William Essex rises from humble beginnings to become a successful dramatist and novelist. We get to know him rather well: he is the narrator of this novel. His friend Dermot O’Riorden, a reluctant Irish patriot, a talented joiner, founds a leading London furnishing emporium. When they first meet, both poor and aspiring, O’Riorden is ‘sitting at a very dusty desk set in the middle of a small dusty room that was not so much lighted as dimmed by one small dusty window’. They become close friends, pouring out their hearts to one another. O’Riorden calls Ireland ‘a stinking, starving little country that I’m glad to be out of’; but he also says, ‘If ever I have a son […] I’ll dedicate him to Ireland’.
My Son, My Son – William’s and Dermot’s story – belongs equally to their sons, Oliver Essex and Rory O’Riorden. The boys grow up as friends in their father’s shadows but, emerging into their own light, the very history that their parents have managed to circumvent lays hold of them. Fathers whose best-laid plans were for their sons, have no power to deliver them from their plans’ consequences. Oliver and Rory are their Absaloms. Fathers provide, counsel, watch, regret, but cannot prevent. Of the mature women characters, only Livia Vaynol, a free and freeing spirit who arrives too late, gives the novel a romantic focus.
When it first appeared in 1938 the novel was entitled O Absalom! Two years before its publication, William Faulkner’s masterpiece Absalom, Absalom! was published. My Son, My Son! kept only the repetition and, initially at least, the exclamation mark. Spring’s and Faulkner’s fathers could hardly be more unalike. If the books share themes – civil conflict, family, material, cultural and political ambition – they are worlds apart in form, texture and tone. Faulkner is a self-inventing modernist; Spring a social novelist in the English line of Eliot, Meredith and Hardy.
1937 had been a good year for English fiction. On publication, Spring’s book succeeded John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men on the bestseller list and outsold Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca in its first year. Both these books have retained the limelight better than My Son, My Son and have not been out of print, where My Son, My Son’s hour has come and gone and come again as its themes return to topicality. In 1940 it was made into a feature film in the United States – where the book was extremely popular – directed by Charles Vidor and foregrounding the romantic themes. In 1979 it became an eight-episode BBC television series exploring the Irish dimension. Kate Binchy played Sheila O’Riorden, Frank Grimes Dermot and Gerard Murphy was Rory; Michael Williams was William and Patrick Ryecart Oliver. The two treatments are totally different, yet the book contains them both.
Howard Spring is a city novelist. Born and reared in poverty in Cardiff, his poverty is not rural but urban, of the slums. His is not Gaskell, Galt or Hardy territory. He has more in common with the worlds of Arnold Bennett and J.B. Priestley, writers whom he succeeded as an influential book reviewer at the Evening Standard.
The early chapters of My Son, My Son are set in and around my home town, Manchester. His first novel, Shabby Tiger (1934) is also set there. The locations – Deansgate, St Anne’s Square, Palatine Road, even the Old Cock Inn – still recognizably survive. ‘All the way from Ancoats to Hulme there was not a tree, not a shrub, not a twig to be seen.’ Things have improved a little, but his world is familiar in outline. The action takes place a century ago, but the map of Manchester and its suburbs has not much changed. Many old buildings still stand, now put to different uses, or derelict and awaiting rehabilitation or the wrecker’s ball. Hulme, where the protagonist endures his threadbare childhood and his mother works as a laundress, is improved but recognizable. The winter streets can still be ‘full of writhing yellow fog’. Grey laundry hangs on lines, bullies are busy bullying, straitened families sprawl and multiply; ‘there was a funeral now and then to thin us out’. Some once-posh neighbourhoods have come down in the world, but Didsbury today is still Spring’s Didsbury, a place to aspire to.
Nellie Moscrop, whom William decides early on in his climb out of poverty to marry ‘in cold blood’, having realized how sick and how rich her father is, draws William’s attention to the Manchester novels and writers. Jane Eyre ‘began to get written not ten minutes’ walk from here’, and Mrs Linnaeus Banks’s The Manchester Man was also local produce. William heeds her, but even then realises that the he is in transit through these streets that are like ‘a small frozen furrow in the waste of the city’, and that the people he uses to rise by he will eventually leave behind – apart from his intimate friend Dermot who rises in a different way and place. The narrator’s candour is reliable and unnerving: he is without moral scruple, which makes time’s judgement on him seem less gratuitous, more just.
William is attuned to social division. Having begun in poverty, he works and calculates his way out of it. His first job, in the novel’s first sentence, is fetching washing for his washerwoman mother. He notices the differences between her clients; some considerate, others brusque. A knowledge of social division pervades the novel, a division based less on social class than on material possession. And William becomes increasingly aware of political division, between Britain and Ireland. Spring is a spare writer, his descriptive writing conveying a kind of uninsistent symbolism. The story moves forward in the characters’ time and the country’s history. The little details are telling: whether a jam roll, Flynn’s narrative of the Manchester Martyrs, or William’s mother’s funeral procession. Spring’s London is less real than his Manchester, and when he writes Cornwall he has travelled a little too deep into Du Maurier country, leaving the real map behind.
Actual incidents and public figures tie the fictional elements to history. Spring insists on the reality of his novel. If someone leaves the action he will tell us – don’t imagine they’ll be back again. They leave for good, the way people do, the way things happen. He insists there is no design: this is life, plain and simple. The Irish home rule versus independence argument is conducted with increasing emphasis – Dermot’s ‘God damn England’ becomes Sheila’s ‘God bless Ireland’ – until we are in the heat of it. As if it was the book’s specific prophesy, in 1996 its themes came to fruition in the huge IRA bomb that stunned Manchester city centre.
One aspect of Spring’s realism was his commercial calculation. He dedicated the book to Eric Hiscock, author of the influential ‘Whitefriar’ column for Smith’s Trade News, the source of information for the book world. Hiscock had a nose for bestsellers. His endorsement could make a book’s fortune. Commercial calculation may have been on Spring’s mind. It is always on William’s mind as he climbs the social ladder and acquires the trappings of affluence. In a way, William is the prototype for the modern writer: a servant to his readers and his interests, knowing which side his bread is buttered on, and lacking the devil-may-care integrity that marks Hardy’s and Eliot’s protagonists. This corruption of artistic ambition is what the novel is about. It is an excellent novel because it makes no scruple in laying bare its narrator’s existential compromise and the consequences it has.
Michael Schmidt, 2016