Creative Writing
Here let me answer a question that even experienced scholars sometimes ask: Can the writing of good new poems and stories be taught? Surely the creative imagination works like God – so mysteriously that all true writers, when adolescent schooling ends, must henceforth be completely self-instructed, or only instructed by earlier literature they discover by themselves. For there have been such writers.
But words are no more mysterious to a professional writer than sounds to musicians, their bodies to footballers, living flesh to surgeons. It is usual for such professionals to train under experienced practitioners, and sometimes required by law. In the same way an older writer can speed the learning of a novice by showing a thriftier use of language and more things to do with it. True, some students cannot learn, some tutors cannot teach. Both incompetents seldom coincide in a university writing course because:-
(1) Though admission depends firstly on ability to pay fees, students are also selected from a larger number of applicants because a portfolio of work they submit shows talent that can develop.
(2) Very few of a university’s staff are wholly useless. And half the learning in a course comes from the novice being, often for the first time, in a community of writers: people of different sexes, ages, social classes and even nations who, having the same aims, encourage each other by both example and shared ideas.
Three Professors
Creative writing courses took root in other Scottish universities. When Philip Hobsbaum retired in 1999 the Glasgow course was made a joint enterprise with Strathclyde University thus adding Zoe Wicomb and Margaret Elphinstone to the staff, lecturers who were also fiction writers. Then in 2001 Glasgow University advertised a new post of Creative Writing Professor, hoping that other well-known authors with teaching experience would apply. By that time Glasgow had many. Here are three.
Tom Leonard – poet, critic, biographer, anthologist – was already part-time tutor in the course. James Kelman, Booker Prize novelist, had taught Creative Writing at Texas University. I, another author, had conducted a similar course at St Andrews. A professor’s salary would have helped all three of us and I was attracted by the title’s grandeur – I came from a class which thought the highest forms of social life were honest Socialist politicians, doctors or teachers, and that professors were the highest kind of teacher. But for all three of us the job had a major snag. A full-time professor of Creative Writing would not have time to creatively write. Then Marie, James Kelman’s wife, pointed out that for thirty years we had been friends who sometimes worked together, and if we offered to share equally the professor’s title, work and salary the university might employ all of us since it would get three notable writers for the price of one.
Which Came To Pass
I fear we entered the Creative Writing Course like bulls entering a crowded mini-market. We had agreed beforehand to wait a full academic term before trying to make changes, thus learning how the course usually ran. We broke that wise resolution almost at once. Student work was receiving a percentage valuation by awarding marks out of sixty for creative work, marks out of forty for critical essays. Since artistic work can only be evaluated in pounds, shillings and pence by salesmen, we wanted to give excellent work a distinguished pass, work that had improved through study a simple pass, and to fail those who did not improve. We wanted critical essays to be a voluntary not essential part of examinations. The fight for this system was supported by Glasgow University colleagues Willy Maley, Adam Piette, Rob Maslen and the head of English Literature, Susan Castillo. Hard work by Tom Leonard and Rob Maslen brought Glasgow University Senate to confirm the new scheme, which resembled the earlier one by Hobsbaum and Maley when they started the course.
This outcome may have led Strathclyde University to separate its writing course from Glasgow’s in 2002. It also annoyed students who, halfway through a two year course, felt their efforts to master criticism were now a waste of time. We disagreed. Criticism, especially self-criticism, is essential to good writing and should be kept sharp by study. When study provoked critical essays we considered them part of a student’s exam portfolio, and only made them voluntary to free those wanting to concentrate on other kinds of writing.
And we conducted classes where works by students and better known authors were discussed. James Kelman organised three weekend conferences at which Scottish, English and Irish filmmakers read or showed their works and answered questions on them. The University Principal, Graham Davies, authorised a grant that paid for these events, and for readings by the poets John Agard and Les Murray, and by the great American story writer, Grace Paley. Like our colleagues in the course we coached students one at a time, and thus read much surprisingly good new work that we thought should be published.
Publication
Most writing courses publish booklets of work and the Glasgow course had already produced two. Such publications, sold chiefly at student readings, seldom pay their costs but let novice writers see, show and keep their work in a neat professional format. We wanted the students’ best work more widely distributed in a more lasting form. The Principal's grant had left some money for this. I knew from experience one businessman who occasionally gave money for artistic work without hope of return: Colin Beattie, owner of public houses. Between 2002 and 2004 he gave the project £3000. We held meetings to discuss practical details, one addressed by editors of Confluence, an earlier course publication. To select work for a book – decide on layout – calculate printing costs – discover a publisher or else ways to distribute and advertise the book – to raise more money if more was wanted – we needed a committee. To form one a meeting was held in the University staff club. Less than half in the course attended, nobody opposed those who were willing to serve, and all are among those who brought this book to publication, even if they have nothing published in the preceding pages. I list them alphabetically, believing some will one day be more widely known: Angela Blacklock Brown; Colin Clark; Rodge Glass; Jamie Johnston; Nick E Melville; James Porteous; Gary Steven; Richard Todd.
At a later date it was suggested that the fewness of women on the committee, especially older women, was a young men’s conspiracy but it happened solely because there were no older, willing women at that crucial early meeting. Only one of the committee was proposed by a member of staff: I suggested Colin Clark because his portfolio of work had shown he understood typography.
Colin Clark explained that he had found a publisher and distributor: Freight, a new firm of graphic designers who had recently, and successfully, entered publication with The Hope That Kills Us, a collection of stories about Scottish football. Freight would pay half the production cost and publish the course’s anthology but wanted it to include work by former students who were now widely known. Since the book must have a limited number of pages, some work by present members of the course would have to be excluded. This caused much debate. Some thought that, having paid to be part of a writing course, students should be free of commercial pressures, and professors should not help to finance a publication that excluded anybody, even if this made professional distribution impossible. And what if the well-known former students invited to submit work submitted work of poor quality? And what qualified anyone in the editorial committee to be selectors and rejectors?
The debate, though intense, was not acrimonious. The professors did not want to force particular decisions upon the meeting, but I wanted proposals voted upon so sometimes cut short debates which, if continued, would have prevented that. Most of the course finally voted to let the Freight publication go ahead under Colin Clark’s guidance, with the selection of work being made by reputable authors unconnected with the university: also to have a small student publication in which every present member of the course would be allowed the same number of well printed words. The smaller work, typeset by James Porteous with a cover design by Richard Todd, was published in 2003 entitled The Human Machine. Works in the book you now read were selected by novelis
t and storywriter Bernard MacLaverty, by poet and journalist Aonghas MacNeacail, and by literary agent Jenny Brown.
So now you know all that lies behind this fine publication. A Scottish Arts Council grant has enhanced the production and let the editorial committee pay the contributors £50 each. Very good! Too many anthologies are produced by folk who think contributors sufficiently well-paid by a copy of it.
The title was chosen because it sounded memorable. A joint of meat’s knuckle end was once the animal’s knee so has the most bone, the least flesh. Sidney Smith called Scotland, “That knuckle end of England – that land of Calvin, oatcakes, and sulphur.” A lot of Scottish writing does deal with hard people in hard situations, but you will find this book contains a lot of tasty mental nourishment, some of it succulent.
An Epilogue
At a pleasant party in 2001 the new professors were introduced to their university colleagues and each made a little speech. I said we had decided never to resign from our job but hold onto it until we were kicked out: to which Dorothy McMillan of English Literature responded, “Why do you think the rest of us are still here?” My speech was wrong. At the start of our second academic year we were happy, having changed the marking system, and got poet playwright Liz Lochhead and novelist Janice Galloway working as tutors with us. We expected now to concentrate on teaching without the worries of administration. But no. We had depended greatly on our secretary Lynda Perkins who now left to have a baby. Administration was mainly handled by Willy Maley or others in the department of English Literature. We were asked to admit more students than we felt able to teach properly unless Creative Writing had more tutors. A strong, firm Professor with staying power and a good political head was needed cope with this. Three old friends only eager to write and teach could not. In the autumn of 2003 Kelman and Gray resigned from our posts. Tom Leonard stayed on as a tutor only. The university saved money by stopping our salaries as soon as it received our letters of resignation, though we had offered to complete the academic year. The extra month would have let us assess the work of the students we had tutored. But I have no doubt that it was fairly assessed by the English Literature lecturers who were our former colleagues. In 2004 Lynda Perkins returned as secretary to the full-time professor who replaced us in the Creative Writing chair. He will therefore find the job less trouble than it became for us.
Our one and three-quarter years as titled professors introduced us to many interesting new writers. I believe those we personally tutored found us helpful. I later employed two of them (Rodger Glass, Richard Todd) as helpers with my writing and visual art work. We three professors also learned about government pressure to make all but a few old richly endowed universities self-supporting from fees the students pay. The result, of course, is a poorer quality of teaching.
* Published in 2004 and subtitled A Meaty Collection of the Best Writing in Scotland, my introduction explains how this thick, eccentric, unsatisfactory little volume, first intended by me and others to publish Glasgow University creative writing passed into the control of a publisher and designer who retitled it, illustrated it with colour photographs of butcher meat, and typeset it in ways the originators never anticipated.
Of Philip Hobsbaum*
POET, CRITIC AND SERVANT OF SERVANTS OF ART, Philip Hobsbaum died last week, a day before his 73rd birthday. His ancestors were among those adaptable, intelligent people driven out of Eastern Europe by anti-Jewish laws and prejudices around 1900. His father, an electrical engineer in the East End of London, had Philip taught boxing at an early age, to cope with the bullies he had suffered from himself. A GPO management job took the family to Bradford where Philip, after doing badly in his first four years at Belle Vue Grammar School, suddenly did so well that a scholarship took him to Downing College, Cambridge where he studied under the great critic and pioneer of “close reading”, Dr. Leavis, continuing his studies at Sheffield with that other poet, fine critic and close reader, William Empson.
While teaching in London he brought out his first book of poems, The Places Fault, and was a member of a writers group sometimes called The Movement who wanted poetry to use simpler, more demotic speech, and organised a regular writers study group, thus influencing and being influenced by such well-known writers as Peter Redgrove, Peter Porter, Edward Lucie-Smith and George MacBeth. In 1962 he lectured in Queen’s University, Belfast. In an essay about the group of writers Philip started there, Seamus Heaney says that before then:–
A lot of people of a generally literary bent were islanded about the place... I don’t think many of us had a sense of contemporary poetry – Dylan Thomas’s records were as near as we seemed to get to it... We hung or sleepwalked between notions of writing that we had gleaned from English courses and the living realitites of writers from our own place who we did not know, in person or in print.
Those of us who stayed around saw that state of affairs changed by the mid-sixties and one of the strongest agents of change was Philip Hobsbaum. When Hobsbaum arrived in Belfast, he moved disparate elements into a single action. He emanated energy, generosity, belief in the community, trust in the parochial, the inept, the unprinted. He was impatient, dogmatic, relentlessly literary: yet he was patient with those he trusted, unpredictably susceptible to a wide variety of poems and personalities and urging that the social and political exacerbations of our place should disrupt the decorums of literature. If he drove some people mad with his absolutes and hurt others with his over-bearing, he confirmed as many with his enthusiams. He and his wife Hannah kept open house for poetry and I remember his hospitality and encouragement with the special gratitude we reserve for those who have led us toward confidence in ourselves.
In 1968 Philip left Belfast to teach English in the University of Glasgow. His marriage had just broken up, which may have moved him to a new beginning. Glasgow University has a student-run magazine founded in 1889 and called, for short, Gum. An edition it published in 1968 had an article with this heading:–
PHILIP HOBSBAUM
Interview - G. Hargie, A. Nicolson
Q. Are you glad that you came to Scotland, Doctor Hobsbaum?
A. No, not at all.
Q. Why is that?
A. Scotland doesn’t need visitors. Nobody but Scotsmen can help Scotland.
Q. Why do you say that?
A. Scotland is a beaten country. It’s been beaten ever since its people sold Mary Queen of Scots to the English and gave John Knox free rein to break down a civilization.
Q. So you think we were civilized once?
A. Undoubtedly – the literature shows it. And your greatest century was the century of Gauvaine Douglas, Henryson and Dunbar.
Q. Do you think nothing’s happened since?
A. Of course – but all abroad. The great Scotsmen have been expatriate. In what sense is David Hume a Scottish Philosopher?
Q. What about Burns?
A. Sonsie, braw – I once turned down ten guineas rather than lecture on him.
Q. Or Scott?
A. Somebody ought to translate him into English. Or into Scots – Wandering Willie’s Tale is a masterpiece, isolated in his work.
Q. What about the modern period?
A. There is no modern period – merely a senseless debate between MacDiarmid and Muir about whether to write in Scots or English. The fact that the debate was possible shows the impoverishment of your language and literature.
Q. Do you not think MacDiarmid is a great writer?
A. Certainly I do. My students don’t. And he has been treated by his fellow countrymen with the discourtesy characteristically shown by Scotsmen to their great artists. No wonder Rennie Mackintosh died an alcoholic.
Q. And yet you say Scotsmen can save Scotland?
A. They might be able to. Certainly Englishmen can’t. I’ve never been in such a philistine dump as Glasgow in all my life.
Q. That’s a bit strong?
A. It should be stronger. Do you imagine that I have had so much as a conversatio
n with any of my fellow artists in this city ? To converse sensibly I have to go to Dublin or Leeds.
Q. What’s the difficulty?
A. Where do I meet them? Do you notice one extraordinary thing about Glasgow is the total absence of a social context?
Q. Well, if you’re looking for an English style pub –?
A. I wouldn’t find one. No, quite. But instead what have you got? Swine-troughs, swill factories. And what swill!
Q. But surely the Close Theatre Club –?
A. And who do you imagine I can meet there? There simply is no centre here where intelligent people can come across each other.
And this is like no other town I ever was in.
Q. So you wouldn’t rate the university very highly?
A. Let’s put it this way. I should hate to think that most of my colleagues were ignoramuses covering ignorance and idleness with a thin layer of complacent irony.
Q. But?
A. That’s it. I’d hate to say it.
Q. Why did you come?
A. I didn’t know it was going to be like this.
Q. Why don’t you leave?
A. I shall do my best to leave, next year.
Q. So you haven’t fulfilled yourself then?
A. I haven’t fulfilled my expectations, no. But I’m worked like a dog and received nothing but envy and bitterness in return.
Q. This is primarily a teaching university?
A. Teaching University, what does that mean? If teaching isn’t fertilized by research, research by teaching, both ossify. The University is a valley of dry bones.
Q. What do you think of the students?
A. Poor little devils, victims of the system. The grizzly bear eats them before they know they’re alive.
Of Me and Others Page 31
