Antidisestablishmentarian

SPRIGHTLY RUNNING (265 pp.)--John Wain--St. Main's Press ($5).

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 is one thing that makes him angry, it is to be mistaken for an Angry Young Man through recurrent journalistic confusion with John (Room at the Top) Braine, one of a group of dissidents who are sore at the English Establishment. Yet he is not a Tory or a stuffed shirt, but is an anti-disestablishmentarian .

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: "I was evasive, cowardly, dirty-minded, egotistical--I nevertheless belonged to the elect."

By the chance of a detached retina. Wain escaped war service and found at Oxford a chance to know himself and the world better. His Oxford life is one of the best stories of an education ever told, be cause he was one of the few for whom education itself is a crucial experience. He conveys this by sketching the characters of others--a theologian talking to a poet in a pub, a dour Clydesider who became a monk, the tutor C. S. Lewis and that really odd ball of erudition, the madly neurotic Jewish poet and scholar "Eddie" Meyerstein.

A sense of this lends complete conviction to Wain's passionate reaction years later, when Novelist C. P. Snow had praised Soviet education. Wain had just been in Russia, and tells about it in a lively bit of reporting. As Wain defines it, "Education is the process whereby the mind is freed: freed by knowledge, by thoughtfulness, by imagination." As such, education, he says firmly, does not exist in the Soviet Union. Technical instruction, yes. Education, no. He seems to know what he is talking about.

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