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The following is being published in commemoration of George Orwell’s 121st birthday today.

I’ve been trying to figure out how George Orwell fits into that 1950s literary phenomenon, or cult, called the Angry Young Men. The Angries, as a movement, were partly an invention of the British popular press of 1956-58. Some writers who are included among them, notably Kingsley Amis, rejected the label and got counted in only because they were new young writers with an irksome attitude. Others, such as Colin Wilson, treated the whole concept whimsically or dismissively but used it as a publicity tool.

The “Angry Young Men” expression first arose in 1956, when a 26-year-old playwright named John Osborne staged his controversial (but successful) play called Look Back in Anger, and 24-year-old Colin Wilson published his controversial (and also successful) book of essays on philosophy and literary criticism, called The Outsider. Osborne and Wilson had little in common otherwise, but they both made good copy, with their attractive looks and tumultuous personal lives. So they got grouped together with other newsworthy young writers, mostly male, and got called Outsiders or the Angry Young Men. Of course, the latter handle won out. Others counted among the Angries include Wilson’s friends Bill Hopkins and Stuart Holroyd, filmmaker Lindsay Anderson, and novelists John Wain, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, and sometimes Doris Lessing and Iris Murdoch.[1]

The connection between Orwell and the Angries seems intuitively obvious today, at least to me. They have many points in common, so that some of the Angries — in public persona, if not in writing — might be considered to be in the School of Orwell. However, these Fifties writer seldom commented on Orwell at the time. He had only been dead a few years, after all. The big Orwell industry, with its fat biographies and criticism, didn’t get underway until the 1980s, mainly due to copyright restrictions imposed by Orwell’s widow Sonia.

So here is my list of parallels:

The scruffy-loser affectation. This was sort of a fetish for Orwell when he devoted himself to writing in his 20s. To get source material, he pretended to be down and out in Paris (where his mother’s sister lived in bohemian comfort) and London (where he put on rags so he could review the various “spikes” or doss houses where hobos spent the night). He went hop-picking amongst tramps in Kent and hung out with nighttime derelicts in Trafalgar Square (all background for A Clergyman’s Daughter). Otherwise he dressed in worn tweed coats and flannel bags, and smoked rollups of cheap shag tobacco. Even after he published a few novels, this look continued to be the Orwell brand. The grey, oppressive atmosphere of Keep the Aspidistra Flying (out of cigarettes; out of razorblades; landlady is watching you) was transferred almost intact to the setting of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Moving on to the post-Orwell 1950s, we get Colin Wilson sleeping rough in Hampstead Heath while spending his days in the British Museum’s Reading Room. He shares scruffy houses in Notting Hill with Bill Hopkins and Stuart Holroyd, and even after he’s famous for The Outsider, he and his second wife Joy occupy a cramped bedsit, which they show off to visiting news photographers: a single table-cum-desk, cluttered with books, typewriter, papers, teacups, and remnants of old meals. Joy’s parents barge in one evening and horsewhip Colin with an umbrella and a . . . horsewhip. They have found his notebooks among Joy’s things and imagine that Colin’s notes for a perverse novel are his own sexual confessions. (The newspapers just lapped that story up!)

Perhaps the most dismal and Orwellian passage in Tom Maschler’s Declaration anthology is Lindsay Anderson’s opening to his own contribution, “Get Out and Push!”:

Let’s face it, coming back to Britain is always something of an ordeal. And you don’t have to be a snob to feel it. It isn’t just the food, the sauce bottles on the café tables, and the chips with everything.[2]

Orwellian, except Orwell himself much approved of having the sauce bottles on the dinner table. Not only that, I seem to recall he reprimanded his first wife for removing the outer paper wrapping to Worcestershire sauce; it should remain on the bottle, as in a working-class café.

No Uni Education. This is not true of all the Angries. Kingsley Amis, John Wain, and Lindsay Anderson were all at Oxford, Amis became a fellow at Cambridge and visiting fellow at Princeton, but quite true of John Osborne and his alter-ego Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger; and of Colin Wilson, Bill Hopkins, Sillitoe, Braine, and others. Not going to university had been less of a class marker for George Orwell because he’d been through Eton, though he nevertheless felt barred from the quality-lit circles because he’d gone into the Indian Police instead of Oxbridge. But for the Angries without much formal education, it tended to cause them to be portrayed as novelty acts, rosebushes growing upon a dungheap.

In The Angry Decade,[3] one of at least three good books about the Angries (Colin Wilson himself wrote another), Kenneth Allsop makes the opening argument that for all the noise they made at the time, the Angries left little movement or imitators behind them. They were a fad that came and went. This was very different from the Satire Boom crowd of the early 1960s (Beyond the Fringe, Private Eye, etc.), where the principals went on and on for decades, in entertainment and publishing, and spawned endless imitators. But the Satire Boom people were Oxbridge, many of them from public schools before that. The Angries, for the most part, were not.

Victor Gollancz. Gollancz published Orwell for a while in the 1930s, but they fell out over Orwell’s anti-Stalinist Homage to Catalonia. In the 1950s Gollancz published Colin Wilson and Kingsley Amis’ early books. Gollancz was an Oxford graduate, of Polish Jewish background, a sometime teacher and editor who prospered in the book trade in the 1930s, first with his own publishing imprint, then with something called the Left Book Club (LBC). For a subscription fee, Left Book Club members agreed to buy, at deep discount, Gollancz’s book-of-the-month. Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier was an LBC offering in 1937. Victor Gollancz books were readily recognizable by their yellow covers with stark, unadorned type. After the War, Gollancz turned away from Leftist politics. He’d lost out, after all, on Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Gollancz continued as a successful mainstream publisher, with titles by Daphne du Maurier, J. G Ballard, and John Updike, as well as Wilson and Amis.

The Fascist Taint. From the 1940s onward, it was a commonplace among those of the far Left that George Orwell was some kind of “fascist Trotskyite,” and was not to be trusted. (I don’t have a citation for you; I heard people of a certain background say things like this when I was young, because they themselves had heard it while growing up in the Forties and Fifties.) This was Stalinist cant, basically, but it had the effect of normalizing such expressions when thrown at dissident or liberal writers in the 1950s and ‘60s. Only in recent years, with the resurgence of antifa groups, has it become common to see “fascist” used unironically as a slur. But in the 1950s, when Colin Wilson and friends Bill Hopkins and Stuart Holroyd were accused of having fascist sympathies, it was easy to dismiss it all as a joke. This was so, even though Wilson and company were known to be friendly to Sir Oswald Mosley — a public association George Orwell most certainly would have avoided!

Notes

[1] A “definitive” list of the Angries is sometimes considered to be the list of contributors to Declaration, a 1957 anthology of essay manifestoes by Lindsay Anderson, Kenneth Tynan, Stuart Holroyd, John Osborne, Doris Lessing, Colin Wilson, Bill Hopkins, and John Wain. Seeking at least one female contributor, the publisher sought out Iris Murdoch, who declined but suggested Doris Lessing.

[2] From Lindsay Anderson, “Get Out and Push!,” in Declaration, edited by Tom Maschler. London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1957.

[3] Kenneth Allsop, The Angry Decade, revised edition (London: Peter Owen, Ltd.), 1964.