A Man of his Time

by Alan Sillitoe

  ON ILKESTON ROAD IN Radford, there is a student accommodation complex named in honour of the author of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. All buildings, and their names for that matter, are transient (the old Raleigh factory where Alan Sillitoe worked as a teenager was bulldozed to make way for housing and this extension of Nottingham University’s campus) but for the time being Sillitoe Court fixes the writer into the official topography of a landscape that he has charted for nearly half a century. An antique map of the city – dark green, streets marked out like veins in an oak leaf – hangs on the study wall in Sillitoe’s West London home. Waving his pipe at a bay of bookshelves laden with tomes, he says, ‘All those are about Nottingham, just so I get it right. Nottingham,’ he adds, the pipe hovering by the corner of his mouth, poised for re-entry, ‘is only half of my output.’

  To consult the ‘Also by Alan Sillitoe’ page amidst the reams of paper celebrating the endeavours of typesetters in Stirlingshire and printers in Cornwall at the front of this novel (itself by no means a complete list) is to be reminded of his range and prolificness – the Sillitoe oeuvre encompasses novels, short stories, film scripts, poetry, travelogues, plays, essays and children’s books. ‘I often imagine myself as basically a lazy person, who has to disprove the fact that I am lazy. I think with me it is more an obsession than an occupation. I don’t write every day, but I do in that I write my diary, write letters, correct typescripts.’ Sillitoe has stated elsewhere that when he first told his family that he was going to have a novel published, his father replied, ‘That’s bloody good. You’ll never have to work again.’ ‘He was quite right, of course. You sit here scribbling. I am very diffident about regarding it as work.’ Idleness, you will recall, is something Ernest Burton cannot abide; and call it work or not, Sillitoe can hardly be described as idle. His workroom, with its orderly rows of box files, tidy stacks of maps and charts, compasses and instruments, radio set and large oak desk, has the air of a military campaign centre, a den in which the compact and spry author – the Napoleon of Notting Hill – plots his next strategy. Everything Sillitoe writes is initially drafted in pen, typed up and then ‘saturated in corrections, re-typed and then that saturated in corrections again’. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning may have been set in Nottingham but it’s worth noting that it was written, with the encouragement of Robert Graves, ‘in the autumn of 1956, sitting under an orange tree’ in Majorca.

  ‘I often imagine myself as basically a lazy person, who has to disprove the fact that I am lazy. I think with me it is more an obsession than an occupation.’

  Before the age of thirty Sillitoe spent eight years outside England, six of them on the continent, mastering his craft, with his wife, the American poet Ruth Fainlight. Fainlight, who pops into the room to discuss parking arrangements for guests expected from France, is today busy translating Mexican poetry in another part of the flat, although bronchitis is hindering her efforts. While Sillitoe goes off to prepare coffee for us all (‘Alan makes wonderful coffee,’ she says with pride, and a dry cough or two), we chat about M.F.K. Fisher and Aix-en-Provence, where the Sillitoes lived for a time. And when Sillitoe reappears bearing what is indeed wonderful coffee and our conversation returns to the eleven or so Nottingham/Seaton novels, it is Balzac, rather than D.H. Lawrence, that is his first point of comparison. ‘Well, looking back over the books I’ve written, what I’ve tried to do – only half consciously, I suppose – is to make a comédie humaine of novels all to do with Nottingham people set in Nottingham.’

  LIFE AT A GLANCE

  BORN

  4 March 1928.

  EDUCATION

  Till 14, but it was enough.

  CAREER

  Labouring – working on a capstan lathe. Air traffic control, wireless operator in the RAF (which taught me how to stand up for three hours, which later was good for cocktail parties), then writer.

  Later on, when I do raise Lawrence, Sillitoe finds the idea that, other than their shared profession and geographical background, there is much common ground between them slightly bemusing. ‘I didn’t start to read, really read, until I was twenty, and I came across The Rainbow and I saw he had made something of the local landscape, or at least a landscape that I knew well, so that was interesting for me, apart from which it’s a very good novel. Otherwise there’s no more connection between him and me. The books that he wrote later, often in anger, well … they were rotten. Certain parts of them were wonderful writing, of course, but take The Plumed Serpent or Kangaroo. Just ghastly. And as for Lady Chatterley’s Lover, it’s awful, actually. But the early books – Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow–wonderful books, absolutely; they give him his place.’

  A Man of His Time he maintains probably brings his Balzacian sequence to a close. ‘What I do have are short stories, they are still in my notebooks, and I am not sure if I’ll use them; I am just feeling my way, really.’ There’s always been a strong autobiographical element to this particular fictional cycle, with, for those interested in such things, numerous parallels between the Seaton and Sillitoe clans. Burton, first mentioned, if obliquely, in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, is, as he willingly admits, closely based on his grandfather, a tyrannical illiterate blacksmith (Sillitoe’s father was also illiterate). A nonfiction portrait of the ‘real’ Ernest Burton appears in Raw Material (1972), Sillitoe’s part novel, part autobiography’. But as a character in Philip Roth’s The Counterlife observes, ‘it’s the distance between the writer’s life and his novel that is the most intriguing aspect of his imagination’. Sillitoe, an admirer of Roth (‘A great writer, a truly great writer’), concurs. ‘Using your family, using things you know about, it’s just classic stuff, but the fact is it’s fiction and your imagination is working on these people all the time. You don’t want them to be historically real people, you just want to make a novel.’

  ‘Looking back over the books I’ve written, what I’ve tried to do is to make a comédie humaine of novels all to do with Nottingham people.’

  Novels for Sillitoe, as his essay Her Victory: A Novel Born or Made confirms, often have a long gestation and sometimes emerge from the idea of a single character or occasionally even an occupation. ‘I do think that what people do in life has great implications for what kind of character they are, and vice versa’ He tells me he spent twenty-five years mulling over a novel about a wireless operator until a story clicked into place and he wrote The Lost Flying Boat. ‘Often, though, it’s someone you’ve never met before; you’ll pass them on the street and there’s a spark and from that point on you have to build up everything. But at least you’ve got their face and you drive ahead fitting all the pieces together. You see, I’ve always thought Burton was worthy of more than a few pages, such as there were in Raw Material. You just think you are going to live for ever and you are going to do it in your own time and if twenty years go by, so what? About ten, twelve years ago, I finally went back to Burton and wrote a film script about him. But nothing came of it, so I just put it aside. Some eight years later I had a look at it and thought, I am not going to waste this, I am going to make it into a novel. And by then I had lots more information which had been bubbling about in my mind.’

  Top Ten Favourite Books

  1. Nostromo

  Joseph Conrad

  2. The Charterhouse of Parma

  Stendhal

  3. Our Mutual Friend

  Charles Dickens

  4. Tom Jones

  Henry Fielding

  5. Les Misérables

  Victor Hugo

  6. A Tale of Love and Darkness

  Amos Oz

  7. Belle du Seigneur

  Albert Cohen

  8. The Worst Journey in the World

  Apsley Cherry-Garrard

  9. The Works of Georg Büchner – especially Lenz

  10. A Treasury of Yiddish Stories

  edited by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg

  Sillitoe shows me a prize-winning shoe his grandfather fashione
d for a lame horse; a crescent of chromed iron, it lies on a cabinet beside his desk. From a neat pile of papers he then retrieves a modern copy of an old sepia photograph; a tall, elderly gent, dapper in an oversized cloth cap, three-piece suit, watch-chain and bow tie, is placed before me. A caterpillar moustache spans his top lip. It’s Ernest Burton. ‘The whole Wales thing in the book is based on one line, which my aunt said to me when I was a kid: “Your grandfather once worked in Wales.” That’s all it came from. But from the original of another photograph of him – the one I describe in the novel – I managed to track it down to Pontllanfraith. So I went down there, with my two brothers, and we went all over the place and checked it out and tried to find the forge where he’d worked. In the end we did find it, we went there twice. It was semi-derelict and surrounded by barbed wire.’

  Q & A

  What is your idea of perfect happiness?

  No such thing, but I’m happy enough at having peace and leisure to write.

  What is your greatest fear?

  I fear nothing, but there are things I don’t like, such as fundamentalist terrorism; or anything which might make travelling more dangerous.

  What objects do you always carry with you?

  Generally a map, and binoculars if I am in the countryside.

  Where do you go for inspiration?

  Into myself.

  What are you writing at the moment?

  Stories.

  In the indomitable Burton, many reviewers spied something of Sillitoe’s own creative past: Arthur Seaton as he appeared in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. ‘Well, I’ve always written about people who are independent-minded, who aren’t interested in “improving themselves”. I think it’s more interesting to create characters who are below that line, who don’t have that kind of political awareness. I do tend to write about those members of society who are not too well known about, I think. But yes, it’s very attractive, that sort of continuity. You sometimes try to think it exists, but it may not, clearly. There are characteristics that flow through families, though. There’s always this thing: is it heredity that forms a person? Or is it circumstance? I’ve always thought it’s predominantly heredity. Circumstances shape you to a certain point because they give you opportunities to exploit what is positive from your genes. You either take it, or not. Below all this, there’s this enormous continuity with the past.’

  John Updike has written that ancestors ‘lived that we may live. We reverence them because they participate in the mystery of our being.’ Sillitoe, too, believes that there is something essentially human in ‘the craving, the desire, to recreate memories that fix us to the past so we can think about the future’, as he puts it. ‘In a sense, I can appreciate the Chinese because they worship their ancestors. I don’t think we should worship them – I have absolutely no religion – but we should certainly think about them. You are only immortal as long as people remember you. When we brothers die, Burton will have faded away; nobody will be alive who knew him so he’ll be gone.’ Burton the fiction, however, is destined to endure, joining Smith from The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Arthur in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning among the ranks of Alan Sillitoe’s and, for that matter, English literature’s finest creations.

  ‘Using your family, using things you know about, it’s just classic stuff, but the fact is it’s fiction and your imagination is working on these people all the time.’

  About the Book

  Sillitoe and the Smith

  by Travis Elborough

  ‘Zillah also gave birth to Tubal Cain, the forger of every cutting instrument of brass and iron.’

  Genesis 4:22

  A WRITER, ALAN SILLITOE has observed, works with words as a ‘blacksmith uses the tools of his strong and often subtle art’. The comparison is not unusual. In the Romany language, to which we owe such words as busk and tramp, the concept of the ‘lavengro’ or ‘wordsmith’ has an ancient-ish pedigree; the nineteenth-century ‘Gypsy-philologist’ George Borrow, who popularized the term in England, maintained that there was ‘something highly poetical about a forge’. But there is an added poignancy in this instance, nonetheless. For while Sillitoe’s blacksmith grandfather Ernest Burton may have been illiterate, it was at his grandparents’ home as a small boy that the author regularly encountered books outside the classroom. Sillitoe ‘spent most weekends and school holidays at their cottage, a mile or so in the country’. A glass-fronted case in their parlour housed a collection of ‘sober volumes’ that the Burton children had received as Sunday school prizes. ‘I had,’ Sillitoe confesses in Mountains and Caverns,’ never seen so many books in one home.’ His grandmother Mary Ann, who later encouraged him to sit (without success) a scholarship exam for the grammar school, gave him the odd book from this store ‘to take home and keep’. Burton, it is plain, was tolerant of his bookish grandson. In Raw Material, Sillitoe writes that he was ‘treated well by Burton because, apart from being able and willing to labour physically, I also bothered myself industriously with books and writing paper … reading or drawing maps, and I know that he looked at me strongly now and again because he had not seen the like of it before.’

  ‘A writer works with words as a “blacksmith uses the tools of his strong and often subtle art”.

  Such scenes have their fictional counterparts in A Man of His Time – Burton looks benignly over Brian reading on the rug and Mary Ann likes to see the boy take books from the bookcase in the parlour because it reminds her of Oliver – and, earlier, in Key to the Door: ‘At home there were no books, but he found a store at the Nook, ancient dust-covered Sunday-school prizes with the names of his uncles and aunts inscribed in impeccable writing within the front covers.’ Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning remembers ‘his grandfather who had been a blacksmith, and had a house and forge at Wollaston village … and its memory was a fixed picture in Arthur’s mind’. And in Sillitoe’s children’s book Big Jim and the Stars, the smith takes on a magical aspect; Jim is ‘a blacksmith with a fiery red beard’ who lights up the night sky.

  ‘While Sillitoe’s blacksmith grandfather Ernest Burton may have been illiterate, it was at his grandparents’ home as a small boy that the author regularly encountered books outside the classroom.’

  Sillitoe on Screen

  A MAN OF HIS TIME began life as a film script; the project unfortunately (or fortunately, since we have the novel instead) failed to take off. Intriguingly, following the recent box office success of Walter Salles’s The Motorcycle Diaries, another of Sillitoe’s unrealized screen treatments is a script about the life of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara that he wrote in 1968, at the behest of Tony Richardson who directed his screenplay of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Of Sillitoe’s published works The Ragman’s Daughter and The General also made the transition from page to screen. However, the latter, filmed without the author’s involvement as Counterpoint (1968), and starring Charlton Heston, Maximilian Schell and Leslie Nielsen, bears only a nodding resemblance to Sillitoe’s original novel.

  ‘Having “written a novel without experience”, he set about honing his story into a script, a process that took him around nine months and four drafts.’

  The author’s involvement in film dates back to his own highly successful adaptation of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. When the American producer Harry Salzman acquired the film rights for the book for Woodall Films, the company Richardson and John Osborne formed to bring Look Back in Anger to the screen, he had insufficient funds to pay a named screenwriter and so asked Sillitoe to oblige. Sillitoe was initially surprised. As he told Alexander Walker (the longstanding film critic of the Evening Standard) in 1972, ‘I’d been to very few films in my life … To me at the time, a film was likely to mean an Ealing comedy.’ (Both the British Lion and the Rank Organisation, previously offered the film, turned it down.) But having, as he believed, written a novel without experience’, he set about honing his story into a script, a process that took him
around nine months and four drafts. The film censor later also intervened, demanding various cuts and rewrites; Brenda’s gin-in-the-bath abortion, a success in the novel, is a failure in the movie. (Such nips and tucks didn’t prevent the film, when it went on general release, being banned by Warwickshire County Council.)

  Sillitoe worked closely with the Czech-born director Karel Reisz throughout. To prepare for the film, Reisz – a leading force, along with Lindsay Anderson and Richardson, in the British socio-realist Free Cinema movement – travelled to Nottingham with Sillitoe and the pair collaborated on a documentary about a local miners’ welfare centre for the Central Office of Information. Much of the finished film was shot on location, with the Raleigh factory and Sillitoe’s mother’s house providing the backdrop in a number of scenes. To this day, Sillitoe admits he found it hard to imagine Albert Finney as Arthur Seaton. Harder still is to picture Peter O’Toole in the role – he, apparently, expressed serious interest – even conceding that the Yorkshire-born actor would have had little trouble mastering the scenes where Arthur imbibes an ocean of black-and-tan, and staggers about drunkenly. Finney’s performance as the truculent lathe-operator Seaton, wolfing down bacon and eggs after bedding his workmate’s wife, made him a star. In its aftermath, it was Albert Finney that David Lean wanted for Lawrence of Arabia. British cinema was never quite the same again.

  ‘To this day, Sillitoe admits he found it hard to imagine Albert Finney as Arthur Seaton.’

  Read On

  Alan Sillitoe on Reading

  ‘AS A READER I want a bit of veracity and I prefer, if I can, to read about people I don’t know very much about, because that’s also what I write. If I read about ten pages and I don’t find anything in it stylistically, I stop. I love stories, of course – the Bible and Shakespeare I couldn’t be without. I read the Bible all the while I was writing Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.