Silly Sod

Back after our trip aboard. Anything changed? All that Sturm und Drang blown out to sea? They laugh at us until silly in the face. This is the North, man. Nothing ever quietens down here. Poor Vic Brown, educated above his station in life, is forced to play the fatalist. Stan Barstow, A Kind of Loving. Little realities crush big dreams.

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Does class exist? Like most concepts it depends on what you want from the abstraction. In politics, parasitic on big numbers and generalisations, class is a useful organising principle; both for practical politicking and its theology. Abstract the minimum of a person’s behaviour – job, home, commercial pleasures – and pretend this defines them, as if what you eat is who you are, then we have the makings of political analysis and political success. To work effectively politics must reduce the population to its common denominators, turn us into stereotypes. How else organise your supporters and acquire votes? It makes for easy rhetoric, and facilitates understanding of the public realm, which for most can only be grasped through simple ideas; these true for as long as they touch the minimum of a person’s character (though a few are naturally typecasts). Also the danger of politics; too many apt to forget that they are dealing in concepts not human beings. Then that itch to extend categories; a class defined not just by what it earns and eats, but what it reads and watches, and how it thinks, especially thinks. Very soon the argument is that Agatha Christie or Jack Kerouac is bad for you….1 Once veer off the main road - to Westminster with its Treasury and Defence - Mr and Mrs Politika are apt end up in an unpleasant country. Oh, look! a battery farm. A battery farm of ideas, where they can stuff our minds with their conceptual clichés. And that glee in their faces: everyone to think like us!

Fables deal with types - king, clown, thief, merchant – which elucidate characteristic behaviours; the literary equivalent of political analysis.2 The best novels, in contrast, are full of individuals. It’s why the working-class doesn’t exist here. Even within Vic Brown’s family there are significant social differences between parents and children, the latter showing the effects of secondary education. The oldest, Christine, is a school teacher, who marries a man from the middle-class (a senior English master at the grammar school); the youngest, Jim, is destined for academia; while Vic works as an industrial draughtsman. The mother a housewife; father a miner.

As I saw it, it was only a matter of time before the right chap came along and snapped her up. But the Old Lady isn’t a big believer in right chaps; all she thinks of is position and income and character; and the duller and plainer they come the more character she seems to think they bring with them. Good-looking blokes are all very well on the pictures or television, but you keep you eye on them in real life because you can’t expect them to be any better than they should be with all the temptation that must come their way.

Position. Income. Character. It is not the moral attitudes that distinguishes the working-class: they are little different from those above them; most subscribe to a prim and harsh morality; though one tempered by feeling. Not the ideas but how you feel them is what determines life here.

But that’s the Old Lady all over: hard as nails on top and soft as a brush underneath.

Strong views and strong feelings. A tension inside each individual, each with its own trajectory and outcome. At first Mrs Brown is wary of David’s good looks and “cut glass accent”, but she ends by mothering him. The family is everything. Vic shares this ethos. He aspires to the same sort of marriage as his sister: love and understanding. It is why, though he plays around with girls, he’s still a virgin.3 Waiting for the right one. Then his life suddenly changes. Love has entered the castle. Feelings swarm around the ramparts. A crisis.

So naïve those middle-class intellectuals who believe the workers wild and feckless! What if…it is these workers who think the bourgeois flash and unsound? In fact they do. Thus the wise reserve about marrying outside one’s class. Exceptions of course. David quickly accepted because he has no side. And now he adds prestige to the family, which nevertheless remains stoutly the same: Mr and Mrs Brown ain’t going genteel.

Very practical this class. A job is important. Settling down with a good man or woman is essential; although the spouse should meet the expectations of the mother, who dominates the home. What she wants is both vague and precise: signs of respectability, whose signposts are specific occupations and residential areas. Oddballs are not encouraged. A son or daughter must live up to their mother’s ideal, a complicated and individual thing, for much depends on her experience; thus Mrs Brown welcomes the marriage to a senior master, because, her own daughter being a school teacher, she idealises the profession.4

That was a point in his favour, though, because the Old Lady thinks that schoolteachers were first in the queue when brains and general strength of character were handed out.

Keep what you’ve got; and let your children improve upon it, but not too much so they become “stuck up” or distant. Thus the importance of fixing the family to a moral standard. This standard changes slightly between families. There are cleavages between the classes. Each class with its own special mix; the middle classes becoming louche in the 1950s. 

But aren’t the differences wider? What you have described could easily apply to the Birmingham bourgeoisie. 

Yes, there are differences. There is something distinctive about the working-class. There’s a characteristic I haven’t mentioned; one that dominates this novel; it’s there in the title: A Kind of Loving. It may even be a defining quality.

The relationship between Vic Brown and Ingrid Rothwell isn’t love. Rather, it is a close approximation to love. At first infatuated with this pretty secretary, Vic discovers that, after their first sexual fumbling, she leaves him cold. Too attractive to resist, he cannot give her up, though bored by her presence: Ingrid has no culture and is not intelligent. His senses and his feelings, his guilt and self-pity at his inability to share her love, keep him hooked; the relationship trundling along until the sexual act and Ingrid’s pregnancy. Social convention demands they marry. Vic willingly succumbs to his conscience, which produces a crisis, as he lives a wretched existence in Mrs Rothwell’s home; for Ingrid’s mother doesn’t like him and treats him as a common lodger. A climacteric scene almost ends the marriage. Home late and drunk, he argues with Mrs Rothwell, then tries to break down the door of her bedroom when Ingrid hides in there. Free at last? Poor sod. He tries to escape. He can’t. His horizons too limited. Running away from his wife he only gets as far as his sister, from whom he expects validation. Christine is too wise for that. Vic is disappointed. She tells him to think of Ingrid’s pain; insists he take responsibility for his actions – a woman doesn’t get pregnant by herself. Vic suddenly feels alone: estranged from his family he cannot go back to the Rothwell’s house. But he is lucky. Chance is on his side. The downstairs tenant is moving out and Christine will help with the flat’s rent if he moves in with Ingrid. He accepts. The couple are reconciled. Vic to live under the yoke of his class and its moral assumptions.

She still loves me. After all that happened… after all that she still loves me and she’s ready to try and make a go of it. Whether I love her or not’s another thing altogether, but that’s not what matters now. What matters is I know I’m doing the right thing. I’m tired of feeling like a louse and now I’m going to do the best I can. And who knows, one day it might happen like Chris said: we might find a kind of loving to carry us through. I hope so because it’s for a long, long time.

Strong feelings and strong values; the kaleidoscope shifts and…Vic sacrifices his desires for an easy conscience. Better a loveless marriage than feel “like a louse”. Some boundaries you can flirt with, brilliantly rendered in the ambiguity over their relations: do Vic and Ingrid actually have sex? But there is one boundary that you cannot cross if you wish to stay the adolescent, with its dreams and endless promise. What is it? When Mr Thomas crosses the hymen and enters sweet Virginia? Not quite. Babies change everything. Vic commits to Ingrid only when she’s with child. That near ‘fatal’ outcome of those few weeks of wild passion; so are we to blame these first kisses and cuddles? When did his youth go? Even Vic is unsure.

I don’t know what started it. Does anybody know what starts these things…

Awash with feeling, with strong values, and believing in love as an ideal, Vic cannot just dump a girl; there is too much to feel about: her love, her pain, his guilt; then that swish of skirt against thigh, the rise of a breast, a saucy smile. Neither can he control his thoughts, which are conventional. We are honing in on the secret. Vic doesn’t have a fixed idea about what he wants to be. No vocation, no purpose, no grand scheme to dedicate a life. Fed up being an industrial draughtsman, he is offered a full-time job in the record shop where he works on Saturday. He is drifting. The reason, surely, he stays with Ingrid: he has no anchor to hold him down when the storm hits the harbour…carried out to sea, where his values, his senses, his emotions and his ideas all sink down with the wreck. No big idea to rescue him. This is the fault-line of the working classes, when educated out of their father’s station. Ideas suffuse their life, but they can’t use them productively - as writer, artist or local politician -; they not quite sophisticated, clever, artistic enough for that; their training designed for routine work not the mad escapades of the aristo and bohemian. This is the education trap. Ideas, not embedded within a creative existence, float as flotsam on the surface of his mind. They can’t energise Vic, they depress him. The life they promise always out of reach. And so he marries a woman he doesn’t love.

An image captures this poor sod’s predicament. A man walks out of an oasis; crossing a short stretch of desert he finds himself, suddenly, in quicksand. He’s caught. As he struggles he sinks down deep: ankles, hips, breastbone.… A stranger passes and pulls him out; makes sure he is alright. Free at last. Only to find that a vast desert stretches before him.

When the novel begins Vic is at liberty. He has a good job, lives at home, and expects to marry someone like his sister: beautiful, classy and smart. He mistakes Ingrid Rothwell - named after the famous actress; a clever symbol of false promise: this woman is no star - for such a person. Au contraire! She is relentlessly ordinary. Aware of this almost at once Vic cannot end the affair. Too much feeling, too little will; then that conventional morality. He is weak. Vic Brown a typical lad moulded by his environment, albeit a little smarter than most, the source of his unhappiness: he has been sold dreams he knows he cannot actualise.

His dreams to remain in the cinema, where they first kissed; a retrospectively poignant scene (and pungent metaphor). Ingrid is no starlet with a Hollywood mansion. Her looks and clothes far richer than what’s underneath. A first class saleswoman selling secondhand goods. Poor sod, he’s been taken in by appearances. Her father an engineer, they live in a better part of town; although the house is smaller than Vic’s.5 Within the myriad gradations of working-class life (its ‘aristocracy’ and its ‘scum’ can live in adjacent streets) the difference between a miner and an engineer is enormous; especially to a narrowed mind puss like Mrs Rothwell, whose self-worth depends on status.6 She looks down on Vic: too common for her daughter. Nevertheless, she too has to accept the moral code: Ingrid will marry him. We hear the author’s sardonic chuckle: it is Vic who’s marrying down. For all her pretensions the Rothwell household is culturally thinner than the Brown’s. Less intelligent, their cultural pursuits are puerile; reflected in their social life, which revolves around the television. Vic hates the TV, a sign of his intellectual superiority, bored by its game shows and inane chatter. Stan Barstow knows what he’s about; making clever play on the ironies of class and image, he shows us how the symbols of higher status - these consumer goods - actually degrade an individual's culture. At least in the collective life of the pub men could talk and discuss and argue about ideas, even if those ideas were poor and ill-informed.7 More vitality there. Smarter.

Mrs Rothwell is obsessed by status, which faces many threats – education is one. Working in the record shop Vic becomes interested in classical music, and occasionally goes to concerts with its owner. This behaviour ridiculed by a woman who instinctively knows that such marks of cultural status are beyond her. For Mrs Rothwell, as for Mrs Brown, people should stay in their place, allowing each their social comforts and social superiority. Vic’s interest in classical music, because it crosses class lines, is not only dissed but made to look suspicious. Unlike David or Mr Van Huyten, Vic is not allowed to enjoy this music for its own sake; for those around him it represents a social misdemeanour. High culture is for toffs and fakes; Vic must therefore be a poseur, aspiring to a status beyond his means.

Inside the working classes education is viewed as an alien presence; a cat not yet tamed, as likely to bite as to snuggle down on your lap. The benefits are obvious – you can get good jobs with good grades - but it is also a strange and threatening thing, of which many are rightly wary. Here is Mrs Brown on the subject.

It’s young Jim ‘at worries me sometimes. Allus studyin’, you know. Never seems to give his mind a rest. He fancies bein’ a doctor an’ I suppose he’ll have to work hard if he’s going to pass for college; but I sometimes think he overdoes it a bit. I found one night, Edna – and this is without a word of a lie – I found him sitting up in bed in the middle of the night, fast asleep, with his books open all round him. Fast asleep, he was. Y’see he can’t even leave it alone when he’s supposed to be resting. His mind never rests; it’s allus on the work. I don’t like it. He’s growin’ fast and he never did have Victor’s constitution….

‘Jim’s certainly shot up since we saw him last….’

‘Aye, too fast for his strength. He’s taking all his strength into his brain instead of his body. I’ve been thinking I’ll have a walk over to the doctor’s with him after the holidays and get his advice.

Education: an illness we must treat.

Oh, it’s wonderful to have a schoolteacher in the family; so nice to admire such a clever man as David, our son-in-law; but these are social facts, they do not touch the intrinsic properties of education, its toxic qualities. School should be an anteroom to work. It helps you get a good job, which for Mrs Brown represents a certain quality of character; solid and dependable; someone who can be trusted, is sensible, and financially safe. The classroom serves purely instrumental purposes. Alas, it has another, darker side…to be interested in education for its own sake is to live in strange lands and speak odd tongues. It is to alienate family and friends, who think you crazy or ill. Are they wrong? Jim is not acting like a normal child (of this neighbourhood) and is therefore seen as strange by a mother who does not understand him. The child looks English, but he speaks a different language. She’s given birth to a foreigner!

Vic is intelligent, but he disguises it, in his man-about-town way. He wants to fit in, which means not flashing his cleverness about. This may be the reason he’s tired of his job – OK for when he left school, but now he finds it beneath him. The growing pains of Victor Brown! Conditioned to be a scholarship boy he find’s that lower middle-class life doesn’t suit his needs. The record shop’s allure an aspiration to be more than a clerk. It’s the residue of an education that can never be wholly instrumental; always that appeal to the aesthetic, the intellectual, the transcendental. Yet Vic is not strong (or clever) enough to live by such ideals. He is not Conroy, who is a first class draughtsman and the source of the workforce’s rudest jokes. After a brawl they are called to the manager’s office, where Conroy refuses to kowtow, arguing that the under-manager should have dealt with the issue properly. The company’s head responds with a barrage of four-letter abuse that embarrasses Vic (no man in his position should use such words, he believes). Conroy takes it, but does not give in. He has his pride and knows his value; he will not submit to threats and criticism. Later he hands in his notice.  

Vic gets to know him. In an unguarded moment at the Christmas party Conroy reveals he is a highbrow; a revelation Vic is told to keep to himself (Conroy is both intellectually arrogant and worried that others might find out). Even this man, more independent than most, is shy of revealing his culture at work, is afraid of the ridicule and ostracism. For sure he resents the fake culture of Rawly, but that’s because it is fake. He is not strong enough to reveal himself on the shop-floor. Thus are stereotypes maintained – the philistine workers and the cultured office clerks. Conroy’s case is extreme. But Vic is not so different. The anti-intellectualism of the working classes a powerful tool to screw its members into conformity; even the strongest characters submit. No one likes a smart arse, unless he dresses up in a joker’s suit.

Education a major tension in the lower classes, because so closely touching status. People preen themselves on any sign of social superiority; even if to what they point is meagre (TV game shows) or a fraud (Rawly’s ‘high culture’ is the middlebrow’s talent to recite famous names – Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Dostoevsky). To have real content? Actual interest? Some understanding…. Resentment and insecurity soon follow. School upsetting a whole load of people, who either can’t deal with its class fluidities (Mrs Rothwell) or its distancing effects (Mrs Brown); then there’s the yearning of Vic, the play-acting of Conroy. Unhappy people! Let’s go further (you know I always do). Is school encouraging the philistine? Status distinctions more difficult to maintain, the likes of Mrs Rothwell become more aggressive in their cultural loutishness, the way to protect her social significance.

Vic’s dilemma is that his natural intelligence, the sound sense of his parents, plus his sister’s example, have produced an outlook that is more sophisticated than the Rothwells but which conflicts with his own weak conformist will. He wants a woman to whom he can relate and idealise. He aspires to the culture of Mr Van Huyten, who owns that record shop. Poor sod. These are difficult to get, given his background. If already bourgeois it would be easy. He’d bump into such a girl on the daily round; while friends would share his intellectual interests. All would come naturally. But this is not his life. To join the middle classes Vic has to made a self-conscious act of will. He has to voluntarily break the ties with parents; smash the working-class mould. Accept other people find him weird.

This is tough. It requires obsession, a mad fanaticism.

Too weak, not quite intelligent enough, he muddles on, living in two worlds, fitting neither; thus he is uncomfortable, unfulfilled. At novel’s end he is estranged from his parents and distant from Christine. The lad’s on his own. Why? There’s something odd about Vic Brown. The music shop gives us the clue: there’s a touch of the artist about him. That outsider to every class.

That world is outside his ken. And if it was in reach?…. He’d either have to act prudently and cleverly like Christine or take enormous risks like his old pal Percy, who almost kills them both while driving recklessly. Vic is neither so careful nor so carefree. A grammar school success, who couldn’t take all the opportunities given to him, he is unable to transcend his education, which is anyway too limited to radically alter his environment. Both his senses and his moral code remain intact. Thus a fling becomes marriage. And he is left with the dream of running away.

Vic has accepted a kind of love in place of the real thing. Cleverly symbolised by the uncertainly over their physical relations which runs through the novel: what we assume is sex is probably mutual masturbation. Our uncertainty is mirrored in Vic’s inability to decide about Ingrid; their relationship meandering on until its sexual climax and that pregnancy. He drifts.8 The cost an ersatz love that is to last for “a long, long time”.

Because now I reckon I’ve got a lot of things weighted up. All this has taught me, about life and everything, I mean. And the way I see it is this – the secret of it all is there is no secret, and no God and no heaven and no hell. And if you say well what is life about I’ll say it’s about life, and that’s all. And it’s enough, because there’s plenty of good things in life as well as bad. And I reckon there’s no such things as sin and punishment, either. There’s what you do and what comes of it. There’s right things and there’s wrong things and if you do wrong things, wrong things happen to you  - and that’s the punishment. But there’s no easy way out because if you do only right things you don’t always come out best because there’s chance. After everything else there’s chance and you can do the best you can and you can’t allow for that. If you say, well why does one bloke have all bad luck and another one have all good luck when he might be a wrong ‘un, well I’ll say isn’t that chance? And anyway, he might not be as lucky as you think because you can’t see inside him and a bloke can have six cars and holidays in the south of France every year and it’s still what’s inside him what counts.

What it boils down to is you’ve got to do your best and hope for the same. Do what you think’s right and you’ll be doing like millions of poor sods all over the world are doing. And when it hits you, if it does, chance, call it what you like, you’ll wonder like all the rest of them because you’ve always done your best and you don’t deserve a rotten deal. But that’s your story.

His expectations lowered, he must accept life as it comes. Squeeze himself into a tiny box, not sail on the high seas. We note his confusion – what counts is what’s inside you; you can be defeated by chance. Nonetheless, the consequences of these years are clear: there will be no train ride to some earthly paradise, Blackpool or Barry Island the best he’ll get. Vic has to take life as he finds it. Poor sod. He can’t see that it’s this diagnosis that is the real failure; highlighting the paucity of an education that produces dreams not inculcates the rigours of intellectual adventure. Chance is no explanation. It is a camouflage jacket he puts on to hide his petit-bourgeois shirt. A typical product of the grammar schools, he can only fantasise about stellar minds or (the example is telling) rich businessmen. These boys need more than this. Give them the tools to turn dreams into realities, ideas into real things!

Peering into smoked-filled pubs, and a steamed-up kitchen, we have found the essence of the lower classes: suspicious of intellect, strong moral values, a certain passivity allied to illusions; then those feelings that are apt to run wilder than good sense allows (if Vic had thought harder he’d have bought a condom before not after they first had sex). 

The promises of school have failed. Life is a disappointment to Victor Brown. And whose fault? Mr Chance! says Vic. Poor sod. No idea what’s gone wrong.

It really begins with the wedding – the Boxing Day Chris got married – because that was the day I decided to do something about Ingrid Rothwell besides gawp at her like a love-sick cow or something whenever she came in sight. I’d been doing this for about a month before Christmas, I remember. I don’t know what started it. Does anybody know what starts these things, why a bint can be one among dozens about the place one day and somebody special the next? Or it seems that way. Well anyway, it was that way with me and I’d been at it for a month, or maybe six weeks, and I’d got to the stage where I knew I’d have to do something about it.

Sometimes you shouldn’t do anything at all. Poor Vic! He should have waited for something better. But for that you need a much finer education.

(Review: A Kind of Loving)

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1.  In the 1950s low culture was the object of attack for the cognoscenti: the mass had to be cultivated. Today, it is high culture that is under attack, that same cognoscenti turned philistine, with all the narrow-minded moralism that goes with it.

2.  How much of the belief that traditional societies don’t have individuals is due to academics mistaking a literary style for actual life? Novels, with their individual psychology, can only emerge in a written culture. Individuals have existed since the first man and woman.

3.  W.G. Runciman’s Relative deprivation and social justice has lots of interesting things to say about this. Nearly all the people studied made life comparisons with those just above or below themselves. Those in high society are completely out of range, and are treated as fantasy figures.

4.  In the postwar period the income differentials between the manual and non-manual classes shrank (and in some occupations the former earned the most). This led to greater stress on status, particularly amongst the lower-middle classes and some sections of the non-manual workers. Relative deprivation and social justice.

5.  For an acute study of class attitudes to inequality see Relative deprivation and social justice. Runciman makes a distinction between status and economic inequality. At some social levels status becomes very important indeed (and will distort perceptions about the actual economic and social situation).

6.  In the 1980s there were those - Edwina Currie - who assumed the private life centred on the family home was more intelligent and civilised than an evening spent down the pub. This is not, as Vic Brown shows, so certain. 

In this novel there is a clear distinction between middle-class men like David and Mr Van Huyten, who are educated and cultured, and those of the lower-middle, like Ma Rothwell and Rawly, who are not, but have pretensions to higher status (social in the former, cultural the latter). This picks up on something that Runciman was to confirm: the rising affluence of the working classes in the 1950s didn’t necessarily translate into ‘embourgeoisement’ (a then fashionable term). Some were detached from the working-class, but without any assimilation into the middle-class. Consumer goods like television undercut older cultures, and became a substitute for the manners and education of the bourgeoisie. Here is the ‘classless society’. Literally a media creation, which hollows out all kinds of peculiarities and distinctions and turns them into mere signs.

7.  Hoggart noticed this: the scholarship boy was typically left with no purpose. The Uses of Literacy. Educated to believe in ideas but not having the culture to make fruitful use of them. By the 1990s it was these semi-educated types that came to dominate the culture, because they formed the mass of the paying public. For the effects: Richard Hoggart: How We Live Now.