THE NEW NIHILISM
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municate by telephone as an occasion for reflecting that machines were
robbing us of the "common feeling ... before nature, to God"?) and
where the inevitable social changes that have been gathering steam in
the last few years can so easily seem, to those suffering from the at–
tendant dislocations, a matter of free choice, like voting for or against
commercial television. (C. P. Snow has said that most English literary
people stilI haven't come to terms with the industrial revolution.)
Hinde is usually associated with the rather heterogeneous group ot
writers now irrevocably known as the Angry Young Men. These writers
are often described as lower-class rebels against the Establishment who
are bitter about the decline of British prestige in the world and/or–
so the usual cliche goes-the drabness of life in the Welfare State. There
is a slight touch of truth in this description, but apart from the fact
that it oversimplifies and ignores the element of genuine rejoicing on
the English Left (where all but one or two of the AYM can be found)
at Britain's retirement from the colonial scene and her increasing egali–
tarianism, its main weakness is that it misses the jauntiness and the
underlying
optimism
of Amis, Wain, and even Osborne-an optimism
that derives from their excitement at the prospect of a new society
coming into being which has the opportunity to create a healthy "or–
ganic" culture for the first time since the industrial revolution. To my
ears, it is a jauntiness remarkably reminiscent of the tone of much
American writing of the 1930's (writing, by the way, which is greatly
admired in England today-the early plays of Lillian Hellman and
Clifford Odets have been recommended by the influential young drama
critic Kenneth Tynan as a model for the British theater to follow). But
many other things besides tone in the British cultural atmosphere today
also recall the spirit of the American 1930's. To take a vivid, though pos–
sibly trivial example: during the few days when DeGaulle's access to
power was stilI in doubt, a number of English writers hired a hall in
London to protest against the impending murder of freedom in France
and formed a Committee to Save the Fourth Republic. (It was later
reported that the Committee's message of solidarity to certain French
anti-Gaullistes caused bewilderment even in Paris, where this fervent
gesture seemed, as the English themselves would put it, "a bit thick,"
given the temper of the times.)
If
I remember rightly, the protest meet–
ing was organized by the
Universities and Left Review,
a new socialist
magazine which has a fresh, naive bounciness that stands out in bold
relief against the tired, almost worldly sophistication of its American
counterpart
Dissent
(for once, the tables of European "maturity" and
American "innocence" have been turned), and a hopeful belief in the
