LOOK BACK ON ANGER

By Melvin Maddocks

ONE of the most chilling modern parables is a short scenario of the absurd by Eugene Ionesco titled Anger.

The playlet takes place on an idyllic Sunday in an idyllic country town, where strollers shower coins and smiles on the local beggar, and husbands treat their wives with adoring deference. Eventually, in all the town's houses and apartments, everyone sits down to Sunday lunch. One after another, the husbands discover flies in their soup. Smiles turn to frowns, soothing words to cross ones. Insults are delivered and returned. Crockery goes smashing. Soup (with flies) pours in torrents from under doors. The police arrive. The civic disturbance turns, absurdly, into global war, and then into an atomic Armageddon. The final scene, projected on television, is of the planet exploding--because of a fly in the soup. Ionesco's black joke scarcely exaggerates the monstrous disproportion, the near pathology, of latter-day anger. If every period has its characteristic emotion, anger must surely be ours--the mask of cracked civility, the furious heart beneath. Yale President Kingman Brewster described the comparative calm of the American campus last winter as "eerie tranquillity," and the U.S. as a whole now seems to be enjoying relative quiet after the stormiest period of demonstrations, bombings and riots. That very calm gives us time to look back on anger. But eerie is nevertheless the operative word. The fact that we find tranquillity unnatural is the most terrible confirmation of what we have come to accept as natural.

Anger is the emotion we tend to feel when in doubt about what else we feel. Anger, once justly listed among the seven deadly sins, today is becoming one of our most praised values. In raising anger to an emotional ideal, we have gravely misgauged the limited utility of adrenaline's quick flashes. In art, anger is regularly mistaken for sincerity, if not inspiration. One is advised to peddle one's cool art with a hot sell. A masochistic public quivers deliciously not only before the real fire of the Genets, the Becketts and the Mailers but before the plastic brimstone of their less gifted imitators. All too often the angry mediocrity gets away with bullying his audience, like Jimmy Porter in John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, that pilot project for the personality of the '70s.

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In politics, anger is too easily confused with moral indignation. But moral indignation purges itself through action, while anger tends to purge itself through rhetoric. As Organizer Saul Alinsky suggests, anger in politics substitutes for all other games the game of "Kill the umpire!" Far right and far left, the angry man in politics prefers the pleasure of being furious to the pleasure of actually having an effect. Demanding final solutions only, he chooses, in Critic Renata Adler's words, "to use the vocabulary of total violence, cultivate scorched-earth madness as a form of consciousness (of courage, even), to call history mad."

Not just "righteous anger" but anger of any kind has also become the accepted proof of moral conviction. It is the way we act out certainty when we do not really feel it. As other emotions become less sure, less confident, anger amalgamates with them. Even love, itself, can become a junior partner. What fierce, cannibalistic love scenes we stage in films and even in private lives! Such Who's Afraid of Virginia foolishness! Such ripping and tearing! Such savage, winner-takes-all grappling! The fistfights in Five Easy Pieces seem like friendly interludes of token mayhem compared with the knockdown and drag-out lovemaking. Not the least among the crimes of angry art is that it makes sentimental art (Love Story, etc.) the polar alternative.

The astonishingly high standing of anger today can be verified thus: it is not only regarded as moral but as something even better, healthy and therapeutic. A fight a day keeps the doctor away, Psychiatrist Theodore Isaac Rubin suggests in something called The Angry Book. With a burst of earnest lyricism, he asks: "Have you ever experienced the good, clean feel that comes after expressing anger, as well as the increased self-esteem and the feel of real peace with one's self and others?" In The Intimate Enemy, Dr. George R. Bach, a clinical psychologist, turns anger into an art, or possibly a science. "Intimate hostilities," he guarantees, "can be 'programmed.' " Dr. Bach has his own slogan: The family that fights together stays together. And don't worry if you aren't very good at being angry. Dr. Bach will teach you.

"Anger," Dr. Bach concludes, "cannot be dishonest"--the security-blanket generalization that all the anger buffs cling to, and one as perilously misleading as "in vino veritas." Upon Bach's misapprehension, America's newest industry, group therapy, founders. Venting hostility is so simplistically scripted as the "Moment of Truth" that a whole cult of anger fakers has developed, not unlike the faith fakers who also deceived themselves into salvation at other and earlier camp meetings.

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Anger ought to be an alarm system that warns us of our deepest concerns.

But left to itself, it can become an undiscriminating rant, equalizing the serious and the trivial, the horrors of Biafra and the poor quality of frozen dinners.

What should be the most generous of emotions too often ends up as a variety of egotism. I am angry, screams the man of the Apocalypse, therefore I am.

We are accustomed to daily anger. We cannot live without it. Civilization and its discontents are too burdensome to bear with equanimity. But we can at least improve the quality of our anger. We can refuse to glamorize it when it is self-indulgence, the sound of baby shoes stamping. We must acknowledge its profound shortcomings as a purgative. Anger finally is the emotion of impotence--mortality up against its limits and refusing to recognize them.

Without pity or grief or laughter, anger is neither moral nor healthy but simply dehumanizing. In Ionesco's scenario, just before the planet blows up, a man sitting in a cafe turns puce and explodes. Which is more destructive, Ionesco seems to ask, the atom bomb that swats all those flies or the chain-reaction anger behind it, disintegrating a man into his obsessions? In either case, the Ionesco moral is clear: in the 20th century, anger requires safety standards.

A diet of tranquilizers? Electrodes in the hotspots of the brain? Genetic engineering? The men in white jackets are waiting with newfangled anger cures. The scientist who invents bombs also invents alternatives. If these cures appear nearly as frightening as the malady they treat, who knows? Perhaps a better kind of cure is simply to get angry, just a little angry, about anger.

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