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Chapters (14)
  1. Introduction by Nick Bentley
  2. HURRY ON DOWN
  3. I
  4. II
  5. III
  6. IV
  7. V
  8. VI
  9. VII
  10. VIII
  11. IX
  12. X
  13. About the Author
  14. About the Cover

Ultimately, Hurry on Down represents a new mode of critical realism that was taken up by a number of British writers in the 1950s and beyond. Its pragmatic criticism of the inherited moral and ideological codes of the Establishment sets a tone for a generation, and its skepticism towards pretensions in whatever form they might appear is at the heart of Wain’s honesty as a writer. It also reveals many of the anxieties at the heart of 1950s culture about new configurations of class and about how the individual is to be placed in this reconstructed social world. Wain’s novel indicates this moment of transition in terms of a rejection of an outmoded modernist experimentation alongside a desire to forge a new kind of realism appropriate for a Britain trying to find its place in the post-war world.

Nick Bentley

Keele University

April 4, 2013

Nick Bentley is a Senior Lecturer at Keele University and is the editor of British Fiction of the 1990s (Routledge, 2005) and the author of Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s (Peter Lang, 2007) and Contemporary British Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2008).

1 This introduction has been adapted from a chapter on Hurry on Down and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim that first appeared in Nick Bentley, Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007).

2 John Holloway, ‘New Lines in English Poetry’, in Hudson Review, 9, 1956, pp.592-597.

3 Success Stories: Literature and the Media in England, 1950-1959 (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1988).

HURRY ON DOWN

HURRY ON DOWN

NAN’S, ARNOLD’S

1925–1953

Hurry on down to my place, baby,

Nobody home but me.

Old Song

A Moralist perchance appears;

Led, Heaven knows how! to this poor sod.

Wordsworth, A Poet’s Epitaph

I

I

‘Can’t you tell me, Mr. Lumley, just what it is that you don’t like about the rooms?’

There was no mistaking the injured truculence in the land­lady’s voice, nor her expression of superhuman patience about to snap at last. Charles very nearly groaned aloud. Must he explain, point by point, why he hated living there? Her husband’s cough in the morning, the way the dog barked every time he went in or out, the greasy mats in the hall? Obviously it was impossible. Why could she not have the grace to accept the polite lie he had told her? In any case he was bound to stick to it. He looked into her beady, accusing eyes and said as pleasantly as he could, ‘Really, Mrs. Smythe, I don’t know what’s given you the idea that I don’t like the rooms. I’ve always said how comfortable they were. But I told you the other day, I really need something a little nearer my work.’

‘And where do you work? I’ve asked you that two or three times, Mr. Lumley, but you’ve never given me any answer.’