Slumming it

Nell Dunn, Up the Junction (UK, 1963)

A former professor, now advisor/colleague, gave me this to read; he's been using it in one of his undergraduate British history classes. Like much of the best urban-working-class work from England's postwar cultural revolution, Up the Junction can only be described as electrifying. I felt the same charge shoot up my spine (only perhaps more so) when I first read Look Back in Anger (1956). 

What makes it so devastating is the unapologetic way it recounts presumably "real-life" tales of lawbreaking, casual sex, verbal abuse, infidelity, abortion, and racism in the back streets of south London. At first blush, there is no romance in these pages. Work, family, love, childraising, death - nobody it seems, is precious about these things, and the resulting picture is sordid at times, like everyone is merely hustling their way through life.

But for all her show of impartial reportage, Dunn, a wealthly young woman consciously chose her slum lifestyle, is clearly partial to her subjects. They are heroes to her, precisely because they can brush off tragedy and setback, and push on. She is particularly taken with her female peers, and I can see why. In most of the working-class-realism canon (at least in the early sixties), women figure variously as cowering housewives, witless victims of philandering husbands or predatory boyfriends, or man-eating materialists. No such women in Dunn's world - Rube and Sylvie work their way through the pool of eligible sexual partners with abandon, despite the ever-present threat of pregnancy. In short, they are like Arthur in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning - only women. 

But through a series of short vignettes Up the Junction sets the scene with razor-sharp precision, right down to the American rock 'n' roll tunes blaring from local jukeboxes. Dunn is careful to include bits of the sentimental lyrics, while the setting and actions make a mockery of them. I loved her authentic choices: "Twistin' The Night Away," "Rambling Rose," "She Said Yes" (Ben E. King), "Sherry" (the Four Seasons) "He's Got The Power" (the Exciters), "(I Love Him) I Will Follow Him."