Wain describes, with some remorse and shame, the "combination of protective colouring, lackeying, and sheer evasiveness" that he had to assume in order to avoid the terrible punishments of rougher boys, and he concludes that these lessons in "manhood" left their mark on him: "my childhood taught me very effectively to understand the nature of totalitarianism. I felt able to enter imaginatively into the world of any modern dictatorship.... But the atmosphere of treacheries and loyalities, the same feeling that power, the naked lust to dominate, is the mainspring of life." If "naked lust to dominate" forms the instinctual "mainspring of life," then the individual must either adapt to and be seduced into a meaningless conformity by the pressures from society and his own obedient superego, or he may fight and be driven into conflicts that will probably prove to be dangerous and destructive. Wain's heroes usually fight, and this is why, early in the 1950s, Wain was branded one of the "angry young men" of English letters, along with John Braine and Kingsley Amis. Although Wain never liked the title, or any reductive title for that matter, anger and defiance seem to be just descriptions for the satirical, social attacks to which Wain seems so committed.
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