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Jack Common | |
---|---|
Born | Heaton, Newcastle, England | 15 August 1903
Died | 20 January 1968 64) Newport Pagnell, England | (aged
Occupation | Writer |
Nationality | British |
Period | 1928–1968 |
Notable works | Kiddar's Luck, The Ampersand |
Jack Common (15 August 1903 – 20 January 1968) was a British socialist, essayist and novelist. [1]
Common's writing was warm, ironic and quirky. He soon won admirers throughout the 1930s as a writer with a genuine proletarian viewpoint, as distinct from the purveyors of middle-class Marxist fiction. He was invited in 1930 by John Middleton Murry, founder and editor The Adelphi , who had noticed an essay he had written, to become circulation promoter and later assistant editor of the magazine. For a period in 1936 he was acting editor, and a collection of his articles The Freedom of the Streets appeared in 1938. V.S. Pritchett considered the book to have been the most influential in his life, and George Orwell heard in the essays 'the authentic voice of the ordinary working man, the man who might infuse a new decency into the control of affairs if only he could get there, but who in practice never seems to get much further than the trenches, the sweatshop and the jail.' [2] E. M. Forster also praised Common as a "warm-hearted, matey writer." [3]
Common's writings about the day-to-day realities of workers lives include descriptions of how work was performed and production organized, and how knowledge was transmitted from worker to worker. Common's writing also reflects on the separation between the ideas of middle-class intellectuals and the ideas of workers. In his usual warm tone, he wrote "Very likely we will have to await the arrival of the intellectuals-in-touch, the unemployed man at present reading in public libraries, the young stoker spending the mornings of his back-shift week ploughing through Shaw and Lawrence, fumbling his way through acceptances and rejections towards a cultural consciousness which squares with this communal experience." [4]
He inspired, prefaced and edited the compilation Seven Shifts (1938), in which seven working men told of their experience. Common and Orwell became friends, [5] corresponding and occasionally meeting when Common was running the village shop in Datchworth, Hertfordshire, about ten miles from Orwell's Wallington cottage. The impractical Orwell asked Common's advice on setting up his own shop. After the war he was engaged in writing film scripts including Good Neighbours (1946), about a community scheme in a Scottish town; [6] he also travelled to Newfoundland and Labrador on another film assignment.
In 1951 Turnstile Press published Common's best-known book, the autobiographical Kiddar's Luck, in which he vividly describes his childhood on the streets of Edwardian Tyneside, as seen through the lens of his adult socialism. There are four chapters on his life before five years old – a feat of detailed memory – while his mother's alcoholism and the overbearing father whom Jack at length dramatically defies, form the dark background to the vigorous, at times bravura, narrative. The book found praise as a slice of Geordie naturalism, a convincing depiction of 'the other England' which so beguiled the imagination of contemporary intellectuals. On the other hand, its irony and subtly bitter universality went largely unrecognised.
In The Ampersand (1954) Common took the story further, but his publishers went into liquidation two years later. [7] Neither book had been a commercial success and Common had not completed the trilogy with his long-promised Riches and Rare, a novel set in Newcastle at the time of the General Strike. Too early (or too old) to be an angry young man of the 1950s, Common was unable to sustain a career in writing. His political attitudes were by now out of fashion, and when he sent the manuscript of In Whitest Britain (1961) to his friend Eric Warman in London, Warman replied in a letter of 7 June 1961 that he was sorry 'such a bloody good writer' could not achieve success. There was too much 'class distinction' in the book, and the downtrodden, golden-hearted workman was a dated 'leading cliché'. Thus Jack Common, perhaps the finest chronicler of the English working class to follow Robert Tressell, spent his last years in Newport Pagnell writing film treatments at poor rates.
He was born in Heaton, Newcastle upon Tyne, [5] close to the rail-sheds where his father worked as an engine-driver. After attending Chillingham Road School, where he developed a lifelong love of Shelley, and Skerry's College, Newcastle, where he gained some secretarial skills, Common found it difficult to extend his education or get a rewarding job. He became a vigorous speaker in socialist circles at the Royal Arcade in Newcastle and began submitting articles to left-wing journals.
In 1928, against the wishes of his father, Common went to London with hope of a better chance of finding work than at home. After a stint as a mechanic in a machine factory, where he was sacked for making suggestions to improve work procedures, he was invited in 1930 by Murry, founder and editor The Adelphi , who had noticed an essay he had written, to become circulation promoter and later assistant editor of the magazine. At this time Common and his partner, Mary Anderson (1901–1942), a childhood friend from Newcastle who went south to join him, had a son, Peter; another son, Robert, was born later. Though they never married, touching love letters survive from their courtship. Common was poor enough by now to be subsidised by Orwell on occasion, and when the latter was in Morocco in 1938 Common and Mary Anderson looked after the Wallington cottage. [8]
In 1939, during the editorship of Max Plowman (1938–1941), Common left The Adelphi, which by now had become a significant socialist/pacifist publication, closely allied to the Peace Pledge Union. At some time during the Second World War Common moved Peter to Frating Community Farm in Essex, where conscientious objectors, Quakers and refugees attempted to avoid contributing to the war effort by self-sustaining farming. Though many of the men had been in heavy rescue and ambulance work during the Blitz and the women in the Land Army.
Mary died in 1942 from cancer, and Common began living with and eventually married Constance Helena (Connie) Wood, née Sambidge (1902–1979), who had a son Jan from her first marriage to Gilbert Wood, another Newcastle friend of his youth. Their first daughter Caroline Alison (Sally) was born in 1944, followed by twin daughters Mary and Charmian, born in 1946. Meanwhile, Common took part in a number of wartime BBC radio broadcasts, including a lively debate, 'What Matters?', broadcast on 19 June 1942, which featured two opposing sets of speakers representing, roughly, suburbia and 'the streets'. Common remarked: 'I like a good argument'. The family changed residence several times, ending up in a council house at 32 Warren Hamlet, Storrington, Sussex, with Common trying to make ends meet by working at a mushroom nursery, while toiling over scripts and reviews at night, and writing for himself in between. He was acutely oppressed by financial insecurity—and the lack of beer and tobacco.
In 1956 Common embarked upon a two-year stint as guide to Chastleton House in the Cotswolds, a position obtained for him through Sir Richard Rees (editor of Adelphi, 1930–1938). Predictable disagreements with the owner, Alan Clutton-Brock, put an end to an arrangement whereby Common had been able to get some writing done in the winter months.
In 1958 a friend from Frating days, Irene Palmer, was instrumental in obtaining a rented Georgian house at 14 St John Street, in the centre of Newport Pagnell. There Common spent hours working on books for film treatment reviews in the 'garden' (a cemetery), walking with Connie in the countryside they both loved, and reading to his children. His daughter Sally later recalled listening to Shelley and Omar Khayyam in the translation of Edward FitzGerald, whose atheistic stance Common was at pains to emphasise. He had always been interested in astronomy (his Uncle Robin was a flat-earther), and Fred Hoyle's theory of an endlessly self-renewing universe, which dispensed with a creator, was attractive.
Common was not a joiner or an activist, nor did he encourage his children to be so. He did, however, blossom in the right setting, often in pubs (a favourite was The Bull in Newport Pagnell), where he enjoyed political arguments with self-taught thinkers like himself. Another favourite haunt was the nearby working men's club on Silver Street, where he took his slippered ease at the bar. He was a connoisseur of beer and was described by his friend Tommy McCulloch as 'fairly jolly' at this period, though he retained his hatred of the 'bulky bourgeoisie' – and kept his Newcastle accent.
He died of lung cancer in 1968, leaving a mass of unpublished material, which forms the Jack Common Archive, now held in Special Collections at Newcastle University Library. [9]
Sculptor Laurence Bradshaw used Common's brow as a model for his bust of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery, saying that he found there a similar patience and understanding.
The folk singer/songwriter Jez Lowe has an album entitled Jack Common's Anthem, containing a song of the same name.
In 2009, North-East poet and scholar Keith Armstrong published Common Words and the Wandering Star, about Jack Common and his work. He has drawn extensively on the archive.
North East folk band, Kiddars Luck, formed by John Dixon, Colin McLelland and Alan Beadle have a track on their album, Where the Red Kites Fly, called "Jack The Lad" dedicated to Jack Common.
Eric Arthur Blair was a British novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell, a name inspired by his favourite place, the River Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to all totalitarianism, and support of democratic socialism.
Keep the Aspidistra Flying, first published in 1936, is a socially critical novel by George Orwell set in 1930s London. The main theme is Gordon Comstock's romantic ambition to defy worship of the money-god and status, and the dismal life that results.
Down and Out in Paris and London is the first full-length work by the English author George Orwell, published in 1933. It is a memoir in two parts on the theme of poverty in the two cities. Its target audience was the middle- and upper-class members of society—those who were more likely to be well educated—and it exposes the poverty existing in two prosperous cities: Paris and London. The first part is an account of living in near-extreme poverty and destitution in Paris and the experience of casual labour in restaurant kitchens. The second part is a travelogue of life on the road in and around London from the tramp's perspective, with descriptions of the types of hostel accommodation available and some of the characters to be found living on the margins.
Homage to Catalonia is a 1938 memoir by English writer George Orwell, in which he accounts his personal experiences and observations while fighting in the Spanish Civil War.
The Road to Wigan Pier is a book by the English writer George Orwell, first published in 1937. The first half of this work documents his sociological investigations of the bleak living conditions among the working class in Lancashire and Yorkshire in the industrial north of England before World War II. The second half is a long essay on his middle-class upbringing, and the development of his political conscience, questioning British attitudes towards socialism. Orwell states plainly that he himself is in favour of socialism, but feels it necessary to point out reasons why many people who would benefit from socialism, and should logically support it, are in practice likely to be strong opponents.
Eileen Maud Blair was the first wife of George Orwell. During World War II, she worked for the Censorship Department of the Ministry of Information in London and the Ministry of Food.
John Middleton Murry was an English writer. He was a prolific author, producing more than 60 books and thousands of essays and reviews on literature, social issues, politics, and religion during his lifetime. A prominent critic, Murry is best remembered for his association with Katherine Mansfield, whom he married in 1918 as her second husband, for his friendship with D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot, and for his friendship with Frieda Lawrence. Following Mansfield's death, Murry edited her work.
A Hanging (1931) is a short essay written by George Orwell, first published in August 1931 in the John Middleton Murry’s British literary magazine The Adelphi and then reprinted in 1946 in the British literary magazine The New Savoy. Set in Burma, where Orwell had served in the British Imperial Police from 1922 to 1927, it describes the execution of a criminal.
John Rayner Heppenstall was a British novelist, poet, diarist, and a BBC radio producer.
Mark Plowman, generally known as Max Plowman, was a British writer and pacifist.
"The Spike" is a 1931 essay by George Orwell in which he details his experience staying overnight in the casual ward of a workhouse near London. This episode in Orwell's life took place while he was intentionally living as a vagrant in and around London as part of the social experiment that would form the basis of his first book Down and Out in Paris and London. The events of this essay are also found in that book, though the essay is not reprinted verbatim in the book.
The Adelphi or New Adelphi was an English literary journal founded by John Middleton Murry and published between 1923 and 1955. The first issue appeared in June 1923, with issues published monthly thereafter. Between August 1927 and September 1930 it was renamed the New Adelphi and issued quarterly. Murry was editor until 1930, when he handed over to Sir Richard Rees and the monthly issues resumed. Rees was succeeded by Max Plowman in 1938. The magazine included one or two stories per issue with contributions by Katherine Mansfield, A.A. Milne, D. H. Lawrence, H. E. Bates, Rhys Davies, G.B. Edwards and Dylan Thomas. The Adelphi published George Orwell's "The Spike" in 1931 and Orwell contributed regularly thereafter, particularly as a reviewer; in the late 1930s/early 1940s, working class writers Jack Common and Jack Hilton also contributed.
Sir Richard Lodowick Edward Montagu Rees, 2nd Baronet was a British diplomat, writer, humanitarian, and painter.
The Criterion was a British literary magazine published from October 1922 to January 1939. The Criterion was, for most of its run, a quarterly journal, although for a period in 1927–28 it was published monthly. It was created by the poet, dramatist, and literary critic T. S. Eliot who served as its editor for its entire run.
The "London Letters" were a series of fifteen articles written by George Orwell when invasion by Nazi Germany seemed imminent, and published in the American left-wing literary magazine Partisan Review. As well as these "London Letters", PR also published other articles by Orwell.
"Confessions of a Book Reviewer" is a narrative essay published in 1946 by the English author George Orwell. In it, he discusses the lifestyle of a book reviewer and criticises the practice of reviewing almost every book published, which gives rise to this lifestyle.
"A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray" is an essay by the English author George Orwell. In it Orwell encourages the public-spirited action of planting trees, which may well make up for the harm people do in their lives. The essay was first published in Tribune on 26 April 1946.
The bibliography of George Orwell includes journalism, essays, novels, and non-fiction books written by the British writer Eric Blair (1903–1950), either under his own name or, more usually, under his pen name George Orwell. Orwell was a prolific writer on topics related to contemporary English society and literary criticism, who has been declared "perhaps the 20th century's best chronicler of English culture." His non-fiction cultural and political criticism constitutes the majority of his work, but Orwell also wrote in several genres of fictional literature.
Joe Wilson was a Tyneside concert hall songwriter and performer in the mid-19th century. His most famous song is "Keep yor feet still Geordie hinny". He was a contemporary of George "Geordie" Ridley. He wrote and sang in the Geordie dialect of Newcastle upon Tyne, his native speech.
Jack Hilton was a British outsider novelist and essayist adopted into the modernist movement of the 1930s. Hilton's works were experimental, using semi-autobiographical first-person narratives and internal monologue to probe the relation of events in his life - and the lives of his characters - to the feelings and attitudes of himself and his subjects. His writing was also unconventional at the time of its publication for its proud but critical depictions of working-class people and settings, centring on his native Lancashire.
For a selection of articles by Jack Common, further biography and a photograph: Jack Common - selected articles