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.