13 July 2009
Martha Haines Butt - Antifanaticism: A Story of the South
Martha Haines Butt is something of a mystery woman, as there is very little biographical information about her. Antifanaticism: A Tale of the South (1854) and The Leisure Moments of Miss Martha Haines Butt, A. M. (1860) appear to be her only publications. Antifanaticism was written when Butt was 19 years old, at her home in Norfolk, Virginia.
Antifanaticism very much reminded me of Danesbury House (1860), the first novel by Ellen (or Mrs Henry) Wood, which is also pure propaganda, and is also concerned with only one central idea: as a temperance novel, Danesbury House's strident message is that alcohol is poison. But to return to Butt, whose aim is not to promote temperance. Harriett Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in the abolitionist National Era between 1851 and 1852, and then as a book in 1852. It was immensely successful, and its part in the drive to abolish slavery must have been important. But the reaction against Stowe's book was great too, and many anti-Tom novels (sometimes covered under the title 'plantation literature') were published, notably Mary Eastman's Aunt Phillis's Cabin (1952) and Caroline Lee Hentz's The Planter's Northern Bride (1854).* Butt's Antifanaticism is a well known example of the genre and she dedicated the book to her friend Hentz.
Similar to Ellen Wood's novel in that it relentlessly repeats a single idea with minor adjustments for variety, Antifanaticism's central tenet is that slavery is good. The novel centres around one family of slave owners, repeating ad nauseam their immense kindness to their slaves, showing that many of them won't take freedom even if it's offered, claiming that white 'slaves' in the factories in the north are 'infinitely' less free than black slaves. Staunch abolitionist visitors from the north become converted to Southern hospitality almost overnight, and return full of praise for the big-hearted slave owners. The slaves are seen singing, dancing and courting far more often than working for their beloved masters. (Although the expression 'false consciousness' comes to mind here.) And the ill treatment of slaves is viewed as a myth.
The reader of this novel will note an apparent irony in the fact that great importance is attached to the wealth of the whites, without of course any hint as to where this wealth has come from: the black slaves who appear to have such a wonderful time in and around their tiny plantation cabins which form the borders of their lives. When the plantation owner's daughter Dora returns home after a number of years schooling in the north-east, she exclaims 'Oh! how natural [...] do all the little cabins look'. And here is the central problem: no matter how well the narrator might try to convince the reader that the slaves are well treated, they are still seen as vastly inferior to white people. The narrator believes that it is part of the natural order that whites should exploit blacks and maintain a rigid control over their lives. They are, in fact, highly lucrative pets depicted as having a very limited interior life, giving amusement to their master's family by the way they speak and the way they live.
As a piece of 19th century anti-abolitionist propaganda, Antifanaticism evidently fails miserably. But as a historical document of a frightened young Southern racist several years before the Civil War, this is very interesting material.
The Leisure Moments of Miss Martha Haines Butt, A. M., although published several years later, was mostly written before Antifanaticism, and is a collection of short stories and musings which seem to have nothing of the polemical nature of her novel.
* Hentz has fallen into obscurity probably largely as a result of her over-attention to her pro-slavery novels Marcus Warlord (1852) and The Planter's Northern Bride as opposed to the other novels she wrote. In her essay 'Caroline Hentz's Balancing Act' in The Female Tradition in Southern Literature (ed. by Carol S. Manning (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992)), Mary Ann Wimsatt says in her conclusion: 'Character balance and contrast, cleverly modified romance narrative structures, folktales, and a covert feminism - Caroline Hentz's novels contain enough variety in content and literary method to intrigue even the most jaded twentieth-century student of nineteenth-century literature.'
Antifanaticism very much reminded me of Danesbury House (1860), the first novel by Ellen (or Mrs Henry) Wood, which is also pure propaganda, and is also concerned with only one central idea: as a temperance novel, Danesbury House's strident message is that alcohol is poison. But to return to Butt, whose aim is not to promote temperance. Harriett Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in the abolitionist National Era between 1851 and 1852, and then as a book in 1852. It was immensely successful, and its part in the drive to abolish slavery must have been important. But the reaction against Stowe's book was great too, and many anti-Tom novels (sometimes covered under the title 'plantation literature') were published, notably Mary Eastman's Aunt Phillis's Cabin (1952) and Caroline Lee Hentz's The Planter's Northern Bride (1854).* Butt's Antifanaticism is a well known example of the genre and she dedicated the book to her friend Hentz.
Similar to Ellen Wood's novel in that it relentlessly repeats a single idea with minor adjustments for variety, Antifanaticism's central tenet is that slavery is good. The novel centres around one family of slave owners, repeating ad nauseam their immense kindness to their slaves, showing that many of them won't take freedom even if it's offered, claiming that white 'slaves' in the factories in the north are 'infinitely' less free than black slaves. Staunch abolitionist visitors from the north become converted to Southern hospitality almost overnight, and return full of praise for the big-hearted slave owners. The slaves are seen singing, dancing and courting far more often than working for their beloved masters. (Although the expression 'false consciousness' comes to mind here.) And the ill treatment of slaves is viewed as a myth.
The reader of this novel will note an apparent irony in the fact that great importance is attached to the wealth of the whites, without of course any hint as to where this wealth has come from: the black slaves who appear to have such a wonderful time in and around their tiny plantation cabins which form the borders of their lives. When the plantation owner's daughter Dora returns home after a number of years schooling in the north-east, she exclaims 'Oh! how natural [...] do all the little cabins look'. And here is the central problem: no matter how well the narrator might try to convince the reader that the slaves are well treated, they are still seen as vastly inferior to white people. The narrator believes that it is part of the natural order that whites should exploit blacks and maintain a rigid control over their lives. They are, in fact, highly lucrative pets depicted as having a very limited interior life, giving amusement to their master's family by the way they speak and the way they live.
As a piece of 19th century anti-abolitionist propaganda, Antifanaticism evidently fails miserably. But as a historical document of a frightened young Southern racist several years before the Civil War, this is very interesting material.
The Leisure Moments of Miss Martha Haines Butt, A. M., although published several years later, was mostly written before Antifanaticism, and is a collection of short stories and musings which seem to have nothing of the polemical nature of her novel.
* Hentz has fallen into obscurity probably largely as a result of her over-attention to her pro-slavery novels Marcus Warlord (1852) and The Planter's Northern Bride as opposed to the other novels she wrote. In her essay 'Caroline Hentz's Balancing Act' in The Female Tradition in Southern Literature (ed. by Carol S. Manning (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992)), Mary Ann Wimsatt says in her conclusion: 'Character balance and contrast, cleverly modified romance narrative structures, folktales, and a covert feminism - Caroline Hentz's novels contain enough variety in content and literary method to intrigue even the most jaded twentieth-century student of nineteenth-century literature.'
14 June 2009
A Dolphin in a Sentry-Box; or, on the Trail of Lionel Britton
The extraordinary writer Lionel Britton (1887-1971) published one novel and three plays in the 1930s and then disappeared from the literary map. There were very few obituaries, although it was in one of them – an anonymous article entitled ‘Forgotten Genius Ends his Days at Margate’, in The Isle of Thanet Gazette – that I discovered that a number of his unpublished works remained intact. His friend Professor Herbert Marshall, a great admirer of Britton, had arranged for all his literary effects to be shipped to Southern Illinois University (SIU) in Carbondale.
Carbondale has a population of about 22,000, although in term time it almost doubles in size. I very much doubt that the name Lionel Britton is known in any other university in the world with the exception of the Open University, where I gained my PhD in Literature on Britton’s work. Yet at the Special Collections Research Center in Carbondale, which houses ninety archival boxes of Britton manuscripts, his name is familiar: one member of staff – obviously to some extent acquainted with his biography – even told me that all Britton needed was a therapist! (The reason for that remark will probably become clear later in this article.) I have been to Carbondale on two occasions, and recently spent five weeks poring over the contents of a number of those boxes. Below I give a synopsis of my findings.
Britton and the Written Word
It is sometimes difficult to ascertain what Britton’s literary influences were, although superficially it would appear from reading Hunger and Love that James Joyce is one of them. C.E.M. Joad comes to this conclusion in Under the Fifth Rib: A Belligerent Autobiography (1932), where he speaks about the ‘Cult of Unreason’, and claims that Britton writes in the same genre as Joyce, Huxley, Woolf and Lawrence. In his brief essay ‘Unreason in Modern Literature’, however, Britton reacts angrily to this, saying:
‘Who are these people? What’s that to do with me? I don’t know anything about these blokes. I’ve heard about them. I hear people talking about them, and every now and again I think to myself I ought to know something about this, and I pick up one of their books. And that’s as far as it gets. I jolly soon lay it down again. What’s this stuff to me? I’m not a critic who’s paid for reading. I’m a writer, and I don’t intend to take poison. If I read this stuff I find I can’t think afterwards. It muddles up the speech centre in the brain. I can no longer think or speak naturally. If I force myself a few sentences too far into one of their books, then until I take a mental purgative or emetic I’m done. I might as well be dead. I won’t do it.’
The reason for this outburst is perhaps initially unclear, although Britton was frequently given to such tantrums, and there are numerous examples of them in Hunger and Love. Evidently, Britton has adopted one of the common preconceptions about the modernists: they are elitists, and therefore out of touch with the working class. Britton sees himself as a ‘proletarian’ writer, and thinks it wholly inappropriate to share a modernist aesthetic with such authors.
But Joad quotes a passage from Hunger and Love which he finds incomprehensible, and then a passage from the ‘Ithaca’ section of Ulysses, which he finds is similarly written – ‘in jerks’:
‘Solitary hotel in mountain pass. Autumn. Twilight. Fire lit. In dark corner young man seated. Young woman enters. Restless. Solitary. She sits. She goes to window. She stands. She sits. Twilight. She stands. On solitary hotel paper she writes. She thinks. She writes. She sighs. Wheels and hoofs. She hurries out. He comes from the dark corner. He seizes solitary paper, He holds it towards fire. Twilight. He reads. Solitary.’
Britton appreciates that Joyce is trying to express restlessness here, and says that if Joad doesn’t understand that then he doesn’t know how to write. Britton, however, would not express it in quite the same way:
‘I could never say “On solitary hotel paper she writes”. I should say: “She writes. Hotel paper. Solitary hotel.” I should not say “In dark corner young man seated.” I should say: “Young man sitting in dark corner.” I’d run a mile rather than use a word like “seated”. Be seated, madam! Not me!’
Throughout Hunger and Love Britton sees his enemies the bourgeoisie as unnatural, and in this article he associates the writing of modernists with an artificial style of writing. If he read them, he could ‘no longer think or speak naturally.’
Fame
The earliest play that Britton wrote was ‘Fame; or, the Reluctant Employee’, which probably dates from the early 1920s if not slightly before. The first words are spoken by Harry Humphries, a starving writer who lives in a garret surrounded by books piled on egg box shelves and sugar box tables and chairs. He is holding a herring in one hand and a frying pan in the other:
‘Life wouldn’t be so bad, only it’s the nuisance of it. First you’ve got to anabolize, and then you’ve got to catabolize; and then it’s time for bed. Now I have here an anabolic herring, denominated red, for no particular reason so far as I can see except that it’s not red in many; the egg that – (feels it in sudden misgiving) – yes, it is hard; many’s the egg that creature laid all unmindful of its destiny down at the bottom of the deep blue sea, because (argumentatively) if they don’t lay them at the bottom where the dickens do they lay them? And to think that to-morrow that fish will be talking philosophy! in me! It’s enough to make a chap look upon himself as an alchemist. It’s a humble sort of instrument when you look at him to make the universe conscious of itself. (Suddenly thinking.) Was Buddha, wasn’t it? – Now what’s the blessed order? (Goes to dictionary, putting herring on table.) Now you lie there, while I look up your references. (Sniffs.) You’ve been out of work a long time. I always classify my food before I eat it. It makes it much more interesting to have a pedigree herring, complete with its genus and differentia, tracing its final journey down your digestive tract.’ (Turning up dictionary.)’
The themes of this passage and the writing style will be familiar to anyone who has ever read any of Hunger and Love, with its emphasis on science (‘anabolize’, ‘catabolize’), its clipped, digressive language (‘Was Buddha, wasn’t it?’), the vital importance of the learning process, and the humour. ‘Fame’ was evidently a precursor of Hunger and Love, and there is even a repetition in the play of the scene in the novel where a bookseller pronounces Pierre de Coulevain’s L’Isle inconnue as ‘Leelin Connu’. The Miss Whyman and the Doreen of Hunger and Love are conflated in ‘Fame’ to Dora, who first sees socialism from a negative perspective. In a heartfelt remark to her, Henry says: ‘I’m looking forward to seeing the employer’s head stuck on a pole.’ The use of the definite article instead of the possessive adjective is interesting here: Britton has shifted the dispossessed working class into a transcendent position and hoisted the bosses into history. (This is probably an allusion to Zola’s Germinal, where towards the end of the book a similar event takes place with the former boss’s genitals.)
The analogies between Hunger and Love and ‘Fame’ pile up, but it’s clear that – although many of the prototypical ideas in this play were forwarded to the novel, there was nevertheless a small amount of self-censorship in the published book; for instance, Britton saw H. G. Wells as a potential supporter of the novel, so he had to delete the following comment about Wells’s support for World War I: ‘I’m wonderfully fond of Wells. He’s a very great man; but he turned out a rotter during the war.’
Towards the end of the play, Henry looks forward to a successful life writing books instead of dusting them: clearly, ‘Fame’ looks to the future with hope as opposed to the bleak vision of Hunger and Love.
A Whisper to the Voice of Man
One of the aims of my second visit to SIU was to bring back a copy of ‘Murder’s Last Word’, Britton’s second and final novel and the follow-up to his huge Hunger and Love (1931). Hunger and Love boasted a five-page Introduction by Bertrand Russell and received very mixed reviews, although many of them – by Upton Sinclair and Richard Aldington, for example – were full of praise. It was well known at the time that Britton had had problems with publishers because he refused to allow them to make cuts to his repetitive and digressive novel; but in the end, Britton found a very sympathetic publisher in Putnam, and this first novel is highly unusual in that the publisher didn’t ask the author to make any emendations. In 1940, Britton was ready to show the world his second novel. Again, Putnam were enthusiastic, and their reader Constant Huntington told Britton that he had waited for years for the occasion. Why, then, was it never published?
The first obvious thing to note about Britton’s manuscript is that, at approximately 67,000 words, it is just over one fifth the size of Hunger and Love. But the second thing is far more important: Britton had made it clear that he intended to write a more popular novel, and this is what ‘Murder’s Last Word’ appears to be. Anyone familiar with Hunger and Love, though, especially with its treatment of some characters as an excuse for the narrator to launch into a long philosophical or scientific digression, would be very sceptical about Britton’s temperamental ability to write a ‘popular’ novel. And indeed, this scepticism would appear to be vindicated by two of the chapter titles: ‘Science and Morality’ and ‘Hegel Keeps His Secret’. And the beginning of the Preface strongly suggests that this ‘murder mystery’, as he calls it, will not be too far removed from what Britton’s readers expected: ‘[A]s any scientist will tell you in these days of Relativity, and as Copernicus found out before Einstein, the cart may push the horse as well as the horse pull the cart, and it all depends on whether you are going up hill or down, or, as in the solar system, on the point of view’, and ‘To a soldier, killing is everything; but as Hegel would have told you before you were born (though without a place in ‘Who’s Who’, and even then perhaps only if you could understand the Otherness in Being), killing implies being killed, and is impossible without it’. Everything seems to be in the place we would expect: Britton continues the long, circuitous sentences, and we appear to be set for the kind of digressions we are used to.
But this Preface is also a kind of excuse, and Britton is evidently apologising to his readers for having been forced to write within a more popular genre. Is there a great difference between this novel and Hunger and Love? Certainly the sub-title sounds a little like the Britton of the beginning of the previous decade: ‘A Sensational Thriller; or, “Blood” for Scientists, Philosophers, Statesmen, and Common Men of Today and Tomorrow – if There is a Tomorrow…’. Nevertheless, ‘Murder’s Last Word’ bears many similarities to conventional thriller fiction of the time. The language is (almost too) simple, the plot (and there is one this time) concerns a series of brutal murders which are embarrassing the police, and as the story unravels it transpires that this is the work of a ruthless (and German run) group of people who want to dominate the world by destroying everyone apart from the inhabitants of their own country; the novel also contains a few gory details, mystery, suspense, and a great deal of action. In a sense, it is everything that Hunger and Love is not, and there is a virtual absence of digression. Even the two nominally suspicious chapters mentioned above are conventional, and there is no scientific debate or philosophical discussion in them.
Britton sent out copies to a number of people to gauge the wisdom of his strategies, and there was some favourable response: V. Selson, ‘a business woman’ and the director of the Selson Machine Tools Co., said ‘Now that you have begun to write for people like me, you should be very successful.’ Fredda Brilliant, Herbert Marshall’s sculptor wife, said ‘I couldn’t at first believe that one and the same author could write such highly contrasting novels with equal brilliancy, but it seems that it is so! Such a book makes blitz reading for blitz hours!’ Bertrand Russell also congratulated him on his ability to adapt, although he thought that Britton should have made it clearer for duller readers who the main characters were meant to represent. Britton had said that this was a thriller with a difference, and it was intended as an allegory, an attack on Nazism. As he said (by way of another apology in an author’s note), ‘I have done the best I can with second best to add a whisper to the voice of man.’ Vernon Porter did not miss the point, but added: ‘I hope those who find the thrills absorbing will not miss the big idea and the clever criticism of dictatorship.’ P. Dienes of Birkbeck College added: ‘The idea behind the story is so good and so important that it seems to me to be wasted on a mere murder story, however cleverly done. And yours is damned well done.’
Dienes, though, along with a number of other readers, felt obliged to comment (very politely) on one small issue: ‘The scientific detail at the end is rather lengthy. I wonder if anybody wants to learn physics while waiting for the wholesale destruction of life on our planet?’ Britton had inserted six pages on the nature of the carbon atom into the novel: it was as if he could not be entirely forget the content of Hunger and Love. But it was sufficient to annoy a number of people. Amy Priestley, the head teacher of Monega Road Infant School in East Ham, loved it, but was forced to complain: ‘[D]o you really expect us lesser mortals to read a scientific lecture on the nature of carbon, when we are bursting for the denouement?’ And Marion Seeley, M.A., a senior English teacher at the Bromley High School for Girls, obviously agreed with her: ‘This I think won't be forgiven you by your average reader of thrillers. It holds up the action intolerably just when the excitement is at its highest pitch.’
Putnam, which had previously turned down later plays that Britton wrote, and had advised him to write another novel, were disappointed with the result, and had to make it clear that they did not publish thrillers. Many years later, Putnam bought the Dennis Dobson imprint and wanted to publish ‘Murder’s Last Word’ in the Blue Lamp Mysteries series. Britton refused because ‘it is obviously something more than just a thriller’.
Mr Pickwick
Britton may not have appreciated the work of the modernists but he enjoyed Charles Dickens a great deal. The half-title of the present article is a quotation from Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1836-37): Chapter VI of the novel takes place in the Wardle home at Dingley Dell, where Mr Pickwick plays whist, and where one of his opponents is ‘the unlucky Miller [who] felt as much out of his element as a dolphin in a sentry-box’. The phrase conjures up a surrealistic image that juxtaposes the artificial and regimented to the natural and the free, the violent to the peaceful, the grotesque to the graceful; it is an image of the outsider, and eerily sums up the world of Arthur Phelps of Hunger and Love. Equally, it sums up the world of Lionel Britton.
‘Mr Pickwick’ is the only play Britton wrote that was performed but not published. Its full title is ‘Mr Pickwick: In Search of Human Nature and the Strange Adventures that Befell Him Therein: An Original Play from the Pen of Charles Dickens through the Eyes of Lionel Britton’. It was performed at Rugby in 1945, although due to what appears to have been a cost-cutting exercise it was not, as originally scheduled, also performed at Huddersfield and Bristol.
In one of the archive boxes at SIU, a textually identical play is bound in a Kellogg’s Corn Flakes box, although there is a different subtitle: ‘[A]ttempts to capture Dickens’s original idea, which he lost as he went along’. It’s obvious that a dramatisation of The Pickwick Papers would vary in many ways from even the film version, but Britton’s treatment of the characters is nonetheless faithful to the characters, and to many events, in the novel. But the whole play takes place in the lounge of the Bull Inn.
The Pickwick Papers was in part a satire on the pretentious activities of historical societies, although this is lost in Britton’s version. What is important, from the beginning, is the working-class element, and Britton emphasises the role of Sam Weller in particular:
‘I feel that we have much to learn here, and perhaps more than we shall find in a further journey, and therefore I deemed it possible that the remarkable personality of the man in question and his services at this spot, would release my energies and afford me at the same time the stimulus of his curious reflections, in the pursuit of my investigations into the peculiarities of our fellow creatures.’
As may be expected, Britton – who used the expression ‘errand boy’ as a metaphor for a member of the working class – dwells on the seedier aspects of Weller’s history; Pickwick, who calls Weller a philosopher, is astonished by his accounts of his vagabond life, by his taking various precarious jobs and having to sleep in the filthy boarding houses of the ‘tuppenny rope’, or under Waterloo Bridge. Britton no doubt identified with Weller’s aphorism: ‘It’s bein’ poor where you sees life.’
To a lesser degree, Weller’s father is also a representative of working-class views:
‘[V]ot’s eddication for but to make the most o’ life, and not to be done no’ow by no sorts o’ blackguards, no matter how smart they thinks theirselves . Vy, ven you got that, you got eddication, and no puttin’ nothin’ arter your name nor no puttin’ nothin’ afore it, von’t take the place o’ that, sir.’
Pickwick replies: ‘I do really believe you are right.’
The blackguards Britton is thinking of, of course, are the bourgeoisie, and ‘Mr Pickwick’ makes considerable criticism of them. As in The Pickwick Papers, there are a number of occasions when the characters are allowed to voice their contempt for the legal profession: Sam is not allowed to kick anyone in the novel, although in the play he kicks the solicitor Dodson, who ‘scuttles out through the door like a scared cat’; in a general remark about lawyers, Old Weller remarks that ‘It’s a pint of honour vit ’em never to leave you nothing’. But it is perhaps Jingle who provides the best opportunity for Britton to extend his attacks to other institutions and also to indulge in the ‘headline abbreviation’ patterns of Hunger and Love; Jingle declares of Dr Slammer: ‘Poor fellow—disgraceful exhibition—mad doctors—regiments—shoot—mad—all mad!’
Several years after writing the play, Britton sent Robert Morley a copy of the script, and Morley claimed to have enjoyed the play immensely, but then realised that he couldn’t play Pickwick because he was a little fat man, whereas he was a big fat man. John Burrell of the Old Vic also rejected the play, claiming that Britton had taken ‘too many liberties’ with the novel.
O. H. M. S.
‘O. H. M. S.: or, How to Make God’ is an original play and marks a return to Britton’s experimental work. It was probably written in the 1940s or the 1950s and begins with a note which serves as a warning to any reader seeking the comfort of a traditional play: ‘If you are looking for the story it is very difficult, because it aint there’. The time is ‘Then, Now and Forever’, and the place ‘Here, There and Everywhere’. Britton continues:
‘The whole play is intended not so much to be immediately and clearly understood the first time it is seen, but as a kind of speaking music which will adjust man’s feelings towards himself and the universe, and which can be more and more understood the more deeply it is studied.’
The first scene is conventional enough, with a family scene set in the evening, and concerns a conflict between a conservative working-class father and his radical son who is studying at the local polytechnic. The son is a great believer in co-operation and believes that one day everyone will be working together for a just society, which he compares unfavourably to the past and the present, as represented by his father, whom he compares to an ape. At the end of the scene the mother partly reconciles the father to the fact that some social progress is being made in that their son, unlike his father, will never have to touch his cap to his bosses at work.
But this is the last we see of the family, and the characters in other sections also only make one appearance: the parts are only thematically related to one another. In the second section a British worker, and then a policeman, try to find some sense in a caveman; soon, they are replaced by a ‘Lit’ry Gent’ and a businessman with a fat cigar, the former arguing the merits of education for the masses, the latter saying that educating them too much will mean that they can ‘See through advertisements’.
In another section a sergeant is training his men when a child enters. The sergeant asks him what he wants, the child replies that he wants to grow up, and the sergeant explodes, ‘Well, you can’t grow up ’e r e ! Besides, you’ll ’ave your blasted career cut short, my bonny boy, with a bullet in the neck, if you come round ’ere tryin’ to bolshevise the soldiers, Now, just you tell me – oo the ’ell sent you?’ The brief speech is of course an attack on the armed forces cutting young men’s lives short, but it also shows the fear in the Establishment that left-wing views are infiltrating those forces.
Britton’s targets are virtually all institutions, and in the fifth section he finds a generic name for anyone he believes is standing in the way of progress – meaning in the way of the march towards anarchism and its twin goal of global co-operation as opposed to competition: they are Way-Closers, or W Cs for short. Britton couldn’t have predicted that wall-to-wall sport would replace the wall-to-wall religion of the 19th and early 20th centuries, although one W C’s remark suggests that Britton was aware of this opium of the people: ‘Sport is good. It uses up energy and nothing is achieved.’
Why She Would Not
Bernard Shaw’s last play, Why She Would Not, was written in the year that he died and was probably unfinished. Britton added a detailed ending to it, and for the rest of his life was obsessed with the refusal of the Society of Authors to allow the simultaneous publication of both Shaw’s piece and his own ending. He kept scrapbooks of newspaper cuttings about the Society, its financial details, and biographical details of the committee members.
Britton wrote to many literary figures protesting against the Society’s rejection of his work, and his grievances met with some sympathy, including that of Bertrand Russell, who remarked: ‘If the principle became established that nothing should be published unless it aroused admiration in a number of elderly big-wigs, the result would be a disastrous censorship’; Graham Greene told Britton that he had recently left the Society, but said that he could use his name as much as he liked in support of his campaign against it. Others, though, were less understanding. Britton was claiming that his aim was to restore Shaw’s good name because he had suffered negative criticism since his death: he believed that the ending would show the public what was in Shaw’s mind; unsurprisingly, T. S. Eliot failed to understand how another writer could show what was in Shaw’s mind, and Colin Wilson simply didn’t understand the point Britton was trying to make.
In 1964, Britton sent a two-hundred-and-eighty-five-paragraph dossier to the Director of Public Prosecutions alleging fraudulent activities on the part of the Society of Authors. Nothing was ever proved. Also in 1964, Britton formed a company – The Park Group Limited – with two Canadians using a bank in the Bahamas with the intention of publishing and producing his plays for stage and screen, of which the first was to be ‘the Shaw play’. However, nothing appears to have come to fruition from the Park Group, probably because Britton was insisting that ‘the Shaw play’ be published first, whereas the other directors (who were responsible for all of the company’s not inconsiderable expenses pending a refund from the ‘profits’) were worried about a possible court injunction. Three years later Britton established his own company – Promethean Publishers Ltd – which appears never to have published anything either.
The play concerns a young man who begins working for a company and swiftly works his way up to the top to become the chair, although he is going to spread the profits evenly between all employees: essentially, his vision is to create a co-operative utopia. But did Britton write a masterpiece as he perhaps thought, or was he was his labour simply a point of principle?
The bound typescript begins with a fifty-page ‘Testament’ in which Britton records his struggle with the Society of Authors; it continues with a forty-eight-page Preface in which he gets a little carried away:
‘There are forms of life which live in the boiling springs of New Zealand, while others, like the anaerobic bacteria, can do without air and indeed choke in it, and the lichen makes a living on bare rock; and the variety and beauty of colour and form is only equalled by the multiplicity and hideousness of shapes so horrible that if only they were big enough to see without aids to vision they would fill the world with gibbering idiots within a week.’
Britton’s play then follows, then Shaw’s few pages, concluding with a ninety-page epilogue entitled ‘Inside Shaw’s Head’.
The play itself only takes up about a quarter of the total manuscript. It transpires that what Britton thought Shaw was thinking was in fact what Britton was thinking, and ‘Why She Would Not’ is a kind of fusion of Hunger and Love and Brain. It is a perfectly respectable play, but no masterpiece: the preliminary pages are of much more interest than the play itself. But then perhaps the same can be said of Shaw’s Prefaces.
We Are the Animals: A Song and Thought Musical
This play is written in the very rough spidery scrawl which characterised Britton’s writing in the few years leading up to his death, so it is highly probable that this was written towards the end of the 1960s, if not slightly later.
Act I is set sometime in the future at Hyde Park Corner, where various animals are preparing for a rally. The new lower classes are invertebrates, who are frowned on by the enfranchised vertebrates: lions don’t want the education of performing fleas, and declare that democracy ‘allows everybody the right to rob everybody else, and share in the robbery, by giving them the vote to elect those who control the robbery’.
Act II is set in the House of Uncommons, where the Home Secretary (the President of the Vertebrates’ Association) states that he will not support the demands of the invertebrates. There is much singing before Worm enters and has an altercation with Lion.
Act IV is the last, when the Russian Bear, the American Eagle and the British Lion enter and express national clichés. On the entrance of Lion, Worm and Lobster, Eagle says that atom bombs are getting smaller and cheaper, that they will be smuggled into big nations in diplomatic bags, timed to go off at the same time, and that this will lead to small nations being allowed to do as they please. This prompts Worm, a representative of the lowest group of workers, to sing in triumph:
‘When the nations have their fun
And they’re done in one by one
We’ll be there.
When the whole wide world is empty,
And the whole wide world is bare
We’ll be there.
When you’ve blown yourselves to bits
We’ll be there.
We’ll be there,
We’ll be there.
When you’ve blown yourselves to bits,
We’ll be there.’
Carbondale has a population of about 22,000, although in term time it almost doubles in size. I very much doubt that the name Lionel Britton is known in any other university in the world with the exception of the Open University, where I gained my PhD in Literature on Britton’s work. Yet at the Special Collections Research Center in Carbondale, which houses ninety archival boxes of Britton manuscripts, his name is familiar: one member of staff – obviously to some extent acquainted with his biography – even told me that all Britton needed was a therapist! (The reason for that remark will probably become clear later in this article.) I have been to Carbondale on two occasions, and recently spent five weeks poring over the contents of a number of those boxes. Below I give a synopsis of my findings.
Britton and the Written Word
It is sometimes difficult to ascertain what Britton’s literary influences were, although superficially it would appear from reading Hunger and Love that James Joyce is one of them. C.E.M. Joad comes to this conclusion in Under the Fifth Rib: A Belligerent Autobiography (1932), where he speaks about the ‘Cult of Unreason’, and claims that Britton writes in the same genre as Joyce, Huxley, Woolf and Lawrence. In his brief essay ‘Unreason in Modern Literature’, however, Britton reacts angrily to this, saying:
‘Who are these people? What’s that to do with me? I don’t know anything about these blokes. I’ve heard about them. I hear people talking about them, and every now and again I think to myself I ought to know something about this, and I pick up one of their books. And that’s as far as it gets. I jolly soon lay it down again. What’s this stuff to me? I’m not a critic who’s paid for reading. I’m a writer, and I don’t intend to take poison. If I read this stuff I find I can’t think afterwards. It muddles up the speech centre in the brain. I can no longer think or speak naturally. If I force myself a few sentences too far into one of their books, then until I take a mental purgative or emetic I’m done. I might as well be dead. I won’t do it.’
The reason for this outburst is perhaps initially unclear, although Britton was frequently given to such tantrums, and there are numerous examples of them in Hunger and Love. Evidently, Britton has adopted one of the common preconceptions about the modernists: they are elitists, and therefore out of touch with the working class. Britton sees himself as a ‘proletarian’ writer, and thinks it wholly inappropriate to share a modernist aesthetic with such authors.
But Joad quotes a passage from Hunger and Love which he finds incomprehensible, and then a passage from the ‘Ithaca’ section of Ulysses, which he finds is similarly written – ‘in jerks’:
‘Solitary hotel in mountain pass. Autumn. Twilight. Fire lit. In dark corner young man seated. Young woman enters. Restless. Solitary. She sits. She goes to window. She stands. She sits. Twilight. She stands. On solitary hotel paper she writes. She thinks. She writes. She sighs. Wheels and hoofs. She hurries out. He comes from the dark corner. He seizes solitary paper, He holds it towards fire. Twilight. He reads. Solitary.’
Britton appreciates that Joyce is trying to express restlessness here, and says that if Joad doesn’t understand that then he doesn’t know how to write. Britton, however, would not express it in quite the same way:
‘I could never say “On solitary hotel paper she writes”. I should say: “She writes. Hotel paper. Solitary hotel.” I should not say “In dark corner young man seated.” I should say: “Young man sitting in dark corner.” I’d run a mile rather than use a word like “seated”. Be seated, madam! Not me!’
Throughout Hunger and Love Britton sees his enemies the bourgeoisie as unnatural, and in this article he associates the writing of modernists with an artificial style of writing. If he read them, he could ‘no longer think or speak naturally.’
Fame
The earliest play that Britton wrote was ‘Fame; or, the Reluctant Employee’, which probably dates from the early 1920s if not slightly before. The first words are spoken by Harry Humphries, a starving writer who lives in a garret surrounded by books piled on egg box shelves and sugar box tables and chairs. He is holding a herring in one hand and a frying pan in the other:
‘Life wouldn’t be so bad, only it’s the nuisance of it. First you’ve got to anabolize, and then you’ve got to catabolize; and then it’s time for bed. Now I have here an anabolic herring, denominated red, for no particular reason so far as I can see except that it’s not red in many; the egg that – (feels it in sudden misgiving) – yes, it is hard; many’s the egg that creature laid all unmindful of its destiny down at the bottom of the deep blue sea, because (argumentatively) if they don’t lay them at the bottom where the dickens do they lay them? And to think that to-morrow that fish will be talking philosophy! in me! It’s enough to make a chap look upon himself as an alchemist. It’s a humble sort of instrument when you look at him to make the universe conscious of itself. (Suddenly thinking.) Was Buddha, wasn’t it? – Now what’s the blessed order? (Goes to dictionary, putting herring on table.) Now you lie there, while I look up your references. (Sniffs.) You’ve been out of work a long time. I always classify my food before I eat it. It makes it much more interesting to have a pedigree herring, complete with its genus and differentia, tracing its final journey down your digestive tract.’ (Turning up dictionary.)’
The themes of this passage and the writing style will be familiar to anyone who has ever read any of Hunger and Love, with its emphasis on science (‘anabolize’, ‘catabolize’), its clipped, digressive language (‘Was Buddha, wasn’t it?’), the vital importance of the learning process, and the humour. ‘Fame’ was evidently a precursor of Hunger and Love, and there is even a repetition in the play of the scene in the novel where a bookseller pronounces Pierre de Coulevain’s L’Isle inconnue as ‘Leelin Connu’. The Miss Whyman and the Doreen of Hunger and Love are conflated in ‘Fame’ to Dora, who first sees socialism from a negative perspective. In a heartfelt remark to her, Henry says: ‘I’m looking forward to seeing the employer’s head stuck on a pole.’ The use of the definite article instead of the possessive adjective is interesting here: Britton has shifted the dispossessed working class into a transcendent position and hoisted the bosses into history. (This is probably an allusion to Zola’s Germinal, where towards the end of the book a similar event takes place with the former boss’s genitals.)
The analogies between Hunger and Love and ‘Fame’ pile up, but it’s clear that – although many of the prototypical ideas in this play were forwarded to the novel, there was nevertheless a small amount of self-censorship in the published book; for instance, Britton saw H. G. Wells as a potential supporter of the novel, so he had to delete the following comment about Wells’s support for World War I: ‘I’m wonderfully fond of Wells. He’s a very great man; but he turned out a rotter during the war.’
Towards the end of the play, Henry looks forward to a successful life writing books instead of dusting them: clearly, ‘Fame’ looks to the future with hope as opposed to the bleak vision of Hunger and Love.
A Whisper to the Voice of Man
One of the aims of my second visit to SIU was to bring back a copy of ‘Murder’s Last Word’, Britton’s second and final novel and the follow-up to his huge Hunger and Love (1931). Hunger and Love boasted a five-page Introduction by Bertrand Russell and received very mixed reviews, although many of them – by Upton Sinclair and Richard Aldington, for example – were full of praise. It was well known at the time that Britton had had problems with publishers because he refused to allow them to make cuts to his repetitive and digressive novel; but in the end, Britton found a very sympathetic publisher in Putnam, and this first novel is highly unusual in that the publisher didn’t ask the author to make any emendations. In 1940, Britton was ready to show the world his second novel. Again, Putnam were enthusiastic, and their reader Constant Huntington told Britton that he had waited for years for the occasion. Why, then, was it never published?
The first obvious thing to note about Britton’s manuscript is that, at approximately 67,000 words, it is just over one fifth the size of Hunger and Love. But the second thing is far more important: Britton had made it clear that he intended to write a more popular novel, and this is what ‘Murder’s Last Word’ appears to be. Anyone familiar with Hunger and Love, though, especially with its treatment of some characters as an excuse for the narrator to launch into a long philosophical or scientific digression, would be very sceptical about Britton’s temperamental ability to write a ‘popular’ novel. And indeed, this scepticism would appear to be vindicated by two of the chapter titles: ‘Science and Morality’ and ‘Hegel Keeps His Secret’. And the beginning of the Preface strongly suggests that this ‘murder mystery’, as he calls it, will not be too far removed from what Britton’s readers expected: ‘[A]s any scientist will tell you in these days of Relativity, and as Copernicus found out before Einstein, the cart may push the horse as well as the horse pull the cart, and it all depends on whether you are going up hill or down, or, as in the solar system, on the point of view’, and ‘To a soldier, killing is everything; but as Hegel would have told you before you were born (though without a place in ‘Who’s Who’, and even then perhaps only if you could understand the Otherness in Being), killing implies being killed, and is impossible without it’. Everything seems to be in the place we would expect: Britton continues the long, circuitous sentences, and we appear to be set for the kind of digressions we are used to.
But this Preface is also a kind of excuse, and Britton is evidently apologising to his readers for having been forced to write within a more popular genre. Is there a great difference between this novel and Hunger and Love? Certainly the sub-title sounds a little like the Britton of the beginning of the previous decade: ‘A Sensational Thriller; or, “Blood” for Scientists, Philosophers, Statesmen, and Common Men of Today and Tomorrow – if There is a Tomorrow…’. Nevertheless, ‘Murder’s Last Word’ bears many similarities to conventional thriller fiction of the time. The language is (almost too) simple, the plot (and there is one this time) concerns a series of brutal murders which are embarrassing the police, and as the story unravels it transpires that this is the work of a ruthless (and German run) group of people who want to dominate the world by destroying everyone apart from the inhabitants of their own country; the novel also contains a few gory details, mystery, suspense, and a great deal of action. In a sense, it is everything that Hunger and Love is not, and there is a virtual absence of digression. Even the two nominally suspicious chapters mentioned above are conventional, and there is no scientific debate or philosophical discussion in them.
Britton sent out copies to a number of people to gauge the wisdom of his strategies, and there was some favourable response: V. Selson, ‘a business woman’ and the director of the Selson Machine Tools Co., said ‘Now that you have begun to write for people like me, you should be very successful.’ Fredda Brilliant, Herbert Marshall’s sculptor wife, said ‘I couldn’t at first believe that one and the same author could write such highly contrasting novels with equal brilliancy, but it seems that it is so! Such a book makes blitz reading for blitz hours!’ Bertrand Russell also congratulated him on his ability to adapt, although he thought that Britton should have made it clearer for duller readers who the main characters were meant to represent. Britton had said that this was a thriller with a difference, and it was intended as an allegory, an attack on Nazism. As he said (by way of another apology in an author’s note), ‘I have done the best I can with second best to add a whisper to the voice of man.’ Vernon Porter did not miss the point, but added: ‘I hope those who find the thrills absorbing will not miss the big idea and the clever criticism of dictatorship.’ P. Dienes of Birkbeck College added: ‘The idea behind the story is so good and so important that it seems to me to be wasted on a mere murder story, however cleverly done. And yours is damned well done.’
Dienes, though, along with a number of other readers, felt obliged to comment (very politely) on one small issue: ‘The scientific detail at the end is rather lengthy. I wonder if anybody wants to learn physics while waiting for the wholesale destruction of life on our planet?’ Britton had inserted six pages on the nature of the carbon atom into the novel: it was as if he could not be entirely forget the content of Hunger and Love. But it was sufficient to annoy a number of people. Amy Priestley, the head teacher of Monega Road Infant School in East Ham, loved it, but was forced to complain: ‘[D]o you really expect us lesser mortals to read a scientific lecture on the nature of carbon, when we are bursting for the denouement?’ And Marion Seeley, M.A., a senior English teacher at the Bromley High School for Girls, obviously agreed with her: ‘This I think won't be forgiven you by your average reader of thrillers. It holds up the action intolerably just when the excitement is at its highest pitch.’
Putnam, which had previously turned down later plays that Britton wrote, and had advised him to write another novel, were disappointed with the result, and had to make it clear that they did not publish thrillers. Many years later, Putnam bought the Dennis Dobson imprint and wanted to publish ‘Murder’s Last Word’ in the Blue Lamp Mysteries series. Britton refused because ‘it is obviously something more than just a thriller’.
Mr Pickwick
Britton may not have appreciated the work of the modernists but he enjoyed Charles Dickens a great deal. The half-title of the present article is a quotation from Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1836-37): Chapter VI of the novel takes place in the Wardle home at Dingley Dell, where Mr Pickwick plays whist, and where one of his opponents is ‘the unlucky Miller [who] felt as much out of his element as a dolphin in a sentry-box’. The phrase conjures up a surrealistic image that juxtaposes the artificial and regimented to the natural and the free, the violent to the peaceful, the grotesque to the graceful; it is an image of the outsider, and eerily sums up the world of Arthur Phelps of Hunger and Love. Equally, it sums up the world of Lionel Britton.
‘Mr Pickwick’ is the only play Britton wrote that was performed but not published. Its full title is ‘Mr Pickwick: In Search of Human Nature and the Strange Adventures that Befell Him Therein: An Original Play from the Pen of Charles Dickens through the Eyes of Lionel Britton’. It was performed at Rugby in 1945, although due to what appears to have been a cost-cutting exercise it was not, as originally scheduled, also performed at Huddersfield and Bristol.
In one of the archive boxes at SIU, a textually identical play is bound in a Kellogg’s Corn Flakes box, although there is a different subtitle: ‘[A]ttempts to capture Dickens’s original idea, which he lost as he went along’. It’s obvious that a dramatisation of The Pickwick Papers would vary in many ways from even the film version, but Britton’s treatment of the characters is nonetheless faithful to the characters, and to many events, in the novel. But the whole play takes place in the lounge of the Bull Inn.
The Pickwick Papers was in part a satire on the pretentious activities of historical societies, although this is lost in Britton’s version. What is important, from the beginning, is the working-class element, and Britton emphasises the role of Sam Weller in particular:
‘I feel that we have much to learn here, and perhaps more than we shall find in a further journey, and therefore I deemed it possible that the remarkable personality of the man in question and his services at this spot, would release my energies and afford me at the same time the stimulus of his curious reflections, in the pursuit of my investigations into the peculiarities of our fellow creatures.’
As may be expected, Britton – who used the expression ‘errand boy’ as a metaphor for a member of the working class – dwells on the seedier aspects of Weller’s history; Pickwick, who calls Weller a philosopher, is astonished by his accounts of his vagabond life, by his taking various precarious jobs and having to sleep in the filthy boarding houses of the ‘tuppenny rope’, or under Waterloo Bridge. Britton no doubt identified with Weller’s aphorism: ‘It’s bein’ poor where you sees life.’
To a lesser degree, Weller’s father is also a representative of working-class views:
‘[V]ot’s eddication for but to make the most o’ life, and not to be done no’ow by no sorts o’ blackguards, no matter how smart they thinks theirselves . Vy, ven you got that, you got eddication, and no puttin’ nothin’ arter your name nor no puttin’ nothin’ afore it, von’t take the place o’ that, sir.’
Pickwick replies: ‘I do really believe you are right.’
The blackguards Britton is thinking of, of course, are the bourgeoisie, and ‘Mr Pickwick’ makes considerable criticism of them. As in The Pickwick Papers, there are a number of occasions when the characters are allowed to voice their contempt for the legal profession: Sam is not allowed to kick anyone in the novel, although in the play he kicks the solicitor Dodson, who ‘scuttles out through the door like a scared cat’; in a general remark about lawyers, Old Weller remarks that ‘It’s a pint of honour vit ’em never to leave you nothing’. But it is perhaps Jingle who provides the best opportunity for Britton to extend his attacks to other institutions and also to indulge in the ‘headline abbreviation’ patterns of Hunger and Love; Jingle declares of Dr Slammer: ‘Poor fellow—disgraceful exhibition—mad doctors—regiments—shoot—mad—all mad!’
Several years after writing the play, Britton sent Robert Morley a copy of the script, and Morley claimed to have enjoyed the play immensely, but then realised that he couldn’t play Pickwick because he was a little fat man, whereas he was a big fat man. John Burrell of the Old Vic also rejected the play, claiming that Britton had taken ‘too many liberties’ with the novel.
O. H. M. S.
‘O. H. M. S.: or, How to Make God’ is an original play and marks a return to Britton’s experimental work. It was probably written in the 1940s or the 1950s and begins with a note which serves as a warning to any reader seeking the comfort of a traditional play: ‘If you are looking for the story it is very difficult, because it aint there’. The time is ‘Then, Now and Forever’, and the place ‘Here, There and Everywhere’. Britton continues:
‘The whole play is intended not so much to be immediately and clearly understood the first time it is seen, but as a kind of speaking music which will adjust man’s feelings towards himself and the universe, and which can be more and more understood the more deeply it is studied.’
The first scene is conventional enough, with a family scene set in the evening, and concerns a conflict between a conservative working-class father and his radical son who is studying at the local polytechnic. The son is a great believer in co-operation and believes that one day everyone will be working together for a just society, which he compares unfavourably to the past and the present, as represented by his father, whom he compares to an ape. At the end of the scene the mother partly reconciles the father to the fact that some social progress is being made in that their son, unlike his father, will never have to touch his cap to his bosses at work.
But this is the last we see of the family, and the characters in other sections also only make one appearance: the parts are only thematically related to one another. In the second section a British worker, and then a policeman, try to find some sense in a caveman; soon, they are replaced by a ‘Lit’ry Gent’ and a businessman with a fat cigar, the former arguing the merits of education for the masses, the latter saying that educating them too much will mean that they can ‘See through advertisements’.
In another section a sergeant is training his men when a child enters. The sergeant asks him what he wants, the child replies that he wants to grow up, and the sergeant explodes, ‘Well, you can’t grow up ’e r e ! Besides, you’ll ’ave your blasted career cut short, my bonny boy, with a bullet in the neck, if you come round ’ere tryin’ to bolshevise the soldiers, Now, just you tell me – oo the ’ell sent you?’ The brief speech is of course an attack on the armed forces cutting young men’s lives short, but it also shows the fear in the Establishment that left-wing views are infiltrating those forces.
Britton’s targets are virtually all institutions, and in the fifth section he finds a generic name for anyone he believes is standing in the way of progress – meaning in the way of the march towards anarchism and its twin goal of global co-operation as opposed to competition: they are Way-Closers, or W Cs for short. Britton couldn’t have predicted that wall-to-wall sport would replace the wall-to-wall religion of the 19th and early 20th centuries, although one W C’s remark suggests that Britton was aware of this opium of the people: ‘Sport is good. It uses up energy and nothing is achieved.’
Why She Would Not
Bernard Shaw’s last play, Why She Would Not, was written in the year that he died and was probably unfinished. Britton added a detailed ending to it, and for the rest of his life was obsessed with the refusal of the Society of Authors to allow the simultaneous publication of both Shaw’s piece and his own ending. He kept scrapbooks of newspaper cuttings about the Society, its financial details, and biographical details of the committee members.
Britton wrote to many literary figures protesting against the Society’s rejection of his work, and his grievances met with some sympathy, including that of Bertrand Russell, who remarked: ‘If the principle became established that nothing should be published unless it aroused admiration in a number of elderly big-wigs, the result would be a disastrous censorship’; Graham Greene told Britton that he had recently left the Society, but said that he could use his name as much as he liked in support of his campaign against it. Others, though, were less understanding. Britton was claiming that his aim was to restore Shaw’s good name because he had suffered negative criticism since his death: he believed that the ending would show the public what was in Shaw’s mind; unsurprisingly, T. S. Eliot failed to understand how another writer could show what was in Shaw’s mind, and Colin Wilson simply didn’t understand the point Britton was trying to make.
In 1964, Britton sent a two-hundred-and-eighty-five-paragraph dossier to the Director of Public Prosecutions alleging fraudulent activities on the part of the Society of Authors. Nothing was ever proved. Also in 1964, Britton formed a company – The Park Group Limited – with two Canadians using a bank in the Bahamas with the intention of publishing and producing his plays for stage and screen, of which the first was to be ‘the Shaw play’. However, nothing appears to have come to fruition from the Park Group, probably because Britton was insisting that ‘the Shaw play’ be published first, whereas the other directors (who were responsible for all of the company’s not inconsiderable expenses pending a refund from the ‘profits’) were worried about a possible court injunction. Three years later Britton established his own company – Promethean Publishers Ltd – which appears never to have published anything either.
The play concerns a young man who begins working for a company and swiftly works his way up to the top to become the chair, although he is going to spread the profits evenly between all employees: essentially, his vision is to create a co-operative utopia. But did Britton write a masterpiece as he perhaps thought, or was he was his labour simply a point of principle?
The bound typescript begins with a fifty-page ‘Testament’ in which Britton records his struggle with the Society of Authors; it continues with a forty-eight-page Preface in which he gets a little carried away:
‘There are forms of life which live in the boiling springs of New Zealand, while others, like the anaerobic bacteria, can do without air and indeed choke in it, and the lichen makes a living on bare rock; and the variety and beauty of colour and form is only equalled by the multiplicity and hideousness of shapes so horrible that if only they were big enough to see without aids to vision they would fill the world with gibbering idiots within a week.’
Britton’s play then follows, then Shaw’s few pages, concluding with a ninety-page epilogue entitled ‘Inside Shaw’s Head’.
The play itself only takes up about a quarter of the total manuscript. It transpires that what Britton thought Shaw was thinking was in fact what Britton was thinking, and ‘Why She Would Not’ is a kind of fusion of Hunger and Love and Brain. It is a perfectly respectable play, but no masterpiece: the preliminary pages are of much more interest than the play itself. But then perhaps the same can be said of Shaw’s Prefaces.
We Are the Animals: A Song and Thought Musical
This play is written in the very rough spidery scrawl which characterised Britton’s writing in the few years leading up to his death, so it is highly probable that this was written towards the end of the 1960s, if not slightly later.
Act I is set sometime in the future at Hyde Park Corner, where various animals are preparing for a rally. The new lower classes are invertebrates, who are frowned on by the enfranchised vertebrates: lions don’t want the education of performing fleas, and declare that democracy ‘allows everybody the right to rob everybody else, and share in the robbery, by giving them the vote to elect those who control the robbery’.
Act II is set in the House of Uncommons, where the Home Secretary (the President of the Vertebrates’ Association) states that he will not support the demands of the invertebrates. There is much singing before Worm enters and has an altercation with Lion.
Act IV is the last, when the Russian Bear, the American Eagle and the British Lion enter and express national clichés. On the entrance of Lion, Worm and Lobster, Eagle says that atom bombs are getting smaller and cheaper, that they will be smuggled into big nations in diplomatic bags, timed to go off at the same time, and that this will lead to small nations being allowed to do as they please. This prompts Worm, a representative of the lowest group of workers, to sing in triumph:
‘When the nations have their fun
And they’re done in one by one
We’ll be there.
When the whole wide world is empty,
And the whole wide world is bare
We’ll be there.
When you’ve blown yourselves to bits
We’ll be there.
We’ll be there,
We’ll be there.
When you’ve blown yourselves to bits,
We’ll be there.’
12 June 2009
A Second Lionel Britton Bust, Fredda Brilliant, Ben Gelman, and Makanda, Illinois
In August 2007, on a second visit to Carbondale, Illinois, I spent several weeks at Southern Illinois University (SIU) researching Lionel Britton's unpublished manuscripts at the Special Collections Research Center. Professor Herbert Marshall, who was a good friend of Lionel Britton's and who worked at the university for a number of years in the the twentieth century, had all of Britton's unpublished work shipped to SIU on Britton's death in 1971. Marshall was married to the sculptor Fredda Brilliant, who is best known for the Mahatma Gandhi statue that once stood in Tavistock Square, London, England, and who created two busts of Britton. Yesterday I received the book Fredda Brilliant: Biographies in Bronze (New York: Shapolsky, 1986), which Britton's great-nephew Robert Hughes had very kindly sent me. It contains a wealth of detail about Brilliant's bronze sculptures, with not only biographical information on the subjects, but also autobiographical information by Brilliant about the circumstances behind the sittings.
But another interest behind this post is the inscription on the title-page that Brilliant made to Ben Gelman in 1986. Gelman was a writer and ornithologist, I discovered through Googling, who used to live with his wife Virginia in Makanda, Illinois. This brought back vivid memories: towards the end of my stay in Carbondale, my partner Penny joined me and we spent some days just exploring the area, driving across the Mississippi and Ohio rivers into Missouri and Kentucky. But we didn't have far to go to reach Makanda, which is just seven miles from Carbondale, although I could have done without the zigzag hairpin bends I had to negociate to the bottom of the valley where this tiny hippie haven lies. There are just nine shops there, but we spent a few hours just pottering around and above all enjoyed visiting Dave Dardis's Secret Garden. When I woke up this morning, I remembered I hadn't mentioned Ben Gelman and Makanda to Penny. She fell into raptures and ferreted about in a drawer under the bed to shove two sealed bars of soap under my nose: 'Butt Naked' and 'Monkey Farts' from Smelly Hippie, Makanda. She'll never use them as she just finds the smell therapeutic, having a kind of Proustian effect that serves as a brief antidote to having to live in the blighted UK. With thanks to Mark Choate of the Special Collections Research Center, without whose suggestion I'd probably still be unaware of the place.
Some of the included sculptures are of: Mahatma Gandhi, Dr Rajendra Prasad, Pandit Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Vallabhbhai Patel, Morajii Desai, V. K. Krishna Menon, Dr Haru Krisna Mahtab, S. K. Patil, G. D. Birla, Dr Y. S. Parmar, The Maharaja of Baroda, Chief Justice Chagla, Sri Karmarkar, Anna Ornsholt, Mohammad Ali, President Kennedy, Professor R. Buckminster Fuller, Taras Shevchenko, Anton Chekhov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sergei Eisenstein, Andrey Voznesensky, Lionel Britton, Sir Maurice Bowra, Professor Herbert Marshall, Anton Slonimsky, Lord Elwyn Jones, Dr Delyte Morris, Dr Francis Warner, Bernard Ostrey, Sir Isaac Hayward, Max Meldrum, Nadia Nerina, Julian Carroll and Alban Barkley, Carl Albert, Meliyn Price, Terry Thomas, Willy Gallagher, Tom Mann, Kay Harrison, Francis Flaherty, Pera Attasheva, Professor hyman Levy, Duncan Grant, Galya Yevtushenko, Georgi Dimitrov, Joseph Wolfing, Pavel Morozov, and Sir John Rothenstein.
07 June 2009
Herbert Marshall and Fredda Brilliant
The photo above shows Fredda Brilliant in July 1947, in her dressing room at the Globe Theatre in London, where she was the leading lady to Michael Redgrave in Robert Ardrey's Thunder Rock, which was produced by her husband Herbert Marshall.
Fredda Brilliant's interpretation of Herbert Marshall. In Fredda Brilliant: Biographies in Bronze, Brilliant describes meeting her future husband on 5 February, 1935, and immediately inviting him to sit for her. She lived in a tiny room in the suburbs of Moscow, where she explains that she had only about three feet in which to move, and was frequently covered in bruises through hitting a pipe that stuck out from the central heating radiator. Marshall was a terrible subject as he was very restless, and Brilliant at times had to hold him down physically. She says: 'It was only his respect for my work that kept him coming to sit for me.' Of course it was.
The portrait was exhibited at the State Museum of Decorative Art, by the Lenin Library, and Brilliant says that it received recognition as one of the best three exhibits.
18 April 2009
Lionel Britton, by Fredda Brilliant
The long missing bust of Lionel Britton – sculpted by Fredda Brilliant – was sold via Live Auctioneers on 13 April 2009 for a remarkably cheap $350. The bust is signed and 16" tall.
16 February 2009
PhD Thesis in Literature (2006): The Work of Lionel Britton: Abstract
This thesis is the first long study of the forgotten novelist and playwright Lionel Britton, whose creative works were all published in the 1930s. Throughout, the emphasis is on his only published novel, the very long and experimental Hunger and Love (1931). The Lionel Britton Collection at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, U. S. A., along with many unpublished materials of Britton’s, holds former states of the novel, and I use a large amount of this material in my thesis; I suggest reasons why the content of the typescripts was gradually changed from the 1920s to 1930. Another vital issue is Britton’s status as a working-class author, and it is my contention that Hunger and Love is an important working-class novel, although it has been almost totally neglected by the critics recovering this sub-genre. My thesis also addresses modernism in working-class fiction, a subject which has all too often been ignored by the almost automatic foregrounding of realism, and is a strong feature of Hunger and Love. Following this, my thesis broadens out to cover political minorities represented as outsiders in literature, and deals with the unmarried woman, the homosexual and the non-white, comparing them with the working-class protagonist in Hunger and Love. The concluding chapter involves the utopias and dystopias of minority groups, with special reference to Britton’s Brain (1930) and Spacetime Inn (1932), which as plays are very unusual to the science fiction genre.
The Work of Lionel Britton: Table of Contents
Introduction A: The Plan of the Thesis
Introduction B: Lionel Britton — A Brief Biography
Chapter 1: Hunger and Love and the Critics
Chapter 2: What Lionel Britton Is Up To
Chapter 3: Lionel Britton’s Place in Working-Class Fiction
Chapter 4: Outsider Modernism
Chapter 5: Alienation and Escape
Chapter 6: Past and Future Perfect?
Conclusion
Bibliography
Appendix: Hunger and Love: The Chapter Titles and Numbers
Introduction B: Lionel Britton — A Brief Biography
Chapter 1: Hunger and Love and the Critics
Chapter 2: What Lionel Britton Is Up To
Chapter 3: Lionel Britton’s Place in Working-Class Fiction
Chapter 4: Outsider Modernism
Chapter 5: Alienation and Escape
Chapter 6: Past and Future Perfect?
Conclusion
Bibliography
Appendix: Hunger and Love: The Chapter Titles and Numbers
The Work of Lionel Britton: Introduction
A. The Plan of the Thesis
Over the previous thirty years there have been a number of attempts to recover from oblivion the literature written by the working classes, an area that has been largely submerged under the literature of the dominant classes; in general, this interest has concentrated on the inter-war years, a period when working-class literature was in considerable evidence. The recovery has placed some emphasis on works by authors other than the few well-known ones in the working-class ‘canon’ because a much larger body of working-class literature exists which had hitherto remained largely unknown.
However, a significant omission from this ambitious recovery project is the novelist and playwright Lionel Britton, who if mentioned at all has been so mainly as a footnote to a general critical work or even to reject his inclusion at all in this literature. One of the aims of this thesis is to draw attention to this omission, and to demonstrate that Britton deserves recognition for his contribution to working-class literature. My thesis also deals with the little-recognised phenomenon of modernist techniques in working-class literature, and more generally with Britton’s relation to the literature of alienation of the inter-war years from the viewpoint of certain groups of outsiders, and with his vision of an escape from this state of alienation. Throughout, my emphasis is on Britton’s seven-hundred-page Hunger and Love (1931), his only published novel: although he also published the plays Brain (1930), Spacetime Inn (1932) and Animal Ideas (1935), his central argument is contained in the novel, and his first two plays are illustrations evolving from this argument, or — in the case of Animal Ideas, about which I have very little to say in the thesis — a simpler re-statement of it (1). Also, I refer throughout the thesis to many manuscripts and obscure published articles, a number of which were written by Britton himself, which are held at the Lionel Britton Collection at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, an invaluable source which I exploit throughout this thesis (2).
I divide my Introduction into two sections because together with this plan, some biographical details about Lionel Britton are necessary as almost nothing has been published about his life, or at least the little that has been published is mainly hidden in newspapers or often obscure magazines from the 1930s. In the second part of my Introduction, as well as using information gathered from the LBC, I make use of material collected from such sources as the International Genealogical Index, census returns, trade directories, and birth, marriage and death certificates. I place some emphasis on the details of Britton’s family in the nineteenth century because in a number of ways these help to shed light on his later development, at the same time as they provide a backcloth to Hunger and Love: the novel has strong autobiographical elements. Other details of Britton’s later life also help to explain the reasons why he disappeared so quickly from public view.
In the first part of Chapter 1, ‘Lionel Britton and the Critics’, I give a short synopsis of the novel in order to make this and ensuing chapters more comprehensible, and in the second I examine the negative, mixed and positive critical reactions to Britton’s work, which largely consist of reviews of Hunger and Love in the early 1930s: as there has been virtually no critical work on Britton in recent years, most of the quoted material in this chapter is from newspapers and magazines from the first half of the 1930s; most of that material again comes from the LBC.
I make particular use of my findings at the LBC in Chapter 2, ‘What Lionel Britton Is Up To’: the title refers to one of the chapters in Hunger and Love concerning evolution, and my own chapter concerns the evolution of Britton’s book. Britton worked on his novel for several years, and an early typescript reveals the differences between this draft and the final copy, of which I give a number of examples. Of interest are the pencilled emendations Britton made to the typescript, because they reveal far more than the expected corrections of typographical errors or other inconsistencies: much more importantly, they facilitate an understanding of his artistic, aesthetic and political intentions. Also of interest to the development of Britton’s work is his attitude to censorship, and the problems it brought not only with publishers, but also the difficulties he experienced when wishing to stage his work; self-censorship is also relevant here.
In Chapter 3, ‘Lionel Britton’s Relation to Working-Class Fiction’, I begin by giving a brief overview of working-class fiction from the Chartist period to the end of the inter-war years, and then continue by assessing how much recent critical work has been written specifically on inter-war working-class literature, which is almost non-existent in the case of Britton. My main aim is to establish the relationship that Britton’s work has with working-class writers of the inter-war years; I analyse several working-class novels written by members of the working classes from the point of view of certain common preoccupations of this literature, continually drawing comparisons and contrasts between these novels and Hunger and Love. My chosen writers are all working-class authors with strong interests in the working classes as distinct from non-working class authors merely sympathetic to the working classes, and my chosen novels are mainly ones that have not previously received a great deal of critical attention.
I entitle Chapter 4 ‘Outsider Modernism’ because it is an expression which I find especially appropriate to what a number of working-class authors were attempting to say beyond the realist model: although realism is generally assumed to be the natural medium through which working-class authors express themselves, the true picture is a little more complicated than this. I begin by defining modernism and looking at its causes and manifestations, and then continue by examining the charges that it was elitist or bourgeois. I interpret ‘outsider modernism’ as a style of writing belonging to marginalized groups of writers, specifically the working classes in this chapter, and I explain the differences between this and mainstream modernism, analysing several passages of examples of outsider modernism in different writers, highlighting where appropriate their similarities to Britton’s novel. Finally, I briefly detail some of the realist techniques used in Hunger and Love, the recording of the minutiae of Arthur’s world, which I then contrast by giving several much more detailed examples of outsider modernist techniques in Hunger and Love, which probe the workings of Arthur’s mind. My main intention in this chapter is to establish that there is a continuation of modernist techniques in the working-class writing of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and which uses a different aesthetic from that of mainstream modernism. It links logically with the following chapter because outsider modernism is often an expression of alienation.
In my ‘Alienation and Escape’ chapter I again examine a number of texts and again draw analogies with a number of episodes in Hunger and Love. The difference is that in this chapter I am extending the analogy to incorporate authors not only from the working classes, but also from writers representing other dispossessed or disadvantaged groups of people. Alienation of some form affects all of these groups, and in order to shed more light on this, beginning with a definition of atheistic existentialism, I apply key atheistic existentialist concepts to several examples of the British literature of alienation during the inter-war period: existentialism, as I explain below, appears to have readier links to the general literature of alienation than any other philosophy. After analysing the books written by various authors, I then give several examples of alienation in Hunger and Love, all the time relating it to Sartrean existentialism. I conclude by stating that the novel is pointing towards an ideal society.
‘Past and Future Perfect’ is my final chapter. After defining the key terms ‘science fiction’ and ‘utopia’ and ‘dystopia’, in the early part of this chapter I address the specifically utopian and dystopian elements in Britton’s science fiction plays Brain and Spacetime Inn. I then briefly discuss the science fiction (a very unusual genre in working-class literature) in two of Grassic Gibbon’s novels and also Gibbon’s and Britton’s anarchism, followed by both authors’ preoccupation with the theme of nudity as an expression of freedom and truth, before broadening the chapter out to examine some utopias in writers from other minority groups, particularly (although not exclusively) in the genre of science fiction.
An Appendix illustrates the difference between the chapter titles in the different states of the novel.
B. Lionel Britton — A Brief Biography
As mentioned above, scarcely any biographical information about Lionel Britton is readily available, and since the mid-1930s his name has been almost forgotten. Information about Britton’s family background, though, is helpful to gain an impression of the formation of his ideas, particularly the importance of literature and foreign languages to him, and the reasons for his hatred of capitalism, religion, the law and institutions in general. The details of Britton’s life after the publication of his last imaginative work in 1935 are also an indication of why he disappeared from the public eye.
Lionel Erskine Nimmo Britton had far from humble beginnings. At his birth on 4 November 1887 his paternal grandfather, John James Britton, was a solicitor practising in the small Warwickshire market town of Alcester and his father, Richard Waddams Nimmo Britton, had very recently passed his intermediate examinations to be a solicitor and was now practising in the family business — Britton & Son — in the nearby village of Astwood Bank, where he lived with his family (3). Lionel’s maternal grandfather, Samuel Thomas, was for some time the representative in France of Samuel Thomas & Sons, manufacturers of needles and fish-hooks in Redditch; this business was founded by Samuel’s father — also named Samuel — who lived in a large house in front of his extensive British Needle Mills until his death in 1878 (4). It was one of the largest businesses in the town, with one hundred and twenty-two employees at the time of the 1871 census. By the 1881 census, Henry Thomas, a younger son of Samuel Thomas senior, appears to have taken over the greater part, if not all, of the family business. By this time Samuel Thomas junior had returned to England on a permanent basis, and he too was a needle manufacturer, employing just twelve people.
Lionel’s mother, Irza Vivian Geraldine, was born in 1866 and had met Richard at Kings Coughton, in a former farmhouse near Alcester where Richard lived with his father and the rest of the family; Irza was a fifteen-year-old poetry enthusiast who had initially gone to the house to visit John James Britton, a ‘real live poet’ who had earned a minor reputation locally, and who later published a novel (5). Irza and Richard married in 1885 and moved to Astwood Bank, where Ivy was born the following year and Lionel the year after (6). There is only one listing of Britton & Son at Astwood Bank in Kelly’s Directories for that period: early in 1888, the company went into bankruptcy (7).
Never fully qualified as a solicitor, Richard — who had previously worked as a teaching assistant and was given to writing philosophical musings by no means entirely different from those of his mature son Lionel — probably did not enjoy the legal profession. On his bankruptcy, he initially tried to find work again as a teaching assistant in England, although the family very soon moved to Paris, where Richard had found work as a managing clerk in a legal firm, and where Lionel’s brother Percy was born (8). France and the French language run throughout the Britton and the Thomas families: Samuel Thomas junior had spent a number of years in France, where at least six of his children, including Lionel’s mother, were born; both of Samuel’s wives were French, and both of Lionel’s parents spoke the language fluently. This strong French connection must to some extent explain Lionel’s fluency in the language, and is no doubt also indicative of the facility with which he later learned so many others: his friend Herbert Marshall claimed that Britton was fluent in over twenty different languages (9).
However, Richard’s employment in France lasted only a short time, and the Brittons then moved to the Bournemouth area, where Richard again worked unsuccessfully as a solicitor, and where the family income was supplemented by Irza working as a boarding house keeper. A fourth child, Cyril, was born in 1891, and by the end of the following year the couple had significant debts. In 1894, when Lionel was seven, Richard died of tuberculosis (10). Irza, who already had at least one suitor, remained in the area and married a gunner in the Royal Navy in 1897, although no other details of this marriage appear to have survived, and she was later to change her name back to Britton (11).
Lionel, Ivy, Percy and Cyril all moved to Redditch to live with their maternal grandparents, where their grandfather was then a traveller in a fishing tackle business. According to Lionel’s own account, he excelled at school and soon learned all that they could teach him. It seems evident that he showed some of the rebelliousness that would later be a notable feature of his character: he already hated religious instruction, and was excused music lessons because he thought them ‘silly’ (12). By 1901 Ivy was still at school at the age of nearly fifteen, but her younger brother Lionel was almost certainly in London by this time. His grandparents had presumably not wanted, or perhaps had not had the means for, him to continue his education. For a brief period he lodged elsewhere in Redditch, later informing the Daily News and Westminster Gazette that his first job was ‘sandpapering fishing rods’ (13). After running away and spending a few days as an office boy in Birmingham, Britton moved to London, and from this point his work life and intellectual life become very similar to that of Arthur Phelps in Hunger and Love.
In London, Britton found work as an errand boy at a grocer’s in Theobald’s Road, although he was dismissed from there for reasons unknown. He next found more errand work with an educational bookseller, the University Book Co. on Southampton Row, which according to Britton was the main catalyst to his intellectual curiosity, where he secretly read all he could in the firm’s time, which was also when he discovered ‘the penny-dump on the book-barrows on Farringdon Road’, ‘a mine of mind for empty pockets’ (14). Britton worked at the shop for about six years, when he voluntarily left to work as a shop assistant for bookseller A. H. Mayhew (on whom Sarner in Hunger and Love is probably based) in Charing Cross Road for nearly two years; Mayhew found him ‘honest and industrious’ and ‘parted with him with regret’ (15).
Britton appears not to have mentioned World War I in newspaper or magazine articles or surviving letters, although the vicious propaganda machine in the novel, where the narrator tells of Phelps being urged by almost everyone around him into joining the war, seems to be comment enough on Britton’s experience of it: in an obituary, Raymond Douglas reveals that Britton was attacked by a patriotic mob for not enlisting, and was imprisoned as a conscientious objector for about eighteen months (16).
As early as 1917, Britton started to learn Russian and applied for Russian citizenship, although his application was disallowed by the Soviet ambassador. Then in the early 1920s he found a more remunerative post with the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers, where he worked for about six years, latterly as Assistant General Secretary. In his letter of reference in 1929, the General Secretary describes Britton as ‘an independent thinker, cautious and meditative, yet courageous in the expression of his opinions’, and who was also ‘a gifted linguist [whose] translation of the lesser European languages has frequently been of value to us’ (17).
For several years before this Britton had been working on his huge novel Hunger and Love, although he had disagreed with publishers because he refused to allow any cuts to be made to the content. It is a measure of his self-confidence and his powers of persuasion that he secured Bertrand Russell’s five-page Introduction to the novel, and that Constant Huntington of Putnam not only did not insist that he make cuts, but also allowed him to write the final amendments to it more or less as he wished.
The influence of the cinema on Britton’s writing is briefly mentioned in a chapter below, as film was of great interest to him: he was chairman of the experimental London Film Guild in the late 1920s, which had its studio in the same building as Foyle’s bookshop on Charing Cross Road. This voluntary organization was largely unsuccessful, only producing a small number of mainly critically unsuccessful shorts; Britton never directed a film, although he was responsible for some montage work (18). The secretary of the Guild was Herbert Marshall, who later moved to Russia for a number of years as a student of Eisenstein’s.
By the time Britton left his advertising job in favour of writing, his mother Irza was living with him in a flat in Marylebone, in Saville Street, which was later incorporated into Hanson Street. And by the late 1920s Britton had also met Sinead Acheson, a woman in the legal profession who was to be his devoted friend for the rest of his life, and with whom he appears to have lived intermittently during the 1930s and 1940s.
Britton also had a strong interest in the theatre over many years and frequently attended performances; when he was a teenager, he had been a supernumerary at Her Majesty’s Theatre under Sir Herbert Tree, and wrote his first play — ‘Fang; or, the Reluctant Employee’ — during this period (19). Before Hunger and Love was finally published, Britton had also written at least a first draft of his three published plays, and it is an indication of his strong powers of persuasion that the play would possibly not have been published without the assistance of Bernard Shaw, into whose hands he contrived to thrust a copy; Shaw passed it on to Sir Barry Jackson, which the press reported with great enthusiasm. Brain was published in May 1930, very shortly after its first and only performance, which was by the Masses Stage and Film Guild at the Savoy Theatre. Brain ensured that Britton was already relatively well known when Hunger and Love was published the following February, and after this his short-lived fame began in earnest and he was in great demand for a few brief years. He was asked to give a number of talks, to open theatres, he became the drama critic for the New Clarion, and established Left Theatre with André van Gyseghem and several others. There were many articles about him in newspapers and magazines, and a great deal of attention was also given to his second play, Spacetime Inn, for example: the blurb on the dust jacket speaks of ‘the play which was read at the House of Commons — the only occasion in the history of any Parliament that such a thing has ever happened’ (20). Britton’s M. P. friend John Smith Clarke had made the occasion possible, but both the blurb and the headlines are slightly misleading: although Britton himself certainly read his play before a group of M. P.s, the session was only held in a House of Commons committee room (21). Critically, the play was better received than Brain, although it was performed for four nights only at the Arts Theatre in London, and once by the Hostel Players in Hoddeson the following year. (For this second performance, the play also attracted a great deal of publicity — much of it pictorial — because Bernard Shaw gave one of his old Norfolk jackets to his namesake in the play.)
There were many caricatures of Britton in the newspapers and magazines of the day because he was quite an unusual figure for the time. Shaw had called him a ‘wild young man’ and Arnold Bennett had thought that he looked as though he had just come from the French Riviera: he had a shock of wiry hair which stood up almost perpendicular to his head and which he rather amateurishly cut himself, and he always wore an open-neck shirt, usually with light trousers or shorts and plimsolls; he was teetotal and did not smoke.
Britton had been anticipating a visit to Russia for some years, and as the initial excitement of his success eased off considerably, he went there in July 1935 at the expense of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers. Five years previously, the working-class writer Harold Heslop had stayed there for the same amount of time as Britton: three months (22). The two writers’ impressions of the country have many similarities — Heslop was shocked by the poverty he saw, by his guide’s ignorance of Russian culture, and bewildered by the consternation which his desire to see Zamyatin caused; after attending a show trial, he called himself ‘a stranger in a world beyond my own belief’ (23). Britton’s frequent letters to Acheson express his disgust with the country. He was also alarmed by the poverty, exasperated by the queues and what he saw as the ignorance of the Russian people, as well as the fact that they would not answer his probing questions or allow him to explore his surroundings unescorted; above all, perhaps, he thought that his belief in co-operation as opposed to competition was not being practised in Russia: he believed that food and other shortages were caused by the government channelling money into the defence budget. What he saw forced him to see the United Kingdom as more socialist than Russia; he still thought that Russian communism would eventually succeed in its goals, but thought that the gradualism of the British Labour Party was better suited to the country’s progress than the Communist Party of Great Britain (24). He returned by boat in October; Irza had become used to having more space, and most of Britton’s belongings had been moved to Acheson’s house.
Britton had awoken from his utopian dream to find a nightmare both in Russia and, more personally, at home. Putnam, having made only a modest profit from Hunger and Love (less than £100 after 10,000 sales and an expensive promotion campaign) and losses with Brain and Spacetime Inn, had already refused to give more than a perfunctory promotion to Animal Ideas. Britton had delayed his visit to Russia because the play was due to be published in the United Kingdom, but it proved to be a disaster: it was never performed (except by Britton himself at various readings), sales were very low, and it was largely ignored critically. In a revealing fourteen-page letter to Herbert Marshall, he called his experience ‘the snuff-out’: he was facing ruin as a writer and had little money left (25).
Britton escaped from London to take part in a socialist project at ‘Netherwood’ in Hastings, which was perhaps chosen because of its connection with the working-class writer Robert Tressell. In the second half of the 1930s, Netherwood was a large run-down property which had been bought by the actor and playwright E. C. Vernon Symonds to convert into a left-wing guest house that was intended as a haven for socialist meetings and trade union conferences among other things. Britton received free board and lodging there in return for manual work — mainly gardening and reconstructing the swimming pool — and was eking out the remainder of his advance for the Russian edition of Hunger and Love, although he hated almost everything about Netherwood.
During his stay in Hastings Britton was writing the play ‘Du Barry’, although it was never published and never performed. He later wrote several more plays and a novel, philosophical works, and dramatized several novels, such as The Pickwick Papers, Barchester Towers, Gwyn Jones’s Times Like These and three works by J. Jefferson Farjeon. But apart from a performance of ‘Mr Pickwick’ at Rugby and two translations of rather obscure Russian writers in the 1940s, Britton’s career in the theatre and in print was at an end (26).
Consequently, although he remained a committed writer, Britton was by economic necessity forced to find other means of survival, which led to an itinerant lifestyle. He taught from time to time, gave play readings throughout the country, and synchronized English dialogue to Russian films. And there was also another source of income: Acheson had bought a second-hand boat — known as ‘Spacetime Inn’, or simply ‘Spacetime’ — which she kept on the Thames and followed Irza’s suggestion to rent it out, with Britton collecting the proceeds from customers. He lived on the boat, in boathouses, or simply by the riverside, from about 1937 to 1944, although not continuously. And towards the end of the 1940s he was living with his mother again, now at Park House, a leasehold property at 66 Tufnell Park Road. In a draft application for a grant from the Civil List fund in 1951, he gave his income as ‘Between £70 and £80 per annum’ (27).
In 1954 Britton suffered multiple injuries in a car accident from which he was very fortunate to survive; however, he received an undisclosed sum in compensation, with which he hoped to publish his work and ‘be independent of publishers’ readers’ (28). Britton was developing an obsession: he had amplified Bernard Shaw’s (possibly unfinished) play Why She Would Not, and for the rest of his life was concerned with the Society of Authors’s refusal to allow the simultaneous publication of both Shaw’s fragment and Britton’s ending. He kept scrapbooks of newspaper cuttings about the society along with its financial details, and biographical details of the committee members. And he was directly or indirectly supported by several prominent writers in opposition to the society’s exclusivity, including Bertrand Russell, who remarked of the society’s attitude to Britton’s writing: ‘If the principle became established that nothing should be published unless it aroused admiration in a number of elderly big-wigs, the result would be a disastrous censorship’ (29). These were encouraging words, although they can only have fed the obsession: in 1964, Britton sent a two-hundred-and-eighty-five-paragraph dossier to the Director of Public Prosecutions alleging fraudulent activities on the part of the Society of Authors. Nothing was ever proved (30).
Also in 1964, Britton formed a company — The Park Group Limited — with two Canadians using a bank in the Bahamas with the intention of publishing and producing his plays for stage and screen, of which the first was to be ‘the Shaw play’ (31). However, nothing appears to have come to fruition from the Park Group, probably because Britton was insisting that ‘the Shaw play’ be published first, whereas the other directors (who were responsible for all of the company’s not inconsiderable expenses pending a refund from the ‘profits’) were worried about a possible court injunction (32). Three years later Britton established his own company — Promethean Publishers Ltd — which appears never to have published anything either.
Britton spent his last years as a virtual recluse in Margate. In 1969 he wrote a letter to Bertrand Russell from his new home, in which he states that he has had a nervous breakdown, and has lost his house in Tufnell Park along with all of his money; the reasons for this are not mentioned (33). But Britton was still trying to sue the Society of Authors as late as June 1970, six months before his death at the local hospital following a heart attack (34). There were few obituaries, and even those commented on his obscurity.
Herbert Marshall, who was by that time Professor and Director of Soviet and East European Studies (Performing Arts) at Southern Illinois University, had all of Britton’s literary effects transported to the university, where they remain today (35). But the copyright of all of Britton’s work, revealed in Britton’s will, went to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, the World Wildlife Fund (UK), and — inexplicably, as he had no apparent connections there — the vicars and churchwardens of Polstead in Suffolk.
1. Lionel Britton, Hunger and Love (London: Putnam, 1931); Lionel Britton, Brain: A Play of the Whole Earth (London: Putnam, 1930); Lionel Britton, Spacetime Inn: A Play (London: Putnam, 1932); Lionel Britton, Animal Ideas: A Dramatic Symphony of the Human in the Universe (London: Putnam, 1935).
2. Hereafter all references to this collection are abbreviated to ‘LBC’.
3. Birth certificate, Lionel Britton, Feckenham, registration district of Bromsgrove, Worcestershire and Warwickshire, 4 November 1887; ‘The Law Society’, Times, 24 November 1883, p. 12.
4. Death certificate, Samuel Thomas, registration district of Tardebigg, Worcestershire, 6 September 1878.
5. Irza Britton, letter to Richard Britton, [n. d.], LBC, Box 2, Folder 29; John James Britton, Carrélla: Lyrics, Lays, and Sympathies (London: Bennett, 1867); John James Britton, The Lay of the Lady Ida: And Other Poems (London: Remington, 1883); John James Britton, Flight (London: Trischler, 1890).
6. Marriage certificate, Richard Waddams Nimmo Britton and Irza Vivian Geraldine Thomas, Birmingham Register Office, registration district Birmingham, Warwickshire, 17 August 1885.
7. G. Edward Saville, King’s Coughton: A Warwickshire Hamlet (King’s Coughton: The author, 1973).
8. Thomas Perkins, letter of reference, 13 February 1888, LBC, Box 6, Folder 1; John Mourilyan, letter of reference, 15 March 1890, LBC, Box 6, Folder 1.
9. Anonymous, ‘Forgotten Genius Ends his Days at Margate’, Isle of Thanet Gazette, 29 January 1971, [n. pg.].
10. Death certificate, Richard Waddams Nimmo Britton, registration district of Christchurch, Southamptonshire, 1 December 1894.
11. Marriage certificate, Francis le Breton and Irza Vivien Geraldine Britton, Portsmouth Register Office, registration district of Portsmouth, Portsmouthshire, 13 October 1897.
12. Lionel Britton, ‘Lionel Britton’, typescript, [n. d.], p. [1], LBC, Box 6, Folder 1.
13. Anonymous, ‘Young Playwright’s Romance: Work in Factory at Age of 13; Fame at 30: Mr. Shaw’s “Find”’, Daily News and Westminster Gazette, 18 March 1930, [no page], LBC, Box 12, Folder 11. (Hereafter, all references to unknown page numbers are referred to as ‘n. pg’.)
14. Lionel Britton, ‘Lionel Britton’, unpublished handwritten notes, [c. 1960s], p. 3, LBC, Box 1, Folder 1.
15. A. H. Mayhew, letter of reference to Irza Britton about Lionel Britton, 18 November 1918, LBC, Box 2, Folder 2.
16. Raymond Douglas, ‘Lionel Britton’, Humanist, May 1971, pp. 151–52.
17. Alfred H. Angus, letter of reference about Lionel Britton, 4 September 1929, LBC, Box 2, Folder 2.
18. The Film Guild of London, newsletter, [n. d.], LBC, Box 6, ‘other programs, newsletters’.
19. Animal Ideas, rear flap; Rebecca Gorski, ‘Biographical Sketch’, LBC.
20. Spacetime Inn, front flap.
21. Hannen Swaffer, ‘Play to Be Read in Commons: Whole Action in Flash: Only Clever M. P.s Will Know What It’s about!’, [Daily Express], [c. 1932], [n. pg.], LBC, Box 12, Folder 10.
22. Harold Heslop, Out of the Old Earth (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1994).
23. Out of the Old Earth, p. 242.
24. In spite of this conclusion, Britton had little interest in party politics, and it is evident from Hunger and Love that a form of anarchism is being advocated; it is no coincidence that anarchist sympathiser Bertrand Russell wrote a five-page Introduction to the novel, or that anarchist periodicals such as Freedom (quoted in Chapter 1) welcomed Britton’s work. I comment on Britton’s and Grassic Gibbon’s anarchism in Chapter 6.
25. Lionel Britton, letter to Herbert Marshall, 20 May 1936, p. [7], LBC, Box 2, Folder 13.
26. V[assili Grigor’evich] Yan[chevetsky], Jenghiz–Khan: A Tale of 13th Century Asia, trans. by Lionel Erskine Britton (London: Hutchinson International Authors, [1945]); N. Teleshov, A Writer Remembers: Reminiscences, trans. by Lionel Erskine Britton (London: Hutchinson, [1946]).
27. Lionel Britton, draft application for Civil List grant, 4 January 1951, LBC, Box 13, Folder 13.
28. Lionel Britton, letter to Bertrand Russell, 28 November 1955, in the possession of Harry Berberian (hereafter ‘HB’).
29. Bertrand Russell, letter to Lionel Britton, 20 March 1956, HB.
30. Attorney General [name illegible], letter to John Parker, House of Commons, 1 June 1970, LBC, Box 2, Folder 23.
31. Cecil Thomas, letter to Lionel Britton, 4 December 1964, LBC, Box 2, Folder 21.
32. Cecil Thomas, letter to Lionel Britton, 3 September 1964, LBC, Box 2, Folder 21.
33. Lionel Britton, letter to Bertrand Russell, 10 June 1969, HB.
34. Death certificate, Lionel Britton, Ramsgate, registration district of Thanet, Kent, 9 January 1971.
35. ‘Forgotten Genius Ends his Days at Margate’.
Over the previous thirty years there have been a number of attempts to recover from oblivion the literature written by the working classes, an area that has been largely submerged under the literature of the dominant classes; in general, this interest has concentrated on the inter-war years, a period when working-class literature was in considerable evidence. The recovery has placed some emphasis on works by authors other than the few well-known ones in the working-class ‘canon’ because a much larger body of working-class literature exists which had hitherto remained largely unknown.
However, a significant omission from this ambitious recovery project is the novelist and playwright Lionel Britton, who if mentioned at all has been so mainly as a footnote to a general critical work or even to reject his inclusion at all in this literature. One of the aims of this thesis is to draw attention to this omission, and to demonstrate that Britton deserves recognition for his contribution to working-class literature. My thesis also deals with the little-recognised phenomenon of modernist techniques in working-class literature, and more generally with Britton’s relation to the literature of alienation of the inter-war years from the viewpoint of certain groups of outsiders, and with his vision of an escape from this state of alienation. Throughout, my emphasis is on Britton’s seven-hundred-page Hunger and Love (1931), his only published novel: although he also published the plays Brain (1930), Spacetime Inn (1932) and Animal Ideas (1935), his central argument is contained in the novel, and his first two plays are illustrations evolving from this argument, or — in the case of Animal Ideas, about which I have very little to say in the thesis — a simpler re-statement of it (1). Also, I refer throughout the thesis to many manuscripts and obscure published articles, a number of which were written by Britton himself, which are held at the Lionel Britton Collection at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, an invaluable source which I exploit throughout this thesis (2).
I divide my Introduction into two sections because together with this plan, some biographical details about Lionel Britton are necessary as almost nothing has been published about his life, or at least the little that has been published is mainly hidden in newspapers or often obscure magazines from the 1930s. In the second part of my Introduction, as well as using information gathered from the LBC, I make use of material collected from such sources as the International Genealogical Index, census returns, trade directories, and birth, marriage and death certificates. I place some emphasis on the details of Britton’s family in the nineteenth century because in a number of ways these help to shed light on his later development, at the same time as they provide a backcloth to Hunger and Love: the novel has strong autobiographical elements. Other details of Britton’s later life also help to explain the reasons why he disappeared so quickly from public view.
In the first part of Chapter 1, ‘Lionel Britton and the Critics’, I give a short synopsis of the novel in order to make this and ensuing chapters more comprehensible, and in the second I examine the negative, mixed and positive critical reactions to Britton’s work, which largely consist of reviews of Hunger and Love in the early 1930s: as there has been virtually no critical work on Britton in recent years, most of the quoted material in this chapter is from newspapers and magazines from the first half of the 1930s; most of that material again comes from the LBC.
I make particular use of my findings at the LBC in Chapter 2, ‘What Lionel Britton Is Up To’: the title refers to one of the chapters in Hunger and Love concerning evolution, and my own chapter concerns the evolution of Britton’s book. Britton worked on his novel for several years, and an early typescript reveals the differences between this draft and the final copy, of which I give a number of examples. Of interest are the pencilled emendations Britton made to the typescript, because they reveal far more than the expected corrections of typographical errors or other inconsistencies: much more importantly, they facilitate an understanding of his artistic, aesthetic and political intentions. Also of interest to the development of Britton’s work is his attitude to censorship, and the problems it brought not only with publishers, but also the difficulties he experienced when wishing to stage his work; self-censorship is also relevant here.
In Chapter 3, ‘Lionel Britton’s Relation to Working-Class Fiction’, I begin by giving a brief overview of working-class fiction from the Chartist period to the end of the inter-war years, and then continue by assessing how much recent critical work has been written specifically on inter-war working-class literature, which is almost non-existent in the case of Britton. My main aim is to establish the relationship that Britton’s work has with working-class writers of the inter-war years; I analyse several working-class novels written by members of the working classes from the point of view of certain common preoccupations of this literature, continually drawing comparisons and contrasts between these novels and Hunger and Love. My chosen writers are all working-class authors with strong interests in the working classes as distinct from non-working class authors merely sympathetic to the working classes, and my chosen novels are mainly ones that have not previously received a great deal of critical attention.
I entitle Chapter 4 ‘Outsider Modernism’ because it is an expression which I find especially appropriate to what a number of working-class authors were attempting to say beyond the realist model: although realism is generally assumed to be the natural medium through which working-class authors express themselves, the true picture is a little more complicated than this. I begin by defining modernism and looking at its causes and manifestations, and then continue by examining the charges that it was elitist or bourgeois. I interpret ‘outsider modernism’ as a style of writing belonging to marginalized groups of writers, specifically the working classes in this chapter, and I explain the differences between this and mainstream modernism, analysing several passages of examples of outsider modernism in different writers, highlighting where appropriate their similarities to Britton’s novel. Finally, I briefly detail some of the realist techniques used in Hunger and Love, the recording of the minutiae of Arthur’s world, which I then contrast by giving several much more detailed examples of outsider modernist techniques in Hunger and Love, which probe the workings of Arthur’s mind. My main intention in this chapter is to establish that there is a continuation of modernist techniques in the working-class writing of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and which uses a different aesthetic from that of mainstream modernism. It links logically with the following chapter because outsider modernism is often an expression of alienation.
In my ‘Alienation and Escape’ chapter I again examine a number of texts and again draw analogies with a number of episodes in Hunger and Love. The difference is that in this chapter I am extending the analogy to incorporate authors not only from the working classes, but also from writers representing other dispossessed or disadvantaged groups of people. Alienation of some form affects all of these groups, and in order to shed more light on this, beginning with a definition of atheistic existentialism, I apply key atheistic existentialist concepts to several examples of the British literature of alienation during the inter-war period: existentialism, as I explain below, appears to have readier links to the general literature of alienation than any other philosophy. After analysing the books written by various authors, I then give several examples of alienation in Hunger and Love, all the time relating it to Sartrean existentialism. I conclude by stating that the novel is pointing towards an ideal society.
‘Past and Future Perfect’ is my final chapter. After defining the key terms ‘science fiction’ and ‘utopia’ and ‘dystopia’, in the early part of this chapter I address the specifically utopian and dystopian elements in Britton’s science fiction plays Brain and Spacetime Inn. I then briefly discuss the science fiction (a very unusual genre in working-class literature) in two of Grassic Gibbon’s novels and also Gibbon’s and Britton’s anarchism, followed by both authors’ preoccupation with the theme of nudity as an expression of freedom and truth, before broadening the chapter out to examine some utopias in writers from other minority groups, particularly (although not exclusively) in the genre of science fiction.
An Appendix illustrates the difference between the chapter titles in the different states of the novel.
B. Lionel Britton — A Brief Biography
As mentioned above, scarcely any biographical information about Lionel Britton is readily available, and since the mid-1930s his name has been almost forgotten. Information about Britton’s family background, though, is helpful to gain an impression of the formation of his ideas, particularly the importance of literature and foreign languages to him, and the reasons for his hatred of capitalism, religion, the law and institutions in general. The details of Britton’s life after the publication of his last imaginative work in 1935 are also an indication of why he disappeared from the public eye.
Lionel Erskine Nimmo Britton had far from humble beginnings. At his birth on 4 November 1887 his paternal grandfather, John James Britton, was a solicitor practising in the small Warwickshire market town of Alcester and his father, Richard Waddams Nimmo Britton, had very recently passed his intermediate examinations to be a solicitor and was now practising in the family business — Britton & Son — in the nearby village of Astwood Bank, where he lived with his family (3). Lionel’s maternal grandfather, Samuel Thomas, was for some time the representative in France of Samuel Thomas & Sons, manufacturers of needles and fish-hooks in Redditch; this business was founded by Samuel’s father — also named Samuel — who lived in a large house in front of his extensive British Needle Mills until his death in 1878 (4). It was one of the largest businesses in the town, with one hundred and twenty-two employees at the time of the 1871 census. By the 1881 census, Henry Thomas, a younger son of Samuel Thomas senior, appears to have taken over the greater part, if not all, of the family business. By this time Samuel Thomas junior had returned to England on a permanent basis, and he too was a needle manufacturer, employing just twelve people.
Lionel’s mother, Irza Vivian Geraldine, was born in 1866 and had met Richard at Kings Coughton, in a former farmhouse near Alcester where Richard lived with his father and the rest of the family; Irza was a fifteen-year-old poetry enthusiast who had initially gone to the house to visit John James Britton, a ‘real live poet’ who had earned a minor reputation locally, and who later published a novel (5). Irza and Richard married in 1885 and moved to Astwood Bank, where Ivy was born the following year and Lionel the year after (6). There is only one listing of Britton & Son at Astwood Bank in Kelly’s Directories for that period: early in 1888, the company went into bankruptcy (7).
Never fully qualified as a solicitor, Richard — who had previously worked as a teaching assistant and was given to writing philosophical musings by no means entirely different from those of his mature son Lionel — probably did not enjoy the legal profession. On his bankruptcy, he initially tried to find work again as a teaching assistant in England, although the family very soon moved to Paris, where Richard had found work as a managing clerk in a legal firm, and where Lionel’s brother Percy was born (8). France and the French language run throughout the Britton and the Thomas families: Samuel Thomas junior had spent a number of years in France, where at least six of his children, including Lionel’s mother, were born; both of Samuel’s wives were French, and both of Lionel’s parents spoke the language fluently. This strong French connection must to some extent explain Lionel’s fluency in the language, and is no doubt also indicative of the facility with which he later learned so many others: his friend Herbert Marshall claimed that Britton was fluent in over twenty different languages (9).
However, Richard’s employment in France lasted only a short time, and the Brittons then moved to the Bournemouth area, where Richard again worked unsuccessfully as a solicitor, and where the family income was supplemented by Irza working as a boarding house keeper. A fourth child, Cyril, was born in 1891, and by the end of the following year the couple had significant debts. In 1894, when Lionel was seven, Richard died of tuberculosis (10). Irza, who already had at least one suitor, remained in the area and married a gunner in the Royal Navy in 1897, although no other details of this marriage appear to have survived, and she was later to change her name back to Britton (11).
Lionel, Ivy, Percy and Cyril all moved to Redditch to live with their maternal grandparents, where their grandfather was then a traveller in a fishing tackle business. According to Lionel’s own account, he excelled at school and soon learned all that they could teach him. It seems evident that he showed some of the rebelliousness that would later be a notable feature of his character: he already hated religious instruction, and was excused music lessons because he thought them ‘silly’ (12). By 1901 Ivy was still at school at the age of nearly fifteen, but her younger brother Lionel was almost certainly in London by this time. His grandparents had presumably not wanted, or perhaps had not had the means for, him to continue his education. For a brief period he lodged elsewhere in Redditch, later informing the Daily News and Westminster Gazette that his first job was ‘sandpapering fishing rods’ (13). After running away and spending a few days as an office boy in Birmingham, Britton moved to London, and from this point his work life and intellectual life become very similar to that of Arthur Phelps in Hunger and Love.
In London, Britton found work as an errand boy at a grocer’s in Theobald’s Road, although he was dismissed from there for reasons unknown. He next found more errand work with an educational bookseller, the University Book Co. on Southampton Row, which according to Britton was the main catalyst to his intellectual curiosity, where he secretly read all he could in the firm’s time, which was also when he discovered ‘the penny-dump on the book-barrows on Farringdon Road’, ‘a mine of mind for empty pockets’ (14). Britton worked at the shop for about six years, when he voluntarily left to work as a shop assistant for bookseller A. H. Mayhew (on whom Sarner in Hunger and Love is probably based) in Charing Cross Road for nearly two years; Mayhew found him ‘honest and industrious’ and ‘parted with him with regret’ (15).
Britton appears not to have mentioned World War I in newspaper or magazine articles or surviving letters, although the vicious propaganda machine in the novel, where the narrator tells of Phelps being urged by almost everyone around him into joining the war, seems to be comment enough on Britton’s experience of it: in an obituary, Raymond Douglas reveals that Britton was attacked by a patriotic mob for not enlisting, and was imprisoned as a conscientious objector for about eighteen months (16).
As early as 1917, Britton started to learn Russian and applied for Russian citizenship, although his application was disallowed by the Soviet ambassador. Then in the early 1920s he found a more remunerative post with the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers, where he worked for about six years, latterly as Assistant General Secretary. In his letter of reference in 1929, the General Secretary describes Britton as ‘an independent thinker, cautious and meditative, yet courageous in the expression of his opinions’, and who was also ‘a gifted linguist [whose] translation of the lesser European languages has frequently been of value to us’ (17).
For several years before this Britton had been working on his huge novel Hunger and Love, although he had disagreed with publishers because he refused to allow any cuts to be made to the content. It is a measure of his self-confidence and his powers of persuasion that he secured Bertrand Russell’s five-page Introduction to the novel, and that Constant Huntington of Putnam not only did not insist that he make cuts, but also allowed him to write the final amendments to it more or less as he wished.
The influence of the cinema on Britton’s writing is briefly mentioned in a chapter below, as film was of great interest to him: he was chairman of the experimental London Film Guild in the late 1920s, which had its studio in the same building as Foyle’s bookshop on Charing Cross Road. This voluntary organization was largely unsuccessful, only producing a small number of mainly critically unsuccessful shorts; Britton never directed a film, although he was responsible for some montage work (18). The secretary of the Guild was Herbert Marshall, who later moved to Russia for a number of years as a student of Eisenstein’s.
By the time Britton left his advertising job in favour of writing, his mother Irza was living with him in a flat in Marylebone, in Saville Street, which was later incorporated into Hanson Street. And by the late 1920s Britton had also met Sinead Acheson, a woman in the legal profession who was to be his devoted friend for the rest of his life, and with whom he appears to have lived intermittently during the 1930s and 1940s.
Britton also had a strong interest in the theatre over many years and frequently attended performances; when he was a teenager, he had been a supernumerary at Her Majesty’s Theatre under Sir Herbert Tree, and wrote his first play — ‘Fang; or, the Reluctant Employee’ — during this period (19). Before Hunger and Love was finally published, Britton had also written at least a first draft of his three published plays, and it is an indication of his strong powers of persuasion that the play would possibly not have been published without the assistance of Bernard Shaw, into whose hands he contrived to thrust a copy; Shaw passed it on to Sir Barry Jackson, which the press reported with great enthusiasm. Brain was published in May 1930, very shortly after its first and only performance, which was by the Masses Stage and Film Guild at the Savoy Theatre. Brain ensured that Britton was already relatively well known when Hunger and Love was published the following February, and after this his short-lived fame began in earnest and he was in great demand for a few brief years. He was asked to give a number of talks, to open theatres, he became the drama critic for the New Clarion, and established Left Theatre with André van Gyseghem and several others. There were many articles about him in newspapers and magazines, and a great deal of attention was also given to his second play, Spacetime Inn, for example: the blurb on the dust jacket speaks of ‘the play which was read at the House of Commons — the only occasion in the history of any Parliament that such a thing has ever happened’ (20). Britton’s M. P. friend John Smith Clarke had made the occasion possible, but both the blurb and the headlines are slightly misleading: although Britton himself certainly read his play before a group of M. P.s, the session was only held in a House of Commons committee room (21). Critically, the play was better received than Brain, although it was performed for four nights only at the Arts Theatre in London, and once by the Hostel Players in Hoddeson the following year. (For this second performance, the play also attracted a great deal of publicity — much of it pictorial — because Bernard Shaw gave one of his old Norfolk jackets to his namesake in the play.)
There were many caricatures of Britton in the newspapers and magazines of the day because he was quite an unusual figure for the time. Shaw had called him a ‘wild young man’ and Arnold Bennett had thought that he looked as though he had just come from the French Riviera: he had a shock of wiry hair which stood up almost perpendicular to his head and which he rather amateurishly cut himself, and he always wore an open-neck shirt, usually with light trousers or shorts and plimsolls; he was teetotal and did not smoke.
Britton had been anticipating a visit to Russia for some years, and as the initial excitement of his success eased off considerably, he went there in July 1935 at the expense of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers. Five years previously, the working-class writer Harold Heslop had stayed there for the same amount of time as Britton: three months (22). The two writers’ impressions of the country have many similarities — Heslop was shocked by the poverty he saw, by his guide’s ignorance of Russian culture, and bewildered by the consternation which his desire to see Zamyatin caused; after attending a show trial, he called himself ‘a stranger in a world beyond my own belief’ (23). Britton’s frequent letters to Acheson express his disgust with the country. He was also alarmed by the poverty, exasperated by the queues and what he saw as the ignorance of the Russian people, as well as the fact that they would not answer his probing questions or allow him to explore his surroundings unescorted; above all, perhaps, he thought that his belief in co-operation as opposed to competition was not being practised in Russia: he believed that food and other shortages were caused by the government channelling money into the defence budget. What he saw forced him to see the United Kingdom as more socialist than Russia; he still thought that Russian communism would eventually succeed in its goals, but thought that the gradualism of the British Labour Party was better suited to the country’s progress than the Communist Party of Great Britain (24). He returned by boat in October; Irza had become used to having more space, and most of Britton’s belongings had been moved to Acheson’s house.
Britton had awoken from his utopian dream to find a nightmare both in Russia and, more personally, at home. Putnam, having made only a modest profit from Hunger and Love (less than £100 after 10,000 sales and an expensive promotion campaign) and losses with Brain and Spacetime Inn, had already refused to give more than a perfunctory promotion to Animal Ideas. Britton had delayed his visit to Russia because the play was due to be published in the United Kingdom, but it proved to be a disaster: it was never performed (except by Britton himself at various readings), sales were very low, and it was largely ignored critically. In a revealing fourteen-page letter to Herbert Marshall, he called his experience ‘the snuff-out’: he was facing ruin as a writer and had little money left (25).
Britton escaped from London to take part in a socialist project at ‘Netherwood’ in Hastings, which was perhaps chosen because of its connection with the working-class writer Robert Tressell. In the second half of the 1930s, Netherwood was a large run-down property which had been bought by the actor and playwright E. C. Vernon Symonds to convert into a left-wing guest house that was intended as a haven for socialist meetings and trade union conferences among other things. Britton received free board and lodging there in return for manual work — mainly gardening and reconstructing the swimming pool — and was eking out the remainder of his advance for the Russian edition of Hunger and Love, although he hated almost everything about Netherwood.
During his stay in Hastings Britton was writing the play ‘Du Barry’, although it was never published and never performed. He later wrote several more plays and a novel, philosophical works, and dramatized several novels, such as The Pickwick Papers, Barchester Towers, Gwyn Jones’s Times Like These and three works by J. Jefferson Farjeon. But apart from a performance of ‘Mr Pickwick’ at Rugby and two translations of rather obscure Russian writers in the 1940s, Britton’s career in the theatre and in print was at an end (26).
Consequently, although he remained a committed writer, Britton was by economic necessity forced to find other means of survival, which led to an itinerant lifestyle. He taught from time to time, gave play readings throughout the country, and synchronized English dialogue to Russian films. And there was also another source of income: Acheson had bought a second-hand boat — known as ‘Spacetime Inn’, or simply ‘Spacetime’ — which she kept on the Thames and followed Irza’s suggestion to rent it out, with Britton collecting the proceeds from customers. He lived on the boat, in boathouses, or simply by the riverside, from about 1937 to 1944, although not continuously. And towards the end of the 1940s he was living with his mother again, now at Park House, a leasehold property at 66 Tufnell Park Road. In a draft application for a grant from the Civil List fund in 1951, he gave his income as ‘Between £70 and £80 per annum’ (27).
In 1954 Britton suffered multiple injuries in a car accident from which he was very fortunate to survive; however, he received an undisclosed sum in compensation, with which he hoped to publish his work and ‘be independent of publishers’ readers’ (28). Britton was developing an obsession: he had amplified Bernard Shaw’s (possibly unfinished) play Why She Would Not, and for the rest of his life was concerned with the Society of Authors’s refusal to allow the simultaneous publication of both Shaw’s fragment and Britton’s ending. He kept scrapbooks of newspaper cuttings about the society along with its financial details, and biographical details of the committee members. And he was directly or indirectly supported by several prominent writers in opposition to the society’s exclusivity, including Bertrand Russell, who remarked of the society’s attitude to Britton’s writing: ‘If the principle became established that nothing should be published unless it aroused admiration in a number of elderly big-wigs, the result would be a disastrous censorship’ (29). These were encouraging words, although they can only have fed the obsession: in 1964, Britton sent a two-hundred-and-eighty-five-paragraph dossier to the Director of Public Prosecutions alleging fraudulent activities on the part of the Society of Authors. Nothing was ever proved (30).
Also in 1964, Britton formed a company — The Park Group Limited — with two Canadians using a bank in the Bahamas with the intention of publishing and producing his plays for stage and screen, of which the first was to be ‘the Shaw play’ (31). However, nothing appears to have come to fruition from the Park Group, probably because Britton was insisting that ‘the Shaw play’ be published first, whereas the other directors (who were responsible for all of the company’s not inconsiderable expenses pending a refund from the ‘profits’) were worried about a possible court injunction (32). Three years later Britton established his own company — Promethean Publishers Ltd — which appears never to have published anything either.
Britton spent his last years as a virtual recluse in Margate. In 1969 he wrote a letter to Bertrand Russell from his new home, in which he states that he has had a nervous breakdown, and has lost his house in Tufnell Park along with all of his money; the reasons for this are not mentioned (33). But Britton was still trying to sue the Society of Authors as late as June 1970, six months before his death at the local hospital following a heart attack (34). There were few obituaries, and even those commented on his obscurity.
Herbert Marshall, who was by that time Professor and Director of Soviet and East European Studies (Performing Arts) at Southern Illinois University, had all of Britton’s literary effects transported to the university, where they remain today (35). But the copyright of all of Britton’s work, revealed in Britton’s will, went to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, the World Wildlife Fund (UK), and — inexplicably, as he had no apparent connections there — the vicars and churchwardens of Polstead in Suffolk.
1. Lionel Britton, Hunger and Love (London: Putnam, 1931); Lionel Britton, Brain: A Play of the Whole Earth (London: Putnam, 1930); Lionel Britton, Spacetime Inn: A Play (London: Putnam, 1932); Lionel Britton, Animal Ideas: A Dramatic Symphony of the Human in the Universe (London: Putnam, 1935).
2. Hereafter all references to this collection are abbreviated to ‘LBC’.
3. Birth certificate, Lionel Britton, Feckenham, registration district of Bromsgrove, Worcestershire and Warwickshire, 4 November 1887; ‘The Law Society’, Times, 24 November 1883, p. 12.
4. Death certificate, Samuel Thomas, registration district of Tardebigg, Worcestershire, 6 September 1878.
5. Irza Britton, letter to Richard Britton, [n. d.], LBC, Box 2, Folder 29; John James Britton, Carrélla: Lyrics, Lays, and Sympathies (London: Bennett, 1867); John James Britton, The Lay of the Lady Ida: And Other Poems (London: Remington, 1883); John James Britton, Flight (London: Trischler, 1890).
6. Marriage certificate, Richard Waddams Nimmo Britton and Irza Vivian Geraldine Thomas, Birmingham Register Office, registration district Birmingham, Warwickshire, 17 August 1885.
7. G. Edward Saville, King’s Coughton: A Warwickshire Hamlet (King’s Coughton: The author, 1973).
8. Thomas Perkins, letter of reference, 13 February 1888, LBC, Box 6, Folder 1; John Mourilyan, letter of reference, 15 March 1890, LBC, Box 6, Folder 1.
9. Anonymous, ‘Forgotten Genius Ends his Days at Margate’, Isle of Thanet Gazette, 29 January 1971, [n. pg.].
10. Death certificate, Richard Waddams Nimmo Britton, registration district of Christchurch, Southamptonshire, 1 December 1894.
11. Marriage certificate, Francis le Breton and Irza Vivien Geraldine Britton, Portsmouth Register Office, registration district of Portsmouth, Portsmouthshire, 13 October 1897.
12. Lionel Britton, ‘Lionel Britton’, typescript, [n. d.], p. [1], LBC, Box 6, Folder 1.
13. Anonymous, ‘Young Playwright’s Romance: Work in Factory at Age of 13; Fame at 30: Mr. Shaw’s “Find”’, Daily News and Westminster Gazette, 18 March 1930, [no page], LBC, Box 12, Folder 11. (Hereafter, all references to unknown page numbers are referred to as ‘n. pg’.)
14. Lionel Britton, ‘Lionel Britton’, unpublished handwritten notes, [c. 1960s], p. 3, LBC, Box 1, Folder 1.
15. A. H. Mayhew, letter of reference to Irza Britton about Lionel Britton, 18 November 1918, LBC, Box 2, Folder 2.
16. Raymond Douglas, ‘Lionel Britton’, Humanist, May 1971, pp. 151–52.
17. Alfred H. Angus, letter of reference about Lionel Britton, 4 September 1929, LBC, Box 2, Folder 2.
18. The Film Guild of London, newsletter, [n. d.], LBC, Box 6, ‘other programs, newsletters’.
19. Animal Ideas, rear flap; Rebecca Gorski, ‘Biographical Sketch’, LBC.
20. Spacetime Inn, front flap.
21. Hannen Swaffer, ‘Play to Be Read in Commons: Whole Action in Flash: Only Clever M. P.s Will Know What It’s about!’, [Daily Express], [c. 1932], [n. pg.], LBC, Box 12, Folder 10.
22. Harold Heslop, Out of the Old Earth (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1994).
23. Out of the Old Earth, p. 242.
24. In spite of this conclusion, Britton had little interest in party politics, and it is evident from Hunger and Love that a form of anarchism is being advocated; it is no coincidence that anarchist sympathiser Bertrand Russell wrote a five-page Introduction to the novel, or that anarchist periodicals such as Freedom (quoted in Chapter 1) welcomed Britton’s work. I comment on Britton’s and Grassic Gibbon’s anarchism in Chapter 6.
25. Lionel Britton, letter to Herbert Marshall, 20 May 1936, p. [7], LBC, Box 2, Folder 13.
26. V[assili Grigor’evich] Yan[chevetsky], Jenghiz–Khan: A Tale of 13th Century Asia, trans. by Lionel Erskine Britton (London: Hutchinson International Authors, [1945]); N. Teleshov, A Writer Remembers: Reminiscences, trans. by Lionel Erskine Britton (London: Hutchinson, [1946]).
27. Lionel Britton, draft application for Civil List grant, 4 January 1951, LBC, Box 13, Folder 13.
28. Lionel Britton, letter to Bertrand Russell, 28 November 1955, in the possession of Harry Berberian (hereafter ‘HB’).
29. Bertrand Russell, letter to Lionel Britton, 20 March 1956, HB.
30. Attorney General [name illegible], letter to John Parker, House of Commons, 1 June 1970, LBC, Box 2, Folder 23.
31. Cecil Thomas, letter to Lionel Britton, 4 December 1964, LBC, Box 2, Folder 21.
32. Cecil Thomas, letter to Lionel Britton, 3 September 1964, LBC, Box 2, Folder 21.
33. Lionel Britton, letter to Bertrand Russell, 10 June 1969, HB.
34. Death certificate, Lionel Britton, Ramsgate, registration district of Thanet, Kent, 9 January 1971.
35. ‘Forgotten Genius Ends his Days at Margate’.
The Work of Lionel Britton: Chapter I: Hunger and Love and the Critics
This chapter concerns the critics’ reactions to Hunger and Love, and in it I examine a number of critics who wrote about Lionel Britton’s work at the time of its publication in 1931. Before looking at some of the contemporary criticisms of Hunger and Love, though, an understanding of the observations made would be facilitated by a synopsis of the novel.
Hunger and Love is a semi-autobiographical account of the intellectual development of the working-class orphan Arthur Phelps, who is about sixteen years old at the beginning of the book, and the reader learns almost nothing of his past life. Set entirely in London from 1904 or 1905 to some time during World War I, it records in some detail the extreme poverty of the uneducated Arthur, who starts his working life at a greengrocer’s and then continues by working for several booksellers. Throughout most of the book he has very few friends, and almost all of his contact with others is through his work or by chance encounters in the street. Some of his limited spare time is spent trying to make his meagre earnings last until the end of the week — by, for example, mending his shabby clothes — but most of his time is spent in the manic pursuit of the education he never received as a child. Arthur devours any scraps of knowledge that he can, reading works of science or arts indiscriminately. He buys books from the penny ‘dumps’ on the book barrows that line Farringdon Road, and works his way through the Penny Cyclopaedia and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. The novel details how Arthur takes advantage of any opportunity to increase his learning by reading at work, when sent out on errands, and during his lunch breaks. Periods of unemployment are described, a few political activities, and Arthur’s developing intellectual education arguing with the crowd gathered around Speakers’ Corner. There are also many descriptions of the book trade from a shop assistant’s point of view.
The ‘Hunger’ in the title clearly refers to Arthur’s lack of food, but it also alludes to both sexual and intellectual frustration; the ‘Love’ too refers to sex, as well as to the love of knowledge, and to a much broader love of humanity. The narrator has complete access to Arthur’s thoughts and no one else’s, and frequently addresses him directly in the second person, often to mock him. The world is thus largely seen through Arthur’s (or the narrator’s) consciousness, and the novel contains many unspoken insults directed at the bourgeoisie, the church, the government, or the police. Any figures of authority are the targets, and they are seen not only as impediments to his freedom, but throwbacks to an earlier period of evolution.
The novel is a long inter-war howl of contempt for the rule-makers and the people whom the narrator considers to be the war-mongers, the perpetrators of a vast conspiracy. For these reasons alone, it was inevitable that there would be some hostile reactions to the novel. Britton foresaw this, and joked about it before the novel was published: ‘I don’t think six months in gaol would stop me. Most of my friends say I shall get twenty years. The unkind ones say I shall deserve it’ (1).
Hunger and Love is far from being a straightforward narrative, and a laudatory review by Geoffrey West in the TLS recognizes that Britton is ‘frankly contemptuous of the novel as story’ (2). The novel is didactic, and filled with philosophical and scientific thoughts, becoming more complex as the book develops. Thoughts hold up the story, or rather, thoughts are a large part of the story: sickened by a world where business rules and the rich perpetuate their life-styles through repressing the poor both physically and psychologically, the narrator gradually develops a blueprint for a future ruled by the human mind. His future will be one in which people co-operate with each other instead of competing, and all energies will be devoted to the benefit of the world as a whole. There is no romantic nostalgia for a lost world, and Britton embraces technological progress as a means to a vaguely communistic society — or perhaps anarchistic to be more precise, as there is no support for any political party: Arthur Phelps’s voice is a lonely one.
It is clear, then, that the book is set in a battle context, as Arthur is constantly pointing out. He bemoans, for instance, the fact that work is taking his life away: ‘what is there in this future that will compensate you now for this […] almost total surrender of your life’ (p. 206). As the book draws to a close, a far more sinister threat than Phelps’s struggle for economic survival develops as preparations are made for war; the propaganda increases, and the pressure on Arthur to enlist for World War I becomes increasingly strong.
Although the narrator assumes that Arthur Phelps dies at the end of the book, it is by no means certain if he enlists in the army, is hit by shrapnel during an air raid, or dies in another way. All the reader is told is ‘Whether you stay at home or go and fight — life is coming to a close’, and ‘I don’t know where you are, but I think it is the end’ (pp. 691, 703). Herbert Marshall, who in his review of the novel seamlessly drifts between his own writing style and Brittonese, had evidently read a proof copy of the book, although he rather oddly speaks of ‘Private Phelps, lost among the war-murdered millions’, and reviewer C. H. Norman also mentions Phelps being ‘blown to bits by a shell on the battlefield’ (3). Thoughts of joining the war certainly occur to Phelps, although only fleetingly, and only as murderous thoughts might easily briefly occur to a confirmed pacifist: if Phelps had been killed as an active member of the armed forces it would have been a psychological victory for the governing class, and it seems doubtful that this is the impression that the narrator wants to convey. It would be far more in keeping with Arthur’s ideas if he died in England, and if he continued to refuse to fight for a cause that he was incapable of identifying as his own. George Rees’s interpretation of the ending is much less assured than either Marshall’s or Norman’s; he does not even believe the assumptions of the narrator:
'In the end we simply lose sight of him. He disappears in wartime, and we are left to guess whether he is driven through the power of Parliament, press and pulpit, to join and thus forsake his principles; or whether, stoically enduring the opprobrium of the lickspittle bourgeois mob, he resolutely refuses to be a hired butcher, and lives until the world madness has passed'(4).
Rees’s lack of conviction is an appealing interpretation, and the ending of the novel is perhaps better for its ambiguity.
Below, I mention several people who commended Britton’s Brain of the previous year because the reception of this work obviously affected the way Hunger and Love was anticipated and received: the interest generated by Brain prepared the ground for the interest in the novel, and even the negative reviews of Hunger and Love were lengthy. The fact that Shaw was instrumental in having the play performed is significant, as are his comments on Britton: he said that the play had ‘good vocal writing and natural theatre sense’, and ‘it is clear he can deliver the goods’, which was reproduced in many newspapers and magazines. But Shaw’s qualification of this remark, ‘as soon as he settles down into an established line of business, unless, ass [sic] seems probable, he starves in the meantime’, was omitted, as were his other reservations (5).
Drama critic Hannen Swaffer was one of Britton’s greatest champions, and defended him against other critics who attacked his work. At the back of Hunger and Love, Putnam reproduced impressive snippets from Swaffer’s Daily Express review of Brain: ‘The most highbrow play ever produced in England…Had more thought in it than any other play for years…May be acted in every capital in the world…I prophesy for Lionel Britton a brilliant future’ [p. 707]. Britton was grateful for his support and wrote a letter to him from which Swaffer quoted in the Express: ‘Thanks for the courage with which you stood up against the whole pack of them’ (6). Other reviews were also highly complimentary. In The Manchester Guardian ‘R. H. T.’ says ‘Many great men have amused themselves by forecasting the future of mankind. It seems to the present reviewer that Lionel Britton leaves them all a very long way behind’ (7). He concludes by proclaiming Brain ‘a work of genius’. C. E. M. Joad also calls Britton a genius in a long review of Brain in The Sunday Referee, but it was perhaps the Introduction to Hunger and Love by another philosopher — Bertrand Russell — which more than anything else generated such interest in the novel.
There were many reviews of Hunger and Love, some positive, some negative, and some mixed. Nevertheless, and perhaps surprisingly for such an anti-Establishment work, hardly any review seems to have been unreservedly negative. Today Britton’s name is almost forgotten, with the occasional exceptions of entries in encyclopaedias or bibliographies of science fiction, utopias or computer science, and a very encouraging recent review by Adam Daly; but he was once very briefly a relatively well-known writer: in her biography of Virginia Woolf, for example, Winifred Holtby lists him alongside other working-class authors, all of whom are far better known today than Britton: James Hanley, Sean O’Casey and W. H. Davies (8).
Frank Swinnerton’s reaction to Hunger and Love, full of anger at Arthur Phelps for having the gall to ‘steal’ from his employers’ time, is very negative. He says of the young worker: ‘His notion of his own greatness is such that he exploits his employers and then savages them […] because they dismiss him ’(9). Swinnerton was obviously proud of having worked his way up from office boy to editor of Chatto & Windus to emerge as a staunch member of the Establishment that Britton is attacking. And although self-deprecating about his own intellectual credentials, Swinnerton strongly resents the idea of the working classes becoming intellectuals:
'Mr. Russell calls Mr. Britton "a highly intellectual proletarian." What a description! And what a terrifying portent! The highbrow sustained by the parental dole is familiar to us but if the slums are also to send us highbrows the end of the world is overdue.'
Swinnerton nevertheless sees a number of positive points in the book, although none in Arthur, whom he finds selfish: the main argument in Hunger and Love is that it is the bourgeoisie who are selfish.
Rebecca West also has some positive things to say about Hunger and Love, and even admits that ‘One would have to be cold and a cad not to have a warm corner in one’s heart for Arthur Phelps’ (10). However, she continues by saying that ‘Since Mr. Britton is cut off from his fellow creatures by this wall of hatred he has learned nothing about [others in a similar situation to himself]. He has written a book about the destiny of man without knowing anything about man.’
Harold Nicolson is more offended by Hunger and Love. He concedes that the book is interesting, but only as a ‘specimen’: ‘it is bottled life, preserved in vinegar’ (11). He continues by denouncing Britton as ‘glum and humourless, and he likes to snarl’, adding that if the novel were intended as a satire on the self-educated it was a work of genius, but that he does not think that this is the case. Nicolson’s main complaint is that the book is dangerous because it is about class hatred.
Bernard Shaw’s assessment of Hunger and Love appears to be lost, although a comment on the front cover of the dust jacket of the New Zealander John E. Lee’s Children of the Poor states ‘A whopper. In its intensity I can only compare it with Lionel Britton’s Hunger and Love’ (12).
In an edition of the Johannesburg Sunday Times (Britton subscribed to press cutting agencies and collected many reviews of his books from around the world) ‘J. L. L.’ is slightly equivocal about the novel. He calls Britton’s book ‘amazing’, and adds that ‘All the destructive criticism in the world cannot rob “Hunger and Love” of a certain brilliance, or the author of intellectual endowments and a general knowledge of no mean quality.’13 But not many people would have understood the concluding remark: ‘If it were not for the fact that the author is obviously sincere and has given us much that reaches high levels of excellence, one would be inclined to use the title of his 31st chapter [‘All Balls’] as a tabloid description of his book.’
Arnold Bennett’s reaction to the novel was not as ambivalent as this, and he was even moved to write a pastiche of Britton’s style:
'Now Lionel Britton’s book. Very Long. Introduction by Bertrand Russell. Yes, by Bertrand Russell. […] I read and read. […] I was continually moving my arms, together with all the nerves, tendons, ganglions, veins, arteries, bones, concealed beneath my seven skins.
'The day wore on. Curtains. Bourgeois electricity. The surface of the planet on which I sat had moved several thousand miles, not counting its movement round the sun, nor its vaster movement as part of the ever-shifting solar system. Indeed I didn’t know where I was in spacetime. …
'Bourgeois dinner. Next day I resumed. Page after big page. I reached page 705. The last. But why the last? ‘Well, said I, to the invisible Lionel Britton, who was rushing through the ether as inconceivably fast as I was, ‘I’ve read your novel, Lionel Britton' (14).
Hunger and Love was the last book that Bennett reviewed for the Evening Standard, and in the article he also describes both his impression of Britton on the two occasions he met him, as well as his review of the novel, written in his own usual style. Bennett sat next to Britton during the premiere of Brain, and although he did not like the play, he was too polite to say so. However, had the invisible Lionel Britton mentioned in the quotation above actually been present at the time that Bennett finished reading Hunger and Love, there would have been no such embarrassment: Bennett enjoyed ‘a great deal of the book’, says that it has ‘genuine force’, that it is ‘not a book to be ignored’ and recommends it ‘to the stout-hearted’. It is evident that the review was written with a considerable degree of affection for the novel; he calls it ‘propaganda, strident as a brass band’, but although he does not mind propaganda, feels that Britton ‘frequently forgets that he is telling a story’. It must be said, though, that Britton would not have disagreed with Bennett’s criticism — in a ‘Caution to the Reader’ which was perhaps originally designed as an Introduction to the novel, Britton freely admits that the book has ‘not, strictly speaking, a story’, with ‘nothing of what is usually understood as characters’ (15).
This is one of the negative aspects that Orwell saw in the novel, and his comments on it are interesting. He calls the book ‘entirely sound’ as a ‘social document’, but (rather like Britton himself) fails to recognize it as a novel as such: it is more of ‘a kind of monologue on poverty’ (16). But like a number of other reviewers, he finds the repetitions annoying. Nevertheless, as mentioned below in Chapter 3, the book (which Orwell stressed was ‘unusual’), certainly made a lasting impression on him, and almost certainly had an influence on Orwell’s work.
Hunger and Love attracted rather more negative criticism from Stephen Garry’s article in the Daily Worker; at the time, ‘socialist realism’ (though not used as an expression until about 1932) was all important to the Communist Party of Great Britain’s approach to fiction, although the degree of its inclusiveness of ‘acceptable’ authors varied considerably through the years (17). Garry’s article seems to represent the fierce strain of criticism of the time; he has obviously realized that the novel is largely autobiographical, and taking the cue from Britton he addresses him as the dead Arthur Phelps, playing on the word ‘dead’ to mean unthinking, and using the second person throughout. In a manner rather similar to the first section of Bennett’s review, although without any admiration — this is parody rather than pastiche — Garry begins with: ‘And so, Arthur Phelps, my boy, you are dead! And no wonder!’18 Garry has understood the book well, and his main argument is that if Phelps/Britton had spent more time in ideological struggle instead of forming lofty ideas about utopia, he would have arrived at the ‘correct’ way of thinking.
But interestingly, if the Communist Party of Great Britain (via the Daily Worker) did not approve of Hunger and Love, other reviewers on the left certainly did, and it is significant that one of the most enthusiastic reviews of it was in in the anarchist weekly Freedom. After giving his appreciation of the late Arnold Bennett, ‘B. M.’ says that ‘Lionel Britton’s work is fated to arouse violent and acrimonious discussion and resentment. People who are positive and have something to say infuriate authority’ (19). The reviewer continues: ‘In my view it is a work of genius and of high literary quality.’ And his final words on Britton’s book are similar to Russell’s: ‘I cannot too strongly urge the claims of this book upon you.’
Another person on the left, J. F. Horrabin, calls Britton’s book ‘A Real Proletarian Novel’, and is almost as enthusiastic as ‘B. M’. He thinks that Britton should have done some editing of the book because he appears to have unloaded all the fruits of his self-education into it in a haphazard fashion, but says that it is ‘dead right in observation, magnificent in passion. Let no one be frightened off reading it by anything I have said above’ (20).
The Marxist Philip Henderson was also impressed: ‘Britton has written a work of undisciplined, elemental power. Its protest against the moral degradation that makes human life dependent upon possession of money, stands out like a huge volcanic rock in the polite literary world of our time’ (21). Henderson claims that Britton’s depiction of Phelps ‘gives his work the quality of an epic’, and also mentions Bennett for having ‘the courage to hail the book as a work of genius’, but disagrees with him saying that Hunger and Love is better than Ulysses. Unfortunately, he does not give his source, although Bennett certainly said neither of these things in his Evening Standard review.
Geoffrey West’s review of Hunger and Love in the Times Literary Supplement is also highly complimentary, speaking of Britton’s ‘ambitious attempt to synthesize all relevant knowledge in a single coherent attitude to society and the universe at large’ (22). He concludes: ‘Mr. Lionel Britton has written a remarkable work; if the term “work of genius” is due to originality in purpose and plan, to industry and vitality in execution on a large scale, then it is difficult to withhold it from “Hunger and Love.”’
Another very positive review of Hunger and Love, and certainly one of the last in a newspaper, was by the above mentioned George Rees in the Egyptian Gazette. In this, he understands Britton’s aim as being to destroy the status quo and begin an egalitarian society, and is obviously in full agreement with him. He is annoyed that the Book Society omitted it from their monthly bulletin, and like Britton, he rails against ‘the bourgeoisie and their system of plunder’ with apparently equal — and personally felt, the reader is bound to conclude — venom:
'One can understand now, perhaps, why the Society refused to recommend this novel; why, also, the fatly comfortable Gerald Goulds and James Agates have utterly ignored, in their recapitulation of the year’s best books, a work of striking beauty and originality' (23).
Finally, a word must be said about Bertrand Russell’s Introduction to the novel. Russell calls Hunger and Love ‘a very remarkable piece of work’, ‘filled with a splendid rage against the humbug, the cruelty, and the moral degradation of the possessing classes’ (24). He has doubts about Britton’s vision working in practice, but ends by saying that ‘Mr. Britton has portrayed his world with passion, with vividness, with a wealth of illustrative detail, and with a considerable power of generalising thought. […] I am convinced that his book deserves to be widely read’ (p. xi). Russell was one of the very few people who had any idea of how much effort had been put into the book, and one of the few to know that a considerable effort had also been put into finding a publisher for it.
1. Lionel Britton, letter, ‘Should Authors Be Paid?’, Everyman, 4 December 1930, [n. p.], [n. pg.], LBC, Box 12, Folder 10.
2. [Geoffrey West], ‘Hunger and Love by Lionel Britton’, 19 February 1931, TLS, 131.
3. H. P. J. Marshall, ‘Towards the Human: Lionel Britton — A New Force in the World of Thought’, New World, May 1930, p. 10, LBC, Box 12, Folder 11, (also Box 6, unnumbered folder); C. H. Norman, ‘The Revolutionary Spirit in Modern Literature and Drama — XII’, Saturday Review, 26 November 1936, p. 3, LBC, Box 12, Folder 10.
4. George Rees, ‘An Epic of Hatred’, Egyptian Gazette, 28 January 1932, [n. pg.], LBC, Box 12, Folder 10.
5. Bernard Shaw, letter to Sir Barry Jackson, 16 September 1929, LBC, Box 2, Folder.
6. Hannen Swaffer, ‘Brain a Book Now’, [Daily Express], [1930], [n. pg.], in the possession of the present author.
7. ‘R. H. T.’, ‘Brain’, Manchester Guardian, 26 June 1930, [n. pg.], LBC, Box 13, Folder 15.
8. Lyman Tower Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature, 1516–1985: An Annotated, Chronological Bibliography (Boston, MA: Hall, 1979; repr. New York: Garland, 1988), p. 188; Everett F. Bleiler, Science Fiction: The Early Years: A Full Description of More Than 3,000 Science-Fiction Stories from the Earliest Times to the Appearance of the Genre Magazines in 1930 (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 1990), p. 85; John Clute and Peter Nicholls, eds, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 1993; rev. 1995), p. 161; Anthony Ralston, Edwin D. Reilly and David Hemmendinger, eds, Encyclopedia of Computer Science, 4th ed (New York: Grove’s Dictionaries, 2000), p. 706; Adam Daly, ‘The Lost Genius of Lionel Britton’, Wormwood, 6 (2006), pp. 47–57; Winifred Holtby, Virginia Woolf (London: Wishart, 1932), p. 58.
9. Frank Swinnerton, ‘A Hero of Colossal Cheek!’, [n. pub.], [n. pg.], LBC, Box 12, Folder 11.
10. Rebecca West, ‘The Exasperating Egotism of Lionel Britton’, Daily Telegraph, 20 February 1931, [n. pg.], LBC, Box 12, Folder 11.
11. Harold Nicolson, ‘Nightmare Novel of an Author Who “Likes to Snarl”’, Daily Express, 19 February 1931, [n. pg.], LBC, Box 12, Folder 11.
12. John A. Lee, Children of the Poor (London: Laurie, 1934; repr. Henry, 1949), front cover of dust jacket.
13. ‘J. L. L.’, ‘Hunger and Love: By Lionel Britton’, Johannesburg Sunday Times, 19 April 1931, [n. pg.], LBC, Box 12, Folder 10.
14. Arnold Bennett, ‘Young Man’s Novel Slaps Your Cheek: Ferocious Hatred’, Evening Standard, 26 February 1931, [n. pg.], LBC, Box 18, Folder 3.
15. Lionel Britton, ‘Caution to the Reader’, [n. d.], LBC, Series II: Drafts, Box 2, Folder 1.
16. The Complete Works of George Orwell, ed. by Peter Davison, 20 vols (London: Secker & Warburg, 1986–1998; rev. and updated 2000), A Patriot After All: 1940–1941, pp. 203–05. (Originally published as ‘Poverty — Plain and Coloured’ by ‘Eric Blair’, Adelphi, April 1931, pp. 80–82.)
17. Andy Croft, Red Letter Days: British Fiction in the 1930s (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), pp. 59–95.
18. Stephen Garry, ‘“Hunger and Love”: The Story of a DEAD Worker’, Daily Worker, 28 March 1931, [n. pg.], LBC, Box 12, Folder 10.
19. ‘B. M.’, ‘Books to Buy’, Freedom: A Journal of Libertarian Thought, Work and Literature, May 1931, pp. 6–7.
20. J. F. Horrabin, ‘“Hunger and Love”: A Real Proletarian Novel’, Plebs, September 1931, pp. 210–11 (p. 211).
21. Philip Henderson, Literature: And a Changing Civilisation (London: John Lane the Bodley Head, 1935), pp. 143–44.
22. ‘Hunger and Love by Lionel Britton’.
23. ‘An Epic of Hatred’.
24. Bertrand Russell, Introduction, Hunger and Love, pp. vii–xi (p. vii). (Hereafter all page references to Hunger and Love are given in parentheses following the quotation.)
Hunger and Love is a semi-autobiographical account of the intellectual development of the working-class orphan Arthur Phelps, who is about sixteen years old at the beginning of the book, and the reader learns almost nothing of his past life. Set entirely in London from 1904 or 1905 to some time during World War I, it records in some detail the extreme poverty of the uneducated Arthur, who starts his working life at a greengrocer’s and then continues by working for several booksellers. Throughout most of the book he has very few friends, and almost all of his contact with others is through his work or by chance encounters in the street. Some of his limited spare time is spent trying to make his meagre earnings last until the end of the week — by, for example, mending his shabby clothes — but most of his time is spent in the manic pursuit of the education he never received as a child. Arthur devours any scraps of knowledge that he can, reading works of science or arts indiscriminately. He buys books from the penny ‘dumps’ on the book barrows that line Farringdon Road, and works his way through the Penny Cyclopaedia and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. The novel details how Arthur takes advantage of any opportunity to increase his learning by reading at work, when sent out on errands, and during his lunch breaks. Periods of unemployment are described, a few political activities, and Arthur’s developing intellectual education arguing with the crowd gathered around Speakers’ Corner. There are also many descriptions of the book trade from a shop assistant’s point of view.
The ‘Hunger’ in the title clearly refers to Arthur’s lack of food, but it also alludes to both sexual and intellectual frustration; the ‘Love’ too refers to sex, as well as to the love of knowledge, and to a much broader love of humanity. The narrator has complete access to Arthur’s thoughts and no one else’s, and frequently addresses him directly in the second person, often to mock him. The world is thus largely seen through Arthur’s (or the narrator’s) consciousness, and the novel contains many unspoken insults directed at the bourgeoisie, the church, the government, or the police. Any figures of authority are the targets, and they are seen not only as impediments to his freedom, but throwbacks to an earlier period of evolution.
The novel is a long inter-war howl of contempt for the rule-makers and the people whom the narrator considers to be the war-mongers, the perpetrators of a vast conspiracy. For these reasons alone, it was inevitable that there would be some hostile reactions to the novel. Britton foresaw this, and joked about it before the novel was published: ‘I don’t think six months in gaol would stop me. Most of my friends say I shall get twenty years. The unkind ones say I shall deserve it’ (1).
Hunger and Love is far from being a straightforward narrative, and a laudatory review by Geoffrey West in the TLS recognizes that Britton is ‘frankly contemptuous of the novel as story’ (2). The novel is didactic, and filled with philosophical and scientific thoughts, becoming more complex as the book develops. Thoughts hold up the story, or rather, thoughts are a large part of the story: sickened by a world where business rules and the rich perpetuate their life-styles through repressing the poor both physically and psychologically, the narrator gradually develops a blueprint for a future ruled by the human mind. His future will be one in which people co-operate with each other instead of competing, and all energies will be devoted to the benefit of the world as a whole. There is no romantic nostalgia for a lost world, and Britton embraces technological progress as a means to a vaguely communistic society — or perhaps anarchistic to be more precise, as there is no support for any political party: Arthur Phelps’s voice is a lonely one.
It is clear, then, that the book is set in a battle context, as Arthur is constantly pointing out. He bemoans, for instance, the fact that work is taking his life away: ‘what is there in this future that will compensate you now for this […] almost total surrender of your life’ (p. 206). As the book draws to a close, a far more sinister threat than Phelps’s struggle for economic survival develops as preparations are made for war; the propaganda increases, and the pressure on Arthur to enlist for World War I becomes increasingly strong.
Although the narrator assumes that Arthur Phelps dies at the end of the book, it is by no means certain if he enlists in the army, is hit by shrapnel during an air raid, or dies in another way. All the reader is told is ‘Whether you stay at home or go and fight — life is coming to a close’, and ‘I don’t know where you are, but I think it is the end’ (pp. 691, 703). Herbert Marshall, who in his review of the novel seamlessly drifts between his own writing style and Brittonese, had evidently read a proof copy of the book, although he rather oddly speaks of ‘Private Phelps, lost among the war-murdered millions’, and reviewer C. H. Norman also mentions Phelps being ‘blown to bits by a shell on the battlefield’ (3). Thoughts of joining the war certainly occur to Phelps, although only fleetingly, and only as murderous thoughts might easily briefly occur to a confirmed pacifist: if Phelps had been killed as an active member of the armed forces it would have been a psychological victory for the governing class, and it seems doubtful that this is the impression that the narrator wants to convey. It would be far more in keeping with Arthur’s ideas if he died in England, and if he continued to refuse to fight for a cause that he was incapable of identifying as his own. George Rees’s interpretation of the ending is much less assured than either Marshall’s or Norman’s; he does not even believe the assumptions of the narrator:
'In the end we simply lose sight of him. He disappears in wartime, and we are left to guess whether he is driven through the power of Parliament, press and pulpit, to join and thus forsake his principles; or whether, stoically enduring the opprobrium of the lickspittle bourgeois mob, he resolutely refuses to be a hired butcher, and lives until the world madness has passed'(4).
Rees’s lack of conviction is an appealing interpretation, and the ending of the novel is perhaps better for its ambiguity.
Below, I mention several people who commended Britton’s Brain of the previous year because the reception of this work obviously affected the way Hunger and Love was anticipated and received: the interest generated by Brain prepared the ground for the interest in the novel, and even the negative reviews of Hunger and Love were lengthy. The fact that Shaw was instrumental in having the play performed is significant, as are his comments on Britton: he said that the play had ‘good vocal writing and natural theatre sense’, and ‘it is clear he can deliver the goods’, which was reproduced in many newspapers and magazines. But Shaw’s qualification of this remark, ‘as soon as he settles down into an established line of business, unless, ass [sic] seems probable, he starves in the meantime’, was omitted, as were his other reservations (5).
Drama critic Hannen Swaffer was one of Britton’s greatest champions, and defended him against other critics who attacked his work. At the back of Hunger and Love, Putnam reproduced impressive snippets from Swaffer’s Daily Express review of Brain: ‘The most highbrow play ever produced in England…Had more thought in it than any other play for years…May be acted in every capital in the world…I prophesy for Lionel Britton a brilliant future’ [p. 707]. Britton was grateful for his support and wrote a letter to him from which Swaffer quoted in the Express: ‘Thanks for the courage with which you stood up against the whole pack of them’ (6). Other reviews were also highly complimentary. In The Manchester Guardian ‘R. H. T.’ says ‘Many great men have amused themselves by forecasting the future of mankind. It seems to the present reviewer that Lionel Britton leaves them all a very long way behind’ (7). He concludes by proclaiming Brain ‘a work of genius’. C. E. M. Joad also calls Britton a genius in a long review of Brain in The Sunday Referee, but it was perhaps the Introduction to Hunger and Love by another philosopher — Bertrand Russell — which more than anything else generated such interest in the novel.
There were many reviews of Hunger and Love, some positive, some negative, and some mixed. Nevertheless, and perhaps surprisingly for such an anti-Establishment work, hardly any review seems to have been unreservedly negative. Today Britton’s name is almost forgotten, with the occasional exceptions of entries in encyclopaedias or bibliographies of science fiction, utopias or computer science, and a very encouraging recent review by Adam Daly; but he was once very briefly a relatively well-known writer: in her biography of Virginia Woolf, for example, Winifred Holtby lists him alongside other working-class authors, all of whom are far better known today than Britton: James Hanley, Sean O’Casey and W. H. Davies (8).
Frank Swinnerton’s reaction to Hunger and Love, full of anger at Arthur Phelps for having the gall to ‘steal’ from his employers’ time, is very negative. He says of the young worker: ‘His notion of his own greatness is such that he exploits his employers and then savages them […] because they dismiss him ’(9). Swinnerton was obviously proud of having worked his way up from office boy to editor of Chatto & Windus to emerge as a staunch member of the Establishment that Britton is attacking. And although self-deprecating about his own intellectual credentials, Swinnerton strongly resents the idea of the working classes becoming intellectuals:
'Mr. Russell calls Mr. Britton "a highly intellectual proletarian." What a description! And what a terrifying portent! The highbrow sustained by the parental dole is familiar to us but if the slums are also to send us highbrows the end of the world is overdue.'
Swinnerton nevertheless sees a number of positive points in the book, although none in Arthur, whom he finds selfish: the main argument in Hunger and Love is that it is the bourgeoisie who are selfish.
Rebecca West also has some positive things to say about Hunger and Love, and even admits that ‘One would have to be cold and a cad not to have a warm corner in one’s heart for Arthur Phelps’ (10). However, she continues by saying that ‘Since Mr. Britton is cut off from his fellow creatures by this wall of hatred he has learned nothing about [others in a similar situation to himself]. He has written a book about the destiny of man without knowing anything about man.’
Harold Nicolson is more offended by Hunger and Love. He concedes that the book is interesting, but only as a ‘specimen’: ‘it is bottled life, preserved in vinegar’ (11). He continues by denouncing Britton as ‘glum and humourless, and he likes to snarl’, adding that if the novel were intended as a satire on the self-educated it was a work of genius, but that he does not think that this is the case. Nicolson’s main complaint is that the book is dangerous because it is about class hatred.
Bernard Shaw’s assessment of Hunger and Love appears to be lost, although a comment on the front cover of the dust jacket of the New Zealander John E. Lee’s Children of the Poor states ‘A whopper. In its intensity I can only compare it with Lionel Britton’s Hunger and Love’ (12).
In an edition of the Johannesburg Sunday Times (Britton subscribed to press cutting agencies and collected many reviews of his books from around the world) ‘J. L. L.’ is slightly equivocal about the novel. He calls Britton’s book ‘amazing’, and adds that ‘All the destructive criticism in the world cannot rob “Hunger and Love” of a certain brilliance, or the author of intellectual endowments and a general knowledge of no mean quality.’13 But not many people would have understood the concluding remark: ‘If it were not for the fact that the author is obviously sincere and has given us much that reaches high levels of excellence, one would be inclined to use the title of his 31st chapter [‘All Balls’] as a tabloid description of his book.’
Arnold Bennett’s reaction to the novel was not as ambivalent as this, and he was even moved to write a pastiche of Britton’s style:
'Now Lionel Britton’s book. Very Long. Introduction by Bertrand Russell. Yes, by Bertrand Russell. […] I read and read. […] I was continually moving my arms, together with all the nerves, tendons, ganglions, veins, arteries, bones, concealed beneath my seven skins.
'The day wore on. Curtains. Bourgeois electricity. The surface of the planet on which I sat had moved several thousand miles, not counting its movement round the sun, nor its vaster movement as part of the ever-shifting solar system. Indeed I didn’t know where I was in spacetime. …
'Bourgeois dinner. Next day I resumed. Page after big page. I reached page 705. The last. But why the last? ‘Well, said I, to the invisible Lionel Britton, who was rushing through the ether as inconceivably fast as I was, ‘I’ve read your novel, Lionel Britton' (14).
Hunger and Love was the last book that Bennett reviewed for the Evening Standard, and in the article he also describes both his impression of Britton on the two occasions he met him, as well as his review of the novel, written in his own usual style. Bennett sat next to Britton during the premiere of Brain, and although he did not like the play, he was too polite to say so. However, had the invisible Lionel Britton mentioned in the quotation above actually been present at the time that Bennett finished reading Hunger and Love, there would have been no such embarrassment: Bennett enjoyed ‘a great deal of the book’, says that it has ‘genuine force’, that it is ‘not a book to be ignored’ and recommends it ‘to the stout-hearted’. It is evident that the review was written with a considerable degree of affection for the novel; he calls it ‘propaganda, strident as a brass band’, but although he does not mind propaganda, feels that Britton ‘frequently forgets that he is telling a story’. It must be said, though, that Britton would not have disagreed with Bennett’s criticism — in a ‘Caution to the Reader’ which was perhaps originally designed as an Introduction to the novel, Britton freely admits that the book has ‘not, strictly speaking, a story’, with ‘nothing of what is usually understood as characters’ (15).
This is one of the negative aspects that Orwell saw in the novel, and his comments on it are interesting. He calls the book ‘entirely sound’ as a ‘social document’, but (rather like Britton himself) fails to recognize it as a novel as such: it is more of ‘a kind of monologue on poverty’ (16). But like a number of other reviewers, he finds the repetitions annoying. Nevertheless, as mentioned below in Chapter 3, the book (which Orwell stressed was ‘unusual’), certainly made a lasting impression on him, and almost certainly had an influence on Orwell’s work.
Hunger and Love attracted rather more negative criticism from Stephen Garry’s article in the Daily Worker; at the time, ‘socialist realism’ (though not used as an expression until about 1932) was all important to the Communist Party of Great Britain’s approach to fiction, although the degree of its inclusiveness of ‘acceptable’ authors varied considerably through the years (17). Garry’s article seems to represent the fierce strain of criticism of the time; he has obviously realized that the novel is largely autobiographical, and taking the cue from Britton he addresses him as the dead Arthur Phelps, playing on the word ‘dead’ to mean unthinking, and using the second person throughout. In a manner rather similar to the first section of Bennett’s review, although without any admiration — this is parody rather than pastiche — Garry begins with: ‘And so, Arthur Phelps, my boy, you are dead! And no wonder!’18 Garry has understood the book well, and his main argument is that if Phelps/Britton had spent more time in ideological struggle instead of forming lofty ideas about utopia, he would have arrived at the ‘correct’ way of thinking.
But interestingly, if the Communist Party of Great Britain (via the Daily Worker) did not approve of Hunger and Love, other reviewers on the left certainly did, and it is significant that one of the most enthusiastic reviews of it was in in the anarchist weekly Freedom. After giving his appreciation of the late Arnold Bennett, ‘B. M.’ says that ‘Lionel Britton’s work is fated to arouse violent and acrimonious discussion and resentment. People who are positive and have something to say infuriate authority’ (19). The reviewer continues: ‘In my view it is a work of genius and of high literary quality.’ And his final words on Britton’s book are similar to Russell’s: ‘I cannot too strongly urge the claims of this book upon you.’
Another person on the left, J. F. Horrabin, calls Britton’s book ‘A Real Proletarian Novel’, and is almost as enthusiastic as ‘B. M’. He thinks that Britton should have done some editing of the book because he appears to have unloaded all the fruits of his self-education into it in a haphazard fashion, but says that it is ‘dead right in observation, magnificent in passion. Let no one be frightened off reading it by anything I have said above’ (20).
The Marxist Philip Henderson was also impressed: ‘Britton has written a work of undisciplined, elemental power. Its protest against the moral degradation that makes human life dependent upon possession of money, stands out like a huge volcanic rock in the polite literary world of our time’ (21). Henderson claims that Britton’s depiction of Phelps ‘gives his work the quality of an epic’, and also mentions Bennett for having ‘the courage to hail the book as a work of genius’, but disagrees with him saying that Hunger and Love is better than Ulysses. Unfortunately, he does not give his source, although Bennett certainly said neither of these things in his Evening Standard review.
Geoffrey West’s review of Hunger and Love in the Times Literary Supplement is also highly complimentary, speaking of Britton’s ‘ambitious attempt to synthesize all relevant knowledge in a single coherent attitude to society and the universe at large’ (22). He concludes: ‘Mr. Lionel Britton has written a remarkable work; if the term “work of genius” is due to originality in purpose and plan, to industry and vitality in execution on a large scale, then it is difficult to withhold it from “Hunger and Love.”’
Another very positive review of Hunger and Love, and certainly one of the last in a newspaper, was by the above mentioned George Rees in the Egyptian Gazette. In this, he understands Britton’s aim as being to destroy the status quo and begin an egalitarian society, and is obviously in full agreement with him. He is annoyed that the Book Society omitted it from their monthly bulletin, and like Britton, he rails against ‘the bourgeoisie and their system of plunder’ with apparently equal — and personally felt, the reader is bound to conclude — venom:
'One can understand now, perhaps, why the Society refused to recommend this novel; why, also, the fatly comfortable Gerald Goulds and James Agates have utterly ignored, in their recapitulation of the year’s best books, a work of striking beauty and originality' (23).
Finally, a word must be said about Bertrand Russell’s Introduction to the novel. Russell calls Hunger and Love ‘a very remarkable piece of work’, ‘filled with a splendid rage against the humbug, the cruelty, and the moral degradation of the possessing classes’ (24). He has doubts about Britton’s vision working in practice, but ends by saying that ‘Mr. Britton has portrayed his world with passion, with vividness, with a wealth of illustrative detail, and with a considerable power of generalising thought. […] I am convinced that his book deserves to be widely read’ (p. xi). Russell was one of the very few people who had any idea of how much effort had been put into the book, and one of the few to know that a considerable effort had also been put into finding a publisher for it.
1. Lionel Britton, letter, ‘Should Authors Be Paid?’, Everyman, 4 December 1930, [n. p.], [n. pg.], LBC, Box 12, Folder 10.
2. [Geoffrey West], ‘Hunger and Love by Lionel Britton’, 19 February 1931, TLS, 131.
3. H. P. J. Marshall, ‘Towards the Human: Lionel Britton — A New Force in the World of Thought’, New World, May 1930, p. 10, LBC, Box 12, Folder 11, (also Box 6, unnumbered folder); C. H. Norman, ‘The Revolutionary Spirit in Modern Literature and Drama — XII’, Saturday Review, 26 November 1936, p. 3, LBC, Box 12, Folder 10.
4. George Rees, ‘An Epic of Hatred’, Egyptian Gazette, 28 January 1932, [n. pg.], LBC, Box 12, Folder 10.
5. Bernard Shaw, letter to Sir Barry Jackson, 16 September 1929, LBC, Box 2, Folder.
6. Hannen Swaffer, ‘Brain a Book Now’, [Daily Express], [1930], [n. pg.], in the possession of the present author.
7. ‘R. H. T.’, ‘Brain’, Manchester Guardian, 26 June 1930, [n. pg.], LBC, Box 13, Folder 15.
8. Lyman Tower Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature, 1516–1985: An Annotated, Chronological Bibliography (Boston, MA: Hall, 1979; repr. New York: Garland, 1988), p. 188; Everett F. Bleiler, Science Fiction: The Early Years: A Full Description of More Than 3,000 Science-Fiction Stories from the Earliest Times to the Appearance of the Genre Magazines in 1930 (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 1990), p. 85; John Clute and Peter Nicholls, eds, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 1993; rev. 1995), p. 161; Anthony Ralston, Edwin D. Reilly and David Hemmendinger, eds, Encyclopedia of Computer Science, 4th ed (New York: Grove’s Dictionaries, 2000), p. 706; Adam Daly, ‘The Lost Genius of Lionel Britton’, Wormwood, 6 (2006), pp. 47–57; Winifred Holtby, Virginia Woolf (London: Wishart, 1932), p. 58.
9. Frank Swinnerton, ‘A Hero of Colossal Cheek!’, [n. pub.], [n. pg.], LBC, Box 12, Folder 11.
10. Rebecca West, ‘The Exasperating Egotism of Lionel Britton’, Daily Telegraph, 20 February 1931, [n. pg.], LBC, Box 12, Folder 11.
11. Harold Nicolson, ‘Nightmare Novel of an Author Who “Likes to Snarl”’, Daily Express, 19 February 1931, [n. pg.], LBC, Box 12, Folder 11.
12. John A. Lee, Children of the Poor (London: Laurie, 1934; repr. Henry, 1949), front cover of dust jacket.
13. ‘J. L. L.’, ‘Hunger and Love: By Lionel Britton’, Johannesburg Sunday Times, 19 April 1931, [n. pg.], LBC, Box 12, Folder 10.
14. Arnold Bennett, ‘Young Man’s Novel Slaps Your Cheek: Ferocious Hatred’, Evening Standard, 26 February 1931, [n. pg.], LBC, Box 18, Folder 3.
15. Lionel Britton, ‘Caution to the Reader’, [n. d.], LBC, Series II: Drafts, Box 2, Folder 1.
16. The Complete Works of George Orwell, ed. by Peter Davison, 20 vols (London: Secker & Warburg, 1986–1998; rev. and updated 2000), A Patriot After All: 1940–1941, pp. 203–05. (Originally published as ‘Poverty — Plain and Coloured’ by ‘Eric Blair’, Adelphi, April 1931, pp. 80–82.)
17. Andy Croft, Red Letter Days: British Fiction in the 1930s (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), pp. 59–95.
18. Stephen Garry, ‘“Hunger and Love”: The Story of a DEAD Worker’, Daily Worker, 28 March 1931, [n. pg.], LBC, Box 12, Folder 10.
19. ‘B. M.’, ‘Books to Buy’, Freedom: A Journal of Libertarian Thought, Work and Literature, May 1931, pp. 6–7.
20. J. F. Horrabin, ‘“Hunger and Love”: A Real Proletarian Novel’, Plebs, September 1931, pp. 210–11 (p. 211).
21. Philip Henderson, Literature: And a Changing Civilisation (London: John Lane the Bodley Head, 1935), pp. 143–44.
22. ‘Hunger and Love by Lionel Britton’.
23. ‘An Epic of Hatred’.
24. Bertrand Russell, Introduction, Hunger and Love, pp. vii–xi (p. vii). (Hereafter all page references to Hunger and Love are given in parentheses following the quotation.)
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