The Socioeconomic Motif in the Literature of the Angry Young Men

Abstract

If we turn now to the literature produced in England in the late forties and the fifties, we observe that the note of social criticism not only persists but grows in intensity. The fever of politics transforms the writer, wittingly or unwittingly, into a partisan and sometimes into a propagandist or self-righteous moralist. As a man he is naturally deeply concerned about the evils of his age, the curse of poverty, the threat of war, the loss of the sense of community, but he realizes there is little that he can do, as an imaginative writer, to change these conditions except to raise his voice against them so as to bear witness. He may lash out at the frequent miscarriage of justice in the land, denounce corruption in high places, call prophetically for a change of heart that will make possible the building of the ideal society, but it is doubtful — and he knows it — if his work will of itself usher in a wave of reform. As Auden wrote in his “New Year’s Letter” for 1940, after repudiating the categorical imperatives of Marxism, “art is not life and cannot be/A midwife to society.” Nevertheless, many modern writers, especially among the so-called angry young men of England, are not discouraged by this handicap from expressing their passion for social justice.

This chapter is an expanded and revised version of an article by the present writer, “The Literature of the Angry Young Men,” The Colorado Quarterly, Spring, 1960, VIII, pp. 293-303.