The man who stood up to Orwell
Norman Collins and the middlebrow panorama of capital life
Norman Collins (1907–82) bestrode the media landscape of his time in a way that might seem rather startling to some of his modern descendants. A bestselling novelist – his debut, Penang Appointment, was published as early as 1934 – he served, successively, as assistant managing director of the left-wing publishers Victor Gollancz, a BBC radio talks producer, director of the Light Programme, an immensely successful controller of BBC television (where, between 1947 and 1950, he presided over a twenty-fold increase in licence holders), a lobbyist for commercial broadcasting and, finally, deputy chairman of ATV. Only Melvyn Bragg, perhaps, among his twenty-first-century epigoni, boasts the same degree of switched-on and thoroughly trans-medial clout.
If the parallels with Lord Bragg can seem faintly eerie, Collins’s persistent shadowing of George Orwell’s career during the 1930s and 40s looks eerier still. As the Gollancz employee charged with seeing Orwell’s London novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) through the press, Collins was one of the few people who can be said to have taken on Orwell in a quarrel and emerged his moral superior. The alarm having been sounded by Gollancz’s press agents, it was Collins’s task to inform Orwell's agent, Leonard Moore, that the supposedly spoof advertising posters strewn throughout the text were more or less drawn from the life. Orwell, forced to make changes, pronounced the book “ruined”. Collins, as his tactful letter to Moore made clear (“Please don’t regard even this as a sign of messy or slipshod procedures on our part. It is simply that the author has evidently been too close to the work”), was only doing his job.
Keep the Aspidistra Flying sold in the low thousands and earned its author £100. Nine years later, Collins published his own “London novel”, London Belongs to Me (1945), which shifted some 880,000 copies. Four years before this, both men had joined the BBC, Collins swiftly rising through the ranks to become Head of Empire Talks, while his subordinate languished in the Eastern Service before escaping to a more congenial billet as literary editor of Tribune. The ill feeling left over from the Gollancz days burned on, and Peter Davison, the editor of Orwell: The complete works prints several notably terse memoranda that buzzed back and forth along the corridors of Broadcasting House in the period 1941–3. London Belongs to Me appeared in the same year as Animal Farm, and if Orwell received the cachet it was Collins who took the cash.
700 pages long, dense, compendious, and almost heroically diffuse, London Belongs to Me represents the high-water mark of what might be called the middlebrow panorama of capital life: one of those novels in which the incidental detail is heaped on with a trowel and even a visit to the funfair unleashes a page of technical information about the electric cranes and What the Butler Saw machines on display. Its most obvious debts are to J. B. Priestley’s no less compendious Angel Pavement (1930) and, to a slightly lesser extent, Patrick Hamilton’s trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky (1929–35), but some of the echoes go back even further, to the kind of lodging-house reportage pioneered by George R. Sims’s Memoirs of a Landlady (1916). At the same time, Collins’s work prefigures later variations such as Monica Dickens’s The Heart of London (1961) and in particular R. F. Delderfield’s The Avenue Goes to War (1964), whose “people’s war” theme it shares. There is even a German spy, Dr Otto Hapfel, who, while masquerading as a research student, files punctilious reports to his superiors in Berlin about the Englishman’s love of cricket and his reluctance to stand up in cinemas when the National Anthem is played.
As in many another London panorama, the action in London Belongs to Me takes place, by and large, at a single address – 10 Dulcimer Street, Kennington, SE. Here, first assembled on December 23, 1938, can be found Mrs Vizzard, the establishment’s vigilant and exacting landlady, the retired clerk Mr Josser and his wife (with and without their daughter Doris), the widowed Mrs Boon and her car mechanic son Percy, the esurient tinned-food hoarder and tea-brewer Mr Puddy, and an elderly woman named Connie, nightly ornament of a cloakroom in a West End speakeasy. Soon swollen to nine by the arrival of Mr Squales, a nest-feathering medium who occupies the back basement, Dulcimer Street’s human cargo is thereafter prey to dispersal and decline. Rather like Hamilton’s Craven House (1926), another novel to which it bears certain resemblances, London Belongs to Me ends in diaspora. The premises may endure, but two years down the road the people are most of them gone.
What is this library favourite from the year of VE Day and the Attlee landslide actually about? Again like many another London panorama, its gaze is at once limitless and extraordinarily restricted. It is about everything – which is to say that its cast are busy marrying, dying, making speeches at the “South London Parliament”, whose debates mirror the progress of the war, creating life and on one occasion snuffing it out – and nothing. It is about London, of course – and the geographical coverage extends from Mayfair to the City – and yet the organism that stretches out on all sides beyond Dulcimer Street is curiously undifferentiated. So, too, are the people, who for all their generational divisions – Doris and Percy are interesting specimens of restless, machine-age youth – talk in the same way, think many of the same thoughts and, in social situations, operate as a kind of catch-phrasing chorus. They are sure they look a perfect fright. They have met his (or her) type before. They insist that visitors must take them as they find them. Diffidently, but with a certain affairé pride, they banter the signature remarks of the day back and forth. “Where was Moses?”, Mr Josser wonders at one point when the lights fail.
It is one of the novel’s most authentic moments, a perfect example of how people really talked to each other in 1939. The answer, which nobody gives, but which I can remember my father (b1921) reciting a dozen times, is “In the dark”. All this makes London Belongs to Me, with its cinema fantasies, its minutely itemized car fleets, its farewell parties in EC2, very true to life, without perhaps being true to any of the individual existences fugitively at large in it. Gas-ring-haunting, baked-bean-swilling Mr Puddy, who remembers even his late wife only for her culinary skills, is a case in point. Mr Puddy’s distinguishing marks are his colossal appetite and his adenoidal vocal tones (“If the drains are still rudding – if it isn’t dodal war by then” etc). The reader knows that this cannot go on for ever, that these hopeful stake-outs in the grocery queue can’t be indefinitely sustained, that there will come a moment when Mr Puddy must quit his gas ring, his tin-opener and his comfy nightwatchman’s basement and perform some heroic act. And yet when he pulls an injured fireman from the flames during an air raid (while returning to rescue the packet of ham booked for his supper) the result is oddly unsatisfactory, as if by jumping out of his stereotype for a moment he has somehow jumped back into it, merely confirming our expectations of him.
Collins’s other great theme, perhaps, is the ability of the human spirit to prosper beneath a topsoil of washed-out mornings, minor privations and the rent being due. Mrs Vizzard has her eye on hard-up, orotund Mr Squales, but her hopes are crushed by his flight, shortly before the wedding, into the arms of a rival admirer – and a breach-of-promise suit. The Jossers pine for a country cottage. Mrs Boon’s dreams are vicarious, bound up in her slinking son. Other hopes are more elemental. Mr Puddy merely wants to accumulate enough provisions to see out the war (“6 tins condensed milk, 8lb sugar, 3 packets Quaker Oats, 2 marmalade” etc). Connie’s only thought, in a world characterized by last warnings, police raids and, on one occasion, a two-week prison stretch, is to survive. Sadly this proves finally beyond her.
In his forgivably partial introduction, Ed Glinert maintains that one of Collins’s strengths is his firm hand with slapstick. He notes in particular a scene in which Mr Puddy’s home-made provisions shelf collapses into matchwood, sending a stream of tinned goods cascading down the stairs and upending Mr Squales on to the carpet (“What the hell happened there?” “You drod on a sabbod . . . . A Sailor Slice”). It could be argued, though, that Collins’s real talent is for incidental dialogue, tangles of smart-alecky call and response whose cumulative effect somehow transcends the minimalist nonchalance of their raw material. There is a wonderful piece of police procedural in which two bored-sounding plain clothes men extract vital pieces of information from a murder suspect without his ever realizing that he is giving himself away. In an early scene, Percy Boon tries to chat up the blonde at the funfair change counter: “I noticed you as soon as I came in”, he said.
“I dreamed about you last night,” the girl told him.
He grinned politely.
“Ever have any time off?” he asked.
The girl shook her head.
“No, I go straight on. All day and all night.”
“What’s your name?” Percy asked.
“Oh, call me Mrs Simpson,” she replied.
“Like to come out some time?”
“Yes, but not with you.”
“Fond of dancing?”
“Never heard of it.”
And so unyieldingly on, in a mosaic of repartee that is practically Firbankian in its rococo patterning, for another half-page.
In a roundabout way, London Belongs to Me answers a question that has always hung over urban English novels of the 1930s and 40s: their lack of susceptibility to American influence. This, after all, was the age of classic American naturalism, of Dreiser, Farrell and Steinbeck, of grim biological imperatives, suicides in Bowery flop-houses and remorseless journeys towards the electric chair. We know that the Priestley–Hamilton–Collins school of metropolitan panorama was aware of these transatlantic determinists to the extent of occasionally nodding to them (Bob, the literary-minded barman in Hamilton’s The Midnight Bell, has ambitions to write a novel that “would put [him] in a class with Hugo, Tolstoy and Dreiser”). If nothing else, Collins demonstrates the absolute impossibility of producing the English equivalent of, say, James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy here in a world of Lyons cafés, social security and the ceremonious routines of the South London Parliament. As it happens, London Belongs to Me has one violent death (the funfair blonde, whom Percy pushes out of a stolen car) and one unexplained drowning, a son missing in action, a trial scene and a death sentence later commuted to life imprisonment. None of Percy’s mental anguish, though, quite dispels the faint air of cosiness that hangs over the proceedings. Collins is not a sentimentalist, but nor is he a realist, and the stagecraft that novels of this type require quite often descends into stage management. It is the same (up to a point) with Hamilton’s “Komic Kapitals”, or with Angel Pavement, where the dissatisfactions of Turgis, the pimply clerk brooding over his gas fire, or Mr Smeeth, the desiccated accountant worrying about his finances, are always ripe to be borne away on a tide of sub-Dickensian comedy.
To anyone brought up on the London cosmopolitanism of Zadie Smith or Hanif Kureishi, London Belongs to Me may seem less a novel than a piece of dramatized sociology, or even an anthropological study. Like an old-fashioned situation comedy, it is predicated on a shared vernacular, geographical precision, a social uniformity that is only reinforced by the faint variations up and down, and a series of assumptions about human behaviour that the intervening sixty years have called sharply into question. Its most distinctive, and simultaneously its most attractive feature is its communality, its nervous protocols, its endless politenesses, its inches given and received, the surface frostiness that nearly always dissolves into inner warmth. It isn’t in the least surprising to discover that Collins’s chief legacy to the Light Programme was the commissioning of Woman’s Hour and Dick Barton Special Agent. Both as a writer, and in his role as one of broadcasting’s first hauts fonctionnaires, he clearly envisaged popular art as a kind of societal glue, designed to bring people together rather than to drive them apart. But of all the assumptions about human behaviour put under the microscope in the sixty years since London Belongs to Me, the idea that popular culture is a unifying rather than a divisive force is the most questionable of all.
Norman Collins
LONDON BELONGS TO ME
738pp. Penguin. Paperback, £10.99.
978 0 14 144233 4
D. J. Taylor’s book Bright Young People: The rise and fall of a generation 1918–1940 was published in 2007. A new novel, Ask Alice, is published this month.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment