James Hanley (novelist) - Biography

Biography

Born in Kirkdale, Liverpool, in 1897 (not Dublin, nor 1901 as he generally implied) to a working-class family, Hanley probably left school in 1911 and worked as a clerk, before going to sea in 1915 at the age of 17 (not 13 as he again implied). Both his parents were, on the other hand, born in Ireland, his father Edward Hanley around 1865, in Dublin, and his mother, Bridget Roache, in Queenstown, now Cobh, County Cork, around 1867. However, Edward was already in Liverpool by 1881 and they married in Liverpool in 1891. Hanley's father worked most of his life as a stoker, particularly on Cunard liners, and other relatives had also gone to sea. James also grew up living close to the docks. Thus life at sea was a formative influence and much of his early writing is about seamen.

Then, in April 1917, Hanley jumped ship in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, and shortly thereafter joined the Canadian Army in Fredericton, NB. Hanley fought in France in the summer of 1918, but was invalided out shortly thereafter. He then went to Toronto, Canada, for two months, in the winter of 1919, to be demobbed, before returning to Liverpool on 28 March 1919. He may have taken one final voyage before working as a railway porter in Bootle. In addition to working as a railway porter, he devoted himself "to a prodiguous range of autodidactic, high cultural activities – learning the piano ...attending ... concerts ... reading voraciously and, above all, writing." It is also probable that he later worked at a number of other jobs, while writing fiction in his spare time. However, it was not until 1929 that his novel Drift was accepted, and this was published in March, 1930.

Hanley's second novel, Boy (published by Boriswood in 1931), was praised by William Faulkner amongst others, but was later, in 1934, suppressed for obscenity. This led to a famous court case which Hanley's publisher lost.

Hanley moved to near Corwen, N. Wales in 1931, where he met Dorothy Enid "Timothy" Thomas, neé Heathcote, a descendant of Lincolnshire nobility. They lived together and had a child, Liam Powys Hanley, in 1933, but did not marry until 1947.

Hanley published two further novels about life at sea Ebb and Flood (1932) and Captain Bottell (1933), before publishing The Furys (1935), the first in a sequence of five loosely autobiographical novels about working-class life in Liverpool. In 1938 Hollow Sea one of Hanley's most powerful novels of life at sea was published.

As war was approaching, In July 1939, Hanley moved to London, to write documentaries and plays for the BBC. His direct experience of the blitz is seen in his novel No Directions (published with an introduction by Henry Miller in 1943). He moved back to Wales, to Llanfechain, the other side of the Berwyn Mountains from Corwen, in December 1940, where he remained until 1963. James Hanley then moved to North London, close to his son Liam.

In the 1950s he wrote three of his finest novels, Closed Harbour (1952), Levine (1956), and An End and a Beginning (1958), the final volume of the Furys sequence. Then in the 1960s, because of his lack of financial success as a novelist, Hanley turned to writing plays for radio, television, and occasionally the theatre. Hanley returned to the novel form in the 1970s, publishing A Woman in the Sky (1973) and The Kingdom (1978), which some see as being amongst his best works. The Kingdom was the last of several works with Welsh setting, that include a section of Don Quixote Drowned (1953), The Welsh Sonata (1954), and Another World (1972), as well as Grey Children (1937), a non-fiction work on unemployment in South Wales. Several of Hanley's plays were later reshaped into novels.

Hanley also frequently published short stories and book reviews, and some of these stories were subsequently collected and published in book form.

Hanley published an autobiographical work, Broken Water: An Autobiographical Excursion in 1937, and while this generally presents a true overall picture of his life, it is seriously flawed, incomplete and inaccurate.

Hanley's brother was the novelist Gerald Hanley and his nephew the American novelist and playwright William Hanley. James Hanley's wife also published three novels, as Timothy Hanley. She died in 1980. James Hanley himself died in 1985. He was buried in Llanfechain, Wales.

In 2001, to mark what was then believed to be the centennial of James Hanley's birth, a one day conference was held in Cambridge, while in 2002 the University of Wales published a major study of James Hanley's life and work: James Hanley: Modernism and the Working Class, by John Fordham.