James Kelman, the Booker Prize and the ‘battle of the F-word', 30 years on

The culture wars may have flared up in recent years, but the conflict is a long one. Thirty years ago, in the early years of the skirmishes, the announcement of James Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late, as the winner of the 1994 Booker Prize prompted some particularly sharp exchanges. The issues then were those that remain familiar now – language, nationality, cultural identity – but also, quaint as it now seems, impassioned discussions about the nature of what was then termed ‘literary fiction’. 

Kelman’s fault, in the eyes of his critics, was not only to tell the story of an irredeemable working-class Glaswegian down-and-out but to do so both as a stream of consciousness and in language that was raw and, to many, deeply offensive. Kelman’s win ignited what might be called ‘The Battle of the F-word’. According to one critic, Blake Morrison, ‘fuck’ appeared no fewer than 4,000 times in the book, at a regularity of 10 instances per page. To many, this was the very opposite of what the language of a novel should be and provided more than enough evidence to condemn the book. 

Kelman fired back in his acceptance speech. Among all the dinner jackets gathered at the Guildhall ceremony, the author arrived in a regular suit and with his tie at half-mast; he was clearly not intending to play the game. In a measured but quietly passionate speech, he said he saw his work as part of a wider move towards ‘decolonisation and self-determination’ and a statement of the ‘validity of indigenous culture’. He stressed too his ‘right to defend in the face of attack’ and sided with the ‘rejection of the cultural values of imperial or colonial authority’. What’s more, his book was part of a fight against ‘cultural assimilation, in particular an imposed assimilation’.  

He was not the first Booker Prize winner to take aim at colonial authority: back in 1972, John Berger had caused a furore when he used his acceptance speech to attack the West Indian sugar holdings of the prize’s original sponsor, Booker McConnell. Kelman, though, was not from the Caribbean but from Scotland, and the colonialism he was attacking was cultural rather than economic. 

One of the 1994 prize judges, Rabbi Julia Neuberger, broke ranks to call the book ‘crap’ and ‘deeply inaccessible for a lot of people’ while its win was ‘a disgrace’. The most excoriating attack, however, came from the newspaper editor and commentator Simon Jenkins. For him, How Late It Was was merely a transcription of ‘the rambling thoughts of a blind Glaswegian drunk’, similar to an intoxicated Scotsman Jenkins had once met on a train who concluded their unpleasant encounter by urinating on a train seat. Kelman’s win, thought Jenkins, was an act of ‘literary vandalism’. 

Other critics, however, saw beyond the effing and blinding. For Blake Morrison, the book was ‘a novel of exasperation’ whose ‘grim, wearing truth… is that people like Sammy – intelligent but inarticulate, stubborn but self-defeating, prisoners of class prejudice and state repression – don’t stand a chance’. James Wood, another of the judges, acknowledged the book’s ‘atmosphere of gnarling paranoia, imprisoned minimalism, the boredom of survival’ but found that ‘within these limits, and because of them, Kelman is a funny, sour, expansive writer, whose strange, new sentences are brilliant adventures in thought’. He likened Kelman to ‘a musician’ who ‘uses repetition and rhythm to build structures out of short flights and circular meanderings’. Elsewhere, the book was lauded for its ‘enormous artistic and social depth’, its ‘distinctive style’ and its ‘sardonic, abrasive prose’, while A.S. Byatt praised the way the novel is ‘punctuated by a lovely waterfall of four-letter words’. 

Kelman’s distrust of ‘standard English’ was partly because it was not of his world: he was brought up in housing scheme accommodation in the more deprived parts of Glasgow and left school at 15. His early reading was self-directed and focused on European existentialist fiction – Albert Camus was a favourite – and American realist writers. Both are present in How Late It Was. In Sammy he portrayed a figure with whom he was familiar, presenting an authentic, unvarnished life narrated in a close mix of the first- and third-person, using the unfiltered language of Glasgow. The book is, among other things, an experiment in late Modernism, not least in being a novel without chapters.  

What both critics and detractors agreed on was that How Late It Was is a challenging read. Kelman has suggested that the outrage over his profanities was not entirely genuine – ‘I think, ultimately, it’s something else’ – and his working-class upbringing, his left-wing politics, his Scottishness, his refusal to become clubbable and join the wider British literary culture (he was Booker shortlisted in 1989 for A Disaffection but refused to attend the award dinner saying he had ‘better things to do than swan around with the literati’) might offer alternative reasons. And characters like Sammy too: ‘They don’t want to see these people in literature’, with the word ‘they’ full of import.