THE SILLITOE PROJECT: Road to Volgograd

It’s strange how sometimes a work can be overtaken by time. Even when I discovered Alan Sillitoe, as a teenager in the late 80s, ‘Road to Volgograd’ was the Sillitoe title I knew of only by its inclusion in the “also by” section in the other titles I owned.

When, last year, I found a copy on eBay, it was the original Pan paperback with a pre-deciminalization cover price of three shillings and sixpence. It was a 1966 reprinting of a book first published in 1964. Its pages were sepia. It had been printed six years before my birth.

As early as 1939, Winston Churchill (not a popular figure in the Sillitoe canon – see ‘Key to the Door’) said “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” That was pretty much still the post-divided Berlin, post-Berlin Wall, post-Iron Curtain public perception of the Soviet Union in 1964.

1964 – the year after John le Carre published his watershed novel ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’, a bitter and angry response to the erection of the Wall; the year that Ian Fleming died, whose immortal secret agent – if more in the movies than the books – would give the Red menace a good seeing-to. 1964 – a year which started with British motor manufacturer Leyland exporting buses to Cuba in defiance of the US blockade. 1964 – the year that Alan Sillitoe published an account of his travels and observations in the Soviet Union.

Alan Sillitoe (in translation) was one of the USSR’s bestselling authors. In 1963 he was invited to spend a month in Russia. A socialist, a worker himself and – as ‘Key to the Door’ attests – an avowed leftist, he jumped at the chance. ‘Road to Volgograd’ isn’t as gee-whiz as it might have been (Sillitoe was too perceptive, enquiring, cynical and world-weary to have fallen into that trap), but it’s clear – reading the book with the smug benefit of hindsight – that his hosts took pains to steer him clear of the brutal realities of life under the Soviet regime. Later, when Sillitoe discovered these aspects, he spoke out against the totalitarian rule. It’s interesting to note that ‘Road to Volgograd’ found its corollary and corrective, forty-three years later, in his last published work ‘Gadfly in Russia’. Much of his work emerged in pairings – the short story ‘Mimic’ and the novel ‘The Storyteller’; ‘The Lost Flying Boat’ and ‘The German Numbers Woman’; ‘Raw Material’ and ‘A Man of His Time’; the short story ‘The Good Women’ and the novel ‘Her Victory’ – but never have two interconnected works occurred at such chronological odds to each other as ‘Road to Volgograd’ and ‘Gadfly in Russia’.

History and retrospect make ‘Road to Volgograd’ a strange and awkward book – awkward not in its writing (hell no; Sillitoe is on excellent form here) but in the perspective of retrospect. To repeat myself, it’s a work overtaken by time. It faded all too soon from the Sillitoe bibliography and wouldn’t be readdressed until the very end.

THE SILLITOE PROJECT: The Ragman’s Daughter

Published in 1963, this collection of short fiction contains seven stories: ‘The Ragman’s Daughter’, ‘The Other John Peel’, ‘The Firebug’, ‘The Magic Box’, ‘The Bike’, ‘To Be Collected’ and ‘The Good Women’. There is a common theme to the collection, as described in a review in The Financial Times: “these stories are variations on the theme superbly expressed in Sillitoe’s masterpiece ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’; namely, the excitement, the poetry and the integrity underlying an anti-social act.”

The title story explores the psychology of theft. The narrator recalls his first instance of stealing: at primary school, he and the other kids are given cardboard cut-out coins to use in reckoning-up exercises. Although valueless, he is compelled to pocket some. He keeps shtum when the teacher puts him on the spot (a nifty and unforced analogy to the professional criminal saying nothing during police questioning). Is our boy a kleptomaniac? Or is there a core of individualism at the heart of his pilfering? This passage goes some way towards an answer:

In spite of the fact that I nicked whatever I could lay my hands on without too much chance of getting caught, I didn’t like possessing things. Suits, a car, watches – as soon as I’d nicked something and got clear away, I lost interest in it. I broke into an office and came out with two typewriters, and after having them at home for a day I borrowed a car and dropped them over Trent bridge one dark night. If the cops cared to dredge the river about there, they’d get a few surprises. What I like most is the splash stuff makes when I drop it in: that plunge into the water of something heavy …

A romantic subplot manages not to detract from the underlying concept but feed into it: our boy’s relationship with a girl from a nouveau riche family spurs him on to new heights of daring. What follows is an almost arbitrarily truncated Nottingham version of ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ with a misjudged shoe-shop heist in place of a slo-mo blaze-of-glory denouement. As in much of his fiction, Sillitoe dissects the aftermath and finds the compromised humanity in his characters. He writes as a witness, not a moralist.

‘The Other John Peel’ feels like a palimpsest, or a try-out for a possible longer work. Two buddies head off at the crack of dawn for a spot of poaching. A .303 service rifle kept over from the war leads to thoughts of armed revolution. The act of poaching loses its traditional meaning – the placing of meat on the table for those who couldn’t afford it other than by filching it from a rich man – and a more expansive sense of social disaffection becomes apparent. There is very little narrative on offer but the last line – “silent headstocks to the left towered above the fenced-off coppices of Sherwood Forest” – establishes an aesthetic through-line to Nottingham’s most famous outlaw.

If Trash-Can Man in Stephen King’s ‘The Stand’ had spent his childhood years in pre-war Nottingham, the result might have been something like ‘The Firebug’. A companion piece to ‘The Ragman’s Daughter’ inasmuch as it’s narrated by a character who is compelled to commit anti-social acts (here small acts of arson as opposed to half-arsed break-ins) without fully knowing why except that he gets a kick out of it. “I smile as much as feel ashamed at some of the things I did,” he begins, before going on to recount the bitter, tear-stinging frustration of carrying off an effective bit of arson only for the glorious carnage of the fire itself to be utterly ignored. The story ends, somewhat abruptly, with a German bomber attack doing more damage than our anti-social narrator ever could; he’s fourteen by this time and is soon packed off to work in a factory. His pyromania, pardon the pun, fizzles out. It’s like seeing Arthur Seaton in ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ have the rebellion leeched out of him before he’s even old enough to start boozing and get into real trouble. But an unvoiced hook remains in the reader’s mind: how long till the latent tendency erupts from him again?

Fred, the henpecked protagonist of ‘The Magic Box’, comes across as a less ebullient version of Arthur’s brother Brian Seaton in ‘Key to the Door’. Like Brian, his formative years were spent as a wireless operator in the forces. A pools win gives him the wherewithal to buy a morse set. He tunes into a private world that drives a wedge into his marriage. Morse code and radio operators recur through Sillitoe’s fiction, from the cruise ship radio operator who plays an important part towards the end of ‘The Storyteller’ to the blind yet heroic protagonist of ‘The German Numbers Woman’. Reality and the destructive power of the mind/imagination are also common themes. ‘The Magic Box’ explores ideas that would later find fuller expression in the short stories ‘Mimic’ and ‘The Second Chance’ as well as the two aforementioned novels. Some of Fred’s characteristics inform the quixotic John Handley, one of the key players in the William Posters trilogy. ‘The Magic Box’ is a thorny and unflinching story, and key to a whole sub-section of Sillitoe’s work.

For all that many of his characters don’t particularly like their jobs, it’s a constant of his writing that his protagonists demonstrate a keenly defined work ethic. The unnamed narrator of ‘The Bike’ reacts with hostility to the prospect of a lifetime of hard graft, but soon prefers to earn his way, albeit on piss-poor wages, rather than thieve or freeload. His supposed mate Bernard, who cons him into a buying a bike that Bernard has in fact stolen, is emblematic of a purportedly more intelligent but morally disenfranchised stratum of society. Meanwhile, our hero – personifying the honest but exploited working class, bides his time till he can get even. “If ever there’s a revolution and everybody’s lined-up with their hands out, Bernard’s will still be lily-white because he’s a bone-idle thieving bastard – and then we’ll see how he goes on; because mine won’t be lily-white, I can tell you that now. And you never know, I might be one of the blokes picking ’em out.”

‘To Be Collected’, about a family of scrap metal dealers, stumbling on a cache of weapons, reads like ‘Only Fools and Horses’ meets ‘Billy Liar’ without any of the laughs and played out against a grim and rain-swept background. It’s blunt and compelling.

Little has been made about Sillitoe’s feminist characters (perhaps because many of his first-person male narrators are as laddish and politically incorrect as their working class backgrounds would suggest). ‘The Good Women’, concerning the feminist voice in political activism – from union action to CND protests – is the first step in an increasing empathy with his female characters that would eventually find expression in his longest and arguably most ambitious novel ‘Her Victory’.

If ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ and ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’ defined Sillitoe for a generation of readers, ‘The General’ proved that he couldn’t be taken for granted in terms of his range and penchant for experimentalism, and ‘Key to the Door’ demonstrated the breadth of canvas he was capable of working on, then ‘The Ragman’s Daughter’ can easily be defined as a setting out of the stall for his later career. But it’s more than that. It’s a box containing seven literary hand grenades. It’s a call for revolutionary thinking and action. It’s the fuck-you to authority that only Alan Sillitoe could have written.

THE SILLITOE PROJECT: latest news

Karel Reisz’s classic film version of Alan Sillitoe’s ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ is the subject of two articles by Kimberly Lindbergs: one on the indispensable Movie Morlocks, the other on her equally essential blog Cinebeats. Myself and David Sillitoe, Alan’s son and the Chairman of the Alan Sillitoe Committee, were interviewed by Kimberly and the resulting article is a terrific appreciation of a great work of post-war British cinema that also glances behind the scenes and considers Alan’s input in this and the other film adaptations of his work.

In other news, thanks to everyone who contributed when we held a collection at the Nottingham Contemporary/LeftLion event 'Gunpowder, Treason and Pot' on 4th November, and special vote of thanks to musician and composer John Aram who, with his band, performed his ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ inspired jazz suite in Arnold, Nottingham, last month and supported the statue fund to the hilt.

The next event is on Thursday 1st December at The Maze, Mansfield Road, Nottingham, and features three great local bands playing in support of the fund.

For more information, or to make a donation, please visit The Alan Sillitoe Website.

A blatant piece of self-promotion

In non-film related news, my short story 'The Assistant' - joint winner in a recent competition - has been published on the LeftLion website. There's an Alan Sillitoe theme, which makes me even more proud of it.

THE SILLITOE PROJECT: Key to the Door

Sillitoe’s first novel of real length (its word count arguably exceeds that of his first three books put together), ‘Key to the Door’ is an epic and assiduously observed family saga. And if the expression “family saga” makes you want to run screaming from the room, stick with me for a few paragraphs. This novel is the family saga as it should be written.

The protagonist is Brian Seaton, elder brother of the hell-raising Arthur from ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’. The four sections of the book – titled ‘Prologue’, ‘Nimrod’, ‘The Ropewalk’ and ‘The Jungle’ – deal with his childhood, adolescence, young adulthood and national service in Malaya. Parts one and two are structured in an explicitly linear fashion. Parts three and four juxtapose Brian’s early working life at a factory and his courtship of Pauline, who he marries after she gets pregnant, with his experiences overseas and his dalliance with an exotic Chinese dancer (and sometime hooker).

Brian’s character and outlook are formed by his iron-willed grandfather, Merton, and his erratic father, Harold. Harold Seaton reminds me of the line in Larkin’s ‘This be the Verse’ about ancestors who “half the time were soppy-stern / and half at one another’s throats”. Both Merton and Harold Seaton have argumentative relationships with their wives, and can often be petulant bullies towards their kids. Thus a certain aspect of Brian: a break-up with Pauline is documented in painfully accurate terms; his enforced marriage (“you’d better tell him and sort something out” as Pauline’s mother pragmatically puts it) is entered into with reluctance.

There are scenes in which Brian is painted as big a bastard as Arthur. Elsewhere, though, Sillitoe realistically depicts his burgeoning intellectualism (though Brian himself, certainly until the very last stages of the novel, would no doubt scoff at the word), his love of the written word and his struggle to express himself beyond the immediate confines of his first two decades’ experience. Nowhere does Sillitoe communicate this better than in a scene where Brian, in the depths of Malaya, sends morse code out into the night:

In his work, his bitterness was forgotten and after the plane landed he amused himself by sending poetry from the Pelican book by his set, each letter going out at fast speed, hot sparks burning the brain of anyone who could read its symbols. Word by word, line by rhythmical line, the whole of ‘Kubla Khan’ found its way from his key, and he felt exhilarated in knowing that such a poem was filling the jungles and oceans of the far east, coming, if anyone heard it, from an unknown and answerable hand … ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ also went singing hundreds of miles out into the darkness, perhaps reaching the soul of the man who wrote it and maybe also touching the source of the golden fire that sent down these words to him in the first place. Dots and dashes went out at a steady workmanlike speed, all poetic rhythms contained, even in the sending of one word. The mast top of the transmitter high above the trees outside propagated the chirping noises of his morse, as if releasing cages of birds into freedom.

Fucking great writing!

In a review for The Daily Herald, Dennis Potter said of ‘Key to the Door’ “this novel is a great achievement. There has been nothing better published this year - nor is there likely to be.” He was absolutely spot on.

THE SILLITOE PROJECT: website news

The Alan Sillitoe website has undergone a major overhaul today: plenty of new content, including the winning stories from the recent short fiction competition.

There's now also a PayPal "donate" button for anyone who would like to make a contribution to the statue fund.

Stealing an idea from Tim at Antagony and Ecstasy, who raised over $1,100 towards cancer research by taking requests for reviews in return for a minimum $15 donation, I'm throwing it open to anyone who reads these pages: hit up the "donate" button at www.sillitoe.com (you'll find it at the top of the "Statue Fund" page) - I'll leave it up to you how much you want to contribute - then email me at alansillitoepage@hotmail.co.uk and let me know what film you'd like me to review.

Thanks for your support.

(PS. Tim - sorry for being an unoriginal bugger. And respect for what you achieved through the Carry On Campaign.)

THE SILLITOE PROJECT: news and events

Cracking new poster for the Alan Sillitoe Statue Fund event Friday next week (kudos to James K Walker): a screening of 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning' starring the incomparable Albert Finney. It's showing at Antenna, Beck Street, Nottingham; event starts at 7.30pm. The film will be introduced by David Sillitoe, in conversation with award-winning novelist Nicola Monaghan ('The Killing Jar'), there'll be live music from local band Blue Yonder, and - oh yes - there's a bar.

If you're in Nottingham next Friday, please come along. Click the poster to make it bigger, or email alansillitoepage@hotmail.co.uk if you have any queries.

Other news: the Alan Sillitoe Website is now up and running: www.sillitoe.com. Please pop over and check out the content we've already got online. The plan is to develop and expand the site and build it into a major resource on Alan's life and work.

THE SILLITOE PROJECT: The General

Although well-received in some quarters (“Sillitoe scores a hat trick” - Punch), ‘The General’ confounded many people. Highly anticipated after the one-two of ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ and ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’, here was a curious fable, miles removed from the back-streets of Nottingham, its twin protagonists the titular military type and a standoffish orchestra conductor who ends up as his prisoner. A fable, moreover, that occurs in a fictitious country, during a period of time that’s deliberately out of time, and loaded with philosophically charged and decidedly non-naturalistic dialogue.

Kind of like Shane Meadows following up ‘Small Time’ and ‘TwentyFourSeven’ with ‘Ivan’s Childhood’.

With an author’s note that “East and West in this novel bear no relation to the east and west of modern times”, it’s clear from the outset that ‘The General’ is 160 pages of allegory. The country in which the story takes place is never named, the General himself remains anonymous beyond his rank, the army he commands are only ever referred to as “the Gorsheks”, and the members of orchestra who become his prisoners have names like Evart, Starnberg and Armgardson – suggesting some shared European (possibly East European) heritage, but remaining frustratingly elusive.

The story itself is pure simplicity: the General puts the orchestra into captivity after their special train finds itself behind the lines. High command order him to execute them. The General doesn’t want to, and they an extension of their lives with an impromptu concert. Yet Sillitoe never seems to milk the inherent tension, instead structuring the novel as a philosophical enquiry into various states of mind, most prominently those of the General and Evart, the conductor.

As a result, characters fling entire pages of cerebral dialogue at each other. Sillitoe’s admittedly excellent descriptive writing slows down every moment of the orchestra’s potential death sentence; in some scenes, ‘The General’ seems to be a precursor of Ian McEwan’s precise and formalist style, wherein every moment is considered intrinsically. In others, it presupposes Iain Banks’s ‘A Song of Stone’ in its quixotic and melancholy approach to its subject matter.

It’s the first of a couple of oddities in Sillitoe’s bibliography, but demonstrates that he was a writer unafraid to test himself, experiment, push back the boundaries and side-step the easy categorisation that many critics would rather he be slotted into. It would be ten years later, with ‘Travels in Nihilon’, that Sillitoe wrote a novel as boldly experiment and critically baffling as ‘The General’.

THE SILLITOE PROJECT: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

Posted to commemorate the first anniversary of Alan Sillitoe’s death




Published in 1959 and one of the few Sillitoe titles (along with ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ and his last two or three books) still in print, this collection of short fiction contains nine stories: ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’, ‘Uncle Ernest’, ‘Mr Raynor the School-Teacher’, ‘The Fishing Boat Picture’, ‘Noah’s Ark’, ‘On Saturday Afternoon’, ‘The Match’, ‘The Disgrace of Jim Scarfedale’ and ‘The Decline and Fall of Frankie Buller’.

The title story is about a youth named Smith who is sent to Borstal after robbing a bakery. Borstals were youth prisons in the UK (named after the village near Rochester where the first one was established in 1902), which housed delinquent offenders under the age of 23. The Borstal model was abolished in 1982 when the Criminal Justice Act 1982 made provision for youth custody centres. The controversial British TV play ‘Scum’, written by Roy Minton (remade as a feature film when the original was banned), was an attack on the Borstal system.

Smith (his first name is never mentioned, rendering him effectively an Everyman given that Smith is the most common surname in the UK) demonstrates an affinity for cross-country running which, as he ruminates early in the story, is “a bit rare, having long-distance cross-country runners in Borstal, thinking that the first thing a long-distance cross-country runner would do when they set him loose at them fields and woods would be to run as far away from the place as he could get on a bellyful of Borstal slum-gullion”. Therefore, seeing an attempt to bolster his own reputation as a progressive jailer, the governor coerces Smith into competing for the Borstal Blue Ribbon Prize Cup For Long-Distance Cross-Country Running (All England), a prize that the gangly-limbed and fleet-footed Smith could win with his eyes closed. If he wanted to …

Essentially a first-person stream of consciousness, ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’ probes Smith’s mind as he reaches his anti-establishment decision. Whipsmart, attitudinous, cunning as a fox with criminal tendencies and blessed with, to quote William Ernest Henley, an “unconquerable soul”, Smith is perhaps Sillitoe’s greatest working class rebel. Even Arthur Seaton accepts the reality of lifetime at his capstan lathe, with booze, birds and brawling as the raison d’etre of the weekend. Smith accepts nothing, nor does he complain or seek to the shift the blame when the establishment demands recompense of him. Smith is the patron saint of everyone who has ever said “fuck you” to authority and lived it!

Most of the other stories are “slice of life” vignettes. ‘Uncle Ernest’ is about a lonely middle-aged man who befriends two prepubescent girls and starts buying them treats, seeing in them the daughters he never had. His intentions are purely good-hearted, but two bullying policemen warn him to stay away from them, their groundless assertion that “we know all about you” awakening in Ernest a guilt for something never done, never even contemplated, and yet a guilt so great that his final refuge is “through the swing doors [of] the crowded and noisy bar of a public house, his stare fixed by the beautiful heavily baited trap of beer pots that would take him into the one and only best kind of oblivion”. It’s a heartbreaking piece, more so for Sillitoe’s depiction of how the sisters, once they’ve cottoned on his generosity, start taking advantage of him.

‘Mr Raynor the School-Teacher’ starts off as a wry portrait of a man settling into the dull routine of work and the tedium of marriage, whiling away his life bullying his class into silence, the better to gaze at the buxom young woman who works at the haberdashery shop across the street. It’s only by the final paragraphs that Sillitoe plays his hand and the small collection of pieces cohere themselves into a picture of loss and helplessness.

‘The Fishing Boat Picture’ treads similar territory, chronicling the aftermath of a couple splitting up. Ostensibly, the man – Harry – seems content enough to live alone. He settles into the routine of work; reads his books; smokes his pipe. The picture of the title – the remaining item from a triptych (the other two broken during vicious arguments) – serves as an epitaph for their relationship. Then his estranged wife reappears on the scene and asks for it back. Harry relinquishes the picture philosophically enough, only to discover the next day that she’s pawned it. The story is a study in regret and ends unexpectedly.

The young lads in ‘Noah’s Ark’ are less like Ernest, Harry or Mr Raynor, and more like teeny versions of Smith in the title story. They skive off school, head to the Goose Fair (a yearly funfair that occupies a large recreational ground in Nottingham), cadge pennies for rides, pick up drop cigarettes, swear, sing rude songs and engage in the odd bit of petty theft. When their ill-gotten finances run out, they take to playing a dangerous game on the mechanical ride of the title, trying to ride for free while evading the bullish owner. Think ‘Emperor of the North’ with a little kid instead of Lee Marvin, a carnival ride instead of the train but still with Ernest Borgnine as Ernest Borgnine and you’ve pretty much got ‘Noah’s Ark’. It’s also an effective study of peer pressure and complicity, and captures that moment when a prank ceases to be a prank and becomes an altogether more serious matter.

A similarly young protagonist is the narrator of ‘On Saturday Afternoon’. Left out of a trip to the cinema, he passes the time roaming the back alleys of his hardscrabble neighbourhood. Overhearing subdued looking man accounting for the coil of rope he’s carrying with the blunt statement of purpose “It’s to ’ang missen with”, the boy follows him out of curiosity. Thus he becomes witness to (and complicit in) a suicide attempt.

I’d be tempted to call ‘On Saturday Afternoon’ the jewel in the crown after the title story, were it not for the poisoned brilliance of ‘The Match’. Storywise, there’s not much to it: Lennox attends a Saturday afternoon football match with his mate Fred, becomes increasingly morose at the poor conditions (a murky fog renders much of the game unwatchable) and outright angry at the final score, which sees Notts County lose pitifully at home (fifty-three years after Sillitoe wrote ‘The Match’, Notts County aren’t doing much better). Lennox’s belligerence is at odds with Fred’s happy-go-lucky demeanour. Fred goes home to his new bride and makes the most of the rest of his weekend. Lennox, however, goes home and deliberately picks a fight with his wife. What Sillitoe pinpoints here is the moment when somebody does something for pure spite, knowing full well what they’re doing and how destructive the outcome will be, but pathetically unable to stop themselves. It’s a horribly realistic and psychologically accurate piece of writing.

Relationships are at the centre of ‘The Disgrace of Jim Scarfedale’, Sillitoe here contrasting a volatile romantic relationship with the smothering influence of a mother unable to give up her son to the realities of growing up, life, love and the outside world. Mrs Scarfedale is a pinafore-wearing, house-proud Midlands version of Mrs Bates, constricting Jim with the taut knots of the apron-strings. Like ‘Noah’s Ark’ and ‘On Saturday Afternoon’, the story also deals with complicity.

The collection ends on an unexpectedly poignant note with ‘The Decline and Fall of Frankie Buller’ which seems, for its first few pages, to be a back-streets of Nottingham vignette that could have been an early sketch for ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’, but suddenly reveals itself as a nakedly autobiographical work.

The nine stories here add up to little more than 170 pages, yet ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’ is a major book. Sillitoe’s ability to evoke a time and place is faultless; his dialogue has the rough-hewn poetry of real working class life. His characters rage and struggle, tearing themselves fully-formed from the page even though their creator has sketched them with deceptively few sentences. Sillitoe gets inside their heads. He understands them. He makes them all too familiar. Disturbingly familiar at times. And therein lies the genius.

The Alan Sillitoe statue fund

My appearance in today's edition of the Nottingham Evening Post; I'm the one in the the top right hand corner. The one with the facial hair. I'm working with the Alan Sillitoe Statue Fund Committee on various projects to publicize and raise money for a commemorative statue of Alan Sillitoe in his home town of Nottingham.

We're hoping to have a website up and running by early next month; I'll post a link when it goes live. In the meantime, The Sillitoe Project continues here on The Agitation of the Mind next week with a review of 'The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner'.

THE SILLITOE PROJECT: Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

There had been working class novels before. But they’d generally been written by middle class authors slumming it for the sake of material. When Alan Sillitoe burst onto the literary scene in 1958, the difference was palpable. ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ was the real thing. It was in-your-face, attitudinous, unapologetic and fired up with fighting spirit.

This is how the novel starts: twenty-something anti-hero Arthur Seaton (played to belligerent effect by Albert Finney in Karel Reisz’s film version), a lathe operator on piecework rates – ie. someone who gets paid per item he turns rather than an actual hourly rate or weekly wage, and who stands to get his per-item rate lowered if he’s too productive (a key indicator of the novel’s “us and them” stance) – goes to his local pub, gets into an altercation with a loud-mouthed sailor home on leave, accepts the sailor’s challenge to a drinking contest, bests him, then – overcome with the alcoholic intake himself (Sillitoe describes Arthur’s intake as “eleven pints and seven small gins playing hide-and-seek inside his stomach”) – plunges down a flight of stairs. Woken up by one of the barstaff, Arthur blags his way back into the pub and gets another pint down him. Bad move. His guts protest and he sprints for the Gents. He doesn’t make it. An innocent middle-aged bystander receives Arthur’s regurgitation all of his best suit. Said individual reacts by whining impotently about the stains. His wife, however, girds her loins and tears Arthur a new arsehole, demanding that he at least apologise. Arthur responds by barfing over her, as well. The mood in the pub turns ugly. He scarpers.

There are plenty of occasions in the novel where Arthur is quite frankly a bastard. He shots a neighbourhood gossip in the face with an air rifle, he and a pal respond to a drunk driver by dragging him from behind the wheel and pushing his car over, he gets the married woman he’s “carrying on with” pregnant and when she holds out on him sleeps with her sister. He baits the foreman at the bicycle factory where he works. He pretends to be a pal to the workmate he’s cuckolding. He whiles away the hours at his capstan lathe fantasizing about planting dynamite under the factory and “blowing it to smithereens”.

In Britain in the 50s and early 60s there was an imperative called National Service. My old man got out of it because my granddad, out of the pit and running a small haulage business at this point, was driving for the government and therefore my dad wangled a deferment (he was paying court to a lass at the government office at the time, which helped). Most of his mates weren’t that lucky and reluctantly accepted their call-up papers and trudged off to spend two years in khaki. Alan Sillitoe’s first stories, as a kid, were about his cousins who had deserted from National Service; his mother destroyed them lest they be used in evidence.

For me, one of the key passages in ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ is when Arthur goes to do his “fifteen days” (ie. a yearly additional stint in uniform):

On his first parade, the sergeant-major exclaimed that he couldn’t make out the shape of Arthur’s head because there was so much hair on it … “You’re a soldier now, not a teddy-boy,” the sergeant-major said, but Arthur knew he was wrong in either case. He was nothing at all when people tried to tell him what he was … What am I? he wondered. A six-foot pit prop that wants a pint of ale. That’s what I am. And if any knowing bastard says that’s what I am, I’m a dynamite-dealer, Sten-gun seller, hundred-ton tank trader, a capstan-lathe operator waiting to blow the army to Kingdom Come. I’m me and nobody else; and whatever people think I am or say I am, that’s what I’m not, because they don’t know a bloody thing about me.

Or, earlier in the novel, you can boil down Arthur’s philosophy to the one-sentence statement of purpose “All I’m out for is a good time – all the rest is propaganda.”

Between these two statements – “I’m me and nobody else; and whatever people think I am or say I am, that’s what I’m not, because they don’t know a bloody thing about me” and “All I’m out for is a good time – all the rest is propaganda”, Alan Sillitoe gave me a reminder, a reality check, a suit of armour. I’m the first Fulwood to hold down a white collar job and it’s changed in my short lifetime beyond anything my granddad or my old man would recognise. The corporate mindset has pushed me through some hoops neither of them would have thought existed. But there’s always been a point where I’ve talked back, argued the toss, pissed off my bosses even though it’s ostensibly been to my detriment.

Arthur’s reprehensible in many ways, but he’s never less than honest about what he is. The theme of a technically dishonest person being true to himself in the face of the system/the establishment is something Sillitoe would address in greater detail in ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’. ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’, however, more than lays the groundwork. Arthur, to whom family is the only social gathering to which he owes any fealty, has an ingrained antagonism towards authority figures from the outset. In an early chapter, Arthur has a brief conversation with foreman Robboe while he hands out the paypackets:

He walked away, and Arthur slipped the wage packet into his overall pocket. Truce time was over. The enemy’s scout was no longer near. For such was Robboe’s label in Arthur’s mind, a policy passed on by his father. Though no strong cause for open belligerence existed as in the bad days talked about, it persisted for more subtle reasons that could hardly be understood but were nonetheless felt …

Us and them. Bosses and workers. Rich and poor. The peasantry and the upper classes. It fills me with despair that four hundred years have passed since a proper revolution was attempted in Britain. Arthur fantasizes about revolution, even in the novel’s last chapter. Like Anthony Burgess’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’, ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ finds itself at a final chapter where its brawling, reactionary anti-hero takes a longer and deeper look into himself and faces up to the reality of maturity and responsibility.

But whereas Alex in ‘A Clockwork Orange’ reflects

Perhaps that was it, I kept thinking. Perhaps I was getting too old for the sort of jeezny I had been leading, brothers. I was eighteen now, just gone. Eighteen was not a young age. At eighteen old Wolfgang Amadeus had written concertos and symphonies and operas and oratorios and at all that cal, no, not cal, heavenly music … And now I felt this bolshy big hollow inside my plott, feeling very surprised too at myself. I knew what was happening, O my brothers. I was growing up.

… Arthur Seaton uses a quiet Sunday morning fishing to come to this conclusion:

Trouble it’ll be for me, fighting every day until I die. Why do they make soldiers out of us when we’re fighting up to the hilt as it is? Fighting with mothers and wives, landlords and gaffers, coppers, army and government. If it’s not one thing it’s another, apart from the work we have to do and the way we spend our wages. There’s bound to be trouble in store for me every day of my life, because trouble it’s always been and always will be. Born drunk and married blind, misbegotten into a strange and crazy world, dragged up through the dole and into the war … Slung into khaki at eighteen and when they let you out, you sweat again in a factory, grabbing for an extra pint … and nothing but money to drag you back there every Monday morning.

Alex: the thug, the truant, the rapist and the murderer. Arthur, the worker, the drinker, the womanizer and the voice of the working class. Reading ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’, half the time I reckon I might not like Arthur all that much if I met him. The other half, I recognize myself in him.

THE SILLITOE PROJECT: the life of a writer

In late 2010, the Castle Rock Brewery announced a series of beers named after famous Nottinghamians. The first scion of the city they chose to immortalize in ale – before the likes of George Green, Albert Ball, Harry Wheatcroft or William “Bendigo” Thompson – was Alan Sillitoe. His most famous creation, Arthur Seaton in ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’, would have bloody loved that!

I’m not going to go into too much detail in this article, merely establish a bit of context. Wider discussion of his life will be pertinent to the books under review. Moreover, there are two autobiographical works on the reading list – ‘Raw Material’ and ‘Life Without Armour’ – where Sillitoe discusses his life and formative influences in such powerhouse style that any biographical sketch I could offer is pretty much redundant.

Still, the basic facts: Sillitoe was born on 4 March 1928. His family, frequently poverty-stricken, lived in Radford. His father was barely literate and given to drinking and heavy-handedness. At fourteen, Sillitoe began working in a factory, a job he walked out of after a dispute over pay. Sillitoe’s rebellious streak manifested itself early. After a union official told him he’d be paying part of his wages as dues, that it was mandatory and that it was for his own benefit, he advise the official to “fuck off and get dive-bombed”. Sillitoe’s adherence to his own code – which soon solidified into a political and social conscience – is writ as large in his work as it was in his life.

With the war drawing to an end and desperate to become a pilot, Sillitoe lied about his age to join the Ministry of Aircraft Production in 1945, where he worked for a year as an air traffic control assistant before volunteering for the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve. As The Telegraph’s obituary noted: “Although he was initially accepted as a pilot, the end of the war with Japan had rendered further pilots unnecessary, and Sillitoe served as a telegraphist and radio operator in Malaya. In 1948 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and spent 16 months in a military hospital, where he began educating himself by reading Greek and Latin classics in translation.”

Between 1949 and 1958, Sillitoe eked out his disability pension from the RAF and wrote about half a dozen unpublished novels until, encouraged by Robert Graves (with whom he and his wife, the poet Ruth Fainlight, had formed a friendship), he began working on more autobiographical material. A series of short stories set in Nottingham and centering around the rebellious and pragmatic Arthur Seaton eventually cohered into the manuscript of ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’. It was an acclaimed and successful debut, which he followed up with the short story collection ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’. Both were filmed, again boosting Sillitoe’s reputation.

His second novel, ‘The General’ (1960), marked a significant change in direction and left a number of critics – as well as a large swathe of his readership – perplexed. ‘Key to the Door’ (1961) saw him back on home turf with a chunky family saga focusing on Arthur Seaton’s older brother Brian. Sillitoe continued Brian’s story in ‘The Open Door’ (1989) and eventually reunited the older and wiser Seaton brothers in ‘Birthday’ (2001).

Elsewhere, Sillitoe’s increasingly political views came to the fore in the Frank Dawley trilogy: ‘The Death of William Posters’ (1965), ‘A Tree on Life’ (1967) and ‘The Flame of Life’ (1974). His short story collection ‘The Ragman’s Daughter’ (1963) considered reactionary themes, while his travelogue ‘Road to Volgograd’ was written after he visited the USSR at the invitation of the Soviet Writers’ Union. Although Sillitoe enjoyed a reputation in Russia like no other western writer, he was quick to criticize the regime. Sillitoe revisited his travels here, as well as chronicling more recent visits, in his last published work ‘Gadfly in Russia’ (2007).

He continued to diversify as a writer throughout the 70s and 80s, with 1968’s ‘Guzman Go Home’ showcasing a deft talent for picaresque narrative and absurdist humour. The Michael Cullen novels – ‘A Start in Life’ (1970) and ‘Life Goes On’ (1985) – are firmly rooted in the picaresque tradition, while ‘Travels in Nihilon’ is an inventive and often just plain bonkers political satire. ‘The Lost Flying Boat’ (1983) is an unapologetically old-school adventure story, ‘Down from the Hill’ is equally unapologetically nostalgic, ‘Her Victory’ (1982) is one of the best examples of a male author completely and empathetically creating a female protagonist, and ‘Raw Material’ is a visceral fusion of novel and autobiography.

That Sillitoe punctuated these works with volumes of poetry, essays and children’s fiction only offer further proof of his continuing commitment to diversify and develop as a writer. His challenging and unflinching 1979 novel ‘The Storyteller’ examined the blurring lines between reality and fiction, bringing a gritty realism to material that many novelists have relied on the tropes of the horror or sci-fi genres to realize.

Sillitoe’s output was prodigious: factor in the kiddie fare, poetry, plays, translations and oddities such as ‘Leading the Blind’ (1997), a social history of the Englishman abroad in the nineteen-hundreds, and his bibliography stands at a good fifty volumes.

His life was marked by as great a sense of transience and wanderlust as his writing: he left Spain in the late 50s, thereafter dividing his time between England (he had homes, at various times, in Kent, London, Somerset and Diseworth, a village on the Nottinghamshire/Leicestershire border) and Montpelier in France.

Sillitoe published a volume of autobiography, ‘Life Without Armour’ in 1995, with an authorized biography, Richard Bradford’s ‘The Life of a Long-Distance Writer’ appearing in 2008 to coincide with his 80th birthday. Alan Sillitoe died, after a battle with cancer, on 25 April 2010.

The Sillitoe project

I was born and bred in Nottingham. I still live there. I live on an estate that repetitively and hyperbolically gets mentioned in the press whenever the focus is on gun crime or knife crime. Nottingham, in recent years, has been foisted with a reputation as the gun capital of the UK. “Shottingham”, as the tabloids like to bleat. Like I say, I’ve lived here all my life. Only twice have I ever seen someone carrying a gun: a security guy at the airport in Rome, and a border guard at the Canadian/Alaskan border. Yup, I live in fucking Nottingham and I needed to go abroad to see someone packing heat.

It’s a shame that my home town gets such a bad rap. And yes, we have our share of slum neighbourhoods, financially disenfranchised residents (I’m not judging; God knows, if I found myself out of work for more than a month, I probably be out on the streets myself), alcohol and drug users, and certain areas where, to quote Bruce Springsteen, “when you hit a red light you don’t stop” (streets and back alleys, in other words, where the fault is yours and yours alone if you stray after dark).

And yet Nottingham has an established literary heritage – Lord Byron, D.H. Lawrence, Alan Sillitoe, John Harvey, Nicola Monaghan – and a nascent cinematic one. Karel Reisz’s classic film adaptation of Sillitoe’s ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ was largely filmed in the areas described by Sillitoe in his belligerently brilliant novel; more recently, filmmakers Shane Meadows, Chris Cooke (‘One for the Road’) and Steven Shiel (‘Mum & Dad’) have come to the fore.

When Alan Sillitoe died in April last year, I felt it like a kick in the guts. When someone I admire dies, there’s always a sense of sadness. But sometimes someone dies who defines your life in some way and you feel their loss as if a loved one had passed away. I remember growing up to the erudite and witty observations of Alistair Cooke’s ‘Letter from America’ on the radio on a Sunday morning. I used to get up before nine o’clock on a Sunday just to listen to it. The day I heard of his death, I drove to work with tears in my eyes. I’d never met the man, but he’d been a part of my life.

The death of Alan Sillitoe was worse. He was one of the most famous sons of my home town. His debut novel ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ could have been written about my family. Swap Arthur Seaton’s lathe for a miner’s lamp and retain his “us and them” attitude and you could have my grandfather. Take his “don’t let the bastards grind you down” belligerence and stick it behind the steering wheel of a 16-tonne truck and you’re part way towards my father. Take Seaton’s philosophy that “whatever people think I am or say I am that’s what I’m not because they don’t know a bloody thing about me” and that’s why I refused to take a Myers Briggs personality test at work last week.

Maybe the “us and them” thing is a peculiarly British characteristic. Maybe it comes of centuries of the landed gentry – the upper classes – grinding the noses of the likes of my family line into the mud that makes me respond to the rebellious cadences of ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’. Generations ago, two Fulwood brothers undertook some work as casual labourers for a Nottinghamshire lord of the manor. He fucked them over re: payment. They laid in wait for him one evening as he returned from a day’s riding, fetched him off his horse, and kicked the shit out of the toffee-nosed bastard. (I take more pride in being descended from these guys than anything else in my family history.) Quickly, though, they came round to the fact that they’d just twatted an aristocrat. They laid tracks for Southampton, stowed away on a steamer and there is now a branch of the family in Canada. I trust they’re prosperous, rebellious and have no use for the aristocracy.

But I digress. When Alan Sillitoe passed, it was as if the only novelist in Britain who’d accurately captured the flavours and experiences of my city and my personal history had suddenly been taken away from us. Even more depressing, as the obituaries began to appear, was how repetitively the commentators fixated on his first two books, ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ and ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’, as if these two works – and their respective film adaptations – were the be all and end all of Sillitoe’s output.

It was only later, having posted a review of Reisz’s ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ by way of a tribute, that I realized I’d adhered to exactly the same narrow-minded response. I also realized that, as much as reading Sillitoe’s early work in my mid-teens had solidified my ambition to be a writer, I’d only read about a third of his output. Cruising bookshops during the last week or two to plug the gaps in my Alan Sillitoe collection, it’s depressed me the most to discover that many of his novels and non-fiction works are out of print.

It got my mad up. I hit Amazon and eBay. I placed bids. I placed orders. I gave the PayPal account a bit of a workout. This week, I have received copies of ‘The General’, ‘Key to the Door’ and ‘The Death of William Posters’. I have located nine other works that won’t set me back more than £2 per copy. I reckon I should be able to amass the entire collection (excepting his poetry and children’s books) within the next two months.

I’ve very seldom posted book reviews on The Agitation of the Mind, and even then only film-related titles. This is changing. From next week, on a fortnightly or monthly basis depending on availability of titles and how long it takes me to read them (‘The General’ is 160 pages, ‘Her Victory’ almost 600), I’ll be working my way sequentially through Alan Sillitoe’s bibliography and posting reviews, as well as looking at the handful of his works that were adapted for cinema: most famously ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ which made a star out of Albert Finney, and ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’, starring Tom Courtney; in addition, I’ll be trying to track down ‘The Ragman’s Daughter’ (filmed, like ‘SN&SM’ on the cobbled streets of Nottingham) and ‘Counterpoint’ (based on ‘The General’) which, thus far, is the only Sillitoe novel to get the Hollywood treatment, with Charlton Heston and Maximillan Schell knocking heads in a war drama.

Next week’s post will be a prelude to the reviews proper, and present a brief biographical overview of Alan Sillitoe.