I have been on a streak of novels that tug insistently at the reluctant Freudian in me. Dinah Brooke’s The Miserable Child and Her Father in the Desert was, by the author’s admission, an act of reparation for her own father’s failures as a husband, businessman, and father. I’m working my way through the small oeuvre of Richard Rumbold, who spent much of his life engaged in a civil war with his father and other proxy father figures.
Even without context, Mark Benney’s novel The Big Wheel (1940) is full of dangling psychological threads that cry out for a good tugging. At the core of the novel is the strange relationship between the narrator, a former burglar named Harry Carne, and an ambition and hyperactive young journalist named Eric Felton. The two men meet when, hoping to make a little money after his release from Holloway prison, Harry tries to sell a few articles to Eric’s newspaper. Eric becomes fascinated with Harry and soon invites him to take a spare room in his flat and start working as Eric’s assistant, a job that mostly involves churning out articles under Eric’s name.
Eric’s concept of journalism seems to have been developed from years of reading the stuff that filled the back pages of London papers:
Journalism was a constant exercise in selecting from a grim, mechanised world its trivial accidents and hazards, and refocussing them until all else was blotted out of the world picture. It kept him in a ferment of small surface excitements, and it was these, communicated into his writing, that made him a good journalist. If a film-star had chosen an Amerindian for her fourth husband, if a cow was born in Wilshire with reindeer horns, the fact would keep Eric in continuous bubbling enthusiasm for hours.
Like Harry, Eric has come up from the tenements, self-taught, full of rough edges, and prone to the allure of bright, shiny objects — and people. “Eric liked to view himself as a patron of genius,” Harry observes, but the geniuses Eric was attracted to tended to be eccentrics: “Anyone who dyed his hair green, or wore shorts in winter, or expounded cosmic themes in an unintelligible gibberish, stood a fair chance of being entertained by Eric.”
Just how Eric affords to be so generous is a bit of a mystery until Harry meets Phoebe, a woman with murky connections who, he gathers, is both Eric’s lover and patroness. Harry’s first sight of Phoebe is as she emerges from Eric’s bedroom one morning, and his description of her dressing is almost bilious in its hatred toward older women:
She seemed to have none of the normal woman’s feelings of pudicity, and no awareness even of her grotesque appearance. She made no attempt at concealment as she divested herself of coat and nightgown before stepping into her undergarments. She moulded herself into tight corsets with apparently no sense of the obscenity of the kneading motions whereby she subdued her flesh. Busily she drew on her stockings, and fastened her suspenders, chattering brightly all the while about her darling Eric and her pleasure that he had at last found a friend who was at once a wide boy and a nice boy. [A “wide boy,” in British slang, refers to a man who lives by wheeling and dealing, often criminal.]
Harry learns that it’s Phoebe who’s paying for Eric’s flat. When Harry asks just what he does for her in return, Eric is vague: “Oh, odd things. Just ideas like the wheel and that club you saw.”
“The wheel” is the big wheel of the title, a large Ferris wheel, part of a small amusement park set up on a vacant lot in East London. The Ferris wheel is equipped with enclosed cars just big enough for two people to sit in comfortably. Eric’s “idea” was to run the wheel very slowly, allowing couples just enough time and privacy to enjoy each other’s company in ways that London offered few clean and cheap alternatives for.
This is just one of Phoebe’s ventures. She is a rising star in the London underworld, an entrepreneur busy expanding her little empire into horseracing betting and penny casinos in Brighton. She has her hooks into the police, with a growing roster of bent cops, as Harry discovers when he gets on Phoebe’s wrong side. As affectionate as she seems toward Eric, he knows Phoebe wouldn’t hesitate to throw him under a bus.
He knows this because she’s already done it to her own son. Jim, an ex-boxer who works as the “Big Wheel’s” bouncer, has done a stint in prison himself, as he tells Harry:
“Wodger get done for?” he asked sympathetically.
“Screwing,” I said.
“The berks!” he said feelingly, and added: “I done a carpet at the Ville.”
“What for?” I asked.
“V’lent assault,” he said. “But somebody mixed it for me. I never done it, they mixed it for me. Found me fingerprint on a broken bottle what somebody’d been glassed wiv; en said I done it. But I never! Me, I don’t use glasses.”
What Jim doesn’t know is that his mother had arranged for his prints to be put on the bottle by one of her crooked cops. She was taking revenge for some wrong the generally harmless palooka had done.
This is just one reason why Harry hates Phoebe, though. Another is that she’s a little too much like his own mother, who, it’s clear, was both a prostitute and a minor operator. Harry sees his criminal record in patently Freudian terms: “Always the fundamental object of my burglaries had been to win my way back to acceptance by the Phoebes — to force their respect, to share their expansive, explosive life.”
The dynamics among the men in the book is equally rich in nuances, whether intended or not. “I’m not a pansy!” Eric protests at one point, but his actions suggest this is not a black-and-white situation. The language that Benney uses at points is difficult to read today as simply poetic:
With a rueful movement of his lips, he [Eric] reached across the table and touched my hand; it was the gesture of one willing to forgive, but unable to forget. “That’s all right,” he said sepulchrally. “You two [Harry and a woman] go ahead and enjoy yourselves.” Then he drank off a glass of beaujolais at a gulp and took up the bottle to re-fill.
When Harry contemplates taking up with Margaret, the woman in the above scene, his language is equally open to analysis: “Living with her, I should always be her dependent, a hungry mouth at her paps, a leech on her arteries.”
The characters in The Big Wheel are too unstable for anyone to expect a happy ending. It takes far too long, however, and Benney introduces too many unnecessary detours before this house of cards collapses. Like other novels from this period I’ve read, The Big Wheel seems to cry out for an editor with a sharp pair of scissors. I get the impression that for every Max Perkins and Edward Garnett, there were a hundred other editors who gave their authors’ manuscripts a quick glance for spelling errors and passed them along for typesetting.
But there are also wonderful bits of writing scattered throughout these pages. A cheap cafe in the early morning before the breakfast rush: “Charwomen wash the corpse of time killed, and downstairs, in the lavatories, one’s footsteps echo hollowly as in a marble mausoleum.’ [OK, perhaps hollowly needs to go back to the thesaurus it came from.] Convincing details of life in poverty: a neighbor asks for change for the gas meter; when Harry notices he has two ha’pennies in his hand, the man explains that he’s keeping them to put on his mother’s eyes when she dies. It’s also a rich source for your vocabulary, one cited numerous times in Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of the Underworld: berk (slattern); nark (rat); on the rory (down and out); straighten (to bribe).
Benney’s account of the London underworld in The Big Wheel seems almost sociological in its detail, it’s understandable, for formal sociological research would be his ultimate destination. Born Henry Charles in the East End in 1910, he grew up in the world of The Big Wheel. His mother was a prostitute. He was taken up by a small-time stage performer and adopted the man’s last name of Degras. It was as Henry Degras that he served three sentences in prison, the last, for fraud, at Wandsworth.
After his release in mid-1933, he was befriended by the publisher Peter Davies, who encouraged him to take up writing. The result, an autobiography titled Low Company, was published in 1936. By then, he’d married for the first time, to a woman named Phyllis Benney. Given his real criminal record, Davies recommended Degras take up a pseudonym, and he chose the name of his wife’s late brother: Mark Benney.
Low Company was an immediate success. George Orwell, one of the toughest critics when it came to working class literature of the time, called it “one of the best lumpenproletarian books of our time.” The book was so well done, Newsweek informed its readers, that “the publishers feel impelled to swear it isn’t a literary hoax.” Every major paper and magazine gave it enthusiastic reviews, and Peter Davies encouraged his protégé to try his hand at fiction as well.
His first attempt, The Scapegoat Dances (1938), got mixed reviews. James Agate felt that Benney had “acquired a style of which any writer ought to be thoroughly ashamed.” But even the poorest reviews held out hopes for better. The next year, he put his writing skills at the service of one of his underworld acquaintances, producing What Rough Beast? A Biographical Fantasia on the Life of Professor J. R. Neave, Otherwise Known as Iron Foot Jack Neave. Neave was a “wide boy” well known around Soho, who, as Matt Houlbrook puts it in Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957 (2005), operated at various times as “strongman, club manager, antique dealer, con artist, and street phrenologist.”
The Big Wheel (1940) was considered a big improvement over Benney’s first novel. Reviewing the book for the Tribune, Orwell wrote,
It is about the London sub-world, the dreadful civilization of pin-tables, cheap night clubs and furnished single rooms, where sport, crime, prostitution, mendicancy and journalism all overlap…. Its distinctive mark is its acceptance of the lumpenproletarian outlook, its assumption that the world of narks, pimps, eightpenny kips, punchdrunk boxers and rival race-gangs is as eternal as the pyramids.
V. S. Pritchett called Benney “the highbrow of the lower depths and the only novelist we have who really knows the Soho underworld” and estimated that the novel’s strongest points were “wit, a restless, over-excited mind, a bottomless pessimism, and a wonderful ear for the dialogue of his people.” Frank Swinnerton, who often found other novelists wanting in comparison to himself, offered begrudging praise: “Mr. Benney can be tiresome, but he is interestingly tiresome, and his people and their seamy streets are real.”
Swinnerton’s comment offers a clue to where Benney’s real interests lay. If the most successful elements of The Big Wheel are its details of London underworld life, it’s because Benney was, fundamentally, more interested in being a recorder than a creator. In 1939, he married Jane Tabrisky, a graduate of the London School of Economics who’d worked earlier for the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. When the war broke out, he attempted to enlist but was rejected for medical reasons. He then went to work at an airplane factory, an experience he turned into his third and last novel, Over to Bombers (1943).
After the war, he was able to get a civil service job as an Industrial Relations Officer with the Ministry of Fuel and Power. The Ministry sent him to report on conditions at coal mines around Durham in the northeast of England, which led to his 1946 book, Charity Main: A Coalfield Chronicle. Following this, he decided to undertake a study of conditions in British prisons and sought advice from Mark Abrams, who was pioneering techniques in polling and surveys. Gaol Delivery, published in 1948, led to further social science work and, ultimately, to an invitation to teach sociology in the undergraduate College at the University of Chicago.
Though he was the only member of the Chicago faculty with no college education whatsoever, Benney thrived in the university environment. As he later wrote, “I think that if I had known in 1950 that such a course as Social Science 2 was being offered anywhere in the world I would have strained all my resources to take it. It was ironical that I found myself now in 1951 both taking and teaching it.” Benney went on to work with David Riesman, whom he later referred to as his “champion.”
In 1959, Benney took a job on the faculty of Shimer College in Mount Carroll, Illinois. The small school, small town atmosphere of Shimer didn’t suit Benney, who was by then on his third marriage and still retained a few habits from his underworld upbringing. He left after a few unhappy years that he documented in his last book, a memoir of his “reformed” life after Low Company, titled Almost a Gentleman (1966). His last years were spent as a researcher for hire for government and academic institutions. He died in Clearwater, Florida in 1973.