Forever out of reach of the establishment

The vividness and power -- and perhaps the flaw -- of many of Alan Sillitoe’s stories come from their relentlessly angry and downbeat vision of working-class life in England, particularly in the once-industrial north. Even when he strays infrequently from his native Nottinghamshire, his emotional baseline remains the twin ghosts that haunt England to this day: the Great War of 1914-18 and the 1930s Depression, both of which permanently scarred the land and its people. His early works -- “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” and “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner,” selections from which are included in the compilation “New and Collected Stories” -- had a huge influence on me and the British reading public well before the films that directors Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson made of them.

Sillitoe’s timing was perfect in the smug 1950s. The British establishment was led by Harold Macmillan, the grouse-hunting prime minister who assured the declining country, “You’ve never had it so good.” The tin-eared and self-satisfied Home Secretary Rab Butler urged working-class voters to campaign for Tories instead of sitting back with what he sincerely believed was their usual diet of vintage port and over-ripe pheasant. During a notorious censorship trial, a conservative barrister asked whether “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” was a book one would allow “one’s wife or servants to read.” The postwar theater was politely dominated by Terence Rattigan, Noel Coward and Christopher Fry -- and stifled by Britain’s chief censor, a man whose sole qualification was having written a history of the 11th Hussars regiment. In the books and plays of the period, the closest thing to working people were amusing butlers and charming maids. (I underestimate Rattigan and Coward to make a point.)

Then the literary bombs began bursting.

Sillitoe has often been compared to D.H. Lawrence because they both hail from Nottingham. It’s a facile reference, because for all of Lawrence’s defiance of middle-class convention, I suspect even he would have been rocked on his heels by Sillitoe’s blazingly amoral heroes. Sillitoe’s men (and his characters are mainly male) declare, in effect, “sod ‘em” to church, state and school. Arthur Seaton, the boozing, thieving, fornicating hero of “Saturday Night” (played by Albert Finney in the film), and Smith, the juvenile prisoner in “Long-Distance Runner” who deliberately loses his cross-country race to spite the warden (“I got them beat at last”), burst upon Britain at a crystallizing moment. The rigid caste system, a hangover almost from manorial times, seemed about to topple. An unprecedented wave of raw new talent, shaped by World War II’s leveling of the social classes, exploded in the (mislabeled) “angry young man” and “kitchen sink” movements in literature and art. In the country at large, smart young people, inspired by rock ‘n’ roll and ban-the-bomb marches, also were saying “sod ‘em” to an incompetent and snobbish establishment.

This defiant insurgency sparked a mood receptive to anarchic roughnecks like “Saturday Night’s” antihero. Sillitoe’s lawless characters seemed to “get” this new real world in ways that the cozier fictions of Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell and Ivy Compton-Burnett seemed not to any longer. None of the new writers -- Kingsley Amis, Doris Lessing, John Osborne, Colin Wilson, Brendan Behan, Shelagh Delaney -- or their characters resembled one another. Yet they all seemed part of the same complex, popular mutiny.

Sillitoe, like almost all the other “angries,” quickly disavowed an explicit left-wing intent. In his own way, however, he probably is more revolutionary than most of the others. His cruddy heroes represent a kind of rebuke to those of us in the English left-wing who have tended to romanticize “the workers.” Arthur Seaton and his ilk couldn’t have cared less about radical politics, trade unions or banning the atomic bomb. All they wanted to do was mess about with their neighbor’s wife, booze all night and into the next morning, thieve whatever wasn’t nailed down and, above all, get away with it under the nose of authority. “The rest is propaganda,” Seaton sneers.

What is most startling about Sillitoe’s work as shown in this new collection is his sustained rage and more-or-less explicit endorsement of violent hedonism. Sabotage -- of oneself or the machines on the shop floor or classroom instruction -- is a mark of this English hipster. “The Firebug,” one story from Sillitoe’s 1963 book “The Ragman’s Daughter,” is an exercise in pure mayhem, the birth and flickering out of a psychopathic arsonist. In perhaps the scariest vignette -- from the story “On Saturday Afternoon” in the collection “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner” -- a bored teenager helps an older unemployed man hang himself and objects when a police officer cuts the man down at the last minute, resenting even more the copper’s reasoning. “You might think [it’s your life],” the policeman tells the would-be suicide, “but it ain’t.... You’ll get five years [in prison] for this.” We own nothing, Sillitoe tells us, not even our own lives.

Class antagonism as such doesn’t figure much in Sillitoe, but when it does it’s usually because the man has married “above” his station. In “Revenge” (from the 1968 book “Guzman, Go Home”) middle-class Caroline marries the “noble savage” Richard only to discover that he isn’t her fantasy of what a “real” worker ought to be. Almost immediately she begins to serve his tea with a loving joke, “How do you know it’s not poisoned?” -- which, of course, isn’t a joke at all at the end. Just about the worst fate that can befall a Sillitoe working bloke is to find a woman stronger than himself; and in his northern England nothing is easier.

Sillitoe, who will be 77 in March, is one of five children of a violent father and a semi-prostitute mother. He left a slum school in Nottingham at 14 to work in a bicycle factory, where noise “punched you in the face like a boxing glove.” His voice, especially in the early stories, is utterly authentic.

His work doesn’t mesh with my own experiences of the same sort of people in the same era. Everything he says is true, I’m sure, but I heard more laughter and saw more solidarity along with the harsh depression that tends to be a Sillitoe trademark. But Sillitoe sees what he sees, not what I saw. I respond more to the occasional antic in his work -- the poaching of the laird’s fox and bedding your best friend’s gal and robbing the gas meter -- than the predictably grim denouements.

Sillitoe has produced 50 books (including children’s tales, such as the “Marmalade Jim” series, and the 2004 novel “A Man of His Time”), as well as poetry and hundreds of essays in the 47 years since “Saturday Night.” Unlike so many of his posturing contemporaries who became a sort of establishment themselves -- some, like John Braine (“Room at the Top”), turned into harrumphing Tories -- Sillitoe was never anybody’s establishment. He didn’t die, and he failed to become a pompous bore. Arthur Seaton would appreciate that. *