Lionel Britton

[titania7]

Originally Posted by lionel

I have now put the entire contents of my PhD thesis - 'The work of Lionel Britton' - on my blog, and many thanks to the wonderful Titania for giving me the incentive to do so: Dr Tony Shaw.

Tony, my love,
What can I say? I am infinitely proud of you. I hope you have an inherent sense of accomplishment. To think my encouragement made the difference is overwhelming! I'm simply so delighted that everyone will now have the chance to read your brilliant thesis on Lionel Britton in its entirety, for it is a stunning achievement!

~Titania


"You can't ensure against the future, except by really believing
in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it."
~D. H. Lawrence

[lionel]

A Dolphin in a Sentry-Box; or, on the Trail of Lionel Britton

The extraordinary writer Lionel Britton (1887-1971) published one novel and three plays in the 1930s and then disappeared from the literary map. There were very few obituaries, although it was in one of them – an anonymous article entitled ‘Forgotten Genius Ends his Days at Margate’, in the Isle of Thanet Gazette – that I discovered that a number of his unpublished works remained intact. His friend Professor Herbert Marshall, a great admirer of Britton, had arranged for all his literary effects to be shipped to Southern Illinois University (SIU) in Carbondale.

Carbondale has a population of about 22,000, although in term time it almost doubles in size. I very much doubt that the name Lionel Britton is known in any other university in the world with the exception of the Open University, where I gained my PhD in Literature on Britton’s work. Yet at the Special Collections Research Center in Carbondale, which houses ninety archival boxes of Britton manuscripts, his name is familiar: one member of staff – obviously to some extent acquainted with his biography – even told me that all Britton needed was a therapist! (The reason for that remark will probably become clear later in this article.) I have been to Carbondale on two occasions, and recently spent five weeks poring over the contents of a number of those boxes. Below I give a synopsis of my findings.

Britton and the Written Word

It is sometimes difficult to ascertain what Britton’s literary influences were, although superficially it would appear from reading Hunger and Love that James Joyce is one of them. C.E.M. Joad comes to this conclusion in Under the Fifth Rib: A Belligerent Autobiography (1932), where he speaks about the ‘Cult of Unreason’, and claims that Britton writes in the same genre as Joyce, Huxley, Woolf and Lawrence. In his brief essay ‘Unreason in Modern Literature’, however, Britton reacts angrily to this, saying:

‘Who are these people? What’s that to do with me? I don’t know anything about these blokes. I’ve heard about them. I hear people talking about them, and every now and again I think to myself I ought to know something about this, and I pick up one of their books. And that’s as far as it gets. I jolly soon lay it down again. What’s this stuff to me? I’m not a critic who’s paid for reading. I’m a writer, and I don’t intend to take poison. If I read this stuff I find I can’t think afterwards. It muddles up the speech centre in the brain. I can no longer think or speak naturally. If I force myself a few sentences too far into one of their books, then until I take a mental purgative or emetic I’m done. I might as well be dead. I won’t do it.’

The reason for this outburst is perhaps initially unclear, although Britton was frequently given to such tantrums, and there are numerous examples of them in Hunger and Love. Evidently, Britton has adopted one of the common preconceptions about the modernists: they are elitists, and therefore out of touch with the working class. Britton sees himself as a ‘proletarian’ writer, and thinks it wholly inappropriate to share a modernist aesthetic with such authors.

But Joad quotes a passage from Hunger and Love which he finds incomprehensible, and then a passage from the ‘Ithaca’ section of Ulysses, which he finds is similarly written – ‘in jerks’:

‘Solitary hotel in mountain pass. Autumn. Twilight. Fire lit. In dark corner young man seated. Young woman enters. Restless. Solitary. She sits. She goes to window. She stands. She sits. Twilight. She stands. On solitary hotel paper she writes. She thinks. She writes. She sighs. Wheels and hoofs. She hurries out. He comes from the dark corner. He seizes solitary paper, He holds it towards fire. Twilight. He reads. Solitary.’

Britton appreciates that Joyce is trying to express restlessness here, and says that if Joad doesn’t understand that then he doesn’t know how to write. Britton, however, would not express it in quite the same way:

‘I could never say “On solitary hotel paper she writes”. I should say: “She writes. Hotel paper. Solitary hotel.” I should not say “In dark corner young man seated.” I should say: “Young man sitting in dark corner.” I’d run a mile rather than use a word like “seated”. Be seated, madam! Not me!’

Throughout Hunger and Love Britton sees his enemies the bourgeoisie as unnatural, and in this article he associates the writing of modernists with an artificial style of writing. If he read them, he could ‘no longer think or speak naturally.’

Fame

The earliest play that Britton wrote was ‘Fame; or, the Reluctant Employee’, which probably dates from the early 1920s if not slightly before. The first words are spoken by Harry Humphries, a starving writer who lives in a garret surrounded by books piled on egg box shelves and sugar box tables and chairs. He is holding a herring in one hand and a frying pan in the other:

‘Life wouldn’t be so bad, only it’s the nuisance of it. First you’ve got to anabolize, and then you’ve got to catabolize; and then it’s time for bed. Now I have here an anabolic herring, denominated red, for no particular reason so far as I can see except that it’s not red in many; the egg that – (feels it in sudden misgiving) – yes, it is hard; many’s the egg that creature laid all unmindful of its destiny down at the bottom of the deep blue sea, because (argumentatively) if they don’t lay them at the bottom where the dickens do they lay them? And to think that to-morrow that fish will be talking philosophy! in me! It’s enough to make a chap look upon himself as an alchemist. It’s a humble sort of instrument when you look at him to make the universe conscious of itself. (Suddenly thinking.) Was Buddha, wasn’t it? – Now what’s the blessed order? (Goes to dictionary, putting herring on table.) Now you lie there, while I look up your references. (Sniffs.) You’ve been out of work a long time. I always classify my food before I eat it. It makes it much more interesting to have a pedigree herring, complete with its genus and differentia, tracing its final journey down your digestive tract.’ (Turning up dictionary.)’

The themes of this passage and the writing style will be familiar to anyone who has ever read any of Hunger and Love, with its emphasis on science (‘anabolize’, ‘catabolize’), its clipped, digressive language (‘Was Buddha, wasn’t it?’), the vital importance of the learning process, and the humour. ‘Fame’ was evidently a precursor of Hunger and Love, and there is even a repetition in the play of the scene in the novel where a bookseller pronounces Pierre Loti’s L’Isle inconnu as ‘Leelin Connu’. The Miss Whyman and the Doreen of Hunger and Love are conflated in ‘Fame’ to Dora, who first sees socialism from a negative perspective. In a heartfelt remark to her, Henry says: ‘I’m looking forward to seeing the employer’s head stuck on a pole.’ The use of the definite article instead of the possessive adjective is interesting here: Britton has shifted the dispossessed working class into a transcendent position and hoisted the bosses into history. (This is probably an allusion to Zola’s Germinal, where towards the end of the book a similar event takes place with the former boss’s genitals.)

The analogies between Hunger and Love and ‘Fame’ pile up, but it’s clear that – although many of the prototypical ideas in this play were forwarded to the novel, there was nevertheless a small amount of self-censorship in the published book; for instance, Britton saw H. G. Wells as a potential supporter of the novel, so he had to delete the following comment about Wells’s support for World War I: ‘I’m wonderfully fond of Wells. He’s a very great man; but he turned out a rotter during the war.’

Towards the end of the play, Henry looks forward to a successful life writing books instead of dusting them: clearly, ‘Fame’ looks to the future with hope as opposed to the bleak vision of Hunger and Love.

A Whisper to the Voice of Man

One of the aims of my second visit to SIU was to bring back a copy of ‘Murder’s Last Word’, Britton’s second and final novel and the follow-up to his huge Hunger and Love (1931). Hunger and Love boasted a five-page Introduction by Bertrand Russell and received very mixed reviews, although many of them – by Upton Sinclair and Richard Aldington, for example – were full of praise. It was well known at the time that Britton had had problems with publishers because he refused to allow them to make cuts to his repetitive and digressive novel; but in the end, Britton found a very sympathetic publisher in Putnam, and this first novel is highly unusual in that the publisher didn’t ask the author to make any emendations. In 1940, Britton was ready to show the world his second novel. Again, Putnam were enthusiastic, and their reader Constant Huntington told Britton that he had waited for years for the occasion. Why, then, was it never published?

The first obvious thing to note about Britton’s manuscript is that, at approximately 67,000 words, it is just over one fifth the size of Hunger and Love. But the second thing is far more important: Britton had made it clear that he intended to write a more popular novel, and this is what ‘Murder’s Last Word’ appears to be. Anyone familiar with Hunger and Love, though, especially with its treatment of some characters as an excuse for the narrator to launch into a long philosophical or scientific digression, would be very sceptical about Britton’s temperamental ability to write a ‘popular’ novel. And indeed, this scepticism would appear to be vindicated by two of the chapter titles: ‘Science and Morality’ and ‘Hegel Keeps His Secret’. And the beginning of the Preface strongly suggests that this ‘murder mystery’, as he calls it, will not be too far removed from what Britton’s readers expected: ‘[A]s any scientist will tell you in these days of Relativity, and as Copernicus found out before Einstein, the cart may push the horse as well as the horse pull the cart, and it all depends on whether you are going up hill or down, or, as in the solar system, on the point of view’, and ‘To a soldier, killing is everything; but as Hegel would have told you before you were born (though without a place in ‘Who’s Who’, and even then perhaps only if you could understand the Otherness in Being), killing implies being killed, and is impossible without it’. Everything seems to be in the place we would expect: Britton continues the long, circuitous sentences, and we appear to be set for the kind of digressions we are used to.

But this Preface is also a kind of excuse, and Britton is evidently apologising to his readers for having been forced to write within a more popular genre. Is there a great difference between this novel and Hunger and Love? Certainly the sub-title sounds a little like the Britton of the beginning of the previous decade: ‘A Sensational Thriller; or, “Blood” for Scientists, Philosophers, Statesmen, and Common Men of Today and Tomorrow – if There is a Tomorrow…’. Nevertheless, ‘Murder’s Last Word’ bears many similarities to conventional thriller fiction of the time. The language is (almost too) simple, the plot (and there is one this time) concerns a series of brutal murders which are embarrassing the police, and as the story unravels it transpires that this is the work of a ruthless (and German run) group of people who want to dominate the world by destroying everyone apart from the inhabitants of their own country; the novel also contains a few gory details, mystery, suspense, and a great deal of action. In a sense, it is everything that Hunger and Love is not, and there is a virtual absence of digression. Even the two nominally suspicious chapters mentioned above are conventional, and there is no scientific debate or philosophical discussion in them.

Britton sent out copies to a number of people to gauge the wisdom of his strategies, and there was some favourable response: V. Selson, ‘a business woman’ and the director of the Selson Machine Tools Co., said ‘Now that you have begun to write for people like me, you should be very successful.’ Fredda Brilliant, Herbert Marshall’s sculptor wife, said ‘I couldn’t at first believe that one and the same author could write such highly contrasting novels with equal brilliancy, but it seems that it is so! Such a book makes blitz reading for blitz hours!’ Bertrand Russell also congratulated him on his ability to adapt, although he thought that Britton should have made it clearer for duller readers who the main characters were meant to represent. Britton had said that this was a thriller with a difference, and it was intended as an allegory, an attack on Nazism. As he said (by way of another apology in an author’s note), ‘I have done the best I can with second best to add a whisper to the voice of man.’ Vernon Porter did not miss the point, but added: ‘I hope those who find the thrills absorbing will not miss the big idea and the clever criticism of dictatorship.’ P. Dienes of Birkbeck College added: ‘The idea behind the story is so good and so important that it seems to me to be wasted on a mere murder story, however cleverly done. And yours is damned well done.’

Dienes, though, along with a number of other readers, felt obliged to comment (very politely) on one small issue: ‘The scientific detail at the end is rather lengthy. I wonder if anybody wants to learn physics while waiting for the wholesale destruction of life on our planet?’ Britton had inserted six pages on the nature of the carbon atom into the novel: it was as if he could not be entirely forget the content of Hunger and Love. But it was sufficient to annoy a number of people. Amy Priestley, the head teacher of Monega Road Infant School in East Ham, loved it, but was forced to complain: ‘[D]o you really expect us lesser mortals to read a scientific lecture on the nature of carbon, when we are bursting for the denouement?’ And Marion Seeley, M.A., a senior English teacher at the Bromley High School for Girls, obviously agreed with her: ‘This I think won't be forgiven you by your average reader of thrillers. It holds up the action intolerably just when the excitement is at its highest pitch.’

Putnam, which had previously turned down later plays that Britton wrote, and had advised him to write another novel, were disappointed with the result, and had to make it clear that they did not publish thrillers. Many years later, Putnam bought the Dennis Dobson imprint and wanted to publish ‘Murder’s Last Word’ in the Blue Lamp Mysteries series. Britton refused because ‘it is obviously something more than just a thriller’.

Mr Pickwick

Britton may not have appreciated the work of the modernists but he enjoyed Charles Dickens a great deal. The half-title of the present article is a quotation from Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1836-37): Chapter VI of the novel takes place in the Wardle home at Dingley Dell, where Mr Pickwick plays whist, and where one of his opponents is ‘the unlucky Miller [who] felt as much out of his element as a dolphin in a sentry-box’. The phrase conjures up a surrealistic image that juxtaposes the artificial and regimented to the natural and the free, the violent to the peaceful, the grotesque to the graceful; it is an image of the outsider, and eerily sums up the world of Arthur Phelps of Hunger and Love. Equally, it sums up the world of Lionel Britton.

‘Mr Pickwick’ is the only play Britton wrote that was performed but not published. Its full title is ‘Mr Pickwick: In Search of Human Nature and the Strange Adventures that Befell Him Therein: An Original Play from the Pen of Charles Dickens through the Eyes of Lionel Britton’. It was performed at Rugby in 1945, although due to what appears to have been a cost-cutting exercise it was not, as originally scheduled, also performed at Huddersfield and Bristol.

In one of the archive boxes at SIU, a textually identical play is bound in a Kellogg’s Corn Flakes box, although there is a different subtitle: ‘[A]ttempts to capture Dickens’s original idea, which he lost as he went along’. It’s obvious that a dramatisation of The Pickwick Papers would vary in many ways from even the film version, but Britton’s treatment of the characters is nonetheless faithful to the characters, and to many events, in the novel. But the whole play takes place in the lounge of the Bull Inn.

The Pickwick Papers was in part a satire on the pretentious activities of historical societies, although this is lost in Britton’s version. What is important, from the beginning, is the working-class element, and Britton emphasises the role of Sam Weller in particular:

‘I feel that we have much to learn here, and perhaps more than we shall find in a further journey, and therefore I deemed it possible that the remarkable personality of the man in question and his services at this spot, would release my energies and afford me at the same time the stimulus of his curious reflections, in the pursuit of my investigations into the peculiarities of our fellow creatures.’

As may be expected, Britton – who used the expression ‘errand boy’ as a metaphor for a member of the working class – dwells on the seedier aspects of Weller’s history; Pickwick, who calls Weller a philosopher, is astonished by his accounts of his vagabond life, by his taking various precarious jobs and having to sleep in the filthy boarding houses of the ‘tuppenny rope’, or under Waterloo Bridge. Britton no doubt identified with Weller’s aphorism: ‘It’s bein’ poor where you sees life.’

To a lesser degree, Weller’s father is also a representative of working-class views:

‘[V]ot’s eddication for but to make the most o’ life, and not to be done no’ow by no sorts o’ blackguards, no matter how smart they thinks theirselves . Vy, ven you got that, you got eddication, and no puttin’ nothin’ arter your name nor no puttin’ nothin’ afore it, von’t take the place o’ that, sir.’

Pickwick replies: ‘I do really believe you are right.’

The blackguards Britton is thinking of, of course, are the bourgeoisie, and ‘Mr Pickwick’ makes considerable criticism of them. As in The Pickwick Papers, there are a number of occasions when the characters are allowed to voice their contempt for the legal profession: Sam is not allowed to kick anyone in the novel, although in the play he kicks the solicitor Dodson, who ‘scuttles out through the door like a scared cat’; in a general remark about lawyers, Old Weller remarks that ‘It’s a pint of honour vit ’em never to leave you nothing’. But it is perhaps Jingle who provides the best opportunity for Britton to extend his attacks to other institutions and also to indulge in the ‘headline abbreviation’ patterns of Hunger and Love; Jingle declares of Dr Slammer: ‘Poor fellow—disgraceful exhibition—mad doctors—regiments—shoot—mad—all mad!’

Several years after writing the play, Britton sent Robert Morley a copy of the script, and Morley claimed to have enjoyed the play immensely, but then realised that he couldn’t play Pickwick because he was a little fat man, whereas he was a big fat man. John Burrell of the Old Vic also rejected the play, claiming that Britton had taken ‘too many liberties’ with the novel.

O. H. M. S.

‘O. H. M. S.: or, How to Make God’ is an original play and marks a return to Britton’s experimental work. It was probably written in the 1940s or the 1950s and begins with a note which serves as a warning to any reader seeking the comfort of a traditional play: ‘If you are looking for the story it is very difficult, because it aint there’. The time is ‘Then, Now and Forever’, and the place ‘Here, There and Everywhere’. Britton continues:

‘The whole play is intended not so much to be immediately and clearly understood the first time it is seen, but as a kind of speaking music which will adjust man’s feelings towards himself and the universe, and which can be more and more understood the more deeply it is studied.’

The first scene is conventional enough, with a family scene set in the evening, and concerns a conflict between a conservative working-class father and his radical son who is studying at the local polytechnic. The son is a great believer in co-operation and believes that one day everyone will be working together for a just society, which he compares unfavourably to the past and the present, as represented by his father, whom he compares to an ape. At the end of the scene the mother partly reconciles the father to the fact that some social progress is being made in that their son, unlike his father, will never have to touch his cap to his bosses at work.

But this is the last we see of the family, and the characters in other sections also only make one appearance: the parts are only thematically related to one another. In the second section a British worker, and then a policeman, try to find some sense in a caveman; soon, they are replaced by a ‘Lit’ry Gent’ and a businessman with a fat cigar, the former arguing the merits of education for the masses, the latter saying that educating them too much will mean that they can ‘See through advertisements’.


In another section a sergeant is training his men when a child enters. The sergeant asks him what he wants, the child replies that he wants to grow up, and the sergeant explodes, ‘Well, you can’t grow up ’e r e ! Besides, you’ll ’ave your blasted career cut short, my bonny boy, with a bullet in the neck, if you come round ’ere tryin’ to bolshevise the soldiers, Now, just you tell me – oo the ’ell sent you?’ The brief speech is of course an attack on the armed forces cutting young men’s lives short, but it also shows the fear in the Establishment that left-wing views are infiltrating those forces.

Britton’s targets are virtually all institutions, and in the fifth section he finds a generic name for anyone he believes is standing in the way of progress – meaning in the way of the march towards anarchism and its twin goal of global co-operation as opposed to competition: they are Way-Closers, or W Cs for short. Britton couldn’t have predicted that wall-to-wall sport would replace the wall-to-wall religion of the 19th and early 20th centuries, although one W C’s remark suggests that Britton was aware of this opium of the people: ‘Sport is good. It uses up energy and nothing is achieved.’

Why She Would Not

Bernard Shaw’s last play, Why She Would Not, was written in the year that he died and was probably unfinished. Britton added a detailed ending to it, and for the rest of his life was obsessed with the refusal of the Society of Authors to allow the simultaneous publication of both Shaw’s piece and his own ending. He kept scrapbooks of newspaper cuttings about the Society, its financial details, and biographical details of the committee members.

Britton wrote to many literary figures protesting against the Society’s rejection of his work, and his grievances met with some sympathy, including that of Bertrand Russell, who remarked: ‘If the principle became established that nothing should be published unless it aroused admiration in a number of elderly big-wigs, the result would be a disastrous censorship’; Graham Greene told Britton that he had recently left the Society, but said that he could use his name as much as he liked in support of his campaign against it. Others, though, were less understanding. Britton was claiming that his aim was to restore Shaw’s good name because he had suffered negative criticism since his death: he believed that the ending would show the public what was in Shaw’s mind; unsurprisingly, T. S. Eliot failed to understand how another writer could show what was in Shaw’s mind, and Colin Wilson simply didn’t understand the point Britton was trying to make.

In 1964, Britton sent a two-hundred-and-eighty-five-paragraph dossier to the Director of Public Prosecutions alleging fraudulent activities on the part of the Society of Authors. Nothing was ever proved. Also in 1964, Britton formed a company – The Park Group Limited – with two Canadians using a bank in the Bahamas with the intention of publishing and producing his plays for stage and screen, of which the first was to be ‘the Shaw play’. However, nothing appears to have come to fruition from the Park Group, probably because Britton was insisting that ‘the Shaw play’ be published first, whereas the other directors (who were responsible for all of the company’s not inconsiderable expenses pending a refund from the ‘profits’) were worried about a possible court injunction. Three years later Britton established his own company – Promethean Publishers Ltd – which appears never to have published anything either.

The play concerns a young man who begins working for a company and swiftly works his way up to the top to become the chair, although he is going to spread the profits evenly between all employees: essentially, his vision is to create a co-operative utopia. But did Britton write a masterpiece as he perhaps thought, or was he was his labour simply a point of principle?

The bound typescript begins with a fifty-page ‘Testament’ in which Britton records his struggle with the Society of Authors; it continues with a forty-eight-page Preface in which he gets a little carried away:

‘There are forms of life which live in the boiling springs of New Zealand, while others, like the anaerobic bacteria, can do without air and indeed choke in it, and the lichen makes a living on bare rock; and the variety and beauty of colour and form is only equalled by the multiplicity and hideousness of shapes so horrible that if only they were big enough to see without aids to vision they would fill the world with gibbering idiots within a week.’

Britton’s play then follows, then Shaw’s few pages, concluding with a ninety-page epilogue entitled ‘Inside Shaw’s Head’.

The play itself only takes up about a quarter of the total manuscript. It transpires that what Britton thought Shaw was thinking was in fact what Britton was thinking, and ‘Why She Would Not’ is a kind of fusion of Hunger and Love and Brain. It is a perfectly respectable play, but no masterpiece: the preliminary pages are of much more interest than the play itself. But then perhaps the same can be said of Shaw’s Prefaces.

We Are the Animals: A Song and Thought Musical

This play is written in the very rough spidery scrawl which characterised Britton’s writing in the few years leading up to his death, so it is highly probable that this was written towards the end of the 1960s, if not slightly later.

Act I is set sometime in the future at Hyde Park Corner, where various animals are preparing for a rally. The new lower classes are invertebrates, who are frowned on by the enfranchised vertebrates: lions don’t want the education of performing fleas, and declare that democracy ‘allows everybody the right to rob everybody else, and share in the robbery, by giving them the vote to elect those who control the robbery’.

Act II is set in the House of Uncommons, where the Home Secretary (the President of the Vertebrates’ Association) states that he will not support the demands of the invertebrates. There is much singing before Worm enters and has an altercation with Lion.

Act IV is the last, when the Russian Bear, the American Eagle and the British Lion enter and express national clichés. On the entrance of Lion, Worm and Lobster, Eagle says that atom bombs are getting smaller and cheaper, that they will be smuggled into big nations in diplomatic bags, timed to go off at the same time, and that this will lead to small nations being allowed to do as they please. This prompts Worm, a representative of the lowest group of workers, to sing in triumph:

‘When the nations have their fun
And they’re done in one by one
We’ll be there.

When the whole wide world is empty,
And the whole wide world is bare
We’ll be there.

When you’ve blown yourselves to bits
We’ll be there.

We’ll be there,
We’ll be there.

When you’ve blown yourselves to bits,
We’ll be there.’

THE END

[lionel]

I had originally intended my previous post to be my final one – the time comes when we really do have to move on – but I now realize, after having deleted the concluding paragraph, that this seems a rather hollow way of ending my own contributions to a thread I originally started. With that firmly in mind, I now conclude.


Lionel Britton is a major working-class writer, and within that field a tremendously important modernist. His only published novel, Hunger and Love, is a vast, sprawling, digressive work of considerable power: the fact that Bertrand Russell was so interested in the book – and that he continued to correspond with Britton for some decades after writing a highly enthusiastic Introduction to the novel - is evidence of Britton's power as a writer. And the fact that Bernard Shaw was largely responsible for the earlier staging of Britton's play Brain is also highly significant.


That Lionel Britton had some influence on George Orwell is little known, but at last some recognition is beginning to manifest itself.


To read, Britton can anger, amuse, excite, fascinate and bore. Sometimes all at the same time. As I write, there are virtually no copies of Hunger and Love for sale online. Re-publication, with a sizeable Introduction, is vital. Perhaps I can revive from my lethargy to put forward a proposal to publishers, although I doubt if the idea of publishing a 700-page, vastly digressive book by a still virtually unknown author will ever appear very sexy to any publisher in the middle of a recession.


Lionel Britton is noted for his repetition, so why shouldn't I, the person who has been promoting the work of the man for years, repeat myself? Looking over the posts to this thread, 'Titania' has consistently, and very enthusiastically, supported my aims towards this promotion, and I can only say: 'Titania', please accept my profound gratitude for all your efforts, my love. I only wish I could say more here.


Tony

[lionel]

The long missing bust of Lionel Britton - sculpted by Fredda Brilliant and mentioned in post #4 - was sold via Live Auctioneers on 13 April 2009 for a remarkably cheap $350. The bust is signed and 16" tall.



For much more information on Lionel Britton:
http://tonyshaw3.blogspot.com

[lionel]

A first Fredda Brilliant bust of Lionel Britton has recently been discovered, along with comments from Brilliant's book Fredda Brilliant: Biographies in Bronze. Er, brilliant though Brilliant was, I don't think, from reading this attachment, that she quite grasped 'socialist realism', and certainly didn't understand that Britton was a modernist. But then, I wonder if Britton himself realized he was a modernist.

http://tonyshaw3.blogspot.com

[lionel]

Speaking of anarchists and Camden - and of course Lionel Britton was an anarchist who spent a large chunk of his life in the Borough of Camden - I found myself with plenty of time to spare on my way from St Pancras station to the annual Open University literature conference in Camden Town last Saturday. Walking slowly to savour to the full the glorious early morning sunshine, I had time to seek out something I'd not seen on previous occasions: in St Pancras Garden is the memorial tomb of William Godwin (1756-1836). Today, Godwin is most noted for his novel Caleb Williams, so I was mildly surprised to see him mentioned as the writer of Political Justice. The inscription faces south, but on the east-facing side of the tomb is an inscription dedicated to his wife Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97), who is remembered by her still most famous work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Lionel Britton may have known of this memorial, and if so would obviously have felt a sense of fellowship.

I was less pleased by the absence of psychotropic mushrooms on Camden Market: our wonderful government outlawed the sale of them a few years ago. The sale of dope has long been illegal, of course, but to encounter no skunk dealers around Camden Lock seemed rather odd. But then, Britton - who even looked forward to the demise of the pub - would again certainly have approved.
Dr Tony Shaw

[George]

I have good information that Mary Wollstonecraft's memorial actually faces West rather than East.

It's not like Lionel to be wrong.

[lionel]

Originally Posted by George

I have good information that Mary Wollstonecraft's memorial actually faces West rather than East.

It's not like Lionel to be wrong.

Oh shit, yes, you're absolutely right, George. I'm always getting my directions ass over tit: Mary Wollstonecraft's memorial does indeed face west. But then, you should know as you live in London. I'm guilty, yes, please forgive me.

But how'd you like to live with a woman who can't tell left from right - this can play havoc when you're driving and she's directing, although I think she's got the political direction sussed.

Thanks for coming back, by the way. I bet you've still not wiped your feet though.

http://tonyshaw3.blogspot.com/

[George]

I still may not be on the main thread, but my thoughts on Lionel are below, and I do hope they don't spread any confusion!

The Lionel Britton thread is a little quiet at the moment, perhaps because Dr Tony Shaw feels he has said all he can for the time being.
In this respect he is in stark contrast to my Great-Uncle, who never let one word suffice when twenty would do, and basically never knew when to rest his case, but in other respects there is a meeting of minds between them. I would hesitate to pin labels on the thinking of either man, for one thing because if Dr Shaw can write a whole thesis on Uncle Lionel and thereby obtain his PhD they each defy labelling by any ordinary mortal, and for another because in the course of researching my family I have discovered my cousin in Canada, Justin Thomas, who has built his fame and fortune on Label Liberation. (Details on Dr Shaw's blog
However, if you described Tony as a wild anarchist you wouldn't be too far off, and he wouldn't bat an eyelid...(before firing off a flame e-mail of course).
Britton is rather harder to put into any convenient box, otherwise what has Tony been absorbed with all this time? If you could just tick "anarchist", "revolutionary", "mad genius", "atheist", "social non-conformist", "scourge of the bishops", "conscientious objector", "anti-capitalist", "totalitarian", "anti-totalitarian"; then it would be all over in two minutes, job done; but Dr Shaw has spent what, six years, seven, on this stuff?
When I was growing up I was told that extreme genius was just next door to madness, and Uncle Lionel was always adduced as an example. I made sure not to become an extreme genius, didn't do too well on the madness thing though.
The man was regarded by the family as a genius who happened to be a fruit cake, or vice versa. No-one doubted that he could speak 22 languages, in part of course because no-one could call him on it unless they spoke 22 as well; and not many of us could do that. Eric! you should have met him. My view of flies doesn't differ too much from President Obama's, but oh to be one on the wall at your meeting!
We had a book, which sadly I have now lost, called "Batu Khan". This was an immensely long Russian saga about the son of Ghengis, who was hardly less of an ogre than his old man. It was translated out of the Russian language by Lionel Britton. According to all the known beliefs of my uncle, Ghengis & Son would have been anathema; but by a huge irony the connection has sometimes made me a a bit of a celebrity in Turkey, where these guys are hugely revered! Anyone who could translate that thing out of the Russian and get away with it probably knew his stuff, after all somebody probably actually read it, which was more than I ever did.
Apart from his huge facility with languages, Uncle Lionel's achievement is questionable, but that is all discussed in Tony Shaw's thesis, which appears in full on .
Tony's work is centred on Lionel Britton's seminal "Hunger and Love", and while I cannot add anything to a thesis so comprehensive, I do happen to be one of about three people on the Planet who have actually waded through the novel, and so I hope no-one minds if I offer an opinion.
When I was a young man, about the age Lionel was when he was a shop assistant in London, I was...a shop assistant in London. The passages about Arthur Phelps' daily grind are so authentic it almost hurts. The holes in his strides, and his lack of any funds to do something about it, why, I have been there!
The refrain about the lack of love and sex resulting from his lack of material means is also authentic because so familiar.
So far so good. He was at least as convincing as Orwell, who was if anything an imitator, while achieving the commercial success that Britton not merely eluded but eschewed. Whereas I totally believe in Lionel's personal experience of the bollocks he went through, (in the 1911 census there he is in black and white: shop assistant), we know that Orwell was conducting an experiment, which became "Down and out...etc."
Where it starts to go tits-up, (an authentic English expression particularly well-understood in such places as Boston, Lincolnshire. Sorry, Eric!), is that Orwell beat Britton to the punch by writing "Animal Farm" and "1984". Britton was every bit as perceptive as Orwell: he visited Russia only to become disillusioned with Stalinism by seeing it at first hand.
The problem is that while Orwell wrote two definitive works challenging the collectivist, even totalitarian, orthodoxies of his time, Britton seems stuck in a 1930s timewarp. Taking "Hunger and Love" together with his off-the-wall "Brain", it appears that he doesn't so much think "the man in Whitehall really does know best...", but that a disembodied power should rule us all!
There are two paradoxes here then, aren't there?
A deeply philosophical thinker who scoffed at the notion of a higher power as conceived by contemporary religions, (and religious scepticism extended to his brother, my grandfather, and also very likely to his father Richard), he nevertheless dreamed of rule by a Universal Intelligence. "Ah," you may say, "but he wanted a rational man-made one, nothing to do with the irrational beliefs of old". The problem there of course is that one man's rationality is another man's tyranny.
The second paradox is not in the fact that he railed against "trade" or the capitalist system despite being a product of the commercial classes. I was in Birmingham at this last New Year researching the family, and have only just begun to discover how deeply embedded the family was in the whole process which Lionel describes as "trade". We were his "beast-men": those who turned out trinkets and baubles for princes and fraudsters. The Brittons, the Smiths, the Waddams, Taylors and Hortons: they were all at it, conniving in a huge conspiracy to take away man's humanity. It is not of course only the manufacturers and traders who cop it from the pen of Lionel, the legal profession takes quite a big hit, (father Richard was a solicitor, as was grandfather John James Britton). And as for the Church, well, you can hardly flip open "Hunger and Love" at any page without noting an excoriation of "Milord Bishop" and his co-conspirators in the government, the army, the police force, etc. etc. One of John James Britton's forebears was supposed to have been Dean of Durham, and two of his sons, (Lionel's uncles), were vicars. And a big family friend was the Reverend Thomas Perkins, who wrote books about ecclesiastic architecture, and went on to marry Ethel Alice Britton, Lionel's aunt. This, then, was not unconscious self-loathing, but completely conscious rejection by Lionel of everything which had formed him. Oh, and I nearly forgot that his great-grandfather Samuel Thomas had become one of the foremost needle manufacturers in Redditch, Worcestershire, having established a huge factory there supplanting what had previously been largely a cottage industry. One of my cousins has told me that at one time Samuel needed sixteen bodyguards to protect him from the stonesthrowing populace of the town. Lionel's grandfather Samuel Thomas appears to have been cut off from any substantial fortune and was condemned to travel around Europe touting the needles. Trade, trade, trade.
Even Irza Thomas, my great-grandmother and Lionel Britton's mother, was a "commercial traveller" in the 1911 census, but enough family history already, you will have the idea by now.
In Lionel's worldview the conspiracy against the likes of Arthur Phelps ran from the King and his ministers, through the ranks of the armed forces and the massed cohorts of the "beast-men", (those churning out the junk that people wanted to buy, like clothes), through the bishops and clergy, right down to the humble shopkeeper, (exploits the worker and customer all at once), and landlady (rents him a roof over his head, but not from the goodness of her heart). Arthur's environment, his life in fact, is totally controlled by the conspirators. Would it be too much to ask whether Lionel believed the system he opposed to be a totalitarian one?
I was never taken to see my Great-Uncle, not even once. For that matter, I never met old Irza Britton who lived to 92 surrounded by cages of cats. I suspect in Lionel's case it was mostly because he wasn't easy company. You will find an account on Dr Shaw's blog of the person who said he didn't want to go and meet Lionel at Lyons Corner House because he didn't relish being shouted at for an hour or so.In Great-grandmother Irza's it could have been the cats. My cousin Dorothy, (one of only three living people who knew Lionel personally, to my knowledge), attests that she had to climb three flights of stairs up to the top flat of the spooky old house, only to be confronted by the malevolent stares of those cats. She didn't like the experience!
If I could rewind time and ask Great-Uncle Lionel one thing, (assuming of course I could get a word in edgeways), it would be whether he believed the system was totalitarian. I might just have made him nail his colours to the wall and say "yes!". In that case, I would have asked what "Brain" was all about?
There is our second paradox.
(If this doesn't get Dr Shaw leaping out of his bath-chair and reaching for his flamethrower, nothing will!)
Even hardened literary freaks, (and are there any other kind visiting WLF?), may well find it a challenge wading through the Lionel Britton oeuvre. "Brain", for example, even though we know exactly what it's all about, is widely regarded as impenetrable gibberish according to a number of reviews, but don't take my word for it, go to the world's incontrovertible expert. "Hunger and Love", a copy of which I had to purchase at vast expense, is readable just about, but padded with what I might politely term a stream of consciousness, (there is a more scatological term, but Eric, are you out there?). One of these days I might get around to "Spacetime Inn", if only because Lionel inscribed it so beautifully to my mother on her thirteenth birthday, in the flyleaf of a copy which I actually have in my possession. I remember her telling me many, many, years ago that it was decidedly odd and that there were various characters including Queen Victoria, all hanging around in a pub. You can see this sample of Lionel's handwriting on
You may wonder if I'm puffing Dr Shaw's blog. HaHaHaHaHa! Whatever gives you that idea???
Some people have even questioned whether I AM Tony Shaw! You know, there are things they can do now with computers which analyse writing styles and can tell which horny old goat wrote what part of Shakespeare. Well, if anyone can prove to me incontrovertibly that I am Tony Shaw, (Eric?), I will personally hand them £10,000 in used notes. (I haven't got them, but then I'm not Tony Shaw).
Why I heartily recommend his blog is precisely because he knows how to cut to the chase, which is the key distinction between him and my poor old Great-Uncle, whom Tony admires while by no means being blind to Lionel's deficiencies.
I am reminded of one of Keebah's jokes. (Keebah was my grandfather, Lionel's brother, and don't ask me how he got the name as I can't remember, but I made it up and then the cousins copied it. It was no dafter than Bob, which he is said to have been called because when a toddler he came down the stairs on his butt, bob, bob, bob. His real name was Reginald Percy Leopold of course).
The inspector goes into the lunatic asylum and discovers a chap who appears perfectly sane. After a few conversations, he decides to confide in him that he intends to recommend him for release. "Oh, thank goodness for that!", says the lunatic, (not very PC is it? I should be saying "person of challenged societal functionality", and then probably go on a course to cure my thought-crime. Gordo has to stimulate the economy somehow).
As the inspector prepares to leave, the loony says "Now look, you're not going to forget about me are you? They've been before, and promised me stuff, then they seem to forget!" "Good heavens, no!", says the inspector, "in my professional opinion, you're as sane as I am!" Once again, as he is being checked out of the gate, the inspector finds the individual bounding up to him and saying "look, you do know it's really important to me don't you? It's not a lot of fun being banged up in here with all these Lunatics!"
"You can depend on me," says the inspector. As he walks away down the drive, a brick hits him in the back of the neck. Barely clinging to consciousness, he turns around to see the lunatic grinning at him over the wall of the asylum: "Don't forget now!"
Having a look at Dr Tony Shaw's blog is a delight not merely because of the discourse about Lionel Britton, but because he covers a massive array of other topics, mostly literary but including pubs he likes and lots more. Oh, and you get to meet my relatives!
Just viewing the side bar where he displays books which he has read and could give you a considered opinion upon will alert you to the awesome range of the man.
Tony's view of the world is in certain respects not my own, but that's hardly the point, is it? What he shares with me, and with my Great-Uncle Lionel, is a loathing of pomposity and hypocrisy dressed up as an excuse to stuff us all for our own greater good.
I make no bones about saying that Dr Shaw is an imcomparably better writer than Great-Uncle Lionel, mainly because Tony knows when to quit and Lionel didn't. If Shaw writes about Lionel Britton, then you may do better reading his writing than going back to the source. Trust me, I've been there!
If you have read Tony's thesis and you STILL want more, I expect they have a bed for you somewhere; although being England you may have to wait howling for a few months. A joke, guys. Remember them? Before PC?
Take a butcher's at his blog:
Repetitive, moi?
It must be better than a brick in the back of the neck, that's for sure.

[George]

Some followers of this thread may have missed the lack of the elephant in the room: the previous post was an exhortation to visit Dr Tony Shaw

but it didn't appear. Tony Shaw also taught me to put in more paragraphs, but this site has actually taken them out again, or at least cut out my double spacing! Censorship, censorship. Boo!

A message for Alexis, if you're reading this: the darkest night is before the dawn. Don't give up.

[Liam]

Originally Posted by George

...the darkest night is before the dawn.

I prefer this version:

The darkest hour is just before dawn.

Cheers,
L

[titania7]

George: Thank you.

Liam: I like your adaptation of George's words very much, too, dear.

But here is my own, for what it's worth:

I think the darkest hour is the one in which we recognize ourselves for the deeply flawed mortals we are. . .and that the dawn is when we realize that we can make the most of our life, in spite of this.

Is not the sun more beautiful than ever when it appears after a turbulent thunderstorm?

~Alexis (Titania)

[George]

Interesting.

But the darkest night is before the dawn moves me better.

Is it just me?

[George]

Titania, you are so right.

I just was trying to feel the poetry of it, (and probably failing!)

I'm a guy who has lived in America and of course in England, where I was born. Sometimes I become confused about what time it is.

The sun rises, and the sun sets. Our little clock by our bedside, (my wife used to call her Feargina, but she may have forgotten: four babies and a career! I admire her. I do hope she hasn't forgotten me along the way. Ach, I expect she remembers me, I snore next to her some nights.)

Girl, I'm so glad to see you posting. How are things in Louisiana, and how is Mom?

Dr Shaw is going to kill me for saying this, but when you get to my age you just get to care about the people you care about, and please remember you have friends, and we're there for you.

[Liam]

Originally Posted by George

How are things in Louisiana, and how is Mom?

Indeed, girlfriend (as Oprah says):

How ARE things in Louisiana?


Cheers,
L

[lionel]

Originally Posted by Liam

Indeed, girlfriend (as Oprah says):How ARE things in Louisiana?
Cheers,
L

Indeed. For someone whose child was born in a swamp in the south of Georgia, and who nearly named her after that state, I find it a little odd that George seems to think Alexis is from a Southern state which is two entire Southern states removed from the one she lives in. George, you wrote this at around 15:45 UK time, so it can't be the Bud. Maybe this is just a slip on your part, OK, but do you have anything going in Louisiana?
You never told me, you bugger.

[George]

Nah, guys, it was the Bud. It may have been half-past three in the afternoon, but I hadn't been to bed from the previous night!

I'm in the doghouse today all right, and I missed a perfectly good barbecue. All those lamb-chops! Duh! (Sorry Lionel)

My little girl wasn't actually born in the Okeefenokee Swamp, nor even conceived there, but we discovered she was on the way the same day as going out on the Swannee River and spotting alligators. For a guy who likes boats and reptiles and is devoted to his children, you can see why that day was one of the highlights of my life!

Another time I'll tell you about our visit to New Orleans, but it hasn't much to do with Lionel Britton.

So to clear up any confusion, Titania: I hope all is well in Atlanta Georgia!

[lionel]

Originally Posted by George

If you have read Tony's thesis and you STILL want more, I expect they have a bed for you somewhere

I think I've stopped blushing now. You're a bit hard on your great-uncle, George: Lionel Britton's Hunger and Love has a number of passages of rare brilliance, remember.

It's also, and I'll stick my neck out here, probably unique in being a first novel in which there was no editing whatsoever by the publisher. I'm sure Britton saw this as a major kick in the ass of the bourgeois publishers, as well as a kick in the ass of all 'respectable' institutions.

Oh yeah, you say about three (living, I take it) people on the planet have read it. Let's see, people I'm aware of who've stated they've read it, to my knowledge alone, are me, you, Katie Gramich, Adam Daly, Kenneth P. Neilson, Harry Berberian, and Book Books "Book Books" (don't ask, but he or she reviewed it on amazon.com in 2005). You see, George, that already more than doubles your estimate, and there must be many more people around. I know John Shapcott, the chair of the Arnold Bennett Society, has just bought a copy, and he seems pretty determined to get through it. But at present, bookfinder.com only shows one copy for sale - anywhere. I really must get round to finding someone to re-publish it.

Ah, Britton and translation. Shortly before his death, Britton was interviewed by a Sunday Times journalist, and stated that some of those languages he wasn't actually fluent in.

Wild anarchist, moi? Wild pacifist anarchist would definitely make me lay off the vitriol.

But how can I get vitriolic about this post, George? It's informative, it's considered, it's very amusing, and I thank you very much indeed for this contribution to my thread.

How much did you say you wanted?

[George]

Oh, a few fleas will do, Lionel!

Some time in the late 'sixties, perhaps even in 1970, my mother showed me an article in the paper and said "Look, this is Uncle Lionel!". I'm reasonably sure that this was the one where he said he was 'better than Shakespeare', which would have definitely goaded my mother as she was trained at the RADA and acted Shakespeare a very great deal in the days when she trod the boards, mostly during the course of the Second World War...(see Dr Shaw's blog for an anecdote or two).

In fact, come to think of it, she guarded Shakespeare rather zealously. My recent research has turned up the fact that my father's mother also was a Shakespeare fan; and I previously had wondered how on earth my parents came to be an item!

The slightly odd thing about the article you quote, Lionel, is that Lionel Britton actually has the humility to admit less than perfection in any area whatsoever, but then I suppose if you are acknowledged to speak 22 languages, the admission of less than fluency in one or two of them is more of a reinforcement than anything...

No flies on him then, never mind fleas!

[George]

Lionel might have taken the bait slightly by naming all the people who have actually read 'Hunger and Love'.

I'm sure he knew better than anyone that I meant it figuratively when I referred to the 'three people' who had read this obscure, exasperating, yet startlingly original book.

Anyway, he has forgotten Ioann. Are you out there, Ioann, and did you finish your copy?

As for Harry, I'm not sure there is any physical evidence that he exists at all.

For anyone who can prove to me that they have met him in the flesh, I will offer a thousand shares in Gordon Brown Futures. Hurry, hurry while stocks last!