Alan sillitoe

_{(b. 1928)}

Alan Silitoe was born in Nottingham in the family of a worker His childhood coincided with the hungry 30s. Alan had to leave school very early and at the age of four­ teen he began to work at a bicycle factory At the age ot twenty he joined the Army and spent two years in Malaya. There he fell ill and was sent to hospital, where he started writing and made a draft version of his first work and sorne notes of the novel Key to the Door

Sillitoe's first novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morn­ ing ( 1958) is a simple story about the life of an ordinary young worker, and, as some critics noted, "every word in it rings true" The realistic reflection of the routine and tedium of the factory worker's life is one of the rnain merits of the novel.

Arthur Seaton, the principal character of the novel, is a typical representative of the majority of the English working class of the period of relative prosperity The author does not idealize his hero. Arthur Seaton does not worry much about lofty matters or urgent world problems. His motto "I am all right, Jack" clearly reflects his views and ideals. His pay is quite sufficient but his pastimes are rather dull, for they are mostly limited to drinking. He understands that his life is being wasted, but he makes no attempt to change it. The increasing difficulties of every­ day life, brought about by the labour conditions that be­ come harder from day to day, finally make Arthur angry

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and dissatisfied. He begins to protest against hard labour and the Government, but young Seaton only instinctively hates the enemies of the working class. He is not yet ready to oppose them from the stand-point of his class. His prot­ est is aimless as he only speaks and does not act. This protest, expressed exclusively in words, is the typical feature of all the main characters of the working class novel.

K.EY TO THE DOOR

The answers to the problems posed in his first novel are given by Sillitoe in his next book Key to the Door (1961). This is a realistic work in which Sillitoe gives a wide, generalized picture of English life. It may be called an autobiographical novel. The author describes his hard life and his attempts to find the right answers to the problems he faces. It is a novel about the hero's evolution, about the choice of ways he must take. The noisy protest and aimless

anger of Arthur Seaton give way to a controlled resentment at social injustice and a conscious approach to political

development.

The book has four parts. In the first part we learn about the great hardships suffered by Brian, the main character

of the novel, in his childhood. His parents are now both jobless, they drink beer and pay little or no attention to their son. In the second part Sillitoe shows Brian's awa­

^{kening to life, his thirst for knowledge and his great desire}

to escape from his surroundings and to build up a decent

life for himself. In order to achieve this he volunteers for the Army at an early age. In part three Brian goes to Ma­ laya as a soldier There he has to defend the social class that is his enemy. Sillitoe pays much attention to the Ma­ layan episodes in the book. He gives a vivid picture of the ruined and oppressed country, whose people are fighting courageously for their freedom. Everything that Brian sees in Malaya influences him greatly and brings him to a final decision. The climax of the novel comes in the fourth part of the book, from which we learn that Brian Seaton is faced with a dilemma- whether to kill a Malayan patriot (and thus follow the jungle laws of capitalist society) or to save him (and prove his own dignity and his proletarian ho­ nour). "And I let him go!.. I let him go because he was a comrade. I didn't kill him because he was a man"­ Brian's thoughts after saving the Malayan communist show what a great evolution he has undergone: from a colo-

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nial oppressor he becomes the supporter of the liberation movement.

^{The following extract taken from Key to the Door shows}

Brian's reflections after he has made his choice, and

allowed the Malayan partisan to escape;

.. Urian leaned against a tree screaming with lau hter, a mad hu­ morous rage tearing itself out. "And I let him go! Odgcson and all you bastards, I lei him go because he was a comrade! I didn't kill him be­ cause he was a man" The certain knowledge that he had been a bandit was a list that made him lie down in the soil, curl up and go on laughing, separate from himself yet unable to look on, roaring at the outcome of his own safely no maller what the man had been. The bastard though,

I should a pulled the rille up to my shoulder and pinned him to the soil

with a bullet like he would have done lome with his kriss if I'd given him hall the chance. He smoked a cigarette: I'd better gel hack and sec if the others have found the plane. But if any clever bastard says to me: "Why aren't yo' the army'" I'll give him lhl' biggest mouthful he's ever heard ..

"What did you do in the war. dacP" "I caught a communist and let

him go. "What did you do that for then'" "Because he was a man. And not everybody'll look at me gone-out. "Brian, my lad, I'm proud o'you, the old man would say ...

The description of hard living conditions and the re­ flection of the fruitless protest of the younger generation was not new in post-war English literature. Moreover, it became the leading feature of most works about the young generation. The innovation in Sillitoe's novel Key to the Door lies in the honest attempts of the hero to find his aim in life. his key to the door He finally achieves this and it opens for him a new way in life. The third novel of the trilogy about the Seatons is The Open Door (1989). It is equally autobiographical and it shows the problems a mod­ ern writer is faced with.

The hero of Sillitoc's other novels- The Death of

William Posters (1965), A Tree on Fire (1967) is a young worker from Nottingham, Frank Dawley who does not want

to live in conformity with bourgeois morals. What he hates most in people is the spirit of philistinism and compromise. He feels it in himself, too, and tries to overcome it. He leaves the country and joins the liberation movement in Algiers. Yet the evolution of Frank's outlook and, unfortu­ nately, that of the author himself, is not a straight and well-defined process, it is complicated and often coillradic­ lory.

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After the novels of the 60s Sillitoe, a truly gifted writer, and excellent story-teller, began to be influenced by that very spirit of compromise which at first he had exposed. At times he still truthfully reflects the fighting spirit of the working people, as he docs, for example, in the story The Pit Strilw ( 1973). The striving for commercial success and conformity to the tastes of the bourgeois public are clearly seen in many of his works of the 70s: A Start In Life (1970), a picaresque novel, Travels in Nihilon ( 1971 ), a philos­ ophical one, are much weaker than those of the 60s.

In the autobiographical novel Raw Material ( 1971) as well as in The Storyteller ( 1976) Silliloe deals with the problem of corelalion of life and art.

SID CHAPLIN

( 1916-1 986)

Sid Chaplin was the son of a miner and a miner himself. In 1948 he published his first collection of short stories The Leaping Lad, later the novels The Thin Seam (1951) and The Big Room ( 1960) dedicated to the working-class. But they were not a success. Only after the publication of his third novel The Day of Sardine ( 1961) did his name become well known at home and abroad.

The Day of the Sardine is the confession of a young boy

who has just started his independent life. Arthur is very lonely; he is eager to have friends, to be loved by others, but all goes wrong in his life. The fate of teenagers in society is the main problem of the novel. Sid Chaplin does not try to teach the reader, but the simple and realistic story of his hero strikes the reader with its truthfulness.

The title of the novel is symbolic. At the beginning of the novel Harry Parker, a worker living as a lodger at Arthur's house, tells him a short tale about sardine-fish­ ing. He speaks of small sardines which are caught in great numbers. Harry means the passive indifferent people, who do not want to fight for their future. The old worker warns Arthur against the danger of becoming such a sardine: "Don't be a sardine", he says,- "swim for yourself" These words of the old worker illustrate the basic idea of the author· the young people of England should be the makers of their own future. They should fight for it.

The action of Chaplin's second novel The Watchers and

the Watched ( 1962) is set in an industrial town in the North of England and the main character is a worker trying to

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understand his environment and himself. Chaplin charac­ terizes this novel as "the book of working-class mar­ riages" But the real value of it goes far beyond this. First Tim Mayson tries to solve the problems of his private life. But very soon he finds this too simple to be his only aim in life and turns to social events. Tim gets involved in a local strike of protest against bad housing, then fights for the rights of coloured immigrants.

We cannot say that Tim Mayson is either a conscious

fighter for a better future or a revolutionary But the ideas of the "glorious proletarian traditions" of the past arc still alive in Tim's mind and they help him to find his aim in

I if e.

Chaplin's novel Sam in the Morning ( 1965), is no longer the story of a man with a working-class back­ ground. It is an exposure of the contemporary capitalist

world which favours people who achieve success by con­

forming to the laws of society, by following the principle of

non-committal. His last novel The Alabaster Mines

(197t) is a proof of the author's drifting away from the problems of his best novels; it shows his compromise with

society