43. H.E. Bates - 'A Christmas Song' (1950)

'A little snub worked wonders with these stupid girls, though, really, she had to admit that Joan's devotion was less revolting than the so-called normal attitude that Tim Prosser and the others professed so loudly, a normality that apparently classed human beings with pigs.'

'It was the most wonderful Christmas Eve, just like a fairy story.'

(Angus Wilson, Such Darling Dodos, Penguin, 1960, p.113/118-9)

'Instead there was almost always rain and long columns of working-class mackintoshes floating down a street that was like a dreary black canal. Instead of singing Mozart to the snow she spent long hours selling jazz sheet-music to factory workers and earned her reward, at last, by being bored at the Williamsons' party.'
(H.E. Bates, Love in a Wych Elm and other stories, Capuchin Classics, 2009, p.135)

Well, there will be something of a theme for this new week's short-stories; they will all be from English writers, arranged alphabetically by surname. Fittingly, there is link with the last one I read; the Muriel Spark, because there is a Christmas theme.

H.E. Bates seems to have been off the radar for a long time in blighty; I cannot remember exactly when the successful TV version of The Darling Buds of May was on, and his books are scarcely in print, it seems, and like Angus Wilson's, do not seem to be accorded the merit of new editions by Penguin. There was, I suppose, the mention in Withnail and I (dir. Bruce Robinson, 1987), and a Peter Tinniswood-involving Uncle Silas TV-adaptation but his work seems to have slipped from public memory in the last 15-20 years or so. Many other major English writers born in the 1890-1914 era seem to have slipped from view somewhat: L.P. Hartley and Anthony Powell (barring Simon Barnes's regular allusions in The Times) do not have the profile of Waugh or Wodehouse, say.

But in 2009 we have a Capuchin Classics collection of his short stories, spanning the whole of his career; the back refers to Graham Greene's comparison of Bates with Chekhov, considering him the best short story writer of his generation. It is also perhaps his provincialism - refusal to court acceptance in London, or move there - that counts against him for some. And his being perceived as an avuncular ruralist.

Like Angus Wilson, he stands as a significant post-WW2 writer born before WW1 and who does not fit easily into today's packaging of the past, which prefers to believe that there was nothing before rock 'n' roll and the Angry Young Men. Or, nothing between WW2 and Elvis. You get a sense in this story, as in early Wilson, of the curious place that Britain was, after the war but before Macmillanite consumerism had won the day. They are sensitive writers, dissecting the pulse of a nation that was changing, moving towards socialism but not quite. 'A Christmas Song' may be compared with Wilson's story from the same year: 'Christmas Day in the Workhouse', a wartime tale set in a Bureau. In that, the young, highly proficient and refined Thea repulsed by a perceived new vulgarity, which she sees as manifested in architecture and people, as captured in Wilson's sly prose:

'Despite the freezing wind that blew across the dismal meadows, where each month saw less trees and more concrete buildings, the atmosphere in the canteen with its radiators and fluorescent lighting was stiflinf. The white coats of the waitresses were splashed with scraps of food and gravy stains; around their thickly lipsticked mouths, their cheeks and chins shone greasy and sweaty. The young technician who sat opposite to Thea spat fragments of potato as he talked to his girl friend. She pushed aside her plate and decided to leave before the roof of her mouth was completely caked in suet. What a prelude to a Mozart concert! she thought. Nothing in her education had ever allowed her to bridge the gap between the material and the cultural.' (SDD, pp.113-4)

There is something of the unease Losey and Pinter captured in their 1963 film, The Servant (itself an adaptation of a 1948 novel), with Bates emphasising the dissolution of an out-of-touch upper crust in society - though in the fictional Evensford the rug is yet to be definitively pulled from under their feet.

The quietly anguished Clara - or "Good Old Clara!" as she is to the absurd Freddy Williamson - is the central character, who is delicately sketched in comparison to the broadness of her sister, the more social Essie, and the Williamsons: 'The Williamsons were in leather; they were very successful and had a large early Edwardian house with bay-windows and corner cupolas and bathroom windows of stained glass overlooking the river.' (p.136)

Clara dreams hopelessly of Christmas snow which might transform the drab Evensford into a more romantic, or Alpine, European town; the epigraph to this post indicates how she sees herself as distinct from both the unsophisticated, increasingly prominent working-class and the rich, represented by the ghastly Williamsons. She is a decidedly pre-pop culture sort of heroine, not assertive in accepting or rejecting the overtures of Freddy, but just not responding to them. The contrast is provided by the 'shy ardent' young man who cannot recall any of the song he wants to buy from the shop. She takes to him with all of his sensitivity and embarrassment - he clearly gets the emotion of the song he is seeking, in contrast to how the Williamsons raucously respond to her habitual Christmas Eve performances.



The song turns out to be, as she had suspected, a piece by Schubert - 'Standchen' (1828) in particular - and this impresses her, presumably in contrast to the endless jazz dance band songs she has to help people buy. There is a wistful gentility in the untapped, unspoken romance that cannot but remind one of Brief Encounter (dir. David Lean, 1945), a sort of Englishness that has in many senses been crushed by left, right and most of all, by consumerism.

One should not easily pigeonhole Bates, at least on this evidence, as a purveyor of cosy, middle-class consensus; there is a restlessness about conventional class-based society that you find everywhere from the finest work of Innes and Stanshall ('Postcard', 'Sport (The Odd Boy)', 'My Pink Half of the Drainpipe') to Bennett and Potter. Those who are cultured and sensitive are not necessarily going to fit in anywhere, seems to be the message. The function of the Schubert is almost entirely what the Al Bowlly songs are within Dennis Potter's work - incantations that transport the protagonists beyond the humdrum and everyday, or emphasise the melancholy contrast between the ideal and the reality. Wilson's Christmas story actually includes a part where 'Paper Doll' (used also in The Singing Detective, IIRC) is playing, chides Thea and her dreams of escaping from her isolation: 'I'd rather have a paper doll to call my own' the crooner sang, 'than a fickle-minded real life doll.' (SDD, p.125)

Counterpointing the poignant encounters between Clara and the shy ardent young gent are her forced encounters with Freddy Williamson. She is entrapped by this grotesque's persistent advances, which she can only seem to avert by agreeing to attend the yearly ritual that is the Williamson Christmas family party. Her reveries are bound to be broken by this actively reprehensible chap - often referred to as like a dog. His fatuous demand for kisses and attention - 'Come on, let's have one for Christmas' - cannot ultimately be rejected. (p.140) Freddy is rather like one of Angus Wilson's grotesque types, vividly painted in his malignance: 'He smacked at her lips with his heavy, dog-like mouth, pressing her body backwards.' (p.141) He also uses phrases like 'Whizzo'...

Christmas is bound to be appropriated by the Freddys; her cultivated, European dreams are ever at bay. There are clear analogues in 'A Christmas Day at the Workhorse'; Major Tim Prosser for Freddy, Stephanie for the ardent shy young man in terms of oblique romantic longing: 'A few minutes later Stephanie had slipped away, and Thea stood by a window, gazing out on to the wet shiny asphalt paths as though her dreams were reflected in their mirrored surface.' (SDD, p.122)

Underlining the resolution is a quintessentially English sense of doors being shut, of opportunities sadly slipping away: 'She felt the frost crackling under her feet. She grasped at something that was floating away. Leise flehen meine Lieder - Oh! my loved one - how did it go?' The inability to precisely remember the words mirrors her inability to escape the world of the Williamsons and find romance.

8/10

19. Wolf Mankowitz - 'Expresso Bongo' (1960)

'The gold on Bongo was no more real than the white beard on the Father Christmas at Selfridges, yet look how that show runs year after year.'

(Wolf Mankowitz, Make Me An Offer, Expresso Bongo and other stories, Hutchinson Educational / Unicorn, 1961, p.85)

There are interesting contrasts to be drawn with the Sitwell; this is focused on the urban scene that is used as marker of oddity against which people in staid Newborough are judged. The style is hard-boiled, rather than florid; clearly the cosmopolitan Mankowitz draws influences from all over - Damon Runyon, for example - rather than the aristocratic Sitwell, rooted in English culture. As with Sitwell and his criticisms made of society as it was, Mankowitz is well-qualified to cast an acidic eye on life in the metropole, being very much part of it himself.

The concern with money is universal in the delocalised world; everything is a show, in a way closer to the modern free-market than to the drowning Victorian age depicted by Sitwell. Mankowitz writes from a Jewish and London perspective entirely new to this blog; perhaps tangentially related to Harold Pinter, though clearly leaning more towards depicting the actuality of the characters' activity in The Dumb Waiter than capturing menace. He has an interest in low-life types and a keen perception of how urban life and pop culture was developing, placing them in the same lineage as musical theatre and Hollywood - with the depiction of a has-been mogul important at the end. Judy Garland is a motif, and high culture is seen inextricably linked to the popular; the dyspeptic talent impressario Mr Mayer professes to be an opera fan, who hates the new-fangled sounds - yet he knows where the money is and invests in Bongo: 'Yet from this disc lunacy I make money.' (p.77) The mogul's films, clearly of the Cecil B. deMille variety, are reappraised by the young: 'He was so dead that the long-haired cineastes (who hate live film makers) put three of his pre-accountancy-era movies into a National Film Theatre series.' (p.92)

Mankowitz is good in capturing talk, if hardly a Pinter; he captures the bravado very nicely, and the whole effect is as much to satirise as to mythologise the pop life: 'you are great with the teen-age public just so long as you're one of them.' (p.88) He creates the sense of this important new consumer group, the teenagers, who would not have been existed a decade before; the dress-sense in the Italian coffee bar is all string-ties and velvet-collared coats and pony-tails for the girls. (p.76) Coffee and pizza are clearly relatively new imports too, enjoyed by the band and their initial fanbase - also, the manager enjoys one of London's Chinese restaurants. It is very much the same sort of picture as that conveyed in the Daniel Farson-helmed TV documentary of 1960, Living for Kicks, with the Brighton youth constrained, envious, looking to America for the answers. Indeed, Mankowitz uses a similar TV documentary, Teen-age Rebellion, as a means of showing how Bongo Herbert becomes popular: 'The shots of him beating the life out of Mother and Hoxton in the shape of a pair of midget drums had real power.' (p.82) The same page describes how the documentary featured, along with other 'delinquent types', 'a magistrate, a psychiatrist and the governor of a Boys' Remand Home.' (pp.81-2) I cannot recall whether the Farson programme counterpoints the views of the young with the old or not...
http://www.transdiffusion.org/emc/tvheroes/daniel_farson.php

But, those views are perceived as as irrelevant as the treasures uncovered by those combing the sands in 'Low Tide': 'The older generation, with a belly full of wars and post-wars, was too tired from jumping over rising costs and crises to see the worry behind its children's gaiety.' (p.86) Mankowitz is very perceptive on how the older generation - perhaps anyone who did national service and older? - are excluded from this new world. The provinces too, are secondary; reputations are made in 'the Smoke', the capital; 'According to them [booking agents], in the provinces the public didn't watch television or read the newspapers. But the fact of no bookings apart, maybe to let Bongo get lost up North for a few months would be bad business wise.' (p.83) Restrictions are still in place, though, even in London; the 'small-time nude revue off Brewer Street' that the manager attends has a 'tableau vivant' in which, rather absurdly, neither the female artiste nor the horse is permitted to move - by law. The Lord Chamberlain's veto on theatres and other such moves on censorship were still in effect. Ironic perhaps that Cliff Richard stars in the film of Expresso Bongo (1959) - which portrays a cynicism towards censorship as much as towards the pop phenomenon - when ten years later he would be a close ally of Mary Whitehouse in her 'Festival of Light' campaign against filth on television, the stage and in popular culture generally.

The somewhat hypocritical nature of the fanbase is made clear; these are easily manipulated, by a fan-mag which absurdly portrays Bongo as 'giving Mum big play for her golden heart and undying faith' - she is actually more concerned in him becoming a standard breadwinner. Perhaps this is merely intended as a reassurance for the older generation; the teenagers clearly revel in how rebellious Bongo is in the early throes of his success.

I have not yet seen the film of this, but would imagine it would at least be interesting; Val Guest is one of the more durable veterans of British cinema, involved in everything from The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), to The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961; an apparently fine science-fiction film), to Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1974) and surely a nadir in British cinema and culture, Cannon and Ball's The Boys in Blue (1982). Fascinatingly, in view of both how Crompton's series developed into the 1960s, he actually directed a 1947 film entitled Just William's Luck, which I had never heard of before: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040503/ This does not appear to be available on DVD, and I can never recall it having been screened on TV in the last ten years.

The book which contains EB is part of a series of 'Unicorn' hardbacks, with a fairly abstract uniform cover design, with a unicorn at its centre. Being Hutchinson Educational, they are clearly intended for fairly intelligent schoolgoers; other Unicorns included The Red Badge of Courage, Huck Finn, The Day of the Triffids, Doctor Syn and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre - which certainly reflect a culture in the early-60s that encouraged the questioning of authority, tying into what was going on in pop culture. My parents' edition is ex-library, with due-to-return dates of 26 SEP 1967 and 23 FEB 1972; it is from Bramhall County Grammar School, I gather in or around Stockport, where my parents lived and taught from about 1974-8 (though not at this school). Paul Morley went to a very similar grammar-school, Stockport GS itself (?), around this time; interesting to consider whether he might have read this in the late sixties - I need to read his superb memoir Nothing again soon.

It is very much a moot point whether Mankowitz glamourises his first-person narrator, who is an archetypal pop svengali - though more a manager than a producer. There is an offhand moment of Spector unpleasantness, dished out to his female secretary with singing aspirations which is not editorially commented upon. However, perhaps his fate, outwitted by a Bongo who is clearly intent upon donning the lucrative, though less vital, mantle of the 'all-round entertainer', ending up with nothing is seen as just desserts in his world. What lingers perhaps more in the mind is how he promotes the first record in terms bound to capture a voracious youth: 'Hate him or hug him, Bongo has something that's new, a swaying calypso beat woven around a rock foundatio. Here it is, kids. Bongo, you beasts.' (p.79)

'In profit.
I love those words.'
(p.78)

Mankowitz touches on how important this was becoming; however restrained capitalism was in comparison to the last thirty years we have witnessed, the old drives, suppressed for so long, were returning.* The essential vitality offered by the narrator and by Bongo would clearly have been difficult to resist for the young. The Tom-Tom club's 'yokels from Elephant and Castle', and Bongo with his 'hoarse Hoxton voice' are a deft portrait of young Londoners who have simply had enough of the very limited world offered by the older generation at this stage. Yes, one will get more depth in terms of interpreting language, mores and behaviour by reading the contemporaneous works of Harold Pinter or Angus Wilson, but this is a very prescient early development of the pop narrative - admittedly one that has since been tiresomely overused in films and literature over the last fifty years. Whilst the utter vitality and necessity of pop culture must be stressed, most would acknowledge that it held greater power when in opposition to an established order with values, rather than in league with a capitalism without values - as has been the case since 1984 and the crucial victories of Thatcherism.**


* Martin J. Wiener, in English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (1981) records the gradual retreat of the British from the sort of urban capitalism, industry and enterprise that had led to Empire and the growth of cities. He fixes upon this as the high watermark of commerce: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Exhibition - and the retreat, whether into ruralist, religious or socialist values is more marked from this point. He uses examples from Dickens and Hardy, as well as the more expected examples of Chesterton, Wilde and Morris, to show how the culture recoiled from what it had done.
Wiener's was an important book in the establishment of Thatcher's monetarist reforms, providing ballast for the case to be made on changing the culture; a copy was distributed to every cabinet member when it was published.

** The articulate cellist Zoe Martlew made the point on Newsnight Review last night (17/04/09) that from 1950-75 we had a funding of classical music youth orchestras which actually compared with the rest of the world - our Local Authority Music Services. This meant free access to tuition and instruments. The Education Reforms of the Tories They were discussing the excellent Venezuelan policy of giving all children (including the poor) a music instrument and subsidising lessons, bringing them into orchestras - resulting in the Sounds Venezuela concerts under review. Portillo, generally making fatuous points on the other topics, made the obvious but pertinent observation that it is 'culturally impossible' for people to be raised in this country by classical music. The urgency, enthusiasm, the training to listen could not be achieved in our current culture, where, as he said, disadvantaged people have no belief in bettering themselves through an artistic education. This is a human right in Socialist Venezuela, and should be everywhere, including Britain. As it stands, classical music is branded as elite; the politicians and educationalists will have nothing to do with it. It is left as the preserve of the pushy, well-to-do middle-classes, who can afford to pay for private tuition; yet one more aspect of our class divided society. Like Martlew, Goldie knows what should be done; like with the youth centres, subsidise; people won't be raised in any other way. And popular music itself will be richer for the interaction and antagonism with the classical. We know it works, it has before.



7/10