Co-opted Authority: Bourgeois writers in Dan Billany’s The Trap
By Dr. Stephen Cloutier
Sitting in an Italian prisoner of war camp in 1942, Dan Billany, a writer and teacher from Hull, finds himself in a position to unburden himself in a way he never could home in England. Freed from the normal social constraints, ironically while in physical captivity, Billany’s anger comes spewing out in his novel The Trap. The Trap follows the story of his working class narrator, Michael Carr, and the working class family of his girlfriend, Elizabeth Pascoe, as they struggle to survive first in the poverty of the 1930s and then the brutalization of the Second World War.
Early in the novel, Carr shows an aggressive self-awareness, writing:
Oh yes, yes, yes, yes! I know I’m holding up the story, and I don’t care a damn. I’ve wanted to say this for years. Rancorous?
By God I’m Rancorous. I’d be ashamed to the very depths of my very soul if I could write about my class without heat. (29)
This statement comes in a lengthy passage in which Carr struggles to express his intention as a writer, both in terms of style and subject. Carr nails his colours to the mast, stating, “I am Working Class. I was born of workers amongst workers, and therefore I am native of their country” (p. 29). Carr has a clear sense of who he is and what his purpose is. His wartime experience has altered him, so that when he looks back on the events that have brought him to the POW camp, he (to steal a phrase) looks back in anger.
For Mark Rawlinson, Carr’s comments bear “the hallmarks of intemperate Sassoonian satire” (162), and Paul Skrebels argues that “Billany’s protagonist is a fictional person […] rather as Siegfried Sassoon invented George Sherston” (56). The relationship between Billany and his narrator clearly echoes the relationship Sassoon has with Sherston, as Billany and Carr share very similar experiences. As Skrebels writes, Billany constructs a device for “othering” (56). Billany does not, however, merely mimic Sassoon’s use of Sherston. Sherston is, as Sassoon famously called him in Siegfried’s Journey, “a simplified version of my ‘outdoor self’” (103). Carr is not quite a simplified version of Billany, as Billany gives Carr experiences Billany himself does not have (including a wartime marriage) rather than stripping away experiences as Sassoon does with Sherston. This allows Billany to broaden his attack on British society. The novel, as Adam Piette suggests, reveals the “deep fissures and rifts in the society” (5) is Billany’s attempt to portray British society with chilling realism and to establish a truly radical voice of the working class.
It is important for both Carr and Billany to establish the authenticity of their voices early in the novel, as one of the ideas that Billany explores in the novel is how the working class voice has been co-opted by bourgeois writers. Billany’s goal in his writing career, and this novel in particular, is to write from an authentic working class point of view, to give the working class a legitimate voice. Working class writers have often been either ignored or seen, as Mary Leapor and Stephen Duck in the Eighteenth Century, as “natural” writers, oddities who showed spontaneous flashes of poetic brilliance. The idea that the working class produced no literature of any literary value is pervasive. In his influential study The Auden Generation, Samuel Hynes writes that “Virtually no writing of literary importance came out of the working class during the decade” (11), and even as late as 1998, Albert Gelpi in Living in Time, his study of C. Day Lewis, writes that “the working classes remained silent in part for the lack of education and opportunity, in part through identification with the technological and industrial system that oppressed them” (43). This refusal to see the value of working class writers is the crux of Billany and Carr’s insistence that the reader see them as working class writers.
Virginia Woolf writes in “The Leaning Tower” that (with the exception of D.H. Lawrence) “Take away all that the working class has given to English literature and that literature would scarcely suffer; take away all that the educated class has given, and English literature would scarcely exist” (168). For Woolf, those middle class writers who make up her canon include Somerset Maugham, Hugh Walpole, Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, and E.M. Forster. Melba Cuddy-Keane, in a lively defence of Woolf, suggests that this comment is not as narrow-minded as it may seem on the surface, arguing that Woolf, writing “in the genre of the informal essay, […] promoted the ideal of a classless, democratic, but intellectual readership, recasting ‘highbrowism’ as radical social practice” (2). Woolf, like Gelpi, links this lack of a working class voice to education, arguing that “if you look closely you will see that almost every writer who has practiced his art successfully had been taught it. He had been taught it by about eleven years of education – at private schools, public schools, and universities” (169). Her argument is that the middle classes, having access to education, can produce writers, whereas the working class, denied such access, cannot. Cuddy-Keane writes that Woolf is showing “the differences separating readers who were part of the privileged hegemony from those who were not” (86).
Woolf is right, of course, that the working class has been denied easy access to education; however, it doesn’t fully explain why working class authors consistently denied an existence let alone entry into the canon. Ian Haywood in his study of working-class fiction shows that there were many working class writers; Haywood, beginning his study with the Chartists in 1837, points out that the 1930s saw a substantial rise in published novels by the working class (48). There were, after all, educated members of the working class. Billany himself was awarded an honours degree in English from University College of Hull in 1937 and qualified to be a teacher the following year (Reeves and Showan, 60-61). The question then becomes: why do working class writers still fail to become accepted in the canon even after they are educated?
For Carr in The Trap, it is the way the working class is viewed by society: “from a little distance -- if not through bars, at least through an impervious psychological screen, so that their actions and emotions were as irrelevant to the gentle Writer and the gentle Reader as those of flatfish on the floor of their aquarium, on the other side of their thick glass and in their own bottle-green element” (26). The working class becomes something of an oddity, like fish in an aquarium. Bourgeois writers (and critics) view the working class as seen, “from the place where Real Human Beings lived (such as the Gentle W. and the Gentle R.), from the windows of Rugby Chapel or Eton, from Oxford or from Park Lane, or from the saddle of one’s hunter, riding to hounds” (26). The working class, “those droll, non-literary, non-ablutionary, non-intelligent, non-creative masses, made a pleasant background of racy, smelly, ludicrous movement for the activities of the normal non-working world” (26), become nothing more than a list of stereotypical physical attributes used as foils for the more urbane middle (and upper) class characters. Once any group is reduced to a stereotype, it becomes easy for others in society to believe that the members of that stereotyped group are unable to function as active agents for their own improvement and then begin to speak for, in this case, the working class.
For Carr, it is the writers who presume to speak for the working class who become his main targets. Carr writes that there is “no break in the chain from Galsworthy to Auden...they may look down their noses at each other, talk contemptuously of the Liberal-bourgeois, but they’re all twisted twigs from the old tree, they all belong between Piccadilly and Park Lane, they’re none of them working-class” (29). It is the new generation of Bourgeois writers (represented by John Galsworthy and W.H. Auden) who claim to attack the British class system on behalf of the working class but will, in reality, always be defined by their middle class attitudes. Carr argues that writers like Auden are:
hypnotized by the violence of their own Oedipus complex, which set them psychologically in opposition to their own class -- I'm speaking of a rising generation -- persuaded themselves that this rebellion gave them identity of interest with the working-class, believed they had actually become working-class by sheer force of will -- unaware, completely, that the thing which divides the Working Class from the Upper Class is, quite simply, not a difference of ideals but a difference of income. (28-29)
Billany’s complaint about these middle class writers is that their identification with the working class comes from the personal conflict with their own class rather than any real interest in improving the lives of the working class. These writers are far more interested in rebelling against members of their own class than actually helping the working class. In Carr’s eyes, this rebellion allows the middle class writers to believe that they are working class, even as they retain all the privileges of their class.
Woolf identifies the same tendency in the middle class writers. Writing about Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal, Woolf states that MacNeice “begins of course with a snipe at the scapegoat – the bourgeois, middle-class family from which he sprang” (172); she then links radical ideas to the bourgeois writers (“They read Marx. They became communists; they became anti-fascists” (172)). This, in effect, strips away any validity to radical ideas, joining them to the hypocritical middle class writers. Woolf has already dismissed any real influence by working class writers, so any radicalism injected into the canon could not come from them. As much as Billany would agree with Woolf’s idea of middle-class writers pursuing a false god in political theory, he would object to her equating revolutionary ideas solely with those bourgeois writers. As Carr knows, there were those who, like Carr himself, believe in these radical ideas not from (to borrow from Billany) an Oedipal rebellion against their own families but from a real desire to change society and the lives of the working class for the better. Their world views, threatening to the middle class liberal, refuse to fit into the bourgeois Weltanschauung and thus are ignored.
As a committed socialist, Billany argues from a revolutionary ideological position. The work of Antonio Gramsci in particular, helps to shed light on the ideas Billany explores in The Trap. Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony serves as a good entry point into Billany’s attack on British middle class writers. For Gramsci, cultural control is vital to the ruling class. Joseph V. Femia writes that Gramsci “saw in a way that no previous Marxist had done that the rule of one class or group over the rest of society does not depend on material power alone; in modern times, at least, the dominant class must establish its own moral, political and cultural values as conventional norms of practical behaviour” (3). Gramsci argues that
Every historical act cannot but be performed by the ‘collective
man’. In other words this presupposes the attainment of a ‘socio-cultural’
unity through which a multiplicity of dispersed individual wills, heterogeneous in their aims, are welded together for the same goal on the basis of an (equal) and common conception of the world...Since this is what happens, great importance is assumed by the overall question of language, i.e. the collective attainment of single cultural ‘climate’. (156)
Everything a culture does is intended to create a collectivity, a collectivity that is focused on maintaining itself. Even the use of language itself is designed to maintain the status quo.
The most obvious example of this in literature is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell writes that the purpose of Newspeak
was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, A heretical thought that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.(312)
This control of language allows the party to control history. Winston Smith’s job in the novel, after all, is to trawl through back issues of newspapers and rewrite “articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify” (41). Gramsci and Orwell both knew that thought and even action can be controlled and manipulated through the use of language. Whereas traditional Marxist theory separates the base from the superstructure, Gramsci (like Orwell and Billany) collapses the base and the superstructure into one, creating a complicated web of social relations. To control society, the ruling class must, therefore, create a single cultural “climate” in which all the separate social voices are brought together to attain the same goal. The ruling class, according to Gramsci, needs to control not only the factories but also what people read or hear on the radio or see on the movie screen (or, in our contemporary context, see on television). Everything in society becomes a weapon for the ruling class. Through this, the ruling class maintains power by forcing discontented voices to disregard their own goals in favour of a common world conception, which is, of course, defined by the ruling class. This social isolation allows the Bourgeois society to separate and dominate the working class, seen in 1984 as the slogan “Ignorance is Bliss.” As a result, the working class does not organise and agitate for change. Revolutionary ardour is blunted.
Billany sees as clearly as Gramsci and Orwell do that cultural control is vital to social control. Further, Billany understands that writers fill a vital role in creating any myth the ruling class wishes to promulgate. This is why, when Billany attacks British society in The Trap, he does it largely by attacking the creative writers. While he certainly does attack government and industry, he does not single out politicians or industrialists by name; he does, however, single out specific writers; two writers he highlights in particular are W.H. Auden and John Galsworthy. For Billany, all aspects of the British socio-political system are designed to maintain the status quo and to keep the working class in poverty, even those writers who, like Auden, profess to rebel against British society. Like Gramsci, Billany knows that writers, as part of the cultural landscape, are complicit in creating how society is viewed and, in this context, how the working class is viewed.
Billany’s key and original addition to British cultural thought posits that not only does the dominant class, aided by the Bourgeois writers, control culture, but it also creates the fiction that working class culture is profoundly different from that of the upper class. That is something to be observed like those fish in the aquarium. As Skrebels would say, the ruling class effectively “others” the working class. The bourgeoisie creates the idea of “Two Solitudes”, a term coined by Canadian writer Hugh MacLennan, in the novel of the same name (1945), to describe the relations between Anglophones and Francophones in Canada. Essentially, the Two Solitudes live together in the same society but never really understand or identify with each other. They live separately within the same society. In Billany’s view, Bourgeois writers are directly responsible for creating the fiction of the Two Solitudes in British society: in Canada based on language (French and English) and in Britain based on class (the working class and the ruling class). In Billany’s view, this division within British society is a false one, propagated by the ruling class in order to maintain the oppression of the working class. As such, cultural expression, even sports, become inextricably linked to class: opera becomes Bourgeois while football becomes working class. Billany, an opera fan himself, rejects this separation as readily as Gramsci does.
Billany’s main objection is to empty commitment, commitment that pretends to benefit the entire social strata but is merely a “revolution” within the middle class. Leon Trotsky, in Literature and Revolution, argues the same point when discussing Futurism: “Futurism originated in an eddy of bourgeois art, and could not have originated otherwise. Its violent oppositional character does not contradict this in the least” (127). Trotsky ‘s point is that merely because an artistic movement is oppositional to the status quo does not mean that the artistic movement is any less bourgeois. Trotsky argues that “the geniuses who are of military age, who, cursing the satiated and vulgar bourgeois culture, secretly dream of a few little balls for themselves, and gilded ones, too, if possible” (128). They may curse the life of the bourgeoisie, but deep in their hearts it is the life they crave for themselves.
Both Trotsky and Billany make the same point: that a literary movement does not necessarily advance the cause of the working class merely because it opposes the status quo. Billany carries that argument farther, stating that a literary movement does not necessarily advance the cause of the working class even if it claims to do so. Carr, in a prisoner of war camp like Billany, vents his spleen at these bourgeois writers: “All that part of our society which I have labelled Park Lane is to me a vulgar tower of insincerities, an unreal world which, the higher the ideals it professes, the more it reveals that its one overwhelming law is that of self-preservation” (30). To Billany, the bourgeoisie professes whatever ideal it needs to remain in control, to retain social power, even if that means pretending to ally itself with the working class.
It is also important to highlight two of the names that Billany evokes: Galsworthy and Auden. Although the thirties cultural critic James Gindin argues for a reassessment of Galsworthy’s work, he recognises that for “the relatively small high-brow critical audience, the work is dated and pedestrian, the fiction one long, slow decline into conventionality from the early peak of The Man of Property” (xi). Gindin is referring to Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga, which has traditionally been seen as beginning as social satire with the first novel, The Man of Property (1906), and ending in a conservative, almost sentimental, view of the upper middle class by the end of the saga. Billany clearly reads Galsworthy’s work in this way. It is not just a small group of high-brow readers who see Galsworthy’s work in this way, so too does at least one radical socialist who looks at Galsworthy and sees not a part of the solution, not a social critic, but a part of the problem, part of the status quo. Like Galsworthy, Auden also returns to a more orthodox social position later in his career. While Billany would not have known what shape Auden’s future poetry would take, he would certainly be aware of Auden’s flight to the United States which signalled the end of Auden’s commitment to socialism. Stephen Spender asserts in his autobiography World Within World that Auden’s famous poem “A Communist to Others” is “an exercise in entering into a point of view not his own” (248). This much anthologized poem has been repeatedly used to show Auden’s commitment to socialism, yet Spender, a close friend of Auden’s, suggests that the commitment shown in the poem is nothing more than a poetic exercise rather than an expression of personal belief. It is not surprising that Auden explored the possibilities of Communism, not only because many of his friends were becoming increasingly left-wing in their views but also because the Communist Party was more accepting of his homosexuality. While understandable, his choice of political party came from more personal motives rather than any real desire to change society, Auden eventually rejected Communism when it became incompatible with his later religious views.
Auden’s later poetry reflects his move away from his Marxist influenced poetry of the Thirties. Bernard Bergonzi argues that Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939” (famous for dismissing the 1930s as being “low and dishonest”) shows “Auden’s personal shift from the Marxism laced with psychoanalysis that had so affected his poetry of the Thirties to a form of existentialist Protestantism” (1). Although a High Church Anglicanism may be a preferable term than Protestantism, Bergonzi points out the obvious change in Auden’s poetry. Auden returns to a more religious and conservative point of view in his poetry with poems like “The Prophets”. Monroe K. Spears goes so far as to state that this shift is “not a denial but a fulfilment of his earlier beliefs” (171). Auden was searching for a world view that reflected his own. Socialism was one world view he explored, only to discard it when it became clear that it did not suit his purpose.
Two writers who begin their careers with savage attacks on the ruling class belie their commitment for social change by turning their backs on their earlier attitudes. Yet these are the voices that dominate their time and are identified by the dominant literary culture as being representative of the pro-working class, or at least anti-Bourgeois, writers. Critical attitude assumes that political commitment ends as the world moves into the Second World War, using Auden’s “September 1, 1939” as “proof”. This is a perfectly valid critical position to take if political commitment is to middle class writers who allegiance may shift as their literary ideas shift and change. This may be natural within the context of the development of the individual writer. In a broader social and literary context, however, it is an incomplete view. There are those who, like Billany and his narrator Michael Carr, still rage, pushing for radical social change.
What becomes clear, then, is that Billany’s position is upheld. The fiction of the Two Solitudes, the British working class versus the British ruling class, has become engrained not only in the writers of the 1930s but also in the critical response to the literature of the Thirties. The working class of the 1930s has become defined by their participation, to use Hynes’s words, “in Hunger Marches, in protests, in the East End resistance to Mosley’s invasion” (11), all distant and dated historical events. The Bourgeois of the 1930s, however, have been defined as creators of enduring works of literature that are timeless in their appeal. The ruling class has, through the writers it accepts into the canon, control of social ideology. True working class writers who agitate for real and lasting change are pushed to the margins, while writers who feign a commitment, no matter how well-intentioned, to the working class are codified and fetishized in the canon.
The authentic Working Class voices were and, to a large degree, still are pushed to the margins of culture and society. After all, who remembers Dan Billany or Walter Brierley or Harold Heslop? Everyone remembers the middle class writers: Auden, Spender, Day Lewis, and even the idiosyncratic and somewhat marginalized Orwell. As Billany writes, “Proletarian Art? There it was, on the Arty-Crafty walls, proletarian Art, all produced by the younger sons and daughters of the world that dines at eight” (29). The word “Proletarian” is used ironically, of course; Billany goes on to say, sardonically, “When Proletarian Art sets out the beauty of Labour, I begin to consider it’s high time the Proletarian Artist did some” (30).
Works Cited
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