Facial Justice

Introduction

‘The past,’ wrote Hartley, in the famous opening to his most famous novel, ‘is a foreign country.’ What, then, about the future? Hartley’s crystal ball throws back a dystopian image in this late-life novel. It happens to be a spectacularly wrong-headed image – but, like much of the best science fiction (was Nineteen Eighty-Four like 1984? No, it wasn’t), its wrongness hits any number of right targets.

As a novel, Facial Justice has always been overshadowed by Hartley’s acknowledged masterpiece, The Go-Between, published seven years earlier. Unfairly so. Anthony Burgess – whose A Clockwork Orange came out two years after Facial Justice was surely right to include it as one of the ninety-nine best novels in the English language since 1939. He hailed it as ‘a brilliant projection of tendencies already apparent in the post-war British welfare state,’ a description which would as aptly fit Burgess’s sole venture into science fiction. Great authorial minds think alike. And in this case Burgess’s mind surely took some inspiration from Hartley’s.

Hartley spent his happiest years as an habitué of the country-house world whose graces and historical decline are nostalgically chronicled in The Go-Between. The tone of Facial Justice is not nostalgic. The 1960 novel is fuelled by a rage against the present world projected on to a vision of a foreseen near-future world. Call it Hartley’s 1984.

Who was this enraged man? One has to look very hard to see him. Few novelists have succeeded in keeping their lives as secret as Leslie Poles Hartley. Adrian Wright’s authoritative biography did not appear until twenty-four years after its subject’s death – by which time the trails had run cold and any illuminating literary and personal remains systematically destroyed.*

There remains, as a result, heated dispute as to whether Hartley was gay or not – or, more specifically, how actively gay. There is no record of any long-term relationship as, for instance, there is with E. M. Forster. In conversation, late in life, Hartley confided to a friend that the only man he ever loved was the Oxford don, belletrist and aristocrat Lord David Cecil, whom he met as a willowy fellow-undergraduate. Their love relationship (if any physical relationship there was) ended when, out of the blue for Hartley, Cecil announced, by letter, that he was getting married. ‘To Hartley,’ says Wright, ‘it was an act of betrayal, from which he may never have recovered.’

Hartley’s secretiveness was less timidity than prudence (so, too, may have been Cecil’s marriage – he was bisexual). It was, for gays, a period still traumatized by what had happened so frighteningly (and wrongly) to Oscar Wilde. Wright’s speculative but entirely plausible account of the intense relationship between Leslie and David, and the ‘betrayal’, provoked angry response from the surviving Cecil family. The likelihood is that posterity will never know (why should it?) any great detail about Hartley’s private life any more than it is privileged to know of the similarly discreet, and probably homosexual, Henry James.

The large outline of Hartley’s life is clear enough. He was born in 1895. His family was enriched by his solicitor father’s canny investment in a local brick works. The Hartleys were able to acquire a fine house, Fletton Tower, Peterborough. Floridly gothic in style it is currently grade II listed. Hartley never loved Fletton. Constructed in the 1840s it embodied, for him, mid-Victorian brashness which was never his more suave Edwardian style.

The family atmosphere within this handsome pile was bourgeois and moralistic, verging on oppressive. On his father’s side the family line was strict Wesleyan Methodist in religion and Liberal in politics. Hartley converted to High Anglicanism as soon as he had any choice in the matter and became stridently, and vociferously, Tory in his political views. In his rabid later years he seriously advocated criminals be branded with a relevant letter (e.g., ‘M’ for ‘murderer’) on their faces. (Was he going to carry the brand ‘Q’ for ‘queer’ on his cheek, a friend archly inquired.) He never expressed any solidarity with what he called the ‘W. C.’ – the ‘working class’. For him they were, at best, ‘S. C.’: the ‘servant class’. In addition to his long-serving Jeeves (‘Charlie’) he was never without an entourage of chauffeurs, housekeepers and maids. In this, as in other aspects of his life, he displayed the attitudes of a patrician without ever being able to claim the three generations it took to truly ‘belong’.

In his formative years Hartley was chronically over-mothered and had two sisters, one older, one younger, who dominated him emotionally. The younger, Enid, is the model for the sister in Hartley’s Eustace and Hilda trilogy, although the author was forever nervous about ever confirming the fact to her. The elder, Norah, who survived him by twenty years (having devoted her life, in Fletton Tower, to the raising of Rotherwood Deerhounds), appointed herself the custodian of her brother’s reputation. She did it with a ferocity to rival that of her hounds.

The sense of being dominated by women (something structurally important in Facial Justice) was intensified by young Leslie not being sent to school until he was ten years old. He eventually attended Harrow (where he was head boy), then Balliol College, Oxford, in 1915. The university was sadly depopulated and demoralized by the war and, defying his mother’s orders, he volunteered in April 1916. He was commissioned as an infantry officer but never saw active service, and was invalided out of the army, unwounded but disabled, two months before the Armistice. Apparently he had sustained shell shock – without ever having heard the sound of a shell fired in anger.

He returned to Oxford, to complete his history degree. A disappointing second-class degree result precluded his joining starred first-class David Cecil as a don, which would have suited him. Faute de mieux in his, and the century’s, twenties he went on to make himself a leading London man of letters, throwing off thousands of reviews. His literary opinions were intelligent, unadventurous and always elegantly expressed. The writer he admired most was Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom Facial Justice is dedicated with ‘homage’ and ‘apologies’. Hawthorne, Hartley said, was ‘the biggest influence on my mind and general attitude towards reality’. Hallmark Hawthornian allegory can be picked up throughout Facial Justice. Bodily marks, a black veil, and ‘letters’ (as in The Scarlet Letter) denoting character are prominent devices.*

Hartley earned well from his pen but it was merely a top-up to his unearned private income. He was one of the few novelists of his day to be bothered by the Inland Revenue with demands for ‘supertax’. Socially he hated interwar London, which he saw (eccentrically) as poisoned by ‘jazz’. The country was more to his taste. As Wright records, ‘Much of his life was spent in a seemingly ceaseless grand tour of the houses of the rich and famous.’ Here it was that he formed his most lasting friendships with women of a higher-born class than himself, such as Cynthia Asquith and Lady Ottoline Morrell (her blue plaque, in London’s Gower Street, reads, uniquely for that honour, ‘literary hostess’). Virginia Woolf (after whose father, Leslie Stephen, he had been named) in a catty diary comment recording her first meeting with him at Morrell’s country house, Garsington, summed him up as ‘a dull fat man’. Everyone agreed, however, that he had good manners.

In 1927, Hartley had his first experience of Venice – a place he seems to have loved more than any man or woman in his life. Venice became his home and England the place he was obliged to visit. The Italian city, says Wright, ‘became a necessity to Hartley’, not simply because of the loveliness and mystery which had entranced writers such as Ruskin and Thomas Mann, but because ‘it distanced him from his mother and Fletton Tower’.

Hartley was forced to repatriate in 1939 (his mother still living) with the outbreak of war. It upset him hugely but, paradoxically, the upset kick-started his career as a novelist of distinction. Hitherto he had been known as a littérateur with a few short stories (best of all ghost stories) to his name. In 1944, closing in on fifty years of age, he published the first of his major novels, The Shrimp and the Anemone, a work with whose composition he had been struggling for twenty years. It was followed over the next three years by two sequels. The bottle was uncorked.

After the war Italy was again available. Hard as it is to visualize, Hartley wrote parts of Facial Justice in 1950s Venice, pen and pad in hand, ‘gondoling’ over the still waters of the city (he employed a personal gondolier and, Wright suggests, may have been interested in the famously handsome profession for personal reasons other than transport). Not for L. P. Hartley the diet of the post-war ration book, make and mend, darned socks and turned collars. How he managed to afford an expensive Venetian apartment and lifestyle in a period of stringent currency exchange regulations, and none the less keep on the right side of the law, is mysterious.

Hartley appends, precisely, the dates of Facial Justice’s composition, ‘January 1953–September 1959’. This is a novel, he clearly wishes the reader to know, which, using the apparatus of science fiction, allegorizes his detested English 1950s, the decade in which he wrote it. What principally discoloured life in that decade (I remember it well) was a sense that the Second World War had barely ended and, dammit, the Third World War was about to begin. In 1946, Churchill announced the clunking fall of an ‘iron curtain’ across Europe. In 1947, President Truman informed the world that the USSR now had nuclear weapons. And what weapons. In 1954, scientists came up with the 100-megaton H-bomb: a weapon which, if ever the superpowers went to war, would incinerate human civilization in, it was estimated, twenty minutes, with four minutes’ warning to those about to be incinerated. And war seemed more than likely. The race to mutually assured destruction was on.

Hartley’s dystopia is set after a catastrophic nuclear conflict in which both sides lose and most of mankind is exterminated. Those twenty million who survived in deep caverns have split into two dictatorships: one (the smaller) above, the other below, ground. (Wells’s terrestrial Eloi and subterranean Morlocks in The Time Machine are evoked.)

It was an eruption (called ‘the exodus’) from the Underworld, led by a strange messiah, ‘the pretty gentleman’, which established the smaller colony in the ‘upper air’. It is with this remnant that Facial Justice is exclusively concerned. What’s going on in the subterranean realm is never described. The portals between the two worlds are guarded.

Above ground an invisible, but everywhere audible via loudspeaker, ‘Darling Dictator’ rules, and has done so for fifteen years. (Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’ may have been in Hartley’s mind.) But the ‘D.D.’ is not tyrannic – at least not in the sense that ‘his’ tyranny requires thugs in black leather and their truncheons. It is what one might call ‘soft tyranny’ but, in its effect, is quite as ruthless as any hard variety might be. He imposes a benign regime based on the ‘Voluntary Principle’. ‘Peace’, in this future world, is maintained by the extinction of all individuality, aspiration and hierarchy. Above ground there is no longer any ‘nature’. Nothing grows. The climate has been altered by nuclear catastrophe – the population shivers and wraps up against ‘perpetual March’ (despite what Eliot says, always the cruellest month in England). Food is factory-manufactured chemicals and is consumed as tablets (different-coloured ones for different courses). There are no politics. There is no class. Neither is there family. Children (what few there are – most above-ground citizens are sterile) are raised by state-appointed ‘kiddy-kuddlers’, who, despite their name, aren’t in the slightest cuddlesome. Five minutes’ laughter a day are allowed the above-ground population. Again one recalls Orwell’s ‘Two Minutes Hate’ ritual in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Another five minutes is allowed for ‘S. T.’ – ‘serious thought’.

Underpinning the drab egalitarianism of the ‘New State’ (there are no longer any countries, nations or ‘peoples’) is collective guilt. Who did this to humanity? Humanity itself, the fools. Citizens of this un-named world are named after murderers with numerical surnames.* Varieties of sackcloth are the universal garb. Women’s hair is dusted with ash.

Everyone is either a self-flagellating ‘delinquent’ or a ‘patient’ requiring cure. The word ‘citizen’ is prohibited. Life is an everlasting Methodist Sunday (it’s not hard to see Hartley paying off some Fletton Tower childhood resentments). Discipline is enforced by golden-helmeted, white-booted ‘Inspectors’ – each given one of the seven archangels’ names – who cajole rather than bully. Mysteriously, they have the power of flight and of being everywhere.

There is no violence, no Orwellian ‘Room 101’, no dignity, no art, no sport, no music, no country houses, no fine wine, no literature. Cinemas show nothing but gruesome films of murders and violent crime: not for entertainment, but as aversion therapy. Infractions are punished with minor fines, a period in plain sackcloth, or – in more serious offences – two rounds of golf (Hartley did not enjoy everything about country-house weekends). Only for true incorrigibles is the far more sinister penalty applied, of being ‘Returned Empty’ to the underground caverns.

Women’s faces in the New State, if they are marginally short of unexceptionably beautiful (Alpha class), are ‘betafied’ – so as not to create envy among the Gammas of the sex (Hartley’s use of the public school/Oxbridge grading system, as in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, rather protrudes here). Men are not required to be betafied. Female betafication, ordained by the ‘Ministry for Facial Justice’, involves plastic surgery and a uniform, inflexible, facial mask that doesn’t quite equate with a human face.

Cosmetic surgery was becoming a topic of public interest in the post-war 1950s. ‘War,’ said Trotsky, ‘is the locomotive of history.’ It is also an opportunity for surgery to make huge advances. Hartley was aware of the heroic work of Archibald McIndoe, consultant in plastic surgery to the RAF in the Second World War years. McIndoe had a near miraculous skill in mending burned faces of airmen. Cosmetic surgery, aimed to beautify not to repair, took off as an industry in the 1950s. Marilyn Monroe, for example, had ‘work’ done – a reshaped nose (‘rhinoplasty’) – which rendered her, by the standards of the time, Alpha double plus.

At fifty everyone, said Orwell, has the face they deserve. But what if society decides he or she should have a face they don’t deserve, or weren’t born with? This is one teasing question raised by Facial Justice.*

It was Brian Aldiss, in his grand survey of the genre,† who made the point that science fiction is ‘prodromic’, not, as is vulgarly thought, ‘prophetic’. What purports to be the shape of things to come is, usually, the shape of things as they are, viewed with a clearer, more sceptical eye. Put another way: Nineteen Eighty-Four = 1948.

Hartley’s big target in Facial Justice is the welfare state, brought in by Attlee’s post-war Labour Government, riding the ‘khaki’ election of 1945. The Weasels and Stoats had taken over Toad Hall – and no Brock, Ratty and Moley to restore it to its proper-class owners. For Orwell, writing in the late 1940s, the embryonic dictatorship in Britain was all about power. O’Brien’s image of a boot stamping on a human face forever is the image that sticks indelibly in the mind. For Evelyn Waugh it is vandalism: oiks like Hooper tramping through the sacrosanct corridors of Brideshead. For Hartley, it is class envy – the ‘WC’ usurping the good things that only their superiors were equipped (and entitled) to enjoy. How to solve the envy problem? Abolish everything that might inspire it. ‘E&E’, ‘Equality and Envy’, ‘Good E’ and ‘Bad E’, are the two core principles around which upper-air society revolves in Facial Justice. In the name of egalitarianism everything that makes life worth living (but might inspire envy) is abolished.

Hartley is a master of opening scenes and that in Facial Justice is among his more masterful. Jael 97 has what is a routine ‘female’ conversation with Judith 91, an old friend, whom she has just met outside the Equalization (Faces) Centre. Both are going in for the ‘process’ and ‘Each felt that she was seeing her old friend for the first and also – it simultaneously occurred to them both – for the last time.’ Jael has been indicted by the Ministry of Facial Justice as ‘over-privileged’. Twenty-five complaints from other, envious, women have been received. She is, by facial category, a ‘Failed Alpha’, A minus. That means she is not quite beautiful enough to be left alone (a faint scar on one cheek, self-inflicted, has brought her down a notch). Full Alphas are recruited as ‘Misses’ – vestals – and let be. Nor is Jael a ‘born Beta’ – a category who are also left alone, on the grounds that no one envies them. Judith, less fair of face, barely scrapes a Gamma in the facial classification system. Betafication for her will be facial promotion.

Judith persuades her friend not to undergo the operation, with Jael thus transgressing ‘Chapter 19, sub-section 3 of the Revised Pandects’ and defying her civil servant brother, Joab, who loyally thinks facial demotion is her duty to the state. But when, after the rebellious and ultimately violent events at Ely Cathedral, Jael is involuntarily betafied, she brings about a powerful revolution through dance, subversion, journalism and female guile. By the end of Facial Justice, the DD’s regime has come to an end – but what the future holds the novel does not divulge. ‘Whether Jael was going to do any better, I doubt,’ Hartley pronounced, musingly, some years later. He hadn’t worked it out himself, apparently.

As prophetically accurate future history Facial Justice is as wrong as wrong could be. But there is an inner truth. The 1950s in Britain were blighted by state-imposed egalitarianism, excessive bureaucracy and uniformity. I recall going to dances on Saturday nights – every male in a charcoal-grey suit, the waltzers/foxtrotters gyrating slowly, in the identical ‘steps’. Hair all short back and sides for the men, ‘permed’ for the ladies. For many males khaki, and even shorter b&s awaited in the shape of National Service. The universal uniformity was all blown to pieces, thank God, in the 1960s – the most individualistic, colourful and insubordinate decade in British history. It’s too bad that the author of Facial Justice, in his mid-sixties, too set in his ways, was too old, and too sozzled (he was by this period wholly alcoholic), to enjoy the swinging decade to come. Facial Justice remains the wittiest, and most engagingly savage, of satires on the dreary decade that preceded it.

John Sutherland, London, 2014

L. P. Hartley

FACIAL JUSTICE

PENGUIN CLASSICS

Contents

FACIAL JUSTICE

THE BEGINNING

Introduction

Glossary of murderers’ names in Facial Justice

Part One