On Man, the Human Heart and Human Life

One of my favourite novelists, now largely forgotten, is Stanley Middleton (1919–2009). He wrote 45 novels, the last published posthumously. I thought I had them all, but when reorganizing my shelves I found I was missing two, which I’ve now bought secondhand for all of £5.80. That’s probably less than I’d pay for petrol to go to the nearest library, although I shall have to deal with the usual complaint from my wife about the lack of space in our cottage.

Which of the forty-five would I recommend, in the hope of persuading other readers that this so-called ‘minor and provincial’ English novelist is worth more than many called major? Holiday was joint winner of the Booker Prize in 1974. Middleton’s ex-pupil, Philip Davis, writing an obituary in the Guardian, picked out as candidates for an omnibus selection: Harris’s Requiem (1960), A Serious Woman (1961), The Golden Evening (1968), Holiday (1974), Valley of Decision (1985), An After Dinner’s Sleep (1986), A Place to Stand (1992) and Married Past Redemption (1993). While I wouldn’t dispute any of these, my own list would include Ends and Means (1977), Live and Learn (1996), at least one of the late novels, probably Sterner Stuff (2005), and certainly The Daysman (1984). Philip Davis may have left the first of these off his own list out of modesty, as it is dedicated to him; but it is a fine example of Middleton’s skills. The plot is cut almost to the bone, but never to incomprehensibility. It is darker in mood than some, even though it is set in the flaming summer of 1976. The central character is a philanderer, a ‘cool bastard’, and there are sexual infidelities in plenty, cruelties, suicides, breakdowns, violence against wives and husbands: not a picture of ‘middle England’ as it is usually portrayed. The protagonist of Live and Learn is a rugby-playing lecturer in English literature at a university in the Midlands, and the novel begins with his escape from a gang of four yobs intent on stealing his wallet and watch. Essentially, however, it is a novel about marriage, and its possibilities and problems, although violence lurks even here – one of the characters is a doctor who has murdered his wife and buried her in the garden. But this novel ends in happiness: a young wife kisses her husband and says to him, ‘Just now I feel completely happy, fulfilled, whatever the word is. I don’t want change. At least for the present . . .’ Middleton was a gifted musician who all his life played the piano for his own pleasure and the organ in local churches, and classical music features in many of his novels. He was a good painter too, of small-scale watercolours, and several of the novels have details from his paintings on their covers. There is always a sense of a whole culture – of learning, of appreciation of the arts – behind his writing; and his notion of the rich possibilities of education is bound up in that. I include Sterner Stuff as one of my recommendations because the central character, Frank Montgomery, is the principal of an art college, who has also begun to earn a reputation as a portrait painter; much of the novel is about the pressure on him to give up the dayjob in education so that he can concentrate on his creativity. However The Daysman, about the headmaster of a big (1,700 pupils) day-school, holds a special place in my imagination. The school is called Penrose Comprehensive, the county unnamed, but all of Middleton’s novels are set in Nottinghamshire, with only an occasional excursion to some other city or on holiday to Wales or France. Middleton knew a lot about schools, although his career as a teacher was spent in one school only, where he had been himself as a boy, High Pavement Grammar School in Nottingham. In similar fashion, he kept the same publisher for all his novels, and he never had an agent. He stayed an English teacher, too, all his career until retirement. When he was awarded a visiting fellowship at a Cambridge college, he accepted it for one term only, and on condition he could go home every weekend. Patronized by a Cambridge English don who asked him what he wrote, ‘romances or thrillers?’ Middleton quoted Wordsworth in reply: ‘On man, the human heart and human life’. A ‘daysman’ is an umpire or arbiter, a mediator – one epigraph comes from the Book of Job, ‘Neither is there any daysman betwixt us that might lay his hand upon us both’, the other from Exodus, ‘And he said, Who made thee a prince and a judge over us?’ The daysman in this instance is a headmaster, John Richardson, who is very much in charge of his school, even though it is so large he can’t gather all his staff in one room. He is beginning to look beyond the school for fulfilment, though he combines caution with ambition. As his powerful wife Joanna says, ‘The trouble with schoolmasters is that they think all problems are soluble. They aren’t.’ Much of the novel is concerned with problems John Richardson can’t solve, or those with consequences beyond his control, or with accidents – and ‘the headmaster hated his helplessness’. He is asked by a mother whose husband is working abroad to advise her daughter about a late application to a university; he does so, not spotting that the young woman is suicidal. A teacher asks for advice about his failing marriage; what Richardson offers may be entirely misdirected. Then, while the Richardsons and their three daughters are on holiday, they hear that four of his 15-year-old pupils have drowned in a boating accident on a school trip, and he has to rush back to manage the aftermath. This latter event triggers his own memories of his brother’s death in an accident while the family was on a seaside holiday. The parents had done their best to shield the youngest boy from their grief, but clearly his need as an adult to control events stems in part from that tragedy. His wife tries to comfort him:

Joanna took his arm. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘life’s not only inexplicable, it’s ungovernable . . . We’re not in control of our lives,’ she concluded. ‘Or not as we seem to be at these good times, on holiday when the sun’s out.’

For all that, this is not a bleak novel. There is a wonderful chapter about a family holiday in France, where the Richardson daughters (Margot, Virginia and Fay) are defined by their joyous differences and nubile development. In a thunderstorm, they and their French friends do a bacchanalian dance.

The shrieking outside whirled noisier. Virginia had fiercely repeated a phrase she had learned from childhood stories, which was still quoted, though loftily, by Fay. ‘Run, run, as fast as you can; you can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man.’ The sentences were taken up, sounding ridiculous and obscure, shouted by men in French accents, the beaux who took care in spite of the haphazard appearance of the sport to be within touching distance of Margot, a schoolgirlish but magnificent figure, a goddess round whom the dance gyrated.

Middleton’s darts hit their targets: a head of department is ‘a man of high standards and low prejudices’; Richardson is ‘summoned and interviewed inconclusively by the Director [of Education] who, as usual, did not know what he wanted’. His observation is equally sharp: a funeral is held in a ‘modern yellow-brick crematorium, a cross between an Italian villa and an eccentric church . . .’ Despite the author’s fierce gaze, the headmaster is allowed his successes. A boy caught cheating in an exam is humanely dealt with. A wife is persuaded to let her husband return to the family, and she describes Richardson as ‘an agent for good’. Joanna has already tried to find the right description for her husband – ‘The go-between. The catalyst. The fixer . . . The factor. The nuncio. The middleman’ – but she is pleased to hear her husband praised. Real life waits, like the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones. Leaving a library where he has spent two pleasant days rereading Plato in search of an epigraph for a book about the aims of comprehensive secondary education, Richardson is accosted by a primary school headmaster whose school has been burned down by a gang of 9-year-olds. Richardson tries to help his demoralized colleague.

‘You don’t blame yourself, Mr Towers,’ Richardson said, judge over Israel, ‘do you? Rationally now? You can’t.’ ‘Rationally.’ The word blocked his mouth like a big pebble. ‘When I stood there and saw the blackened mess which had been my office or spick-and-span classrooms, there was no rationality . . . it was like war. This was a centre of order and cleanliness and sense in a world where those things are at a premium, and there they lay in bloody cinders, in ashes . . .’ Richardson lifted his head. ‘It’s a tragedy,’ he said. ‘But the thing about education is that one never knows what the results will be. We might hope so. We might expect to. But it needs only one lunatic . . .’

The final scene of the novel has Richardson meeting by chance the mother of the young woman who had committed suicide. She is almost certainly drunk, and attacks him verbally: ‘Who in hell do you think you are? . . . My God, you’ve got a good opinion of yourself.’ She tells him something that he couldn’t possibly have known, that she had already lost two children before her daughter died. ‘Both still-born; both at the full term . . . You don’t know what that means. . . Two perfectly formed sons. I saw them . . . And then I come on you, with your instructions.' The real world is always out there, waiting for us to pretend we can order it around, can control it, can tell the back row to behave itself. Schoolteachers are perhaps especially prone to that failing. Stanley Middleton is a fine, underrated English novelist, ‘provincial’ certainly because of his settings, but universal in his concerns. ‘Minor’? I hope not, because it may be that his novels will be perceived as getting better as they age. Sell-by dates don’t apply here, thank goodness.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 43 © C.J. Driver 2014