in brief: Alan Sillitoe at eighty
Brief seems fitting. Alan Sillitoe is a man of few words, seemingly saving them up for where it counts: the page. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was the first really-English - that is, so English that it was a phenomenon here but I'd never heard of it in America - book that I read when I arrived in Finsbury Park at the tender age of Connecticut-suburban-19. Was it a Pan paperback? A Corgi? I remember the writing, and the faintly illicit-looking cover, and the grimness of the story, and the feeling that I had arrived in an unknown country. Adulthood.
I can remember, years before that, being shown the The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner at school. Impossible to comprehend in its bleakness, its utter foreignness: but I remember it vividly. Did we read the story? Maybe.
Yesterday's Guardian celebrates Sillitoe's achievement and places him in the context of a time many of us can't remember:
"The 50s and early 60s - the era of the Movement and the Angry Young Men - was an age of literary declarations and anguished symposia convened to address the writer's 'dilemma' or test the depths of his ideological commitment. Always reluctant to theorise about his art (questioned by the New Review some years later about 'the state of fiction' he professed to be 'totally uninterested ... One either judges, or one writes, and I only care to do the latter'), Sillitoe did, however, make one significant contribution to these collections of writerly opinion. Working men and women who read did not have the privilege of seeing themselves honestly and realistically portrayed in novels, he told readers of Stephen Spender's assemblage The Writer's Dilemma in 1961. 'They are familiar with wish-fulfilment images flashed at them in cliché form on television or in the press, and the novels they read in which they do figure are written by novelists of the right who are quite prepared to pass on the old values and who, unable to have any feeling for the individual, delineate only stock characters.'"
It occurs to me that if I never tell anyone my age I won't get the fuss made of me when I'm eighty... I guess I can live with it.
1 comment:
I've always had a lot of time for Alan Sillitoe. I saw him interviewed once and he was pretty much what I would have expected, a very down-to-earth man, no frills and no attitude.
I have no idea whether I saw the film or read the short story but The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner has always been important to me; the two meld into one in my head anyway in just the same way as Keith Waterhouse's 'Billy Fisher' will always look like Tom Courtney too.
What I particularly appreciate about him is that he has also continued to publish short stories and poetry right down to the nineties (seven collection of each).
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