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On Saturday I'm playing in a soccer tournament for the charity, Athletes for Africa. Great cause. Sponsor me with a nominal stipend ($10?) and in a fit of appreciative affection, I will give you a hug. Or, if you don't want a hug, a fist bump. But go for the hug. I give good hugs. Hey, all you have to do is type in your credit card info at my personal fund-raising page.
http://www.myathletesforafrica.com/cshulgan
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe (#22 of 2010)—Well, I finally scrunched up my face and plunked down the $200 necessary to buy a researchers' pass at Robarts Library again. I had let mine lapse over the last year or so, probably because writing the memoir didn’t require access to all that many books. And yet I found myself missing the stacks of the University of Toronto’s brutalist concrete peacock. In the summer this city has no better place to write than the library apexes, the three-sided chambers that exist at each point of the building’s triangular layout. It’s quiet; not a lot of students are here in the summer. And there isn’t any Internet, so fewer distractions. My word count triples each day I come to Robarts versus stints at a local coffee shop.
The other advantage is the remarkable breadth of books in this library. Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is one volume I’ve long sought on Abebooks and never quite summoned the will to click “purchase.” With my research pass renewed I just extracted the novel from the shelves on Robarts’ 13th floor, home to a respectable fraction of the English-language novels printed in this century.
Sillitoe gets grouped in with the Angry Young Men of post-war British literature—a lot that also includes Kingsley Amis. Saturday Night isn’t as funny as Amis, but there is an honesty, and an earnestness, in Sillitoe’s work that makes it affecting in a manner that Amis’s never is. I think it’s the ironic detachment—Amis has it, Sillitoe doesn’t, and so even if Amis’s anti-heroes are likeable rogues, you don’t root for them as much because Amis’s Brits aren’t quite as real.
This summer I’ve been on about how current some past literature feels; particularly, Ellis’s Less Than Zero. Sillitoe’s Saturday Night also has a contemporary feel, although it was published in 1958. Or maybe it just feels contemporary because it so fits with the themes I’ve been confronting these last two years.
Arthur is a twentysomething lathe operator in the enormous bicycle factory operated in the British Midlands by Raleigh, the cycling company. He makes good wages in the post-war economic boom, and he lives for the weekends when he spends his money on clothing, on pints of lager, and especially on women, preferably married woman. When the book begins, Arthur is involved with one; he snags another semi-regular affair later on, and it’s through the risk and the action of getting together with these two women that Arthur gets the thrills that he needs to get through the working week’s drudgery.
I won’t give much more of the plot away, because the book really is worth reading. Sillitoe’s prose has an impressive realism; he spends a lot of time on the sociology of factory life. “The minute you stepped out of the factory gates you thought no more about your work. But the funniest thing was that neither did you think about work when you were standing at your machine,” Sillitoe writes. There are brilliant stretches about the dance between labour and management, and the way each side tries to game its way to emerge victorious in the battle between productivity and wages. Fascinating stuff to someone like me, who is plodding away at a novel about characters who work in Detroit’s Poletown plant.
This is a book about aging, about a man settling down into adulthood, with all the melancholy, nostalgia and hard-earned wisdom that entails. It’s timeless. I recommend it. “To win meant to survive,” Arthur muses toward the end. “To survive with some life left in you meant to win. And to live with his feet on the ground did not demand, he realized fully for the first time, that he go against his own strong grain of recklessness… but also accepting some of the sweet and agreeable things of life…”
