John Wain

Today is the centenary of the birth of John Wain, a British writer - mostly novelist and poet, though also dramatist, critic, and professor - who was well-known to followers of contemporary English literature in his heyday in the 1950s, but is almost forgotten today.

Except for one thing. As a student at Oxford in the 1940s, he'd had C.S. Lewis as his tutor, and after his graduation Lewis invited him to attend the Inklings, so now he's on the unofficial roster of that famous society.

But he wasn't too happy about being known for that, when he was still around to express an opinion (he died in 1994), because the Inklings are most famous for fostering Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and Wain disliked that book. He found it meaningless and detached from reality. Wain's own fiction is conservative modern realism, so you can see the difference and perhaps understand why he couldn't grasp fantasy as reflective of reality.

But perhaps he shouldn't have been too upset, at least with me as an example, for after learning about Wain through reading about the Inklings, curiosity drove me to try his writings. I liked enough of them to carry on. Eventually I read all 14 of his published novels and 3 short story collections, as well as much of his nonfiction. Most of his novels aren't really very good, though they were clearly readable and not murky or dull, but a few I enjoyed, one of them - Lizzie's Floating Shop, his only juvenile - enough to re-read it. Some of his short stories are extremely biting. And I liked a lot of his nonfiction, particularly his two books of memoirs (Sprightly Running and Dear Shadows) and his biography of Dr. Johnson.

Last year I finally completed a long-mooted project of writing a paper about Wain - his biography, his literary views and their formation, and a survey of his novels - and gave it at Mythcon and a Signum University conference. It's not formal in nature so I have no plans to publish it academically, but maybe I can get it out somewhere else.

In the meantime, a centenary is a moment to think about its celebrant. Wain was born in Stoke-on-Trent, son of a dentist, on March 14, 1925, and by his own account wasn't much formed literarily or in personality until he got to Oxford at 18 and became a disciple of Lewis, the Oxford drama teacher Nevill Coghill, and, less formally, the independent scholar E.H.W. Meyerstein. Then Wain met fellow students and budding writers Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis, both much better remembered today than himself, and his literary affiliations were set.