Saturday night and sunday morning

ALAN SILLITOE “SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING” ANALYSIS
Contents:
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I. Alan Sillitoe.
1.1. Biography
1.2. Novels
CHAPTER II. Saturday night and sunday morning.
2.1.
2.2.
CONCLUSION
REFERENCE

Alan Sillitoe (4 March 1928 – 25 April 2010) was an English writer and one of the so-called "angry young men" of the 1950s. He disliked the label, as did most of the other writers to whom it was applied. He is best known for his debut novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and his early short story "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner", both of which were adapted into films.

Sillitoe was born in Nottingham to working-class parents, Christopher Sillitoe and Sabina (née Burton). Like Arthur Seaton, the anti-hero of his first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, his father worked at the Raleigh Bicycle Company's factory in the town. His father was illiterate, violent, and unsteady with his jobs, and the family was often on the brink of starvation.
Sillitoe left school at the age of 14, having failed the entrance examination to grammar school. He worked at the Raleigh factory for the next four years, spending his free time reading prodigiously and being a "serial lover of local girls". He joined the Air Training Corps in 1942, then the Royal Air Force, albeit too late to serve in the Second World War. He served as a wireless operator in Malaya during the Emergency. After returning to Britain he was planning to enlist in the Royal Canadian Air Force when it was discovered that he had tuberculosis. He spent 16 months in an RAF hospital.
Pensioned off at the age of 21 on 45 shillings (£2.25) a week, he lived in France and Spain for seven years in an attempt to recover. In 1955, while living in Mallorca with the American poet Ruth Fainlight, whom he married in 1959,[8] and in contact with the poet Robert Graves, Sillitoe started work on Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which was published in 1958. Influenced in part by the stripped-down prose of Ernest Hemingway, the book conveys the attitudes and situation of a young factory worker faced with the inevitable end of his youthful philandering. As with John Osborne's Look Back in Anger and John Braine's Room at the Top, the novel's real subject was the disillusionment of post-war Britain and the lack of opportunities for the working class. It was adapted as a film by Karel Reisz in 1960, with Albert Finney as Arthur Seaton; the screenplay was written by Sillitoe.
Sillitoe's story The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, which concerns the rebellion of a borstal boy with a talent for running, won the Hawthornden Prize in 1959. It was also adapted into a film, in 1962, directed by Tony Richardson and starring Tom Courtenay. Sillitoe again wrote the screenplay.
With Fainlight he had a child, David. They later adopted another, Susan. Sillitoe lived at various times in Kent, London and Montpellier. In London he was friendly with the bookseller Bernard Stone (who had been born in Nottingham a few years before Sillitoe) and became one of the bohemian crowd that congregated at Stone's Turret Bookshop on Kensington Church Walk.
In the 1960s Sillitoe was celebrated in the Soviet Union as a spokesman for the "oppressed worker" in the West. Invited to tour the country, he visited several times in the 1960s and in 1968 he was asked to address the Congress of Soviet Writers' Unions, where he denounced Soviet human rights abuses, many of which he had witnessed.
In 1990 Sillitoe was awarded an honorary degree by Nottingham Polytechnic, now Nottingham Trent University. The city's older Russell Group university, the University of Nottingham, also awarded him an honorary D.Litt. in 1994. In 2006 his best-known play was staged at the university's Lakeside Arts theatre in an in-house production.
Sillitoe wrote many novels and several volumes of poems. His autobiography, Life Without Armour, which was critically acclaimed on publication in 1995, offers a view of his squalid childhood. In an interview Sillitoe claimed that "A writer, if he manages to earn a living at what he's doing, even if it's a very poor living, acquires some of the attributes of the old-fashioned gentleman (if I can be so silly)."
Gadfly in Russia, an account of his travels in Russia spanning 40 years, was published in 2007. In 2008 London Books republished A Start in Life in its London Classics series to mark the author's 80th birthday. Sillitoe appeared on Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4 on 25 January 2009.
Sillitoe's long-held desire for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning to be remade for a contemporary filmgoing audience was never achieved, despite strong efforts. Danny Brocklehurst was to adapt the book and Sillitoe gave his blessing to the project, but Tony Richardson's estate and Woodfall Films prevented it from going ahead. Sillitoe was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1997.
There are but few and scattered examples of autobiographical literature in antiquity and the Middle Ages. In the 2nd century BCE the Chinese classical historian Sima Qian included a brief account of himself in the Shiji (“Historical Records”). It may be stretching a point to include, from the 1st century BCE, the letters of Cicero (or, in the early Christian era, the letters of Saint Paul), and Julius Caesar’s Commentaries tell little about Caesar, though they present a masterly picture of the conquest of Gaul and the operations of the Roman military machine at its most efficient. But Saint Augustine’s Confessions, written about 400 CE, stands out as unique: though Augustine put Christianity at the centre of his narrative and considered his description of his own life to be merely incidental, he produced a powerful personal account, stretching from youth to adulthood, of his religious conversion.

Confessions has much in common with what came to be known as autobiography in its modern, Western sense, which can be considered to have emerged in Europe during the Renaissance, in the 15th century. One of the first examples was produced in England by Margery Kempe, a religious mystic of Norfolk. In her old age Kempe dictated an account of her bustling, far-faring life, which, however concerned with religious experience, reveals her personality. One of the first full-scale formal autobiographies was written a generation later by a celebrated humanist publicist of the age, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, after he was elevated to the papacy, in 1458, as Pius II. In the first book of his autobiography—misleadingly named Commentarii, in evident imitation of Caesar—Pius II traces his career up to becoming pope; the succeeding 11 books (and a fragment of a 12th, which breaks off a few months before his death in 1464) present a panorama of the age.

The autobiography of the Italian physician and astrologer Gironimo Cardano and the adventures of the goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini in Italy of the 16th century; the uninhibited autobiography of the English historian and diplomat Lord Herbert of Cherbury, in the early 17th; and Colley Cibber’s Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, Comedian in the early 18th—these are representative examples of biographical literature from the Renaissance to the Age of Enlightenment. The latter period itself produced three works that are especially notable for their very different reflections of the spirit of the times as well as of the personalities of their authors: the urbane autobiography of Edward Gibbon, the great historian; the plainspoken, vigorous success story of an American who possessed all talents, Benjamin Franklin; and the introspection of a revolutionary Swiss-born political and social theorist, the Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau—the latter leading to two autobiographical explorations in poetry during the Romantic period in England, William Wordsworth’s Prelude and Lord Byron’s Childe Harold, cantos III and IV.

An autobiography may be placed into one of four very broad types: thematic, religious, intellectual, and fictionalized. The first grouping includes books with such diverse purposes as The Americanization of Edward Bok (1920) and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1925, 1927). Religious autobiography claims a number of great works, ranging from Augustine and Kempe to the autobiographical chapters of Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and John Henry Cardinal Newman’s Apologia in the 19th century. That century and the early 20th saw the creation of several intellectual autobiographies, including the severely analytical Autobiography of the philosopher John Stuart Mill and The Education of Henry Adams. Finally, somewhat analogous to the novel as biography is the autobiography thinly disguised as, or transformed into, the novel. This group includes such works as Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh (1903), James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), George Santayana’s The Last Puritan (1935), and the novels of Thomas Wolfe. Yet in all of these works can be detected elements of all four types; the most outstanding autobiographies often ride roughshod over these distinctions.
Angry Young Men, various British novelists and playwrights who emerged in the 1950s and expressed scorn and disaffection with the established sociopolitical order of their country. Their impatience and resentment were especially aroused by what they perceived as the hypocrisy and mediocrity of the upper and middle classes.
The Angry Young Men were a new breed of intellectuals who were mostly of working class or of lower middle-class origin. Some had been educated at the postwar red-brick universities at the state’s expense, though a few were from Oxford. They shared an outspoken irreverence for the British class system, its traditional network of pedigreed families, and the elitist Oxford and Cambridge universities. They showed an equally uninhibited disdain for the drabness of the postwar welfare state, and their writings frequently expressed raw anger and frustration as the postwar reforms failed to meet exalted aspirations for genuine change.
The trend that was evident in John Wain’s novel Hurry on Down (1953) and in Lucky Jim (1954) by Kingsley Amis was crystallized in 1956 in the play Look Back in Anger, which became the representative work of the movement. When the Royal Court Theatre’s press agent described the play’s 26-year-old author John Osborne as an “angry young man,” the name was extended to all his contemporaries who expressed rage at the persistence of class distinctions, pride in their lower-class mannerisms, and dislike for anything highbrow or “phoney.” When Sir Laurence Olivier played the leading role in Osborne’s second play, The Entertainer (1957), the Angry Young Men were acknowledged as the dominant literary force of the decade.
Their novels and plays typically feature a rootless, lower-middle or working-class male protagonist who views society with scorn and sardonic humour and may have conflicts with authority but who is nevertheless preoccupied with the quest for upward mobility.
Among the other writers embraced in the term are the novelists John Braine (Room at the Top, 1957) and Alan Sillitoe (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1958) and the playwrights Bernard Kops (The Hamlet of Stepney Green, 1956) and Arnold Wesker (Chicken Soup with Barley, 1958). Like that of the Beat movement in the United States, the impetus of the Angry Young Men was exhausted in the early 1960s.

Alan Sillitoe’s first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, first published in 1958 rather burst into that territory which came to be described, in literature and especially in theatre, as that of ‘The Angry Young Man’ Playwrights such as Wesker and Osborne were writing about working class experience in a way which celebrated and showed the vigour of a kind of angry, cynical awareness of class politics, and how the establishment worked to grind down the working class.

Sillitoe himself, who died in 2010, had left school at 14, and failed to get into a grammar school – despite the fact that as the adult man would prove, he was fiercely intelligent, with a ferociously enquiring mind, and deeply thinking.
Saturday Night and Sunday morning is the story of a deeply flawed, often unlikeable, mendacious young man of extreme charm and more self-reflective depth than his heavily boozing, serially philandering and enjoying of fisticuffs would indicate. Arthur Seaton, 21, works in a bicycle factory (as did Sillitoe himself, aged 14, and his father before him). He both hates and despises the daily grind of the factory, and prides himself on his manual skills – and the ability to outwit the bosses and the time-and-motion-study piecework rate organisers. He has a good friendship with an older man working in the same factory. Nonetheless despite the odd twinge of guilt, his friendship does not prevent him from having a passionate affair with his colleague’s wife. Nor does that passionate affair prevent him from simultaneously embarking on another affair with a second married woman, and risking the safety and reputation of the two women, who know each other, and have a theoretical loyalty to each other. The women, Seaton, and the husbands all exist within a close knit community. To add to the complexity, Seaton also plays around with a young unmarried woman hoping to catch a husband. As well as charm, Arthur has that much to be admired prospect – at this point, a steady job, and his skills at the lathe are netting good results, on piecework.
Womanising, heavy drinking and a keen sense for sharp dressing fashion are Arthur’s passions. Sillitoe shows that his antihero, despite the fact that he prefers to settle disagreements with his fists and workman’s boots, has a sharply analytic mind. In fact, he muses in an almost existential way on what the point of it all is. Arthur not only loves danger, and excitement, and womanising, but there is a side to him which has passion for something more quiet – days spent solo, fishing by the riverside: a pastime naturally giving the space for reflection.
On one level this book can be said to chart a journey from wild rebellion towards an acceptance of, in the end, accommodating and settling into accepting family life, marriage and parenting.
At times, in this first novel, Sillitoe does labour some of his imagery a little overmuch – fishing, swimming with and against the stream etc. are metaphors which hold a multiplicity of possibilities, and I did feel that by his second outing, the wonderful novella The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, he was trusting his reader, and himself, much more, and paring back.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning became of course an iconic Karel Reisz film, launching the bruised, powerfully sexual young Albert Finney on his road to stardom, a perfect casting for Arthur Seaton. Although Sillitoe himself wrote the screen adaptation for that 1960 film, it is perfectly obvious, from the quality of the writing in the novel, that he did not write the book FOR the film, with ‘this would make a brilliant (and money-earning) film, as his objective. Something I sadly feel is rather different now – there are writers (and many are not very good!) clearly writing with the idea of film, video and TV as their springboard, so that narrative, and often implausible narrative at that, becomes the driver, and operatic desire to shock the tool.
Sillitoe has character, multifaceted, at the heart of his novel. Arthur Seaton is powerfully and deeply realised, and thus becomes an archetype. Writing the archetype, and not the individual is what makes for two-dimensional writing, but if the writer, as Sillitoe does, makes the individual both unique and reflective of his cultural time and place, he will become fully rounded, as the complexity of his humanity is explored
Finney’s portrayal has all the dark, brooding quality of Seaton, Sillitoe’s book, whilst that is very powerfully there, also has savage humour, a cruel celebration of some kind of ability to laugh and self-mock. Perhaps there was a desire to launch Finney as Britain’s answer to Brando. Reading the book I have been more aware of Arthur’s mocking, self mocking laughter – less obviously bitter, more biting and mordant in how the writer shapes thingsSillitoe 2009
I received this as a review copy from the excellent digital publishing company Open Road Integrated Media. My version included an afterword, with photographs of Sillitoe, by the writer Ruth Fainlight. Fainlight and Sillitoe were married for 41 years.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is the first novel by British author Alan Sillitoe and won the Author's Club First Novel Award.
It was adapted by Sillitoe into a 1960 film starring Albert Finney, directed by Karel Reisz, and in 1964 was adapted by David Brett as a play for the Nottingham Playhouse, with Ian McKellen playing one of his first leading roles.
Sillitoe later wrote three further parts to the Seatons' story, Key to the Door (1961), The Open Door (1989) and Birthday (2001).
The novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is split into two unequal parts: the bulk of the book, Saturday Night, and the much smaller second part, Sunday Morning.
Saturday Night
Saturday Night begins in a working man's club in Nottingham. Arthur Seaton is 22 years old, and enjoying a night out with Brenda, the wife of a colleague at work. Challenged to a drinking contest, Arthur defeats "Loudmouth" before falling down the stairs drunk. Brenda takes him home with her and they spend the night together. Arthur enjoys breakfast with Brenda before her husband Jack gets home from a weekend at the races.
Arthur works at a lathe at a bicycle factory with his friend Jack. Arthur keeps his mind occupied during the mundane and repetitive work through a mental collage of imagined fantasies, and memories of the past. He earns a good wage of 14 pounds a week, and Robboe, his superior, fears he may get in trouble for letting Arthur earn so much. Soon Arthur hears the news that Jack has been switched to nights, which pleases Arthur as he can now spend more time with Jack's wife. At the same time, Arthur carries on with Brenda's sister Winnie.
During another night out at the pub, Arthur meets Doreen, a young unmarried girl with whom he begins a relatively innocent courtship — all the while keeping Brenda and Winnie a secret. However, although Jack is oblivious to his wife's infidelity, Winnie's husband Bill catches on — and Arthur's actions catch up with him when Bill and an accomplice jump Arthur one night, leaving him beaten and bed-ridden for days.
Sunday Morning
Sunday Morning follows the course of events after Arthur's assault. When Doreen comes to check up on him, Arthur finally comes clean about his affairs with Brenda and Winnie. Doreen stays in a relationship with Arthur despite his dishonesty; Brenda and Winnie disappear from the story. By the end of the novel, Arthur and Doreen have made plans to marry.
Miranda Grey in John Fowles's The Collector (1963) found the book and its protagonist Arthur Seaton "disgusting".
English singer Morrissey was heavily influenced by the book and its 1960 film adaptation. The runout groove on the B-side of vinyl copies of The Smiths' 1986 album The Queen Is Dead feature the line "Them was rotten days" said by Aunt Ada (Hylda Baker) in the film. Also the line said by Doreen before Arthur takes her to the fair "I want to go where there's life and there's people" inspired the song "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out" on the same album ("I want to see people and I want to see life").
The title of Arctic Monkeys' debut album, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, is a direct quote from the book, and many of its songs were inspired by the protagonist, Arthur. Also the art design of the album was influenced by the realist images of British working-class neighbourhoods and night life in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.[5]
During a 2011 BBC interview on Desert Island Discs, the comedian Frank Skinner stated that Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was the first book he read at the age of 21, when he was enrolled into Birmingham Polytechnic that year as an undergraduate.
In 2013 BBC Radio 4 presented a two-part dramatic adaptation (by Robert Rigby) of the novel.
As a young man in the 1960s it was the cinema and not the theatre that was important, with the small family business I worked for in Stratford still holding to the old tradition of half day closing on Thursdays which, for me, was a golden opportuning to indulge in the splendid renaissance of British cinema then exploding onto British cinema screens.
It had all started in the 1950s with such World War Two epics as The Cruel Sea (1953) The Dam Busters (1955), followed by the steamy Room at the Top (1959), starring Laurence Harvey and the very sensuous Simone Siqnoret, all of which created artistic room for the 1960 rule breaking Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, directed by Karel Reisz, and starring Albert Finney. This was a film to cheer silently, especially Finney’s Arthur Seaton character, a young man who broke all the rules, shot his elderly and continually moaning neighbour in the backside with his air rifle, drank heavily and flirted outrageously with all the girls he came into contact with, at the same time having an affair with his work mate’s wife, making her pregnant in the process. This was Room at the Top on six pints of bitter a night.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was a raw working class fingers up at the establishment film with huge, raw power, yet with a dignity that had come through the historical literary sieve of D. H. Lawrence by another Nottingham writer, Alan Sillitoe, who wrote the original novel and the screenplay. It was the start of the so-called kitchen-sink drama (coined by someone who’d probably never been near a kitchen-sink), and I loved it, every inch of it. In 1960 it was considered, by Stratford Town Council, to be unsuitable for the delicate sensibilities of the inhabitants of Shakespeare’s town.
That decision of the council was eventually overruled, and the Thursday afternoon I saw that film changed my rather restricted outlook on life, making the many Arthur Seatons I hadn’t realised were Arthur Seatons into real young men who now acted more like Arthur Seaton than they ever had before, and, like Albert Finney’s Arthur Seaton, ending up getting married to a ‘nice’ girl and buying a new semi-detached house on a new estate built on what had probably once been a less than flourishing market garden, or a derelict factory site.
By the end of the film, for me, something had happened: a new reality had popped up, a different point of view that had to be thought about. Something to mull over as I cycled the five miles back home to my mother’s cooking and her dislike of Arthur Seaton types. It was the beginning of an education, with each film an illustrated lecture on life.
Stratford’s ‘Picture House’ had been built in 1932, the same year as Elisabeth Scott’s New Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, replacing the original pre-First World War cinema, a building that had been commandeered to stage Shakespeare after the old Memorial Theatre burned down in 1926. The new cinema (my parents favourite haunt in the late 1930s) was a beautiful Art Deco building that was not unlike the new theatre, with an extraordinary interior that, by the 1960s, was still in good shape and well looked after, with a manager who, even in the afternoons, wore a dinner jacket.
The matinee started at 2.15, but beforehand, as I took my seat in the Dress Circle, the music of Henry Mancini’s orchestra and chorus, would be playing over the sound system, always fading down on ‘Moon River’ for the ads (included local businesses, which, in Stratford’s case was a dreadful greasy spoon caf that described itself as a candle lit romantic restaurant) and the trailers, which gave me, and maybe the three other people in the audience, the chance to settle down ready for the second feature, which was invariably a hour long crime drama, some of them rather good, or a travelogue, and then a short newsreel before lights up, more Mancini, and the usherettes selling ice creams and ‘Kia Ora’ drinks: irresistible. Then, at last, the main feature.
In early 1963 came This Sporting Life, also directed by Karel Reisz, starring Richard Harris and Rachel Roberts: a dark film of sexual passion, and the hard, somewhat crooked world of professional Rugby, set in Yorkshire, with a screenplay by the extraordinary David Storey (brought up in the school of D.H. Lawrence), based on his own novel. It was another film of Lawrentian sexual tension and pent-up anger. What it lacked was humour, something that has not served the film well over the years.
By the end of 1963 I’d seen so many good British films, not least The Servant, Tom Jones, Billy Liar and The Running Man I felt I had gone through something of an emotional and intellectual stimulus that was to continue to end of the decade as film after film came along, not least Zulu which was hugely influential, then A Kind of Loving, The Longest Day, Georgy Girl, Billy Liar, The Ipcress File, From Russia with Love, Dr Strangelove, A Taste of Honey, Lindsey Anderson’s remarkable If, and perhaps above all, David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, with the latter leaving an indelible mark on me, not just about the character of T. E. Lawrence and his times, but also about the social and political life we were living through in the Britain of the late 1950s and the early1960s. Peter O’Toole’s T.E. Lawrence was another Arthur Seaton.
There has never been another period in British cinema so important as the 1960s: there have been individual films, but never such a concentrated period of such excellent, and influential work.
Interestingly, David Lean had Finney down as an early choice to play Lawrence of Arabia.