D.A.N. Jones

‘We are not concerned with the very poor,’ wrote E.M. Forster, with heavy irony. ‘They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.’ He was almost thirty when he wrote this, thinking about the unthinkable, in Howards End. Some fifteen years later he met (and apparently fell in love with) Police Constable Harry Daley, twenty years his junior. Forster’s ironic paragraph of 1910 had continued: ‘The story deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend that they are gentlefolk.’ He was introducing an imagined character, Leonard Bast, who ‘stood at the extreme verge of gentility. He was not in the Abyss, but he could see it, and at times people whom he knew had dropped in, and counted no more’: therefore, the unlucky Bast ‘was obliged to assert gentility, lest he slipped into the Abyss where nothing counts’. Blundering through the ironies, we gather that the Abyss means the world of the working class, the world of most people, and that Forster was suggesting that it was impossible in 1910 for gentlefolk and novelists to connect with that large world – ‘that huge body of individuals that generally goes by the name of the People’, as Hazlitt put it. For some reason Forster was unable (or so he posed) to connect with anyone ‘lower’ than Leonard Bast, low-class, anxious for promotion, fearful that he might drop into the Abyss. It may have come as a relief from all these ironies when Forster connected with PC Daley in the Twenties – for Daley was a working-class man, quite as cultivated and artistic as Leonard Bast, but not at all anxious for promotion, quite happy with the Abyss, where all the good-looking people are. Daley was not a capitalist or a monetarist (nor, of course, a racist or a sexist): he was a looksist.’

Let us be sexist. The Progress of Love is a woman’s book, particularly interesting to men who want to know what women think of them and know about them. Alice Munro is a 56-year-old Canadian who has been married twice: she is particularly concerned with the knowingness derived from broken relationships. One of the 11 skilful stories in this book (her sixth collection) is called ‘Lichen’ – a fungoid growth or eruption used as an image for the progress of love. A civil servant called David, his grey hair dyed, has come to visit his ex-wife, Stella: he brings with him his new partner, Catherine, but he is already sick of her and obsessed with a third woman, the pleasingly trollopy Dina. David accompanies Stella on a visit to her aged father in the Balm of Gilead home. As they leave, he thinks that this troll-like woman, to whom he was married for 21 years, knows him too well: ‘He could never feel any lightness, any secret and victorious expansion with a woman who knew so much. She was bloated with all she knew.’ Nevertheless, he embraces Stella in the hospital corridor – and, just then, a pretty nurse passes, pushing a trolley and calling: ‘Juice time. Orange. Grape.’ David feels a very slight discomfort at being seen by such a young and pretty girl in the embrace of Stella. It is not an important feeling – ‘It simply brushed him and passed’ – but Stella knows about it. She says:’

These tales of mob and gang will be appreciated by man and boy, but especially by those of us who have survived fifty-odd years of life in Britain. Our day-school years in the Thirties were much influenced by the public school system, expressed in schoolmasters’ aspirations and schoolboys’ comics. Simon Raven’s notorious devotion to that system began when he was only a seven-year-old comic reader, as he admits in The Old School, a loving but mordant survey of the dormitory schools: he went on avidly to Charterhouse and he fancies other men will envy or scorn that experience, as he himself scorns or envies men from rival dormitories. Such is the gang spirit. Then, in our teens or twenties, we entered the mob, post-war conscripts in the years of National Service: here the public schoolboys came into their own, hogging the Queen’s Commission and acquiring conscript valets. Trevor Royle, a serious young Scot, describes ‘the National Service Experience, 1945-63’ in his worthy book, The Best Years of Their Lives: he feels sorry that he was too young to meet this challenge himself.

David Robert Jones, alias David Bowie, is now in his 40th year. His creepy, chilling phrases pop out of pub juke-boxes, and extracts from his movies catch the eye on pub videos, whether he is embracing a Chinese girl or being executed by Japanese soldiers; his image appears in the Sunday-paper magazines, artistically displayed in sundry poses. As actor, mime, musician and crowd-poet, he has chanted his eerie music and frightening stories in thronged arenas; he has strutted in high boots, wearing strange masks. This is what I call ‘crowd-poetry’, not mere words. He can make up catchy tunes to go with his half-heard words and he can blow them or sing them while he shows off his costumed body. He is more like the old Athenian crowd-poets whom Aristotle praised for their command of spectacle and song, pity and terror. ‘Aeschylus tragical on stilts,’ sighed Aldous Huxley. ‘Bawling sublimities through a tortured mouth-hole!’

When Heinrich Böll died, last year, we had come to respect him as a Roman Catholic pacifist, a Nobel Prizeman speaking measured words to young idealists. We may have forgotten the work of his youth, the two post-war novels based on his experience of service with the German Army in Russia. The 22 stories in The Casualty were written in the immediately post-war period, 1946 to 1952, so that they are ‘old’ stories, but satisfyingly youthful, physically aware of particulars, not seeking generalisations, hot-tempered, desperate and ashamed.