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The Herald Scotland

James Kelman's delightfully deplorable language is f***ing necessary

So casually powerful. So f*****g unnecessary. So rhythmically right. Could have come from the mouth of a character in a novel or short story by this week's Icon. A typical James Kelman tale takes us into the foul-mouthed mind of a downtrodden proletarian. Its Glaswegian is unsparing, its language delightfully or because of this, his novel How Late It Was, How Late won the Booker Prize for Punctuality in 1994 … with hilarious consequences. Ructions were occasioned. Strops occurred. The English language formed a picket line. So, who was this stirrer? Well, James Kelman was born on 9 June 1947 in Glasgow, a large city in western Scotland. He has spake thusly: 'My own background is as normal or abnormal as anyone else's. Born and bred in Govan and Drumchapel, inner city tenement to the housing scheme homeland on the outer reaches of the city.' He left school at 15 to undertake a six-year printing apprenticeship. After driving buses in Govan, he began writing when he worked in London's Barbican Centre. 'I wanted to write as one of my own people,' he has declared. His first short story collection, Not Not While the Giro, was published in 1983, with 26 tales including the titular one, wherein the protagonist briefly contemplates suicide before remembering his benefit cheque is due. Kelman's first published novel was The Busconductor Hines (1984), a portrait of a man who hates his job, is bored with life, and dreams without expectation of better days. GONE TO THE DOGS ANOTHER collection, Greyhound for Breakfast, featured 47 stories, some v. short, such as the eight-line 'Leader from a Quality Newspaper', and some jolly long, such as the one involving the aforementioned canine repast, about a hopelessly unemployed man who spends his last money optimistically on a racing dog, which he cannot afford to feed. His pals laugh and he responds: 'I'll tell yous mob something: see if this f*****g dog doesn't get me the holiday money I'll eat it for my f*****g breakfast.' Blimey, at this rate, Herald stores will be running out of f*****g asterisks. Bizarrely, Greyhound won the, er, Cheltenham Prize for Literature. But, by now, it was clear that Kelman had been unduly influenced by The Good Life with Richard Briers and Penelope Keith. His 1989 novel A Disaffection was shortlisted for the Booker and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. It tells of a week in the life of a Glaswegian school teacher afflicted by boredom, loneliness, depression, municipal gloom and sexual frustration.A London Review of Books critic judged A Disaffection 'pretty terrific', while a Times Literary Supplement reviewer said it 'can be read as a fuller orchestration of its solipsistic lament'. Solipsistic, aye. But let's cut to the stooshie proper with the English Literary Establishment. It's fair to say that, despite its poncy sounding title, How Late It Was, How Late would not make ideal beach holiday reading. In it, unemployed Glaswegian Sammy Samuleson wakes up in a police cell after a night on the swallie, only to find he's gone blind. The consequent narrative recounts his struggle against baffling bureaucracy, unhelpful doctors and cruel strangers. One American news outlet found its vernacular 'difficult for non-Scottish readers'. And, oh, the profanity! In its 400 pages, the 'common street word for sex' was used 4,000 times. This became a major issue, though not the only one, when in 1994 How Late won the Booker Prize, with Kelman the first Scot so honoured. At the ceremony, he stood out like a bottle of Buckie at Harrod's, wearing a regular suit and open-necked shirt to the glittering, televised, black tie dinner at London's Guildhall. JUDGMENT DAZE THE judging panel was divided, but Kelman won by three votes to two. One judge, Rabbi Julia Neuberger, stormed out, denouncing the decision as 'a disgrace'. The book, she said was 'not publicly accessible' and 'frankly', she added in an ironically unsophisticated critique, 'crap'. Kelman protested: 'My culture and my language have the right to exist, and no one has the authority to dismiss that.'One executive from food distributor and sponsor Booker McConnell was overheard calling his performance 'a bloody disgrace.' Well, that was certainly food distribution for Simon Jenkins, writing in the Times, a tabloid-shaped newspaper, said Kelman had done no more than 'transcribe the rambling thoughts of a blind Glaswegian drunk'. He called the award 'literary vandalism' and likened Kelman to an 'illiterate savage'. Lest anyone think this a Scotland v England thing, Sam Jordison, writing some years later in the Guardian, described How Late as 'one of the best winners in the prize's history', adding: '[A]ttacks on Kelman for having the audacity to use a demotic voice, and allow his protagonist to speak and think in his own tongue, now just seem like so much snobbery.' In the New York Times, Richard Bausch said: 'Objections to the language in which this good book is couched seem to me to be so far beside the point as to be rather ridiculous.' Nevertheless, Kelman's work has been called monotonous, miserable, unpunctuated, foulmouthed, boring, tedious, narrow, minimalistic, claustrophobic and repetitive. He has also been called repetitive. So, pretty good then. READ MORE: Robert McNeil: I detest yon Romans but I dig excavating their wee fortlets RAB MCNEIL'S SCOTTISH ICONS: John Knox – the fiery preacher whose pal got burnt at the stake Rab McNeil: All this talk about celebs and their neuroses is getting on my nerves ABOUT A BOY HIS 2008 novel Kieron Smith, Boy, about a young laddie in post-war Glasgow whose family moves from a traditional tenement to a new housing scheme, was hailed as 'a masterpiece' and won both the Saltire Society's and Scottish Arts Council's books of the year. In 2010's short story collection, If It Is Your Life, wider social life is tentatively explored, with a Scottish student returning from England and talking 'properly' because, if he did not, 'people did not know what I was talking about'. On the other hand, in 'Death Is Not.', the dying narrator declares: 'Death is not, is not, isnay … death is not, it is nought. Death is not really, it isnay …' Soon to be made into a film by Walt Isnay.