An old husband's tale
Francis King
GET OUT EARLY by Walter Allen
Robert Hale, £9.95
0 f the melancholy literary truth `out of print, out of mind', Walter Allen pro- vides an obvious instance. There was a time in the Fifties and early Sixties when any itinerant lecturer on the Modern En- glish Novel for the British Council abroad would be certain to say in the course of a disquisition on such novelists of provincial, proletarian life as Stan Barstow, Alan Sillitoe and David Storey: 'Nor, of course, must we forget Walter Allen.' Now, however, many people of an older genera- tion have forgotten-Walter Allen or only half remember him, and many people of a younger generation have never heard of him at all.
As to the reason or reasons why, after two such solidly meritorious and generally well received novels as Dead Man All Over and All in a Lifetime, there should have been a lapse of more than 25 years before the publication of the novel now under review, one can only guess. Much of that period Allen spent on the treadmill of reviewing, of compiling two books essen- tial to lazy students of Eng. Lit., The English Novel and The Short Story in English, and of teaching at a variety of American universities and the New Uni- versity of Ulster. Such pedestrian labours all too often leave a writer too much out of breath for the long, patient haul up the mountain of a novel.
Many years ago Allen wrote an excellent httle book about Arnold Bennett; and the best way to convey his quality to someone who has never read him is to say that it is a less ebullient and ambitious and a more pensive and pessimistic Bennett that he brings to mind. The anti-hero, Tommy !Culver, of Get Out Early, half card and half cad and yet always likeable — it is easy to see why he is so easily able to charm and exploit other people — is very much the kind of man that Bennett, with a kind of oblique self-love, relished in so many of his novels. Indeed, as an adolescent, Tommy comes on Bennett's Clayhanger in the public library — a novel 'soaked in Methodism' — and at once decides that it seems 'to explain much of his own life and make sense of the lives of his forbears'. The 'Bromford' which is all too clearly the Birmingham of Allen's own youth is riot all that different from one of Bennett's Five Towns; and Tommy's father, an upright Nonconformists from the humblest of beginnings, whose foundry makes a great deal of brass, both figuratively and literal- ly, might well be one of Bennett's self- made men. Bennett's, too, is the ironic but by no means hostile detachment with which this man and those around him are presented from the viewpoint of the out- sider son who has removed himself from them, to scrape and scrounge a living, as best he may, in London.
The book spreads itself, sometimes rich- ly and sometimes far too thinly, over a long period of time, from 1913 to 1967, with Tommy usually, though not always, at its centre. Having been the indirect cause of his mother's death in parturition and there- fore rejected from his father's love, he is sent away to a Nonconformist boarding- school where he learns to shop-lift; first cigarettes for an older, tougher boy, with whom he enjoys a sado-masochistic rela- tionship, then books for himself. Found out in the second of these transgressions, he is expelled. Later, his unduly scrupulous father feels obliged to withdraw him from college, after he has been suspected of being implicated with a fellow student in cribbing during an examination.
Tommy's sexuality, is as ambiguous as his moral character. He sleeps with the male editor of the first paper on which he gets a job as a journalist. Later, he picks up a wealthy Midlands businessman, goes to bed with him, and suffers him — while deceiving him into believing that they both went to the same minor public school — to set him up in a flat. His subsequent rejection of this man — beautifully por- trayed as a mixture of innocence and shrewdness, softness and hardness — is ugly in its brutality and yet, given the circumstances, wholly intelligible. Near the close of this relationship, Tommy starts a rival one with a father-fixated young woman surgeon. The books begins and ends with a love-affair with a Rapunzel look-alike, a girl called Chris with long golden locks, who has just emerged from what she calls 'the funny-farm'. By this point, Tommy's father has just died, and he has inherited from him a fortune suffi- cient to keep both Chris and himself.
The book often gives one the strange sense that it is still not complete. It peters out, rather than ends, and there are curious hiatuses. The story of the girl, with her episode of madness — caused, one infers, from the trauma of having her parents' closest male friend put his hand down her knickers when she is still an adolescent — is almost a separate novella in itself. That novella is a strong one, but it distracts from the main theme of the book — which is the slow often painful evolution of Tommy's character over a long period of years.
Another defect is the intermittent in- security of the dialogue. Would a Thirties schoolboy, in suggesting that a character may be a lesbian, use the word Ireemar- tin'? Would he exhort another schoolboy `Don't blub, nipper'? Would anyone be- fore the war speak of 'Reds under the bed'? To achieve his comic effects, Mr Allen also has a tendency to overdo the clichés in his dialogue — most notably in the cases of Chris's brother-in-law, who keeps producing bromides like 'I'm ready to climb the wooden hill to Bedfordshire' or 'everyone will welcome a noggin', of an Australian friend of Tommy's, who repeat- edly refers to `cobbers'; 'cobblers', %hellos' and `chippies', and an American whose conversation is spattered with things like `As sure as God made little apples', 'Sure thing, lady!', 'That's for sure!' and 'What's a guy to do?'
But this is a strong, substantial novel, full of diverting characters and incidents, and written from a viewpoint that, though drily sardonic, remains admirably tolerant and even benevolent throughout. It is sad that we have had to wait so king for it.
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