124
PARTISAN REVIEW
school, seems inferior of its kind to Amis's novel,
Lucky Jim.
Amis'l
inventiveness in the department of action is not shared by Osborne.
What Osborne gives us is a full-length portrait, deeply ambiguous
in
its
implications, of a man raging in the abstract dark of his largely seU·
spun universe.
Look Back in Anger
is nevertheless worth contemplating,
especially in the excellent production it is getting in New York, where
the original London cast of dedicated players is mostly present.
To
judge by the text of the play (published in the
U.
S. by Criterion
Boob,
$2.75), no concessions have been made to Broadway. Song and dance
have not been added, nor have Osborne's lines been tampered with, ex·
cept perhaps to de-expurgate them for the tougher New York audience.
Where the text refers to "a matelot's arm," an actor in the stage ver·
sion was distinctly heard to say "a sailor's ass." It doesn't matter.
Text
and performance both have Osborne's bottom-dog humor in quantity;
and like the play of which it is so important a part, the humor is some–
times genuine, sometimes
voulu
and awful.
While the New York critics were generally friendly to
Look
&ti
in Anger,
they did in some cases object that the hero's anger is insuf·
ficiently motivated.
It
is; Jimmy Porter, as he is called, is that some–
what depressing figure with which certain movies and novels, as well
as
certain young writers who contribute to symposia on the problems
of
their generation, have made us familiar: the rebel without a cause.
This
figure seems more inspired in his English incarnation. Having wit and
rhetoric Jimmy makes something, dramatically speaking, of his base–
less revolt, his career of gratuitous inaction. For his wit and rhetoric,
moreover, he draws on a long line of British moral bullies and prophets,
from Hamlet to more recent examples. Politically impotent though
he
is, Jimmy Porter can at least blow his trumpet and scan the newspapen
for gratifying instances of scandal and fatuity. Mainly, he is free to abuse
his wife, her family, her social class, her England. Porter is of working.
class origins while Alison, his wife, belongs to the upper sections of
s0-
ciety. As his "hostage"-her word for it- she helplessly submits to
his
accusing tirades.
He
knows things undreamt of in
her
philosophy;
he
has seen, as
she
hasn't, men suffer and die ; in short, he's spiritually
alive and
she's
spiritually dead. Porter is a sort of Hamlet who has
read
the Communist Manifesto,
Man and Superman
and
The Plumed Ser·
pent.
He has Labour Party posters on his wall but doesn't really envisage
a changed social order. Failing this, he makes a blood sacrifice of
his
wife-all his fantasies are of blood-letting. The trouble, as he sees it,
is with his class enemies even more than with himself. They are all
empty do-nothings like his wife, whom he calls "the Lady Pusillanimous,
It
