Room at the Top

Room at the Top

[For these notes I am indebted to an article by one of my past tutors at the University of Sussex, Stuart Laing, who has written one of the best accounts of Representations of Working Class Life: 1957-1964. This article, 'Room at the Top: The Morality of Influence', can be found in Popular Culture and Social Change, ed. Christopher Pawling. I have put a copy of the article on Reserve in the Library. These notes begin with extracts from Laing's article]

"Room at the Top was published in March, 1957 and was immediately exceptionally successful for a first novel by a largely unknown author. It sold 35,000 copies in the first year of publication (as opposed to an average for first novels of about 5,000). It was serialised (drastically abridged) in the Daily Express and by the end of 1958 Braine was reported to have earned between £12,000 and £15,000 from the book During 1959 the potential market was greatly extended by the Penguin paperback edition and Jack Clayton's cinema film. These two proved mutually reinforcing and the Penguin edition was reprinted eight times in the first year and nineteen times by 1970. From the mid-1960s Penguin were proclaiming Room at the Top (alongside such texts as The Odyssey and Lady Chatterley's Lover) as one of their million sellers...
During the 1960s the novel was kept in the public eye both by its sequel Life at the Top (hardback 1962, paperback and film 1965) and by a television series, Man at the Top, running in the late 1960s and early 1970's...
John Braine himself was thirty-five at the time of first publication. His first synopsis for the novel had been rejected in December 1951 (the hero at that time being called Born Favourite and its hero Bob Mayne, not Joe Lampton). During 1951 Braine had abandoned his job as a librarian in Yorkshire and attempted to earn his living as a writer in London. Despite selling a few articles to the New Statesman, tribune and other journals (as well as some radio work) he was unsuccessful and contracted tuberculosis. He was in hospital for eighteen months and worked on the novel during that time; it was finally accepted for publication in 1955.
John Braine has given a number of accounts of the origins of the novel. At one level the emphasis was on writing from observation and experience - forsaking exotic 'literary' environments for a less glamorous setting. At another level the interest lay in the psychology of the hero - 'I saw a man sitting in a big shiny car. He'd driven up to the edge of some waste ground, near some houses and factories, and was just sitting there looking across at them. It seemed to me there must have been a lot that led up that moment.'..."

Although the novel was written in the early 1950s, and published in 1958, it is important to realise that it is set in the immediate post-war years, with an older Joe Lampton as narrator looking back on his life and the circumstances which have made him what he is today. At two particular points (pp123-4, end of Ch. 14, and pp183-4, end of Ch 24) Joe looks back at his earlier self and sees what he has become now. Have a look at these two passages, and see what you think Joe has become, because it is from this point of view that he reassesses his life and essentially tells the novel.

I'd suggest that it's possible to see the novel in two distinct (but related) ways. Firstly as a recasting of the "timeless" Faustian tale, of the man who sells his soul for riches and success, but has to pay a terrible price. We see this tale in Marlowe's Dr Faustus, Goethe's Faust and, less obviously, in the 1980s Michael Douglas movie, Wall Street. In each of these the central character has to reassess his values having had to pay a price for material gain. In Room at the Top Joe Lampton secures his place at the 'Top, but the price he must pay for this is the death of Alice Aisgill (and the Lawrentian depths of his passion for her) and of the death of his "true and authentic self". It's also possible to argue that the novel also incorporates elements of the masculine "rites of passage" novel, recording the male protagonist's entrance into the adult world of moral responsibility, at the price of adolescent freedoms. The second way of seeing the novel, which is outlined in Laing's article, is to see it as a direct commentary on the 1950s, and of the "price" of climbing from "austerity" to social affluence, particularly amongst the young working classes who, by the end of the 1950s, had joined the ranks of the middle classes. Room at the Top is, for Laing, a "morality tale", which tells of the cost of affluence". Think about these two readings and, after you have discussed them for a short time, decide which you agree with most. When we have done this it should be possible to work our way around them by looking at the novel in more detail, as follows:

(i)

Joe Lampton. In a sense the novel starts and finishes with our assessment of Joe. How do you see him? Is he, for you, a sympathetic character, a hero or an anti-hero? Would you agree with descriptions of him which include the following: "drivingly ambitious, sexually ruthless", "hero of our time", or "young Northerner on the make"? What do we know about Joe the man, as the novel reveals him (and we have to remind ourselves that, as in Dickens' Great Expectations, there is a gap between the older first person narrator and the central protagonist, seen most clearly at the point when Joe hears of Alice's death - "I hated Joe Lampton...he'd come to stay")?

What do we know of Joe's origins and working class background in Dufton (aka Barnsley, I think?) and how does he feel about these? What do you think of his values, and particularly his feelings about class (e.g. pp28-29, when he first sees Jack Wales) or in his continual references to 'Zombies (which bears some comparison with Holden's views about 'Phoney's' in The Catcher in the Rye? What, furthermore, do you make of his view on women, particularly the "grading system" (p36) or his summary of flattery and female psychology (p65). There are a number of points which you might look at in some detail, e.g. his feelings at the first rehearsal, (when he is shown up for mispronouncing 'brazier') or the row with Alice over her modelling past (p123), his treatment of Susan and Alice, and his reactions to hearing of Alice's death and his subsequent "going to ground". Look particularly at Joe's moments of moral decision, (p113 and p197): do they indicate a strong moral consciousness on Joe's part or a calculating amorality?

(ii)

Alice and Susan. These two contrasted women are, for Joe, symbols of a choice between two possibilities. Make a list of the contrasting characteristics of each, and then look at the contrasting ways in which Joe behaves with them, thinks of them, makes love with them, assesses them as people. You'll need to look at p183-4 again, and the ways in which the affair with Alice represents a form of personal, sexual and psychological authenticity, contrasting with pp198-9, when Joe makes love to Susan. Is it simply a difference of class and social status between the two women and, if not, what else is it? Think of episodes which illustrate these differences? How would the novel be different if it were told from the points of view of either of these two female characters?

(iii)

Society, Class and Politics. Whilst the novel can be seen as a morality tale, focusing on Joe's psychological and moral development, it's also a novel which very firmly rooted in a particular society at a particular time. Joe's movement from Dufton to Warley (Leicester) is not just a geographical move, and it is significant also that Joe's roots (in the immediate post-war working class community) are clearly established for the reader. What messages and 'arguments' do you feel that the novel provides into society, politics and working class aspirations, into social mobility and to the position and status of women within this society? Is it a radical, socialist or anarchistic novel in its conclusions, or does the novel shy away from reaching these kinds of conclusions? Does the novel's portrayal of sexuality suggest any political or social conclusions (libidinal rebellion)? Does the novel suggest anything about the "price" of belonging to society? Clearly the novel's popularity suggests that, whilst readers were enthralled (or disgusted) by Joe's perilous social climbing, the novel struck a chord which may well have something to do with it having something to say about these kinds of issues. One test might be your own responses to the novel today: does it still seem relevant, or does it seem dated and leave you wondering what all the fuss was about!

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