Life at the Top is not a masterpiece; it is not even Braine’s best novel. It is a challenging, unhappy book, the value of which lies, to a significant extent, in the discomfort it induces. The anxiety Hoggart identifies is productive, telling us something about the inadequacies and contradictions of Braine’s society and, to a considerable extent, our own. Masculinity is only one of the more conspicuous sites of tension the text exposes. Braine cannot provide answers to the questions he raises, and does not always seem conscious of asking them, but the questions are valuable in themselves.
Ben Clarke
December 3, 2014
Ben Clarke is Assistant Professor of Twentieth-Century British Literature at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is the author of Orwell in Context: Communities, Myths, Values (Palgrave, 2007), and co-author, with Michael Bailey and John K. Walton, of Understanding Richard Hoggart: A Pedagogy of Hope (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).
LIFE AT THE TOP
For Maurice Temple Smith
1
She woke me up by lifting my eyelids; then she slipped under the bedclothes beside me and lay there smiling, her arms around my neck. She had no business to be there, and she’d have to go before Susan awoke; but I could never regret her presence, no matter what Spock said. She was so small, so vulnerable, and at this moment so beautiful, her face pink and her fair hair tousled, that something dreadful was bound to happen to her; this is no world for children.
I kissed her to get rid of the picture of her body broken by accident or illness, and held her tightly to me; here at least she was safe – as safe as houses, for what that was worth these days.
She looked at me with large, brown eyes – Susan’s eyes – and stroked my chin. “You haven’t shaved, Daddy.”
“Never mind that,” I said. “You shouldn’t be here, Barbara.” I said this to her every Sunday morning.
“You’re lovely warm, Daddy. You’re a giant warm.”
She put her words in the wrong order sometimes – which was forgiveable at the age of four – but the right message always got through. I was security to her, whatever I might be to myself. The sun caught the silver backs of my hair-brushes on the dressing-table; suddenly I felt enormously happy.
I lay back and closed my eyes. There wasn’t any need to go anywhere and I was more tired than I had thought. Susan was still asleep; I could hear her even breathing beside me. I smiled to myself; after nine years of marriage, last night I had not known her. I had kept my eyes open so that I could find out who this naked stranger was, but it hadn’t helped. And perhaps it wasn’t necessary, or even wise, for me to attempt to find out; warm giants accept things as they are.
Barbara lifted my eyelids again. “Wake up, Daddy,” she said.
“Let Daddy sleep, Barbara.”
“Why do you want to sleep?”