Context
Rayner Heppenstall
G. J. Buckell
Rayner Heppenstall was many things during
his lifetime: a poet, journalist, critic, translator, and broadcaster;
a Catholic and an agnostic, a revolutionary and a reactionary, a
pacifist and a soldier. Above all, he was a novelist, and if he is
remembered for anything at all, it is his fiction. However, despite
being cited as the founder of the nouveau roman by numerous
critics, and becoming a spiritual forefather to the neo-modernist
circle headed by B. S. Johnson in ’60s Britain, Heppenstall has been
completely forgotten by literary critics since his death in 1981, and
all of his novels remain out of print. Born John Rayner
Heppenstall in Huddersfield, Yorkshire in 1911 (Rayner was his mother’s
maiden name), Heppenstall graduated from Leeds University in 1932 with
a degree in English and Modern Languages. This cultivated a lifelong
Francophilia that did much to shape the character of his subsequent
novels as well as his idiosyncratic critical writing. Moving to London
in 1934, Heppenstall quickly became extraordinarily well connected,
befriending Dylan Thomas, Herbert Read, Eric Gill, George Orwell, and
countless other writers, critics, artists, and dramatists during a
fifty-year career as a freelance writer and broadcaster on BBC radio. As
well as studies of John Middleton Murry, Léon Bloy, and Raymond
Roussel, and several volumes of memoirs, Heppenstall wrote eight
novels, the first of which was The Blaze of Noon (1939). This novel made a considerable critical impact, as did The Connecting Door (1962), which excited British avant-gardists seeking a domestic equivalent to the école du regard of Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, Simon, Duras, and others in postwar France,
being described by its publisher as an “anti-novel to stand up to the
performances of the Frenchmen.” He was name-checked in B. S. Johnson’s
introduction to Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs, and, as Heppenstall recorded in his journals, Hélène Cixous stated that “il [Heppenstall] à inauguré le nouveau roman dès 1939 avec The Blaze of Noon” in an article for Le Monde on “le roman experimental” in Britain, published in May 1967. Despite
this, Heppenstall has disappeared from the critical consciousness,
being primarily of interest to Orwell biographers disconcerted by his
account (in Four Absentees) of their drunken contretemps. Heppenstall was also the subject of a typically spiteful personal attack in John Carey’s The Intellectual and the Masses,
a populist Tory denunciation of modernism riddled with deliberate
misrepresentations and simplifications of modernist literary culture,
Nazi cultural policy, and the connections between the two—otherwise,
very little is written about him, and a sustained, balanced critique of
the literary qualities of his novels has never really been attempted.
This despite the fact that Heppenstall’s novels can be read in many
contexts: the development of the nouveau roman, the
reinvigoration of British modernism during the sixties, the transition
from modernism to postmodernism in British fiction, the contemporary
attempt to find new directions for serious fiction amidst World War II
and its aftermath, and, of course, according to their own considerable
merits. After publishing reviews in T. S. Eliot’s Criterion, and two books—a brief study of Middleton Murry and Apology for Dancing,
a volume of ballet criticism—Heppenstall began to infiltrate British
literary and intellectual circles. Noted as a poet, he was aware of
British surrealism, being friends with Dylan Thomas and Herbert Read,
who were involved if not fully committed to the movement. He also
reviewed Hugh Sykes Davies’s Petron (1935), Britain’s first surrealist novel, for the Criterion. However, it was not the fantastical exterior of Petron’s
world that captivated Heppenstall, who expressed doubts over whether
one could deliberately be “pre-rational”; rather, it was “the
withdrawal from life, by a method directly anti-poetic, into phenomena
not yet capable of rationalisation as image and symbol, much less as
philosophy or argument” that interested him. Heppenstall
entered intellectual life in a period of crisis: the English
modernists, to whom Heppenstall was essentially sympathetic, had often
been less socially engaged than their European counterparts; the
reluctance of the British government to aid the Spanish Republic and
the increasing threat posed by Hitler left many intellectuals feeling
obliged to politicize. Heppenstall’s pacifism, which contrasted starkly
with the surrealists’ polemics and Orwell’s Spanish adventure, was
rooted in opposition to Fascism: “Risorgimento” was an oblique attack
on Mussolini, assimilating political critique into an introspective
pseudosymbolist poem, with discernable religious overtones. This
religiosity dominated Heppenstall’s verse, which displayed more
affinity with Eliot and Yeats than Auden or Spender, the
self-proclaimed poetic orthodoxy of the decade. Heppenstall
shared the surrealists’ interest in Freud but not their faith in
Marxism, and like many other intellectuals of the time, spent the
decade searching for an intellectual framework within which he felt
comfortable. Throughout the 1930s, he flirted with a number of
positions: varying shades of socialism, pacifism, and most importantly,
Catholicism, a conversion that was brief but left Heppenstall with a
“metaphysical hangover.” This spirituality permeated his epic poem Sebastian (1937), but constituted a notable absence in his novels, which are
often infused with a vague sense of pessimistic futility. Heppenstall’s
refusal to accept any of the political or spiritual structures proposed
as a solution to the turmoil of the decade distanced him from his
contemporaries, a distance exacerbated by his constant focus on the
position of the Self (usually a cultivated, individualistic bourgeois)
rather than the body politic. The esoteric introspection that characterized Heppenstall’s poetry was integral to The Blaze of Noon.
The narrative concerned a blind masseur, staying in Cornwall with a
patient, Mrs. Nance, whose niece, Sophie, falls in love with him, with
further complications arising from the intrusion of Amity Nance, who is
blind, deaf, and dumb. Heppenstall wrote an introduction for a 1962
reprint, supplanting the original one by Elizabeth Bowen, whom
Heppenstall did not meet until the mid-1940s. Here, Heppenstall
explained how the book had been written in response to a friend
(Michael Sayers, an Irish author) who had said that he could never
write a novel, and that it was “not the work of a literary theorist.”
However, Heppenstall did have one theoretical principle, crucial to the
transposition of his self-reflective poetics into prose, which was that
“the cinema had taken over the story-telling functions of the
exteriorised novel and that prose narrative would do well to become
more lyrical, more inward.” It was this inwardness that accounts for
critical suggestions that The Blaze of Noon anticipated the nouveau roman, with the narrator’s blindness necessitating the focus upon the properties of objects favored by Robbe-Grillet. The Blaze of Noon was completed during the Munich crisis and published in November 1939;
politics barely impinge on the narrative, which is psychologically and
spatially distanced from sites of contemporary political meaning.
Narrator and protagonist Louis Dunkel is incredibly self-absorbed,
using memory, imagination, and extensive speculation on his other
sensory receptions to apprehend the world in the absence of supposedly
more trustworthy eyesight. However, he does engage with modern
literature, reading Eliot and Nietzsche in braille, displaying an
interest in Freud (which manifests itself in ceaseless
self-psychoanalysis) and knowledge of avant-garde composers like Auric,
Milhaud, and Stravinsky. However, the fragility of Dunkel’s means of
interpretation is exposed immediately: the opening paragraph sets the
tone, beginning “The handshake and a few words of conversation are
enough. I rarely fail to receive the impression of a woman on meeting
her.” Sophie Madron is swiftly established as an object of fascination
when she does not shake his hand, leading Dunkel to speculate in the
absence of his favored clues. There is much conversation between them
but the love affair operates on an unequal basis. Sophie falls in love
with Louis, but Louis falls in love with his idea of Sophie,
seeing her as an extension of himself rather than a person in her own
right: perhaps due to his blindness, all of the characters Dunkel meets
serve merely to emphasize aspects of his personality, and help him in
his struggle to define himself amidst a complex, often hostile
environment. He attempts to do this through his relationships
with others; Amity’s arrival heightens his self-awareness to an
unbearable degree, and his relations with his hosts in the country
house are strained, some beyond repair. His sexual relations cause the
most difficulty—and caused difficulty for Heppenstall as well. The Evening Standard labeled The Blaze of Noon “an affront to decency” and called for it to be banned. Inevitably, the
novel sold out immediately. It is difficult to see what offended the Standard so
much, even in context: other reviewers thought the book to be inventive
and serious, and Heppenstall established himself as a novelist of
considerable promise. Circumstances obliged Heppenstall to
abandon his pacifism; he was conscripted in 1940 and served in
Yorkshire and Northern Ireland, in the Royal Artillery and the Pay
Corps. His experiences in London immediately before the war, and in the
Army, formed the basis for his next two novels, Saturnine and The Lesser Infortune, as well as two short prose pieces in the 1944 edition of New Road. Saturnine was published in 1943 in a limited edition of 1,650 copies, primarily
because the publisher was concerned that its contents were inflammatory. Certainly, Saturnine offended some critics, particularly James Agate of The Daily Express,
an adversary of Heppenstall’s who labeled it “A book more dangerous
than bosh.” Agate was infuriated by a passage that read, “Consider
merely that everyone stinks of excrement and putrefaction. That goes
for you and me, for the Prime Minister and the Hangman, for the Queen
of England, the little princesses and the Queen Mother, for all the
war-lords of Europe”—particularly controversial at a time when
unequivocal support for Churchill’s National Government was demanded,
and a contributory factor in the publisher’s decision not to commit to
a reprint, which contributed in turn to the novel’s critical
disappearance. This is a pity, because Saturnine is
Heppenstall’s most original, most adventurous novel, ceaselessly
questioning its own form in playful, delicate prose. With its loose
episodic structure, Heppenstall, with typical self-effacement, recorded
that it was “a very suitable kind of novel to be written by a man in
the Army, since he can post off the separate episodes to a friend, wife
or typist as he writes them and need not . . . bear the whole thing in
his head.” Describing Saturnine in The Intellectual Part,
Heppenstall labeled it a picaresque novel: “it has no formal plot but .
. . the episodes follow each other serially.” The process of its
construction demonstrates how Heppenstall’s approach to writing
differed from that of many postwar avantgarde novelists: rather than
establishing a tight set of formal boundaries and writing within them,
Heppenstall tended to let his circumstances dictate how he composed his
works, and opted to resurrect a traditional form and stretch its
limitations, rather than attempting to create an entirely new one. Saturnine introduced Alick Frobisher, again a first-person narrator who recounts
his experiences in London immediately prior to the war, covering
bankruptcy, the birth of a daughter, a drunk and disorderly charge,
homosexual acquaintances, political reflections, and astrological
asides. Once more, the central character is highly introverted, with
his many failings laid bare. Frobisher is desperate to escape his
destitution and the mundane, oppressive realities of late-’30s life,
but rather than advocating any philosophy or ideology as the solution
to twentieth-century malaise, he fixates upon “irrational” astrology
and mysticism in an exuberant narrative that strains in numerous
(apparently contradictory) directions simultaneously. The Lesser Infortune,
published in 1953 but mostly written during Heppenstall’s service,
seems the most formally traditional of his novels, being an apparently
autobiographical account of Frobisher’s time in the army, during which
he suffers a mental breakdown. Although the plot of this sequel to Saturnine meant that many strands of its predecessor’s narrative were terminated, The Lesser Infortune was delicately written, with its detached ruminations on army life,
subdued political engagement, and the narrator’s relentless focus on
his own consciousness pointing towards the nouveau roman. Here,
Frobisher finds that the war consists of a solitary battle to remain
sane, and that the end of the war merely substitutes one set of
insecurities for another. Its constant focus upon physical properties
of objects, occasionally punctuated by reflection on their effects upon
the narrator’s psychology, anticipated the relentlessly observational
style that characterized Robbe-Grillet’s novels, which in turn bore a
crucial influence upon Heppenstall’s next novel. A revised edition of Saturnine was issued by Peter Owen in 1960, under the title The Greater Infortune,
a publication that heralded an increased rate of literary productivity.
Heppenstall took pains to distance himself from his protagonist,
changing Frobisher’s name to Leckie, primarily because, “A number of
readers took both Saturnine and The Lesser Infortune to
be more autobiographical than they are and in some cases formed (while
one or two critics expressed) conclusions unflattering to myself . . .
Myself the most respectable of men, I now think it advisable, if only
to make it clear that my central figure is indeed a fictitious
personage, to give him a background more distinctly not my own.” This
focus upon his personality rather than his works was to hamper
Heppenstall’s career from this point onward, as he published several
volumes of memoirs during the ’60s that revealed many problematic
aspects to his character. Immediately after the war,
Heppenstall’s time with the BBC Third Programme limited and channeled
his creativity. He produced a number of radio scripts, both original
plays and adaptations (including one of Orwell’s Animal Farm),
before reemerging as a novelist and literary critic in the early ’60s.
Heppenstall’s fiction took a new direction, anticipated in his critical
work The Fourfold Tradition (1961), which attempted to draw
parallels between both “traditional” and “counter-traditional”
literatures in English and French. Here, Heppenstall bemoaned the fact
that “we have endless conventional novels,” exasperated by the popular
and critical success of the reactionary Angry Young Men (particularly
Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, and John Osborne), while praising the nouveau roman more enthusiastically than any other literary movement. Heppenstall
insisted that the French “second tradition,” which incorporated Gide
and Proust, and Juhardin’s development of the “stream of consciousness”
had culminated in the nouveau roman, which he declared an
interesting variation on the technique. Heppenstall became personally
acquainted with Sarraute (who was impressed with The Greater Infortune) as well as Robbe-Grillet, whose Jealousy was a vital influence upon Heppenstall’s The Connecting Door.
Robbe-Grillet took an interest in the fortunes of Heppenstall’s novel,
the English writer’s most consciously avant-garde work to date. While
Heppenstall’s earlier novels, particularly his debut, perhaps
anticipated certain structural and thematic characteristics of the nouveau roman, The Connecting Door openly demonstrated the influence of the école du regard. Its
“plot” is uneventful: a nameless man in his late thirties arrives in an
unidentified city on the Rhine in 1948 on a journalistic assignment;
the relationships he develops with two younger men, local officials,
and several women prompt recriminations about his previous visits to
the area, in 1931 and 1936. The narrative drew heavily on Heppenstall’s
own experiences, and reflected his literary influences, both through a
range of allusions and its structural experimentation, which was
foregrounded to an unprecedented level. It shared its predecessors’
concern with memory and self-definition, but here, Heppenstall’s
descriptive prose aspired to a level of “neutrality,” eschewing the
narrator’s reflection on the personal relevance of his surroundings
that characterized The Blaze of Noon and The Lesser Infortune.
The novel was highly mysterious, challenging its reader to establish
which events take place in which plane of time, addressed
simultaneously by its text, as well as which characters existed in
“reality” and which solely in the narrator’s consciousness. A year later, in The Intellectual Part, Heppenstall refuted an Italian critic who called him “il padre del nouveau roman,” believing that none of the French writers had read the 1947 translation of The Blaze of Noon and that the similarities were, as he put it, “Zeitgeistig.” Heppenstall explained that the unusual temporal arrangement employed in Connecting Door had been developed over several abortive novels, with a section praised
by one reviewer written in 1945, whilst he was still in the army. If
this is true, it adds weight to the claim that Heppenstall anticipated
the nouveau roman, although, as he would doubtless have insisted, this is unverifiable. It was The Connecting Door, more than its immediate follow-up The Woodshed,
that impressed the 1960s avant-garde, constituted of a generation of
writers mostly born in the ’30s, such as Johnson, Ann Quin, and Eva
Figes, loosely unified around a shared opposition to literary
conservatism more than a dedication to any defined set of aesthetic
principles. The Woodshed was, seemingly, a more modest novel than The Connecting Door.
Harold Atha (again a figuration of the author), traveling from
Aberystwyth to his hometown of Hinderholme (a fictional Yorkshire
village) after receiving a telegram telling him that his father is
dying, is prompted by external stimuli to recall fragmented memories of
his inter-war childhood. This was a refined “stream-of-consciousness”
novel, intended as a contribution to England’s “second tradition.”
Heppenstall felt that this technique, developed in English-language
writing by Joyce, Woolf, and Dorothy Richardson, had become “bedevilled
with literary politics” as a consequence of the Angry Young Men’s
reactionary disdain for it, and The Woodshed represented an
attempt to rehabilitate it into a burgeoning literary counterculture
that aimed to pick up where Joyce and company had left off before the
war. Four Absentees and The Intellectual Part demonstrated the breadth of Heppenstall’s literary connections. As well as the loose nouveau roman group, he had many links with the survivors of the 1930s, and was now
being invited into new avantgarde circles, meeting Anthony Burgess,
Alan Burns, Figes, Johnson, Quin, and Stefan Themerson among others.
The writers in Johnson’s circle were primarily novelists, a form that
Heppenstall was moving away from in order to specialize in criminal
historiography—indeed, he only wrote one novel between 1963 and 1977, The Shearers,
which told the story of the trial of eight members of an incestuous
family for murder, in (unusually for Heppenstall) the third person. Heppenstall was also shifting politically. He detailed this in The Intellectual Part,
saying, “I have not enjoyed this drift to the Right. I hope it will be
reversed . . . The outside world seemed bent on provoking it.” A read
through his published journals, covering 1969 to 1981, suggests that it
was not reversed: indeed, Heppenstall’s political opinions became
increasingly reactionary, with his diaries indicating a rapid decline
into outright insanity. It was this decline that made Heppenstall such
an unpalatable figure to commentators such as Carey, and is largely
responsible for his fall into obscurity. Although
Heppenstall’s compositional methods had previously been improvisatory,
with form being determined by circumstance and content, his penultimate
novel Two Moons (1977) was built upon a given construct, with
two narratives printed side by side to contrast the world at large with
the personal tragedy of Heppenstall’s son being paralyzed in a fall.
However, these narratives consisted mostly of numerous arbitrary
details recounted endlessly, in a fashion that becomes tedious almost
immediately. Heppenstall, by this time obsessed with death and
espousing some frighteningly reactionary ideas himself, was irritated
that the reviews focused on the structure, ignoring the content. By now
mentally ill and bitterly disillusioned, Heppenstall wrote one more
novel, an uncomfortable diatribe called The Pier, indicative more of a psychological collapse than a return to form. He died of a stroke on May 23, 1981, aged 70. ___________________________ Selected Works by Rayner Heppenstall: The Blaze of Noon. Out of Print.
Heppenstall’s earlier novels, then, can be read in several contexts, but above all they should once more be read. While The Lesser Infortune and The Woodshed are not to be discounted, The Blaze of Noon, Saturnine, and The Connecting Door are among the most successful novels produced by Britain’s
neo-modernists. They are unique within English literature for their
discernable awareness of developments in French writing, finding a
radical new direction for the stream of consciousness, and genuinely
changing the nature of this technique rather than merely reviving as it
as did some of his contemporaries. Rayner Heppenstall is scarcely
mentioned now, save for colorful appearances in biographies of his
contemporaries, and there are no signs of a critical revival in the
near future. However, Heppenstall’s writings are, at their best, witty
and provocative, being brutally honest about the failings of man,
emphasizing the precarious nature of identity and attendant mental
health. They ask searching questions about how the sensitive individual
can justify his existence in a world where social circumstances seem
always to put his actions just beyond his control.
The Connecting Door. Out of Print.
The Double Image. Out of Print.
Four Absentees. Out of Print.
The Fourfold Tradition: Notes on English and French Literatures, with Some Ethnological and Historical Asides. Out of Print.
The Greater Infortune. Out of Print.
The Intellectual Part. Out of Print.
The Lesser Infortune. Out of Print.
The Pier. Out of Print.
Raymond Roussel: A Critical Guide. Calder, £5.99.
Saturnine. Out of Print.
The Shearers. Out of Print.
Two Moons. Out of Print.
