Still Angry
Scenes from Life.
by William Cooper.
Scribners. 379 pp. $4.50.
Take a Girl Like You.
by Kingsley Amis.
Harcourt, Brace & World. 320 pp. $3.95.
Warmly reviewed for the American press by no less a literary couple than C. P. Snow and Pamela Hansford Johnson, William Cooper’s Scenes from Life comes to us as the fountainhead of the English angry-young-man school. The book is composed of two shortish novels, Scenes from Provincial Life, first published in 1950, and Scenes from Married Life, published in 1960. The earlier thus appeared four years before the fresh humor of Lucky Jim established Kingsley Amis as the most talented of young English novelists. Amis has acknowledged his debt to Cooper, and his own fourth novel is curiously close in theme to Cooper’s first book—in theme but, fortunately, not in quality. Taken together, Cooper’s Scenes from Life and Amis’s Take a Girl Like You show how small a distance the English novel of bad manners has moved in a decade. They also tell a good deal, little of it attractive, about the British petty bourgeoisie.
“Petty bourgeois” is Cooper’s own choice of label for the world of the first Scenes. The “I” of his novel, Joe Lunn, starts as a teacher of physics in the grammar school of an ugly provincial town somewhere in north England. (Though Joe comes from the petty bourgeoisie, his students are, he tells us, from the proletariat.) Joe has two problems to solve: how to continue making love to his girl without giving her the shadow of a claim to eventual marriage; and how to go on writing novels on a master’s salary, without ever doing enough real teaching to convince anyone that he is really a schoolmaster.
Master Lunn, in fact, is a fortunate fellow. He has a decent job, a certain standing in the community, a large circle of friends and (offstage) an affectionate family, a willing girl, a bicycle, a half share in a weekend cottage, a publisher, and a letter from a distinguished older novelist to prove that his last book is excellent. The letter arrives in time to convince us that Joe’s loss of his job (to judge from evidence, at least a year after he should have been fired) is all for the good. For Joe, who has no style or taste or sensitivity and never reads a book, is an effortlessly prolific novelist. And keeps a professional eye on the royalties.
Kingsley Amis’s man is also a schoolmaster, obviously made for higher things, and terrified of getting married. But Amis’s Patrick Standish, unlike Cooper’s Joe Lunn, is capable of reflection and feeling, which makes his problems considerably more grave. Patrick rather likes teaching and puts a good deal of himself into it—enough so that he might find himself stuck in the job. And his girl is so attractive, and wants marriage and a family so passionately, so naively, and so sensibly, that she may very well get what she wants from Patrick.
Jenny is the most serious and most successful character in Amis’s work, and she justifies this otherwise imperfect and unfinished book. She is an improbable but convincing blend of sexy good looks with solid domestic instincts, feminine gentleness with the toughness of the slums. One of the funniest scenes Amis has written is the triumph of Jenny as a schoolmistress—twisting arms, dodging verbal filth, and maintaining order among her little hoodlums with a ladylike ruthlessness all her own. Jenny rightly holds the center of the stage. But it is difficult not to worry about Patrick Standish.
Patrick’s future, at the end of the novel, is left hanging. Without any particular talents or settled career, despite his verbal wit and cultivated mind, Patrick has nowhere to go—especially if married to Jenny who, with all her charms, is barely half-educated. Kingsley Amis, like all the angry young English novelists (it is their great quality), has no use for self-pity. Their pivotal characters always seem doomed to trouble in maturity—a maturity they achieve, apparently, somewhat late in life, and to which the author himself rarely takes them.
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In fact, William Cooper’s second Scenes contains the one portrait I know of an angry young hero grown up. Thirty-nine and graying, still a bachelor, the Joe Lunn who reappears in Scenes from Married Life is not a failure. Crassness, laziness, philistinism, and provincialism intact, he is flourishing in London as a lesser but frighteningly powerful civil servant whose job it is to pass on the career possibilities of government-employed scientists. By the end of the book our Joe is moving on to the rank of Assistant Secretary.
Lecturing a few years ago about the widening gap between the two intellectual cultures, C. P. Snow pointed the moral. Young men with a science degree, though their ability be modest, know that they are guaranteed “a comfortable job,” as Sir Charles said, “while their contemporaries and counterparts in English or History will be lucky to earn 60 per cent as much. No young scientist of any talent would feel that he isn’t wanted or that his work is ridiculous, as did the hero of Lucky Jim, and in fact, some of the disgruntlement of Amis and his associates is the disgruntlement of the underemployed arts graduate.” Without much apparent interest in the subject, Joe Lunn has cannily provided himself with training in physics. He will therefore be fully employed while Amis’s heroes—a history instructor, a librarian, a literary critic, and now in Take a Girl Like You, a Latin teacher—must be underemployed.
In Joe Lunn’s case it is the degree alone that counts. Joe does not think of himself as a scientist in the vanguard of the new revolution. He claims to be an Artist turning out, as he says, small masterpieces of universal significance. (If Joe’s novels are really like Cooper’s, then slang, purple passages, skimpy plots, bad grammar, careless characterization, and rather flat jokes must be the hallmark of his style.) His rule for success would, then, seem to be: take a science degree, but write novels. And don’t marry until you are forty and established. And play the harmless fool. And keep up your university connections, for Joe does not make his own way in the world. His older friend Robert, Oxford don, upper civil servant, and another part-time novelist, finds Joe his job and gets him promoted.
It would be unfair to say that Joe Lunn’s success is impossible. Joe says his novels are True; C. P. Snow writes that Cooper’s novels are True. The dust jacket says that William Cooper (a pen-name) took his degree in physics at Cambridge, wrote novels, and moved up through the Civil Service to his present position “as consultant on scientific and engineering personnel to the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority.” The author well knows, then, the stages of Joe Lunn’s success—in the same arena, incidentally, that Sir Charles Snow has inhabited and described with an altogether un-Cooperish power and understanding. The objection to Cooper’s scenes from life is not that they are untrue, but that their truth is narrow, provincial, unhistoric—in a bad sense, childish. Behind Joe Lunn’s behavior (and, in varying degrees, that of the heroes of Braine, Wain, and Amis) lies a snobbish affectation of petty bourgeois mannerisms: anti-intellectualism, laziness, boorishness. The source of their bitterness (which Dwight Macdonald and Edmund Wilson have been somewhat at a loss to understand) is resentment of the surface refinements of the upper classes—such things as good speech, cleanliness, taste, even the ability to make what Joe Lunn calls a “moral choice”—which the angry young English writers cannot separate from social class.
The writer who concentrates on the surface mannerisms of class risks becoming a merely fashionable novelist. The satire of Evelyn Waugh, to whom Amis and his colleagues have been too readily compared, is never, in this or any other sense, trivial. Nor is the quiet deadpan humor of Camus, whose novels reflect social and economic conditions not substantially different from the world of the angry young English. The young English novelists are admittedly (and understandably) leery of the large issues that concerned Camus. But it is a relevant commentary on their narrowness that Camus, whose personal background was shabby and provincial beyond their imagining, never bothered about the trivialities of class. Among the English, Kingsley Amis most successfully escapes mere snob concerns. His excursions into the imaginary life of ineffectual people, and the reflection of this life in their grotesque faces and gestures, their inward monologues, are Amis’s highest comedy. They touch on the human condition which traps us all—upper, middle, or petty in class.
With all their apparent rebelliousness, the angry young English heroes have no complaint against the sub-structure of their society, about which, in fact, they appear ignorant. They vote Labor from the tepid conviction that “socialism” has been good for the working class, but never for any larger or more personal reason. (Joe Lunn makes a little speech about how pleasant it is to see fancy perambulators in the grip of working-class mothers.) In fact, they do not want change. Things have been so arranged, in these novels, that they will make their way easily, without a tedious apprenticeship in the middle class, into the secondary ranks of the Establishment. So Lucky Jim is at the end plucked from provincial nullity to serve as private secretary to Julius Gore-Urquhart, a certain “rich devotee of the arts who made occasional contributions to the arts sections of the weekly reviews.” Patrick Standish has a mysteriously idle, wealthy patron named Julius Ormerod. And Joe Lunn’s sponsor Robert shores up his role as the protector of the Joe Lunns by marrying the daughter of such another, high up in the rarefied air of the uppermost Civil Service. Some tip-top toff, the Establishment figure, is waiting round the bend of Cooper’s and even Amis’s little world; his power may be feared or hated, but it is not questioned.
“Political sentiment,” says Joe Lunn with habitual bravado, “does not seem to be a suitable subject for literary art. If you doubt it you have only to read a few pages of any novel by a high-minded Marxist.” Joe is nowhere near so colorful on the subject of Marxists as Marx was about the Joe Lunns of the petty bourgeoisie—“the ‘dangerous class,’ the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the oldest layers of the old society, [which] may here and there be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.” They just don’t write like the old sod any more, as Joe Lunn would say.
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