Working Class Highbrow

A few words about the old days

Over a decade at Serenity Science, it now feels like I am leaving home. So I have decided to take some luggage along on the ride. An old post close to my heart, which in saying something about those at the bottom of the educational heap, reveals much about myself. How did I find James Joyce if the only maps on offer were the telly and Agatha Christie?

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In England they are rare. The culture either kills them off or never allows them to mature. They used to be all over Wales and Scotland. We’d meet Gwyn and Rhys on the coal-dusted terraces of a Welsh valley side, bump into Archie in the lift of a Glasgow high-rise. Always time for a chat and a laugh and a thrust of dialectical repartee. ‘Trotsky!?’ I'd say, ‘that pompous parvenu!’ And you'd go as red as that flag you sometimes wore as a bath towel. ‘Are you calling our greatest revolutionary…’ ‘A state bureaucrat, is what you mean. Order. Discipline. The well-polished slide rule. He loved these more than his wife. The bohemians? He'd shoot you, or put you in prison, with his complete works for company. Ha! Ha! Ha!’ With Archie I once went up and down his lift a dozen times. Giggling like school girls when we got out. The working class highbrow. We don’t see many these days. Why is this? A young writer suggests the lack of social housing. Can it be so simple?

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Visit St Fagans and you will come across a terrace of cottages, each recreated in the style of a generation, 1800 through to the 1980s. Comfort increases as the 19th century progresses, with literacy a little way behind; then, around the fin de siècle, a reversal takes place, two shelves of books miraculously appearing in the fireside niche. These workers are readers! Half a century later we walk into a new world: wall-to-wall carpets, consumer goods, modern kitchen units, a proper bath, and, that most important of postwar commodities, a television set. There has been a revolution to the material culture, turning a rural cottage into a modern, urban house. The books are numerous, the shelves bending under the weight… ‘Sorry, but you’ve come to the wrong address. No library here my love. I think it’s Professor Jones you be wanting. He lives in Twynyffald Avenue, just round the corner there. No no, I don’t know the number, but it’s the big house half way along. You can’t miss it. It has these big bay windows and a bright red door. And the books, you know, they like to pop their heads out, whole walls of them looking at you when you walk past; it gives me the shivers at times…’ Here in the terrace, after the Second World War, the books have disappeared. All six cottages are the same cottage - though extensions increase their size from the 1950s - yet the variation in reading matter is immense; the later period undergoing a regression in literacy, prosperity the cause, as a relatively rich working class no longer needs books to enjoy their leisure time. Literature has only a tenuous connection with tenancies.

That early 20th century family, clustered around the novel, belongs to a unique epoch, when the slow rise in literacy over the centuries was given a sudden massive boost by the industrialism of the 1880s.1 What an Everest of words it was! Ever since we have been in descent from that mountain peak.

High culture has very little to do with housing. Penelope Fitzgerald is a model example. Superficially her council flat confirms Glen James Brown’s argument: her novels written after she received a secure tenancy. On reflection we know this cannot be true: her mentality and upbringing made her a writer; the flat, in an estate that would otherwise be evidence of disadvantage, merely a welcome refuge and base. Literature lives in the spirit and feeds off the immediate intellectual environment; a rich literary culture almost ubiquitous amongst the upper bourgeoisie until the invention of the smartphone. Yet it is not all class doom. Prior to the 1960s the literate working class had a substitute for this cultivated habitat; it is was the Church; Nonconformity an especially strong influence in Scotland and Wales, with the minister an inspiration to many a scholarship kid.

In her classic Stet, Diana Athill gives the obvious explanation for the decline in reading: more compelling entertainments - radio, TV, records - replaced the book as the main leisure activity. That trend has accelerated today, and threatens, for the first time, to eviscerate the literary culture; a real problem for the middle classes, who during the 20th century turned literature into an industry and made a professional career out of it. The workers played only a small role in this history. For a few years they were big players - they became the fashion in the early Sixties - but this interest soon faded; in part because it was a fashion. Changes in education were more important. The scrapping of grammar schools and the retreat from meritocracy making it harder for the smart working class kid to rise. Pierre Bourdieu’s The State Nobility describes how the clever but unsophisticated adolescent - a good definition of the poor scholarship student - was excluded by their background from the top universities when style replaced examination results as the means of selection.

According to DJ Taylor there is a dearth of working class literature (it is there in his essay on Sid Chaplin). Our champion of the provinces here shows himself debilitatingly parochial: he has not read his Welsh or his Scotch. Robin Jenkins, perhaps the greatest of the Scots, writes with wonderful penetration about the texture of working class life and its psychic difficulties, especially those that surround education, that friend and threat to the working class home. In novels such as The Changeling, Fergus Lamont and Just Duffy the dilemma of the working class child is acutely delineated. To cultivate themselves the child must escape an upbringing whose emotional attachments bind them to the family, and where mothers, jealous of school, seen as stealing their sons, often try to hold them back. Kate Roberts, in Feet in Chains, portrays this once common saga. Recognising the danger the family is often hostile to anything that reeks of pretension. This obstacle is extremely difficult to overcome as it suffuses the peer group, creating a resistance to the culture of school (Richard Sennett, on brilliant form, in The Hidden Injuries of Class). A compromise is eventually achieved: the value of education is reduced to simple utilitarian terms. Alas, this kills its soul. Meanwhile, the child has its own problems. To break away from the family, casting off the clinginess of its sentimentalities, the hero must alienate himself both from the neighbourhood and his own emotions. This can be fatal to the creative faculty.

The bourgeoisie tends towards a cooler temperament, and are more sophisticated in their understanding of the emotions, which are discussed and dissected in everyday discourse, creating a milieu from which it is natural for a writer to emerge. This is an environment that the clever scholarship boy can find impenetrable, lacking, as he does, the cultural background to grasp the nuances of such subtle and allusive talk. Albie, in Emrys Humphries’ masterpiece A Toy Epic, collapses under the strain of such an encounter; his examination-mind unable to grasp the verbal elusiveness that is conveyed through irony and taste, and which cannot be learned by schoolroom study. To be a literary success one must become a citizen of this class, a place where cleverness is fused with the emotions and becomes part of everyday thought and speech (think of Antonioni’s La Notte, where feelings are discussed as if they were philosophy). In England working class writers found entry into this realm almost impossible - the rape at the end of the Kingsley Amis’ Take a Girl Like You sadly summing up their plight. Life was different in Wales and Scotland. There, social alternatives to bourgeoisdom were available, and were intimately connected to a more demotic and democratic national culture…

He had a conviction that everything boiled down to sociology eventually. That dreadful place, her father, those wretched streets, that leaden river, the voluble, argumentative, non-deferential Welsh. (Alun Richards: Groceries in The Former Miss Merthyr Tydfil and Other Stories)

Glen James Brown quotes Orwell on the predicament of the working class writer. This old Etonian must be treated delicately. Orwell is certainly right to argue that writers require solitude and comfort (though not much, as his own example shows) and that this can be difficult in poor households. But, and it is typical of his style, he makes the complex too simple. The writer isn’t a child. This distinction is crucial. A working class pupil - there they are in A Toy Epic and Fergus Lamont - can escape the claustrophobia of an over-packed home if they have good brains and go to good schools; the clever child, with the backing of the classroom, able to isolate himself within the family.

Of more significance is what happens after they have retreated into this inner space… Those mothers again, becoming resentful and aggressive: in William Glynne Jones’ Farewell Innocence mam forces Ieuan to give up his studies. The greatest danger, though, is the middle classes. That first encounter with a young bourgeois can be disastrous. Confronted by such obvious distinction, floundering amongst the sophistication, whose subtleties they cannot grasp, the working class adolescent feels cut off from the culture - it is a different language, with its own codes, its own customs, its own history - and rightly believes himself inferior; while the old ways of learning no longer seem to work: how does one become fluent in bourgeois-speak? Albie disintegrates under the pressure; while Ifor, in Alun Richards’ Home To An Empty House, accepts his second-rate mind and becomes an educational official; bureaucracy the great trap for the scholarship student. Only a few have the linguistic ability to acquire the bourgeoisie’s language, and so absorb its bohemian culture necessary for literary success; Fergus Lamont a possible example, though the narrator is unreliable. The crisis is that first meeting with the middle classes: survive it and the working class teenager might just transcend his background and become a writer.

Will Self, in a brilliant performance, reclaims two of Cyril Connelly’s Enemies of Promise: conversation and the pram in the hall. These, he states, really are obstacles to a novelist’s talent. Self is right. Company of any kind prevents the concentrated effort necessary to write at length - what he calls long-form fiction. The pram in the hall, aka the family, is the problem for the working class writer whose background prejudices him in its favour: family is the centre of a worker’s consciousness. Through his upbringing the working class writer is drawn to those who by their every existence hinder him; it is why many working class novels of the 1950s - think of Stan Barstow’s A Kind of Loving or Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night Sunday Morning - are obsessed with pregnancy: a young family takes away the freedom necessary for creative effort or social ascent. It is here that the bourgeoisie have the greatest advantage: by training and education they have acquired an emotional distance from the family; this independence giving them the mental space within which their talents can grow, later prosper.

Unfortunately, the evidence Glen James Brown gives for working class creativity - telling stories - is one of Connelly’s targets; telling stories wrecks even the possibility of literature, which requires a craft beyond the mere delivery of the anecdote; Self’s analogy of the painting of the Firth of Forth Bridge to the drafts of his novels makes this obvious. The hard work of writing a novel conflicts with pub chat, whose conviviality keeps one snug in a noisy room. Such stories belong to Connelly’s “conversation”, the writer’s greatest foe. The error is a simple one: a folk culture, social and largely verbal, is conflated with a high culture, which is isolated and built upon the word (slowly chiselled out, to steal from John Updike). Yet in the Welsh Valleys, in the early 20th century, there was a folk culture that at the same time was highly literate, a mix from out of which masterpieces could be written; the chapel the secret of Anglo-Welsh success, marvellously evoked in The Withered Root by Rhys Davies. These Welsh writers were given the gift of the silent word - the Bible - that yet lived in a rumbustious social scene: those Nonconformist sects, who shared the narrow terrace streets with the devotees of the public house.

The chapel crowd were not synonymous with the whole of the community; they were a minority, often aloof. This distinction usually avoided when the workers are discussed; one homogenous social grouping, a single working class, being generally assumed. Robin Jenkins describes the reality: each street in a working class town represented a different social grade. It’s time to be provocative. Along with the educational reforms of the 1960s - the weakening of primary and secondary education at the expense of university expansion, a shift that favoured the less academically talented of the middle classes - the attempt, through housing policy, to make that homogeneity real is another factor that worked against this literate culture. ‘We’ll have no snobs on our streets’, the housing manager might have said, if she could speak working class Welsh. The villain? You want one, do you? It is the middle class philistine, usually a political activist or an official of the Welfare State.

We should also consider the decline of Christianity; its spiritual glue, a force for self-transcendence, its respect for the written word.2 It collapsed in the 1960s.

We must be very careful when inviting Karl Marx into Lit Crit. He is a clumsy person. He knocks down our fragile generalities, pushes over the delicate characterisations, barges into scenes, smashing them, treading them down, reducing them to the equality of dust. Marx gives too crude a picture of working class existence. His own life is a better guide to the realities of high culture: much of his best work was done when he was poor. This life story the story of much thought and art in the last two hundred years: it is the bourgeois drop-out who has been our creative artisan. It is here, in that special blend of an ascetic temperament with a rich culture, acquired through parents and a public school education, that we find the artist; or did until recently. Beginning in the 1960s we have tried to make bohemia respectable; this drive morphing into the present attempt to eradicate the bohemian altogether: we must all be good middle class people now, the universities making us so.

The central problem for the working class rebel is that too often he ends up fighting the very culture he needs to assimilate; the working class artist the one who rises up through the bourgeoisie and comes out the other side. What a crisis for the poor writer! Their course is so complex, and so little understood, even by themselves, that it is extremely difficult to navigate; rarely do they arrive at the safe harbour of the completed page. Orwell, in contrast, had it easy: though he lived in Poverty Row he retained his expensively dressed mind.

Not the cottage but what goes on inside it, this is what we must consider when we think about the artist. Arthur Koestler, far more penetrating than Orwell, is closer to the facts of the case.

I believe I can guess what you feel. You start eagerly to read an article, let’s say in the New Statesman; let’s say by Raymond Mortimer or Stonier; after a few lines you stumble over an allusion which you don’t understand — a reference to Proust, or Kafka, or Péguy — authors whom you have never read. But the writer of the article seems to assume that everybody has read, or at least ought to have read, them; and so you begin to feel like a schoolboy who hasn’t learnt his lesson, or, rather, like the uninvited guest at a party; left in the cold, humiliated, envious, resentful. And here we are at the crucial point: we are facing the wall, the tragic barrier which separates the progressive intelligentsia from the educated working class. (The Readers’ Dilemma in The Yogi and the Commissar)

For Koestler the educated working man should give up. He was wrong. This poor schmuck can acquire the culture of a Mortimer or Connelly, if he puts the work in. It is a long and painful task. It is Will Self we must listen to here: the novelist has to be an autodidact. Today, the institutions work against this admirable tradition.

The one institution that can help the working class writer is school, providing it instructs the poor kid as if she were a child of the aristocracy. Such schools have been rare. It is understandable. We cannot expect the elite to give up its advantages. Once the Welsh were lucky, they had their own Harrows and Winchesters - Libanus, Zion, Bethel - where the spirit was uplifted, knowledge acquired and a craft engendered; these chapels giving the writer both the ability and the will to transcend their place and themselves (Raymond Williams’ Border Country describes it wonderfully). Always we come back to the spirit, to religion. It is the one substitute for the sophisticated culture of the bourgeoisie, itself a product of the religious impulse; my mate Max Weber goes on and on about it. Come on, let’s go and listen. Talk talk talk, he never stops.…

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1. For the crooked path of education see the work of Keith Wrightson: English Society 1580-1680. For the vexed question of what literacy means before the 20th century see Donald Sassoon’s The Culture of the Europeans.

2. ‘One of the most striking features of the expansion of popular literacy is the extent to which the initial achievement of literacy among the common people was in excess of the functional necessity for the skills. Literacy had many applications, yet it was only when they became commonplace that these everyday uses of literacy acquired a significance sufficient to encourage parents to put their children to school and unlettered adults to learn to read and write. In the initial impulse towards literacy there was a further, quite specific motivation, and there is every reason to believe that this incentive was primarily religious.’ (Keith Wrightson)