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 ADVERTIMENT. La consulta d’aquesta tesi queda condicionada a l’acceptació de les següents condicions d'ús: La difusió d’aquesta tesi per mitjà del servei TDX (www.tdx.cat) i a través del Dipòsit Digital de la UB (diposit.ub.edu) ha estat autoritzada pels titulars dels drets de propietat intel·lectual únicament per a usos privats emmarcats en activitats d’investigació i docència. No s’autoritza la seva reproducció amb finalitats de lucre ni la seva difusió i posada a disposició des d’un lloc aliè al servei TDX ni al Dipòsit Digital de la UB. No s’autoritza la presentació del seu contingut en una finestra o marc aliè a TDX o al Dipòsit Digital de la UB (framing). Aquesta reserva de drets afecta tant al resum de presentació de la tesi com als seus continguts. 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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.