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In Douglas Stuart's new novel, an unbridgeable gap between father and son
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Douglas Stuart won the coveted Booker Prize in 2020 for his debut novel, "Shuggie Bain," about a boy in 1980s working-class Glasgow caring for his mother as she struggled with alcoholism. Geoff Bennett spoke to Stuart about his latest book, "John of ...
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- [00:00]
A
Hey, everybody.
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B
Jeff Bennett here. Welcome to another episode of Settle In. From PBS News, our guest today is Douglas Stewart. He's the renowned author behind the 2020 Booker Prize winning novel Shuggie Bain, which tells the story of a Young boy in 1980s Working class Glasgow caring for his alcoholic mother. His latest book is called John of John. It follows a young man as he returns to his home in the islands off the Scottish mainland, navigating relationships with his family, his religion and his sexuality. I spoke with Stewart about his new book, how he started writing, and how his own life is reflected in his work. So settle in and enjoy our conversation with Douglas Stuart.
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A
Douglas Stewart, it's great to see you. Thanks for being here.
- [00:43]
C
Thank you for having me.
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A
So much of your work is inspired by your early years. Tell me about growing up in Scotland. How did that shape you?
- [00:51]
C
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm a Scotsman. I grew up in Glasgow in the 1970s and 1980s. Although I've been an American. I've lived in America since about 2000. But I grew up in Glasgow, which is the large city at a really tumultuous time in the city's history. As you know, Britain deindustrialized really rapidly under the Thatcher government and unemployment in the city went to about 20%, which affected my grandfather, my father, all my siblings, you know, they closed shipbuilding and steel and coal mining. And so it was a time of real hardship in the city. And that was really the backdrop of my youth. On top of that, I was raised by a single mother because my father eventually abandoned us. And my mother, I think because of some things that were going, she was a wonderful woman, but because of some things that were going on in her personal life and also how she felt about sort of hope and the city. She had a problem with alcoholism, which eventually killed her when I was about 16. And so I found myself without parents at age 16. And I think in many ways a lot of my writing, although I've been in America all these years, is about trying to go back to the past and to sort of reclaim it for myself, to also add voices to the landscape that often aren't heard of. You know, certainly single mothers are often overlooked working class single mothers. And because I was a young gay boy, I felt like I was never quite part of the city's history.
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A
And you had to find your way to becoming an author. You took quite a circuitous route starting in fashion. Tell me, tell me about that journey.
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C
Yeah, I mean, I'm often asked as an author, you know, what's your favorite childhood book. And the truth is, I grew up in a house that didn't have books. We didn't read. When I was a. I was a kid, we were hyper literate because we were very, you know, education was wonderful, but we just didn't have books at home, and I didn't have any. You know, children both need access to books, but they also need peace in their environment to be able to read. And I didn't have peace at home. I also didn't really have peace at school. But as I said, When I was 16, my mother passed away very suddenly from her addiction. And school actually went from about 300 kids in my year to only 12 remaining in education for the last two years of high school. A lot of the other kids went out to find work or to do something. El and I suddenly found myself in an English class with these two teachers for eight hours a week. And I was the only kid in the class.
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A
Really?
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C
Really? Yeah. The only kid in our high school English class. And it was just in a really intense way to be introduced to books. But I suddenly found I had both the attention from a teacher who for the rest of their career was sort of very invested in crowd management and just keeping kids safe and on curriculum, and suddenly had like, all this time just to talk to a reader to teach me how to read and. But the truth is, at 16, if you leave high school at 18, it's too late for me to think about going to university to study English. And it's often reported that they turned me away from English because I was a working class kid. But I think they were guiding me towards something that would make me feel successful and I could have a living at. And so instead they turned me towards textiles. And actually I went to college to learn how to be a weaver and a knitter because I was a very creative kid. But at the end of the day, what does Scotland make if not lots of beautiful cloths? And so it was seen as a way to sort of get me in place and to help me to build a life for myself. But, you know, I didn't know that my education in textiles would lead me to a life in fashion. I didn't know that life in fashion would bring me to New York. But I worked for many large American brands. For Calvin Klein, for Ralph Lauren. I was at the Gap for 15 years designing menswear for Banana Republic. And it was at the height of my fashion career that I, you know, I'd always been a huge reader. And I thought I really want to be a writer. And so I sat down and wrote the first pages of Shuggie Bain. And it took me 10 years to write it, but I wrote it entirely in secret while I was working in fashion. And here I am today.
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A
10 years. 10 years to write it. There are a million different ways you could have said to yourself, this will never happen. I can let this go. Why did you persevere?
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C
That's a good question. I think I persevered, first of all, because it brought me some kind of joy and catharsis that nothing else in my life was giving me. I think I was feeling incredibly homesick because I'd been living in New York by that point for maybe 10, 12 years. And I felt not only did people not understand me as a Scotsman, but the city I grew up in had changed so ultimately so totally that in fact, that was lost not only to geography, but also to time. And so I think writing my debut novel was a chance for me to really sort of capture something that I felt I had lost and also to explain myself to myself. I felt very much as a young man who grew up in poverty and then a young professional man who was working in luxury fashion, I felt like two very different people. I felt very broken down, the middle. And so I think, you know, writing the story, writing about my hometown, was a way for me to feel whole again.
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A
And you've mentioned how you were intentional about capturing depictions, writing about working class life, writing about poverty. What do other depictions of working class life get wrong, do you think?
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C
Well, I think before we answer that, what we often don't see when we think about the great canon of queer literature is it never sort of tackles class. It's always told from a middle class point of view. There's always usually a university or a large cosmopolitan city. And essentially, when you're gay and you're working class, all the consequences are different. Your ability to sort of move about the world, what you're exposed to, and also the type of masculinity you're often surrounded by is so completely different. But I also think often, certainly in representations of the British working class, there's always an expectation, expectation of community and solidarity, and that is certainly there. You know, I was always raised to think only of the we and never to think of the I. You know, it comes from coming from a unionized place where not only were all the jobs very standardized, but the houses were determined by the jobs. And so the houses were standardized. But in order to access that solidarity, you need to conform you need to fit in. And as a young gay person, I just never fit in. I was, you know, my masculinity was just very different in very subtle ways. But those subtle were incredibly conspicuous to all the other boys and men around me. And so for me, I never felt I could access that solidarity of the working class. I was always made to feel on the outside of the only community I knew. And I think a lot of my writing is about characters who are trying to figure out where they belong when the only place they belong doesn't let them feel like they can rest.
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A
Well, let's talk about this book, John of John. Where did this story come from? And did you know where John and Cal were headed when you started?
- [07:35]
C
Yeah, I actually began this novel in 2019 when I was waiting for my debut novel, Shuggie Bain, to publish. You know, I was filled with anxiety, and I'd sort of taken my fashion career and put it on hiatus. And I was wondering if that was the right thing to do, to risk it on my dreams of becoming a writer. And so I was looking at my husband one day and I said, I have an idea for a new novel I want to write, but I have to go to the Outer Hebrides. And as a kid growing up in the inner city of Scotland, I'd never been to the islands. You know, it's a. The Outer Hebrides are an archipelago of islands that sit off the northwest coast of Scotland. And they're absolutely stunning, but they're quite difficult to get to. And so I think my husband was sick of dealing with my anxiety. And he said, 12 weeks away from me sounds like a great idea. And so he totally co signed me going to the islands. But I showed up on the islands in 2019 knowing only two people. And I was there, first of all, for 12 weeks. And I just sort of traveled up the islands and got a sense of my own country, a sense of the people. And I found that everybody was incredibly generous with their time. They were curious about what I was doing, what I was interested in. And I fell in love with the place. You know, I sort of journeyed up from. There's a very small island at the bottom called Vatersea. And I went up about four or five islands until I got to the Isle of Harris, which is almost near the very top. And when I got there, I realized that there was a convergence of fascinating things. First, it's the last stronghold of Scottish Gaelic, the language. It is the sort of home of a very conservative Calvinism. There is Beautiful Harris Tweed weaving. And then there's a crofting way of life that's sort of dying, you know, a subsistence farming that is not so common these days. And when I was on the island, I just thought, this is. There's. There is a story here. It's this wonderful, almost lunar landscape, very rocky, quite barren. The elements are very wild. And I just thought, oh, there's a story here. But I thought the story was about a young man who had gone to art school. And in that wonderful moment we all have when we first leave home and we think we can expand and become who we are going to be, my protagonist is actually called by his father and says, you have to come home. Your grandmother's sick. And so he does the dutiful thing. He loves his grandmother very much, and so he sort of puts his own life away and he comes home to the island. And as soon as he gets home, he realizes his grandmother's in fine health. And so something else is actually afoot. And I thought that was going to be the novel. But on my trip when I was on the islands, I was sort of sitting at a lot of kitchen tables, just meeting islanders. And I was about five weeks into my trip, and I had heard frequently when I would go from settlement to settlement that there would maybe be an unmarried man or some bachelors or spinsters in each settlement. And I often ask, you know, why didn't they marry? Why weren't they interested in marrying? And the answer would be, often, well, they missed their moment for love. The person would say, you know, there's a very short window, and you don't meet so many people when you live so far away. And, you know, they just miss their moment to meet that special person. And I'd been listening to that for some weeks. And I said just very casually, well, of course, some of them might be gay, and that makes it harder. And the woman I said it said, oh, no, no, no, that's not possible. And she was neither cruel nor homophobic, but for her, it was just not a thing she could imagine. And I thought, oh, there's the novel. It's not really about the son returning home. It's about the home he returns to and about the father and the grandmother who he's left behind, who couldn't quite become who they were meant to be either.
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A
Yeah, I want to come back to that. But a question about the setting, because the Western Isles feel so fully inhabited in this book, and now I know why you spent 12 weeks there. How much of your imagination fills in the rest of the place.
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C
Yeah, I think I would absolutely claim that this is not a work of a survey of the people that are there. It is entirely of my imagination. And in fact, the small settlement doesn't exist. It is entirely fictional. But, you know, I was. It was curious because it was such a. One of the things I had to do, I had to come to terms with as a very urban person, in the first instance, was the different rhythm of the islands. You know, it has many heartbeats, but one of the things, you know, there is the weather, the seasons, there is the heartbeat or the rhythm of sort of rearing sheep and farming sheep. But there is also the rhythm of what is said and what is unsaid. When people live in a place where they're very familiar with their neighbors and they will live next to them for generation upon generation, I had to understand that people were often very reluctant to speak the truth because they would have to deal with the consequences of whatever they said for a long time. And so as I was building the characters, although they are all of my imagination, I had to sort of create islanders that sort of were almost not wanting to face the emotional truth and were quite comfortable in the gap between what was known and what was spoken about. And that for me was sort of the biggest challenge, I think, because I think in fiction you often sort of create characters and then you set them to plot and you set them going. And this was about withholding an awful lot. And so trying to sort of understand the island way of life was important.
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A
And there's a real sense of isolation in the setting, the physical isolation and to your point, the emotional isolation, what does that kind of environment allow you to explore about identity and belonging?
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C
Well, you know, like all rural places, it suffers with great depopulation. And perhaps your viewers and listeners would know about the Highland Clearances, which cleared lots of Scottish people off the land, the wealthy landowners cleared people off the land in favour of sheep. And so I think the Outer Hebrides have lost about 45% of their population over the last century. And the population, the population that remains is often aging, like many rural places. And so for a 20 year old man, 22 year old man like Cal, our protagonist, is to come home and to think he's going to find love and to build a life is just naturally very difficult. There's a wonderful epigraph at the beginning of the novel that said, islanders the world over are born for exile. Islands give you the most privileged childhood, but then once you're grown, they give you no way to express it. And I think that was sort of what was stuck in my mind, that sort of loneliness and that search for love and, you know, and if you have this very short window to find love, then how does that form a person? All the characters in the novel, whether it is son or whether it's father, are after looking to find a version of themselves, but also to find the person that they want to spend their life with.
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A
Faith also plays a major role in this book, shaping how characters see themselves, see each other. How did you think about religion as a source of structure and at times a source of constraint in the lives of these characters?
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C
Yeah, you know, I think one of the things I had to do was to get past any preconceived notions of what the religion is on the islands. You know, Presbyterianism, this very sort of devout Presbyterianism, is often expressed as a very sort of dour religion and a little joyless sometimes, if I'm being very honest. And it's often represented in the media that way. But in my 12 weeks on the islands, I came to realize there's actually quite a schism there. There's a divide because the people are incredibly gentle, incredibly kind, very community minded, but because they believe deeply in the scripture. And the scripture is, I think, that we are born in sin, we are born in total depravity, and unfortunately, our reward is going to be hell at the end and God will save only very few of us. That's quite a hard path to God. And so what I discovered is you have very gentle people that believe a very difficult thing. And trying to sort of show that and portray that with nuance was a great challenge in the novel, but also a joy in many ways. But although the island religion is a minority religion, it has an effect on everything. They are very strict Sabbatarians. And so the island stops. Even if you're in the church, you're not. Everything halts on a Sunday. All work, all labor, even all joy, all recreation stops. And people are meant to sort of be very quiet, very still and give themselves over to the Lord. And so that was another sort of rhythm and heartbeat I had to get used to. But Cal, our protagonist who returns home, doesn't necessarily believe in the church. He hasn't felt his own calling to faith. Although his father is a deacon, he's actually a presenter. One of the wonderful things about faith on the island is because the Calvinist faith believes in no accompaniment. It nothing but bare worship of the Lord. John the Father is the presenter in the local church. So he sets the line, as you might hear in some gospel churches in the South. He sings the line, the congregation sings it back to him. Call and response, call and response. And it's a very, very beautiful thing when you hear it in this quite archaic Gaelic. But these two men have very different beliefs. They have very different paths to God. And Cal does not believe in his father for his father. It is everything in life, and. And Cal has to sort of work around that.
- [16:48]
A
The novel gives us two points of view. You've got John's, you've got Cal's. We understand each man completely, even when they're hurting each other. Reading it, I thought to myself, this. I mean, you talk about the challenge. I mean, that is a Herculean task, to structure a book that way. Why that approach?
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C
That's a great question. I think, emotionally, first of all, you know, I didn't know my own father, and I'd written two novels about a son's relationship with his mother and how that can sort of change a life. And I went into this thinking. I had wanted to explore what a love between a father and a son was almost in a completely imagined way, because I had no reference in my own life. But I had been raised around a lot of men who would put a lot of energy into avoiding the emotional truth. They would never speak about how they felt or what their own feelings were in life. You know, they did. The men that I was raised around did really difficult, dangerous jobs. And I think if they started to talk about their feelings, then everything would unravel. Because the very first thing you would say is, I don't want to go into a coal mine. I'm scared, I'm underpaid. I feel undervalued. And so instead, in order to protect themselves and to protect the families, they would say nothing about their feelings. And so the book becomes about that, in a way, they are sheep farmers, and John doesn't express how he feels very much, but they love each other, father and son. And a lot of the frustration is about the fact that they cannot communicate. They can't actually say who they are and what they want and how the other lets them down. Cal feels very much like his father wants to control him. And, you know, when masculinity is expressed very narrowly, something that fathers do is they try to make sure their sons come out in that image. And sort of, it's almost as a protective thing, you know, that your masculinity has to be tough and macho and quite stoic on the other hand, John the father, feels like Cal doesn't respect everything he has sacrificed, everything he has built, that Cal looks at their home and their farm and their croft almost like it's worthless and it's a bore, and who would want to do this? And so, in that sort of misunderstanding, the men are trying to love each other. But, you know, the thing is, it was almost a sort of exercise in how, as a writer's exercise in how claustrophobic could you make this relationship? How could you take these two characters that almost know everything about each other, but then won't say the things that are sort of closest to their hearts? And how far could I push men together in that way? You know, they work and they worship and they eat together. They're together all the time, and yet there's so much they're withholding.
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A
And John is a man capable of tremendous cruelty. I mean, the violence, the way he uses silence, the way he uses scripture as a weapon. And yet by the end of the book, the reader, I think it's fair to say, feels a certain tenderness toward him. How are you able to hold both of those things at once while writing that character?
- [19:40]
C
Yeah, I had always understood that John's cruelty or his anger was never actually generated by Cal. I always felt that he didn't love himself and that he didn't like himself very much. He says at some point in the book, he has not become the man he set out to be. And I think so much of the book is about inheritance. But one of the central things in the novel is, you know, crofting is subsistence farming. There is no great profit in it, but the only thing that they have of value is this little bit of rocky land and then this house that has sat there for generations. And John has been maintaining this for all of his adult life. In the thoughts that Cal would one day want to inherit it. He would give his son some land and a house, and Cal has no interest in it. He doesn't want to be on the island. He wants to be on the mainland. And as Cal sort of rejects his father's inheritance, in a way, John's furious about it, because why has he given his life to this project if your children don't want it? And so I could have John beauty, sort of stern and cruel and mean at times, because I also understood that he was just very deeply hurt. And I think our parents often make great sacrifices for all of us, and we don't often fully appreciate what they have done, and we don't often want it Sometimes, you know, perhaps they should ask us, but it was really about that.
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A
Do you write chronologically or do you think of an emotional scene and expand on that first?
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C
You know, I'm a very visual writer because I myself studied textiles and I went to art school. I see things almost as film in my mind. And when I see the piece of film and it feels full and I can imagine the characters in the world, down to the textures and the smells and the sound, I can really be in the room. Then I follow that vision in a way.
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A
Really?
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C
Yeah, really.
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A
How do you slow it down so that you don't get ahead of the film, first of all? So how do you not forget the film that's in your head? But then how do you slow it down so that you are articulating what you're thinking and seeing in your mind's eye?
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C
Yeah. Well, it becomes an obsession for me. It becomes a thing that really haunts me and I can't stop thinking about it. The struggle, the gap is always taking that and finding the words to capture the richness of it, that you can then project that film in someone else's mind. But for me, to your question, I sort of have that vision and then I write into the vision. The problem often becomes, is then when I have what feels like a first draft of a novel, it's a very disjointed thing, you know, it can feel sort of like out of place, and you have to sort of smooth it almost. Almost like a potter or whatever you would say, where you have all the raw clay and now you have to make it feel like a seamless hold. But, yeah, I sort of. I never try and stand in the way of my muses by putting form on something too soon because I feel like writing is quite a precious thing that can sort of get stuck or evaporate at any moment. And so I follow it where it will lead me and then see where I end up.
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A
Shuggie Bain took 10 years and faced a number of rejections before it was ultimately published. And then young Mungo followed it. How has your process changed or has it.
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C
I think in lots of ways my process hasn't changed at all. I mean, one of the things about Shuggie, the reason why it took 10 years, because I was working full time in a job that never ended, there is no conclusion in fashion. So you never worked on something and then thought, now I'm done one season,
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A
on to the next.
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C
That's right. There was always just more and faster and extra. And so in A way I had to often put my work aside for months, sometimes for half a year, because I would be too busy to sit at my desk. And so I think what that really taught me, though, is you've got to write and you've got to do it when you can do it. You cannot always get a room of your own. The conditions won't be ideal. And so you've almost got to be in a state of preparedness to do it at any time. And in a way, that's quite a healthy skill to have to always feel like your writing's going to be threatened. And so do it when you, you know, you know, get the crop while you can get the crop, I suppose. And so I do that. But I think what I've learned over the. Over the writing of the three novels is that each book is different and they come to me in different ways. Shuggie was such a portrait of a city and a place that I wanted it to be this huge tapestry. And so that really was like embroidering a rug in different places. Mungo's a plot driven book. And so that came in a way where I had to sort of consider plot first. And this book is a sort of gentler novel than my first two. And so that was really about creating characters in a way where the moment they felt like they were very real to me was the moment they said, this is now. What I want to tell you on
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A
the one hand, I want to resist the urge to put creative work into categories. But so much of your work focuses on this idea of masculinity under pressure. Do you view your books as a. As a trilogy in some ways, or are they each sort of separate reckonings?
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C
They're very separate reckonings because none of the characters carry through and the story and the peril and the plot is different and all. But I think of them almost as a loose triptych. You know, I like the metaphor of
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A
a tapestry, a loose tryptop. I'm writing that in my notes. I will be using that again. I do.
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C
I think of it. The thing that is behind all of my novels is a country. And it's a country in flux, you know, from how the devastating policies of Thatcherism in my first novel caught the working class unawares who had built the country and who were very proud with their work and then suddenly found themselves thrown on the scrap heap of history. My second novel is about post that when young men have sort of given up hope on themselves because they realize the government doesn't care and, and this last novel is looking at just a little beyond that when we start to get into the Blair years as the backdrop where the country is just on the cusp of great hope again, but lots of old ways of life are dying. This is, you know, crofting is really under threat. Rural communities are shrinking. And so in a way, although there is no through line of story, I hope I'm sort of painting a portrait of a nation that is changing.
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A
You won the Booker Prize in 2020, a genuinely life changing event.
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B
On the other hand, how do you
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A
protect the part of you that writes from a place where that kind of recognition can change a writer's approach, point of view and work?
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C
One of the most helpful things in that was the year I won the Booker Prize, was the year when we were all locked down for the pandemic. And so I won it from my own couch at home. So I didn't get to go. There's usually a big fancy Guildhall dinner where people are in sort of tuxes and fancy dresses. And I was literally sitting on my couch at home. And then about a year and a half after that was the first time I could leave that we could all leave and go and sort of mix and I could meet my readers and things. So in many ways my life didn't change at all. It was a very protective thing, I think that happened. It almost felt like it happened to someone else altogether. But the truth is prizes are nice and prizes are helpful, but all that matters is the work. I think the one thing that winning a prize like that does is it often it makes people sort of want to challenge you a little bit more. And so the work is scrutinized a little deeper. And certainly in Britain we have a very. We have a very different feeling about success than Americans do. What I love about being an American is people think sort of success, there'll be more success, they celebrate it and everyone can have some. And isn't it good to decide, see someone doing well?
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A
That's the American dream.
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C
That's the American dream. It's not the British dream. The British dream is that success is finite. And if you get it, I'm not going to get some. And also when you think about a class system, you know, we often talk about being oppressed from outside a class, you know, the middle class wanting to hold the working class in place. But sometimes if you do very well in the working class, the working class can look at you as well, like, are you, you know, are you a traitor? Are you trying to get out of here, are we not good enough? And so there's very complicated things with winning the Booker in Britain. But. But what can you do but write?
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A
Is there a character in John of John that you understand more than you wanted to?
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C
Surprisingly enough, I think I feel closest to the character of the grandmother, Ella. When I was writing the novel, if it was about the sort of how close these two men are, but how distant they are because they can't talk about their feelings, then I knew that I needed to introduce a character that. That could hold all of the truth, that just saw everything. And I was raised by these really strong women in Glasgow. My grandmother, My grandmother's friends, who were women who operated in a patriarchy where men controlled worship and labor and all recreation, sports, everything was really under the control of men. And yet the women absolutely ran the world, but they had to run it from the back. And a lot of what they had to spend their energy doing was making sure that men that didn't want to emotionally understand the world didn't cause any harm for the family or for themselves, and were also getting by all right. You know, the wisdom of my grandmother and my aunts and people like that was really outstanding because they had to sort of see what men weren't able to cope with and then hold all that truth and silence and be able to sort of make the world manageable for a lot of the men in her life. And so when I was writing these two very taciturn Presbyterian men, I thought, I want the antithesis of that. I want a woman who is so not afraid of men, who would speak her mind, who also is worthy of Cal's love. When Cal receives the phone call that says, your grandmother's sick, I needed him to be like, I will be right there. She is a woman that is worth loving, you know, and he comes home without hesitation. And that for me, was really my own grandmother. My grandmother loved to collect insults. Nothing tickled her more than hearing new swear words or hearing how kids sort of could be very irreverent. And she liked to bring that out in all of us because she felt that a great sense of humor or a way to sort of skewer the world was a great self defense against it. It meant people couldn't control you and that you couldn't ever be kowtowed. And so the character of Ella, I've never had more fun writing a character.
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A
We could certainly use more Ellas in the world these days.
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C
I think so. I think she thinks of herself as a gay icon, as well this character. So we'll see. You know, she's certainly her grandson's best friend.
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A
The book John of John Douglas Stewart. This is tremendous. Congratulations.
- [30:19]
C
Thank you very much.
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A
Thank you for speaking with me.
- [30:21]
C
Thank you.