Working-class Culture and Work as portrayed in the Texts and Films of Alan Sillitoe´s Saturday

375 Pages·2014·1.05 MB·English

Working-class Culture and Work as portrayed in the
Texts and Films of Alan Sillitoe´s Saturday Night and
Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the
Long Distance Runner

Stephen Keady

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UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA

DEPARTMENT DE FILOLOGIA ANGLESA I ALEMANYA

PROGRAMME: LITERATURES AND CULTURES 2002 – 2004

WORKING-CLASS CULTURE AND WORK AS

PORTRAYED IN THE TEXTS AND FILMS OF

ALAN SILLITOE´S

SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING

AND

THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG DISTANCE

RUNNER.

DOCTORAND: STEPHEN KEADY

DIRECTOR: Dr. ANA MOYA GUTIERREZ
In memory of my parents, Patrick and Kathleen,

and for Pilar.
CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION page 1

PART ONE: THE BACKGROUND

1.1 The Industrial Revolution 12
1.2 Work and living conditions 17
1.3 Class and the evolution of the working class 24
1.4 Reactions to protest 37
1.5 Education and religion 41
1.6 The growth of culture 48
1.7 Culture versus anarchy and civilization 53
1.8 British cultural studies 69
1.9 Working-class literature and work 86

PART TWO: THE TEXTS

2.1 Wartime and post-war England 123
2.2 The Angry Young Men 142
2.3 Alan Sillitoe 156
2.4 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning 162
2.5 The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner 216

PART THREE: THE FILMS

3.1 Post-war and 50s British cinema 255
3.2 The Free Cinema 261
3.3 Film adaptation 270
3.4 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, the film 287
3.5 The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, the film 302
3.6 The Free Cinema and poetry 334
3.7 Working-class politics and culture 339

CONCLUSION 349

BIBLIOGRAPHY 356

FILMOGRAPHY 368

INTRODUCTION
Alan Sillitoe rose to prominence in 1958, with the publication of his novel Saturday
Night and Sunday Morning. The collection of short stories, The Loneliness of the
Long-Distance Runner, published the following year, confirmed the opinion that an
important new writer had arrived in England. The films of the novel and the title story
of the collection, which were released in 1960 and 1962 respectively, and for which
he wrote the screenplays, further strengthened his reputation. Since then he has
produced a large and varied body of work, including over twenty novels, over fifty
short stories, poetry, plays, travel writing and children´s books, and remains active at
the age of 79. He is, to my mind, one of the most significant English writers of the last
50 years, and possibly the only one whose work spans the post-war and the present.
My opinion, however, does not seem to be generally shared, at least in terms of the
critical attention which Sillitoe has received. My primary research has been carried
out in Catalonia, naturally, and in the whole of the Catalan university library system
the only two critical works dedicated exclusively to Sillitoe date from the 1970s.
Furthermore, of the 133 theses written over the last 20 years or so, whose details are
available from the departments of English Philology of the University of Barcelona
(U.B.) and the Autonomous University of Barcelona (U.A.B.), not one deals with
Sillitoe, or indeed with the themes found in Sillitoe which I have chosen as the area of
enquiry for this thesis.1 With wider research, I have found reference to only 3 books
on Sillitoe published in English in the last 25 years, all of them written by British
writers but published in the U.S.A. Peter Hitchcock´s Working-Class Fiction in

1 ccuc.cbuc.es
www.bib.ub.edu
www.uab.es/servlet
Not surprisingly, the themes which most recur in these post-graduate works reflect the current interest
in post-colonialist and feminist areas of research.

1
Theory and Practice: A Reading of Alan Sillitoe (1989) has some interesting points to
make, and will be quoted from later. However, Hitchcock only treats in any depth
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, with some mentions of “The Loneliness of the
Long Distance Runner”, an emphasis mirrored by John Sawkins in the more recent
The Long Apprenticeship: Alienation in the Early Works of Alan Sillitoe (2001), a
book whose title is self-explanatory as regards the works examined and the focus of
the examination. Gillian Mary Hanson, in Understanding Alan Sillitoe (1999), does at
least give a more comprehensive idea of the scope of Sillitoe´s work: in terms of its
variety she mentions many of his stories, apart from novels and autobiography; in
terms of the length of his career, she considers his work up to 1995; and as regards
themes in his work she discusses existentialism, alienation and his depiction of
women. Such a quantity of material necessarily makes the book descriptive rather
than analytical, introductory rather than investigatory. Hanson´s bibliography is
useful, however, and hers and those of the other books mentioned reveal a dearth of
recent (from 1980) books and articles about Sillitoe. Stanley Atherton´s Alan Sillitoe:
A Critical Assessment (1979) is necessarily limited by its age, as is R.D.Vaverka´s
Commitment as Art: A Marxist Critique of A Selection of Sillitoe´s Political Fiction
(1978), although both will be quoted from. Before these books, now almost thirty
years old, one has to go back to the early 70s to find references to critical works on
Sillitoe. My most general aim, therefore, is to attempt to redress with this thesis, in
however small a way, what I consider to be the critical neglect of a writer whose work
has been unjustly ignored or undervalued.
Although he is mentioned in a number of recent books and articles, such mentions
are usually limited to his first two works, and are generally in the context of the
“Angry Young Men” phenomenon. I shall give examples of this, and also offer some
2
suggestions as to why attention still seems to be limited to his first books, in Part 2 of
this thesis. I am, of course, conscious of the possible irony in the fact that I have
chosen these two books myself as the basis for this work, whilst seemingly
complaining about the narrowness of the attention devoted to Sillitoe. There are a
number of reasons for my choice, perhaps the most obvious being the aforementioned
deficiency of criticism of almost all of Sillitoe´s later production. His first two books
are, of course, significant, but they by no means represent the only significant work in
his long and productive career. Another of my aims, then, will be to show, by quoting
from a number of his works, that although Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner2 have become somehow isolated by time
and success, they represent simply the first, rather than the only expression of ideas
which were to remain evident in Sillitoe´s work over the next forty-plus years.
The fact remains, however, that until Sillitoe no writer in English fiction had given
or had been able to give a detailed and informed picture of the English working class
living in a period of seemingly stable prosperity, and thus the two books retain the
prominence reserved for the first in the field. Though, as has been mentioned, these
first books were and still are included in the Angry Young Men/working-class fiction
groupings of the 1950s/early 1960s, there are, in my opinion, several aspects which
differentiate them from other works of the same period with which they are often
associated and, indeed, differentiate them from most others before or since. These
differences lie mainly in the areas of the depiction of the way of life of the characters,
and in their beliefs and attitudes, which is to say their ideology. These two questions,
way of life and ideology, which could be summarized in the word culture, are the
central focus of the critical approach known as cultural studies, and in using this

2 Hereafter referred to, for the sake of brevity, as SNSM and LLDR respectively. Page references are to
the 1993 edition (SNSM) and the 1962 edition (LLDR) and will be included in the main text.
3
approach as the theoretical basis for this thesis I feel that I shall be re-examining the
books3 from a new perspective, a perspective which has been missing from previous
criticism of Sillitoe in general and of these two now emblematic books in particular.
Cultural studies is or was primarily a British field, though it has taken many
theories from French, German and other writers. Though originally evolving from the
area of literature, it overlaps with other areas such as sociology, anthropology, history
or newer disciplines such as media studies. Though there may be as many definitions
of cultural studies as there are writers, Storey summarizes it thus:
The object of study in cultural studies is not culture defined in a narrow sense, as
the objects of supposed excellence (“high art”); nor in an equally narrow sense, as
a process of aesthetic, intellectual and spiritual development; but culture
understood, in Raymond Williams´s phrase, as “a particular way of life, whether of
a people, a period or a group”… Therefore, although cultural studies cannot (and
should not) be reduced to the study of popular culture, it is certainly the case that
the study of popular culture is central to the project of cultural studies (Storey
1998: xi).

In this quote Storey gives a brief summary of the meanings which the word culture
has had and continues to have, though finally settling on the one which is probably
now the most commonly-used, at least in the area of cultural studies, that of culture as
a way of life. (Williams said: “Culture is one of the two or three most complicated
words in the English language” (Williams 1988: 87).) With his emphasis on the
importance of popular culture, an integral component of any way of life, Storey
implicitly introduces the question of ideology, a theme about which he is more
explicit elsewhere: “Ideology is without doubt the central concept in cultural studies”
(Storey 1996: 4). In the first part of this thesis I shall examine these crucial terms, and
others, in order to define more exactly my approach to the works, but for the moment
suffice it to say that I shall be examining the books and films from a cultural point of

3 Though LLDR is, strictly speaking, the title story of a collection, I shall frequently refer to it as a
book, for the purposes of convenience. The abbreviation LLDR can be taken as referring to the story
rather than the book, unless otherwise stated.
4
view, and in doing so I hope to offer some new insights into these works as depictions
of, to paraphrase Williams´s phrase quoted by Storey above, a people and a group in a
specific period. Most criticism of these books, particularly at the time of publication
but also since, has tended to focus on the rebellion of the characters against the
political and economic conditions of the class in which they live. These are, of course,
important factors in their lives, and form part of the society with which they are in
conflict. However, as I hope will become clear, there is another factor, that of culture,
which is less tangible but equally if not more important; culture, in its different
meanings, is both the justification of the capitalist system which has assigned a
specific place and role to Arthur Seaton and Smith, the protagonists of the two books,
and is also the outward manifestation of their disagreement with the dominant
ideology which they should embrace if they are to become the “good” subjects which
are the hoped-for end result of the workings of this ideology.
My aim, therefore, will be to recreate from the texts and films the world which is
shown, and then examine it in order to demonstrate a number of points. Firstly, I hope
to show that there is such a phenomenon as a working class, and that this class has its
own culture. This culture is different from, and in many ways opposed to, the “high”
artistic culture of the elite, but is in no way a culture of lack, as in “lack of culture”, or
“lack of education”; it is rather a creation of the working class themselves and serves
as a positive force in their lives, which are again different from and frequently
opposed to the lives of the upper and middle classes. Furthermore, although political
and economic factors are important in the creation and definition of this culture, they
are by no means the only factors.
Ideology, as has been noted, is a central question in any discussion of culture, and I
also hope to show that the working class, rather than being simply passive consumers
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