Loneliness Murakami

The Loneliness of the Long-DistanceRunner in Browning, Sillitoe, and

Murakami

HELEN SMALL

Every marathoner runs alone. Breath, heartbeat, the strikeof feet on the road, the sweat-soaked shirt, the achinglegs – it’s all private. To run the marathon is a whollypersonal decision. Only the runner can summon the willto complete it, and the satisfaction of finishing will beeach runner’s alone.

Yet every marathoner runs with many others – some-times tens of thousands. They share the road, thepurpose, the struggle, and the satisfaction. Together theymake up a race, a field, and a community.1

THE EXEMPLARY LITERARY CASE of the long-distancerunner’s dual status – at once solitary struggler and representa-tive of an imagined community – is Robert Browning’s ‘Pheidip-pides’ (1879). ‘All runners should read “Pheidippides”’,Kathrine Switzer and Roger Robinson urge in 26.2: MarathonStories, not least because it has some claim to have inspiredthe modern revival of the marathon race. Reading the poem in1894 led the French philologist Michel Breal to write to theplanning committee for the revived Olympic Games in Athensproposing a ‘“race from Marathon” with a prize to commemor-ate “the heroic messenger”’.2 More legend and misrecollectedhistory than fact,3 Pheidippides’ story, as retold by Browning,nevertheless played a modest part in the history of Greek twen-tieth century nationalism (the victory of Spiridon Louis in the

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first Olympic marathon is still celebrated in Greece), and a majorpart in the history of long-distance running’s twentieth centurytransformation from a pursuit of very rare individuals to aglobally popular sport and lucrative industry.

In the course of that history, literary writing about runninghas also changed. Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1959) gave the genre its definitive title. Italso articulated a political vision of the runner much lessobviously idealistic than Browning’s. In these two works(perhaps the most potent evocations of running in English) thelong-distance runner became the vehicle for two strikinglyopposed kinds of political romanticism: for Browning, abeleaguered but defiant nationalism; for Sillitoe, an equallybeleaguered and defiant class antagonism. With hindsight,1959 may have been almost the last moment when suchan account of the loneliness of the long-distance runner couldbe fully plausible. As revised in Haruki Murakami’s WhatI Talk about when I Talk about Running (2008), therunner’s loneliness has a personal rather than political cast,participating as he or she does in a globalised running culturewhere the individual’s ability to run at length and at speedmay no longer mark him or her out as exceptional at all.

The civic context of the long-distance runner comes first forBrowning. His poem opens with Pheidippides’ address to thearchons of Athens on his return from Sparta: ‘First I salute thissoil of the blessed, river and rock!’4 Pheidippides has run, not(like most modern long-distance runners) in pursuit ofpersonal fitness or to test his own powers of endurance, but asthe emissary of his city, charged by its magistrates with takingto Sparta the news that the Persian army threatens the city,and bringing back its response.

Your command I obeyed,Ran and raced: like stubble, some field which a fire runs

through,Was the space between city and city: two days, two nights

did I burnOver the hills, under the dales, down pits and up peaks.

(ll. 13-16)

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The sorry reward for this fortitude, he reports, was Spartan pre-varication: ‘Nowise precipitate judgment – too weighty the issueat stake!’ (l. 35). Pheidippides scented every low motive (‘envy,mistrust, / Malice [. . .] gratified hate’, ll. 26-7), and his civicpride was enflamed. To hear the name of Athens so abused

sent a blaze through my blood; off, off and away wasI back,

– Not one word to waste, one look to lose on the false andthe vile!

Yet ‘O Gods of my land!’ I cried, as each hillock and plain,Wood and stream, I knew, I named, rushing past them

again,‘Have ye kept faith, proved mindful of honours we paid you

erewhile?Vain was the filleted victim, the fulsome libation! Too rashLove in its choice, paid you so largely service so slack!

‘Oak and olive and bay, – I bid you cease to enwreatheBrows made bold by your leaf! Fade at the Persian’s foot,You that, our patrons were pledged, should never adorn a

slave!Rather I hail thee, Parnes, – trust to thy wild waste tract!Treeless, herbless, lifeless mountain! What matter if slackedMy speed may hardly be, for homage to crag and to caveNo deity deigns to drape with verdure? at least I can

breathe,Fear in thee no fraud from the blind, no lie from the mute!’

(ll. 42-56)

Even when goaded by outrage to ‘blaze’ his way back againthrough the rugged hills that separate Sparta from Athens,running is, for Pheidippides, a spiritual experience – a kind ofproto-Heideggerian communion with the gods of place,immanent in hillock, plain, wood, and stream.5 Barren thoughparts of the terrain are, he locates virtue in the landscape’s plain-ness. The ‘wild waste tract’ of Parnes is preferable to a ‘waste’ ofwords on the false Spartans. Athenians, he implies, will do betterto trust to their own native strength and honour than rely upon

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the assistance of such false friends. Browning’s compactions ofsyntax are characteristically ambiguous at points here, butlines 47-51 seem to be addressed not just to the Spartans,whose observance of the forms of religious ceremony has ledthem to delay answering an urgent request, but also to hisfellow Athenians, who have been only superficially lavish intheir tributes to the gods. Pheidippides alone has truly kept thefaith, and his political and religious exceptionalism is enactedas exceptional athletic prowess: his compatriots’ service maybe ‘slack’, but ‘slacked’ his own speed will ‘hardly be’; theSpartans may be slow to respond, but he will only run thefaster back to Athens – ‘off, off and away . . .’.

Pheidippides runs, as all long-distance racers would ideallyrun, in a ‘blaze’ of speed, without apparent strain. Much ofthe pleasure of reading this poem, perhaps especially for arunner, stems from its dramatic exploitation of metre to evokethe rhythms of long-distance running. In Browning’s flexible six-stressed lines (paying homage to Greek hexameters), one hearsnot simply the rapid pounding of a runner’s feet, but the irregu-larity of the cross-country runner’s stride as it accommodatesunevennesses in the terrain:

Gully and gap I clambered and cleared till, sudden, a barJutted, a stoppage of stone against me, blocking the way.

(ll. 58-9)

Here Pheidippides encounters the obstacle placed in his path bythe god Pan, whom he shortly discovers concealed in a coolcleft of the stone. Even before this point Pheidippides hasrun easily, covering the miles with no regard for legs orlungs: ‘No care for my limbs! – there’s lightning in all andsome, – ’ (l. 23); ‘What matter if slacked / My speed mayhardly be [. . .] at least I can breathe’ (ll. 53-5). When heencounters Pan, the runner’s eye drawn admiringly to ‘thegoat-thighs grand’ (l. 69), the god’s promise of victory toAthens and a reward for Pheidippides himself brings super-natural ease to the remainder of his race.


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I ran no longer, but flew.Parnes to Athens – earth no more, the air was my road . . .

(ll. 85-6)

In the course of the whole poem he runs (assuming Wikipe-dia’s estimate of the distance from Athens to Sparta and backto be correct) 240 kilometres (150 miles) in four days, thenfights in the battle of Marathon, then promptly runs the 40 kilo-metres (26 miles) from Marathon to Athens.6 Legend does notrecord how long a break Pheidippides enjoys between the endof the Spartan expedition and the start of the battle, but presum-ably not more than a day, and quite possibly less (the armiesappear to have stood in stalemate for several days after thelanding of the Persians).7 By any reckoning it is a punishingfeat of endurance. Add in the heat of the day, the rudimentaryfootwear (if any), and the heavy waterskins (assuming he hasthe good sense to carry water), and the only wonder for thedogged realist would be that he makes it back to Athens at all.We are, indeed, in the realm of divinely assisted running.

J. W. Cunliffe pointed out as long ago as 1909 that, in Hero-dotus, Pheidippides meets Pan on Mount Parthenium, not on‘Parnes ridge’, which is significantly ‘out of the way, as aglance at the map will show’: ‘no runner who knew hisbusiness, whether amateur or professional, would have left thestraight road from Eleusis to Athens, close by the coast, tostray ten miles off into the hills’.8 Cunliffe found an explanationin a colleague’s suggestion that Browning deliberately playedaround with the geography of Greece in order to secure thelink between the individual runner’s expenditure of energy andthe hoped-for renewal of the Athenian civic spirit:

Parnes is in Attica, while Parthenium is in Arcadia. [JohnMcNaughton] writes that Browning ‘must have an Attichill at all costs, when what he wants to say is that it is thespirit of her own mountains, her own autochthonousvigor, which is going to save Athens. He consciously sacri-fices, in a small and obvious point, literal accuracy to thelarger truth.9


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Deviation from historical accuracy, then, in the form of devi-ation from the expected running route, serves a politicalpurpose.

Pheidippides, in short, is the exemplary Hellenic citizen, trueservant of Pan and of the Attic state, accurate prophet of Persia’sdoom and Athenian victory. He may also have served more con-temporary political purposes for Browning and his first readers,either as a reflection on Greek efforts in the 1870s and 1880s toextract a larger state out of territories controlled by the Ottomanempire,10 or – allegorically – as an expression of English nation-alist anger at Russia’s advances on the Balkan states in 1878when Browning was writing, or preparing to write, ‘Pheidip-pides’.11 Whichever political frame the poem is read through,Pheidippides remains in all these readings the first and bestexample of the civic athlete. His dying words are not ‘I did it’but ‘We conquer!’ (Browning’s nicely robust translation of theGreek text from Lucian which provides his epigraph12).

And yet the disappearance of Pheidippides’s personal motiv-ation within the political motives of a history of the state isnever complete. On the contrary, one of the reasons why ‘Phei-dippides’ is a discomfiting as well as an exhilarating poem is thatone is never sure whether one is reading a heroic episode from anationalist myth or a much more narrowly pointed drama ofpsychology and physiology under extreme pressure. As a diplo-matic emissary, Pheidippides leaves much to be desired. Hisappeal for assistance from Sparta is startlingly tactless:

shall Athens sink,Drop into dust and die – the flower of Hellas utterly die,Die, with the wide world spitting at Sparta, the stupid, the

stander-by?Answer me quick . . .

(ll. 19-22)

No wonder that the Spartans are slow to respond. And if hisdescriptions of his own body are nicely exact accounts of atrained athlete quivering with nervous energy, they alsosuggest the boastfulness of a young man who knows he iswithout competitors in the field, demanding his audience’s


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admiration for the ‘lightning’ in his limbs, their ‘fretting as firefrets, an inch from dry wood’ (ll. 23, 29). His sense of his ownspecial loyalty as a worshipper of Pan is similarly free frommodesty, and when he delivers the god’s promise to thearchons of Athens the wording is as egocentric as it iscivic-spirited:

Here am I back. Praise Pan, we stand no more on the razor’sedge!

Pan for Athens, Pan for me! I too have a guerdon rare!(ll. 87-8)

Under questioning from the general Militiades, Pheidippidesexplains that the god has promised him ‘a worthy reward [. . .]release / From the racer’s toil, no vulgar reward in praise or inpelf!’ (that is, booty, with a suggestion of stolen goods; ll.95-6). Pheidippides interprets this as a promise that he shall‘Marry a certain maid’, on whom he has had his eye, and thattheir children shall in years to come ‘creep / Close to [his]knees’ to hear the story of how the god, ‘awful yet kind’,rewarded their father (ll. 101-3).

At this point the poem suddenly shifts from monologue tothird-person narrative, and Browning’s ‘dramatic idyl’ (definedby Arthur Symons as a ‘short poe[m] of passionate action, pre-senting in the most graphic and concentrated way a singleepisode or tragic crisis’13) starts to sound more like a moralitytale in the ‘be careful what you wish for’ vein. The final linesof the poem are spoken by an unnamed historian:

Unforeseeing one! Yes, he fought on the Marathon day:So, when Persia was dust, all cried ‘To Akropolis!Run, Pheidippides, one race more! the meed is thy due!“Athens is saved, thank Pan,” go shout!’ He flung down his

shield,Ran like fire once more: and the space ’twixt the

Fennel-fieldAnd Athens was stubble again, a field which a fire runs

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Till in he broke: ‘Rejoice, we conquer!’ Like wine throughclay,

Joy in his blood bursting his heart, he died – the bliss!(ll. 105-12)

For the speaker, as for Lucian (Browning’s primary source here),Pheidippides is to be envied. ‘Whom the gods love die young’, asthe Homeric hymn put it. Pheidippides, ‘the noble strong man /Who could race like a God’, has his reward not in a wife,children, celebrity, but in the fact that he will ‘never decline’(ll. 115-18). He has ended ‘gloriously [. . .] in the shout for hismeed’ (ll. 120-1). Broadly, the poem supports the nationalistthrust of the original, yet irony lies heavily on this ending.Browning twists Lucian’s narrative so that the last word is notthe shout of civic victory ‘Joy/Rejoice’, but the personaldemand for an ill-understood ‘meed’ or reward.14 In theprocess he shifts the accent of the long-distance runner’s storyaway from the renewal of the health and security of the civicstate to the private desires of the runner – seen at the last asyoung, ardent, touchingly naive, not unreservedly to be admired.

If Pheidippides remains the great (though ambiguous) literaryexemplar of running as an expression of civic virtue, his modernand now much better-known counterpart is Alan Sillitoe’s ColinSmith: the borstal inmate doing time for robbery who is pickedout to represent his Essex institution at the big sports day butwho defiantly stops short of the finish, rather than give theborstal governor the victory he so badly wants. To Smith’sway of thinking, a victory for the governor is a victory for thewhole system he represents. His refusal to deliver is a hugelycounter-suggestible, counter-intuitive gesture.

For Smith, thinking is one of the pleasures of running. Not aquick thinker by nature, so he tells us (or he would never havebeen caught for stealing a baker’s cashbox), he finds ideascoming to him with unexpected clarity when he is out doing hisfive-mile round of the fields and woods of a winter morning:15

as soon as I take that first flying leap out into the frosty grassof an early morning when even birds haven’t the heart towhistle, I get to thinking, and that’s what I like. I go my


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rounds in a dream, turning at lane or footpath cornerswithout knowing I’m turning, leaping brooks withoutknowing they’re there, and shouting good morning to theearly cow-milker without seeing him. It’s a treat beinga long-distance runner, out in the world by yourself withnot a soul to make you bad-tempered or tell you what todo or that there’s a shop to break and enter a bit backfrom the next street.16

The principal result of this unconscious mental processing whilerunning is political awareness. Smith’s purpose in recording hisstory an unstated length of time after the events described is topass on to his readers the clarity of insight into class that long-distance training has brought him. There are ‘In-law blokes’like the governor and everyone else born on the right side ofthe system, and ‘Out-law blokes’ like himself and ‘a fewmillion others’ (p. 10). The ‘honesty’ that the governor wouldlike to cultivate in Smith – whom he imagines turning pro-fessional athlete, and putting a life of crime behind him –would not be honesty in Smith’s eyes but a lie and a betrayalof his class roots. Honesty would mean admitting the basic hos-tility between haves and have nots: if he had ‘the whip hand’ hewould take all the ‘cops, governors, posh whores, penpushers,army officers, Members of Parliament [. . .] stick them upagainst a wall and let them have it, like they’d have done withblokes like us years ago, that is, if they’d ever known what itmeans to be honest’ (p. 15).

This frank class hostility alarmed the British censors whenthey read Sillitoe’s expanded script for the 1962 film version,directed by Tony Richardson. Audrey Field, the censor whodealt with the script and the earlier Saturday Night andSunday Morning (directed by Karel Reisz, 1960), labelled Lone-liness ‘disappoint[ing]’, ‘blatant and very trying communistpropaganda’, complaining that Colin Smith had all themakings of ‘a good hero of the British Soviets’. Like manyearly viewers of the film (which dispenses with interiormonologue after its opening shots, relying on Tom Courtenay’s‘lean, hungry, aware’ face to convey Smith’s rationale17), Fieldwas baffled by the ending. ‘It is true party line stuff. I can never


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see myself what the objection is to an honest to goodness prize,openly and honestly competed for and judged.’18

Rattled though several early reviewers were by the perceived‘communism’ of Loneliness (as also by the free swearing,and – in the film version – the borstal staff’s brutality to a boywho attempts to escape), their anxieties seem politicallyirrational, as well as deaf to the language of both story andfilm. Did Field realise that in complaining of a want of‘honesty’ she was echoing the critical term in Colin Smith’sdescription of middle-class complacency? Smith’s anger isemotionally potent because it is so self-defeatingly cut off fromany possibility of collective action of the kind the censorsfeared. Smith is a loner. Even his partner in crime, Mike, failsto qualify as a friend: ‘he’s the sort that don’t say a word forweeks on end – sits plugged in front of the telly, or reads . . . orjust sleeps – when suddenly BIFF – half kills somebody foralmost nothing at all’ (p. 25). Re-enacting his habitual social iso-lation through the physical and emotional loneliness of a long-distance runner, Smith feels by turns exhilarated – ‘I’m the firstman ever to be dropped into theworld’ (p. 11) – and abandoned:

it’s sometimes when I stand there [at the start of a morningrun] feeling like the last man in the world that I don’t feel sogood. I feel like the last man in the world because I thinkthat all those three hundred sleepers behind me are dead.(p. 9)

Or is it Smith himself who is dead?

I often feel frozen stiff at first. I can’t feel my hands or feet orflesh at all, like I’m a ghost who wouldn’t know the earthwas under him if he didn’t see it now and again throughthe mist. (p. 11)

An isolation as deeply felt and defiantly clung to as Smith’scannot be the basis for a coherent class politics. Smith askshimself, at one point, whether all the boys ‘in the runningbusiness’ are ‘on to the same lark’: are they forgetting thatthey are running because they are too busy thinking and


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coming to an understanding of their ‘Out-law’ position? Thoughhe tells us elsewhere that what goes on in other people’s heads isalways a mystery, he quickly decides ‘for a fact that they aren’t’(p. 42). His political consciousness remains his alone. His storywill be not about collective rebellion but about a private refusalto play the game. ‘[T]he only time I’ll hit that [finish]-line’, Smithassures us, ‘will be when I’m dead and a comfortable coffin’sbeen got ready on the other side’ (p. 52), at which point notcrossing the finish line looks at once a very powerful gestureand an entirely empty one.

The real climax of this story, Bruce Robbins suggests, is notthe ‘dramatic gesture of disaffection’ at the end, which weknow of well in advance, but the revelation of Smith’s father’spainful death from stomach cancer, refusing to be taken to thehospital or to accept pain relief from the doctor. For Smith,this rejection of well-meaning interference from others is akind of heroism, and when his own guts feel the strain of therace he identifies physically with his father:

something’s happening inside the shell-case of my guts thatbothers me and I don’t know why or what to blame it on, agrinding near my ticker as though a bag of rusty screws isloose inside me . . .

It’s not till now that I know what guts [my dad] had . . .By God I’ll stick this out like my dad stuck out his painand kicked them doctors down the stairs . . . (pp. 47,50, 51)

As Robbins puts it, ‘there has been a major displacement ofanger, both in the father and in the son, away from its realcauses inside (and outside) the family and onto the representa-tives of the state, even in their arguably most innocuous formof doctors bearing painkillers’.19

Smith’s long-distance running has, for all these reasons,nothing of the divine ease of Pheidippides’ running. WhereBrowning’s hero, inspired by Pan, ‘ran no longer but flew’, Silli-toe’s invokes the same commonplace (sprinting as flight) andregrounds it in brute physiology, with an ironic excess ofrealist effect in its choice of metaphor and simile: ‘down the


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drive I went, carrying a heart blocked up like Boulder Damacross my arteries, the nail-bag clamped down tighter andtighter as though in a woodwork vice, yet with my feet likebirdwings and arms like talons ready to fly’ (p. 50). Goadedby resentment and the determination to be ‘honest’, he sees hisown body as kind of battlefield for the class war (the SecondWorld War, not long over and recalled by the ‘shell-case’,stands as a recurrent warning in the story that men like Smithare never more than cannon fodder for other men’s victories).

But if running is physically painful in Loneliness, its rhythmsare seductively strong and easy: ‘Trot-trot-trot. Puff-puff-puff.Slap-slap-slap go my feet on the hard soil. Swish-swish-swishas my arms and side catch the bare branches of a bush’(p. 12). Smith says very little about the experience of writing(‘It’s a good job I can only think of these things as fast as Ican write with this stub of pencil’, p. 18), but Sillitoe has morethan once described the composition of Loneliness as a rareexperience of absolute fluency. In his autobiography, he remem-bers writing the story as like sitting ‘in a field of energy, therhythmical narration of a runner coming from hardly to beguessed where – except possibly from the beats of the printingpresses’ in the ground floor printworks beneath his Alicanteapartment.20 His voice commentary for the British Film Insti-tute’s 2009 reissue of Richardson’s film expands on thememory: ‘The story seemed to be dictated. I wasn’t thinking,I was simply writing, the pen racing over the paper’. Obligedto break off half-way through, in order to return to England,he completed it ten days later in Brighton: ‘I finished it in acouple of days. And . . . again, it was dictated. I simply don’tremember thinking. And when I typed it I hardly altered it’. Inthe story and in its supporting narratives of origin thelanguage of running leaks into the language of writing:Smith’s sense of pushing a pencil mimics pushing his bodyinto speed; Sillitoe’s ‘pen rac[es]’.

As Sillitoe explicitly acknowledges, The Loneliness of theLong-Distance Runner is a kind of allegory for the writer’s iso-lation and necessary self-reliance:


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The theme of the story [is] really [. . .] about a writer, butyou can’t write about a writer so I put my hero into aborstal and all around him the borstal attitudes were theattitudes of society and what they expected of him, andwhat they expected and hoped that he would believe. Buthe fought against it. He knew, he realised, that the onlyvalue is to keep your own integrity. It was really anextended essay on the integrity of a person in prison, inborstal, or if you like the integrity of a writer.21

At this point, Sillitoe’s class-positioning as a writer soundssuddenly very like – almost too like – Smith’s class-positioning.It is not that the story can’t, as Sillitoe intimates, function as apowerful allegory for the necessary individualism of writing: inthe end, most writers, most of the time, sit alone in a room witha blank page or screen, just as most long-distance runners, mostof the time, train alone, and the process will be more or lesspainful depending on fitness, temperament, circumstance, andinscrutable other factors. But if the metaphor is emotionally per-suasive here, that may be partly because it has, like Smith’s heroicself-reliance, elements of incoherence as well as romanticidealism. The oddest moment in Sillitoe’s story (not present inthe film version) comes in the final lines, when Smith suddenlyexpresses his hopes for the publication of this work:

I’m going to give this story to a pal of mine and tell him thatif I do get captured again by the coppers he can try and get itput into a book or something, because I’d like to see thegovernor’s face when he reads it, if he does, which I don’tsuppose he will [. . .] And if I don’t get caught the blokeI give this story to will never give me away; he’s lived inour terrace for as long as I can remember, and he’s mypal. That I do know. (p. 54)

Suddenly Smith the loner has a friend, an ideal audience (thevery governor he has so determinedly defied), and some fairlyrespectable aspirations for publication. The purity of thewriter’s isolation necessarily ends at the point where he seeks


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publication, just as the purity of the long-distance runner’s lone-liness stops at the point where he enters a race.

Does the perceived loneliness of the long-distance runnerinvolve a peculiar and now historically somewhat remote politi-cal romanticisation? Read alongside each other, Browning andSillitoe offer two sharply contrasting interpretations of thetension involved in holding together the dual conceptions ofthe runner described by Switzer and Robinson – his or her indi-vidualism, and his or her ability (and willingness) to be seen torun on behalf of larger social and political aspirations. Thatthe runner might also thereby function as a figure for the con-dition of the writer is Sillitoe’s particular insight, not presentin Browning. It rests on a vision of the working-class writer asboth the spokesman for his class and an exile from it –isolated and artistically self-determining. It rests also on aromantic understanding of the runner which was, in 1959,on the verge of changing, though it has never quite disappeared:the runner as possessor of exceptional talent, an outsider to thegroup he (always ‘he’) represents, stretching the capabilities ofhis body in ways the rest of the group never attempt, andexperiencing extremes of pleasure and pain in the dailyfamiliarisation of his body to a landscape.

The datedness which now seems to attach to both Browning’sand Sillitoe’s political interpretations of the long-distance runnerhas much to do with the dramatic alteration in the popular statusof running. Smith’s physical sensation of going ‘[o]ff like thewind along the cobbled footpath and rutted lane [. . .]Flip-flap, flip-flap, jog-trot, jog-trot, crunchslap-crunchslap,across the middle of a broad field’ (pp. 42-4) is no longer (atbest) a distant school memory for most readers. For a substantialnumber of those who read Sillitoe and Browning today runningis a regular activity. The democratisation of running makes it dif-ficult if not impossible to conceive of the runner either as the lasthope of an imperilled nation-state or as the true voice of an unac-knowledged class war. This may be why, in the rich history ofwriting about running pieced together in Roger Robinson’sRunning in Literature,22 the weight of literary attention turnsout to be so heavily towards the ‘pre-professional era’ – eitherwritten at that time, or looking back to it for inspiration.23


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An apt recent example of the no longer so exceptional statusof the long-distance runner, and the adjustments thereforerequired in drawing an analogy with the writer, can be foundin a recent series of diary-like essays by the Japanese novelistand translator Haruki Murakami, What I Talk about When ITalk about Running:

Most ordinary runners are motivated by an individualgoal, more than anything: namely, a time they want tobeat. As long as he can beat that time, a runner will feelhe’s accomplished what he set out to do, and if he can’t,then he’ll feel he hasn’t. Even if he doesn’t break the timehe’d hoped for, as long as he has the sense of satisfactionat having done his very best – and, possibly, havingmade some significant discovery about himself in theprocess – then that in itself is an accomplishment, apositive feeling he can carry over to the next race.

The same can be said about my profession. In the nov-elist’s profession, as far as I’m concerned, there’s no suchthing as winning or losing. Maybe numbers of copiessold, awards won, and critics’ praise serve as outward stan-dards for accomplishment in literature, but none of themreally matter. What’s crucial is whether your writingattains the standards you’ve set for yourself.24

The category of ‘most ordinary runners’ was not one available toBrowning or Sillitoe (Colin Smith would probably have refusedto put on his running shoes if it had been). Murakami’s strongsense of belonging to a writing ‘profession’, helping his publisherpromote his work, taking part in public readings, lecturing tostudents, and so forth, however he may profess to despise therewards of that profession, has a close counterpart in his mem-bership of a global running community. He may train alone,but his calendar is dominated by race fixtures (Tokyo,New York, Boston, Marathon) and he has a particular(although for a runner entirely familiar) vocabulary of preferredrunning gear, shoes, routes, training programmes.

In this hugely self-involved book something has been lost, inliterary terms, along with the runner’s exceptionalism.


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Murakami is not wrong in his speculations about what motivates‘most ordinary runners’, but his sentiments about running, asabout writing, lapse repeatedly into cliche: ‘done his very best’,‘no such thing as winning or losing’, what matters is ‘the stan-dards you’ve set for yourself’. Neither Browning nor Sillitoeseems to have been much of a runner,25 but ‘Pheidippides’ andThe Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner both know whatMurakami’s diary of his running life neglects: that literaturemay get closer to running when it evokes its rhythms, itsphysical environment, its unconscious or barely conscious motiv-ations, than when it takes as its subject the democratised but alsocommercialised world of advocacy for running as self-help.

There is a form of loneliness, nonetheless, in What I Talkabout when I Talk about Running – and it’s whereMurakami is at his sharpest: in the sense of fighting one’s owninevitable decline from whatever peak of athletic ability onehas achieved in earlier life. The competition with others is delib-erately disavowed here in favour of the competition with oneselfover ‘times’ and ‘standards’, in which the real and (forMurakami) deeply threatening opponent is not a better runnerbut old age: ‘I’d really rather not talk about this – I’d muchprefer to hide it away in the back of the closet – but the lasttime I ran a full marathon it was awful. [. . .] my legs suddenlystopped following orders’ (p. 52). This is loneliness recast asthe purely personal battle of a man with his body and his willto go on ‘Til I Die’ (Murakami’s penultimate chapter title). Itis of existential and emotional interest, but it is strikinglywithout the kind of political and dramatic dimensions whichwere critical to the most significant English literary writingabout running before 1960. If the runner is to possess againthe kind of symbolic weight he possessed, for Browning, as therepresentative of a civic and nationalist spirit, or for Sillitoe, asa model of the self-determining working-class writer, it maybe that our poets and novelists now need to start thinkingharder about the political ground – global, but imperfectlydemocratic – on which the runner now treads.

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NOTES

1 Kathrine Switzer and Roger Robinson, 26.2: Marathon Stories(Toronto, 2006), p. 100.2 Ibid., p. 27.3 See J. W. Cunliffe, ‘Browning and the Marathon Race’, PMLA24 (1909), 154-63.4 ‘Pheidippides’, in Dramatic Idyls, First Series (1879; correctededn. 1895), in The Complete Works of Robert Browning, withVariant Readings and Annotations, vol. xiv, ed. John C. Berkey,Michael Bright, David Ewbank, and Paul D. L. Turner (Athens,Ohio, 2003), pp. 224-9, and notes (pp. 433-47).5 Heidegger thought of places as ‘com[ing] into existencethrough human activity and language, they are intersections ofthe mortal and the metaphysical’. See John Kerrigan, ‘EarthWriting: Seamus Heaney and Ciaran Carson’, E in C, 48(1998), 144-68: 145.6 ,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pheidippides., accessed 22Apr. 2009.7 See J. F. Lazenby, The Defence of Greece 490-479 BC(Warminster, 1993), pp. 58-9. Browning repeats the claimfound in Herodotus and in Plutarch that Pheidippides arrivesin Sparta the day after he leaves Athens. Histories, vi. 106, inHerodotus, with an English translation by A. D. Godley, 4vols., Loeb Classical Library (1922), iii. 259. Plutarch, ‘On theMalice of Herodotus’, trans. Lionel Pearson, in Plutarch’sMoralia, 15 vols., Loeb Classical Library (1965), xi. 55.8 Cunliffe, ‘Browning and the Marathon Race’, p. 159, quoted inBrowning, Complete Works, xiv. 444.9 Ibid., p. 159.10 See Robert Shannan Peckham, ‘Map Mania: Nationalism andthe Politics of Place in Greece, 1870-1922’, Political Geography,19/1 (2000), 77-95; R. Clogg, A Concise History of Greece, 2ndedn. (1992; Cambridge, 2002), ch. 3. The year 1878 was one ofcrisis for Greece. Russia, after a crushing victory over theOttoman empire, proposed the formation of a ‘Big Bulgaria’,embracing ‘territories long coveted by Greek nationalists’. Atthe Congress of Berlin in the summer of 1878, the Ottomanempire agreed to cede Thessaly and part of Epirius to Greece.


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Great Britain took control of the predominantly Greek-populated island of Cyprus. See Clogg, Concise History,pp. 65-7.11 Queen Victoria to Disraeli: ‘There is not a moment to be lostor the whole of our policy of centuries, of our honour as a greatEuropean Power, will have received an irreparable blow! . . . Oh,if the Queen were a man, she would like to go and give thoseRussians, whose word one cannot believe, such a beating! Weshall never be friends again till we have it out’. Quoted inL. S. Stavrianos, The Balkans since 1453 (1958; repr., with anew introduction by Traian Stoianovich, 2000), p. 408. Onthe mirror of Victorian concerns in their writing about ancientGreece, see Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in VictorianBritain (1981).12 Dramatic Idyls, p. 443 n.13 Quoted in Dramatic Idyls, p. 437.14 ‘A Slip of the Tongue in Greeting’, p. 3, in Lucian, with anEnglish translation by K. Kilburn, 8 vols., Loeb ClassicalLibrary (1959), vi. 177.15 How far Smith goes on his early morning runs is a puzzle. Weare told variously that he is out for two hours, for one hour, andthat he is in training on a five-mile circuit – on what seems to bethe same course every day.16 Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner(1959; repr. 2007), p. 11.17 ‘Lean, hungry, aware’ is Sillitoe’s description, in his contri-bution to Robert Murphy’s voice commentary for The Loneli-ness of the Long-Distance Runner, dir. Tony Richardson(Bryanston: Woodfall Film Productions, 1962); restored andreissued as a DVD (British Film Institute, 2009).18 Quoted by Robert Murphy as part of the voice commentaryfor The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.19 Bruce Robbins, Upward Mobility and the Common Good:Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State (Princeton, NJ,2007), pp. 184-5.20 Alan Sillitoe, Life without Armour: An Autobiography (1995;repr. 2004), p. 244.21 Voice commentary for The Loneliness of the Long-DistanceRunner.


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22 Roger Robinson, Running in Literature (Halcottsville, NY,2003).23 See ibid., esp. ch. 17, on ‘Running Novels’.24 Haruki Murakami, What I Talk about When I Talk aboutRunning (2008), pp. 9-10.25 John Maynard, Browning’s Youth (Cambridge, Mass., 1977),makes only a general reference to a ‘recreation area’ and toexercise being part of the curriculum at the Revd ThomasReady’s school, and to his having been tutored in dancing,fencing and boxing between the ages of 14 and 16: seepp. 249-50, 253-4. But see Elizabeth Barrett to RobertBrowning (24 May 1846), reporting that he has been seencutting a furious pace as a walker in London; to whichBrowning replied (25 May 1846): ‘As for my walking fast thatis exactly my use & wont . . . I am famous for it [. . .] WhenI haveanything to occupy mymind, I all but run’. The Brownings’Correspondence, vol. xii: January 1846–May 1846, ed. PhilipKelley and Scott Lewis (Winfield, Kan., 1994), pp. 354, 357.Sillitoe records briefly trying to get fit by ‘running up anddown the beach every evening, but after a couple of half-milejogs my chest seemed full of rusty nails’. The wording directlyechoes Smith’s account of racing, but discomfort seems tohave set in rather faster: Life without Armour, p. 124.


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Loneliness Murakami