Hanley's Palimpsest
MATHEWSON, RUTH
Writers & Writings HANLEY'S PALIMPSEST by Ruth Mathewson The English writer James Hanley has been discovered and rediscovered for almost half a century. When his last book came out in 1973, Time...
...The people in A Dream Journey are obsessed, frightened, aging—but there is something permanent and passionate about them...
...And in another respect—one I find almost as interesting as the story itself—the novel is a palimpsest of earlier Hanleys, for with very few changes its longest section, "Yesterday," is his old novella, No Directions, published in 1943...
...Despite the characteristic bravura, Miller has not exaggerated the power of this strange, unforgettable little book...
...To add to the confusion, there is little agreement about these qualities...
...There is a wry joke in the possibility that in re-offering the wartime work as the major part of a "new" novel, Hanley is counting on the British public's past obliviousness to his existence...
...Not all the comparisons are far-fetched, yet they tend to lose Hanley's special qualities in a welter of associations, to make him a kind of chameleon...
...Small wonder that the word "eccentric" constantly recurs in critical attempts to place Hanley in some tradition...
...The destruction of his enormous canvas in a final bomb blast—not suggested in the original?could account for Clem's failure to paint in the last decade of his life...
...At the same time he may be testing the truth of the belief, expressed recently by Paul Theroux, that "his books live happily in the memory of a dozen good and well-known novelists...
...Lena, a complex and interesting woman who consistently eludes the reader's impulse to type her as a martyr or a foolish victim, goes out occasionally to walk or ride a bus, but Clem has not left the flat for months...
...His earlier novels—more than 20—have been accorded a respectful neglect, not because he is particularly obscure or avant-garde, but because odd accidents of timing and shifts in public taste throughout his long career have resulted in such audiences as he has had being cut off from one another...
...He has described novel writing as "a series of blind gropings in a long dark tunnel...
...The people I had left there lying in a heap were not so limp as I thought so I gave each character an extra squeeze...
...One of the memorable scenes is that of the genius?magnificently obsessed—moving his canvas...
...the young model from Bermondsey is working class...
...Surely some must still be around who in 1943 declared No Directions "a masterpiece...
...a second Balzac, Zola, Beckett or Pinter...
...There they had encountered a drunken sailor, a former model of Clem's, an air-raid warden and his wife, an elderly retired couple, an RAF man on leave, his stupid wife, and their child Podge, usually called "it" as if to invoke all crying babies in stinking crowded shelters...
...The dream of the title is here both desire—will he finish a painting??and reverie—the recollection of youthful longings...
...In extending the time from five hours to two days and shifting the syntax rather gratuitously in virtually every paragraph, Hanley has sacrificed some of the novella's intensity...
...In the case of his most ambitious undertakings, for example, a five-volume family saga of working-class life, many reviewers of the fifth book in 1958 were unaware that it was part of a cycle begun in 1935.Much that Hanley has written is unavailable today, so it is difficult to get a clear sense of his growth...
...Their complicity in each other's failures is beautifully suggested in their lengthy conversations, their thoughts and "silent quarrels...
...a new Melville, Bierce, Farrell or Faulkner...
...But the Irish in his novels grew up, like the author, in Liverpool (for a long time he was so closely identified with that city that it belonged to him, one critic said, the same way London belonged to Dickens), and only a few of his works are set in Wales.Hanley has also had a reputation as a writer of sea stories that Henry Green, among others, thinks superior to Conrad's...
...When Henry Miller said in 1946 that at the end of No Directions we begin all over again, he was prescient about Hanley's need to return to the book...
...But the sequel is very strong...
...In Part II, "Yesterday," the dream is the nightmare of the blitz in the early '40s, when they had carried Clem's huge painting down the long stairs to the basement shelter every time the sirens sounded...
...He was not a social realist, though, and not much interested in politics...
...The conclusion, "No Tomorrow," brings us back to the '50s...
...At the height of the air-raid the scene became apocalyptic . . . like a passage out of Revelation...
...That he did not give up we know from the books of the '70s—Another World, A Woman in the Sky and now A Dream Journey, which is divided in three parts.Part I, "Today" (the early '50s), takes us almost painfully close to the lives of aging Clem Stevens, a failed painter, and his wife Lena, "nailed to their shabby flat" at the top of an old Chelsea house that is emptied of all other tenants and about to be condemned...
...When his last book came out in 1973, Time magazine, calling him "one of the most consistently praised and least-known novelists in the English-speaking world," echoed its judgment of 20 years before: "If critics' raves paid their way in royalties . . . Hanley might well be one of the richest authors alive...
...At the end of this section?almost half the book—as Clem and Lena start up the stairs to their "shell" at the top of the house again, we know that even then, 10 years ago, Lena had decided Clem was crazy but she would stay with him always...
...Finally, for a time he was considered a proletarian novelist, raw and violent...
...In discussing his family saga he has said, "Once I actually did look back into it and something made me enter it again...
...As he developed he became increasingly concerned with exploring self-imprisonment and spiritual deprivation in characters that have been compared with Henry Green's and Elizabeth Bowen's...
...up and down, in and out...
...Presumably it has at least flourished in the memory of Henry Miller, who wrote an exuberant Introduction to the third edition in 1946:"I woke up this morning thinking of No Directions and I let out a roar...
...We understand why their author could not forget them...
...In its new positioning it becomes a new text, much as Pierre Menard's "modern version" of Don Quixote in Borges' story becomes utterly different although it is faithful word-for-word to Cervantes.True, Hanley has made a few changes in the original, including an altered conclusion that is more decisive for Clem...
...The author could not leave his characters standing at the foot of the stairs...
...Because he was born in Dublin, he is known as an Irish writer...
...since he has lived most of his adult life in Wales, he has been regarded as Welsh...
...Strindberg...
...His latest novel, A Dream Journey (Horizon Press, 368 pp., $8.95), probably will not make Hanley wealthy either, but it should earn him a greater popularity than he has heretofore enjoyed...
...The War also becomes an episode, a chapter in the Stevens' past, and loses some of its impersonal character...
...we watch Lena and Clem live out the logic of all that has gone before.A Dream Journey is a good introduction to Hanley, combining as it does different layers of the author's career: the sailor, who confounds the glass shattered in the raids with the ice of the North Atlantic, is drawn from Hanley's close knowledge of the sea...
...For all his admirers, however, including writers as various as T. E. Lawrence, E. M. Forster and Edwin Muir, I have been able to discover just one full-length study of Hanley...
...the artist and his wife suffer the spiritual claustrophobia that became the writer's mature preoccupation...
...His father and brothers were sailors, and he himself shipped out at 14...
...I was thinking of . . . the drunken sailor man, and of Clem, the little genius, and of Lena, his wife, suffering from 'cancer of the heart.' . . . The book is one long roar of oceanic trash drowned in a jungle of cracked ice, dementia, hysteria, flames and hallucination . . . The humor is savage and explosive, maudlin and cracked by turns...
...Moreover, those critics who could have kept the score have been less than helpful in their eagerness to claim him as another Joyce, Lawrence, Kafka, Dostoevsky...
...his greatest achievement...
...One half wishes that it had been reissued just as it was, with the sequel to follow soon after...
...The other two parts are probably the sequel Stokes reported among the author's unpublished manuscripts in 1963...
...The [ending] indicates to us that we may now begin all over again, get the canvas hoisted to the top floor...
...Stokes takes Hanley's career up to 1963, when it seemed "the extraordinarily widespread ignorance of his existence had driven him virtually to abandon the novel...
...His stokers and seamen recall not Conrad, but the early O'Neill, Stephen Crane, Jack London, and B. Traven...
...they are not limp at all...
...Done in 1964 by Edward Stokes, a professor at the University of Tasmania, this explains the author to the home country as if he were an unknown Australian or Canadian...
Vol. 60 • January 1977 • No. 1
