A Dream Journey by James Hanley

First published: 1976

Type of work: Social realism

Time of work: From roughly 1940 to 1950

Locale: Chelsea and other parts of London

Principal Characters:

• Clement (Clem) Stevens, an unsuccessful painter living in Chelsea, fifty-six years old at the beginning of the novel
• Lena Stevens, his common-law wife
• Celia Downes, a model who once posed for Stevens, identified in a portrait as “the Bermondsey girl”
• Johns, a sailor
• Richard Jones, a resident of the building in which Clem and Lena live, who served as an air raid warden at the beginning of World War II
• Gwyn Jones, his wife
• Roblnson, a Royal Air Force pilot, also identified as “the blue man”
• Ducksie, his wife
• Mr. Grimpen, the caretaker of the building in which Clem and Lena live
• Cis Grimpen, his wife, who serves as the building’s caretaker after the end of the war
• The Frasers, an elderly couple who also are residents of the building

The Novel

At the beginning of James Hanley’s A Dream Journey, Clement Stevens is fifty-six years old; his wife, Lena, is perhaps as much as ten years older. Clem is a painter, unsuccessful and dissatisfied with his own work. Lena and he live in a flat in Chesil Place in Chelsea that they have occupied since before World War II. The building has been badly damaged by bombs dropped on London, and it is scheduled to be demolished to provide a site for a block of new apartments. Clem and Lena have little money, just enough for food, rent, and the bottles of whiskey on which he depends. Alone in the building except for the caretaker Mr. Grimpen and his wife, Cis, who live in the basement, Clem and his wife get on each other’s nerves. Clem is aware that his moodiness and drinking, fed by an inability to paint, bother Lena, and he suspects, correctly, that his wife considers not coming home every time she leaves the flat to do her weekly shopping in Euston. Lena learns from Dr. Beecham that she must have a breast removed because of cancer, and Clem takes pills she gets for herself from Beecham because he has a bad heart.

Hanley calls this first section of the novel “Today” and follows it with a section titled “Yesterday,” in which he focuses on two days in 1940 during the heavy German bombing of London. The building is full of people. Richard Jones and his wife, Gwyn, live in one apartment. Jones is an air raid warden and herds the residents of the building into a basement shelter. In addition to Clem and Lena Stevens, who carry a huge, unfinished canvas with them every time they come down to the shelter, Jones is responsible for the Frasers, an elderly couple living on a civil servant’s pension; The Royal Air Force pilot Robinson and his wife and child; and a drunken sailor named Johns who appears with Celia Downes in the empty apartment of Miss Benson, the upper-middle-class owner of the house. Despite the shared experience of two days of bombing, the building’s occupants are largely concerned with themselves. Mrs. Fraser is obsessed with the fact that her apartment door will not latch. Terrified that somebody will come in while she is asleep, she stands sentinel in the doorway. The pilot Robinson stays drunk; he is more afraid on the ground than in the air, and the idea of returning to duty comforts him. Richard and Gwyn Jones find safety only in each other’s arms; the fact that his duties as warden take him out of the shelter keeps Gwyn in a state of nervous exhaustion. Surrounded by these people, all of them experiencing unusual stress, Clem and Lena Stevens do not stand out as unusual. Their habit of bringing Clem’s most recent canvas downstairs seems no more eccentric than the behavior of the others. Clem and Lena see the painting, which Robinson suggests depicts the sun rising, as fulfillment of Clem’s promise as a painter. It is his masterpiece, even if it is unfinished. Jones, however, refuses to allow Clem to bring the canvas into the shelter, and it is destroyed when a bomb hits near the house.

The loss of this painting is a devastating blow. It explains Hanley’s use of “Not Tomorrow” as the title of the third section of A Dream Journey. The morbid lack of confidence in his work that Clem develops comes from the destruction of the canvas he regards as his finest. On a Tuesday while Lena has gone to Euston to shop, Clem has a fatal accident while moving a lighted oil stove. The inquest concludes that he had a heart attack, but one policeman advances the theory that he was trying to burn paintings in his studio. Ivor Cruickshank, the former owner of a gallery at which Clem had exhibited his work before the war, calls on Lena after Cis Grimpen tells him that the painter has died. He is prompted by sympathy for Lena, memories of a brief attraction to her twenty years before, and curiosity about the quality of the work Clem has left behind. Cruickshank’s examination of the canvases in the workroom confirms Lena’s awareness that her husband failed to live up to his youthful promise as a painter.

The Characters

Hanley’s use of an omniscient third-person narrator enables the reader to see how each of the characters thinks and feels. He shows the reader Clem’s frustration with his painting, Lena’s disillusionment with her husband, and the terror of the various tenants of the Chesil Place house during the German bombing. The prose with which Hanley communicates these characters’ emotions is idiomatic, highly individualized, and charged with emotion.

Despite the fact that the efforts of Clem Stevens to paint are squarely at the center of the plot of Hanley’s A Dream Journey, the protagonist of the novel is his wife, Lena. The painter’s death is not dramatized in the third part of the book. The focus is on the reactions of the Grimpens, the former art dealer Cruickshank, and Lena to Clem’s death, and its meaning is different for each of them. In the first section of the novel, the narrator enters Clem’s mind to record his fear of being left by Lena, his growing awareness that he has stopped functioning as an artist, and his paranoia when faced with the world outside his apartment. This characterization is deft, but it serves chiefly to underscore Lena’s dilemma. She has sacrificed as much as Clem in pursuit of his artistic success, and she accepts only reluctantly that his paintings never measure up to his intentions.

Hanley fills A Dream Journey with sets of character foils for the Stevens couple. In the first and third parts of the book, he presents the caretaker Grimpen and his wife Cis. They are as poor as Clem and Lena, but they are more compatible as a couple. Cis Grimpen shows unaffected sympathy for Lena after Clem’s death; she is the only character in the framing sections capable of much compassion. In the middle section of the novel, Hanley provides a series of younger couples as Clem and Lena’s foils. Richard and Gwyn Jones are tenderly romantic, the pilot Robinson and the wife he calls Ducksie share concern for an infant daughter, and the sailor Johns makes a purely physical assault on Celia Downes. The three suggest the range of forces which can bind a couple together. While Clem and Lena are sexually attracted to each other and psychologically interdependent, it is their commitment to the canvas—symbolically, their child—that they try to protect, that provides the strongest bond. When they no longer have Clem’s painting to nurture, the tensions between them grow.

Despite the seriousness of Hanley’s treatment of Clem and Lena Stevens, his characterizations of minor figures are comic. Robinson, the nervous Royal Air Force pilot, is identified by the epithet “the blue man.” Celia Downes is identified from Clem’s portrait as “the Bermondsey girl,” so it is ironic that she steals this canvas from his apartment, hides it during the bombing raid, and removes it from the building when the coast is clear. The art dealer Ivor Cruickshank, a small, neatly dressed man, reminds Cis Grimpen of an actor whom she cannot name but whom she saw in a prewar pantomime. The comedy aside, these secondary characters are typical lower class and middle-class types representative of their culture. Hanley cannot have chosen Jones, Fraser, and Robinson—Welshman, Scotsman, and Englishman—without intending to represent the British people.

Critical Context

While A Dream Journey may not be Hanley’s finest single achievement in fiction, it is certainly the most accessible book for readers unfamiliar with his work. Since publication of the sea novels Drift (1930), Boy (1931), and Ebb and Flood (1932), Hanley has focused on the lives of men and women emerging from working-class to lower-middle-class status. Like Joseph Conrad and D. H. Lawrence, of whose books his early novels are reminiscent, Hanley is ambivalent about the change. He sees that the lives his protagonists make for themselves are often as crippling as the ones they struggle to leave behind.

That is certainly his point about Clem and Lena Stevens in A Dream Journey, although it is not the conclusion Hanley drew about them when they appeared in No Directions (1943). In the earlier short novel, which appears as the “Yesterday” section of A Dream Journey, Clem and Lena are minor characters. The focus is on Richard Jones, the air raid warden, and his wife, Gwyn, and the other tenants of the house in Chesil Place share the Joneses’ terror at the bombing. Hanley appears to have recognized that Clem and Lena are different. Because their dream is of artistic transcendence over circumstance, their story is both more heroic and more tragic than those of the other men and women in No Directions. The factors which limit their lives, as Hanley suggests in A Dream Journey, are as much of their own making as anything else.

Elements of the novel suggest the influence of Joyce Cary’s portrait of an artist in The Horse’s Mouth (1944) and of the artist’s muse in Herself Surprised (1941). Where Cary stresses the vitality of his Gulley Jimson and Sara Munday, however, Hanley shows how much life has taken from Clem and Lena Stevens. The portrait of the artist in A Dream Journey is a deeply pessimistic one, and it is hard to resist the temptation to see Hanley’s characterization of Clem Stevens as a portrait of himself.

Bibliography

Allen, Bruce. “Dream Journeys,” in Sewanee Review. LXXXV (Fall, 1977), pp. 687-696.

Edwards, Thomas R. “Getting Away from It All,” in The New York Review of Books. XXIV (March 3, 1977), pp. 31-32.

Howe, Irving. “A Dream Journey,” in The New York Times Book Review. LXXIV (December 19, 1976), p. 1.