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Alan Silitoe

ALAN SILLITOE like D.H. Lawrence, lived in Nottingham, and had an early struggle in becoming a writer. He taught himself. As a child he read everything he could get in the public libraries or from second-hand book shops, at that time mostly novels by G.A. Henty, Conan Doyle, Rider Haggard, etc. Later, at 21, he wrote all the time after coming out of the Royal Air Force with TB and went to live in France and Spain, He had years of penury on a small pension and many rejections of his work until, in Majorca, his friend Robert Graves said: "You should write about Nottingham." He did not take much notice of this advice for a while, but a year or so later started to write Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which made him world famous. A year or so later he wrote The Lonelinesss of the Long Distance Runner, which was also filmed. He lives in London.

I played with the idea of becoming a writer, at an early age, rather as a journalist. I tried to learn Pitman's shorthand out of a threepenny book but found it too difficult to distinguish between the thin and thick symbols that had to be written at speed. I knew I wanted to write, however, and I loved ink, paper, pens and notebooks, and started making notes about members of my own family in a large jotter. In the R.A.F. I was a wireless operator in Malaya, and when traffic was slack on the nightwatch I read The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell, about the kind of people I had known, and A child of the Jago by Arthur Morrison, the style more polished, the plot more artful. I snatched any book the library could provide, and read H.G. Wells, P.G. Wodehouse, Rafael Sabatini, P.C. Wren and Warwick Deeping. When I was in hospital in 1948 my notebook list showed 38 novels. I read Rupert Brooke, Edward Lear, Kant, Wilde, Voltaire, de Maupassant. I never read a book that was not enjoyable, and, enjoying everything because it was good, learned more than if I had been told to read or from a sense of duty.

I had always wanted to travel, to see foreign places, and live in countries where different languages were spoken. By this I was able to learn French and Spanish.

Education was vital for a writer, I realised.

Over the next few years I read everything I could get my hands on from the Latin and Greek classics, as well as Shakespeare and the Hebrew Bible, realising that I could not become a writer unless I had read everything important from the great literatures of the world.

I wrote a 100,000 word novel for a publisher's competition which was rejected, and many short stories, some of which I later ploughed into Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. I hitch-hiked around Cornwall and then went to live in Menton. Lemon and orange trees were in full fruit, and our house was called Le Nid (The Nest). We lived mainly on fruit and vegetables and bought stale bread from the baker at half price. In 1953 seven stories, six poems and a novel were going the rounds. The rest of my writing, necessarily persisted in, was a cul de sac, but one in which accumulated a mass of material out of which my true voice would eventually emerge, though I was not to know it at the time. Since living in Spain was half the cost of France, I went to Soller in Majorca. Before I left a visit to the doctor showed my weight at 130 lbs, even less than when I came out of the Malayan jungle.

In Soller, quasi-philosophical and literary discussions, fuelled by wine and tobacco which was very cheap, had a range as wide as civilisation seem to be long, and could have gone on forever without resolving anything. I fell back behind the palisade of my own basic drift which convinced me that creativity and intellect need not go together, that talk was one thing, and writing another, and that Art promised to be more effective when unencumbered by any theories. To go on writing was the only way forward, and even with the anxiety that came of living from hand to mouth, I had little to complain about.

I was generally reluctant to show my work, even to friends, but on hearing that Robert Graves lived in Deya, just along the coast, I wrote to him and enclosed some of my work. He said, of my poems, some were good, in that at least I ended them well, whereas so many poets got off to a fair start but fizzled out half way through. Robert was always generous in his appraisal of beginners, never discouraging anyone, on the sound principle that no matter how inept they might a be at that moment, it was always possible that they would become better in the future and write something of value. I found his remarks about my poems encouraging, told him only two had been published but he said it didn't matter, as long as one kept on writing. He asked me what University I had been to. On telling him I left school early, he said: "So did I, to go to the War."

It was in Majorca that I began writing about my chidhood, contrasting the anguish and shortages of home life in the 1930's with my haven in the sun, and recalling the idiosyncrasies of my blacksmith grandfather. With the name of Brian Seaton for the main character, I tried to give the narrative an aspect of fiction, my imagination creating the life of his mother and father from the time before their marriage, which later became part of my third novel Key to the Door.

The story was satisfying to write, material seeming to come as much from my subconscious as from what was actually known about such people. After the handwritten draft was typed and put away, I set about rewriting The Green Hills of Malaya, turning that, also, as much as I was able, into fiction. The only person to know whether or not I was any good as a writer was myself, and a permanently underlying optimism allowed me to think so at times of rejection. This also became part of Key to the Door. One day, with Elizabeth Trocchi we took a picnic basket and walked 10 kilometres to Deya as she wanted to meet Robert Graves. Her husband Alex spent an evening trying to contact people who might supply him with hash, but he couldn't find any in a small place like Soller. He told me he had earned 75,000 francs writing a pornographic novel for Olympia Press, then he was merry enough to start advising me how to write, at which I could only reply that he didn't know what he was talking about.

At 26, after five years of unremitting dedication, there was little to show for my writing. Quantity was not lacking but quality was slow in coming. Stories and parts of novels suggested that recognition should have been closer than it was, but the perfection of whatever talent existed would only evolve as its own rate. Nothing could speed the process, and no one could help with the problems that needed solving. Trusting no one but myself, I went on writing. Success would come if I went on long enough. Telling a story was not good enough unless written with such conviction that the language and content would indicate that I had something to say as well as a story to tell. The best writing was when the movement of my pen coincided neatly with the tone of my thoughts, leading to the knowledge that every writer has his or her own unique voice, or style, and that though some might find such a voice more quickly than others the longer it took to do so the more likely was it to be your own and not somebody else's. As a trial and error system it could only be called learning the hard way, and for most of the time the business of living, and being involved in the actual writing, was a sufficiently powerful anodyne to keep such nagging thoughts in their place. The only allies against the problems which beset me were energy and faith.

Sitting with my pen and notebook one morning against an orange tree on the terrace, I began to write Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, at first called The Adventures of Arthur Seaton. Reading my work aloud was a way of ensuring that it had the fluidity and clarity of good English. Good English is clear English. During that long winter it became obvious that I had not been working hard enough on style: every word, every phrase, every sentence -- in every story and on every page of a novel -- had to be broken up and then knitted together again so that no loopholes in the prose remained.

During the many revisions I was so deeply back in Nottingham that the whole of my life up to the age of eighteen was called in for use, though little of the book is autobiographical. My autobiography was to come later with the title Life Without Armour. I was setting the story against a realistic background which nevertheless demanded the use of imagination. So deeply was I engrossed in the writing that I was in no mood to hurry the book. Short stories which I had written earlier but which no magazine wanted were ploughed in to propel the narrative on its way. As I went on I came to realise that you do not write what society or editors expect, but only that which is illuminated by the truth of your own experience. A writer must listen to no one but himself. A writer should not surrender to the sail-trimming of editors and publishers who want to guide him or her towards middle-brow best-sellers, or the kind of book they think will win literary prizes.

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. All my short stories and writing, including Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner were rejected several times by publishers but suddenly everything changed and my agent wrote to tell me that a publisher was interested in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. It was 1958 and I had been working towards it for ten years, perhaps for the whole of my life, certainly what seemed at times like a century. The proofs came and gave me the impression that my novel was better than I had thought. Print endowed it with a glow that typescript could not. The pleasure of seeing my writing at this stage has never left me. Recently re-published by Harper Collins, it is still in print after 35 years. I remember that when I first showed a copy of the novel to my father he said: "My God, Alan, you've written a book. You'll never have to work again." He was right, of course.

Later, at a cocktail party the Managing Editor of a large publishing firm regretted that the manuscript of my novel had not been sent to him.

"It was," I said. "But you rejected it."