Notes from the Underground

THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG-DISTANCE RUNNER (176 pp.) -- Alan Sillitoe --Knopf ($3.50).

I was told, continued Egremont, "that an impassable gulf divided the Rich from the Poor; I was told that the Privileged and the People formed Two Nations, governed by different laws, influenced by different manners, with no thoughts or sympathies in common"

--Benjamin Disraeli: Sybil

Disraeli's truism about England's "two nations" appeared in 1845, nearly a quarter of a century before he became Prime Minister. Today, despite the leveling influences of repeated wars and the advent of the welfare state, the two nations still eye each other across a gulf nearly as impassable. In Alan Sillitoe, the largely silent second nation has found a brilliantly articulate spokesman. His people, rattling around in the urban slums of the English Midlands, have nothing in common with the world image of the Englishman: tall, stolid, well-spoken with a reverence for fair play and the law. In this new collection of nine short stories, as in his novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Sillitoe's characters are spry, gamy, wry-humored, and view the British policeman not as a kindly bobby but as "a dirty, bullying, jumped-up bastard."

Son of a Nottingham tanner, 31-year-old Author Sillitoe left school at 14 to work in factories, turned to writing during the war while serving as an R.A.F. radio operator in Malaya. Far from being one of Britain's heavily intellectual Angry Young Men, Sillitoe is extremely matter of fact in his recital of the war between the two nations. The blokes he writes about may have been "put inside" for anything from arson to stealing cars, from burglary to grabbing passing women and "trying to give them what-for."

In the long title story, the battle lines are swiftly drawn. Smith, the 17-year-old narrator, is serving a stretch in a Borstal Institution for juvenile delinquents (his offense: stealing -L-150 from a bakery). Encouraged by the hearty, sports-loving warden to train for an All-England crosscountry race of Borstal inmates, Smith lets down his high-minded sponsor by deliberately quitting in the stretch. Why? Because Smith knows "it's war between me and them," and has no intention of giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

Many of the other stories point the same moral, and yet Author Sillitoe is almost never bitter, self-pitying or sentimental. Most of his people are buoyed by a bottomless optimism. As Smith puts it, talking about the warden: "It's dead blokes like him as have the whiphand over blokes like me, and I'm almost dead sure it always will be that way, but even so, by Christ, I'd rather be like I am--always on the run and breaking into shops for a packet of fags and a jar of jam--than have the whiphand over someone else and be dead from the toenails up."

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