The Angry Young Men

Abstract

The "angry young men" were a group of mostly working and middle class British playwrights and novelists who became prominent in the 1950s. The group's leading members included John Osborne and Kingsley Amis. The phrase was originally coined by the Royal Court Theatre's press officer to promote John Osborne's Look Back in Anger. It is thought to be derived from the autobiography of Leslie Paul, founder of the Woodcraft Folk, whose Angry Young Men was published in 1951. Following the success of the Osborne play, the label was later applied by British newspapers to describe young British writers who were characterized by disillusionment with traditional English society. The term was always imprecise, began to have less meaning over the years as the writers to whom it was originally applied became more divergent, and many of them dismissed the label as useless.

Headnote

Abstract:

The "angry young men" were a group of mostly working and middle class British playwrights and novelists who became prominent in the 1950s. The group's leading members included John Osborne and Kingsley Amis. The phrase was originally coined by the Royal Court Theatre's press officer to promote John Osborne's Look Back in Anger. It is thought to be derived from the autobiography of Leslie Paul, founder of the Woodcraft Folk, whose Angry Young Men was published in 1951. Following the success of the Osborne play, the label was later applied by British newspapers to describe young British writers who were characterized by disillusionment with traditional English society. The term was always imprecise, began to have less meaning over the years as the writers to whom it was originally applied became more divergent, and many of them dismissed the label as useless.

Keywords: Movement, 1950s

The 1950's in Britain saw the emergence of two literary movements, the so called "Movement" and the "Angry Young Men" movement. Controversies regarding whether or not these two rightly deserve such a label or not persist until today, with some arguing that the "Movement" and the "Angry Young Men" in particular possessed none of the traits of what is traditionally viewed as an artistic or literary grouping, and that in fact both were artificial creations, the products of publicity and external factors, lacking a manifesto or a proper literary programme. Certainly most of the "angries" would agree with such a statement. On the other hand, there are those who claim that although the movements did not have a clear program, there existed nevertheless a common view with respect to writing, to what the material for a novel should be and also an anti-modernist attitude and a return to more traditional approaches to writing fiction. Having taken this into consideration, it must also be stated that the "Movement" came closer to what one might call a literary movement, basically because of the fact that its main protagonists, Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and John Wain, John Osborne were bound by friendship and the dynamics of the relationship between them facilitated influences and proved benefic for their careers and their development as writers.

John Wain, Man of Letters

Another notable appearance at Oxford was John Wain. Three years younger than Larkin and Amis, he came from an upper-class family and was determined to assert himself both academically and as a writer. He first met Larkin and, given his own aspirations, was impressed by his selfdetermination and effort put in edifying his literary reputation: "he was important to me... His literary self-training had already begun and had already borne some fruit; and this, combined with his quietness, his slight stammer, and [perhaps] the impression of giant intelligence produced by the fact of his having a large dome-like head and wearing very thick glasses, all helped to make him 'the college writer'" (Carpenter, 2002: 42).

Larkin's image as a "Flaubertian saint of letters" persisted even after his departure from Oxford and created around him a tight group that would meet whenever he reappeared at the university during the weekends. Amis naturally participated in these meetings and on such occasion he and Wain met. He wrote: "My first casual meeting with him came about because we were both, so to speak, swimming in the thin fluid that solidified only when Philip Larkin arrived" (Carpenter, 2002: 42). Amis resented Wain for his notable academic achievements such as receiving a junior fellowship at St John's and co-editing the literary periodical Mandrake, often taking satisfaction in Wain's occasional misfortunes. In a letter to Larkin, Amis wrote: "John Wain was in a minor car smash recently and was cut rather badly about the forehead. I am glad". Al Alvarez, a friend and protégé of Wain's, recounts that being Wain's friend "was a tricky business" and that he was "a man without much modesty who sincerely believed he was a great genius and would tolerate no one he couldn't patronize" (Leader, 2007: 361). Nevertheless, he played a crucial role in Amis's rise to literary notoriety and substantially promoted his work. Also Wain's efforts towards building a literary and academic career influenced and determined Amis to take conclusive steps in the same directions. He recalled that it was Wain who "pushed me in the academic direction myself, inciting me to go for my First, pointing me towards a provincial college lectureship and away from the suburban schoolmaster's job I had vaguely envisaged" (Carpenter, 2002: 43). Conversely, Wain recalls that he "caught the virus" of writing novels after having read samples of Amis's work in progress, The Legacy: "When a few years later I sat down... to 'see if' I could write a novel, Amis's example was certainly one of my motives. He had made it seem. simple and natural to be trying to shape one's day-to-day reactions to life into fiction. I'm quite certain that I would never have written Hurry on Down without the example of that first, undergraduate novel of Amis's" (Carpenter, 2002: 42).

The year 1953 marked a turning point for Wain's career both as a writer and as an intellectual. After three years of work on his first novel, he finally finished it and also managed to find a publisher. However the most important event was the offer he received from the BBC third programme to edit and introduce a revamped version of the New Soundings radio programme. Disappointed by John Lehmann for his failure to discover new writers and present them on his show, the third programme decided to replace him with Wain. He immediately accepted seeing this as "a chance to move a few of the established reputations gently to one side and allow new people their turn, people whose view of what should be attempted was roughly the same as my own" (Carpenter, 2002: 45) and decided to call the programme First Reading. At the beginning of the first programme of First Reading, Wain included a reading of an excerpt from Amis's novel Lucky Jim. This initiative immediately attracted criticism and, in a way, kindled a sort of awareness that a new generation of young writers is slowly but surely emerging and with them a new literary hero is ready to take centre stage. Hugh Massingham, radio and television critic of the "New Statement", greeted the first programme with a sort of uneasy anticipation of what the consequences of change brought about by the new writers might be, without realizing that their intentions where far less radical and that they lacked any real focus in such a direction: "Mr. Wain's implication, I think, is fairly clear. Our brave new world is over at last and the old fogies can be led off to the slaughterhouse. Mr. Wain and his fledglings can move in and establish the new dispensation" (Carpenter, 2002: 15).

With the publication of Hurry on Down and Lucky Jim, this awareness of an impending change that was going to be implemented on the literary scene and perhaps beyond it by the new young writers grew more acute. The members, willing or not, of this new generation that was now threatening to become a movement, had to be identified and described. Their goals, views and the substance of the literary hero they proposed had to be carefully studied and discerned.

Parallels were drawn between the central characters of Amis's novel Lucky Jim and Wain's Hurry on Down. Beside the more obvious common traits and similar themes in the two novels, such as the characters preoccupation with jobs and earning a living, as well as their resentment towards social classes and their efforts towards freeing themselves from the constraints of such a system, some critics noted that the new hero, as characterized in these two novels, signals an emerging Zeitgeist:

A new hero has risen among us... He is consciously, even conscientiously, graceless. His face, when not dead-pan, is set in a snarl of exasperation. He has one skin too few, but his is not the sensitiveness of the young man in earlier twentieth-century fiction: it is the phoney to which his nerve-ends are tremblingly exposed, and at the least suspicion of the phoney he goes tough. He is at odds with his conventional university education, though he comes generally from a famous university: he has seen through the academic racket as he sees through all the others (Carpenter, 2002: 75).

"The New Statesman" critic, Walter Allen, who wrote these lines, was referring to Jim Dixon, but also added: "In fiction I think he first arrived last year as the central character of Mr. Wain's Hurry on Down" (Carpenter, 2002: 75). In his book The Angry Years, Colin Wilson also notes about Wain's novel that: ".it seems to embody the ideas that would later be regarded as typical of the Angry Young Men. Lumley's explosion in the first chapter about his girlfriend's petit bourgeois parents might have been put into the mouth of Osborne's Jimmy Porter. This also applies to his tirade against the standards and values of a crowd of right-wing ex-rugby types he encounters at a party thrown by one of the junior doctors, from which he is forcibly ejected" (Wilson, 2007: 49). Of course much of the parallels drawn between the two protagonists were superficial and strained but nevertheless they contributed to establishing the new literary hero who was supposed to reflect a certain social reality specific to that period and also embody the complexities, angst and aspirations of the younger generation. What most reviewers overlooked in their haste to point to the symptoms of a new state of affairs was the substantial reliance of the fictional characters' eccentricities and attitudes on the author's own subjective experiences and options. And this had far less to do with the creator's sensitivity to the changes in society, changes far less radical than one might think, than with their own peculiarities and traits. This is something that later reviews would highlight.

Slowly but consistently, the feeling that a new group of writers was emerging started to spread through the London literary community, as reflected in a review by Anthony Hartley, who had been a student at Oxford and was slightly acquainted with Amis, Wain and Larkin. The review appeared in January 1954, a month after Lucky Jim's publication and in it Amis was identified as one of a group of young poets called the "University Wits". A few weeks later Amis remarked to Larkin that he had been "flanked by you and Alvarez" in an edition of a BBC Third Programme series called New Poetry, and he added: "There's no doubt, you know, we are getting to be a movement, even if the only people in it we like apart from ourselves are each other" (Wilson, 2007: 49). Hartley further attempted to more exactly identify this movement in another article published in the "Spectator" on 27 August 1954. The article was called "Poets of the Fifties" and in it Hartley named Amis, Larkin and Wain among those he considered to be developing a new poetic voice that he described as being "'dissenting' and non-conformist, cool, scientific and analytical". He also characterized their style as being an "elimination of richness, of dryness pushed to the point of aridity", and although he warned of the dangers inherent to such a style he nevertheless concluded that they amounted to "the only considerable movement in English poetry since the thirties".

The transition from a circumscribed group of young writers who seemed to share certain aesthetic preferences to a full-grown literary movement with well-defined principles was the work of J. D. Scott. In 1954 he was editing the "Spectator's" literary pages and according to his own account it was the paper's disappointing sales that determined him to begin looking for something that could become sensational, given that a proper strategy was applied to it: "The circulation was not behaving as it should and one day in the autumn, the editor, Walter Taplin, gave the staff a pep-talk. What could we do to liven things up...? Sensational journalism: not an easy product for a literary editor, whose main job is to arrange for reviews; you can review sensational books in a sensational way, but what can you do if people are not producing sensational books? Well, you can look again to see whether those already in your hands are not capable of generating a deeper or more widespread interest" (Leader, 2000: 375). He also remembers that after reading Anthony Hartley's article on "Poets of the Fifties", he decided to take this supposed literary movement and "see how far it extended beyond poetry, and specifically into the novel, and to consider the extent to which it represented some historic change in society. Two of the poets named in 'Poets of the Fifties' had then recently published first novels; Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim and John Wain's Hurry on Down. Not very much, but I used it as the basis for my attempt" (Leader, 2000: 375).

The result of this attempt was an article entitled "In the Movement" and published unsigned in "Spectator" on 1 October 1954. According to Scott, it was "designed to grab the attention of any casual reader. on his way from the political pages ["The end of Bevanism?"] to the financial column [ Sterling Convertibility Deferred ] and was consequently written in a tone brisk, challenging and dismissive" (Carpenter, 2002: 79). In the article Scott points to three novels as representative of the Movement: John Wain's Hurry on Down, Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, and Irish Murdoch's Under the Net and further attempts to highlight its basic characteristics as evident from the three literary works mentioned: "It is bored by the despair of the Forties, not much interested in suffering, and extremely impatient of poetic sensibility, especially poetic sensibility, about the writer and society. So it's goodbye to all those rather sad little discussions about 'how the writer ought to live'", and its goodbye to the Little Magazine and "experimental writing". The Movement, "as well as being anti-phoney, is anti-wet; skeptical, robust, ironic, prepared to be as comfortable as possible in a wicked, commercial, threatened world which doesn't look, anyway, as if it's going to be changed much by a couple of handfuls of young English writers" (Carpenter, 2002: 80). The impact of the article was powerful and it immediately triggered reactions. Nevertheless, Amis was not very enthusiastic about the whole "Movement" idea. Two weeks after the publication of Scott's article he wrote to Larkin: "Well, what a lot of bullshit all that was in the Spr about the new movt. Etc. Useful up to a point, but the point is nearly here, I feel..." (Carpenter, 2002: 80).

In a further attempt to emphasize the historical validity of the Movement and also to capitalize on the publicity stir created by Scott's article, two anthologies of poetry were published in 1955 and 1956 respectively. The first was D. J. Enright's collection entitled Poets of the 1950s which included poems by Amis, Larkin, Wain, Davie, Elizabeth Jennings, Enright himself, John Holloway and Robert Conquest. The second was an anthology edited by Robert Conquest called New Lines which published the same writers with the addition of Thomas Gunn.

During the early and mid fifties the London stage was faced with an acute lack of originality and freshness in its plays. In a round up of the plays of 1954, Anthony Hartley wrote in the "Spectator": "appalled by the lack of standards among those fabricating material for actors and actresses to perform. It is not easy to recall one English play in this last year which even suggested that there might be a new playwright behind it ... The [lading playwrights] of 1954 were, of course, Charles Morgan and Christopher Fry. It seems to be the fact that the best writers. are. not concerning themselves with the theatre. The English stage is passing through a singularly barren period. Shaw must be turning in his grave" (Carpenter, 2002: 81-82).

The reason for this situation was the British theatre's heavy reliance on the canonical writers on the one hand and on the other hand the predominant lack of real value of the works of most young aspiring playwrights. In his cultural history of the period Robert Hewison writes: "Shakespeare, Sheridan, Maugham and Wilde were keeping the new playwrights out" and the young Peter Ustinov complained that "there is very little reason for the dramatist to be confident these days. Like Ibsen's Mrs. Alving he is haunted before he begins to work by ghosts-ghosts of the past" (Leader, 2000: 405). One of those who were sensitive to the crippling situation that was dominating British theatre was George Devine, a man who was not satisfied with passively observing what was going on but envisioned a practical solution to this problem. He told a potential patron: "I want to have a contemporary theatre. I have been all my life in the classical theatre. I want to try to make the theatre have a different position and have something to say and be a part of the intellectual life of the community" (Carpenter, 2002: 89). This resulted in the creation of the English Stage Company, a theatre company devoted to the promotion of young playwrights and their work and in the publication of an advertisement in the "Stage" requesting new plays by new writers. Devine received more than 600 scripts in response to the "Stage" advertisement but they all lacked any real merit from a literary point of view.

John Osborne

One notable exception among these was a play called Look Back in Anger. Its author was a 25 years old struggling actor and playwright named John Osborne. Devine agreed to produce Osborne's play and on the night of May 8th 1956 Look Back in Anger opened at the Royal Court Theatre. At first, it failed to draw in audiences and the critics were mostly unimpressed. The hero of the play was generally viewed as a sort of spokesperson for the younger post-war generation, one that is frustrated by the lack of meaning and purpose around him. One reviewer, T C. Worsley of the "New Statesmen" made a link with Lucky Jim, describing the play as "set on the seamy side of the Kingsley Amis world" (Carpenter, 2002: 118).

A very different review came from the 27 years old drama critic for the "Observer" Kenneth Tynan. In it Tynan discuses not only the play's merits and shortcomings but also what had already been written about it and the condition of the British drama in general. It had an important impact and eventually led to a reconsideration of the play and its relevance. One excerpt from this review is particularly interesting for the emphasis it places on the plays supposed accurate depiction of the post war youth:

Look Back in Anger presents post war youth as it really is, with special emphasis on the non-U intelligentsia who live in bedsitters... To have done this at all would have been a signal achievement; to have done it in a first play is a minor miracle. All the qualities are there, qualities one had despaired of ever seeing on the stage - the drift towards anarchy, the instinctive selfishness, the automatic rejection of 'official' attitudes, and the surrealist sense of humour. the casual promiscuity, the sense of lacking a crusade worth fighting. The Porters of our time. are classless, and they are also leaderless. Mr. Osborne is their first spokesman in the London theatre. (Carpenter, 2002: 118).

Financially the play became successful only after the BBC presented a 25 minute extract on television. After that broadcast, Look Back in Anger played to pack houses. Three weeks after Look Back in Anger had opened at the Royal Court a book called "The Outsider" was published receiving enthusiastic reviews and becoming a media phenomenon. It transformed its author, Colin Wilson, a 24 years old man coming from a working class family with no academic training into an intellectual celebrity. Wilson was usually associated with two other writers; one was Stuart Holroyd and Bill Hopkins. Holroyd says that what the three of them had in common was "a shared conception of man as a creature with spiritual hunger. We held that mystical experiences, visionary states of consciousness, moments of ecstasy. should be the chief object of man's endeavour. 'Religious Existentialists' we called ourselves. 'Spiritual Fascists' we were called by our critics" (Carpenter, 2002: 131). They played the role of disciples to Wilson's genius. And indeed his exacerbated self-confidence plus his vast readings must have made a powerful impression on the two. In his dairy, Wilson's description of himself even before his leap to literary stardom was flattering to say the least: "The day must come when I'm hailed as a major prophet"; "I am the major literary genius of our century. the most serious man of our age" (Carpenter, 2002: 133).

The person who apparently coined the term angry young man was George Fearon, the English Stage Company's part time press officer. According to Osborne's recollection, Fearon invited him for a drink in a pub, told him how much he disliked the play, and added: "I suppose you're really - an angry young man" (Carpenter, 2002: 103). The first indication of the fact that Fearon's phrase was catching on was an article published in the "Daily Mirror" and signed by Robert Tee in which Look Back in Anger is described as being "an angry play by an angry young author" (Carpenter, 2002: 169-170). Still, the first person to make public use of Fearon's description of Osborne seems to have been a journalist called Thomas Wiseman, in the Evening Standard's 'Show Talk' column on 7 July 1956, two months after the opening of Look Back in Anger. Osborne himself seems to have found the phrase silly and unhelpful, at least according to his memoirs. And yet he used it two days after the Standard article, while being interviewed by Malcom Muggeridge on BBC television's Panorama. "You see", he told Muggeridge, "if one recognizes problems and one states them, people say - oh, this is an angry young man" (Carpenter, 2002: 130). Daniel Farson picked up the phrase in a pair of articles he wrote for the "Daily Mail" a few days after Wiseman's piece had appeared in the "Standard". "The post-war generation has suddenly arrived", he told readers of the "Daily Mail" on 12 July 1956. "A number of remarkable young men have appeared on the scene. I have met them". The first one on the list was Amis, whom he described as "the only literary movement since the war"; then Osborne, who's "angry young man Jimmy Porter" typified "the lack of any real belief" among his generation (Carpenter, 2002: 134).

From the point of view of fashion, the Angry Young Men were also beginning to be associated with a specific style of dress best exemplified by Colin Wilson. Harry Ritchie writes:

Beaton photographed Wilson for his 1957 collection the face of the World, and parodists and cartoonists latched on to the distinctive look with glee. Soon the hornrimmed glasses, lank hair and inevitable polo-neck sweater were adorning caricatures of the celebrity philosopher. Wilson provided the essential components for a new literary type, as the cover illustration for the November 1957 issue of Twentieth Century demonstrates; three generations of writers are represented, the youngest by an author wearing the mandatory costume of Wilsonian spectacles and sweater and holding an [Amis inspired] glass of beer. He was offering a new literary image at a time when one was badly needed (Carpenter, 2002: 139).

John Braine: The Man at the Top

A later, but very valuable addition to the group of Angry Young Men was the thirty-four-year-old Yorkshire librarian John Braine. The London literary press greeted his first novel Room at the Top published in 1957 with much praise. He was also immediately labelled as a new recruit to the AYM movement. John Davenport in the "Observer" described Room at the Top's protagonist, Joe Lampton as "a callous, ambitious, sexy L-cky J-m... Joe inhabits the same sort of world... as Mr Amis's hero. L-cky J-m [is] saved by [his] amiability: Joe Lampton reveals the obverse side of the medal; he is a beast, and his story is the autobiography of a cad. He is ruthless rather than an angry young man: any anger he has is the driving force of his ambition" (Carpenter, 2002: 139).

"R. G." in Punch drew a comparison to Osborne's Jimmy Porter: "Joe Lampton looks back more in sorrow than in anger". David Holloway wrote in the "News Chronicle": "If I were given to movement-hailing, I would welcome Mr. John Braine as the leader of a new school, 'The Lecherous Young Men'. But... the love making is handled with directness that is totally void of offence and the book crackles with life" (Carpenter, 2002: 142). The "Daily Express" described Braine as one of "three youngish men" who had "geysered into the writing world", the other two being Amis and Osborne (Carpenter, 2002: 142).

In 1957 Tom Maschler, then an editor at MacGibbon and Kee, invited several Angries to contribute to a book entitled Declaration by writing essays in which to explain their views on a wide range of topics such as literature, the role of the writer, contemporary society and of course the angry young men label. The writers invited were: Amis, Osborne, Wilson, Kenneth Tynan, Lindsay Anderson, Bill Hopkins, Stuart Holroyd, John Wain and Doris Lessing, with the notable exception of John Braine because Maschler simply did not find any interest in Room at the Top. Amis turned down Tom Maschler's invitation telling him: "I hate all this pharisaical twittering about the 'state of our civilization' and I suspect anyone who wants to buttonhole me about my 'role in society'" (Carpenter, 2002: 153). The presentation for the book claimed that these were writers who "together. will help to mould our tomorrow"; yet, it admitted that they did not "form part of a united movement". Similarly, in his brief introduction, Maschler dismissed the AYM label as a piece of low journalism, and complained that "the writers who have set themselves the task of waking us up have been rendered harmless in the AYM cage". He also added: "It is important to note that although most of the contributors to this volume have at sometime or other been labelled Angry Young Men they do not belong to a united movement. Declaration is a collection of separate positions" (Carpenter, 2002: 154). And indeed any reader of the essays comprised in this collection would have to agree to that last sentence.

On the issue of whether or not there is any validity to the assertion that Angry Young Men movement had indeed existed, Wain and Osborne expressed the view that it was something created by the press and that in order to support such a claim actual facts were necessary, which in their opinion were missing. Doris Lessing on the other hand concluded that such a group existed and that "the work of the angry young men was like an injection of vitality into the withered arm of British literature" (Carpenter, 2002: 154). Wilson forecast "the evolution of a higher type ofman. hardly less than superman" (Carpenter, 2002: 154), and Hopkins and Holroyd prophesied the end of pure rationalism as the foundation of western thinking and an imminent change in traditional forms of government. Tynan and Lindsay Anderson took a conventional left-wing stance in their essays. Tynan wrote: "I want drama to be vocal in protest and I frankly do not see whence the voices will come if not from the Left" (Carpenter, 2002: 156). Jason Osborne's essay was perhaps the most striking do to his attack against the Royal family, the nation's worshipful attitude towards it and also his criticism of the Church of England.

In sales terms the Declaration was a success but most of the critics found no justification for its publication. In fact, by 1957 the general impression was that the Angry Young Men had run its course and the critics' hostility towards its alleged protagonists was growing. Daniel Farson, the same Daniel Farson who played a pivotal role in the popularizations of the "Angry Young Men" phrase and of its association with a literary movement, published a scathing review of Declaration in the "Books and Bookmen" magazine:

The really heartening thing is its complete failure. Not its commercial failure, for I believe the first edition has sold out, but its failure as a statement of any real significance or permanence. It would have been too awful if this conceited and remote little document had been acclaimed as the voice of a generation, but the opposite has happened. For the first time we see the "angry young men" in their proper perspective. They not only disagree, they actively dislike each other and they are not nearly angry enough; there is instead a note of sullen petulance. Declaration marks the death of the "angry epoch"...

The only attempt at a movement comes from Colin Wilson who is trailed by Stuart Holroyd and, inevitably, by his literary dog, Mr. Bill Hopkins, whose inclusion in the book is one of its mysteries (Carpenter, 2002: 178).

It is interesting to note how only after the AYM movement had served its purpose its striking lack of consistency and coherence became highlighted - ironically by one of its former architects. A careful reader of Amis's review of the "Outsider" published in 1956 would have become aware of this situation long before the publication of Farson's critique of Declaration. In it Amis states his antipathy to the qualities attributed to the outsider type, qualities that soon after its publication became incorporated into the angry young man figure. The "most untenable and annoying" of these was a supposed "larger share, if not a monopoly, of depth and honesty and sensitivity and intensity and acuity and insight and courage and adulthood - especially that". Another quality that was sure to irritate Amis was the outsider type's intellectual superiority and consequently his isolation from most people. Considering Amis's anti intellectual leanings and his highly active social life it becomes transparent why such traits were unlikely to impress him: He has no strong affections, and his lack of ordinary warmth makes him divide the human race into himself on one side, plus the odd hero-figure or two, and the mob on the other". Another side to the outsider is his irrationalism, his reliance on extreme states of consciousness to deliver him from the limitations of ordinary life and what others perceive as being reality: "He does not accept the conditions of human life, and finds release from its prison only in moments of terror and ecstasy". Amis also rejected this attitude and expressed his adherence to a rationalistic view on life: "feeling as I do that one is better off with too much reason than with none at all" (Carpenter, 2002: 178).

Collin Wilson: The Man behind The Outsider

There is undoubtedly a fundamental difference between Amis's and Wilson's [and by extension Hopkins's and Holroyd's] views on "man" and consequently on the manner in which the writer relates to this specific image of humanity, both as a source of inspiration for his fiction and also as a potential consumer of his literary products. For Wilson and his acolytes the primary appeal of humanity resided not in its present configuration but in its supposed potential for a spiritual transformation. They all prophesied the imminent arrival of a spiritual revolution that would result in a new type of man, in Wilson's words a veritable "superman".

Amis perceived man in a totally different manner. For him man was a concrete being, something that can be perceived in its manifestations, its contradictions, and its commonality, something that exists in the real world and exhibits recognizable traits. In an interview when asked what was there to write about in contemporary England, Amis retorted: "he [the writer] is not distracted from his proper task, which is to write about human nature, the permanent things in human nature. I could reel you off a list as long as your arm, beginning with ambition, sexual desire, vainglory, foolishness - there's quite enough there to keep people writing" (Carpenter, 2002: 180). So it is man that Amis is talking about, not how he would like him to be but how he in fact it is in all his complexity and contradiction. This also explains Amis's attitude towards his potential reader, trying never to bore him with ideological or philosophical nonsense, but concerned with satisfying his need for entertainment and not disappointing his expectations (although not at the cost of superficiality and commerciality). It can be said that Amis wrote with the public constantly in mind. For Wilson, Hopkins and Holroyd literature should serve the purpose of elevating man's spirit to a higher level, to facilitate a spiritual transformation and reveal all his potentialities. This is not literature written for the sake of entertaining the reader. At one point asked about his image of the ideal reader Hopkins answered: "I think I only write for people of my own imagination. And of course one or two very close friends, but certainly not with the public in mind. I think that literature of the sort that we're thinking of will be very difficult to absorb, and will require a different attitude on the part of the public" (Carpenter, 2002: 180).

At the end of these considerations, it seems rather clear that the AYM was nothing more than a media stunt. Due to the fundamental lack of a unified and coherent perspective on art and writing of its alleged members, there simply was no ground for such a movement to be "created". Any attempt to group together Wilson and Amis, for example, under the same label seems rather ludicrous now. The group had an important function which Doris Lessing remarked in her Declaration's essay, it was partly to revitalize the London literary scene in a moment when it desperately needed such an effort.

Sidebar

Odeta Belei is Assistant Lecturer with a Doctoral degree in Philology; her doctoral thesis, entitled Kingsley Amis 's Protean Growth, was presented at Sibiu in 2010. She is presently working at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of "Aurel Vlaicu" University, Arad. Her domains of competence are English Language and Literature. She published different studies about Kingsley Amis, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Stephen Crane.

References

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Alvarez, Al., Where Did it All Go Right? Bloomsbury, 2002.

Amis, Kingsley, Memoirs, London: Mackays of Chatam PLC, 1991.

Amis, Martin, Experience, Jonathan Cape, 2000.

Books and Bookmen, December, 1957.

Carpenter, Humphrey, The Angry Young Men, London: Penguin Books, 2002. "Daily Express", 13.4.57.

Hewison, Robert, In Anger: Culture in the Cold War 1945-60, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981.

Holroyd, Stuart, Contraries: A Personal Progression, Bodley Head, 1975.

Taylor, John Russell (ed.), Osborne, John, Look Back in Anger: a Casebook, Macmillan 1968.

Larkin, Philip, Required Writing, Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982, London: Faber & Faber, 1983.

Leader, Zachary, The Letters of Kingsley Amis, Harper Collins, 2000.

Literary Voices, no. 2, Borgo Press, California, San Bernardino, 1984.

Maschler, Tom, Declaration, MacGibbon and Kee, 1957.

"New Statesman", 18.7.53.

"New Statesman", 30.1.54.

"News Chronicle", 14.3.57.

"Observer', 13.5.56.

"Observer', 17.3.57.

Osborne, John, Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise, Faber and Faber, 1999.

"Punch", 17.4.57.

Ritchie, Harry, Success Stories: Literature and the Media in England, 1950-1959, Faber and Faber, 1988.

Roberts, Philip, The Royal Court Theatre and the Modern Stage, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999.

"Spectator", 1.10.54.

"Spectator", 7.1.55.

"Spectator", 16.4.77.

"The Daily Mail", 12.7.56.

The Legion of the Lost, "Spectator", 15 June, 1956.

The originals of Amis's letters to Larkin, Bodleian Library, Oxford, MSS Eng. C. 6044-54.

Wain, John, Sprightly Running: Part of an Autobiography, Macmillan, 1965.

Wilson, Colin, The Angry Years, London, Robson Books, 2007.