John Sutherland

Glowacki’s novel makes trouble for itself. The work is translated – one of the two ways in which, notoriously, a British book can be guaranteed to lose money (the other sure thing is poetry). Give us this day was originally published in 1981, and was evidently completed before December and Jaruzelski’s imposition of martial law. Its saga of the uprising in the Gdansk Lenin shipyard ends with a cloudy optimism (‘It looks as if it’ll be all right after all’) which unforeseen events, not least the author’s subsequent exile, have sadly contradicted. Give us this day is presented as the historical witness of a hull-welder like Boxer in Animal Farm: dim to the verge of half-wittedness but – ultimately – the salt of the Polish earth. English readers will shrink from the biceps-flexing opening sentences: ‘Can’t complain. Built like an ox, I am. Productive. Efficient member of the workforce.’ Productive and efficient the steel-driving hero may be. Articulate narrator he is not. His solidity makes a point about Solidarity. His humble reflections on the upheaval around him may even be eloquent in his native Polish. But working-class vernacular must vie with poetry in making things awkward for translators. The hero, for instance, identifies the world around him by homely menagerie nicknames: his workmates are Sloniu the Elephant, Roundy, Swarthy, Foureyes, Skinny, Miskia the Bear, etc. Walesa (never named) is ‘walrus face’. One can see the slang equivalences which the translator (Konrad Brodzinski) is aiming at. But by the wildest stretch of the imagination, one can’t hear an assembly-line worker at Cowley or Dagenham fondly referring to his leader as, say, Moss the bullmoose. And it doesn’t help that Glowacki’s workers have such well-soaped mouths. I won’t believe that the great liberation at Gdansk was achieved without a single expletive, or any harder retort by the foiled management than: ‘Back to work, revisionist scum.’–

Publishing History has something of a Balkan status in this country’s universities. Bibliography, sociology, economic history periodically lay claim to it: none is prepared to grant it the dignity of a subject or area of study in its own right. In the past few years there were signs that publishing history might form itself into something coherent. There was the foundation of the learned journal, Publishing History, in 1977. Its publishers, Chadwyck Healey, embarked on a laudable, if sisyphean, programme of microfilming whole sets of publishers’ records. Meanwhile libraries – notably that of the University of Reading – systematically acquired and sorted publishers’ archives. But we still lack anything comparable to the German Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens. Nor does Britain have an equivalent to John Tebbel’s multivolume history of American publishing. The student of the subject in this country (particularly if he is interested in contemporary matters) will find himself dredging through the pages of more or less hagiographic ‘house histories’ and the nuts-and-bolts trade material to be found in the weekly columns of the Bookseller. Direct approaches to publishers and agents (though some are helpful) are commonly turned away. And, one suspects, many British publishers have simply junked their dead files.

The short story emerged as a major form in the 19th century, a by-product of the great Victorian periodical boom. Some years ago a pessimistic literary diagnosis assumed it would wither with its host – the non-specialist, general-interest magazine. Like the long poem, the short story would become a superseded species. But recently, things have boomed again. New careers (McEwan, Mac Laverty, Mars-Jones) have been founded on the short story. Other established writers have resourcefully played a two-handed game, writing full-length and short fiction turn and turn about. A learned journal has even been set up learnedly to study the form.

With Wise Virgin, A.N. Wilson continues his bleak investigation of trauma. The Healing Art (his most acclaimed novel so far) scrutinised human sensibility under the sentence of terminal cancer. Wise Virgin takes the life term and solitary confinement of bereaved blindness. It’s played out with Wilson’s customary geometric neatness of design. Giles Fox, as the novel’s retrospect finds him, was once a fulfilled man – someone who could have represented the happy ending of some other story. He is a librarian and a scholar (his ‘period’ is ‘somewhere between 1213 and 1215’), and the best efforts of his intellectual maturity have been happily applied to editing a Medieval text, the ‘Tretis of Love Hevenliche’, a work eventually destined for the dusty glory of Early English Texts Society publication. It’s not my period, but despite some convincing quotation and an authenticating footnote, this work by ‘Robert of St Victor’ appears to be invented. (Readers of Wilson’s earlier novels will expect highly specialised pockets of expertise on church and university matters.) The treatise celebrates the anchoretic life: or the wisdom of virginity as the path to true marriage with Christ. For all his obsessed attention to his text, Fox had lived the life of its antitype. He was worldly, carnal and atheistic. Happily married, he was prone to flippancy about the ‘much over-rated joiner’s son’. Then, in the way of Wilson’s world, there fell on him a rain of shattering blows. His wife died in childbirth with her baby. He went blind. His second wife, a Moorfields nurse, was run down and killed by a hit-and-run driver (the miseries in Wilson’s narratives are invariably the acts of a God who may perhaps just be an insurance company fiction). Giles remained, a sightless scholar blundering uselessly in his library. As we encounter him, he is attended by two virgins: his luscious teenage daughter Tibba and his dowdy amanuensis, Miss Agar (PhD, failed). With all this wretchedness stacked behind it, the novel opens: ‘ “Marry me,” said Louise Agar.’ Will he?

David Storey’s new novel begins with a brief prelude reminiscent of The Rainbow’s, tracing the historical mutations of a locality from its natural to its urban (here 1930s) condition. The theme of the novel has other evident similarities with Sons and Lovers. Both deal with the emergence of artistic talent from working-class fetters. But in the way that he has chosen to tell A Prodigal Child, Storey defies Lawrentian precedent. The novel suggests, rather, that he is aiming to synthesise his play and novel-writing practices. The marrow of the work is in its dialogue – a dialogue which is largely constrained by the terse naturalism of Yorkshire dialect or the limitations of refined middle-class speech.