GREAT BRITAIN: POLITICS OF THE ANGRY YOUNG MEN
Walzer, Michael
One day I was walking with my grandfather, when we were passed by a man who seemed to greet him rather cheerfully. He was answered with a curtness that was surprising for a man as gentle as my...
...One day I was walking with my grandfather, when we were passed by a man who seemed to greet him rather cheerfully...
...For those who manage to live outside the Brave New-nothing-very-much, all that is left is to wrestle with privatetorment...
...but that means also from England's culture and from much of EngIand's politics...
...It'll just be for the Brave New-nothing-very-much-thank-you...
...It has been possible to rise out of the great middle class and to become a "gentleman," but it required assiduous imitation and the destruction of one's past...
...Yet no one seems to have any clear idea what they are angry about, and this stems largely from not having any clear idea what there is that it is possible to be angry about...
...The work of bringing the Labor Party to power had better be done by professional politicians than by collegiate 152 romantics...
...he tries to maneuver the prettiest girls into his senior section, while keeping out the one boy who knows something about Scholasticism...
...he struggles to publish an article in one of the academic journals, but mocks the "niggling mindlessness" of what he has written and what he has read...
...Educated on state funds at a "red brick" (i.e...
...JOHN OSBORNE A great deal of fuss is being made over the discovery, in England, of a group of angry young men...
...other than Cambridge or Oxford) university, he arrives in the intellectual world in the early 1950s only to encounter an extraordinarily well-established group of men who arrived there 300 years ago...
...Yet the steady harangue against the world in which most people live, the search for ever fresh outrages to the bourgeois soul, at least maintains a relationship to that world and soul...
...But they are not politicized as tools offered to the hands of the "revolutionary proletariat," or the Communist Party...
...It would be wrong to assume that this group is simply a rigid social class...
...And education in England has traditionally been open to young men who "promised" the right things...
...That man's a socialist," said my grandfather...
...II To be as vehement as Jimmy Porter, Osborne has admitted, is to be virtually uncommitted...
...If you talk to the cats you will find in them these qualities: an instinctive Leftism, an undemonstrative sympathy with anarchy, a dislike of classy politicians, a vivid vernacular made up of Hollywood, space fiction and local dialect, a polite interest in drugs, a good deal of shared 153 promiscuous pleasure, and almost no drunkenness...
...This is not because the life of factory workers and road sweepers, of bus conductors and bartenders is better, but because it is more important, than that of the gentleman...
...But, we are warned quietly, they are really not rebels at all, but deserters from the true cause of all earnest, patient men...
...Obviously quite a few of those who achieve personal success could climb if they were willing, and come eventually to decorate what now they claim to despise...
...Lucky Jim cannot become a gentleman without transforming gentility...
...apparently only gentlemen shared in England's cultural pride...
...149 By contrast, Lucky Jim's ambition is to join the ranks...
...But even more, the angry young men insist that the culture of the gentleman—precisely because of its class nature—has lost touch with 150 human life, and that means ultimately that it has become barren and cruel...
...A generalized and continuous fury hardly has a program...
...The self-expression of the angry young men is enough...
...The apparent integrity of most of the rebels makes such an outcome unlikely...
...Jimmy is by no means meant to be an entirely pleasant young man, but he does possess a savage honesty, the refreshing pride of an arriviste who has declined to arrive and the frightened insecurity of someone caught in a "lost cause": the play is hardly more than his fervent monologue...
...His wife Allison is essentially phlegmatic, detached from such experiences as she has had...
...So long as the values of the gentleman were the dominant ones in English society, both of these seemed entirely legitimate...
...The title, thank heavens, is not a self-designation...
...Yet Jimmy is bitter that the age of the "good, brave causes" is over...
...This, for the time being, the Labor Party cannot give them...
...he cultivates the art of making faces...
...And the Welfare State—all the rebels, let me stress, are its partisans...
...Osborne means us to sympathize with, but not to admire, his condition, for Jimmy stands only at the beginning of a creative discontent...
...he gave a very bad one...
...154...
...This is the nature of Osborne's insistence upon those experiences which make men human: to be poor and to suffer, he knows, have a positive value...
...that it is right and good and in the nature of things that Lord Salisbury, whose forefathers served Elizabeth I, should choose Elizabeth II's prime ministers...
...The world of culture has itself become a battleground, and art, literature, and criticism are irrevocably politicized...
...It is to the same renunciation that Allison's class must eventually be brought...
...Even the New York Times has presented us with a column of quotes from the angriest of the young men, out of all context, of course, and apropos of nothing, but indicating fairly clearly that anger is thought interesting these days, perhaps a trifle piquant, and above all, newsworthy...
...that every fat woman on earth is Jesus Christ," where "emotional" is not a dirty word and sex is recognized and humanly recognizable...
...It is curious that the group has been discussed so much more in the political than in the literary journals, for their novels, plays and poems really represent the first burst of cultural energy in post-war England...
...At the point where quantitative change in the educated classes threatens to become qualitative, it will be resisted...
...I want to be a lost cause...
...A German intellectual, one of the Weimar Republic's "superflous men" and a future fascist, once wrote, "When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver...
...These young people cannot look at Macmillan's face without laughing and they cannot work up much interest in our inalienable right to flog Cypriot school boys...
...They cannot bring themselves to join unless on their own terms...
...Against this impotence they search for a new culture, built out of ordinary human experience and culminating in love: a world, writes Kenneth Tynan, "where people feel...
...His refusal to join the ranks of the educated classes constitutes a declaration of war...
...The savage attack on the "posh" papers, the musical evenings, the self-centered world of academic irrelevance, the well-bred commonplaces of conventional morality represents an effort to tear through the cultivated mannerism of false gentility, and to reveal stupidity and arrogance and brutality...
...he is no less at war, but he is compelled to resort to subterfuge...
...The effect of socialist reforms has not been to alter its essential structure, but rather to set an increasing number of lower class intellectuals outside the class system altogether...
...It is important to note that fascist nihilism does not provide the tone of contemporary English anger...
...It is here that the meaning which Osborne sought in Spain is, in a sense, recaptured...
...While it mocks the world of privilege, it is forced to search for alternatives...
...The angry young men have been true to their experience in seizing upon cultural rather than political issues, and the quality of their culture has yet to be judged...
...And the goal of the angry young men is precisely such a qualitative change...
...The rebels have dismissed the "social conscience" of the middle classes without a tremor of guilt...
...A sort of mild and increasingly invisible indignation has been established as the proper attitude for proper young men...
...Osborne remembers the Spanish Civil War—Jimmy's father was killed there—because he believes that at that historical moment personal integrity was able to achieve a social connection and a broader human relevance...
...Not only a "lost cause" in the world of gentility, he must struggle against human failure...
...they despise the high-brow who is merely bored by it—is not enough, for it is not economic privilege alone which is under attack, but the very culture it has created...
...Yet it would not be quite fair to characterize the angry young men as anti-intellectual...
...The snobbery of class in England is not, as it frequently was in America, a defensive reaction to mass democracy...
...It implies that there are kinds of people who ought to rule, and sometimes even that there are kinds of people who ought to read...
...The continued mockery of conventional morality becomes increasingly senseless...
...And the angry young men, in their search for a new response, have been forced into paths which are apparently not political at all...
...but to struggle to understand poverty and to sympathize with those who suffer is morality...
...How many quietly outraged liberals agree—but dare not agree in public—with the middle-aged Englishman who announced with stupid tort' bluntness: What these young men need is a good kick in the pants...
...They hate only that culture which has refined away too much of human life...
...For him it is a question of making a living...
...They continually insist upon their own lower class origins...
...parlor pinkism was a pose too easily forgotten...
...Lucky Jim can neither assume his father's position nor find a new one for himself...
...The bombing of Port Said, the flogging of Cypriot schoolboys, the insensitive delight with the Christmas Island explosion, all this is masked, even as it is occasionally "indignantly" denounced, by the smug decorum of the gentlemanly pose...
...But in 1957, when John Osborne insists upon telling everyone that his parents ran a succession of pubs in the working class sections of London, those values are called into question...
...To choose to live outside is probably a moral act, but it is the last one with any public meaning...
...he attends, with as much grace as he can muster, the pretentious and idiotic cultural evenings of his boss, Professor Welch, but despises "filthy Mozart" and eventually escapes to get hopelessly drunk at the local pub...
...I wanted to tell him that we had long ago discovered in America that the things only gentlemen did were hardly worth doing...
...London, Tynan tells us, "is rapidly becoming the jazz center of Europe...
...Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim—the central symbol of English anger—is probably the son of such a man, and he and his father already live worlds apart...
...To explain this we must glance at contemporary England...
...He was answered with a curtness that was surprising for a man as gentle as my grandfather...
...They are themselves engaged in a vigorous intellectual activity upon whose human relevance they would insist...
...Powerlessness is not its dominant experience, but rather the outrages of power...
...they seek a society, in the words, again, of Tynan, where "people who think and people who work can share common assumptions and discuss them in the same idiom...
...It is from this entire world that Lucky Jim—and Osborne's Jimmy Porter—are alienated...
...The angry young men are the prophets of a radical equalitarianism...
...But the pushing youngsters of today's working class have discovered instead the music of the Negro...
...even more, their numbers would appear to make it impossible...
...There is spirit and toughness, boisterous humanity and daily courage, but not cultural independence: culture was the preserve of the educated classes...
...I knew it couldn't be good from the quiet way he said it...
...Its success will realize the needs of the working class, not the disinterestd visions of the intellectuals...
...But we shall see that anger in contemporary society has immediate political significance wherever it is expressed...
...It is with the hope of this morality that his play Look Back in Anger ends...
...On the faculty of a provincial university, Lucky Jim teaches medieval history and nourishes a secret andabiding hatred for the Middle Ages...
...it is a free gift of the week-end reviewers...
...That's a man who doesn't believe in raising his hat...
...It is not, or it would never have endured so long...
...Our common condition becomes their personal tragedy—and they are made "rebels without a 148 Cause...
...If the big bang does come and we all get killed off, it won't be in aid of the old fashioned, grand design...
...they ever appropriated the folk song...
...It is still an essential qualification, a limitation of that democracy...
...But my landlord gave none of the good reasons...
...It is the breeding and malaise of her class, and Jimmy tortures her for it...
...To flog a 16yearold boy may not be in good taste, but it is even less so to mention the incident over tea...
...Some intuition of this must account for the reception given the young rebels...
...For while England is still a class society, it is now a society under pressure...
...We do not really get at the core of Lucky Jim—or any of the other angry men—if we see them only in their mockery of the world about them...
...But he was not a humble man, and hardly needed such an infusion of spirit...
...Until fairly recently the English intelligentsia was a well-integrated part or adjunct of the ruling class...
...The educated gentlemen of Oxford and Cambridge, whether they be socialists or tories, share in the expectation of the deference they receive from the servants and shopkeepers of the towns...
...Osborne describes her as "turned in a key of well-bred malaise...
...Jimmy's anger feeds itself on the anticipation of the gen tleman's fall, just as it relishes now the actual fall of his daughters into the arms of men like himself...
...He would become a gentleman outwardly and save his integrity for private moments...
...and given to pretentious academic performances, for another...
...The English young men may look to the Cockney, but they discover only the opposite side of the gentlemanly coin...
...He looked at me and smiled...
...And this culture served both as camouflage and justification for political and economic power...
...It has been Iabeled best not as an upper or a middle, but as an educated class...
...How long can one go on being shocking...
...Its plot centers on the relationship between Jimmy Porter—a Lucky Jim who has abandoned deceit and lives by running a sweet shop in a Midlands market—and his wife Allison "kidnapped" from the upper classes...
...After all, we are told, the Welfare State is established, prosperity has endured the dangerous post-war decade, Russia has shown us what happens when people get too enthusiastic, and we ought at last to be content to pursue modestly our slight careers in a world where social ideals and social reality "more or less coincide...
...They would insist that the editors of the Sunday papers, the young students of the ancient universities, even the Queen herself, attend that flogging in Cyprus and examine the boy's back when it is over...
...they no longer have meaning or attraction...
...And when the angry young men stand before us with their hilarious rage and mock this "coincidence," they are allowed their joke but not their purpose...
...But what is to take its place...
...In their hostility, Mozart suffers for the exclusiveness of his associations, the middle classes because they did not destroy the snobbery of the gentleman but squirmed before his arched eyebrows...
...But in its course it also suggests the danger of the rebel's alienation...
...I suppose people of our generation aren't able to die for good causes any longer...
...What they lack is a rallying point, social or political...
...But today there is no similarly dramatic call to political activity and meaning...
...So his method is not assiduous imitation, but calculating deceit...
...He said that he was not a gentleman...
...The English rebels feel the meaninglessness and hypocrisy of a culture which has been unable to develop a moral reaction to these outrages...
...it is the ritualized discontent which continues to echo from our twenty-year-old past, clothed now in the overcoat and galoshes of responsibility...
...Now there are many good reasons for not listening to the Third Program: it is frequently dull, for one...
...It establishes the gulf between themselves and the educated classes...
...this mockery is marvelously funny, but its function is essentially defensive...
...And all the while he endures the market stall and multiplies frustration into hatred...
...His is the sickness of a life deprived of human connection beyond the sphere of its own tortured ego...
...The politics of the Welfare State seems too far away, too complicatedly removed from any single human hand or eye...
...I In England last year, I once asked my landlord—an 81-yearold retired shopkeeper—why he never listened to the BBC Third Program...
...We had all that done for us, in the thirties and forties when we were still kids...
...Probably the most important thing that could be said about that class was not that it owned the means of production or that it ran the government (although it did both) , but that it possessed the culture...
...he simply took his "place" entirely for granted...
...There remain always the concrete needs of human beings, but the angry young men believe that the effort of the intellectuals to attach themselves to these has been false and insincere...
...The point, of course, is that the traditional political responses of the earnest, patient men have suddenly become outmoded...
...And in return they offered the two-penny press and the Light Program...
...the established values of the gentleman are to be laughed at...
...The drawing room comedy is played out and with it the doddering world of leisured refinement...
...The connections of the angry young men with these people, or rather, with their sons, makes it very doubtful that they can simply be absorbed into the educated classes...
...She must repeat his creed: "I don't want to be neutral, I don't want to be a saint...
...In a curious post-Suez pamphlet, Kingsley Amis has attacked the political intellectual as such, and insisted that political activity must reflect self-interest...
...Only the degradation and horror which she endures in the death of her unborn child—a death which her husband in a moment of anger has wished upon her—brings her to the love which Jimmy demands: 151 the complete acceptance of his hopeless honesty...
Vol. 5 • April 1958 • No. 2
