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Alan Sillitoe (1928-2010) |
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English novelist, children's book writer, playwright and social critic, compared to D.H.Lawrence, who also came from Nottingham. Alan Sillitoe was grouped among the "angry young men" of the 1950s, with John Osborne, John Braine, John Wain, Arnold Wesker, and Kingsley Amis. He introduced in the post-World War II British fiction realistically portrayed working-class heroes. Best known for his novels, Sillitoe also published children's books (starring a cat called Marmelade Jim), poetry, plays, and an autobiography, Life without Armour (1995). Stars, seen through midnight windows Alan Sillitoe was born in Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, the
second son of an illiterate tannery laborer. His father, Christopher
Sillitoe, became one of the long-term unemployed during the 1930s
Depression. On different occasions he worked as a house painter. Once
he was imprisoned for "running up bills for food that he had no hope of
paying." (Understanding Alan Sillitoe by Gillian Mary Hanson, University of South Carolina, 1999, p. 2) Sillitoe's mother, Silvina (Burton) worked in a lace factory.
"We lived in a room on Talbot Street whose four wall smelled of leaking
gas, stale fat, and layers of mouldering wall-paper," Sillitoe once
recalled. (Ibid., p. 3) Sillitoe's
childhood was shadowed by the financial problems of
the family, but he also found early on the joys of literature – he read
comic books and novels written for children or juveniles. Sillitoe's first semi-fictional tale
about his wild cousins was burned by his mother for being too
revealing. At the age of 14, Sillotoe left school and worked in a number
of
jobs in Nottingham factories, including the Raleigh bicycle factory. At
eighteen, he went into the Royal Air Force, where he trained as a
wireless
operator, and sent to Malaya. "It was there that I really started to
read. . . . I read Sebastopol and The Kreutzer Sonata by
Tolstoy, and knew immediately that I stumbled on a new sort of writing.
My work was mostly in an isolated hut far off from the main camp, and I
had much time for reading—and also writing. I kept a journal, and wrote
what I thought were poems." ('Sillitoe, Allan,' World Authors 1950-1070, edited by John Wakeman, 1975, p. 1303) After returning from Malaya, Sillitoe was was given an X-ray examination before discharge back to civilian life. It was found that he had tuberculosis. Sillitoe spent sixteen months in an RAF hospital. Just after leaving the hospital, Sillitoe finished his first novel, around a hundred thousand words long, which has been destroyed. Pensioned off at 21 on 45 shillings per week, he lived in France and Spain for seven years in an attempt to recover, and writing all the time. In 1951 he met an American poet, Ruth Fainlight, who was
married, but they decided to go abroad together. They
lived largely
on Sillitoe's air force pension. Extra income came from his efforts at
translating and teaching and her work as a travel-agency courier.On the island of Mallorca in 1956, Sillitoe met Robert
Graves,
whom he had sent his poems. At Graves's invitation, Sillitoe visited
him one Sunday. Graves said that some of his poems were good. "At least
you end them well. So many people get off to a good start, then fizzle
out half way through, coming lamely at the end." Sillitoe found his
remarks encouraging. (Alan Sillitoe by Richard Allen Penner, Twayne Publishers. 1972, p. 18) At the time when Sillitoe
began to write Saturday
Night and Sunday Morning
(1958), a story about working-class
life in Nottingham, he still considered himself more a poet than a
novelist. His first novel, which was first rejected by three publishing
houses, was published by W. H. Allen. It received the Author's Club
Prize for the best English first novel of 1958 and became a bestseller. Sillitoe used working-class speech in his depiction of the
weekend of a young, robust laborer, Arthur Seaton. Arthur lives for the
weekends, drinking beer in the pub and chasing a girl. Saturday night
is "the best and bingiest glad-time of the week, one of the fifty-two
holidays in the slow-turning Big Wheel of the year, a violent preamble
to a prostrate Sabbath." (Ibid., Plume, 1992, p. 4)As
an anti-social hero, Arthur had many similarities with
the characters found in the works of John Braine and Stan Barstow.
Sillitoe's realism was striking to 1950s readers; the work was noted
for its unsentimental honesty, authenticity and the dialogue. The novel was adapted for the screen by Karel Reiz, whose cinematographer Freddie Francis shot in "documentary" style the long rows of workers' brick houses and grubby homes. However, the film toned down the vernacular style and the successful abortion was changed into an unsuccessful abortion attempt. In Key to the Door (1961), a sequel to Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, the protagonist was Arthur Seaton's older brother Brian. Arthur returned in Birthday (2002), after 40 years. Jenny's 70th birthday brings together Arthur, his wife Avril, and Brian, who has become famous as a screenwriter. Arthur has remained in the East Midlands; Avril is dying; Brian and Arthur miss the old days. Among Sillitoe's other acclaimed works from the 1950s is The Loneliness of a Long Distance
Runner (1959),
a collection of stories which was awarded
the Hawthornden Prize. The title tale is narrated by a Borstal (reform school) boy,
Colin Smith, set to run in a race. Colin is a natural athlete. The institute's governor has high hopes
that his protegé will be a winner and thus prove that his theories about rehabilitation are right, but Colin finds an
opportunity to show his defiance of authority. ""Run!" But I was deaf,
daft and blind, and stood where I was, still tasting the bark in my
mouth and still blubbing like a baby, blubbing now out of gladness that
I'd got them beat at last." (Ibid., Alfred A. Knopf, 1960, p. 52) Generally, Colin's resistance in an individual's reaction to the pressures of society: he runs for his own freedom. Tony Richardson's film
version of the book drew on the emerging youth culture and the Free
Cinema movement. One script-reader commented on Sillitoe's screenplay
before the filming started: "But this story is blatant and very trying
Communist propaganda, and particularly worrying for us because the hero
is a thief and yet is held up to the admiration of silly young thugs.
If the leading citizens of Nottingham didn't like Saturday Night
because they thought the hero was not a good representative of that
city, I don't know what they will say about this epic." (Best of British: Cinema and Society from 1930 to the Present by Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards, I. B. Tauris, New Edition, 1999, p. 96) The various protagonists of Sillitoe's early fiction are
generally restless young men from the slum world, who oppose the
established order of things, but who are at the same time affected by
consumerism and hedonism. Sillitoe rejected artistic elitism and instead of satirizing cosy middle-class
British life, he focused on rebellious individuals and poor people, who
have vile lives. "If I lost all I have in the world I wouldn't worry
much," Sillitoe wrote in the title story of The Ragman's Daughter (1963). "If I was to go across the road for a
packet of fags one morning and come back to see the house clapping its
hands in flames with everything I owned burning inside I'd turn my back
without any thought or regret and walk away, even if my jacket and last
ten-bob note were in the flames as well." (Ibid., Pan Books, 1970, p. 10) The collection of short
fiction was praised for its vitality. "Every story (and there is not
one dud) has the exhilaration of revolutionary writing," stated Julian
Jebb in The Sunday Times. The Death of William Posters (1965), A Tree on Fire (1967), and A Start in Life (1970) formed a trilogy about a Nottingham factory worker. In the 1970s he produced another trilogy, consisting of The Flower of Life (1974), The Widower's Son (1976) and Storyteller (1979). A selection of his short stories, mostly written beween 1959-1981, Sillitoe collected in New and Collected Short Stories (2003). Sillitoe moved in his later works beyond this lower-class milieu towards analysis of the psychological states of his characters. In the autobiographical Raw Material (1972) he portrayed his grandparents, A Start in Life leaves the protagonist peacefully cultivating his garden, bemused by a prophecy that he will go wild again at thirty-five. In 1959 Sillitoe married Ruth Fainlight; they had a son and
adopted a daughter. The Rats and
Other Poems
(1960) was Sillitoe's first published book of verse.
"I have always regarded myself as a poet before novelist," Sillotoe
once said, but he met with little critical success for his poetry.
Being a poet and being a novelist were according to Sillitoe so
separate that they were two different personalities in him. In 1963 Sillitoe spent a month in the Soviet Union, recording his impressions in Road to Volgograd (1964). While in Moscow, Sillitoe phoned Yevtushenko, whom he had met in London, but there was no answer. The explanation Sillitoe got was that Yevtushenko was ill, stomach trouble after so many journeys. "I told them about Finnegan's Wake [sic], and mentioned the works of William Burroughs. These books, I said, weren't read by a very wide public, but to someone like myself, a writer who wrote straightworward prose, they had a stimulating effect. Were there, I wanted to know, any such writers in the Soviet Union? Lednev smiled broadly. "No," he said. "But if there were, they'd be in the lunatic asylum."" (Ibid., Alfred A.Knopf, 1964, p. 56) Three years later he drove in his car (it was dark blue Peugeot Estate) from Harwich to Leningrad. Sillitoe made several trips to the Soviet Union, where he was viewed as a spokesman for the oppressed working classes. However, Sillitoe's stand against the oppression of free speech annoyed the authorities. Mostly he lived with his family in London, but also spent time in France, Tangier, Spain, and Israel. Alan Sillitoe died in London on April 25, 2010. He was 82. For further reading: Alan Sillitoe by Allen Richard Penner (1972); Commitment As Art by Ronald Dee Vaverka (dissertation, 1978); Alan Sillitoe: A Critical Assessment by Stanley S. Atherton (1979); The British Working-Class Novel in the Twentieth Century, edited by Jeremy Hawthorn (1984); Alan Sillitoe by David Gerard (1988); Working-Class Fiction in Theory and Action: A Reading of Alan Sillitoe by Peter Hitchcock (1989); Understanding Alan Sillitoe, edited by Matthew Joseph Bruccoli (1999); The Long Apprenticeship: Alienation in the Early Work of Alan Sillitoe by John Sawkins (2001); The Life of a Long-distance Writer: The Biography of Alan Sillitoe by Richard Bradford (2008); British Working-class Fiction: Narratives of Refusal and the Struggle against Work by Roberto del Valle Alcalá (2016); The Resurrection of the Spectre: a Marxist Analysis of Race, Class and Alienation in the Post-war British Novel by Sercan Hamza Bağlama (2018); Decolonisation of Asia in the Eyes of Alan Sillitoe and Anthony Burgess by Siti Saridah Adenan (thesis, 2022) Selected works:
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