Masarykova univerzita v Brně Filozofická fakulta
Katedra anglistiky a amerikanistiky
Bakalářská diplomová práce
2006 Alice Bělová Masaryk University in Brno Faculty of Arts
Department of English and American Studies
English Language and Literature
Alice Bělová
The Angry Young Men and Their Decade in the 1950s in Britain
B.A. Major Thesis
Supervisor: Doc. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A.
2006
2
I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the Works Cited.
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I would like to thank my supervisor Doc. Mgr. Milada Franková, CSc., M.A. for her kind help and guidance throughout my thesis.
4 Table of Contents:
I. Introduction 6
II. Post-war years in Britain 7
II.1 Post-war situation 7
II.2 Social class 8
II.3 Welfare state 9
II.4 Changing attitudes 11
III. The Movement and the Angry Young Men 13
IV. Ambitious Joe Lampton 18
V. Unlucky Jim Dixon 24
VI. Angry Jimmy Porter 31
VII. Comparison of the heroes 37
VIII. Conclusion 42
Works Cited 44
5 I. Introduction
For my bachelor thesis I chose the topic of the Angry Young Men, the literary movement that emerged in Britain after the Second World War. The situation that arose in the
1950s was remarkable for many political as well as social changes that took place in England.
In 1945 most people voted for a better future which was promised them by the Labour
Government with their socialist programme led by Clement Attlee who, after the election, became the Prime Minister. The Labour Party tried to improve the economic situation of
Britain which was after the war in a severe condition. They nationalized the Bank of England as well as many private institutions and they developed the “social security system”
(Kyzlinková 24). However, they improved it only a little and people, disappointed with the slow progress, elected in 1951 the Conservatives who stayed in power until 1964.
Many social changes took place as well. More families now owned cars, televisions and washing machines than before war. Women became more independent, they began sharing their home duties with their husbands and also they could start to go out for work.
And of course, many voices about diminishing the differences between the social classes appeared. But usually, the abbys between the working and upper-class remained unchanged and many young writers started writing about their discontent with the situation. They were labelled the Angry Young Men by journalists and in spite of their disagreement with this label, it stayed with them up till nowadays.
Among the most famous are ranked Kingsley Amis, John Osborne and John Braine, who expressed their discontent with the society through their works, Lucky Jim, Look Back In
Anger and Room at the Top , respectively.
In my thesis, I am going to show the heroes’ attitudes to contemporary society, to their own lives, how they tried to improve it and how they coped with problems which they had to face. The main heroes of the novels have much in common – they are usually of working
6 class background, they had the possibility of studying at the university which offered them new opportunities and chances in life and yet, they are very different from one another. They all deal in varoius ways with the current situation because each one of them sees it from a little different angle.
I divide my thesis into six major sestions. Firstly, I will outline the situation of post- war Britain, what were the main changes and how they influenced British society. Secondly, I will explain what exactly was the movement of the Angry Young Men, what they were angry about and where they saw the solution. In another three parts I will describe the heroes Joe
Lampton, Jim Dixon and Jimmy Porter individually, dealing with their problems and attitudes to life. Finally, I would like to compare all the main heroes’ approaches, suggest what were their prime aims and how and if they managed to fulfil their desires. I am going to outline the circumstances and the social background which influenced their behaviour and the final choice of their way of life.
II. Post-War Years in Britain
II.1 Post-war situation
After WWII the whole world was shattered. The consequences of the worst conflict of the modern world were immeasurable. Millions of people died and the world resources were exhausted. But the countries had to face other problems right away. Millions of refugees were homeless, the economy of Europe had collapsed, 70% of the European industrial infrastructure was destroyed and many nations were forced to pay huge reparations. And from about 1947, another war, the so-called Cold War emerged and lasted for another four decades.
The 1950s in Britain are sometimes called the period of ‘Butskellism’ which is the term used in British politics referring to the political consensus “associated with the exercise of office as Chancellor of the Exchequer” – the title held by the British cabinet minister
7 responsible for all financial matters – “by R.A. Butler of the Conservative Party and Hugh
Gaitskell of the Labour Party” (Butskellism).
World War II left the United Kingdom with an appetite for a broader distribution of wealth and a strengthening of social security, while a natural conservatism believed in individual initiative and private property. The practical resolution of this tension in politics by the two Chancellors was a mixed economy with moderate state intervention to promote social goals, particularly in education and health (Butskellism).
And precisely the education and health together with lowering the unemployment were the first problems the government tried to solve after war. No matter who ruled the country, whether the Labour Party or the Conservatives, both aimed at bettering of the social and economic situation for the nation. In 1960, the Home Secretary R. A. Butler commented on the contemporary situation: “We have developed [...] an affluent, open and democratic society [...] in which people are divided not so much between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ as between ‘haves’ and ‘have-mores’ ” (Wringley).
II.2 Social class
Nevertheless, there still remained great differences between those ‘haves’ and ‘have- mores’. Before the war, there was still rather clear distinction between the classes. The upper- class consisted of “true landed aristocrats and successful industrialists” (Marwick 37), the middle-class, sometimes called bourgeois, was believed to rule the country, and finally, there was the working class, which created about 60 per cent of the employed population. (Marwick
37)
In 1945 the Labour Party came to power and it was a significant victory because it ousted “the great wartime leader, Winston Churchil” (Ford 6), which was described by one elector as “the greatest act of treachery since Christ” (Ford 6), but rather, as Ford comments it, it was “a sign of the rejection by the electorate of the unjust society of the pre-war years”
( Ford 6).
8 During the war, a little of “ ‘mixing’ of social classes” (Marwick 38) took place and from 1945 the Labour Party introduced a new system of taxation, which “in general favoured the working class” (Marwick 38).
High taxation during and after the war hit the upper-class hardest, lowering the barriers between it and the lower middle class. Overall, the war stengthened the solidarity and self-awareness of the working class. Thus there was both disintegration of class boundaries and consolidation between classes (Marwick 38).
The programme of the Labour Party intended to abolish the class division, or at least to diminish it as much as possible, but it was not that easy in a country where the class ranking system has been surviving for hundreds of years. The working class was advantaged concerning the taxation but it was disadvantaged in another way. As Marwick mentions “to be working class meant performing manual work. Conditions of work still demanded special working clothes, and still often left definite physical marks” (Marwick 43). This suggests that even though there was one adavantage for working class people, many more disadvantages still existed and it was clear, at first sight, who belonged among the blue-collar employees and who among the white-collar clerks.
II.3 Welfare state
Before the end of the war Winston Churchill told the people of Britain: “We are not fighting to restore the past. We plan and create a noble future” (McDowall 169). And this
‘noble future’ is, what both the Conservative and Labour Party during and after war wanted to secure for the nation. It was called the Welfare State “to point a sharp contrast with Hitler’s
‘warfare state’” (Marwick 45).
The phrase [...] 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 socail problems which beset individual citizens (Marwick 45).
The basic problems which faced the post-war Britain were those of social security, housing, medical service, education and unemployment. Both leading parties were trying to
9 diminish these problems and help people to recover from war, but usually they could not agree on how they should achieve the improval. “Britain became in fact a social democracy, in which both main parties agreed on most of the basic values, and disagreed mainly about method” (McDowall 170).
The educational opportunity was not equal among the classes up till 1944 when the
Educational Act was passed. Most working class children had only elementary education, whilst the majority of the middle-class children received the secondary education because their parents could afford sending their children to school instead of the factory.
If we are to compare the significance of class with that of other sources of distinction and inequality, such as age, sex, nationality, race, or religious community, class stands out as a key factor in such matters as wealth political power, educational opportunity, and style of life (Marwick 44).
The Educational Act was passed in 1944 under the “Churchull’s National
Government” (Marwick 51), which promised free education to all children until the age of 15.
Nonetheless, in their fifteens children had to take the ‘eleven plus’ exam, whose results would divide pupils into those who will continue to study at the grammar school and those who will continue at secondary modern school. “The way to better jobs and to higher education was through the grammar schools; the secondary modern school was the route to the traditional working class occupations” (Marwick, 56). This Act also secured the “local authority responsibility for the health care of school children while it abolished all charges made to parents” (Marwick 51).
Even though this Act enabled many working class children to study also the secondary schools, they usually did not make well at the ‘eleven plus’ and only a part of them managed to go to the grammar schools. “The whole system still very much replicated the division of the social structure into working, lower-middle, upper-middle, and upper-class” (Marwick 56).
And one major problem lied, unfortunately, at children’s homes. A very important factor in education of the working class children was the parental guidance and
10 encouragement to study. Within the middle- or upper-classes it was rather easy to lead the children to the school their parents wished them to attend, those were usually the schools where also their fathers studied, but within the working class it was a little different. The parents usually had only primary school themselves and so their children “had their educational progress brought to a premature halt” (Marwick 62).
II.4 Changing attitudes
The 1950s meant not only the change of educational and class division, but it meant a great change in attitudes in many different fields within the society, most significantly within the working class. One of the most remarkable was the change in the status of women. They were still the ones whose responsibility was to keep the house clean and children fed, but they started to share these duties with their husbands and the choice of how many children will the family have was no longer only man’s decision. Consequently, women had fewer children and they usually went out for work.
Also the divorces became a more common matter. In 1947 “divorces reached a peak ten times the pre-war figure” (Marwick 60). And the Legal Aid Act passed 1949 enabled divorce even those people who could not afford it and so many people gained new chances for new lives.
Especially in advertisements the stress was slowly shifted to the family unit as it became “the centre of consumption” (Marwick 63). In Britain, gradually with the development and broader distribution of television sets, radios, newspapers and magazines, emerged the so called consumer society. “By the time Harold Macmillan coined his famous slogan ‘You’ve never had it so good’ for the 1959 election, consumerism had arrived” ( Ford
17).
The advertising industry became perhaps the biggest economic success story of the post war years, with its ramifications of market research and public relations companies. [...] From the mid-fifties ‘image’ became a prime concern. Not only the
11 image of products, but the image of people and of corporate concerns, even churches became fitting subjects for the services of the marketing experts ( Ford 17-18).
Before the 1950s there was nothing like youth culture, because majority of working class children had to go out to work in their fifteens and the middle-class children were forced to wear school uniforms until their eighteens. Now, when also the working class children had the opportunity of studying longer, they developed a new clothing style and their own music.
The new fashion of ‘Teddy Boys’ appeared in Britain and the market was now more concentrated on the young people, their clothing and their life styles. The things that were now important were the style and music.
A new social construction of ‘youth’ in the 1950s was central to the contemporary feeling that young people had become for the first time ‘a distinct cultural entity’ [...] palpably different from previous generations of young people (Ellis).
A group of young men in a northern milk bar was described by Hoggart:
aged between fifteen and twenty, with drape suits, picture ties and an American slouch. Most of them cannot afford a succession of milk-shakes, and make cups of tea serve for an hour or two, whilst – and this is their main reason for coming – they put copper after copper into the mechanical record player ( Ford 20).
Young people began to express their disagreement and discontent with their parents and with the time they lived in. “In particular they rebelled against the sexual rules of
Christian society” (McDowall 171) And of course, they rebelled against “the culture of the well-to-do” (Wringley).
Another significant change appeared also in the British literature as it was no longer just the matter of the upper-class, because after war the democratization of the whole culture took place. The movement of the Angry Young Men arose from the mood of the time. It was a group of writers who were making fun of and criticising middle-class life styles and values and who expressed their disagreement with the world around them. As Hilský writes, the
Angry Young Men introduced a young, disenchanted, individualist intellectual who is in a various ways discontented with the role the society prepared for him. (Hilský 7) Among the
12 most famous are ranked John Osborne, John Braine, Kingsley Amis, John Wain and Allan
Sillitoe. However, I will deal with the group in more detail in the next chapter.
III. The Movement and The Angry Young Men
In Kenneth Allsop’s opinion, the 1950s Britain was in a run-down condition and both the state and people were exhausted by the post-war situation and ten years of rationed food, worn-out clothes and austerity, which resulted in total lack of anyone’s “energy to support or the appetite for new intellectual brainwaives or banner-wagging movements” (Allsop 25).
When in September 1946 Rose Macaulay in New Writing and Daylight was discussing “The
Future of Fiction” she wrote:
The post-war period has not yet established itself... A kind of miasma, a dullness, still obscures the imaginative life of many. A young man who has spent his adult years at high tension, among perils, discomforts, fears, adventures, will not see or write of life as if he had lived at ease; he will be either toughened or sensitized. No new style is even faintly to be on the horizon... There has been in fact a flight from style ... the novel of the future will be in plain, uncoloured English, with no frills; the Max Beerbohm period is dead, those laurel trees are cut, and we shall go no more (for the moment) into those elegant, aromatic and verbaceous woods (Allsop 33).
To which extent she was right I will not examine. But when taking into account all the angry novels which emerged after war, we will see that she was very close. The authors used rather simple language describing the ordinary lives of the heroes who were neither supermen nor fighters for people’s rights nor lived in the bottom of the society. They usually fought just for themselves, trying to establish an ordinary life of which they need not be ashamed.
In the 1950s two new “movements” emerged almost simultaneously in Great Britain as a result of boredom of young writers who strongly disagreed both with the post-war political and social situation and with the literary development – or rather stagnation. One of them was the so called “The Movement” and the other were the “Angry Young Men”.
The Movement is a term made up by J. D. Scott, a literary editor of The Spectator , who, in 1954, labelled so a group of writers including Kigsley Amis, John Wain, Philip
13 Larkin, Elizabeth Jennings and Robert Conquest, Donald Davie and Thom Gunn, the English poets who tended towards anti-romanticism, rationality, and sobriety (Wikipedia).
“The Movement was a reaction against the extreme romanticism of the previous identifiable major movement in British poetry, the New Apocalyptics which had been irrational, deliberately incoherent, and “outrageous” or “controversial”. The Movement poets addressed everyday British life in plain, straightforward language and often in traditional forms” (Wikipedia). It first attracted attention with the publication of the anthology New
Lines , edited by Robert Conquest. Conquest saw the group’s work “free from both mystical and logical compulsions and - like modern philosophy - is empirical in its attitude to all that comes” (Philip Arthur Larkin).
The Angry Young Men was a group of prose and drama writers, among whom are counted Kingsley Amis, John Braine, Colin Wilson, John Wain, John Osborne and Alan
Sillitoe. Although all of them are placed under one, let us say ‘heading’, each of them had a different point of view and a distinctive opinion about solutions of the contemporary situation.
In this chapter I would like to closely explore what really were the purposes of their anger, what exactly they disapproved of and what were their chances of improving their situation and of changing the course of events.
Kenneth Allsop in his book The angry decade divides the authors into three different categories. First category is created by those who “are in fact working for the overthrow of the exhausted but tenacious ideas, a little band of spiritual bomb-throwers led by that guerilla philosopher Colin Wilson who campaigns against the present high priests of Western civilisation” (Allsop 17).
Another group is represented by John Osborne, “the emotional actionists who are all for reform and revolution” and the final and also the biggest group is made up by those “who share with Kingsley Amis a cynical, mocking, derisive disgust with authority and the ‘shiny
14 barbarism’ [...] but who, out of either laziness or despair, opt for an inner neutrality” (Allsop
17).
It would probably be difficult to find one or two words which would characterise this group of angry authors. Dissentience would be one and irreverence, vigour, brightness, vulgarity, impatiance, stridency, resentment, self-pity, bitterness, indignation and discontent the others. They converted their criticism against the values of the welfare state, expressed repulsion to hypocrisy and to ability to parody this phenomenon.
Humphrey Carpenter writes about these writers in his chronicle The Angry Young Men the following: “They were simply, as John Osborne calls them, ‘poor successful freaks’; but their works, once so controversial, have now joined the canon of English literature as established classics. Each ‘Outsider’, as Wilson’s first novel was titled, has become a mainstream figure” (Carpenter).
The term Angry Young Men appeared first in 1956 when on May 8 a new play by
John Osborne Look Back in Anger was put on at the Royal Court Theatre and it quickly came to have specific significance and wide use. The hero of the play, Jimmy Porter suddenly became a “character genus” (Allsop 19) and another contemporary prototype and “articles in the weekly reviews began talking about ‘the Jimmy Porters and the Lucky Jims’ including the hero of Amis’s novel Lucky Jim ” (Allsop 19).
On May 26 The Times published an article actually commenting on the anger of these young men and connecting this topic to Osborne’s play:
People who like to leave the theatre in an argumentative mood will go to the Royal Court Theatre to see Mr. John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger . They will not necessarily argue about the merits of the piece, but they will remember those reviews in which it has been put forward as an expression of opinion valid for the generation of those in their late twenties. They will see a thoroughly cross young man, caught into an emotional situation where crossness avails nothing. And they may well wonder whether the young men of today are really as embittered, as prompt to offence, as the hero of the play (Allsop 19).
15 Even though Look Back in Anger was published in 1956, which means two years after
Amis’s Lucky Jim had been published, it was just Osborne’s play that broke the ice and made critics talking about the Angry Young Men. This was the end of deference and obedience and the new era of British literature began.
The heroes of the novels were young people aged between twenty-five and thirty-five who sometimes more and sometimes less tried to cope with the problems they found themselves in. Usually they also tried to change their status or class label which was seen as a cause of their setback and failure. They were mostly working class or lower-middle class boys who had some education, sometimes they even studied at the university, but who, after finishing school lost “the protection of collective security and their course has been convoyed through to the safe harbour of the Welfare State” (Allsop 27).
However, not all the heroes tried to really deal with their situation. Jimmy Porter was a great speaker, intellectual who asked questions and gave answers to everything without hesitation, but his efforts to alter anything were equal to zero. He actually did not want to change anything because it was much safer for him to stay where he was. If he possibly tried to act and did not succeed, he would be humiliated by the most detested society and it was something he would never let happen. On the other hand there was Joe Lampton who, by origin from a suburban city, comes to the city of his dreams Warley where he concentrates all his activities on moving up on the social ladder to his dreamed wealth, esteem and success. In their novels the authors expressed opinions about the ways that their heroes chose for pursuing their goals and also criticised the society for its shallowness and lack of understanding.
In 1945, the moderate Trade Union socialism came to “spread education and opprotunity, but the heroes displayed neither enthusiasm for their elevation nor comradeship towards the idealists“ (Allsop 27) who had put them where they were. Allsop describes the
16 situation: “The larger result is that the new dissentients feel unassimilated. They are a new rootless, faithless, classless class – and consequently, because of a feeling of being misplaced and misprized, also often charmless – who are becalmed in the social sea. (...) They are acutely conscious of lacking the arrogant composure of the ruling-class line: they are strangers to their own sort” (Allsop 27).
Allsop also asks questions about the source of their anger. He would find it easy to answer if it was asked in the Twenties when people were angry about the slashing of the miners’ rates, in the Thirties when people got angry about the air assault on Guerenica or in the Forties when Germans massacred the Czechoslovakian village of Lidice. But what is there to be angry about in the Fifties? (Allsop 28).
One of the things the angry young authors had in common was their disagreement with the old Establishment which disagreed with any change and who were trying to influence the nation with the conservative opinions. Nevertheless, the heroes are not angry about the dominant problems of that time, conversely, they are bored with them deeply
(Allsop 28). In Look Back in Anger Jimmy Porter, who is a self-centered, egoistic, rude and violent young man never giving up biting and spiteful remarks, permanently torturing his wife Alison and a friend of theirs Cliff, suddenly turns away from his class obssessions and shouts: “There aren’t any good, brave causes left. If the big bang does come and we all get killed off, it won’t be in aid of the old-fashioned grand design. It’ll be just for the Brave
New-Nothing-very-much-thank-you” (Osborne 89).
The heroes are not much interested either in mankind’s political problems. Their anger is deriving from problems that seem to be insoluble by the heroes themselves and they feel as if the solution of these problems was beyond their capacity to work out. They are losing their liberty and identity and “lacerate themselves with self-doubt. They are angry at having nothing they dare to be angry about”(Allsop 29). However, they are.
17 One thing which is peculiar for Britain is the class division. As Marwick says: “All one can do then [...] is agree that class exists when people themselves, explicitly or implicitly, recognize its existence and behave in ways which reflect its existence” (Allsop
35). There has been and probably always will be an inequality between the members of the society: “in power, authority, wealth, income, job situation, material conditions, and culture and lifestyles” (Marwick 35).
And precisely the class division was one of the biggest splinters in angry heroes’ eyes. They hated and simultaneously admired the upper-class, something that was always unattainable for them and so they craved it so much. But they were proud. They did not want anyone to pity them or to do them a favour. They were determined to gain everything they wanted by themselves. Any help from someone they detested was unimaginable for them; and it is the quality which one must admire in them. The strong will and conviction that anything they want is possible to gain made these heroes attractive and likeable for readers. I am going to compare all the heroes of the main and most famous novels in the next chapters, compare not only their characters but also the ways they chose to make their dreams come true. I will begin with Joe Lamton, move on to Jim Dixon and I will finish with the prototype of the all the angry young men Jimmy Porter.
IV. Ambitious Joe Lampton
Joe Lampton is a hero of John Braine’s novel Room at the Top and its sequel Life at the Top . Concerning his background, Joe is the prototype of the angry young hero. He is quite clever, he studied at the university, but he has no much chance of becoming
‘somebody‘ in his native town and so he moves to the town of the rich where his chances are much better. He comes from an industrial provincial town of Dufton into Warley, the town of his dreams where the middle- and upper-class live, having everything Joe wants to gain one day himself. “He is a quick-minded twenty-five-year-old North Country working-class boy
18 on the make” (Allsop 87) who is determined to break all obstacles lying in his way to success. When he comes to Warley in “a light grey suit that has cost fourteen guineas, a plain grey tie, plain grey socks, and brown shoes [...] the most expensive I’d ever possessed, with a deep, rich, nearly black lustre” (Braine 7), he quite early realizes that to catch on in Warley this will not be enough. He comes there to gain success and esteem, to make a lot of money and become powerful, to find a girl who will belong into the Top category and to buy a car which would place him in a social class far above the one he was in.
Warley is full of promise and Joe realizes that such a chance of getting away from the poverty will never occur again. He congratulates himself on the good fortune that the landlady who came to meet him at the station comes from the Top of Warley and he will not have to live in “scruffy little houses by the station”. Instead, he is “going to the Top, into a world that even from my first brief glimpses filled me with excitement: big houses with drives and orchards and manicured hedges, a preparatory school to which the boys would soon return from adventures in Brittany and Brazil [...], expensive cars – Bentleys, Lagondas,
Daimlers, Jaguars – parked everywhere in a kind of ostentatious litter as if the district had dropped them at random as evidences of its wealth” (Braine 10). Braine describes all the luxurious houses and cars in order to show the main differences between the world Joe comes from and the world Joe comes in. Dufton is a working class city, there are only factories, a few dirty and by the air raids damaged houses and there is not even the theatre to develop some culture in the local people. Warley is the total opposite of Dufton.
So it is clear why Joe admires all the expensive cars, large houses, luxury, the lifestyle of the upper-class and simply everything that, for the moment, is very close but also very far from him. Nevertheless, Joe knows that all these things cannot be secured him by the
Welfare State even if he worked from early in the morning until late in the evening seven days a week.
19 According to the scheme of categories of jobs and women he once worked out with his friend Charles, Joe belongs into the seventh category according to his income and even though he takes up a job as an accountant in Warley, he knows that he would have to work for at least the next twenty years to have at least a fragment of this all. Joe is sure that the best and certainly the quickest way of his rise would be a marriage to some girl from a very rich family which would secure his future. Joe is a complete opposite of Jimmy Porter about whom I will write later. The biggest difference between them is that Jimmy would never even touch anything that Joe wants. Jimmy despises the middle- and upper-class values as well as their property and wealth.
One way of gaining everything quickly and with not much effort is to find a rich girl.
And so when Joe meets Susan, he immediately falls in love with her and the fact that her father is the richest man in Warley only helps him to rout his next steps.
Susan was Grade Two – if not One – whether or not she has any money; but I had a shrewd idea that she’d qualify for the grade financially as well as sexually. To be quite fair to myself, this wasn’t the only reason that I was excited by her, that the genteel commonplaces of the play seemed profoundly poetic, that it seemed at any moment there’d be an annunciation which would transform existence into what it ought to be, hold, as it were, to its bargain the happiness which Warley had promised me (Braine 38).
But Susan was not the only woman that attrected Joe’s attention. He was also introduced to George Aisgill and his wife Alice who was or once used to be very similar to
Joe. Neither was she born in a gold cradle, but she married an upper-class man Goerge, who helped her to climb the social ladder up to the Top. Alice knows what it means to be poor and not to have money and she also knows what it means to make money in ‘different ways’.
As in all angry novels, neither in Room at the Top is the subject of sex left out. As
Hilský remarked, the erotic and social statutes coalesce and the erotic acquires an obvious social function (Hilský 7). Alice is in this sense a goddess for Joe, because she teaches him everything she knows about sex. From the very beginning Joe is driven by his sexual needs
20 and in some moment he does not know what to prefer, whether love or money. He starts a relationship with both Susan and Alice, the first being an innocent one, with a lot of talking, gentle touches, getting to know one another and sometimes kissing and the second one being a passionate, wild, sexual relationship which both of them try not to influence with love.
After a moment she said: ‘Please, don’t fall in love with me, Joe. We will be friends, won’t we? Loving friends.’ ‘Loving friends,’ I said (Braine 84).
Nevertheless, their relationship grows into love and Joe knows that one day he will have to decide what he will choose, either love or money. And because from the early beginning we know, what Joe Lampton longs for, we also know what he chooses. It is a fight for him, and at one point, Joe is even determined not to marry Susan but stay with Alice, but
Charles, seeing Joe forget about his dreams, persuades him to leave Alice alone and revive the relationship with Susan.
Sometimes a man marries an older woman for her money – people call him nasty names, but as long as he’s got the money why should he care? In our class we marry women of our own age, which I suppose is the most decent arrangement. But you want to make the worst of both worlds. You want to marry an older woman who hasn’t any money. [...] Face facts, Joe. [...] You don’t belong to the class that thrives on scandal. You’d have your heart broken. [...] And you’d break the hearts of a lot of other people. People who don’t wish you anything but good. [...] Look, Joe, I don’t often ask you a favour. This isn’t for me, either. It’s for you. Promise me to write to Susan. (Braine 194-195).
Joe knows that Warley is the city of the rich, but still, at least a few months after his arrival there, he is not aware of the plenty the people of Warley have. When he is invited for a dinner to Aisgill’s, he feels an obligation to refuse the invitation because of the food- rationing which the Labour Party established after the war.
‘You might as well come and have some supper,’ he said. ‘You can phone the Thompsons.’ ‘Do come,’ said Alice. ‘The rations – ’ She laughed. ‘Don’t worry about that, honey. It won’t be a banquet anyway, just bits and pieces.’ (Braine 66).
21 Susan’s parents, though, are not happy at all about Susan’s love for Joe. Susan was always supposed to marry Jack Wales, a boy from another rich family from Warley and it was assumed that when they once marry, their fathers will merge their firms and will form the biggest and richest company far and near. When they meet him at the Civic Ball, they try to humiliate him and to prove that he will never be as good as they are and that he should give up his attempts to become one of them. Apart from their cold and ironic welcome, they ask him many questions for which Joe does not know the answer. They are asking him questions like Do you know - ? and Surely you’ve met - ? and You must have come across - ? permanently and Joe is at loss. “I’ve never in all my life felt so completely friendless; I was at bay among the glasses of sherry and whiskey with the vicious little darts
[...] thrown at me unceasingly”(Braine 163). The humiliation of the main hero is clearly seen also in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. In the twentieth chapter Jim Dixon argues with his biggest rival Bertrand, who is the upper-class snob with plenty of money and a family background that secures him quite a careless life. Bertrand is trying to humiliate him but Jim does not allow him to do so.
(Bertrand) The trouble with you, Dixon, is that you’re simply not up to my weight. If you want a fight, pick someone your own size, then you might stand a chance. With me you just haven’t a hope in hell. (Jim in response) People aren’t going to skip out of your path indefinitely. You think that just because you are tall and can put paint on canvas you’re a sort of demigod. It wouldn’t be so bad if you were. But you’re not: you’re a twister and a snob and a bully and a fool. (Amis 212)
Jim fights back, but Joe just stands and listens to all this trying to make the best of it even though he knows that he will be the one who will leave as a defeatist.
Nevertheless, Joe does not give up so easily. He knows what he came into this society for and he is determined to get it by all means. “He knows precisely what he wants, and he wants with a fierce longing ‘an Aston-Martin, three guinea linen shirts, a girl with a Riviera suntan’” (Allsop 88). In this respect, Joe turns from a self-confident, demanding and longing
22 man into a vindictive, dishonourable and a real angry young man, who does what he does just to show the others that they can not defeat him so easily.
I continued to take Susan out after the Civic Ball. I had no hope now of marrying her; but I saw no point in letting her go. She was my weekly shilling on the pools, my selection at random with no hope of winning. And I suppose that to run two women at once rather tockled my vanity; and to take her out at all was still a satisfactory way of spitting in the eye of Jack Wales and the rest of them (Braine 169).
Joe’s desire is finally fulfilled. Susan gets pregnant and Joe is accepted into the family. But not before his future father-in-law examines his intentions with his daughter.
They meet in the Conservative club and Mr. Brown is playing a game with Joe, trying to bribe him and force him leave the town. But Joe knows that he can not ease off in his demands. He realizes what is at stake and he persuades her father that he really loves her.
“‘I’m not in love with her,’ I said. ‘I love her. She’s absolutely the best girl I’ve ever met. I wanted to marry her the first moment I saw her; I didn’t know who she was then, and I didn’t care’” (Braine 207).
When Alice, in despair after Joe’s departure, kills herself in a terrible car accident,
Joe realizes what things he has not gained, but lost. He knows that he will never forget her and that he will never be as happy as he would be with her by his side. He now has everything he craved from the beginning, he has got a girl with Riviera suntan, he will soon become one of the upper-class snobs, he will work for the biggest company in town, but still, he knows that he lost the most precious thing he had, his self-esteem and his freedom.
When Joe first comments on Alice’s death, he realizes the change that happened to him and for a short while the novel is narrated in the third person.
‘What a damned awful way to die,’ Teddy said. ‘I expected it,’ Joe Lampton said soberly. ‘She drove like a maniac. It doesn’t make it any the less tragic, though.’ I didn’t like Joe Lampton. He was a sensible young accountant with a neatly-pressed blue suit and a stiff white collar. He always said and did the correct thing and never embarrassed anyone with an unseemly display of emotion. Why, he even made a roll in hay with a pretty little teenager pay dividents. I hated Joe Lampton, but he looked nad sounded very sure of
23 himslef sitting at my desk in my skin; he’d come to stay, this was no flying visit (Braine 219).
Joe was now a great deal different from the Joe who came into Warley a few months ago. He obtained what he wanted and in the same moment the old Joe passed away and there came another one, who lost his ideals, love and freedom. At the very beginning of the novel,
Joe who has everything now is looking at his photograph when he first came to Warley and he sees the difference clearly. “For my face is, not innocent exactly, but unused . I mean unused by sex, by money, by making friends and influencing people, hardly touched by any of the muck one’s forced to wade through to get what one wants” (Braine 7-8).
Braine masterfully criticised the contemporary world and the post-war government who promised the way to the top via socialism. It was clear that an ordinary man can never get that high. And so Braine suggested and consequently mocked another way, the one of
“ruthless individual self-advancement.” (Marwick 82)
Once, when Joe was about fifteen, his father warned him against losing his face and wanting too much. “Mind what Ah say, Joe. There’s some things that can be bought too dear” (Braine 95). And he was absolutely right. Joe bought his power and social status, but he paid too much for it.
V. Unlucky Jim Dixon
Jim Dixon is the main character of Kingley Amis’s novel Lucky Jim . The novel is remarkable for Amis’s mastery of sarcasm, irony and bitterness which are included in all its parts as well as in Jim’s thinking and conduct. Jim had the opportunity of studing thanks to the educational reform which took place after war and thanks to which he and other young people could study even though they had the working class background. However, even though the working class children were now able to study at the university, they could not presuppose what will be the attitude of the aristocracy and the upper-class towards it. Allsop
24 comments on this problem: “It seems to me that Amis, whether or not he had that specific intention, accurately defined and explained many of the grudges of the post-war fund-aided, who believed that although they are being permitted to undergo an educational process hitherto much restricted, it is only on sufferance” (Allsop 59). And these prejudices of the upper-class towards the educated working class people appeared in The Sunday Times after the publishing of Lucky Jim where W. Somerset Maugham wrote:
They do not go to university to acquire culture, but to get a job, and, when they have got one, scamp it. They have no manners, and are woefully unable to deal with any social predicament. Their idea of a celebration is to go to a public house and drink six beers. They are mean, malicious and envious. [...] They are scum (Bradford 23).
And also T. S. Eliot in his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture condamned the democratizational tendency of the whole British post-war educational system, which means the whole Butler’s Act, by saying that the effort to enable everyone to acquire the higher education will lead to the lowering of the level of educated people (Hilský 8).
Jim is a lecturer in Medieval History at an unnamed provincial university south from
London, but he is not particularly interested in what he teaches. Conversely, “he feels only a bored loathing” (Allsop 53) but he needs the job very much and so he is determined to make up to the head of the department, professor Neddy Welch, about whom he thinks that he “is a pretentious, drooling fool” (Allsop 53). Jim Dixon is “fair and round-faced, with an unusual breadth of shoulder that had never been accompained by any special physical strength or skill” (Amis 8), whose trousers are “so stained with food and beer that they would, if worn on the stage to indicate squalor and penury, be considered ridiculously overdone” (Allsop
53). He has no money to spare and so he is doing his best not to lose his job.
When the story begins, Jim is almost at the end of his probationary year’s engagement as a junior lecturer and he is “possessed with the necessity of ingratiating himself” (Allsop
53) with Welch, at least until his contract has been renewed. He is trying to make Welch like him. He is playing his game – says what Welch wants to hear, agrees with him in every
25 aspect, pretends a great joy over his invitation for coffee with the Welches and even agrees to take part in Welch’s weekend “arty get-together” (Amis 23), where he knows he has nothing to do, except to attrack Welch’s attention. Jim’s anger is a little different from Joe’s anger.
He does not rage because he is not the member of the upper-class, he is more discontented because of the authorities he has above him and for whom he is inferior and whose invitation for a boring weekend he cannot reject. He is not the master of his own choices and this is what gets on his nerves the most.
When he is talking to his friend and former lover Margaret, he openly admits that he is not the sort of person who is familiar with the kind of entertainment that is to be performed at Wlech’s weekend. “Look Margaret, you know as well as I do that I can’t sing, I can’t act, I can hardly read and thank God I can’t read music” (Amis 24). Though, when he comes to this meeting, he, to show himself in the best light (and not to humiliate himself in front of all these intellectuals), somehow forgets to mention that he can neither read music nor sing. “It was much too late now for Dixon to explain that he hadn’t really meant it when he’d said, half an hour before, that he could read music ‘after a fashion’; much too late to transfer allegiance to the basses. Nothing sort of an epileptic fit could get him out of this” (Amis 38).
His assumption is that “anyone who has anything to do with the arts must inevitably be effeminate, cowardly and fraudulent” (Allsop 54). This “aggressive barbarianism” as Allsop calls it “is part of a total condemnation of upper class attitudes” (Allsop 54).
Jim Dixon’s aim is to keep his position at the university, but it is very difficult as he hates what he does and he wants to gain everything as easy as possible. In comparison with
Joe Lampton, he does not do almost anything to get what he wants. Joe is able to sacrifice anything to gain the position he desires, but Jim hopes that it will fall into his lap without him moving a finger. When asked by his friend Atkinson why he teaches Middle Ages he responses sardonically that it was simply the easiest choice.
26 You don’t think I take that sort of stuff seriously, do you? [...] No, the reason why I’m a medievalist, as you call it, is that the medieval papers were a soft option in the Leicester course, so I specialised in them. [...] But I never guessed I’d be landed with all the medieval stuff and nothing but medieval stuff. [...] Haven’t you noticed how we all specialise in what we hate most? (Amis 33).
One of the conditions of him staying where he is is publishing at least one article in some academic periodical. And so Jim writes an article called The Economic Influence of the
Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485, which Jim wrote without any particular interest in shipbuilding in the 1450s. He himself describes the article: “It was a perfect title, in that it crystallised the article’s niggling mindlessness, its funeral parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems” (Amis 14).
Another one of professor Welch’s ideas, which obviously comes just to bother
Dixon’s peaceful life, is opening a new special course, led by Jim. When Dixon’s painstaking student Michie wants to know what the syllabus for this special subject called Honours in
History will be, Jim deliberately leaves out the problems Michie is interested in, just to get rid of him – because “Michie new a lot, or seemed to, which was as bad” – (Amis 28) and to get the girls into this subject exclusively. “So far, Dixon’s efforts on behalf of his special subject, apart from thinking how much he hated it, had been confined to aiming to secure for it the three prettiest girls in the class, one of whom was Michie’s girl, and excluding from it
Michie himself” (Amis 28).
Jim seems to be a cunning, lazy and pretentious person who is able to lie and make long stories with no head or tail, just to get other people where he wants to have them. It is clear from the very beginning that he does not mean the relationship with Margaret seriously, but he is not able to tell her the truth. He likes her on one side, but he thinks of her that she is just a hysterical actress on the other side. “In a high voice, kept steady only by obvious effort, she said: ‘Please go’. Dixon fought hard to drive away the opinion that, both as actress and as a script-writer, she was doing rather well, and hated himself for failling” (Amis 76). He not
27 only fails because he does not want to hurt her, he also fails because telling the truth to her would be too complicated and too much effort from his side. He wants everything to go as smoothly and peacefully as possible.
Jim is in fact trying to incorporate himself into the highbrow society but he can never get that high because he behaves like a bully-boy from the village. Dixon usually finds relief in a pint or two and in cigarettes, he never reads books and never goes voluntarily to the theatre. The problem arrives only when he has no money for buying his cigarettes as he is usually hard up. “He rations himself with the cigarettes and reflects at one point that he has never all his life been able to smoke as much as he wants” (Allsop 53). When he is under strain, he must have a cigarette right away and so it is not rare for him to find out that he smoked many more that he should that particular day. “He repressed the desire to smoke , having finished his five o’clock cigarette at a quarter past three” (Amis 33).
What is rather funny about Jim are his “violence-fantasies” (Allsop 55) and various grimaces which help him cope with situations he finds himself in. Jim uses these grimaces when he most wishes to mock his superiors and the environment they live in, but because of his position he cannot tell them right away what he thinks. The hypocrisy is one of the characteristic features of the angry novels and it is usually the thing that the authors criticise.
One of these violence-fantasies comes into his mind when professor Welch tells Jim about how Margaret is recovering from her suicide attempt in his place and boastfully starts to assure Dixon how perfect environment in his house must be.
He pretended to himself that he’d pick up his professor round the waist, squeeze the furry grey-blue waistcoat against him to expel the breath, run heavily with him up the steps, along the corridor to the Staff Cloakroom, and plunge the too-small feet in their capless shoes into a lavatory basin, pulling the plug once, twice and again, stuffing the mouth with toilet paper (Amis 9-10).
Moreover, Jim is also a dangerous enemy. He will not allow anyone to humiliate him.
When he finds out that someone plots against him or fools him, he is determined to take
28 revenge. After the arty weekend, he finds out that his flatmate Johns told the Welches that
Jim had lied them about his departure because of his parents’ arrival and so Jim writes a letter in a semi-literate style in which Johns is charged with the attempt to seduce a university secretary. “This is just to let you no that I no what you are up to with yuong Marleen
Richardson, young Marleen is a desent girl and has got no tim for your sort, I no your sort”
(Amis 157). Richard Bradford finds in this letter a genuine connection between Amis and
Dixon. “The only definite point of contact between Amis and Jim is in their double-edged talent for the exposure and the disruption other people’s states of safe complacency”
(Bradford 29).
Amis highly criticised the shallowness of the upper-class and also the division of people into classes in general through Jim. The Welches are Jim’s enemy number one and even though Neddy Welch does not seem to be arrogant, his son and wife and people around him are. They do not consider anyone from the lower class then is theirs worth shaking his hand. Jim Dixon hates these class divisions and despite his feeling of inferiority and occasional self-pity, he is finally able to tell the Welches to which class they, according to his scale, belong by saying that there are “the two great classes of mankind, people I like and people I don´t” (Allsop 58). It is clear that the Welches are in the second one.
Nonetheless, no matter how Jim Dixon might seem irreverent, thoughtless and obsequious, he is quite a funny and entertaining companion. Even Christine, a girlfriend of
Welch’s son Bertrand finds this out and starts falling for Jim. But before this happens, Jim does not think much about Christine. The worst thing about her is that she is a girlfriend of a man he does not like at all. He envies Bertrand (same as Joe envies Jack Wales), because he knows that he has always had everything and always will have, whereas Jim will probably always stay where he is now, because he does not have such rich parents as Bertrand and that is the reason, why he would not dream of a girl like Christine for himself.
29 Fundamentally his outlook seems to be even more subjective, often nakedly a matter of personal envy and spleen. Even the girls he gets seem to be second best, as when he first sets eyes on the luscious Christine, who has been brought down to the Wleches by Bertrand: “The notion that women like this were never on view except as the property of men like Bertrand was so familiar to him that it had long since ceased to appear an injustoce (Allsop 57).
The class distinction is clearly visible from this point of view and although Jim is not particularly interested in being one of “them”, one part of his heart secretly wishes he had the same possibilities and chances as Welch’s sons.
Why hadn’t he himself had parents whose money so far exceeded their sense as to instal their son in London? The very thought of it was a torment (Amis 182).
However, even though he is attracted to Christine, he dares not to make any step because of the feeling of inferiority and also because girls like Christine have never been for him. “She’s a bit out of my class, don’t you think?” (Allsop 57). But this time Jim Dixon is not the one who is defeated at the end. Although Jim has always been a bit self- consciousness, something starts changing in him, when Christine is going to dance with him, and a feeling of pride and victory comes into his mind for the first time.
As he left the bar with Christine at his side, Dixon felt like a special agent, a picaroon, a Chicago war-lord, a hidalgo, an oil baron, a mohock. He kept careful control over his features to stop them doing what they wanted to do and breaking out into an imbecilic smirk of excitement and pride. When she turned and faced him at the edge of the floor, he found it hard to believe that she was really going to let him touch her, or that the men near them wouldn’t spontaneously intervene to prevent him (Amis 115).
At the end of the novel, Jim’s efforts of his contract being renewed do not meet the target and he is dismissed from the university. Nevertheless, he gets much more than he had ever thought of. He does not only win Christine’s heart, he also gets the job which Bertrand was so much interested in which is the best revenge he could imagine. For the first time in his life Jim Dixon is Lucky and is able to start a new life which he had always envied the others. Similarly as Joe Lampton won Susan, Jim Dixon won Christine. The only difference
30 is that Joe knows that Susan and all her wealth will not bring him happiness whilst Christine is Jim’s treasure which will bring luck into his life.
The beret, however, was on Wlech’s head, the fishing-hat on Bertrand’s. In these guises, and standing rigid with popping eyes, as both were, they had a look of being Gide and Lytton Strachey, represented in waxwork form by apprentice hand. Dixon drew in breath to denounce them both, then blew it all out again in a howl of laughter. His steps faltered; his body sagged as if he’d been knifed. With Christine tugging at his arm he halted in the middle of the group, slowly doubling up like a man with stitch, his spectacles misting over with the exertion of it, his mouth stuck ajar in a rictus of agony (Amis 256).
VI. Angry Jimmy Proter
When in 1956, for the first time, John Osborne’s play Look Back In Anger appeared at the stage of the Royal Court Theatre, it aroused a huge debate. Never before has there been such an angry young hero, who did not care to say anything about anyone, no matter how much he could hurt the others. Jimmy Porter “quickly became a character genus” and a
“contemporary prototype” (Allsop 19).
Taylor describes Jimmy as “the self-flagellating solitary in self-inflicted exile from the world, drawing strength from his own weakness and joy from his own misery” (Taylor
39). Jimmy Porter is a young intellectual, one of those university graduates who, thanks to
Buttler’s Educational Act of 1944 was able to finish the university even though he comes from the working class and who, as most angry young men, hates the upper-class society and their life-styles.
He is “an enormous cultural snob (only the safe classics and the most traditional jazz, only good books and ‘posh’ Sunday papers)” (Taylor 39), but he lives in an untidy attic flat with his wife Alison and makes a living in sweet stall which was a gift from one of his friends’ mother. However, this does not mean that he would not be able to do something more highbrow or that he is too lazy to build some business of his own, he simply does not want to.
Jimmy does not “struggle to better” himself, “either in the sense of striving for better jobs and
31 standards of living, or in the sense of taking social and political action for the general betterment of society” (Elsom 73). He detests everything that is connected to the upper-class and so, maybe from defiance, maybe from animosity, he rather stays where he is, torturing
Alison and their friend Cliff. “Jimmy hungers for power from the position of social inferiority” (Elsom 72).
The “neurotic discontent” (Allsop 18) is one of the many characteristic features of the whole angry generation Allsop uses in his survey. And Jimmy’s discontent is the strongest of all, at least in his eyes. Throughout the whole drama, he pities himself and he never shows pity with anyone else. He knows how much he hurts Alison when he constantly tries to humiliate her but as soon as she leaves him, he finds himself in the very same situation with
Alison’s friend Helena and even so, he never ceases his insults directed towards her or Cliff.
Examined objectively, there is little that is constructive or organically developed in Jimmy Porter’s invective, but the dialogue Osborne laces through the play like a spluttering gunpowder trail is authentic modern talk (Allsop 20).
Alison is in a sense enemy number one for Jimmy, because she represents everything he so much hates. She comes from the upper-class, she has always had everything she wanted and before she married Jimmy, she had had friends and had lived in a society he abhors.
When Alison speaks with her father, she even admits that their marriage could be a kind of revenge from Jimmy’s side.
Colonel But why should he have married you, feeling as he did about everything? Alison This is the famous American Question – you know the sixty-one dollar one! Perhaps it was revenge (Osborne 69).
As most of the angry heroes, also Jimmy comes from a working class family and he does not believe in any change that the post-war politics promises. The promise of the “social security system ‘from the craddle to the grave’” (Kyzlinková 24) was taken with reserve.
When reading an article in his favourite Sunday newspapers, he reads about the Bishop of
Bromley, who says that “he denies difference of class distinction” (Osborne 6). But Jimmy is
32 very sceptical about it, he does not believe a word of it. And that is why he immediately turns to Alison and asks her: “You don’t suppose your father would write it, do you?” (Osborne 7).
In Taylor’s Anger and After , Jimmy is seen as “a convincing dramatic represantation of a complex human being, and one who offered a rellying point for a number of people from the post-war generation who felt that the world of today was not treating them according to their deserts” (Taylor 43). None of the angry heroes believe that the class distinction would disappear or even that it would decrease. And so Jimmy is left alone with his malice and self- pity over his stillborn life. Ian Hamilton once remarked in The Spectator :
Your average New Hero is egocentric, of course. He gorges his way through life like a worm, instinctively contracting and relaxing his muscles. He is also, of course, for a large part of the time an Angry Young Man – without knowing, naturally, what he is angry about (Allsop 22).
But Jimmy might know, what he is angry about. “As the play’s title suggests, the roots of Jimmy’s impotent anger lie in the past – in his premature, lingering death, over which he stood youthful witness: and in his need to expiate by means of self-imposed proletarianism his mother’s inadequate, middle-class compromises” (Trussler 9). Jimmy suffered a lot when his father was dying. He apparently loved him very much, but he could not help him survive. He accuses all his relatives and even his mother that they all were “embarrassed by the whole business. Embarrassed and irritated” (Osborne 58) and he claims that he “was the only one who cared” (Osborne 58) At one point of the play Jimmy admits that this is why he is so angry now.
He would talk to me for hours, pouring out all that was left of his life to one, lonely, bewildered little boy, who could barely understand half of what he said. All he could feel was the despair and the bitterness, the sweet, sickly smell of dying. You see, I learnt at an early age what it was to be angry – angry and helpless (Osborne 59).
This is the point when the reader believes that he did not have it always easy and rather sympathises with him. But most of the time Jimmy only pities himself and his egocentrism is really visible. Jimmy loves to attract the attention of others to himself, showing
33 how much he suffers and how much they torment him with their lack of enthusiasm for anything and with their ignoring him all the time.
I rage, and shout my head off, and everyone thinks ‘poor chap!’ or ‘what an objectionable young man!’ But that girl there can twist your arm off with her silence. I’ve sat in this chair in the dark for hours. And although she knows I’m feeling as I feel now, she’s turned over, and gone to sleep (Osborne 60).
Jimmy thinks that he deserves much more than that. But what does he do to get it?
Nothing, except constant moaning over everything. He hates Sundays because he spent them monotonously at home doing the same things round and round. “We never seem to get any further, do we? Always the same ritual. Reading the papers, drinking tea, ironing. A few more hours, and another week gone. Our youth is slipping away” (Osborne 8).
The stereotype is a typical feature of the angry young writers. Also Jim Dixon is enclosed in a boring job he hates, but he knows that there is the security. The security that is provided for him from the Welfare State which promises to take care of him. And as Dixon’s job is his security for at least another few years, Jimmy’s security is his sweet stall. He would never give it up not only because it is the only source of his money, but also because he really likes Hugh’s mother who gave it to him.
Jimmy’s malaise derives from his feeling of classlessness – and his desire to achieve a proletarian pedigree accounts for the affection with which he regards the offstage figure of an uneducated old woman, who has meant to Jimmy all that his mother never could (Trussler 10).
No matter how Jimmy can seem rude, ruthless and harsh, from the tone he is talking about Hugh’s mother it is clear that he is able to love as much as he is able to hate. In his relationship to her it is obvious what he appreciates in people. Hugh’s mother has never been rich, she was a working class woman who has never left this class and never even tried to.
“Jimmy seems to adore her principally, because she’s been poor almost all her life, and she’s frankly ignorant. I’m quite aware how snobbish that sounds, but it happens to be the truth”
(Osborne 45).
34 Jimmy Porter is seen by Taylor “to be speaking for the whole generation” (Taylor 38).
The generation of young people, waiting for a better future which does not seem to come.
They become “gradually disillusioned when a brave new world failed to materialize” (Taylor
39). Most of them still quite clearly see the difference between “ ‘us’ and ‘them’ ” (Hilský
10) with ‘us’ referring to the working class people and ‘them’ referring to the old
Establishment.
Jimmy’s outbursts of discontent are usually directed towards Alison, whom he loves, but “whom he cannot forgive for her upper-middle-class background and whom he constantly torments in order to extract some reaction from her, to bring her to her knees” (Taylor 39). He attacks her whenever possible, humiliates her, her family and her friends, never lets her be alone. And when he sees that Alison is moved with his words, he does not stop, conversely, he even speeds up spitting his remarks until he himself acknowledges that it is enough.
There are constant indications of his neurotic determination to establish and keep his supermacy in any situation, inventing trouble if there is none lying around in order to do so, his hysterical persecution of Alison, his childish petulance (Taylor 42).
Her only defence is silence, ignorance and “imperturbability” (Taylor 39). “I pretend not to be listening – because I knew that would hurt him, I suppose” (Osborne 24). As seen by
Elsom, by marrying Alison Jimmy
... has one foot in the mansion’s hall, and this is what confuses him. He has wandered into a world which looks more impressive from without than within. He has lost his main enemy, but not the habit of fighting (Elsom 76).
When Alison tells Helena about the beginning of this all, she many times uses words like hostage, enemy territory and war when talking about Jimmy’s and his friend Hugh’s relationship to the upper-class. They use Alison as a hostage when they want to come to the parties of Alison’s friends. They eat the food there, drink the best drinks, mock the people there and cadge money from them. As Alison calls it, they “revelled in the role of barbarian invader” (Osborne 43).
35 Just about everyone I’d ever known. Your people must have been among the few we missed out. It was just enemy territory to them, and, as I say, they used me as a hostage. We’d set out from headquarters in Poplar, and carry out our raids on the enemy in W1, SW1, SW3 and W8. In my name, we’d gatecrash everywhere – cocktails, week-ends, even a couple of houseparties. I used to hope that one day, somebody would have the guts to slam the door in our faces, but they didn’t. They were too well-bred, and probably sorry for me as well. Hugh and Jimmy despised them for it. So we went on plundering them, wolfing their food and drinks, and smoking their cigars like ruffians. Oh, they enjoyed themselves (Osborne 42-43).
The relationship worth exploring in the play is the one of Jimmy to Alison’s father
Colonel. Jimmy describes Colonel as “just one of those sturdy old plants left over from
Edwardian Wilderness that can’t understand why the sun isn’t shining any more” (Osborne
69). Even though Jimmy attacks Alison’s father, we later learn that he does not hate him so much and Alison once even admits that Jimmy may quite like him, “though he is obviously in many ways representative of everything Jimmy is against” (Taylor 47). He sympathises with him, because he knows, how Colonel probably suffers from the changes that took place after war.
Alison’s father generation knew where they were, what standards their lives were ruled by, and where their duty lay [...]; they had causes to die for and even if they were wrong they had a certain dignity (Taylor 47).
For Jimmy, “there aren’t any good, brave causes left” (Osborne 89). He has no such certainty as Colonel had and so there is nothing left for him, just to shout and scream and leave the outlet of his thoughts and fears open, even though it means that he is ruthless to the people he loves. “In a year of changes, Look Back in Anger came to symbolize the urgent demand for change” (Elsom 76). Jimmy’s generation hoped for a great change in their lives, they wanted to believe everything the Welfare State promised them, but soon they realized that many of these changes were just people’s wishes, but did not happen in reality. Alison explains to her father: “You are hurt because everything is changed. Jimmy is hurt because everything is the same” (Osborne 70).
36 And so Jimmy and Alison run away from the real world into the world of animals, world, that cannot hurt them, the only one where they feel safe and protected.
He and Alison are united again in their idyllic dream world of bears and squirrels, content, perhaps, never to make it as human beings in the real world around them. (Taylor 41).
VII. Comparison of the heroes
To compare the heroes of these three novels discussed above does not appear to be an easy task. Jim Dixon, Joe Lampton and Jimmy Porter are very different from one another.
Nevertheless, they have a few common features. They all come from the working class background, they have no money to spare, they are the young intellectuals, graduates from the university who more or less want to change their contemporary situation. But when we read the novels we find each of them in quite a different environment.
Joe Lamton is a very young and very ambitious man who comes from a small, suburban town of Dufton to the town of the upper-class Warley. He has some money and a job of accountant, which is able to secure him quite a good living. But Joe does not want to have quite a good living. He wants more. He wants success, money, a luxurious house and clothes, a girl with a Riviera suntan and an Aston Martin which would show, at first sight to the others, how well off he is.
On the other hand, there is sarcastic Jim Dixon, who works as a university teacher of the Middle Ages, whose present task is to gain Professor Welch’s trust and maintain his position at the university. He does not think much ahead, gaining Welch’s trust would secure him only another year there. But he does not know what else he could do, staying at the university is for him the most comfortable way of earning money for cigars and a few pints of beer. He just flows through life and his biggest effort is to spend the minimum of his energy on things like studying, working or promotion.
37 The most remote from these two young men is Jimmy Porter who does not wish to be enormously rich, he is not afraid of losing his job, he does not want to show the others what he has. In my opinion, Jimmy Porter is the most angry of them, directing his hatred towards the upper-class whose part he himself has never been. He stands against the society that, according to him, did not change a bit after the war, everything seems the same to him and he is drowning in the boring monotonous days, in an attic flat, burried under the pile of Sunday newspapers and arguing with his wife Alison and their friend Cliff.
One of the biggest differences appears to lie between Jimmy Porter and Joe Lamton.
Jimmy hates everything that has something to do with the upper-class, he would never touch or wanted anything that Joe Lamton craves so much. Joe’s only aim is to get out of the working class society and get into the upper-class (even the middle-class is not good enough for him), he wants to have not just a girl but the richest girl and he would not do with a car, he wants an Aston Martin. Jimmy’s aim is to stay where he is, have nothing in common with the upper-class – the only ‘problem’ seems to be his wife Alison who “is the product of a well-off army family” (Elsom 72) – and he does not intend to change anything about it. It is clear that if Alison had appeared in Braine’s Room at the Top, she would have definitely been a hot candidate for becoming Joe’s wife. Nevertheless, both Jimmy and Joe each married quite a rich girl, at least her family has a lot of money if not she herself, but each of them uses the situation in a distinctive way. Joe’s wife Susan secured him an excellent position on the social ladder and he is determined to enjoy it as much as possible, become someone else and gain esteem which he could not have, according to him, as an ordinary accountant. On the other hand, Jimmy cannot forget Alison for her social background and this topic is one of the most frequent causes of their arguments and of Jimmy’s outburts. Joe is angry, because he must conquer his place under the Sun, Jimmy is angry because there are people, whose place under
38 the Sun is already conquered for them and they are the ones who can possibly have some power over him.
Jim Dixon is a little different in this aspect. He already has quite a good position as a lecturer at the university and the only problem he has to solve is: How to keep this position?
Jim does not want to try hard, he sees his way to success in making up to professor Welch who is the person that can help him to save his job. “Jim wants the privileges of the old ruling class without its responsibility” (Allsop 52). He has no prejudice against the working class (as
Joe Lampton has), but he does not want to be one of them again. Jim, same as Joe and Jimmy, falls in love with the upper-class girl Christine, but he does not see in her the way to success.
He even does not like her at first, because she is one of the snobbish society and Jim thinks that she must be the same as Welch and his son are. But when he finds out that Christine is quite a nice person, the situation changes and Jim is not the one who would refuse her, but suddnely he is afraid of being refused. He feels inferior and he doubts if Christine would be ever interested in someone like him. Jim does not need to have the most of all as Joe does, he just wants to keep his job and have enough money for his cigarettes and beer.
The thing that closely connects Dixon and Porter is their aggression, nervosity and impulsiveness which is usually manifested when they get in conflict with the authority or with the discontent with themselves. However, each of them finds his own way of outlet for the negative energy that is piled up inside them. Porter shouts, argues and humiliates his wife and
Cliff, torments them with his assaults and is even able to hurt Alison. Dixon’s way of coping with the strain are the faces he performs. He has “his Eskimo, crazy peasant, Evelyn Waugh, sex life in Ancient Rome, Edith Sitwell, lemon sucking and ape faces with which he expresses his true feelings about the situations” (Allsop 55). In comparison with them, Joe is not so aggressive as they are. He usually finds escape from unpleasant situations in drinking a few glasses of whiskey or in making love with Alice.
39 Concerning the politics, we do not exactly know, which party Jimmy prefers. But we can deduce the political sympathies of Jim Dixon and Joe Lampton. Jim clearly expresses his
Labourist thinking when he is speaking about choosing one person of two who has to give up his buns. “If one man’s got ten buns and another’s got two, and a bun has got to be given up by one of them, then surely you take it from the man with ten buns” (Allsop 56). The feeling of Joe Lampton is a little harder to guess. He comes from a Labourist family, his parents never wanted too much, they were satisfied with what they had. But Joe recently lives under the Conservative government and the people he meets in Warley and with whom he wants to have good relationships, are all Conservatives. When he is asked by Susan’s father in a
Conservative club, whether this is his first visit there, he acknowledges:
“ ‘This or any Conservative club,’ I said. ‘My father’d turn in his grave if he could see me.’ ‘So would mine,’ he said, and winked. ‘So would mine. But we’re not bound to our fathers.’ ” (Braine 206).
Both Jim Dixon and Joe Lampton wish their parents were from the upper-class. Not that they did not love their parents, but when they see how easy one’s life could be when you have rich and influential parents. Jim Dixon envies Bertrand and his brother Michel, because they do what they like and enjoy their living, Bertrand paints and Michel writes, but Jim has to do teaching because he has not got parents who would help him in financial problems and who would sponsor his flat. Neither would Joe’s parents have been able to sponsor his whims if they had been alive, he always had to think about the direction which would keep him alive and fed. These differences between the upper-class and working class still remained within the society and no matter how one tried to get rid of them or how much the recent governement promised diminishing these differences, there has always been some kind of label telling everyone where your roots are. And if you came from the working class, the upper-middle class or the upper-class immediately knew.
40 A very remarkable difference between those three lies in their attitude and truthfulness to life. Jimmy Porter is a character who does not pretend anything in front of anyone, he stays himself on any occasion. He would be unable to flatter people he does not like, even if this would mean improving of his situation. He is straightforward in expressing his feelings, when he does not like someone, the one will surely immediately know. The only feeling he is not expressing is the feeling of love to his wife Alison.
Jim Dixon stands between Joe and Jimmy in this field. He is able to flatter other people, because he needs it for keeping his job, but he hates it as much as he hates the people he makes up to. If he did not have to, he would not humiliate himself and would rather be closed somewhere with a pack of cigarettes and a pint of beer. In the end of the novel, when he is sure that he had already lost his job, he throws away his mask and tells the Welches what he thinks about them.
Finally, there is Joe Lampton who came to Warley to become rich and successful and who knows that without making friends with people who matter he will not gain anything. Of course he feels how people look at him, especially Susan’s parents, but he also knows that when he gets Susan to his side and wins her heart, his way to the Top will be much easier. It is only later, when Joe marries Susan, that he realizes what he lost and what he will never possess again. He lost his independence and freedom that he would still have if he settled for a lower salary, a smaller house and an ordinary car, not the Austen Martin.
Each of these three heroes represents a distinctive kind of people who tried to in some way escape their fate. Coming from the working class families, they, in various ways, coped with their life-styles, moods and attitudes. Joe saw his happiness in getting into highbrow society, Jim Dixon knew that having his job was important for him and was doing anything possible for keeping it and Jimmy Porter, in a sense, gave up and the only thing he managed
41 was grumbling and shouting his thoughts out with not a bit of attempt to change himself or anything that so much annoyed him.
The anger of these three heroes is expressed in different ways and in a diffierent degrees. Nevertheless, it is for sure that all of them were full of it, coping via it with their discontent with the society and its predjudices which placed them in positions they wished to change because knew they deserved more.
VIII. Conclusion
After WWII people were happy that everything was over and looked forward to a better future full of promised changes and new possibilities. Nonetheless, soon they learnt that nothing was that easy and that many of the promises of the Labour and consequently of the
Conservative parties would take much longer to fulfil, if ever they were fulfilled. The mood of embitterment and disappointment set in people’s mind and it was quite difficult to overcome it. And so in literature the movement of the Angry Young Men emerged, expressing their feelings of dissentience and disagreement with the post-war development in Britain. The mode of the angry novels was purely realistic, the setting was going on in a common life of ordinary people and usually the action took place in their homes, at school or at work. The authors used simple language, their hero was an ordinary man whom you can meet in the street and he had the same existencial problems as a majority of contemporary young people did. They criticised not only the society but also government who promised to revive the
British magnificance which was destroyed during the war.
Each of the angry writers chose different, but as I mentioned above, realistic setting and so their works soon became representations of certain kind of literary culture in Britain which was determined to break the old Establishment and bring new fresh air into the British literature. Braine’s novel Room at the Top showed a young man hero who is going to leave
42 his family and friends and sets out to the “better” world of the rich to fulfil his dreams, no matter what methods he chooses. Amis’s novel Lucky Jim about an easy-going but a little awkward teacher Jim Dixon embodied the type of the Campus novel which started to emerge after WWII in Britain. Amis managed to introduce “an archetypal figure” who, “among the young soon became a figure to be identified with” (Allen 280). And finally, Osborne’s drama
Look Back In Anger became the prototype of the ‘kitchen-sink drama’ whose story is all going on in one room of hero’s house. Jimmy Porter was the main character of this drama a soon became the prototype of the Angry Young Men in general.
John Braine, Kingsley Amis and John Osborne touched the problems that many people, especially of their generation, faced and this was the reason why their novels became hugely successful and for ever registered in reader’s minds as best-sellers.
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