James (Joseph) Hanley (3 September 1897 – 11 November 1985) was a British novelist, short story writer, and playwright from Kirkdale, Liverpool, Lancashire, of Irish descent. Hanley came from a seafaring family and spent two years at sea himself, during World War I. He published his first novel Drift in 1930. In the 1930s and 1940s his novels and short stories focussed on seamen and their families, and included Boy (1931), the subject of an obscenity trial. After World War II there was less emphasis on the sea in his works. While frequently praised by critics, Hanley's novels did not sell well. In the late 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s he wrote plays, mainly for the BBC, for radio and then for television, and also for the theatre. He returned to the novel in the 1970s. His last novel, A Kingdom, was published in 1978, when he was eighty. His brother Gerald was also a novelist.

Biography Born in Kirkdale, Liverpool, Lancashire, in 1897 (not Dublin, nor 1901 as he generally implied) to a working-class family. Both his parents were, on the other hand, born in Ireland, his father Edward Hanley around 1865, in Dublin, and his mother, Bridget Roache, in Queenstown, County Cork, around 1867. However, both were "well established in Liverpool by 1891", when they were married. Hanley's father worked most of his life as a stoker, particularly on Cunard liners, and other relatives had also gone to sea.Chris Gostick, "Extra Material on James Hanley's Boy", in the OneWorld Classics edition of Boy (2007), pp.182–3. James also grew up living close to the docks. He left school in the summer of 1910 and worked for four years in an accountants' office. Then early in 1915, during the First World War aged 17 he went to sea for the first time (not 13 as he again implied).An important biographical source is Chris Gostick's "Extra Material on James Hanley's Boy", pp. 181–4. Thus life at sea was a formative influence and much of his early writing is about seamen.John Fordham, James Hanley: Modernism and the Working Class (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002), p. 23.

Then, in April 1917, Hanley jumped ship in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, and shortly thereafter joined the Canadian Army in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Hanley fought in France in the summer of 1918, but was invalided out shortly thereafter. After the war he worked as a railway porter in Bootle and he devoted himself "to a prodiguous range of autodidactic, high cultural activities – learning the piano, regularly attending […] concerts […] reading voraciously and, above all, writing."John Fordham, p. 94. However, it was not until 1930 that his novel Drift was accepted.Gostick, pp. 185–6.

Hanley moved from Liverpool to near Corwen, North Wales in 1931, where he met Dorothy Enid "Timothy" Thomas, née Heathcote, a descendant of Lincolnshire nobility. They lived together and had a child, Liam Powys Hanley, in 1933, but did not marry until 1947.Gostick, pp.187–8.Fordham, pp. 139, 266 fn18. As World War II was approaching, in July 1939, Hanley moved to London, to write documentaries and plays for the BBC,Fordham, pp.161–62. but he moved back to Wales, to Llanfechain, the other side of the Berwyn Mountains from Corwen, in the early years of the war, where he remained until 1963, when the Hanleys moved to North London, close to their son Liam.Gostick, pp.189–90,192, and Fordham, pp. 225–26

Hanley published an autobiographical work, Broken Water: An Autobiographical Excursion in 1937, and while this generally presents a true overall picture of his life, it is seriously flawed, incomplete and inaccurate. Chris Gostick describes it as "a teasing palimpsest of truth and imagination".Gostick, p. 181. Fordham and Gostick are the most reliable biographical sources.

Hanley's brother was the novelist Gerald Hanley and his nephew the American novelist and playwright William Hanley. James Hanley's wife also published three novels, as Timothy Hanley. She died in 1980. James Hanley himself died in 1985. He was buried in Llanfechain, Wales.Gostick, p. 193.

Works

1930s and 1940s Hanley's first publication, the novel Drift (1930), was written under the influence of James Joyce.As a quotation blurb on the cover of the cheap edition of 1932 underlines: "The portraits of Joe Rourke and his mother are, indeed, two of the most profound expressions of the Catholic soul I have yet seen; truer and finer, in my opinion, than anything in Joyce's A Portrait of an Artist or the vicious caricatures of Liam O'Flaherty". London: Joiner and Steele, 1932. A quotation from The Referee. While Drift is about an Irish Catholic family, the setting is Liverpool, and in the 1930s Hanley wrote largely about the Irish community in Liverpool, especially with the semi-autobiographical novels about the Fury family, The Furys (1935), The Secret Journey (1936), and Our Time is Gone (1940), as well as Ebb and Flood (1932). Hanley's novels of the 1930s and 1940s also focus on life at sea. Hanley wrote two further novels about the Furys of Liverpool, Winter Song (1950), and An End and a Beginning (1958), though Irish and especially Roman Catholic characters continue to have a significant role throughout most of Hanley's career.See Fordham, pp.185, 187, 188, 201.

James Hanley consistently explored the lives of men and women in extremes, that is in dramatically precarious states of fear and isolation, which tend to lead to violence and madness.Kristin Anderson, "A Queer Sort", review of One Worlds Classics' edition (2007) of Boy. Dublin Review of Books: A grim early example is in the novella The Last Voyage (1931). John Reilly is a fireman who is still working only because he has lied about his age, and now faces his last voyage.Edward Stokes, The Novels of James Hanley (1964), p. 90. Reilly although he is in his mid-sixties has a young family, and therefore the family will have to live on his inadequate pension.Stokes, p. 16. In another sense this is Reilly's last voyage, because despairing as to the future he throws himself into the ship's furnace: "Saw all his life illuminated in those flames. 'Not much for us. Sweat, sweat. Pay off. Sign on. Sweat, sweat. Pay off. Finish. Ah, well!".Paul Binding, "Man Against Fate", a review of James Hanley's Last Voyage and Other Stories. Times Literary Supplement, 5 December 1997, p. 21.Last Voyage and Other Stories (London: Harvill Press, 1997, p. 43.

In Boy (1931) young Fearon's isolation and suffering arise because no one cares for him. The story of Boy is "sordid and horrible".Stokes, p. 28. The young protagonist's parents are only interested in the wages he can earn, and encourage him to leave school as soon as possible.Stokes, p. 28. Likewise society is unconcerned about the harsh, unhealthy conditions he endures cleaning ships' boilers. Then, when he goes to sea, he is sexually abused by his fellow seamen. Finally, when young Fearon is dying in agony from a venereal disease caught in a Cairo brothel, his Captain smothers him.Stokes, pp. 28–32.

Boy was reprinted in 1931, and 1932, when an American first edition was also published. Then, when it was reprinted in 1934, in a cheap (second) edition with a "scantily dressed" belly dancer on its cover, Boy was prosecuted for obscenity. The court case followed a complaint to the police in Bury, near Manchester, Lancashire: "The prosecution suggested that the cover of the book and extracts from reviews just inside were most suggestive, and that the purpose was to pollute young people's minds".Gibbs, pp. 25–6. The publishers Boriswood "were advised that, owing to the book's reference to 'intimacy between members of the male sex', any defence against prosecution was futile'".Fordham, p. 140. In March 1935 Boriswood pleaded guilty of "uttering and publishing an obscene libel" and paid a substantial fine.Fordham, p. 146.

Subsequently Boy was republished by the Obelisk Press in Paris in 1935 and 1946.Gibbs, pp. 26–7. Re the 1936 edition, see Fordham, p. 146 and fn 57, p. 270. Jack Kahane owner of this company was a noted publisher of banned books in English, including Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and Lady Chatterley's Lover.Fordham, p. 270, fn 57. Other editions followed, including one by Penguin Books in 1992, with an introduction by Anthony Burgess and most recently, in 2007, by Oneworld Classics.

It is not surprising that Hanley should show an interest in extreme situations, given his early awareness of the precariousness of life in the working class world that he came from.Fordham, pp.39–40. Hanley would also have sensed, very early in his life, that individual lives of the working poor and their children was of little value in a modern industrial city like Liverpool.Paul Binding, "Man Against Fate", p.21. All this encouraged his exploration not only of working class life but also the emotional life of characters on the periphery of society.See for example Fordham's discussion of The Closed Harbour and Levine, pp. 185–193.

There is an exploration of another type of extreme situation in those works of Hanley which deal with a shipwreck, such as "Narrative" (1931), and the World War II novels The Ocean (1941), Sailor's Song (1943), though these extreme situations are undergone by groups of men, and "were primarily inspiriting in their representation of maritime heroism".Fordham, p. 165.

After World War II

In the 1950s he wrote some of "his finest novels", Closed Harbour (1952), The Welsh Sonata (1954), Levine (1956), and An End and a Beginning (1958), the final volume of the Furys sequence.Gostick, pp.190–91 Characters in extreme situations is also the subject these novels of Hanley's maturity, where the male protagonists, following some trauma, are both unemployed and isolated from family and society.Stokes, pp.158–165, 165–174, 79–85.

Hanley's protagonists tend to be solitary figures and his concern is with loneliness, rootlessness, violence and madness and "he was never a political novelist or propagandist".Stokes, p. 201. He described himself as an anarchist, in a statement sent to International Pen. "I have been labelled a 'Proletarian writer' [… which] is to be party to more than one quite absurd theory, one of which is that only one section society is evil, and only one section capable of soaring; this message comes out of Communist vacuums […] My whole attitude is anarchial (sic), I do not believe in the State at all ".Originally from P.E.N. online archives.

In the 1960s, because of his lack of financial success as a novelist, Hanley turned to writing plays for radio, television, and occasionally the theatre.Gostick, pp.190–92. While he wrote mostly for the BBC, his plays were also produced in several other countries, including the CBC in Canada.Linnea Gibbs, James Hanley: A Bibliography, pp.168–70. Hanley's play Say Nothing was on stage for a month at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East in 1962 and off Broadway, New York, in 1965, while Inner Journey was on stage in Hamburg in 1966, as well as New York's Lincoln Center for a month in 1969.Gibbs, p. 175

Hanley returned to the novel form in the 1970s, publishing Another World, A Woman in the Sky (1973), A Dream Journey (1976) and The Kingdom (1978), all of which "were positively received".Gostick, p. 203. Several of Hanley's later novels were derived from earlier plays.Gibbs, pp. 169, 170.

Hanley also frequently published short stories and book reviews, throughout his career, and some of these stories were subsequently collected and published in book form.Gibbs.

Subject matter

War fiction