posted on 11 Apr 2016

The Ampersand by Jack Common

Jack Common has virtually disappeared from public view - a state of affairs that would have dismayed much of the literary establishment of the 1940s and early 1950s. Born in 1903 into the working class of Newcastle in the north-east, Common was self-taught, with a writing style that was very much his own. His literary essays brought him to the attention of John Middleton Murray who invited him to join the writing and editorial staff of The Adelphi magazine in the 1930s - a job that meant he mixed with some of the biggest names on the British literary scene. In particular he became a friend and intimate of George Orwell, who was a great champion of Common's writing.

However, although he set out to explicitly write about working class life he was never seen as one of the school of proletarian writers that was emerging in the 1930s. His work lacked an explicit Marxist perspective and he never felt comfortable with the brutally didactic approach to social realism. He planned a trilogy of semi-autobiographical novels of which only two were completed. The first of these, Kiddars Luck, covers the period of childhood in Heaton and takes the young Will Kiddar up to the age of 14. Common considered his second instalment, The Ampersand, the superior of the two books - which is why I chose this one to read.

The action of the book is set in the last year of World War One when Will Clarts leaves school and enrols in a private commercial college in the hope of improving his chances of eventually becoming the owner of his own business with an ampersand in its name - Clarts & Co. The war plays very little part in the book as the young Clarts does his growing-up: he gets involved in a minor money-making scheme, argues with his tutors, loses interest in his studies, takes up photography and - inevitably - falls in love (twice). Common gives us an entirely convincing and fully rounded portrait of a young boy growing to maturity and beginning, by the end of the novel, to reassess his aspirations and options. We can only guess that the third part of the sequence would have taken Will (Common) off to London to explore the wider world.

For me, the moving spirit of this book is Will's unconventional and exciting Uncle Rod - an extraordinarily modern man. Rod suffers from depression ( he is almost certainly what we would now call bi-polar) but when he is on form he fills Will with all sorts of different ideas, views and news and lights an intellectual fire under the young man that lifts him onto a different plain. Rod is the one that enables Will to see that the world is so much bigger and more complex than he had ever imagined.

Initially I thought that it was rather confusing for Common to change Will's name from Kiddar ( local dialect for 'boy') to Clarts (dialect for dirt or mud) between the publication of Kiddars Luck in 1951 and The Ampersand in 1954 but, on reflection, this is a telling decision. Common is clearly making a point about the way in which so many young working class people will be seen in society and the quality of the lives they will have to face up to.

I really don't understand why reputations rise and fall in the literary world and ultimately it can only be a case of luck or an accident of time and space - if you don't happen to fit a current trend or fashion, history can be cruel and neglectful. I wouldn't argue Common is a great writer but he is surely a writer who didn't deserve to be out of print for the best part of three decades.

 

Terry Potter

April 2016