The Dear Green Place

by Archie Hind

  Yet it had been the same with his other books. The underlining of a striking phrase, the annotations and marginal notes were all characterised by the weak, pathetic literariness of the self taught. Even the working books, the ones which had formed the basis of a practical dream, the books by Marx, Shaw, G. D. H. Cole were not in fact used as tools which would help to explore the world, act on it, understand it, but as authorities for an idealistic and impractical dream of socialism, a sentimentalised orthodoxy, a pathetic and futile hope for utopia. In the little pink book Doug had scored under the line,

  ‘Ah, take the Cash in hand and waive the Rest;’

  And Mat thought with a direct hard sourness that even Doug’s bitterness had been misdirected.

  Doug’s was no case for grief, or mourning, for in grief and mourning there comes eventual assuagement. Nor was his life capable of redemption by any act, achievements or success on Mat’s part. He was dead and could not confirm his expectations any more, not even through his bonny wean. Yet, Mat thought, he’d write a story of this bonny wean, a story of a bonny gifted child who’d scatter his useless gifts about the world; a story of prodigality, of waste, of squandering, which would contain all his sourness, pessimism and accusation; and his love too, for that battered and violated grace which had gone – from Doug and the useless spendthrift family into which he had married.

  14

  A FULL YEAR passed from the time of Doug’s death until the time when Mat seriously thought of writing his new novel. At first there had been the period of recuperation from the single fact of Doug’s death, then the long convalescent-like period of stock-taking during which Mat had lived a steady dutiful life attending to the common realities of living without feeling any other compulsion. The seed of the new idea was laid in him round about this time. An ironic, rather bitter idea which could only have been held by a man suffering from an acute sense of loss. Yet as the idea grew in him – the picture of the small elegant life full of the tokens of promise – this picture of the favoured child who had been himself became more and more representative of something other than mere self love. Mat thought of the Devlins, with all their wit, musicality, generosity, energy, their priceless talents, their sheer exuberant being. He felt a contraction of the heart, an overwhelming sadness. It was the element of prodigality in all this, the knowledge that the value of the child’s gifts lay simply in his unrestricted capacity for squandering his largesse, gave Mat the grave sense of the inevitability of loss. The idea that it was only the excessive, abundant spending of his gifts, their unsaved use, gave them their value. So the little graceful child became more and more representative of that sprawling useless brood that had come to being amid the smoke and the grime, the tilted tenements, the yards and factories and mills, the sprawling industrial choked-up muddle which was bound by that same loop of the Clyde which Mat had thought of so often in another context.

  In the end Mat’s resolution broke. He found himself again tempted into that bright lamplit area in the evenings when he would sit casting his mind back and round in his attempt to redeem all that was past, the destructive uselessness, the love, the generosity, Doug’s death, the dissolution of his own promise, all that had been formative in the making of this wasted present, in the making of his own defect, his stigma, his failure. And to give the idea flesh Mat cast his memory back to that loop of the Clyde and he wrote of the fresh facile little boy about whose birth and upbringing were scattered these tokens of promise.

  The bright summer of the next year had come before Mat had a sudden leaping exaltation, a notion that he was on to something. Along with the idea that had crept up on him to write the novel there was also a revulsion at the sheer physical bulk of the work. But as the months went by and he sat up at night under the circle of light he teased himself into the work, starting it and continuing almost unintentionally. Then one night as he sat working, or rather looking over his work, with his bits and pieces spread around him and the big cardboard box stuffed with his old rejected magnum opus on the floor beside him, he felt this spark inside him, this spark which grew into a warm glow of satisfaction. For he had recognised something, experienced the creative shock, felt the sudden click like a box shutting which the poets say happens when something comes right. The setting of the novel was somewhere in that same place which he had tried writing of before, the place which he only had to think about for him to be driven by this warm lust to make, to shape, to invent, to describe, this loop of the Clyde with its dusty streets and backyards, its crumbling walls and stretches of waste, its factories and chimneys and noise and nooks and people. And yet there was in his new theme something which excited him in its complementary opposition to the old. A glimmering of an idea here, the bonny wean, with his prodigal wilfulness, an idea which had something in it of the same motive, the same end, as his masterpiece of accumulation and acquisition which had never been written. The bonny wean, the facile profligate waster and the burghers, the men of controlled energy and thrift. There was something in the new idea which was an abandonment of the old, of the substitution of a new thing, the acceptance of the vagrant and lavish shapelessness of life, for the old, the order and rigour of an ethical idea.

  Yet it was in a sense no abandonment either . . . But here Mat rejected any attempt at the discursive expression of his feelings for his two loves and saw them instead related in a warm and living image, in his felt experience – his remembrance of a need for excess, for recklessness, his love and admiration for the panache and sweetness of his useless family and his remembrance of a need to conserve, to guide, to order, to fear the loss of those things which were of value. It was as if the old idea had been lightened, swiftened by the new and the new idea had been darkened, thickened of meaning, as if its irresponsibility and extravagance had been given a quality of gravity and significance by the old. But what thrilled Mat, what gave him that classic shock of recognition, was that he had started that extraordinary new theme in opposition to the old in a direct creative way, quite unconscious of any later critical significance which he was now able to see in it.

  From then on, during those times at night, Mat smiled to himself with satisfaction as he piled on the tokens, as the winds of portent blew hansel in on the bonny wean, and he thought of those shades which he would darken round the growing boy.

  In that spring, before the year of the bright summer, Mat also wrote some stories and sent two of them away. They were both stories he had written in a kind of mechanical way, according to the strict economies of the short story which he had read about. He wrote the stories with a certain contempt and with only enough competence to make them work. They were in strict narrative form, stories which one read in order to get to the end, their only real appeal being to the reader’s curiosity. They were not in any way involved with the responsibility to experience which Mat felt his work had, even the overweight magnum opus that had fallen in on itself and failed. They had as their moral centre only those vaguely pious sentiments of the love-one-another-or-die kind. They were hard to write because they were boring and routine; and they both brought in money.

  For a while now Mat had been paying regular visits to the house of the poet George Duncan, the little man whom he had met that same afternoon when he had strayed into the picture gallery. Duncan lived only a few minutes’ ride on the tramcar away and Mat went to see him, sometimes once in a couple of weeks, sometimes more often. Duncan stayed in a tiny room and kitchen in a tenement with his wife and two children. Between Mat and Duncan there had grown an odd relationship. In one way Mat didn’t like the man – he felt out of sympathy with him in a direct, almost physical, way. Duncan had a penchant for red colours, his house was decorated with wallpaper patterned with hideous dark red fleur-de-lys against a pale pink background, there were pink plastic curtains on the windows, red linoleum, a crimson carpet, a bedspread of a different shade of pink, the bed curtains were of plushy, dark mahogany coloured material, the woodwork was stained amber colour and was artifi
cially grained.

  Sometimes when Mat went to see him they would play with the children’s games – draughts, Chinese checkers, but mostly those kinds of games played in tiny glass topped boxes in which little steel balls rolled through complicated mazes, or tiny bagatelle boards, or wire puzzles, or a delicate game played with fragile pieces of coloured stick – games which called for a kind of skill which Mat didn’t have. He was so used to play of another kind, which gave expression to the boisterous needs of the body like playing tig up and down the diving board in the swimming baths; in the army he had boxed, played football and rugby; in the slaughter-house he mucked about wrestling; he was used to the releasing skills of the body and limbs. When Duncan got Mat to play these games which called for skills of the hand, neatness and deftness, Mat would feel irritated and constrained. But he would join in, out of a kind of moral belief in games, but he was so clumsy at them that he couldn’t enjoy the fun. When they ate Mat got the same feeling – Duncan drank his tea very weak, very sweet and milky and had a terrific passion for sweet cream-filled biscuits. At teatime they ate cold meat out of tins, or processed cheeses or tinned fruits. Duncan spoke quite consciously to Mat about his tastes. He tended towards vegetarianism, not out of principle, but out of a revulsion of anything organic. He boasted to Mat of his buying monosodium glutamate, a substance which seemed to give flavour to food by exciting the taste buds and gingering up the appetite. It was this quality of fastidiousness which perhaps put Mat out of sympathy with Duncan, seeming as it did to come from a desiccated appetite which had to be whetted artificially. Mat preferred the bland, more direct flavours of untreated food. He was in a way proud of his palate, and the harsh chemical bite of the food at the Duncans’ offended him and caused him something of the same feeling he had when Duncan foisted his games on to him.

  Duncan also collected pin-ups and indulged himself in a mild kind of voyeurism, cutting out pictures of girls from glossy fashionable magazines and filing them away. In his physical make-up, with his beautiful boned head, his ethereal blue eyes, his small deft hands, his daintly pursed lips hiding the ugly impacted teeth, there was a quality which repelled Mat in its non-masculinity. It was not that he was effeminate so much that he was un-male in his beautiful lack of appetite. These revulsions which Mat felt in an immediate way as an un-like of the man were added to by his constant harping about literary integrity. Mat disagreed with him entirely that integrity was a thing that needed thinking about. Mat had his own private term for something which he called his ‘entelechy’ and he was simply unable, coming to the experience of art the way he did, to write out of anything other than the private distinctness of his own experience. He had not the kind of talent, the kind of cleverness, to write anything without the pressure of experience forcing him; he only wrote with his ‘entelechy’, with his back up against his material. It was a phrase which Mat often used to Duncan when he was being criticised for flirting with Sam Richards’ crowd and indulging himself in intellectual chit-chat. They were all published poets who came to Duncan’s house and among them there was a good deal of spite and small literary envies. Duncan would warn Mat about these and flaunt his own purity in such matters. In all his warnings were the implications that Mat was an innocent, open to the blandishments of the literary crowd who came around, weak to their flattery but good material if he could avoid the taint, the corruption. Mat was indifferent to all this, having taints and corruptions of his own to think about. To him, someone else’s success was a matter for a shrug of indifference – ‘it’s no skin off my nose’ – he’d say to Duncan. He was often surprised that the last thing anyone noticed in him was his arrogance, his final and utter indifference to anything other than his ‘entelechy’. He was surprised that in spite of his own egotism, his dark private obsession, his slow stand with his back to his own material, they should think him in any way malleable. He was surprised that they were so unaware of them. But his real attitudes he kept to himself.

  All this on the negative side might have made Mat lose interest in Duncan, but there were the complications of Mat’s own kind of fastidiousness. He could not elevate what was a mere feeling of dislike into a moral judgement, he felt it unfair to dislike a man for no reason. Then in another way Duncan won Mat’s loyalty from him. The first came when Duncan spoke about writing, about art. Then all of Mat’s reservation went overboard, for in spite of Duncan’s continual harping about integrity, in his attitude towards art, his own and other men’s work, there was a hard-won love and honesty. And when he wrote – there Mat saw something which made him thrill. For he knew the man, knew his sensations, his obsessions and miseries, his difficulties and the day to day affronts which the world put on him, knew his work through the day in the dull office, knew what he hoped for from art, knew his disappointments, something of his fatigue and lack of appetite, knew something of his greyness; he knew his surroundings – the breadcrumbs on his table, the clock on his mantelpiece, his vegetables in the cupboard, his children, his wife, his stairway down into the street, his window-panes, his dust – and out of this inchoate diminishedness he saw his poetry being created. In the astringent, witty order of the poems he saw the obliteration of Duncan’s misery and malice. Mat saw in his enjoyment and love of words, a quality, almost technical, in which Duncan’s frozen morality of integrity was lost or overridden; his scrupulous craftsmanship, his artifice, in which all his reproach and meanness was purified into a clear hardness. He saw the mess of Duncan’s life take shape, he saw his style. It was something which only showed in his poetry, but it gave Mat a rollicking sense of exuberance and satisfaction. Often Mat thought of Duncan as he’d seen him once in the street, with his halo of dull hair frizzing round his delicate skull, his tidy suit, his sad, inward, pathetic walk. He felt a loyalty and love for something in him, the thing from which he took his easy style. It was Duncan’s own ‘entelechy.’

  Duncan had no sense whatever that he could influence Mat through his work. Perhaps in anything to do with his real creativeness there was humility. But he did try to influence Mat through exhortation, continually carping at Mat, suggesting themes, harping on and on at him to write, what to write, how to write, where to send his stuff. In the end, in a kind of reaction of irritation Mat had written several stories and two of them had brought in money.

  It was because of one night which Mat was to remember, when he had first started to put down something on the background to the new work about the bonny wean. There had been several people at Duncan’s house that night. The conversation had taken on a hectic flush. Mat had spoken tentatively of his idea that he would like to try writing a novel and had found himself at the centre of everyone’s attention. He was reproached for not writing. Especially at this particular time, for there was a new something in the air, changes coming about, a new flowering of working-class literature, a new tone. Why shouldn’t Mat do something? He had the background, the right kind of humour, the social insight, the sensitivity to change and new directions. Mat had been unable to express his disagreement, but demurred in a dumb kind of way.

  The things they talked about were offensive to Mat – keeping pace with life, newness, which was an idea anathema to Mat, the frantic race for modernity. Duncan read only that work which was absolutely fresh from the pen like the American beats, the French experimental novelists. In returning more and more in the evenings to the circle of lamplight in order to ease himself into this extravagantly bulky and ambitious work which Mat was proposing to himself it was the very question of pace, of timing himself, which came uppermost in his mind, of reserving his energies, of the slow easing out of what was fresh in him. By sheer effort of will he had resisted that tingling thrusting adrenalin surge in himself, had by effort, by calm and lucid thought, tried to relax his time sense, making an atmosphere of silence and leisure. He tried not to force himself by getting into the rhythm, the swing of creation, by letting things come. But his calmness at his desk, being the result of a conscious effort of will, was part
icularly vulnerable to upset.

  And now they talked about ‘setting the pace’ and it made Mat miserable. He thought of his own slow growth and protested that what they were asking of him were the quick day-to-day responses of journalism. He was not out of sympathy with contemporary writing – but what these men meant could not be decided in a day – one day their work was taken as if it had concluded something, the next it was taken as false prophecy – the responsibility for the immediate evaluation of all this change and flux was a false one – all the hectic atmosphere it generated was false – the works themselves were being ignored by the literary journalists in their desperate hurry for meaning – all these tremendous significances were in the end only journalistic copy. ‘It’s all very decade-ent,’ Mat joked, but he felt very much on the defensive.

  Going home in the tram later Mat thought of this talk, that it had, in spite of his protestations, awakened a dangerous egotism in him. In spite of his protests he felt that it would be tempting to enter into this world in which ideas were hurled about so excitedly. It was a temptation of power, the enticing glamour of participation. But it was also a threat to his ‘entelechy’, his right to be slow, to move at his own pace. It exerted a kind of pressure to false change, to adaptation rather than growth. Against all this Mat felt in himself a black reactionary mood, for he could see no redemption or guilt in any of the new styles of architecture, nor in the images of modernity.

  The effort to keep calm was too great in the end for Mat to sustain; however inimical he felt the mood of the world to be to real creativeness, he eventually succumbed to it and wrote these stories which had brought him money. Wrote them out of a kind of irritated reaction against the pressures of time and the world.

  15

  TO MAT THE story of the bonny wean began with Doug, in his real physical existence, standing before the mirror brushing his hair. He would take a brush in each hand and run them in consecutive strokes, backwards, over his thick auburn hair. After that, just as Jetta would put the dinner on the table, he would roll his shirt sleeves down carefully so not to spoil the stiffness of the starched cuffs, adjust his sleeve bands and put his waistcoat on. Then, just before sitting down to dinner, he would stand erect and tug at his clothes, hauling and smoothing at his waistcoat, wriggling and shifting his body under the clothes. When finally he sat down to dinner he would first give his trousers a little deft hitch at the knees.