by Archie Hind
‘Carbuncles!’ Mat was shaking with silent laughter, then repeating to himself with satisfaction. ‘Carbuncles! Ha! Ha! Carbuncles! Nae wonder he got belted into the Capitalists.’
Doug stood with one finger in the air and cried. ‘Capitalism will have cause to remember the carbuncles on my behind.’ They both started to giggle.
Jetta heard them giggling together and became annoyed and came through from the kitchen. ‘Don’t you be giving him any of your high-falutin’ notions, now. There’s naebody in the world gets anything without working for it.’ She thought about her remark for a second, then added in order to be honest. ‘Unless it’s on the pools.’
‘Don’t be daft, woman. Have you never heard of unearned income? The hardest work some folk do is sitting counting the stuff.’
‘Aye. But that’s a different kind of folk. It’s not us. We’re never that fly. Anyway, they’re not for us, these high-falutin’ notions.’
‘I suppose you’re right, Ma.’ Mat made his hopeless gesture. ‘Writers are always other people.’
‘Why for that?’ asked Doug, ‘I always told you there was value in learning, didn’t I? We’ve always had good heids on us, we Craigs. Your grandfather was a gey well-educated man. Myself –’ Doug started to tell him that when he was young he had thought of writing as well. Mat had never heard of this before, but in a way he wasn’t surprised. Everybody’s at it, he thought, but everybody. Then after a while as Doug went on talking Mat realised that he had made a mistake. He remembered the old fellow he had once met in the library. The old chap had been slightly tipsy and had tried to buttonhole everyone in the library and the librarian had been too embarrassed to do anything about it. Mat had been too mild to resist the old fellow’s advances and he had to accept the books that the old fellow had insisted on choosing for him. But the old fellow’s taste had surprised him – W. H. Hudson’s The Green Mansions (this was Mat’s discovery of Hudson) – and after Mat’s refusal to accept a novel by Jack London, whose writing he disliked heartily, he accepted the old man’s choice of a book of Flaubert’s short stories. It turned out that the old man read Flaubert and Stendahl in the original French. Now here was his father telling him of the plans he once had of retelling the tales from Chaucer, Daudet, Balzac, Rabelais, Burton’s Thousand and One Nights in Scottish settings. Doug’s idea didn’t sound all that bad – and yet. There was something sad about the whole thing. Like that old man reading the work of Hudson and the French novels. He must have found in Hudson some vicarious, sensuous world of activity and adventure away from the grey tenement sprouted world of Glasgow. The choice of foreign writers by Doug came from the same sense of deprivation. A whole background against which the drama and the seriousness of life could be played out was missing from their lives. All the background against which a novelist might set his scene, the aberrant attempts of human beings and societies to respond to circumstances, all that was bizarre, grotesque and extravagant in human life, all that whole background of violence, activity, intellectual and imaginative ardour, political daring. All that was somehow missing from Scottish life. In lieu of all this artistic and human extravagance, all the menace, violence and horror which had been the experience of so many European writers, in Scottish life there was only a null blot, a cessation of life, a dull absence, a blankness and the diminution and weakening of all the fibres of being, of buildings not blown up but crumbling and rotten, of streets not running with blood or rivers of fists but with wan puddles, a withering of existence, no agony of living, no cry of warning which extravagance and outrageousness sets up.
It was a country which seemed wrapped in a Scotch mist of understatement, where the edges are blurred, shapes and colours take on the neutrality of spiritual deprivation – a lack of definition, phlegmatic, timorous, apologetic, diffident, hesitant. The canny Scot with his deathly stultifying safety.
Mat looked at his father. He would have liked to tell him what he was thinking. That what a writer should do is wrench his whole world up and put the mark of his thumb on it. Shove it into the violent torrent of events. Make things happen. Disturb the peace.
Yet they were gentle humble people, as he was himself. How could he tell them, or make himself speak of the arrogance with which he loved his trade.
‘Oh, I wish I could explain it all to you, Pa. The main thing is . . .’ Mat made his gesture of frustration. ‘I don’t want to get on. I’m too ambitious. Look, Pa, to you a writer is someone who has got on, isn’t he?’
‘Aye.’
‘Well, I want to be a writer who hasn’t got on, see?’
Doug was blank but kindly. ‘Aye. I see what you mean, son.’
‘Ah see what he means all right. He’s getting highbrow again. A cut above himself.’
‘Oh, Lord.’
‘Never mind “Oh, Lord”, a clever boy like yourself shouldn’t be reading a lot of daft books if it isn’t going to get him anywhere.’
‘Oh, for godsake. I might never even write anything worthwhile in my life . . .’
‘You might not even write? Son, this is not the time to be putting the hems on yourself.’
‘You mean to tell me that you waste all that time reading classics, philosophy, all that stuff?’
‘Well, I wouldn’t put it like that,’ said Doug. ‘Learning never did anybody any harm.’
‘Don’t encourage him or he’ll go all high falutin’ again. And anyway, whit good did it ever do you, wi’ all your Socialism and Karl Marx?’
Doug was hurt. ‘I was working for my fellow man.’
‘Well you should have been working for your fellow family, maybe they’d amount to something.’
‘Whit’s wrang wi’ them? I’ve always taught them . . .’
‘Aye. The value of learning.’ Jetta interrupted. ‘If I wasn’t here to keep an eye on ye ye’d be givin’ yer wages away at the end of the week. And noo this yin wants to be writing for his fellow man.’
‘Ach, people just gang their ain gait.’
Mat was laughing. ‘Look, I’d better get to work.’ He finished drinking his tea. He was suddenly on his feet and out into the lobby. While he was putting on his coat he could hear them still arguing in the living-room.
‘That was quick,’ Jetta was saying. ‘It’s not that early.’
‘He was just trying to get away from your nagging.’
‘Me? Nagging? Well, if ah was, I have to nag you lot into staying respectable.’
‘Och, Jetta. We’ve aye been respectable enough, and we’ve aye been hard workers, even if we dae get fancy notions. He’s a decent respectable boy.’
‘I’m not saying no to that. They have aye been hard workers. But there’s something in all this writing business I don’t like. It’s not for the likes of us.’
‘Ach, Ma, shut your auld gitter. The boy’s just got ideals.’
‘Ideals? Ideals?’ Jetta’s voice sounded now genuinely anxious and irritated and Mat could hear his father’s paper rustle as he took refuge behind it. ‘Much guid he’ll get from ideals.’
It was raining a thin soaking haar when Mat got outside into the street. He turned up his collar and headed for the tram stop. There were two kinds of temptation offering themselves to him. One was to avoid the explanation which going to his work would mean, the other was to spend the day writing. It was very early but he could go for a ride in the tram until the libraries opened. He had been sitting writing all night and talking and thinking about it all morning and now he had the curious feeling that it was another person entirely who went to work in the regular office. The feeling disturbed him for it had a tendency to reverse itself so that he would begin to think of himself as the person who went to work in the office and then he would look on the person who sat up writing as absurd and ridiculous. When this happened he had to pay the price in disgust with himself. He decided that he would be best to go into work and think up a good excuse as to why he had stayed off. His decision was firmly made when the first tram came going in a writi
ng direction and not in the direction of his work. He crossed the road and waited for it at the stop.
When he mounted the tram he felt guilty and had the feeling that everybody was looking at him and wondering where he was going. They were local people in the tram who knew him, and knew where he worked, so that they’d know that he was going in the opposite direction. He huddled himself up in his seat and gave himself over to his thoughts. He would buy a ball-point pen and a notebook and go into the library and sit and write. The thought of the ball-point pen and the notebook warmed him. He was fascinated by the apparatus of writing. He couldn’t go past a stationery shop window without stopping to gaze fondly at the files and folders and pens and paper clips. He would imagine all the thick chapters of manuscript tucked away in the folders, the satisfaction of finished work, all the lovely pages of foolscap covered thickly with the up and down markings of his illegible script, the bulky manuscript of a finished novel being weighed in the little brass scales and being packed and parcelled and waxed and sent off to the publishers; and the desk he would have liked, a big flat wooden surface all covered with papers and cigarette ash and a big office typewriter with a clangy bell that would resound in triumph at the end of every line. Then he thought of his own confusion of paper, the hurried confused notes scribbled on sixpenny jotters, the welter of material which he had collected without giving it any shape or form. It was probably characteristic of a writer to have this urge to collect, to scour through streets and books collecting data, taking inventory. It was the richness of variety that he loved, within a certain scope, when it did not quite amount to chaos. He loved profusion and jumble, and he imagined again the desk that he would like with hooks round the side on which he would hang clips of paper full of information on old Glasgow, histories of streets, names, houses, institutions, events, and which one day he would put into his magnum opus, his great work.
Inside the tram people were smoking and the atmosphere was thick with fog. The windows were all steamed up and Mat wiped the pane next to him with his hand so that he could see out. As the tram passed the curve at the bottom of the park he could see the trees all dripping with the light rain that was falling. Trees! Stripped of their summer garments he’d seen many a lovelier poem. The writhing, battling laborious growth, the heavy limbs, sinking down under their own weight, the gnarled twisted trunks, the fissured bark, the eerie winter shapes twisted like modern wire sculptures – all entitled ‘Agony’. He had tried to write a poem once to these trees. Or rather, he remembered, to a particular tree which he had seen once elsewhere which had held these same shapes. He wondered if it had been a good poem. He had got the rhythm right, and the length of the line, as long as a limb. And the feeling of the thing, too, the rippling grain running up the trunk through which the sap rose to nourish the tender buds, and the silver grey glossy bark on to which lovers had carved their names. Lovers of long ago, now proved faithful to the grave, the scars of their names growing up with the tree and becoming slowly obliterated with time, the scored graffiti which had stretched into long unreadable strips of roughened bark.
‘The blank impervious hide wraps earth’s rising nurture.’
‘Blank impervious’ were words put in to make the length of the line right. But were they right for meaning? Never mind. A wee bit weakness in the line would do no harm, we accept them so that the line doesn’t become all clotted with syllables and meanings. One hundred and seven types of ambiguity.
‘The blank impervious hide wraps earth’s rising nurture Which seeping through the limbs drives out the bud.’
Echoes of something or other, something quite familiar which he couldn’t remember. But the images of the roots clutching at the earth – sucking victuals, nourishment, food, sap and the slow rise of the sap, fullness. The earth round the trees was grey and trodden hard without that fat, fecund, fertile – eatable look of loam or ploughed earth. Was that what gave the roots their twisted searching shape? Thrusting their tender tips into the dearth of stone or gravel or sand or clay or whatever it was. Clinging roots sucking voraciously at the dry earth. Was that what happened? Was there a great plunging movement inside the dry limbs of the tree which sucked into itself all the juices of the earth?
Sucking victuals voraciously.
A great baby at the earth’s teat. One could seriously attribute a kind of intention without danger of the pathetic fallacy. The actual tree had been alive and some of its greedy limbs had, like some monster of overgrowth in science fiction, sunk themselves back into the earth to make a circle of smaller beech trees round the great parent in the middle. Somehow, through hundreds of years, the dissolved minerals, gases, chemicals, had forced themselves in a weak solution up from the earth and had crystallised and solidified by some process of chemical change, drying off into millions of minute fibres which made up the great solid bulk of the tree. Nature’s illustration of Samuel Smiles. Mat enjoyed thinking of the tree and its patient timeless plodding accumulative nature.
‘There is patience there; patience to labour and to wait.’
Like a great numbskull! Mat had never finished the poem.
Now the tram was passing over a crossing and the jolt of the wheels shocked Mat back into awareness of his surroundings. He felt the usual feeling which he had when he became lost in thought and he was shocked back into consciousness of his surroundings. Like that he should be at his work instead of sitting on trams writing weak poetry about trees. He felt guilty because he had leisure and irritated at the thought of having to come to grips with life even if it only meant having to get off the tram before his fare was up. It was still fairly early and as the tram passed between rows of tenements Mat thought of all the people ensconced in their homes with a regular day’s routine before them. He envied them and started to wish that he’d gone into work. In another half hour he could be sitting comfortably at a high desk immersed in all the safety of calculation. But eventually he would find the desk become irksome, too. It occurred to him that he would be far better off if he had become something like a farmer, or an engineer. Someone who, like the poet chopping wood, was happy with the singleness of his vocation and avocation.
When he got off the tram he went down a side street towards where he knew there was a workman’s tearoom. It was one of those places with brown painted walls and with letters in whitewash on the windows saying, ‘Breakfast’ and ‘Special Lunch Today’. It had a big copper urn on the counter for tea that Mat called the samovar, and he began to feel like literature with that thought, like a Dostoevskian character with his strange ingrown walk. Walking as sheer movement gave salve to his thought. It prevented the peculiar sensation which he got sometimes when a new idea came to him, or when he thought of writing or trying to explain to Mr McDaid why he had already been two days off his work. This sensation was of tingling in his fingers and toes and an awful shock as the anxiety in his mind would send the adrenalin surging through his limbs. When he got into the tearoom he went over to the counter and asked the woman behind it for a glass of tea.
‘You mean a cup, son. Think you were in the pub? Ha! Ha! Wishful thinking!’
‘Just a habit wi’ us hard drinkers, you know!’ He felt silly having projected his whimsies outside himself like that. But as he sat and sipped his tea he thought of Russian literature, then of Alec’s description of Oblomov that time he had first talked about the book when they had been sitting in the park. He remembered what Alec had called Oblomov – a layabout.
6
IT WAS A Friday afternoon a few days later when Mat and Jake scuffled up the stairs making their usual Friday racket. When they came in Doug was sitting on the arm of his chair and flipping through the paper. Jake poked his head round the door and held out a paper bag towards Helen. ‘Here. We brought the necessary for a wee libation. Stick that in the cocktail cabinet.’ Helen took the bottles of beer from Jake and put them on top of the sideboard, folding a tea cloth under them so that they wouldn’t mark the polished surface. Mat came in and grab
bed the paper from Doug. ‘Gimme that.’ He riffled through the pages, then as he held a page open his head would move from one side to the other, then he’d riffle through the pages again.
‘Huh!’ said Doug. ‘You can keep it for me.’
‘It’s all right. It’s not a bad rag.’
‘Aye, rag’s right. Nae Radical paper should be like that.’
‘Away! Ye cannae be fire-eating all the time. There’s some good things in it.’
‘That’s not what I’m talking about. Look, I’ll show you what I mean. Here, haud it up.’ Mat held the paper and Doug smacked it with the back of his hand. ‘There, you can read it all right?’
‘Aye.’
‘Well, the way you’re holding it up towards the light?’
‘So what?’ asked Mat.
‘In my days you couldn’t do that with any Radical paper. You had to fold it up’ – Doug took the paper and folded it up and peered at it – ‘like this, afore you could read it. Or the light would shine through the back. Nae left-wing newspaper should be printed on such good paper as that.’
‘You’re nothing but an auld Calvinist. I suppose you think the devil should have all the best tunes?’