Albert Finney in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
Sad news. Alan Sillitoe died this morning, aged 82. The novelist of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner and 50 other books helped to define an era in English writing, and was consequently I think the first novelist I read when I arrived here at 19, trying to find a way in beyond Monty Python, Mary Poppins and Keats. In fact, they had shown us the film of Long-Distance Runner when I was at school – looking back on it, our education doesn’t seem that bad – but we were a bit too young and our teachers a bit too unable to contextualise it for us. Some things you have to grow into and feel.
I met him only once, a few years ago, an honour: I was interviewing Ruth Fainlight (an interview that turned to a conversation and then to an afternoon) and he made our coffee. (That’s one thing I love about writing: how much you admire the people you meet.) And in 2007, shortly before the smoking ban came into effect, I was surprisingly moved to see this video on the BBC website, where Sillitoe talked about his life as a smoker. It’s incredibly redolent – remember ashtrays in the arms of cinema seats? – and captures perfectly a defunct era, as well as Sillitoe’s personality. I’m never not quite sure if we’re making as much actual progress as we think, or if we’re just kind of moving forward.
Here’s the proper BBC article. And here’s a lovely piece in the Mirror by Christopher Hitchens.
I have a feeling (I met him just twice, very briefly) he was a wonderful man. Annoying how 99 per cent of the coverage of his death identifies him as a 50s Angry Young Man only to add, often in the same sentence, he rejected the label. For years as an over-read adolescent I was haunted by a scene in one of his early novels (The Death of William Posters, I think) in which a character tears apart his bookshelves, maybe even throws them out of the window, because he feels that books separate him from LIFE. And now look at his own oeuvre – well over fifty books. It’s not an either/or thing after all.
Dear Katy
Alan Sillitoe was a working-class boy who made good in an age when social mobility was still a practical reality for bright children. My own father was born into a council house in Birkenhead, won a scholarship to his local grammar school and never looked back. To be honest I don’t think that 82 is too bad an innings. Most poets die a lot younger!
Best wishes from Simon
The era he defined was the one in which my own cultural awareness dawned. Writers never really ‘die’ when we always have their hearts and minds in the books. RIP
Yep, you’re right: we’re just kind of moving forward.
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner is one of the first ‘grown up’ pieces of writing I was introduced to as a child (probably around the same time as Catcher in the Rye which was also discussed in your comment box recently and for much the same reasons ie the death of the author). The scene that sticks in my mind is set on a Nottingham doorstep in a rainstorm, where a policeman has come to question our hero about a recent petty theft. Just as the danger seems to have passed a flurry of fivers is forced out of the bottom of a nearby drainpipe by the downpour, and the game is up (I think that’s why our hero ends up incarcerated and subjected to weekly outdoor exercise, as a result of which his gift for long distance running is discovered). Anyway, thirty years after reading that, the scene always comes to mind when I see torrential rainfall spurting out of a sburban drainpipe- which I suppose is testament to Sillitoe’s craft as a writer and storyteller . I feel quite ashamed to learn from you that he wrote another 50 books alongside the two that I was familiar with.