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 sufficient 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.