Free Fun

After hours peering through the window, we walk into a pub and meet the real thing, a bunch of lads with their tarts, all nice and noisy. Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Bit rough though, hey? Take this chap here, he beats those literary types into a pulp. God! How they run from him!

___________

Arthur Seaton is a free man, even though he works as a wage slave. He moans about this a lot, even regards himself as a communist, but the truth…ah the truth; the truth is he enjoys his work. Immensely. Wouldn’t change it for the world.

The minute you stepped out of the factory gates you thought no more about your work. But the funniest thing was neither did you think about work when you were standing at your machine. You began the day by cutting and drilling steel cylinders with care, but gradually your actions became automatic and you forgot all about the machine and the quick working of your arms and hands and the fact that you were cutting and boring and rough-threading to within limits of only five-thousandths of an inch. The noise of motor-trolleys passing up and down the gangway and the excruciating din of flying and flapping belts slipped out of your consciousness after perhaps half an hour, without affecting the quality of the work you were turning out, and you forgot your past conflicts with the gaffer and turned to thinking of pleasant events that had at some time happened to you, or things that you hoped would happen to you in the future. If your machine was working well - the motor smooth, stops tight, jigs good - and you spring your actions into a favourable rhythm you became happy. You went off into pipe-dreams for the rest of the day. And in the evening, when admittedly you would be feeling as though your arms and legs had been stretched to breaking point on a torture-rack, you stepped out into a cosy world of pubs and noisy tarts that would one day provide you with the raw material for more pipe-dreams as you stood at your lathe.

It was marvellous the things you remembered while you worked on the lathe, things that you thought were forgotten and would never come back into your mind, often things that you hoped would stay forgotten. Time flew while you wore out the oil-soaked floor and worked furiously without knowing it: you lived in a compatible world of pictures that passed through your mind like a magic-lantern, often in vivid and glorious loonycolour, a world where memory and imagination ran free and did acrobatic tricks with your past and with what might be your future, an amok that produced all sorts of agreeable visions. Like the corporal said about sitting on the lavatory: it was the only time you had to think, and to quote him further, you thought of some lovely and marvellous things.

A revealing soliloquy. His body turned into a machine Arthur’s mind wanders free. In just two paragraphs this rough-hand has demolished most of the assumptions of the Marxist Left, its ideas about alienated work, class animosity, and workers’ control of the factories (that wet-dream of bourgeois radicals: didn't want the hard work of managing them, hey?).1 Making decisions! That’s not in Arthur’s line; on the job is a place to dream; the last thing he wants to actually think about what he does. For that allows work to colonise the mind; all freedom lost. 

His rational intellect weak, our hero has strong physical needs and a wild imagination; the kind of man an intellectual finds hard to understand, no doubt why they want him changed.2 Of course such brutal prejudice is never expressed directly; then it was clothed in the fancy dress of ‘alienation’. These poor saps, suffering psychic damage, which they believed natural even enviable. Victims of false consciousness. Thus Arthur cannot really love his job. He is a dupe of the bosses. Too stupid to know he is being conned.3 No, what he needs is those clever types from the best universities to tell him what’s what.

This is not to say the work is easy. He hates Monday morning. It takes until Wednesday to acclimatise to the rhythm of the machine, after his freewheeling weekends. Then Arthur grumbles about the gaffer. He doesn’t like the government taking his taxes - he thinks it theft. But he’s honest enough to recognise these are good times. The workers far richer, and more secure, than ever before. A happy man. Even his moaning a sign he’s content; it is Adam complaining there are not enough Eves in Eden.

Arthur doesn't want his life to change. A single man sleeping with two married women; his only real complaint is that he’d like more regular and less risky sex. All his problems arise from these relationships: work a haven from their complexities. Yet he accepts the hassle, for he doesn't want the trap of marriage, his greatest fear. Marriage the threat to his liberty; this novel a picaresque journey around the free life, where it’s not easy to find the time or the place to shag your woman; or to dodge Winnie’s husband, a squaddie who finds out about the affair. Arthur Seaton is a young man who, living at home, lives in the borderland between the limited freedoms of his late adolescence and the lost liberties of the married state. Before the pill, when getting contraception was inconvenient and embarrassing - his gaffer ridiculed when known he buys rubbers - the best contraceptive device was to sleep with another man’s wife; at least this is Arthur’s idea, who practices what he conceives. A man of his times. Like many young heroes of the 1950s, with a reasonably paid job, available women, plenty drink, lots of fun, and little responsibility (his parents take care of that) he’s having the best of times. But this is no rebel. Arthur lives in a paradise, which he wants to last forever.4 Work intrudes, for sure, but is a slight irritant. The worst things happen outside the factory gates. The fights and the frights (Brenda gets pregnant) and that fading away of his wild ways, when he falls in love with Doreen, who is single.

A rough life, because so physical. Manual work. The sex. Heavy drinking. The inevitable fisticuffs, that local court of justice, whose blood and bruises an acceptable penalty when others steal your woman or your dignity. When Arthur is mashed he accepts it as fair dues for the debts he has racked up sleeping with Winnie and Brenda. Ring the police? You must be joking! Even the feeling of revenge quickly cools; while there is a reconciliation of sorts when Arthur realises that Winnie’s promiscuity is hurting her husband. The scale of values are human ones; rough and ready, sometimes harsh but always homemade, they are specific to individuals and generally accepted as fair; they encourage a laissez-faire attitude to life and work. No hassles man. Thus inside the factory just about everyone, including the supervisors, accept the inefficiencies of the production line; these men prefer the easy life to more pay and its rise in stress (they also know that in the long run they will not gain from working harder). Money less important than ease. 

Such characters are tough. They mock and gossip and say the most terrible things about each other; but in the long run none of this matters. Doors are closed to neighbours. The family a fortress to the outside world. Yet the book feels crowded with people and events. The weekly round full of repetitious rituals - the same boisterous company in pub and on street - creates a tightly compacted scene, easily bursting out into sex and violence. It seems so much because so loud: Arthur falling down the stairs blind drunk; a fight in pub; the smashing of the undertaker’s window; Brenda and Arthur copulating in the woods.… A young man’s world. A place full of excitement (that isn’t going to last long). There’ll be no fighting when Arthur’s married. No cause if Doreen stays faithful. That crowd of punters… yet most of the action occurs within families. Apart from the love affairs, a world in itself, there are only a smattering of friendships, less than we could have imagined in such a town. In fact, this is a small, conservative place. The contrast with these few years of freedom is what gives Arthur’s life its explosive charge. He may appear to be rebelling against his parents, in reality he is turning into them.

Arthur’s aria to work is a recognition that there is little freedom outside the factory floor (those dull Marxists sat on their heads not their backsides). His mind not free when at home, in the pub or when bedding a woman. Work a place of refugee from the pressures of being a single man. An extraordinary idea. Also a true one. The manual class can be heavily conformist; the family and one’s immediate social circle to exert enormous pressure on its members to stay within the terraced streets of its narrow ideas. The problem of Marriage: it keeps you in your place.5

For a few years Arthur Seaton is largely free of all that (there is some tension between his freewheeling ways and the conventions of social life). One day, though, it must end. In an extraordinary passage Arthur recognises this. A threnody to a passing paradise.

For himself, his own catch had been made, and he would have to wrestle with it for the rest of his life.  Whenever you caught a fish, the fish caught you, in a way of speaking, and it was the same with anything else you caught, like the measles or a woman. Everyone in the world was caught, somehow, one way or another, and those that weren’t were always on the way to it. As soon as you were born you were captured by fresh air that you screamed against the minute you came out. Then you were roped in by a factory, had a machine slung around your neck, and then you were hooked up by the arse with a wife. Mostly you were like a fish: you swam about with freedom, thinking how good it was to be left alone, doing anything you wanted to do and caring about no one, when suddenly: SPLUTCH! - the big hook clapped itself into your mouth and you were caught. Without knowing what you were doing you had chewed off more than you could bite and had to stick with the same piece of bait for the rest of your life. It meant death for a fish, but for a man it might not be so bad. Maybe it was only the beginning of something better in life, better than you could ever have thought possible before clamping your avid jaws down over the vital bait. Arthur knew he had not yet bitten, that he had really only licked the bait and found it tasty, that he could still disengage his mouth from the nibbled morsel. But he did not want to do so. If you went through life refusing all the bait dangled before you, that would be no life at all. No changes would be made and you would have nothing to fight against. Life would be as dull as ditchwater. You could kill yourself by too much cunning. Even though bait meant trouble, you could not ignore if for ever. He laughed to think that he was full of bait already, half-digested slop that had certainly given him a share of trouble one way or another.

(Review:  Saturday Night and Sunday Morning)

1.  For the illusions of the New Left: Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism.

2. When they found they couldn’t the intellectuals ditched the working-class for other groups who they believed would carry their revolutionary fantasies.

3. The problem of the Left: intellectual arrogance, that blinds them to their own stupidity. The first four volumes of Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest tetralogy a fascinating case study.

4. Just the place Charles Lumley is looking for when he tries to escape from the expectations of his middle class family: Hurry on Down. Contrary to Marxist myth is the bourgeoisie who are defined by work. It is one of the odd aspects of the middle classes: they project their own values onto everyone else.

5. Very strong in Stan Barstow’s A Kind of Loving.