In September The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner received a Recommendation from the Book Society, the more prestigious Choice being awarded to something about the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Tony Godwin, a peppery little media genius, printed a review in the journal of the Book Society by Penelope Mortimer, which had a drawing of me on the cover by Andrew Freeth. In the same issue he published my story ‘Uncle Ernest’. A telegram of congratulations from Rosica was followed by many favourable reviews, those stories being praised which had been sent back by so many magazines (except for one in France) during the last ten years, though I was too gratified by the reception of the book to be more than a little wry about that.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was published in the United States, and Pan Books was about to issue a paperback. A Swedish firm was first in line for translation rights, and enquiries were coming in from many other countries. The original hardback was in its fourth printing, sales in the first year close to six thousand.
In Whitwell we met Betty Allsop, who was helping Peter Benenson to stand for Labour at the coming General Election. We also agreed to do something, as did a few others in the village, including our neighbour, the painter Terry Harjula. My speech for Labour at Hitchin was an embarrassing peroration that went on far too long. The local atmosphere was hostile when we tried canvassing, and though our house was plastered with Labour posters my heart wasn’t in it because Labour used the Suez campaign as something with which to berate the Conservatives.
In November, a few days after reading ‘On Saturday Afternoon’ at the BBC, Ruth and I were married at Marylebone Town Hall. In neither of our diaries is the fact recorded, which may have been because our long engagement had been going on for ten years. With Harry Fainlight, Lillie Gore, and Karel Reisz, we went to Soho afterwards for a celebration lunch.
The main change from an expatriate life to that of living in England as someone who had become accustomed to the idea that every novel he wrote would be printed without let or hindrance, had gone smoothly enough. This was due both to luck and a certain amount of industry, as well as a backlog of material from the previous few years. Apart from poems and stories, and sections for insertion in Key to the Door, little was being written that was completely new, because I was working on the film script of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Having no more anxiety about money seemed the one sure confirmation of success. Another, perhaps, was being invited to tea by the fascinatingly fragile Blanche Knopf on a visit from the United States. When I was threatened with expulsion from the restaurant for not wearing a tie, and ready to walk out at such stupid intolerance, Blanche charmed (or perhaps bribed) the waiters into letting me stay.
Harry Saltzman was having difficulty raising the 95,000 pounds needed to make the film of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Without someone as hardworking, knowledgeable and dedicated the project would have been dead-stopped. Many of the financial people, on reading the screen treatment, said that cinema-goers wanted to see comedy, adventure and musicals, and not a story set in conditions with which they were too familiar, and from which if they had any sense they would only want to escape. Nevertheless, Harry obtained the money, and assembled a team which could not help but make a good film: Johnny Dankworth wrote the music, Freddie Francis was the photographer, Seth Holt the editor, and Karel Reisz the director. Miriam Brickman chose Albert Finney, Rachel Roberts, Shirley Ann Field, Norman Rossington, Hylda Baker and Bryan Pringle as the cast.
Filming began in the spring of 1960, and in Nottingham my brother Michael, a musician in his spare time, played the part of a pub drummer, while various members of the family walked up and down as extras. The old familiar backyards and streets were used on location, and my mother enjoyed making tea for the stars as they came and went.
In January we moved to Hampstead, into the top flat of Karel Reisz’s house once occupied by his father-in-law, A.E. Coppard, who had written such excellent short stories. Working in his study, I did four Sundays of novel reviewing for Reynolds News, but did not extend the stint, because it was hard to put in the time necessary to read every one of the half dozen books for each article.
We bought a lease on a flat near Notting Hill Gate, a part of London we have always lived in except for a brief and unsuccessful experiment in Clapham. When the Aldermaston March came into London the temptation to join it was irresistible, though my views on nuclear disarmament were far from unreserved, believing that the West should give up weapons only if Soviet Russia agreed to do the same. My opinion was also different from those who wore sackcloth and ashes over the use of the atomic bomb against Japan in August 1945. The raids had been an unfortunate occurrence but, war being war, the bombs probably caused less casualties than if an invasion and bitter fighting had taken place, though at the time I hadn’t been altogether happy because the war had ended before I could get into it. Japan and Germany would certainly have used such a bomb against the Allies if they had had it, and then the guilt would have been on their side, had they been capable of feeling it. All the same, it seemed senseless now to have such weapons in the world. On starting a book the question would nag at me as to whether the outbreak of a nuclear war would prevent me from completing it.
The Aldermaston March was in any case a convivial occasion. One met people like Christopher Logue, whose play The Lily-White Boys had been so successful at the Royal Court; Michael Hastings, the novelist and playwright; Clancy Segal, whose book about a Staffordshire coalminer, Weekend in Dinlock, I had written about for the Evening Standard; and Penelope Mortimer, who had so enthusiastically reviewed The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.
Some Sunday afternoons we went to the Hampstead salon of Ella Winter and Donald Ogden Stewart, American members of the Hollywood Ten who had been persecuted in the United States during the McCarthy era. Don was witty, graceful and debonair, while Ella (who had been married to Lincoln Steffens: ‘I have seen the future, and it works!’) had eyes which gave an expression of vulnerability, of wanting to believe well of the world, and hoping it would repay such trust in kind. They were a hospitable couple, and at their magnificent old house we made contact with such writers as James Aldridge, Cedric Belfrage, Kenneth Tynan, Elaine Dundy and Sally Belfrage. One could also look at the rare collection of paintings by Paul Klee.
The General, started as a short story so long ago, was published in May. It has since gone through several hard and paperback editions, and been translated into half a dozen languages. The film rights were later bought for 30,000 dollars, and a movie made from the idea in Hollywood called Counterpoint, with Charlton Heston playing the lead.
Some reviewers of the novel suggested that I ‘get back to Nottingham’, in other words write only about what they had decided I knew best, or ought to know at all. This opinion was offensive, for I had always believed that a writer should show interest in people from any background, no matter what education they had had, or whatever profession or trade was followed. I had never intended to restrict my imagination by writing only about those who worked in factories or came from Nottingham. For reviewers and journalists to refer to me as ‘working class’ or ‘of the working class’ was as much a misconception as roping me into the ‘angry young man’ corral. It was even worse in the United States, where ex-Marxist subliterate reviewers used those dreadful words ‘prole’ and ‘proletarian’ in their articles.
I had never thought of myself as being of the so-called ‘working class’, or in any class at all. As a child the term would have been meaningless, since it was hard to imagine belonging even to my parents. In the factory I was judged by the amount of work I was expected to do, and looked on it as little more than a basic commercial transaction, and if any knowing lickspittle had in those days implied that I was a member of ‘the working class’ he would have been told in the harshest terms to find a quiet corner and indulge in sexual intercourse with himself. When I enlisted into the Royal Air Force it was to become a technician, with men from all kinds of b
ackground.
In France and Spain I had lived the life of a man with a private income, small as it was, so couldn’t have had anything to do with, or feeling for, the whole class issue, which seemed (and still does) to obsess the English, and to that extent at least I am a foreigner. When Tony Godwin said that someone like me must have strong opinions on ‘class’, he was told that I knew nothing about it, a mild response since he was likeable.
Nor did I feel any part of the ‘angry young man’ movement, if such there was, and I can’t think of any writers who did, for the label was used by journalists and others who wanted to classify those who wrote in ways they didn’t understand or care for – to define so as to defuse.
With some hesitation I allowed my name to be put on to the letter press of Arnold Wesker’s ‘Centre 42’. While respecting Wesker’s selfless efforts to educate ‘the workers’, it had always been obvious to me that anyone in England wanting to become knowledgeable or cultured, no matter what their income or status, could do so freely, and at little cost. They still can. Libraries are free, secondhand books almost given away, and a basic radio will provide familiarity with classical music.
In May news came that the weekly rate of my pension would be reduced to sixteen shillings, continuing until June 1962, when a terminal gratuity of seventy-five pounds would end it all – thirteen years after it had begun. I often wonder whether some unknown sympathizer at the Ministry of Pensions had divined my ambition, and secretly did his or her best to keep me going. However it was, such an extended period of cosseting merely for doing my duty turned into a much appreciated case of patronage.
Whether from shock at receiving news of being given the prestigious Hawthornden Prize for The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, or from the cumulative effect of too much eating in restaurants, I took to bed for the longest period since Wroughton. A lump in my stomach had the shape and consistency of a cannon-ball, which suggested in more sombre moments that the bells of hell were at last going ting-a-ling-ling for me and no longer only for others. The cannonball area was painful to touch, but Dr Green, instead of rushing me off to the Knackerstone Hospital as a terminally ill patient, suggested it might have to do with the state of my liver, and that three days would see me still among the living. Obviously, the diet in Majorca had been healthier. At the Hawthornden ceremony in St James’s Square, I met Lord David Cecil, and Victor Pritchett who presented me with a prize which Robert Graves had gained in 1934 for I, Claudius.
It’s hard to say why the first rough-cut film version of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning made me so embarrassed that I wanted to sink back into my seat and disappear. The accents seemed hopelessly out of shape, but that shouldn’t have mattered, and no doubt wouldn’t to those who had no idea where Nottingham was anyway. If the accents had been right nobody would have understood a word. Nor, in spite of the authenticity of the locations, could I think the film showed the reality imagined while writing the book. Wanting the film to be exactly the one set going in my mind’s eye during that process was clearly unreasonable.
I was also weirdly perturbed at having set off the whole complex mechanism of a movie in the first place, and though in the end my unease remains a mystery, such sensations were to come back with my next film, and return even more fully some years later when a story was dramatized for BBC television, reinforcing my belief that the novel is merely a blueprint, while the film made out of it is something different. Such reality was a peculiar form of art because it left little to the viewer’s imagination, giving nothing to do except supinely watch.
My feelings also reflected the fact that whereas I had total control of a novel, with a film there was, in spite of writing the script, not very much. I suppose that finally my embarrassment was little more than chagrin at not being all powerful, but there was some comfort in the fact that the book existed for whoever cared to read it, and in knowing that the reader of fiction becomes his or her own film-maker, setting their particular and idiosyncratic cameras moving after the first word of novel or story registers on the brain, thus completing the work of the writer. There is no substitute for that unbeatable combination.
My brother Michael was to appear before a tribunal in Manchester as a conscientious objector to military service, and I went there to help defend him. It was inconceivable to me to be a pacifist, yet I had always believed that conscription was not compatible with a free society, in so far as one could be said to exist, and that the armed forces should be manned by volunteers. In times of war this opinion might have to be modified, but even then there had to be an outlet for people who objected on the sincerest principles to being called up.
My brother didn’t have a leg to stand on, you might say, because he had served as a bandsman for two years in the Territorial Army. On the other hand he played the fact to his advantage, saying that because he had already had some experience of military life, he now knew for genuine pacifist reasons that he did not want to be called upon to serve full-time.
Fortunately, because what he and I said at the tribunal had little effect, a schoolmaster of Michael’s, who had been in a Guards regiment and won the Military Cross during the war, wrote such an eloquent endorsement of my brother’s beliefs that the appeal was successful. The only penance for Michael was that he must work out his time in the food distribution industry, which he did willingly enough as a Co-op warehouseman. Had he lost his case I might well have helped him leave the country.
The Times Literary Supplement published my essay ‘On Both Sides of the Street’, in which I wrote that while most of the population were as yet unable to recognize themselves in a novel, should they care to pick one up, this situation was changing, and writers were appearing who would counter and ultimately stifle the stereotypes issued by films, radio and television. I damned Soviet-style writing as well, for portraying working people as heroic automatons, and using them in as false a fashion as the jokey creations of popular entertainment in western countries.
Such articles took up too much of my time, being far more difficult to produce than fiction. I was more at home with myself in writing ‘The Other John Peel’ for the Manchester Guardian’s summer issue, and in July there was the pleasure of seeing my poem ‘Picture of Loot’ published in The Listener, and ‘Carthage’, commented on by Robert Graves in 1953, in the New Statesman. Advance payments for the screen rights of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner were made at the end of August by Woodfall Films – the total payment being six thousand pounds – stipulating that work was to begin on the script in the following year.
In Manchester Ruth and I stayed a night at the house of Bill Webb, the literary editor of the Guardian, and it was good to settle down to a long evening of convivial talk with someone whose views were much like our own.
From there we took the train to Ambleside in the Lake District, where a friend of Terry Harjula’s had lent us High Hall Garth for a month. This was a low stone slate-roofed house beyond Little Langdale, with calor gas for lighting and cooking, an outside toilet which hung over a cliff (very windy for the vitals) and water to be scooped by bucket from a nearby stream.
Such conditions were more primitive than those we had known at Le Nid, but the place was better furnished, and the isolation priceless. It rained every day, but was the perfect place to work in, sitting under lamps at opposite ends of a large dining table. Ruth was writing a play on which an option was later taken by a producer in New York, while I was bodging along with Key to the Door. We walked daily downhill and across Slaters Bridge to the village for supplies, calling at Birk Howe Farm for a slab of newly churned butter that shot out droplets of water when a knife was run along it.
In October came the proofs of The Rats and Other Poems, with a dedication to Ruth Fainlight. Later that month the film of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was shown for the first time, at the Warner Theatre in Leicester Square. The sight of the title in huge lit-up letters across the outside of the cinema was somehow unbelievable, on recalling t
hose months of parsimonious desolation in the house among the olive trees where the first tentative pieces of the novel had been written.
When the lights went down Ruth took my hand, emotion subdued at seeing Albert Finney as Arthur Seaton working in the Turnery Department of the Raleigh factory, as if he too had been there since he was fourteen. The spot was the same I had stood on at that age, in another world, at another time, and certainly as someone else.
Chapter Thirty-eight
After the show Karel, Ruth and I, with Albert Finney and Norman Rossington, went to a nearby steakhouse for supper, a short and gloomy affair in which we had little to talk about, none of us knowing whether or not the film would be received with any kind of understanding.
We need not have worried. Critics who didn’t like it were not able to ignore it, and the film ran to full houses all over the country. The Watch Committees of certain counties banned it, like Colonial District Commissioners who didn’t want the natives to be suborned by the idea that they had any value in the world. How anyone could object to such a film puzzled rather than annoyed me, but the publicity created by intolerance helped to fuel interest and speculation. In a short time the film recouped its relatively small budget, and Harry Saltzman received a great deal from its success, as he well deserved to do, which enabled him to buy the screen rights of all the Ian Fleming novels.
The gutter press was harassing me to know whether or not my mother would be getting a new fur coat now that I too was rich. Gutter language told them what they could do. Sick of the novel, and of everything concerning the film, we left by train and boat for Paris, to stay a week at the Martins’ place.
With Sally Belfrage and the beautiful Elaine Netboy (now the writer Kim Chernin), we set out one Sunday morning to have lunch with the script writer Mike Wilson, who had a villa near Pontoise. Elaine was bowling us along in her tiny Gogomobile, when a wheel came off. With great coolness she stopped the car, and I chased the weaving wheel along the wide and almost empty road, to bring it back and fix on so that we could continue our merry journey.