by Simon Warner
But, to what degree did the literary wave that had shaken up New York and San Francisco, and nascent bohemian cliques at many points in-between, have an effect on those in the UK? One thing we must say is that the mid-1950s did see some novelists and poets gradual move away from fawning deference to the past traditions of the English literary canon. At the onset of the 1950s, UK poetry and fiction remained very much in the hands of a conservative young breed who seemed to look backwards, a position typified by the Movement, formalists who wanted to clawback history rather than radically alter the future.27 Yet there were some signs of a shifting mood, too. Voices outside the traditional stream or even the modernist and more radical caucus were making themselves felt. As we have hinted, Orwell’s Socialist visions and his extraordinary satire on totalitarianism – Nineteen Eighty-Four, which emerged in 1949 – were setting a new tone and a fresh mood. By the mid-1950s, a pioneering wave of young writers was penning novels and plays about a post-war world in which nostalgic certainties had evaporated. To reiterate, Britain’s imperial power and commercial domination of world trade had each taken serious setbacks in the critically damaging years of the Second World War and a small but bold group of rising writers would hold up a mirror to this denuded setting, this much altered state. But let us briefly step back another ten years.
The so-called Khaki Election of 1945 had marked a sea-change in British political life. Returning soldiers, in particular, had surprisingly rejected the war-winning hero, premier Winston Churchill and his upper-class, paternal and patrician Toryism. The electorate had plumped instead, in a remarkable landslide, for Labour under Clement Atlee, the first time this party, only founded at the start of the century, had ever held a clear Parliamentary advantage and the Socialist arrivistes would use this mandate with vigour. The radical innovations passed by Prime Minister Atlee’s regime – the formation of a welfare state coupled to the nationalisation of many of the nation’s command industries, from coal to iron, shipbuilding and the railways – indicated that the older model of aristocratic government had passed its sell-by date. A democratised and more egalitarian Britain was promised and, if this manifesto pledge was hardly delivered in any wholesale sense, the effects of the wide-ranging moves Labour had initiated were too deep-seated and profound to be easily reversed. Thus when Churchill returned as PM in 1952, he could not roll back Atlee’s tide of radical change in any meaningful way.
Such changes in atmosphere, with key legislation such as the reforming Education Act of 1944, a product of a war-time coalition administration, created an environment in which ordinary people – working class and lower middle-class young men, primarily – could at least consider, maybe even seize, opportunities for advancement. By the middle of the 1950s, if university entry remained very much a dream of the privileged sectors in society, there were glimmers of possibility and a number of young writers, several of whom had grabbed these chances and certainly witnessed some of these social changes at close hand, suggested through their novels and plays that transformation, of a deep and substantial kind, was underway. Dubbed the Angry Young Men – though few accepted the soubriquet with any enthusiasm – they told stories of a post-imperial Britain in which a new wave of ambitious working class and lower middle-class protagonists were making their way in a state forever changed by the scars of war and the political machinations of a visionary Labour administration.
Further, there was a fresh academic approach to culture and society in its broadest sense, as a group of bright young men who had faced the trauma of the war returned, hoping that the end of that global conflict would signal a new dawn: chances for ordinary people to prosper in a Britain that had felt the crude jolt of battle, at home and abroad, but was now awakening from that nightmare of despair – its lost sons, its battered cities – and dreaming of a brighter, better future, one in which professional and social mobility were not regarded as mere pie in the sky, the stuff only of fantastic utopias. Such individuals as Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams who had faced the battlefront, returned and become involved with progressive adult education projects at English universities. As the 1950s neared their end, both had written and published books which preached a novel approach to understanding society, one that challenged the frozen stratification of class, aristocracy and elitism and, instead, discussed the everyday realities of the masses – their lives, their interests, their passions, their culture. Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy (1957) proposed that working class culture had values that been too long under-valued and ignored, but also expressed reservations about mass culture swamping older cultural traditions. Williams suggested in Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (1958) that the quotidian practices of the vast majority had been considered far too little in connection with the sphere of literary study. A little later, E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) related a history of Britain that was not based on kings, generals and bishops but on workers and their families, while Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel’s The Popular Arts (1964) broke new ground in seeing potential relationships between an increasingly high-profile range of popular cultural activities – in the visual arts, cinema and music – and the school curriculum.
Out of these seeds would grow an impressive philosophical moment, one that would lead, quite speedily, to the serious, scholarly study of everyday practices – culture as a way of life rather than a set of hierarchical behaviours pursued only by the high and mighty – and, in 1964, to the formation of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK.28 The centre would not only found a new field of intellectual engagement, eventually termed British Cultural Studies – a multi-disciplinary construct centred on the analysis of the world through the prism of power relations linked to class, race and gender – but also the recognition that the examination of mass and popular cultural forms – from music and television to the tabloid press and playground games – could also find a place within the hallowed portals of the academy. These breakthroughs nurtured the strong sense that popular culture could not be ignored, indeed should not be ignored. Such intellectual developments would cultivate a climate in which artistic practices outside the elite circuit – whether popular music or performance poetry, graphic art or agitprop theatre – could earn appropriate attention from the critics and, in time, the academy. Barriers of class and cash, which had been largely impenetrable before this cerebral revolution, would be cracked, dented and finally breached over the next decade, encouraging alliances to emerge between rock stars and Beat poets, bands and Pop artists, political novelists and radical film-makers, art photographers and avant garde choreographers, experimental playwrights and unconventional stages. This quite radical intellectual shift, the seeds of which would be sown slowly but deeply, would eventually bear rich fruit, a quiet accompaniment to the psychedelic trumpets blaring from TV and movie screens, theatre venues and music clubs.
The British Zeitgeist of the later 1950s hinted at this atmosphere of potential transformation and, alongside those fresh and far-sighted voices in the scholarly field, would rise a wave of almost contemporaneous new fiction and drama, produced by writers whom the press would characterise as the Angry Young Men. This loosely gathered literary force would critique the world of privilege and speak up for the common man, the new tier grammar schoolboys – principally boys – and challenge the pre-war certainties of empire and public school, inherited fortunes and titles and power handed down. In the terrain of the novel and the stage, the new broom was wielded by writers and dramatists such as John Osborne and John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, Colin Wilson, Stan Barstow and Arnold Wesker and even, in time, women – a gender isolated, much as Beat women had been marginalised – like Shelagh Delaney and Lynne Reid Banks, who penned novels and stage plays which painted new images of the nation.
Some, like Osborne’s 1956 play Look Back in Anger, railed against the dying imperial flame, the faded grandeur of a Britain that had collapsed under the ravages of war. Its presentation on the new
ly founded commercial television station29 – another innovation that would test the BBC’s monopoly and have a major effect on audience choice – offered a platform no play had ever enjoyed to that date. Braine published Room at the Top (1957), a tale of northern mill towns and striving lower-middle-class aspirants; Sillitoe issued Saturday Night, Sunday Morning (1958), an account of a working class factory operative whose drunken and adulterous behaviour was both shocking but also a sign that older moralities – the lynchpin of the faded, jaded and repressive system – could no longer be easily sustained; and A Kind of Loving (1960), Barstow’s story of pregnancy outside wedlock, touched upon the fraying of long-standing codes, too. Shelagh Delaney from Salford, joined Braine from Leeds, Sillitoe from Nottingham and Barstow from Wakefield as part of a rising tide of regional talent from the north of England. Delaney’s play A Taste of Honey (1958), which considered the social taboos and emotional traumas triggered by an inter-racial relationship, was part of a trend that saw working class literary talent not only aired, but new writers with non-metropolitan backgrounds challenging the received wisdom that London was the natural epicentre of the written word. The capital did, nonetheless, join this vogue for contemporary and unconventional narratives by younger voices. Lynne Reid Banks’ The L-Shaped Room (1960) was another tale of unmarried pregnancy in a London setting, while Arnold Wesker brought the Jewish East End of the city to life in plays like Chicken Soup with Barley (1956).
Colin Wilson’s The Outsider (1956) was also influential: a reflection on the existential possibilities of life, shaped by the French Left Bank thinkers of the 1940s, like Sartre and Camus and de Beauvoir, but also an echo of the kind of ideas of psychological liberation that the Beats were sharing in the US at a similar moment. There was even the first real novel of the new British youth subcultures, Colin MacInnes’ Absolute Beginners (1959), which portrayed a vibrant, stylish and youthful London obsessed with American sounds, modes of dress that rejected the conservatism of suits and ties, and moral codes that reacted against longstanding notions of racial separation and class division.30 Wilson and MacInnes aside, the Angry Young Men were not, however, by and large, proto-bohemians; they were upwardly aspirational even if the barriers to full and true social mobility remained persistently in place. They did not, as a whole, harbour a hunger for nostalgie de la boue; they were calling for ways in which the talented working and lower middle classes could take an up-escalator to status and influence and maybe reciprocal earnings and financial well-being.
MacInnes was a middle-class journalist and novelist who lived in – some may say slummed – in the rare English bohemia of Soho, the Italian-veined, inner London quarter, about which he often wrote. The young white people MacInnes described in his most celebrated books – City of Spades would pre-date Absolute Beginners by two years – were drawn to transatlantic style, particularly black Caribbean expressions, and might be usefully linked to that other subcultural strain that would come to prominence from the early 1960s, and one we have already touched upon – the mods.
Although few of this gathering of writers enthusiastically pinned their creative colours to any kind of unifying mast, the description of this diverse gang as Angry Young Men (the women came a little later, as we have said) by the mass media marked them as a group with a set of common intentions, even if this was just a helpful piece of shorthand. The fact that some feathers were ruffled by this over-arching denomination and that this distilled overview was incapable of describing the separations and differences – in class, politics and outlook of the members of this informal grouping – did not stop it being applied.
When Max Feldman and Gene Gartenberg co-edited a US collection called Protest and sub-titled The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men in 1958, published in Britain the following year, the linking of these two transatlantic, and even more contrasting, communities was further sealed. Thus John Wain and Norman Mailer, Kingsley Amis and Kenneth Rexroth, found themselves gathered in a similar intellectual room and the collection – a diverse range of fiction and literary criticism, culture history and social commentary – proved to be a nourishing intellectual meal to readers in both the US and the UK. That said, once the elision of AYM and Beat was made, the coupling proved most difficult to un-link. Said the editors in their introduction to Protest:
In the United States of America, those ‘new barbarians’ who have chosen the present as the compass of their lives are the Beat Generation. In England, with certain differences, they are the Angry Young Men. Both the Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men are social phenomena which have found increasing literary expression, Because both represent a significant adaptation to life in mid-twentieth-century, the writings they have engendered possess an immediate value to us all. In the long run they may be the advance columns of a vast moral revolution, one which will transform man from a creature of history to a creature of experience …31
Superficially there was a connection: here were writers of a similar age, largely in their mid-20s to 30s, trying to make sense of a post-war world but, of course, the national conditions were quite different. While the US cowered with fear at the possibility of nuclear annihilation, that same country enjoyed booming economic security; in the UK, the fiscal decline was immense, rationing remained in place – until 1954, in fact – and cities revealed the weals of destruction in weed-strewn bombsites, many left untouched and rotting for a decade and more after the German air-raids of the early 1940s. The introduction to Protest again:
In England, World War II, which levelled tenement and manse in the common rubble of the night raid, produced the psychological levelling which made possible the victory of the Labour Party in their first peacetime election. Although the pressures of socialisation, higher income and inheritance taxes weakened the upper classes, the Socialists were generally blamed for the high cost of the war which, by necessity, had been borne into the years of reconstruction. Lacking the leadership possessing the boldness to overcome the disadvantage, the Labour Party was swept from office. In its place came the Tories, wearing the badges of accent, name and tie which have always symbolised rule to the English people. So there came into being – and remains today – the social anomaly of the Welfare State which must perpetuate itself on privilege.32
Feldman and Gartenberg maintain the theme, stating that it is against this background that the phenomenon of the Angry Young Men presents itself. They characterise the AYM as ‘the sons of the lower middle and working classes who came of age with Socialism, had their bodies cared for by the government health programme and their minds nourished through government scholarships in red brick universities (though, now and then, Oxford). Prepared to seek their places in the new England that had been created by parliamentary revolution, they found they had nowhere to go.’33 They did not, like the Beat Generation, seek to create their own subterranean world, but wanted entrance into the very real one on the surface where fortunes were made and power wielded.34 In addition, the Angry Young Men ‘had no common goal’35 with John Osborne a old-fashioned, pre-war Socialist, Kingsley Amis, a lukewarm Labour backer, George Scott temporarily pinning his colours to a Tory mast and Colin Wilson formulating a religious existentialism.
But what actual impact did the news of stirrings Stateside have on the literary climate in Britain? How were the Beat signals translated? Hewison says that ‘a romanticism of manner began to revive among the young as the austerities of the early 1950s eased: it was derived from images of Parisian Left-Bank bohemianism, Colin Wilson’s Outsider, and increasingly from the style of the American Beats […] although Wain, Amis, Wilson, Braine, Donleavy, Hinde, Scott and Osborne rather paled beside Kerouac and Carl Solomon, and especially Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl”. The Beat style fell in easily with jazz bands and CND;36 the first British poet to pick up on the new manner was Christopher Logue, who experimented with poetry and jazz at the Royal Court…’37 Logue would appear with several principal Beats at the International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert
Hall in 1965. Ritchie also hints at the diluted character of British output when compared to the AYM as ‘allied groups of anti-bourgeois rebels’.38 He believes that only Colin MacInnes ‘could stand comparison with the Beats’ and comments that when Andrew Sinclair ‘tried to use Beat attitudes and expressions’ in his 1959 novel, My Friend Judas, ‘the embarrassing result emphasised how alien the literature of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs and the rest really was’.39
