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.