Alan Plater

My favourite books

From Socialist Review, No. 174, April 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

To begin at the beginning: I originally trained as an architect in Newcastle but had secretly decided to be a writer, cartoonist and celebrated wit – my fantasy life was dominated by a table at the Algonquin Hotel in New York where I would trade one liners with Dorothy Parker, James Thurber and S.J. Perelman. Then, as now, it was a wacky sort of notion for a kid born in Jarrow and brought up in Hull; but under its influence I spent 30 shillings on The Passport by Saul Steinberg, the greatest of the New Yorker artists. This was around 1954 when my term’s grant was £60 and £1.50 was a week’s rent.

Steinberg had also trained as an architect. He said it was the greatest training in the world for everything except architecture. The title drawings of the book are a brilliant parody of official documents, adorned with layers of self-satisfied and illegible signatures, impenetrable rubber stamps and the assorted visual trappings of totalitarianism. Everything is oppressive, authoritarian and, crucially, anonymous.

There are equally ferocious drawings of buildings. He had a sharp eye for architectural facades – what my old professor used to call a Queen Anne front with a Mary Anne back. And there are deceptively simple drawings which are a love affair with the drawn line: people drawing themselves, or carrying their own signatures with them, or more conventional sketches – two lovers kissing having first removed their spectacles.

For an apprentice writer the 1950s was a tricky time. Most novels and plays seemed to be set in the Home Counties, lubricated by gin and tonic and speckled with witless epigrams. The angry young men, like Wesker and Osborne, had only just begun to peer over the barricades and were not visible from Tyneside. The discovery of Gwyn Thomas was therefore a key moment.

Here was a man who wrote about the world I recognised – where people ate chips, left their front doors open, hated their rulers and traded savage jokes and bitter tales about the General Strike. The emotional and political kinship between South Wales and Tyneside is self-evident. Gwyn’s autobiography, A Few Selected Exits, is a perfect introduction to the man, his life and his work. He wrote like a Celt: no purple patches for him – his prose is purple all the way through. John McGahern, the Irish writer, once said that in all Celtic writing you can hear the ghost of the dead language – the Welsh or the Gaelic. The same is true of much American and Caribbean writing: the oppressed taking the language of the oppressors and transforming it into a subversive challenge to official history.

I can trawl Geordies into this debate at the drop of a cloth cap, and the finest of the north-east writers (though not a true Geordie since he was born in south-west Durham) is Sid Chaplin, who gave me the tales and inspiration that helped me make Close the Coalhouse Door. Sid was a good friend and respected father figure to many of the northern writers who emerged in the 1960s: a genuine, self-educated working class intellectual who, unlike most of us state scholars, really had worked down the pit. His anthology of essays and stories, The Smell of Sunday Dinner, is the next best thing to sitting around his front room trading yarns.

If I ever accept pieces of silver and write an autobiography, the title I have in mind is Abandoned Projects – celebrating all the plays, books and films which, for whatever reason, never got past first base. The best screenplay I ever wrote was from Wide Sargasso Sea, a near perfect novel by Jean Rhys.

She wrote for the disenfranchised and the dispossessed with a resilience that passes all understanding. Her Collected Letters are a painful but necessary companion to the novel. She held us up to look at the blood on the moon. Among novelists, she is the Billie Holliday, and there is no higher praise.

Alan Plater is a playwright. His works include the Beiderbecke Trilogy for television and the play about miners, Close the Coalhouse Door

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