THEATER CHRONICLE
125
and do not even put up a fight. Jimmy rails, Alison quails; and be–
tween them they enact an endless ritual of mutual damnation in their
dreary Midlands flat. For them it is always Sunday on the calendar
just as it is always a season of oppressive idleness in the mind. Their
windows open on a covered areaway; their door gives on a hall, a much–
used bathroom and a landlady who may throw them out at any moment.
The furnishings look provisional, as
if
waiting for the landlady's ire or
a bomb to finish them. A couple of friends share the Porters' lives for
a while without in the long run loosening their mortal embrace. Amid
all that is insubstantial in their lives, this grim association alone per–
sists. Meanwhile Jimmy finds his ideal opponent in his mother-in-law,
who never appears in the play. On her imagined presence, embodied in
a gas burner downstage, he lavishes his finest flights of abuse, drawing
enthusiastically on Hamlet's wit of worms and corpses. Jimmy Porter,
it should be added, is often a detestable character from any point of
view, including-at moments-the author's. With all its monotony of
structure, its false starts into domestic melodrama or screwball comedy,
Look Back in Anger
has the courage of its author's talent for relentless
portraiture. There's nothing wrong with Jimmy Porter that a good
revolution wouldn't cure, if a good revolution were conceivable by him
or anyone else connected with the play. Nor is anything amiss with
Look
Back in Anger
that a small upheaval in Osborne's stagecraft wouldn't
put to rights. This, at least, is a possibility.
The play version of
Look Homeward, Angel
is an outstanding ex–
ample of the familiar process by which a formally dated subject is
periodized, as it were, and so made interesting once more. Thomas
Wolfe's novel takes us back to a time when the modern movement in
the arts was young; when art was created by large-scale, widely ac–
claimed, often self-advertising geniuses; and when genius, in order to
realize itself, had to revolt violently from the village, the family and
the other conditions of existence. In its original form
Look Homeward,
Angel
(1929) was the last ambitious treatment of a subject which
Dreiser, O'Neill and Anderson-to mention only the leading American
examples-had initiated at an earlier time; and Wolfe's novel perhaps
revealed its belatedness in the conscious literariness of its style and the
gargantuan exaggeration with which the theme was handled. The Broad–
way version of the novel probably owes its inception to the remarkable
success of O'Neill's posthumous
Long
Dcry's
Journ ey into Night,
a starker
presentation of embattled youthful genius in an earlier America. In the
New York theater, where trends so often substitute for traditions, the
