This book examines the first five novels of Rayner Heppenstall (1911-1981). During his lifetime, many critics cited Heppenstall as the founder of the nouveau roman, believing his debut novel, The Blaze of Noon (1939), anticipated the post-war innovations of French writers such as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute. Since his death, however, Heppenstall's reputation has faded, and his fiction is all out of print.
His final novels, written during a descent into madness, were structurally simplistic and politically unpalatable, and their disastrous critical reception clouded critical judgment of his previous novels. Gareth Buckell examines the importance of technical experimentation, rather than the ideological content, within Heppenstall's earlier works, and seeks a more favorable standing for Heppenstall within our critical and cultural memory.
‘In this country, there is too little technical enterprise.
We have endless conventional novels.’
So wrote Rayner Heppenstall in 1961, exasperated by England's failure to produce a literary movement comparable to the French
nouveau roman. Born in Huddersfield on 27 July 1911, Heppenstall studied English and Modern Languages at the University of Leeds, cultivating a lifelong passion for French literature. During his professional life he was a journalist, broadcaster, critic, and a novelist, writing eight in total. After issuing several volumes of poetry, Heppcnstall published his first novel,
The Blaze of Noon, in 1939. His subsequent fictional output was sporadic:
Saturnine appeared in 1943, while Heppenstall was in the Army; its sequel,
The Lesser Infortune, was not published for another decade. Rayner did not release another novel until 1962, when both
The Connecting Door and
The Woodshed were issued, before
The Shearers in 1969. Eight years later,
Two Moons appeared, and his final novel,
The Pier, was published posthumously. Rayner Heppenstall died in Deal on 23 May 1981.
Heppenstall’s denunciation of England's 'endless conventional novels' eloquently captured the frustration many upcoming writers felt, with the formally reactionary 'Angry Young Men' becoming the darlings of post-war literary critics. Often aggressively philistine, these authors disdained Modernism, claiming that the experimentation of Joyce, Woolf and others had pushed the novel into a cul-de-sac that could only be escaped by returning to the forms popular during the Victorian period.
As he expressed his dissatisfaction, Heppenstall was writing a novel that deliberately accentuated the influence of Alain Robbe-Grillet, the nouveau roman figurehead, upon its construction in an attempt to produce a British equivalent. His articulation of sympathy with the nouveau roman in The Fourfold Tradition, and its creative manifestation in The Connecting Door, prompted critics to define Heppenstall as an 'experimental' novelist, and he won the attention of several younger writers aiming to rehabilitate modernist writing. These included Anthony Burgess, Alan Burns, Eva Figes, Ann Quin and B. S. Johnson, who included Rayner in his conscious attempt to create a circle of writers unified by their hatred of formal conservatism. Johnson loathed the term 'experimental', believing that 'to most reviewers [it] is almost always a synonym for “unsuccessful”’ : these counter-traditionalists would best be described as 'neo-Modernists', given their shared interest in continuing the inter-war investigation into the possibilities of literary form.
Johnson was their ringleader, championing Sterne, Joyce and especially Samuel Beckett, whose output could justifiably be situated within both Anglo-Irish and French Modernist contexts. Like Beckett, Heppenstall was fluent in both English and French, and although he never published in French, his novels usually demonstrated the influence of French-language writing, often referencing French authors. In his critical volumes (particularly The Fourfold Tradition) he highlighted intrinsic similarities and parallel trends with-in English and French writing, within both traditional and counter-traditional literatures.
The Connecting Door, labelled an 'anti-novel' by its publisher, (as the nouveau roman also became known outside France), did not just attract the attention of Johnson's circle, which shared Heppenstall's admiration for this French neo-Modernism. Even before its release suggested affinities with Robbe-Grillet, one or two critics had suggested that The Blaze of Noon, Heppenstall's debut novel, inaugurated the nouveau roman. These critics were often European. British commentators, even those reconsidering the novel during the sixties, tended to stress the influence of D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller, retrospectively placing it within a tradition of Anglo-American Modernist writing rather than asking how it anticipated developments in post-war continental literature.
Until the sixties, Heppenstall had avoided clarifying his literary prefer- ences, having befriended many important cultural figures, including Eric Gill, John Middleton Murry, Dylan Thomas and most famously, George Orwell. It is for his account of a drunken contretemps with Orwell, published in Four Absentees, where Heppenstall describes Orwell's look of 'fear and sadistic exaltation' as his flatmate raises a shooting-stick above his head, that Rayner is most often discussed, frequently troubling Orwell biographers. Orwell and Heppenstall remained friends, but many British critics formed an unfavorable opinion of Heppenstall's character, based on revelations in his memoirs and (especially) his posthumously published journals, as well as the ideological tone of his final novels, Two Moons and The Pier. Consequently, Heppenstall has all but vanished from British literary history, his novels absent from university reading lists and entirely out of print. The Anglo-American liberal-pluralist revision of the canon, opposing the domination of university syllabi by 'dead white men', has often focused on ensuring greater minority representation rather than encouraging the reassessment of an author or text's place within narrative(s) of formal innovation.
When British critics have discussed Heppenstall, they have often appropiated him to illustrate Modernism's more sinister tendencies, and even then, only in passing. Populist critic John Carey devoted two pages castigating Heppenstall in the postscript to The Intellectuals and the Masses, a simplistic, contentious study of the complex relationship between Modernism, elitism, and right-wing extremism, which characterised Nietzsche as the Machiavellian demon behind all three. Focusing primarily on Heppenstall's final novels and journals, Carey explains how he relished ‘contemplating the extinction of large sections of humanity', which apparently informed Heppenstall's malicious decision to make his writing ‘defiantly difficult'. Additionally, Carey deliberately misrepresents The Blaze of Noon’s ironic references to Nietzsche and, ignoring his other novels, dishonestly implies that Rayner (who fought in World War Two) was a lifelong Fascist.
For Helene Cixous, however, Heppcnstall was a captivating figure, worthy of considerable praise. Engaged solely with form, Cixous did not just share Heppenstall's belief that 'experimental' writing in England and France were closely linked; she became the most prominent critic to name the Englishman as the founder of the nouveau roman. In an article for Le Monde on 'Ie roman experimental' in Britain, published in May 1967, Cixous likened Heppenstall's novels to those of Michel Butor, stating that 'il à inauguré le noveau roman dés 1939 avec The Blaze of Noon’. Cixous also praised ''Porte de communication’, simultaneously crediting Heppenstall with a pivotal role in the development of the French nouveau roman and within the subsequent British neo-Modernist project, to which Heppenstall, although peripherally involved, never wholeheartedly committed.
Heppenstall found several of these British authors — particularly Burns and Johnson — disagreeably tendentious, disliking their tendency to link aesthetic radicalism with revolutionary politics. Perhaps this was why the nouveau roman was the only contemporary literary development that he unconditionally championed after flirting with, and ultimately rejecting, numerous ideologies, philosophies, and movements. Like Heppenstall, these writers prioritised formal innovation above political commitment, rejecting Sartre's concept of 'engagement' and demanding that the be 'a free and autonomous process of discovery'.
The nouveau roman had no manifesto, and was not unified by a predetermined set of principles like futurism or surrealism. The movement was a critical invention (which perhaps explains its vague name), with reviewers discerning similarities in Robbe-Grillet, Butor, Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, Marguerite Duras, and others, all opposed to the 'traditional' novel, resenting Socialist realism, and all publishing at least one novel through Editions dc Minuit. 'Anti-novels' such as Robbe-Grillet's The Erasers (1953), In the Labyrinth (1957) and Jealousy (1957), as well as Sarraute's The Planetarium (1959) and The Golden Fruits (1963), and Simon's The Flanders Road (1957) seemed to lack the components of 'conventional' novels - dramatic plots, coherent temporality and complex exploration of character psychology — that had been carried into much Modernist literature, focusing instead on concrete objects and the mundane, random events of everyday life. Often exploring the limitations of writing, its narrative material took place 'in the reflective consciousness of the novelist', examining the relationship between the internal working of the author's psyche and problematic concepts of 'reality'.
The Blaze of Noon and The Connecting Door received the most attention on their original release and when the nouveau roman was at its most
fashionable. Of all his novels, they have been the most studied. His other 'earlier' novels — Saturnine, The Lesser Infortune and The Woodshed — have all fallen obscure despite possessing many admirable qualities, although now, with British neo-Modernism having frequently been unfavorably judged, Heppenstall's novels have undeservedly become equally and almost totally forgotten. For those interested in the nouveau roman, domestic (neo-)Modernism and the project of reconsidering the canon of formally inventive British literature, and the criteria by which authors are included within it, Rayner Heppenstall demands reassessment: a reassessment that must begin with his debut.
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