John Gross's spirited review of a new book out entitled, Blokes: The Bad Boys of British Literature, reminded me of the first time I came across the pithy Anglo term denoting "a male who believes in his own spirit and is willing to do almost anything to see that it doesn't die." I was fourteen and it was a purchase of British socialist troubadour Billy Bragg's album, "William Bloke," a play on the name of his favorite poet and homegrown radical, whose poem "Jerusalem" Bragg continues to want to see made the official national anthem of England. (He also wants to see the House of Lords abolished, a prospect that strikes this foreign observer as rather appealing given the system of peerage-for-service exacerbated by Tony Blair and the fact that today's electorally unaccountable members welcome Islamist totalitarians to the same shores they threaten to line with religious rioters should an eccentric and xenophobic Dutch filmmaker dare to alight.)

A bloke, in contemporary parlance, is a guy's guy, someone you want to have a beer with, crack bawdy jokes with, go cruising for girls with--the actor Vince Vaughn, namely. (Interestingly enough, Bragg's other album is "Bloke on Bloke," which unintentionally prefigured the cinematic vogue for what's now called the "bromance" comedy, about two male friends who do everything but have sex with each other; Wedding Crashers being little more than Bouvard et Pécuchet overstuffed with canape and taffeta.)

But, according to the book's author David Castronovo, the term also represents a distinct literary phenomenon, beginning in the mid-50's among (mostly) working-class British writers who matured in the cask of a postwar, post-imperial state riven by class consciousness and the "scholarship-or-nothing" fork in its education system. Known commonly as the "Angry Young Men," Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, John Osborne and Kenneth Tynan conducted careful investigations into the nature of masculinity, femininity, and heterosexual "ree-lay-shun-ships" (as Larkin put it), without which collective toil it's simply impossible to imagine the advent of Maxim magazine or the "lad lit" of Nick Hornby, who infuses his work, unfortunately, with the sort of sentimentalism the forebears would have loathed.

Gross is more exacting than Castronovo in his use of "bloke":

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.

It's worth keeping in mind that the expression "down-to-earth" was coined by P.G. Wodehouse, grandfather to the bloke literary movement without qualifying as a bona fide bloke himself (he was sexless in both life and comedy). And while Gross is correct to indicate that having an artistic bent seems to nullify inclusion in the category, Amis nonetheless stands apart as the most bloke-ish of the bunch. Larkin used to mildly rebuke his best friend for being an "enemy of books," or, at any rate, the ones not written by Dick Francis. And although the King's English was unsurpassed, and he could be venomous about the abuses of language or style, he took a curmudgeonly pride in playing the role of folksy anti-intellectual, a creature subsistent exclusively on the senses and basic good sense. That's pretentious in its way, too, but what began as a posture evolved into Amis's genuine nature, one which could drive those who had to live with him or read him into paroxsyms of either politically correct outrage or belly-laughter.

Come to think, that might actually serve as a fair acid test for contemporary blokedom.

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