Alan Sillitoe, the author of “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning”” and “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner”, died in 2010. I read both those books last year. Before I read them I used to say, at the risk of sounding pretentious again, that my favourite writer was Albert Camus. Sillitoe now runs him a close second. And not surprisingly, because there is a connection between the two.
Camus wrote two books about condemned characters who refused to toe the line – one fictional, one mythological. In L’Etranger the central character, Meursault, is condemned to death at his trial for murder, ultimately not because of his guilt but because he refuses to appease the jury by pretending to be who he is not. “The myth of Sisyphus” is Camus’ take on the Greek myth in which Sisyphus is condemned by the Gods to an eternity of daily pushing a boulder uphill only to watch it roll back down each evening. Camus transformed the myth into one of the most influential metaphors of 20th century literature. One that clearly meant a lot to Alan Sillitoe.
Camus” version of the myth, like much of French Existentialist thought, was born out of the German Occupation of France in the 1940s. How do you live when there’s no escape? How can you be yourself? Do you have no option but to collaborate, and so live a lie? Or is it possible to find a way of rebelling, secretly resisting . Camus, Sartre and others saw this as a model for the answer to a wider, deeper problem in modern life. How do people who are godless non-believers live in a world which judges everyone as if the only way to live is as a believer. Do you pretend to believe? No, like Meursault, you accept the consequences for living out life as you see it. In the same way Camus shows Sisiphus accepting his fate positively. Camus tells us “We must believe Sisyphus was happy”, happy in accepting who he was.
Sillitoe was a Socialist, who saw that working-class people in 1950’s Britain faced a similar problem. Their lives were controlled by an Establishment who denied them any economic freedom but expected them to live by the rules of an alien upper-class culture. New freedoms of thought were appearing but still ordinary people were expected to live by an ageing fixed moral code. Arthur Seaton in “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” is an updated Sisyphus, like many others pushing his rock uphill in the daily grind of factory life, but refusing to be cowed by authority. He lives by his own morality, shocking though it is to his peers. In fact he flaunts it in the faces of those who would judge him. Sisyphus would surely agree with his credo “Don’t let the bastards grind you down”
The hero of “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” is even closer to the Sisyphus model. Locked up in a remand prison he fills his days with the same cross-country run, but like Sisyphus he finds solace in it. He cannot physically escape but he finds freedom in his running. And he refuses to collaborate. Coerced into running competitively for the glory of the prison governor, he privately rebels and throws the race in the finishing straight. He finds freedom and happiness in running for himself.
Sisiphus was everywhere in the 1950s and 60s. He sometimes went by the name of “angry young man” or “rebel without a cause”. He was important to me without me knowing it. Camus view of Sisyphus contains most of what young people then believed in. Sillitoe was ahead of the crowd though. That’s why his books are my new second favourites