Alan Sillitoe


Alan Sillitoe FRSL was an English writer and one of the so-called "angry young men" of the 1950s. He disliked the label, as did most of the other writers to whom it was applied. He is best known for his debut novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and his early short story "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner", both of which were adapted into films.

Biography

Sillitoe was born in Nottingham to working-class parents, Christopher Sillitoe and Sabina. Like Arthur Seaton, the anti-hero of his first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, his father worked at the Raleigh Bicycle Company's factory in the town. His father was illiterate, violent, and unsteady with his jobs, and the family was often on the brink of starvation.
Sillitoe left school at the age of 14, having failed the entrance examination to grammar school. He worked at the Raleigh factory for the next four years, spending his free time reading prodigiously and being a "serial lover of local girls". He joined the Air Training Corps in 1942, then the Royal Air Force, albeit too late to serve in the Second World War. He served as a wireless operator in Malaya during the Emergency. After returning to Britain, he was planning to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force when it was discovered that he had tuberculosis. He spent 16 months in an RAF hospital.
Pensioned off at the age of 21 on 45 shillings a week, he lived in France and Spain for seven years in an attempt to recover. In 1955, while living in Mallorca with the American poet Ruth Fainlight, whom he married in 1959, and in contact with the poet Robert Graves, Sillitoe started work on Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which was published in 1958. Influenced in part by the stripped-down prose of Ernest Hemingway, the book conveys the attitudes and situation of a young factory worker faced with the inevitable end of his youthful philandering. As with John Osborne's Look Back in Anger and John Braine's Room at the Top, the novel's real subject was the disillusionment of post-war Britain and the lack of opportunities for the working class. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was adapted as a film with the same name by Karel Reisz in 1960, with Albert Finney as Arthur Seaton; the screenplay was written by Sillitoe.
Sillitoe's story The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, which concerns the rebellion of a borstal boy with a talent for running, won the Hawthornden Prize in 1959. It was also adapted into a film, in 1962, directed by Tony Richardson and starring Tom Courtenay. Sillitoe again wrote the screenplay.
With Fainlight he had a child, David. They later adopted another, Susan. Sillitoe lived at various times in Kent, London and Montpellier. In London he was friendly with the bookseller Bernard Stone and became one of the bohemian crowd that congregated at Stone's Turret Bookshop on Kensington Church Walk.
In the 1960s Sillitoe was celebrated in the Soviet Union as a spokesman for the "oppressed worker" in the West. Invited to tour the country, he visited several times in the 1960s and in 1968 he was asked to address the Congress of Soviet Writers' Unions, where he denounced Soviet human rights abuses, many of which he had witnessed.
In 1990 Sillitoe was awarded an honorary degree by Nottingham Polytechnic, now Nottingham Trent University. The city's older Russell Group university, the University of Nottingham, also awarded him an honorary D.Litt. in 1994. In 2006 his best-known play was staged at the university's Lakeside Arts theatre in an in-house production.
Sillitoe wrote many novels and several volumes of poems. His autobiography, Life Without Armour, which was critically acclaimed on publication in 1995, offers a view of his squalid childhood. In an interview Sillitoe claimed that "A writer, if he manages to earn a living at what he's doing, even if it's a very poor living, acquires some of the attributes of the old-fashioned gentleman."
Gadfly in Russia, an account of his travels in Russia spanning 40 years, was published in 2007. In 2008, London Books republished A Start in Life in its London Classics series to mark the author's 80th birthday. Sillitoe appeared on Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4 on 25 January 2009.
Sillitoe's long-held desire for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning to be remade for a contemporary filmgoing audience was never achieved, despite strong efforts. Danny Brocklehurst was to adapt the book and Sillitoe gave his blessing to the project, but Tony Richardson's estate and Woodfall Films prevented it from going ahead.
Sillitoe was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1997.

Death

Sillitoe died of cancer on 25 April 2010 at Charing Cross Hospital in London. He was 82. He is buried in Highgate Cemetery.

Works

Novels

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, London: Allen, 1958; New York: Knopf, 1959. New edition has an introduction by Sillitoe, commentary and notes by David Craig. Longman edition has a sequence of Nottingham photographs, and stills from the film, Harlow.The General, London: Allen, 1960; New York: Knopf, 1961Key to the Door, London: Allen, 1961; New York: Knopf, 1962; reprinted, with a new preface by Sillitoe, London: Allen, 1978The Death of William Posters, London: Allen, 1965; New York: Knopf, 1965A Tree on Fire, London: Macmillan, 1967; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968A Start in Life, London: Allen, 1970; New York: Scribners, 1971Travels in Nihilon, London: Allen, 1971; New York: Scribners, 1972The Flame of Life, London: Allen, 1974The Widower's Son, Allen, 1976; New York: Harper & Row, 1977The Storyteller, London: Allen, 1979; New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980.Her Victory, London: Granada, 1982; New York: Watts, 1982The Lost Flying Boat, London: Granada, 1983; Boston: Little, Brown, 1983Down from the Hill, London: Granada, 1984Life Goes On, London: Granada, 1985Out of the Whirlpool. London: Hutchinson, 1987The Open Door, London: Grafton/Collins, 1989Last Loves, London: Grafton, 1990; Boston: Chivers, 1991Leonard's War: A Love Story. London: HarperCollins, 1991Snowstop, London: HarperCollins, 1993The Broken Chariot, London: Flamingo/HarperCollins, 1998The German Numbers Woman, London: Flamingo/HarperCollins, 1999Birthday, London: Flamingo/HarperCollins, 2001A Man of His Time, Flamingo, 2004, ; Harper Perennial, 2005. ;

Collections of short stories

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, London: Allen, 1959; New York: Knopf, 1960The Ragman’s Daughter and Other Stories, London: Allen, 1963; New York: Knopf, 1964Guzman, Go Home, and Other Stories, London: Macmillan, 1968; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969; reprinted, with a new preface by Sillitoe, London; Allen, 1979Men, Women and Children, London: Allen, 1973; New York: Scribners, 1974Down to the Bone, Exeter: Wheaton, 1976The Second Chance and Other Stories, London: Cape, 1981; New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981The Far Side of the Street: Fifteen Short Stories, London: Allen, 1988Alligator Playground: A Collection of Short Stories, Flamingo, 1997, New and Collected Stories, Carroll and Graf, 2005.

Compilations

Every Day of the Week: An Alan Sillitoe Reader, with an introduction by John Sawkins London: Allen, 1987Collected Stories, London: Flamingo, 1995; New York: HarperCollins, 1996

Writing for children

The City Adventures of Marmalade Jim, London: Macmillan, 1967; Toronto: Macmillan, 1967; revised ed., London: Robson, 1977Big John and the Stars, London: Robson, 1977The Incredible Fencing Fleas, London: Robson, 1978. Illus. Mike Wilks.Marmalade Jim at the Farm, London: Robson, 1980Marmalade Jim and the Fox, London: Robson, 1984

Essays/travel

Road to Volgograd, London: Allen, 1964; New York: Knopf, 1964Raw Material, London: Allen, 1972; New York: Scribners, 1973; rev. ed., London: Pan Books, 1974; further revised, London: Star Books, 1978; further revised, London: Allen, 1979Mountains and Caverns: Selected Essays, London: Allen, 1975Words Broadsheet Nineteen, by Sillitoe and Ruth Fainlight. Bramley, Surrey: Words Press, 1975. Broadside"The Interview", London: The 35s, 1976Israel: Poems on a Hebrew Theme, with drawings by Ralph Steadman; London: Steam Press, 1981 98 copies.The Saxon Shore Way: From Gravesend to Rye, by Sillitoe and Fay Godwin. London: Hutchinson, 1983Alan Sillitoe’s Nottinghamshire, with photographs by David Sillitoe. London: Grafton, 1987Shylock the Writer, London: Turret Bookshop, 1991The Mentality of the Picaresque Hero, London: Turret Bookshop, 1993, Turret Papers, no. 2. Leading the Blind: A Century of Guidebook Travel. 1815-1914, London: Macmillan, 1995Gadfly in Russia, JR Books, 2007

Plays

Three Plays, London: Allen, 1978 Contains The Slot-Machine, The Interview, ''Pit Strike''

Autobiography

  • Life Without Armour,,

Collections of poems

Without Beer or Bread, Dulwich Village: Outposts, 1957The Rats and Other Poems, London: Allen, 1960Falling Out of Love and Other Poems, London; Allen, 1964; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964Shaman and Other Poems", Turret, 1968 Love in the Environs of Voronezh and Other Poems, London: Macmillan, 1968; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969.Poems, by Sillitoe, Ruth Fainlight and Ted Hughes; London: Rainbow Press, 1971. From Canto Two of The Rats, Wittersham, Kent: Alan Sillitoe, 1973Barbarians and Other Poems, London: Turret Books, 1973. 500 copiesStorm: New Poems, London: Allen, 1974Somme, London: Steam Press, 1974. In Steam Press Portfolio, no. 2. 50 copiesDay-Dream Communiqué, Knotting, Bedfordshire: Sceptre Press, 1977. 150 copiesFrom Snow on the North Side of Lucifer, Knotting, Bedfordshire: Sceptre Press, 1979. Snow on the North Side of Lucifer: Poems, London: Allen, 1979Poems for Shakespeare 7, Bear Gardens Museum and Arts Centre, 1979 More Lucifer, Knotting, Bedfordshire: Martin Booth, 1980. 125 copiesSun Before Departure: Poems, 1974-1982, London: Granada, 1984Tides and Stone Walls: Poems, with photographs by Victor Bowley; London: Grafton, 1986Three Poems, Child Okefurd, Dorset: Words Press, 1988. 200 copiesCollected Poems, London: HarperCollins, 1993

Film scripts

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner Counterpoint

Translations

  • Chopin's Winter in Majorca 1838-1839, by Luis Ripoll, translated by Sillitoe. Palma de Majorca: Mossen Alcover, 1955
  • Chopin’s Pianos: The Pleyel in Majorca, by Luis Ripoll, translated by Sillitoe. Palma de Majorca: Mossen Alcover, 1958All Citizens Are Soldiers : A Play in Two Acts, by Lope de Vega, translated by Sillitoe and Ruth Fainlight. London: Macmillan, 1969; Chester Springs, PA: Dufour, 1969Poems for Shakespeare, volume 7, edited and translated by Sillitoe and Ruth Fainlight. London: Bear Gardens Museum & Arts Centre, 1980