Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Not All Propaganda is Art 3: The Man Who Was Thursday's Children

Episode Date: February 6, 2024

In 1956 London Theater critic Kenneth Tynan helped launch a youth movement committed to exposing social and political issues on stage, on screen and in literature. We take a close look at the operators and opportunists behind England’s Angry Young Men. Shownotes: Michael Billington wrote for the Guardian, Celia Brayfield wrote Rebel Writers, Clare Bucknell wrote The Treasuries Laura Bradley writes on Brecht. Support ToE and get access to the incredible exclusive bonus companion series to Not All Propaganda is Art by subscribing at https://theoryofeverything.supercast.com/, or subscribe directly in Apple Podcasts by hitting “Subscribe” right on the show page.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. Previously on Not All Propaganda is Art A young Englishman who, if not angry, is at least opinionated. Kenneth Tynan In the mid-1950s, British drama critic Kenneth Tynan grew sick and tired of British theatre and culture. I think the English have ploughed this country absolutely into a cultural,

what I could call a cultural dust bowl. Kenneth Tynan wanted a theatre that was engaged with the political, social and sexual issues of the day. And in 1956, he was ready to put his thumb on the scale and his shoulder to the wheel. Let's slip out, shall we, for a quiet cup of coffee. I want to return to where we began last episode, the CIA's Encounter magazine May 1956 investigation into the younger generation. To go with Martha Gellhorn's report on London's coffee scene, the editors sent out playwright Sandy Wilson to report on the city's theater scene. You might hear of something. The audition is over.

So you're not back to me. Oh, that's fine. You're welcome. Are the girls all right? Oh, by the way, there's an audition for dancers at Max Rehustler Hall. It started 15 minutes ago. Sorry, over five foot fours only. Oh.

Never mind, girl. The kids are not all right, Sandy Wilson reported. Lots of complaints about a lack of good plays and a lack of good pay. The post-war world, a young actor griped, isn't really as much fun as it ought to be. But if it's really so awful, an exasperated Sandy Wilson asked, why do so many young people want to take it up? We can complain about conditions as much as we like, the young man replied. But give us one successful show and everything suddenly becomes perfect.

This is an extremely prescient conversation. Because on May 8th, 1956, as this issue of Encounter was on newsstands, a play about complaining young people opened at London's Royal Court Theatre. God help me, I'll go out of my mind if he doesn't stop anything. Why don't you? That would be something anyway. Look back in anger.

I want to be there when you grovel. I want to be there. I want to watch it. I want the front seat. The most successful play of its generation. There's nothing else I can hope for anymore. There's nothing else I want anymore. A play that changed British culture forever.

One began to hear a splendid grunt around. The grunt of the apprentice began to be heard. I think in the second half I heard a few seats clang. And I heard the exit door go bang a couple of times. To that time, it was a very good sign in the theatre. And by the end of it, one at that time was a very good sign in the theatre. And by the end of it, one walked out serenely glowing, surrounded by disgruntled middle-aged faces, knowing that something very heartwarming had happened, and that one was dying to be

on the street with the news. I introduced you to Kenneth Tynan, the British theatre critic, in the first episode of this miniseries. He's one of our three main characters. He was a key figure in this cultural shift, or turn, that takes place in England in the mid-1950s. In fact, some British historians point to his May 13, 1956 review of Look Back in Anger as the exact date of this cultural turn. Because Kenneth Tynan's influential review launched a youth movement.

And I think that's at the heart of Tynan's review. He says it's the best young play of its decade. And what he means, I think, is it's written by a young man, obviously, John Osborne, but it's about youth and it's capturing the moment for young people. And that was why it became a historic play, historic production. And Tynan was the only critic really to seize on that. It got middling reviews generally, but Tynan was the only critic who saw that it was directly addressing a new generation. Michael Billington recently retired after 48 years as the Guardian's theatre critic. When he was a young man, he told me, he was obsessed with Kenneth Tynan's weekly reviews in the London Observer. Many critics in the Tynan era were middle-aged to elderly, often rather crusty, often rather reactionary.

Tynan was a young man. He was in his 20s when he started writing The Observer. He cut a dash, and he seemed to have a sort of, what is it, a flair for showbiz. He made criticism seem rather glamorous and sexy in a strange way. In the first episode, I told you about Tynan's 1956 appearance on the BBC radio programme Desert Island Discs. Michael Billington still remembers listening to that. And I remember Roy Plumley asked him how he would fare on the desert island. And he told a story about how he was on holiday

on an island and sitting under a tree and a huge coconut fell on his head and left a permanent dent in him. And he said, you know, that that cured me of the outdoor life. Michael, you do realize this was almost 70 years ago, and yet you remember it with like perfect detail. Tom Theatre in my teens because I lived in the Midlands of England. And I think it was reading Kenneth Tynan's reviews in The Observer that really alerted me to the excitement of modern drama. And it was A, because he wrote superlatively and coruscatingly well every Sunday, but also because he seemed to have a hunger for theatre and an appreciation of where theater was going. So one of Kenneth Tynan's reviews that made you fall in love with the theater was his review of Look Back in Anger. And I'm really hoping I can get your professional take on that, if that's okay. What is the Michael Billington review of the Kenneth Tynan review of Look Back in Anger. Well, total admiration, because he not only describes what the play is about, he puts it in context.

He relates Jimmy Porter, the hero of Look Back in Anger, to Hamlet in a way. He says he's, you know, he's like Hamlet in that he's got a gift for words. He's very intellectually and emotionally confused, etc. But he has the vitality and energy that marks out a great dramatic character. But the key point in that review, I suppose, the phrase that people always quote, and I've got it here in front of me, is the way he ends that review. I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger. It is the best young play of its decade. Now, to say that you couldn't love anyone who didn't want to see the play

is a kind of direct emotional statement of a kind that critics very rarely make. And I think that was a sign of Tynan's passion for the theatre and his endorsement of that particular play. It's also a really neat rhetorical trick. He's not saying, I doubt I could love anyone who doesn't like this play. He's saying, I doubt I could love anyone who doesn't want to see it. Yes. And I'm wondering, for someone like you, who's outside of London, kind of reading about what's going on in the big city and interested in theater. Isn't this like a direct poke at you?

Well, yes. I mean, well, I wanted to see the play the moment I read his review, but it's very hard to convey the significance it's had for what a 15, 16-year-old guy as I was there and a schoolboy, you know, when you read something like that, something important happening in London. There I am sitting in, you know, Leamington Spa, which is, you know, 100 miles away from London. But I think I got to get to see this play at some point in my life. Otherwise, my education will be incomplete. Wherever John Osborne's play has been seen, audience reaction has been swift and startling. So much to shock people. The black hatred, the hurt, and the anger.

For your own sake, don't ever do that again. I have no public school scruples about hitting girls. In the last episode, I told you a story about Colin Wilson. Like John Osborne, influential British critics had turned him into a youth phenomenon in May of 1956. But by November, Colin Wilson's star began to fall. And this is when John Osborne's star begins to rise. Partly because British TV aired a performance of Look Back in Anger to an audience of millions. And partly because of the efforts of our man, Kenneth Tynan.

My name is Benjamin Walker, and this is episode three of Not All Propaganda is Art. It's called The Man Who Was Thursday's Children, and it's a story about a British youth movement called the Angry Young Men, a movement in which Kenneth Tynan was both observer and participant. Why do you resent being labeled an angry young man? Well, I think partly because it arouses the most awful expectations. If I come into a room, people sort of flinch and say, is he going to hit me or spit in my face? No, it's just an ordinary journalistic popularizing label without any meaning at all. After the success of Look Back in Anger, the British press started calling every young playwright, poet, essayist, filmmaker, novelist, and theater critic an angry young man.

And future UK publishing legend Tom Mashler, himself a young man at the time, decided to turn this trend into a book. In 1957, he convinced some of the biggest young and kind of young stars of the moment to contribute essays to a book he called Declaration. He got essays from Kenneth Tynan, John Osborne, Colin Wilson, filmmaker Lindsay Anderson, and novelists John Wayne and Doris Lessing. But don't be fooled. This was most definitely a boys' club. Something we're going to come back to later on in this episode. They've been called everything from messiahs of the milk bars to the new intellectuals. Who are these angry young men?

Are they a cult or only a myth? When Declaration was published, the BBC's art show Monitor took note. A number of them have set down their credos or their attitudes to life in a book called Declaration, a sort of mental bearing of the chest, a kind of Mein Kampf of the young.

This BBC feature includes interviews with both Colin Wilson and Kenneth Tynan, who notably clash with each other. Here's Colin Wilson. involved, but not involved politically. If you get too involved, you lose the essential sensitivity, I think, that makes you a good writer. And here's Kenneth Tynan. I didn't see how you could be uninvolved. Now, I think it's a question of defining

exactly what you mean by something like a civilized human being. Because the actual word civilized means to be in a community and of it and a part of it. And if you decide that I don't want any part of this, you are technically being uncivilized. Kenneth Tynan wanted a British theater that was more engaged with the social, political, and sexual issues of the day. For him, the Angry Young Men was an opportunity to push for this vision. But first, he had to push anti-engagement, apolitical Colin Wilson off the stage. Which writer and declaration do you disagree with most? Well, I'd like to say Mr. Colin Wilson,

but I don't think there's anything there to disagree with. It's like you're disagreeing with a ton of lead cotton wool. A few weeks after that BBC feature ran, Kenneth Tynan invited his friend Christopher Logue, the poet, to see a play with him at the Royal Court, the same theatre responsible for Look Back in Anger. The play was called The Tenth Chance, and it was written by Colin Wilson's protege

and Declaration's youngest contributor, Stuart Holroyd. In The Tenth Chance, a Norwegian resistance fighter is tortured to death on stage by Nazis. And during one particularly grueling scene, Christopher Logue stood up and shouted rubbish. And then he clanged his seat and huffed out to the Sloan Square pub next door. When the play was over, Colin Wilson grabbed hold of Kenneth Tynan and demanded he keep his friend in line. Get out of my life, Wilson, Tynan allegedly retorted, and then he joined Christopher and his wife Elaine,

who'd also quit the play and discussed, at the pub. Colin Wilson and his friends followed Tynan in, and a fight broke out. One of the many papers who wrote about this tussle called it the Sloan Square Stomp. Sandy Wilson, the guy who wrote that report on the theater kids for Encounter, was there, and he told a reporter,

I hated the 10th chance, but I love this excitement at the bar. The historical record is unclear in regards to who exactly won this exciting round at the bar, but Colin Wilson and Stuart Holroyd most definitely lost the match. In his weekly column, Tynan dismissed the 10th Chance as sadistic spinach, and in an official history about the angry young men he penned for Holiday Magazine, he brutally wrote anti-engagement Colin Wilson off and out, declaring him a butterfly theorist.

The historical record also suggests that Kenneth Tynan and Christopher Logue went into the theater that night with a premeditated plan to make trouble for Wilson and his gang. At least that's what Christopher Logue confesses in a letter I found in Kenneth Tynan's archive at the British Library. Christopher Logue, what are you angry about? Well, what am you angry about? Well, what am I angry about?

Now, Christopher Logue was not an official angry young man. But like I said, during the angry years, the British media called everyone under the age of 30 angry. I'm angry about the way in which people get cheated. Yes, but what is the cheat? The cheat is a simple thing, that people are given a whole mass of things to enjoy, and a whole mass of things that liberate them, but they get no time in which to enjoy them, and all their time is spent taking up getting the things that in fact liberate them. Washing machines, motor cars, all the contraptions and gadgets that we've got,

all bind us more and more, not to a freedom in which we can do what we like and exploit ourselves however we like, but more and more to the grind where, well, we've got to earn more money, and so we're less free, and so we're cheated. This rant is very typical of a lot of the angry young man protests from this period.

You really can't tell what's complaint and what's posture. Is he really angry about washing machines? A lot of people tried to make sense of what exactly the angry young men were angry about in the late 1950s, including another one of the main characters in our story, Dwight McDonald. I could never understand the angry young men, what they were so angry about. Actually, the angry young men are certainly the darlings of English society. I mean, I don't know why they feel excluded. They're printed everywhere, invited to all the best parties and everything. By the end of the angry decade, numerous articles

and books had appeared on the scene, each one promising to help the reader make sense of the cultural revolt of the 1950s. I believe I've read every single one of them. And while some of these accounts do a fine job of explaining how and why publishers like Tom Mashler and critics like Kenneth Tynan made the most of this cultural trend, no one ever thought to ask what the cultural Cold War spies, and propagandists made of the angry young men? What opportunities did they see in all this cultural rebellion? To answer that question, we need to first get a better understanding of what this whole angry young man thing was all about and who officially was in this movement. And to do that,

we are going to turn once again to the CIA's magazine, Encounter. Dwight McDonald's co-editor at the magazine, Stephen Spender, was more understanding and generous when he first wrote about the angries in 1956. Of course there are things to be angry about, he wrote in the magazine, acknowledging the complaints of poets like Christopher Logue. The incommensurability of our poetic aspirations with our world set headlong on the straight, broad path of material progress.

But young writers succeed, he added, when they wear masks and dramatize their role in history. In the fall of 1957, Encounter magazine took a close look at the dramatic masks of the angry young men. They ran three excerpts from Declaration over two issues. One paired reviewer and reviewee Kenneth Tynan and John Osborne, and the other ran a long excerpt from angry young filmmaker and film critic Lindsay Anderson. You must see torture by immersion in boiling oil. In his haunting film, Oh Dreamland, Lindsay Anderson took a 16mm camera and a tape recorder to an amusement park. But Dreamland appears anything but fun.

I had seen Dreamland in Marbet when I was preparing with a friend of mine, Guy Brenton, a film called Thursday's Children about the education of deaf children in Margit. And while in Margit, I saw Dreamland and I thought this would make a very good film. In 1956, Lindsay Anderson and a few of his friends came up with a plan to get their experimental films shown. They pretended they were all part of a revolutionary film movement, and they called it free cinema. We wanted to show these films, so we had to invent free cinema. And that's really what free cinema was.

Free cinema didn't last all that long, chiefly because at home it wasn't very much talked about, and the British Film Institute, for instance, and the National Film Theatre said, we couldn't give any more free cinema shows because they thought we were too left-wing, which of course was nonsensical. Lindsay Anderson has a point. The only thing really left-wing in his condemnation of the British film industry

is his complaint that it ignores the working class. This virtual rejection of three- quarters of the population of this country represents more than a ridiculous impoverishment of the cinema. It is characteristic of a flight from contemporary reality. A new kind of filmmaker is needed, one who is not frightened or scornful of his fellows, who is eager to make his contribution and ready to use the mass media to do so. In his contribution to Declaration,

John Osborne also addresses England's lack of a working-class culture. But he also calls critics like Lindsay Anderson, posers. One of the difficulties in the way of trying to establish a working culture, he writes, is the stupidity of most critics. It is too much to expect any of them to stand up and admit that they've never lived in a street where the lavatories are all outside. One of the myths of the angry young men is that they all emerged from outside the establishment. But as John Osborne points out, all the big names in the movement were establishment insiders. In fact, Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson, Kenneth Tynan, and some of the others,

they all went to Oxford together. Suddenly in the midst of that throng came this tall, epicene figure. He was a year older than I was. The journalist Paul Johnson wrote about his memorable first encounter with Kenneth Tynan at Oxford in his book Intellectuals. Wearing a plum-colored suit and a lavender tie, and followed by what appeared to be a cortege of porters carrying trunks. And all of us, wing commanders, lieutenant commanders, colonels, brigadiers, goggled

at this figure as he came through. And he turned to one of his bearers and said, Have a care with that trunk, my man. It is freighted with golden shirts. Back in 1957, young Paul Johnson tried to make sense of his former classmates' new working class politics in a satirical review of Declaration he wrote for the New Statesman. His review is called War Games, and it has a fantastic setup. Corporal Tom Mashler, editor of Declaration, arrives at the front line with a batch of new recruits. One by one, the commanding officers

assess the potential of each declaration essayist to decide who gets a rifle and who gets sent back to the depot. Who's next? Kenneth Tynan, sir. Seems a bit unnecessarily pro-American. In fact, he's had himself photographed in this book against a background of Coca-Cola bottles. Brilliant marksman. His essay is far and away the best. He now asks for a society where people care more for what you have learned than where you learned it. Where art connects instead of separating people. Question is, sir, does he believe it?

We'll soon find that out in action. Give Tynan a rifle. Paul Johnson was right. Kenneth Tynan's piece is far and away the best thing in Declaration. An encounter chose the best part to excerpt in its magazine, a fictional letter. An attempt, Kenneth Tynan explains in his preface, to cram most of what he felt about England into a long, ironic letter written in the guise of a letter to the young son of a friend who's about to graduate from Oxford. It's totally Letter to a Younger Brother.

Dear John, Tynan writes, As one who has crossed the armed frontier that separates the university from real life, I feel a humane desire, now that you are on the eve of finals, to unload on you a little kindly advice. I do so because you are an art student, and hence likely to be led into errors that might delay, perhaps indefinitely, your entry into the world of reality and success. If you want to be a writer, he advises, turn critic as soon as possible. Less schizophrenia is involved. Most of the writerly advice Kenneth Tynan offers young John is ironic.

But in the final paragraphs of his letter, he drops the mask. There is one other course open to you. I hesitate to mention it, for it is the most perilous of all. You might go out and discover what the rest of your generation is really like, and act on what you discover. Go first to the jazz clubs, and if you talk to the cats, you will find in them these qualities. An instinctive leftism, an undemonstrative sympathy with anarchy, a dislike of classy politicians, a vivid vernacular made up of Hollywood, space fiction, and local dialect.

These young people are bright, unaggressive, and authentically tolerant. You could never make a lynch mob out of them. Do I speak for you when I ask for a society where people care more for what you have learned than for where you have learned it. Where people who think and people who work can share common assumptions and discuss them in the same idiom. Where art connects itself instead of separating people. Do you want these things?

Perhaps you don't, in which case I must sign myself your implacable enemy, K.T. I never posted the letter, he tells us in the postscript, because I heard that the boy had just signed a long-term contract with an advertising agency. There seemed no point in depressing him. When I grew up, I thought I wanted to be an angry young man. You know, I wanted to be someone protesting at the existing state of things. I don't think I succeeded, but that was my ambition, actually, to be angry. Kenneth Tynan's Dear John letter had a tremendous effect on young Michael Billington, who, around the time Declaration came out, finally made it to London to see Look Back in Anger.

I'd booked a ticket, and I went on my own. I'd booked a ticket, I think, for 8.30 on the Saturday, the second house performance. There'd been an earlier performance at 5.30. So when I did, I went to Sloan Square, where the Royal Court is, and I stood on the steps of the theater, gazing at the faces of the people as they were coming out of the first performance, because I wanted to see if they had been changed in some way, if their lives had been altered by this play. I was very naive and very stage-struck, but I just wanted to see what impact the play had had on them.

Do you remember how the play impacted you? What impressed me when I saw the play is the comedy of the play. There is this man at the center of the stage, Jimmy Porter, railing at the world, but never actually doing anything about his anger and his contempt. And there is something inherently futile about him. It is a very funny play. Surrealist humor is, of course, one of the qualities Kenneth Tynan celebrates in his original review of the play, along with an instinct of leftistness and a drift towards anarchy, which I'm sure you've noticed are the very same qualities Tynan says young John will find if he goes looking for his generation in the jazz clubs in his letter in Declaration.

In fact, the last bit of his statement in Declaration almost follows his review of Look Back in Anger word for word. And I'm really curious, like, what do you make of this? I think Ken's politics were very much at the mercy of his aesthetic response. In other words, I think his politics, I wouldn't say it was shallow, but it was acquired through his aesthetics, is my argument. In the first episode, I played you this tape of Kenneth Tynan's wife, Elaine Dundee,

talking about how Tynan first responded to Berthold Brecht. He said to me, well, he said, I am a Marxist. I have seen Mother Courage and I'm a Marxist. To me, it sounds very much

like a grand theatrical pose, you know, and a way of articulating the impact that this production has had on him, which was undoubtedly a theatrical impact. Laura Bradley is a Brecht scholar, and she told me that Kenneth Tynan's response to The Angry Young Men is very much in line with his aesthetic response to Berthold Brecht.

There's absolutely a tie-in. Tynan already knew what was wrong with British theatre, what he wanted to change. He wanted to have a socially relevant theatre. He wanted to have a full spectrum of society, you know, potentially represented on stage. So Tynan had already diagnosed the problem, but I think for him, Brecht represented the possibility of a cure. We're going to hear lots more from Laura Bradley on Tynan, Brecht, and Berlin later on in the series. But I find her take on Tynan's aesthetics and politics really helpful. It's a lens through which to understand the opportunity he saw in the angry

young men. Opportunity for cultural revolution. I think he's trying to shake up British culture, you know? This is the man who went on to use the F word on television for the first time. That is what he's trying to do. He's trying to shake things up. For me, the best way that I've found to make sense of the aesthetics, politics, and revolutionary potential of the angry young men is to compare them with the young women rebel writers of this period. Like the angry young men, most of them did not know each other, but they were all working. They were singing from the same hymn sheet. They all wrote for female protagonists and were concerned with their experience of life,

their position in society, which was extremely uncomfortable. They were also artistically really innovative. They were definitely putting an axe to the root of the patriarchy. You know, this cultural turn was gender-based as much as anything else. This is Celia Brayfield. She's the author of Rebel Writers, a survey of young women who were contemporaries of the angry young men. Writers like Lynn Reed Banks, whose book The L-Shaped Room tells the story of a young, unmarried pregnant woman who ends up in a London boarding house after her middle-class family casts her out. And

playwright Sheila Delaney, whose play Taste of Honey took London by storm when it opened in Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop in May of 1958. The colour's wrong. I'll bash his brain out and kill it. I don't want this baby, Jeff. I don't want to be a mother. I don't want to be a woman. This is a play about a 15-year-old girl who has a relationship with a black man, a West Indian sailor, we presume the Navy,

who disappears. She decides to become a single mother and raises her child in a platonic relationship with a gay man. Before I knew you, I didn't care much whether I lived or died, you know. These were completely taboo topics anywhere in British culture at that time. Hey, there's no need for us to split up, is there, Joe? Come on, rain! Come on, storm! Kenneth Tynan raved about Taste of Honey in his theatre column, and he called 19-year-old Sheila Delaney a portent.

But most of the critics could barely conceal their misogyny. This is how ITV interviewed her. How much help did you have in writing your play? Well, originally, when I wrote the original thing, I didn't have any help at all. You know, I just wrote it. But when it went into production, I think Joan Littlewood is the most sort of valuable person I've ever met, as far as work's concerned.

I understand you're getting married soon. No, I'm not getting married soon at all, no. It's been reported. It has been, yeah, but you know, I mean, that sort of thing isn't usually very reliable, is it? I think the misogyny that these writers encountered was, part of it was simply unconscious. The media and the literary critics were responding to work they simply didn't understand, because they had never considered the female experience. All of the rebel writers in Celia Brayfield's book wrote about the female experience in ways that were both aesthetically and politically shocking in the 1950s and 60s. But one writer in her book also wrote about the angry young men, Charlotte Bingham.

She was a highly privileged debutante. You know, the white dress, the rubbish you've seen Downton Abbey, the ostrich plumes, the presentation at court, the whole number. She just decided to blow the gaff on the life of an aristocratic young woman. She decided to tell it like it is. Could you explain what makes her a rebel writer for you? Well, to me, the outstanding fact about her was she was so incredibly young, I think 17, when she began writing her novel, which was called Coronet Among the Weeds. And weeds refers to all the men she has to fend off as a young debutante. British upper class slang for what you might call a dweeb, I think.

Coronet Among the Weeds is obviously her story, but she published it as fiction. In fact, her narrator doesn't even have a name. And while this is common for writers to disguise their identities, she had another reason. Indeed, her father is the MF5 operative identified as the prototype of George Smiley in John le Carré's books.

Her father also wrote, but less successfully. And in fact, a junior officer joined his group in MI5, and that was John le Carré. So she was very close to the spy element in British society. It seems she actually wrote some of Coronet Among the Weeds while working for her father at MI5. But still, there's not a single mention of anything related to him or MI5 or spies in that book. She could not possibly have identified her father in her first book, they would have gone to jail. I mean, you don't mess with this stuff. So she could not have identified him. And she did fictionalize herself quite elaborately in the book. I mean, it is a genuine novel. It's not a memoir. He did get her a job typing in MI5. But in the book she gets a job doing something else somewhere else.

Later in life, Charlotte Bingham wrote two sequels to her novel. And in these books, the spy stuff is front and center. One is called MI5 and Me, a coronet among the spooks, and the other, Spies and Stars, MI5, Show Business, and Me. All the action in these two books takes place in London in the late 1950s. They cover a lot of the same ground as this miniseries. Her father, she writes, is pursuing a popular theme with British security folk. Namely, that the airwaves and films and stages were being infiltrated by communist-leaning people

who were intent on bending minds and hearts towards Stalin and the Iron Curtain. And while Lottie, as she calls herself in these books, argues with her father that people will always choose washing machines over communism, her father is committed to subverting the subversives. He even recruits Lottie's boyfriend, Harry, to go undercover for him. And one day, Lottie runs into Harry on the street,

and she realizes that all of the raggedy young men who are surveilling the crowds outside the theaters and selling copies of the Daily Worker on the tube are her father's undercover agents. It's an incredible scene, a comedic update of The Man Who Was Thursday, G.K. Chesterton's famous spy story in which an undercover police officer infiltrates a gang of anarchists and gets himself elected as one of their leaders, Thursday.

All the anarchist leaders are codenamed after the days of the week. But by the story's end, our man Thursday discovers that all of the anarchist chiefs are actually, like him, undercover secret agents. Of course, I wrote to Charlotte Bingham to see if I could interview her about her amazing fictional account of the angry years for my series, but I never got a response. So I wrote her daughter and then a few of her friends. I even got a personal email for her famous editor, and I sent her a request pleading to help me set up an interview with Charlotte Bingham so I could run a feature on her amazing cultural Cold War novels. But nothing.

And then, one day, I noticed that both MI5 and me and spies and show business and me are clearly labeled as memoir, not fiction. I totally blew it. It was simply lovely to interview Charlotte. She is my relative neighbor now in the English countryside. Celia Brayfield interviewed Charlotte Bingham for her book Rebel Riders. And oddly, in our checkered careers, we had both gone to the same secretarial college

as teenagers. So I could recognize in her book, you know, some of the typing teachers that we had. Oh, incredible. So I'm even more curious then, what do you see in this connection that she makes between England spies and its angry young men? Well, this was the British version of radical chic, wasn't it?

It was certainly true at that time that a radical presentation appearing to hold left-wing views was a definite plus. There was a lot of mileage in appearing to be left-wing and to be subversive. And a great many people undoubtedly faked that to their advantage. Over the past few decades, the British government has declassified a number of important MI5 files, proving that Charlotte Bingham's father's agents were surveilling actors, playwrights, and producers in the London theatre world of the 1950s. And these files offer us perhaps the best way to gauge the subversiveness of the angry young men. Because while Sheila Delaney and Joan Littlewood both had files,

massive in the case of Littlewood, none of the angry young men did. Except for Doris Lessing, the only woman who was included in declaration. I think it's fitting we should begin by drinking a toast. What should we drink to? Down with Big Brother. Down with Big Brother. In the first episode of this series, I told you about the CIA's 1956 adaptation of George Orwell's 1984.

And how, in their version, Winston goes out in a hail of bullets, screaming, Down with Big Brother. The CIA also made a few cosmetic changes. In the book, the anti-Big Brother resistance is called the Brotherhood. In the film, it's called the Underground. This creates what might be my favorite dialogue in the movie. Does the Underground exist? That, Winston, you will never know.

Well, here we go then. Is there an angry young man generation? In 1958, the British novelist Kingsley Amis, who at the time was in the U.S. teaching at Princeton, was invited to lecture about the angry young men in New York City. The occasion was a new book, an anthology that brought together beat generation writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and angry young men like John Osborne and himself. An impression is growing up on both sides of the Atlantic that the American beat generation,

considered for the sake of argument as a group of writers have opened a branch office in England or according to some accounts have entered into a kind of spiritual and moral amalgamation with an already existing concern the angry young men and so we find this anthology the beat generation and the angry young men

simply appearing both here and at home. And we find me here tonight. Kingsley Amis hated the angry young man phenomenon, even though the label most certainly helped his first novel, Lucky Jim's Sales. That book cemented his reputation as the angry young man novelist. But when Tom Mashler asked him to contribute something to Declaration, Amos flat out refused. I think he jumped at this invitation to go on stage with Jack Kerouac in New York because he saw it as an opportunity to publicly call

the whole angry young man thing out as journalistic fraud. Is there a group of writers dedicated to protesting about the stagnation of contemporary English life? The frustration imposed on everything original and creative? The abandonment of all moral effort? Is there a bunch of chaps complaining in prose and verse about the way they've been treated, being nasty about the Queen and so on, instead of getting down to a decent job of work? Well, however you care to phrase the question,

the answer is the same. No. There is no movement of this kind in England. The idea that there is has been a creation of literary middlemen, characteristic of the journalistic approach, to put people in pigeonholes and save the reader trouble and exertion. It's easier to have novels and plays pre-digested than to face the gruelling task of making up one's own mind about them. There is no angry young man movement.

There may conceivably be a beat generation, but I very much doubt it. Thank you. Now, when it comes to fake literary movements, Kingsley Amos was a real authority. You see, along with the Angry Young Men, he was also a member of a group of poets called The Movement, who also made a splash in 1956 when Amos' friend Robert Conquest published New Lines, an anthology of movement poetry. So New Lines was a really major mystery event and it was sort of understood immediately, more or less, as marking a kind of watershed, a kind of change in how people saw things. This is Claire Bucknell.

She wrote about New Lines in her amazing book, The Treasuries, a history of British poetry anthologies and their influence on British culture. New Lines, she says, was a huge event because it proclaimed the arrival of a new kind of British poetry, a poetry that was opposed to the flowery romantic poetry of the 1940s and the political poetry of the 1930s. The conquest group are so strongly reacting against the poets of the 30s. And the poets of the 30s define themselves as seers, seers of the way forward, you know, communism is the way forward and we will lead the public there. And everything we do is driven by that moral politics.

And this book says we are done with this kind of poetry. What we need now is a sort of more formal, hard line, a realist, or you could think of it as Orwellian kind of poetry of facts and pragmatism and then the real thing. So New Lines feels so out of sync with all the committed and engaged work of the angry young men from this moment. And while that's really just a historical coincidence, you make it sound like New Lines was by design a work of anti-engagement. Yeah, that's a really nice way of putting it, a work of anti-engagement. Because when you read the process to New Lines, one of the first things that strikes you is how persistently negative it is and negative it is in its framing and reviewers pick this up so it's a book that's not going to do this and it's not going to do that

and it's not going to be like x and it's not going to be like y and it's hard to find what positively will do and when you put it along something like Look Back in Anger, it starts to look, let's say, somewhat regressive. It starts to look slightly conservative, slightly dusty. Unhip. Yeah, absolutely unhip.

It looks unhip and uncool. It has a very different literary sensibility. I want to ask you about a connection New Lines has with propaganda. Because when he published New Lines in May of 1956, Robert Conquest worked at the Information Research Department. He was an actual secret propagandist. He ran the British desk for the IRD. And Kingsley Amos knew this about his friend. His letters from this time make it clear that he understood that his friend Bob had the power to push their apolitical poetry movement into the culture using the same methods he used to push out anti-Soviet propaganda. How do you make sense of New Lines in this context? And the information comes in many forms. And so New Lines is a kind of information or a kind of pushing of information, just as Conquest was doing at the IRD. And so what they did there was to sort of collect information about Soviet misdoings and then they would spread it. They would disseminate it to journalists and politicians they could trust and they would financially back anti-communist

writing. So Congress can apply that sort of attitude in new lines just as he does in his day job. So I see the two as intimately connected and there are precedents for this. Whatever advantages Robert Conquest had as a secret IRD man, he still couldn't get Encounter magazine to say anything nice about New Lines. In a merciless review, the poet David Wright demolished Robert Conquest's movement. The bad poetry of New Lines, he declared, was just as bad as the bad poetry of the 30s and 40s. At least in the old days, he wrote, there was a theory that in order to write poetry, you had to be a poet first.

He had only one word for Robert Conquest's apolitical manifesto. Um. Encounter also gave its review of New Lines, a title worthy of the movement. They called it, A small green insect shelters in the bowels of my quivering typewriter. This rejection of the movement is further proof that in the fall of 1956, the propagandists at Encounter saw more opportunity in cultural expression that was engaged, committed, and angry.

Exactly what kind of opportunity they saw is explained in an internal memo that you can find in the Congress for Cultural Freedom's archives. This memo was written by a guy named Melvin Lasky, one of the Congress for Cultural Freedom's founders. At the time he wrote it, he was running the Congress's internal magazine committee, coordinating editorial policy and running quarterly meetings with key magazine personnel from London, Paris, Rome, and Berlin, where he was based. Melvin Lasky's memo is a response to recent internal criticisms and recommendations that the Congress for Cultural

Freedom do more with its magazines to combat European anti-Americanism, especially British anti-Americanism. Melvin Lasky disagreed. I would be wary of insisting, he wrote, that the USA be constantly projected positively, that all European anti-American stereotypes be made short shrift of, and systematically and vigorously. My own feeling is that this is mistaken. America projects itself badly. We, not unlike everybody else, have too many problems,

including materialism, cynicism, corruption, violence, to consistently come out with a positive word of cheer for these stars and stripes forever. Let European writers grumble. Let's grumble a bit ourselves. Now, Melvin Lasky wrote this memo in April of 1956, one month before Encounter ran its report on the younger generation, one month before Look Back in Anger's cultural debut. Now that is some prescient writing. Anti-Americanism, as we talked about in the last two episodes, is what brought Dwight McDonald to Encounter. His association with the magazine was supposed to signal that Encounter could and would be critical of America in its

crusade for intellectual freedom. Well, at least that was the idea. But in the fall of 1956, after the U.S. forced Britain to halt its invasion of Suez, anti-Americanism surged in England, and combating it became a top priority for America's propagandists. Kenneth Tynan really is standing in front of a wall of Coca-Cola bottles for his Declaration author photo. And the reason Paul Johnson called this detail out in his 1957 War Games review was because it signaled Kenneth Tynan's blatant anti-anti-Americanism. In the mid-1950s, no one made anti-Americanism look less cool than Kenneth Tynan. In the fall of 1958, Kenneth Tynan moved to New York City.

That's where he'll be when we pick up with him next in episode 5. And just before he left London, he rented out his Mayfair apartment to Melvin Lasky, the guy who wrote the memo I just told you about. In 1958, Melvin Lasky moved from Berlin to London to take over as co-editor at Encounter, a job that he will hold until the bitter end. In America, Kenneth Tynan will continue to develop his ideas about socially engaged theater and art. He'll profile beat poets in San Francisco and satirical comedians in New York. He'll also write his definitive piece on Berthold Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble for The New Yorker.

And he will produce one of the craziest and most controversial pieces of British anti-anti-American propaganda ever made. Thank you. Not all propaganda is art. This episode is researched, written, and produced by me, Benjamin Walker. The one and only Andrew Calloway mixed it. Special thanks this episode go out to my friends, Fran Panetta and James Burke, who put me up in their London flat when I did most of my London recordings. And they listened to me go on and on about cultural revolution and 1956 for days when they really just wanted to celebrate their new garden and the end of COVID lockdown.

I hope I didn't wear out my welcome. Also thanks again to all of the amazing folks who appear in this episode. You can find links to their work in the show notes. I've actually created a complimentary podcast to go with this series called Propaganda Notes and Sources. Think audio footnotes. Each episode in Not All Propaganda is Art gets its own corresponding episode of Propaganda Notes and Sources.

I take you through the script and cite all the corresponding original sources I consulted and the archives I visited while reporting this series. So if you want to know more about the rivalry between Kenneth Tynan and Colin Wilson and how I located a recording of both of them from November of 1956 but couldn't get access to it because the museum it's in is still under construction? Well, all that and more is in episode three of Propaganda Notes and Sources. You can access the entire run of Propaganda Notes and Sources, this exclusive companion series, by subscribing at theoryofeverythingpodcast.com slash subscribe. All the info on what you need to do is right there.

And it's a really simple process. We're using Supercast and Apple subscriptions. And if you're listening on Apple Podcasts right now, you can just tap the subscribe button on the show page. Subscribing is the way to support this kind of work. Your one-time contribution will directly fund more standalone limited series like this one. You know, as far as the podcast industry experts are concerned,

the very idea of a podcast limited series is, in their words, unviable. And that's another reason why I'm doing this subscription plan. It's a way to show that this kind of work, stories with a beginning, middle, and end, is actually what listeners want more of. And lastly, dear, dear listener, if you do find this series of interest, please tell a friend or two or three or four. The only way that this podcast group biography, this exploration of intellectual history from the 1950s is going to find its audience is through you. Thanks again for listening. We're going to be back in one week with episode four. This one is called Propaganda Noir. We're going to go to France next episode, to Paris, and we're going to pick up where we left off with Richard Wright and James Baldwin,

and we're going to learn how the French do propaganda. It's not, it's not very, how can I say, it's not very convenient to say we make propaganda when you're the government. So you say action psychologique, it's okay. Action psychologique, it's nice. But in fact, there's no such distinction.