The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

Alan Sillitoe (1959)

Running had always been made much of in our family, especially running from the police.

            Been in some kind of awfully British mood recently; it feels as though I have endured week after week of bad skies and dreary food, and in some of my more desperate and pitiful moments I have even listened to the Smiths. I haven’t ever been to England, and I never will, but I wouldn’t hesitate to call this mood “British”. And the cherry is I have begun to occasionally drink tea, a couple times a week, like somebody’s desiccated old grandmother. This Brythonic attitude of mine can be traced back, I believe, to a documentary about the Beatles I recently watched in a “History of Rock and Roll” class I am taking at a Community College because I failed it years ago when I was a shifty, miserable teenager prone to taking out his relationship with his mother on himself and the world. Obstinate ol’ me may be the only person on the planet who isn’t totally jazzed and fully erect over the Beatles, though I have mellowed on that front a little bit. I was struck at the footage used in the beginning of the documentary, during the earliest part of their career, in Munich and Liverpool. It was very grimy and romantic, and I think it infected me somehow. Mostly I just zoned out though, because of the indecipherable Liverpudlian accents of many of the interviewees. One could hardly call it English at all. Also because skiffle is terrible music.

            Alan Sillitoe is one of the writers counted among the “Angry Young Men” of British authors from the 1950s, and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner is a collection of nine short stories all set in various awful parts of England. As far as I’m concerned an Angry Young Man is the only sort of young man to be. Who the fuck ever wants to hear from a contented, self-satisfied young man? Nobody, that’s who, and such squares aren’t ever going to have a movement. The Angry Young Men mostly concerned themselves with working-class themes and rogue-ish protagonists who rebel against the confines of poverty and the square world and such, all topics near and dear to my heart. For me “postwar social realism” is as much of an enticement as “free beer”.  I often read books because I want to satisfy my internal yearnings and/or calm the stormy emotions in my stomach, and sometimes to confirm that other men have felt the same things I feel. In that respect this book was just what I needed for my gloomy mood. It’s very British!

            Of the nine stories three are real gems. None of them are really bad, but the other six aren’t that remarkable. The title story is a real winner. Smith, a young hoodlum, robs a bakery and is sent to a borstal, which is some kind of reform school. The headmaster sticks him on the cross-country running team where he’s a gifted natural and on a day of the big race for the Borstal Blue Ribbon Prize Cup for Long-Distance Cross-Country Running (All England), Smith easily outruns his competition only to stop mere feet before the finish line, throwing the race in an act of defiance against the system that oppresses him and everyone he knows and against the authorities who administer that system. “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner” was later made into a film, starring Tom Courtenay’s larcenous face, and is regarded as one of the classics of the British New Wave of Cinema. Other such films include This Sporting Life, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, also adapted from a Sillitoe book, and A Taste of Honey, supposedly Morrissey’s favorite movie. Smith, though he doesn’t realize it, is a Marxist. His every thought is infused with class-consciousness, and he is keenly aware of his station in life. His attitude is very much “us against them” and there’s no conflict in his mind over which side he is on. In America we try to ignore the fact that social classes exist, even though they very obviously do, but I suppose that in England, where there are Lords and Ladies and Queens and suchlike, one’s station would be impossible to forget.

            The second good story, “The Fishing-Boat Picture”, is about a middle-aged postman who just wants to sit and enjoy his pipe and tea after work but his ex-wife keeps on hitting him up for money, looking worse and worse, poorer and poorer, each time she shows up, until she finally dies.

            The last story in the book, “The Decline and Fall of Frankie Buller”, was my favorite. Frankie is a vaguely developmentally challenged teenager who leads young boys from his lower-class neighborhood in skirmishes against young boys from the next neighborhood over. They throw stones at each other, take prisoners, etc. It seems pretty quaint given that these days most teens are involved in low-level drug crime, waving MAC-10’s at each other on the street, or video recording gang rapes and sending the footage to all the rest of the football team. One thing, however, is never going to change: half of all teens are currently pregnant. Frankie is a dreamer, a romantic, obsessed with his father’s heroism during the Great War, but as the Second World War approaches Frankie falls apart. His impulses become darker and his battle tactics, once brilliant, become shakier, reckless, and erratic. He begins yelling indiscreet things at women as they leave the factories at closing time. A favorite hiding place is filled with rubble from the Blitz. Eventually the gang splits up and Frankie disappears, and years later the narrator finds out that Frankie was deemed medically unfit for the Army and received electroshock therapy at an asylum.

            The one thing that unites all these stories, aside from the location in various dismal British cities, is that the characters are all in their own ways lonely. Loneliness, alienation and disconnection are natural results when you’re poor in a place where social stratification is such a heavy and certain fact. The poor man is the ultimate outsider, and poverty isolates us from each other. Poverty divides and conquers. It’s difficult to feel like you mean anything in society when you sit in your dingy roach infested apartment watching rich people on television lead lives that are so much more vibrant and important than your own. I very much appreciated how class conscious these stories were. A story, book, or movie that leaves out class is as bad as a story that leaves out sex and class is such an important part of our experience that it’s almost a crime of omission. Neglecting to address the status quo that oppresses and mutilates millions is being complicit through silence.

            Since these stories are about industrial drop-outs and working class drunks they are of course full of rough, sooty slang. But, since it’s British slang it sounds goofy as fuck. I can’t imagine ever thinking that any of this stuff would be appropriate to say. Barmy, blokes, mash up a cuppa tea for yeh. My personal favorite: “day in and day out she worked her fingers to the bone at the fag-packing machine.”

            I can’t help but compare Sillitoe’s stories to the novels of the greatest American writer that has ever lived, Hubert Selby, Jr., who also tackled huge ugly subjects. It’s not a fair comparison, but most books that have ever been published would look poor next to Last Exit to Brooklyn. Specifically I recalled The Room while reading “Loneliness”. In Selby’s novel the narrator, a petty thief, is imprisoned and spends his time locked up in jail and locked up in his head. He is completely absorbed by his sadistic, self-gratifying fantasies. In “Loneliness” the narrator, a petty thief, is imprisoned and finds within himself a small untouchable grain upon which he anchors his rebellion, from which no force or authority will ever be able to budge him. I don’t know if it really means anything but I found the contrasting outlooks to be interesting to think about.

            About a week ago I had an interesting experience. I was in the bathroom after my shift at work, sitting on the toilet. A guy came in and entered the stall next to mine. I could hear him fumbling around in his pockets. There’s a couple click clicks of a lighter, and the phhhhhhhwwwppp of someone sucking on a pipe. Click click, phhhhhhhwwwppp. It didn’t smell like weed, so I think that basically narrows it down to crack or meth. We both exited our stalls at the same time. He looked like every other depressing East County tweaker I’ve ever seen, with the meth mouth and everything, so I’m going to say that he was smoking crank. He had a very difficult time with the automated paper towel dispensers. Now, the bourgeois thing to do would have been to tattle, to call security or whatever. I didn’t for a few different reasons. One, that would be a bother. I just wanted to go home, eat something, and go to bed. Two, the guy was some sad Lakeside meth head partying with crystal in a hospital bathroom on a Sunday night. He’ll be dead within a year. No need for me to kick him while he’s down. And three, everyone knows that you don’t tell the fucking pigs anything.

Cunning is what counts in this life.