Cigar Weekly

With 1,300 roubles in his pocket, advanced by two Russian magazine publishers for extracts of his successful early books, Alan Sillitoe set off in 1967 to drive 5,000 miles around Russia in his blue Peugeot estate. Written three decades after the trip, Sillitoe's dry travelogue is as pleasingly old-fashioned as the Soviet world he clearly relishes. Against his loner's instinct, he has an aide foisted on him by the Moscow Writer's Union. His companion for the journey, George Andjaparidze, was to remain a lifelong friend. Which is surprising, given Sillitoe's evident contempt for all things comradely: 'On hearing that "all men are brothers" my instinct is to take to the hills with a quantity of tobacco and a rifle.' Despite this, he and Andjaparidze embark on a colourful odyssey through Mother Russia with a Peugeot full of Cuban cigars. 

 

CW Editor: For some background and biographical  information here is what the British Council's Contemporary Writers gives us about Sillitoe.

 

Biography

Alan Sillitoe was born on 4 March 1928 in Nottingham, England. He left school at the age of 14 and worked at the Raleigh Bicycle Factory (1942), and as an air traffic control assistant (1945-6). From 1946 to 1949 he served as an RAF wireless operator in Malaya, and after demobilisation was hospitalised for 18 months with tuberculosis, during which time he began to write. Between 1952 and 1958 he travelled in France and Spain with the poet Ruth Fainlight, whom he married in 1959, and was encouraged to write by the poet Robert Graves whom he met in Majorca.

 

Critical Perspective

'The art of writing is to explain complications of the human soul with a simplicity that can be universally understood', Alan Sillitoe has claimed. Ever since the landmark publication of his novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning in 1958 (still in print more than forty years later), this is precisely, and prolifically, what he has done. He has been regarded as Britain's leading 'provincial realist', using his home city of Nottingham as his stage set. 'I have no difficulty in understanding people from the kind of life I knew in Nottingham, who came into my mind with their stories', he wrote when introducing The Far Side of the Street (1998). Yet his writing career began while living abroad in France and Spain on a RAF disability pension during the early 1950s, and his expatriation was significant in the ways he has been able to continually fictionalise his tough early experiences - the old industrial working class life of factories, back street housing and surrounding villages, local words and speech patterns, and above all its characters. For those seeking the full background to Sillitoe's life and development, Life Without Armour (1995) is an uncompromising autobiography. It ends around 1960, with his commercial success as a writer sealed by the filming by the late Karel Reisz of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1959), their rebellious anti-heroes memorably portrayed by Albert Finney and Tom Courtney respectively.

Sillitoe was a contemporary of a so-called 'Angry Young Men' generation of writers (though he has more in common with playwright John Osbourne or even Keith Waterhouse than Kingsley Amis) who came to prominence in the late 1950s. He has turned out to be the most durable of them all and certainly the most prolific: in addition to his many novels and short stories, he has written film scripts, a play, and a book on Nottinghamshire (with photographs by son David). Sillitoe's fine Collected Poems (1993) draws upon his eight published volumes and indicates that poetry is an essential if under-appreciated part of his writing. His wife is the poet Ruth Fainlight, and he enjoyed productive friendships with both Robert Graves and Ted Hughes. The influence of his Nottingham antecedent D. H. Lawrence in poems such as 'Lizard', and the harshness of 'The Rats', eventually gave way to philosophical concerns: 'By afternoon life's all we've got, / no more over the horizon.../ Me at the desk creating lives: / No strength to break my own' ('Work').

Sillitoe's real distinction however lies in prose fiction, as a truly masterful storyteller. He uses a deceptively simple vernacular style to get inside the feelings of his often combative or alienated characters, giving them a voice. He brings to light what has been called his 'rare sense of the mysterious inwardness of people'. This quality is evident throughout his several volumes of stories, culminating in a Collected Stories (1995), whose contents give him claims to be one of Britain's greatest - ever short story writers.