Faber & Faber

John Hall, a distant relative and friend, here pays tribute to Julian Hall and places his novel The Senior Commoner, a book that was much-admired by Philip Larkin, in its historical, social and literary context. He looks, too, at the author's wider work.

Well before he was thirty, Julian Hall (1907-1974) had had four books published: a book about the future of Oxford and Cambridge and three novels. The Senior Commoner was the second novel, published in January 1934 and almost immediately reprinted. It is the one that is still spoken about, no doubt mostly thanks to Philip Larkin’s 1982 Spectator article, ‘The Traffic in the Distance’ (reproduced in Required Writing), though there may be other reasons, such as a continuing and widespread fascination with its topic and setting, Eton College (Ayrton in the novel), and for the way it acknowledges and includes as a matter of course, without giving them any undue significance, both unrealised homoerotic impulses and almost domestic homosexual relations.

Larkin had ‘[n]ever read another book in the least like it’. Another way of putting this might be to talk about what it isn’t, though might have been. It is not a school adventure story; it is not a comedy of manners; it is not a portrait of the artist as a young man (or any other kind of bildungsroman), in which a protagonist survives an oppressive institution against the odds. The only novel I know - but I no longer read many novels - that comes close is Marguerite Poland’s Iron Love, written following a period of residency in a South African boarding school. And Marguerite Poland was trained as a social anthropologist and linguist. I mention this because there is something in the method of The Senior Commoner that combines fiction with ethnography. Although its title suggests a narrative about Harold Weir, who is the ‘senior commoner’, the true single figure is this social organism, the school, made up of a weave of interactions and parallel activities. Because time will always be there in fiction, this method creates another pleasurable tension, one between serialism (what comes next?) and parallelism (all these things happening at the same time).

As an ethnography, there are intended and unintended filters. This is a world of ‘maids’ and ‘odd men’ (as in odd-job, I think), who are encountered only when they interact through their work with the teaching staff and boys. But there are conventional filters which are very deliberately not used, which is why Larkin talks of ‘irrelevancy’.  An ethnographer who wants to understand a social whole cannot afford too many easy decisions about what is relevant. And there is no strong plot line to determine narrative relevance.

A method of juxtaposition works at several levels. For example, the novel is constructed out of short separate episodes that read as though placed to be near each other rather than in strict narrative sequence; and at a lower level, the paragraphs nearly all consist of short juxtaposed sentences, as in the final paragraph celebrated by Larkin, linked neither by the ‘and then’ of story nor the ‘and so’ of rhetoric. These sentences are as likely to fly off unexpectedly from each other as to add some pedantic information to the previous one (a character’s name, for example). A string of sentences will start with the same pronoun (‘He’, usually) in the subject-position and without the qualifying apparatus of subordinate clauses. The narrator seldom explains, does not himself judge, keeps prior knowledge at bay. His ears and eyes are open.

These are writerly devices familiar to certain kinds of poet. The effect, to use a painterly analogy, is to provide a worked surface rather than an illusion of depth. But it is a thick surface; there is that degree of depth.

It strikes me now that all four of his publications are ‘about’ institutions, within a wide sense of the term. In the first novel, Laura Seaborne, published when he was barely twenty-five, the ‘institution’, put at its simplest, is marriage; the theme, the lived tensions between possibilities of sexual partnership and legal marriage. Two Exiles, the last novel, is set in the world of theatre in the early 1930s. Despite the title there are actually three émigré theatre professionals in London, trying to find some compromise between the theatre they have had to leave (Russia, Berlin) and the theatre (and film) that might offer a living in England. There is close attention to the relation between the economics and sociality of entrepreneurship and permitted or supported forms of theatre.

Two Exiles was published in 1936. The political events that caused the two exiles to leave Germany were to divert Julian Hall into military intelligence. After the war he worked with BBC Home Talks. Later he continued to write theatre and sometimes film reviews but never published another novel.

Julian himself went to Eton and then on to Balliol College, Oxford, with a scholarship. He was an only son. His father, like Harold’s, did not go to Eton. His career had mostly been in public service, including time in Bechuanaland and significant Whitehall-like roles during and after World War I. He was the third son of a fifth son who, even so, within the vagaries of primogeniture, inherited a Scottish baronetcy. Julian was probably ‘put down for’ Eton in the belief that it would provide the most suitable preparation for someone who would bear an inherited title. The estate that, as it were, underwrote the title, had been sold by his uncle a year or two before he started at the school. A number of his forebears - direct and indirect - had been published writers, though Julian was the first to produce fiction.

I am related to Julian: our lines link up with a common forebear in the late eighteenth century (his great-great grandfather; my great-great-great grandfather) who was a prominent figure in the Scottish enlightenment. I knew Julian from 1959 to his death. He was kind to me and generous, especially with his time and his attention to my own reading and writing. He never mentioned his own books and I regret to say that I hadn’t read them before he died. I admire them and I am delighted that Faber Finds is publishing The Senior Commoner.