‘Nice to be Nice’ was my earliest attempt at the literary or phonetic transcription of a speaking voice. It so happens that the voice belongs to a working-class man from Glasgow. The story is told in the ‘I-voice’, a first-person narrative. It was difficult to do. I spent ages working on it but learned much from the process.
It was one of the stories I later sent to Mary Gray Hughes. By then Philip Hobsbaum had passed her several. Early in 1972 she had visited the country from the U.S.A. She and Anne Stevenson had been close friends since student days. Both spent a year at Oxford. Anne and Philip held a wee night for her in their flat in Wilton Street. I talked to her the whole evening. I connected with her as a writer and it was an uncommon experience.
Mary Gray Hughes was a poet and short-story writer born in Brownsville, Texas, then living in Evanston, Illinois with her husband John, an economist. Her first collection of stories, The Thousand Springs (1971), had just been published by Constance Hunting’s Puckerbrush Press. Any writer who knew her work held her in esteem. When she returned to the U.S.A. she passed my stories on to Constance who took a chance on them. So that was how, in the spring of 1973, my first collection of stories came to be published in Orono, Maine.
Mary Gray and I communicated regularly, exchanged work, recommended writers. She commented on my early stories, and it was important to me, even if I disagreed with some of it. She was a real artist. She advised caution in my use of ‘dialect’, and warned me of the risk of alienating the reader. This was directed at the title story of my first collection, ‘An Old Pub Near the Angel’. But I saw in her comment that she had confused a piece of nonsense. At one point in the story the young central character, Charles, leaves the pub to buy a racing paper. When he returns he encounters an old lady at a table who ‘sucked her gums and smiled across at him, then looked up at the barman. “Goshtorafokelch,” she said.’
Mary Gray thought ‘Goshtorafokelch’ was a failed attempt at a localised London dialect. It was not. I meant it like it is. The old lady may or may not be a Londoner. What she says is indecipherable to Charles. Of more fascination to him is her ‘gums’, and that she is ‘around 90 years old’. By that time he has swallowed a couple of beers, in the process of spending his ill-gotten gains from a wrongful payout at his local broo. He has just come from signing on at the old unemployed register formerly located on Penton Street across from Chapel Market. I did many a weary trudge from there myself, then back to Calthorpe Street WC1. In earlier versions of that story I alternated between a first and third-person narrative. I did the same with ‘Abject Misery’ and ‘Dinner for Two’.
Mary Gray recommended I look at the work of Flannery O’Connor and Emily Brontë’s use of dialect in Wuthering Heights. Of course I had my own opinions about ‘dialect’ and in response to her comment on language I sent her ‘Nice to be Nice’. She replied, ‘Forget all I said about dialect . . . you obviously know what you are doing better than anyone.’
In regard to my own stories I did feel that way. I was working my way through things. I never bothered about alienating readers, neither then nor now. The priority was to write the story properly. The readers could take care of themselves. There were a couple of editorial judgments made by Puckerbrush that I allowed. I felt it was good manners to allow something. Editing can become a negotiation between writer and editor. I am not in favour of that. Editing is necessary but negotiation can imply the presence of a third party: the marketing team. A couple of alterations I allowed through I later regretted, but only mildly.
My original intention in ‘Nice to be Nice’ was to use the phonetic transcription only for the narrative. I thought to apply Standard English form for the dialogue. It was an attempt to turn the traditional elitist assumption on its head. I was irritated by so-called working-class writers who wrote third-party narratives in Standard English then applied conventional ideas of phonetics whenever a working-class character was called upon to say a few words. When a middle-class character entered the dialogue all attempts at ‘phonetics’ disappeared; his or her lines were transcribed in standard form, leading to the extraordinary presumption that Standard English Literary Form is a literal transcription of Upper-Class Orature.
Others were less impressed by ‘Nice to be Nice’. Some made no attempt to read it. Of course the language made it difficult. But so what? That just meant it was a difficult story. It was not a structural fault. I did not care if somebody did not read it. But I got weary with explanations. Read it or not, but there it is.
Some who knew Tom Leonard’s work assumed I was familiar with his Six Glasgow Poems, published in 1969. These poems are brilliant. But why would people think I knew them? If I had, it would have affected my work, and that particular story would have been altered fundamentally. Tom’s language was pared to the minimum, and his precision even then, at the age of 21 or 22, was all that any artist could have sought.
There was a particular response to ‘Nice to be Nice’ that irritated me, as though the struggle for the means of expression was definitive, that the battle had been won and the war was over. According to that argument, the primary concern is the means of expression: the thing expressed is irrelevant. Forget about the primacy of this story and that story and that one over there; this writer, that writer and the one over there. They admit the validity of the language, they do not want the poetry and stories. The language exists and people exist who use it, okay, but do not force them down our throat!
In ‘Nice to be Nice’ the story is narrated in the first person by the central character. I was concerned about other characters. There are four in all: the narrator; his old pal Erchie; the young fellow who exploits him; and the single mother in danger of losing her home. In what sense could the ‘I-voice’ be defined as the central character? Only because he is telling the story. Each of the four characters would see it differently, each of the four characters had their own story, a different story. I started writing them, each as a first-person narrative. The shift in the language of each person was the most interesting factor. That subtlety, the sophistication of how human beings use language, is not possible for the elitist or racist for whom working-class existence may be an amorphous experiential mass, but if you hear one you hear them all, see one you see them all. During the Booker Prize controversy of 1994 much of the hostility directed at How Late It Was, How Late derived from the astounding proposition that the life of one working-class Glaswegian male is a subject worthy of art. I was used to the prejudice but the gleeful abandon with which some attacked my work took me by surprise. It never occurred to the literary mainstream that working-class males from Glasgow might be watching the programme or reading the newspaper.
Ultimately there was only one story, ‘Nice to be Nice’. I composed it as best I could. The other draft versions are in a bottom drawer someplace. But it was not my first story to appear in print. Glasgow University’s Extra-mural Department had its own little magazine, edited by Ann Karkalas, and she published ‘He knew him well’ in early 1972.
Ann is another hero. During that period in the early 1970s she fostered contemporary writing in Glasgow and elsewhere. She sought different ways to do it, extending the range of the Extra-mural Department. She employed part-time tutors like myself to lead Creative Writing groups. It was only two hours a week for maybe ten weeks but for an artist any money is crucial. And money you earn as a result of your labours as an artist, that is fucking well nigh unique; it is just such an exciting thing, a validation. You run and show your family the cheque. Ann Karkalas took it for granted that we could lead these groups, and maybe bring to them some crucial element of our own.
When that shipment of 200 books arrived myself and Marie thought about their distribution. We gave many to family and friends. Occasionally I charged somebody £1.50 or £2. My grannie paid the dough without a grumble.
I asked friends what to do with them. Sell or deposit them in bookshops was the response. I walked along Great Western Road with a pile. A newsagent ne
ar Kersland Street gave me a cheery grin. He accepted three copies on a sale-or-return basis. Perhaps they sold. I never went back to check. I managed to place a few more in local bookshops. I returned to see if they had sold but generally no one knew. I had to content myself with a gentlemanly nod, departing with self-respect intact.
Somebody suggested I take a few to Edinburgh bookshops. I wondered what to wear. Should I adopt the bohemian look or that of the ‘prosperous clerical worker’? Unfortunately, in those days I wore my hair long and had a beard so the ‘prosperous clerical worker’ image was tricky. I walked the middle path. I donned a duffle coat but wore a neat pair of trousers rather than jeans. I had discovered that clothes can be a problem for writers.
Years later I was with Tom Leonard and Alasdair Gray arriving to do a reading somewhere, and each of us wore a herringbone-patterned Harris Tweed sports jacket. We were not taken aback. I think Alasdair said, Aha!
In the mid 1970s I was guest speaker (recommended by Ann Karkalas) at a writers’ workshop on the Ayrshire coast, on my way to pick up two hours’ work plus expenses. I guessed it would be a middle-class set-up and adopted the ‘prosperous clerical worker’ approach: dark overcoat, shirt and tie and the usual neat trousers. Months before I had cut off the long hair and shaved the beard off completely, so I looked well scrubbed. I also carried a bag. A bag! It might even have been a briefcase! Fuck sake man. Unfortunately the Bhoys were playing Ayr United away that evening in a cup tie, and the train was packed full of green-and-whites. I had to stand there. A couple of the Celtic fans noticed me; one pointed and shouted, Look at Elmer Fudd!
Fucking mortified man, I did not know where to look.
But he was quite right.
So, back in 1973, still with all the hair, I had donned the duffle coat and journeyed to Edinburgh with a bagful of An Old Pub Near the Angel. I walked to the first place on the list, up the hill from Waverley Station, James Thin’s bookshop on South Bridge. Inside I wandered by the shelves, composing myself, bagful of books at the ready. I saw a smallish dome-headed personage who seemed to work in the place. He observed me. Maybe I was a book shoplifter. In those days I was a book shoplifter. If I had been engaged in that pursuit then he would not have spotted me.
I approached him. I asked about the set-up. Did a writer chap seek out the manager or what? I indicated my bag. He was wary to the point of fear and pointed towards the woman at the cashier desk. So I asked her. Oh, you should see Mister Thin, she said, pointing back the way. It was the same wee baldy guy. He was watching me. Now he backed away. I left the premises, for the next train back to Glasgow.
None of the people I knew earned much at all from writing – Aonghas MacNeacail, Tom Leonard, Liz Lochhead, Donald Saunders, Anne Stevenson, Alasdair Gray. Little bits of tutoring and the occasional paid reading, that was about it.
Mary Gray Hughes advised me, ‘If you want to earn money, don’t be a writer, at least not a “real writer” . . . [real] writing has a lot of grimness in it.’ She never earned a thing from writing either. Like the rest of us she occasionally led Creative Writing classes or placed a story in a literary journal. Twenty years passed until our next meeting, which was in Chicago in 1995. We corresponded throughout the years, until her death from cancer in 1999. Constance Hunting published a posthumous collection of her stories in 2002 (Cora’s Seduction, and Other Stories, Puckerbrush Press).
Mary Gray’s father was Hart Stilwell, a radical Texan journalist and fiction writer from the first half of last century. When I taught a graduate class in Creative Writing in Austin, it took place in the old home of J. Frank Dobie, a legendary Texan man of letters (who corresponded with R.B. Cunninghame Graham). Hart Stillwell had studied at the University of Texas in Austin in the early 1920s. He knew J. Frank Dobie and visited his home on occasion. It was a rich coincidence for myself.
In 1992, after a gap of 19 years, Puckerbrush Press published the second edition of An Old Pub Near the Angel and it was twice reprinted. On the small-press scene that represents a bestseller. Although I received ten copies of the new edition I never did receive any money. Whenever Connie Hunting earned anything it was ploughed into the next publication, mainly local writers and poets from the area around Maine. I felt privileged to be part of it, as would any young writer. I never met her personally. I wish I had. She liked to keep in touch with her writers and got a kick out of seeing us move on. She died in April 2006 at the age of 80. She was one of the great literary figures in that small-press tradition and it is an honour to dedicate this reissue to her memory.
Although An Old Pub Near the Angel earned me no actual money there were indirect benefits. I applied for an Arts Council grant and was awarded £500. We used £400 of it as the deposit towards a two-bedroom flat in North Woodside Road, close by the old Pewter Pot. By then Tom Leonard and Liz Lochhead were both back living in Glasgow and I got to know them. Tom’s first collection, Poems, appeared around the same time as An Old Pub Near the Angel in 1973. Liz’s Memo for Spring had been published a year earlier.
When we moved into our new flat Tom and Alasdair Gray helped with the flitting. We just heaved the stuff round the corner. Liz was short of a place to stay and took over our old room and kitchen in Garriochmill Road. Unfortunately, no sooner had she moved in and Glasgow Corporation started knocking it down. Then a couple of years later they demolished, by compulsory purchase, our part of North Woodside Road. They gave us £1,500 and a council flat in lieu.
Living as an artist is another way of living on your wits unless you get a stroke of amazing fortune, such as marrying a breadwinner. Marie was that breadwinner. Following the end of one statutory spell on the broo I was forced to get a job. Driving buses was the only serious option. I had worked on the buses on six previous occasions and my last term included an unofficial strike to which I was closely connected, so it seemed like a long shot. But the transport official who interviewed me had a sense of humour. He knew of An Old Pub Near the Angel and remembered reading an interview Anne Stevenson did with me for The Scotsman newspaper. He gave me another chance. I nearly said ‘with a twinkle in his eye’; fortunately I know better. Not only did I beat the odds, but my first collection of stories was paying its way; without it the buses would not have re-employed me.
In early 1974, however, I had to resign for good. I was going mad. A few months later old Partick Garage closed for the last time. I used its layout and location at the corner of Hayburn Street and Beith Street for my novel The Busconductor Hines.
Except for one copy, I have since disposed of all of that first edition of An Old Pub Near the Angel. This last copy is the one I sold my grannie. She was a big fan. After she died I nabbed it, but she would have wanted me to have it, and that is the truth.
My father, Ronald, had a workshop at the foot of the same tenement building where me, Marie and the kids lived. Like his father before him he was a self-employed picture-framer and gilder. His three older brothers were also in the trade. Many years ago a specialism within that trade was picture restoration but it was stolen by the bourgeoisie and transformed into their own intellectual property. Their Universities’ Degree in Fine Art then became necessary to practise the work – by now termed a profession – within art and other state institutions, e.g. galleries and museums. The seven-year apprenticeship and a journeyman’s continuous application at the trade were no longer sufficient qualification. A graduate student left university at 23 and entered straight into the ‘profession’. For the last ten years of his working life my father took a job within an art institution as a gilder and frame-maker. It irked him that he was barred from restoration work; he gritted his teeth when the white-coated 23-year-old ‘technician’ asked him to move his elbows out of the way so s/he could get on with the ‘fine’ art.
A similar robbery is being attempted on the practice of literary art. The higher learning institutes have commandeered much of this, from Sydney to San Diego, Seattle, Boston, through London, Glasgow, Edinburgh and ever onward. Th
e title they have applied to the activity is ‘Creative Writing’. It is preferable that the practice engaged in by the students is not described as ‘creating art’. That is too ambiguous, not only does it imply ‘freedom’, it suggests a distinction may be drawn between literary art and what they themselves practise.
Conformity, convention, homogeneity at all costs; arise Ye Standard English Literary Form. The values being stamped as a template within this field of endeavour, ‘Creative Writing’, act as though designed to destroy diversity. These values are not confined to the aesthetic.
In future, public areas associated with literary art – publishing, magazine editing, newspaper reviewing, bookselling etc., the entire range – will be controlled by the values of ‘Creative Writing’. Much of it is already. Power lies with the priesthood: graduate students with degrees in a subject invented by their peers. In the past they had only Degrees in English Studies. Now they can inform other ‘Creative Writers’ (i.e. literary artists) what they can and cannot do, not simply as editors and critics, but as editors, critics and fellow ‘Creative Writers’.
Literary artists will still be able to fight. They will be able to do their work. Certain areas and markets will be closed off to them. It will become increasingly difficult for authentic writers to enter institutes of higher learning in a teaching capacity, not unless they have obtained a ‘Degree in Creative Writing’ and are equipped to teach students how to disguise their passions, conceal their emotions, dull their minds, push the self-destruct button on their imagination.
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