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Inside Working Class Literature

by Hugh Blanton

The problem with so called working class literature is that it’s mostly written by people who are not working class; or often even by people who have never had to work a shit job at all. Much of this less-than-authentic literature comes off as as romanticized poppycock (to actual working class people) or as condescending hero worship. Michael Dorris’s Working Men (Henry Holt, January 1993) is part of the latter—Dorris being an academic making his living with tenure and grants (he quit academia to write full time after a $1.5 million advance for Crown of Columbus). Even Charles Bukowski, who actually did work the shit jobs he wrote about, was just shopping for experience before he finally settled in and began his career in the post office. When the going got tough, Bukowski went back home to live in his childhood bedroom (and had the temerity to complain when his parents charged him rent).

There simply isn’t much authentic working class literature about; working class people not having the time to sit and scribble. Even for those who have the desire to write there is a hesitancy—they haven’t had the training and fear their writing will be too poor to be accepted and published. Poet George Vincent found (and made!) the time to sit and write between working twelve-hour shifts at a pizza joint. The result is his debut chapbook Inside the Blueberry Gown. The dominant theme is of course the job he works and also the ever-present drinking that goes along with it. The poems here are not titled and move along in a singular narrative taking place among the council flats of Newcastle Upon Tyne where Vincent and his girlfriend (or maybe wife) Mia live and work.

Vincent’s style is blunt, as you would expect from a working class writer, and sometimes crass: ‘Because I farted/ And I thought I/ Shit myself’ His capitalization is whimsical, sometimes beginning new lines with capitals and sometimes not. He smuggles in some good subtle rhymes from time to time, a reader not paying attention might miss them:

No thought of life

Sense of wrong, or right

Like a moth in a dark room

Which once was light

On each road could crash

And there’s the glass and metal

Death

And sometimes not so subtle: ‘With our pints against the sky/ We live like the butterfly’.

The narrator of these poems is not ambitious: ‘And I too/ Am in no rush to make/ More money/ Or move up/ Move anywhere’, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t want a better job and a better life. However, work being the bane of the drinking class, the time spent on drunkenness and hangovers impedes upward mobility. (He does stop drinking for a week when his ocular migraines become too much to bear.) The drinking is also straining his relationship with Mia: ‘You can only stand so much of each other/ So much of drinking and working/ Old arguments refashioned/ Into fresh insults.’ (Notice the drinking comes first.)

Inside the Blueberry Gown is both poetic and narrative, it’s a short chapbook that can be read in one sitting. It’s economical (Vincent says a lot with a little) and gives the reader a detailed glimpse of the impoverished working class without the social injustice bleating that comes from the advocates of the working class who try to speak on their behalf.

Inside the Blueberry Gown
by George Vincent, 59 pages
Alien Buddha Press, $11.25