An Old Pub Near the Angel

Afterword

In the spring of 1973 a postman arrived at our door with a big parcel, a cardboard box containing 200 copies of An Old Pub Near the Angel. This was payment for my first collection of stories. We were living in a room and kitchen in Garriochmill Road. I ripped the parcel apart and showed the books to Marie and our infant daughters Laura and Emma. They were mightily impressed. At the back of four next morning I resumed paid employment and drove a bus out of Partick Garage. A time-inspector punished me for running six minutes sharp on a 64 bus through Brigton Cross. I explained that I was a writer and showed him a copy of the book. He thought it looked the part. In those days I carried a copy in case somebody wanted to read it.

An Old Pub Near the Angel, and Other Stories was published by Puckerbrush Press of Orono, Maine, U.S.A. It was a one-woman operation specialising in poetry but open to short fiction. Constance Hunting was the woman. Her publication of my work came about through a sort of fluke. She was shown it by the American poet and short-story writer Mary Gray Hughes whom I had met in Glasgow the year before.

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.

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 near 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. The 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.

For generations Departments of English Studies and other language literatures have fought to pronounce the death of ‘the artist’, that and their own entitlement to a tenured position, the right to earn a lifetime’s salary derived from the artwork produced by the deceased. Nowadays the one branch of the study that pays lip service to the human beings who create the stuff, ‘Creative Writing’, is slowly but surely having its life snuffed out from within, like a worker dying from the effects of asbestos fibre. People who die from this do not ‘pass on’; the breath is squeezed from their lungs forever and ever, amen.

When I find myself within such an institution I feel like the character portrayed by Donald Sutherland in the movie about Zombies and Sunflower Plants, as I stroll across campus, trying to mask my self-consciousness, awaiting a bloodless body in a flowing black robe to halt in mid-stride, pointing me out to his colleagues in an accusatory shriek: Aaahhhh! Aaarrtist!

A hunner and fifty years ago, or thereabouts, Herman Melville suggested that two novels might exist for every one created; the unwritten one concerned the endeavours of the writer in the act of creating the damn thing. The horrible part of this is that Melville, as I recall, was silent for almost twenty years. Meanwhile in other parts of the world the literary texts of a handful of writers indicate that not only might they have shared Melville’s insight, they were attempting to rectify matters. But what truly would have excited Melville was that these furnir literary artists were doing it simultaneously.

What furnir literary artists is he talking about?

Away and fucking read the fucking books.

The work of these artists is at the heart of what we call the ‘existential tradition in literature’. Anglo-American institutions have difficulty with such furnir stuff.

Theorists of ‘Creative Writing’ have derived a ‘holding tactic’ to stem the nightmare: Graduate Students are now instructed that in order to qualify for the Jackie Wilson Degree in Creative Writing — ever Higher and Higher — they should submit a Final Paper that is a Critical Analysis of themselves in the act of creation; to what extent does their finished ‘art product’ match the original idea, conception or design?

Ah, excellent, an Anglo-American counterblast to the literary Enlightenment that allows a return to Shaftesbury and Alexander Pope, while sneaking in a neat wee argument for the existence of a Christian God — a priori, if we do our homework. What more could be asked by academia?

Under the banner of ‘Creative Writing’ the Anglo-American higher education institutions have tried to corner the ‘literary art market’ for years, producing their own literary journals, anthologies of poetry and fiction, chosen from among themselves, and fostered within academia as ‘the good’. Nobody buys them apart from each other, but it does not matter, because the public pays for most of it, via state and/or government subsidy. Nevertheless, students are taught to recognise this work as ‘the good’. Forget all that existential angst stuff, our society moves as one, with a sharply defined set of criteria. For all I know, ‘Creative Writing’ has its roots in a 1950s CIA/MI6 propaganda project relating to literary arts and the suppression of debate generally. Certainly it bears the analytic stamp of that giant of the Anglo-American intellect, B.F. Skinner.

Fortunately there are academics who believe that a relationship exists between art and those who create it, that this may be protected and fostered, thus they fight to employ real writers.

Perhaps the defect is not yet structural, that it might be remedied by saturating these tiny departments with living breathing literary artists who can open a vein and offer students a drink. But the artists will not come if time and space is denied them. They will not come if the academics look enviously upon them, and demand that they share the full burden of bureaucratic and administrative necessity. And the artist must say to the academics, Fight yer own fucking war.

The ‘literary art market’ of the world cannot be controlled in the same way as they controlled my father’s craft of picture restoration. Yet the irony is severe. They transformed his craft into a ‘fine art’. They are transforming my art into a craft. Those dulled by institutionalised ‘Creative Writing’ are roused to excitement by talk of ‘craft’. Students walk about arm-in-arm and with beatific smiles, bearing a striking resemblance to the duo who came finally for Josef K. Oh, they say, we are learning our craft. Do not talk to us about formal necessity or arguments from design; when we hear any of those we run for cover. Next year our Creative Writing Professor is taking a Sabbatical to follow up an idea he has for a Gothic Romance. But he may do a Literary Novel instead. His editor, a former M. Litt graduate student from our very programme, has asked him to outline a proposal, always remembering the subtle nuances of the literary market. But what about the one he discussed with us in class, about the Detective Chief of Police who continually flouts Political Authority but always gets his man through the powers of Ice-Cool Logic and his intimate knowledge not only of the underworld, but Early Victorian Fiction in Old London Town?

My father still received picture-restoration work in a private capacity. One of his personal customers was the Director of Kelvingrove Art Galleries, Dr Honeyman. Occasionally he and a pal made antiques (sic). His pal was a cabinetmaker to trade. At that time in Glasgow many of the city’s cabinetmakers and French-polishers were employed around the Corunna Street area of Finnieston. Along Argyle Street were various crafts and antique shops. Different tradesmen could work on the same job. One fine cabinetmaker was Ben Smith, British champion racing cyclist. (By coincidence Ben Smith’s daughter and her husband are now close friends of me and Marie.) My father always knew when he arrived by the sound of the cycle’s handlebars against the workshop window.

Craft-suppliers and related businesses were centred around the old Anderston Cross, and right the way along Stobcross Street was a range of carriers to transport your goods across the world. I tramped that whole area as a 15-year-old message-boy, carrying goods to the shipping offices and the carriers, the stamp and dyers, printers and machine-tool shops. It was my first job after leaving school. Like all young folk I walked to save busfares, servicing my tobacco and gambling habits. Myself and my elder brother were used to going business messages from schooldays. Usually it was to one of the wee private galleries and frame-makers around the Kelvinbridge and Charing Cross districts.

I am the second of five, all boys. We enjoyed poking about in Dad’s workshop and he showed us how to burnish gold-leaf frames. Whatever we did, we must not sneeze or cough, otherwise flecks of gold scattered into the sawdust on the floor. He had all that great stuff beloved by boys and girls: oils and water-based paints; brushes; methylated spirit by the gallon; knives, glues and tools and tools and tools; and planks of fresh wood; and scores of frames and crazy ornate moulds from the early nineteenth century. Composition forever bubbled in strange little saucepans — the ‘compo pots’. Old composition had solidified round the walls and over the edges of the saucepans. The ‘compo recipe’ was a closely guarded family secret. When times were tough and all else failed we ate it with a mixture of cod-liver oil and brown sauce. He used to offer customers a cup of tea but to their horror — Do you think I’m made of pots? — he boiled the water out the ‘compo pot’.

Most of the old-time journeymen were meths drinkers; according to my father, the ‘compo’ put a lining in their stomach. When he was 15 his own father — my grandfather — employed on a casual basis an elderly picture-framer by the name of Jake, who was then hitting 80. Therefore he was born in the 1830s. I have his saw. But a pal of mine, Alistair Kerr, is not impressed by the saw. He is a joiner to trade and believes this mystique of the legendary skills of old-time tradesmen is romantic keech.

There were always old paintings and reproductions around in our family. My grandfather started the business, immigrating to Glasgow from Aberdeenshire around the turn of the twentieth century. It was a luxury trade. In times of depression business was scarce. If there was work on occasionally he needed other workers, usually his older sons. He hung exhibitions down south for private galleries, including the Annan which greatly impressed myself.

As a youth I was fond of van Gogh although his life did not excite me like that of others. I enjoyed reading about him but he was just too messianic for myself at that age, and his bad luck with women put me off. My opinion has changed. When I taught a graduate class at the University of Texas I used his letters on art theory. All students of art should read his letters. But as a youth I knew well his portrait of Alexander Reid. I wondered if it was Mister Reid’s hair that appealed to van Gogh. No matter, my grandfather shook the hand of the man who shook the hand of Vincent. I liked the idea of him and my uncles driving to London to hang an exhibition and, of course, that my middle name is Alexander.

But he could never build the picture-framing, gilding and restoring business sufficiently to employ more than one man and a boy on a regular basis. His older three sons sought work in other towns. My father was the baby of the family, by several years the youngest of six children, two of whom died in infancy. It was his own misfortune never to have worked alongside his three big brothers.

My grandfather took a part-time job as a door manager at the old Empire Theatre. His great pastime was music and he sang in one of Glasgow’s choruses, so maybe he had contacts in show business. He still worked in a small way at the trade where possible. One customer was the artist J.D. Fergusson. His wife was Margaret Morris, a famed dancer and beauty of the day. She is the model Fergusson painted most frequently. Unfortunately my grandmother was sensitive to certain matters where Alexander was concerned. She thought his choral activities an excuse to meet other women. One night he got the family free tickets for a show, and when he was showing my grannie to her seat in the stalls there came a call from above, Yoohoo Sandy!

It was Margaret Morris from up in the boxes with J.D., dressed in the height of fashion. She stood up to wave down to my grandfather. And she used ‘Sandy’, his family name. My grannie never forgave him. Later they separated. My father was 12 at the time. He remained with his father, lodging in houses around Kelvinbridge. When the pair flitted from place to place the bulk of their belongings was choral songbooks. They had different workshops over the years; Partick Cross, Otago Street, Gibson Street and Great Western Road were some of the addresses. But he stayed in touch with his mother, and when we were growing up we visited her regularly. She was the last Gaelic speaker in my immediate family, Katherine MacKenzie from Kios on Lewis. Dizzie Gillespie’s grannie was also a Gaelic speaker, from North Carolina, U.S.A.

Before the First World War picture-framers and gilders could be hired on a casual basis at the corner of Cadogan Street and Waterloo Street. Many art studios lay up Blythswood Hill, in the vicinity of the square, five or ten minutes from the Glasgow School of Art. Female models were traditionally hired from there by artists. The art models have been gone for nearly a century. From there and down the hill towards Argyle Street women continue to hire their bodies, but for the last many years they have risked horrific violence, including murder, selling themselves for sex.

In the 1950s Salvador Dali’s painting, Christ of Saint John of the Cross, was vandalised by one of Glasgow’s religious bigots inside Kelvingrove Art Gallery. Under Dr Honeyman’s direction the gallery had purchased some very fine art, including the vandalised Dali painting. My father was one of the many with whom he discussed its restoration. I remember seeing other ripped, scarred and badly damaged canvases people brought into his Gibson Street workshop. In some of those paintings large areas were threadbare. Time and patience were required for these jobs. Eventually, and it could be several months later, he could show us where he had mended the canvas and applied the paint and whatever else was necessary. Note the clouds and the flock of geese. See that bush, these big waves. Look closely.

If it had been a very bad rip you might see something of the repair; otherwise not. Of course it was him that had painted the clouds, the bush and the flock of geese, matching the oils of the eighteenth-century original. That trade was full of stories.

One morning in the early 1970s Marie and I were walking along Sauchiehall Street and we stopped to read the notice for a forthcoming sale of Scottish paintings at the old Crown Auction Rooms. One of the artists whose work was to be auctioned was Alexander Kelman. I asked my father if he was a relation. He’s your grandpa!

Whenever the signature disappeared from the face of a canvas during the restoration process one of the old-time journeymen signed their own name for a laugh. Some of these old paintings had been in and out of restoration so often that the only paint left on the canvas had been applied by the restorers.

My grandfather died in 1951. He is buried in his family lair along King Street, Aberdeen.

In my teens the biographies of artists of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries were some of my favourite reading. I looked at reproductions of their work too. I enjoyed people like Dave, Ingres, Corot and Courbet; and Velázquez and Rubens; and, in particular the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. My early heroes were Degas and Manet; afterwards Modigliani, Rodin, Cézanne and Utrillo; especially Rodin and Modigliani, flitting in and out of Parisian bars and coffee houses, never eating, swallowing dope and booze by the bucket, constant sex. Then they all met other artists for conversations over a bowl of Mrs Pissarro’s homemade soup. What a life! I thought Modigliani’s paintings of naked women were just superb and if anybody wanted to argue — well, I would just have argued back.

I assumed I would become a painter. Art was the only class that interested me at school. My first proper art teacher, Mrs Harper, was strict but ironic, the best kind. She let us choose and sort out the materials for ourselves; charcoals, brushes, get our own water from the sink. To be granted such responsibility was an extraordinary experience. You were also allowed to talk to your classmates, females as well as males, as long as you kept it quiet and did not laugh too loudly.

Nevertheless, school proved too much for me even in the short run. I turned 15 and needed out. I returned to start a fourth year in August but those first days were a living nightmare. I had failed third year in the most miserable fashion so this fourth year was a repeat year. A careers teacher was seeing pupils so I took that opportunity to escape a double period of History which, as I recall, was devoted to the Exciting Adventures of the later Diaturnable Drones of Imperial England. I discovered I was out of cigarettes so went along to hear the careers teacher to pass the time. He asked if I was interested in anything. Art, I said.

Well, I have the very job for you.

The printing trade. A firm down the road in Partick was looking for a boy and my qualifications were spot on: Boys’ Brigade and Protestant Senior Secondary School.

You did not have to be a Protestant to work in that printing shop but it got you entry into the better occupations. Protestants became compositors. Catholics did the labouring and semi-skilled work. If they made it as time-served journeymen it was to the level of machinemen, printers. They wore boiler-suits. The very idea. Compositors wore dustcoats.

A drawback to hourly paid work is how it crushes the spirit. First Year Apprentice Compositors had their own defences. If you were at your wits’ end and desperate for a day off, you injected yourself with lead. You drew blood around the area of the wrist and rubbed in some of the fluid from the lead type, then waited to see if it ‘travelled’. The thing that ‘travelled’ was poison. It ran a thin red streak up a vein in the inside of your forearm. It was great when it ‘worked’. You showed the thin red stripe to the gaffer and he sent you home. But you were not to let the red line move beyond your elbow. If that happened it went right up and through your body and just was there and ‘it’ would not come out, thus one had breathed one’s last, that was you, deid. You had to flex your upper-arm muscle as tautly as possible and grip your inside elbow very tightly. That stopped it.

My father and mother decided to emigrate with the family to the U.S.A. in 1963. They were in their early forties with five sons, aged from three to 20. My father advertised in different newspapers across the U.S.A. and received replies from around seven prospective employers, including Houston, Texas; Springfield, Missouri; and Hartford, Connecticut. Dr Honeyman had written his references. He and my mother chose Los Angeles, California, working for a private art gallery in Pasadena. A house went with the position. They gave myself and my elder brother, Ronnie, the choice to go or stay. I could finish my apprenticeship — my other grandparents, my mother’s parents over in Govan, offered me a place to stay — then emigrate later. To go with my family meant severing my apprenticeship, but it was an easy choice. Ronnie also decided quickly. He worked as a clerk for the old Glasgow Corporation and was glad to escape. Our younger brothers Alan and Philip were still at school while Graham, the youngest, was only three.

The secretary of the union, S.O.G.A.T. (the Society of Graphic and Allied Trades), advised me that it was a serious matter and amounted to voluntary expulsion. I would be finished with the trade in this country, except for non-union shops. But he wished me well and gave me a good letter of introduction for any printers interesting in hiring me.

On the day before we left I went into a bookie’s at Partick Cross and stuck my entire life savings on a horse by the name of Pioneer Spirit. It won at 4/5. I got £9 back. Arkle and Mill House were around in them days. Sea Bird II had won the Derby.

Los Angeles proved an ordeal. I had been working for about two and a half years in Glasgow. Now I was in a country where at 17 I was too young to work. I went looking anyway, scouting about. Surely I would find something. My elder brother had found a job, earning real dollars.

In Pasadena they had a labour exchange office near Colorado Boulevard. I tried it a few times. A printing factory needed ‘experienced men’. I took a chance and they gave me an interview. They knew of S.O.G.A.T. and were impressed by the secretary’s letter. It was a non-union shop along Colorado Boulevard. In those days the non-union shops had their own sort of union or society. Their interview included practical work with the composing stick and a case of type. It was too easy for a Second Year Glasgow Apprentice and they were keen to start me. But I had to bide my time until my eighteenth birthday. There was nothing else for it, they had no choice. They said they would write me later. I continued trudging around Pasadena but there was little doing there. I began travelling into Los Angeles whenever possible. Surely some sort of under-the-counter job existed?

If there was I did not find it. My father and my elder brother were working; my two younger brothers at school; and my mother busy with all the domestic stuff, trying to make ends meet. I was company for her, kept my youngest brother from under her feet.

The money brought into the home by my elder brother was greatly appreciated. The cost of living was proving greater than anticipated. Our father’s wage did not go as far as all that. He was finding difficult the transition from self-employed tradesman to wage-slave employee. At home he had worked nine, ten or twelve-hour days, six days a week, and if he was five minutes late, so what? One way or another he got the work done. Now he had to cope with the timecard routine. A minute late and people took notes. He was not there in the guise of the gruff but loveable Scottish engineer who can build a spaceship from a dod of chewing gum, three nuts and a bolt. He had expected to be treated as a first-class craftsman, but the gallery used him like any other worker. His workmates were from Puerto Rico and Central America. He was also an immigrant; immigrants are cheap labour.

Most of the time I read or loafed about. L.A. was where the jobs lay but it costs money to look for a job. That had to come from the family budget. Busfares mount up. If you are out for several hours, a coffee and a sandwich enter the reckoning. I could not borrow if I could not pay back. It was donations or nothing and nobody wants charity, not even 17-year-olds, especially ones that have been independent for years. You become overly sensitive. I hated to be ‘caught reading’. But what else was there? I went out for walks but that area of Pasadena was fairly boring, besides which walkers were suspicious characters.

My mother made sandwiches for my father and elder brother. I took one when I travelled into the city, two or three times a week. Occasionally I walked to save money. It was 11 miles from Pasadena to downtown L.A. Coming home in the dark was worse, down across quite a wide stretch of railroad tracks and through Chinatown and then on, and on, and on.

I got to know the downtown area quite well. There was a single-window record store nearby a pawnshop whose entire window was devoted to Bob Dylan merchandise. This was a time for Elvis, the Everlys, Del Shannon, so it was an adventurous display. Back in Glasgow, Dylan had a cult following but only a hardy few; the rest of the population had succumbed months previously to The Beatles, myself included. I had the Please Please Me album and took it everywhere, until I lost it — I hope not at cards. Bob Dylan’s image did not last long in that record-store window.

Like most other exiled teenagers I was proud when The Beatles stormed the U.S.A. In Glasgow there was also a music scene. We had good bands of our own: Blues Council and the Pathfinders were just two; a third was George Gallagher’s The Poets. A couple of nights ago, as I write here in San José, January 2007, a local radio station featured two of their songs. It was a complete surprise, sitting staring out the window at 11 o’clock in the evening. I was expecting a wee lassie to jump out and shout, Ha ha Dad, April Fool!

The Poets split up in the 1960s. Individuals continued in other bands. In the 1980s some were doing gigs around bars in Glasgow and district, playing a role in local political campaigns. They reformed as The Blues Poets in the early 1990s and in 1993–4 they agreed to take the lead in my ‘musical’ One two — hey! The band took on acting roles as well as performing seven or eight songs. It was just a special thing altogether. Their performance night after night helped keep me sane during the media hullabaloo that followed publication of How Late It Was, How Late.

In 1964 The Beatles were everywhere. The first song to make it was ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’. Young Americans walked about in a daze. Within two weeks or less The Beatles’ U.K. backlist was rushed onto the market and four more of their singles entered the U.S. top ten.

Not only was I proud, it made sense of my clothes. I had been walking about dressed in Glasgow-style; early mod and strictly working-class. Another couple of years passed before the art-school, cross-class culture appeared and dominated. On the east coast young males were still trying to look like Bobby Darin or Elvis Presley. Where I came from nobody of my generation wanted to look like Elvis — that was your auntie’s boyfriend. Teddy Boys and Rockers singing ‘I Don’t Have a Wooden Heart’, you kidding?

In California white youths were more influenced by Archie comics and the Jerry Lewis look; crew cuts and trousers that flapped six inches above the ankles; white socks and thick rubber-soled shoes. They would have been laughed out of Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle. Thanks to The Beatles I was vindicated, strolling about in my box-cut short jacket, nay vents and cloth-covered buttons; open French-seam trousers, Boston-collar shirt, black socks and chisel-toed shoes.

I still attracted attention, mainly from men around the bus station at 7th and Main. I was naïve but not innocent. Young people of both genders suffer harassment in factories. I coped with it, I think. The situation in Los Angeles was different. My vulnerability lay in the economic. A few years passed till I came upon the work of John Rechy. His City of Night was published back in 1963. If I had found a copy then I would have viewed differently the downtown area around Central Library and Pershing Square. Maybe one of these early stories would have been entitled ‘Not Raped in California’. The York printer and the Extra-mural class at Glasgow University would have enjoyed it. Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn was published in 1964 and I had no knowledge of it, nor of the obscenity charges brought against his work in the U.S.A. in 1961, then later in the U.K. in 1968.

The courageous integrity of artists like Selby and Rechy can have an inspirational effect on young writers. Just get on with it, do it honestly, do it properly, tell the fucking truth, just tell it, do it. Whereas, in mainstream English literature young writers are encouraged to find their place in the hierarchy. As an existential experience working-class life was a taboo area and prostitution, like industrial cancer, is a working-class experience, essentially.

While in San José I attended a reading given by a contemporary of mine here in the Bay area. He is a decent writer and a likeable man but his public persona, like many another English novelist, appears modelled on Prince Charles taking a stroll down the charity ward of a Cambridge hospital. During the question/answer session that followed he declared to an audience of maybe 500 people that in his opinion the greatest influence on English novelists of the past thirty years was Philip Larkin.

Honest to god.

But Anglo-American audiences dote on that socio-intellectual embrace. Especially when the individual appears able to cope with the beastlier forms of street life. He reminds them of that English actor who portrays bumbling upper-class characters who stay calmly ironic while dealing with brute reality, even such horrors as having to buy a young black woman to service one orally. They understand such angst and often experience it themselves when making contracts with street people. Even young WASP women share a smile. They empathise with the man buying the woman! The idea of being on your knees in a back alley, staring up at a rich white bastard’s penis, seems not to occur.

If only I was a fucking musician, man, why did I have to be a writer, I could just get on with the work as honestly as I could. Music had Eric Burdon, Them, the Stones. We writers had Kingsley Amis and the Angry Young Men.

In the name of fuck.

In those days the clearest statement of my own position came via Steve Marriott and the Small Faces:

Wouldin it be noice,

to get on wiv me nighbirs

and then shout like fuck and bang yer drums and whistle and stamp yer feet. Instead one is to learn firstly the rudimentaries that one might come to respect, not simply Standard English Grammatical Form, but its exigency, how to be a good literary chap, and know yer place.

Poverty types do exist but it is bad manners to air them publicly. The bourgeoisie expect beggars to apologise for their lack of invisibility. Regrettably some beggars do just that. Thus they seek a pitch nearby a public sewer. Sorry guv, I aint one of em reds, give me twenty pee and I’ll plop dahn the plugole.

Young artists learn how not to deal with life on the street except at a distance, to subjugate the impulse to create original art, and look to the fiction-as-sociology mainstream. Stay with the objective third-party narrative, or that whining first-person present tense: assimilate that conventional grammar at all costs, that one might come to describe those curiously shabby, odorous creatures from the outside, without having to touch, taste or smell them. Do not attempt to gain entry into their psyches, you will find that a contradiction in terms; amorphous mobs and baying multitudes do not ‘have’ psyches.

Earlier writers tried something different. They knew the lives of ordinary people and attempted to work from within. It was not necessary to have experienced everything. But you have to be sufficiently touched as a human being to address these areas; you begin from solidarity — a mixture of sympathy and empathy, a tricky emotion for those in an economically advantaged and socially superior position. I was ignorant of American writers like Saroyan, Caldwell, Le Seuer, Ellison. I had no idea of the existence of stories such as ‘Blue Boy’, ‘The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze’ or ‘King of the Bingo Game’?

I read work by writers who touched on it from the outside; in my teens I enjoyed A.J. Cronin and had no knowledge of James Barke or Walter Greenwood. But who tackled poverty and its effects, whether malnutrition or degradation, as an existential experience? In U.K. prose fiction a masterwork such as Knut Hamsun’s Hunger was a logical absurdity. Fortunately we could learn from European writers in translation.

When I started writing I looked with longing to rock music. It was never to do with being a liberated young male, it was to do with being a liberated young working-class male. The Who’s ‘My Generation’ was exciting but it let the upper classes off the hook once again, it universalised rebellion. You and me brother, the whole world could hold hands and join in. Oh no, here we go, a penny for the black babies. Religion and spirituality and wholefoods and tolerance for one another. Even the richest man in the world will bleed if pricked. Leave the guy alone, he is a suffering soul. Let us read the Beats and rebel against Daddy and his corporate chums. If only they loved one another they could join with Bob Geldof and Bono and become multibillionaire charity heroes. Perhaps then they could dance and let their hair down, use words like ‘gig’ and ‘cool’ in context; sniff a line, smoke a joint, listen to Jimi Hendrix, read Ginsberg and not shave on weekends. Thus ‘we’ might come to halt this beastly systematic brutality being perpetrated by corporate capital on working-class and indigenous communities across the globe. Absafuckinglootely, as they say in Cambridge and Yale.

In 1964 Los Angeles I had no money and no way of getting money. There was no game in town, not that I knew about. Since boyhood me and my pals gambled for money for as long as we had any. Once or twice the cards landed correctly or the horses ran to form. Here in L.A. the local newspapers had racing-form pages. Maybe the locals could make sense of them, I could not. Nor could I find a betting shop. The only money I had was skimmed off the busfares, or given by my father or elder brother. I did not like being in that position. Who does? I was not used to dependency.

So who knows, had I been offered dough by one of the men that hung around the bus station, probably I would have taken it and dealt with the consequences later. I was never completely sure what went on between men anyway. Stories in An Old Pub Near the Angel are set in England where I lived from the spring of 1965. The same business option existed there. Two Scottish guys I knew in London had taken the money. One referred to an elderly man who paid him for minor masochistic pleasures. The other said, I would have kicked his arse for ten Woodbine — a cheap brand of no-filter cigarettes; you could buy them in fives. That stuff was incredible to me, and by then I was 21. At 17 I thought anal sex was a metaphor.

In L.A. I just wandered about, along to Grand Central Market; maybe one of the butchers was in need of a delivery boy and I would just happen to be passing and that would be me with a job. My elder brother met my father here on Friday evenings to stock up on food before catching the bus home to Pasadena. By then I was on the road home myself. A hamburger stall on 5th had become my second home. An older man operated the stall, open from 7 a.m. and finished by mid afternoon. He did not know of any jobs for 17-year-olds but offered coffee refills for as long as I stayed.

His hamburgers were magnificent. When he dished one up to me he used to ask, With everything?

He soon stopped asking. Of course with everything, what are ye kidding? Mustard and ketchup, fried onions, chopped jalapeños, pickled gherkins: it was all over my nose and down my neck. I rationed myself to one a fortnight.

I came to realise that he assumed I was Jewish. It was my name. There are more Jewish Kelmans in the U.S.A. than there are Protestant Kelmans in the entire north-east of Scotland, including Macduff. In the 1990s I did a reading in New York City at an Irish club near the Museum of Modern Art. It smelled of money. I read from How Late It Was, How Late. A few individuals in the audience hated it, they really hated it, and harrumphed, coughed and spluttered throughout. Afterwards I heard one of the harrumphing elderly men say to his female partner, Kelman is not even a Scottish name, it is Jewish.

The hamburger-stall owner was not put off when I told him I was a Protestant Atheist, as they say in parts of Scotland and Ireland, just embarrassed and apologetic that the subject had arisen. His son was my age and a soccer freak; he tuned in to foreign stations to get results from Europe. For some reason he had latched onto Partick Thistle. I explained to him that there was only one team in Scotland worth bothering about and they played at Pittodrie Park. He never had heard of Graham Leggatt, George Kinnell or Ian Burns, not even Paddy Buckley let alone the legendary ‘Gentleman’ George Hamilton, my father’s hero. When the Dons thrashed Rangers 6–0 in a cup semi-final at Ibrox Park back in the early 1950s, ‘Gentleman’ George ran amok. As I recall he missed the cup final and Celtic beat us 2–1 before a record 134,000 spectators.

In L.A., football was one of the primary absences in our family’s life. My mother was used to us ranting and raving about it but she missed it too. But she was missing everything. With five sons she was accustomed to the absence of female company, but not inured to it. Here she had none at all, and saw nobody. In Glasgow we lived in tenement blocks; six, eight or even twelve families lived up a close, and the next close was a five- to ten-second walk away. It was a community, even if ye hated the neighbours. Here in Pasadena the tied cottage was down at the end of a private lane, nobody except us. A family of animals with striped tails appeared in the evening to stare in the window, watching us watch television.

My father’s job at the private gallery in Pasadena deteriorated to the extent that he handed in notice to quit. The owner was looking for cheap labour only, and practised in the arts of obedience. Now she wanted us off the premises immediately. If we stayed even one minute beyond the period of employment, she would have us charged with all sorts of criminal misdemeanours, and each of these minutes would cost us rent.

Our tied cottage was located on the grounds of a large home on Arlington Drive. The owner had a Japanese gardener ages with herself, and an established Japanese garden with plenty shrubbery; bushes and trees and a burn flowing through the middle. There was a wee temple with a shrine where the gardener spent much of his time. My younger brothers, Alan and Philip, ran wild in the garden playing chases, splashing through the burn and sneaking into the temple and making the gardener’s life a misery. I climbed up on the roof to keep out the road, reading and sunbathing. My mother spent most of her time in the tied cottage, doing the domestic work and dreaming of Scotland. The mindset we entered into reminds me of that opening in the Cassavetes movie Gloria. The accountant father has cooked the books of his employers, a team of mafioso. It is useless to run. His wife has bouts of rage, then lapses into lethargy, like her mother and daughter, just staring at him occasionally, as they wait for the executioner. It is a brilliant scene.

One of my father’s ex co-workers was our saviour, a young Puerto Rican picture-framer by the name of Mario. My father had been free with his skills to the other workers. Now Mario was quick to offer his support. They hatched a plot a week or so later. In Glasgow we call it ‘doing a moonlight’. Mario had a rusty old banger, wings falling to bits, exhaust system knackered. They stuffed everybody in, bags and suitcases, the lot, and we hightailed it out of town, straight onto Pasadena Freeway, Mario’s car rattling and shaking the whole way south to an apartment in Hawthorne, south L.A. This was more like it.

Hawthorne is next door to Watts where much racist violence hit the street in 1965. Around 15,000 National Guard troops were sent in to show the black American community who was boss. On any bus into town I sat at the back because I was a smoker. Only blacks sat there, whites went to the front. Sometimes the back of the bus was crowded and only a few seats being used in the white section. None of the whites gave me a row, they just kind of looked, as did the blacks, but nothing more than that. Not even a vague frown, that I recall. Perhaps the clothes I wore advertised my foreign origins. What happened to other colours or ethnicities, I do not know, I do not know.

Walking about in L.A. was no different from walking through the foreign neighbourhoods of Drumchapel: not for youths. This pressure is known to almost every full-sighted urban male that breathes, every day of our lives. Who will step out the way first? After an entire day tramping the streets, one wearies of the constant decision-making, and the longer it goes on the more complex the judgment. I start making a priori decisions: it does not matter the male, for every second one I shall step out of the road. For every third male over the age of 70 I shall keep my ground and stick out my elbows.

Then you start playing games: I think I will step out the road of this cunt and see if he smiles, if he smiles I will batter him across the fucking skull. By the end of the evening ye weary of everything and just step out everybody’s way. Then ye start making a virtue out of it. After you!

No, after you.

Please, take my ground.

No, you take my ground.

Take my ground ya bastard.

Fuck you man, fucking fag bastard.

Wait a minute you I am from Scotland we always look at guys, nay ambiguity intended.

In California they have detox macho units where males learn how to step out of the other man’s path. It is a rich, rewarding field of study, all the more so for its increasing complexity. Just when you think you have mastered the basics ye land on yer back. I was trudging along a quiet, tree-lined street at dusk. Sixty yards away a guy approached. We were heading along the same track of the same path. Aw naw.

Nobody else was in sight. I walked on, less steadily. From many yards off I decided to step sideways. I just made the decision. I just thought I cannot be bothered with this. Even so, I did the manoeuvre from far off, so it would seem like a natural, absent-minded veer, rather than me being forced out by him and his damn presence. He just kept coming, he just kept on. I did not care. Now I saw he was black, a sturdy-looking guy, still not slowing, but he knew I was coming. When we passed he said, God bless you brother.

My father had a start in one of the picture-framers on La Cienega Boulevard. Quite a few galleries and linked businesses were there. Some still are. I passed through L.A. in the late 1990s and checked to see. My father much preferred this job; Puerto Rican and Central American workmates, a lively atmosphere. But the money was poor and the work repetitive; almost no gilding, let alone picture restoring. The apartment was costly and with seven of us there my mother was working miracles. He could not afford to buy a car. He still had not acquired his driver’s licence. These things take ages. It was difficult getting a day off work, then when he did it was problematic with buses, and they took so long to get anyplace, and you got sick of not being understood, repeating the same questions time and time again.

Though wearying of it myself I still went on the tramp once or twice. Word arrived about a Scottish fast-food joint. My brother had spotted it from the bus. It was miles away but worth a shot. Maybe if I threw myself on their mercy, in a guid Scotch tongue, they would give me a start. I got the busfare and next morning set out. I got off the bus too early and had to continue on foot. Then I found the place, it was a proper Scottish name — McDonald’s. Two white American lassies were serving. They noticed me. It became a male v. female interlude. I was enjoying it. I hung about by the counter awaiting an opportunity to chat, all too aware that my only line was, Any jobs?

I gave up and went hame. About my last throw of the dice came via an advertisement in a newspaper. A big soccer day was scheduled one Saturday. Teams of players of different nationalities were involved. There was bound to be a Scottish contingent. Maybe I could make a connection. Secretly, I still dreamt about making the grade as a player. There were a few semi-pro teams in the Los Angeles area. Some junior and ex-senior Scottish players had gone out, in the twilight of their years. I was never anywhere near that standard but this was America, could they even tell the difference? At least I was young. I decided to have a go. The one genuinely great Scottish player to have made L.A. his base was before my time but his name was still known and my father had seen him play; the Scottish international and ex-Dundee inside-forward Billy Steel.

If a U.S. team signed you they ensured you had a day job. Even if I was not good enough to play maybe somebody would know about a day job. Off I went. A bus into downtown then another one out. Miles away as usual. In area, Los Angeles was the biggest city in the world, in those days something like 35 miles wide. When I reached the football ground, to my dismay, the entrance fee alone would swallow up every cent of busfare I had left. I would be stranded, and the walk home was as bad as the Pasadena marathon.

Three games were to be played consecutively. Okay, it was good value. I agreed with the guy on the turnstile. But I only needed to see the one featuring the Scottish players. I argued it out but to no avail: full entrance fee or nothing. Watch the football or get a bus home. No contest. My whole world depended on it. In the stadium I strolled to one of the empty seats. There was a German team, an Italian team, a Mexican team, a British team and a couple from Central America. Where were the Scottish boys? Maybe I missed them.

At the final whistle of the final game I wandered towards the exit, postponing the reality of the long hike home. Then there on the ground, was a crumpled but complete copy of the Saturday ‘Pink’ Times!

In the old days the proprietors of the Glasgow Evening Times published a late edition on a Saturday afternoon that gave all the sports results. They used pink newspaper to distinguish it from the boring early editions. The newspaper I found was a fortnight old but it induced a spring in my step and every mile or so I was stopping to read extraordinary snippets of news. Brechin City 0–0 Alloa Athletic, Maryhill Juniors 7–1 Pollok. Was I dreaming?

And then the racing news. The Grand National approached! My god. Dunky Keith rode two winners for Walter Nightingall at Kempton Park. I might have known. They’d always done well at Kempton. And had Arkle beaten Mill House for the Gold Cup? And what about the two- and four-dog combination at the White City? Or the three- and five-dogs at Shawfield. I would have kicked myself if that forecast had entered a winning run.

What about the mighty Dons? Had maestro Charlie Cooke left Dundee yet? Oh man! And how was Jim Baxter playing? Was Denis Law in Torino? All this and more. I was gloating in anticipation of the response my ‘Pink’ Times would get from my father and brothers. Maybe I could charge them a dollar for every result I told them. All of these hot topics from 6,000 miles away.

Except the road went on forever and I was still trudging and my fucking feet man, these shoes I had, fucking chisel-toed winkle-picking bastards or some such nonsense, where had I bought them? Gordon’s Shoe Shop in Partick, if I remember rightly, they were fucking killing me and I still had not reached the downtown area.

A couple of months on and my parents called it quits. My mother had never enjoyed the experience and my father just worked, slept, ate and travelled on buses. In many ways it was a typical immigrant experience. For my parents it was a case of cutting the losses, getting home as soon as possible. At least we had a country to go to. But they did not have enough money for everybody’s fares. My elder brother decided he could stay, look after himself and our younger brother Alan who was 15 years old and attending school. He would save to pay Alan’s flight home. It was a burden for a 21-year-old but he managed it fine. Alan returned home a few months later, but Ronnie stayed and has been there ever since, now with his wife and four grown-up children.

I had no option but to return to Scotland. The decision was a family one. I was doing nothing anyway. Back in Glasgow I could work and contribute to the family purse. There was the possibility of returning to the States later.

The printer’s factory over in Partick could not take me back. The firm was agreeable but it was a union shop; I had severed my apprenticeship and that was that. But really, I had no complaints. The S.O.G.A.T. secretary had warned me months ago.

I stayed with my grandparents in Govan, my mother’s parents, and got a job on the line at the Cooperative shoe factory in Shieldhall, earning a man’s wage on piecework. Then a letter arrived from Pasadena weeks after my eighteenth birthday. The printers on Colorado Boulevard were holding the job open for me. I did consider it but decided against.

This was the period when I knew I was never going to be a painter. I still fancied the art business. I had discovered, perhaps through my father, that a college existed in Europe that specialised in a course for art dealers. I had discussed it with my elder brother for a time, and my father. If I completed the course in art dealing, Ronnie would save dough in the States and send money home, and I could make use of that to buy and sell art. By this time he was in the U.S. Army. We were serious about it. But life was getting on top of me at that time and I needed away.

The immigrant experience left an obvious mark on our family, as it does on every immigrant family. We were never together again as a unit. My younger brother Alan found life unsettling. In 1971 he crossed to New York City to be best man at our brother Ronnie’s wedding. He did not come home for eight years; he travelled south to work for a time in the Pennsylvania hills, then Florida, Texas, Death Valley, Nevada and other places in between. He has his own stories. Before then, in Glasgow, when he turned 16 he discovered the music clubs in the city: the Electric Garden, the Lindella Club, Bruce’s Cave and the rest. He worked on the door at the Picasso Club, and occasionally borrowed 45 RPM EPs from the D.J. The first time I heard the name James Brown was from Alan. He was clutching that very early EP, Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag, from 1965.

My head was not in music so much. I had discovered other clubs around Glasgow, with names like the Raven, the Hanover, the Coronet, the Starlight Rooms, the Blue Dolphin, the 44 Club, the Establishment, the Cigar Club, the White Elephant and the New Businessman’s Club. The latter was known locally as ‘the Busy’, a play on words; the police also were known locally as ‘the busies’. I was 18 at that time.

These were gambling clubs of one kind or another; cheminde-fer — chemmy — the most popular game; and five-card stud poker for afters, for those left with money. I preferred the atmosphere in gambling clubs but it was a tougher world than that of Damon Runyon, though I was fond of ‘Big Nig’ and ‘The Lemondrop Kid’. The guy on the door on these clubs stared at ye, looked left and right, then nodded ye in. Occasionally I brought along guests, my pals. They were very impressed. I whispered, Mind now, ye have to be quiet, and for fuck sake do not chat up the lasses, they are all on the game.

One night I returned to a club from a greyhound track with money burning its way through both trouser pockets. People were around but it was quiet, a man had been stabbed to death at the door. Guys were coming in to play cards and saying, That’s bad news about the bloke on the door. . Then they coughed quietly, So, what, is there nay cards later on or what?

In another club there was a £1,500 bank for afternoon sessions at faro. I was a busconductor out at Gavinburn Depot, Old Kilpatrick. One day I had a ‘spare’ duty. But it was payday. Everybody goes to work on payday. I was hanging about the garage doing nothing. We could not even watch television in the garage bothy. One of the conductresses had switched it on but nothing happened. Eventually we looked round the back of it to check the electrics. There was nothing there. It was a shell. Some dirty bastard stole the tube and all the inner workings. That was typical at Gavinburn Depot — the garage was fucking notorious; after forty years I still remember the name of the garage superintendent — wee Dunbar!

To pass the time I skipped down to the village bookie and bet a double at Cheltenham; Ken Oliver’s brilliant novice, Arctic Sunset, and Jimmy Scot, trained by Fulke Walwyn. They fucking bolted home. I lifted the dough and went back to the Depot, but couldnay stand it, signed off sick and went straight to the Hanover club for a game of faro. The guy on the door looked at me. I was still in the busconductor uniform. Jesus Christ, son, he said.

When I walked into the card room there was guffaws: Aw look, the buses is here.

The gambling clubs in A Chancer are based on those named above. And the snooker hall Tammas frequents is the old Imperial, Mitchell Street. He lives with his sister and brother-in-law on the Anderston side of St Vincent Street, prior to the M8 upheaval and the demolition of the tenements from Elliot Street.

But oh that gambling. Life is a complication. I forgot about art dealing in Paris, card dealing in Glasgow, I needed away, fast. I went to Manchester with a pal, Colin Hendry from Partick who died a few years ago. His elder brother Ian was a plumber to trade; he died some years before Colin. We played football and cards together, gin rummy for the entire trip down by train. Colin could lose patience. When our train pulled into Victoria Station, Manchester that Friday afternoon in the spring of 1965 I had to make a confession: Colin, I said, I only have twelve and a tanner (63 pence in new money).

Aw for fucksake Jimmy, how did ye no tell me?

Because ye wouldnay have come.

Aye, ye are fucking right I wouldnay.

We bought two bags of chips and went to find the nearest Department of Social Security.

Eventually we got a start at a Salford copper mill producing coils of copper wire. We left the down-and-outs’ hostel, found a room at a place doing dinner, bed and breakfast. Huge meals.

It was heavy, difficult work, semi-skilled. For Colin it was temporary; I was enquiring about pension schemes. A week into the job and they tried us on a section where we had to grab white-hot lengths of copper bar with a pair of extreme clamps. We had thick gloves to protect our hands. Often the material had worn away; you had to be careful the clamps did not connect with your skin. The first time Colin was given the clamps, he managed to get them round the white-hot copper bar but was unable to connect in a move, thus he took the full weight of the copper length, could not hold it, it rolled off the bogey onto the floor. Being a decent football player Colin did the instinctive thing, he ‘trapped’ the white-hot bar, and his shoe burst into flames. He threw his clamps to one side, threw me a look and off he went. The gaffer came to find out the problem. Colin threw him a look as well, and continued walking, shoe smouldering. A few days later he got a proper job as an electrician. He was 21 and had only finished his apprenticeship weeks previously. I used that incident in a story.

A while later I lifted my insurance cards and P45, collected the week’s lying time, and went home for a holiday. I had some dirty laundry my mother insisted on washing. They were still living in a two-room flat down a dunny in Gibson Street, my mother and father in the kitchen, the four of us in two double beds. I stayed in my Govan grannie’s some of the time. My mother showed me the dirty-washing water left by my jeans and working clothes. It was full of a thick green dye. Aye, right enough, I remembered also when ye smoked a fag it always tasted sweet, and every hour or so the gaffer told ye to swallow some green solution that tasted like concentrated lime.

I planned to return to England. I took a job on the buses to save enough money for the fare and the settling-in period. Thoughts of industrial disease or injury were not to the fore; I returned to the same factory.

One time I was showing a new guy how we coiled the copper wire. This was the end of the wire-making process. The wire would have been between a half and three quarters of an inch in diameter. I do not know what length it was, maybe 50 or 60 yards. The big coiling machine was shaped like a ship’s steering wheel. Once the wire coiled onto it one man got a pair of heavy-duty clamps and gripped the end of the wire to keep it secure, otherwise the coil sprung. He kept one foot on the bottom of the wheel to stop it spinning. The man needs to use his wrist and arm muscles, at the same time concentrate on gripping the end. At this stage the wire is not yet trained into its coil, and is very powerful, fighting to spring. If it does the wire is ruined, no longer malleable and cannot be recoiled. Of course that spring is also dangerous, its whiplash is unpredictable.

While the one man grips tightly the end of the wire his mate has another pair of clamps which he uses to twist the wire some ten inches or so from the end. He inserts this twisted end into the coil so that it cannot spring. The first man continues gripping the end until certain that his mate has made the twist and can take the strain.

I was showing the new guy how this was to be done when he lost concentration, and thus control, and the coil sprung, the end lashed me across the cheek and eye. It was my cheekbone saved me from losing the eye. My face was cut open across there and my eyebrow. The new man was crestfallen. Nay fucking wonder. I did not have much sympathy for him. He was a strong cunt as well, it was his concentration that faltered.

I sat in the doctor’s waiting room holding a rag to my eye to stop it landing on the floor. In this factory they used dropped eyes as ball bearings. I was offered a job in the boiler room after that; twelve-hour shifts, alternate nightshift, dayshift. They also had a snooker table in their welfare club. And a works football team that played on grass pitches. And down the road was Salford Greyhound Track, with a casino at the first bend.

I was still there when Germany were denied the World Cup. Denis Law spent the afternoon playing golf; we went for a game of snooker. A guy called Charlie had moved into the rooming house. He wanted to play on a regular basis and, next to myself, was the finest loser I ever met. I made a story out of it, ‘Charlie’.

Next time in Manchester four friends came along, one has been a friend since boyhood, Ian Lithgow, another great reader. Two of us got a start in a Trafford Park factory with the cleanest working conditions I ever encountered. This was a huge asbestos company.

Our workmates in the asbestos plant were mainly Jamaicans, Poles, Ukrainians and Hungarians. I learned not to assume a person’s politics because of their background. You never knew people’s lives, what their families had experienced. They were generous men and shared their grub and tobacco, but discussions could veer off track. The East Europeans did not say much in English, just looked and smiled. An older Hungarian was respected by the other men. He spoke better English and had a certain mildness of manner, indicating one used to authority. Ian Lithgow worked with him. On one occasion he was close to losing his temper with me over politics. I had referred to communism in a positive way. It was my own naïvety. I wanted to know why they were here. I wanted to talk about life in a ‘socialist country’.

Of course they had not come from any socialist country, they had come from Stalin’s brand of so-called communism. I was 19 and probably had not connected that there was a link between a real live Hungarian person and the actual events that had occurred ten years earlier in Hungary. His and Ian’s job was weighing out the white asbestos fibre and cement in tubs. Ian had red hair. Half an hour into the shift and the pair were like snowmen, fibre clinging to their eyebrows, in their ears and up their nose.

The wee guy who taught me my job was Polish and spoke no English. He shared everything. Rye bread and thick salami, hot sweet tea and roll-ups thicker than a cigar, and loaned me dough if I was skint. He was very patient, and showed me how not to clean the chute and asbestos mixer by hand. But he occasionally did it himself and if he caught me looking just grinned and shrugged, cigarette dowt hanging from his mouth. Eventually I took over the mixing operation at that machine, and he moved to a different shift.

The biggest man on the floor was a Ukrainian who moved with the slow precision of a weightlifter. He rarely spoke but laughed a lot. In Anglo-American litrachuhh the narrator would describe him as ‘a hulking brute’, unless the upper-class hero was not intimidated by his physicality in which case he would be described as ‘a great oaf’ or ‘a lumbering jackass’, and be felled by the hero ‘with one mighty swoop to the jaw’. My grannie would have called him ‘a big handsome man’.

The best-dressed guy on the floor was a Jamaican whose name I think was Danny. He worked directly beneath me on the spreading table. The asbestos and cement came from Ian Lithgow to me. I mixed a concrete that consisted of a tub of asbestos fibre and half a tub of cement, and a certain amount of water. Then I dumped it down a chute. On the level below me the ‘spreader’, the Jamaican, opened the trapdoor, and let the mix pour out. He spread it then rolled it into asbestos sheets. Each month we did a batch of blue asbestos, the deadliest fibre. When I was learning I erred and forgot to put in the cement element of the composition. Danny released the chute trapdoor and out splashed a tidal wave of asbestos paste. I had forgotten to put in the solidifier. I looked over the rail to apologise. He was covered in stuff, wiping it out his eyes and mouth. The spreading job was supposed to be one of the cleaner ones, that was how he could wear decent clothes doing it. It was my first experience with the less familiar aspects of Jamaican English, beginning with a paean to the old ska song ‘Judge Dread in Court’, with slightly different lyrics to Prince Buster; I will kill you I will torture you I will fucking lynch you ras clat fuck blood scotch twat fucker blaaad claat.

And the wee Polish guy tugging at my elbow, conveying that I should not approach him for a couple of days, as if I had intended any such thing. In Manchester they all call you a twat. They all called me a twat anyway. A few years later I discovered twat did not mean ‘silly fool’, it meant ‘vagina’. Ach well.

It was a tricky job but paid good money and sometimes you could work double shifts. If me and Ian had done the dough and were extra hungry we stole dry bread from the canteen bins out in the deserted parking lot, spread on layers of asbestos, applied a little brown sauce with the blue and white. What a tasty mouthful. This asbestos company operated an Employees’ Suggestions box throughout the world. In view of mounting litigation costs new uses for asbestos fibre were especially welcome. I tipped them the one about sandwiches and they now export them to service station fast-food outlets on foreign shores. Ian and myself are in touch about twice a year; we have an interest in each other’s symptoms, and wonder if we are the last of that batch of factory hands.

On a few Saturdays, with the other three guys that came with us, we went to Old Trafford to watch United; Law, Best and Charlton, Paddy Crerand. When Denis scored the fans sang:

The King Has Scored Again

The King Has Scored Again

eee aye addio

The King Has Scored Again

My heart beat loudly. We also went to Maine Road to watch the City and Colin Bell, Johnny Crossan, Mike Summerbee.

I watched many strange games in Manchester. In one of them Man City destroyed Tottenham Hotspur for 88 minutes. But they did not have Jimmy Greaves and Alan Gilzean. Two breakaways, two flicked headers, two goals. Tottenham won 2–0. The pair of them walked off the field chortling, pair of baldy bastards. But Alan Gilzean, what a fucking player! But so was Greaves, one has to confess.

My loyalties were split one day at Old Trafford. Jim Baxter had signed for Sunderland and the team was full of Scottish players. They had a great team but unfortunately did little on the park to show it. Baxter had thickened, and was not the player of old, but still capable of plenty. He played a few years on from then.

Several months before that game in 1964, when I was in Glasgow, a horrible tragedy had occurred. John White, a Scottish internationalist, was killed by lightning while playing a round of golf. White was a highly regarded inside right, known as ‘the ghost’, a member of the Tottenham Hotspur team of the early 1960s. For myself, and thousands of other boys, it was always Law and Baxter, but John White was a hero too.

Davie Mackay was in that same Spurs team. Nobody would have accused him of ‘swashbuckling’, he would have lifted ye up by the jersey and stared ye right in the eye, even if ye were Billy Bremner. Men prefer that, but boys like the ‘swashbucklers’. Scottish sports journalists describe football-artists in these terms, unless they are wee guys like Jimmy Johnstone, a ‘buzzbomb bundle of tireless energy’. In addition to Baxter and Law my own heroes were Lester Piggott and the Cincinnati Kid.

Jim Baxter was still with Rangers at the time of John White’s funeral. He called into the gents’ outfitters, Jackson the Tailor, at 76 Union Street with a pair of old black trousers. Downstairs he came to the alterations section in the basement and interrupted a period of quiet. I was working in Jackson the Tailor for a couple of months. It was mid morning. Me and the old guy who worked down there were reading the Sporting Life and discussing race form in a side room. We heard the footsteps coming down and my older mate went to serve the customer. It was his turn, we took turn about with customers. I sat on with the Sporting Life. But to my horror I saw it was Jim Baxter, in his shirtsleeves. Nobody came into a tailor shop in their shirtsleeves, not in them days boy, no sir.

The older guy was laughing across at me, he knew I was a fan. Then he relented and called me over to continue the job. Baxter needed the alteration in a rush. It was the only pair of black trousers he had. He never bought stuff ‘off the peg’, it was always made-to-measure. But there was no time to get a new pair made, this was a rush job, he was flying down for John White’s funeral and needed them immediately. The trousers had to be altered, the trousers taken in or let out or something. He was still quite skinny in those days. I listened and noted everything. A rush job, immediately, John White’s funeral, a rush job. Then he was off up the stairs, whistling a cheery wee tune to himself. I heard his footsteps dying away. Then I had to dash through to the alterations room and see the crabbit auld cunt that did the tailoring alterations. Robert, I said, this is a rush job, immediately and it is just, it is a rush job, honest.

What ye mumbling about, rush job, I do not give a fuck if it is a rush job.

Aye but it is Jim Baxter.

I do not give a fuck if it is — who?

Jim Baxter.

I do not give a fuck if it is Jim Baxter, the job will take a fucking week.

But Robert, it is for John White’s funeral.

I do not give a rat’s fucking tadger if it is the fucking Queen’s fucking — who?

John White.

You must think I am stupit. Here, give me them.

Thanks Robert.

Shut the fucking door on yer way out.

The trousers were altered, pressed, packed and ready to go, on schedule. And he had done the actual repair job. Usually he just slapped the trousers three times with his heaviest iron and muttered, That will do the cunt. Then he flung the trousers or jacket at ye, Give that peg for two days.

‘Peg for two days’ meant ye folded the trousers or jacket on a hanger and hung it up for two days. When the customer came in for his new suit complete with alterations ye had to pretend it was all done and hope the guy would not ask to try it on again. Once ye had him out the door ye knew he would wear the unaltered trousers and just fit his way into them, or else get his wife or his maw to do the job.

But Robert did the genuine alteration on this occasion. Everybody knew about Baxter’s funeral trousers and was waiting for his return. But I planked the trousers so nobody could steal the job off me. That was what the salesmen did to one another when a personality came in the shop, especially football players, and a few football players did come in. Everybody rushed to serve them. Sometimes the manager himself took the job, hoping he would wind up with an order for eleven blazers and eleven pairs of flannels.

I couldnay bear the thought of missing Baxter. I had been a fan since his Raith Rovers days, way before his £17,500 transfer to Rangers. My Uncle Lewie stayed in Kirkcaldy and through there they all knew about Baxter from his days as a Junior.

So what if I missed serving him! What if I was in the smoke-room for a quick puff? What if I skipped out to the betting shop? Or if I went round to the Imperial Billiards Parlour where I usually spent my lunch break watching the money games? A couple of the salesmen came too, there were always huge queues and no time to play. But on this occasion I would not have wasted time on any such nonsense. I sat at the counter and waited. In case of emergencies I planked the trousers so nobody could find them. They would have to come and find me first.

Unfortunately I had to charge Jim Baxter 10/6 (53 pence) for the alteration to his black trousers. Old Robert was one of these ancient codgers you get in the tailoring business. They glower at ye over the top of their specs, and insist on petty detail. I do not care who he is, away out there and get the ten and a tanner!

In those days football players still travelled on public transport. In the shop doorway of Jackson the Tailor a few Rangers players met in the morning. There was a bus stop outside the doorway. The players were going to Ibrox. They came in from the east coast to Central Station, and crossed the road to wait for a 15 bus along Paisley Road West. Baxter was not one of them. He was not a ‘buses’ kind of footballer. When he left Rangers he went to play for Sunderland. I was at Old Trafford when he came with his new Sunderland teammates.

It was one of those strange games that occur from time to time. After a full 90 minutes’ play the final whistle blows, and the fans walk hesitantly to the exits. Gradually their foreheads start wrinkling, they start looking at one another, some scratching their heads, the puzzled frowns begin. The boys are taking notes, waiting to see what they should think. Then one of the younger men says suddenly, What the fuck was that about?

And another one nods. That must have been one of the weirdest games I have ever seen.

Weird! says a grizzled 60-year-old, I have never seen a game like that in my entire fucking puff.

Aye but what happened? says a younger man.

Fucked if I know!

Then a burly man with the look of a retired boxer strides past, shoulders barging, shaking his head, speechless, just fucking speechless. They continue homeward.

At Old Trafford that day the English fans were not too bothered about Baxter one way or another. But many Scotsmen, as well as Irishmen, attended the games at Old Trafford and they were anticipating something special. Baxter wore the number 10 jersey and played inside-left. He was not outstanding but he played well. I thought it was a great game, and very even. Yet it was one of these peculiar spectacles where you want to discuss important pointers, but cannot find the words. United won 5–1. Of course they did. I know they did. But it was still an even game. How come?

Others among the Sunderland Scottish contingent included a fine ex-Aberdeen winger, George Mulhall, also cousins George Herd and Alec Herd. There was a third Herd on the pitch that day, another Scottish player. Man U had just signed Davie Herd from Arsenal — I think for £45,000 — a right-winger. United fans were perplexed by the signing. He was nothing at all like George Best. He looked more like ‘big Yogi’, John Hughes of Celtic, but without the nifty footwork. This was the day Davie Herd scored four goals.

On their way out the ground the Man U supporters were still unconvinced, not willing to concede the point. One of them delivered the classic cliché: Fucking twat, he only kicked the ball four times.

From the tail end of 1966 through to 1969 I lived and worked mostly in London, until Marie and I married in early November. I had been writing for several months and completed a couple of stories from An Old Pub Near the Angel. We had met the previous March, appropriately enough on St David’s Day, her being Welsh. She was working as a shorthand typist. I sold suits on Oxford Street, laboured on a building site down Harley Street, then a building site at the Barbican, plus spells in other jobs. In one of them it coincided we worked in the same place, the Royal Free Hospital, where she had reported from her agency. We were living together but pretended not to know each other.

A busdriver I knew from Glasgow was living in Bracknell, outside of London. He and his wife, Dorothy, had invited me to come and stay the night. I had just met Marie and invited her to come with me. She refused on the grounds of ulterior motivation. But I was just showing off, acting like a cool guy with friends in out-of-the-way places. If I arrived in Bracknell with Marie by my side maybe they would recognise the striking similarity of the image we presented to that early album cover of Bob Dylan and his girlfriend, her on his elbow, photographed in Manhattan.

But maybe not. Chris Harvey was not easily impressed, not then, not now. Back in Glasgow he had been over 21 so could drive buses. I was under 21 so I could not, I was the damn conductor, then serving my third or fourth sentence. Harvey gave me no peace, insisting on the merits of Sartre, in opposition to Camus, of Mann as opposed to Kafka, van Gogh rather than Gauguin, Russell against Wittgenstein; he saw merit in Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence, and thought The Go Between one of the finest novels ever written. I disagreed with everything he said, never having read the damn books, and no wonder. I was unwilling to consider these possibilities, strictly on a point of logic. But Chris is not the model for the character Willie Reilly, busdriving sparring partner of the central character in The Busconductor Hines. For one thing he is English and for another the bastard knew too much, even at 21.

For my and Marie’s wedding night party we had four singles: ‘Lazy Sunday’, The Small Faces; ‘Lay Lady Lay’, Bob Dylan; ‘I Heard It through the Grapevine’, Marvin Gaye; and a nice one by Billy Preston whose title I cannot remember.

A friend in North London, Gavin Allison, gave us the use of the front room in his flat so we could have a party. Gavin was another good reader and we bumped heads frequently, usually on the subject of James Jones, his favourite author.

Marie was pregnant and had to stop work late November. Accommodation in London was not easy to find, not on a labourer’s wage, with a baby on the way. We tramped around looking. Racist stuff still applied. Blacks and Irish were unwelcome, Scots had it easier, but babies were out the question unless one was loaded with dosh. Swansea or Glasgow became the option. We decided on Glasgow. By this time my father was back self-employed and had found that decent wee workshop in Garriochmill Road. He ‘spoke’ for us with the factor, laid down some key money as a wedding present, and we rented the room and kitchen up on the second floor.

Our next-door neighbours were an elderly couple by the name of Bradford. Mr Bradford came from the North of Ireland. He looked and dressed like a proper businessman in the three-piece suit and soft hat. His business was a private lending library in a wee shop across the street: the Garriochmill Library. He charged threepence to borrow a book.

He had just retired when we came to stay there but his house was full of old library books, most of which were written by Lloyd C. Douglas and Edgar Burroughs, but included a few by John Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, Walter Greenwood and A.J. Cronin. I could borrow any I wanted and he always enjoyed a chat.

After he died his widow let me take what I wanted. I have to confess there were not too many I did want, but a few I still have. The circumstances surrounding his death were sad. Mrs Bradford had been away staying with relatives and he was alone. We had not seen him for a few days. Myself and Frank McGoohan, the upstairs neighbour, were banging on his door. Then we forced it in. He took one side of the flat and I the other. I found him dead, in the act of getting into his bed. He had the alarm clock in one hand and must have been setting the alarm, and just sank back when the heart attack hit. I stood there looking. Frank came ben to tell me that a taxi had just drawn up on the street and Mrs Bradford was getting out. We had to move quickly, meet her on the stair, take her into my house.

This part of North Woodside was full of life forty years ago; small businesses by the score. Butchers, bakers, carpentry shops, chemists, drapers and domestic repair shops; secondhand bookshops, launderettes, chip shops, newsagents and dairies; a sweetie shop, a crockery shop, secondhand furniture stores; many pubs, bookies, pawn shops, fish shops and licensed grocers: all within five minutes from the foot of my close, and from South Woodside Road to St Clair Street, taking in Henderson Street, Mount Street, Carrickarden Street and Dick Street. We did not need Great Western Road or Maryhill Road. I am not even including Raeberry Street in this, although I recall the Shakespeare Bar served three-course lunches for 2/6 around 1972. Nah, my memory is surely defective on that one.

When my family returned from the States things were tough and my mother needed to go out to work. But doing what? She began the long haul to become a teacher. She secured the necessary Highers at day school then entered Teacher Training College. Napiershall Street Primary School was a short walk from my close. My mother taught there from the late 1960s for a period of six or seven years. It was her first job since 1942. My elder daughter Laura was one of her pupils for a year. She was under instructions never to greet her in the playground and never to say ‘grannie’ in the classroom. She was allowed to give secret smiles.

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.