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.