Life Without Armour (35 page)

Walking along the Strand, steeped in a compound of gloom and optimism, it was hard to understand what I had let myself in for but, whatever it was, I had been working towards it for ten years, perhaps for the whole of my life, certainly for what had seemed at times like a century. I probably appeared mindless to those passing by, if they noticed me at all, but thoughts crowded in of those absent people who were nevertheless with me, including Ruth who had known me much of that decade; her parents who were helping us so selflessly; her Aunt Ann in America who had sent food, clothes and often money; my own family who had contributed food parcels from time to time; Robert and Beryl Graves; and last but not least Rosica Colin who had persisted with my work for so long. I wanted to talk to them and explain my feelings, even perhaps to boast a little and show my joy.

Laughing inwardly (and a smile may have been on my face by now) the much desired seemed to have occurred. My book would be printed, and perhaps earn as much as two hundred pounds, which would allow Ruth and myself to live, modestly still, in Majorca while we went on writing. The future didn't delineate itself beyond that basic hope, for I was taken up with the moment, walking as light as air and unwilling to speculate further on what had happened because it already had, and I had learned to waste nothing.

For a moment I recalled the day thirteen years before, also in April, when I had passed the aircrew selection board to be trained as a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm. That incident too, insignificant as may be, had set me apart from people in a way I wanted to be, which was a strange aim perhaps in someone who would write as if he belonged to them more than they did themselves. I had not removed myself half as effectively in 1945 as by the present achievement, but the desire to escape the crowd didn't mean that I despised it. Though part of it from every point of view, I could only write about the individuals that make up the crowd by living apart from them, because solitude enhances the power of judgement and reflection.

I was nothing except glad, in spite of all that, on entering a Lyons Café to have tea, before taking the train back to Brighton and telling them the news.

Chapter Thirty-six

Towards the end of April, staying again at Ima Bayliss's place in Dulwich, I cashed a money order from the Ministry of Pensions for thirty-seven pounds, and a cheque for ninety pounds came from Rosica as an advance on my novel. In the London of that time it might have been possible to live on ten pounds a week, but such resources as the above would not carry us as far as the middle of October, when the next ninety pounds was due on publication. We moved to a room-and-kitchen on the top floor of a house in Camden Square for two pounds seven and six a week, and Ruth worked as an interviewer with the British Market Research Bureau, thus becoming our mainstay until the end of the year. In this period she had two more poems taken by the
Hudson Review
.

With the bed pushed against a wall, a table for us to write and eat at, and a small kitchen across the landing, such living space was rather a decline after the flats and houses in Spain. We managed because we could afford nothing better, but it was important for us to believe that we lived in such a way from choice, and could always go back to the more ample life in Majorca.

For want of something to do in my unsettled state I continued the story of Colin Smith, the long distance runner, telling what happened to him after he came out of Borstal. The work grew to nearly a hundred pages, but, the quality being indifferent, it was put aside. I revised eight of my best Nottingham stories and, with
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
in the lead, typed them into a book-length manuscript and posted it in July to Rosica with the suggestion that it be shown to Jeffrey Simmons as a possible second book after
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
. This would give time for the final revisions to be made on
The General
, which I would present as my third book.

Poems were returned from the
Times Literary Supplement, The Listener
, and the BBC, though the story ‘Big John and the Stars' appeared in a children's anthology, for a fee of five pounds. I sent
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
story to the
London Magazine
, though being rather long I didn't believe it had much of a chance, and in any case it came speedily back with a plain rejection slip. I was anxious to have it published, anywhere, since it seemed based on such a rare idea that I was afraid someone else would write as similar a story as made little difference, and get it into print before mine. I occasionally woke in a paranoid sweat after reading exactly the same story in my dreams, with the name of a writer impossible to decipher on the title page, an anxiety which persisted, though with diminishing force, until it was published the following year.

At the end of June the proofs of
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
were ready at Essex Street, and I couldn't resist fetching them myself. I took the large envelope back to the bed-sitting room and spread out the long sheets to see a book of mine in print for the first time. No editing, at my request, had been done (though none had been suggested) so there were only a few errors to correct. Mulling over such paper fresh from the printer gave me the impression that my novel was better than I had thought. Print endowed it with a glow that typescript could not. The pleasure of seeing my writing at this stage has never left me, and with every fresh work I recall the bemused hours going through the proofs of my first novel.

Clifford Bayliss provided tickets for a performance of
The Trojans
at Covent Garden, the five-hour operatic spectacular by Berlioz, which I don't think has been done since at that length. I was beginning to enjoy London, and during this strange period of waiting worked on ‘The Rats and Other Poems', also sketching out the shape of what was to become my third published novel
Key to the Door
.

August was spent at the cottage of a schoolmistress friend, Jo Wheeler, in the village of Whitwell, Hertfordshire. The long evenings were warm and mellow, and we passed them listening to Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A on a small wind-up gramophone, as the gloaming slowly deepened over the fields outside the small windows of the living room.

‘The Decline and Fall of Frankie Buller' was refused by the
New Yorker
and
Atlantic Monthly
, but advertisements were beginning to appear for my novel, and I was interviewed for
Books and Bookmen
by the editor Bill Smith, who had been a librarian. In September, six complimentary copies of the novel came in the post, one being sent immediately to Ruth's parents, and most of the rest to Nottingham. An appointment was made for me to be interviewed by David Holloway for the
News Chronicle
.

The
Books and Bookmen
article, out at the end of September, was headlined ‘Working Class Novelist', a rather crass label, because I had always strongly objected to any sort of categorization. The irritation was tempered however by the hope that the piece might help in making the book known, and on the whole Bill Smith had written fairly. Mention was made of a television interview, and such general interest in the air led me to suppose that even if the novel wasn't a commercial success it could not help but be noticed. As a beginner I assumed that this was a normal atmosphere on the publication of a book, though people at W. H. Allen may have wondered at my phlegmatic attitude.

We spent Saturday night being royally entertained by Rosica at her flat, amusing her by our ‘hats off!' clowning, and joking about the old notion of erecting barbed wire around the house to keep off biographers. On Sunday morning of 13th October, the day before publication, I walked down the square and crossed the street after breakfast to get the newspapers.

As well as advertisements for the book there was a second-place review by John Wain in the
Observer
, and a dozen lines in the
Sunday Times
. While not exactly splash coverage, though it was pleasing to get what there was, more substantial notices came out in the following couple of weeks, in the
Daily Telegraph
, the
News Chronicle, Reynolds News
by Brian Glanville, and the
Daily Express
by Robert Pitman, not to mention the
Oxford Mail
and, of course, the Nottingham newspapers, as well as many others from throughout the kingdom. Often they were short, and took second or third place in the ‘posh papers', one writer in a communist journal blathering that Arthur Seaton and such like were ‘the scum of the earth', which infelicitous designation caused me to observe that I myself would have been the scum of the earth had such a party hack seen Arthur in any better light.

The understanding of such people had never been expected, yet Victor Hugo surely showed great wisdom when he wrote:

Are the duties of the historians of hearts and souls inferior to those of the historians of external facts? Can we believe that Dante has less to say than Machiavelli? Is the lower part of civilization, because it is deeper and more gloomy, less important than the upper? Do we know the mountain thoroughly if we do not know the caverns?

An interesting but perhaps unconsidered remark came from a reviewer in a London evening tabloid called the
Star
: ‘No reader is going to be deceived into thinking that Arthur Seaton is in any way typical of factory workers.' This writer may have been as experienced in the matter as I was, perhaps more so, because my hero (or anti-hero, as some called him) had been made as untypical as possible in order to show someone different to all the rest, bearing in mind that ‘typical' is not what I wanted Arthur Seaton to appear, as much as an individual in some way recognizable by those who worked and lived in similar conditions. Maurice Richardson's perspicacity in the
New Statesman
amused me most: ‘The style is effectively clear and blunt, as if it had been written with a carpenter's pencil on wallpaper. This is all the more of a
tour de force
as Mr Sillitoe is plainly highly educated.'

The antipathy from those who did not like the book showed that the character created out of my imagination had genuine differences of attitude to the normal run of people depicted in novels of that time. Some of the wilder utterances of Arthur Seaton were based on my own views of earlier years, but sloganized from long entries in notebooks and blended with sentiments which would come naturally to him. Such views were genuine because I had heard them while working in a factory, and things had not changed in that respect during my conversion to another life. The objection of many was that such remarks had found their way into print, and in the form of a novel that might be in danger of becoming popular among the people it was written about. Rough hewn or not, style was married to narrative as neatly as I knew how, though some reviewers commented on the uneven story line, as well as on the form – whatever was meant by that. It was evident that, a kick having been aimed at the door, the whole structure was found to be rotten.

Perhaps it is unjustifiable to devote so much space to the genesis and appearance of a first novel, but the book is still in print after thirty-five years, and count has been lost as to how many million copies have been sold in all versions and languages. This phenomenon is still as much of a surprise to me as it no doubt is to others, though I hardly ever need tell myself that to sell many copies is not necessarily an indication of a book's literary excellence. In my opinion much better work was to come, but the sales and film success of
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
enabled me to live as a writer, and not have to earn money in ways which could only be regarded as a waste of time.

After publication I was for ever racing down three flights of stairs to answer the telephone in the entrance hall, one call being for a live television appearance in Birmingham. Brendan Behan was on the same programme, and in the lounge of the hotel, and in the studio later, he was surrounded by publishing and publicity people who wanted to see him sufficiently drunk to perform in the unorthodox way they had come to expect, yet not so blindoe that he would lapse into obscene humour, in which case the technicians would be compelled to cut him off and the show would be ruined. Behan responded to a certain extent, though was astute enough to know what was going on. We were introduced, and cordially greeted each other, but I stayed on the periphery of the circus. As it happened, the media people knew what they were about, and Behan's interview turned out well.

We visited my brother Brian, who with his Shropshire wife lived in Dawley. Walking through woods along the banks of the Severn near Coalbrookdale we came across abandoned chimneys and forges, perfect relics of the Industrial Revolution in a better state of preservation than the ruins of many Roman cities, and possibly as interesting in the history of Man's attempt to create a civilization.

From Dawley we went to Nottingham, where I gave interviews. My father, ill with cancer of the palate, was no longer at work. While I was in the house he picked up the copy of my novel, turned it round and round in his large analphabetic hands and said: ‘My God, our Alan, you've written a book! You'll never have to work again!' – a reaction difficult to forget.

In November another ninety pounds came from W. H. Allen, as well as a two hundred and fifty pound advance from Alfred Knopf publishers in the United States, who had accepted the book after fourteen other American firms had turned it down. Including Ruth's earnings, and my pension, over seven hundred pounds had come into our coffers since leaving Spain, which gave enough money for entertainment. In one week we saw
Endgame
and
Krapp's Last Tape
at the Royal Court, Gorki's
Childhood
at the National Film Theatre, and Brendan Behan's
The Hostage
put on by Joan Littlewood at Stratford East. A few songs in this last show were good, and much of it funny, but the squalid execution of a young soldier by the IRA at the end left a bitter taste.