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[ 09-06-2003 ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/goodden.html
'Angry' writers outgrew the label
Herman Goodden, London Free Press
2003-06-09
I picked up British literary biographer Humphrey Carpenter's, latest book this week. Carpenter's first biography was 1977's J. R. R. Tolkien.
A quarter century later, that remains the definitive study of the perennially popular Hobbit-meister and its continuing sales - with sharp spikes the last few Christmases as director Peter Jackson releases succeeding instalments of his Lord of The Rings trilogy - have handily underwritten the two dozen books Carpenter's been able to publish subsequently; none of which have racked up sales in quite that astronomical league.
One of the most consistently interesting biographers now writing, all of Carpenter's books are distinguished by his un-fakeable and contagious fascination with his subjects and his latest is no exception. And because of that tidy Tolkien windfall, he can afford to take on more out-of-the-way subjects, as he does here.
The Angry Young Men is a thoroughly enjoyable romp that can be polished off in a day. Subtitled, A Literary Comedy of the 1950s, Carpenter examines the little-remembered media frenzy that attended the publishing debuts of a handful of unrelated English writers who all arrived on the scene at the same time and were reflexively lumped together by sensation-seeking newspaper editors eager to classify them as representatives of a threatening new movement that would push all the old literary fogies out of the way.
In the drab aftermath of post-Second World War England, still hobbled with shortages, rationing and a social hierarchy as stubbornly stratified as ever, people were hungry for some sort of cataclysm that would reshape society along more egalitarian lines. When this group of revved-up young writers arrived on the scene, eager as young writers always are to make their own distinctive mark on the world, they were, in effect, kidnapped by journalists with their own agenda to advance and were uniformly portrayed as seething, irreverent malcontents intent on smashing the old order for once and for all.
Most artists at the start of their career will submit to practically any indignity that assures their work will be discussed in the press. And so it was with this motley assortment of novelists (Kingsley Amis with Lucky Jim, John Wain with Hurry On Down, and John Braine with Room At The Top), one playwright (John Osbourne with Look Back In Anger), one poet (the bitterly dyspeptic Philip Larkin) and one wildly pretentious literary theorist (Colin Wilson with The Outsider).
In one way or another, all of them played along with the "angry" tag for a while, even though most of them didn't know each other and didn't have much regard for their fellow "angries" once they'd been introduced.
In a way, they were the unwitting precursor of the dozen or so marketing labels that have been applied to succeeding waves of pop music stars. Whether they're called rockers, mods, hippies, punks, purveyors of grunge, or rappers, the message is always the same: "Lock up your daughters! Nothing is safe from the all-wrecking approach of these beasts! The end of the world is finally at hand!" It's a great, time-proven trick and it sells records by the truckload.
Just one problem though.
With any luck, a writer's career lasts longer than the butterfly life of a pop star. What were these guys going to do once they'd staked out a turf and had a legacy of their own to protect? In his 60s, writing from an ever-more conservative perspective and winning major literary prizes, Kingsley Amis had become the new establishment. John Wain's last great book was a moving biography of every conservative's hero, Dr. Samuel Johnson.
It was a marketing tag that worked wonders for a season or two, but soon they all discovered there wasn't much of a future in anger and youth.
Herman Goodden is a London freelance writer. His column appears in Monday's and Thursday's Opinion pages. It no longer appears in Sunday's A&E section. He can be e-mailed at herman.goodden@sympatico.ca.
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