The Dear Green Place

by Archie Hind

  He looked over towards where the obelisk in the park squatted, obscene. With its memories, Omdurman, Ypres, Tel-el-Kebir, screaming pipes, whisky, sweeping moustaches, regimental dinners, photographs in barbers’ shops and boys with Malacca canes. Brass button sticks and old medals in junk shops. The park looked grey like a plucked fowl with its stark leafless trees. He leaned on the smooth granite parapet of the bridge easing the weight on his legs. Glasgow! Gles Chu! The dear green place!

  Just as the Clyde comes into Glasgow it takes its last big loop. On the inside of this last loop is the old common land, the Glasgow Green, with its public bleaching green, its play parks, its People’s Museum. To the west of the Green is the old hub of the city where the old merchants once conducted their business and built some of their houses. From this spot, but slightly to the south of the modern commercial hub of the city, the river runs nearly straight on, under the bridges and railway viaducts to the docks and the famous Clyde shipyards at Govan. Mat turned away from the parapet and started to follow the river in this direction. He moved off the bridge to the north bank of the river and walked along past the fish market again. He went past the exodus of vehicles, past the long narrow streets with their shipping offices, sundriesmen, pubs, seamen’s institutes, carriers’ quarters, chandlers, whisky bonds and coopers’ yards. He smelled the spice, rope, tallow, flour, butter, treacle, fish and beer. He could see the varnished tops of the ships’ masts, their stays and rings and splices all whipped and white with paint. There were big red funnels and spidery derricks and cranes looming over the tops of warehouses. He was walking along an almost straight mile of river. To the north was the hub of Glasgow, a piled-up heap of buildings, offices, shops, theatres, cinemas. As he looked up the long telescopic streets the magnificent views and perspectives were all blocked by a tangle of wires and roofs and chimneys and gables. On the other side of the river he could see where Hutchesontown and Gorbals lay with their broad streets and their good sandstone houses all sordid with abuse and disrepair. Mat thought of the enthusiastic Victorian citizenry who had built all this – the city fathers, all waistcoated, befobbed and frock-coated – who had accumulated all this great heap of iron and glass and steel and stone, all these great blocks of sandstone and granite. Were they really slaking an aesthetic passion? Trying to understand them sympathetically Mat felt he could understand their counting house satisfaction in this great pile-up orgy of anal-erotic vigour.

  A Calvinist, Protestant city. The influx of Roman Catholic Irish and Continental Jews had done nothing to change it, even if they had given to its slum quarters an air of spurious romance. Even they in the end became Calvinist. A city whose talents were all outward and acquisitive. Its huge mad Victorian megalomaniac art gallery full of acquired art, its literature dumb or in exile, its poetry a dull struggle in obscurity, its night life non-existent, its theatres unsupported, its Sundays sabbatarian, its secular life moderate and dull on the one hand and sordid, furtive and predatory on the other. Yet Mat had to admit that all this moved him in a way that art could only be secondary to; the foundries, steelworks, warehouses, railways, factories, ships, the great industrial and inventive exploits seemed to give it all a kind of charm, a feeling of energy and promise. He thought of its need for introspection which was traditionally satisfied by the Saturday night binge, when its hero, Homer, and apotheosis in a cloth bunnet would lull his maudlin soul to rest with the drunken hymn.

  ‘When Ah get a couple of drinks on a Saturday,

  Glasgow belongs to me.’

  Belongs! Belongs! Mat could understand that, too. A dirty filthy city. But with a kind of ample vitality which has created fame for her slums and her industry and given her moral and spiritual existence a tight ingrown wealth, like a human character, limited, but with a direct brutish strength, almost warm. Glasgow! Gles Chu!

  Mat walked on up a long narrow street flanked by the blank backs of warehouses. Heavy lorries were roaring and bumping up and down the street and the dust stirred by their passing set Mat’s teeth on edge and made his nose dry and stinging.

  Later on Mat went into a working man’s tearoom full of carpenters with dusty overalls and rolled up sleeves, builders’ labourers with cement stained rubber boots, and lorry drivers, tense and unrelaxed even while they were eating their soup. Mat ordered a meal of rolls and sausage and tea. Afterwards he went to the old library and sat in the reading-room among the old-aged pensioners and modellers. He read all the afternoon from a volume of Hegel’s work. His head went down into the book amid the teasing abstraction of the old German. He sat there the whole time utterly absorbed and completely oblivious to the hectic toiling and hurrying and scraping and worrying that was going on in the city round about him. He was captivated by the idea that the act of being might be connected with the act of forming, that consciousness might be form; and another idea which almost bounced him out of his seat so that he rocked back and forth with excitement as he read that his discrete, individual nature might depend upon the fact of his mortality. He was still excited and preoccupied by these thoughts when he noticed the pale pink lights in the offices which he could see through the steamy windows of the library. It was time to be home.

  5

  ONE OF THE problems of writing was what Mat called to himself the ‘relativity of desperation’. People could, or rather they must, pay token admission to the plight of the drowning man who clutches at a straw. If we don’t feel the pain, the water searing at the lungs, or the choking sense of strangulation, or the fluid chaotic element without solidity or ground at which the limbs clutch and thrash, or the physical panic in which the body writhes and bends, or the wild moral fear, at least we can’t justify our own safety by pretending that the drowning man’s writhing is excessive, that there is no real need for it. Not even if we are Glaswegians.

  But what of a lesser case? A quiet undramatic desperation? The old lady who goes into the shop on the evening before she draws her pension and buys a sixpenny packet of tea. She counts her money, her pennies, and decides that she hasn’t enough to buy a packet of biscuits. That’s all! Maybe she has only a few years to go, a few hundred more weeks to count and divide and scrape at her pension. As the clock ticks it’s a long time to live. But if you can only afford to buy biscuits two days in the week and the rest of your time is spent in a kind of hiatus awaiting next pension day, then the weeks are all broken up and shortened, time goes in skips and jumps, so many minutes and hours of that precious time is wasted just waiting, and it isn’t long until she doesn’t require any biscuits. So many unlived lines in her body, so many packets of biscuits uneaten, unbought. But this isn’t a case that calls for excessive action, not any more than, say, the children whom Ivan went on about so much in The Grand Inquisitor. You don’t stand in the shop with money jingling in your pocket, watch the old lady fumbling in her purse with arthritic fingers and decide to go yelling into the street, ‘Riot, murder, fire, police, ambulance! There’s an old lady who can’t afford a packet of biscuits.’

  Not unless you want locking up.

  Yet if most men live a life of quiet desperation, is it the writer’s job to make real and desperate every case? Mat decided that it was. But to make too exorbitant a claim on behalf of these quiet desperations, to bare the breast and make too loud a noise, to do these things only to meet with a phlegmatic, ‘What’s the fuss? It isn’t all that bad.’ Mat decided that perhaps the writer’s task was no cri de coeur, neither from his own heart nor another’s. There was something peculiarly elusive and shifting about thinking about writing, outside the actual act of writing itself, the words and the constructions. Even there Mat had a sense that there was something fruitless and impossible in it. He had to admit to himself that he had no love for works themselves, and he made this admission with some embarrassment. His attitude was only one of respect, that words should not be abused, nor allowed to tire and exhaust themselves in the way they so often did. His feeling for language had no connection with the exotic, nor the e
xuberant, nor the exciting. On second thoughts he thought that he did love words, but he was a poor lover, inactive and faithless. His own writing never had that quality put into it which he did admire in others, say panache, daring, excessiveness, presumption. He would be sure to say to himself eventually, ‘What’s the fuss?’

  He supposed that this was why he was sitting here doodling and exhausted with his mind running in circles. Just sit down and write, was what they’d say. Mat just sat down, and here he was with his imagination fluttering round him like a bat loose in a room, evasive and jerky. No amount of effort, thinking, will, could enable him to pin anything properly on the page. He felt the abrupt division between the tight inflexibility of his moral concerns and the indulgent whimsy of his thoughts. For a while he was exhilarated by the tempting idea that poetry, verse with all its formality, its pattern, its discreteness –

  ‘A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains

  All that man is,

  All mere complexities,

  The fury and the mire of human veins.’

  – the idea that here in poetry within the very rigidity of its structure he would find a way of resolving all doubt. This thought, which came to him from time to time, seemed to loosen something in Mat, excited him with the notion that he would find liberation and freedom in the tight formality of poetry. But it was the very strength of the lust which this temptation forced into him, so that his hands would shake and his body tremble at the thought of creating verse. It was this very strength which defeated him, for immediately there would spring up the nagging conscientious objection, the obtrusive sense of a reality that would not permit poetry. ‘An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.’ He dismissed the whole idea with a shrug, with a keelie ironic sense of his limits. ‘Mat Craig – Poet.’ He had a living to earn, and the thought of poetry seemed to him the wildest of irresponsibilities. He thought again, ‘Mat Craig – Poet.’ For a wild moment he felt the electric tingle that Yeats’ poem engendered in him, then he shrugged again. ‘Huh!’ He was really in the doldrums.

  Mat was an omnivorous reader. He read everything which came his way: novels, poetry, philosophy, criticism, psychology, politics, history, sociology, but he had not yet read one single writer whom he would want to call Master. This didn’t mean that he was incapable of admiration. As if in contrast to the dullness of life at the office and at home he became really interested in exotic literature. The American novelists attracted him, Hemingway, Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald. Tender is the Night, with all its cadences of promise and disappointment which he understood so well himself, moved him to tears. He admired without reserve Faulkner’s tough adherence to his material, Hemingway’s great craft, and Steinbeck’s exuberance. But he considered also how uncomfortable he might feel in Cannery Row or amid all the blood-letting, castration, violence, ambition and pride. There were other exoticisms, too, even more attractive because they were of the spirit – the virtuosi – Pound, Joyce, Eliot, Cummings, and especially Yeats – the men who represented to him the freedom which seemed to him to be the only element in which he could be happy. Sometimes he delighted in hugging to himself his experience of reading Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood or Durrell’s Black Book. This especially when everything, his work and the limitations of his life, became tedious and irksome. These writers created in him the illusion of having reserves.

  Yet he could accept nobody as master and paradoxically enough it was because of the immense superiority of talent which these men possessed which made him unable to imitate them. He had no gift of the gab so it was useless for him to know that Joyce could spin his way out into art. He admired their manners but could not use them and he often yearned for a writer who would painstakingly plod his way into art. He would be the man under whom Mat would serve his apprenticeship. After this Mat would dream of his canny magnum opus, read up more about the Rutherglen Burghers and their wee roon red lums and go back to soaking himself in the atmosphere of provision and accounting in the regular office in Carmyle.

  The lamp was shining over the papers on the table. He looked through the screed of paper which was covered by his small handwriting and wondered how he had ever had the energy to cover all that paper. He couldn’t remember ever writing any other way but slowly and painstakingly and he found it surprising that he had written such a bulk. He was busy riffling through the manuscript and enjoyed the mere material existence of all the written words on the paper when he heard Jake’s alarm go off. The clock showed the time as five – which would make it four forty-five. Mat felt a strange sense of unreality when he thought that he had sat here at the table for the whole night.

  Through the thin walls of the house he could hear Jake muttering to himself, then there was a loud thump. Mat got up from his chair and went through into the kitchenette to put on the kettle and make himself a pot of coffee. He could hear Jake up now and making gurgling sounds in the bathroom. When Mat had finished making the coffee he lifted the pot and came back into the living-room. The papers were spread all over the table and Mat sat and looked at them while he sipped his coffee. He prepared himself in the cold dawn for the overwhelming sense of disgust which he would feel looking at the suddenly cold pages, the children’s jotters which he used to write in, the diffident tentative struggle not to say too much. He supposed that if he kept his feet on the ground, wrote good wholesome social realism, he would not feel anything like this revulsion.

  Jake came in and crossed slowly over to the kitchenette. He was in his stocking-soles, yawning and scratching himself. As he passed Mat he raised his hand solemnly, muttered ‘Hi, genius!’ and went into the kitchenette. Then he did a double take, poking his head back round through the door.

  ‘Struth! You still up?’

  ‘No, it’s no’ me. There’s coffee in the pot.’

  Jake loved coffee. He also refused to drink it on principle. It was an intellectual drink for people who sat up all night writing. He also loved books but he hid his love covetously.

  ‘Not for me, thanks,’ Jake said. He opened the lid of the coffee pot and grimaced. ‘How you drink that stuff. Me, I’m for the old cornflakes. Sharpens your gums.’ He made a face like a man with all his teeth missing, pulling his lips over his teeth and sucking in his cheeks. While Mat laughed he was off on another tack, kneeling on the carpet and searching beneath the couch for his shoes. ‘Where’s the old how-de-ye-does? Have you been up all night?’

  ‘Just been doin’ a wee bit scrievin’ you know.’

  ‘Aye, a’ night.’

  ‘Well, you know what the poets say.’ Mat started to sing.

  ‘And the best of all ways,

  To lengthen our days,

  Is to steal a few hours from the night, my dear.’

  ‘Aye, there’s a difference between casual stealing and doin’ the professional burglar. Maybe you’ll lengthen your days the noo, but you’ll shorten them in the end, I’m thinking.’ Jake was half-serious, but Mat ham-acted with his forefinger and thumb gripping the bridge of his nose. ‘The artist’s fate, dear boy.’

  ‘As you say.’ Jake was unimpressed. He had found his shoe and he went to the table and looked over Mat’s shoulder at the pages scattered on the table. ‘What’s all this guff you’re writing anyway?’ He sounded a bit aggressive.

  Mat spoke diffidently, ‘It’s just a lot of notes. Ideas. Chancin’ my arm.’ He felt embarrassed by his need to justify all this to Jake. If he was a real writer he wouldn’t need justification. But Jake had gone back to his usual bantering tone.

  ‘Just writing doon a’ the answers?’

  ‘Some o’ them . . .’

  ‘Shining up the sentences. Struth! I wonder what folk’ll say if you ever dae anything wi’ a’ that and they find out we’ve reared a poet in the house?’

  ‘I’m not a poet.’

  ‘No, now, laddie, don’t be modest. It’s not such an – heh! – accomplishment! See I could dae it myself. Eh! Let me see.

  ‘“Says she to me,

&nbs
p; ‘Is that you?’

  Says I, ‘Who?’

  Says she, ‘You!’,

  Says I, ‘Me?’,

  Says she, ‘Aye!’,

  Says I, ‘Naw!’,

  Says she, ‘Well it was awful like you!’”

  ‘See! Nae bother! If I can dae it so can you.’

  ‘Naw. I’m just an old Calvinist. It’s you that’s the poet in this hoose.’ Mat continued Jake’s bantering tone. ‘You know your approach to life is – eh – predominantly aesthetic.’

  ‘Get away. Flattery’ll get ye naewhere. He! Whit would the lads in the slaughter-house say?’ Jake curved his hands above his head and stood up on one toe, wavering about with one leg flailing the air. ‘Aesthetic! Ha! Ha!’

  ‘It is you know. It is because there is no room for the aesthetic because the good and the true are no longer equated that you indulge in self mockery. You scoff at something which is in yourself because in a capitalist society it is unmarketable – useless, and a sequitur – bad, or at least, almost so.’

  Jake started to grin and Mat realised that he was too sensitive to Jake’s banter. Jake had merely been teasing him into making one of his pedantic speeches so that he could pull his leg, for he was now intoning in a nasal voice. ‘Who’ll bid for one aesthetic sensibility – who’ll bid?’

  But Mat felt that he had to justify himself, to tell Jake that his loyalty to his father’s books on the shelf still stood. He went on arguing the case with Jake and himself about the moral nature of art. He proposed to Jake the notion that art was the ingredient which was missing from modern political and social life. For instance, their father, who had now grown indifferent to politics. Jake acknowledged some of the Marxist criticism because he could use it as a base for his cynical humorous attacks on the working class. As Marx says, the working classes are exploited, and being exploited they are mugs. Tame mugs. Jake didn’t hold to any serious side of any belief and it was this serious side that Mat was interested in showing him – the need to care. As he went on formulating his ideas to Jake he became more and more embarrassed and ended up by using Jake’s own flippant style. ‘Life’s dead,’ he was saying, ‘if you’ll excuse the paradox. People don’t care. They’ve nothing to believe in and less to believe with. Well?’ Jake raised his eyebrows in interrogative half hoops, but Mat ignored him and went on. ‘Who has the monkey gland injections? Who’s going to slip the body politic the old needle so that it’ll jump up and begin to worry whether it’s bored or cold or hungry or damn near annihilation? Who’s going to take the plain old ethical hen and stick on a few peacock’s feathers, who’s goin’ to brush up the auld claes, who’s goin’ to heat the porridge? The politicians? The scientist? The Church? Not on your life. It’ll be –’