I was nothing except glad, in spite of all that, on entering a Lyons Café to have tea, before taking the train back to Brighton and telling them the news.
Chapter Thirty-six
Towards the end of April, staying again at Ima Bayliss’s place in Dulwich, I cashed a money order from the Ministry of Pensions for thirty-seven pounds, and a cheque for ninety pounds came from Rosica as an advance on my novel. In the London of that time it might have been possible to live on ten pounds a week, but such resources as the above would not carry us as far as the middle of October, when the next ninety pounds was due on publication. We moved to a room-and-kitchen on the top floor of a house in Camden Square for two pounds seven and six a week, and Ruth worked as an interviewer with the British Market Research Bureau, thus becoming our mainstay until the end of the year. In this period she had two more poems taken by the Hudson Review.
With the bed pushed against a wall, a table for us to write and eat at, and a small kitchen across the landing, such living space was rather a decline after the flats and houses in Spain. We managed because we could afford nothing better, but it was important for us to believe that we lived in such a way from choice, and could always go back to the more ample life in Majorca.
For want of something to do in my unsettled state I continued the story of Colin Smith, the long distance runner, telling what happened to him after he came out of Borstal. The work grew to nearly a hundred pages, but, the quality being indifferent, it was put aside. I revised eight of my best Nottingham stories and, with The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner in the lead, typed them into a book-length manuscript and posted it in July to Rosica with the suggestion that it be shown to Jeffrey Simmons as a possible second book after Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. This would give time for the final revisions to be made on The General, which I would present as my third book.
Poems were returned from the Times Literary Supplement, The Listener, and the BBC, though the story ‘Big John and the Stars’ appeared in a children’s anthology, for a fee of five pounds. I sent The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner story to the London Magazine, though being rather long I didn’t believe it had much of a chance, and in any case it came speedily back with a plain rejection slip. I was anxious to have it published, anywhere, since it seemed based on such a rare idea that I was afraid someone else would write as similar a story as made little difference, and get it into print before mine. I occasionally woke in a paranoid sweat after reading exactly the same story in my dreams, with the name of a writer impossible to decipher on the title page, an anxiety which persisted, though with diminishing force, until it was published the following year.
At the end of June the proofs of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning were ready at Essex Street, and I couldn’t resist fetching them myself. I took the large envelope back to the bed-sitting room and spread out the long sheets to see a book of mine in print for the first time. No editing, at my request, had been done (though none had been suggested) so there were only a few errors to correct. Mulling over such paper fresh from the printer gave me the impression that my novel was better than I had thought. Print endowed it with a glow that typescript could not. The pleasure of seeing my writing at this stage has never left me, and with every fresh work I recall the bemused hours going through the proofs of my first novel.
Clifford Bayliss provided tickets for a performance of The Trojans at Covent Garden, the five-hour operatic spectacular by Berlioz, which I don’t think has been done since at that length. I was beginning to enjoy London, and during this strange period of waiting worked on ‘The Rats and Other Poems’, also sketching out the shape of what was to become my third published novel Key to the Door.
August was spent at the cottage of a schoolmistress friend, Jo Wheeler, in the village of Whitwell, Hertfordshire. The long evenings were warm and mellow, and we passed them listening to Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A on a small wind-up gramophone, as the gloaming slowly deepened over the fields outside the small windows of the living room.
‘The Decline and Fall of Frankie Buller’ was refused by the New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly, but advertisements were beginning to appear for my novel, and I was interviewed for Books and Bookmen by the editor Bill Smith, who had been a librarian. In September, six complimentary copies of the novel came in the post, one being sent immediately to Ruth’s parents, and most of the rest to Nottingham. An appointment was made for me to be interviewed by David Holloway for the News Chronicle.
The Books and Bookmen article, out at the end of September, was headlined ‘Working Class Novelist’, a rather crass label, because I had always strongly objected to any sort of categorization. The irritation was tempered however by the hope that the piece might help in making the book known, and on the whole Bill Smith had written fairly. Mention was made of a television interview, and such general interest in the air led me to suppose that even if the novel wasn’t a commercial success it could not help but be noticed. As a beginner I assumed that this was a normal atmosphere on the publication of a book, though people at W. H. Allen may have wondered at my phlegmatic attitude.
We spent Saturday night being royally entertained by Rosica at her flat, amusing her by our ‘hats off!’ clowning, and joking about the old notion of erecting barbed wire around the house to keep off biographers. On Sunday morning of 13th October, the day before publication, I walked down the square and crossed the street after breakfast to get the newspapers.
As well as advertisements for the book there was a second-place review by John Wain in the Observer, and a dozen lines in the Sunday Times. While not exactly splash coverage, though it was pleasing to get what there was, more substantial notices came out in the following couple of weeks, in the Daily Telegraph, the News Chronicle, Reynolds News by Brian Glanville, and the Daily Express by Robert Pitman, not to mention the Oxford Mail and, of course, the Nottingham newspapers, as well as many others from throughout the kingdom. Often they were short, and took second or third place in the ‘posh papers’, one writer in a communist journal blathering that Arthur Seaton and such like were ‘the scum of the earth’, which infelicitous designation caused me to observe that I myself would have been the scum of the earth had such a party hack seen Arthur in any better light.
The understanding of such people had never been expected, yet Victor Hugo surely showed great wisdom when he wrote:
Are the duties of the historians of hearts and souls inferior to those of the historians of external facts? Can we believe that Dante has less to say than Machiavelli? Is the lower part of civilization, because it is deeper and more gloomy, less important than the upper? Do we know the mountain thoroughly if we do not know the caverns?
An interesting but perhaps unconsidered remark came from a reviewer in a London evening tabloid called the Star: ‘No reader is going to be deceived into thinking that Arthur Seaton is in any way typical of factory workers.’ This writer may have been as experienced in the matter as I was, perhaps more so, because my hero (or anti-hero, as some called him) had been made as untypical as possible in order to show someone different to all the rest, bearing in mind that ‘typical’ is not what I wanted Arthur Seaton to appear, as much as an individual in some way recognizable by those who worked and lived in similar conditions. Maurice Richardson’s perspicacity in the New Statesman amused me most: ‘The style is effectively clear and blunt, as if it had been written with a carpenter’s pencil on wallpaper. This is all the more of a tour de force as Mr Sillitoe is plainly highly educated.’