Nineteen-Fifties. The main argument of this thesis is to demonstrate that the Movement and the Angry Young Men have played an important role within culture and society, both in the decade they appeared in and also later on, and that they masterfully reacted on the social situation of the time. Furthermore, I would like to prove the Angry Young

Men’s importance within culture by showing examples of how the culture has been inspired by the movement.

This thesis is basically divided into two main parts concerning their content, or to be more precise the thesis is somewhat divided thematically. The first part, which is supposed to be more extensive, deals with the Angry Young Men and the Movement

(differentiation and definitions of these two terms are provided further) in the literary and social and cultural context. Further on the thesis will mainly encompass just what the term of the Angry Young Men comprises, leaving the Movement somewhat behind.

The second part thematically deals with what can be called “the legacy” of the Angry

Young Men. The thesis will start with a chapter where there will be an introduction of the background from which the Movement and the Angry Young Men emerged. This means to provide a necessary description of the social situation in Great Britain in the

Nineteen-Fifties as this thesis involves culture and society as well, not only authors of literature. Subsequently, both the terms (the Movement and the Angry Young Men) will be explained and described. We will discover the origins of and characterize the Angry

Young Men: Who were they and what they were angry about? The next section of the thesis will be devoted to the connection of selected literary works of the Angry Young

Men and the contemporary social situation of the Nineteen-Fifties. The task is to find

5 out what were the social issues that the Angry Young Men were actually angry about, and how they reflected these issues in their literary works. The literary works that will be examined are as follows: John Braine’s novel Room at the Top , John Osborne’s drama Look Back in Anger , Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim and last but not least Alan

Sillitoe’s working-class novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and a short story called The Loneliness of the Long-distance Runner by the same author. Each author’s work reflecting certain issues and problems is allotted one subsection. Each such subsection begins with a short introduction of the writer or with information about the book with brief comments on the story and characters. Then the main issues of the author’s interest are introduced and demonstrated on several examples from the book.

These quotations from the books will show the actual relationship between literature and society, since each of the writers of the Angry Young Men Movement somehow reflects what surrounds him and the way he perceives the society. This also offers space for comparison of the main heroes and their attitudes (which certainly reflects the attitudes of the authors themselves in some cases) and finding possible differences or similarities between them.

In the subsequent chapter, the emphasis will be placed on what can be called the

“legacy” of the Angry Young Men. Here, by the word legacy I mean mainly cultural products that have been inspired by the Angry Young Men and their books, or have something in common with them. Therefore film adaptations of the books (considered to be a part of a specific film stream called “British New Wave”) will be commented on.

II. Social background (Great Britain in the Nineteen-Fifties)

In order to put the Angry Young Men into context, it is necessary to provide a description of the social background of Great Britain in the Nineteen-Fifties, which is the decade when they emerged on the cultural scene. This chapter will cover certain

6 social issues of the decade rather than historical events. The issues to be discussed are those that appear throughout various reference books and publications devoted both to the culture, history and literature of Britain in the Nineteen-Fifties. They also appear in the writings of the Angry Young Men. These issues are the legacy of the World War II, austerity and recovery from it, class stratification in Britain, the welfare state, affluence, consumer society, status of women, the British Government and its policy both inside and outside Britain and the people’s discontent with it (e.g. so-called Suez fiasco).

The decade of the Nineteen-Fifties has been connected with the legacy of World

War II worldwide as well as in Great Britain. Not only the second half of the Nineteen-

Forties but also the Nineteen-Fifties was a time of recovery from war and a time of war consequences: “Life in these dozen years [i.e. 1945 – 1957] was dominated by the consequences of the war, both negative and positive” as Arthur Marwick puts it in his

British Society Since 1945 (18). The warfare legacy certainly influenced British society, its establishment and structure.

World War II ended in 1945. “Battered by the war and ten years of filthy food, worn-out clothes and austerity, with grime and drabness rubbed into the pores, the

British public was in what GPs call a ‘run-down condition’ ” (Allsop 25). The British nation, the society was devastated by the war. “Many of the conditions of war were indeed to continue until early 1950, with rationing and controls enduring still longer”

(Marwick 18).

In the first post-war years almost everything was rationed, with basic foodstuffs on ‘coupons’, clothing on ‘clothing coupons’, tinned foods and dried fruits on one kind of ‘points, and chocolate and sweets on another, more popularly known as ‘sweetie coupons’ […] Between July 1946 and July 1948 even bread was rationed. (70)

But the Nineteen-Fifties were meant to be a time of recovery in the majority of aspects. This recovery was started already in the second half of the Nineteen-Forties,

7 when “the general election of 1945 […] for the first time ever, gave Labour a decisive victory” (Marwick 7), and the recovery was lead by the Labour Government and continued throughout the following decade under the Government of the Conservative

Party, thus sometimes the second half of the Forties and the Fifties are perceived as one era; as the era of renewal of the country and society. Further on, Marwick asserts:

“Discussing Labour’s general election victory in 1945, Peter Calvocoressi, in The

British Experience 1945-75 , writes of the electorate hoping and believing ‘that the

Labour would make great strides towards the elimination of absolute poverty and excessive inequality’ ” (Marwick 8). This was the reason why the Labour Party was elected.

The changes started to take place after the war. But there was a shortage of material in many branches of industry, and life in general – and not only in Britain:

“With re-building going on everywhere in the world, many materials and foodstuffs were even scarcer than they had been during the war” (Marwick 19). The war had a deadening effect in many ways. Nevertheless, there were even some positive aspects.

“The war itself had had an enormous direct influence in stimulating all kinds of expanded or new industrial development often in areas remote from the attentions of

German bombers” (Marwick 20).

To get out of the poor condition caused by the war, the Government made various efforts to improve the situation. What was important was the industry. The industry always goes hand in hand with science and technology.

It is a commonplace, though also an accurate and significant truth, that economic developments and social conditions in all industrialized countries since 1945 have been mightily affected by scientific and technological change. (Marwick 11)

Further on in his book, Marwick returns again to science with saying that “[t]he war had had a great influence, also, on the exploitation of science and technology” (20-

8 21), and inventions like a “radar [in] commercial air transport”, “infra-red devices”, or

“electronics and optics” (20-21). What came into practice concerning the industries was nationalization. It “was very much a major issue between the two parties in the general election campaigns of 1950 and 1951” (100).

The increase in production is connected to the increase in the number of job opportunities for people. As Marwick puts it “the idea of diversification and the direction of industry was very much in the minds of Government planners after the war”

(20). During the war the industry was not varied, it was focused on those branches of industry that were the most necessary. But when the war was over there was to be more varied industry to give more opportunities for people to have jobs and earn money.

Marwick continues in giving examples in what aspects the situation was changing:

Planning, direction of the economy, and social engineering I general, it was hoped, would be achieved through nationalization of the major industries, the Distribution of Industry Act (1945), and the channelling of new investment to ‘development areas’ through the building of new towns. (20)

Here is another example of the positives after the war generally describing the situation: “Overall, despite the frustration and austerity of the immediate post-war years, there was modest prosperity, and the bulk of wage and salary earners did reasonably well” (Marwick 20).

Another feature brought about with World War II was the increase in the number of newborn babies. This is referred to as “the post-war ‘baby boom’ which culminated in 1947 with a birth-rate of 20.7 per thousand” (Marwick 31).

Besides the “expansion” of newborn babies, there was an expansion in transport

“meaning […] transport by bus and coach not by private car” (Marwick 32). “The great expansion in private car ownership began only in the very last years of the period under review [i.e. 1945-1957]” (32), and continued in the following years of affluence.

9 The post-war effort of the Labour Government had however “many successes”

(33) as Marwick points out: “Britain spent far more on research and development than any other of the European countries. The heaviest spending was channelled into aircraft, manufacture, telecommunications, precision engineering, and chemicals” (33).

Let us now advance towards the next theme of this chapter. It comprises positive social changes during the Nineteen-Fifties. As it was suggested above, these are mainly the turn from the post-war austerity to the affluence and emergence of the consumer society phenomenon. “In 1954 rationing of most major foodstuff finally ended; in the same year the bill introducing commercial television became law […]. These, certainly, were signs of change” (Marwick 12). These facts, the arrival of television and the termination of rationing, are signals of the onset of consumer society which actually flourished worldwide in the decade. And towards the close of the decade “[t]he word

‘affluence’ began to be bandied around freely. Release came, not just from post-war austerity, but from social controls going back to Victorian times […]” (Marwick 13).

One of the most important issues is the topic of class. It is the aspect that determined all of the British subjects as well as the literary characters of the Angry

Young Men.

“Three elements make up class as it actually is”, Marwick asserts. “First of all, class is shaped by history. It originates with the Industrial Revolution, which steadily replaced an older society of estates and orders […]” (35).

Second, class has a very strong subjective element. It is by studying what people say and write about class, by studying, that is, ‘images of class’, that we are best able to map out a social structure which conforms with life as actually lived in the period under review […]. (35)

“Thirdly, we can quite unequivocally perceive areas of inequality in modern society: in power, authority, wealth, income, job situation, material conditions, and culture and lifestyles” (35).

10 The English class hierarchy is as follows: “ ‘working class’ […]; we find a rather more varied and less precise use of ‘middle class’ and ‘middle classes’ as well as

‘lower-middle class’ and ‘upper-middle class’ ” (34). Further on Marwick states that

“the broad notion of there being a working class and a middle class, however divided up, was well established” (35). What might have been confusing was the term upper class: “many of those who might be thought, by objective criteria, to have belonged to such a class preferred to refer to themselves, and were often described by others, as

‘upper-middle class’ ” (35).

Concerning the working class there “was little ambiguity about [its] composition

[…]. Of the total employed population, well over 60 per cent did manual work of one sort or another […]. Manual workers and their families formed the working class […]”

(37). Few pages onwards Marwick defines what it meant to be working-class:

[…] to be working-class meant performing manual work, most usually under arduous, uncongenial, or just plain boring circumstances. Conditions of work still demanded special working clothes, and still often left definite physical marks – calloused hands, for instance. When it came to ‘life chances’ members of the working class were still at a disadvantage compared with all of the rest of he society. Individual members might move upwards, but conditions within the working class, not excluding working-class attitudes themselves, discouraged educational aspiration. (Marwick 43-44)

The education is also an important aspect of a class. Marwick quotes Professor

Margaret Stacey who has found that “ ‘the majority of the working class have received only an elementary education […]’ ” (Marwick 43).

Middle class, “or middle classes” were “amounting to well over 30 per cent of the population” (37). There was “quite an important, though far from rigid, line between the lower-middle class of, essentially, clerical and other types of white-collar worker, and the upper-middle class of local businessman and the more prestigious professionals”

(37). Professor Stacey commented in Marwick on education of middle-classes as well.

11 She states that “ ‘a much higher proportion of the middle class received a secondary education’ ” (Marwick 43).

Concerning the warfare legacy the “[h]igh taxation during and after the war hit the upper-middle class hardest, lowering the barriers between it and the lower-middle class” (38).

What is remaining to be discussed is the upper class:

[…] in the nineteenth century, the upper class elaborated on older traditions in evolving a distinctive ethos inculcated through the major public schools and, in lesser degree, Oxford and Cambridge universities. There was created an upper- class ‘box’ of attitudes and life-styles into which newcomers could b socialized. (36)

Marwick points out that he prefers the definition of the upper class by Sir Ian Fraser who

shrewdly defined [the upper class] as that ‘reservoir of persons economically free and accustomed to responsibility from early age’ who as a matter of objective fact, turn out to exercise a dominance in the spheres of power, authority, wealth, and income totally disproportionate to their numbers, and who have a distinctive culture and life-style of their own. (Marwick 36)

One might expect that the warfare legacy which comprised “[r]ationing, controls, and shortages” (39) would strike the upper class as well. However, “many within the upper-class fold were able to lead a life of considerable amplitude in the age of austerity” (39).

What is interesting about the upper class is the fact that “[b]y the mid-fifties journalism, publishing, films, radio, television and advertising had become classic refuges for the upper class” (41).

To sum up the topic of class Marwick points out: “Class is a difficult and messy subject, but indisputably neither the upheavals of the Second World War nor the programme of the Labour Government abolished it” (44). He adds: “If we are to compare the significance of class with that of other sources of distinction and inequality,

12 […], class stands out as a key factor in such matters as wealth, political power, educational opportunity, and style of life” (44).

The term welfare state is to be discussed now. “The phrase ‘welfare state’ […] came into widespread use during the war to pint out a sharp contrast with Hitler’s

‘warfare state’ ” (Marwick 45). The term welfare state

essentially […] means the totality of schemes and services through which the central Government together with the local authorities assumed a major responsibility for dealing with all the different types of social problems which beset individual citizens. (45)

Those social problems to be resolved by the Government were five and were as follows: social security, medical services, housing, education, and to avoid unemployment. In addition to these five objectives, there were “other areas of social life

[that mattered]: the arts, the environment generally, the care of children” (45-46). By solving these problems, “the Labour Government’s legislation […] intended to mark a break with the past” (46). Generally, the Labour Party’s plan to achieve the welfare state was the stress on “the principle of universality” (47), which should work

only by making the state services open to all could it be ensured that the highest standards would be available to all; only by having a universal service could the stigma be removed from those who had to make use of state services. (47)

First, social security for people must have been ensured. The most important thing in connection with social security is family allowances. They were “payable to the mother”, “financed by general taxation [and were] subject to taxation” (47). National

Insurance scheme was the other important thing in social security.

In the realm of medical services “[d]ealing with the nation’s medical problems was not so easy” (49). The most important thing was the introduction of so-called NHS standing for National Health Service on 1948. It was “a monumental expression of the principle of universality” (51). Since then the health care “was entirely open to everyone

13 […and] entirely free” (51). This meant that the social differences no longer played role in providing general medical care.

Thirdly, there was the problem of housing. During the war many houses were destroyed in air raids, other dwellings were in poor condition. In connection to the housing problem there was

a wish to re-create the classless villages of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. [There was a hope] to achieve this by raising the standard size of subsidized housing and ensuring that all houses were provided with all the conveniences of modern living. (54)

The problem of education was to be solved by “the major Act passed in 1944”

(55). It ensured that the pupils went to secondary schools, and various examinations at certain age levels.

The unemployment was another striking problem to be solved by the welfare state policy. “[…] both Labour and Conservative Governments were fully committed to a philosophy of the avoidance of mass unemployment” (57).

To conclude the topic of the welfare state we may say that “[w]hat was done – and it was a lot – was the result of truly noble vision […]” (59).

The welfare state started the solving of problems and the affluence was to come towards the close of the Nineteen-Fifties. Affluence went hand in hand with so-called consumer society. As the welfare state was doing better, it was producing more goods that had to be consumed by people. The important unit in the consumer society was the family unit. “More and more, especially in the freer economy of the 1950s, it was becoming important as a centre of consumption. Advertisements would be directed at wives and at children […]” (63). The status of women had also undergone slight changes, “it had been changing since the beginning of the century, and the changes had been greatly accelerated by the Second World War” (63). Marwick continues:

“traditional male attitudes persisted, [however], there were examples in working-class

14 homes of husbands sharing in duties […]. Women were having fewer children, earlier, and then often going out to work […]” (64).

The consumer goods which were obtainable were “the benefits brought by technology: disinfectants and detergents [for hygiene]; food was […] purer and fresher than before the war […]” (111). Furthermore, there were fridges, washing and dishwashing machines, television sets and other technical developments marking the standard of better living.

As far as the foreign policy is concerned, I would like to mention one issue that will be later discussed in the chapter on the Angry Young Men. It is the issue of so- called Suez fiasco or Suez crisis of 1956:

In collusion with the French and Israelis, Britain waged war for one week against Egypt in pursuit of Eden’s [the Conservative Prime Minister at the time] delusion that Colonel Nasser was another Hitler, and vain hope that the Egyptian President could be thus removed from power. Eden’s ‘armed conflict’ lasted just long enough to demonstrate that Britain no longer had the logistic power to mount an efficient sea-borne operation in the Middle East, and for Britain to be branded by the United Nations as an aggressor, before American opposition, Russian threats, and the inevitable run on the pond brought an ignoble venture to a humiliating conclusion. (101)

The Suez crisis was one of the things the Angry Young Men were discontent with as it will be touched upon further in chapter III.II.

To conclude it is appropriate to mention that this chapter certainly does not encompasses the social situation in its entirety. It highlights and discusses the most important issues of the society after the war and in the Nineteen-Fifties. These issues of the social background actually initiated the Movement and the Angry Young Men.

III. Who Were the Angry Young Men and What They Were Angry About

An angry young man is:

[…] a young person who strongly criticizes political and social institutions. The phrase was originally used by British newspapers in the late 1950s, after the success of the play Look Back in Anger by John Osborne, to describe

15 young British writers like Osborne, Kingsley Amis, and Keneth Tynan […]. (Crowther 19)

This chapter’s goal is to develop this entry from the Oxford Guide to British and

American Culture ; that is to map the origins of the Angry Young Men and to find out what these young writers were actually angry about.

III.I. The Angry Young Men and the Movement (definitions)

So far, the terms the Angry Young Men and the Movement have been used without proper clarification and distinction. It is necessary to distinguish these two terms naming two groups of authors. Nevertheless, they cannot be separated or even put into opposition. This is because both the Angry Young Men and the Movement are somehow connected to each other; the development of both of these two groups blended together, and it was mainly in the beginning – in the moment when the Movement and the Angry Young Men emerged.

In the early Fifties “already a number of younger poets had determined to make a clear and explicit stand against modernism, internationalism, neo-Romanticism and the exclusiveness of upper-class bohemia” (Marwick 26). This was an obvious reaction on styles that prevailed before the Nineteen-Fifties. These young poets comprised Kingsley

Amis, John Wain, Donald Davie and Philip Larkin. It was John Wain who “used his position on the BBC Third Programme series First Reading to publicize such like- minded poets […]; the weekly review Spectator very much became a platform for this group of writers and poets” (Marwick 26).

In 1955 an anthology called Poets of the 1950s was published. This signifies the fact that these young poets started to be perceived as a group:

A year later a further collection, New Lines , was presented by Robert Conquest (b.1917) […]: this collection contained nine poets […]: Conquest, Elizabeth Jennings (b. 1926), John Holloway (b. 1920), Larkin, Thomas Gunn (b. 1929), Amis, Enright, Donald Davie and Wain. Already, thanks to an October 1954

16 Spectator article entitled ‘In the Movement’, this group of poets had a name. (Marwick 26 – 27)

So this is how the Movement was born.

Every group or movement is supposed to have its goals, ambitions, or objectives` simply the reason for doing what they were doing. As Marwick points out, Robert

Conquest stated these objectives on behalf of the Movement in the preface to New

Lines :

If one had briefly to distinguish the poetry of the fifties from its predecessors, I believe the most important general point would be that it submits to no great systems of theoretical constructs nor agglomeration of unconscious demands. It is free from both mystical and logical compulsions and – like modern philosophy – is empirical in its attitude to all that comes. (Marwick 27)

From the above we are acquainted with the members of the Movement and their

“ideology”. Their names are known but still some questions remain. For example what background is hidden behind those names? Where do they stand within society? In

Marwick’s definition, their predecessors (e.g. post-war literary figures) were members of the upper class. Referring to the Movement, he continues: “Members of ‘The

Movement’ were educated at Oxford or Cambridge, but were generally from the lower ranges of the middle class, having moved upwards via grammar schools and scholarships” (Marwick 27).

Although the Movement is perceived as a group, it was not as consistent as one might imagine. The term Movement roofs over a group of individuals – this explains its possible inconsistency. Marwick explains: “There was no consistency in political attitude or social criticism: here was an alternative cultural form to those which had dominated literature in the forties, but scarcely an alternative ideology” (27). This disposition to inconsistency of the Movement probably caused its “end”. “The

Movement did not long remain a coherent movement […]” (27).

17 To sum up what was said above about the Movement, we may put it that the

Movement was a grouping of writers and poets who were marked as a movement from the outside, e.g. by editors. The fact that the Movement did not have any proclamation or program meant its logical end.

The decline of the Movement prepared ground for the emergence of the Angry

Young Men. Other genres than the Movement poetry came into focus of literary audience and newspaper readers. There was a switch from the poets of the Movement towards the novel and drama that started to be discussed in newspapers. Marwick says that “developments in the novel and on the stage actually made it […] into popular daily newspapers.” (27) When speaking about the novelty that came with the Angry Young

Men, some sources talk about vitality that they brought into literature:

New vitality, although it was just unrestrained and undirected, was brought back into English literature by dramatists and novelists who obtained an attractive […] name “Angry Young Men” […]. The whole of this turbulent movement had been gathering up its strength for many years, and it only thundered in May 1956 with Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger […]. (Stříbrný 667; my translation) 1

Zdeněk Stříbrný offers in his History of English Literature, vol. 2 2 one more definition of the Angry Young Men movement:

Immediately after the half of the 20 th century significant excitement in the English prose – likewise in the drama – was brought about by several writers who were despite their angry objections attributed a name “the Angry Young Men” by the British sensationalist press. (731-732; my translation) 3

Another source asserts that the Angry Young Men were “all those 1950s new writers who marched down from the provinces to storm the barricades of literary

London” (Ritchie).

1 Novou vitalitu, i když jen živelnou a neusměrněnou, vrátili anglické literatuře dramatici a romanopisci, kteří dostali atraktivní (…) název „rozhněvaní mladí lidé“ (…). Celé toto bouřlivácké hnutí sbíralo řadu let své síly, až zaburácelo v květnu 1956 Osbornovou hrou Ohlédni se v hněvu (…). 2 Stříbrný, Zdeněk. Dějiny anglické literatury. 2 . Praha: Academia, 1987. 3 Hned po polovině 20. století vyvovalo značný rozruch v anglické próze – podobně jako v dramatu – několik spisovatelů, kterým britský senzacechtivý tisk přisoudil přes jejich rozhněvané námitky označení „rozhněvaní mladí lidé (…).“

18 Works that were discussed most “were the first novel by Movement writer

Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim […], Look Back in Anger , by the unknown playwright John

Osborne […], and The Outsider […] by twenty-four-year-old unknown writer Colin

Wilson […].” (Marwick 27) Other angry writers and their writings were for example

John Wain with his novel Hurry on Down , John Braine’s Room at the Top , or Under the

Net by Iris Murdoch.

Here is a new generation of angry young writers. But where did the expression

“Angry Young Man/Men” actually come from? Both Arthur Marwick and Tadeusz

Żuczkowski give their explanations. According to Marwick, this term in connection to the young writers of the Nineteen-Fifties came into usage after the opening night of

John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger .

Then, almost by accident, the Royal Court press officer produced the notion that Osborne was ‘a very angry young man’. ‘Angry young men’, particularly Wilson and Osborne […], but also the ‘new’ novelists and many associated with the Movement, became the centre of media attention. (Marwick 29)

Tadeusz Żuczkowski in his essay confirms what Marwick stated. Żuczkowski claims: “The ‘Angry Young Men’ label was employed by the press.” (Żuczkowski)

Further on, he goes more into details in explaining the origins of the expression “Angry

Young Men”.

The name is taken from Leslie Allen Paul’s Angry Young Man (1951) – an autobiography of a contemporary religious philosopher converted from Marxism to Christianity, dealing with angry youth in politics, left-wingism and unemployment during the 1930s. (Żuczkowski)

As it was suggested above, only “in 1956, the term started to be more often used in relation to a group of young writers and the heroes of their novels.” (Żuczkowski)

To conclude this subchapter I want to quote Marwick’s words which briefly sum up both the terms already discussed: “The Movement was dead, but it had expressed a coherent point of view […]; the Angry Young Man had always been something of a

19 media invention, but beneath the fantasy there were genuine stirrings in British culture

[…]” (Marwick 32).

III.II. What the Angry Young Men Were Angry About

This subchapter will mainly exploit the essay by Tadeusz Żuczkowski called What

Did the Angry Young Men Have to be Angry About? . This article suggests that the

Angry Young Men actually did not have anything to be angry about. Considering another source, Harry Ritchie asserts in his article: “No one was quite sure what they were angry about – the class system, perhaps, Suez, or the H-bomb – but they were clearly angry about something” (Ritchie). Żuczkowski describes the Nineteen-Fifties as a decade of affluence and proves it by quoting various important figures of that time

(including Prime Minister Macmillan) – these people claim that the social situation was simply good and that there was almost nothing to be angry about. However, the situation was not that idyllic as it seemed and as leading figures would claim.

To prove the first version, i.e. that everything was all right in the society of the

Nineteen-Fifties, we may quote the very beginning of Żuczkowski’s essay. He states that in the Fifties when

[…] war was over, rationing ceased, coal and electricity came back. Almost at once, affluence came. Suddenly, the shops were piled high with all sorts of goods. Boom was in the air. The nation rapidly moved forward from post-war harshness to [Prime Minister] Macmillan’s [quotation that] “most of our people never had it so good”. (Żuczkowski)

This description really does not sound pessimistic and one would guess that the situation in society described in that way could not allow anybody to be angry about anything. And the list of positive aspects of the Fifties could be much more longer.

Still there could be found negative sides to politics and society. And it was rather politics that worried more that the domestic social situation. As Żuczkowski puts it “the

1950s were not a nice time to live” (Żuczkowski). As worrying and problematic he

20 mentions the beginning of the Cold war or nuclear race where Britain got involved too.

The following quote confirms that the writers, too, were concerned:

The Angries attacked British foreign policy (Suez) and the post-war English Establishment in press articles. Osborne published one of the fiercest pieces of criticism in the Encounter. He regarded the English experiment with the H- bomb in the Pacific the meanest criminal swindle in the history of England. (Żuczkowski)

Besides the foreign policy of the United Kingdom there was another reason for the anger of the Angry Young Men. This problem was class and its boundaries that they were in most cases unable to get over. Tadeusz Żuczkowski suggests that the class problems were a frustrating factor for many people of the time. “Still another frustrating factor may have caused the ‘anger’ was the fact that the Angries were of working-class origin and welfare-state opportunity.” (Żuczkowski) By welfare-state opportunity is meant the fact that the Establishment considered the youth of the Fifties fortunate because of the affluence and all the achievements that the Fifties were offering to those young people. Nevertheless, the youth were discontent. They succumbed to various negative phenomena for example to the “problem of hypergamy, or marrying upwards” as Żuczkowski states in his essay. Both the issues (and many others) were not only typical of real living people but they were typical of the literary characters that were created by the Angry Young Men in their writings

What is interesting is the fact (as claimed by Żuczkowski) that the Angry Young

Men were angry with women too. More precisely, they attacked the status of women, or the change of the status of women with the arrival of affluence.

It was believed that affluence was less female labour than female consumption. The “housewife” – with her new washing machine, vacuum cleaner and New Look fashion wear – was the one to whom affluence was aimed and who was its prime beneficiary. (Żuczkowski)

21 Further on in is essay Żuczkowski gives concrete examples of what the Angry

Young Men were angry about concerning women in the era of affluence. It reads as follows:

As it has already been mentioned, the “female consumer” served as a metaphor for the “affluent society”. The Angries attacked effeminacy, the sum of those qualities which were supposed traditionally to exude from the worst in women: insignificance, snobbery, impertinence, voluptuousness, superficiality, materialism. (Żuczkowski)

The politics, class, women and other issues that these young writers were angry about will be discussed and reflected in Angry Young Men’s selected writings in the following chapters.

IV. Literary Reflections: How Were Contemporary Social Issues Reflected

in the Writings of the Angry Young Men

This chapter is divided into four subchapters, each devoted to one angry young author and his book; in the case of Alan Sillitoe there are two books. All the books were chosen to demonstrate some typical aspects of the society of the Nineteen-Fifties that the Angry Young Men were angry about.

IV.I. John Braine: Room at the Top

John Braine’s novel was first published in 1957. It is “an impressive realistic story about a young, impecunious careerist” (Stříbrný 735; my translation). 4 Its main hero, a young man called Joe Lampton who is of working class origin and who served in the army during World War II, is heading towards success in life and career. He is climbing the social ladder, breaking the rules of the post-war society with its class restrictions which were fixed boundaries within the society of those days. The story is told

4 (…) působivé realistické vyprávění o mladém kariéristovi (…).

22 retrospectively, thus John Braine “[g]ained a critical distance by letting his protagonist tell the whole story with a ten-year lapse of time […]” (Stříbrný 735; my translation). 5

The main and the most visible issues that reflect the post-war society in this novel are the class and warfare legacy.

As far as class is concerned, the novel portrays class distinctions and the huge gaps that lie between each class. It demonstrates the difficulty to cross the class boundaries. More precisely, Room at the Top shows representatives of the working class and of the middle class. Joe Lampton would probably end up working in some of the mills or factories, if he had not left his hometown of Dufton, to which he refers as

“Dead Dufton, […] Dirty Dufton, Dreary Dufton, Despicable Dufton” (Braine 81) where “no dreams were possible” (71). At one point Joe recalls his working-class father:

“He was a good workman; too good a workman to be sacked and too outspoken about his Labour convictions to be promoted” (79). Thus Joe he decided to begin an entirely new and different life in a city called Warley, taking up a job “as the Town Hall clerk”

(Braine 23). He wants to take the path from the working class to the middle class. In one moment, Lampton admits that he “was manoeuvring for position all the time” (Braine

64).

In Warley Joe is lodged at the Thompsons, a middle-class couple, who lost their son during the war. When Joe arrives, he gives a description of a typical middle-class bathroom in the Thompsons’s house:

The bathroom was the sort you’d expect to find in any middle-class home—green tiles, green enamel, chromium towel rails, a big mirror with toothmug and toothbrush holders, a steel cabinet, a flush-sided bath with a shower attachment, a steel cabinet, and a light operated by a cord instead of a switch. It was immaculately clean, smelling of scented soap and freshly laundered towels […]. (10-11)

5 Kritický odstup si získal tím, že dal svému protagonistovi vyprávět celý příběh s odstupem deseti let (…).

23 In a moment Joe gives a pretty realistic description of his working-class bathroom in Dufton where he had lived with his aunt and uncle:

The bathroom I’d used the night before I came to Warley had been adapted from a bedroom. At the time the houses […] were built it wasn’t considered that the working classes needed baths. It was a small room with pitch-pine flooring (if you weren’t careful you could pick up a nasty splinter) and brown wallpaper blotchy with splashes. Towels were kept in the cistern cupboard, which was generally full of drying undergarments. On the window sill were a razor, a stick of shaving soap, a tube of toothpaste, and a dingy mess of toothbrushes, used razor blades, face cloths, and no less than three cups with broken handles which were supposed to be used as shaving mugs but, obviously, from their encrusting of dust, never had been. (11)

Joe can see the differences and knows that he does not want to live again in conditions like those described above. He is decided to make a fortune and go to the imaginary Top. He wants to achieve a position, money, and a luxurious car: “Parked by a solicitor’s office […] was a green Aston-Martin tourer […]; it wasn’t the sort of vehicle for business or for family outings but quite simply a rich man’s toy” (23). Joe goes on: “The ownership of the Aston-Martin automatically placed the young man [the owner of the car] in a social class far above mine; but that ownership was simply a question of money” (23). Lampton is thinking about the ownership of the girl of the man with Aston-Martin as well: “[…] her ownership, too, was simply a question of money, of the price of the diamond ring on her left hand” (23). Joe admits that “[f]or a moment [he] hated him” and “tasted the sourness of envy” (23). Joe is longing for things like that: “I wanted an Aston-Martin I wanted a three-guinea linen shirt, I wanted a girl with a Riviera suntan—these were my rights, I felt […]” (24).

This is the reason why the working-class Joe starts courting an upper-class young girl, Susan Brow whom he met at the amateur theatre group in Warley. However, Susan is officially pledged to Jack Wales, a man of her own social rank, not Joe’s rank. When

Joe takes Susan to a rather expensive café he thinking:

24 It’s queer when I remember it—I have even bought meals at cafeterias when for a couple of shillings extra I could have had an eatable meal at a good restaurant. That evening with Susan, though, I walked into the café quite happily: she was my passport, it was her sort of place. (Braine 62)

Further on in the book, Joe repeats his “Susan-passport” to the Top, only in other words: “I was taking Susan not as Susan, but as a Grade A lovely, as the daughter of a factory owner, as the means of obtaining the key to the Aladdin’s cave of my ambitions” (117). To make his plan successful, Joe realizes that “[he] must transform

[himself] into a different person for her. […] Self-pity and class-consciousness weren’t included in that conception” (116).

Besides secretly dating Susan, Joe has another secret love affair with a middle- class, married woman, Alice Aisgill who is older than Joe and thus experienced in life.

It seems that Joe is internally more attracted to Alice because she is truly womanlike in comparison with Susan, who is rather girlish, inexperienced, innocent, sweet and more or less unengaged. In addition, she is the one who is on the Top, who has the wealth Joe is longing for.

And in the end, he gets it. Leaving Alice behind, he is dating Susan, and when it is revealed that she is pregnant, Susan’s father arranges for the young couple to get married and establishes Joe in his company. Mr. Brown says to Joe: “[…] you’re marrying her. With my consent. Right quick” (175). Brown offers Joe a job with a salary of “[t]housands to begin with” as well as “one of the firm’s cars” (178). This is what was on Joe’s mind at that moment:

There was a handshake, there was a talk of contract, there was tolerance—I’ve been young and daft myself —there was praise—You’re the sort of young man we want. There’s always room at the top —there was sternness—See her [i.e. Alice Aisgill] tomorrow and get it done with, I’ll not have it put off anymore — there was brandy and a cigar, there was a lift back to Warley in the Bentley; and I said yes to everything quite convincingly, to judge from Brown’s satisfied expression […]. (Braine 179)

25 Joe Lampton made his way to the Top as he had planned from the first moment.

He had followed the path to the success purposefully, sometimes with blunders, but he finally made his dream of wealth come true.

Concerning the other topic – the warfare legacy – I would like to touch upon two things connected to it. The first one is the impact that the air raids as a part of war had on Joe Lampton and his family. The second is the rationing, so typical of post-war

Britain.

The impact of war in the form of the blitz did not avoid the Lamptons. Joe’s parents died during the air raid in 1941, as he is thinking back during his Christmas visit to uncle and aunt in Dufton. One evening in Dufton he “went past [his] old home” (76) which initiated his bad memories.

I paused by the gap where our house had stood; I had no desire to receive old memories but instantly, unbidden, the events of that morning in 1941—the bad Morning, the Death Morning—unreeled themselves like a film. […] It was the smell which had upset me most. […] on the Bad Morning it had been chokingly strong—the blitz smell, damp plaster and bonemeal. (76)

Joe enters the ruins of his old home and recalls the way in which his parents died:

“Father and Mother had gone to bed when the bomb dropped. The siren had sounded but it was unlikely that they’d taken any notice. Dufton simply wasn’t worth the trouble of raiding. They’d died instantly […]”. (77) He is struck by the suddenly revived memories of the days already long gone: “[…] images of pain and distress, more memories of things I’d seen during the war and would rather have forgotten, rose to the surface of my mind” (80).

The rationing was another typical feature of the post-war Britain and is referred to it in Braine’s novel. Two examples from the book were chosen to demonstrate how the rationing influenced people after Wolrd War II.

26 The first reference to the rationing is made when Alice wants Joe to come to her place for a supper but Joe hesitates, saying: “The rations—” (55). He knows very well that in the post-war years there is shortage of food and he does not want to take something that Alice and her husband might be later short of.

Further on in the novel there are mentioned coupons on sweets. It is in the conversation between Joe and Susan during one of their dates. Susan says: “I adore treacle toffee. I wish I had some now, but all my coupons are gone” (112). As it was explained in chapter II., “[i]n the first post-war years almost everything was rationed”, even “chocolate and sweets” (Marwick 70).

Joe Lampton is an angry young man because he is one of those who disagreed with the social system. He is angry with his working-class origins that were devoid of the opportunity to gain wealth and better position in the society as well as a decent girl from the Top. This is the reason for Joe’s unscrupulous and self-confident climbing of the social ladder to achieve his aim.

IV.II. John Osborne: Look Back in Anger

Look Back in Anger is the only drama discussed in this thesis. Although it is in minority here it is not of minor interest, since Look Back in Anger is definitely one of the “ultimate classics” of what the “Angries” produced and what the realm of drama produced in general.

“The first night of Look Back in Anger was on 8 May 1956. The newspaper critics the next morning damned it with faint praise or outraged virtue […]” (Trussler 7). But later the play “was hailed as revolutionary” (7) and launched Osborne to fame. And even nowadays Osborne’s drama is highly appreciated and staged worldwide. If we put it in simple words, Look Back in Anger has been seen as exceptional drama since it was staged for the first time. This has been because

27 Osborne had the desire to shock, which in turn, for a short time in the late 1950s and early 1960s, put theatre at the centre of popular media attention, and made it a contentious space of representation. With the impact of Look Back in Anger , English theatre was no longer about the well-made play, about formal experiment or even about murders in country houses. Theatre was now about society, about the highly publicised and mythologised changes in English society and culture. (Brannigan 138)

In other words, what Brannigan asserts in the previous quotation shows the impact that Osborne’s drama has caused in the realm of culture. There was an advance in the development of drama in general. What is more, this cultural impact did not appear only with Osborne but with the other Angry Young Men as well. They influenced culture and initiated the development in literature, too.

What were thus the themes of Osborne’s plays like that they caused such disturbance? We may get an answer in Zdeněk Stříbrný’s book. He points out that in his plays

[…] Osborne started to create socially critical plots that criticized with wrathful eloquence the ruling British society and its class barriers. He thus became the spokesman of a generation that was disappointed and embittered by both the reactionary post-war policy of the Conservative Government, and the compromise and halfway practice of the Labour politicians. (667; my translation) 6

Besides his “angry” perspective on the Government and politics, Osborne has also merit in the fact that he “put the plays with topical themes through the London theatres and smoothed the path for other contemporary dramatists” (Stříbrný 669; my translation). 7

Look Back in Anger demonstrates the angry young man prototype. Here the angry young man is Jimmy Porter, who is actually angry about everything and nothing at the same time. He is rude to his wife Alison, rude to his friends, or rather a friend – Cliff –

6 (…) začal Osborne vytvářet sociálně vyhrocené zápletky a realistické postavy, které s hněvivou výmluvností kritizovaly vládnoucí britskou společnost a její třídní přehrady. Stal se tak mluvčím generace zklamané a rozhořčené jak zpátečnickou poválečnou politikou konzervativní vlády, tak kompromisními a polovičatými postupy labouristů. 7 (…) prosadil na londýnských divadlech hry s aktuální tématikou a prorazil cestu dalším současným dramatikům.

28 who lives in the room next door. It may seem that he has almost no friends. He is angry, rude, and violent. He shouts at people who are around him, but the actual reason for his anger seems somewhat hidden – he may seem as a rebel without a cause (this can be related to some other angry young heroes and the Angry Young Men as well). But under the veil of unbound anger we can again find the cause in society and social structures of that era, in his case the discontent with the state of affairs around him. To learn who

Jimmy Porter really is, what is his nature like, it is opportune to quote here John

Osborne’s own description of Jimmy from the beginning of the play:

He is a disconcerting mixture of sincerity and cheerful malice, of tenderness and freebooting cruelty; restless, importunate, full of pride, a combination which alienates the sensitive and insensitive alike. Blistering honesty, or apparent honesty, like his, makes new friends. To many he may seem sensitive to the point of vulgarity. To others, he is simply a loudmouth. (Osborne 1-2)

As Simon Trussler states “ Look Back in Anger has strong social undertones” (10).

Let us then have a closer look at the issues that bother Jimmy Porter as an angry young man. It is not entirely easy to trace these issues, for it is a play and primarily intended to be staged, and is devoid of long realistic descriptions of details. Nevertheless, these

“angry” issues of the Nineteen-Fifties are present and can be traced when the text is read carefully. These are: attitude towards women and class.

Concerning the first issue, the attitude towards women, Tadeusz Żuczkowski presents quite a daring theory: “It is in the work of Osborne where this attack on women becomes most extreme. It can be argued that the real subject of the play was neither social injustice nor hypocrisy but the debasement and degradation of women”

(Żuczkowski). John Brannigan also makes a remark on Porter’s behaviour towards women. It reads: “Jimmy Porter’s violent outbursts tend to be directed against women, rather than the social or political order […]” (Brannigan 137). Jimmy’s way of treating

29 his wife Alison, as well as Alison’s friend Helena of whom Jimmy says that she is “one of [his] natural enemies” (Osborne 33-34) is rude and insensitive.

Jimmy gets sometimes annoyed with details that are for most people imperceptible. But not for Jimmy. He is bothered with common things that his wife does. He says about Alison to Cliff:

She’s so clumsy. I watch for her to do the same things every night. The way she jumps on the bed, as if she were stamping on someone’s face, and draws the curtains back with a great clatter, in that casually destructive way of hers. It’s like someone launching a battleship. Have you ever noticed how noisy women are? […] Have you? The way they kick the floor about, simply walking over it? Or have you watched them sitting at their dressing tables, dropping their weapons and banging down their bits of boxes and brushes and lipsticks? (Osborne 19)

It may seem that every step Alison takes and every move she makes disturbs Jimmy and contributes to his anger even more.

In act two, after one of the violent and noisy quarrels between Jimmy, Alison and

Helena (who is staying at the same place now), Alison wants just “a little peace” (60).

But Jimmy continues reproaching Alison for almost everything when she wants to go to church with Helena. Jimmy is enraged because the only time when Alison had been to church was when they were getting married. Jimmy, full of rage, says to Alison:

Perhaps, one day, you may want to come back. I shall wait for that day. I want to stand up in your tears, and splash about in them, and sing. I want to be there when you grovel. I want to be there, I want to watch it, I want the front seat. […]. I want to see your face rubbed in the mud – that’s all I can hope for. There’s nothing else I want any longer. (Osborne 61)

This angry quote of Jimmy proves what has been stated about his nature in the beginning of this chapter. Malice and cruelty are obvious in this quote. What is more, the quotation is a kind of anticipation of what will really happen later. Towards the close of the play, Alison (who meanwhile left Jimmy and whose place at his side was

30 taken by Helena) returns, really desperate and exhausted because she lost her and

Jimmy’s baby.

As far as the issue of class is concerned in this drama, it can be introduced by this quote, clearly outlining who is of what background in the play:

Osborne’s play, indeed sets up a dramatic contrast between the decorum and emotional restraint of its middle-class characters, Alison, Helena and Colonel Redfern [Alison’s father], and the rebellious energy and articulate ‘anger’ of its working-class characters, Jimmy Porter and Cliff Lewis. (Brannigan 136)

As we can see, the class issue is connected to Jimmy’s rude behaviour towards Alison.

Each of these two comes from a different social background, from a different class.

Stříbrný remarks: “[…] Jimmy Porter, coming from the working-class background, could have graduated from university due to the state scholarship, but he did not find adequate employment in the privileged society” (667; my translation). 8 Instead of having a proper job “Jimmy has […] chosen to make a meagre living by running a sweet-stall in an anonymous provincial town” (Trussler 9). He could have been earning much more money if he had used his intellect and education in a better job than running a sweet-stall.

If we return to Jimmy’s wife Alison, she is of “upper-class” origin as Trussler puts it: “[…] his [i.e. Jimmy’s] marriage to Alison is a symbolic defiance of her upper- class parents—whose sense of the stable values of an imperial past he at once despises and envies” (Trussler 10). What is interesting in connection to Alison’s parents is the way in which Jimmy looks upon them. Generally, he despises them for their middle- class background with everything this label bears within. But having a closer look at the matter, he seems to think differently of Alison’s father and her mother. Concerning

Jimmy’s father-in-law, Colonel Redfern, he makes rather ironic remarks about him that have something to do with Colonel’s class affiliation. Let me quote some examples

8 (…) Jimmy Porter, pocházející z dělnického prostředí, mohl díky státnímu stipendiu absolvovat univerzitu, ale nenašel v privilegované společnosti odpovídající zaměstnání.

31 from the play: “[…] Daddy – still casting well-fed glances back to the Edwardian twilight from his comfortable, disenfranchised wilderness” (9). But he actually never says anything really cruel about Colonel Redfern. Jimmy saves the cruel words for

Alison’s mother. All his hatred culminates in Jimmy saying about his mother-in-law:

“That old bitch should be dead” (53). Quite brutal words, but Jimmy has a reason for saying them because he hates Alison’s mother as much as she hates him. She cannot bear the fact that her daughter would marry someone like Jimmy, someone of working- class origins. She wanted to do anything to prevent the marriage of Jimmy and Alison.

As Jimmy says:

There is no limit to what the middle-aged mummy will do in the holy crusade against ruffians like me. […] I knew that, to protect her innocent young, she wouldn’t hesitate to cheat, lie, bully and blackmail. […] So she hires detectives to watch me […]. (52)

As it turns out, when Colonel Redfern appears on the scene, he shows that he is somewhat reconciled with the fact that his daughter married someone like Jimmy, so he is in the end perceived rather as likable character in comparison with his wife who stays behind the scenes as the evil one.

As we have learned above, Jimmy’s friend Cliff is of working-class origin as well.

And this is probably why Jimmy maintains this friendship between them. In the play,

Cliff says:

Well, I suppose he and I think the same about a lot of things, because we’re alike in some ways. We both come from working people if you like. Oh I know some of his mother’s relatives are pretty posh, but he hates them as much as he hates yours. Don’t quite know why. Anyway, he gets on with me because I’m common. (Osborne 27)

To sum up, the themes discussed above, women and class, cannot be strictly divided in Osborne’s play, as one is connected to the other: Jimmy against Alison in terms of the realtionship of a man and a woman, as well as Jimmy against Alison (and

32 her friends and family) in terms of class distinction – working-class man and a middle- class woman.

IV. III. Kingsley Amis: Lucky Jim

Kingsley Amis can be viewed as one of the essential figures of the whole movement, or to be more precise, of both the movements: The Movement and The

Angry Young Men since he was a member of both of them. Stříbrný says about him:

“Kingsley Amis (b. 1922) brought about the biggest response in England and abroad with his humoristic novel Lucky Jim […]” (732; my translation) 9 and in general, his

“early novels present us with sardonic vision of British society in the 1950s” (Bradford

21). Lucky Jim , published in 1954, can be considered one of the essentials among the books of the Angry Young Men. As Stříbrný goes on, he points out that:

Amis’ first novel combined exuberant verbal and situation comedy with qrotesquely masked satire, attacking stiffness, authoritativeness, hypocrisy, and impotence of both the old academia and of all of the city notables. (732; my translation) 10

This quotation outlines what will be the issues to discuss in this chapter. It can be summed up into the statement that the issue which is attacked in Lucky Jim is the structure. And the structure, or the system is the thing that the Angry Young Men disliked.

Richard Bradford’s publication on Kingsley Amis’s literary works offers another general introduction to Lucky Jim as well as to his other characters that followed:

Lucky Jim ’s status as the first satirical ‘campus novel’ and our tendency to automatically categorize it as a part of the 50s school of angry realism can easily cloud our awareness of its rather bizarre originality. Amis has since created figures who bear a reasonably close resemblance to Jim Dixon but he has not repeated the sustained effect of interweaving the manic and

9 Největší ohlas v Anglii i v zahraničí vyvolal Kingsley Amis (nar. 1922) humoristickým románem Šťastný Jim (…). 10 Amisova románová prvotina spojovala bujnou slovní a situační komiku s groteskně maskovanou satirou, útočící proti koženosti, autoritářství, pokrytectví a impotenci staré akademické obce i celé městské honorace.

33 directionless energy of the central figure with the structure and narrative thread of the novel. (Bradford 32)

The so-called campus novel is, according to the Merriam-Webster’s Encyclopedia of Literature , “[a] novel set on a university campus, usually written by someone who is or was an academic. Examples include Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim (1954), John Barth’s

Giles Goat-Boy (1966), and Robertson Davies’ The Rebel Angels (1981)” (203).

Since the novel is set in a humoristic tone, it may be difficult to trace the grave and painful issues that are more visible for example in the working-class novels by

Sillitoe. Nevertheless, the issues are really there but are presented to the readers in not that much pessimistic way.

The novel is set at a provincial university. The main hero, young Jim Dixon, is a

Medieval History lecturer there at the History Department.

[He] is at the centre of a narrative which provides a fast-moving guide to the social, aesthetic, political and mental peculiarities of the early 50s, but instead of pausing to reflect upon anything in particular, his own sense of genial panic always shifts us rapidly into the next episode of life imitating farce. (Bradford 32)

As far as his status at university is concerned he is an “underling” (Amis 41) of old Professor Welch. Dixon is trying to please Welch as much as he can, because it is upon Welch whether Jim would stay on as a lecturer at the university or not. As the story unfolds it is revealed that Jim actually dislikes his job, he is bored with it, and sees no sense in what he is doing and why he is doing that. He made no big effort to get his current job; it is more likely that the job, teaching medieval history, came to him. He explains:

[…] the reason why I’m a medievalist […] is that the medieval papers were a soft option in the Leicester course, so I specialized in them. Then when I applied for the job here, I naturally made a big point of that, because it looked better to seem interested in something specific. It’s why I got the job instead of that clever boy from Oxford who mucked himself up at the interview by chewing the fat about modern theories of interpretation. (Amis 33)

34 When Stříbrný mentioned hypocrisy, he had probably meant the hypocrisy of authorities. But in the quote above there may be traced hypocrisy of Jim himself, not being any authority. Here the key phrase is “to seem interested”. He is not much interested in what he is doing; he is interested in getting the job and is able to pretend that he is interested in medieval stuff. Nevertheless, there is “Jim’s lively awareness of the absurdities and hypocrisies of his world […]” (Bradford 29). He is aware that the system is wrong, however, he has to conform to its rules if he wants retain his post and be possibly promoted. At the same time Jim is disgusted that he has to do things in spite of himself.

[…] neither of them [i.e. Dixon and Amis] seems to be willing to offer the reader an alternative to the condition of social and cultural banality into which England, or at least provincial England seems to have sunk. (Bradford 29)

If we omit the rather weak theory of Jim’s hypocrisy, we may assume that all that he does throughout the book is mocking the hypocrisy of the over-rigid university hierarchy and system with its over-rigid professors.

Besides hypocrisy Dixon has to deal with another quality of the provincial nobility which is haughtiness. Here it is represented through the character of Bertrand Welch, an artist, a painter, living mostly in London. This makes him feel that he is something more than the other people, that he is someone special, extraordinary. Jim faces his haughtiness and arrogance when Bertrand warns him “to keep of the grass where

[Christine was] concerned” (Amis 222). Bertrand goes: “ ‘I gave you a straight warning to leave Christine alone. When I say that sort of thing I expect people to have the sense to do as I say. Why haven’t you” (Amis 210).

Jim Dixon is the Angry Young Men because he crosses the boundaries; he does not respect the rules of the university. He is mocking the system – partly consciously,

35 for example when preparing a script for his important lecture that should help him to keep his job, he pretends to be a monkey when rehearsing the text:

With a long, jabbering belch, Dixon got up from the chair where he’d been writing this and did his ape imitation all round the room. With one arm bent at the elbow so that the fingers brushed the armpit, the other crooked in the air so that the inside of the forearm lay across the top of his head, he wove with bent knees and hunched, rocking shoulders across to the bed, upon which he jumped up and down a few times, gibbering to himself. (Amis 209)

Jim is not avoiding going to “public houses” (Bradford 23), often he does “

‘scamped jobs’ ” (23) to people who he dislikes, for example his colleague from university Johns who is eavesdropping and then informs the Welches in order to spoil

Jim’s advance in career and ingratiate oneself with Professor Welch. His mischievous activities directed mainly on already mentioned Johns, Mrs. Welch, and Bertrand

Welch, Professor’s son, continue with “anonymous letters and telephone conversations

[and] form an inaccurate, but immediately recognizable, summary of the fictional activities of Jim Dixon […]” (Bradford 23).

He also makes blunders deliberately, being involved into situations he does not expect or he gets drunk at the wrong time and place, mainly in the presence of people who have influence over his job. One of such examples is Jim’s attending Welch’s boring arty weekend where he’s “got to turn up, but [he] can’t face the whole Sunday there” (Amis 34). Thus Jim arranges a trick – he asks his friend Atkinson to do him a favour:

‘Could you ring me at this [Welch’s] number about eleven on Sunday morning?’ […] ‘If you can’t get hold of me tell whoever answers that my parents have turned up here out of the blue and I will please come back as soon as I can […]’. (34)

The conversation is eavesdropped by sneaky Johns who reveals Jim’s plan to Mrs.

Welch, causing a shame to Dixon. In addition, when Jim disappears from the arty evening, Johns reveals that Dixon went probably to the pub. Before the weekend at the

36 Welches, he says to Margaret Peel, his colleague from the university, that he does not want to attend the event because he is not trained in singing, music, and arts in general.

He knows that old Welch wants to test him: “[…] I can’t sing, I can’t act, I can hardly read and thank God I can’t read music. […] He wants to test my reactions to culture, see whether I’m a fit person to teach in a university, see” (Amis 24). What is more, during the week-end “he quarrels with the Professor’s son, gets drunk and sets his bed on fire with a forgotten cigarette” (Allen 281).

In the society that Jim is situated in he simply must struggle for the position because the rules are like that. If one wants to achieve success and position, he has to try hard and do his best, even though it is not completely his belief and conviction. This is exactly the case of Dixon. Although he knows what he should do, he is very uncertain at times. This concerns his career and also his private life – women. Very often he asks himself for the sense of all the doings and things. Here is an example concerning his uncertainty with women, more precisely with a girl called Christine Callaghan, a girlfriend of Welch’s son, to whom Jim is attracted:

[…] he felt romantically excited. But he’d got no business to feel that, had he? What he was doing here, after all? Whatever it was leading towards, it was certainly leading away from the course his life had been pursuing for the last eight months and this thought justified his excitement and filled him with reassurance and hope. All positive change was good; standing still, growing to the spot, was always bad. (Amis 131)

From this extract it seems that the uncertainty about his affair with Christine gives Jim a feeling of certainty, which he definitely does not have at the university. He is now sure that he must make some change by himself, not to do what is expected from him to do by the other people.

This is not for the first time that Jim is questioning himself in his mind. It was also in an intimate situation with Margaret Peel; he was considering whether to start a love affair with her or not:

37 Why shouldn’t he go on? It seemed he’d be able to, though he couldn’t tell how far. Did he want to? Yes, in a way, but was it fair to her? […] Was it fair to her? Was it fair to him? […] No, it wouldn’t be fair to him. And it certainly wouldn’t be fair to her […]. (Amis 58)

Jim’s effort to conform to the rules of social life is commented on by Christine at one point. She gives a true picture of how it is with Jim:

Don’t you think people ever do things because they want to do them, because they want to do what’s for the best? I don’t see how it helps to call trying to do the right thing caution and lack of guts. Doing what you know you’ve got to do’s horrible sometimes, but that doesn’t mean to say it isn’t worth doing. (Amis 206)

In the novel, Jim makes a particular remark, although in his thoughts only, on the current events of the Nineteen-Fifties and its problems in connection to his field – the

Medieval Period:

The hydrogen bomb, the South African Government, Chiang Kaishek, Senator McCarthy himself, […] seem a light price to pay for no longer being in the Middle Ages. Had people ever been as nasty, as self-indulgent, as dull, as miserable, as cocksure, as bad at art, as dismally ludicrous or as wrong as they’d been in the […] Middle Ages? (Amis 88)

Dixon’s effort to please the authorities seems to be futile. Everything culminates at the lecture Jim is about to give, although he does not want to; Professor Welch is the one who wants him to give the lecture on medieval culture. It is the last in the row of his blunders. Before the lecture Jim gets slightly drunk which contributes to the fact that the whole lecture ends up in a total fiasco; it is a final confirmation of his not staying any longer at the university. Jim had tried clumsily and finally he failed to gain a better position by conforming to the rules set by the authorities.

But in the end Jim actually achieves what he wanted – a position, beloved girlfriend, and wealth. The failure of the lecture amused no one but a man named Julius

Gore-Urquhart, “a rich devotee of the arts” (Amis 47). This wealthy man was the only one laughing person from those present at the lecture. He finds Jim likeable and offers him a job when Jim is made redundant. At the university, Jim had tried to maintain the

38 job he actually disliked and found boring. Before he got Gore-Urquhart’s job offer he had a vision:

If only I could get hold of a millionaire I’d be worth a bag of money to him. He could send me on ahead into dinners and cocktail-parties and night-clubs, just for five minutes, and then by looking at me he’d be able to read off the boredom-coefficient of any gathering. (219)

This was an anticipation of the wealthy man’s job offer which would comprise

“[s]ort of private secretarial work. Not much correspondence, though; […]. It’ll be mainly meeting people or telling people I can’t meet them” (238). Jim accepts. What is more, Gore-Urquhart is in fact the uncle of Christine Callaghan, which makes it possible for Jim to be dating her. In the end, Jim achieved the real fortune not by effort, but he achieved it accidentally, by luck.

If we compare Jim Dixon with the other angry young heroes, he resembles the character of Joe Lampton the most. Both of these men have the same goal, that is to achieve success and position higher than is their expected place within the society.

Nevertheless, the methods of Jim are more blundering and comical and more likely to fail; he often makes trips on pursuit of happiness. It is only by the already mentioned luck and accident that Jim achieves a good position and the heart of the girl he wanted.

Joe Lampton seems to be more composed and concentrated in his way to the top, and step by step, sometimes recklessly, he is climbing the social ladder exactly in the way he had planned it.

To conclude it should be pointed out “that there had never before been a literary presence like Jim Dixon. His synthesis of social insight and farcical misbehaviour makes it difficult to experience or to actively articulate an objective response to him”

(Bradford 25). He may be perceived as a fool and a clown, but he is actually one of the very few “normal” people at university, setting the mirror to the system and laughing behind it. Finally, “Amis succeeded in reflecting the mood and atmosphere of

39 contemporary life” (Bradford 32) and thus established himself among the leading literary figures of the angry Nineteen-Fifties.

IV.IV. Alan Sillitoe: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning ; The Loneliness

of the Long-distance Runner

Alan Sillitoe was not a direct member of the group of the Angry Young Men.

However, when discussing the decade of the Nineteen-Fifties he is more than often included. The reason why I included him and his books into this thesis is simple – the heroes of the two books analyzed below are actually angry young men.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe was first published in 1958.

We can read the author’s aim a justification of the book in the introduction. Sillitoe writes: “Many people make the mistake of assuming that the novel is autobiographical,

[…]” (Sillitoe 7). He claims this because Sillitoe himself “at the age of fourteen went to work in a bicycle factory where his father was employed” (Hennessy 12). The same life story is the story of Arthur Seaton, who is the main hero of the novel. Sillitoe continues:

“It is not [biographical], at least not in the strictest sense of the word. When I was writing it I had not been in a factory for ten years (Sillitoe 7).” Sillitoe was just “trying to portray ordinary people as [he] knew them, and in such a way they would recognise themselves” (Sillitoe 8).

As far as the structure of the novel is concerned, it is divided into two parts:

Saturday night that takes up most of the pages, and the second part, not surprisingly, is called Sunday Morning . Both of the names of the two parts of the book can be read metaphorically. Saturday nights are usually linked with going out for a drink, partying, and it is in the first part that the reader witnesses the main hero getting drunk every

Saturday. The second part representing a Sunday morning can be read as a metaphor of

40 sobering up after getting drunk the previous night. And it is in this part that the main hero somewhat settles down with a nice girl and has a perspective to lead a decent life.

Alan Sillitoe is considered to be an author who was writing books that fall into the category of the so-called “working class novel” and Saturday Night and Sunday

Morning falls into this category as well.

In post-war England, working class authors first appeared towards the close of the Nineteen-Fifties and the beginning of the Nineteen-Sixties. They had never created a “movement” or a “group” of an attractive name; their only connection was writing about working class environment. (Hilský 34; my translation) 11

Hilský’s comment provides a definition of sorts for the working class authors.

There were other representatives of the working class novel than just Alan Sillitoe.

Besides him for example David Storey should be mentioned. The heroes of the working class novel shared certain characteristics:

Unlike the “angry” intellectual from Amis’s and Wain’s novels the new working class hero has much closer relation to the present community, which he came from, and lacks the ambition so much typical of the “angry young men”, that is to move a step higher on the social ladder. (Hilský 34; my translation) 12

Here it is possible to see the difference between the typical angry young man and a working class hero. The angry young man is full of discontent with his position within society and wants to move forward, wants to climb higher on the social ladder. On the other hand, the working class hero is somewhat reconciled with his position, but it does not mean that he is fully content. He has his troubles as well.

As it is mentioned above, here the troubled angry young man is named Arthur

Seaton and “ ‘[h]e’s on’y twenty-one […]’ ” (Sillitoe 10). He is a member of the

11 Dělničtí autoři se v poválečné Anglii poprvé ozvali na sklonku padesátých a na počátku šedesátých let. Nikdy nevytvořili „hnutí“či „skupinu“ s atraktivním názvem, spojovalo je pouze to, že psali o dělnickém prostředí. 12 Na rozdíl od „rozhněvaného“ intelektuála z románů Amisových a Wainových má nový dělnický hrdina mnohem užší vztah k současné komunitě, z níž vzešel, a postrádá onu ambici, tolik příznačnou pro „rozhněvance“, posunout se o stupínek výše na společenském žebříčku.

41 working class: every day he is sweating at the lathe at the bicycle factory exactly as his father is. The novel’s “events are securely rooted in working-class life as it was at that time […]” (Hennessy 4). To relieve himself from his all-week-long drudgery in the factory, Arthur gets regularly drunk on Saturday nights, because on Friday he gets his wage and he wants to enjoy his money as much as he can. How much he adores

Saturday booze-ups is shown in the following extract from the book:

For it was Saturday night, the best and bingiest glad-time of the week, one of the fifty-two holidays in the slow-turning Big Wheel of the year, a violent preamble to a prostrate Sabbath. Piled-up passions were exploded on Saturday night, and the effect of a week’s monotonous graft in the factory was swilled out of your system in a burst of goodwill. (9)

To get drunk every Saturday means to disrupt the monotony of work. In addition, this fact can be seen as a kind of rebellion against something; rebellion against his way of life rather than the social system as a whole. Nevertheless, throughout the novel, there are several comments on the British Government of the time.

In addition to the portrait of Arthur’s rather indecent drunkard life style, I would like to comment also on some features of the book that are more or less related to the

Angry Young Men’s attitudes and the social situation in general. These are brief comments on the Government of Britain from Arthur’s perspective, the warfare legacy, the attitude towards women and a brief comment on the consumer society of the

Nineteen-Fifties.

To begin with, let us have a look at Arthur Seaton’s comments on the British

Government and politics in general. Concerning Arthur’s political thinking it is clear that he is not a supporter of the current Government of the Conservative Party. Neither is he a supporter of the Labour Party. He shows his opinion on politics by calling the

Conservatives “big fat Tory bastards” (Sillitoe 36) and the members of the Labour Party are actually “Labour bleeders” (36). Arthur continues: “ They [the Labour Party] rob

42 our wage packets every week with insurance and income tax and try to tell us it’s all for our own good” (36). What is interesting is Arthur’s opinion on communists. He does not like their idea of “share and share alike” (36). However, he admits one thing to his friend Jack: “[…] did I tell yer, Jack, I voted communist at the last election? I did because I thought the poor bloke wouldn’t get any votes. I allus like to ’elp the losin’ side” (36). This attitude however seems to be rather one of scorn than one of pity.

The warfare theme appears in Arthur’s conversation about war with his uncle

George who was told by someone in the market “that he’d read in the paper as a war was goin’ ter start in three month’s time” (177). George is obviously afraid of “rationing coming in again” and “a terrible shortage of food in war” (177). In Arthur and George’s conversation there is one allusion to Cold War, which was also a big issue in the

Nineteen-Fifties, and this allusion is the expression “an atom bomb”. Arthur goes: “ ‘If they drop an atom bomb a hundred miles away from Nottingham even, it’ll make all the soil dead […]’ ” (177).

Arthur’s view of the army is negative as well. He spent there two years and after this experience he claims this: “ ‘The on’y thing the army cures you on […] is never to join the army again. They’re dead good at that’ ” (29). Or: “Being in the army’s no life even at the best of times. I know, because I’ve been in” (99). What is more Arthur bears with aversion his military training which he has to undergo and calls it “purgat’ry”

(133)

Arthur and his attitude toward women is another issue to be discussed here. Arthur has an affair with Brenda, who is the wife of his friend from the factory – Jack. In addition, Brenda and Jack have children. Later on, Arthur starts an affair with Winnie,

Brenda’s sister, whose husband is abroad because he is a soldier. These circumstances lead to no good for Arthur and finally, when everything concerning his affairs with both

43 of the married women is revealed, Arthur is beaten up by Winnie’s husband Bill who returned home. Bill is told by Jack where he can come across Arthur to beat him up. In the end, Arthur meets a young girl called Doreen with whom he seems to settle down finally. Although Arthur carries on with two married women, he wouldn’t tolerate such behaviour if it were his wife:

If ever I get married, he thought, and have a wife that carries on like Brenda and Winnie carry on, I’ll give her the biggest pasting any woman ever had. I’d kill her. My wife’ll have to look after any kids I fill her with, keep the house spotless. And if she’s good at that I might let her go to the pictures now and again and take her out for a drink on Saturday. But if I thought she was carrying on behind my back she’d be sent back to her mother with two black eyes before she knew what’s happening. By God she would. (150)

This attitude of Arthur here is somewhat similar to the attitude mentioned above in the chapter III.II., meaning that the Angry Young Men were angry about their women in the way that with the arrival of affluence the status of women has changed. Let me quote Żuczkowski again: “The Angries attacked effeminacy, the sum of those qualities which were supposed traditionally to exude from the worst in women: insignificance, snobbery, impertinence, voluptuousness, superficiality, materialism” (Żuczkowski).

As far as the technical advance of the Nineteen-Fifties is concerned, there are several comments throughout the novel on the topic; especially if we have in mind the television boom as a part of consumer society and affluence. In the Seaton family, there is a television set as well. It is taken as a mark of deserved good living and happiness in this working class family. Arthur “was glad to see the TV standing in a corner of the living-room” (26). Arthur thinks that especially his father deserves the television: “The old man was happy at last, anyway, and he deserved to be happy, after all the years before the war on the dole, five kids and the big miserying that went with no money and no way of getting any” (26). Arthur’s sister Margaret and her family have their television set as well and are proud of it, at least that is the impression when she was

44 telling Arthur “that she’d had a television set installed” (187-188). She goes on: “ ‘It’s marvellous, our Arthur. I never thought I’d be able to afford one, but Albert don’t drink so much anymore, and he said he’d pay the thirty-bob a week’ ” (188). But Arthur is not that excited about televisions:

I’d love it if big Black Marias came down all the streets and men got out with hatchets to go in every house and smash the tellies. Everybody’d go crackers. They wouldn’t know what to do. There’d be a revolution. I’m sure there would, they’d blow-up the Council House and set fire to the Castle. It wouldn’t bother me if there weren’t any television sets, though, not one bit. (188)

In Arthur’s reaction the criticism of the consumer society is obvious. He can objectively see that people go mad about having television sets. All of Arthur’s above critical attitudes reflect his anger and scorn of conformity of the contemporary society.

The Loneliness of the Long-distance Runner is a short story of about fifty pages, and was published in 1959. It is written in the form of first-person narrative and thus enables the readers to have a closer look into the thoughts of the angry young man named Smith. The reader “plunges […] into Smiths’s mind” (Hennessy 6), he can observe “the concentration of his [Smith’s] hatred of a social system that […] has turned him into a criminal […]” (6). He is seventeen years old, which differentiates him from all the angry young heroes described above – none of them was younger than twenty years. However, Smith’s age is no handicap among the angry young heroes. Although young, he has a lot of experience, mainly in the negative sense. At the moment of telling his story, Smith is placed in a Borstal in Essex. Borstal is a detention home where young criminals are supposed to be re-educated in order to lead honest life. Smith ended up in Borstal because he had robbed a bakery and he had been previously placed in remand homes for minor criminal activity.

In order to stick to the previously staked out aim of the thesis – to reflect the painful issues of the Nineteen-Fifties – the issue of class should be discussed here.

45 Smith comes from a working class family based in Nottingham. His father had worked in the factory before he died and his son, Smith, had “normally sweated [his] thin guts out on a milling-machine” (Sillitoe 20) but after his father’s death and his mother collecting the money from the factory where the father had worked, Smith stopped working and together with his mother and brothers and sisters commenced a big spending spree. The children “got […] dolled up in new clothes. Then [their mother] ordered a twenty-one-inch telly, a new carpet […] and took a taxi home with bags of grub and a new fur coat” (20). Mentioning the telly points to another typical feature of the Nineteen-Fifties and this is the technical development during the decade. Television was a part of a living standard at the time. And thus the mother takes the advantage of money and raises the living standard of her working class family just a little bit. When they had run out of money, Smith did not want to return back to the factory because there was an easier way to get money without much effort and this was stealing money.

And that is how he got to the Borstal in the end.

The Angry Young Men often disagreed with the Government and its policy. Smith also disagrees, but not with the Government of Britain. Concerning the Government, it can be said that Smith is generally uninterested. “Government wars aren’t my wars; they’ve got nowt to do with me, […]” (Sillitoe 17). Nevertheless, he is angry with some kind of establishment. This establishment is that of the Borstal and the way in which the youth are treated there. Smith points out the inequality between the Borstal establishment and the inmates. “If only ‘them’ and ‘us’ had the same ideas we’d get on like a house on fire, but they don’t see eye to eye with us and we don’t see eye to eye with them, so that’s how it stands and how it will always stand.” (Sillitoe 7-8)

Throughout the book it is obvious that Smith looks down on the members of the Borstal establishment. He may seem arrogant from time to time, calling the establishment

46 names such as “bastards” (12) and generally, he considers them stupid in a way. The establishment is stupid in thinking that long-distance running would re-educate Smith, but they are wrong. By making Smith a long-distance runner they allowed him to be free in a way – they allowed him to have a moment for himself and to think about things, which was not normally possible among the walls of the Borstal. Long-distance running made Smith somewhat happy, it gave him the freedom:

Because when on a raw and frosty morning I get up at five o’clock and stand shivering my belly off on the stone floor and all the rest still have another hour to snooze before the bells go, I slink downstairs through all the corridors to the big outside door with a permit running-card in my fist, I feel like the first and last man on the world, both at once […]. (Sillitoe 8)

How much Smith appreciated the running can be seen below. The quote again describes his feelings when running. Running helped him to think things out, to clear his mind of the Borstal harshness and hypocrisy:

I couldn’t see anybody, and I knew what the loneliness of the long-distance runner running across country felt like, realizing that as far as I was concerned this feeling was the only honesty and realness there was in the world […]. (Sillitoe 43)

This was the honesty that Smith approved; not the one of the Borstal bosses which meant the inmates to be re-educated and most probably be sent to the army. This was not the thing Smith wanted to happen to him.

Smith’s fulfilling sport activity has also its negative aspects. As it was suggested, the Borstal establishment consider long-distance running and sport in general a way to re-educate young criminals and make them honest and good. Viewed from the perspective of Smith, he claims that the establishment see young Borstal sportsmen as racing horses; the establishment want the sportsmen to win prizes. But the prizes are not awards for the young people, the prizes will be displayed at the offices of the establishment. Smith knows that

47 [t]hey are training [him] up fine for the big sports day when all the pig-faced snotty-nosed dukes and ladies […] come and make speeches to us about sports being just the thing to get us leading an honest life and keep our itching finger- ends off them shop locks and safe handles and hairgrips to open gas meters. (8- 9)

The angry young Smith somewhat enjoys being an outlaw, being in opposition with to establishment. And in this position he is very conceited: “If the In-laws are hoping to stop me making false moves they’re wasting their time” (10). “It’s a good life,

[he’s] saying to [himself] if you don’t give in to coppers and Borstal-bosses” (11-12).

By his outlaw attitude Smith emphasises the hypocrisy of the system in the Borstal and the short-sightedness of the bosses there. I dare say that this demonstration of hypocrisy can be related on the society as a whole. Sometimes, there are things in society that primarily are intended for the good of society, for example the social system. But as it turns out later the system does not work the way it should be working, and this causes people to be discontent with it. This is actually the case of the Angry Young Men in the

Nineteen-Fifties.

The “hypocrite system” theory is confirmed by Brendan Hennessy. In his text devoted to both of the Sillitoe’s texts discussed in this chapter he claims that the short story “goes deeper into the nature of rebellion by studying a rebel whose scorn for the way ordinary society is based on hypocrisy or stupidity hardens into rejection of its values” (Hennessy 6).

The story’s climax lies in Smith’s decision not to win the race in long-distance running and he puts his plan into practice in the end. “The governor of the institution wants him to win the Borstal Blue Ribbon Prize Cup for Long Distance Country

Running (All England)” (6) But Smith is determined not to win because the victory in the race would mean the victory of the establishment; the establishment which displays the Borstal inmates as race horses. Smith asserts that the Borstal inmates are “like race

48 horses, only [they] don’t get so well looked-after as race horses […]” (Sillitoe 9). It is obvious that Smith does not want to be like a racing horse and wants face the bosses bravely and honestly – in his sense of the word. He says:

I’m not going to win because the only way I’d see I came first would be if winning meant that I was going to escape the coppers after doing the biggest bank job of my life, but winning means the exact opposite, no matter how they try to kill or kid me, means running right into their white-gloved wall-barred hands and grinning mugs and staying there for the rest of my natural long life of stone-breaking anyway, but stone-breaking in the way I want to do it and not in the way they tell me. (45)

By deliberately losing the long-distance race Smith demonstrates his will not to conform to the rules of the hypocrite system, which he hates. This act “will confirm him in his belief that he’s a human being, not just a machine for winning cross-country races

[…]” (Hennessy 7). This is what he has in common with the angry young heroes – a disapproval of a certain type of a system, although with the other angry young heroes the system is the social system as a whole, not the Borstal institution as in the case of rebellious Smith.

V. Legacy of the Angry Young Men

So far, the thesis was focused on the Angry Young Men only in the context of the

Nineteen-Fifties. This chapter of the thesis still concerns the Angry Young Men but the focus is the legacy of the Angry Young Men from the Nineteen-Fifties onwards. As it is stated in the beginning of the thesis, the legacy of the Angry Young Men is what those men produced, i.e. the books they wrote. These literary “products” influenced culture further on.

V.I. Adaptations for Film (British New Wave)

The literary works by the Angry Young Men gained immediate and great success in the time of their publications, thanks to the striking accurateness and realism in the portrayal of the society. The books attracted the attention of readership and literary

49 critics The Angry Young Men established themselves on the cultural scene of the

Nineteen-Fifties. What was to come next secured their position in this sphere even more, with the overlap of the boundary of the Nineteen-Fifties to the decades that followed. Besides the readership, the books attracted filmmakers as well. It was in the

Nineteen-Fifties and early Sixties when many of the books written by the Angry Young

Men were made into films.

Of course the film industry was always ready to turn to well-publicized literary successes and now there was the additional incentive that the young writers had clearly pointed to the existence of a new kind of audience. It was time for British films to reflect the new mood. (Stead 187)

This was also the case of those five literary works discussed above. Films based on those books have created a part of a new cinematic stream, the so-called British New

Wave, which has brought fresh air into the movie industry in Great Britain and has played an important role even within the context of the filmmaking worldwide. These books were adapted for cinema by skilful directors and are of rather high quality 13 . All these things ensured a realistic perspective on the society as the books did when they were published. The films became a part of culture then and they have also become a part of culture throughout the years. Even nowadays they attract the eyes of film critics, film fans, and ordinary viewers.

To prove all what has been written in the previous paragraph let me quote

Żuczkowski again:

The Angry Young Men played a considerable role in initiating the “New Wave” in the English film. The artistic quality of British films rose for a time at the end of the fifties. Largely out of the plays and novels of the “Angry” writers, a new generation of film directors – such as Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, and John Schlesinger, made a number of well-

13 For audience’s overall ranking see the Internet Movie Database: Room at the Top (1959): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053226/ Look Back in Anger (1958): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051879/ Lucky Jim (1957): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050660/ Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054269/ The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056194/

50 scripted and sharply observed films: Lucky Jim (1957), Room at the To (1959), Look Back in Anger (1959), The Entertainer (1960), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), […] The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), […]. (Żuczkowski)

What the situation of the British film was like before the arrival of the British New

Wave is depicted by Peter Stead:

By the mid-1950s British cinema had clearly been driven very firmly and decisively into a cultural cul-de-sac. A set of conventions had been established which produced films that were often very polished and entertaining without ever really being significant in cultural and especially social terms. (178)

The successful literary works by the Angry Young Men thus became a perfect source of inspiration for the filmmakers in order to revive the British cinema and raise its quality. As Żuczkowski points out above almost all of the Angry Young Men’s writings were made into the films. This chapter of the thesis will focus mainly on the five movies based on the five literary works discussed in preceding chapters. There will be mentioned the success of most of the five films as well as the relative failure of one of them. What will be also touched upon a little bit are the directors of those films, scriptwriters, and actors because they have inseparable credit in the success of the film along with the Angry Young writers.

Let us now have a look at the movies based on the novels discussed in this thesis.

Probably the most famous of the directors of the adaptations of the above-mentioned literary works is Tony Richardson. He directed two of the literary works discussed and these are: Look Back in Anger and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner that were made in 1958 and 1962 respectively.

Tony Richardson’s […] film of Look Back in Anger was an accomplished film that was certainly far more demanding and challenging than most other British films and it is no surprising that it was not a great success at the box-office. (Stead 188)

51 It can be said that Look Back in Anger was highly sophisticated and intellectual film, as well as the play, thus it did not appeal to the broad masses of spectators which resulted in the low box-office success as the quote above suggests.

The film’s star was Richard Burton in the role of Jimmy Porter.

There has always been a critical debate […] as to whether Richard Burton was the right choice to play Jimmy Porter for the purists thought of him as being too old […], too theatrical, too Hollywood, too physical, or too Welsh. (Stead 188)

Nevertheless, there is “no doubt that Burton convincingly depicted anger and resentment especially in those scenes where he is denouncing his wife’s upper-middle-class and imperial background” (Stead 188). Burton was not the actor who was excellent in the film: “the performances of Mary Ure [Alison] and Claire Bloome [Helena] made femininity into something more challenging, more vulnerable, and sexual than it had ever been before in English films” (Stead 189).

Not only the actors contributed to the film’s above-average quality. It was the director as well and last but not least, John Osborne himself participated in the preparation of the film. He wrote the additional dialogues for the screenplay by Nigel

Kneale. This added to the quality and the credibility of the adaptation of Osborne’s play.

The film was nominated for the Golden Globe award.

As far as the other film by Tony Richardson is concerned, The Loneliness of the

Long Distance Runner profited as well from the participation of the author of the short story. Alan Sillitoe himself wrote the screenplay. The film starred Tom Courtenay in the role of Smith. The film won the BAFTA film award.

Only two years after the publication of John Braine’s Room at the Top a film version was made. Peter Stead points out: “Jack Clayton’s […] film of John Braine’s novel […] was to be a commercially successful film because it dealt realistically and maturely with the subject of sex in a provincial English town” (189). He continues:

52 The whole power of the film came first from the suggestion that a sexual affair could be enjoyed even in the industrial North and then from the suggestion hat an ambitious young man would abandon a fascinating mistress in order to marry a rich man’s daughter. (189)

Concerning this movie Peter Stead highlights the actors’ performances, especially those of Simone Signoret in the role of Alice and Laurence Harvey in the role of Joe

Lampton. He asserts that “crucial was that Simone Signoret’s performance as the careworn and very moving mistress constituted a display of sexual and emotional frankness that was quite novel in British cinema” (189). Next, he states that “the casting of Laurence Harvey was absolutely right for as one later critic was to comment the part

‘perfectly matched the cold arrogance of his screen personality’ ” (189). The performances as well as the film itself were awarded many nominations and awards including an Oscar for Simone Signoret.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was made into a film in 1960 and it was directed by Karel Reisz. “[H]is Central European, English boarding-school background had given him insights into the particular vitality and disrespectfulness of working-class lads” (Stead 192). The script was written by Alan Sillitoe. Albert Finney appeared in the role of Arthur Seaton. “Albert Finney’s bravura performance as the factory-hand” was his “first major screen role” (192). In the role he

was independent, surly, powerful, and northern enough to express all of Arthur’s rebelliousness and bloody-mindedness and yet he could also charm his entire audience by the very obvious relish with which he wrapped his mouth around Northern vowels and with which he enjoyed every meal, drink, and woman who came before him. (193)

Apparently, Albert Finney did really well in the role and was admired and appreciated by the critics and the spectators as well. Stead praises him even more:

We are interested in Arthur Seaton not because he is a worker but because he is an exceptional worker who will obviously go places, but even more we are interested in [him] because he comes in the form of Albert Finney. The crowds turned up in their thousands because they had been told that at last there was a

53 British actor who had not emasculated his personality in acting school and who knew that to convey reality you had to be far from ordinary. (195)

Stead draws a conclusion that “British cinema had made its most powerful statement about the working class by discovering a new kind of hero” (195).

As well as the previously mentioned films, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning won several awards, including the awards for Finney’s acting.

So far, there has been a lot of praise on the films based on the books by the Angry

Young Men. But there is an exception. According to what Peter Stead states, the adaptation of Amis’s Lucky Jim was not that successful, at least as far as the critics’ views are concerned. “The problem that filmmakers faced was that of introducing some kind of edge or social anger into films whilst hanging on to the format that would entertain the mass of ordinary film-goers” (187). He goes on to say:

It would in any case have been difficult for any British director of the mid- 1950s to have captured the tone of metropolitan and Oxbridge incredulity that Kingsley Amis had juxtapositioned with provincial pretension and absurdity […] but by any standards the film version by the Boultings [i.e. John Boulting and Roy Boulting] in 1958 is bad. (187)

It seems as if the Boultings did not understand the humoristic tone of the novel:

In their usual way the Boultings had settled for caricature and farce: the action takes place in an entirely studio-bound artificial world and all sense of place, time, and character is sacrificed so as to ensure blandness. What is now almost unbelievable is that Lucky Jim was filmed almost two years after the great theatrical event of the decade, namely the first night of […] Look Back in Anger […]. (187)

Obviously, some of the films were successful as far as the reviews are concerned.

On the other hand, some of the films were successful at the box-office. Nevertheless, all of the films have played an important role in culture since the late Nineteen-Fifties and the early Sixties. They represent another form of the Angry Young Men’s literary works, another interpretation of those books. The film adaptations have definitely enriched British cinematography as well as cinematography worldwide.

54 VI. Conclusion

Both the Movement and the Angry Young Men were groups of considerable importance. Their importance is grounded both in literature and society. It was in the sphere of literature where the Movement and the Angry Young Men genuinely changed something; they brought the fresh air into poetry, prose, and drama. These authors entered the literary history with vigour (mainly stirred up by their anger) and later entered even the hall of fame of literature. Their novels and short stories are still read and their plays are still staged. I dare to claim this because of the fact that since the

Nineteen-Fifties until now the Movement and the Angry Young Men have established themselves as terms that are able to stand in culture in themselves. The terms can be found as entries in various dictionaries and reference book as well as in literary history and social history books; many of these books were used in this thesis. The term the

Angry Young Men is often used to refer to a group of people who are discontent with and disagree with the establishment. Furthermore, the Angry Young Men influenced and enriched cinematography by inspiring directors who practically immediately adapted many of their books for the cinema. Thus were created films of above-average quality roofed under the term “British New Wave”. British New Wave comprises impressive film like Look Back in Anger or The Loneliness of the Long Distance

Runner , both made by the renowned director Tony Richardson.

In comparison with literature, there was no change in society caused by the

Movement nor the Angry Young Men. The Angry Young Men only reacted to the social situation of the Nineteen-Fifties and although their voices were loud and were heard by a lot of people, but they were not forceful enough to change the establishment, the

Government, its policy, the social structures. The question is whether they really wanted

55 to change something. They rather wanted to rebel and to be just angry and thus stake out their position within the society.

In conclusion, all the arguments above serve as a proof that the Movement and the

Angry Young Men are significant segments of British literary and social history with a conclusively positive impact on literature, culture and society from the Nineteen-Fifties onwards – until the present day.

56 VII. Works cited and consulted

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Twenties to Our Time. London: Phoenix House, 1964.

Allsop, Kenneth. The Angry Decade: A Survey of the Cultural Revolt of the Nineteen-

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Bradford, Richard. Kingsley Amis . London: Edward Arnold, 1989.

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Crowther, Jonathan and Kathryn Kavanagh, eds. Oxford Guide to British and American

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Hennessy, Brendan. Alan Sillitoe: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The

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57 Osborne, John. Look Back In Anger . London: Faber and Faber, 1996.

Ritchie, Harry. The Anger That Never Was. 18 May 1985. The Times. 12 December

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Sillitoe, Alan. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning . London: Pan Books Ltd, 1965.

---. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner . London: W.H. Allen, 1959.

Stead, Peter. Film and the Working Class: The Feature Film in British and American

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Stříbrný, Zdeněk. Dějiny anglické literatury. 2 . Praha: Academia, 1987.

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