Away Thinking About Things

I was a judge of the 1994 Booker Prize, the year the award went to “How Late It Was, How Late,” by the Scottish writer James Kelman. The decision was contentious. For most of us judges, the prize gave recognition to a significant and consistently challenging writer, whose experiments with vernacular speech and internal monologue had produced some of the most stubbornly interesting work in recent British fiction. To others on the panel, his novel was monotonous, unpunctuated, and foulmouthed. (“Every other word is ‘fuck’ ” was the usual reproach.) One of the judges marched out of the room, promising to denounce the decision to the media. Kelman turned up at the foolishly formal, black-tie award dinner in a regular business suit and an open-necked shirt, the rebellious semiotics of which were quickly understood, and spoke about how the writer must stand up to oppression: “My culture and my language have the right to exist, and no one has the authority to dismiss that. . . . A fine line can exist between élitism and racism. On matters concerning language and culture, the distance can sometimes cease to exist altogether.” As he began to raise his fist in a quasi-power salute, I overheard one of the executives of Booker McConnell, the food distributor that sponsored the prize, call the performance “a bloody disgrace.” Each to his own vernacular.

Kelman was referring to the way he uses Lowland Scots and Glaswegian dialect, to his work’s linguistic difference from what used to be called, in Britain, “received pronunciation,” or “educated speech.” His claim that verbal élitism approaches actual racism might seem politically overwrought, a territory that Kelman has never avoided. But the overwrought response to the Booker win seemed to justify Kelman’s extremity. Rabbi Julia Neuberger, the judge who had promised to denounce the decision, made good on her pledge. The book, she said, was “frankly . . . crap.” The columnist Simon Jenkins, writing in the Times of London, called Kelman “an illiterate savage.” He had done nothing more, in his novel, than transcribe “the rambling thoughts of a blind Glaswegian drunk.” Even those who defended Kelman fixated, perhaps inevitably, on the profanity of the style rather than on the style of the profanity. (It was reckoned that “fuck” occurs four thousand times in the novel, twenty-one times in the first three pages alone.)

Kelman is a narrow writer, and can indeed be monotonous (often usefully, sometimes merely). It is not Kelman’s sociological seam that is narrow—he writes about Glasgow’s white, Scottish poor, the class into which he was born in 1946: about bus conductors, street sweepers, night-shift workers, the unemployed, small-time criminals, men waiting for scrawny unemployment checks and hopeless job interviews—but the vein of his thought. Most of his characters work the same side of the mental street; they wage an obsessive, internal war with their limited circumstances, and often rant against the authority figures who seem to control those circumstances: the boss, the government officer at the job center, sometimes the wife, the police, the local and national politicians. Unlike the work of Beckett, who has obviously had a large influence on him, Kelman’s writing has almost no metaphysical dimension, as though metaphysics were offensively luxurious—brocade for the bourgeois. There is an atmosphere of gnarling paranoia, imprisoned minimalism, the boredom of survival.

But within these limits, and because of them, Kelman is a funny, sour, expansive writer, whose strange, new sentences are brilliant adventures in thought. He uses first-person and very close third-person narration (the two are almost indistinguishable in his work) to represent with bitter fidelity the mental journeys of his characters. Because proximity of impersonation is his goal, he is unafraid of boredom, banality, digression, repetition, and verbal impoverishment. His experiments in vernacular Scots push and twist the language, sometimes to breaking points. And his work is humorously interested in the question of what constitutes a story: he likes tales in which nothing happens, twice, thrice, and beyond. When these tendencies are joined by his politics (he has said that he feels a particular affinity with post-colonial writing, because he considers Scotland to be an occupied nation), language gets weaponized, and fiction marches out to do passionate deconstructive battle with “official” writing—that is, ninety-nine per cent of everything produced by the despised English literary tradition.

His strongest work is in the short story rather than the novel, where the immersion principle can make for work that seems relentlessly long. By contrast, his short stories are often very short—he is fond of brief dramatic monologues, sometimes only a page or two in length—and present vivid fragments, barely comprehended moments. His story “This Man for Fuck Sake,” which appeared in the great collection “Greyhound for Breakfast” (1987), is only nine sentences long. Here it is, entire:

This man for fuck sake it was terrible seeing him walk down the edge of the pavement. If he’d wanted litter we would’ve given him it. The trouble is we didn’t know it at the time. So all we could do was watch his progress and infer. And even under normal circumstances this is never satisfactory: it has to be readily understood the types of difficulties we labored under. Then that rolling manoeuvre he performed while nearing the points of reference. It all looked to be going so fucking straightforward. How can you blame us? You can’t, you can’t fucking blame us.

Notice how content Kelman is to leave “points of reference” unexplained. What does “litter” mean in this story? What is being inferred, exactly? Yet, without having to explain the “types of difficulties we labored under,” he imparts a pretty immediate idea of the difficulties within which his characters exist.

You get a sense of this approach—the story as a swipe at life—from the wonderful, songlike titles in his new collection, “If It Is Your Life” (Other Press). In addition to the title story, we get such selections as “Tricky Times Ahead Pal,” “Talking About My Wife,” “As If from Nowhere,” “Pieces of Shit Do Not Have the Power to Speak,” “Justice for One,” “Death Is Not.,” and “Bangs & a Full Moon.” They’re not all quite successful, but you want to start each one because of the titles, just as you might want to hear all the Paul Weller songs on a record at least once. Kelman has claimed, in fact, that his influences come from “two literary traditions, the European Existential and the American Realist, allied to British rock music (influenced directly from Blues music, with an input from Country and Western).”

Kelman’s language is immediately exciting; like a musician, he uses repetition and rhythm to build structures out of short flights and circular meanderings. The working-class Glaswegian author knows exactly how his words will scathe delicate skins; he has a fine sense of attack. “The One with the Dog” is only two pages long, and is narrated by a man who begs for money, likes to do so on his own, and is wary of other guys who do it in gangs or go around with dogs. It begins, “What I fucking do is wander about the place, just going here and there. I’ve got my pitches. A few other cunts use them as well.” It’s hard to imagine a swifter, more visceral introduction to this man’s voice and world, a place of pitches and cunts, temporary benefactors and regular rivals. The reader begins to hear the prose as well as read it, ideally allowing its Glaswegian rhythms to speak through the phrasing. If the novelty of this kind of writing has lost a bit of its shine, it’s partly because authors like Irvine Welsh have subsequently rubbed away at the same surfaces. But when this story initially appeared, in “Greyhound for Breakfast,” Welsh’s first novel, “Trainspotting” (1993), was six years away. And, besides, while Welsh has tended to drop Scottishisms (“wee,” “didnae,” “canna’e,” and so on) into fairly established, normative rhythms, a process that might be called tartanizing, Kelman invents his own rhythms, using words and stubs of words with subtle daring. A bit later in the same tale, Kelman’s panhandler complains, “Sometimes I think ya bastard ye I’m fucking skint and you’re no.” The sentence gets all its fighting power from the jabbing of “ya,” “ye,” and “you’re no.”

Or consider the way that Kelman uses the word “but”: “One thing I’m finding but it makes it a wee bit easier getting a turn.” The man is saying that, although he dislikes having a dog tag along with him, he has found that it helps to bring in money. So the sentence, written out formally, would be something like: “One thing I’m finding is that it makes it a little easier to get a turn.” In the formal version, though, the musical pitching of “but” and “bit” disappears, as does the sentence’s weird, hopping rhythm, where the unexpected incursion of “but” forces a caesura, so that the reader has to speak the sentence as: “One thing I’m finding / but / it makes it a wee bit easier getting a turn.” (Kelman often does surprising things with “but,” as in this line of spoken dialogue: “I’ve never been to Carfin but; never I mean have you?”)

Kelman’s fiction travels in two apparently opposing directions. In subject and theme, it insists on an absolute materialism. There is almost no visual description in his work, very little metaphor or figuration, no fine phrasing or lush gratuity. Nothing extra. His characters worry about money, cigarettes, a drink, just getting home and getting by. A grinding minimalism holds sway, not without a grim comedy of its own: “He lifted his empty beer glass and swirled the drop at the bottom about, put the glass to his mouth and attempted to drink, but the drop got lost somewhere along the way.” Or this, on a dwindling supply of cigarettes:

There were only two left. It was unbelievable how they went. Two before going into the pub; three in it; then this was the second since leaving. Which makes seven. He must’ve smoked another one somewhere else.

Kelman, in this mode, can sound like the Knausgaard who lovingly describes making tea, or spreading toast with butter: “He collected the dirty dishes, the breakfast bowls and teaplates from last night’s supper. He put the plug in the sink and turned on the hot water tap, shoving his hand under the jet of water to feel the temperature change; it was still a novelty.” Kelman, like Knausgaard, is rarely boring when writing like this: partly because, like Knausgaard, he simply proceeds as if the subject matter were interesting; and partly because, in writing as in most areas, limitation increases focus, and tends to irradiate necessity as if it were a luxury. This is the principle of prison writing, both in the literal sense (“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”) and in the figurative sense (Kafka’s allegories of imprisonment). “How Late It Was, How Late,” a three-hundred-page monologue from the point of view of a Glaswegian man who has recently lost his sight (perhaps as a result of a drunken fall, perhaps at the hands of the police, who briefly locked him up), systematically employs the prison principle to squeeze amplitude out of deprivation, feet of fascination out of mere inches of material.

The prison principle extends to Kelman’s language—his habit of using and reusing a relatively small register of words, as, for instance, in the way he repeats and refines “fuck” and “fucking.” A single sentence will deploy the same word differently. “If it was me I’d just tell them to fuck off; away and fuck I’d tell them, that’s what I’d say if it was me,” the narrator thinks in “The One with the Dog.” There is also “fucking” as a kind of midsentence punctuation (functioning like “but”): “She would just fucking, she would laugh at him.” And also as impacted repetition: “Fuck sake, of course she would; what was the fucking point of fucking, trying to fucking keep it away, of course she’d be fucking worrying about him,” Ronnie thinks in the story “Greyhound for Breakfast.”

But, alongside this materialism of subject and language (words as things, weapons, counters), Kelman insists on the play and the liberty (more often glimpsed than found) of the mind. It’s not that his characters escape from their impoverishment in flights of thought or imagination. More desperately, it’s that they see privacy as the last unmortgaged, unindebted, unsold space, always on the verge of being invaded by the materialism of survival that tyrannizes the rest of life. Here Kelman announces, perhaps, his connection not only to Kafka, Hamsun, and Beckett (the “European existential tradition”) but to comic Russian internal expansionists such as Gogol and Chekhov, and to those English writers who learned most from those Russians, including V. S. Pritchett and Henry Green. In “Street-Sweeper,” which appeared in the collection “The Burn” (1991), Peter, who works for the city, sweeping the roads, likes to nip away for illicit breaks, in order to catch up on his reading:

This was these fucking books he read. Peter was a fucking avid reader and he had got stuck in the early Victorian era, even earlier, bastards like Goldsmith for some reason, that’s what he read. Charles fucking Lamb, that’s who he read; all these tory essayists of the pre-chartist days, that other bastard that didni like Keats. Why did he read such shite. Who knows, they fucking wreaked havoc with the syntax, never mind the fucking so-called sinecure of a job, the street cleaning. Order Order. Sorry Mister Speaker. But for christ sake, for christ sake.

Peter is confronted by his hated boss (“the gaffer”), who sacks him for going off the job. But Peter finally does what he has always wanted to do: tells the boss where to shove it. Though he appears to read the “wrong” writers (“that other bastard that didni like Keats”—Kelman, as a fiction writer here, is more playful than his own, rather humorless politics might seem to allow), it is reading per se that acts as license for the eventual rebellion against the job. Maybe there is a connection between good wrecked syntax and wrecking your life for the good. A fucking avid reader is fucking avid for change.

Ronnie, the protagonist of Kelman’s greatest short story, “Greyhound for Breakfast,” is also avid for change. He has just bought a greyhound, for the not small sum of eighty pounds, which he hopes to race for profit. He takes it to the pub, where his regular friends start ribbing him. Does his wife know yet? Where is he going to keep it? What’s he going to call it? Imagine if he’d brought a horse into the pub! They see only failure and comic shame. “I’ll tell yous mob something: see if this fucking dog doesn’t get me the holiday money I’ll eat it for my fucking breakfast” is Ronnie’s defiant boast. But he is stung by the reaction of his friends, and spends the day walking around town with his dog, afraid to go home, where he must tell his wife what he has done. As dinnertime comes and goes, Ronnie wanders, thinking about profits and losses, and about how the foolishness of dog racing—“racing round and round and fucking round”—is matched only by the foolishness of the human race. It’s a beautiful story, whose tone recalls Chekhov’s tale “Rothschild’s Fiddle” (another anguished calculation of profit and loss), in which hope and fatalism are evenly weighted, and only fantasy retains any dignity.

There aren’t any stories of that calibre in “If It Is Your Life,” though a couple come close. Several continue Kelman’s struggle against official notions of the well-made story. In “Bangs & a Full Moon,” which is only a page in length, the narrator looks at the full moon from his window:

A fine Full Moon from the third storey through the red reflection from the city lights: this was the view. I gazed at it, lying outstretched on the bed-settee. I was thinking arrogant thoughts of that, Full Moons, and all those fucking writers who present nice images in the presupposition of universal fellowship under the western Stars when all of a sudden: BANG, an object hurtling out through the window facing mine across the street.

The “story,” the event, is the BANG, though we never find out what it is. And its function is to undermine stories that go on too long, or wallow in epiphany (“nice images”). The piece ends, “I got back up again and closed the curtains. I was writing in pen & ink so not to waken the kids and wife with the banging of this machine I am now using.” In “The Third Man, or Else the Fourth,” four men stand around a fire, on a freezing day. They appear to be out of work, and very poor. They talk about politics, about an old man who was recently found dead in a cold tenement building, about prison. One of the men, Arthur, starts describing a dream he had. Like most dreams, it is incomprehensible; it gathers pace, and we are drawn into it, and then it fizzles out. Kelman makes a funny, implicit connection between maintaining the fire (the narrator goes off to get “burnables”) and maintaining a story: everything is potentially burnable, everything can be used.

If everything can be used for stories, it follows that middle-class life is as permissible as working-class life. Indeed, Kelman’s new collection shows him swerving from his commitment to Glaswegian vernacular and exploring, if a bit tentatively, a wider area of social life. Along with the unemployed, or the night-shift worker (who, in the story “Talking About My Wife,” declares, “That was a thing about women, they were all middle class”), there are portraits of a young university student (the title story); a writer (“Bangs & a Full Moon”); and a teacher and artist (“Ingrained”). There is less vernacular. In the beautiful story “Death Is Not.,” Kelman’s language strives to impersonate and inhabit the negation of death—the narrator is dying, and so his language dies with him, as he considers how to tell the woman he loves what is happening to him: “How would I speak of my death to her, speaking to somebody of that. Death is not, is not, isnay . . . death is not, it is nought. Death is not really, it isnay. . . . To her I could say it and not to others, it ended for them before that.”

The book’s title story is its longest, and most complex. The narrator is a Scottish student, who is on the bus, coming home from university in England. He thinks about England, about Scotland, about social class, about his girlfriend, Celia, about his joyous discovery of sex. The narrator talks “properly,” because “if I do not say things properly people did not know what I was talking about.” Without Kelman’s scintillating use of the vernacular, the story’s language can seem, at first, a bit pressureless. But the pleasure, as always in Kelman, is being allowed to inhabit mental meandering and half-finished thoughts, digressions and wayward jokes, so that we are present with that student on that bus. He thinks about Celia (who is from a much higher social class than he), and his words expire at the surprise that he has such a girlfriend:

My head went everywhere, and seeing the moon too, just everything. The thing about her, how sexy she was. You were not supposed to talk about that. Ha ha. Well it did not apply to her! Because she would have been the first, and I was the one if anybody did, knowing about it, because I did. It made you smile. Because people would never think, seeing me, they would never ever think, and yet, that was them, it was up to them.

The narrator enjoys studying philosophy: “I loved the subject, if you would call it a subject. The great thing about philosophy is that it is actual life, it is hardly a subject at all.” His parents think that he is brilliant, because he did well at school in Scotland; but they don’t understand that everything is harder in England: “I was in the low half down there whereas up home I was top or else near the top.” Out of this loaded spatial geography—down there/up home; low half/near the top—Kelman delicately builds his themes. The story is alive to class difference, to the border between home and away, but proceeds in gently exploratory fashion, without the pugilism and the occasional didacticism of some of Kelman’s work. Being away in England, in order to think properly (studying philosophy at university), and being away in one’s mind, actually thinking (sitting on a bus and carelessly philosophizing) are wonderfully, lightly brought together near the end of the story, when the narrator looks out the window: “It was heavier rain than a drizzle. Had it been like this a while? Maybe. I was away thinking about things.” ♦