Raw Material

by Alan Sillitoe

  My father used to say, in a tone that combined both envy and condemnation, that the Jews always helped each other. Much later in his life I heard him make a more open remark which shocked my Burton mother. I could not knock him down because one side of his head was dark from the bruises of cancer, and he died soon afterwards.

  To forgive the dead is the first step towards illumination. In some ways it is easier, as well as more necessary, to understand the dead than the living, because the life of the dead is actually rounded off so that it becomes no more than a memory. They can neither disappoint nor deceive, but having existed they still live, and to comprehend their spirit one has to bring them back to a sharper portrayal than they were awarded while solidly moving. If you want them to return through the barrier they went beyond it is almost as if you have to go in and fetch them, get into their spirit and draw them out by an act of imagination and justice.

  My father did too many kindnesses not to deserve forgiveness. He too had much to forgive, so that understanding was needed all round. What small harm he did was kept in his family, as society meant it to be, and he was never in a position to act out any of those poisonous hatreds which came from the Edwardian ethos in which he and his brothers had grown up. He was not anti-semitic, because he did not possess that combination of intelligence and absolute rottenness. He was anti-everything in his black despair, and my feeling is of sadness at his hard life, and for what was done to him by his parents. In such family conflicts one can neither withdraw nor take revenge. Savage or unthinking parents leave one merely paralysed, like an outsider.

  In his tolerable moments he wanted to do good. When I was a child he got into debt to buy books for me, and money I gave when working later in a factory could never repay it. If you have seen your father suffer it is impossible to hate him, or to be afraid of him. The only thing you can do is try to understand, because not to do so will leave a large part of yourself in the wilderness. It is the same with others you dislike. You can never understand them, which means that much of yourself is lost to you, for you can only know yourself by knowing others.

  In any case nothing attaches you more to a person than hatred. Those you hate have you more in their power than those you love. If you want to imprison someone in your own spirit, give them cause to hate you—and you have them for a long time, if that’s how you feel. Universal and benign love would give everyone the greatest freedom of all, but people are unable to give this love because they are afraid of the freedom which is its price.

  56

  Just after the Second World War my father bought a bull-terrier. All his life he had wanted a dog, and in his middle forties he became the proud owner of one.

  When he was walking up Ilkeston Road one day it snapped the lead and ran against a bus. It was fatally injured, and he came home weeping with it in his arms, as if it had been a child.

  He laid it on a barrel inside the back door, and went for the vet, in the hope that the comatose and bleeding animal could be brought back to life. Yet any belief in miracles had gone from his heart generations ago. Tolerance of Biblical Job-like suffering had reasserted itself for a while during his middle years, but by now it was worn away because it did not have much moral strength to feed on. Faith in life had given way to sentimental hope.

  When the vet came he jabbed a shot of pentathene into the dog’s paw as it lay on the barrel. He talked to my father for a few minutes, putting him wise as to where he might get another dog, and also to calm him down. Then he gave the dog a dose of strychnine which finished it off.

  My father didn’t buy another dog. Never having got out of the nursery, as it were, there was only room for one woman in his life, no matter what the pain. And there was only room for one dog as well, as representative of a certain kind of creature, so that he could not start again on another. It would not be the same.

  One of his favourite pictures was taken from a calendar. It was a coloured reproduction photo of a young woman standing at a cottage window on a sunny day in the country. She wore a yellow dress, and had a girl of about three years of age in her arms. They were looking together at a robin perched on the branch of a tree close by, both of them warm and loving with each other, and enraptured at the bird.

  My father liked this picture. Such a scene went straight to his heart. It stayed there, a sort of imprint of paradise which he neatly framed with black passe-partout tape and hung on the wall, and took from house to house when we moved. He liked it because he identified himself with the little girl in the woman’s arms—certainly not with the woman herself, or with the bird.

  57

  The River Leen was sinewy and narrow, though its Celtic name of ‘lleven’ also suggests ‘smooth-surfaced’. But the root of the word may be ‘linn’ meaning ‘still deep pool’, and it certainly is that in places. Whenever I heard the phrase ‘still waters run deep’ either about me or somebody else, I always flashed my picture-mind to the River Leen, whose water I would recently have looked on from the brick parapet of the bridge. While playing on its steep bank I once fell into it from an imperfect balance on the bough of a tree, and though its waters were not still they certainly stank, having come through mills and collieries most of the way from Robin Hodd’s hills near Mansfield.

  Early expeditions over the fields to the Burtons at Engine Town took me across the River Leen, and then a railway which ran along its shallow, wide valley. These two obstacles both hemmed me in and tempted me out, and made the advance beyond into an adventure of the spirit, as well as an exploration of new territory.

  Crossing the railway I would sit on the fence by its side, watching coal-trains pulling trucks from Nottinghamshire collieries. In those days before the mines were nationalized I read the names painted broadly and plainly on each truck as it went by, one strange word after another, some so quick and difficult that I had to see them several times before my memory held them. Nevertheless, the words came fast, forming an eternal telegram that was never sent, but which still occasionally spins into my head:

  BOLSOVER

  NUNCARGATE

  NEWSTEAD

  BLIDWORTH

  ALDERCAR

  CLIPSTON

  PINXTON

  RIDDINGS

  TIBSHELF

  PLEASLEY

  TEVERSAL

  HUTHWAITE

  romantic place-labels, almost as if they had come from Italy or Abyssinia, and while they showed me the headstocks of their collieries, like the one I could see just up the line, I did not also visualize—as I no doubt should have done but am pleased that I did not—row upon row of miners’ houses that would be clustered round about. Or if I did, they were set in the sunshine of hilltop situations, and were altogether more picturesque and salubrious than those among which I lived.

  I recited their names like a litany for the rest of my way to the Burtons, as I broke through hedges and leapt streams. They kept me company when the sky darkened and it began to thunder. I remember the smell of bacon frying on damp Sunday mornings in summer. And when I slept at the Burtons’ on Saturday night, those big white words on the coal trucks rode by in my dreams.

  The stuff and fibre of peoples’ language is made up of names. Total history is nothing less than an accounting of every name in it—not just a few, but all of them. Without a name nothing exists—neither place, person, nor piece. Names cement the regions and generations in such a way that time becomes timeless, and only words are important, the labels that pinpoint a person’s soul, the backdrop and bedrock of languge.

  Names mean life and matter that is always on the go. They decay and change, fret and vanish, then come up somewhere else and grow again. Those who hold their names too tight get buried with them—just as raindrops, glorying too much in their own moisture, melt on meeting soil.

  Names remain. The passing years pile up and give them tales and weight, or bleed them white and take out all significance. When you can’t tell one name from another all men look the same. The more people there
are, the more you know them by their names or not at all. An increase in breeding broadens the tongue. We must know one from another—man and name—if civilization is to take hold and properly accumulate true richness.

  When the wild and conquering hordes settled down to their fields they contemplated each other and gave out names that would last. A cycle is complete and now expands. Poets take over. Tillage and metre rule. The seasons and the moon dominate utterly when every place and person has a name—some of which eventually ride by on coal trucks through disordered childhood dreams.

  58

  When I told my father I was going to have a novel published he said: ‘That’s bloody good. You’ll never have to work again’—as if I’d been given a million pounds in exchange for colic on the heart. A dozen books later I still see what he means. ‘You’ve got an aim in life now,’ he added, though with more truth than before.

  But to write books is not to have an aim in life. It is a camouflage under which a real aim can wither before it is even understood. By blind chance I became a writer, and unknowingly sidestepped a career which might have turned out more useful and satisfying. It is a futile thought that occasionally flashes in, but as long as my proper fate stays with me—as it presumably does—I shan’t complain.

  Any true aim perished in the blinding light of emptiness when I tried to understand it, and so my spirit withdrew from the struggle as if it were burned, and took refuge in the greater comfort of the periphery, where the process of writing begins. And if in spite of this I still mull on it and wonder why I became a writer, I’m careful not to make the mistake of driving straight to the empty middle and search for the truth there.

  Having sorted among the aborted tributaries of my family it is no use coming back into the core of myself to get at the truth. It would be a sentimental head-on clash, to be avoided at all costs. It is better to chase the indirect and apparently unimportant as being more worth while, to keep my thoughts clear and insignificant, rather than boringly definitive.

  In someone of low intelligence sentimentality is pathetic. In those of high intelligence it is obnoxious, even dangerous. I will not decide which of these categories I fit into, but state them so as not to get entangled—and send each one into that great central fire of emptiness where they can burn into gas and ashes, while I stay on the rich outside.

  A writer is born without God, and his centre has been taken over so that he is a god. It could be that he then spends his life writing in order to hold off the fear of dying and death, and keeps writing so as not to expose himself to the danger of having his questions answered and therefore of having to accept God.

  The ultimate aim is to phrase questions, not to solve them, for if you show people what to ask, they will soon find their own solutions. A question is not a question unless it contains the seeds of its answer, and when this phenomenon occurs to a primitive or uneducated person he overcomes his fear of the world and makes a fundamental break with his past. For a writer, another sort of fear comes with the questions, because he is afraid that the questions may desert him. It also stays because fear is a birthmark of life. Those who do not have it are not yet born. Whoever says ‘I am not afraid’ has grown old before his time. Who cannot suffer morally, perishes physically. Lack of fear bursts the heart, which is the worst of diseases. If the bravest of the brave replies that fear makes the face ugly, and takes all honest beauty from it, and that the earth will despise the fearful and pull him more quickly to his death, he is wrong. To be fearful is to be able to love. To lie three days in no-man’s-land as Edgar did, with every minute full of terror from the rats, men, and unseen dismemberment, was a feat of adoration for the scarred earth he clung to. It was a love that drove him almost out of his mind, a state of question without answer he chose to live with for the rest of his life.

  The soil also pulls you under out of love, and since death is the end it is better for it to be welcoming than ward you off. It will cool and cushion those who are hot from dying, or merely warm you if the chill of crossing that terrible barrier is still present.

  59

  A simple man is a person who cannot express his complexities. A writer expresses them for him and still lets him keep the illusion of his simplicity. The Burtons are the simple men in me, but they had illusions of complexity that could never break out. The Sillitoes are the complex men, but they had illusions of simplicity that could not prevent the complexities from tormenting them.

  The qualities of one family shift onto the other. They merge and cross-fertilize, become a running sore, ruining memory in a sea of psychic pain—which I distrust. Truth is like the tip of an iceberg: one-tenth of it based on nine-tenths lie. When I am out walking I sometimes feel the sallow Sillitoe blackness gaining the upper hand over the optimistic, energetic, easy-going Burton lot. At such times the two forces separate, and leave me in the middle of an expanding emptiness.

  The past is fiction, what bits of it can be remembered. The present is illusion, what pains of it can be felt. Only the future exists, because it is yet to happen. When it does, it also is full of flickering uncertainties impossible to latch on to, so that with necessary speed it fades into the fiction of the past. Yet out of this past which has become fiction I fish for the truth, and even knowing a great deal about my grandparents, it is impossible to say for certain where I come from, or where I belong. A man only knows he comes out of his mother, and has to be satisfied with that. To dispute it and want to believe otherwise means to accept the maxim that emotion is tempered by reason—before conclusions can be drawn.

  But emotion tempered by reason is a perfect excuse for pride of place and faint-of-heart. Emotion, it is true, smothers reason. And reason emasculates emotion. The uneasy combination, if ever it is achieved, is the very body of reaction. If reason goes forward like the patrols of an advancing army, emotion in full body catches up to wield its destructive victory. If the emotional vanguard goes on ahead, reason eventually overtakes and robs it of any achievement. Sooner or later, reason and emotion rend each other, and leave a desert. They are terms of mutual annihilation. Is this emotion? Or is it reason? A jointure of the two makes it no better. Both reason and emotion are too near the surface to be properly controlled and matched.

  As if born in a state of spiritual decapitation a writer wants to join his head back on to his body, the Scipio on to the Africanus, the first name on to the second, to sew the soul into the stomach and throw them together into the river of life, there to rend each other, to sink or swim. Perhaps he only succeeds in unifying himself when he is about to die, by which time it is too late. He fears death because it means that his life as an earthly god will come to an end. And if after life there is still more life, there can be no more final death for a writer.

  If anything exists in the burning middle it is an alchemical brazier of the soul, driven white by a salt wind coming from the sea. Both gale and blaze thrive on each other and never let go. In the storm’s centre I ask myself what I am, but cannot say. Forty days or forty years can be spent in the attempt, but if one doesn’t know without even asking, then all further tries are bound to collapse.

  Yet the more unsuccessful, the fuller in spirit one becomes, the greater the overall richness of life will be. If I look in a mirror and ask this question I get a blank look, or enough of a shocked expression to remind me that it is not a question but a riddle. The half-smile that lingers in the mirror after I have turned my head tells me that I still have a sense of humour, which is the last defence against the truth.

  To go bull-headed at the riddle means I’ll never get an answer. I am a writer because I do not know what or who I am, though in trying to find out I may by a fluke help others to know who they are. If so I trust it will persuade them to go on living and not despair about the fate of the world or themselves.

  You have to go beyond the limits of despair to reach the truth. Certainly you cannot get close to it by standing still, or by locking yourself into an idiot-gaze against the warm
and comforting fireplace. You move a finger, stare at the hand and lift it with a movement of the arm, and then you stand up and feel the pressure of the ground in both legs, and you shift across the room and look through the window and go to the door and open it and walk outside to smell the sky and let the wind into the brain. The senses waken as the odour of fields and marshes rushes in. While gleaning for the truth, despair calls from one side and hope beckons at the other, and they try and draw you apart. When such horse-mares struggle for your inner vision you manage to walk, or take a spade and dig the soil over.

  To be without hope, in the belief that nothing is worth living or working for is an act of murder against the human spirit, self-willed or not. One must learn to suffer without taking to despair, for despair is a killer, a suicide-monger, the mongrel-devil who does not hand out any consolation, even in death. Yet if those who fall into this trough have no control against being brought to it, they are in a state of grace and waiting to be saved. The axis of the world’s goodness depends on them, and upon those with the strength and will to help.

  The sphere of white fire spins, an illumination of truth which can never be reached simply by wanting to. I use it to see by. It dazzles and blinds when I reach out and try to use it: it uses me. Art is order made out of chaos; false art is chaos made out of the false order already in existence.

  If I am to go forward I must switch round and get free of the cul-de-sac, otherwise I do violence to the soul. There is a part of every book which turns out to be a dead-end, and you need sooner or later to reverse from it. I entered this one on a trip into the past, and to reach clear space once more I must fight against all the purples of the spectrum.