Raw Material
A Family Biography
by
Alan Sillitoe
This is a book about two families — a blacksmith’s and an upholsterer’s. It tells by the wayside a little of what made the author — who has a certain standing in his own volume of so-called Raw Material. It is also a trip to Jerusalem (as the Nottingham pub is called), a personal statement, a voyage to the battlefields of France, a dip-book, a family-album, a hundred-year time-span, a mirror through which the author not only brings his people into the open but comes out with them as well — holding their hands, as it were, while they speak.
Raw Material is anything but raw like the meat in a butcher’s shop, though there are characters in it who bleed in various places. It is neither quite fiction nor non-fiction, but a mish-mash of fact, and an artefact of fiction, a conscious romp in a half-disciplined style, a self-portrait of a non-man, a non-portrait of a self-made man, a first-rate port of call for the affections and afflictions that come to mind — which are offered on a bookplate for all to read and, if possible, relish.
‘All the future is foretold, but freedom of choice is given to everyone.’
PART ONE
1
In the beginning was the word, and Adam was the Printer’s Devil.
As a boy I walked into the middle of Nottingham, passing St Barnabas’ Cathedral on my way down Derby Road. In a deep niche of its grey-black wall sat a man with no legs, selling matches. The niche had a heavy wooden door to it, and he could lock the place securely every night before going home.
At the time of packing up I saw him put the money into his pocket without counting it — as if he had already noted every penny that dropped there during his long day. Then he folded the mat and set it at the back of the niche with his stock of matches. After a look to see that everything was tidy he came on to the pavement and locked the door. He propelled himself down the road by his two hands, the trousers of his brown suit pinned under his trunk. He wore a collar and tie, which somehow saddened his look of respectability.
His brown eyes watched people walking by all day long, and his single great indisputable truth was that the rest of the world had legs. He was privileged in having such an enormous and satisfying fact all to himself, but what a price he had had to pay for it. His features were a prison wall that held in his thoughts and everything he suffered. He smiled, but never talked.
His fate did not seem so terrible to me as I now think it was. He had a way of earning a living, shelter from the rain while doing it, and a fact about himself with which he could gainsay every other truth. I did not envy him, but in my simplicity as a child I realized that his truth would have been absolute if only he had given into it entirely by staying in his wall-cave during the night as well.
When I asked my parents how he had lost his legs my mother said he’d been run over by a tram as a boy. My father told me they had been blown from under him twenty years before at the Battle of the Somme. My grandmother heard he’d been born like that. Grandfather Burton thought it as good a way as any to dodge his share of proper work.
It was difficult to know which of these tales to believe, but they ceased to matter after a while. The man still had no legs, after all.
2
The man with no legs is the first thing that comes to me as I start to write. There is much more, because this book is called Raw Material, part novel, part autobiography, but all in all a book, a reading book, and non-committal in these aspects till I get to the end. It is an attempt at self-portrait in which I will leave out the expected run-throughs of the confessional because I assume that most have been used, suitably disguised or not, in novels and stories already finished.
In any case, my plain unblemished life-story would in no way guarantee an accurate design, because the ordinary occurrences since birth may be weighed down by the heavy blight of lost happenings that took up my parents or grandparents. The important particulars that moved them, if one can sort it out from this point on in time, may be more vital than the petty issues I have been involved in.
Those events which were overwhelming and decisive may account for my inability to wear a simple necktie, indicating that some criminal antecedent was hanged for stealing a sheep, when a Celtic judge from my father’s side did for some Jutish marauder on my mother’s — or vice versa, since both strands are inextricably ravelled. Or perhaps I don’t flash a tie because I am a rationalist and see no reason for it, or that it does not keep me warm and is therefore useless in the long run. If one sticks to the truth, all minor reasons need considering.
No matter what I call this book, everything written is fiction, even non-fiction — which may be the most fictional non-fiction of all. Under that heading are economic reports, international treaties, news items, Hansard accounts, biographies of ‘great people’, historical blow-by-blows of crises and military campaigns. Anything which is not scientific or mathematical fact is coloured by the human imagination and feeble opinion.
Fiction is a pattern of realities brought to life by suitably applied lies, and one has to be careful, in handling the laws of fiction, not to get so close to the truth that what is written loses its air of reality.
It is a hard test sailing so near the gale, but however this narrative is classified it bears no relationship either to golden truth or black lies. To pursue truth one minute while denying there is any such thing the next has the advantage of realism. Such vacillation divides the compulsively verbal persuaders from the writer who has neither time nor leaning to swing anybody. For the talkers there is only one truth, and they know it. They go on talking so long that it stokes them up and keeps their home fires burning. Manic continual speech prevents self-knowledge and the threat of facing the wasteland. As a way of taking in air, it inflates them and keeps the feet just that bit above the earth to maintain their confidence. Politicians are so good at telling lies that their faces are not even pock-marked to show they are not being deceived by them.
On the other hand those who see truth everywhere have great difficulty in selecting certain truths to make a pattern of wisdom from it. Language becomes more precious when truths proliferate. It is not so easy then to talk or write, for truth is difficult to pin down when it is everywhere. But those who exult in the truth turn into a river of semantic devastation.
No one can speak for anyone else, and whoever says differently is a mean-throated, twin-faced liar. Perhaps I am saying that only God can speak the truth, which may or may not be a useful yardstick, because though it invites chaos in by the front door if one does not believe in God, one can only explore that chaos and reduce it to some ordered arrangement by a strict pursuit of truth regarding one’s own attitude — so as to get out of the back door before the house falls in on both truth and lies together.
Having stated this, it seems unlikely at the moment that I shall ever get any truth from myself. But in case it becomes even more difficult in the future, through accident or loss of nerve, I had better attempt to do so now and get it over with, set my arms flailing and make a snatch at the truth with one or the other when any recognition of it seems possible in the distorting fog.
3
Outside on the window-ledge a wasp stings a fly into unconsciousness and walks off with it under its arm like a parcel. A few minutes later, a mistle-thrush waddles back across the grass from chasing a sparrow, and the way the bird moves I know she has an egg in her. The same sights could be seen a hundred years ago, and at any time since.