Lionel Britton and the Jewish Working-Class Intellectual in London and New York as Seen by Simon Blumenfeld and Peter Martin

Reception of Lionel Britton's work varied widely, as the two fictional representations below clearly show.

Simon Blumenfeld’s protagonist Alec in Jew Boy (1935) is very disparaging towards Britton (and the recent plays of Bernard Shaw), and pretends to believe that Shaw is dead and that Britton is now writing under his name:

‘If you take the trouble to compare [Shaw’s On the Rocks (1933) and Too True to Be Good (1932)] with Lionel Britton’s Brain and Spacetime Inn, you’re bound to see that they’re written, all four, by the same verbose, muddled, amateur sociologist’ (1).

Peter Martin’s protagonists in The Building have a rather different reaction:

‘In brief, vivid phrases Max began talking of a novel he had just read from cover to cover, a long and cruel book, quite upsetting, whose theme he could not accept, but neither could he put the book down. It traced the life of a London orphan from boyhood through his death in the war. Evidently a crushing experience, Max described it as being the ultimate in novelistic revolt against the war.

Philip said he would like to read to (remembering Uncle Leo Sociable’s remark, “Next time they wanna shoot me, let ‘em do it right here on this side”), and Max said he would give him his copy of Hunger and Love.

“Some title,” Julian said.

“Bigger than War and Peace,” Max replied.

“I have read it,” Paul announced, knocking the ashes out of his pipe.

“And you felt it slightly overdone?”

“Completely. It made me cry. It’s the best goddam best novel ever written in the twentieth century.”

“Thank you,” Max said, delighted. “Since the minute you opened your mouth, I’ve been trying not to tell you you’re a bag of wind. You’re all right”.

Philip found the book extremely difficult, but impossible not to discard. He kept it in the bathroom, reading steadily in it. He knew the author, Mr. Lionel Britton, had overwritten but refrained from skipping as much as possible lest he miss one of the frequent flashes of towering irony directed at the blind forces intent upon the destruction of the insectlike hero, Arthur Phelps. Arthur, a super-human Oliver Twist, gained Philip’s undying sympathy in his struggles to gain minuscule creature comforts such as cooling his inflamed feet on his brass bedposts after a day of running the London streets delivering books from one bookstore to another, reading meanwhile whatever lay closest to his hand.

The book made an indelible impression, partly because of its subject matter and also because he knew Max worked at Kemer’s [a New York bookshop]; the mustiness of the store, the Londonish feel of Fourth Avenue, the dirt of Greenwich Village, and his own good fortune to have been born so high in the world made him rail at Julian to forget Slameroo! [a play he's working on] long enough to crack into Hunger and Love.

After a hundred pages Julian gave up.

“Lissen,” he said in unconscious aping of Pop, “you call this life? I’d rather be an African cannibal” (2).

(1) Simon Blumenfeld, Jew Boy (London: Cape, 1935; repr. Lawrence & Wishart, 1986), p. 245.

(2) Peter Martin, The Building (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1960), pp. 77–78.

Peter Martin and Lionel Britton

I usually look at google/books once a week, and I'm very rarely disappointed. Today, I learned that a forgotten writer — possibly more forgotten than Lionel Britton — wrote a novel entitled The Building in 1960. As usual, only a snippet of the book is included, but it is a fascinating one:

'Philip found the book extremely difficult, but impossible to discard. He kept it in the bathroom, reading steadily in it. He knew the author, Mr. Lionel Britton, had overwritten but refrained from skipping as much as possible lest he miss one of the frequent flashes of towering'...

And there it tantalisingly ends. This is obviously a reference to Lionel Britton's Hunger and Love, and there is perhaps not a great deal more said about the novel or the fictional Philip's reaction to it, but I had to find a copy. The British Library doesn't have one, though, and COPAC failed to turn it up in any British university. Neither abebooks.co.uk nor Amazon had a copy, although I found a number for sale in the USA on abebooks.com. Helpfully, a few dealers on bookfinder.com told me that the novel concerns a Jewish American family's struggles in the 1930s. There was also an earlier Martin novel — The Landsmen — which was published in 1952; and I was surprised to discover that Southern Illinois University Press in Carbondale had re-published The Landsmen in 1977 in its 'Lost American Fiction' series.

But just who was Peter Martin, who, perhaps like his character Philip, was influenced by Lionel Britton? Unfortunately I don't know, because there doesn't appear to be a great deal of information out there. The Library of Congress lists The Landsmen and The Building (both editions), and gives his date of birth as 1907. There is also an interesting paragraph posted anonymously as a review of The Building, a copy of which is for sale via Amazon. The poster — 'A Customer' — claims that The Landsmen describes a 'small village in pre-revolutionary Russia [that] springs to life', and also notes that this was intended as the first novel of a trilogy: but Martin died in 1961, a year after the publication of the second novel.

I can find no further information on Peter Martin (1907—61), but would welcome any that anyone has. (The main problem, of course, is that the name is very common and can easily be confused with others.)