Art & Class
David Storey’s novels appear to be about a peculiar social problem: the rise of workers from factory floor to penthouse suite; a subject that so excited the literati of the 1950s. The trimmings mislead us. His interest is the artist, their isolation from life. Which suggests he might not be writing about the working-class at all. Is Flight into Camden a typical bourgeois tale, but with the gents wearing cloth caps, the ladies cheap skirts and blouses?
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At first we think it a character study of a working-class woman; but later find that Turgenev’s landed in the North of England, a superfluous man now standing on our terrace doorstep. This a psychological study of an outsider.
Two novels in one. The first is a careful analysis of a post-war phenomenon: the expansion of education into the working classes, which fragments it. Michael and Margaret both receive a good education; he to become a lecturer at the local university; she to leave after school, to work in the N.C.B. On the surface little seems to have changed. Both still live at home, and both appear cosy in their childhood culture. It is an illusion. Although on campus it may sound like Michael can play the working-class tunes, at home they know he is badly out of key: his schooling has distanced him from his family. There is a gap in understanding.
‘What is it?’ my father said. ‘Why, it’s your emptiness. Your great and everlasting emptiness.’ He looked at Michael narrowly, his eyes blazing and wet. ‘It’s your great educated emptiness. And I never saw it. Me, a bloody man.’
(Has the author himself taken the train too far from his home town? This language is overly abstract. Would the father really use such words as ‘emptiness’? Surely his phrases would be more concrete, the mockery touched with humour. In such places the educated are ridiculed; the purpose to level not to elevate.)
Margaret is also alienated. The cause of her running off with a married man, or is this a sign of a shift in values? Education has instilled a new language and a new set of feelings into the children, generating a sensibility their parents cannot share. These children now foreigners in their own home. This is not all. Immigrants often take the lowest paid jobs, their status visibly affected. These ‘foreigners’ have jumped over their parents in the status-stakes; Michael earns more than his father; while an office worker has a social polish denied to a housewife and manual labourer. A hierarchy has been turned upside down, its values reversed. The old and the homegrown are made to feel inferior.
Two powerful scenes underscore the point. After a funeral Michael refuses to attend the wake. Margaret gets off the train to her brother’s wedding. Why? Because they feel the claustrophobia of their parent’s culture; a mixture of collective ritual and coarse sentimentality, which irritates the refinement of an educated sensibility. School creates detachment. It controls one’s feelings; instils its own set of ideas and social priorities, in the light of which the rituals of working-class life seem lifeless and crude. Margaret is in her twenties and yet she remains unmarried, a mystery to her family, who believe a woman’s role is that of wife and mother. What is going on? Bloody education! With its smart aleck ways, is the obvious and correct answer. Now that it’s too late the father realises what school has done. There is nothing he can do. Once your daughter has learned a foreign language you cannot stop her speaking it.
Margaret breaks free; Michael cannot. He needs the working class background to perform in the university. A working-class ‘radical’ amongst these middle-class conformists. It is a game. The reason he hates Howarth so much. Howarth a true outsider, detached from every environment; richly portrayed at the miner’s gala, where he is both sentimentally attached to the festival and ironically distant from it. Howarth can’t fit in. A class nomad; a gypsy in every social locale. Trained as an artist, he gave it up. Joined an advertising job, he quit that. Now he is a lecturer in industrial design, but this doesn't fulfil either…. Michael tries to ridicule him by calling Howarth an artist (for an ersatz political radical nothing is more affected than art). He rejects this as daft. How to describe him? I pull a book off the shelf.
Bacon’s history had throughout been one of improvisation, willed or involuntary, and he could have improvised his way out of painting just as quickly as he seemed, from outside, to have improvised his way back into it after several years away from the easel. He had been, and could be again, a classic case of what could be called Marginal Man. He had never stuck to any one thing - one school, one home, one office, one profession, one way of life, one country - and it seemed implausible that he would ever stop being what he had always been: one of Nature’s unclassifiables.
Such outsiderdom appeals to Margaret, far more alienated from home than her brother. This due, no doubt, to the greater pressure of social expectation on a working-class woman: she is not expected to have a fancy career; her working life an interlude between school and kids. Education, with its goad to ambition and sexual equality, thus generates a greater tension in herself, producing an existential conflict with the family. Margaret has to give up more, suppress more, be more torn-in-two, if she is to either reject or conform to her parents’ wishes. A son can be a lecturer. A daughter must be a daughter and wife. Yet school can make it hard to find a mate. For a working-class child to excel in the classroom they have to self-consciously damp down their feelings. This makes them independent, but also suspicious and cautious about relationships. A Berlin Wall is placed between them and sex. Only a crisis to save them from sterility.
Howarth is that crisis. Off to London, and a wonderful time. Free at last! Even though Margaret is now emotionally dependent upon her lover…a paradox only for those who do not understand freedom.
The family won’t let her be. First father and then brother visit London to persuade her to return. Her father the more civilised of the two, though his language can be coarse and abusive. He has a gentleness, common amongst miners, that gives him a civility that Michael lacks. His son is more articulate but his manners are terrible: he grabs Margaret and tries to drag her off…. Is university to blame? We think so. It encourages an egotism that knows no bounds; and prolongs an immaturity that is impatient with life, thus this aggression when his selfish will is denied. When physical force fails he tries moral blackmail: Margaret is killing her mother. Margaret resists, until Howarth suggests a short visit back.
The return home is wonderfully depicted, capturing both the immense distance and the familiarity of the old house. Feeling the claustrophobia even more intensely, Margaret is determined to go back to London as quickly as possible.
A letter now arrives from Haworth.
Here is the second novel; that psychological study of a superfluous man. Haworth cannot settle. He has no vision nor vocation. He is thus alone, outside every society he enters. Maybe he should have been an artist (we are never told why he gave it up; not because of lack of talent; we suspect the will, its driving purpose, is not there). Adrift from himself he drifts through the world, never staying anywhere for long. His affair with Margaret and their life in London provides him with a meaning; but this is short-lived; its injection of emotional excitement soon wears off. Where to now? He decides to teach in a poor school, but finds the work gruelling and pointless - these kids do not want to learn.
Each morning during the next few weeks he would be silent and tense, pale, hardly aware of me, and unable to eat even a slice of toast, or drink a cup of tea. His nervousness affected me. I bore it with me on the bus to work, and I didn't feel safe or relieved until I was in the office. I wondered why he was so afraid and destroyed: in the evenings he would be full of excitement and high spirits, tremendously facetious, unconfined and lustful. He did little marking and no preparation at home now.
He told me several amusing stories of what happened in the classroom, and was never serious when he spoke about the school. There was just the white tension before he went, and that awful steeling of himself. Then the exhausting jubilance of the evening.
He reminded me of my father going to the pit, and coming back with that peculiar male hysteria and forgetfulness. He himself wasn’t aware of the effect of his extreme appearance.
A marvellous evocation of the horror of work. Haworth cannot last long here. Or he’d have to change. He can’t. He has too much spirit to become an automaton, the small-minded disciplinarian who wins respect by puritanically enforcing the rules. The pain of work creates a tension inside him, making him uneasy, even guilty about the relationship. Margaret’s trip back home now proves useful. He sends that letter. Once again that need to escape, to return to the island that is himself. He justifies it in a different way: it is not fair that you should sacrifice yourself for a loser.
The pressures of outsiderdom are too much. Haworth can’t find a place to be a productive non-conformist; all the bohemian niches, with their promisie of an independent life, have been cleared away. And art no longer offers the meaning that he craves. Education appears its own salvation, but he finds the reality cannot live up to his ideas. What can he do? Unable to live outside the system he must work inside it, but finds this oppressive. It’s why his jobs don’t last long. He takes so much, and then runs away. How long will he run?
An aside at novel’s end suggests he has returned to his wife. At last - in his late thirties? - Howarth resigns himself to life, accepts he must adapt to his surroundings. The struggle is over, the game lost: Bohemia 0 Bourgeoisie 3.
Margaret could have broken free, providing she stayed with Haworth: she needed his support. With the affair over she returns to the family home, and conforms to their expectations. But she cannot remain the working-class daughter. She marries a friend of Michael’s - the university chaplain. It’s one way to leave the country.
Review: Flight into Camden
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