Snobbery With Violence Read online

  Indicative of just how heavy that demand was, and how widespread, is a report dating from 1933 by a West Country representative of one of the chain libraries. According to this, the firm’s branch at Poole, whose population was then 43,000, issued six thousand books a week. The readers were predominantly from the lower middle class and seventy-five per cent of them were women. One woman was noted as taking out six books every two days. Favourite authors among women were Denise Robins, Louise Gerard, Ethel M. Dell, Elinor Glyn and P. G. Wodehouse; men’s preferences were headed by Edgar Wallace, ‘Sapper’, Sydney Horler and Zane Grey. The proprietors must have been much gratified by their representative’s further information that each book at Poole was made to last at least a hundred and eighty issues and that stolen novels, or ‘non-returns’, represented a loss of no more than one in eight thousand.

  A question of special relevance to the type and quality of reading matter available to the public in the two decades before the 1939 war is how far the commercial libraries were able to influence the publishing trade. One publisher, Stanley Unwin, declared categorically that their effect was ‘to assist the circulation of indifferent and bad books, and to retard the circulation of really good books, especially those by writers who have not yet established reputations’. He added: ‘There is one circulating library that makes a boast of the extent to which it can force its subscribers to take what is given them, which means, in that particular case, what the library can buy cheapest.’

  This doubtless was the case, but it always is arguable whether taste dictates catering or catering taste; that they interact is the only safe contention. The preoccupation of the circulating and chain libraries was that of all commercial organizations – to make money. It was natural, therefore, that apart from an occasional gamble on an unknown but potentially popular author they should play safe and stock their shelves with work of proved appeal. This policy was bound to exclude the innovator, the novelist of ideas, the ‘disturbing’ or ‘depressing’ writer.

  Publishers, in so far as they were business men, could not escape the implications of the policy of their biggest customer. It is to the credit of many of them that they continued to accept and to champion works which had no hope whatever of scraping beneath the low-slung boom of the libraries’ literary standards. A good deal of courage, not to say quixoticism, was needed to back a Lawrence, a Forster or a Virginia Woolf in an era when the lion’s share of the rewards of publishing went to the managers of dream-factories and cliché-mills.

  Apart from exerting pressure in obedience to ‘lowest common denominator’ economics, the commercial libraries occasionally applied their influence on a moral plane. Their propensity to do this varied according to the sensibilities of the directors of individual firms, just as public library censorship varied with the notions of committees from town to town. In general, discrimination against a supposedly ‘naughty’ book was quietly exercised by a simple failure to order it. Only when fuss was made by a disappointed subscriber or a slighted publisher was attention called to this aspect of control of public reading. Now and again a cause célèbre arose when an author of reputation offended against the arbitrary code whereby library stocks were supposed to be kept free of salacious and corrupting material. Just how ridiculous the code was may be judged by the names of some of the writers who managed to get involved in controversies of this kind. They included Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and Compton Mackenzie.

  Unfortunately for the high moral intention of the library arbiters, private and public, a common result of the publicity attendant upon their ‘banning’ of a book was a boost to its sales through other channels. Proscription actually became a cachet much sought by authors; it was worth a good many columns of advertising. The suggestion that in some cases condemnation was engineered by mutual agreement has a certain perverse attraction.

  Censorship of an overt kind decreased towards the end of the inter-war period: probably because its practitioners had tired of being made to look foolish. Control continued to be exercised, but more tactfully. A notable example of this change in strategy concerned Compton Mackenzie’s book about the abdication of Edward VIII, Windsor Tapestry, published in 1938. The occasion inspired a directive from the head office of W. H. Smith and Son:

  All ‘A’ shop, ‘B’ shop and stall managers will note carefully the following important instructions in connection with the above book which are to be adhered to rigidly. No objection will be placed in the way of the manager carrying such stock as is necessary to meet reasonable public demand, but special displays of the book, inside a shop, in a shop window or on a bookstall front are definitely forbidden. No advertising matter of any sort will be issued by head office for the book and no advertising matter is to be accepted from the publishers; neither will managers write ‘home-made’ tickets for the book. We repeat that these instructions are to be rigidly observed.

  The significance of moral and political strictures by those who had acquired a near-monopolistic control of the distribution of popular reading matter is clearly considerable in principle. It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that the literary diet of library and bookstall customers was determined and imposed by management without reference to those customers’ wishes. Supposing that D. H. Lawrence, George Moore, James Joyce and Havelock Ellis had been given equal shelf freedom with Edgar Wallace and Ethel M. Dell, the odds are that on the shelf they would have stayed, except for an occasional furtive airing by the prurient. They would, in fact, almost certainly have been bad business.

  Charging commercial institutions with failure to educate public taste is an indulgence from which intellectuals will only be deterred when they grasp that a non-existent contract can be neither breached nor enforced. If commerce is to be indicted for anything, it can only be for commercialism, and whether that is a crime or not is a political question. Very few people who walked into the High Street from a library forty years ago with three or four thrillers and romances under their arm had the slightest misgivings about the freedom of choice they had just exercised. Even fewer would have been prepared for a moment to credit that the ‘good read’ to which they were looking forward was part of a process that debilitated taste, shrank discrimination and impoverished thought.

  Despite the economic crises, chronic unemployment and widespread misery in the industrial areas, the mood of people not immediately affected by these things was predominantly one of satisfaction. Gilt-edged Victorian and Edwardian optimism had taken far less severe a knock from the murderous futility of the 1914–18 war than one might suppose. The middle class had suffered its share of casualties, of course, but it mourned them as it would have mourned bereavement by pneumonia or motor accident. Anger was felt hardly at all, and if there was little of the kind of pride which a nation-wide clutter of memorial masonry made pretence of witnessing, the ‘sacrifice’ by so many fathers and sons and brothers and uncles was accepted by most as having been a dutiful and responsible act. The Great Bore was over, the threat from foreigners had been removed for the moment, and the prospect visible from city suburb, commuters’ village and provincial township was one of secure continuance of the old order and its gradual enrichment by the innovations of progress.

  It might be asked how so complacent an attitude could have co-existed with conditions that gave rise to the use of troops against strikers and unemployed, to lockouts and riots, naval mutiny, the national paralysis of 1926 and the hunger marches of the 1930s. The reason is that the population of Britain was living then, to an even greater extent than it is now, in compartments. These were defined not only by class barriers but by physical, geographical divisions.

  Thus it was quite possible to be leading a comfortable existence in a pleasant residential area of Gloucester or Hereford and be genuinely unaware that less than fifty miles away in the Welsh valleys whole communities were living on a bare survival level. Kindly Londoners who would have been shocked by the spectacle of a child shivering with cold simply refu
sed to believe stories of schools on Tyneside in which, summer and winter, nearly half the pupils sat barefoot in class. The stories were true, as were those of Durham shipyard towns where only one man in three had a job, and of areas in Lancashire and Cumberland where malnutrition had hoisted the tuberculosis rate to between ten and twenty times that of the Home Counties. But distance – even a short distance – was a great insulator of conscience. So was the notion, inherited from the Victorian self-help school, that misfortune was somehow the consequence of fecklessness and therefore the unalterable lot of those who had allowed themselves to slip to the bottom of the pile. Yet another aid to the equanimity of the comfortably placed was the preoccupation of the Press with cheerful and trivial themes. With very few exceptions indeed newspapers were dedicated to the profitable Northcliffe slogan ‘Give the public what it wants’.

  What the public – the middle-class, reading public – clearly did not want was disquieting dispatches from beyond the frontiers of its own experience. Circulation managers noted that too frequent reference to menacing political situations abroad depressed sales, as did ‘sordid’ stories of industrial depression at home. News selection and treatment were adjusted accordingly. The News Chronicle (formerly Dickens’s Daily News) was practically alone among national daily newspapers in consistently presenting foreign and home events with due regard to the realities of the situation. The readers of the rest were shown an Italy and Germany whose rulers, while not quite gentlemen, perhaps, were too busy building autobahns and getting trains to run to time for the entertainment of any aggressive intentions; a Russia of measureless malignance and cardboard tanks; a France consisting of the Promenade des Anglais, rude night clubs and the Maginot Line; and a motherland to which prosperity was slowly and surely returning while Mr Baldwin tamped his pipe, Mr MacDonald mixed his metaphors, and Gracie Fields led a crowd of happy, be-shawled mill girls in the chorus of ‘Sing As We Go’.

  The euphoric conspiracy was not completely solid. Apart from the predictable fusillade from left-wing polemicists, there came protests from relatively respectable quarters. Wells warned and Shaw taunted. George Orwell’s dark prophesies frightened a few people. Hilaire Belloc declared England to be ‘done’ before he lapsed into silence in order to contemplate the enormity of the demolition of Hanacker Mill. The intellectual poets, Auden and Isherwood, blistered the smug compatriots whose salvation they were to leave others to complete when they opted for America in 1939. A particularly unkind cut, coming as it did from the author of The Good Companions, 1929’s top favourite among solid citizens, was delivered by J. B. Priestley in 1934. His English Journey confirmed by personal testimony that there existed on a large scale places and conditions of unimaginable awfulness. Some library committees in the areas he described, persuaded that Mr Priestley had been less than fair, declined to stock the book.

  Outside the rotting industrial areas, developments favourable to the expansion of a ‘leisure’ literature continued steadily during the 1920s and 1930s. The national income – the ‘real’ income, that is, in terms of purchasing power – rose in spite of political and economic uncertainty by 40%, thanks largely to a fall in prices of materials from abroad. The proportion of people in non-manual employment increased. Thus, between 1921 and 1938, the percentage earning a living from insurance, banking and finance went up by nearly a fifth; while a similar rise was registered in the number of jobs in local government. Wage and salary earners in these kinds of work were more likely to have the means, opportunity and inclination to read than were industrial and agricultural workers and an army of unemployed that fluctuated between one and a half and three millions. The provision of homes, which were, among other things, places to keep and read books, had become accepted as an important matter of public policy. Between 1919 and 1939, more than a million houses were built by local authorities in England and Wales and two and a half times that number by private enterprise.

  A great number of the latter were in dormitory areas and strung out by ‘ribbon development’ through what previously had been attractive countryside. Railway and bus services were developed to link them with business centres. In less than ten years after 1920, the forty-eight local authorities then operating buses were joined by fifty-two more, and the number of passengers carried increased elevenfold. For millions, journeys by road and rail became a daily routine that a newspaper, magazine or novel helped to render less tedious.

  And while they travelled, their wives – or at least the wives of the more prosperous among them – became increasingly engaged by another aspect of the problem of time-killing. There existed a reservoir of domestic help – maids, handymen, charwomen, gardeners and laundresses – fed constantly by the wives and daughters of the poorly paid, by war widows, disabled ex-Servicemen, pensioners and men out of work – that could be tapped for a few coppers an hour. Then, as the home use of electricity spread, the American example of domestic mechanization began to gain followers, as was instanced by the increase of annual vacuum-cleaner production in Britain from 37,550 to 409,345 between 1930 and 1935. Home leisure was ceasing to be the prerogative of the rich and the upper middle-class; it was well within the means of the wife of the £300 or £400 a year man, provided that the fashionable limit of two children had been observed. As often as not, she used some of her spare time in the same way as her husband used his travelling intervals between home and office. She read.

  “THIS TOO, TOO SOLID FLESH.”

  Pursued Burgiar (who has escaped through only gap in high fence, to large policeman who has stuck in it). “SO LONG, OLD DEAR. IF WE MUST PART, IT’S NICE TO PART FRIENDS!”

  CHAPTER 3

  A very decent sort of burglar

  The division of crime fiction into its twin limbs, the tale of detection and the felony-based adventure story, or thriller, was fairly clear by the beginning of this century. There have been sports and offshoots – Gothic shockers in the tradition of Sheridan le Fanu; documentary and psychological studies that Raymond Postgate, Gerald Bullett, Julian Symons and others were to give lasting literary authority; steady production by Bram Stoker’s successors in the pernicious anaemia business; certain sorts of spy story – but each of the two main branches has preserved its own characteristics, modified only by changes in technology and fashion.

  Both kinds have commanded popularity and do so still. Each, therefore, must supply in some degree and in its own special way those standard needs of the fiction-reading public: stimulus, diversion, relaxation, reassurance.

  The detective story stimulates, or is supposed to stimulate, the intellect because it contains a puzzle. People who cannot be bothered with puzzles do not read it. It diverts because it presents a situation altogether outside the normal experience of the reader. It relaxes by the well-established therapeutic process of summoning effort for no other purpose than its subsequent discharge without effect in terms of work done. The element of reassurance subsists in the inevitability of the puzzle’s being solved, with or without the reader’s self-gratifying guesswork, by the end of the book. We do not like the outcome of a detective novel to be easily predictable (although it is surprising how many people turn first to the final page and then patiently wade through from the beginning) but confidence that there will be an outcome, and one of a morally acceptable kind, is all-important.

  A much wider range of possibilities can be drawn upon to satisfy the demands of the reader of the thriller, without altering the definition of those demands. Stimulus need not involve a problem, or not, at any rate, a problem requiring applied thought. Mystery – always a useful ingredient of the thriller – is something else: it induces unease of that pleasant kind that may be dispelled at the author’s convenience at any time without putting the reader to the bother of ratiocination. Then there is available a host of emotional stimuli capable of rousing, in greater or lesser degree according to the writer’s skill and the reader’s susceptibility, such enjoyable responses as patriotic zeal, indignation at breaches of fair p
lay, feelings of cupidity, sexual desire, hatred (in a thriller the identity of the villain may legitimately be known from the beginning) or of rectitude, religious partisanship, and personal superiority.

  The thriller also has greater scope than the detective story for offering diversion. Whether or not the apparatus of law enforcement be invoked, it does not have to be a pace-setter as in the roman policier. Investigation tends to be a static business, particularly when detailed evidence is being assembled and assessed. In the thriller, the scene is where the action is, not where a witness is answering a detective’s questions about action that has taken place already.

  This emphasis on action might appear to be incompatible with the relaxative purpose of light reading which, in the case of the detective novel, is fulfilled by allowing the mind to uncoil after exercise on some artificial and external problem. But the thriller achieves the same end by a more widely acceptable means, that of emotional catharsis. Just as there is no reason to doubt the assertion by some women that they like to go to the cinema to have ‘a good cry’, one recognizes the fact that very many people feel better for a good chase or a few good murders.

  The fourth need, for reassurance, has always been met by successful thriller writers, and probably with less strain on their inventiveness than might be supposed. The record suggests that they often are people who themselves have an especially strong yearning for reassurance. Edgar Wallace, their king, was so hopelessly inept in the management of his own affairs that an income the size of a small national budget did not prevent his slide into debt. Yet on paper he spawned financial wizards and organizational master-minds. Mrs Q. D. Leavis and other stern critics of the 1930 literary scene were fond of ascribing the popularity of thrillers to the public’s desire for ‘wish-fulfilment’, a fashionably pejorative concept at that time. None seems to have thought to blame the authors on the same count. Yet there was poor old ‘Sapper’, for one, sending forth his fantasy alter ego to smash that conspiracy of foreigners and Jews that so obviously haunted his imagination; while John Buchan, afflicted by the notion that the world’s secret rulers were epitomized by ‘a little white-faced Jew in a bathchair with an eye like a rattlesnake’ (The Thirty-nine Steps) kept mobilized for five novels the British agent Richard Hannay whom he had created back in 1915.