Ruth Fainlight and Alan Sillitoe were both in their twenties when they met in a bookshop in Nottingham. Fainlight, born in New York to Jewish parents, had caught the poetry bug during a peripatetic childhood, not least thanks to reading Milton at school. Sillitoe, meanwhile, had also experienced the world beyond the home town he would write about with such vivid force. He escaped Nottingham by serving as a Royal Air Force radio operator in British Malaya (having trained to become a pilot just as the Second World War was ending). He returned with tuberculosis, to which condition he owed a small but vital military pension and an obsession with books acquired during his recuperation; such an obsession comes between a married couple in one early story, “The Fishing Boat Picture”. Sillitoe’s literary breakthrough remains a famous one: his debut novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958).
Much has been written about this novel, the timely second shock of “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” (1959), the film versions of these stories, the author’s rejection of the Angry Young Man label, and how his many later works, admired though some of them are, could hardly have matched that initial double impact. Although Fainlight was yet to publish her debut collection of poems, Cages (1966), those early years had a highly charged but different significance for her. As she would later recollect in the TLS (December 12, 2003), it was around this time that she met Jane Bowles and Sylvia Plath, the latter a “sister-spirit” to whom Fainlight felt especially, admiringly close: the time of visiting Jane in Morocco (where Tennessee Williams dandled the Sillitoes’ baby son on his knee) overlapped with the time of meeting Plath and Ted Hughes (via the Hawthornden award, which Sillitoe, as its holder, presented to Hughes, his successor). Plath’s last letter to Fainlight, written on Boxing Day 1962, rhapsodizes over plans to meet at the end of February at Court Green in Devon, her home with the estranged Hughes: “It would be such fun to open the place up in spring there with you”.
Going along with this plan, Fainlight learnt about Plath’s suicide from the Observer, picked up as she and Sillitoe were on their way back to England from Tangier. “I could not understand why there was a photograph of Sylvia and some accompanying text surrounded by a heavy black line at the top of the books page …”
In the industrious years that followed, brimful of their published work – novels, collections of stories, collections of poems, collections of essays, translations, plays, film scripts, memoirs and children’s books – Fainlight and Sillitoe remained close to Hughes. They collaborated with him and Leonard Baskin; and, naturally enough their own writings and Sillitoe’s political commitments (anti-Soviet, pro-Israeli) entailed a widening circle of acquaintance. Traces of these entwined lives may therefore be found – where else? – in the collection of some 350 volumes from their shared library that Shapero Rare Books is now preparing to sell en masse.
While “association copies” of books, as they are known to the trade, have become a common phenomenon, large collections of them from writers’ libraries, not least writing couples, are harder to come by. The story that this particular one has to tell will be lost, or at least become difficult to reconstruct, if it ends up being broken up. (A writer’s working library is perhaps more readily, and in some cases more regrettably, dismantled – see, for example, the many volumes on history and politics from Sillitoe’s bookshelves that were sold as a single lot at auction by Toovey’s, in 2018, for the awesome sum of £75.) For one thing, this intact collection includes Sillitoe’s annotated copies of his own books. The annotations may not seem to be directly revealing in themselves, but in the case of a writer who refused to be edited – as Sillitoe did, to his detriment – the concession to second thoughts, the making of minor amendments to a published work, might be seen to constitute a belated admission of fallibility. Or, failing that, a watchful authorial attitude to publishers’ productions. What is more likely to catch the eye of an avid collector, however, institutional or otherwise, is this collection’s core of inscribed copies from fellow writers. Many of them, to use the relevant bookselling jargon, are first impressions of first editions in fine or very good condition. And prominent among them are gifts from both Hughes and Sillitoe’s sometime mentor, Robert Graves.
The young Fainlight and Sillitoe had met Graves in Mallorca during the 1950s, when they lived for a spell in Sóller. The established writer was, as Paul O’Prey has it in his edition of Graves’s letters, “largely responsible” for the direction of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, encouraging Sillitoe “to write about his working-class upbringing”. “I knew you had it in you to write a good book”, Graves wrote to the debut novelist on its first publication, “but did not expect so good a one so soon.” To Fainlight, The White Goddess was “the poet’s handbook”, and the time she spent in the presence of its author was invaluable. “That was my education”, Heather Clark heard her say when interviewed for Clark’s Red Comet: The short life and blazing art of Sylvia Plath (2020). The connection was maintained for years afterwards, with Graves continuing to read and criticize both writers’ work. (Graves to Sillitoe, July 1954: “Your poem sounds good, holds together well, but the language has been taken beyond common sense, and that I always regret”; Graves to Fainlight, February 1969: “I like the ‘Wide-Eyed’ poem but from my own experience would have written the last line: Blind love, blind wide-eyed jealousy”.)
In the Shapero collection, the earliest book from Graves is Occupation: Writer (1951), a medley inscribed to Alan only, “afectuosamente”; brief, plain messages adorn the rest, but they are nothing if not choice. Amid many other possibilities, Graves gave publications such as Mammon (1964), an “exceptionally scarce” pamphlet containing an “oration delivered at the London School of Economics and Political Science on Friday, 6 December 1963” and Love Respelt (1965), a verse collection, “copy J of 18 copies lettered A–R”, with a frontispiece portrait of the poet by his muse, Aemilia Laraçuen; both poet and muse have signed it. The traffic went in both directions: many of Sillitoe’s books, and a few of Fainlight’s, are still to be found at the Casa de Robert Graves in Deià. Beryl Graves joined in, fifteen years after her husband’s death, by sending the Sillitoes her selection of his work, Yesterday Only and Other Poems (2000).
A similar tale of enduring attachment is suggested by copies of Hughes’s work, from The Hawk in the Rain (1957) down to Tales from Ovid (1997). Book collectors will undoubtedly see an intrinsic value in items such as Gaudete, plainly inscribed though it is, on the front free endpaper, “For Ruth and Alan / with much love / from Ted / 21st May 1977”. “Keep at it” is the terse encouraging addition to the collected edition of three books (Remains of Elmet, Cave Birds, River) published in 1993. Since the poem “Grouse-Butts” in Remains of Elmet (1979) lacks its last ten lines, thanks to a misprint, Hughes has made up the deficit in his own hand.
Most of the interest of the inscriptions themselves, however, lurks in the earliest volumes. “The new boat / finds the old rocks”, runs Hughes’s inscription in The Hawk in the Rain – a favourite couplet of his for such purposes. Similarly repeated here and there are the lines inscribed in Lupercal (1960): “The mind reigns / the mind slaves / the mind pastures geese”. Perhaps most enticing in this respect, is the quaint recipe written into the Sillitoes’ copy of Wodwo, dated to May 3, 1967: “add one goose / a pig’s ear / an holly bush / and simmer gently for 2 years / Serve in an old sock”. In another direction, there is the copy of Crow (1970) that comes with a loosely inserted birth chart, drawn by Hughes for Fainlight and Sillitoe’s son, David.
There are obvious limits to the kind of information that can be gleaned from association copies. Perhaps they may gain in interest, though, when set against other kinds of evidence. In this case, there is Hughes’s published correspondence, edited by Christopher Reid (2009). For example, Hughes encouraged both husband and wife to get involved, like him, with the Arvon Foundation: “People who’ve never written a line begin to flow with poetry. A very intense erotic atmosphere developes [sic]. (It’s quite isolated.) Maybe you should come separately” (January 1974). To Keith Sagar, meanwhile, Hughes complained that there is a “great plastic megaphone mask of English, that gets jammed over the head of all English writers”, introducing “into all writing a sort of struggle – Alan Sillitoe’s is a full battlefield display of it. Most writers simply capitulate” (August 28, 1984). Keep at it, indeed. To Anne Stevenson, while arguing a point during the correspondence over her Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath, Hughes strikes a different note: “the Sillitoes are very sensitive, but evidently not sensitive enough – or at least whoever conveyed the approaching thunderstorm detail to you was not very perceptive” (autumn 1986). Letters beget letters – eventually. To Daniel Weissbort, Hughes had once said of Sillitoe: “he’s a Communist of course” (February 12, 1964). As Fainlight clarified in a letter to the TLS of March 18, 2016, however, her husband was a “committed non-joiner” who never signed up for the Communist Party. “Alan and I were both (fondly) amused by how Ted romanticized Alan as an authentic representative of the working class.”
Booksellers are apt to call association copies “wonderful”, a magical cliché of hype – regardless, that is, of how much or little they differ from unmarked, association-free copies of the same mass-produced publication. Yet the hype can be justified sometimes, one way or another. The Sillitoes, for example, wisely hung onto a small volume called Six Turkish Tales (1987), sent to them with two painted greeting cards and a letter from the book’s author: Tracey Emin. They had met the artist through a mutual friend, the poet and bookseller Bernard Stone; Emin gave them her stories after “a very nice evening” in their company. “I write short stories sometimes, but mostly they lurk around in my head, I hope you like them.” She attributes the publication of her Tales to Billy Childish without spelling out that he had been her partner and that she helped him to run his press, Hangman Books. The gift must count here as an unexpected surprise among the inscribed copies from established writers such as Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing and Joyce Carol Oates (who presented Fainlight with one of sixty copies of her poetry collection Season of Peril, 1977, along with a sigh about a publisher of her prose: “My poetry has never appeared in England; Gollancz sometimes appears grudging enough in regard to the fiction, and has no interest at all in my poetry, for which I suppose I can’t blame anyone”).
Ruth Fainlight’s copy of The Colossus, meanwhile, contains only the signature of its owner – who might one day, had things been different, had asked its author, her friend Sylvia Plath, to sign it.
Michael Caines works at the TLS.
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