A Man of his Time

Interview with Alan Sillitoe by Travis Elborough

ON ILKESTON ROAD IN Radford, there is a student accommodation complex named in honour of the author of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. All buildings, and their names for that matter, are transient (the old Raleigh factory where Alan Sillitoe worked as a teenager was bulldozed to make way for housing and this extension of Nottingham University’s campus) but for the time being Sillitoe Court fixes the writer into the official topography of a landscape that he has charted for nearly half a century. An antique map of the city — dark green, streets marked out like veins in an oak leaf — hangs on the study wall in Sillitoe’s West London home. Waving his pipe at a bay of bookshelves laden with tomes, he says, ‘All those are about Nottingham, just so I get it right. Nottingham,’ he adds, the pipe hovering by the corner of his mouth, poised for re-entry, ‘is only half of my output.’

To consult the ‘Also by Alan Sillitoe’ page amidst the reams of paper celebrating the endeavours of typesetters in Stirlingshire and printers in Cornwall at the front of this novel (itself by no means a complete list) is to be reminded of his range and prolificness — the Sillitoe oeuvre encompasses novels, short stories, film scripts, poetry, travelogues, plays, essays and children’s books. ‘I often imagine myself as basically a lazy person, who has to disprove the fact that I am lazy. I think with me it is more an obsession than an occupation. I don’t write every day, but I do in that I write my diary, write letters, correct typescripts.’ Sillitoe has stated elsewhere that when he first told his family that he was going to have a novel published, his father replied, ‘That’s bloody good. You’ll never have to work again.’ ‘He was quite right, of course. You sit here scribbling. I am very diffident about regarding it as work.’ Idleness, you will recall, is something Ernest Burton cannot abide; and call it work or not, Sillitoe can hardly be described as idle. His workroom, with its orderly rows of box files, tidy stacks of maps and charts, compasses and instruments, radio set and large oak desk, has the air of a military campaign centre, a den in which the compact and spry author — the Napoleon of Notting Hill — plots his next strategy. Everything Sillitoe writes is initially drafted in pen, typed up and then ‘saturated in corrections, re-typed and then that saturated in corrections again’. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning may have been set in Nottingham but it’s worth noting that it was written, with the encouragement of Robert Graves, ‘in the autumn of 1956, sitting under an orange tree’ in Majorca.

Before the age of thirty Sillitoe spent eight years outside England, six of them on the continent, mastering his craft, with his wife, the American poet Ruth Fainlight. Fainlight, who pops into the room to discuss parking arrangements for guests expected from France, is today busy translating Mexican poetry in another part of the flat, although bronchitis is hindering her efforts. While Sillitoe goes off to prepare coffee for us all (‘Alan makes wonderful coffee,’ she says with pride, and a dry cough or two), we chat about M.F.K. Fisher and Aix-en-Provence, where the Sillitoes lived for a time. And when Sillitoe reappears bearing what is indeed wonderful coffee and our conversation returns to the eleven or so Nottingham/Seaton novels, it is Balzac, rather than D.H. Lawrence, that is his first point of comparison. ‘Well, looking back over the books I’ve written, what I’ve tried to do — only half consciously, I suppose — is to make a comédie humaine of novels all to do with Nottingham people set in Nottingham.’

LIFE AT A GLANCE

BORN

4 March 1928.

EDUCATION

Till 14, but it was enough.

CAREER

Labouring — working on a capstan lathe. Air traffic control, wireless operator in the RAF (which taught me how to stand up for three hours, which later was good for cocktail parties), then writer.

Later on, when I do raise Lawrence, Sillitoe finds the idea that, other than their shared profession and geographical background, there is much common ground between them slightly bemusing. ‘I didn’t start to read, really read, until I was twenty, and I came across The Rainbow and I saw he had made something of the local landscape, or at least a landscape that I knew well, so that was interesting for me, apart from which it’s a very good novel. Otherwise there’s no more connection between him and me. The books that he wrote later, often in anger, well … they were rotten. Certain parts of them were wonderful writing, of course, but take The Plumed Serpent or Kangaroo. Just ghastly. And as for Lady Chatterley’s Lover, it’s awful, actually. But the early books — Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow — wonderful books, absolutely; they give him his place.’

A Man of His Time he maintains probably brings his Balzacian sequence to a close. ‘What I do have are short stories, they are still in my notebooks, and I am not sure if I’ll use them; I am just feeling my way, really.’ There’s always been a strong autobiographical element to this particular fictional cycle, with, for those interested in such things, numerous parallels between the Seaton and Sillitoe clans. Burton, first mentioned, if obliquely, in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, is, as he willingly admits, closely based on his grandfather, a tyrannical illiterate blacksmith (Sillitoe’s father was also illiterate). A nonfiction portrait of the ‘real’ Ernest Burton appears in Raw Material (1972), Sillitoe’s part novel, part autobiography’. But as a character in Philip Roth’s The Counterlife observes, ‘it’s the distance between the writer’s life and his novel that is the most intriguing aspect of his imagination’. Sillitoe, an admirer of Roth (‘A great writer, a truly great writer’), concurs. ‘Using your family, using things you know about, it’s just classic stuff, but the fact is it’s fiction and your imagination is working on these people all the time. You don’t want them to be historically real people, you just want to make a novel.’

Novels for Sillitoe, as his essay Her Victory: A Novel Born or Made confirms, often have a long gestation and sometimes emerge from the idea of a single character or occasionally even an occupation. ‘I do think that what people do in life has great implications for what kind of character they are, and vice versa’ He tells me he spent twenty-five years mulling over a novel about a wireless operator until a story clicked into place and he wrote The Lost Flying Boat. ‘Often, though, it’s someone you’ve never met before; you’ll pass them on the street and there’s a spark and from that point on you have to build up everything. But at least you’ve got their face and you drive ahead fitting all the pieces together. You see, I’ve always thought Burton was worthy of more than a few pages, such as there were in Raw Material. You just think you are going to live for ever and you are going to do it in your own time and if twenty years go by, so what? About ten, twelve years ago, I finally went back to Burton and wrote a film script about him. But nothing came of it, so I just put it aside. Some eight years later I had a look at it and thought, I am not going to waste this, I am going to make it into a novel. And by then I had lots more information which had been bubbling about in my mind.’

Top Ten Favourite Books

1. Nostromo

Joseph Conrad

2. The Charterhouse of Parma

Stendhal

3. Our Mutual Friend

Charles Dickens

4. Tom Jones

Henry Fielding

5. Les Misérables

Victor Hugo

6. A Tale of Love and Darkness

Amos Oz

7. Belle du Seigneur

Albert Cohen

8. The Worst Journey in the World

Apsley Cherry-Garrard

9. The Works of Georg Büchner — especially Lenz

10. A Treasury of Yiddish Stories

edited by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg

Sillitoe shows me a prize-winning shoe his grandfather fashioned for a lame horse; a crescent of chromed iron, it lies on a cabinet beside his desk. From a neat pile of papers he then retrieves a modern copy of an old sepia photograph; a tall, elderly gent, dapper in an oversized cloth cap, three-piece suit, watch-chain and bow tie, is placed before me. A caterpillar moustache spans his top lip. It’s Ernest Burton. ‘The whole Wales thing in the book is based on one line, which my aunt said to me when I was a kid: “Your grandfather once worked in Wales.” That’s all it came from. But from the original of another photograph of him — the one I describe in the novel — I managed to track it down to Pontllanfraith. So I went down there, with my two brothers, and we went all over the place and checked it out and tried to find the forge where he’d worked. In the end we did find it, we went there twice. It was semi-derelict and surrounded by barbed wire.’

Q & A

What is your idea of perfect happiness?

No such thing, but I’m happy enough at having peace and leisure to write.

What is your greatest fear?

I fear nothing, but there are things I don’t like, such as fundamentalist terrorism; or anything which might make travelling more dangerous.

What objects do you always carry with you?

Generally a map, and binoculars if I am in the countryside.

Where do you go for inspiration?

Into myself.

What are you writing at the moment?

Stories.

In the indomitable Burton, many reviewers spied something of Sillitoe’s own creative past: Arthur Seaton as he appeared in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. ‘Well, I’ve always written about people who are independent-minded, who aren’t interested in “improving themselves”. I think it’s more interesting to create characters who are below that line, who don’t have that kind of political awareness. I do tend to write about those members of society who are not too well known about, I think. But yes, it’s very attractive, that sort of continuity. You sometimes try to think it exists, but it may not, clearly. There are characteristics that flow through families, though. There’s always this thing: is it heredity that forms a person? Or is it circumstance? I’ve always thought it’s predominantly heredity. Circumstances shape you to a certain point because they give you opportunities to exploit what is positive from your genes. You either take it, or not. Below all this, there’s this enormous continuity with the past.’

John Updike has written that ancestors ‘lived that we may live. We reverence them because they participate in the mystery of our being.’ Sillitoe, too, believes that there is something essentially human in ‘the craving, the desire, to recreate memories that fix us to the past so we can think about the future’, as he puts it. ‘In a sense, I can appreciate the Chinese because they worship their ancestors. I don’t think we should worship them — I have absolutely no religion — but we should certainly think about them. You are only immortal as long as people remember you. When we brothers die, Burton will have faded away; nobody will be alive who knew him so he’ll be gone.’ Burton the fiction, however, is destined to endure, joining Smith from The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Arthur in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning among the ranks of Alan Sillitoe’s and, for that matter, English literature’s finest creations.