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CLASS
INCOGNITO
On
James Hanley
Howard
Slater
We must
understand that the proletariat
has acquired organisation but has lost
its being
Jacques Camatte
The
woeful throb of voiceless woes
the woes become the salvos
Mohammed Khair-Eddine
In a startling
exchange of letters between Liverpudlian seaman and ex-Wobbly, George
Garrett, and his editor John Lehmann, we can read not only of the struggle
to write but an accompanying struggle to be. Garrett, one of several members
of the working class being courted as exponents of ‘proletarian literature,’
came across the machinations of a publishing industry entirely in the hands
of a university-educated bourgeoisie. However sympathetic people of
Lehmann’s class were to the exigencies of working class struggle they could
not conceive of the psychological vicissitudes of the struggle over the
means of expression for working class people. Writing in overcrowded
conditions may be one thing, being unaligned to a political racket and being
idiosyncratically self-taught may be others, but Garrett, in this
correspondence, cannot help but articulate the sense of shame that he
experiences, a shame that comes forth in the clash of intellectual desire
with the need to provide for his family; a shame that still manages to
enmesh the writer in the parlous dichotomy of class belonging pitted against
what is seen as individualism. In one letter Garrett describes hearing a
knock at the door and he quickly gathers up his pen and papers and hides
them away. He writes: “In the environment I live in, a fellow sitting down
to write is considered a freak.”[1]
This freakishness,
this “genuine half-conscious concretion of hard experience into unaccustomed
words,”[2]
as fellow working-class writer Jack Common puts it, may be what was sought
in the pursuit of a proletarian literature that often comes across as an
overly digested category in search of a content. With Seven Shifts,
Common himself edited a survey of working-class experience written by
workers of different trades, and we can offer that this was one of many
publishing ventures, akin to the Mass Observation project, that sought after
both the authenticity and exoticism of the, then, even more obscure world of
the silenced and taciturn majorities of working-class life. Yet, it is
something of an irony that the book Garrett was being urged to write and
over which he struggled was one that attempted to give a “feeling-idea”[3]
of his experiences not of work aboard ships and in the docks, not of his
time as a New York based theatrical activist and member of IWW, but of
long-term unemployment and the collective struggles to get a rise in the
parish relief rate. However, once more we find a dampening double bind that
psychologically afflicts these working-class writers: they are caught
between capturing life-as-lived whilst having an inkling that they are
providing a sort of marketable otherness, an ideology personified, that
serves an a priori intellectualised version of themselves.
The costs of this
struggle for Garrett (not helped by Lehmann suggesting he had a “social
duty” to document his experiences) was that he had a nervous breakdown: “I
broke down and cried for an hour. My brain snapped, and in a moment I was a
physical wreck. I did not know whether I had a paralyse stroke or
not.”[4]
Garrett’s crack-up is neither the stuff of proletarian literature nor of
proletarian politics, and neither is his writing an essay on The Tempest
(‘That Four-Flusher Prospero’) that, in his letters to Lehmann, he
demonstrates a keenness to have published. Such an essay, by means of which
Garrett intended to “explode all those conceptions of the ‘gentle
Prospero,’” was not what left-leaning publishers were seeking from
working-class writers. Indeed, what has become central to interpretations of
this play is the way that Prospero treats the indigenous Caliban as a
sub-human beast. This is picked up by Garrett’s fellow working-class writer,
Jack Hilton, who titled one of his books Caliban Shrieks. This
working-class identification with Caliban may have informed Garrett’s essay,
not least because as Kamau Brathwaite offers “Caliban [is] howling for his
tongue,”[5]
seeking after a means of expression, but in so doing issuing abreactive
curses and insubordinate crudities at the patriarch Prospero and the
colonising world he stands for. From the plantation to the cotton mill,
these Calibans may be looking for their tongue but are they not, in their
grappling with language and affect, cussing-away genteel mores and
articulating a baroque expressivity? Are not these the shameless
skrikings of outcast intellectuals?[6]
Garrett was not alone
in his crack-up. Hilton, in recalling the mental breakdown of a comrade
writes: “Humanity may seem as though its powers of endurance are limitless,
but many reach that point where too great an effort sends them over the
line.”[7]
To a large degree this is one of the major themes of James Hanley’s writings
from the 30s and beyond. Leaving aside the prominence of experiences of
‘madness’ in some of those critically acclaimed classics of literature (Crime
and Punishment, The Outsider, The Bell Jar), Hanley,
whilst not being politically aligned, even though he was part of a loose
group that orbited Charles Lahr’s Progressive Bookshop and attended the 1935
Paris Conference of the Writer’s International, is concerned with the
psycho-social dimensions of working-class life. Rather than adhere to the
class as a mass, class as ‘pledged’ group, class as sociological category,
or class as a political force, Hanley’s writing redresses a notion of
working-class life as that of an insensate, undifferentiated and unthinking
humanity. One could say that Hanley not only added an unaccustomed
psychological depth to his working-class characters – a depth explored by
means of the unspoken intimacies of their inner dialogue rather than
anything approaching well-rounded ideas – but, in choosing youthful
protagonists in his early novels, he focussed upon adolescent alienation
from social conditions marked by parental repression as it segues into
work-place exploitation.
At this time in the
30s, with its rise of university Marxism, one could say that the organic
presence of working-class auto-didacts in the Workers Movement was beginning
to wane. The likes of Garrett, Hilton, Common and Hanley could be said to
have been seeking out a politics that was at several removes from that which
was afforded representative status in the various political organisation of
the time (CPGB, ILP, Labour Party.) As Hanley later put it: “I have been
labelled a 'proletarian writer' [… which] is to be party to more than one
quite absurd theory, one of which is that only one section society is evil,
and only one section capable of soaring; this message comes out of Communist
vacuums […] My whole attitude is anarchical, I do not believe in the State
at all.”[8]
This anti-statist politics, this mistrust of political mediation and the
reduction of being to an identity, is one that veered not towards a
celebration of the dignity of labour (even its self-organised variety) but
towards an anti-work rhetoric, an attitude to wage labour as one of its
being futile and psychologically structurating. Being life’s sole purpose,
wage-labour, in which the worker is “overseen and pays the blackmailer’s
price,”[9]
could in no way be the harbinger of anything describable as ‘freedom.’ Such
a standpoint, loosely shared by these writers, is one that Hanley, unlike
Hilton, Common and Garrett, didn’t proselytise about directly, but is one
that is embedded in the mise-en-scene, the social-relational fabric,
the tone of his writings.
Initially known and
pigeon-holed as a writer of ‘sea novels’ Hanley’s specific depictions of
work orbit employment on the docks and at sea. It has been suggested that
unlike Conrad and his view from the captain’s bridge, Hanley’s characters,
like those onboard Traven’s Death Ship, could be said to be drawn
from the unskilled ranks of the sub-proletariat. From the child labour of
“cleaning out the bilges” and “descaling the boilers” (Boy) to the
stokers of the “below crowd” (‘Last Voyage’), from fights breaking-out in
dockside hiring-pens (‘A Narrative’) to elderly women mopping-up the
blood-stained holds of WW1 hospital ships (Our Time is Gone), Hanley
cannot be said to be bringing forth an image of the heroic worker but rather
a world of petty commandments and askance servitudes that characterise most
types of working-class labour. The central character of ‘Last Voyage’ says
to himself: “What’s it all for? Who cares? Nobody. Who feels? Nobody […] Not
much for us. Sweat, sweat. Pay off. Sign on. Sweat, sweat...”[10] For
Hanley, wage-labour, as the opposite of those reputedly life-affirming
vocations (into which all of being is invested), is linked to repressed
feelings, self-armouring, slow death and physical mutilation. This latter is
one of the muted preoccupations that pepper his novels and short stories.
Whilst he never depicts an actual injury at work, other than a suicidal
stoker throwing himself into the ship’s furnace, industrial injury casually
stalks the edges of his narratives: “remember her getting her arm caught in
the tobacco cutting machine?”
One should also bear
in mind that, with working-class women’s writing mostly yet to be researched
and rescued from the archives, Hanley does not eschew depictions of domestic
and social reproductive labour.[11]
One could say that the Fanny Fury character, whom Hanley draws as the “noble
and heroic” driving force of his five-volume Furys saga, is something
of an embattled matriarch whose anxiety-ridden upwellings are offset by her
carrying the psychic load of family life. So, whilst Hanley only rarely
depicts work-processes (perhaps because his protagonists are mainly engaged
in unskilled and repetitive labour), he attains a level of detail when it
comes to fleshing out those ‘abject’ domestic chores that, especially in
these times, were seen as a woman’s lot: “The woman flung the bed-clothes on
to a chair, turned the mattrass up, and then flung open the window. She
carried the bucket to the corner, knelt down and began to scrub. When the
oilcloth was wetted it threw up an odour, partly the smell of its own cloth,
partly from the staleness that lay hidden beneath it.”[12]
That such thought and feeling is ascribed to the mundane is a rarity in the
mostly male-authored literature of the times, as are the depictions of Fanny
Fury as she tends to her stroke-afflicted father. There are many touching
passages in The Furys of the care work (and its attendant sadnesses)
that Fanny Fury carries out in cleaning, dressing and moving her mute father
from room to room, and one could add in this connection that Hanley’s work
contains portrayals of struggling elderly female characters (Woman in the
Sky, The Darkness.)
We begin to see that
Hanley, in giving veracity and voice to both un-skilled labour and domestic
reproductive work, as well as to those outside of the catchment of wage
labour (teenagers and pensioners), is not supplying the proletarian images
required by the Left-intelligentsia of the day. Hanley is not offering up
propaganda or the flag-waving commitment to political struggle that is
perhaps epitomised by John Sommerfield’s Mayday. However, a central
event in The Furys is what became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’: the 1911
police assault on striking transport workers who had gathered in Liverpool’s
central square. This strike, moving, in the novel, from a stage-off rumour
in the community to a full-on national emergency leading to a Churchillian
influx of troops and the stationing of a destroyer in the Mersey, is seen
from multiple angles. Fanny Fury and her sister, both religiously devout,
are against the strike as a senseless inconvenience, her husband (Denny) is
apathetically indifferent, her eldest son (Desmond) is invested in it as a
trade union official and her youngest son (Peter) is caught up in witnessing
the violence in the company of an eccentric and misanthropic ‘professor of
anthropology’ who pompously expounds on the ‘bestiality’ of crowds. Despite
this latter, Hanley sympathetically stages this collective response to class
oppression and his multi-perspective rendition of the strike, whilst not
disavowing social struggle, is just as much concerned with intra-class
conflict. Not least here is the way that Desmond is depicted as being
committed to the strike and working-class struggle as a means of rising
through the ranks of the Workers Movement. Hilton, as with Common and his
notion of a “fake left,” also gives this form of ambition short-shrift:
“They take advantage of our misery.”[13]
So, Sara Sha’ath has
accurately offered that in Hanley’s work there are “no straight-forward
class oppositions.”[14]
This would make Hanley’s depictions of a potentially combative class less
than satisfying for those seeking after a proletarian literature with its
drive towards ideological unity and its fetishization of an homogenous
working-class identity. On the contrary, the heterogeneity of Hanley’s
approach takes in factors that have long divided the working class: the
divisions between a ‘respectable’ working class and its nemesis in an
unorganisable sub-proletariat of casual labour and criminality (young women
working as ‘hostesses’ in Drift); the rise of the white-collar
‘salaried masses’ that Siegfried Kracauer was contemporaneously bringing to
light (Arthur Fearon in Boy has aspirations to be a chemist or a
teacher); the religious and racial sectarianism between Irish-Catholic and
Anglo-Protestant workers reflected in zonal demarcations (violently
emphasised in Drift); the gender divide in terms of social
reproductive labour and the losing battle of nurturing aspiration and
maintaining family cohesiveness (The Furys); the generation-gap and
the parental repression of the youthful characters who are expected to
reproduce community mores to the point of mimesis and, to an extent, to
‘live the desires’ of their parents (Drift, Boy, The Furys,
Levine.) These examples of disunity point to a worrying irony in that
the desired political unity of the class is refracted in what Sha’ath
describes as Hanley’s depiction, in the Furys chronicle especially,
of a “claustrophobic gossiping community.” So, there is a unity after all, a
unity of community mores, of alterated conformism that, with
characters feeling they are “being observed and narrativized,” is one that
is vigilantly policed for signs of slight deviations which, however
innocuous, are considered as ‘freakish.’[15]
When Jack Common,
writing in 1934, offered that “the X, the unknown quality which is really
the growing tip of social life, is still unsure of itself and does not yet
know how to describe its own nature except in terms of not this, not that,”[16]
it could be considered that he is not just referencing the struggle over the
means of expression but how this is informed (and perhaps hindered) by the
psychological tensions of social life that the above-mentioned sampling of
intra-class divisions give rise to. In another essay from this collection,
Common expresses this ‘X’ in a more politically inflected manner: “we must
have done with leaders who understand the historic necessity of communism
but who never let it become a personal question.”[17]
After all these years we are still probably more familiar with relating to
this ‘personal question’ as subjective tendencies, as an escape into
inwardness, as an egocentric narrowing of social reality and the
ramifications these can have, especially in political milieus, for a
making-guilty, for an auto-repression, for a self-silencing. Yet, what
Common is shedding a light on here (perhaps taking his cue from a favoured
D.H. Lawrence) is that which Hanley is bringing to articulation in his
novelistic depictions of the psychological conflicts of working-class life
that, smothered within alterated families, have also been unable to
find a harbour in conventional politics. Common’s ‘X,’ then, could be what
Ernst Bloch referred to as “human expressions of the incognito.”[18]
An aspect of Hanley’s
exploration of class as a cultural milieu – one that gives it a wider remit
by his being from that class and feeling along with it – is reflected in
Hanley’s Furys chronicle. In the second volume, The Secret Journey
(titled after Fanny Fury’s surreptitious trips to a money lender but also a
reference to merchant ships commandeered during wartime), there are two
conjectural definitions of class from ‘within’ the class that reflect the
social gradations of two different characters. The money-lender, Mrs Ragner,
offers that there are two classes: “those who waited and those who were
attended to at once.” (3) Likewise, Desmond Fury, the Trade Union official,
offers that “the world is made up of two kinds of people – wise men and
mugs. Workers are mugs, damned mugs. And I spent years telling them how it
all began and how it would end. But where they interested?” (108) Whilst
these are hardly adequate as economic, sociological or historical
materialist renditions of class they do point to singular psychological
factors that are reflective of what John Fordham has described as Hanley’s
embracing of the “ideological complexity” of the working class that sets
before us “contradictory motivations” that, it could be added, also include
non-discursive self-definitions.[19]
The money-lender, who garners a sadistic supplement from her position of
power, makes reference to an entitled aristocratic class whilst reducing the
working class to the status of dependent servants. This is perhaps a
reference to a previous feudal epoch whose power-dynamic, Hanley suggests,
still subsists (and which he preserves in the mythic tropes of a rural
Ireland.) This is complemented by Desmond Fury’s more industrially informed
rendition of class, through which, as a labour aristocrat, he disdainfully
registers the failings of class consciousness.
In terms of class conflict and its key role in
proletarian literature one could say that this class consciousness is
offered by the Left-intelligentsia as the solution; the means to forge
intra-class unities of struggle whilst having recourse to a knowledge of
history (“how it all began.”) In many ways such literature is charged with
helping to create the continuities of such an (historical) consciousness,
but despite its still welcome awareness of class exploitation, of the
colonisation of the means of subsistence, of its being revelatory of
capital’s role in all institutional power, class consciousness comes to
suggest not just a social unity but a psychological unity, a
‘being-for-the-other,’ that Aaron Esterson calls an alterated
identity. At worst, as Murray Bookchin has offered, class consciousness
implies that “the psychology of the proletariat, in effect, is political
economy.”[20] This
impasse, as it effects revolutionary theory, is nothing new but, taken in
the light of Hanley’s writing, what seems to be occurring is that, firstly,
the class consciousness that Hanley depicts is not a category of knowledge
(hence the role of intellectuals and labour leaders is besmirched) but an
implicit solidarity, a “feeling-idea” to cite Garrett again. Secondly, in
his depictions of intra-class division, Hanley could be seen to highlighting
that an ideologically affirmed class consciousness amounts to a
de-subjectification of the working class in that it is not seen as being
affected by any other subjectifying forces than those connected to
wage-labour and the value-form (whose psychological effects are, after
Lukacs, lastingly rendered as a “false consciousness” that smacks of an
intellectual superiority and an indication as to why Desmond Fury message
wasn’t heeded.) This is suggestive, then, as to why Hanley chooses to focus
on an adolescent coming-to-consciousness (as a proto-revolutionary
rebellion?) that, to cite Bookchin again, “undermines the concrete loyalties
of the individual to the system before it vitiates the system’s abstract
political and moral verities.”[21] Such concrete
loyalties are those of upholding not just a social unity but a psychological
unity.
As with the struggle for the means of expression, an
adolescent coming-to-consciousness is rarely taken into account by
Left-intellectuals from the educated classes who, as Hilton mentions, know
the “tricks of the talkie game.”[22] In some
ways class consciousness can be used as one of these tricks as it seems to
imply that a knowledge of the class trumps the experience of the class or
seeks to occlude some of those possibly galvanising internal divisions. As
we have already noted, these divisions have psychological effects and that
Hanley’s work in the 1930s focuses on these is to say that, for him, it may
be a matter of consciousness-raising from a class position, from within
“structures of feeling,” rather than the importation of an economically
over-coded class consciousness.[23] This latter, as
implying and giving rise to a ‘going to the workers,’ perhaps added a
wariness that fractured the Workers Movement. That the ‘talkie game,’ with
its seductive and ideologizing demagoguery, establishes an authority
over-and-above and in conflict with working-class people’s experience, meant
that it could have the effect of impeding the psychic dynamism of their
inner life which could extend to inhibiting thought itself.[24] As an
appeal to psychological unity (and implying some kind of ‘true
consciousness’) class consciousness can operate like a
‘being-for-the-others,’ like a super-egoic command, and, being affected by
the hierarchical servitudes instilled in the institutional trinity of
family-school-work, the working class thus withdraws from engagement and
shuns its class identity, its consciousness of class, as another mode under
which it is dominated and rendered inarticulate, thoughtless. Bookchin: “The
working-class becomes revolutionary not in spite of itself but because of
itself, literally as a result of its awakening selfhood.”[25]
Can Bookchin’s
comments here be read as suggesting that class consciousness could be
rendered more effective if it follows upon a coming-to-consciousness, if it
follows upon sensing and becoming increasingly aware of received ideas and
challenging these? Hanley’s work, with its implicit class basis seems to
suggest an inverse and asynchronous process: that of striving to become a
non-alterated ‘being-for-self’ based upon the ‘felt known’ of being
conscious of class, being instinct with class.[26]
Would this not then make ‘class consciousness,’ in its being proffered as an
ideology, a conceptual representation, identifiable as an alterating
received idea and modifiable in light of such an unveiling?
So, when Bookchin speaks of an ‘awakening selfhood’, could this be
seen as move towards an individuation, a process of becoming informed by
class as ground, rather than as an identity enticed into a psychological
unity?[27]
With his fumblingly tentative and innocently enquiring adolescent
characters, is Hanley, like Kafka, drawing our attention to just such a
disavowed psychological dynamic which is neither a straight forward and
conflict-free awakening, nor is it a selfhood that smoothly resolves itself
to settle on any one identity. As Peter Fury, the disgraced ex-seminary
student, considers which trade he could take up he exclaims, in Secret
Journey, “I don’t want to be anything,” (423) and with this we see that
his existential struggle first comes into focus as struggle against a
‘for-the-others’ bespoke identity which, in his rejecting it, has dramatic
implications as it breaches the psychological unity of ‘pledged’ groups that
can function as a defensive means of supressing errant thought.
This almost
inchoate struggle against an alterated identity is played out in
Hanley’s first novel, Drift. Here the son of a poor catholic family
(“seven days off the workhouse”) comes up against what Charles Fourier would
have considered as the twin pillars of civilisation: family and work. His
conforming to neither is the source of tensions within the family, as, his
becoming suspicious of religion and not actively seeking work, sees Joe
struggling alone to affirm himself as a ‘being-for-self’ outside and
independent of those factors that, as Esterson would say, could provide him
with ontological security: “For a long time he had been tortured by strange
thoughts. He had been on the brink of an abyss […] In a flash he had been
drawn down into the gulf of desire. […] It had lain there so long, that
desire for being, that desire for creating a something within himself.”[28]
Such a desire to create ‘something within himself’ is his desire to become
something other than a member of a ‘pledged’ group. Hanley depicts this
striving as a ‘feeling-idea’ rather than a fully-fledged ‘thought.’ So,
whilst Joe frequents a group of culturally inquisitive Left-leaning friends
and meets with these throughout the novel, these are employed in
white-collar jobs and Joe, feeling the pressure of intra-class division, is
unable to ‘pledge’ himself to them just as he is unable to untroubledly
break-away from his family. This group of friends, more or less advise Joe
to take a ‘reformist’ route of reconciliation with his family despite his
being regularly beaten by his father. So, we see here, with this combination
of social and psychical pressure, his self-questioning, that Joe is on the
brink of a crack-up. In terms of his religion, not only does he alight on
its corruption (the usurious landlord is a church dignitary), he is subject
to its moral codes as factors that form the psychological unity of his
family. Moreover, in wanting to ‘create himself’ Joe is going against God as
the all-seeing creator, as the omnipotent self-sufficient being, which, as
many historians have offered, was a leading factor in the persecution of
heretics and mystics who were seen as persecutable in their bid for what was
seen as self-deification.
To be seen to be
doing the right thing, to be watched and to thereby be auto-vigilant, to be
constantly on the verge of excommunication are all effects of an
alterating super-ego that, as a threatening internalised authority, as a
moral injunction, runs through the family-work-church trinity that forms the
central spine of Drift. To get Joe back in line – to make him
reaffirm the ‘pledge’ by ending his relationship with a protestant
prostitute, by finding work, by going to Mass on a regular basis – not only
are Joe’s books burnt by his mother (Zola the ‘frenchie’ and ‘dirty’ Joyce
are mentioned), but priests are brought into the home as if to exorcise the
evil demon within Joe. Is he possessed? Is he a heretic? Is he an
“ungrateful swine?” Is he highfalutin? Are his “strange thoughts”
confirmation of an incipient ‘madness’ that only self-harming ferocity can
assuage? So, Joe is subject to a disciplining guilt-inducement for if he is
not brought back in line, if he breaches the psychological unity which
entails his living of the desires of his parent as they lived theirs before
them, then he poses a threat to the ontological security of his parents; a
security that is held together by both personalised myths and a
paranoia-inducing secrecy, itself based upon the lack of any affective
reciprocity (this latter is especially pronounced in The Furys.) Joe
wants to tell his mother that he is not a believer, he wants to ‘come clean’
and form an extimate bond with her, but the thought of the effects of
such a ‘confession’ upon his mother is enough to fill him with anxious fear.
He is caught in another classic double-bind, a social-relational
configuration that is not just a matter of conflicting ideas but of
contradictory and simultaneous emotions.
Such psycho-social
knots as these are central to how Hanley deals with the crack-up of
characters who come to the ledge of an abyss. In Drift, Joe’s father
sets the tone: “You’ll be just what I want you to be and nothing else.” So,
in light of such parental repression, when Bookchin talks of an ‘awakening
selfhood’ we are not just on the terrain of bourgeois individuality (the
only one allowed!) nor in some corporatised consulting room, but on the
terrain of risk-taking, of auto-traumatisation, in that coming to awareness
and challenging super-ego driven psychological unities is a struggle
that, bereft of mutual recognition or due acknowledgement, butts up against
notions of ‘madness’; a struggle that in challenging the ‘pledge’ that can
guarantee ontological security risks that very ontological security: to be
excluded from belonging or to enter into a self-exile is the question posed
by Hanley’s youthful characters. He describes this existential conflict as a
great battle, one that runs the risk of tipping over into what some term as
the pathological: “It seemed to him as if the thoughts in his mind had
actually become living things […] supposing his mother or father was to come
up and suddenly open the door […] then it would all be plain. They would
know his thoughts…”[29]
This sense of being exposed, of being readable, in this context, is related
to Joe’s sense of guilt at having ‘thoughts’ in the first place, as, without
the reciprocal interiority of the intimate bond he seeks, without thought
being socialised or inner dialogue finding an interlocuter, then, the
thoughts, being furtive and repressed, force themselves involuntarily into
presence. This form of abreaction, of upwelling, leads Joe into a fatal
argument with his mother that precipitates her having a stroke.
In discussing The
Furys, Sara Sha’ath speaks of Hanley’s characters being “overwhelmed and
underserved by language.” There is a lack of fit between opaque affect and
words, an impassable boundary between thought and speech, at the same time
as there is “a fluency in their inner voices” (in this Hanley as author
seems sometimes to come to the rescue of his characters) and, although
rarely, a sudden candid extimacy sometimes issues from an
unadulterated communicativeness between characters outside of the bounds of
the censuring ‘pledge.’ She mentions the very touching scene when Maureen
Fury and her father, Denny, meet by chance in a local park and, on neutral
ground, they open up to one another. Another occurs in Hollow Sea,
when the look-out man, ‘Rochdale’, attempts to console an overworked steward
as the latter tends to a “barmy” hallucinating soldier. These rare moments,
when set against the prevailing atmosphere of blocked self-awareness,
labouring exhaustion and struggle over the means of expression, when taken
as impromptu contexts of consciousness-raising won from repressive secrecy,
take on an affective power that feel almost liberatory to the reader. In a
passage in Secret Journey, Sheila Fury, married to Desmond but having
an affair with Peter, her younger brother-in-law, bursts forth: “You have
frightened me. You have awakened something in me that has hidden itself so
deep down, has lain there so long, that I never, never realised that it did
lie there – that in my deep self it was actually living, only waiting for
some hand to touch it, some breath to stir it into being again.”[30]
Not only does this, and passages like it, however potentially melodramatic,
suggest an awakening of what has been subdued by a parental repression that
instils a ‘being for the others’ to the detriment of self-awareness and
becoming, but, as Hanley’s work suggests, to stifle such upwellings, to be
unable to share feelings, to be, as R.D. Laing offered, party to a society
in which the “absence of relation becomes the fundamental relation,”[31]
is to be party to tragic events.
Hanley’s writing is
brimful of such tragic events which may be another reason why his work has
been avoided. Various contemporaneous critics offered that his writing was
“sordid and horrible” and that it was rife with “brutality, sadism and
degradation.” Another remarked that Hanley was “too bitter for words.”[32]
The same could be said of Greek Tragedy and with these critical comments we
touch upon yet another reason as to why Hanley was not to the taste of the
Left-intelligentsia. From degrading work through to sexual abuse, from
spiteful contempt to the onset of crack-ups, from unfeeling cruelty through
to suicide, Hanley’s work brings to the fore the “disgustingly true,” the
abject dimension of a Real that is not softened by any ideological lens nor
by the idealistic unities of class consciousness.[33]
Now this would have been anathema for the epigones of proletarian literature
in that the perpetrators and victims are all drawn from the cultural milieus
of the working class (outside of ship’s captains there is very little
inter-class exchange in Hanley’s 30s novels.) Furthermore, if we are to
consider one of Raymond Williams’s takes on tragedy we discover that, as
glossed by Enzo Traverso, “the tragic vision of the world derives from
feelings of despair. Tragedy arises when no issue is visible, when people
feel definitively lost.” Traverso continues, “That is why, according to
Raymond Williams, tragedy and revolution reciprocally exclude themselves.”[34]
Whilst Hanley has been seen by some as depicting characters who are subject
to an overarching Fate, who have no choice of action (akin to the relation
between characters and the Gods in Greek Tragedy), is Williams’s contention
– if accurately depicted – one that, in excluding the tragic dimension from
revolutionary thought, not only excludes the ‘despair’ factor and seems to
abandon the ‘lost’ (who can stew in their ‘false consciousness’), but
hinders any notion of Capital and the value-form as an overdetermining
psycho-social tragedy we are all undergoing: “all the farce we have created;
all the foulness we feed; all the rottenness we sustain and maintain.”[35]
In a way Hanley’s
realism is too real. The psycho-social tenor of his tragic turn, which
should have served to inform the Left intelligentsia, is based on the social
non-relation, on the consensual neutrality of the ‘pledge,’ on the fear that
any too intense expression of feelings will upset a hard fought-for and
defended equilibrium. Yet, these are just some of the means of facing and
overturning lives fated by the ‘real domination’ of capital. In fact,
Hanley, by focussing on an adolescent coming-to-consciousness reveals such a
periodisation of capital to be one which, with parental repression and its
instilled sense of guilt uppermost, is replaced by the continual resetting
of blockages before any self-awareness can come to the fore. The tragic
dimension lies in the often unconscious, out-of-awareness, nature of
parental repression; a kind of transgenerational transmission which, to echo
Alice Miller, is supposedly done for the child’s own good. Hanley has Joe
say, “They ranted all the livelong day […] watched my every move […]
followed me everywhere […] And what for? Because they thought they were
trying to do me a good turn, save my soul – and then they didn’t want to be
disgraced.”[36]
Such are the “psychological checks” that Common refers to and these are made
more tragic by their being pitted against the social unity of class
consciousness rather than their being seen as modes of struggle over
individuation, becoming, that in the case of these working-class characters,
is grafted upon an awareness of the injustices of class. That such as this
has an existential flavour (and in a sense Hanley’s early novels can be seen
as pre-figuring the novels of Sartre and Camus) is not to be shied away
from, nor lumped in with Sartre’s quest for some broad and indeterminate
essence of ‘freedom.’ The yearning after being-as-becoming as sought by Joe
Rourke, Peter Fury and Grace Helling, is one that not only resonates with
Vladimir Jankélévitch when he offers “my being is never acquired once and
for all, inalienably,”[37]
but one that needs a reciprocity of feeling with others that have suffered
the costs of an alterated identity. Are we not, once more, orbiting
Walter Benjamin’s tentative notion of an ‘affective class?
To end, let’s cite
Val Cunningham’s appraisal of Hanley: “The academy won’t let students have
him … Left-wing orthodoxy doesn’t want him either … It’s the whiff of
hackery, of course, about the too prolific author… [but] from first to last
he’s kept up a fictional intensity that hacks never manage: a fiction
strikingly powered by the energies violence affords.”[38]
This violent energy is that of repression, or, more accurately, becoming
aware that one is repressed; but this need not always end in tragedy. In
Drift, amidst all Joe’s to-ing and fro-ing, in with his struggle over
feelings of guilt and shame, he manages to gain a clarity that Hanley does
not neatly fit into the novel as a concluding closure, a piece of
self-knowledge that Joe wins once for all. Rather, in line with the theme of
characters being in-process and indicative that Hanley himself is struggling
over existential themes from the perspective of his being conscious of
class, he offers the reader something of a thumbnail abstract of his work:
“He knew he was hemmed in by the stout walls of convention and tradition.
Had he not the strength to knock down the wall? He must assert himself. What
were people anyhow? They were like himself, swayed by great passions and
trivial emotions which were but a cloak for those who wished to bury forever
within themselves that warm torrent which is at the seat of every man’s soul
– that torrent which rages, and which is held back only after great battles
with oneself. For civilisation imposes a restraint upon these passions.”[39] That
times have changed since the 1930s is obvious, that capital has restructured
is also obvious, but the travails of coming-to consciousness remain the
same, if not, today, more despairingly acute. So, Hanley’s work, still
remaining at several removes from mainstream politics and literature,
entices his modern readers to reassess his writing as a micropolitical
endeavour. Hanley does not just bring unsuspected inner-worlds to the fore,
but, in attempting to address the often clumsy fit between language and
affect, he sets before us a density of psycho-social experience that, in
often eluding rational comprehension, can fend-off its being reduced to a
conceptual representation, an etcetera.
Appendix One –
Obituaries
Anon:
Unnamed German soldier held captive, tortured, raped and murdered by two
British soldiers in no-man’s land. (The German Prisoner, 1930)
Anon:
Two-hundred dead troops in the holds of the A.10 (née
Helicon) following a chaotic attempted landing near Salonika. Some
aboard consider the A.10 was used as a “decoy ship.” (Hollow Sea,
1938)
Anon:
Five unnamed motorists killed in a car accident on a small bridge in the
Midlands that causes a traffic jam that creates
gridlock as far as Scotland. The five corpses are laid out in the cellar of
Farrar’s nearby farmhouse. (What Farrar Saw, 1946)
Mr Bradshaw:
First officer “blown high into the air” on board the A.10 troop carrier
turned hospital ship (“a bleeder”) following enemy shelling. The A.10, with a “ballast” of
dead and wounded, makes for Alexandria but the port is closed due to an
outbreak of disease. (Hollow Sea, 1938)
Brady:
Following the torpedoing of the SS Corinthian (renamed AO.2 by the
Admiralty) this young trimmer throws himself out of the last surviving row
boat. His last words: “Who are we! B___ all. God save the King –
B___on ‘em all.” (Narrative, 1931)
Mr & Mrs Burns:
Deceased parents of the recently demobbed Rosie who both died in a WWII air
raid. Rosie manages to retrieve two objects from the ruins: a small pewter
vase and a worn dog collar. (Another World, mid 1940s)
Elsen Family:
Sailor, John Elsen returns to Liverpool to eventually discover that all six
members of his family and his fiancé have been killed by the “heavy stuff”
of an air raid. The entire street no longer exists. (The Road, mid
1940s)
Arthur Fearon:
Young seaman and “slop-rag” smothered to death in a mercy killing after
catching syphilis from an onshore prostitute with whom he has fallen in
love. (Boy, 1931)
Grace Helling:
Murdered by her younger lover, a shipwrecked and disorientated Polish
sailor, in a shanty settlement on the outskirts of a Northern town. (Levine,
1956)
Father Hooley:
Dies from a brain haemorrhage after raping Sheila Moynhian who, having seen
him roped to a cross, deludedly believes him to be the “risen Christ.” (Resurrexit
Dominus, 1934)
Brigid Kavanagh:
Alcoholic pensioner, author of unposted letters to a long-lost son, who
commits suicide by jumping out of a tower block window when her friend is
arrested once more for shop lifting. (A Woman in the Sky, 1973)
Horace Marvel:
Having “reached pitch” this steward tending wounded soldiers who have gone
seriously “dippy” is found dead in his quarters. A character remarks: “A man
hung, and the thing was done. But the air was full of it […] so that the man
was something he could never have been whilst living. Important.” (Hollow
Sea, 1938)
Madelaine O’Hara:
Young mother of three found dead in the river Mersey after having her
furniture impounded by a money lender earlier in the novel. (The Secret
Journey, 1936)
Joseph Parr:
Port-watch lookout man on the SS Hernian dies of a seizure. He is
“lowered away” at sea. (Boy, 1931)
Mrs Anna Ragner:
Money lender stabbed to death by Peter Fury, the son of a debtor who
haphazardly happens to be her quasi-lover; “obliging a lady” says her smarmy
factotum. (The Secret Journey, 1936)
Johnny Reilly:
Elderly stoker aboard the Oranian. Commits suicide (or
self-sacrifices himself to the cult of work) by throwing himself in the
ship’s boiler. (The Last Voyage, 1930)
Rourke:
Faced with a laid-off husband (an abattoir worker), rent arrears, a leaking
roof, a fourth child and a blaspheming rebel son, devout Catholic Martha
Rourke dies of a heart attack during a domestic row. (Drift, 1930)
Appendix Two –
Eros/Thanatos
When John Fordham
suggests that Hanley’s early writings are “marred by an over-emphasis on the
immanence of both repressed and unrepressed sexual impulses in all social
relations,” he is hinting at another potential reason for Hanley’s obscurity
that far from ‘mars’ his writing. We could wield the well know trope of
‘catholic guilt’ here as does Fordham (and indeed we have seen how an
alterated identity leads to self-repression) but, just as there are
depictions of sexual violence, there is equally something polymorphous and
transgressive in Hanley’s bringing to light the darker corners of sexuality
that is often running parallel to the sexual awakening of his youthful male
characters. Indeed, these dark corners are not so much immanent as, for
some, too fully articulated; an asocial realism that veers towards that of
Pierre Guyotat. However, in some senses Fordham has a point in that Hanley
sets up a pervasive atmosphere of parental oppression as it segues into
child abuse. The rigid demarcation between adults and children, be it in the
family or at the workplace, adheres to a hierarchy in which children, being
seen as lesser-beings, become targets for an almost haphazard and yet
morally enfranchised physical and sexual abuse. In Boy, the
thirteen-year-old Arthur Fearon is both battered by his father and subject
to continual sexual harassment on board ship to the degree that he fears his
rape by older seamen is imminent. At the end of the novel, suffering from
syphilis, he is smothered to death in a mercy killing by a drunken Captain,
who, it is hinted, tries, at the same time, to rape him.
Boy
was subject to an obscenity trial in 1934 in
which the prosecution advised that “owing to the book's reference to
'intimacy between members of the male sex', any defence against prosecution
was futile.”[40] There
were already fears amongst mainstream publishers that his writing would
attract such legal attention which led to many of his earlier works of the
decade being privately printed. In his short story, ‘The German Prisoner,’
two Tommies, lost in no-man’s-land come across a teenage German soldier who
they manhandle, torture and rape with a bayonet. The battlefield, as the
site of the social non-relation par excellence, gives rise to either an
opportunity for psychosis to come to the fore (one of the soldier’s is
describe as having an “atrophied mind”) or for a post-traumatic instilling
of psychosis: “All the actions, rebuffs, threats, fatigues, […] lice,
tooth-aches […] forced absence from women, burial parties, mopping up
parties, dead horses, heaps of stale shite, heads, balls, brains,
everywhere.”[41]
That Hanley refrains from moralising about this abhorrent act and portrays
it as a matter-of-fact act that is in some ways condoned by the
circumstances of war speaks to an unleashing of instinct as a direct and
unsublimatable merging of sex and death that starkly reveals the morbidity
at the heart of that civilization that Joe Rourke is coming to question:
this episode in no-man’s-land speaks to an instinctual freedom (forever
idolised yet repressed and thus continually an ‘object’ of desire) that
gives rise to nothing other than a hypnoid state, a consciousless
autonomization of the self that lies beyond narcissism.
In light of the
strong overtones of a predatory paedophilia in these texts (as well as in
Peter Fury’s encounter with the ‘professor of anthropology’), then, in an
odd reversal, there is a marked accent placed on an inter-generational love
in which older women characters voluntarily embark upon affairs with younger
male characters. This is the case in Drift, as well as in the later
novel Levine, but it is a prevalent theme of the Furys
chronicle. Here, Peter Fury, who has been expelled from a seminary for, it
is eventually revealed, visiting prostitutes, falls in love with his older
brother’s wife, Shelia. That this is reciprocated is one of the penumbral
mysteries of the novel, but it is perhaps inspired by a mutual intensity of
feeling (driven by the unbound energies that are needed to overcome an
alterated identity) that, for Peter, reaches an almost mystical pitch.
His first meeting with her, at his brother’s house, is prefaced by an
anticipatory preamble that fetishistically comes to focus on Shelia’s hands
as she holds open a door and comes into the room. It is as if her hands
become religious icons and she is imbued with a kind of supernatural power.
In line with the male idolisation of women (and its violent ‘fragmenting’
inverse), is Hanley here outlining some sort of blasphemous transference of
the divine onto Shelia which, as the affair gathers pace, is also a symbolic
transgression of the oedipal incest taboo? Is Shelia a substitute for
Peter’s mother? Is she ‘prized’ because she is his rivalrous brother’s wife?
Likewise, for Shelia, does Peter figure as the child she cannot have? Is her
affair with him a means of punishing her preoccupied husband? That the
affair remains clandestine adds to the sense of its forbidden nature. It is
a relationship that has the power to rend apart the ‘psychological unity’ of
the ‘pledged’ group that is the Fury family.
In Secret Journey
this oedipal theme with all its dramatic import of being ‘unresolved’ – and
hence, in psychoanalytical terms, sowing the seeds of pathology – takes a
tragic turn. Whilst Maureen Fury remarks of her loveless marriage, “think
why I married my grandfather of a husband,” and Denny Fury experiences a
frisson in the presence of his sister-in-law, Peter’s affair with Shelia,
continuing despite the suspicions of his mother, is more than just a passing
element of the chronicle. Indeed, in this second volume, Peter’s involvement
in another inter-generational tryst, seems to add a ‘perverse’ parallel to
his affair with Shelia. As with Joe in Drift, Peter Fury suffers from
a familially induced guilt and shame for his being a ‘failure,’ for his
having failed to live the desire of his mother in becoming a priest. This is
ramped up when he learns that his mother is in debt to a money lender so as
to pay-off his overdue seminary fees. The threat of foreclosure looms over
the family and Peter Fury becomes the go-between for his mother and the
money-lender, Mrs Ragner. Again, at the initial encounter, the fetishism of
her hands and ringed fingers, is brought to the fore (it features as the
cover design of the first 1936 edition), but there is also a pervasive sense
of Mrs Ragner’s sadistic streak. Not only does she play the martinet with
her factotum who serves her unconditionally and whom she humiliates
(“Understand me! I am master here! You obey orders!”), but she enjoys seeing
her debtors embarassedly writhe before her and her ‘sessions’ with debtors
follow what appear like meticulously performed rituals with their
incantatory listings of monies owed and interest added. When she meets Peter
Hanley remarks: “Maybe she enjoyed the look of bewilderment, coupled with a
certain agitation, that gave his features a fretted and impatient look.”[42]
Whilst Hanley articulates the affair with Shelia in a realist ‘time-bound’
manner, the tryst with Mrs Ragner, more of a crypto-relationship, is
depicted in a dream-like way: the contours of the relationship are hazy, the
setting for Peter’s visits is often a furtive twilight and, whilst the
desires of Mrs Ranger for Peter are articulated, Peter’s will in the matter
is unclear.
Whilst it is not
explicitly stated by Hanley, the inference is that, in “obliging a lady” (as
her factotum puts it), Peter is receiving payment in the form of reducing
his mother’s debt. It is rare for such sex-economic exchange to be depicted
as being entered-into by a male, and, outside the realms of pornographic
fiction, unheard-of in the 1930s.
However, in eschewing moralism, this ‘exchange’ comes to be eclipsed
and becomes a minor factor in Hanley’s less than explicit rendition of this
tryst, in that, depicting Peter as in some kind of hypnoid state, and, in
line with the thematics outlined above, Hanley is once more bringing to the
fore the psychic costs of struggling to become other than an alterated
being. The cost in The Secret Journey is of the upmost tragic nature
in that Peter stabs Mrs Ragner to death. True to classical tragedy, the
unpremeditated nature of this murder (a whole sequence of haphazard events
are rendered by Hanley), its being unintended and almost inevitable, sees
Peter driven, not by the will of the Gods but, by a destabilising set of
unconscious psycho-social factors that Hanley presents as a density of
experience that he outlines and yet renders inconclusive. There is no single
reason, no prime motivating factor behind this murder, but a whole raft of
possible avenues to wander down. Is Peter expiating his guilt? Is he taking
a stand against a usury that profits from poverty? Is he drawn to the
sexualised play of power relationships? Is he symbolically entering into
matricide? Has the network of factors, including the psychical feedback of
an a-socialisable interiorisation, now congealed into a pathological magma,
an uncontainable upwelling, that has led to a psychotic episode?
What Hanley manages to achieve with this
indeterminate opacity, with this refusal to render Peter’s actions as
knowable and certain is akin to an existentialist theme: the irreducibility
of being in relation to knowledge which, in the case of Peter, cannot be
assimilable to ‘psychological unities’ nor to social taxonomies such as
class and work with their offer of an ontological security. Bearing in mind
Hanley’s compounding of Eros and Thanatos (a theme present across much of
his work), sexual encounters are rarely depicted as modes of loving
consummation and untroubled passion. On the contrary they are a well spring
of anxiety and frustration. Bruce Baugh, writing of Jean Wahl and Benjamin
Fondane, offers that “rending [déchirer] and passion [are] forms of
experience beyond rational comprehension.”[43] This
affective element, the opacity of affects bereft of the ‘right words’, this
para-logic, present in the existentialism of these two writers is also
present in Hanley’s 30s writing. It reaches a kind of spectral fever pitch
in his short story, ‘A Passion Before Death.’ As with the murder of Mrs
Ranger and that of the young German soldier, with this story Hanley
confronts his readers with an uncanny suspension of rationality that, in the
writing, is very apposite to Deleuze’s take on Melville’s Bartleby:
“Why should the novelist believe he is obligated to explain the behaviour of
his characters, and to supply them with reasons, whereas life for its part
never explains anything and leaves in its creatures so many indeterminate,
obscure and indiscernible zones that defy any attempt at clarification?”[44] For some,
who need their questions answered, such a take is a tragic dereliction of
the writer’s duty. For Hanley it is a means of eschewing authorial
authority, foregoing the manipulatory power of language, and creating a
textual nexus that links character, author and reader in an enigmatic
sensorial space.
In a review of one of Hanley’s later novels, Irving
Howe observed “there is no point in quoting, since the effects are
accumulative.”[45] This is
arguable, but what Howe is pointing to is how Hanley’s work, with its
experiential layerings and its occulting of motivation, seems to stage the
unconscious life of his characters. This reaches the heights of
disorientating delirium in ‘A Passion Before Death.’ Here, Carter has been
sentenced to death for the murder of Jackson, who tried to rape his wife on
their wedding night. His marriage uncosummated he writhes in his cell before
nonplussed guards and repeatedly calls for his wife (using almost the exact
same words each time as if he is in some kind of dissociated state.) Carter
simulates sex acts on his bed and against the cell door. A priest is called
and they writhe together on the floor; the priest’s saliva dropping onto
Carters shirt. That Carter has been denied satiation has left him in a hyper
sexual state, left him bereft of a closeness that as much as it concerns
jouissance also concerns the promise, after suffering an alterated
sexual repression, for an opening onto the usually taboo intimacies of
reciprocal feeling, a means of crossing the “impassable boundary between
thought and speech.” One of the guards begins to philosophise on the
situation (“in condemning a man they had condemned themselves”) and
recognising its limit-point (Carter is “near to inevitable nothingness”) and
Carter’s satyriacal suffering, he offers himself, as if he is a member of
Fourier’s angelicate, to Carter. Once more Hanley muddies the waters
of the oedipal complex when he describes the Guard as yielding to Carter
“like a mother suckling her child.”[46]
So, despite that element of tragedy in these tales, despite the
seemingly immovable co-presence of sex and death, of sexual sadism, there
is, in the interstices, the vacuoles, of Hanley’s work, an implied
polymorphousness, a fluid ‘queerness’, that reveals the sexual-relation not
only as a beyond of language but the means by which we perhaps compensate
(and overcompensate) for the social non-relation. In terms of language,
Hanley, once more can be aligned to what Baugh refers to as an element of
existential protest: “Language expresses a meaning that is objective and
universal, and so fails to capture the singular subjective experience of
real individuals.”[47] It is
this struggle over the ‘real,’ over the indistinct attributes of affect,
that is brought to the fore with many of Hanley’s characters, and which
attempts to find its alleviating point in the sexual-relation as it shifts
terrain to a ‘semiotic of the impulses’: “He began to think. It is a trick
of fate that in such moments and in such circumstances human thought should
surrender itself to an intensity of feeling, that words having lost all
power, the feeling should manifest itself through the medium of the body.”[48] That this
intensity of feeling is taboo (“feeling is like poison and a certain kind of
high explosive” comments a guard) in the ordinary course of things, that it
has nowhere else to go other than the sexual- relation perhaps feeds into
the alignment of sex and death in that the psycho-social stakes become so
high, so condensed in the medium of sexuality, that we become prone to
unpredictable upwellings. To be schematic, Hanley’s work, is for me,
presenting us with a psycho-social conundrum that for now can be expressed
as a manageable dualism: either it is a tragic matter of murder and
self-immolation, command and cliché, or it is a matter of opposing the
social non-relation through a coming-to-consciousness that can free up
singularities, becomings, transversal-sexualities... This is, perhaps, not a
matter of great effort, of learned ideology or class consciousness, of
power/knowledge or the ‘talkie game’, nor something that we can settle
alone, but, as Benjamin Fondane, simply put it: “Of all that exists,
gentlemen, we know everything. Well, then, let us speak of that which
doesn’t exist... For example, of ourselves.”[49]
Appendix Three – On
the Dog-Watch
Inconsistencies? The
usual connectives and transitions are often dropped, the usual ‘rests’
between units of speech denied. Null anaphora. The dropping of pronouns. Why
is he writing about nightfall when it’s surely still late in the morning?
Didn’t that character just leave the room? Why is she talking now? Whose
thoughts are these? Why are they thinking the same thing, having similar
feelings but are letting these drift out into the nether time of the
wilfully forgotten? What kind of time is this that is demarcated by bells?
Is the cry of pain trans-historical?
Time hangs. They knew neither day or night. One shift off, one on. Working
in the moonlight the clouds are striated into the shifting hands of a cosmic
clock. The Lookout can’t see the skyline. He’s nested in the void and his
loved ones appear before him as an hallucination, as the concrete
irrational. So, the immensity of memory augurs another kind of time, one in
which the synchronic and diachronic merge.
“When will they hang
me” implores Carter. “When will he return” says the stoically awaiting
Grace. The stowaway Arthur Fearon spends three days in the coal bunker
trying to gauge time by the change in tone of the ship’s engines. Peter Fury
is living some other kind of time, a time of sacrificial murder, a
misogynistic delirium, an upwelling that melts the clocks and wields the
knife. He’ll get 15 years. Life. Slow, slow.
Slow, slow… to port
there: L. At Lat. 40º 7’ 3” N. Long. 26 º 24’ E. approx. S. of C.11. Time
measured by the distance between one point and another. Or made immeasurable
in the granular “hissing and flipping of the ratlines and stays,” in the
far-spreading sound of a dropped bomb. By the grinding machines of the Bone
Factory. By the lappings of the Mersey as a corpse is fished out with a
stick. Slow becomes quick-quick as a factory hooter signals the end of
labour for a day.
“How many days until
we’re in Port” ask the ‘below crowd.’ The very same that have waited for the
shortened shift of the dog-watch and who have spent weeks imagining the
off-the-clock time of shore-leave. Free time? Time away from the monotony of
work from which the only remedy is to render it into the non-time of
obsession. A prison guard asks after the time. How long before Carter is
hung. “A few hours? Really? Or is it not rather a few eternities?”
And then there’s
mythic time. The time of love. After the voyage a quick embrace on the
quayside and then to the tram stop. Blackpool time. A love best expressed on
an upturned hull at the edge of the shore as the last gulls take flight. A
love looking back, preserved in a photo pinned to a cell wall. A pining
love. A love that that upsets the oedipal order of things, that reverses
birth, that sees instantaneous history through the hoop of a noose or in the
swish of a baton.
Why kind of time is
meant by Chronicle or Saga? A span of time that the working class has never
known other than as the early rise of domestic service? So, it’s time spent
in Barchester amongst the Forsytes? The time it takes to fend-off a master?
The time it takes to spawn your own nephew or for a family to disintegrate,
to refuse progeniture? Is it the ongoing tragedy of C-M-C’ time? The time of
the treadmill? Time lived as an etcetera? Or time lived in the ellipses of
an errant indirection?
Howard Slater
May-June 2025
This text is
dedicated to Alan Dent and Stefan Szczelkun
without
whom…
[1]
George Garrett, Ten Years on the Parish, Liverpool University
Press 2017, p.255. The psychodynamics of this shame are manifold and
extend from being seen as betraying the family as a ‘pledged group’
to intellectual pursuits being seen as ‘rising above’ the class and
writing as a form of onanism.
[2]
Jack Common, Freedom of the Streets, People’s Publications
1988, p.38. This ‘half-conscious’ is intriguing as it hints at a
writer’s sensitivity to the unconscious, his or her exploring an
‘inner life’ of submerged memory and hard-to-express affects. It is
a ‘freakish’ pursuit in that it summons forth in others a fear of an
‘inner life’ that is defended against: “what’s she thinking?”
[3]
Garrett, ibid, p.239.
[4]
ibid p.264.
[5]
Kamau Brathwaite, X-Self, Oxford University Press 1987, p.21.
[6]
Édouard
Glissant’s reinterpretation of the baroque as “not just as art and
style but as a way of living the unity-diversity of the world,” as a
kind of all-encompassing flamboyance, is articulated by Hilton in
his pleasingly outré
relish for wordplay:
“rollicking roughneckism,” “molly-cosh bleatings,” “sheer martinet
staccato.” For Glissant see Poetics of Relation, University
of Michigan Press 1997, p.78. For Jack Hilton see Caliban Shrieks,
Vintage Classics, 2025.
[7]
Hilton, ibid, p.92.
[8]
James Hanley, Wiki entry. Of his experiences in the Rochdale branch
of the CPGB, Hilton wryly remarks: “Twenty people set up twelve
committees,” ibid, p.134.
[9]
Hilton, ibid, p.36.
[10]
Hanley, The Last Voyage and Other Stories, Harvil 1997, p.
45. Interestingly in his exchange of letters with John Lehmann,
Garrett objects to the editorial suggestion to change ‘stream’ of
sweat to ‘rivulet’ of sweat: “In the tropics I have known men not to
wear laces so that as fast as their boots become full of sweat they
would kick them off and empty them […] Rivulet would hardly describe
the amount they empty out. Stream is best.” Garrett, ibid,
p.231.
[11]
See Sarah Richardson et al, Writing on the Line: 20th
Century Working-Class Women Writers, Working Press 1995. In an
essay included in this book, Merylyn Cherry offers: “With the
exception of Ethel Manning, who was by this time a popular author, I
have found no evidence of any working-class woman writer coming to
the fore in the 1930s.” It should also be noted that Virago Press,
as a champion of women’s writing as a whole, only began its
publishing venture in 1973.
[12]
Hanley, The Furys, Faber and Faber 2009, p.307. It should be
noted that in Hollow Sea (1938), Hanley does go into some
detail about the various onboard jobs which, outside of those
associated with the bridge and the engine room, amount to a kind of
24/7 domestic maintenance work: scaling, painting, greasing,
trimming, sweeping, mopping etc.
[13]
Hilton, ibid, p.89. See Common, ‘Fake Left’ in Revolt Against an
Age of Plenty, Strong Words 1980, p123-135.
[14]
Sara Sha’ath, Working Class Representation and the General
Strike, unpublished Phd, University of Anglia 2017. Accessed at
https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/67775/1/Collated_Thesis_v12.pdf
[15]
In his study of mental ill-health and the family, Aaron Esterson
charts how people, especially children, can come to be seen as “the
equivalent of property or money to invest.” This leads to what he
terms alterated identities: “They [the children] were
required to be ‘objective’, objects in the world of the other. Their
being was to be a being-for-the-other […] in which their feeling of
being was dependent upon the reputation of the [family] group with
‘the others’.” See Aaron Esterson, The Leaves of Spring,
Pelican 1972, p.69. Esterson extends this sense of ‘public display’
to a kind of surveillance internal to the family itself which,
absenting any reciprocity of feeling, any consciousness of the
psychical costs of alterated being, can end up as a
schizophrenizing hall of mirrors.
[16]
Common, ibid, p.108
[17]
ibid, p.122.
[18]
Ernst Bloch, ‘Discussing Expressionism’ (1938) in Aesthetics and
Politics, Verso 1980, p.24. Such an ‘incognito’ can refer to
Hanley’s youthful characters belonging nowhere (in the interstices
of family-church-work); however, with Bloch’s defence of the
“emotional effusions” of expressionism in this 1938 article (a
polemic with Lukacs) is he not also suggesting the psychological
incognito of an errant coming-to-consciousness?
[19]
John Fordham, James Hanley:
Modernism and the Working Class, University of Wales Press 2002.
Such ‘ideological complexity’ is perhaps a way of hinting at the
psychological dimension of Hanley’s writings whilst occluding it as
solely a matter of knowledge (ideology) rather than the
psycho-social lived experiences of everyday life? Fordham makes a
case for Hanley being seen as an expressionist writer which, to a
degree, also occludes the psychological dimension by remaining
within literary categorisation.
[20]
Murray Bookchin, On Spontaneity and Organisation, Section 7,
Solidarity 1975. Accessed at
https://libcom.org/article/spontaneity-and-organisation-murray-bookchin
In this light Esterson’s notion of alterated identity
is pretty much another way of articulating the more Marxist notion
of our being reified as de-subjectified objects (roles etc) under
the value imperative: “Each ‘I’ is an ‘it’” as Esterson puts it,
ibid, p.56.
[21]
Bookchin, ibid, Section 1. There
are many examples of such a ‘coming-to-consciousness’ in canonical
literature: Melville’s Pierre; or, The Ambiguities,
Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Salinger’s Catcher in The Rye
etc. One would do well here to consult Jessie Kesson’s Where the
Apple Ripens, Hogarth Press 1986.
[22]
Hilton, ibid, p.90.
[23]
Raymond Williams’s notion of a
“structure of feeling” is useful in expanding on Garrett’s notion of
a ‘feeling idea’: “‘feeling’ is chosen to emphasise a distinction
from more formal concepts of ‘world-view’ or ‘ideology’ […] we are
concerned with meanings and values as they are actively lived and
felt…” See, Marxism and Literature XX. Here, Williams draws
very close to what would later be rendered as ‘affect.’
[24]
Jack Common draws attention to these inhibitions as “the private
inferiority of the worker.” He adds: “Even if you got your
proletarian to the point of bursting-full class consciousness […]
there remains a number of psychological checks.” See Freedom of
the Streets, ibid, p.32.
[25]
Bookchin, ibid. Hanley’s work displays many instances of the
auto-repression of thought and, at times, its eventual upwelling:
“It was as though he had cut down every thought in his head, just
like wheat, that he had long forgotten how to think, and then
suddenly like the growing wheat the thoughts had come up again. All
kinds of thoughts.” See Hanley, Hollow Sea, Panther 1965,
p.245.
[26]
In ‘The Sartre Question’ Jacques Camatte refers to Bordiga speaking
of a ‘class instinct’ at
http://www.revueinvariance.net/sartre.html.
[27]
In terms of ‘awakening selfhood’ one should
take into account here Hegel, as cited by Guy Debord, when he points
to an implicit social relation being established between two
self-conscious beings: “Self-consciousness exists […] by the fact
that it exists for another self-consciousness; that it to say, it
is only by being acknowledged or ‘recognised.’” See header quote
to ‘Section IX – Ideology Materialised’ in Society of the
Spectacle, Black & Red 1983.
[28]
Hanley, Drift, Nicholson & Watson, 1930/1944, p.11. This
sentiment, this will-to-become, is echoed by one of Hanley’s later
characters, Grace Helling: “I am sick of my
life and I hate my own obedience. I am tired of this house of death.
I am not what I am and not what I should be.” See Levine,
Macdonald 1956, p.170. A notable aspect of this novel is that Grace,
in her mid-thirties, has been cloistered by her parents to such a
degree that she can be said to have been infantilised. After their
death in an air-raid she walks away from the family home in a
hypnoid state.
[29]
Hanley, Drift, p.161.
[30]
Hanley, The Secret Journey, ibid, p. 353.
[31]
R.D. Laing, Reason and Violence, Tavistock 1971, p.161. This
is more or less a prefiguring of the ‘social non-relation’ of the
Slovenian Lacanian school.
[32]
These critical comments are drawn from Fordham, ibid.
[33]
Hanley’s second novel Boy (1931) was subject to an obscenity
trial and Fordham relates how his draft WW1 novel was abandoned on
the advice of a literary editor. A 1934 work, Resurrexit Dominus,
which Hanley saw as his finest work to date,
was printed in an edition of one hundred and ten.
[34]
Enzo Traverso, Left Wing Melancholia, Columbia University
Press 2021, p.53.
[35]
Hanley, ‘A Passion before Death’ in Last Voyage and Other Stories,
ibid, p.137. The notion of the ‘real domination’ of capital (“the
horror of having brought into being the very machine they were
helpless to smash”, ibid, p.136.) perhaps brings tragedy and
revolution into closer contact: the characters of Greek Tragedy
often find ways and means of going against the Gods. See Pasolini’s
Medea (1969.)
[36]
Hanley, Drift p.228. For Alice Miller, see For Your Own
Good: The Roots of Violence in Child-rearing, Virago Press 1987.
[37]
Vladimir Jankélévitch, La Méconnaissance et le
Malentendu, Editions Seuil, 1980. p.24. Authors translation.
[38]
Cited by Kristen Anderson in her review of Boy for the
Dublin Review of Books, September 2007 See
https://drb.ie/articles/a-queer-sort/
[39]
Hanley, Drift, ibid, p.160.
[40]
See entry for Boy on Wikipedia. No mention in this ‘advice’
of the adult abuse of children.
[41]
Hanley, ‘The German Prisoner’ in The Last Voyage and Other
Stories, ibid, p.73. This hard-edged cynicism is also on view in
Hilton’s recounting of his experiences in the trenches: “The moon
made their faces a bile-lit green […] Poor chap, what a mess!
Stammering and all the shakes, one of God’s children who had been
reduced to a hopeless lump of shocks…” Hilton, ibid, p. 23.
[42]
Hanley, Secret Journey, ibid, p.153
[43]
Bruce Baugh, The French Hegel: From Surrealism to Post-Modernism,
Routledge 2003, p.33. Accessed at Memory of the World.
[44]
Gilles Deleuze, cited by Baugh, ibid, p.50. See Deleuze, ‘Bartleby,
or the Formula’ in Essays Critical and Clinical, Verso 1998,
p.66 ff.
[45]
Irving Howe’s review of A Dream Journey in New York Review
of Books, December 19, 1976. See
https://www.enotes.com/topics/james-hanley/criticism/hanley-james-1901-1
[46]
More muddying occurs in Drift when Rimson, commenting upon
Joe’s precarious family situation, says, “fancy a father murdering
his son and a son killing his mother,” ibid, p.173. More
disquietingly strange than this irreverent jest is Grace Helling
fascinatedly watching the ‘primal scene’ of her devout parents
making love. See Levine, ibid, pp.78-79.
[47]
ibid, p.34.
[48]
Hanley, ‘A Passion Before Death’, ibid, p.112.
[49]
Benjamin Fondane, Le Festin de Balthazar (Auto-Sacramental),
Arcane 17 Editions 1985, p.22. Author’s translation.