Stanley Middleton (1919 – )

Stanley Middleton is the outstanding novelist of Middle England, greatly admired by Byatt who has written that his "is a world of questing morality, without the sanction of religious injunction, upheld only by decency." This is indeed the world in which all these writers live. It is perhaps the reward of a provincial upbringing in a society where "smart" was not an admiring adjective, and where "duty" was still presented as a moral imperative.

Middleton is the Cezanne of the modern English novel, achieving extraordinary effects with apparently the most ordinary of materials. He works at the same subject again and again, and its matter is never in itself striking or remarkable. His novels are all set in the Midlands and his characters are drawn from the middle classes: schoolmasters, solicitors, businessmen, whose roots are generally to be found in a narrow chapel-going culture, which has in the course of time lost its religious element without surrendering its ethical content. Typically, his plot poses a complex moral problem: we find marriages at breaking point, people having to come to terms with retirement, bereavement or estrangement. "He works," Byatt observes, "on the borders between people where the nature of the self of the other is a mystery and a blank."

In his later novels, like "The Daysman," "An After-Dinner Sleep" and "Recovery," his mastery is so assured that he in fact dispenses with "plot" in the formal sense of the term. Instead he fastens on the haphazard nature of life. There is of course a story, but there is a story as there is one in ordinary experience. One thing succeeds another, and there is no satisfactory shape to events. To write a novel in this way is to take a great risk, for no work of art can dispense with form. The movement in a Middleton novel is internal. It is his characters' state of mind and spirit which is important, and it is by his deployment of feeling rather than incident that he contrives to give his work an aesthetically, and therefore morally, satisfying pattern. His characters are committed to a moral obstacle course, by means of which they learn, or learn again, how to go on living in the right way. Part of the strain imposed on them comes from their realization that in the modem world they have to make their own code of decent behaviour.

Middleton works tentatively, his prose echoing his characters' uncertainties and divagations. His is always an exploratory art. The sense of felt life is one of his qualities: he is admirable in the evocation of place, weather, mood, and in the isolation of significant moments in experience. He is also consistently interesting. This sounds a weak adjective of praise; yet the ability to be interesting, to make what happens to the characters he has imagined seem to matter to the reader, is not the least of the novelist's required talents. Indeed it is a fundamental one: if the writer does not possess it, all his other gifts may go for nothing.

On the whole, the people in Middleton's novels are decent, well-meaning, unremarkable; they really are the sort of people we might have as neighbours. Most of them try to be good, to be pleasant; they could even be called nice. Their ordinariness is a mark of the author's ambition. It is easier to create wild, flamboyant and extraordinary characters; the portrayal of evil is always a temptation to the writer because it is more dramatic than good. Middleton, however, brings to the depiction of ordinary humdrum undramatic life the high seriousness which less subtle and understanding writers can bring only to awful and extraordinary events.