Unlikely Stories Mostly

by Alasdair Gray

  IT WAS UNKIND OF THE JEWS TO GIVE the job of building the world to one man for it made him very lonely. Earlier people saw the creator as a woman giving birth, which is sore, but not sore on the head, and fulfils body and soul until the empty feeling starts. But these wandering shepherds were so used to featureless plains under a vast sky (not even the sea is vaster than the sky) that they thrust a naked man into formless void and left him there forever with nothing to remember, not even the sweetness of a mother’s breast.

  Roman Catholics and the English parliamentary poet Milton evade the horror of this by placing the void below a mansion where God lives in luxury among angelic flunkeys. Satan, his sinister head waiter, provokes a palace rebellion resulting in a serious staff-shortage; so God, without leaving his throne, gives orders which create a breeding and testing ground (the earth) for a new race of servants (mankind). This notion is very reassuring to people with power and to those weaklings and parasites who admire them. Most citizens with a religion really do believe that heaven is a large private property, and that without a boss to command them they would be nobody. I reject this bourgeois image of God. If God is the first cause of things then he started in a vacuum with no support and no ideas except those arising from his passions. Some commentators present the void as a sort of watery egg on which God broods like a hen until it hatches. Oh yes, why not? This sweet notion is easily reconciled with the splitting of that grand primordial atom which scientists have made so popular. But I am better than a scientist. The Jewish Genesis intoxicates me by attributing all creation to a mind like mine, so to understand God I need only imagine myself in his situation.

  First, then, black void, pure and unflawed by sensations. No heat, no cold, no pressure, no extent. What is there to do? Be. Being is all that can be done. But gradually a sensation does occur, the sensation of duration. We perceive that we have been for a long time, that we will be forever in this darkness unless we do something. The more we endure of our dark self the less we can bear it. We move from boredom to unease and then to panic-horror of an eternity like this. We are in Hell. So the cry “Let there be light” is not an order but a desperate prayer to our own unknown powers. It is also a scream rejecting everything we know by committing us to an unimaginable opposite. And there is light. And oh, what appalling vertigo we feel when eternity becomes infinity also and we find ourselves floating beside above beneath that dazzling blank bright breadth, height, depth with no content but ourselves. The light is too much for us, we turn to darkness again. And the evening and the morning are the first day.

  Genesis says God saw the light, that it was good, but I cannot imagine him standing happily upon that boundless floor of light before he has peopled it with creatures. His first creature is water, a body compatible with his agitation and as formless as his thinking at this stage. Its sparkling movement reflects and refracts the light into every possible tone and tint, there is a rainbow in each drop of it. With this water he makes the sliding architecture of the sea and the steady, starry flood of the firmament. Unscientific? Good. I would have it so. I will skip most of the other stages. By the sixth day God is almost wholly incarnate. We taste earth and dew through a million roots, our leaves and blossoms sense and scent the air, we graze on our herbs and strike beaks into our squealing flesh while our unutterable doubt of the whole enterprise sneaks searchingly through sunlit grass in the body of the serpent. Our largest intellectual powers are almost (but not quite) realized in Adam, who kneels to study, in a puzzled way, his reflection in a quiet stream. The reflection causes a stiffening in his ureter which has to do with the attached seedballs, but the stiffening is not sufficient to impregnate the image in the water or the moist gravel under it. What other body do we need? Eve, of course, our last and most intricate creature. So Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she conceived and bare Cain. And Cain knew his wife, who conceived and bare Enoch, who builded a city. And after more generations of knowing and conceiving, a Seventh-Day Adventist, Joseph Pollard, cleaved to his far more liberal wife Marie, who conceived and bare myself, the poet. If your education is adequate you already know I have been paraphrasing the start of my Sacred Sociology, printed privately at Dijon in 1934.

  My infancy resembled that of God, my ancestor. I only dimly recall the dark time before I screamed into light, but I was in that dark, like all of us, and I screamed, and there was light. I may have found the light emptier than most. My mother once told me, in an amused voice, that as a baby I screamed continually until one day they sent for a doctor. He examined me minutely then said, “Madam, what you have here is a screaming baby.” Clearly she had never wondered what I was screaming for. Herself, probably. But soon my vocal chaos acquired the rhythm and colours of articulate speech and I named and commanded a child’s small universe. My command was not absolute. In my tenth year Marie Pollard eloped to Algiers with one of her husband’s business acquaintances. I sympathized with at least half the feelings which compelled her. Illness had made Joseph Pollard hard to live with. His fits of blinding rage destroyed a great deal of furniture and did not always spare the human body. But I am grateful to him. Paul Cezanne once said, “My father was the real genius. He left me a million francs.” Father Pollard was not such a genius as Father Cezanne, but in my eighteenth year he freed me from himself and the curse of earning my bread by succumbing to cancer of the spleen. The consequent income did not permit me to marry, or support a housekeeper, or to frequent respectable brothels; but I silenced the desperate hunger in my young heart by studying it, and the world containing it, and by learning to read all the great sacred books in their original tongues. And I depressed my professors at the Sorbonne by finally submitting no thesis. A poet need not truck with bureaucrats.

  I am shy, fastidious and arrogant. I am unattractive, but do not need friends. I am a close reasoner, and love language. My poetic vision is deep, but lacks breadth. It is the drama of their infancy which makes men poets, but the writers of the greatest divine and human comedies are men of the world, they discover and represent that drama in commonplace streets, bedrooms and battlefields. I can only represent Gods, and lonely intelligences, and multitudes viewed from a very great distance. I will never be popular. To pay the printers of the Sacred Sociology and Child’s Dictionary of Abstractions* I went shabby and hungry for many days and these books made no great stir. An early act of folly cured me of seeking fame in the reviews. I sent Gide the Sacred Sociology with a letter indicating that his Protestant education had made him capable of appreciating it. He returned the copy with a seven-word comment: “Literature cannot be founded on Larousse Encyclopedias.” His rage, when his wife burned all his letters to her, still amuses me extremely. Bravo, Madame Gide! You hoarded these scribblings as long as you believed he had no other way of making love, but thrust them in the stove when you discovered he enjoyed that passion, physically, elsewhere. You refused to be a postbox through which the great man despatched himself to posterity, bravissimo. I am the opposite of Gide. I now address the public in order to be read by one woman I can reach in no other way. Love drives me to this. Gide was driven by vanity.

  I am as old as my century. In the late sixties the respectable working men who frequent the café where I dine began to be ousted by students and other members of the lower intellectual classes. This led to an increase of prices and one day I told the manageress that I could no longer afford to patronize her establishment. A shade of unease came to her face and was instantly quelled. After a moment she indicated that, to a customer of long standing, a reduction of five per cent was permissible. She was not being friendly. She had been friendly twenty years earlier, but I then made certain detailed proposals which she construed as insults. She is one of those strict atheists who determine themselves far more completely than a priest determines a good Catholic. Over the years her splendid body had come to depend on the corset for its shape but I still found the sight of it entertaining; she knew this and cordially detested me. I told her that a fifteen per cent reduct
ion might ensure my continued custom and, after quelling a distinct flicker of wrath, she agreed. I left the café proud to be a Frenchman. The change in clientele was due to myself. Though unpopular I had clearly become famous, and where else in the world would intellectual eminence receive such tactful regard? I remembered also that my mail had recently become abundant, though I only open envelopes from publishers and from the bank which manages my estate. I decided to give myself a holiday. I usually study in a small useful library containing no publications after 1765. Today, in a spirit of sheer caprice, I visited the Bibliothèque Nationale and investigated the history of my reputation.

  My books had suffered from an absence of agreement upon how to regard them. In the thirties, the only period when I associated with a political movement, my support of the National Front led the surrealists and left wing generally to regard the Sacred Sociology as a satire against religion in the fashion of Anatole France; but Claudel called it a grand heresy revealing the truth through the agony of estrangement, Celine praised it as hilarious antisemitic comedy, and Saint-Exupéry noticed that it did not seek to deface or replace the scriptures, but to be bound in with them. In the forties the existentialists had just begun to bracket me with Kierkegaard when I printed A Child’s Plainchant Dictionary of Abstractions. This was thought an inept satire against dictionaries and final proof that I was not a serious thinker. Twelve years later a disciple of Levi-Strauss discovered that, though printed as prose, each definition in my dictionary was a pattern of assonance, dissonance, half-rhyme and alliteration invoking the emotions upon which words like truth, greed, government, distaste and freedom depend for their meanings. My definition of digestion, for example, if spoken aloud, soothes stomachs suffering from indigestion. This realization brought me the reverence of the structuralists who now used my dictionary as a text in three universities. I was often quoted in controversies surrounding the American linguist, Chomsky. It seemed that among my unopened mail lay an invitation to join the French Academy and the offer of a Nobel prize for literature. There was widespread speculation about my current work. My first two books were of different kinds and I still pursued the habits of study which had produced them. It was noted that five years earlier I had begun subscribing to a journal devoted to classical Greek researches. All things considered, there was a chance that, before the century ended my name might be attached to a metro terminus.

  I left the Bibliothèque Nationale knowing a new epoch was begun. I had become magnetic. In the café, when I raised a finger to order a Pernod, the manageress brought it then turned her haunches on me in a manner less suggestive of the slamming of a door. The glances of the other customers kept flickering toward my meagre person in a way which showed it reassured them. I was filled with social warmth which I did not need to express, dismissing importunate journalists and research students with a blank stare or aloof monosyllable. This procedure greatly entertained the respectable working men. I came to notice a nearby face, a well-exercised face of the sort I like. The fine lines between the brows and the corners of the mouth and eyes showed it was accustomed to smiling and scowling and was often near to tears; the main expression was eager and desperate. My own face is too big for my body and bland to the point of dullness. My only lines are some horizontal ones on the brow which show I am sometimes surprised, but not often and not much. I arranged my features to indicate that if I was approached I would not be repellent, and after hesitating a moment she left her table and sat down facing me, vastly disturbing in the circumambient field of attention. We were silent until it settled.

  She was in the mid-thirties with long, rather dry, straw-coloured hair topped by a defiant red beret. Her other clothes (baggy sweater, trousers, clogs) had been chosen to muffle rather than display her not very tall figure, which was nonetheless good. My personality is modelled upon August Dupin. I eventually said, “There is a book in your handbag?” She opened the bag and laid a thin pamphlet on the table between us. I could not read the author’s name, but it was not by me, so must be her own, or by her lover, or perhaps child. I said, “Poems?”

  She nodded. I said, “Why do you approach someone so famous for taciturnity as myself? Have you been rejected by the more accessible celebrities?”

  She said, “In approaching you I have not been guided by reason. You are an almost complete reactionary. I ought to despise you. But when a young girl your dictionary gave me an ineradicable respect for the meanings, the colours, the whole sense of our language. If your talent is not dead from disuse, if you are not wholly the dotard you impersonate, you may help me, perhaps. I so much want to be a good poet.”

  I am not accustomed to challenges, my usual habits prevent them. Her words released into my veins an utterly intoxicating flood of adrenalin. I gazed on her with awe and gratitude. She had turned her face sideways and tears slid down the curve of her cheek. I lifted the little book and said playfully, “If I dislike this you will think me a dead man; if I love it there is hope for me?”

  She said coldly, “I am not a fool.”

  Her proud chin was at an angle as defiant as the beret, her small nose was as tip-tilted as a sparrow’s beak. The bridge may have been broken. I, who have never touched a woman tenderly in my life, longed to lift and cradle her protectingly. So much sudden new experience could overstrain an old heart. I pocketed the book, climbed down to the floor and said, “Madam, my habits are invariable, you may find me here whenever you please. I will have read your book in two days.”

  For the second time in four years I allowed myself a holiday. On the sunlit pavement I was gripped by a walking frenzy. She had given me a precious part of herself (I stroked the book in my pocket) and defied me, and asked for help, and wept. I loved her, of course, and did not regret that this state, for me, would be painful and perhaps impossible. Romeo and Juliet, Anthony and Cleopatra found love painful and almost impossible. Phaedra and Medea found it quite impossible, but nobody doubts they were enhanced by it. I was enhanced by it. I am a wholly suburban Parisian who distrusts, as much as any provincial, that collection of stale imperial pie-crusts calling itself Paris. We require it to awe the foreigner who would otherwise menace our language and culture, but I refuse to be awed. So I was amused to find myself standing on one of the curving benches of the Pont-Neuf, my arms on the parapet, staring downstream at one of our ugliest* buildings with a strong sentiment of admiration and delight. Since I was physically unable to seduce her I must persuade her to seduce me. This required me to remain aloof, while feeding her with increasingly useful parts of my mind, cunningly sauced with flattery to induce addiction. Everything depended on her poems. If they were entirely bad I would lose interest and botch the whole business. I sat down and read.

  I was lucky. The person of the book was intelligent, tough, and on the way to being a good writer. She was a feminist, vivisecting her mauled sexual organs to display the damage and making the surgery icily comic by indicating, in a quiet lip-licking way, “It’s even more fun when I slice up him.” Some poems showed her embracing and embraced by a lover and unable to tell him something essential, either because of his indifference or from her fear that big truths are too destructive to be shared by a society of two. It was entertaining to see a woman in these Byronic postures but she was potentially greater than Byron. Her best work showed respect for human pain at a profounder level than sexual combat. It was spoiled by too many ideas. A good poem is a tautology. It expands one word by adding a number which clarify it, thus making a new word which has never before been spoken. The seed-word is always so ordinary that hardly anyone perceives it. Classical odes grow from and or because, romantic lyrics from but and if. Immature verses expand a personal pronoun ad nauseam, the greatest works bring glory to a common verb. Good poems, therefore, are always close to banality, above which, however, they tower like precipices. My woman avoided banality (which has, indeed, swallowed hordes of us) by turbulent conjunctions. Her book was filled with centaurs because she had not fully grasped t
he complexity of actual people, actual horses. Her instinct to approach me had been sound. I could teach her a great deal.

  I bought a note pad from a stationer in the Place Dauphin. It was Sunday. I entered the Louvre and fought my way through the polyglot mobs to the Maria de Medici salon where I always feel at home. The canvases adorning this temple to female government bubble with enough good-humoured breasts to suckle a universe. My favourite painting, which always gives me a wicked thrill, shows the Italian banker’s fat daughter handing over the tiller of state to her son, a boy with the clothes, rigid stance and far too solemn face of a very small adult. The ship of state has a mast with Athene beside it pointing the way, her curves compressed by armour which recalls the corsets of my manageress. The motive power of the vessel is provided by lusty women representing Prudence, Fortitude, etc., who toil at heavy oars with pained, indignant expressions which suggest that work comes to them as a horrible surprise. Unluckily there is no sofa near this painting. I settled before the canvases which show Maria’s coronation inaugurating a new golden age and there, in the severe language of literary criticism, wrote the first love-letter of my life. I was inspired. I filled twenty-four pages with minute writing before closing time, then walked home, corrected them in red ink, typed them, recorrected, retyped, then sealed them in a large manilla envelope of the sort used for preserving legal documents. My heart palpitated as I inscribed her name upon it.

  I had said I would read her poems within two days. For a week I extended my lunch hour beyond the normal and on the eighth day her shadow fell across the print of the book I was reading. Without raising my eyes I placed the letter between us, saying, “You may wish to digest this in private.”