Man at Arms

By Paul Gray

THE WIDOWER'S SON

by Alan Sillitoe

Harper & Row. 288 pages. $8.95

Although he achieved fame in the 1950s as one of England's Angry Young Men, Author Alan Sillitoe never lost his temper in his books. The working-class characters in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1959) and Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1960) did indeed rail at the upward immobility of the British class system; it was Sillitoe's cool precision in portraying them that made these fumings so hot to the touch. Sillitoe's restraint, his continued attention to the Nottinghamshire region of his own childhood, are quiet virtues that the noisy passage of 20 trendy years in England sometimes eclipsed. On the evidence of his 14th novel, these qualities have also made him a long-distance writer.

The Widower's Son sets up all the obstacles faced by a working-class lad in the 1930s but concentrates on another: the baffle that prevents people from understanding themselves. Left motherless at age seven, William Scorton is raised by his father, a veteran artilleryman who has used the military to escape from the coal mines of his youth. Equating discipline with love, the father trains his young son to become an artillery gunner; when he takes William to visit his mother's grave, he carts along a compass so that they can make a field map of the cemetery. This utilitarian education takes: William wins a scholarship to the Military College of Science, receives a wartime-accelerated commission in the artillery, and behaves with bravery before and during the British retreat to Dunkirk.

William eventually marries a brigadier general's daughter--and the trajectory of his life veers sharply downward. For no reason that he has been trained to calculate, the marriage sours. He resigns from the military, hoping to please his wife, and only succeeds in driving her back to an ex-lover. He must ponder mysteries too large to be circumscribed by a gun sight: "They had started off on the wrong foot, not only when they had first met, but from the day they were born in their separate corners of the universe."

Sillitoe handles his hero's awakening with compassion--and with none of the prattling about narrowness blighting young lives that could serve as the moral of such a tale. If anything, his message is the reverse: people can learn in spite of what they are taught; the residue of ignorantly directed affection is both pain and the memory of love. At the end William muses: "His father had pushed him into it [the army] but he forgave him for that: we have to forgive our parents if we want our children to forgive us." In a different context, this conclusion could have all the resonance of a greeting-card sentiment. In Sillitoe's novel, it rings with hard-earned wisdom.

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