I was good friends with Frank McGoohan, my upstairs neighbour. He was divorced, a few years older than me, and lived alone. The last couple of days before payday he was always skint but rarely accepted Marie’s offer to come in for his tea. He was another reader, and was writing a novel based on his conscription days with the military. After Marie he was the next person to see my stuff. We passed our writings to each other. Frank was fond of English poetry, Keats and Shelley. He could not thole some of my spellings in ‘Nice to be Nice’. My rendition of ‘Wedinsday’ just fucking annoyed him. We agreed that ‘Wensday’ was more exact. But I argued that ‘nsday’ was just a glottal stop and I had to reject it. The central character in ‘Nice to be Nice’ is narrating a story from his recent life but assumes an audience and shifts his pronunciation accordingly: he resists glottal stops.
After a few pints discussing all that in the Gowdoc Bar with Frank, the Creative Writing class at Glasgow University Extra-mural Department was a doddle.
The possibility of revising my early stories of course has occurred to me. I find it impossible. The author of An Old Pub Near the Angel is in his early twenties and with his characters right at the heart of the experience; a smoke, a meal, sex, a beer, the next bet, a relationship. At the same time he – the author – was trying to be a proper parent and husband, helping prepare the bottle, doing a feed, changing the nappy, telling a bedtime story.
I was happy doing all that. I enjoyed it very much. I loved seeing my daughters grow up. Before publication of the book I became friends with Tom Leonard who had two sons. We had disagreements but shared an outlook that included a way to conduct yourself as artist, husband and parent. None of that writer-as-adolescent shite: acknowledge the responsibilities and try to cope. I think we further agreed that if it was impossible to be both artist and father there was something wrong with art. I doubt if we would share that opinion nowadays.
The writing crowded in. I was chewing the nails until I could get my work out on the kitchen table, or spread on the carpet, to sort through the pages. Reading yesterday’s first draft was always an exciting experience. The lack of working time was a continual source of stress, as it still is. The frustration worms its way through rage and bitterness, and can lead to breakdown, and silence. I returned to the lives, as well as the works, of writers and artists, particularly Franz Kafka. He too appreciated the early novels of Knut Hamsun.
I saw it as the fundamental and shaping struggle in each, the need to do your work in the face of the socio-economic reality. There was no place in society for your work, as with Cézanne, van Gogh and the rest. Your only requirement was to do their work. Who the fuck were they? These bastards. Who wants to do their work? Let them do it themselves, tell them to go and fuck.
Young writers seek bonds of solidarity with older generations; we look for things in common. If a writer comes to mean something to us we want to discover affinities. How did they live their life? What hardships did they endure to pursue their art? How long did it take them to write a story? Kafka did The Metamorphosis in a couple of nights. Oh, I don’t believe it, no, no, for godsake, no.
Yes. Now pick yourself up, brush yourself down. Van Gogh did not even begin until he was 28. And look at Tolstoy, a hero at 22, a hero at 72. Phew.
The biographies I read back in my teens proved worthwhile in context. I have been an atheist since 12 so I do not know where the Lives of the Saints lead ye, but the lives of the artists lead you to other artists, philosophers and other thinkers. Cézanne’s life led me to Émile Zola; then van Gogh’s letters, Turgenev’s essaying; through Kafka’s journals you go everywhere.
Yet I still found difficulty in connecting with writers who had no reason to worry about money and job security. I was prejudiced against Turgenev for years, until it dawned on me how influenced I had been by Dostoevski’s judgment, arrived at through a suicidal gambling habit. I would have sat down for a game of poker with Dostoevski but knew I would not have enjoyed it. I aye imagined him jumping up from the table and flinging a cape round his shoulders, This is too slow, too slow! and marching out into the night.
When I read Mary Gray Hughes’ first collection, The Thousand Springs (Puckerbrush Press, 1971), I was very taken with the title story. It is set back in time and takes the form of the diary of a young woman surviving in desperate circumstances. She is the wife of a smallholder barely eking out a living from the land, just about coping with running the home. Her son is gravely ill, perhaps close to death. And the woman is trying also to be a writer, a writer who loves literature, who loves other writers. She is fighting for her own time and space, that point in the evening when the chores are done and she manages a clear 15 minutes. That is what she can count on: 15 minutes. During that brief period she will go at it and take from it what she can. At the end of the story we discover that the young woman did not ‘become’ a writer, but her son did.
I think of another literary hero, Agnes Owens. What if Agnes had been ‘granted’ a proper chance to write when she was fighting to rear her family? As if it was not enough of a burden raising eight children, she spent years going out to work in whatever capacity, servant to the middle classes, clearing up their domestic mess. When she saw the squeak of a chance she grabbed it and produced those great stories that we know. How much more could it have been?
That part of her life she holds in common with Tillie Olsen who was writing in her teens then had to shut down in order to rear a family. And ‘shut down’ may give a sense of what happens; it is a part of your being that closes, like entering ‘sleep’ mode on a computer, if you are lucky, otherwise it is forever. Tillie Olsen returned to her art from around the age of 40, finishing Yonnondio, a novel she had begun as a 19-year-old girl. Theirs is a woman’s story. But it is also a writer’s story and encompasses many male writers.
The title story of Olsen’s collection, Tell Me A Riddle, is one of the great pieces of American art. She also published a brilliant work of non-fiction entitled Silences which I passed on to Agnes Owens. The title refers to those precise gaps in a person’s life, when you should be working at what you do, but simply cannot beg, steal or borrow the time.
She was a friend of Mary Gray Hughes, who in the mid 1970s sent me a rare edition of Olsen’s Tell Me A Riddle. She did not tell me it was a rare edition. This collection of only four stories has had an impact on contemporary English-language literature, not only in the U.S.A. Her work offered a different way of seeing for myself, finding ways to hijack third-person narrative from the voice of imperial authority.
Prose fiction was exciting at this level. Somebody was punching fuck out ye but ye went away and attended the cuts, had a shower, and came back with Daddy’s axe. Tillie’s work was a weapon. The true function of grammar. Make yer point. Writers need to learn these lessons. If you do not then you will not tell the story. You might tell other stories but not the one you could be telling. These bastards think they own the language. They already own the courts. They own everything. They want to block your stories, and they will, if you let them. So go and do your work properly. Ye will need every weapon.
In my short-story collections, many stories began life as part of a longer narrative I hoped would become a novel. The problem becomes formal, particularly in ‘I-voice’ narratives. When there is no continuity in the writing the perspective of the central character shifts. It starts to feel like a different person. Even a slight variation can be too much. Eventually I gave up, transformed and finalised these sections. They became short stories in their own right.
Shifting the narrative voice back and forward, from first person to third, from third back to first, helped the process. This can resolve dramatic problems writers experience in ‘I-voice’ yarns. I wanted the central character active in a present adventure, not recounting the one about a mysterious stranger he once chanced to meet aboard a cargo ship to Borneo. I tried and rejected the present tense; locked into one dimension, behaviourist, static, lacking mystery, deterministic, non-
existential. Just fucking philosophically naïve, like science fiction or world-weary detectives trudging the mean streets humming a piece of Mozart, to a backdrop of the theme from Johnny Staccato: the mental masturbation of the bourgeoisie, that was how I felt about the ‘I-voice’ present tense. Avoid it at all costs. Go for richness, sophistication, infinite possibility: use the past tense properly, discover its subtlety. Learn yer fucking grammar! Do not be lazy! How does the verb operate in other language cultures?
There was a crucial factor that I liked about the shift from first to third party: you were left with a thought process; the central character had an inner life that seemed authentic. I just kept developing that third-party narrative, finding ways to embed the thought processes. This culminated in moves I made in The Busconductor Hines. There was something Joyce was doing, trying to be doing, Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, Finnegan’s Wake, it was just there how something, and it was just like eh, it was just fucking obvious man just how I could not quite say.
Alasdair Gray and I were having a pint together many years back and had a laugh about that. He knew exactly what I was talking about but could not quite get to what it was, that thing that we were talking about, maybe it was not a thing, maybe it was just a verb. It was certainly not the ineffable man that was a certainty, the ineffable is a fucking noun. That was 30 years ago, unless I have invented it all, probably I have.
The other novel from the early period was A Chancer which could only have been written prior to The Busconductor Hines otherwise it would have been very difficult, if not impossible. Yet I had to complete The Busconductor Hines before I could complete A Chancer.
Even to this day I get wistful about that other one, the unfinished third novel. I should have fucking finished it. I was just beat. If I had had the time, the space, if I could have found a way in. It needed all of that. The first, last or central section would have been the title story from my Not Not While the Giro collection.
There was even a fourth novel, about a private detective with a fondness for Russian literature. This guy is a black belt at every martial art, yet adored by women for his sensitive touch. He is at home in every situation, able to cope with life on the street, degenerates of every profession, smiled at by prostitutes, respected by pimps and dealers, always at the ready to flummox university professors by quoting casually one of Pindar’s lesser-known odes.
I wrote about 30 or 40 pages during that 1971–3 period.
When the bills pile up I trot it out and stride purposefully about the room. This one will be a movie! Hey Marie! Marie! Then I trip over the cat, try to kick him and fall on my chin. Where am I? Where is the computer? This damn novel will enter manifold translations. It will set us free forever!
Then I glance over the manuscript for ten minutes, yawn and make another cup of tea. Nothing against worldly private eyes, except how fucking boring they are. Imagine having to write such shite. It doesn’t even warrant an exclamation mark. The ghostly appearance of one returned via Jeremiah Brown in You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free.
Mary Gray Hughes was not so keen on my story ‘Not Not While the Giro’. It was a bit too flashy, she thought. But I liked it. It was necessary, I had to work a way through the dimensions and that section was fundamental. If I had found the way through it, in it, and out it, then who knows. I should have explained to Mary Gray that originally it was a central section of an unfinished novel. But I always resisted explanations, as a rule of thumb. If you enter into one it usually means yer story has failed.
An Old Pub Near the Angel Page 17
