LONDON LETTER
113
lectuals, academic, despite Amis's anti-"culture" pronouncements, in–
fluenced in their criticism by Leavis, in their poetry by Empson. They
show, indeed, that Cambridge with the toughly intellectual Empson
was perhaps more seminal to the present generation than the Oxford
of Auden, Day Lewis, MacNeice and myself.
To Lindsay Anderson this means that Amis represents the old stuff
which the new and revolutionary are revolting against. He is scathing
about a Fabian pamphlet in which Arnis gives his unenthusiastic half–
support to the Labour party.
It
is to John Osborne that he looks for
the new note of change. And he is right, of course, that cultivated in–
tellectual superiority backed by academic standards "tarted up" (to use
a favorite phrase of Kingsley Amis) make about the stalest modern
pastry.
To continue the parallel with the 1930's, John Osborne has the
freshness and strength of rhetoric expressed by a personality in which sin–
cerity seems oddly fused with meretriciousness, of another Dylan Thomas.
Like Thomas, he is always "different." And perhaps he is more for–
tunate than Thomas in writing for the stage at the beginning, and not
the end, of his career.
What John Osborne has to say is not far from Thomas either,
though it has an additional force through being applied to a new kind
of hypocritical social situation. He is denouncing the hypocrisy of Wel–
fare State uncharitableness-the idea that today the poor are looked
after by Social Security from cradle to grave. His Jimmy Porter, and
the hero of
The Entertainer,
are people who-statistically, and officially,
as it were-are not supposed to exist in our society, unless, perhaps, by
an oversight. The reaction of many of the critics to these plays is that
they are not-they cannot be-about "real" people, because the Welfare
State has deprived every individual of the right to be economically piti–
able. Therefore-the argument goes on-what these characters are com–
mands no objective reason for pity. They should be left alone to stew
in
their self-pity.
The inexcusability of Osborne's characters being sorry for them–
selves-or of anyone else being sorry for them-is just what makes them
disturbing. And the flimsiness of their actual material situations-that
Jimmy Porter and his friend sell sweets, that the Entertainer has man–
aged not to pay income tax for so many years, and is then, without
apparent warning, arrested for not doing so-these personal situations
balanced out by a vision of the public one which exploits injustice and
the pompous nonsense of monarchy: it is this defiance of the socially
real which seems outrageous. Mr. Osborne shows how subtly many of
