Raw Material

by Alan Sillitoe

  52

  Eddie and Frederick should know better, Joseph thought. They realized all too well what they were on about, damn and blast them, but just didn’t care to alter their ways, both to spite their family first, and to ruin themselves second. To Joseph they possessed Free Will, and he thought them wrong not to use it so as to dispossess themselves of it, as he had been forced to do.

  It was not pleasant to see his own hidden yearnings given some benefit of liberation in others. Yet Joseph would have been unhappy with that freedom. He did not have the moral stamina to sustain such breadth, which therefore stopped him getting it, and which led him to condemn it in those who had got it—who in any case were not happy, though in his limited vision he did not realize this. It was better to condemn others, as a sure way of hiding his own faults.

  There was a tight and lonesome streak in him, a need to stay by himself with what he had got, as if to be in life at all called for a sustained and painful effort. He wanted nothing more than to be left alone and looked after, like a baby still warm in the amniotic fluid. Even a neighbour knocking at the back door turned him into a tense, poised animal about to shout them abusively to hell.

  Joseph fitted silently and resentfully into his occupation, grudging the near presence of his fellow-workers so much that in order to stay apart from them he laboured with a dedicated frenzy of industrious skill that made him invaluable to any customer or boss. Such an individualist was, of course, antisocial, paying no dues and joining nothing. If he had to buy a licence or fill in a form it was a wicked infringement of his personal liberty. A slight twist of humanization might have made him a good anarchist, but for that slight twist to come about the planets would have to alter in their tracks.

  Many might call him a typical Englishman, and if there was such a thing they could easily be right. Knowing the blood that ran in him I have always thought that an anti-social person was one hair’s breadth from hating foreigners. He was certainly patriotic, for though he wasn’t a ‘joiner’ he could always be persuaded to put on uniform in times of war. Without being loud about it he knew he must be patriotic because it would never do for his tight little world to be altered by any foreign or revolutionary influence. His safe cocoon might be upset. He might actually have to meet other people, people who were new to him what’s more, strange people, the dark people, people not actually and absolutely like him, people who stood with their mouths open or who sweated when they worked, people who might not be as prepared as he was to leave everybody else alone—people, in fact, who might imagine they not only had a perfect and easy-going right to stop him in the street and ask the way to Sneinton Market, but also to talk to him about the weather afterwards.

  And yet one must give him his due, for perhaps he thought, with that modesty which is the opposite side of the coin to black conceit, that his soul was of value only to himself, and that he ought not to bother anyone else with it. A frustrated hermit, he suffered because he was forced to live through the muted agony of ordinary life, for which he did not feel himself fitted in any way, though he made a courageous attempt to go on with it.

  He became so good at suffering in silence that the real wounded were those who were forced to live close to him, such as his own family, which served as a sort of lightning conductor. The pain of suppressed violence, emotional and otherwise, was etched on to the face of his wife and children, which enabled his set features to present a tight-lipped dignity to the world.

  The real violence pent inside was sufficiently curbed by society, and he had the one good quality of being law-abiding, and therefore willing to allow society to influence him, in that by saving him from the realization of his own wild and sombre fantasies it at the same time protected others. Providing the laws were good, he was reasonable, but if ever the laws became unjust to a certain portion of the community, and the law was on his side, he would be a demon.

  At the same time, and to himself, he saw too much worth in his own soul. A man who overvalues his soul and nurtures it alone—pets it, indulges it, allows it to grow and get to full flower untampered as much as possible by society, who keeps it free and proud, and believes it to come straight out of the soil loving the wind and the smell of its own earth—is the hermit, the ascetic, the monument of selfish ecstasy, the bigot, and the patriot for himself alone.

  He is the man who calls on God from his imprisoning parlour, which he sees as his very own and golden field and thinks is heaven on earth. But he would kill God if God appeared—after condemning him for lack of pride in condescending to approach a mere and lowly mortal such as himself. Calling to God in an ecstasy of self-approbation, the man in the middle of the field is too involved to help anybody. He has already given up hope of his fellow-men, which means that he never had any of God.

  By way of an opposite we have the man who lives by the best of those moral laws inscribed in the various holy books of the world, the social man who interacts and confronts nature both as a communal act and to get his food. Such people can be more tolerant and civilized, more sceptical and rational, and less dangerously dogmatical, servants of God but not enamoured of the mystical soil, more religious in a family sense, and in a way more civilized. He would help a stranger as well as his neighbour. And he who helps a stranger will make sure his neighbour does not die alone. His brother certainly would not.

  53

  Joseph was dark-haired when young, and inclined to be stocky in middle age. Unlike the Burtons, who kept good heads of hair throughout their lives, he went bald by his late thirties, so that he was fairly pink on top when I knew him as a child. He had the eyes and forehead of a lawyer, or the discontented manager of a small provincial department store. His light-brown eyes betrayed the unrest within, indicating what great reserves of honesty were needed to control such potent turmoil. His fine sensitive fingers seemed to hold proof of the skill that saved him from himself.

  He was a useful and talented craftsman, good with hands and eyes. Two of his brothers relinquished the family trade to become managers of butchers’ shops, and on slack afternoons they would look forlornly at the traffic-flowing world over trays of chops and sausages, as if wondering how they came to be where they were, and whether they would ever get out of it except through the grave.

  Joseph was a man of neither God nor Party, but if a man has no religion, one might ask, what then is left? His own soul, would be the reply. If a man has (in general) no patriotic feeling, what remains? His own country. If a man has no love to give, what can take its place? His own family. Their basic questions and answers could only have fallen out like that. And if the roots of Joseph’s family were fused and burned down for him there was only the sharp, debilitating, aching desire to find or meet some woman of cosmic force and passion to fall in love with who would alter everything. Death, life, death: in his dreams he saw a round-faced mature woman with reddish hair and small white teeth. Could that be anything to do with happiness?

  Joseph and his brothers were non-men who had dragged themselves from the Welsh hills, or the misty marshes close by, and had made a go of it in Staffordshire because they could not go back to where they came from. Being not of this world they seemed to be more English than the Burtons, sole survivors of some lost tribe still too shattered by an unexplained disaster that had bitten at their tails.

  Pride they had, but pride is a means of self-preservation when at bottom you are not sure of what there is to preserve. Or if you do have something to preserve then an excess of pride indicates that you feel yourself in danger of losing it. Pride is an encircling moat that you dig around yourself and fill with the muddy water of self-esteem.

  Joseph was excessively proud and self-centred, and it was a far more concentrated pride than that of the Burtons, a meaner pride that not only drew the head back but also pulled in the stomach—which was just as well because Joseph was a rather sedentary and self-indulgent person. One felt that in order to get out of a tricky situation Burton would tell lies, while Joseph would tig
hten his face like jaundiced steel and grit his teeth as the leaden sky dropped in on him.

  Burton was like a ramrod in his walk, born that way, it seemed, but Joseph was a turkey-cock who had to know he was proud, and constantly tell himself so, before he actually appeared proud to other people. His eyes then burned with the self-importance of the little man who believes he is the centre of the earth and of society around him.

  He acted his part with panache, and a certain amount of swagger, a show-off who is often recognized as the lynchpin and asset of a tight society afraid of falling to pieces. He was considered to be noteworthy and attractive enough, a by no means common attainment that lifted him—in his estimation—from the crowd round about. Where the Burtons might at most get stomach ulcers, the Sillitoes were prone to cancer.

  As brothers they lived for themselves alone, not as a clan and for each other, but imprisoned in the airless cells of their families, which usually consisted of one or two children, except for my father, who was illiterate and had five. The fate of Joseph’s wife would be a tale all of its own if he had not been so self-righteously discreet in his treatment of her. Full information rarely emerged. Edgar’s wife abandoned him to melancholia and idleness, and to his frequent tears brought on by memories of Gommecourt. Frederick left his wife after twenty years of marriage, to devote himself to art and freedom, though it may have been a mutual parting. An early scene of home-sweet-home is of my mother bending over a bucket to let the blood run into it after my father (a real Sillitoe, so the Burtons said) had used the usual overforce of his energy when he hit her on the head with a shoe.

  What agony of the heart did he go through before the hand lifted to strike? I hope it lasted for a decently long time, though I suppose that after the first blow they came on call, almost with pleasure on both sides, as the barrier went down and the fist pounded. And if the pain of my father’s soul seemed to have plagued him for an eternity before he picked up the shoe or clenched his fist, maybe it was really only a few minutes, in spite of how long it felt when he fought the great fight to leash back his vicious urges.

  Joseph turned against women because, having an aversion for his own life, he held them to blame for his birth, unwilling to get up courage and turn such wrath on the father who was equally responsible—or to set it at no one at all, but to do the impossible and live reasonably ever after.

  He held his wife down more effectively than by knocking her about. He did it by sheer force of demonic personality. He oppressed her by oppressing himself even more, and there is no more final way of doing it than that. In other words, he did it at any price. He spited himself to crush his wife, and perhaps he thought it eminently worth while, since it held in check the parts of himself he was afraid of, but which were nothing more than the surviving freedom of his spirit which society had trained him to despise.

  54

  Joseph imagined that if he lived alone he would live longer, and that family life was cruelly shortening the number of his years on earth, time that would be blissfully untrammelled if he had no such domestic commitments. This fact, unjust to everyone, gnawed at his vitals. It was one of those fundamental untruths which had moulded his features—but became true after it had fixed them for ever. He could not know that if women want to stop living in the jungle with men, and if men care to ease their fang-and-claw existence with women, then they have to be together in peace, and start chopping the trees down instead of each other. Like most people, he could not see beyond the limits of his own conflict. If he could, it might no longer be there—and then what would he have to live for?

  On his wedding day Joseph committed the minor and understandable fault of drinking too much whisky. When the guests left he turned on the wedding presents and smashed them to pieces. Or maybe it was something else, I’m not too sure. Whatever it was, it would have been easier on his wife if Joseph had been able to forget it. Then she might have forgotten it also.

  But memory feeds on guilt, and guilt on memory. Without memory there is no guilt: without guilt—no memory. Guilt attacks those least able to bear it, and who have done least to deserve it. It takes the energy of the weak who are trying to be strong. The monsters of history are immune to guilt. Those with long memories remember guilt till their dying hour. A harmless and repressed desire becomes an obsession that can turn into a crime, either quick and homicidal, or one that lasts forty years and leaves no obvious or open wound. So the women suffer more, because they are made to remember the wrong the husband is supposed to have committed by the continual phenomenon of his guilt, by which he leaves her in no doubt that he did whatever it was only because of meeting and marrying her. He implies that no one but she can be held responsible for it, though the nominal blame stays entirely his because he wants it that way, and won’t let anyone forget it.

  Guilt is that unacknowledged feeling at having come out of the slime, a useless sensation which drives the innocent into apathy and sloth. It begets the crime that creates another, and so it is compounded into a monstrous black tangle in the soul allowing no other person to live close by—unless they infect themselves with the same malaise, so as to be able to fight back and prevent themselves going dead under it. Joseph was guilty of nothing more than the harmless desire for a freer life. But he thought that to achieve it would utterly wreck his peace of mind, and maybe that of everyone near by, whereas in reality it would have liberated them as well, or at least made their lives more tolerable.

  In a sudden rage he would hit the wall with his fist, while Burton, who did not recognize rage because he lost his temper far too easily, and who assumed absolute right to be on his side anyway, and who didn’t need the fuel of guilt to get the best out of life, would hit his children. Is there much to choose between them? Joseph was bitter and timid. He lived in a twilight world of hard work and respectability, being the sort of person who decided early on in life that it was easier to pick up a cash book than a hod of bricks. He rarely worked hard enough for his labour to call forth much sweat, and even when he did, rather than mop his brow, he would stand and look as if he were bone dry, like someone not accustomed to sweating, in which case he would get dry sooner than if he took to wiping at the sweat assiduously—though he had the sort of skin that did not sweat much anyway.

  He clung to his tight principles for fear he would drop into hell—hell being a chaotic place where he wouldn’t be able to tell one person from another. He never made any contact with the Burtons, being geographically divided from them by the spiritual barrier of the Pennines—which assumed the same height and ruggedness as the Alps which cut off the Romans from the Numidians, until Hannibal pushed a way through the passes with elephants. Beyond the Pennines lay the flat, open lands of the Trent and the Fens, where the Burtons and all their like could stay for ever, part of that tribe of pikers who dealt in coneys and ponies and other such pastoral low life.

  Joseph believed in the freedom of the individual in such a way that instead of being a slave to others he was a slave to himself. It was certainly a case with him that though self-pity corrupts, ordinary human pity corrupts absolutely because it would lead him into more contact with people. He would not get out into the world and compete with others. Competition was anathema and death, indignity and dishonour. He knew that safety lay in hard but ambitionless work, and with his combined qualities of tenacity, loyalty, application, and skill he could appear proud without being put upon.

  Though he was too sure of himself to compete, it was also true that he was riddled with envy. This was what stopped him competing, because with such a black dog on his back he could not be sure of success. So all he could do was hold down that envy with the jackboot of self-satisfaction.

  There was a certain advantage to this exercise in repression. Knowing that envy was not a good trait, and that it ought to be resisted, he was able to take part in an honourable fight. This gave him a feeling of self respect—which he might not otherwise have had, and which came by refusing to go into the common world
and compete with it.

  This absolute refusal to compete was in fact his strength. The inability to set himself against other men, to pitch himself into the jungle of ambition, to elbow his way up some shaky ladder of strife and success was his one saving virtue, no matter how it came about. If the coiled spring of his spirit had shot him across to America, or down to the Antipodes, he might have found such release from the English paralysis of class structure that he could have striven for a better life without being robbed of his dignity—as he felt he would have been had he tried the same thing at home.

  55

  My Uncle Frederick renamed himself Silliter when he came back to Nottingham in the thirties, in case his creditors of the previous decade should think to catch up with him. Fifteen years was not a long absence. The Market Place had changed, as had many of the buildings round about, but the prominent names of the stores he had, shall we say, traded at told him that so many years might shrink to very few if a manager from one of them should spot him in the street.

  Having been born a plain Church of England Christian, and spent twenty years as a Christadelphian, and then lapsed into atheism, Frederick had never shown much moral responsibility to the community at large—no more perhaps than most people. But it seemed strange to me in my pre-sophistication days that, while priding himself on having learned Hebrew, he should have made several anti-semitic comments during the year or so in which I knew him. Perhaps they were rather too trivial to recall, because to be fair his words were harmless, in that they might have come after long association with Jewish colleagues who had made those same remarks in his presence. But when retailed to me (sheepishly, as I now recall, and possibly to test me) I could not be sure how serious he was.