Raw Material (23 page)

67

A mountain of uncertainties makes one unstable stepping-stone across a river, or a single drop of water in the desert. Beware of a man who always says no. He'll enslave you as he too has been enslaved. Look out for a man who continually shouts yes. He'll destroy you before doing away with himself. How can clarity come except out of confusion? How can one decide except through indecision? Seven negatives make a positive. If you dream you don't act. If you act, you can't dream. That rare and lucky person who does both lives in a world of angels. But he is further from the truth than anyone else.

All roads are set at the truth, whether it is down the valley of dereliction that filters back to the past, or up on to the saddle of exultation that leads into the future. Or take it the other way round, that chaos signifies neither comfort nor satisfaction. Toss the coin of limbo, throw the dice of confusion for any number from one to six. Win or lose, you may not choose, but move you must, until rest is a forceput, and not of your own selecting either. All valleys are exalted, and all hills have good views except when the mists of inbuilt obstinacy cloud them.

It is necessary for every person to explain himself. I do so halfway through my writing life (being if nothing else an optimist) for my own benefit, and as a way of burning bridges. The surviving cinders are visible at the bottom of deep water. It is also a journey, and all journeys are sentimental, whether towards truth, or a trace of smoke on the horizon that vanishes as soon as you look at it. Destinations are illusory, but the point of departure is a mountain of such living rock that you cannot help but set out from it.

And yet, reading what I have written, where has it got me, except to the end of a normal story told in a roundabout way? Wrapped in verbal peregrinations are the lives of several people who stand on an island across the dark and violent sea. From it a light shines, sometimes clear, occasionally obscure. Often it does not show.

All truth is fiction, all fiction is the truth. This book is no more than a novelist's shape of fiction, a misshapen truth, a broad, swamp-bordered Lake Chad whose outlets are narrow flows of myself and little else. I have written about a particular stream, but it is a channel which never expands sufficiently for much truth to be born. If I claimed to write the truth I would have told a lie. If I said I had written lies it would not have been the truth.

It is, perhaps, a historical novel in that people are given real names, while others come out of my imagination. Ordinary people also deserve the benefit of history. And since I cannot guarantee that there is not one lie in the whole of it I have no alternative except to call it a novel.

What, then, is it all for? Life, work, love, living. It is inevitable that I should end on a question, for only questions are divine, the urge to question everything and never take any answer. To accept an answer is to condemn those who provide it to silence, and so you give them tyrannical power over you. The good people in this novel know that you must never do that.

A Biography of Alan Sillitoe by Ruth Fainlight

Not many of the “Angry Young Men” (a label Alan Sillitoe vigorously rejected but which nonetheless clung to him until the end of his life), could boast of having failed the eleven plus exam not only once, but twice. From early childhood Alan yearned for every sort of knowledge about the world: history, geography, cosmology, biology, topography, and mathematics; to read the best novels and poetry; and learn all the languages, from Classical Greek and Latin to every tongue of modern Europe. But his violent father was illiterate, his mother barely able to read the popular press and when necessary write a simple letter, and he was so cut off from any sort of cultivated environment that, at about the age of ten, trying to teach himself French (unaware books existed that might have helped him), the only method he could devise was to look up each word of a French sentence in a small pocket dictionary. It did not take long for him to realize that something was wrong with his system, but there was no one to ask what he should do instead.

So, like all his schoolmates, he left school at fourteen and went to work in a local factory. Alan never presented himself as a misunderstood sensitive being, and always insisted that he had a wonderful time chasing girls and going with workmates to the lively Nottingham pubs. He also joined the Air Training Corps (ATC) where he absorbed information so quickly that by the age of seventeen he was working as an air traffic controller at a nearby airfield. World War II was still being fought, and his ambition was to become a pilot and go to the Far East, but before that could be realized it was VE Day. As soon as possible he volunteered for the Royal Air Force. It was too late to become a pilot or a navigator, but he got as far as Malaya, where as a radio operator he spent long nights in a hut at the edge of the jungle.

The Morse code he learned during this time stayed with Alan all his life; he loved listening to transmissions from liners and cargo ships (although he never transmitted himself), and whenever invited to speak, he always took his Morse key along. Before beginning his talk, he would make a grand performance of setting it up on the table in front of him and then announce that if anyone in the audience could decipher the message he was about to transmit, he would give that person a signed copy of one of his books. As far as I remember, this never happened.

In Malaya, Alan caught tuberculosis—only discovered during the final physical examination before demobilization. He spent the next eighteen months in a military sanatorium, and was awarded a 100 percent disability pension. By then Alan was twenty-three years old, and it was not long until we met. We fell in love and soon decided to leave the country, going first to France and then to Mallorca, and stayed away from England for more than six years. That pension was our only reliable income until, after several rejections, the manuscript of
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
was accepted for publication. Afterward, Alan would say that during those apprentice years he had been kept by a very kind woman: the Queen of England.

It is said that an artist must choose between life and art; sometimes Alan would tell whomever questioned him that after his first book was published and he became a recognized writer, he stopped living—there was not enough time to do both. I hope that was not entirely true. But writing was his main activity: He would spend ten to twelve hours a day at his desk, reading or answering letters when he needed a break from working on his current novel. And there were poems, essays, reviews—and scripts for the films of his first two books,
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
and
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner
, and later others. He was extremely productive. But certainly he also enjoyed social life with our friends and going to concerts or the theatre. This was the heyday of the young British dramatists at the Royal Court Theatre.

Now, in the 1960s, there was enough money for what we enjoyed most: travel, and although in the first few years our son was still a baby, we would spend up to six months of the year away from England. Alan's books were translated into many languages, which meant that he was invited to many other countries, frequently to literary festivals, or sometimes offered the use of a villa or grand apartment for generous periods of time. I remember a stay at a castle in then-Czechoslovakia, where we were awoken every morning by a scream from our son, who had managed to get his head or hand caught in some part of the rickety crib that had been put in our room for him. We also spent months in Mallorca, in a house generously lent by Robert Graves. During our four years on the island we had become good friends with him and the Graves family.

Time passed … the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties.… Every year or two a new book, a trip to another part of the world. Japan, India, the United States, Mexico, and Latin America: the range extended. I usually went with him, and as by then I also was having work published, sometimes the invitation was to me, and he would assume the role of consort.

Looking back, I realize what a wonderful life we had then. But a year or two before his eightieth birthday, Alan told me he was not feeling well. It was always hard to persuade him to see the doctor; this time he suggested it himself. There were many hospital appointments for investigations and tests—the National Health Service was as excellent and thorough as ever—and a few weeks later the diagnosis came: There was a cancer at the base of his tongue. His suspicions were confirmed. Although he had continued to smoke his pipe (and the occasional cigar), now he stopped at once. The tragic program of treatments started, and the inevitable oscillations between hope and despair. Twice it seemed that he was cured; then it all began again. In April 2010, not long after his eighty-second birthday, Alan died. We had hoped he could die at home, but he needed the facilities of a good hospital. Months later, on a cupboard shelf in his study, I found the manuscript of
Moggerhanger
.

Sillitoe in Butterworth, Malaya, during his time in the RAF.

Sillitoe and Ruth Fainlight shared their first home together, “Le Nid”, while living in Menton, France, 1952.

Sillitoe in Camden Town in 1958, soon after the publication of
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
.

Sillitoe at his desk in his country house in Wittersham, Kent, 1969.