The volume that interests me today is a novel: No Mean City (1935), ‘the classic novel of the Glasgow slum underworld’ as the cover of the Corgi edition announces. Apparently, this novel has its origins in the short stories written by Gorbals unemployed baker Alexander McArthur. They were polished for publication by journalist H. Kingsley Long, a choice made by the original publisher, Longmans, Green & Co. The middle-class target readership might explain the unique narrative style of No Mean City, which mixes melodramatic, violent action with pseudo-ethnographic comments on working-class life in Glasgow’s most notorious neighbourhood, the Gorbals, between 1921 and 1930. Despite the abundant Lowland Scots dialogue this does not feel like a novel primarily addressed to Scottish people, though it might well be that I’m mistaken and that the patronizing tone adopted is intended to inform anyone outside the Gorbals of its degraded social situation, whether they live in Glasgow, in London or elsewhere.
In essence, the plot concerns the efforts of Razor King Johnny Stark to maintain his reputation among the local gangs by getting involved in a variety of brawls, though the novel also narrates the failure of his brother Peter and of his friend Bobby to climb socially upwards beyond the Gorbals. McArthur and Long portray a lifestyle which is absolutely depressing for there is no way out of the violence, the squalor, the economic insecurity, and the general injustice that keeps these characters tied to their sordid background. The vicious circle depicted is easy to understand: poverty results in working lives that begin too early, with no chance of an education; boys and girls marry young and soon have too many children, which results in poverty like their parents’. Finding decent housing is simply impossible because slum landlords charge outrageous amounts for appalling accommodation–if that’s a word to be used in this context–with unhygienic bathrooms shared by dozens. Ill-health is general. Not even youth offers a respite. With no prospects at all, girls try to catch a husband as soon as possible to leave their exploitative, low-paying jobs and boys try to find in gang violence and heavy drinking the enjoyment which work does not offer. All this is well-known but it is still shocking to find it described in so much detail.
Critics and readers since 1935 have complained, precisely, that the detail is lurid and that the plot veers in the last third of the book towards the sensationalist–and I agree. The novel loses interest and quality the moment the marriage of Stark and Lizzie begins disintegrating and the authors show more interest in how other persons take part in their sex life than in why they live in that miserable way. The sub-plot dealing with Peter narrates how his budding political awareness–stimulated by his voracious but haphazard reading–results in his leading, though unwillingly, a more than justified workers’ protest. This ends up costing him his job and, hence, his chances of accessing the low middle-class. Yet, No Mean City is not at all a political novel, nor a text that seeks to denounce the situation of the characters in any way: it is just a vivid representation of a condition that seems to be impossible to solve; the authors demand no reaction from middle-class readers except curiosity for the human zoo that the Gorbals appears to be. They offer no pity for any of the characters, which is understandable in Johnny’s case but not so much in Peter’s and Bobby’s. Much as it happens in its main successor, Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993), the main aim seems to épater les bourgeois.
No Mean City came to attention again in 2010, in its 75 anniversary, with some controversy about whether it should be kept alive at all. An interesting article by Dave Graham (https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-glasgow/glasgow-fights-no-mean-city-tag-75-years-on-idUKTRE6042N520100105) explains that Johnny Stark’s “fondness for slashing his adversaries’ faces with razors” is still a problem today. As local police officer Carnochan warns “If you bring a child up in a war zone, you’ll create a warrior. That’s what we’re doing. I’ve been a cop for 35 years and I can tell you, you can’t arrest your way out of this”. Actually, Glasgow Police and the Town Council authorities have started a quite successful programme to if not eradicate at least to curb down the stabbings that have replaced the slashings (in my time in that city I learned that a ‘Glasgow kiss’ is a knife cut that opens both corners of the mouth…). The authorities are doing something quite simple but effective: have the gang members talk to each other. Most boys simply do not know why they are perpetuating a type of patriarchal masculinity that only finds satisfaction in hurting other equally disempowered young men, and women, and talking seems a good way to start deconstructing it.
Two issues caught my attention in particular when reading No Mean City. One is the ambition for ‘reflected glory’ that leads women like Lizzie to encourage men like Johnny onto their violent path, regardless of the dangerous consequences. The women were (and are) mostly the victims of Johnny and his ilk and, indeed, in the novel they are beaten and raped as he pleases. Yet, they are loyal, though it is also true that only as long as it is convenient. To my surprise, Johnny’s mistresses, even his wife, take other lovers without concealing this from him; Stark is so certain that his reputation will attract other girls that he does not care for any in particular (except briefly for Lizzie). The women may be disempowered in this patriarchal regime but the authors remind us that they have some domestic power derived from the unstable economy: the men are often unemployed and depend on their women; they feel, however, no qualms to let the girls pay for drink, entertainment, or household expenses–even for their upkeep. There is a kind of equality combined with inequality, though it is also evident that the couples’ social standing depends on the husband, which is why the wives are constantly judging (to their face) whether they are ‘manly’ enough to get better jobs.
The other issue is ‘the impossibility of imagining something better’. There is an obsession in No Mean City for specifying how much money each character earns at each job they take, accompanied by frequent comments on how being on the dole often pays better than taking the worst jobs. The working classes are presented as tremendous snobs that classify neighbours depending on their unkempt looks and clothes with more precision than any middle or upper-class person might use. At the same time, the jobs the characters aspire to are a limited selection–the best-paid men are Lizzie’s lover, a foreman at the bakery where they work, and Peter’s father-in-law, an usher at a ‘kinema’. Bobby manages to earn quite a nice amount of money as a professional dancer, partnering with his girlfriend and later wife Lily but their private lessons also include sexual services for the richer patrons. Not only upper middle-class professions, such as medicine or the law, are totally absent from the horizon of the Gorbals’ people but also the professions by which many working-class individuals have improved their lot: primary school teaching or nursing for women, office work or specialized positions as mechanics for men, among others. Blue-collar life is not even guaranteed in the Gorbals, though it is obvious that those with higher aspirations (mainly Peter) are trying to copy more affluent neighbours. Of course, those with no chance of upgrading their lives hate the better off workers.
School is never mentioned, either, in No Mean City and this seems to be a glaring absence. Social upward mobility was (and is) encouraged in working-class schools by teachers: to begin with, theirs might be the first and only example of employment based primarily on mental work that working-class children ever see. Things have changed very much since the 1920s of this novel but I can tell first hand that contact with teachers, particularly those in possession of university degrees, is primordial in awakening the imagination of the less privileged children to social mobility. In middle-class families this is very different: children are surrounded by relatives with socially respectable jobs and the family’s income allows them to take a higher education for granted. This does not mean that middle-class children do not face any battles but it means that they needn’t face some battles. There is an abyss between a child who wishes to be, say, a lawyer in a middle-class family and who perhaps has lawyers in the family and a child with the same vocation whose parents are constantly in and out of employment (even always out) and who, besides, knows no one with a university degree.
Obviously, primary and secondary school teachers are also often the ones to help children see beyond their family’s horizon of expectations, suggesting specific professional training, further education and even careers. Apart from them, working-class kids with a wish to pull themselves up by their bootstraps started dreaming of a chance to leave the Gorbals–or their local equivalent–thanks to each new 20th century media. Movies, the popular press, radio, television, the internet, etc… have made the representation of desirable middle-class lives constant in the cultural panorama of the working classes. Some may bemoan that the glorification of the middle classes has destroyed working-class culture but, as the authors of No Mean City claim, the truth is that, given the choice, workers prefer being middle-class. This is what Marx and Communism, generally, woefully misunderstood.
What I’m saying is that, though this may sound trite, No Mean City has taught me again a lesson I had forgotten: you need imagination to leave a working-class background behind, and this must be awakened somehow. We take it for granted that social upward mobility is there for the taking but it is not and though consumerism seems to fulfil the function of stimulating an urge for what the Victorians adored, namely self-improvement, this is still very limited. I’m well aware that in 2019 we are at the end of an attempt to allow the working classes to change their prospects thanks to the welfare state. Even the children who got university degrees are unemployed or find only bad-quality employment, while the children of the upper classes continue enjoying privileges based on their families’ networking as the middle classes are destroyed. I hear no one, however, truly discuss how social mobility works, if at all, and there is total silence about children born to affluent parents who end up being working-class by income, if not by background. There is much talk about how the current generation will have a worse life than their parents but the issue is not addressed from the point of view of how much actual upward mobility there has been, in Scotland or anywhere else.
If you ask me, I’d say that very little–the upper classes have noticed that too many working-class individuals have dared imagine a better future through education provided by the welfare state. The way to limit those dreams is by a) cutting funding for public education; b) putting as many obstacles as possible in the way of publicly-educated persons; c) forcing families to spend so much on housing that nothing is left for improving the chances for their children. And d) pretend anyone can become an overnight instant success on YouTube, Instagram, etc while allowing 1% of the population to enjoy 99% of all wealth on Earth.
Imagining a better future might not be enough but it’s a beginning.
I publish a post every Tuesday (follow @SaraMartinUAB). Comments are very welcome! Download the yearly volumes from: http://ddd.uab.cat/record/116328. My web: http://gent.uab.cat/saramartinalegre/