SOURCE: Cairns, David, and Shaun Richards. “No Good Brave Causes? The Alienated Intellectual and the End of Empire.” Literature & History 14, no. 2 (autumn 1988): 194-206.

[In the following essay, Cairns and Richards explore the issue of colonialism in Look Back in Anger.]

‘Then, on 8 May 1956 came the revolution …’¹ With these words, John Russell Taylor, in his 1962 study of Look Back In Anger, confirmed the reception given to the play by, most notably, Kenneth Tynan which set the critical parameters within which much of the subsequent exegesis was to take place. While Osborne's own career has generated a response whose general tendency is best represented by the title of one article: ‘Whatever Happened to John Osborne?,’²Look Back In Anger continues to generate an interest which owes much to the view of Tynan, confirmed by Taylor, that while the play may be speaking for a minority ‘What matters … is the size of the minority. I [that is Tynan] estimate it at roughly 6,733,000, which is the number of people in this country between the ages of twenty and thirty.’³ It is true that some extreme reactions to the representational quality of the play have occurred—Freudian readings of Jimmy Porter as a case of arrested development in the oral phase for example⁴ but the intimate relationship between the play and its contemporary audience is now almost a critical truism. One of the most succinct expressions of this view is to be found in Alan Sinfield's survey of audiences for the ‘new’ British drama. The theatre of the mid-1950's, he argues, was ‘the particular form within which a new, growing and ultimately influential section of the middle class discovered itself. In the terms developed by Raymond Williams in Culture (1981). Look Back in Anger was associated with the development by “a class fraction” of an independent set of attitudes within the dominant culture.’⁵ Sinfield's position of identifying a relationship between the development of a ‘class-fraction’ and the reception of the play leads us to question the identity of that class-fraction and hence its distinctive features—issues which require a detailed examination of the play in its moment of production.

The questions which we wish to pose in the course of this paper are centred upon Look Back In Anger and in particular on the impotent rage and retreat from active political and social engagement which are such marked features of Osborne's protagonist. Subsequently, we shall consider the contemporary situation vis-a-vis colonialism, for the passing of which Jimmy evinces a curious nostalgic regret, through a brief examination of aspects of post-war colonialism, concentrating on the interplay of socialism and colonialism. Our conclusion will then seek to demonstrate the validity of Ashis Nandy's suggestion that ‘the experience of colonizing did not leave the internal culture untouched.’⁶ We shall suggest that Alison, Jimmy's wife, constitutes, as woman, one of the terrains on to which the discourse of metropolitan superiority vis-a-vis the colonial was transposed in decolonising and ‘post-colonial’ Britain. Suggestions therefore, as to some aspects of how and in what ways metropolitan culture was ‘touched’ by the experience of colonialism are the principal concern of this paper.

As a startling point in locating that class-fraction which is represented by Jimmy Porter, we should at least take note of that moment in the text when Jimmy provides a clear sense of having a group identity: ‘I suppose people like me aren't supposed to be very patriotic. Somebody said—what was it—we get our cooking from Paris (that's a laugh), our politics from Moscow, and our morals from Port Said. Something like that, anyway. Who was it?’⁷ The answer to Jimmy's question (or is it Osborne's nudge to the audience?) is George Orwell who, in ‘England Your England’, commented that the English intelligentsia were Europeanised, taking, as Jimmy mockingly paraphrases, ‘their cooking from Paris and their opinions from Moscow.’ The intelligentsia, Orwell concluded, formed ‘a sort of island of dissident thought.’⁸ To take Jimmy's self-definition as an intended indicator of that of which he can, in part, be seen as representative, leads us to consider a central issue in the play—Jimmy's politics, and Osborne's commentary via Jimmy on the contemporary Labour Party. Our procedure, therefore, will be to draw upon Osborne's reference to Orwell, cited above, as an invitation to consider the struggles of Jimmy Porter in the light of Orwell's observations on left-intellectuals. Writing in ‘Inside the Whale’, Orwell mocked the ‘Boy Scout atmosphere of bare knees and community singing’⁹ with which the intellectuals of the 1930's had embraced communism, but then attempted a serious psycho-social analysis of the causes of this conversion; the outline of which has a direct bearing on our analysis of Look Back In Anger:

The debunking of Western civilisation had reached its climax and ‘disillusionment’ was immensely widespread. Who now could take it for granted to go through life in the ordinary middle-class way, as a soldier, a clergyman, a stockbroker, an Indian Civil servant, or what-not? And how many of the values by which our grandfathers lived could not be taken seriously? Patriotism, religion, the Empire, the family, the sanctity of marriage, the old school tie, birth, breeding, honour, discipline—anyone of ordinary education could turn the whole lot of them inside out in three minutes. But what do you achieve, after all, by getting rid of such primal things as patriotism and religion? You have not necessarily got rid of the need for something to believe in.¹⁰

The ‘something to believe in’ for the 1930's intellectuals was, above all, Spain and the anti-fascist struggle, which provided a ‘good brave cause’ around which the left and, very prominently, the extra-parliamentary left, coalesced. The defence of the Republic, and the limpness of the Labour Party's response to the policy of non-intervention, which was adopted by the National Government, gave to the extra-parliamentary left a cause which was emotive and popular. On Spain, as on little else, a broad popular opinion emerged in favour of the Republic and opposed to the Government; Spain becoming identified (despite the breadth of the support given) as a cause of the left. In the 1950's, to a very real degree, Jimmy is right: no cause until the Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament achieved the emotional commitment that the '30s had witnessed for Spain. Moreover the function of Spain in British domestic politics should not be ignored: it heartened the left, produced some evidence of popular support, and partially occluded their marginalisation in virtually all other areas of national life. That marginalisation, undisguised in the 1950's by a ‘good brave cause’, is clearly referred to by Kingsley Amis in his Fabian Tract of 1957 when he says:

Until very recently there has really been only one political issue of anything like the same proportions and of the same kind as the Abyssinias and the Spains of the Thirties: I mean, of course, Cyprus. Here at any rate is something which potentially unites the romantic with the practical man. But what gets done about it? Compare what does get done about it with what would have got done about it in the Thirties. In my innocence I asked one of my Labour party sociological friends why there weren't protest meetings all over the place, why people weren't organising something. ‘We run meetings all right,’ he said, ‘but nobody turns up. Have you ever tried protesting to an empty hall?’¹¹

It is this same sense of domestic apathy in the face of international issues which can be found in Osborne's own writing as, in response to a question on contemporary writers' interest in immediate international issues, he replied: ‘Of course most writers appear to be indifferent to the problems of human freedom, like Hungary and the Rosenbergs. The reason for this is, I believe, that most writers find it difficult to be engaged in the problems on their door-step. If you are surrounded by inertia at home, it is not so easy to get all steamed up about what is going on in Central Europe or America.’ Osborne develops his argument in terms which relate directly to Jimmy's demand for good brave causes when he writes: ‘It wasn't so difficult to make up your mind about which side of the barricades you were voting for, when men were standing on street corners all over England, and nobody was doing anything about it.’ Now, he argues, the material conditions of the working class have altered radically, and although Osborne makes it clear that his sympathies are still with those on what he terms ‘the ash-can’, he concedes that ‘This isn't the kind of atmosphere that produces the heart-searchings and the gestures of the ‘thirties.’¹²

What needs to be established therefore, is why the left in the 1950's were incapable of identifying ‘good brave causes’ and equally, of enthusing their supporters into campaigning on them. To answer that question we need to examine the situation of the left in the 1930's, for it is there, in the supposed hey-day of left activism, that we need to seek for the paralysis that beset the Labour left, and the left generally, in the 1950's.

We would agree with the seeming consensus amongst historians and political scientists that throughout the 1930's, the radical left constituted an isolated and increasingly marginalised force. Analysts have suggested a number of reasons for this—including the crassness of Comintern policy and the inadequacies of the leadership of the Communist Party of Great Britain (C.P.G.B.). But although as early as 1960 Ralph Miliband was arguing in Parliamentary Socialism, that the Labour Party's embrace in the 1920's of the parliamentary road to socialism necessarily entailed a turning away from commitment to a thoroughgoing reformation of British society, it is only within the context of more recent reassessments of the politics of this period that we can begin to outline the parameters within which occurred, starting in the 1930's, the detachment from the politics of the left of significant numbers of young intellectuals—of whom in the 1950's the fictional Jimmy Porter might stand as one illustration, and Kingsley Amis as another.

Miliband's arguments have suggested how the strategy of parliamentarism operated as a hook, baited by the dominant group (which by 1924 had virtually become identical with the Conservative Party), on which MacDonald was first impaled and then helped to impale the bulk of the Labour Party. The strategy of parliamentarism operated as a hook because, having accepted parliamentarism as the only proper route to socialism, and therefore having rejected extra-parliamentary procedures and direct action, the Labour leaders and their supporters were constrained to operate almost exclusively on a terrain, the gradient of which gave their opponents positional and structural advantages. In the 1930's therefore, the continuing test of adherence to parliamentarism, which the Labour Party's opponents applied to it, was supplied by examining the vigour or otherwise with which the Party condemned left radicalism within its own ranks and denounced Communists and ‘fellow-travellers’ in politics generally. Thus, once the rules of the discourse of parliamentarism had been set by Baldwin, with the assistance of Macdonald, in the mid-1920's, the maintenance of monopoly power over the interpretation of those rules by the leaders of the Conservative Party acted to transmit and reinforce the power of the dominant group.¹³

A consequence of the position occupied by the Labour Party in the 1930's and after, was that intellectualism and speculation became suspect activities, which were permissible only under close control. As Orwell noted acidly ‘the intellectuals could find a function for themselves only in the literary reviews and the left-wing political parties’—and it is doubtful here that he could have meant by ‘left-wing’ the Labour Party.¹⁴ This anti-radical stance on the part of the Labour Party hierarchy can be clearly discerned in accounts of the short life and unhappy end of the Socialist League and illustrates the impossibility at that time of blending left-wing intellectual speculation with parliamentarism.¹⁵

When we couple to this anti-intellectualism, and almost as a corollary of it, the failure of the Labour Party to organise and educate amongst the young in any systematic way¹⁶, we should not be surprised to find that the capacity of the Party to sustain itself and to develop a coherent political strategy for the achievement of its central objectives diminished as the age of its stalwarts increased and as a dwindling number of new recruits took their place. As Gramsci observes ‘A human mass does not “distinguish” itself, does not become independent in its own right without in the widest sense, organising itself and there is no organisation without intellectuals that is without organisers and leaders … the parties are the elaborators of new integral … intelligentsias.’¹⁷ By all the evidence, this was a function that, other than in a perfunctory fashion, the Labour Party was failing to do by the 1950's, so that without a large and committed cadre of organic intellectuals traditional intellectuals were not being incorporated into support for the fundamental class which was striving with the dominant group. Indeed, by the end of the 1930's the gap between the Labour and Conservative Parties on social issues and the economy was discernibly narrowing, if one ignores the rhetoric of each position to concentrate on the actual effect of measures.¹⁸ The result was the diminution of the critical gulf between the parties during the 1930's and its elision by the years of wartime coalition. Such close agreement on the advantages of maintaining capitalism and the measures needed for its reform (which came together in wartime and post-war Keynesianism) made criticism of capitalism as capitalism unthinkable by the Labour Party hierarchy.

We are reminded here of Gramsci's arguments that the elaboration of an ideological position requires a long-drawn out process of critical labour and ‘distancing’ from the dominant or hegemonic ideology through critical awareness of ‘what one really is.’¹⁹ For the group to which Jimmy Porter identifies himself as belonging, and to which, equally, Osborne and Amis identify themselves as belonging—i.e. the post-war radical intelligentsia—the failure of the Labour Party to elaborate a coherent critique of the dominant group and of its political expression, the Conservative Party, produced an inability to challenge capitalism and leads on to its acceptance in the form of the revisionism of the Gaitskellites. ‘Bevanism’, the stock bogey of the 1950's Labour Establishment, was in reality merely a collection of uncoordinated opinions and never approached the status of a coherent alternative to revisionism within the Labour Party.²⁰ For would-be left-intellectuals therefore, all that there was to unite them to Labour was a rapidly evaporating emotional attachment and an empty rhetoric, while only a sense of exclusion from the interests and mores of the dominant group stood in the way of their absorption into it.

An important and near contemporary commentary of the situation for left intellectuals in 1956 is provided by Kingsley Amis in the Fabian Tract already referred to. As a summary of his position he says: ‘I confess in conclusion that I feel very little inclination to go and knock at the door of the local Labour party headquarters. My only reason for doing so, apart from mere vulgar curiosity would be a sense of guilt. And this is not enough. How agreeable it must be to have a respectable motive for being politically active.’²¹ Amis argues that the intellectual ‘is politically in a void’, ‘he belongs to no social group which might lend him stability’²² and what he requires is a cause which can generate the excitement and associated commitment. As Amis argues: ‘At some periods these things are readily available: Spain and its committees, Abyssinia, unemployment, the rise of Fascism and so on’²³, but in the post-war era the situation is otherwise. ‘We were nicely fixed up, the romantics might say, in 1937; but what about 1957? When we shop around for an outlet we find there is nothing in stock: no Spain, no Fascism, no mass unemployment.’²⁴ Although Amis was writing within the time of the Russian assault on Hungary and the Suez invasion and they, in consequence do not feature significantly in his article, his comments on the Cyprus issue indicate that he perceives not merely a dearth of potential ‘good brave causes’ but more importantly a general absence of interest in political causes per se. Hence, in Look Back in Anger, the lament of Jimmy Porter is that ‘people of our generation aren't able to die for good brave causes any longer. We had all that done for us, in the thirties and the forties, when we were still kids. There aren't any good, brave causes left.’²⁵ This speech has become central to many readings of the play—readings which see it as expressing the social sterility of the 1950's against which Jimmy is supposedly the rebel spokesman—a spokesman who contrasts, with nostalgia, the purposefulness of the left of 1930's with the numbing purposelessness which is his experience of the 1950's. What increases the irony of the situation is that in the very moment which appeared to the 1950's left-intellectuals as the heroic period of the Left can be identified the initiation of the processes, outlined above, which were to produce the isolation and alienation of the 1950's. Thus, marginalisation and passivity in the domestic arena is the supposed justification for the retreat from engagement with the substantive international issues of the moment. What is lacking is not causes but commitment.

The overall timbre of the play may be such as to validate its title vis-a-vis the immediate post-war period, and in particular the 1951 election, but in terms of his response to the Edwardian era, which is so fondly remembered by Colonel Redfern, Jimmy openly envies its air, when seen from the present of the 1950's, of serene imperial superiority. He is conscious that he may be exaggerating the attractions of those far off days before World War I, but nonetheless they attract him. The referencing of the imperial past in the play can all too easily be taken as tangential given the context we have outlined above. However, we would argue that we need to be aware that although Osborne's Jimmy Porter believes the Empire to be in the past, that in contemporary Britain the evidence suggests that notions and symbols of Empire were part of the everyday currency not only of Establishment British culture but also—perhaps particularly—of popular discourses, even of those cultural producers antipathetic to the Establishment. In this context we should note that the terms Empire and Commonwealth were used in day-to-day situations interchangeably, and that for popular consumption the practical effects of the Statute of Westminster, which had given the Dominions formal independence from the Westminster Parliament in 1931, and which signalled the end of the attempt to constitute an Imperial federation, had been downplayed. In the post-war period Labour Ministers in power were just as likely to evince pro-imperial sentiments in their public and private statements as the members of the Tory Opposition. Indeed, on first experience, it comes as something of a shock to learn that in 1946 Herbert Morrison expressed boisterous support for the ‘jolly old Empire’ or that in his diary, in 1950, Hugh Dalton described colonial territories as ‘pullulating poverty-stricken, diseased nigger communities’.²⁶ Quite apart from the overt and unashamed racialism of such comments we should not ignore the habit that British politicians had of treating the Commonwealth—even in the later 1950's—as if it were merely the Empire under a flag of convenience.²⁷

What we wish to call attention to here is the open way in which imperial discourses were still being reproduced and productively activated at a time when it is often assumed that the Empire was widely perceived as defunct. The historian Kenneth Morgan states: ‘The mood of the British public, too … was also capable of being excited by the majesty and pomp of Empire … the literature of the time—for instance, Enid Blyton's immensely popular and very numerous adventure stories for children written in the forties—was unashamedly colonialist, perhaps racialist, with clear assumptions of the cultural superiority of the Anglo-Saxon and other white races. School geography primers and atlases with their extensive splashes of British red, reinforced the point by reindoctrinating a new generation of post-war children.’²⁸ Robin Wilson, in his examination of the salience of Empire in Langan and Schwartz's collection of essays Crises in the British State 1880-1930, has shown how the Empire, Ireland, Tarriff Reform, and the rise of Germany and the U.S.A. as world economic powers, became for late nineteenth and early twentieth century Imperialists such as Lord Milner and Cecil Rhodes, not only the pressing and inextricably linked issues of the day, but the key to the remaking of the British State and the crushing of Socialism.²⁹ Earlier studies, such as Semmel's Imperialism and Social Reform³⁰ had indicated the ways in which early twentieth century Socialists and Fabians had cooperated with men like Milner in the belief that thereby they could win for the working class the benefits of economic affluence in an expanding, imperial economy. In Wilson's account he emphasises the use made of the Empire by the Unionists in terms of their attempt to undermine Gladstonian Liberalism, outflank New Liberalism and Socialism, and by seizing the State, remake Britain. But where his account concludes with the failure of this design, in the mid-1920's, what we wish to call attention to is the fact that, as Morgan notes, the discourses which promoted and elaborated upon the idea of Britain as an imperial power continued to be reproduced not only within schools but with ramifying effects throughout all levels of civil and political society until well after World War II. We have already referred to Nandy's comment that ‘the experience of colonizing did not leave the internal culture untouched’³¹ and certainly much could be made of his observation that ‘the experience of colonizing … openly sanctified—in the name of such values as competition, achievement, control and productivity—new forms of institutionalized violence and ruthless social Darwinism. The instrumental concept of the lower classes it promoted was perfectly in tune with the needs of industrial capitalism and only a slightly modified version of the colonial concept of hierarchy was applied to the British society itself. The tragedy of colonialism was also the tragedy of the younger sons, the women and all the “etceteras and so forths” of Britain.’³² What is significant here is that Nandy asserts that colonialism touched the metropolitan society at all levels, and in a continuing fashion, even after the retreat from Empire.

Nandy's considerations on the cultural aspects and effects of colonialism start from a number of premises. For example, it is assumed by Nandy that without an ideological buttress, imperialism and colonialism would have proved incapable of survival, because unless the colonizers get the colonized to accept their colonial status they will need constant recourse to physical coercion with associated costs. As Nandy puts it, the British ‘… could not rule a continent-sized polity while believing themselves to be moral cripples. They had to build bulwarks against a possible sense of guilt produced by a disjunction between their actions and what were till then, in terms of important norms within their own culture, “true” values.’³³ The strategy through which colonial discourses were deployed was to seek a multiplicity of means by which to demonstrate that colonialism proceeded from a metropolitan superiority in organisation, morals and way of life and that its colonial subjects were subjects because of their lower civilisational and cultural status. We have not the space here to recapitulate Nandy's intricate, but always provocative, arguments, and by concentrating on a few aspects of his positions we may give a false impression of the power and significance of his project; this is unfortunate but unavoidable. What we wish to do, however, is to isolate from his work a line of arguments, coherent within the whole, which outlines, firstly, how discourses of sexuality were deployed within colonialism and, secondly, considers their effects.

Nandy's writing on the homology of colonialism and sexuality proceeds from a historical analysis of the development of certain discourses of sexuality in the West which were somewhat later deployed in the colonies and, particularly from his point of concern, in India. In essence, he argues that colonialism accentuated within both colonial and colonized societies sub-cultural forms which had hitherto been marginal. Thus, for Nandy, the deployment of sexuality within colonialism was both dependent upon—and at the same time productive of—‘a cultural consensus in which political and socio-economic dominance symbolized the dominance of men and masculinity over women and femininity.’³⁴ In the case of India, Nandy shows how colonialism drew upon ‘the denial of psychological bisexuality in men in large areas of Western culture.’³⁵ This worked to reduce the possibilities of sexuality from a continuum of positions to three only: the Masculine r the feminine r the androgyne. In order to posit an immutable theorem of power in which lordship and masculinity were the incontrovertible attributes of dominance, and subservience and submission were the attributes of femininity, it was above all necessary to reduce the range of possibilities which, Nandy argues, even in the West, had been available to men to a situation of polarity—masculine/feminine—which required the stigmatisation and repression of androgyny.

Nandy's analysis of the consequences of these procedures in the context of India and Indian responses to colonialism, is compelling. But, like Foucault, he maintains that discourse is uniformly available to both the oppressor and the oppressed, and that the discourse of colonialism/sexuality could not be differentially deployed; its effectiveness, and the positional superiority which it supported, derived from the mastery—and the manipulation—of the rules of discourse and therefore that discourses of sexuality deployed in a colonial context were also effective within the metropolitan power. That is why he states in his introduction ‘… the following pages speak only of victims; when they speak of victors, the victors are ultimately shown to be camouflaged victims, at an advanced stage of psychosocial decay.’³⁶

Jimmy Porter's political life encapsulates the process of the marginalisation of the intellectual as outlined above, for what is clear is that commitment to ‘good brave causes’ has lapsed rather than never having been present. As we learn in the long section of exposition in which Alison gives Helena a resumé of Jimmy's past, he was a political activist at the time of the 1951 general election, breaking up the meetings of ‘Brother Nigel’ and, faced by the perceived defeatism of Hugh in the aftermath of the Conservative victory, Jimmy had accused him of giving up.³⁷ But in the contemporary moment of 1956 that commitment has evaporated. In Jimmy's words: ‘The old grey mare that actually once led the charge against the old order—well, she certainty ain't what she used to be … she just dropped dead on the way.’³⁸

Within the terms of the play the only possible solution is personal, because the social-political dimension is presented only as a void and, echoing Orwell, the collapse is experienced by both the Blimp and the Intellectual. Colonel Redfern laments the state of the England to which he has returned at the end of Empire: ‘I think the last day the sun shone was when that dirty little train steamed out of that crowded, suffocating Indian station, and the battalion band playing for all it was worth. I knew in my heart it was all over then. Everything.’³⁹ Empire stands for Jimmy also as a now lost certainly: ‘If you've no world of your own its rather pleasant to regret the passing of someone else's.’⁴⁰ Empire may be then the yearned for, but absent, guarantor of purpose—but in reality the discourse of imperialism has been internalised, producing a complex and paradoxical personal politics which denies the Establishment, and implicitly the Empire, at the very moment when the supposed retreat from that world reproduces it in all its most repressive features. It is here that Nandy's comment on ‘camouflaged victims, at an advanced stage of psychosocial decay’⁴¹ becomes most apposite as indeed the opening didascaly indicate. Jimmy is a mixture of sincerity and malice, tenderness and cruelty and, while it is the former qualities which he claims for himself, it is the cruelty and malice which are most powerfully staged, and explicitly so in his violent and vehement treatment of Alison who has to shoulder the ‘White Woman's Burden’; literally, the ironing but also, our reading would suggest, that of the displaced discourse of colonialism. Women are described as ‘butchers’ and ‘bastards’, their ‘primitive hands’, which frequently carry ‘weapons’, are seen as threatening the very viscera and life blood of the male; ‘Why, why, why,’ laments Jimmy ‘do we let these women bleed us to death.’⁴² Women are a threatening ‘other’ in the face of which the male must, to guarantee his own security, exercise the ultimate sanctions of repression and the denial of the independent female subject. In terms of colonial discourse Jimmy's practise is a model of what Homi Bhabha defines as standard in this ‘apparatus of power’: ‘The objective of colonial discourse is to construe the colonised as a population of degenerate types … in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction.’⁴³ The play's conclusion is then particularly striking when read in this context, as Alison submits to Jimmy's definition of ‘love’ in an act of abject surrender: ‘Don't you see! I'm in the mud at last! I'm grovelling! I'm crawling! Oh, god’—She collapses at his feet.⁴⁴ Such a reading, however, has to be erected in opposition to that preferred by the text where the strength of the characterisation indicates that the dramatic intention is to create empathy with Jimmy and an acceptance of his self—and social—analysis as confirmed by Alison and Helena; namely that society rather than the individual, is at fault: ‘He was born out of his time’ and ‘There's no place for people like that any longer—in sex, or politics, or anything. That's why he's so futile.’⁴⁵

The fact of this sensed futility is undeniable; why it should breed the malaise so effectively dramatised by Osborne is clarified in part by reference to the work of historians such as Michael Walzer and Mark H. Curtis on what Curtis terms the ‘alienated intellectuals’ of Early Stuart England. As Curtis defines his term, the ‘alienated intellectuals’ are not to be seen as either economically oppressed or exploited. Rather they experience a frustration born of a lack of challenge, recognition and honour. Being thus alienated from society, and particularly from its inner circles, ‘they simultaneously viewed certain aspects of it with greater realism and objectivity than many of their contemporaries and yet on critical occasions acted and spoke irresponsibly.’⁴⁶ They were, argues Curtis, ‘angry young men’, but his conclusion to his piece indicates the crucial distinction which we would wish to make between these Stuart intellectuals and their 1950's counterparts. ‘They’, writes Curtis, ‘were a significant segment of the educated, talented, sensitive, conscientious men in Stuart society—men who would be capable of giving leadership and direction to the causes that they shared in common with others.’⁴⁷ Although there are some distinctions to be drawn between the conclusions of Curtis and Walzer, Walzer too, argues that these ‘advanced’ intellectuals were ‘capable of organising themselves voluntarily on the basis of ideological commitment’, that they could direct themselves to ‘enthusiastic and purposive activity.’⁴⁸ Whether the intellectuals are seen as alienated as a result of their Catholicism, and so attempting incorporation, as David Aers and Gunther Kress argue is the case with John Donne, or as Puritan, and so are secure in the certainty of their oppositional ideology, the common factor among these ‘angry young men’ would appear to be the group cohesion resulting from adherence to a sustaining faith or ideology, the very things which, as we have argued above, are lacking in Jimmy Porter.

Written as it is within the dominant theatrical form of realism Look Back In Anger displays two central features of that form which bear directly on the nature of its socio-political analysis; namely empathy and closure. In terms derived from Brecht empathy is a characteristic of Realist, or what Brecht calls ‘Dramatic’ theatre, and is defined as drawing the spectator into something; involving the spectator in a stage-action; and making the spectator stand inside and experience with the characters. The result of the empathic identification, produced by the foregrounding of Jimmy Porter, is that members of the audience who belong to the same class fraction look to the staged solution of the problem as he defines it, as one which is indeed to be welcomed, since it provides, finally, the very commitment whose lack has produced the anguish and anger of the play. The point for emphasis is finally, for in raising the issue of alienation and the absence of any good brave causes the play has released the potential for a sustained and radical critique of the role of intellectuals in society; by providing a resolution to its character's problem the validity of further analysis is denied as Jimmy, the play's raisonneur, defines both the initial problem and its ultimate solution. The nature of that act of closure requires attention, for Jimmy—libertarian and radical—finds a resolution of a personal and profoundly political problem in terms of the subjection and effective ‘colonisation’ of Alison.

Lacking a cause on the political plane, Jimmy demands commitment on the personal level; and demands, rather than gives, is the operative word. He longs for enthusiasm and berates his wife until she, rejected, reviled, now having miscarried, returns to Jimmy finally able to give, having experienced, the absolute emotional intensity he has always required. The play closes on their embrace as they play the game of bears and squirrels which Alison had earlier described as ‘the one way of escaping from everything.’⁴⁹ If the issue for the character has been to achieve intensity in personal relations then that objective has been achieved for Jimmy, albeit at the cost of Alison's independence, but only, it is clearly acknowledged, with the concomitant retreat from the ‘cruel steel traps’ of the world which, supposedly, lacks causes adequate to generate an equivalent political commitment. Jimmy may be able to identify the political inadequacies of ‘Brother Nigel’ and sense the significance of the end of Empire, but both the character and the play, far from being radical or revolutionary are, in fact, profoundly reactionary. A solution is staged which invites the audiences' acceptance of Jimmy's, and their, resolution to alienation as one of retreat from commitment. This is a profoundly unhappy ending, but both the work, and we would argue, the intellectuals among its audience who, in Alan Sinfield's terms, were likely to discover for themselves a set of independent attitudes, lacked—and had lacked for decades—the ability to think in terms of Brecht's Epilogue to The Good Woman of Setzuan: ‘You're thinking aren't you, that this is no right / Conclusion to the play you've seen to-night? … Can the world be changed? … It is for you to find a way, my friends / To help good men arrive at happy ends. / You write the happy ending to the play / There must, there must, There's got to be a way!’⁵⁰

The position of the alienated intellectual at the end of Empire was that in retreating from a world supposedly lacking in ‘good brave causes’ they—or their stage representative Jimmy Porter—reproduced the discourse of that to which they were nominally opposed, and in the powerful dramatic evocation of impotence made impotence not so much a condition to be rejected, as a sign of intellectual integrity in the face of a world which now, supposedly, lacked the ability to provide them with a cause.

Notes

1. John Russell Taylor, Anger and After (Harmondworth: Penguin, 1963), p. 28.

2. Arnold P. Hinchliffe, ‘Whatever Happened to John Osborne?’, in C. W. E. Bigsby (ed.), Contemporary English Drama: Stratford-Upon-Avon Studies 19 (London: Edward Arnold, 1981), pp. 53-63.

3. Kenneth Tynan, in John Russell Taylor (ed.), Look Back in Anger: A Selection of Critical Essays (London: Macmillan, 1968), pp. 50-51.

4. M. D. Faber, ‘The Character of Jimmy Porter: An Approach to Look Back in Anger’, Modern Drama, Vol. XIII, No. 1, May 1970, pp. 67-77.

5. Alan Sinfield ‘The Theatre and its Audiences’, in Alan Sinfield (ed.), Society and Literature 1945-1970 (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 174.

6. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 32.

7. John Osborne, Look Back In Anger (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), p. 17.

8. George Orwell, ‘England, Your England’ in Inside the Whale and Other Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962) p. 85.

9. George Orwell, ‘Inside The Whale’ in Orwell, op. cit p. 30.

10. Ibid., p. 35.

11. Kingsley Amis, ‘Socialism And The Intellectuals’, Fabian Tract 304, in Fabian Tracts Nos. 295-320 (Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprints, 1971), p. 415.

12. John Osborne ‘The Writer in his Age’, in Look Back In Anger: A Selection of Critical Essays, p. 60.

13. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), pp. 101-102.

14. Orwell, Op. Cit, p. 85.

15. Ralph Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism (London: Merlin, 1973), p. 250 ff.

16. See Zig Layton-Henry, ‘Labour's Lost Youth’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 11, Nos. 2 & 3, July 1976, pp. 275-308.

17. A. Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks, eds. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), pp. 334-335.

18. See Arthur Marwick, ‘Middle Opinion in the '30s: Planning, Progress and Political Appeasement’, English Historical Review, LXXIX, 1964 and Stuart Holland, ‘Keynes and the Socialists’, in Robert Skidelsky (ed.), The End of the Keynesian Era, (London: Macmillan, 1977), pp. 67-77.

19. Gramsci, Op. Cit., p. 324.

20. David Howell, British Social Democracy, (London: Croom Helm, 1976), p. 186ff.

21. Amis, Op. Cit, p. 417.

22. Amis, Op. Cit, p. 410.

23. Amis, Op. Cit, p. 411.

24. Look Back In Anger, p. 84.

25. Ibid.

26. Morgan, Op. Cit. pp. 194-200 especially pp. 194-5.

27. See, for example the political circumstances surrounding the attempt by the Tory Government to palm-off Blue Streak, its cancelled ballistic missile on the Commonwealth as a satellite launcher to improve and develop Commonwealth ties. The rhetoric employed in press communiques used precisely the same tone and terminology as that which can be read in the communiques of the 1900's. For some unusual examples of imperial discourse therefore, see D. W. Cairns, ‘Intergovernmental Cooperation in Science and Technology: The Experience of E.S.R.O. and E.L.D.O. 1960-1970’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Keele, 1978, p. 44 and especially n. 22.

28. Morgan, Op. Cit, p. 194.

29. Robin Wilson, ‘Imperialism in Crisis: The Irish Dimension’, in M. Langan and B. Schwartz (eds.), Crises in the British State (London: Hutchinson—C.C.C.S., 1985), pp. 151-178.

30. Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform, (London: Allen & Unwin, 1960).

31. Nandy, Loc. Cit.

32. Nandy, Op. Cit., p. 32.

33. Ibid., p. 10.

34. Ibid., p. 4.

35. Idem.

36. Ibid., p. xvi.

37. Look Back In Anger, p. 46.

38. Look Back In Anger, p. 52.

39. Look Back In Anger, p. 68.

40. Look Back In Anger, p. 17.

41. Nandy, Op. Cit. p. xvi.

42. Look Back In Anger, p. 24 and p. 84.

43. Homi Bhabha, ‘The Other Question …’, Screen, Vol. 24, No. 6, Nov-Dec 1983, p. 23.

44. Look Back In Anger, p. 95.

45. Look Back In Anger, p. 90.

46. Mark H. Curtis, ‘The Alienated Intellectuals of Early Stuart England’, in Trevor Aston (ed.), Crisis in Europe 1560-1660, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), p. 300.

47. Curtis, Loc. Cit., p. 316.

48. Walzer, cited in D. Aers and Gunther Kress, ‘“Darke Texts Need Notes”: Versions of Self in Donne's Verse Epistles’, Literature and History No. 8, Autumn 1978, p. 147.

49. Look Back in Anger, p. 47.

50. Bertolt Brecht, The Good Woman of Setzuan, trans. Eric Bentley, (New York: Grove Press, 1966), p. 141.