Following the Fashion

The provinces sought to conquer the 1950s; yet to the bien-pensant it was all about the workers. These literary types looking down from their eyries as the poor saps tried to climb to such impossible heights. Puffing, farting, shouting, swearing…. Gillian Freeman, Jack would be a Gentlemen. Is this how we want the working classes to be? 

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‘I’ll beat Peter Croft-Franklyn.’ But poor Barry Prosser won’t…. 

The climatic car race is the novel’s big symbol. An inexperienced Barry tries to overtake the rich and flamboyant, but this practised, though essentially amateur, driver. A bad idea. The lad crashes and dies. A morality tale, a warning sign, for these changing times. It’s target the one class - the working-class - who won’t read this book. Do not get above yourselves! Or you’ll suffer pain.

So difficult to change the important things. Class closer to caste, when it comes to sensibility and the mind’s playground. Storm clouds of fate forever on the horizon. This novel the culmination of a life, not its beginnings. This family pregnant with problems long before the birth of that first paragraph. Decades ago Beatrice married down the social scale. In the subtle gradations of the working classes the character differences between a shop worker - draper here - and those who work with their hands - painter and decorator - are large; retail giving you a patina of respectability and the ambition that goes with it. Alas for Beatrice, Jack is typical of his type. No get-up-and-go. His ideas. His clothes. His general demeanour. All are suffused with slackness. He works to keep a family. It is enough. This man’s not going to change his job. His entertainment is the local pub. While home means comfort: a place to relax not to work. Other attitudes follow almost automatically. That strong conservatism (nothing to do with politics) that resists any change, viewed as strenuous and unnecessary. No self-improvement for Jack! He wants looking after. In a working-class family the man is a child; the woman mother as well as wife.

The wife is in charge. But not even the commander-in-chief can change a personality. Thus her endless disappointment and frustration. Beatrice is unhappy. She nags all the time. It is because she expects more than this man can give. Jack ain’t going to reach the next level on the working-class staircase. It’s not in him. Beatrice wants them to be quite respectable. Jack doesn't understand what she means.

‘Look, Beat,’ Jack said, ‘we said all this before. We don’t need to ‘ave it all up again. You got everythin’ you want now, a lovely ‘ouse an’ furniture, car, telly, ‘olidays, clothes, chicken every day of the week if you want it. I don’t understand you, carrying on as if I set out to deny you things. I always give you everythin’ I could. I put your ‘appiness first,’ he finished righteously, ‘I even put this ‘ouse in your name.

‘It’s ‘ow you treated me that’s wrong.’

‘If that’s not treatin’ you right I don’t know what is. What you want? You know I’d give you whatever you want.’

‘You couldn’t,’ she said spitefully, ‘you’ve ‘aven’t go it in you.’

Jack shrugged, puzzled and upset, thinking she must be run down, it was Moyra going to live in London. Moyra had always meant a lot to her.

They speak different dialects. Jack never to learn Beatrice’s. It is too abstract, too vague for him. His life exists in concrete things. That the most important stuff belongs to the spirit; not what you own but how you behave; those qualities of a civilised person…such thoughts are way beyond the boundary wall of his understanding.

Jack wins the pools, transforming their lives. A big house in Upton Park. Expensive furniture, clothes, holidays; and a new “career” for their son Barry. It is not enough. Only the externals have changed. Inside these people remain the same. The reason is obvious. None of these characters can learn. Ossified by their upbringing they are too impervious to influence to acquire the culture of the rich. A building without windows.

For Jack lots of money means not working. Money allows you do nothing. You can also be generous: Beatrice to have all commodities she wants. Of course Beatrice likes all this, but…she wants a more active, dynamic man. Her nagging the flip-side to Jack’s inertia; her words an armchair where she rests from the tedium of her existence. She too suffers from the same social malady. To passively complain - to moan - is actually to accept one’s lot. Ignorant of her ignorance.

She mistakes the owner of the house for the gardener: the rich wouldn’t do manual work themselves. You make a mistake, fine; but to go on making mistakes.... Beatrice lacks the capacity - her mind is not flexible - to learn the mores of the wealthy. Thus she visits her neighbour wearing a fur coat. As if the rich are on show all the time! Beatrice has mixed up the public face of wealth - what she sees on the “tee-vee" or in the high street - with their private, more relaxed, more intimate, selves. But even after this - rather obvious - faux pas she doesn't change; she lacks the intelligence and critical self-consciousness to analyse and rectify her errors. It is young Barry, not yet encrusted into their ways of being, who is attuned to the class differences - he registers how more comfortable and sophisticated is Olive Sansom’s living room to his own family’s - and we assume that had he lived he would have adapted his behaviour accordingly.

Jack is stupid. At a classy hotel he demands salad cream, even though the waiter tells him there is dressing already on his salad. This man is obtuse to anything outside his habitual existence.

A working-class world is a small one. Family. Home. Work. The pub. The cinema, for the younger ones. For Jack such a world is sufficient; and he has no interest in anything else. He lacks curiosity. He is a lazy sod. Beatrice is little different; her ambitions for Jack mere dreams; signs of weakness; of spiritual poverty. Beatrice doesn't have the character to change her life, thus she resorts to the comfort of complaint. And really; if she had wanted a more respectable man why not marry one? She is at fault.

A poor aristocrat offers Moyra an escape into a finer life. It is an illusion, which soon dissolves. His gifts are disappointing. His ideas - about abortion, for example - repel. The gap in sensibilities too enormous to be comfortably crossed, Moyra, we assume, to suffer the same fate as Beatrice; but one more extreme, harsh, unforgiving: James is a harder, more distant character than soft and sentimental Jack. Then Beatrice has the consolation of being a superior person. Moyra is not so lucky. Always to feel her inferiority.

The rich so much more flexible, more at their ease, more louche, than these poor puritans, who are too morally stiff to properly enjoy themselves. Stodgy. Thus, despite Jack’s desire for the ease, his life is rather dull. It does not galvanise. The wealthy, in contrast, are very interesting indeed. One never knows what they’re thinking. Then that style. And, to use a colloquialism of the time, so much faster than the Prossers, stuck in the slow lane of habit and prejudice.

Inevitably there are exceptions. Wally Jenkins - a Welshman: surely no coincidence - runs his own business; and will take over Jack’s failing shop. It is telling that Beatrice doesn't like Wally. She says because of his crude humour; but she resents his ambitious spirit. Her dislike costs her one dream: if she had encouraged Jack to be Wally’s partner the business would have been a success.

Bingo! Suddenly they are rich. It is a disaster. The unhappiness of Beatrice now spreads out and infects all the family. None of them can adapt to this new life. A fortune is itself a job, which Jack cannot manage. The money soon disappears. But spending leads to emptiness. An expensive holiday in a top quality hotel spotlights their vulgarity. They become conscious of their inadequacies. Money makes Jack lazy, gives Barry the means to fulfil his dangerous fantasies. Then friends become enemies: Frank is taking advantage of Jack’s generosity.

This is a moral fable. Do not let the classes mix. Beatrice’s mistake was to marry Jack. A minor one, because they belong to the same milieu, her unhappiness containable. In Upton Park they are exiles, the problems enormous and immutable. Upton Park a foreign country whose language they cannot learn. Too set in their ways to change, they clash with their new environment; and suffer the pains of failure. They become figures of fun - that fur coat - or of hate: Barry’s nighttime party. Aliens in their own country. Excluded, they feel their exclusion, and unhappiness increases day-by-day. To leave your background. To desert your class. A tragedy on the doorstep.

We imagine an immigrant living in England. Is it more than class? In this novel there are two Jewish characters (unusual for the setting), and we wonder if the novelist is projecting an immigrant’s life onto British workers. For sure there are many similarities - and in some respects class is a greater divide than country - but we doubt if they are the same. Yet the descriptions feel that of the outsider, which may account for an odd quality of this book: the characters are perfect stereotypes. Beatrice. Jack. Moyra. Barry. Ideal types. Something we would expect from a middle-class author, who only sees such people from the outside. Never to walk into a living-room or kitchen…. Thus an abstract idea of the workers replaces the peculiarities of each individual. This novel dealing in the common attributes of class not their weird variations. The result: there are no surprises. In truth this novel a little flat.

Fashion. All the tropes of the period are here. In addition to these types and their too obvious clash of values, we have the Kingsley Amis motto; the gay man; the lesbian; the fast set…. This author a stenographer typing out the lines of the time.

We imagine its origin. A husband and wife in a hotel restaurant sitting next to some nouveau riche, whose coarseness both annoys and amuses. There is little sympathy. It is why the young man most likely to assimilate is killed in a car crash. That’s right you scum: stay down where you belong. Keep out! We don’t want you here. But of course this is a liberal’s novel, such abuse obscured by false sympathy, those nice words.

Review: Jack would be a Gentlemen