Life Without Armour

by Alan Sillitoe

  My stand-offish dislike of England came from having been so long away as to feel almost a foreigner. This would have been depressing had not sufficient novelty remained, to fascinate me in spite of myself. So strong had been the influence of Spain, and so decisive the struggle to consolidate my persona as a writer, that England had been very much rubbed away, and its people and the lives they led almost forgotten about during those five years. I didn’t want to stay, and could only face doing so by living from day to day, since the reality of being there seemed to have no relationship to hopes and expectations.

  After delivering the half dozen chapters of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning to Tom Maschler, my talk was broadcast on the wireless at nine o’clock on 10th April. The Radio Times said: ‘The Mountain stands surrounded by dense jungle, and rises steeply to four thousand feet. Tigers still roam its forests, and so we were all armed. Mr Sillitoe describes the ascent and exploration of a mountain in North Malaya by a party of six members of an RAF jungle rescue team.’

  The talk was preceded by the Promenade Players, and followed by a song recital. Not one word of the script I had sent in was altered, proof enough that my prose had for some years possessed the necessary quality of self-assurance to be read on the BBC, which organization had formed no small part in my pursuance of education and enlightenment. Apart from all that, the eighteen-guinea payment was a useful addition to our resources.

  The last month was a pleasing counterpoint to the early weeks, for Ima Bayliss let us stay in the thatch-roofed Primrose Cottage which she had the use of, at Manuden near Bishop’s Stortford. The countryside roundabout was a dream-England, fine spring weather recalling those first forays out of the hospital in Wiltshire eight years before. I sat in the front room facing the lane to begin writing again. Two months doing none had made life fairly insupportable, and for a few weeks I had as satisfying an existence as a writer could wish for.

  Immersed in the works of Albert Camus, I was especially impressed by L’Homme Révolté, and the Gallic complexities of logic that went into the definition of the rebel’s state of mind. A novel to be called The Rats, in which I would clarify my reflections on life in England with the fresh eye of a returning exile, turned instead into a book-length poem, and developed into an attack on the mindless conformity and complacency of England in the 1950s. At my writing one day (or not writing, because at times I could do no more than look vacantly out of the window before me) I saw a youth in vest and shorts trotting by along the lane. On a clean sheet of paper I scribbled what seemed the beginning of a poem: ‘The loneliness of the long distance runner …’ No second line came, so the paper was put away, and more work done on The Rats.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Back in Soller at the beginning of May, we unpacked books posted to ourselves from Manuden, and in spite of the dream-time in that village, it was like being home again, for there was no place I had lived in longer except Nottingham. I set to work revising Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, improving the style as well as shortening the book by some 50,000 words.

  A Swiss woman explorer who lived in the valley, Colette Martin, had written about her travels in the Sahara with a St Bernard dog, and I translated sixty pages from French and sent them with her unique photographs of Bedouin women and desert scenery to a publisher in London. We agreed to go half and half on any cash from the project, having already received a few guineas from her article ‘Nomad Women in the Sahara’ which I placed in the Geographical Magazine. The package came back in double-quick time, and nothing further was done with it.

  ‘The Decline and Fall of Frankie Buller’ was returned by the Hudson Review, and ‘The Fishing Boat Picture’ came back from another magazine. After the visit to England, which had not after all been so unsuccessful, I wanted to remain in my agreeable state of exile for as long as we could afford to do so. Majorca was where we lived, and it was impossible not to be content in such a place. Ruth was earning money by making hotel and villa bookings for a travel agency, and I gave English lessons which were suddenly in demand, for a couple of hours a day. The exchange rate had improved in the pound’s favour, while the cost of living remained the same, so that our income was almost half as much again, though a cool watch was still kept on expenditure.

  Tom Maschler wrote a long letter in which he outlined what he thought ought to be done about making Saturday Night and Sunday Morning into a successful book, to which I could only reply: ‘I may be able to let you have the manuscript by the date you mention.’ In a letter of 4th June Rosica said: ‘What Tom wants is the old mss of “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” so that he can compare that with the revised one, but you have not left that with me.’ Exactly. The reason was that in a letter of 6th May Maschler had written: ‘I confirm that you will let me have the completed manuscript by the end of July at the very latest, and I can then make suggestions on the rewriting as a whole.’

  While completing the final version of the book I lived as if the England which I loved but did not especially like had little to offer. A miasma of falsity was spread by those who assumed that their opinions were the same as everyone else’s – and therefore the only ones that mattered – such hypocrisy stifling every aspect of life. These purveyors of conformism did not know about the great majority of the people, and did not care to consider them as worthy of notice. When they did not fear or hate them, they wanted them to be in perpetual thrall to values which the complacent upper few per cent had decided, because they were their own, were the only ones worth living by. This included those socialists and left-wing commentators who also thought they knew how people ought to live, but would never live like it themselves. The country was dead from the neck up, and the body was buried in sand, waiting for someone to illuminate those views and values which they were being told in a thousand ways were something to be ashamed of and ought never to be expressed.

  Tom Maschler came to Majorca on holiday, and called on me in Soller to talk about what he had seen of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. I listened, but was unable to show any enthusiasm, wanting a publisher to say ‘Hats off!’ about my novel, or not touch it at all. Maschler may have looked on the book as something worth influencing, but if so it was difficult for me to feel in any way flattered by such interest. I had not been working unrewarded for eight years, and learning to write the hard way, to be told by any editor how to revise my novel.

  My recent visit to England, and the reading of that score of books on criminology the year before, led me to believe that my writing should unite the opinions and observations, settled in my mind up to the age of eighteen, to those of the voice which had emerged during the past few years, and which exile had clarified. I knew by now that you do not write what society or editors expect, but only that which is illuminated by the truth of your own experience. A certain amount of iron must have been in my soul before I was born, reinforcing the attitude that the writer must listen to no one but himself, as a magnet attracts iron filings because it is a piece of more solid metal. He has to know, of course, what his true self is to be sure he is not mistaking it for someone else’s or for what other people say it ought to be.

  A writer may well feel the need of approval from those around him, but he has a choice of courting the acceptance of those who run the country – at the time I was calling them ‘the rats’ – or of those who are the governed. The only valid way is to disregard both, to write for yourself alone, out of an ineradicable respect for the unique voice, but a voice all the same about which you must have no illusions. I had lived too many lives to listen willingly to others, and if my writing continued even now to be unpublishable, then so be it.

  Having been lifted by Fate out of the zone of popular culture for most of the ’50s could be compared to a situation in which you didn’t have to listen to an adversary’s point of view, nor care about not being able to, since whatever it was could have no relationship to your own. In the age of mass media, cultural variations, called fashion, come and go, but t
he eternal values override them and remain, and it is the same today as it was then.

  When Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was finished at the end of July I gave it to dark-haired and willowy Felicity Meshoulam, who was in Majorca on her honeymoon, to carry to England. This method saved on the postage, would be more secure than in the mail (though I had not yet lost anything) and might possibly bring me luck.

  In August I set out, with the Dutch journalist Constant Wallach, to climb the 1,400 metres of Puig Major. After an all-night bout of mixed drinking we were hardly in condition for such exercise and, coming out of the wooded area of small oaks and stunted pines on to the stony slopes above the valley, the heat became intense. By midday we were at 1,000 metres, and in early afternoon had reached a point not far short of the summit. We hadn’t a hat or any water between us, and I at least should have known better but, as occasionally happens, Fate takes a stronger hand than common sense, something only realized when it is too late.

  In such a season we turned back, and reached the valley in a state close to sunstroke. The summit of the island defeated me as surely as had Gunong Jerai in Malaya nine years before. The heights of both mountains were roughly the same, equally tempting and visible, but I ought to have realized that, small as they were, such pimples of the earth were not meant to be climbed by me. Other heights, though less solid under foot, deserved more attention.

  I had always seen myself as a physical being, when I clearly was not to that extent, but the indication that such heights were beyond me was proved wrong when, on a tour across the United States in 1985, I set out alone at five o’clock one morning, to go down into the Grand Canyon. Three hours later I had crossed the Colorado River 5,000 feet below and nine miles from my starting point. To get back to the hotel before nightfall, and avoid the rattlesnakes, meant ascending a mountain in reverse, higher than any I had attempted to climb before, and I got back with nothing worse than sore feet and aching thighs.

  I wrote a story during that last summer in Majorca called ‘On Saturday Afternoon’, about a boy watching a man trying to hang himself, suggested by a scene from the French film of Dostoevsky’s ‘The Eternal Husband’. Another tale from that year was ‘The Insider’, describing the collapse of the offices of a leading London literary magazine, and the death of the editor who is buried under the rubble. This was published by Michael Horovitz in New Departures five years later.

  Poems came back from The Listener, Time and Tide, the London Magazine, and Partisan Review – to name a few, but Howard Sergeant printed ‘Guide to the Tiflis Railway’ in Outposts, to coincide with the publication of the booklet Without Beer or Bread.

  A letter from Rosica at the end of August said that Saturday Night and Sunday Morning had been rejected by Tom Maschler at MacGibbon and Kee, but that she was sending it immediately to another firm. I had earlier told her that I had taken note of some of Maschler’s oral suggestions during his Soller visit, but this was little more than a white lie, to prevent her becoming discouraged in trying to get my work published.

  Before the end of the year two more publishers were to reject the novel. I said in a letter to Rosica in December that I thought it would be a success if someone were to take it on, adding that in my opinion it was being rejected because it didn’t fit into the preconceived romantic notions that people had about the so-called working class. The book was too realistic, and didn’t support their theories, ‘but I have broken new ground,’ I went on, ‘and can only hope that some publisher will see this sooner or later.’

  It’s no use saying I was not discouraged. One publisher thought, or so I was to hear, that I should alter the ending, though I would not have enquired in what way. Another gave it as his opinion that I did not know much about working people if I chose to describe their lives in such a way, which made it difficult to believe that a rather nasty form of what has come to be known as ‘political correctness’ was not being followed, or that some publishers’ readers were half conscious Marxist sympathizers who could not take to my book. I had always suspected that such leftward-inclining people looked on socialism as little more than a confidence trick to keep the Arthur Seatons of the world in their place. However it was, these rejections confirmed my eternal antipathy to anyone who tries to meddle in the work of a novelist. Such people are no doubt amiable, hard-working, and perhaps creative (with other people’s work) and eager to give that help which some writers timorously seek and are grateful for.

  Publishers, and you may say why not, want novels which they think have a chance of selling, and are reluctant to print work without an editor having smoothed it into the style and content of what they imagine their readers expect, or what they decide, according to their own prejudices, readers ought to get, in which case there is little chance of a deviation from the dull norm, or of any interesting whiff of experimentation, or even of any flaws which can make an author’s work memorable. What one editor will think acceptable another will deem inept, so that only the writer’s version can be the right one. A writer should not surrender to the sail-trimming of editorial readers who want to guide him or her towards middle-brow best-sellers or, as in these days, the kind of book they think likely to win a literary prize.

  Art only ever came out of a single creative mind, and good writing that aspires to art can only be achieved through trial and error. If it were not the case that the writer always knows best nothing interesting in fiction would ever be published. Writing is an activity where the individual is supreme, and an author has no chance of achieving anything unless his talent is protected by his own integrity.

  The occupation of a novelist is a lonely one: labouring like the coalminer far underground, and away from all populist influences, or intellectual preconceptions, he has only the light from his helmet to illuminate the unique ore he has discovered, at which he must work undisturbed.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  I revised The General’s Dilemma, shortened the title to The General, and sent it to Rosica, being the version which was to be published, with few alterations, in 1960.

  We had become friendly with the painters Philip Martin and Helen Marshal, who with their two children had come to live in Soller. How it came about I shall never know, because I had certainly not imagined leaving Majorca in the way we did. Perhaps we had been there too long, and acted out of a false sense of boredom with the place. Maybe Fate again had a hand in my life, but the fact was that we and the Martins assumed it would be jolly good fun, or something like that, to take off for Alicante on the mainland, share a flat, and set up life in a communal sort of way. An adventure of this type was so uncharacteristic of me that I still cannot decide how it happened.

  Philip, tall and thin, and with a long black beard, looked something like a walking ikon. He stammered now and again to the point of incoherence, but had a fine sense of humour. Helen was about twenty years older, short and stout and loquacious, and wore shapeless smocks and skirts to the ground. The two of them together appeared, to say the least, ‘bohemian’, telling anyone from a distance that they were ‘artists’, though they assumed such flamboyance because that was how they wanted to be, and thought that the world could go and fuck itself if it saw anything unusual or funny about it.

  Ruth and I were fairly indistinguishable from the normal run of people, so it’s possible that the Martins seemed by contrast more outlandish when we were all together than when they were on their own. They were also taken by various types of Indian mysticism at that time, reading such people as Krishnamurti and Shri Aurobindo, which didn’t interest me at all.

  Our party assembled early in the morning at the Soller railway station and, as well as Philip and Helen, there was Philip’s mother, the widow of a Suffolk bank manager who no doubt felt the same sense of unbelonging as I did. She had come down for a week or so to be with her son and the two children, Steven and Serafina.

  We stood beside a mountain of suitcases, steamer trunks, rolls of canvas, huge boxes of painters’ materials, b
undles, easels, baskets and bedrolls, as if a tribe of gypsies was on the move. My little reconditioned Remington typewriter in its hard black case was somewhere in the middle.

  At the docks in Palma so much money was demanded by rapacious stevedores to get the luggage on board that Philip and I took off our jackets and, to the jeers of bystanders, manhandled every last piece into the hold. We were obliged to perform the same operation on docking at Alicante next morning. An amused policeman on the quay recommended a dilapidated fonda on the waterfront for our accommodation and, on arrival there, the two taxi drivers demanded brigands’ prices.

  The rooms were cheap, fundamentally furnished, but of elegant proportions, though the far-away toilets were an odorous hole in the ground over which one had to squat, such being nothing strange in the Spain of that time. There was no dining room, so we often used an alcohol stove and ate convivially in one room or the other. Coming back after a walk one day Ruth and I found that the ceiling of our room had fallen in, the bed splattered by lath and plaster, suitcases dusty but luckily undamaged. The landlady moved us to another part of the building, but soon afterwards someone stole a thousand pesetas from the Martins’ room while they were out, and we decided to move as soon as possible.

  Large flats were scarce, and expensive compared to Soller, but we found one for 2,000 pesetas a month, and took it one Sunday without too much thought, installing ourselves the same evening. The more people involved in a decision the more likely things are to go wrong. Groups act hurriedly and less circumspectly simply to get things done without too much bother, being basically impatient with each other. Even with only two people this is often the case, the ideal number perhaps being no more than one, at least among artists.