ALAN SILLITOE

Raw Material

1972

NOT MANY NOVELISTS have influenced me, but Alan Sillitoe is one of them. I had been brought up to think of literature as the recording of the human comedy. Some of those who kept the record, I understood, suffered and sacrificed, sometimes to a greater extent than other people. What couldn’t be enjoyed could still be understood. Coming up to Oxford as an undergraduate, for the first time I was made to feel that the attitude I had towards literature was selfish, that only the rich and the spoiled could afford to reduce a major art form to entertainment. The human comedy was a figment, then, a delusion. Writers knew, or ought to know, that in reality they were engaged in class warfare. According to Stalin, writers were “engineers of the soul,” which in practice meant that they were state officials dictating the beliefs and practices that would propel the working class towards its pre-determined victory over other classes, something many Oxford intellectuals would have considered the approved ending of the Cold War. At a college party, some don asked me what I was doing. Working hard, I said. He took hold of my hand, ran his fingers over it and said, “Not manual, I see.”

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and its successor The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1959) seemed to be dispatches from the front line of the class war. I had no experience of a character like Arthur in the former novel or of the anonymous Borstal boy in the latter. Conversation in a Sillitoe novel that went, “Well, my old man ain’t never got no fags either, but I wun’t bother to save ’em for ’im if I found any,” sounded fresh and convincing in grammar as well as subject, giving voice to people who had no voice. The dust jacket of Loneliness carries the sentence, “His father was a labourer at a bicycle factory in a Nottingham suburb where Mr. Sillitoe grew up.” I doubt that my father had ever set foot in a factory or a suburb either, for that matter.

A phenomenon of the class war is the individual who benefits from inherited privileges while denouncing and doing whatever can be done to destroy them. Oxford University in my day turned out such characters in their thousands as if their three years as undergraduates had been a sustained tutorial in how to make feelings of guilt an integral part of their self-satisfaction. I was one such. My early novel The Sands of Summer is indebted to early Sillitoe, except that he had lived what he wrote and I had to imagine everything. Put in its real light, he was a genuine protester, I was merely patronizing.

As literary editor of the weekly magazine Time and Tide, I asked David Caute, an Oxford contemporary and friend and Marxist too, to review Sillitoe’s Key to the Door. He spoke for many other critics and most of the literate public when he wrote with approval, “Clearly Sillitoe attaches the highest value to the honest, fearless instinct of a proud working man,” and he spoke particularly for me when he went on to pass the exclusive class judgment that Sillitoe “now stands in the forefront as describer and interpreter of working class life.” I invited Sillitoe to contribute and he came to the office. Picture my surprise that he wanted to review the new edition of the Baedeker Guide to Spain, and a novel by William Saroyan, master of the sentimental ending.

Raw Material is a last word, an adieu to the hard and fast subject matter of class that had hitherto singled him out. Success is good for some people. Through his own efforts, the bitter young rebel from Nottingham evolved into a bohemian living in a house like a barn in a fashionable district of London, happy to entertain, to travel and even to write poems.