BRITAIN'S ANGRY YOUNG MEN
Tennyson, Hallam
Britain's Angry Young Men by HALLAM TENNYSON London LAST SUMMER a cataract of violent, scatological eloquence suddenly burst from the boards of a London theater, scattering into the wings the...
...He says, for instance: "The best place to watch the eternal comedy of human beings deluding themselves...
...The last and most important test, of course, is: how do they write...
...Jimmy Porter and Lucky Jim are both clearly outsiders...
...Jimmy, a working-class lad, has married the daughter of a respectable bourgeois household—and this is what he says about his mother-in-law: "There is no limit to what the middle-aged mummy will do in the holy crusade against ruffians like me . . . to protect her innocent young she wouldn't hesitate to cheat, lie, bully, and blackmail . . . she'd bellow like a rhinoceros in labor—enough to make every male rhino for miles turn white and pledge himself to celibacy . . . Mummy may look over-fed and a bit flabby on the outside, but don't let that well-bred guzzler fool you...
...But then one doesn't look for such things in prophets...
...But even given this—can anger by itself make a movement...
...He is the author of several books, including "Minds in Movement," "Tito Lifts the Curtain," and "India's Walking Saint: The Story of Vinoba Bhave...
...Not even Bernard Shaw was ever really angry—he was much too amused at his own jokes for that...
...The one a hard version and therefore slightly repellent, the other "soft" and more sympathetic...
...It is at this point that one begins to see the tie-up with Amis and Osborne...
...The Welfare State has given them a first-rate education so that they have become highly articulate intellectuals, and yet they are still excluded...
...All they see in the future is a dissolving vista of impotence and futility with no new vision to replace the old emblems of Britain's imperial greatness...
...Lucky Jim (the similarity of his Christian name with that of Osborne's character has led to a lot of confused cross-reference) is a lecturer in a provincial university, unlike Jimmy Porter who runs a rather odd sweet stall...
...There was Kingsley Amis, with his novel, Lucky Jim, which became a best-seller over night...
...Well, here in Britain it must be admitted that anger seems to have a certain value It's about a hundred years since we saw any real signs of it on our liter-ary horizon...
...And here they pass the test pretty well...
...Why don't we have a little game...
...Then there's the terrible British apathy, too often dignified with the romantic name of reserve: "Oh heavens, how I long for a little ordinary human enthusiasm...
...He merely talks—but talks so cogently that you came out of the theater with your head buzzing with excitement...
...They merely reflect an attitude, a state of soul, which is representative of the coun-try and epoch in which they live...
...Both Amis and Os- borne have a tremendous, even over- whelming vitality—something surg-ing and gushing and crude which is utterly different from the tired anemia typical of true nihilism...
...He is also inaccurate...
...There are other things which make it difficult to take Colin Wilson too seriously...
...The tepid, moribund society with which they are surrounded and which seems intent on not recognizing the truth about itself drives them to make faces of gibbering frustration...
...He wears roll-neck sweaters and, judging by recent disclosures in the popular press, suffers from advanced delusions of grandeur...
...Underneath all that, she's armor-plated...
...What these sacred cows are is not easy to define— often, of course, they are the very things which visitors from the other side of the Atlantic are conventionally expected to admire...
...Osborne's second play, The Entertainer (in which Sir Lawrence Olivier is currently performing), shows a disregard for the grammar of play-writing that is even more glaring than the careless construction of Look Back in Anger...
...But for the moment one is so relieved at the end of the postwar stagnation in British literature that one is prepared to overlook such faults...
...Nothing much happens to Jimmy Porter or the play which he so savagely illuminates...
...But in this country Quakers meet habitually on a Sunday morning, which makes me wonder exactly how far I can trust him on facts about which I am less well-informed...
...Like the typical Colin Wilson "hero," they see more clearly through the hideous shame of present-day British life They are cut off from normal pride in the British heritage, since with their working-class background the are outside this too...
...There are pages of Look Back in Anger and Lucky Jim which hit one straight in the solar plexus, so that one is almost too winded to laugh...
...But the two Jimmys have never had the opportunity to make the choice although their education foiled them into thinking that they were going to be given a chance to exercise it...
...Britain's Angry Young Men by HALLAM TENNYSON London LAST SUMMER a cataract of violent, scatological eloquence suddenly burst from the boards of a London theater, scattering into the wings the well-bred platitudes to which we theater-goers here are accustomed...
...They have little regard for narrative and no sense whatever of economy or shape...
...Wilson, however, has a poor style and very little sense of humor...
...is a Quaker congregation on a Sunday evening...
...There have been "outsiders" in the past but only now, when the very foundations of our civilization are threatened, can the outsider's attitude and values be considered as somehow the reflection of the deepest meaning of an age...
...In the first place Colin Wilson is young (would he have sold half the number of copies, one wonders, if he had been 42 instead of 24...
...It wasn't long before a third young writer had been roped in to add philosophical weight to the new "Movement...
...Both the Jims are would-be idealists who are either too modest and lazy (Lucky Jim) to live up to their ideals, or feel that they have been cheated out of them by previous generations (Jimmy Porter...
...Then there's something else, and I suspect this is more universal: a sense that the younger generation today has nothing to live for...
...The Outsider, so Wilson's thesis runs, questions the very purpose and meaning of life and is aware that anarchy and chaos lie deeper than the order which his fellow-men believe in...
...The Establishment holds its flaming sword, like Gabriel, at the Gates of Paradise...
...But it clearly has the same general implications and arises out of much the same social and emotional climate...
...Does all this add up to a "Move ment...
...Thirdly, it is as difficult to pin down the cause of Colin Wilson's anger as it is to explain the anger of Jimmy Porter or Lucky Jim...
...First of all, of course, it's important to point out that in so far as an Angry Young Man Movement exists, it exists simply and solely in the minds of reviewers and critics The three young writers and others who are grouped with them show no signs of ever having met—or even read—each other...
...One has the feeling that he has jumbled every odd and unusual book that he has ever had time to make notes on into one thesis and that many of the "conclusions" are merely a quick gloss added as an afterthought, little more than clever undergraduate word-spinning...
...Above all there is the terrible ballyhoo—raised mostly, of course, by people who have never read more than the blurb of his much publicized book...
...ized that other young writers using different media had been, perhaps more tentatively, saying the same sort of thing...
...Then there's another thing—the anger of the Angry Young Man Move ment is not merely negative and rlle...
...Through it a new generation found expression and attacked all those sacred cows of British life, which not even Shaw, two world wars, the end of an empire, or the beginning of the Welfare State had succeeded in demolishing...
...Yet clearly, and in spite of all this, the Outsider thesis has something that illuminates a new facet of the human situation in general and the British situation in particular...
...Wilson despises—one might almost say loathes—"normal" bourgeois life with its normal bourgeois satisfactions, and he bitterly castigates the bourgeois idealism of "humanist ethics...
...For it is the quality of their writing which will decide whether they are a literary movement or merely a social phenomenon...
...But they are outsiders in a more strictly social sense than the characters Wilson analyzes...
...Nevertheless, both Jimmy Porter and Lucky Jim together form the new archetype of the Angry Young Man...
...If the big bang does come, and we all get killed off, it won't be in aid of the old-fashioned grand design...
...If they abdicated from the ruling classes it was a matter of vol untary choice and they got their own sense of moral satisfaction from the sacrifice...
...Members of the middle-class intelligentsia in this country have suffered from the same disability but with, one important difference...
...But like Jimmy Porter he too comes from a working-class background and is dissatisfied with the drabness and decay of our overcrowded island...
...Wilson is only 24 (or at least was no older when his book was published last year) and is at the least phenomenally industrious and well-read...
...About as pointless and inglorious as stepping in front of a bus...
...Let's pretend we're human beings, and that we're actually alive...
...And Colin Wilson spends the last 100 pages of his book putting forward some "solutions of the outsider problem"—he is apparently in favor of a rather garbled mixture of Nietzsche and Christo-Vedantic mysticism...
...It'll be just for the Brave New-noth-ing-very-much-thank-you...
...The Movement is probably near as Britain has ever come to sihilism, but that, frankly, is not very near...
...only the voice and the frenzy had a new edge to them...
...The world of the London Times, government, and city business will never allow them in...
...Jimmy Porter's talk was not new...
...I want to hear a warm, thrilling human voice cry out, 'Hallelujah...
...Jimmy Porter, the "hero" of Look Back in Anger, might define his enemy as some sort of moral and social climate, a pervading atmosphere of dim, well-mannered hypocrisy—for one thing, the pretense that there are no class distinctions...
...Just enthusiasm—that's all...
...Suddenly I realHALLAM TENNYSON, great grandson of the poet, is a British writer and lecturer whose views are broadcast frequently by the BBC...
...Here the similarities between the two characters come to an end...
...And that in itself is no small thing...
...For Lucky Jim is actually kind to his nauseating girl friend who has staged a phony suicide in order to ensnare him, and, while Jimmy Porter never stops spluttering from the moment the curtain rises, Lucky Jim reserves his anger strictly for private sessions...
...He adopts different and more satisfactory identities when no one else is looking ("My Edith Sitwell face," "my ape face" are already part of contemporary British mythology), and he is more objectively portrayed and certainly less self-pitying than Osborne's character...
...Also, both write with a wit and sense of ribald fun which has been quite un-known in English literature since the Eighteenth Century...
...Anyhow, whatever happens, here are three writers who have had the courage to look at the spiritual crisis which is gripping current British life...
...The could always say, "I could, if I would run the Times, the government, big business...
...One trusts that where there is so much honesty, so much passion, and so much vital involvement in contemporary issues, then surely the other gifts will be added...
...Unable to make the necessary compromises, even if they had wanted to, they have nothing left them but their honesty...
...Besides, he was too brilliant at coat-ing every little pill with sugary, Shavian humor...
...This was Colin Wilson whose book of psycho-religio-socio-literary criticism called The Outsider was published the same month as Look Back in Anger had its first performance...
...There aren't any good, brave causes left...
...Hence their howl of rage and the whole complex of outsider frustration which seems to have eaten into them...
...and in the second place he is very angry...
...And it is not difficult to see why Wilson's book has been hailed as part of the "Movement...
...But John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger was more than eloquent...
...Both Amis and Osborne are still quite imperfect in their technical equipment...
...Hallelujahl I'm alivel' I've an idea...
Vol. 21 • July 1957 • No. 7
