It is queer how glibly I write speeches for folk whose language I do not know, and who painted wall pictures I have only seen in books, and were inspired by a Christianity in which I have no faith, in a land I have never visited. All of them are highly educated. How can I write convincing speeches for ordinary peasants, shopkeepers and craftsmen without going to Italy and learning the language?
13: ANGUS CALDER’S LETTER17
Old Grindle’s Bookshop
Spittal Street, Tollcross
Edinburgh
2003
Dear John Tunnock Mate,
I call you Mate because that is a common English way of sounding friendly and I am English. Like you I am a middle-class Socialist of the Robert Owen-John Ruskin-William Morris kind, but would feel pretentious if I called you Comrade. Have just read your first chapters in Joy Hendry’s special edition of Chapman. Great stuff, Mate! I would not be saying this to a Glaswegian I have never met if I were not a bit drunk (Smith’s Glenlivet Malt) and moved almost to tears. I’ve read nothing so good since Alasdair Gray’s Lanark. Most writers are shy introverts with a very narrow experience of both public and private life, so learn about it by reading each other’s books. They usually compensate for this by inventing tougher, richer, sexier heroes than themselves. I ain’t referring to low-class fantasy heroes like Fleming’s James Bond but to historic figures worn like masks by better writers – Mary Renault’s Alexander the Great, Marguerite Yourcenar’s Hadrian, Graves’ Claudius and our own dear Alan Massie’s Roman emperors. Your Pericles and Alcibiades are more believable because you confront them with convincing common citizens like your farmer and sausage seller and show through them how the greed of the Athenian Empire led it to destruction. This is relevant to continual wars started in eastern oil-bearing nations by U.S. presidents and our own dear Tony Blair, on the pretext of defending justice and democracy. Congratulations!
But (I must be very ve-e-e-e-ry drunk to say this to a writer I have never met) how can you keep this level of relevance in a book ending with an eccentric Victorian clergyman? As your prologue says, his century was an age of industrial and social revolutions. What can an Anglican priest getting rich by fooling wealthier people tell us about the British Empire in India, Africa, Egypt? About women and children slaving 14 hours a day in mines and factories? About the fight to legalize trade unions and Cooperative Socialism? I don’t want Who Paid for All This? to end by showing as little of the 19th century as Bertie Wooster’s antics in Blandings Castle show the 20th. If it ends like that you had better call your book Money at Play.
Instead of provincial England why not show the Golden Age of a third famous city much the same size as Periclean Athens and Medician Florence? A city whose main citizens became intellectual world leaders? Why not use late 18th century Edinburgh? It had Hume, founder of modern philosophy; Adam Smith, founder of political economy; Hutton, who made geology a modern science; Boswell who wrote the first modern biography. Burns, a world-famous poet, was its honoured guest. These and many others of slightly lesser genius all knew each other socially.
Mind you, mate, I’m not pretending Scotland in those days was all sweetness and light. The landowners and merchants of Edinburgh and Glasgow owned cotton and tobacco plantations in Florida, Virginia, Carolina, and sugar plantations in Jamaica, so used slaves as much as English merchants. Scottish coal miners, like Russian serfs, had been their employer’s property for a couple of centuries under laws making it a crime to help them escape, and sometimes had iron collars riveted round their necks. In England the parliamentary system was managed on behalf of the aristocracy and rich merchants by several magnates; in Scotland it was managed by one, Henry Dundas, nicknamed The Uncrowned King of Scotland, being most recent in a line of uncrowned kings appointed by the London government. Fewer Scottish householders were entitled to vote than Englishmen in the county of Suffolk, and as nobody got a government job in Scotland without Dundas approving, the law courts, the county and town councils were completely Tory. He enriched his family and friends, normal practice then as now, and of course blocked all attempts at political reform.
But you need someone remarkable whose life reveals this society. Why not James Watt, born in Greenock, maker of musical and scientific instruments who turned engineering into a science that transformed the world? He and his apprentice Murdoch (who invented gas lighting) and partner Matthew Bolton were members of the Birmingham Lunar Society. So was Josiah Wedgewood. Bolton and Wedgewood’s factories anticipated Henry Ford’s production lines. These men were political radicals who supported the American colonists’ fight for independence, and welcomed the French Revolution.
Or take Thomas Muir, who Dundas thought the most dangerous man in Scotland. Surely you know about Muir of Huntershill? The Glasgow stickit minister18 who became an Edinburgh advocate? And started Scottish Friends of the People Societies demanding political reform? And talked with leaders of the French National Assembly in Paris? And joined the Society of United Irishmen? And was tried in Edinburgh for lending Tom Paine’s Rights of Man to a weaver? Was transported to Botany Bay, then escaped from there in an American vessel with the connivance of George Washington? After shipwreck and sea battles he was received back in Paris with acclamations by the French National Assembly. He would have been president of the Scottish Republic had the proposed French invasion succeeded, did you know that? Why so many rhetorical questions? It’s the Glenlivet talking.
Your excellent Prologue says your teachers discouraged prrronouncing the r in worrrds to stop you sounding Scotch. Has your education made you, like the Scottish Labour Party, indifferent to the land where you live? Are you writing with an eye on London and its book reviewers? I am not, alas, a creative writer, just an English historian in Edinburgh.19 Historians, of course, enjoy escaping into the past as much as fiction writers. Many are like Ibsen’s Dr Tesman who spends his honeymoon studying cottage industries in medieval Brabant and ignoring his fascinating wife. In a humble way I have tried to emulate Herodotus, Xenophon and Marx instead of Tesman and show how the nation where I live has happened. I also know that some fiction writers have done it better. Scott and Tolstoy’s greatest work was set a few generations before their own time, but the kind of people and class conflicts they described were and are still contemporary.
I must be daft as well as drunk to criticize an author I’ve never met for something he has not yet written, but believe me mate, your first chapters have enthused (oh God I hate that word but cannae think of another yes I can) have inspired me to this insolent diatribe.
I am, believe me,
my dear dear sir and mate,
your apologetic,
humble,
and very urgent well-wisher,
Angus Calder
Damn Angus Calder. Through Joy Hendry’s Chapman the greatest encouragement I ever received ends by demanding that I abandon years of research and invent a new ending to my masterpiece. Had a Scottish Enlightenment setting occurred to me twenty years back I might have used it but I CANNOT now~fling aside years of research and undertake more. How can I possibly write well about life in Edinburgh around 1780 – 90 when I hardly know Glasgow in 2003 though surrounded all my life by detailed information about it? I could write nothing after reading that letter yesterday and went for a meditative stroll that ended in another bad shock.
The weather was neutral, neither cold nor warm, wet nor sunny, the sky one ceiling of smooth grey cloud. I love such dull days, perhaps because I am a rather dull man. I wandered through the University grounds, crossing Kelvin Way and entering the park. Mastermind tells me Glasgow parks are now dangerous places, infested by gangs of youths from District Council housing schemes who, when Glasgow was productive, would have been apprentices learning to build or operate ships and machines, but now live on Social Security benefits while stealing money for drink and drugs. Casual violence is their main recreation. Some openly call themselves Nazis and patrol the inner public parks, maiming or murdering fo
lk who seem homosexual or foreign, and folk with darker skins are the usual victims. The chief Kelvin Park terrorist calls himself Hitler – how does a quiet, erudite, stay-at-home body like Mastermind know such things? I saw that the monolithic bust of Carlyle facing the old park bridge had its nose smashed off again. Ten years ago it was restored in ciment fondu after a similar act of vandalism by people who (judging by words spray-painted on a nearby statue of a soldier commemorating the Boer War) were feminists defying patriarchal authority. This time the nose was probably removed by one of Hitler’s henchmen who did not know Hitler the First was encouraged by Carlyle.20
When writing hard I often find sentences in an accidentally opened book that help the work forward, so on leaving the park I visited Voltaire and Rousseau. This big low-ceilinged shed (probably once a livery stable) has all kinds of second-hand books stacked in high cases and in piles on the floor. In a box of dog-eared paperbacks I found Picture This by Joseph Heller, published by Pan Books of London. I had never heard of it, though Heller’s Catch 22 is one of the three great novels about World War II. Glancing into Picture This I was stammygastered to find it a one volume trilogy about (1) Socrates and Athenian democracy, (2) Rembrandt and the Dutch Republic, (3) the modern New York art market. Paid 50p, brought it home, read, digested it before sleeping.
Picture This reports on Periclean Athens more than dramatising it, but tells much that I missed. Socrates went barefoot. Heller also shows the rapacity of Dutch capitalism better than I show that of Florence. His presentation of Rembrandt is masterly – he knows more about oil colour than I do about tempera and fresco. His third section shows modern capitalism working through millionaire art deals in New York and refers to the Vietnam war in a way that exposes my writing as antiquarian exercizes. I have not shown the ignoble sweat, toil and mercenary warfare that PAID FOR the freedom and confidence that let Italians make astonishingly lovely towns. Why does modern Capitalism, despite commanding much more wealth, only produce more cars, motorways, pollution, drugs, weapons and warfare? What is it doing to Britain? To Scotland? To Glasgow? Why did that never occur to me as a subject?
Doctor Johnson said the only measure of a good nation is how well it treats the poor. Surely orphans, the sick and disabled, homeless and unemployed and unemployable are treated better now in Britain than in Italy five centuries ago? Perhaps not. I once read that British travellers used to greatly admire schools, orphanages and hospitals for the poor in Italy. These, of course, were attached to monasteries and staffed by monks and nuns. Britain had such places until Henry VIII first nationalized monastic lands and buildings, then sold them to private owners, thus destroying what had been (no doubt) a semi-corrupt welfare state, but one which was meant to care for the poor. Henry’s Protestant reforms kept him and his greatest supporters rich, made many in the middle class richer while increasing the number of beggars. Why does this sound familiar?
I was deluded to think I could know Athens and Florence as well as Dickens, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Joyce knew London, Paris, St Petersburg, Dublin. Making Socrates go barefoot won’t change that. Mastermind tells me tomatoes were impossible in Filippo’s Florence because they came from America which Columbus reached twenty-seven years after Filippo died. Changing them to artichokes won’t help. The Mona who put him into the Carmelite monastery, I have discovered, was his mother, not his aunt. Diamante assisted Filippo until he died, but Filippo had a sister who did the housekeeping. And Pope Eugenius died five years before Filippo seduced Lucrezia. And perhaps she seduced him. And I haven’t the faintest idea how ordinary people made their livings in the weaving sheds and dye-works that made Florence rich. Maybe most lived fairly satisfactory lives, like fully employed, well-paid British workers between 1945 and 1970.
I am haunted, oppressed by feeling I should write about the life I know, but what do I know about life? What has life taught me about Glasgow? How can an old man of very little experience put the world where he lives into a good story?
Think about it, Tunnock. You have nothing else to do.
Unable to start thinking about it. After penning last entry around two in the morning I bathed, changed into clean pyjamas slippers dressing gown and was enjoying small whisky-toddy nightcap by livingroom fire when doorbell rang and rang and rang until I opened door to large crying baby upheld by woman saying hysterically, “Can I come in Johnny? I’ve nowhere else to go.” In she came and it was Niki. Not knowing what else to do I led her into kitchen. She sat down at table, burst into tears so I had two weeping females (the wean was female) in this house where to my certain knowledge nobody since I was a baby has wept. I tried quieting them with tea and warmed milk which she put into bottle for baby. I made cold beef pickles tomato cheese sandwiches because she was hungry and stiff hot toddy that she gratefully drank after to my horror adding some to baby’s bottle. Between bursts of hysterical tears in phrases I did not try to fully understand she spoke of being beaten deserted involved in vague unspeakable crimes by someone who then attempted murder and suicide with or without success. Only two of her sentences were clear and often repeated, “Don’t throw us out Johnny, we’ve nowhere else to go,” and, “Please don’t send for the polis.”
I escaped from her by rushing upstairs to make a bed. Luckily wardrobe in main bedroom still has thanks to Nan big drawer of sheets blankets pillowcases I never needed so quickly made up bed in small room opposite so now Niki and Mo (what is Mo short for? Surely not Moses or Moloch) are sleeping there. I hope. How long will they stay?
During our session in kitchen Niki produced photograph from pathetic little knapsack that had held Mo’s bottle, gave it me saying, “This is yours, sorry there’s no frame.” Without pleasure recognized young self in gown and mortarboard between Nan and Nell. Asked why had kept it she said, “I sometimes liked looking at it.” This suggests she sometimes liked remembering me how strange. I hardly gave her a thought after she vanished two years ago.
In the wee small hours last night, perhaps around three o’clock, I heard the tapping on my bedroom door that I had been dreading for over a week. I unlocked and opened it a few inches and saw Niki in nothing but her knickers. In a voice low enough not to wake Mo in the room behind her (Mo wakens horribly easily) she asked if she could join me? I whispered, “Sorry, not with a baby in the house,” and cautiously shut and locked the door again, feeling terribly guilty. I have never before had the chance of comforting a young thing and gratifying myself at the same time, but have no sexual appetite for pitiable women.
Cannot work on my book with Niki and Mo in the house and am afraid to leave them alone here for longer than it takes to run to the Byres Road shops and back. She won’t go out because she says people are after her. I do not ask who or why because her answers would certainly be lies. For three weeks she has hardly left the bedroom. I am sick of carrying trays of food upstairs, sick of the queer looks shopkeepers give me when I buy disposable nappies, women’s underwear (since she brought no change of clothes) also lipstick, mascara and false eyelashes. When asked why she who wants to see nobody must doll herself up she said her face in the mirror was all she had to look at, and why didn’t I have a television set? I answered that television is a drug that added nothing to life, that it distracts, deludes, insulates people from reality and she yelled, “That’s why I want it!” When I said it was unhealthy to keep a baby in one room all day she said I could take it out as often as I wanted. I do NOT want to take it out. If Mo starts liking and trusting me I will start feeling responsible and be stuck with the child until it is old enough to support itself, which will not happen before I die of natural causes.
A dull dreadful day. Having paid one of the cleaners to buy Niki and Mo warm coats with big hoods, also the modern equivalent of the sling-seat squaws used to carry papooses, I got my lodgers out of the house by going for a taxi, using it to collect them from the house and take us to Anniesland station. Here Niki was sure nobody would recognize her if I carried Mo and she kept her head well back in
the hood and a scarf over her mouth as if she had toothache. We took a train to Helensburgh, walked along the esplanade, looked in shop windows, had tea and ice cream in café, took train and taxi home. They enjoyed the outing. I would have enjoyed it too had I been a character in a sentimental Victorian novel. I did not enjoy it.
My life a hopeless nightmare. Now nearly a year since she came. Work on my book at a standstill. Whole idea of it awkward, wrong, impossible. Can sometimes snatch half hour in library reading dull social histories of Glasgow, half-heartedly meaning to write another. My former womanless, childless existence used to make me feel outcast from life’s feast – know now it was a paradise of freedom and hope. An implacable force, probably Nature herself, has enslaved me to a selfish bitch I neither love nor have sex with. Only a masochist could stand more of this. I was not a slave when I shopped, cooked, cleaned for Nell and Nan – they had done as much for me before taking to their beds, and I knew they would one day leave me by dying. Niki and Mo won’t die unless I
Have never never never lost my temper because nothing annoying used to happen, but for weeks now am containing with difficulty rage that must end in bloodshed and infanticide when it finally overwhelms me. This diary will prove I was driven to it. I may only be suffering what many married men endure but they must have been immunized against weeping women, screaming infants by miserable childhoods full of frantic mothers and blubbering siblings. I was spared that normal-family-life shit and am too old to take more. Am on brink of breakdown, verge of insanity. Another day of this life will drive me to
Amazing improvement. This morning overheard cleaners casually refer to me as Mo’s father! Cross-examined, they said Niki told them so. I thanked them politely for that news, went upstairs, and to stop myself grasping Niki’s throat seized an ornate vase I have never liked and hurled it to smash in the fireplace. Then I stamped around the room clawing the air with hooked fingers, howling like a wolf, growling like a tiger, spitting at Niki the filthiest names I knew – “Inconsiderate mother! Untruthful parasite! Selfish manipulator!” I only went quiet when starting to enjoy this undignified performance. Its effect was remarkable. Baby Mo stopped wailing and watched me with obvious delight. Niki stopped weeping and when silence fell asked in a plaintive but sensible voice what I wanted? I pointed to the mess in the fireplace and said, “Clean that up, bitch, and you’ll hear!” – using an American accent which somehow seemed appropriate. She has now agreed to take Mo out after breakfast each morning when I go to the library. She will not be given a key to the house but receive twelve pounds a day for expenses and be let back in when I return after five to make dinner. In the evenings she and Moloch will be left in the house if I go to Tennants, but if I find she has let people in when I am out she and infant will be evicted, and if she robs me again I will call the police. She knows I will keep my word so at last, with peace of mind and enriched experience, I can devote myself to a new and better book. What kind will it be?
Old Men in Love Page 9