Life Without Armour

by Alan Sillitoe

  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.

  My policy was to accept all interviews, since writing a book was one phase, and helping its sales was another. Whether a newspaper was left- or right-wing didn’t bother me, since any publicity, whether positive or negative, was good. I was interviewed by the News of the World, and photographed by Mark Gerson. Several literary agencies enquired about the possibility of representing me. Letters from various people said how much they had enjoyed my novel, and a corrected typescript went on show, with other material from local authors, at Nottingham Central Library, in whose reference section I had written the first chapters of The Deserters seven years before.

  With one or two exceptions the backwash of rejection slips dried up, and editors were asking for work. At a cocktail party the managing director of a publishing firm regretted that the manuscript of my novel had not been sent to him, and some satisfaction was felt in replying that in fact it had, but his editors had rejected it.

  In December we stayed a fortnight in Amsterdam, at the flat of Constant Wallach, our journalist friend from Majorcan days. The weather was wet and raw but, perusing a Baedeker, we spent hours at the Rijksmuseum and in the Rembrandt House.

  Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was taken by Pan Books for a paperback edition, and was featured as one of the best novels of the year in the Observer. Shortly afterwards a contract was signed for the novel to be turned into a film, which deal made a happy end to an unusual year.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Early in 1959 we moved to a furnished cottage in Whitwell, twenty-six miles north of London, paying two hundred pounds in advance for the year’s tenancy. An extension built on to the back made it a large enough place, with a garden going down to the banks of the reedy and sinuous Mimram. On wet nights in late spring, new green frogs, as flat and small as buttons, would find a way under the
kitchen door, and amuse us by hopping across the tiles as if in some kind of sack race, till I lifted each one on to a piece of newspaper and put it carefully back on the grass outside. Their activities reminded me of those which sported around the water pump near our first house in France.

  Our literary earnings up to the end of the tax year in April were such that we now felt reasonably secure, though for another year or two – habits of parsimony taking a long time to relinquish – accounts were still kept of every item spent to the nearest halfpenny.

  Harry Saltzman, who was to be the producer of the film, rented an opulent flat on Kensington Gore from which to conduct his operations. When I went to see him he told me that I should write the script, at the same time implying that the job would be easy, because all a director need do was turn the pages of the novel while making the movie. The book was so cinematic in the unrolling of its sequences that he wondered if it had been written with a film in mind. I told him that it had not, though perhaps it was natural that my work should give that impression, since I must have seen as many films as I had read books. Whether his assumption was a ploy to fob me off with a smaller fee is hard to say, but it was certainly hammered in, as all of us involved knew it had to be, that the film must be made as economically as possible.

  The rights were bought for four thousand five hundred pounds, of which two-thirds came to my bank, though the contract stated that I should also receive two per cent of the producer’s profits, a clause which eventually gave me several times that amount. The fee for writing the script was one thousand five hundred pounds and, though the combined sum was small indeed by Hollywood standards, there seemed no reason to complain at this unexpected addition to our riches.

  On Friday 22nd April I was given the Authors’ Club Prize for the Best First Novel of 1958, which meant (after an interview for The Times) going to their imposing premises in Whitehall, wearing the dark suit sent by Ruth’s aunt from America some years before. My first after-dinner speech was a carefully written account as to how I had become a writer and produced the novel they had chosen to honour. I had hoped for Jeffrey Simmons to be present, and was somewhat annoyed that the committee of the Authors’ Club had unwittingly selected the one evening of the year when it was impossible for both religious and family reasons for him to do so.

  For the next two years, as well as writing the film scripts, I was working on Key to the Door, an autobiographical novel which had been maturing for some time. The hundred-page account of the early married life of Brian Seaton’s parents, and of his childhood (the first draft done in Soller in 1953), was followed by chapters of Letters From Malaya, which were interspersed with sections on Brian’s youth and work in the factory, the narrative finally shifting entirely to Malaya. This shuffling of material, at one stage an uneven heap of nearly a thousand pages, needed stringent cutting and revision. By the time the final draft of 750 pages was typed in April 1961 it had been ‘in progress’ for thirteen years, since two chapters were based on that first handwritten version of the trip to Kedah Peak in the autumn of 1948.

  A late change was to have Brian Seaton spare the life of the communist guerrilla at his mercy when the jungle rescue patrol is ambushed. In earlier versions he had killed him as having been responsible for the death of his friend Baker. In view of the nature of his upbringing such a change would, I hoped, be understandable. I saw Brian Seaton’s decision as a similar ‘cutting off the nose to spite the face’ to that of Colin Smith losing the Borstal governor’s race in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Morally right or wrong, the idea was to give more than insular point to the book, and though one or two critics were offended, it was hard to see why the possibly amoral action of a character implied a lack of morality in the author. At the end of April I sent a letter to the Home Secretary, pleading for the life of Ronald Henry Marwood, who had been sentenced to death for the murder of a policeman during a robbery. He was later hanged.

  I talked to a doctor friend in London about whether there wasn’t some treatment which could be paid for and thus prolong my father’s life, but the verdict was that no better medical care existed than what he was already receiving in Nottingham. He died at the end of May, in his fifty-seventh year, the only mourners at his funeral being his long-suffering wife and their five children. Not long afterwards my mother married a lorry driver somewhat younger than herself and, after a more peaceful time than had ever been possible with my father, survived him by a few years.

  The countryside around Whitwell was ideal for walking, but if you wandered off paved lanes you were likely to be warned away at the point of a gun by the landowner or one of his cap-touching minions, an experience unknown in my childhood, and certainly not in France or Spain. Work was, as always, the saviour, and in six weeks I produced a screen treatment, and then the first draft script, for the film of my novel. Disinterring the book after it had seemed dead and out of the way, and reading it several times to decide how to marshal the events into the sort of movie I would like to see, was a tedious process. However, having pocketed some of the money, the task had to be taken seriously, though my temperament was not suited for work which depended on a certain amount of consultation.

  Karel Reisz, the director, read the script, and in his quiet and diplomatic manner said: ‘Well, yes, it is all right, but in my opinion there is just one small problem.’ If the film was made according to what I had written, he went on, the running time would be several hours too long. We were both novices with regard to feature films, but Karel had made documentaries, including ‘We are the Lambeth Boys’, and knew infinitely more about the business than I ever could. During the next few months the script was honed down to a ninety-minute maximum under his careful and talented scrutiny.

  One of the main reasons for doing the script was to get as faithful a transition to the screen as possible, with no other writer muddying the adaptation according to his own personality or beliefs. Each version had, however, to be examined by the British Board of Film Censors, and some employee of that loathsome organization stipulated that though the issue of the abortion may be mentioned in the film, the attempt to procure one on the part of Brenda after she gets pregnant by Arthur must not be shown. Not even by as much as a stray word could it be indicated that the abortion had been ‘brought off’.

  Then there was the matter of violence, which they might consider to be exaggerated, and as for strong language, well … Such a film in any case could only be released with an ‘X’ certificate, a category which it was hoped might restrict the size of its audience. My acceptance by the world – or some of it – had brought my nihilistic feelings even more to the fore, and my impulse was to tell the censorship goons to fuck off, but such nursery rules had to be followed if the film was to go on release at all, and in my view we ended with a much watered down version of the book.

  The advance payment for The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner volume, of 100 pounds, was on the low side, but was considered adequate for a book of stories, which might not sell as well as a novel. Since we did not lack money this amount seemed reasonable, and in any case an ‘advance’ payment is not, and never was, a munificent handout for the privilege of printing one’s work, but a sum which must be earned by copies sold in the shops. The lower the advance the sooner would further money start to come in, whereas an extravagant advance which was not recouped in sales would do no good for an author’s reputation. Such was my view then, though the economics of writing and publishing today do not allow such principles to be followed too closely.

  In May a letter asked me to report to a hospital in Luton for a final check-up with regard to my pension. An early bus from Whitwell took me to St Albans, and the train another twenty miles to Luton. The distance back to Whitwell was only six miles direct, so after the examination I set off with a map in my pocket along lanes and footpaths. Few cars were about, and no pedestrians, and I strolled along recalling half-forgotten names of trees and wild flowers, the clear warm day giving a
couple of hours in which to be at peace in a way that had not been possible since leaving Majorca.

  Karel Reisz wanted me to write the commentary to a documentary he was making on how Nottinghamshire coalminers spent their leisure. He decided that since we were going to investigate their pastimes we should also see the conditions they worked in, which meant spending a day down Clipstone pit. The two-mile trek to the coal face where men laboured in seams of less than thirty-six inches, 3,000 feet underground, convinced me of the wisdom of people who said they would never let their sons go down the pit unless they couldn’t get a job anywhere else. But the miners endured their work, since there was no other, and they certainly seemed to enjoy their leisure. I had never been present at a brass band rehearsal, or inside a Welfare Institute before, or watched with any interest people playing bowls, but half a dozen pages were duly produced, and used for a film I have no memory of seeing.

  Still in Nottingham, Karel mentioned that an actor who might be good as Arthur Seaton was playing Edgar in King Lear at Stratford. My opinion seemed to be wanted, so seats were booked. I hadn’t been to the place since riding in on the back of an army lorry from RAF Snitterfield to see Ann Hathaway’s cottage, and the Memorial Theatre from the outside. How are the lowly lifted! This time Ruth and I were trundled there in Karel’s Morris van.

  Albert Finney flailed and muttered in half darkness as Edgar, and while not difficult to imagine him as Arthur Seaton, it was obviously impossible to find an actor who matched the appearance of the person so vividly pictured when writing the book. Karel, and Miriam Brickman the casting director, were convinced that Finney could do the job, and they turned out to be right.