by Archie Hind
‘You’ll not be havin’ to strain things for the wee fella any more.’
‘No. I’ve stopped that for a while now. He’s old enough now.’
They went on talking about baby-feeding. Jake moved away from the draining board to flick the long column of ash from his cigarette into the fireplace then he came over and sat on the far edge of the divan from Mat.
‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Things are quite busy. Doin’ well. Some of the blokes are asking after you – why don’t you come in and see us oftener?’
During the last few weeks when Mat had been particularly worried or hungry he had had vivid images of himself back working in the slaughter-house, with his kit on, early in the mornings, drinking cups of scalding tea from a can and eating rolls and eggs, or skinning down a head, or slitting a tripe, or smoking cigarettes on a full stomach.
‘Ah, well. Been busy.’
‘Aye.’ Jake paused for a moment and Mat could see that he was embarrassed. ‘How’s it comin’ on, I mean, your – writing?’
It was as if, Mat thought, he was asking after some embarrassing secret. It was the first time that Jake had ever asked him this question. Yet Mat shared his embarrassment, and he simply turned his head away and shrugged. ‘All right.’
When Helen got up again and went over to the grill she spoke to Jetta saying, ‘I think we’ll have some supper.’ Mat felt a moment of wild panic for he knew that their whole economy was so finely balanced that this would either wreck the whole thing or that there would be nothing in the cupboard to offer them. He got up and squeezed past the table and opened the cupboard himself. The first thing he saw was the fat packet of sugar, then the block of butter, the mince lying in a bowl, the streaky bacon gleaming through the grease-proof paper. Mat turned and looked at Helen then he went back and sat down on the couch. As soon as he had seen the packed cupboard he knew it was Jake and his mother who had brought the things and that it would have been Jake who would have paid for them. With the amount of fasting Mat had done recently his senses had sharpened. He had smelt the contents of the cupboard almost before he had opened the door. The aroma from the grilling sausages made him swallow his saliva in yearning.
The plates were out on the table and Helen and Jetta had supper ready before Jetta spoke to Mat. He and Jake were talking about work when Jetta suddenly broke into the conversation.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘is it not about time you were starting work again?’
Mat stood and looked at her. He had been thinking the same thing himself – his novel had got into such a mess that he couldn’t envisage ever finishing it. He was about to agree with Jetta when something stopped him – in all the lines of her body Jetta stood there disapproving of him; even in Jake, as he stood there looking at him, he could feel the disapproval. There were all the things in them which would be left unsaid, but which were there – he had neglected Helen, subjected her to this life, and the baby. He was a layabout, a useless loafer, a lazy good-for-nothing. Even the supper they were about to eat, the cigarette he was smoking, were reproaches. He felt angry, but also he had a desperate need to justify himself. Sometimes he had asked himself why he did this – expose himself to every kind of humiliation and reproach and abuse. Not just from his own family, to all these strangers to whom he owed money, to these neighbours who sneered at him with their sly smiles because he wasn’t working. He hated all this, hated and abominated it – that he should be dependent in any way on other people for anything. He had to cower and cringe and fawn when what he wanted to do was to spit in their eye. But this dependency – even this – he was enduring for the sake of something about which he was half-hearted and dubious. It seemed the only sensible thing to do, to start work again, yet even at this point he still wanted time. He didn’t think it was worth it – yet he knew he couldn’t stop. It was like a kind of tick in himself which he couldn’t control. He opened his mouth to speak, sawing at the air with one hand, ‘You see . . .’ he was going to try and explain himself, but Jetta interrupted him.
‘Oh, don’t start. You can twist things round until they mean anything. You just can’t go on like this. It’s disgraceful. Writing! You’ve nae time to think of things like that. You’ve got a wife and wean depending on ye.’
‘It’s not that. Look, I’m quite agreeable. I’m going to start.’
‘I should think so. I should damn well think so. Agreeable? I should think you’d be agreeable. Do you realise that food has been brought into the house?’
Mat winced. He looked at Jake sitting in his dapper clothes.
‘Facts are chiels that winna ding, laddie,’ Jake said. ‘You know. I mean what’s a half-pound of tea between friends? Especially when they’re helping you drink it. It’s not that, Mat. Anytime. O.K. Forget it. But, look, Mat, seriously, I mean, look . . .’
‘Aye, look indeed,’ said Jetta. ‘Look, he hasnae got a decent suit to his back.’
‘Oh, wheesht, Ma,’ Jake came over to Mat. ‘We’re gey busy. You could start tomorrow. You should be thinking of putting a bit of something by. You can’t go on like this forever. Go back to work and wait until you get your stuff published . . .’
‘Published.’
How often had he dreamed of that. Of his bonny wean. Dreams of being accepted as a writer – of critics writing of his work – ‘Mr Craig has put forward a secular notion of divine grace. Worked through the rich texture of a vividly apprehended life we have the brilliant idea finally emerging’ – he had thought of this exhilarating final thing, but never in the real context of his life, only in dreams. Mostly he thought only of his work, of making some kind of breakthrough, of resolving something of the dilemma of his time. ‘Published?’ Mat thought, when he couldn’t even write! He went and took his haversack and took out the bundle of sixpenny jotters. He felt angry. All this ambitiousness in him, all this endeavour reduced to a squabble in a tawdry room with empty cupboards in a crumbling tenement in a back street in this bloody engineering city. All reduced to a few sixpenny jotters.
‘Fair enough,’ Mat said.
‘It’s all right for some folk,’ Jetta said.
Jake spread his hands out appealingly to Mat. ‘I mean. After all, we’re just common five eights.’
‘Fair enough, nothing,’ Jetta shouted at him. ‘I don’t know what the devil you’ve been thinking about . . .’
‘Naw,’ Jake sighed. ‘When the baby gets older. I mean, you can’t bring him up here.’
‘Why not? Other kids get brought up here.’
‘Oh, Mat. Be your age. Your ain wean.’
‘Oh, all right.’ Mat looked at the sixpenny jotters which were the measure of all his achievement, full of his incoherent, confused searching, lying crumpled there on the table. Jetta went to speak again but Jake gestured at her for silence. Mat was filled with rage and hatred and shame as he stood and looked at the jotters. He tore one of them in two, then another, then another. Jake put his hand to his brow and said, ‘Aw, Jesus Christ.’
‘Well, I said it. Didn’t I? I said it. Fair e-bloody-nuff.’ Mat took the last two pieces and threw them in Jake’s face. He was surprised at the smack they made. Before he went raging out of the room he saw Helen, her face all crumpled, going down on her knees after the sixpenny jotters. ‘You’ve no right to do that,’ she said, and as she picked up each piece she held it to her breast.
Mat stood and looked over the dark waters of the river. He shivered, half from the cold and half from something else – from a depressing fearful ague which seemed to live constantly in his limbs, and which felt like thin aerated bubbling in his veins. He gripped the top bar of the wooden fence with one hand, feeling its worn knotted hardness. He looked across the shirred surface of the dark water, dotted here and there with the reflection of lights. From down river a raw wind blew, puckering the running water and swaying the arc lamps which shone outside the big dockside sheds up river. Above him the tall cranes in the shipyard stood filigreed against the sky, their gantries seeming to plung
e into the thin running clouds in the air at their back. Mat put his foot up on the bottom rail of the fence and took his last cigarette out. He threw the empty packet into the river and the wind whipped it away into the darkness.
He had spent the last three or four weeks since his theme had gone either probing weakly at the numb dead thing in his mind or searching in his mind for some formulation of this thing which had happened to him. Instead of stopping at home and writing with his imagination he had spent most of the time in libraries, reading and thinking about the imagination – he had followed every possible trail from the dry notions of mechanical behaviourism to the rich symbolic schemes of Freud, from the irrational ravings of frantic religiosity to the subtle irrationality of Boolean logic, every trail of abstraction or criticism. Out of this distrust of the imagination had arisen this desperate hunger for the explicit. And in the end he was left with his imagination throwing two things in his face. He had copied down on a piece of paper a passage from Goethe’s autobiography, Goethe’s recollections of his beginning in life as a poet, of his pendulous nature, swinging from one extreme to the other, his need to convert his preoccupations into an image, this rectification of his knowledge of exterior things and the interior tranquillity which was his reward. And in opposition he had copied down Kierkegaard’s contemptuous question about this very passage in Goethe’s book. ‘At what point did he ever bring idea to reality?’ This inward rectification and tranquillity which never earned pennies for the bairns.
Mat was tired now of following these ramifying intellectual trails – the connection between art and truth, goodness, morality, reality and what-not. It was easy to construct an arguable case which would connect art with actuality or any other thing one cared to name, but the existential feeling of connection became no stronger, it became in fact weakened and diminished. The explicit when it came could satisfy no hunger, nor pay any bills. This was the existential fact – his bills, his petty little debts which did not even dignify themselves in bills or accounts. Even they were abstractions – for he had crouched away from the thought of them, crouched into this circle of light. He had sold his books and his record player and anything else in the house which could be hawked or pawned or flogged in order to go on writing and eating, and he had held at bay by dint of myth-making the thought of those bills – the rent, electricity, gas, food, milk, his hire purchase – all of them lagging and all of them being shoved continually into the back of his mind so that he could concentrate exclusively on his ridiculous illusion that earned no pennies for the bairns.
Yet fed up as he was with these ramifying trails his mind still roved round them. As he stood there and looked up at the giant cranes his mind went on coiling in on itself in a continual inverted movement. He thought of those stories which had brought in the money. The temptation to write like that, in order to earn money, had come over him, but when he had tried he found he couldn’t. The necessity to write out of what was present in his experience had been too great, the reluctance to externalise the drama or conflict which was implicit in his life too strong, for to do that was to take away what was most significant about his life – the very inwardness of his whole situation – its overt existence, its explicitness was exactly in the undramatic nature of his misery. Yet his real life – his actual life, his life in which the grocer wanted his bill, the sheriff officer came to collect, the rent man called, the stomach rumbled with hunger and the lungs ached for a draw of smoke – what was present to him, immediately and unavoidably present all worked against his writing, took the pen out of his hand with a literal and physical force. He wondered if there were two kinds of art, two separate distinct things; there was a difference between the retreat into the self-contained order of art and outward imposition of order upon material. Was he really an artist at all, or did this hunger for the explicit which destroyed his work not make him just another bloody engineer? It was an ironic situation that just where he was most vulnerable in his moral equivocations about reality and art, in his disgust with art’s passive wisdom – it was here that his present life bore most strongly. That great gulf which separated him as a man with bills, anxieties, poverties, from the experience of art; was it not just the contingency that comes to all men; the toad, which he and Flaubert had to swallow every day? Was this a mere sickly neurosis which afflicted him or was it a deep essential sickness and analogy of some general and primal condition of his world, his city?
All during the last few days he had pursued his theme, his obsession carrying him in a weird turning pilgrimage through the streets. All day he had walked collecting his thoughts, his journeys, his experiences, taking inventory of himself and the two lives he lived in this dour, grey, unkind and sweetest of all cities.
He had walked through the city, ticking it all off in his mind – the pylons, the chimney stacks and peeling hoardings, the shops and bus routes and tramcars. He stood up the close at the door of the little two-roomed house where he had been born and listened to the flaring of the gas mantle which had lit up the stair. He wandered round the streets of his childhood gazing at the great steel chimneys of the power station, listening to the eerie, midnight hoot of the railway engine and the rattle of the shunted trucks. He watched the last lit-up trams and the lonely skulking policemen. He walked among the sooty greenery of the river, through the empty boyhood parks and lots and grey ash football pitches, up the long stretches of windy road. He had looked over the roofs of the great rain-swept city from the tops of braes and up into the cloudy skies from between the walls of great tenements. He climbed stairs and looked at strange names on brass nameplates, he stared through windows and eyes at other lives.
But still he couldn’t find his theme.
Where did the failure of his work come from? Was it from some other source? Lack of courage? Fear of risk? Or the hazards of success? Was it in the language he spoke, the gutter patois into which his tongue fell naturally when he was moved by a strong feeling? This gutter patois which had been cast by a mode of life devoid of all hope or tenderness. This self-protective, fobbing off language which was not made to range, or explore, or express; a language cast for sneers and abuse and aggression; a language cast out of the absence of possibility; a language cast out of a certain set of feelings – from poverties, dust, drunkenness, tenements, endurance, hard physical labour; a reductive, cowardly, timid, snivelling language cast out of jeers and violence and diffidence; a language of vulgar keelie scepticism.
Yet all this walking the streets, this insane envy of the protected and shuttered, these mad reluctances, the life killing nostalgia, the indifference, exhaustion, nausea, the peering in at windows, questioning the stars, the peripatetic frenzies, the great fatiguing turning round of obsessions, compulsions, scruples, hesitations – all this was wasted and meaningless, unless . . . here he found himself shrugging in a familiar vulgar sceptical way and at the same time his thoughts rising to an arrogant pitch . . . unless he were to write in a key in which the rapturous, the hopeful, the exploratory, the courageous, were possible. To struggle through the limitations of his talent and language and create for himself that backcloth against which the great opera of human creativeness and possibility could be sung. The unquestioned high C, the bravura, the strut, the wilful cadenza, the unnecessary aria. Sung at concert pitch. ‘The bloody euphoric!’ Mat thought. ‘The lot!’
Then he thought of something which made him laugh. He had got himself into this awful mess on behalf of literature. Something which in the context of his life appeared as an absurdity. It was no excuse for him to say – I am a moral wreck and a mess because I am a writer. It was in fact his own moral failure, his blame, his weakness as a man which had got him into this. The provisional nature of his situation was no excuse either. It was no excuse to say that he was deferring his responsibilities until he had made good. It was, he realised, genuinely no excuse. He knew that if ever he made enough money as a writer to live decently then the integrity of his attitude would be recognised. Everyth
ing would be justified and excused. What had seemed an indefensible and weak-minded neglect of his duties would be forgiven by Jetta and Jake and everyone who knew him. But he would not forgive himself. Yet again, this superior moral scrupulousness of his would not enforce him to change his ways.
And again, a vague idea tickled his mind that in all his weakness he had maintained a persistence that almost amounted to courage. The courage to allow himself to live in this state of despair. Surely any other course open to him would end in that kind of moral disaster which happens to people who take care of their duties, when certain kinds of responsibility have been robustly looked after, and a hardening of the moral faculty takes place. This thought tempted him for he knew that he could allow himself a certain amount of easeful self-approbation by believing it. So he rejected the thought on the grounds of its temptingness, its persuasiveness. Then in the moment of rejection the strange thing happened. He felt that now the idea had been rejected he could see in it objectively, without relation to himself, some truth, and he felt suddenly the exhilaration of knowing honestly about oneself something which is good.
He had courage. He wasn’t weak. These qualms which weakened him so disastrously for everyday living were just the qualms experienced by any artist, his choice between perfection in life and work. All he needed to do was to sustain that courage, to crack his nut, to persist in his apparent weakness. Then he’d write the best novel ever to have been written in Glasgow.
When the ferry arrived at the moorings beneath him there were only a few people to get off. From the top of the steps Mat could see the two men who operated the ferry sit down inside the centre housing among the shiny brass levers. They started to drink tea out of cans. Their faces shone red from the blaze of the tiny furnace which glowed up through a hatchway. Mat walked down the stairs, jumped on to the deck and walked through under the covered sides of the ferry to the open front. He looked out from beneath the canopy of the ferry to the glittering black water. Black enamel. Black lacquer. Sheen, shimmer, ripple, wave. A black shape in the water (a matt blackness against the shimmering lacquered liquor. Oh, literature!) came flowing into the circle of light around the ferry. A mauve shape now, palpitating slowly nearer with each lap of the waves. A laxed dog, a drowned dog, a boxer dog, its blunt head beneath the surface and its bloated side high in the water, its paws limp, and a human hand, a glaring crimson hand, curved lovingly round its shoulder; somewhere in their loneliness they had met, the cold drowned dog, its coat all sleeked with wet to be caressed by the red surgical glove. Quelle chance! Mat laughed. He was still in his euphoric mood.