William McIlvanney: Living With Words

I've always had a compulsion to write,

even if it was never going to be published.

And a lot of what I have written wasn't meant for publication,

it was meant for self clarification,

and I'm afraid, in my advanced old age, I'm still doing the same.

I'm still writing these things down.

To what point, I know not.

"Experiences always seem to come at me like flak.

"I can see no coherent or meaningfully chronological

"shape to it, beyond physical erosion.

"I believe that the final form of my experience has been flux,

"and will be till I die.

"This is, I suppose, a kind of chaotic inner autobiography,

"the only kind of autobiography I can imagine honestly creating.

"It is also, as a lot of writing is,

"testament to the fact that I was here, before I'm not.

"A bit like carving your initials on a classroom desk."

# I love you in the morning

# Our kisses deep and warm... #

'Because Scottish familiarity breeds the most terrible contempt,

'Kilmarnock, like the rest of the country, has been

'slow to recognise that McIlvanney, in his young 40s,

'is now a significant novelist by any standards, and in Scotland,

'the best hope we've had for at least a decade

'that a major talent will continue to flourish

'in its own grudging environment.

'There are, of course, blandishments from sunnier shores.

'His thriller Laidlaw may be made into a major feature film,

'but his most mature and important achievement so far

'is his novel Docherty, in which he invests the lives of the

'working people of lowland Scotland with a rare and moving eloquence.'

I am 77 years of age,

and showing every manifestation thereof.

When the books were out of print, first of all,

I didn't realise it for a while.

I just vaguely thought that they were just not selling a lot,

but there was a good reason for not selling.

Quite a lot of them were out of print!

It kind of reached the point where I thought, "Well, maybe that is it."

I did feel that, in a kind of wider sense, maybe I'd had my shot at it.

I suppose I always had a desire to write about areas of life

it seemed to me which were underrepresented in literature,

obviously working-class life.

I remember an old ex-miner shaking my hand and crying and saying,

"You've written my story, son." I thought,

"Well, that'll do me." If I did, I'm happy.

Because I wanted to commemorate that kind of...

..that kind of way of life and...

..the kind of solid values it generated among a lot of people.

"I'll tell you the sense, Tam said.

"We walk a narrow line.

"I ken who narrow is.

"I've walked it a' my days.

"Us and folk like us

"have got the nearest thing to nothing in this world.

"A' that filters doon tae us is shite.

"We live in the sewers of other bastards' comfort.

"The only thing we've got is one another.

"That's why you never sell your mates,

"because there is nothing left to buy with what you get.

"That's why you respect your womankind.

"Because what we make ourselves is what we are,

"because if you don't you're proving their case,

"because the bastards don't believe we're folk.

"They think we're something less than that."

This is, I suppose, where it all began for me,

where I emigrated to the world of books.

There appears to be none.

Of course, what that means is they're all taken out, isn't it?

One other good theory is somebody stole them.

Can't see any.

Oh, there's some. Remedy Is None.

There's the book of that. See, what you do with that is...

go like that.

HE LAUGHS

-One of the best books I have ever read, Docherty.

-Is that right?

-Aye!

-Thanks for that.

I've got it up in my cupboard, where I keep all the books

-that I read every now and again.

-You're a good man.

I knew you were intelligent as soon as I saw you there.

No' very many folk have told me that!

I was the youngest of four kids,

and my father, by the time I came along, was an ex-miner.

He had come out the pits.

My mother was a terrific reader,

and there was endless conversation, and I loved that.

It was a very verbal household,

and everybody talked.

Even when the facts were unable to attend,

they still had plenty of opinion! And I loved that.

I used to sit among it and take it in.

So those two things were always combined, the desire to write

and the kind of celebration of where I came from.

"High Street was the capital of Conn's childhood and boyhood.

"The rest of Graithnock

"was just the provinces.

"Everyone whom circumstances had herded into its 100 or so yards,

"had failed in the same way.

"It was a penal colony for those

"who had committed poverty,

"a vice which was usually hereditary."

You took some time to open the door, you. How are you doing, kid?

Good to see you.

Is it the climate, perhaps,

or the water in Ayrshire that produces such men of letters?

I don't know. People have asked, often, why especially Hughie and I

should have both had a go at writing,

because the background we come from is not too kind to such activities.

This is one of the things I've always felt about your writing

is that I feel that you've represented

not only voices and experiences

-but the intelligence that swirled around us.

-Oh, it was...

-And that great capacity for vivid expression.

-..omnipresent.

If you were in a pub in Kilmarnock, or something like that,

evidence of intelligence or of a capacity to use words properly,

and so on, it actually meant more than being hard.

Being hard meant quite a lot, they had a lot of respect for hard men,

-but they had even more respect...

-Absolutely.

-..for the word.

I remember coming in from the dancing at 17

and seeing another unfortunate lassie home, and my mother was

sitting, with the housework done, reading The Rubaiyat,

and I thought, "Well, maybe that's not happening in every house."

Oh, the other one that she used to like reciting occasionally

was that one from Walter Scott, from The Lay Of The Last Minstrel -

"Breathes there a man with soul so dead...

-BOTH:

-"..who never to himself had said

"this is mine own my native land."

You know.

You got off with nearly everything.

Listen, when I was smoking at three,

with my wee velvet trousers, smoking a gaily, and I looked up

and saw my mother's face at the window,

it was like your worst nightmare.

I ran over to make my apologies

and she beat my bum up the stairs

and then put me to bed.

Neilly looked in and said, "It looks bad, Willie,

"They are sending for the polis."

I was panic-stricken.

And I wisnae inhaling.

-When you were three years old.

-20-packet.

-You gave it up till you were about six, though?

-Aye, that's right.

We met about 18 years ago, but I felt as if I knew him

because I had read all of his stuff,

and through his books, I had always

assumed he was a particular kind of person,

and he turned out to be like that,

but in a way I was nervous about meeting him

because I thought he'll never be the hero that you think

the person is going to be,

but he turned out to be more.

-Very dashing looking in that one.

-Of course.

-I really like that.

-It's quite a good photo, that.

I would be, what, 22?

22 when you graduated?

1959.

I went to university in 1955.

It was, I think, a time when the Visigoths arrived in university.

A lot of us came from working-class backgrounds.

We used to converge in the union and talk the world into oblivion.

It was great.

I mean, I could come out there not sure who I was.

It was life-transforming.

I'd been trying to write before I went to uni

but that made it more of a desire for me, to try and be a writer.

And that haunted me throughout.

"There was often a sense of being a surrogate of himself,

"an impostor in his own life,

"the servant of his circumstances and not their master.

"He supposed the feeling might be related to his attempts to write,

"that compulsion that precluded him from merely accepting who he was

"and sharing it with others.

"Such talent to create as he had, he thought once,

"was like having an elephant on a leash.

"It complicated your entire life."

'Until recently, he made his living as a teacher,

'an assistant headmaster in an Ayrshire school,

'but now he is that rare Scottish thing - a full-time writer.'

Having written Docherty, I wanted to write about modern times

and I wanted to write about Glasgow.

# I belong to Glasgow

# Dear old Glasgow town... #

Folk love talking about Glasgow and seeing what is happening to them.

It is a great city to write about because it is a great city,

but it is terrific to write about

because it will tell you what it feels.

Glaswegians don't hide, they tell you. Sometimes,

even when you don't want to hear, they'll tell you what they think!

And that is where a sense of Laidlaw's city came from.

# ..Couple of drinks on a Saturday

# Glasgow belongs to me... #

It was also a way of expressing my affection for Glasgow, because

the light and the dark coexist in Glasgow very dramatically.

# ..Glasgow belongs to me... #

"The strangest thing was no warning. You wore the same suit.

"You chose your tie carefully.

"There was a mistake about your change on the bus.

"Half an hour before it,

"you'd laughed. Then your hands were an ambush. They betrayed you.

"It happened so quickly. Your hands, that lifted cups

"and held coins and waved...

"..Were suddenly a riot, a brief raging.

"The consequence was forever."

'What I want to catch is the feeling of the city,

'but I knew I would need to know more,

'and Robbie and Jack, these two detectives,

'helped me about what it was like being a policeman in Glasgow.'

I tried to introduce him to a few people in Glasgow, shall we say?

Some very interesting people.

Some very interesting people,

who took him to places where I couldn't possibly go,

because I was known

as a detective in the city.

So, I think Willie got a lot of information

-from some good people who I cannot name now, obviously.

-No.

-Would you agree with that?

-Oh, absolutely.

What I liked about Laidlaw was that he was a guy...

He was a guy who wasn't just the polis, inverted commas.

"Think about it this way, Laidlaw said.

"There are tourists and travellers.

"Tourists spend their lives doing a Cook's tour of their own reality,

"ignoring the slums.

"Travellers make the journey more slowly, in greater detail,

"mix with the natives.

"A lot of murderers are, amongst other things, travellers.

"They become terrifyingly real for themselves,

"their lies are no longer a hobby. Poor bastards."

There is a book written by JP Hartley, the first sentence says,

"The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there."

When you get to my age, the present is a bloody foreign country.

They do things differently here,

because it is so different from when we were growing up

and in the small ways, and in the big ways... Like, the internet

-must have changed detective work really dramatically.

-DNA.

-Aye.

Imagine if I had DNA?! Oh, my God!

-The number of people you could have caught, Robbie.

-Oh, you dancer!

"His is the Glasgow of smoke-filled bars, newspapers stands,

"public buses, cheap hotel lobbies, dark street corners,

"empty parkland and dimly lit nightclubs.

"It's a warren as complex as any labyrinth imagined by Dedalus,

"and as evasive as any castle

"encountered by a confused Kafka."

Oh, I love that.

-That's your Glasgow.

-I love that.

"Think of this as a wee ritual exercise

"for opting out of tourism.

"A car is psychologically sterile,

"a mobile oxygen tent.

"A bus is septic."

I found these this morning on my bookshelves.

What have we got?

Laidlaw paperback.

That's the original. It's a terrible cover, isn't it?

This is what crime novels used to look like.

-Dire cover.

-Yeah.

They always used to have guns or blood or knives.

-40 years out of date.

-I don't know when you signed that for me.

"All the best, Willie McIlvanney."

But this is one I really want to show you, which is Docherty.

Winner of the 1975 Whitbread Award for Fiction, young man.

-Oh, I like that.

-But look at that, 1985, at the Edinburgh Book Festival.

I told you I was writing a book that was a bit like Laidlaw

but set in Edinburgh.

"For Ian, good luck with the Edinburgh Laidlaw."

You must have thought, "This guy's got nae chance."

-You had good luck.

-I did have good luck.

A lot more than I had with the Glasgow Laidlaw.

The harder you work, the better luck you get, it seems to me.

-I think that is a reprimand to me, that.

-Aye.

-I should've worked harder.

-You should've worked harder.

Should try harder.

When I wrote Laidlaw, you fortunately followed this advice...

IAN LAUGHS

..and are one of these people.

The editor said, "If you write one a year, you'll be a millionaire."

-It's not what I do, I don't write one a year.

-It takes a few years.

-It takes a few years. You've got to stick around.

-Absolutely.

That's what he meant, if you keep doing this,

it will pay off for you, and I just knew I couldn't.

-First of all, it's not the way I work.

-Yeah.

Occasionally, two in the morning, you think,

"Hmm, maybe I should have done that,

because I could be really well off now," but no, it's a kind of...

It's a phoney temptation.

No, I am quite happy to be trying to write what I am writing,

and that's it.

# Well, I woke up Sunday morning

# With no way to hold my head that didn't hurt... #

Obviously, all writing is a fairly lonely activity.

You're never sure the effect it's going to have on you

and the effect it has had.

# ..So I had one more... #

I suppose what kept a sense of remaining somewhat valid

and alive was what I would call street reviews,

and it gives you the self-belief to think you're not wasting

people's time doing this, especially your own.

# ..And I shave my face and comb my hair

# And stumble down the stairs to meet the day... #

Most writers don't get a lot of appreciation in life.

Most writers will vanish into the ether, as I will, I'm sure.

The truth is, you think of writers of the past,

who you might find them in the occasional anthology,

but who were really, intensely committed to what

they were doing and yet most of us,

as I say, fade into the ether.

# ..Sunday morning coming down... #

SCHOOL BELL RINGS

My uncle Willie, I asked him if he could come along,

and these are some of your questions that we were thinking about

because we read the short story At The Bar, OK?

Did you ever feel that any characters that you had created

or written about were reflective of yourself or anyone that you know?

It's never you. At the same time,

I don't think you ever write about another person fully.

You may take aspects of them.

Because I think all of us, everybody in this room,

is uncatchable in prose. We are too various.

We have too many different thoughts every day.

But I suppose you put aspects of your nature, inevitably, into it.

What is your best accomplishment?

I'm the father of two children, maybe that,

and the books are a kind of variant of that,

but the main thing is the people.

I would say that is my greatest accomplishment.

Although they might not say that!

I think that he's someone who requires feedback and approval.

You'd think that if he's done what he's done,

then he wouldn't necessarily need that,

but I think he really does need that. I suppose we all do.

SCHOOL BELL RINGS I think that the fact that he

goes through 11 times rather than just...

putting in stuff for the sake of it,

there's a sort of integrity about that.

'I love teaching.

'And I was kind of ambushed by the job.

'I realised without expecting

'that would happen, that I loved it.

'Even when I left,

'Laidlaw had been published, I'd made not a lot, but a few quid,'

and Scotland qualified for Argentina and I knew I wanted to go there.

And when I came back, that was me, a full-time writer.

# We are on the march With Ally's Army

# We are going to the Argentine... #

I've tried to erase it from my memory, obviously,

the pain is too much.

There's a huge guy from Aberdeen and the first half he's shouting,

"Come on, Scotland!" He's shouting, to us, "Lift them, lift them!"

And I said, "If you've got a jib crane you could nae lift them."

And I went out at half-time.

I think by that time we were down one-nothing.

And he was seriously weeping, he's no kidding...

There's all these terrific-looking women all clustered round him

and one of them turned to me and says, "What is problem?"

-WILLIAM LAUGHS

-I thought, what a lovely question.

I thought, if you've got 50 years,

we'll try and explain the problem to you, missy.

DISTANT CHEERING

The problem is not going to go away.

I realised, it's like folk looking for something that,

you know, is probably better found in politics than in football.

But they invested so much.

CHEERING AND CHANTING

Well, well, well.

'I don't care if people call me a socialist.

'I mean...I mean, I am. I was called recently an old socialist.

'Well, I'm old and I'm a socialist, but if they mean, you know,

'trapped in the past, I don't think so at all.

'What I believe in is, I suppose, social idealism.

'But what's the point of trying to create a society

'unless you make it as fair as you can

'and that's a hugely difficult thing to do.'

-What do we want?

-Independence!

-When do we want it?

-Now!

Oh, I think this is amazing.

I mean, when have you ever seen so many young people

energised by not a rock concert, but politics?

It's terrific. This is not going to recede, there's a...

It's a tide of political passion.

This is a kind of victory.

CHEERING AND CHANTING

These are rather copious notes,

which I hope will lead...

to another Laidlaw. That's the theory, anyway.

'When you get to my age,

'I don't think I've got all that much time to play about with.

'Because I've got another Laidlaw that I'd like to write

'and I've got a bizarre novel

'that probably nobody will ever want to read, but I want to write it.'

'I will die in a certain state of mystification

'but I won't gain on it.'

If you don't die mystified, you're kidding yourself on, you know.

You've made up the solution, it's not the real one.

DISTANT VOICES

Willy's events here at the Edinburgh International Book Festival

have become something of landmark occasions.

Just three years ago, Willy was on this very stage

when he was talking about his seminal novel being out of print.

And in fact, 2013 turned out to be rather an annus mirabilis

all-round for Willy.

Film and television rights have been optioned for the Laidlaw books,

his 1975 novel, Docherty,

was voted in the top ten of best-ever Scottish novels,

despite having been out of print for a number of years.

And now Canongate has brought back into print

ALL of Willy's novels and his short stories.

So, Willy, that's just a long way of saying...

welcome back. GENTLE LAUGHTER

-APPLAUSE

-Thank you.

'It was a resurrection and I suppose...

'any kind of interest in me took me somewhat by surprise.

'But a happy surprise.'

-Lazarus lives.

-Yes...

Without meaning to do it and without knowing you did it,

while we were out of print, you were

influencing a whole generation of Scottish crime writers.

It's everybody you talk to, whether it's Ron McDermott,

or whether it's Denise Mina, whether it's Chris Brookmyre,

everybody remembers reading these books and thinking, well,

if it's OK for Willy to do it, maybe I'll give it a go as well.

-Such a pleasure to meet you, I'm so delighted.

-Oh, thank you.

I've been reading your works since I was very little.

I think one of the things I learned,

from coming through the threshold of knowing you, was that

no box holds this.

-Mm.

-And that everything,

even though you're in that tiny corner,

-is still possible with the words you can say in the corner.

-Yes.

-Yes.

You must be knackered now.

I'm just amazed that so many folk want it signed.

-SHE LAUGHS

-I'll sit here all night if it's required.

'I love that one from Anthony And Cleopatra,'

"And we are for the dark." I always think that if you're not...

-"Unarm Eros, the long day's task is done..."

-Oh, yeah. It's that.

'When you've got to our stage of the game,

'it would be a bit churlish to moan too much.'

We haven't exactly lived a careful life.

We invited more trouble than we've got.

Certainly got plenty of regrets, there are plenty of things...

Oh, a shed load.

As my mother used to say, we're better aff than better folk.

-Aye, that's right.

-And I think...

I think we'd have to claim that.

We've had a better run than we deserved!

Whatever happens, it's been good.

'My readers are anonymous people in anonymous rooms

'and if I pass the time interestingly for those people,

'and maybe if I clarified something about their own lives

'and what they think about things,

'that's the best gift a writer gets.'

And maybe it's good for writers if that's unquantifiable,

because you could imagine it,

even if it's not happening too much, well, maybe it happened.

Maybe it happened.

# Suddenly the night Has grown colder

# The God of love Preparing to depart

# Alexandra hoisted on his shoulder

# They slip between The sentries of the heart

# 'Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving'

# 'Then say goodbye To Alexandra lost.' #

Leonard's the best.

-GENTLE APPLAUSE Whoo!

-You're the best.