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…