Universities & Left Review 7 Autumn 1959

Cultural Notebook
"ROOTS"

RNOLD Wesker's play, Roots, is the second part of a three-part dramatic trilogy. It is a distinct advance over Chicken Soup With Barley, both in terms of the pace and authenticity of dialogue, and in the subtlety of dramatic statement. It deserves a long current run and more, for it is rare to find on the stage a play by a young author which comes at us so directly, so dead on the point. What's moregiven the brief careers of many, and the degenerating careers of others, on the contemporary stageit is something of a miracle to have written a better second play. If Wesker has staying power, he will find it in the next few years almost as great an asset as his quite remarkable ear for dialect. The play is set in Norfolk, and is only loosely connected with Chicken Soup, through the young intellectual, Ronnie, whose return at the end of the first play provided the raison d'etre for the most moving passages in that playthe Mother's speech about learning to care. Roots centres about the Norfolk girl friend of Ronnie, and her familyNorfolk agricultural workers and their wives. The girl, Beatie (played by Joan Plowright, with a remarkable spontaneous freshness) returns to Norfolk after an initiation, through Ronnie, into London intellectual life. She returns, excited equally by the novelty as by the difference of Ronnie's views (Ronnie is a socialist, an intellectual with a serious interest in culture and a humane view of working class life). She is constantly quoting them a little out of context, naturally, in a working class Norfolk kitchen. Beatie is impressed. Ronnie has opened her eyes to new things and interests, new possibilities for herself and for others. She is anxious to pass them on, to enrich the provincial life of her sister and her father and mother. Nevertheless, it is clear that Ronnie and all he stands for are a bit foreign to her. She loves rather more than she understands. At one point she tells her sister that of course, once she marries and starts having babies, she won't need to spend so much time

trying to understand what Ronnie is saying, reading the books he recommends, showing an intelligent interest. It is partly a jokealso partly true. For the fact is that Beatie has remained resistantly Norfolk, true to her background, less free of even the trivialities of her family life than she would like to believe. The little quarrels between her sisters and her Mother, the round of gossip, deaths and marriages irritate her; they also involve her. And she knows that. That is the centre of dramatic tension in the play, and the undoing of Beatie. The first Act is remarkably good, and has a sense of completeness which none of the others match. Beatie is a fresh presence in the little home of her sister and her brother-inlaw, and the chatter between the girls gives Wesker opportunities time and again to exploit the gap between Beati;'s new interests (represented by her Ronnie-quotations) and her old (Jenny's gossip). It also gives rise to some well-cbserved clashes between Beatie's forward-looking altitude to life and the rather monosyllabic, conservative but "rooted" responses of her brother-in-law, Jimmy Beales, a farm labourer. The direction of this scene is sympathetic and true (John Dexter directed), communicating in its attention to the details of eating and washing up a strong realism; and pointing up, at the same time, the ease with which Beatie rediscovers the rhythms and habits of Norfolk. In the second Act, Beatie goes home to Mother and Dad. Mrs. Bryant is a strong, self-willed woman, warm but domineering, with a mind of her own and a stock of well-told family tales and local trivia. The relationship between Beatie and her Mother is good, but it is clear that, here as well as at her sister's, Beatie is going to have to defend the new ideas she has picked up from Ronnie. Beatie loves her Mother, but blames her for the narrowness of their lives. An argument develops between them about music, and Beatie subjects her unwilling Mother to Ronnie's ideas about music and culture, about asking questions and opening the mind and using language to make bridges between people. Wesker's heart is in the right place here, and he makes Beatie say some telling

52

things about the trivial responses to "pop" culture. But they seem to be less felt than the other elements in the situation. They are written off the front of his brain, rather than embodied in his characters. It is only where Wesker leaves rhetoric and tries to embody his point of view in dramatic metaphor that the theme really takes hold of the stage. Beatie, beaten by words, puts on a record, and the record makes her want to dance, and she does, with mounting joy and exuberance, and the Act ends in a splendid demonstration of vigour and life. Intellectually, the resolution is something of a cheat for Beatie is trying to live out what she has learned from Ronnie, whilst her Mother is taking joy from the happiness of her dancing daughter. They appear to share a similar common experience of release and enjoyment, and it makes a most successful curtain; but if you stop to ask what is actually going on you are forced to admit that the gap between them is as wide as it has ever been. The resolution is theatrically perfect but dramatically false. I think this false note is carried through and developed in the third Act, where the family is gathered together to meet a Ronnie who never appears. Wesker's observation of the Norfolk family in this Act is extremely good. Beatie tries to take her family through the process of re-awakening, but fails to move them. And when Ronnie's letter arrives, saying that the whole thing is off, her world collapses. All the time she has been pretending that she identified with Ronnie; but his letter reveals that she had never really been able to live herself out of her "Norfolk" provincial stubbornness. Her whole performance for her family has been a cheat. Instead of seeing this as a tragedy, her family are only too pleased to find their own narrowness justified, and this leads Beatie to address to them, and through them, to working class people in general an exhortation to drag themselves up out of the darkness into the light, to discover living roots in the new world awakening round about them, and not to close themselves off from life. The family turn back, relieved that they are not after all to have their set ways challenged, but in the very course of trying to convince them, Beatie finds that, after all, she has understood Ronnie, she is awake and alive in his sense. She can speak for herself. The curtain ends on this hopeful note of self-revelation. There are some awkward passages (the letter from Ronnie, for example, is really a dreadful caricature), but the end is deep and moving. It is, I think, nevertheless something of a cheat, because it seems to me that Wesker has unwittingly rigged the play against the problem. Beatie does not, at the beginning, understand Ronnie at all. She is only making believe. Moreover, the passages in which Ronnie's point of view is represented are shockingly directed; she climbs up on a chair in order to quote him, and succeeds in making him sound both priggish and intellectually insensitive. A sharp division exists between what Beatie is and what she says Ronnie thinks. Presented in this way, the "intellectual" provokes a number of easy laughs from the audience, but never figures in the play as a serious presence. When Beatie talks about "roots"about Ronnie's rootsshe, like Wesker, talks off the top of her head. There is nothing there, on stage, to make the audience feel it as a serious way of thinking. There is nothing which can contrast with the real feel of "roots" which Wesker conveys through his Norfolk characters. Norfolk wins hands down. The family, the Mother, the bonds between the men and women in the family, Beatie's stubbornness which she inherits from themthese strong provincial roots survive and triumph. They are felt by Wesker (there was something of the same sympathy in his treatment of the Jewish family in Chicken Soup), and embodied both in the characters and in the ebb-and-flow between characters on the stage. And so they should, for they represent a remarkable integrated strength of a kind, a close "community". But presumably Wesker's intention was to counterpoint these roots, and show something of their limitation, by the use of Ronnie. Ronnie, however, doesn't much exist, for the play, and Beatie, as we have said, is an ambiguous substitute. The real conflict, then, between Ronnie's values and Norfolk is not centred, as it should, within the central character. She does not embody the drama. Roots,

therefore, is a telling statement in dramatic terms of the central conflict of values which disturb a growing section of working class people who are being in some sense cut off from their "roots". But it does not point a way forward. Wesker is ranged, in this play, pretty solidly against the intellectual. I know these are crude distinctions, but I think they roughly apply. I don't think this was his intention. In fact, the opposite is clear from the words which he makes Beatie use. He intends "Ronnie" to counterpose and modify Norfolk provincialism, and he tries to use him to awaken the latent energy of Norfolk. The two come together in the love affair between Beatie and Ronnie. I think this is what Wesker wants to say; but it is not what comes through on the stage. This is a criticism of the play on the highest level. It opens to the London stage a range of experiences and a dilemma which rarely, if ever, penetrates to that rarefied circle; and it carries forward in its own terms a moral debate outside of the framework of the "Angry Young Man" plays proper. Wesker's tone is more searching and humane, less strident and extrovert. It belongs with Taste of Honey rather than with Look Back in Anger, and that, in itself, is a major advance for a young playwright to have made. Wesker and Shelagh Delaney are the most interesting playwrights whose work we have seen in a very long time. STUART HALL.

C. P. SNOW'S TWO CULTURES

(Notes on The Rede Lectures, 1959: The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution) C. P. Snow's recent essay is broad indeed in scope; a commentary: on the divisions within contemporary high culture, a critique of the British educational system, and a proposal for massive Western intervention in the industrialisation of the Afro-Asian countries. Nothing could be more up to date in theme; yet it is difficult to avoid the impression that, whatever world he may inhabit, Snow doesn't live in ours. He manifests sobriety, and a carefully measured good will. Sobriety, however, is an insufficient response to our cultural situation; in fact it makes an appropriate response impossible by implying that this world can be met on its own terms. And a measured good will cannot do justice to the measureless agonies that surround us. Snow measures out his good will too precisely, and his units of measurement are, upon examination, not very attractive ones. He begins with the lack of communication between natural scientists and the custodians of our literary-philosophical culture. The chasm is there, of course, but Snow does very little more than point to it. Some aspects of his account of it are curious. He cites Yeats and Eliot as instances of a general literary tendency to reactionary social attitudes (which he contrasts, unfavourably, with the alleged optimistic progressivism of most scientists). Snow refers to a highly restricted kind of literary culture: the effete prestige culture of "good taste", which feeds parasitically on an imagined past without contributing to the human present. Yeats and Eliot paid a high price for beauty. But why is Snow so provincial in his choice of examples? What about Toller, the early Malraux, Sartre, or Shaw and Wells? Snow has so under-estimated the political engagement of the litterateurs in our time that one feels he ought to be given one of those American fellowships to catch up on his reading. Finally, Snow's charge that literary men don't understand industrial life is shallow; they have, after all, depicted industrial society and its human problems. Those who don't talk about factories and laboratories are nonetheless affected by them, and it is more important that an artist should be unconsciously honest than that he should be ideologically trained. Snow's conception of the literary man, then, is tendentious. What about his image of the scientist? He writes of their political progressivism (not further defined) and their lucid approach to social problems. But what about the participation of scientists in the production of weapons of mass destruction? (In The New Men Snow himself, speaking through the narrator, intimated that a protest against the Hiroshima bomb

53

by British atomic scientists would have beenin 1945most indiscreet.) It is difficult to take the self-confident Philistinism of Snow's assurance that scientists are, on the whole, "the soundest group of intellectuals we have" with respect to the moral life. Snow doesn't tell us what his moral criteria are; and, as we shall see, rather than judging the rest of us, he would do well to examine his own moral assumptions rather critically. One thing is clear: Snow likes scientists. He was one himself. It is equally clear that he is right, that different sorts of intellectuals talk past each other. But the striking thing about his analysis is that his opposition of a stereotyped literary culture to an (equally stereotyped) scientific one is followed only by his advice that writers and readers had better start learning calculus, fast. Snow doesn't suggest that we're all caught up in a situation none of us has mastered. Scientist and poet are both equally distant from the ordinary consumer of mass culture; these are the "two cultures" which we ought to be looking at. Snow touches our problem, then, but does not grasp it. Here, as elsewhere in his work, his casualness is deceptive. A cursory reader of his novels might think he takes the world as it appears, that he is a superficial but not inaccurate chronicler of events that might have happened any day. Similarly, for all his talk of a "Scientific Revolution", it' appears that he doesn't quite understand what is happening in modern society. His defective view of our time and place is, in some part, a consequence of a given moral positionone that many may find reprehensible. There is a telling passage in the essay, where Snow speaks of his grandfather in these terms: "He never had the luck or, as I now suspectthe worldly force and dexterityto go very far." Readers of Snow's novels will recall that if there is any value which seems to dominate them, it is that of success approached only by the importance the author attaches to the regard of men for men, and this too is an essential component of the fetishism of success. Snow cannot see contemporary society as it is, because he is too pre-occupied with one of its most central (and vulgar) ideologies. His plea for science is a plea for an instrument of success. Snow talks a good deal of the Establishment, but he cannot establish his distance from it. On the contrary, much of his talk of it is suspicious; it sounds like an attempt to impress us. Snow sees that the Establishmentarians are intellectually fuzzy; he supposes, however, that this can be changedif they only listen to him, and give the University Grants Committee more to spend on physics. But bumbledon, too, is historically determined. The present incompetence of the British elite is a consequence of its loss of power relative to other elites, which has not been entirely compensated by its success in surviving the domestic "revolution" of 1945. This cannot be overcome simply by making the literary mind "more scientific". Snow, then, cannot think clearly about society; and he cannot, therefore, think clearly about the social role of science. He finds it inexplicable that nineteenth century Germany should have had superior facilities for scientific education. But the requirements of a bureaucratic state for reserve officers are not very difficult to imagineproviding, of course, that one can see bureaucracy in its historical setting. It is the functional hindrance to insight that is, apparently, decisive in Snow's case. He must be one of the few people in England who thinks that the Amis-type hero represents the disgruntlement of the under-employed arts graduate (most of the Jims I know, lucky or unlucky, are research scientists). But the Amis-type hero hits us in the face with problems of class, status, powerthe problems Snow avoids. Thus, in discussing the obstacles to the realisation of his proposals for massive Western scientific aid to the under-developed countries, he lists all the mechanical ones (inertia, short-sighted self-interest) and none of the structural ones: that Western elites can't enter into new-type relations with ex-colonial countries which threaten the remnants of their power. I haven't, in these notes, said very much about Snow's ostensible themes. But, then, neither has he. But perhaps I've suggested that conventional assumptions won't solve unconventional problems. NORMAN BIRNBAUM.

MEN ONLY
The place of women's magazines in contemporary journalism is unprecedented. Of the leading twenty-one weeklies (including Sunday papers) exactly a third are for women; of the same number of leading monthlies more than two-thirds are for women. Of course women will form a substantial proportion of the readers of most publications (20% of even Men Only, for example), but I am only concerned with periodicals specifically directed at them. Not that they are new. Many extant ones go back several decades, and there is a continuous history of women's magazines since Maids', Wives' and Widows' Magazine and Christian Ladies' Magazine came out in the 1830's. But women first exerted a perceptible influence on English letters even earlier, at the beginning of the 18th century. This was the age of Defoe, best-seller and founder of the first English daily paper. The second one was the Spectator, founded in 1711 by Addison and Steele to replace the latter's Taller. The genius of these two was in apprehending their reading public. Like Wells and Bennett later, they happened to embark on a new sort of writing at exactly the right timejust when a new class had become properly literate and had the time to read; all that was needed was someone to write for it. In the late 19th century artisans and clerks thirsted for fiction about themselves; in the reign of Queen Anne it was merchants and yeomenand their bored wives and daughterswho wanted to read something serious that wasn't too religious or too difficult. They read the Spectator. Addison and Steele were acutely conscious that a large proportion of its readers were women. It is easy to criticise the old Spectator; Swift's sneer at the patronising way Addison "fair-sexed" it was just. But before we let criticism run too freely we must look at its successors. What characteristics have come down to us from the work of Addison and Steele? By and large the worst qualities of the Augustan Age superficiality, flatness, pomposity, triteness, colourlessness, monotony, lack of originality and biteall summed up in the motto of Spectator No. 112: "Honour the gods according to the established modes." In the early 19th century this sort of instructive and elevating manual was blended with the trashy romances (these still exist in their own right, of course) to form the prototypes of the modern women's magazine. To the unfavourable qualities described above were added the worst ones of the Victorian Agethe mixture of vulgarity and snobbery, the cliche romanticism, the obsession with morality in its narrow, chiefly sexual, sense, and the deadly seriousness. In fact the tragedy of feminine journalism today is that it derives largely from the worst types of feminine journalism in the past. Broadly speaking, there are four categories of women's magazines in active existence (not counting the romances). They overlap, but it is convenient to discuss them separately. 1. SPECIALIST MAGAZINES. These call for little comment. They are mostly monthlies, dealing with the details of housekeeping or things like knitting and fashion. Characteristically they encourage "good taste" (a sort of bourgeois mediocrity devoid of personality) and the expenditure of a lot of money. Their circulations range around 200,000 (though My Home is 324,000), and they are really the feminine equivalents of such things as Practical Householdergood money-spinners, but nothing very interesting. 2. " T O P " MAGAZINES. These are prestige publications (as indeed are fashion magazines like Vanity Fair and Vogue) with relatively small circulations and high self-esteem (like youknow-who). The big ones can be weekly (Lady), fortnightly (Queen) or monthly (She). They correspond more or less to Tatler, Sketch (now deceased) and Sphere, as you can guess from the glossy paper, high price and general format and contents. Their appeal must be mostly upper-middle-class, with some concessions to intelligence (an article on Haydn in Queen, for example), 3. MASS MAGAZINES. These are the "women's magazines" par excellence, the ones with the really powerful appeal. A few are monthliesthe most popular being Woman & Home

54

(674,000), but most of them are weeklies. Some idea of their weight in the field of popular journalism and the advertising market can be gained from the following table of the seven leaders: Circulation Readership Advertising (thousands) (thousands) Page Rate Woman 3,156 8,266 2.650 Woman's Own 2,458 7,251 1,930 Woman's Weekly 1,549 3,094 825 Woman's Realm 1,253 2,783 880 Woman's Mirror 1,154 2,441 770 Woman's Day 921 1,988 720 Woman's Illustrated ... 874 2,083 540 The readership is that of women only (there are between twenty and twenty-five million women in the United Kingdom above the age of 15). The page rate is for black-and-white advertisement; the use of colour can add as much as 40% to the cost (thus a double-page spread in colour in "Woman" will cost over 7,000). It is normal for a woman's magazine to contain as much advertising space as ALL OTHER MATTER. The chief owners of these magazines used to be the Amalgamated Press (Rothermere), Odhams and Newnes, but this pattern of ownership has recently been upset by cannibalism and take-over bids from outsiders like the Daily Mirror and News of the World. Evidently the prospects in this field are good enough for the most popular daily and Sunday papers respectively to see what there is in it for them. So far the Daily Mirror has taken over the Amalgamated Press and Odhams have taken over Newnes; further changes are no doubt to be expected. This is not surprising when we consider that, excluding newspapers, Woman (Odhams) and Woman's Own (Newnes) have wider circulations than any other weekliesand that includes Reveille, Weekend, John Bull and Tit-Bits. Well over half the women in the country must see at least one of these big magazines; and women are now the chief purchasers in most households. What do their favourite magazines consist of? The pattern seems to be fairly rigid (except for Woman's Mirror, a sort of feminised Daily Mirror that keeps the Pictorial company on Sundays), and we can take the two leaders as representative. The difference between them is broadly that Woman's Own favours diversionfiction, big names and popular features while Woman favours instruction; some comfort may be drawn from the fact that it is the latter that seems to be the most popular. To take it as the leader in this field, the sorts of things Woman specialises in giving advice about are furnishing and decoration, making clothes, fashion, make-up and appearance, food, health, religion, and behaviour and etiquette. This function of women's magazines, as readers will have realised, is one that might be expected to belong to their readers' mothers. That it is indulged to such an extent suggests that young women no longer learn about these things from their mothers (if they ever didVictorian magazines were full of similar features). But advice articles don't just replace mothers; they are also subtle instruments for raising the class status of their readersas indeed they have been since the days of the original Spectator. It is not so much a case of making the non-U seem U as of 'helping women with working class or lower middle class backgrounds to fit into what is supposed to be an upper middle class environment, or just to get on with friends or boy friends who come from it themselves. It must be admitted that this is done in a manner as tactful and as little patronising as possible, but I find the whole business rather distasteful. Snobbery keeps breaking in, and the uniformly smooth conformist bourgeois-biedermeyer tone is oppressive. One of the chief functions of the women's magazines is that of making moral judgement at a time when moral judgements are going out of fashion. The ethical position they take up is widely known; it is roughly that of a cautious middle-aged woman of average income and intelligence, with old-fashioned ideas. Young people should honour their parents and mix with plenty of friends; the men should be ambitious and considerate, and the women should perform their jobs diligently

until they are able to embark on their true functionto marry a nice man and raise a nice family. For their husbands and children they should keep a good home and provide a safe refuge in times of trouble. In the field of sex the ethos of these magazines (aptly called "the Code" by Peter Woods in University Libertarian No. 6) is rigid. The best wedding presents a bride and bridegroom can give each other on their first night together are their respective virginities. Young men and women should "keep themselves pure" by refraining from fornication ("the love-making that belongs to marriage"); married people should continue the good work by refraining from adultery. The Code is obsessed by sexual intercourse. In no circumstances is premarital experience encouraged or even condoned, though there is no condemnation of those who have erredat least of girls "in trouble". Complete chastity is assumed to give way to complete sexual happiness after marriage, the transition being smoothed by love and literature. Adultery is sometimes accepted in the most extreme casessuch as that of a couple already separated for many years. It is always assumed that sexual intercourse is something the male asks for and the female grants or refuses. Girls in a quandary insist that their boy friends have asked them to "do wrong"; married women often complain about the extent of their husbands' demands. Spontaneous female sexuality is ignored; masturbation in either sex too. Kinsey might never have pointed out that most people have more than one orgasm a week by some means or other. The idea that sexual intercourse is fun, let alone exciting, is seldom raised; and when it is, the blushes can be felt through all the camouflage of the embarrassed language.

Aggressively Feminine?
The problem pages deal with sex, though reticently ("send me a stamped addressed envelope"), but the stories look at it only through the most romantically coloured spectacles. When it does rear its dangerous head, kissing is de rigueur; caresses are confined to hands, feet and hair, and only in the most critical circumstances (all very Swinburnian). Sexual stress or difficulty is unmentioned. Villains are more uninhibited than the goodies, who are always disgustingly chaste. The serials are the worst offenders, but since they are drawn from the romantic novels churned out by obscure but prosperous pulp publishers, no more can be expected. Sex is not the only taboo. The other main ones are religion, politics and culture. Religion does of course come in, but only in the most milk-and-water way. There is no theology or controversyjust a vague, moralistic Anglicanism. As for politics, it never seems to be mentioned at all. Some letters raise the problem of marrying someone of another faith, but the similar problems of getting on with people of different political views or racial origins do not apparently arise. No one in the stories seems to care much one way or the other about public affairs. Culture fares little better; the usual way snippets are smuggled in is in the form of gossip (features about famous people or remarks about Angry Young Men) or of a potted version of a big film. Thus the Newnes magazines recently published Look Back in Anger (Woman's Own) and The Diary of Anne Frank (Woman's Day). It is difficult to give a verdict about these magazines. They are of a high standard professionally that is, what they attempt, they perform. They are not palpably harmful as the Daily Sketch is. They are often useless and sometimes entertaining. But their flavour is like ice-cream (so-called): attractive at first, pleasant to sample, but the after-taste is sour. Is it really a good thing that over half the women in the country should read these things every week? Need they really be exposed to the fatuity of the stories and the pomposity of the serious articles? Are profounder matters quite beyond them? Can't women do any better? And anyhow, must writing for women be so self-conscious? It is true that they have had to put up with a lot of oppression, prejudice and inferiority in the past, and the mere existence of these magazines shows that

55

general ones do not satisfy them; but this does not make it necessary to be so aggressively, brightly feminine. I think it is the brightness that is the worst of all. Their motto ought to be: ". . . adds brightness to triteness." NICOLAS WALTER.

LOOK BACK IN ANGER ON ICE

The most striking feature of the film version of Look Back in Anger is the cuts in Jimmy Porter's famous long speeches. Some of Jimmy's most famous remarks are lost; I missed the "no brave good causes" comment and the passage about the Bishop of Bromley and the H-bomb. In an interview with Alexander Mackendrick, Tony Richardson, the director of the film, was asked why "no brave good causes" was left out. Mackendrick suggested that the success both Richardson and Osborne have enjoyed since the play was first performed had made them less radical. Richardson denied this and said the reason was that they wanted to bring the film up to date. In view of the social and political changes of the past few years, they felt that the "no brave good causes" feeling was no longer relevant. Osborne obviously has a perfect right to change his work if he wishes. The trouble with the alterations in the film version is that they destroy much of the force of the play and its representative quality. The political and social background which we are made to feel in these remarks of Jimmy's to a great extent explains the frustration he feels. And it is because so many people felt themselves victims of the same circumstances that they responded to the play. Without it Jimmy exists in something of a social vacuum and his cruelty and brutality are unexplained. It is unfortunate that Richard Burton's playing emphasises Jimmy's cruelty. Fine actor though he is, Burton is too old and mature in manner and appearance for the part. He looks old enough to have come to better terms with the world than Jimmy has. But it is not just a matter of appearance. Burton plays the part slower and more deliberately than did Kenneth Haig in the first stage production. This makes Jimmy appear more calculating and intentional than I think he is meant to be. Richardson's explanation of the changes is unconvincing. It suggests a real lack of understanding of the quality of the play. I suspect that the changes came out of the problem of adapting the play for the screen. The play looks as if it is realistic. In fact it isn't. The room in which all the action takes place is a symbol for the world that traps and frustrates Jimmy. And Jimmy's speeches have more in common with jazz trumpet solos than they have with realistic speech. To make a realistic film, several changes have to be made; some of the action has to be taken out of the room and the speeches have to be cut to a manageable length. It is a weakness of the play that the social-political element is never properly integrated and can therefore be removed without doing too much damage. Having removed it, the adaptor, Nigel Kneale, has tried to replace it with a sequence between Jimmy and an Indian, who becomes the victim of colour prejudice. But this change is unsuccessful as the sequence is completely unreal and outside the mood of the rest of the script. Could this social-political element have been suggested in any other way? I think it could and I think there is one sequence in the film, which, although unsuccessful, shows what might have been done. This is a sequence where Jimmy and Helena go to the cinema and see a dreadful colonial war film. When they come out, they walk in a park which is full of decrepit old people, obviously meant as victims of war. The connection is plain. It is one of the few occasions when the film works on a level other than the directly realistic. This second level is what one might call "poetic realistic". If the whole film had been thought of in these terms, I think that a natural cinematic equivalent for the political-social dialogue in the play would have been found. Lindsay Anderson's film O Dreamland is a good example of what I mean. The film's angry protest comes naturally out of its images of the hideous entertainments of the fun fair.

This level is just not explored in Look Back in Anger. This is partly the result of the director's inexperience; it is after all Tony Richardson's first feature film and only his second film. This inexperience is particularly evident in the scenes in the flat where, since the camera is never in quite the right place, one gets no real sense of the flat and its atmosphere. But I do not think that this is the complete explanation. Throughout the film there is a feeling that the director has not imaginatively entered into it. This comes through in all the outside scenesthe market, for example, doesn't seem to belong to anywhere, and the jazz club is either unreal or tarted up, as in the opening shots of the film. Richardson is not helped by his other chief players. Mary Ure is her usual anonymous self and Claire Bloom remains the only British actress with a built-in ice box. Some of the minor parts are better handled. Edith Evans is superb as Ma Tanner and the bit parts are given distinction by members of the English Stage Company. It goes without saying that despite its faults, Look Back in Anger (with Room at the Top) is far superior to any other British film that has been made in the last ten years. Whether they add up to a break-through in the British cinema is another matter. Both the films had rather special advantages. Room at the Top was a best-selling novel and could be sold (was sold!) as a conventional sexy film. Look Back in Anger was a very famous and a much-discussed play, with enough sex to help the publicity boys along. It would be rash to think that the British cinema industry has been converted merely on the evidence of these two films. ALAN LOVELL.

Articles in the new issue, NR 9 include E. P. Thompson on "The New Left", Ronald L. Meek on "Professor Blyumin's Economics", Tibor Meray on "Imre Nagy, Communist", F. Le Gros Clark on "World Without War", David Ross writes an Obituary Obloquy on "The Life and Logic of John Foster Dulles", and V. G. Kiernan does a long review article on "Culture and Society". There is a story, "Giancarlo", by Roddy Barry, a document from Antonio Gramsci on "The Jewish Question" and an "African Chronicle" prepared by John Rex and Kanyama Chiume. Reviews, discussion.
enterprising booksellers stock

I n d e p e n d e n t

S o c i a l i s t

Q u a r t e r l y

Independent of party machines, American subsidies, and Odhams, this is one part of our "cultural apparatus" which will not capitulate in the "Decline of the Left". 146 pages of stimulating and varied reading for 4s. If your bookseller is unenterprising, write direct to The New Reasoner. Holly Bank, Whitegate, Halifax, Yorks, for an annual subscription (16s. or $2.50 post free). Why not take advantage of our special joint subscription offer with U.L.R.? 25s. or $5.00 for three issues of U.L.R. and four of the New Reasoner. Send to our address, or to Janet Hase, 7 Carlisle Street, London, W.I.

56