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Contents
Introduction
BOOK ONE
The Complexion of the Colonel
BOOK TWO
The Beating of Retreat
BOOK THREE
The Funeral Orders
Introduction
Tunes of Glory was James Kennaway’s first novel, and has remained his most popular. It was published in 1956 to a chorus of critical approval. Evelyn Waugh wrote that Kennaway ‘demonstrated a powerful natural talent which may well develop into something important’; Peter Quennell forecast that he ‘would take his place amongst the finest story-tellers of the day’; Compton Mackenzie selected the novel as his Book of the Year.
It was filmed in 1960. Alec Guinness starred with John Mills, Dennis Price and Susannah York. There were smaller parts for Duncan Macrae, Gordon Jackson and John Fraser. The director was Ronald Neame; Kennaway himself wrote the script and was nominated for an Academy Award, few better films have been made so faithfully from a novel, and it is hard now to read the book without visualizing these actors and hearing their voices.
This is testimony not only to the merits of the film, but to the peculiar qualities of the novel; it is perhaps also an indication of something lacking in it. The writing is intensely cinematic. From the opening we are invited to use our eyes:
there is a high wall that surrounds Campbell Barracks, and in the winter there is often a layer of crusted snow on top of it. No civilian rightly knows what happens behind that grey wall but everybody is always curious, and people were more than ever curious one January a year or two ago.
That first paragraph offers another invitation: to enter a closed, exclusive community. Kennaway speaks in the knowing tones of the insider; the young writer has a clubman’s assurance, while the word ‘crusted’ applies to more than the snow. It hints at the nature of the community within the wall, and suggests that Kennaway is about to lift its lid for our enlightenment and enjoyment.
The knowing tone was not a pose, or not wholly. Kennaway was indeed an insider, though he was also conscious, for a number of reasons, of never entirely belonging. He was twenty-eight when the book was published, and his education had been that of a conventional member of the upper-middle classes. His father, a hero of the First War, was a writer to the signet, and the factor for a number of Perthshire estates; he was a wealthy man as a result of his part in various land sales, which included the deal by which part of the Gleneagles estate was sold to the lms Railway Company for the famous hotel, and he sat on the board of a number of Scottish companies. James was educated at Trinity College, Glenalmond, and then, after National Service, during which he was commissioned into the Cameron Highlanders before serving with the 1st Battalion the Gordon Highlanders in Occupied Germany. Thereafter, he went to Trinity College, Oxford. He was successful at every stage of his education, never in any sense a rebel.
Yet his self-assurance was perhaps less than it appeared. His father had died when James was twelve, and the boy had had to assume family responsibilities prematurely; he was acutely conscious of his duty towards his mother. He felt a compulsion to excel, if only to prove that he had not been diminished by his father’s death. Moreover, he was sensitive about his social position: a factor’s membership of the upper class was conditional, not absolute. The young Kennaway felt himself to be a member of an exclusive club, but one who could easily be displaced.
His attitude to the Army was similarly ambivalent. He enjoyed the experience of being an officer, and revelled in life as a privileged member of the occupying force in post-war Germany; but he disliked his regiment, finding in the Gordons ‘a pettiness and filth which is hard to believe’. The batallion was troubled by internal rivalries: according to his biographer Trevor Royle, the regiment in Tunes of Glory ‘is undeniably the Gordons and most of the characters are based on officers he knew in Germany’. He was offered a regular commission, but declined, very nearly (or so he confided to his mother) telling the Colonel ‘that I would rather serve in the Argentine Police than in his regiment’.
He went up to Oxford to read ppe (Politics, Philosophy and Economics) with the eventual intention of becoming a barrister. This was abandoned when he fell in love with Susan Edmonds. This love affair dominated his last year there, and they were married a few months after he came down. Otherwise he had dabbled in Conservative politics (he used to dream frequently of Winston Churchill) and in the theatre; he had enjoyed social life, with the help of a private income; he had not worked, and his degree was a poor one. He joined a publishing firm, but he already believed that his true metier was writing. In the next few years he published a few short stories, before Tunes of Glory justified that belief.
Tunes of Glory is a dramatic novel. It is the story of the clash of opposites, and it is simple enough to be outlined in a paragraph. Jock Sinclair, the Acting Colonel of the regiment —ex-ranker and war hero, a rough swaggerer who came into the army by way of Barlinnie Jail and the Pipe Band—is superseded by Basil Barrow, Eton and Sandhurst, a product of the Staff College, a gentleman, everything Jock is not. Both are more complicated than they seem, men of action who live on their nerves. Jock drinking too much, is haunted by the ghosts of the past; Barrow by memories of his failed marriage and his terrible years in a Japanese p.o.w. camp. Naturally they clash; naturally the Officers’ Mess is split. Then Jock blunders: he strikes a corporal, unknown to him, is his daughter’s boyfriend, and he does so in the public bar of a hotel in the town. He has played into Barrow’s hands, but Barrow does not know how to play the cards he has been dealt. For a moment it seems as if Jock will crack first, but he pulls himself together and rebuffs Barrow’s conciliatory overtures with contempt. Meanwhile Barrow tries to evade the responsibility for deciding what should be done. He consults Jock’s closest friend, Major Charlie Scott, who refuses however to give him the answer he clearly seeks. Jock, Scott says, has to pay for what he’s done: ’you can’t have chaps striking corporals’. Faced with this respsonsibil- ity, and crushed by his inability to rise to it, Barrow escapes in the only way open to him: he shoots himself. Jock’s shame and pity are roused. He decrees for Barrow a military funeral on a scale more suitable for a Field-Marshal. At the end of giving his instructions for the funeral, he suffers a nervous and moral collapse.
The ending, not entirely convincing in the novel, works more effectively in the cinema where visual images, music and Guinness’s presence supplement the words. Despite this reservation, Tunes of Glory is a strikingly competent first novel and I use the adjective in no derogatory sense: competence in fiction is sufficiently rare to call forth admiration.
It is a story of men within an institution. The women— there are only two, Jock’s daughter Morag, and Mary Titterington, an actress at the locak Reportory theatre, sometimes Jock’s mistress, and sometimes Charlie Scott’s— receive short shrift. These are men who define themselves by their relationship to the regiment. Kennaway’s understanding of this is both subtle and penetrating: Charlie Scott betrays Jock, and no doubt sexual jealousy has a part to play in this betrayal; but it is not the most important element. Jock realizes this himself: ‘Charlie’s a good soldier’. Within the terms according to
