Last of the Proletarian Novelists

...Once an off-beat Marxist, now an off-beat Catholic, he is above all his own man, an artist of integrity and originality no party or church could hope to dominate...

...At the end of the novel neither he nor Sheila have found anything very like happiness, yet one feels strongly that they may find a kind of salvation, a reconciliation to things as they must be and were perhaps always intended to be...

...Sheila, who imagines what his lonely bewilderment must be, offers him the refuge of her family's home at Ram's Gate in an out-of-the-way part of Ireland...

...Henry Green thinks him superior to Conrad...

...He isn't conventional in ideas or technique, either...

...It is exceedingly difficult to find the first four novels in the series...

...My account of the novel must make it sound both strange and vague...

...No one who can write as he can knows so well the little people who are most of the world's population...

...It is the same with characterization, for the Sheila he is with becomes for him a mixture of the Sheila he loved happily in adolescence, the Sheila of whom he dreamed in prison, and the distraught middle-aged woman she has become...

...He goes there, takes long walks, tries to brood his way to redemption, happens upon a Franciscan monastery where a friendly Franciscan helps him to talk out enough of his past to come to a partial understanding of it...

...Still, except for a flurry of popularity in the Thirties, he has been ignored by the buying public in both England and the United States...

...She sees Sheila as the young girl she loved at Ram's Gate, the woman who ran away from home, and the sinner who does not try to conceal the fact that she goes to bed with her husband's brother...

...The reason, one guesses, is that he has never been taken up by an organized claque that has tried to shout him into popularity, that he has never belonged to an organized group of writers who have been able to publish their mutual admiration in influential journals...

...James Hanley's quality doesn't leap at you from the page...

...These independent readers will have to be patiently perceptive...

...He isn't an angry middle-aged man denouncing everything with reckless abandon...

...E. M. Forster thinks him a novelist "of distinction and originality...

...C. P. Snow says he is "one of the most important of living writers...

...An End and a Beginning is excellent both for itself and for the way it continues to fulfill the compassionate intention that underlies all his novels...

...It is both, though both the strangeness and the vagueness are, in the novel, esthetically satisfying...

...Most of his more than 30 books cannot be found in bookshops or libraries in either country...

...While he was still a Marxist, he wrote: "The more insignificant a person is in this whirlpool of industrialized and civilized society, the more important he is for me...

...Peter Fury, as the novel opens, has just been released from prison where he has spent 15 years because of the murder of a money-lender who had ruthlessly exploited his own and other poor families...

...I like to believe that there are independent readers in sufficient quantity to recognize the quality of An End and a Beginning and that they will buy it into popularity and start a demand for the many other excellent Hanley books it is almost impossible to find today...

...Boy (1931), all five of the Furys novels, many of the short stories, the recent Levine and The Closed Harbor, still deserve, indeed demand, reading...

...Not to read Hanley is to be unaware of the befuddled search both the significant and the insignificant people are involved in...

...The world outside prison seems as alien and terrifying as a nightmare...

...His Catholicism has not changed the pattern of his interest any more than his early Marxism marred his vivid presentation of the importance of insignificant people...

...Herbert Read calls him "a great realist...

...He fears strangers, for they seem to know both his crime and his punishment...

...Nor does Sheila see him as he is...

...Sean O'Faolain, Granville Hicks and Henry Miller— unlike in every other way—agree in praising highly both what Hanley has to say and how he says it...

...Reading the novel one never seems sharply in contact with reality as normal eyes see it...

...Reviewed by Harvey Curtis Webster Professor of literature, Louisville University...

...But it is only when Sheila, herself bewildered by her continuing love for his brother whose way of life she despises, comes to him at Ram's Gate that he begins to see a way out of the nightmare his existence has become...

...Even Miss Fetch, the housekeeper at Ram's Gate, the third eye through whom we see the action and its milieu, sees Peter partly as she imagines a released murderer, partly as her sentimentalization of a "poor lost man...

...The only people he can hope to establish some sort of relationship with are Kilkey, the friend his sister deserted, and Sheila, his remaining brother's wife who once seemed to love him and who, like Kilkey, continued to keep in touch with him while he served his prison term...

...He is for her himself before he went to prison, the unhappy he she imagines he was in prison, his present bewildered self, and the brother he resembles physically...

...author, "On a Darkling Plain" It is unlikely that any modern British writer has been praised by as many discriminating people and read by as small an audience as James Hanley...

...His remaining brother, a labor leader who has sold out for respectable comfort, Peter does not want to see any more than the brother wants to see him...

...An End and a Beginning, the fifth in Hanley's series of novels about the Fury family, fortunately can be read as a separate entity...

...He isn't an experimentalist, like Joyce or Beckett, whom you can like from sheer love of novelty (whether you understand or not...

...Granting, as I think we must, that Hanley has the right to portray pathetic be-fuddlement in search for the clarification of redemption, the method is right, though it may present to the impatient reader difficulties as great as the language of Finnegan's Wake...

...so are two of his brothers...

...Gelton, where Peter lived before going to prison, and Ram's Gate,, where he goes for refuge, are properly presented with dream-like fuzzi-ness, for they are seen through eyes that do not dare to face sharp outlines...

...She sleeps with him and, although she is unable to give him the love he hopes for, helps him to see dimly a way out of nightmare...

...His mother and father are dead...

...His remaining sister, Maureen, has left his friend, her husband, to go nobody knows where...

...Hanley, who spent his early years in the slums of Dublin, who has been sailor, stoker, cook, baker, butcher, postman, porter and clerk, who was in Ireland during the rebellion, who now is a part of a small community in Wales, could be called the last distinguished proletarian novelist...