The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Note On the Liberty Fund Edition
• Foreword John Blundell
• The Authors
• The Representation of Business In English Literature
• Introduction Arthur Pollard University of Hull
• Eighteenth-century Attitudes Towards Business W. A. Speck University of Leeds
• Early Nineteenth Century: Birmingham—“something Direful In the Sound” Geoffrey Carnall University of Edinburgh
• The High Victorian Period (1850-1900): “the Worship of Mammon” Angus Easson University of Salford
• The Early Twentieth Century: Uniformity, Drudgery and Economics Allan Simmons St. Mary’s University College
• Mid-late Twentieth Century: “an Unprecedented Moral Quagmire” John Morris Brunel University

Mid-Late Twentieth Century: “An Unprecedented Moral Quagmire”

JOHN MORRIS Brunel University

1.

THE SCENE IN THE 1930S

You gave a week of your life, every week, so that you might have a hovel for shelter, an insufficiency of food and five bob left over to clothe yourself and the missis in shoddy.—Walter Greenwood, Love on the Dole (1933)

It is difficult to find positive and appreciative images of business in twentieth-century English literature. This is especially true in the period leading up to the Second World War. By then the entrenched feeling among many writers reflected the powerful influence of Charles Dickens to the effect that business—capitalism—was a dirty, disreputable, tarnished affair in practice. Hard Times, Dombey and Son and in particular Our Mutual Friend, which includes an unseemly struggle for the ownership of a heap of dirt near the waters of the Thames, were profoundly influential on a whole range of differing writers from H. G. Wells to T. S. Eliot (the latter even considering an alternative title to The Waste Land [1922] taken from Dickens’s novel).1

But there were further, political, reasons why the world of business and finance should have received such a “bad press” in creative writing. For by the 1930s literature had become increasingly polarised into Left and Right. For the Left, capitalism was seen as allied to fascism. Indeed, fascism was seen in Freudian terms as a kind of social-psychological disease whose financial wing was capitalist. There were those on the Left who considered fascism to be the last death-throe of capitalism faced by the advance of Marxist theory and practice.2 Thus W. H. Auden’s Miss Gee who wonders “Does anyone care / That I live in Clevedon Terrace / On one hundred pounds a year?” and who as a frustrated spinster is doomed to die of cancer, is portrayed as a victim, literally carved up by Church and State.

• • Mr. Rose he turned to his students,
  • Said: “Gentlemen, if you please,
  • We seldom see a sarcoma
  • As far advanced as this.”
• • They took her off the table,
  • They wheeled away Miss Gee
  • Down to another department
  • Where they study Anatomy.
• • They hung her from the ceiling.
  • Yes, they hung up Miss Gee;
  • And a couple of Oxford Groupers
  • Carefully dissected her knee.3

Such Freudo-Marxist analysis of how a predominantly capitalist society with an established church can use “the little people” may seem absurd now, but it was common in the 1930s when for many the Soviet Union and its policies offered the only fair financial prospects for the future. Stephen Spender’s picture of capitalist England as “the landscape of hysteria” similarly sees only exploitation and cruelty in a country where the profit motive is paramount. The passengers in an aircraft coming in to land

• . . . observe the outposts
• Of work: chimneys like lank black fingers
• Or figures frightening and mad: and squat buildings
• With their strange air behind trees, like women’s faces
• Shattered by grief.

And here too capitalism is seen as in league with the Church in depriving people while obscuring the reality:

• . . . larger than all the charcoaled batteries
• And imaged towers against that dying sky,
• Religion stands, the church blocking the sun.4

Images of Cultural Debasement

Yet the writers of the Right, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Wyndham Lewis scarcely saw business and capitalism more favourably, partly because from their lofty stand-point they considered the counting of pennies and the charging of interest beneath them, but also because as mass society became larger and more integrated and more the creature of applied science, industry and technology they felt that standards were being debased. Indeed, John Betjeman spoke for many both of the Left and the Right in his 1937 poem when he invited bombs to “fall on Slough . . . and get it ready for the plough.” The “air-conditioned, bright canteens,” and the “tinned beans” and “tinned minds,” images of cultural debasement, are portrayed as the direct result of “The profits of the stinking cad.”5 Similarly, Gordon Comstock repeatedly in George Orwell’s 1936 novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (written as an attack on the worship of the “Money-God”), welcomed the idea of destroying the products of capitalist consumerist society because of their debasing effects, while Orwell’s own war-time diary echoed these sentiments:

• Always, as I walk through the
• Underground stations, [I am] sickened
• by the advertisements, the silly
• staring faces and strident colours . . .
• How much rubbish this war will sweep away . . .6

It might now seem strange to us that creative writers of both Left and Right, divided on so much else, should have shared anti-business feelings, especially as Eliot became a director of Faber and Faber, Pound a propagandist for Mussolini, and Yeats an established figure close to the rich and privileged. What was really happening, I think, was that a great realignment was taking place, notably foretold by the remarkable Peter F. Drucker in his book The End of Economic Man (1939). Orwell too was quick to realise the significance of Drucker’s prediction and acknowledged it.7 Economically and therefore ultimately politically, Fascism and Communism were moving ever closer. The development of industry, technology and mass communication which accelerated in the 1930s in the face of probable war led remorselessly to even more powerful state capitalism on both sides of the political divide and eventually to the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact of 1939.

There is a further reason why business and industry should have been so negatively portrayed in the decade that produced the Means Test and the Jarrow Crusade. One would have thought indeed that the hardship and squalor vividly depicted in Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), written on behalf of the Left Book Club, would have encouraged the positive re-establishment of successful businesses properly financed and run so that the unemployment figure of three million could be significantly reduced. Yet that is scarcely found in the literature of the time which concentrated instead on the exploitation of workers, the poor working conditions and the callousness and cruelty of those who had succeeded in the system. But this further reason mentioned above has more to do with literature than with society. The problem goes back to the advent of the Modernist era in the first two decades of the twentieth century. It has been argued that literature faced a schism in the early years of the century. Should it concentrate on “the voyage without” or “the voyage within”? Was important creative writing to be about “the real world,” the world say of Rudyard Kipling whose work deals with war, empire, business, and so on, or the world, say, of James Elroy Flecker, the world of imagination, dream and spirit? Undoubtedly these two worlds which a Chaucer, a Shakespeare, a Donne, could bring together had become by 1910 so separate that a fusion was unthinkable.

Stream of Consciousness

It was perhaps because of this “dissociation of sensibility”—to use T. S. Eliot’s term—that ideas of what literature was supposed to be about, its very justification, divided into two “camps.” The more powerful and avant-garde of these become known as “stream of consciousness” writers: those who believed that creative writing should portray the life of the mind. One of its foremost apologists was Virginia Woolf who argued that the worthwhile literature of the early decades of this century was written by those who believed that the act of thought was “an event.” She referred to writers like James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and herself. Significantly, she illustrated what she meant by attacking writers like Wells, Shaw, Galsworthy and Bennett, that is, those who would claim they dealt with “the real world”: the world of business and money in particular, but also of politics and society. She argued that in a novel such as Arnold Bennett’s Hilda Lessways (1911) we could not hear characters’ voices, “we can only hear Mr. Bennett’s voice telling us facts about rents and freeholds and copyholds and fines.”8 She claimed that the “Edwardian” novelists—Bennett, Wells, Galsworthy—had stressed only “the fabric of things” and by so doing had been allowed to “palm off” upon the reading public “a version” of the living reality that constitutes a person’s character and life: “the Edwardians were never interested in character in itself; or the book in itself. They were interested in something outside.”9 Neither Wells nor Galsworthy tried to portray the reality of a character of, for example, an ordinary woman you might see in a railway compartment:

Perhaps Virginia Woolf’s most fundamental criticism of these novelists is as follows:

Those critics who, like Virginia Woolf, considered these “naturalistic” writers inferior, would tend to bracket together business and politics for they believed that the writers concentrated on “the voyage without” effectively derived from W. E. Henley and Rudyard Kipling “the dream of unending progress through empire and machine”12 even if the empire was not necessarily the British Empire but rather one of future socialistic propaganda.

I think it is important to recognise these influences because the “greatness” subsequently claimed by critics like F. R. Leavis for writers of whom Virginia Woolf approved—Joyce, Eliot, D. H. Lawrence—effectively denigrated those who dealt with the realities of the world of business, industry and politics. Not only would such a significant text as Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914) have been considered scarcely worth attention but even what are now seen to be novels of lasting importance—Wells’s Tono-Bungay (1909) and Bennett’s Anna of the Five Towns (1902), for example—received scant regard as serious works of literature.

Even though Leavis considered Wells a very inferior novelist and “slapped down” Lord David Cecil for even mentioning Wells in the same breath as writers like Conrad and Lawrence,13 other critics have been highly appreciative of him as not only the father of science fiction but also “a great comic novelist” in the Dickensian tradition. Wells had also had experience of business which he portrayed in a number of novels: Kipps (1905), Tono-Bungay (1909) and The History of Mr. Polly (1910), for example. It is true that, as a socialist, Wells portrayed business as haphazard, a lottery and destructive, but it was always done with gusto, humanity and a sense of fun. In Tono-Bungay we see Uncle Ponderevo fantasizing about making a fortune by playing the stock market or cornering the market for a patent medicine like quinine, an antiseptic or cocaine. “Rather a nuisance to the doctors,” remarks his nephew George, the hero, to which he receives the reply:

Looking back on this conversation with the wisdom of adulthood, George tells us with biting irony:

Yet despite his uncle’s “going bust” and frittering away George’s inheritance, George cannot resist the attraction of helping his uncle to build a financial empire by advertising and marketing a patent medicine called Tono-Bungay that largely consists of distilled water. The activity is deeply satisfying and great fun:

Together they do succeed in building a financial empire—which subsequently crashes.

Arnold Bennett, too, as we have seen, was sneered at by those who considered themselves superior, in part because he portrayed the world of business. “He was declared to be a vulgarian who ‘stank of brass’—in Virginia Woolf’s word, a tradesman.” Yet Frank Swinnerton, whom I quote here, continued, “In reality he was an artist.” And of Bennett it has also been said, “although he regarded literature as a business, his imagination never became corrupt.”17

Bennett had an extraordinary capacity for describing the workings of a factory process such as a pottery involves:

Here, in my opinion, Bennett anticipated the kind of man-machine interface later to be portrayed in Eastern Europe by writers such as Zamiatin, Mayakovsky and Capek. Such prophetic futurism was not to be achieved by a workmanlike journeyman: there is real stylistic power here and, lest the reader does not make the proper connections, Anna, the eponymous heroine, who has just witnessed the awe-inspiring union of man and machine, ponders over “the organising power, the forethought, the wide vision, and the sheer ingenuity and cleverness which were implied by the contents of this warehouse. . . . It was a humble and deeply felt admiration.” The passage ends with the lightest touch of humour: “ ‘You seem to make a fine lot of tea-sets,’ she remarked.”19

Business and Industry—Class Divisions

Finally in this discussion of how and why business was portrayed as it was in the period that was to lead to the Second World War, I will briefly touch on the work of three further writers: Galsworthy, Lawrence and Forster. They all reflect class divisions when business and industry are portrayed.

In Galsworthy’s play The Skin Game (1920) there is a head-to-head confrontation between the landed gentry and a vulgar nouveau riche industrialist who justifies despoiling the countryside and breaking his promise not to evict people living in tied cottages on grounds of expediency: “My works supply thousands of people, and my heart’s in them. What’s more, they make my fortune. . . . Suppose I were to consider this and that, and every little potty objection—where should I get to?—nowhere!”20 Yet all is not as clear-cut as it may seem for the battle between the two emblematically named rivals. Hillcrist, the gent, has a wife who manages mercilessly to expose the marital and moral irregularity in the family of Hornblower, the vulgar industrialist. When it comes to hitting below the belt the message seems to be that the upper classes are more than a match for the lower. Similarly, in The Forsyte Saga it appears that the dynasty of property owners and lawyers is to be exposed. However, by the time the saga draws to its close, “The Forsytes who have been the villains of the early novel now become its heroes.”21

That business and industrialism debase mankind is a recurrent message in the major fiction of D. H. Lawrence from Sons and Lovers (1913) through The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1921) to Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). Worse than that in Lawrence’s view, the industrial emasculates mankind: it destroys what is vital and organic in him. It is significant in Lawrence’s portrayal that the upper-class mill-owners are mechanical types like Gerald Crich and Sir Clifford Chatterley. Gerald “glistens” like a machine, the word “mechanical” is constantly used in reference to him and during his wrestling bout with the “organic” Rupert Birkin, Gerald’s power is described as “plastic,” “frictional” and “mechanical” and his appearance as “gleaming.”22 Conversely, Birkin, the schoolteacher, is throughout Women in Love portrayed as vulnerable flesh which yet, unlike Gerald Crich’s, has the power to grow. Birkin, however, is constantly threatened by the mechanical:

Of course, Lawrence’s was an extreme view of industry and commerce but not one to be totally separated from other writers: some of Lawrence’s ideas and images are anticipated in the work of William Morris and even carried on in the poetry of T. S. Eliot.

Lawrence’s admirer, E. M. Forster, also portrayed social types whose characteristics are directly related to questions of wealth, class and business. There is the “anger and telephones” type (successful businessman), the “ancestral wisdom” type (one spiritually remote from the concerns of business, commerce and technology), and the lower or lower middle-class semi-cultured type (one in danger of falling into poverty and therefore out of “society”). Howards End (1910) clearly displays these types but it has to be said that whatever the social satire and indeed moral condemnation involved in the portrayal of Henry Wilcox’s behaviour, there is tacit acceptance that “anger and telephones”—that is, successful business practice—pays the mortgage even though Wilcox’s advice to Leonard Bass concerning finance and employment is an absolute disaster. On these matters, as on the Empire, Forster’s portrayal had an ambiguity which some find teasing and others irritating.

Indeed, overall, many writers of different genres, different political persuasions and different social opinions were ambiguous about business in the pre-war period and of course many have been since. “A necessary evil” might suggest something of a general approach to those who wished to write, be published and succeed as an influence in an age where patronage was increasingly scarce and where market size was increasingly developing in the direction of mass audiences, this being made possible and ultimately inevitable as the media industry accelerated towards what was to become an explosion in the post-war years.

2.

THE POST-WAR ERA: THE BUSINESS OF DEATH AND ITS AFTERMATH

• If we are more than groping pain,
• If we are more than soldiers,
• Can we separate desire and death?
• And must these streets form scabs,
• The smiling fields grow sick
• While little shops hoard luxuries, and avarice
• Gleams in the commercial eye?

• —Emmanuell Litvinoff, Garrison Town

• Ah, were I courageous enough
• To shout stuff your pension!

• —Philip Larkin, Toads

What was the war fought for? For many British writers it was not fought to restore the status quo with its inequalities of class and wealth. But although “fairer shares for all” might encapsulate the mood and wishes of many ex-military, ex-combat, writers and indeed the general mood, it was far from clear which economic system would or should prevail. The land-slide victory for Labour in 1945 ushered in a government which, within the space of a few years, had taken into state ownership the Bank of England and the coal, gas, electricity, iron and steel and transport industries. By the early 1950s a planned, nationally run, integrated industrial policy had been set in place, giving clear advantages as far as the co-ordination of services and capital investment were conceived. There were undoubtedly improvements in working conditions and in facilities such as hospitals and schools for many, yet those in charge, those in managerial and executive positions, tended to be from the same background as before the war: upper-middle class, privately educated, Oxbridge. Attlee’s massive programme of nationalisation and the creation of a National Health Service were brought in by a Cabinet nearly all of whom had been to Eton, Harrow or similar schools. Eighty percent of the country’s industry remained in private ownership. Thus, whatever socialist policies had achieved in the reorganisation of industry, little had been done to transform the character and structure of British society.

Yet had not George Orwell in “My Country Right or Left,” while patriotically applauding “the military virtues” and lambasting the “boiled rabbits” of the Left, acknowledged that if necessary “the red militias” should be billeted at the Ritz and “the London gutters run with the blood” to bring in a New Britain after the war?24 There is a sense in which the term “business as usual” took on for many writers an ironic and even pessimistic meaning in the forties and fifties. For what had really changed after all? Unless you were lucky or very talented you were in hock to a commercial or state-capitalist organisation, working your life away to make the rich richer and the powerful even more so. Such sentiments may seem a travesty and, indeed, those without a job, despite the advent of the Welfare State, would have recognised them as such, yet particularly in the writing fraternity the sense that this war had not delivered economically and socially any more than the Great War, was to continue powerfully at least until the 1970s.

During the war, and for a while after, there appeared a series of books called English Story edited by Woodrow Wyatt. Many were “Services Editions” and must have been read by thousands of serving men and women. The Fourth Series includes “Fancy Free,” a story by James Hanley. Ostensibly it is a graphic account of a drunken pub-crawl told in the present tense by a newly disembarked sailor in search of alcohol and female company. Yet it is also about death and money and the connection between the two. For the sailor meets a man whose job it is to stand behind a grille all day and dole out wages to sailors’ wives. The job had reduced him to a scarcely human shadow: “that was his place in this city . . . being pressed down and fated to wear a grey suit forever.”25 In the convivial atmosphere of the pub with its liquor and buxom barmaids, the man seems a harbinger of coldness and death, “a fish-eyed feller” dressed in grey whose incongruous appearance “tickles [the sailor] to death.”26 And in a monologue worthy of a plebeian character in The Waste Land the sailor pictures the man as symbolic of the spiritual death of someone who is caged daily to count out money:

Shortly after, when he comes face to face with the vibrant barmaid Susie, “she looks hard at him” and he vanishes “just like he was shadow and not man.”28

War and Business

This positively Kafka-esque (or perhaps Dickensian) figure brings to mind a recurrent idea in twentieth-century literature to the effect that money and money-counting are not just degrading and dirty but also deathly. Such feelings were undoubtedly reinforced by both world wars, partly because they were industrial wars which acted inevitably as catalysts for the accelerating development of scientific and technological research and of commercial and state-capitalist expansion. The idea that war was a business was further reinforced by the increasing involvement of civilians not only in the war effort but also of course in the suffering of war, its death and destruction. The Blitz made London, the financial capital of the world, a front-line city and its areas of devastation are clearly anticipated in George Orwell’s novel Coming Up for Air (1939) and echoed in his last book 1984 (1949). Similarly, our greatest poet of the Second World War, Keith Douglas, who clearly saw war literally as diabolic and that to take part involved being in league with “the devil,” portrayed the commercial detritus that litters a battlefield:

• . . . by a day’s travelling you reach a new world
• the vegetation is of iron
• dead tanks, gun barrels split like celery
• the metal brambles have no flower or berries
• and there are all sorts of manure, you can imagine
• the dead themselves, their boots, clothes and possessions clinging to the ground, a man with no head
• has a packet of chocolate and a souvenir of Tripoli.29

As Peter Drucker has argued, the “devils” of hyperinflation and unemployment had haunted the Weimar Republic leading to Germany’s need for a homo magus or “witch doctor” to purge all ills by violence or war if necessary. (And were such ideas not already confirmed by the anthropological research of Malinowski among the Trobriand Islanders?) In a real sense, therefore, total war was big business “gone mad,” an idea later to be confirmed with lacerating humour in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961).

A British novel which also deals with these ideas and which deserves to be better known is Alex Comfort’s The Power House (1944). Set in Northern France before and during the German occupation, the early part of the novel is dominated by La Virginie, a huge steam-engine which operates looms. The machine is so large and powerful it attracts the admiration and loving commitment of those who operate and tend it—or perhaps one should say “her.” But La Virginie is also a murderess who crushes the unwary who work near her in her 120-foot embrace. At her heart is a “cauldron of moving parts.”

La Virginie is part of an industrialised complex that includes mills, works, a chemical plant, a plastics factory and a slaughterhouse. Each has its own machines, smells, noises, pollution and dangers. Apart from industrial accidents there are the appalling conditions in which many work. It is the time of socialist and communist rallies and of pitched street battles with fascists just before the collapse of the Popular Front. And, of course, the “phoney war” is soon to become very real with the German invasion. Against this background we follow the lives of the employees, their hopes and fears, jealousies, sexual and emotional problems, the squalors and satisfactions of their working days. A good example of the two-way tug of employment is the case of Uncle Pécquard who loves and takes pride in the work that destroys his health—anticipating perhaps our current ambiguous attitude to the decline in Britain’s coal-mining industry since 1980.

Comfort’s style—especially when he describes workers and their machines—owes something perhaps to Arnold Bennett and before him to Emile Zola, though he also writes with the eye of a surgeon. Uncle Pécquard, who works as a crane-operator, not only because of financial need at a time of growing unemployment, but because of intense pride in the job, is in his misfortune a symbol of the callousness of capitalist industry which will use, ruin and then discard. When found to be unfit for work he is given a small pension:

But something even bigger than these industrial concerns is taking place in his novel. For La Virginie, despite being for some positively voluptuous in her attractions, together with her fellow machines, comes to symbolise the plight of industrial man trapped in a system he cannot control that is in due course taken over by the Nazi army of military machine-men who reduce those captured further to slaves or even animals which, like those in the slaughterhouse, are dispensable once they have served their purpose. The pre-invasion scene was just a preparation for what was to follow. The novel, however, ends on a note of desperate fight, anarchy, subversion and passionate idealism:

It is perhaps significant that the novel was prefixed with a German quotation whose translation is “killing is a form of our continuing bereavement.”

The American Connection

There is a further reason why business became associated with death both before and during the Second World War: the American connection. American influences on British culture had grown steadily since their significant advent during and after the Great War. However, following the Great Crash in 1929, American writing that portrayed business increasingly pictured commerce as destructive of talent and humanity: equally hard on those who were creative and those who were vulnerable. Even before the Wall Street crash, Scott Fitzgerald had portrayed the death of the eponymous Gatsby as a product of his financial and social success while the fact that no-one attends his funeral and his empty mansion is surrounded by ashpits takes on a symbolic value. And again in The Last Tycoon (published posthumously in 1941), the glittering tinsel world of Hollywood is seen to mask a cruel world of money versus art in which the talented and romantic hero Monroe Stahr is crushed by the power of the profit motive. Deceit and death also dominate the plays of Arthur Miller which portray business, like All My Sons (1947) and Death of a Salesman (1949). The “little guy” is callously swept aside by forces which even the victim himself, in this case Willy Loman, fails to recognise because he sentimentally harks back to the brave America of opportunity he had been brought up on. As Biff tells his father, he has been bred in an atmosphere of self-deception:

Images of death, such as ashes, are recurrent in mid-century American portrayal of the business world. One of the most telling and ironic, perhaps, is Kenneth Fearing’s brilliant evocation of a funeral (eerily reminiscent of Gatsby’s heartless end, though here at least are some nameless pallbearers):

• DIRGE

• • 1-2-3 was the number he played but today the number came 3-2-1;
  • bought his Carbide at 30 and it went to 29; had the
  • favourite at Bowie but the track was slow—
• • O, executive type, would you like to drive a floating
  • power, knee-action, silk-upholstered six? Wed a
  • Hollywood star? Shoot the course in 58? Draw to the ace, king, jack?
  • O, fellow with a will who won’t take no, watch out
  • for three cigarettes on the same, single match;
  • O democratic voter born in August under Mars,
  • beware of liquidated rails—
• • Denouement to denouement, he took a personal
  • pride in the certain, certain way he lived his own, private life,
  • but nevertheless, they shut off his gas;
  • nevertheless, the bank foreclosed; nevertheless
  • the landlord called; nevertheless, the radio broke,
• • And twelve o’clock arrived just once too often,
  • just the same he wore one grey tweed suit, bought
  • one straw hat, drank one straight Scotch, walked
  • one short step, took one long look, drew one deep breath,
  • just one too many,
• • And wow he died as wow he lived,
  • going whop to the office and blooie home to sleep
  • and biff got married and bam had children and oof got fired,
  • zowie did he live and zowie did he die,
  • With who the hell are you at the corner of his casket,
  • and where the hell we going on the right hand
  • silver knob, and who the hell cares walking second
  • from the end with an American Beauty wreath
  • from why the hell not.
• • Very much missed by the circulation staff of the
  • New York Evening Post; deeply, deeply mourned by the B.M.T.,
• • Wham, Mr. Roosevelt; pow, Sears Roebuck; awk,
  • big dipper; bop, summer rain;
  • bong, Mr., bong, Mr., bong, Mr., bong.34

Even “jokey” writers like e. e. cummings make connections between money and death:

• • suppose
  • Life is an old man carrying flowers on his head.
• • young death sits in a café
  • smiling, a piece of money held between
  • his thumb and first finger35

Cummings also wrote memorably: “a salesman is an it that stinks to please.”36 Moreover, while he too links money and death, Ogden Nash in “Bankers Are Just Like Anybody Else, Except Richer” has the following:

• Most bankers dwell in marble halls,
• Which they get to dwell in
• because they encourage deposits and discourage withdrawals.37

In the trivialisation of banks, the suggestion of small-mindedness, Nash is following a well-established tradition of humour that had been seen also in the novels of Thornton Wilder:

“I’m closing up my account,” he said. “I’ll draw out everything except the interest.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’ll take out the money,” he repeated, raising his voice as though the cashier were deaf, “but I’ll leave the interest here.”

The cashier blinked a moment, then began playing with his coins. At last he said in a low voice: “I don’t think we’ll be able to keep your account open for so small a sum.”

“You don’t understand. I’m not leaving the interest here as an account. I don’t want it. Just turn it back into the bank. I don’t believe in interest.”

The cashier began casting worried glances to right and left. He paid out both sum and interest across the counter, muttering “. . . the bank . . . you must find some other way of disposing of the money.”

Brush took the five hundred dollars and pushed the rest back. He raised his voice sharply and could be heard all over the room saying, “I don’t believe in interest.”

The cashier hurried to the president and whispered in his ear. The president stood up in alarm, as though he had been told that a thief was entering the bank. He went to the door of the bank and stopped Brush as he was about to leave.

“Mr. Brush.”

“Yes.”

“Might I speak to you for a moment, Mr. Brush? In here.”

“Certainly,” said Brush, and followed him through a low door into the presidential pen.

Mr. Southwick had a great unhappy head rendered ridiculous by a constant adjustment of various spectacles and black ribbons. His professional dignity rested upon an enormous stomach supported in blue cloth and bound with a gold chain. They sat down and gazed at one another in considerable excitement.

“Mm . . . mm . . . you feel you must draw out your savings, Mr. Brush?” said the president softly, as though he were inquiring into a private and delicate matter.

“Yes, Mr. Southwick,” replied Brush, reading the name from a framed sign on the desk.

“. . . and you’re leaving your interest in the bank?”

“Yes.”

“What would you like us to do with it?”

“I have no right to say. The money isn’t mine. I didn’t earn it.”

“But your money, Mr. Brush,—I beg your pardon,—your money earned it.”

“I don’t believe that money has the right to earn money.”38

The Technology of Control Systems

But at some point the “funny” aspects of business and finance inherent perhaps in the Keynesian idea that the stock market was “a lottery” became subsumed in its deathly aspect. Perhaps it was the advent of British futuristic novels such as Brave New World and 1984 where state controls meant that any fluctuation or movement in currency would be intended. Certainly the technology of control systems permeates the picture of a future society in Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952) where that society is divided into three groups: the professional managers (qualified people who operate the system), the proletariat, the “Reeks and Wrecks” (those with redundant or non-existent skills who are forced into the reconstruction and reclamation corps), and thirdly the machines (computers and computerised techniques) which control the system. What is portrayed is a financial and commercial society which, however competitive, entails the cultural death of man. For social engineering has meant that a

Indeed, “waste and duplication” are eliminated through rationalisation and techniques of social control while future qualified workers are placed into professional and social slots by “grading machines.” The struggle of the emblematically named Paul Proteus, the arch-hero and “rebel observer,” is set against the remorseless development of civilisation “towards a techtopia where humanity is subordinated to its own mechanical means.”40 Significantly, it is clear that behind this novel lies the epoch-making early study of computer and cybernetic power and its social implications, The Human Use of Human Beings by Norbert Wiener, itself a precursor of the disturbing study by Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason.41

When we look back now in the early 2000s we can see that business and finance and their computerisation, let alone society, are no more predictable and subject to real controls than quasars and black holes would have been fully in accordance with the laws of physics as taught in the early 1950s. But it has to be said that the dystopian look at finance and business set an important literary and cultural trend to the effect that those who work within the system need to use it before it uses them.

In Britain by the mid-1950s all that has been discussed above was established as an influence on the rising generation: those who were likely to have been called up at the tail-end of the war or involved in National Service. University education was being widened socially and attracted on a much greater scale those who came from working- and lower middle-class backgrounds. They knew that business was unscrupulous and cut-throat: many came from families that had been personally involved in its effects. They knew too that money was dirty: “filthy lucre”; “where there’s muck there’s brass.” Indeed, there was and is a cultural and literary tradition that links money to excretion: it can be found in Swift, Dickens, William Morris, D. H. Lawrence and right through to Martin Amis. The new generation were aware too of the dangers of work reducing one to a kind of automaton. Yet in general they wanted what is now called “part of the action” and their wants and requirements were, in Britain, to a significant degree class-driven. Key texts to support these claims are John Braine’s Room at the Top (1957), Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954), Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), and the poetry of Philip Larkin. Other writers of that period would be associated: John Wain and Stan Barstow, for example, while Muriel Spark and Stevie Smith wrote in part from their experience of business and commerce, the former publishing The Girls of Slender Means in 1963. Some of these writers are also associated with the group which became known as the “Angry Young Men” following Walter Allen’s review of Lucky Jim in 1954.42 “Angry” for a while some of them may have been in the sense that their social and financial origins debarred their progress to “The Fame and The Girl and The Money” but “rebels” they were not, despite being called so in some contemporary studies. On the contrary, in general it could be said that they were knocking at the door of success, if not the Establishment, and asking to be let in.

Room at the Top contains the essence of what we are concerned with here. Indeed, it came to typify the genre as did the name of its hero, Joe Lampton. “Working-class boy makes good” is an insufficient cliché, however, to do justice to the fierceness and, yes, anger with which Joe sets about his quest. Behind the fierceness and anger is the question of class, but it is not as simple as that because the hero has a hard-eyed, calculating quality that informs his aspirations. His lust to succeed is directed by awareness, experience and education. It is interesting that Joe comes to talk in terms of grades and of bridging the gap between grades as if here too in Warley, an industrial northern town that is significantly superior socially to his home town of Dufton, the kind of mechanical system had developed which predetermines status. We are not as far as it might seem from Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano. Here in my opinion is the most important passage which encapsulates and anticipates what the novel is about:

And, of course, Joe Lampton does get the girl and the job and the money, sufficient no doubt eventually to buy an expensive car. He does it by courting (and in the end almost raping) Susan Brown, the daughter of his future boss, the major local industrialist who realises what has happened and with grudging admiration for Joe’s success and determination is prepared to admit him to the family and a good job with his company despite Joe’s lack of pedigree: “See her tomorrow and get it done with, I’ll not have it put off anymore.” When Joe inquires why he resisted the match earlier, old Brown says: “You should have seen to it that your parents had more brass.”44

It is “brass” that determines events in the novel and defines a kind of harsh morality. The discarded mistress, Alice Aisgill, already into early middle age, kills herself in a horrific intentional motor accident that leaves her crawling half-dead in her own blood. Yet the overall effect is less one of pity for her than the inevitability and in a sense rightness of her destruction. She was in the way. She had played around with too many men, we are told, and anyway as her former girl friend tells our hero: “. . . it was all for the best. She’d have ruined your whole life.”45 Thus Alice symbolises in her demise the ruthlessness of the business ethic, although I am not sure that John Braine would have seen it quite in this way. As with the other novelists of this genre there was a definite ambivalence concerning those who succeeded in making money. When Joe muses “honour, like freedom, is a luxury for those with independent incomes,”46 I suspect it is the author speaking, and yet of course much of the evidence which the novel itself provides would contradict this statement.

The Angry Young Men—a World of Absurdity

It is true that the early novels, poems and plays of the “angry young men” were “egotistical” in the Keatsian sense—that is, that their work re-created their own world. Like Jim Dixon, Kingsley Amis had experienced working as a young university lecturer on probation. That world through Amis’s uncanny gift for humorous invention seems to be transformed into something “rich and strange”: a world of absurdity, of at times “Alice in Wonderland” dimensions, though I can vouch for the fact the universities have indeed gone through absurdist periods, largely due to government interference! In Lucky Jim there are strange pre-echoes of the plot of Room at the Top in that when Jim is invited to the ridiculous weekend party at his Professor’s house he meets his odious, pretentious son Bertrand (pronounced in the French manner) whose beautiful girlfriend, Christine, Jim instantly falls in love with. As in the case of Jack Wales, Susan Brown’s former intended in John Braine’s novel, the anger felt by the protagonist is fired to white-hot proportions by the snobbish superiority of the upper-class, public school-educated rival for the lady’s hand—although other parts of her body attract most of his attention. Once again the ex-grammar schoolboy wins through, getting the girl and the job and an entrée into money and privilege. Jim’s career as a university lecturer ends farcically when he collapses drunkenly while giving a public lecture on “Merrie England” before an audience that includes the Principal and most of the College Council. But his dismissal is well compensated for when he is taken on as a well-paid private secretary to Christine’s wealthy uncle, Julius Gore-Urquart.

Arthur Seaton in Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is another central character with a job which in many ways he despises. Like his creator he had worked at a piece-work rate on the production line in a Nottingham cycle factory. Monday, for him, is “back to the treadmill.” Although Arthur is a joker with an eye for the girls and a passion for beer, a man full of vitality, he communicates memorably the deathly, mind-numbing repetitiveness of his work. Not inappropriately, D. H. Lawrence springs to mind when we read the following:

He works of course just for the money; his job means that half his life is lived vicariously. Can, could such a means of employment be socially, indeed humanly, justified? And yet, rebel that he seems to be in some ways, Arthur too wishes to join, to be engaged, in the very set-up that the novel satirises. In an interesting and revealing passage near the end of the novel while Arthur is fishing by the canal, he compares himself to the fish:

And then Arthur continues: “It meant death for the fish, but for a man it might not be so bad. Maybe it was only the beginning of something better in life.”48

Most revealing of all are Arthur’s final thoughts:

Yet he continues immediately: “Well, it’s a good life and a good world, all said and done, if you don’t weaken.”49That is the prime characteristic of the 1950s novels of this genre: defiant optimism despite the moaning (some would say whining) about the job, the money, the system. If they can, the heroes want to be inside and climb towards success and happiness.

Arthur’s foreman is called Robboe which suggests indeed that here too the author was aware that factory office employees were being treated like machines (robots) with the implication that in the future the identification between man and machine could become even closer. Even in the poetry of Philip Larkin there are such suggestions: that an employee becomes programmed to respond to just this or that situation in the workplace, recognise this face and ignore that. Sometimes the stimuli are mechanical or electronic as in the superb “Aubade”:

• . . . we can’t escape,
• Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
• Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
• In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
• Intricate rented world begins to rouse.50

Frequently the imprisonment in work—in Larkin’s case at a university—is inseparable from money and the need for it with which, as is the case of so many writers, especially of the post-war period, he had an ambiguous relationship. “Money” or its equivalent as an image or epithet is recurrent in this verse (from “Neurotics”):

• The mind, it’s said, is free:
• But not your minds. They, rusted swift, admit
• Only what will accuse or horrify,
• Like slot machines only bent pennies fit.51

In “Modesties” he spoke of “Thoughts that shuffle round like pence” and in “Arrival” of shovelling “faces like pennies down the back of mind.” And most potently of all, in the poem “Money” he speaks of the futility of our dependence on it:

• • . . . however you bank your screw, the money you save
  • Won’t in the end buy you more than a shave.
• • I listen to money singing. It’s like looking down
  • From long French windows at a provincial town,
  • The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
  • In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.52

The famous “Toads” is ostensibly about “work” but of course the need to do it—to be trapped and crushed by it—is inseparable from the need for money:

• • Ah, were I courageous enough
  • To shout stuff your pension!
  • But I know, all too well, that’s the stuff
  • That dreams are made on:
• • For something sufficiently toad-like
  • Squats in me, too.53

And in “Toads Revisited” work, and therefore money (a.k.a. “toad”), are appropriately equated with death:

• • . . . give me my in-tray
  • My loaf-haired secretary,
  • My shall-I-keep-the-call-in-Sir:
  • What else can I answer,
• • When the lights come on at four
  • At the end of another year?
  • Give me your arm, old toad;
  • Help me down Cemetery Road.54

3.

THE SIXTIES AND BEYOND

• • Money, it’s a crime.
  • Share it fairly, but don’t take a slice of my pie.
  • —Pink Floyd, “Money” (1973)
• • Money is the only thing we have in common
  • Dollar bills, pound notes, they’re all suicide notes.
  • —Martin Amis, Money (1984)

The 1960s has been called “the Swinging Decade”: one in which “having fun” now and not considering the morrow was fashionable and one which even spawned quasi-oriental philosophies that were anti-work, anti-business and anti-profit. The influence of hippie-dom harked back to the beatniks of the fifties. Yet some of those who appeared most in support of such a life-style ended up becoming—to use a later term—“seriously rich.”

During the late 1960s money and its application in society became quite suddenly trendy. The Beatles—who helped to power the financial success of Carnaby Street and The King’s Road—Mary Quant, Terence Conran and many others effectively focused an explosion of talent and creativity that were unmistakably marketable. And yet the picture we get of business, finance and money itself in the writing of the 1970s and indeed into the succeeding decades is one of mockery and guilt with increasingly a note of hysteria and death—just as if the legacy of the Second World War, far from abating, intensified. Moreover, when one thinks of the accelerating impact of new technology on industry and the money markets, all this is hardly surprising.

The topic of money was certainly “in the air” by 1972—or perhaps I should say “on the air” because of the phenomenal success of the film version of Cabaret and its hit song “Money, Money, Money.” The musical had a strange history which takes us back to the 1930s, the period at which this essay begins, for although the musical was based on John van Druten’s play I Am a Camera which had also been made into a successful film in 1955, its real genesis was Christopher Isherwood’s semi-autobiographical novel Goodbye to Berlin (1939).

The Role of Money: The “Mad” Christie Malry

The role of money in society and the ethics of the situation have always interested writers, of course, but by the early 1970s we are firmly in the run-up to massive computerisation and globalisation of money systems—a process which still continues and whose effects can alarm and surprise even seasoned observers. In 1973 appeared an extraordinary novel called Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry by B. S. Johnson. There is something rather “mad” about the work, but then in the era of Monty Python, which targeted institutions like the BBC, universities, government departments and banks, such a quality seems singularly appropriate—the novel even has the characteristic of referring to itself as a novel just as in Monty Python you get characters saying: “What a way to end a sketch!” This novel moves us firmly into the era 1970-90, that was to produce such revealing and often absurd—in the literary sense—pictures of the commercial world as David Hare’s Plenty, Martin Amis’s Money and Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money, of which works more discussion later.

The novel begins: “Christie Malry was a simple person. It did not take him long to realise that he had not been born into money,” and soon continues: “He therefore decided that he should become a bank employee. I did tell you Christie was a simple person.”55 While working at the bank Christie finds he is increasingly irritated by colleagues whose acts of wrong towards him as he sees them need, in his opinion, recompense. During his evenings Christie studies Accountancy and becomes aware of the system of Double-Entry which leads to his “Great Idea”: that is that he should draw up a double-entry account with “Them”: other people in the world. Every offence he considers he has received is shown as a debit on his account with “Them” which duly receives a recompense to be credited to the other column of the account. For example, the bank’s General Manager is unpleasant and £1.00 is debited, but a small kindness from a female colleague results in 28p credit. Soon Christie is getting his recompense by scratching the façade of an Edwardian office-block or leaving his mother’s funeral bill unpaid.

Much of the early part of this novel is farcical or absurd—but there is an interesting undertone of serious disturbance suggesting desperation that the mad world of society (and its transactions) is not recognised for what it is. These matters are focused by the author through his device of Christie Malry’s double-entry. For example, when leaving his mother’s funeral the clergyman who has officiated at the service hands him a leaflet. Christie’s reaction is to write the following letter to the Borough of Hammersmith Weights and Measures Department:

Dear Sirs:
re St. Jude’s Church.

You will note that the organisation publishing the enclosed leaflet claims to have the answer to all problems, personal, political and international?

I would be grateful if you would check upon the factual accuracy of this claim and, if you find it to be in any way false or exaggerated, I trust you will institute proceedings under the relevant section of the Trade Descriptions Act.

Yours sincerely,

Christie Malry.56

The action of the clergyman and the letter are recorded in Christie’s account with “Them” and appear in the significantly titled “The First Reckoning.”

After leaving the bank Christie works for Tapper’s, an organisation that “had been manufacturing sweets and cakes for a mere eighty-three years,” where he becomes an invoice clerk. We are close to the world of Reginald Perrin and “Sunshine Desserts,” and indeed the entire workings, organisation and set-up of Tapper’s sweet-factory is comically and satirically portrayed through the device of Christie’s double-entry. This passage indicates, in more than one sense, the flavour of this part of the novel:

Tiny’s enthusiasm and Christie’s sharp eye for potential double-entry targets are put into perspective when employees are given bags of “misshapes of their own” and the Sector Head cries, “I wouldn’t eat this firm’s muck if you paid me!” The situation produces some superb throw-away lines as when one colleague complains that his girlfriend who works in the Wages Section will not reveal the salary of the Head of the Typing Pool. “Would you credit it?” he says. “I’d have to think about it,” replies Christie.58

The novel moves remorselessly towards terrorism and a kind of justification for it that significantly is underpinned by criticism of a heartless money-system of profit and loss—as Christie sees it. As part of his recompense for injustices received he blows up the local Tax Office, killing several people. Here is a bit of his “justification”:

In the Third Reckoning the Credit or Recompense column contains the sum of £110.10 for the Tax Office bombing “calculated at the rate of £1.30” for each body “being an allowance of the commercial value of the chemicals contained therein: plus damage to property etc.” By the time we reach the Fourth Reckoning Christie has succeeded in poisoning 20,479 “innocent West Londoners” similarly charged for at the same rate and producing a credit of £26,622.70. We may be reminded of N. F. Simpson’s One Way Pendulum (1959) but the effect of the humour here is macabre and by the Final Reckoning Christie has died, his body riddled with cancer. Shortly after the novel’s publication the author committed suicide.

The Attack on Thatcherism

Mrs. Thatcher came to power in 1979 and, rightly or wrongly, that era is still seen by many as one in which it became socially acceptable to be not only vulgarly rich but to laud one’s wealth over others less fortunate. Harry Enfield’s character, Loadsamoney, became not just an amusing joke: he could be seen as an exaggeration of the reality. In any case, the atmosphere of the period with its working-class jobbers sporting garish braces and driving Porsches was to many preferable to the ethos associated with the “Winter of Discontent.” The stereotyped images created by the media gathered strength during the 1980s and of course increasingly dominate today with a power which alarms some observers. Yet this heady brew of computer-generated image and profit that was to make tycoons in the multi-media business even more fabulously rich—while leaving others penniless, bankrupt and hopelessly in debt—this whole approach to life was significantly and in a sense prophetically attacked on the eve of Thatcherism in David Hare’s major play Plenty (1978), which was subsequently made into a film.

The key figure in Plenty is Susan Traherne, one of the David Hare heroines the author admires “but whom the audience dislikes.”60 She is an idealistic young woman who has never been able to free herself emotionally—perhaps I should say psychologically—from her wartime activities as an agent operating in occupied France. She has no admiration or respect for the accepted social mores of post-war Britain and in particular for the English “Establishment.” She is fiercely devoted to her primitive, atavistic ideas of what is right and what is wrong: ideas which served her well during her time as an agent. Consequently, despite periods in which she tries with success to live an appropriate life with her diplomat husband, the experience takes her ever closer to mental breakdown.

The play opens with a scene set in a Knightsbridge flat at Easter 1962. Susan is leaving her husband Raymond Brock and has, unknown to him, rented the flat to Alice, a hippie bohemian who helps unmarried mothers. Raymond, the former diplomat turned City insurance broker, is lying asleep naked and “covered in dried blood.” How all this has come about is revealed scene by scene as we see a series of flashbacks commencing in occupied France in November 1943 and taking us right up again to Easter 1962.

The nub of the play is the borderline between right and wrong for Susan. She will not compromise. Is this moral behaviour on her part? Or self-indulgence as her husband claims? When she is pressed into a corner to face the consequences of her actions she becomes violent. For example, she decides she wants a child but wants it by a man who is nothing to her. When after eighteen months of failing to cause a pregnancy, Mick, the would-be father, remonstrates with Susan, saying that he wants to humanise the relationship, that he feels dirty and used, she fires a revolver at him. Aware that she has damaged her husband’s career as a diplomat she goes to the senior staffing officer of the Diplomatic Corps to plead for his promotion and, when she gets negative reactions, threatens to kill herself if he is not promoted in six days. Susan is clearly an “impossible” person—and yet we still have the nagging feeling she might be right.

This is what brings us to money and the concept of “selling out.” Lurking behind Susan’s actions are deeply established ideas of the sanctity of life and of natural morality, perhaps expressed in Christianity as “Man doth not live by bread alone but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” We sense that somehow—however bizarre this idea might be—this “mad” woman Susan has some channel that links her with divine good—whatever her behaviour might suggest to the contrary.

As the play progresses we realise that Susan is fundamentally and, in various senses, dangerously opposed to what British society represents economically and politically because she sees it as a hypocritical charade—even the Britain of Attlee’s post-war government. The “invoices go back and forth, import, export . . .”61 When Alice asks Raymond Brock whether he has lots of money he replies: “I find it moderately easy to acquire. I seem to have a sort of mathematical gift. The stock exchange. Money sticks to my fingers I find. I triple my income. What can I do?”62 At the end of this scene, after an argument about the insulting and dismissive way Susan refers to Raymond’s boss Leonard Darwin in front of Alice (“he would not trust him to stick his prick into a bucket of lard”), Raymond says it is time he was “pushing off home.”63 After another exchange in which Susan accuses Raymond of using such expressions which do not “belong,” he admits that the diplomatic world is dull, stuffy and dead but adds that it is the only world he has. When he urges Susan to visit him in Brussels she uses the excuse of her hated job to prevent her coming: “. . . the shipping office is very important to me. I do find it fulfilling. And I just couldn’t let Mr. Medlicott down.” This is a lie, but in a strange way the comment is genuine for Susan knows she is not good for Raymond. Yet we feel they are doomed to remain together in a future which offers, in Alice’s ironic words, “peace and plenty.”64

The remainder of the play is in a sense concerned with Susan divesting herself of worldly goods. She compares the “glittering lies” she told as an undercover agent in France with her present job of “lying for a living,” producing what her “masters call good copy” to sell “some rotten shoe.” When she asks Alice what the point of her existence is she is told that she has “sold out.”65 His diplomatic career ruined, Brock also sells out, getting an insurance job in the City, ruefully reflecting “we can cope in a smaller sort of flat. Especially now we don’t have to entertain . . . I can’t help feeling it will be better, I’m sure. Too much money. I think that’s what went wrong. Something about it corrupts the will to live. Too many years spent sploshing around.”66 It should not be forgotten that “selling out” in the sense in which it is used in this play does not only mean offering yourself as a purchasable package in a capitalist market but also “giving up,” retreating from ideals. Thus Brock’s “selling out” is of a different and minor order compared to what Susan, in her own mind, risks. For Susan “selling out” would become death. She gives £200.00 to one of Alice’s protégées to pay for an abortion, remarking “Don’t thank us. We’re rotten with cash,” and subsequently “giving” Brock’s flat to Alice so that she can continue her work for unmarried mothers. The last we hear of Susan is that she has dropped out of the society she hates, is on drugs and has been, albeit briefly, reunited with her Second World War mentor and idol code-named Lazar—a man who, ironically, ashamedly admits to giving in (selling out): “I gave in. Always. All along the line. Suburb. Wife. Hell. I work in a corporate bureaucracy.”67 The last we hear of Raymond Brock is that he had had to fight to get his house back from Alice.

I consider this play to be a very significant text on the question of the representation of capitalist corporate society because it portrays in human terms the effects on people and their ideals, especially as they appeared immediately before the Thatcher era, the Big Bang and the Alice in Wonderland world of Soros and Leeson that the high-tech globalisation of the money-markets was to create. It is also notable that the one political event in the play that is closely examined—the Suez Crisis—reveals that Eden’s government and the Foreign Office “sold out” on the question of honour, thus betraying the ideals of their staff: “the entire war is a fraud cooked up by the British as an excuse for seizing the canal.” For Susan Traherne the linked financial and political systems are irredeemably corrupt and she refers to the situation wistfully as the “death-rattle of the ruling class.”68

The “Money-Conspiracy”

The 1980s inevitably brought a growing sense of money and business being innately corrupt, dirty and “mad” and nowhere in contemporary creative writing was this clearer than in Martin Amis’s novel Money (1984). This astonishing, rambling picaresque work has as its central theme the fact that the world is increasingly governed by the “money-conspiracy.” In a video conversation with Ian McEwan recorded soon after the publication of Money, Martin Amis speaks at length on the historic sense of money as sordid, dirty and “smelly” and in doing so echoes almost word for word the sentiments of John Self, the anti-hero in his financially eponymous novel.69 The sentiments are all the more powerful in that they are to a large extent guilt-ridden for both character and author. Money, with its associations of drugs, fast-food, sex, instant-access credit, computers, faxes, fruit machines, and so on, is seen as the key to unlocking an ever-powerful force of addiction (chemical, mechanical, electronic) that enslaves and debases the world in mindless self-indulgence. Money is the key to this power but is also controlled by it: it is a cyclical self-reproducing process in which “advanced” financial societies are trapped.

Here are two quotations from the novel, written incidentally as a kind of confessional diatribe.

The quotations come from near the end of the novel when John Self discovers he has been the victim of a financial “sting” that could only be possible in the unreal fantasy world that the money-markets have become. It is interesting to note that the subject matter and imagery in the latter passage echo or anticipate the work of William Gibson and in particular his Neuromancer (1984), while of course the electronic world portrayed looks forward to such cinema thrillers as The Net.

The novel, delivered in the first person in a kind of rambling, yet strangely incisive, tirade littered with expletives, portrays the life of John Self, who like his creator, is taking stock of life and self at the halfway point: age thirty-five. His lifestyle which receives his constant contempt but from which he cannot break free is one of the consumption of addictive additives:

The humour, as exhibited here, can be extremely funny but it is always tinged with the sick and the black, while the reversals and exaggerations give the visions of London and New York a quality that reminds me of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. The junk world portrayed symbolises, and is the product of, the often mentioned “money-conspiracy”: “If time is money, then fast food saves both.” Moreover, John Self’s “job,” making pornographic films, takes him to the centre of a pointless existence of futile self-gratification. Even when he laughs at himself the laughter contains horror and self-contempt. Here he is suddenly realising who is pictured in a home-made pornographic video:

John Self had just performed this act with one of his leading actresses (Butch Beausoleil) only to find that she had secretly filmed it. The horror of what he sees is all the greater since it is characteristic of the “junk” lifestyle he cannot resist. When he subsequently does form a stable relationship based on affection with Martina Twain he finds himself unable to perform sexually and betrays her with an old flame who has maliciously arranged for them to be caught in flagrante delicto.

One could argue that linking these moral obscenities with money—let alone business—is tendentious and contrived. But Amis is clearly convinced by his vision of what is wrong with the world—the more so perhaps because he is caught up in the “conspiracy.” Businesses that deserve to succeed fail and vice versa, the whole affair seen as a global lottery in which winners and losers are chosen at random. John Self’s uncle Norman, with whom he lived from seven to fifteen, tried “to make it big” during those years in America, “a land with success in its ozone, a new world for the go-getters and new-broomers, a land where fortune grins and makes the triple-ring sign . . . Yeah. Or not?” In practice, despite hard work and enterprise, he repeatedly failed and ultimately has to return penniless to Britain. Such stories of cruel market forces were not new to fiction, of course, as we have noticed with regard to The Great Gatsby and Death of a Salesman, but by the 1980s the literal inhumanity which controlled those forces (that is, that they derived from non-human powers linked to technology on a global scale) was taking the picture, the scene, into a new and frightening dimension. John Self also talks about the unemployed, the no-hopers:

And of course, to use a monetary metaphor, the other side of the coin is the wealth of those who randomly succeed in the lottery that the business and financial world has become:

John Self is in fact financially ruined by a “scam” which itself symbolises the operation of the global “money-conspiracy.” The backers for his film—incidentally also called Money—are former actors. All the expenses he claims, all the documents he signs, all the cheques he endorses which he thinks are paid for out of the financial resources provided by his backers are in fact creating a huge debt that is down to him to repay. As Martin Amis himself (who appears as a character in this novel!) explains to John Self:

The novel is subtitled A Suicide Note. The suicide of John Self never materialises despite a spirited—if that is the word—attempt near the end. But Martin Amis, the author rather than the character, suggests in a short Preface that the Note is addressed to us, to the readers, to ourselves, and that we are part and parcel of the suicide, that in a sense it is our suicide too. There is indeed a quirky neo-romanticism approaching sentimentality in Amis’s final portrayal of John Self—a kind of down-market junk-fed Candide—representing by his name all of us, un homme moyen sensuel, who instead of cultivating his garden as a means of survival, just continues to be his imperfect self, living from day to day but on a much smaller scale than before. Indeed, he is mistaken for a beggar while waiting for his new girlfriend, Georgina. Seeing the tenpence piece lying in his cap he tells us:

The Obscenity of “Serious Money”

The outrageous crudity, the sheer obscenity, that jaundiced observers, particularly those of the “Old Left,” considered they saw in Thatcherite, monetarist Britain received massive exposure in the media and in creative writing during the late 1980s and nowhere was this more clearly expressed than in Serious Money, Caryl Churchill’s play, first performed at the Royal Court Theatre in 1987. Indeed, such is the fidelity with which the crude and the obscene are reproduced, that “the parody becomes the thing parodied.”78

The play is set in the City following “The Big Bang”: “The financial world won’t be the same again because the traders are coming down the fast lane.”79 “White Knights” and corporate raiders have invaded the square mile. A cartel is plotting a hostile take-over of an unsuspecting, old-fashioned company called Albion with the help of the new breed of arbitrageurs and “oiks”: those who use junk bonds and “greenmail.” But things go wrong when Jake Todd, a commercial paper dealer, is shot dead and the Department of Trade and Industry begins to investigate.

What is portrayed is a heartless, ruthless world of industrial espionage, “dirty tricks” and greed of unparalleled vulgarity, yet written in the kind of verse which T. S. Eliot had successfully adapted for the stage in such plays as The Cocktail Party and The Confidential Clerk. Here Corman, a corporate raider, and Brown, an industrial spy, are planning their take-over of Albion:

• CORMAN

• The analysts reports are satisfactory,
• Predicting high industrial synergy.
• I’ll have to close the chocolate biscuit factory.
• The management lacks drive and energy.
• Tell me what you learnt about the company.

• BROWN

• I spent a month posing as a secretary.
• The working atmosphere is very pleasant.
• A shock to the chairman would be salutary,
• His presence at his desk is just symbolic,
• He disappears to fish and shoot pheasant. . . .

• CORMAN

• Excellent, they’ll put up no resistance.
• I’ll sack them all, put in new staff, maybe promote a few of their assistants.
• Too late for them to make the company over,
• Because I am going to take the company over.
• Now to the larger and still more inviting
• Albion Products. Fuck the analysts,
• What do they know? It’s much more exciting.
• Is their chairman gaga too and their managing director always pissed?

• SMITH

• No, he’s sober and quite competent.
• Duckett runs a rather happy ship . . .
• . . . they all seem quite efficient.
• Employees feel considerable loyalty.
• The factory has been visited by royalty.

• CORMAN

• Albion is obviously deficient
• In management. Old-fashioned and paternal.
• These figures stink. I can make it earn a lot
• more for its shareholders, who are
• The owners after all. It will be far
• Better run, streamlined, rationalised,
• When it forms part of Corman Enterprise.
• (And anyway I want it.)
• Right. Both targets will be hit.
• Now summon my war cabinet.80

The crudeness of the language illustrated above symbolises of course the crudeness in moral and perhaps aesthetic terms of the world portrayed. And the greed I mentioned is not just simple greed for wealth and nice possessions: it is also greed for success upon success in the world of money. Meanwhile the unsuspecting Duckett, chairman of Albion, one of the “old school,” is thinking of turning profit into new possessions:

• DUCKETT

• I’m Duckett. I enjoy the Financial Times.
• It’s fun reading about other people’s crimes.
• My company Albion’s price is looking perky.
• I think I’ll buy that villa in the south of Turkey.81

However, the obscenity of the language and the crudeness of the rhythm reach their apotheosis in the “Futures Song” sung from the floor of L.I.F.F.E.82 It finishes:

• • Money-making money-making money-making money-making
  • money-making money-making money-making money-making caper
  • Do the fucking business do the fucking business do the fucking business
  • And bang it down on paper
• • So L.I.F.F.E. is the life for me and I’ll burn out when I’m dead
  • And this fair exchange is like a rifle range what’s the price of flying lead?
  • When you soil your jeans on soya beans shove some cocoa up your head
  • You can never hide if your spread’s too wide, you’ll just fuck yourself instead.83

T. S. Eliot’s theatrical career began in fact with two “aristophanic fragments” called Sweeney Agonistes which portray a reduced crude world of sex and violence and, above all, death. In my opinion Caryl Churchill has had considerable success in using and updating Eliot’s techniques in creating the moral and cultural vacuum that she sees the City to be.

A sense of theatrical and cultural history is also shown in Caryl Churchill’s use of a scene from the late-seventeenth-century playwright Thomas Shadwell—considered something of a joke by his contemporaries for his vulgarity. Such a speech sets the tone of what is to follow:

HACKWELL

Look thee, brother, if it be to a good end and that we ourselves have no share in the vanity of wicked diversion thereof by beholding of it but only use it whereby we may turn the penny, always considered that it is like to take and the said Shares will sell well; and then we shall not care.84

London, it seems Caryl Churchill is saying, has returned to the vulgarities and obscenities of the past though now they are systematised and amplified in the new technologies of globalisation. As Zac, a banker, puts it:

• Sure this is a dangerous system and it could crash any minute and I sometimes wake up in the bed
• And think is Armageddon Aids, nuclear war or a crash, and how will I end up dead?
• (But that’s just before breakfast.)
• What really matters is the massive sums of money being passed round the world, and trying to appreciate their size can drive you mental.
• There haven’t been a million days since Christ died.
• So think a billion, that’s a thousand million, and have you even tried
• To think a trillion? Think a trillion dollars a day,
• And that’s the gross national product of the USA. . . .
• Naturally there’s a whole lot of greed and
• That’s no problem because money buys freedom . . .
• . . . the Conservatives romped home with a landslide victory for five more glorious years.

• (Which was handy though not essential because it would take far more than that for Labour to stop us.)85

Thus the play ends with an uncanny anticipation of Blairite economic policy—at least I think that is what Caryl Churchill would say. And as for the murder of Jake? It appears that the government probably used MI5 or the CIA to silence his awkward questions and anyway no-one really cares as long as the scam of international finance continues. A scapegoat (Greville Todd) is sent to prison “to show the government was serious” and then things carry on as before. It all illustrates what could be taken as the play’s subtitle: “Do others before they can do you.”86

4.

FINAL THOUGHTS

“Here we go. Here we go. Here we go.”

As the century ended it was apparent that life in “the advanced world” had become an unprecedented moral quagmire. To use a word such as “unprecedented” may seem excessive—after all the idea that the “love of money is the root of all evil” dates back to the origin of currency in the third millennium bc87 But it is now money—and its use in business and in leisure as deployed in a world dominated by computers—that has created the situation which horrifies and, disturbingly, excites the imagination of so many gifted contemporary writers. Whether you read Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1988), Gordon Burn’s Alma Cogan (1989), Will Self’s My Idea of Fun (1993), Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) or Julie Birchall’s Ambition (1990), you find repeated the characteristic ingredients of a yuppiedom whose “meaningless” machine-ridden existence is spiced-up by artificial—often drug-induced—excitement of the most powerful and dangerous residual emotions: violence, greed, despair, death-wish, megalomania, hollow laughter, distortion of reality, and total abandonment of any moral sense. The brooding feel of death and the relentless domination of technology which began to appear in the portrayal of business before the Second World War accelerated, as we have seen, during the 1970s and 1980s in the work of, among others, B. S. Johnson and Martin Amis. This genre, if we can call it that, would also include the work of lesser literary figures like James Herbert and Jeffrey Archer: writers who inevitably see themselves as much businessmen as authors, part of the process, producers of a potential package of book, film, video and even, perhaps, tee-shirt. However, the trend in writing I have discussed, in which in a sense business has been both subject and villain, seems to be approaching an apotheosis. Let us hope it is that and not an apocalypse.

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[1. ] “He Do the Police in Different Voices.” Eliot was referring here to Sloppy’s skill as a newspaper reader in Our Mutual Friend and also to Dickens’s experimental technique in anecdotal reportage, for Eliot like the great novelist was giving a panoramic view of London and its society. See T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. V. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), 23. See also Erik Svarny, “The Men of 1914”: T. S. Eliot and Early Modernism (Milton Keynes and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1988), 188.

[2. ] John Strachey’s The Coming Struggle for Power (1932) took such a view and is considered “the most influential exercise in Marxism produced by the English Left.” See also Strachey’s “The Strangled Cry,” Encounter XV (November 1960), and Richard Crossman, ed., The God that Failed: Six Studies in Communism (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1950), especially Crossman’s Introduction. Further information on Strachey and his influence is given in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, eds., The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), 247n.53.

[3. ] W. H. Auden, Selected Poems, ed. E. Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), 58.

[4. ] Stephen Spender, Collected Poems, 1928-1953 (London: Faber and Faber, 1955), 56-57.

[5. ]John Betjeman’s Collected Poems, comp. Lord Birkenhead (London: John Murray, 1959), 21-23.

[6. ] Entry for 14 June 1940 in Orwell and Angus, op. cit., vol. 2, 395-96. Cf. George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962), 21.

[7. ] In “Notes on Nationalism” (1945): “A few writers . . . such as Peter Drucker, foretold an agreement between Germany and Russia.” Orwell and Angus, op. cit., vol. iii, 413n.

[8. ] See Virginia Woolf, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (London: Hogarth Press, 1924), 9-23.

[9. ] Ibid.

[10. ] Ibid.

[11. ] Ibid.

[12. ] W. Y. Tindall, Forces in Modern British Literature, 1885-1956 (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), 57.

[13. ] In Early Victorian Novelists (1934; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1948), 22. Leavis believed his “great tradition” would exclude Wells and that there was an “elementary distinction” to be made between those within the tradition and a writer such as Wells.

[14. ] H. G. Wells, Tono-Bungay (1909; London: Odhams Press, n.d.), 57.

[15. ] Ibid.

[16. ] Ibid., 116.

[17. ] See Arnold Bennett, The Journals, ed. F. Swinnerton (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1954), Introduction, 5. See also M. Seymour-Smith, Guide to Modern World Literature (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1973), 201.

[18. ] Arnold Bennett, Anna of the Five Towns (1902; Bath: Chivers Press, 1991), 113.

[19. ] Ibid., 118.

[20. ] John Galsworthy, Loyalties, with Two Other Plays (London: Pan Books, 1953), 157.

[21. ] Seymour-Smith, op. cit., 200.

[22. ] D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (London: Ace Books, 1960), 212-16.

[23. ] Ibid., 145.

[24. ] Orwell and Angus, op. cit., vol. 1, 591-92.

[25. ] James Hanley, “Fancy Free,” in English Story: Fourth Series, ed. Woodrow Wyatt (London: Collins, Services Edition, 1945), 12.

[26. ] Ibid., 12-14.

[27. ] Ibid., 15-17.

[28. ] Ibid., 17.

[29. ] “Cairo Jag,” in I Burn for England: Anthology of the Poetry of World War II, selected and introduced by Charles Hamblett (London: Leslie Frewin, 1966), 91.

[30. ] Alex Comfort, The Power House (London: Readers Union, George Routledge & Sons, 1945), 8.

[31. ] Ibid., 76.

[32. ] Ibid., 318-19.

[33. ] Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman, act II (London: Pocket Book Edition, Cresset Press, 1952), 116-17.

[34. ]The Penguin Book of Sick Verse, ed. George MacBeth (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963), 323-24.

[35. ] e. e. cummings, selected poems, 1923-1958 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965), 6.

[36. ] Ibid., 53.

[37. ] In the original text the word is “withdralls”; The Pocket Book of Ogden Nash, with an Introduction by Louis Untermeyer (New York: Pocket Books, 1955), 163.

[38. ] From Thornton Wilder’s Heaven’s My Destination (1935); quoted in G. C. Thornley, ed., Further Practice in English (London: Longman, 1970), 12-13.

[39. ] Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano (London: Flamingo Books, 1992), 45.

[40. ] See David Porush, The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), 90-92.

[41. ] Vonnegut, op. cit., 22. The books by Wiener and Weizenbaum date from 1950 and 1976 respectively.

[42. ]New Statesman and Nation, vol. 47, 30 January 1954; reprinted in Gene Feldman and Max Gartenberg, eds., Protest (London: Quartet Books, 1973), 299-300.

[43. ] John Braine, Room at the Top (London: Methuen, 1983), 29-31.

[44. ] Ibid., 228.

[45. ] Ibid., 256.

[46. ] Ibid., 233.

[47. ] Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (London: Pan Books, 1960), 31.

[48. ] Ibid., 189.

[49. ] Ibid., 191.

[50. ] Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, edited with an introduction by Anthony Thwaite (London and Boston: Marvell Press and Faber and Faber, 1988), 209.

[51. ] Ibid., 22.

[52. ] Ibid., 198.

[53. ] Ibid., 89.

[54. ] Ibid., 148.

[55. ] B. S. Johnson, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), 11.

[56. ] Ibid., 34-35.

[57. ] Ibid., 65.

[58. ] Ibid., 67-70.

[59. ] Ibid., 115-16.

[60. ] David Hare, Plenty (London: Faber and Faber, 1978), 87, “A Note on Performance by the Author.”

[61. ] Ibid., 30.

[62. ] Ibid., 33.

[63. ] Ibid., 35-36.

[64. ] Ibid., 37-38.

[65. ] Ibid., 44.

[66. ] Ibid., 74.

[67. ] Ibid., 83.

[68. ] Ibid., 51.

[69. ] The video is from the series Writers in Conversation and was produced for the Anthony Roland Collection of Films on Art by the ICA. In the interview Amis covers, among other topics, “Money in literature, folklore and history” and “Money in the twentieth century.” Interestingly, another topic is the “Unspoken threat of annihilation informing contemporary thought.”

[70. ] Martin Amis, Money (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985), 389.

[71. ] Ibid., 350-51.

[72. ] Ibid., 265.

[73. ] Ibid., 280.

[74. ] Ibid., 153.

[75. ] Ibid., 153-54.

[76. ] Ibid., 378.

[77. ] Ibid., 394.

[78. ] Stephen Spender on Eliot’s imitation of jazz lyrics in “Sweeney Agonistes,” quoted in V. de S. Pinto, Crisis in English Poetry, 1880-1940 (London: Hutchinson, 1972), 157.

[79. ] Caryl Churchill, Serious Money (London: Methuen, 1987), 25.

[80. ] Ibid., 37-38.

[81. ] Ibid., 39.

[82. ] London International Financial Futures Exchange.

[83. ] Churchill, Serious Money, 62.

[84. ] Ibid., 13.

[85. ] Ibid., 109.

[86. ] Ibid., 108.

[87. ] See Jonathan Williams, ed., Money: A History (London: British Museum Press, 1997), 16.