A few weeks ago, a shivering intimation of imminent mortality was felt all across literary Scotland. Willie McIlvanney was not well. Very far from well. The kind of unwell that requires a lung transplant. If the news was hardly revelatory – McIlvanney had, for more than sixty years, given his body a pretty thorough work-out – it was still gloomily depressing. We might not have Willie McIlvanney for very much longer.
And so it came to pass and we no longer do.
It does McIlvanney a great disservice to say that, until today, he was Scotland’s greatest living novelist. He was much more than that. His writing was ineradicably rooted in Ayrshire, Glasgow and the West of Scotland but there was nothing limited about its power or ambition.
It could, in other circumstances, have been transplanted to Flanders or the Ruhr or Pittsburgh or Detroit. Anywhere, in fact, where men chiselled coal from beneath their villages or where their lives resounded to the din of hammer on metal.
Even that, however, while accurate, sells McIlvanney short. His best work – and, unusually, most of his work qualifies for that race – was universal and if he was less well-known than he should have been that says much more about fashion and forgetfulness than it does about Willie McIlvanney.
He was never prolific and this, too, doubtless helps explain his retreat from prominence but there was still something galling about seeing article after article hailing your Grays and Kelmans and Welshes and who knows who else but forgetting the novelist greater than any of them: Willie McIlvanney.
In recent years he enjoyed a late reappraisal, being hailed as the ‘Godfather of Tartan Noir’ as Canongate reissued his trio of crime novels featuring the Glaswegian detective Jack Laidlaw. He enjoyed what he termed his ‘resurrection’ even as he occasionally found it necessary to remind interviewers that the Laidlaw books were novels that happened to feature a policemen rather than crime capers that happened to be novels.
Still, there was a melancholy romance about much of McIlvanney’s work. If Laidlaw was not quite Chandler’s shop-soiled Galahad, Willie McIlvanney certainly was. Life’s a shipwreck, old chum, and the rocks are unavoidable. It’s how you deal with them that counts.
That meant that, in novels such as Docherty and its successor The Kiln, his writing was soaked in obligation. How, he asked, can a man square what he owes to himself – to be true to himself – with what he owes to other people, especially to those nearest him? How do you survive a wrestling match with life when you’re so obviously over-matched?
No wonder his writing was laced with a certain mordant humour. As Beckett put it, nothing is quite so funny as unhappiness. But the anguish, while real and inescapable, was not without hope. Being someone, standing for something, could be quietly heroic too.
Fashion is only fashion but class is permanent. And Willie was class. Many writers can fill a hall, few can do so with as much warmth as Willie McIlvanney. To witness him read from his work at a literary festival was to be made aware that here was a writer who inspired something greater than simple admiration. McIlvanney was loved as few novelists are loved. There was, on these occasions, no simple distinction between the man and his work. The two were fused together to a degree unusual in any writer, let alone a ‘literary’ novelist of his calibre.
At the risk of exaggeration, let me simply suggest this: many men saw Willie McIlvanney as a kind of hero and many women saw in him the kind of man who needed to be nurtured and protected. He was, for some, the literary embodiment of a certain kind of working-class, socialist, Scotsman and there was enough truth in that for it to be thought worthwhile and valuable. But there was, beneath the carapace, an emotional tenderness and psychological awareness so acute it verged on being fragile.
It was, I think, the interplay between these two states that made McIlvanney such a wonderful novelist and, also, the kind of man who inspired such affection. He was a writer for Edinburgh matrons and still also a writer for dingy, old-man pubs in Glasgow. Not many people straddle those audiences.
Years ago, I worked at Scotland on Sunday at the same time Willie was the paper’s star columnist. For a while, shepherding his copy from the time it arrived – by fax, written by hand – to its appearance in the paper was one of my weekly duties. It was always late and frequently had nothing to do with anything that had happened that week. (Conversations on this were futile: “What are you going to write about this week, Willie?” “Something will come to me.”) But it was always wonderful, quarried from McIlvanney’s deep reserves of humanity and then shaped into luminous prose by a master craftsman. The subs hated it because it was, as I say, always late and, also, because they were never allowed to cut a word or adjust even a comma. But it meant we had some real writing in the paper each week and once upon a time that counted for something too.
Fading glories were another of McIlvanney’s strengths. Courage comes in many forms and knowing a cause may be lost is no good reason for abandoning it if doing so also means abandoning a certain idea of yourself. Like the football, life’s worse than it used to be but what alternative is there?
The work remains, however, and few of us are able to write our own memorials in the manner Willie McIlvanney wrote his. All across the country this evening people will be dusting off their copies of Docherty, Laidlaw and The Kiln and reminding themselves we were lucky to have Willie McIlvanney. If you’ve not read him, today’s a good day to start.
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