Chris Beckett's Blog

In a certain country the people are divided by law into just three classes: the Owners, the Experts and the Workers, the precise boundaries between them being set down in the relevant statutes. At one point the Owners, who were at that time basically warlords and protection racketeers, were in charge of everything. However, as time went on, the Experts – merchants and what we might now call professional people- grew more influential until the Owners deemed it advisable to allow them a share in the running of things. There had in fact always been a few Experts co-opted into the Owning class in return for services rendered, but now they as a class were granted a say – and their very own house of Parliament alongside the House of Owners. And in due course both classes, Owners and Experts, became known collectively as gentlefolk – as opposed to the rough folk, who were the Workers.

The Workers were excluded from this new dispensation, but since they were considerably more numerous than the other two classes put together, it wasn’t difficult to argue that this was contrary to natural justice. And eventually it was judged prudent to grant the Worker class also a modest say in the running of things, if only to forestall rebellion. The way this was arranged in this particular country – other countries achieved the same sort of thing in various more complicated ways – was to create a third house of parliament, so that each class was now represented by its own house: the House of Owners, the House of Experts and the House of Workers. The rule was that, to make a new law or elect a prime minister, at least two of those three houses must agree to it.

For some time, the Owners and the Experts continued in practice to run things, because they were now used to working together. The boundaries between the two had in any case become blurred, for the less wealthy children of Owners would often study for professions and so move from the Owning to the Expert class, while the most successful Experts would often accumulate sufficient wealth to join the Owners’ ranks. Indeed so often had the latter happened that the descendants of warlords and protection racketeers had ceased to form the backbone of the Owning class, and it now predominantly consisted of business magnates risen from the Expert class, and the wealthy descendants of such magnates.

But the boundary between Experts and Workers was also blurred. There were many in the Expert class who had risen from the Workers (which you could do either by obtaining certain prescribed qualifications, or by achieving a level of material wealth deemed by the law to demonstrate sufficient business acumen). And there were many in the Expert class too who resented the wealth and standing of the Owners, for the latter were still disproportionately powerful. After all, Owners were far less numerous than the Experts and often had no special expertise of any kind, yet they still had their own house of parliament equal in power and status to the other houses.

These disgruntled members of the Expert class began to find common cause with the Workers, and they called themselves ‘progressives’, by which they meant that, in alliance with the Workers, they would bring about progress towards a fairer future. So successful was this movement, in fact, that it sometimes came about that a ‘progressive’ majority in both the Expert and Worker houses was able to drive through changes and chose prime ministers against the wishes of the Owners.

Naturally enough, many Owners didn’t like this and, since they had considerable resources at their disposal, including ownership of almost all of the country’s newspapers and television stations, they set about doing something about it. And their strategy was to drive a wedge between the Expert and Worker classes.

This actually wasn’t difficult because, once you moved away from the boundary between those two classes, they didn’t have a great deal in common. Even the ‘progressive’ element of the Expert class, who were notionally allied with the Workers, did in fact rather look down on them, seeing them as ignorant, and itself as enlightened, whether as a result of superior ability, superior education or both. This element tended to assume that it should lead the whole ‘progressive’ movement, and that the Workers, if they had any sense, should simply follow. Since many Workers resented this assumption, it wasn’t hard for the Owners to pursuade them that the Experts really didn’t have their interests at heart (not least because there really was some truth in it), and that they should form an alliance with the Owners instead.

When this happened, the ‘progressive’ element of the Expert classes felt betrayed by the Workers, and so came to despise them even more, accusing them of being so ignorant that they voted against their own interests and refused to be guided by reason. (Although some might argue that it was actually quite canny of the Workers not to let themselves be taken for granted). Some progressive members of the Expert class even went as far as to argue that the Workers shouldn’t be allowed to vote on matters that they weren’t competent to understand.

But here the ‘progressives’ themselves, in their disappointment, were being irrational, for they lacked both the numbers and the resources to govern alone.

See also: ‘Trust’

Back in my social work days, I was often involved in the placement of children in foster-homes who were from abusive, neglectful or otherwise messed-up backgrounds. Such children are often difficult to look after: closed off, self-destuctive, prone to challenging behaviours. If you didn’t know better, you might think that all their carers had to do was to provide whatever was missing from their own families -love, stability, safety, boundaries- and those children would cease to be sad and difficult, just as a hungry person ceases to be hungry when given food. But in fact closed off and challenging children tend to remain so for many years and few, if any, completely get over early traumas.

I have some personal experience to draw on as well as professional. My own childhood was nothing like as bad as many I encountered in my professional life, but it was not a very happy one all the same, and I often felt profoundly alone and unseen. I am in my late sixties now. I have many kind, warm friends, a lovely wife, grownup children and small grandchildren who I love and who love me – all things that once seemed frighteningly beyond my reach – yet I still often feel myself inside to be that lonely, isolated child. My subjective experience, a lot of the time, is that I still lack things that I do objectively possess. In fact, you could almost call this my resting state, the place I end up if I don’t do something to avoid it.

I read somewhere about a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps who would sometimes burst into tears when presented with a meal. No amount of food could take away the memory of starving.

One thing that has helped me to think about this is a story by Philip K. Dick. His own childhood was unhappy, and he had many problems in his adult life, including drug addiction and an inability to sustain relationships with women. The story is called ‘I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon’ (though it was originally published under the equally appropriate title of ‘Frozen Journey’), and it’s sufficiently important to me that I once wrote a whole 20,000-word dissertation on it for an MA in English Studies.

The story is about a man called Victor Kemmings who is one of the passengers being carried in cryogenic suspension in coffin-like boxes on a ten-year journey to a new planet. When the journey is underway, the starship, which is very intelligent, realises that, due to some malfunction in the cryonic storage system, Victor is not completely unconscious. There’s no air in the ship, though, so he must stay inside his box for ten years, with nothing to do and no one to talk to except the ship itself.

The ship can see that, unless something is done about this, Victor will be completely insane by the time they reach their destination, so it hits on the idea of drawing on his own memories: it will fill up his time by getting him to relive his past. But when the ship tries this, all that comes up for Victor are episodes full of loneliness and shame. (Small children who are isolated, and have no one to help them understand their own experience, have no recourse but to fall back on their own pre-rational way of explaining things, and often imagine themselves to be responsible for all sorts of bad things – the story evokes this very vividly.) Memories from Victor’s adult life are also full of fear and insecurity: houses that crumble, relationships that fall apart, treasured possessions that turn out not to be real…

Realising that memories aren’t going to help, the ship comes up with another idea. Instead of getting Victor to inhabit his past, it will get him to live out his future arrival on the destination planet. This- sort of- works, but only up to a point. Victor does imagine arriving on the planet, emerging from the ship, making a start on his life there, but pretty soon he starts to see through the illusion, and then he’s alone on the ship once again. However the ship is out of ideas now, so all it can do is keep replaying Victor’s arrival over and over, going back to the beginning each time Victor starts to become aware of the illusion. It’s not ideal, but it prevents him from completely losing his mind.

When the ship finally reaches his destination, Victor is greeted by his ex-wife, who the ship has contacted, and who it seems is willing to give their relationship another go. They go to a hotel, they make a start on a new life, but almost immediately Victor begins to have doubts. He’s been through this scenario so many thousands of times, and it’s always turned out to be an illusion. He simply can’t believe that this time he really has arrived.

That’s the story. But you can find the same theme in pretty much everything Dick wrote: anxieties about whether what appears to be real is real in fact, and how you tell the real from the fake – the androids and artificial animals in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the drug-induced delusions of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, the precious but possibly inauthentic artifacts in The Man in the High Castle, the idea, found in so many of his books, that this entire world is in fact a delusion, a kind of malevolent trick. And you can see it in his own life too. Dick was married five times, and talked about the way that, in every relationship, his partner seemed at first to be the loving mother he had always longed for, and ended up turning into the scary, distant mother he actually had.

Constantly feeling that what you have isn’t real can lead to a very unstable life -and a lot of hurt for other people- as your inclination is to abandon what you’ve already found and search obsessively for something better. The only way out of the cycle is to learn to live with your doubts, and stop picking and poking away at your life as Victor Kemmings does, searching for the flaws that will make it fall apart. This can be very hard work if you have to do it day in day out. It also has its own drawbacks, since, if you disregard all your own doubts, you may settle too easily for something that really isn’t the best that you could do. So you have to try to distinguish different kinds of doubt, all of which may seem subjectively to be equally real.

Although this is particularly hard for people with very traumatic episodes in their past, I’m guessing that, to some extent at least, it’s a challenge for almost everyone.

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

One of my weaknesses as a writer is that I have a tendency, which I constantly have to fight, to spell out things that readers could fill in for themselves. This comes from a fear of not being understood. (This fear originates in childhood and probably has a great deal to do with why I write at all). Of course readers do not always latch on to what I mean to say, which feeds into that fear, but this is inevitable. Authors can’t control what readers take from their books, just as we can’t control what other people make of us in real life.

But the second part of this quote -it comes from a book I’ve never read- is also interesting. You can omit things which you know, and the reader will still sense their presence, but if you omit things you don’t know this makes ‘hollow places’ in your writing.

The way I have always put this is that a reader does not need to be shown everything in order for the fictional world to come alive for her, but she does need to feel that the story-teller understands the fictional world, and could answer the questions that are left unanswered. Otherwise there really is a feeling of hollowness. The very best stories never feel hollow in that way (of the books I’ve read recently, Hangover Square is, for me, a good example). A lot of good stories are flawed but not ruined by hollownesses (A Hair Divides falls into that category). Some stories feel to me so hollow as to be not worth reading.

Another mid-century British writer recommended to me by my late friend Eric Brown (see previous post) is Claude Houghton. I would guess he is even less well-known these days than Patrick Hamilton, since he never was as successful, most of his large output is no longer in print, and the few books that are still in print are only so because they’ve been reprinted by Valancourt Books, a company which specialises in bringing forgotten books back from obscurity. I’ve read three of these books now: I am Jonathan Scrivener, This was Ivor Trent, and A Hair Divides.

Ivor Trent and Jonathan Scrivener are in many ways very similar. Both are set between the two world wars. Both have an eponymous character who is not present at all for most of the novel. Both have a main viewpoint character who is seeking to learn more about this charismatic absent figure, and does so through a series of interactions with the friends, lovers and acquaintances of the missing character. Both too deal with the idea of a superior human being, who perhaps offers some hope in a world that seems to have lost any sense of direction. Shades of the Nietzchean superman? They are both engaging reads, and Ivor Trent in particular left a particular dream-like flavour in my mind that stayed with me, though (as with all dream-like flavours), I would be hard pressed to say what it was. None of the characters was very likeable, though, and they and their stories did not stay with me.

A Hair Divides I think is a fine book.

The main protagonist is a young writer called Rutherford, who at the beginning of the book is trying to make his way in London in the years before World War I. He is rather aloof and judgy, and seems to have only superficial and utilitarian relationships with others. He despises his father and older brother, from whom he is estranged, for being in business, but at the same time longs for their approval.

Rutherford meets a man called Feversham, who is charming, lively and a very talented artist though he has not committed himself yet to art as a career, and similarly has not committed himself to one place but travels the world. Unlike Rutherford he is not judgy, and not an intellectual snob. He brings out the best in people he talks to, and is interested in all areas of life and not just (like Rutherford) the arts. He is another of Houghton’s superior humans, in a way, but also possesses some of the qualities of Patrick Hamilton’s decent competent people (see previous post), while Rutherford is in some ways one of Hamilton’s status-conscious overgrown schoolboys.

Through Feversham, Rutherford meets an extremely beautiful, cultured and intelligent woman called Sondra. (These exceptionally clever, exceptionally beautiful women are a Houghton type, featuring in all three of the Houghton books I’ve read. There are no exceptionally clever women who are not also exceptionally beautiful.) Rutherford spends time with the two of them on a number of occasions, but can’t work out if they are lovers or just friends. He is very attracted to Sondra, who is different from all the women he’s known so far, and he is very jealous of Feversham, to the point of hatred, because Feversham is manifestly a better man than him in every way, and Rutherford is driven by a need to be one of the superior people. (Or one of the cool kids, as a schoolboy might say.)

Feversham shows Rutherford a play he has just written, and asks him for advice. Rutherford sees straight away that it is very good, but he thinks he sees a way of advancing his own career: if he tells Feversham the play is seriously flawed and offers to help him rework it, he might be able to get credited as co-author. Feversham takes this bait, but eventually they fall out when Rutherford is so critical that Feversham says that he might as well proceed with the play as written and see where that gets him, and Rutherford accuses him of wasting his valuable time. Their falling out, and Rutherford’s hatred for Feversham, is a matter of public knowledge among the people Rutherford knows.

They meet again unexpectedly. Feversham bears no grudge and invites Rutherford to a very remote cottage he owns in Cornwall, where they can work together on the play uninterrupted. Rutherford isn’t grateful that Feversham harbours no grudge, but he sees an opportunity, and they go to Cornwall, unknown to anyone else. Everyone thinks that Feversham has gone to Paris.

Rutherford pretends to find implausible a particular crucial scene in the play. It’s a murder involving a gun which to everyone else looks like suicide. Soon after arriving at the almost derelict cottage, miles from anywhere, Feversham suggests they act out the scene (using a gun he owns) to see whether it works. In the process of them doing so, the gun goes off, Feversham is killed and Rutherford now has a dilemma. This looks like a murder. It was widely known they Rutherford was jealous of, and hated, Feversham. If he tells the authorities what has happened, he won’t be believed. So he must act like he really is a murderer, hide the body, return unseen to London, hide from everyone until he’s confident no one is onto him, and pretend he knows nothing about what became of Feversham other than the fact that he said he was going to Paris.

What follows is a thriller, in the sense that we of course want to know whether he is eventually accused of murder, and if so what happens, and that keeps us wanting to turn the pages. But it is also a kind of meta-thriller, in that the narrator refers on several occasions to the necessity of plot to keep people interested in a novel or a play, but also to the artificulity of plot devices. Feversham’s play is described as an unusual thriller in that, while it includes the necessary plot twists to keep the audience interested, does not do so at the expense of character, ideas or psychological depth. I guess that’s what Houghton was aiming to do with this book.

Forced to act like a murderer, Rutherford’s life hollows out. His writing dries up, he fills up his time with study and work. He moves abroad, he participates in the war, not on the front, but as a translator. He is haunted by what happened in Cornwall, which has forced him to live a lie for the rest of his life. Sometimes he wonders if he really did intend to kill Feversham.

He eventually moves back to London, hiding away in a lodging house which is actually the very same house where he grew up (his room is his former nursery), and there leading a miserable and solitary life. The unfolding of the story does provide some nice thrillerish twists, but is also a convincing psychological study, packed with ideas and observations. Events gradually force Rutherford to face up to himself in a new way and, towards the end, they offer him a certain kind of redemption, which does in way remind me of Patrick Hamilton.

Valancourt books have done well to make this book available. And dear Eric Brown has done me a favour drawing this writer to my attention.

As I’ve mentioned before, I sometimes go to the Museum of Classical Archaeology with a friend of mine, to try and draw some of their magnificent collection of casts of Greek and Roman Statues. I’m not particularly good at drawing, and the Greeks and Romans were very good indeed at sculpting, so, as much as anything, it’s an exercise in appreciation: sitting in front of amazing images, and just taking them slowly in.

One of my favourites is this statue of Athena, the goddess of wisdom. In my imagination, she is looking down at the human world, but, although I’ve tried many times, I’ve never been able to capture her expression in a drawing – or for that matter in words. She is interested, certainly, but in what way? Is this the expression of a scientist observing an ant’s nest, or a chess player considering her next move? Or maybe a falconer standing on a cliff, watching her hawk below, circling above its prey?

We have so much acuity in recognising tiny nuances in faces, and yet it is extraordinarily hard to reproduce them, and even harder to name them.

“He was not a major writer,” says Doris Lessing a few lines into her otherwise appreciative introduction to my copy of Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude. This makes me wonder what one has to do to qualify as a ‘major’ writer? I think him quite wonderful, and, having recently reread The Golden Notebook, which I loved back in the seventies, I have a feeling his work may turn out to age better than Lessing’s own.

I only knowingly came across Hamilton for the first time a few years ago (though in fact I have always been a particular fan of the Hitchcock film, Rope, which is based on a Patrick Hamilton play.) He was recommended to me by my friend the late Eric Brown, who had a real feeling for British authors of the mid-twentieth century. I promptly devoured Slaves of Solitude, Hangover Square and the trilogy Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, and was really blown away by them. What’s more, when I recommended these books to other people, they either turned out to already be big fans, or read the books and were as enthusiastic as I was (except in the case of my wife, to be fair, who is not prone to reckless enthusiasm, and thought Slaves only ‘quite good’). I have recently reread those first two again (or to be more accurate, listened to them this time as audiobooks), and remain very impressed. Slaves is my favourite, but with Hangover Square a fairly close second, and I particularly liked the third book of the Twenty Thousand Streets trilogy, The Plains of Cement, in which the barmaid Ella has to choose between marrying a horribly unattractive older man who treats her like a child and barely notices her as a human being, and depriving her frail mother of a chance to come out of poverty.

I don’t know much more about Hamilton’s background than can be found in his Wikipedia entry here. He had communist sympathies (like the early Lessing), a strong identification with the downtrodden (something that does not come over so strongly in the work of the self-assertive, self-consciously visionary Doris Lessing), and he was an alcoholic – in fact you may find you get a hangover reading any of the above five novels, just from the sheer number of drinks you have to imaginatively knock back. He was a successful playwright. Rope, as I mentioned, became a film, Gas Light was filmed twice, and is the origin of the concept of ‘gaslighting’ – something, of course, which is done to the downtrodden to keep them down. (Hangover Square was also made into a film, though from what I gather its central character is a very different proposition from the slow, heavy George Bone of the novel.) He was also severely disfigured when he was run over by a car.

The five novels I’m discussing here are all set in or near London before or during the second world war. This seems to lead some commentators on Hamilton to speak of his work as though it was some kind of historical artifact, a record of a certain kind of life in a certain part of London, at a certain time in history. As I’ve remarked before, this idea of fiction as ‘documenting’ some particular period of history, or place, or area of life, strikes me as very reductive. What makes these novels great is that they speak to things that we all experience, seen through different eyes.

However Hamilton certainly is very good at evoking place – see for example the account of a commuter train arriving in a suburban terminus that begins Slaves – and the way that a place is transformed by our mood. (In Slaves for instance, he mentions in passing the way that the aspect of nature itself seems different on a Sunday from how it looks on weekdays). He is equally good at writing about interior states, and especially about obsession and addiction, to which of course he was not a stranger. He writes beautiful, functional, unfussy descriptive prose. There is absolutely no showing off (a quality, incidentally, that reminds me of the personality of my friend Eric).

In all these books, there are hard, narcissistic, self-obsessed people, who are cruel to others, or use others without ever really seeing them, and who may nurture fascistic fantasies: examples are Vicki and the truly ghastly Mr Thwaite in Slaves (though the two are very different to each other), and Netta and her friends in Hangover Square. There are quiet, mild characters who don’t know how to assert themselves in the world. Miss Roach, the main character in Slaves, is one such, a 39- year-old single woman, appallingly lonely, living during the blitz in a genteel lodging house with a bunch of older people in a town outside London. George Bone (or at any rate George Bone when in his right mind) is another: lumpish, clueless, hopelessly pursuing a beautiful but heartless woman. Ella, the barmaid in the trilogy is another. (But again, these three are not mere types and are all very different from one another.) Finally, there are a number of characters who manage to be both competent at life and non-egotistical. George’s friend John Littlejohn is one of these. Mr Lindsell, and to some extent Mr Prest (though the latter is a bit of a lost soul himself) are other examples in Slaves.

All of these books are beautifully structured and paced, and what makes the latter particularly impressive is the fact that comparatively little actually happens. Miss Roach is simultaneously bullied and bored silly by Mr Thwaites over the dinner table in her boarding house, she is taken out for drinks by an apparently benign but ‘inconsequent’ American officer who never makes his intentions clear, she is let down by her friend Vicki, she has a row with Thwaites, and finally she experiences a very small but very touching moment of redemption at the end, though certainly not happy ever after, or even an end to loneliness. George, again and again, tries to interest Netta in him as a person, and again and again discovers that she cares absolutely nothing for him. (The first book of the Streets trilogy deals with a similar hopeless obsession, which I gather relates to Hamilton’s own biography.)

I’m not conveying much, I fear, but these are wonderful books.

(I should add that the later ‘Gorse’ trilogy is, accordingly to a friend who was already be a fan of Hamilton, a very different proposition, with one of his cruel, ruthless figures in the driving seat throughout, and none of the mercy that pervades the books I’ve read. I’m going to give it a go, but it’s not the one to start with.)

And, on a somewhat similar topic to my last post, is there such a thing as collective guilt? Is it acceptable to mete out suffering and death to people, simply because they belong to the same nation, or the same ethnic group, as others you feel have done you wrong?

Plenty of people think it is acceptable, and most nations act as if they think it is when they go to war, even though collective punishment is a war crime under the Geneva Convention, since all wars involve death and suffering for non-combatants. What makes no sense at all, though, is to condemn the ‘killing of innocents’ by the other side, but defend and condone it when it’s done by your own.

There’s the old-fashioned type of massacre, and the new kind. In the old kind, people are murdered en masse by others who are right there in front of them. Men, women, children may be killed indiscriminately, buildings may be looted and set alight, girls and women may be raped, but, whatever exactly the massacre consists of, it’s done by people who can see with their own eyes both their victims’ faces and the direct consequences of their own actions.

In the modern kind of massacre, the killing is done from the sky by people who have never met the folk they kill and don’t have to see how they die. This second kind can be as deadly or deadlier than the first – in World War II, for instance, a hundred thousand people were killed in a single night’s raid on Tokyo, many of them burnt alive- but the aircrews can fly back to base without witnessing the burnt and broken bodies they’ve left behind them, the screaming children covered in blood, the frantic parents clawing at the rubble…

We tend to be less appalled, less morally outraged, by the second kind than the first, to the point that bombing raids are not usually even described as massacres. Like the people who do the killing, we seem to buy into the idea that there’s something less culpable about murdering people you don’t ever meet, than doing it face to face. And certainly I find it easier to picture myself pushing a button to release a bomb, even when I know the bomb will kill and maim children, than it is to imagine myself, say, plunging a bayonet into a terrified child. But is there really a moral distinction? Or is it just that the former makes us feel less squeamish?

I’m chuffed that my story ‘Art App’ is included, with distinguished company, in this annual collection, beautifully edited by Donna Scott. The book is now available for pre-order from NewCon Press.

In the anthology To the Stars and Back: Stories in Honour of Eric Brown, (see post), edited by Ian Whates, from Newcon Press, published May 2024.