Raw Material

by Sillitoe, Alan;

  Passed on to me, the horseshoe of his spirit is as misshapen as the map of Deception Island pinned to my wall.

  64

  Burton’s horseshoe holds down the notes and mulch-thoughts that come to me at midnight and after. One says that a writer is an old man who picks up a pen instead of garrulously speaking his words into thin air. If in need of a certain sort of painkiller he bites on words instead of bullets. I was a premature old man as a child, which is one reason why Burton and I hit it off so well together. A writer has no age but old age, though he only becomes senile if he stops writing, and when that happens he usually finds some way to die, not matter how old he is.

  Vanity inscribes such secret thoughts, but they are a way of formulating the frequent question as to why one became a writer. The pile of papers underneath the horseshoe may provide a clue to this elusive puzzle: I can see it as a grand travelling trunk of raw material, and me lifting the lid occasionally to make a lucky dip or pick a winning number out of the raffle-bag.

  No writer should take drugs, it says, or drink too much, or get psychoanalysed. Such things are for the others. If he feels himself going mad it is only part of the creative process—the soul rebelling at some offence against the sacred code, or showing a new direction for his talent. Madness is to be welcomed, and shared with no one.

  A writer’s reality is other people. His hell is himself, whom he is continually trying to get away from, or explain into extinction. But he cannot escape, because the long exploration which lasts all his life, from alef to tav, takes him deeper into that skin-enclosed world of visionary shade and colour, badger-runs of memory, and all inventions of the soul. He goes to find out what is there, and organize it into any sense he can. From such material he creates his golems and sends them on to the sidewalks.

  Close to heaven and hell, the writer paces a narrow lane between the frontiers of both, with a passport for neither place. To sidestep his own demon by choosing one or the other means death. A writer is a born and sometimes eloquent loser—a person who cannot win. He is never satisfied with what he does because he is always trying for the impossible, to remake himself according to a dream of perfection that he felt close to since birth, and to keep himself as alive as the language which surrounds him. He is attacked continually by his basic self, and so is forced into a never-ending quest for the truth by which he can be remoulded into the ideal man—meaning the most ordinary of men.

  The impulse behind his endeavour is one of gnawing uncertainty, which would not leave him alone even if by a miracle he finished his task. So he compromises, tries to delineate an emotion or experience beyond the limits of what he had done before, to make reality out of a dream, to turn a vision into ordinary experience, to think complicated and write plain, to refabricate life and construct people because he cannot take himself to pieces like a clock, and find out what makes the world go.

  He became a writer because there was no other way out of the dilemma, which in any case was insoluble. There is no single explanation. The feeling of being a born loser turned him into the only endless direction that was open, so he began to write and accepted the role of scapegoat and sacrifice, fate’s potlatch, doomed never to tackle the fundamental problems of his life or finally explain them.

  To make his existence supportable he finds it easier to tackle the despair of others than mend his own disabilities. This binds him tightly to humanity. His attempts to write instead of perish help to keep him and the world sane, give people something to live for, provide them with a fragment of hope in a desperate planet when they might otherwise think that universal extinction is the answer.

  Too many occurrences of actual life rob him of time which would be better spent writing, though to use this as an ideal merely brings down the troubles he hopes to avoid. There is no way out of that one, but the argument that experience widens his spirit is false. In the beginning his spirit is a door, which opens more and more of its own accord as he gets older. A writer has to go further back than that. He should match the suffering of others with his fresh imagination, mix in with his tribulations, and illuminate the fused result with that third and holy eye which not only guards the past as he goes forward but watches for treachery from it, keeping it clear and well-balanced in his own iron-wrought truth.

  65

  Being a writer is the one great fact, my only love, a love which I had to feel before I could fall in love with anything or anyone else. It had to be there even before I could fall in love with myself.

  I can only write about people I love, even if they are crooks, cowards, scoundrels, weaklings, and renegades whom the rest of society abominates. The evil and the cynical in me also has its favourite characters which it likes showing to others. One falls in love with that which can either destroy or save, knowing that in the end there will be no difference between either state of the brain or backbone.

  At the beginning I felt an air of mystery and importance at being a writer—of hardly caring whether I was a writer or not, because an inner fire that I hadn’t yet uncovered but which kept me faithful to it knew that I was and would be, no matter what happened. It was pure and naïve enthusiasm, a feeling of youthful love that did not come and go in a month or year but went on like real love till it turned underground in order to survive. Like real love it is still there, and always will be, but I can never forget the time when it made me happy, in spite of all adversities and turmoil, just to tell myself that I was a writer, even though ten years were to go by before anything was printed. If any other person detected it they might have thought it was because I was in love.

  To lose one’s naïvety is to say goodbye to part of one’s soul. Youth has vanished, leaving an ashen disaster. If enthusiasm in its first rush is cut down by the sword of cynicism, or by reality, or common sense, or critical praise, or reviewers’ dislike, or an acceptance of any truth, it is a great misfortune, and wrong indeed to allow it. A writer is open, vulnerable, a prey to derision, and it is good for him that he stays so, otherwise he will never get respect from those who matter to him, nor any from himself. Those who clamour for nothing but the truth, who demand easy and unconsidered opinions as well as form and style and deadly academic care, only want to spread his guts out in the sun to see what he is made of. They scatter sawdust over his remains with gestures of disgust when they see that he is built the same as everyone else except them.

  The great poet David had a verse for it, when he realized the true nature of man’s most sacred possession: ‘Let them be ashamed and confounded that seek after my soul: let them be turned backward, and put to confusion, that desire my hurt.’

  A writer must search for the integral large space of his soul and, once he has found it, never abandon it, and be always sure to write with his own true voice, and not reflect the shallow guidelines of society. If there comes a time when he cannot distinguish between the two, then he should no longer call himself a writer. He must break through the thin gauze of the social fabric and get to what exists underneath, to that which has more meaning. It may not be easy to pick out the truth, but it is not difficult to distinguish the lies. If a writer is awarded some form of authority by the society in which he lives, and he believes in that authority, he loses blood, and indulges in artistic suicide. He slits his wrists in the warm bath of society’s approval, and dies with a flaccid smile on his face.

  No writer should agree to the simplicities and deceptions of the society in which he lives, and if he is true to himself he must fight against bourgeois culture, communist or otherwise, for with its lifeboats of surrealism and socialist realism it is a culture of deadness and mediocrity, sadism and self-praise imposed by those who came into the world with the truth on their lips and with nothing human in their hearts.

  Some writers cannot go below the skin of their perceptions, so keep within standard lines of behaviour, and stick to the fossilized social patterns created for them. Others use the imagination as a way of exploring chaos, employing examples of archetypal m
yths that belong to both the past and the future. A writer may not be popular in this, but he is brought near the edge of sanity on beginning to write. His mind splits, becomes fragmented, and creates an agony which forces his pen to move in an attempt to reassemble it and so attain the peace of putting on paper what did not exist before. He is driven up to the holy frontier by the barbs of madness, but once there he is serene, writing with honesty and fire, and as near the truth as he can get.

  66

  If the writer is to preserve his integrity and inspiration he must be concerned with life beyond such public arenas as the boxing ring or the cockpit, out of range of groans or cheers from people who are in thrall to such anaesthetical comfort. They are beguiled by a brash and clamorous truth which is not theirs, truth which is too much in the present, and exploits them because it is somebody else’s. Purveying what it believes to be the basic truths of the people, it deliberately puts them out in a monstrously exaggerated fashion, thus pampering the people into a sort of craven inanition, or a self-satisfying acceptance of all their vices. It stuns their senses, and no one can deny that they like its tune, for it takes them away from their own realities, which are less intoxicating, and more troublesome to all concerned.

  How far must one go in fighting those who believe in the white truth, the absolute truth, their especial creed by which they seek to enslave others and force them into a ruination of their dignity? A writer can only live by his own truth if he is able to exist without offending his moral conscience. Otherwise he must fight, and in battling to preserve the integrity of the artist, he struggles to maintain the freedom of all individuals. This is another truth I will accept, but though I keep it small so that it tyrannizes no one, I hope to keep it big enough to fight all tyranny. You can only contend against unjust laws by breaking the law. There is no other way. Most laws are not made for the smooth running of society, but to keep people unnecessarily docile. Society could run itself, but those in power make laws, and thereby impose a tyranny which seeks to fix everyone in his place. Such domination destroys energy, talent, and any tangible freedom.

  The great virtue of the English (especially the so-called lower classes) is that they are still expected to know their place in the social hierarchy created for them. The simple English workman is much honoured if he stays where he belongs. But it is not like that any more. Nowadays he is beginning to examine the basis of that discriminating society which has imposed injustice upon him, and to question himself who so willingly accepted it. It has been left too long, however, so that only the bitter, liberating energy to declare war and wreck everything for everybody is left. Most of the workers have not yet got into the way of wanting to take over the riches (i.e. the means of production) for themselves. They would like to, but they don’t know how. Baffled and smouldering with rage, and a terrifying historical sense of injustice, they know that to enjoy such riches they would need to control and maintain them—before sharing out the results.

  They have not been trained to do this, nor educated to expect it. They are stalled, frustrated, unable to tolerate being what they are, or to make a long revolutionary effort for their own and everybody else’s benefit. The men who organized the Somme massacres, and those toadies who attended to the gruesome detail of it, still run the country. The same dead brains proliferate. The same morality governs. The same incompetence rules. Those who see themselves as masters, those who hate the poor because they want to enjoy more of life and are therefore seen as a threat, those keepers of the nation’s traditions, the bitter old-mannish intransigents and narrow-gutted guardians of privilege, the sham and shallow pontificators in the courts and churches and in parliament, those who accuse the British working man of sloth and deviousness, yet continue to live off his back (little knowing that if they were not on his back he might again become one of the best workmen in the world), those who are afraid of losing what they have aquired by system and not by intelligence and work—will have to die off or step into the background unless there is to be civil war. The country is creaking fit to crack.

  Five per cent of the population owns ninety per cent of the wealth—a more wicked proportion than in any other European country. That is what the old men of 1914 sought so successfully to prolong. That was the victory of 1918, the fruits of which are still being enjoyed, but not by the men who died, and neither by those who survived, nor by their descendants. No Labour government since then has done anything to change it.

  The working men of today do not trust those middle class and no doubt sincere socialists to help them and give justice, for they see socialism of that sort as perhaps the last defence of the ruling class against the working class, the only system that will effectively stop the workers getting at their throats. To accept this kind of help might be to lay themselves open to an oppression as bad as what they have now, for such socialists could then say: ‘This is what you yourselves wanted’—and what greater tyranny is there than that? We must become each other’s equals, and treat each other as fellow human beings. It is a fundamental attitude that must be stated, but also one which can alter in a very short time if the battle is joined.

  67

  A mountain of uncertainties makes one unstable stepping-stone across a river, or a single drop of water in the desert. Beware of a man who always says no. He’ll enslave you as he too has been enslaved. Look out for a man who continually shouts yes. He’ll destroy you before doing away with himself. How can clarity come except out of confusion? How can one decide except through indecision? Seven negatives make a positive. If you dream you don’t act. If you act, you can’t dream. That rare and lucky person who does both lives in a world of angels. But he is further from the truth than anyone else.

  All roads are set at the truth, whether it is down the valley of dereliction that filters back to the past, or up on to the saddle of exultation that leads into the future. Or take it the other way round, that chaos signifies neither comfort nor satisfaction. Toss the coin of limbo, throw the dice of confusion for any number from one to six. Win or lose, you may not choose, but move you must, until rest is a forceput, and not of your own selecting either. All valleys are exalted, and all hills have good views except when the mists of inbuilt obstinacy cloud them.

  It is necessary for every person to explain himself. I do so halfway through my writing life (being if nothing else an optimist) for my own benefit, and as a way of burning bridges. The surviving cinders are visible at the bottom of deep water. It is also a journey, and all journeys are sentimental, whether towards truth, or a trace of smoke on the horizon that vanishes as soon as you look at it. Destinations are illusory, but the point of departure is a mountain of such living rock that you cannot help but set out from it.

  And yet, reading what I have written, where has it got me, except to the end of a normal story told in a roundabout way? Wrapped in verbal peregrinations are the lives of several people who stand on an island across the dark and violent sea. From it a light shines, sometimes clear, occasionally obscure. Often it does not show.

  All truth is fiction, all fiction is the truth. This book is no more than a novelist’s shape of fiction, a misshapen truth, a broad, swamp-bordered Lake Chad whose outlets are narrow flows of myself and little else. I have written about a particular stream, but it is a channel which never expands sufficiently for much truth to be born. If I claimed to write the truth I would have told a lie. If I said I had written lies it would not have been the truth.

  It is, perhaps, a historical novel in that people are given real names, while others come out of my imagination. Ordinary people also deserve the benefit of history. And since I cannot guarantee that there is not one lie in the whole of it I have no alternative except to call it a novel.

  What, then, is it all for? Life, work, love, living. It is inevitable that I should end on a question, for only questions are divine, the urge to question everything and never take any answer. To accept an answer is to condemn those who provide it to silence, and so you give t
hem tyrannical power over you. The good people in this novel know that you must never do that.

  A Biography of Alan Sillitoe by Ruth Fainlight

  Not many of the “Angry Young Men” (a label Alan Sillitoe vigorously rejected but which nonetheless clung to him until the end of his life), could boast of having failed the eleven plus exam not only once, but twice. From early childhood Alan yearned for every sort of knowledge about the world: history, geography, cosmology, biology, topography, and mathematics; to read the best novels and poetry; and learn all the languages, from Classical Greek and Latin to every tongue of modern Europe. But his violent father was illiterate, his mother barely able to read the popular press and when necessary write a simple letter, and he was so cut off from any sort of cultivated environment that, at about the age of ten, trying to teach himself French (unaware books existed that might have helped him), the only method he could devise was to look up each word of a French sentence in a small pocket dictionary. It did not take long for him to realize that something was wrong with his system, but there was no one to ask what he should do instead.

  So, like all his schoolmates, he left school at fourteen and went to work in a local factory. Alan never presented himself as a misunderstood sensitive being, and always insisted that he had a wonderful time chasing girls and going with workmates to the lively Nottingham pubs. He also joined the Air Training Corps (ATC) where he absorbed information so quickly that by the age of seventeen he was working as an air traffic controller at a nearby airfield. World War II was still being fought, and his ambition was to become a pilot and go to the Far East, but before that could be realized it was VE Day. As soon as possible he volunteered for the Royal Air Force. It was too late to become a pilot or a navigator, but he got as far as Malaya, where as a radio operator he spent long nights in a hut at the edge of the jungle.