by Colin Wilson
One of the first writers to attract attention in the 1950’s was Angus Wilson. His first two volumes of short stories were notable for the intense dislike with which he seemed to regard all his characters; his attitude was not unlike that of Aldous Huxley in Point Counter Point. Yet in spite of the wit and trenchancy of the satire, the whole approach bore strong resemblances to the Mrs. Dale’s Diary type of entertainment. The stories were all about “ordinary people,” and the characters were, almost without exception, other-directed; they were either nice or not nice (mostly the latter). But it is perhaps hardly fair to observe the other-directed tendency of these early volumes, since satire is, by its very nature, about other-directed people. All its emphasis is on motives, on the weakness and contemptibleness of its characters. But Mr. Wilson’s later work has shown that he is not to be considered as a satirist; there are many of his characters whom he seems to like and to take quite seriously. Even so, they remain essentially socially oriented; their problems are all to do with other people. The effect is occasionally that of a highbrow Woman’s Own serial. The preoccupation with other people is declared immediately in the first sentence of his latest novel, The Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot. “Meg Eliot was well aware that in taking her place as the Chairman of the Committee for the third time in succession, she was acting in an unconstitutional way.” And later, on the same page: “Meg felt a bit ashamed when she considered how she had persuaded them.” Similarly, the dilemmas of his central characters are always connected with their relations to other people; the hero of Hemlock and After, the writer Bernard Sands, is a humanist whose inner complacency is shattered by two things: his development of homosexual tendencies in middle age, and his observation that he feels a sadistic pleasure on seeing a male prostitute arrested in Leicester Square. It is not his salvation he is worried about (like the heroes of Sartre and Camus), but the fact that his relation to society is not what he thought it was; the discovery of his real relation to it gives him a sense of guilt that leads to his death. In Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, the central character is a historian whose personal life has been highly unsatisfactory—mostly owing to his moral cowardice—and who suspects that a historical discovery in which he took part is actually a fraud. At the end of the book, he manages to straighten out his personal relations to some extent and announces to the historical world that the discovery was a fraud, thus propitiating society. His inner life now runs smoothly because his personal relations have been established on a more satisfactory basis and his relation to society has been adjusted. He can now go off for a holiday to Mexico with a light heart.
This survey of his work certainly fails to do justice to Mr. Wilson’s skill as a manipulator of scores of characters, as well as to his extraordinary powers of observation. Nevertheless, none of these characters can be considered as inner-directed in the sense that the great inner-directed characters of literature can be—Faust, or Ahab in Moby Dick, or even Prewett in From Here to Eternity. Mr. Wilson’s characters bring to mind that passage at the beginning of Shaw’s Apple Cart in which Sempronius talks about his father, who had spent his life arranging pageants and who, when he was cast up alone on a desert island, went melancholy-mad from solitude. Mr. Wilson’s characters also exist solely as social entities. All their thoughts are occupied with other people. Perhaps Mr. Wilson’s tendency to call them all by their Christian names emphasizes the Mrs. Dale’s Diary affinities; but it is something deeper than these odd literary tricks that gives his work its tone of other-direction. The very seriousness of his intentions underlines the fact that society is for him what the Church might have been for a writer in the Middle Ages; it occupies the whole of his horizon, and he shows no interest in what lies beyond it.
Although Mr. Wilson published his first volume in 1949, he actually belongs to an older generation of writers; he is now in his mid-forties. The most notorious literary revolt of the fifties is associated with the names of a younger set of writers, whose ages range from twenty to thirty-five. The first thing to note about most of them—the best known are Kingsley Amis, John Wain, John Braine, John Osborne, Bill Hopkins, Michael Hastings, Stuart Holroyd—is a certain bluntness in their language and a down-to-earth quality in their attitudes. It is the opposite of the high-flown quality that De Tocqueville noted in American orators. It seems to be a determination not to say anything they don’t feel. But the question that will determine their importance is, what do they feel? And this is altogether less definite. They have been lumped together as Angry Young Men, but the phrase is almost completely irrelevant; they are no more or less angry than any previous generation of writers.
John Wain set the tone of revolt in his Hurry On Down. This novel deals with a young man who leaves university with the right qualifications for becoming a schoolteacher or for getting some minor executive post in industry. But he has no desire to settle down, and prefers to drift from job to job—as a window cleaner, a TV script writer, and so on. There is no conclusion (except a rather dubious ending that involves “the love of a good woman”—a device that Nietzsche exploded when he wrote of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman). The point of the novel is its hero’s desire to be inner-directed instead of “fitting in.” But its revolt is as inconclusive as that of the Beat Generation.
The same criticisms can be made of Amis’s Lucky Jim. Again, the main point about Jim is his refusal to fit in. He is a university lecturer who dislikes a great many things about his job but hasn’t the courage to revolt openly. The humor of the book arises from the contrast between the violence of his thoughts and the submissiveness of his actions. In many respects, Jim has the characteristics of the typical Aldous Huxley hero—the ability to put his foot in it, to make a mess of things, a sort of wincing sensitivity about his faux pas. But the book’s popularity arises from quite a different source: from the fact that, in spite of his faux pas, Jim still gets the girl and lands the important job. The reader who sympathizes only too painfully with Jim’s sense of ordinariness is delighted to be assured that he has nothing to be ashamed of, that the ordinary chap will always come out on top. Together, Amis and Wain launched a new cult of the ordinary chap, who is only Riesman’s other-directed man with a veneer of rebelliousness.
The revolt of John Osborne has the same dubious quality. His first successful play, Look Back in Anger, gave the impression that a new revolt against society had hit the British theater. It was true that the hero’s revolt had a strong pessimistic flavor—“There aren’t any good, brave causes left”—but at least it was alive and kicking, it wasn’t fatalistic. But Mr. Osborne’s next play, The Entertainer, written after his fabulous success, is as pessimistic as The Iceman Cometh. It concerns a number of theatrical people in a seaside boardinghouse who get on each other’s nerves for three acts. Nothing happens, except that everything goes from bad to worse and that its hero, the third-rate comedian Archie Rice, shows a disinclination to “make a fresh start” in Canada, preferring to go to jail. It looks like masochism, or exhausted defeatism, although Mr. Osborne tries hard to make it look like a sort of integrity. Since The Entertainer, an earlier play of Mr. Osborne’s has been shown in London, in which he is again preoccupied with the autobiographical-type hero who has a grievance against society. The hero of Epitaph for George Dillon has the same capacity for invective and self-pity as Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger, but the play shows him abandoning his integrity and writing cheap melodramas for provincial touring companies.
The revolt of Amis, Wain, and Osborne lacks direction. It tends to be a wild thrashing around that demonstrates nothing but dissatisfaction. Moreover, their involvement in the cult of the ordinary chap shows that they are very far from extricating themselves from the premises they believe they are attacking.
John Braine, in Room at the Top, is far more in control of his material than are Amis, Wain, or Osborne. He boldly returns to a major theme of the nineteenth century—the need to assert oneself in society, to become a man of importance—a theme to be found in Balzac, Zola, Stend
hal. In this respect, he has already thrown off the defeat premise that dominates the American scene. But it must not be supposed that he set out deliberately to return to an earlier tradition. Joe Lampton’s aspirations are not merely to make money, to achieve power; his ambitiousness is as thoroughly romantic as Jay Gatsby’s in Fitzgerald’s novel. The injustice of his own dull life as an office worker hits him for the first time as he watches a beautiful, sunburned girl climb into a Jaguar with a well-dressed youth. His is a completely romantic fantasy, a longing for everything that he imagines the girl and the Jaguar symbolize.
All the same, the novel is not about Joe’s struggle for money. After stating his theme, Braine seems to forget it, and goes on to describe Joe’s experiences with the local dramatic society and the two love affairs he gets involved in. These two affairs become the center of the novel—one with a teen-age girl, the other with an older woman (as in Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir). At the end of the novel, he jilts the older woman and marries the teen-age girl, whose father is a rich factory owner and can offer Joe a well-paid job. The older woman kills herself in a car crash, and Joe is left suffering from pangs of conscience and a feeling of emptiness—in spite of the fact that he is now a prosperous man with an attractive wife. The moral overtones are unmistakable.
It would be a complete misinterpretation of the book to regard Joe as a social climber with a one-track mind. Passages like this contradict the idea:
Then I thought of Sparrow Hill and Warley Moor again. I knew that there was a cold wind outside and a light covering of snow. It would be quiet there and untouched and clean. The beer went dead inside me; I felt with my own selfishness, as nasty as catarrh; there was nothing in my heart to match the lovely sweep of the moor and the sense of infinite space behind it and a million extra stars above.
Moreover, the death of Alice focuses the unresolved problem of human suffering and the necessity for indifference. (In Les Faux Monnayeurs, Lillian persuades Vincent to abandon his mistress by telling him of a shipwreck in which she was involved; the boat was loaded to capacity, and the sailors hacked off the fingers of those who tried to climb into it with hatchets—one more passenger would have sunk the boat. Gide here expresses the problem with great power.) It is not that Joe wants to abandon Alice; but he has to make the choice that involves all his dreams of riches.
The important thing about this novel is that it is a revival of the inner-directed hero. Most criticisms of it that I have read suggest that Joe is an unsympathetic, grasping character, but nothing could be further from the truth; the author has obviously poured a great deal of his own longing and imagining into him—and above all, of his own sensitivity (for Joe is by no means insensitive). The total effect is of a tone very like A Farewell to Arms—the love of life, the mixture of sensitivity and toughness in the hero, and the same final sense of tragedy and loss. It was startling that a book of such extraordinary merit should have been written, not by a widely traveled journalist, but by a Yorkshire librarian.
Bill Hopkins’s The Divine and the Decay has many of the same qualities as Braine’s book, although technically it is a far less satisfying job. Its hero, Peter Plowart, has a bottomless contempt for most human beings, which seems to be based on the same kind of observations as those of Riesman and Whyte. But Plowart’s situation is made more interesting by the fact that he himself is by no means inner-directed; he is always being seized by misgivings and self-doubt. His whole attitude towards the world is based on his certainty that he is not like other men, and he wants to prove this to himself by gaining political powers, by becoming the second Napoleon. But he is self-divided: certain of his own superiority and the stupidity of most men; yet, as soon as he is left alone, torn by the realization that he has not yet achieved self-control. The plot of the book is too complex to be detailed here, and frequently fails to convince. But the inner situation of its hero is always convincing; and the climax of the book, when Plowart’s self-division is healed in a moment of crisis, has considerable power. But the book stops at the very moment when the reader wants to know what happens next, the moment when the author is challenged to show what his hero will do now that he is no longer self-divided. Although Hopkins makes a far more determined attempt to explore the problems of the inner-directed man than Osborne or Amis, he still leaves most of the questions unanswered.
The situation in England is, on the whole, more promising than in America. This may be for exactly the reasons that Whitehead suggested made the English student more self-determined and confident than the American: the English writer has a lack of diffidence, a willingness to tear into problems without too much fear of making a fool of himself. This usually means that English writing tends to be less technically polished than American (no English novel of the fifties can compare, for sheer technical skill, with Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place). But it also means that there is a stronger sense of individualism. By its very nature, individualism is a revolt against other-direction. But unless it possesses a sense of conscious purpose, the revolt is likely to express itself as a futile gesture of protest. This is the major complaint to be brought against writers like Amis, Wain, and Osborne. They seem to lack an awareness of the central problems, or to be aware only of their nonessential aspects. These problems are fundamentally psychological. They spring from the fact that the complexity of our society tends to create a defensive attitude in many people, the sort of acknowledgment of defeat that a schoolboy might feel on looking into a volume of higher mathematics. The result is a sense of diffidence, a loss of the feeling of being self-determined. This diffidence gnaws into the nervous energies, into the power of enterprise; it narrows the individual’s conception of his own abilities and values.
The Lonely Crowd and The Organization Man examine this attitude in its sociological aspects, treating its literary manifestations merely as evidence. But neither Riesman nor Whyte deals with the most important symptoms in contemporary literature, the diminishing role of the hero, and the cult of the ordinary chap. This is the matter of greatest concern for the contemporary writer.
The first signs of this new anti-heroic consciousness began to reveal themselves in the 1920’s, in the work of such men as Eliot, Joyce, Huxley. After the generation of Shaw, Chesterton, Wells, who regarded themselves as all-rounders, capable of pronouncing on politics, religion, literature, culture, even sport, came a generation who deliberately narrowed their approach. Eliot said, typically, “The spirit killeth, but the letter giveth life.” Joyce excluded any general ideas from his work and seemed to think of himself as closer to the painter or musician, a “pure artist,” rather than a writer. Pound declared his admiration for Flaubert and James. Huxley stuck to a cultured satire, and only in later years began to state—somewhat diffidently—his positive values.1 It is true that this revolt began as a repudiation of the carelessness and irresponsibility that so often reveal themselves in the work of the Shaw-Chesterton generation, but caution and understatement soon developed into an unwritten law, which strengthened the diffidence premise, whose social causes Riesman has analyzed. The result has been a quarter of a century of increasingly diluted imitation of the “great names” of the twenties.
The present generation is consequently in a cleft stick. It is hardly surprising that critics after the war began to declare that literature had reached a point of exhaustion and that no great names were likely to arise in our epoch. Good writing is usually a reflection of and a reaction against its time. The work of Shaw and Wells cannot be understood without knowing that they grew up in late-Victorian England. The work of Eliot, Huxley, Joyce, and Hemingway is post-war; the 1914-1918 war always lurks in the background. But the powerful forces of our own age are mass media. Shaw could react directly against Victorian prudery, and Eliot could react against post-Victorian complacency (which included Shaw and Wells). The modern writer has nothing so well-defined to start from. Among other things, he has to react against Mrs. Dale’s Diary, Diana Dors, American success worship and Brit
ish royalty worship, the News of the World and the New Statesman, T. S. Eliot and Dale Carnegie and Forever Amber, the hydrogen bomb, James Dean, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Wilfred Pickles. If he is born into a working-class or lower-middle-class family, all these things will be woven into the fabric of his life from an early age or will obtrude themselves into it as he starts to take an interest in the world outside. And even if a young writer made the effort to get all these things in focus, he would still have solved only a half of his problems. Shaw could begin writing where Dickens and Carlyle left off, and Eliot could turn his back on Shaw and plump for Newman and T. E. Hulme. But the writer of today finds that the Eliot-Joyce-Hemingway tradition of writing has now worked itself to a dead halt, and he will have difficulty in feeling himself a part of a tradition. He is faced with difficult alternatives. He could write as if Shaw, Wells, Eliot, Joyce, and the rest had never existed. (This seems to be what Mr. Amis has done.) In that case, he is bound to take himself fairly lightly. Or he could attempt to synthesize within himself the whole movement of writing in the twentieth century, attempting to act as arbitrator between Shaw and Eliot, Greene and Chesterton, D. H. Lawrence and Wells, and to base his own work on a total reassessment of the past sixty years. In doing this, he would also be working against the modern trend of other-direction, which makes him feel that to undertake such a task would be an absurd overestimate of his own powers and importance. The decision to attempt it would be the most important step.