176 pp. Knopf, 1960. On a British-owned island in the West Indies recently, I read through an anthology of “schoolboy” stories—a genre special to the English, who take their schoolboys with a singularly high seriousness. Some of the stories were jolly spoofs, but the most exciting and convincing were those nakedly concerned with inculcating the social virtues of endeavor, pluck, and fair play. The plot was always the same: a young lad, named Pip or Snip or Fudge or Pudge, by a mighty effort succeeded, though half-blinded by the flapping flags of School and Nation, in kicking the winning goal or bowling the innings that turned the tide. The title story of Alan Sillitoe’s collection, The Loneliness of the Long-distance Runner, is squarely in this tradition, none the less squarely for being an inversion of it. The school is not Eton or Willows-in-the-Dale but an Essex Borstal; the hero, Smith, makes his mighty effort not to win the race but to lose it; the nation for which he strives is not Green England but the black kingdom of Downtroddendom; and the vision that gives him strength is the memory of his father’s prolonged death of throat cancer.
