BOOKS:Words that go the distance

LIFE WITHOUT ARMOUR: An Autobiography by Alan Sillitoe, HarperCollins pounds 18.99 COLLECTED STORIES of Alan Sillitoe Flamingo pounds 16.99

THERE is a commonplace, frequently misplaced, which asserts that, in later life, rebels embrace the values against which they rebelled. It would be a pity if Alan Sillitoe's autobiography were to be interpreted in this light, for it would perpetuate the misapprehensions that have attached to his fame (and so become confused with his character) ever since the publication of his two tremendous early successes, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. Sillitoe's life, read attentively, tells a more interesting story. Far from being a workshy slob dedicated to ignorance, he is a driven Stoic whose life has been given to work, a self-made man in the non-material sense. Responding to critics who always wanted him to produce more of the same, Sillitoe points out that he had never been the writer that they wanted:

"Some reviewers ... suggested that I 'get back to Nottingham', in other words write only about what they had decided I knew best, or ought to know at all. This opinion was offensive, for I had always believed that a writer should show interest in people from any background, no matter what education they had had, or whatever profession or trade was followed. I had never intended to restrict my imagination by writing only about those who worked in factories or came from Nottingham. For reviewers and journalists to refer to me as 'working class' or 'of the working class' was as much a misconception as roping me into the 'angry young man' corral. It was even worse in the United States, where ex-Marxist sub-literate reviewers used those dreadful words 'Prole' and 'proletarian' in their articles.

"I had never thought of myself as being of the so-called 'working class', or in any class at all. As a child the term would have been meaningless, since it was hard to imagine belonging even to my parents. In the factory I was judged by the amount of work I was expected to do, and looked on it as little more than a basic commercial transaction, and if any knowing lickspittle had in those days implied that I was a member of the 'working class' he would have been told in the harshest terms to find a quiet corner and indulge in sexual intercourse with himself. When I enlisted into the Royal Air Force it was to become a technician, with men from all kinds of background.

"In France and Spain I had lived the life of a man with a private income, small as it was, so couldn't have had anything to do with, or feeling for, the whole class issue, which seemed (and still does) to obsess the English, and to that extent at least I am a foreigner."

This long quotation is an epitome, both in content and in presentation, of Sillitoe's autobiography. The testy intelligence and analytical confidence, the solid sense of self and inter-pretation of the outside world, all evident here, fill the pages of Life Without Armour. Yet its interior tone is, as the title suggests, more complicated. For Sillitoe is, at least, a double man, a nature in disguise, aware continually of the splits in himself - in his own word, "a foreigner".

The book frequently adverts to the gap between the seeming and the dreaming life: "The repetitious sweat of producing over a thousand brass nuts a day did not worry me, because for one thing I was making it pay, and, once accustomed to the process, could dream my way from morning till evening as if I were two people." Here is the root of Sillitoe's creative force: "a sure qualification for turning into a writer is to grow up with a divided personality."

Early in his life Sillitoe had to develop a talent for fugue. His childhood was presided over by an illiterate father trapped by his own limitations, and by unemployment, into drink and violence, and a mother who allowed her head to be hit till it bled (taking care to hold the bleeding head over a bucket so as to protect the carpet). The concrete strengths of Sillitoe's writing show at their best in the description of these years. More than many more overtly bookish autobiographers, he makes vivid to the reader those books that became the reality of his life - Les Miserables, the Bible, The Count of Monte Cristo, innumerable detailed travel guides, and the Latin, French, Spanish and German Midget Dictionaries. Sillitoe was early a formidable autodidact with a highly tuned memory. The astounding self-motivation he was born with propelled and protected him but, equally impressively, did not sever him from taking direct pleasure in his surroundings. The account he gives, necessarily overshadowed by Lawrence, of his sex life is direct and sunny. Work - in the Raleigh bicycle factory from the age of 14, in the signals branch of the Fleet Air Arm, and subsequently the lonely life of writing - is addressed with dignity and the detail that makes another life real to a reader.

Sillitoe is a writer who is not preoccupied by surface. He is not seeking Nabokovian "aesthetic bliss", but neither does his prose seek the transparent ideal attained by Raymond Carver or Bernard Mac Laverty. The assured tone makes one hesitate to think so ugly and confused a habit can be unconscious, but he repeatedly muddles his subjects, as in: "While about six, or maybe seven, my mother heard of a school..." Another stylistic quirk is his peculiar attachment is to the passive voice. Though a fine practitioner of the neutral tone, Sillitoe can sometimes slip into bathos ("Concurrent with my reading, a phase of acquiring lead soldiers lasted till well after it should"), curiously reminiscent of the much more deftly angled memoirs of Anthony Powell. This danger is outweighed by the trust induced in the reader by his sheer levelness.

The dedication of Alan Sillitoe to the hard art he chose cannot be doubted. At its best - describing courting couples making "hearthrug pie" on the carpet, the screwed-up newspaper his mother put into her handbag so that it would not seem empty, or his long happiness in love and work with the poet Ruth Fainlight - this book conveys a fine conjunction between the vividly apprehended world and what is unkillable in the human spirit. At its worst, it resorts to airless pedagogic guff such as that dreary "find a quiet corner and indulge in sexual intercourse with himself"quoted above. Poverty and serious illness (TB) have done their worst, but Sillitoe has done his best with them. Possessing a steady character combined with a more occluded temperament, he has admirably put each to use in his work.

The Collected Stories of Alan Sillitoe is just short of 600 pages of human observation shaped by human folly and dreams. Read after the autobiography (exactly as one should not read fiction), it provides a depth of texture to the events described, as well as a chance to re-read The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner and find a more linguistically agile Sillitoe than he is prepared to reveal in Life Without Armour. One story, "The Chiker", reads as though its meatily sexual language ("the mutton-dagger dance") could have inspired the more jocund butcherly excesses of Roald Dahl.

Describing himself in his autobiography as "an eternal refugee from ... ambiguous feelings", he says that it was not possible for him "to work and live, and though that decision was to be a mistake as far as my life was concerned, it was necessary because there was not enough energy in me to do both". But the work makes the life hang together, just as the stories fix the apparently sparse lives they record. Son of a father who was glad to give his signature, "in order to show he wasn't totally illiterate", Sillitoe has not turned his back on unarticulated lives, but has used to the full his own uneven, authoritative articulacy and its smarting objectified moments of sensory connection.