Likability

I'm not honestly sure that John Braine's Life at the Top, which I'm two-thirds through, is as engaging a novel as its predecessor Room at the Top. The prose doesn't seem as sharp; I've scarcely noticed a telling phrase in the sequel, while the first novel abounds in them. And a 35-year-old cushily settled Joe Lampton inherently lacks a bit of the interest of a 25-year-old upwardly striving uncertain-of-outcome Joe Lampton. The older Joe seems smug, and since he continues as narrator, you're confined within his smug perceptions. Or almost confined -- I love the moment when his wife breaks out and accuses him of being so "damned triumphant." If you recall my earlier post about Joe's sexual confidence, you won't be surprised that at one point Joe muses about a possible extra-marital conquest (my bolding):

[W]omen..wanted me...I was well aware that I had both bored and infuriated Norah. But in bed it would be a different story.

One thinks, Well, nice for you, dude. And his wife for her part has grown a bit weary of his obsession with sex: ""You think that's the answer to everything."

No, I'm just not liking Joe Lampton that well on the occasion of spending a second whole book with him. Alpha males wear me out. And there are certainly plenty of them in the British "angry young man" movement. It gets me thinking, how much does the likability of the protagonist affect my apprehension of a text?

The answer is, considerably. And although I understand that my "dislikable" is not exactly the same as anyone else's, still I can't imagine that some of these guys rank high on most people's Pleasant Meter. One reason I haven't written yet about Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life, as excellent a film as it is, is that the rugby player protagonist Frank Machin doesn't appeal to me either conceptually or as embodied in Richard Harris's fine, bruised performance. Imagine Tony Soprano without any prism of humor, and you're about there. (Anderson himself, a gay man, was hypnotized by the Machin/Harris thuggishness, and fell painfully in love with his relentlessly hetero leading man.)

John Osborne's Jimmy Porter and Bill Maitland are neither of them very likable (although Kenneth Branagh's Jimmy is more tolerable than Richard Burton's Jimmy). Likability doesn't register in John Osborne's scale of values, as anyone will immediately perceive if they spend an hour researching Osborne's life.

Albert Finney's Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning calibrates for me a little differently, with some Frank Machin-like characteristics but also a spirit of fun and roguery that exerts an appeal. Or am I saying this because I like Finney, and am reverse-engineering my reactions to this performance from his magnificently likable Tom Jones (the very next film he made)? Who knows: these strands cannot be completely separated. Our psycho-sexual reactions to performers inevitably influence our assessments of their performances (would that more critics were honest about this), and our knowledge of their careers can't be neutralized either. But Arthur Seaton does seem to be liked by the characters who surround him in the film; while Frank Machin isn't even liked by his lover.

POSTSCRIPT: Speaking of Frank Machin's lover, Rachel Roberts (who also stars with Finney in Saturday Night), was acclaimed and Oscar-nominated for her performance opposite Richard Harris, although she seems to hate him so very much that it is hard to see why she ever agrees to sleep with him: there is not even a flicker of positive attraction on view. Roberts, like Mary Ure and Gene Tierney whom I discussed in earlier posts, was an actress with a large gift and a completely messed-up personal life. Roberts was an alcoholic who committed suicide at 53 (after her divorce from Rex Harrison, whose busy life included six wives and the suicide of a lover, Carole Landis, in 1948). Tierney was mentally unstable and romantically promiscuous. The fragile Ure, also an alcoholic, gave birth to Robert Shaw's son while married to John Osborne, and later died a possible suicide at 42 after a disastrous West End opening night.

I don't think I want to come back as an actress.