Books: Laureate of the Losers

THE RAGMAN’S DAUGHTER fay A/an Sillitoe. 189 pages. Knopf. $3.95.

Alan Sillitoe, whose first short novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, made him famous overnight at 30, is now in a fair way to becoming the laureate of the losers—the spivs, tea-leaves and no-hopers who never quite made it into Britain’s working class.

In these spirited short stories, Sillitoe’s characters command a rich dialect in which the underdog facetiousness blurs but does not hide wary resentment or cynical despair. In their softer moments, they would like to live like their betters—ride bikes, wear cloth caps, eat fish and chips, play the football pools, and watch the telly on a paid-up set. For those simple pleasures of the poor, sex and the bottle, they have the same words: they “have a bash.”

The Ragman’s Daughter is a finely machined narrative that illustrates the virtues and defects of Sillitoe’s work. A young spiv describes his lovely nasty life in the golden months when he is headed for Borstal (reform school) but has not yet arrived there. Love intrudes, in the form of the nubile daughter of the local ragman (U.S. “junk dealer”), a rich man who drives a Jaguar and provides his daughter with a chestnut filly, which she rides about the slum. She and our hero fall to stealing things—just for kicks in her case. Their shared criminality lends something special to the times they have a bash. He goes to jail while she bears his child and is then killed. He grows up to semi-respectability (he now only steals on the job) and dourly watches his son grow up as the spoiled grandson of a rich man.

The other stories, notably The Other John Peel and The Firebug, are well told but have the characteristic defect in that Sillitoe’s automata of the sub-world are moved to explain themselves in terms of those heavily bearded bores Marx and Freud. An unctuous homiletic tone slops over into the hard-case dialogue as Sillitoe labors to make clear that the allright blokes are pro-Corn and the real rozzers are Tory types.

This is a pity, because here is a genuine talent.