Alan Sillitoe obituary
Alan Sillitoe, who has died of cancer aged 82, was one of the most important British writers of the postwar era. He made his name with the novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and the collection of short stories The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959), and he is still routinely perceived as a member of the kitchen-sink branch of the Angry Generation. Such characterisations obscure the breadth and originality of his writing.
Among his 53 volumes – including novels, short stories, plays, children's fiction, poetry, travel books, drama, memoirs and criticism – there are works that defy classification. A Start in Life (1970) and Life Goes On (1985) marry a picaresque style with the drabness of post-1950s Britain. Travels in Nihilon (1971), inspired by his experiences in the USSR, invokes the tradition of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Huxley's Brave New World, but supersedes both in its manner. It is as though Finnegans Wake has been unselfishly rewritten, with coherent sentences and a story, and it offers a magnificent evocation of totalitarianism, inhumanity and farce. The Rats and Other Poems (1960) shows a disdain for the conventions of verse unmatched since Blake.
The Storyteller (1979) is one of the best ever novels about the pitiless, unforgiving nature of writing, and The General (1960) is the fictional precursor to Wladyslaw Szpilman's The Pianist. For a representation of the heroic comedy of growing old, Birthday (2001) cannot be bettered.
Sillitoe was born in Nottingham, the son of Christopher Sillitoe and his wife Sabina (née Burton). The Sillitoes already had one child, Peggy, aged two, and would go on to have two more sons, Brian and Michael, and another daughter, Pearl. Christopher was illiterate and rarely held a job for more than a month at a time, and as a consequence the Sillitoes moved constantly from one overcrowded insanitary dwelling to the next, followed by mercifully feckless rent collectors. Once, when the children were close to starvation, Sabina turned for a short time to prostitution.
Sillitoe left school at 14 with no qualifications and took work as a labourer, lathe operator and panel beater in several nearby engineering factories, most famously the Raleigh plant which at one point employed the entire family.
During the war he used a fake ID to join the air training corps. He was 18 months younger than officially stated, his mother already having doctored the original card to assist a deserter who sheltered in their house for a week. It was Sillitoe's ambition to become a pilot, and for most of the war he was engaged in a race against time, measured in allied victories, to qualify for flight training and join the conflict. He passed the examinations one month before Japan surrendered, resigned himself to postwar national service as a radio operator and spent two years in Malaya at the start of the emergency.
He returned to Nottingham with no ambitions or prospects, and just prior to discharge from the services was diagnosed with tuberculosis. While staying in a sanatorium in RAF Wroughton, Wiltshire, he became preoccupied with books – consuming at random everything from translations of classic literature to Hobbes, Descartes and Wittgenstein, and contemporary British fiction. Before he left for home he had decided that he would become a writer.
He met Ruth Fainlight, the poet, translator and playwright, in a Nottingham bookshop. They began a relationship and in 1952 decided to move to the Mediterranean, first of all house-sitting for a couple in the French resort of Menton and later renting properties in Majorca and mainland Spain. In Majorca he met Robert Graves, forming a lifelong friendship, and it was there that a set of stories involving the same character, Arthur Seaton, evolved into Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, but that novel and the collection The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner drew their energy and raw material from Sillitoe's experiences in Nottingham.
Before reaching Jeffrey Simmons, chief commissioning editor of WH Allen, the typescript of the former had been rejected by five mainstream publishing houses. None was disappointed by the quality of the work, but each – notably Tom Maschler – proclaimed that Sillitoe's representations of working-class existence were based upon a bizarre dystopian hypothesis. When the novel came out the critics disagreed, as did the impresario Harry Saltzman, who sponsored Karel Reisz as director of the 1960 film adaptation, with Sillitoe as scriptwriter. Starring Albert Finney as Seaton, a young Nottingham factory worker who has an affair with the wife of a colleague, it became a landmark in the British New Wave. The film was followed by the director Tony Richardson's 1962 screen version of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, in which Tom Courtenay portrayed the title character who, after breaking into a bakery, is placed in borstal, where the governor hopes to exploit his gift for cross-country running in an upcoming race. Sillitoe again adapted his own work for the screenplay.
During the 1960s, the Soviet Union feted Sillitoe as the only genuine spokesman for the oppressed working classes of the west, his first official invitation to visit coming in 1963, which he recorded as Road to Volgograd (1964). During the 1960s he travelled to Russia and the eastern bloc satellite states on six more occasions. He was still treated as an unalloyed literary revolutionary, but the communist authorities were in for a surprise. When asked in 1968 to address a Congress of the Soviet Writers' Union, with Brezhnev present, he denounced the abhorrent abuses of human rights they had carelessly allowed him to observe and record.
Thereafter he campaigned tirelessly, and secretly, on behalf of political prisoners in the eastern bloc and turned his public scorn against what he discerned as the hypocrisies and complacencies of the British leftwing intelligentsia. He was convinced that pro-Palestinianism was antisemitism by the back door, and by the 1970s he had been shunned by many of those who, usually with a hint of condescension, regarded him as DH Lawrence reborn with Marxist credentials.
As a 14-year-old factory worker during the war, he was informed by the shop steward that union membership was compulsory, that it was for his own good and that fees would be deducted from his wages. Sillitoe returned to his bench after urging the official to "fuck off and get dive-bombed". He was throughout his life deeply committed to the ideals of freedom and equitability, but equally he detested the infringement of systems – however benign and altruistic they might claim to be – upon individualism.
Always an atheist, he nonetheless developed during the 1960s a deep interest in the lore and history of Judaism (the only book in his possession to date from his childhood years was the King James Bible, and he read the Old Testament voraciously), becoming a regular visitor to Israel from the 1970s onwards.
His campaigns on behalf of those maltreated or unjustly imprisoned were cosmopolitan and unalligned, but during this period he focused on individual Jews who in the eastern bloc were subject to a brand of antisemitic victimisation that transcended history and ideology.
After returning from Spain at the end of the 1950s, he kept a flat in London, while spending part of his year at a succession of properties – first Wittersham in Kent, then Montpellier in southern France, followed by Somerset and Diseworth on the Leicestershire-Nottinghamshire border. His purchase of the Somerset property was prompted partly by his longterm friendship with Ted Hughes.
Sillitoe shunned literary awards. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning won the Hawthornden, but thereafter he instructed his agents and publishers never to allow his work to be forwarded for prizes of any kind. He did, however, receive honorary degrees from four universities, including a doctorate from Nottingham, and was visiting professor at Leicester de Montfort university and at the University of Ulster.
He retained a love for Russia, in particular its vodka, but his most compulsive fascination, aside from writing, was with maps. He explored new landscapes with an enthusiasm that matched that of any 19th-century adventurer. As a family man, he was a rare exemplar of kindness and unpatronising wisdom; he displayed, as a writer, an equally uncommon lack of resentment towards those ill-disposed toward his work and opinions.
He is survived by Ruth and two children, David and Susan.
Alan Sillitoe, author, born 4 March 1928; died 25 April 2010