An Old Pub Near the Angel

Off the Buses. An interview with James Kelman by Anne Stevenson, originally published in The Scotsman, 14 July 1973

I met Jim Kelman over a pint in a crowded pub near Garioch Mill Road in Glasgow, where he lives with his wife and two small daughters. Jim’s first book of short stories, An Old Pub Near the Angel, has just been published in the United States by the Puckerbrush Press of Orono, Maine; so it seemed appropriate to talk to him over a hubbub of voices and the acrid smell of smoke and spilled beer.

Quiet spoken, fair, with large, expressive eyes, Jim considers himself a Glaswegian, although after being brought up in Drumchapel he has lived in California, London, Jersey and Manchester. I asked him if the material for his stories, most of which are about working-class people and written with exceptional depth and tenderness, was provided by his own life.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I want to write about real people, real things. I’m not interested in theories. A story can only be real if written through your own experience.’

We were surrounded by university students, celebrating their release from exams; so I asked him whether he thought a university education would be of much help to his writing.

‘No, not at all. I don’t think anyone should go to university before at least 25.’ (Kelman is 27.)

‘They don’t know enough. It’s training them to be officers before they’ve learned to be men.’

‘But you, yourself? Do you think now you’d like more education? Would you go to the university as a mature student?’

‘Me? No. I don’t write for educated people particularly. Of course I’m interested if they read my books, but I’m also interested in their reasons.’

‘Who do you write for, then?’

‘People,’ he said. ‘Ordinary people who might pick up the book on a news stand. Of course, I don’t expect many people will pick up this book because they don’t know about it. Half the booksellers I’ve approached won’t take it. It’s published in Maine by a small press and is only known by other writers. Writers are classless, or should be.’

‘And yet you write mainly about working-class people.’

‘I write about the working classes because I was brought up in a working-class family. I’m published in America because an American writer, Mary Gray Hughes, liked my stories. She couldn’t have known anything about working-class Glasgow. I feel I have a lot in common with black writers who have to write from the point of view of class. They can’t do otherwise. But that doesn’t mean you write for a class, if you write about it.’

‘I see what you mean,’ I said. ‘Tell me about your family and schooling. What made you want to write stories?’

‘I was born in Govan, but we moved to Drumchapel, Number One Scheme, in 1954. My father is a craftsman, a picture framer known to Glasgow artists, and he taught me to know good workmanship.

‘Drumchapel was a good place for a child to grow up, lots of fresh air and space. My brother was at a school in Hyndland, so I went there too. That was before there was a school in Drumchapel.

‘I left school at 15 to be an apprentice printer and was a member of the printers’ union. Then my father moved with the family to Pasadena, near Los Angeles in California. He thought there would be opportunities there, but after a while he got to hate the American system — master/slave relationship he called it — so he came back to Glasgow.

‘Two of my brothers stayed in the US, but I returned with my father. We didn’t have much money. The printers’ union wouldn’t have me back, so I went to work for a shoe factory in Govan. Then I was a sales assistant, a storeman and twice a bus conductor.

‘In 1965 I went to Manchester where I worked in factories, occasionally doing 12-hour shifts, six days a week. I remember working a straight 20-hour shift once. It didn’t pay very well.

‘In 1967 I came back to Glasgow and worked on the buses until August of that year, when I headed for London. There I worked as a porter and on building sites and other things. For a while I picked potatoes in Jersey. Eventually I had to do a moonlight from there back to London.’

‘Where you met your wife?’

‘Yes, we met in 1969. Marie’s from Swansea, a secretary. Shortly after we met, we married, and when we found she was going to have a baby we came back to Glasgow.’

‘Why?’

‘Accommodation’s cheaper. We couldn’t have afforded to live in London. I was working on the buses until last year, when I stopped and went on the buroo so as to have more time to write.’

‘And you’ve wanted to be a writer all your life?’

‘Well, no, I wanted to be a painter, but I wasn’t good enough. I must have been 21 or two when I wrote my first stories. One was called “He Knew Him Well”, about an old man who died without anyone knowing him. Another was called “Abject Misery”, about having no money and no job.’

‘Those are included in your book, aren’t they? I’ve noticed quite a number of your stories take place in slums or pubs.’

‘That’s because I live in a slum and drink in pubs.’

‘When did you begin to take your writing seriously?’

‘It was in 1971. Philip Hobsbaum was giving an extra-mural class in creative writing at Glasgow University. I went along. He liked my work and encouraged me. When the American writer Mary Gray Hughes visited Glasgow last year he showed her my work.’

I asked finally about his plans for the future.

‘I’ve no fixed plans. I’ll probably keep writing, though I have to get a job again in January. My wife’s supporting us now, but in January it’ll be my turn. I can’t write for television or radio. I’ll keep writing stories. I began a novel last year and had about 60,000 words down on paper, but it turned out wrong. I’ve started another’

‘Aren’t stories difficult to get printed?’ I suggested. ‘Wouldn’t it make sense to write for the media, since they pay well?’

‘Media isn’t real,’ Jim replied. ‘If I had to write something not real I’d drive buses again. Does that sound ridiculous?’

‘I don’t think so. What writers do you like then?’

‘Mostly contemporary Americans. Mostly American women writers. Especially, I think, Katherine Ann Porter, Flannery O’Connor, Mary Gray Hughes and Tillie Olsen. But of course, men too. Sherwood Anderson, Isaac Singer. The Russian, Isaac Babel.’

‘For somebody without a formal education you seem to have read quite a bit,’ I said.

‘You don’t need a formal education to read,’ Jim said.

We drank to that.