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Angry, but mostly deceased, men
May. 24th, 2007 08:46 pmAnother 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.
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.
