It is surprising that a designer who has worked for brands as famous as Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein tries his luck in the literary arena. However, Douglas Stuart has done it, which in his case is even more creditable. Firstly, because he lacked experience in the field of writing, and secondly, because he rarely frequents intellectual circles. If literature demands painstaking work, silence and calm, then fashion is the opposite: ephemeral brilliance that lasts for a season.
Perhaps the blank page allows the exercise of memory better than the design. Although based in New York for two decades, the writer has Glasgow in his blood. In working-class, railway and steelworks Glasgow, a city stultified by violence, alcohol and an overflowing testosterone, a gay boy grew up who, in the midst of that peasantry of rude and rude guys, it was an impossible mission to express his homosexuality. That kid, Douglas Stuart, 46, won the Booker Prize in 2020 for his hit ‘Shuggie Bain Story.’ Stuart has just published in Spain ‘A place for Mungo’ (Random House), a learning novel with Dickensian flavors that tells the love story of two teenagers who live in a working-class neighborhood in the depressed and deindustrialized Glasgow of the nineties.
Stuart drinks from his own biography to light his second novel. «If you have money, you can escape this violence, you can change schools or go to a psychologist. But for the working class there is no way out, it is subordinated to violence. What I was interested in reflecting is to what extent violence and tenderness can coexist; That fight is universal, ”says the writer at a press conference via Zoom.
«If you have money you can escape the violence, change schools or go to the psychologist. For the working class there is no way out»
Douglas Stuart thinks that homophobia is in all corners of society. No country escapes that sullen presence. “Gay people know that the threat of violence follows us everywhere, it’s always lurking, we always have to be vigilant.” “I grew up on those streets and felt invisible as a queer man,” Suart alleges. The son of an alcoholic mother, as a boy he lived in a house without books, despite which he experienced the dazzling discovery of literature at age 17, when he immersed himself in reading for the first time. From reading stories, he went on to write them. If in the ‘Shuggie Bain Story’ he inquired into femininity, in ‘A Place for Mungo’ he explores the masculine idiosyncrasy.
“The Protestant ethic is strict and stoic. With her, no questions are asked. What must be avoided is sin, and that is present in those hard men who keep their feelings hidden”, argues the writer. “When I was a kid I felt very lonely because there was no ‘queer’ literature and less related to poverty,” argues Douglas Stuart, who continues to be astonished at being compared to Dickens, an author whom he has not seen much, but whose stories permeate the British atmosphere.
Ken Loach
On the other hand, he does feel dependent on the social realism of the British filmmaker Ken Loach and the Italian neorealism films, whose plots show the world of the working class without half measures. «We are used to seeing privileged people appear in literature, people from the middle classes or with a certain glamor, which I flatly reject. It is urgent to address stories about the working class. It is a novel that talks about very hard things, but in which there is also a lot of dignity, ”says Stuart, a victim of Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies.
For the Scottish novelist, the violence that permeates his book is the result of the confluence of two factors: boredom and the urgent need to feel like the leader of the pack, an alpha male to whom colleagues pay homage. «You had to preserve your reputation. It was even funny to fight and then drink your fill with friends and remember what had happened. In the background there are very tribal behaviors.
The protagonist’s name, Mungo, is borrowed from the patron saint of Glasgow, a miracle-working saint with much prestige in the Scottish city. If religious symbology is appealed to, the boy has something of a martyr, as he sinks into the ordeal of “sexual exile” that Glasgow meant, something that fortunately has changed in recent years, to the point that the city is a one of the most welcoming to the LGTBI community. “It was meant to reflect the beauty of a first love and how monsters were the adults you were supposed to trust.”
In his youth, homosexuality weighed like a stone, it was a hidden sexual orientation, even in novels, but reality sheds its skin. Now there can be many stories as empowering as they are tragic. ‘Queer’ literature is taking a big step towards the variety of narratives.