The Underclass

...There were also works by Arthur Miller, Camus, and Sartre, plus an adaptation of The Good Soldier Scbweik...

...In addition to other similarities, their stories have one characteristic in common above all others: They are boring, excruciatingly boring...

...B 0 0 K R E V I E W S Ken Auletta, like a multitude of social workers and political practitioners, believes that fallen souls can be rescued for useful work and con- + structive citizenship by sensitive institutions run by humane, though superficially stern, guardians...

...Each participant tells his story at one point or another in Auletta's account...

...were supposed to have cast off these chains of bondage...

...a number of imports were influential, among them five plays by Bertolt Brecht, of which one was The Threepenny Opera...

...his Tory nostalgia for good old c a u s e s - - a middle-aged sentiment at the time--was accepted as the voice of mutinous left-wing youth in principled rebellion against the state of society...

...The morality of public concern with the problems of the underclass are much less simple than the discussion in Auletta's book would lead one to believe...

...There have been underclasses in all Western societies, and I use the limiting term "Western" because I know too little of other societies to judge the extent of deviant behavior...

...To what extent is a society obligated to the principles of charity when the same investment of resources in the exceptionally talented people might b e n e f i t society as a whole significantly more...

...What he actually wrote was that it was "likely to remain a minority taste," a view similar to that of several other critics...

...The family foraged in the 1930s and 1940s on the grotty underside of the British middle class...

...There were new plays by Graham Greene, Robert Bolt, T.S...

...In 1956 about 400 plays were professionally produced in Britain...

...That is not charity, a noble impulse...

...They make life seem so difficult that it is no longer their failure that requires explanation, but rather anyone's SUCCESS...

...Auletta's second set of side trips takes the reader to the writings of sociologists and other thinkers about the reasons for the existence of the underclass, and what's to be done about it...

...That is how a thin, poorly crafted, peevish, and finally mawkish play like Look Back in Anger and its author came to be first lionized and then apotheosed...

...A t the source there is the "working class" writer, Osborne himself...

...It is a grim and ironic matter that the intrinsic characteristics of an aging, increasingly compassionate society make inevitable the spread of social disturbance that can only be kept in check by measures that affront that same compassionate urge...

...Look Back in Anger and Inadmissible Evidence have become set texts for the study of contemporary drama in British schools...

...It doesn't take a Darwinian theory of social development to make plausible the conjecture that the death rate struck most remorselessly at those members of the population who took the least care of themselves and lived under the worst, most primitive urban conditions, the almost entirely white members of the 1900 underclass...

...None suggests that the underclass growth, and the increasing dangers perceived on the streets of American cities, reflect not harshness or indifference, but the contrary...

...It seems more likely that the movies are responsible for its acceptance in America...

...Few find public norms totally acceptable...

...Such British admiration as he still enjoys is based mainly on his early work...

...Her work, " P u b l i c Housing and Mrs...

...The movies did it better...

...But the idea of continuing to deprive the hungry of food and the cold of heat when an abundant society can satisfy these needs is repulsive, at least to people who have passed their early acquisitive phase...

...Perhaps it is not the harshness with which the poor are treated today that has created a criminal class of those unable to earn a decent living honestly, but rather the perfections of public health and the government assumption on a very large scale of what had been private charity that kept alive the disorganized human failures...

...Laboring under these gigantic misapprehensions and led at last by Kenneth Tynan, the media and the fashionable took the play and its author to their hearts...

...No one is suggesting that these diseases be reintroduced, a loathsome prospect, not only on moral grounds but also because bacteria, unfamiliar with class distinctions, will always manage to weed out wealthy and productive citizens as well (and prod the medical profession and its benefactors into miraculous discoveries...

...When was it, exactly, that he "got the hell out" of the working class...

...A few legends of the period linger on in the mythology of the arts, includ...

...They might otherwise have been cruelly and inevitably wiped out, as so many like them were only 80 years ago...

...tive British form of militant trade unionism...

...As a society ages and its leaders (and more particularly their children), safe from economic pressures, begin to worry about their scores on a compassion test, the spurs that moved the survivors of the underclass of previous generations are dulled...

...I , for one, find the discussion irrelevant, based as it is on a pair of obvious misconceptions...

...John Osborne's first volume of autobiography stops at the point where this soi-disant revolution begins--advisedly so, because almost the whole of the myth is pure rubbish...

...Patiently and faithfully we got them to clinic, gave them friendly advice, sent the children to camp, took them to the Art Institute, used our full kit of social work tools to try to bring them to orderly behavior...

...Auletta refuses to romanticize the underclass as happily free from the horrid inhibitions that keep the rest of us from punching our mothers when they request us to hang up our pyjamas, or to stop shooting up heroin in the bathroom when others are waiting to use it...

...They were qualified for admission by virtue of promise shown in their stint of "supported" work run by Wildcat...

...He published brief accounts of his childhood and its vigorous, cozy family life, and put about the story of how he was expelled from a public (i.e., private) school when a brutal schoolmaster slapped him, " s o I slapped him back...

...and one extraordinary staging of a work which has held its savor far better than the "angry" shows of the period: Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas...

...Not the Humiliation of Suez, not the Lost Empire, not the "good old c a u s e s , " but plain oldfashioned getting and spending were the under thirties orders of the day...

...Genuine "proles" (as the radical chic liked to call them) preferred the excitements of soccer, rugby, the cinema, and the pub...

...Every one of t h e s e figures played a part in the transition of the new urbanite to the habits of the city and its industries--leading them to understand a cash economy, the rule of the clock, the requirements of cleanliness...

...John Osborne, with his harsh new work, was touted as the harbinger for a tough working-class invasion of British culture's bourgeois tea-party...

...Fatal accidents outside the home dropped from 3,521 to 623...

...Hobbes has best described a society that does not give e x p r e s s i o n to c h a r i t a b l e impulses when it can afford them...

...Something happens, moreover, to public p e r c e p t i o n of the value of human life when so many of the diseases of poverty, youih, and crowdedness are eliminated...

...in I978, 188 died in the same city with a larger population...

...Miss Wood wrote: _9 . . when I was a caseworker in Chicago, I [had to] strip . . . my caseload of 220 to 125 . . . . ! went over my caseload with my supervisor and said "This family is hopeless--let's send it to County" (Cook County Bureau of Public Affairs...

...Their personal inadequacies are revealed in a particularly cruel light when they are asked to stand before their peers and explain the drawings they have made to illustrate their own lives...

...Auletta's literary device--concentration on a class of 22 or so members at any one time-crowds the screen so that individuals cannot be identified...

...Too many people, tiring of the self-discipline required to conform with any set of behavioral standards, look with longing at the underclass and begin to ape its license in the name of liberty...

...They have remorselessly (and sometimes inaccurately) kept its numbers under control...

...A Better Class of Person provides the definitive answer: He never did, for the very good reason that he was not born into it...

...Mr...

...In the end, the results seem quite discouraging...

...The time, effort, ingenuity, dedication, and generosity that impel government and the foundations to establish programs such as Basic Typing with Life Skills Training are remarkable...

...As life expectancy increases, death itself appears an avoidable accident...

...Dutton/I13.75 Herb Greer I t all seems very Jurassic now, that fifties fuss about the Angry Young Men (some of whom were over forty...

...So sure is he that the miracle of redemption can be duplicated in real life that he tells America that it would be perilous to stint the resources needed to bring it about...

...The movies also made the process more interesting...

...Bill Maitland (the protagonist of Inadmissible Evidence) is articulate enough, but a self-pitying, pretentious, and thoroughly bourgeois lawyer...

...Auletta's gadget is the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, a nonprofit agency whose start-up money came from private foundations...

...McGee," deals with the devastating consequences for public housing projects of the admission of multiproblem families, another term for the underclass...

...THE UNDERCLASS Ken Auletta / Random House / $I7.50 Roger Start the rise of moral order in other periods, such as eighteenth-century London, when it was under serious attack...

...One is geographical, leading us first to Appalachia and then to the deep South, where we again have the opportunity to encounter other members of the underclass, rural variety in this case...

...28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1982 The part of the course in Basic Typing to which Auletta gives most attention is the six hours each week devoted to teaching Life Skills...

...Actually, there's little enough to identify them by, and they'd be hard to distinguish even if they were not so crowded...

...Both of these characters bring to mind an earlier creation of James Thurber, in his story "Something To Say": Elliot Vereker, a pseudo-writer who slopes about being violently rude to his passive friends while bawling prolix and abusive nonsense...

...The principle was simple...

...The reformed addict who leads the instruction seeks to help the disorganized enrollees get their looking-for-ajob act together...

...Its first article of faith was that every new hope for society, for politics, for literature, art, and the theatre, lay in the surging and thrusting vitality of an unspoiled working-class youth, held down in previous generations by a selfish and oppressive Establishment...

...Unlike Osborne's heroes he ends up with his head bashed in by a blunt instrument: autres temps, autres moeurs...

...So far, at least, hunger and cold have been far more effective in moving the underclass to social usefulness...

...But the success rate is not...

...The tedium of the class in Basic Typing is obvious to the author as well as his readers, and so he takes us on two types of field trips...

...When Auletta observed its work, it was funded entirely, or almost so, by the federal government...

...Four students join the course as it continues, making a total of 26 starters, all of them paid while they take the course...

...Surely the impulse to keep everyone alive as long as possible includes strains of nobility and may indeed be connected to important human values...

...His father was a tubercular copywriter, his mother a child of pub-keepers...

...Those earlier, rather chummy accounts of humble family cheer are THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1982 31...

...To study the underclass, Auletta observes the research corporation and one of its dependent affiliates, Wildcat Skills Training Center...

...To what extent should the elites in a society undermine minor and i m p e r f e c t authority figures--police, teachers, clergy, politicians, business people, even l a n d l o r d s - - i n the name of a "higher morality," only to encourage those with frailer self-discipline to flout the rules...

...Today, contagious diseases account for much less than one in every 15 deaths...

...Osborne and his fellow Angries "In particular the tedious, pretentious, and very over-rated products of Edward Bond...

...I remember well bundling up the McGee case--three huge volumes, the record of three years of casework, of trying to cope with the multitudinous problems of the family--drunkenness, criminal behavior, epilepsy, illegitimacy, malnutrition, etc...

...It is less important to blame someone or something for the existence of an underclass of people who cannot organize their lives than to examine what social conditions and moral imperatives lead to order...

...Osborne, as one of the icons of the postwar British theatre, is now respected less in his own country than in the rest of the world where Western-style plays are staged...

...It is hard to believe that Life Skills Training does as much to stimulate the progress of the students of Basic Typing as the fear that they might really go hungry...

...it's fear, less so...

...A c o n s i d e r a b l e p a r t of the p r e s e n t l a r g e s s e extended to those who do not work, however, flows not from the charitable impulse to help them, but r a t h e r from the f e a r t h a t if the more affluent (and self-disciplined) members of society do not help their disorganized brethren, the brethren will assault them ever more viciously on the street...

...Unilluminated by any significant historical insights, Auletta's account seems based on the theory that the seven deadly sins were not only an American invention, but a recent one...

...Auletta saw the same movies, his newest book, The Underdass, chronicles his search for an institution that will do in real life what Pat O'Brien was able to accomplish every 70 minutes in a theater...

...Perhaps this assumption derives from religion, but religion is rife also in societies that regard sinners as damned...

...Auletta tells us that the class members are "humorous, curious, compassionate, vulnerable, and wise...

...A BETTER CLASS OF PERSON: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY John Osborne/E.P...

...Whether or not Mr...

...His play's rage, eloquence, and proletarian energy was supposed to have " r e v i t a l i z e d " a parochial, effete, and exhausted tradition ruled then by the Coward-Rattigan anyonefor-tennis school of dramaturgy...

...They found ample opportunity for "achievement" in the new challenges of a burgeoning consumer society, and in the peculiarly destruc...

...What's new about today's underclass is not its existence but its numbers...

...As an example, in New York City, in 1900, 9,400 people died of tuberculosis...

...This problem was elucidated much more clearly (and succinctly) 25 years ago in a small pamphlet written b y Elizabeth Wood, a social worker who became the executive director of the Chicago Housing Authority...

...Osborne's protagonist, we were (and still are) told, uttered a "call to arms" for a younger generation who were "bored, and had little opportunity for achievement...

...The relaxation of standards, for fear they may be applied arbitrarily, hurts none in the society more than poor, working citizens who must, for example, bear the consequences in public housing projects...

...If "blame" there must be, it should be directed at the effective and honorably motivated public health engineers who prevented the underclass from being wiped out, as I [ I was almost always its fate in past centuries, by the diseases of poverty and disorganization: In the last hundred years that meant the diseases that disproportionately afflicted the underclass and kept its numbers down to manageable proportions...

...None suggests that there may, in fact, be no cure for the dangers of the underclass except a return to the harsh conditions which accompanied Roger Starr is a member of the New York Times EditoHalBoard...

...There were some failures, of course, but clever writers arranged to have them killed off in moments of transitory heroism they couldn't be expected to sustain...

...From this perspective it seems only natural to think they will be cured by an American gadget...

...They Herb Greer is an American writer and playwmght living in Europe...

...Perhaps the underclass has grown not because American authority has been unfeeling and mean, but rather because American authority figures have been undermined, weakening the process by which most rural migrants came to conform, more or less, to the norms of urban and industrial life...

...Jimmy Porter's boorish manners were taken for working-class discontent (the character is petty bourgeois...

...The very notion of a society implies the need of social order...

...The family had been visited at least once a month...

...The sight of a scruffy young fellow being sophomorically coarse to everyone around him, snarling at the use of French in the literary columns of the Sunday papers, and making uncivil remarks about his wife's well-to-do parents, seems to have tickled the fancy of London's modish fringe...

...Osborne rode this wave of enthusiasm with great skill...

...As I have already pointed out, Jimmy Porter and his views are unmistakably lower middle-class and Tory...

...some surely find them totally unacceptable...

...That, as many have pointed out for the past 2,500 years, implies that certain norms of human behavior will necessarily be imposed on the natural impulses of the species...

...Although the commentators on the underclass, whom Auletta quotes at length in the interstices of his description of specific efforts to turn the class from its ways, rarely agree in their explanations of its behavior patterns, it is clear that Auletta himself and most of the commentators ascribe the growth of the underclass to a certain unspecified harshness or indifference on the part of other Americans and American institutions...

...Do you wonder that you are baffled...

...In New York City in 1900, for example, when life expectancy at birth was about 30 years less than it is now, the diseases that flourished in dirt and poverty and overcrowding--tuberculosis, diphtheria, scarlet fever, pneumonia, and even yellow fever--accounted for two of every five deaths...

...With some astute defiance of the Lord Chamberlain (then Britain's censor), and a certain amount of help from literary hustlers like Tom Maschler--now a British publishing executive--the Angry Young Men, the Royal Court Theatre, and especially John Osborne were turned into superbly salable products and topics of chic conversation...

...At the end of a three-year period, they weren't a whir better than when we began . . . . I have been reading the public welfare records on the problem families living in 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1982 a New York City Housing Authority project and, you, my dea/brothers, are getting the McGees...

...ing the belief that in 1956 Look Back in Anger burst like a left-wing nova inside the British theatre and blew it apart...

...The families have bar: fled far better caseworkers for years and years...

...included one Rattigan revival and two badly received works by Noel Coward...

...The reclamation " g a d g e t " is "supported" work--never precisely defined but apparently signifying what was formerly and less politely called "make-work"--and a certain amount of training by new-style authority figures to whom the underclass people are, in the chilling jargon of the day, expected to be able to "relate...

...We were now to be caseworkers, so we could keep families we felt we could 'help...

...Governmental regulatory agencies and juries in negligence and malpractice cases try to express the rise in dollars...

...The play and Osborne became famous during the second run of the production in the autumn of that year--when an excerpt was broadcast on television...

...As it happened, very few of the era's younger generation went to the theatre in London or anywhere else, and almost none of those who did were working class...

...Nobody can tell how many actually found jobs, and, of those who did, how many stayed how long in them...

...Homicides, on the II THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1982 29 other hand, rose from 143 to 1,582...

...American politics expresses the added value of life by adopting programs for environmental and accident control t h a t place an immense value on each life saved, irrespective of the old common law test of earning capacity...

...Every life, t h e r e f o r e , is deemed to have a natural value that grows with every passing year...

...And so, in the long run, much more rigid and unforgiving patterns of social control --more police, more prisons, more asylums--may be the only choice left to a society that by its very compassion has seen the underclass enlarged until it seems likely to endanger the safety of everyone else...

...Part of the legend says that Kenneth Tynan, bucking universal hostility, championed the play and assured its success...

...His book hardly justifies this conclusion...

...They merge into each other, a catalogue of the discouragement caused by one or more bad turns of fortune, an addiction to blot out memory, and a long sequence of disastrous consequences...

...The existence of so large an underclass is, according to Auletta, reasonable cause for a feeling of shame on the part of all Americans...

...Ten completed it...

...They were admitted to Wildcat's supported work because they had been in prison, or were addicted, or had been on welfare for a long time...

...He also laid claim to the working class credentials which had been bestowed on him by the media...

...Those who trooped down to Sloane Square to see Look Back in Anger were, as the saying goes, A Better Class of Person: the middle-class trendy fringe or those who aspired to join it...

...He produced more plays which were carefully calculated to outrage, and himself assumed the role of the bad boy of drama...

...The class, starting with 22 members, was held in a very cold building in Manhattan --the coldness and discomfort of the building formed a constant basis of complaint by the enrollees...

...One unfortunate side-effect of all this was that gossipy excitement outside the auditorium became more important than theatrical excitement inside, giving cachet to a lot of mediocre work...

...Over the years, I have sat in countless darkened theaters watching ramshackle groups of juvenile delinquents or simple naughty boys turned into upright pillars of society by Father Flanagan, Knute Rockne, drill sergeants, and other minor authority figures in a long string of Boys' Towns, military camps, naval vessels, and football locker rooms...

...The status of these plays as expressions of working-class anger remains as puzzling as ever...

...Our author divides the chorus of intellectuals into two voices, liberals who believe that society is to blame for the existence of an underclass, and conservatives who believe the underclass is to blame for its own existence...

...During a 1968 Observer interview with Tynan, this proletarian hero of the arts remarked in passing: "The working class isn't what it was when I got the hell out of it . . . . " This was one more nod to Britain's special form of radical chic, which had sprouted in the fifties...

...Eliot, and Angus Wilson...

...As a matter of fact Look Back in Anger had a mixed reception, and its first run in the spring was quite unremarkable...

...Auletta examines a class of students of Basic Typing conducted by the Wildcat center...