Am-Dram

A typical bourgeois gets it wrong. Looking out the window they mistake their own reflection for the world outside. It is why so much lit crit of the 1950s misread these novels. John Braine supplies the evidence. Room at the Top. But no workers live in London: though they appear to be about the working-class, it is the status battles of provincial life that grab the attention.

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As the book rushes past its climax, hurtling towards its dénouement, we stroll into the archetypical scene of a pub with its lonely tart. A young working-class woman, drinking in the lounge bar, falls for the charms of an attractive man, who shags her in a disused plot of land. Within a week she’ll have forgotten all about it.

The stereotypes stand-out like billboards. We wipe this billboard clean.

Elements in this scene change its meaning. The man, who muses on how hard are easy pick-ups, is a psychological wreck, wild with drink, drowning out his lover’s death. Sex is a sedative. The woman is waiting for her boyfriend; but he is late and Joe Lampton is so good-looking and such a wonderful talker; plus all those gin-and-Its…. She too loses control, and that little plot suddenly looks a sexual oasis.

The working classes are more complicated than we thought. They are more thoughtful, civilised, puritanical, more careful, than the adverts would have us believe. Respectability is a shield for them, a sort of condom, that protects them from the dangers to which their raw feelings make them prone. Those haven’t been dressed in an expensive education. Joe, an anthropologist amongst a bourgeois tribe, is reflecting on what he has learnt.

Looking back, I see myself as being near the verge of insanity. I couldn't feel like that now; there is, as it were, a transparent barrier between myself and strong emotions. I feel what is correct for me to feel; I go through the necessary motions. But I cannot delude myself that I care.

Strong emotions carry a great danger. You lose control. A quick shag in an alleyway that’s right next to the registry office, whose contracts have no opt-out clauses. Harsh words at the boss can mean the sack. While even a simple pleasure has its risk: too many pints on a Saturday night, and you’re on the floor, with bruises and a black-eye for company.

You need a corset to hold them in. The old Puritan morality was handy; the control of the sexual instincts, especially in women, the means by which the workers maintained their respectability; and their livelihoods.

In the 1950s the middle classes wore different clothes; though the advertisements told another, safer tale. These men and women had freed themselves of the old morality. Joe’s reflections giving us a clue to what has happened: thoughts are detached from feelings; feelings, because of a lower temperature, are separated from the sex act.

Alice Aisgill is a married woman who likes to sleep around. Joe one more entertaining interlude between the dull acts of a flat marriage. The body an instrument, which she plays like a virtuoso. She calmly tells Joe about the time she modelled naked for a painter.

And Alice. I wondered if she’d done that too, if that were another thing she hadn’t bothered to tell me about, if she had stood in the pink spotlight in a spangled headdress and a gold fig-leaf with a thousand eyes settling on her naked flesh like leeches. I couldn’t be sure that it hadn’t happened, that she, with her bright, quick mind and sharp tenderness, hadn’t descended to this last tatty extreme; it was as if I’d seen her given over to torture in some shabby cellar. That was what hurt me. It wasn’t the fact of modelling, but of Alice modelling. Some of my standards were still Dufton standards, and in Dufton artists’ models were thought of as tarts, not quite professionals, but simply the kind who couldn't be bothered to say no. It was unbearable to think of Alice in that way; and I didn’t know, or didn’t want to know, why it should affect me at all. And I was jealous retrospectively - it was almost as if I were standing frustrated outside the studio, a pimply sixteen.

Such insouciant behaviour offends Joe’s working-class dignity. His prudery belongs to a self that feels what it thinks; ideas about his own status intimately linked with the body’s actions. Respect is key, and is measured against a bourgeois standard that has long been fading away…that billboard was put up decades ago, and now needs taking down.1 In closed communities there is a terror of what other people think; the criticisms of one’s neighbours and colleagues apt to wound and subjugate. With no telly, and the papers dull reading, the main entertainment is to analyse and complain about whom you know (always behind their backs, but sure to shuffle around to their front, when mother, wife, friend hears about it). For a man on the way up - Joe is ambitious - to go out with a slut is a catastrophe; everyone in Dufton to know about it: tarred and feathered by her reputation. 

The bourgeoisie is freer of such restrictions. For sure there is talk. But it is more discreet; to wound directly seen as a faux pas, the prerogative of stupid people. And anyway bohemia is allowed. It could even be a sign you’ve made it!2 The houses are bigger. They have cars. The neighbours are almost strangers. Plus all that free time…Alice’s friend works during the day, her flat a safe place for sexual gymnastics. It is easy to hide an affair in this community. Add the psychology. That cooler temperament; the social detachment; the transformation of the emotions and the body, even sex, into ideas, which in such civilised surroundings fades their force. All reduce the intensity of one’s feeling about moral indiscretions. And all want to appear sophisticated. Thus more acceptance, more understanding; everyone is prepared to look the other way.

The working classes were not so lucky. Their streets are stuffed with houses, the houses  packed with people; and the only mode of transport is the bus.

The middle classes are fortunate in another way: their private lives a whorl of social activity, with many opportunities to meet the opposite sex. In Warley a favourite pastime is the amateur dramatics; a release of emotional tension, and a safe place for an affair.

The theatre is a good symbol for Joe Lampton’s direction of travel: he has arrived in a foreign country and is pretending to be fluent in the language. Inevitably he confuses the local dialect with his own tongue, stumbles over its colloquialisms. Thus Joe mistakes a married woman’s flirting for the real thing - yet to see that these people play roles, their temperaments cool and calculating, their emotions protected by layers of petticoats and dresses. The bourgeoise appear more friendly than they are in fact. So much is surface. Joe yet to learn how little these characters feel; their emotions highly, almost effortlessly, controlled, even when their behaviour appears loose and sexually dangerous. Eva is an example of total artifice; the signs she gives are false ones: she plays a game to excite only herself. Alice is different. Although similarly cool, she enjoys illicit sex and the feelings it produces; but…she doesn’t confuse this with love. Pleasure and the ability to detach it from the rest of her emotional equipment, this is her talent; her body a machine producing desire and its sweet results. New territory for Joe, who doesn’t understand this at all. And now this revelation about naked modelling. Bing! The discovery devastates.

This is an unsentimental education. Joe is being trained to become a respectable member of Warley high society. But sloughing off his working-class skin takes time. Thoughts will stick to feelings, and he finds it difficult to pretend what he doesn’t feel. There are to be many months in rehearsals…. This is a different kind of test. To learn the lines are easy, especially if you can absorb knowledge effortlessly: Joe is upwardly mobile because of his schoolroom intelligence. But to act requires more than this. To persuade an audience you’re the real thing…to be a character and act it out, that balance of self-conscious reflection and unconscious instinct…it’s a craft that takes many years. So tough! Joe can’t suddenly change from integrated butterfly to segmented caterpillar. In the play it takes many attempts before he gets his entrance right. Still the amateur.

Alice is a half-way house for him. Because she likes sex and gives herself up to it, Joe can respond instinctively to her passion. At the same time she is a social education: in sensibility Alice is thoroughly bourgeois, and has a sophistication that is attractive and infectious. It often said that best learn a language in bed. Age matters too. It is useful she’s ten years older, and that he can see the signs of age decay: when the passion cools breaking-up will be easy (for him). Also: she is married. Perfect! The registry office won’t be on the phone in the morning. Alice, then, the ideal instrument to wean Joe from his background. A teacher who teaches this naive and awkward man both the joys of sex and the intricacies of culture, demonstrating how they are kept apart.3 She’s doing a fine job. Joe acquiring all the gloss of the professional. But…this teacher has also become the pupil.

Poor Alice! She is absorbing too much from him. Feeling floods thought and she falls in love. At book’s end the roles are reversed; Joe close to being a typical bourgeois - the last scene his purgatory before he enters heaven -; while she has suffered a metamorphosis: Alice now a completely integrated person, who cannot live without her man. She causes a public spectacle. Has forgotten her society. Shameless.

Freedom. How horrible it is! To let the feelings flow is to give oneself up to one’s ego. Exciting. Intoxicating. Self-righteously liberating; how important it can make one feel; an adventurer in a land of bureaucrats. Yet such feelings are dangerous, a drug to which one is easily addicted. It is why the middle classes, with so much to lose, were once so wary of the passions. That restraint is going, at least on the edges. Alice is free. She comes to a bad end.

The working classes are losing the freedom of their emotions. Joe to marry the daughter of a businessman, and thus act out a role he doesn't like but accepts with equanimity. Yes he’s rich. And Susan is beautiful. But she is stupid. Wealth and beauty not quite enough for the upwardly clever. Everyday to play the loving husband he doesn't quite feel. It is to lose one’s integrity and the pride that goes with it. Always on the make; turning those close to him - his wife and her parents - into colleagues and clients. An actor to play the same part every night for the rest of his life. Imagine the strain, and the boredom; the emptiness and sense of loss. This man is to be hollowed out by luxury.

A sign of this change is Joe’s welcome of Susan’s pregnancy: it eases the marriage on. Being working-class he recoils from the idea of an abortion - Mr Brown’s suggestion an attempt to buy him off, which affronts his sense of honour. There’s his desire to have a baby; his reaction against treating another human as a thing. At the same time the baby is a good economic deal…. A tension has appeared in Joe’s life, which he cannot resolve. When the book ends he still has too much of the working-class inside him; thus his mental collapse and complete degradation. It is his Fall before his Rebirth as a member of Warley’s elite. Pregnant Susan is good for him. He knows it, and so doesn't fear the baby like so many 1950s men, like Vic Brown in A Kind of Loving or Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night Sunday Morning. Pregnancy here is a business opportunity. One that he will not lose.

Review: Room at the Top

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1. Virginia Nicholson, Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939.

2. See Jasmine’s comment in Doris Lessing’s, A Ripple from the Storm. Because a provincial colony, the tensions within this middle-class between respectability and revolt are greater than in the home country. But even there we see a generational shift, brought on both by the War and education. Communism as much about social freedom as politics. These kids want to rebel.

3. Sections of the book are written in a similarly naive and awkward way;  thus Joe, wishing to show off his knowledge of architecture, mentions some details he has read; yet these show he has no grasp of the topic. Culture is not something that he can feel or conceptualise, it is only information.

Is such narration meant to illustrate Joe’s lack of sophistication, or is itself a sign of poor writing? We are in two minds. In one scene there is an attempt at fine writing; but the result: a straining after effects that this writer does not have the talent to reach.