'Angry Young Men'

[LitNetIsGreat]

Anyone enjoy the 'Angry Young Men' works?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angry_Young_Men

I'm just reading some short stories by Alan Sillitoe at the moment and have ordered the book he is most famous for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (I've always thought that such a good title anyway). Also his Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner sounds good.

I have read Osborne and Delaney before but not the others, I'm into the Sillitoe shorts though, very engaging.

[DocHeart]

I love stuff by Kingsley Amis, and I love John Osborne's Look Back in Anger. I first read the Angry Young Men when I was taking A-levels, and have loved them since.

[dfloyd]

Look Back in Anger was the first film I ever saw Richard Burton star in. The movies may even be better than the books. They only played at the so called art houses in the US.

[kelby_lake]

Does A Taste of Honey fall into the category, though technically it's a female playwright?

[LitNetIsGreat]

Does A Taste of Honey fall into the category, though technically it's a female playwright?

Yes I'm pretty sure it does.

[kev67]

Anyone enjoy the 'Angry Young Men' works?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angry_Young_Men

I'm just reading some short stories by Alan Sillitoe at the moment and have ordered the book he is most famous for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (I've always thought that such a good title anyway). Also his Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner sounds good.

I have read Osborne and Delaney before but not the others, I'm into the Sillitoe shorts though, very engaging.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is on my bookshelf waiting to be read. I agree it is a great title. They were good at titles, those British, post war, working class story writers. A Kind of Loving is another good title, as is This Sporting Life.

[Emil Miller]

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is on my bookshelf waiting to be read. I agree it is a great title. They were good at titles, those British, post war, working class story writers. A Kind of Loving is another good title, as is This Sporting Life.

I don't, in general, go in for post-war writers and wasn't drawn to the 'kitchen sink' school anyway, but I did see all of those filmed versions. This Sporting Life was memorable if a bit grim. The one that hasn't been mentioned so far is Room at the Top which was an outstanding film in every way.
The irony of John Osbourne was that he made his name attacking the class system in the UK and ended up, 40 years later, blaming everything for being degraded in his last play Watch It Come Down.

[kev67]

I love stuff by Kingsley Amis, and I love John Osborne's Look Back in Anger. I first read the Angry Young Men when I was taking A-levels, and have loved them since.

I am surprised Kingsley Amis was considered an Angry Young Man. Lucky Jim did not seem very angry. Mind you, I see he wrote a lot of other books, the only one of which I've heard of was The Old Devils, which he wrote when he wasn't young any more.

[Nitu]

i will read soon..

[LitNetIsGreat]

I'm just reading this particular selection of stories at the moment:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/A-Sillitoe-Selection-Imprint-Books/dp/0582233739/ref=sr_1_sc_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1349213125&sr=8-2-spell

I came into them by chance. I would certainly recommended them though, some good sketches of working class life together with just the right balance of humour and reality, many of them told from a child's POV. The stories are set in and around Nottingham.

[partizandrew]

Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise by John Osborne is a good angry read (it consists of his 2 volumes of autobiography, A Better Class of Person & Almost a Gentleman), & if you enjoy that, then John Osborne: A Patriot for Us by John Heilpern is very interesting as well, if not perfect.

[LitNetIsGreat]

To be fair as well the title "angry young men" was rejected by just about all of the writers in this category as far I know, it certainly was by Sillitoe whose collection of shorts have just finished reading. This is not surprising seeing as their is not much anger in them! The stories didn't boil down to the class war angst I was sort of expecting, but rather recount childhood tales. This might be different with Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, if it ever comes, I don't know. I wasn't that enthused with Osborne after seeing a play once - granted it was a student production but still I didn't think much of it.

Here is an extract from the start of the short story "The Decline and Fall of Frankie Buller" found in the collection I posted above (at less than the price of a pint - bargain.)


Sitting in what has come to be called my study, a room in the first floor flat of a ramshackled Majorcan house, my eyes move over racks of books around me. Row after row of coloured backs and dusty tops, they give an air of distinction not only to the room but to the whole flat, and one can sense the thoughts of occasional visitors who stoop down discreetly during drinks to read their titles:

"A Greek lexicon, Homer in the original. He knows Greeks! (Wrong, those books belong to my brother-in-law.) Shakespeare, The Golden Bough, A holy Bible bookmarked with tapes and paper. He even reads it! Proust all twelve volumes! I never could wade through that lot. (Neither did I.) Dostoevsky. My God, is he still going strong?

And so on and so on, items that have become part of me, foliage that has grown to conceal the bare stem of my real personality, what I was like before I ever saw those books, or any book at all, come to that. Often I would like to rip them away from me one by one, extract their shadows out of my mouth and heart, cut them neatly with a scalpel from the jungle-brain. Impossible. You can't wind back the clock that sits grinning on the marble shelf. You can't even smash its face in and forget it.

Yesterday we visited the house of a friend who lives further along the valley, away form the town noises so that sitting on the terrace with eyes half-closed and my head leaning back in a deck-chair, beneath a tree of half-ripe medlars and with the smell of plundered oranges still on my hands, I heard the sound of a cuckoo coming from the pine woods on the mountain slopes.

The cuckoo accomplished what a surgeon's knife could not. I was plunged back deep through the years into my natural state, without books and with the knowledge that I am supposed to have gained from them. I was suddenly landed beyond all immediate horizons of the past by the soft, sharp, fluting whistle of the cuckoo, and set down once more within the Kingdom of Frankie Buller.

That was an interested start to a story I thought. I liked the idea of returning to the 'natural' state before knowledge gleaned from his books (and that it was nature in the cuckoo call that returned him there). The story goes on to recount himself as young boy who used to play with a bit of loon - Frankie Buller, marching up and down the town with sticks and stones, terrorising small boys and pretending to be in the army as young boys do, only Frankie Buller was much older and had a screw loose. This one had a little Lord of the Flies feel to it, but again, no evidence of anger or social venting as you might reasonably come to expect.

[Emil Miller]

I think you will find that Alan Sillitoe fits into the 'angry' category if the film of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is anything to go by. It belongs to a set of novels that filed onto the literary scene in the 1950s, as a reaction to pre-war middle-class writing, and which had bolshie working class protagonists. Osborne's Look Back in Anger had one in Jimmy Porter and his subsequent plays had similar bolshieness in their tilt at religion, sexual norms, middle-class mores etc.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Oh yes he fits into the category but he rejected it personally. The book has still not come another useless Amazon seller or just the usual third class Royal Mail service?

[Emil Miller]

I don't know where the The Angry Young Man tag originated but it may have been one of those media inspired titles that was taken up by the public and bandied about as a generic description of a certain type of writer. Sillitoe may not have intended to be one of their number but he was inevitably lumped in with them as a result of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

Here's an extract from the film:

http://youtu.be/zJAeb0wiQjA

[LitNetIsGreat]

Brilliant, I think I have seen that clip before - yes there is a bit of anger there for sure, like all sane people who have to work in hell holes like that (or even to work anywhere). Actually, it is not too far removed from my first job as a late teen - absolute living hell, bored out of my brain. There are loads of places like that still around in Sheffield, most of them are now disused and empty shells of building with broken windows home only to the rats at night though there are still some left in operation if you believe it.

[kelby_lake]

Didn't Karl Marx say that he was not a Marxist? I think writers like to think of themselves as unique rather than belonging to a group, even when they clearly fit the description.

[Emil Miller]

Didn't Karl Marx say that he was not a Marxist? I think writers like to think of themselves as unique rather than belonging to a group, even when they clearly fit the description.

In the case of the 'angry young men' it was the proximity of their work that had them pigeonholed under the term and by the end of the seventies the name had become redundant except in reference to their past writing.

[kelby_lake]

In the case of the 'angry young men' it was the proximity of their work that had them pigeonholed under the term and by the end of the seventies the name had become redundant except in reference to their past writing.

It was very much a zeitgeist.

[Emil Miller]

It was very much a zeitgeist.

The times had obviously changed because of the war but one of the things that went to the wall was the 'Well made Play', a la Terence Rattigan, and its replacement by 'Kitchen sink' drama.
Rattigan has had a bit of a revival recently but I don't expect it to last.

[ennison]

Sillitoe has a huge body of work. He can hardly be called an angry young man now. I liked a lot of the writers of that era but it would be wrong to group them all under that superficial heading just because they were contemporaries and wrote of working class experience. Probably the angry ones weren't the best. I never found the self-deprecating Barstow to be angry. Realistic yes and entertaining.

[kev67]

The angry young men, and the associated women had a good line of book titles. Stilitoe had the Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Someone else had This Sporting Life. Someone else, A Kind of Loving. There was a play about the same time called A Taste of Honey, not such a good title IMO, but written by an 18-yrear-old girl. A little later on there were books like Up the Junction by Nell Dunn.

[sandy14]

I am surprised Kingsley Amis was considered an Angry Young Man. Lucky Jim did not seem very angry. Mind you, I see he wrote a lot of other books, the only one of which I've heard of was The Old Devils, which he wrote when he wasn't young any more.

Lucky Jim was a satire - whilst the tone of the book is comedic, the book to me seemed like an attack on the pompous social order of the academic circle and society that Jim found himself in.

Not as savage in tone as Look Back in Anger, but the same targets (smug upper classes governing for everyone else) are attacked. Maybe Amis was displeased, rather than angry.

[ennison]

slightly miffed young men! Doesn't have the ring to it.

[sandy14]

The slightly miffed young men make fun of the moderately displeased young men. At the bottom of the heap, there's the bit put out young men.

[ennison]

Like it Sandy
Let's think
Sillitoe on the strength of "The Loneliness..." was definitely very angry
John Osbourne would be miffed
Storey, moderately displeased
Amis , a bit put out
Delaney , wryly amused