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Billy Liar

Keith Waterhouse




  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Billy Liar

  Keith Waterhouse was born in Leeds in 1929. Failing his eleven-plus, he left school at fourteen, worked for an undertaker and did his National Service, before taking a job on the Yorkshire Evening Post. He then moved to the Daily Mirror where he became a celebrated national columnist, not leaving till Robert Maxwell took over the paper in 1985. He went on to write more than 2,000 columns for the Daily Mail.

  Waterhouse published his first novel, There Is a Happy Land, in 1957, quickly followed by Billy Liar in 1959. He was also a prolific writer for stage and screen – his hit play Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell won the Evening Standard Comedy of the Year award in 1990. With his long-term collaborator Willis Hall, he wrote the scripts for a number of successful British films including Billy Liar, Whistle Down the Wind and A Kind of Loving.

  His many non-fiction titles (he claimed to have published over sixty books) included The Theory and Practice of Lunch, and Waterhouse on Newspaper Style and English Our English, both published by Penguin.

  Keith Waterhouse was made a CBE in 1991. He died in 2009.

  Billy Liar was Keith Waterhouse’s second novel, and remained his most famous. It was adapted into a play (starring Albert Finney), a film (starring Tom Courtenay), a musical (starring Michael Crawford and Elaine Page) and a TV series. On the author’s death, the Daily Telegraph wrote that Billy Liar was ‘one of the great comic novels of the twentieth century’.

  Blake Morrison is a novelist, poet and critic. A Yorkshireman like Waterhouse, he has been literary editor of both the Observer and the Independent on Sunday. The film of his acclaimed memoir And When Did You Last See Your Father? was released in 2007, and his most recent novel The Last Weekend is published in 2010. He is Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College.

  Billy Liar

  KEITH WATERHOUSE

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA), Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published by Michael Joseph 1959

  Published in Penguin Books 1962

  Reissued with a new introduction in Penguin Books 2010

  Copyright © Keith Waterhouse, 1959

  Introduction copyright © Blake Morrison, 2010

  The moral right of the author and of the introducer has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  ISBN: 978-0-14-195803-3

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Introduction

  In the final chapter of D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, the hero, Paul Morel, gazes out beyond the light of his home town into the darkness, unsure which way to turn. With a suitcase in his hand and a train ticket in his pocket, Keith Waterhouse’s narrator faces a similar dilemma at the end of Billy Liar. Like Paul, he has just suffered a family bereavement. Like Paul, he has just rejected an offer of marriage. Like Paul, he knows that his artistic talents will only be expressed if he escapes his claustrophobic family, his boring job and his provincial enclave. But will he dare catch the train to London? Or are his dreams of a life elsewhere just an adolescent fantasy? ‘It was a day for big decisions,’ we’re told at the outset, and the narrative, set over the course of one long day, leads inexorably to Billy’s moment of decision at the railway station.

  Keith Waterhouse wouldn’t have cared for the comparison with Lawrence, whom he’d have seen as insufferably earnest. The tone of Billy Liar is comic and what is attractive about Billy is his irreverence. But both novels are highly autobiographical and both protagonists are faced with the same question: should one be loyal to home, family and the past, or to self, art and the future? ‘We gotta get out of this place/If it’s the last thing we ever do,’ Eric Burdon and The Animals sang in 1965, about a dirty old city where the sun refuses to shine. Billy would recognize the place and echo the sentiment. But being a big fish in a small pond has its advantages. And even when events conspire to make a departure the obvious move, his resolve to leave is put to the test.

  Sons and Lovers may have been a distant precedent, but it wasn’t until the 1950s that novels featuring a provincial hero, or anti-hero, came to prominence – among them William Cooper’s Scenes from Provincial Life (1950), John Wain’s Hurry on Down (1953), Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954), John Braine’s Room at the Top (1957) and Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958). There was talk of a generation of Angry Young Men, with Amis’s Jim Dixon and John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter the most frequently cited examples. W. Somerset Maugham dismissed them as ‘scum’ and would doubtless have felt the same about Billy Fisher, with his putdowns of fools and phoneys. But Waterhouse’s novel was also part of a more specifically northern sub-genre: in its wake came Stan Barstow’s A Kind of Loving (1960), David Storey’s This Sporting Life (1960), Bill Naughton’s play Alfie (1963) and, later, Barry Hines’s A Kestrel for a Knave (1968, better known under its film title Kes). No less important, Billy Liar was published on the cusp of the 1960s, when a whiff of sexual adventure and literary experiment was in the air. Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners appeared in the same week, and William Burroughs’s The Naked Lunch in the same year.

  It’s true that Billy moans about his native Stradhoughton ‘dragging its wooden leg about five paces behind the times’, but sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll have arrived nevertheless. There are coffee bars, record shops, pubs with stand-up comedy acts, and ‘all-pop nights’ at the Roxy dance-hall. And though Billy has no luck persuading the frigid Barbara to let him touch her above the knee, even after dosing her with ‘passion pills’, the adventurous Liz is as eager for sexual experience as he is. When it comes to the act itself, Waterhouse’s language turns euphemistic, as if fearful of the censor: Billy talks of his ‘moment of satisfaction’. But elsewhere, by the standards of the time, the idiom is boldly profane. ‘Does she shag?’ and ‘Are you getting it regular?’ are questions rarely met with in fiction published before the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial in 1961. Even the repeated use of the word ‘bloody’ was mildly shocking, and occasioned some booing wh
en the stage version opened.

  It’s a mark of the novel’s resonance that it became not just a play (starring Albert Finney) but a film (with Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie), a Drury Lane musical, a British television series and a US sitcom. The naughtiness of the hero was part of the charm.

  The catchy title helped, too, though Waterhouse took some time to find it: the novel, his second (There Is a Happy Land had appeared two years earlier), began life as The Young Man’s Magnificat (‘the supposed freewheeling inner thoughts of a north-country adolescent’), but when Waterhouse left the typescript in the back of a taxi he had to start again from scratch. The final draft, completed in a frenzied three weeks, was provisionally called Saturday Night at the Roxy until the appearance of Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning made a further change of title inevitable.

  Billy’s ordeals are ones faced by most young men in any age – trouble with parents, trouble with women, trouble with the boss. What sets him apart is the richness of his fantasy life: in the first chapter alone, he invents a land called Ambrosia where he’ll be Prime Minister; recreates himself as the indulged son of liberal, middle-class parents; plans to write a public-school novel; and – having failed to post to clients the 200-odd calendars promoting the firm of funeral directors where he works – imagines being sent to prison for his crime. Billy’s private fantasies are harmless fun; they help make his life more interesting. But the lies he tells to impress his girlfriends are more troubling and show how confused he is about what he wants. His machinations soon land him in a mess: both Barbara (the Witch) and Rita (waitress at the Kit-Kat milk bar) believe they’re engaged to him, but it’s Liz (a freer spirit and his natural soulmate) whom he seems to love. All the wrangling over a ring seems dated now. Those passion pills are worrying, too: aren’t they the fifties equivalent of a date-rape drug? But we know that Billy will get his comeuppance in due course. And when it arrives, he’s denounced with a vehemence that restores the moral order. ‘You miserable, lying, rotten, stinking get! … You think you’re it but you’re shit!’

  If Billy retains our sympathy, it’s because of his wit and brio. The double act with his friend Arthur sets the tone: they while away the working day with banter, practical jokes, music-hall routines and linguistic games (‘ “Never use a preposition to end a sentence with,” he said’, ‘ “I must ask you to not split infinitives,” I said’). Farce and lavatorial humour also appear, notably in Billy’s efforts to dispose of those unposted work calendars. Above all, there are the parodies and piss-takes, as the clichés of elders and betters are exposed to merciless pastiche. Solemnity is a particular target; snobbery, too, including the inverted kind. As for Yorkshire, awareness of how it is changing makes Billy satirize the nostalgia of his dialect-speaking employer, Councillor Duxbury: ‘Ah only had one clog on me foot when ah came to Stradhoughton. Only one clog on me foot. But very soon ah were riding about in taxis … Ah had to take a taxi because ah only had one clog.’ A local newspaper columnist, Man o’ the Dales, is similarly sent up for his sentimental platitudes. In a passage that looks back to Dickens’s evocation of Coketown in Hard Times and forward to the takeover of the British high street by chain stores, Billy takes on the pair of them, if only in his imagination:

  … our main street, Moorgate, was – despite the lying reminiscences of old men like Councillor Duxbury who remembered sheep-troughs where the X-L Disc Bar now stands – exactly like any other High Street in Great Britain. Woolworth’s looked like Woolworth’s, the Odeon looked like the Odeon, and the Stradhoughton Echo’s own office, which Man o’ the Dales must have seen, looked like a public lavatory in honest native white tile. I had a fairly passionate set-piece all worked out on the subject of rugged Yorkshire towns, with their rugged neon signs and their rugged plate-glass and plastic shop-fronts, but so far nobody had given me the opportunity to start up on the theme.

  ‘Dark satanic mills I can put up with,’ I would say, pushing my tobacco pouch along the bar counter. ‘They’re part of the picture. But’ – puff, puff – ‘when it comes to dark satanic power stations, dark satanic housing estates, and dark satanic teashops …’

  If Stradhoughton is no different from anywhere else, there’s little reason for Billy to stay there. And it’s not as if London is hard to reach: ‘you just get on a train and, four hours later, there you are.’ The problem is that Billy is far more fearful than his cocky manner suggests. To work as a scriptwriter for the comedian Danny Boon would fulfil his most cherished ambition. But the prospect fills his bowels with ‘quick-flushing terror’. As Liz tells him, ‘You’re like a child at the edge of a paddling pool. You want very much to go in, but you think so much about whether the water’s cold, and whether you’ll drown, and what your mother will say if you get your feet wet …’ Billy has a touch of Hamlet about him, the native hue of resolution sickli’ed o’er by the pale cast of thought. That’s why his fate is still hanging in the balance until the last chapter, on a railway platform at 1.35 a.m.

  Keith Waterhouse did leave for London, where he became a high-profile journalist, wrote for film, theatre and television, had a West End hit with the play Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, and – as a long-time campaigner for clear and simple English – founded the Association for the Abolition of the Aberrant Apostrophe. His range and energy were remarkable. But Billy Liar is the work he will be remembered for. Its lasting power is something the former US president Bill Clinton and the former Conservative party leader William Hague can ruefully attest to, both having earned ‘Billy Liar’ tabloid headlines for their sins. But what makes the book unique is its mixture of laddish humour and exorbitant fantasy. And the hero, of course – a rebel in the cause of comic realism.

  Blake Morrison

  1

  LYING in bed, I abandoned the facts again and was back in Ambrosia.

  By rights, the march-past started in the Avenue of the Presidents, but it was an easy thing to shift the whole thing into Town Square. My friends had vantage seats on the town-hall steps where no flag flew more proudly than the tattered blue star of the Ambrosian Federation, the standard we had carried into battle. One by one the regiments marched past, and when they had gone – the Guards, the Parachute Regiment, the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry – a hush fell over the crowds and they removed their hats for the proud remnants of the Ambrosian Grand Yeomanry. It was true that we had entered the war late, and some criticized us for that; but out of two thousand who went into battle only seven remained to hear the rebuke. We limped along as we had arrived from the battlefield, the mud still on our shredded uniforms, but with a proud swing to our kilts. The band played ‘March of the Movies’. The war memorial was decked with blue poppies, the strange bloom found only in Ambrosia.

  I put an end to all this, consciously and deliberately, by going ‘Da da da da da da da’ aloud to drive the thinking out of my head. It was a day for big decisions. I recalled how I could always cure myself when I got on one of those counting sprees where it was possible to reach three thousand easily without stopping: I would throw in a confetti of confusing numbers or, if they didn't help, half-remembered quotations and snatches of verse. ‘Seventy-three. Nine hundred and six. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, he maketh me to lie down. Four hundred and thirty-five.’

  It was a day for big decisions. I had already determined, more for practical reasons than out of any new policy, to clip the thumb-nail which I had been cultivating until it was a quarter of an inch long. Now, lying under the pale gold eiderdown, staring up at the crinoline ladies craftily fashioned out of silver paper and framed in passe-partout (they would be coming down, for a start) I began to abandon the idea of saving the clipping in an ointment box; I would throw it right away, without a backward glance, and from now on short nails, and a brisk bath each morning. An end, too, to this habit of lying in bed crinkling my toes fifty times for each foot; in future I would be up at seven and an hour's work done before breakfast. There would be no more breath-holdin
g, eye-blinking, nostril-twitching, or sucking of teeth, and this plan would start tomorrow, if not today.

  I lay in bed, the toe-crinkling over; now I was stretching the fingers of both hands to their fullest extent, like two starfish. Sometimes I got an overpowering feeling that my fingers were webbed, like a duck's, and I had to spread them out to block the sensation and prevent it spreading to my feet.

  My mother shouted up the stairs: ‘Billy? Billy! Are you getting up?’ the third call in a fairly well-established series of street-cries that graduated from: ‘Are you awake, Billy?’ to ‘It's a quarter past nine, and you can stay in bed all day for all I care’, meaning twenty to nine and time to get up. I waited until she called: ‘If I come up there you'll know about it’ (a variant of number five, usually ‘If I come up there I shall tip you out’) and then I got up.

  I put on the old raincoat I used for a dressing-gown, making the resolution that now I must buy a real dressing-gown, possibly a silk one with some kind of dragon motif, and I felt in my pocket for the Player's Weights. I was trying to bring myself up to smoke before breakfast but this time even the idea of it brought on the familiar nausea. I shoved the cigarettes back in my pocket and felt the letter still there, but this time I did not read it. ‘He scribbled a few notes on the back of a used envelope.’ The phrase had always appealed to me. I had a pleasing image of a stack of used envelopes, secured by a rubber band, crammed with notes in a thin, spidery handwriting. I took the used envelope out of my pocket with the letter still in it and thought up some jottings. ‘Calendars. See S. re job. Write Boon. Thousand??? See Witch re Captain.’ Most of these notes were unnecessary, especially the bit about seeing Witch re Captain; that, along with the calendars, always a part-time worry, and the other bit about seeing S. re job, had kept me awake half the night. As for Thousand??? this was a ghost of idle thinking, the last traces of a plan to write a thousand words each day of a public-school story to be entitled The Two Schools at Gripminster. Having conceived the plan in early August, I was already thirty-four thousand words behind on the schedule. There were long periods of time when my only ambition was to suck a Polo mint right through without it breaking in my mouth; others when I would retreat into Ambrosia and sketch out the new artists' settlement on route eleven, and they would be doing profiles of me on television, ‘Genius – or Madman?’