Did pulp fiction destroy one of our great novelists?
How a boy from the schemes went from Booker shortlist and Hollywood stardom to penning trash novels for £300 a time...
STRAW Dogs, starring superstar Dustin Hoffman and a pouting Susan George, had just taken the cinema audience on a stomach-churning two-hour orgy of violence – no wonder they were now pouring towards the exits, desperate for a stiff drink to steady the nerves.
Only two people remained sitting, oblivious to the melée, staring resolutely at the screen as the credits rolled. This was Gordon Williams and his wife Claerwen, anticipating his finest moment.
Williams had written the novel, The Siege of Trencher’s Farm, on which the poisonous and still controversial 1971 film was based. His name on the big screen would surely mark his arrival as a Hollywood big shot...
But there was only bitter disappointment for the Scot, for his credit had been buried amid the names of ‘best boys’ and ‘key grips’ by the psychotic director Sam Peckinpah, who treated the author and his book with contempt, despite using it to create his most notorious movie.
The snub was emblematic of the life of Williams, who has died aged 83. He wrote one of Scotland’s greatest post-war novels and penned another, about an excessively creative journalist, which was widely thought the best about newspaper life.
He was a fluent ghost-writer for some of the biggest names in British football, and helped create TV’s Hazell, the wisecracking Cockney private detective whom the British public took to their hearts in the late 1970s. Yet there was always something of the nearly-man about Williams’s career.
He was nominated in 1969 for the inaugural Booker Prize – and should have won – but the laurels and plaudits went instead to PH Newby.
Straw Dogs could have made his fortune but Williams loathed the movie’s treatment of his 1969 novel and publicly condemned the film.
Then in 1979 an obscure Scottish director – with a cast of young unknowns from the Glasgow Youth Theatre – begged Williams to write a film-script for them. Williams, unimpressed, declined. The picture, written in the end by its director Bill Forsyth, was Gregory’s Girl and a global hit.
By then, Williams had lost interest in fiction and by 2003 was in such obscurity that one newspaper profile was headlined ‘Gordon who…?’ And he was, really, a constitutional exile from his homeland.
HE was born in June, 1934, in Paisley’s Ferguslie Park, which would become one of Scotland’s most infamous postwar housing schemes. Yet it gave us talent, including the artist John Byrne, singer/songwriter Gerry Rafferty and disgraced banker Fred Goodwin.
Williams grew up there the son of a Glasgow policeman, and was always at pains to stress that, unlike many neighbours, he grew up in relative comfort, even in ‘the worst slum in Britain for violence, drunkenness, incest, you name it…’
‘No one was rich in the jungles of Ferguslie Park Avenue,’ he cracked. ‘But in our house we had shoes and a complete set of the Waverley Novels of Sir Walter Scott, and food-parcels from our auntie in Texas – bubble-gum and Spam and white sugar-cubes... Superman comics…’
It was a godly grand-uncle who first encouraged the lad to write, and Williams found a berth as a cub reporter at the Johnstone Advertiser for £2 a week. But he had to leave to complete National Service and, on his return, 20 bigger Scottish newspapers did not even acknowledge his letters in search of work.
So he made for england, taking with him from his father ‘two blue police shirts, plus collars; two £1 notes, and a stern warning about drink’.
Williams ignored the counsel. Roistering benders and pubcrawls are often glibly thought to have been his undoing. Yet in reality he lived a broadly sedate life, married for more than half a century to the same woman – Claerwen Jones, who was herself a novelist and later a psychotherapist.
And after a quarter-century of industrial-level drinking, he finally turned teetotal in 1979. ‘Thank God I did,’ he would reflect. ‘My old address-book is now page after page of the dead…’
His early years in england were comically peripatetic: by the age of 23 he had lived at 28 separate addresses. But he mastered journalism at the Poole & Dorset Herald and finally, in 1965, won a feature-writer’s slot on the Daily Mail’s Weekend magazine.
england’s national football side, as we cannot forget, was on its way to winning the World Cup and Williams was put to commissioning articles from Bobby Moore, Denis Law and other sporting superstars.
He quickly found it was quicker to write these pieces himself, and he won widespread trust, becoming tight friends with the young Terry Venables and ghost-writing two of Bobby Moore’s autobiographies, as well as that of the controversial Tommy Docherty.
Williams might well have had Docherty in mind – and no doubt himself – when writing in 1982 that certain ‘little quirks’ of the Scots character, ‘namely obsessiveness, megalomania, suicidal guilt, paranoia, cowardice when sober and loudmouth hostility in drink, a fetish for minutiae and unquestioning drudgery as a defence against headaches from using our brains, and a belief that conversation is a series of interruptions, are exactly those required for novels…’
His first book, in 1960, was the dutiful and official history of the London Trades Council, followed in 1962 by a ‘hack biography’ of jazz-clarinettist Acker Bilk. Williams’s first novel, The Last Day of Lincoln Charles, appeared in 1965 but made little impact. But two years later The Man Who Had Power Over Women was another matter – it won widespread praise and in 1967 Rod Taylor starred in the movie version after Hollywood snapped up the film rights for £27,000.
Williams’s 1968 novel From Scenes Like These is his greatest and most assured work – a tale of contemporary Scotland in an era when such stories were rare. Had it won the 1969 Booker Prize – for which, Newby apart, Williams was competing with Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark – he might have committed full-time to serious literary fiction.
But it didn’t, although Williams had been sure of victory and the handsome cash prize: ‘My wife and I had already spent the 5,000 quid on a new bathroom. When my name wasn’t read out, I was bloody p ***** off.’
Literary awards, he decided, were for ‘the would-be dairy queens of Kentucky, not writers’. And his bitterness was legitimate – in nearly 50 years, only six Scots have been shortlisted for the Booker, with only one – James Kelman – winning it.
Williams thereafter deeply distrusted literary circles and other writers, and their whole schmoozing world of book launches, private viewings, tinkly gala luncheons and brittle cocktail parties, where authors stimulate other authors, contacts are made, agents sought out and publishers buttered up.
EVERYONE’S an individual by definition,’ he mused. ‘When you become a self-employed writer, you’re even more of one. What have I got in common with James Kelman? B ***** all. I don’t like writers as a group. They seem repressed and malevolent. Always thinking things, devious, cannae trust them.’
‘Of course,’ Williams added mischievously, ‘it takes one to know one…’
He still wrote serious novels but he spread himself thin, with movie-projects and schlockathon thrillers knocked off over a weekend under the pseudonym Jack Lang at £300 a pop. With Terry Venables, he co-wrote They Used
To Play On Grass – widely regarded as the best story ever about football.
As PB Yuill, he penned a supernatural tale, The Bornless Keeper – and three lighter tales about James Hazell. Thames Television swooped on them and the ensuing series, starring Nicholas Ball, ran for two seasons and was a ratings hit. It all helped pay the mortgage and raise the family, but such sausage-machine wordsmithing inevitably cheapened the Williams brand.
The filmic fate of The Siege of Trencher’s Farm hurt him dreadfully. It had taken him only nine days to write the tale of a wellmeaning American academic and his English wife who unwittingly harbour an escaped childmurderer – thus ensuring their rented manor is attacked by a mob of enraged villagers.
Williams, then living in Devon, drew his inspiration from local panic when Frank ‘The Mad Axeman’ Mitchell escaped from Dartmoor Prison. But the story did not achieve lasting notoriety until Peckinpah got his hands on it.
Warped by years of drink and drugs that would kill him before the age of 60, Peckinpah is best remembered for Westerns of sickening and gratuitous violence, with the goriest scenes often shot in slow motion. On the other side of the camera he was notorious for incessant fights, on and off set, with cast, producers and writers.
The subtleties of The Siege of Trencher’s Farm, praised by The List magazine for its ‘deliberation on how traditional masculine values find a place in modern society’, were quite lost on the psychopathic director, who made no secret of his contempt for ‘this rotten book’.
Little of Williams’s story made it into the film, beyond the siege itself. He added gross brutality and a rape scene so horrific that it would be more than 30 years before British censors allowed an uncut video-release of the movie.
Williams was aghast, especially as there was already public tumult that year about grotesque violence on the big screen in movies such as The French Connection, Dirty Harry and A Clockwork Orange. Copy-cat attacks on down-and-outs, seemingly inspired by the latter, sent author Anthony Burgess into hiding.
Cornered on television after the Press tried to blame a violent incident in Falkirk on Straw Dogs, Williams had no choice but to condemn the film, denouncing Peckinpah as ‘sick’ and the picture as ‘neo-Nazi c***’.
Peckinpah hit back, declaring that reading the novel had been like ‘drowning in vomit’ – and buried the author’s credit at the very end of the reel.
Recalling how it felt to be kicked in the teeth, Williams said: ‘I’m sitting there with my wife, this is my big moment, the Hollywood film, the big time... and there was my name, and every single person in the cinema had their backs to the screen, rushing to the exit.’
There were other novels, including 1970’s The Upper Pleasure Garden, a darkly funny satire of newspaper hackery. Don’t Walk, in 1972, was inspired by his first US book tour, several years earlier – Williams never forgave the minder who, determined to keep him sober for furious book-plugging on breakfast television, did not pass on Judy Garland’s request for a night-cap ‘with that crazy Scottish author’.
BIG Morning Blues, in 1974, explored the seedy world of Soho. Later Williams would dabble in science fiction, script documentaries and novelise Ridley Scott’s film The Duellists. But of a proposed new series of novels in the 1980s, only the first – Pomeroy: An American Diplomat – would be published, in 1983. Williams was not yet 50 but the Napoleonic-era book would be the last he would write.
He had simply got bored of novels, declaring in a rare interview nearly 30 years later: ‘I just kind of lost the notion.’ And with the production line stopped, he sank rapidly from public notice. He had been a successful Scottish writer, yet in his native land he was scarcely thought of and, if at all, with resentment.
In 1998 he was much amused when a newspaper included him in an article about near-forgotten authors, headlined ‘Where are they now?’ Five years earlier, the same paper had reported his death – while he was actually doing research in its newsroom.
‘I’d even been out for a drink with the arts editor who wrote the piece,’ he chuckled. ‘I’m just glad to find I’m still alive. It’s a relief.’
Always a journalist, Williams enjoyed the company of journalists. His fellow writer Bill Heaney recalled how he was ‘approachable and comradely and liked a pint, as most of us did at that time’.
As a journalist, Williams took a relaxed view of his own deathless prose, bending to the dictates of editors and conscious that what makes the paper today will wrap fish suppers tomorrow.
Fatally, he was just as nonchalant about his fiction and his abiding reputation, hard as it must have been to be best remembered for a movie he loathed.
Yet the forgettable 2011 remake of Straw Dogs had a silver lining – with the cheque, Gordon and Claerwen bought another new bathroom.