Originally Posted by lionel
Don’t apologise – that’s an interesting thread.
In between other things, I’m steadily working on a book – part (critical) biography, part novel – on the forgotten working-class modernist writer Lionel Britton (1887–1971). Britton’s only published novel, Hunger and Love (1931), is in part a representation of a trip inside the brain of Arthur Phelps, the (virtually only) character, and most of the 705 pages are taken up by ramblings about evolution, philosophical speculations, stream of consciousness, and Arthur eking out an existence on poverty wages.
Of inestimable help to me has been the Lionel Britton Collection at Southern Illinois University, which houses 45 cubic feet of space – in 90 boxes – of Britton’s correspondence and unpublished works: eventually, is you read enough letters, it becomes clear that, after three published plays and one novel, he would never have accepted being published by anyone but himself. But he never made it. I believe Hunger and Love was, and may even still be, the only first novel ever published without any emendations being made, not even a comma. (Britton insisted on it, or else he’d go elsewhere.) But then, the amazing five-page Introduction by Bertrand Russell, full of praise for the novel, no doubt helped to persuade the publisher a little.
For just a year now, I’ve been receiving emails almost daily from one of Britton’s great-nephews, who’s manically hunting down his family tree, and has also been a great help in fitting together so many pieces of Britton’s life.
Hunger and Love is not a major novel, by the way, but it’s certainly a major working-class British novel.
My (frequently slightly altered, of course) Wikipedia entry on him gives a few brief details, but I wouldn’t recommend it.
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