Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is a look at the shackles and minor freedoms of 1950s English working class men, seen through the eyes of a ballsy Arthur Seaton who works all week in a factory job and spends his weekends dressed up, drinking to excess, getting into the occasional fight and hopping into the beds of married woman. With a strong focus on his rage against the Establishment and domestic life, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning has a strongly masculine voice but ultimately the sadness, hopelessness and futility of his revolt has wide appeal.
For it was Saturday night, the best and bingiest glad-time of the week, one of the fifty-two holidays in the slow-turning Big Wheel of the year, a violent preamble to a prostrate Sabbath. Piled-up passions were exploded on a Saturday night, and the effect of a week’s monotonous graft in the factory was swilled out of your system in a burst of goodwill. You followed the motto of ‘be drunk and be happy’, kept your crafty arms around female waists, and felt the beer going beneficially down into the elastic capacity of your guts.
Arthur Seaton is young, cocksure and fond of a strong drink and married women. He’s all attitude: it seems to be an insolent youthfulness in him, the feeling that nothing can touch him, he knows everything, he’s got everyone all figured out. He works a repetitive factory job, spends his weekend boozing and the rest of his free time bedding a married woman, Brenda. Arthur is surprisingly friendly with Brenda’s husband, Jack, who he works with – he sometimes worries about being found out, but at the same time is pretty certain he won’t be, or that if he is it won’t be his problem. When Brenda tells Arthur that she is pregnant with his child, Arthur’s encourages her to “take care of it.” Arthur’s attitude toward women is outdated, slightly misogynist and youthfully ignorant. He doesn’t seem to appreciate the great risks Brenda takes in order to be with him. For him it’s a lark, for Brenda it endangers everything she holds as stable.
On the evening Brenda terminates her pregnancy, Arthur sleeps with Brenda’s sister – the also married Winnie. Only Winnie’s husband isn’t as clueless as Jack, and he sets out to find Arthur and make him pay. Arthur continues his dalliances, as well as romancing a somewhat naïve girl named Doreen, until he is beaten up by two soldiers on account of his reckless affairs. After this happens, there is a more pronounced level of dissatisfaction with the world around him, with the government, the army, the work force, as he realizes he is impotent to fight against it and he too is drawn into the endless of cycle of marriage, procreation, work and boozy weekends. Perhaps his relationships with married women was a method of avoiding the responsibility of marriage, an inevitability that his relationship with Doreen seems headed toward.
He was nothing at all when people tried to tell him what he was. Not even his own name was enough, though it might be on his pay-book. What am I? he wondered. A six-foot pit-prop that wants a pint of ale. That’s what I am. And if any knowing bastard says that that’s what I am, I’m a dynamite-dealer, Stengun seller, hundred-ton tank trader, a capstan lathe operator waiting to blow the army to Kingdom Cum. I’m me and nobody else; and whatever people think I am or say I am, that’s what I’m not, because they don’t know a bloody thing about me.
Arthur’s family and home life are written with such an inviting warmth, which contrasts sharply to Arthur’s booze-fuelled weekends and shunning of domestic life. Sillietoe makes it difficult to see what exactly Arthur is so afraid of this domesticity. Arthur’s is a particularly masculine rage and disaffection that is eventually made futile by his inability to escape the routine of familial life. His only escape, such that it is, is through booze and random acts of violence – although these seem to be more of a stunted expression of his anger and disaffection than an escape from it. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning effectively captures how banal comments can escalate into brawls, how violence is always – in Arthur’s circumstances – just a brief comment or misguided look away; and how much of a role alcohol plays in such situations. Like the drunk that smashes the store window and attempts to run away only as the police arrive, Arthur too is resigned to his fate, to what he cannot fight or avoid any longer despite his staunch self-belief and anti-authoritarian attitude. There is something resoundingly sad in his resignation, his willingness to give up those beliefs he held on to so strongly so easily, out of necessity, the social world practically demands it of him.
