Jerusalem The Golden by Margaret Drabble

 

Jerusalem The Golden by Margaret Drabble was published over fifty years ago. Reading it now, for this particular reviewer, is the equivalent of reading Arnold Bennett in the same year that Margaret Drabble’s novel was written. Bennett’s quintessential late Victorian and Edwardian identity was then and remains almost foreign territory to the contemporary reader, but – even given the fifty year time shift – one might expect that the reader who actually experienced the 1960s as a teenager might suffer no culture shock whatsoever in reading Margaret Drabble’s essentially 1960s novel. That assumption, however, would be quite wrong.

The mechanics of Jerusalem The Golden’s plot can be described without spoiling the experience of reading the book. Clara is a lower middle-class girl growing up in Northam, which is clearly not far from Margaret Drabble’s own Sheffield, despite being described as being fifty miles or so further from London than its real-life manifestation. Clara clearly rather despises Northam. In her third person narrative that always feels like it wants to inhabit the first, Margaret Drabble has her principal character regularly refer to the dirt, the lack of sophistication and general ugliness of the place, factors that convince Clara – and no doubt the author herself – that life should transfer to London at the first opportunity.

Clara’s family is far from dysfunctional, but then the jury might be out on this because it hardly displays any function at all. Mrs Maugham, Clara’s mother, seems to live her life at arm’s length behind a wall of collected prejudice and panic if experience gets too close. Clara seems determined not to be like her mother.

Clara is successful at school but ignores received opinion as to what she might study, preferring her own judgment to the conventional pragmatism of offered advice. Before she leaves school, Clara has already shown significant signs of maturity. Not only does she develop an obvious but inwardly not perceived independence and individuality, but she also matures physically, developing an early and fine bosom, which she soon realises can be used as a source of power.

In London, where she attends university, Clara meets the unlikely-named Clelia, whose family turns out to be precisely the kind of befuddled, messy, propertied, sophisticated, if rather unclean lineage that would forever be diametrically opposed to her own Maugham household. One feels that if Clara’s mother were invited to the Highgate pad of the Denham family, her nose would turn up in silence as she reached for a mop to disinfect the floors. Strangely, Clelia is rather similar to Clara, both physically and personally, though we do not appreciate this until late in the book, when consciously or otherwise Clara seems to morph into the very identity of her friend.

Clara is a thoroughly credible 1960s character. This misunderstood decade, for most people, was not about free love, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll or protest. Ideologically, it may have become so, but day to day life was school uniforms, dance halls largely segregated by sex, social conservatism and conformity, allied to a newly won, for most people, glimmer of opportunity for self-betterment. Clara exhibits the values of her age, but also gnaws gently at the edges of the constraints, as the era appeared to expect one ought. She surprises herself on a school trip to Paris, but she does retain total control, a facility she learns to cultivate.

And it is this aspect of Clara’s character – its desire and ability to control, to extract exactly what she wants from life in general and circumstances in particular that comes to the fore. Clara desires, Clara gets. She is always self-deprecating, but she even learns to use this flawed confidence to focus attention and facilitation from others when she needs it. Gradually Clara is revealed as someone who ruthlessly uses her physical, personal and intellectual advantages to achieve precisely what she wants, despite the fact that she often tries to deny any conscious plan.

Margaret Drabble’s style throughout is both complex and backward-looking. Clara could easily be a character from fifty years earlier – an Arnold Bennett society debutante, aware of social niceties, protocols and conventions, but needing to make her own way through life’s challenges. But Clara is always ready to assert her presence in a way a woman from fifty years earlier might not have done and thereby she achieves her ends, often irrespective of any potential damage done to others. Her potentially self-destructive success in achieving her wishes is increasingly quite disturbing. Hers is an individualism that also could easily become self-defeating, as evidenced in the author’s assessment that Clara “thought nothing of” being sick in a Paris toilet when she decided to leave her married lover behind. We are left thinking that there is something unsaid to follow. And, if that were to be the case, perhaps a more general parallel with the 1960s decade is possible, in that it might have felt like a liberation for the individual, but also that it might eventually have threatened something that was both longer lasting and longer term. One feels by the end that Clara is set for some pretty rude awakenings.

The Jewel In The Crown by Paul Scott

Paul Scott’s The Jewel In The Crown is the first of his tetralogy of novels on British India. These really were the last days of the Raj. And the jewel in Empress Victoria’s crown was India, itself. Without it Britain may have remained a colonial power rather than an imperial one. Status was all. But Paul Scott’s book is no jingoistic celebration of empire. On the contrary it lays bare the pretensions, the racism and above all the class divisions that characterise the society that Britain exported to its colony. And, in the final analysis, while India embarked upon an unsatisfactory, divided independence, the British – certainly those directly involved, but perhaps the rest of us as well – remained trapped within their cocoon of often inappropriate and certainly blind presumptions. While India might challenge caste via development and prosperity, the British remain trapped in the class divisions that their own early economic success created.

Central to the story embedded in The Jewel In The Crown is the relationship between Daphne Manners and Hari Kumar. In 1942 Daphne is already a victim of war. She has lost all her family and has been driving an ambulance in the blitz. Her uncle, now deceased, happened to be a high ranking official in the British Raj so, by way of respite, she travels to her aunt in India to pick up the pieces of her life. She soon moves on to Mayapore where she does nursing in the hospital and also volunteers at the Sanctuary, a hospice for those found dying on the street. Hari Kumar is the lynchpin in the tale’s structure.

An only child, he was raised in Britain from the age of two and was about to finish school – Chillingborough no less, a prestigious public school – when his bankrupt father committed suicide. His mother had died in childbirth, so he was left both alone and penniless in England, the place he called home. An aunt in India was his only hope. So he is also in Mayapore trying to find a way of making some sort of living. He speaks no “Indian”, has an accent that to all but the English upper classes sounds like a put-down, has black skin over white identity, and so is accepted by no-one. Except the rather idealistic – perhaps naive – Daphne Manners, that is. And by the way, if you are not English, you need to know that in Britain a public school refers to a wholly private, privileged institution. Have we changed at all? Daphne and Hari become friends. But where can they meet? Clubs, restaurants and even workplaces enforce racial segregation. Even Lady Chatterjee, widow of Sir Nello, knighted by the English king, and with whom Daphne lodges, cannot get into such places, so Hari has no chance. But if Daphne goes local, she incurs the wrath and ridicule of her class and race-conscious compatriots who see their own status threatened if questioned.

Add to that the complication of timing, since the couple’s romance coincides with the 1942 Quit India campaign and the arrest and imprisonment without trial of Congress leaders and then protest riots. The real strength of The Jewel In The Crown, however, is Paul Scott’s insistence that we should see events from different perspectives. Not only do we hear Hari’s and Daphne’s account, but we also have the voice of the military, that of the civil administration and that of an Indian activist.

But it is always from outside, sometimes from afar, that we are presented with the attitudes and actions of the policeman, Ronald Merrick. It is his actions that are crucial to the book’s success. He is no upper class military type, no public schoolboy. He is an ambitious, self-made man with competence and a desire for achievement as his badge. He potenjtially is meritocracy personified. And so through the lives and actions of these characters, against a backdrop of war and colonial turmoil, Paul Scott creates a rich tapestry of comment on social class, ethnicity and politics.

It is a truly remarkable book and its observations, despite the unfamiliarity of the language to contemporary readers, are still relevant in today’s Britain, but are perhaps no more than an historical relic in today’ s India.

Before The Knife by Carolyn Slaughter

In Before The Knife Carolyn Slaughter describes her childhood, a fraught, anxious prelude to an adulthood that continued to suffer from its heritage. She tells us early on in the book what caused this anguish, and what gave rise to its associated self-pity, self-abuse and anger. She was raped by her father at the age of six. But then the book unfolds almost without another mention of the trauma until its reality is finally recognized, long after the father, the self-tortured mother, and even the younger sister have gone to their graves.

Carolyn Slaughter’s life, though not fully acknowledged in the book, could only have been lived in a narrow window of history. The British Empire, always eager to install a white face in a position of colonial authority where people of race might not be trusted, elevated many lower middle class émigrés to effective aristocracy. It meant that they could only feel at home, that is, only attain the status they assumed, if they lived outside of the Sceptred Isle.

Carolyn’s mother had been born and brought up in India. She had grown used to a life with servants, where sewing, cooking and cleaning could be delegated to the competent. This created time for the important things in life, like deciding what to wear for dinner, what would go with what, and whether the lunch invitees would gel. Not that there were many expatriates to invite in the Kalahari Desert.

Carolyn Slaughter seems to have lived an itinerant’s life. More significantly she seems to have adopted an itinerant relationship with life. It happened as a result of denial, as a result of not accepting or acknowledging what happened to her. The father, a shop worker back home, was a District Commissioner in the Empire when his white face provided his main qualification. His wife, Carolyn’s mother, unable to accept what the daughter had told her or, indeed what evidence proved, slumped into a private depression that never left her. The author’s African childhood was almost wholly unhappy, even depressing. Her tantrums angered others, her self-abuse threatened her own life, and yet the father who was the source of the tragedy soldiered on, apparently stoically, delivering whatever duty the assumptions of Empire might demand. 

There were times when I lost touch with the sense of depression and foreboding, periods in the book when I knew things were lighter and brighter than the reminiscences suggested. Occasionally, the weight being borne got too much. But then I had a happy childhood, without abuse, indeed with love, affection, and support throughout, so who am I to criticize this insight into a world I never knew?

So, towards the end of the account, when the horror of the abuse can be re-lived in later life and thus partially expunged, we can sense the destructive havoc it has wreaked through the family’s life. It’s a rather one-paced account, but the seriousness of its focus justifies its form.

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Life At The Top by John Braine

After recently re-reading John Braine’s Room at the Top, I went On Chesil Beach, courtesy of Ian McEwan. Without doubt the latter is a masterpiece, whereas the former seems to be a little too reliant on its contemporary setting, its social mores, its finely tuned appreciation of social class to be considered more than “of its time”. Concatenating the two books, however, has made me think a little more about the underpinning thesis of Ian McEwan’s book, that the early 1960s remained an age when sexuality was not discussed, dealt with or even experienced in the more open, liberal manner of just a decade later. In the context of Ian McEwan’s setting and for his characters, this was undoubtedly the case. Memories of John Braine’s 1950s, however, remind me that there might have been room for a different reading.

And so I approached a re-discovery of Braine’s Life At The Top with more than just an interest in the narrative. Of course the book is a sequel, an attempt to recreate the success that had eluded its author in the intervening years. But it is based in the early 1960s, precisely the time when Ian McEwan’s fumbling lovers marry.

Life At The Top is ten years on from its germ. Joe Lampton and Susan are married and have two children. Joe is also firmly ensconced in his father-in-law’s firm, has made a moderate success of his career and, certainly relative to others around Warley, has plenty of money. But as those for whom success seems to be a given, it is necessary to be reminded that, “It’s one thing to get there, and quite another thing to stay there”. And so it is with Joe Lampton. He becomes a councilor – a Tory one at that – and all seems to be made. But then, but then… he’s still our Joe. He still likes his pint, though now it’s more likely to be a scotch, and perhaps Susan is still as naïve as she was a decade before – naïve, that is, until she decides what she wants.

So, obviously, in Life At The Top Joe and Susan’s life together turns sour, even a little bitter. But John Braine’s plot and style always keep the process above soap opera, where character only exists to fuel plot. In some ways, the pair of novels, Room and Life At The Top, is a loose allegory of the experience of the author, himself. In Room he’s an upstart successfully staking his claim, but at a cost in terms of pigeon-holing and confinement to a genre. In Life he’s a known success and is clawing on to its retention.

But after finishing the book two points stand out. The first is a reminder of the apparent sexual liberty enjoyed by its characters. Not only Joe, but also Susan and eventually Norah, not to mention the ailing Mark, are apparently free-loaders. Only Mark’s wife seems to possess the frigidity, perhaps aridity, that Ian McEwan seems to associate with the era. I can remember when Life At The Top was a much watched film. It was seen as racy, even a bit risqué, but not because of what it portrayed, only that it was portrayed. It wasn’t the content that shocked; it was the fact that the content was made public.

On the other hand, if John Braine’s mission had been purely to shock, then the ultimate morality of the outcome would be incongruous at best. Life At The Top is the kind of novel where what happens is crucial, so to reveal the finishing point would detract from the experience of reading the book. Suffice it to say that, in its own way, Life At The Top becomes an affirmation of a given set of values, even if those who want to live by them do not always live up to them.

So I return again to On Chesil Beach and conclude that there may be a greater element of social class – or even stereotype – involved in Ian McEwan’s reading of the mores of that age. A shortcoming it might be, but it detracts in no way whatsoever from the quality of the book. The imagined rules applied to those described, despite the fact that, as John Braine’s Life At The Top reminds us, they might not actually have been rules and certainly didn’t apply to everyone, especially the imagined.

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Life at the Top

A social climber, our Joe - A review of A Room At The Top by John Braine

It’s fifty years since A Room At The Top first appeared. Against a backdrop of post-war Britain, a period when people really did believe that a new future, a different kind of society was just around the corner, Joe Lampton, born January 1921, aspired to social and economic elevation. Though competent and already promoted as a local government officer in a grubby northern English town, with spare time interests in amateur dramatics, cigarettes and beer, even he himself rated his prospects of success as very poor. But Joe’s other passion was the ladies.

Two in particular caught his eye. Alice Aisgarth was married, older than him, and had a local reputation for being a bit “forward”. Basically she wanted love and passion to light up her dull, unhappy life with excitement. Susan Brown was a different prospect entirely, being nineteen, virginal and daughter of a rich businessman. If Joe Lampton could never work his way to wealth, he might just be able to marry it. His problems arose out of Susan’s desire to remain pure during their courtship, a position that meant Joe had to continue seeing Alice to satisfy his needs. Further complications arose when Susan relented and fell immediately pregnant. Well Joe achieved his goal. He and Susan married and he attained what he had sought all along, a meal ticket for life. He was not entirely without conscience, however. So when the rejected Alice, who deeply loved him, is killed in a car crash after a drunken night trying to drown her sorrows, Joe Lampton does suffer some remorse. But eventually, like many social climbers, he achieves his heights by trampling on others.

What remains enduringly intriguing about Room At The Top is its portrayal of British society’s obsession with social class. Joe perceives his best chance of social elevation is to marry money. And, in 2007, I re-read this novel in a week when a United Kingdom report declared that current day social class differences were widening, whilst opportunities for social mobility are actually decreasing. So John Braine’s novel is also a social document. The book is very much of its own time. It reminds us, for instance, that in the 1950s everyone smoked – and smoked a lot. Men drank pints in the pub – some of which did not even admit women. Homosexuality was not only not tolerated, it was illegal, though remained visible.

Some of the recorded individual aspiration now seems nothing less than quaint. Alice Aisgarth, for instance, declares that she would like to sleep with Joe. “Truly sleep,” she qualifies, “in a big bed with a feather mattress and brass rails and a porcelain chamber pot underneath it.” In the 1950s, most north of England houses did not have bathrooms and the potties were usually enamel.

But it is in the area of social class that A Room At The Top is bitingly and enduringly apt. Joe Lampton believes he lacks the capacity to succeed, lacks the necessary background, the poise, the breeding. He sees himself as essentially vulgar and possesses no talents which might compensate for this drawback. His rival for Susan Brown’s affections, however, is one John Wales. He is studying for a science degree at Cambridge, and thus acquiring not only the knowledge which will ensure that he will become the managing director of the family firm, but will also endow the polish of manner, the habit of command, the calm superiority of bearing, the attributes of a gentleman. 

Fifty years on, we might change an odd word, and the family firm might now be multi-national, but the spirit of contemporary Britain’s class system is arguably the same. And so despite the aspiration for and perceived attainment of social change in post-war Britain, Room At The Top, juxtaposed with recent evidence, reminds us that very little, if anything, has changed – except for the cigarettes and the chamber pots, of course. Oh, and we might now also prefer lager.

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A review of A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell

Anthony Powell’s “A Question of Upbringing” is the first part of his mammoth twelve novel epic “A Dance to the Music of Time”. He writes with wit, humour and not a little sarcasm, describing a quintessential Englishness that perhaps was never representative of the society and has, arguably, disappeared. He wrote this first volume in 1951 and, though the book starts with a London scene from that era, the majority of the book deals with the characters’ school and university experiences and recalls a time passed.

The main character is Jenkins. I will follow the author’s lead and use surnames only for males, surnames plus titles for married, older or otherwise unavailable women, and Christian names for eligible women, whether they be of a certain class or prone to wear flowery dresses while standing next to post boxes in the street. As his friend, Stringham, discovered, even some of the surname plus title women at times can prove highly eligible.

The book’s form is both simple and intriguing. It is so effective we almost miss the ingenuity of its construction. There are just four chapters, each in excess of fifty pages and each focused on one particular episode. We have school, a social gathering, a holiday in France and college undergraduate life. Powell’s writing has such a lightness of touch that we forget how intensely we are invited to analyse the circumstances of each chapter and how penetratingly we discover the characters’ lives. There is considerable innuendo, much gossip and usually piles of money, along with social status and influence wrapped up in every household.

The quintessence of their Englishness, like characters in the novels of Evelyn Waugh, arises out of their apparent inability to question – or perhaps even notice – their privilege. It’s a state they inhabit without either reflection or gratitude, so much taken for granted that it lies beyond doubt, its achievement apparently assumed, not expected. School means one of the better “public” schools. Going “up to university” assumes Oxbridge as a right, though Powell tinges this with the perennial blight of the English upper classes, intellectual paucity, by having several of his keen entrants “decide” not to complete a degree. One assumes that many of the others will take thirds before assuming their company chairs or ministerial portfolios. The army figures large in family histories, always at officer class, of course, and so does the City, where one can always become “something”. Even Americans, however, can be described as having “millionaire pedigree” on both sides, an economic status that presumably compensates for what is otherwise a palpable lack of breeding. When family members do not assume expected and assumed heights, they are referred to in hushed tones, the words “black sheep” perhaps not politically or at least socially correct even then.

But if this really was a quintessence of Englishness, it was a pretty rare ingredient. Maybe one or two per cent of the population went to the right school. Only about five or six per cent attended higher education of any sort, let alone a university one “went up to”. Neither Sandhurst nor corporate board rooms were populated by the masses. (They still aren’t!) And so this was a quintessence of separateness, of rarefied heights in an extended class system and, certainly by the 1950s, some of these peaks had been scaled by other aspirants, using new climbing techniques eschewed by the incumbents of years.

And so “A Question of Upbringing” reveals its duality. It’s a tale that celebrates a time lost, a nostalgic peek into a remembered adolescence where a hand placed apparently carelessly and always momentarily upon that of a member of the opposite sex remained a daring highpoint of teenage years.

Nostalgia is always tinged with loss, however. Early in the book, Powell describes the school thus: “Silted-up residues of the years smouldered interruptedly – and not without melancholy – in the maroon brickwork of these medieval closes: beyond the cobbles and archways of which (in a more northerly direction) memory also brooded, no less enigmatic and inconsolable, among water-meadows and avenues of trees: the sombre demands of the past becoming at times almost suffocating in their insistence.”

And how about this for a presumption of affluence: “It was a rather gloomy double-fronted façade in a small street near Berkeley Square: the pillars of the entrance flanked on either side with hollow cones for the linkmen to extinguish their torches.” And we notice we are in a different age when Powell has his lads pick up two girls off the street to joy-ride in a new Vauxhall. Without a suggestion of tongue-in-cheek or indeed relish he can write that: “The girls could not have made more noise if they had been having their throats cut.”

When I first read Anthony Powell, I could not get past my ingrained hatred of this class and its power-assuming, wealth-inheriting inhabitants. It was a country that was not mine. I come to it now a little wiser and a little richer myself, richer in experience at least, and now I can appreciate the irony that my previous naivety ignored. I now look forward with some relish to the next eleven episodes. “[book:A Dance to the Music of Time|16113]” is certainly a masterpiece to be revisited.