James Kelman / In Praise Of
There is something unnerving in discovering a brilliant writer whose name has never before passed before your eyes—that he exists in the same time frame as you do and on the same planet. Where have I been? Well, at least, he doesn’t come from the same country. His name is James Kelman and he comes from Scotland.
The book is How Late It Is, How Late. It was published twelve years ago and won the Booker prize but even after more than a dozen books Kelman is not a well-known name here. I confess a love for British and Irish writers; perhaps my Canadian background makes their cultural concerns more familiar than American ones. Scotland shares a colonial link to England but Kelman writes here of a punishing poverty and an even more punishing social bureacracy that is less familiar. This is a particularly apt book for Americans, I think. So many of the desperately poor here seem to have no voice or have no way to have their voice heard.
In this story Sammy Samuels, one of Glasgow’s working poor, a petty criminal and a man who has served time for those crimes, loses a Saturday to a bender so monumental he doesn’t remember a thing about it. And so monumental that he’s picked up by the police and given a beating that leaves him blind. When they’ve done with him they turf him out and he finds himself on the streets of Glasgow with no money and no way home. He fumbles his way back to the flat he shares with Helen, the woman he loves, to discover that she’s not there. And we discover that the bender had something to do with an argument he’d had with Helen, with his confessing to her the truth about his life, as he understands it, the crimes he’s committed and his desire to leave all that behind now that he’s with her. We don’t know why she’s taken off or where she is or if anything’s happened to her.
What’s remarkable is that Sammy, alone, blind, never reaches out for help. Never calls a friend. Or his son, whom he’d had fifteen years before with a woman he now doesn’t speak to or who won’t speak to him. He doesn’t trust anyone. He’s loathe even to accept small offers of help from a neighbor. He goes through the motions, in time, of applying to see a doctor, a process so labyrinthine and unconsoling as to be useless. And he hooks up with a scalper who offers to ‘rep’ him if he applies for disability benefits—his take ‘only’ thirty-three percent.
But he’s wiley, our Sammy. He’s not fooled; he sees things as they are—as so messed up that you can be robbed of your dignity and even hope in an instant. He doesn’t expect anything of people. He doesn’t expect love or even decency and yet he sees the good in folks. Old Boab down the hall is not a bad sort, he helped him paint a stick white to use when he went out. Helen was probably just off seeing her kids who’d been taken away from her; you couldn’t blame her. Even the police; he wouldn’t come out and say the loss of his sight was their fault. Hadn’t he played a part in it? Hadn’t he landed the first blow? No, he couldn’t blame them.
All the while we’re in Sammy’s head. It’s the kind of head if we’d seen it on the street, dirty, unshaven, hair matted to the scalp, we’d have turned away, we know. But inside it, with all his wild, repetitive language, with his stoic acceptance, with his lack of demands, with his bravery, with the moments when he collapses—it’s a surprisingly fine place to be.
And somehow familiar, not so different from our own place, after all.
Sammy can’t see where’s he’s going; he doesn’t have a clearly thought out plan for his life—like a lot of us. But somehow, with every conceivable stroke against him, he is putting one foot in front of the other even in shoes a size too small. Thank you, Mr. Kelman. Nice job of cracking the heart open to the real experience of powerlessness and to the power of love, even transcendence, that pokes through where we least expect it.
