James Kelman
Of course, the old Criterion was founded by TS Eliot. I remember seeing the Scottish writer James Kelman on TV saying that when he was at university studying English he always wondered why he didn’t like Eliot’s poetry. Then he realised why: “He was a Fascist”. An overstatement perhaps, but Eliot was an avowed Royalist and Anglican in later life; hardly likely to be attractive to a working-class loyalist like Kelman.
There’s a new review of Kelman’s most recent novel Translated Accounts on The Modern Word site. Much as I share Kelman’s political opinions (see his Some Recent Attacks: essays cultural and political), I’m not keen on his novels. Years ago I enjoyed A Disaffection. Kelman says that Southerners liked it because it was about a teacher and mentioned Kant a lot, so that’s why perhaps (and one can’t get more than 250 yards further south than me without getting very wet). His Booker Prize winning novel How Late It Was, How Late, extracted here, demonstrates the problems of his apparently radical style. Behind the Scots dialect and obscenities lies a very conventional literary approach. And where he’s tried something new and necessary to the subject, he seems worthy but humourless. The novels tend to be given respect by those sympathising with his progressive political aims, so that’s probably why he resented the particular praise from those who don’t sympathise for the one less political work.
Occasionally, I have night terrors dreaming of an English course I did during the last days of the Thatcher era. We read novels as social commentary. Set secondary texts were written by sociologists and the class earnestly discussed the noble woes working class life. One of the set novels was Love on the Dole by Walter Greenwood. This is possibly the worst novel I have ever read. No wonder I like Eliot’s poetry. It isn’t sociology.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Kelman in the land of the free
- Booker blog
- He gets paid for this
- Goalless
- Sticky Fingers Another snippet of info has emer…
