Eloquence and Rage in "Caliban Shrieks"

By Ben Clarke on July 3, 2024

Jack Hilton's 1935 novel Caliban Shrieks is not only one of the most important twentieth-century working-class texts in English, but one of the most innovative and compelling books of its period. His contemporaries quickly recognized its originality and artistic value; George Orwell praised Hilton's "considerable literary gift," which enabled him to describe poverty "from the inside," and W. H. Auden his "magnificent Moby Dick rhetoric." Despite this, Caliban Shrieks remained out of print for almost ninety years. Its neglect was not an isolated critical failure, exposing problems with the ideas of literature that have shaped academic scholarship, publishers' lists, and even the preferences of the "common reader" since at least the Second World War.

Hilton's experimental, protean text does not follow conventional models even in its diction and syntax; as he emphasizes in his preface, his "jargon is one of the 'Clamorous Demagogue' for which there is no apology." More provocatively, it rejects the idea that art is defined by its distance from politics in the broad sense. Caliban Shrieks is driven by an uncompromising working-class anger that underpins Hilton's astonishing rhetorical dexterity and is all the more effective for being combined with a sharp black humor.

These qualities, which make the novel remarkable, also make it difficult to integrate in existing literary histories. Caliban Shrieks demands different ways of reading and a different understanding of the forms and functions of literature. This new edition should not only secure Hilton's position as a significant twentieth-century writer, but open a space for other neglected texts and authors.

Caliban Shrieks is an autobiographical novel. Hilton left a remarkable account of his life, Caliban Boswelling, which, absurdly, remains unpublished. Writing Caliban Shrieks as a work of autofiction was a deliberate and productive choice. Amongst other things, it emphasizes the process of composition and enables him to establish a critical distance from his material. Challenging the idea that working-class writers simply transcribe their experience, Hilton emphasizes the artistry of his work.

He uses a variety of techniques to do this, including allusions to canonical texts that situate the novel within literary histories and struggles. As its title suggests, Caliban Shrieks is punctuated with references to Shakespeare, who is figured as a common resource rather than the property of the privileged. Framing his narrative as the "musings and tirades of my modern Caliban" enables him, as Andrew McMillan argues in his introduction, to assert his claim to the freedom Caliban has taken from him. But it also asserts a close, subversive relation to the canon.

For Hilton, Shakespeare provides particular insights into politics of language, including the use of that "wonderful tripe known as eloquence" to manipulate the working classes. Recalling the propaganda that led him to enlist in the First World War, which centered on words such as "[h]onour, duty, service and sacrifice," the narrator notes that he has since "learned what Falstaff says of honour." A contemporary demagogue is dismissed as a "political Iago, with his sheaf of papers and stance like a Blackpool pill-seller." Shakespeare is a familiar, liberating figure and is treated as a comrade. Juxtaposing Hamlet's famous insistence that "man" is "noble in reason… infinite in faculty" with a description of the horrors of the war, he comments, "Bill, dear boy, you must have turned over many times during this madhouse lunacy." The intimacy of this statement claims an equal working-class access to Shakespeare, who is valuable partly because he demonstrates that literature can challenge established systems of power. The radicalism of Caliban Shrieks is founded on a hard-won fearlessness in its use of words and ideas that draws strength from earlier texts but does not repeat their methods.

Hilton's independence of thought is embodied in his anarchic prose. His writing forces language to its limits and occasionally beyond; some passages collapse under the weight of justified rage. A memorable assault on the middle-class "Mr Sub-urban," which instructs him to "[o]ffend the rota club and the bethel, miss the building society, get off that stodgy office stool, have a good row with your wife's family, get blotto with the booze, have that angel puritan next door collapsing with a stroke and above all things break his windows," concludes with the observation that the "sky is the limit to a gambler, but for you, dry feet, one child and a wife that fears poverty. 'Out, out, brief candle', you are not an incandescent." The partial disintegration of the imagery at the end does not indicate a loss of authorial control but is, on the contrary, a display of rhetorical skill, enacting rather than simply describing an impatient contempt.

The pleasure of the text stems partly from these moments of excess, which are all the more effective for being combined with demotic commentaries that challenge the pretensions of elaborate jargon, including that of the Left. Commenting on socialist historical analysis, Hilton observes that it simply emphasizes "the obvious fact that the 'haves' some time ago diddled the 'have nots,' and its purpose is in the last analysis proved conclusively and indubitably to be 'That the only remaining class to rise, will rise,' and so become dominant in the we-are-the-boss stakes." The playfulness of the passage should not obscure its insights. Hilton is an astute reader, the dexterity of his own prose matched by his keen critical analysis of others' texts and a sensitivity to manipulation that emerges from a consciousness of his own past deception.

Any account of the kind of precarious working-class life represented in Caliban Shrieks is valuable. The novel explores experiences conventionally ignored in literature, from a respectable working poverty sustained by the capitalist myth that "the righteous, the frugal, the noble, the sober, willing and deserving, would eventually come out on top," to tramping and imprisonment. What makes Caliban Shrieks exceptional is Hilton's unique literary talent. Always sensitive to the misuse of language, and contemptuous of the "sleight of hand illusionist on the stage of talkology," he also demonstrates its possibilities. Liberating himself from dominant social narratives that positioned him as a "one of the multitude of ineffective useless undesirables," he develops a fiercely individual, subversive eloquence that insists on the richness and value of working-class experience. The novel challenges the "stiff collared puritans" amongst its middle-class readership to get "some idea of what men are, outside your little mousetrap circle," even if it means getting "contaminated," and concludes with a moment of radical democratic openness: "I accept you, general masses, howling mobs, beastly blondes, you are infallible, impeccable, and always right."

It is an astonishing, necessary book. Jack Chadwick, who describes himself as "another working-class man, another Northerner," tells the remarkable story of its recovery in his introduction. We are all indebted to him for this new edition, which not only introduces a new readership to a brilliantly talented working-class writer but demands we think again about what literature is, what it does, and who gets to write it.