TEN days after William “Willie” McIlvanney died at the age of 79 a funeral celebration of his life was held yesterday Glasgow University Chapel. It was an occasion befitting someone who made his name and fame by writing stories and poems that have become part of the national DNA.
Among several hundred mourners were family and friends drawn from across the literary and civic spectrum, including former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Scotland’s Makar Liz Lochhead, historian Sir Tom Devine, crime novelist Ian Rankin and many others whose paths had crossed at some point with Mr McIlvanney’s, or who had simply been fans of his books.
Above all, however, this was, despite the magnificence of the surroundings, a private and intimate affair. And while it was conducted by the university’s chaplain, Stuart McQuarrie, it was determinedly non-religious in nature. Music was provided by fiddler Aly Bain, country singer Mary Chapin Carpenter and Leonard Cohen, whose repertoire Mr McIlvanney knew as if he himself had been its author.
Among those paying tribute was Frank Donnelly, a lifelong friend and teacher of history. Referring to Mr McIlvanney’s own career at the chalkface, Mr Donnelly recalled that, when he taught a Higher English class, 29 out of 30 of the pupils had band A passes.
After Mr McIlvanney’s first novel, Remedy Is None, was published in 1966 he told Mr Donnelly that he had received a letter praising it from an old teacher, saying “it was the best novel about Ayrshire since The House with the Green Shutters”; which was not such a great compliment as it seemed since it was probably the only such one there had been.
Brought up in a council house in a working-class family in 1930s Kilmarnock, Mr McIlvanney – recalled his older brother Hugh, a sports writer of renown – had been known to throw a few “verbal haymakers”, of which now, alas, there would be no more.
Theirs, he added, was a disputatious family that would rather have an argument than a discussion. Some nights things got so heated, he said, that it would have taken water cannon to separate the various warring parties. Football, books and politics were the preferred subjects of engagement but, in truth, they seemed to like arguing for the sheer fun of it.
The two youngest of four children, Hugh and Willie were especially close, not least because when space was at a premium they shared a bed. Their love of words and literature came from their mother who was a great reader. Willie’s heroes, Hugh recalled, were the likes of Albert Camus, Montaigne, Marcel Proust, Shakespeare and “big Fydor”; that is, Dostoevsky.
Mr McIlvanney’s daughter Siobhan spoke of her father’s admiration and respect for women and read Emily Dickinson’s poem Because I Could Not Stop For Death. Not only was her father well and widely read, she observed, he could speak French fluently and read Latin and Greek. That he loved Glasgow, “the city of the stare”, is well known. But he also loved London, Paris, New York, Berlin and Venice, his favourite European destination. What he didn’t love was parochialism and Thatcherism.
His son Liam, an author and academic, remembered being read to in bed. But while other children were being introduced to Roald Dahl and the Famous Five he drifted off to sleep with episodes from the Odyssey and the Iliad buzzing in his head. Moreover, he said, by the age of five he had been taught to recite by heart Robert Burns’s long poem Tam o’ Shanter.
The service ended with Auld Lang Syne. A public memorial service in honour of William McIlvanney will be held in the New Year.
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