Bad-tempered Neurotics?

An Examination of Nigel Balchin’s Leading Male Characters

This is the first in a three-part series devoted to a study of the characters who populate Nigel Balchin’s novels.

Introduction

I have a theory that when the heroes of Nigel Balchin’s novels are about 15, a girl dares them to dive off a high board and they are afraid to do so. By the time they are old enough to be a character in one of Mr. Balchin’s books they have become bad-tempered neurotics who bully their women, torment themselves, and can only achieve a measure of salvation by carrying out a feat of extreme daring.

This opinion, advanced by the Daily Mail’s film reviewer at the time of the release of the movie version of The Small Back Room, has become almost received wisdom about the nature of Balchin’s leading men. According to the stereotype, the protagonists of Balchin’s novels tend to be self-loathing curmudgeons who are crippled or otherwise emasculated in some way, trapped in doomed, unhappy relationships and frequently put upon or outmanoeuvred by their superiors in the workplace. Like most stereotypes, this one possesses more than a grain of truth but, as I hope to show in this article, the situation is slightly more complicated than it may appear at first sight.

Early characters—“the unwitting innocents”

The central characters of Balchin’s first three novels (George Ordyne in No Sky, Rufus Wade in Simple Life and Alfred Lightbody in Lightbody on Liberty) are all similar in the sense that they are unwitting innocents dragged into an unfamiliar milieu in which they gradually find themselves to be out of their depth in some way. George, a medical student who has to take a job in an engineering factory when his father dies, becomes entombed by his work and trapped in a loveless marriage. Rufus cannot handle the drudgery of his job as an advertising copywriter in London and so hands in his notice and jilts his attractive fiancée on the same day. At first he seems to derive contentment from living a free and easy existence as part of a ménage-a-trois in the rural depths of Wiltshire but ultimately becomes bamboozled by the motivations of the two other people in the triangle. In Lightbody on Liberty, Alfred is thrust into the limelight as the unlikely figurehead of a popular movement for justice but later endures crushing disappointment when he realizes that he has been taken for a ride.

Mature characters—“the bad-tempered neurotics”

This is where the stereotype mentioned above holds most water. The main characters from Balchin’s mature period are world-weary, cynical and sarcastic, weighed down with problems in both their private and working lives and encumbered by one or more physical, psychological or emotional handicaps. In the novels that Balchin wrote during the Second World War we first encounter what The Times once described as “the characteristic Balchin hero”. Men such as Bill Sarratt in Darkness Falls From the Air, Sammy Rice in The Small Back Room and Felix Milne in Mine Own Executioner represent excellent examples of the archetype of “a good, intelligent man despairingly obsessed by one private failing”.

For Bill Sarratt, the failing in question is his inability to stop his wife straying from the path of marital fidelity, although one might also mention in this regard his failure to get his bright ideas approved by his superiors at the Ministry. Sammy Rice is distraught when he fails to dismantle the booby-trapped bomb himself and haunted by the thought that the crucial “half a turn with a wrench” was administered by someone else’s hand. The psycho-analyst Felix Milne despairs of his inability to deal with his own personal problems in the same measured and effective way in which he handles those of his clients.

Late characters—“the men who know how things ought to be done”

Beginning in the early 1950s, Balchin’s central characters undergo a marked personality shift: the cynical neurotics from the wartime books are replaced by a set of rather smug and supercilious control freaks. In his 1974 article about Balchin (http://www.clivejames.com/pieces/hercules/balchin), Clive James correctly identified this change in the characters who inhabit the later books:

There is always a character, usually a major one and often enough the holder of the main viewpoint, who knows how things ought to be done.

Two examples serve to illustrate the attitudes and mien of these characters. In 1951’s A Way Through The Wood, Jim Manning insists that his wife get out of bed early on Easter Monday so that she can witness the fall of light on the façade of their elegant Queen Anne house:

‘Come and look at the house with the sun on the front. It’s lovely.’

‘Can’t I say it’s lovely from here?’

‘No.’

The patronizing demeanour and controlling personality of Jim Petersen (In The Absence of Mrs Petersen) are exquisitely distilled by a thought that occurs to him in a Parisian restaurant:

I remembered that in our last few years together I had been in the habit of making Sarah choose the wine, because it was good practice for her in knowing what the whole wine affair is about.

Other examples of this new type of character include Henry Payne, the narrator of The Fall of the Sparrow, who is constantly trying to influence the direction of Jason Pellew’s life and Frank Lewis, the physiologist in Kings of Infinite Space, who treats the women in his life as little more than sexual playthings.

The exception to the rule: the unclassifiable Jason Pellew

Jason Pellew is one of Balchin’s most fascinating protagonists, principally because he doesn’t fit into any of the neat categories outlined above. At times he certainly resembles an innocent caught up in events beyond his control but unlike the characters in the first three novels he also suffers from marked psychological disorders (one reviewer described him as “a bundle of symptom-formations”). He is not a professional man like Sarratt, Milne or Rice, but more of an aimless drifter flitting from job to job. Jason is too strange and different, too complex a personality, to be slotted neatly into any sort of pigeonhole. As Clive James observed, Jason possesses “an independent personality, one that can’t fully be reproduced on a punched card.” This is perhaps because Jason’s character was based on that of a real person whom Balchin knew slightly.

Characteristics of the characters

1. Difficulties with women

There are a number of common features that unite Balchin’s major characters, the first being the rocky nature of their love lives. It is practically unheard of for true love to run smooth in a Balchin novel: in almost every book the hero is forced to vie with at least one other rival for the attention of the woman he has his eye on (or is married to).

Beginning with Darkness Falls From the Air in 1942, love triangles became a mainstay of Balchin’s plots, although as hinted at previously it should be noted that a triangle is also present and correct in Simple Life. The most famous love triangle of all is to be found in A Way Through The Wood, written soon after Balchin’s wife Elisabeth had left him to go and live with the artist Michael Ayrton.

2. Disabilities

There are not quite as many disabled characters in Balchin’s books as some critics would have you believe. In terms of those with a physical handicap, the only examples that readily spring to mind are Sammy Rice with his false foot, the double-amputee Ivor Gates in A Sort of Traitors, the very sickly Uncle Patrick in Seen Dimly Before Dawn (who was gassed in the First World War) and the limping ex-RAF pilot Adam Lucian in Mine Own Executioner, although his problems are localized far more obviously in his head than his legs.

Of course, many of Balchin’s principal characters are afflicted by psychological disorders of some form or other, prime examples being the megalomania of Cesare Borgia (The Borgia Testament) and Walter Lang (Sundry Creditors), Adam Lucian’s schizophrenia and Jason Pellew’s kleptomania and assorted other symptoms. Quite a lot of the characters are experiencing an ongoing emotional crisis, such as Jim Petersen grieving the death of his wife and Bill Sarratt and Jim Manning having to put up with being (at least temporarily) separated from theirs. We also encounter two examples—Jason in The Fall of the Sparrow and Lawrence Spellman in Sundry Creditors—of war heroes who are unable to function properly in Civvy Street.

3. Trouble at work

Most of Balchin’s characters are engaged in some type of gainful employment and, just as in their personal lives, they are confronted by all manner of difficulties in the workplace. Particularly in the books from Balchin’s mature period, it is generally true to say that a young, bright, idealistic man battles to get his schemes accepted by an older, duller, more realistic superior in thrall to bureaucracy and “doing things the right way”. This sort of confrontation is nicely exemplified by one of many clashes in Darkness Falls From the Air between Bill Sarratt and his boss Harness:

‘You’re always looking for trouble,’

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said Harness.

‘I’m always looking for somebody with guts,’ I said. ‘And never finding him.’

There are plenty of other examples of horns being locked, such as Sammy’s arguments with Waring in The Small Back Room, Felix Milne quarrelling with Norris Pile (the principal of the clinic in Mine Own Executioner) and Bob Marriott fighting to get the paper on epidemics made publically available in A Sort of Traitors in the face of perceived spinelessness on the part of his superior Professor Sewell.

To what extent did Balchin resemble his own characters?

There is probably a little bit of Nigel Balchin in many of his major characters. From what I have been told about Balchin’s personality, he certainly answers the description of somebody “who knows how things ought to be done” and so figures such as Jim Manning, Henry Payne and Jim Petersen from his later novels are those most likely to resemble their creator, at least in some regards. Several of the books from the 1950s and 1960s feature an older man who struggles—often in vain—to keep a younger wife or mistress in check and such scenes may well have been influenced by the occasionally tempestuous relationship between Balchin and his second wife Yovanka, who was twenty-two years his junior.

Next time I will look at Balchin’s minor characters, a colourful bunch who enliven his novels in a multitude of ways.

Derek Collett 2011