Angry, but mostly deceased, men

[calimac]

Another couple of interesting books about the Angry Young Men have come out. I haven't seen either of the books yet, but there have been reviews on the web. I'll have to read the books later, for this is a continuing scholarly interest of mine.

The Angry Young Men, a name loathed by everyone it was applied to, was a journalistic catch-all term used in the 1950s to describe some very disparate young British writers whose only common factors were a relatively conservative, plain-spoken literary style (as opposed to the experimentalism of the previous generation of young writers), and a cheeky or truculent attitude towards society and the establishment. John Osborne's turgid play Look Back in Anger (I tried watching a BBC telefilm of this once; despite starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson it was so tedious I couldn't get through the first act) and Colin Wilson's incomprehensible philosophical treatise The Outsider were enormously popular and talked about at the time; but after only a few years people looked back and said, "What were we thinking?" Even Philip Larkin's reputation suffered a huge hit a few years ago when a biography revealed just how much of a racist, sexist misanthrope he really was, though I still like his poetry despite that; and the only Angries still to maintain strong literary reputations are Iris Murdoch (just about the only woman associated with the group, and not very angry) and Kingsley Amis (whom we always knew was a right bastard). Some of Amis's novels, particularly Lucky Jim, still hold up very well. He is also well thought of in SF circles, where we didn't have to suffer his personality: part of his cheeky attitude towards traditional literarydom was to take a strong serious interest in popular culture like jazz and SF, and he wrote the first serious outside literary study of the SF field, New Maps of Hell, as well as a couple novels.

Now there is a new biography of Amis - this is at least the third - written by Zachary Leader, the editor of the staggeringly brick-like Amis Letters. Here's a New Republic review (probably behind a subscription wall) which, like so many reviews, says almost nothing about the book but is a good brief summary of its subject, showing Amis's evolution from sleek, witty, rather left-wing young man to cranky old Tory boozer (and his alcoholic intake was really amazing).

One of the most colorful qualities of the Angries, especially as they aged, was the way their catty attitude towards each other, even their closest friends, and towards everyone else they knew, would come out in unwittingly self-revelatory memoirs. Amis's own Memoirs are a masterpiece of the unintentionally self-condemnatory autobiography, and from this review it looks like Colin Wilson has written another one. Wilson, the youngest of the original Angries (he was just 24 when The Outsider was published) is also just about the only one still alive, so he gets the last word in edgewise. He too is known in SF circles, mostly through his interest in the occult, and he also once wrote a very nice little essay on Tolkien.

I have an article on another one of the Angries I mean to write some year soon, and this will all be useful background reading.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Hmmm the Wilson one sounds potentially interesting--but otherwise, I cannot stand these guys, and resent precious reading time spent on them. I got way too much exposure to them in college, and had to write wayyy too many papers on their Relevance and on their Existential Stances.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I can't stand Osborne, but I like Amis and Larkin, even when I find their views repugnant, because they're actually trying to communicate and are talented at doing so. And neither of them is mired in existentialism, which, judging by the Sartre I had to read in college, is an intensely naval-gazing species of depression.

[divertimento.livejournal.com]

I wonder if any of the Amis biographies shed light on his obsession with Carl Maria von Weber, who figures prominently in two of his novels ("The Alteration" and "Girl, 20"). In the latter, the narrator is working on a major biography of Weber, while in the former's alternate history scenario, Beethoven died earlier and Weber lived longer, cementing a reputation as greatest composer ever into the 20th century.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Weber, eh? I didn't take special note of his appearance in The Alteration, and I haven't read Girl, 20.

Tolkien said in an interview that he particularly liked Weber, which surprised me, as he's a far more luridly dramatic composer than would fit what I knew of Tolkien's tastes.

My own take on Weber is that he's the better composer whom Wagner is a bad imitation of. (And Wagner is the better composer whom Richard Strauss is a bad imitation of, and the bad imitations of Strauss are endless, especially in film scores, so the turtles keep going all the way down.)