There comes a point in most accounts of the lives of “working-class novelists”
when the question of social placement rears its head. Exact social
placement, that is. Orwell once compared the average Marxian analysis of the
British class system to a roast duck being carved up with a chopper. When
working-class people come to write about themselves, on the other hand, the
most delicate instruments tend to be pressed into service. In Stan Barstow’s
In My Own Good Time (2002), for example, the moment comes when someone – not
Barstow – asks a friend if he has ever known poverty. With maximum
judiciousness, the friend answers: “I’ve known poverty, but I’ve never known
squalor”.
In The Life of a Long-Distance Writer, Richard Bradford’s wide-ranging
biography of Alan Sillitoe, published to mark its subject’s eightieth
birthday, the moment comes on the very first page of the opening chapter,
when Bradford settles down to decipher the family milieu. The Sillitoes – an
illiterate labourer, his wife and their four children – were thrown out of
their Nottingham council house sometime in the early 1930s for non-payment
of rent. They spent the rest of the decade moving their belongings by
handcart between, as Bradford puts it, “the kind of dwellings which Dickens
improved on and would have tested the credulity of Orwell’s readers”. Living
six to a room, in tenement houses routinely occupied by four other families,
the Sillitoes had access to a shared hall, a landing and a solitary outside
lavatory that might have been emptied once a week. The particular cry that
Sillitoe associated with his infancy, shrieked out by his mother whenever
her quick-fisted husband set about his offspring, was “No, not on his head”.
The deprivations of Sillitoe’s childhood are worth attending to, not only for
themselves but as a way of emphasizing his detachment from other
working-class writers of the later 1950s with whom critical orthodoxy tends
to bracket him. As Harry Ritchie points out in his excellent Success
Stories: Literature and the media in England 1950–1959 (1988), most
reviewers of the new wave of “northern” novels by, among others, Barstow (b
1928), Philip Callow (1924–2007) and Keith Waterhouse (b 1929), assumed that
the social origins of their authors were broadly homogenous. Similarly, the
books that they produced were acclaimed – when they were acclaimed – for
what was assumed to be their documentary value, a social realism that was
the literary equivalent of cinéma-vérité. If the second of these assumptions
was false – a key theme, inter alia, of Bradford’s biography – the first is
largely correct. With a few flagrant exceptions, Barstow, Waterhouse and Co
were the flag-bearers of a distinctive social sub-group: first-generation
grammar schoolboys, drawn from the “lace curtain working class” (Barstow),
eagerly rising from the foundry or the production line to the provincial
solicitor’s office or the draughtsman’s shop. In a novel like Room at the
Top by John Braine (1956) this ascent becomes a kind of triumphal progress:
the materialism of Sillitoe’s debut, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
(1958), with its full wage packets and endless fags, is much more
matter-of-fact.
There were good reasons for this. If most of the Northern horde wrote about
getting on and (by extension) getting out, Sillitoe’s early work is about
getting by and staying put, kicking against stagnancy, bringing sometimes
anarchic inner resources to bear on inertia and routine. Just as the
solidarity of his characters rarely extends beyond the family hearth, so
Sillitoe himself defies the easy categorizations of 1950s literary taxonomy.
As his brother Brian (supposedly the model for Arthur Seaton) put it,
summing up on both counts: “We were in a class of our own”. While it is
possible to overstress these distinctions, as the Daily Mail did in its
catchpenny serialization of Sillitoe’s autobiography, Life Without Armour,
of 1995 (“His Mother Worked As a Prostitute”, “His Father Was a Violent
Drunkard” etc), there is no getting away from Sillitoe’s fundamental
separation from the usual channels of literary self-help.
Bradford defines his subject as “the energetic auto-didact from nowhere”. But
even autodidacts have to start somewhere, and however ground down or
otherwise unsatisfactory Sillitoe’s early life was, the roots of his
absorption in the worlds of literature and learning lay in the Nottingham
backstreets. A martinet grandfather, Ernest Burton (who recurs in his
grandson’s fiction) took a mild interest; his grandmother encouraged him to
try for a scholarship to Nottingham High School and funded the purchase of a
copy of Pitman’s Guide to French Grammar. In the end the grammar school
scheme came to nothing, and Sillitoe was left to rot at Radford Boulevard
Senior Boys, whose alumni departed at fourteen without qualifications, but
in the interim he had discovered books: copies of The Lamplighter and John
Halifax, Gentleman in his grandparents’ glass-fronted bookcase; radio
dramatizations of The Cloister and the Hearth and The Count of Monte Cristo
to which the Sillitoes listened en famille, terrified that the set would be
repossessed before the series reached an end.
With books came raw material. Bradford is particularly good at showing how the
short stories assembled in Sillitoe’s first collection, The Loneliness of
the Long-Distance Runner (1958), draw on the personalities and sometimes
even the artefacts of the old Nottingham past. The protagonist of “Uncle
Ernest”, for example, is the family’s Uncle Edgar, known as “Eddie the
Tramp”, a First World War casualty of no fixed address who would “sit for
hours brooding and staring into space”, while “Mr Raynor the
School-teacher”, who alternates between bullying his pupils and ogling the
shop assistants in the drapery store across the way, derives from a local
man who spent his time watching the factory girls passing his doorstep on
the way to the nearby Raleigh plant. The two paintings of fishing boats, the
only “non-utilitarian objects” loaded onto the handcart, reappear in “The
Fishing Boat Picture”, in which a postman renews his relationship with an
absconding wife.
The war brought a certain amount of prosperity to these denizens of the East
Midlands underclass. Sillitoe Snr, having lied about his age to avoid
conscription, was put to work assembling air-raid shelters. Leaving school
in March 1942 – so slightly built that he was often taken for a boy of
eleven – his son was able to take advantage of the relatively high rates of
pay available to piece-workers (the £1.12s of his first weekly pay packet
compares favourably with the 17s 6d of my father’s clerking salary five
years before). Like Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,
Sillitoe claimed not to resent time spent at lathe or capstan: among other
advantages, it allowed him to reflect on the vigorous sex life he had begun
to lead. The family tradition was determinedly anti-militaristic – Arthur’s
deserter cousins are drawn from the life – but an interest in cartography,
encouraged by old man Burton, steered him towards the Air Training Corps
and, shortly after the war ended, the RAF, where he trained as a wireless
operator. After serving in Malaya he was invalided out with tuberculosis,
met his wife of nearly fifty years, the poet Ruth Fainlight (then in the
process of detaching herself from her first husband), in a Nottingham
bookshop and eventually decamped with her to the South of France. Here, he
resolved to live cheaply – his RAF pension began at £3 11s a week – and set
about the business of becoming a writer.
The first half of The Life of a Long-Distance Writer is, effectively, a study
in preconceptions. Some of these are Sillitoe’s own, in particular his idea
of what literature demanded from the individual intelligences caught up in
it. Rather more, though, are to do with the literary world’s diagnosis of
the kind of writer he was, and the social constituency he might be thought
to represent. The “magnificent lack of allegiance” that Bradford detects in
nearly all Sillitoe’s dealings with officialdom, party lines and idées
reçues is especially acute in the field of literary influence. An RAF
corporal had introduced him to Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered
Philanthropists with the recommendation that it “won the ’45 election for
Labour”, but Sillitoe, though impressed by Tressell’s naturalistic account
of the struggles of his broken-down gang of Edwardian house painters, was
suspicious of its preachy tone. D. H. Lawrence, the local literary boy made
good (“Everybody seems mad on Lawrence today” someone remarks in The Open
Door, in which a fictional version of Fainlight is represented as “loving
Lawrence’s work”), was swiftly arraigned on a charge of arrivisme – Sillitoe
suspecting that Nottinghamshire was merely Lawrence’s departure point for
Garsington and Gordon Square. (Doing the chores in their house near Menton,
Sillitoe and Fainlight would sometimes amuse themselves with burlesque
impressions of “Bert” and “Frieda”.)
At this point – the early 1950s – Sillitoe was much less interested in finding
a tradition of working-class literature that he could colonize than
attempting, as Bradford phrases it, “to absorb all major ideas”. Xenophon,
Tacitus and Sophocles gave way to Kant, Candide and Egerton Smith’s The
Principles of English Metre. As to what got written, several fragments of
“Nottingham fiction” were already doing the rounds of the literary
magazines. “Uncle Ernest” had been written before the couple’s departure
from England. “The Match”, inspired by a visit to a Notts County game in
1949, was printed by Carrefour in 1954 (the French editors who exclaimed
over this story of domestic violence spilling out of an afternoon on the
football terraces were reminded of Camus). By contrast, some of the
unpublished novels Sillitoe was turning out at this time sound much less
grounded in any kind of personal reality. “Mr Allen’s Island”, dutifully
précised by Bradford, features a millionaire who, by manipulating his press
and political contacts, whips up an international incident over a small and
wholly imaginary speck of land in the Bering Strait.
The manuscript of “Mr Allen’s Island” was shown to Robert Graves, whom
Sillitoe first met on a trip to Majorca in 1953 (Fainlight had gone back to
London to finalize her divorce). While Graves’s later claim to have
“discovered” Sillitoe is briskly disposed of, he certainly judged that
Sillitoe should concentrate on “something you know about”. A first draft of
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was finished by early 1956. Having
conquered his own expectations of what a writer ought to write about,
Sillitoe soon encountered a second set: those of the publishers to whom his
agent, Rosica Colin, enthusiastically touted his work. The left-wing reader
at Victor Gollancz who detected an imposture (“an attempt by a writer with
no experience of proletarian existence to make money by inciting contempt
for decent working people”) one may write off as a halfwit, but a
correspondence with Tom Maschler, then editorial director of MacGibbon &
Kee, reveals something of the disquiet that Arthur Seaton’s bolshie
self-interest bred up in the breasts of sensitive young literary
opinion-formers.
Maschler, who according to Bradford “wanted Sillitoe to rewrite the novel
according to his own prognosis of what it ought to be and do”, sensed in its
protagonist “a kind of Nietzschean anarchy, but not enough”. There were
calls for “existential hauteur” and talk of “hopeless resignation . . . the
crux of the book . . . a prevalent attitude amongst working class people”.
Sillitoe ignored him. After several more rejections, the novel was picked up
by W. H. Allen, rapturously reviewed, ineptly but inevitably compared to
Lawrence, brought out as a million-selling Pan paperback (“a raw and
uninhibited story of a working-class district in Nottingham and the people
who live, love, laugh and fight there”) and filmed by Karel Reisz in a style
so inflammatory that the Nottingham watch committee tried to suppress it.
Tired of life in the Mediterranean, Sillitoe settled permanently in London and
adapted himself, with moderate enthusiasm, to the life of the successful
writer – to which he brought innate resourcefulness and a determination to
be his own man that bordered on obstinacy. Bradford’s handling of these
tornado years – roughly speaking, 1958–61 – punctures several myths, notably
the idea of a creative compact between cinematically inclined novelists and
the new wave of early 1960s film directors. He quotes a blistering letter
from Shelagh Delaney about Tony Richardson’s attempt in 1962 on The
Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (“I think Tony goes from bad to worse
. . . . I found the whole thing depressing. Even more so than A Taste of
Honey. And that’s saying something, believe me”). That the second half of
The Life of a Long-Distance Writer never quite sustains the terrific impetus
of its opening is no great surprise. Unless their subjects go mad, commit
suicide or suffer marital torments, most literary Lives are more interesting
before the cheques start arriving: the rejection slip nearly always has the
edge on the position at the bar of the Garrick. Anxious to fend off these
midlife longueurs, Bradford abandons strict chronology in the early 1960s to
concentrate on such themes as Sillitoe’s increasingly sceptical view of
Soviet Russia (where 2 million copies of his third novel Key to the Door
were sold in the first year of publication), his conversion to Zionism and a
friendship with Ted Hughes. (Interestingly, Hughes, in a letter printed in
the recent selection edited by Christopher Reid, claims that among the
“Angry” decade’s newcomers he “had the best barbarian credentials, except
for maybe Alan Sillitoe”.) This approach has its advantages, but it also
robs some of the supporting detail of its context. Summarizing a letter to
Hughes in 1980, for example, Bradford notes that, among other readjustments,
Sillitoe has sacked W. H. Allen and changed his agent. It would have been
nice to know something about the frustrations that brought about these
professional throwings-over.
It is the same with the periodic introduction of “old friends” hitherto
unmentioned in the text. Bradford’s partisanship is one of his great
strengths – Sillitoe has always needed partisans – and also a minor
weakness. On the one hand, his closeness to Sillitoe, with whom he seems to
have regularly discussed the book as it took shape, allows him to bounce
hypotheses off him and to solicit a good many sharp-eyed retrospective
judgements. On the other, it leads to the staking of some very large claims,
both for the work itself and the wider landscape beyond it. Of the literary
1950s, for instance, Bradford writes: “to make good literature from the
lives of those outside the cultural mainstream without diluting or
patronising them was something that had scarcely been attempted, let alone
achieved, in English writing”. A trawl through Red Letter Days: British
fiction in the 1930s by Andy Croft (1990) or Valentine Cunningham’s
compendious British Writers in the Thirties (1988) might call this judgement
into question. So might a glance at the novels of – say – Walter Greenwood,
James Hanley or Walter Brierley, each of whom made serious and arguably
successful efforts to see working-class life from the inside. As for
Sillitoe’s early stories, one might just accept Bradford’s claim that “Uncle
Ernest” combines “understatement with crisp evocation of scene as magically
as anything in Joyce’s Dubliners”, but is it really true that by the end of
“The Decline and Fall of Frankie Buller” we know its hero “very well indeed
but in a way that no character ever before in literature has been introduced
and held the reader’s attention”?
Yet these exaggerations are a price worth paying for the wider point that
Bradford wants to make about Sillitoe’s early books, or rather about their
reception: the critics’ habit of saluting their “realism” at the expense of
the artistry that ran beneath. “The Match”, as Bradford shows, is a great
deal more than reportage – devious, full of sly juxtapositions, odd symbolic
sheens and ambiguous human traffic.
This emphasis on Sillitoe as creative artist rather than inspired reporter
underpins Bradford’s account of his prolific post-1950s output, which the
bibliography puts at over sixty items. The novels Sillitoe produced in the
1960s and 70s are a mixed bag: eclectic, sometimes densely wrought,
differing wildly in subject matter and treatment, and often mystifying to
the reviewers who had praised his early work. Here Bradford offers the
plausible thesis that, faced with the spectacle of a writer trying to expand
his range, Sillitoe’s critics either woefully underrated his achievement, or
simply misunderstood what he was trying to do, compounding this by refusing
to allow him the degree of linguistic licence they would have granted a
Virginia Woolf or an Iris Murdoch.
Certainly, the best of Sillitoe’s later novels play to his strengths (the
Nottinghamshire background, the tough, unregarded lives) while continuing to
explore new territory in unexpected ways. The novelty of A Start in Life
(1970 – reissued earlier this year by London Books; £11.99) lies in its
form, which is picaresque; in its milieu, which very soon relocates its
hero, Michael Cullen, from the Midlands to the life of a wide boy in Soho;
but also in an awareness of literary models which is self-conscious to the
point of archness. By the final chapters, full of gangsters double-crossing
each other to a soundtrack of ricocheting bullets and police sirens, Cullen
has turned into a kind of skit on the idea of the existential hero (how
pleased Tom Maschler would have been), moving almost randomly but with
effortless poise from one tricky situation to another, doggedly improvising
his way out of trouble, with retribution forever a step or two behind him.
Not quite a satire on Swinging London, and a great deal more than the standard
account of provincial diaspora, the novel is, despite much incidental
camouflage, about one kind of life merging imperceptibly into another. The
same goes for The Broken Chariot (1998), which, cunningly, reverses the
trajectory of A Start in Life by having an upper-class boy, Herbert
Thurgarton-Strang, break out of his West Country boarding school and assume
a new identity as “Bert Gedling”, a hard-drinking, skirt-chasing operative
at the Nottingham Royal Ordnance factory. Like many another piece of
late-period Sillitoe – A Man of His Time (2004), for instance, which
fictionalizes the life of old man Burton – the novel refers back both to
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (also reissued this month with an
introduction by Richard Bradford; Harper Perennial, £7.99) and to its
creator, in this case by letting Bert/Herbert write a published account of
his experiences in the engineering shop and go on to mimic the career of the
“working-class writer”. As The Life of a Long-Distance Writer shows in
penetrating detail, the two worlds of Sillitoe’s fiction – sometimes
distinct, occasionally contending, at times seamlessly conjoined – are
replicated in his own career. In forging an aesthetic in which they could be
brought together, he has also solved a problem with which practically every
working-class writer sent south to storm the citadels of literary London has
had to contend: how to stay close enough to the things that are worth
writing about, while dealing with the consequences of your deracination.
Richard Bradford
The life of a long-distance writer
The biography of Alan Sillitoe
384pp. Peter Owen. £25.
978 0 7206 13179
D. J. Taylor's recent books include Bright Young People: The rise and
fall of a generation 1918-1940, and the novel Kept, which were both
published last year.
