Man Booker Prize 1976 / Saville by David Storey

MAN BOOKER PRIZE 

Booker club: Saville by David Storey

Obituaries / David Storey

Sam Jordison

Tue 18 Nov 2018

The long hiatus in my trawl through past Booker winners has not been caused by boredom. True, the last winner I read, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Heat And Dust, was dry and cold, but the project itself interests me as much as ever. Indeed, the book at which I broke off – David Storey's Saville – is particularly fascinating. It's certainly blown apart one of my own long-held cultural assumptions.

Until I read Saville I had always thought that Monty Python's working-class playwright sketch had finished off all modern attempts to write books like Sons And Lovers. Nobody who has laughed at Tungsten Carbide Drills, "writers' cramp" and Terry Jones' matronly hand-wringing could again take seriously a book about a son who'd rather attain the lofty heights of poetry than work down a mine. And yet here is the 1976 Booker winner set among a South Yorkshire mining family in the late 1930s, complete with small kitchen, moaning mother and an oldest son who snubs "yon pit" to become a writer in "that London".

Untroubled by irony: 1976 Booker winner David Storey.
 Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

It was written in 1975, a good half-decade after Python – but if Storey was aware his themes could seem absurd, he valiantly ignored the problem. This is a book entirely untroubled by irony. A book that in all earnestness presents reams of dialogue like the following:

'"What are the teachers like," his father said.

"They call them masters."

"Masters. Masters. What are the masters like?"

"They're very strict."…

"I can see they believe in work," his father said.

"That's the motto: work is pleasure." He pointed to the blazer. His father laughed.

"Sithee, not where I work then," he said. "The one who wrote that has never been down yon."'

It's po-faced. It's daft. It retreads territory that was over-familiar in English fiction by 1975. Indeed, this wasn't even new ground for the author. The themes of small town pit-based frustration replicate those in his most famous work This Sporting Life. What's more, Saville's eponymous hero is also good at rugby league and entwined in marital infidelity. Small surprise that the headline of the Guardian review when the book came out read simply: "Same Old Storey".

So, it's all the more impressive that this novel remains captivating for most of its 500+ pages. Storey may take himself too seriously, but that's not enough reason to disregard his talent. His scenes may be hackneyed but they are no less vivid for that. Or less real. The layer of fiction here, whether through skill or accident, seems thin. Storey makes us feel like we are being granted a privileged and even painfully intimate insight into his own upbringing(painful especially given the obsession Saville seems to have for his mother).

The emotions the story evokes seem correspondingly true. There's no doubting how strongly felt are Saville's love and hate for the mean and puritanical - yet close-knit and frequently alcoholic – community in which he grows up. There are intriguing complex shadings surrounding its contradictions and the fact that no place could be less tolerant of the desires of Saville or other natural outsiders trapped within the village boundary – but nowhere could they be better understood or valued either. It's an affecting study. Even the father becomes a deeply sympathetic character. His speech may be weighed down by unconvincing Yorkshire-isms, but Storey is still able to show us his heart. In short, he writes wonderfully far more often than he writes badly.

Ultimately, Storey's insistence on the importance of his selfish hero's internal struggles to the exclusion of all humour and irony is irritating. The final chapters detailing his inevitable break for "that" London also drag. Still, so immersed was I in the world and characters that Storey conjured that when I closed the book, I felt like I was parting company from a friend. An egotistical and bitter friend with a dull fixation on class and surprising ignorance of television satire, admittedly – but one I admired nonetheless.

It's been suggested that Saville won the Booker because of a left-wing desire to give it to something written from the workers' perspective. Having read the book, I'm willing to believe it won the prize simply because it's a class act.

THE GUARDIAN

Obituaries / David Storey

David Storey

David Storey obituary

Author of This Sporting Life whose raw, realistic plays and novels reflected on family, atonement and the north-south divide

Michael Coveney
Mon 27 Mar 2017

 David Storey in 2004. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian

David Storey, who has died aged 83, was an unusual literary figure in being as well known for writing novels as he was for writing plays, never claiming that one discipline was harder or easier than the other, but achieving distinction in both, often overlapping, fields. He sprang to prominence with his first novel, This Sporting Life, in 1960; his 1963 movie adaptation, directed by Lindsay Anderson, and starring Richard Harris and Rachel Roberts, was an outstanding example of the new wave of British film, in its raw black-and-white northern realism and its brutal story of a miner turned professional rugby player and his widowed landlady.

Storey, the big and burly son of a Yorkshire miner, played rugby league for Leeds in the early 1950s while also studying fine art at the Slade school in London. His recurring themes, on stage and page, were defined by this dual experience; and by the conflict between his roots in the north and a sense of powerful dislocation in the south, as well as feelings of guilt and atonement in family life.

His career-long association with Anderson blossomed at the Royal Court theatre, London, in an extraordinary flush of plays between 1969 and 1971: In Celebration, in which three sons return home for their parents’ 40th wedding anniversary; The Contractor, in which a tent for a wedding reception is erected and then dismantled; Home, an enigmatic, poetic study of elderly patients in a mental asylum, first played, unforgettably, by John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson; and The Changing Room, a gritty realist drama set in a rugby league locker room. Storey himself said that, after years of struggle and rejection, a dam had burst; none of these fine plays, impeccably directed by the irascible Anderson, took more than five days to write.

In the middle of this period, Hilary Spurling, who was then reviewing plays for the Spectator, was denied free tickets by Anderson, who declared that he did not find her attitude to his and Storey’s work “illuminating, and we do not believe that it furthers our relationship with the public”. The Arts Council intervened and threatened the theatre with punitive financial measures if Spurling was not reinstated on its press list.

The incident illuminated the spirit of entrenchment and defiance in the Court’s work at this time. On another occasion, in 1976, the critics were passing through the circle on the way to a small production in the Theatre Upstairs, a week after delivering indifferent notices of Storey’s Mother’s Day downstairs. They were accosted en masse by Storey; Michael Billington was cuffed around the head by the irate playwright shouting “id-i-ot” before Storey was restrained by Irving Wardle.

Rachel Roberts and Richard Harris in Lindsay Anderson’s 1963 film of This Sporting Life. Photograph: ITV/Rex Shutterstock

Storey was born in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, the son of Frank Storey and his wife Lily (nee Cartwright), and was educated at the Queen Elizabeth grammar school in Wakefield, before attending the Slade School of Fine Art between 1953 and 1956. As a teenager, he worked for a tent contractor in Wakefield (the same firm supplied the original tent for The Contractor) and later as a teacher in a school behind King’s Cross, London, as he turned out his fiction.

Although This Sporting Life was soon followed by the award-winning Flight into Camden (1961), in which a miner’s daughter falls in love with a married teacher and goes to live with him in London, Storey was impatient “to get something down quickly,” and he tried a play; he had seen Hamlet at the Grand in Leeds when he was eight, but had hardly bothered with the theatre since.

That first play, To Die With the Philistines, was rejected by every theatrical management in Britain in 1961, Storey said. However, six years later a young director at the Royal Court, Gordon McDougall, recalled its portrait of a puritanical schoolmaster veering into madness, beset by a jealous wife, the dialogue flecked with passages of unusual, humorous rhetoric, when looking to make an impact as the new director of the Traverse theatre in Edinburgh.

Retitled The Restoration of Arnold Middleton, the play was remounted at the Royal Court in 1967, directed by Robert Kidd, and won Storey a half-share of the Evening Standard’s most promising playwright award that year; his fellow winner was another unknown, Tom Stoppard, also for his first success, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

One of the distinctive features of Storey’s playwriting was the voice it gave to the new breed of working-class actors that straddled the first and second waves of new writing at the Royal Court. The three brothers in In Celebration, for instance, were played by Alan Bates, James Bolam and Brian Cox, their parents by Bill Owen and Constance Chapman. When the production was filmed by Anderson in 1974, he said that this was “probably the most complete and authentic record of Royal Court playing and directing”.

At the same time, there were other significant partnerships between writers and directors in Sloane Square: John Osborne and Tony Richardson, Edward Bond and William Gaskill, Christopher Hampton and Kidd, while Arnold Wesker and, later, Peter Shaffer had equally creative relationships with another Court director, John Dexter. It was a golden age, but Storey was never seduced by the trappings of West End and Broadway success.

There was a nine-year gap in his novels between Radcliffe (1963) and Pasmore (1972), in which a college lecturer drifts through his own past like a ghost after his marriage breaks up. Two novels in 1973 – A Temporary Life and Edward – were followed by the Booker-prizewinning Saville (1976), a big and complex work notable for its meticulous recreation of a Yorkshire boyhood.

The Royal Court stream continued with the enigmatic Cromwell (1973), which Anderson disliked, written at the height of the Troubles and the Vietnam war; Anthony Page took over, directing Cox as a recruit turned pacifist and Albert Finney as an Irish labourer. But Anderson was back in harness for The Farm (1973), an echo of In Celebration, this time with three daughters, and Life Class (1974), in which Bates played a sort of existential Prospero of an art teacher in a richly allegorical, and underrated, play drawing on Storey’s drawings, with a nude female model unselfconsciously played by Rosemary Martin.

Times and tastes had changed at the Royal Court, and Storey’s last three stage plays, all directed by Anderson, surfaced at the National Theatre: there were more strange and poetic riffs for Ralph Richardson in Early Days (1980); an update on the family in Pasmore, and more echoes of In Celebration, in The March on Russia (1989); and a dramatically inert distillation of many earlier plays in Stages (1992). Anderson died in 1994, and Storey retreated from the theatre, though he did write one or two more unproduced plays.

He published a collection of poems in 1992, and later novels included A Serious Man (1998) – a study of a playwright, pitman’s son, painter and novelist as his life falls apart (Bates had played the character, Richard Fenchurch, in Stages) – and Thin-Ice Skater (2004), full of terse, tense dialogue in a bleak Hampstead hinterland.

In later years, Storey still cut an imposing, distinctive, white-haired figure, lumbering around Hampstead in a large overcoat and comfortable trainers. He kept on writing and drawing, and in summer 2016 an exhibition of his artwork was held at the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield.

His wife, Barbara (nee Hamilton), whom he married in 1956, died in 2015. He is survived by their two sons and two daughters.

• David Malcolm Storey, playwright and novelist, born 13 July 1933; died 27 March 2017

Ralph Richardson, left, and John Gielgud in the Royal Court’s production of Home, 1970. Photograph: Evening Standard/Getty Images

THE GUARDIAN