Writer Agnes Owens was once seen as “part of a golden age of Scottish literature,” and influenced younger writers, including Janice Galloway, Douglas Stuart and Damian Barr. But she was never accorded the respect given to her male peers, and her books have fallen out of print. This year — the centenary of her birth — could herald a revival, writes Dani Garavelli
“She wasn’t a cuddly mother,” John Crosbie tells me, his big hands toying with a tiny espresso cup. “But we knew she was there for us. And she gave us a sense of culture. She wasn’t really interested in the ins and outs of what was going on in our scheme. What she wanted to talk about was books and films and politics.”
Crosbie — a bricklayer turned construction inspector — is the fourth of writer Agnes Owens’ seven children, and the keeper of her flame. In a world that wasn’t stacked against working class women that would be an easy task. Owens was a master of her craft, the creator of witty, often macabre short stories, and a series of spare, unsentimental novellas.
Championed by Alasdair Gray, Liz Lochhead and James Kelman, Owens was published first by Polygon, then Penguin, then Bloomsbury. Once seen as “part of a golden age of Scottish literature,” she influenced younger writers, including Janice Galloway, Douglas Stuart and Damian Barr. But she was never accorded the respect given to her male peers, and her books have fallen out of print. This year — the centenary of her birth — could herald a revival.
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Letters, scripts and newspaper cuttings rescued by Crosbie from his mother’s house after her death in 2014, and passed on to the Alasdair Gray archive, have been curated to form a smaller, satellite archive dedicated to Owens in the room next to his. The archive, run by Gray’s former art agent, Sorcha Dallas, has also appointed two writers in residence — authors Kirstin Innes and Heather Parry — to explore how “class, gender and social expectation intersect” in the work of both writers.
Most importantly, Polygon will be republishing all her work in two batches in May and September. The books will have new introductions by fans of her work, including Lochhead and Jenni Fagan, and gorgeous covers graced by the work of artist Joan Eardley, who shared her kinship with those on life’s margins.
“My hope is this will right past oversights, raising the profile of the woman Gray called ‘the most unfairly neglected of all living Scottish authors’ and ensuring her contribution continues to be celebrated for generations,” Crosbie says.
The way he tells it, it was a miracle his mother ever wrote at all. If, as Cyril Connolly suggested, the pram in the hall is the enemy of good art, then how hard is it to produce anything of note with seven? Harder still given, in the early days, there was no hall, and the prams were being trundled from Highland town to Highland town in an attempt to scratch a living.
Owens was born into a working class Milngavie family in 1926, between the great wars, each of which cast a shadow over her young life. Her father lost a leg in the first, enduring years of unemployment before finding a job in a paper mill. The second left her husband Sam mentally damaged and with limited prospects. Lured by a false promise of work, the couple headed north when their first child Ann was still a baby — “a case of squaw follows Indian brave and asks no questions,” as Owens describes it in Marching to the Highlands and into the Unknown, the last piece in her short story collection People Like That. Their second child, Bill, came along while they were squatting in a condemned cottage in Keith in Moray.
By the time John was born, the family, which now included his sister Irene, was living in a prefab in Milngavie. Sam, a janitor, struggling with PTSD and problematic drinking, was in and out of Glasgow’s Stobhill Hospital, though there were good times, too: he sometimes took them camping. Crosbie was eight when his life was upended first by Sam’s death at the age of 43, and then by his mother’s remarriage nine months later to a labourer, Pat Owens. For reasons he doesn’t understand, they had to move — from the spanking new council house they had finally acquired — to a two-roomed tenement flat with outside toilet in Alexandria in the Vale of Leven.
“I think that with four kids, my mother had to get another wage in,” Crosbie says. But the second marriage brought three more mouths to feed: Catherine, Margaret and Patrick, who would go on to be fatally stabbed, dying in her arms, just as her career was taking off.
To pay the bills, Owens took on a range of jobs, as a typist, a barmaid and a cleaner to Billy Connolly, and the family gradually moved to better flats and houses, in a succession of Vale of Leven council estates, something those who came to interview her never failed to mention. But somehow Owens carved out time to read — taking four or five books at a time from the library — and to write.
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As early as 1958, while still in her troubled first marriage, she had already had one short story, A Hopeless Case, published in a Scottish newspaper. The legend that has attached itself to Owens is that she was “discovered” by Lochhead, Gray and Kelman after pitching up at a local writers’ group in 1978 because she was desperate for a night out of the house.
It is not inaccurate. Lochhead was struck by Owens’ short story, Arabella, a brilliant piece of grotesquerie about a dirty, overweight woman, who fancies herself a witch, and tries to use her powers on an ill-fated sanitary inspector. Kelman admired her tales about bricklayers, which would become the novella Gentlemen of the West. As for Gray, “he loved my mother, I think,” Crosbie says. “He supported her right to the end.”
But the inference some critics have drawn from this patronage is that Owens stumbled into writing, and rode on their coattails. Early reviews of her work have a patronising, “fancy that!” tone, as if she was an accidental, happenstance author, as opposed to one driven to write, and as invested in style and form as any of her contemporaries.
“She was so good at evoking the claustrophobia and darkness and poverty of economics but plenitude of mind,” says Peter Kravitz, who published her first novella, Gentlemen of the West, in 1984. Kravitz is a psychotherapist now. But in his early 20s, he was the editor at Polygon, then part of Edinburgh University Student Publications, and a key figure in a mid-1980s’ explosion of literary work written in the Scottish vernacular. He was in the process of publishing Kelman’s first story collection, Not Not While the Giro, when Gray handed him Owens' completed 30,000 word manuscript. “I don’t know how much work had been done on it before I saw it,” he says, “but it was probably the lightest edit I ever did.”
Gentlemen of the West is a series of vignettes told by a young bricklayer, Mac. It was partly inspired by Crosbie and the wild tales he told his mother about the people he hung out with. Crosbie had wanted to be a joiner; he turned down a bricklaying apprenticeship until Owens told him to get back up the road and accept it. He was 15 when he started, and mixed with the “crazy guys because when you were young you thought these were the guys to be with.” One of these guys was immortalised as Paddy McDonald, Mac’s sometime friend and drinking partner, who lives in a ramshackle bothy, and keeps live rabbits in his oven.
The novella is both laugh out loud funny, and unrelenting in its portrayal of the precarity of the bricklayers’ lives, and the extent to which they have to deny their own emotional needs in order to survive. It is also the best thing I have ever read on the all-pervasiveness of alcohol in Scottish working class communities. In Gentlemen of the West, drinking isn’t part of the culture, it *is* the culture, the acquisition of a “hauf and a hauf” the imperative that drives all interactions. Alcohol is the universal currency: traded for company and kudos, withheld in anger. And the only thing anyone wants to know on Christmas Day is: “Will the Paxton Arms be opening?”
When you finish reading it, you have the smell of alcohol in your nostrils, and the taste of it on your tongue. “Some critics struggle because they see [Owens’ work] as miserabilist, but they miss the sense of humour - there’s a joke on every page,” Kravitz says. Others struggle with the lack of a moral arc. Terrible events — lay-offs, violence, losses — happen with alarming regularity and there’s never much prospect of a better future.
But that doesn’t mean Owens’ books are pitiless. She may prefer characters who “are sinners with a little bit of good here and there,” but her empathy with those she writes about never waivers. The following year, several of Owens’ short stories, including Arabella, were published in the Kelman/Gray/Owens anthology Lean Tales, and in 1986, Penguin republished Gentlemen of the West with an introduction by Gray. Owens was beginning to attract media attention. When a BBC film crew turned up at the building site where Crosbie was working to film in connection with a piece on the novella, it sparked a few moments of life imitating art imitating life.
“The bricklayers had to be given plenty of notice, so those who were also signing on could make themselves scarce,” Crosbie laughs. Then Owens talked on camera about the hardships of the job. “Some of the guys hid themselves upstairs in the houses we were building and shouted out the window: ‘Is life tough for you, John? Aw, is it?’”
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Like Birds in the Wilderness, Owens’ sequel to Gentlemen of the West, was published in 1987. It felt like she had the wind in her sails. But then, in December the same year, 19-year-old Patrick was killed outside their home. “He had been in a fight with some friends,” Crosbie says, “but they had shaken on it, so it was supposed to be over.”
Later that night, three of them threw stones at his window. Patrick went out onto the street where he was knifed. Owens tried to give him the kiss of life, but couldn’t save him. The court case was the following April. As he left the house, Patrick had picked up a baseball bat, so the man who wielded the knife was convicted only of culpable homicide (though he had originally been charged with murder). He was sentenced to four years of which he served two. The others were immediately released because they had already spent several months on remand.
“It was hell on earth,” Crosbie says. The only writing Owens, an active member of the Labour party, did in the aftermath was to MPs and the Faculty of Advocates. She was invited on to the Kilroy TV show and joined a support group for the parents of children who had been killed. “You weren't ill, no, “ she later said, “and you never became ill, but you would have loved to have died.”
It was an act of generosity that lured her back to her typewriter. In 1989, Lochhead asked her to collaborate on a play for Cumbernauld Theatre. Them Through the Wall was poorly reviewed, and the tour that followed ended prematurely, but at least she was back creating. The 1990s proved a fruitful period. Her novellas, A Working Mother and For the Love of Willie, and her short story collection. People Like That were all published by Bloomsbury.
The 2000s brought two more novellas, Bad Attitudes and Jen’s Party (also Bloomsbury), along with The Complete Short Stories, and Complete Novellas, published by Polygon. Kravitz says the work of Owens, Kelman and Gray revolutionised Scottish literature. “Before [them], you might get working class characters, but the narrative voice — “he walked into the room” — would be in standard English and then only once you were in inverted commas —’I cannae hold back’ — would it shift to the vernacular.
“As Kelman said, this meant the authors were holding those working class characters ‘with tweezers’. The thing Agnes did was to make the narrator’s voice the voice of her character. Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway opened the doors to allow daily speech into US literature. Agnes and the others did the same for the next generation of Scottish writers.”
After he won the Booker Prize for Shuggie Bain, Douglas Stuart referred to Owens, Gray and Kelman as “rock stars,” adding: “They created the most beautiful sentences with the plainest language and the least amount of pretension.” Damian Barr tells me: “When I was writing Maggie & Me, authors like Agnes, who were writing in their own language and with that west coast sensibility that made me free to think: ‘I am allowed to do this’.”
For Carrion Crow author Heather Parry, too, the way Owens uses language is a big part of her appeal. “I am from South Yorkshire originally and we have a very stylised, almost archaic, way of speaking, using thee and thou in conversation,” she says. “Because communities are traditionally working class, people don’t ascribe a thoughtfulness to sentence construction, but actually the thoughtfulness is inherent in the way those communities communicate. I think that’s what I see and like in Agnes’ work. She reflects so well how people speak; she invites you to consider her characters as the centre of this little world.”
In real-life, Owens was mischievous, with an interest in spiritualism. “On a Saturday night, she would take us up to the woods to scare us, which we loved,” Crosbie remembers. He also recalls her using an ouija board, both for a laugh when they were younger and in an attempt to communicate with the other side. Kravitz, who was born in the US and had been studying Russian, loved her deadpan humour. “I remember at her book launch in the Horseshoe Bar [in Glasgow], she said: ‘Ah, Peter Kravitz, I know you’re a spy.’ There would always be a 30-second gap before she laughed.”
Yet, for all her popularity, the literary establishment remained sniffy. Though For the Love of Willie was shortlisted for the Stakis Prize, she never won any major literary awards.
Her lack of self-worth may have played a part: the title of A Hopeless Case echoed the words of a teacher, who told her she would amount to nothing. So, too, might the lack of a selfish gene that allows many writers to hold the world at bay in pursuit of their art. Even once her children had left home, she abandoned her typewriter the second one of them appeared on her doorstep. But she was also a victim of a toxic mix of classism, sexism and ageism. (“Maybe it’s because I’m old and ugly,” she once suggested to Gray. “No, I don’t think it’s only that, Agnes,” he replied).
Innes thinks Owens had more in common with older writers such as Jessie Kesson and Muriel Spark, who were already adults in WWII, than with Gray and Kelman, who were eight and 20 years her junior.
“There’s an absolute economy in her work, and a post-war mentality,” Innes says. “A death can occur and you are not allowed time to dwell on it because it’s very much that pick-yourself-up-and-move-on mindset.”
Certainly, Owens did her best to set herself apart from her Glasgow mentors. When asked about her influences, she did mention Kesson, whose work also focuses on life in the margins. But mostly she cited US authors: Graham Greene, John Steinbeck, and Flannery O’Connor, who shared her taste for sinners and the supernatural, and whose southern gothic aesthetic Owens channeled to create a West of Scotland equivalent. O’Connor‘s world was also restricted, in her case by lupus, which forced her to live with her domineering mother in Georgia. O’Connor described her limitations as “a gateway to reality”. You can see how that might have resonated with Owens who mined universal truths from her circumscribed circumstances. Nor did she care to be seen as a feminist (“I don’t think men are up to much, but I like a male character,” she once said) though her work is an indictment of the way patriarchy impacts everyone.
In the year of her centenary, Owens’ legacy is being lit by new torchbearers led by Crosbie, Sorcha Dallas and Polygon, whose decision to republish means her work will once again be accessible.
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“Our programme has a particular focus on publishing new fiction, and in reissuing Owens’ work we are looking to the past to help publish the future,” says Polygon editor Edward Crossan. For a long time, Crosbie was heading down the same dark path walked by many of the characters in Gentlemen of the West. But in his early 30s, he split up with his first wife, attended Alcoholics Anonymous, went to night school and became a chartered builder. He now lives in the Highlands with his partner, Helen. “We go to yoga on a Friday night and have a couple of glasses of wine after. It’s very middle class,” he laughs. Crosbie also attends writing classes at Thi Wurd, producing his own work even as he promotes his mother’s.
He knows Owens felt the lack of public recognition keenly. “Whenever she was asked to talk about A Working Mother, she would say: ‘This is my latest book from Bloomsbury, the people who publish JK Rowling.’’ Then she would make a disparaging remark: ‘‘Not that I’m going to get the same place she’s going’.” The lack of a big launch for Bad Attitudes peeved her, too. “Sometimes you do want something, a wee cocktail party and all these very upper class people coming,” she told one interviewer.
Owens’ genius is about to be properly toasted. It would be lovely to think that, unlike so many of her stories, this one might have a belated happy ending.
You can pre-order the author's novels from: Agnes Owen's book collection
