Stan Barstow Obituary

Stan Barstow obituary
Writer whose novels signalled a sea-change in British literature

Ian Haywood
Guardian.co.uk, Monday 1 August 2011 20.06 BST

Stan Barstow, who has died aged 83, belonged to a generation of working-class writers who became famous in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Like his peers Alan Sillitoe, John Braine, David Storey and Keith Waterhouse, he was born in the depression years of the interwar period and flowered as a novelist in the booming welfare state of postwar Britain. Barstow and his fellow, primarily northern, writers were products of this remarkable transformation in the social landscape of Britain, and their creativity was fuelled by the opportunities and anxieties that such an enormous process of change inevitably generated.

Barstow arrived on the literary scene in 1960 with his first published novel, A Kind of Loving. An unsentimental and unpatronising portrayal of an unhappy marriage, it struck a new note of sombre and sensitive realism. He was riding the crest of a wave: Braine's Room at the Top and Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning were already in print, and the vogue for working-class fiction was in full swing. Writers who knew this way of life at first hand had found their moment: they wrote about the conflict between individualism and community, self-fulfilment and conformity, modernity and tradition, ambition and betrayal.

These themes were not new, but the settings represented a sea-change in the class-based assumptions of English literary tradition. The drawing room had been replaced by the kitchen sink, the pub, the factory floor and the community, while standard English gave way to a new vernacular of regional passion and eloquence.

There was another reason for the success of these new voices. It was the assumed primitivist sexuality of working-class culture which gave the literature a mystique and even a risque glamour. Working-class sexuality had often been a source of fascination for the middle-class gaze, and the paperback and film versions of the various novels lost no time in exploiting sexual controversy. A Kind of Loving was adapted for the cinema in 1962, with Alan Bates and June Ritchie, and inspired a TV series in 1982, with Clive Wood and Joanne Whalley.

Although A Kind of Loving is frank about sex, its hero, Vic Brown, is neither macho nor radical. He seems relatively contented with the lifestyle that Joe Lampton in Room at the Top despises and labels "zombie". Vic lacks virility and drive; underneath his sexist banter he is squeamish about sex, and he is afraid to admit to his mates that his real pursuit is love, not fornication. He marries his pregnant girlfriend, Ingrid, but he does not love her, and the novel ends with an uneasy reconciliation. Vic has unrealised potential but as yet there is no cultural or social outlet. The novel was an attempt to cast new light on the complex and often confused moral interiority of the respectable working class during a moment of change.

Most of Barstow's narratives were set in his familiar northern industrial community, and much of the critical acclaim awarded to him was based on the authenticity, sympathy and conviction of his writing. Unlike Sillitoe, Storey, the Beatles and other "northern" successes of the 1960s, Barstow did not move south, though in the sequel to A Kind of Loving, The Watchers On the Shore (1966), Vic leaves his wife for London bohemia. Vic's metropolitan trials and tribulations furnished a third novel, The Right True End, in 1976.

Barstow's regional loyalism reflected a steadfast adherence to the creative possibilities of his heritage: in his own words, "to hoe one's own row diligently, thus seeking out the universal in the particular, brings more worthwhile satisfaction than the frantic pursuit of a largely phony jet-age internationalism".

Barstow was born in Horbury, a railway town on the outskirts of Wakefield in West Yorkshire. His father was a coalminer and the household was, in an earlier parlance, unlettered. This was not a propitious beginning for a career in literature: "There were no writers in the family (there were, in fact, few real readers)," he once said.

He attended Ossett grammar school, which he left in 1944 to become a draughtsman in a nearby engineering firm. It was as a result of this modest degree of social mobility that Barstow began to feel the real frustrations of his regional and cultural isolation. He regarded these feelings as symptomatic of the exclusion of the working class from literary tradition: "We had the temerity to think we could write but [had] no teachers and no models."

It was to be a long haul. Only four short stories were completed in his first nine years of writing. Meanwhile, Barstow married Constance Kershaw in 1951, settled into family life and remained in his job as a white-collar worker until his success with A Kind of Loving gave him the financial security he needed to become a full-time writer. The Desperadoes, a collection of short stories, was published in 1961, followed by the novels Ask Me Tomorrow (1962) and Joby (1964). When contemporary history failed to inspire him, he looked back to his formative years and produced a trilogy of novels set in the 1940s: Just You Wait and See (1986), Give Us This Day (1989) and Next of Kin (1991). He published his autobiography, In My Own Good Time, in 2001.

In 2010, A Kind of Loving was republished, in a 50th anniversary edition, and was also dramatised for Radio 4 by Barstow's partner, Diana Griffiths, who has adapted several of his novels. A collection of short stories, entitled The Likes of Us, is due to be published next year.

Barstow is survived by Diana, his children, Neil and Gillian, and a grandson.

• Stan Barstow, writer, born 28 June 1928; died 1 August 2011

What's it all about?

New town, new doctor. Visit to the medical centre to register and the basic tests; urine and blood pressure. Blood pressure is cause for concern so it's back a few days later to test the presure and give a blood sample. The results come in, the doctor writes to me "I would appreciate if you were to call my secretary in order to make an appointment . . . "

Reasons to be cheerful

Ian Dury & The Blockheads

Reasons to be cheerful part 3
1 2 3
Summer, Buddy Holly, the working folly, Good golly Miss Molly and boats
Hammersmith Palais, the Bolshoi Ballet, Jump back in the alley and nanny goats

Despite good reason to complain, Dury (1942 - 2000) chose creativity and an interest in others. Polio disabled him and, ultimately, cancer killed him. I saw the Blockheads in Edinburgh in 1984, the venue had no licence so you could take your own drink in with you - a good reason to be cheerful.