Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

A Biographical Sketch

Alan Sillitoe was born on 4 March 1928 ‘in the front room of a red-bricked council house on the outskirts of Nottingham’, the son of an illiterate and often unemployed tannery worker. His early years, candidly drawn in his unsentimental autobiography Life Without Armour, were marked by poverty and overshadowed by domestic violence. Sillitoe’s maternal grandfather, Ernest Burton, a blacksmith, was also illiterate. However, it was at his grandparents’ house that the author’s love of books and reading was nurtured. As a young boy, 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. Sillitoe confesses in Mountains and Caverns, ‘I had 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’.

Sillitoe left school at fourteen and worked as a lathe operator in a number of factories in Nottingham, including a stint at the city’s famous Raleigh bicycle plant. In 1945 he became an air traffic control assistant with the Ministry of Aircraft Production. He then enlisted in the Royal Air Force and worked as a wireless operator. (To this day he retains a working knowledge of Morse code — at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2004 he revealed that tapping out Morse helped him to relax and overcome moments of writer’s block.) While he was stationed in Malaya a fellow operator lent him a copy of Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, a novel that left a lasting impression on him. ‘It isn’t easy to say precisely the effect this book had on me when I first read it,’ he recalled in 1964. ‘It certainly had a great one, because it has haunted me ever since.’

Diagnosed with TB, Sillitoe spent over a year in an RAF hospital where he read avidly and started to write. Discharged from hospital, he was ‘pensioned off’ at twenty-one after ‘ceasing to fulfil Royal Air Force physical requirements’. Back in Nottingham, Sillitoe met the American poet Ruth Fainlight, then nineteen, in a bookshop. They fell in love and in January 1952 sailed for the Continent, living hand-to-mouth on Sillitoe’s RAF pension in France, Italy and Spain for the next six years. During this period Sillitoe wrote numerous short stories and poems and several full-length novels, though none of these early novels succeeded in finding a publisher. In Majorca the couple befriended the poet and novelist Robert Graves. Spurred by Graves, Sillitoe began to write what would become Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, composing much of the novel ‘in the autumn of 1956, sitting under an orange tree’.

Rejected by several firms, the novel was eventually taken on by W.H. Allen and published on 14 October 1958. It was an instant critical and commercial triumph, voted best novel of the year by the Observer and in April 1959 awarded the Authors’ Club Prize for the Best First Novel of 1958. Successfully adapted for the stage and screen (with a script by Sillitoe himself), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning has never been out of print since.

Everyone Getting Blindo Travis Elborough talks to Alan Sillitoe

You’ve written that when you were in Majorca, reading the clear prose of De Quincey’s The Confessions of an English Opium Eater aloud helped you to improve and refine your own style. What other works, do you feel, informed Saturday Night and Sunday Morning?

It was a clarity of English I was after. I read the Bible all the while I was writing Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, but I was reading so much then. It’s very difficult to put your finger on it. Camus, Sartre, Salinger, of course, Mailer and all the great Americans, but one finally disregarded all that and found one’s own voice.

Sartre and Camus were the leading exponents of existentialism, which in turn was a great influence on American writers like Mailer and Salinger. Given your own reading at that time, I wonder, did you ever envisage Arthur Seaton as a kind of existential anti-hero?

No, I didn’t. The thing is I didn’t think of him in any terms at all. I just wrote the story. I don’t think I could retrospectively apply them to him, as it wouldn’t be valid. I was just interested in writing about characters that were independent-minded, people who aren’t that well known.

You’d written a few novels before Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Is it true that it was your friend Robert Graves whoactually suggested you try writing a novel about Nottingham?

I think, in a way, it was. He said, ‘You know, why don’t you write something about where you come from, your past life,’ which is what most people do. In any case, I was already writing short stories which were set in that milieu with my own voice. It wasn’t a great leap forward, just a progression, which perhaps I should have taken sooner. But maybe it’s just as well I didn’t, because by the time I did I really knew what I wanted to do and how to do it.

Had you, do you think, consciously avoided it before then?

No, I don’t think I fought against it, as such. I think I just thought writing these dud novels was the way to do it. In any case what they did teach me was how to write. Not to indulge in purple passages and overwrite and use too many words meaning the same thing and all the rest of it. Not having had it all cleared from my head by university, I found my own way, which was probably just as well.

Did being in Spain make a difference? Could you have written the novel if you’d remained in England, for instance?

It gave me a greater sense of objectivity, so it really came out better. I think if I had written it while still in Nottingham, possibly while still working in a factory, it would have been three times as long and it wouldn’t have had that clarity and shape, if it had any shape at all.

I seem to recall that in your autobiography you mention trimming something like 50,000 words from the early draft of the novel. Was the original version radically different? Was revising it a painful process?

There were repetitions I cut. I didn’t leave anything vital out; by then I knew enough not to do so. It was another thing Graves used to say: ‘Always take out everything that’s unnecessary but be very careful not to take out what you want to say.’ Which I’d learnt, of course, by writing all these dud novels! The first chapter had been a short story, which I hadn’t been able to get published but it felt like a good thing to kick off with, and so it went from there. I don’t think I knew where I was going in the first draft, I just moved from chapter to chapter pulling things in — the odd story and a poem I’d written. Then after the first draft, when I’d typed it up, I began to chuck it around. Rather like carving a statue out of granite, you know, chipping away. As it went through draft after draft I added a little bit at the beginning, restructured it and so on, and then I was away.

Given the initial difficulty of getting it published, were you surprised by the reaction to the book when it appeared?

I am not sure ‘surprised’ is the word. It might be. I was pleased more than anything. And somehow I just took it as my due, as you do at that age.

How did you feel at the time about being bracketed with the Angry Young Men, people like John Wain and John Osborne? Did you feel any affinity with their work?

I’d seen Look Back in Anger, so there may have been a little influence of that, not too much. The kind of Jimmy Porter-ish stuff didn’t wash on me. I enjoyed it. I thought it was a great play, and I still do. But a lot of the supposedly more outré sayings in my novel were things I’d heard in the factory, and I just ploughed them in without any inhibitions.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was the first in a series of your novels about various members of the Seaton family, which you’ve described as a kind of Nottingham comedie humaine. But in 2001 you published Birthday, a sequel to Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. What drew you back to Arthur? Had you always planned to write a sequel?

Yes, I had always wanted to do it. I’d even made an attempt only a few years after Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. But at the time I didn’t really feel it was quite right. I started one and eventually it became The Death of William Posters, which was quite different. He was someone like Arthur, out of Nottingham, but I concocted this story that turned into a trilogy. But the idea hung around. I really wanted to settle it once and for all, but of course decades go by and if you are a writer you just think you are going to live forever. And suddenly, after forty years, I had an idea to hang the story on, which was this woman’s birthday. So I started with that, and then it all fell into place. It was ready, and I never really do anything until it is ready.

Young people binge drinking at the weekend. For a book written nearly fifty years ago, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning feels remarkably contemporary in many ways, don’t you think?

I go back to Nottingham quite frequently to see my brothers, but I went back a few months ago and deliberately stayed in a hotel in the middle of town. It was a Friday night, and so I had a walk around after I’d had my dinner. It looked pretty much the same, everyone getting blindo, in quite a nice kind of way. It wasn’t dangerous, or perilous, in any way. I just walked around and watched people going from one pub to another, occasionally stopping off at the cash machine to get the wherewithal for more boozing. That’s the way it always has been. I remember, during the war and after the war, when people got their wages they went and had a damned good time. The idiom too stays the same: despite everything else, the local accent and language, a heavy strain of the old Nottingham lingo goes on. That’s what I like, and I am glad it doesn’t change.

Incidentally, are there any contemporary writers whom you admire?

John King. His three or four football novels are wonderful. I think he does what people have said that I do, which is giving people a voice who don’t normally have one — which is wonderful. No doubt there are ‘better’ novelists out there, but no one is really doing that kind of thing.

How do you regard Saturday Night and Sunday Morning now?

I suppose if I had the opportunity I’d tighten it up a little, but… having said that, I don’t know if I would actually. I think it stands. I won’t comment on the quality of the writing, I think it just came out and it’s good enough to stand. I have re-read it since and I don’t think I would want to do anything basically with it at all. I don’t normally read my books, or else I’d start rewriting them. I do pick up a book now and again and read a page and think, Oh well, I could do better now … But Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was my bridgehead. It still keeps earning me a bit of money! Obviously I’ve advanced far beyond but I still have a soft spot for it. It was my first published novel and, whether it had been successful or not, first novels are important because they are your launching pad.