Wifey (1978) by JUDY BLUME

 

Putnam first US edition, 1978

 

 

 

Sandy scraped her shoes on the mat outside the Ladies Locker Room, then went inside and collapsed on the floor in front of her locker.  One thing she knew for sure.  She hated the game of golf.  So why had she made an appointment with Steve to caddy for her on Friday morning at eight?  Because she was expected to.  Because she always did what she was told.  Because she was such a good little girl.  Such a good little wifey.

 

The Novel:  Wifey, the first adult novel published by the phenomenally popular children's author Judy Blume, tells the story of Sandy Pressman, an attractive, college educated wife and mother in her early thirties who lives with her successful businessman husband Norman and their two children in suburban New Jersey.  Set at the beginning of the 1970s, the book examines — in an amusingly candid and sometimes ribald manner — Sandy's emotional dissatisfaction and delayed sexual awakening, offering the reader a decidedly feminine view of life in middle class mid-century North America that earned the ire of many a male chauvinist pig for its realistic portrayal of marriage and the compromises women were (and in many cases still are) expected to make in exchange for hypocritical promises of 'security' and 'stability.' 

 

Sandy is the quintessential product of her conservative Jewish upbringing, a woman who has spent her life being the 'good little girl' her parents wanted her to be and the 'good little wife' she was trained and inevitably expected to become by them and the rest of her family.  But life with her husband Norman, comfortable though it is despite his occasional bullying and her being afflicted with various minor illnesses, has become stifling and unfulfilling, producing feelings of disenchantment and ennui she's unable to shake off by participating in the activities — joining the Country Club and taking up golf and tennis, building an expensive new house, sending her kids off to summer camp for the first time — that a young wife and mother is automatically expected to find socially and spiritually rewarding.

 

What Sandy craves most is a genuine sense of connection with another human being in both the physical and emotional sense of the term — something she's never really known with Norman who, despite his grudgingly professed love for her, remains unwilling to experiment in the bedroom, preferring to stick to a sexual routine that's become as predictable as it has always been perfunctory.  'One bed for Norman,' we're told, 'with cool, crisp sheets… And one bed for Sandy, where once a week, on Saturday nights, if she didn't have her period, they did it.  A Jewish nymphomaniac.  They fucked in her bed, then Norman went to wash his hands and penis, making Sandy feel dirty and ashamed.  He'd climb into his own bed then, into his clean, cool sheets, and he'd fall asleep in seconds, never any tossing, turning, sighing.  Never any need to hold hands, cuddle, or laugh quietly with her.  Three to five minutes from start to finish.'

 

But this is the early 1970s, a time when women of all ages are being encouraged, thanks to the sexual revolution of the late 1960s, to actively pursue their own contentment by whatever means available to them.  Sandy is no stranger to these concepts thanks to her uninhibited college friend Lisbeth, a woman who spends each Thursday night making love to other men while her husband Vincent spends his own 'night off' making love to other women.  While Sandy has no intention of adopting Lisbeth's free-and-easy swinger lifestyle, she is having a dalliance of sorts with an anonymous flasher, a man who likes to park his motorcycle on her front lawn early in the morning and enthusiastically masturbate in full view of her bedroom window.  

 

Sandy has no idea who this mysterious masturbator is, assuming only that he's the same man who periodically calls her on the telephone to politely enquire if she's ready to fuck him today.  Sometimes she wonders if he might be her first serious boyfriend Shep Resnick, the exciting older man who introduced her to sex — an introduction that did not include intercourse as such — before he was drafted into the army and she reluctantly broke up with him.  Sandy hasn't set eyes on Shep for eight years, when she and Norman crossed paths with him and his wife Rhoda at a restaurant.  Could Shep be her mysterious self-abusing admirer?  While this thought unsettles Sandy on one level, she can't help but feel aroused by it on a purely sexual level. 

 

 

Pocket Books US, c 1979

 

 

For the present, however, Sandy remains unhappily stuck with Norman, the man she met in college and lost her virginity to in less than ideal circumstances on their wedding night.  Sometimes she finds herself wishing that her husband — who keeps pressuring her to make new friends at the club and improve at tennis and golf despite her clumsiness and lack of interest in all forms of sport — would drop dead.  'Because then,' she guiltily realizes, 'she'd be free.  Oh, she knew that was a terrible thought, a wicked thought and she certainly didn't wish him a long, horrible, cancerous death… She'd never been free, could only imagine what it was like.  She'd never been on her own.  She'd gone from [her parents] Mona and Ivan straight to Norman.  Little girl to little wife.'  

 

As the summer progresses, Sandy finds herself growing increasingly frustrated with Norman and the unfulfilling, rigidly circumscribed marriage they endure.  And her frustration continues to grow when she spots Shep Resnick on a train one afternoon on her way home from a visit to New York.  Too shy and flustered to approach her former beau again, Sandy can only fantasize about what life might have been like had she married him — fantasies that become much harder to dismiss as girlish folly when she and Norman once again cross paths with Shep and Rhoda at a Country Club party.  

 

Following dinner and a few too many drinks on her part, Shep approaches Sandy and asks her to dance.  He soon feels embolded to enquire if she 'plays around' and, when Sandy says no, suggests they talk a stroll around the pool to help clear their heads.  As soon as they're outside and conveniently out of sight behind the cabana, Shep takes Sandy in his arms and kisses her.  'He still had that delicious way of kissing,' she discovers, 'licking the corners of her mouth, running his tongue along her teeth, sucking on her lower lip… How different from Norman's cold, toothpaste kisses.  Shep tasted of wine, of salad dressing, of sex.  Shep was hard.  Oh yes, she could feel it against her.'  Deeply aroused by her former boyfriend's obviously rekindled desire for her, Sandy nevertheless pushes Shep away, only to see him immediately lose interest in trying to take things any further.  After suggesting that she give him a call if she ever changes her mind about sleeping with him, Shep walks away, leaving Sandy to return indoors alone.

 

The following evening sees Sandy and Norman attend another party, this time a pool party held at the lavish new home recently purchased by Sandy's sister Myra and her gynecologist brother-in-law Gordon.  (It was at their wedding, where she served as Myra's seventeen year old bridesmaid, that she first met Shep.)  When the behavior of the drunken male guests becomes too raucous for her liking, Sandy, more than a little drunk herself by now, seeks refuge in Gordon's darkened study where she attempts to make sense of her feelings about Shep and everything he formerly meant to her.  She's still attempting to process these feelings when Gordon, also drunk and wearing only a swimsuit as she herself is, enters the room and begins to complain about the 'shittiness' of his life.  Soon Gordon is sharing a lot of other feelings with Sandy, including the feelings of lust she inspires in him each time she visits his office for her regular gynecological examinations.  Gordon begs to be allowed to make his 'penis dance inside her' and Sandy lets him, an experience that ends with her brother-in-law becoming overwhelmed by remorse and sobbing in her arms like a traumatized child.  

 

As off-putting as her encounter with Gordon was in almost every respect — although the sex, she's honest enough to admit to herself, was not half bad — it does break down the last of Sandy's childhood inhibitions regarding the sanctity of marriage.  At Lisbeth's insistence she makes a Thursday night dinner date with her college professor husband Vincent, a man who is, in almost every respect, the physical opposite of Shep, Gordon and her own unsuspecting, hypercritical husband.  But the date ends awkwardly for Sandy, with Vincent losing his erection after taking her back to his office for sex and confessing, somewhat shamefully, that this always happens when he tries to sleep with women other than Lisbeth because he doesn't really enjoy being in an open marriage.  Unwilling to try sex with Vincent again, Sandy does the only thing she can do as a disempowered wife and returns to New Jersey and her safe if now even more unsatisfying life with the still clueless Norman.

 

But the episode with Vincent is far from being the end of Sandy's one woman sexual revolution.  Throwing caution to the wind — something much easier to do without her children around to monopolize her attention — she soon calls Shep and arranges to meet him at a nearby motel.  'She wasn't sure,' she wonders, 'if she liked the sex best or the closeness following.  She felt so safe sleeping in his arms, their bodies curved around each other.'  But her happiness is almost spoiled by Shep talking to her about his wife Rhoda.  'She didn't want to think about Rhoda, didn't want to acknowledge her existence… She wished Rhoda were dead.  Rhoda and Norman, killed in an accident together.  How easy that would make it for them… She could imagine what they'd say when they found out she was going to divorce Norman and marry Shep.  Norman wouldn't believe her at first, wouldn't take her seriously… I'm in love with another man,' she imagines herself calmly informing her apoplectic husband less than a week into her renewed romance with Shep, 'and we're going to be married.  It's very easy to understand if you try.'

 

In Sandy's mind her marriage to Shep is already a foregone conclusion, lacking only the necessary documentation required to make the arrangement a legally binding one.  But it's not long before reality begins to intrude on these dreams of a blissfully perfect future.  On a weekend trip to Maine with her lover — a stolen, hastily arranged pleasure for both of them — Sandy begins to notice how other women look at Shep.  She can't help feeling jealous, not only of the attention these women pay him and his habit of shamelessly rewarding it with slyly lascivious glances but also of their beauty, youth and freedom, things she once possessed herself but will never possess again, she realizes, even if they do manage to divorce their respective spouses and eventually become man and wife.

 

And it turns out that Shep, for all his talk of loving her and wanting them to be together, is not in any sense prepared to leave his wife.  For all his philandering — Sandy is not his first mistress nor, it's clearly implied, is she likely to be his last — he intends to stay with Rhoda and their children, two of whom are recently adopted refugees from war-torn Vietnam.  Shep wants to continue their current arrangement but Sandy, shattered and humiliated, refuses to live that way and tells him so, eliciting the response that she should still leave Norman and do whatever she needs to do in order to 'find herself.'  The answer she offers Shep speaks volumes: "I don't know where to look."

 

Sandy's problems only multiply following the loss of her relationship with Shep.  She soon learns that she may have contracted gonorrhea, possibly from Vincent who may have contracted it from Lisbeth via one of her Thursday night hook-ups — a revelation that comes with its own set of potentially serious if somewhat farcical consequences.

 

Penguin Books, 2004

 

As expected, Norman hits the roof when he learns that Sandy been sleeping with other men, angrily demanding to know who she's been seeing behind his back.  This time, however, Sandy finds the strength to argue with him, eventually fleeing to their attic while Norman, needing to calm down, takes their dog for a long walk around the neighborhood.  

 

In the attic Sandy finds a stack of recently mailed letters sent to Norman from a woman named Brenda Partington Yevelenski in which she expresses her appreciation for the $5000 he loaned her — money, it transpires, that allowed her to open a restaurant following her divorce.  The letters also make it undeniably clear that Brenda and Norman were once in a relationship, a union that Brenda hoped to revive until Norman refused to do this out of loyalty to her, his suddenly demanding and adulterous 'little wifey.'  Rather than hypocritically hating Brenda for trying to steal her husband from her, Sandy instead finds herself envying the financial and social independence her rival apparently enjoys.  'She had a sudden desire to call Brenda, to ask her what Norman had really been like way back then.  Because she could see now that there must have been another Norman.  A Norman who dreamed of becoming a biologist… of saving the world.  A Norman who loved intensely.  Could that Norman still be locked inside the Norman she knew, just as another Sandy was inside her, struggling to get out?'

 

The next day, which happens to be the day before their twelfth wedding anniversary, Sandy awakens to find her husband gone and the house completely silent.  She has no idea if she and Norman are going to separate or stay together, an issue that remains unresolved even after he walks in from work at the usual time, carrying a pizza for their dinner.  They talk again, more honestly than they probably ever have, and agree to try to stop hurting each other, with Norman even apologizing for pushing her too hard to fit in at the Country Club.  In return he asks Sandy to accept him as he is and try to relax, insisting their marriage can and will survive if only she'll stop questioning its validity so frequently.  Norman even agrees to try a few new things in bed, things that Sandy freely admits to having done and enjoyed with Shep.  

 

It remains to be seen, of course, if any of this will make any difference to Sandy's life in the long run or if these compromises, small though they are on Norman's part, will be enough to keep them together after their kids return from camp and their life slips back into its predictable well-worn groove.  The airing of grievances is a step in the right direction but it takes more than that to establish a connection and connection is still what Sandy craves along with a sense of what it may mean to live her life with some degree of autonomy and the possibility of obtaining some sense of ongoing fulfilment.  What remains unclear, to her and the reader, is whether Sandy has any chance of finding these things without making some kind of drastic change in her life.  Nor is it insignificant that all of the men she's involved with — Norman, Gordon, Vincent, the wrongly idealized Shep, even her anonymous masturbating admirer — ultimately fail to give her what she wants, be it sustained sexual satisfaction or true emotional commitment or even a clue, in the case of the latter, as to their true identity.

 

Wifey quickly rose to the top of the national bestseller list in 1978 and it's not difficult to explain what made it so popular.  Its combination of humour, acute social observation and plainspoken detail concerning the facts not only of sex but of marriage as an institution designed for no other purpose, it seemed, than to deny women their individuality and the right to any kind of self-determination must have a struck a deep chord with readers of Blume's generation, women who had begun to question traditional gender roles and what had to be sacrificed in order to be perceived as someone who was 'successfully' abiding by them.  The novel remains a perfect literary snapshot of its time, showing what frustrated 1970s wives like Sandy were really dealing with behind the locked doors of their upscale suburban ranch houses and how marital relations were changing both in and out of the bedroom, aided and abetted by the rising divorce rate and the shift from a culture of monogamy to one that had begun to view infidelity as a stepping stone to a sexier, more satisfying lifestyle.  Sandy often feels confused, is often taken for granted and marginalized by Norman and the other men she knows, but she refuses to give up searching for what will ultimately provide her with some measure of control over her own life.  It is this willingness to search, Blume implies, and to keep searching in the face of what can sometimes be very strident male opposition, that truly matters in the end.    

 

 

 

JUDY BLUME, c 1978

 

The Writer:  As a bestselling writer of unsparingly honest children's, young adult and adult fiction, Judy Blume has never been a stranger to controversy.  When the first attempts were made to ban her work in the early 1980s, she immediately fought back, joining the National Coalition Against Censorship and urging her fellow writers to do the same.  'When I started, in the 70s,' she remembered in a 2014 interview, 'it was a good time for children's book writers.  Children's reading was much freer than in the 80s, when censorship started; when we elected Ronald Reagan and the conservatives decided that they would decide not just what their children would read but what all children would read, it went crazy.  My feeling in the beginning was wait, this is America: we don't have censorship, we have, you know, freedom to read, freedom to write, freedom of the press, we don't do this, we don't ban books.  But then they did.' 

 

Judy Blume (née Sussman) was born in the city of Elizabeth, New Jersey, on 12 February 1938 to homemaker Esther Sussman and dentist Rudolph Sussman.  She attended Battin High School, Boston University and New York University, graduating from the latter in 1961 with a Bachelor of Arts in Education.  By that time she had been married to lawyer John M Blume for two years.  Their daughter Randy was born shortly after Blume graduated from college and was followed in 1963 by their son Larry.  

 

A happy and devoted mother, Blume began inventing stories for her children when they were toddlers — poor imitations, she freely admitted, of The Cat In The Hat and other works by Dr Seuss (the pen name of Theodore Seuss Geisel) — and began trying to turn these into rhyming picture books when they entered pre-school and she finally had time to enrol in a writing course at her former alma mater.  'When the class ended after one semester,' she later recalled, 'I took it again.  And before the end of the second semester a few of my stories were accepted for publication in small magazines.'  The class also forced her to transform one of these stories into what would become her first novel for young adults.  

 

This book, titled Iggie's House, was published in 1970 and was followed that same year by Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret which went on to become a national and international bestseller and remains perhaps Blume's most beloved, most widely read work of fiction.  The story of a sixth grade girl who struggles to feel accepted because her mother is Christian and her father is Jewish, it became notorious for its frank depictions of puberty and menstruation and the title character's engagingly personal, non-sectarian religious beliefs.  Although it went on to be named 'Outstanding Book of the Year' by The New York Times, it became almost immediately controversial, with many school boards attempting to ban it from school libraries right across North America.  Sadly, these efforts to ban Blume's work would persist through the 1980s and 1990s and well into the new millennium.

 

The 1970s saw Blume publish many other bestselling children's and YA titles, including Then Again, Maybe I Won't (1971), Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing (1972), Deenie (1973) and Forever… (1975), with the latter again proving to be highly controversial because it dared to depict the first sexual encounter between its teenaged female protagonist and her boyfriend along with the eventual ending of their relationship.  Sex was also the dominant theme of Wifey, Blume's first adult novel which appeared in 1978 and, like its predecessors, became another national bestseller.  Blume would go on to publish three more adult novels including Smart Women (1983), Summer Sisters (1998) and In the Unlikely Event (2015), the latter being inspired by a trio of unrelated airline crashes that occurred near her hometown of Elizabeth when she was a girl. 

 

Blume's first marriage ended in 1975, with her going on to marry her second husband, the physicist Thomas A Kitchens, later that same year.  Blume and her children moved from New Jersey to New Mexico, where her new husband worked, but this marriage likewise ended in divorce in 1978.  She has been happily married since 1987 to former law professor George Cooper and runs a not-for-profit bookstore with him in their hometown of Key West, Florida where she can often be found working behind the counter, recommending books to curious customers. 

 

 

JUDY BLUME, c 2015

 

 

The recipient of many literary awards, Blume was most recently honored with the 2017 EB White Award for Lifetime Achievement in Children's Literature and a 2020 prize from the Author's Guild Foundation for Distinguished Service to the Literary Community.  She remains a popular and beloved writer despite the many criticisms leveled at her over the years by conservative organizations, parents and critics who feel her work places too much emphasis on physicality and sexuality and not enough emphasis on the moral growth of her characters.  But these criticisms never stopped her from writing.  'For me,' she once admitted, 'writing has its ups and downs.  After I had written more than ten books I thought seriously about quitting.  I felt I couldn’t take the loneliness anymore.  I thought I would rather be anything than a writer.  But I’ve finally come to appreciate the freedom of writing.  I accept the fact that it’s hard and solitary work.  And I worry about running out of ideas or repeating myself.  So I’m always looking for new challenges.'  

 

Blume was the subject of a 2023 feature length documentary film titled Forever Judy Blume, the release of which coincided with the first-ever film adaptation of Are You There, God? It's Me Margaret starring Abby Ryder Forston, Rachel McAdams, Benny Safdie and Kathy Bates.     

 

 

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to visit the website of bestselling North American writer JUDY BLUME:

 

 

https://judyblume.com/

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Looks and Smiles (1981) by BARRY HINES

 

Penguin UK film tie-in edition, 1983

 

That afternoon, Mick walked into the city.  He visited the Jobcentre first, but it was closed.  'DUE TO LACK OF STAFF' it said on the door.  He stood in the doorway while he buttoned up his denim jacket and decided what to do next.  Sweet wrappers, crisp packets and sheets of newspaper tumbled past on the pavement.  Mick managed to read a few headlines as they went by.  One said: WAR DECLARED ON SCROUNGERS.  A police car cruised by and Mick looked up and down the road busily, as if he was about to depart, rather than just loitering there with nowhere to go.  He could not go home yet: his mother would still be in and she would accuse him of not looking for work.  But he could not face traipsing round all the firms again and seeing the same NO VACANCIES signs on board after board, or meeting gatekeepers and receptionists who, with a supercilious look and smug shake of the head, seemed to revel in his misfortune.  It was humiliating.  It made him feel ashamed: like a beggar.

 

The Novel:  It is 1981 and Mick Walsh and his best friend Alan Wright are about to leave school after sitting their A level GCSE exams, a decision made after they were assured by their careers counsellor that possessing this qualification would vastly improve their chances of finding good jobs when they were ready to enter the workforce.  But this advice, like so much in the UK and in the northern city of Sheffield they call home, was a lie.  The national economy is on the brink of collapse, marked by widespread factory closures and mass unemployment, violent race riots and — overseeing and sometimes directly inspiring the chaos — the repressive Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, a politician who believes that the poor are poor only because they 'choose to be' and has come to power on the promise to slash funding to vital social services, cripple the trade unions and sell off what have previously been publicly owned utilities to the highest private bidders. 

 

A fortnight after leaving school Mick, Alan and their friends find themselves fronting up to their local Jobcentre every day where they're told by its chronically overworked and under-resourced staff that there are no vacancies for lads of their age anywhere and, worse, that this is likely to remain the case for months if not for years to come.  With nothing but time on their hands and nothing much in life to look forward to, this new generation of the long-term unemployed spend their days loafing in bed, roaming aimlessly round the city or, when the weather gets too cold, sitting for hours over a single cup of tea in the local cafeteria until they're chased out by its unsympathetic manager.  They have no money, no prospects and no real lives to speak of, while their parents are technically no better off than they are despite being gainfully employed, living as they do with the constant threat of wage cuts and the possibility of lay offs hanging uneasily over their heads.

 

Nor are Mick and his friends able to find any relief in their physical environment — an environment, thanks to a seemingly endless series of budget 'adjustments,' that is coming to resemble a war zone in a third world country, filled with rubbish and the rubble from unfinished apartment blocks and council improvement projects that have been abandoned due to lack of funds.  Theirs is a landscape essentially the same as that described by George Orwell in his dystopian 1948 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four — bleak, crumbling, dominated by poverty and want and facing increasing instability as families struggle to put food on the table and are forced by necessity to move elsewhere to search for work.  

 

Even when Mick does get sent for a job interview at Uttley and Parsons, a local engineering firm that has advertised for an apprentice fitter, it turns out to be another exercise in futility.  Although he makes it to the final round of interviews, he's ultimately denied the position, causing him to vent his frustrations by kicking over his broken motorcycle and wrecking the few objects contained inside his parents' largely empty garage.  (The family car has long since been sold off after being deemed an unnecessary luxury by Mick's dad.) 

 

Like Orwell's protagonist Winston Smith, Mick finds some relief from his troubles in the arms of the opposite sex, becoming involved with a girl named Karen Lodge whom he meets at a dance where he and Alan go to spend what little dole money they have left at the end of the week on beer.  But the excessive consumption of alcohol and the fights it invariably provokes are no substitutes for the chance to earn a decent living and, in Mick's case, finally have the funds required to get his beloved motorcycle back on the road.  Hard choices need to be made and Alan, remembering the military recruitment films they were shown during their final weeks at school, does what so many other young men in their position are doing and enlists in the army.  Mick is tempted to follow his example but is forbidden to do so by his parents who understandably have no desire to see their only son used as a cannon fodder in Northern Ireland or anywhere else that Mrs Thatcher may decide to send British troops in an effort to assert the nation's waning military might and boost its flagging morale.  (She would blithely send British troops to die in the Falklands War one year after Looks and Smiles was published.)

 

Mick stays in Sheffield, continuing his fruitless search for work and eventually breaking up with Karen who, unlike him, has a full-time job in a local shoe store.  Their relationship ends on a sour note after she insists on attending a football match with him, only to find herself relegated to the status of an unwanted burden that Mick is wary of being seen with by his mates.  (This is a prime example of Hines' honesty and at no time does he make Mick or his friends appear as martyrs.  They are always presented as ordinary young men with the usual flaws and foibles all young men possess.)  Although he attempts to console himself with beer, football, daydreaming and jeering at most forms of adult authority, Mick finds himself trapped in a routine now rendered even emptier and more demeaning by the loss of his best friend.  Only when Alan returns to town on leave does his life briefly improve, his interest piqued by tales of Alan's exploits as a 'squaddie' and the various sexual escapades he's enjoyed with the allegedly more amenable women who live 'down south.'

 

 

Michael Joseph first UK edition, 1981

 

 

 

Alan's return to duty sees Mick re-examine his decisions to remain in Sheffield and stay on the right side of the law.  When another friend suggests they break into the local Working Men's Club through its broken emergency door, Mick reluctantly agrees, walking off with several cartons of cigarettes they subsequently offload to a dodgy bookmaker for £175 — much less than the purlioned merchandise is worth, but more money than either of them has ever seen let alone had inside their pockets in their lives.

 

This illegally gained windfall allows Mick to finally repair his motorcycle, providing him with the means and the excuse he needs to try to reconnect with Karen.  But Karen has her own problems to contend with, chief among them being the daily struggle to arrive at work on time with so many bus services being cancelled due to cutbacks and her mother's plan to remarry following her separation from Karen's lorry driving father.  Things come to a head when Karen and Mick, who has stopped by to plead his case with her, are discovered naked in her bed together.  After fighting with her mother and fleeing their tiny council flat, Karen is found in the street by Mick who offers to drive her to the southern port city of Bristol where her father lives.  Once there, Karen tells him, she will move in with her father who, she has no doubt, will welcome her with open arms.  She will then find a new job and a flat of her own and keep an eye out for a job for Mick who, in time, will be able to leave Sheffield and move south to live with her. 

 

The trip to Bristol is an eye-opening journey for Karen, exposing to the hard truths of her father's life with his new partner Jenny and their infant son.  Although her father allows Karen and Mick to stay with them overnight, it soon becomes obvious that the idea of Karen moving in with him on a permanent basis is out of the question.  With nowhere else to go, Karen and Mick are forced to return to Sheffield, arriving there late the following afternoon and returning to their respective homes after agreeing to meet up again that evening at the pub.  

 

But all is far from well in the Walsh household.  Mick's parents are angry with him for traipsing off to Bristol with some strange girl on the spur of the moment without any motorcycle insurance or even the valid license required to pilot his machine.  And it turns out they have some discouraging news to share with him.  After months of speculation and silent worrying, Mr Walsh has now been laid off from his job, leaving Mick's mother as the only wage earner in the family.

 

Mick absorbs this setback as he has absorbed every other problem that life has dumped on him, finding some comfort in his continuing relationship with Karen and Alan's return to Sheffield on leave prior to his re-departure for the war zone that is British-occupied Belfast.  Alan has been hardened by his time as a soldier but, despite this, Mick can't help but regret that he didn't join his friend in the army — a regret that Karen, who insists that things will improve if he will only keep on trying to look for work, is quick to question, adding that they will be finished as a couple if he decides to enlist.  She goes on to suggest that Alan is trying to break them up, an idea hotly denied by Mick who nevertheless finds it impossible to deny the truth of what she's saying.  Joining the army represents radical irreversible change, something Mick desperately craves after enduring months of failure and frustration — a point depressingly emphasized when he returns to the Social Security Office the following day to sign the document that will allow him to collect his weekly dole money, only to discover that its queues are growing longer by the day.

Looks and Smiles was described by one reviewer as "A quietly devastating portrayal of human waste" and that is what it is — a graphic reminder of a time when the British working class were subjected to a particularly harsh form of economic rationalism implemented by a government determined to do everything in its power to stigmatize and dehumanize them while simultaneously doing all that it could to consolidate and increase the wealth of the ruling class.  The book often reads like a piece of stark dystopian fiction, filled with sharply drawn images of hopelessness and decay as business after business shuts its doors and finding paid work becomes a rarely bestowed privilege rather than a basic human right.  Of its three main characters, only Alan successfully emerges from the trap that life in Sheffield has become.  But he does this at the cost of his freedom and at the risk of dying a violently premature death at the hands of the IRA.  

 

The reader is left wondering if the lives of Mick and Karen will ever substantially improve, if the lives of the children it is implied they will go on to have together will be any different to or any better than their own stalled, perpetually compromised lives.  Sadly, it's difficult to believe they will.  Barry Hines was too canny a novelist to suggest that meaningful social change was possible without being accompanied by significant and committed political change.  Looks and Smiles is first and foremost a political novel, but a novel that does not rely on slogans or polemic to paint what is a damning portrait of a society determined to steal everything, including but not limited to their dignity, from those least able to afford to part with it.

 

 

BARRY HINES, c 1969

 

 

 

The Writer:  Although he published nine novels, one collection of short fiction and several works for stage and radio, Barry Hines was arguably best known for his cinematic collaborations with acclaimed British director Ken Loach.  Their first project, the 1969 film Kes based on Hines' 1968 novel A Kestrel for a Knave, remains a well-loved classic of social realist cinema, a film that has lost none of its power to affect and outrage the viewer after more than half a century.

 

Hines' work, like that of his fellow northern novelists David Storey, Alan Sillitoe and Stan Barstow, is imbued with the gritty working class spirit of its Yorkshire setting, presenting the reader with an undiluted vision of what were often very hard lives marked and sometimes redeemed by a dry and mischievous sense of humour.  It is no surprise that Hines rejected an offer from the Disney organisation to film A Kestrel for a Knave on the proviso that it be granted the right to change its ending so that the bird of the title lives rather than meets its end at the hands of its young protagonist's brutish older brother.  Hines instinctively understood that the lives of the people he wrote about had no place in them for predictable happy endings.

 

Melvin Barry Hines was born in Hoyland Common, a small mining village near the town of Barnsley in West Yorkshire, on 30 June 1939.  He was the son and grandson of miners and would have entered that perilous trade himself had he not been academically gifted enough to earn himself a scholarship to the grammar school in nearby Ecclesfield.  He had in fact accepted a position as an apprentice mining surveyor and was poised to enter the industry when a neighbour, upset that he was not utilizing his full potential and wasting an opportunity that the sons of many other miners would have killed to obtain, sent him back to school to take four A-levels and before going on to train as a teacher.  It was while he was teaching Physical Education at a school in Barnsley — and contemplating a possible career as a professional footballer after he was offered a trial by English club Manchester United — that Hines began his debut novel The Blinder, writing the bulk of it in the school library after the students had vacated the premises for the day.

 

The Blinder, based on Hines' own experiences as a cocky young football prodigy, was published in 1966 following the broadcast by the BBC of two short radio plays he had written.  The novel brought him to the attention of film and television producer Tony Garnett who offered him the chance to write a script for the popular BBC Wednesday Play series.  Hines turned the offer down, explaining that he had a new novel he needed to write and taking a leave of absence from his teaching job to write it far from home on the Italian island of Elba.  This book became A Kestrel For A Knave and remains the most popular novel he ever published, one that Garnett and his friend and collaborator Ken Loach wasted no time securing the film rights to.  The film's success led to more offers of work in films, radio and television, including three more collaborations with Loach that saw him become deeply involved with the production process, even to the point of having some say in the casting decisions.  The last of these collaborations was Looks and Smiles released in 1981 — a project that would go on to win the Young Cinema Award at that year's Cannes Film Festival.

 

 

BARRY HINES, c 2001

 

Hines continued to combine the writing of novels with film and radio work through the 1980s, penning the script for the award-winning speculative drama Threads that imagines life in Sheffield following a nuclear war.  Released in 1984, the telefilm was nominated for seven BAFTA awards the following year, winning the prize for Best Single Drama Program.  (The program was so graphic that it was not re-screened on British television for seven years.)  His penultimate novel The Heart of It appeared in 1991, telling the loosely autobiographical story of a successful screenwriter who returns to the mining town he was born in to visit his radicalised miner father.  It was followed in 2000 by a final novel titled Elvis Over England, an attempt to portray a different, more comical side of life in the north that received mixed reviews and came as a perhaps disappointing end to what had been a notable literary career.

A collection of Hines' short fiction titled This Artistic Life was published in 2009, the same year he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease and entered a care facility in his childhood home of Hoyland Common.  Married twice and the father of two children by his first wife, Barry Hines died in his native Yorkshire on 18 March 2016. 

French film poster, 1981

The film adaptation of Looks and Smiles, co-written by BARRY HINES, directed by KEN LOACH and starring GRAHAM GREEN as Mick Walsh, TONY PITTS as Alan Wright and CAROLYN NICHOLSON as Karen Lodge was released by Kestrel Films in 1981.  It may be available to view via your preferred streaming service, as may Kes (1969) which was fully restored for the prestigious Criterion DVD Collection in April 2011.

 

 

 

 

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Joby (1964) by STAN BARSTOW

 

 

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Bimbo (1990) by KEITH WATERHOUSE 

 

 

Kingdom On Earth (1941) by ANNE BROOKS

 

Cope Books print on demand edition, 2007

 

Although it was August, the night was very cold, and Harriet sat close to her new husband and kept her right hand in his pocket.  They could see the moonlight through the windows of the station wagon, but it was yellowish, distorted by the smoky isinglass which showed the prints of dogs' paws and human fingers.
    In the front seats, Harriet could see the heads of Joel's family.  The car light silhouetted them into four black knobs.  They were singing, soprano, tenor, alto and a tuneless bass.  In the darkness Harriet smiled at them tenderly.  Joel had said that she would like them, but he had forgotten the important thing, which was that they would like her.  Joel hadn't realized yet how uncertain she was, and afraid of people.  But there could be no fear where people were so friendly.  Harriet had never known that a family could be as affectionate as this and at the same time as unpossessive.  The only other warmth she had ever known had been grasping.

 

 

The Novel:  It is 1938 and shy, socially awkward Harriet has just married the handsome and confident Joel Randolf, a man who is in many ways the antithesis of her stodgy professor father — the kind of parent who, by simply being himself, ensured she had a lonely, emotionally deprived childhood.  She and Joel have just returned from their honeymoon in Mexico and are visiting the Randolf estate in South Wales, Connecticut before returning to New York City where her charming new husband will shortly resume his promising career in advertising. 

 

Harriet feels dazzled and humbled by the Randolfs — Joel's elder sister Kit and her PhD candidate husband Gray, the pretty younger sister Pris and their somewhat dim if eminently respectable mother Elaine — and the ease with which they conduct their lives and seem to take their inherited wealth and its associated privileges for granted.  

 

But, unbeknownst to Harriet and her new in-laws, this carefree lifestyle is about to come to an abrupt and permanent end.  A visit from the family lawyer, the man charged with handling their finances following the death of Joel's father, reveals that their investments are practically worthless thanks to the combination of poor decision making and the late John Randolf's long term mismanagement of the family's money.  The lawyer advises Elaine to sell the family home — which is now worth much less than her deceased husband paid for it — and re-locate to a cheap apartment in the city.  

 

Although shocked by this unexpected news, the Randolfs strive to adopt a positive attitude to their situation, telling themselves that being poor will be an adventure and not necessarily something to fear and dread.  Harriet, forced to raise herself in a cash-strapped household following the death of her mother, admires their grace and fortitude.  Joel and his family, she generously decides, are very brave people.  'They had never been used to anything but luxury; the prospect of being without it must be more frightening to them than it was to her.  She knew, even with her limited experience, that pressure of this sort can bring out all sorts of uglinesses in people.  But here were the Randolfs, not only being strong, but actually making a joke out of the whole thing.'  Soon, everything is settled between them.  They will move to the city, with Kit and Pris declaring themselves willing to look for work should the need arise.  But for now, the family decides, they'll try to retain the South Wales house, expensive though it is to run.

By September 1938 Elaine, Kit, Gray and Pris are sharing an apartment on Riverside Drive near Columbia University (where Gray is studying for his doctorate) while Joel and Harriet are installed in an apartment of their own on the outskirts of Greenwich Village.  Money remains tight but Harriet has a gift for economizing and providing the small wifely touches which mean that Joel hardly misses his former luxurious, semi-rural home.  There's even cause for cautious optimism after Joel, having breezed in late from work with liquor on his breath, takes Harriet to their favorite Italian restaurant to celebrate the news that he may be on the verge of landing a very important advertising account courtesy of an old college friend.  Do a good job with it, he confides to his delighted wife, and he'll be in line for a promotion and a raise, the implication being that they will then be in the position to start a family of their own.

 

But life is not looking quite so promising for the other members of the Randolf clan.  Kit has had no luck finding herself a job, while Pris and Elaine hardly seem to have acknowledged their changed circumstances, continuing to spend so much money that selling their beloved family estate has now become a matter of urgent financial necessity.  Joel agrees this is the only course of action open to them and jokes that he looks forward to being rich again.  Again, Harriet admires the family's fortitude, thinking it wrong that people as fine as the Randolfs should have to scrimp and save as she's been obliged by necessity to do all her life.  

 

Things begin to look up again when, a few months later, Kit invites Harriet to lunch to pass along the news that she's at last found a job as a salesgirl at Considine's department store, a place she often patronized as a customer and at which she once held a charge account.  This small success appears to have changed Kit, filling her with an undisguised ambition she formerly did not possess.  "I've changed, though, Harriet," she admits to her slightly stunned sister-in-law over cocktails.  "Just the feeling of earning my own money has changed me.  I want to be independent all the way through.  Can you understand that?"  Harriet can understand this but is nevertheless surprised to see Kit gradually change from a laconic lady of leisure into a hardnosed businesswoman, determined to capitalize on every opportunity she's offered or can negotiate for herself by ethical means or otherwise.  

 

Kit also distances herself from her family, ending the longstanding tradition of joining them each week for Sunday lunch.  Elaine is hurt by this defection, while Pris seems too preoccupied with the loss of a former beau — a Harvard man named Fulke — who once wanted to marry her to be concerned by her sister's uncharacteristically grasping behavior.  Pris jokes to Harriet that her only hope of enjoying a stable future will be to marry a rich man.  Concerned that Pris may be serious about this, Harriet raises the issue with Joel, only to learn that, on his advice, Elaine invested all the money she received from the sale of the family home in a company whose share price has plummeted, effectively bankrupting her.  With Kit now doing well enough to afford an apartment of her own, their next step is obvious — they must give up their cosy flat and move in with his mother and Pris. 

 

A pattern soon begins to emerge.  As Kit does better at her job, eventually stealing the position of the woman who mentored her with no concern for the ruthlessness of her actions, so too does Pris's situation improve when she begins to date a wealthy 'scientific' farmer named Kenneth Tryson.  Tryson is a pretentious boor but his money makes him an acceptable suitor, particularly in the eyes of the perpetually bewildered Elaine, even though Harriet is fully aware that Pris is far from being genuinely attracted to the man.  

 

Harriet, however, has her own problems to contend with.  She notices that Joel has begun to drink much more than usual, unaware that he's doing so because he's lost the big account he was given and been put on notice by his boss to either shape up or be fired.  He stumbles in drunk one afternoon when he should be out visiting a client, full of remorse and self-pity and behaving as though he wants to be scolded for having failed to provide for her.  But Harriet can't bring herself to scold him.  She pities him and takes his side, insisting he can turn things around if only he'll regain a little of his former confidence and make a concerted effort to apply himself.  

 

But Joel's almost too frank confession of inadequacy also disturbs Harriet, prompting her to take the unprecedented step of enrolling in a typing course in case her husband does get fired and she needs to find paid work in a hurry.  'Probably every man was as full of doubts and uncertainties as Joel,' she loyally reminds herself while practicing at her typewriter one night.  'It wasn't fair to expect to lean entirely on him, she must be able to give him support too.  But in spite of all her arguments, she knew that she had been happier the old way.  There had been something exciting and poetic about their marriage then… The trouble was that she hated to lose that sensation now.  It was wrong and unintelligent of her, but she hated to see it go.'

 

Yet go it does despite her growing list of anxieties and regrets.  As his sisters appear to pull their lives together — with Kit becoming ever more ruthless and ever more ashamed of her floundering relatives while Pris secures her future by paying a clandestine late night visit to Kenneth Tryson's bed — the formerly sparkling Joel comes to feel burdened by his responsibilities and resentful of his wife's desire to acquire some basic secretarial skills.  They argue about this on their way home from a concert neither of them has enjoyed, only to forgive each other and make love as soon as they get home.  Although they agree to forget all the hurtful things that were said in the heat of anger, Harriet is aware that something is still bothering Joel who, when pressed by her to come clean about his feelings, admits that he lost his job the week before but has been too afraid to say so.  

 

With no other option available to them, Harriet finds a job as a secretary to a 'difficult' writer named McIlvaine.   "He's sort of a literary hack," the woman at the secretarial agency informs her.  "He's an odd sort of duck, it's hard to get on with him."  Harriet, however, finds McIlvaine a remarkably easy man to work for.  Impressed by her talent for editing and organization, he comes to rely on her more and more, even listening to Harriet's suggestions for improving the articles he churns out with such impressive if monotonous regularity.  So useful do her suggestions prove that Harriet herself is soon offered a job, with McIlvaine's full knowledge and consent, by his editor.

 

In the meantime Pris announces that she and the lumpish Mr Tryson are going to be married, shocking Harriet, when they meet by chance on the street, with the news that she's pregnant and that their civil wedding ceremony will be taking place that same evening.  The family are briefly reunited for this event and a few days later, at Kit's invitation, Harriet visits her in the apartment she's now in the process of leaving.  Kit confides that she's recently argued with Joel because he expected her to find him a new job in the advertising department at Considine's, stating bluntly that she has no intention of jeopardizing her position by doing that and can't understand how Harriet can bear to remain married to such a feckless weakling.  When Harriet suggests that Kit doesn't really mean to criticize her brother, Kit responds with a smile and asks if Harriet realizes why all the Randolfs have always been so fond of her.  "Because you always think the best of us," she explains.  "We're a bunch of bums, really, but you couldn't be persuaded of it, could you?"  Harriet denies this and asks Kit where her husband is, only to be informed that she and Gray are now in the process of filing for divorce.  Again, Harriet is taken aback by this news, only to be told that Kit feels Gray is too spineless for her to remain married to him.  "I didn't know how things like this can work on people.  I didn't realize that every little word would have to be watched, that I would be stepping on Gray's toes continually.  I can't go on living that way, Harriet, it's too damned much of a strain."

 

These words, upsetting though they are, cannot help but strike a chord in Harriet regarding her own floundering marriage.  Things come to a head during another Sunday gathering, with Kit on hand to stir up old resentments while she and Joel criticize the absent Pris for having duped Tryson into marrying her while Elaine, confused as ever, fumbles to defend the actions of her youngest daughter.  This is too much for Harriet, who begins to feel ill and flees to the roof to escape not only her squabbling in-laws but also the oppressive summer heat.  'I am tired of them, she thought.  Elaine, who's so foolish; Kit with her thoughtlessness, striving so hard to imitate a type of success that only that kind of intelligence would tell her is desirable.  And Pris.  Pris had wanted more than the rest of the world and she had gotten it even if she had to cheat the rest of the world by breaking their rules… They had lost consecutiveness, she hadn't the strength to organize them.  She missed Gray, he had been on her side, Gray would have helped her now, he had already faced these things.'  Joel appears and leads Harriet back downstairs, his attempts to comfort and console her not only unwanted but suddenly intolerable.  The family are equally solicitous of her, telling her to lie down and rest, something she's more than happy to do if only to keep her distance from them.  When she awakens again several hours later Pris and her husband are there, discussing their impending move to the country and Pris's now obvious pregnancy.  Only when she and Pris are alone, discussing the latter's morning sickness, does Harriet connect how ill she felt earlier that afternoon with the fact that she too must be pregnant.

 

The story concludes as it began, with Harriet visiting Joel's family in the country.  But this time it's Pris and Kenneth's home that she and Joel and Kit are visiting — a household that has now expanded to include Elaine, who will be staying on, they're told, to help care for her new grandchild.  Harriet, formerly so dazzled by the Randolfs, now feels suffocated by them and plans to tell Joel, after informing him that he's about to become a father, that she plans to leave him.  Her desire to part from him becomes even stronger after Joel rejects a new job Kenneth has gone out of his way to arrange for him with the brokerage firm he uses.  Joel is grateful but adamant that the job will not suit him, that he'll be destined to fail at it just as he failed as an advertising salesman.  But his attitude changes when he learns that Harriet is expecting.  Suddenly, there's a hint of the old, confident Joel, the man Harriet once loved so passionately, the charming stranger who has been absent from her life for so long.  He agrees to accept the job and starts babbling about his son going to college some day, leaving the deeply conflicted Harriet with an extremely difficult choice to make.  

 

 

 

 

The Writer:  Anne Brooks was twenty-five when her debut novel Kingdom On Earth was published in 1941.  It was praised by the critics and was followed in 1942 by Hang My Heart, a second novel that was greeted even more enthusiastically and saw her touted as a writer from whom great things might be expected in the future.

 

Sadly, this was not to be the case.  According to Brad Bigelow, whose post on his excellent 'forgotten literature' website Neglected Books was what first drew me to read Brooks's work, she subsequently disappeared from public view and never published a third novel.  Nor is her fate an uncommon one.  Many writers, promising and otherwise, stop writing due to discouragement, illness or that pernicious condition known as 'writer's block.'  It's a great pity that someone as gifted as Brooks gave up writing fiction.  As should hopefully be clear from this review, she was a writer of exceptional talent with an eye for telling personal and atmospheric detail that was nothing short of extraordinary.  Unfortunately, there's not a single photograph of her or either of her novels — both of which are long out of print — available to view online.

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to download a free legal copy of Kingdom On Earth, published by William Morrow and Company in 1941, from the Internet Archive.  (I recommended downloading the PDF version which, despite missing two pages, is the most readable version available.)

 

 

 

https://archive.org/details/kingdomonearth001098mbp

 

 

 

 

 

 

Several online publishers, including Cope Books, have offered both Kingdom On Earth and Hang My Heart as print-on-demand books in previous years but neither title now appears to be available.

 

 

 

 

Special thanks to BRAD BIGELOW for alerting me to the work of ANNE BROOKS and to that of so many other wonderful 'forgotten writers' via his unfailingly informative Neglected Books website:

 

 

 

 

https://neglectedbooks.com

 

 

 

 

 

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