PhilipCallow

Sep 26 2007 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

THERE was anger in the air and the clerk’s son inhaled deeply, becoming one of the working-class writers who dragged the novel from suburban lawns and tennis clubs to backs streets and factories.

Although never quite as famous as Alan Sillitoe, Shelagh Delaney, John Braine and Stan Barstow, Philip Callow wrote prodigiously, embracing novels, biographies and poems, without ever quite escaping the shadows of his hero DH Lawrence.

Strong of jaw, keen of eye and wiry haired, Callow knew the foggy days when men bicycled to work, when tea was dark and Bakelite wireless sets crackled in the parlour. Gloom held post-war Britain and one critic noted of Callow: “His heroes tend to be aloof, embittered solitaries, their vigour guttering away in relationships with unsympathetic women or frustrated grapplings with art”.

But his work was also greatly admired, winning praise from such writers as Margaret Drabble and John Betjeman.

In more recent times, his novel Common People was adopted as the title of a hit song by Jarvis Cocker of Pulp.

Callow was born in Birmingham, but the family moved to Coventry, where he attended the Broadway Secondary School and the local technical college.

He became a toolmaker, a reserved occupation, which exempted him from service in the Second World War, but the Luftwaffe’s attacks on the area featured in his autobiography, Going to the Moon.

For a while after that, he lived in Nottingham, birthplace of DH Lawrence, and then he moved to Plymouth to work with the electricity board. There he married and settled in a cottage, writing poetry and prose at the weekends.

His first novel, The Hosanna Man, was published in 1956, the height of the Teddy Boy era, when Angry Young Men were making their mark.

Although not a commercial success, Callow’s promise was noted and other, semi-autobiographical novels, the Common People and Native Ground, followed. Soon after that, volumes of his poems started appearing.

But it was perhaps for his trilogy – Going to the Moon, The Bliss Body and Flesh of Morning, that he received lasting acclaim.

After retraining as a teacher, Callow was appointed writer-in-residence at Sheffield Polytechnic, native city of Jarvis Cocker.

His academic output included biographies of DH Lawrence, Anton Chekhov and Robert Louis Stevenson. His own memoir, Passage From Home was published in 2002.

Philip Callow, writer; born October 26, 1924, died September 22, 2007