Old Men in Love

by Alasdair Gray

  Is our life together entering a jolly new domestic phase?

  An ominous start to unsatisfactory day. Wakened from dream of a Scottish Pope being Fascist President-Prime Minister of Anglo-America and making torture on television a popular entertainment. Every politician and cardinal in his government was a Scottish thug who spoke with a posh English accent. On way to library this morning saw on pavement at corner of Byres and Observatory Road a fat eight-foot high pillar topped by a black cupola, like a dirty big fungus with too thick a stalk. The sides were plastered with concert adverts under a narrow notice with these words which I copied down: THIS SITE IS MANAGED BY CITY CENTRE POSTERS WORKING IN PARTNERSHIP WITH GLASGOW CITY COUNCIL FOR A CLEANER, MORE ATTRACTIVE CITY. TO ADVERTISE CONTACT – I omit email address. This structure cannot make Glasgow cleaner, only makes it more attractive to lovers of adverts who don’t get enough from billboards, sides of taxicabs, buses, commercial vehicles, from newspapers, magazines, sound and television broadcasting and film shows. Paris has had similar pillars for over a century but her avenues have wide pavements, her posters were once masterpieces by Mucha and Toulouse-Lautrec, and Paris has no other displays of street posters. The French loved their architecture too much to disfigure it with billboards. I later saw more of these toadstools sprouting on Byres and Great Western Road, a new way to make money out of Glasgow while doing it no good at all.

  For lunch today went to café in Creswell Lane, once a big sky-lit room built as sorting room of Hillhead post office, then an auction room, then the Metropolitan Café, a pleasant self-service restaurant in revived art deco style. It is now Bar Buddha, made mysteriously dark by blocking the skylight windows and having low table lights, intimate corners and waiters. One greeted me by saying, “How you doin’?” I asked for soup and a salad and he said, “No problem.” On placing them before me he said, “There you go. Enjoy.” A large television screen was showing a glamorous woman talking to a seemingly normal young man to the sound of laughter and clapping. I stopped looking by reading a cheap newspaper left on a nearby chair. Since British jails have more prisoners than they can decently hold (it said) the Home Secretary (a Scot) proposes to make a former RAF camp a jail, and use two naval vessels as prison ships, so Britain will get a concentration camp for civilians – as was first used by Britain in the South African Boer War and hugely emulated in Nazi Germany and USSR Russia – while locking up other civilians in off-shore hulks, as in pre-Victorian days. He also suggests police and judges do not press charges or jail people for crimes they think slight, thus contradicting New Labour’s past policy of tougher penalties for all crimes except fraud by businessmen and politicians. I recoiled from the newspaper to the television screen and found the ordinary young man is famous throughout Britain for surviving longer than anyone else in a reality show. Mastermind tells me all networks broadcast them, showing ordinary folk in a house from which they are one at a time, steadily, humiliatingly evicted by a popular voting system until only one is left. My nightmare about Britain was contemporary, not prophetic. Even so, I looked forward to a pleasant evening card-party with Zoe and pals.

  At half past five she brought home Is, who I had not seen for five years, a girl called Mish, an Indian meal from the Ashoka and six bottles of wine. I thought that number excessive as I have not seen Zoe drink much alcohol since three years ago when she came here to seduce me, nor did she drink any tonight. Our guests drank it all with the meal and while playing cards afterwards, which did not improve their manners. To teach them the game Zoe partnered Is, I partnered Mish who became so flirtatious and come-hither that I could not treat it as a joke. She and Is gave the game so little serious attention that I was soon disgusted and went to bed. Zoe joined me much later, said I had been rude to Mish, refused to be cuddled. Today she stayed in bed all morning and afternoon, not touching meals I brought, snorting at suggestions that I call a doctor. Saw half bottle of vodka under her pillow – this is unusual. Assumed she was sulking. It is 7.35 p.m. and half an hour ago, heard the front door slam. She has gone out without a word. Everybody I love at last becomes a pain.

  This morning she sat silently glooming over the breakfast table, refusing to touch the omelette I served, then suddenly said, “Well it’s tonight.”

  “What is?” I asked. She said, “The meeting here, with those folk you don’t want to see. But you neednae see them. Lie low in the bedroom like I suggested if you won’t spend the night in a hotel. Everything should go fairly quietly.”

  I said I would not let such strangers into my house and would call the police if she tried to bring them. She said, “How? You havenae a phone.”

  I told her that today I would buy a mobile phone. On a shrill note she asked did I want her to get her throat cut? Or worse? I stared at her, speechless, and saw she was panic-stricken, with facial twitches and trembling I have never seen before and want never to see again. If she had started weeping I could not have borne it. I said alright, her visitors could come, but I would certainly not hide from them as if I was a criminal and they were police. I would meet them at the front door, offer them sandwiches and drinks in the living room, then withdraw to the study, leaving her to discuss business without my presence. In a smaller voice than I have heard her use before she whispered, “Thanks,” and went out, not seeming much cheered up. But that is what I have decided, what I will certainly do.

  Despite which surprisingly happy day re-reading, re-planning book as originally intended, but named Money at Play. It only needs now a short end note for Socratic part, and enlarged Renaissance part showing workings of Medici capitalism, fall of Constantinople, French invasion. From Filippo Lippi’s standpoint these will appear like a brilliant landscape above which looms a huge storm cloud he does not notice – the coming Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation that will change most of Europe for the worse. That may take months but the end is certainly in sight.

  An almost incredibly great idea seizes me. Can I also complete for this book my panoptic vision of Scotland from the Genesis of the universe to the near future? If I did, would it not become the Bible of a new and independent Scotland? Perhaps. I will now throw together the Athenian end notes then pop down to Buchanan Street, buy a mobile phone and see if it can be activated before Zoe brings her visitors. Best be on the safe side.

  32: SOCRATIC END NOTES

  Witnesses were not called at Athenian trials and none of the important witnesses I have described could have attended the trial of Socrates in 399 BC. Alcibiades had died five years earlier, murdered by enemies after betraying so many people that nobody knows who hired the assassins. It may have been Critias who died a year later, in battle against the restoration of Athenian democracy. The name of Anytus’ son is not recorded but was almost certainly not Phoebus. He is said to have liked Socrates more than his own father, but may not have been the neurotic wretch I invented to show the bad effect of a strong, original thinker upon a weak one.

  It is a pleasant fact that the restored Athenian democracy prospered without its empire for centuries after the trial of Socrates. It lived up to Pericles’ boast of being a school for other nations, though soon after Pericles died the Athens of his day was thought a golden age. Romans who made Greece part of their empire studied Greek poetry, philosophy, art and science in Athens which seemed their strongest source. Many schools of philosophy flourished there, Idealist and Cynic, Academic and Realist, Stoic and Epicurean. All claimed Socrates as their founder. Statues of him were erected in public places.

  If I knew Greek well enough to understand the plays of Aristophanes he would have had a bigger part in my story, being as great an original genius in drama as Socrates in philosophy. His plays are great poetry, like Shakespeare’s, and satirize every aspect of life in his day: Olympian gods, the mighty dead, the Athenian state, its politicians and celebrities. He understood the democracy so completely – it understood him so well – that he successfully caricatured it in The Wasps as a daft old man who has to be loc
ked up by his son because he prefers parliamentary politics to minding his own business. When Cleon, a tanner like Anytus, became popular by a vulgar display of bad parliamentary manners, Aristophanes showed him being pushed out of office by a sausage-seller whose manners were even worse. No good actor could be found brave enough to perform as Cleon on stage so Aristophanes acted the part himself. During the war with Sparta his comedies constantly, wittily denounced it. No government, democratic or monarchic, has since allowed such freedom to a great satirist.

  The Greek empire Alcibiades dreamed of leading was made real by Alexander, young king of Macedonia, the Greek state closest to barbarism. He conquered all Greece, Palestine, Babylon, Egypt, Persia and part of India. He died at the age of thirty-three and his generals dismembered his empire. The Romans later reconquered much of it, adding on Italy, Spain, France, the Balkans and south Britain. Then the Roman empire split in two, the eastern and richest part being ruled by emperors with a bureaucracy speaking Greek. In the 1322nd year of the Christian era that part was conquered by an Islamic empire that renamed the capital city Istanbul. It ruled what is now called Turkey, Greece and most of the Balkans until 1864 when Greece got independence under a constitutional monarchy whose capital was Athens. In World War 2 it was conquered by the Third Reich, a German empire that held it for three or four years, after which the constitutional monarchy was restored. In 1967 a left-wing government was overthrown by a military coup aided by the United States. This dictatorship lasted until 1974 when Greece got back a form of parliamentary democracy with Athens still the capital.

  Nowadays the securest nations have elected assemblies acting as their governments. None would have appeared democratic to Athenians who believed democracy was impossible in big nations, since in a vast population the influence of a single individual hardly exists, if he is not very rich. Plato said the ideal state should have 5,040 citizens, a number divisible by all numbers up to 13 except 11, thus making subdivisions of populace easy. Aristotle preferred solid things to ideal numbers and said the best size of nation was one with borders visible from a high point in the centre. The quarter-million people in the Icelandic Republic would have seemed unmanageably vast to democrats before the days of radio, telephone and cheap swift transport. But in small democracies (Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Holland, New Zealand) goods are still shared best. I hear the Irish Republic is a better place to live since a hierarchy’s hold on it loosened. Even before then hardly anyone in the Irish Republic wanted to be ruled again by the London parliament, hence Brendan Behan’s words:63

  The sea, the sea, the blesséd sea!

  Long may it flow between England and me.

  God help the Scots, they’ll never be free.

  He may turn out to be wrong. The Scottish general election next week will show us. Surely at last some of Scotland’s faithful Labour party voters will see Blair, Brown and his crew had become Thatcherite Tories when they came to power? That is why the English money market let them come to power.

  33: HERALD OBITUARY, 2 MAY 2007

  Schoolteacher, writer.

  born 1940

  died 2007

  JOHN SIM TUNNOCK died on 28th April as the result of a fall in his Hillhead home. He was for many years a well-known figure around Glasgow’s Byres Road, having lived in Hillhead all his life. After attending Glasgow University and Jordanhill Training College he was first a teacher, then headmaster in Molendinar Primary School, Robroyston, accepting early retirement for family reasons in 1977. A life-long bachelor, his literary hobbies made him a contributor to Chapman, the Edinburgh-based literary magazine. His funeral service at the Linn Crematorium was attended by a few close friends, among them Dr Francis Lambert and the lawyer, Angela Mullane. His only surviving relative is in the U.S.A.

  JOHN TUNNOCK’S CROSSWORD TESTAMENT

  Dirty stuff, dust, turmoil in Scots is stoor, stofzuiger Dutch for hoover. Love, desire, lust are English, lust Deutsche, désir Francais so spirits, sprites, geists, ghosts inspire esprit. Great Yeats creates, sweet Keats repeats, eager Edgar Poe try poetry games until dog shout, tree skin, water car meet in one word, a curtailed world. See saw so we embark, go out into nothing like candle flames.

  Sidney Workman’s Epilogue

  In his introduction to the 2007 reprint by Canongate of Gray’s first book, Lanark, William Boyd says that years before the publication in 1981 it had a Scottish reputation as “a vast novel, decades in the writing, still to see the light of day . . . an impossibly gargantuan, time-consuming labour of love, a thousand pages long, Glasgow’s Ulysses – such were the myths swirling about the book at the time, as far as I can recall.” Boyd is referring to the early seventies when he was a student at Glasgow University. I was then a young lecturer in English at the Adam Smith Teachers’ Training Institute, Kirkcaldy, and had encountered Lanark through the publication of two early chapters in a short-lived but influential quarterly, Scottish International. Finding some of my students impressed by what they thought “the novelty” of that sample I wrote to the editor, Robert Tait, pointing out how much these chapters owed to Màrquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, published three years before, and the first magic realist novel to be noticed internationally. Scottish International did not print my letter but Gray certainly read it. Shortly before Lanark was published in 1981 he sent me a proof copy and letter begging me to return it with any critical remarks I wished to make. “The severer the better!” he wrote. “I promise to take account of them, and acknowledge your contribution.”

  This request seemed honest so I honestly replied, saying (among other things) that the only apparent reason for combining two very different narratives in Lanark was the author’s assumption that a heavier book would make a bigger splash. I also noted several misleading and unjustified ploys in a so-called “epilogue” between chapters 40 and 41. On receiving a final copy of the book I found my criticisms had moved Gray to change his book in one way only: he had separated my strictures and added them as footnotes to his “epilogue”. But he certainly acknowledged me as their author! The novel’s success in Scotland led to smiling colleagues congratulating me on my part in it. Lecturers from other colleges began greeting me with surprise because they had thought me a figment of Gray’s imagination – thought the footnotes a device to deflect criticism, not voice it. Gray had lured me into a trap. That I really exist has led those who know this to see me as Gray’s dupe or stooge, thus irrevocably damaging my career. Since the mid 1980s it has been obvious that my Cambridge First will never lead to a more important teaching post, and that only retirement will let me escape from Fife. This has left me with a strong but unenchanted interest in Gray’s work.

  In February 2007 I received a parcel through the post and, opening it, had a déjà vu experience that almost set my hair on end. It was a proof copy of Old Men in Love and letter from Gray profusely apologising for the bad effect of Lanark upon my career, which had been the opposite of his intention. Old Men in Love (he wrote) was a chance for us both “to set the record straight”. He invited me to review it, at any length I liked, with any other of his books. He promised to publish this review as an epilogue to Old Men in Love without comment or alteration, and since this novel would be his last (for he is seventy-two and in poor health) I could be sure of having the last word. This smooth invitation was obviously Gray’s way of obtaining another critic-deflecting device. I have accepted it with open eyes, believing that a cool statement of facts will let me at last indeed “set the record straight”.

  The attention that Gray’s first novel Lanark received in Scotland is not surprising. A small country of about five million souls will make the most of what literature it has, and Lanark appeared in 1981 when northern universities urgently needed such a book. For nearly two centuries Scots literature had been taught as a branch of English. The post-war increase in Scottish national feeling finally made it a separate university course with only some twentieth-century poetry worth lecturing upon, and hardly any fict
ion. England had H.G. Wells, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Forster, Greene and Orwell, but the only well-known Scottish author was a thriller writer, John Buchan. From Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow England has had a great tradition of great literature showing its social breadth. The nearest Scots equivalent since Burns, Hogg and Sir Walter has been a line of dour working-class novels set in depressed local communities. Brown’s House with the Green Shutters (1901), Grassic Gibbon’s Scots Quair (1934) were the best and William McIlvanney’s Docherty (1975) the most recent. When Docherty received the Whitbread award Scots critics hoped McIlvanney would go on to produce something new and surprising, but McIlvanney, tired of high critical attention and low royalty cheques, turned to crime thrillers and left a gap in modern Scots literary courses that Lanark filled perfectly.

  In the first place it was very big, combining several genres with a short linking story. One half was in the Scottish depressed working-class tradition, enlivened by elements from Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The other half was a Kafka-esque pilgrimage mingled with science fiction. They were linked by a Borges type of story, a fantasia on memory, and the whole was welded together by devices that began to be labelled Postmodern in the 1980s, most of these being in the so-called “epilogue”. Here, like Fowles in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Gray described himself inside his book, writing it. He put in a large index of authors he had plagiarised, except for Fowles, and named many friends and acquaintances in a west of Scotland literary clique that east coast critics had begun to call “the Glasgow literary mafia”. He disarmed criticism yet further by enlisting me, as I have described.