118. Angry Young Men

 

They say there's plenty of anger left in Sam Gold's new version of John Osborne's "Look Back in Anger" but apparently not much of it is political anger. According to the reviews most of the lines raging at England's postwar governing classes — the lines that made Osborne "a poster boy for the notion of the Angry Young Men" (New Yorker) — have been removed. We're down to domestic bitterness now. And that, luckily, still makes wonderful theater.

How often this happens with political plays! It's a caution to those of us who are aroused by them. I remember being so excited by Maxwell Anderson's Winterset that I worked the anarchist Vanzetti's prison statement into my first freshman composition class. On the first day! My first day of college teaching, ever. 1946. "If it had not been for these thing, I might have live out my life talking on street corners to scorning men...” I cast about for an excuse to use it. Ah yes, "See, you don't have to have perfect grammar to write eloquent English."

Now I look at Winterset and it's "yeah, yeah." And the world is with me.

The shelf life of political anger shortens as people, including the angry, learn more about the world, which has been full of angry men. They read history and make comparisons. There were angry Young Turks. When you find out that they lived under a Sultan who violently suppressed his political opponents, massacred ethnic minorities, and resisted all liberal reform you have to adjust your anger meter.  Measured against this the British anger looks like petulance.

Nor, you discover, does political anger travel well. Take the British anger to its contemporary in Eastern Europe (the "Bloodlands") and have it, on a stage, look back at twenty years of life under Stalin and Hitler and you make another adjustment. Bring one of those angry Poles back to Britain and let him see that Osborne has put AYM (Angry Young Man) on his license plate and you do a complete re-scale.

You don't have to be a Pole to have a laugh. Just be an ordinary adult in the getting-ahead game and you're ready for some of those Anglophone Angries. "A world I never made." Sure, sure, the rest of us all made ours, right there in the womb — all the playing fields level, all the judges just, all the rewards fair. There it was, as soon as we came out.

If I feel moral indignation — which is what political anger is — on the playground or in my house I can find out (or be told) fairly easily how far my indignation is justified. I see a blow, get angry, and then learn that "he hit him first." Oh, it's more complicated than I thought. And maybe there will be more complications, but they're not too hard to learn.

If a poem or a play or a novel ignites my anger at something being done in the larger world it's much harder to find out how far my anger is justified. It's a denser world with a far more complicated history. Yet, if I'm serious about justification, I have to learn it. A novelist or playwright can make my job easier, of course, by thickening his work with the world's complications, but this is very difficult and few go very far with it. Some don't even try.

Poets hardly ever try. It's too much for them. Shelley gave up completely, specifying nothing whatever about the object of his anger and despair:

Sad storm whose tears are vain,
Bare woods, whose branches strain,
Deep caves and dreary main,—
Wail, for the world's wrong!

The price you pay for a general "Wail" is to be told by people like T. E. Hulme to "end your moan and come away." He'll blame you and your fellow Romantics for making us all believe that "a poem isn't a poem unless it's moaning or whining about something."

If poets are bad at density how about television news? There we're pretty well down to one-blow reporting. "Here we are on the playground. Look at that smack. Oh the blood. Oh the poor boy."

Nope, television news and lyrical poems are no help to you if you want to justify your political anger. Novels and plays do better, but they are pretty limited too — even though they can, like All the King's Men, teach you a lot about the people who do the politics. The plain fact is, for moral judgment on any political conflict your helper just has to have room to weigh both sides. (Both sides? All sixteen sides. Think of the Balkan conflicts. Jeez.) And for that he's got to have a lot of space and a form that arouses no expectations about length. He's got to be writing a history book—or maybe a political science or a philosophy book.  And then it's tough.