The Angry Young Man

The Angry Young Man
Job 32 1-22

I was a “word child.” Indeed, I probably still am, though I am also a music child and a people child. A Word Child is a novel by Iris Murdoch about a man for whom words are the means of his redemption or happiness. Words save him. For me, that was so from the beginning, and not because I had the grim family background of the character in the novel. I remember getting in trouble with the public library when I took books out in the morning, read them by the afternoon, and wanted to return them to take out more in the evening. Whereas I would have spent my life working in factories like my father and mother if I had been born a decade earlier than I was, by the time I was born, the sky was the educational limit for ordinary British children. Words could then become not only something I loved to read but something I loved to write. You are the victims...