James Hanley

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James Hanley (born September 3, 1897 in Liverpool , † November 11, 1985 in London ) was a British writer , best known for his novels about seafaring and life in the slums of cities.

life and work

Hanley falsified his résumé considerably in his autobiography Broken Water , published in 1937 , so that to this day it is often said that he was born in 1901 in the Irish capital Dublin . In fact, he was born to a modest family in Liverpool in 1897 to Irish immigrants . Six of his eleven siblings did not survive childhood. Presumably, as was customary at the time, he attended school until he was 13 and then began to work in Liverpool, before he was hired as a merchant marine in 1915 after the outbreak of World War I. In the next two years he mainly sailed the North Atlantic, but also the Mediterranean, on changing ships.

On April 27, 1917, he deserted when his ship docked in the Canadian port of Saint Johns and volunteered for the Canadian Expeditionary Forces. As a private of the 236th Battalion (the "New Brunswick Kilties" ) he was transferred to the French front in August 1918. After only a few days in combat, he suffered a poison gas injury and was taken to a hospital in England. After the end of the war, after another brief stay in Canada, he was dismissed from army service in the course of demobilization after the end of the war in 1919.

Hanley returned to England and made the decision to become a writer. Over the years he wrote countless short stories, but tried in vain to find a publisher. Almost nothing has survived from this early work, as Hanley destroyed these stories in more mature years. After many unsuccessful years, he was able to convince Eric Partridge , who was an editor at the Scholartis Press at the time , to accept his first novel Drift . It was published in a small edition in 1930 and received some favorable reviews. In 1931 the short story volume Men in Darkness followed , which was praised in particular by left literary critics as a courageous work of “proletarian” realism, even if Hanley himself hardly took a political position in his work or in public. He became known nationwide through his second novel Boy , which was published in 1932 without objection. Hanley's publishing house Boriswood published a new edition of the novel in 1934 with the rather lurid image of a scantily clad oriental belly dancer on the cover. After a tip-off from the population, the police confiscated the remaining edition, the publishers were charged with distributing immoral writings and were ultimately fined £ 400, although the most piquant passages in the incriminated edition had been replaced line by line with asterisks . EM Forster defended the work of art in 1935 in his address to the International Writers' Congress in Paris.

In addition to Forster, it was among others TE Lawrence , better known as "Lawrence of Arabia," who supported Hanley in his writing ambitions. In the 1930s and 1940s, Hanley produced a large number of stories and novels, mainly about life at sea, which led many critics to compare them with Joseph Conrad . Increasingly, he tried modern style experiments. His novel No Directions , published in 1943 with an introduction by Henry Miller , depicts the events in a London house during the Blitz , mainly in the streams of consciousness of the protagonists.

In 1930 Hanley had moved to a small house in Wales and in 1931 married Dorothy, called Timmy , Heathcote. In 1933 their only son Liam was born. Over the next few decades, Hanley spent most of his time writing in Wales, but occasionally moved to London when he felt it was opportune to be closer to his publishers due to financial difficulties. In the 1940s and 1950s he wrote prose steadily, in the 1950s mainly radio plays for the BBC , one of which, Say Nothing , he adapted for the theater in 1962 with moderate success. In later years the frequency of his novels decreased noticeably. He died in 1985 at the age of eighty-eight in London and was buried in Llanfechain, Welsh - his tombstone, however, again records the dates of 1901–1985.

His early works were almost forgotten in the meantime, but in the years since his death there has been an increased interest in Hanley. Under the editorship of André Deutsch , new editions of his early novels appeared, in particular a first uncensored - in other words uncensored - edition of Boy with a foreword by Anthony Burgess in 1991 by Penguin .

Works

Novels

  • Drift (1930)
  • Boy (1931)
  • Ebb and Flood (1932)
  • Captain Bottell (1933)
  • Resurrexit Dominus (1934)
  • The Furys (1935)
  • Stoker Bush (1935)
  • The Secret Journey (1936)
  • Hollow Sea (1938)
  • Between the Tides (1939)
  • Our Time is Gone (1940)
  • The Ocean (1941)
  • Sailor's Song (1943)
  • No Directions (1943)
  • What Farrar Saw (1946)
  • Emily (1948)
  • Winter Song (1950)
  • The House in the Valley (1951; published under the pseudonym Patrick Shone )
  • The Closed Harbor (1952)
  • The Welsh Sonata (1954)
  • Levine (1956)
  • An End and a Beginning (1958)
  • Another World (1972)
  • A Woman in the Sky (1973)
  • A Kingdom (1978)

Volumes of short stories

  • Men in Darkness (1931)
  • Half An Eye (1937)
  • Collected Stories (1953)
  • Don Quixote Drowned (1953)

Essays and autobiographical works

  • Gray Children (1937)
  • Broken Water: An Autobiography (1937)
  • A Man in the Corner (1969; essay on John Cowper Powys )
  • A Man in the Customs House (1971; essay on Herman Melville )

Secondary literature

  • James Armstrong: The Publication, Prosecution, and Re-publication of James Hanley's Boy (1931) . In: Library 19: 4, 1997, pp. 351-362.
  • Simon Dentith: James Hanley's The Furys: The Modernist Subject Goes on Strike . In: Literature and History 12: 1, 2003, pp. 41-56.
  • John Fordham: The Matter of Wales: Industry and Rurality in the Work of James Hanley . In: Welsh Writing in English 5, 1999, pp. 86-100.
  • Frank G. Harrington: James Hanley: A Bold and Unique Solitary. Typographeum, Francestown, NH 1989.
  • John Fordham: James Hanley: Modernism and the Working Class. University of Wales Press, Cardiff 2004. ISBN 0-7083-1755-3 .
  • Anne Rice: 'A Peculiar Power about Rottenness': Annihilating Desire in James Hanley's The German Prisoner . in: Modernism / Modernity 9: 1, 2002, pp. 75-89.
  • Robert Starr: “Nailed to the rolls of honor, crucified”: Irish literary responses to the Great War: the war writings of Patrick MacGill, James Hanley, and Liam O'Flaherty, Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, [2019], ISBN 978- 3-8382-1331-6
  • Edward Stokes: The Novels of James Hanley . FW Cheshire, Melbourne 1964.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Hanley, James
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British writer
DATE OF BIRTH September 3, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Liverpool
DATE OF DEATH November 11, 1985
Place of death London