In 1958 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning became the first Pan paperback to sell a million copies thanks to the antics of hard drinking, womanising anti-hero Arthur Seaton. In the opening chapter to Alan Sillitoe’s raw portrait of working-class Nottingham life, Seaton quenches payday thirst by having a skinful down his local, The White Horse. By the end of the evening he’s had a drinking game with a sailor, thrown up over some fellow drinkers before exiting head first down the pub stairs.
Yet Seaton is more than just your average drunk. He’s belligerent and hedonistic, with a healthy scepticism of all forms of authority. Karel Reisz’s 1960 film would immortalise him forever as the icon of anti-establishment defiance.
Sillitoe’s novel has provided the defining image of my home town, Nottingham, be it in our labelling as the binge capital of Britain, or in recognition of the defiant streak that has manifested itself in numerous ways over the centuries.
You don’t get more unconventional than the 1766 Cheese Riots, when we expressed our dissatisfaction with rising food prices by flattening the mayor with a barrel-shaped cheese, or the 1831 Reform Riots when we burned down our very own castle. And let’s not forget that we’re home to England’s favourite potty mouth, D H Lawrence. The acquittal of Penguin Books in the Lady Chatterley trial of 1960 would pave the way for greater freedom of expression for us all. A Nottingham man made it possible for everyone to swear more freely.
Image from www.sillitoetrail.com
But Nottingham has an incredibly rich literary history that extends beyond booze and foul language. It was home to Quaker poet Mary Howitt who translated the works of Hans Christian Anderson, it’s the birthplace of Alma Reville, aka Mrs Hitchcock, and it was here that J M Barrie found the inspiration for Peter Pan and Graham Greene converted to Catholicism. More recently it has become the adopted home of Booker-shortlisted author Alison Moore and Impac winner Jon McGregor. Yet despite this, Nottingham, and the Midlands in general, are largely ignored when it comes to mapping out English literary culture.
Hopefully projects such as Dawn of the Unread and Nottingham’s UNESCO City of Literature bid will go some way to rectifying this vulgar prejudice and reminding the beautiful south and our friends in the north that culture exists in the forgotten squeezed middle that is the Midlands.
Alan Sillitoe: The Bard of Nottingham was originally commissioned for BBC Radio 3 series The Essay. It was produced by Robert Shore, author of Bang in the Middle, for a four-part series called In Praise of the Midlands. The words and video were created by our Nottingham-obsessed literature editor James Walker.
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