom and problems of moral decision and so on.
This may affect sometimes the way one portrays a character.
She would have her characters in her novel putting forward different philosophical positions
which is a very good way of writing a book.
You don't know who's right or wrong, they change sides and allegiances.
But they're concerned with... They're concerned with ideas of goodness.
Murdoch's first novel Under The Net follows the fortunes of a young writer named Jake
as he journeys through the streets, theatres and pubs of 1950s London,
overcoming a tangled web of personal relationships and financial problems.
For Jake, life is a philosophical voyage of discovery, a matter of choosing the right way to live.
Time, gentlemen, please!
There is a theme in Under The Net which is a perpetually recurrent theme
and one which I don't mind recurring.
That is, I think it's a deep theme
and that's the conflict between the man who wants to be good
and the man who wants to create.
And there's often, I think, a kind of actual conflict of character
and a conflict of life involved in these choices,
one might say the conflict between the artist and the saint.
While some writers wrestled with philosophical questions of good and evil in a post-war world,
others seemed more concerned about the state of Britain.
The end of the war had brought a popular mood for social change
with a landslide Labour victory and the establishment of the welfare state.
But by the early '50s, Winston Churchill was back in power.
CHEERING
This prompted one man to write
what would become one of the most successful debut novels in the English language.
I personally then was suffering from a good deal of depression
over quite a long time, over the results of the 1951 election
which seemed to say that the modest bit of social revolution that the British might have been going in for
between 1945 and 1951 had now come to an end and the public had turned their back on that
and were trying to reverse the process, which I found depressing.
Kingsley Amis was a 31-year-old Swansea University lecturer
when he published Lucky Jim in 1954.
The novel tells the story of Jim Dixon,
a reluctant history lecturer at a provincial university
who struggles through the daily tedium of his job and his life
with bitterly funny consequences.
He may have taught at Swansea,
but for Amis, university life was ripe for mocking.
The university did strike me, I think I can say, as one of those sacred cows of British life
that could stand a bit of deflation or puncturing or whatever one does to a sacred cow.
The establishment, if such a thing exists in English literature, were horrified by Lucky Jim
because it poked fun at sacred cows like classical music - "Filthy Mozart!"
It mocked the Bloomsbury Group.
It had no time for a great many of the cultural icons
which a lot of the people who peddled culture in the 1950s had grown up with.
It caused great alarm among that class.
It won The Somerset Maugham Award
and there's a quote often quoted from Maugham saying,
"There is a new generation of young men and women coming up to the universities.
"Mr Amis's ear is so acute that he captures them exactly."
But the next sentence of that piece is, "They are scum.
"They have no conception of what is beautiful and noble."
And Lucky Jim is absolutely anti-that.
How far are you yourself a socialist and a welfare state boy?
I used to be a socialist. I used to be much keener on being a socialist than I am now.
Jim is a socialist, I suppose, after a fashion,
but both he and I are, or would be by now, anti-Conservative people, rather than socialists.
Jim is a controversial figure.
A lot of people see him as a villain, rather than a hero. How do you react to this?
Jim was my mouthpiece for saying things about education and he had some harsh things to say,
but they were about the arts side of a university, history, literature.
If he'd been talking about the science side, he'd have been far more offensive.
I would welcome the chance of saying some harsh things about scientists and the way scientists are regarded.
There's a great deal of ignorant bumptiousness on the part of scientists these days
and an unthinking acceptance of the importance of the scientist.
On the question of him being a hero,
he hasn't got a lot of the characteristics of the conventional hero,
but he is certainly intended to be an admirable kind of person
with a lot of attitudes and views on things and even kinds of behaviour in personal relationships and so on
that I'd endorse a good deal.
He's a conscientious kind of chap
and in his own odd way, a moral chap too.
Amis's unlikely hero struck a chord.
Lucky Jim was to take the novel in a new direction.
And Kingsley Amis became associated with a new set of writers,
a disparate group of novelists, playwrights and critics collectively known as The Angry Young Men.
Well, Kingsley taught us grammar school boys how to make rudeness genuinely funny.
They included Ken Tynan,
Alan Sillitoe...
..and John Braine.
Many of these writers came from working-class northern cities
and they wrote of what they knew.
They brought gritty, kitchen sink realism to the forefront of popular literature.
One of the first of these novelists to hit the mainstream was the Yorkshire librarian John Braine.
In 1957, Braine published Room At The Top,
the tale of a working-class lad determined to make a better life for himself.
I think that up to about 1954 and indeed let me say up to 1957 with the publication of Room At The Top,
open brackets, advertisement, close brackets,
that it was considered that there were certain OK places
for novels to be set in,
just as there were certain OK people to be written about
and if you did write a novel with a provincial setting,
it was pretty well bound to be a piece of straight propaganda
or else a regional novel, "regional" in heavy italics, you see.
John Braine...
used to bring lunches to a halt by looking round the table drunkenly and resentfully and saying,
"You hate me, don't you, for I never went to university!"
But it was a great thing to have the untutored voice.
That was a tremendous contribution.
Hot on his heels was Alan Sillitoe
whose novel Saturday Night And Sunday Morning catalogues the frustrations and sexual infidelities
of a young factory worker in Nottingham.
But the hero of the novel was taken quite recently, I think,
to be a rather tempestuous man with a profound discontent. What is he discontented about?
Well, it depends what you mean.
The discontent could be the sort of human condition which I think most of the time is discontent
and I would say that this discontent often manifests itself in sort of social ways.
This character, for example, had practically all the earthly bread he wanted,
but he didn't have any spiritual bread whatsoever of any kind.
In this sense, perhaps people could put on to it some sort of social importance or social meaning.
HE BLOWS TRUMPET
Sillitoe was writing about a genuine Nottingham underclass.
Sillitoe's childhood, so far as we can tell, was spent in pushing the family belongings on a barrow
from one rented room to another.
Almost the first words he remembered being spoken in the family household
were his mother shouting, "Not on the head,"
when his illiterate labouring father used to beat him up in the evenings.
These working-class voices represented an unsettling assault
on the middle-class literary establishment.
The point is that we don't shape events, we mirror events.
And if we are good mirrors...
Let's face it, most writers are cracked mirrors. They don't show what really happens.
Everybody gets such an awful shock
that it might indeed move them to do something about things.
I think Kingsley's books and John Braine's books and John Osborne's books all reflect a feeling
that it's possible to take people of all classes seriously,
their opinions, intelligence and wit seriously,
their attitudes of irreverence towards the established order.
Kingsley's book especially had that sort of "why the hell do I have to accept this" attitude about it.
Since his book, the effect has been to liberate lots of people who had shared this attitude for years
into becoming unconscious socialists
by becoming rebels and satirists.
So The Angry Young Men opened up the world of fiction to previously dispossessed voices.
The consequences would be immense.
# London is the place for me
# London, this lovely city
# You can go to France or America
# India, Asia or Australia
# But you must come back to London city... #
British society was changing
and one of the most obvious changes was the influx of West Indian immigrants,
known as the Windrush Generation.
# Believe me, I am speaking broad-mindedly
# I am glad to know my mother country
# I've been travelling to countries years ago
# But this is the place I wanted to know
# London, that's the place for me... #
The experience was captured in this BBC documentary.
I've heard that you've got rooms going. I have got a room, but I'm afraid I can't let you in.
I beg your pardon? I can't let you in. I've got 14 English boys in here.
14 English boys? So you don't want a...? I can't mix. I'm ever so sorry.
I would myself, but if I let you come in, all my boys would leave.
If I let you come in, all my other ones would go. Yes.
OK... I'm ever so sorry. Yes.
# That's the place for me... #
INAUDIBLE
Several West Indian writers began to chronicle the experiences
of immigrants in Britain in the post-war years.
'In England, nobody notices anybody else.
'You pass me in the street or sit next to me in the train as if I come from the next planet.
'Nobody asks questions and nobody gives answers.
'You see this the minute you put foot in London.
'People don't have nothing to do with one another.
'You can live and die in your own room and people next door never say "boo" to you,
'no matter how long you inhabit that place.'
George Lamming, who arrived in England from Barbados in 1950,
was one of the first to write about the West Indian experience of Britain.
The terror of not knowing and of not even daring
to call upon a single soul among the hundred who surround him.
That is the initial experience of the West Indian arriving.
However tough he is, for the first time in his whole experience, he is alone.
Both George Lamming's The Emigrants and Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners
deal with the hardship, alienation and disillusionment of the Windrush Generation.
I wrote my first novel here.
I was called upon to describe what was happening with West Indians in this country.
I had to meet the immigrant to find out how they were living.
They had this feeling of being carefree
and being able to laugh
at the fact of not being able to get a place to live, of not being able to get a job.
This was a joke. Chaps met in the pub or they met in the street.
One would tell the other, "I couldn't get work down the road," and that would be a joke.
This is what I tried mainly to bring out in The Lonely Londoners,
that they were able to cope with all the difficulties
and they had brought over from the West Indies some of this humour
and this exuberance
and this carefreeness about life,
which, alas, in these latter years,
they seem to have lost somewhat,
which to me is a very great pity.
And I think this is a result of all this racial talk and trouble.
PIANO MUSIC
# No more shall they in bondage toil
# Let my people go
# Let them come out with Egypt's spoil
# Let my people go... #
Racial talk and trouble was undoubtedly on the rise.
1958 saw racial tensions boil over in Notting Hill when white mobs attacked West Indian homes
and violent skirmishes ensued.
# Tell ol' Pharaoh
# To let my people go... #
And it wasn't only West Indian writers who engaged with the immigrant experience.
Colin MacInnes became fascinated by this clash of races.
In 1959, MacInnes published Absolute Beginners.
Set against the backdrop of the Notting Hill race riots,
it charts the experiences of a teenager in late '50s London.
Often it is by placing your character in conditions of moral and social difficulty
that you enable him or her to be tested by circumstances.
I've also tried to learn from life itself not to judge, not to pretend I know,
but to be, as it were, a witness to the society of my own age,
so that those who do me the pleasure of reading what I've written
may make their own judgments and draw their own conclusions.
The novel soon caught the attention of the BBC's flagship book programme Bookstand.
These riots are the climax of Colin MacInnes's novel Absolute Beginners.
His novel is mainly about the teenage world
and it seems to get inside the skin of a teenager more successfully than almost any book could hope to do.
It's written in the first person and the hero is an 18-year-old photographer.
He lives in that very overcrowded part of London which is the scene of the disturbances
and he refers to coloured people as "spades".
They dramatised sections of the novel with a young Terence Stamp
who describes a mob attack on a West Indian man.
And then somebody cried, "Get him!"
The spade dug it quick enough then.
He went running down the Bramley Road like lightning, still holding his holdall and his parcel.
There must've been a hundred young men chasing after him
and hundreds of girls and kids and adults chasing after them and even motorbikes and cars.
Someone must have shouted sense into his ear cos he dived into a greengrocer's and slammed the door.
The old girl inside locked it and she glared out at the crowds...
And the crowd gathered there and they shouted.
And I'm quoting their words exactly.
"Let's get him! Bring him out and lynch him!"
They cried that.
It was through the immigrant experience that MacInnes felt
the reality of post-war Britain was to be found.
If you want to know what a former great power and now a dwindling minor power
is really like, who better can tell you than its minorities? Who knows better?
Who knows more, the master or the servant? It's always the servant.
The one who is exploited knows more about the one who exploits
than the exploiter knows about the exploited.
Colin MacInnes had picked up on Britain's changing position on the world stage.
CHURCHILL: From Stettin in the Baltic
to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent.
As World War turned to Cold War, Britain had to confront its reduced role in international affairs
and the loss of a once-great empire.
The symbolic watershed came with the Suez Crisis when Britain lost control of the Suez Canal to Egypt.
Strangely, these global upheavals were to revitalise an old literary genre
which had its roots in the Boys Own-style adventures of Richard Hannay and Bulldog Drummond.
Ian Fleming was a journalist when he created James Bond,
a hero for the post-war world who would keep Britain great.
Fleming had worked in Naval Intelligence during the war and he drew on his own experiences.
Particularly since the last war, we've all become much more educated in what really is.
Violence and sadism and savagery and so on.
And what technical tricks of torture and violence
the Gestapo got up to, what the KGB gets up to now in Russia,
what happened in Northern Africa in Algeria and Morocco,
with these terrible electrical devices they use on people.
And so to, as I say, use the old Bulldog Drummond baseball bat would be rather stupid.
It wouldn't be contemporary writing.
Fleming is really disturbing. I used to read him when I was a kid.
I don't know if my mind was poisoned by the violence and misogyny.
He really likes the bad things that happen to people. It's really quite thigh-strokingly detailed.
Fleming's seemingly unrestrained use of sex and violence caused outrage at the time,
but that did little to dent the popularity of the franchise.
A new Bond adventure was published every year until 1966.
By the early '60s, the Cold War had grown distinctly chillier.
In 1961, the ideological division between East and West found tangible form in Berlin.
The following year saw the world brought to the brink of destruction by the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Some writers felt the fantasy and escapism of Bond was too far removed from reality.
I think it's a great mistake, if talking about espionage literature,
to include Bond in this category.
It seems to me that he is more some kind of international gangster
with, as is said, a licence to kill.
He's a man with unlimited movement, but he's a man entirely out of the political context.
It's of no interest to Bond who, for instance, is President of the US
or who is President of the Union of Soviet Republics.
It's the consumer goods ethic, really,
that everything around you, all the dull things of life,
are suddenly animated by this wonderful cachet of espionage.
With the things on our desk that could explode, our ties which could suddenly take photographs.
These give a drab and materialistic existence a kind of magic.
John Le Carre, a former British Intelligence officer,
understood the reality of Cold War espionage and it was a world away from the glamour of Bond.
Has he called yet? No. Six minutes to go yet, Control.
If Fleming provided escapist entertainment with a dash of sadism,
Le Carre was all about the paranoia and everyday reality of intelligence work.
City Removers here. I believe you wanted an estimate.
'You're always welcome.'
The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, published in 1963,
painted a bitterly harsh picture of Cold War Berlin.
I was in Berlin watching the wall being built.
And that was like seeing one's first dead body. That was an absolutely appalling sight
and of monstrous cruelty. People, one forgets now,
were jumping out of windows and being brought away by the Fire Brigade
and people died, people were shot.
The sight, the actual experience of a great political and potentially apocalyptic event
was extraordinary and to see Russian tanks brought up nose to nose almost with American tanks...
In those days, they were big tanks. You had to keep them warm if they were going to advance.
And to watch the American advisor going through the checkpoint, testing the responses all the way through,
that was extraordinary.
So I shot back to Bonn then and wrote The Spy Who Came In From The Cold in three or four months.
And I knew then it was pretty good.
There was still the absorption in this tight little word of spying,
packages being left in the backs of cars and mysterious transits through continental cities,
but the impression one gets out of Le Carre is that it's become a job of work.
It's become almost institutionalised, I suppose. The spy is a high-grade civil servant.
'I wrote about the things that I knew of.'
The tensions of Berlin, institutional behaviour,
British nostalgia for power, perhaps.
And... I imported from my experience of the Foreign Service
a great deal of the way paper is moved around, the dinginess of decisions.
Right.
We shall start.
JAZZ BAND PLAYS
Spy fiction wasn't the only genre to respond to the changing mood of the time.
As the Cold War took hold in the public mind, atomic anxiety began to approach fever pitch.
I believe it is a world where people want peace. Ordinary people want it.
So when Khrushchev says it, I believe him.
A young Doris Lessing seemed to articulate the thoughts of an increasingly-nervous generation
when she appeared on Panorama.
In a studio panel discussion, she grilled Home Secretary Rab Butler
about the Government's position on the H bomb.
Mr Butler, a great many people are not so much worried about whether your government or the Russians
or the Americans are going to start a war, but whether some trigger-happy general starts one by accident.
I cannot be responsible for situations that might arise that I'd regret as much as you.
It would be too late to regret it when this bomb has dropped.
The atomic threat and rapid advances in science and technology
pushed a number of writers toward an increasingly dystopian view of the future.
Consider for a moment the end of the world.
Throughout the centuries, many suggestions have been made as to how it will come about and when
but few more sinister than this.
For the moment, we have pushed them back, but they will return,
for the same urge drives them as drives us - the necessity to exterminate or be exterminated.
And when they come again, if we let them, they'll come better equipped.
Or maybe this might be the beginning of the end.
If you look at the statistics of casualties, look at the proportion
that were stung across the eyes and blinded.
It's remarkable and significant.
Both these books, The Day of The Triffids and The Kraken Wakes, as well as these others
are by one of our best-known writers of science fiction, John Wyndham.
John Wyndham's most famous novel, The Day of The Triffids, tells the story of an attack on mankind
by giant carnivorous plants.
Aah!
Ohh...
The original Triffids one,
I think came one night when I was walking along a dark, country lane
and the hedges were only just distinguishable against the sky.
And the higher things sticking up from the hedges became rather menacing.
One felt that they might come over and strike down or, if they had stings, sting at one.
So that... The whole thing, really, grew out of that.
It did seem to chime with prevalent anxieties about the dangers of scientific research,
eugenics,
the possibility of weird things happening in the natural world that we might be responsible for.
There was this sense that what Wyndham was writing about could turn up on next week's Panorama.
He was that much in touch.
Somebody once said that half of fantasy is the willing suspension of disbelief.
Well, you must not go beyond a certain barrier, if you can find it,
in which that willing suspension is shattered.
Science fiction somehow chimed with the mood of the time.
Even otherwise conventional novelists like Anthony Burgess found themselves embracing it
as a means of exploring their concerns about the world.
In 1962, Burgess published what would become his most famous work, A Clockwork Orange.
Later immortalised by Stanley Kubrick's controversial film,
A Clockwork Orange offers a terrifyingly bleak view of youth and violence in the near future.
The novel follows the character of Alex, a Beethoven-loving young thug,
who leads his gang on nightly orgies of violence and mayhem.
But when Alex is arrested, he is subjected to a brutal programme of reconditioning.
Burgess even created his own futuristic slang.
'What's it going to be then, eh?
'There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs,
'that is Pete, Georgie and Dim, Dim being really dim.
'We sat in the Corolla milk bar making up our rasoodocks what to do with the evening.
'Our pockets were full of deng, so there was no real need
'from the point of view of crasting any more Pretty Polly to tolchok some old veck in an alley
'and viddy him swim in his blood while we counted the takings.'
Partly inspired by the juvenile delinquency of the '50s and '60s,
Burgess also seemed to draw on Aldous Huxley's A Brave New World, a book he admired.
I wish I'd written it. I wish I'd had the idea and knew what Huxley knew.
The notion of this confrontation of a world in which a young savage is brought up solely on Shakespeare
and a world where Shakespeare and all imaginative writers are banned
and your subject is emotional engineering, is a great conception.
# Sweet sixteen, goes to church Just to see the boys... #
For Burgess, the bigger threat was not the violence of an unrestrained youth,
but the society that tries to curb it by sinister or overbearing means.
# Everybody knows She's only putting on the style. #
I heard talk in the 1960s of the possibility of getting these young thugs and not putting them in jail,
because jail is for professional criminals, but rather putting them through a course of conditioning,
turning them into clockwork oranges.
No longer organisms full of sweetness and colour and light, like oranges, but machines.
I feared this and that's why I wrote the novel. I feared the possibility
that the state was all too ready to start taking over our brains and turning us into good citizens.
Anthony Burgess made science fiction about the here and now.
It was territory that another novelist, JG Ballard, had already begun to make his own.
I had felt, when I began writing science fiction in 1957, at the time of the launching of Sputnik One,
that science fiction should turn its back on the far future and on alien planets and alien universes,
that the real subject matter was here, in the present day.
I felt we should have a science fiction based on the present.
Instead of outer space, it should be based on inner space.
For Ballard, the modern world was as strange and alienating as any space-based science fiction,
the real world far more interesting than fantasy worlds.
The blueprint for the world which we inhabit now was being laid down then.
A world of consumer goods, of package holidays, jet travel, high rises, motorways, computers,
the first hints that space travel was around the corner. Change was in the air.
In 1962, Ballard published The Drowned World, a novel based on the outlandish idea
that our world might become irrevocably transformed by global warming and rising sea levels.
'The bulk of the city had long since vanished and only the steel-supported buildings of the central commercial
'and financial areas had survived the encroaching flood waters.
'The brick houses and single-storey factories of the suburbs had disappeared completely
'below the drifting tides of silt.'
He was always
a decade ahead of everyone else in his apprehension of the present
and his sense of the future and the direction things were going in.
And capable of writing the creamiest prose of anyone in the century.
# Woke up this morning with light in my eyes
# And then realised it was still dark outside... #
Toward the end of the 1960s, Ballard had moved on to a new obsession
which he was to explore in his writing and in a film for the BBC.
I think the key image of the 20th century
is the man in the motor car. It sums up everything. The elements of speed, drama, aggression.
The junction of advertising and consumer goods, the technological landscape, the violence and desire,
power and energy, the shared experience of moving together through an elaborately-signalled landscape.
These ideas were ultimately to find expression in his best-known and most controversial book, Crash,
a novel that links car crashes with explicit sexual fetishism.
'The overlay of her knees and the metal door flank.
'The conjunction of the aluminised gutter trim with the volumes of her thighs.
'The crushing of her left breast by the door frame and its self-extension as she continued to rise.'
We now see that what we had to fear,
it's quite interesting with the Ballard stories,
what we really had to fear was not the atom bomb,
but the Westway Flyover. He kind of knew that on one level.
The cementing over of everything was more terrifying.
The ecological death of the planet was more terrifying than the potential of the atom bomb,
which was so terrifying that nobody, touch wood, exploded it again.
# See, don't ever set me free I always want to be by your side
# Girl, you really got me now You got me so I can't sleep at night... #
As the '60s progressed, anxiety about the future seemed to subside.
The mood was changing. # Oh, yeah, you really got me... #
Britain may not have been a world power any more, but did it really matter?
Social liberalism and sexual liberation swept the country,
aided in part by the introduction of the oral contraceptive pill.
The mood was one of excitement, freedom and fun.
Superficially, it was one big party.
But to some this party was a bit one-sided.
A lot of people have said this meant that men did what they felt like
and women didn't feel like that, but now had to go along with it because they had pills.
I think I observed a lot of that. There was a huge rush of liberation amongst men.
Women liberated themselves more slowly.
Some women were keen to redress this balance.
There is this new wave of articulate, well-educated, forceful, won't-take-no-for-an-answer women
coming on the stage at that point.
It's possible to say that the '60s is the women's decade in British fiction.
It was in this atmosphere that Doris Lessing, no stranger to political activism,
turned her attention to female sexuality and published what would become her most important work,
The Golden Notebook.
The Golden Notebook examines mental and social breakdown through the central character of Anna,
who separates the different parts of her life into five colour-coded notebooks.
A friend of mine kept notebooks and they were Politics,
Psychology,
My Husband,
Children,
you see, Job. And I thought that was the oddest thing
since when you're living a life you don't live in this kind of way at all, do you?
You don't. It's just...inhuman. There's something wrong with someone who thinks like this.
The Golden Notebook had an extraordinary frankness
about women's sexuality, about women's responsibilities,
and it was extraordinarily rude about men. I mean, Doris did get called a castrating woman
and I don't think that pleased her, but I could understand why men felt that
because it simply hadn't been good manners to write about men's sexual failings in the way she writes,
or indeed their other failings.
She was completely merciless in her expose of sexual conflict.
When I wrote The Golden Notebook,
which was regarded as a kind of bible of women's liberation before there was such a thing,
it never crossed my mind that that's what I was writing.
I was simply writing the kind of experiences I'd had
and the kind of...experiences other women I knew had had.
# Well, no one told me about her The way she lied
# Well, no one told me about her... #
Intentionally or not, The Golden Notebook chimed with social currents of the time
and it seemed to offer a challenge to some of the less reconstructed attitudes currently being aired.
# Please don't bother trying to find her
# She's not there... #
I can't offhand, I think, think of any contemporary female writer
who I have tremendous admiration for, but I don't say you couldn't find one.
Your own sort of relations with women, naturally, you use them in your novels.
But they're not portraits from life.
I'm like a Turk. I don't believe they have souls. Women? No.
But men have? Oh, yes.
# I don't mind But a guy's dancing with my girl... #
It's easy to see why women writers wanted to make themselves heard.
The young Margaret Drabble appeared to embody the spirit of London in the Swinging Sixties
and she made a documentary for the BBC at the age of just 28.
# The kids are all right
# The kids are all right... #
I think all writers would agree that writing is a very solitary occupation.
Perhaps that's why it suits me.
I say I'm a solitary, but I'm also hopelessly gregarious.
I think the two things quite often go together.
But her fiction frequently dealt with guilt and anxiety, not the wild abandon of the sexual revolution.
The Millstone, published in 1965, tells the story of a young Cambridge graduate living in London
who becomes pregnant and decides to keep and raise the child alone.
What do you think about abortion?
In The Millstone, the girl doesn't really want an abortion, does she?
I myself think that the abortion law reform... The abortion laws were archaic and wicked
and should have been changed
and, indeed, kind of, you know, did what I could to do something about it,
but this doesn't mean I myself... I have a very strong religious feeling about unborn children.
Yet I don't feel one can impose one's own religious or mystical sense about how marvellous it is to have a child
on a mother of nine who's about to risk her life with the tenth.
I think it's wicked to impose one's own rather hazy mystical notions about the virtues of life
on somebody in a position like that.
'I think I was writing my books because there weren't any like them and I needed there to be.'
I wrote my books because there weren't any books like mine.
I didn't feel I was angry all the time
and being of a conciliatory spirit I hope I've redeemed some of the moments of anger that I had.
But I did feel indignant about some of the choices women were obliged to make
and some of the restrictions that were imposed on them.
'I see them all and I can't think how they put up with it.
'I tell myself that they don't really mind ending up spending their lives trudging the street with heavy bags,
'or being shut up with babies in top-storey flats
'or dragging themselves to the Post Office for their old age pensions.
'Though surely they must have expected something better when they threw snowballs at school
'or gossiped with their friends. I try to persuade myself that they don't mind,
'but I know they do because they write and tell me so. There's just absolutely nothing they can do.
'The shopping, the washing, the fatigue.
'I couldn't do it. I wouldn't survive.'
There is a bleakness about some of her early books,
just as there is about the books of her sister, AS Byatt.
They were both exponents of a genre you can see beginning to take shape very early in the 1960s
and that's the anti-Sixties novel, the novel by the clever novelist
who looks around at the new freedoms and ways of enjoying yourselves
and realises some of the moral consequences.
I feel there was a terrible innocence about the people of the '60s who thought now anybody could do anything
and everything would be all right
because what it does
is flick into cruelty very quickly.
# I'm so glad
# I'm so glad, I'm glad I'm glad... #
I really thought everything was hopeful until the '60s came,
then I saw human nature goes round in eternal cycles of folly
and - what's the word I want - absolutism
and telling everybody what to do
and calling something a revolution when actually it's a putting down of somebody else.
I just got very depressed in a half-amused kind of a way.
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# You've got some plans for the night
# And then I stop and say, "All right"
# Love is kinda crazy with a spooky little boy like you
# You always keep me guessin'
# I never seem to know what you are thinking'... #