An Old Pub Near the Angel (14 page)

I was fortunate to meet a few generous older writers (and readers) when I was younger. One was poet and critic Philip Hobsbaum. Another was the poet Anne Stevenson, daughter of American philosopher Charles Stevenson and biographer of Sylvia Plath. She and Philip were partners at that time.

Philip’s influence on the literary scene of the period has been
attested. He was a founder member of the group of poets known as ‘the Movement’ in late 1950s London. Others in the group included Pete Porter, John Redmond and Edward Lucie-Smith. In the mid 1960s he lectured at Queen’s University, Belfast and around him gathered a group of younger writers that included Michael and Edna Longley, Seamus Heaney and Bernard MacLaverty. He became a senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow in the late 1960s and stayed for the rest of his days. In his spare time he tutored a weekly Creative Writing class for the Extra-mural Department. I attended this class during the 1971–2 academic year unless shiftwork made it impossible – one week early, one week late, and as much overtime as possible – but the class had become the highlight of my week and I was there at least once a fortnight.

It was a large class. Each session centred on the work of one or more of those present. Philip chaired the sessions. He would have had our stuff photocopied and ready for distribution the previous week. Thus people had at least seven days to study the poetry or stories properly. It was a good and thorough method. I was 25 and had been writing for three years. When it came my turn I passed five stories on to him.

This was the second time I had shown my work to anyone other than Marie. We had met in London not long after I started writing, in early 1969; she was twenty, a Swansea girl. I had begun writing only a few weeks before, and planned on returning to the U.S.A. where I had lived for a spell in my teens. I was in touch with the U.S. Embassy, had completed most of the paperwork and it appeared a formality.

Thereafter I forgot about it. Marie’s dowry comprised four albums; Nina Simone, Los Paraguayos, the seminal
What is Soul?
anthology, and the fourth was by The New Seekers for which she makes no apologies. My one and only album which I won in a game of cards was the 1964 Newport Folk Festival
recording featuring Boozoo Chavis, Doc Watson, the Swan Silvertones and old Fred McDowell. Only the New Seekers album is missing from our current collection but dastardly practices were not involved.

All my early stories were written in longhand until 1971 when I purchased an elderly desktop typewriter. Then I used both techniques. I have longhand drafts of stories as late as ‘Nice to be Nice’ and ‘Remember Young Cecil’. Then we got a neat little portable typewriter that chased itself across the table when I pounded the keys. Occasionally Marie typed out the stories. She would not disclose if she read them. It is better not to show work to family and friends if you seek critical comment, as a general principle. I learned that from Marie. She earned a living as a shorthand typist and was very efficient. Efficient shorthand typists scan thoroughly but do not necessarily read. She gave me a certain look if I asked. Yet over the years I have heard her muttering ‘Fair do’s and all that pish’. This very line can be found in the first story I ever wrote and finished: ‘Abject Misery’. She denies she got it from me. Maybe I got it from her.

Philip Hobsbaum photocopied and distributed my five stories to the other class members. On the night he said I should select three and read them. I had expected him to choose. I read ‘He Knew Him Well’, ‘Abject Misery’ and cannot remember the third.

At these sessions a critique of the work followed the reading. Philip chaired the sessions and avoided talking too soon, otherwise his contribution would have shaped the discussion. His way allowed class members to go off on their own. When the poem or story was being read he spent the time gazing over the top of his spectacles, watching the class. Maybe he saw me watching him.

After my reading came the critique. I enjoyed hearing people discuss my stories but certain aspects began to irritate me. I
appeared to be absent. ‘What Kelman should do is this.’ ‘No, instead he should do that . . .’ ‘Oh but what if he . . .’

Occasionally textual suggestions were made as though they never would have occurred to me. There was a vague assumption that the stories had just come. All I did was write them down. It was weird. I sweated blood over the damn things. Seventeen years later my novel
A Disaffection
was shortlisted for prizes and a member of an adjudicating panel asked if I ever revised ‘or did it just come out?’

It jist comes oot, ah says, it’s the natchril rithm o the workin klass, ah jist opens ma mooth and oot it comes. Similar to the American dancer in reply to a related question, ah jes closes ma eyes an ma feets git to movin.

Some of what I encountered from those early days prepared me for later struggles. But the blatant elitism encountered by so-called working-class writers still surprises me. I can never predict it. I assumed that anybody who thought about art and writing would know that my finished work was hard won.

During the session at Philip’s class there were lapses in the conversation, fewer people took part. Maybe some were intimidated, not only by the language of the stories but by the subject matter. It was not the stuff of literature and they were peeved, but they remained silent; I think because there had been a very positive response from Philip and at least two others.

Philip entered the discussion earlier than usual. He read aloud from ‘He Knew Him Well’. He was good at accents, in particular that of South London where for a couple of years he taught secondary school. It was an odd experience hearing somebody else speak the words and sentences so familiar to me. He brought to life the old man of ‘He Knew Him Well’. It sparked ideas. It was exciting.

Later it became clear that for some in the class my work had
been an ordeal. Hostile comments arrived. A letter came from a schoolteacher of English with an antipathy to ‘the language of the gutter’. She found my stories disgusting and unreadable and did not see why they should have been forced upon her. She and her friend were among the small number who left the class never to return.

But why had they come in the first place? They had had a week to read the stories. They knew what to expect. Or did they? Perhaps they were there for the kill.

Philip was upset by their reaction. I assumed he would treat it ironically. Instead he took it seriously; he worried how it might affect me. It is true that I was unprepared. But equally I had been unprepared for his pleasure in the stories. At that time I was not prepared for much. It was my first experience of the world of letters – any response was noteworthy. I felt quite confident in what I was doing. In the face of the schoolteacher’s outrage there was little to be done other than give up writing, which by then was impossible.

Anyway, the negative stuff was insignificant in the face of one simple truth: Philip Hobsbaum, a real writer, had enjoyed my stories.

I have heard criticism of Philip over the years but he loved literature. Young writers did not scare him; he was not in competition and was generous towards them. Philip made me feel like a real writer.

Although he showed me the English teacher’s letter he did not give me it to keep. I speak from a distance of 35 years. She must have been hurt by something deeper than my five stories. Perhaps it was Philip’s response that provoked her. He was supposed to be an authority. She and others would have considered him a guardian not only of English Literature but of Standard English literary form. He could give that impression. He had the speech and mannerisms of a Cambridge professor.
Yet Philip spent much of his boyhood in a working-class Yorkshire environment, and was Jewish. He knew how to assimilate: sometimes he did, other times not.

I had no experience of higher education and English Literature as a field of study but was used to discussing books and writers with various people in my various jobs since leaving school. Friends, family and workmates shared information. I read voraciously and wrote whenever possible. I never thought about my writing as part of anything. If it was I hoped it might include Albert Camus, Franz Kafka and Fyodor Dostoevski. I had read a great many English-language writers but none had made such impact.

After Philip’s class some of us walked down the road to the Rubaiyat Bar at the corner of Byres Road and University Avenue, to continue the conversation. It was a long way home but who cared about that. And I had company for much of the walk, a colleague from the class, John Roy, who was a poet and member of the Socialist Workers Party. I was always interested in horse racing. He was antagonised when I asked what happened to horse racing after the revolution. I thought it a fair question, he thought it frivolous. What has horse racing got to do with anything?

Ah well, nay S.W.P. for me. Sir Ivor, Vaguely Noble and Nijinsky had by then retired to stud but Mill Reef, My Swallow and Brigadier Gerard had exploded onto the scene. Heady days. Their exploits got me through many a weary shift.

In the Rubaiyat Bar Philip introduced us to a few of his acquaintances, including Donald Saunders, Alasdair Gray, Catriona Montgomery and Aonghas MacNeacail. Later he and Anne Stevenson would set up a small, independent writers’ group at their home, by invitation. The four writers mentioned
came along. It took place on a Sunday evening and operated in a similar format to the Creative Writing class but was separate from it. Other participants were Chris Boyce, Angela Mullane and Angus McAllister. Tom Leonard and Liz Lochhead were friends of some who attended but they did not appear until later, and not on a regular basis. I did not know them or their work. Tom and his wife Sonya were living in London at that time. After a year or so the group faded and by then I had stopped attending the extra-mural class.

Robin Hamilton was another poet who went to Philip and Anne’s group. He wrote poetry and had connections with
Eboracum
, a literary magazine published by students at the University of York. On my behalf he submitted the story ‘Nice to be Nice’ for publication. It was accepted but caused the students a major headache. Their printer was a fundamentalist Christian who refused to print the magazine unless they withdrew my story. He said it was blasphemous and obscene, and tried to convince other York printers to reject the job. He succeeded with most but not all. The students stayed with the battle and eventually
Eboracum
was published, my story included.

‘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.