Life at the Top

LIFE AT THE TOP

JOHN BRAINE

With a new introduction by

BEN CLARKE

VALANCOURT BOOKS

Life at the Top by John Braine

First published London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1962

First Valancourt Books edition 2015

Copyright © 1962 by John Braine, renewed 1990

Introduction © 2015 by Ben Clarke

Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

http://www.valancourtbooks.com

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INTRODUCTION

John Braine’s first novel, Room at the Top, made him famous and wealthy. It sold 35,000 copies in its first year and an abbreviated version was serialized in the Daily Express. Two years later Rom­ulus Films released an adaptation directed by Jack Layton; widely regarded as inaugurating the British New Wave, it won numer­ous awards, including two Oscars and the BAFTA for best British picture. Its success further increased interest in the novel and by the mid-1960s Room at the Top had sold more than a million copies. Braine, who had been working as a librarian before the book was published, attended parties with the stars of the film, Laurence Harvey and Simone Signoret, got to know fellow writ­ers such as J. B. Priestley and John Betjeman, and bought a large house in Bingley and a Mercedes. Neither his prominence nor his prosperity lasted. By the time he died in 1986 he was estranged from his wife and most of his last years were spent in what Martin Amis described as a “murky bedsit”. Twenty years later his widow, who continued to collect his royalties, revealed that the payments were so low she did not pay tax.

Braine’s career is too easily reduced to a straightforward nar­rative of decline that seems to justify the widespread view that working-class authors are defined by their historical signi­ficance rather than their abilities. Middle-class writers have talent; work­ing-class writers have “authentic” experience. From this perspec­tive, Braine is important because in 1957 he was able to represent the dissatisfactions and anxieties of what became known as the “Angry Young Men”; once his moment passed, he had nothing further to contribute.

This story is too simple to be useful, though it does tell us something about conventional views of the working class and the arts. In an interview conducted a few years before his death, Braine acknowledged that he was “known as the author of just one book” but pointed out that he was “still writing”, unlike many of the “bright people” first published in the 1950s. By the end of his life, he had produced a substantial, varied body of work that cannot be reduced to the diminishing echoes of a single moment of historical sensitivity. Room at the Top is likely to remain central to both the critical and popular ap­praisal of Braine’s achievement, but this should not preclude an interest in his other books.