LIDIA VIANU

Alan Brownjohn and the Desperado Age

FICTION

THE BLANK NOVELIST: TO CLEAR THE RIVER  

The first novel Alan Brownjohn wrote was To Clear the River (1964). It is a novel about adolescence (written for young adolescents and published as such) and a first secret love, but, all along, highly important for an East-European reader, the plot evolves against the background of a left-wing demonstration, with slogans, pamphlets and speeches. The idea of indoctrination could send shivers up the spine of the inhabitant of an ex-communist state, especially as the novelist mentions youths who go marching willingly, and enjoy to the full the cosy party for comrades at the end of the march (although Brownjohn has repeatedly stressed he never intended to invoke the spirit of communism).

The novel is unpretentious as narrative, no hybridization of literary genres, no lyrical outbursts, no Desperado attempts at shocking the reader in every possible way. It is a traditional, uncomplicated story, with clear traces of the stream of consciousness in the way the characters are analyzed from the inside, even though everything is narrated in the third person, with rather few incidents taking place, which should set us thinking, anyway.

In poetry, Alan Brownjohn is an obvious Desperado, because his blank poems suggest emotion by all kinds of tricks discovered by the poet on his own. This story about very little to start with, maybe about the first experience of love, which leaves us before it has had any time to unfurl, is blank, too. As Virginia Woolf wrote at the beginning of the 20^th century, the modern novel can do without chronology, coherent characters, plot or love interest. The novel suffered a drastic change at the hands of James Joyce, but what Brownjohn writes is in fact a revolt against those who had already risen against the changes imposed by the stream of-consciousness.

Tony Finley and Christine Wait are teenagers, still pupils, part of working, not well off families. They have the complexes and shyness that are typical of their age, and which Brownjohn notices with subtlety and renders ruthlessly, while his understanding prompts a certain tenderness, too. The two meet at a party for the young ‘reds’ of the district. Brownjohn says nothing about their political convictions. The demonstration, the preliminaries of the party, are mere pretexts to spend time with other youths. Old age is for these teenagers another planet, something that could never happen to them. They have typically teenage resentments against their parents, and are positive ageing will never happen to them too, and anyway they will never die.

The nuclear disarmament march blends with the bus drivers’ strike (Tony’s father is one of the drivers), everything takes place in 1962, and the plot does not take longer than a few months. As far as communism is concerned, here are Brownjohn’s own words again: ‘Almost everyone on the Nuclear Disarmament marches were rejecting  communism as well as American capitalism because both super-powers had nuclear arsenals. Personally I had no time for the Communists of that period – they were opponents because they approved of the Soviet H-bomb.’ Nothing spectacular happens. Tony falls in love with Christine unexpectedly, manages to invite her out, they go for a group drive in the car of an unlikable teenager, and this last incident is a fiasco in the relationship Tony-Christine. Actually nothing begins for the two, Christine feels indifferent to Tony, and Brownjohn does not strive much to describe her sensibility. Tony is more coherent, but both youths are mainly seen as revolted people, the reason of their revolt being unclear. We could say they are dissatisfied mainly because this is the specific mood of a restless high school pupil. The details do not quench the thirst for narrative: Tony is ashamed to wear his glasses or tell Christine what he feels for her. The story is poor, but we might be scared by the constant insinuation that the communist demonstration is ‘non-violent,’ that those who distribute left-wing papers and pamphlets are right, that the ‘gang’ who are trying to ruin the march and the party after it is hateful. We ought to be scared by the cause of communism embraced by English society, by an island of protesters who hardly know what they are fighting for, what their fight might lead to.

Life is  for the two teenagers just ‘discontent’, a flux which sixteen-year-old Christine experiences as ‘sadness and restlessness she could not explain,’ a pattern she cannot foresee or change at will. The two are at a loss. Psychology is static. Freshness of reaction is missing, mainly because the novelist avoids effusions. Sentences such as, ‘Tony felt the newness, the astonishing surprise of her face (the same each time they met)’, or ‘As he spoke to her he felt the almost physical pain of the love he had,’ flow superficially, while others slip into poetry. Not many statements are lyrical, but one of them is significant, as it explains the title of the novel: ‘ ‘I’d like to clear the river and keep it new,’ she said suddenly and quite passionately.’ Christine is not only the symbol of youth and concentration of the message in the novel, but she also opposes Tony, who, a year older than her, feels ‘very clumsy and unhappy.’ The misfortunes of adolescence, the void these youths are trying to fill by participating to a march, or by preventing it (as ‘Baines’ gang’ do) seem to be prolonged into the despair of the other, grown up lives. The doctor, the owner of the house where the party takes place, parents, an aunt spreading manifests, are all swiftly outlined, and their superficiality is deliberate, which means that the author refuses to communicate the moods of blank characters, but, much more ingeniously, he conveys the creator’s own grudge against the intention of writing a blank text, a neutral text, which does not overwhelm the reader with the usual sympathy characters drain from him. Brownjohn the young novelist is a Desperado by virtue of this refusal to write, by the miserly involvement he plans for both writer and reader in his text.

Mainly the novel revolves around ‘anger and frustration,’ spicing it with awkwardness, waste of time and faintly mentioned ideals, all wrapped in intense loneliness. This is what Brownjohn wants to get at: everyone with his own world. Yet an East-European feels menaced when Tony joins the march and describes his feelings thus:

‘You had committed yourself, and you could not drop out, because people were watching. You felt dangerously exposed (although it was rare for anyone to say or do anything hostile), and you felt courageous.’

Communist marches are bound to cross one’s mind. True, in London only those who want take part in it, and Christine’s father even disapproves of the march, but children are happy and excited. Just as in Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist, the communist temptation seems so harmless at first. True, ‘Baines’ lot’ utters a ‘Heil Hitler!’ incidentally, but the very moment the plot becomes exciting, a conflict is on the way, Brownjohn sends the doctor to flatten all interest and calm things down. Notably, though, the doctor is a communist-minded marcher himself. Christine meditates that she does not like boys’ emotions, she thinks she might be in love with this politically minded doctor. Communism has its appeal. Unlike Tony, who is unhappy and dispirited from first to last, Christine has a short moment of enthusiasm:

‘She felt purposeful and contented, defiant all at once; dissatisfied, but a dissatisfaction that felt powerful and constructive; sensitive, but in a clear, positive way that meant being alive. As she stood there, cool and still, looking into a sky that was dazzlingly full of the light of the sun, she knew she was playing a part, she was posing dramatically. But it was a wonderful feeling.’

The author feigns participation in the text. In fact he withdraws his emotions and leaves us in the company of the page and of heroes deliberately emptied of any reaction, animated by the mere feeling of emptiness itself. A blank novelist who writes about the red peril with apparent serenity, Alan Brownjohn manages here, as he does in his poems, to drive our minds to the opposite  of his statements. The novel lives in a virtual image, a possible dark chamber of our being, where the reader achieves an image never intimated by the author. If we are to enjoy this kind of fiction, we must change our reading habits and clear more than the river, ‘clear’ our own sensibility, which can hardly wait to meet the challenge of the text. Alan Brownjohn’s texts deny us any kind of involvement. The author himself keeps his distance from the text. He writes blindfolded, his mind plunging in creation as in the beginning of a world.

Alan Brownjohn’s own political comment in the margin of this novel is the following:

‘Those who grew up in post-war Britain (after Hiroshima and Nagasaki) with a hatred of war dreaded the possibility of a nuclear holocaust. The Soviet Union developed and manufactured its nuclear weapons – so did the USA, so did Britain in alliance with the USA. An later, France. All these countries conducted highly dangerous nuclear tests.

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) which was founded in 1957 declared itself against all nuclear armament everywhere. In the ideological conflict between Russia and America it took a pacifist and neutralist attitude. It favoured a non-nuclear and neutral Britain seeking general disarmament beginning with a renunciation of the British H-bomb because (a) it was expensive, (b) it gave Britain, a small island, no protection, and (c) it encouraged other small countries to spend money on dangerous nuclear arms.

CND marched to the American embassy, the Russian embassy, the French embassy to protest against nuclear arms.’

The words clarify there is no sympathy with communism, but sometimes we cannot be too careful. To Clear the River is a novel that will speak differently to Eastern and Western readers. On the one hand, it is a proof of Englishness, on the other it sounds the alarm. Politics has a tendency of happening when you least expect it, and communism is a horrible threat. Youths playing with the fire, marching in a crowd that to anyone who has participated in a communist compulsory ‘demonstration’ spells totalitarianism, dream in vain of ‘clearing the river’, or so it seems to a reader coming to Brownjohn’s first novel after fifty years of communism. Lessing (The Good Terrorist) failed to perceive this communist dimension of marches, but saw their potential violence. Consequently, in clear Desperado manner, this novel is a question mark, after all.

            Brownjohn’s own position is ambiguous:

‘I end up wondering whether To Clear the River deserves such generous space? It was a very early effort, written for teenagers – and taken up by publishers who wanted a teenage love story done unsentimentally and in up-to-date setting. (I have not re-read it for a long time!) It was a mild success, selling quite well in both hardback and paperback.’