The Widower's Son by Alan Sillitoe

First published: 1976

Type of work: Psychological realism/social criticism

Time of work: From the early twentieth century to the 1960’s

Locale: Ashfield (near Nottingham), Europe, and Southern England

Principal Characters:

• William Scorton, the protagonist, a professional soldier in World War II
• Charlie Scorton, his widowed father, a professional soldier in World War I
• Georgina Woods, William’s wife
• Brigadier “Jacko” Woods, her father
• Harold Oxton, William’s batman

The Novel

The Widower’s Son is a three-part novel which spans the lifetime of two professional soldiers. Charlie Scorton, the widower of the title, serves for twenty-four years in the Royal Artillery, rises to the rank of sergeant, and is on active service during World War I. His son, William Scorton, serves in World War II and achieves the rank of colonel.

Part 1 starts with a tightly written account of Charlie’s career. Born in Ashfield, a small industrial town near Nottingham, he follows in his father’s footsteps as a miner but enlists in the army when his best friend is killed in a pit accident. His father angrily disowns him, and his mother dies while he is serving, after the war, in India. After his discharge and the birth of his son, his wife dies also.

Charlie brings the boy up in his own image. While other boys are out to play, William is being put through his paces by his father, who teaches him map reading, orienteering, and tactics and employs a private tutor to coach him in his schoolwork. At fourteen, William wins a scholarship to a military college. On leave, he has his first sexual experience, with a girl he meets in the street, before returning home to show off his uniform to his father.

At the beginning of part 2, William has completed a wartime course at an officer cadet training school and has been promoted to captain. In a grimly realistic account of the British army’s retreat from the advancing Germans on the European battlefields, William and his battle-seasoned batman, Harold Oxton, become isolated from the rest of the unit and make their way, under heavy bombardment, to the embarkation port of Dunkirk.

Part 3, the major section of the novel, deals with the turbulent relationship between William, now a colonel, and Georgina Woods, the daughter of Brigadier “Jacko” Woods. Georgina has recently broken off a passionate affair with a married man and has married William on the rebound. The early years of their marriage are cemented by their sexual compatibility and their shared roots in army life. After a miscarriage, however, Georgina becomes increasingly restless, and when William leaves the army, the social differences between them loom large. They have frequent quarrels, which lead to heightened sexual activity and temporary reconciliation.

Through a chance meeting with Albert Monk, owner of an entertainment and indoor sports center, William becomes the manager of the center, which he runs with the precision and tactical skill of a military exercise. He installs his former batman Oxton as doorman and trains him as his deputy. The work offends Georgina’s upper-class sensibilities, and their marriage goes from bad to worse.

William, devastated when he discovers that Georgina has resumed her affair with her former lover, attacks her physically. In one of a series of increasingly bizarre confrontations, he humiliates her by arriving late at one of her dinner parties and appearing before her guests ludicrously decked out in her underwear. Later, he smears the words “Smash Matrimony” in red paint all over their bedroom walls. Georgina fails to notice that he has cut his wrists and that some of the writing is in blood.

Broken-spirited and ill, with Georgina gone and his job handed over to Oxton, William has a feverish hallucination in which the German bombers of his battlefield experience are transformed into flying pterodactyls—a lurid surreal version of the account of actual bombardment in part 2.

When he eventually pulls himself together, he tosses all of his possessions into his car and heads for Ashfield, to discover that his father is terminally ill. Charlie’s death is William’s catharsis. The final two pages of the novel encapsulate an unexpected happy ending. William trains as a teacher, marries a colleague, rears a family, and, at the age of sixty, is at last able to lead a full and rewarding life.

The Characters

The British army is a central feature of the book and the main influence on the lives of its characters. In his early years, Charlie accepts army discipline gratefully as a means of freezing the pain of his emotional deprivation—the deaths of his best friend and his mother, and ostracism by his father. He is a good soldier, and in later life, the army continues to represent everything he holds dear. He is never tired of reliving his own past glories and is able to relive them yet again through his son.

Charlie’s life is deeply rooted in his social class and in the mining village of his birth. His army rank as noncommissioned officer and his civilian work as a postman keep him well within the parameters of his social origins.

The forces that shape William’s development are more complex. As a child, he accepts his father’s guidance. He enjoys serious study, but when he asks why he has to learn French, Charlie’s reply, “So that you can become a gentleman,” surprises and puzzles him. Joining the army and becoming “a gentleman” are not his own aspirations but have been decided for him by his father.

As an officer, he is treated at first with some condescension by his fellow officers, most of whom have middle-or upper-class backgrounds, but he is strong-minded enough to cope with their antagonism. His father has instilled in him the soldier’s habit of not asking questions about motive but concentrating on the practical tasks in hand. He approaches his relationship with Georgina similarly, dealing with her in a tactical way rather than trying to understand her deeper feelings. This attitude is most clearly imaged in a brilliantly described confrontation between them in which they fantasize about a full-scale war, inventing increasingly extravagant maneuvers against each other until, in an assault of mounting sexual excitement, his imaginary army conquers hers and they make passionate love.

William’s civilian post as manager of the entertainment complex requires merely the application of his military work patterns: Everything is done along predetermined lines of action and there is very little scope for personal vision or fulfillment.

It is not until the collapse of his marriage that he is able to understand the hollowness of his whole life which, as the author puts it, has been built “on his father’s lie.” At the core of his mental breakdown is the realization that although his life is half over he has never really lived: Everything that has happened to him has been determined by others, especially by his father and by the army.

His marriage to a brigadier’s daughter is also based on his father’s “lie,” on Charlie’s unrealistic, high-flying aspirations for him. Georgina is a passionate woman, and William, sturdy son of the working class, can fulfill her sexual needs. Emotionally, however, he fails her completely.

Georgina is accustomed to comfortable and gracious living, and as long as William is in the army, his rank provides her with the status she regards as her right. As a civilian, he has no such standing. She scorns his tentative idea of training to be a teacher, telling him that she cannot imagine mixing with schoolmasters and their wives. In her snobbish eyes, his post as manager of the center is beyond the pale.

Georgina might have achieved emotional fulfillment through children, so her miscarriage is a greater loss than William allows. His evening absences also add to her loneliness. The reader can easily understand why she seeks solace with her former lover, but to William her infidelity is a personal insult.

Oxton is in many ways the typical salt-of-the-earth batman of military fiction. His main motivation, however, is not patriotic duty or devotion to country, but duty and devotion to his mother, who absorbs all of his love. When she dies, after the war, he is a broken man, saved only by William’s offer of further service to him, albeit in a civilian trade. Oxton’s story reaches a happy ending when he marries his landlady. His evident joy in his new life is one of the factors that make William look more deeply into the causes of his own despair.

The army features in the lives of all the male characters. Even Albert Monk, the hard-nosed owner of the entertainment center, has had a spell in uniform. He had served in the Pay Corps and, in line with his questionable character, was involved in some kind of trouble and was dishonorably discharged.

Critical Context

With his first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), Alan Sillitoe established himself as one of the key figures in the movement for socially critical realism which transformed British literature in the late 1950’s and 1960’s by breaking away from middle-class metropolitanism and dealing sympathetically with working-class life in the industrial regions. Unlike most of the other authors, Sillitoe wrote from his own experience, having been born and brought up in a working-class family in Nottingham.

His personal experience in the armed services in Malaya informed his third novel, Key to the Door (1961), about a young Nottingham worker who is conscripted into the army and is sent on a mission in the Malayan jungle. In many of his subsequent novels, Sillitoe widened his range, and to his early concerns with the social forces that shape people’s behavior he added psychological motivation.

In The Widower’s Son he returned, at an altogether different level of perception, to some of the elements of Key to the Door. The two novels are similar in structure. Both begin with a careful and detailed description of the protagonist’s family and upbringing as a basis for understanding his subsequent choices of action. In Key to the Door, however, as in Sillitoe’s celebrated story “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner,” the climax of the narrative is an affirmation of the protagonist’s personal stand against established moral values. In The Widower’s Son the climax is tragic and destructive. Self-affirmation comes afterward, almost as a postscript, and is achieved despite the protagonist’s upbringing rather than because of it.

Bibliography

Atherton, Stanley S. Alan Sillitoe: A Critical Assessment, 1979.

Duvall, E. S. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXXVII (July 24, 1977), p. 1.

Gray, Paul. Review in Time. CX (August 22,1977), p. 70.

Moynahan, Julian. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXXVII (July 24, 1977), p. 1.

Sokolov, Raymond. Review in Newsweek. XC (August 15, 1977), p. 72.