Books: Slummies

No MEAN CITY—Alexander McArthur & H. Kingsley Long—Longmans, Green ($2.50).

Good collaborations in fiction are rare.

Collaborators are somewhat in the position of two men trying to see the same object through a single pair of binoculars: when it is in focus for one, it is blurred and out of perspective to the other. Two years ago two British writers, one a Glasgow slum dweller, the other a London journalist, turned their imaginative spyglass on the squalid, violent Gorbols section of Glasgow, on the south bank of the Clyde. Last week they reported on what they had seen, in a strange uneven book that suggested they could not quite agree on their findings. They saw horrors galore, filth, brutality, misshapen creatures of an unknown kind, a few recognizable human beings.

The story back of No Mean City is almost more significant than the one it tells. Alexander McArthur had lost his job in Glasgow in 1929, spent the next five years writing novels based on the lives of his Gorbols neighbors. The books that he submitted to Longmans, Green were considered unpublishable by that staid publishing firm, which hired H. Kingsley Long (Limey: an Englishman Joins the Gangs) to read the manuscripts and check on the accuracy of McArthur’s grim accounts. The resulting collaboration plainly shows the joints and seams of each author’s contribution, with McArthur presumably providing the harsh dialog, the accounts of Gorbols’ uncivilized ways, with Long interspersing pompous, horrified comments as the story unwinds.

The tale revolves around Johnnie Stark, a petty gangster who fought with razors, picked up one girl after another, married, led his gang against the gangs of other slum districts, was eventually killed when hoodlums caught him without his weapons. His story is paralleled by that of his brother, Peter, who was driven by a fierce determination to get out of the slums, became a white-collar worker, married a good, respectable girl, but landed in trouble when he was forced to lead a strike. Aside from these two, the clearest characterization is Lizzie, Johnnie’s wife, who married beneath her station, became obsessed with her husband’s fighting ability, egged him into one fight after another, provided him with girls when his passion for her ended. Although these figures are sometimes vividly seen, they tend to disappear or grow cloudy as the descriptions of the customs and habits of mind of the “slummies” interrupt the narrative.

For U. S. readers the most unpleasant aspect of No Mean City is likely to be a note of hypocritical horror that runs through it. Writing as if the poverty-stricken masses they describe belonged to some savage tribe heretofore unknown, the authors solemnly state that “their novel deals only with one seam in the crowded life of the Empire’s second city.” They add that Glasgow is making a determined effort “to rehouse and to help its poorer citizens.” After picturing stables that would tax the strength of a dozen Hercules, they end their book with a vague reference to “preachers and social workers” who entered the wilderness of Gorbols, improved conditions so much that desperadoes like Johnnie Stark could no longer flourish there.