Of Me and Others Read online

  Q. What was childhood like?

  A. Apart from the attacks of asthma and eczema, mostly painless but frequently boring. My parents’ main wish for me was that I got to university. They wanted me to get a professional job, you see, because professional people are not so likely to lose their income during a depression. To enter university I had to pass exams in Latin and mathematics which I hated. And of course there was homework. My father wanted to relieve the drudgery of learning by taking me cycling and climbing, but I hated enjoying myself in his shadow, and preferred the escapist worlds of comics and films and books: books most of all. Riddrie had a good library. I had a natural preference for all sorts of escapist crap, but when I had read all there was of that there was nothing left but the good stuff: and myth and legend, and travel, biography and history. I regarded a well-stocked public library as the pinnacle of democratic socialism. That a good dull place like Riddrie had one was proof that the world was essentially well organized.

  Q. When did you realize you were an artist?

  A. I did not realize it. Like all infants who were allowed materials to draw with, I did, and nobody suggested I stop. At school I was even encouraged to do it. And my parents (like many parents in those days) expected their children to have a party piece – a song or poem they would perform at domestic gatherings. The poems I recited were very poor A. A. Milne stuff. I found it possible to write verses which struck me as equally good, if not BETTER, because they were mine. My father typed them for me, and the puerile little stories which I sent to children’s radio competitions. When I was eleven I read a four-minute programme of my own compositions on Scottish BBC Children’s Hour. But I was eight or nine years old when it occured to me that I would write a story which would get printed in a book. This gave me a feeling of deliriously joyful power.

  Q. What sort of things did you draw when you were a child?

  A. Space ships, monsters, maps of imaginary planets and kingdoms, the settings for stories of romantic and violent adventure, which I told my sister when we walked to school together. She was the first audience I could really depend on in the crucial years between seven and eleven.

  Q. How did your parents react to your wish to become a professional artist.

  A. They were alarmed. They wanted art to enrich my life in the spare time left over from earning a wage, but they thought, quite correctly, that living to make it would bring me to dole-queues, and wearing secondhand clothes, and borrowing money, and having my electricity cut off – bring me to the state many respectable working folk are forced into during depressions, for reasons they cannot help. That I should choose to become a seedy parasite in order to make obscure luxury items hardly anybody wanted worried them, as it would worry me if my son took that course. So till a few years ago I was embarrassed when I had to tell people my profession. But that feeling of shame stopped last year when I earned enough to pay taxes, so it was not important.

  Q. Is it possible that your concentration on Scottish subject matter will make Lanark inaccessible to the non-Scottish?

  A. You would not be interviewing me if my book was only accessible to Scots. And all imaginative workers make art out of the people and places they know best. No good writer is afraid to use local place names – the bible is full of them. No good writer is afraid to use local politics – Dante peoples Hell, Purgatory and Heaven with local politicians. I don’t think Scotland a better country, Glasgow a better city than any other, but all I know of Hell and Heaven was learned here, so this is the ground I use, though sometimes I disguise the fact – just as Dean Swift pretended to describe an island people by pygmies, when describing England.

  Q. What made you write 1982 Janine?

  A. A wish to show a sort of man everyone recognizes and most can respect: not an artist, not an egoist, not even a radical: a highly skilled workman and technician, dependable, honest and conservative, who should be one of the kings of his age but does not know it, because he has been trained to do what he is told. So he is a plague and pest to himself, and is going mad, quietly, inside.

  Q. What are the main themes of your painting?

  A. The Garden of Eden and the triumph of death. All my pictures use one or other or both. This is nothing abnormal. Any good portrait shows someone at a point in the journey from the happy garden to the triumph of death. I don’t regard these states as far-fetched fantasies. Any calm place where folk are enjoying each other’s company is heavenly. Any place where crowds struggle with each other in a state of dread is a hell, or on the doorstep of hell.

  Q. How important to you is religion as a theme?

  A. Religion is not a theme, religion – any religion – is a way of seeing the world, a way of linking the near, the ordinary, the temporary with the remote, the fantastic, the eternal. Religion is a perspective device so I use it, of course. I differ from the church people in seeing heaven and hell as the material of life itself, not of an afterlife. Intellectually I prefer the Olympian Greek faith. Emotionally I am dominated by the Old Testament. Morally speaking I prefer Jesus, but he sets a standard I’m too selfish to aim for. I’m more comfortable with his daddy, Jehovah, who is nastier but more human. The world is full of wee Jehovahs.

  1. A gird was a thin metal hoop, at least waist-high to the child racing it but the bigger the better. The cleek was a short iron rod ending in a hook or ring, used by the racer as a handle to drive the hoop. The pleasure of this was the pleasure of running as fast as a wheel running beside you, a wheel which depended on your skill in turning corners, dodging obstacles and leaping over holes without you and gird losing speed or falling.

  2. A dunny is the ground floor exit from a close into a tenement back yard or green, which was usually some steps down lower than the close mouth or entrance from the paved street.

  3. Milton and Cromwell were of this sect, and during the Protectorate it nearly became the legally Established Church of England and Scotland. It resembled the Scottish Presbyterian Church in rejecting Episcopalian bishops, liturgy and ornament, but differed from it after 1688 by insisting that the congregation of each church should elect its ministers, so has never been supported by the revenues of the state.

  4. Remember Alexander Gray is writing in 1971.

  5. A walk of at least seventeen miles or 27.3 kilometers.

  6. In 20th Century’s first half Beardmore & Co. was the largest engineering firm in Britain, building parts of Merchant and Royal Navy warships, locomotive engines, motor cars and aircraft, including the first airship to make a double-crossing of the Atlantic. (See Keay’s Collin’s Encyclopeadia of Scotland.)

  7. This was a trip by paddle steamer from Broomielaw, at the centre of Glasgow, to one of the many resorts on the Firth of Clyde and its islands, the trippers usually returning the same day.

  8. This is an error. Edward VII was crowned in 1902 when Alec Gray was five. He is remembering the coronation of George V in 1911 when my Dad was thirteen.

  9. A pend is an passageway into a lane through the ground floor of a tenement, usually with upstairs flats above it entered from the communal close.

  Another Not Scotland

  The Edinburgh Book Festival Ltd (International, of course) hired me to write this for publication by Cargo Publishing 2012 in a boxed set of four slim hardcover books with the titles Here and There, Somewhere and Everywhere. The set was named Elsewhere. The writers, asked “to explore what it meant to them to be elsewhere,” came up with prose grouped (said said the blurb) so that “Here were stories of home, There was travel and exploration, Somewhere a land of magic and imagination and Everywhere was what young adults find elsewhere.” My piece was 6th in Here. This essay spans more of my life that any other, showing how the more I have aged, the more interesting remote past has become to me. It does. Yes indeed.

  NOBODY IS MORE LIKE GOD than a baby. Babies live in eternity, a present tense without past, future and thought. When hungry or in pain their whole universe starves and is wholly evil until it supplies what they
need, failing which they abolish it by dying. When fed, comfortable, awake they are fascinated by sensations, smells, tastes, noises, lights, colours – everything perceivable. Slowly they start noticing bodies besides theirs.

  As a baby I was taken out in a pram by my mother’s sister, Aunt Annie, through Riddrie Knowes near my home. Knowes is a Scots word for hills, which for years I thought meant trees, because though she pushed me uphill to reach it, we then went along an unpaved road between high elm and beech trees. Years later she told me that one day a dead crow fell into the pram from an overhead branch, perhaps struck dead by heart failure. This unexpected corpse did not hurt me, but she said that when we passed under that tree on later perambulations I looked up as if expecting another bird to fall from it. This showed I was starting to associate ideas, as Hobbes, Locke and Hume called the process. Pavlov later proved it anatomically by opening dogs’ cheeks to show they salivate on hearing dinner bells. More experience of that tree must have taught me that it was not a dependable source of dead birds, but proved I had begun connecting past events, however mistakenly, with future expectations.

  Before my son could walk or talk I saw that happening in his face when he was fed his first spoonful of ice cream. First a brief frown – What is this? – then a look of shock – It freezes! Hurts! His face tensed, mouth opened as he drew a deep breath to bellow out his rage, but before that cry emerged he suddenly stopped – his mouth was thawing the freezing cream, the pain of his cold palate roof was giving way to lovely new sweetness on his tongue. He swallowed, licked his lips, opened his mouth for more. The second spoonful made the first range of expressions happen again, but faster. When the last of the ice cream was eaten he was welcoming the coldness as an introduction to something better. Thus we learn to think, while discovering we are not God, but a body in times and places others share.

  Wordsworth is surely right to say that the younger we are the more wonderful appear realities like rainbows, sunlight, storms, flowers, mountains etcetera. So what also arouses our early appetite for tales of magic gifts, impossible monsters, fantastic kingdoms? I seem to remember that no sooner was home a familiar place to me than I wanted stories to take me elsewhere, to extravagantly different places. Two or three centuries ago some authors decided that fairy tales were invented by superstitious nursemaids who used them to fill the minds of respectable people’s children with nonsense. They wrote stories for children about children, tales about children who told lies and were disobedient so came to really bad ends, good children who sometimes suffered unfairly but were at last rewarded or else died and went to Heaven.

  Two very different poets hated such tales – Sam Johnson, a very sensible Christian, and Sam Coleridge, an intensely intellectual scatterbrained Romantic. They agreed that young children needed tales of giants and magical wonders – “to stretch their little minds” said Johnson. The reason was obvious long before Alfred Adler advertized his inferiority complex. Infants live in a world of giants because even children a year or two older tower over them. They can hardly ever redress unfair treatment so like imagining help from fairy godmothers, an Aladdin’s lamp, a Wizard of Oz. As a child in the 1930s and 40s I gloried in such stories and the Disney movies based on them, which were also wise enough to contain believable nightmares – the wicked witch’s gloating mockery of the skeletal prisoner dead from thirst, Dumbo Jumbo’s mother chained as a mad elephant when she revolts against her child being made a clown, Pinocchio growing donkey ears and tail after joining an orgy of vandalism. My appetite for fantasy was healthily abated between the years of eight and ten when I lived beside a Yorkshire market town.

  Our home was a bungalow at the side of a rural lane. On the other side was, a neglected field with trees and clumps of bushes, also an overgrown garden with an old draw-well smothered in ivy. I don’t recall even a ruined house nearby. Here with one or two school friends I made dens – secret places inside bushes or up trees which we wanted nobody else to see or know about. Much healthy open-air business was enjoyed searching for and making these as we explored the banks of the river Wharf, or cycled on country roads to places like the Jackdaw Crags beyond the town, looking for new ones. I recall nothing wild or remarkable done in these dens, not even stories we told each other there. Then in 1944 our family returned to Riddrie, the housing scheme in North-East Glasgow where I was born, and been as happy as most well-treated children, but which now felt like confinement. Secret dens could not be built in our back green or the adjacent public park. The banks of the nearby Monkland Canal would have done, being sufficiently wild, but were forbidden to me as dangerous. Other boys played outdoors by kicking balls about. I didn’t enjoy that. Fantastic fiction became my obsession. I visited Riddrie Public Library four or five times a week, never taking much more than a day to read a whole book.

  The genre I preferred began with someone who seemed like me in a commonplace world, who found an exit into a wonderland, a place of exciting adventure. The earliest classics of this genre were Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, and I had heard others dramatised on the BBC’s Children’s Hour – The Magic Bedknob, The Wind in the Willows, The Box of Delights. A sub-division of this had children who found lost or hidden lands. Prodigiously productive Enid Blyton wrote a shelf of books about these – The Valley of Adventure, Sea of Adventure, Island of Adventure, and others. In adolescence, I enjoyed similar books written for immature adults – Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, Rider Haggard’s She, The Return of She and Allan Quartermain. There were films about them – King Kong and Lost Horizon. In a BBC radio dramatisation I heard H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds and at once ordered through Glasgow Public Libraries all his early romances, which I still think are science fiction’s unsurpassable best. His The First Men on the Moon shows an impossible adjacent planet, yet imagined in gloriously convincing detail that also makes it excellent social criticism. That novel, his The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds describe exotic worlds elsewhere, but are no more escapist fiction than Gulliver’s Travels and Orwell’s 1984.

  Before leaving secondary school I decided to write a book about a fantastic world of my own invention that would also grotesquely satirise the world I knew. In planning this I was inspired by Kafka’s The Trial, translated by Edwin and Willa Muir, and also by their foreword saying that Kafka’s protagonist, like John Bunyan’s Pilgrim, was seeking salvation in a world where neither Heaven nor Hell are clearly signposted. This novel in which a bureaucracy uses a rented bedroom, the attic of a slum tenement, a pub’s bar room and a cathedral outside service time to entangle a man could be happening in Glasgow, and the bureaucrats were more humane and believable than Orwell’s Thought Police. Kafka’s junior bank manager was so ruthlessly selfish that I never doubted his guilt. And now I was also reading books about the growing pains of young men in worlds nearer my own in time and space – David Copperfield, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Sons and Lovers. I realised that books which, as Milton says, the world would not willingly let die must present real local experiences such as those Dickens, Joyce and D.H. Lawrence suffered, even if they were combined with strange Heavens, Hells and magic wonderlands elsewhere. Many books in the Bible did that, and most folk tales, the stories of Hans Christian Andersen and poems I loved and knew by heart, especially the Scottish Border Ballads. In a public library (Denistoun, not Riddrie) I found Tillyard’s The English Epic and its Background which, after briefly surveying the great epic poems and histories of Greece, Rome, Italy and Portugal, concluded that since Milton’s time, great epics were likely to be in prose, and mentioned Walter Scott’s most Scottish novels as almost (though not quite) amounting to a national epic. So I set out to write an epic, and a Scottish one.

  Like many Scots children’s primary and secondary schooling, mine had said nothing about Scottish culture. Until the 1970s our state schools had generally a broader and higher standard than their English equivalents, but aimed to qualify the smartest pupils for high positions in London, Oxford, Cambridg
e, Canada, Australia and elsewhere, so in Scotland English literature was taught as if no Scot had contributed to it, though some Irish and American authors were named. We had heard of Robert Burns because most of our parents knew some of his poems and many were sung on the BBC Scottish Home Service, but R.L. Stevenson was dismissed as a writer for very young children and the only Walter Scott novel given to us was Ivanhoe. This tells how the Normans in England became acceptable to Saxons they had conquered – a fine lesson for Scottish children! For most of the 20th century the poet Hugh MacDiarmid was treated as a pest by Scottish politicians and ignored as a poet by British academics, though his work and critical writing had won the attention of French and American professors of literature. In 1958, Hogg’s The Private Memoirs & Confessions of a Justified Sinner, with a preface by Andre Gide, came to Glasgow Public Libraries and me, proving that a Scottish tradition of combining local and supernatural events existed in prose as well as poetry. But to work well in a book, the Scottishness of Scottish characters must be taken for granted. Dostoyevsky slightly spoils some great novels with sentences about Russian-ness. Gillespie by MacDougall Hay is a nearly great novel about a dull but cunning, mean, greedy grocer becoming wealthy in a Highland fishing village, blighting lives around him as he does so. This account of late 19th century capitalism at work through interesting people in a small town would be almost as good as Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge and Brown’s The House with the Green Shutters, were it not nearly ruined by a first chapter suggesting that Gillespie’s parents were doomed to produce a monster by their weird, uncanny Scottish home. I saw that the local setting of my epic, like the supernatural part, must be shown without comment in convincing details.