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.

Life at the Top does not, as first sight, seem the most promising place to begin such a reassessment. Its initial reception was mixed and some later criticism actively hostile. In one early study, James Lee described it as a “badly executed novel” that was “an embar­rassment to admirers of Braine’s work”. Others were less severe, but few regarded it as a straightforward success, and for many the book was little more than an attempt to return to a safe sub­ject and set of characters after the relative critical and commercial failure of Braine’s second novel, The Vodi. As a sequel to Room at the Top, it received attention in the press and was also adapted for cinema but neither the book nor the film achieved anything like the success of the earlier works and neither has been much discussed since they were released. Few people who have read Room at the Top now even seem aware that Braine wrote another book about Joe Lampton.

Life at the Top is more difficult to enjoy than Braine’s first novel. Whilst Room at the Top is the Faustian tale of a man de­stroyed by the fulfilment of his desires, its sequel is the claustro­phobic story of an unhappy marriage, unfulfilling adulteries, frus­trated ambitions, and the experience of ageing. Its value lies in the dis­comfort it generates and its lack of resolution. As Richard Hog­gart argued in a characteristically perceptive review, the text re­veals “much more clearly what Mr. Braine’s talented novels have so far really been about – where their undoubtedly strong appeal is founded.” For Hoggart, this is not “nostalgia or brass or brash­ness or even . . . sex” but a “persistent pessimism and anxiety”. Life at the Top shows the evolution of Braine’s re­sponse to con­temporary life, developing and complicating his engagement with the problems at the center of his first book. The novel cannot resolve the contradictions it exposes, a failure demonstrated by what Hoggart described as the “plot-manoeu­vres” of its closing sec­tions. It recognizes the fragmen­tation of life in post-war Brit­ain, the inadequacies of dominant ideas of success and the good life, as well as the inability of the established order to pro­vide satisfactory alternatives. These problems, re­vealed in Joe’s misdirected struggles against the life he has chosen, cannot be solved by returning him to his marriage, family and job at the end of the text or by the revelation that some of the people he has identified as his enemies are more compassionate than he had thought. The anxiety remains, empha­sized rather than obscured by the attempt to achieve closure.

Anxiety takes many forms in the novel, from Hethersett’s fear of immigration, expressed in his desire to leave Leddersford because it “seems to be full of whores and West Indians”, to Joe’s tense encounter with a new youth culture embodied in the threatening “gang” gathered around a basement jazz club. It is best illustrated, though, in the novel’s exploration of masculinity, one of Braine’s recurrent concerns. The anonymous reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement described Joe Lampton as “a caricature of male competitive aggressiveness . . . hunting for new worlds and women to dominate”. Masculinity seems to offer Joe the power and status from which he is otherwise excluded by his working-class background, but the concept proves slippery and evasive. Being a man is never as simple, secure, or rewarding as it appears, and despite his constant efforts he often feels emas­culated, “something less than a man”.

Joe reveals the contradictions and failings of conventional ideas of masculinity by enacting rather than challenging them. He sees women in generic and instrumental terms, as means to particular ends; Mrs. Brown tells him that she initially did not like him because “you were so obviously using Susan to get what you wanted.” With the exception of Alice Aisgill, whom he sacrifices to his ambition in Room at the Top, women are a social and sexual resource for which he competes with other men. His enjoyment of them derives as much from his sense of success in this competition as from anything else. At the party in London he anticipates “[n]ot just the pleasure of having Jean but the pleasure of taking her from someone else”. Masculinity offers a way of legitimizing his actions, not least to himself; he can represent his pursuit of his own interests as a demonstration of virility, the fulfilment of an inherent drive to dominate.

In practice, Joe’s attempts to embody conventional ideas of manliness generate anxiety, for himself and the reader. In the first place, it exposes aspects of contemporary masculinity that are often obscured or disclaimed, revealing the way in which sex­ual assertiveness can spill over into sexual violence. Look­ing at Norah he considers “the need for rape” and he and Susan com­pulsively reenact their initial sexual encounter in Room at the Top as what she calls the “big pretend, the hurting pretend”, in which “I can’t stop you”. Even Joe is intermittently troubled by his desires; when Susan tells him that “I deserve to be hurt” he thinks that “I had never been so excited in my life; and I had never hated myself so deeply.” His reaction demonstrates a self-awareness that allows Joe, and Braine, to respond to dominant ideas of masculinity rather than passively reflect them.

Joe’s attempts to assert himself do not bring him security but reveal its absence. Having used his sexual charm to transform his social and material status, he finds himself occupying the con­ventionally feminine role of the “gold digger” and he is conscious that Norah will hear him described as a “superannuated gigolo . . . who’d risen from the working classes, not by brains, not by hard work, but by getting a rich man’s daughter in the family way.” Despite his fantasies of control, he is dependent on the desire of those he has tried to use; he is aware that “I hadn’t got as far as I wanted to go” but consoles himself with the thought that “women had wanted me”. The past tense is significant. In Life at the Top his body, the final guarantee of his masculinity, is ageing. He is “much fatter than I ought to be” and troubled by the decline in his looks; surveying himself in the mirror at Norah’s flat whilst she is out at work he confronts a face “more blotchy and more puffy” than before.

Joe hopes to find in established ideas of what it means to be a man a stable foundation for his identity and sense of self-worth. By the end of the novel these ideas have collapsed, un­able to bear the weight he piles upon them. His body, his sexual charm, and his position as a father are all revealed to be fragile, and his claims to masculinity are contested by those around him. Susan insists that even his controlled exercise of power demonstrates that he is “not a real man at all” but “like one of your bloody cal­culating machines”. The weakness of the conclusion demon­strates Braine’s inability to resolve these tensions, but he does, to some degree, recognize them. For all its failings, the conversation Joe has with his son, who has been punished after resisting a pri­vate school initiation ceremony in which they “whitewash your – thing”, suggests a tacit realization that established forms of male bonding and development, with their cruelty and contra­dictions, will not suffice, and that the conventional understanding of masculinity itself must be questioned.

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?”

I yawned. “Daddy works hard all week earning pennies. He needs to rest on Sundays.”

“Why do you earn pennies?”

“Because Mummy and Daddy and Harry and Barbara need a house. And things to eat and drink—”

“Harry lives at school. He has a house there, he has. And things to eat and drink.”

“But Daddy has to earn pennies to keep Harry at school. And pennies for pyjies and frocks and dollies and bicycles and all sorts of things.”

And the light grey fitted carpet and the grey and primrose yellow wallpaper and the built-in wardrobe and dressing-table and the candy-striped sheets and the divan bed with the Con­tinental headboard; we were always buying something new, the house itself was only three years old. The building of a Council estate near by had been the excuse for leaving Linnett Road; the neighbourhood – we had to face it – was going down. And the birth of Harry had been the excuse for leaving Pudney Lane, on the road to Gilden; the house was too old, too big, too much for Susan to look after; and too cut off. I’d liked it myself, and still missed it; it was my choice, it had belonged to me. At least, I’d paid the deposit myself and could keep up the mortgage repay­ments. I remembered the visit to our solicitor to go over the deeds of our present house and the expression which had flick­ered across his face when he’d realized where the money – or most of the money – was coming from. There was nothing I could put my finger on; but there was no mistake about either his con­tempt when he looked at me or his envious lubricity when he looked at Susan. The expression wasn’t too obvious, of course; and perhaps no one but me would have noticed it. But when you marry a rich man’s daughter you become expert about these matters.

Barbara tugged my hair. “You’re still not up, Daddy,” she said.

“All right,” I said. “I tell you what, we’ll make some teapot tea for Mummy.”

“And juice for me. Nice cold cold juice. With ice in.”

My dressing-gown was on the floor; I reached down for it, but Barbara ran out of the room with it. She threw it over the stairs, then began to cry. I looked at her in bewilderment. “What is it, silly billy?”

“I won’t like it,” she said. “I won’t like it, I never. I want the fuzzy one.”

“Put your dressing-gown on first, then. And your slippers.”

I went back into the bedroom to fetch my own slippers and the fuzzy dressing-gown. It was of camel-coloured wool, and I’d bought it when we lived in Pudney Lane; it was now mangy rather than fuzzy, and always had been too large for me. Its thick­­ness had been welcome enough in the draughty corridors and icy bathroom of the house in Pudney Lane; it wasn’t really neces­sary now. The oil-fired central heating, in fact, kept the house so warm that we hardly needed clothes at all; I didn’t object to this, but there were times when, perversely no doubt, I missed the com­fort the old dressing-gown had given me on winter morn­ings, just as I missed the open fire in the big kitchen. But I didn’t mind; more and more frequently these days I didn’t mind. Bar­bara re­appeared in her pink dressing-gown, the hood pulled up over her head. “Be my horse,” she said. “Be my furry horse.”