Paris was marvellous, but the itch was on to move, out of the lowering weather for another look at southern landscapes. Couchettes on the train took us to Madrid, and more inspections of the Prado. During a day’s trip to Toledo I made unflattering remarks about the stand of the fascist forces in the Alcazar fortress during the siege of the Civil War. In the train going back to town a couple of identikit plain-clothed coppers, who must have been told by the crutch-wielding guide what I had said, came on board to look at our passports. With everything in order there was no cause to bother us but, recalling my experience in Barcelona, we left next day for Tangier, arriving in the middle of November.
Mike Edmonds had written the only useful guidebook to the place, and helped us find an unfurnished flat in a modern block on the outskirts. We rented furniture from a Danish man, and set up house with a Spanish woman to clean for us.
Jane and Paul Bowles lived in the same building, and we met frequently for talk and meals. Jane’s aura of anxiety was redeemed by a mordant wit, and Paul’s nonchalant precision of speech matched it with an elegant sense of humour. Jane’s writing was interesting in a very different way to Paul’s (whose books we had read in Majorca), especially her novel Two Serious Ladies, written when she was twenty. She was half crippled after a stroke but, being relatively young, was able to get about with a walking stick and the aid of her Berber girlfriend. She and Paul kept separate establishments in the same block, but ate together every evening in Jane’s. Paul’s rooms, more orientally arranged, let out a subtle aroma of pot and parrot droppings.
While Ruth worked on poems I revised the penultimate draft of Key to the Door. Kenneth Allsop came to interview me for the Daily Mail, and I had sharp words with the photographer who wanted a picture of me riding a donkey through the Kasbah.
The Rats and Other Poems was published during my stay in Morocco, the reviews implying, or their paucity seeming to indicate, that I couldn’t expect to be thought of as a poet as well as a successful writer of fiction. Either that, or the diatribe of ‘The Rats’ struck too close to home and was considered crude and offensive, one critic idiotically describing me as ‘a working class Lord Byron’.
In December, going still further south, we toured Morocco with Mike Edmonds in his Peugeot motor car. He knew all the good hotels and restaurants and, after a gastronomic blow-out in Rabat, and lunch at a comfortable brasserie in Casablanca on Christmas Day, he drove us inland to the vast walled city of Fez.
With many different trade quarters it was like a place out of the Arabian Nights, but Muslim fanaticism forbade us to enter the celebrated El Karouine mosque. We were more welcome at a synagogue and yeshiva in the rapidly depopulating Mellah or Jewish Quarter. The Jews were treated badly at the time due to the Arab world’s inflexible attitude to the State of Israel. Having no future in the country, most wanted to leave, but it was difficult to get exit visas. A boat load of sixty Jews, trying to reach Spain ‘illegally’, sank in bad weather in the Straits of Gibraltar, and all on board perished.
On leaving Tangier we drove with Mike to Paris, sharing the cost of petrol, calling on Mack Reynolds in Malaga, then going up and into France at Bayonne, with good eating and accommodation all the way. Ruth and I stayed a few days in Paris, then got back to a quieter life in London than we had left four months before.
Key to the Door was posted to W.H. Allen, and it was a good feeling to have the table cleared so that I could begin the film script of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Being a story and not a novel, the first draft was much too short, and new material had to be added to bring it to the usual length of ninety minutes.
The British Board of Film Censors was even more worried about the text than on the previous occasion, though Tony Richardson and I came off better because times were changing. In a two-page closely typed letter the censor complained of excess ‘language’. Such words as ‘bugger’, ‘sod’ and ‘Christ!’ were really not acceptable, he said, pointing out that ‘bleeding’ was used thirty-two times, and ‘bastard’ eleven times, leading me to wonder what demented apparatchik had gone through the 120 pages to count them. He suggested there should be some reduction of these words, and it was fruitless for me to argue that they were used merely to give colour and punctuation to the talk of those whose vocabularies were otherwise somewhat limited.
The censor also objected to an ‘obscene’ sign which one of the Borstal boys makes with his two fingers, and he also thought that ‘a bob in the eye is worth two in the crotch’ should be excised. One certainly ought not to show a screw kicking Stacey, he burbled on, when they bring him back to the institution after he has absconded, because parents with sons in Borstal might imagine that this was normal treatment. For the benefit of the young those ideas expressed in the story which were dangerous should also be toned down.
Early in 1961, at which point this account of a life without armour comes to an end (because the mere enumeration of a list of books produced would be too dull to write about), enquiries were made as to whether I would go to Hollywood and write a script for 50,000 dollars. A refusal to embark on such a career and become rich was not difficult. My publisher indicated that he would like me to continue writing ‘Nottingham books’, perhaps with such titles, I thought, as ‘Monday Night and Tuesday Morning’, ‘Wednesday Night and Thursday Morning’, or ‘Son of Arthur Seaton’, or ‘Arthur Seaton Goes West’, or even ‘And Quiet Flows the Trent’. I had no intention of competing with radio and television, which would soon have the new mood well in hand, or with other writers who came through the door which I had helped to blow off its hinges.
Such success as I had achieved was purely financial, because in three years, from the first advance payment for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, enough had been earned from all sources to begin paying back with income tax what I had received as my pension. We were indeed rich compared to the days in France and Spain, and though it was still modest by worldly standards we were content in having sufficient to live on. By now it was not difficult to believe that such a state would continue for as long as I went on writing, my main reason for being alive. I was under no illusion that the success of my first book – or my second – need be put down to more than a socio-historical accident, and artistic success still had to be striven for, and never lost sight of.
My first luxury, apart from travel, was the huge hundredweight black box of an AR-88 RCA communications receiver, of the type I used in Malaya, with which one could eavesdrop on Morse code transmissions, never knowing when the idea for a novel or story would come into my earphones from the sacred aether. I also used it as a sort of therapy when for reasons known only unto God I was paralysed with despair halfway through a comma.
I bought a pair of Barr and Stroud binoculars, so as to see landscape clearly without having to walk over it. Thirdly, a mark of normality perhaps, and so as to get from A to B more quickly, I acquired a new Austin Countryman car and learned to drive, taking happily to motoring because I was still in thrall to machines. I was also able to buy books, and what maps took my fancy at Stanford’s.
There was something which did not allow me to enjoy my so-called fame to the extent I should have been capable of doing. Perhaps it was just as well. I persuaded myself that such an afflicted state was necessary in order to go on writing. The wheels of fame and artistic success did not lock into each other, and I distrusted any feeling which came from a whiff of either.
Lack of enjoyment could have been caused by something in me, or factors exterior, or a mixture of both. The only success which meant anything was that of doing good work, and my increasingly hypercritical faculties never allowed me to acknowledge that sort of achievement. I learned to regard good reviews with the same objective appraisal as bad ones, realizing that success which eluded me in one book could always be aimed for in the next.
An eternal refugee from such ambiguous feelings, I immersed myself in work that came out of the coal measures of my subconscious, and never allowed sufficie
nt time to elapse between novels in which I could be intimidated by what the ‘normal’ world looked on as ‘success’. Nor was it possible for me to work and live, and though that decision was to be a mistake as far as my life was concerned, it was necessary because there was not enough energy in me to do both.
Facing such truth reinforces my inherited conviction that, having chosen what to do in life, you must go on with it to the utmost. Choices have to be paid for, and those half hidden ones that you allow to be made for you, or which Fate makes, cost even more.
Many aspects of life were too difficult for me to endure. They always had been. Why this was is hard to say, but I suppose a possible answer might be that dissatisfaction supplies the power for the mill of the imagination, out of which one endeavours to create works which leave the reader (and therefore the author) in favour of life by the end of the book rather than in a state of despair at all the vile things that go on in the world.
15 April 1993
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.
The Morse code he learned during this time stayed with Alan all his life; he loved listening to transmissions from liners and cargo ships (although he never transmitted himself), and whenever invited to speak, he always took his Morse key along. Before beginning his talk, he would make a grand performance of setting it up on the table in front of him and then announce that if anyone in the audience could decipher the message he was about to transmit, he would give that person a signed copy of one of his books. As far as I remember, this never happened.
In Malaya, Alan caught tuberculosis—only discovered during the final physical examination before demobilization. He spent the next eighteen months in a military sanatorium, and was awarded a 100 percent disability pension. By then Alan was twenty-three years old, and it was not long until we met. We fell in love and soon decided to leave the country, going first to France and then to Mallorca, and stayed away from England for more than six years. That pension was our only reliable income until, after several rejections, the manuscript of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was accepted for publication. Afterward, Alan would say that during those apprentice years he had been kept by a very kind woman: the Queen of England.
It is said that an artist must choose between life and art; sometimes Alan would tell whomever questioned him that after his first book was published and he became a recognized writer, he stopped living—there was not enough time to do both. I hope that was not entirely true. But writing was his main activity: He would spend ten to twelve hours a day at his desk, reading or answering letters when he needed a break from working on his current novel. And there were poems, essays, reviews—and scripts for the films of his first two books, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, and later others. He was extremely productive. But certainly he also enjoyed social life with our friends and going to concerts or the theatre. This was the heyday of the young British dramatists at the Royal Court Theatre.
Now, in the 1960s, there was enough money for what we enjoyed most: travel, and although in the first few years our son was still a baby, we would spend up to six months of the year away from England. Alan’s books were translated into many languages, which meant that he was invited to many other countries, frequently to literary festivals, or sometimes offered the use of a villa or grand apartment for generous periods of time. I remember a stay at a castle in then-Czechoslovakia, where we were awoken every morning by a scream from our son, who had managed to get his head or hand caught in some part of the rickety crib that had been put in our room for him. We also spent months in Mallorca, in a house generously lent by Robert Graves. During our four years on the island we had become good friends with him and the Graves family.
Time passed … the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties.… Every year or two a new book, a trip to another part of the world. Japan, India, the United States, Mexico, and Latin America: the range extended. I usually went with him, and as by then I also was having work published, sometimes the invitation was to me, and he would assume the role of consort.
Looking back, I realize what a wonderful life we had then. But a year or two before his eightieth birthday, Alan told me he was not feeling well. It was always hard to persuade him to see the doctor; this time he suggested it himself. There were many hospital appointments for investigations and tests—the National Health Service was as excellent and thorough as ever—and a few weeks later the diagnosis came: There was a cancer at the base of his tongue. His suspicions were confirmed. Although he had continued to smoke his pipe (and the occasional cigar), now he stopped at once. The tragic program of treatments started, and the inevitable oscillations between hope and despair. Twice it seemed that he was cured; then it all began again. In April 2010, not long after his eighty-second birthday, Alan died. We had hoped he could die at home, but he needed the facilities of a good hospital. Months later, on a cupboard shelf in his study, I found the manuscript of Moggerhanger.
Sillitoe in Butterworth, Malaya, during his time in the RAF.
Sillitoe and Ruth Fainlight shared their first home together, “Le Nid”, while living in Menton, France, 1952.
Sillitoe in Camden Town in 1958, soon after the publication of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.
Sillitoe at his desk in his country house in Wittersham, Kent, 1969.
Sillitoe in Berlin while on a reading tour in 1976.
Sillitoe sitting at his desk in his flat, located in Notting Hill Gate, London, 1978.
Sillitoe writing at his desk in Wittersham in the 1970s or ’80s.
Sillitoe and Ruth Fainlight at the PEN conference in Tokyo, Japan, 1984. They both gave readings at the conference, and Sillitoe was a keynote speaker, along with Joseph Heller.
Sillitoe standing on the porch of his wife’s apartment in Nashville, Tennessee. He visited Ruth while she was a poet-in-residence at Vanderbilt University in January of 1985.
Sillitoe (right) in Calais, France, with Jacques Darras (center), a French poet and essayist, August of 1991.
Sillitoe in front of his and Fainlight’s Somerset cottage with his friends, American poet Shirley Kaufman and Israeli literary critic and academic H. M. “Bill” Daleski.
Sillitoe on holiday in Penang, Malaya, in 2008. Sillitoe spent time in
Malaya as a radio operator for the RAF in 1948.
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Copyright © 1995 by Alan Sillitoe
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ISBN: 978-1-5040-3501-9
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