With English anti-Semitism a matter of headline news, the time is perfect for some quick-witted publisher to reissue Emanuel Litvinoff’s second novel, The Man Next Door, which is a case study of how hate can turn a proper Englishman into a seething cauldron of antagonism and violence. Litvinoff does operate on the level of a prankster in the high school chemistry lab in a way, as he deliberately sets a catalyst — a Jewish couple with a Holocaust refugee mother-in-law — next to a highly combustible substance.
Even before David and Sylvia Winston (originally Weinstein) move into the empty house next door, Harold Bollam is an unstable compound. A mid-level manager in International Utilities, back in London after a long stretch in West Africa, Harold is having trouble adapting. “Forty-five was too old to change,” he thinks at one point. Younger men are beginning to rise above him. His wife Edna has failed him by getting older, too. And everything is slipping away from him:
The country had gone mad for gimmicks. Young smart alecks were getting in everywhere. Long-haired pop-singers bought up the stately homes, public opinion media were in the hands of queers and sensation-mongers who made England look cheap in the eyes of the world. Cheap, indeed, when black college boys became prime ministers of ridiculous “independent” states, dined with the Queen and lectured the British on the what’s-what of democracy.
Harold looks back wistfully to living in a country “where blacks were regarded as getting above themselves if they put a pair of boots on their naked feet.”
Like most objects of hatred, the Winstons don’t actually have to do anything to arouse Harold’s anger. They simply have to be. To be younger and better looking, have a pretty daughter, have a better car, have newer, nicer furniture. And in any case, it isn’t Harold who harbors a grudge: it’s them, even if they haven’t the guts to admit it. “Only the Jews hoarded their grievances, maintaining a cold, exclusive conspiracy against the world.”
As the story progresses, Harold’s ability to bottle up his resentments behind the exterior of a dignified, bowler-hatted gentleman erodes. He gets drunk, begins ranting in a pub about women, minorities, Jews, the bosses, goes to a prostitute, insults Edna. When he runs into Sylvia Winston on Regent Street, he offers her a ride home, then corners her into having dinner with him, then attempts to force himself upon her.
Yet Litvinoff somehow manages to keep the reader from utterly despising Harold. His pain, his fear, his loss of self is too palpable, too raw to see him as simply a demon. Alone in his living room, “He had a queer notion that if he went over and looked in the mirror now it would offer no image but that of an empty room.” And as his hatred consumes him and leads him to even more violence, Harold is still left with a tiny core of decency that cannot be erased.
“The British answer to Portnoy’s Complaint” Martin Levin wrote in his New York Times review — possibly one of the most inaccurate comparisons ever made by a critic. There is little funny and nothing sexy about The Man Next Door. More than anything, this is a book about how resentment builds to a boiling point when a person feels that youth, power, success, and even just self-esteem is being taken away and there is nothing to do but get angrier and angrier. And a book about how fear is the base emotion for an oppressor. It’s a book that’s relevant in the U.K, in the U.S., and in any other country where a once-secure majority feels itself losing control.
The Man Next Door is available in electronic formats on the Open Library (Link).
Emanuel Litvinoff was the older half brother of David Litvinoff, one of the most talked about and legendary yet enigmatic figures of Swinging London. A very well researched biography of David by Kieron Pim was published in the UK several years ago to much acclaim. Emanuel was interviewed for it and there’s quite a bit about him in the book.