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In his introduction to the 1983
re-print of Brierley's novel, Means-Test Man, which had been first
published in 1935, Andy Croft remarks that it took the author ten weeks to
produce this "simply-told tale of a week in the life of an unemployed
Derbyshire miner and his family, leading up to the visit of the Means-Test
Inspector." He also notes that although on publication the novel was
warmly praised in some quarters, approval on the left was noticeably more
muted. And he quotes the view of the Daily Worker that it is
misleading for Brierley to imply that Jack Cook's passivity in the face of
his degrading treatment is somehow typical. "The unemployed worker
who sits at home waiting for the investigator is not the rule, but the
exception." Ernie Wooley, who wrote these words, couldn't then have
known of Georg Lukac's argument that the best kind of
"progressive" fiction, which also happened to be that in
accordance with historical inevitability, was one in which the
"average" hero embodied the hopes, and energies, of the emergent
class to which he belonged. But Wooley plainly felt that Brierley's
protagonist was hardly a model of working-class resistance to capitalism
and therefore no help to readers wanting to understand the forces shaping
contemporary history.
That Cook is profoundly passive
in his acceptance of what is happening to him is undeniable. There is
something very English about this and it isn't confined to the working
class. "We must face reality", university colleagues haplessly
reiterated as Thacherite minions and then, later, Blair's, set about
wrecking just about everything that made the UK university system
worthwhile. To my protest that on the contrary we make reality they
responded with a shrug, a shake of the head, a wry smile. "The
culture of consolation" Gareth Stedman Jones called the music hall,
and argued that its hey-day coincided with the spread of fatalistic
acceptance of the status quo among those who had most to gain by
challenging defeatism. About the only consolation on offer to Jack Cook,
who is not merely unemployed but who day by day sees his pitiful savings
whittled down by me need to feed and clothe his wife and son, is to take
the boy to a cricket match. No cinema, no pub, no social life. "The
mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation", Henry Thoreau wrote,
who could hardly have anticipated the desperation of
"respectable" working class people like the Cooks. I put the
word in inverted commas because one of the best things about Brierley's
novel is the way he establishes Jack and Jane's desire for a kind of
modest but decent existence that circumstance denies them. They go short
of food, they can't afford to buy new clothes, they struggle to maintain a
modicum of personal cleanliness and to keep the house trim. And it's a
losing battle.The coming of the Means Test man is a final, terrible
humiliation.
The
master and mistress of a household - the two heads of a home - husband and
wife in their castle -- English.And this man sat here at the table where
grace used to be said, where friends used to come and laugh over tea,
always on the first Sunday in the year, that nearest to [their son's]
birthday. And this man sat where those friends had sat, he was like a lord
and they stood trembling before him. No, that wasn't the relation at all,
there was something soulless in this, callous. Means Test. It was
something else beside a means test, it tested one's soul, one's being, and
the soul and the being were poorer every time. It could not but leave mem
worse, disturbing as it did the calm and quietness of the inner life.
However far back into one's self one retreated, still the test followed,
measuring, measuring.
Jack's helpless reply to his
wife's grief-stricken storm of tears after the means test man has taken
his leave - "If all the women of England could feel for a minute what
you've gone through this morning, there'd be no more of it", is, in
its forlorn impotence, deeply affecting. We need only recall that at more
or less the moment Brierley's novel was published the Jarrow marchers were
being told that "Jarrow must work out its own salvation",to
register the full pathos of his words.
Means-Test Man is remarkable for
its detailed study of lives, outer and inner, being worn away by misery
for which there seems precious little alleviation. And I'd also want to
pay tribute to Brierley's handling of dialect and local idiom.
Nevertheless, there is something odd about Cook's isolation, the fact that
he keeps himself apart from others, and his isolation does, as Wooley
implies, seem atypical of the kinds of lives with which the novel engages.
To put it rather differently: it isn't so much Cook's failure to raise a
red duster against the system that disturbs me as Brierley's apparent
indifference to community.
An at least partial explanation
for this may lie in Brierley's own circumstances. He was born in the
Derbyshire village of Waingroves, in June, 1900, where his father was an
engine winder at Derby Hall Pit. A bright boy, he nevertheless left school
at the age of 13 to start work at Waingroves Pit. But he attended night
classes in French, English and Maths, and as a young adult applied for a
place on me Miners Welfare Scholarship for a non-vocational course at
Nottingham University College. According to Philip Gorski, "Between
1927 and 1931 he studied two days per week at the college, working the
other three days at the pit. However, out of the four subjects, History,
English, Latin and Logic, he first failed Logic and then Latin,
consequently failing to secure a full-time place." As a result he had
to go back to pit work, though he was soon made redundant, "despite
the supposed guarantee covering his job. He was then out of work until
1935. " The publication of Means-Test Man turned him into a full-time
writer (the story of his progress can be found in Croft's commanding Red
Letter Days: British Fiction in the 1930s); two years after its
appearance came Sandwichman, which as Gorski points out in the
Introduction to the Merlin Radical Fiction edition of the novel (1990),is
based on Brierley's own experiences, especially his struggles to enter
higher education. Gorski also mounts a vigorous and I think entirely
successful defence of the novel against those on the left who see Sandwichman
as deeply compromised by its fatalism. Certainly Arthur Gardner, the main
protagonist, gains nothing from his higher educational studies. He loses
his job, his girl deserts him, his mother dies (after a visit from the
means-test man) and Arthur himself is reduced to tramping the streets and
then taking the only work he is offered -that of a sandwich board man. A
grim tale, as Gorski says, if not a tragic one. But he rightly dismisses
Carol Snee's absurd claim that Brierley's prose is at once
"self-consciously literary" and "lifeless and static."
(You can't get language much more self-conscious or lifeless than hers.)
On the contrary: Sandwichman is marked by vivid prose that catches
both the talk of miners and that of the adult students yearning for a life
elsewhere; and it explores in harrowing detail the collapse of Arthur's
hopes and dreams. But what gives the novel its especial distinction is the
way in which Brierley depicts the tensions that inevitably arise within
and between those for whom the life of the pit is where they
"naturally" belong, and those who yearn for an alternate
existence. And if Snee and others think that this somehow untrue to or a
betrayal of "inherent" working-class values, she should consider
the lives of, among others, John Clare and D. H. Lawrence. Lawrence in
particular is hugely important. Not only did he manage to break away, his
novels act out and in a sense live through the inevitable emotional
complications, the opening up of psychic wounds, the hostilities and
accusations of betrayal, that such breaking away habitually entails, the
deep fissures it opens up between those who stay and those who go, the
cultural divisions - how to speak, to dress, to behave- and the damage
done to (and by) those whose class and regional identity is, it must feel,
rejected as inadequate. (Though such splits are, I'd guess, far less
pronounced nowadays, and a very good thing, too. Class is still a key
issue in any consideration of Englishness, but it is less significant,
less a defining matter, than when Brierley was writing.) I am not going to
claim that Brierley manages to attest to, far less explore, these matters
with anything approaching Lawrence's range and intensity, (only Philip
Callow comes near to that, most especially perhaps in his memoir, Passage
from Home), but Sandwichman undoubtedly contains moments which
register the cost of wanting away. As here, for instance, where, after a
long day's work down the mine, Arthur settles down, as he hopes, to an
evening's study.
His mother came in when he had
been working at his history essay for about half an hour.
"You'd better come and give
your Dad and Sid a hand in the garden. They're going to put some potatoes
in."
"Crikes," he said, with
a touch of bewilderment and disappointment. "It'll throw me all
behind. He looked into her face, then at his pages. "No logic
tonight. I s'll be too tired."
"There'll be a row if you
don't.... You shouldn't stay out so late, you wouldn't be so tired
then." A touch of anger was in her voice, not at him directly, but
that such a circumstance had arisen through what she felt could have been
avoided; she was angry that he would fall short of the point the had aimed
at.
"I shall stay up and finish
this, anyway."
He followed her out and put on
his pit shoes again, turned up the bottoms of his shifting trousers, then
went into the garden. His father and Sidney were digging; neither had
washed....
"You thought of gettin' out
of it nicely, didn't you? [the father said], when Arthur came up with the
last spread of manure. The man was standing at the end of the row, his
face slightly pale with the exertion just ended. He spoke with the
suggestion of a sneer. "Runnin' into t'parlour every night."
"What are you talking
about?" Arthur looked the man straight in the eyes, after momentary
surprise had wavered across his face. "I didn't know you were coming
into the garden tonight."
"Didn't want to know."
Arthur walked away to the other end of the row .... "Nothink else but
books and women. Other folks can sludge-pump."
The bad feeling between Arthur
and his father is very different from the mother's anger. She wants Arthur
to succeed, his father simmers with hurt at his son's rejection of a life
that he himself has had to accept as all that's on offer. I don't see how
you can read a passage such as this and not recall the great opening of The
Rainbow: nor can I believe that it hadn't affected Brierley when he
came to write Sandwichman. This is emphatically not to say that his
novel is in any way a pastiche or, worse, tamely derivative of Lawrence.
It is, however, to suggest mat for all his novel's virtues, Brierley
needed Lawrence to show him how to articulate and give fictional shape to
his own experiences. It is also to say that where Sandwichman differs
from, and improves on, Means-Test Man is in Brierley's ability to
write about Arthur as both within and resistant to a community that is
largely absent from the earlier novel. The narrow focus of Means-Test
Man almost makes the Cook family into a case study. (Though I don't
want to suggest that this brings the novel down to the level of Mass
Observation, that pruriently intrusive device by which certain individuals
in the 30s chose to document "our" world.) Sandwichman
feels a more confidently achieved work, and a measure of Brierley's
growing sureness of touch is the way he trusts to unobtrusive detail to
achieve his effects. It's worth noting, for instance, that in the passage
quoted above, Arthur sounds the final g to certain words - talking, coming
- whereas his father cuts them off- getting', runnin' - or uses the
equally idiomatic k. (Nothink). Even more worthy of note, as the bickering
between the two men starts up, Arthur, through whose eyes we see the
incident, looks not at his father but at the father. The older man is no
longer seen as standing in unique relationship to his son, but merely
plays out a conventional role. By such socially and psychologically
convincing devices we are able to register me growing gap between the two
men.
Jobey
also registers gaps that open up between apparently "natural"
allies. But Leslie Williamson's novel was published getting on for fifty
years after Sandwichman, and although it is recognisably about the
same area of the East Midlands, the scene has moved on. This however may
not be at first apparent, given that the novel's ostensible subject is the
General and then Miners' Strike of 1926, a defining moment in working-
class history of which Williamson, who was born only four years before the
Strike began, clearly knows a great deal. Some of this knowledge must have
come from anecdotes handed down by and through the Eastwood community
where he has spent his life. But Williamson has a keen and well-informed
historical interest in the region. Hence Bread For All, (1992), his
novel based on the Pentrich uprising of 1817. (Which brought about the
execution of a number of Derbyshire miners, led to the naming of what is
still Australia's largest prison, and prompted Shelley's great Essay on
Liberty. And he is also the author of a charming prose-poetry sequence
called D.H. Lawrence and the Country that he Loved. (2003).
Lawrence is his hero, both for his love of the countryside round Eastwood
- "the country of my heart" Lawrence famously called it - and
for the fact that, in Williamson's own words, "He was afraid of
nothing and nobody." The upshot, among much else, was that "he
managed to alienate his friends and neighbours and practically the whole
of Eastwood as well." At one time I toyed with the idea that the
eponymous hero of Williamson's novel is meant as a tribute to Lawrence,
but I doubt that this is intended, though I do think that Joe Bird, the
novel's wise socialist, bears more man a passing resemblance to Willie
Hopkin, Lawrence's life-long friend. Jobey is a man of great physical
prowess, someone who loves and is loved by Margaret Booker, the daughter
of the manager of the colliery where he and most men in his community
work. His love for her leads to tension between him and his workmates.
Early on in the novel, when, Margaret and Jobey are engaged in one of
their semi-clandestine meetings, she says to him "You should live out
here [in the open country]... .Men such as you belong in the open
air." Jobey replies: "That's where I belong." He pointed
down at the water. "Under there, where a man doesn't have to know
when to sit or stand, when to shake a hand or stand respectfully. We use
the words our fathers taught us and ... and" ... The word Father was
like a ball and chain.
This neatly enough touches on
allegiances mat are pulling Jobey in different directions, allegiances
which are then put agonisingly to the test when Booker recruits him to
protect the mine from the wrecking intentions of the striking miners.
Nevertheless, the fraught
relationship between Jobey and Margaret which matters most. The best
things in Jobey are, first, the unsentimental accounts of community life,
and second the underground explosion that occurs after the men have
returned to work, a disaster written about with an intensity and narrative
drive that makes it a genuine tour de force. Many novels of the 1930s that
revolve about mining communities include accounts of such disasters, but
none approaches the sustained power of Jobey.
Nor does any of them rival Jobey's
disenchanted realism in its depiction of how, for all the selflessness of
some, others are conditioned by a self-serving determination to survive
that, in the case of Pokey Jordan, amounts to an Abhorson-like readiness
to kill anyone who stands in his way. Pokey is a man who can "sink
enough beer to float a canoe without once relieving his bladder. When he
finally did go, he stood back about three feet from the wall, hands behind
his back, staring at the ceiling.... As Sid Perkins used to say, 'He
sounds like a bloody great station hoss' ..." He uses and humiliates
the local prostitute, bullies his family and anyone weaker man himself, he
is, in a word, unregenerate. At the moment of me pit explosion, Pokey is
trapped below with forty or so other miners, one of whom he batters to
death, another of whom he half strangles, and when eventually some are
saved by Jobey's intervention, Pokey is the first to scramble out,
"to a very subdued cheer." Not that he cares. Simply the thing
he is shall make him live.
Williamson's refusal to make
heroes out of all his working-class characters is as admirable as his
avoidance of costume drama. So, too, the easy authority with which he
handles dialect and idiom. Above all, though, we should note the way he
writes about the underground explosion and its consequences, for this
constitutes a sustained narrative of quite extraordinary power. Because it
unfolds over the best part of a section that runs to 11,000 words it is
impossible to offer any quotation that will give an adequate sense of just
how impressive Williamson's achievement here is. To understand that you
will simply have to read the novel. One other notable feature of Jobey is,
however, more easily pinned down.
As the strike takes hold, Joe
Bird, "fearless, far-seeing, incorruptible, yet quietly
resolute", knows that he will need to be at his most persuasive to
prevent local miners from backsliding.
A lot of districts with no coal
near the surface had been accusing him of letting them down. 'Watch
Nottingham' they had said at the National Conference. "That's the
weak spot. That's where the wall will break.' he had sat there taking it
all. Not because the men were any less resolute, but because the coalfield
was so exposed, the temptation was enormous in this area.
And so he orders his men to fill
in the outcrops.
Given that Jobey was published in
1983, this is ominously prescient. For in the miners' strike of 1984-5 it
was of course Nottinghamshire miners who broke away to form the UDM, and
one of their leaders, Roy Greatorex, as good as said that whereas the
Yorkshire pits, being deep, were expensive to maintain, Nottingham coal
was for the most part nearer the surface, and that the future of
Nottingham mines would be guaranteed under that nice Mr Heseltine. Fat
chance. A very few years later the plug was pulled on the Nottinghamshire
mines.
There is another parallel between
Jobey and the events of 1984/5. In Jobey, Yorkshire miners march down to
Nottinghamshire after the local miners begin to drift back to work. They
hope to persuade them to change their minds. But they fail as surely as
did those picketing miners who, sixty years later, tried to stop filled
coal lorries driving off from Nottinghamshire pits. And although I doubt
that Williamson intended the explosion that ends his novel to be read
symbolically, the havoc it causes, and the deaths of miners it results in,
reads uncannily as a foretaste of what would happen to the mining industry
after the collapse of the strike in 1985. Not that Williamson in any way
demonises the miners whose reluctant return to work is, they plead,
undertaken for the sake of their wives and children. But it leads to
disaster. During the strike the pit has accumulated what ought to be
unacceptably high levels of gas, but though Booker knows of this, he still
allows the men to go back down. He's under pressure from Waverley, the
mine owner, to re-start the pit. As a result of the explosion, Waverley
drops dead from a heart attack, an outcome in which wishful thinking
rather triumphs over probability. This isn't how it happens, as more
recent outrages - Potter's Bar and Hatfield, say - make plain. Nor am I
much persuaded by Jobey's love affair with Margaret Booker. This, too,
seems a piece of conventional fiction. But to say this doesn't damage
Williamson's overall achievement That rests on qualities which between them
make Jobey a novel of real worth and one that deserves to be far better
known.
Note:
Walter Brierley's Means-test
Man, first published in 1935, was reprinted by Spokesman Books in
1983. (Bertrand Russell House, Gamble Street, Nottingham, NG7 4ET.) Sandwichman,
first published 1937, was reprinted in Merlin Radical Fiction, under my
general editorship, Merlin Press, London, 1990. Merlin Press was a small
but very important press specialising in radical writing (it published
most of EP Thompson's work) which ended with the death of its publisher,
Martin Eve, though the stock, or such of it as wasn't sold off, survives.
Leslie Williamson's Jobey was first published by Robert Hale in
1983, then issued in paperback by Methuen, and in 2002 became available in
a large-print edition, "complete and unabridged": The
Ulverscroft Foundation, The Green, Bradgate Road, Anstey, Leicester LE7
7FU. Ulverscroft also issue a large-print edition of Williamson's mystery,
The Crowded Cemetery, first published by Hale in 1981. The
following year the same publishers brought out another Williamson mystery,
Death of a Portrait
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