‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’ by Alan Sillitoe

For a while, at school, we read a lot of fiction by writers who were from the north of England, like us. Looking back, it seems inspired to try to introduce teenagers to literature through writing that reflects the landscapes and voices they know best, and I still love a lot of the writers I discovered then, but I enjoy this story especially because I’ve run on and off for most of my life, and its descriptions of the physical and psychological effects of running are some of the best I’ve ever read.

The story is narrated by Smith, a teenage boy who’s been sent to Borstal for theft, but is given an unusual freedom: he’s allowed out three mornings a week so he can practise for the inter-Borstal race the institution’s governor is sure he can win. It’s cold and uncomfortable to set out at 5 am, but he finds that he can think on these runs in a way he can’t at any other time.

His clarity of thought gives him power; he clearly articulates the lack of hope and opportunity in his life and his awareness that he will never be a winner in the system valued by the governor and the kinds of people who watch the race. He does, however, understand that the governor intends to use his almost certain success in the race to bolster his own career, and as he runs, he forms a plan to get his revenge.

The narrator’s description of reaching a stage where he forgets he’s running and is barely aware of his body moving, or the landscape passing and reaches a meditative state where his thoughts are unexpectedly clear and his feelings more powerful resonates with me, and his account of the final race, where the memory of finding his father’s dead body unexpectedly resurfaces and he realises that he can’t control his thoughts while he’s running is deeply emotional, though characteristically understated.

In The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, W. H. Allen & Co., 1958. Read online here

‘The Fishing-boat Picture’ by Alan Sillitoe

Growing up in the South of England, Sillitoe’s Saturday Night, Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner shaped my views of English life further north. ‘The Fishing-boat Picture’ is more sentimental than my usual taste, with a sweet, pure sadness runs through it, but we have reached a point in this anthology where the reader might like a break from dark, cynical stories. It describes one ordinary life within huge historical events, one of my favourite things.

“[M]aybe they were the best times we ever had together in our lives. They certainly helped us through the long monotonous dead evenings of the war.”

The narrator is a postman, Harry, who is conscious of narrating: “If I started using long and complicated words that I’d searched for in the dictionary I’d use them too many times […] so I’d rather not make what I’m going to write look foolish by using dictionary words.” He recalls the previous twenty-eight years (from the 1920s to the 1950s), in which he married Kathy, she left him, she came back to visit years later, in a sorry state, and eventually she died.

“I looked up and caught her staring at the picture of a fishing boat on the wall: brown and rusty with sails half spread in a bleak sunrise, not far from the beach along which a woman walked bearing a basket of fish on her shoulder.”

This picture passed between Harry and Kathy over the years, a symbol of their relationship in a clear but never overstated way. They remained always fond of each other, but Harry was too unadventurous, Kathy too reckless, and neither managed to learn balance from the other.

Collected in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, WH Allen & Co, 1959. A video of a reading by Garry Cooper is available here

‘The Decline and Fall of Frankie Buller’ by Alan Sillitoe

The constellations were aligned on the day Rudyard Kipling was born. Not so on the birthday of Alan Sillitoe. “I suppose it could be said that I had risen from the ranks. I had become a writer of sorts, having for some indescribable reason, after the evacuation and during the later bombs, taken to reading books,” he explains. Sillitoe came out of the Nottinghamshire slums and factories, made his name with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and followed it up with The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1959). By that time he’d long escaped Nottingham and was living on an army pension in Deia, Majorca, where he came to know Robert Graves. It’s hard to imagine two more dissimilar writers – the erudite, patrician Graves, steeped in the classics, with an aristocratic heritage, and the upstart Alan Sillitoe with his stories of working class rebellion and alienation. Yet the two were friends. At the start of The Decline and Fall of Frankie Buller, a writer named Alan tells us: ‘Yesterday we visited the house of a friend who lives farther along the valley… sitting on the terrace with my eyes half closed and my head leaning back in a deckchair… I heard the sound of a cuckoo coming from the pine woods on the mountain slopes.’ Was the house Robert Graves’s? In my imagination, it is.

The cuckoo accomplished what a surgeon’s knife could not. I was plunged back deep through the years into my natural state, without books and the knowledge that I am supposed to have gained from them… I was set down once more within the kingdom of Frankie Buller.Whereupon follows a story that begins with kids playing war games and ends, in adulthood, with the sort of forced electroshock therapy that Janet Frame must have undergone. Unlike Frame, Frankie Buller hasn’t survived the treatment well. The light in his eyes has died; silently the narrator rages against ‘the conscientious-scientific-methodical probers’ who did the never-to-be-reversed damage.

I, meanwhile, wonder what happened to Alan Sillitoe. To his writing, I mean – to his talent. It’s easy to forget what a big name he was back then, in the 1960s. (Before my time, but I know). “Over 275,000 copies sold in Pan Books alone” announces my copy of The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, printed in 1972 and now as brown as a used teabag. That’s a lot. But Sillitoe had gone off the boil by then – I haven’t read anything of his that’s much good after the first run of success. My understanding is that is he moved to London and, for a time at least, lived the life of a successful author. Coming from where he came from, who can blame him? And no doubt I’m ignorant of his later life. Yet I can’t help speculating about what later works of excellence he might have been produced if he’d stayed quietly on Deia.

From The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, W.H. Allen & Co., 1959