Joy Riding
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING Joy Riding By Stanley Edgar Hyman Miss A. L. Barker—I am embarrassed not to know what the initials stand for—is one of the most talented of living English writers. She is...
...The interrelationship of these three novelettes is complex and subtle, and I suspect that Miss Barker's model is the Faulkner of Go Down, Moses...
...Here Esther's padded-cell bar is a wonderful symbol, not merely of her need for phony glamor, but of the shoddy materialism of British values...
...It is this horror that gradually reveals Esther's world of fantasy, as she tells Arthur one elaborate lie after another to explain where she got the money...
...In the first, the woman, Alice Oram, leams that her husband has a mistress...
...she has escaped from the working class to the scrimp-and-save white collar class...
...Now, 13 years later, we have The Joy-Ride and After (Scribners...
...It tells of Esther's life five years after the joy-ride...
...The ultimate joy-ride is Esther's life of fantasy, but someone will pick up the tab...
...Rumbold's passion for Evie is a joy-ride, and he pays for it, comically, in blood...
...Innocents was followed by a novel...
...Apology for a Hero, which I have not seen...
...All the characters love what cannot be obtained, or kept, or paid for...
...More important, is the later Esther a product of that joy-ride five years before...
...The Joy-Ride and After consists of three interrelated novelettes...
...At the novelette's end he returns her wedding ring, she recalls her identity from the initials engraved in the ring, and she puts the ring back on her finger...
...She progresses from fearing for her life and virtue, to cleaning up the boat and baking a cake for Garnett, to recognizing her lust and giving in to it...
...Instead, it is a fancy foreign sports car belonging to a customer of the garage...
...If going 90 with Esther is a symbolic sex act, hitting the woman is its symbolic orgasm...
...deprivation seems general, on every social level...
...Joe works in a garage and lives in a London slum called The Welshies, in its worst section, where proletariat shades into lumpen...
...It contains two stories, "The Iconoclasts" and "The Doll," which are among the finest of our time...
...They are all about joy-rides and aftermaths...
...In the central action of the novelette, she buys, as a surprise for Arthur, an enormous bar of white buttoned plastic, "like the wall of a padded cell," complete with pushbutton sliding panels, tinkling music, rosy lights, amber mirrors, and four plastic bar stools in four different colors...
...She has lost her memory...
...All this repressed and reactionformation sexuality finds expression in the phallic power of the car...
...As a remote consequence of Joe's joy-ride, in a bitterly funny scene, Rumbold swings on a man he believes to be his successful rival for Evie, misses him, and falls to the floor with a nosebleed...
...He is neither violent nor bitter, but he is full of an uncontrollable energy that is, although he doesn't know it, ultimately sexual...
...This is again bitterly funny, but it has a perfect Tightness as the shocking start of a hysterical fugue...
...Alice despises him for his stupidity and vulgarity, and regularly catches him out in his lies...
...The first, "The Joy-Ride," is about a 16year-old working-class boy named Joe Munn...
...An eccentric sick old lady, Mrs...
...Alice then discovers that her 16-year-old daughter knows about the mistress and has contrived to meet her, that even the younger boys know, that in fact Alice really is the last person to know...
...Miss Barker's first book of short stories, Innocents, appeared in 1948 and won the Maugham award...
...In novelettes, Joe's initiation and Alice's rebirth are finalities, and it is Esther's nature that is important, not her history...
...Joe is disgusted by women...
...Joe's employer, Barty Rumbold, is desperately and unhappily in love with Evie, the waitress across the street...
...Martineau, lives in the basement of Joe's house and is his friend...
...Deserted and betrayed by Joe, she is captured by a mob of well-wishers in another funny yet horrible scene and taken by force to the hospital...
...He is not a romantic wish-fulfillment like Lady Chatterley's gamekeeper but a human being: sensual, coarse, fiercely independent, childishly sly, habitually untruthful, and oddly joyous and free...
...Unlike "The Joy-Ride," with its complexity of subplots, "The Narrow Boat" is a simple linear sequence of three episodes...
...The coffinlike berth is death, the old boat rotting on a mudbank is decay, but from them come rebirth and life...
...At the novelette's end, Arthur overhears Esther asking his boss to settle her debts, explaining that she cannot tell Arthur the truth because of his murderous temper, which she illustrates by telling the Joe story, about Arthur...
...At the end of the line, she gets off and walks wildly along a country road, where she is hit by Joe's borrowed car...
...The second novelette, "The Narrow Boat," is about the woman Joe hit...
...Where did Esther get the money, and does she have a lover...
...It is worth the wait...
...but he is not without aspirations, and in a characteristic glimpse we see him trying to get the grease out from under his fingernails with a piece of fuse wire...
...Alice first wakes in the boat and thinks that the berth she is in is a coffin...
...perhaps her brief fling with Garnett is a joy-ride for which she has already paid in advance...
...At one point Arthur believes that it came from a lover, and there is some evidence that Esther has a whole other life, although neither Arthur nor the reader ever learns the truth...
...She is little known in this country, and not much better known in Great Britain, since she issues neither pouty manifestoes nor self-advertisements...
...She is not killed, as Joe and Esther think, but she is badly injured...
...He cannot stand the sight of Esther's body, with its puffy little breasts and nipples the color of tea, and he wants to punish and smash it...
...The "narrow boat" of the title is thus a shifting symbol...
...A beautiful love-object comes into Joe's fairly impoverished life...
...In a nightmarish scene, a strange man gives her a ride, decides that she is drunk, and puts her out of the car...
...But it is a tribute to A. L. Barker's art that her characters come so strongly to life that they make us ask the wrong questions...
...Alice flees the house and takes a bus at random...
...Beyond these personal meanings, there is a strong suggestion that England has been on a joy-ride, in postwar prosperity, and must now suffer the consequences...
...Alice pays for Joe's joy-ride with every bone of her body, as she had earlier paid for Frank's joy-ride, his mistress, with every fibre of her spirit...
...Does putting the wedding ring back on mean that Alice will return to Frank...
...Miss Barker does not answer these questions, because they are questions about people in real life, not about characters in fiction...
...Garnett feeds and takes care of her in a grumpy fashion...
...A Likely Story," the third of the novelettes, is more lightheartedly funny than the other two...
...For a split second she blazed in every pore," Miss Barker writes, "then the darkness ran over her like ink over a fly...
...The novelette of the title is a work of great power and beauty...
...280 pp., $3.75...
...The Joy-Ride" is like a novel in the complexity of its subplots and their thematic relationship to Joe's adventure...
...In the long (perhaps too long) final section of "The Narrow Boat," Alice is rescued by a semitramp named Garnett and taken to the abandoned boat where he lives...
...On the bus she is further deranged by an overwhelming woman who insists on talking to her...
...In the second episode...
...What fleshes out Esther's bones, as it puffed up her feathers at the end of "The Joy-Ride," is symbolic status, and she gets that from property and fantasy...
...she decides that "If death was comic everyone was in the same boat...
...Driving in the country, they hit a woman and leave her for dead...
...The details are manufactured and lurid, and Esther turns Joe into a vicious deliberate murderer...
...Joe's world has rigid limits—the sound of the sea that he expects to hear from a shell is the man at Brighton calling out "Any more for the Skylark...
...Ultimately the narrow boat we all share is life, the human condition...
...Everything about Esther is described as thin and meagre...
...Each of these novelettes leaves unanswered questions...
...Joe is guilty and terrified afterwards, but he has been initiated, and his relationship with Esther has subtly changed: now they touch hands like lovers, and they share a fantasy in which she is the chief witness in his trial for murder, and he watches her "getting plump on the thought, like a skinny bird blowing up its feathers...
...The Bulows live in a house they cannot afford because Esther chose it for its piecrust rooftiles and its wrought-iron bell pull...
...Carried away by Esther's taunting, Joe borrows the car without permission and takes Esther for a joy-ride...
...Beneath the surface, though, Miss Barker tells quite another story...
...Its title too is a play on words...
...Martineau's life has been a joy-ride, and now she is helpless and alone...
...This is not his 15-year-old cousin Esther, who comes to live with the Munns, and whom he despises...
...One day, to stop his questioning, Esther tells Arthur of Joe Munn's killing the woman...
...Joe's car, Esther's bar, Rumbold's vision of a warm loving girl in a cold climate...
...Old Mrs...
...Will Joe's guilt gradually fade away when the police never come...
...Joe spends the rest of the novelette in sick terror of the police...
...Perhaps life in the Tory Welfare State is so spiritually impoverished and diminished that some glamorous fantasy is necessary...
...This scene, in which a friend tells her with ill-contained relish, is a classic of its kind...
...A second volume of stories, Novelette with Other Stories, appeared in 1951...
...Her bones are of a "rabbit fineness," her sharp shoulder blades stick out, she has a "pale fortuitous prettiness," even her crying is "a painful poor sort of wetting...
...This is only one narrative line in the novelette...
...She is now married to Arthur Bulow, who has just been made canteen manager at a plastics factory...
Vol. 47 • February 1964 • No. 4
