Old Men in Love

by Alasdair Gray

  I stared at her and she stared expressionless back. Her face was freckled, without make-up, not glamorous, not ugly, not exactly plain. She wore a leather jacket and baggy jeans with cuffs turned up to show laced-up, thick-soled boots. I said coarsely, “Sorry hen, you’re no my type.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  Her impudence was not surprizing. All women think they know me better than I do. I groaned, shoved the bottle into her hands, rushed back to the living room where the three others sat giggling and drinking the last of the brandy. I changed the ragtime roll for the first Wagner that came to hand, sat down and, pedalling furiously, played the overture to The Meistersingers as loud and fast as possible. Someone shouted, “So you want rid of us?”

  “Yes,” I said, standing up. They had finished the wine and still sat round the fire, the three youngest staring at their boss who, without moving, said slowly, “I think you owe Is more than biscuits and three swallies of booze.”

  “You mean money,” I said, “Here’s what’s on me, there’s no more in the house.”

  I dropped my wallet open on the coffee table so they saw the notes inside, then chucked coins from my pockets on top. Isabel and the other two stared at me, then at their boss, then at the money. One (not Isabel) stretched a hand toward it. The boss said, “Leave it. Come on yous, we’re going.”

  She stood up and led them out. I hurried before them to open the front door. The boss took longer to put her coat on and left last, saying as she passed me, “You havnae heard the end of this.”

  I lost my temper, thrust my face close to hers and with what felt like a thoroughly evil grin whispered, “If that’s a threat, I’m no feart.”

  We stared at each other for a moment then I slammed the door on her.

  And went upstairs weary to bed. Why did I say that last thing to her in the voice of a tough Blackhill schoolboy?7 I understand myself as little as the young things I pick up. I’m sure life is easier for Italians, or was before the Counter Reformation.

  This morning received letter from Joy Hendry saying she will print a special edition of Chapman with all my first chapters of Who Paid for All This? as a work-in-progress, if I give her a prologue explaining and outlining the whole book. Very encouraging. I will tackle it at once, giving it an epigraph from my favourite novel.

  8: PROLOGUE TO HISTORICAL TRILOGY

  “The scope and end of learning is to allow perfection to distributive justice, giving everyone his due, procuring good laws and causing them to be observed: an achievement really generous, great, deserving the highest praise.”

  – from Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

  When a student of the Humanities in 1958 I intended to become a great writer. My ambition was as strong (I thought) as any that had driven Shakespeare, Burns or Tolstoy, but private efforts proved I was a poor versifier and could never be a playwright or novelist, being able to write brisk dialogue but incapable of inventing a plot. I was therefore only fit to become a historian, a biographer or blend of both in the manner of Plutarch. I did not at once try to write anything of that sort because the available material was of literature, religion, science and philosophy – the complete records of the human race, so any selection from them would be accidental if not harmonized by a mighty idea. Gibbon’s mighty idea showed the slow ruin of the Roman empire making room for the nations of Christian Europe and Arabic Islam. Marx showed all history as a struggle between social classes for the ownership of surplus wealth. My own schooling had described history as a forward march from an age when low-browed cavemen killed their meat with stone clubs, to my own time when every sane British adult could vote for the government of their welfare state which had achieved full employment, abolished abject poverty, and made good health care and education and legal justice available to every citizen. I did not doubt the essential truth of such big ideas, but knew I could write nothing worth reading unless excited by a big new idea of my own, or else by a new way of making an ancient truth look like new.

  One Saturday morning I visited Renfield Street, a short street of shops in central Glasgow. It joins Sauchiehall Street, Bath Street and Argyle Street to the main bridge over the Clyde, so is always throng with pedestrians and vehicles. It is now almost incredible that second-hand books were once sold from flat-topped wheelbarrows at the corners of blocks on the western side. The spate of private cars must have swept these away in the 1960s, but in my second university year I found on one a tattered Penguin paperback of 19th century verse called Hood to Hardy. Opening it at random I found it had work by poets my teachers had never mentioned, and as I read the street noises seemed to withdraw, leaving me in a silence with these words:

  This Beauty, this Divinity, this Thought,

  This hallowed bower and harvest of delight

  Whose roots ethereal seemed to clutch the stars,

  Whose amaranths perfumed eternity,

  Is fixed in earthly soil enriched with bones

  Of used-up workers; fattened with the blood

  Of prostitutes, the prime manure; and dressed

  With brains of madmen and the broken hearts

  Of children. Understand it, you at least

  Who toil all day and writhe and groan all night

  With roots of luxury, a cancer struck

  In every muscle; out of you it is

  Cathedrals rise and Heaven blossoms fair;

  You are the hidden putrefying source

  Of beauty and delight, of leisured hours,

  Of passionate loves and high imaginings;

  You are the dung that keeps the roses sweet

  I did not know what amaranths were or why they perfumed eternity, but that verse shook my intelligence awake by contradicting everything I had been taught about history, literature and life, and would be officially taught for years to come. Since then evidence that this grim view of civilization is strictly true keeps hitting me in the eye. Recently I found this passage in a second-hand paperback called Who Killed Tutankamun? by Bob Brier, an American Egyptologist:

  The density and quality of bones reveal a person’s social status and occupation. For instance, manual labour increases muscle size which causes bone to thicken, so a single arm can tell us if the dead man was a labourer or a man of leisure. In the remains of a queen from 4,000 years ago I had never seen such delicate bones; it was as if she had never lifted her hand and travelled everywhere in her sedan chair. The cemetery of the workmen who built the pyramid at Giza held the bodies of men who moved heavy loads. Their spines were severely deformed, especially the lumbar vertebrae which ultimately bore most of the stress.

  Forget the Pyramids. Suddenly all I had been so blandly taught made new, better sense and included all the great Athenian tragedies of sexual and political conflict lasting from generation to generation, with more than one great chorus bitterly chanting “Not to have been born is best.”8 Every nation in the world – Jewish or Roman, Spanish or British, German or American or Russian – has been made by a devil’s bargain, usually a war of conquest, letting a well-organized lot master arts and sciences while treating the defeated as shit. Deep thinkers have never stopped worrying about this devil’s bargain. Buddha and Jesus tried persuading people to withdraw from it. That is why early Christians believed Satan was Lord of the Earth and all nature damnable, especially human nature that let a minority enjoy earthly possessions – no wonder the first Christian Jews converted so many women and slaves whose lives had been cheapened by Roman conquest. Nietzsche despized Christians for trying to obey Jesus and love those who hated them, bless those who cursed them and willingly give what little they owned to whoever needed it more, or merely demanded it. I am too weak to despize them. This doctrine let them exert the only moral authority possible for the otherwise powerless. Nietzsche had no right to scorn them for using it.

  This pure sad Christianity was warped when rich powerful folk adopted it. Early Roman Emperors thought it a conspiracy to undermine their Empire and tried to extirpa
te it. A later one made it the Empire’s official religion, partly because it was spreading but also because its doctrines stopped slaves and poor folk rebelling, so the faith spread far and wide, many of the poor accepting Hell on Earth because they hoped to change places with the rich after death. Then states arose in Renaissance Italy where life for many became pleasanter. They revived the old pagan idea that the human body and its appetites were more Good than Evil, so the natural world was God’s handiwork and not inherently damnable. European trade and conquest increased with experimental sciences, now called natural philosophy. In the 17th and 18th centuries Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Newton and Leibnitz were both Christians and great mathematicians who believed the natural universe with its infinite multitude of suns and worlds was created and managed by God down to the very last detail. Only Pascal – a devout Catholic whose faith was close to Calvinism – found the idea terrifying. Most educated people were comforted by it. There have always been atheists – rich and poor folk who saw that bosses used religion to exploit others, and thought it a fraud. It became possible for prosperous people to say, at least in private, that if the natural universe was a huge machine running as Newton described, no god was needed to keep it going. But only a god could create it, and start it running so beautifully! was the reply of those who thought the only evil in the universe was human greed and stupidity. In his Essay on Man Alexander Pope set out, like Milton, To justify the ways of God to man, and after finding human pride the only source of evil concluded that Everything that is, is right. Leibnitz tried to show that every form of evil was essential to the workings of a splendid universe so Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

  Some great intelligences disagreed – Dean Swift and Doctor Johnson, Christians with some faith in God and common sense but none in philosophical systems, Christian or scientific. Johnson said of the Essay on Man, “Never has penury of knowledge and vulgarity of sentiment been so happily disguized.” And Voltaire thought the machinery of the universe imperfect. He cartooned Leibnitz as Dr Pangloss who travels through Europe with his innocent pupil, Candide. They find Protestant states brutalized by wars for the glory of a Prussian king, Catholic states where questioners are tortured and burned by the Inquisition, Holland where all religions are tolerated but it is a crime to be poor. Accompanied by a sailor they arrive at Lisbon, capital of Portugal, in time for the 1755 earthquake.

  They felt the earth tremble beneath them. The sea boiled up in the harbour and broke the ships which lay at anchor. Whirlwinds of flame and ashes covered the streets and squares. Houses came crashing down. Roofs toppled on to their foundations and the foundations crumbled. Thirty thousand men, women and children were crushed to death under the ruins.

  The sailor chuckled: “There’ll be something worth picking up here.”

  He rushed straight into the midst of the debris and risked his life searching for money. Having found some, he ran off with it to get drunk; and after sleeping off the effects of the wine, he bought the favours of the first girl of easy virtue he met amongst the ruined houses with the dead and dying all around. Pangloss pulled him by the sleeves and said, “This will never do, my friend; you are not obeying the rule of Universal Reason.”

  “Bloody hell,” replied the other. “I am a sailor and have trampled on the crucifix four times in my trips to Japan. I’m not the man for your Universal Reason.”

  Candide had been wounded by splinters of flying masonry and lay helpless in the road, covered with rubble.

  “For heaven’s sake,” he cried to Pangloss. “Fetch me some wine and oil! I am dying.”

  “This earthquake is nothing new,” replied Pangloss, “the town of Lima in America experienced the same shocks last year. The same causes produce the same effects. There is certainly a vein of sulphur running under the earth from Lima to Lisbon.”

  “Nothing is more likely,” said Candide,“but oil and wine, for pity’s sake!”

  “Likely!” exclaimed the philosopher. “I maintain it’s proved.”

  Yet something in humanity refuses to lie down under disasters and injustices, hence the French and other revolutions aiming to make a just world for everyone – no wonder great poets welcomed it. In Britain the revolution was purely industrial, making big landowners wealthier and enlarging the middle class. Dickens and Hardy showed how miserable this made life for most folk, though Dickens usually softened that message by giving happy endings to pleasanter characters. Wealth gained or sought by evil means inspired most great masterpieces – Goethe’s Faust, Stendhal’s Red and Black, Wagner’s Ring, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, all Ibsen’s plays. Strangest of all, best-sellers about supernatural, evil bargains were written by folk without faith in the supernatural – Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Trilby, Dracula, A Picture of Dorian Gray, The Wild Ass’s Skin. The last is Balzac’s only supernatural novel. His realistic ones indicate that criminal bargains are well worth striking if you are smart enough to keep the gains. I did not want to believe that. I was sure that all great efforts to achieve liberty, equality and fraternity in Cromwell’s Britain, Robespierre’s France, Lenin’s Russia had been good efforts, though powerful cliques had spoiled them by helping dictators seize power, power they mainly obtained in 1789 France and 1916 Russia when foreign armies invaded to stop the revolutions.

  Despite which most children of even poor people have enough to believe life is basically good, and on this basis teachers and governments promote the lie that we need not question those running our states, because they are good states, and in safe hands. I decided to examine closely some states widely advertized as good and, without cynicism, show how the goodness was purchased by badness.

  I did not glimpse all this in Renfield Street as I held in my hand the tattered book I bought for ninepence. The jacket told me the price when new had been 2/6, meaning half a crown, meaning 30 pence when 12 pennies made a shilling and 240 a pound. How queer that old money now seems! I still have and love that book. Among notes at the end I read that the author of the poem had been: John Davidson [1857-1909].9 Born at Barrhead, Renfrewshire, son of a Dissenting Minister, Schoolmaster in Scotland until 1889 when he settled in London and published various plays and volumes of verse. He died in circumstances that suggested suicide. Barrhead is a small factory town in the Renfrew Hills six or seven miles south of Glasgow. It made lavatory pans, and I think could be reached by tram before 1963 when the trams were scrapped. I began thinking that another obscure individual in the west of Scotland (me) might write something great that would open people’s eyes as Davidson had opened mine. Great writers had been trying to do so for centuries but their works were taught by teachers with eyes firmly shut, so the eye-opening effort was endless. When I tackled it I would be recentest in a line of great tacklers. The job was obviously endless.

  At first my book was going to be a broad historical survey until a remark by Sherlock Holmes directed me to Winwood Reade’s Martyrdom of Man, which showed that survey had been written. Reed describes mankind originating in Africa when climate and land made clothing no problem and food was got easily. Overpopulation drove us into the valleys of Egypt and the Euphrates, where we could only feed our great numbers by inventing complex irrigation systems maintained by an intellectual minority. These were the first civilizations, since when civilizations had been ruled by elites using religion and armed forces to control the majority. The continual spread of humanity has ever since formed nations where warfare is unending. Both poverty and refusal to suffer it constantly drove folk to invent new means of livelihood, or plunder their neighbours, or do both at once. Scientific knowledge (said Reade, writing in 1872) was replacing religion as a way of mastering folk, which was why Europe had come to dominate the world. Men and women would only be freed from lives of torture by finding how to make good food cheaply out of minerals, and by solving the overpopulation problem through emigration to other planets.

  The accuracy of Reade’s account cannot be improved and
is not much hurt by ending in a glimpsed utopian future, just as the accuracy of Karl Marx’s view of history as class warfare is true despite his prophecy of a workers’ revolution creating a classless world where all government withers away. If global businesses ever make food or any essential thing cheaply they will always sell it as dearly as possible, to keep riches and poverty eternal. Davidson was not a Socialist and would have taken that for granted. I could never write a broad historical survey as good as Reade’s and Marx’s, so I decided to select three triumphant historical periods and show both their virtues and the devil’s bargain that created them from the viewpoint of real people. Plato’s Dialogues showed how Periclean Athens might be dramatized round Socrates. Browning’s poem Fra Lippo Lippi showed a way into Renaissance Florence. I took longer finding a guide into the glories and miseries of Victoria’s reign. What real person would help me to dramatize that over-weaning, self-satisfied nation brilliantly described by Dickens, George Eliot and Hardy? Even Sherlock Holmes’ tales are mostly about private fortunes created or inherited through crimes in India, Australia, America or piracy on the high seas. My only chance of a story that would not be adversely compared with theirs was to make it factual – not entirely factual for I would invent conversations – but factual enough to be supported by the historical evidence.

  One day in Voltaire and Rousseau’s second-hand bookshop, then at the corner of Gibson Street and Park Road, I found Aubrey Menen’s novel The Abode of Love, about a sect created around 1845 by Henry James Prince, a former Church of England curate. Menen describes Prince as a smart hypocrite who exploits rich dupes with the help of a lawyer. I knew that could not be true, since all who successfully fool many for a long time have first fooled themselves. I searched Glasgow University library’s special collections and found Prince’s published diary, sermons, and some contemporary accounts of him. These told a stranger story than Menen’s.