Scenes from Provincial Life and Scenes from Metropolitan Life

by William Cooper

Scenes from Provincial Life was first published in 1950, when Joe Lunn was one of the first breed of ordinary male anti-hero protagonists to appear in English fiction. Joe's exploits and ordinariness, as he tries to avoid his mistress Myrtle's attempts to trap him into marriage, brilliantly poke fun at what were, and often remain, the taboo subjects of sex and class.

Genres: Fiction

422 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

H.S. Hoff (William Cooper) was an English novelist, born in Crewe. After graduating from Christ's College, Cambridge in 1933 he became a science teacher in Leicester, an experience on which he seems to have drawn for his novel, Scenes from Provincial Life. Hoff served in the Royal Air Force in World War II, and later became a civil servant, associating closely with C. P. Snow, who appears in light disguise as Robert in Scenes from Provincial Life and its sequels. After retiring he held an academic position with Syracuse University, New York, lecturing on English literature to its students in London.

Hoff wrote four novels between 1934 and 1946 under his own name but made his reputation with his first novel under the pen name William Cooper, Scenes from Provincial Life (1950), the first of five more or less autobiographical novels published over the ensuing half century.

Hoff wrote 17 novels in all as well as short stories, two plays and a biography of his friend C.P.Snow. In 1971 he published an account of the trial of the Hosein brothers.

[from Wikipedia]

Reviews

[Leonie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Book from the fifties about a youngish man in 1939 who doesn't want to marry his girlfriend. It's supposed to be the forerunner of anti-heroes and angry young men, but, while I can see that it's quite sexually frank for it's time, especially given that it's actually about 1939 rather than the fifties, I imagine it's much more mellow and pleasant than a lot of those other books. Nick Hornby introduces this and says it influenced him, and I can certainly see it. Joe has a bisexual friend whose love life gets mixed up with Joe's own to some extent. All this is relayed very matter of factly and, although it apparently shocked people, the nice thing about it is that there's no anxiety to shock apparent in the text. It's the story of young people who take themselves and their dramas seriously but it's told from the perspective of being over all that and rather amused by how seriously everything was taken. The nuances to situations are spelled out and summed up for you in a droll, self-deprecating way. It's very easy to read and really quite pleasant, I thought, if nothing more. The narrator's attitude to women is certainly sexist in a benignly patronising way, but there's worse.

[Colin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some books, considered radical, groundbreaking or influential in their day endure far beyond their initial succes d’estime or popularity; others fare less well as the years progress and date badly. William Cooper’s Scenes from Provincial Life, published in 1950, although set in 1939, definitely falls into the latter category. Regarded as a trailblazer for later, greater novels like Lucky Jim, Room at the Top, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and others, it feels pale and insipid in comparison. In the lazy ennui of Joe Lunn’s narrative voice, his tedious introspection and indecision, the reader can hear the origins of Jim Dixon, Joe Lampton, et al, but it’s pretty thin gruel and frankly fairly dull. One remarkable feature though for a book of this era is the completely accepting treatment of a gay relationship.
This Penguin edition (part of their ‘Decades’ series), provides the extra bonus of Cooper’s third book in the ‘Scenes from’ tetralogy, Scenes from Married Life, but on the basis of the first, I’ll give it a miss.

[Gareth Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had been looking for Scenes from Provincial Life for some time having heard part of the radio adaptation (although I seem to have partially confused it with another adaptation at the same time as I expected part of this book to be set in a newspaper office - nevertheless Myrtle, Joe and their cottage are there). This edition contains both Scenes from Provincial Life and Scenes from Married Life. The former is often said to be a precursor for the anti-hero books of the 1950s such a Lucky Jim and Room at the Top. With its frankness about pre-marital sex (or indeed sex where there is no intention of marriage) it is certainly ground breaking (as some of the later parts of Scenes from Married Life make clear). Whilst good, it is much less good than the novels it is said to inspire, it's neither as funny nor as endearing as, for example, Room at the Top. Scenes from Married Life is very much of it's time, and the self-absorbed narrator proves somewhat irritating. A decent period piece of a time when one's friends (at least the narrator's) could decide whether to have servants or not.

[Richard Newbold · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scenes from Provincial Life is set in the months leading up to the start of WWII, in an unnamed provincial town. However, this is obviously Leicester - the dialect, the trams, the clock tower, the market, the sheer humdrumness of the place - and as such can be considered almost a prequel to Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, which trawled similar depths to great comic effect a few years later. The central character, Joe Lunn, a disaffected teacher and would-be author, describes with a curious mix of insight and self-pity, his life and especially his relationship with Myrtle, the girl he regularly beds but is desperate not to marry. Peculiarly for the time, the narrator gives a matter-of-fact, uncensorious description of what is frankly a tiresomely unstable gay relationship between two of his circle, weaving friendship, love and aversion to commitment into their shared ambition to escape the approaching conflict by decamping to America. How the whole thing unravels, sunk by inertia in a very provincial, understated way, is the gentle satire at the heart of the book. Nick Hornby wrote a fan's preface to the edition I have, and stylistically I'd stand Provincial Life alongside Hornby's mix of self-preoccupation, whimsy and gentle laddish obsessions, as well as the Angry Young Man School with which Cooper is often linked.

Leicester is my home town, and I never tire of its parochialism being lampooned or worse - Kingsley Amis, Joe Orton, Sue Townsend, Malcolm Bradbury - all have carried on the tradition. True to type, the backdrop of the looming World crisis is distinctly underwhelming and undramatic, perhaps stifled by the mundanity of everyday life. The central characters too, I found mostly annoying with their endless selfishness, I can't decide if this is a weakness or incisive writing. The grotesques and eccentrics of Lunn's professional life as a teacher (Alderman Newton's Boys, where Cooper was a physics teacher, at a guess), and the seething resentment within, we meet in set piece farces such as Sports Day, and they bring some much needed colour to the book. All-in-all a wholehearted recommendation from me, and an intention to follow Joe Lunn through the sequels Married Life and Metropolitan Life.

[Stephanie Patterson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I decided to read Scenes of Provincial Life because it cropped up in some discussion of modern British fiction and I had never heard of it. It concerns the life of Joe Lunn who teaches at a boy’s school. He spends much of the novel sleeping with his girlfriend Myrtle but also evading any suggestions of marriage. He has written a few novels and as WWII heats up wants to leave Britain to pursue life in the United States. When he’s not working or alternately seducing and fending off his girlfriend, Joe spends time with a good male friend who pursues a younger man, Steve. This relationship has all the volatility and sense of urgency that Joe’s with Myrtle lacks. Though not as funny as the writers he influenced, Kingsley Amis and Malcolm Bradbury, Cooper creates a familiar type, the self-obsessed protagonist who worries more about private life than world events or existential questions. The sequel, Scenes of Metropolitan Life, which was not written until many years later evidently because the prototype for the character of Myrtle threatened to sue finds our hero longing to escape his government job in order to write and maintaining a relationship with the now married Myrtle who is more attractive as she is more unobtainable. The books are also worth reading for the time and place they capture.

[Leslie · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting precursor for books like Lucky Jim and Room at the Top, less laugh-out-loud than the former and less misogynistic and concerned with class than the latter. It was considered rather shocking when it came out in 1950, mostly because the narrator and his best friend are in complicated nonmarital sexual relationships, one with a young woman he doesn't want to marry and the other with a young man. I can see how this fact, plus a few other details, would have been rather a surprise at the time. The casual, self-obsessed tone of the narrator strikes a distinctly modern note.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's nothing very profound about this book, but it paints an interesting pictures of life in 1950's Britain - an era that is now gone for ever. The book is very easy to read and full of characters that seem very real. This edition also includes the shorter "Scenes from Married Life", which I read thinking all the time that something dramatic (and probably bad) would happen. I won't spoil your enjoyment by telling you if it did happen.

[Kirsten · Rating 3 out of 5]

England, kurz vor dem zweiten Weltkrieg in einer nicht näher genannten kleinen Stadt. Joe Lunn erzählt dem Leser Geschichten aus seinem Leben: von seiner Beziehung zu Myrtle, seinem Freundeskreis, seiner Arbeit als Lehrer und von seinem Wunsch, Schriftsteller zu werden.

Beim Lesen hatte ich manchmal das Gefühl, als ob ich durch Joes Fenster sehen und seinen ganz normalen Alltag beobachten würde. Denn mehr ist die Geschichte nicht. Es ist eine Aneinanderreihung von Alltäglichkeiten. Joes Beziehung zu Myrtle läuft schon länger ins Leere. Er findet es angenehm, mit ihr zusammen zu sein, aber er will sie nicht heiraten. Was Anfangs beiden angenehm war, wird später zur Belastung. Erst als Myrtle eigenständiger wird, wird sie für ihn wieder interessant.

Auch die Arbeit läuft nicht rund. Ich habe nicht den Eindruck gewonnen, dass Joe wirklich ein begeisterter Lehrer ist. Wie über alle anderen auch, redet er über seine Schüler eher von oben herab. Deshalb überrascht es mich, dass er manchmal Eigeninitiative zeigt. Die wird aber von seinem mehr als konservativen Schulleiter abgeblockt.

Joes Freundeskreis ist ähnlich gestrickt wie er. Es ist eine Gruppe oberflächlicher junger Männer, die keine Verantwortung übernehmen will. Als dann doch einer von ihnen ein Mädchen in Schwierigkeiten bringt, unternehmen sie alles, um die zu beseitigen.

Alles in allem waren mir Joe und seine Freunde eher unsympathisch. Und obwohl Teile des Buchs durchaus interessant und auch schön geschrieben waren, war mir das Gesamtbild von Joes Leben doch zu farblos.

[Liz Chapman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I couldn't put this book down . Men haven't changed very much have they , but laws have changed since this book was written . Being gay isn't against the law but women have more rights and the law on their side , to be treated with respect . The character Tom is a creepy puppeteer and the most disturbing aspect of this book . The things teachers could get away with in the past ! I'm glad that laws have changed this and the National curriculum brought in . I would like to find William Coopers sequel " Scenes from married life "

[Karla Outzen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jeg tror egentlig jeg ville give den 3,5. Den er god at tage et kapitel ad gangen af, og er meget analyserende, men faktisk meget interessant.

[Sebastian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think he's gay.