Article in London Magazine, March 2008
Is it possible to be nostalgic about a time before you were born? For me the Thirties hold a very powerful appeal, partly due, I suspect, to the films and fashions, the music, the cars, and not least to a pervasive atmosphere of dark menacing glamour in the build-up to a war everyone knew was coming, sooner rather than later. Also many of my favourite writers were producing their best work then - Greene, Orwell, Waugh - and while these are still remembered, and revered, there are several novelists critically lauded at the time, some of them highly popular, who are today virtually forgotten; my "Lost" writers: Nigel Balchin, Gerald Kersh, James Hanley, Malcolm Lowry, Rosamond Lehmann and Patrick Hamilton.
Hamilton's and Lehmann's fortunes have revived somewhat in recent years, thanks largely to TV and radio dramatisations. There was a terrific 3-part version of Patrick Hamilton's trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (1929-34) on BBC2 a few years ago, and a feature film or TV version of his brilliant and most paranoid novel, Hangover Square (1941), is long overdue. As for Rosamond Lehmann, she's been well served by a sparkling Radio 4 adaptation of her novel Invitation to the Waltz (1932), and once again her early novels, Dusty Answer (1927) and The Weather in the Streets (1936) - full of heart-wrenching stuff about innocent young girls having doomed love affairs with handsome cads, plus the achingly romantic fashions of the Thirties - are perfect for the big screen. Why a movie producer hasn't snapped them up is a mystery.
Malcolm Lowry is a writer who keeps getting lost and then found again. During his lifetime he published only two novels: Ultramarine (1933) and Under the Volcano (1947), the latter hailed as a work of genius. The action of the novel takes place in a small Mexican town during the annual festival of the Day of the Dead, where we find Geoffrey Firmin, the disgraced British ex-consul, drinking himself to death; he ends up in a ravine, shot in the belly, with a dead pariah dog for company. So not exactly a barrel of laughs then. But such is the enduring power of the book, and Lowry's idiosyncratic vision, that there's a revival every few years with new readers discovering him. I have been party to this process in that I wrote and presented a programme for Radio 4 last year to mark the 50th anniversary of Lowry's death, "The Lighthouse Invites the Storm," after the title of his own poem.
Nigel Balchin's books differ from those of his contemporaries - and indeed from most other novelists - in one important respect: they deal with the world of work. His protagonists have real jobs and occupational skills you can believe in, not inserted just as background or a means of fleshing out the characters, and Balchin's plots are based on the actual working lives of engineers, scientists and psychiatrists. The dilemmas his backroom boffins come up against in The Small Back Room (1943), for instance, possibly his best-known novel, are intimately involved with - and a direct consequence of - their work in a top-secret government research department during the war. As he revealed in an interview in 1962, Balchin was able to achieve this sense of authenticity because he shied away from writing full-time. "I feel I need some other work. There is a danger of becoming a 'literary gent', the sort of person who is in contact only with other people who write. This is too limited a range of contacts for a novelist."
After Cambridge he became a consultant at the National Institute of Industrial
Psychology, an experience he used as the basis for his leading character,
a psychiatrist, in Mine Own Executioner (1945). During the war he was
Deputy Scientific Adviser to the Army Council, attaining the rank of Brigadier.
It was his frustration at the mountain of red tape and rampant bureaucracy
that led to The Small Back Room, the novel which introduced such terms
to the language as "boffin" and "backroom boy". (It is
also claimed that while working for Rowntrees of York in the early 1930s,
Balchin had the brainwave of blowing bubbles through chocolate, thus inventing
Aero, and dreamt up the brand name Kit Kat.)
In truth, Balchin is a bit of a snob as a writer, and his tone a mite condescending,
yet he remains a first-rate story-teller, intelligent and entertaining, and
knows how to ratchet up the tension. Any writer who can have a hero with a
tin foot gets my vote.
As the title of this piece tells you, many writers fall into neglect, some deservedly so. James Hanley, for my money, was and still is a neglected genius, and I use the term advisedly. William Faulkner thought so too (" … language like a good clean cyclone" was his verdict). Born in 1897 to Irish parents, Hanley was brought up in desperate poverty in the Kirkdale waterfront district of Liverpool and ran away to sea when he was thirteen. His second novel, Boy (1931), deals so harshly and unflinchingly with what he endured on board ship and in foreign ports that it was prosecuted for obscene libel. It wasn't the youth's initiation in the brothels of Alexandria that the wife of the Bury taxi driver (who instigated the court case) objected to so much as what he endured at the hands of his lascivious shipmates - and this from the blurb, she never even read the book!
Hanley's method, his whole approach, is visceral. He forces you to face the situation full-on, makes you feel it and live it, with no pandering to delicate sensibilities or the niceties of literary technique. In some ways a primitive writer, he broke the "rules" of fiction either because he didn't know there were any, or he just didn't care. It doesn't matter; talent of Hanley's calibre can do as it pleases, break every rule in the book.
For extensive periods Hanley lived in north Wales, and some years ago I went to the small village of Llanfechain to pay homage at his small modest grave in St Garmon's churchyard. Afterwards I wrote to his son Liam, suggesting a memorial of some sort, and received this reply: "My dream would be for something in stone at the top of the hill behind my father's cottage. And I would have him looking west into Wales, his back to England!"
The family message was clear: as England had all but ignored the writer in
life, he would ignore it in death.
Gone but not totally forgottten, because Boy has been reissued in a
handsome new edition by Oneworld Classics, with an introduction (from 1989)
by Anthony Burgess, plus four pages of photographs and a fascinating essay
on the life and work. Remarkable value at £7.99. I'd also recommend,
if you can find it, The Furys (1935), a grimly realistic and very moving
novel about a Catholic family in Liverpool during the General Strike.
The distinguished American SF writer and critic Harlan Ellison has gone on record as saying: "Gerald Kersh is a giant. He is my favourite writer." He come very near the top of my list too. I've racked my brains and can't think of any other writer, living or dead, who was a master of so many genres of fiction: mainstream, crime thriller, war, horror, science fiction, supernatural, disaster, historical, humour, satire ... his imaginative range knew no bounds and he had the energy and prodigal talent to back it up.
I'll start with possibly my favourite (there are several contenders) novel, Night and the City (1938), which has petty crook, pimp, swindler, blackmailer Harry Fabian roaming the seedy bars, nightclubs and backstreets of Soho. With his fake American accent and sharp suits and hand-painted ties Harry thinks he's a cool hero with charisma; he's actually a cowardly slimeball who beats up women. The reader is swept along by the sheer pace and exuberant invention - to my mind as febrile and fertile as Dickens.
To hear many critics you'd think there wasn't a single war novel of any merit by an English writer until Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy came along. This is literary snobbery at its worst. Kersh was actually a serving soldier in the Coldstream Guards and he wrote vivid and powerful novels of men in training: They Die with Their Boots Clean (1941), The Nine Lives of Bill Nelson (1942) - and men in combat: The Dead Look On (1943), Brain and Ten Fingers (1943) and Faces in a Dusty Picture (1944) about the desert campaign in North Africa. During the war, and whilst writing newspaper columns for the popular press, he had four books on the bestseller lists at the same time.
I can't finish without mentioning Prelude to a Certain Midnight (1947), about the stalking and murder of a child by a psychopath. How an author of such bravery and insight can have a zero reputation and remain largely out of print is not only unfathomable, it's an outrage.
© Trevor Hoyle 2008
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