Blokes...................
Posted: Thu May 07, 2009 7:05 am
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"a male who believes in his own spirit and is willing to do almost anything to see that it doesn't die."
Unlike a gentleman, who lives by rituals and codes, a bloke has no time for traditional social
disciplines. The qualities that distinguish him include self-assertion, the pursuit of pleasure and
"transgressive humor."
By JOHN GROSS
In the annals of British literature and the British theater, the 1950s have gone down as the era of the Angry Young Men -- of a change in the cultural climate signaled above all by Kingsley Amis's novel "Lucky Jim" (1954) and John Osborne's play "Look Back in Anger" (1956). The phrase "Angry Young Men" itself was devised by a theater publicist at the time, and in a rough fashion it indicates what the fuss was about: a scornful rejection of Establishment values, a truculent individualism. But it was never more than a loose journalistic label, and over the years it has lost most of such resonance as it once had.
.
David Castronovo, who teaches at Pace University in New York, has set out to find a more satisfactory collective term for the writers of the Amis/Osborne generation and their successors. He has come up, as his title proclaims, with "blokes." In a long introductory chapter he explains that a bloke is "a male who believes in his own spirit and is willing to do almost anything to see that it doesn't die." Unlike a gentleman, who lives by rituals and codes, a bloke has no time for traditional social disciplines. The qualities that distinguish him include self-assertion, the pursuit of pleasure and "transgressive humor."
The bloke is also a recurrent type in English literature -- or so Mr. Castronovo maintains. The principal exhibits in his book are the works of Amis, Osborne, the poet Philip Larkin and the theater critic Kenneth Tynan, as well as the writers themselves. But before we come to them he presents us with a cross-section of supposedly blokish characters created by their predecessors (Falstaff, for example, and Tom Jones) and supposedly blokish elements in such writers as D.H. Lawrence and George Orwell.
Blokes
By David Castronovo
(Continuum, 197 pages, $25.95)
.
Some of the historical parallels that Mr. Castronovo draws make good sense. But his general argument in "Blokes" is too sketchy to carry the reader along with him, and many of his individual observations are notably off-target. This is especially true when he gets down to detail with Amis and his other major subjects.
In "Lucky Jim," the hero denounces the folksy bohemianism of "the homemade pottery crowd, the organic husbandry crowd, the recorder-playing crowd." Mr. Castronovo asks us to believe, absurdly, that this put-down isn't far from the American critic Harold Rosenberg's attack on conformist radicals ("the herd of independent minds"). Or again, Mr. Castronovo argues that Larkin's poem "Church Going" owes much of its effectiveness to its blokish language, "including church going, like movie going" -- but "church going" is a perfectly respectable non-blokish term that has been around for centuries. And for anyone who recalls Kenneth Tynan as he actually was -- flamboyant, witty, histrionic, star-struck, kinky, silly-clever -- it is hard to suppress a smile on being told that his life and work are "a monument to blokedom."
Much of the trouble lies in Mr. Castronovo's use (or misuse) of the word "bloke" itself. It is a term with a strong distinctive flavor, which often gets in the way of what he wants it to mean. It also has an interesting history. While nowadays thought of as almost exclusively British, it was once widely used in America as well. According to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, it was still current in the earlier decades of the 20th century. Among other sources, the Dictionary cites Damon Runyon and the song "Minnie the Moocher." ("She messed around wid a bloke called Smokey.") On both sides of the Atlantic the word's primary meaning was simply "man." But in Britain it has also acquired a more positive connotation. A British bloke is sometimes just a man but frequently (to quote a leading dictionary of British slang) "a decent, down-to-earth, unpretentious man."
Perhaps no writer of stature, if only by dint of having exceptional gifts, qualifies as a bloke in this second sense. Certainly the members of Mr. Castronovo's chosen quartet don't. They were difficult, aggressive and self-centered: They cultivated a number of blokish tastes but also remained stubbornly literary, remote in many of their interests from the general mass of men and women. "Lucky Jim" is far more a campus novel than a study of the condition of England. Jimmy Porter, in "Look Back in Anger," may have persuaded Tynan that he was the herald of a bright new revolutionary dawn; but in retrospect he seems more like a shrill little one-man show, peddling nothing but his own localized will to power.
The main author-portraits in "Blokes" are best approached as separate case histories. Larkin is the only one of the four who emerges as a writer of genius (though he would have winced at the word), and Mr. Castronovo does him justice, stressing in particular the positive impulses that force themselves through Larkin's negations: "The struggle to live and experience joy is everywhere." By contrast, Mr. Castronovo tends to overrate the other three writers by taking them on their own terms, accepting most of their judgments without question. But at least this approach has the merit of recapturing the excitement that surrounded them when they first made their appearance.
The concluding chapters of "Blokes" are the most rewarding. Mr. Castronovo turns his attention to the novelists who succeeded Amis and thus continued, in the author's view, what he calls "the bloke revolution" -- Alan Sillitoe (of "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning"), John Braine (of "Room at the Top") and others. Mr. Castronovo reminds us what good writers they were at their best. Thanks in large part to their provincial, working-class background, they also created characters who were much more authentically blokes than Amis's or Osborne's. If the term has to be used as a literary category, that is; but despite Mr. Castronovo's best efforts, it seems one we could probably do without.
Mr. Gross, a former editor of the Times Literary Supplement, is the author of "The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters."
"a male who believes in his own spirit and is willing to do almost anything to see that it doesn't die."
Unlike a gentleman, who lives by rituals and codes, a bloke has no time for traditional social
disciplines. The qualities that distinguish him include self-assertion, the pursuit of pleasure and
"transgressive humor."
By JOHN GROSS
In the annals of British literature and the British theater, the 1950s have gone down as the era of the Angry Young Men -- of a change in the cultural climate signaled above all by Kingsley Amis's novel "Lucky Jim" (1954) and John Osborne's play "Look Back in Anger" (1956). The phrase "Angry Young Men" itself was devised by a theater publicist at the time, and in a rough fashion it indicates what the fuss was about: a scornful rejection of Establishment values, a truculent individualism. But it was never more than a loose journalistic label, and over the years it has lost most of such resonance as it once had.
.
David Castronovo, who teaches at Pace University in New York, has set out to find a more satisfactory collective term for the writers of the Amis/Osborne generation and their successors. He has come up, as his title proclaims, with "blokes." In a long introductory chapter he explains that a bloke is "a male who believes in his own spirit and is willing to do almost anything to see that it doesn't die." Unlike a gentleman, who lives by rituals and codes, a bloke has no time for traditional social disciplines. The qualities that distinguish him include self-assertion, the pursuit of pleasure and "transgressive humor."
The bloke is also a recurrent type in English literature -- or so Mr. Castronovo maintains. The principal exhibits in his book are the works of Amis, Osborne, the poet Philip Larkin and the theater critic Kenneth Tynan, as well as the writers themselves. But before we come to them he presents us with a cross-section of supposedly blokish characters created by their predecessors (Falstaff, for example, and Tom Jones) and supposedly blokish elements in such writers as D.H. Lawrence and George Orwell.
Blokes
By David Castronovo
(Continuum, 197 pages, $25.95)
.
Some of the historical parallels that Mr. Castronovo draws make good sense. But his general argument in "Blokes" is too sketchy to carry the reader along with him, and many of his individual observations are notably off-target. This is especially true when he gets down to detail with Amis and his other major subjects.
In "Lucky Jim," the hero denounces the folksy bohemianism of "the homemade pottery crowd, the organic husbandry crowd, the recorder-playing crowd." Mr. Castronovo asks us to believe, absurdly, that this put-down isn't far from the American critic Harold Rosenberg's attack on conformist radicals ("the herd of independent minds"). Or again, Mr. Castronovo argues that Larkin's poem "Church Going" owes much of its effectiveness to its blokish language, "including church going, like movie going" -- but "church going" is a perfectly respectable non-blokish term that has been around for centuries. And for anyone who recalls Kenneth Tynan as he actually was -- flamboyant, witty, histrionic, star-struck, kinky, silly-clever -- it is hard to suppress a smile on being told that his life and work are "a monument to blokedom."
Much of the trouble lies in Mr. Castronovo's use (or misuse) of the word "bloke" itself. It is a term with a strong distinctive flavor, which often gets in the way of what he wants it to mean. It also has an interesting history. While nowadays thought of as almost exclusively British, it was once widely used in America as well. According to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, it was still current in the earlier decades of the 20th century. Among other sources, the Dictionary cites Damon Runyon and the song "Minnie the Moocher." ("She messed around wid a bloke called Smokey.") On both sides of the Atlantic the word's primary meaning was simply "man." But in Britain it has also acquired a more positive connotation. A British bloke is sometimes just a man but frequently (to quote a leading dictionary of British slang) "a decent, down-to-earth, unpretentious man."
Perhaps no writer of stature, if only by dint of having exceptional gifts, qualifies as a bloke in this second sense. Certainly the members of Mr. Castronovo's chosen quartet don't. They were difficult, aggressive and self-centered: They cultivated a number of blokish tastes but also remained stubbornly literary, remote in many of their interests from the general mass of men and women. "Lucky Jim" is far more a campus novel than a study of the condition of England. Jimmy Porter, in "Look Back in Anger," may have persuaded Tynan that he was the herald of a bright new revolutionary dawn; but in retrospect he seems more like a shrill little one-man show, peddling nothing but his own localized will to power.
The main author-portraits in "Blokes" are best approached as separate case histories. Larkin is the only one of the four who emerges as a writer of genius (though he would have winced at the word), and Mr. Castronovo does him justice, stressing in particular the positive impulses that force themselves through Larkin's negations: "The struggle to live and experience joy is everywhere." By contrast, Mr. Castronovo tends to overrate the other three writers by taking them on their own terms, accepting most of their judgments without question. But at least this approach has the merit of recapturing the excitement that surrounded them when they first made their appearance.
The concluding chapters of "Blokes" are the most rewarding. Mr. Castronovo turns his attention to the novelists who succeeded Amis and thus continued, in the author's view, what he calls "the bloke revolution" -- Alan Sillitoe (of "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning"), John Braine (of "Room at the Top") and others. Mr. Castronovo reminds us what good writers they were at their best. Thanks in large part to their provincial, working-class background, they also created characters who were much more authentically blokes than Amis's or Osborne's. If the term has to be used as a literary category, that is; but despite Mr. Castronovo's best efforts, it seems one we could probably do without.
Mr. Gross, a former editor of the Times Literary Supplement, is the author of "The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters."