A Man of his Time

Sillitoe and the Smith by Travis Elborough

A WRITER, ALAN SILLITOE has observed, works with words as a ‘blacksmith uses the tools of his strong and often subtle art’. The comparison is not unusual. In the Romany language, to which we owe such words as busk and tramp, the concept of the ‘lavengro’ or ‘wordsmith’ has an ancient-ish pedigree; the nineteenth-century ‘Gypsy-philologist’ George Borrow, who popularized the term in England, maintained that there was ‘something highly poetical about a forge’. But there is an added poignancy in this instance, nonetheless. For while Sillitoe’s blacksmith grandfather Ernest Burton may have been illiterate, it was at his grandparents’ home as a small boy that the author regularly encountered books outside the classroom. Sillitoe ‘spent most weekends and school holidays at their cottage, a mile or so in the country’. A glass-fronted case in their parlour housed a collection of ‘sober volumes’ that the Burton children had received as Sunday school prizes. ‘I had,’ Sillitoe confesses in Mountains and Caverns,’ never seen so many books in one home.’ His grandmother Mary Ann, who later encouraged him to sit (without success) a scholarship exam for the grammar school, gave him the odd book from this store ‘to take home and keep’. Burton, it is plain, was tolerant of his bookish grandson. In Raw Material, Sillitoe writes that he was ‘treated well by Burton because, apart from being able and willing to labour physically, I also bothered myself industriously with books and writing paper … reading or drawing maps, and I know that he looked at me strongly now and again because he had not seen the like of it before.’

Such scenes have their fictional counterparts in A Man of His Time — Burton looks benignly over Brian reading on the rug and Mary Ann likes to see the boy take books from the bookcase in the parlour because it reminds her of Oliver — and, earlier, in Key to the Door: ‘At home there were no books, but he found a store at the Nook, ancient dust-covered Sunday-school prizes with the names of his uncles and aunts inscribed in impeccable writing within the front covers.’ Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning remembers ‘his grandfather who had been a blacksmith, and had a house and forge at Wollaston village … and its memory was a fixed picture in Arthur’s mind’. And in Sillitoe’s children’s book Big Jim and the Stars, the smith takes on a magical aspect; Jim is ‘a blacksmith with a fiery red beard’ who lights up the night sky.

Sillitoe on Screen

A MAN OF HIS TIME began life as a film script; the project unfortunately (or fortunately, since we have the novel instead) failed to take off. Intriguingly, following the recent box office success of Walter Salles’s The Motorcycle Diaries, another of Sillitoe’s unrealized screen treatments is a script about the life of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara that he wrote in 1968, at the behest of Tony Richardson who directed his screenplay of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Of Sillitoe’s published works The Ragman’s Daughter and The General also made the transition from page to screen. However, the latter, filmed without the author’s involvement as Counterpoint (1968), and starring Charlton Heston, Maximilian Schell and Leslie Nielsen, bears only a nodding resemblance to Sillitoe’s original novel.

The author’s involvement in film dates back to his own highly successful adaptation of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. When the American producer Harry Salzman acquired the film rights for the book for Woodall Films, the company Richardson and John Osborne formed to bring Look Back in Anger to the screen, he had insufficient funds to pay a named screenwriter and so asked Sillitoe to oblige. Sillitoe was initially surprised. As he told Alexander Walker (the longstanding film critic of the Evening Standard) in 1972, ‘I’d been to very few films in my life … To me at the time, a film was likely to mean an Ealing comedy.’ (Both the British Lion and the Rank Organisation, previously offered the film, turned it down.) But having, as he believed, written a novel without experience’, he set about honing his story into a script, a process that took him around nine months and four drafts. The film censor later also intervened, demanding various cuts and rewrites; Brenda’s gin-in-the-bath abortion, a success in the novel, is a failure in the movie. (Such nips and tucks didn’t prevent the film, when it went on general release, being banned by Warwickshire County Council.)

Sillitoe worked closely with the Czech-born director Karel Reisz throughout. To prepare for the film, Reisz — a leading force, along with Lindsay Anderson and Richardson, in the British socio-realist Free Cinema movement — travelled to Nottingham with Sillitoe and the pair collaborated on a documentary about a local miners’ welfare centre for the Central Office of Information. Much of the finished film was shot on location, with the Raleigh factory and Sillitoe’s mother’s house providing the backdrop in a number of scenes. To this day, Sillitoe admits he found it hard to imagine Albert Finney as Arthur Seaton. Harder still is to picture Peter O’Toole in the role — he, apparently, expressed serious interest — even conceding that the Yorkshire-born actor would have had little trouble mastering the scenes where Arthur imbibes an ocean of black-and-tan, and staggers about drunkenly. Finney’s performance as the truculent lathe-operator Seaton, wolfing down bacon and eggs after bedding his workmate’s wife, made him a star. In its aftermath, it was Albert Finney that David Lean wanted for Lawrence of Arabia. British cinema was never quite the same again.