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A University of Sussex DPhil thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details MICHAEL HALLAM UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX AVANT-GARDE REALISM: JAMES HANLEY, PATRICK HAMILTON AND THE LOST YEARS OF THE 1940s THESIS SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY APRIL 2011 I hereby declare that this thesis has not been and will not be, submitted either in whole or in part to any other University for the award of any other degree ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my deep gratitude to Peter Nicholls and Alistair Davies who supervised this thesis, and to the Arts and Humanities Research Council who funded the project. Many other people also helped with my research and I would like to thank Peter Boxall and Margaret Reynolds; Chris Gostick for his invaluable guidance on the biography of James Hanley; Geoff Gilbert and Philip Tew for sharing their thoughts on Patrick Hamilton, and William Baker and Pat Fox for helping me locate archive material at the libraries of Northern Illinois University and the Harry Ransom Centre for the Humanities. David Rush read drafts of chapters and made a huge number of helpful suggestions. I would also like to express my gratitude to Isheeta Mustafi, who has supported my research and writing in innumerable ways. I would also like to thank the Patrick Hamilton Estate (managed by AM Heath) and the James Hanley Estate (managed by David Higham Associates) for their kind permission to quote from unpublished and archival material in this thesis. All other material used in this thesis is believed to be in the public domain. UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX MICHAEL HALLAM DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY AVANT-GARDE REALISM: JAMES HANLEY, PATRICK HAMILTON AND THE LOST YEARS OF THE 1940s This thesis examines the dynamic relationship between realism and experimentalism in the 1940s and mid-century fiction of James Hanley and Patrick Hamilton. It is argued that the work of both writers during this period, although it might utilise realist forms and techniques, is not characterised by reversion to a traditional and outmoded model of novel writing that predates modernism, but rather, is engaged in a productive and sometimes tense dialogue with the gestures, manners and experiments of the avant- garde. In so doing, Hanley and Hamilton are read as key exemplars of a varied and adventurous literary moment that has been frequently overlooked within the broad narrative of twentieth century British fiction. It is argued that these works complicate the vocabulary of literary realism by suggesting the novel as a hybrid form: an aesthetic which privileges fidelity to a contemporary ―real‖, especially the conditions of wartime and post-war and the shifting configurations of social and economic relations, even as it simultaneously projects a deep estrangement or satirical detachment from a sense of unified reality. Whilst registering the manifest differences between the two writers, the thesis explores their fiction‘s varying reactions towards and absorption of avant-garde idioms, such as the surrealist and expressionist, and analyses the affective qualities of that ―heightening‖ of language in the construction of their realist narratives. All the novels discussed, in a series of close readings, possess a stylistic or tonal singularity that tangibly frames their narratives, a process of divergence that contests and reconceptualises the concept and aims of literary realism. In historicising this phase of literary change, the thesis draws on the work of various cultural theorists and historians and elaborates the interpretive framework in which the literary 40s and the fiction of Hanley and Hamilton can be recast. CONTENTS Introduction p.2 Section One: James Hanley Chapter One: ―Touchy About Style‖: Perspectives on James Hanley p.14 Chapter Two: ―The Terror Language‖: No Directions (1943) p.31 Chapter Three: ―Horizon‘s Line A Blur‖: The Ocean (1941) and Sailor‟s Song (1946) p.73 Section Two: Patrick Hamilton Chapter Four: ―The Man on the Margin‖: Perspectives on Patrick Hamilton p.132 Chapter Five: ―Eerie Days Followed‖: Hangover Square (1941) and Slaves of Solitude (1948) p.146 Chapter Six: ―A ‗Black‘ Social History‖: The Gorse Trilogy (1951-55) p.170 Conclusion p.215 Bibliography p.219 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Fig. 1: A photograph of James Hanley p.16 Fig. 2: Firemen working during a Saturday night raid in 1941 p.61 Fig.3: An American poster from 1942 p.82 Fig. 4: The sole survivors of the shipwrecked Lulworth Hill p.105 Fig. 5: A photograph of Hamilton in the 1930s p.140 Fig. 6: A Moribundian ―balloon‖ p.143 Fig. 7: 35 and 36 Cromwell Road, Hove p.178 Fig. 8: Brighton‘s West Pier p.180 Fig. 9: Brighton Railway Station from the early 1900s p.180 2 Introduction There is an event that occurs in James Hanley‘s novel No Directions (1943) that the narrative discloses in momentous terms. Clem, a reclusive painter, has become so overcome with emotion at the spectacular carnage that falling bombs are wreaking on London that he runs through the city‘s streets during a black-out. After scrambling to the top of a tall building he senses ―A battering sound below, something white threshing in the black moving sea.‖1 Getting closer Clem perceives that it is a horse: ―A big white stallion loose, a maddened animal‖ (ND 137). He begins to cling to the ―beast‖ as it runs through the streets: ―all his life had been a single movement towards this, to hold fast with a hoofed creature, demented in a rocking city‖ (ND 137). Such a visually striking image encourages us to discern a symbolic meaning. Alan Munton reads it as a redemptive moment in a text specifically about war and apocalypse, something that can symbolise how ―History does not come to an end. There must be a future, however diminished by loss.‖2 In this thesis, I argue that such a narrative incident is expressive of a tendency that has a significant but hitherto little discussed life in a certain strain of fiction from the 1940s. This tendency is towards singular stylistic manoeuvres that have the potential to transform the tone of an entire novel; moments of seeming unreality (or perhaps sublimity) that push past or make self-conscious the ―realist‖ narrative frames through which other parts of the fiction appear to be housed. Through this act of categorising an aesthetic tendency, I argue that the British novel in this cultural moment was a highly permeable form receptive to many influences. Whilst images of expressionistic terror or acts of textual surrealistic 1 James Hanley, No Directions (1943) (London: André Deutsch, 1990), p.136. Subsequent page references in text with abbreviation (ND). 2 Alan Munton, English Fiction of the Second World War (London, Faber & Faber, 1989), p. 43. 3 subversion are certainly modalities of avant-garde practice from the 1910s and 20s, the presence of such ―moments‖ in British novels of the 40s and mid-century has not been fully accounted for. Indeed, such a presence seems anomalous to many chronologies of literary history which suggest that 40s writing emerges from a cultural moment when the energies of modernist activity in Britain were dissipating or had entirely died away.3 Cultural practice in the later inter-war years is often thought to be characterised by a large-scale reaction against the ―elitist‖ nature of some modernisms and their supposed elevation of issues of subjectivity over wider social and public problems.4 This was a time when many writers – with George Orwell as an exemplar – turned to ―documentary‖ forms of fiction in an effort to account for realities of British life (especially those of class, economic and regional difference) that modernist writers are presumed to have neglected. As Jed Esty explains, this conception of the novel ―took as its premise the idea that English society was an unknown quantity.‖5 There have been negative (if unintended) consequences of a characterisation of literary history that suggests modernism in Britain, with London as its epicentre, represents a cosmopolitan 3 Tyrus Miller suggests that the notion of dissipating artistic energy within avant-garde movements was widely recognised in the late 20s, a phase when a ―central part of the avant- garde‘s vocation was to profess its lack of vocation.‖ See Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction and the Arts Between the World Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p.3. This project is much influenced by Miller‘s thesis that a body of work emerged in the 30s and 40s that engaged in implicit dialogue with what it perceived as the failed or failing aesthetics of previous modernisms. Yet, whereas Miller‘s study focuses on modernists who self-consciously broke with modernism (several of whom were iconic literary figures) my emphasis is on a set of writers who worked entirely outside of the social networks of modernism. I suggest that novelists situated outside of modernism - in terms of recognised social groupings - were no less engaged in the arguments it initiated or recognised its ―afterlife‖ in the novel form. For discussion of whether modernism should be seen as an historical category with a finite time-span or as a ―tendency that lives a rich and discontinuous life‖ across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, see ―introduction‖ to Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls, eds., The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp.3-4, at p.4.