Class Unconsciousness: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Writer
Tall, skinny and long-legged, I was born to run. Middle and long distances mostly, sprints not so much.
Born? Or was I made?
At my hyper-competitive, British colonial, all-boys, virtually all-white prep school in Toronto, I set a record in the 220 yard dash in the spring of 1963. I was a shy, excruciatingly self-conscious kid who never spoke in class, so this was a big deal. I was 12.
Noticing my promise, my remote, workaholic doctor father bought me a snazzy pair of spiked track shoes, a hefty textbook by uber-trainer Lloyd Percival, and a stainless silver stop-watch to chart my times. Given he had never given me the time of day since Day One, his sudden, intense attention felt weird, suspicious, confusing. I was being “groomed” – but for what exactly?
For months, we walked over to the school cricket grounds where I puffed up and down steep hills to build my calf and thigh muscles. I pounded around the neighbourhood pavements, a mini-marathon of a mile or two, my father waiting at the foot of our driveway, stopwatch and clipboard in hand, urging me to sprint the last 50 yards as fast as I could, shouting for me to go all-out, hard, hard, hard; each night I was expected to shave a few seconds off my time, achieving, by increments, some cosmic, death-like state of perfection. Zero = Hero!
In the annual lower school track meet of June, 1964, I was poised to sweep all the medals and the Duke Somerville Cup, named after a popular, pedophile headmaster from the 1920s. But sudden, stabbing pains in my Achilles tendons stopped me dead in my tracks and I finished out of the running. Unconsciously, I had dug in my heels in silent protest. Long live passive-aggression – a passionate Upper Canadian specialty![1]
My father called a surgeon colleague who, in two separate operations, cut open my heels and shaved bone spurs that were so miniscule as to barely exist. Psycho-somatic? You bet. Washed up at 13, the sic transit gloria of my track career left me contemplating equal feelings of disappointment and relief.
Little did I know we were poised on the cusp of the Sixties counterculture, and sports will suddenly turn uncool. (And yes, boomer rebellion will become the new conformity).
Art, of course, perpetually imitates life, and vice-versa. In the fall of 1962, the British film, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, based on the short story by Alan Sillitoe and directed by Tony Richardson, was released like a birthday gift from a stranger. Like Lawrence of Arabia, appearing only weeks later, LLDR was one of those numinous films that seemed to have been made expressly for me and me alone.
I can’t pinpoint when I first saw the film, but as I “grew up” in my stunted, stutter-step fashion, its full impact remained underground, undigested, unarticulated. It was of course impossible to talk about anything with my father -- films, books, music, girls, feelings, anything – but of course he was busy twisting down a suicidal rabbit hole to meet his own long-distant doctor-father. Ditto for my aloof or persecutory prep school “masters”, mostly British-born Oxbridge types, lonely bachelors, closeted gays and/or alcoholic remittance men with mild-to-severe sadomasochistic tendencies.
Who do you trust?
Only upon later viewings as a “grown-up” did I start to integrate the film’s uncanny echoes coursing through my unconscious life, a dream-like vibration where stark distinctions between working class England and upper middle class Canada blur and meld. Quoth the melancholy Danish philosopher: we live life forward and understand it backward. If we’re lucky.
###
Shot in black and white, the film opens with a sly aural pun: the sound of running feet and the violin strains of William Blake’s sublime anthem Jerusalem (“And did those feet in ancient times…”)[2]
Colin Smith, an alienated, 18 year old working class Nottingham lad (played by 25 year old, Yorkshire-born Tom Courtney), is jogging down a cold, bleak rural road in short pants and t-shirt, his back to the camera, telling us in voice-over: “Running has always been a big thing in our family…especially running away from the police.”
A green and pleasant land? Not bloody likely.
The scene shifts to a scowling, handcuffed Colin chained to a row of fellow adolescent toughs, packed in a police van arriving at Ruxton Towers Borstal. Nailed for burgling a bakery with a friend, Colin’s only regret is getting caught: “I didn’t run fast enough.”
The inmates are stripped, assigned uniforms and numbers, and hauled before The Governor, a smug, pipe-smoking bureaucrat (Michael Redgrave) who blandly recites the predictable work hard-play hard, “in sano in corpore sano” ethos.
A failed ex-runner, the gov is bent on moulding nasty punks into “proper gentleman” and “industrious and honest citizens.” But only, of course, “if you play ball with us…” But Colin is defiant; he knows “they’ve got the whip hand.” He contains attitudes.
Aping the high-end public school system, the low-end reform school runs inter-house competitions with surly prefects riding the younger boys, a co-optive, divide-and-conquer “kapo” tactic also popular, in extremis, in concentration camps.
The gov is keen to prove the success of his rehabilitation program to the headmaster of Ranley (another sly pun on running), a neighbouring posh institution – the kind of unkind institution which our own “Upper Canadian” species so slavishly imitated across the Atlantic. How about a five mile cross-country race, the dirty proles pitted against the upper class twits, competing for a Challenge Cup?
A young psychologist inflicts a word association test on the recalcitrant Colin. Both are “new boys”, but establish zero rapport. Suspiciously eyeing the spinning tape-recorder, Colin deflects the probing questions, unwilling to “play ball.”
Offered the stimulus word, “Father,” Colin mutters, “Dead.”
“I’m sorry. Were you upset?
“No. Not very.”
The “old school” gov tells the progressive psychologist that sensitivity to a boy’s inner life is pointless: he must channel his aggressions into sports. With a pair of binoculars, he zeroes-in on the fleet-footed Colin playing in a soccer game, and after he scores a goal on a breakaway, he singles him out: “He will be useful to us – keep an eye on him.”
In a series of flashbacks and flash forwards, we follow Colin’s life before and after his arrest.
We discover the seedbed of our anti-hero’s truculence in a cramped council flat where he is encircled by a harridan mother, two small, unruly sibs, and a bedridden, labourer father who refuses medical help.
Wandering the mean streets of Nottingham with his mate Mike, Colin finds a parked car with its keys in the ignition, and they grab a spontaneous joy ride, horsing around with the owner’s porkpie hat and pack of ciggies.
They cruise and proposition two girls on the sidewalk, Audrey and Gladys; although Audrey is initially reluctant, she relents. Climbing a hill, the quartet pairs off – amazing how quickly that can happen – and scan the panoramic blight of Nottingham’s dark satanic mills.
Colin’s girl, Audrey, predicts: “You’ll end up in prison one of these days.”
Gladys pipes in: “If he ain’t careful.”
Colin retorts: “It’d get me out of this dump.”
To which Audrey replies: “It ain’t the only way to get out.”
If she’s implying matrimony, Colin’s face suggests that’s just something else to run away from.
Dreaming of escape to London, the teens tentatively neck, risking a rare touch of tenderness. Then the nervous birds bolt onto a bus, capping an archetypal, juvenile rite of passage that transcends class. The lads repair to an arcade; when Mike loses five bob to a slot machine, Colin shakes out fistfuls of change and they dash off with the loot, as giddy as if they just got laid.
Flash forward to Colin in a practice race with fellow inmates in the woods. In a sudden burst of will, Colin elbows past Stacey, the gov’s previous protégé being groomed to win the Challenge Cup. “Keep back!” shouts the desperate Stacey, for he rightly fears an existential threat to his special status.
The gov is delighted with Colin: “You’re a sprinter and a stayer.” A self-admitted plodder, the gov promises to inject his newfound piece of raw talent with a dose of style and strategic thinking.
In the locker room, Colin and his defeated rival Stacey descend into fisticuffs. As the lads piece together gas masks in a workshop, Colin tries to convince his peers he is nobody’s favourite: “The best thing to do is to be cunning and stay where you are. I’m going to let them think they’ve got me house-trained…to get me, they’ll have to stick a rope round my neck. That’s a job they don’t mind doing.”
In other words, he knows the system is inherently and irredeemably violent. Don’t try to control me under the guise of “helping” me. But is “staying where you are” the answer?
Flashback to Colin and his mother shortly after his father’s funeral. His father’s boss hands over 500 pounds in insurance money: “He was a jolly good worker…are you the new breadwinner?” But Colin refuses to follow his father into indentured servitude. Stubborn, just like Dad. Meanwhile, a sleazy, parasitic suitor of his widowed mother appears on the scene, beady eyes fixed on her windfall.
Flashing forward to the borstal, Stacey has escaped. He felt betrayed by the gov, given to euphemized rationalizations behind his crested blazer and the avuncular smile that is, in fact, aimed straight for the jugular: “By putting pressure on a boy, you know what he’s worth.”
As a food riot breaks out in the cafeteria, the camera grazes a wall poster that reads: “Join the new regular army.” The gov decides not to crack down and cancel the evening entertainment as he can’t let this “spot of bother” threaten the big race with Ranley and his own personal glory promised by his manipulation of Colin. In a twist that that we sense is coming, the gov remarks offhandedly: “He’ll surprise us all.”
At the entertainment, a white-collared reverend leads the boys in a rousing rendition of Jerusalem, William Blake’s irresistibly compelling, spiritual poem highjacked by a sentimental, state-sponsored indoctrination process permeating every rung of the fixed English class hierarchy.
Then comes a brilliant cut to the capture and handcuffing of Stacey. As he is savagely beaten in a jail cell with a chain -- this is what happens when you decline to “play ball” -- we cross-cut to a montage of the unified, singing faces: “Bring me my bow of burning gold/Bring me my arrows of desire/Bring me my chariots of fire.”
The gov promotes Colin out of the grim workshop to softer garden duty, but on the condition he concentrate on the running. Then he decides to let Colin practice alone for the first time, unsupervised, trusting that he will not make his escape -- a crafty ploy, as Colin is now tacitly invited to “trust” the authorities in return. The carrot trailing the stick.
In a lyrical sequence influenced by the New Wave “jump cut” cinema of Godard and Truffaut, Colin joyfully skips and tumbles through the woods to a jazz trumpet and piano soundtrack as the sun sparkles through the stark, leafless branches. There are no straight lines in nature. A brief breath of bliss. His cup runneth over.
Flashback to Colin on a shopping spree with his family. With the insurance money, his mother splurges on a leopard skin coat and a new mattress as her freeloading boyfriend smirks salaciously. Clustering her brood around the new telly, riveted by the garish adverts, his mother hands Colin a one pound note, which he promptly burns. Sod consumerism!
Colin and Mike take their girlfriends on a weekend tryst to Skegness by the Scottish seaside. In a private train coach, they pull the blinds and twist and shout to a pop song on their transistor radio, another rude stab at intimacy.
As they check into a hotel, the manager asks: “You’re married, are ya?” The following morning, the presumably de-virginized foursome rove the dunes by the overcast seashore, playing hide and seek, regressing to the childhoods they never had. [3]
Opening up to Audrey, Colin recalls a visit here as a four year old with his impoverished parents, and how he got lost in the water, only to be found hours later: “I was always trying to get lost as a kid…I soon found out that you can’t get lost.”
Or found, either.
He tells tales of his parents “fighting like cats and dogs”, his father “sweating out his guts out for nine pounds a week -- we never had it so good.” The system, he sighs, needs to be changed -- but how? “I’ve been learning a lot lately—not quite sure what, though.”
Back home, Mike and Colin mock a pompous politician spouting the latest homily on the telly: “Patriotism is out of favour with the intellectuals” (like, say, the makers of this film). Britons are enjoying greater luxury than ever before, but what they really need is “a new mood of self-discipline.” Out of step with the zeitgeist, what?
Turning down the sound, the boys crack themselves up ventriloquizing the silently flapping lips of the sanctimonious, establishment dummy, wagging his finger at the recent scandalous publication of Lady Chatterly’s Lover, written by Nottingham’s own D.H. Lawrence.[4]
When Colin’s mother and her boyfriend interrupt their antics, a fight erupts over the control of the volume. When Colin screams at the boyfriend -- “It’s our house!” -- his mother whacks him across the face and screams back:
“Nothing belongs to you!”
“You brought in your fancy man before my father was cold!”
“Get out! Don’t come back till you have some money!”
As he wanders with Mike on the night streets, Colin spies an open window of a second floor bakery. They climb in and steal a cash box, scoring a fortune of 71 pounds, 5 shillings, 4 pence ha’penny. Realizing that spending the cash would draw attention, Colin stuffs it in a drainpipe beside his front door, reveling in his cunning. The money is for them, not his mother.
The next morning, a detective knocks on the door. Convinced Colin is the culprit, he imposes the third degree on the “thieving young bastard.” Three more cops arrive to search the house, ripping apart everything from an easy chair to a vacuum cleaner. As they leave empty-handed, Colin grins and waves goodbye, cocking his wrist like the Queen.
In a fish and chip shop with Mike and the girls, Colin flares when Audrey suggests he get a job. As they stand in front of a bedroom set displayed in a store window, he is taunted by the melancholy spectre of the bourgeois life.
The detective returns, and as he re-interrogates the stone-walling Colin on the doorstep, a driving rain flushes the stolen cash out of the drainpipe, symbolizing his downward-spiraling path. As he panics and sprints away, we cut to Colin running in the woods as the gov’s prized catch.
When Mike lands in the borstal for committing a separate petty crime, he is shocked to realize his best mate is the gov’s “blue-eyed boy” and joins the inmates in their hostility for the traitor: “Whose side are you on?”
When the Sports Day against the Ranley bluebloods arrives, the gov informs his charges with unintended irony that their rivals are “boys just like yourselves, but with advantages.” [5]
In the locker room, the genteel Ranley-ites doff their ties and jackets and make nice with the exotic creatures festering at the bottom of the food chain.
“What’s it like?” asks a borstal boy, curious about the charmed life at the top of the food chain.
“Bloody awful.”
When the toff reveals they are beaten for smoking, the tough is incredulous: “Do you pay to go to this school?”
“Our parents do.”
When the tall, blond, handsome Gunthorpe (James Fox, a real life aristo), half-heartedly suggests both sides join forces in a revolution, they all raise a mock cheer -- a spark of insolence, shared by both the elitists and delinquents, swiftly extinguished by irony.
Gunthorpe politely offers his hand to Colin in good luck. Jolly good show. Out they jog, the future bankers in gleaming whites, the future bank robbers in dark scrubs, parading past a grandstand of parents, a recruiting army general, and assorted wankers. The Ranley headmaster tells Colin: “I’ve heard good things about you.”
Gunthorpe takes an early lead with a loping, pretentious stride while the shorter, grittier Colin chugs behind, awkwardly flapping his arms like a bird -- a succinct metaphor for the Sisyphean struggle for upward class mobility on an island built on the rock of hereditary privilege. “In ancient times”, indeed.
As Colin makes his move in the final mile and passes Gunthorpe, he recalls the fateful day when he overtook Stacey, ignoring his prescient warning: “Keep back!”
His mind floods with dissonant sounds and images: cruel mother, dying father, feral sibs, haranguing police, bombarding adverts, the gov’s “whip hand”, Mike’s disillusionment -- “Whose side are you on?”, the Skegness shoreline, and the longing face of Audrey. Mondo confuso.
Building an insurmountable lead over Gunthorpe, Colin glimpses the wildly cheering crowd about 50 yards distant. Puffing and sweating, he stops and roots himself mere yards short of the finish line, hands on hips, alone in the world, as the crowd intensifies its frenzy. Denied his orgasm, the gov is apoplectic. As a bewildered Gunthorpe catches up and staggers across the line first, a defiant smirk creases Colin’s face.
In the last scene, Colin is flung back into the workshop, with fat chance of parole, the “arrows of desire” turned back on himself. Held in a freeze frame, the inmates obediently assemble gas masks, an echo of the World War I trenches and the surreal yet familiar madness of Empire. Linking arms across both ends of the class divide, institutional sports and discipline prepare Britannia for the next, inevitable war. Then one last blast of Willie Blake:
“Till we have built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.”
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Playing to the emerging ‘60s boomer youth demographic, the advertising tagline of the film read: “You can play it by the rules or you can play it by ear…WHAT COUNTS is that you play it right for you.”
Of course, like most advertising, the message did not match the hard truth. Colin’s cunning, negative rebellion is ultimately self-defeating; he is thrown backwards, not forward, in his young life, not in fact “playing it right.”
Being “played” by the gov, he is caught in an unresolvable double bind in which creative self-realization, via natural, spontaneous play, is made impossible. His masochistic integrity demands he choose crime and prison over a life of mindless consumerism and suffocating social conformity. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
A contemporary critic of the film sniffed: “An illustrated guide to current fashion, with every attitude and every statement perfectly predictable.”
Like the blowhard, puritanical politician on the telly, the critic failed to realize she was perfectly – and predictably -- parroting the dismissive, entrenched attitudes Richardson and Sillitoe were laying bare in the film, timeless attitudes that will achieve their apotheosis with the inevitable ascent of Mrs. Thatcher, the “Iron Lady” who refused to “play ball” with anybody, and was lionized for it.
I am struck how most contemporary critical responses to the film glossed over the exposure of the invisible hand of class conditioning, thus revealing the critics’ unconsciousness of their own class conditioning. Over the span of human history, the enduring genius of the ruling elites has yet to fail them: the dark art of conning the bulk of the populace that their best interests are being served -- or as Karl Marx grouchily put it, “false consciousness.” Not to mention the highly effective racist strategy of pitting the white working class against the Black working class to forestall a mass uprising against the techno-capitalist bosses.
If the film is over-stated in parts, that’s because no one has ever listened, no one is listening, and that’s why we need to “turn up the volume.” Remember, the film was made in 1962 – the “whip hand” is on the brink of experiencing its own backlash, or in the words of Dr. King: “A riot is the language of the unheard.” Bring on The Who! “Listening to you, I get the music…”
The message of the film stands as legitimately today as it did six decades ago, resisting reduction to pinko agitprop. Our technocratic society practically goes out of its way to block people from finding their unique path, and that’s why so many of us either turn in on ourselves or run off a cliff. (Read Studs Terkel’s masterful oral history, “Working” – if you liked school, you’ll love work.)
When we sell ourselves out and take the path of least resistance, we are loathe to examine the cost to our true selves. If we ever do wake up, it’s usually too late – the essence of classical tragedy. A recent cartoon nailed it. One kindergarten kid asks another: ‘What do you want to be when you give up?”
The head boy of a Yorkshire prepare-a-tory school, Tony Richardson likely experienced first hand the grooming process (a phrase that has since assumed a more disturbing connotation with the widespread revelations of the sexual interference with children at all levels of society). At Oxford, turning hard left, Richardson was a bi-sexual insider/outsider who kept his gay side under wraps; in the U.K., homosexuality remained legally un-OK until 1969. As an undergrad, he met fellow traveller Lindsay Anderson, future director of This Sporting Life (1963), If… (1968) and O Lucky Man! (1973). An exquisite take-down of the vicious Brit establishment, If… is a better realized work of art than LLDR, but both are cut from the same inspired, dissident cloth.[6]
Richardson was also an Oxford contemporary of Rupert Murdoch and Margaret Thatcher, radicals tugging from the other end of the tether. If nothing else, rocking around inside a narrow, exclusive institution can, paradoxically, arm an embryonic artist with a wide-angle lens; after graduation, he was a leading pioneer of “kitchen sink realism” that reflected the disillusionment of the post-war English working class, the “angry young men” savaging the endemic moral rot and hypocrisy of the over-privileged. Plus ca change![7]
The Colin Smith character in LLDR is an autobiographical spin on Allan Sillitoe’s own working class childhood in Nottingham. His illiterate and violent father drove the family to the brink of starvation, forcing the boy to work at 14, so the fiction of the book and film is small potatoes compared to his own brutal, Dickensian early life. Sillitoe disliked the label of “angry young man” — he was a pragmatic, resolute autodidact who struggled for a decade before being published — but he viscerally understood and fought the forces that grind down our individuality. The passionate “man against the system” is not entitled to his anger, or so demand the repressed and entitled systems men. The whipped, privileged public schoolboy internalizes, then inherits, the whip hand, lashing his inferiors with 400 blows until they are driven to commit the crime that justifies the whip hand, and prison.
The class-crossing collaboration of Richardson the director and Sillitoe the writer is deftly distilled in the pre-race locker room scene when Gunthorpe and Colin consider a joint insurrection against their respective overlords, if only fleetingly. Both young Tony and Alan chose the artistic path – not a career move either set of parents endorsed, I’d wager.
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Flash forward (or is it back?) to 1974: Grown from 12 to 24, my head stuffed with imported subversive cinema and literature, ear-bleeding rock n’ roll, and Monty Python’s cartoon foot crushing all and sundry, I escaped my imploding family and cycled abroad for 14 months. A culture-less, identity-less English Canadian, neither English nor Canadian, I was a “British subject” struggling to break the trance of my house-training and, in the cliché of the times, “find myself.”
Shunning the straight and narrow path set out for me, I hankered to burst my hygienic class bubble and “get real.” Where better to start than by rubbing shoulders with the world’s first industrial working class I knew only through the mediated filter of books, films and the genius of four moptopped Liverpudlians? (I could have chosen Afghanistan or Terra Del Fuego, but there’s such a thing as too much reality for a sheltered preppie with a case of Crohn’s Disease).
Flirting with vague notions of being a writer, I cycled around England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, paying homage to literary shrines from Shakespeare to Joyce to Yeats to Wordsworth to Dickens to Hardy to the Brontes. No Canadian writer could hold a candle to these cats.
Over that foggy winter, I hunkered down in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, working as a warehouseman, then a milkman on the Pennines, impersonating, badly, John Lennon’s working class hero (“They hate you if you’re clever and they despise a fool”). At first I lived in a massive, shabby boarding house chock-a-block with coal miners, five beds to a room. Every day, the lads rose at dawn, hit the pit, returned covered in black dust, then showered and headed straight to the pub to blow their pay packets. Every day.
One night as I was drifting off to sleep, a muscular, young miner my own age stumbled into the room drunk, his face covered with a bloody bandage. At the pub, a “bottle merchant” had smashed a pint glass on the bar and thrust the jagged shards into his face. “Thirty stitches,” he slurred proudly. “And you should see the other guy!” As he slipped under the bedclothes, I thought of Queequeg the tattooed cannibal, harpoon in hand, breathing down the neck of the unworldly Ishmael, the budding writer recording life in the raw.
I retreated to a tiny, solitary bedsit with a shilling-driven heater where I was taken under the wing of a kind landlady named after the socialist martyr Rosa Luxemburg. Returning from work in the winter dusk to my stack of paperbacks, I clung to countercultural fare -- sympathizing with the devil, meeting the new boss, same as the old boss -- now stumbling along on its last legs. When the truth is found to be lies/and the joy within you dies/you need somebody to love.
Disco and punk coming up fast from behind! Keep back!
One grey, rainy Sunday, I visited Newstead Abbey, the ancestral home of Lord Byron, in Nottingham, of all places. When I found it closed, I wandered the gardens alone, feeling as if I had been snubbed by royalty. (To this day, the staying power of the long-running absurdist play, “The British Monarchy”, never ceases to impress me. Held over for 1,000 years! Even the best of Sam Beckett can’t compete).
Redemption came when I retreated to my local Coronation Street-esque pub, sharing pints of bitter with my “mates”, the music of their “ta” and “luv”-strewn Yorkshire argot invoking memories of my working class doppleganger, Tom Courtney, the lonely, angry runner. Unlike home, these people actually talked and listened to me; they dubbed me “Canada Dry.”
A winter spent in the soot-dusted bosom of the Labour Party – the current PM Harold Wilson was a Huddersfield native – gloriously filled the holes in my unrounded, prepare-a-tory education. Certainly I found nothing glamourous in their grinding, another-brick-in-the-wall, rat-race lives, but I appreciated how their rough and ready realness punctured my own over-intellectualized meta-life. My family, school and class had tacitly taught me to look down on tradespeople who worked with their hands. Despite my 6’3” height, I never felt anyone “looked up” to me, and that was a great leveller.
Of course, my accent and my manner, the indelible marks of a house-trained politeness I will probably never fully shed, did set me apart. They knew what I knew: I was the ironically distanced runner, just passing through – a privilege unto itself. I returned to Canada to work on a small newspaper, pecking out stories on a typewriter. Working with my hands, in my own way. One day, a friend neatly condensed my travels abroad into a single sentence: “The poor have one advantage over the rich: they know when they have been loved for themselves.”
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LLDR remains my favourite “race movie”, if I may co-opt that phrase. The chariot race in Ben Hur or the car chase in Bullitt don’t count, as they’re not the central metaphors of the stories. Breaking Away (1979), directed by the Englishman Peter Yates, comes a close second: the bicycle race between snobbish university “gowns” and authentic working class “towns” is both touching and hilarious, and re-cycled me back to my days in Yorkshire. But when Chariots of Fire, the treacly, true story of a Christian and a Jew competing in the 1924 Olympics won the best picture of 1981, I gagged. In slow-motion.
(Brendan Behan’s memoir, Borstal Boy, published in 1958, a year before LLDR, forms an interesting counterpoint to Sillitoe’s rendering of the effects of reform school. A teenaged IRA recruit, Behan was captured and spent three years in an English borstal. Ironically, he came to realize he had more in common with his Anglo-Protestant working class peers than the Catholic ideologues back home: “I was brought up to hate the English. I had to come here to learn how to love.”)
Flash forward (backward?) to 2010: Now I am sixty, standing at a podium, accepting a Writers’ Trust literary prize for my family memoir, “What Disturbs Our Blood.” I was emotionally exhausted after running a lonely, 15 year marathon, painstakingly pulling together an intense story of inter-generational trauma and repression, and this was my first “win” since my truncated track star days in the early Sixties. While I had resolved much, an echo of my youth lingered – both my longing for and my dread of standing out. When both your outstanding grandfather and father crack up after reaching the peaks of their professions, no wonder you catch a chronic case of success-phobia.
The very name of the prize – “Writers’ Trust” – challenged me from the start. I flirted with pulling off a Marlon Brando or George C. Scott, declining my Dar-win-ian Oscar on a point of high principle. I fantasized about speechifying on how crazy and unfair it was that four out of the five nominees needed to “lose.” Thwart the gov. Refuse to play ball. Downplay your gift to dodge the arrows of envy and contempt, or worse. Look what happened to John Lennon!
But as I basked briefly in the limelight, I was forced to admit to myself that I needed, maybe even craved, recognition by an audience. (And that also goes for a recluse like you, J.D. Salinger). Otherwise, why do we write, act, sing, dance, film, paint, run?
As I was nearing the end of writing this essay, I hit a wall and put it away for a long time. I realized I still carried a piece of Colin Smith, resisting crossing the “finish line”, as if I were courting a form of death. Whose side am I on?
The groomed 12 year old “old boy”, digging in his heels, is now a new 70 year old man, a published writer, but in the end an inescapable loser in the human race, if not the race to become human. Technically, lacking children, I am evolutionary failure; my “last name” will die with me as I cross over to the other side. But if a story is any damn good, it will last forever.
The moral of this story? Walk, don’t run. And don’t forget it’s good for the soul to put your feet up and watch an old movie you loved when you were young. As if for the first time.
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[1] Thirty years later, when compiling “Old Boys”, an oral history of my prep school, several graduates testified that Somerville, a repressed Brit, habitually caned long lines of pre-pubescent boys, including my father, in a perverse ritual of re-enactment uniquely his own: after each beating, he’d pull the boy up his lap, fondle the purple welt on his bum, kiss him, then start to weep, shifting from extreme severity to extreme vulnerability within seconds. Failing to win the Somerville Cup stands as one of my proudest achievements.
[2] “And Did Those Feet” remains a solemn staple in Anglican private schools the world over. My brother and I, together with our lunatic friend Jay, loved the hymn so much that after smoking up, we played it as a trio on gazoos in swing time. I defy you to pull that off and keep a straight face.
[3] Whether consciously or not, the seaside scene evokes the famous ending of Francois Truffaut’s first, autobiographical film, The 400 Blows (1959), in which another reform school boy runs away from his bleak life only to thwarted by the vastness of the sea.
[4] As irreverent teens in the ‘60s, my fellow prep school inmate Mike Albery and I formed the habit of watching cheesy B-movies together, turning down the sound and ventriloquizing our own ad-libbed dialogue, just like Colin and his friend Mike in LLDR. Reverse puppetry! My friend Mike possessed a bizarre facility for reading the scrolling credits backwards at lightning speed, a source of convulsive hilarity, especially when stoned; Ringo Starr will forever remain Ognir Rrats.
[5] As a player on my 1963 prep soccer team, I was coached by Jack Schaffter, the only teacher during my 10 year sentence who actually cared to know who I was, wounded heels and all. A former RAF pilot, he embodied for me the best of British culture – manly, kind, brave, principled, erudite, fun, and as democratic as much as elitist. Normally we played exclusively against other exclusive private boys’ schools. To counter our conditioned belief in our innate superiority and entitlement, Jack arranged for us to play against humble, inner city Essex Public School, the size of a parking lot and stuffed with Italian immigrant boys and girls. Echoing the scene in the locker room in LLDR, the grotty “lesser breeds” of Essex were awed by our groomed 40 acre grounds and patriarchal clock tower rooted in the austere heart of Forest Hill. Then they soundly whipped our asses, running rings around their snotty WASP “betters”, but with a disarming graciousness. When I scored our only goal, a complete fluke, an Essex boy complimented me with such sincerity that I was tongue-tied. Aren’t we supposed to “play to win or not play at all”, as my driven grandfather used to say? Thank you, Jack, for a lasting lesson in humility – and class unconsciousness.
But I digress.
[6] Richardson’s edgy ‘60s oeuvre helped define the English decade: Look Back in Anger (1959), The Entertainer (1960) -- both originally plays that he directed as well -- The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), Tom Jones (1963), The Loved One (1965), and The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968). In 1960, he also produced the film version of Sillitoe’s first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, directed by Karel Reisz. Those seven titles alone would make for one hell of an all-night film festival. Not to mention Tom Courtney’s own quick “run” of anti-hero ‘60s films after LLDR: Billy Liar (1963), King and Country (1964) in which he plays a English soldier shot as a coward, and of course his character of Strelnikov in Dr. Zhivago (1965,) the ruthless Red Army commander who kills himself. Those last two roles sound like the “paths of resistance” Colin Smith would likely have taken after he got out of the borstal. If he ever did. Apparently Courtney is a delightful person in real life; maybe playing intense, fuck-you types helped clean out his basement.
[7] I highly recommend the 2019 book “Gilded Youth: Privilege, Rebellion and the British Public School” by James Brooke-Smith, a brilliant examination of how the establishment educational system has ironically produced some its most radical and original critics, artists and rebels from Percy Bysshe Shelley to George Orwell, John Le Carre, Christopher Hitchens, John Fowles, Richard Branson, Peter Gabriel, Pink Floyd, Monty Python, et al.