Meanwhile, the Cold War crept across minds and cabinet tables in a new Ice Age of anxiety. In its progress, it encouraged a curious doublethink. On the one hand, Stalin’s purges, the Ukrainian famine and even the Gulag itself were scarcely known; Stalin was still invoked as ‘Uncle Joe’. On the other, the Red Menace hung like a crow over a peaceful meadow. Its hour would come soon, it was whispered, and in that hour all freedoms, and perhaps all life, would be extinguished. For it, too, had the Bomb.
The Labour party under Attlee disavowed any connection with communism and even expelled members suspected of being fellow travellers. Communists were held to have powers of concealment almost preternatural in scope, and on 11 February this superstition seemed vindicated when Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean, who had disappeared in 1951, now took shape again in Moscow five years later. Of the two, it was Burgess who caught the public imagination. He was charming, erudite, handsome and clever, qualities that made his apostasy all the more puzzling. ‘Surely only the aggrieved could become socialists?’ ran the reasoning. But Burgess had no genuine grievance, beyond a conviction that his peers had failed to appreciate his gifts. Like many English radicals, Burgess quickly found that he had little taste for Russia or the Russians. Apart from anything else, he missed cricket. Again, like many radicals, his nursery was Eton College. This school has often been seen as the forcing ground of the English establishment, but any paradox dissolves under scrutiny: Eton taught self-reliance within an atmosphere of uneasy equality.
Anger howled in many alleys during this supposedly settled period. The English theatre, dominated for four hundred years by bourgeois or aristocratic concerns, was to celebrate the kitchen and the bedroom along with the fury they might nurture. On 8 May 1956, Look Back in Anger was first staged.
English theatre was previously notable for three professional playwrights and two poets. J. B. Priestley, Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan had very different styles and political opinions, but their subjects were broadly the same: middle-or upper-middle-class people whose ingenious attempts to fend off reality led to comic or tragic failures. They were schooled in the tradition that the business of art was to entertain rather than preach. While these three wrote in a style that owed at least something to the cadences of ordinary speech, T. S. Eliot and Christopher Fry wrote in verse, on explicitly or subtly religious themes. During the post-war years, overt religious affiliation was gradually being diminished. How could it draw audiences when it could scarcely keep congregations?
John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger embodied other spirits. And when Jimmy Porter, a young man fulminating against the world, savages the women in the play for their supposed distance from reality, he sets the tone for later generations. The play could only have belonged to the newly affluent, newly educated Fifties. The Royal Court used the expression ‘angry young man’ to describe Osborne, shrewdly hinting that they had coined it. But it was a term already current in 1951. And its most distinctive avatars appeared in fiction, not on the stage.
To call the movement ‘leftist’ would be reductive and inaccurate, and ‘workingclass’ will not quite serve. The opening salvo of the movement is an instance in point. John Wain’s Hurry On Down, published in 1953, tells the story of Charles Lumley, an irritant abroad, and his search for freedom and authenticity. Such a quest is ideally bourgeois, but the time was not ripe for that irony to be apparent: the middle classes were not yet rich enough. Lumley becomes a window cleaner, a chauffeur and a drug dealer. True love proves his salvation in an ending that is at best uneasily hymeneaclass="underline" he and his love simply look at each other, their expressions ‘baffled and enquiring’.
In an introduction to the 1985 edition, Wain took up the gauntlet of critics who had accused him of being peripheral to the angry young men. As he pointed out, his novel predated those of others in the movement. ‘If anything,’ he wrote, ‘I started it.’ This claim can be justified on other grounds. In many ways, Charles Lumley is far more typical of the movement than either Osborne’s Jimmy Porter or Kingsley Amis’s Jim Dixon. Though in no sense a son of the tenements, Charles contrives to reinvent himself as one. Once a social fetter, a workingclass origin had become a rosette.
One of the book’s characters, an old soldier, speaks of how the working classes had ‘got above themselves since the war’. C. S. Lewis, too, felt that the working classes had been ‘flattered’ under the post-war settlement. If so, it was a flattery that many were eager to accept. A superstitious dread grew around what had once been known as ‘middle-class values’, even as the middle classes spread inward from the suburbs and so deep into the heart of national life that they seemed close to comprising the majority.
Like the post-war consensus itself, the phenomenon of the angry young men was in part the creature of public perception. In any case, it would have defeated the object of those authors to be placed in a group; it was a confused and fissiparous trend. And what provoked the anger? Partly the perceived failures of the political class, but primarily the continuing existence of class in the first place. The culture of aristocracy had gone up in steam, and a mist of gentility fell. ‘True’ democracy lay as far off as ever. The promises of the Left had addled, and those of the Right were so much chaff. England seemed a drab, chiffon-choked, tea-and-cake-smothered boutique, all too often with a ‘CLOSED’ sign. So what remained for a reflective soul but indiscriminate anger? As Kingsley Amis suggested in later years, ‘annoyance’ might be the better term. Amis himself made a literary career of it, and his protagonists evince this quality to a high degree. In Lucky Jim, Jim Dixon ends his lecture on ‘Merrie England’ with a comically drunken diatribe directed at ‘The Esperanto crowd’, but the rage expressed is curiously apolitical. In this, Amis was as much of his nation as of his class. The English rarely maintain intensity in political matters – sooner or later, their instinct is to wipe the sweat from the demagogue’s collar and propose a soothing cup of tea.
The post-war years had brought fables of spiritual or material collapse, from That Hideous Strength to Brave New World to Nineteen Eighty-Four. During the Fifties, the novel seemed to be settling back to its journalistic roots – quotidian in subject, unpretentious in style – but the zeitgeist is a wayward wind. Among writers of fiction, another response was offered to the bewilderments of the post-war world, which was to fly above it. In 1955, The Return of the King, the last instalment of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, was published. It was the resurrection of heroic romance, tempered by its author’s memories of war.
It tells of a small, unregarded race of Middle-earth, the ‘hobbits’, who ‘arise to shake the counsels of the great’. The freedom of the world hinges upon the destruction of something tiny, beautiful and evil, a ring forged by a fallen angel. While elves, men and dwarves fight, two hobbits are tasked with the destruction of the great destroyer. A whole world, formed of its author’s experiments in language, came into being, to the extent that if anyone were to point out that ‘Middle-earth’ is only a translation of the Norse ‘Mittlegard’, the hearer would respond with a shrug. It was there, whatever its origins.
For the English journalist Bernard Levin, it offered a beautiful and salutary reminder that the ‘meek will inherit the earth’; for the American critic Edmund Wilson, it was ‘juvenile trash’, a story of good boys being rewarded. In spite of the naysayers, the popularity and influence of The Lord of the Rings grew to unprecedented heights. Tolkien himself, a scholar and devout Catholic, was later to find his work taken up as a banner by most unlikely allies, a group that came to be known as the ‘hippies’.