Stanley Middleton's Booker Prize finds a new home in Nottingham

So, Arthur thumbed the concordances, trudged to the library, gave a strict account to his family on the way of scholarship...the memory whirled like the dust from the car wheels, settling gently after a time.

So we might read midway through Stanley Middleton’s Holiday, which won the Booker Prize in 1974 - the protagonist Fisher is visualising his father’s halting attempt to deliver a lecture. The speakers today are more assured - fifty years after Middleton’s Booker win we’re gathered together as listeners in Nottingham’s Central Library, to remember the man and the writer, and to honour the new building’s contribution to our public life by introducing the long-term display of the Booker statuette itself. 

‘Perhaps, to mark the occasion,’ says Nottingham writer Jon McGregor to me - himself a Booker nominee - ‘we could finally reopen the Sherwood library that Middleton so regularly frequented?’ 

These kinds of events can cause sober reflection: we live within eroding public space - the dissolution of the libraries, perhaps. Stanley Middleton, the author who sketched the contours of Nottingham life, might never have written his 45 books without a regular Saturday morning trip to the one nearby. On today’s evidence, we can count the new Central Library, at least, as a place still churning with life. The event is cordoned off from the practicalities of public library existence - the fire extinguishers, the exhibition on Byron, the Xerox machine. Above the formality, there is brightness and chatter.

The celebration is well-attended, because Middleton’s career, and his Booker win, are so worth recalling even half a century later. In 1974 the prize had only been awarded five times previously, and it was to be a sixth instalment accompanied by a frisson of controversy - Elizabeth Jane Howard, one of three judges that year, had lobbied for her husband Kingsley Amis to win. Instead, unable to decide, the Booker was split for the first time - between Nadine Gordimer, who would go on to win a Nobel Prize, and Middleton, an unassuming English teacher from provincial Nottingham who played double bass with his school orchestra. The novel has influenced another Booker-nominated writer from our city, too: Alison Moore recommended it as an unlikely beach read in a recent article for the Guardian, writing: Middleton’s voice 'is still in my ear.’

David Belbin, a well-regarded crime writer, takes the lead role in remembering Middleton and his work, today. He was Stanley’s good friend for many years and, as the man who spearheaded the application for Nottingham to become a UNESCO City of Literature, something of a missionary when it comes to making sure we remain deservedly on the map.

Belbin talks to us with candour. He met Middleton in 1996, having worked together on a project which brought crime and literary writers together - as he speaks, he borrows the author’s deep voice to recall their first conversation on the phone: ‘Middleton here’. It would be hard to listen and not feel some vicarious admiration: Middleton was diligent in his craft, writing almost a book a year between 1958 and 1987. And all speakers make a point of his humility, to a degree that you suspect could have put the brakes on his passing into public consciousness. To some extent he fortified himself against the onrush of the technology which happened during his career - the word processor was complete anathema to Stanley, says Belbin. Writing longhand was a slow method for quick work.

Those who know him best think that his teaching others was just as much a vocation: I join a conversation afterwards where Chris Corr, a former pupil of Middleton’s, remembers Mr. Middleton writing a play called The Captain from Nottingham for High Pavement college, which was later staged at the Playhouse. On other occasions Stanley would appear in the school orchestra, conspicuously playing the double bass - this habit encouraged his wife Margaret to upgrade the family car, for extra boot space, adds his daughter. That’s Penny Lymn Rose, who has kindly chosen to present the award today. 

Stanley played piano at home, and learned Latin, Welsh and Mandarin - the latter two, certainly, languages which must have appealed to his sense of melody. Indeed his second novel Harris’s Requiem - perhaps his own favourite - deals with the suppressed joys and frustrations of a classical musician within a provincial town. Like his Nottingham predecessor D.H. Lawrence, Middleton had an eye for painting, and some of these became covers for his novels. ‘A Renaissance man’, offers Chris’ wife Anne, and you’d be hard pressed to disagree.

At the prize-giving in 1974, Booker chair Ion Trewin had said that Middleton’s Holiday belonged to ‘an unfashionable genre – the provincial English novel’, dusting it with faint praise. And Stanley and Margaret were indeed unshowy people, proud among their garden and their family. David Belbin tells us that they were stopped at the British Museum the day after winning - the guard found the trophy suspicious and gave it a cursory once-over.

The author refused an OBE in 1979, believing he was working a job like any other. And might he have become more garlanded had he moved London and honed the art of self-promotion, rather than choosing to run his college’s Art Appreciation society? Maybe - but perhaps that form of ambition creates only one sort of writer. ‘He never wrote to get honours or fame,’ says daughter Penny, ‘he wrote because it was inside him and he wanted to do it.’

Most of the world is province, and most stories come from the thick vignette away from the brightest lights of cultural power. The voices in these places have another richness, and Nottingham’s finest writers always work with some contrary motion, from Byron to Lawrence; and Sillitoe’s long distance runner, the outlaw ‘sick of in-laws with lily-white hands’; and in Middleton’s books, with their own sense of quiet, wry antagonism. 

Middleton’s ambition was profound, but sprung from its own source, channelled towards his friends and family, among whom he is remembered only with great warmth - and directly into his body of writing, which in its observation and dry pathos stands above the need for embellishment. His Booker prize, won on a whim of last minute decision, is deserved as much now as it was half a century ago. And, for now at least, it stands in Nottingham Central Library, a victory for a wayward province.

You can buy Stanley Middleton's Holiday here. 

Follow the links here to find out about works by Jon McGregor, David Belbin and Alison Moore.