Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

by Alan Sillitoe

  The works of Georg Büchner, especially Lenz

  A Treasury of Yiddish Stories

  edited by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg

  About the Book

  What the Papers Said

  Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is a much-loved classic today, but here is what the critics made of it when £14 a week was a comfortable wage and a hot dinner could be yours for two bob.

  ‘The style is effectively clear and blunt, as if written with a carpenter’s pencil on wallpaper. This is all the more a tour deforce as Mr Sillitoe is plainly highly educated.’

  — Maurice Richardson, New Statesman (1958)

  ‘… makes Room at the Top look like a vicarage tea party.’

  —Daily Telegraph (1958)

  ‘The moral attitude of Mr Sillitoe to his graceless Arthur Seaton is that the responsibility for behaviour which is by any standards reprehensible, evil or ugly is lifted onto the shoulders of society … By the end of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Arthur Seaton is chastened if not a nicer man, as the result of a well-deserved beating up. We are left with the impression that the next woman he seduces will be unmarried and when he has made her pregnant he will marry her to beget a family who will grow up as selfish as himself.’

  — The Times Literary Supplement (1958)

  ‘His writing has real experience in it and an instinctive accuracy that never loses its touch. His book has a glow about it as though he had plugged it into some basic source of the working-class spirit.’

  — Guardian (1958)

  ‘Alan Sillitoe, the young author of the present book, has caught much of the mood of the present-day working class in England — its half-conscious spirit of rebellion, its ploitative laziness and non-cooperation, its uneasy respect for law and order, its secret sympathy for the clever rogue and the army deserter, its sense of the distant vague “they” which runs its life, so that you can never win … A fine novel.’

  — Malcolm Bradbury, New York Times (1959)

  ‘Brilliant … if he never writes anything more, he has assured himself a place in the history of the English novel.’

  — New Yorker (1959)

  Read on

  Must Reads

  Other novels by Alan Sillitoe

  Birthday (2001)

  Birthday is the long-awaited sequel to Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Four decades on from the novel which was at the forefront of the new wave of British literature, we rediscover the Seaton brothers: older, certainly; wiser — possibly not.

  Arthur and Brian Seaton, one with an ailing wife, one with an emotional knapsack of failure and success, are on their way to Jenny’s seventieth birthday party. Jenny and Brian had years ago experimented with sex — semi-clothed, stealthy, with the bonus of fear. Arthur, of course, had cut a winning swathe through the married and unmarried women of Nottinghamshire.

  ‘Sequels are seldom better than the original, but this one is.’

  — Allan Massie

  ‘Sillitoe remains the most physical of writers, spontaneous of language yet resolutely protective of its values. Sharing common territory with the late novels of Kingsley Amis, Birthday represents a carefully textured work by an old devil, still spiky after all these years.’

  — Independent

  ‘A beautifully crafted and perceptive work.’

  — Daily Express

  ‘There are parallels here with Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils — another old man’s book about old age. But it is well worth reading, both for its evocation of a vanished way of working-class life, and for its steafast depiction of the horrors of old age and the valour and comradeship that can, in part at least, redeem it.’

  — Daily Telegraph

  The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959)

  Smith is an incorrigible and defiant young rebel, inhabiting the no man’s land of an institutionalized Borstal. Watched over by a phlegmy sunlight, as his steady jog-trot rhythm transports him over an unrelenting, frostbitten earth, he wonders why, for whom and for what he is running.

  ‘Tough and punchy.’

  — Evening News

  ‘Sillitoe writes with tremendous energy, and his stories simply tear along.’

  — Daily Telegraph

  ‘Graphic, tough, outspoken, informal.’

  — The Times

  ‘A beautiful piece of work, confirming Sillitoe as a writer of unusual spirit and great promise.’

  — Guardian

  The Broken Chariot (1998)

  When Herbert Thurgarton-Strang was seven, his parents — as loving, as doting as any parents of their generation — took him away from India and left him in a boarding school in England which had everything to recommend it except pity. Through the stifling, alarming years which follow, Herbert is held together by his desire for revenge on those loving parents, and by the knowledge that, out there, a new world beckons. When he’s seventeen he steals away from school, steals away from Herbert, becomes a different boy; becomes, in Nottingham, Bert the lathe-worker, Bert the womanizer, Bert the soldier, Bert the sometime bruiser. Plunged into the louche life, he bobs like a cork.

  ‘Sillitoe’s sheer narrative drive manages to suspend most of the reader’s disbelief. This is an old-fashioned novel — technically conventional, pulling off the usual tricks of character and motivation — but oddly alive in a way that a great deal of modern fiction, written by those as yet unborn when Sillitoe began his career, patently is not.’

  — Mail on Sunday

  ‘The Broken Chariot explores familiar themes for Sillitoe: working in factories, drinking in pubs and chasing women in post-war Nottingham. But the writer has found a fresh, new approach to his specialist subject; one that again allows him to tackle the issue of class in a way that is often surprising and always entertaining.’

  — Yorkshire Post

  Find Out More

  http://www.nottinghamcity.gov.uk/

  The city’s official site.

  http://www.thisisnottingham.co.uk/

  Nottingham news engine.

  http://www.raleighbikes.com/home.html

  Raleigh Bikes of Nottingham’s website — although the cycle factory on Triumph Road has now been demolished.

  http://www.nottinghamgallery.co.uk/

  This site offers a photographic survey of Nottingham past and present.

  If You Loved This, You Might Like…

  A Kind of Loving

  by Stan Barstow

  Room at the Top

  by John Braine

  The Day of the Sardine

  by Sid Chaplin

  The Sound of My Voice

  by Ron Butlin

  Alfie

  by Bill Naughton

  Born Free

  by Laura Hird

  All Points North

  by Simon Armitage

  The Football Factory

  by John King

  The Red Riding Quartet

  by David Peace

  On the Man, His Life, and Art

  Sillitoe’s novelistic memoir Raw Material (1972) and his compelling and beautifully written autobiography Life Without Armour (1995) are essential reading for anyone wishing to know about his life and times.

  A Flight of Arrows: Opinions, People, Places (2003) is a wonderful collection of Sillitoe’s essays and reflections.

  Understanding Alan Sillitoe (1998) by Gillian Mary Hanson offers a detailed appraisal of Sillitoe’s life and works.

  The Life of a Long Distance Writer (2008) by Richard Bradford is the authorized biography of Sillitoe. Written with exclusive access to his personal archive, it includes much new material on Sillitoe’s life, including revelations on his political beliefs and close friendships with the likes of Ted Hughes.

  Also by the Author

  Fiction

  The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

  The General

  Key to the Door

  The Ragman’s Daughter

  The Death of William Poster
s

  A Tree on Fire

  Guzman, Go Home

  A Start in Life

  Travels in Nihilon

  Raw Material

  Men, Women and Children

  The Flame of Life

  The Widower’s Son

  The Storyteller

  The Second Chance and Other Stories

  Her Victory

  The Lost Flying Boat

  Down From the Hill

  Life Goes On

  Out of the Whirlpool

  The Open Door

  Last Loves

  Leonard’s War

  Snowstop

  Collected Stories

  Alligator Playground

  The Broken Chariot

  The German Numbers Woman

  Birthday

  A Man of His Time

  Non-fiction

  Life Without Armour (autobiography)

  Gadfly in Russia

  Poetry

  The Rats and Other Poems

  A Falling Out of Love and Other Poems

  Love in the Environs of Voronezh and Other Poems

  Storm and Other Poems

  Snow on the North Side of Lucifer

  Sun Before Departure

  Tides and Stone Walls

  Collected Poems

  Plays

  All Citizens are Soldiers (with Ruth Fainlight)

  Three Plays

  Essays

  Mountains and Caverns

  A Flight of Arrows

  For Children

  The City Adventures of Marmalade Jim

  Big John and the Stars

  The Incredible Fencing Fleas

  Marmalade Jim on the Farm

  Marmalade Jim and the Fox

  Copyright

  Fourth Estate

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublisher

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  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  This edition published 2008

  First published in Great Britain by W.H. Allen & Co. Ltd in 1958

  Copyright © Alan Sillitoe 1958

  PS Section copyright © Travis Elborough 2006

  PSTM is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  Alan Sillitoe asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

  Source ISBN: 9780007205028

  Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2013 ISBN: 9780007385652

  Version 2014-12-11

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