Gentle Readers will be aware that YHB has been on something of a James Hilton kick. Well, it’s not really accurate to call it a kick, I suppose. Four novels in three years and change. Still, that’s more James Hilton than you’ve read, I suppose.
The latest one is called Time and Time Again; it’s also the last book he published, back in 1954. It’s an odd little book. It’s the life of a boring but rather sweet fellow, to whom very little actually happens. I’m a fiend for narrative, and this book is about character. I liked it anyway, although I didn’t adore it. I think I just like the way Mr. Hilton wrote.
Also, I found myself interested in the focus of the book, which is (more or less) a wistful look at the vanishing pre-war IVSRs, particularly as they applied to the very English class our protagonist belonged to. This is the upper-class that isn’t the aristocracy, that is of good family but not blue blood, that goes to public schools but not Eton or Harrow, goes to Oxford or Cambridge and then gets a job, probably something in the City, but perhaps law or diplomacy or even journalism. They aren’t working-class, and the IVSRs of their class prevent them from doing working-class jobs.
There’s a literary tradition of depicting this class, although often it’s the more affluent end of it that turns up. Mr. Bennet’s son, if he had one, would have been in this class. Mr. Jarndyce is of that class but his wealth makes him a squire, instead; Mr. Tulkinghorn and Mr. Kenge are better examples. Nicholas Nickleby Senior was in the class, but Nicholas Junior drops out of it and Ralph Nickleby leaves it. Colonel Pickering and Henry Higgins, although of course Henry Higgins has no class at all. A better example from Shaw is the daughters of Captain Shotover, or their husbands. They are a trifle older than Stuffy Anderson, but he could have married Ellie Dunn. He’s neither a Boss Mangan nor a Marcus Darnley, but he’s not Sir Hastings Utterword either, although he probably worked for him.
The difference, of course, is that where G.B. Shaw celebrates the destruction of that class, and its absurd and useless pretensions (as he would call their ISVRs), James Hilton rather mourns it. The pretensions are absurd and useless, true, but they are gentle, in nearly every sense of that word, and gentility is something that Mr. Shaw had no time for, but that Mr. Hilton finds … well, preferable to its alternatives.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.