British Fiction After Modernism: The Novel at Mid-Century

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British Fiction After Modernism

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British Fiction After Modernism The Novel at Mid-Century Edited by

Marina MacKay and Lyndsey Stonebridge

Selection and editorial matter © Marina MacKay and Lyndsey Stonebridge 2007 Individual Chapters © Contributors 2007 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-1-4039-8642-9 hardback ISBN-10: 1-4039-8642-8 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data British fiction after modernism : the novel at mid-century / edited by Marina MacKay and Lyndsey Stonebridge. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-1-4039-8642-9 ISBN-10: 1-4039-8642-8 1. English fiction – 20th century – History and criticism. I. MacKay, Marina, 1975– II. Stonebridge, Lyndsey, 1965– PR883.B73 2007 823′.91409 – dc22 2006050301 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

In memory of Lorna Sage

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Contents

Acknowledgements

ix

Notes on Contributors

x

1

Introduction: British Fiction After Modernism Lyndsey Stonebridge and Marina MacKay

2

Rendering Justice to the Visible World: History, Politics and National Identity in the Novels of Graham Greene Andrzej Gasiorek

3 The Case for Storm Jameson Elizabeth Maslen 4

17 33

The Nooks and Crannies of her Being: Howard Spring’s Shabby Tiger and Northern Camp Paul Magrs

5 A Plausible Magic: the Novels of Henry Green James Wood 6

1

Varieties of Modernism, Varieties of Incomprehension: Patrick Hamilton and Elizabeth Bowen John Mepham

42 50

59

7

James Hanley and the Colours of War Gerard Barrett

77

8

The Girl on a Swing: Childhood and Writing in the 1940s N.H. Reeve

88

9

Ivy Compton-Burnett and Risibility Sara Crangle

99

10 Angus Wilson: No Laughing Matter and No Laughing Matter Steven Jacobi

121

11 Reconsidering Lucky Jim: Kingsley Amis and the Condition of England Greg Londe

131

12

145

Olivia Manning and her Masculine Outfit Jeremy Treglown vii

viii Contents

13

The Cold War Way of Death: Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori Rod Mengham

157

14 The Greater Tragedy Imposed on the Small: Art, Anachrony and the Perils of Bohemia in Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows Victor Sage

166

15

From Psychology to Ontology: William Golding’s Later Fiction Kevin McCarron

184

16

The British Novel in 1960 Bernard Bergonzi

203

Select Bibliography

212

Index

218

Acknowledgements The idea of this collection began at a conference on mid-century fiction and in honour of Angus Wilson held in the spring of 2001 at the University of East Anglia. Our thanks to Wilson’s partner, Tony Garrett, and to those people who contributed to that event in significant ways: Val Striker, Jon Cook, Denise Riley, Peter Conradi and Maud Ellmann. Our main thanks go to our contributors, not only for their patience and timeliness, but for their keen and original readings of mid-century fiction. We owe a special debt to Jeremy Treglown. Thanks too to Joe Kennedy and Emma Whiting who helped put the book together. This book is dedicated to the memory of Lorna Sage, whose writing on twentieth-century fiction influenced many of the contributors here and whose sense for the critical and aesthetic awkwardness of the British novel was never less than acute. ‘Of course it bloody well is’, would have been Lorna’s response to the idea that mid-century fiction was a stranger and more challenging literary-historical category than is often recognized. Of course.

ix

Notes on Contributors Gerard Barrett is a graduate of University College Galway, Ireland, where he wrote a Master’s thesis on the novels of Henry Green. He is Director of Studies for English at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge, where he organizes an annual symposium on modernist fiction. He has published essays on Henry Green and Joseph Conrad and is currently completing a book-length study of the American novelist John Hawkes. Bernard Bergonzi is Emeritus Professor of English at Warwick University, and the author of Heroes’ Twilight (1965) and The Situation of the Novel (1970). His recent books include A Victorian Wanderer: the Life of Thomas Arnold the Younger (2003) and A Study in Greene (2006). Sara Crangle is currently a research fellow at Queens’ College, University of Cambridge. She has previously published work in the Journal of Narrative Theory and Women’s Writing. Andrzej Gasiorek is Reader in Twentieth-Century Literature at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After (1995), Wyndham Lewis and Modernism (2004), J.G. Ballard (2005), and he has co-edited a collection of essays on T.E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism (2006). He is also co-editor of the electronic journal Modernist Cultures. Steven Jacobi was educated at Cambridge, Edinburgh and London. He completed a doctorate on Angus Wilson and taught in South-East Asia, Cambridge, and latterly in London where he was Head of English at University College School. Now a full-time writer, he has published two novels, a biography, and a work of non-fiction about stand-up comedy and the English sense of humour. He has written drama and documentaries for BBC Radio 4 and contributed to The Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Observer, Marie Claire and Arena. Greg Londe received his BA and MA in English from Washington University in St Louis. He is currently in the PhD programme at Princeton University. Marina MacKay is Assistant Professor of English at Washington University in St Louis. She is the author of Modernism and World War II (2006) and of x


xi

articles on modern fiction in English Literary History, Modern Language Quarterly and Twentieth-Century Literature. Paul Magrs lectures at Manchester Metropolitan University. His latest novel is Exchange (2006). Elizabeth Maslen taught for many years in the English Departments of Westfield College and Queen Mary, University of London, and is now a Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of English Studies, University of London. She has published books and many articles on women’s writing, her most recent book being Political and Social Issues in British Women’s Fiction, 1928–1968 (2001). She is currently working on a biography of Storm Jameson. Kevin McCarron is Reader in American Literature at Roehampton University, London. He has published numerous articles in scholarly journals and has contributed chapters to over thirty books on subjects including tattooing, cyberpunk, popular music, horror fiction, dystopian literature, drug addiction and alcoholism, and blasphemy. He is the author of William Golding (1995; second edition, 2006), The Coincidence of Opposites: William Golding’s Later Fiction (1996), and he co-authored Frightening Fictions (2001), a study of adolescent horror narratives. He is the author of the entry on William Golding in the New National Dictionary of Biography (2004), and he is currently writing a book on ‘University Teaching and Stand-Up Comedy’. Rod Mengham is Reader in Modern English Literature at the University of Cambridge, where he is also Curator of Works of Art at Jesus College. He is the author of books on Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë and Henry Green, as well as of The Descent of Language (1993). He has edited collections of essays on contemporary fiction, violence and avant-garde art, and the fiction of the 1940s. He is also the editor of the Equipage series of poetry pamphlets and co-editor and co-translator of Altered State: the New Polish Poetry (2003) and co-editor of Vanishing Points: New Modernist Poems (2005). His own poems have been published under the title Unsung: New and Selected Poems (1996; second edition, 2001). John Mepham taught philosophy and English literature in colleges and universities in England, Australia and the USA. He taught most recently at Kingston University from which he has recently retired. His research was mainly in the area of English modernist fiction, most particularly the work of Virginia Woolf.

xii


N.H. Reeve teaches at the University of Wales, Swansea. His previous books include Reading Late Lawrence (2003) and Nearly Too Much: the Poetry of J.H. Prynne (with Richard Kerridge, 1995). Victor Sage is Professor of Literature at the University of East Anglia. He works on nineteenth and twentieth-century fiction. He is the author of numerous essays on the Gothic tradition, and has co-edited Gothic: Origins and Innovations (1994) and Modern Gothic: a Reader (1997). He has edited Uncle Silas for Penguin Classics and also Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer, also for Penguin Classics. His latest book is Le Fanu’s Gothic: the Rhetoric of Darkness (2003). A novelist and short-story writer, he is the author of two novels, A Mirror for Larks (1993) and Black Shawl (1995). He is currently working on A Cultural History of European Gothic, due out in 2007. Lyndsey Stonebridge is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of East Anglia, where she teaches on the MA Studies in Fiction. Her publications include The Destructive Element: British Psychoanalysis and Modernism (1998), Reading Melanie Klein (1998; edited with John Phillips), and The Writing of Anxiety (2007). Jeremy Treglown’s most recent books are V.S. Pritchett: a Working Life (2004), which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Biography Award, and Romancing: the Life and Work of Henry Green (2000), which won the Dictionary of Literary Biography Award. A Professor of English at the University of Warwick, he was previously editor of The Times Literary Supplement (1982– 91) and, with Deborah McVea, edited the online TLS Centenary Archive (2000). James Wood teaches at Harvard University. His most recent book is The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (2004).

1 Introduction: British Fiction After Modernism Lyndsey Stonebridge and Marina MacKay

I One answer to the question raised by this collection – what happened to British fiction after modernism? – might be: not much. The literary gardens of the West, in Cyril Connolly’s frequently quoted phrase, closed in the 1940s: ‘ “Nothing dreadful is ever done with, no bad thing gets better; you can’t be too serious”.’1 By 1947 writers had little left to push against, let alone experiment with. ‘You don’t think’, Elizabeth Bowen wondered in an exchange with V.S. Pritchett and Graham Greene, ‘you don’t think it possible that things these days may be almost too propitious?’2 In the new post-war consensus there was no room for the social and political isolation that had been so crucial, albeit in different ways, for the modernist novel. For a generation who were about to never have had it so good, the omens for a productive literary tension were never so bad. As their island shrank, mid-century writers became more domestic and domesticated. ‘The Novel No Longer Novel, 1945–1960’, was the less than flattering title Malcolm Bradbury gave to his chapter on this period in The Modern British Novel (1993).3 The period covered in the next chapter is so dull it cannot even inspire a literary pun: ‘The Sixties and After: 1960–1979’. With modernism a distant dream, attention turned from the condition of the novel to the condition of England. Tinkerings with realism propped up a creaking liberalism. By the time England had shrunk to the size of a campus novel, the novel (much like Britain itself) was in dire need of rescue from its own parochialism. Small wonder, perhaps, that until very recently universities tended to offer courses on ‘Modernism’ and ‘Modernist Fiction’, and ‘Postmodernism’ and ‘Contemporary Fiction’, and left what was in between discreetly to gather dust in the back bedroom of literary scholarship. This collection aims to restore some significance to a critically awkward phase of twentieth-century writing. Focusing on the years between the late 1930s (just after modernism) and the late 1960s (just before postmodernism), its contributors suggest what it meant for writers to work in the wake 1

2 British Fiction After Modernism

of modernism’s achievements. Too often characterized as a conservative literature of retreat, this book argues instead that mid-century fiction has a complex and under-thought relation to its own history – both to its historical and literary legacies and to the history of which it was such an uneasy part. For those writing at mid-century, after two wars and in the middle of an undeclared chilly third, the historical resonances of what had come before loomed as large as (and as part of) the task of imagining the present and the future. Modernism lingered in the literary imagination as, sometimes ironically, sometimes peevishly, mid-century writing reacted to its influence by adapting some of its elements to new political and fictional ends. ‘Late modernism’ and even ‘intermodernism’ are terms that have been used in recent scholarship to describe the ways in which the literary energy of the first part of the century segued into the period between the wars.4 As many of our contributors demonstrate here, late modernism continues to splinter into the gritty concerns of mid-century writing. It is in an effort to bring some of this complex history into view that this collection has set its historical parameters around the Second World War rather than to one side of it. Thus viewed, we think, the extent to which mid-century fiction is a literature of continuities and transitions between the earlier and later parts of the century starts to become a little clearer. It is also a way of filling a gap in current attempts to rethink twentiethcentury literary history. 1950 has emerged recently as the preferred start date for the study of post-war British fiction based on the argument, on the one hand, that it took a long time for the war to unravel after 1945 and, on the other, that most writers published in the late 1940s were already established authors.5 This seems a proper division to the extent that it rightly acknowledges the palpable sense of the new that inflected the 1950s and that was to flower so powerfully in the 1960s. The literary backdating that marks this collection does not so much depart from these accounts as, we hope, add to them by both recording the transitions that fiction made in this period and tracking the careers of some of those crucially significant writers whose careers spanned the 1930s, the 1940s and the 1950s (and often beyond): Graham Greene, Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Rebecca West, Patrick Hamilton, Storm Jameson, Howard Spring, Elizabeth Bowen, Olivia Manning and James Hanley, for example, all wrote across the war. Evelyn Waugh, L.P. Hartley, V.S. Pritchett, Rosamond Lehmann, Sybille Bedford, Molly Keane, Rose Macaulay, Malcolm Lowry, P.H. Newby, Anthony Powell, Jean Rhys, Stevie Smith, C.P. Snow, Edward Upward, could all be added to this list.6 In any case, perhaps, the fact that the term ‘postwar’ has come to mean so many things suggests that a literary history of breakthroughs and ruptures is never going to work particularly well for this period. Whereas in or about 1947 (the year of Indian Independence) marked the date of irreversible cultural change for some, for others that process, and the insular turn in British fiction that went with

Introduction

3

it, came much earlier, in or about 1938. For others, post-war fiction pro per started in 1954, the publication date of fi rst novels by Iris Murdoch, Kingsley Amis and William Golding; whereas those wanting to identify the re-emergence of the avant-garde in post-war Britain are more likely to seize on 1957 (Muriel Spark’s The Comforters and Christine Brooke-Rose’s The Languages of Love) or 1963 (B.S. Johnson’s Travelling People, Ann Quin’s Berg and Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means). It is only when the post-war sensibility violently sheds its historical and ideological skins in 1968 that we can really say (again) that on or about a certain date something in human character changed. Thinking about mid-century fiction precisely as mid-century fiction is also an attempt to get beyond the formalist distinction between experimental and realist fiction that has dominated accounts of this period and which has also, and not always merely incidentally, stamped many mid-century writers as irretrievably and disastrously minor. ‘The progress of the novel has always depended on an oscillation between two parts of its nature’, Bradbury argued in No, Not Bloomsbury (1987), ‘its referential and discursive and its aesthetic function.’7 This is a difficult proposition not least because the polemical separation of the ‘referential’ and ‘aesthetic’ is largely the legacy of modernist manifesto-making itself, and is thus not only of doubtful relevance to earlier novelists, but also potentially damaging for those who followed. The terms on which mid-century fiction has been (and often still is) read were often established by those modernist writers who, in their iconoclastic polemics about the function of fiction, attacked their immediate predecessors for having ‘referential and discursive’ ambitions of a kind that made the highest artistic achievements impossible; famously, ‘realist’ became synonymous with crudity and anachronism. Despite the title of Bradbury’s book, you cannot, in fact, help thinking of Bloomsbury, and of Woolf’s famous attack on the Edwardian novelist, so dogged a materialist that he was ‘taking upon his shoulders the work that ought to have been discharged by Government officials’.8 Bradbury’s commitment to these ‘polar distinctions . . . between, on the one hand, the novel’s propensity toward realism, social documentation and interrelation with historical events and movements, and on the other with its propensity toward form, fictionality, and reflexive self-examination’ is pretty well representative of a whole generation of work on post-war British fiction.9 Novelists, David Lodge wrote in his famous 1969 essay, stood ‘at the crossroads’ between ‘realism’ and ‘experiment’.10 By the time Lodge revised his original thesis twenty years later, the crossroads had become ‘crossover fiction’: ‘an aesthetic supermarket’ (‘an astonishing variety of styles on offer today’) had put both the corner shop of grubby realism and the up-market avant-garde boutique out of business.11 In an effort to rescue the mid-century novel from its dire reputation, Bradbury would argue that it was often, in fact, incipiently postmodernist; any return to realism was


temporary, he suggested, and ‘formal and epistemological questions began to reassert themselves’ by the early 1960s.12 But if proleptic postmodernism is the rationale with which mid-century writing is to be salvaged, many important mid-century writers appear beyond rehabilitation. Certainly, there would be no place for most of the authors discussed here because, even leaving aside the obvious non-starters (Rebecca West or Olivia Manning, say, or William Golding), it doesn’t really work to characterize even tricksy writers like Bowen or Spark as postmodernist. Even when Spark described her own work as ‘post-modernist’ (‘They say post-modernist, mostly, whatever that means’), one senses that her idea of postmodernism was not that of Angela Carter or even Spark’s one-time mentor, Christine Brooke-Rose, even as Spark was subject to the same nouveau roman influences. ‘I think it means’, Spark said in an interview, ‘that there is another dimension which is a bit creepy, supernatural . . . not supernatural but not necessarily consequential. I always think that causality is not chronology. I go on that; one thing doesn’t necessarily lead to another inevitable thing, although it does lead to something else in actual fact.’13 Contingency, indeed, is always part of Spark’s fiction; what makes it ‘creepy’, however, is the sense that although her characters and narrators as well as the author cannot grasp what it is that drives causality, someone or something else does. This is the kind of poetic telos, the sense that there is a pattern to the fiction somewhere despite the free-falling nature of the narrative, that Frank Kermode was quick to note in his readings of Spark’s early fiction.14 It is a poetic that places Spark closer to Golding, and indeed to Iris Murdoch, than might first appear. Notwithstanding their very different innovations, the strange god-shapes in the fiction of all three can be read as late examples of the fight between textuality and authority that had so preoccupied writers in the earlier part of the century. When we say that we are interested here in what happened to the novel ‘after’ modernism, then, we do not quite mean ‘after’ in an innocently chronological sense, but that many of these writers are so indebted to modernism that they have to be read in relation to it. Implicitly they always have been, of course, in so far as mid-century fiction was often dismissed for collapsing in the face of the challenge to literary form that the avantgarde set down in the first thirty years of the century. Modernism exhausted the novel, Bernard Bergonzi argued in 1970; the post-war novelist ‘has inherited a form whose principal characteristic is novelty, or stylistic dynamism, and yet nearly everything possible to be achieved has already been done’.15 The fact that Britain spent most of the post-war period staggering from one economic crisis to another gives this industrial model of fictionmaking – whereby modernism has depleted a finite stock of resources – a certain historical pathos. At the same time, it remains an incidental irony of the formalism bequeathed by modernism to mid-century criticism that it should have facilitated a degree of insensibility to all but the most

Introduction

5

extravagant textual eccentricities. Laments about the poverty of 1940s’ writing, for instance, often make an exception of Malcolm Lowry’s Joycean Under the Volcano (1947) even as they sideline the late modernist novels of Henry Green and Ivy Compton-Burnett – as rewardingly subtle as Lowry, but otherwise utterly sui generis. Any book that professes recuperative intentions risks making inflated claims about the neglected brilliance of the age – no doubt there were plenty of wretched novels produced in this period (as in any other) that have been deservedly forgotten. However, there needs to be a revision of the conventional wisdom that sees modernist and modernizing energies repudiated wholesale by generations of otherwise unremarkable writers. Rubin Rabinovitz had good reason to identify a ‘reaction against experiment in the English novel’ in his seminal work of that title which set the terms for readings of the immediate post-war novel for a decade.16 But Rabinovitz’s contemporaries might have done well to counterbalance this extraordinarily influential book by trying to account for the aspirations of novelists outside the John Wain-John Braine-Alan Sillitoe axis. This collection, in part, reserves a corner for those who were modernism’s fi rst readers, and whose respect for the modernist enterprise is apparent throughout their complex and sometimes introspective fiction. The perception that modernism was too self-indulgently inward, and too little concerned with historical, social and political actuality does, of course, have an authentic period flavour; it was the basis on which the ‘reaction against experiment’, such as it was, took place. William Cooper, the author of the proto-angry-young-man novel Scenes from Provincial Life (1950), set out his and C.P. Snow’s position vis-à-vis their immediate predecessors in exactly those terms: ‘the Experimental Novel was about Man-Alone’, he wrote in 1959, ‘we meant to write novels about Man-in-Society as well’.17 The return to realism needs to be qualified in two ways, however. First, new work in modernist studies has done much to erode what Fredric Jameson in the mid-1990s called a ‘virtually universal stereotype of the great Western modernists as subjective and quietistic antipolitical figures’.18 As Geoff Gilbert reminds us in his Before Modernism Was: Modern History and the Constituency of Writing (2004), the category we like to call ‘modernism’ came after the difficult and ill-fitting body of historical and literary writing that eventually bore this name.19 By now, it can fairly be argued that modernism was always more overtly social and historical in its characteristic obsessions all along, and that the break with nineteenth-century preoccupations, like the critical orthodoxy of the post-war repudiation of modernism, was rather less dramatic and complete than it looked to contemporaries. Second, the turn to some kind of realism was already well advanced by the late 1930s. As a new ethnography turned inwards to observe an evermore precarious-looking Britain, in the form of Mass Observation for example, writers such as Storm Jameson looked for new ways to document


an increasingly gritty reality – ways that often borrowed from modernism (for example, the use of filmic narrative and montage) while pushing against its aestheticism. That ethnographic turn, it has been argued recently, helped establish the basis for the development of Cultural Studies in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s and for the pioneering work of Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams.20 Similarly, it could be suggested, the realisms that emerge in the post-war period develop a concern with class and region which first flourished between the wars. Writers such as Snow, David Storey, Stan Barstow and Colin MacInnes were, of course, documenting the emergence of a distinctly new Britain, but the sorts of realisms they produced owed as much to the concerns of their immediate predecessors as it did to the nineteenth-century novel. As Bergonzi concludes his essay below: ‘Realists, yes. But they do the realism in different voices.’ It is partly because they are trying to make these kinds of generic and historical connections that many of our contributors focus on the Second World War and its aftermath.21 The war was the major turning point of the century in Britain: a domestic and geopolitical watershed, it remains inescapably present in public culture and popular memory in Britain. (‘Do not say “before/after the war” when you mean the second world war’, the stylebook of one national newspaper now cautions its journalists.22) With respect to domestic conditions, the war changed life in Britain considerably, not least in that it led to the election of a declaredly redistributive Labour government in 1945. Globally, a war that had been deferred because of the virtual impossibility of defending an empire sprawling across three potential fronts (Pacific, Atlantic, Mediterranean) ultimately hastened the end of the empire and the superpower status attendant on it. Financially bust by 1941 and unmistakeably a satellite of American power, Britain was losing the war while winning it. It is no wonder that the Second World War should be used as the century’s fault-line, and, what is more, that these global and domestic transformations should have multiple implications for the national literature in the years that saw London’s demotion from the magnetic imperial metropolis of the high modernist 1920s to the blitzed and bankrupted conditions of the 1940s. Contrary to received wisdom, the war was a major literary event in its own right, as some of the writing careers discussed in this collection show. Many writers, such as Bowen and Green, came of literary age during the war. Witness Bowen’s furious wartime short story writing, for example, as well as her masterpiece, The Heat of the Day (1949). Green, writing possibly even more furiously, wrote no fewer than three novels (Caught, 1943; Loving, 1945; and Back, 1946) in that period. James Hanley and William Sansom produced work which dazzles in its attempt to represent the fractured experience of war. In the same period, ‘thirties’ writers, such as Graham Greene, Storm Jameson and Patrick Hamilton adapted their literary forms to new critiques of 1940s’ fascism. For others still, the war was at the very

Introduction

7

least formative: Spark sailed back from South Africa to work in Sefton Delmer’s black propaganda unit; Manning voyaged out with her husband to the Egypt and Palestine that were to feature so colourfully in her later fiction; Angus Wilson (who was later to generate his own different version of literary coding and decoding) toiled away at the famous Bletchley Park; while Golding and West, in different ways, discovered the moral imperatives that were to govern their fiction in the second half of the century. In her 1969 autobiography, Storm Jameson tried to compare the contemporary fear of nuclear war with ‘the fear that slowly submerged our minds during the thirties’: An American reviewer, a woman, complained that ‘like so many English writers, Storm Jameson seems unable to outgrow the war.’ I retorted that the war we could not outgrow was not the one we had survived but the one we were expecting.23 Only now, perhaps, after the end of the Cold War which shaped the imaginations of so many writing at mid-century, do the continuities of twentieth-century British fiction really become apparent. For many, the climate of fear that dominated the post-war period was in fact their third experience of war anxiety. What Jameson is describing in the late 1960s is the fear that, as Andrzej Gasiorek notes here of Graham Greene, the twentieth century would be a time in which there would never be a peace. Spark’s hilarious but grim account of the paranoia this induced is captured in Memento Mori (1959) where, as Rod Mengham argues in his contribution to this volume, it is ‘as if the fi res of the Blitz have only been damped down temporarily’. The continuities that span the century are continuities of anxiety; British writers after modernism are haunted by the past, as well as by the present and future. Propitiousness is only half the story: ‘Even to objectify futility is something’, Bowen remarks in the exchange with Pritchett and Greene with which we opened this introduction. All the writers discussed in this book reflect insistently on the problematic nature of representing an age of ambiguous victories, and the troubled question of historical and national representation is never far from their concerns. If Britain has averted its own occupation, it is no longer the centre of an empire; it has participated in the defeat of one version of totalitarianism only to feel the apocalyptic threat of another. As we have suggested here, the project of writing that anxiety generates a distinctive aesthetic in which realisms emerge that are written self-consciously ‘after’ modernism. Indeed, many of the essays in this collection show how mid-century writers were self-consciously rewriting modernism: from Compton-Burnett’s perhaps unsurprising debts to modernist theories of laughter, to Howard Spring’s edgy appropriations of Lawrentian idioms (the impact of Lawrence


on a later generation of mid-century writers would need another volume – David Storey is an obvious case in point) and Kingsley Amis’s embarrassed indebtedness to Joyce. Frequently, mid-century fiction appropriates modernism’s dense aesthetic inwardness and puts it to ends that are very selfconsciously sociological and historiographic, as in Bowen and Hamilton’s transformation of streams of consciousness into frustratingly opaque streams of talk, discussed here by John Mepham. In such ways and others, these anti-heroic, post-imperial fictions could almost be said to radicalize the diffidence for which they are perhaps better known. These writers knew there was no returning to a time before modernism. Being modern at mid-century entailed an uncompromising engagement with the public and private violence of a modernity that was revealing itself as intractable and never-ending. It was in an attempt to give this violence some kind of genealogy that Rebecca West and Angus Wilson resurrected and re-imagined the densely social genre of the bourgeois family saga. Their autobiographical novels The Fountain Overflows (1956) and No Laughing Matter (1967), discussed here by Victor Sage and Steven Jacobi, chart the progress of families from Edwardian England through the second half of the century in acts of what Sage calls ‘retrospective prophecy’ (Sybille Bedford does something similar with her German-Jewish family in A Legacy, also published in 1956). Both Wilson and West engage in highly critical ways with nostalgic fantasies of the belle époque that continued to surface in times of post-war crisis as a punishing measure of what the twentieth century cost Britain: ‘Never such innocence again’, as Philip Larkin famously lamented in his poem about 1914. 24 In contrast with Larkin, West and Wilson render illusory the century’s lost innocence, arguing that their homes had always been ‘protected’ by ruinously irresponsible gamblers. ‘I had a glorious father’, West indicts the seductions and failures of patriarchy: ‘I had no father at all.’25 Traditionally a condition-of-England form, these mid-century family sagas refuse to whitewash the national past with narratives of private transcendence, but see in private violence the symptomatic foreshadowing of an atrocious century. Thus the horrors of domestic fascism so urgent a concern to writers of the 1940s like Hamilton, Bowen and Compton-Burnett continue to be represented through the second half of the century. What, in one of her bleak late essays, Virginia Woolf referred to as the ‘subconscious Hitlerism in the hearts of men’ becomes the force behind all forms of repressive and hierarchical domestic and social organization.26 And even the most diligent post-war efforts at universality turn out to be pretty historical after all: Kevin McCarron contends that, for all its provocatively ahistorical qualities, ‘the issue of historical representation is at the heart of everything Golding wrote’; Gasiorek meanwhile shows how Greene’s theological preoccupations are tied to his commitments to political and historical representation. Read together, these writers bring into focus the continuities between the pervasive mid-

Introduction

9

century atmosphere of domestic fascism and the anxieties about race, nation, gender and class that dominated the second half of the century. For them, there is no possibility of seeing creative activity as hermetic aesthetic transcendence; on the contrary, mid-century writers were pragmatically selfaware about the relationship between writing and public life. In a different but possibly related sense, the politics of literary reputation are central to a reading of twentieth-century British fiction because the writers discussed here are, bluntly, not enough read. (One of this book’s editors found her first Henry Green novel when she was a guest in a real back bedroom. Next to the Patrick Hamiltons.) Critical and historical awkwardness has always dogged the careers of these writers: indeed, with this in mind, it might be foolish to say we need to recontextualize mid-century writers in order to understand them better – to some extent those contexts never really seemed there for many of the writers discussed. While there were certainly movements within mid-century fiction, there was no one ‘Movement’, as there was for poetry, by which one could really set up firm cultural and literary markers. And even within these movements, many mid-century writers seem to write, peculiarly, of their time but out of their immediate culture. One thinks, for example, of the experimental writer Ann Quin, who wrote, it is said, without reading (Quin died just before she was to begin her degree in English literature at the University of East Anglia – where she would have quite probably been taught by Angus Wilson). Even the most generous of literary categories, such as women’s writing, can seem too tight for many writers discussed here. 27 In this volume, for instance, Jeremy Treglown shows how Olivia Manning was no genteel lady author, but a woman unafraid to write scenes of combat with the rugged tactics for which Norman Mailer would later be credited. If there is one characteristic that does unite much of the work discussed in this book it is the grim humour of a group of writers who always felt themselves to be writing from the political periphery. ‘Ridicule is the only honourable weapon we have left’, Spark declared in her 1970 essay, ‘The Desegregation of Art’.28 Perhaps the most paradoxical – but also the most symptomatic – dimension of British culture after modernism is the way that its writers of central significance so relentlessly and wilfully positioned themselves on the outside. Widely considered in his time to be one of the most important twentieth-century British novelists, Angus Wilson was essentially an ironist, an outsider, and a tireless critic of the political and cultural certainties of the post-war English; and yet Steven Jacobi shows here how, at the very height of his reputation, Wilson’s humour becomes ‘the comedy of displacement and self-displacement’. Similarly, Bowen’s worry about writers suddenly finding themselves understood and respected within the post-war consensus was also a worry of not being outside enough (‘My writing may be a substitute for something I have been born without’; she adds, ‘– a so-called normal relation to society’29 ).


It is a mistake to assume that this kind of ironic self-displacement translates unproblematically into a form of reactionary retreat. In 1970 Bergonzi was right to say that ‘[f]or complex historical and cultural reasons, English literature in the fifties and sixties has been both backward- and inwardlooking’; ‘It is’, he added, ‘in the centripetal nature of its preoccupations that English culture can look parochial and irrelevant to outsiders.’30 This is all true, but not all British fiction was quite as smug as this perhaps implies. As Randall Stevenson points out in the introduction to The Last of England? we should not assume that Britain’s decline – its sinking and shrinking – was simply reproduced in its literature: even if the age were somehow defined as one exclusively of historical decline, there would be little reason to suppose its literature doomed to follow the same direction. Literary developments do not always straightforwardly reflect or run in parallel with the wider history of their time, reproducing its ups and downs. On the contrary, what history refuses, culture provides: changeful, challenging times demand a direct new vision.31 In Stevenson’s account, the most innovative and creative cultural response to a historical ‘world well lost’ emerges in the 1980s and, notably, in the work of some of the best critics of that lost world, Salman Rushdie, Timothy Mo, Kazuo Ishiguro and Caryl Phillips. As Jed Esty has shown, in the earlier part of the post-war period writers such as Samuel Selvon, George Lamming and Doris Lessing were already starting to demonstrate how what reads as historical decline in one register, emerges as something a great deal more culturally and politically interesting in another. In some respects, this collection tells a complementary story to that in Esty’s important study A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (2004), which describes ‘the inner logic and stylistic contours of a major literary culture caught in the act of becoming minor’.32 Esty’s last chapter describes the emergence of voices from the formerly imperial ‘periphery’; the story we tell here describes how the English literary ‘centre’ ceased to understand itself as central. There is nothing necessarily complacent about the responses that British literary culture made to its midcentury dispersal. Concerns with ‘displacement and self-displacement’ connect Storm Jameson’s early definitions of modern diaspora to Bowen’s concern with metropolitan migrancy, while in the novelist Paul Magrs’s discussion below of urban renewal in his reading of the working-class Mancunian bestseller Howard Spring, there is a rich sense of the way in which a tearing down also promises a more democratic and inclusive remaking. British fiction – if by the 1970s it can quite be called that – explored and enacted continuities of modern experience that are only now coming into critical view. Not, perhaps, until the very last decades of the century did

Introduction

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the novel really begin to understand itself once again as a culturally vital and politically critical force. But nor did the critical inventiveness of the writers we are interested in here simply shrink with their island. One last comment from Bowen’s response to Pritchett: ‘I don’t think any of us feel ourselves to be unrelatable to something. We envisage, we are not passive, and we are not contributing to anarchy: that may be the most to be claimed for us.’33

II Without underestimating either the rich heterogeneity of mid-century fiction or the sometimes very striking distinctiveness of individual writers, read together the authors discussed in this book indicate, even as they complicate, the period’s characteristic contours. That Britain produced distinguished late modernist stylists should be clear from the cases of Green, Bowen and Compton-Burnett; but that a critical reading of modernism could have other creative outcomes too is evidenced by Jameson and Greene, whose arguments with modernism, unlike the occasionally philistine attacks that would surface in the 1950s, resulted in formally supple and politically regenerative engagements with the work of their predecessors, realist and modernist. Also considered definitive of post-war fiction, the mid-century preoccupation with social class is most obviously covered in this collection through the example of Kingsley Amis, who was perhaps the most enduring of the writers saddled with the journalistic tag of the ‘angry young men’, but also, and in keeping with the collection’s more extended sense of ‘mid-century’, through those older writers of class mobility and paralysis, Howard Spring and James Hanley. Usually represented by the novel sequences of Anthony Powell and C.P. Snow, the historically and socially panoramic ambitions of mid-century fiction are here represented by Angus Wilson, Olivia Manning and Rebecca West – chroniclers who were perhaps rather less class-constrained in their outlook than Powell, and more global in their fictional priorities than Snow. Historical considerations become ontological conditions in their younger contemporaries, Golding and Spark, major names in their own right, but also writers who may well be considered representative of the profound moral and philosophical seriousness of the period. Two essays on the immediate aftermath of modernism open this collection. In a prequel to his earlier study of post-war fiction, Andrzej Gasiorek turns to Graham Greene’s novels of the 1930s and early 1940s.34 As stable ideas of nationality began to crumble under the pressure of the global economic crises of the interwar period, and as the individual found himself or herself at the mercy of wholly impersonal forces, Greene, Gasiorek argues, discovered the means to represent these new conditions by returning to the early modernists who aimed, in Joseph Conrad’s phrase, to ‘render the


highest kind of justice to the visible universe’, or, in other words, to represent the modern condition in social as well as metaphysical terms. Elizabeth Maslen describes how Storm Jameson, too, engaged critically with modernism in order to find a new idiom for her acutely political fictions. Jameson experimented with varieties of realism in pursuit of a literary vocabulary for the political engagements that in life made her a tireless advocate for the rights of the victims displaced by the totalitarianisms of the 1930s and 1940s. The pursuit of a new literary vocabulary for those who have ‘the nous to rewrite themselves’, as Paul Magrs puts it, characterizes the work of Howard Spring, the subject of Magrs’s celebratory essay, which revisits Spring’s 1930s’ stories of gutsy refashioning from the point of view of post-industrial, millennial Manchester. James Wood’s deft reading of Henry Green’s novels gives an account of how a plausible magic emerges from Green’s remarkable ear for the extraordinariness of the language of ‘unliterary people’: the verbally imaginative self-artificers who make reading Green such a pleasure, and who seem to claim a right, denied by lesser writers, to be properly mysterious. If it is the potential (including that for tragicomic misunderstanding) of the human voice that characterizes Green’s fiction, it is the extent to which the voice degrades into ‘bad talk’ within a culture in which domestic fascism is more spoken than spoken of, and is no less sinister for that apparent silence, which concerns John Mepham in his essay on Elizabeth Bowen and Patrick Hamilton. Mepham’s is the first of three essays on the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. James Hanley’s hallucinatory wartime writing is the subject of Gerard Barrett’s discussion of Hanley’s late modernist trilogy; whereas Graham Greene found a modernism to suit his cause in Conrad, Hanley – who despised Conrad’s class-blind heroism – made the connections between art and experience in a more edgy and troubling surrealist aesthetic. As with so many writers described in this collection, Hanley’s writing is late modernist to the extent that it is acutely conscious of the power of art and fantasy, and mid-century to the extent that it also understands that the aesthetic cannot transcend experience but can make all its mucky and horrifying inescapability more real. Some of the uncanny kinks that history puts in mid-century fiction are also subtly rendered in N.H. Reeve’s sensitive reading of childhood in 1940s’ writing. Tracing the disturbing dispossessions at work in the fiction of A.L. Barker, Elizabeth Taylor, William Sansom and Arthur Gwynn-Browne, Reeve describes how these undeservedly little-read writers ‘find various ways of addressing the sense of being abruptly severed from something which now, in retrospect, seems incoherent; or treacherous’. In a grimly revelatory way, the war was a second childhood for its participants: following that backward path, its fiction had to find new ways of writing an anxiety that was regressive as well as timely.

Introduction

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Sara Crangle’s essay on ‘risibility’ in the work of Ivy Compton-Burnett reads this notoriously hard-to-place novelist’s rendering of childhood alongside modernist theories of laughter. Laughter is both an anarchic and, in the course of Compton-Burnett’s career, a regenerative and uniting force. In fact, laughter, the explosive by-product of the grim humour of this generation of novelists, is one of the perhaps more unexpected uniting themes at the centre of this collection. In his essay on Angus Wilson, Steven Jacobi, too, is interested in the histories of laughing – a cultural history in which Wilson participated and also a laughter that has its own history in the span of Wilson’s oeuvre; once an instrument of satirical unmasking, it becomes an uneasy instrument of self-exposure and self-criticism. Why mid-century laughter is, in the phrase that gives one of Wilson’s most important novels its title, no laughing matter is further explored in Greg Londe’s reappraisal of Kingsley Amis’s iconic Lucky Jim (1954). Londe reads Amis alongside the mid-century condition of England genre and backwards through the novel’s allusions to Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) – and thus against the grain of the novel’s conventional institutionalization as comic fiction. Laughter after modernism and after the war is, Londe concludes, ‘laughter as execution’. The last section of the collection focuses on post-war novels about violence. The Second World War and the diminution of the empire (its ‘flotsam and jetsam’) are crucial contexts for the work of the Anglo-Irish writer Olivia Manning, whose ‘masculine outfit’ – a phrase that captures perfectly the extraordinarily wide range of her fiction as well as her life – Jeremy Treglown describes in his essay. Claims about the provincialism of the midcentury novel frequently overlook the fascination ‘abroad’ held for women writers in this period. Rose Macaulay, Sybille Bedford, Marghanita Laski, as well as Jameson, West, Spark and the early Carter also found the inspiration for their best work outside Britain: the Middle East, for Macaulay and Spark; a shattered Europe for Jameson, West, Laski and the German exile Bedford; and Japan for Carter. Like Waugh (notably in his Sword of Honour trilogy, 1965), Manning understood that representing war needed a larger canvas than the British home front: like others of her generation she also understood that its prolongation into the bitter international contexts of the 1950s made new demands on the geographical imagination of the novel. In his essay on Spark, Rod Mengham reads the memento mori of Memento Mori as a darkly comic warning about culpability in the continuity and acceleration of Blitz conditions, and situates the novel in relation to the unprecedented temporality of the atomic bomb. Disturbed temporality is also an important dimension of Victor Sage’s essay on Rebecca West’s selfconsciously anachronistic The Fountain Overflows, a novel whose title derives from Blake and which complicates seemingly inviting binaries of containment and excess in the years before Blake’s visionary writings would be appropriated by the counter-cultures of the 1960s. ‘Visionary’ is the right epithet, too, for William Golding, whose later work is appraised by Kevin


McCarron at the end of this book in an examination of how Golding’s concerns shift from the psychological to the ontological towards the end of his career. The very last word in this collection belongs to Bernard Bergonzi, whose essay revisits the year in which he began his distinguished career as a fiction reviewer. Bergonzi’s snapshot of the literary productions of 1960 – a year in which work was published that marked the middles of some careers as well as the endings and beginnings of others – points, finally and rewardingly, to the impossibility of periodizing literature with the rhetoric of the clean break. The story of British fiction after modernism was never, after all, going to be entirely self-contained.

Notes 1. Cyril Connolly, ‘Editorial’, Horizon, (Dec. 1949/Jan. 1950), 362. 2. The exchange began as a radio broadcast and was published in 1948. Why Do I Write? An Exchange of Views between Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene and V.S. Pritchett (London: Percival Marshall, 1948), 22. 3. Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel (London: Penguin, 1993). 4. See Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), discussed by Andrzej Gasiorek below; and Kristen Bluemel, George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics: Intermodernism in Literary London (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 5. This is the argument that Zachary Leader makes in his introduction to On Modern British Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 2–3. See also Steven Connor, The English Novel in History, 1950–1995 (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), and Dominic Head, The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction: 1950–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 6. Fortuitous birthdays and good health also mean that many, like ComptonBurnett, Greene, Doris Lessing, Murdoch and Spark have writing spans that actually stretch to both ends of the century. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is as if sheer longevity has made a retrospective grasp of the period at last possible. Recent autobiographies, for example, from women who have outlived the twentieth century to become two of its finest literary chroniclers, also provide excellent starting points for the reappraisal of which this collection is a part: Diana Athill’s account of her career at André Deutsch has much to say about how a changing publishing market and the end of empire impacted upon the development of the novel (Diana Athill, Stet: an Editor’s Life (London: Granta, 2000)); and Sybille Bedford’s extraordinary account of a writing life shaped by the legacies of a pre-war Europe and the shifting sands of the post-war period (Sybille Bedford, Quicksands: a Memoir (London: Penguin, 2005)). 7. Malcolm Bradbury, No, Not Bloomsbury (London: André Deutsch, 1987), 187. 8. Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, The Common Reader: First Series (San Diego, New York and London: Harvest, 1994), 148.

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9. Malcolm Bradbury, ‘Introduction’, The Novel Today: Contemporary Writers on Modern Fiction (London: Fontana, 1977), pp. 7–21, 8. 10. David Lodge, ‘The Novelist at the Crossroads’, The Novel Today: Contemporary Writers on Modern Fiction (London: Fontana, 1977), 84–110, 100. 11. David Lodge, ‘The Novelist Today: Still at the Crossroads?’, in Malcolm Bradbury and Judy Cooke (eds), New Writing (London: British Council, 1992), pp. 208–9. 12. Bradbury, ‘Introduction’, The Novel Today, 10. 13. Martin McQuillan, ‘ “The Same Informed Air”: an Interview with Muriel Spark’, in Martin McQuillan (ed.), Theorizing Muriel Spark: Gender, Race, Deconstruction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 210–29, 216. 14. Frank Kermode, ‘Muriel Spark’, Modern Essays (London: Fontana, 1971), 267–83. 15. Bernard Bergonzi, The Situation of the Novel (London: Macmillan, 1970), 19. 16. See Rubin Rabinovitz, The Reaction against Experiment in the English Novel, 1950–1960 (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1967), which argued that ‘post-war writers conscientiously rejected experimental techniques’ (2). 17. William Cooper, ‘Reflections on Some Aspects of the Experimental Novel’, in John Wain (ed.), International Literary Annual No. 2 (London: John Calder, 1959), 29. 18. Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 119. 19. Geoff Gilbert, Before Modernism Was: Modern History and the Constituency of Writing (London: Palgrave, 2005). 20. See Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004). 21. Indeed this collection can be read as a contribution to a growing argument for the importance of the 1940s in both cultural and literary historical terms. See Adam Piette’s Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry, 1939–1945 (London: Papermac, 1995), Mark Rawlinson’s British Writing of the Second World War (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) and Rod Mengham and N.H. Reeve (eds), The Fiction of the 1940s: Stories of Survival (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). 22. David Marsh and Nikki Marshall (eds), The Guardian Stylebook (London: Guardian Books, 2004), 162. 23. Storm Jameson, Journey from the North, Volume I (London: Collins and Harvill Press, 1969), 306 24. Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (London: Faber & Faber and The Marvell Press, 1990), 128. 25. Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows (London, Virago, 1999), 274. 26. Virginia Woolf, ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’, The Death of the Moth and other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1942), pp. 243–8, 245. 27. See Jane Dowson (ed.), Women’s Writing: 1945–60 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), for a sense of the sheer diversity of women’s fiction in this period. 28. Muriel Spark, ‘The Desegregation of Art’, quoted in Martin McQuillan, ‘Introduction’, Theorizing Muriel Spark: Gender, Race, Deconstruction, 13. 29. Elizabeth Bowen, Why Do I Write? 23. 30. Bergonzi, The Situation of the Novel, 56, 152–3.

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31. Randall Stevenson: The Last of England? The Oxford English Literary History, vol. 12: 1960–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 4–5. 32. Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England, 3. 33. Elizabeth Bowen, Why Do I Write? 58. 34. Andrzej Gasiorek, Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After (London: Edward Arnold, 1995).

2 Rendering Justice to the Visible World: History, Politics and National Identity in the Novels of Graham Greene Andrzej Gasiorek

And art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect. Joseph Conrad, ‘Preface’ to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’1 The First World War has long functioned as a convenient point of departure for discussion of what we now think of as the period of high modernism that immediately followed it. The brutal reality of mechanized slaughter didn’t just shatter human bodies but also destroyed long-held illusions about the nature of pre-war society, with far-reaching consequences for the arts.2 Reflecting on the erosion of the storytelling tradition by twentiethcentury modernity, Walter Benjamin noted that ‘the ability to exchange experiences’ on which narrative depends had been progressively undermined since the First World War, which had decisively exposed human vulnerability; experience, he suggested, had ‘fallen in value’ and looked as though it were ‘continuing to fall into bottomlessness’, so that ‘our picture, not only of the external world but of the moral world as well, overnight has undergone changes which were never thought possible’.3 This benumbing of experience is evoked in the second half of Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That (1927), a text Wyndham Lewis described in his 1937 memoir as a ‘masterly winding-up of a bankrupt emotional concern’ whose demise his own work sought to hasten.4 Benjamin, in turn, grasped that the transformation he was struggling to adumbrate was of a hitherto unimaginable kind, which meant that coming to terms with it required a different view of human reality and altogether new modes of representation. What had earlier been unthinkable – namely the existential crisis he was tentatively gesturing towards – had somehow to be conceived and articulated, not least because its abyssal quality was so threatening to communal life. 17


Modernism answers this need in complex and conflicting ways. Nonetheless, it is striking that many writers saw the war as sweeping away a moribund civilization and offering the possibility of a clean break and a new beginning. If T.S. Eliot’s search for order in myth and for continuity in tradition mounts a bulwark against a modernity troped as nightmare and anarchy, then this defensiveness should be contrasted with D.H. Lawrence’s passion for a cleansing apocalypse, Ford Madox Ford’s exposure of pre-war cultural pretensions, and Lewis’s anatomization of a society in terminal decline. Lewis was initially the most ‘advanced’ of these writers, arguing in the years immediately after 1918 that ‘those whose interests lie all ahead, whose credentials are in the future, move . . . forward, and away from the sealed and obstructed past’, although Pound too considered that Europe before the war ‘was guttering down to its end’ and saw in GaudierBrzeska’s sculpture ‘the proclamation of a new birth . . . [a] volitionist act stretching into the future’.5 But by the late 1930s these hopes for root-andbranch social change had been dispersed, to be replaced by a widespread feeling that the interwar years had turned into a stagnant interregnum. George Orwell, writing in the early months of yet another war, tellingly contrasted the nineteenth-century Walt Whitman’s expansive faith in American freedom with European pessimism, arguing that ‘our own age . . . is less healthy and less hopeful than the age in which Whitman was writing’ and asserting that ‘we live in a shrinking world’.6 Graham Greene’s novels in the 1920s and 1930s evoke this sense of a shrinking world. Unillusioned studies in what Christopher Caudwell described as a ‘dying culture’, they document the slow slide into hopelessness.7 But whereas Lewis lamented England’s failure to break with the past, Greene reveals that he was never optimistic about its chances of doing so. In Blasting and Bombardiering (1937) – a book Greene admired – Lewis famously declared of himself, Eliot, Joyce and Pound that they were ‘the first men of a Future that has not materialized’ and that they belonged ‘to a “great age” that has not “come off” ’; despite the numerous differences between himself and Orwell, Lewis deploys a similar rhetoric to that of ‘Inside the Whale’ when he concludes that ‘more and more exhausted by War, Slump, and Revolution, the world has fallen back’.8 Greene, in contrast, writes of Armistice Day that those ‘who, even though we were children, remember Armistice Day . . . remember it as a day out of time – an explosion without a future’, and he notes that this curious timelessness suggested in turn that ‘perhaps there would never be a peace . . .’9 The difference between Lewis’s disillusionment and Greene’s caution is explicable in generational terms. Like Ford, Lewis fought in the First World War, and both writers’ subsequent views were conditioned by their experiences of the confl ict. Greene was just ten in 1914, and he came to maturity within the post-war milieu. His first novel, The Man Within (1929) was published one year after Evelyn Waugh’s scabrous Decline and Fall (1928), two years after Graves’s

Rendering Justice to the Visible World: Graham Greene

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sobering Goodbye to All That, and three years after the beginning of the period that for Lewis signalled the end of the post-war interval and the start of the real post-war period.10 Greene comes after modernism, after the great upheavals and experiments that have now been so belauded and canonized. But Greene’s relationship to his predecessors is complicated, and the way in which he negotiates it reveals a good deal about his writing in the 1930s and 1940s especially. Tyrus Miller has suggested that a number of writers (Wyndham Lewis, Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett and Mina Loy among them) are best thought of as ‘late modernists’ whose works ‘represent breaking points, points of nonsynchronism, in the broad narrative of twentieth-century cultural history’.11 These are interstitial works produced in full, if ironic, awareness of modernism, but because they mark out ‘lines of flight’ away from it they are its ‘splinter-products’.12 Miller notes that there is a resistance to the fetishization of aesthetic form in this writing, a refusal to embrace the consolations of narrative order, and although he does not mention Greene, the latter’s writing belongs to the cultural landscape he describes. Greene’s novels are characterized not only by their suspicion of an earlier modernism, perhaps especially its over-valuation of form and its fascination with subjectivism, but also by their almost relentless focus on vulnerable characters caught up in global processes that threaten to destroy them. Benjamin’s view that ‘never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power’ is amply illustrated by fiction in which the individual is a mere distraction in a political game (Stamboul Train, 1932; and It’s a Battlefield, 1934); a social and national anachronism in the world of high capitalism (England Made Me, 1935); or a confused loner adrift in a conspiratorial terrain marked by alienation and paranoia (A Gun for Sale, 1936; The Confidential Agent, 1939; and The Ministry of Fear, 1943).13 Miller might well be summarizing Greene’s early work when he observes that: Taking their stand upon the shifting seismic plates of European society between two catastrophic wars, late modernist writers confronted no less an issue than the survival of individual selves in a world of technological culture, mass politics, and shock experience, both on the battlefield and in the cities of the intervening peace.14 How, then, does Greene position himself in relation to his immediate predecessors? In fine, he chooses to skip a generation, bypassing figures such as Joyce, Lewis and Pound (although Eliot was important to him) so as to proclaim his affinity with writers such as James, Conrad and Ford. These writers are all early modernists whose experiments are arguably less destructive of the novel form than those of the post-war period.15 By

20


invoking them, Greene not only signals his allegiance to one kind of writing rather than another but also distances himself from direct competitors and aligns himself with the safely dead. This may be a deflecting strategy but it still signals a key shift: Greene looks back to writers who may not have been as overtly ‘radical’ as those he criticizes but who were no less obsessed with aesthetic considerations. High modernism was in his view at once too self-regarding and too removed from the workaday reality of ordinary people, whereas he believed that the proto-modernists whose work he celebrated were in touch with the social realm he himself wanted to explore. Greene’s passion for the fi ne minutiae of everyday life is the motor of his early narratives, making them telling social documents. Unlike Orwell, whose misguided infatuation with Joyce clearly mars A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), Greene’s forays into stream-of-consciousness modes (in It’s a Battlefield and England Made Me, for example) were half-hearted attempts to render the inner workings of the mind, which quickly disappeared from his work. Greene feared that modernism was always just on the edge of solipsism, a view he articulated in a hostile review of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, during the course of which he claimed that ‘after twenty years of subjectivity, we are turning back with relief to the old dictatorship, to the detached and objective treatment’ (Essays, 116). This invocation of the detached and objective stance is intended as a reminder of the virtues of the Jamesian method. James was the writer Greene most admired (although Ford and Conrad ran him close). But however much he was influenced by James’s technique – especially as mediated by Percy Lubbock – Greene was no less concerned with his depiction of social viciousness and moral corruption, in which he saw an extraordinarily powerful awareness of the interpenetration of the spiritual realm and the material world. If James was driven by ‘a sense of evil religious in its intensity’ (Essays, 21), then he was also ‘a social critic’ and for Greene (who virtually paraphrases Ford here) no ‘writer was more conscious that he was at the end of a period, at the end of the society he knew’ (Essays, 31).16 In his criticisms of modern fiction Greene was most exercised by the loss of this extra-textual dimension. Prior to Flaubert and James, he argued, the novel ‘was ceasing to be an aesthetic form and they recalled it to the artistic conscience’, but their inheritors treated the ideal of formal perfection as the novel’s raison d’être and trivialized the genre, transforming it into ‘the dull devitalized form . . . that it has become’ (Essays, 93). Coterminous with the lapse of what Greene calls ‘the religious sense’ is the erosion of any ‘sense of the importance of the human act’, and this leads to a double loss: the writer seeks ‘refuge in the subjective novel’ but this in turn dissolves external reality itself such that the ‘visible world cease[s] to exist as completely as the spiritual’ (Essays, 91–2). Reading these observations, we can see why Greene was moved to write the novels that, starting with Brighton Rock (1938) and continuing with The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart


21

of the Matter (1948) and The End of the Affair (1951), explore the relationship between the visible and the invisible, the human and the supernatural, in such diverse ways. In the earlier novels, however, it is this world that looms largest, in keeping with Conrad’s claim, endorsed by Greene, that art ‘may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe’.17 In the fiction with which I will be concerned here, in books such as It’s a Battlefield, England Made Me, A Gun for Sale, The Ministry of Fear and Brighton Rock, Greene documents the changes taking place in a decaying society and depicts the bewilderment of people trapped in events they can neither understand nor control. Conrad, of course, held that the writer should disclose what is hidden behind surface realities, and Greene is no less interested in exposing the truth underlying appearances. This drive to uncover, to challenge conventional ways of seeing and thinking, motivates much of his writing, manifesting itself on one hand in the melodramatic streak that runs through ‘entertainments’ such as A Gun for Sale and The Ministry of Fear, and on the other hand in the social criticism that informs ‘novels’ such as It’s a Battlefield, England Made Me and Brighton Rock. In The Ministry of Fear, for example, the melodramatic imagination runs free, and it conjures up a topsy-turvy world pervaded by alienation and paranoia. In this tragicomic situation time-honoured abstractions such as patriotism, honour, good, evil, justice and so on, are meaningless: society is out of joint. Yet there is no escape from the phantasmagoria. The novel’s central protagonist, Rowe, considers ‘that you couldn’t take such an odd world seriously, and yet all the time, in fact, he took it with a mortal seriousness’.18 Confronted by a world so strange that it seems unreal in comparison with pre-war complacency, Rowe has a histrionic dream in which he addresses his dead mother: ‘It sounds like a thriller, doesn’t it, but the thrillers are like life – more like life than you are, this lawn, your sandwiches, that pine. You used to laugh at the books Miss Savage read – about spies, and murders, and violence, and wild motor-car chases, but dear, that’s real life: it’s what we’ve made of the world since you died.’ (Ministry, 65)19 Yet inasmuch as melodrama and a strong sense of the absurd figure prominently in Greene’s writing they are balanced by attentiveness to the prosaic detail of ordinary life. In this aspect of his work, an active social conscience is in evidence, focusing on the various injustices perpetrated against the underprivileged and the vulnerable. Even the most ‘monstrous’ of his characters, Brighton Rock’s Pinkie, is portrayed as the unwitting product of an environment that has made him what he is:


Heaven was a word: hell was something he could trust. A brain was only capable of what it could conceive, and it couldn’t conceive what it had never experienced; his cells were formed of the cement school-playground, the dead fire and the dying man in the St Pancras waiting-room, his bed at Frank’s and his parents’ bed. 20 Pinkie’s mawkish self-pity and adolescent rage manifest themselves as a desire to annihilate the world altogether. As the most vicious of Greene’s egotists – characters such as Raven, Acky, Lime, Bendrix, Scobie and Pyle – Pinkie is the terminus ad quem of this particular psychopathology. But if we think of him alongside Raven, the first of Greene’s ressentimentfilled protagonists, then we can see that such figures are social types as much as they are psychological cases.21 Emerging from the depths of a world that makes no allowance for them, they expose the class fault-lines of 1930s’ British society and the hypocrisy with which they were veiled. Greene noted of this period that it was impossible to believe in patriotic values, imperial aspirations, civic purposes or constitutional politics in a time of economic depression and hunger marches. Raven was thus an exemplary figure: ‘It was no longer a Buchan world. The hunted man of A Gun for Sale . . . was Raven, not Hannay; a man out to revenge himself for all the dirty tricks of life, not to save his country’ (Ways, 54). Yet although Raven is the most fully-fledged of Greene’s early anti-heroes, he is not the first character to be hostile to the social order, for It’s a Battlefield and England Made Me are centrally concerned with Greene’s ‘sense of capitalism staggering from crisis to crisis’ (Ways, 31). The most noticeable feature of both It’s a Battlefield and England Made Me is the extent to which their protagonists are bereft of any sustaining belief system or ideology. Written and set in a decade usually associated with the politicization of social and literary life, these two novels depict a fracturing world in which there are neither clear-cut public causes nor trustworthy personal relationships. It’s a Battlefield is marked by scepticism, while England Made Me is suffused with world-weariness, but both books contradict Stephen Spender’s glib assertion that this ‘was one of those intervals in history in which events make the individual feel that he counts’.22 On the contrary, in these texts the individual counts for nothing. It’s a Battlefield is peopled by characters who struggle with personal difficulties, and although private crises intersect with public concerns, the public and the private never coalesce. In the Assistant Commissioner’s jaundiced view, the country is a chaos of unrelated conflicts and is not ‘on the edge of revolution’ at all: ‘The truth is, nobody cares about anything but his own troubles. Everybody’s too busy fighting his own little battle to think of the next man.’23 The idealistic Caroline Bury wants to believe that she and the Assistant Commissioner are ‘not fighting their own battle in ignorance of the general war’, but the novel suggests that there is in fact no general war at


23

all, because society is splintering into fragments. In England Made Me, by contrast, the individual is depicted as an anachronism, as an escapee from the past who has wandered unwitting and unprepared into a present run by multinational corporations, high fi nance and global strategists. The plausible but fraudulent Anthony Farrant, a middle-class Englishman run to seed, is displaced in spatial as well as temporal terms. His sister Kate recognizes that in contrast to the modern businessman Krogh, ‘he’s not the future, he’s not self-sufficient, just one of us, out of his proper place’, while Anthony himself admits that he’s giving up because he’s ‘not young enough and not old enough: not young enough to believe in a juster world, not old enough for the country, the king, the trenches to mean anything to me at all’.24 If It’s a Battlefield asks whether there is any pattern to be discerned in social conflict, then England Made Me probes the fate of the individual in a globalizing world economy. But we are not talking about just any ‘individual’ here. The characters depicted in these novels belong to a particular historical period and to a determinate social conjuncture. To revert for a moment to Spender, he is more right when he suggests that ‘in a crisis of a whole society every work takes on a political look either in being symptomatic of that crisis . . . or in avoiding it’.25 Of what, then, are the two novels under discussion symptomatic? Most obviously, a crisis of ideology. Notwithstanding his four-week membership of the Communist Party, to which he signed up as a jest, Greene might best be described as something of a ‘fellow-traveller’ in the 1930s.26 Although he was sympathetic to Communism, he saw the writer as an oppositional but non-partisan figure. For Greene, the novelist’s job was to sympathize with dissidence from all quarters, and this precluded the writing of literature that sided with any particular political outlook. 27 Greene’s participation in a literature of commitment was always going to be unlikely, but this does not mean that he refused to deal with social concerns. It means that he refused to be didactic: ‘I don’t want to use literature for political ends, nor for religious ends . . . I don’t fight injustice: I express a sense of injustice, for my aim is not to change things but to give them expression.’28 The crisis of ideology to which I have referred was not Greene’s crisis but a cultural crisis, which his novels diagnose and anatomize. Greene’s early novels are characterized by a longing for social change, but they give no sense that it is imminent or even possible. Their protagonists adhere to no consistent ideology or coherent political programme, and the strength of their longing for change seems to lie in inverse proportion to their capacity for bringing it about. In Stamboul Train, for example, the doomed socialist Dr Czinner sees moral scruples as a luxury permissible only to those who already possess the power he knows he will never have; thus he reflects that he ‘would have welcomed generosity, charity, meticulous codes of honour to his breast if he could have succeeded, if the world


had been shaped again to the pattern he loved and longed for’.29 In The Ministry of Fear the dissolution of established distinctions between right and wrong, which unmoors its protagonist from any reality he can recognize, is expressed as a shift in literary codes: ‘The Little Duke is dead and betrayed and forgotten; we cannot recognise the villain and we suspect the hero and the world is a small cramped place.’30 But it is in It’s a Battlefield, which stealthily rewrites Conrad’s The Secret Agent, that loss of belief in viable ideologies is most marked. The Secret Agent suggests that police and revolutionaries are trapped in a pointless dynamic, are counters in a game that has no purpose and can have no resolution. The anarchists may be portrayed as parasites and charlatans, but no higher purpose is attributed to the forces of law and order. The Assistant Commissioner in It’s a Battlefield is a no less disillusioned figure. Considering that his job is ‘simply to preserve the existing order’ (Battlefield, 19), he sees himself as a mercenary, ‘and a mercenary soldier could not encourage himself with the catchwords of patriotism – my country right or wrong; self-determination of peoples; justice’ (Battlefield, 129). Like the idealistic Czinner, the Assistant Commissioner is a utopian who yearns for ‘an eternal life on earth watching the world grow reasonable, watching nationalities die and economic chaos giving way to order’ (Battlefield, 191). But this is a passive vision from which agency has been expunged; it is a dream of change magically taking place all by itself. Reality lies in the nausea the Assistant Commissioner feels at the situation under his nose, and this nausea discloses his impotence in the face of injustice and his sadness that he finds it ‘impossible to believe in a great directing purpose’ (Battlefield, 191), impossible to have ‘any conviction’ that he is ‘on the right side’ (Battlefield, 201–2). Indeed, the very notion of clear-cut ‘sides’ is undermined in It’s a Battlefield, which ends by suggesting that the espousal of causes may be motivated more by the desire to have faith in something (anything?) than by their intrinsic political or social merits. England Made Me provides a depressing picture of what happens when nationalities start to die: they are assimilated by multinational capital. It is of particular interest in this text that the nationality in question is English, for what is delineated here is the gradual crumbling of a once powerful nation-state in the face of global economic forces. Anthony Farrant and his semblable, the pathetic Minty, are products of a country that, as the novel’s title insists, has literally made them. Yet both characters are symbols not only of the country’s failure to keep pace with a changing economic and political landscape but also of its refusal to recognize this fact. Even more damningly, Farrant is above all a fake, a disreputable figure whose misdemeanours dog his every step but who is able to conceal them beneath a façade of good breeding. With his interchangeable public school ties, his invented military ranks, his fabricated autobiographical stories, and his effortless charm, Farrant is the epitome of the Englishman whose job it is


25

to administer the affairs of the world. Except that his cuffs are frayed, his vita is a record of disgrace, and he has no future. No future. The words reverberate through this text, which dissects the pretensions of a superseded class and skewers the illusions that so precariously sustain it. Yet Farrant is also a tragic figure. He is a man who in his childhood attempted to escape from the class values being imposed on him but who was forced to conform, with disastrous consequences. The novel’s depiction of the process by which both he and Minty were reeled in reads like an object lesson in the interpellation of subjectivity by means of violent coerciveness. Minty’s fawning passion for the school that brutalized him reveals a profound and inescapable self-abasement: ‘The school and he were joined by a painful reluctant coition, a passionless coition that leaves everything to regret, nothing to love, everything to hate, but cannot destroy the idea: we are one body’ (England, 83). Farrant’s entire life, in turn, has been dominated by an authoritarian father and his proxy, the public school where he learned ‘to conform, to pick up the conventions, the manners of all the rest’ (England, 141). A major theme of the novel concerns his sister Kate’s regret that she convinced him to return to school when he ran away, and her sense that she is responsible for making him what he is, but the father’s role in moulding Farrant’s identity has been equally decisive: Anthony learning (the beating in the nursery, the tears before the boarding school) to keep a stiff upper lip, Anthony learning (the beating in the study when he brought home the smutty book with the pretty pictures) that you must honour other men’s sisters . . . yes, he loved Anthony and he ruined Anthony. (England, 63–4) The result of this upbringing is a figure whose identity has been hollowed out, leaving him a shell whose ‘character’ is compounded of empty moral clichés and obsolete social traditions. Greene captures Farrant’s inherent falseness in a passage that shows his ‘personality’ to be a masquerade: The more he drank, the further back he plunged in time. His slang began the evening bright and hollow with the immediate post-war years, but soon it dripped with the mud of the trenches, culled from the tongues of ex-officers gossiping under the punkas of zero hour and the Victoria Palace, of the leave-trains and the Bing Boys. (England, 31) England Made Me depicts Farrant as one of J.M. Barrie’s ‘lost boys’, a naïf who is out of time as well as out of place. Taken away from the shabby London milieu with which he is so familiar, Farrant is forced to confront the gleaming modernity of Krogh’s Stockholm business concern. There is


of course an irony in the fact that he has hitherto made his desultory way in the tropics of the East, in the far-flung corners of a decaying British Empire, for the novel dramatizes the transition from an imperialism based on the control of territory to an expansionism based on the deterritorialized flow of liquid money. Farrant’s out-of-date and ersatz Englishness is risible in large part because the class he represents has no understanding of the irrelevance of its worldview to the economic and political reality of the 1930s. If in It’s a Battlefield and The Ministry of Fear sentiments such as patriotism, duty and justice no longer seem credible, then in England Made Me they simply have no purchase on the world at all. More specifically, the national/ racial distinctions between different countries and peoples on which patriotism depends are dismissed as entirely beside the point. Anthony’s lofty refusal to go and work in Stockholm (‘ “I don’t like foreigners” ’) is met with Kate’s irritation at his inability to keep up with the times: ‘ “My dear . . . you’re out of date. There are no foreigners in a business like Krogh’s; we’re internationalists there, we haven’t a country” ’ (England, 11). The modernity of a business such as this is signalled by its refusal to be limited by territorial boundaries. The language of nationalism is consigned to the dustbin of history, to be taken over by a rhetoric of placelessness. This cosmopolitanism is inextricable from what Anthony Giddens describes as a process of ‘disembedding’, that is, ‘the “lifting out” of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space’, which he sees as a defi ning feature of modernity.31 Farrant and Minty have no future because they cannot accommodate themselves to the spatio-temporal transformation that disembedding brings about. Although they long for a return ‘home’, this longing represents nostalgia not just for a ‘place’ but for a ‘time’ – in other words, for a past that has been shown up as a fantasy. Yet at the same time, ‘home’ is in this text consistently constructed metonymically in terms of specific locations, as though a return to them could somehow bring about a return to a world in which ‘England’ (as place and as site of specific values) has not been destroyed by transnational modernity. Giddens suggests that the ‘advent of modernity increasingly tears space away from place by fostering relations between “absent” others’ and that ‘locales are thoroughly penetrated by and shaped in terms of social influences quite distant from them’.32 In England Made Me this shift from ‘place’ to ‘space’ is signified partly by the contrast between a notion of ‘here’ that belongs to the past and a conception of ‘there’ that signifies the future and partly by the ubiquity of global business: ‘Krogh like God Almighty in every home; impossible in the smallest cottage to do without Krogh; Krogh in England, in Europe, in Asia.’33 Kate is described as ‘a dark tunnel connecting two landscapes’ (England, 139), and she functions as a link between Anthony (the past) and Krogh (the future). Although she is marked by the ruthlessness that characterizes Krogh, she is nonetheless nostalgic for the values that are being superseded,


27

even if, in the end, she rejects the past because it is associated with a routed nationalism. But Kate is ultimately as lost in this frontierless world as Anthony: ‘Good Looks and Conscience, she thought, the fi ne flowers of our class. We’re done, we’re broke, we belong to the past, we haven’t the character or the energy to do more than hang on to something new for what we can make out of it’ (England, 135). In the end, the notion of ‘England’ as a touchstone has been so discredited that Kate, a deracinated cosmopolitan, is simply ‘moving on’, while the dead Anthony, ‘the refuse of a changing world’, stands as the symbol of a defunct class. His inevitable doom has of course been prefigured early on when he turns his eyes on his perceptive sister: ‘They were as blank as the end pages of a book hurriedly turned to hide something too tragic or too questionable on the last leaf’ (England, 13). Greene’s belief that the writer should not take sides but should try to grasp his characters’ motivations comes across strongly in England Made Me. Given that his political leanings were to the Left, his portrayal of Farrant was a remarkably sympathetic one, even if his account of national identity and its helplessness in the face of economic globalization was unremittingly critical.34 In England Made Me sympathy is granted to the members of a still relatively privileged class, but in other novels of the 1930s and 1940s, such as It’s a Battlefield, A Gun for Sale, Brighton Rock and The Ministry of Fear, it is extended to those who have never had the opportunities vouchsafed a Farrant or a Minty. Desperately impoverished figures such as Raven (A Gun for Sale) and Pinkie (Brighton Rock) are shown in these texts to be the real ‘refuse’ of capitalist modernity. The 1930s and 1940s were for Greene characterized by economic chaos, political uncertainty and ideological confusion. Above all, perhaps, they were marked by poverty. Various writers of the period testify to this aspect of interwar life, most obviously in books such as Walter Brierley’s Means-Test Man (1935), Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole (1933), Lewis Jones’s Cwmardy (1937) and We Live (1939), and George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). Greene does not explore this terrain in anything like the detail found in these books, but he is acutely aware of the world they describe. It’s a Battlefield, for example, is not just concerned with the Assistant Commissioner’s musings about abstract justice but also with the reality of automated factory work and the sense of hopelessness induced by blighted domestic conditions.35 A Gun for Sale and Brighton Rock, in turn, depict protagonists who are the victims of extreme poverty, their class resentment manifesting itself as violence against a persecuting world. A Gun for Sale and Brighton Rock are especially attentive to the issue of housing, which was so central to debates about how to ameliorate poverty in the period.36 A strong sense of social decay permeates both novels. In A Gun for Sale, for example, Anne Crowder is struck by the jerry-built nature of a new estate, revealingly situated at the margins of the town: ‘These


houses represented something worse than the meanness of poverty, the meanness of the spirit. They were on the very edge of Nottwich now, where the speculative builders were running up their hire-purchase houses.’37 This reflection has a wider resonance, of course, since the novel is also concerned with profiteering and suggests in a more general sense that England itself is becoming a speculative enterprise. (Another example in Greene’s work of the way that internationalism denotes not a ‘league of nations’ spirit but the cartelization of an increasingly global economy. 38) By the end of a book in which it is revealed that respected ‘Establishment’ figures have been fomenting war in order to boost profits, Anne will wonder, ‘staring out at the bleak frozen countryside, that perhaps even if she had been able to save the country from a war, it wouldn’t have been worth the saving’ (Gun, 183).39 For what is there to be saved in a country that is divided against itself? No positive answer to such a question could ever be found in Brighton Rock, in which living conditions are far worse. Pinkie’s dismissal of Nelson Place merely conceals his intimate knowledge of the slum in which he himself grew up: he could have drawn its plan as accurately as a surveyor on the turf: the barred and battlemented Salvation Army gaff at the corner: his own home beyond in Paradise Piece: the houses which looked as if they had passed through an intensive bombardment, flapping gutters and glassless windows, an iron bedstead rusting in a front garden, the smashed and wasted ground in front where houses had been pulled down for model flats which had never gone up.40 Such descriptions show the extent to which Greene sees Raven and Pinkie as products of a specific and historically locatable social environment. To put it like this is not to absolve them of responsibility for their actions but to explain what motivates them. The main characters of A Gun for Sale and Brighton Rock are driven by a rage that may well be nourished by large dollops of self-serving self-pity, but it is recognizable as class rage for all that. Raven’s obsession with proving that he is educated, his belief that his disfigured face is ‘a badge of class’ (Gun, 14), his loyalty to people ‘of his own kind’, and his growing ‘sense of injustice’ (Gun, 29) at the way they are treated, all indicate his awareness of social inequality. A man ‘made by hatred’ (Gun, 66), Raven is at the outset of the novel entirely preoccupied with himself. Although he is conscious of how he has been formed as a subject, it is only as the novel unfolds that this consciousness is partially extended to others. Early on it is said that he ‘had never felt the least tenderness for anyone’ (Gun, 66), but he later admits that had he known the politician he was to kill was a socialist he would not have committed the act: ‘ “I didn’t know the old fellow was one of us. I wouldn’t have touched him if I’d known he was like that” ’ (Gun, 129). The irony here is that the murdered man had cut down on military expenditure in order to generate


29

money for the clearance of slums. But Raven is only on the verge of selfconsciousness. The profiteer Sir Marcus describes him contemptuously as ‘ “this – waste product” ’ (Gun, 110), and so he is, although not in the way this sinister figure means. For Raven, who has always been excluded from society, functions as its ‘return of the repressed’: Anne’s feeling that ‘they need never go back to the scene’ of the crime is undermined by her uneasy recognition that ‘a shade of disquiet remained, a fading spectre of Raven’ (Gun, 184). A Gun for Sale and Brighton Rock are characterized above all by a profound sense of waste. This is not Eliot’s elegiac waste-landism – described by Orwell as ‘a lament over the decadence of Western civilisation (“We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men,” etc., etc.), a sort of twilight-of thegods feeling’ – but rather H.G. Wells’s more practical disgust at simple opportunities missed.41 Anne Crowder expresses this sense of a social rather than a metaphysical anger when she associates Raven with a tortured industrial landscape: ‘In this waste through which she travelled, between the stacks of coal, the tumbledown sheds, abandoned trucks in sidings where a little grass had poked up and died between the cinders, she thought of him again with pity and distress’ (Gun, 182). But the sentiment of pity may be no more effectual than the belief that one is living through a Götterdämmerung (and the ambiguous nature of pity is a major theme in later works such as The Heart of the Matter, A Burnt Out Case and The Human Factor). In Greene’s early writing sympathy for life’s victims is closely related to a sense of impotence in the face of events that are too big and too distant for the individual to have any sway over them. Individuals are simply swallowed up by impersonal social processes, economic changes and political machinations. Whether they are disillusioned, confused, scared or angry, they are unable to intervene meaningfully in social life or to alter the course of its direction. Pity is displaced by compassion in Greene’s early novels, a feeling that is perhaps compounded by his recognition that he has no solutions to the social problems he describes. But there is also intense anger. It is revealing that when Greene reflected in 1940 on the violence unleashed by the Second World War he reacted to it (just as Lewis and Pound had reacted to the First World War) with the hope that it might destroy the interwar world once and for all: Violence comes to us more easily because it was so long expected – not only by the political sense but by the moral sense. The world we lived in could not have ended any other way. The curious waste lands one sometimes saw from trains – the cratered ground round Wolverhampton under a cindery sky with a few cottages grouped like stones among the rubbish: those acres of abandoned cars round Slough: the dingy fortunetellers on the first-floor above the cheap permanent waves in a Brighton back street; they all demanded violence. (Essays, 334)


They demanded violence because they were themselves instances of a social violence perpetrated against people who could scarcely resist it. Greene’s work in this period belongs to the ‘late modernist’ context described by Tyrus Miller not just because it stitches together realism, melodrama and a tragicomic view of life’s inherent absurdity but because it discloses a symptomatic sense of frustration at the powerlessness of the beleaguered individual. As Rowe is informed in The Ministry of Fear: ‘One must avoid self-importance, you see. In five hundred years’ time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this little episode would not exist. There will be plenty of other causes. You and me and poor Jones will not even figure in a footnote. It will be all economics, politics, battles’ (Ministry, 188).

Notes 1. Joseph Conrad, ‘Preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” ’, in Conrad’s Prefaces to His Works (New York: Haskell, 1971), pp. 49–54, 49. 2. See Daniel Pick, War Machine: the Rationalization of Slaughter in the Modern Age (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 3. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1978), 83–109, 83–4. 4. Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering: an Autobiography (London: John Calder, 1982), 6. 5. Wyndham Lewis, Wyndham Lewis on Art: Collected Writings, 1913–1956, ed. Walter Michel and C.J. Fox (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969), 195; Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: a Memoir (New York: New Directions, 1970), 142, 144. 6. George Orwell, ‘Inside the Whale’, in Essays, ed. John Carey (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 211–49, 219. 7. Christopher Caudwell, Studies and Further Studies in a Dying Culture (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971). 8. Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, 256. For Greene’s welcoming review of Lewis’s book, see ‘Homage to the Bombardier’ in Graham Greene, Reflections, ed. Judith Adamson (London: Reinhardt, 1990), 52–4. 9. Graham Greene, Collected Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 129, Greene’s ellipses. Greene is reflecting here on the ending of the third novel in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End tetralogy, A Man Could Stand Up (1926). He was disappointed with the fourth volume, The Last Post (1928), which he described as ‘a disaster’; in his view it mistakenly tidied up the confusion and uncertainty at the end of A Man Could Stand Up. See Graham Greene, Collected Essays, 128. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Essays, followed by page number. 10. Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, 249–51 and 339–43. 11. Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 12. 12. Miller, Late Modernism, 13, 14. 13. Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, 84. 14. Miller, Late Modernism, 24. 15. See Graham Greene, Ways of Escape (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 33. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Ways, followed by page number. In ‘Homage to the


16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

34.

31

Bombardier’ Greene dismisses Eliot along with Joyce and Pound: ‘Somehow these great and good men lack, for me, the legendary excitement – perhaps a younger generation may fi nd these the most thrilling pages’ (Greene, Reflections, 52). An unconscious echo of something once read or homage to an admired writer? Compare Ford on James: ‘He gives you an immense – and an increasingly tragic – picture of a Leisured Society that is fairly unavailing, materialist, emasculated – and doomed. No one was more aware of all that than he’ (Ford Madox Ford, Return to Yesterday, ed. Bill Hutchings (Manchester: Carcanet, 1999), 164). Greene cites Conrad’s remark in Essays, 21. Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), 33. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Ministry, followed by page number. Acknowledging his ‘inclination towards melodrama’, which originates in his ‘adolescent reading’, Greene notes that ‘there are times in fact when I’m inclined to think that our entire planet gravitates inside a fog-belt of melodrama’. MarieFrançoise Allain, The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene, trans. Guido Waldman (London: The Bodley Head, 1983), 37, 65. Graham Greene, Brighton Rock (London: Vintage, 2004), 248. Andrews in The Man Within (1929) is perhaps a prototype, but his rancour pales into insignificance in comparison to Raven’s. Stephen Spender, The Thirties and After: Poetry, Politics, People (London: Fontana, 1978), 25. Graham Greene, It’s a Battlefield (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 188. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Battlefield, followed by page number. Graham Greene, England Made Me (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 158 and 180. Hereafter cited parenthetically as England, followed by page number. Spender, The Thirties and After, 25. For his account of how and why he joined the Communist Party, see Graham Greene, A Sort of Life (London: The Bodley Head, 1971), 132–3. Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene and V.S. Pritchett, Why Do I Write? An Exchange of Views between Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene and V.S. Pritchett (London: Percival Marshall, 1948), 46–47, 48. Allain, The Other Man, 81. Graham Greene, Stamboul Train (London: Vintage, 2004), 136. Greene, The Ministry of Fear, 89. The reference is to Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Little Duke, a novel that functions as a key, if lighthearted, intertextual reference point throughout The Ministry of Fear. The simplistic values put forward in Yonge’s text are swamped in Greene’s novel by a paranoid melodrama that has the savour of truth. Like Orwell, who envisaged a ‘shrinking world’, Greene sees the shift from one kind of literature to another as evidence of a shutting down of cultural and social possibilities. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (London: Polity, 1990), 21. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 18–19. Thus ‘here’ is troped as ‘the scented pillow, the familiar photographs, the pawned bags, the empty pockets, home’, while ‘there’ is ‘the glassy cleanliness, the latest fashionable sculpture, the sound-proof floors and dictaphones and . . . the reports from Warsaw, Amsterdam, Paris and Berlin’ (England, 15). For a clue to the nature of this sympathy, see Greene’s claim that Anthony was based on his brother Herbert and that he himself ‘shared many of Anthony’s experiences’ (Ways, 31).

32 British Fiction After Modernism 35. See, for example: ‘Between death and disfigurement, unemployment and the streets, between the cog-wheels and the shafting, the girls stood, as the hands of the clock moved round from eight in the morning until one (milk and biscuits at eleven) and then the long drag to six’ (Battlefield, 29). 36. See Noreen Branson and Margot Heinemann, Britain in the Nineteen Thirties (St Albans: Panther, 1973), 200–22; Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: an Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). 37. Graham Greene, A Gun for Sale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 44. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Gun, followed by page number. 38. It is worth noting that in The Ministry of Fear the breakdown of distinctions between ‘England’ and ‘Germany’ is related to erosion of clear ideas about what constitutes ‘crime’ and ‘legality’. In the end, the spreading of an all-pervasive atmosphere of fear, initially attributed to an insidious secret German ‘ministry’, is seen as an omnipresent feature of modern life itself (see Ministry, 46–8, 121, and 220). 39. Even the stolid policeman Mather sees England as ‘this darkening land, flowing backwards down the line’ (Gun, 185). 40. Greene, Brighton Rock, 95. 41. Orwell, ‘Inside the Whale’, 227. Wells’s Tono-Bungay ends with George Ponderevo noting ‘the immense inconsequence of my experiences’ and concluding: ‘It is, I see now that I have it all before me, a story of activity and urgency and sterility. I have called it Tono-Bungay, but I had far better have called it Waste.’ (H.G. Wells, Tono-Bungay and A Modern Utopia (London: Odhams Press, 1933), 300.)

3 The Case for Storm Jameson Elizabeth Maslen

In this chapter, I want to make a case for the importance of Storm Jameson as a writer, and in the process to explore the place of realism in the twentieth century. Jameson, a Yorkshire woman, was born in 1891 and was the first woman to read English at the University of Leeds. Her writing career began during the First World War, and by the time she died in 1986 she had written over forty novels. Her reputation was very high in her lifetime, as a novelist and as a writer of non-fiction – she was, like Winifred Holtby, very much in demand both as a literary critic and as a commentator on social and political issues. She was also president of the English section of PEN during the late 1930s and early 1940s, helping refugees from Europe in their struggles against British reluctance to help. One reason why I’m interested in her is because, in my view, she offers a much-needed counterbalance to Virginia Woolf and the high modernists as regards the practice and perceived function of fiction. For there has been something very restrictive in the way academics in the Western anglophone world have tended to categorize the literature of the twentieth century. My argument is that Storm Jameson’s novels, like those of Christina Stead and Angus Wilson, for instance, have in part suffered because of this mania to define fictions by such labels as modernist, postmodernist, realist (this last usually in a derogatory sense and cited as in opposition to modernism, implying a medium which is incapable of manipulation, being in essence conservative, reactionary, old-fashioned). Throughout the twentieth century, the tendency to pigeonhole fiction within one of these categories has shown remarkable resilience, despite lessons to be learnt from postcolonial and diasporic writings – and as a result, writers who cannot be slotted into one or other of these categories have tended to be at best viewed with suspicion, at worst dismissed as ‘middlebrow’, by many academics in the West. I am not of course denying that these labels have a function – but when they are treated as ultimate determinants of what is and what is not admirable in fiction, often without precise definition (are they being used as tied to a particular period? Do they imply a specific attitude to content 33

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and style? Or a precise attitude to ‘modernity’?), they can blind us to many texts which we neglect to our very great loss. Reasonably enough, work which is textually complex is very attractive to the academy, since it both invites and is enriched by analysis of various kinds. But why is this complexity so often perceived as only functioning on the level of style or of interiority – why is realism so often perceived (perversely, in the light of the evidence) as by its very nature reactionary, incapable of moulding from within? And why have fictions which have engaged with social and political issues too often been regarded with suspicion? There have of course been those who have protested against this attitude. Margaret Atwood, for instance, argues in Second Words: In some countries, an author is censored not only for what he says but for how he says it, and an unconventional style is therefore a declaration of artistic freedom. Here we are eclectic; we don’t mind experimental styles, in fact we devote learned journals to their analysis; but our critics sneer somewhat at anything they consider ‘heavy social commentary’ . . . Stylistic heavy guns are dandy, as long as they aren’t pointed anywhere in particular. We like the human condition as long as it is seen as personal and individual. Placing politics and poetics in the world in two watertight compartments is a luxury . . . Most countries in the world cannot afford such luxuries.1 By quoting Atwood here, I am not suggesting that all Jameson offers is a kind of realism which involves ‘heavy social commentary’, although arguably the intensity of her observations of her wide-ranging characters and their situations can be viewed in that light. But I am trying to arrive at some of the reasons as to why the Anglo-American preoccupation with labels has been damaging to Jameson – simply because she doesn’t fit. And if we turn to the label ‘modernism’, I would argue that she fares no better. Michael Levenson, for instance, has warned that ‘it will prove better to be minimalist in our defi nitions of the conveniently flaccid term Modernist and maximalist in our account of the diverse modernizing works and movements, which are sometimes deeply congruent with one another, and just as often opposed or even contradictory’.2 Levenson rightly insists on the useful distinction between a narrow definition of the term ‘modernism’ and the concept of modernity, too often linked as if inseparable. High modernism is arguably restrictive in its approach to many of the concerns of twentieth-century life – that complex mixture of the personal, social and political, a mix which often results in contradictions and confusions; Jameson is particularly good at highlighting these. Meanwhile the term ‘realism’, so often dismissed as in opposition to modernism (without clear definition of either term), has provoked much impassioned rhetoric, not only among critics, but among writers of fiction too. In the 1930s, Samuel

The Case for Storm Jameson

35

Beckett, for instance, refers to Marcel Proust’s distaste for ‘the realists and naturalists worshipping the offal of experience’, commenting on Proust’s ‘contempt for the literature that “describes” ’.3 Yet, more pertinently for Jameson, Salman Rushdie, writing in the 1980s, takes a very different position: description is itself a political act. The black American writer Richard Wright once wrote that black and white Americans were engaged in a war over the nature of reality. Their descriptions were incompatible. So it is clear that redescribing a world is the necessary fi rst step to changing it . . . The novel is one way of denying the official, politicians’ version of truth.4 But, like Stead and Wilson, Jameson has been largely ignored by academics because of this tendency to privilege those writers who concentrate on interiority or on foregrounding the intricacies of text and language. On the whole, throughout the twentieth century, there has been a tendency to downgrade political commitment in novels and to dismiss those who choose to develop versions of realism as taking an easy, conservative, old-fashioned line – the tag ‘nineteenth-century’ is often applied to realism to show how old-fashioned it is – as if, by definition, realism is stuck in a time warp. But surely it is time to take a fresh look at how realism has developed during the twentieth century, as is being done in relation to the visual arts. In his excellent work, Realism in Twentieth-Century Painting, Brendan Prenderville argues for a demonstrable plasticity in the development of realism throughout the last century. He points to a simple distinction when he says, ‘Painting has given rise both to radical and to conservative versions of realism, and where it has been radical, it has been modern.’5 Certainly, the same can be said about realism in the novel – Jameson is a prime example of a writer who develops realism radically, largely by the perspectives she offers on her subject matter. Prenderville’s review of painting offers other parallels – for example, he points to the impact Freud had in the interwar years, showing how a number of realist painters focus on a particular kind of ‘reality’ – they focus, he says, on ‘the “heimlich” [homely or canny] which has become an object of uncertainty, “unheimlich” [unhomely or uncanny]’.6 This approach, in the increasingly threatening atmosphere of the 1930s, is one which Jameson uses constantly in her fiction; one of her most effective examples of this is the futuristic novel In the Second Year (1936), where she paints vividly familiar English landscapes in which a brutal fascist government comes to power – the distortion of the ‘heimlich’ is deeply disturbing. Her approach to realism throughout her career mirrors that of the Italian painter Guttuso, who, Prenderville reminds us, came to London in 1955 to argue that ‘Realism today’ was ‘essentially concerned

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with the present, “strictly connected with modern reality and culture”. It meant involvement.’7 Unlike Guttuso, Jameson is not of the far left, not a communist, but her commitment to realism, the plasticity of realism, is intense, and passionately argued in many articles, for her work is always ‘strictly connected with modern reality and culture’. But what lies behind her kind of realism? She doesn’t, in fact, look to English models. When she discusses realism, she most often refers to Stendhal – a lifelong icon, and the subject of her last book in 1979. But she does not indulge in imitations of a bygone master, who was pre-eminently of his own time; what she offers, at her best, is a fresh interpretation for her own age of the essence of a work like Le Rouge et Le Noir. She offers, to borrow a phrase from Prenderville, a ‘critical realism and a critique of realism’; she develops Stendhal’s low-key perceptiveness about the follies of society, his use of a colloquial, easily accessible style, and above all his skill in letting pathos or passion rise out of a situation or a conversation, rather than being imposed on it.8 And she does this in a wholly modern way: her work has absorbed the ideas of Marx (she was a committed socialist – her work centred not on party politics, but on passionate fights on behalf of poverty and refugees, for overseas writers without a hearing in Britain, whether Czech, maybe, or the Indian writer, Mulk Raj Anand). Her work is of her time in its exploration of Nietzschean ideas, of the need to achieve balance between the Apollonian and the Dionysian (Nazi so-called ‘logic’ was seen by Jameson and many of her contemporaries as the triumph of the Dionysian, and this is a theme in many of her works from the 1930s through to the 1950s). Jameson’s work is also imbued with the ideas of Freud and Jung – her understanding of interiority stems from them, together with her awareness of cultural and group memory – something of which her knowledge of Nazi attempts to eradicate certain languages and cultural practices, and her work with refugees taught her the value. In all, her work is redolent with the modernity, the unstable, complex, ever-changing modernity of her time. And she debates the responsibility of the writer constantly over the years. Much of Jameson’s non-fiction in the interwar years supports pacifism and pleads for the eradication of poverty, since she sees this as the chief breeding ground for those who advocate war. Vera Brittain adopted her as a friend and confidante after Winifred Holtby’s death, seeing her as a kindred spirit in her commitment to peace. But Jameson is also very alert – given her deep personal knowledge of Europe, both East and West – to the threat of fascism, and is appalled by what she learns in her travels abroad, and by the danger Oswald Mosley exposes at home; her pacifism struggles with the perils of remaining passive. In an essay of 1934, ‘The Defence of Freedom’, for instance, she deplores any artist who ‘can like to forget’ to engage with such issues, and she points to what is happening in Europe.9 In another essay of 1934, ‘The Twilight of Reason’, she argues that


37

‘over a wide area of Europe the irrational revolt has proved stronger than the promptings of reason’, but she also notes that ‘the revolt against reason has been able to make use of the energy of reason to help it’ – a brutal logic built on irrational foundations is the threat.10 In such circumstances, we can see why Jameson sees an intelligent use of realist strategies originating in Stendhal’s work as the way to present the current situation in Europe and in Britain in all its complexity to readers – too much innovation distracts from the main thrust of an implied message; innovation must be shrewdly balanced against expectation if new ideas are not to be rejected by an audience often resistant to the vast changes under way. Of course the author is inevitably a product of her times as well: we can see Jameson still struggling to remain a pacifist – but unlike Brittain, who is always haunted by the deaths of her brother and lover in the First World War, Jameson (who also lost her brother in that war) is very much of the present, very aware of Europe and indeed of a contemporary world where old-style frontiers are becoming meaningless, and convinced that as a writer she has a duty to alert her readers to what is going on. In many ways Jameson’s insights are ahead of her times in her sense of Britain’s interconnectedness with Europe and global events. Revealingly, she says of Europe in another essay of 1934, ‘our frontier is not the Rhine. In actual fact, we have no frontier, or our frontiers are the edges of the world.’11 And in 1935, when many writers who deplore racism are still in favour of a kind of ideal imperialism, Jameson asserts, while trying to assess where she stands in relation to patriotism, ‘I wish our Empire were no larger than Norway’s.’12 For a writer so very much involved with ideas, with passionately upheld causes, a style must surely be evolved which will serve contentious, contemporary content and make it accessible to its readership. The essay for which Jameson is best known today is ‘Documents’, originally written for the journal Fact in 1937. Publishing it later in Civil Journey, she makes light of it, saying, This essay is as mild, orthodox and one-sided as the annual conference of the Conservative Party, and much more so than any Mothers’ Meeting. But then a Mothers’ Meeting, in Yorkshire at any rate [remember she’s a Yorkshire woman], could give points in revolutionary outlook to any nest of singing rebels in Bloomsbury or elsewhere.13 The mischievous reference to Bloomsbury is pointed, and the essay is in fact far from mild. But Jameson does not target Bloomsbury as such. She protests instead against a socialist realist approach which sees working-class life as the only legitimate subject-matter; she wants to treat society holistically since no class exists in isolation. She also doubts the efficacy of the party line ‘revolutionary hero’; importantly, she quotes Stendhal in her support when she says ‘heroes’ only come to life if they are involved with


the everyday – in all her best novels, she maintains this approach, rooting major events in the street, and showing their impact on the lives of a range of ordinary people. But she also, in this essay, deplores old-style naturalism. What she wants are documents, modelled on something like a documentary fi lm – but this must be, it emerges, of a very specific kind. Narrative, she says, must be sharp, compressed, concrete, the dialogue short. Most importantly, ‘The emotion should spring directly from the fact’, while the writer’s self (that is, a subjectivity which is foregrounded in many novels about interiority – of course Jameson is not implying that point-of-view is not subjective) is kept out of the picture.14 Aesthetic, moral or philosophical questions should be implicit, not spelt out. For, she insists, ‘Writers write to be read.’15 She sees the mission of the modern writer as ‘how to make people listen to what they don’t want to hear’ and not to bore those who do; she knows a great deal about psychological denial, and is evolving strategies to cope with it.16 The kind of text she wants needs major skill, a well-honed craft; as she says, ‘It takes a . . . disciplined mind to handle a mass of material in such a way that only the significant details emerge.’17 And in another essay of the same year, she again attacks writers who choose to ignore ‘changes and threats of changes in the world’, announcing that ‘a new Battle of the Books has begun’.18 This is Jameson’s clearest statement to date that she stands against those who pretend there is a status quo or who look back to the past, not just as to the roots of the present but as the sole arbiter for the present. The writing she advocates must be political, but not in any crude sense. Again there are echoes of Stendhal as she insists that ‘Politics’ must only appear ‘as a human activity, expressed through human passions and deeds’, for the writer, she tells her readers, is there to ‘enlarge their consciousness’; what is more, the writer must have a ‘willingness to travel, mentally if not physically’ to where new life is being born.19 So Jameson’s view of what is present is of a dynamic, a continual moving point between past and present, a constant site for reinterpretation and for constructed memory through the illusion of reality which realism offers. One way of approaching her work is through the kind of biography theory which Nicola King explores in her book Memory, Narrative and Identity: Remembering the Self. In many ways Jameson is very much involved in her work with the construction of memory for reasons which King probes. In her largely autobiographical Mary Hervey Russell books, the Mirror in Darkness trilogy of the 1930s, Jameson shows her awareness of what King addresses – namely that ‘consistency of consciousness and a sense of continuity between the actions and events of the past, and the experience of the present, would appear to be integral to a sense of personal identity’. 20 And she also shows awareness of something else which King pinpoints, namely the notion of memory as a continuous process of construction and of ‘retranslation’; for ‘it is in and through writing that memory constructs itself


39

as inevitably “belated”, but it is through writing that its “immediacy” is also re-created’.21 But Jameson’s interests in the importance of memory go further than this, largely because of her experiences within a warthreatened Europe and at home with uprooted refugees. Her novels addressing Europe demonstrate again and again what King argues: that ‘assumptions about the nature of memory shape not only notions of personal identity but also the relation of culture to its past, and the nature and structure of the narratives that reconstruct the past’. 22 Developing as a writer in a climate in which what was happening in Europe was largely being ignored by many writers in England, Jameson pleads for the writer’s mission to review the memories of the century, and to record situations almost as they happen as memory in process. We see Jameson wrestling with such concepts – just as Benjamin did in his essays – in her best novels. And she writes many excellent novels, developing ideas found in the essays from which I have quoted, and exploring the plasticity of realism with impressive invention. For instance, there is The Fort, published in 1941, and set in the previous June, as the Nazi forces were rolling into northern France. Jameson originally wrote it as a drama, and then turned it into a novel, shrewdly keeping the construction of a classic play in which she could control a situation of tragic dimensions. Accordingly, the novel has three chapters and obeys the unities of time, place and action: we are given twenty-four hours with English and French soldiers hiding in the cellar of a French farmhouse. The characters involved are two officers, one English, one French, who served in the First World War; two young French soldiers, one for capitulation, the other for resistance; one young English soldier, and a young German Nazi whom they capture (intellectually, these last two have much in common, but for the Nazism which binds the prisoner). Jameson’s dialogue is utterly accessible, modern and colloquial, emotion under strict control, and for the most part obeying the limits on those speaking together which Aristotle advocates; clearly she is using maximum constructional constraints on her creativity, given the freshness of such traumatic material. And it works powerfully, the men discussing their different views, their different ‘memories’, of how this war has reached such a pass. The older officers recall the last war (the English major hid in the selfsame cellar with a friend, Jamie, who was later killed); the young Englishman blames the older generation for the current situation; the young Frenchmen quarrel. The tragic tension grows: the German is taken out to be shot by the French officer, the two young Frenchmen fight, and one is accidentally killed, the surviving French leave to chance their luck – and the Germans arrive. The final moments of the novel are masterly: the Germans have entered the cellar and there has been a fight. As moonlight filters through the cellar shaft, the two remaining Englishmen appear to be asleep, and there is another young man standing by the shaft. He and the younger Englishman begin to talk, and gradually, without any


intervention from the author, it becomes clear that they are talking about different wars – but only tiny details point to this, the reader is very much involved in interpreting the clues, just as the realist painters that Prenderville examines involve the viewer in their work. Finally the older Englishman wakes up, and the final line of the novel is his: ‘ “Jamie!” he said. “What luck. When did you get back?” ’23 There is the final clue – Jamie was the young friend who was killed in the last war – but it is left to the reader to deduce that all those in the cellar are now dead; the dead of two wars, fought over the same ground, greet each other. The tragedy is complete, and all the more impressive for having been re-membered, constructed in such a disciplined way, so soon after the event; this is a novel devastatingly involved with modernity, but self-consciously containing its realism in a classical frame which both allows for the exploration of modern motifs and stresses the tragic ironies in what might be termed the traditional dilemmas of war. In another work, Then We Shall Hear Singing, published in 1942, Jameson turns more specifically to the importance of folk memory, the cultural memory of a society – but again her realism is offered not as straightforward record of an event but as a fable. While clearly this work refers to the fate of Czechoslovakia and the language and references draw on current events (such as Nazi biological experimentation and suppression of expressions of indigenous culture in Eastern Europe), it is set far in the future, its realism assuming the garb of folktale. The peasants in a village have their memories of their cultural past lobotomized to turn them into a docile workforce for their conquerors – the tale evokes a real-life tragedy, but the folktale frame allows for the kind of hopeful ending which a naturalist approach would not have permitted at that time. These are wartime novels, but Jameson continues to show an exciting capacity to reframe and rework realism after the war, very much in line with contemporary visual artists. There is, for instance, the powerful novel, The Black Laurel, published in 1947, which takes us to post-war Berlin, into a macabre world where the protagonist, Arnold, sees ‘the hangmen had done their work thoroughly, the body of Europe, flayed while still living, was stretched before him’.24 (Here, Jameson, despite her outspoken dislike of surrealism as a dominant mode, shows how surreal images can be harnessed to realism in this post-war world of a shattered civilization.) Conspiracies and vendettas abound but – the work is finely structured – Jameson’s view of documentary is never to be one-sided; she lets the devastation she paints, the damaged human beings of Berlin engage a reader’s sympathy before she re-draws, in vivid detail, the obscenities of the crushed Warsaw rising. She deliberately complicates the picture for her readers, forcing – as so many visual artists using realism were doing – her audience to take responsibility for an interpretation of what was being shown them. She does this again in The Hidden River (1955), which explores the difficult aftermath


41

of fraternization and collaboration in France. Here, a tale of Anglo-French friendship, conveyed in accessible contemporary terms, is devastatingly fractured by the figure of old Marie, dressed in black, and living within the very different rules of a Greek tragedy involving nemesis. The clashing of codes is another way of reminding us that modernity is always an impure concept – we cannot edit out continuities, good and bad, or conservatisms, the destructive with the constructive remembering, and opt only for what we may like to think of as progress. Jameson’s handling of her chosen medium, ringing the changes with great integrity within the frame of continuity, demonstrates exactly that. And for that reason hers is, for me, an important twentieth-century voice.

Notes 1. Margaret Atwood, Second Words: Selected Critical Prose (Toronto: Anansi, 1982), 396–7. 2. Michael Levenson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 3. 3. Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues (London: John Calder, 1999), 78–9. 4. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (London and Harmondsworth: Penguin and Granta, 1992), 13–14. 5. Brendan Prenderville, Realism in Twentieth-Century Painting (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000), 13. 6. Prenderville, Realism in Twentieth-Century Painting, 56. 7. Prenderville, Realism in Twentieth-Century Painting, 125. 8. Prenderville, Realism in Twentieth-Century Painting, 197. 9. Storm Jameson, ‘The Defence of Freedom’, Civil Journey (London: Cassell, 1939), 164. 10. Storm Jameson, ‘The Twilight of Reason’, Civil Journey (London: Cassell, 1939), 199. 11. Storm Jameson, ‘In the End’, Civil Journey (London: Cassell, 1939), 223. 12. Storm Jameson, ‘On Patriotism’, Civil Journey (London: Cassell, 1939), 248. 13. Storm Jameson, ‘Documents’, reprinted as ‘New Documents’ in Civil Journey (London: Cassell, 1939), 261. 14. Jameson, ‘Documents’, 270. 15. Jameson, ‘Documents’, 272. 16. Jameson, ‘Documents’, 273. 17. Jameson, ‘Documents’, 273. 18. Storm Jameson, ‘The Novel in Contemporary Life’, Civil Journey (London: Cassell, 1939), 277. 19. Jameson, ‘The Novel in Contemporary Life’, 293, 296, 303. 20. Nicola King, Memory, Narrative and Identity: Remembering the Self (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 2. 21. King, Memory, Narrative and Identity, 9. 22. King, Memory, Narrative and Identity, 28. 23. Storm Jameson, The Fort (London: Cassell, 1941), 159. 24. Storm Jameson, The Black Laurel (London: Macmillan, 1947), 35.

4 The Nooks and Crannies of her Being: Howard Spring’s Shabby Tiger and Northern Camp Paul Magrs

When we first moved to Manchester we were in a flat on one of those wharves where everything is Done Up. All the ex-warehouses had been redeveloped in the same red brick as the original mills and the viaducts, over which trains still rumble into Deansgate and into the heart of the city. We were just yards away from Coronation Street. On the Ordnance Survey map the fictitious street is even labelled – in italics, right inside Granada Studios, seemingly making it real. All around Coronation Street, Castlefield mimics its old red brick and cobbles in rather bijou fashion. In a bar round there I heard a Swedish girl asking the barman about the area’s history. ‘But this building, this bar . . . used to be a factory?’ ‘It were a mill, years ago . . .’ The blond barman, lilac shirt tucked neatly into trim black trousers, was rubbing a tea towel into pint glasses. He was like a miniature little man, all exact, and patient with her. I decided she wanted to keep him talking because she fancied him. ‘But it is the same building?’ ‘Oh . . . practically . . . I mean, they pulled it down, but they built it up again in the same kind of style, you know . . .’ It’s lounge bars everywhere round there now, along the canals. The kind of places where you can sit in retro moulded furniture and they play music from decades past very loudly. This is the landscape of contemporary Manchester storylines: Russell T. Davies and Paul Abbott in particular. Widely regarded as among the UK’s best TV drama writers, both Davies and Abbott began their careers on Manchester-based soaps and series, such as Coronation Street and Cracker. Both have written popular and criticallyacclaimed original drama series based in the city. In 2001, the year my partner and I moved to Manchester, Red Productions was making Russell 42

Howard Spring’s Shabby Tiger and Northern Camp

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T. Davies’s ITV drama series, Bob and Rose. It was a prime time show about a gay man who falls in love with a straight woman: they bump into each other on a night out in the city centre, and their story dramatizes the clash between the queer and the straight worlds. Bob and Rose’s paths intersect somewhere between the gay village on Canal Street and the straight pubs of Deansgate Locks. All of these places are a stone’s throw from Coronation Street. Manchester’s is a city centre marked out by stories. Most often its musical legends and landmarks are cited: the Smiths, the Hacienda, Oasis and so on, but these are streets mapped out in various forms of popular narrative, too. It is a city used to seeing itself on the telly, and in novels. It is a city very used to the idea of self-mythologizing: of promulgating and ironically undermining a grand idea of itself. The people here know their city, and they know the stories that are liable to go on in any given area. It is a city refurbishing itself, continually polishing up its scandalous old tales in a knowing and not-quite-jaded fashion. And there is a certain self-conscious, self-deprecating northern camp wit in that. This is the north of that chilly and gritty social realism that critics of the south and writers who have moved south have talked about quite dismissively ever since Mrs Gaskell was gadding about the place. It is an idea of the north that continued right through the twentieth century and especially in the novels and plays of the 1950s and 1960s. Both as a play and has a film, Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey gives a marvellous sense of that parochial grit and grime, much lampooned over the years. In this chapter, I want to suggest that these northern tales of the city – and especially those of the mid-twentieth-century novelist Howard Spring – are perhaps less a case of straightforward slumming it in dirty realism, than a very self-conscious and artful process of camp re-mythologizing. Manchester is a city that is forever doing itself up. These transformations have come about through a variety of means: the decline of traditional industries, terrorist attack, and the evolution of the city as a cultural brand. Manchester has a history of dreaming itself into new versions. Like Elsie Tanner, who was the original heroine and flame-haired floozy of Coronation Street, it knows when to put its glad rags back on after a knock back, and when to patch its make-up. It knows that making a go of something means making a show of yourself. The city’s fictions are entwined in its history. Coronation Street itself was created by Tony Warren in 1960 for Granada TV (the studio’s baleful yet oddly welcoming 1960s’ red neon logo still looks out over the city from the highest point of the roof). A kind of Mancunian Arabian Nights, Coronation Street is one of the longest, ongoing, still unfolding narratives in the world. In the 1990s, Warren (having left the production team in the mid-1960s never to return) published a series of four original blockbuster novels. The first of these, The Lights of Manchester (1991), was a roman à clef about creating the world’s most famous television show, demonstrating how


inextricably his storytelling and the life of the Street were linked with the voices and sights of Manchester. These novels of his were not just a gloss on his own early work for Granada TV. They stirred echoes of another Manchester-based writer from thirty years previously. Howard Spring’s manuscripts lie in the John Ryland’s library on Deansgate in the centre of Manchester, but for years his titles have been missing from bookshop shelves. Shabby Tiger (1934), Rachel Rosing (1935) and There is No Armour (1948) are titles from shortly before and after the Second World War which two generations ago would have been known and respected. Now they seem as remote and quaint as the Victorians: those titles somehow sound musty and irrecoverable. But these novels are, in fact, starting to reappear just recently, thanks to the help of the online publishing-byreader-demand that is returning to us the novels of other once popular and seminal, and now slightly obscured figures, such as Angus Wilson and Brian Aldiss. The first copies I ever saw of Howard Spring’s books were luridly covered Pan paperbacks: the pulpy kind that made everything look like it was either horror or thriller. Spring’s first novel, Shabby Tiger, came down to me in a rumpled paperback that had a cover depicting a nude woman being painted by some gorgeous, rumpled Gauguin type. This was a paperback from the 1960s and it was sheer, delightful pulp from a time when pulps had to be both sexy and gritty. Howard Spring had, at that point, been revived and repackaged by Pan paperbacks as if to give the low-down on the lowlife of the 1930s: the prostitutes, queers, Jews, rakes and wayward artists from between the wars. The tiger of the title and the savage Gauguin overtones of the jacket promised as much: this was a promise of authentic experience of the rough old days in Manchester. Before Coronation Street, and before the war, even. Before any of the city had been miraculously Done Up. Now, of course, as small presses get to work on reprinting and repackaging the ageless, priceless novels of the past, what comes to replace the sexy Pan version is a copy I picked up – fittingly enough – in the brand spanking new Lowry Museum over Salford Quays way. The building is a contemporary classic – all sweeping and futuristic aluminium curves. It was built to house the work of the Manchester-born twentieth-century painter L.S. Lowry. Famed for his iconic paintings of rudimentary matchstick men and matchstick cats and dogs, Lowry was, like the writers looked at in this chapter, concerned primarily with the lives of working-class people in and around Manchester. The new version of Spring’s fi rst novel that I bought in the Lowry Museum’s gallery shop came from a small and gallant press called ‘Memories’. At the start of the twenty-first century, Spring has been, by locals at least, heritage-industried. The promise is still the same in the jacket blurb and introduction: we will return you to a time when life was harder and dirtier. From the packaging of Shabby Tiger it seems safe to assume that we are dealing with razor-sharp


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documentary realism, and that character is to the forefront. The back cover of the Memories edition makes this plain: Meet . . . Anna Fitzgerald – a lovely creature, but with her own set of morals . . . Nick Faunt – a shabby artist with a touch of genius . . . Rachel Rosing – the cold-hearted gold digger. Her burning ambition will be her undoing. Just as Coronation Street was, at its outset, mistaken for social realism of the 1950s’ kitchen-sink type (and was actually a blend of the same, along with elements from 1930s’ film melodrama and the old music hall), so Spring’s fiction is inflected with a curious self-consciousness about the genres it passes through. Spring is a high-handed narrator. He handles a large cast of men and women on the make and has them dash back and forth through the heart of the city: from Cheetham Hill to Didsbury and back again on various assignations. Shabby Tiger is a novel of coincidence and random encounters in which one is as likely to fetch up soliciting around Piccadilly as flaunting in good company in the Lord Mayor’s apartments. Spring makes knowing use of several classic popular fiction narratives: primarily the rise of Anna Fitzgerald – the flighty, mouthy Irish housemaid – from homeless, fallen woman to blissfully happy Lady Faunt at the end of the novel. The novel opens with Anna walking away from the country home where she has been in service and where she has been made pregnant by the young lord of the manor. She has, however, given away her child and sets off on foot to Manchester in a green hat with a bobbing, broken feather to seek her fortune. She is relentlessly cheerful and ironic about the scrapes that she manages to get herself into. She is heading for the metropolis. She flicks her cigarette ash into the bluebells as she strides along. This is a very modern girl, with no time for nature. Hers is the very opposite of the journey out of the dirty city into the countryside made by the heroes of George Orwell in, say, Keep the Aspidistra Flying or by Nell Dunn’s eponymous heroine, thirty years later, in Poor Cow. Howard Spring’s Anna is looking keenly for a lift from a car: for something that promises her life and company. When she hooks up with Nick Faunt the artist, who is sleeping rough even though his father is rich, we learn that she is running from the big house in Chester because she feels it is a prison. This is when we learn that she was seduced by Master Tony, the son of the great house. To my mind, the prison house she is talking about is that of an earlier tradition of novels which concerned themselves solely with the sexual exploitation of another helpless female by another Mr B., as in Samuel Richardson’s 1740 novel Pamela. In this newer tradition the hounded housemaid simply ups and leaves, and in the first three pages of Shabby Tiger, Anna has already


extricated herself from the earlier narrative, dumped her bastard baby somewhere, nicked some good linen and walked out, towards the lights of Manchester and a new kind of storyline. Nick Faunt and the narrator both seem enchanted by this idea. Even when all the novel’s characters are introduced to us and their interconnected storylines start criss-crossing each other as elaborately as the tramlines by the city library, Anna is still at the centre: modern, insouciant and very self-aware: ‘You see, I’m a wellread girl with a neat turn for allegory.’1 When Nick and Anna arrive in town they happen to run into Rachel Rosing, a voluptuous adventuress who just happens to be the nursemaid to Anna’s abandoned child. Throughout the novel, Rachel will be Anna’s opposite number: fickle and exploitative where Anna is, if careless, steadfast in her affections. The coincidence of their meeting up in Manchester on Anna’s first night there is entirely stagy and contrived, as is every other chance encounter in the book. Nick’s rich old rake of a father, Sir George, happens upon nearly all of the novel’s waifs and strays by accident, one after the next. This is Howard Spring’s very contrived portrait of a city and its characters. These characters are brightly coloured and emblematic: music hall turns. They are full of repartee and glamour and they seem to exist on a knife-edge: there is destitution and there is luxury and very little in between. These are characters haunted by passion. The horny, elemental ghosts of characters from the pages of D.H. Lawrence and Mary Webb rise provocatively in these shabby attic rooms and rainy streets. When these characters cross each other’s paths those passions are ready to take them over, however close the confines. Rachel Rosing makes a play for the scruffy, bad-tempered, good-natured Nick Faunt. Their short entanglement deserves looking at as an example of Spring’s toying with genre and pastiche. The title of the novel actually refers to Nick, who, when stirred to Lawrentian violence, bears ‘the lithe tautness of a shabby tiger, tortured to a pitch when it springs’ (105). This is the point when Nick is starting to exhibit and sell his paintings – all of them of very modern subjects to do with speed and mobility. He is in a position very like Birkin’s, the hero of Lawrence’s Women in Love, furiously resentful of patronage and compromise. Of course, he runs off into the countryside, taking the breathless Rachel with him: ‘He could hear the far rumour of the party; and, damning God and man in fierce undertones, he fled from it down the flowery escarpment of the staircase’ (92). Why is that ‘flowery escarpment’ so funny? Again, I think it is a knowingness and a nimbleness on Spring’s part. He starts the Lawrentian passions burning, starts the breast-beating, and then undercuts it, so neatly, with a comment on the pattern of the carpet. This bathetic wit recurs throughout the novel. It is the means by which the narrator parodies the romantic, novelistic clichés that he knows full well he is using. Spring’s is a very deft, very camp performance: all very nuanced and blackly comic.


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When it becomes clear to Nick and Rachel that they are about to have sex, out in the countryside, we get a classic Howard Spring moment: ‘But now it was the man himself, fierce and elemental, who was diffusing his image through her consciousness, spreading like a cloud impalpable but irresistible, into all the nooks and crannies of her being’ (105). This has the elemental stuff of romantic fiction of the past and, of course, we have the lovers elevated here into the abstract and the emblematic – when they are beyond personality and individuality, and when they are struggling to be free of the notion of themselves as mechanized economic units in a modernized world. But there is that extra touch at the end: that particular northern wit: it is not the fibres of her being that are stirred, but her being’s nooks and crannies. This is not quite a double entendre, but it is near enough. What’s more, it is a self-deprecatory gesture on the narrator’s part. He is deflating his own lyrical grandeur and pomposity in a way Lawrence would never have wittingly managed. You can find moments of bathos and hilarity in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but they weren’t put there on purpose. Spring is using an old deflecting feature of the local sense of humour: undermine yourself verbally, extravagantly, before anyone else can. The lyricism is grounded suddenly, hilariously, in the very localized, specific and down-to-earth. In the space of one sentence Spring can take you from Glory’s heights down to stubbing your toes on dustbins in the dark. The impulse is built into all northern humour, into those dicta: don’t get above yourself. Remember where you come from. Don’t get your head turned. Spring’s writing is robust. In his self-consciousness about writing a novel and his wrangling with his forebears, metalanguage and modernity are not things that appear to bother him much. He simply has his characters rambunctiously jeer each other: ‘Technically, according to all the best novels, you have the pleasure (of having been my lover. Once, in the heather.)’ ‘You must read some very old-fashioned novels.’ (126) Spring is there to reward those of his characters who can break out of their old stories and reinvent themselves. Nick is the tormented artist, torn by two women. He isn’t really expected to get beyond that. He’ll merely be given as a reward to either Anna or Rachel, the tiger huntresses. These two women find themselves climbing the social ladder because of their involvement with Nick and his world. In the Lord Mayor’s apartments, Anna feels shabby and self-conscious in the wrong way. Outside in the city is where she belongs, among the people she knows. At the same do, Rachel is swanning about quite happily and able to acclimatize herself because she is a gold-digger. Anna blushes because she feels she has got above herself, even by being here in the opulence amongst the portraits. It is Nick’s estranged


father, Sir George, who reassures her: ‘Everything is permitted, my dear, on an artistic occasion . . . You have . . . an artist’s freedom of speech’ (90). Anna has a certain kind of articulacy then, which allows her mobility through the complex, overlapping social circles of Manchester. She has a certain literariness, as well as her blunt, vivacious wit. Where, in a different kind of novel of opposites, Anna might have been rewarded for just her virtue and Rachel damned for her avarice, things are made muddier here by Spring. Neither woman is by any means a ‘good girl’, but in 1930s’ Manchester both have a chance to make something of themselves. No one here is ‘innocent’: the contrasts are as blurry as the rain-sticky roads. A kind of aestheticized, self-conscious approach to life is called for in Howard Spring’s fictional world: a meritocracy of the meta-aware, of those who have the nous to rewrite themselves. Rachel can’t. She goes wrong, in Spring’s book, not because she’s spiteful and cruel, but because she adheres to the old story. She wants to walk away from her background in Cheetham Hill, which she hates (‘the inchoate jumble of that feral landscape’; 111). There’s a very Howard Spring paradox here: Rachel might look like the very spirit of modernity and self-invention; striding out of the backstreets and into Sir George’s arms in his flash mansion in the city’s south. But, to Spring, she’s just enacting an old tale: she’ll come to a bad end, we know (and she does: she has an abortion, ends up a hooker in Piccadilly and eventually runs off to Blackpool: doomed). She is self-aware only to the extent that she makes sure she gets what she wants. She knows how to manipulate appearances and adjust herself in order to attain her goals. But this sort of performance is merely a means to an end for her, and not a vocation. Satisfied, she would happily retire from self-consciousness: ‘For nearly ten hours on end she had been radiating femininity. This was where, if this house was already hers, she would slack up, put her feet up and sleep’ (163). Spring is interested in the defining of their own lives by these women, and in how a seemingly self-conscious re-creation of self (Rachel’s) isn’t really. Anna, meanwhile, seems to drift along amongst the bric-à-brac and the lurid episodes, but she is the triumphant figure throughout the book. She is both good-hearted and clever and, in Spring’s world, this must be rewarded. Spring’s meritocracy is that of self-willed orphans who can take the stuff of the past and adapt it to their own uses, and who don’t depend on what they simply and unknowingly inherit. Anna is an orphan (her father was a groom kicked to death in the stables) and Nick has disowned Sir George. They are living off their wits and off art itself. They refuse to pay into the grand, Victorian narratives of the past and, unlike Rachel Rosing, won’t seek to hitch their wagon to them either. This is best seen when Anna and Nick visit a furniture store to buy some old jumble for their new flat. A ‘burst of tom-fool energy’ overcomes them as they pick up a load of Victoriana for pennies; the child Brian’s voice is


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loud enough in the storerooms to ‘set the ghosts flying’ (78). When their flat is filled with cheap antiques they decide to throw a Victorian-themed party, with the child dressed as Little Lord Fauntleroy and reciting pious verses, and Nick and Anna themselves in grandparent drag. Back in the 1930s they have invented for themselves the genre of retro-chic; in an atmosphere of ironic hilarity which steps up a notch when someone plays a new song on the gramophone, ‘Happy Days are Here Again’. When Rachel arrives she is disparaging, of course. She can’t see why they’d sit among such old tat. She can’t see the joke in it at all. What underpins Howard Spring’s idea of mobility is not, as Rachel would think, ruthlessness, but rather an idea of the capacity to reinvent yourself in new circumstances. He dutifully logs the historical monuments and the bric-à-brac of Manchester; but he is never tempted to sweep the accretion of it away as Lawrence was tempted to, dispelling forever those ghosts in the old furnishings. Instead he favours a robust, artistic self-sufficiency in his characters; their ability to disrupt the narratives seemingly laid down for them. The ebulliently contrived cross-hatching of Spring’s ensemble novels sets about self-consciously ransacking the lumber rooms of the past and fitting them together again. Read today, he can seem sentimental and brutally cynical in equal parts. This is the kind of thing that can seem to be dated. It is rather, I think, a deployment of a sensibility that is perhaps more camp than straight realism, more northern than southern, more puritan than decadent, more commonsensical than dandified. And much more involved in the nooks and crannies of life than it is in the lyricism.

Note 1. Howard Spring, Shabby Tiger (Manchester: Memories Press, 2001), 11. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number.

5 A Plausible Magic: the Novels of Henry Green James Wood

To his devotees, it seems extraordinary that so much pleasure can be had from a writer still so essentially neglected: the unstopping, tissueless sentences travelling without delay of punctuation – those sentences which seem to drop a stitch and unravel just as you thought you were sewing up their meaning (‘We lived here in the early years, in soft lands and climate influenced by the Severn, until my grandfather died and we moved to the big house a mile nearer the river where it went along below the garden’1); the metaphors and similes, which float the strangest, rarest likenesses (a character’s eyes seen as catching the light ‘like plums dipped in cold water’2); the delicate psychological subtlety, with its deep understanding of tragicomic fantasy; the authorial tact, content to let the reader move without explanatory signals, so that, as Coleridge said of Shakespeare, his characters ‘like people in real life, are to be inferred by the reader’3; and above all the genius for speech, especially working-class, regional and dialect speech, perhaps the greatest facility for the writing of dialogue in twentieth-century English fiction (less hammy than Kipling, more various than Lawrence, more inventive than Pritchett). All this gathers in the nom de plume Henry Green, who was born Henry Yorke a hundred years ago, and died in 1973. He was an aristocrat, with an aristocrat’s rich confidence; he felt no need to explain himself to his readers, either on or off the page. Off the page, he preferred to be photographed from behind – there is a famous Cecil Beaton photograph, with a Magrittelike surrealism, of the dark glossy back of Green’s head – and for many years successfully arrested the publication of his books in America or in paperback. On the page he removed those vulgar spoors of presence whereby authors communicate themselves to readers: he never internalizes his characters’ thoughts, hardly ever explains a character’s motive, and avoids the authorial adverb, which so often helpfully flags a character’s emotion to readers (‘She said, grandiloquently’). He can be a difficult writer, is a scrambler of syntax, is in many ways the last English modernist novelist: his best-known novel, Loving, was published in 1945, after which English literary modernism essentially expired. 50

A Plausible Magic: the Novels of Henry Green

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But paradoxically, despite the apparent mandarinism – he belonged to the generation that included Robert Byron, Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh – one of Green’s greatest literary achievements lies in his ability to write about unliterary people, and to catch the half-thoughts of unlettered minds: factory workers in Living (1929), socialites in Party Going (1939), firemen in Caught (1943), servants in Loving (1945), the upper classes in Nothing (1950) and Doting (1952). In this sense, he has much more in common with V.S. Pritchett, who greatly admired him, than with Waugh, who complained that in Loving Green was ‘debasing the language vilely’.4 Henry Green was interested, precisely, in the ‘debasement’ that language and meaning undergo when we speak. His father, a distinguished classicist, had listened delightedly to the way his servants spoke at the family home, Forthampton Court, and often consulted a dialect dictionary. Radically, Green dropped out of Oxford and went to work in Birmingham, on the factory floor of the family firm, Pontifex. (It made plumbing equipment for brewing and for domestic bathrooms.) Many of the workers assumed that the young man had been sent as a punishment by his father; in fact, the precocious writer, who had been writing fiction while at Eton, and who had already published a novel at Oxford (Blindness, 1926), was listening hard to the way his co-workers talked. In his memoir, Pack My Bag (1940), Green argues that working-class speech is more poetic than upper-class speech, and offers examples of fragments overheard in the factory: ‘ “His eyes started out of his head like little dog’s testicles” ’; or this, spoken by a man about his brown dog: ‘ “What he likes is I take him out into the fields weekends and he rolls ’im white in the grass”.’5 In novel after novel, Green paid his tribute to this poetry. The novel that he wrote about the Birmingham factory, Living, features a histrionic and gabby manager named Mr Bridges, fond of such things as ‘ “Worry, I’ve ’ad enough of that washing about in my head to drown a dolphin” ’, or images such as ‘ “He was sick as if I’d been Mussolini and given him cod liver oil” ’ (talking about an unwell colleague).6 Caught, the novel Green wrote about his own experiences as an auxiliary in the wartime London Fire Service, is dominated by another histrionic, Dickensian talker, Mr Pye, the unit’s instructor, who enjoys his ability to lecture the men in his charge: ‘ “I ’ad to consider what chance a man like you stood with those boys in the Rescue. They’d castrate you, Piper, like a starved bullock. Or they’d wrap those long legs of yours round your neck and stuff the ’eels in your gob. And then where would your new denture be?” ’7 Pye has the habit of calling attractive girls ‘ “lovely bits of ’omework” ’, and his idea of ‘educated’ speech, into which he sometimes falls so as to impress his underlings, is to say something like ‘ “Does the staff car want petrol?” ’ (Caught, 89). His long arias of advice and bullying are wonderfully funny, though Pye, like the best comic creations, has no sense of humour himself:


Take a hospital . . . you are called there, you arrive, and this lecture is called practical firefighting ’ints, but all this comes into the job, just as much as putting out the fire. Take an institution, even take what they call a place of public entertainment. Now what do you do? You’ve got always to recollect you must make as little disturbance as possible, use your loaf, don’t let the patients get any idea there’s something up. Go about it quietly. Don’t rush in a ward shouting where’s the fire? There may be people in there through no fault of their own. They’re to be pitied. (Caught, 20) The workers in Living often sound, to my northern ear, more Cockney than midlands, and it may be that Green fell most happily into London speech rhythms. Loving, his greatest novel, is set in an Irish castle during the Second World War, but its servants are all transplanted Cockneys, and it is in this book, largely written in dialogue, that Green’s instinct for the poetry of speech reaches Shakespearean heights. Like Living and Caught, Loving is lorded over by a petty tyrant, a speechifying butler named Charley Raunce, who spends much of the book chasing, and finally winning, a pretty housemaid, Edith. Raunce has strong opinions about women, however, and likes to bully his young assistant Bert on the matter: ‘ “You know Bert I sometimes marvel women can go sour like that. When you think of them young, soft and tender it doesn’t ’ardly seem possible now the way they turn so that you would never hold a crab apple up to them they’re so acid” ’ (Loving, 58). The English servants feel menaced both by the IRA and by the threat of German invasion. Raunce, speaking to Edith, puts it like this: ‘ “And what about the panzer grenadiers? . . . When they come through this tight little island like a dose of Epsom salts will they bother with those hovels, with two pennorth of cotton? Not on your life. They’ll make tracks straight for great mansions like we’re in my girl” ’ (Loving, 86). (It is characteristic of Green’s great subtlety as a novelist of character that he makes Raunce simultaneously terrified and boasting – he can’t hide his self-satisfaction at the idea that the Germans will avoid those Irish ‘ “hovels” ’ and come for ‘ “mansions like we’re in” ’.) Raunce is not alone; Loving is populated by characters who match his verbal flair. Edith, marvellously, complains that she has to take out the lady of the house’s grandchildren for a walk: ‘ “Well, I’ve got to take those little draggers out this afternoon” ’ (Loving, 74). The cook, Mrs Welch, alleges that, in wartime, children have all become monsters: ‘ “Children is all little ’Itlers these days” ’ (Loving, 39). Bert, musing on the aged nanny’s rheumatism, mentions his own uncle in London: ‘ “Why come to that I got an uncle ’as ’is joints boiled Tuesdays and Thursdays over at St Luke’s down the old Bow Road” ’ (Loving, 44). Even a familiar idiomatic phrase will get a slight rhythmic addendum: Edith says at one point: ‘ “Why I’m browned off absolutely” ’.


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Green’s late novels, Nothing and Doting, attracted the attention of Nathalie Sarraute, in part for the daring with which they surrender all the conventionalities of fiction – plot, authorial explanation, descriptive detail – to the drift of pure speech: these novels are a succession of apparently aimless conversations. They have their passionate admirers, but are flatter and less delightful than the earlier books, largely because no working-class characters appear in them; and Green does indeed appear to have believed that upper-class speech lacked poetry. The people in these books, unlike their proletarian counterparts, seem rarely to use images, metaphors, neologisms or twisted idiomatic coinages. Green, the aristocrat, perhaps lacked the alienation from his own speech necessary to hear its poetry; Waugh, the upper-middle-class publisher’s son from Hampstead, could certainly hear it. Still, these late books abound in strange and cunning slippages, moments of surreal comedy when conversationalists are revealed to be not really listening to each other. In Nothing, for instance, Philip and Mary are discussing the possibility of eloping. It is just after the war: ‘I know but it’s so rude to the relations when people elope.’ ‘Yes you’re right,’ she gulped. ‘And then eloping’s out of date, it went out with horses.’ ‘Oh dear now they’re all eaten poor things.’ ‘Too many people on this island keep carnivorous pets Mary,’ he replied. ‘The waste is fearful.’8 Though one praises a writer for having an ‘ear’ or an ‘instinct’ for speech, it is not realism, as such, that one is praising. Speech, in a writer like Green, is not simply a matter, as creative writing workshops put it, of ‘getting it right’. Green, like Pritchett, did indeed listen to conversations in pubs and on buses – the realist’s impulse to gather from the world – yet a great deal of his genius lies in how he invented a plausible magic on the page for his speakers. The speech in novels like Loving and Caught is consistently more savoury and inventive than it would ever have been in ordinary life: reality TV shows us just how drab most unfictional speech is. You might roam the streets for days and never hear someone likening the Nazis to ‘a dose of Epsom salts’: this is Green’s leap into simile (and Raunce’s too, of course). When Edith calls her little charges ‘draggers’, she is creating a brilliantly apt figurative neologism for the way children drag their heels and pull on one’s adult arm. Again, it is Green’s poetry – but it is Edith’s, too, because the word, like Raunce’s Epsom salts, does not stretch credibility; it seems possible that Edith might have come up with it. ‘Draggers’ is a literary word, but it does not belong to high-literary diction. Speech in Green is both real and magical, observed and invented, a report and a dance. And of course, he had great sponsors in this plausible magic.

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He had Dickens to study, and Hardy, whose Farmer Crawtree, at the end of The Woodlanders, strikes the Greenian note: ‘I knowed a man and wife – faith, I don’t mind owning as there’s no strangers here, that the pair were my own relations – they’d be at it that hot one hour that you’d hear the poker, and the tongs, and the bellows, and the warming-pan, flee across the house with the movements of their vengeance; and the next hour you’d hear ’em singing “The Spotted Cow” together as peaceable as two holy twins . . .’9 He had Kipling, and Lawrence, the Lawrence of the early stories, and he had, above all, Shakespeare – the Shakespeare who created Mistress Quickly, the nurse in Romeo and Juliet, and Launce in Two Gentlemen of Verona. Like Shakespeare, Green is unafraid to let his characters ramble on, and unafraid to lend his metaphorical and image-making powers to those characters. In addition to handing Edith a word like ‘draggers’ or handing Pye, in Caught, a word like ‘homework’ (to describe a girl), Green will often use, in third-person authorial narration, the kind of simile or metaphor which while successful and literary enough in its own right, is also the kind of figure his characters might use – as when people walking along the streets in Living are seen as ‘tongues along the streets’10 or when, in Caught, a girl’s neck is ‘the colour of junket’ (Caught, 38). Chekhov, who habitually does this in his short stories, may have influenced Green. (We know from Jeremy Treglown’s biography that Green read Chekhov with considerable attention.11) It is an extension of free indirect style, whereby the third-person narrative is so heavily inflected by the characters it is describing that the very images themselves seem to have been produced by those characters. When Browning describes the sound of a bird that seems to sing its song twice over in order to ‘recapture / The first fine careless rapture’,12 he is being a poet, trying to find the ‘best’ poetic image; but when Chekhov, in his story ‘Peasants’, writes that a bird’s cry sounded as if a cow had been locked up in a shed all night, he is being a fiction writer: he is thinking like one of his peasants.13 Green is sometimes Browning and sometimes Chekhov. In his Chekhovian mode, these kinds of images, handed directly and sometimes indirectly to his characters, constitute a kind of transference of power from creator to creation. This transferred imagery is quite distinct from an obviously literary register – the Browning mode – in which we feel Green laying claim to his characteristically lavish pictures, those figures that seem at times to force metaphor into the peril of hypothesis – roses that stare ‘like oxen’, or a man’s hands going ‘like two owls in daylight over the hills, moors, and wooded valleys, over the fat white winter’ of his lover’s body (Caught, 62, 116).


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About both kinds of imagery, however, there hovers a mysteriousness that is one of Green’s most original qualities. In his memoir, he defined prose as ‘a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known’.14 With no direct appeal to what both may have known: what would it mean for a prose to not know something? Green’s writing dares to fall into little abysses in which it seems not to know itself what precisely it means. Sometimes this is only a child’s estrangement technique, which briefly bemuses and then refreshes our sense of the world, as when Green writes of Amabel in Party Going that ‘when she did not smile her eyes were not so blue’,15 or when in Pack My Bag he says that at school ‘Sundays smelled, I do not know why.’16 (Not, you notice, smelled differently, just ‘smelled’.) But often he loves to leave his effects mysteriously unexplained, sending them back to the reader untasted, as it were. In Caught, we are told about the first time that the Auxiliary Fire Company is called to a fire. The new recruits go up the stairs of the wrong house, the whole thing is a farce, and an embarrassment to the top brass of the service, like Mr Trant. Several pages after the incident, we encounter this paragraph: ‘Up at Number Fifteen, Trant’s wife, as he left his quarters, promised him pork pie for dinner. This put Trant in mind of his sub officer who had made them a laughing stock the previous day, running about like a chicken that had its head cut off, with his Auxiliaries like a herd of sodding geese’ (Caught, 85). Why does the promised pork pie put Mr Trant in mind of the previous day’s fiasco? It is not for Green to say. A more beautiful example appears on the final pages of Loving, when Raunce and Edith are talking about marrying. Raunce suddenly suggests that they get out of Ireland fast and go home: ‘Elope,’ she cried delighted all of a sudden. ‘Elope,’ he agreed grave. She gave him a big kiss. ‘Why Charley,’ she said, seemingly more and more delighted, ‘that’s romantic.’ ‘It’s what we’re going to do whatever the name you give it,’ he replied. ‘But don’t you see that’s a wonderful thing to do,’ she went on. ‘Maybe so,’ he said soft into her ear, ‘but it’s what we’re doing.’ (Loving, 197) I remember when I first read that passage, unsure of why it was so sublime, but sure that strange and profound human truths had been gently ghosted. Edith is thrilled by the romanticism of elopement; but why does Charley twice check her eagerness? (‘ “It’s what we’re going to do whatever the name you give it” ’, and ‘ “Maybe so, but it’s what we’re doing”.’) There is an obvious comedy in the idea that the word ‘elope’ seems to make Raunce


anxious, while it is he who has proposed the very act. Comically, he’s afraid of a word, and this is appropriate, since Raunce is all talk. And Raunce, for all his confident talk, is a prude. He may have been pursuing Edith throughout the novel, but he in fact has a rather petty bourgeois anxiety about sex, and has been notably evasive until now about marriage. (In an earlier scene, Edith teasingly held a lacy black silk nightdress in front of her, eliciting from the nervous Raunce the immortal response, ‘ “that piece of cobweb ain’t for us” ’; Loving, 175.) And there is male pomposity, here, too: Raunce perhaps likes the idea that he’s being cool and calm in the face of female flightiness (‘ “It’s what we’re going to do whatever the name you give it” ’) – a kind of shushing. Proposing elopement but not the word, Raunce both does and doesn’t want to elope. All this, in four or five lines of speech, left beautifully unannotated by the author. It was a shock to come across, a few years ago, a perfectly accurate remark of Walter Allen’s, to the effect that Green’s characters are described entirely from the outside.17 Indeed they are, but they don’t feel like this to us. Green’s fiction exaggerates to acuteness the paradox that by entirely describing a character from the outside we can still feel we utterly know him or her from the inside. After all, the mysteriousness which defines so many of his characters may be a quality better comprehended, better evoked, from the outside than the inside; the ‘psychological’ or metaphysical novelist – the other Greene, Graham, comes to mind – has a habit of killing mysteries by naming them. In fact, Henry Green’s novels invariably establish a tension between the outside and the inside. On the one hand, the novels generally revolve around a practical or hermeneutic puzzle or challenge, often trivial, which seems to be powering the mechanics of the fiction: will Bert and Lily get away, and did an iron beam almost kill Craigan? (Living). Who has the ring? (Loving). What’s happened to Mary? (Concluding). Is Philip Weatherby John Pomfret’s son? (Nothing). Characters often talk about solving these matters: ‘ “I shall get to the bottom of it” ’, cries the lady of the house, Mrs Tennant, in Loving, who wants to know why and how the servants have got hold of her ring (Loving, 181). But alongside, or inside, these small enigmas, is the actual bottomlessness of the characters, who pose much deeper puzzles. The same Mrs Tennant who promises to get to the bottom of it concedes, haughtily, ‘ “but what do we know about the servants?” ’ (Loving, 164). We might think of these two levels of enigma – plot enigma and human enigma – as two time-signatures. In Chekhov’s story, ‘The Kiss’, an innocent young soldier, who has never before had dealings with women, has a strange encounter. At a ball, he wanders away from the ballroom into a dark corridor. A woman runs up behind him and, mistaking him for someone else, kisses him. Realizing her mistake, she flees the room. The incident excites the young soldier, and he


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can’t stop thinking about it. The next morning, sitting with his more worldly fellow-soldiers, he tells them the story. The soldier is disappointed, writes Chekhov, because he had expected that his story would take all morning to tell, and it has only taken a minute.18 Two time-signatures: there is Chekhov’s own story, a relatively brisk affair of only a few pages, and there is the soldier’s story, which is endless, bottomless, since it has expanded in his mind. Green is Chekhovian in his attention to the power of fantasy, and how it often functions in our lives in a tragicomic key. In Loving, Edith walks into a bedroom to find Mrs Tennant’s daughter-in-law, Mrs Jack, in bed with a man not her husband. She is shocked but also slyly pleased. It becomes terribly important to her that her witnessing of Mrs Jack is her story, and she is horribly deflated when Raunce tells her that the previous butler, Eldon, also caught Mrs Jack at it. She feels that Raunce is trying to take her story from her, and bursts into one of the funniest, loveliest flights of bitter poetry in the whole of Green: ‘ “D’you stand there an’ tell me Mr Eldon had come upon them some time? Just as I did? That she sat up in bed with her fronts bobblin’ at him like a pair of geese the way she did to me?” ’ (Loving, 112) In Caught, in a sadder vein of inner fantasy, Mrs Howells dreams about how she will confront her daughter’s husband, who has abandoned her. In reality, she travels to Doncaster where the man is living, barely speaks to him let alone confronts him, and then returns to London. Later, in the fire station – she is the cook – she lies and brags to one of the men, Arthur, that she tore a strip off the young man: ‘ “But I told ’im, Arthur, you should’ve been there to ’ear . . . ’E went white, Arthur … But I wouldn’t spare ’im” ’ (Caught, 116). Edith and Mrs Howells are recognizably the heirs of Chekhov’s dazed, fantasizing soldier. In Green, what happens to us is ours, and what we make of it may be more important than its actuality; hence that word so prevalent in his fiction, picture: ‘It was a picture’; ‘it made a picture’; ‘they looked a picture’. At the end of Loving, Raunce watches Edith feed the peacocks, and is moved: ‘For what with the peacocks bowing at her purple skirts, the white doves nodding on her shoulders round her brilliant cheeks and her great eyes that blinked tears of happiness, it made a picture’ (Loving, 201). Earlier in the book Raunce had said to Edith, ‘with those eyes you ought to be in pictures’ (Loving, 8), meaning the movies. But Edith is in pictures: the picture Green has made of her, and the picture she herself has made, the picture she makes when she uses a word like ‘ “draggers” ’ or when she likens Mrs Jack’s breasts to ‘ “fronts bobblin’ . . . like a pair of geese” ’. And how does Green himself describe Edith’s eyes? Opening a curtain, she turns to the light, and it catches ‘her dazzled, dazzling eyes’ (Loving, 64). Just as Green’s writing is both mimetic and magically artificial, both imitative and original, both a report and a dance, so Edith does not merely reflect beauty (‘dazzled’ eyes),

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but makes beauty (‘dazzling’ eyes). Through his own artifice, Green’s humblest characters become the artificers of their own lives.

Notes A version of this chapter was fi rst given as a lecture at the Henry Green Centenary Conference at the University of Warwick, 2005, and was first published as ‘A Plausible Magic: Henny Green the Last English Modernist’, Times, Literary Supplement, 6 January 2006. 1. Henry Green, Pack My Bag (London: Vintage, 2000), 2. 2. Henry Green, Loving (London: Vintage, 2000), 8. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. 3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Characteristics of Shakespeare’, in Thomas Middleton Taylor (ed.), Shakespearean Criticism Volume 1 (London: Dent, 1960), 201. 4. Quoted in Jeremy Treglown, Romancing: the Life and Work of Henry Green (London: Faber, 2000), 176. 5. Green, Pack My Bag, 156. 6. Henry Green, Living (London: Hogarth, 1953), 17, 66. 7. Henry Green, Caught (London: Harvill, 1999), 44. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. 8. Henry Green, Nothing (London: Hogarth, 1951), 122–3. 9. Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders (London: Macmillan, 1963), 440. 10. Green, Living, 108. 11. See Treglown, Romancing, 49 and 58–9. 12. Robert Browning, ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’, in John Pettigrew (ed.), The Poems Volume One (London: Penguin, 1993). 13. Anton Chekhov, ‘Peasants’, Eleven Stories, trans. Ronald Hingley (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 171. 14. Green, Pack My Bag, 55. 15. Henry Green, Party Going (London: Hogarth, 1962), 193. 16. Green, Pack My Bag, 24. 17. Walter Allen, Tradition and Dream (London: Phoenix House, 1964), 218. 18. Anton Chekhov, ‘The Kiss’, Select Tales of Tchehov Volume Two, trans. Constance Garnett (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962), 15.

6 Varieties of Modernism, Varieties of Incomprehension: Patrick Hamilton and Elizabeth Bowen John Mepham

One way of seeing British fiction in the 1930s and after is as the flowering of a variety of ways of breaking with established and familiar fictional techniques. One can chart an ever-widening range of experiments and innovations in fictional form and content, any of which might be considered ‘modernist’. My own preferred way of telling the story is to emphasize the ways in which post-1930s’ fiction broke not only with nineteenthcentury traditions but also with the conventions developed in the period of avant-garde modernism, for example in the works of Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. New possibilities were tried out, still in response to the novelties of modern life but often at the same time attempting to avoid the ‘unreadability’ and typical difficulties of avantgarde modernism.1 There are writers whose work can reasonably be labelled modernist while at the same time being accessible, working within or closer to mainstream, popular models of fiction. There was an attempt to win back a broader readership while continuing to be innovative and exploratory. In saying this I have in mind authors such as Rosamond Lehmann and Jean Rhys (Alison Light also presents the work of Ivy Compton-Burnett in something like this perspective). 2 After a decade of uncompromisingly experimental modernist fiction in the 1920s, some writers who could reasonably be seen as modernist because they wrote in response to specific changes in modern life and also employed and explored experimental fictional techniques, nonetheless returned to more mainstream genres and forms. They brought some of the new devices of 1920s’ modernism as well as some of their own within more middlebrow frameworks. David Lodge gives an account that suggests that we see modernism giving way after the 1920s to something different, marked by a return of fictional dialogue, as streams of consciousness give way to a stream of talk.3 Lodge cites Christopher Isherwood, Ernest Hemingway, Evelyn Waugh, Henry Green and again Compton-Burnett in this context. These and the somewhat later writers whom I will discuss here, can be seen as choosing to work more with popular fictional genres than did Woolf and Joyce (for example, 59


the domestic and romantic dramas of Rosamund Lehmann, Hemingway’s war stories and Elizabeth Bowen’s use of the espionage thriller plot; the chosen popular genre of Waugh and Hamilton was the comic novel). Lodge’s emphasis is on the expansion and detailed rendering of characters’ speech in the absence both of an accompanying thought stream and of a narrator’s commentary. My own topic is not just characters’ speech but more broadly characters’ talk. As I see it, writers developed an interest in using fiction as a way of analysing talk, and a particular interest in the ways in which talk can go wrong or be diverted from its presumed purposes. Bowen and Patrick Hamilton were both uncomfortable with the emphasis on the inner worlds of characters such as in the work of Richardson, Woolf and others; instead both employed dialogue extensively. Green and Compton-Burnett are well known for the way they stay on the surface of talk and specialize in rendering talk in all its class and idiosyncratic detail. Neither wanted to claim any narrative position of knowledge as to what exactly is going on when their characters speak to each other. Hamilton and Bowen do something along the same lines. The emphasis is on characters speaking to one another while leaving both them and the reader uncertain as to exactly what is being said or intended. The point is not, or not only, to clarify characters’ talk by providing a stream of consciousness context for it, but to emphasize uncertainty, ambiguity, vagueness and implicit malice. My argument is that there were varieties of modernism, characterized in part by an exploration of the varieties of incomprehension and malice. So my point is a little different from David Lodge’s. I do not think of 1920s’ modernism as being uninterested in talk – after all there is hardly a scene in Ulysses, in Mrs Dalloway or To the Lighthouse, or in the stories of Katherine Mansfield, that is not the setting for a conversation. It is true, however, that the major technical innovations in these writers’ stories and novels centre on the rendering of what is going on in characters’ minds when they speak, on their inner worlds, on their streams of consciousness (a notoriously elusive concept).4 In the fiction of the 1930s and 1940s, the focus shifts to the problem of how to represent talk in such a way as to suggest what is going on as characters talk, not in the privacy of their minds but in social interactions. The interest is in intersubjectivity rather than inner subjectivity and in the social contexts within which the personal goings on take place. In the most extreme examples (perhaps in some of Hemingway’s stories and novels) there is a complete absence of representation of or narrative comment on the thought streams of the characters. A useful place to begin is Woolf’s puzzling, though on the surface conventional, novel The Years (1937), which is very different from her modernist classics from the 1920s, Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). Woolf was herself very unsure about The Years, especially about the place of talk in the novel: ‘ “All talk would be nonsense, I suppose, if it were written down” ’, says Rose Pargiter, speaking surely for her author.5 Woolf

Patrick Hamilton and Elizabeth Bowen

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cut out large chunks of dialogue in the course of redrafting the book, as if convinced that talk, especially discussion of politics and ideas, could not really be a proper subject for fiction. In the end, though, talk dominates the book, more than in any of her other novels. It is a novel, in fact, about talk, its difficulties and exigencies, in the context of radical social change, especially in the lives of middle-class women, between the 1870s and the 1930s. Talk is represented as having become difficult or impossible; attempts to communicate are constantly obstructed and undermined: the frequently repeated pattern is that of the interrupted conversation, within a general culture of incomprehension and thwarted intimacy. More broadly, the main theme of the novel could be taken as the failure of talk to achieve the meeting of minds and mutual comprehension, in the context of violent masculine psychic impulses, the threat of fascism and the invasiveness of modern urban life. The Years also exemplifies another trend of fiction in the late 1930s and beyond, namely an attempt to reach a broad audience by switching to recognizably accessible and popular genres and material. The Years, being something like a family saga novel, is more conventional than, and sold more copies than, Woolf’s other 1930s’ novels, The Waves (1931) and Flush (1933). Woolf called it her Arnold Bennett novel, though she might equally have said it was her John Galsworthy novel. Within the Victorian patriarchal family depicted in the opening sections of the novel, incomprehension (between men and women, boys and girls) is primarily but not only a consequence of male dominance as well as of the prevailing culture of sexual reticence. In the middle and later sections of the book incomprehension is presented as an aspect of the disintegration of the family and the violence of modern life. The novel presents an almost encyclopaedic catalogue of modern obstructions to talk, including warfare, modern transportation, manners, the telephone, and in general the invasion of private spaces by noise. Interruption is depicted as endemic to modern urban life. The private space of conversation is invaded by the telephone, by public music, by neighbourhood disputes, by passing traffic, by rowdy street behaviour, by aerial bombardment, but also by inattention and disruptive impulses. The sheltered space of family intimacy is constantly shattered or violated. The rise of fascism and the threat or actuality of war also form the sociopolitical contexts for the other novels which I will discuss here. Patrick Hamilton’s novels have many claims to be considered modernist, yet he employs popular genres: Hangover Square (1941) employs a Jekyll and Hyde psychological fantasy and murder plot; Slaves of Solitude (1947) is a bleak comedy of manners; and Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (1930–34) is a Dickensian social comedy.6 Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1949) is perhaps more obviously modernist than Hamilton’s novels in being highly self-conscious, with much comment on storytelling and with frequent contorted sentence structures, yet Bowen also deliberately chose to


use the popular wartime espionage genre and employed it to create an atmosphere of conspiracy, duplicity, betrayal and suspense, while at the same time ignoring the rules of the genre by leaving certain mysteries unsolved. The novels I focus on here all have wartime or near wartime settings, but the protagonists are not combatants. The theme is the effects of the Second World War on life in London. Hangover Square is set in 1939, immediately before the war, and the shadow of fascism and the imminence of war are important aspects of the setting. The Slaves of Solitude and The Heat of the Day are set in 1942–43. In the two later novels there is comment about the effect of the war in breaking down traditional British reserve: previously outlawed behaviour becomes tolerated in wartime. The pattern is of shortterm relationships between people whose lives are on hold, without the normal connections with past and future. Temporary liaisons and gaiety are the rule. The Slaves of Solitude is set for the most part not in central London but in a fictionalized version of Henley, to which many Londoners (including Hamilton) decamped to escape the bombs. Enid Roach, a respectable and reserved unmarried woman of thirty-nine years of age finds herself plunged into strange circumstances, drinking in the local pub, dating an American serviceman, and eventually being driven around the countryside with a German woman and four American officers, sitting on each other’s knees, singing and generally being riotous and behaving badly. Oh, this world (thought Miss Roach as they sped along) into which I have been born! And oh this war, through which it is my destiny to pass! (Though pass was not the word, for she could not conceive any end to it.) This, she saw, was as much a part of the war as the soldiering, the sailoring, the bombing, the queueing, the black-out, the crowding, and all the grey deprivations. No imaginable combination of peace-time circumstances could have brought about such a composition of characters as now filled the car and sat on each other’s knees . . . And yet, she was aware, all over the countryside around, all over the country, cars were racing along with just such noisy loads to just such destinations. If it wasn’t Americans, it was Poles, or Norwegians, or Dutch, and if it wasn’t sitting on each other’s knees it was singing, and if it wasn’t singing it was sitting on each other’s knees, and whatever it was it was drinking and drinking and screaming.7 The war, she thinks, amongst the innumerable other guises it had assumed, had taken on the character of the inventor and proprietor of some awful low cosmopolitan nightclub. These novels can be best read not as realist documentaries on life in wartime, but as allegories of life in a world of screaming and drinking, in which desperate strangers come across each other in strange, hallucinatory encounters. And when they do, they talk.


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But the unaccustomed lack of reserve and unbridled behaviour does not result, as it might in more sentimental writing, in greater mutual comprehension and intimacy, more open relationships. On the contrary, the result is baffled talk; characters engage with strangers and have fun, even love affairs, but the result is something far different from mutual understanding. ‘The varieties of incomprehension’ would be a fair summary of these novels. All three novels contain examples of ‘domestic fascism’, or fascism on the home front. European political fascism is the common background, but the immediate context of the dysfunctional talk in these novels is domestic; it is the dysfunctional family, the boarding house and the gang of drinking friends in the pub. An analysis of the intimate connections between political fascism and domestic fascism had been offered by Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas (1938), in which she had suggested that political dictatorship grows in the same psychological soil as dictatorial relations within the family, namely the infantile fi xations of men and their obsessive need to exercise power over women, both within the family and within social institutions. Women are required to collaborate with men in constructing their inflated sense of themselves. In these novels there is a similar sense that fascism grows from or is complicit with common psychological impulses and pathologies of personality, and that the power-mad, dictatorial behaviour and cruel, sadistic and systematically humiliating relations typical of political fascism can also be found in apparently ordinary domestic situations. The difference, however, between Woolf’s analysis and that adumbrated in these novels lies in the picture of gender differences presented. In the novels it is both men and women whose obsessions, infantile fi xations and manipulating, egotistic self-absorption lead to pathological and dysfunctional relations. In Hangover Square the two main enemies of the amiable George Harvey Bone are Netta and her friend Peter. Both have explicit fascist sympathies. Peter has served time in gaol for beating up left-wing protesters in a demonstration. Utterly selfish and cruel, they both get sick pleasure from the power they have over George. A clear connection is being proposed between their relentlessly sadistic humiliation of George and their fascist politics. In The Slaves of Solitude the situation is rather different. It is now the apparently comic and trivial banter of a boarding house that harbours seriously wicked fascistic cruelties. Because the setting is now 1942 and there is a war on the characters cannot openly express whatever fascist sympathies they might have. The wicked Mr Thwaites and his friend Vicki Kugelmann therefore always speak in code, and tie themselves in knots as they attempt to express simultaneously their patriotism and their sympathy for Hitlerian politics. Again, a clear connection is suggested between their political views and their infantile, sadistic taunting of the inoffensive Enid Roach who is driven by their verbal torture to the point of lunacy. Both Hamilton novels are


thus also clear repudiations of Woolf’s gender-based social psychology of fascism. In The Heat of the Day it is the spy Robert Kelway who turns out to be a fascist sympathizer. He has been giving war secrets to the Germans because of his lust for a fascist political order. The psychological roots of this behaviour seem to lie in his dysfunctional family, the suburban Kelways who are ruled over by the appalling ‘Muttikins’, a matriarch who has earlier figuratively killed Robert’s father. It is the women of the family, combining total self-absorption and poisonous social snobbery with dithering incompetence, who drive Robert into sympathy with a politics of hierarchy and order. The family scene in the Kelway’s suburban Home Counties stronghold is very reminiscent of those in Compton-Burnett’s novels, in which families combine a veneer of manners with a depth of idiocy and cruelty. Bowen’s novel illustrates another important feature of the fiction of the 1930s and 1940s and that is the extent to which fiction in those decades was responding to the huge growth and popularity of film. Film had rapidly become a major cultural presence (just before the Second World War, some eighteen and a half million people went to ‘the pictures’ every week in Britain).8 Writers could hardly ignore it and its influence can be detected in both form and content. The cinemas of London were converted to the new talkies by 1930, and the shift from silent film to talkies suggests a significant context for this new strand of talk-focused fiction. Cinema is also a strong presence in Hamilton’s novels. He was himself a dramatist, and some of his plays were made into films, most famously Rope and Gaslight.9 His earlier trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky contains what must surely be one of the earliest depictions of scopophilia, long before the phenomenon was named in film theory, and an implicit critique of popular film plots. In Slaves of Solitude there is a great deal of cinemagoing. Film is seen as escapist entertainment, one of the ways, along with pub going and binge drinking, characters have of getting away from and forgetting the horrors of the war. In 1938 in an essay called ‘Why I go to the cinema’, Bowen had confessed a similar attitude – cinema is wonderful fun and also associated with a mildly narcotic atmosphere (she loves smoking while watching the film), but the film aesthetic is not seen as offering anything positive to the writer of prose fiction: ‘It is not as a writer that I go to the cinema; like every one else, I slough off my preoccupations there.’10 Both Bowen and Hamilton are cinema fans and each responds to sound cinema in his or her own way. What they both like about it is that it is popular, which literary modernism had not been, and, as commerciallyminded writers, they were aware of the need to employ popular genres even while using them for their own unconventional purposes. In Hangover Square Hamilton uses film as a metaphor in a most unexpected but perhaps revealing way. The main character in this novel is George Harvey Bone, who suffers from a strange split personality syndrome;


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he exists in two distinct forms, being either the inoffensive, amiable doormat and victim of his drinking companions who sponge off him without scruple, or the obsessed, murderous madman who pursues and ultimately kills his tormentor Netta. When his mind clicks, he switches instantaneously into his other personality, into a completely different kind of subjectivity. His insane version offers much opportunity for modernist free indirect speech; extensive passages of stream of consciousness prose are used to create the inner world of this strange character who is cold and calculating and might be best described as suffering from a made-up form of autism. It is as if there were a barrier separating him from other people, which prevents his engaging with them in ways that are normally required in even the most trivial of conversations. So completely is he focused on his own thoughts that he cannot read the thoughts of others in their speech. He can hear what they say, and he can understand each of their words at a purely linguistic level, but he cannot understand their utterances pragmatically. Two reasons for this are given. First he cannot understand utterance because the words are decontextualized. For a normal conversational exchange to work it is necessary to understand the situation in which it is taking place: there has to be an understanding of who it is that is talking and what sort of talk is going on. Without this it is impossible to attach meanings to the words. But George cannot do this when he is in one of his strange moods: He could hear and understand the words, but for the moment he couldn’t gather what they meant. They seemed divorced from any context: or at any rate he didn’t know what the context was. So he didn’t answer. For the moment anyway, he was too interested in what had happened in his head.11 Second, he loses the ability to understand people in terms of their intentions and motivations – he cannot see what they have in mind. He goes mentally deaf. In fact, he is not interested in involvement with them as minds at all. He sees people as puppet-like, ‘without motive or conscious volition of their own’ (Hangover, 165). It was as though the people around him, although they moved about, were not really alive: as though their existence had no motive or meaning, as though they were shadows . . . And although they talked, and although he could understand what they said, it was not as though they had spoken in the ordinary way, and it was an effort to understand and to answer. (Hangover, 83) In order to clarify his conception of this switch of mental state, Hamilton turns to the relatively recent experience of sound film. In an odd use of


Christopher Isherwood’s famous ‘I am a camera’ metaphor, he writes that when George’s mind ‘clicks’, it is as if his mind is a camera: But instead of an exposure having been made the opposite had happened – an inclosure – a shutting down, a locking in. A moment before his head, his brain, were out in the world, seeing, hearing, sensing objects directly; now they were enclosed behind glass (like Crown jewels, like Victorian wax fruit), behind a film – the film of the camera, perhaps, to continue the photographic analogy – a film behind which all things and people moved eerily, without colour, vivacity or meaning, grimly, puppet-like. (Hangover, 165) George’s pathological locked-in state is rendered by a stream of consciousness prose; his self-absorbed thoughts and feelings are narrated in a free indirect style that seems absolutely appropriate to this style of subjectivity. It is as if for someone to be this focally aware of his own stream of consciousness is to be in a pretty strange, detached state, unable to pay proper attention to anyone else. If you listen this carefully to your own thoughts you can hardly listen to anyone else at the same time. Could this picture of a disturbed mind be a subtle critique by Hamilton of 1920s’ stream of consciousness prose? Does George Harvey Bone just suffer an extreme version of a disease of consciousness that we also find in Miriam Henderson, Lily Briscoe and Clarissa Dalloway?12 Is having a stream of consciousness not, pace William James, the universal state of mental life but a very particular and somewhat pathological condition of mind? It is in any case notable that the metaphors used to convey George’s state of mind (the glass screen, or film, standing between consciousness and its objects) are very like those Woolf used when she tried to convey what she meant by life or reality – the luminous halo, the semi-transparent envelope. Talk is thought of as a conspiracy of social life to evade the real. Talk, being involvement with other people and engagement with them in a cooperative task of mutual mind-reading, tends to be seen as pleasurable but unreal, a matter of non-being (this idea is particularly strongly emphasized by Richardson). To push this a stage further, talk is seen as prose, whereas the verbalization of silent ruminations and the flow of mental images is poetry. In Eliot’s words, we linger by the sea with the mermaids ‘Till human voices wake us, and we drown.’13 When George switches from auditory involvement with the world of others to a silent absorption in his own inner world, he switches to a kind of subjectivity which is insane, obsessive and murderous. This character presents the clearest example of the switch from inner subjectivity to intersubjectivity, the latter being presented as the sane option. This is again a reversal of high modernist rhetoric, in which the silent moment of poetic vision is most highly valued. It


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was also seen as the richest of possibilities in the aesthetic of silent fi lm (poetic montage), endangered by the introduction of the talkies, which encouraged a switch to a fi lm aesthetic based on dialogue and storytelling.14 Obviously these matters are too complicated and entangled to be unravelled here, but I do want to suggest that this strand of fiction in the 1930s and 1940s represented a turning away from the poeticizing aesthetic of both silent film and modernist fiction (or at least the Richardson/Woolf variety of it). Certainly in Hamilton’s novels, the world of talk is represented as the sane world, because it is the world of intersubjectivity, the world in which visionary fantasy and infatuation come up against the reality of the mind of another person, usually with a shock. It is only through the cold shower of talk that his protagonists’ ideas about other people, about their feelings, motivations and intentions, are tested. Talk is the best reality-testing device in the realm of intersubjective relations, of other minds. The centrality of talk in Hamilton’s novels (as well, of course, as in his stage plays) stems from his preoccupation with the moment of reality testing, which is usually a moment of disillusionment, a moment of bafflement at the obscurity of other people’s intentions. Talk, usually bad talk or dysfunctional talk is, in Hamilton as well as in Bowen, Compton-Burnett and Green, where the real nastiness and cruelty and deviousness of other people is seen, even if not understood. Talk is the destructive element in which the characters are immersed. This strand of fiction then represents a turn towards the dynamics of intersubjectivity, a prioritizing of the intricacies and pitfalls of involvement, and away from the moment of silent poetic vision. There is, as one might put it, a shift from visionary modernism to auditory modernism.15 In placing the analysis of ‘the varieties of incomprehension’ at the centre of their work, and in using dialogue and film melodrama plots (however subversively, for they both show themselves highly critical of mainstream narrative cinema), Hamilton and Bowen were both consciously part of this complicated cultural turn. In order to make something more precise of talk and incomprehension I need to say more about functional talk, or talk that works. I have in mind a model of talk derived from the analysis of talk begun in the 1950s, based on the work of linguists such as Howard Garfinkel, and of the philosopher Paul Grice.16 Talk involves much more than understanding the meaning of uttered words. In talk, a listener tries to grasp what it is that the speaker has in mind. For this to work certain conditions have to be met. The speaker has to help the listener along by obeying certain maxims or principles. These oblige the speaker to cooperate with the listener. They have to have, or to build and negotiate, a shared definition of the setting, the situation, and of what is going on – what story is this talking a part of? Moreover, they must share assumptions, have a common cognitive environment, so that they grasp one another’s references and get the drift of one another’s intentions. With cooperation and good will, and by obeying the principle


of relevance, they can hope to engage in ‘mundane talk’, talk conducted within their common world, and within the ‘natural attitude’. Only within such a framework of shared assumptions and good talk behaviour can the listener perform the cognitive work that is an essential element of all talk, the work of ‘filling in’, of silent inference and interpretation, that allows the listener to move from the literal meaning of the speaker’s words to whatever it is that he or she has in mind. We have already seen, in George Bone’s incomprehension when he is in one of his bad mental states, an example of what happens when ‘fi lling in’ cannot proceed. He can understand the words but not the intention or thought behind them. The three novels I am discussing seem to have as a central focus the display of the varieties of bad talk, talk in which cognitive work cannot get going. Strangers meet, in a park, in a restaurant or pub in wartime London, in a boarding house dining room, and they talk. But their talk is filled with anxiety and suspicion and doubt because something is going wrong. In every case the consequence sooner or later is psychological devastation. Bad talk, dysfunctional talk, can be very bad for you. The listener ends up obsessively going over the speaker’s words and asks over and over, ‘What on earth did that mean?’ and ‘Whose words can I trust?’ In the world of Hangover Square talk is systematic goading and humiliation, in that of The Slaves of Solitude it is bullying, deceit and conspiracy, and in The Heat of the Day talk is duplicity and betrayal. In these circumstances mundane talk is impossible and ‘the natural attitude’ is abandoned. The formula in Hamilton’s novels is bad talk drives people mad; the formula for the Bowen novel is, as on the wartime posters, that careless talk costs lives. Much of modern conversation analysis has its origins in the work of Garfinkel. In one set of experiments he sent his students off to their families, briefed to deliberately indulge in bad talk and to record the consequences. They would, for example, talk with inappropriate formality, or would say hello instead of goodbye as they left the room. Naturally, this made their families angry, for it was correctly interpreted as a wilful refusal to share a common world and common sense definitions of their situations. Another variant was this: the student would affect to not understand some common word. Thus, the father would say, ‘I must go and deal with that flat tyre’, and the student would reply, ‘What do you mean, “flat tyre”?’ Again anger, or even outrage, would ensue. The emotional temperature could be turned way up very quickly indeed by playing this game, and it only dawned too late on the academics just how dangerous it was. Because of course the wilful refusal to admit shared meanings amounted to an insinuation that the world as defined in mundane family discourse was somehow not good enough, was beneath the student, or even that it was possibly cognitively flawed. What began as what seemed like mildly amusing experiments were soon revealed to be quite serious interference with people’s grasp of their world.


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A version of this Garfinkel game occurs in Hangover Square, written some twenty years earlier. George Harvey Bone phones Netta, with whom he imagines himself to be in love and who has already agreed, the previous evening, to go out with him for a meal. ‘Oh, hullo, Netta,’ he said in studiedly polite and gentle tones, though of course this would only add to her fury. ‘This is me.’ ‘What? Who is it? . . .’ ‘This is me. George.’ ‘Oh.’ ‘Have I interrupted you in your bath or something?’ ‘No. I was asleep. What do you want?’ ‘Oh, I’m awfully sorry. I was ringing up about today – that’s all.’ ‘What do you mean – “today”?’ ‘I mean this evening.’ ‘What do you mean – “this evening”? What about this evening?’ (Hangover, 65) George is immediately quite clear about what is going on here. He knows that Netta is playing a sadistic game. He knows that he has, in loving Netta, broken some rule and that ‘he can no longer expect the normal amenities of intercourse. Only in an excess of amiability or generosity might she now treat him as an equal human being’ (Hangover, 44). Refusing to abide by Grice’s maxims of cooperation in talk is indeed to refuse to treat someone as an equal human being. She knew exactly what he meant, of course; but because she was in one of her tempers, which might have been brought about by his having wakened her by phoning, but which was more probably quite spontaneous, arbitrary, and gratuitous, she was going to cross-examine him, make him explain himself, make him look a fool. It was an absolute marvel what he put up with from this woman. (Hangover, 65) Netta’s repeated behaviour amounts to a sadistic campaign. ‘Will you come and have a meal with me sometime this week, Netta?’ He said. ‘How do you mean, exactly, “meal”?’ she said. He looked at her and saw from her expression that she really knew what he meant, that she was purposely playing ‘village idiot’. (Hangover, 44)


Talk involves the speaker making an effort to make his references clear and unambiguous, and the listener’s making an effort to grasp who or what is being referred to. A lazy, inattentive or even wilful refusal to pick up references is rude because it is implicitly saying ‘I can’t be bothered to see what you’re pointing at.’ ‘Who’s this?’ said George, quietly aside to Netta, as they waited for the drinks to come. ‘Who’s what?’ (Hangover, 150) Or again: ‘Who was that man?’ ‘What man?’ she said. She knew, of course, who he meant, but she was pretending she didn’t in order to make it seem that the man had been dismissed from her mind. (Hangover, 72) As Netta says, refusing to allow that George could possibly make sense, ‘ “I don’t know what you’re talking about” ’ and ‘ “Most extraordinary. In fact I’ve never actually heard anyone say a thing exactly like that before” ’ (Hangover, 80–1). How could anyone’s sanity survive such repeated assault? A different variant of this Garfinkel situation occurs when the failure to grasp someone else’s banal meanings is not wilful but stems from the listener’s serious lack of confidence that her cognitive work can come up with trustworthy inferences, even in the simplest of cases. The Heat of the Day opens with just such talk. The mysterious Harrison, apparently a counterespionage agent, talks with Stella, and puts a strange proposition – her lover, he explains, is a spy, but will be left alone as long as Stella allows Harrison to enter her life. Just what he has in mind is never clear and he is provided with no back-story, so neither Stella nor the reader ever knows what he is really on about. These are perfect conditions for conversational failure. Harrison’s mind, Stella thinks, was ‘a jar of opaquely clouded water, in which, for all she knew, the strangest fish might be circling, staring, turning to turn away’.17 Conversational failure is the norm. Stella finds herself saying, ‘ “you mean to convey that there’s something more. What then? – then what? I should like to know what you mean. I should like to know what you think you have up your sleeve. You mean, I am to do as you say – ‘or else’, ‘otherwise’ . . . ? Well, otherwise what?” ’ (Heat, 33). Deliberately withholding information that allows a listener to interpret utterance and to arrive at a confident guess as to what you are thinking creates a sense of menace or worse, and has become a staple of popular genres (the espionage


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or detective thriller, confidence trickster genres, and so on). Bowen seems to be using the espionage setting precisely to focus on talk in conditions of duplicity, threat and betrayal, but not in order to exploit the entertainment possibilities of the genre. ‘ “It’s funny” ’, Harrison says, ‘ “when you begin ‘you mean’, you remind me of a girl I met in the park. I would say, for instance, ‘How blue the sky is,’ whereupon she’d say, ‘You mean, the sky’s blue?” ’ (Heat, 33). Again, it is the difficulty of establishing the minimal conditions for effective talk that is involved here. Either through malevolence or madness, the listener cannot help being unsure just what is being meant by what seem to be even the simplest of exchanges. The encounter to which Harrison refers has been between himself and the lonely working-class Louie Lewis, whose husband is away in the war and who strikes up a conversation with Harrison in Regent’s Park. Harrison manages to make her feel just as he’d made Stella feel, that she cannot trust herself to grasp what he has in mind. She cannot take quite at face value his palpable will to unkindness. ‘ “We haven’t met before?” ’, Harrison asks; Louie replies: ‘ “How do you mean, met?” ’ (Heat, 12). Louie knows instinctively that to succeed in getting someone to talk with you is to get them to engage with your mind, to become involved, at least, in focusing their attention upon you and being willing to begin all the necessary estimations and negotiations that are involved in the maxims of relevance. If she can get Harrison to talk with her, then she has succeeded in establishing and enjoying her own intersubjective existence. Engaging a stranger in talk is an assertion of self (Heat, 12). The last thing Harrison wants, it seems, is to allow this to succeed and he is so rude that Louie says, ‘ “You keep wanting to catch me out!” ’ (Heat, 13). The general point that these ‘Garfinkel’ situations demonstrate is that the failure to establish a basis of common sense can very quickly escalate into a situation of extreme emotional intensity, whether of outrage or menace, of existential anxiety or epistemological uncertainty. Dysfunctional talk is so much an obsession of Patrick Hamilton that Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky reads like an encyclopaedia of the varieties of failed communication. But in this novel by and large the failures stem from the characters’ own obsessions and addictions, and they are analysed relatively kindly. Bad talk, if not exactly innocent, is at least not sadistic, not purposefully cruel as it is in Hangover Square and The Slaves of Solitude. In the latter novel one of the main culprits is the thoroughly odious Mr Thwaites, an elderly resident in the Rosamund Tea Rooms boarding house, and he is a specialist in innuendo. He goads the inoffensive Miss Roach almost into lunacy by hinting at his thoughts, carefully keeping his utterances not quite decidable. He seems to accuse her of lack of patriotism, of impropriety, eventually even of seducing teenaged boys, while carefully keeping his animosity almost hidden under the wraps of a sort of boarding house politeness. He is a small-minded and utterly foolish bully. His skill


is that he can suggest something rude or antagonistic while, by careful calculation, not quite saying it explicitly, maintaining an air of innocence. He thereby forces his listeners to ask, ‘What do you mean?’ For example, when he is in a jocular manner accusing Vicki Kugelmann of leading people dances, he turns to Miss Roach and says, ‘ “But perhaps you wouldn’t know anything about it” ’ (Slaves, 135). Miss Roach’s mind cannot get going on the normal ‘filling in’ cognitive work, arriving at a defi nitive interpretation of the inferences of his remark. She is effectively silenced. There were three ways of answering this. One was with the drearily familiar ‘What do you mean?’ Another was with the embarrassing and equally familiar silence. The other (in view of the fact that his intention pretty obviously was to present her with one of the gravest affronts a man could present to a woman) was to throw her cup of tea in his face. But she had better not do this, and she had better not say ‘What do you mean?’, in case he did explain more fully what he meant. So she remained silent. (Slaves, 135) At last, goaded beyond endurance, Miss Roach pursues Mr Thwaites trying to get him simply to say openly just what it is that he is hinting at, screaming at him over and over again, ‘ “Will you please tell me what you mean, Mr Thwaites?” ’ (Slaves, 184). Goaded at last by the most malicious of his silent accusations, she is provoked beyond endurance and resorts to moderate physical violence and pushes him over so that she is exposed as the aggressor. In the apparently calm and civilized boarding house ‘waves were flowing forward and backward, and through and through, of hellish revulsion and unquenchable hatred’ (Slaves, 144). What fascinates Hamilton is the coexistence of what seems to be calm, polite, respectable normality and these destructive, violent waves of hidden psychic impulse. Vicki Kugelmann also indulges in innuendo, at the climax of the story implicitly accusing Miss Roach of having killed Mr Thwaites who, soon after being pushed, dies in hospital: ‘ “I thought very soon after his fall that something bad was on the way” ’ (Slaves, 203). It is this remark which, by its combination of serious implication and overt innocence, drives Miss Roach most nearly to distraction by its calculated undecidability. She spends hours walking the streets with the various interpretations of the utterance circling around in her head. ‘Perhaps the woman had not meant it . . . Nonsense! Of course she had meant it!’ (Slaves, 203). Either Miss Kugelmann is very wicked or Miss Roach has a distorted mind. Bad talk drives people mad because it makes them lose confidence in their ability to understand what is being said, and therefore in the integrity of their own minds. The campaign of innuendo is exposed as cruel power play, as playing games with the victim’s mind.


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Hamilton succeeds in finding power-mad bullying, dictatorial tendencies, hiding in what seem like small bits of bad talk behaviour; great crimes are disguised as trivial offences. Mr Thwaites’s other method of verbal torture is to speak in his own unbearably arch speech style, and this is also a talk offence to which Hamilton returns again and again in his novels. Verbal bad taste is actually the triumph of the will, the will to dominate another person’s cognitive world. Thwaites speaks a kind of cod medieval English: ‘ “And dost thou go forth this bonny morn . . . into the highways and byways, to pay thy due respects to Good King Sol?” ’ (Slaves, 60). It is embarrassing and silly but why exactly does it drive its victims to depression or despair? It is because it is among the ways in which he manages to rule over the company, to be a complete master of the conversation. Miss Kugelmann has her own embarrassing speech style – it is a dated, slangy style, mixed in with a few foreigner’s solecisms, by means of which she attempts to impose a certain attitude or atmosphere of false gaiety, overriding everyone else’s wishes. This at any rate is the analysis of Miss Roach, though the torment is, of course, that she cannot be quite sure that she is not merely being unkind. Even her way of saying ‘ “Good evening, Mr Lieutenant” ’ is analysed as a power play. And the way she said this was controlling and dominating – the ‘Mr’ seeming to challenge him, slightly ridicule him, and take him in charge. From the first moment, too, she took on the part of the leading spirit of the party – an attitude of being the guest of the evening, of giving forth, at once as a duty and charming condescension, her vitality and wit. (Slaves, 104) So powerful is Miss Roach’s loathing of Vicki’s idiolect that pages are given over to its display. It is a pure case of Bakhtin’s view that the novel is the image of a language. Miss Roach tosses and turns, at five in the morning, torturing herself thinking about Miss Kugelmann and her language. Her words. Her expressions. Not her behaviour, so much as her vocabulary! ‘Mr Lieutenant’! . . . ‘Oh, boy’! . . . ‘Uh-huh’! . . . ‘Wizard’! ‘Sporty!’ ‘Sporty play’! ‘Sporty shot’! ‘Wizard shot’! . . . ‘Good for you, big boy’! . . . ‘Hard lines’! ‘Hard lines, old fellow’! ‘Hard cheese’! ‘Skol’! ‘Prosit’! ‘Santé’! No, that was unfair. The filthy woman had a right, as a ‘foreigner’, to Skol, Prosit and Salut. Or had she? ‘Cheers, old chap’! ‘Mud in your eye’! ‘Down the jolly old hatch’! Oh, my God! (Slaves, 117)


And so it goes on and on. Why is replaying her speech such torture for Miss Roach, whose stream of thought, in free indirect style, this is? She hates Vicki Kugelmann and her hatred focuses not so much upon her behaviour as upon her oppressive speech style which amounts to a complete refusal to attempt to construct or negotiate a shared world. The world will be as Miss Kugelmann defines it, and Miss Roach will be as Miss Kugelmann labels her and there is no way that any answering voice will ever be allowed to be heard. Miss Kugelmann is so barricaded behind her idiolect that there is no way that Miss Roach’s alternative way of viewing things will ever be admitted into the conversation. This of course leaves her vulnerable to being the target of Miss Kugelmann’s determined labelling and this is indeed the climax toward which Miss Roach’s disturbed mind is travelling. ‘You must learn to be sporty, Miss Prude.’ . . . ‘Miss Prim.’ . . . ‘The English Miss.’ . . . THE ENGLISH MISS! THE ENGLISH MISS! (Slaves, 118) Miss Roach’s stream of self-doubt and her hatred of Miss Kugelmann go on uninterrupted for several more chapters: ‘Miss Roach had now reached the point (she saw) at which she was inventing conversations with Vicki, inventing Vicki’s answers, and then getting white with anger at these invented answers. This was the point at which she must stop, or go clean off her head’ (Slaves, 124). Vicki’s bad talk has so undermined her that it threatens to drive her mad. Hamilton returns again and again to such situations in his novels as if he wants to convince the reader of the potential malevolence of idiosyncratic speech in the wrong mouth, where it is revealed to be a weapon of control and domination and an implement of torture. There is such pleasure in denouncing these verbal bullies (and there is usually in Hamilton a sophisticated narrator who does denounce and put the bad characters in their place and punish them) that the writing seems a kind of vengeance. Hamilton is getting his own back, but on whom? One of Miss Roach’s thoughts might be a clue. Why should she be set on like this? It reminded her of her schooldays – her schooldays both as a pupil and as a schoolmistress – in which there would occur, for no apparent reason, sinister developments of this sort – gradually and mysteriously emerging plots, spies, malicious alignments against an individual, sendings to Coventry, at last open hatred and torture. Had she got to go back to school at the age of thirty-nine? (Slaves, 165)


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The conspiracy of bullies whose weapon is deliberately dysfunctional talk, the withholding of ‘the normal amenities of discourse’, reminds one of the plays of Harold Pinter. There is not a huge distance between the boarding house of The Slaves of Solitude and the pub gang of Hangover Square and the menace in Pinter’s The Birthday Party and The Caretaker. The difference is that post-war Pinter draws the audience into the same position of recipient of undecidable talk as the victim characters, whereas in Hamilton the reader gets to know all. But in both cases there is a strong sense of some ancient hatred at play, and the pleasures of getting one’s own back.18

Notes 1. See John Mepham, ‘Dorothy Richardson’s “Unreadability”: Graphic Style and Narrative Strategy in a Modernist Novel’, English Literature in Transition 1880– 1920, 43 (4) (2000): 449–64. 2. Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London and New York, Routledge, 1991). Light’s framework argument has much in common with my own: see for example, her idea that Compton-Burnett suffered a ‘traumatized relation to modernity’ (11), that her writing warns us of the need to observe ‘the full repertoire of feminine desires’ (23) and that these include impulses to despotism. The general thrust of her argument is toward expanded conceptions of modernity and of modernism (see especially 216–17). 3. David Lodge, ‘Dialogue in the Modern Novel’, After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism (London: Routledge, 1990). 4. See John Mepham, ‘Stream of Consciousness’ and ‘Interior Monologue’ in The Literary Encyclopedia (online database at http://www.litencyc.com). 5. Virginia Woolf, The Years (London: Hogarth, 1937), 184. 6. For a survey of Hamilton’s life and work see John Mepham, ‘Patrick Hamilton’, in The Literary Encyclopedia (online database at http://www.litencyc.com). 7. Patrick Hamilton, The Slaves of Solitude (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1999), 108–9. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Slaves, followed by page number. 8. Sidney L. Bernstein, ‘Walk Up! Walk Up! – Please’, in Charles Davy (ed.), Footnotes to the Film (London: Peter Davies, 1938), pp. 221–37, 221. 9. On Hamilton’s experiences in, and disappointments with the fi lm industry, see John Mepham, ‘Patrick Hamilton’; Sean French, Patrick Hamilton: a Life (London: Faber, 1993); and Nigel Jones, Through a Glass Darkly: the Life of Patrick Hamilton (London: Abacus, 1993). 10. Bowen ‘Why I go to the Cinema’, in Davy (ed.), Footnotes, pp. 205–20, 207. Bowen saw fi lm as mainly an entertainment medium. She claimed to go to the cinema as a holiday from thinking. Nonetheless, both Bowen and Hamilton were aware of cinema’s vast popularity. Neither writer wanted to be seen as ‘uncompromising’ (a battle cry for the avant-garde in the 1920s). The challenge was to be popular without becoming trapped in genre conventions, hence their use of modernist devices. 11. Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square (London: Penguin Books, 1974), 11. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Hangover, followed by page number.

76 British Fiction After Modernism 12. On Hamilton’s diagnosis of modernism, see Jones, Through a Glass Darkly, 213– 14. Jones reports Hamilton’s belief that modernists were too immersed in their inner preoccupations and took no account of social reality. They were ‘hopelessly and morbidly turned in upon themselves and sterile in consequence . . . [They are] self-conscious to an ever more tormented degree . . . the mind can only look at ever receding reaches of the mind, and an art on the borderline of madness or idiocy must be reached.’ 13. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, Selected Poems (London: Faber, 1961), 16. 14. This idea that talk is disruptive of fi lm’s visual poetry was one on which Richardson based her comments about film. She wrote for the film magazine Close up. See James Donald, Anne Friedberg and Laura Marcus (eds), Close up 1927–1933: Cinema and Modernism (London: Cassell, 1998). 15. This cultural turn has many dimensions, most of which cannot be touched on here. For some further background to it see John Mepham, ‘London as Auditorium: Public Spaces and Disconnected Talk in Works by Ford Madox Ford, Patrick Hamilton and Virginia Woolf’, Susana Onega and John Stotesbury (eds), London in Literature: Visionary Mappings of the Metropolis (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag, C. Winter, 2002), pp. 83–106. 16. Grice’s maxims and the cooperative principle are discussed for example in Malcolm Coulthard, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (London: Longman, 1985), and Ronald Wardhaugh, How Conversation Works (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985). An attempt to elaborate the ideas with more detail and precision can be found in Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). For Garfinkel see for example, John Heritage, Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984). 17. Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (London: Penguin Books, 1962), 30. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Heat, followed by page number. 18. The Slaves of Solitude is a fine example of fiction as vengeance. But who was Hamilton so angry about? Janet Montefiore pointed out in discussion that immediately after the war, the feelings of loathing excited by Nazis were extremely strong in a left-winger like Hamilton, and that it is quite enough to imagine him putting his vengeful feelings against them into the fiction. Jones’s biography points rather to his parents as the targets for his revenge. The two possibilities are not incompatible.

7 James Hanley and the Colours of War Gerard Barrett

If they only wrote a right true history of the war – that on Conrad and his tribe bloody masterpieces about Empire written in cabins with carpets and nice fires and more wine there tiger they’re all right. What about bloody war in ship’s bunkers ship’s stokehold bleedin’ authors shipping on tramps as passengers damn-all to do and down to Borneo and Gulf and other places and masterpiece written in London true story of the sea. Know nothing of bloody war they don’t . . . James Hanley, Narrative (1931) Although he was purportedly described by Henry Green as ‘far and away the best writer of the sea and seafaring men since Conrad’, this was not a judgement that would have brought James Hanley (1901–85) particular satisfaction.1 While the jaundiced view of Conrad in the passage above is admittedly put into the mouth of a feverish sailor who is dying in a lifeboat following the torpedoing of his ship, there is every indication that Hanley shared his character’s sentiments. In an introduction to an edition of Melville’s Moby Dick published in 1952, Hanley contrasted the ‘cold, distant, almost planetary heart of the Polish writer’ with the ‘warm, confused, and headlong heart’ of the American, commenting also on how well ‘Melville understood simple sailor men, a thing Conrad never did, since he had little or no patience with them’.2 Whether this view is fair or not, Conrad clearly was a writer from whom Hanley needed to distance himself, temperamentally, aesthetically and politically. It is possible that Hanley’s antipathy to Conrad had its roots in his working-class background and in a personal experience of the sea that was conducted below rather than above the decks. Biographical knowledge of Hanley’s early years is fragmentary and inconsistent but, according to one source, his father was a stoker, a man who tended furnaces and boilers on steamships, and this was a job that Hanley himself worked at after being demobilized from the army at the end of the First World War. In this 77


account, Hanley was compelled by the dire economic circumstances of his family to join the Merchant Navy at the age of twelve.3 Another account, however, claims that Hanley came from ‘a reasonably well-to-do background’ and that his father had voluntarily given up a promising law career in order to go to sea.4 What is generally agreed is that Hanley was born in Dublin in 1901 and moved with the rest of his family to Liverpool in 1908 but, until an official biography appears, a degree of caution must be exercised when making statements about his early life. It is possible that Hanley’s family, like that of James Joyce, found itself moving down the social scale because of decisions made by the father and that Hanley’s aversion to what he perceived to be Conrad’s privileged milieu derived from regret for his own family’s loss of middle-class status. Having joined the Merchant Navy at the outbreak of the First World War, Hanley jumped ship in New Brunswick and enlisted in the Canadian army in 1915. He saw combat in France in the summer of 1918, and after the war he worked in a variety of jobs, including that of stoker on troop carriers, before beginning to write in the late 1920s. He published his first novel, Drift, in 1930 and a further twenty-five over the ensuing fifty years, along with several volumes of short stories, drama and autobiography. His early work primarily took the form of privately printed novellas issued in small print runs for subscribers only. These books were art-objects in themselves, printed on hand-made paper and illustrated by artists such as William Roberts and Alan Odle.5 The bibliographical details of these novellas are somewhat paradoxical, with the deluxe nature of the books themselves being at odds with the unrelenting harshness of their subject matter: captured soldiers are tortured, mutilated and murdered (The German Prisoner, 1930); a prison warder submits to having sexual intercourse with a deranged prisoner on the eve of an execution (A Passion Before Death, 1930); a stoker at the end of his working life throws himself into a furnace (The Last Voyage, 1931). Furthermore, the way these books were made and disseminated meant that were never likely to reach the kind of people they depicted. Indeed, Hanley’s early champions were primarily upper-class writers such as E.M. Forster, T.E. Lawrence and Henry Green.6 Hanley’s working-class sympathies were not, however, compromised by his aesthetic affiliations; indeed, they had a pronounced impact on the kind of narratives and characters he shaped. It was his perception of the abject powerlessness of the sea-going proletariat that led him to deny his characters the tragic grandeur of Conradian heroes such as Lord Jim. While Edward Stokes is correct in claiming that Hanley had the power to create ‘larger-than-life characters which achieve an almost mythic stature’,7 Hanley’s characters (his sailors in particular) are ultimately victims, deprived of autonomy to an extreme degree. The early novella Narrative (1931) 8 is a paradigmatic example. The story concerns seven men ‘lucky’ enough to

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gain berths on a mysterious ship during the First World War. These men are so far removed from power that even their captain has no idea of their destination: the ship sails under ‘sealed orders’ that will not be opened until it is far out to sea. There is speculation that the ship may be a ‘decoy’, which the captain defines as ‘one that follows a convoy at a convenient distance and when trouble is in sight sees to it that she shall be the target for any interfering submarine’.9 This suspicion seems to be confirmed when the ship is subsequently hit by a torpedo in the English Channel. As the last lifeboat sinks and the final two survivors go down with it, their bodies bob up and down in the water ‘like well-manipulated marionettes’ (Men, 126), an image that implies it is not the enemy alone that is responsible for their deaths, but those puppet masters at home who sent them out on a ship whose destination is the ocean floor. The tropes deployed at the end of Narrative suggest the political or class basis of Hanley’s distance from Conrad. The tragic status of a character such as Lord Jim derives from his having a degree of free will and autonomy that is based on a secure upper-middle-class foundation. Hanley, however, was writing about working-class men who did not have the luxury of being the architects of their own downfall. In Hanley’s critique, Conrad becomes a figure of privilege whose seductive narratives must be resisted. But while Hanley’s working-class sympathies involved a rejection of Conrad’s bourgeois milieu, he did not wish to jettison Conrad’s formalism; Hanley’s more deterministic vision, with its emphasis on disempowerment, is conveyed with the kind of stylized narrative patterning and distortions that are characteristic of modernist fiction. As a member of a generation that came after the high modernism of Conrad, Joyce and Woolf, Hanley demonstrated that a novelist could write about stokers and soldiers in forms that would have been deemed more appropriate for ships’ captains, middle-class salesmen and society hostesses. In the fiction Hanley went on to write during the Second World War, he remained true to the determinist vision of Narrative while nonetheless allowing the modernist, almost surrealistic, dimension of his writing to come to the fore. The three novels Hanley published between 1941 and 1943 comprise a sequence of interconnecting narrative patterns and distortions. Although The Ocean (1941), No Directions (1943) and Sailor’s Song (1943) have usually been regarded as discrete entities, with little to connect them other than their wartime settings, the imagery of each novel is complicated but ultimately enriched when viewed in relation to the other two. In fact, The Ocean and Sailor’s Song form the opening and closing volumes of a trilogy that has No Directions at its centre. The connections between the first and the third novels would be clear even on a casual perusal of their situations; both are stories of survival at sea with the action of the first confined to an open boat and that of the second to a life-raft. At first glance, No Directions, which focuses on a tenement block in London over


the course of a single night during the Blitz, has little in common with the novels that flank it. However, the setting of these two novels is figuratively evoked throughout No Directions by that novel’s abundance of marine imagery, with London streets during the Blitz becoming ‘an ocean of floating trash’.10 Though it stands perfectly well by itself as a lucid depiction of the disorientation of the time, No Directions takes on added resonance when viewed as the central panel of a triptych. Hanley’s three wartime novels comprise a distinctly modernist trilogy or sequence rather than a traditional one. According to Howard Erskine-Hill, the traditional sequence, associated with Trollope and Galsworthy, displays ‘a continuity of character and action through several book-length fictions’.11 The modernist sequence, which Erskine-Hill traces back to Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (1924–28), avoids such stability and continuity. Characterized by ‘sharp contrast and counterpoint’ and frequently using ‘unchronological time’, the modernist novel sequence poses interpretative difficulties for the reader, who, Erskine-Hill points out, ‘is rarely assisted in this act of synthesis’.12 In Hanley’s case, the connections between his novels are certainly not linear ones; characters and plot lines from the fi rst book are not developed in the second and ushered towards a resolution in the third. The novels have a relationship best conceived in spatial rather than temporal terms, one that is imposed from without by the war and from within by recurring images and colours. Within the confines of the individual novels, however, particular images and motifs are fraught with emotional contradiction. All three of Hanley’s novels emphasize delirium and hallucination in their oblique depictions of the war. The clearest instance of this is the drunken sailor’s disorientation at the beginning of No Directions, whose delirious imagination transforms the broken glass that litters the streets into ‘a whole, bloody shining sea’ of ice (No, 10). Such a distortion typifies the sailor’s state of mind for the duration of the novel; when he later breaks into an abandoned apartment and helps himself to the alcohol left behind, he insists on seeing the room as ‘a great ship’ with a ‘fine store’ of drink that, ‘sort of makes you forget the ice’ (No, 46, 46, 47). The moment encapsulates the deracination of this blackout fiction, as one delusion becomes the means of dispersing another. The Ocean anticipates this sense of double delirium, with ‘dream and actuality’ being confused by almost every character.13 With the novel’s five characters adrift in a lifeboat after their liner has been torpedoed, some actively embrace delirium as a means of psychic survival as when Stone and Benton become convinced at one point that there is a ship on the horizon. Benton admits that, in these conditions, ‘You had to make pictures and fill your mind with them, you had to shut the ocean out’ (Ocean, 96), while Curtain, the only sailor among the five survivors, acknowledges that sometimes, ‘when one is looking out on water like that, moving water, and


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the sky so still against it, you fancy things’ (Ocean, 73). For others, however, this capitulation of rationality to delusion turns to nightmare. In a remarkable passage, another character, Gaunt, relives a childhood phobia and fi nds himself trapped inside a room with a giant cockroach that grows so large that he can ‘see its head, and eyes green’ and ‘many legs hanging from its body’ (Ocean, 113). In Gaunt’s fevered consciousness, this creature talks, and moves ‘like a snake, wave-like, like a worm, twisting and turning, its flesh was blue and grey, like a fish he once saw his father catch in the river’ (Ocean, 116). The vision culminates with Gaunt convinced that a whale rising to the sea’s surface is in fact the cockroach ‘moving in the sea’ (Ocean, 116). It then takes on another incarnation, that of a submarine (Ocean, 116). As in the case of the drunken sailor in No Directions, one hallucination becomes the means of dispersing another; only here the depths of terror plumbed get deeper with each new layer of delusion. The text itself appears to share in these hallucinations: over twenty pages later, when the nightmare seems to have passed, the narrator casually remarks that ‘the boat crawled, an insect in this ocean’ (Ocean, 139). The Ocean ends with one of the survivors, a priest, looking up at one of his rescuers and seeing not a fisherman but ‘the shape of Christ’ (Ocean, 184). Although this can be viewed as arising at least partly from a realistic aesthetic (who wouldn’t hallucinate after days at sea with little water or food?), the extent and intensity of the novel’s distortions have the effect of rupturing its own realistic surface. In No Directions, the sense of the imagination feverishly going out of control extends well beyond the sailor, Mr Johns, and his obsession with ice. Every time bombs are dropped during a raid, the artist, Clem, enlists the help of his wife, Lena, to move the painting he has in progress down to the cellar of the tenement block; to another tenement dweller, Mr Robinson, the creaking noises they make as they descend the stairs with the painting remind him of mice (No, 116). This image takes hold of Robinson to such a degree that when he later pulls some matches out of the pocket of the sleeping sailor, he moves delicately, ‘as though he half-expected to withdraw not matches, but a handful of mice’ (No, 118). Clem himself is in the habit of borrowing money from someone called Rupert who ‘never even existed’ (No, 68). When, in another scene, Lena watches a balloon descend while walking through the streets at night, she inexplicably thinks of ‘prodigious lice, white lice’ (No, 62) while looking at it. Although this is a strange simile rather than a hallucination, it can hardly be a coincidence that the word ‘lice’, like ‘mice’, is only a letter away from the word that initiates the theme of hallucination in the first place. It is as if Hanley is, through minute textual adjustments, seeking to convey the sense of hallucination at this time as something contagious. Yet the novel’s major distortion, which can also be traced back to the sailor, is the sheer predominance of marine imagery in this fiery setting.

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Tropes relating to the sea are particularly emphasized at the conclusion of No Directions, where the painter runs out of a burning building and wrestles in the street with a bolted white stallion. At fi rst the horse, which appears out of nowhere, takes the form, in Clem’s perception, of ‘something white threshing in the black moving sea’ (No, 136). As Clem grips the leather of the horse’s reins, he feels that he is ‘pulling against tides’ and as he is dragged along the street by it he feels himself at ‘one with all this rushing ocean’ (No, 137). In intertextual terms, this combination of maritime imagery with that of a white horse recalls a scene in The Ocean where Stone, watching waves break and shoot spray into the air, sees ‘battalions of white horses galloping’ (Ocean, 51). The presence of the word ‘battalions’ endows this figure with a military connotation that arises from the text’s historical setting: the men in the lifeboat are the only survivors of an enemy attack on their ship. Although the correspondence between this trope and the rampage of the white stallion through the bombed cityscape of No Directions may seem clear enough, the passage in No Directions is a reversal of the figure in the first novel. In The Ocean, the equine image is a poetic figure that momentarily relieves the oppressive omnipresence of the sea; at the end of the second, it is the horse that dominates the scene, with the sea now forming part of the text’s figurative backdrop. Up until this moment, the painter had wrestled only with himself as he sought to capture on canvas the ‘depth’ he believed to be missing from contemporary life. In his essay ‘Broken Glass’, Rod Mengham views Clem’s struggle with the horse as ‘a much more spectacular, and wholly symbolic, demonstration of the role of fantasy in providing this muchneeded “depth” ’.14 The suggestion here is that the moment provides a paradigm for the artist in wartime, with the white horse representing a powerful force in the unconscious that is struggling for expression. In Hanley’s description of Clem’s encounter with the horse, some of the phrases deployed suggest that the horse embodies the violence of the time itself. As Clem touches it, something seems to ‘explode’ beneath his hand and he feels ‘electric waves running across its back’ (No, 137). Other details imply Hanley’s suggested response to the crisis; as he feels himself being dragged along, Clem does not resist, but allows himself to be pulled even though ‘the maddened beast was dragging him towards a fire’ (No, 137). This suggests that the artist’s capitulation to the unconscious will ultimately lead him towards, rather than away from, the infernos that surround him; chaos and destruction are to be embraced rather than avoided. The dreamlike appearance of the horse also signals the kind of art that should result from such a capitulation of the artist’s conscious control. It will be an art that is, to use words Rosamond Lehmann applied to the writing of Henry Green, ‘perfectly centred in the times, free to settle nowhere, everywhere, at home in ruins, on fruitful terms with rubble, explosions, flames and smoke’.15


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The image of the white horse recurs again in Hanley’s next novel, Sailor’s Song, which, like No Directions, was published in 1943. In the course of a scene depicting ‘hard bound’ sailors queuing outside a building for a place on a ship, the narrator momentarily focuses on a red-haired man who finds his attention captured by a figure that recalls the stallion of the previous novel: He scraped his feet, often spitting, in the absence of something to do, and when a powerful white dray horse hauling a lorry laden with cotton bales came up this road, striking fire from the street stones, he looked hard at it and went on looking, because it was something to do. But he never looked ahead at the green building that heaved itself up to greyness of road and stood fast, often vibrating to its foundations when the enormous power of a train thundered past it. He kept on looking at the horse, exploding energy remorselessly against slippery stones . . . but no word was spoken by this red-haired man. A struggling horse has become the eight wonder of the world.16 Although the immediate background here is not the London Blitz, the phrases ‘striking fire’ and ‘exploding energy’ both allude to the earlier avatar of the horse in No Directions. As an image, the white horse was clearly something of an obsession for Hanley at this time, one that is almost shied away from in the third novel, where the man’s fascination with the horse is played down by the repeated phrase ‘something to do’. The significance of this image in these three novels, while certainly involving elements of apocalypse, fantasy, artistry, violence and fire, has other dimensions that only emerge when it is placed in the context of Hanley’s use of colour in these novels, particularly those of green and grey.17 Green is the dominant colour of No Directions where it is initially the focus of a desired retreat from the city and the devastation of the Blitz. When Lena writes a letter to her sister in the country in the hope of coaxing her to London to look after Clem while she goes into hospital for an operation, she fails to complete the letter when she pauses to think of ‘all that green, a garden, a lawn, a field, would ink reach that far, count against all that green?’ (No, 33; Hanley’s emphasis). This admittedly predictable association of green with the pastoral is complicated, however, in a subsequent scene where Clem’s former model, Celia, and the drunken sailor break into an abandoned apartment containing green furniture, pale green walls, a table with a green top cloth and a bookcase full of books with green bindings – ‘a green dream’ (No, 41). They drink from a green jug, end up ‘staggering on a green carpet’, with Celia as drunk as the sailor, ‘dreaming green’ (No, 42, 50, 76). As these different instances of the colour indicate, it is fraught with indeterminacy in the text as a whole. Representing on one level the lushness of the countryside and an artificial representation of


that lushness, it also comes to signify drunkenness, delirium, nausea and decay. This instability renders Clem’s final thoughts on the horse ironic. After he has calmed it down he reflects that if you, ‘walked far enough you came to something green, older than steel or stone, where this beast belonged’ (No, 138). ‘ “I freed it” ’, he subsequently says to his wife; ‘ “I left it in a field” ’ (No, 142). The text, however, does not allow this to be the happy ending it appears to be. Although the words ‘something green’ and ‘field’ evoke, by themselves, a vision of fertile, rolling countryside, by this late stage of the novel greenness has gathered too many negative associations to allow it to be a positive conclusion. The full significance of the white horse that appears in Sailor’s Song only emerges when viewed against a backdrop of green and grey. A recurring theme of this novel is the desire of Sheila, the sailor’s wife, to escape the built-up town where they live for the countryside. The sailor, John Manion, hardly ever mentions the countryside itself, but fi xates on the word ‘green’ as representing everything his wife is denied in their oppressive urban environment. In chapter 17, he and Shelia take a tram out of town to find ‘ “that bit of green your missus had set her heart on” ’ (Sailor’s, 115). Finding this idyllic spot proves difficult. They are mocked by a sneering tram conductor, whose green teeth become a bitterly ironic gloss on their longing for a pastoral escape. The movement here is similar to that in No Directions, the desire for nature in some kind of uncorrupted form being undercut by insinuations of decay. In a further irony, the mean-spirited conductor lets them off at a cemetery (Sailor’s, 118). All this has implications for the scene where the red-haired man transfi xed by the white horse waits for work outside a green building. This is not a contingent detail, as the narrator emphasizes the colour of this structure repeatedly (Sailor’s, 165, 173). The dual nature of greenness in Sailor’s Song produces the following paradox: that the colour that represents a proletarian character’s yearning for the pastoral is also associated with the urban-based, corporate exploitation of the class to which she belongs. In a similar way, the ‘greyness of road’ mentioned in the same sentence is a detail that obliquely communicates Hanley’s sense that the war can be viewed in terms of class conflict rather than those of international politics. The man transfi xed by the white horse on this grey road is only one in a long line queuing for work on the ships. The shape these men form is a ‘snake-line of grey men, moving, always moving towards a green door, green blaze to this grey’ (Sailor’s, 164). Although there is an echo here of the hallucinatory cockroach that moves ‘like a snake’ in The Ocean, the greyness of the men and the road they stand on is also significant, the colour, in Sailor’s Song, being associated with both British battleships and German submarines. The sailor, John Manion, who is also queuing for work here, had once worked on a ship that was called Grey and the enemy submarine which blew his ship out of the water is described as a ‘sort of fish,


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grey-black under the belly, grey-black all over . . . This fish liked a grey ship, she liked a good hold on sailormen’ (Sailor’s, 50). The greyness attributed to both ship and submarine suggests that these metallic vessels of destruction, whatever their nationality, are both participating in the ongoing dehumanization of the sea-going proletariat by the shipping companies. The sailors, in their desperation for employment, accept the danger money the companies offer in wartime, although, as Manion bitterly reflects, that pound a month extra is stopped the moment the guns stop fi ring (Sailor’s, 159). Against this backdrop, it is no wonder that Scupper Jack, the recruiter of hard bound men for the shipping companies in Sailor’s Song, is spoken of in such chilling terms: ‘Anything he touches’, it is said, ‘even if that’s warm, is ice, and anything he sees, even the brightest and loveliest colour you ever saw turns grey’ (Sailor’s, 178). Scupper Jack’s ability to bring a chill to where previously there was warmth adds a further dimension to the opening of No Directions, where the drunken sailor perceives the broken glass that litters the ground as ice. Scupper Jack’s grey touch can be felt in this novel too; the green apartment that Celia and the sailor invade belongs to ‘two grey ladies who liked green things’ who are ‘airing themselves in Somerset’ away from the falling bombs (No, 58, 46). The greyness that is attributed to these two ladies is a different yet nonetheless related shade to that assigned to the men queuing for work in Sailor’s Song. The implicit disapproval that underlies the description stems partly from the narrator’s resentment at the easy financial circumstances that allow these ladies, unlike the other inhabitants of the building, to escape from the Blitz. Their greyness is akin to that of the ships and submarines that convey proletarian sailors to their deaths at sea. Indeed, the only fatality that occurs in the course of the night charted in No Directions is that of the drunken sailor, Mr Johns. However, if the bourgeois have the means to escape to the country during the Blitz, Hanley implies that they also miss out on potentially transformative hallucinatory experiences such as those experienced by the people who are forced to stay behind in the bombed city. Hanley leaves the reader in little doubt that the future of art lies with figures such as Clem and his embrace of the white horse rather than with grey ladies who like green things. Hanley implies that it is the artist’s role to stand against greyness in all its different forms. Towards the end of No Directions, one of the painter’s models, Celia, ransacks his studio for an idealized portrait of herself he had painted ten years before. While searching, she picks up a painting ‘that looked grey’ and then drops it ‘like a stone’ (No, 79), as though it were something contaminated. Against the background of everything that grey and green stand for in these three novels, the white horse the painter grapples with suggests the direction Hanley believed the imagination should take. Offering a momentary respite from the aggravations of wartime, the image of the white horse briefly lights up the unemployment line and

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provides a dynamic alternative to bourgeois apartments with their shallow recreations of the pastoral. It provides an alternative vision of the pastoral, one that is ‘older than steel or stone’ while nonetheless vulnerable to the carnage those materials can inflict. Just as it enables a sailor to escape momentarily the mayhem wrought on ships by submarines, it allows the artist to transcend for a brief but liberating instant the nausea, delirium and putrefaction of wartime, holding out the possibility that, through the encounter of the unconscious with havoc and fi re, artistic achievement can, for what it is worth in these circumstances, still be attained.

Notes 1. Green’s remark is quoted by Edward Stokes in his entry on Hanley in Contemporary Novelists, 3rd edition, ed. James Vinson (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1982), 288 and also by Meic Stephens in his entry on Hanley in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. 25, ed. H.C.J. Matthews and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 60. A bibliographical source is not indicated in either case. Green is, however, on record as describing Hanley as a ‘genius’ in a letter (written under his real name, Henry Yorke) to Edward Garnett dated 28 August 1931; see Jeremy Treglown, Romancing: the Life and Work of Henry Green (London: Faber, 2000), 306. 2. James Hanley, Introduction to Moby Dick (London: MacDonald & Co., 1952), xxiv. 3. Stephens, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 61. 4. See The James Hanley Network, a website maintained by Chris Gostick, http:// www.jameshanley.mcmail.com/INDEX.htm. 5. William Roberts (1895–1980) was a founder member of the Vorticist group and a war artist who vividly depicted front-line scenes in works such as The First German Gas Attack (1918). He drew the frontispiece for The German Prisoner. Alan Odle (1888–1948) was a critically acclaimed illustrator who married the modernist novelist, Dorothy Richardson, in 1917. He provided the remarkable dustjacket for Men in Darkness (1931). 6. See Forster’s ‘Liberty in England’, an address delivered at the Congrès International des Ecrivans at Paris on 21 June 1935, included in Abinger Harvest (London: André Deutch, 1996), 60–6. Forster defended Hanley when the trade edition of his second novel, Boy (1931), was successfully prosecuted for obscenity in 1934. 7. Stokes, Contemporary Novelists, 287. 8. Narrative was subsequently reissued under two different titles. Having originally appeared with four short stories in the collection Men in Darkness (1931), Hanley’s later reprinting of the novella as Victory, in the collection Half an Eye: Sea Stories (1937), may have been intended as an ironic swipe at Conrad, who published a novel under the same title in 1914. Narrative was also republished in 1948 under the title Men in Darkness without the four other stories with which it first appeared. The copyright page of the 1948 edition interestingly but mistakenly claims that the novella was fi rst published in 1943. The most recent printing of it, in The Last Voyage & Other Stories (London: Harvill, 1997), restores the original title.


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9. James Hanley, Men in Darkness: Five Stories (London: Lane, 1931), 69. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Men followed by page number. 10. James Hanley, No Directions (London: André Deutsch, 1990), 136. Hereafter cited parenthetically as No followed by page number. 11. Howard Erskine-Hill, ‘The Novel Sequences of Joyce Cary’, in Rod Mengham and N.H. Reeve (eds), The Fiction of the 1940s: Stories of Survival (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 91–100, 91. 12. Erskine-Hill, ‘The Novel Sequences of Joyce Cary’, 91. 13. James Hanley, The Ocean (London: William Kimber & Co., 1976), 54. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Ocean followed by page number. 14. Rod Mengham, ‘Broken Glass’, in Rod Mengham and N.H. Reeve (eds), The Fiction of the 1940s: Stories of Survival (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 132. 15. Rosamond Lehmann, ‘An Absolute Gift’, Times Literary Supplement, 6 August 1954. Rod Mengham has also pointed out that the appearance of the horse at the end of No Directions bears a close resemblance to a scene in Humphrey Jennings’s film Fires Were Started (1943), a feature-length documentary about the Auxiliary Fire Service during this period (‘Broken Glass’, 132). It is a case of parallel rather than allusion; the fi lm wasn’t released until April of that year, the same month in which No Directions was published. 16. James Hanley, Sailor’s Song (London: Nicholson & Watson, 1943), 164–5. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Sailor’s followed by page number. 17. The association of the figure with the idea of apocalypse relates to Revelations 6. The first of the four horsemen, who personifies war, rides a white horse.

8 The Girl on a Swing: Childhood and Writing in the 1940s N.H. Reeve

In his British Council pamphlet, The Novel 1945–1950, P.H. Newby briefly discussed the preoccupation with childhood that appeared to be one of the dominant responses to the contemporary mood, especially among younger writers whose careers only began during the war.1 The work he chose to illustrate this was A.L. Barker’s story ‘Submerged’, the first piece in her début collection Innocents (1947) – specifically a story, although Newby does not tease the implications out, in which certain childhood routines and expectations are suddenly interrupted by an overwhelming and hideous event that bars all further access to them. ‘Submerged’ begins with a boy, Peter, alone at his favourite spot on a river, bracing himself for his regular swim through a dangerous underwater tunnel of weeds and tree roots, a private initiation ordeal that cleanses him of the accumulations of the day, and helps establish his ‘suzerainty’ over the river, his ‘sense of property and kinship’.2 An obese woman comes blundering along the bank, clumsily chased by a man who seems intent on murdering her. Out of breath, she stops and taunts her pursuer, in the hearing of the hidden boy, with being unable to do it, whereupon the man retreats a little and she makes her escape, only to fall into the river a few yards off. The man searches for a while before running away; Peter assumes the woman has simply climbed out further downstream, until he dives in again and fi nds her body wedged tight in the entrance to his tunnel. He never goes back: It was as if he had closed a lid on the river. If by chance it was lifted, he did not remember the brown, soft water, the quiet colour, the jumping beams of sunlight. There came only a pang of alarm, a warning not to invite memory. This he prudently heeded, the lid was replaced on the river and all its associations . . . The lid was replaced and it was almost as if there had never been any river.3 The lid is firmly closed, and not only on the horrible contaminating adult mess that burst on him, blocking off his ritualized self-renewals and their 88

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proliferating connotations – uterine, baptismal, Parsifalian. The lid is closed even more firmly on his having refused to come to the woman’s help when she called for it, the moment when shame became part of the horror: a shame both evoked and concealed by his balancing refusal to help the man now, when he is arrested for a murder only Peter knows was never actually committed. And since Peter was cleaning his bicycle when he heard of the arrest, it is as if the desire to wash away stains were drawing ripples from the trauma back towards him; the obscure link between his impulse to purify and his edging-away from his own conscience becomes something else that needs to be submerged in order for the psyche to be able to continue. The desire for continuities, for ways of reconnecting the split parts of a life across the central, dividing disruption, dominates Elizabeth Taylor’s 1949 novel A Wreath of Roses. An unmarried school secretary in her midthirties finds herself alarmingly attracted to a disorientated homecoming soldier in search of his childhood roots. Listening to his stories of his life, she convinces herself that the two of them are fundamentally alike, as if brother and sister; both raised in atmospheres of crippling emotional deprivation, both adrift, maladjusted as adults. She uses this theory to rationalize her erratic and compromising behaviour, obsessively trailing after an edgy stranger she feels she has a bond with, insisting to herself that she is in full control of their relationship, and that her apparent estrangement from her normal self is not really estrangement at all, but the salutary resurrection of something previously buried and unacknowledged. The problem is that the man is making it all up; this is not his home, and he was never the soldier he claims to be. He is actually a murderer on the run – in part trying to invent a homecoming story to soothe himself, in part exploiting the attraction he found such stories to hold for lonely, discontented women in search of emotional outlets: he seems to be both a symptom and a manipulator of the widespread post-war craving for narratives of recuperation and self-empowerment in a world so inhospitable to them. A Wreath of Roses is full of effects of problematic, skewed return; repetitions, echoes and reflections which disconcert either by not quite matching or by matching too precisely. There are many comparable instances of this elsewhere in the cultural products of the period – the scene in the 1945 film Dead of Night, for example, when a man and a woman standing side by side look into a mirror and see different images, or throughout Henry Green’s novel Back (1946), with its extraordinary repertoire of warpings and substitutions, the uncanny play of sameness and difference engendered by so much desire to hear false echoes as true ones, to feel oneself back, with the dark fissures of one’s recent experience safely bridged over. In other cases, though, the juxtapositions of the not-quite-matching need not simply be indices of anxiety; they can also have an emancipating potential. In Elizabeth Taylor’s first novel, At Mrs Lippincote’s (1945), the heroine, Julia,


has a number of rather frightening and unexpected encounters with a seemingly demented young woman, Phyllis Lippincote, who is living with her mother in a hotel down the road for the duration of the war, while Julia and her family rent the formidably Victorian Lippincote house. Phyllis is now in the habit of letting herself back into the house without warning and making dramatic proprietorial appearances. She is first seen at the head of the staircase – ‘steps crossed the wide landing and a young woman in a white coat appeared. She was bareheaded and carried a suitcase.’4 On subsequent occasions she appears in the garden at evening, and in the attic, amid a strewing of wedding outfits and accessories. The novel makes interesting use of these Jane Eyre–Bertha Mason allusions – allusions extending to the ghostly nun in Villette as well. Phyllis clearly functions as Julia’s fiery alter ego, embodying all her suppressed resentments: dispossessed by the war, as Julia has been, of her home and the domestic happiness she anticipated, and vigorously protesting against these enforced sacrifices, reoccupying her territory as she pleases, and fighting back against the displacing intruder. The display of Phyllis’s ruined bridal preparations, just as Julia and her husband Roddy are giving a dinner party for Roddy’s RAF commanding officer, speaks eloquently of Julia’s own deteriorating marriage and the anger she has for various reasons decided to hold back. At the same time, there are strong suggestions that what Mrs Lippincote calls her daughter’s ‘difficulties’ (Lippincote, 163) may have had their roots less in the confounding of expectations than in the expectations themselves. The Lippincote house, which Julia finds so oppressively imposing, offers evidence everywhere of the pressures likely to have been exerted on anyone at all sensitive growing up in it. The portrait of the late Mr Lippincote in his Masonic regalia; Mrs Lippincote’s massive bosom, seemingly ‘unrelated to the female body, a structure, a shelf, a thing to pin watches to, hang chains upon’; her contempt for her vicar nephew and his life of ‘women and too many afternoon calls’; her proclamation that her once frail little boy was now ‘a Major in India!’ (Lippincote, 161, 163, 165): all these are accumulating indications of how Phyllis may have been caught between her own highly-strung nature, and the assumption that she would automatically follow in her mother’s footsteps, and embracing with the rest of her family the ethos of bullying and obeying to which the war has given free rein – the ethos from which Julia is struggling to protect her own little boy. Being so caught may have been the burden of Phyllis’s comment, when Julia found her in the attic, on her mother’s wedding dress: ‘ “I should have worn it at my own wedding” ’ (Lippincote, 157); a deep intimation of how ‘home’ in this novel is revealed to be, as John Brannigan puts it, ‘an ambivalent space of identity and alienation, of belonging and oppression’.5 Gazing at the grand Masonic portrait, Julia spends some time thinking about Phyllis’s childhood, picturing to herself the little girl out shopping with her mother at Marshalls’, ‘kicking her buttoned boots against the


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counter, watching for the change of more insignificant people, who paid cash, to come shooting back along the overhead wires in a little cage. ‘ “Come, Phyllis, Mamma is ready. Pick up your muff” ’ (Lippincote, 71). Would Phyllis have simply been trying to imitate her mother’s haughtiness, or is Julia imagining little signs of something more mutinous, less compliant in her, something that was never able to develop safely? Immediately after this, it is Julia who is seen on the landing in her own white coat, a white coat ‘with a fine bloom of dirt upon it’ (Lippincote, 72), heading out into the world as if to be the woman Phyllis could not be; a near but not exact replica, one that both acknowledges the connection and refuses to be imprisoned by it, refuses to remain fi xed forever at the moment of breakdown that invests the lost thing with a spurious purity: the double meaning in ‘a fine bloom of dirt’ is implicitly a sign of continuing growth and the demands it makes. These writings find various ways of addressing the sense of being abruptly severed from something which now, in retrospect, seems incoherent; or treacherous, as if it had deliberately deceived you about where it was leading; or frozen into immaculacy. All this is also present in William Sansom’s long story ‘Fireman Flower’ (1944), another piece mentioned in passing in Newby’s study. Sansom served as a firefighter during the Blitz, and wrote several sharp, hyper-realistic fictionalized responses to it, but in ‘Fireman Flower’ he attempted a more protracted registration of the hallucinatory element in that experience, the way the world could be ‘somersaulted’,6 surrealistically resculpted by strange combinations of fi re and water. The narrative takes Flower through a giant blazing factory, as he tries to follow Brigade instructions to locate the ‘seat’ or ‘kernel’ of the fi re. Hectic riots of sensory dislocation, weird effects of the kind Sansom must have observed actually occurring at great conflagrations, mingle rather uneasily with an allegorical, Kafka-influenced quest for authority and meaning, for the ‘seat of the fire’ in a more abstract sense. Flower proceeds through various scenes in different parts of the building, each of which purports but fails to present him with what he is looking for. Each passing battle with bits of burning material seems equally to involve a battle with different compartments of the psyche, each in turn tempting him to accept that its special claim to be the ‘seat’ absolves him of the need to inspect any others; his overall journey is a sort of pilgrim’s progress, away from entrapments, towards a new dispensation, a revolutionary understanding of truth grounded on interconnectedness rather than privileged kernels – an understanding to which all those compartments will have a contribution to make, and none will dominate or unbalance the rest. On the way, though, some of his encounters seem to offer more problematic inferences than those he draws from them, especially where childhood is involved. The central sequence begins in a storeroom filled with crates of soap and perfume bottles, which have burst open in the heat from the


fire and reacted with the water from the hoses, bringing about a disconcerting evocation of the mother; Flower finds himself lying in an overwhelmingly fragrant foam bath, suffering ‘confused memories’, as the scents ‘pounded through his arteries, whirling his equilibrium, blinding him to all direction’, and wishing he could ‘sink back on the foam and float slowly towards the fire’, in an amniotic oblivion.7 The upper stories of the building, when he reaches them, appear mysteriously furnished with items from his parents’ bedroom. There is a full-length dress mirror at the end of a corridor, in which he sees himself running towards himself, both in space and time, and a mahogany wardrobe with a decaying fur coat hanging in it, on which he launches a savage attack with his hatchet: ‘For a while he lost all reason, all sense of time. Breathlessly he hacked and twisted in the dark. The close air flew with gusts of fur.’8 It is as if his original entry into the world were being restaged, and at the same time bitterly denounced, in a frenzy of sexual disgust and hostility surging up from somewhere undetectable; and he then finds – some years before C.S. Lewis’s Narnia stories appeared – that in his excitement he has cut through the back of the wardrobe as well, to a room beyond, that appears untouched by the flames all round it: a perfectly-preserved museum of his childhood, full of longforgotten objects and associations, and complete with a custodian, an old friend who waylays him with seductive nostalgia. The kind of psychic trial involved here seems not dissimilar to Phyllis’s, alternating between a violent confrontation with something unconsciously formative, and the temptation to lapse into infantile security – and the solution proposed is a bit like Julia’s, a closing of the door on everything the episode represents. When Flower rejects his friend’s invitation to immerse himself in this artificially sheltered world, he comes out to the corridor again, and fi nds that the mirror has disappeared, clearing the way ahead. The suggestion seems to be that in order to create something fresh from the somersaulted world, one must push resolutely forward, undistracted by any awkward surviving deposits. But there does seem to be too much unresolved trailing business for the vision of interfusion at the end of the story to be fully convincing; the euphoric final paragraph seems not only to have traces in it of the wild breathlessness of the wardrobe scene, but to invoke just the kind of semiotic, all-embracing maternal–infant nexus that Flower had contemptuously turned his back on. Newby felt that those writers who attempted a direct representation of their wartime experience struggled because they were too close to it; it still loomed too large, too foggy or too rapid for shape and direction to be discerned with any clarity. Sansom himself commented on this difficulty. Perhaps, though, that sense of a perplexingly excessive immediacy may itself have fed into the preoccupations with childhood – childhood not just as a symbol for whatever has been torn away or cast adrift, but as a condition of being and responding in which event, idea and sensation are only dimly


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distinguishable, a condition which certain contemporary traumas can appear to revive. One writer alert to these possibilities was Arthur GwynnBrowne, in F.S.P., his memoir of his six-months’ service in the Field Security Personnel, up to and including the retreat to Dunkirk. The style he uses, adapted from Gertrude Stein but with a very distinctive stamp on it, intriguingly conveys the sense that joining the army could be like becoming a child again, living, as Stein would put it, in a ‘continuous present’, where neither memory nor anticipation could offer reliably stable bearings: One of the things about army life is how seldom what is going to happen does happen and when it does it happens differently . . . It is a choice and who chooses and why in choosing one why not choose both and why in choosing both why not choose one. Naturally not the same one. So anything that happens first does not and later if it does it happens differently.9 A passage such as this seems on the one hand to align itself with familiar satires on army absurdity and muddle, and on the other to have a strange, fascinated freshness about it, even wonder, an unfazed and essentially trustful immersion in the flow of difference. Elsewhere, the army is presented almost as a vast maternal body, effortlessly providing for all possible requirements. Food, bedding, clothing – ‘what was impressive was that what there was of it was everything we had we needed no more and no less’ (F.S.P., 9). ‘Everything we had we needed’: this appears to have telescoped the end of one thought into the beginning of another, or to have inverted what might have been the expected order of those verbs, as if to register how the narrator’s civilian identity were being subtly reconstituted, almost born again; and there seems to be an even more marked drift towards the semiotic realm in his account of drilling: About drilling there is not much to say. As everybody knows it has it and does it why also say it, what it is it is. It looks it as it is and doing it is all it looks it is but more so. (F.S.P., 10) There is a rhythm here of clipped and abrupt parade-ground instructions, and a rhythm of words and meanings shifting to and fro like soldiers’ automatized feet, in forwards, sideways and reverse directions. The flexible placements of the word ‘it’ seem to dissolve the boundaries between subject and object, while the participle ‘doing’, slipped in between the fivefold repetitions of ‘it is’, is like the first stirring of movement within a steadystate suspension – all in all an extraordinary intimation of the rebuilding of attitude and outlook, the bonding and self-subordination which joining up entailed for millions.


When Gwynn-Browne’s unit crossed to France, and levels of anxiety and apprehension began to build up, the sense of being loosely held in a sheltering maternal surround came under increasing pressure. One of the most striking passages in the book describes an incident in a café where soldiers were drinking illegally; a passage striking not only for what it contains, but for temporarily abandoning the Steinian manner in favour of something closer to direct reportage: Through the haze of our smoking I saw a large double bed dirty and crumpled and on it sitting up and staring in a fi xed and frightened way two small children, a little boy and girl clasping each other, mute and petrified with fear. The woman with the bottles called out an oath to them and with a stifled cry they shrank and burrowed under the bed clothes and lay there stretched and shivering, more terrified of what they could not see but only feel and hear as the night wore on. (F.S.P., 42) In the corner of the observer’s consciousness appear to be traces of an inarticulate terror matching and surpassing the children’s – terror not simply of what may be going on out of sight, but that the bond of child and mother, on which one’s sense of reassurance depended, might at any moment break down, and reveal the mother to be the intensifier rather than the soother of one’s fears. The force of this apprehension seems to have a momentary jolting effect on the narrative’s imaginative work, work that increasingly involves a kind of nonchalant skating over questions which, as with the questions about Flower’s hacking through the fur, consciousness is not yet ready to address: Identity is one of the things it really is impossible to argue about, if you are you then your papers can not make you more you and if you are not you and your papers say you are you then how can you be you if you are not you, and that is identity. (F.S.P., 59) Again, this passage could belong to the familiar world of forces’ comedy. At the same time, it could indicate the adroit fending-off of a deep bewilderment. What exactly has happened to one’s identity? Does this second childhood of wartime, this problematic breach in the continuity of the self, represent a loss or a liberation? ‘How can you be you if you are not you’: this is the stark question that all disrupted lives have to face sooner or later, and in posing it like this Gwynn-Browne quite brilliantly crystallized what would become the entire 1940s’ obsession with mirrors, doubles, echoes

The Girl on a Swing: Childhood and Writing in the 1940s 95

and matchings. Once he had survived the horrors of Dunkirk, the key experience in his homecoming, the one making it fi nally real for him, was his ecstatic vision of maternal-nurturing figures – volunteer helpers on the troop trains – who brought continuity back and healed the temporal breach: ‘In their cotton frocks and smiling and just as they had been yesterday that made today like yesterday and today like any day. We did not know what was today but they did make today today . . . they had been like yesterday what they were today’ (F.S.P., 136). And the landscape he sees through the railway carriage windows is powerfully invested with his relief at feeling able to sink back again into a feminized world of reassurance, a world in which all anxieties about sameness, difference, memory and anticipation have been gently taken care of: ‘the buttercups were sheets of gold in meadow after meadow and oxeye daisies spangled them and cow parsley like a bride’s veil drifting’ (F.S.P., 137). There is one more piece I should like to mention, one seeming to condense into a tiny area many of the imaginative compulsions I have been trying to trace in the writing of this period – or, more specifically, in the writing of four authors, none of whom published anything prior to the war, and much of whose subsequent work went on being tinged by these colours. This is a story by Elizabeth Taylor, first published in 1945 under the title ‘Study’, referred to in her notebooks as ‘Aunt’, and reprinted in Hester Lilly, her 1954 collection of stories, as ‘A Sad Garden’. Jenny Hartley discussed it briefly in her study of British women’s Second World War fiction, Millions Like Us.10 ‘A Sad Garden’ does not refer to the war directly, but clearly takes its tone from it: there is bereavement, a loved place ruined and haunted, and a ‘questionmark of white smoke’ rising over heaped-up decay. The aunt, Sybil, who has recently lost both her husband and her young son Adam, is sitting in her autumnal garden, her fingers wandering ‘over the stone seat as if from habit until the tops of them lay at last in the rough grooves of some carved initials – the letters A. K. R.’: the seat is like a tombstone as well as a last point of contact.11 Her niece, Audrey, on a sympathy-visit with her mother Kathy, exasperates Sybil by refusing to eat the pears she is offered, for fear of staining her clothes. The contrast between this prim, temptation-resistant girl, and the rebellious, fruit-coveting ‘Adam’, is increasingly and ominously pointed, as Sybil remembers having smacked her son for gouging with his chisel the very marks her fingers now nestle in: ‘When she did that, he had stared at her in hatred, wild, beautiful, a stain on his mouth from the blackberries.’12 But it is only when Audrey, at Sybil’s prompting, starts to rock herself timidly on the garden swing – Adam’s old swing, also carved with his initials – that something seems to give way: ‘Can’t you go higher than that?’ [Sybil] said, and she took the seat in two hands, drew it back to her and then thrust it far away, so that Audrey went high up into the leaves and fruit . . . ‘That’s how Adam used to go,’


Sybil shouted as Audrey flew down again . . . ‘I don’t . . . I don’t . . . ,’ cried Audrey. As she flew down, Sybil put her hands in the small of her back and thrust her away again. ‘Higher, higher,’ Adam used to shout. He was full of wickedness and devilry. She went on pushing without thinking of Audrey . . . ‘There you go. There you go,’ she cried.13 While pushing, Sybil continues to think how boring Audrey is, how obediently tied to her mother – unlike Adam, whom Sybil would never have restricted in this way: ‘I’d push him out into the world. Push him!’ She gave a vehemence to her thought and Audrey with her hair streaming among the branches flew dizzily away. Frantically now her aunt pushed her, crying: ‘There you go. There you go.’ The child, whiter than ever, was unable to speak. She sensed something terribly wrong, and yet something which was inevitable and not surprising . . . As the swing came down, [Sybil] put up her hands and with the tips of her fingers and yet with all her strength, she pushed. She had lost consciousness and control and cried out each time exultingly: ‘There you go. There you go’ – until all her body was trembling. Kathy came screaming up the path.14 Sybil’s is a kind of fort-da game with a vengeance – the game Freud described being played over and again by his grandson, who would throw a toy into his cot with a cry sounding like ‘fort’ (gone), and then draw it back by its string, crying ‘da’ (there). It prompted the theory of repetitioncompulsion; for Freud, the boy was re-enacting the periodic departures and returns of his mother, trying to gain a measure of control over the trauma her absences provoked. He may also have been seeking to revenge himself on his mother for having left him, saying in effect, ‘ “All right, then, go away! I don’t need you. I’m sending you away myself”.’15 Sybil’s violent shoving of the swing seems to concentrate all her sense of having been abandoned, while the continuous pattern of expulsion and retrieval, as the swing comes rushing back to her, keeps alive the dream of the beloved’s return, the recovery of the paradise Adam took with him. Her unconsciously repeated actions also seem to be engaging with some element of guilt, which the memory of the smacking appears to have sparked off, some suppressed impulse to harm or reject him which she cannot allow herself to face: the pendulum rhythm could convey not only the undoing of apparent finality, but the absence of a finality that is desired, the impossibility of ever being rid of whatever it is you are pushing away. Perhaps Sybil’s reiterated cry of ‘There you go’ might itself be offering a submerged allusion


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to what Freud believed his grandson had been saying? In its common uses, the phrase can either be a way of bidding farewell, watching a breach open up, or of restoring continuity – what one might say to a child whose toy one had just repaired, or whose graze one had bandaged: the words mechanically drawn from Sybil by her exertions seem themselves to be swinging between soothing and dismissal. The story’s feeling for the child’s experience, though, seems just as intense and acute as its feeling for the woman’s. Everything one would normally want to associate with the image of a girl on a swing is grotesquely distorted: the combination of expectancy and security, the anticipatory miming of a safe release from childhood to wider horizons beyond, are suddenly given a vicious and brutal face. Audrey finds herself cast in the role of the unwitting substitute who, as the swinging motion delicately suggests, both closes up and widens the gap between past and present; the imperfect replication that leaves both sides wrenchingly violated. Yet, for the child, this violation may implicitly also be a relief; in the remarkable sentence beginning ‘She sensed something terribly wrong’, Audrey appears to have understood instinctively that, however much terror it entailed, some such crisis of passing-over had long been lying in wait for her, had to come, and may even have been covertly looked for. In the space of a few words we seem to swing from childhood and puberty to wartime to loss and grief and back again, in the experience of being seized by an overwhelming force and having no option but to cling on and ride with it until it settles.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

P.H. Newby, The Novel 1945–1950 (London: Longmans Green, 1951), 8–9. A.L. Barker, Innocents (London: Hogarth Press, 1947), 10, 11. Barker, Innocents, 27, 31. Elizabeth Taylor, At Mrs Lippincote’s (London: Virago, 1988), 38. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Lippincote, followed by page number. John Brannigan, ‘No Home of One’s Own: Elizabeth Taylor’s At Mrs Lippincote’s’, in Jane Dowson (ed.), Women’s Writing 1945–60 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), 83. William Sansom, Fireman Flower and Other Stories (London: Hogarth, 1944), 141. Sansom, ‘Fireman Flower’, 140, 141. This episode seems to owe a good deal to Bloom’s – or Flower’s – bathtime in Ulysses. Sansom, ‘Fireman Flower’, 147. Arthur Gwynn-Browne, F.S.P. (Bridgend: Seren Books, 2004), 3. Hereafter cited parenthetically as F.S.P., followed by page number. Jenny Hartley, Millions Like Us (London: Virago, 1997), 143–4. ‘A Sad Garden’ was first published as ‘Study’, in Modern Reading, 13, ed. Reginald Moore (London: Wells Gardner, Darton, 1945).

98 British Fiction After Modernism 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Elizabeth Taylor, Hester Lilly (London: Virago, 1995), 133. Taylor, Hester Lilly, 133. Taylor, Hester Lilly, 134. Taylor, Hester Lilly, 135. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 16.

9 Ivy Compton-Burnett and Risibility Sara Crangle

Bored by an extended family conversation, Tobias Clare, aged three, twists his hand out from his brother’s and wandered about the hall. He saw a vase on a table and sent his eyes from it to his brothers. Then he went behind the table and threw it on the ground, and as it broke, gave himself to guarded mirth, hampered by further glances. Then he rejoined the group and placed his hand in Fabian’s.1 In this odd little scene from Ivy Compton-Burnett’s The Present and the Past (1953), Toby struggles to re-enact previous events. Earlier, at lunch, his nurse has reprimanded him for throwing his spoon onto the floor, telling him that only when his dinner is eaten will he be considered a good boy. ‘Toby returned to his plate, but misliking the scraps left upon it, took it in both his hands and threw it after the spoon. It broke and he fell into mirth.’ Though scolded, Toby remains ‘lost in his emotion’ – he approaches hysteria, a state fully reached when siblings Henry and Megan retrieve and repeatedly smash the plate fragments, ‘to divert him further’ (Present, 20). Toby is delighted and appeased by the multiplication of bits of plate, eating the rest of his meal contentedly, and giving, at its end, ‘a reminiscent giggle’ (Present, 21). The nurse tells Henry he is too old for such ridiculous behaviour, to which Maria offhandedly replies, ‘ “You always tell us to amuse him . . . and nothing has ever amused him so much” ’ (Present, 21). Outside, after lunch, Henry throws flowerpots into a wheelbarrow to elicit Toby’s laughter a second time. Toby is genuinely amused by these instances; his later, solitary laughter over the broken vase is not nearly so satisfying. These sorts of scenes are commonplace in Compton-Burnett’s work, where laughter functions as an index of character relations, and as a fundamental accompaniment to the stichomythic banter comprising the vast majority of what she called her ‘dialogue novels’. The sounds mouths emit are integral to Compton-Burnett’s prose, and as such, her interest in 99


laughter is perhaps inevitable. But Compton-Burnett’s exploration of risibility is also historically and intellectually significant, as it concurs with a body of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thought exploring the relationships between the self, others and laughter, perhaps most famously evinced in the work of Darwin and Freud. So too do philosophers such as Bergson, Nietzsche and Bataille grapple with the reasons for and function of laughter, often paying special attention, as does Compton-Burnett, to the youthful quality of risibility. In Compton-Burnett’s writing, tyrannical older relatives regularly and cruelly suppress children, who possess not only a startling clarity of perception, but also a frequent, and frequently illtimed, desire to laugh. Their laughter brings an appreciable element of excess into Compton-Burnett’s Spartan, staccato prose, which spans twenty novels and sixty years (1911–71). In part because of this lengthy career, ‘Compton-Burnett has been characterised as a modernist, who tries to reconstruct meaning out of the fragmented values of post-war civilisation and as a post-modernist, who toys with fragmented meaning by cynically denying that there is any larger meaning to be grasped.’2 Like Beckett – to whom she is often compared – Compton-Burnett’s writing articulates transitions in twentieth-century thought, although, as Phillippa Tristram observes, ‘Beckett’s fundamental distrust of significance is the result of two world wars, hers of only one.’3 If there is something forward-looking in Compton-Burnett’s retro-focused novels, it may well be discernible in her representations of laughter. Humorous rupture could be considered fundamental to modernism’s ‘make it new’; as Mikhail Bakhtin argues, the pursuit of laughter is often a catalyst for literary reinterpretation and innovation.4 But if perceived humour underscores the present moment, the desire to laugh – the infinitesimal time between our recognition or anticipation of humour and laughter itself – affirms our experience of endless continuity, refusing absolutes and finality in a fashion akin to a great deal of postmodern thinking. Risible endlessness is well evinced in Compton-Burnett’s work, where laughter comes to embody just such a regenerative, infinite longing; modernizing her style, sustaining her readers, and eventually signalling a bond between even the most wildly disparate characters. Biographer Hilary Spurling recounts how Compton-Burnett was a widely admired literary figure in London, topping bestseller lists alongside Virginia Woolf and Agatha Christie in April 1937. Throughout the 1940s, she received her most positive reviews and her sales and fan mail increased sharply; her reputation continued ‘to grow at a reckless pace’ throughout the 1950s.5 Certainly Compton-Burnett’s literary peers appreciated her work. Edward and Vita Sackville-West publicly lauded her innovations.6 P.H. Newby rated her ‘among the élite of contemporary British novelists’ alongside Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green and Graham Greene, going so far as to contend that ‘since the death of James Joyce’ Compton-Burnett authored the only fiction

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that would be read in a hundred years’ time.7 And Angus Wilson defined her as ‘a great experimentalist . . . stand[ing] so alone in a wilderness of . . . dismal imitated dead tradition’.8 But perhaps the best example of the scope of her reputation occurs in this passage, from a letter sent by novelist Elizabeth Taylor immediately following the publication of A Heritage and a History (1959): ‘It has been Ivy week. . . . The book emerged on Monday, on Wednesday was broadcast as a play, on Thursday Daniel George . . . spoke on the wireless and said she was the greatest writer of her day, and on Sunday morning the book was discussed by a querulous little bunch called “The Critics”, who seem to be part of the Establishment, and on Sunday afternoon . . . she was interviewed [live on television] by Alan PryceJones [then-editor of the Times Literary Supplement] . . .’9 Although Taylor was concerned that Compton-Burnett would not come across well on television, her fears were quickly assuaged: ‘ “She was most amusing, and described how . . . one man wrote to her asking her to explain what on earth her books were all about, and enclosed a stamped and addressed envelope for her reply – ‘I used it when I was paying a bill’ ”.’10 While many friends and associates describe Compton-Burnett as ‘most amusing’, her typist Cicely Grieg maintains that her laughter was seldom heard, a supposition furthered by reminiscence of her ‘ “mischievous sideways glance, as if she really must not laugh at her own jokes” ’.11 If ComptonBurnett’s laughter glimmered beneath the depths of her personality, her wit rose to the surface in her novels. Spurling contends that ComptonBurnett’s literary comedy is an ‘idiosyncratic version of that sleek and frivolous wit which went down so well in the twenties’ – a gallows gaiety exhibited by those elated to have survived the First World War.12 But as Charles Burkhart acknowledges, this wit is as conceptual as it is historical: ‘The wit of the dialogue – probably the chief reason the novels are read – comes, especially in the later novels, from the persistent use of irony and ironic paradox.’13 Wit came to define Compton-Burnett: awarded an honorary doctorate at the University of Leeds in 1960, she was introduced as an author whose ‘wit illuminates our age through the lens of tradition’ – mention of her ‘aphoristic wit’ arises also in Francis King’s 1969 obituary.14 The sophistication, tacit amorality and knowing nature of her humour also aligns her to the camp tradition, an assertion vying for critical popularity with comparisons to Greek tragedy.15 Compton-Burnett studied classics in college; it might be argued that in word-play and cutting riposte she bears resemblance to Plautus, the comic Roman playwright, and the name given to a cat in her novel Mother and Son (1955).16 But Compton-Burnett is regularly and somewhat unsatisfactorily compared to many authors: Austen and George Eliot feature high on the list,

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although other memorable parallels include Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot. Mary McCarthy notes that Compton-Burnett’s work engenders many ‘false generalisations’, largely because her plots ‘wor[k] like a factory mechanism . . . She produces Compton-Burnetts, as someone might produce ballbearings’.17 With rare exceptions, her books incorporate an upper-middleclass domestic setting in the British countryside in the late Victorian period, and a myopic domestic sphere headed by a tyrant to whom all is meant to be sacrificed. The genteel poverty of these families generates conflict, followed by unethical – and sometimes criminal – acts of desperation. ComptonBurnett believed plots necessary to fiction, ‘ “like the bones of a person, not interesting like expression or signs of experience, but the support of the whole” ’.18 Her own plot machinations often function like exoskeletons: summary conversations about the intricate subtleties of family relations and history open most of her novels, and objects are often forcibly introduced as a means of furthering intrigue, as in Two Worlds and their Ways (1949), when Mr Firebrace, looking for an earring, announces to his son in front of the whole family: ‘ “It was in this drawer. . . . And no one knows of this drawer but you and me. The secret drawer we call it”.’19 Events can also be absurdly over-dramatic. Shortly after learning that her ‘niece’ and ‘nephews’ are in fact her husband’s biological offspring, Miranda of Mother and Son dies from shock: ‘as her son approached, she suddenly threw up her arms, turned eyes on him with no sight in them, gave a long, deep sigh and was silent’.20 There is a low-grade cinematic quality to these instances, as if Compton-Burnett hadn’t sufficient resources for further refinement. Compton-Burnett’s work has been dismissed as antiquated because of her focus on the late nineteenth century, a charge against which more admiring critics cite Elizabeth Bowen’s contention that she ‘is not merely copying but actually continuing the Victorian novel’. For Bowen, Compton-Burnett’s novels are immersed in ingenious, contrived shallowness and exhibit a lack of sensuality or remorse; in short, Bowen suggests, her ‘avoidance of faked, or outward, Victorianism, is marked’.21 Other factors place her oeuvre firmly in the twentieth century, including her explorations of atheism and divorce. Compton-Burnett is believed to have read the entire works of Darwin; critics observe that she is particularly interested in the opposition between nature and civilisation.22 A Freudian influence has also been detected: while Compton-Burnett claimed no great interest in psychology, her father studied under Freud, and her characters’ more outrageous statements are often presumed to be renderings of aspects of the unconscious. 23 As such, she is perceived as having taken stream-of-consciousness narrative to newer and deeper levels. Modernist influences are also used to describe her humour. Burkhart links her absurd and rigid tyrants to Bergson’s Le Rire (1884), where all laughter is ascribed to mechanical inelasticity, arguing further that the wittiness of Compton-Burnett’s victims echoes Freud’s argument that jokes present opportunities to be free of social pretence.24 For her


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critics, Compton-Burnett is inseparable from the thinking that engendered so much modernist literary innovation. As well as the history of ideas, historical events play a part in ComptonBurnett’s writing. A survivor of both world wars, Compton-Burnett regularly asserted, ‘The essence of people remains what it is’; in an interview with Frank Kermode, she also expressed her belief that history repeats itself.25 This embrace of individual and historical stasis goes some way toward explaining Compton-Burnett’s repetition, and the lack of retribution in her plots. Stasis is also exacerbated by her unusual prose style, alternately admired as economical and distilled, or derided as abbreviated and wooden.26 Compton-Burnett’s characters often gnaw at language, whittling it down to near-meaninglessness. The most obvious statements repeatedly come into question, and as such, are not allowed to slip into the past. In Elders and Betters (1944), a servant is shown round a house and benignly instructed that a staircase leads to rooms above, provoking this response: ‘ “A natural use for a staircase. . . . I am glad we are to be allowed to put it to its purpose”.’27 Six pages later, another servant points out that the basement cannot be accessed without the stairs. Platitudes especially come under fire; told that his dead son had a happy life, Sir Jesse of Parents and Children (1941) counters, ‘ “You see that as a reason for losing it? People state it as if it were”.’28 And in The Last and the First (1971), when Angus describes his mother as her own worst enemy, his sister replies: ‘ “Like everyone else she is her own best friend. But that is not to say there might not be a better”.’29 This disembowelling of the immediate carries over into narrative description, as in a moment of irritation in Daughters and Sons, wherein ‘Hetta remained in her position, with her eyes fi xed on space and her foot tapping it.’30 What exactly is Hetta’s foot tapping? The pronoun ‘it’ calls attention to the ‘space’ that is surprisingly no longer past: via the returned subject, the sentence does not progress in time, but collapses back into the present. The same pattern is enacted in this, from Two Worlds and their Ways: ‘Maria smiled at her own problems, in which she found she could’ (Two, 10). As for modernists like Gertrude Stein, for Compton-Burnett, ‘ “[t]he present is always the better thing” ’ – a statement from Mother and Son consistent with a general disengagement from the past, or disregard for the future (Mother, 182).31 ‘ “So much of my life is pause” ’, Salomon observes in A God and his Gifts (1963), a book whose ‘god’ is Hereward, a name ushering toward the now (God, 209). This elision of past and future applies also to narrative time, which, while generally chronological, regularly evinces sudden, unidentified temporal advances.32 Compton-Burnett’s habit of conflating her narratives into the present applies also to her children, who are frequently catapulted, long before they could conceivably be ready, into an adult here and now.33 Exposed early to the minutiae of adult discontent, they respond with near-tragic perceptiveness; as Fabian asks in The Present and the Past, ‘ “Why should I talk like a

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child, when my life prevents me from being one?” ’ (Present, 13). While acknowledging the peculiarly adult tone of most of her children’s dialogue, many critics consider Compton-Burnett’s renderings of childhood discerning, accurate and compassionate.34 Left to their own devices, these children mimic their elders, put together dramatic productions, worship pagan gods of their own creation or find pretexts for mock funerals. Most are not particularly affectionate, displaying a tendency to endure their parents’ occasional caresses, and gravitating more willingly, as McCarthy observes, to their nurses.35 Routinely humiliated by miserly authority figures who thwart their desires and force them to wear threadbare clothing, they tend to form what Burkhart describes as ‘little phalanxes according to their age groups’. 36 From this vantage, they mock governesses and tutors overtly, guardians more tacitly. In Darwin’s The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals (1872), laughter is described as a means of ridding ourselves of excess energy, and Spurling similarly describes the children’s laughter in ComptonBurnett as a form of nervous release.37 But while these children may well release pent-up energy with their laughter, they are rarely cowed, regularly articulating brazen comments in the midst of confrontations with their elders.38 Instead, Compton-Burnett’s youngest characters know something, long to laugh about it, and freely indulge this desire.

Pastors and Masters: tittering boys ‘ “Ah, we are not small enough, not small enough” ’, says one Miss Lydia at the close of Compton-Burnett’s second work, Pastors and Masters.39 Published in 1925, the book was turned down by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press and merited almost no critical attention.40 Set in pre-World War I Cambridge, it marks the inauguration of Compton-Burnett’s unusual style and modernist approach, openly challenging Victorian religion, goodness and authority. Littleness pervades this novella, as everyone is either a child or childish enough to warrant the comparison. Thirty-nine boys giggle incessantly and perceptively throughout; the school they attend is partly run by Emily Herrick, a woman in her fifties who is, like the children, knowing and verbally playful. Emily’s brother Nicholas has founded the boys’ school near his former college, admires his own youthful writings, continues to read his school books, and takes part in an old boys’ network comprised of childhood friends. Mr Burgess, a teacher at school, looks so young Emily fears he will be mistaken for one of the pupils. Burgess regularly challenges the schoolmaster, Mr Merry, eliciting appreciative titters from the boys whenever he does so: he is their peer in behaviour and appearance. While Merry rages at the children, to his employer’s face he never abandons the cheerful demeanour his name betokens. The boys are perfectly aware he is authority figure and ingratiating child, and ‘signif[y] amongst themselves their sense


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of the doubleness of Mr. Merry’s nature’ (Pastors, 10). Merry is, however, just one adult boy among many. Herrick’s school is a frugal place, exhibiting a paucity of food, staff, communication, skill, knowledge and profit. Coupled with this pervasive lack is a general rigidity about punctuality and appearances. While scarcely a word is heard from the boys themselves, they are not silent about their experiences, exerting their influence in the best way they know how: by laughing. ‘ “I am here to make the boys happy” ’, Mr Merry assures one anxious parent; this statement, like his name, is weighted by a none-toosubtle irony given that his every muddled action sparks the boys’ risibility. Mr Merry ineffectually attempts to control bouts of tittering with fierce sidelong glances and long-winded lectures. His reprimands augment the giggles, which, in the opening sequence, proceed from the breakfast table to Mrs Merry’s scripture lesson, where ‘the laughter held its own’. ‘ “Constant laughing and inattention make it impossible to teach them!” ’ Mrs Merry tells her husband, but the boys are laughing at her woefully inadequate instruction; the unexplained sanctity of the Bible cannot command their seriousness (Pastors, 12–13). Mr Merry does not abate perceived humour when he enters the class with this rallying cry: ‘ “I am degraded. . . . And I hope that no boy in this room will speak to me again to-day. Because I could not come down to his level, and there is the truth for him” ’ (Pastors, 13). This admission is of the same nature as the boys’ emissions: it is an excessive response that changes nothing – the boys almost never speak to Merry anyway, and he is already at their level: both in their eyes and in the Herricks’. Thus they make merry at Merry. As a unified body, the boys hunt down humour and laugh. Following the departure of an inquiring parent, there is a hint of scatological joking in this inadvertent exchange between Merry and his boys: ‘Well, there is another one come and gone, Mother. Another ship in the night. One never knows if anything will come of it. And a third of what comes out of one more boy won’t overflow our coffers, will it?’ There was a titter from the boys. (Pastors, 15) It seems Mr Merry and his pupils have different ideas about what comes out of the boys; the mention of overflow surely sparks the laughter here. Mr Merry misreads their understanding of excess, thinking they are entertained by the notion of another boy’s arrival. Instead, their laughter is a play on his words and part of their constant risible commentary on the fact that, as Merry himself notes shortly thereafter, they are in need of everything. Their endless fidgeting, gaming and joking speak to their yearning for the pleasures of laughter, one of the few desires they can exercise within the restrictions of Herrick’s school. The boys are constantly derided for

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wasting time, resources, and creating mess: laughter is their only ‘excessive’ behaviour that no one else can control (Pastors, 41–2, 61–2).41 Only those in authority perceive laughter as excessive, although these self-same figures do not shy away from excesses of their own. Nicholas is a terrifically lazy man who relies on his sister’s praise to assuage his nostalgia and fear of mortality. Emily plays on Nicholas’s vanity by praising him constantly, as when she claims she is ‘ “not like Nicholas, who is really God’s equal, and not his child at all” ’ (Pastors, 23) – a statement eliciting protest from neither Nicholas nor his friends. Emily deifies Nicholas only to deflate him, and this is a game with complex rules, as she scolds others who openly mock her brother, as if to imply her own acclamations are quite genuine. So intertwined are their lives that even when Emily realizes that Nicholas has plagiarized the work of fiction he means to publish, she keeps this knowledge to herself, allowing Nicholas to sustain the lie of his creative genius. Nicholas is a blissfully ignorant audience to Emily’s extended solitary game; of all her associates, only her friend Theresa enjoys her humour. A spinster barely resigned to her life as her brother’s keeper, Emily resents having so little life left and being alive; she longs to claim some sort of infinite for herself (Pastors, 75). And she fears death: ‘ “I join [Nicholas] in living for himself. He doesn’t join me in anything like that. I should love to live forever. I don’t wonder that religious people, who can plan things, arrange it like that” ’ (Pastors, 37). Within the spectre of her own mortality, the desire to laugh at her brother may be the only longing Emily can claim as her own. But Emily’s solitary laughter, like Toby’s over the broken vase, leaves much to be desired. Her isolation is uncomfortably emphasized at the school’s annual prize-giving event when Mrs Merry inadvertently shakes her hand, a formal gesture reserved for parents. Everyone is profoundly uneasy after this gaffe, as it points to Emily’s absence from staff consciousness (Pastors, 50). Even Emily’s wit is silenced. Emily Herrick’s word-play, like the boys’ laughter, is central to the narrative continuity of Pastors and Masters. Although the plot ostensibly focuses on Emily’s brother’s authorial longings, allusions are made to Emily’s more genuine authorial leanings. At one point, Emily describes Mr Merry as ‘ “superior, vindictive and over-indulgent” ’, considering him ‘ “one of the best drawn characters in fiction” ’ (Pastors, 24) – the fiction she alludes to is of her own making. After Emily realizes her brother has plagiarized his book, she tells Theresa she intends to go home and write the entire episode down in her diary, which she keeps because she ‘ “[has] that kind of personality” ’ (Pastors, 80). She jokes that she will have it destroyed at her death, or leave it to Nicholas, who can plagiarize it with her blessing. Emily’s wordplay gives voice to the risibility sustaining the plot, signified in turn by the boys’ inarticulate titters. Neither child nor witty authority figure, Mr Merry stands between these two poles. In a statement suggestive of his inability to see beyond daily minutiae, Merry is a self-described ‘ “poor man. . . . [who


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does not] rise to The Times” ’ (Pastors, 12). Mr Merry does not rise with levity either: he does not perceive humour in the same way as the students who rupture his daily continuity with their humorous perceptions. For Henri Bergson, group laughter is generally directed at rigid individuals like Merry: ‘In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to humiliate, and consequently to correct our neighbour.’42 Just as Bergson argues that corrective laughter returns us to a more fluid experience of temporality, so too do the students of Pastors and Masters engulf Merry with their desire to laugh, an inclination begging him to engage in an enduring, risible continuity. Additionally, Bergson contends that humour returns us to an uninhibited childlike state in which play is paramount and longrepressed memories surface, an idea explicitly reworked in Freud’s Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905). Freud maintains that humorous perceptions are not reliant upon specific memories, but a more general recollection of uninhibited childishness, and can involve the emergence of the unconscious, which he likens to the infantile. This valorization of risibility and youthfulness emerges also in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883), where Nietzsche’s protagonist refers constantly – and reverently – to the childish aspects of laughter, begging his disciples to return to this state, and laugh differently, with wisdom and from truth and, particularly, at themselves. All three of these thinkers perceive laughter as regenerative, childish and primarily self-affirming; so too are the laughing figures of Pastors and Masters never quite ‘small enough’ and very much alone.43 The divide between laugher and laughee is never again quite so starkly delineated in Compton-Burnett’s work.

Sardonic Brothers and Sisters Like the students and Emily in Pastors and Masters, the youngest characters of most of Compton-Burnett’s novels seek out humour; in Brothers and Sisters (1929) Robin Stace occupies this role. Although Robin is twenty-two years of age, his family and the narrator treat him like a child; he is ‘a short, slight youth . . . with blue eyes and a small, sardonic face’.44 Grim jocularity is key to Robin’s character: he finds humour in the most distressing circumstances, including his mother’s grief over his father’s death, as well as in the slowly emerging revelation that his parents are half-siblings. Etymologically, ‘sardonic’ refers to a plant native to Sardinia; it resembles celery, but if eaten, is said to cause death by laughter.45 Robin does not die from his own laughter, but welcomes it as a response to death. This willingness is established at the novel’s outset, when on his brother’s birthday Robin states, ‘ “We go on rejoicing year by year until there is an end of Andrew” ’ (Brothers, 27). Like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Robin laughs at the infinite call of mortality.


But this laughter is not purely solipsistic. Robin chuckles at his mother’s claim to crippling grief because it in no way mitigates her tyrannical grip over her household. As the narrator explains, ‘Sophia’s lifelong exercise of her own will had led her almost to expect response from the dead’ (Brothers, 140). Her mourning becomes a tool employed to shape her children’s behaviour and undermine the extent of their dedication to her – no one, it seems, can be dedicated enough. Only Robin openly mocks the transparency of her machinations, as in this scene, just prior to everyone’s going to bed on the night his father dies: ‘Well, I will go to bed, or I will sit up,’ said Sophia in an aloof monotone. ‘Nothing that I do will make any difference to me now. Nothing will ever help me again. But I will go to bed, so that other people may go. So that they will not feel that they have to wait up with me, to watch with me one hour.’ A sound as of hysteria came from Robin. ‘Are you laughing, my son?’ said Sophia, in a simply incredulous voice. (Brothers, 141) This exchange initiates a pattern in which Sophia asserts that no one’s troubles are as extensive as her own, followed by ‘a breath as of laughter silenced before it was heard’ (Brothers, 164). Robin’s breath may not be audible, but Sophia’s conversation abruptly addresses her children’s needs after the narrator notes this repressed sound. While failing to make Sophia laugh, Robin does pull her out of herself, occasionally even paving the way for his siblings to step in and voice their own concerns (Brothers, 178–9). While Robin pokes fun at his mother, he also resembles her more than her other offspring. In a lacklustre discussion of their future after Sophia’s eventual death, his sister Dinah suggests that she and her brother Andrew live together in a mock continuation of the family’s incestuous tradition. Robin, on the other hand, should marry because he ‘ “is the most like Sophia, and has the right to survive” ’ (Brothers, 270). This is a second iteration of similarities between Robin and Sophia: Robin’s sardonic features, we have already been told, share ‘a look of Sophia’ (Brothers, 27). With his word-play and laughter, Robin attempts to engage Sophia in not only a familial, but also a laughing continuity; because Sophia refuses to respond, these attempts ultimately exacerbate unbreachable differences between two similar beings. Robin’s solo laughter may thus be read as a valorization of his own, possibly nihilistic, modes of thought. He laughs regularly in the midst of anguish, as when he jokes in response to the news of his parents’ shared parentage: ‘ “I never thought to have so much in common with my maternal grandfather, my paternal grandfather, my only grandfather” ’ (Brothers, 207).


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Georges Bataille – himself heavily influenced by Nietzsche and Freud – suggests that to laugh ecstatically in the midst of pain is to dissolve subjective sovereignty, and can enable us to transcend the self, and enter a divine, rapturous state. For Bataille, all laughter emerges from expressly Freudian renderings of desire, and is thus either sexual or death-driven: he argues, for instance, that a tickler might drive a convulsive ticklee to murder. Because it is an endless and endlessly accessible form of desire, risibility may well represent a lived experience of eternality. But in Compton-Burnett, this infinite is purely terrestrial in nature: Robin’s willingness to laugh at incest and death – occasionally bordering on hysteria – provides nothing in the way of access to the metaphysical. Instead, Robin’s laughter more closely resembles a bid for what Bataille calls ‘compenetration’, a term referring to the risible communication that occurs between individuals, a reverberation and amplification initiated by the rupture of the comic object.46 Robin fails to provoke mirth in Sophia, but succeeds in doing so for the reader, if only because apart from his mockery, his mother’s hypocrisy brooks no narrative comment. Indeed, Robin’s levity underscores just how some of the most serious events of the novel might be read, ultimately suggesting that mortality is itself an infinitely laughable thing. Come ComptonBurnett’s later work, laughter is shared between figures more dissimilar than Robin and his mother, an exchange that near-paradoxically compounds its regenerative qualities.

Daughters and Sons: the genuine laugh Perhaps the most risible of Compton-Burnett’s youngest characters is elevenyear-old Muriel Ponsonby of Daughters and Sons (1937). By far the youngest of the Ponsonby offspring, Muriel is disregarded by her family. As family friend Charity Marcon puts it, ‘ “I can’t think why people say it is difficult to talk to children. They so often have a governess” ’ (Daughters, 186). Muriel is an object to be ordered about, a problem to be solved, and a social embarrassment because she laughs continuously. The plot revolves around her sister France’s rise to literary notoriety, eclipsing that of writer-father John, and France’s subsequent anonymous financial assistance to him. John believes the money comes from Edith Hallam, one of Muriel’s governesses, to whom he proposes on this pretext. When John marries, his worryingly devoted sister Hetta feigns her own suicide, only to return to the family home to realize that in death she was not missed, and, furious, to divulge the entire scandal to her family. This revelation effectively kills Sabine Ponsonby, Muriel’s grandmother and the family matriarch. Within the confines of Sabine’s severity Muriel exerts her risibility; the difference between the Sabine-Muriel relationship and that of Robin and Sophia lies in the fact that Sabine occasionally shares Muriel’s willingness to laugh.

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The novel begins and ends with Muriel’s open mouth; her inarticulate emissions provide narrative frame and subplot. The fi rst line of the text reads, ‘ “Well, Gapy-Face” ’ – one of Sabine’s favoured names for Muriel. Sabine tells Muriel she should open her eyes and close her mouth, or she will confuse her family as to which part of her face is which. Indeterminacy is one of the key features of Muriel’s appearance and expressions, as the narrator observes: The confusion would have been easy in Muriel’s case, as her features were undefined, and seemed to occupy indeterminate portions of her face, and her tiny, blue, twinkling eyes tended to disappear in attacks of mirth. Sabine used to say that she wondered what she found to laugh at; and others could not enlighten her, as they were more struck than she by the absence of causes for spirits in her grandchild’s life. (Daughters, 5) The plasticity of Muriel’s face is echoed by her malleable desire to laugh. No one knows why she laughs, but everyone wants her to stop what Sabine considers her ‘ “trick of giggling at everything, at nothing” ’ (Daughters, 35). So often do Sabine and Hetta tell Muriel how and when to open and close her mouth that her brother Chilton intervenes on her behalf, stating to the family: ‘ “Let us not interfere with Muriel’s utterance” ’ (Daughters, 173). Chilton inadvertently hits upon a central conflict in Muriel’s young life, forcing in this instance an eruption of not laughter, but stormy weeping (Daughters, 176). Muriel sees humour in a staggering diversity of things, of which the most common is her governess’s eating habits, a laughter catalyst shared by Victor, her brother closest in age. Each time Miss Bunyan mentions her appetite a glance is exchanged between Muriel and Victor, or Muriel alone ‘strives anew with her mirth’ (Daughters, 35).47 A new governess learns that Muriel felt Miss Bunyan ‘ “a person of gross habit” ’ (Daughters, 112). But in laughing at another, Muriel becomes an object of familial scorn; by overemphasizing Miss Bunyan’s excessiveness, Muriel overfeeds her own hunger for laughter. And Muriel’s is not a lean risible desire. She ‘burst[s] into laughter’ at Sabine’s supposition that her brother will feel better for engaging in family prayer, and at unfamiliar turns of phrase, like ‘close my eyes’ instead of sleeping (Daughters, 7, 12). She laughs, more understandably, at authority: at Chilton’s mimicry of Sabine, and at the idea of the ever-frugal Hetta storing food in the afterlife (Daughters, 28, 235). None of these laughters fully eclipse the humour of Miss Bunyan’s excess, which comprises the novel’s last laugh. The governess makes a triumphant return, and at her injunction that they eat, drink and be merry, Muriel erupts, prompting Miss Bunyan to suggest, ‘ “Muriel has not got out of her habit of laughing at nothing” ’ (Daughters, 288).


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Sabine describes Muriel to Edith as a merry child, and this is in some sense the truth: Muriel desires laughter, and seeks out things humorous to inspire it (Daughters, 110). But her laughter becomes notably more communicative with Edith Hallam’s arrival. Muriel respects her new governess, and laughs not at, but with her: ‘[Edith] gave a deep little laugh, and Muriel was already so in sympathy with her to echo it’ (Daughters, 190). Edith announces to the family that she wants to take Muriel beyond the beginning – a euphemistic phrase referring to her education and upbringing, both of which have been sadly lacking (Daughters, 214). When asked by her grandmother what she learnt from the governess she had between Miss Bunyan and Edith, one short-lived Miss Blake, ‘Muriel paused, burst into laughter, and struggled into speech. “The beginning, Grandma” ’ (Daughters, 216). This perception of humour-turned-joke sparks not only Muriel’s laughter, but also smiles from the rest of the family, including Sabine (Daughters, 216). Here Muriel laughs not for herself alone, but with others. This communicativeness is matched by a hitherto-unknown openness in her speech, one that comes to the fore at Hetta’s feigned death, when Muriel’s perceptiveness suddenly unearths itself. Like the rest of the family, she proves able to make cogent asides, including an observation that life has improved remarkably in Hetta’s absence. As a result of these professions, Chilton, who previously likened Muriel to a foolish virgin, tells France he no longer considers Muriel innocent (Daughters, 53, 229–30). But there is nothing in Daughters and Sons to suggest Muriel has not always been aware of her family’s hypocrisies; the difference lies only in her means of expressing that awareness. Indeed, what her family describes as a habit of laughing at nothing is a knowing articulation, a carnivalesque laughter subversive and only permissible because impossible to control. Robin’s laughter at Sophia in Brothers and Sisters is similarly subversive, as is the laughter in Pastors and Masters. But Daughters and Sons effects a challenge to the breach between tyrant and laughing underdog, because Sabine occasionally expresses sympathy with Muriel’s laughter, even laughs along with her. These moments are juxtaposed to an ongoing portrayal of Sabine’s hostile tyranny. Sabine, who ‘seldom spoke anything but evil of any human being’, possesses a scolding hiss and a long list of desires she expects her family to fulfil (Daughters, 6). Desire is a word often on her lips: Sabine finds dull manners and lying undesirable, but desires attention, and to be told all that goes on in her household (Daughters, 7, 114–15, 28, 91). Muriel’s will to levity is pitched against this torrent of Sabine’s desirousness, and at times the two converge in a shared laughter. Muriel erupts when Miss Bunyan announces that Dorothea, her first name, means a gift from God; Sabine reprimands, ‘ “Do not be foolish, child” ’, but ‘laugh[s] gently herself’ (Daughters, 33). Muriel may be a ‘ “silly little girl” ’, but there is something of this silliness in Sabine as well (Daughters, 33). This is underscored in the mêlée surrounding Miss Bunyan’s departure, when Clare intimates that

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Miss Bunyan scarcely refrained from giving Sabine a piece of her mind, eliciting from Sabine ‘the genuine laugh, which had a note of Muriel’s’ (Daughters, 50). Here Sabine and Muriel not only laugh at the same perception, but in the same manner – it is a laugh Sabine is notably described as giving, and giving genuinely. Sabine is an ageing tyrant, a woman deeply cognizant of her own mortality. Although happy to exert her own authority, she is increasingly made subject to Hetta’s desires (Daughters, 38). Like most of Compton-Burnett’s domineering figures, Hetta frequently laughs too, particularly as her hold over the family weakens in Edith’s stead; her laughter is alternately sardonic and triumphant, but unlike Muriel and Sabine’s, never genuine. Sabine posits Muriel as a marker of her own continuity, not only by laughing with and like her, but also literally: as her health deteriorates, she tells the family she does not want to see Muriel grow into womanhood (Daughters, 241). Muriel stands alone among the siblings as the child whose progress determines Sabine’s sense of her own mortality. And Sabine herself is more and more childlike. Her doctor suggests that all people over eighty are like children; when Hetta disappears, the family watches the strain take its toll and decides Sabine has finally reached Muriel’s level (Daughters, 69, 242). But Muriel, with her progressively communicative laughter, has also reached Sabine’s. Like Sophia Stace, Sabine often chooses to be outraged by Muriel’s giggles; her excessive laughter compounds the infinite divide between them. But by including these moments of shared laughter between elderly tyrant and tittering child, Compton-Burnett exposes the implicit longing in their relationship and the temporal continuity at work in the desire to laugh. Regenerative longing is central to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, a contemporary of Bataille’s very influenced by Bergson, whose writings, like Compton-Burnett’s, extend well into the second half of the century.48 Unlike Nietzsche and Freud, Levinas makes a case for human desire steeped in neither power nor sexuality, a longing arguably like that between Muriel and Sabine at their risible best. For Levinas, individuals can never be fully known to one another, and as such, all subject–other relations are founded upon an unresolvability that emerges as desire; in Levinas’s view, it is this longing, and not some transcendent realm, that comprises our lived experience of the infinite. Levinas goes so far as to contend that our desirous relationship with an always unknowable other defines us, dismissing the plausibility of a fully understood, autonomous subject as the great chimera of Western thought. In Compton-Burnett’s Daughters and Sons, risibility might be seen as a deeply quotidian manifestation of Levinas’s fundamental, other-based human yearning. Like all laughter, Muriel’s giggles rely upon external stimuli and are enhanced by the presence of others. Muriel is a family outcast, a figure either openly derided or ignored – no one knows or wants to know her, and her random laughter may in fact speak to a vast


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network of latent, unspoken longings. Sabine is similarly, multiplicitously desirous, and thanks to Hetta’s machinations, increasingly an outsider to the family she once dominated. Deeply divided by generations, motivations and unhappy living circumstances, Muriel and Sabine nevertheless manage to share a palpable, endless risibility that, when articulated, indicates how, as per Levinas, they define and regenerate each other.

Later laughters Following the emphatic longing between Sabine and Muriel, ComptonBurnett’s dictatorial figures more persistently reveal a human dimension; as in Daughters and Sons, this affection is most strikingly realized in shared laughter.49 Additionally, come the 1940s, Compton-Burnett evinces an authorial interest in children just learning to talk, and the amount of laughter in her novels becomes directly proportional to the number of very young children in the character cast.50 For instance, in Parents and Children (1941), the domineering figure is Eleanor Sullivan, wife to Fulbert and a self-consciously inadequate parent of nine. Neighbour Hope Cranmer continually makes half-disparaging, half-envious comments on the numerous inhabitants of this household, as when she is told that Fulbert will be going away, and consternation is expressed that his parents, who own and share the family residence, will find his absence unbearable. Hope commiserates: ‘ “The house never strikes me as empty somehow. There are plenty of little, pattering feet. I mean there are eighteen” ’ (Parents, 141). Children are in excess in this home, as are their incessant giggles, toward which Eleanor, though rigidly autocratic in many ways, demonstrates a surprisingly fond indulgence. In one instance at the dinner table, one of her daughters ‘made an involuntary sound that served as a signal, and the brothers and sisters rocked in mirth’. Eleanor responds: ‘ “That sort of laughter is very easy to catch.” ’ This statement is rendered, according to the narrator, ‘in a condoning manner that did her credit considering that she had hardly found this the case herself’ (Parents, 33). Unlike Hetta of Daughters and Sons, Eleanor’s laughter is less an expression of incredulity at being challenged than an affirmation of risibility, and one that can take her by surprise, as in an instance where she scolds her children, yet fi nds herself ‘laughing before she knew’ (Parents, 46). Eleanor’s response to laughter – her own and others’ – bridges the divide between herself and her charges, even when she does not understand its cause. When one of her sons laughs loudly after hearing the news his father has died, Eleanor is bewildered, but simply looks over at him; her silence is accepting in a way unthinkable of Sophia Stace of Brothers and Sisters (Parents, 198). Perhaps the happiest Compton-Burnett family arises in Two Worlds and their Ways (1949), a group of five headed by Sir Roderick and Lady Maria Shelley. This novel may be Compton-Burnett’s closest brush with mawkish

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sentimentality, as intimated in the introduction of the youngest children, Clemence and Sefton: ‘A girl and boy entered and advanced to embrace their parents. They came to their father fi rst, but he motioned them to pass him and give Maria the first greeting . . . Sir Roderick’s face lit up with affection and pride, Maria’s with affection and pride and eager hope’ (Two, 13). Our tyrant here is Maria, signalled by that ‘eager hope’ – rabidly ambitious for Clemence and Sefton, she eventually agrees, at the behest of meddling relatives, to send them to boarding schools, where, quite independently of each other, they cheat their way to academic success. Returned home and found out, they are fondly welcomed by parents who reserve indignation only for the relatives who urged them to school in the first place. Maria’s ambitions are also presumed responsible for the children’s dire measures, but, like Eleanor of Parents and Children, Maria is a rather tender tyrant. Although she sharply berates Sefton for eating too many tarts at tea – eliciting near-standard giggles – it emerges he has in fact eaten seven of the eleven available (Two, 35–6). And while Clemence is sent to school in threadbare clothing, a dress is delivered for the end-of-term party, an extravagance Maria berates, but indulges. Sir Roderick also constantly reminds Maria to put the children first; expressions such as ‘ “we owe them everything” ’ and promises not ‘ “to forget their childhood” ’ pepper his dialogue (Two, 199, 201). Most significantly, the Shelley parents often smile and laugh with real pleasure at their children’s utterances and behaviour. Perhaps the best example of this occurs when the children disappear to the nursery as their aunt Lesbia arrives. Some time later, the adults climb the stairs only to discover that Clemence and Sefton have been busily engaged in dressing up a servant in a parody of their aunt. In the earliest Compton-Burnett novels, this sort of inappropriate behaviour provokes outright fury from older relatives. But on this occasion, Lesbia congratulates the children on an excellent rendering, ‘going into easy mirth’ while Roderick nearly collapses in hysterics (Two, 62). In response, Lesbia smiles indulgently, stating, ‘ “You are still young in heart and mind, Roderick. Childish things are not of those that you have put away” ’ (Two, 62). Unable to gain full control, Roderick wonders aloud why he cannot stop laughing as Maria and his family look on admiringly (Two, 64). Roderick’s excessive laughter – a source of admonishment from Pastors and Masters to Daughters and Sons – is here accepted as a plausible return to youthful behaviour, an event to be savoured, if not fully understood. This same compassion concludes Two Worlds; passing by the nursery after the decision to keep Clemence and Sefton home has been announced, Maria and the governess ‘heard sounds of laughter and paused’. In response to Maria’s wonderment, the governess replies that their mirth is due to an awareness that ‘ “home life stretches before them in happiness and peace” ’ – a strangely blissful, if customarily risible, Compton-Burnett conclusion (Two, 310).


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To suggest that the divide between tyrant and child is bridged, or at least pleasurably and productively acknowledged by Compton-Burnett’s later depictions of risibility, is not to assert that her irretrievably alienated families disappear. The novel widely considered Compton-Burnett’s best – Manservant and Maidservant (1947) – contains another family tyrant, Horace Lamb, whose youngest son Avery possesses an uncannily conscious laugh, often giggling along uncomprehendingly with others in a desperate attempt to prove his recognition of humour.51 So cowed is Avery by his father that he laughs at his command, maintaining an artificial laughter to please him, and desisting for the same reason.52 Sombre tyrants remain central to Compton-Burnett’s work. But glimmers of change emerge in Daughters and Sons (1937), evolving into the near-utopia of the Shelleys in Two Worlds and their Ways (1949), and these changes are marked not so much by narrative comment or portrayed affection, but instead by an increase in shared risibility. Many of Compton-Burnett’s depictions of laughter can be read through theorists central to modernity. While solitary laughter in Compton-Burnett is never as satiating or transcendent as it is in Nietzsche and Bataille, it is fundamental to her narratives, defining, for instance, Robin Stace of Brothers and Sisters, who laughs alone at tragedy. Additionally, most of ComptonBurnett’s tyrant figures either laugh incredulously by themselves, or are laughable in a way reminiscent of Bergsonian and Freudian thought in that their rigidity provokes mirth from those around them, thereby eliciting subjective pleasure. And, as for Bataille, many of Compton-Burnett’s characters find laughter inextricable from death, the greatest rupture of all: nothing is guaranteed to generate giggles in a Compton-Burnett novel quite like an individual’s demise. This odd motif is so recurrent in her work that it occasionally warrants self-conscious mention, as when Dora Calderon of Elders and Betters wonders, ‘ “Why do we nearly laugh, when people tell us someone has died?” ’ (Elders, 141). In part, this behaviour corresponds with Darwin’s supposition that nervous laughter can result from trauma. But mirth as a response to death – most frequently depicted in children – also spectacularly affirms the regenerative quality of risibility, its part in the infinite strivings of life itself. More than this, laughter makes palpable the longing shared by the most disparate of Compton-Burnett’s figures, a category into which almost everyone in these fraught domestic novels fits at some juncture or another. As Oliver Firebrace states in Two Worlds and their Ways, ‘ “familiarity breeds contempt, and ought to breed it. It is through familiarity that we get to know each other” ’ (Two, 21). By repeatedly exploring the risible in her writing, Compton-Burnett depicts how laughter emerges from an infinite, ever-present desire for an other that can never be fully known or understood; quite often, her very oldest and youngest characters laugh together most. Just as Sabine and Muriel are radically at odds, yet share the same


genuine laugh, so too do the youngsters in Parents and Children comment that they don’t ‘ “know anyone with such an infectious laugh as Grandma, when she really gives it” ’ (Parents, 112). In a fashion commensurate with philosophy preceding and concurrent with her writing, Compton-Burnett struggles with the value of solitary laughter, eventually articulating a laughter rooted, in a way distinctly Levinasian, in the renunciation of the self. A palpable self-disinterest and an emergent privileging of otherness spark the laughter of Sabine Ponsonby and Sir Roderick Shelley. Without excessively laughing youngsters and wit-laden dialogue, these novels are readily reducible to rather abruptly rendered tragedies. ComptonBurnett asks that her readers make an implicit choice: find humour here, maintain a willingness to laugh at the near-inconceivable, or desist from reading altogether. And her readers persisted, both in the United Kingdom and abroad. In the 1950s, Compton-Burnett’s work was extolled by members of the nouveau roman movement in France; quoting Henry Green, Nathalie Saurraute predicted that dialogue novels would replace stream-of-consciousness as the most realistic, avant-garde narrative form, and considered Compton-Burnett a pioneer in this regard.53 By the sixties, Compton-Burnett’s work had been translated into the better-known European languages; ‘Romanian, Polish, and Serbo-Croat were soon to follow’.54 Compton-Burnett also had a wide American following: US reviews were among the most positive of her work, and Philadelphian Charles Burkhart wrote some of the earliest and most cogent criticism of her novels. 55 And at some juncture in 1961 or 1962, New York poet Frank O’Hara wrote ‘Biographia Letteraria’, a series of one-line summations of writers including Dickens, Joyce, Stein and Compton-Burnett, under whose name he writes: ‘My grandfather’s lap was comfortable and becoming speaking is not becoming a cactus.’56 While O’Hara’s poem is clearly meant to be wry – Joyce is described as ‘a very lovable [sic] person, though thorough’ – it gets at the heart of ComptonBurnett’s style and content. Family relations are her focus, and her speakers regularly strive, and fail, to overcome their relentless prickliness. In its stark humour, brevity and tacit intergenerational longing between a child and his or her grandfather – two figures united and inevitably divided by time and relation – this quick line encapsulates the risible regeneration so integral to Compton-Burnett’s writing. The child’s viewpoint is key: writing about British fiction in 1951, P.H. Newby suggested that authors wanting to draw on their own experience were forced to write about either the Second World War or childhood: In their different ways these young writers have pinned down the intensity of experience, the vision and the sense of wonder of the unformed mind; they have, too, used the innocence of childhood as a kind of camera angle on the world with the result that their books are sometimes


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filled with strangely foreshortened figures, with giants and grotesques who are none the less true to life for being described in this way. 57 The ‘giants and grotesques’ of Compton-Burnett’s novels are clearly her dictators, whose misdemeanours are as readily understood by her child characters as they are by her readers. Asked in an interview if the tyranny in her novels is representative of the rise of fascism in Europe in the twentieth century, Compton-Burnett denied consciously making this connection, then elaborated further in a way that confirmed it as a possibility: ‘I think that the tremendous impetus that came from Germany arose from the presence of the forces of millions of people – not only in Hitler . . . [without him] they would have been smouldering there just the same.’58 This statement casts an interesting light on Compton-Burnett’s elision of narrative commentary. Critics regularly berate her for her bald ‘amoral’ rendering of dialogue in the midst of so much familial will-tampering, covetousness, theft and neglect. But in excising any discernible, overarching ethical scheme, Compton-Burnett may well be asking us to consider the wider implications of complicity in relationships. There is something truly fantastic about her resilient authorial bathos, which persists through years of global violence and economic strife – this self-same deflation of outrageous events and statements arguably forms the very basis of her narrative wit. And it is through this wit that Compton-Burnett refuses to yield completely to the horrors of human behaviour, ensuring instead that the author–reader relationship is predicated on a risibility reinforced by character laughter – a risibility that acknowledges the unknowability and longing that lie at the heart of all human relations. Though consumed with her own peculiar narrative present, Compton-Burnett knew a laughing life is not a stagnant one, and sought to underscore the continuity in and of her works by eliciting laughter.

Notes 1. Ivy Compton-Burnett, The Present and the Past (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 54. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Present, followed by page number. 2. Kathy Justice Gentile, Ivy Compton-Burnett (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), 23. 3. Phillippa Tristram, ‘Ivy Compton-Burnett: an Enbalmer’s Art’, in British Novelists since 1900, ed. Jack I. Biles (New York: AMS Press, 1987), pp. 75–93, 90. 4. Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Epic and Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 21. 5. See Hilary Spurling, Secrets of a Woman’s Heart: the Later Life of Ivy ComptonBurnett 1920–1969 (London: Hodder & Stoughton), 1984; Hilary Spurling, ‘Review of The Last and the First’, in Charles Burkhart (ed.), The Art of I. ComptonBurnett: a Collection of Critical Essays (London: Victor Gollancz, 1972), pp. 76–80,

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6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

British Fiction After Modernism 76; and Anthony West, ‘Ivy Compton-Burnett’, in Principles and Persuasions: the Literary Essays of Anthony West (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1958), pp. 199–204, 199. Edward Sackville-West, ‘Ladies Whose Bright Pens . . .’, in Inclinations (London: Secker & Warburg, 1949), 78–103; for Vita’s words of praise in a BBC interview, see Elizabeth Sprigge, The Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett (London: Victor Gollancz, 1973), 77. P.H. Newby, The Novel: 1945–1950 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1951), 19, 31. Angus Wilson, ‘The Novels of I. Compton-Burnett’, in Burkhart (1972), pp. 129–36, 129. Robert Liddell, Elizabeth and Ivy (London: Peter Owen, 1986), 77. Liddell, Elizabeth and Ivy, 78. Cicely Greig, Ivy Compton-Burnett: a Memoir (London: Garnstone Press, 1972), 44; Liddell, Elizabeth and Ivy, 98; Louis Auchincloss, ‘Ivy Compton-Burnett and Margaret Jourdain’, Love Without Wings: Some Friendships in Literature and Politics (Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1991), 75–6. Hilary Spurling, ‘I. Compton-Burnett: Not One of Those Modern People’, Twentieth-Century Literature, 25 (1979): 153–65, 154. Charles Burkhart, I. Compton-Burnett (London: Victor Gollancz, 1965), 37. A. Norman Jeffares, ‘Speech of Introduction to the Awarding of the Doctor of Letters Degree to I. Compton-Burnett, Leeds University, May 19, 1960’, in Burkhart (1972), pp. 17–18, 17; Francis King, ‘Obituary’, ibid., pp. 195–7, 195. On Compton-Burnett and camp, see Malcolm Bradbury, ‘Unhappy Families are all Alike: New Views of Ivy Compton-Burnett’, Encounter, XLI(1) (1973): 71; and Robert F. Kiernan, Frivolity Unbound: Six Masters of the Camp Novel (New York: Continuum, 1990), 15–16. Plautus (254–184 BC) is also defined by his wit; see Peter L. Smith, ‘General Introduction’, Three Comedies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 4. His Pseudolus aligns with much in Compton-Burnett, as it includes a joyous immorality, and the woes of a penniless child pitted against a tyrannical father. Mary McCarthy, ‘The Inventions of I. Compton-Burnett’, in The Writing on the Wall and Other Literary Essays (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970), 113–14. ‘I. Compton-Burnett and M. Jourdain: a Conversation’, in Burkhart (1972), pp. 21–31, 26. Ivy Compton-Burnett, Two Worlds and their Ways (London: Victor Gollancz, 1972), 225. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Two, followed by page number. Ivy Compton-Burnett, Mother and Son (London: Victor Gollancz, 1972), 105. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Mother, followed by page number. Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Ivy Compton-Burnett I-II’, Collected Impressions (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1950), 89. Kay Dick, Ivy and Stevie: Ivy Compton-Burnett and Stevie Smith (London: Gerald Duckworth and Co., 1971), 28. ‘Adapting’ is also unusually applied to jewellery refashioning in Two Worlds and their Ways, and a discussion of relationships in Mother and Son (13). Michael Millgate, ‘Interview with Miss Compton-Burnett’, in Burkhart (1972), pp. 32–47, 44. Burkhart, I. Compton-Burnett, 62–3. Millgate, ‘Interview with Miss Compton-Burnett’, 44; Frank Kermode, ‘The House of Fiction: Interviews with Seven English Novelists’, Partisan Review, 7(6) (1963): 73.


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26. Liddell suggests euphony is not Compton-Burnett’s concern; I am also indebted to his enunciation of her stichomythic style (Elizabeth and Ivy, 16, 107). 27. Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elders and Betters (London: Allison & Busby, 1983), 9. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Elders, followed by page number. 28. Ivy Compton-Burnett, Parents and Children (London: Victor Gollancz, 1979), 225. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Parents, followed by page number. 29. Ivy Compton-Burnett, The Last and the First (London: Victor Gollancz, 1971), 34. 30. Ivy Compton-Burnett, Daughters and Sons (London: Allison & Busby, 1984), 218. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Daughters, followed by page number. 31. See also Elders, 10; and Ivy Compton-Burnett, A God and his Gifts (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963), 125, 223–4. Hereafter cited parenthetically as God followed by page number. 32. Compton-Burnett’s combined interest in dialogue and the present aligns her work with drama. As she observed in an interview with John Bowen, her ‘books seem . . . to be something between a novel and a play’, but she persisted in writing novels because she believed they ‘gave her more scope’. John Bowen, ‘An Interview with Ivy Compton-Burnett (BBC Home Programme, September 17, 1960)’, Twentieth-Century Literature, 25 (1979): 165–73, 165–6. 33. Blake Nevius, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Columbia Essays on Modern Writers 47 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), 19. 34. The questionable verisimilitude of this dialogue is evinced by one BBC director’s statement that he could ‘ “make good radio out of any of [Compton-Burnett’s] books provided that not more than two major characters are under the age of five” ’ (quoted in Sprigge, The Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett, 135). 35. McCarthy, ‘The Inventions’, 134. 36. Burkhart, I. Compton-Burnett, 77. 37. Hilary Spurling, Ivy When Young: the Early Life of I. Compton-Burnett, 1884–1919 (London: Allison & Busby, 1983), 116. 38. For example, in Parents and Children, asked whether he feels no gratitude for his home and education, a son candidly replies, ‘ “You make me pay too heavy a price for them” ’ (310). 39. Ivy Compton-Burnett, Pastors and Masters (London: Allison & Busby, 1984), 94. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Pastors, followed by page number. 40. Robert Liddell, ‘Notes on Ivy Compton-Burnett’, Twentieth-Century Literature, 25 (1979): 154. 41. This pattern is quietly re-enacted in the Herrick parlour when Miss Basden, one of their teachers, reveals her middle names (they are never told to us), provoking ‘a faint titter from one of the maids’ (Pastors, 91). Mr Merry glares fiercely, and Emily says that the kitchen maid must fi nd two middle names ‘ “too much” ’ (Pastors, 92). Here laughing to excess at authority includes laughing at authority’s excesses. 42. Henri Bergson, ‘Laughter’, in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), pp. 61–190, 148. 43. Bergson believes any thoughtful consideration of otherness, such as sympathy or compassion, extinguishes laughter (Bergson, ‘Laughter’, 150); laughter at one’s self is essential to the pursuit of Nietzsche’s overman (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Josefine Nauckoff and Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 104); and Freud writes, ‘When I make the other person laugh by telling him my joke, I am actually making use of him to arouse my own laughter’ (Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the


44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

Unconscious, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 8, 24 vols, trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth 1905), 156.). So too does Darwin argue that laughter satiates individual needs, and is dependent upon the individual’s ‘happy frame of mind’ (Charles Darwin, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (London: Julian Friedmann, 1979), 200). Ivy Compton-Burnett, Brothers and Sisters (London: Victor Gollancz, 1967), 27. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Brothers, followed by page number. Robert R. Provine, Laughter: a Scientific Investigation (London: Faber, 2000), 157. Georges Bataille, ‘Laughter’, in Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (eds), The Bataille Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 59–63, 60. Sprigge writes: ‘In the days when most upper class families employed a governess, having a “governess’s appetite” was a description often given of somebody in light disparagement. Ivy made the most of this with Miss Bunyan’ (The Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett, 96). For an overview of Levinas’s basic precepts see Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987). Other critics cite Muriel’s lucid rendering as a turning point in ComptonBurnett’s oeuvre; see Violet Powell, A Compton-Burnett Compendium (London: Heinemann, 1973), 76; and Sprigge, The Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett, 96. Gentile marks this shift to younger children at about mid-career (Ivy ComptonBurnett, 76); Compton-Burnett’s two fi nal works, A God and His Gifts (1963) and The Last and the First (1971) have few youngsters and delineate almost nothing in the way of risibility. Ivy Compton-Burnett, Manservant and Maidservant (London: Victor Gollancz, 1947), 56, 94. Compton-Burnett, Manservant and Maidservant, 112, 33. Nathalie Sarraute, ‘Conversation and Sub-Conversation’, in Burkhart (1972), pp. 137–57, 141. Sprigge, The Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett, 156. Greig, Ivy Compton-Burnett, 42. Frank O’Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, ed. Donald Allen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Newby, The Novel: 1945–1950, 8–9. Millgate, ‘Interview with Miss Compton-Burnett’, 46.

10 Angus Wilson: No Laughing Matter and No Laughing Matter Steven Jacobi

In his 1946 essay on ‘The English Sense of Humour’, the writer and critic Harold Nicolson observed that the three physical expressions of amusement – the smile, the chuckle and the laugh – actually possessed a lesser degree of uniformity and continuity than most people supposed. Thus, he went on, it is sometimes asserted that the progression from smiling to laughing is a continuous progression and that the smile is no more than an incomplete laugh, whereas in fact there actually exists some psychological progression from smiling to laughing – four successive stages of muscular activity, to be precise, all of which Nicolson is keen to examine in solid, fussy detail.1 The description of laughing and laughter as a distinctive comic condition – that is, as being separate from, say, giggling or smiling – is especially significant to Angus Wilson (1913–91), a writer who was celebrated for short stories and novels which blended wit, acute social observation and a love of the macabre. Though his later work in the 1960s and 1970s became more experimental, he never lost the capacity to blend the funny and the serious, frequently deploying the one as a means of calling attention to the other. For Wilson, especially in his early work, laughter was most closely associated with the first of the four types of laughter Nicolson identified; namely, the theory of self-esteem. This is described as being a not-too-distant relative of the German Schadenfreude, the amusement which is aroused in human beings by the dangerous misfortunes or infi rmities of their fellow mortals: that is, laughter which is never far removed from derision, the essential function of which is to degrade people and interests, something close to what Samuel Beckett called ‘the mirthless laugh, the laugh that laughs – silence please – at that which is unhappy’.2 Similarly, Wilson has been noted for his habitually waspish, satirically denigrating wit. His early work was often (and often characteristically) savage and direct. His reputation was forged through the campy though intelligently persuasive deployment of pitiless humour. 121


Initially at least, and certainly in his early short stories, he enlisted laughter in his perceived role as the debunker of hypocrisy, the exposer of cant, and the scourge of the pretentious, the ludicrous and the pompous. In particular, the two collections of stories The Wrong Set (1949) and Such Darling Dodos (1950) were filled with vivid characters, frequent invitations to laughter, and sharply satirical social observation, bitingly pointing in two simultaneous directions: against the old bourgeoisie, clinging to their privileges and old class attitudes, and also against the cleansing new bureaucrats who were busy administering the post-war period. The stories were monuments to loud, exuberant, cocksure laughter, and Wilson used the confident gustiness of laughter as a means to pin his hapless subjects. Here, for example, is Wilson laying into one of the new bureaucrats, John Hobday, in the opening paragraph of ‘Realpolitik’, a story from The Wrong Set about office politics and the sophisticated but duplicitous dealing with staff by a senior manager at an art gallery: ‘John Hobday sat on the edge of his desk and swung his left leg with characteristic boyishness. He waited for the staff to get settled in their seats and then spoke with careful informality.’3 John Hobday’s ‘characteristic boyishness’ is not necessarily authentic because it is ‘characteristic’: quite the reverse in fact – he is clearly a man for whom every one of his characteristics is carefully manicured before being allowed its public airing. Even at such an early stage in the story, Hobday’s boyishness (it is implied) is being laid on a bit thick, as if it masks something altogether more adult and sinister. The fact that he speaks with ‘careful informality’ confirms this. Here is a man in whom what appears to be instinct and reflex is in fact smoothly executed manipulation motivated entirely by selfish aims. He may appear to be boyish and informal, and he can swing his legs as casually as he likes, but we already know what Wilson knows, that he is actually a bit of a shit. And this is precisely what the rest of the story makes very clear. As Hobday gradually takes apart the old liberal ways of running the art gallery, Wilson steadily exposes the careerist brute loitering behind the smoothly delivered words. The story is an attack on the new breed of managers who were in the process of dismantling the old, pre-war England – silver-tongued young bureaucrats who valued efficiency and productivity more than people and, in this case, ‘scholarship and ideas’ (Wrong, 63). Thus, Hobday talks in over-elaborate similes and his voice consists of ‘loud, trumpeting, rhetorical’ notes. Hobday is too theatrical in his manner. Hobday comes across as too sentimental; Hobday is ‘like some damned Methodist preacher fellow’. He is a ‘mountebank’, ‘a professional careerist’ (Wrong, 64–5). Hobday is patronizing and offensive. Hobday tells lies. In just a few pages we learn something about the characters who are listening to Hobday’s well-honed though ultimately glutinous drivel – their decency and loyalty to the gallery’s commitment to learning. Gradually, they appreciate that their jobs are being threatened, held hostage to Hobday’s new

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schemes of competing with ‘the cinema, the football team and the fireside radio’ (Wrong, 67). In such stories, there is an ongoing insinuation of laughter, the firm insistence on a tone and atmosphere which invites enjoyment, recognition, indulgence and eventually collusion with the author’s own mocking laughter. In ‘Realpolitik’, this is accomplished by unravelling Hobday’s manner and, through the other characters, inviting us to take sides and see him for what he is. We’ve all come across the Hobdays of this world – in shops, schools, businesses: everywhere there is an opportunity for self-promotion – and the process of recognition helps nudge us in the appropriate direction. Laughter is direct and dangerous in these stories – Wilson not only evokes it, but also dramatizes it within the narrative. Thus, the destructive, selfconfidently anarchic properties of laughter are embraced in perhaps his most famous story, ‘Raspberry Jam’. This tells of a young boy, Johnnie, who befriends two old sisters, the Misses Swindale, and takes to visiting them in order to escape his humdrum home life. He is slightly in awe of Dolly and Miss Marian, who seem impossibly exotic and sophisticated creatures, far removed from his own drab family. At the end of the story, the two women are in a state of nervous excitement after a drinking binge. They have found a little bullfinch which has pilfered some of their raspberries. Johnnie watches in horror as they torment and then destroy the bird. Immediately prior to the shocking torture of the bullfi nch with a pocket knife, Miss Dolly’s inebriation causes her to keep ‘on laughing in a silly, high giggle’ (Wrong, 157). Here, laughter is the compelling prelude to the deeply disturbing act of grotesque cruelty. We laugh at the two old women, and we laugh with them. They are, after all, very funny, even though laughter is associated with destruction and degradation. Although Wilson’s fictional world may well be nasty and often bitchily rendered, it is nonetheless a considerable one, the nastiness being seductive because it is executed with the kind of Bacchic, destructively arch humour that often accompanies laughter. It is the kind of funniness which, though it often exposes an awful truth, also seems a bit improper and out of place. Only one of Wilson’s individuals, you think, could be so coarse. This was something not lost on Martin Amis, himself no shrinking violet, who has observed, ‘One of the things I would rather run a mile than do is have an Angus Wilson character over for the evening.’4 Nothing survives Wilson’s unblinking rheumy eye. This hunting down and skewering of the insincere is characteristic of Wilson and, initially at least, was something of a stylistic signature. His wit, his gift for savage comedy, was to be used primarily for unmasking. In this, he was perceived as a natural successor to Evelyn Waugh, the devastating satirist of his time and class, the malicious and sharp-eyed analyst of post-war Britain.5 Though others could be as socially acute (Simon Raven),


probingly ironic (Muriel Spark), downright funny (Kingsley Amis) or satirically aware (Ivy Compton-Burnett), it seemed for a while as if only Wilson possessed all these qualities and, moreover, was able to blend them into a wide-ranging, neo-Dickensian appreciation of post-war life in England. Yet among the gleefully outraged carnage, Wilson’s comedy had an ethical purpose. Malcolm Bradbury once observed that Wilson was not only a kind of moral scourge, but also a kind of moral scourge of a moral scourge.6 His narrative tone contained equal parts of moral wisdom and toughness, the sense of mischief often used to reveal something puppetlike, theatrical and absurd in all our actions. As Wilson probed the morally responsible ways in which we should be conducting ourselves, behaviour often dissolved into a distinctive grotesque, where instead of being truly humane, characters persisted in merely acting out roles or performances, their theatricality an emblem of emptiness. Consequently, the behavioural traits we all attempt to project are viewed as being essentially counterfeit. Wilson’s qualities as a moralist and comic mimic enabled him both to ape the persistent absurdities of life and indirectly pass judgement on them. Thus, Wilson’s short stories and early novels – The Wrong Set and Other Stories (1949), Such Darling Dodos and Other Stories (1950), Hemlock and After (1952), Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956), A Bit Off the Map and Other Stories (1957) and The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot (1958) – were primarily satiric, their targets being, generally speaking, the façade of middle-class values and manners, the hollowness of the respectability, the decorum and the apparently progressive virtues which can mask hypocrisy, meanness, immaturity exhibited to a pathological degree, and, above all, cruelty. Full-on laughter is the fuel for this fundamentally moral perspective. It is the characteristic Wilson music. However, he became increasingly and restlessly alert to the contradictions of his position as a fictionalizing exposer of other people’s fictions: ‘All fiction is for me a kind of magic and trickery’, he said in an interview, thereby acknowledging the relation of storytelling to mimicry and clowning and simultaneously, if discreetly, aligning himself with the very characters his comedy sought to unmask.7 This sense of doubt can be expressed by saying that a writer couldn’t possibly hope to really ‘capture’ the multiplicity of character; there was always the possibility of another role just around the corner. Even the most complex and apparently certain grasp of character was bound to be an illusion. At a rudimentary level, this suggests Wilson’s awareness that there is an element of ‘play’ and sleight of hand involved with the process of writing, a sense that the whole operation isn’t quite real. And exposing bogus behaviour was at the very centre of his work. By the time Wilson gets to write No Laughing Matter in 1967, nearly twenty years after his first collection of stories was published, the tensions between the fluently accomplished, laughter-powered and relatively cosy satirizing


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of character and value, and the insecurities concerning his own counterfeiting, fictionalizing role, have gathered into something of a crisis. In The Wild Garden (1964), for example, he admitted that ‘I started to write at the age of thirty six and in unconscious response, I believe, to a definite crisis to which my earlier years have steadily moved.’8 In this context, The Wild Garden is an important book, as Wilson analyses his fiction and attempts to uncover its psychological and autobiographical sources. The godlike manager of Hemlock and After, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes and The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot – usually able to move unflinchingly from character to character, see through many eyes, and allow himself acerbic moral points and judgements – is now able also to examine his own insecurities. It is at this point in his career that Wilson’s use and begetting of laughter changes in character and intention. In the 1960s, the tone of his writing shifts so that anxiety and even a sense of the neurotic become part of the mix. At a very obvious level, the certainties that powered his capacious Dickensian novels begin to absorb other modes of writing. There is a strong element of science fiction in The Old Men at the Zoo (1961), for instance, and No Laughing Matter (1967) wriggles with testy experiment. Rather than being a useful tool for the enlisting of our sympathies in the unmasking of fools and charlatans – an irresistible tidal wave of comic assault – it becomes something altogether more ambitious and complex. It develops instead into an agent of displacement and self-displacement, where the former complacence, even the daring arrogance of laughter, is questioned. In No Laughing Matter, in particular, comedy and laughter get a thorough going over. Their previous incarnations as catty, enforcing lieutenants of ‘Wilson the moral scourge’ begin to dissolve under the various insecurities that Wilson recognized and now confronted in himself. Laughter begins to dry in the throat. Here, biographical context is significant in outlining the steady building of confidence prior to the writing of No Laughing Matter, the kind of confidence that was necessarily required for the harsh self-examination on which he was about to embark. The reviews had been good for Late Call (1964), his previous novel, about a retired hotel manageress trying to understand her new life in one of England’s New Towns. He had even become something of a celebrity in the intervening years. This popularity was nourished by a sense of holiday, of freedom, which (literally) was sustained by frequent and extensive travelling. When we get to No Laughing Matter itself, we find precise and insistent parallels between Wilson’s own life and the narrative concerns of the novel. Here was a writer at the height of his powers, with a considerable reputation behind him, now buoyed by acclaim. He was secure enough to tackle anything – even (or maybe especially) insecurity. No Laughing Matter is a sprawling book which follows the various fortunes of the Matthews family through the twentieth century. The main


protagonists are ‘Billy Pop’ and ‘the Countess’, idiosyncratic parents who leave an indelible mark on their children. It is a complex evocation of family, politics and neuroses played out against an increasingly difficult and unforgiving world. Partly because of its ambition and the bravery of its scope and experimental manner, which risked the wrath of his devoted readership, many regard it as Wilson’s masterpiece. Like the author’s own family, this is a middle-class outfit comprising six children, aware of its financial difficulties and living in genteel poverty. In addition, the novel’s dealings with homosexuality, left-wing politics, global travel and the process of writing itself point to an emphatically intimate connection between text and authorial preoccupation. So how does all this impact on laughter and, in particular, Wilson’s use of laughter? There are early clues in the novel. The Matthews family visits Olympia for a Wild West exhibition and is shown to be vulnerable to examination and scrutiny by others: Many in the large crowd turned with amusement or surprise to see these posh youngsters singing so loudly in public. Mr Matthews, by now conscious of the public gaze, smiled and swung his walking stick a little at the attention of the passers-by; his wife smiled, too, to see him smiling. ‘Billy loves public notice, don’t you, darling?’9 The Matthews’ behaviour becomes, at least in part, a reaction to what it believes others expect of it. As the scene progresses, the family becomes the accumulated and concentrated axis of a variety of public perspectives – reflections of both their own and others’ perceptions of them. They play parts and take themselves and others’ expectations of them too seriously. Individually, their sense of selfhood becomes blurred, and the defensive wall of smiles gives way not to laughing but to giggling: ‘They repeated the same phrases, then they tried out some others. At last they sounded so like it was creepy, and to break the eerie atmosphere, they burst into giggles’ (Laughing, 35). Giggling, then, assumes the quality of a mask which conceals the real impropriety that lies behind the lack of identity and not knowing oneself. Ominously, at the end of Book One, these two aspects of the Matthews family are closely identified and cause unease: ‘Giggling and imitating, it was some time before they fell asleep’ (Laughing, 35). Giggling – a muted, discreet version of laughter, its suppressed but irresistible cousin perhaps – has therefore mutated from being an aggressive weapon in the armoury that Wilson once used in the debunking of hypocrisy, and has become instead part of a defensive strategy, a parrier of awkwardness and embarrassment.

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In 1956 (in the novel), Gladys seems finally to have found some kind of happiness in married life with Benny, though his death brings back old ghosts. As a child she has been abused by Billy Pop, then as an adult has suffered financial leeching from him. She has been sent to jail for fraud, framed by her first husband who then profited from the scheme. So Benny’s death is a terrible blow; an apparently unlikely opportunity for humour. Arranging his funeral, and encountering transport difficulties, she desperately pleads, ‘ “But I do want you to understand that money is no object” ’, even though at that moment it clearly is (Laughing, 438). At the end of her tether, she is about to see the funny side of things (as she did as a child) to make things bearable. Old ghosts are brought back. A few lines later, when she is on the phone, Gladys’s repressed sense of insecurity surfaces, and she ‘laughed so loudly that Doris had to hold the receiver away from her ear’ (Laughing, 440). Laughter here is clearly linked with the displacement of character, and is by this point acting in a purely defensive way. Laughter, which used to be the vehicle for Wilson’s unrestrained waspishness, is now a sign of something else, and is even, on occasions, to be avoided. Doris’s holding of the receiver at a distance emphasizes this; it keeps both the obese, ridiculous Gladys and her silly laughter at arm’s length. Perhaps the most macabre use of comedy and laughter in No Laughing Matter is in its connection to death. Billy Pop and the Countess, the children’s parents, meet violent deaths, but the horror is filtered through a pastiche of Beckett’s Endgame. The terror is laced with Beckettian comedy and a sense of the bathetically absurd, as though Wilson were reluctant to play death ‘straight’. Wilson was approaching sixty when the novel was published; though no great age, age itself had become a concern. Old age and its inevitable consequence, death, are rarely absent in No Laughing Matter. And, as I’ve already suggested, the funeral arrangements of Gladys’s husband Benny are subject to the same kind of comic diminuendo observed when Billy Pop and the Countess die. Just as the Matthews children are ringed by their elderly relations in the first section of the novel, so they in turn surround the new, younger generations in the closing episodes. This cyclical, repeated pattern suggests the obligatory nature of mortality. The reverse framing of the novel’s action (children surrounded by ageing adults, turning into ageing adults surrounded by children) confirms an unavoidable, recurring, sequential process. Rose Tremain has observed that Wilson used the comic to illuminate the tragic.10 This is so, but in the early work the dynamic between the two was relatively unflustered, the comedy liberating and carefree. There are still flashes of the confident, uninhibited use of humour in No Laughing Matter, but the general sense is of laughter being banished, or at least qualified, giggling and pastiche being set in its place; and then where laughter is not actually absent or altered, of the comedy screening tragedy and softening rather than illuminating its implications.


At the beginning of the novel, it is the laughing mirrors at the Wild West exhibition which bring to an end the blissful, delicious period of rapture in the children’s lives. The mirrors also initiate the lifelong anxieties in each of the characters which are played out to death. Laughter is ominous and prophetically double-edged. None of the children is able to escape the roles fi xed for them by the mirrors. Narcissistic Rupert is disappointed by the image he sees reflected back at him, in later life becoming an actor. Margaret’s glimpsed childhood gawkiness evolves into a sour and increasingly inaccessible novelist. Sukey sees a melting jelly of a girl and her life ultimately dissolves into one of soft domesticity. And little Marcus screams at the image he sees reflected back at him, a sign of the adult bitchery and affected camp which will characterize his rent-boy phase, and in a less shrill way, his career as art dealer and the owner of a perfume factory in Morocco. And fat, damaged Gladys is ‘too disconcerted at first to speak’ when she sees herself, upside down and with ‘a plump face grown red with surprise. They all at last could laugh. To keep the fun going Gladys stood on her head on the shiny linoleum floor. Sure enough there she was the right way up, her flushed straining face coming out of her tumbled skirts and petticoats and down below a great expanse of knickers and stockings’ (Laughing, 26). Again, laughter and laughing are found; the children have fled to them when confronted by its frightening antithesis, a kind of anti-laughter. In his notes to the novel, Wilson made it clear that he was extremely wary of the kind of humour with which he had been most closely associated in the past. He said that the basic theme of No Laughing Matter was the effect of defensive humour where comedy becomes a kind of hysteric evasion.11 The novel’s most obvious example of defensive humour is in the deployment of the device known as ‘The Game’, which runs through the book and is where the Matthews children attempt to mimic their parents, to come to terms with them by playing out roles and taking the parts they wouldn’t be able to embrace in their real lives. In effect, they ‘rewrite’ their parents in reacting to the lack of stability and ordinary warmth which they needed but did not receive from Billy Pop and the Countess. At one point, for example, the children bring their parents (played by Rupert and Marcus) to trial, asking for a suitability ruling from ‘Mr Justice Scales’, played by the oldest sibling, Quentin. Though even this charade has interesting overtones, as Rupert and Marcus (as a self-admiring Billy Pop and bitch Countess respectively) are like their parents and Quentin eventually becomes a left-wing, Muggeridge-ish journalist. They might think they are using The Game as a means of deflecting an unhappy reality, though at another level, they are merely reinforcing actuality. The Game, in other words, expresses a kind of parasitic dependency whereby the children become literally and strongly associated with their parents while simultaneously attempting to disregard them. If the humour here acts as a kind of mask which guards what the individual considers to be his or her identity, the children eventually come to realize, in 1946 when both their parents are dead, that there is no longer


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any reason to pursue The Game. Suddenly free to establish their own characters, the realization comes as a literal comic relief which is expressed in uncontrollable laughter. Margaret, for example, ‘was convulsed with laughter which set all the others off’ (Laughing, 421). It is as if her infectious gale of laughter, which signalled the relief of supposed release from parental influence, is the cue for an outbreak of identity. The association of laughter with certainty about individuals, with the solidity of individuality – first witnessed in the assured laughter directed at the mercilessly exposed characters in the short stories – has momentarily returned. The laughter of the brothers and sisters signals a more general movement towards their apparent release from a world of parental restraint into one of childhood and play. If laughter is conventionally perceived as a restorative, a sign of order and social equilibrium (and Wilson would argue that its assured presence in the early novels and stories indirectly proposed a particular kind of moral and emotional hierarchy), it can also be seen, in its gestures towards freedom and the desire to cleanse, as being allied to a kind of anarchy. Partaking in laughter, we are both of society and assured of our own identities and points of view, our liberated and independent selves. But the children’s burst of laughter is quickly qualified. Quentin is unaware of developments and enters late, feeling estranged when he hears ‘the mixed excited voices and uncontrollable laughter’ (Laughing, 421). He is a reminder to the other children that their laughter will inevitably be short-lived and hollow. However, his entry also emphasizes, through contrast, that the laughter of his brothers and sisters is part of a movement towards their apparent release from a world of parental restriction into one of childhood and play. No Laughing Matter becomes a novel in which laughter is challenged and often replaced by other forms of a more defensive kind of comedy. It is a novel that turns its back on the freewheeling, sharp certainties of Wilson’s earlier work and instead suggests a cautionary introspection. As Sukey observes early on: That old Trusty [the family dog] should so suddenly and unexpectedly have given birth was wonderful, supreme surprise of these wonderful supremely happy days of – at last – a real family life she had always read of in stories, heard of from other girls at school, dreamed of over the nursery fire. No scenes, no ‘words’, no clever laughing at good ordinary things . . . (Laughing, 18) On the other hand, this also suggests that such a view of comedy comes at a price. After all, Sukey’s life is eventually given over to uncomplicated, diehard domesticity (with Middle England politics to match), suggesting that Wilson is aware that though his comedy might at this point be compromised, such a reactionary (even unsophisticated) perspective might not

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always work in a world that is often more than just ‘ordinary’. Despite being quite entitled to her view, and though it has currency in the novel’s meditative context, it is not the whole story. No Laughing Matter is Wilson’s most obvious novel of self-examination, and together with this self-examination came a re-examination of the way he used comedy. The cocksure certainties of full-blown laughter gave way to the more circumspect qualities of giggling, parody, pastiche, satire and mimicry – and occasionally actual silence. It is a novel full of humour, from delicate irony to crude farce, and its blend of drama interleaved with more conventional sections of narrative exposition, also with specific episodes detonating within a broader, century-wide framework, imparts a formal sense of restlessness which helps to imply the mood of edgy questioning. It works brilliantly both as a novel and as an enquiry into the writing of novels, as well as in its examination of self. In Wilson’s next book, As if by Magic (1973), one of the characters at a Swami’s gathering in India remarks ‘ “Oh! For God’s sake! Who knows what positive etheric waves you’re neutralising with all that defensive humour?” ’12 Search me, you might say, but it is as if Wilson had realized late on that he had begun to appreciate and scrutinize the very talents which twenty years ago had made his reputation. To this extent, the fact that No Laughing Matter is not a laughing matter becomes for Wilson a very significant matter indeed. A sense of humour is a serious business, and not having one isn’t funny.

Notes 1. Harold Nicolson, The English Sense of Humour (London: Dropmore Press, 1946), 5–7. 2. Samuel Beckett, Watt (London: John Calder, 1976), 47. 3. Angus Wilson, ‘Realpolitik’, The Wrong Set and Other Stories (London: Secker and Warburg, 1949), 63. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Wrong, followed by page number. 4. Martin Amis, The War against Cliché (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001), 74. 5. See Edmund Wilson, ‘Emergence of Angus Wilson’, in Jay Halio (ed.), Critical Essays on Angus Wilson (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1985), pp. 23–4, 23. 6. Malcolm Bradbury, No, Not Bloomsbury (London: Arena, 1989), 221. 7. Angus Wilson, interview with Michael Millgate, Paris Review, 17 (AutumnWinter 1957): 88–105, 95. 8. Angus Wilson, The Wild Garden (London: Secker and Warburg, 1963), 11. 9. Angus Wilson, No Laughing Matter (London: Secker and Warburg, 1967), 21. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Laughing, followed by page number. 10. Rose Tremain, quoted from interview on Bookmark; broadcast on BBC2, 3 October 1991. 11. Wilson’s manuscript notes for No Laughing Matter (Box No. 11, University of Iowa archive). 12. Angus Wilson, As if by Magic (London: Secker and Warburg, 1973), 311–12.

11 Reconsidering Lucky Jim: Kingsley Amis and the Condition of England Greg Londe

What to make of a diminished thing? The perception of Kingsley Amis’s decline into a caricature of his own politics, acting as a foreclosed ‘period archetype’,1 was more-or-less ratified by the scathing reactions to his thirteenth novel, Jake’s Thing (1978). Reviewing this book, which is in many ways a scabrous revision of Amis’s seminal debut Lucky Jim (1954), John Updike argued that, ‘If the Post-War British novel figures on the international stage as winsomely trivial, Kingsley Amis must bear part of the blame.’2 By the time Updike made this hyperbolic claim, the drastic distance Amis had travelled – from the sharp-witted Fabian of the 1950s to the wry Conservative of 1967’s ‘Why Lucky Jim Turned Right’ – had been glaringly obvious for years.3 At the dawn of the Thatcher era and with a new Amis on the literary scene, what was becoming fully apparent was how easily Amis père could act as a metonym for broader trends toward conservatism. The perception of Amis’s humorous fiction as merely reactionary has increasingly alienated him from the liberal enclaves of universities (a liberalism which has grown steadily since the democratization of education for which Lucky Jim stands, thus ironically, as the marker). The effect of Amis’s later reputation has been the shrinking cultural and literary claims made for his first novel. Over the last forty years, the narrative of the post-war British novel’s development has witnessed a gradual redrawing of its margins from the provincial to the postcolonial. Against Bernard Bergonzi’s paradigmatic account in The Situation of the Novel (1970), which argued that the years of post-war decline saw a return to English fiction’s supposedly dominant strain of realism, numerous critics have attempted to expand the range of possible representational responses to post-war and post-imperial transformations. Andrzej Gasiorek’s later model, proposed in Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After (1995), declares an interest, specifically contra Bergonzi, in the experimentation of the period’s plural realisms – in diverse ‘novelists who sought a rapprochement between experimentalism and realism’.4 131


His account nevertheless pushes off against ‘the opposition between them [experimentalism and realism] posited by writers like Kingsley Amis’, maintaining the perception that Amis was unable to engage seriously with the experimentalism that he ultimately, and publicly, denounced as elitist.5 Even in critical accounts that dissent from Bergonzi’s contours of decline, little effort is spent re-examining the actual novels of the working-class and lower-middle-class diaspora that came to prominence in the 1950s, writers of plain-speaking and often funny fictions that played well with sociological tracts such as Andrew Shonfield’s dire forecast in British Economic Policy since the War (1958) and Michael Shanks’s The Stagnant Society: a Warning (1961). Bergonzi’s thesis can be taken to indicate the retrenchment of such authors, their return in the post-war period to a style that pre-dates and perhaps ignores the exemplary engagement of high modernism with the devastating effects of the First World War. This would imply an insufficiency of response by modernism’s mid-century successors to the nightmares and holocausts of the twentieth century, a ‘return to Realism’ that was nominally ‘Angry’ but, in retrospect, apparently complacent. If Lucky Jim does encounter the Second World War, traditionally it has been thought to do so tangentially, through its satire of the social-democratic institutions engendered by the Labour victory of 1945. In Paul Fussell’s reading, ‘the Great War Staff and “home-front” merge to assume the shape of the common enemy, persisting as club-man, don, divine, editor’, and he cites Jim’s nemesis Professor Welch as exemplary of this enemy.6 But what are the stakes of this bathetic persistence of the war? In a comment that would apply equally well to Lucky Jim, Fussell writes of Amis’s ‘I Spy Strangers’ (1962) that ‘The story is not about damage to the body but damage to principles and to personal freedom and integrity.’7 But what of the bodily responses to such post-war, home-front aggressions? What of Jim’s laughter, his faces pulled in mockery of clubmen and dons? As I will show later, Lucky Jim’s representation of the war should also be thought to include an elaborate and wilful trivialization of violence: the novel simultaneously writes about the war and challenges the idea that the war can be written about; after all, this is a novel that ends with the hero’s laughter emitting from a ‘mouth stuck ajar in a rictus of agony’.8 In this chapter I will examine how these two stories of damage, to the body and to the person, correlate in Amis’s comic novel, and how such correlations respond to the transformations of the post-war period. Starting from some recent analyses of Philip Larkin’s poetry that recommend a new approach to Amis in relation to post-imperial English national culture and masculinity, I will go on to explore how a pivotal scene in Lucky Jim invokes and redeploys the question of national consciousness as represented in a canonical modernist novel typically thought to be outside of Amis’s purview, James Joyce’s Ulysses. Finally, I will assess what it means for Amis, in the

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wake of modernism and the Second World War, to forge an association between comic good fortune and self-mutilation or self-distortion.

‘Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions’9 Amis falls into many anthologized categories: he can be taken and taught as the progenitor of the ‘campus novel’, a member of ‘the Movement’, and a stop in the line of modern British satirists that begins with Wodehouse and Waugh. Perhaps most famously, his debut novel was almost immediately swallowed up in the media hype regarding the ‘Angry Young Men’ and read alongside such texts as Colin Wilson’s The Outsider (1956), John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1957), John Braine’s Room at the Top (1957), and Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1959). In Lucky Jim, Jim Dixon attempts awkwardly to fit into the history department of a provincial red-brick university, with its insufferable chair Professor Welch, by publishing a pedantic article, composing a pandering lecture on ‘Merrie England’, and not giving in to his constant temptation to physically abuse nearly everyone in his sight. Luck, libido, love, drink and ‘honesty’, in some fantastical combination, mitigate his misery. In the best-selling fictions of these ‘Angry Young Men’, lower-class protagonists combined street-level common sense with an outsider’s exilic nihilism, combating the established class hierarchy with a new allowance for mobility (both downward and upward). These authors generally used a gritty and naturalistic style to narrate the implications of broader social access and to demonstrate the hypocritical restrictions still in place. But Amis’s novel does not sit altogether comfortably along these class lines. The transcription of working-class voices is caricatured in Lucky Jim, as Dixon affects the grease-smeared argot of one of his students in order to harass a stuck-up older colleague: ‘I am not threatenning you, but you just do as I say else me and some of my palls from the Works . . . Joe Higgins’ (153). He then actually smears some grime on the letter, for some of the aforementioned ‘authenticity’. Dixon ventriloquizes a view that Amis would hold more strongly later, and with more off-putting candour, that ‘more will mean worse’.10 In describing a lecture he dreads actually delivering, Dixon says, ‘ “I thought I might start with a discussion of the university, for instance, in its social role” ’ (28). Such a discussion might be seen to share the preoccupations of ‘campus novels’ by Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge and others, but suggests here the sort of ‘threatenning’ growth that somehow constrains Jim’s individual voice. The tongue-in-cheek irony of these passages highlights the dual purpose that Lucky Jim can have for readers who wish to use it as a gateway of sorts to a particular cultural moment. It is, viewed from one angle, in line with its angry brethren in its depiction of a ‘new proletariat’ protagonist writhing under the institutional thumb. But


the novel is also highly sceptical of old Professor Welch’s talk of ‘ “the sort of new man” ’ (29). Against a screen of social development, Jim’s personal story is picaresque and not a Bildungsroman. In the triumphant ending, Jim only wins the girl thanks to his famous luck: the ‘self-starter’ in the novel’s last sentence is Welch’s car. The problem for Lucky Jim with the ‘new man’ is less the ‘new’ than the ‘man’. In attempting to win the girl, Dixon must contend with the fact that ‘the sight of her seemed an irresistible attack on his own habits, standards, and ambitions: something designed to put him in his place for good’ (39). The double nature of the ‘irresistible attack’ conjoins desire and defencelessness. ‘His place’ is a socio-sexual impotence that Jim never fully overcomes, despite getting the girl and a good job in London in the end. How does Jim win the wealthy and attractive Christine Callaghan? One over-simplified answer resorts to the conventions of the genre, where such goddesses are inevitably taken, as the reader should be, with the salt-of-the-earth protagonists (precisely for their shabbiness and provinciality – which are infinitely better, of course, than overly polished and metropolitan). While we must be careful about assigning Christine too much dynamic interiority (this is a Kingsley Amis novel, after all), any view of Jim ‘getting the girl’ ignores the woman’s ‘attack’ on the very parts of Jim that, generically, allow his victory.

The example of post-Letters Philip Larkin Lucky Jim has surely been misrepresented by the ‘angry’ and ‘realist’ tags; but how do we recover a writer who was never afraid to reveal and revel in his misogyny, racism, homophobia and Anglocentrism, and whose prose actually depends thematically in some cases upon these things? His political limitations make it less and less likely that Kingsley Amis’s stock will rebound any time soon. Still, there is a model for making Amis speak to current critical preoccupations without acting as an apologist for his reactionary politics: Philip Larkin. As Raphaël Ingelbien writes of Amis’s lifelong friend, and the dedicatee of Lucky Jim: If his Englishness is synonymous with the Little-Englandism, the jingoism and the Thatcherism of his letters, Larkin can be safely dismissed as a hopeless reactionary. On the other hand, if his Englishness can be interpreted as a form of marginal, provincial, (post)colonial consciousness, Larkin emerges as a more interesting writer.11 Indeed, Larkin’s reception over the last decade offers a way of reading Amis’s similarly colloquial and occasionally sombre prose. Larkin had been seen as a sort of ‘national monument’, as Tom Paulin put it, just as Amis in 1989, right before being knighted, was beginning, according to an appre-


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hensive Hermione Lee, ‘to be treated with that kind of cozy warmth, as a splendid monument of British satire’.12 The 1993 publication of Larkin’s letters, along with Andrew Motion’s warts-and-all biography, seriously shook a section of the poet’s public. Describing their reception, Nigel Alderman asks ‘why did so many reviews nostalgically use Larkin or a Larkin poem as a means to access a whole historical period, and why were they so saddened . . . as if his views said something about them?’13 Marjorie Perloff, in her perfectly titled review ‘What to Make of a Diminished Thing’, articulated the need to reconsider the complacent national-biographical readings of Larkin’s poems ‘to see if indeed they express “our” moods, and if not, whose moods they do express’.14 Critiques such as Alderman’s and Ingelbien’s reconstruct a new poetics of selfhood and masculinity out of the rubble of Larkin’s persona, wherein ‘his conception of England is predicated on its lyric death’.15 Alongside a deterioration of metanarratives – which Alderman implies is often incorrectly diagnosed as occurring after and apart from Larkin and Amis – the verse ‘finds a limited space which by asserting the failure of reproduction . . . allows it to produce its shrunken objects . . . out of its own belatedness’.16 This might remind us of the ending that I just described, with Jim placed in a cosy and bizarrely perfect new situation. No reading of this sort has been attempted for Amis, though, and we must ask why not. Perhaps it was simply not such a shock to see what the person on the other end of Larkin’s savage epistles had to say; more likely, it had to do with their respective genres. Alderman contrasts Larkin’s synthesis of ‘lyric’ and ‘self/ death’ with Amis’s elucidation of ‘community/reproduction’ and ‘narrative’ that is ‘formally and ideologically performed by the novel: the premiere prose narrative form and one that points outside England toward the greater community of Europe’.17 This characterization of the novel form will not entirely suffice in a period where Anglo-European relations are so fraught on the part of a nation readjusting its boundaries and negotiating its position in world affairs.18 The difference between poetry and the novel in this case is one of hermeneutic focus and access. After modernism, it is hard to relinquish the sort of close reading of poetry that allows Alderman to see the debris of Eliot and Pound’s characteristic works losing coherence, separating from fragments shored against ruin into the bric-à-brac that clutters a poem such as Larkin’s ‘Home is so Sad’. Here, ‘the pictures and the cutlery / . . . That vase’ cannot add up to more than the sum of their parts, and ‘bereft / of anyone to please, [home] withers so’.19 And surely the modernist novel, which took the life of the mind to such a pitch that language had to rush to compensate poetically, sometimes begs to be read like a lyric poem, making this sort of scrutiny inescapably useful. Amis, after all, does give Jim his most Larkinian moment, appropriately, while Jim fights to get his ‘Merrie England’ speech out of ‘his labouring mind’ (223): ‘immense

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depression and fatigue . . . sadness at the thought of Christine seemed to be trying to grip his tongue at the root and reduce him to an elegiac silence’ (225). But what is he elegizing? What is so sad? Larkin has already given us the answer. Simultaneous with this moment of ‘elegiac silence’ and of nationalism stuttering into ‘un-Merrie’ incoherence, Dixon indeed reaches what Alderman identifies as, à propos Larkin, a late modernist failure of reproduction, but does so in the comic terms of his frequent imitations and mocking faces. Jim ‘seemed to have forgotten how to speak ordinarily’, and so he decides mid-speech to make ‘no more imitations, they frightened him too much’: he can only voice his final public criticism of the state of the nation by reducing himself nearly to silence, can only ‘suggest by intonation . . . the worth of the statements he was making’ (225).

Modernism and the example of Joyce Having just seen how Dixon croaks out his ‘point about Merrie England’ (227), let us thus move ‘past the memorial plaques, and along the deserted corridors’ (11) of Lucky Jim to see how it colludes in and collides with the construction of its own geography. ‘The little town and the city were in different countries’, writes Amis; and this cartography of cultural relevance has been applied uncomplicatedly by a number of his readers (54). Here is Dixon’s escape route from the little town, as he envisions it at the end of the second chapter: As he stood in the badly-lit jakes, he was visited again, and unbearably, by the visual image that had haunted him ever since he took on this job. He seemed to be looking from a darkened room across a deserted back street to where, against a dimly-glowing evening sky, a line of chimneypots stood out as if carved from tin. A small double cloud moved slowly from left to right . . . He was certain it was an image of London, and just as certain that it wasn’t any part of London he’d ever visited. He hadn’t spent more than a dozen evenings there in his life. Then why, he pondered, was his ordinary desire to leave the provinces for London sharpened and particularized by this half-glimpsed scene? (26) The few nights that Jim has spent in London were ‘a week-end leave during the war’ and the capital now seems as distant as ‘Monte Carlo or Chinese Turkestan’ (64) – prospects that are more appropriate to that other James of British masculinity and global-Englishness, Bond.20 With this exotic later thought, his weariness and distance from his fantasy London leave him ‘crumpling like a shot film-gunman’ (64). We can see that the pain of such desires has much to do with exactly how ‘half-glimpsed’ and artificial are his views of a centre that cannot be central anymore. His horizon arises out of sublime darkness patently to reveal itself as less sterling than tin, a


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tourist’s view of warm chimneys softly sooting the London sky, where London is, in essence, a sort of northern province. His provinces stand in relation to a centre that exists more in nostalgia than reality, cheapening both. In this case, of course, the provinces are a campus; and we can see Jim’s ‘Merrie England’ lecture, which he cannot get to stretch past eleven minutes (166), as one way in which calling this a ‘campus novel’ misunderstands Amis’s condemnation of the way university life in the 1950s fed the culture machine, the production of national definition down to minutiae (Jim’s CV consists of one essay on fifteenth-century British shipbuilding techniques). Much later, on the verge of leaving the university, Dixon famously ponders what part of the centre he will occupy after he escapes the ineptitudes of his home in ‘this mental, moral, and physical backwater’ of the provincial university (245): ‘he pronounced the names to himself: Bayswater, Knightsbridge, Notting Hill Gate, Pimlico, Belgrave Square, Wapping, Bloomsbury. No, not Bloomsbury’ (250). From this list, one can note how complicated and partitioned is the seemingly unified centre of London, as well as identify Amis’s glancing denunciation of a particular section of modernism. Malcolm Bradbury took the title of his 1987 study, No, Not Bloomsbury, from this very reproof of the Bloomsbury group, and used Bloomsbury as a rather uncomplicated synecdoche for the high modernism of the 1910s and 1920s. However, all editions of Lucky Jim currently in print (British and American) finish this list with the somewhat less telling ‘Chelsea? No, not Chelsea’. It is fully conceivable that Amis had the line changed simply to upset the ‘shit’ Bradbury’s thesis.21 But this line, which bluntly states his opposition to what Jim Dixon thinks of as ‘effeminate writing’ (250), condenses a ‘much more deliberate “programme” of dismantling and demolition of modernist assumptions and procedures’ (again, the phrase comes from work on Larkin). 22 Critics have done some useful mining of Larkin’s references to modernist poetry and prose, but Amis’s have largely gone unnoticed. The contemporary British novel as it appears under the Amis aegis (‘winsomely trivial’) has been cast as a retreat, a ‘return [of] the literary arts to the accessible ways that prevailed before the coming of modernism’.23 It is easy to see Amis as a reactionary plain-speaker, but we should note how he considered his progress out of his now-institutionalized forebears as one of a more direct revision. David Lodge, in a 1963 essay and in his 1992 introduction to Lucky Jim, cites Dixon’s fight with ‘the bearded pacifist painting Bertrand’ (13) as the novel’s climax. After dozens of pages of his comically violent inner monologue being ‘discharged in harmless private fantasies of a childish nature’, this scene reaches its culmination in ‘the fi rst occasion on which Jim’s inner and outer speech exactly coincide’.24 As examples, Lodge lists the fantasies that Bradbury, Bell and others have since repeated: stuffi ng Welch in a toilet, pushing a bead up Margaret’s nose. Here, Jim knocks Bertrand down

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and suddenly: ‘The bloody old towser-faced boot-faced totem pole on a crap reservation, Dixon thought. “You bloody old towser-faced boot-faced totem pole on a crap reservation,” he said’ (209). Regarding this moment, Robert Bell exults, ‘Language has amazing capacity: recognizing and designating the truth miraculously transforms self and world into something better.’25 But what in the world is better for this garbled insult? If Lodge is right in saying that ‘after this, Jim’s fortunes begin to improve . . . he is rewarded with the job, and the girl, of his dreams’, then we must ignore the mounting violence of his fantasy after this point, as well as the precise nature of this supposedly performative insult.26 Lodge claims a sort of cause and effect wherein Jim’s honest self-articulation is ‘rewarded’ by the book’s conclusion. We could equally, however, see the lucky conclusion forecast as early as the title – the book wearing its deus ex machina on its sleeve – arriving without any particular narrative provocation. Indeed, Lodge’s point would be stronger if our hero did not continue living his dream-life: before the hilariously mannered fight Dixon ‘would prevent that, if necessary by unlawful wounding’ (97–8) but afterwards he still imagines needing to ‘knife the drivers of both vehicles’ (245).27 In the end, of course, he is the one who ‘sagged as if he’d been knifed’ (251), in a scene that will directly invoke Bloomsbury and some members of its circle. But before fully exploring the book’s fascinating and deeply ambiguous ending, let us stay with this taunt to ‘towser-faced’ Bertrand. Microsoft Word’s spellchecker knows about as well as I do what a ‘towser’ is, but this, crucially, is the second use of the word in Lucky Jim. Earlier, Amis writes, [Jim] wished there were some issue on which he could defeat Bertrand, even at the risk of alienating his father. Any measure short of, or not necessitating too much, violence would be justified . . . He thought of a sentence in a book he’d once read: ‘And with that he picked up the bloody old towser by the scruff of the neck, and, by Jesus, he near throttled him’. (50) The ‘book he’d once read’, believe it or not, is Joyce’s Ulysses, where this quotation appears in the ‘Cyclops’ chapter.28 Why does that matter? According to Gavin Keulks, ‘Kingsley’s earliest novels . . . make clear his rebellion against such exemplary modernists as James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf, writers . . . [he] lambasted [for] their formal complexities and verbal acrobatics’.29 And similarly, in Bradbury’s reading, ‘The plain form of the novel is justified by artistic presumptions developed in the book . . . For the danger of art is Bertram’s [sic] danger, mannerist pretension, and that above all is represented by Bloomsbury’.30 Lodge, Keulks and Bradbury’s notions essentially suggest that the book’s cultural stance derives from moments of defiance that formally up-end the ‘mystification and


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outrage’31 of modernist presumptions in total. In fact, Bertrand is the one who complains that ‘ “These modern chaps jigger up the detail so much, and we don’t want that, do wam?” ’ (100). The ‘climactic’ fight literally pits one story of modernism against another, proving that we cannot take Bloomsbury, become genteel good taste by the 1950s, as either Amis’s code for the modern or as his ultimate foe in crafting a distinctive voice. Amis noted, in a much later interview, that he was ‘trying to get back, let’s say, to the pre-Joyce tradition, really – but not very consciously’.32 The ageing Amis, it must be admitted, is one of the worst readers of Lucky Jim that one is likely to find. If the novel returns to a pre-Joyce tradition, it does so by going through him at a crucial moment, not around him. Lucky Jim’s response to modernism can be mapped with much more precision in order to discover how exactly it intends to navigate the transition. In a letter of 16 January 1949, during the writing of Lucky Jim, Amis wrote to Larkin of having just read the greater part of Ulysses. He quotes the exact line that appears in the novel, one of his favourite humorous bits, but notes, ‘it isn’t worth going to all that trouble and expense in order to be funny once in a dozen pages . . . I think novels ought to tell a story’ (Letters, 196). It is not particularly surprising that the ‘Cyclops’ episode would appeal to Jim, given its setting amidst rounds of pints and given especially its characteristic technique of gigantism. The chapter’s recounting of mundane bar chatter wars perpetually with expansive parodies of pompous stylistic excess, against litanies of the melodramatic and institutional language that similarly dogs Amis’s anti-hero. On 6 October Amis suggests to Larkin, ‘If only you and I had been there, telling Joyce what to write about, and stopping him when he went wrong, what a wonderful writer we should have made him’ (Letters, 216). This advice would have included the deletion of most stream-of-consciousness sections, a view of subjectivity that he elsewhere associates with Woolf’s ‘hysterical’ interiority; hers is ‘a kind of intellectual melodrama, the exacerbation of totally fictitious states of feeling into a sentimental pipe-dream untouched by discipline’ (27 December 1947, his emphasis; Letters, 150). Woolf’s fictions often spiral out expressionistically until the desires, neuroses and anxieties of the inner world sublimely transform the simultaneously domineering exterior, narrative world. Amis, in his own way, approximates this very expressionism with Jim’s comic inner monologue (his ending, as I will suggest, may actually achieve it). However, the key difference is that Jim’s violent instincts are neutered and have no recourse to transformative aesthetic efficacy. Clearly distinguishing between masculine and feminine traditions of modernism, the word ‘discipline’ is telling here. ‘Discipline’ suggests tradition, especially as it is embodied in the white male canon of institutions such as the ones that dominate Amis’s life at the time of his writing. Underlying the presumption of Amis’s line on Joyce is a familiar Bloomian (Harold, as well as Leopold) anxiety of influence: ‘They want you to write novels like other novels don’t they? I

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don’t want to do that. If I were Joyce I could write Ulysses and that would always get published, but I’m not as good as that’ (8 January 1951; Letters, 253). During the composition of Lucky Jim, Amis delivered a series of lectures on ‘the modern novel, and my ridiculous integrity has led me to put in all those cheerless craps between 1900 and 1930 – Ginny Woolf and Dai Lawrence and Morgy Forster’ (23 October 1952; Letters, 295). This is more a pedagogical concession to the congealing canon, in Amis’s opinion, than an admission that one must seriously overcome this strand of modernism. Amis thus makes the ‘parallel between the occupations of graveyard attendant and custodian of learning’ that he follows through in his novel (12). The lesson from Joyce is an odd one, until we see how it allows Amis to take on a progenitor of his move into a diminished Englishness-afterModernism who is not himself English, and who can even signify what is lost after the break-up of Britain. ‘Cyclops’ marks an important counterpoint to Jim’s heroism, containing as it does Bloom’s declaration of his belonging to a race (both national and cultural, Irish and Jewish) and his poignant, vocal stance against ‘Force, hatred, history, all that.’33 Jim’s stand has no recourse to such belonging, though he tops the towser anyhow. Jim and Amis ironically internalize Joyce in this later context by putting Ulysses into pugilistic action. Ulysses thus becomes the perfect foil for Dixon’s limitations, reduced from polymath scholasticism down to Dixon’s winning ‘authoritative vapidity’ and a single utterance of one of Joyce’s less savoury characters (201). Unlike for Joyce, for Amis ‘it seemed as if there were no facts anywhere in the universe . . . which could possibly be brought within his present scope’ (195).

To what end? Amis, in writing Lucky Jim, is deeply concerned with the way modernist deep psychology interacts with a performed self. This performance seems to be what is left after the twin crises of modernism and, in the spectre of the war, nationalism. Lodge reads Dixon’s ultimate Bertrand-bashing as a watershed in its exteriorizing of his inner turmoil, but he does not take into account how painful the process of making such feelings exterior, the process of finding a form for such feelings, might be. Dixon ‘wanted to implode his [own] features, to crush the air from his mouth, in a way and to a degree that might be set against the mess of feelings she aroused in him’; instead his performance constantly explodes into ‘sterile anger, all the allotropes of pain’ (72). He is constantly making faces, which have too often been taken as a tacit rebellion that fi nally finds words. Consider his ‘shot-in-the-back face’ (27) and the way later ‘Dixon felt desire abruptly flooding his entire frame with an immense fatigue, as if he’d been struck by a bullet in some vital spot’ (118). Rather than going unrealized, self-


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wounding desire and the acting of his faces (which often express this desire) lead to ‘fatigue’, the soldier’s weariness. Listen to the language of violence that envelops Jim, and which Amis’s tone makes all the more sinister: ‘Conundrums that sounded innocuous or even pleasant were the most reliable sign of impending attack’ and on the same page he is ‘bombarded with kind inquiries’ (22); the romping misadventure at the Welch’s house leaves a record of ‘mutilated bedclothes’ (65) from ‘last night’s holocaust’ (70); at the ball, the dancers sway ‘like a crowd that knows a baton-charge is imminent’ (120); after his disastrous lecture becomes a drunken debacle, Christine is ‘pulled . . . away with some violence . . . virtually frog-marched’ (218) out of the hall. And so on. Certainly the violence in Lucky Jim could be considered quaint, the adornment of hyperbolic consequence on quotidian struggle; but it is also exhausted and willfully trivialized. Most men in the book have seen military service, but their experiences in the war (never made explicit) are used to bathetic effect: Dixon’s eager student, Mr Michie, ‘was a moustached ex-service student who’d commanded a tank troop at Anzio while Dixon was an R.A.F. corporal in western Scotland’ (27); his friend Bill Atkinson is not just an ‘ex-Army major’, he is ‘an insurance salesman and ex-Army major’ (32). Dixon’s theatre of command ends up being his ‘Bertrand campaign’, where his efforts to win the beautiful Christine from his effeminate rival can only be conceived in terms of combat: ‘This was clearly the moment for a burst of accurate shelling from Dixon in his Bertrand-war’, but, Amis tells us with a barely concealed innuendo of impotence, ‘he found himself reluctant to fire’ (142). Elsewhere their jousting is referred to as a ‘cold war’ (183). The most interesting portrait from this point of view is Christine herself, who looks ‘like a soldier standing easy’ at Dixon’s very first sight of her (39). Later, in Dixon’s imagination of her over the phone, she appears ‘like an airman-clerk told to “carry on” during an inspection by the Air Vice-Marshal’ (96). The chances of reproduction, that we have already seen to be neutered in Larkinian shrinkage, are further embattled by the fact that her female perfection exceeds Dixon’s notions of femininity – derived primarily from hysterical Margaret – to such a degree that she must be described in the only other available language. When Dixon finally feels happiness with Christine at the bizarre ending of the book, in the last two pages, he says, ‘Now that something had happened which really deserved a face, he’d none to celebrate it with. As a kind of token, he made his Sex Life in Ancient Roman face’ (250). Inexpressible in the anxious language of his grotesqueries, Dixon’s attempt to express love, his final face in the book, threatens to turn their impending consummation from tenderness to orgy. Fully highlighting itself (in case we missed the title or the manifestos on luck) as a novel that eschews development in favour of fantastic artifice, we get a curtain call: ‘effeminate writing Michel, on stage at the last minute just as the curtain was about to ring down’ (250).


Welch and his children appear ultimately as waxwork approximations of homosexual members of French modernism and Bloomsbury, respectively, ‘Gide and Lytton Strachey’ (251). Here, prepared for the real matching of words and actions at a more truly paramount narrative point, we instead hear Dixon’s denunciation cough out as a ‘howl of laughter’; and then Dixon’s pyrrhic victory: ‘His steps faltered; his body sagged as if he’d been knifed . . . slowly doubling up like a man with a stitch . . . his mouth stuck ajar in a rictus of agony’ (251). This is his big win? In the end of a book that has been read almost exclusively by critics as a comic novel, the last image is of laughter as execution. Like Larkin’s diminished returns on national masculinity, Amis ends with the most deathly scene of triumph in contemporary British prose. Amis writes imperatively of Jim earlier in the novel that ‘Somehow he must mortar or bayonet Welch out of his prepared positions of reticence, irrelevance, and the long-lived, wondering frown’ (82). This sounds revolutionary; but does anyone doubt how gloriously this attack on Welch’s ‘prepared positions’ will fail to alter its object? Ultimately, to erase a ‘long-lived, wondering frown’ with such an armoury can only result in an opposing agonized smile. We have now, hopefully not taking all the fun out of the book, examined Dixon’s feeling of ‘so violent a sense of failure and general uselessness’ (203) in terms that are both completely appropriate to his mid1950s’ era and yet legible in the broadened perspective of the British novel’s history after both modernism and the Second World War. So let us at the very end return to John Updike’s scathing review of Jake’s Thing. Updike, in line with the veiled geopolitical readings of Lucky Jim that have been perpetuated for 50 years, continues, ‘it is a rare sentence of his prose that surrenders to the demons of language . . . His universe is claustrophobically human’. Updike proclaims him to be tied to the ‘weary concept of the “comic novel” ’ (my italics). Exactly.

Notes This essay is dedicated to the memory of my grandfather, Edward Londe (1922–2005). 1. Keith Wilson, ‘Jim, Jake and the Years Between: the Will to Stasis in the Contemporary British Novel’, Ariel, 13 (1982): 55–69, 55. 2. John Updike, ‘Jake and Lolly Opt Out’, in Robert H. Bell (ed.), Critical Essays on Kingsley Amis (New York: G.K. Hall, 1998), pp. 293–5, 293. 3. Kingsley Amis, ‘Why Lucky Jim Turned Right’, in What Became of Jane Austen? And Other Questions (London: Cape, 1970), 200–11. 4. Andrzej Gasiorek, Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After (London: Edward Arnold, 1995), 2. 5. Gasiorek, Post-War British Fiction, 2. 6. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 112.


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7. Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 88. 8. Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 251. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. 9. The title to this section is the first sentence of Muriel Spark’s novel The Girls of Slender Means (1963), set in the rubble of post-war London. 10. Kingsley Amis, ‘Lone Voices, Views of the “Fifties” ’, Encounter, 15 (1960): 8. 11. Raphaël Ingelbien, ‘ “England and Nowhere”: Contestations of Englishness in Philip Larkin and Graham Swift’, English, 48 (1999): 33–48, 36. 12. Quoted in Nigel Alderman, ‘The Life with a Hole in It: Philip Larkin and the Condition of England’, Textual Practice, 8 (1994): 279–301, 279; Hermione Lee, ‘Kingsley and the Women’, The New Republic, 201 (1989): 39–40, 39. 13. Alderman, ‘The Life with a Hole in It’, 280. 14. Marjorie Perloff, ‘What to Make of a Diminished Thing’, Parnassus, 19 (1994): 9–21, 13. 15. Alderman, ‘The Life with a Hole in It’, 294. 16. Alderman, ‘The Life with a Hole in It’, 296. 17. Alderman, ‘The Life with a Hole in It’, 294–5. 18. See, for instance, Paul Henri Spaak’s Why Nato? (1959), Nora Beloff’s The General Says No: Britain’s Exclusion from Europe (1963), and John Mander’s Great Britain or Little England? (1963). 19. Philip Larkin, ‘Home Is So Sad’, The Whitsun Weddings (London: Faber, 1964), 17. 20. Amis was an avid fan of Ian Fleming’s novels; Casino Royale had been published a year before Lucky Jim. 21. This is a rather inexplicable bit of literary gossip, as Bradbury was by most accounts kind and respected. Nevertheless, my suggested origin for the alteration comes from Amis’s letter to Brian Aldiss of 20 October 1981, in which he asks, ‘Is Bradbury as big a shit as he seems from slight acquaintance and a glance at his works?’ (The Letters of Kingsley Amis, ed. Zachary Leader (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 929; hereafter cited parenthetically as Letters, followed by page number.) Amis disparages Bradbury again (as a ‘shag’) in letters to Larkin and Robert Conquest (both December 1983; Letters, 966–7) and indirectly in a letter to Anthony Powell (21 November 1990; Letters, 1101) that laments Bradbury’s BBC adaptation of Amis’s ghost story The Green Man. 22. Edward Neill, ‘Modernism and Englishness: Reflections on Auden and Larkin’, Essays and Studies, 36 (1983): 79–93, 86. 23. Malcolm Bradbury, ‘No, Not Bloomsbury: the Comic Fiction of Kingsley Amis’, in Critical Essays on Kingsley Amis, ed. Robert H. Bell (New York: G.K. Hall, 1998): 60–75, 66. 24. David Lodge, ‘Introduction’, Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), xii. 25. Robert H. Bell, ‘Seriocomic Amis and True Comic Edge: Lucky Jim and You Can’t Do Both’, in Robert H. Bell (ed.), Critical Essays on Kingsley Amis (New York: G.K. Hall, 1998), pp. 141–57, 148. 26. Lodge, ‘Introduction’, xiii. 27. Mannered: ‘the impact had hurt them rather’ (209, my emphasis). Dixon makes sure, in his fury, carefully to place his glasses in his pocket. 28. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 243.

144 British Fiction After Modernism 29. Gavin Keulks, Father and Son: Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, and the British Novel since 1950 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 27. 30. Bradbury, ‘No, Not Bloomsbury’, 66–7. 31. Bradbury, ‘No, Not Bloomsbury’, 66. 32. Quoted in Terry Teachout, ‘A Touch of Class’, in Robert H. Bell (ed.), Critical Essays on Kingsley Amis (New York: G.K. Hall, 1998), 293–5. 33. Joyce, Ulysses, 273.

12 Olivia Manning and her Masculine Outfit Jeremy Treglown

‘A great many novels nowadays are just travel books’, Ivy Compton-Burnett grumbled to Barbara Pym in 1960. ‘Olivia has just published one about Bulgaria.’1 To Compton-Burnett, as Neville and June Braybrooke say in their 2004 biography of Olivia Manning, ‘Abroad was abroad’ (Manning, 145) so she hadn’t noticed that the setting of The Great Fortune, the first volume in what was to become the Balkan Trilogy, is in fact Romania. Still, she had a point. Journeys, voluntary and enforced, are big in Manning’s work, as they had been at crucial points in her life, and the painter manqué in her always made the most of topographical detail. An element in the success of Fortunes of War, the 1987 BBC television version of her two trilogies set in the Second World War, was its sheer visual sumptuousness: the arrival of the train carrying the young British Council teacher Guy Pringle and his new wife Harriet into Bucharest; the Athens settings of Harriet’s romance with one British officer and her scrambles up the Pyramids with another; the North African desert; Alexandria, Luxor, Damascus . . . The TV series, combined with some well-timed Virago reissues, was crucial in bringing a wider readership to Manning’s work. A quarter of a century after her death, the Braybrookes’ biography provided a further opportunity to look at her career and at what her reputation is based on.2 Vicarious tourism is certainly part of it: the kind that exceeds Philip Larkin’s back-the-same-day criterion by enabling readers not to leave home at all, and with the added advantage of taking them to what could seem like lost paradises just before they fell: Romania to Soviet architecture, Greece and Egypt to the travel agents. Manning always glamorized place. She described herself as Anglo-Irish, as if, like Elizabeth Bowen, she had been brought up in a crumbling West Cork mansion rather than at 134 Laburnum Grove, North End, Portsmouth. (The Irish element came from her mother, Olivia Morrow, a Protestant Ulsterwoman whose father had kept a pub in Bangor, County Down.) It’s true that as a child she spent part of the First World War in Ireland while her father, Oliver – everyone in her immediate family was either Oliver or Olivia – was on active service in the 145

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Navy. She later kept quiet about this period, both because it revealed her age – she preferred people to think that she was born around 1918, rather than ten years earlier – and because, superficially, it didn’t seem to amount to much. But she could make a little go a long way and Ireland is important to her work, both as the setting of some early fiction and a travel book and because it encouraged her to try out what was to make her unusual among women novelists of her time (an exception of a different kind is her exact contemporary Simone de Beauvoir, in The Blood of Others): writing about men at war. Virginia Woolf, of course, had more or less said that this was impossible, as well as undesirable. A Room of One’s Own (1929) assumes that war is a male subject: one whose fictional dominance had contributed to the crushing of female literary talent, the proper concerns of which lay elsewhere: ‘it is the masculine values that prevail . . . This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.’3 Woolf was a heroine of Manning’s teens. The Braybrookes tell us that ‘she used to have dreams in which Vanessa Bell and her sister Virginia came floating towards her like beautiful swans’ (Manning, 22). An assiduous user of her local public library, the young Olivia took out Jacob’s Room almost as soon as it arrived there. But her tastes were catholic: Rider Haggard’s Zulu Trilogy – Marie, Child of Storm, Finished – excited her so much that her mother thought she was running a fever and sent her to bed. Olivia Manning (it’s hard to resist making something out of her surname) would in some ways have quite liked to have been a man. The writing she did in the late 1920s, after she left Portsmouth Municipal School of Art, was at fi rst sent out under the name Jacob Morrow: romantic thrillers with titles like Rose of Rubies (serialized in the Portsmouth News), Here is Murder, The Black Scarab. In December 1929, Jacob Morrow won fourth prize in a Christmas short-story competition run by the Hampshire Telegraph. Soon afterwards, she began to sign her work O.M. Manning, but it was as Olivia Manning that she published The Wind Changes with Jonathan Cape in 1937. The novel is set in civil war Ireland. The Wind Changes begins mysteriously and excitingly with a man who has been shot through the wrist waiting on the coast for another man to arrive by sea. Soon, British soldiers are busy setting fire to the cottage of an old woman who won’t tell them who it was that laid an ambush for them nearby. There’s no false heroism about her silence, the narrative explains. If she had betrayed them, ‘the Sinn Feiners would have taken her up into the hills and shot her and thrown her body into a bog. So what was she to do?’4 Meanwhile, it begins to appear that one of the book’s main characters, Arion, may be spying for the British against the Republican Irish. (He may have influenced Elizabeth Bowen’s depiction of the traitor and lover, Robert, in The Heat of the Day.)

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In being acquired by Cape, Manning made an acquisition of her own. More striking than beautiful, with down-turned dark eyes and very slender legs, she was extremely interested in sex and, as she experienced more of it, fashionably forthright about it. Her editor, the dashing Hamish Miles, soon became her lover. But she was less lucky in her choices in those days than later. Miles, who was married with a young family, died of a brain tumour in 1937. Manning’s husband from 1939, the British Council teacher and later BBC radio producer and academic, R.D. (Reggie) Smith, drank hard and was a compulsive, if helpfully complaisant, philanderer. Among other men she was attracted to, the novelist William Gerhardie proved to have sadistic tendencies which she didn’t enjoy – though, like many of her lovers, he was useful to her professionally.5 The theatre and film director Tony Richardson, meanwhile, was so nervous of her that he hardly dared to take a bath while he was the Smiths’ lodger in St John’s Wood. In fiction, on the other hand, Manning’s generally forthright approach to sexual behaviour is among her distinctive strengths. In The Wind Changes, her central character, Elizabeth, who has been to art school in Dublin, instigates most of the amatory episodes, unexpectedly kissing the Republican leader Sean ‘hardly [sic], spitefully and with anger’.6 Soon afterwards she’s having sex with the married Arion. What she wants most, though – anticipating Hélène after her political awakening in The Blood of Others, or the more timid Anna in Natalia Ginzburg’s All Our Yesterdays (set in wartime Italy) – is a role in the conflicts going on around her. At one point, Elizabeth throws herself on to the ground in front of a Republican activist shouting ‘ “Oh God, make use of me or I shall go mad.” ’7 Manning’s later, better-known novels are often more nuanced as well as richer in other ways, but much of the underlying pressure is the same. Elizabeth Bowen was to remark that Manning had ‘an almost masculine outfit in the way of experience’ (Manning, 131). It was a matter of sympathy as well as of contingency: she disliked her mother and identified strongly with her father – his naval career, his pride in his country. But first-hand experience was certainly involved, of kinds that few English women authors of the time had had. She always worked for her living. From the mid-1940s until her death she was exclusively a writer: one not too proud to do scripts for Mrs Dale’s Diary. In earlier days, having run away from the domestic constrictions of Portsmouth, she had worked as a clerk at Peter Jones, then in the firm’s furniture-painting studio, then as a secretary at the Medici Society, then for MGM as a reader. She used this period, the mid-1930s, in the best of her novels outside the trilogies, The Doves of Venus (1955). ‘Stevie Smith-ish’ was among my first notes on the book, before I learnt from the Braybrookes that, at the time, the two women were rivalrous friends. From the detachment of her late forties, Manning sharply delineates young Ellie Parsons, up from the southern provinces, with her newness to London and her desiccated lover,


Quintin Bellot, a predatory bore with a suicidal ex-wife. The book conveys Ellie’s guilt over escaping her background – a common theme in 1950s’ writing but one more often described by and about men – and also the incongruity between her feelings for Quintin and his, such as they are, about her. Setting and mood work economically together, for example in a deftly handled scene where some painful thinking on Ellie’s part about the reality of her situation with Quintin is matched by their surroundings in Regent’s Park: The ice [on the lake] was the colour of a fish’s eye. In its thickness were held plane leaves and twigs, with here and there a bullet-star of cracks or a white cockle-shaped air-pocket. On the surface walked gulls and mallards with flame-golden breasts . . . Someone had pulled a bough out across the lake. It stood . . . lightcoloured like a root thrown up from a submerged forest, enormous, tangled and unreal in the ice-grey air . . . On all this Quintin commented delightedly as though he had not been so entertained for years. But beyond the lake the atmosphere darkened and grew heavy, dissolving things in a fog that seemed a concentration of cold . . .8 The novel treats with feeling irony other aspects of the life of a single woman of the time – having to spend a lot of time sitting around in pubs with despairing men, for example. Admittedly, the imaginative powersupply can seem intermittent. When it fails, as in some of her other novels – particularly A Different Face (1953) – Manning is too ready to find solutions in a mix of needless flashbacks to her characters’ pasts, and outbreaks of wordy, clichéd sensationalism. (Quintin’s ex-wife Petta meets a former drug addict, Dinkum Jones. ‘His ghostly paper-mask of a face had still the imprint of his once remarkable good looks, but his body jerked about with the angular indecision of a ventriloquist’s doll’.9) For all that, The Doves of Venus is vivid and powerful, not least at moments where it displays a feminist dimension of the 1950s’ anger more often associated, again – in British writing, at least – with young men: ‘ “I don’t want to be a machine for breeding” ’, Petta bursts out in the pub. ‘ “I resent the whole set-up. I want my emotions to be attached to something bigger than biology. I object to the limitations of the human creature . . . I ask for more.” ’10 Stevie Smith, reviewing the book in the Observer, accused it of ‘moral naïveté’ and of lacking ‘balance of thought’ (Manning, 67). This ended the women’s friendship. There were personal as well as professional rivalries between them, but Manning could forgive almost anything more easily than criticism. Few writers don’t mind about bad reviews but Manning was unusually vociferous about them: not only about what reviews of her work said but about exactly how long or short they were, about what she per-


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ceived as a dearth of solo pieces devoted to her,11 and about the precise position in which she was noticed in any ‘batch’. She was obsessed with the enmities and cabals which, she believed, were responsible for keeping prizes out of her grasp, and took a corresponding relish in the failures of others. She could be unkind, crowing quite untruthfully to a vulnerable Angus Wilson at a party, for example, that his publishers had gone bankrupt. It must have been tempting, though, to puncture Wilson, whose reputation at the time was overblown by contrast with Manning’s: it is often assumed that the war novels which Manning began immediately after The Doves of Venus were immediately and unanimously praised, but they had a mixed reception, especially among male reviewers, and the TV series wasn’t made until seven years after she died. As far as the Second World War was concerned, Manning’s ‘masculine outfit in the way of experience’ was paradoxically a consequence of her husband’s exclusion. Reggie Smith’s poor sight kept him out of the armed services and in the British Council. So Olivia was with him in Bucharest when Romania began to succumb to Nazism. Along with other expatriates, the couple escaped to Athens and, when Greece in turn fell, moved on to Egypt and then Palestine. Each of them worked throughout the war, he at his teaching, she in various jobs, including as a press attaché to the American Embassy in Cairo and on the literary staff of the Jerusalem Post. All this supplied material not only for the trilogies (Anthony Burgess – among the most vocal fans of her work – typically called them a hexateuch) but also for two earlier books which are in some aspects trial runs for them: Artist Among the Missing (1949) and School for Love (1951). The first of these, about the steady disintegration of a hypersensitive British officer in wartime Jerusalem, contains touches of realism that wouldn’t have been out of place in Norman Mailer’s once shocking-seeming The Naked and the Dead: an exhausted woman ambulance driver, for example, just back from Syria, describing the practical problems of transporting corpses: ‘ “You’d pack in the bodies – pretty far gone, they were, in that heat – and by the time you got them to base, they’d be running all over the floor.” ’12 And for readers today, there are resonances of different kinds in the predicament of young Felix Latimer in School for Love, also set in Jerusalem, this time in the early post-war years. Felix’s parents are dead, his father, a colonial servant in Iraq, killed in a German-prompted rising in Mosul. Alone in Jerusalem, Felix finds himself learning about colonialism almost as an adjunct to his emotional development: The driver . . . drew his attention to distant, sharp-edged peaks, each tipped with a village and looking like strong-holds carved from living rock. ‘All Arabs,’ he said, ‘and down there . . .’ Felix gazed down into the valley where the settlements were green with cultivated fruit trees, ‘Down there all Jews.’

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Felix, ignorant of the problems of Palestine, nodded and thought this was probably some arrangement agreed on by both sides.13 Both novels anticipate the trilogies in taking a strong line against British imperialism. When, in the later Levant Trilogy, Harriet asks Simon what Britain has done for Egypt, the conversation feels set up. ‘ “We’ve brought them justice and prosperity” ’, he answers dutifully. ‘ “We’ve shown them how people ought to live.” ’14 Harriet is all too ready with her own verdict: ‘ “What have we done here, except make money? I suppose a few rich Egyptians have got richer by supporting us, but the real people of the country, the peasants and the backstreet poor, are just as diseased, underfed and wretched as they ever were.” ’ But if these are Harriet’s wartime views, Manning’s own take on the issue to some extent changed in the light of later decolonization. The Rain Forest (1974), written just before she began the Levant Trilogy, though full of satire against expatriate complacency and prejudice in a fictional British-ruled island in the Indian Ocean, also criticizes the mixed motives of people in the independence movement and is pessimistic about the likely effects of home rule. What’s interesting about her, in this regard, is not so much the range of opinion expressed in her books as how directly and also how early she reflected the impact of power shifts in places where European rule was coming to an end. School for Love is densely populated by the flotsam and jetsam of empire. It’s for the 1500 pages of Fortunes of War, though, that Manning is now best known. Rider Haggard apart, she had two models in mind. One was Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, the second volume of which had just appeared when she began The Great Fortune in 1956; the other, Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, which reached volume 3, The Acceptance World, in 1955. Powell was then literary editor of Punch and Manning often wrote for him. The Braybrookes tell us that she bought all the volumes of Dance as they appeared and got Powell to sign them. Meanwhile, she nudged Powell about Punch’s coverage of her own work. ‘ “Do you think I will ever reach the exalted status of being reviewed separately, like Iris [Murdoch] or Muriel [Spark]?” ’ she asked the harassed editor. ‘ “Or am I just not good enough?” ’ (Manning, 160).15 It’s on the wartime sequence that any answer to the latter question has, in the end, to be based. The two volumes differ in a major respect. The Balkan Trilogy, like Waugh’s and Powell’s sequences, is entirely seen from the vantage point of its main character, Harriet, an intelligent, independent-minded but vulnerable young Englishwoman married to the amiable, gregarious socialist, Guy Pringle. Closely caught up by the war in much the same ways as Manning and her husband had been, they, too, are essentially observers, though Manning invents an active role for them in sheltering the son of a rich Jewish family, the Druckers. Harriet lets slip the fact of the boy’s presence


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to their unreliable, chronically broke and sponging White Russian friend, Prince Yakimov, who betrays him. The Levant Trilogy continues the Pringles’ story but alternates between their experiences and those of a young British officer just arrived in North Africa, Simon Boulderstone, who, in the midst of the fighting, is trying to track down his brother, Hugo. Hugo is killed just before Simon catches up with him. (Olivia Manning’s own brother, Oliver, her only sibling, was killed when his plane went into the sea off the Dorset coast in 1941.) Simon in turn is badly wounded and at this point his story meshes with Guy’s. Harriet, who has been ill and is supposed to have embarked for England on a boat full of refugees, has in fact on impulse let herself be carried off by a woman friend to Damascus. Meanwhile, the boat is sunk, so Harriet is presumed dead. Simon’s slow, uncertain convalescence and Guy’s mourning intertwine, as do their happy endings. At its best, the sequence powerfully realizes the places in which it is set, not only physically and in terms of their cosmopolitan populations, but against a long history. Manning has some of Waugh’s sense of the past. When we’re told that a Bucharest businessman called Hadjimoscos is ‘a last descendant of one of the Greek Phanariot families that had ruled and exploited Rumania under the Turks’,16 the detail not only lends local colour but opens up a whole new imperial perspective. Guy’s little power struggles in ‘the Organization’ – which occupy rather too much of the narrative – or Harriet’s more absorbing efforts to deal with her marginalization in his life and in the world at large, are set against a complex international background, one which extends beyond wartime immediacies, effectively though these are portrayed. The steady rise of Nazism in Romania, the destructive impact of Dunkirk on foreigners’ confidence in the British, the antagonists’ rapidly changing fortunes in Greece, North Africa and the Middle East, stream after stream of refugees: no other novelist has described these crucial arenas of the war with such scope and immediacy. In terms of characterization, the trilogies’ success is more touch-and-go. Guy is for the most part convincingly and affectionately diagnosed, with his promiscuous charm, his workaholism, his unshakeable belief that putting on a production of Troilus and Cressida in Bucharest as the Iron Guard takes over, or teaching Finnegans Wake to his last two remaining students in Alexandria, are important activities. Harriet is still more persuasive, despite Manning’s weakness for giving her fine speeches. (‘ “Save yourself, Clarence” ’, Harriet says to a critic of Guy’s politics. ‘ “You said that Guy is a fool. There may be ways in which that sort of fool is superior to you. You show your wisdom by believing in nothing. The truth is, you have nothing to offer but a wilderness.” ’17) Harriet is never in the wrong. Yet something is missing which Manning’s biography helps one to identify and understand. Do Harriet and Guy have any sex life? The neglected Harriet is attractive to, and attracted by, other men, and at one point comes very close to

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having an affair. But as far as the Pringles – though not other characters – are concerned, the sequence is much more reticent about such matters than Manning’s previous books had been. Sheer marital discretion on her part, of course, may have been an element in this. But there seems to be a clue to something more, late in Friends and Heroes (volume 3 of the Balkan Trilogy), when Harriet becomes distraught over the death of a pet kitten and Guy says, ‘ “You couldn’t have made more fuss if it’d been a baby.” ’18 The Braybrookes reveal that in 1944 – five years after her marriage – Manning became pregnant (Manning 118). The foetus died at seven months but she was obliged to carry it to term. The only occasion when she brought herself to put this trauma into fiction was in The Rain Forest (1974), in which the central characters, Hugh and Kristy Foster, are very similar to Guy and Harriet – that’s to say, to Reggie Smith and Olivia Manning. A main theme of this later novel is failure, lost hope, sterility, disillusion: the disintegration of Hugh’s once-successful career as a screenwriter; the much-punctured fantasies of the landlady’s son Ambrose;19 the collapse of British colonial idealism and the simultaneous greed and indiscriminate violence of the revolutionary nationalists, their ambitions reinforced by contempt for the latest European incomers, many of them druggy dropouts. There’s another powerful strand of pessimism in the character of an English adventurer, Simon Hobhouse, a doctor and a naturalist, simultaneously fascinated and horrified by western environmental despoliation. (‘Simon had been right’, Hugh decides. ‘These people were the devourers, the enemy. They made a ruthless demand on life. For them the world was being squandered, its resources used up, its wildlife decimated, its seas polluted, the sea life destroyed. . . .’20 ) Kristy’s loss of her unborn child fits these big patterns over-tidily but is delineated painfully in itself. The personal experience on which it was based seems to explain some areas of blankness in the trilogies. Harriet and Guy apart, few of the characters in the trilogies have much depth. The brisk caricatural approach Manning for the most part adopts, though usually adequate to a single volume, is less so over the whole saga. Readers differ over how well Prince Yakimov sustains interest but no one could find the treacherously opportunistic, dirty-fingernailed, underqualified Scouse would-be teacher, Dubedat, anything but a too-easy target for Manning at her most snobbish. As often as not, the treatment comes down to a single, often-repeated tic: Yakimov’s wearyingly reiterated obsession with food and drink, or the diplomat David Boyd’s sniggercum-snuffle. (In The Spoilt City (1962) alone, we’re told at least three times that he ‘sniggered’,21 at least twice that he was ‘Snuffling happily [or just ‘snuffling’] to himself’,22 as well as that he ‘snuffled gleefully’ or simply ‘snuffled’,23 and so on.) David Craig in the New Statesman, reviewing Friends and Heroes on its first publication, was right to say that ‘The rendering of the characters’ inner emotions is dry and schematic. The characterisation


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is done mostly from the outside: if a homosexual or an academic, an officer or a “bounder”, comes on stage, he is done in a few conventional traits’ (Manning, 188). The big-budget TV version brought the best out of all this. Alan Plater’s characteristically adroit screenplay, though it runs for six hours, removed almost all repetitions and longueurs (not least, passages of reprise between individual volumes). More, it gave interpretative shape to what, though not absent from the books, is often left unpointed in them: particularly, how the holiday which Harriet (played by Emma Thompson) takes from her marriage, and the impact of her supposed death on Guy – Kenneth Branagh did these scenes with thrilling rawness – bring a shift in the balance not so much of power as of need between the partners. Beyond this, other good actors gave independent life to their roles: Ciaran Madden as Angela Hooper, deranged by her son’s death; Robert Stephens as the indolent, pleasureseeking poet Castlebar; Alan Bennett as the tetchily self-absorbed Professor Lord Pinkrose, forever on the brink of giving his lecture about Byron while the world explodes around him. James Cellan Jones’s direction also made the most of the battle scenes. The text itself, though, handles these a lot more vividly than was claimed by grizzled, dismissive warrior-reviewers like Auberon Waugh (injured on National Service in 1957) or Allan Massie (one year old in 1939). Manning herself hadn’t, of course, seen front-line military action, but she knew people who had, and came closer to it than a lot of men who actually ‘served’. Besides, war is as much a subject for the imagination as anything else, and ever more so as the events themselves recede into the past. (One wonders what Manning’s own take as a reviewer might have been on the plausibility of, say, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin or The English Patient.) She tends, admittedly, to over-romanticize Simon Boulderstone. For a young English officer in his first battle to kill a German with his first shot while crying ‘ “Damn you. Damn the lot of you” ’, and then to pick up his wounded batman and carry him behind the lines to safety, may not be too good to be true but is certainly too good for fiction.24 Still, to my unmilitary eye Manning for the most handles these parts of her story with impressive restraint and conviction: The smudge, pale and indefinite at first, deepened in colour and expanded . . . until, less than a mile away, it revealed itself as a sand cloud, rising so thickly into the heat fuzz of the upper air that the sun was almost occluded. Inside the cloud, the dark shapes of vehicles were visible. The first of them was a supply truck, lurching, top-heavy with mess equipment. The procession that followed stretched away to the horizon. Like the convoy, it moved slowly, creaking and clanking amid the stench of its own exhausts and petrol fumes. As they reached and passed it, Simon felt the heat from the vehicles . . .


Transports carried tanks that had lost their treads. Trucks towed broken-down aircraft or other trucks . . . Guns, RAF wagons, recovery vehicles, armoured cars, loads of Naafi stores and equipment, went past, mile after mile of them, their yellow paint coated with sand, all unsteady, all, it seemed, on the point of collapse.25 Good passages and a well-realized pair of central characters don’t, perhaps, quite add up to a great novel, let alone a sequence of six, whatever the interest of their historical setting. Ivy Compton-Burnett does seem to have put her finger on one of the main problems. If the style and characterization sometimes flag, so, too, does the action and at these points Manning too often lets travel writing take over. There’s an early intimation of this, as of so much else about her work, in The Wind Changes, when Elizabeth, sent on an urgent mission to prevent a Republican coming to Dublin, where things have got too hot for him, stops to admire a landscape and some animals being loaded on to a ferry, as if she had changed her mind after all and decided to take a job with the Irish Tourist Board. There are many similar moments in Manning’s subsequent books: Geoffrey’s needless trip to Petra, in Artist Among the Missing, just when he has at last been recalled to Cairo and to the wife about whom he has been anxious; the implausible jungle adventure of Hugh and Simon at the end of The Rain Forest; various sections of touristic padding throughout Fortunes of War. But if ComptonBurnett got something right about Manning, so, too, did Elizabeth Bowen. It’s precisely that ‘masculine outfit in the way of experience’ that equipped her to write what can claim to be, apart from books set on the ‘home front’, the most vivid and durable novels about the Second World War by any British woman writer.

Notes A shorter version of this chapter appeared in the London Review of Books, 28:3, 2006. 1. Neville and June Braybrooke, Olivia Manning: a Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 2004), 145. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Manning followed by page number. 2. The Braybrookes were close friends of their subject. June Braybrooke, who wrote fiction as Isobel English and introduced Virago’s reissue of The Doves of Venus, died of cancer in 1994. Her husband, a well-known literary editor and critic in his day, with whom she had been working on the biography, struggled before resuming it. After his own death, another of Manning’s friends, the novelist Francis King (all three writers were joint dedicatees of The Rain Forest), pulled it into its still fairly rudimentary fi nal shape. It seems pointless to speculate whether, had they lived, the Braybrookes would have offered more by way of psychological interpretation or a critical claim for the books. Olivia Manning: a Life is usefully informative about the novelist’s early years. It identifies real-life models of some fictional characters and situations, albeit without adding much in the process. (To say, for example that Yakimov may have been based on Derek


3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

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Patmore, grandson of the more famous Coventry, without telling us more about the supposed model than that he had known the Smiths in Bucharest and later lived in Brighton, is to tell us less than nothing.) We also learn that the novelist had a long and well-managed affair with her married GP, Jerry Slattery, from as early as 1949 until his death in 1977, though one might have wished for an approach to this more sophisticated than that Slattery was ‘like a ringmaster, immensely successful at keeping his two fi llies bucking and prancing until the final curtain’ (Manning, 194). As for R.D. Smith, it’s clear both that this genial and popular cultural impresario put up with a lot at home and that he in turn was given generous scope for his drinking and fl irting and his not entirely unaccountable disappearances. He is said to have ardently supported his wife’s writing, which he read and commented on before she showed it to anyone else. Perhaps it was her unassuageable need for praise and detestation of criticism – see below – that led both him and her publishers to overlook so much which careful editing could have helped make good. It was left to television to show that, with Olivia Manning, less is a lot more. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (Harmondsworth: Penguin 2000), 74. Olivia Manning, The Wind Changes (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937), 27. See below, note 15. Manning, The Wind Changes, 11. Manning, The Wind Changes, 304. Olivia Manning, The Doves of Venus (London: Virago, 1984), 61–2. Manning, The Doves of Venus, 272. Manning, The Doves of Venus, 296. But see below, note 15. Olivia Manning, Artist Among the Missing (London: Heinemann, 1975), 35. Olivia Manning, School for Love (London: Heinemann, 1951), 2. Olivia Manning, The Danger Tree (1977), reissued in Fortunes of War, volume 2, The Levant Trilogy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 24. Powell had in fact himself given her a very favourable solo review, but anonymously: in the TLS, during the period when he was fiction editor there. Writing about School for Love, he spoke of its ‘remarkable qualities of form and originality’ and called it ‘a book that tells a story distinctly out of the ordinary and one which approaches its characters in a direct, and often very entertaining manner’. (TLS, 12 October 1951). The following year, William Gerhardie offered to write a ‘middle’ (the TLS’s name, then, for a summative review-essay published on the left-hand centre page facing the editorial and letters) on all of Manning’s work to date. Powell, presumably knowing about Gerhardie’s relationship with Manning, fended him off but Gerhardie was persistent. In the spring of 1953, Powell left the paper to become literary editor of Punch. Six months later, an anonymous TLS middle described Manning as a ‘writer of genius’ and School for Love as ‘brilliant and successful to the point of giving the impression, on a first reading, that it is without a blemish’. (There was even a metaphor alluding, not entirely happily, to Manning’s nautical background in Portsmouth: ‘Every original writer displaces to some extent, as an ocean liner displaces by her volume of water unanchored craft, adjacent reputations still afloat’; TLS, 4 September 1953.) The author of the piece was William Gerhardie. Olivia Manning, The Great Fortune, 1960, reissued in Fortunes of War, volume 1, The Balkan Trilogy (Harmondsworth: Penguin), 1982), 52. Manning, The Great Fortune, 286.

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18. Olivia Manning, Friends and Heroes, 1965, reissued in Fortunes of War, volume 1, The Balkan Trilogy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 687. 19. The emphasis on disillusion seems to have over-affected Manning’s treatment of this character. She evidently changed her mind between setting him up as one of her romantic heroes, with his double First and his brilliance as a piano player, and then rapidly turning him into a ruthlessly opportunistic charlatan. 20. Olivia Manning, The Rain Forest (London: Heinemann, 1974), 124. 21. Olivia Manning, The Spoilt City, reissued in Fortunes of War, volume 1, The Balkan Trilogy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 374, 448, 570. 22. Manning, The Spoilt City, 375, 560. 23. Manning, The Spoilt City, 445, 461. 24. Manning, The Danger Tree, 157. 25. Manning, The Danger Tree, 50.

13 The Cold War Way of Death: Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori Rod Mengham

Muriel Spark’s novel Memento Mori, first published in 1959, presents the reader with a particular problem of interpretation that is characteristic of nearly all this writer’s work. The different strands of the narrative do not converge decisively by the end of the text. There is no dominant figure, no protagonist whose experience is placed at the centre of the story. Instead of focusing ultimately on one personality, the novel divides its attention between the members of a group of characters whose varied relationships cannot be said to illustrate a general thesis. The reader’s project of interpretation is not dissimilar to the kind of research pursued by the character Alec Warner in the novel. He is compiling data for a study of old age based on the comparison of a large number of individual case studies. But there are limitations in his methods; he often looks for the wrong kind of evidence, making a fetish of taking pulse rates and temperatures when he should be paying a different kind of attention to his human subjects. The novel proclaims the difficulty of establishing an impartial, objective viewpoint for the study of old age by making its own representative of scientific method an enthusiastically proactive agent of the plot. At several key points in the narrative, Alec intervenes crucially in the course of events by imparting information to other characters precisely in order to provoke a response from them. The futility of trying to establish the general laws of behaviour among the old and dying seems to be confirmed when the whole project goes up in flames. Alec’s records are completely destroyed, and the book ends rapidly with no general models available, whether for his sociological enquiries, or for the reader’s interrogation of the novel as an imaginative examination of old age and death. But there are other ways of reading novels. Within the text itself, Alec’s quasi-scientific kind of knowledge is counterpointed with the intuitive, anti-rational knowledge embedded in the romantic fiction of Charmian Piper. Charmian’s literary method is contrasted directly with the realistic fiction of her son, Eric. Her books are concerned with a kind of secret knowledge (‘secret life’, as the character Guy Leet puts it) in respect of which 157


the workings of plot are almost redundant.1 Charmian even admits the extent to which the management of plot is irrelevant to her purpose in writing; when Guy praises the artistry of her novel, The Seventh Child, she discounts the terms of his admiration: ‘ “The suspense, the plot alone, quite apart from the prose, are superb.” “And yet,” said Charmian, smiling up at the sky through the window, “when I was half-way through writing a novel I always got into a muddle and didn’t know where it was leading me” ’ (187). Spark clearly has more deliberate authority over the shape of her creations than Charmian does over hers, and yet both writers devalue their plots. Spark contrives her negligence – it is a matter of policy, and finely calculated – whereas Charmian is simply insouciant. The hermeneutic code of Memento Mori virtually collapses in on itself. The main hermeneutic puzzle, which revolves around the question of who is making the threatening phone calls, is never solved. The lack of a solution renders the identity of the caller irrelevant to the direction of the reader’s enquiry, and places the emphasis instead on the variety of the characters’ reactions to the same threatening message: ‘Remember you must die.’ Readers have the potential to react to the phone calls in the same manner as the characters, who are effectively divided into two groups according to their responses to the message; the fi rst group consists of those who see the calls primarily as a hermeneutic challenge and whose ultimate goal is to stop them occurring, while the second group consists of those who are prepared to accept the calls and to respond to the message itself. The hermeneutic challenge of the text leads to a situation in which a readerly interest in the complications of plot is linked to the procedures of detective work through the figure of Henry Mortimer, an ex-CID officer who is brought in to investigate the activities of the hoax caller. Detective work can uncover the origins of actions and connections between them, but when its procedures are transferred to an investigation into the past history of sexual and emotional relationships, it reveals very little of the underlying motivations, of the ‘secret’ knowledge of the characters’ lives. The ‘secret life’, as Guy would call it and as Charmian would conceive it, remains essentially unrecoverable and can only ever be represented by a conflict of interpretations. The impossibility of reconciling interpretations, of making divergent readings converge, is well illustrated by the quarrel between Guy Leet and Percy Mannering over the facts in the case of the death of Ernest Dowson. The point about this quarrel is that it dramatizes the inconclusiveness of literary criticism. It invites a comparison between the reader’s own struggle over the meanings of Memento Mori and the characters’ disagreements over the literary evidence provided by Dowson’s works. The discussion actually moves on from a consideration of Dowson to include references to the works of Yeats and Byron as well, in case we should be in any doubt that what we are dealing with here is essentially a case of textual interpretation. And since the immediate pretext for the quarrel is an interpretation

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of the death of Dowson, this underlines the connection with the reader’s understanding of the issues at stake in Spark’s novel about the onset of death. In the end, Guy’s approach to literary criticism is not that dissimilar to Percy’s. Guy ignores whatever is inconvenient to his meaning in order to stress what ‘might have happened’ (191), while Percy, in his aside about Byron’s ‘Childe Harold’, stresses the need to get at the ulterior meaning, or what he refers to as the ‘ “SECRET of the poem” ’ (193). The impossibility of establishing the facts of the matter is a dilemma common to both literary criticism and the detective work of Henry Mortimer. Mortimer recognizes the practical impossibility as well as the irrelevance of identifying the hoax caller, and offers his own interpretation that it is death himself who is responsible – death being the one caller, incidentally, who is not and who could never be a hoaxer, or phoney. The reader’s own detective work comes to focus progressively on issues of sexuality, and sexual relationships, in order to construct a history of passions, betrayals and manipulations. More and more ground is uncovered in an area of experience where the underlying motivations remain secret, even though a great deal of what was hidden is revealed in a superficial sense. Because of the advanced age of most of the characters, the reader’s expectation is probably for the kind of ‘remembrance of things past’ that would be a history of desires now finished. But in actual fact, desire, transformed into various manifestations, is still very active in most of the characters’ lives. There are not very many of them who are exempt from a desire for knowledge, meaning or control. Even sexual desire survives in etiolated form, enmeshed in a dynamics of control and dependence. If death can only be timely after desire has been eclipsed, then it cannot be said that very many of the characters are ready for death. Desire is perhaps most evident in the debased form of cupidity, or avarice, which functions as a corrupt substitute for the craving for affection. Mrs Pettigrew has spent her adult life as a professional companion, focusing almost entirely on using her own sexuality, and her knowledge of others’ sexuality, to financial advantage. Eric has similar ambitions in his dealings with the members of his own family. The novel’s exposure of the degradations to which the various characters are subjected makes it the travesty of a novel concerned with the getting of wisdom in old age. In fact, it makes a mockery of the kind of relationship between knowledge and experience encoded in the traditions of the European novel. Memento Mori is practically an inversion of the Bildungsroman tradition. If the Bildungsroman regards adolescence as a period of exploration and experimentation, to be succeeded by the kind of self-knowledge and maturity that earns social legitimation, then Spark’s novel turns this configuration inside out. The legitimation process is reversed in Memento Mori. The shallowness of society’s foundations and the meaninglessness of its roles and rewards are uncovered by an experiment with knowledge which reveals the secret springs of characters’ actions. While the Bildungsroman


equates maturity and social placement with the disclosure of a secret self, merging individual vocation with the demands of the social environment, Memento Mori offers a retrospective account of the characters’ lives, demonstrating the extent to which legitimation has depended on concealment, not to say deceit, for the maintenance of a less assimilable kind of ‘secret’ self. Charmian, whose novels deal with a ‘secret life’ of a rather naive variety, nevertheless emphasizes the importance to her of a retrospective point of view: ‘ “Only in retrospect,” ’ she claims, ‘ “did I discern discord in people’s actions. At the time, all seemed harmony. Everyone loved each other” ’ (183). The tension between discord and harmony, antagonism and affection, selfishness and ‘charity’, characterizes the vast majority of relationships depicted in the book. The true scope of this tension only really becomes apparent in a retrospective reading, carried out by those who possess ‘period-sense’, as Guy Leet expresses it in his discussion of the kind of retrospective reading required for the revaluation of past works of art: ‘ “If a valuable work of art is rediscovered after it has gone out of fashion, that is due to some charity in the discoverer, I believe. But I say, without a periodsense as well, no one can appreciate your books” ’ (186). He is addressing Charmian at the time. The inevitable question prompted by this statement is, what period-sense do we the readers need in order to appreciate the values and meanings of Memento Mori? Interestingly, the novel starts with a reference to its periodsetting in a quotation from a letter by one of the characters, Dame Lettie Colston: Dame Lettie Colston refilled her fountain-pen and continued her letter: One of these days I hope you will write as brilliantly on a happier theme. In these days of cold war I do feel we should soar above the murk and smog and get into the clear crystal. The telephone rang. She lifted the receiver. As she had feared, the man spoke before she could say a word. When he had spoken the familiar sentence she said, ‘Who is that speaking, who is it?’ But the voice, as on eight previous occasions, had rung off. (9) The novel then is set at the time of the Cold War, less than fifteen years after the end of the Second World War: ‘ “In these days of cold war I do feel we should soar above the murk and smog and get into the clear crystal.” ’ Does Memento Mori transcend the conditions of the Cold War – does it ‘soar above’ them, or does it remain bound up in them? Historians will remember the Cold War as a period when the most significant memento mori of all was the threat of a nuclear strike, of a death for which there is no adequate means of preparation, or any time in which to do the preparing. Dame Lettie’s first sentence makes it clear that she is


addressing her letter to a writer (probably Eric, the realist) and this makes the connection between fiction and its historical context all the more unavoidable. Dame Lettie’s second sentence is fantastically ironic, since what it is describing in a hidden form is actually the launching of a nuclear missile: ‘ “In these days of cold war I do feel we should soar above the murk and smog and get into the clear crystal.” ’ The aftermath of that launch, occurring only minutes later (and the brevity of the interval is important) is death on a catastrophic scale. The aftermath of Lettie’s penning the sentence is the first of the novel’s many telephone announcements, anticipating death’s arrival. The telephone call from death does not interrupt the writing of a text about the Cold War – it is the inevitable sequel to it. The point about death during the Cold War is that death by nuclear strike can never be a timely death. Historical time during the Cold War took on a particular rhythm and pace. Historical time during much of the post-war era has converged with what Maurice Blanchot has called the ‘time of the disaster’.2 Military strategy has been overshadowed by the time-scale implied by the nuclear threat; the political process has been devalued by the realization that democracy is inoperable within the period of the four-minute warning. Political control has been confined, ultimately, to the split-second decision-making of supreme commanders. ‘The present feels narrower, the present feels straitened, discrepant, as the planet lives from day to day’, claims Martin Amis in an essay from the book Einstein’s Monsters.3 Given this contraction of the time available for significant action, and the sense of meaninglessness it produces, we should not be surprised that the last thirty years have seen a remarkable surge in the growth of millenarian and apocalyptic religious sects, since these provide a framework for the disaster which turns it into the most significant event in history, rather than a means of ensuring the failure of history altogether. Spark’s next novel after Memento Mori, The Bachelors, published a year later in 1960, explores the activities of spiritualists in London, while her masterpiece, The Takeover (1976), is fascinated by the growth of fundamentalism, by the development of a Charismatic Renewal movement found not only in Christianity but also in other religions. The deep imprint left by this apocalyptic or millenarian model of history – history as curtailment – has survived the withdrawal of the Cold War threat and is reflected in popular enthusiasm for the Hollywood disaster-substitutes of invading aliens, volcanic catastrophes and impacting asteroids. Perhaps the most symptomatic among films of this kind is Godzilla, because it makes the connection itself, albeit in a literalminded fashion. The film starts with a kind of dumb-show making it clear that nuclear fall-out is responsible for mutations in the genes of iguanas, resulting in the monstrous aberration that is Godzilla. What has happened is that the psychology of the Cold War has invented the rampaging monster as a replacement for the nuclear catastrophe. The conclusion to be drawn from all these films and novels is that the real catastrophe is the irreversible


social and psychological damage occasioned by the mere existence of nuclear weapons, and this is what Spark’s novel Memento Mori is indirectly but crucially concerned with. In the novel, the memento mori, the reminder of death, takes the form of a telephone call. But if the telephone caller is effectively a personification of the Cold War, why does his voice change continually? The hoax caller is a composite, chameleon figure capable of imitating different age groups, classes and genders. His multifariousness seems to suggest that the Cold War should not be regarded as the product of a remote, abstract, mysterious agency, but that it only exists through the complicity of everyone in society. Paradoxically, that variousness, the range of differences reflected in the voice, is what is obliterated by the nuclear strike, as one of the least discriminating of deaths. Another of the book’s stinging ironies is that Alec’s project, which seeks to eradicate difference by establishing general models of behaviour in proximity to death, is itself terminated abruptly by a disastrous conflagration. Although Alec has actually made arrangements for his notes to be burned in the event of his own death, he has not bargained on surviving their destruction, bereft of his work and deprived of the meaningful pattern they might have established. One of the most obvious effects of nuclear catastrophe is its threat to the very meaning of death. The fire occurs in the penultimate chapter. One of the more tendentious aspects of the final chapter, with its careful enumeration of the causes of death of most of its main characters, is that it restores individuality to death. On the other hand, the catalogue of deaths is rendered in a clinical fashion, concentrating on the causes of death, not on the manner of dying. Right to the end, the novel sustains the tension between sameness and difference, ‘harmony’ and ‘discord’, the general and the particular. When Percy Mannering asserts that death on the telephone sounds like W.B. Yeats – ‘ “It was a strong mature voice, very noble, like W.B. Yeats” ’ (193) – he probably has in mind the voice we can hear in Yeats’s poem actually entitled ‘Death’: Nor dread nor hope attend A dying animal; A man awaits his end Dreading and hoping all; Many times he died, Many times rose again. A great man in his pride Confronting murderous men Casts derision upon Supersession of breath; He knows death to the bone – Man has created death.4


If death has a meaning only because man has given it one, it follows that death means different things at different historical periods. Death means different things, according to your ‘period-sense’. One point that should be made about Yeats’s poem in connection with Memento Mori is that death acquires meaning in a face-to-face confrontation, in a personal, highly specific situation, in precisely those conditions that are not reflected in a general catastrophe. The conflagration that destroys Alec’s notes occurs as the climax of the novel’s action, but it has been prepared for well in advance. Conflagrations on a minor scale occur throughout the text. The cremation of Lisa Brooke in Chapter Three is made the occasion for assembling most of the cast of characters. Percy recalls the cremation later on while standing in front of the fire in Olive’s room. When the tensions rife in the Piper household reach a critical point, pots and pans catch fire in the kitchen. Charmian’s effort to cope by herself is focused on her control of the library fire and the lighting of the gas stove. Alec’s exchange with the night-watchman takes place in front of a glowing brazier. Most suggestive of all is the association between Godfrey’s attempts to kindle his waning sexual desire and the parking of his car outside a bombed house. It is while she is hiding in the entrance to this house that Mrs Pettigrew experiences the most unpleasant physical sensation in the book as a rat slithers over her foot. In the late 1950s, London was still full of such buildings, destroyed by the bombing raids of the Second World War. The obscure threat of bomb sites is juxtaposed with the characters’ fears of mental decline and physical degradation. It is as if the fires of the Blitz have only been damped down temporarily, breaking out again spasmodically in the conditions of the Cold War that simultaneously magnify the threat of aerial bombardment even as they sublimate it. The sublimated launching of the missile at the beginning of the book and the sublimated nuclear catastrophe at the end of it are far from being the only allusions to a Cold War scenario. Several of the characters seek to regulate their relationships in terms of one form or another of a balance of power. The prevalence of blackmail, and the intensifying use of blackmail as a means of retaliating to being blackmailed oneself, create a deadlock in the relations of Godfrey, Eric and Mrs Pettigrew that is akin to a situation of mutually assured destruction. The procedures of detective work are easily translated into the machinations of espionage. Numerous characters are involved in spying on each other. Mrs Pettigrew is the most blatant of these intelligence gatherers but Alec is probably the most systematic, relying as he does on a network of informers to complete his research: ‘To understand the subject, one had to befriend the people, one had to use spies and win allies’ (61). The ostensible goal of Alec’s programme of research is a sociological one, but the pleasure he takes in it is largely derived from his activities as a spymaster. In a

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grotesque parody of government operations, the majority of characters in the story relate to one another through the withholding or release of information. The state of well-being of these ageing operatives is almost always directly correlated with the trade in secrets. Unsurprisingly, the mode of knowledge with which they end up interpreting the world is neither scientific nor novelistic, but paranoid. The sorts of connections they rely on making in order to explain the world in which they move are the connections made by conspiracy theorists. But the conspiracies of the novel are both real and imagined, and the most active conspiracies are those formed in direct response to the making, interpreting and challenging of wills. In previous literature, the making of a will was judged to be part and parcel of ‘making a good end’; it was part of a narrative sequence that consolidated the meaning of a life. The will ensured that death was not merely an end, but a means of establishing continuity with other lives. Making a will formed a bridge between generations, a guarantee that the value of a life was not lost or dispersed, but inherited and honoured. In the Cold War scenario of nuclear death, there is no narrative, no sequence of meaningful actions, no negotiation of the relations between the living and the dead, no survivors to relate to, and nothing to inherit. The making of wills becomes redundant, and yet the psychological satisfaction that accrues from making a will is what the characters crave with an ever-increasing desperation. There is a positive frenzy of will-making in Memento Mori, and yet the emptiness of this activity, the fundamental meaninglessness of Cold War wills, is accentuated by the number of different wills that individual characters make. Dame Lettie makes twenty-two. Each of these wills gives death a different meaning, and the competition between them works to deprive death of any meaning at all. The death of the individual can have no meaningful sequel when the number of possible endings is multiplied. This narrative open-endedness is not a liberation, but an evacuation, of meaning. It makes the relationship between narrative and death as trivial and incoherent as the incessant predictions of Granny Valvona’s horoscopes. Memento Mori, then, is a novel about the Cold War; more specifically, it is a novel about the Cold War way of death. The longevity of most of its characters means that they have been exposed during their lifetimes to many different kinds of death, and to many different ways of responding to death, not least in the great collective episodes of the First and Second World Wars. Old age is a universal condition, but the sense of an ending which governs these characters’ lives is highly specific; it operates on a scale, and with a tempo, or velocity, that seems familiar to us now, but which was both urgent and unprecedented at the time of the novel’s composition in 1958.


Notes 1. Muriel Spark, Memento Mori (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961), 187. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. 2. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986). 3. Martin Amis, ‘Introduction: Thinkability’, Einstein’s Monsters (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), 17. 4. W.B. Yeats, The Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran (London: Macmillan, 1983), 234.

14 The Greater Tragedy Imposed on the Small: Art, Anachrony and the Perils of Bohemia in Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows Victor Sage

On 3 October 1946, Rebecca West, who was covering the Nuremberg Trials as a reporter, was in a Prague cinema watching Brief Encounter with one of the prosecutors. They were escaping from Nuremberg. The whole context – the co-presence of this peculiarly British film and its dutiful but uncomprehending Central European audience – is presented by West as a bizarre montage, like a photographic double-exposure, of cultural expectations alien to each other, of artistic representation and historical event, and of whatever could be counted in that moment of limbo as ‘past’ and ‘present’: The drab and inhibited little drama seemed to unfold very slowly before this audience, which so plainly felt that if such cases of abstinence occurred in a distant country there was no need why it should have to know about them; and there was drowsiness in the air when an American voice spoke loudly out of the darkness. A minor character had crossed the screen and at the sight this voice was saying in horror, ‘By God, that man looks just like Göring.’ It was one of the American lawyers from Nuremberg, who had fallen asleep and had awakened to see the screen as a palimpsest with the great tragedy imposed on the small.1 Brief Encounter stands here for the dreamlike innocent world of the past, a Britain shielded from the forces of European darkness, and this ‘palimpsest’ is explicitly meant by West to show how the trials themselves had already begun in this moment to recede into the past or the world of dreams. But palimpsests, like puns, work in two directions: the layering of West’s image also works the other way round to show how this insular, profoundly domestic film, so thoroughly overtaken by a real historical tragedy of immense proportions, momentarily coincides with (and in its frailty and innocence is thus oddly prescient of) the forces of darkness that surround it. 166

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West’s writing is often, like this dense conceit, a kind of prophetic witnessing, that reminds one (especially after the outbreak of the Second World War) of George Orwell’s. It leaves the category of fiction itself in an odd or unacknowledged position of allegorical resonance, an agency or gobetween, that doubles her narrative effects between small and large, private and public. Her metaphorical structures, as it were, throw open material which readers might think of as private to the influx of the larger theatre. The prophetic mode works two ways between the biographical and the larger categories of history, politics and (especially with West) metaphysics. This is clearly true of her hybrid masterpiece, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), in which the author is both a character undergoing crises as a traveller in a present world and a historian of the already-lost world of the Balkans, and which was researched in the 1930s and written up during the war.2 Her extravagant and transgressive rhetorical patterns draw farreaching links between past and future, private and public, that seem to take delight in revealing how these different sets of opposites are subject to each other. These writerly strategies are strongly bound up with her feminism, but also with a habit of overview that is not merely secular and anthropological, but romantic and quasi-religious too. The all-powerful father was always there to be rebelled against. Much of the autobiographical text I want to look at in this chapter, The Fountain Overflows, published in 1956, is charged with oscillations between micro- and macrocosmic dimensions, in the manner of Göring’s fl ickering and hallucinatory appearance in Brief Encounter. West first conceived of an intimate family memoir that would be both a fiction and a history of the twentieth century, a saga, which was, for years, to be called Cousin Rosamund. England in the 1950s liked a saga: it says much about the ‘fit’ between that period and pre-1914 social structures, that the nation should have been set alight by the BBC radio performance of The Forsyte Saga, and the extraordinary popularity of this work’s extended dramatization of the sexual, marital and generational conflicts and the class and monetary obsessions of the Edwardian period was revived and repeated all over again in the 1960s’ TV dramatization with Nyree Dawn Porter as Irene and Eric Porter as Soames.3 West thought perhaps her work would be a trilogy and then it grew like Topsy into a projected four novels, and the prophetic motif was explicitly part of the project – she left copious notebooks in which she projects the future of her characters as they traverse the major events of the century.4 By 1950, she had written twenty-three draft chapters of this family saga, which, though late Victorian and Edwardian in content, and, for some, when they were published, classic in style, already bore in the freedom of their language the signs of their own twentieth-century future. In the end, West took the first fourteen chapters of this draft and, adding three chapters, worked the whole into the first volume, The Fountain Overflows, which

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was published in the USA in 1956 by Viking and by Macmillan in 1957 in England. It was a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, selling 50,000 in the USA and almost 40,000 in the fi rst few months in England. West then worked on and off for twenty years at the next volume, which she called This Real Night, a quotation from James Thomson’s City of Dreadful Night: ‘I wake from daydreams to this real night.’5 This second volume was published posthumously in 1984 (again in both New York and London) and sold well. Three editions of the remaining fragment, which retained the original title Cousin Rosamund, came out in 1985 and 1986. In none of these cases, it seems, is the writing diminished by having been picked up and dropped for so many years. She also wrote a set of ‘Family Memoirs’, which do not form part of the project and can be used to expose the (considerable) degree of fiction in these novels. The Fountain Overflows, the story of the Aubrey family – Piers and Clare, and their children, Cordelia, Mary, Rose, and Richard Quin – is told from the narratively retrospective and textually present point of view of its fierce protagonist-narrator, Rose, who is apt, as she puts it, ‘to meet rage with . . . rage’.6 This narrative conjures up the raffishness in the gaps between the pronounced economic and social strata of an Edwardian world, and re-presents that seedy eccentricity to the equally stratified 1950s. Even now, it has a curiously modern and public resonance, though it apparently sets out, through the mode of eyewitness testimony, to describe a vanished private sphere of relations. I am reminded of a similar effect in the opening section of Angus Wilson’s No Laughing Matter (1967), discussed in this collection by Steven Jacobi, where the text plays on the very distance of that far-off day in the history of the Matthews family in the Edwardian ‘wilds of West Kensington’ and establishes, this time for a 1960s’ audience who might seem now as if they would have been out of sympathy, the seedy eccentricity of that family’s preoccupation with art. Bohemia, its horrors and hilarities, as Wilson reveals in that novel, was still with us after the 1950s. Blake’s Proverb of Hell (spoken therefore in the voice of the Devil), ‘The Cistern Contains: the Fountain Overflows’, which gives West her title, is notoriously dialectical, and there is a sense in which the eloquence and confidence of West’s title is haunted by its silent other half. Blake’s formulation doesn’t just offer you a passive choice between these two mutually exclusive dynamics: that of containment and excess. First, it tempts you to reject containment as one of God’s fictions; and to substitute for it a romantic Prometheanism (the allegory can evidently be applied to a whole range of things, including revolutionary politics and human personality, but West is particularly concerned with art) as the effortless and illimitable excess of the Fountain. But Blake’s irony, inevitably, through the rhetorical form of gnomic paradox, sets up a ricochet between the very thought of inexhaustible energy, and the existence of its limit.

Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows

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I want to try and sketch a translation of how this ricochet effect operates in the rhetoric of West’s narrative, because it seems to me to have some interesting historical and cultural resonances. For one thing, the ‘fi lter’ of West’s fiction is the more mystical Blake of the 1950s, before he became the icon of campus revolution via writers such as Marcuse and Norman O. Brown and the counter-culture of the 1960s, and perhaps West, like Joyce Cary in The Horse’s Mouth, who quotes enormous chunks of ‘The Mental Traveller’ – a daring and strange choice still, in the 1950s, which linked modernism with a mystical native tradition of the resurrection of the body practised by painters, for example, Stanley Spencer – was to some extent anticipating this shift to a more dialectical version of the ‘Proverbs of Hell’, through her own Freudianism and her ever-present sense of God’s hatred of her as a woman. This passage from her last New Yorker story, ‘Parthenope’ seems to smack of that kind of Blakeian apocalyptic thinking, grafted on to a profoundly libertarian feminist impulse: Something has happened which can only be explained by supposing that God hates you with merciless hatred, and nobody will admit it. The people nearest you stand round you saying that you must ignore this extraordinary event, you must – what were the words I was always hearing? – ‘keep your sense of proportion,’ ‘not brood on things.’ They do not understand that they are asking you to deny your experiences, which is to pretend that you do not exist and never have existed.7 West, of course, obsessed by Communist conspiracy and her opposition to Stalin, had shifted her own position after the war to the right, and she reviewed both Marcuse and Marshall McLuhan unsympathetically when they came out in the 1960s, but she remained, it seems, on insultingly intimate terms with God the Patriarch.8 West’s novel represents, often comically, from the child’s point of view, the fall of a well-endowed upper-middle-class family from financial security, if not into, then onto the edges and ledges of what was thought of as ‘the abyss’ by social explorers and historians of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. The narrative mediates this tale to a middle-class postwar recovery audience, amongst whom intimate fear of abysses was still quite acute, though the term doesn’t necessarily refer to the same things as it did in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods.9 Some of the textual pleasure of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a popular model for the male Bildungsroman in the 1950s, is also associated with the representation of this fall. It is worth remembering that Joyce’s sociological background for Stephen’s rebellion in the name of art is the decline and dissolution of the family from a secure and influential middle-class Catholic household – his father’s connection with the priests, at least in Stephen’s own eyes, is what gets Stephen into Clongowes and Belvedere – to (by the

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time we see them in Ulysses) a group of desperate and starving beggars on the streets (Katie and Boody) and in the pubs (Simon) of Dublin. Stephen’s rebellion is against this abyss, inevitably, as well as the famous ‘nets’ of Nation and Religion he seeks to fly by. Joyce had studied naturalism in his youth and was familiar with its arc of inevitable decline as the exact flipside of aestheticism and this shows in the structure of this novel.10 Abysses are no doubt relative, and perhaps each class and age has their own version of what lies over the edge. Seediness, crime, debt, art and the perversely erotic constituted the perceptible edge of the abyss in the Wilsonian hell of the mid-century. West too recalls an Edwardian version of this hell, when she inserts the subtexts of lesbianism and murder in her use of the 1889 Maybrick case.11 West’s Irish gambler father, Charles Fairfield, deserted the nest when she was six, and she spent half her life trying to understand why. And to bear an illegitimate child, dodging from pillar to post (while trying to start a career as a writer), an ordeal which the rebellious West had been through in the twenties, was once again one of the scandalous motifs of the 1950s, which came back to haunt her in the person of her son, Anthony, who constantly threatened to reveal intimate details of her relationship with his father, H.G. Wells. To me, growing up in a council house in the late 1940s and early 1950s, life often felt as full of ‘abysses’ – despite the Welfare State – as the Aubrey children in West’s novel feel it is. There was still the feeling that to be an artist was to drop off the end of the thin planks of recognizability and respectability – and yet, as anyone reading Volume Two of Doris Lessing’s Autobiography will know, the 1950s was an exciting time for the artist. West was not alone in her interest in this theme: as I have said, Joyce Cary had famously used huge dollops of the most visionary bits of Blake – not widely known at the time – to lash his readers about the opposition between the artist and the corrupt social structure in The Horse’s Mouth (1944), a novel which was a classic by the late 1950s, when I first brought it home from the public library. Here’s Gulley Jimson, Cary’s ex-convict painter, discussing his murderous relation to a millionaire patron: ‘What is the situation?’ ‘There’s two, mine and his. His situation is a bit ticklish,’ I said, ‘He might get his throat cut.’ ‘Have some more coffee, Mr Jimson, do,’ said Walter, turning quite red . . . ‘And what will happen to artists if there’s no millionaires. Will art stop?’ ‘Not art – you can’t stop art. But you can stop original art.’ ‘What happens then?’ ‘The people go on with the old stuff, and folk art and so on, until they get sick.’ ‘Sick of art?’ ‘Sick of everything. Though they don’t know it. It’s a kind of foot-and-mouth disease. The mouth gets very foul and the feet turn sideways, so that the patient is always going round to the pub, the same pub, of course. I’m told by experts that there’s a lot of it in country districts where you only


have old masters to look at. . . . ‘So you’re for the millionaires.’ ‘The more the better, Walter. In my view, everybody ought to be millionaires.’12 The twin themes of art and murder are never far from each other in The Fountain Overflows. The children of the Aubrey family are gradually estranged from their talented, wayward, lovable but distant Father, who eventually abandons them. Father, a follower of Herbert Spencer, an anti-socialist, whose writings are prophetic of things to come in the 1930s, is constantly being arrested by the ‘intellectual police’ – narrator Rose’s joke about his preoccupation with economic theory (126). They are brought up by their mother, Clare, who has been a concert pianist: ‘ “the great Clare Keith, who had retired far too young and had played the Mozart Concerto in C minor and Schumann’s Carnival better than any other woman who had ever lived” ’, declares Mr Kisch, the music teacher (368). Clare’s marriage to Piers Aubrey, journalist and inveterate gambler, is a hopeless match between her art and his (lack of) money, and this dialectical opposition is a prominent part of the novel’s rhetoric. Because of Piers’s improvident lurch towards the abyss, the family find themselves poor relations, actors in a theatre of debt. After the absentee Piers has sold Clare’s aunt’s Empire furniture, one summer while Clare and the children have been on their summer trip to the Pentlands, Clare eventually plucks up courage to inquire casually of their landlady, as Rose registers it, ‘in mimicry of a happy woman’, when the man came for the furniture (37). After she has learnt defi nitively of this betrayal (and the reader has realized he was lying all along in the opening of the novel), having mimicked her hearty and careless reply, Clare collapses: When we got back into the flat we closed the door softly and Mamma stood shuddering in the hall. She muttered to herself. ‘He will have sold it for a fraction of its value. Oh, I am getting old and ugly, but it is not that. I cannot compete with debt and disgrace, which is what he really loves.’ She lifted her arms to embrace a phantom, but they fell by her side. (37) Saved by Papa’s Jewish boss, Mr Morpurgo, they are forced to live in his Cousin Ralph’s house in South London and Piers to edit the humble Lovegrove Gazette, where they develop the usual techniques for dodging creditors: We got used to Kate coming and saying with a peculiar inflection in her voice that a man had come to see Papa. Then, if Papa was in, he went out by the back door and through the stables, without hurrying; Mamma used to turn her back so that she should not see him go. But whether he was in or out, Mamma had to deal with the dun. There was a sentence


in our history books which we grimly enjoyed because we felt we had a special understanding of it. When we read, ‘The garrison then sent out one of their number to parley with the attacking troops,’ we knew exactly what it had been like, we had so often seen Mamma do it. (126) Life is intensely embattled, as Rose’s military metaphor here suggests, and, at the centre of the battle is the struggle for art. The Aubrey children, rackety and unrespectable in the South London suburb of Lovegrove (fashioned out of West’s memories of Brixton Hill in the 1890s) are brought up by Mamma to see the world through the eyes of the artist. Music is their primary conduit to reality, and, such is Clare’s passion, reality is tied to the value of the artistic performance: ‘Oh, children, children,’ said Mamma. ‘You should not be so impatient with your poor sister. It might have been far worse, she might have been born deaf or blind.’ ‘That would not have been worse even for her,’ said Mary; ‘she never would have known what was wrong with her, any more than she does now, and she would have gone to one of those big places with gardens for the deaf and blind one sees out of trains, and she would have been looked after by people who like being kind to the deaf and the blind. But there are no homes for bad violinists.’ (19–20) The hapless eldest sister Cordelia cannot play and Mamma cannot help edging into collusion with her audience, Mary and Rose, who apparently can: In the little bedroom Mamma was standing in an attitude of despair which struck me as excessive. Of course Cordelia could not play the violin, but Mary and I could play the piano. Surely that should be enough for her? But she was standing with her hands crossed on her bosom and her eyes staring wildly about her while she cried, ‘But anybody not an idiot must understand that tahatahatahahahahahata is not the same thing as ta-ta-ta-ta-ta, which is what the composer wrote?’ with a passion that would have been appropriate had she been a person in Shakespeare’s world declaring that she was going to tell the yet unknowing world how these things came about, so shall you hear of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts, of accidental judgments [sic], casual slaughters, of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause. But her disorder was excused by the intact appearance of Cordelia, who was standing with her violin firmly held in her hand, a patient expression on her face . . . I thought how nice it would be if I were a street child and could take a piece of chalk and write on a wall, ‘Cordelia is a fool.’ It would do no good really, but it would be something.


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Talking through Mamma’s cries, Mary said, ‘Papa has sent a telegram.’ Mamma was instantly still. (24) The quotation from Hamlet stands right outside the young Rose’s register, but is juxtaposed with her ‘street child’ fantasy. For Clare, this passionate, humorous and oppressed woman, music is the source of the fountain’s overflow, and money is the cistern that threatens to contain it. Rose’s tooth abscess bankrupts them at the dentist’s, so there will be no cab home afterwards, and her simultaneously childish and retrospectively knowing comment on her mother’s humiliation gives the reader an echo of Blake’s dialectic between the free and the bound: ‘I have to think of every penny,’ she explained. ‘But,’ she continued, when we were out in the street, ‘you children must not worry. We will not starve, whatever happens. I promise you that. But just now I must scrape and save. It is difficult to explain, but you must trust Mamma.’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘yes, Mamma.’ But I did not trust her. I loved her. Still I could see that she had been tripped by the snare of being grown-up, she lay bound and struggling and helpless. (33) For Rose, what is at stake here is nothing less than the nature of reality itself. The children live in the prison of their parents’ desires. Piers – who effortlessly provides the chain to debt that binds Clare and drags her down – is referred to by Rose as a ‘shabby Prospero, exiled even from his own island but still a magician’ (78),13 and Clare, on the other hand, is reported as insisting on the reality – not just the value – of the world of art: ‘You see, you are allowed to read the newspapers now. I hope you will not attach too much importance to them. They give you a picture of a common-place world that does not exist. You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.’ (210) The context of this conversation is a recent foray by Rose into the supernatural, which I’ll return to, but the passage shows how, for Mamma, the overflowing fountain of music is opposed to the dry cistern of the commonplace, the ersatz, and the sheer vulgarity of the quotidian. But Clare is a hard taskmistress and Rose a murderously stubborn clone, as she makes clear in her reference to ‘one of those terrible clashes between Mamma and myself which had happened once or twice, when we had become fountains of rage and pain’ (209). They are on the same side, but the fountain backpours here, so to speak. Like Gulley Jimson, Rose is willing to murder for her art, and her elder sibling, poor unfortunate Cordelia, the talentless violinist, is standing in line:


‘I cannot think why your Papa and I gave you the name of Rose,’ said Mamma. ‘From the first we should have seen it was quite unsuitable. Please be silent.’ ‘Mamma,’ I said, trying to be reasonable, ‘we have to have Aunt Theodora in the house, though I don’t want any of us to please her. Not to please her. It would be like wanting us to please Nero, or what’s the man who did all the murders, Charles Peace. None of us but Cordelia would want to please her. Cordelia is . . .’ I paused, choked by the intensity with which I wanted to murder her. Now I recall my emotions at that moment, children seem to me a remarkable race. They want so much to murder so many people, and they so rarely murder anybody at all. ‘Cordelia is such rubbish,’ I concluded. (154–5) Much of the novel’s comedy comes from a savagery in the child-narrator’s perceptions that reads like a fusion of Dickens and the more unpleasant of Blake’s infants. But Rose is never parricidal, unlike Blake’s falsely-smiling babies.14 When Cousin Rosamund comes to stay and, while they are looking at the copies of the family portraits, mocks both their fathers, Rose is taken aback: For it was with such sharp irony that my cousin said: ‘What sensible Papas those ladies must have had.’ ‘Why, how can you tell that?’ I asked. ‘They could not have had all those lovely dresses and those jewels and feathers and cloaks, or looked so smooth and content, if their Papas had not stayed quiet and got on with what they had to do.’ This was a new idea to me, and I was shocked. Temperamentally I was born to acquiesce in patriarchy. (307) Rose resolutely tries to avoid the implications of Rosamund’s feminist jokes, while admitting their justice, by playing the family masculine honour card: But now Rosamund had laid an axe at the roots of a tree which I did not care to identify; and I was displeased too because she mocked at what angered her. It was the way in our family to hate without humour, and now it seemed to me that was the only fair way of fighting. You did not hit people below the belt or take from them their seriousness. But I had to admit that this did not apply. She had not spoken as if she hated either my father or her father; she only laughed at them, lying on my bed among her spilled golden hair. But it could not be said that she was wrong. (308)


But from the novel’s outset ‘feminism . . . was in the air, even in the nursery air’ (11). Even before she learns about any such thing, Rose’s childish and grotesque notion of marriage and childbearing is also a shrewd allegory about power and authority: ‘Why’, I said, ‘did Cousin Constance have to marry at all, if she couldn’t get anybody better than Cousin Jock?’ ‘Why,’ said my mother, her voice thin as a wisp of mist, ‘how could she have got Rosamund if she hadn’t married someone?’ Her eyelids dropped, she fell into a doze. I looked out of the train at the dark rows of houses striped vertically with the lives of families, showing yellow through the windows, and was interested at my new knowledge of what a family was. It was as if Mamma, my Mamma, or Rosamund’s Mamma, or anybody’s Mamma, were in a place like the Zoo or Kew Gardens, and were waiting for her little girl and fi nally saw her standing outside the entrance, on the other side of the gate, ‘My little girl is outside, would you mind if I went outside and fetched her in?’ She would have to be polite to the attendant who could let her through the gate, no matter what he might be like. (113) The nine-year-old Rose’s notion of marriage, procreation and the role of the husband combines the bizarre freshness of the child’s imagination with a satire of the marketplace. The point of view and tone are deliciously ambiguous: the child’s voice is built on a combination of instinctive feminism and inadequate information, overlaid by the amused retrospection of an adult voice. This double-focus is the point at which we can see that the text is more cunningly organized than the child-narrator’s sole perspective, however precocious or prophetic Rose may be, and there are places which faithfully represent her bafflement, which has an estranging effect. For example, her capacity to recognize things and provide overview for the reader is stretched to the limit in Chapter V, when they decide to visit Cousin Constance and Cousin Jock in another, much poorer South London suburb (Earlsfield). This family has fallen on even worse times than the Aubreys, but have no touch of the Bohemian about them; they are simply poor. As they approach the small terrace house, a poker flies through the window. The text makes us see the whole incident through the child’s eyes, and comically gives us Rose’s solemnly snobbish evaluation of it, using the rational equipment her mother has given her: A few yards from the house there was a clothesline, on which there were hanging four dishcloths. Three heavy iron saucepans sailed thought the air, hit the dishcloths, and fell on the ground. Evidently they had taken to the air without due preparation, for their lids were scattered on the


ground below them. I put down the poker, for I realised the nature of the violence raging through this house. ‘Is this what you call a poltergeist?’ I asked Mamma. We had read about them in books by Andrew Lang. ‘Yes, Rose,’ said Mamma, her voice quivering with indignation, ‘you see I am right, supernatural things are horrible.’ I was a little frightened, but not much; and I tried to remain imperturbable, because I assumed that the supernatural took this coarse form in Constance’s house because she lived among common people, and I had no desire to be impolite by drawing attention to her circumstances. (91) Abysses are relative and Earlsfield is precisely not Lovegrove. This is what happens, she assumes, when you have fallen over the edge: the supernatural coarsens itself like the natural. But music tells Rose all. When the ghastly, clever, sly, vulgar Cousin Jock plays the flute, she sees very clearly what is going on, penetrating the mystery of the poltergeist: But as I listened it came to me that Cousin Jock was not playing really well at all. I think I understand now the dissatisfaction which was then only a strong but vague repulsion. When Mamma played well she was making clear something which the composer had found out and which nobody had known before him. It might even be that by the emphasis she placed on the different parts of his discovery she could add something to it of which nobody, not even the composer, had before been conscious. In her playing there was a gospel and an evangelist who preached it, and that implied a church which worshipped a God not yet fully revealed but in the course of revelation. But when Cousin Jock played he created about him a world in which all was known, and in which art was not a discovery but a decoration. All was then trivial, and there was no meaning in art or in life. His playing was perfect, yet it was a part of the same destruction that had defaced the room where we sat. (104–5) Jock, the Lowland spiritualist with a chip on his shoulder, has been terrorizing his wife and daughter, who behave towards the fiction of his poltergeists as if it were simply a rather unpleasant aspect of reality. Rose, who sits there passionately hoping Jock will die so that they can take their cousins home with them, sees the whole grotesque incident as real, but as an ersatz, degraded form of reality. From the point of view of the religion of art, reproduced here in Rose’s jokes about evangelism and revelation, false art goes with fake reality. Here the book’s central dialectic shows through the tortuous naivety of Rose, whose beliefs partly reproduce those of her mother and are partly


patched out of whatever she can work out. Having substituted art for religion, Clare believes that any direct manifestation of the supernatural – all forms of established religion, and particularly the vulgar material fiction of spiritualism – is, as she trenchantly puts it, ‘ “filth” ’ (210). The ricochet effect between the metaphors of cistern and fountain, the world of money and the world of art, is present even in this romantic judgement. On the other side of the abyss are lies and crime, and yet, confusingly for Rose, there are different kinds of deception. For example, it transpires that Piers has been trying to rob Cousin Ralph’s house in the odd scene at the beginning of the book, when the children and their mother come in and catch him scraping at a panel above the grate in the sitting room. Since he grew up there, he knows that there is a hidden deposit box. Mother and children accept his story at the time – that he’s just trying to uncover an old wall panel – because the ‘shabby Prospero’ has entranced them all with the magic of his stories of his own childhood, including those of the long gone ponies, Cream and Sugar, which, for the children, become actual presences in the deserted stables.15 Clare and Rose steal out to the stables at two one morning to confront these ghosts by the light of a lantern: The yellow light shone on the perfect emptiness that fi lled the lesser spaces of those stalls, the larger space contained by the plastered walls and the broken windows. It showed everything, the brackets of frail cobweb which cast much stouter shadows, the mangers which held nothing but dust and shadows, the pail which was cracked though its shadow looked sound enough. But in this emptiness four horses slept and dreamed after their different fashions. Now it was Pompey or Caesar that shifted a heavy and complaining hoof, now it was Cream or Sugar that moved lightly like a drowsing dancer among the thick litter which was not there. (53) Prospero’s fiction of a distant Victorian past that is present trembles on the senses, its perceptibility generated for Rose, not by the light at all, but – appropriately for a child-musician – by sound. All stands on the brink of full revelation, full vision and sensory paradox, full belief, but Rose notes that the horses ‘sounded anxious about an issue not yet settled’, and that Clare, who is ‘looking towards them and beyond them’ her mouth open ‘in the bafflement of extreme stupidity’ and her eyes shining with wisdom, seems to know something (53). Clare’s wisdom is to draw back and leave the horses, for Rose, in the realm of sound: A silence fell, far away a clock struck two, and in the loose-box Sultan, who had been an old horse when my father was a child, whinnied loudly. My mother’s eyes moved to my face. The horses in the stalls became luminous shapes. We knew that if we willed it, if we made a movement

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of the mind comparable with the action of throwing all one’s weight on one foot, we could make them visible as ourselves. But it was my mother’s choice to abstain. The horses remained faint outlines for a minute or so and then were only sound again. Mamma looked past me into the distance, at the remote sources from which she had drawn her assurance, before picking up her lamp and coming towards me, meeting the shadows and sending them jerking into a dark mass behind her. She said my name very softly and took my hand, and we went out of the stable, pausing on the threshold to give a last civil glance at the horses which we could not see. (53–4) Clare refuses to betray her Prospero’s art, the absent Piers, by exposing his fictions to the light of the lantern (too close to the values of the cistern), and yet it is clear to the reader that she is staring beyond those fictions at their source. Instead, she leaves the vision intact for herself and Rose, in the private, secret realm of sound. The gesture is reminiscent of Lucretius’ leaving of the gods as fictions on their clouds in De Rerum Naturae. This is of course an impossibility, if we think of the opposition between Fountain and Cistern, but the whole of this delicate paradox is a ricochet engineered by Clare between the two opposed sets of values: leaving the horses where they are keeps Prospero, shabby and reduced as he is, on his throne and holds Rose in a pact between herself and her mother, for art. But this is a worldly manoeuvre, built out of Clare’s sense of Piers’s fragility in relation to his children, and it is revealed at the end that Mamma has another card up her sleeve: the family paintings hanging in their bedrooms are not, in fact, copies of Gainsborough and Lawrence, as she has always said, but originals – a fact which she has neglected to tell Papa, because he would immediately have gambled the money away. So, of course, art both does and doesn’t save them from the abyss of poverty, crime and Bohemia, and Rose begins to notice certain paradoxes about her parents – that, in fact, they have a kind of selective worldliness about them, Mamma included, despite appearances, which make a virtue of the values of the abyss: They were incapable of getting on terms with their fellow creatures on the plane where most of us find that easy. My mother could not dress herself to go out of her house tidily enough to avoid attracting hostile stares, she could not speak to strangers except with such naïveté that they thought her a simpleton, or with such subtlety that they thought her mad. She was never much more negotiable than William Blake. My father was unable to abandon to the slightest degree his addiction to unpunctuality, swarthy and muttering scorn, and insolvency, no matter how earnestly his admirers (and there were always new ones to replace those he alienated) begged it as a favour. Yet when people had passed a


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certain threshold in the lives of either Papa or Mamma, which they did easily enough by attaining a high pitch of desolation, both were able to exercise on behalf of these desolates a celestial form of cunning nearly irresistible. They were as tricky as a couple of winged foxes. They never had a conversation in the interests of those they were protecting which did not sensibly alter the situation in the way they wished, while those with whom they conversed remained quite unconscious of any propulsive force in their surroundings. (238) We are not so far from the anarchy of Gulley Jimson’s abyssal values here as we might have thought, as we can see from the comparison between Clare’s and William Blake’s non-negotiability. The Fountain and the Cistern sometimes need each other: the world of art as an autonomous and higher form of knowledge – even the sacrifice of life for art that formed a cornerstone of the modernist doctrine which Cary satirizes and yet so profoundly and murderously subscribes to in his pictures of the struggles of Gulley Jimson to subsist – this belief can only survive by ruthless acts of adaptive cunning. The twists in West’s plot that pull the rug from under the reader by exposing Rose’s ignorance are quite consistent with these central oppositions between art and money. So, for example, the high-minded savagery of Rose, Mary and collusive Mamma at the expense of Cordelia and her erotically enslaved music teacher, the dread Miss Beevor – she of the preRaphaelite clothes, and the brooch with the two doves drinking from a fountain, so blindly in love with her pupil that she cannot see that she cannot play for toffee; this savagery on behalf of art is reversed by the pathos in the revelation that Cordelia has been insisting on playing in public, not from vanity or stupidity, but to earn money to keep herself from the abyss. After her downfall, this is – equivocally – acknowledged by Mamma: ‘But I doubt if Cordelia has enjoyed a single moment of her childhood. It has all been a torment to her. She is not selfish. It is not what she has lacked that is an agony to her, it is what we all have lacked. She has hated it that all our clothes have been so shabby and that the house is so broken down. She has hated it that I have always been so late in paying Cousin Ralph the rent. She has hated it that we have so few friends. She hates it that your father has gone away, but not as you hate it. She would have preferred a quite ordinary father, so long as he stayed with us. She wishes she could have lived a life like the other girls at school. Your father’s writing, my playing, and whatever goes with those things, and the enjoyment we have had, are no compensation to her for what she has lost. Now, do not dare to despise her for this desire to be commonplace, to be secure, to throw away what we have of distinction. It is not she who

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is odd in hating poverty and’ – she felt for the word – ‘eccentricity. It is you who are odd in not hating them.’ (384) And she goes on to try to justify the ethical freedom of their abyssal childhoods by reference to the discipline of music – the fountain’s dependence on the cistern. The final step in this process of reversal is that Rose herself, after all her high-minded acceptance of her mother’s values, meeting a young composer and suddenly understanding him, dialectically, by reference to Cordelia, comes to see the sacrifice for art, finally, as a prison: We had met him for a few minutes when we arrived at the house: he was a slender young man, with grey eyes clear as water, not so many years older than we were, gentle in manner, and from what he had said to us and from the character of his compositions it was plain that he was as essentially musical as Cordelia was unmusical. Yet even he was evidently finding it difficult to be a musician. I suddenly realised that for me it would be impossible. I looked round the room, lined with books on music, and felt that I was in prison, I had been shut up in a cube of music, and could not even have full use of my cell, so much of it was occupied by the grand piano, which seemed to me now not an instrument I had studied with results that till now had been successful, but an engine which throughout the years established tyrannous claims on my life, and was now enforcing them, and would enforce them for ever and ever, to my ruin. (391) Rose clearly sees her own containment here in the ‘cube’, or cistern, of music – a paradox which entails a certain freedom from the relentless overflowing of her childhood and her past. Perhaps the most resounding ricochet of all between these dialectical opposites, which takes me back to my beginning, is in the other direction – from the microcosm of Mamma’s struggles to the world stage of male politics – when Mr Pennington, one of Papa’s parliamentary colleagues, comes to see Mamma and tells her how Piers’s prophetic pamphlet about ‘The Future of Europe and Foreign Policy’ has gone ‘off the rails’ (315). The conversation is full of West’s irony about relations between the personal and the political. It seems that Europe, according to Papa, is heading for the abyss: ‘. . . Mrs. Aubrey, if there’s one thing we know it is that the world is getting better and better. There’s such a thing as the law of progress. Your husband puts down in black and white the idea that we’re not going forward, we’re going backward. He says that civilisation’s going to collapse. It’s going to shrink instead of spreading. He says that country after country is going to be taken over by common criminals.’


‘Well, perhaps that is true,’ said Mamma. ‘Oh, Mrs. Aubrey, you can’t possibly agree with him. He doesn’t mean the United States or South America, or Australia, which would make some sense, there is a lot of rag, tag and bobtail there. He says this may happen in Europe. And he goes on to say the most extraordinary things about the wars we are going to have after the criminals have taken over . . .’ (316) This pamphlet contains a retrospectively accurate set of forecasts of twentieth-century history – the collapse of the Austrian Empire, the rise of nationalism, the advent of barbarism and fascism, the possibility of war from the air. Here is the palimpsest of Göring and Brief Encounter, the ‘great tragedy’ of fascism and two world wars, imposed on an Edwardian tea-ceremony. By the time she wrote this, West had become enamoured of Edmund Burke and the notion of tradition. But she also managed to revere Trotsky after visiting that disturbing and poignant house of his in Mexico City, because he escaped Stalin for at least a time. There are two dynamics here in the same structure: one is to see time as rhetorically compressed into layers of reference, so that large and small events occur as an overlap or correspondence, an atemporal oscillation between opposed energies. This is what I have been calling the ricochet effect. The other is to produce by these paradoxical correspondences a continuous allusion to prescience, recreating small moments at which the imagination of characters like Rose – either through ignorance or innocence – was still free before subsequent history arrived to efface them. Instead of containing Rose in an Edwardian past, the novel’s strategy allows this savage, murderous sibling to speak to a future set of listeners who have, for example, long internalized the ideas on sibling rivalry of Freud, who was her historical contemporary, a strategy which, when multiplied into a whole textual structure, produced for West a ‘match’ in the mid-century between her audience and her subject-matter.

Notes 1. Rebecca West, ‘Greenhouse With Cyclamens I’, A Train of Powder: Six Reports on the Problem of Guilt and Punishment in Our Time (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 65. 2. That ‘character’ is a fictional creation in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, as is ‘Constantine’, whose original, Stanislav Vinaver, according to West’s diaries, tried to rape her and succeeded in physically assaulting her on several occasions. West thought of these incidents as ‘far-fetched’, even though they had happened. She evidently had a more impersonal, archetypal (that is, fictional) mission with Vinaver’s ‘character’ as a Serb. She wrote these and many of her husband Henry’s

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activities out of the book. See Carl Rollyson, Rebecca West: a Saga of the Century (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1995), 150. 3. One of the continuities was the law covering rape. The stubbornly un-modern Soames, an Edwardian catapulted into an existential limbo of unrespectability by his fatally overpowering lust to possess, was a national hero in the 1950s – there was no possibility at that time of ‘reconstructing’ his masculinity. His tragic opposite number Irene – for many a femme fatale (or is she just a confident and attractive woman who enjoys life?) – ends up by giving in to his machinations and marrying him. When she appears reluctant to consummate the marriage, his frustration is so great that he rapes her. The law still allowed him to do this, as a husband, even by the time of the 1960s’ TV performance and so the same controversy was sparked by this Edwardian drama. 4. Carl Rollyson gives some snippets of these: ‘Rebecca’s trilogy is Pauline in its occult portrayal of the world as seen through a glass darkly. In notes for her projected trilogy (eventually she thought it might be four novels), Rebecca listed her characters according to their prophetic roles. Thus Piers “saw only a little way prophetically.” Clare actually saw more but “got confused in life.” Richard Quin, the perfect brother Rose and Mary dote on – and the idealized brother Rebecca never had, based on Isabella’s [that is, West’s mother’s] brother, Joey, who died in his twenties – is described as lacking ambition because he knows he will be killed in World War I. Cordelia is “denied her gift of prophecy.” Rosamund will become the “perfect priestess” and also the most enigmatic character – in part because she is powerless to prevent the awful vision of the holocaust she harbours . . .’ (Rollyson, Rebecca West, 276) 5. James Thomson, ‘The City of Dreadful Night’, The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems (London: Dobell, 1922), 26. 6. Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows (London: Macmillan, 1957), 208. Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. 7. Cited in Rollyson, Rebecca West, 284, who interprets it as being about denying her own ‘paranoia’. 8. Compare the following joke to Marshall Best in 1964, when The New Meaning of Treason came out: ‘God doesn’t love women writers. But I’ve had good reviews from his creatures, I must say’ (Rollyson, Rebecca West, 305). 9. The feeling of continuity in Lorna Sage’s memoir Bad Blood (London: Fourth Estate, 2001) between the narrowness of a decayed Edwardian social structure (admittedly rural, but see note 3 above) and the class relations of the immediate post-Second World War scene is irresistible. 10. I’m thinking here, in speaking of ‘textual pleasures’ of the way in which, after the ecstasy of Stephen’s ‘bird’ epiphany on the beach, Joyce brutally (and tongue-in-cheek) obliges his arrogant narcissistic young aesthete to contemplate the hideous slap of ‘white puddings’ in the sound-structure of the opening sentence of the next section of Ulysses. It was possible for myself and my schoolfriends in the 1950s, by a kind of doublethink, almost to bypass this Zolaesque moment, such was the power of the myth of the artist; and even though it struck a vein of grim humour at the preciousness of such an aspiration, one identified with Stephen’s loathing, as a loathing of the material, investing it with the bit-


11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

terness of idealism. We read it through the eyes of Yeats, ‘offended’ by ugliness, a notion that Joyce clearly parodies. But Stephen was thrown into and mixed in with a cocktail of mid-century rebels willing to risk the seedy and the shabby in their bids for freedom and truth, which included Jimmy Porter, James Dean and Holden Caulfield. This case of a woman who poisoned her husband is one of the many things Molly Bloom lies in bed thinking about. Joyce Cary, The Horse’s Mouth (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 281–2. The novel’s Shakespearian motif is interesting, and West’s Yale lectures, in which she discusses Shakespeare, were written just at the time when she was finishing The Fountain Overflows. West hated Hamlet (along with Heathcliff, the Byronic type, which she associated with her Father and could never abide), Cordelia and Prospero, and she seems to have convinced herself, and half of Yale in her lectures there, that Shakespeare hated them too: ‘ “Shakespeare . . . didn’t have the affection for Cordelia that everybody assumes he had. The Tempest shows what he thought about the creator – Prospero made his land quite uninhabitable for normal people with those inventions of his, Ariel and Caliban, and he had been exiled to the island for behaving as intolerably in his kingdom” ’ (Rollyson, Rebecca West, 270–1); and again, on Cordelia: ‘ “Cordelia I think a poisonous creature – clinging to the mean, mad father and leaving the King of France” ’ (Rollyson, Rebecca West, 273). She continued to be mean about Cordelia’s original, her sister Lettie, to whom she dedicated The Fountain Overflows, in an equivocal gesture which Victoria Glendinning describes without presuming to resolve as ‘a supreme act of bravado or conciliation’ (Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows (London: Virago, 1984), viii). West retained this childlike bellicosity herself in later life. When Churchill finally took over from Neville Chamberlain at the beginning of the war, so buoyant was West that she wrote to Alex Woollcott in America: ‘We are all going about our business, with one eye on the map and a certain amount of curious feeling about the bowels. I have never felt so coldly ferocious in my life, and optimistically carry a couple of linoleum knives wherever I go . . .’ (Rollyson, Rebecca West, 172). The term ‘optimistically’ here is a hilariously precise amalgam of the great and small contexts. As Victoria Glendinning notes, there was no coach-house (and so no stables) at Streatham Place, Brixton Hill (West, The Fountain Overflows (London: Virago, 1984), 5). West has invented, or grafted on, Piers’s fiction.

15 From Psychology to Ontology: William Golding’s Later Fiction Kevin McCarron

Although William Golding (1911–93) was a Nobel Laureate, even many highly literate people associate him only with Lord of the Flies and, possibly, Rites of Passage. However, although not an immensely prolific author compared with many of his peers, Golding actually produced a considerable body of work. His writing is clearly divisible into three distinct phases. The first of these begins with Lord of the Flies (1954), The Inheritors (1955), Pincher Martin (1956) and Free Fall (1959), and ends with the publication of The Spire in 1964. The second phase incorporates the volume of essays The Hot Gates (1965), the novel The Pyramid (1967) and the three short stories collected as The Scorpion God (1971). With the exception of the collection of essays A Moving Target (1982) and the travel book An Egyptian Journey (1985), the third phase comprises novels alone, beginning with the publication of Darkness Visible (1979); following this were Rites of Passage (1980), The Paper Men (1984), Close Quarters (1987), Fire Down Below (1989), and then the posthumously published The Double Tongue (1995). In this chapter Golding’s later fiction will be discussed in chronological order but an exception has been made for the Sea Trilogy, so that The Paper Men will be discussed before Rites of Passage. Although this order disrupts the actual sequence of publication, the inevitable narrative continuity established by the voyage depicted in these novels clearly suggests that they be assessed together. Throughout the period 1954–64, Golding published five novels, all densely textured, fable-like narratives, employing brutally limited and strikingly unconventional narrative perspectives. He demonstrated throughout this period an unmatched ability to infuse pragmatically and minutely observed detail with a visionary significance. In these novels, Golding depicted isolated man, stripped of social encumbrances, indeed usually in extremis, while alluding throughout to (and usually subverting) his literary predecessors, including Ambrose Bierce, Dante and Ibsen. Golding’s work was always out of step with that of his fellow writers who were publishing novels in the early and middle 1950s. While novelists such as Kingsley Amis, John Wain and Iris Murdoch seemed, at least initially, to be describ184

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ing parochial communities of considerable limitations, Golding was from the outset writing aggressively bold fables which claimed for themselves a universal applicability, underpinned by Greek myths and legends, echoing their harsh, primitive tone. Particularly during this period, Golding’s was an art of essences; he strove to depict what lay beneath, or above, the observable surface of life. If contemporary society had no fictional interest for him, it was because, unfashionably, he prioritized humanity’s spiritual struggle, its craving for religious enlightenment, over its desire for social cohesion. Paradoxically, however, Golding’s disinclination to engage directly with his own contemporary society allowed him the imaginative freedom to become one of its acutest commentators. The issue of historical representation is at the heart of everything Golding wrote. Like the other writers discussed in this book, Golding is concerned with the construction of British cultural history, manifested in his case by the relentless ‘rewriting’ of earlier texts, whose ideological assumptions are subjected to a variety of responses, ranging from the brutal dismissal of R.M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island in Lord of the Flies and H.G. Wells’s ‘The Grisly Folk’ in The Inheritors, to the affectionate revaluation of Euripides’ Ion in The Double Tongue. Golding’s rewriting of earlier texts can be seen as an attempt to reject their authoritative power and influence, and, linked to this, the principal cultural anxiety Golding addressed throughout his career is masculinity. The sociologist David Morgan writes: ‘Of all the sites where masculinities are constructed, reproduced, and deployed, those associated with the military are the most direct.’1 War is one of Golding’s central subjects and he invariably uses it to address questions of gender. Golding is far more critical of conventional notions of masculinity than peers such as Amis, Barstow, Sillitoe and Braine, all of whom equate masculinity with conflict, possession, attainment, and, particularly, material success. The telos of Golding’s fiction is centred in revelation, not acquisition. In Golding’s writing, success is always presented as a moment of revelation, an epiphany; never as a material acquisition, or as a favourable advance in society. Connectedly, his fiction consistently implies the existence of a spiritual power, external to humanity, which in its numinous intangibility is directly opposed to the rational, scientific worldview which is conventionally gendered as masculine. In his earlier fiction Golding seems unusually aware, compared to his peers, that while to be male is a biological fact, masculinity is a cultural construction. However, in the later fiction the male as specifically gendered loses importance for him; his real interest here is in dramatic polarizations: gender is simply an obvious distinction, not a significant one. Overall, in the later fiction Golding queries several of the ostensibly intractable polarities embedded in Western culture, particularly male/female, good/evil and creative/critical. Golding’s primary religious concern is the nature of evil, and while the earlier fiction often suggests that humanity is composed equally of good and evil, the later fiction implies that existence itself is


similarly constructed. Golding’s fictional modalities move from fable to fantasy, and his emphasis shifts from psychology to ontology. Golding only wrote one novel, The Pyramid (1967), during the second phase of his career, and indeed many of Golding’s critics argue that it is not a novel at all – rather a collection of three vaguely linked stories. The title has obvious connections with Egypt, but a pyramid is also a traditional image for representing a class structure, and the pyramid is very clearly a novel concerned with social class. The protagonist’s father is the town of Stilbourne’s chemist and the family occupies an uneasy and never quite defined position within the social hierarchy. Pyramids, however, are not only apt metaphors for evaluating hierarchical structures; they are also suggestive of death: an embalmed, eerie form of death. The name ‘Stilbourne’ itself overtly projects images of stasis and death. The Pyramid depicts a world of crushing mediocrity, and Stilbourne is a society which is paralysed to the point of immobility by its obsession with class and the niceties of social behaviour. Stilbourne is a town in love with death rather than life, and it resists change with all the murderously genteel weapons that it possesses. By setting the novel in so genteel an environment, Golding is able to emphasize the brutally destructive effects of the English class system. He also suggests, as he will also do later in Rites of Passage, that negotiating its complexities can often literally be a matter of life and death. By the late 1970s it was generally felt that Golding was a spent force, that he had taken his unique vision as far as it could go. Then, in 1979, Darkness Visible was published, an event that demonstrated that Golding still had one of the most extraordinary voices in contemporary literature. In general, the book was received enthusiastically, but with some bewilderment. The author himself did nothing to clear up the confusion by his refusal to talk about the novel at all. Golding had been an unusually cooperative writer in terms of discussing his own books, as indeed he was about subsequent books, and this quite uncharacteristic reticence on his own part has contributed a great deal to the mystique which still surrounds the novel. Darkness Visible, like many of Golding’s novels, is set against the background of war. Immediately upon the outbreak of the Second World War, Golding himself joined the Royal Navy and there is little doubt that the war was his most significant educative experience. He later wrote in his essay ‘Fable’: Before the second world war I believed in the perfectibility of social man; that a correct structure of society would produce goodwill; and that therefore you could remove all social ills by a regeneration of society . . . but after the war I did not because I was unable to. I had discovered what one man could do to another . . . I must say that anyone who moved through those years without understanding that man produces


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evil as a bee produces honey must have been blind or wrong in the head.2 Darkness Visible is divided into three sections, each one of which is centred upon a specific character. The first section focuses on Matty, who has emerged from the blazing ruins of London’s docks after a bombing raid during the war, and who acts throughout the novel like an Old Testament prophet. The second section focuses on Sophy, who, because of her criminal behaviour, sexual excesses and general attitude to life, is usually seen as the antithesis to Matty, and therefore as a figure representing evil. The third section describes the convergence of these two characters. Sophy plans to kidnap a child for ransom from the school where Matty is working as a caretaker, but Matty sacrifices his life to stop this happening. The novel ends with the death of Mr Pedigree, a paedophile, who once taught Matty and who appears throughout the novel as both a tragic and a comic figure. In essence, Darkness Visible is a novel which illuminates the inseparably integrated nature of good and evil, not the polarized distinction between them. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James writes that ‘In mystical literature such self-contradictory phrases as “dazzling obscurity”, “whispering silence”, “teeming desert”, are continuously met with.’3 The phrase ‘darkness visible’ could clearly be added to this list. Critical consideration of the title to Golding’s novel has been limited to announcing its probable source, and has focused exclusively upon Milton. Bernard F. Dick’s comments may be seen as paradigmatic of the way in which this focus upon Paradise Lost as the source of Golding’s title structures subsequent responses to the novel. Dick writes that the title is ‘taken from Milton’s Paradise Lost; it comes from his description of hell (1.63) where, despite its fires, darkness alone is visible . . . This, then, is hell: an unnatural state, a place of fiery darkness. Darkness Visible is about hell.’4 Readings of Darkness Visible invariably assume that Golding has taken his title from Paradise Lost and so the novel is always viewed from within a specifically moral framework that sees Matty as synonymous with Good and Sophy as the manifestation of Evil, in readings that duplicate the conventionally perceived moral conflict within Milton’s poem. However, the phrase also occurs within Pope’s The Dunciad: Yet, yet a moment, one dim ray of light Indulge, dread chaos, and eternal Night! Of darkness visible so much be lent, As half to show, half veil, the deep intent. (IV. 1–8) 5 It is certainly possible that Darkness Visible is not concerned with moral issues at all, but is primarily concerned with seeing. The emphasis within the title can then fall on ‘visible’, not ‘darkness’, and this then complements


Pope’s phrase ‘half to show, half veil’. When looked at in this way, the novel implies that ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are evaluations based on perception, rather than absolute moral values. This is not to suggest that Paradise Lost possesses no referential significance for Golding’s novel. However, the poem is relevant to Darkness Visible when it is seen as the dramatization of a paradox, and not as a confl ict between the separate and opposing forces of good and evil. Alan Macfarlane writes of Paradise Lost: The confusion at the heart of life is echoed in Milton’s greatest poem. The central theme of Paradise Lost is the battle between good and evil. Yet the struggle is not between two opposed sides, but within the same principle. The poem is an attempt to state the paradox that good and evil are entirely separate, yet also entirely the same.6 This suggestion that good and evil ‘are entirely separate, yet also entirely the same’ is central to Darkness Visible and can be found in the work of a number of different writers. For example, within the notes he appends to Baudelaire’s poem ‘Les Litanies de Satan’, C.F. MacIntyre quotes from Baudelaire’s own work ‘Mon coeur mis à nu’: ‘In every man, at the same time, there are two simultaneous postulations, the one towards God, the other toward Satan.’7 Jean-Paul Sartre states specifically of these ‘simultaneous postulations’ suggested by Baudelaire: ‘It must be understood that in actual fact these two postulations are not independent, are not two autonomous and opposing forces which are applied simultaneously at the same point, but that one is a function of the other.’8 Although Matty is invariably seen as good, a perspective which can offer the reader another way of regarding Matty may be suggested in the striking description of him as he emerges from the flames in the opening pages of Darkness Visible: ‘The brightness on his left side was not an effect of light. The burn was even more visible on the left side of his head.’9 Ronald Inden writes of Vena, ‘the evil-souled one’: ‘He is the charred remains of a fire, not fire itself . . . in a word, ugly. Appropriately, this dregs of a son brought forth . . . on the inauspicious (death-related) side of the body.’10 Evil is seen here, not as a form of proud self-aggrandizement as it is represented in Paradise Lost, but as a lack of something; as a manifestation of unfulfilment. David Parkin notes of Paul Ricoeur’s book The Symbolism of Evil that ‘Ricoeur’s view of evil, as primordially that of defilement or staining what was clean or pure does not quite capture this more profound notion of physical imperfection.’11 Golding’s suggestion here is that Matty’s ‘goodness’ is significantly compromised by his ugliness, as archaic an implication as can be found in the contemporary novel. Although Golding’s critics have focused on the possible biblical connotations of the name Matthew, the first book of the novel is called ‘Matty’, and this is the name by which he is known throughout the novel. The name evokes the word ‘matter’, the


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substance which in Manichaean cosmology is the very embodiment of evil: ‘Manichaeanism combined Christian and Zoroastrian elements, teaching that evil is a positive principle, embodied in matter, while the good principle is embodied in spirit.’12 Stan Gooch similarly writes of Gnostic views on religious dualism: ‘The world of matter (darkness) belongs to the Devil and he alone is its ruler.’13 Sophy’s name is of equal importance. Edwin M. Mosely notes of the central female character in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment: ‘It has been pointed out that Sonia is a diminutive for Sophia, and that Sophia in the Greek-Orthodox religion is added to the Trinity as a kind of female principle suggesting both Wisdom and Love, almost in the sense of the Love that surpasseth Understanding.’14 These perspectives suggest that the persistent assumption that within Darkness Visible Matty represents Good while Sophy represents Evil could usefully be re-evaluated. Darkness Visible describes the counter-entropic activity generated by both Matty and Sophy. The central vision of unity that the novel conveys is in the depiction of Matty and Sophy as connected, not opposed; together, they are darkness visible. Like the two ostensibly antithetical visions in Lipari and Rome which Wilf Barclay experiences in The Paper Men, Matty and Sophy embody the inseparable manifestations of religious power. Mircea Eliade writes of the violent Indian mother-goddesses Duraga and Kali: ‘One understands that this conjunction of virtues and sins, of crimes and generosity, of creativity and destructiveness, is the great enigma of life itself.’15 Darkness Visible depicts a world in which to choose damnation wilfully is to exist on a superior spiritual level to most of those who believe in salvation, and one in which human sacrifice may be pleasing to a God whom contemporary society erroneously envisages as ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild’. Golding’s views here are not totally sui generis: Graham Greene was often criticized for his apparent belief that evil was more pleasing to God than conventional secular kindness, and T.S. Eliot, in a famous essay on Baudelaire, expressed a similar opinion. However, while Greene and Eliot’s views are unconventional, they both write from a denominational perspective, while Golding’s views are religious without even being Christian, let alone specifically denominational – in this, he offers a genuinely unique twentieth-century vision. The Paper Men is also a novel very much preoccupied with querying the pervasive contemporary notion of ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild’. This novel was poorly received when it appeared in 1984, attracting the worst reviews of Golding’s career. The novel describes the efforts of an elderly novelist, Wilf Barclay, to escape the predatory attempts of a young American academic, Rick Tucker, who wishes to write a biography of Barclay. Perhaps understandably, The Paper Men was seen as a rather cantankerous attack on academics by a famous author, and perhaps equally understandably, academics and reviewers were not particularly amused. However, the novel actually refutes any distinction between the critical and the creative, and

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in doing so it actively supports the literary theories which it appears to attack. Tucker introduces himself to Barclay as a professor, a claim which Barclay later discovers to be a lie. Nor is it the only one, and Tucker’s subsequent lies, exaggerations and fantasies suggest that it is he who lives by ‘fictions’. Conversely, Barclay’s primary gift is his ability to ‘select’ – he claims to ‘invent’ almost nothing. Patricia Waugh argues that no valid hierarchical order exists in the assignation of respective functions to product and process, but that instead ‘The two processes are held together in a formal tension which breaks down the distinctions between “creation” and “criticism” and merges them into the concepts of “interpretation” and “deconstruction”.’16 The attitude which post-structuralism adopts towards this ubiquitous antithesis is similarly one of vigorous denial: ‘There is no clear division for post-structuralism between “criticism” and “creation”: both modes are subsumed into “writing” as such.’17 With similar approbation, Terry Eagleton also notes that ‘deconstruction rejects the literary/nonliterary opposition as any absolute distinction.’18 Golding actually uses the conflict between Tucker and Barclay, critic and artist, as a way of anticipating, then paralleling, the denial of an ontological antithesis. Barclay is a bellicose atheist, yet when he is on the Sicilian island of Lipari, fleeing again from Tucker, he enters a cathedral and immediately realizes that it has a peculiar type of resonance: ‘there was something about that cathedral, an atmosphere . . . You could call it a complete absence of gentle Jesus meek and mild. I didn’t like it and was in half a mind to leave but knew that if I did I should only find myself in an endless stream of time with nothing to help me forget it. I went on.’19 Within the north transept Barclay discovers a silver statue, but he uneasily notes that the silver resembles steel somehow, and immediately he begins to wonder precisely who, or what, the statue really represents: Perhaps it was Christ. Perhaps they had inherited it in these parts and just changed the name and it was Pluto, the god of the Underworld, Hades, striding forward. I stood there with my mouth open and the flesh crawling over my body. I knew in one destroying instant that all my adult life I had believed in god and this knowledge was a vision of god. Fright entered the very marrow of my bones. Surrounded, swamped, confounded, all but destroyed, adrift in the universal intolerance, mouth open, screaming, bepissed and beshitten, I knew my maker and I fell down. (Paper, 123) The juxtaposition in the cathedral of Christ with Pluto, in an atmosphere that is terrifyingly empty of conventional religious reassurance, clearly constitutes a deeply ambiguous episode and one that many readers might describe as ‘unholy’. However, it is precisely this antithesis that is com-


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monly believed to exist between the holy and the unholy, good and evil, which is itself being assessed in this episode. Rudolf Otto suggests that the conventional understanding of the word ‘holy’ is itself often in error: ‘We generally take “holy” as meaning “completely good”; it is the absolute moral attribute, denoting the consummation of moral goodness . . . But this common usage of the term is inaccurate.’20 The power in the cathedral that causes Barclay to faint is not good or evil. It can be seen as, in Nietzsche’s famous phrase, beyond good and evil. The force that is revealed to Barclay is naked religious power, revealed in all its purity, stripped completely of its moral and ethical trappings. Eliade writes: ‘In Yahweh, too, we fi nd the benevolent creator combined with another, terrible, destructive, and jealous god, and that negative aspect of divinity makes it plain to us that God is Everything.’21 Similarly Rudolf Otto writes of that Old Testament phenomenon ‘The wrath of God’: It is patent from many passages of the Old Testament that this ‘wrath’ has no concern whatever with moral qualities . . . Anyone who is accustomed to think of deity only by its rational attributes must see in this ‘wrath’ mere caprice and willful passion. But such a view would have been emphatically rejected by the religious men of the Old Covenant, for to them the Wrath of God, so far from being a diminution of His Godhead, appears as a natural expression of it, an element of ‘holiness’ itself, and a quite indispensable one. 22 Barclay, a chastened man, travels to Rome and there, on the Spanish Steps, he has another vision. This time, though, it is beatific: There was sunlight everywhere, not the heavy light of Rome but a kind of radiance as if the sun were everywhere. I’d never noticed before, but now I saw, looking down, that the steps had the symmetrical curve of a musical instrument, guitar, cello, violin. But this harmonious shape was now embellished and interrupted everywhere by the people and the flowers and the glitter of the jewels strewn among them on the steps. All the people were young and like flowers . . . I found that he was standing by me on the roof of his house after all and we went down together and stood among the people with the patterns of jewels and the heaps of flowers all blazing inside and out with the radiance. Then they made music of the steps. (Paper, 160) Just as the combination of Matty and Sophy in Darkness Visible begins to approach some representation of the true nature of existence, so too the visions in Lipari and Rome together show Barclay the true nature of religious power as Golding perceives it; one equally constructed of terror and

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joy. Like virtually all the fiction which preceded it, The Paper Men is not concerned with such concepts as fairness and justice, but with the irrational, numinous force that Golding perceives at the centre of existence, which can be apprehended as much, if not more, by outrage and violence as it can by conventional piety. Again, while Eliot, Greene, and to some extent Muriel Spark have produced striking work which echoes Golding’s perspective here, possibly only William Blake anticipates – by a century and a half or so – Golding’s belief in the immensity of the brutality and violence at the very core of this numinous power. Nevertheless, like Blake, Golding also perceives this power as ‘sacred’. In addition, however, as a novelist rather than a poet Golding is able to dramatize rather than speculate upon the impact of this force on the lives of his characters. Rites of Passage (1980), like The Paper Men, is preoccupied with writing and, therefore, with language, although in this case not ‘literary’ language alone. Rites of Passage, which won the Booker Prize, is, after Lord of the Flies, Golding’s most widely read and popular book. It is the first volume of what became known as his Sea Trilogy, and was followed by Close Quarters (1984) and Fire Down Below (1989); the three novels were published together as To the Ends of the Earth (1991), and it was under this name that in 2005 the novels were dramatized for the BBC, directed by David Attwood and starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Edmund Talbot. Most obviously in Rites of Passage, but indeed throughout, To the Ends of the Earth can be read as a sophisticated and comically articulate blend of Bildungsroman and Kunstlerroman, as Talbot eventually becomes both a better man and a better writer. The first person narrative recounts the adventures of Talbot, a well-educated young man of the upper classes who is on a ship bound for Australia in 1812–13, during a lull in the Napoleonic Wars. During the voyage, Colley, a young clergyman from a lower social class gets drunk and after making a general fool of himself takes to his bed, apparently too embarrassed to appear in public. However, three days later, having refused all food and drink, he dies. Rites of Passage is constructed as a journal, and within Talbot’s journal the reader is also offered Colley’s journal, a technique which allows Golding to use two first-person narratives. The reader, along with Talbot, eventually learns that Colley had done more when drunk than simply make a fool of himself; he had performed fellatio on a sailor and had been sodomized by an unspecified number of the crew. The shame of this, so Talbot believes, is what killed Colley. In terms of Golding’s persistent interest in masculinity, both social and metaphorical, it might initially seem that such a depiction of male behaviour as Colley exhibits is strikingly different from the representations of masculinity readers encounter throughout the 1950s and 1960s in the novels of, say, Wain, Amis and Braine, or even in the considerably later fiction of such authors as Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes. However, it must be noted that none of these writers, from the 1950s or


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from the 1990s, would have celebrated Colley’s behaviour. It should further be noted that the specific nature of Colley’s actions ‘feminize’ him; Talbot, not necessarily Golding, of course, implies that had Colley himself been fellated, or had he performed some vigorous sodomizing himself, not only would he have been far less ashamed, if indeed he had been ashamed at all, but he would be quite entitled to this lack of shame. Yet Talbot’s conviction that Colley did die of shame is one of the novel’s principal interrogative issues. Rites of Passage, like so much of Golding’s fiction, is indebted to an earlier source; in this case Elizabeth Longford’s Life of Wellington: After only three days at sea the unfortunate clergyman got ‘abominably’ drunk and rushed out of his cabin stark naked among the soldiers and sailors ‘talking all sorts of bawdy and ribaldry and singing scraps of the most blackguard and indecent songs’. Such was his shame on afterwards hearing of these ‘irregularities’ that he shut himself up and refused to eat or speak . . . In ten days he forced himself to die of contrition.23 It is possible that it was not only the actual death of the parson that prompted Golding to write Rites of Passage, but also the baldness and lack of detail in the account. There is an austerity about it which is quite horrifying, and to invent the ‘human circumstances’ of an event is paradoxically to make it more real. However, the assumption in the last sentence quoted above, that the author somehow ‘knows’ that the clergyman ‘forced himself to die of contrition’ is interesting. How does the author know? How can any of us ever know what another human being is experiencing? It is these questions which Rites of Passage attempts to answer. The novel is structured around the related activities of reading and writing, and in addition there are numerous references to painting and to the theatre, but even this array of artistic modes is, individually or collectively, unable to explain Colley’s mysterious and lonely death. Rites of Passage, one of Golding’s most polished and articulate novels, paradoxically describes the inability of art, any art, adequately to represent reality. This preoccupation is also found in The Paper Men, and Wilf Barclay, a professional author, actually shouts in despair ‘ “Words are useless” ’ (Paper, 156). Talbot is very alert to the chasm in class that separates him from Colley and, like The Pyramid, Rites of Passage is clearly concerned with social class and issues of judgement. However, Golding also uses the aristocrat and the parson to represent different forces within another crucial moment in history. With its use of the dual narrative perspective, Rites of Passage can be viewed as a novel which is structured around the conflict between Augustanism and Romanticism. Talbot’s elegant, learned and affected prose style shows him as an Augustan, a Neo-Classicist, the literary heir of Lord Chesterfield, Dryden and Pope. The vibrant spiritual energy of Colley’s

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prose conversely reveals him as a Romantic, heir to a radical new poetic vision – that of Coleridge, Keats and Byron. By the novel’s conclusion Talbot has learned enough to see that, irrespective of class, Colley was a highly gifted writer, and his own thought processes and his prose style become more flexible as a result. This stylistic development in Talbot is paralleled by a comparable moral development. The first lieutenant, Summers, is a good officer who has made his way through the ranks. Although Talbot consequently dismisses Summers, preferring the better-bred Deverel, it is the first lieutenant’s insistence that it is Talbot’s duty to visit the sick man which forces Talbot to recognize that he is not a spectator in a theatre but a participant in a real life and death. Talbot begins to accept the reality of other lives, distinct from their entertainment value to him, and, indeed, inseparably connected to his own actions. Although Summers teaches Talbot the value of masculine duty and of masculine friendship throughout the trilogy, each one of the three novels focuses upon a character who teaches Talbot the most valuable lesson he will learn within that particular novel. In Rites of Passage it is Colley who obliquely informs Talbot of an irrational dimension to human experience which Talbot had not even dreamed existed. Mr Prettiman is Talbot’s tutor in politics, and specifically, in social responsibility, and his influence is profound; but in Close Quarters the beautiful Miss Chumley is Talbot’s tutor in the emotional life, and her lessons extend into Talbot’s understanding of art. Close Quarters has an even more straightforward story line than Rites of Passage. It describes Talbot’s further adventures, the most important of which is his meeting with Miss Chumley, a passenger aboard the Alcyone, which Talbot’s ship encounters in mid-ocean. Miss Chumley very effectively furthers Talbot’s education by causing him to fall deeply and passionately in love with her. In fact, he is so smitten that he suffers a breakdown. The dashing and flamboyant Lieutenant Benet also transfers to Talbot’s ship, and his rivalry with Summers provides the most interesting conflict within the novel. When Talbot’s cynical and exploitative treatment of Zenobia in Rites of Passage is contrasted with his feelings for Miss Chumley in Close Quarters, it will be seen that one of Talbot’s very great accomplishments within the trilogy is to fall in love. The response to the third novel in the trilogy was extremely enthusiastic. The great majority of reviewers agreed that the happy ending of Fire Down Below made it Golding’s most optimistic novel. John Bayley wrote that ‘Fire Down Below brings the whole magical enterprise to a prosperous and happy conclusion’, while John Fowles wrote that ‘In this black-besotted age some may be unsettled by the happy ending, indeed by the generally jaunty (a word that kept perversely returning to me as I read) spirit of this closing leg.’24 However, the last of Golding’s books published in his lifetime can also be read as a deeply conservative political allegory and, overall, as one


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of his most deeply pessimistic novels. Talbot may conclude his three volume voyage to Australia by accepting the assertion of his fellow passenger Mrs Prettiman that the Odyssey provides no paradigm for his experience, but when Summers gives him some clothes at the beginning of Fire Down Below Talbot immediately finds a Homeric parallel: ‘I took down the Iliad, therefore, and read in book Zeta the story of Glaucus and Diomedes. They had exchanged armour recklessly, it seemed, trading bronze armour for gold.’25 Rites of Passage, with its two separate journals, is a novel very much concerned with reading and ‘misreading’, and in Fire Down Below Talbot strikingly misinterprets this incident from the Iliad: ‘I now understand it as a profound allegory of friendship! Friends will hand over anything that is needed and think nothing of it!’ (Fire, 120). However, in the Iliad, Glaucus and Diomedes have only just met on the field of battle and they exchange gifts, not through friendship, but out of mutual respect for one another’s lineage: ‘Glaucus’ tale delighted Diomedes of the loud war-cry. He stuck his spear into the fruitful earth, and now addressed the Lycian prince in cordial terms. “Surely,” he said, “your family and mine are linked by oldestablished ties”.’26 The story of Glaucus and Diomedes is referred to on several occasions throughout Fire Down Below, and it possesses important implications for the conclusion of the novel in particular. Equally important, however, is the alacrity with which Talbot perceives symbolic significance. Despite Mrs Prettiman’s insistence that the voyage is what it is and no more, Fire Down Below is an intensely metaphorical work and consistently suggests dual levels of meaning. Marilyn Butler suggests that Wordsworth’s tragedy The Borderers can be read metaphorically: ‘The Borderers can be read as a stylized account of the French Revolution. Its hero, Marmaduke, is led on by the disaffected Oswald to wish to kill the old, blind helpless Herbert, a father-figure who might stand generally for the ancien regime or more specifically for Louis XVI himself.’27 Fire Down Below can also be read in such a way. Benet can be seen to represent the most immediately engaging, and yet ultimately superficial and even dangerous aspects of the revolutionary temperament, for the qualities that he possesses are also those which have caused the destruction of the ship by fire. The flames that engulf the Britannia are suggestive of the flames that have only just ceased to engulf Europe, and Talbot views these as the direct result of the destructive and deadly work begun during the Revolution; a sentiment he shares with the majority of his class. If it is possible to view Benet as the attractive yet ultimately destructive power of the Revolution, the cautious Summers represents a considerably more conservative view of life. It is certainly possible here to speculate that Golding’s political allegory has a contemporary resonance. The novel was published in 1989, when ‘conservatism’ in Great Britain, had a particular kind of social meaning, and this word would certainly have had significance for Golding

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whose own politics were considerably left of centre. However, typically, and consistent with all his later fiction, he seems much more attracted to the vivid polarity that exists, in this case, between Romanticism and Conservatism. While Golding reconciles polarities that are religious, as in Darkness Visible and The Paper Men, here, politically, he allows the polarity to stand but, significantly, he refrains from endorsing one over the other. Summers’s prudence enables him to stand for all those, regardless of class, who are aware of the fragile hold which humanity has over its own barbarism, and the relevance of Golding’s own Lord of the Flies may be seen here. Summers speaks for all those who value restraint and moderation in the political arena. He speaks, most particularly, for Edmund Burke. Conor Cruise O’Brien quotes from a letter written by Burke in October 1789: ‘ “Prudence (in all things a Virtue, in politicks the first of Virtues) . . . Believe me, Sir, in all changes in the State, Moderation is a Virtue, not only amiable but powerful. It is a disposing, arranging, conciliating, cementing Virtue . . . to dare to be fearful when all about you are full of presumption and confidence”.’28 Only Summers has as much respect for prudence as does Burke: ‘ “I have seldom found circumstances in the service where caution did not enable me to detect the correct line of duty” ’ (Fire, 87). Summers’s apparent dullness is no match for Benet’s reckless audacity and it is the most poignant of ironies that the one man on board the ship who has the courage and the sense of duty to oppose Benet should also be the only man to be killed by his methods. Like Golding’s earlier novel Free Fall, Fire Down Below is principally concerned with choice. In Free Fall, Samuel Mountjoy chooses Beatrice Ifor: the world of the flesh over that of the spirit. In Fire Down Below, Talbot makes precisely the same choice; the narrative is centred upon his crucial decision not to accompany Mr Prettiman on his quest: ‘But you will come!’ I said nothing. It was a silence that grew, lengthened until the very noise of the water hissing past our hull sounded like some wordless voice; and at last I knew that it did not need words and was something even closer to me than words themselves. It was the cold, plain awareness which we call common sense. (Fire, 219) Browning writes in ‘Andrea Del Sarto’: ‘Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp / Or what’s a heaven for?’29 Talbot’s reach never exceeds his grasp; he remains irrevocably wedded to the world. Significantly, however, like Sophy in Darkness Visible, of whom the spirits tell Matty: ‘ “Many years ago we called her before us but she did not come” ’ (Darkness, 238), Talbot too has been called: ‘And yet I really had seen!’ (Fire, 220).


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Talbot’s recognition of the existence of a way of life which he chooses not to follow invests the novel with a pessimism which was ignored by the great majority of its reviewers. The conclusion of Fire Down Below actually resembles that of The Pyramid, a novel which Don Crompton describes as ‘a deeply gloomy novel, one of the most pessimistic of all Golding’s works’.30 In the concluding lines of The Pyramid, Oliver, the protagonist, comments: ‘ “I would pay anything – anything: but knew in the same instant that, like Henry, I would never pay more than a reasonable price”.’31 Talbot makes exactly the same choice as Oliver, and writes of Mr Prettiman’s invitation to join him in Eldorado: ‘Yet I saw already that the price was impossibly high’ (Fire, 220). Talbot’s love for Miss Chumley is exemplary and his desire to serve his country is admirable, but Mr Prettiman offers him the spirit and, like Oliver in The Pyramid, Talbot chooses the world. With his printing press and his belief in human equality, Mr Prettiman resembles Tom Paine, the author of The Rights of Man (1791–92), a book which is possibly being alluded to in Golding’s own title Rites of Passage. While Paine’s book was a reply to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Mr Prettiman is less specifically political than Paine. He has a visionary optimism that verges on the mystical in its insistence upon a richer and more purposeful existence, the utopian promise of which is unquestionably one of the very great legacies of the Romantic movement. Mr Prettiman may take the word ‘Eldorado’ from Voltaire’s Candide, but he uses it metaphorically – to represent a utopian ideal, much as W.H. Auden uses the word ‘Atlantis’ in his poem of the same name: Being set on the idea Of getting to Atlantis, You have discovered of course Only the Ship of Fools is Making the voyage this year . . . 32 Although Talbot has been asked to keep an official eye upon Mr Prettiman, whom the authorities regard as a possible revolutionary, he develops a genuine respect and admiration for him. Mr Prettiman forces Talbot to realize that the established order is corrupt and it is he, therefore, who begins in Talbot the process which concludes in his laudable desire to fight complacency, corruption and indifference in the borough he is to represent in parliament. While Mr Prettiman rounds off Talbot’s education in politics, Miss Chumley finishes his ‘sentimental education’. Her very arrival in Australia, of course, is part of the ‘fairy story’ which Talbot admits he is recounting during the concluding pages of Fire Down Below. Fowles writes in his Independent review that Miss Chumley ‘reappears at the end of the book (perhaps


a touch unbelievably . . .)’.33 Much of what occurs in the last chapters is indeed unbelievable – plot reversals swiftly succeed one another, the narrator’s fortunes rapidly plummet then just as rapidly rise again, characters coincidentally and tidily return; it is surprising that Talbot does not possess a useful strawberry birthmark. When the ship is approaching land Talbot is careful to emphasize the way in which reality is unlike fiction, and yet the chapters which follow luxuriate in the artificial. There are addresses to the ‘dear reader’, and Talbot archly invites Goldsmith and Jane Austen to emulate him, while reference is knowingly made to the ‘suspension of disbelief’. However, at this point, even the most acquiescent reader might balk at Miss Chumley’s suggestion that she and Talbot are like Romeo and Juliet. Their completely unopposed love has as little relevance to the tragic poetry and doomed young lives within Romeo and Juliet as Talbot and Summers’s friendship has to the Glaucus and Diomedes incident in the Iliad. However, Romeo and Juliet does have relevance to Fire Down Below, if not to the relationship between Talbot and Miss Chumley. Romeo and Juliet depicts the conflict between passion and prudence and so does Fire Down Below. In Golding’s novel this conflict is represented by the relationship between Benet and Summers, but it is also present in Talbot’s decision not to accompany Mr Prettiman. Of course, Romeo and Juliet ends tragically while Fire Down Below seems to have a happy ending, but even here there are similarities. T.J.B. Spencer writes of the play: ‘the last Act is fine, in its way. But in the remembered impression of the play it is the passion of the lovers, their conversation by moonlight, and their parting at dawn, and not their suicides, that remain.’34 Fire Down Below parallels this effect. With its steadily increasing focus upon the fairytale prosperity and good fortune of the young couple, the novel achieves the interesting feat of persuading its readers that it ends with Miss Chumley rushing into Talbot’s arms; this is the ‘remembered impression’. The conclusion proper of Fire Down Below, however, is considerably less joyous, for Talbot dreams of Mr Prettiman and his followers: ‘You would have thought from the excitement and the honey light, from the crowd that followed them, from the laughter and, yes, the singing, you would have thought they were going to some great festival of joy’ (Fire, 312). It is these dream figures who enjoy a happy ending, not Talbot, who will not, cannot, accompany Mr Prettiman. The last words which Talbot writes, ostensibly to his own descendants, are ‘we could not all do that sort of thing. The world must be served, must it not? Only it did cross my mind before I had properly dealt with myself that she had said, or he had said, that I could come too, although I never countenanced the idea. Still, there it is’ (Fire, 313). At the end of the novel Talbot is obviously a very successful man, but the principal reason that Fire Down Below places such an emphasis upon its ‘fairytale’ ending may well be to invite speculation as to precisely what constitutes a happy ending. Golding artfully suggests that an unequivocally


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‘happy ending’ is an impossibility; all endings, however apparently happy, must have within them something of an unhappy ending, if only because they are endings. Critical readings of the Sea Trilogy focus on what Talbot has learnt, the ways in which he has developed, but Fire Down Below enables the reader also to see just what Talbot has lost throughout the voyage. Talbot pays handsomely for all that he has learnt. His understanding of pain and sorrow cost him his equanimity and his egoism. He has lost his assured place in the universe. Although he has discovered the existence of a spiritual realm, he cannot enter it. Miss Chumley may seem to offer an eminently superior alternative to Mr Prettiman’s eccentric vision, but in the concluding pages of the novel Talbot writes of her: ‘Was she really as anxious, so innocent or ignorant, and was I ever so moved by her?’ (Fire, 301). The tone is one of mild disbelief. Miss Chumley’s name is perfectly chosen, and offers a very English joke. ‘Chumley’ is a phonetic rendering of the vexatious and problematic English surname ‘Cholmondely’, which is pronounced as her name is spelt. A ‘chum’, of course, is a friend, and Golding’s phoneticism allows him to stress the real nature of the relationship between Miss Chumley and Talbot. This is indeed what she is – what she is not, is everything that could transcend the limitations inherent in human relationships. Talbot chose the life he would lead and it has been a good one, but he never stops wondering whether he made the correct choice, or whether he ever had a choice. At the conclusion of Fire Down Below we may see Talbot’s similarity to one of Auden’s ‘witty scholars’ ‘Who have proved there cannot be / Such a place as Atlantis’; Talbot also shares their ‘enormous simple grief’: Learn their logic, but notice How its subtlety betrays Their enormous simple grief; Thus they shall teach you the ways To doubt that you may believe.35 When Summers gives him the old clothes on the ship, Talbot imagines that he and Summers are playing the parts of Glaucus and Diomedes, of whom Homer writes: ‘With no more said, they leapt from their chariots, shook hands and pledged each other. But Zeus the son of Cronos must have robbed Glaucus of his wits, for he exchanged with Diomedes golden armour for bronze, a hundred oxen’s worth for the value of nine.’36 Talbot reads this as an allegory of true friendship, and he feels himself Diomedes – to have given little and received much. But an alternative reading might see Talbot as Glaucus, and suggest that the world, not Zeus, robbed him of his wits. Talbot exchanges the honey light and the joy and the singing for the continuously decaying blandishments of a world in which all voyages end in

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death. It is Talbot who exchanges the golden armour he had seen during one blindingly intense moment for the bronze armour of public office and private domesticity; a hundred oxen’s worth for the value of nine. In 1995 Faber published The Double Tongue, which is, essentially, the second draft of the book Golding had been working on for the two years before his death. Nevertheless, unfinished though it clearly is, it is a remarkable piece of work. The majority of the book is set in Delphi, early in the first century BC. Greece is becoming a province of the Roman Empire, and Delphi is losing its position at the centre of the religious world: donations are down and the temple roof leaks badly. The story is narrated by Arieka, a woman now in her eighties, as Golding was when he was writing it, who reminisces about her extraordinary life as First Prophetess at the oracle in Delphi. The Double Tongue is deftly and economically written, with a wry, iconoclastic humour running throughout it. There are, of course, some magnificent set-pieces, the most powerful of which is Arieka’s account of her first descent into the cave of Apollo. The novel is a meditation on doubt, a celebration of uncertainty. From the beginning of the book, ambiguity is privileged. Even as a child, Arieka realizes ‘the god speaks with a double tongue’.37 At Delphi, Arieka’s mentor and confidante is the flamboyantly gay, cynical high priest Ionides. It is he who encourages Arieka to solicit money to pay for the much-needed repairs to the temple, and he also advises her to tell the rich and powerful what they want to hear. Strikingly, though, despite her understanding of the cynicism and manipulation which animate Delphi, Arieka is also convinced something real is also present: I began to see how the oracle, like Ionides, was surrounded by contradictions. Whatever lay at the centre of the oracle, that mysterious heart of it which spoke so often with riddling words so that only a suppliant who was both wise and humble could choose the right interpretation, I believed, no, I felt I knew there was something connected with the hidden centre of existence that lay there and sometimes spoke. 38 However, near the end of her life, Arieka is not sure if she really was an interpreter of the great mysteries, or just an entertainer. It is not at all fanciful to suggest that Golding offers his readers here an oblique commentary on the artist’s vocation: do artists have access to a deeper wisdom? Do they deserve respect for the profundity of their vision, itself lying somewhere outside their own comprehension, or are they all merely entertainers, charlatans, dazzling their audience with what amounts to little more than technical expertise and manipulative trickery? Given the immensity of Golding’s contribution to the English novel, The Double Tongue is a remarkably modest, even humble book, and a valuable addition to an extraordinary legacy.


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Notes 1. David Morgan, ‘Theater of War: Combat, the Military, and Masculinities’, in Harry Brod and Michael Kaufman (eds), Theorizing Masculinities (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994), pp. 165–82, 165. 2. William Golding, ‘Fable’, The Hot Gates (London: Faber, 1984), 86–7. 3. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (London: Fontana, 1985), 405. 4. Bernard F. Dick, William Golding (Boston: Twayne, 1987), 93. 5. Alexander Pope, Collected Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 162. 6. Alan Macfarlane, ‘The Root of all Evil’, in David Parkin (ed.), The Anthropology of Evil (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), pp. 57–76, 70. 7. Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs Du Mal, trans. C.F. MacIntyre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1947), 392. 8. Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949), 69–70. 9. William Golding, Darkness Visible (London: Faber, 1979), 14. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Darkness followed by page number. 10. Ronald Inden, ‘Hindu Evil as Unconquered Lower Self’, in David Parkin (ed.), The Anthropology of Evil (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), pp. 142–64, 160. 11. David Parkin, ‘Introduction’, in The Anthropology of Evil, pp. 1–25, 7. 12. Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1961), 325. 13. Stan Gooch, Total Man: Notes Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Personality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 57. 14. Edwin M. Mosely, Pseudonyms of Christ in the Modern Novel (New York: Harper, 1962), 44. 15. Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Harper, 1958), 115. 16. Patricia Waugh, Metafiction (London: Methuen, 1984), 6. 17. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 139. 18. Eagleton, Literary Theory, 134. 19. William Golding, The Paper Men (London: Faber, 1984), 122–3. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Paper, followed by page number. 20. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 5. 21. Mircea Eliade, Ordeal by Labyrinth, trans. Derek Coltman (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), 125. 22. Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 18. 23. Elizabeth Longford, The Life of Wellington, vol. 1 (London: Methuen, 1969), 51. 24. John Bayley, Guardian, 17 March 1989, 40; John Fowles, Independent, 18 March 1989, 38. 25. William Golding, Fire Down Below (London: Faber, 1989), 64. Hereafter cited parenthetically as Fire followed by page number. 26. Homer, The Iliad, trans. E.V. Rieu (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 122–3. 27. Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 64–5. 28. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 15. 29. Robert Browning, The Poetical Works (London: Heinemann, 1951), 524.

202 British Fiction After Modernism 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

Don Crompton, A View From The Spire (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 70. William Golding, The Pyramid (London: Faber, 1967), 217. W.H. Auden, Selected Poems (London: Faber, 1964), 45. Fowles, Independent, 40. T.J.B. Spencer, Introduction to Romeo and Juliet (London: Penguin, 1967), 44. Auden, Selected Poems, 45. Homer, The Iliad, 123. William Golding, The Double Tongue (London: Faber, 1995), 8. Golding, The Double Tongue, 99.

16 The British Novel in 1960 Bernard Bergonzi

Among the novels published in a single year were: Kingsley Amis’s Take a Girl Like You; Lynne Reid Banks’s The L-Shaped Room; Stan Barstow’s A Kind of Loving; Anthony Burgess’s The Right to an Answer and The Doctor is Sick; Lawrence Durrell’s Clea; David Lodge’s The Picturegoers; Colin MacInnes’s Mr Love and Justice; Anthony Powell’s Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant; C.P. Snow’s The Affair; Muriel Spark’s The Bachelors and The Ballad of Peckham Rye; David Storey’s This Sporting Life and Flight into Camden; and Raymond Williams’s Border Country. My present aim is to take a high-level and bird’s eye view of the productions of a single year, and to see what possibly interesting features the landscape presents. But why 1960? The reason is partly personal: in that year I started reviewing novels, and in fact reviewed some of the titles above; beyond that, I read most of the other books soon after they were published. 1960 was, too, a year in which several novelists who had emerged in the 1950s developed and consolidated their achievements, and when some significant first novels came out. It was also a highly productive year, when novelists such as Burgess, Spark and Storey published two novels each. And all the novels on the list are currently in print. People are evidently still reading them, although I suspect that in some cases the readers may be the captive audiences of courses on the modern novel; significantly, Stan Barstow’s A Kind of Loving is available in the UK only in a high school edition. Before coming to the productions of 1960, I want to glance at some earlier dates. 1945, which saw the end of the Second World War, was not a good year for fiction: only just over a thousand novels were published, compared with more than 4000 in 1939 (although only a small proportion of these productions in either year would be what we would regard as literary fiction). The figures tell their own story, reflecting the wartime paper shortage and the fact that novelists were engaged in activities other than writing. Yet even that bleak year brought forth three works which remain important: George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Henry Green’s Loving and Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. These three were writers who began their careers well 203


before the Second World War. New writers were slow to appear, but Angus Wilson brought the sense of a startling new talent with his collections of short stories at the end of the decade, The Wrong Set (1949) and Such Darling Dodos (1950). I am old enough to remember the excitement they caused, and which I shared when I read these books soon after their publication. But Wilson’s first novel, Hemlock and After (1952), was received with great respect rather than wild acclaim. In any case, he was not, after all, a very young writer, being thirty-nine by then; and I incline to the opinion that his essential gifts were those of a short-story writer rather than a novelist. One other year needs to be mentioned, something of an annus mirabilis, 1954, which saw the first novels of Amis (Lucky Jim), Golding (Lord of the Flies) and Murdoch (Under the Net). They went on to acquire great celebrity, and titles, as Sir Kingsley, Sir William and Dame Iris. Even though they were not very young either when their first novels appeared – Golding was in his forties – their development having been delayed by wartime service, they brought the sense that a new literary generation had finally arrived. Anthony Powell wrote in a review of Lucky Jim, which was the first of the three novels to be published, that Amis was ‘the first promising young novelist who has turned up for a long time’.1 By 1960, these particular writers had consolidated their reputations. Amis published Take a Girl Like You in that year, and Golding and Murdoch bracketed it with Free Fall in 1959 and A Severed Head in 1961; in the latter year, too, Angus Wilson published The Old Men at the Zoo. The synchronic process of looking at entities which came out at the same time can be illuminating, but it can also seem unnatural to creatures who are forced to live in time and sooner or later want to get back to the diachronic comforts of seeing one thing follow on another. The oldest writers on the list, Powell, Snow and Durrell, had begun as novelists before the war. After it, all three engaged in one of the most interesting aspects of post-war fiction: the production of long novels in several parts, whether romans fleuves such as Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time and Snow’s Strangers and Brothers, which he had started as long ago as 1940, or trilogies and tetralogies such as Durrell’s. Other examples would include Henry Williamson’s A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight and Simon Raven’s Alms for Oblivion, among the very long works, and L.P. Hartley’s Eustace and Hilda, Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour and Anthony Burgess’s Malayan Trilogy among the merely long ones. And there are a good many others. Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant, one of the novels of 1960, is the fifth volume of Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. Like all the parts of the sequence it appeared as a separate novel as a matter of publishing convenience, but it would be hard going for a reader who came to it without knowing what had gone before. It has the range of characters, the comic effects and the baffled curiosity about human behaviour familiar from the earlier volumes. But the lives of Nicholas Jenkins, the narrator, and his

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friends are getting darker and more troubled, or at least more complicated. Jenkins marries Isobel Tolland, and marriage provides a recurring theme; Nicholas is concerned about and interested in the difficult marriage of his friend the composer Hugh Moreland, and appalled by the destructive one of the music critic MacClintick. The novel is set against the historical background of the Abdication Crisis of 1936 and the Spanish Civil War, ending with the prospect of a larger war. That war will bring death to many of Nicholas’s acquaintances, and death is already an intrusive presence: MacClintick commits suicide, and the elderly man of letters St John Clark finally dies. Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant is one of the richest volumes in the sequence, and in 1960 it concludes the pre-war phase of Nicholas’s life. C.P. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers has lasted less well than Powell’s sequence, although it continues to appeal to readers who want fiction about men and affairs and, in the phrase Snow gave to the language with the title of one of his novels, the ‘corridors of power’. His contribution to the literary output of 1960, The Affair, seems to me to be a sadly wasted opportunity. It takes place in the Cambridge that provided the setting for what I think is Snow’s best novel, The Masters, seventeen years later, with many of the same characters. It has a deeply interesting situation and plot, the story of a scientific forgery and the incrimination and disgrace of an innocent but widely disliked fellow of the college (there is a deliberate echo in this of the Dreyfus affair). This should be a fascinating drama about academic politics and moral decision-making, but it suffers from the wooden, inexpressive quality of the writing and, by implication, of the pervading sensibility. One way of describing it might be to say that it reads like an interesting foreign novel in a terrible translation. If Snow’s prose is flat, Durrell’s is in a state of permanent over-excitement. His 1960 novel Clea is the last volume of the Alexandria Quartet which he had been writing during the 1950s. War has come to Alexandria and at the end of the sequence several of Durrell’s bizarre or colourful characters are dead, and most of those who remain are maimed or mutilated. There were good reasons for Durrell’s sequence to be popular at the time: in the dull deprived culture of post-war England it offered a powerful whiff of the exotic, tuppence-coloured rather than penny plain. But, taking a longer view, I think those critics were right who saw the Quartet as a late venture into the Decadence of the end of the nineteenth century. The Alexandria Quartet should perhaps stand on one’s shelves with Mario Praz’s The Romantic Agony on one side of it and Edward Said’s Orientalism on the other. Among the lesser characters in Snow’s The Affair is a young Cambridge don called Lester Ince, who teaches English and is writing a detailed commentary on Conrad’s Nostromo; he is slangy and iconoclastic, and likes beer and jazz. The novel is something of a roman à clef and Ince is evidently meant to be a version of Kingsley Amis – an identification that Snow himself indeed once confirmed to me. It is a superficial and inaccurate rendering,


but it conveys Snow’s sense that Amis was, in another of his phases, one of the ‘new men’ (another Snow title) who were taking over literature. We now tend to think of Martin as the dominant Amis, and his late father as a grotesque, crusty reactionary, but the Amis of 1960, as Snow tried to present him, was youngish, prepared to be cheerful, and a Labour voter. He was then the most prominent of the generation of novelists who had come on the scene in the 1950s. Patrick Standish, the quasi-hero of Amis’s Take a Girl Like You, has a lot of his author in him. It was Amis’s fourth novel, his longest, and his most carefully considered and worked on. It has a kind of nostalgic appeal as a period piece from the early days of the sexual revolution, and has since been made into a television series (which didn’t work very well from what I saw of it). It is in fact a very literary novel, as readers have long been aware, in which Patrick’s protracted siege of Jenny Bunn’s virginity, which he can only overcome when she is unconscious, echoes the rape in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. Jenny also has elements of a female Candide, and her movement from the gloomy North of England, where her father, appropriately enough, is a hearse-driver, to be a teacher in a pleasant country town somewhere near London, follows the archetypal progress visible in nineteenth-century French and English novels: a character, usually a young man, goes from the provinces to seek his fortune in the capital. Take a Girl Like You does, I think, ultimately suffer from its moral incoherence and contradictions, but it offers many of the satisfactions of traditional realism, with a quasi-Balzacian solidity and an acute response to the sounds and surfaces of social life. The north-south divide is always good for journalistic mileage and it was invoked by several of the new novelists of the 1950s, notably by John Braine in Room at the Top (1957). Jenny’s move south in Amis’s novel is paralleled in David Storey’s second novel Flight into Camden, in which the heroine Margaret flees from the Yorkshire mining town where she has grown up, to live in a room in Camden Town with her married lover. Storey presents London as hellish rather than attractive, and by the end of the novel the lover has departed and Margaret is back in Yorkshire. That most of the novels on my 1960 list are set in London is not altogether surprising given the cultural dominance of the capital, but it is not a very glamorous London. David Lodge’s The Picturegoers and Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye take place in the unfashionable southeastern suburbs, and Spark’s The Bachelors and Lynne Reid Banks’s L-Shaped Room in the western areas that had not yet become sought after. Burgess’s The Doctor is Sick has a nondescript urban setting which suggests to me somewhere like Paddington; Colin MacInnes’s Mr Love and Justice moves between Stepney and Kilburn; Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant is set in Powell’s favourite territory, which Walter Allen described as the point where Mayfair met Soho, although this is as much a socio-cultural as a geographical area.2


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The other novels take us elsewhere; Durrell’s right off the British map, to Egypt. Snow’s is set in Cambridge, with occasional scenes in London clubland. Barstow and Storey use an industrial Yorkshire setting, and Raymond Williams the Welsh border country. Burgess’s The Right to an Answer takes place in a nameless Midland town which he identifies as Leicester in his autobiography.3 The place of Leicester in modern British fiction is worth a brief note; it provided the starting point, or at least the inspiration, for a surprising number of novels. As well as Burgess’s, there were the early volumes of Snow’s Strangers and Brothers, William Cooper’s Scenes from Provincial Life (1950), Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954) and Malcolm Bradbury’s first novel Eating People is Wrong (1959). In one sense the English novel has always had a strong provincial element: if there were Dickens and Thackeray, there were also the Brontës and George Eliot. But the new provincialism of the 1950s was seen as a challenge, perhaps a threat, to metropolitan dominance. Of the other novelists who began in the 1950s, Anthony Burgess is the most cosmopolitan, both in the experiences he draws on and in the extraordinary range of his interests. His Malayan Trilogy is based on his years as a teacher in Malaya and is an early post-war example of the fiction of decolonization. It lacks the verbal sophistication of Burgess’s later work but it already reflects his cheerfully misanthropic view of the world. The two novels he published in 1960 are a fairly minor part of his oeuvre and are intermittently out of print. The Doctor is Sick is a light-hearted comic novel, based on Burgess’s own experience of having been wrongly diagnosed as having a brain tumour and not having long to live. It ranges over the rundown London of the late 1950s, when his hero, Edwin Spindrift Ph.D., escapes from hospital and gets caught up in picaresque adventures with various bohemian or criminal types. It is very funny in places. My favourite joke donnishly involves Hopkins; Dr Spindrift looks at a row of magazines in a newsagents, called Brute Beauty, Valour, Act, Oh!, Air, Pride, Plume. (But where, I wonder, was Buckle?) Spindrift, like Burgess, has come back to England from the Far East, as has the central character of The Right to an Answer. He is disgusted with the wife-swapping and other low antics of the inhabitants of the Midland town where he is staying, and his life is made miserable by a Singhalese student who follows him to England and stalks him. The Right to an Answer is sourly comic; it provides an early satire on what is now called the race relations industry, and would probably not be publishable today. Burgess got into his stride two years later with the notorious but powerful A Clockwork Orange. That novel, like most of his best fiction, is pervaded with his lapsedCatholic, Augustinian sense of the depravity of human nature, conveyed in bleak comedy. Muriel Spark had made a dazzling debut as a novelist in 1957 with The Comforters, a novel in a metafictional mode in which the act of composition


is part of the material of the work. This made it a striking exception to the broadly realistic norms of the novel-writing of the time. Her 1959 novel Memento Mori, discussed in this collection by Rod Mengham, shows how casually Spark took the conventions of realism. And so does The Ballad of Peckham Rye, which, as Bryan Cheyette remarks in his study of Spark, resembles a border-ballad disguised as a novel, where the attractive but demonic figure of Dougal Douglas appears in the settled, respectable community of Peckham and violently disturbs its life.4 It is an ingenious fantasy in a scrupulously observed setting; it provides an acute account of workingclass life, though done with cold detachment rather than sentiment. The writing is impressively economical and precise; the dialogue recalls Pinter’s, and the minute notations of scenes remind me of Robbe-Grillet. The Bachelors, Spark’s other novel of 1960, is also ingenious, but less inventive, and the tone is rather heavy in comparison. It presents a little world of bachelors and their lady friends in the coffee bars and pubs of Chelsea and Kensington, at a time when those areas still had their rather raffish aspects. It is tightly plotted, in the manner of a detective novel; epilepsy and spiritualism play important parts in the characters’ lives. Colin MacInnes was an indefatigable recorder of London life in three novels published between 1957 and 1960: City of Spades (1957), Absolute Beginners (1959) and Mr Love and Justice. He was interested in what one might loosely call the socially marginalized: West Indian immigrants and working-class teenagers, respectively, in the first two, and prostitutes, ponces and policemen in the third. MacInnes was, in his way, a brilliant writer; although he may not be widely read now, his Absolute Beginners was filmed in the 1980s, and a play based on City of Spades has been performed on BBC radio. These two novels combine acute social, or sociological, observation with a strong comic sense. In comparison, Mr Love and Justice is narrower in focus and less funny, although it goes deeper. It reveals the relationship, at first adversarial and then collusive, between Frankie Love, a young seaman who drifts into becoming a ponce, and Edward Justice, an ambitious young CID officer. MacInnes always gives the impression of being well informed, and in this book he writes knowledgeably about the ways of prostitutes and their protectors, and about the police and their peculiar culture. It seems to me penetrating in its reflections on the nature of justice, and the complex relations, indeed interdependence, between policing and crime. MacInnes’s narrator is a keen observer of human nature and its settings, but he is also given to agreeably mordant comments on character and motives. He remarks of a detective-sergeant, who brushes aside an objection to his plan: ‘as with so many strategists, “the plan” already was, for him, a reality to which reality itself must needs conform’.5 Mr Love and Justice is formally and thematically tighter than its predecessors, with the patterning of a moral fable. It is deliberately stylized: thus, only the two central characters are given names. This is a distinguished novel,


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with a philosophical dimension that is more characteristic of French fiction than of English. I turn now to the debut novels that appeared in 1960. Raymond Williams’s Border Country was the work of a writer who was already celebrated for his Culture and Society 1780–1950. It has a clearly autobiographical dimension; the ‘border country’ of its title refers initially to the area on the edge of Wales where Williams grew up, but more generally to the border that working-class scholarship boys found they had to cross when they moved into higher education and professional life. It is a theme that recurs in Williams’s writing, and in the work of his contemporaries, such as Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957). Border Country has always had its admirers; more, I would say, than his other fiction. But the admiration may be more for its contribution to the view of life and culture and society presented in Williams’s whole corpus of works than for its merits as literary fiction. I reviewed it when it appeared, and I happen to have kept this review. I wrote then: Mr Williams writes with intense conviction, and has evidently lived through the experiences he describes; but he lacks the disinterested passion, the delight in fictive life of the true novelist. The story is excessively slow moving and clogged with descriptive detail, and while there is a great deal of dialogue, not much of it is convincing. Harsh? Certainly. Wrong? Possibly. Lynne Reid Banks’s The L-Shaped Room retains a particular status as a proto-feminist novel. Banks’s literary territory, though not her talent, has something in common with MacInnes’s, which might be described in sociological terms as ‘socio-cultural marginalization in Inner West London in the late 1950s’. Her heroine Jane is a young professional woman who moves through a representative modern experience by becoming pregnant and insisting on keeping the baby without marrying the father. She moves into the ‘L-shaped room’ in a boarding house in darkest Fulham, then a seedy and unfashionable area. She is loyally supported in her difficult situation by the other tenants: a gay black jazz musician, a tormented Jewish writer who falls in love with her, and a kindly prostitute. At the end even the cantankerous and grasping landlady turns out to be reasonably kindhearted. Notwithstanding its seriousness and the representative nature of its study of a young woman who embodies both traditional vulnerability and up-to-date independence of spirit, The L-Shaped Room is grossly sentimental, in ways that are sometimes reminiscent of Dickens at his direst. Margaret Drabble would later treat a similar subject much more effectively in The Millstone (1966). With David Lodge’s The Picturegoers we cross the river, to the southeastern suburbs where he – and I – grew up. It focuses on a large working-class

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Catholic family, whose weekends are divided between going to the cinema on Saturday evenings and Mass on Sunday mornings. In its treatment of Catholic themes it occasionally recalls Graham Greene, whom Lodge has always admired though acknowledging that Greene’s Catholic preoccupations are very unlike his own. The Picturegoers is ambitiously organized, rather too much so for its own good, and parts of it are patently immature. But when one recalls that it was published when Lodge was twenty-five, and had been completed two years earlier, its promise is remarkable. Lodge’s later reputation has been substantially as a comic novelist but there are few traces of that quality in his first novel. Since then he has stayed the course to a remarkable extent as a novelist and critic. The two remaining first novels were written by Yorkshiremen, and have both been categorized as works of provincial realism. In Stan Barstow’s A Kind of Loving the young protagonist and narrator, Vic, is the son of a miner; he has acquired enough education to move several rungs up the class ladder and is working as a draughtsman; his sister is a teacher and his younger brother wants to be a doctor. But his hopes in life are dashed in a very traditional fashion; his shallow girlfriend becomes pregnant after a single fumbled encounter, and according to the traditional mores of the community he has no alternative but to enter into a loveless marriage, although he no longer even likes her. It is the tragedy of Hardy’s Jude and many other young men in fiction; in places Barstow recalls Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence, but the author he most suggests to me is George Gissing, in his careful naturalism and his depressed determinism, though with more relieving touches of humour. David Storey’s This Sporting Life is in one sense a novel of northern working-class life. But the work in question is twofold; the narrator and central figure Arthur Machen is a factory worker; but he is also a professional player of Rugby League football. The novel is marked by an uncomfortable intensity and a strong sense of the physical; Arthur describes what it is like to endure pain on the football field, and to inflict it, for he is a rough player. The toughness, sometimes the brutality, of the narrative is tempered by a lyrical response to landscape, whether urban or rural. Lawrence is a strong influence in these descriptions, and in the account of the touching but miserable love affair between Arthur and his widowed landlady. There is an obvious division between Arthur’s inarticulate toughness and the lyrical passages in which the author takes over the narrative, though Storey knew from personal experience what he had been writing about, having himself been a professional rugby player. This Sporting Life is original and powerful, and I regard it as the best first novel of 1960. In the language of recent ideological debates it is an emphatically masculinist novel; its successor, Flight into Camden, where there is a female narrator and where the influence of Lawrence is excessive, is compelling and very lyrical in places, but less memorable.


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In the convenient categories of literary history and pedagogy most of the novels I have discussed could be placed in the capacious bag of realism. But not all of them: Durrell’s Clea would not fit it very easily, and Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye certainly would not, and perhaps not her The Bachelors. Mr Love and Justice, for all its careful documentary study of London life, is as much concerned with ideas as with observation. Storey’s realism is inescapable, grim and anhedonic, yet even in his first two novels it has an expressionist quality that points to a different mode of writing – what that was appears in the quasi-Gothic quality of his later novels. If there is any kind of conclusion to be drawn from this rapid survey it is that the concept, formulated in subsequent years, of the ‘classic realist text’ is a propagandist rather than a critical term. That text is liable to come apart in one’s hand when one picks it up. There is a phrase from Our Mutual Friend that T.S. Eliot used as a working title for The Waste Land: ‘he do the police in different voices’. I will adapt this and conclude: ‘Realists, yes. But they do the realism in different voices.’

Notes 1. Quoted in Michael Barber, Anthony Powell: a Life (London: Duckworth, 2004), 208. 2. Walter Allen, Tradition and Dream: the English and American Novel from the Twenties to Our Time (London: Phoenix House, 1964), 221. 3. Anthony Burgess, You’ve Had Your Time (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), 22. 4. Bryan Cheyette, Muriel Spark (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2000), 16, 44–5. 5. Colin MacInnes, Mr Love and Justice (New York: Dutton, 1961), 125.

Select Bibliography Primary sources Cary, Joyce. The Horse’s Mouth, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1944. Compton-Burnett, Ivy. Pastors and Masters, London: Heath Cranton, 1925. ——. Brothers and Sisters, London: Allison & Busby, 1929. ——. Daughters and Sons, London: Allison & Busby, 1937. ——. Parents and Children, London: Gollancz, 1941. ——. Elders and Betters, London: Gollancz, 1944. ——. Manservant and Maidservant, London: Gollancz, 1947. ——. Two Worlds and Their Ways, London: Gollancz, 1949. ——. The Present and the Past, London: Gollancz, 1953. ——. Mother and Son, London: Gollancz, 1955. ——. A God and His Gifts, London: Gollancz, 1963. ——. The Last and the First, London: Gollancz, 1971. Eliot, T.S. ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, Prufrock and Other Observations, London: The Egoist Ltd, 1917. Ford, Ford Madox. A Man Could Stand Up, London: Duckworth, 1926. Golding, William. The Pyramid, London: Faber, 1967. ——. Darkness Visible, London: Faber, 1979. ——. The Paper Men, London: Faber, 1984. ——. Fire Down Below, London: Faber, 1989. ——. The Double Tongue, London: Faber, 1995. Green, Henry. Nothing, London: Hogarth Press, 1951. ——. Living, London: Hogarth Press, 1953. ——. Party Going, London: Hogarth Press, 1962. ——. Caught, London: The Harvill Press, 1999. ——. Pack My Bag, London: Vintage, 2000. ——. Loving, London: Vintage, 2000. Greene, Graham. Collected Essays, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970. ——. A Sort of Life, London: The Bodley Head, 1971. ——. Gun For Sale [1936], Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. ——. The Ministry of Fear [1943], Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978. ——. It’s a Battlefield [1934], Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980. ——. England Made Me [1935], Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981. ——. Ways of Escape, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981. ——. Brighton Rock [1938], London: Vintage, 2004. ——. Stamboul Train [1932], London: Vintage, 2004. Gwynn-Browne, Arthur. F.S.P.: an N.C.O’s Description of His & Others’ First Six Months of War, Jan. 1st–June 1st 1940 [1942], Bridgend: Seren Books, 2004. Hamilton, Patrick. Hangover Square, London: Penguin Books, 1974. ——. The Slaves of Solitude, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1999. Hanley, James. Men in Darkness: Five Stories, London: Lane, 1931. ——. The German Prisoner, London: James Hanley, 1935. ——. Half an Eye: Sea Stories, London: John Lane, 1937. ——. Sailor’s Song, London: Nicholson & Watson, 1943. 212

Select Bibliography 213 ——. The Ocean, London: William Kimber & Co., 1976. ——. No Directions, London: André Deutsch, 1990. ——. The Last Voyage and Other Stories, London: Harvill, 1997. Jameson, Storm. Civil Journey, London: Cassell, 1939. ——. The Fort, London: Cassell, 1941. ——. The Black Laurel, London: Macmillan, 1947. ——. Journey from the North, Vol. 1, London: Collins and Harvill Press, 1969. Larkin, Philip. The Whitsun Weddings, London: Faber, 1964. ——. Collected Poems, London: Faber & Faber and The Marvell Press, 1990. Manning, Olivia. School for Love, London: William Heinemann, 1951. ——. The Spoilt City, London: Heinemann, 1962. ——. The Rain Forest, London: Heinemann, 1974. ——. The Danger Tree, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977. ——. Artist Among the Missing (1949), London: Heinemann, 1975. ——. Fortunes of War, Volume 1, The Balkan Trilogy, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982. ——. Fortunes of War, Volume 2, The Levant Trilogy, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982. ——. The Doves of Venus (1955), London: Virago, 1984. ——. The Wind Changes, (1937), London: Virago, 1988. MacInnes, Colin. Mr Love and Justice, New York: Dutton, 1961. Sansom, William. Fireman Flower and Other Stories, London: The Hogarth Press, 1944. Spark, Muriel. The Girls of Slender Means, London: Macmillan & Co, 1963. ——. Memento Mori, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961. Spring, Howard. Shabby Tiger, Manchester: Memories Press, 2001. ——. Hester Lilly (1954), London: Virago Press, 1995. Taylor, Elizabeth. At Mrs Lippincote’s (1945), London: Virago Press, 1988. Tchekhov, Anton. ‘The Kiss’, Selected Tales of Tchekhov Volume Two, trans. Constance Garnett, London: Chatto & Windus, 1962. Wells: H.G. Tono-Bungay and A Modern Utopia, London: Odhams Press, 1933. West, Rebecca. A Train of Powder (1955), London: Virago, 1984. ——. The Fountain Overflows, London, Macmillan, 1957 and London: Virago, 1984. ——. The Meaning of Treason, London: Virago, 1982. Wilson, Angus. The Wild Garden, London: Secker and Warburg, 1963. ——. No Laughing Matter, London: Secker and Warburg, 1967. ——. As if by Magic, London: Secker and Warburg, 1973. ——. The Wrong Set and Other Stories (1949), London: Granada, 1982. ——. Manuscript notes for No Laughing Matter, Box no. 11, University of Iowa archive. Woolf, Virginia. The Years, London: The Hogarth Press, 1937.

Secondary sources Athill, Diana. Stet: an Editor’s Life, London: Granta, 2000. Atwood, Margaret. Second Words: Selected Critical Prose, Toronto: Anansi, 1982. Alderman, Nigel. ‘ “The Life with a Hole in it”: Philip Larkin and the Condition of England’, Textual Practice, 8, 1994: 279–301. Allain, Marie-François. The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene, trans. Guido Waldman, London: The Bodley Head, 1983.

214

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216 Select Bibliography ——. (ed.). On Modern British Fiction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Lee, Hermione. ‘Kingsley and the Women’, The New Republic, 201(5), 1989: 39–40. Leggett, B.J. ‘Larkin’s Blues: Jazz and Modernism’, Twentieth Century Literature, 42, 1996: 258–76. Levenson, Michael (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Lewis, Wyndham. Blasting and Bombardiering: an Autobiography (1914–1926) [1937], London: John Calder, 1982. ——. Wyndham Lewis on Art: Collected Writings 1913–1956, eds. Walter Michel and C.J. Fox, London: Thames and Hudson, 1969. Liddell, Robert. Elizabeth and Ivy, London: Peter Owen, 1986. Light, Alison. Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars, London/New York: Routledge, 1991. Lodge, David. ‘The Novelist at the Crossroads’ [1969], in Malcolm Bradbury (ed.), The Novel Today: Contemporary Writers on Modern Fiction, London: Fontana, 1977. ——. ‘Dialogue in the Modern Novel’, in After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism, London: Routledge, 1990. ——. Language of Fiction: Essays on Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1996. McQuillan, Martin (ed.). Theorizing Muriel Spark: Gender, Race, Deconstruction, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. Mengham, Rod and N.H. Reeve (eds). The Fiction of the 1940s: Stories of Survival, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. Mepham, John. ‘Dorothy Richardson’s “unreadability”: Graphic Style and Narrative Strategy in a Modernist Novel’, English Literature in Translation 1880–1920, 43(4) 2000: 449–64. ——. ‘Patrick Hamilton’, The Literary Encyclopaedia, online database at www.litencyc. com. ——. ‘London as Auditorium: Public Space and Disconnected Talk in Works by Ford Madox Ford, Patrick Hamilton and Virginia Woolf’, in Susan Onega and John Stotesbury (eds), London in Literature: Visionary Mappings of the Metropolis, Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag, C. Winter, 2002, pp. 83–106. Miller, Tyrus. Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts between the World Wars, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999. Moore, Reginald. Modern Reading, volume 13, London: Wells, Gardner, Darton & Co., 1945. Mosley, Edwin M. Pseudonyms of Christ in the Modern Novel, New York: Harper, 1958. Newby, P.H. The Novel 1945–1950, London: Longmans Green, 1951. Nicolson, Harold. The English Sense of Humour, London: Dropmore Press, 1946. Orwell, George. ‘Inside the Whale’, in Essays, ed. John Carey, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002, pp. 211–49. Otto, Rudolph. The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970. Parkin, David (ed.). The Anthropology of Evil, Oxford: Blackwell, 1985. Perloff, Marjorie. ‘What to Make of a Diminished Thing’, Parnassus, 19, 1994: 9–29. Pick, Daniel. War Machine: the Rationalization of Slaughter in the Modern Age, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

Select Bibliography 217 Piette, Adam. Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry, 1939–1945, London: Papermac, 1995. Pound, Ezra. Gaudier-Brzeska: a Memoir, New York: New Directions, 1970. Prenderville, Brendan. Realism in Twentieth-Century Painting, London: Thames and Hudson, 2000. Rabinovitz, Rubin. The Reaction against Experiment in the English Novel 1950–1960, New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1967. Rawlinson, Mark. British Writing of the Second World War, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Rollyson, Carl. Rebecca West: a Saga of the Century, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands, London/Harmondsworth: Penguin/Granta, 1992. Sage, Lorna. Bad Blood, London: Fourth Estate, 2001. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Baudelaire, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949. Spaak, Paul Henri. Why Nato? Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1959. Spencer, T.J.B. Introduction to Romeo and Juliet, London: Penguin, 1967. Spender, Stephen. The Thirties and After: Poetry, Politics, People (1933–75), London: Fontana, 1978. Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson. Relevance: Communication and Cognition, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Sprigge, Elizabeth. The Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett, London: Gollancz, 1973. Spurling, Hilary. Secrets of a Woman’s Heart: the Later Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett 1920–1969, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1984. Stevenson, Randall. The Last of England? The Oxford English Literary History, vol. 12: 1960–2000, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Treglown, Jeremy. Romancing – the Life and Work of Henry Green, London: Faber & Faber, 2000. Vinsen, James (ed.). Contemporary Novelists, 3rd edition, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1982. Wardhaugh, Ronald. How Conversation Works, Oxford: Blackwell, 1985. Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction, London: Methuen, 1984. Wilson, Edmund. ‘The Emergence of Angus Wilson’, Critical Essays on Angus Wilson, ed. Jay Halio, Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1985. Wilson, Keith. ‘Jim, Jakle and the Years Between: the Will to Stasis in the Contemporary British Novel’, Ariel, 13, 1982: 55–69. Woolf, Virginia. ‘Modern Fiction’, The Common Reader: First Series (1925), San Diego, New York and London: Harvest, 1994. ——. A Room of One’s Own, (1929) London: Penguin, 2000. ——. ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’, The Death of the Moth and other Essays, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1942.

Index

Alderman, Nigel 135, 136 Amis, Kingsley 124, 131–44, 184, 185, 192, 205–6: Jake’s Thing 131; Lucky Jim 131–44, 204, 207; Take a Girl Like You 203, 204, 206 Amis, Martin 123, 161 Angry Young Men 133–4, 148, 184–5, 192 Atwood, Margaret 34 Auden, W.H.: ‘Atlantis’ 197, 199 Bakhtin, Mikhail 73, 100 Barker, A.L.: ‘Submerged’ 88–9 Barstow, Stan 185: A Kind of Loving 203, 210 Bataille, Georges 109, 115 Baudelaire, Charles 188 Bayley, John 194 Beckett, Samuel 35, 100, 121: Endgame 127 Bedford, Sybille: A Legacy 8, 13 Benjamin, Walter 17, 39 Bergonzi, Bernard 4, 10, 131 Bergson, Henri 102, 107, 112, 115 Blanchot, Maurice 161 Blake, William 168–9, 173, 174, 192 Bowen, Elizabeth 1, 6, 7, 9, 11, 59–60, 100, 102, 147: The Heat of the Day 6, 61–2, 64, 68, 70–1, 146 Bradbury, Malcolm 1, 3–4, 124, 137, 143n21: Eating People is Wrong 207 Braine, John 185, 192: Room at the Top 133, 206 Brannigan, John 90 Brief Encounter 166 British Empire, end of 10–11, 13, 136– 7, 149–50, 205 Brittain, Vera 36, 37 Browning, Robert 54, 196 Burgess, Anthony 149: A Clockwork Orange 207; The Doctor is Sick 203, 206, 207; The Malayan Trilogy 207; The Right to an Answer 203, 207

Burke, Edmund 181, 196 Burkhart, Charles 101, 102, 104, 116 Butler, Marilyn 195 Carter, Angela 4, 13 Cary, Joyce: The Horse’s Mouth 169, 170–1, 173, 179 Chekhov, Anton 54, 56–7 Cheyette, Bryan 208 Cold War 7, 160–4 comic fiction see laughter Compton-Burnett, Ivy 59, 60, 67, 99–120, 124, 145, 154: Brothers and Sisters 107–9, 111, 113; Daughters and Sons 103, 109–13, 114, 115; Elders and Betters 103, 115; A God and his Gifts 103; The Last and the First 103; Manservant and Maidservant 115; Mother and Son 101, 102, 103; Parents and Children 103, 113, 114, 116; Pastors and Masters 104–7, 111, 114; The Present and The Past 99, 103–4; Two Worlds and their Ways 102, 103, 113–4, 115 Connolly, Cyril 1 Conrad, Joseph 17, 21, 24, 77–9 Cooper, William 5: Scenes from Provincial Life 5, 207 Crompton, Don 197 Darwin, Charles 102, 104, 115 Dead of Night 89 de Beauvoir, Simone: The Blood of Others 146, 147 Delaney, Shelagh: A Taste of Honey 43 Dick, Bernard F. 187 Drabble, Margaret: The Millstone 209 Dunn, Nell: Poor Cow 45 Durrell, Lawrence: The Alexandria Quartet 205; Clea 203, 205 Eagleton, Terry 190 Eliade, Mircea 189, 191 218

Index Eliot, T.S. 18, 135, 189, 192 Erskine-Hill, Howard 80 Esty, Jed 10 fascism 35, 36–7, 40: ‘domestic fascism’ 8–9, 61–4, 117 First World War 17–19, 29, 37, 39–40, 132, 180–1 Ford, Ford Madox 18, 20: Parade’s End 80 Forster, E.M. 78, 140 Fowles, John 194, 197–8 Freud, Sigmund 102: on jokes 107, 115; on trauma 96–7 Fussell, Paul 132 Galsworthy, John: The Forsyte Saga, adaptations of 167, 182n3 Garfinkel, Howard 67, 68, 70, 71 Gasiorek, Andrzej 131–2 Gerhardie, William 147, 155n15 Giddens, Anthony 26 Gilbert, Geoff 5 Ginzburg, Natalia: All Our Yesterdays 147 Golding, William 4, 184–202: Close Quarters 184, 192, 194; Darkness Visible 184, 186–9, 196; The Double Tongue 184, 185, 200; An Egyptian Journey 184; Fire Down Below 184, 192, 194–200; Free Fall 184, 196, 204; The Inheritors 184, 185; Lord of the Flies 184, 185, 192, 196, 204; A Moving Target 184; The Paper Men 184, 189–92, 193, 196; Pincher Martin 184; The Pyramid 184, 186; Rites of Passage 184, 192–4, 195; The Scorpion God 184; The Spire 184; To the Ends of the Earth (BBC serial) 192 Gooch, Stan 189 Graves, Robert: Goodbye to All That 17, 18–19 Green, Henry 6, 50–8, 59, 60, 67, 77, 78, 82, 100, 116: Back 89; Blindness 51; Caught 51–2, 53, 54, 55, 57; Concluding 56; Doting 51, 53; Living 51, 52, 54, 56; Loving 51, 52, 53, 55–8, 203; Nothing 51, 53, 56; Pack My Bag 51, 55; Party Going 51, 55

219

Greene, Graham 1, 17–32, 56, 100, 189, 192, 210: Brighton Rock 21–2, 27–9; A Burnt Out Case 29; The End of the Affair 21; England Made Me 21, 22– 3, 24–7; A Gun for Sale 21, 27–9; It’s a Battlefield 21, 22–3, 24, 26, 27; The Heart of the Matter 20–1, 29; The Human Factor 29; The Man Within 18; The Ministry of Fear 21, 24, 26, 30; The Power and the Glory 20; Stamboul Train 23–4 Greig, Cicely 101 Grice, Paul 67, 69 Gwynn-Browne, Arthur: F.S.P. 93–5 Hamilton, Patrick 59–60, 61–76: Hangover Square 61, 62, 63, 64–7, 68, 69–70, 75; The Slaves of Solitude 61, 62–3, 64, 68, 71–5; Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky 61, 64, 71 Hanley, James 77–87: Drift 78; The German Prisoner 78; The Last Voyage 78; Narrative 77, 78–9; No Directions 79–80, 81–2, 83–4, 85–6; The Ocean 79, 80–1, 82; A Passion Before Death 78; Sailor’s Song 79, 83, 84–5 Hardy, Thomas 54, 210 Hartley, Jenny 95 Hemingway, Ernest 59–60 Hoggart, Richard 209 Inden, Ronald 188 Ingelbien, Raphaël 134, 135 Isherwood, Christopher 59, 66 James, Henry 20 James, William 66, 187 Jameson, Fredric 5 Jameson, Storm 7, 33–41: The Black Laurel 40; ‘Documents’ 37–8; The Fort 39–40; The Hidden River 40–1; In the Second Year 35; Mirror in Darkness trilogy 38–9; Then Shall We Hear Singing 40 Joyce, James 59, 78, 116: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 169–70; Ulysses 60, 79, 97n7, 136–40, 170, 182–3n10, 183n11

220 Index Keulks, Gavin 138 Kermode, Frank 4, 103 King, Francis 101 King, Nicola 38–9 Larkin, Philip 8, 134–6, 137, 139 laughter 9, 13, 99–100, 101–17, 121–30, 133–4, 137–42 Lawrence, D.H. 18, 46, 47, 49, 140, 210 Lee, Hermione 135 Lehmann, Rosamond 59–60, 82 Lessing, Doris 170 Levenson, Michael 34 Levinas, Emmanuel 112–13, 116 Lewis, Wyndham 17, 18 Light, Alison 59, 75n2 Lodge, David 3, 59–60, 137–8: The Picturegoers 203, 209–10 Longford, Elizabeth 193 Macfarlane, Alan 188 MacIntyre, C.F. 188 Mailer, Norman 149 Manning, Olivia 7, 145–56; Artist Among the Missing 149, 154; The Balkan Trilogy 150–4; A Different Face 148; The Doves of Venus 147–8; Fortunes of War (BBC serial) 145, 153; Friends and Heroes 152–3; The Great Fortune 145, 150–1; The Levant Trilogy 150–4; The Rain Forest 150, 152, 154; School for Love 149–50; The Spoilt City 152; The Wind Changes 146, 147, 154 Mansfield, Katherine 60 McCarthy, Mary 102, 104 MacInnes, Colin: Absolute Beginners 208; City of Spades 208; Mr Love and Justice 203, 206, 208–9 Mengham, Rod 82 Miller, Tyrus 19, 30 Milton, John 187, 188 Modernism 1–2, 3, 4–6, 18–21, 33–5, 66–7, 78–9, 80, 132, 136–40: and the representation of consciousness 20, 60, 66, 102, 139; late modernism 19–20, 30, 50, 59–76, 135–6 Montefiore, Janet 76n18 Morgan, David 185 Moseley, Edwin 189

Murdoch, Iris 4, 184: A Severed Head 204; Under the Net 204 national identity 24–7, 37, 131–44 Newby, P.H. 88, 100–1, 116–17 Nicolson, Harold 121 Nietzsche, Friedrich 107, 115, 191 nouveau roman 4, 53, 116 O’Hara, Frank: ‘Biographia Letteraria’ 116 Orwell, George 18, 20, 45, 167, 203 Osborne, John: Look Back in Anger 133 Otto, Rudolf 191 Paine, Thomas 197 Parkin, David 188 Paulin, Tom 134 Perloff, Marjorie 135 Pinter, Harold 75 Plautus 101 Pope, Alexander 187 postmodernism 3–4, 135 Pound, Ezra 18, 135 Powell, Anthony 150, 155n15, 204: A Dance to the Music of Time 150, 204–5; Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant 203, 204–5, 206 Prenderville, Brendan 35 Pritchett, V.S, 1, 50 Quin, Ann

9

Rabinovitz, Rubin 5 Raven, Simon 123, 204 realism 3–4, 5–6, 33–41, 44–5, 210–11 regional fiction 42–9, 136–40, 206–7, 210 Reid Banks, Lynne: The L-Shaped Room 203, 206, 209 Rhys, Jean 59 Richardson, Dorothy 20, 59, 60, 66 Ricoeur, Paul 188 Rider Haggard, H. 146 romans fleuves, novel sequences 11, 80, 150, 167–8, 204–5 Romanticism 193–7 Rushdie, Salman 35

Index Sackville-West, Edward 100 Sackville-West, Vita 100 Sansom, William: ‘Fireman Flower’ 91–2 Sartre, Jean-Paul 188 Second World War 6–7, 12, 13, 203: and Kingsley Amis 132, 140–2; and Elizabeth Bowen 62, 64, 68, 70–1; and Ivy Compton-Burnett 117; and William Golding 185, 186–7; and Graham Greene 29–30; and Arthur Gwynn-Browne 93–5; and Patrick Hamilton 61–4, 68, 71–5; and James Hanley 79–87; and Storm Jameson 35–41; and Olivia Manning 145, 149–54; and William Sansom 91–2; and Muriel Spark 7, 163; and Elizabeth Taylor 89, 95; and Rebecca West 166–7, 180–1, 183n14 Shanks, Michael 132 Shonfield, Andrew 132 Sillitoe, Alan 185: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner 133 Smith, R.D. 147, 155n2 Smith, Stevie 147, 148 Snow, C.P.: The Affair 203, 205–6; Strangers and Brothers 204, 205, 207 Spark, Muriel 4, 7, 124, 157–65, 192: The Bachelors 161, 203, 206, 208; The Ballad of Peckham Rye 203, 206, 208; The Comforters 207–8; ‘The Desegregation of Art’ 9; Memento Mori 157–65; The Takeover 161 Spencer, T.J.B. 198 Spender, Stephen 22, 23 Spring, Howard: Shabby Tiger 44–9 Spurling, Hilary 100, 101, 104 Stein, Gertrude 93, 103 Stendhal 36, 37, 38 Stevenson, Randall 10 Storey, David: Flight into Camden 203, 206, 210, 211; This Sporting Life 203, 210, 211

221

Taylor, Elizabeth 89–91, 101: At Mrs Lippincote’s 89–91; ‘A Sad Garden’ 95–7; A Wreath of Roses 89 Thomson, James 168 Tremain, Rose 127 Tristram, Phillippa 100 Updike, John 131, 142 Wain, John 184, 192 War see First World War; Second World War Waugh, Evelyn 51, 53, 59–60, 123: Brideshead Revisited 203; Sword of Honour 150, 204 Waugh, Patricia 190 West, Rebecca 7, 8, 166–83: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon 167, 181–2n2; Cousin Rosamund 168; The Fountain Overflows 167–83; ‘Parthenope’ 169; This Real Night 168 Williams, Raymond: Border Country 203, 209 Wilson, Angus 7, 8, 9, 101, 121–30, 149, 170: Anglo-Saxon Attitudes 124, 125; As if by Magic 130; A Bit Off the Map 124; Hemlock and After 124, 125, 204; Late Call 125; The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot 124, 125; The Old Men at the Zoo 125, 204; No Laughing Matter 124–30, 168; ‘Raspberry Jam’ 123; ‘Realpolitik’ 122–3; Such Darling Dodos 122, 124, 204; The Wild Garden 125; The Wrong Set 122–3, 124, 204 Wilson, Colin: The Outsider 133 Woolf, Virginia 3, 8, 59–61, 66, 139, 140, 146: Flush 61; Mrs Dalloway 60, 66, 79; A Room of One’s Own 146; Three Guineas 63; To the Lighthouse 60, 66; The Waves 61; The Years 60–1 Yeats, W.B.: ‘Death’

162–3

British Fiction After Modernism: The Novel at Mid-Century

British Fiction After Modernism: The Novel at Mid-Century

British Fiction After Modernism: The Novel at Mid-Century

The Novel Now: Contemporary British Fiction

Architectures: Modernism and After

Modern Poetry after Modernism

Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel

Modernism, Satire and the Novel

The Contemporary British Novel

The Modern British Novel

British Fiction of the 1990s

Contemporary British Fiction

After Science Fiction Died

The World through a Monocle: The New Yorker at Midcentury

British Poetry in the Age of Modernism

Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945

British Science Fiction Cinema (British Popular Cinema)

Screening Novel Women: From British Domestic Fiction to Film

After This: A Novel

After River: A Novel

British at War

British at War

Modernism, Romance and the Fin de SiГЁcle: Popular Fiction and British Culture

Front Lines of Modernism: Remapping the Great War in British Fiction

Constructing a Science Fiction Novel

The planet buyer, a science fiction novel

Latin Fiction: The Latin Novel in Context

The planet buyer, a science fiction novel

The British Regulatory State: High Modernism and Hyper-Innovation

The Day After Tomorrow: A Novel

British Fiction After Modernism: The Novel at Mid-Century