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  Radcliffe

  A Novel

  David Storey

  INTRODUCTION

  David Storey was born in Wakefield, West Yorkshire in 1933, the third son of a mineworker who was determined that his boys should not follow him down the pit. Yet when David decided upon the Slade School of Art rather than university, his father told him, in that case, he could find the money himself. This he did, by signing with Leeds Rugby League Club, and playing for their A-team for four seasons in the early 1950s with special dispensation to commute to London every week. This arrangement proved a curse, not a privilege. Storey has said: ‘It had a very poor effect on the other players who were all young coal miners – this artist swanning in for matches. At the Slade meanwhile I was seen as a bit of an oaf. I only really felt at home on the train, where the two different parts of my life came together’. This divided life was too hard to bear. Storey gave up football to concentrate on painting, but he also began to write, and to probe this sense of division. This Sporting Life, the first of his novels to be published, was a study of the torn sensibility and painfully conflicted loyalties of rugby player Arthur Machin, and came out in 1960. Storey married Barbara Hamilton in 1956, with whom he has four children, and went on to produce fiction, plays and poetry across a prolific fifty year span.

  Radcliffe is Storey’s third novel, published in 1963. Its eponymous protagonist, Leonard Radcliffe, is the last son of a degenerating squirearchy; his father the futile conservator of the collapsing family seat, the Place. Leonard attempts to escape from his decrepit home, fractured family and febrile mind through physical labour, and the story turns upon his passionate obsession with Victor Tolson, a childhood friend whom he meets again as his foreman. Storey’s novel paints a landscape in the midst of violent change: crumbling on its hilltop, the patrician Place is rocked by the trains crammed with passengers in tunnels beneath, and glared at by the denizens of the modern estate encroaching on every plane of the corrugated valley opposite. The treatment of that landscape and all its warring figures is frequently one of intense realism: the sections of the novel that describe Leonard’s experience of the raising of showground tents, for example, are almost hallucinatory in their precise detailing of actions and objects. (In Storey’s play The Contractor (1969), a marquee is erected on stage at every performance.) In the noisy critical need for a defining movement in postwar British fiction, Storey was compulsively positioned by journalists in a group of working-class, regional realists in the immediate wake of the Angry Young Men, joining Stan Barstow, John Braine and Barry Hines and their studies of northern English life. Yet Storey has never been a clubbable writer, and reading his work as pure documentary denies it its powerful individuality.

  John Russell Taylor has identified Storey’s ‘unique capacity for turning reality into symbols, making something presented with meticulous realism stand also, quite independently, for something more than itself, a drama of souls as well as (or perhaps sometimes instead of) a drama of tangible physical entities in conflict’.* The realism in Storey’s fiction may be precise and localized, but it co-exists with a dark symbolism painted with broader, jabbing brushstrokes. In a rare exposition of his own artistic practices, Storey spoke in a 1963 interview of his conception of ‘a sequence of four novels which would constitute a sort of campaign for reintegrating myself’ after the schizoid experience of being both aesthete and athlete. Machin of This Sporting Life was intended as an isolation of physical experience; the female protagonist of Flight into Camden (also 1960) represented ‘the other half, the spiritual, interior and – as I conceived it – feminine part of my nature’. ‘In Radcliffe I bring the two halves face to face embodied in two separate characters, and then in the fourth, the key work, which I am writing now, I am trying to reconcile them into one person: the conflict moves inside, and is fought out in one man’s brain’.* That fourth novel of psychic reconciliation has never been completed. Instead, Radcliffe and Tolson will battle on in our minds long after the novel is over, for they are realistic figures at the same time that they are symbolic titans. As Taylor puts it, ‘Like dark gods pietistically rationalized, they wear their cloak of flesh convincingly, but the wilder, stranger, more unaccountable elements keep bursting through’.*

  Radcliffe is a powerful, disturbing and occasionally infuriating novel. Storey has claimed that of all his fictional works, this novel ‘in particular is in parts really wild; it sometimes goes right off the rails, but in a way that is what the book is “about” for me.…’* He has admitted that, infuriated by the critical enthusiasm for the perceivedly uncomplicated documentary nature of his realism, he may have tried too hard to emphasize the symbolism: ‘Radcliffe is scattered with great big notices saying “Pay attention now, this is important”.’* These signposts can stand between passages in which it seems impossible to grasp exactly what is happening. The competing demands make for a peculiarly disorientating reading experience. Perception is forever failing in the novel: fog lowers over the landscape, motivations are unclear, the rooms in the Place are shuttered and dim, and Leonard’s thoughts, which colour the third-person narrative, fade in and out of rationality. Storey’s descriptions are frequently riddled with qualifications and obfuscations, as in the following passage, with my emphases:

  Tolson stood gazing in at the barren interior with a kind of stifled curiosity, half-embarrassed. He seemed neither to hear nor to see John who, as though recognising some sort of threat in Tolson’s attitude, had suddenly leaned against the wall in a vague gesture of appeal.

  As readers, and like the characters, we are constantly denied full understanding and cognitive privilege. In 1970 Storey mused that ‘It seems to me that if, on reading something through, I know completely what it is about, then it is dead’.* Radcliffe is enigmatic and unsettling, and it remains very much alive.

  In part, we might understand the novel’s strain of mystification as a necessary authorial response to its focus upon a gay love affair. Homosexual desire extends well beyond the nexus of Radcliffe and Tolson too: Leonard’s dandyish uncle, Austen, has an enduring fascination with Tolson’s friend and devotee Blakeley, a club comedian with a grotesquely gothic family secret. Though the Government-commissioned Wolfenden Committee’s report proposing the decriminalisation of homosexual acts between consenting adult men was published in 1957, it was not until the 1967 Sexual Offences Act that this was passed into law in Britain. The Lord Chamberlain’s office, albeit with increasing laxity, was censoring references to homosexuality on the stage until 1968. With some rare exceptions (Angus Wilson’s 1952 Hemlock and After and Mary Renault’s 1953 The Charioteer amongst them), the few British novels that broached the subject of homosexuality in the 1950s and ’60s portrayed it as A Problem. In Radcliffe, where The Problem is that tyranny of the mind/body split, this is not the case. The passion between Leonard and Tolson increases the pitch and potency of that central Cartesian clash, and desire between men (for the novel contains no other kind) imbricates and intensifies the class conflict too. Yet homosexuality it is never cited as cause for all the torment, and it is never condemned.

  From This Sporting Life to the most recent novel, Thin-Ice Skater (2004), critical appreciation of Storey’s work waxed and then waned. Accolades were awarded (most notably, perhaps, the Booker Prize for Saville in 1976, as well as three New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards). Names were bandied as points of approving comparison for Storey’s fiction and plays, including those of Emily Brontë, D. H. Lawrence, and Chekhov. In recent times, though, his realism has fallen out of fashion, joining the symbolism that, as a boy, he first read and aspired to in V
erlaine’s work, and which has never been truly à la mode in British writing. Flaws and fashion aside, Radcliffe endures as an astonishing work, with characters and settings that linger long after its violent and ambiguous ending. As theatre director Dominic Dromgoole has noted, ‘Posterity is our last resort. And if posterity is true, it should reveal a giant in David Storey’.*

  ALICE FERREBE

  Liverpool John Moores University

  July 18, 2013

  * John Russell Taylor, David Storey (Writers and Their Work), London: Longman/British Council, 1974, 5.

  * ‘Speaking of Writing II: David Storey’, Times, 28 November 1963, 15.

  * Taylor, 23.

  * ‘Speaking of Writing II: David Storey’, 15.

  * J. Russell Taylor, ‘British Dramatists: The New Arrivals III: David Storey: Novelist into Dramatist’, Plays and Players, June 1970, quoted Taylor 1974, 20.

  * Ibid.

  * Dominic Dromgoole, The Full Room, London: Methuen 2002, 267-268.

  1

  The Headmaster brought the new boy into the classroom several weeks after the term had begun. He stood alone, the centre of the children’s curiosity, as the class-teacher, a squat, kindly-faced matron, talked quietly with the Headmaster by the open door. At first he returned the solemn gaze of the children, but as the time passed he began to blush and look urgently away, the stares slowly changing to open expressions of amusement. Eventually several of the children burst out laughing at his plaintive isolation.

  He was a small boy, very slight with an intense, Spanish kind of face, narrowly featured and pale, and with eyes of such a dark liquidity that they suggested an almost permanent expression of condolence. It was the kind of bland transparency seen in people of little sophistication or self-assertion, and in certain peripheral conditions of idiocy. He had thick, straight black hair and thick black eyebrows which, in private moments of despair such as this, gave his face the imitative irony of a mask. It was as if he guyed his own emotions. It amused the children intensely.

  Eventually the Headmaster gave the teacher a certificate and a letter which had been flapping in his hand, and left the room. The teacher closed the door and came back to her desk. The class watched in silence as the new boy responded to her instructions, walking quickly to her chair and standing stiffly beside it while she ordered them to work. She sat down and, turning to him with a sympathetic smile, began to ask him the relevant questions.

  His full name was Leonard Radcliffe, he was nine years and seven months old, and had been transferred from a private school in the centre of town. His father was a caretaker. As she copied down this final piece of information in the Register under the heading ‘Father’s Occupation’ the teacher paused, and glanced at the boy then put down her pen and wrote the word in pencil. The gesture itself, made almost absent-mindedly, caused a fresh suffusion of blood to creep up his face, and after looking hurriedly at the class he stared down at his feet in confusion.

  He was given a place at the front, close to the teacher’s own desk, until he should become more familiar with his surroundings. But as the weeks passed, his single desk, protruding irregularly from the set pattern behind, tended to confirm that isolation, a nervous shyness and detachment, which the children had instinctively recognised, and been amused by, when he first came into the room. Yet he was an alert boy, with an anxious alacrity, and a condoling, private kind of humour, so that when the teacher was belabouring some child at the back of the class he would twist round, his arm crooked over his chair, and watch with a slight smile of consolation. Frequently, as the teacher came to recognise his unusual if erratic intelligence, he was called upon almost as her accomplice to provide those answers which the children themselves had been unable to suggest.

  One day, shortly after his arrival, the teacher had glanced meaningfully at the class then out of the large windows of the room, and pointing her broad, slightly inflamed arm, said, ‘Why do you think it is that chimneys, factory chimneys, are so tall?’ It was a question characteristic in its simplicity of her relationship with the children, as if she sought some way of antagonising them, or of suggesting the preposterous nature of knowledge itself. She was that not unusual paradox in her profession, a sympathetic yet didactic person at heart.

  Radcliffe’s hand had risen immediately; but not satisfied with this response she searched round the class for others, prompting them by name and even by drawing a chimney and a factory, roughly, on the blackboard. The question defeated them: there were so many tall chimneys visible at that moment through the classroom windows, their black streamers furled over the ranked houses of the estate. Chimneys were tall. Eventually, as if acknowledging her oblique success, she turned to Radcliffe. ‘Well, Leonard? Can you tell us?’

  ‘They’re tall so that they can carry the dirty smoke well away from the ground.’

  Someone laughed; it was as if this simplicity confirmed the teacher’s own eccentricity. She looked up amusedly.

  ‘Well? Can anyone else think of a better reason?’

  She sought a sudden and ironical confederacy in Radcliffe whenever she was opposed by the class, and as if stimulated by their amusement she turned to a large, muscular boy at the back of the room and posed a similarly disarming question: ‘Why are roofs pointed and not flat like in the pictures in the Bible?’ And when he could give no hope of an answer she moved towards the class, coming to a stop by Radcliffe’s desk, and asked the large boy to stand up.

  Tall and thickset, with dark, tightly curled hair and a frank, unwittingly surly face, he stood facing the teacher as if the question demanded some physical retaliation. His muscular figure was set in an instinctively aggressive pose. Then his eyes rolled slowly upwards in search of the answer.

  Radcliffe, his head close to the teacher’s thighs, had twisted round to stare almost grievedly at the boy as though his enforced furtiveness were directly his fault.

  ‘Now, Tolson … Victor,’ the teacher said as if his inability served as a further illustration in her didactic pursuit of the class. ‘Do you know?’

  He nodded, continuing his search of the ceiling while a gradual blush lit his powerful cheekbones. And, as though disregarding his male pride, or out of some innate desire to take advantage of such an exposed muscular confusion, the teacher pressed her inquisition. ‘Well, come on then, Victor. Let us all hear.’ A deeper look of humiliation gave way to one of helplessness. The boy suddenly stared round guiltily at the class.

  ‘Perhaps there’s no reason for Victor to think at all. We already know where he’s going to end up, don’t we?’ She gestured at the factory chimneys outside about which Radcliffe had already been so articulate. ‘There are places waiting for him out there already. Well, never mind. Just you stand there a moment, Vic, and let me see you paying attention and listening.’

  She left him exposed in his quaint destitution and continued her questioning further, but more superficially, round the rest of the class.

  ‘Well, Leonard. Can you tell us?’ she said eventually, almost revengefully.

  ‘No.’ He shook his head, blushing.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  He shook his head again, looking down at his desk.

  ‘Now, you’re not going to let me down?’

  He looked away in confusion. Then he said hurriedly, almost inaudibly, ‘So that the rain can run off.’ His look continued across the room until it reached the muscular boy at the back of the class. Their eyes met. The boy’s expression was one of such incoherent humiliation, half-blinded with reproach, that Radcliffe swung round to stare fixedly at his desk, his face red and peculiarly tortured.

  ‘Roofs are pointed so that the rain can run off,’ the teacher said, wiping her hands free of chalk on her smock.

  It was in this way that he became associated in the class’s mind with her cynical didacticism. He was, in fact, one of her instruments of instruction. In answering at all he suggested that certain naïvety and defencelessness which only knowledge and intelli
gence can give. Certainly it was a vulnerability in him which his white, starved face and his narrow features readily confirmed. He was a natural victim of children of this age, and always very much on his own. Occasionally, however, he was reprieved from his bullied situation by a facility for drawing, a gift from which he appeared to derive unique pleasure and amusement, emotions that scarcely showed on his face so clearly at any other time. During art lessons, whenever the teacher was inattentive or called from the room, a small queue of frustrated and bored children would form at his desk and in a warm daze of service he would draw or outline whatever subject was required. It was only later, when he saw that his gift served no other purpose than expediency, tinged with some curiosity, and in no way brought him closer but encouraged the separation he had learned to dread, that he began to refuse to draw for other people, and would sit at his desk crying and shaking his head at the now malicious attempts to make him perform.

  He became the particular victim of one group of boys who throughout each dinner hour encouraged him to carry them in turn around the playground. At first, recognising no way of avoiding this imposition, he responded to it ambitiously, even conscientiously; bowed deeply forward, he carried each kicking and shouting burden safely round the vast perimeter of the yard. It was the deliberation and care with which he did this – a seriousness the boys interpreted as a perverse willingness – that created the demand to outrage it.

  This infliction, interrupted occasionally by puzzled or amused teachers, continued for several weeks until a point was reached when he began to fall on his knees, and no amount of kicking and punching could persuade him to rise. Like any attempt to retaliate, this docility antagonised the boys, and such moments became the focus of their frustrated ambitions. They would gather round him with their curious attacks as if he were some strange creature washed up on a beach.

  One particularly cold day, several months after his sudden appearance at the school, when he had lain for some time in white-faced prostration, his huge burden shouting excitedly astride his back, Tolson had come across and lifted the boy off. There was a brief argument and within a minute a fight had started.