Michael Stapleton, The Threshold

Abstract

Michael Stapleton (1923–1994) was born in Dungarvan, County Waterford. When he was four, his family moved to Hackney in north London, where he was educated. He left school in his early teens to become a butcher’s boy and later served as a merchant seaman during the Second World War. After the war he worked as an actor for a short time before swapping the theatre for a career in publishing. He worked as a proof-reader with Oxford University Press in the 1950s and later became a commissioning editor with the Hamlyn Group. Stapleton’s abiding love of opera inspired a short book on the Sadler’s Wells Opera in 1954. This brought him to the attention of Edith Sitwell, who encouraged him to write his autobiography, which became one of the first titles to be published by New Authors, an imprint launched by the Hutchinson Group in 1957. The stated aim of this new publishing venture was to reconcile ‘the frustrations of the new writer who has something of importance to say’ with ‘the harsh economic climate of publishing as it is today’. As if to reassure hesitant readers, The Threshold is prefaced by a selection of approbatory comments from critics who read the work when it was still in manuscript. Special praise is reserved for Stapleton’s social realism, particularly the documentary accuracy of his account of swapping ‘a classless Waterford existence for the revoltingly petty class consciousness of N. E. London; one facet of despair for another’. At the heart of this narrative of transition is a richly evocative account of an extended, carefree holiday the author spent with his mother and brother in Waterford in the early 1930s.

(London: Hutchinson, 1958). 272pp.; pp. 48–51; 58.