Old Men in Love

by Alasdair Gray

  In the late 1940s the children of thrifty parents still carried schoolbooks in khaki satchels issued by the government to hold gas masks during the recent war, but in posh Hillhead most of us had cloth or leather schoolbags hung by straps from our backs. Mine was of shining leather which always looked new because on Saturday mornings Aunt Nell brushed it with shoe blacking, then polished with rags until it shone. I would have preferred a schoolbag stained by accidents like those of other pupils, but could not hurt her feelings by telling her so, and eventually insisted on doing that job myself, though not quite so efficiently. Aunt Nan handled our finances. When I started at Hillhead Secondary School aged 11 Nan replaced my bag with a pigskin briefcase. I foresaw the mockery it would bring but pretended to be grateful. Only our school captain and some prefects in the final year had briefcases, none as blatantly expensive and manly as first-year Tunnock’s. After the evening meal we called Tea or (if Nan and Nell had asked a friend to share it) High Tea, we usually sat in the drawing room, listening to the BBC.26 At the end of my first Hillhead Secondary week I brought home the briefcase full of new schoolbooks, and asked for a table in my bedroom to do homework there in private.

  “Why of course,” said Nell, but Nan said firmly, “No.”

  We stared at her. After a solemn pause she said, “Homework certainly needs privacy. He must have the study.”

  “Yes indeed,” cried Nell with enthusiasm and they conducted me there. The study was a room my aunts always kept clean but otherwise avoided, perhaps because their father had insisted on privacy there when writing his sermons, which seem to have been his only work when not conducting Sunday services. I had always assumed it was forbidden to me, though nobody had said so. They ushered me and my briefcase inside but stayed out, telling me to make myself at home and would I like a cup of tea in half an hour? but I wanted nothing before our usual supper together before bedtime.

  “Well,” said Nell, “If you want something sooner, strike that twice and one of us will come running.”

  She pointed to a brass push-bell on a massive, leather-topped desk. Looking strangely satisfied they left me there. Either then or later I heard Nan say it was nice to have a man working in the study again.

  On first sitting down in the leather-upholstered swivel chair and spreading my schoolbooks on the desk I felt daunted by this ponderously furnished chamber, but soon came a feeling of ease and mastery because this place was wholly mine. I had no need to ensure privacy by turning the large brass door key in the lock because the aunts never entered without knocking and asking my permission. Nell only entered to dust and hoover once a week when I was at school. An elaborate ebony inkstand on the desk had a shallow little drawer in the base where I found keys unlocking the desk drawers and doors of glass-fronted bookcases. One drawer held a cut-glass tumbler and a stoppered decanter three-quarter full of brown liquid. In cupboards under the bookcases I found more of this liquid: five bottles of Harvey’s Bristol Cream Sherry and several dozen empty ones. Tasting that sherry did not then occur to me. In the following weeks I gradually found the delights of the bookshelves among a mass of very dull sermons.

  The first discoveries were an early Encyclopaedia Britannica and an 1850 Chambers’ Conversationalist’s Lexicon with engravings (some coloured by hand) of improbable flying machines that could never have left the ground, wooden warships with side paddles and smoking funnels between masts crowded with sails, grotesque creatures, plants, castles, temples and cities. These pictures and fragments of text took me to a time when the U.S.A. and Russia traded in slaves and serfs, when Japan was closed to foreigners and maps of most large continents had big blank areas inscribed Terra Incognita. Then I found two volumes of Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel illustrated by Heath Robinson, Balzac’s Droll Tales illustrated by Doré, Kraft-Ebbings’ Sexual Pathology with photographs. Most precious was a set of four tall volumes with ornately gilded leather bindings published by The Harvard Gentleman Scholars’ Press of New York in a limited edition of 150, each personally signed and numbered on the biblio page by the editor, Frank Harris.27 The pictures alone must have made the cost immense: Ovid’s Art of Love was illustrated by Mantegna, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata by Aubrey Beardsley, Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal by Felicien Rops, Burns’ Tam O’ Shanter by William Bell Scott. I investigated the texts of these after sampling the illustrations, eventually reading all the Droll Tales and most of Rabelais, the latter in what I now know was Urquhart’s translation. The Harvard Gentleman Scholar volumes were a constant delight. The verses in the original tongues were helped by English prose translations and pictures which showed a lot of lively nudity.

  Of course the translation of Tam O’ Shanter was needless. Any English speaker can easily understand it. I read Burns’ verses to learn the story behind Bell Scott’s outline drawings of the witch Nanny leaping and flinging about in her cutty sark, and enjoyed them so much that I tackled his complete poems which were also in Grandpa Tunnock’s library, beside Catherine Carswell’s 1920s biography of him. She had aroused the fury of admirers who sentimentalized him as a hard-working family man (which he was) by calmly and without censure naming his lovers and illegitimate children. These Burns books filled a big gap in my education because Burns was not mentioned at school where I learned verses by Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats – naytcha poems, the teachers called them, being careful not to pronounce a final r. The subject matter (daffodils, the west wind, sky-lark, nightingale) were certainly natural but not human. Burns’ poems are all about human nature. He loves it at its most fallible, so how could he be taught in schools? When I was a teacher I would have been sacked had I taught young children The Jolly Beggars’ chorus – A fig for those by LAW protected, LIBERTY’s a glorious feast! COURTS for cowards were erected, CHURCHES built to please the Priest. Burns is declaring that sexual love, after breathing eating and drinking, is the most essential human activity and the most enjoyable.

  What is TITLE, what is TREASURE,

  What is reputation’s care?

  If we lead a life of pleasure,

  ‘tis no matter HOW or WHERE.

  With the ready trick and fable

  Round we wander all the day;

  And at night, in barn or stable,

  Hug our doxies on the hay.

  Does the train attended CARRIAGE

  Thro’ the country lighter rove?

  Does the sober bed of MARRIAGE

  Witness brighter scenes of love?

  Most folk, especially children, instinctively know pleasure is the best thing we can get so distrust all authority that tries to postpone or ration or abolish it. This instinct was denounced as original sin by Fathers of the Christian church from Saint Paul and Augustine to Luther and Calvin. Most educations deliberately divert, destroy or pervert that belief – a good reason for academia to neglect Burns even after the 1980s, when commercial entertainment and advertizements were added to academia’s raw materials.

  Yet Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and Keats took his greatness for granted. Matthew Arnold thought his poetry second only to Chaucer’s, while regretting the ugliness of Burns’ Scottish subject matter because, No one can deny that it is of advantage for a poet to deal with a beautiful world. T. S. Eliot defends Burns for his choice of subjects because a poet should be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory. With sinister dexterity Eliot then calls Burns, A decadent representative of a great alien tradition – by which he meant that the great Scots pre-Reformation poets were courtiers and clergymen while Burns (like Melville and Hawthorne) never rose above the social rank of exciseman, and his poetic vocabulary was not used by royalty. Since a German dynasty was popped onto the British throne in 1714, who but Eliot has thought royalty a source or defence of profound speech? The Jolly Beggars’ chorus and its capitalized abstract nouns are in the polite standard 18th century English Burns used when writing broad general truths. When writing about particularly Scots things – poverty,
women gossiping, men getting happily drunk, a grotesque hypocrite at prayer, every kind of sexual love and also love of freedom – he used Scottish words. I am annoyed by daft Burns fans who forget his use of 18th century south British mandarin speech. The song which ought to be Scotland’s national anthem, Scots Wha Hae, is nearly all romantic English clichés – Welcome to your gory bed or to Victory, Now’s the day and now’s the hour, See the front of Battle lour etcetera. It needs to be sung with a Scots accent because first line, Scots Wha Hae (the only line spelled in phonetic Scots) cannot be sung by singers who say Scots Who Have. Try doing it if you doubt me.

  Grandpa Tunnock’s library introduced me to England’s national literature through three big stout leather-bound volumes of Shakespeare’s Histories, Comedies and Tragedies containing (said the title pages) the celebrated illustrations of Kenny Meadows. These sinister, almost surrealistic illustrations seduced me into the astonishing delights of Shakespeare’s language. Sometimes I went round for hours muttering a single phrase – sharked up a list of lawless resolutes also the cloud capped towers, the gorgeous palaces and also I am tame sir. Pronounce! Yet the joyful education I got from him, Burns, Balzac, Rabelais, Aristophanes were mostly unconnected with the schoolwork I was taught in order to pass exams and qualify for University. I would have hated Latin and Greek if the Gentleman Scholar’s Library had not proved what my classics teachers never suggested – Romans and Greeks enjoyed every kind of sex together with jokes about it. And my enriched reading certainly got me high marks for schools essays, persuading me writing would one day make me famous. This had to happen because my future fame would not come from physical strength, manipulative dexterity and a fine appearance. Plans for a literary masterpiece became more cloudily ambitious the more I read. I began filling notebooks with fine sentences to use in it. Finding so much goodness in an obscure library gave me a taste for discarded textbooks, biographies, slender volumes of forgotten poetry in second-hand shops and stalls. I believed most neglected books contained at least one exciting phrase that my great book would at last restore to general knowledge and make ENJOYABLE. It would also include love – erotic fantasies of a Rabelaisian and Robert Burns kind. I may have matured late but my sex in the head (as D.H. Lawrence called it) never stiffened my penis before I discovered pornography. Kraft-Ebbing’s account of sexual perversions in 19th Century Vienna intrigued but did not excite. My happiest hours were in the study before I learned to masturbate, but read, scribbled and fantasised about my eventual great book. I agreed with Keats who said, fine writing is, next to fine doing, the top thing in the world.

  Study and school apart, Nan and Nell and I had a rich social life. We went to plays at the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre, to symphony concerts at the St Andrews Hall, to Carl Rosa and D’Oyly Carte operas that came yearly to Glasgow, and to exhibitions in Kelvingrove Art Galleries. In these places we met friends of my aunts’ age and sex who treated me with the deference they felt due to a respectable dominant male. But at home my aunts so worried about me having no friend of my own age that at last I invented one.

  One boy in my class was as friendless as myself. His clothing indicated a poorer home than most of us. His face was pitted by acne scars and his movements were awkward and jerky, maybe from an early attack of infantile paralysis. There was a rumour that he should have gone to the Junior Secondary School, but had only passed the qualifying exam to the Senior Secondary because the examiners pitied him. Unlike me, who was mocked, Stewart Doig (nicknamed Stoory Doig28) was simply avoided. Nobody sat beside him in class if there was an empty seat elsewhere. When there was not I had to sit beside him, at which times he would try to start conversations which I discouraged, because like most outcasts who long to be accepted by a majority I disliked others in my situation. When I said this boy was my school friend Nell and Nan, who often spoke simultaneously, cried, “Bring him home to tea!”29

  I hid my horror of the idea by saying sadly, “Impossible. He has a widowed mother who keeps him on a very short leash. She frets a lot if he doesn’t eat with her – she’s a bit of an invalid who has very little company – and he’s a very devoted son.”

  Nell cried, “O poor woman!” and Nan, “And poor boy! We must do something to help. Perhaps we should visit them?” “No,” I said, shaking my head, “His mother may be poor but she’s very proud and would hate anything like condescension.”

  “You’ve met his mother?” said Nan, surprized.

  “No, but he talks a lot about her, and that’s the impression I get.”

  This sounded inconclusive and unconvincing so I added, “I’ve been invited to their house for a meal once or twice, but honestly, I prefer eating with you.”

  “But you must go!” they cried and, “The poor woman will be glad to see her son has got at least one good friend,” said Nell, and Nan said, “It will be a rare social occasion for her. I will bake a cake for them and you must also take a bunch of flowers.”

  This conversation left me astonished by the ready stream of lies I had smoothly told, but depressed by the consequences. From now on my aunts wanted reports about Doig and his mother, who really was a widow but not (as far as I knew) an invalid. Nell and Nan were so pleased with this fiction of my new friend that I had no heart to destroy it by telling the truth or inventing a quarrel with Stoory that would make reconciliation impossible. A time came when I could not postpone a visit to his home so set off one Saturday after lunch with a bouquet of chrysanthemums in one hand, in the other the briefcase containing a bottle of dry sherry and rich dark fruit cake in a cardboard box. When out of sight of the house I turned north instead of south, went quickly through Botanic Gardens to the Ha’penny Bridge, chucked the flowers into the river as I crossed and then turned upstream along a path that is now the start of the West Highland Walkway. It was a grey day and thin rain began to fall. I passed the great weir serving the west bank paper mill and under an arch of Kelvingrove Aqueduct30 sat down on a lump of rubble and took out cake-box and bottle. Even on bright summer days this is a dank, dreary place but few folk pass that way and that Saturday it suited my mood. I opened the box, broke off handfuls of cake and stolidly ate them between swigs from the neck of the bottle. My previous experiences of alcohol had been small glasses of hot toddy brought to me in bed with an aspirin pill when a cold looked like coming on. I had never before drunk at one sitting a whole bottle of anything. As the sherry went down my gloom gave way to foolish, light-headed cheer. I flung the bottle away, stood up and everything seemed spinning and tilting round me. By an effort of will I stopped that happening, which added a sensation of power to my strange cheerfulness. Leaving most of the cake for birds and rodents I strode up to the Maryhill Road and along the busy pavement, amazed that nobody seemed to see how drunk I was. Either my self-control was super-human or other folk had also secretly drunk too much and were too busy disguising the fact to notice my condition. This last explanation seemed most probable and enhanced my sense of total freedom.

  Nobody will understand what followed without a digression.

  16: EARLY SEX

  When I asked my aunts where people came from I was very very young but remember the guilty glance Nell always gave Nan when wishing her to speak for them. After a moment Nan said slowly and deliberately, “Everybody begins as something the size and shape of a tadpole. It floats in an elastic bag of fluid the size and shape of an egg and this bag is in a woman’s stomach. The bag stretches as the wee fishy thing gets larger, growing a human head, arms, fingers, toes etcetera. After nine months, usually, it hatches out of the mother’s stomach, just as chickens hatch out of eggs.”

  “You mean babies break their mother’s stomachs open?” I cried, because one Easter I had been given a brown chocolate egg which, cracked open, contained a chicken made of white chocolate. Nan said, “Not at all! The narrow groove between the halves of a woman’s bottom continues between her legs to the point at which males . . . men like you . . . have a . . .” (She hesitated and flushe
d slightly) “. . . toot. Uretor. Penis is the adult word for it. Through this groove that only women possess the baby emerges in what is technically called birth. Births are seldom fatal but always painful. Many women like Nan and me choose not to give birth. We have never needed children because we have you.”

  I brooded on this. The fact that other children had mothers and I had aunts had never before struck me as strange enough to need an explanation, but Nell cleared her throat and Nan immediately supplied one: “Your mother was a wonderful woman who left this house, toiling in a British government office until she gave birth to you. She then handed you over to us, returned to the service of her country in London and died bravely in a Nazi blitzkrieg. You should be proud of her. It has been our privilege to serve her by caring for you.”

  Nell clapped her hands saying happily, “O good, well done Nan, that covers everything.”

  I thought so too. After that my aunts often referred to my mother. The meals they made were so good that I have never enjoyed meals as much since they stopped cooking for me, but after that first mention of my mother they never served me with anything, not even a soft boiled egg, without telling me how much better it would have been if my mother had supplied it. She had also (they said) been much better than them at knitting, darning, washing clothes, lighting fires, handling money and schoolwork. My school reports gave me high marks. They would nod happily over them saying, “Yes, you have your mother’s brain.”

  Years passed before I learned that babies needed fathers. I thought nature ensured half the animals born were masculine because women needed a breadwinner to support them by working in an office or factory, for in those days the only women I knew who worked for a living served behind counters in shops. The mothers of everyone I knew at school were housewives. In the Hillhead Salon I saw Tarzan and the Amazons which showed the jungle hero in South America where he is captured by a savage tribe of blonde white women, all wearing very little and in their early twenties. In those days I believed all films except Disney animations were based on truth, and decided a completely female nation would be possible if a natural fluke made the mothers incapable of giving birth to males, thus forcing the women to learn hunting. The necessity of fathers dawned on me when I was twelve or thirteen and too old to embarrass Nell and Nan with a question about a matter too delicate for them to have mentioned. When anyone asked about my parents I would say crisply, “Don’t remember them. Both killed in the London Blitz.”