James Hanley (novelist) - Works

Works

Hanley's first publication, the novel Drift (1930), was written, in part at least, in County Cork, Ireland in 1926, under the influence of James Joyce, as a quotation blurb on the cover of the cheap edition of 1932 underlines: "The portraits of Joe Rourke and his mother are, indeed, two of the most profound expressions of the Catholic soul I have yet seen; truer and finer, in my opinion, than anything in Joyce’s A Portrait of an Artist or the vicious caricatures of Liam O’Flaherty". While Drift is about an Irish Catholic family, the setting is Liverpool, and in the 1930s Hanley wrote largely about the Irish community in Liverpool, especially with the semi-autobiographical novels about the Fury family, The Furys (1935), The Secret Journey (1936), and Our Time is Gone (1940), as well as Ebb and Flood (1932). Hanley wrote two further novels about the Furys of Liverpool, Winter Song (1950), and An End and a Beginning (1958), though Irish and especially Roman Catholic characters continue to have a significant role throughout Hanley’s career.

James Hanley consistently explored the lives of men and women in extreme situations, that is in dramatically precarious states of fear and isolation, which tend to lead to violence and madness. A grim early example is in the novella The Last Voyage (1931). John Reilly is a fireman who is still working only because he has lied about his age, and now faces his last voyage. Reilly although he is in his mid-sixties has a young family, and therefore the family will have to live on his inadequate pension. In another sense this is Reilly's last voyage, because despairing as to the future he throws himself into the ship’s furnace: “Saw all his life illuminated in those flames. ‘Not much for us. Sweat, sweat. Pay off. Sign on. Sweat, sweat. Pay off. Finish. Ah, well!’” (43).

In Boy (1931) young Fearon’s isolation and suffering arise because no one cares for him. Boy is a grim and sordid, twentieth-century Oliver Twist, without Dickens’ comedy and happy ending. The young protagonist’s parents are only interested in the wages he can earn, and encourage him to leave school as soon as possible. Likewise society is unconcerned about the harsh, unhealthy conditions he endures cleaning ships’ boilers. Then, when he goes to sea, he is sexually abused by his fellow seamen. Finally, when young Fearon is dying in agony from a venereal disease caught in a Cairo brothel, his Captain smothers him, in a gruesome mercy killing.

It is not surprising that Hanley should show an interest in such extreme situations, given his early awareness of the precariousness of life in the working-class world that he came from. Hanley would also have sensed, very early in his life, that individual lives of the working poor and their children was of little value in a modern industrial city like Liverpool. All this encouraged his exploration not only of working-class life but also the emotional life of characters on the periphery of society, vagrants, pariahs and the displaced.

There is an exploration of another type of extreme situation in those works of Hanley which deal with a shipwreck, such as “Narrative” (1931), and the World War II novels The Ocean (1941), Sailor’s Song (1943), though these extreme situations are undergone by groups of men, and “were primarily inspiriting in their representation of maritime heroism” (Fordham 165).

However, Hanley’s most effective depiction of this subject can probably be found in three novels of his maturity, published in the 1950s, The Closed Harbour (1952), Levine (1956), and the last of the Furys saga, An End and a Beginning (1958), where the male protagonists, following some trauma, are both unemployed and isolated from family and society. This includes having broken with the Catholic religion in which each was raised. While the main characters in these three novels are men, Hanley also depicts in these novels the suffering of women in similar, if not usually as extreme situations. This is because these women, unlike the men, retain their Catholic faith, and often as well their capacity for love. In addition to these woman, priests and other Catholics play an important part in these novels.

Hanley lived a large part of his writing life, from 1931 until 1963, in Wales, and wrote a number of works with a Welsh setting and subject matter. The first full length work was Grey Children: A Study in Humbug and Misery (1937). The subject matter of this non-fiction work, unemployment in industrial South Wales, though has more in common with Hanley’s novels of the 1930s about the struggles of working-class Liverpudleians. In genre Grey Children belongs with George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier, published earlier in 1937. In fact, Hanley read a proof copy of Road to Wigan Pier, when he was starting to work on Grey Children.

It was not, however, until 1953, over twenty years after Hanley moved to Wales, with the publication of “Anatomy of Llangyllwch”, in Don Quixote Drowned, that he wrote at length about that part of rural North Wales where he lived. Hanley uses the fictional name “Llangyllwch” for the village of Llanfechain, where he had moved at the end of 1940, on the other side of the Berwyn Mountains from Corwen, close to the English border. This is a series of essays and anecdotes about the villagers of Llangyllwch/Llanfechain, though the boundary between fact and fiction is deliberately imprecise.

Another local character from Llanfechain was the source of the central character, the tramp Rhys, in The Welsh Sonata (1954), which was Hanley’s first full-length novel with a Welsh setting. This novel marks an important step forward in Hanley’s attempt to give form to his feelings about Wales. The Welsh Sonata is narrated from the perspective of Welsh characters, and Hanley occasional uses Welsh words, and he adopts, at times, a poetic style.

Almost twenty years after The Welsh Sonata, in 1972, Hanley’s second Welsh novel, Another World appeared. One critic found in this work “deafening echoes of Under Milk Wood", while another saw allusions to “the magical quality of The Mabinogion". Although there are resemblances to Under Milk Wood, it is not overshadowed by the earlier work, while the mythological allusions are ironic.

Hanley’s third Welsh novel, A Kingdom (1978), published just before his seventy-seventh birthday, was his last novel. As he had been living in North London since 1963, this is very much written at a distance; an elegy to a dying way of life, that of hill farming in Wales; and the tone is quieter, less ironic than in Hanley’s other novels set in Wales. The poetry of Hanley’s unintrusive, lyrical prose style works successfully, unlike the more self-conscious poetry of The Welsh Sonata, written some twenty years earlier. In both style and subject matter A Kingdom suggests the influence of the more austere poetry of Hanley’s friend, Welsh poet-priest, R. S. Thomas rather than Dylan Thomas.

In addition these novels wote many plays for radio and television, as well as occasionally for the theatre. While he wrote mostly for the BBC, it appears that his plays were also produced in many other countries, including the CBC in Canada Hanley play Say Nothing was on stage for a month at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East in 1962 and off Broadway, New York, in 1965, while Inner Journey was on stage in Hamburg in 1966, as well as New York's The Lincoln Center for a month in 1969. Say Nothing was also staged 46 times at The Finish National Theatre in 1973/74.

Hanley’s protagonists tend to be solitary figures and his concern is with loneliness, rootlessness, violence and madness rather than broader social and political issues. Hanley’s is an unheroic world of anti-heroes. His described himself as an anarchist, in a statement sent to P.E.N. "I have been labelled a 'Proletarian writer'..... is to be party to more than one quite absurd theory, one of which is that only one section society is evil, and only one section capable of soaring; this message comes out of Communist vacuums.... My whole attitude is anarchial (sic), I do not believe in the State at all ".

Following Hanley's death in 1985 there has been the occasional reprinting, including, by Harvill The Last Voyage and Other Stories (1997) and The Ocean (1999); and more recently by OneWorld Classics, Boy (2007) – with an invaluable biographical postscript by Chris Gostick – and The Closed Harbour (2009). Several titles are also available from Fabers reprints on demand service.

In terms of both James Hanley's reputation and our understanding of his work, an important landmark was the publication in 2002 of John Fordham's James Hanley: Modernism and the Working Class by the University of Wales Press. Particularly useful is his suggestion that Hanley is not simply a realist or naturalist, but because of his use of expressionistic techniques, should be seen more in the context of modernism. Fordham's study also contains important, new biographical material.

Hanley never achieved major success as a writer, even though he often received favourable reviews, both in Britain and America and counted amongst his admirers E.M. Forster, Lawrence of Arabia, John Cowper Powys, Anthony Burgess, Henry Green and Doris Lessing. John Cowper Powys in his "Preface" to James Hanley's Men in Darkness (1931), comments: "There are few people who could read these powerful and terrible tales without being strongly affected" (ix). And more recently Alberto Manguel questions: "Why one of the major 20th-century writers should have suffered such a fickle fate is a question to which, no doubt, modern readers will have to answer to the sound of the Author's final trumpets".