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to improvise the terms of this uniqueness. It is a difficulty that seems,
at the moment, unavoidable and I have no wish to disparage writers
who face it courageously. Still, it had better be said that the procla–
mation of personal identity in recent American fiction tends,
if
I
may use a fashionable phrase, to
be
more a product of the will than
of the imagination.
It may help strengthen my point- critics ought not to strengthen
such points too much- if I turn for a moment to the two most–
discussed literary groups of the last few years: the "angry young
men" in England and the "beat generation" writers of San Francisco.
Partly because they write in and about England, Kingsley Amis,
John Braine and John Wain are blessed with something utterly pre–
cious to a writer: a subject urgently, relentlessly imposing itself upon
their imaginations. They have earned the scorn of a good many Amer–
ican critics-notable, of course, for asceticism- who point out that it
is not clear whether it is a better or just a bigger share of the material
and cultural goods in contemporary England that these writers want.
But while you can feel righteous or even hostile toward Amis and
Braine, you can hardly deny that in their novels one finds somethinf
of the focussed desire, the quick apprehension and notation of con–
temporary life which, for reasons I have tried to suggest, has become
somewhat rare in serious American fiction. These English writers
face a predicament of the welfare state: it rouses legitimate desires
in people of the "lower orders"; it partly satisfies these desires; but
it satisfies them only to the point of arousing new demands beyond
its power of meeting. For society this may be irksome; for writers
it is exhilarating. Gripes can be transformed into causes, ambitions
cloaked as ideals. And the "angry young men" are particularly for–
tunate in that their complaints lead them to deal with some of the
traditional materials of the novel: frustrated ambition, frozen snob–
bery, fake culture, decaying gentility. Through comedy they are able
to
structure
their complaints. Their work touches upon sore spots in
English life, hurting some people and delighting others. It threatens
the Establishment, perhaps its survival, more likely its present leaders.
It creates tension, opposition, a dialectic of interests. All of which
is to say: it rests upon an articulated, coherent though limited vision
of English social relations.
By
contrast, the young men in San Francisco seem largely a
