Thursday, October 02, 2008

Inauspicious beginning indeed ...

... The start of Alan Sillitoe.

This is telling:
The left-wing reader at Victor Gollancz who detected an imposture (“an attempt by a writer with no experience of proletarian existence to make money by inciting contempt for decent working people”) one may write off as a halfwit, but a correspondence with Tom Maschler, then editorial director of MacGibbon & Kee, reveals something of the disquiet that Arthur Seaton’s bolshie self-interest bred up in the breasts of sensitive young literary opinion-formers.
Maschler, who according to Bradford “wanted Sillitoe to rewrite the novel according to his own prognosis of what it ought to be and do”, sensed in its protagonist “a kind of Nietzschean anarchy, but not enough”. There were calls for “existential hauteur” and talk of “hopeless resignation . . . the crux of the book . . . a prevalent attitude amongst working class people”. Sillitoe ignored him.

"The novels Sillitoe produced in the 1960s and 70s are a mixed bag: eclectic, sometimes densely wrought, differing wildly in subject matter and treatment, and often mystifying to the reviewers who had praised his early work." I reviewed one of them, The Widower's Son, and if memory serves rather liked it.

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous4:10 PM

    Very strong influence on me. I loved his books when I was in my early teens. I have lost track of him since, unlike Stan Barstow, a contemporary of Sillitoe's, whose output I read consistently for many years. Also I was fond of David Storey, another author of the time and genre. Lynn Reid Banks and John Braine were others. I read them all. LRB now seems to write/publish children's books often with an Israeli theme, but have lost track of the others.

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