Alan Sillitoe – Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

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Alan Sillitoe, Book Review, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

Nottingham in the fifties : an exuberant, cynical and poetic slice of the times

Alan Sillitoe’s first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, first published in 1958 rather burst into that territory which came to be described, in literature and especially in theatre, as that of ‘The Angry Young Man’ Playwrights such as Wesker and Osborne were writing about working class experience in a way which celebrated and showed the vigour of a kind of angry, cynical awareness of class politics, and how the establishment worked to grind down the working class.

Sillitoe himself, who died in 2010, had left school at 14, and failed to get into a grammar school – despite the fact that as the adult man would prove, he was fiercely intelligent, with a ferociously enquiring mind, and deeply thinking.

Saturday Night and Sunday morning is the story of a deeply flawed, often unlikeable, mendacious young man of extreme charm and more self-reflective depth than his heavily boozing, serially philandering and enjoying of fisticuffs would indicate. Arthur Seaton, 21, works in a bicycle factory (as did Sillitoe himself, aged 14, and his father before him). He both hates and despises the daily grind of the factory, and prides himself on his manual skills – and the ability to outwit the bosses and the time-and-motion-study piecework rate organisers. He has a good friendship with an older man working in the same factory. Nonetheless despite the odd twinge of guilt, his friendship does not prevent him from having a passionate affair with his colleague’s wife. Nor does that passionate affair prevent him from simultaneously embarking on another affair with a second married woman, and risking the safety and reputation of the two women, who know each other, and have a theoretical loyalty to each other. The women, Seaton, and the husbands all exist within a close knit community. To add to the complexity, Seaton also plays around with a young unmarried woman hoping to catch a husband. As well as charm, Arthur has that much to be admired prospect – at this point, a steady job, and his skills at the lathe are netting good results, on piecework.

           Arthur Seaton – or should I say Albert Finney

Womanising, heavy drinking and a keen sense for sharp dressing fashion are Arthur’s passions. Sillitoe shows that his antihero, despite the fact that he prefers to settle disagreements with his fists and workman’s boots, has a sharply analytic mind. In fact, he muses in an almost existential way on what the point of it all is. Arthur not only loves danger, and excitement, and womanising, but there is a side to him which has passion for something more quiet – days spent solo, fishing by the riverside: a pastime naturally giving the space for reflection.

On one level this book can be said to chart a journey from wild rebellion towards an acceptance of, in the end, accommodating and settling into accepting family life, marriage and parenting.

At times, in this first novel, Sillitoe does labour some of his imagery a little overmuch – fishing, swimming with and against the stream etc. are metaphors which hold a multiplicity of possibilities, and I did feel that by his second outing, the wonderful novella The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, he was trusting his reader, and himself, much more, and paring back.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning became of course an iconic Karel Reisz film, launching the bruised, powerfully sexual young Albert Finney on his road to stardom, a perfect casting for Arthur Seaton. Although Sillitoe himself wrote the screen adaptation for that 1960 film, it is perfectly obvious, from the quality of the writing in the novel, that he did not write the book FOR the film, with ‘this would make a brilliant (and money-earning) film, as his objective. Something I sadly feel is rather different now – there are writers (and many are not very good!) clearly writing with the idea of film, video and TV as their springboard, so that narrative, and often implausible narrative at that, becomes the driver, and operatic desire to shock the tool.

Sillitoe has character, multifaceted, at the heart of his novel. Arthur Seaton is powerfully and deeply realised, and thus becomes an archetype. Writing the archetype, and not the individual is what makes for two-dimensional writing, but if the writer, as Sillitoe does, makes the individual both unique and reflective of his cultural time and place, he will become fully rounded, as the complexity of his humanity is explored

Finney’s portrayal has all the dark, brooding quality of Seaton, Sillitoe’s book, whilst that is very powerfully there, also has savage humour, a cruel celebration of some kind of ability to laugh and self-mock. Perhaps there was a desire to launch Finney as Britain’s answer to Brando. Reading the book I have been more aware of Arthur’s mocking, self mocking laughter – less obviously bitter, more biting and mordant in how the writer shapes things

I received this as a review copy from the excellent digital publishing company Open Road Integrated Media. My version included an afterword, with photographs of Sillitoe, by the writer Ruth Fainlight. Fainlight and Sillitoe were married for 41 years,

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning Amazon UK
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning Amazon USA

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Alan Sillitoe – The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

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Alan Sillitoe, Book Review, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

Resistance is not futile

Short stories, as I find myself repeatedly telling myself, are a slightly unsettling read. It’s to do with the variable length of reading time. A short can be just too short, and if you read several by the same writer in fairly quick succession, there can be a sense of ‘here we go again’ as a writer’s pattern repeats.

And so I found here, with Sillitoe. In some ways, to my taste, this collection would have been better served by having fewer of the ‘stories in the middle section’ The first, ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’ is a marvellous novella, rather than short story. It is full of bitter, angry realism, a heady mix of despair, resignation and empowerment. It was of course also made into an iconic film of the 60s, part of the New Wave of Cinema – which included the film of another Sillitoe book, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

Tom Courtenay, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, 1962, director Tony Richardson

The central character of the title story is a troubled, disadvantaged young Nottinghamshire teen, doing time in a Borstal, after he was caught with the proceeds of a robbery – in a scene which mixes dark humour with pathos. The story, told in the first person is imbued with a sharp, intelligent sense of the unfair nature of an unequal society.

Smith did not have the chances, due to poverty and deprivation for any kind of better life (the book was published in 1959) Petty crime offered glamour, excitement – and food on the table.

In his time in the Borstal, the superficially progressive prison governor discovers that Smith has a rare talent for running, and when a cross-country running competition is set up against a prestigious school, the prison governor sees glory for himself and his running of his Borstal, in pitting his prize boy against the elite. For Smith, the buzz, the graft and the drudgery of daily training offer a meaningful solitary time for expansive, curiously transcendental thought, bringing him to a wider consciousness of himself and the system he is caught within

Although the ending of the story is never really going to be in doubt, once the reader sees how Smith’s process of analysis is going, it is gloriously satisfying.

Sillitoe himself came from precisely the same kind of background as the characters in this and the other stories in the collection. What I like is the sense of fire and spirit, the individuality and humanity in his characters, despite the fact that life does what it can to grind this down and away. He neither patronises, pities, indulges or allows his characters to indulge in ‘poor me misery’ in the best of the stories.

Of the shorter stories, I found ‘The Fishing Boat Picture’, the story of a mismatched marriage between a bookish postman who liked a quiet life and the ‘big-boned girl yet with a good figure and a nice enough face’ whom he marries rather in haste, followed by the inevitable joint repentance at leisure, a particularly strong one. The twist in the story is not a twist of event, rather, one of dignity, sensitivity, tenderness and emotional refinement inside what seems like unpromising, wasted lives

I was also moved by the sad pathos of ‘Uncle Ernest’, a lonely man who, through pity, forms a friendship with two manipulative young girls. I think a modern writer would have done something more sensationalist with this, and maybe, in the light of recent events, the idea that there can be innocent friendships is something which gets more cynically viewed.

Some of the later stories (when I had got the measure of the writing), such as ‘On Saturday Afternoon’, where the narrator, a young boy, assists another typical Sillitoe loner in his suicide attempt, just because he (the boy) was feeling ‘black and fed –up because everybody in the family had gone to the pictures’ seemed a little contrived, an attempt, curiously enough to lift with mordant humour, a darkening collection.

However, the very different end story absolutely raised the game again for me. ‘The Decline and Fall of Frankie Buller’. This is either a more fully autobiographical story, or a story where the writer wants us to believe in its autobiography, as the narrator in this is a writer called Alan, originally from a background of poverty and deprivation, whose success as a writer has taken him out of class, out of background, and into a much more gracious life, now in Majorca (Mallorca) . Sillitoe did indeed live for several years in France, Spain and specifically in Mallorca

In this endpiece story, quite different in tone to the earlier pieces, the theme is that of ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ The writer muses of a life formed through a passion for books, reading and writing. His relationship to them is ambivalent, they are :

Items which have become part of me, foliage that has grown to conceal the bare stem of my real personality, what I was like before I ever saw these books, or any book at all, come to that. Often I would like to rip them away from me one by one, extract their shadows out of my mouth and heart, cut them neatly with a scalpel from my jungle-brain. Impossible. You can’t wind back the clock that sits grinning on the marble shelf. You can’t even smash its face in and forget it

The writer, in his present, is taken back in time from the aural equivalent of Proust’s madeleine – the song of the cuckoo, into a flooded, present remembrance of himself, earlier in life, and tells the important story of Frankie Buller, who he was, who he was for Alan, and the moment when life paths diverge.

We were marching to war, and I was a part of his army, with an elderberry stick at the slope and my pockets heavy with smooth, flat, well-chosen stones that would skim softly and swiftly through the air, and strike the forehead of enemies

The gathering up of Sillitoe’s time and place in this, as stages of his life are weaved into and out of, is wonderful.

I was offered this as a digital copy for review, by Open Road Media, a States based company who bring many ‘gone out of print’ writers from earlier in the twentieth century, back into circulation. They are meticulous (not all digitisers are!) in producing versions which read seamlessly and cleanly on ereaders

This particular version is not the one available in the UK, I have linked to the UK ‘available on Kindle’ which was an earlier publication. The stories are the same, and in the same order, but the UK Kindle and USA Kindle (Open Road) contain different afterwords, by different authors. Open Road’s version has an afterword by Sillitoe’s wife, Ruth Fainlight, a writer herself, and photographs

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner Amazon UK
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner Amazon USA