Alan Sillitoe and Ruth Fainlight

Alan Sillitoe and Ruth Fainlight

Reader, please take note of informed comment by Himan in Morrocco who offers correction of inaccuracies in my piece. Sybil

Also, thanks to Kenneth Lisenbee for correction of Paul Bowles link and for his account of Bowles and his associates at http://www.paulbowles.org/chronologytwo.html

Chronicles and Chronologies

Real life is always something less than its chronology because between the real life and its chronology is an abyss of failed visions and dreams. “We each have only one single life which is our real life, starting at the cradle and ending at the grave . . . the farther a man follows the rainbow, the harder it is for him to get back to the life which he left starving like an old dog,” Alva Perry says in Plain Pleasures, a story by Jane Bowles, writer and friend of Ruth Fainlight.

Jane Bowles is one of those who went before; writers, artists and musicians of the 1950s counter culture, who prepared the way for the 1960s vision of a transformational shift in human consciousness, a vision that would usher in an new era of peace and freedom and understanding.
In 1950 Jane and Paul Bowles are in Tangier. It is a Mecca for the Beat avant-garde. They come to write or paint or perfect their hashish habit. Some carry the vision back home to trigger the cultural shift that will rock the world, rock even dreary London, an unlikely venue for a summer of love.

According to the Paul Bowles chronology at http://www.paulbowles.org/chronologytwo.html, William S Burroughs, a novelist with an opium habit, came to Tangier in 1954. Chronologies interest me. The more remote they are from my experience, the more I like to place my own chronology alongside and wonder at the impossibility of any kind of convergence. I note that Fermanagh, in 1954, has been aroused to a state of religious fervour by Pius XII’s denomination of that year as a Marian Year. My father, a bus operator, realises there is money to be made out of religion. He buys two extra buses second hand, a Leyland Comet and a Dodge, to meet the demand for bus pilgrimages to the Knock shrine, at fifteen shillings a head, excursion fare.

Meanwhile, in Tangier, William S Burroughs’s friend Jack Kerouac comes to visit Jane and Paul Bowles. Alan Ginsberg comes and Tennessee Williams and Gregory Corso. In 1960 Fainlight and Sillitoe visit and again in 1961. Sillitoe has had his first success, the bestselling Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Before their return to England, Fainlight hires a Moroccan nanny whom she plans to share with her friend and confidante, Sylvia Plath. Having a nanny to care for their children will allow the poet mothers to enjoy long walks and talks in the English countryside. Fainlight has learned, since the birth of her son, that for a woman to write she needs not only a room of her own but hours of her own, free of the demands of family.

News of Plath’s suicide reaches Tangier before Fainlight and Sillitoe sail for England but Ruth Fainlight mentions none of these things when she visits Queen’s University Belfast, a guest, with her husband, of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry. Fainlight does not serve her life on a platter to be prodded and tasted and picked over. She has come to read her work and to speak about it. That is all.

She and Sillitoe are alike elderly and slight of figure. Sillitoe sports a waistcoat of mottled leather, a material known during the late sixties and early seventies as antique leather, a more valid appellation now than when the waistcoat was new. Fainlight wears a two-piece that may be a recent revival of sixties Quant black on white but might equally be a well-preserved original. Her manner is reserved. She sits quietly during the introductions and lets her husband begin.

I am pleased at the sixties references in their dress. Fainlight published her first poems during the post-war decades of literary counterculture. Her early work contributed to the subversive ferment in women’s writing that resulted in the feminist resurgence of the late twentieth century. Sillitoe I consider a sixties rebel, even though critics locate him in the Angry Young Man counterculture of the previous decade. I remember the glee with which my generation experienced our 1960s awakening. The film of Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning shocked and delighted. Here was overt presentation, in the public space of a cinema, of unmentionable themes. Albert Finney’s Arthur Seaton shattered the boring certainties that our elders mistook for truths. I subsequently read the book and was irked at Seaton’s insistence that love is a snare and that freedom means freedom to be drunk and use women for pleasure without commitment. Don't let the bastards grind you down, was meaningless unless it applied to both halves of the human race.

On Friday morning Fainlight and Sillitoe join The Practice of Writing 210ENG793 to share their knowledge and experience. Again, Sillitoe is first to speak. He opens with a reprise of the previous night’s performance of Morse code, removing his telegraphy key and oscillator from their case and unwrapping them from a yellow duster. Fainlight turns aside, elbow on table, finger on lips. Does she find her husband a tedious old codger or is that a gleam of tolerant amusement in her eyes? Her posture is non-committal She gives nothing away.

I realise it is all down to Ohm’s Law. Sillitoe, in his memoir, Life without Armour, says Ohm’s Law is his guide to life. Six or seven unpublished books were not enough to discourage an aspiring young writer who had learned, while being trained in radio operation by the RAF, that the current in a conductor is directly proportional to the applied voltage. Sillitoe ends his demonstration of Morse and wraps the telegraphy key and the oscillator in their yellow duster before continuing his story.

He was born into vilest poverty, son of an illiterate father and a defeated mother. However young Sillitoe was fortunate in his teachers who taught him fundamentals of reading and writing. One read aloud from the King James Bible, stopping to explain its rich poetic vocabulary. Another gave him an almanac with tantalising excerpts from literary classics, leading Sillitoe to the public library to borrow the complete books. His earliest written stories, inspired by the criminal activities of his cousins, led to his first brush with censorship. His mother found and burned his juvenilia. An obsession with maps led him into the RAF where he learned to type and was provided, on discharge, with a disability pension sufficient to support him and Fainlight, frugally, during several years of literary wanderings.

“Read your work aloud,” Sillitoe advises. “It’s a good test to discover what is superfluous. And don’t be literary.”

Then it is Fainlight’s turn. She speaks with precision and clarity. Poetry, she says, is the most basic and primitive form of literature, the expression of emotion and of madness. Best Wishes, from Ruth Fainlight, she has written on my copy of her newest collection, Moon Wheels. It will be the weekend before I can reunite the sister with the brother. Sussicran by Harry Fainlight, Ruth Fainlight’s younger brother, has occupied a space on my bookshelf for longer, possibly, than Fainlight’s Quant two-piece may have hung in her wardrobe. Harry Fainlight is only dimly remembered nowadays as the Shelley of Notting Hill Gate even though Roger McGough has declared him “the greatest lyrical and metaphysical poet of the 20th century.”

I bought my copy of Sussicran, slightly used, in a flea market off Kensington High Street, in 1967. It is flanked, on my bookshelf, by other poetry of 1967, The Mersey Sound by Henri, McGough and Patten and Love Love Love, the New Love Poetry. Three books of love poetry in 1967? My chronology notes an infatuation with a Bundoran beach lifeguard. At the end of the bathing season he goes to London to work as a swimming pool attendant. “Look me up if you’re ever in the big city,” he says. Six weeks later, I walk along Queensway towards Porchester Baths, pleasantly surprised at the friendliness of Londoners. Several passing motorists have slowed to a crawl and leaned out of car windows to ask, “Would you like a ride, love?” I decline, explaining that I am not going very far.

It is the point where my chronology almost intersects with others more interesting. Queensway is not so far from Portobello Road where Harry Fainlight was arrested for hitting a policeman and I carry his book in my antique leather shoulder bag. Sussicran, (Narcissus reversed) with silver lettering on its cover and pale blue pages inside, looks and feels like some manual of popular Marian devotion that might have found its way into the lost property drawer in my father’s office in 1954. The poems are melancholy, just the sustenance I shall need, shortly, for my aching heart.

“My mouth on the cold glass.
My breath, endlessly, filling for the dead god hall after hall with flowers.”

“Where did you two meet?” Ruth Fainlight is asked.

“Nottingham.”

In a bookshop in Nottingham, the Sillitoe and Fainlight chronologies converge. It is 1951, the year in which a Labour government goes to the country and I vote in an election for the very first time. It is also my first time to use a pen. An adult hand guides mine as I trace an inky X alongside the name of the Nationalist candidate for Fermanagh-South Tyrone. He wins the seat and Bridie, our housemaid, lets me sit up late to watch the torchlight victory parade pass beneath my bedroom window. There are countercultures and countercultures. As the parade deteriorates into a riot, Bridie explains the difference between us and them, why it is perfectly all right for a five year old to have a postal vote but tell nobody, and why it isn’t wrong for the men in the street to use their torches, tipped with burning pitch, to pin a screaming policeman against a wall.

Fainlight, questioned about translation, explains that translation of ancient classics is not actual translation from the original dead language. It is much more likely to be a poetical re-creation of a literal translation by a classicist. She believes the moral dilemmas of the classical tragedies are still with us. Antigone was performed in Paris under the Nazi occupation and today’s revival of interest in these ancient materials is probably related to the Iraq war.

Although time is running out and there is a courteous disagreement about whether it is five or ten minutes to, Fainlight goes on to emphasise that to write, one must be curious, one must saturate oneself in the natural world, one must know as much as possible.

Then, it is time. Fainlight and Sillitoe leave and I gather my notebooks, understanding that these two have kept faith with the dream. I had despaired of the visions and the dreams. By 1970 the Beatles were disbanding, Jane Bowles was confined in a lunatic asylum and, in the same week in August 1969 that Woodstock proffered its alternative utopia of orgiastic self-indulgence, Northern Ireland became a killing field. Humanity seemed not amenable to improvement.

But Sillitoe and Fainlight survive. They go on living and creating, bearing the torches of counterculture among shades of ageing. Any day now I may pick up the torch I let fall. There is nothing to stop me lighting it up again. “It’s always better to stay alongside of your life . . .life [is] not a tree with a million different blossoms on it,” Alva Perry says in the Jane Bowles story. Alongside is the way to go, stepping carefully round the abyss. A match is all it takes to light the darkness.