Sin.---Mr. Hollis wrote a very interesting article in your issue
of October 18. There is one small point which I should like to make : he wonders who the angry young men are and picks on Mr. Osborne as the probable one.
I do not know Mr. Osborne, but I think he wrote a very good play. It is good because it is dram'atic and exciting even if one does not wholly sympathise with Jimmy Porter. One doesn't wholly sympathise with Macbeth or Madame Bovary or some cat who hops around on an old tin roof. Unfortunately for him, Mr. Osborne happened to call his play Look Back in Anger. Had he called it Look Sideways in Passion or Look Forward in Protest, would whoever- they-arc now be known as `The Passionate young Men'? 'The Protesters'? or 'The Entertainers'? Has the dramatist no right tither to entertain or to invent? If, as a novelist, I had the luck to write a successful novel about 'upper-class uselessness' would 1 the become identified with all the useless class U stuff! I suppose so.
But no writer, surely, wants to become a myth Of have they time to be personally angry. That is • ' if they still have work to do.—Yours faithfully, 41 Halsey Street, SW3
ELIZABETH MONTAGV
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