What happened in Britain in the 1950s? On this side of the Atlantic, we remember the decade as one of mind-numbing conformity and conservatism, but in Britain there was an incredible flowering of literature. We tend to lump it now under the heading of the Angry Young Men, but there were many distinct groups within the movement. One of them was called, in fact, “The Movement.” It included Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis along with other poets. Then there were the working class novels which poured out of the decade. Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning might be one of the best known. There was also John Braine's Room at the Top, as well as the novels of Amis and Larkin themselves-the best known of the Angries. I suppose Keith Waterhouse's Billy Liar would also fit that mould. Finally, there was the concomitant development in British drama called Kitchen Sink Realism.
John Osborne's Look Back in Anger would fall under that category. This play is seen by many as the epitome of AYM literature. The Kitchen Sink genre would also include Shelagh Delaney-possibly the only Angry Young Woman. Few of these writers were interested in being associated with one another. Most were funneled off into exclusive side-groups, some were looked down upon by the others, and some, like Philip Larkin, became so curmudgeonly that they ignored the society of fellow writers altogether. Maybe what was bothering them was the noticeable similarities in their writing, politics, class-origin, and outlook. Almost all of the Angries were more working-class than previous generations of British writers. Most started off as radical socialists, maybe even with an anarchist tinge. And many turned to the right at some point during the Swinging Sixties.
How did all of this come about? Mostly, the movement was the result of the sudden release of a great deal of pent-up working class angst. Britain had certainly had radical, socialist writers before. Even without including pre-1848 radicals, there was the first generation of British socialists-including William Morris and John Ruskin. Then there were the Fabians, including H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. After that, there were several waves of radical writers during the first half of the 20th century, right up to the Auden Circle in the "30s and "40s. But something distinguishes the anarchic fury of the Angries from all previous British writers. And that is that the AYM-generation was truly of the working class in a way that was not possible for previous writers. As the Second World War ended and British troops were coming home, many began to feel that they had been fighting a people's war against fascism. Churchill was roundly defeated at the polls and a Labour government took power.
A welfare state was introduced, and most British people felt that the time was right to throw out all the old Tories, aristocrats, and landed gentlemen which had represented The Establishment in Britain for so long. As feudalism was thrown out on its royal arse and ex-servicemen began attending universities, a new working class generation became educated. What's more, they also became aware of the persistence, only in muted form, of the old order: a persistence which manifested itself in a Conservative win at the polls in the early "50s. The working class became aware of itself in a new way. A similar change occurred in the United States, thanks to the GI Bill and various cultural changes which took place circa 1945. I suppose you could call it the “Norman Mailer Generation.” Class was not such a central theme of our movement, but races and ethnicities who had been silenced or ignored by discrimination found a new voice. There was a tremendous revival of Jewish and African American literature, for instance. Think of Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, and all the rest.
But now that they were speaking for themselves, what did the British working class writers have to say? Possibly the first AYM novel to come out was Philip Larkin"s Jill in 1946. The novel established several of the AYM trademarks. First of all, it was about working class people, but not in a working class setting. Jill is the story of a working class boy at Oxford-where Larkin was a student himself at the time-and was the first novel of its era to address the condition of Britain at the time-in other words, the simultaneous empowerment and alienation of the working class. Here is protagonist John Kemp receiving an education his parents would never have dreamed of, yet it is driven home again and again that he does not really belong in this new setting. Oxbridge is still the country of musty old dons and young aristocrats punting on the Thames.
